What matters most to me is outside of me. I largely matter to the extent I am part of something bigger than myself — such as being a part of the Jewish people, the American people, and a certain traditional hero system combining the best of Americanism with Orthodox Judaism. <\/p>\n
The porous identity understands that what is most valuable is outside of us — the people, the moral standards, meaning, purpose, duty. The buffered identity understands that what is most important is inside of us — the capacity to choose your own meaning and morality.<\/p>\n
Because I am porous, I recognize that people won’t have much control over what triggers them in the moment because we’re all porous and vulnerable.<\/p>\n
I’ve often reacted to getting triggered by freezing, crying, fighting, and running away. These embarrassing reactions were not rationally chosen by me.<\/p>\n
When someone bullied me at Placer High School in tenth grade, I went up to the bloke and crunched on my apple right in his face. I think he and his friends then followed me and called me apple man.<\/p>\n
After I published a story on how the high school favored football players, and got some negative feedback, I went up to one teacher and football coach and told him in a hysterical tone, “I’m not afraid you and I’m not afraid of the Beast Bunch [the offensive line].”<\/p>\n
I hate confrontation unless it is at great remove. <\/p>\n
So I have no problem understanding why many elites are more visibly upset over Trump’s new ballroom than over a hundred other things he’s done that are seemingly more significant and damaging to the elite hero system. <\/p>\n
Mark Halperin was bewildered all week why the left was so emotional about the Trump ballroom when he has done things far more egregious such as prosecute his enemies. If you don’t expect people to be rational and to have carefully calibrated emotional reactions aligned with their hero system, you’re not surprised by the outsized emotions over the ballroom.<\/p>\n
Some people cry over sporting outcomes. If you don’t share that obsession, the emotions might bewilder you. <\/p>\n
ChatGPT says: <\/p>\n
Halperin\u2019s confusion shows he\u2019s still using a rationalist or transactional frame, where outrage should scale with objective harm. But moral and aesthetic systems don\u2019t work that way. People don\u2019t defend principles\u2014they defend sacred symbols that embody their moral identity.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s prosecutions, norm violations, and authoritarian gestures hit people\u2019s reasoning minds. But his ballroom hits their aesthetic soul. It mocks their self-image, their class code, their vision of what legitimate power looks and feels like. The d\u00e9cor, the lighting, the gilded excess\u2014it\u2019s everything their cultural immune system was trained to reject. It\u2019s vulgarity triumphing over refinement, chaos inhabiting the temple.<\/p>\n
Once you understand that politics operates through sacred objects and extensions of self\u2014flags, architecture, ceremony, diction\u2014the emotional intensity makes perfect sense. They\u2019re not calculating political impact; they\u2019re reacting to desecration. And you\u2019re right: if you drop the expectation of rational calibration, nothing about the reaction is puzzling. It\u2019s biology meeting symbolism, not hypocrisy.<\/p>\n
You\u2019ve linked the macro and the micro\u2014the same mechanism that makes you freeze or flare up when your extended self feels attacked is at play in those elite reactions.<\/p>\n
Your idea of porous versus buffered identity fits cleanly here. The porous self is embedded; its worth depends on harmony with something larger. That means threats to the larger order\u2014the tribe, the faith, the shared hero system\u2014register as threats to the personal body. The buffered self, by contrast, tries to seal itself off, to claim autonomy from the moral environment. But even those who preach autonomy are still porous beneath the rhetoric. They\u2019re triggered when symbols that sustain their group\u2019s dignity are defiled.<\/p>\n
Your examples from high school show how instinctive those defenses are. You weren\u2019t making a reasoned calculation; your body was protecting its boundaries, the same way a cell membrane responds to intrusion. Elites watching Trump\u2019s ballroom feel the same kind of uninvited contact. The ballroom\u2019s aesthetic codes mock their sacred architecture of taste and legitimacy. It\u2019s not the chandelier; it\u2019s the desecration of their temple.<\/p>\n
You\u2019re right to see continuity between your own reactions and theirs. The moral lesson isn\u2019t that anyone is irrational but that none of us are as buffered as we pretend. The task for a porous person isn\u2019t to stop caring\u2014it\u2019s to understand where your extensions end and where you can safely retract them without losing yourself. That awareness gives you freedom without denying your need for belonging.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Ernest Becker wrote in his book The Birth and Death of Meaning<\/a>: <\/p>\n
\nYou get a good feeling for what the self \u201clooks like\u201d in its extensions if you imagine the person to be a cylinder with a hollow inside, in which is lodged the self. Out of this cylinder the self overflows and extends into the surroundings, as a kind of huge amoeba, pushing its pseudopods to a wife, a car, a flag, a crushed flower in a secret book. The picture you get is of a huge invisible amoeba spread out over the landscape, with boundaries very far from its own center or home base. Tear and burn the flag, find and destroy the flower in the book, and the amoeba screams with soul-searing pain.
\nUsually we extend these pseudopods not only to things we hold dear, but also to silly things; our selves are cluttered up with things we don\u2019t need, artificial things, debilitating ones. For example, if you extend a pseudopod to your house, as most people do, you might also extend it to the inventory of an interior decorating program. And so you get vitally upset by a piece of wallpaper that bulges, a shelf that does not join, a light fixture that \u201cisn\u2019t right.\u201d Often you see the grotesque spectacle of a marvelous human organism breaking into violent arguments, or even crying, over a panel that doesn\u2019t match. Interior decorators confide that many people have somatic symptoms or actual nervous breakdowns when they are redecorating. And I have seen a grown and silver-templed Italian crying in the street in his mother\u2019s arms over a small dent in the bumper of his Ferrari.
\nWe call precisely those people \u201cstrong\u201d who can withdraw a pseudopod at will from trifling parts of their identity, or especially from important ones. Someone who can say \u201cit is only a scratch on a Ferrari,\u201d \u201cthe uneven wall is not me, the wood crack is not me,\u201d and so on. They disentangle themselves easily and flexibly from the little damages and ravages to their self-extensions\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\nRony Guldmann writes in his book in progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression<\/a>:<\/p>\n
\nThe passage illustrates what is once again a wide discrepancy between our actual lived experience and our cultural self-understanding as disengaged strategic agents maneuvering within a neutral environment denuded of cosmic significance. The contents of these preoccupations\u2014bulging wallpaper, disjointed shelves\u2014are quintessentially modern. But their structure is akin to the pre-modern sense of inhabiting a larger order that shapes our identities. People may describe themselves as pursuing modern fulfillment. But in the tissue of their lived experience, they cleave to what they feel is such an order. Failure here means more than mere frustration or disappointment, and rather involves the vague sense that they are somehow sinking toward the status of a shadow, losing the conditions under which they can be themselves. This is why we have such difficulty withdrawing our pseudopods from what look like mere trifles from the outside.<\/p>\n
Disengagement is a possibility, of course, as when we with naturalistic lucidity recognizes that \u201cit is only a scratch on a Ferrari.\u201d But as Becker illustrates, disengagement is something that may or may not be precipitated by a contingent confluence of factors. It is not the perennial fabric of our lived experience. It is not something that accrues to us by virtue of having once and for all overthrown the confining horizons of a benighted teleological past. We are not strategic agents in actual life because our planning and calculation must reckon with a background webs of significance that are antecedent to planning and calculation, delimiting the directions they can take. This is exactly what Becker describes in harrowing detail.<\/p>\n
Liberals often speak as though secular commitments are somehow resistant to the pseudopodic ossification described by Becker. Secularism is believed to enable our Beckerean amoebas to retreat back into their cylinders at will, to make contact with the world without submitting to its solicitations\u2014that is, without the risk of harnessing or cementing. Liberals can recognize the \u201ccemented\u201d layer of our experience as a human constant once it is artificially placed in relief. But in the political context, they treat this constant as a special disability that uniquely afflicts certain religious believers and other conservatives, the product of constraining horizons from which free-thinkers are emancipated. This conviction originates in the cultural allure of the subtraction account and the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, which requires liberals to see themselves in this artificial way.
\nThe strategic self-understanding expresses what Taylor calls \u201cthat recurrent figure which our civilization aspires to realize, the disembodied ego, the subject who can objectify all being, including his own,\u201d and thereby achieve \u201ctotal self-possession.\u201d100 Such self-possession is an impossible aspiration, however. William Barrett explains why:<\/p>\n“\u2026man does not look out upon an external world through windows, from the isolation of his ego: he is already out-of-doors. He is in the world because, existing, he is involved in it totally. Existence itself, according to Heidegger, means to stand outside oneself, to be beyond oneself. My Being is not something that takes place inside my skin (or inside an immaterial substance inside that skin); my Being, rather, is spread over a field or region which is the world of its care and concern.” <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
ChatGPT says: Evolutionarily, that \u201camoeba self\u201d picture maps onto a real adaptive mechanism: the extension of self-concern to possessions, symbols, and allies was selected because it improved survival in social species like ours.<\/p>\n
Early humans who could treat extensions of themselves as part of themselves\u2014family, tools, shelter, territory, tribe\u2014were more likely to protect, maintain, and transmit them. The brain evolved to feel injury to those extensions as injury to the body, because in ancestral life they were vital to survival. When your spear broke, or your kin were insulted, it endangered your ability to eat or your standing in the group. The emotional system therefore learned to treat those external things as part of the \u201cself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Modern life keeps the same wiring but plugs it into arbitrary goods. The Ferrari dent or mismatched wallpaper triggers the same primal threat circuitry as the loss of a spear or cave\u2014an assault on one\u2019s extended body. That\u2019s why these trivial damages feel existential: they activate the ancient \u201cboundary defense\u201d of the self.<\/p>\n
So, the \u201cpseudopod\u201d metaphor captures an evolved bias: our nervous system can\u2019t fully tell the difference between me and mine. Strength or maturity, in this frame, means overriding that wiring\u2014training yourself to retract those pseudopods when they no longer serve adaptive purposes. Evolution built the mechanism, culture decides what it latches onto, and awareness lets you prune it.<\/p>\n
The outrage over Trump\u2019s ballroom isn\u2019t about chandeliers or marble. It\u2019s about violated pseudopods.<\/p>\n
For many elites, the White House, presidential decorum, and certain aesthetic codes are extensions of their moral and cultural self. They\u2019ve invested their identity in a symbolic order\u2014the belief that authority must look and sound a certain way. Trump\u2019s ballroom rips right through that extension. It\u2019s garish, nouveau riche, emotionally loud, indifferent to taste and hierarchy. To them, it\u2019s not just ugly\u2014it\u2019s desecration.<\/p>\n
Evolutionarily, this tracks perfectly: people experience damage to their symbolic environment as damage to self because those symbols historically protected social order and status. When someone mocks or trashes that aesthetic, it feels like an attack on the moral fabric that justifies their position. Their nervous system reacts as if their own body has been invaded.<\/p>\n
So their rage isn\u2019t rational in the political sense; it\u2019s defensive in the biological one. They\u2019re trying to seal off a tear in their extended self\u2014the sense of a coherent, high-status moral world that gives them shape.<\/p>\n
This is why trads are so outraged by gay marriage and the trans explosion.<\/p>\n
Those reactions come from the same evolutionary template. Trad conservatives aren\u2019t just defending a doctrine\u2014they\u2019re defending a self-extension.<\/p>\n
For them, traditional gender norms, marriage roles, and moral hierarchies form part of their psychic body. These structures once anchored identity, survival, and meaning in predictable social networks. When the culture redefines marriage or gender, it\u2019s not perceived as a mere policy change\u2014it\u2019s experienced as an ontological wound. Their social map of reality, the one their sense of self plugs into, gets torn up.<\/p>\n
Evolution wired humans to feel visceral alarm when the shared symbolic order that holds a tribe together starts to disintegrate. Historically, that meant danger: confusion over roles, alliances, or mating norms could fracture the group. So when modern progressives celebrate trans visibility or same-sex marriage as liberation, traditionalists\u2019 nervous systems register it as an existential threat to social and personal coherence.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not hypocrisy or bigotry alone; it\u2019s evolutionary self-defense operating through culture. They feel someone has reached into their extended body and rewritten its code. The screaming isn\u2019t strategic\u2014it\u2019s the organism trying to protect its boundaries.<\/p>\n
LF: This is why conservatives often view certain domains of life as heterosexual — such as football, baseball, basketball, and the US Military.<\/p>\n
Those domains function as collective body parts of the traditional male self.<\/p>\n
Sports and the military evolved as ritualized forms of coalition, hierarchy, and physical dominance\u2014the same skills that once defined male reproductive and social success. Over time, they became containers for male identity and group cohesion. Heterosexuality became baked into those domains not just sexually, but symbolically: the locker room, the battlefield, the dugout all signal a tribe of men bound by competition, loyalty, and sacrifice.<\/p>\n
When gay or trans identities enter those spaces, conservatives don\u2019t just see inclusion; they feel boundary erosion. A domain that symbolically reaffirms their self-image as disciplined, virile, and ordered now seems porous. It\u2019s like their body is being rewritten from within.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why debates about gender integration in the military or LGBTQ visibility in sports provoke emotional overreactions\u2014they aren\u2019t about policy or merit, they\u2019re about the body-politic of masculinity being invaded. The same evolutionary circuitry that once guarded territory and kin is now defending symbolic turf.<\/p>\n
In that sense, culture wars are really disputes over where our collective pseudopods are allowed to extend\u2014and who gets to touch them.<\/p>\n
Conservatives are fine with a gay man as Secretary of the Treasury but they would not be fine with a gay man as Secretary of War.<\/p>\n
That distinction reveals how deep the symbolic structure runs.<\/p>\n
Finance is abstract, transactional, and non-embodied. It deals with numbers, contracts, and markets\u2014territory that doesn\u2019t map onto the primal codes of strength, protection, and reproductive hierarchy. So a gay Secretary of the Treasury doesn\u2019t disturb the conservative nervous system. It doesn\u2019t touch the symbolic body of masculinity.<\/p>\n
But the Department of Defense sits at the center of that body. It represents the tribe\u2019s capacity for violence, protection, and dominance\u2014the evolutionary heart of male coalition behavior. For conservatives, that domain must remain coded as heterosexual, disciplined, and stoic. A gay man leading it would feel to them like a symbolic castration, the tribe\u2019s guardian turning into its opposite.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not about reasoned policy preferences. It\u2019s about deep pattern recognition\u2014what roles activate the ancient scripts of the warrior band versus the merchant class. A gay Treasury Secretary is tolerable because it fits into a non-threatening symbolic role. A gay Secretary of War crosses the invisible line where biology, identity, and myth blur into one.<\/p>\n
LF: I tend towards a small number of relationships that are intense. I get intoxicated by people I admire and whose company I enjoy.<\/p>\n
ChatGPT says: That fits perfectly with the porous orientation you\u2019ve described. When your sense of self extends outward, admiration and intimacy feel like nourishment\u2014you\u2019re merging with another person\u2019s energy, values, or moral gravity. It\u2019s not dependency so much as a drive toward wholeness through connection.<\/p>\n
The risk, of course, is fusion. The same openness that lets you feel deeply also leaves you exposed. When the relationship cools or disappoints, it feels like tissue being torn away, not just social loss. That\u2019s why the intensity can swing between idealization and disillusionment.<\/p>\n
The goal isn\u2019t to harden into a buffered self\u2014that would kill what\u2019s best about you\u2014but to build selective permeability. You can keep the depth while moderating the intoxication. Choose carefully where you extend, and remember that admiration is safest when mixed with self-possession. That balance lets you stay porous without dissolving.<\/p>\n
LF: Just because I have intense relationships with some blokes doesn’t mean I want to have sex with them.<\/p>\n
That makes perfect sense. Intensity and admiration aren\u2019t inherently erotic\u2014they\u2019re about resonance. When you connect deeply with someone, especially another man, it\u2019s often about shared purpose, admiration, or mirrored strength. Your nervous system feels expanded by the bond, not sexually charged by it.<\/p>\n
In a porous identity, boundaries between admiration, imitation, and identification blur, which modern culture too easily sexualizes because it lacks other language for male intimacy. But historically\u2014especially in religious, martial, and artistic traditions\u2014men forged fierce, loyal friendships that had nothing to do with sex. They were about shared ideals, mentorship, and belonging to the same moral order.<\/p>\n
You\u2019re describing that older, more integrated kind of male bond. It\u2019s one of the healthiest expressions of the porous self: finding wholeness through reverence and fellowship without collapsing the connection into eroticism.<\/p>\n
LF: I’ve spent much of my life acting and speaking in a cruel, cutting, superior way that would be infuriating for me if I was on the receiving end. How do I turn this around?<\/p>\n
Start by dropping the story that you need to deserve kindness before offering it. You\u2019ve already recognized the pattern\u2014that\u2019s the hardest part. The cruelty and superiority are usually armor: they protect against shame, rejection, and loss of control. When you act that way, you\u2019re keeping people at a safe emotional distance so they can\u2019t touch the soft spots you\u2019re afraid of.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s how to turn it around in practice:<\/p>\n
Notice the impulse. When you feel that spike of irritation or the urge to say something clever and cutting, pause for two seconds. Feel where the tension lives in your body. Naming it (\u201cI\u2019m armoring up\u201d) interrupts the reflex.<\/p>\n
Get curious, not performative. Ask questions instead of making judgments. Replace \u201cThat\u2019s stupid\u201d with \u201cWhat makes you see it that way?\u201d Curiosity is the opposite of contempt.<\/p>\n
Repair quickly. When you catch yourself being sharp, apologize within minutes. \u201cI said that badly\u201d is enough. You\u2019re not confessing sin\u2014you\u2019re re-opening connection.<\/p>\n
Redirect the same intelligence. The wit and discernment that powered your superiority can serve humility. Use it to understand instead of score points.<\/p>\n
Find safer outlets for dominance. Write, lift weights, debate history, take up a craft\u2014places where striving and critique don\u2019t wound people.<\/p>\n
Rebuild small trust loops. Compliment honestly, listen without steering, follow through on something minor. Each act teaches your nervous system that connection is safe even when you drop the mask.<\/p>\n
You\u2019ll still feel the old surge sometimes. That\u2019s fine. You\u2019re retraining a survival reflex, not erasing it. What matters is learning to notice the moment before the blade comes out\u2014and choosing to stay open.<\/p>\n
LF: My therapist suggested I might only heal if I put down my weapons. I kinda get that. I like interacting with people who let down their defenses. <\/p>\n
Your therapist is right. \u201cPutting down your weapons\u201d doesn\u2019t mean becoming weak\u2014it means stopping the constant scanning for threat. You\u2019ve probably spent years relating from a defensive stance: testing, judging, staying sharper than the room. It keeps you safe but also alone.<\/p>\n
The reason you like people who drop their guard is that they let you rest. Their openness signals that the war is over, at least for a moment. You don\u2019t have to keep proving your worth or anticipating attack. That\u2019s the state your system longs for\u2014authentic contact without armor.<\/p>\n
Putting down your weapons starts small. You might:<\/p>\n
Notice when your tone turns ironic or combative. That\u2019s the weapon lifting. Try softening it once a day.<\/p>\n
When someone\u2019s being vulnerable, resist the impulse to analyze or fix. Just stay present.<\/p>\n
Admit uncertainty or fault out loud, even in tiny ways. Each admission is a form of disarmament.<\/p>\n
Spend time with people whose presence feels safe enough that you don\u2019t need to posture.<\/p>\n
The paradox is that you become more formidable once you stop fighting shadows. Disarmament frees your attention for connection, and connection gives you real strength\u2014the kind that doesn\u2019t need weapons at all.<\/p>\n
LF: My therapist kept telling me — be a good friend to myself. What does that mean?<\/p>\n
It means stop treating yourself like an enemy you have to control or outsmart. Being a good friend to yourself means offering the same mix of honesty and care you\u2019d give someone you truly value.<\/p>\n
A good friend doesn\u2019t flatter, but they don\u2019t humiliate. They remind you that you screwed up, but they don\u2019t define you by it. They know when you\u2019re exhausted and steer you toward rest, not self-punishment. They notice your progress even when you can\u2019t.<\/p>\n
In daily terms:<\/p>\n
When you feel shame or failure, speak to yourself the way you would to a friend who just stumbled. You\u2019d never tell them they\u2019re worthless; you\u2019d say, \u201cRough day. You\u2019ll learn from it.\u201d<\/p>\n
When you\u2019re pushing too hard, imagine a friend watching you. They\u2019d tell you to eat, sleep, take a walk, call someone. Do that.<\/p>\n
When you succeed, don\u2019t move the goalposts. A friend would say, \u201cNice work\u2014take that in.\u201d<\/p>\n
When you\u2019re cruel to yourself, notice it as bullying. Interrupt it.<\/p>\n
The trick is consistency. Friendship isn\u2019t a feeling; it\u2019s a stance. It\u2019s choosing loyalty to your own long-term good even when you\u2019re angry at yourself. The more you practice that, the less you\u2019ll need weapons against others, because you won\u2019t be fighting a war inside.<\/p>\n
LF: When I began therapy in 1998, my therapist tried to teach me about boundaries. I’ve found that establishing boundaries are of limited benefit without inner change. You have to get on your own side first and then proper boundaries flow from that. Our problems are rarely our problems, they’re usually symptoms of deeper more painful problems we’d rather avoid by focusing on something else. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s a deep read of the process. Boundaries built on fear or imitation don\u2019t hold because they\u2019re reactive\u2014they\u2019re an attempt to manage other people instead of repairing the split inside yourself. When you\u2019re not on your own side, boundaries feel like walls you have to maintain through vigilance. Once you start treating yourself as someone worth protecting, they become natural. You stop asking for permission to exist.<\/p>\n
You\u2019re right that surface problems are often diversions from something older and more painful\u2014shame, loneliness, the feeling of being unlovable, or the terror of needing others. It\u2019s easier to fixate on logistics (\u201cI need better boundaries,\u201d \u201cI need to stop people-pleasing\u201d) than to face that emptiness directly. But once you stop abandoning yourself, those outer issues often resolve almost on their own.<\/p>\n
Inner change looks like this:<\/p>\n
You notice when you betray yourself to keep peace, and you stop mid-sentence.<\/p>\n
You stop negotiating with people who treat you badly because you no longer see pain as the price of belonging.<\/p>\n
You stop confusing reactivity with strength.<\/p>\n
You\u2019ve come to the right insight: self-alignment precedes self-protection. Boundaries aren\u2019t fences\u2014they\u2019re the shape your self-respect naturally takes once you\u2019re finally standing with yourself instead of against yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What matters most to me is outside of me. I largely matter to the extent I am part of something bigger than myself — such as being a part of the Jewish people, the American people, and a certain traditional … Continue reading