The Wandering Farmer (an feirmeoir fánach)

This may seem like a preposterously ambitious title for a single entry of a travel blog, but I’ll give it a go anyway.

First off, I’m not formally trained in philosophy, nor even educated as an amateur. I only reclaim the term philosophy from its Greek roots- the love of knowledge, and feel that I have the right to use it from that basis. I study. I read. I pursue knowledge and love it for its own sake.

So, by underlying philosophy, I mean the foundation of facts, of underlying knowledge acquired through love of knowledge itself, that leads me to support one side, and not sit on the sidelines.

I support Ukraine due to the long-in-emerging beliefs surrounding national sovereignty and the rights to self-determination that come from the past several centuries of political thought. When a sufficient number of individuals, expressing their individual views, agree to come together as a political body under their own drive and free will, that body itself also contains a form of free will that has a kind of sacredness (provided it does not violate others’ free wills), and a right to make choices without receiving nor giving violence or compulsion.

These rules apply to large states as well as small states- just like we understand that individual liberties are not modulated based on how much you can benchpress or whether you can run a five minute mile. It’d be preposterous if individual liberties ran that way.

Similarly, nations (composed of individuals agreeing to be nations) have clear rights that do not depend on their size, their GDP, their nuclear weapons stockpile. The most preposterous bias seen in the Russia-Ukraine conflict is that, somehow, some people think that large states are allowed to fight bloody wars in order to have “buffer states,” while we rarely give mental “green light” to smaller states to do the same.

This bias constantly pops up, quietly, in Western media. We start articles on sovereign countries like Latvia or Ukraine as “former Soviet bloc member Latvia,” or “former Soviet country, Ukraine.” (Follow Bad Baltic Takes on Twitter, who has done the most to help me notice this.) Most Americans would be enraged, or confused, if every article about the US started as “Former member of the British Empire, America.” France would be enraged if every article about it started as “Former Third Reich Member State.” I could start every article on the Netherlands as “Former Spanish Crown Possession, the Netherlands.” This big-state-small-state bias creeps into how we comfortably short-hand country’s names. The journalists may be trying to signal to ignorant audiences where the country is, but it’s slowly baking in this possession bias that has real-world consequences.

• read this excellent timely article that is a case study of how to reject some recent bad Western journalism

The most insidious form of Western punditry I see is to title some article or talk like “why Russia had to invade Ukraine.” We get treated to some breathless rundown of Russian security concerns, Russian viewpoints, all to explain why a nation of 160+ million people with over 5,000 nuclear warheads had a “justified” reason to brutally invade a neighbor with one quarter the population, zero nuclear warheads, etc.

So, in 2022, I carefully stayed up on the news from the January pre-invasion period and throughout. I read a lot of the arguments for and against Ukraine’s position. I also read all of the hullabaloo about Ukraine’s political issues before that time. I considered many of them to be in bad faith- because if those standards had been used on the US or other European countries, Ukraine’s situation would pale in comparison.

I also had many good in-person conversations with friends where we talked about the issues from a good faith perspective. When applying the same rules of judgment, the salient fact is that Ukraine has a representative government, it supports the individual rights of humankind (mostly relevantly, those of its citizenry), and whenever it was up to Ukraine, it lived in peace with its neighbors. Furthermore, the “insurgency” of the eastern regions was manufactured from near-thin air, financed and egged on by dark Russian money and influence. 

Crimea, similarly, was a case of years of insidious Russification of both Ukrainian-ethnic folks and of Crimean Tatars. Even in heavily biased referenda done decades after attempts at Russification, the democratic choice had been to remain Ukrainian. Full stop. No nation has an inherent right to an ice-free port and it’s no one’s job to supply them one. If Russia really felt it had a fair claim that could stand up in court, there were plenty of processes to handle that- but they knew they’d lose a fair-and-square referendum and that’s why they’d never use one anyway.

All excuses made for neutrality, for appeasement, melt away, when you apply basic principles of individual rights and national sovereignty in an even-handed fashion. It’s not a left or right issue- the vast, broad center of humanity that believes in self-determination without coercion should agree to help Ukraine. I’ve seen for myself, since volunteering, that the coalition is broad, and should remain broad. I’ve proudly worked with people around the world who by global or local standards run the whole range of beliefs you could think of. It’s the far ends of the horseshoe (read up on Horseshoe Theory as it applies to the Russian invasion of Ukraine here) who need the current system destabilized enough for their worldviews to take wider hold.

For all those reasons, I chose to support Ukraine. I started with digital activism (Twitter mostly,) where I argued Ukraine’s case on forums, where I disputed misinformation on Russian media accounts, et cetera. It didn’t always feel like much, but many Ukrainians report that it does in fact get exhausting to feel alone on the internet, between Russian official misinformation, their bots, etc, so I always felt it was worth it.

After a few months of doing just that, I evaluated my personal situation- my career, my spare time, et cetera, and realized that I was in a unique position to do more. So many of us are caught up in career progressions, in self-owned businesses, etc, that we just can’t make long-term volunteering work. I just had the unique position of being ready for a transition, right at a time when I could put myself in a physical place to help directly.

I’d also led a previous life where I’d worked hard to keep expenses low. I’d been luckily gifted an empty plot of land by family. I’d purchased, free and clear, a tiny home to place on it. I always buy used vehicles with cash. I had done that as an intentional structuring of my life so that I’d have high optionality for whatever I’d do next. It has come in handy in the past year.

Back to the choice of volunteering, I’m going to go into a bit of psycholinguistics here. I’m a language enthusiast, and speak several foreign languages. I also like reading into the early evolution of language, its possible emergence in other earth species, and the theoretical world of exolinguistics (great summary here*) as well (where we hypothesize what languages on alien worlds may look like.) I like to merge evolutionary biology into this, and understand language from its big picture role there. Language allows us to know who is big boss and who isn’t, without the physical fight that could injure both. Language allows us to make impassioned speeches where we hijack the kinship-bond mechanism honed by evolution, and trick it into being applied to entire other nations, species, in the flash of an idea.

Language allows us to cooperate far faster than any other system. The only problem is that spoken language is metabolically cheap- it costs very few calories, and very little sacrifice of other systems, to have a spoken language.

This creates, in evolution, the emergence of the “costly signaling theory.” It’s the theory to explain extravagant peacock feathers, massive deer antlers, etc. It’s to say that any ole asshole can tell you they’re fit, they’re healthy, they’re worthy mates, etc, but only so many actually have the excess resources, the health, to invest in an otherwise useless structure like a peacock’s tail.

Marketing guru, multi-time TED speaker (great intro talk here) , and all-around-brilliant thought leader Rory Sutherland surmises that most marketing, in the human realm, works almost as well due to its reliable costly-signalhood as for its actual marketing content.

*A fellow Sutherland acolyte wrote this short article describing this in some more marketing and real-world examples, worth an explore.

** Sutherland is one of the most brilliant people you can listen to on digital marketing- going after his meatier industry-intended talks is a must-do. Check this out.

A commercial, if nothing else, tells you that the company is healthy enough to waste its money on a commercial. It tells you they’re not on the verge of going belly-up. Even if you don’t remember a single spec about their product, a single meaningful detail of why you should buy their thing instead of the other guy’s thing, you at least know they’re alive and kicking.

Bringing this back to the evolution of ever-more-complex language, we have to think about what language is, fundamentally. It’s the replacement of action with symbol. Some apes have emergent words– separate calls for “snake!” or “hawk!” You no longer have to get bit by, or personally see, a snake, to know one is near.

Whales have the emergence of dialects or accents– regionally marked whale calls that if nothing else, tell you if you’re talking to a home whale or a foreign whale. They also have names for themselves. It would be too difficult to wait for visual confirmation to see if another whale is kin or a member of your wider pod- all you have to do is listen for that South Pacific twang and you’d know.

Back to signaling theory- the beauty of language is that it’s so cheap. By howling the “snake!” word, a chimpanzee can save its siblings, cousins, etc, from an early death. All at the cost of a bit of extra processing power in the brain, and a sufficiently developed vocalization method. (though, I imagine, the processing power to decode your own species’ utterances is actually a free-rider upgrade that comes from the intensive environmental listening you’re already doing.) Language is a software patch that can get layered on a whole lot of existing hardware- you need to breath and have ears anyway, why not just go for gold and develop the ability to manipulate those breaths a bit?

That is also the curse of language- its cheapness and its “comes included!” origins. It’s only by a stroke of big-picture mathematics that evolution has (mostly) punished “lies” and rewarded truth-telling. In short- if you’re the only one lying, you’ll do really well. But if everyone lies, eventually all spoken symbols collapse and no emergent complexity can arise. This article- if you just read the summary, can give you just a hint of the academic work going into this idea. It’s a great example of an evolutionary innovation (costly communication) needing a near-lockstep development with another feature (cooperation).

Anyways, so, we’ve arrived at a mathematical point where “the system” (humankind? all biology”) can tolerate only a minority of lies and a majority of truths. Anyways though, the truth remains- talk is cheap, and can be fudged at critical moments. It can be cast about by uncommitted casuals, it can be twisted by small minorities of sociopaths, tyrants, etc.

On a side note, in marketing terms, Rory Sutherland notes that this cheapness of language is the weak point of much of digital marketing. It is so easy to write an email and almost equally easy to send to 5,000 addresses as it is to 5. Mail the same people with heavy cardstock envelopes in the old fashioned mail and they know you mean business, though. How many of us throw away mail precisely because we see that it was a pre-postage-paid envelope, versus when you see that an individual stamp had been licked and adhered to it? So…even if you haven’t totally followed me yet, you can get the idea intuitively from in-life examples. We respect communications that we know to be irrefutably costly. Handwritten notes, licked stamps, knocks on the door, all take precedence over mass emails, prepaid envelopes, and the like.

So…to get back to myself being a language enthusiast, I sometimes despair of how hard it is to get really good at a non-native language. I also despair of how even my fluent English does not always feel adequate to make my points. I like to think that by embracing direct actions, I’m actually just switching to yet another language- the language of the body. Not body language (which can be mastered and used for deception as much as for good purposes), but the language of the body itself- of communication undisputable. Where you work, where you live, where you shop, where, when, or how you travel.

When I got tired of my internet work in support of Ukraine, I often felt like I wanted to send a stronger signal. Talk is cheap, as we famously say, and I wanted to intentionally position myself with a costly signal that could not be faked. I suppose it’s a laborious way to come about it, but I thought of it in those psycholinguistic terms. I knew, and know with even more conviction now, that much of the support from Russia comes from casual, immature nihilism, and doesn’t have the horsepower nor intellectual wattage to power anything more than the clack of a keyboard. 

Don’t get me wrong- I know there are hundreds of thousands of people, if not more, motivated by lies and stretched truths, who are firing guns, driving tanks, and launching missiles for those ideas, but I know their peanut gallery has less courage than ours, has no driving higher philosophy to unite them. I feel like I’m a poker player at the table- calling their bluff and putting the chips in. I believe that sufficient numbers of people understanding this can change the tide of a conflict where human wills are involved.

There are many people who’ll casually engage in whataboutist Russian bullshit on the internet- but while they did that for a few hours and proceeded on with their nihilist or myopic lives, I was putting up drywall in southeastern Poland. While they cracked open a can of Mountain Dew and debated making a few more edgy Reddit posts or just going back to their other hobbies, I was installing kitchen tile in southeast Poland. While my pro-Russian counterpart took a vacation, I was…you guessed it…engaged in some kind of light construction in southeast Poland. I was speaking the language of pure action, “costly” action. Not as costly as others making much bigger sacrifices, but costly in the basic metabolic or biological sense.

So, that is why I volunteer, and most certainly why I am trying to spend a slice of my life doing so full-time. Verbal support, advocacy, et cetera, have their role, but there must be a group of people using the language of shaped reality, to make their point. In the fight for Ukraine’s right to exist, I speak Tile, I speak Drywall, I speak Smiles, Handshakes, and Efficiently Delivered Goods. All things that are impossible to fake, and impossible to counter except by other, opposite direct action.