Black Iron Prisons
You have probably met someone who saw the world in a way that was clearly wrong, but that they could not be reasoned out of.
For example, you might have met someone who suffered from some kind of apophenia - drawing wild and inappropriate conclusions from seemingly random occurrences in the world. They may have been able to provide an ironclad chain of reasoning for believing what they did.
The problem isn’t at the level of formal reasoning. The problem is that they are insane. The lens through which they evaluate the evidence is distorted; it does not obviously point to what they think it points to.
The black iron prison is not a set of propositional beliefs; it is a frame. It is not what we see in the world but how we look at the world. It is the dark counterpart of the lifeworld. Its walls are composed of self-evidence. It is not reduceable to propositional statements that can be rejected as true or false: it is the lens through which propositions are evaluated for their truth or falsehood.
A worldview can be both unfalsifiable and wrong.
If people who are in these all pervasive mental constructs cannot see them, then you should probably assume that you are in one (or more) right now.
Consensus Beliefs
It is dangerous to leave behind the realm of consensus and enter conceptual wilderness. Social feedback is one of the mechanisms we use to correct for beliefs, actions, and attitudes that originate in the black iron prison, but it isn’t an infallible one.
However, whole subcultures, societies, and civilizations can be broadly wrong about things individuals are right about and consensus is often more discordant and fragile than it appears.
A few cranks turn out to be geniuses who overturn a flawed consensus (or Cassandras who were too far ahead of their time) but most are simply cranks.
Breaking Out
Religions and ideologies which rest on direct truth claims about the world are the most superficial form of black iron prison, and the easiest to break out of.
When a worldview hinges on falsifiable truth claims, it is fragile. When these load bearing pillars collapse, cognitive dissonance stacks up, and individuals can experience a crisis and leave. The straw that breaks the camel’s back is rarely what people outside might think it is; it is rather something that does not make sense from within that framework.1
More severe cases do not look like dogmatic ideologies or religions. They look more like personality disorders or mental illnesses. If you have met someone with a severe personality disorder, they construct elaborate, air tight defenses for behavior that clashes with their stated values. The languages of psychotherapy or religion are useless because they are masters of this language and can construct elaborate deflections. But a black iron prison is not always an obvious mental illness.
For the more subtle blackiron prisons, breaking out is rarely a rational process. I know of a few things that seem able to do it:
Crushing personal loss, near death experience, or some form of “rock bottom;”
spontaneous experience or personality shift, often felt as a religious experience;
1 or 2 triggered specifically by psychedelics or intense spiritual practice;
anecdotally (I am skeptical of this one), years of psychotherapy.
Pointing out a black iron prison is hard. Jesus famously addressed people with parables; it was later, Nicene Christianity that solidified the faith into propositional statements that must be assented to and believed.
I suspect that the point of parables is to speak to a frame, rather than making people accept some proposition. Parables and art aim to point to something beyond themselves. They are an alternative to semantic, propositional statements.
Propositional statements speak only within a lifeworld - a pre-existing construct that determines what is or is not self evident - parables, art and mysticism can speak to a lifeworld.
Salvation and Perdition
From outside of a black iron prison, the black iron prison looks like its own punishment. Punishing wrongdoers as a practical matter of social deterrence is one thing; but punishing them as a matter of meting out cosmic justice is ridiculous. They’re already being punished.
If I am driving and I see a family of geese crossing the road, and I can decelerate or swerve to avoid hitting them, this is a good thing. The parents will not see their children die, the children will not see their parents die. None of them will be left dying mangled and in agony by the side of the road.
If you asked me “would you like to take a pill that will instantly and painlessly turn you into someone who does not brake for wildlife when it’s not in his self-interest to do so?” I would reject it, even if it made my life easier. I would not want to be confined to a morally smaller world. Only a profoundly disordered mind would want this.
There doesn’t need to be (and probably isn’t) an eternal reward for braking for wildlife. It doesn’t have to be my purpose in life. A sane, moral person pursues good and detests evil without the need for fantasies about cosmic rewards and punishments.
When we suddenly perceive the wrongness of a particular frame - a black iron prison - we may choose to abandon it and its restrictions. We may see how destructive, ignoble, wasteful and pointless our previous approach was. The reward is that we get to live in a new or better way, if we choose. Our previous state is seen as a punishment in itself, and the reward is our liberation.
This liberation comes, or feels like it comes, from outside of ourselves because it is not and cannot be a product of mere reasoning.
If free will exists, it does not exist in the making of quotidian choices like what breakfast cereal to eat. We make these decisions mechanically. Free will exists in the possibility of radical choices. Liberation from a black iron prison is accompanied by frame collapse - the end of a loadbearing conceptual framework - and when it happens, there is a possibility that we may choose to double down on that frame. We might choose not to say “I was wrong” - and proceed from there, but rather “I was right.”
Rules of Thumb for Life in a Black Iron Prison
Given that we can’t know if we are in a black iron prison, we should assume we are in one. We are probably enthralled by some all pervasive mental construct that seems self evident to us at any given time.
So what can we do? I would suggest that the best thing to do is to fall back on very simple heuristics. The simpler they are the harder they are to rationalize or lawyer our way around.
A useful heuristic is how we treat people. Many black iron prisons provide us with no shortage of ontologically evil enemies beyond the scope of ordinary moral consideration. You have to treat people with a baseline of respect precisely at the point where you believe they least deserve it.2 “Punch a Nazi” (or, if you are on the right wing side of the very online culture wars, “punch a pedo”) is not very good because if you just want to punch people and feel morally vindicated, eventually everyone looks like a Nazi or a pedophile.
From the inside, this staying of one’s hand, the unwillingness to give in to malice and spite feels like an unnatural mercy, perhaps even anti-social leniency. From the outside, it looks like an unwillingness to capitulate completely to whatever black iron prison we live inside.
I worked for a while at a criminal defense law firm whose clients included some profoundly evil people. One of the things that struck me was the detached bureaucratic and impersonal manner with which these people were handled by the criminal justice system. This is the moral floor of civilization. If we ever collectively give in to our most vengeful instincts against those who deserve them the most, civilization is in trouble.