Notice That You've Taken Two Steps

There’s a concept called “frogboiling” that is based off a phenomenon whose reality I’m not super worried about because the metaphorical thing definitely happens.

The idea is that if you throw a frog into a boiling pot of water, it leaps out, but if you bring the heat up slowly, the frog doesn’t notice anything is wrong until it’s too late, and it’s too overheated/burned to escape.

This happens to humans in romantic relationships that slowly worsen. This happened to the Republican party over the past twelve years or so. This happens to people in their jobs, in their finances, in their hobbies, in their friendships—all over the place. The basic gist of frogboiling is “you wouldn’t have accepted this whole pile of bullshit, if someone offered it to you all at once, but they spoon-fed it to you little by little in ever-increasing concentration and now you’re some combination of used to it and too embarrassed to change course.”

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In Agor, frogboiling is something that happens a lot less, and it happens a lot less because the median and modal Agori citizen is a lot more on-guard against it. It’s the sort of thing that’s the subject of children’s cartoons and middle school health class discussions, on par with the way this culture talks about peer pressure and bullying.

(This culture’s discussions of peer pressure and bullying haven’t gotten rid of those things, but I do pretty firmly believe they’ve made them less bad. And they’d do an even better job if their standard depictions were less caricatured and more true to the actual lived experience of peer pressure and bullying.)

The core of Agor’s (relative) immunity to frogboiling is simple: Agori citizens teach their children, and remind each other as adults, to notice when they’ve taken two steps in the same direction.

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When you take a deep breath, and decide to simply … let something go, for the sake of the relationship, because it’s just not worth fighting over, that’s a step. When that happens again a few days later—

When you hold your nose and continue to support a political candidate despite them doing something that’s genuinely contra your values, because there’s some other value that you hold even more sacred, and they’re still currently helping you with that, that’s a step. When that whole thing happens twice in quick succession—

When you notice that you’re having a really hard time viewing your conversational partner as present in good faith, because they seem almost criminally negligent or ignorant, and you downgrade your assessment of their whole position in the direction of “probably a bad position that only bad people take, for bad reasons,” that’s a step. But having already taken that step, if you notice yourself doing the whole thing all over again, ending up in an even more suspicious and absolutist place—

When you slip the deadline for your project a second time—

When the group goes to that restaurant you hate, again—

When you’ve “uncharacteristically” lost your temper twice in the past month—

When you find yourself saying “fuck it, it’s only $47,” and something about the whole situation feels oddly familiar—

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One of the most reliable predictors of “a pattern of neurons in your brain will fire in a certain way” is “that same pattern of neurons in your brain fired that way before.” Many of our mental motions are self-reinforcing; much of our growth (in any given direction) has momentum and inertia behind it. A thing happening makes that same thing more likely in the future.

Additionally, most processes do not come with their own terminating conditions. Most people don’t think in cold, dispassionate terms like “once the rates of police shootings of unarmed black men drop to the point that they happen as often as they happen to unarmed men of other races, that particular problem of racist animus will have been solved, and at that point we will be able to turn our attention to the larger problem of unwarranted police killings in general.”

Instead, people notice that police killings of unarmed black men are extremely bad,

and they make a decision to join Team Let’s Do Something About It, Actually,

and they tend to just … not revisit that decision? …to keep on walking in that direction by default, regardless of the costs or consequences.

(Especially if the first costs or consequences are small, such that you get used to absorbing or dismissing them. Inject yourself with small violations of your principles, to build up your capacity to exercise large violations of your principles.)

It takes attention, and courage, and a special kind of mental effort that people generally have a very limited budget for, to stop walking after you’ve been walking in the same direction for a while—all the moreso if it’s a direction that has provided you with a sense of purpose, that’s given you community and camaraderie, that has rewarded you with status and feelings of success, that only people you already did not like were saying was the wrong direction.

(And as rare as it is to stop, it’s even rarer for people to turn around and go back if they’ve gone too far.)

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Knowing all this, the Agori try to avoid getting it wrong in the first place. Agori culture expects things to snowball, by default. If you notice that you’ve taken two steps in the same direction in a relatively short window (so goes prevailing Agori wisdom), you should assume that the most likely outcome is that you will keep on walking in that direction, by default.

If that seems good to you, on reflection, then great! No action needed.

But if it feels like the ideal stopping point is somewhere shy of infinity—if it feels like you should walk a little bit in that direction, but not miles—then the moment when you take your second step is the moment when you pause to reflect. To ask yourself how far should I go? and how will I recognize ‘far enough’?

(Not to pick on the Republicans too much, because it’s more that they’re the unlucky ones this decade than that the Democrats are somehow better at this skill, but: if it were common and popular to ask oneself these sorts of questions, I think a lot of Republicans would have gotten less frogboiled in the period of time stretching from roughly 2018 to 2024. I think a lot of people on that team never bothered to ask themselves where their line ought to be, and if they had, a lot of them would have put it rather shy of where they currently stand today.)