82. Deadlock in the Parliament of the Self

(Epistemic status: I'm not claiming that this is actually how cognition works, but I do claim that it's a useful frame, and one which I find predictive. For and with thanks to NC, IL, and M/T.)

 

You know how sometimes there’s something you think you want to do but whenever you try to do the thing you mysteriously lack energy? You want to do the task. You know you need to do it. You even know what to do, and how. But every time you take a run up at it to try, you lose all motive force and find yourself sliding off to some onerous chore instead, tidying up or doing dishes instead. How mysterious!

Or: you have something you need to write. A paper, a grant application, an email, whatever. You sit down to work on it. It's right there in front of you. You have the time and the tools and the necessary knowledge. And yet... nothing happens. You stare at the half-finished writeup before you. You close the file. Then you open it again. You read the same paragraph three times without it leaving much of an impression on you. You get up for water and sit back down; still nothing. You find yourself opening and shamefully closing social media, video sites, even tangentially related and plausibly necessary papers on arxiv. But you're still not buckling down and getting the writing done. What is wrong with you?

You're not physically tired, and you had plenty of sleep, and you blocked out a part of the day well in advance to do the writing or the mailing or the furniture assembly, but some essential animating force within you is evidently out to lunch; some vital capacity to put your shoulder to the wheel is missing, or maybe inapplicable, or unplugged. Yes, that seems closer to right - that grit, that drive, that eternal capacity to make the right choice; it's come unplugged or been somehow disconnected. It's not even depleted; your stack of clean dishes and (different) stack of clean clothes can attest to that. So, less self-deprecatingly and more seriously - what is wrong with you?

It's not laziness, though it might look like it from outside. If you're not careful and perceptive, or you're nursing past wounds, maybe it looks like laziness from inside, too. But it's not. It's actually a deadlock, and to understand and break it requires that you stop thinking of yourself as a unitary executive for a bit and instead consider yourself as a parliament.

The basic idea comes from such disparate but similar-flavored frames as shard theory, internal family systems (IFS), multiple systems/DID, Ord's Moral Parliament, and other various multi-agent models of the self. They share a core idea and frame in common: you, a single body-mind, are not a single agent with a single coherent set of preferences; and it's more accurate and more helpful to model yourself as a coalition of different subsystems. These subagents - shards, alters, parts, whatever you want to call them - all want different things, but must still coordinate on action. The parliament must debate, and cut deals, and then speak with one voice as best it can. Notably, these different desires need not directly conflict: they can overlap, or be at cross purposes, or be in rough agreement on goals but disagree on means and in conflict over scarce resources, internal or external. We might model each of those parts as being like a political party, complete with a platform. Some parties are single-issue, like the Desire for Treats Party and the Touch Grass Party. Others are minor parties with some amount of pull and a wider platform, like the Wanderlust and Adventure Party or Who You Are in the Dark. Still others are major parties whose platforms touch on nearly everything in daily life and which commensurately greater power, like the Material Resources Party, which advocates for high employment (keeping your job and working harder at it), infrastructure maintenance (having a fairly nice house and clothes and taking care of health), and less public aid to run a budget surplus (more savings trading off against smaller tips and little-to-no donations to beggars); or the Curiosity and Knowledge Party, which advocates for basic research (learning and a budget for good books), more funding for policy research (exploring many possible options), and a moderately high prioritization of foreign policy and even adventurism (learning from and getting to know others and taking a peek in that hallway you're technically not supposed to go down).

These parties might form coalitions - the single issue Domestic Comfort Party joining with minor parties like Social Anxiety and Caution First; they might also be bitter ideological enemies - the Health and Weight Loss Party will hardly get along with the Eat, Drink, and Be Merry Party, though either party might fracture along ideological lines - maybe the Health part gets peeled off into a Living Well coalition. Importantly, the parties present in any given person's Parliament will vary wildly, as will the relative strengths of those parties; major parties might be downgraded to minor ones, or even single-issue parties: Risk Aversion and Stability to Caution First to Concern About My Relationships, for instance.

As you might expect from the frame, the parties negotiate, squabble, gain or lose seats over time, cut deals, join and leave coalitions, spend down resources like political capital and popular will or run risks like the establishment of grudge coalitions or outrage due to coercion, and they generally eventually come to a single course of action to promote to the unitary executive - the Self. There might also be other faculties and ministries, like the Department of History and Memory, the Bureau of Plans and Hopes, the Office of Prediction and Futurity, and the Treasury; these departments might, as in the wider world, have clear ideological bents one way or another. And usually, all of this complex coordination happens automatically at the speed of thought, well below the layer of conscious awareness. Single-issue parties largely sit out or on rare occasion take the dais, minor parties figure out what they think and might vote or abstain or occasionally demand slight alterations, and major parties might even already be in broad agreement on policy. When you're hungry and there's food available, and have no competing priorities, the Sustenance and Maintenance Party proposes eating, Hunger and Thirst seconds, and Desire for Treats lends its voice - though it might push the final decision towards getting dessert; maybe Health and Weight Loss picks a fight about it today, maybe not. You can just eat, with relatively little internal negotiation necessary, if any. This is the Parliament of the Self, in full function and plenipotentiary authority.

Sometimes, however, such a coalition doesn't form. Sometimes different parts want different things, and they can't agree on a course of action: the result is paralysis. There is deadlock in the Parliament of the Self.

Indeed, there's a whole array of possible internal states and lived experiences that this theory retrodicts with ease:

• Unanimity or overwhelming supermajority. Every part of you or nearly every part of you that has an opinion agrees on a single course of action. Maybe there are slight adjustments to the same basic proposal. Action is natural, easy, even energizing. The decision is an obvious one: no need to force yourself.
•  It's late at night. You're tired and at home. Your bed is right there and there are no household chores you need to do. Every part of you agrees that the thing to do is go to bed, so you do. No internal struggle.
• Comfortable majority; a mandate. Most parts of you are on board. A few aren't that excited, but none of the major or minor parties object especially stringently. Action is still pretty easy. You might need a little willpower to overcome that minority objection, but it's manageable.
•  You're running out of clothes and should probably do laundry, but it's late and you'd rather read and then go to bed. Most of you agrees that doing laundry is still a good idea - you'll have clean clothes, your future self will be grateful, and it won't take that long. You can even keep reading while the laundry runs. You run the laundry with some little reluctance, fold your clothes, and finally go to bed. Desire for Reading has been mollified, but Rest and Comfort might have something to say tomorrow night.
• Majority or strong plurality, but with a vocal and united minority. You technically can act - there's a majority coalition, after all - but doing so feels rightly like a betrayal of a significant part of yourself. The minority that objects is large enough that overriding it causes you internal distress.
• You take a comfortable, interesting, and highly-paid job, but one that requires that you compromise on or abandon values that you care about. Most of you agrees that this is the pragmatic choice... but a substantial part of you, comprising a fair-sized coalition with a decent amount of Shapley value, makes you miserable every time you cash a paycheck. Don't count on the Shining Future coalition to help you run statistical analysis for OpenAI or Raytheon, nor its fellow travellers at the Ministry of Cleverness and Progress.
• Narrow majority and unified opposition. A tiny bit over half of the Shapley value's worth of parties want to do the thing, and somewhat less than half don't. Action becomes genuinely difficult. You can still do it, if you want to push the proposal through the opposition, but it will take substantial willpower to do so.
• You feel like you should go to the gym. Part of you wants the health benefits, the sense of accomplishment, and the adherence to routine. Part of you is tired and would rather rest. It's something of a toss-up: sometimes you go, and sometimes you don't. When you go, it feels like a victory of willpower over reluctance... or a wasteful use of that same willpower towards an ultimately less important goal. When you don't, it feels like you're throwing away all your hard work... or a genuinely prudent move to avoid exhausting yourself or worsening an injury.
• Notably, there's a much less stable subtype of this where a decent chunk of the Parliament starts off abstaining, and both a narrow plurality (not majority) and its somewhat weaker opposition try to win over as much of the undecided center as possible.
• Deadlock. The Parliament is split roughly 50-50, but unlike a narrow majority with a much weaker opposition even if united, in this case neither side has the support or resources to simply override the other. The result is paralysis: you can't do the thing, but neither can you refrain from doing the thing. The clock is ticking, and you're stuck.
• You need to write an email asking for help with something. Part of you is well aware this is necessary and reasonable. Part of you is terrified of bothering people and looking incompetent. Neither side can win. You type the addresses in, write a greeting, and get two sentences into the email... and then you stare at the blank email draft for an hour and write nothing more. The email rots accusingly in your draft folder.

A narrow majority is hard but at least navigable. Even if there's just a plurality, and the minority opposition is unified and vocal, you can at least act. Deadlock is so much worse than either one, because you're hopelessly stuck. You can't do the thing, you can't not do the thing, and you can't even give up altogether because part of you insists that it still needs to happen. You go around in circles, chasing your tail, wasting time, and burning resources, all to no effect - neither a solidly completed task nor the rest or alternate accomplishment of refraining. Your experience is one of profound executive dysfunction, parts of you throwing vetoes at other parts of you. You sit, paralyzed, unable to make yourself move. Someone asks you what's wrong and why you can't do the thing, and you don't even have a good reason - "I just can't" definitely won't cut it as an answer, least of all to yourself; behind your eyes, a brawl plays out worthy of the Malaysian, South Korean, or Ukrainian Parliaments, or perhaps even the US House just pre-Civil War.

From the outside, it looks like weakness, laziness, or extreme distractibility. From the inside, it feels like some essential component of your agency has simply gone missing. The executive Self, the part that does things, has left the building in dismay, and you become nothing more than a collection of conflicting impulses with no tie-breaking mechanism. No plan, no system, no method.

So what drives this awful state of affairs, and more importantly: how can we avoid or mitigate it? In my experience, deadlock arises when enough of a few contributing factors - none of which is essential, and none of which are especially rare - are present.

Having a goal conflict where both sides feel essential contributes: you want to ask for help, but you fear being a burden. Both needs feel like the stakes are existential for your relationship to someone or even your job; neither can yield without something important risking destruction, so neither coalition yield. A lack of clarity contributes, too: if you knew for certain that asking for help would be fine, or alternatively that it would bring you grief, then one side would carry the day. Not knowing one way or the other means intractable uncertainty, and if there's anything that international relations YouTube has taught me, it's that uncertainty and bargaining friction spark conflict.

Your expectations about the future matter, too: if you're uncertain about the likely fruits of your action and aren't even fully convinced that dedicated action will get you what you want or even stave off what you fear, then the opposition has good grounds for undermining the majority's proposal. Your past plays an even more important role. If in the past you've tried to force your way through a deadlock and come to disaster as a result, or even if it worked at a terrible cost, then the resisting coalition has only learned that in service of protection you and by extension itself, it must resist all the harder and more stubbornly. Your attempted override has specifically brought about harsher internal opposition. Even your recent past plays a role: if you're fresh, calm, and full of energy and decision-juice, you can sometimes brute force your way through a deadlock, maybe with mollifying promises to the opposition that you have the vigor to think of and offer. If you're already depleted and tired, you can't. The tie-breaking mechanism - willpower, vigor, mettle, mana, spoons, whatever - is offline, and so you're stuck.

So what might you be tempted to do that actually just worsens the problem? Trying to force your way through is risky at best, and only sometimes works. You're already in a situation where brute force isn't working or isn't a real option; trying harder can just entrench both sides of your internal conflict. It's better at least than ignoring it, though: that objecting coalition is still a part of you and has reasons for its objection. Maybe those reasons are misguided, self-defeating, or poorly-expressed, but they're generally coming from some place of sincere desire to protect you and advance your goals. Tragically unlike many real-world parliaments, all these shards of you want what's best for you, albeit filtered through some or other strongly-colored lens. Ignoring them won't make them go away: they are there as a part of you to be interacted with, and their voices will be heard one way or another. Trying to proceed as if their objections don't matter will mean self-sabotage down the line. But worst of all is judging yourself for the deadlock - if brute force is risky and costly, and plugging your ears is bad, then adding shame to the mix is vastly worse. Now you're paralyzed and on top of that you feel bad about being paralyzed. If you want to be that self-destructive, buy a motorcycle or some drugs or something; at least it'll be fun for a while first.

Fine. Enough about what doesn't work. What does? What can help? Most obviously, you can attack aspects of the deadlock at their roots. If you suffer from uncertainty and it's cheap to dissolve it, go seek clarity and find cruxy information. If you find out that your boss is an unhelpful menace or that your advisor loves to nerd out about exactly the blocker you face, then that's decision-relevant and valuable and Just make sure to commit in advance to respecting and using whatever information you get, one way or the other; maybe visualize a signing ceremony. Another possibility in the same vein is to look directly at, name, and strike at the underlying fear. If you keep noticing a hitch whenever you try to apply for jobs, take note, and try to figure out what you're afraid of. It could be a fear of being revealed as inadequate, trauma around interviews, terror about committing to the wrong path, or even simply finding rejection painful. What goes wrong if you do this? Ask yourself that question and similar ones, and don't stop asking until you've found something true. In particular, "what goes wrong if I do this and it goes well" is an especially sharp question that I've found useful for tracking down these kinds of fears. Don't keep trying to pull that door open - check if it's a push-door instead. One last minor possibility is that something in you is deeply powerfully unhappy with two or more options, all of which are bad. Waiting around for something to change is an underrated option - both in terms of how good of an idea it is, and in terms of how risky it is. A lot can pass you by, if you don't take action when necessary, but it's also sometimes the case that waiting around for a bit can let clouds clear and once-firm constraints soften or crumble away.

On the other hand, it might take not dogged persistence and basic groundwork but rather a bit of creative thinking to break the deadlock. As I mentioned before, asking strange-feeling variations on obvious questions can be productive - "what goes wrong if I do this and it turns out for the best, at least for now" is one, and "what am I afraid of losing or missing out on here" is another. Reframing the problematic proposal is another strong possibility here - rather than lock yourself into "send the email" vs "don't send the email", maybe you can find a third option that satisfies both sides of the deadlock - you could take care to word the email more safely without sacrificing expressive truth, for instance, or go see someone in person over a coffee, or do a bit of rubber-ducking first. Finally, you can try to induce the formation of a coalition along different ideological lines. You can explicitly broker multipartisan deals between parts of yourself. If you notice yourself dragging your heels on going on to a party you know you'd like to attend, you can assure the Social Anxiety Party that (for example) every half an hour, you can go sit somewhere quiet off to the side, and after two hours, you can just leave without feeling guilty, or you can get the Desire for Treats Party's support by giving it the right to get some nice snack you spot while you're out. Importantly, if you choose to do this, you do in fact have to follow through on the deals you make. You have to listen to those shards and if they pull the ripcord you offered, you have to go through with it. If you don't, you'll almost certainly provoke a crisis of confidence. Similarly, if you somehow conveniently never think to make use of those outs, then once again the opposition party will notice and feel betrayed and that will have effects not just on whether it will be as willing to make such an internal deal next time but whether any of your shards will. After all, if the Self engineered a soft renegement now, who's to say it won't again later on? In some cases, you might need to make bets with yourself instead: if a shard is blocking you because it's scared of something going poorly, make a bet with it - go do the thing, and if it goes well, that shard gets something it wants a lot - both something material and the right to say it told you so - and otherwise it needs to trust the Self a bit more (and possibly you get yourself something nice). As a word of caution, to do this well you not only have to make good on those bets, but you also likely need to be reasonably well-calibrated on probability and odds, with a good sense of what your shards value.

For my part, I end up in deadlocks like these reasonably often, though thankfully less so lately. In recent weeks I've tried in vain to send off applications for jobs, schedule interviews, book travel, purchase expensive hobby materials, follow up on research admin, read Discord messages, and take a more active role in project management. For each of these, part of me insists they're important, and part of me is exhausted and depleted and doesn't believe any of it will work anyway. Neither side is winning. The result is that I sit here, staring at my to-do list, unable to make myself move. But the Parliamentary Model of the Self at least gives me some framework for understanding the problem that's both less damning and more useful that simply thinking I'm lazy or broken or burnt out. I'm not - just deadlocked in a variety of different frustrating ways. There's an internal coalition that needs to form, and it's subtly different in each of those cases; there are large conflicting factions, with no real tie-breaking mechanism to hand. And mere understanding may not fix the problem on its own, but it at least points me in the right direction, for what to do, what to chew over further, and how to move forward anyway without fighting myself unduly. And if nothing else, the frame means that I'm not constantly beating myself up about it, adding yet more shame and self-judgement to the pile of action paralysis. It's not a matter of personal weakness, but rather a multipolar coordination problem in an internal parliament - and those, of course, are just famously easy to solve. But never mind my wryness - a solution exists, if I'm thoughtful and patient and willing to spend the resources. And on good days, my Parliamentary Self makes stunningly vast and high-quality progress on a glorious variety of different proposals. Now that you know yourself for a Parliament, maybe yours will, too.