Psychomyths and Thought Experiments

In the 1991 HarperPaperbacks edition, “surrealistic” is unhyphenated.

My response to these scenarios that pose dilemmas involving throwing someone out an airlock to stop a plague, or switching tracks so that the train kills one person instead of twenty, is the same that the narrator expresses at the beginning of the Satyricon towards the education he is receiving from his professor of rhetoric. It’s all about pirates trooping up the beach in chains, tyrants scribbling edicts compelling sons to chop off their fathers’ heads, or oracles condemning three virgins to be slaughtered to stop some plague (Hey, that last bit is straight from Petronius. Godwin just lifted it cold, except he cut it from three to just one. The piker couldn’t fully commit, I guess.). These scenarios don’t feel like anything real.

Dostoevsky can be counted on to bring the real. Ivan brings out his scrapbook of child abuse as the coda to his Grand Inquisitor session because he senses that the story itself did not make the desired sweeping impression. He divides humanity between the few powerfully honest and uncompromising people such as himself and the Grand Inquisitor on one hand, and on the other the mass of childlike sheeple who consistently abuse any freedom they are granted by messing up their lives. The adults such as himself and the Inquisitor have to take on themselves the sad and lonely duty of directing the lives of the sheeple. Ivan himself has pretty much thrown in the towel, at least as far as trying to get his own dysfunctional family straightened out. He’s getting on the train out of town, and he’s a pure observer now, but he projects the Inquisitor as a version of himself who is still at the task of trying to govern the childlike masses. He doesn’t think Alyosha gets, just from the story, the seriousness of this role he sees himself and the Inquisitor in, without bringing in real world cases of the consequences of letting adult children’s stupidity loose on actual children.

Of course the dichotomy is an illusion. The most penetrating intellect is still a helpless child in the face of a human nature that is “too broad, I would have it narrower”. Ivan’s splitting of his own personality, the abandonment of the helpless child within him in order to act always as if he had the duty to master the impossible situations in his and his family’s life, has him treat his brothers, Katya, but mostly himself, with boundless cruelty. He reduces himself to a helpless invalid by the end, more terrified and tormented by his situation than the shit-smeared five year old left out in the cold of an outhouse in that scrapbook of his.

He can’t escape this split he has made in his nature. When Alyosha responds to the wrenching spectacle his brother has made of his emotional state, with this Grand Inquisitor and child abuse rant, by embracing him, Ivan can only see it as plagiarism of the Christ in his story embracing the Inquisitor.

In reality we’re all the characters in these scenarios, both victim and perpetrator, both helpless child and controlling adult. We never face life as just the agent who has to decide which track to send the train down, we’re that person, and the passengers, and the people tied to both tracks, and the train, and the tracks, and the switch. Reality never comes at us narrow and melodramatic.

I think – but ask someone who knows – that Godwin originally intended for there to be some way out for the girl, but editor John Campbell insisted on the tragic ending.

In many respects, I think most of Le Guin’s fiction, starting with The Dispossessed can be regarded as anthropological or philosophical thought experiments. Le Guin, however, unlike a philosopher engaging abstracts, always allowed for the ambiguity that human character introduces into life.

It’s one of those cases where I for one see the appeal of mixing up one’s rigorous philosophical thinking with a bit of Freud. Compare the Underpants Gnomes. That’s a gag about the form of a logical syllogism, isn’t it: “1. steal underpants. 2 …… 3. Profit!” And the gag is both that the most important part of the get-rich scheme is missing, and that the gnomes are revealing more about themselves than they realise by advertising their plan. They think they’re presenting a scheme to make money; in fact they’re giving away that they have this weird fetish for stolen underpants. The search for profit is a fig-leaf; what they’re really interested in is the pants.

First as farce, then as tragedy. ‘The Cold Equations’ gussies-up a standard Philosophy 101 trolley problem with a little science-fictional stage setting. As is often the case in these problems, there is a tacit prioritising of rational thought over squishy knee-jerk emotions. But one of the things that makes the story so queasy and unpleasant is that its pseudo-rational superego excuses a terrible desire. Put the story on the analyst’s couch and it soon emerges that what matters to it is not that the planetful of people are saved, but that the girl dies. The whole elaborate schema is set-up, elaborately constructed in order to give the (male) reader a licensed opportunity to kill this girl. That’s the secret pay-off, the ground of the story’s appeal to a certain kind of reader. Its Id.

It’s not, in other words, coincidental that the spaceship pilot is an older man and the stowaway a young and beautiful girl. Devil’s Advocate might point out: but the ethical problem would be the same if the pilot were a woman and the stowaway a young boy. But the Analyst is going to note that this is not the way the story was actually written, and to suggest that that fact isn’t arbitrary. The Analyst is also going to take the garish Pulp cover, that nearly-naked sexualised woman, as more grist to their mill.

You can’t really blame either Godwin or Campbell for that garish cover. Godwin died in 1980, Campbell died in 1971, and the Eric Flint-edited collection didn’t come out until 2003. Blame Baen Books, most likely.

Another entry in the genre is Theodore Sturgeon’s “If All Men Were Brothers, Would you Let One Marry your Sister?“, Dangerous Visions, 1967.

Very well put. I like the Metaphysical MacGuffin and will use the term. I understand the distinction you make in placing Omelas in a different box of the category than Groundhog Day and Exterminating Angel (both great examples) and it makes me think there IS an essay to be written (and perhaps you’re writing it, or have written it.)

“Omelas” doesn’t work at all as a philosophical thought experiment (John Crowley just explained why), what it is an exploration of our own attitudes– the narrator lays out detail after detail and keeps harping on our own (the readers) responses to them. When the (completely absurd) detail of the suffering child is added in, the narrator challenges us with a question like “Does this make them seem more realistic, more plausible?”. And that’s the entire point: we have an instinctive, visceral rejection of the very possibility of utopia, we don’t think perfection is a possibility: adding in a flaw, any flaw, no matter how ridiculous, suddenly makes us believe more in the scenario. The ones who “walk away” then are the idealists who still haven’t given up hope.

I’m not sure I’d agree about Groundhog Day. I think the implicit answer to the question of what caused Phil Connors to experience Groundhog Day over and over again is that God did it.

Omelas is Salem, O. In the story though that means everywhere “we” live. The happiness in our homes is due to some sort of exploitation of innocents somewhere else, though somewhere else is disguised as the room where the tortures take place. When they walk away, they die, which is why none of them ever ask others to leave, suicide being a personal choice. The political moral is that if we were truly decent people, we would kill ourselves rather than exploit others. The story has such power because who with any aspirations for better things never felt this at moments? And the story is widely acceptable because it is entirely an indulgence, with no possibility of provoking useful action, or even deeper thought.

One of the things I’ve noticed about reactionaries in SF is that they like to insist on how the laws of nature require that life is a tragic struggle, that some must be sacrificed for the greater good. Some of these reactionaries will make an exception for friends. Others insist on some sort of infallible touchstone for identifying the evil ones whose passing is not only necessary but just. And a few will weep over the randomness of it all, at least in their fiction, as in real life, somehow the suffering is not so randomly distributed. And some will take all positions as needed, counterposing them to pure pacifism as a comfortably ideal/irrelevant alternative.

This kind of thinking really should be remembered when speaking of The Cold Equations. None of the to do over the vaccine is at all needed. The Cold Equations would say kill the one who can’t pilot the ship but uses up the fuel. If The Cold Equations were about killing the woman as such, the supposed justifications would not center on some social good like a vaccine, but on her secret sins and flaws. Wanting to hurt women is about feeling hurt by women. No matter how irrational the feelings, the satisfying “justifications” in that story are not about vaccines. Misreading the story as a sexual fantasy means by the way forgiving the blatant sexism in assuming that a woman not understanding basic physics (much less being able to pilot the ship herself,) is so much more plausible than a man being so foolish.

The purpose in making the stowaway a woman rather than a child is first, to soften the general implications by not killing a child. Second, it intensifies the agony of the pilot and the reader, who want (mostly) to save the girl, because she’s sexy. No doubt somebody reads the sacrifice as heroic renunciation, a deliciously exciting Triumph of the Will. But then, there are people who insist on reading Jim Kirk as Bond in Space too. The death of the author is a myth, but the defenseless of the author against misinterpretation is grim reality, no matter how much it is denied.

Devil’s Advocate might point out: but the ethical problem would be the same if the pilot were a woman and the stowaway a young boy.

‘The Cold Solution’, by Don Sakers, first published in Analog in 1991.

The pilot has read ‘The Cold Equations’ (although she doesn’t refer to it by name), and questioned why, if it’s so important in that story to conserve fuel and minimise load, they even use men as pilots when women are lighter.

Correction:

In many respects, I think most of Le Guin’s fiction, starting with The Dispossessed The Left Hand of Darkness can be regarded as anthropological or philosophical thought experiments.

Is there a name for a reverse Sorites Paradox? Omelas seems to function like one. You can say, “Our world isn’t that bad,” but the point is to ask where the point is where that doesn’t matter anymore, it’s quite bad enough, and which side of it we’re actually on. It’s a thought experiment in that way.

I like the analysis of Anarcissie that it’s a Gnostic story. In Gnostic thought the universe itself is a a parable, and so any strong or true strory is a parable of a parable. It doesn’t mattter that such a story can yield up no useful moral; the point is to shake you out of the false (moral) universe you think you live in. I am sure Le Guin didn’t think of it that way (a Taoist not a Gnostic) but it’s ours now and she would not grudge us,

As an aside: I highly recommend James Patrick Kelly’s ‘Think Like a Dinosaur”, in many ways a direct response (and pointed fuck-you) to “The Cold Equations”.

I will again advance the suggestion, though it might not have been LeGuin’s intention, that it is not a philosophical puzzle, but rather an allegory for the world as it is, and a thin one at that, given the prevalence of child slavery. I’d rather not dwell on the provenance of the cobalt used in the battery of my electric car.

J-D’s comment – or rather, Le Guin’s comment relayed by J-D – forecloses some readings* of ‘Omelas’; it suggests that ‘walking away’ isn’t just walking into aporia, or into some sort of sublime deontic limbo where we are forced to realise that the question exceeds any answer we could offer. It suggests that something hangs on ‘walking away’, i other words, in terms of how we live together. (A ‘one’ who walks ‘away’ is very precisely not ‘living together’, but I guess that’s part of the point.) But if Odo is a type of those who walk away, the inference has to be that it’s not simply a matter of walking out, cutting oneself off; perhaps it’s more like walking into the wilderness for forty days and coming back to turn the moneylenders out of the temple. Another inference has to be that not many people manage it – not nobody, or only one person ever (it’s ‘the ones who walk’, not ‘the one who walked’), but not many of us. And that’s fine; not everyone can be an Odo. Might be better if one or two more of us were, though.

*How many depends on how big a deal we think authorial intention is. I guess at the minimum it excludes “we should read ‘Omelas’ as not having any imaginable real-world political referents because Le Guin wanted it read that way”; she clearly didn’t. At least, not consciously, and not at the time she wrote that headnote.

One might think that the citizens of Omelas are in fact deluded and that they torture the brutalized child of the story because they cannot imagine a world without torture. Certainly the necessity of brutality is an argument I hear from many conservatives, and many of the brutalities they defend are unnecessary. Life itself is brutal: it hurts, and no-one gets out alive. But must we make it worse?

Nozick’s utility monster sounds remarkably like Donald Trump, or any exceptionally greedy person.

“Cover Art – the design of the book jacket, generally produced in-house by the publisher’s art department, all of whom are near-sighted psychotics who never actually read the book and routinely forget to take their meds.” – S. L. Viehl

“Cover Art; Book Jacket: A small poster advertising the book to potential readers. Authors who have failed to take into account the fact that it has been bound to the outside of the book, rather than printed on an interior page, will often come to the mistaken conclusion that it is meant to illustrate the story, and be distressed by its inaccuracy.” – Teresa Nielsen Hayden

The Godwin book cover is by illustrator Clyde Caldwell.

The last few sentences of the story are:

The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

To me this suggests that the people described do not appear to be proceeding without direction. The text doesn’t enter into their minds to disclose their thoughts or feelings; the text states only how they appear to others. So the possibility is left open for the reader to imagine that the walkers-away feel directionless, even though they do not appear so to observers. Still, we are told how they seem, which opens up the possibility of imagining that they are how they seem, that they are not merely walking away from something but do have a forward direction–even though the text explicitly canvasses the possibility that no destination exist for their journey. Can one have a forward direction without a final destination? Absolutely yes. The idea of travelling, for example, north-north-west does not require the existence of a North-North-West Pole to make it meaningful. Likewise, the idea of travelling (metaphorically speaking) in the direction, for example, of liberation does not require a final destination of maximal freedom to make it meaningful.

One might even say that the child in the dark room is you, the reader, whom the story is torturing with guilt by asking you why you didn’t walk away (which you didn’t, if you’re still reading…) That’s why “the place they go towards is even less imaginable to most of us than…”

Come to think of it, the trolley problem could also be solved by the presence of a tank, or pretty much any superhero.

You know what? I think that’s going to be my official answer to any further trolley problem I’m confronted with from now on: I do nothing, because Black Panther is about to arrive and to save everyone. After all, I have a pretty strong moral intuition than a world with trolleys that can be swayed or not precisely under the circumstances described and none other also has a Black Panther, myself.

It has been a while since I last read these stories, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas and The Day Before the Revolution. Like J-D @26 I’d say that the introduction to the latter suggests a way of read the former. It also helps to keep The Dispossessed in mind.

I read Omelas as a parable where the people of Omelas believe, sincerely, and possibly correctly, that their happiness requires imposing suffering on the child. I don’t think it is just about meaningless and inevitable suffering, in my view it makes a difference that the people of Omelas do this themselves, or at least condone having it done on their behalf.

So Omelas is nor a physical place, but a state of mind, and to walk away from Omelas is to reject the idea that society must be structured along such lines. Which is why the revolution inspired by the Odo of Day Before, who is “someone who walked away from Omelas”, is an anarchist revolution. The anarchist answer being that no-one should have that kind of power over others. Not a recipe for a world without suffering, but rather for a world where people are not made suffer on someone else’s behalf.

The Dispossessed suggests that the resulting society was not entirely successful in achieving that lofty goal.

Either you say ‘yes’ to Omelas or you say ‘no’ to life. Because life anywhere is as bad as Omelas, or worse.

It occurred to me that many ideologies in the strict etymological sense of the term – especially radically eschatological ones – are built on the premises that you should walk away from Omelas in the interpretation above: the world is fundamentally unjust, life is fundamentally wicked, reality is fundamentally unacceptable. You should renounce them. Early Christianity, Shi’a Islam, many strands of Protestantism and arguably many strands of radical Left ideologies, including Marxism.

Paradoxically, people and societies built on these ideologies often “seem to know where they are going” and often achieved remarkable things even though the world they aspire to is ” even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. [They] cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist.”

So I’m going to record that a possible reading of Omelas, not completely implausible considering Le Guin’s profession, is that it is a fictionalization of the common anthropological observation that functioning societies have been built on the rejection of everything.

Well, you can write your own story your way, Fuzzy, but the one we’ve got reads like this, for the record:

And that’s exactly what you’re supposed to do.

“The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

This is why I maintain Omelas actually is a thought experiment/trolley problem–more so than Le Guin can admit. Once you’ve accepted the premises of Omelas, suspended your disbelief, it’s impossible to imagine where else anyone would go (and, like, she literally told you you can’t). The point of the story is to put you in a place where you imagine yourself forced to accept that the child’s torture is necessary (just like a trolley problem makes you imagine yourself killing someone…). The only way to walk away is to reject the premises the author has set up–write your own story. The story is drawing attention to its own fictionality (as Sufi literature is wont to do), asking you to reject it/rewrite it.

= = = Le Guin carefully avoids discussing how it is that the suffering of the child generates the happiness of the city – there’s no possible way that it can. It’s less realistic or possible a scenario than even Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”. It is not so much a philosophical puzzle story as a story paradox, i.e. something that can only happen, or be asserted to happen or to have happened, in story. = = =

As I noted over on Prof. DeLong’s blog:

slavery => Southern cotton => British cash => German tools => new steel mill for the virtuous North

Did every member of US society 1820-1865 realize that? Did the average worker toiling away in a Massachusetts textile mill or New York foundry? No, but many did. Harder to be smug about having grown up north of the Mason-Dixon line and being on the “right” side of history after one figures out those links.

I strongly disagree with many or these takes. I’m even bold enough to say I disagree with John Crowley. But I started thinking, why is the central figure of this story a child? I think because we expect so little of a child. If the story were about an adult suffering, the reader would be implicitly asked to wonder whether they deserved it, whether they should have been capable of resisting, and so on. We expect an adult, even an adolescent, to be capable of adapting to a situation or taking action against it. The story isn’t about children leaving Omelas because they’re best placed to know what’s happening and most likely to feel the one child’s suffering is unjust. It’s about adults who, equally with all other adults and almost all children, are very happy, are not going to have anything unreasonable asked of them, and yet find what they see being asked of the child so awful that they won’t participate anymore. Yet if the character were not a child, the narrative would not work.

I see that people are saying that the child suffering is so awful it awakens an emotion in the reader, who then being rational, examines the sources of the emotion and the extent to which the reader’s conclusions can be generalized. I’m not certain that’s how the rhetoric is intended to function. Le Guin, I think, has left us pretty irrefutable statements of what her politics were on at least some subjects, and “nothing can be done to eliminate or even marginally improve the situation” is not it.

Mr. Crowley, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to start an argument.

I only intended to acknowledge that my comments (particularly the earlier ones) were in essence incompatible with many of the others in the thread, and with what seems to be the sense of the commentariat on this point. I don’t think I agree with you that the story doesn’t present a problem in ethics or that the ones who walk away (if I’ve understood you) the readers, but those are fairly minor points. It felt presumptious even to disagree with you so far, but my disagreement was with other commenters, and I shouldn’t have included that sentence.

Fuzzy Dunlop @ 70: if the story is about solvable problems, then why does no one in the story even attempt to help the child? Why does the narrator seem to think merely walking away is amazing and, apparently, admirable? (And the author, too, given her comments in the intro to “The Day Before the Revolution”?).

While the description of the city is very vague, maybe-its-this, maybe-it’s-that, you pick, the description of the child and her suffering is very specific. That means something, too.

@74 Thanks, if that was directed at me!

@71 Unreliable by her own admission, I think, and not because of incidental inconsistencies. The question of Omelas’ believability is hanging over our heads all the way through the story until we meet the child. (And does the child actually make it believable, as she claims? What are we supposed to do with these instructions about not just what she wants us to believe for the sake of her story, but about what kind of thing we tend to find, or should find believable? I feel like these instructions/observations are not just scaffolding for the thought experiment, they’re the heart of it.)

Etv13 @73 I like that point about the specificity of suffering vs the vagueness of pleasure. That seems to go along with Le Guin’s point that “we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.”

“why does no one in the story even attempt to help the child? “Why does the narrator seem to think merely walking away is amazing and, apparently, admirable?”

You got into Omelas by making all those choices she kind of asks you to make as you enter (helicopters, orgies, drugs…) about what paradise contains, which means that you got into Omelas by building it. So you walk out the way you came in, which is also taking it apart–un-building it. Her claim that we (artists, pedants) don’t take happiness seriously is the central challenge. A part of the moral/emotional economy of Art, which she’s trying to draw our attention to, is that taking happiness seriously feels like walking away and abandoning the suffering child.

Infovore @ 76: I agree with you that Le Guin is saying the child should not have been there at all, but given that the child is there, it raises the question, what should a citizen of Omelas do when confronted with the child? And the story seems to rule out any possibility that the answer is “help the child.” It’s been a long time since I read it, but my vague recollection is that the citizens believe that helping the child would bring the whole structure of Omelas crashing down, and that’s why John Holbo is writing about it as a quasi thought-experiment of the trolleyish type in the first place. (If he is; 76 comments down, and I’m losing track of what he said in the original post.) In other words, they walk away rather than help the child because while they don’t want to live by exploiting the child’s suffering, they also don’t want to cause additional suffering. This is, in my view, where Omelas diverges from the real world, because I believe that we can, in fact, help hungry or exploited children and by doing so, make the world a better place, rather than a worse one. Also, within the story, I don’t believe the child is beyond help. Maybe permanently cognitively damaged, yes, but that doesn’t mean the child wouldn’t benefit from decent food and warmth and not being locked in a place with cleaning equipment it’s afraid of. But you already sort of said that in your first paragraph.

Fuzzy Dunlop at 75: You are starting to sound like a Chaucer professor I once had who believed that every one of Chaucer’s poems was about poetry as poetry, rather than, say, a bunch of pilgrims telling stories on the way to Canterbury, or death and mourning. (Seriously, when the narrator in The Book of the Duchess says at the beginning that he can’t sleep, this professor thought that was a metaphor for writer’s block. The thought that maybe the narrator was having trouble reconciling himself to the idea of death was not entertained.) You have more justification here, because the narrator does address the reader and say, “Imagine this as you like,” but I think Le Guin is getting at something bigger and more fundamental than “the moral economy of Art” or what is happening to us as we read the story.

John Holbo: Thanks so much for starting this thread. It’s been really interesting and engaging.

John Holbo @ 81: So, another sense in which the splendor of Omelas is built on the suffering of the child. Who can’t stay a child forever — unless by magic. But then, I always had the vague sense that Omelas was the result of some kind of bargain with the gods.

Or maybe the child is an illusion, or a hologram or something? Okay, the story truly doesn’t support that, what with the child being afraid of the mop and all, but everyone always sees a child, and it’s always about the same age, no matter what year it is. It’s another aspect of “the impossibility of the premise” that John Crowley referred to in his first comment. Although I note that the passage you just quoted, while perhaps not adequate to explain how the suffering of the child contributes to the happiness of the city, does at least gesture in that direction.

Wel, saying that There Is No Alternative to Omelas other than suicide and that Omelas is the best of all possible worlds, does come across as a modest boost of sorts, at least from my perspective. I read you as reading Le Guin as saying TINA. She is writing about pervasive exploitation in our societies and some people’s refusal to accept it (a refusal that she clearly views in a positive light). You are reading her as saying that exploitation (or, generally deriving our pleasure from the suffering of others) is inevitable in this universe and the only alternative to exploiting other people is suicide, no less.

On second thoughts, if we accept that animals are rational conscious beings, plants have souls and even inanimate objects might have some preferences of their own, I suppose it makes sense to say that we really can’t physically survive without torturing and murdering cabbage and stones, and we might as well stop worrying and learn to love capitalism.

Le Guin was an anthropologist, with strong inclinations toward anarchism and Taoism.

I have always read the story as about human sacrifice under a setup that makes it an actual inescapable human ethical dilemma. “The Ones Who Walked Away From Tenochtitlan .” I presumed the release of the girl would mean the collapse of (this) civilization and the suffering of many people. Yet, it remains a dilemma? If it meant the death of thousands, should we still help the girl escape? Maybe…

Is human sacrifice the basis of civilization? Well, sacrifice, accepting your lot with complaint or resistance, looking away from the losers and casualties, looks pretty strong. Wilfred Owen used the metaphor for the young and innocent sent to Verdun so the rest might be free. Our economic and social systems declares that there must be losers so that there be winners, so that the winners can more enjoy the fruit of the efforts.

We are all Omelans. We read the tragedy and the plea in the morning newspaper, and go shopping. The cost ain’t worth the benefit. Ain’t that bad. Only one child. Let’s not get radical about it.

The only moral thing to do is to walk away, to cast aside all ties to society and become something like a hermit. Human society is that corrupt, that we all are doing the equivalent of torturing a child in our basement. Or looking between our fingers at school shootings.

They don’t sacrifice the child, even though it’s unimaginable that this won’t make things worse, even guilt and responsibility-wise, nevermind suffering-wise.

It’s not like not-omelas is even that bad! It’s not stated, which means it doesn’t matter, which means it’s like our world. And that’s, you know, actually OK; the absence of impaired-child-torture-based social-welfare guarantees in the world doesn’t actually make it suck all that much.

[I always read it as the marginal welfare improvements child-suffering generated for everybody else not being worth the cost of the child-suffering; which is to say, “y’know, maybe your life wouldn’t suck all that much if you didn’t [eat meat/pay so little for your clothes that the people who make them cannot but suffer / treat half of humanity as existing for your comfort / whatever]; maybe you could live with not doing some of that shit?”]