Why am I who I am

500 sub special

In my real life, I often get requests for a one-word label¹, because I don’t have any you get this post instead. It is actually a very recurrent question I get IRL, who I am. It usually comes after meeting new people and explaining a bit of my background. I was born in southern Spain to migrant North African parents, moved to France as a wee lad and then pursued the typical zoomer striver education path, then moved around a bit for life experience via ERASMUS and such.

What comes after is always some version of: wow, so cosmopolitan, so multilingual, so multicultural. They don't say it in those words, but that's clearly what many are thinking. A true citizen of the global world, how exciting!

But then the gears turn and the same request for a one-word label comes up: ok but what are you really?

The answer depends on my mood and how much trolling I want to do that day. Usually the answer is "I am asmy." When I can sense the political outlines of the person I try to troll them, posing as either a libtarded universalist and cornering them into acknowledging some kind of ethno-nationalism, or as a based muslim traditionalist diasporoid to make the left-wing libtards think a bit about their ideology. But those situations are actually rare. What usually happens is that after a few loops of "what are you → asmy → what are you really → a software developer" I just say French Maghrebi and we move on.

Sometimes my trolling backfires though. I remember one particular time I got some of my own medicine when I met a latina and tried to explain to her that yes, I look like a Jiménez, but no, I am not latino. Then my friends started messing with me (and her), convincing her that I am in fact a self-hating latino, and she ended up getting mad and shouting at me that I should be proud of my latinx roots. A shame given she was very cute too and didn't like me anymore.

That moment captures something I keep running into: my identity is illegible and prickly. She had a category ready, and I didn't match any she knew, so she picked the closest one and got angry when I wouldn't accept it. Mystery and multiculturalism is nice up to a point, afterwards it starts to bust people's balls.

The honest answer is reserved for one case only: when I encounter a long lost kin of my tribe, someone with an equally mixed identity.

Ok, but what are you really?

The sociologists Ruth Hill Useem and John Useem coined the term "third culture kid" in the 1950s to describe children who construct a third cognitive space because neither of their two available cultural templates fully works. The concept has since been stretched to cover any immigrant child, which makes it nearly useless. What I am is a special corollary: instead of two source cultures, I got three, maybe four, and all of it from a proletarian background. The literature on TCKs mostly describes diplomat's kids and expat circuits. My version came from the bottom, or as it is called in Moroccan, chaabi.

Chaabi means popular, in the original sense of low people. The folk, the street-people.

This produces a specific type of person: me. Cosmopolitan despite myself, someone who has internalized different operating systems and switches between them fast enough that most people don't notice the switching, only the very occasional glitches. I've met maybe four people in my life who are the same. Usually it is a kindred spirits moment.

1. Maghrebi foundation

Like all common people, I inherited a large chunk of my culture and character from my family. In my case this meant growing up in a classical traditional household like most of humanity: two parents, father outside working and bringing the bread, disciplinarian and authoritarian force; the mother doing the housekeeping and the one who actually educated us, nurturing and formative force. My parents both came from rather chaabi families and kept a lot of that mentality.

All North Africans are basically Muslim, so Islam was part of my childhood by default. My family being normal people, they gave all of us very Islamic names and a decent level of education in the traditions, rules and practice. Islam rhythmed part of our lives, with the Spanish Catholic calendar rhythming the rest. A lot of my mores today were absorbed by osmosis from Islam and usually show their head regularly in private matters like how I want to structure my family, the choice of partners and such.

A particularity of my family is that they put intense pressure on two things: us conforming into the larger culture as much as we could without trespassing our own, and education. Where I was born this was particularly rare for moros², because the families who put focus on education usually came from the higher strata of their original society³, not the common people, and usually the pressure of education was reserved for women, not men. In my family, my parents saw their sole duty as giving us the opportunities they never had, and they became Arab Tiger Parents when it came to schooling. Their outlook was very Asian in a way, they would foment everything that could be measured and nothing more but they also kept some cool and never forced me into things I didn't care about like music instruments, sports or English classes.

2. Spanish childhood

I grew up partly in southern Spain, which means I speak very loudly and I gesticulate a lot. It also means I grew up in a pretty xenophobic part of Spain by the standards of the time, which shaped my childhood in specific ways.

This put my parents into a hyper-compensating mode. They implanted into us the idea that we are not only ourselves but also represent our group at large, which means we are to always act in the best way possible, in an effort to counteract the damage our more retarded co-ethnics were (are) doing to our collective reputation. One consequence of this was the obsession with education. The family idea was: because there is racism and rampant xenophobia, the solution is to become so excellent that no one can reproach anything. They also forced this on me as the eldest sibling to serve as an example to my younger brothers. Every time I had a mark below 8/10 there was some classical "disappointing son" speech at home. Another effect of this xenophobia was my Spanish accent, having a broken accent made you a target for bullying and getting beat up, so I and many other immigrant kids like the latinos got our respective accents beaten out of us and we grew up speaking with a rather standard accent like you would hear on the news.

This overbearing attitude pushed me to hone my natural intellectual skills from very young, but it also meant that I put a lot of time into education and very little into sports, which through time made me like sports less and deprioritize them entirely. This was a good rational choice but a shit one socially, because in southern 2000s Spain, if you didn't play football you were gay, and if you didn't play you were always left out during the midday hour of play because all guys played football and all football was guys. Me not liking football put me in the gay category and in a position to mostly socialize with girls. And socializing with girls as a guy also put you in the gay category, so it was a self-fulfilling cycle. So as a kid I grew up a scrawny intellectual who mostly socialized with girls and was kept out of the guy circles (like Yukio "gay but have a wife" Mishima).

Spanish culture also meant a certain kind of extraversion and warmth towards people, learning about Catholic culture because it is the culture of the land. In southern Spain it meant that every year you would attend Holy Week, Christmas, the 6th of January and many other Catholic festivals born out of the Counter-Reformation. This was layered on top of the Islamic calendar at home, and you just lived in both without anyone asking you to reconcile them. Living in such an environment basically made me question and learn a lot of both cultures and religions by comparative analysis.

The first notable milestone in my intellectual development happened here. This is where I fell in love with computers. I think I was four or five when I saw my first computer, and probably where I decided I would be doing something related to that for the rest of my life. As long as I can remember, whenever people asked me "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I always answered the same exact thing: Ingeniero Informático.⁴

But growing up in that Spain also meant a very big crash after 2008 and a lot of relative poverty and anxiety. Public schools became more expensive by dumping part of the budget on families, buying new school books every year which cost 500€ per kid, with little resale value because they'd be outdated 2 years later. There was also the general corruption, the lack of resources, hearing "crisis" everywhere, and long bouts of unemployment in my family which put financial strains on everything. This became exacerbated with time and many Spaniards and immigrants left for greener pastures. My family, helped by a coptic Egyptian family friend, eventually did the same.

3. Republican France

I remember the move as a bit fuzzy, but basically one day my father told us: get ready, we move in two weeks, and that was it. My father, the quintessential immigrant dad , thought that we were smart enough to be thrown in water and swim, for which he was right.

But the move was different for each of us. My younger siblings adapted without issues, one brother got four friends the first week and was invited to a birthday automatically. I instead was stuck. I had finally started getting popular in Spain because my intellectual skills were being recognized in group settings, I was being accepted as a competent peer, I was starting to actually have fun with guys. And then it was all snatched from me and we moved to a rural area.

We initially moved into a medium size three-room apartment for all of us, with a kitchen that had no exhaust fan, which meant that food smells stayed. So I was a weird small kid who didn't speak the language and smelled weird. I discovered later on many nicknames that were given to me. Some years after I was socializing with the weird kids only, which was an improvement.

I spent the first year or two basically alone, learning French from scratch on hard mode, bitching to my parents about not having friends. So they got us internet and loosened the rules about it. Because of some part of guilt and regret on their side, I played them (and their improved economic situation) to get a laptop for myself, mostly unsupervised and with much more freedom. The argument was partly "you moved me here and I am alone" and partly "you want me to become a software engineer but I have no computer????" so they relented.

France is the culture I eventually identified with the most, and for a simple reason: people accepted me as one of them without me having to fight for it first. In Spain you had to claw for a seat at the table just to be treated as a sort of equal. In France you were just accepted and you ran with it. I got the Republican propaganda in school (values, democracy, EU and all the good things) and despite being a cynical bitch by inheritance from my father, I accepted most of it as true, because the promises more or less held. Meritocracy actually worked. The effort I put in academically was paid out in better schools and opportunities. The economic winds were improving for my family. Ah yeah also, there were a lot of people like me and you could see them in TV, as your professors and in all levels of society, which for me was new and refreshing.

The best way to show this difference is what happened when I lived in Germany for part of my studies. Every time I met a French person, I would start speaking French and it would be an amazing moment, they would just assume I was one of them and roll with it. The first time I met a group of Spaniards, I spoke to them, and they just told me that I have the papers but I am not one of them. I won't get into nationhood, blood or soil and such, but the nation that accepts you is, at the end, your true nation.

The old map

Before I can explain how I think now, I need to explain the worldview I grew up inside, because the current one is a reaction against it.

Envidia

The Spanish word for envy, but in the Mediterranean it is less a feeling than a social institution. In the cultures I grew up in, success is suspicious by default. If someone is doing well, the first instinct is "what did he do to get there", with the implication that the answer is something dirty. Wealth is assumed to be stolen or inherited, never earned. Ambition is treated as a character flaw.

This runs across the whole Mediterranean basin and deep into Latin America. It is the social consequence of zero-sum thinking: the belief that there is a fixed amount of good things in the world, and that someone's gain is necessarily someone else's loss. If your neighbor got a new car, it is because you didn't get one. There is no concept of a rising tide and no concept of value creation. There is only distribution, and distribution is always unfair unless you are on the top.

This does something specific to how people think about effort. If outcomes are determined by a fixed distribution controlled by people more powerful than you, then effort is at best naive and at worst self-deception. Why study hard when the jobs go to the guy whose uncle knows someone? The rational response to a zero-sum world is cynicism, and cynicism in turn validates the zero-sum assumption.

Conspiratorial logic

Layer on top of this the Arab and Muslim version, which takes the same basic structure and adds an architect. In the Mediterranean model, the world is unfair but nobody is specifically in charge of making it unfair, corruption is the natural state, everyone is out for themselves. In the Arab model, there is a "they." Variously: the West, Israel, the Americans, the elites, the Freemasons, the Shiias or the Salafis. Every bad outcome has an attributable author, and poverty is a project architected by the hidden hand to oppress Muslims because of (((reasons))).

This framework is extremely resilient because it is never falsifiable from the inside. If things go badly, it proves "they" are winning. If things go well, it proves "they" haven't noticed yet, or it is a trap.

Maktub

Maktub means “it is written” in Arabic.

This is a variant of Calvinist Predetermination where God has already decided the outcome. In its mild form this is a reasonable theological position about divine sovereignty and free will debate but in its street-level, chaabi form it becomes something else: a total removal of human agency from the equation. If God has already determined whether you succeed or fail, then effort is either pointless or impious, pointless because the outcome is fixed, impious because trying too hard implies you don't trust God's plan. Faithfulness becomes the only lever: pray, be patient, accept. If the harvest is bad, then pray, if it is good, then pray again. But thinking about why the harvest went good or bad is retarded, because it is maktub and the only thing you can do is pray…

Combining these three you get a triple lock.

• The world is zero-sum, so there is nothing to gain.

• The game is rigged by powerful enemies, so you cannot win.

• God has already decided the result, so trying is beside the point.

All three logics converge on the same conclusion of removing agency from the indidivual. Stay where you are. Endure. Be politically quiet. Anyone who breaks out is either a traitor, a thief, or unusually blessed by God, in all three cases, not someone whose example you can follow.

I was partly spared of the maktub mentality by my incredibly faustian father whose philosophy was that actions are more impactful than prayers. He is right, but in an irony of sorts, when he enacted this philosophy, labored and sent back money to my grandma, she saw it as divine reward for her prayers and not the reward from actions.

Why am I who I am

My upbringing was governed by hschuma, the concept of shame, of what is and isn't acceptable to discuss, think about, or question in front of others. Hschuma covered a lot of territory: sex, religion, doubting your parents' worldview, asking why things are the way they are when the answer is supposed to be obvious.

The internet was the first space in my life where hschuma did not apply. Nobody knew my name, nobody knew my family, nobody was going to report back to my mother that I was reading weird shit at two in the morning. For a kid raised inside a culture where curiosity about the wrong subjects gets you social punishment, anonymity was an incredible opportunity.

The first time I contributed to something online, it was a Spanish-speaking Linux blog. As a young kid I became obsessed with Linux and Android, and the first code I ever wrote was a simple bash script that installs software, plus a config for ncmpcpp. I was deeply enmeshed in the Spanish-speaking community on Google+ (yes, yes...) but as a lonely kid with access to the internet, it stopped being enough. After consuming all the possible content in Spanish and French, I needed more.

Around fourteen or fifteen, hormones started kicking in. I looked at myself in the mirror and realized I was objectively ugly and unattractive⁵, and that I would probably struggle to find a girl because all girls saw me as the ugly brown kid I was. So I started thinking about palliative strategies and the best one was increase quantity, meaning what if I learned English???? The potential pool of women would be 10x and I would probably be able to get a girl. It would also have the nice side effect of being able to read more Linux documentation and man pages. So yes, the initial motivation for the decision that has had the biggest and most everlasting effects on my life came from my love towards boobs.

I had been "learning" English since the age of three, but the reality is that the education system's way of teaching languages is terrible and even with good effort you will not end up with enough fluency to do anything with it. What made me learn English for real was not school.

English cracked the internet open for me. Before it, I was confined to the Spanish and French-speaking corners of the web, which are small and derivative in ways that become obvious the moment you step outside them. After it, I had access to the Anglophone internet in its full, unfiltered, chaotic vastness. Reddit, YouTube in English, forums, blogs, entire intellectual traditions that simply did not exist in the languages I already spoke. The quantity of thought available in English compared to Spanish or French is a difference in kind. This also allowed for getting books via unsayable ways. My parent's philosophy to books was always "go to the library" which in a rural area doesn't open outside school and also, doesn't have Hobbes's Leviathan in English, you know who does, pirate websites.

Political philosophy and /pol/

Around the same time came the true trigger of change: I discovered that political philosophy exists as a field. The specific trigger was reading Rousseau's Du Contrat Social. Despite nowadays holding very opposite ideas to Rousseau on basically everything, this book remains personally significant. It was the first time I encountered someone attempting to reason from the ground up about political order rather than just complaining about the existing one, or not complaining about a vast conspiracy of Jews keeping Saddam down. It opened a door I did not know existed and I walked through it and never came back.

English, the Anglophone internet, and political philosophy arrived almost simultaneously when I was 15-18, and they recursively fed each other. English gave me access to a world where ideas were discussed at a level and volume that did not exist in my environment. Political philosophy gave me something to explore. And the internet gave me a space where I could explore freely without the social cost that exploration carried in real life.

And like every other terminally online edgy teenager in the mid-2010s, I ended up on the dark side. Reddit first, then the rabbit hole that was 4chan's /pol/ during its 2015-2017 heyday. I was 1X, I was bored and I was smart enough to follow the arguments but not experienced enough to evaluate them. It also appealed to me because of how it fit my conspiracy-brained upbringing, and because underneath the racism and the shitposting, there were genuinely interesting questions circulating about institutions, about culture, about why some societies work and others don't, questions that I could not find discussed with the same energy anywhere else. The French school system certainly was not going to teach me about human biodiversity debates or the Cathedral or why the Enlightenment might have been a mistake. /pol/ was mostly wrong about a lot of things, but it was asking questions that polite society had decided were not allowed, and for a kid raised inside hschuma, a space that refused to respect taboos was irresistible.

The good thing is I grew out of it around 2016 and stopped completely around 2017. I became too busy with studies and actual good friends, but I was also finding better answers to the same questions that didn't require a shadowy cabal or a racial hierarchy to make sense of the world. That was partly luck because the abyss quote is very real and /pol/ was an easy gateway drug to harder and more unhinged ideologies if you were low IQ enough to take it seriously.

Reading

The old worldview was replaced, slowly, by a lot of reading. It came in waves and without a plan. Once English opened the Anglophone intellectual world to me, I started consuming political philosophy and economics the way I had consumed Linux documentation a few years earlier, compulsively, indiscriminately, following every link and every reference.

My early serious phase was partly libertarian, as it tends to be for edgy young men who discover that there exist people who have actually thought carefully about why governments fail. I read the usual Jewish suspects, absorbed the usual arguments about free markets, individual liberty and the dangers of central planning. The basic insight that incentives matter and that well-intentioned policies can produce terrible outcomes if you ignore them is one I have never let go of. The technical side (pricing as information, the knowledge problem, the impossibility of rational central planning) is genuinely powerful.

But pure libertarianism, taken as a complete worldview, had the same structural problem as the old worldview, just inverted. Instead of "they are keeping us down" it was "the government is keeping us down." The villain was different but the architecture remained: a single malicious agent, a simple story, a world that would be fine if we could just remove the obstacle. It also has a fatal blind spot, which is that it conveniently ignores culture and the fact that humans are not pure rational utility maximizers. The whole libertarian utopia would be brought down by 20 motivated Algerians. A political philosophy that cannot account for the existence of people who do not share its premises is not a serious one.

Parallel to this I went through Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Montesquieu and Bodin. These didn't give me policy answers but they gave me the grammar of political reasoning itself: what a state is, what legitimacy means, why the question "who should rule" is less important than the question "under what constraints."

Then I read the contemporary institutional thinkers: Joel Mokyr on the culture of growth, Acemoglu and Robinson on institutions, North on transaction costs, Ostrom on commons governance. This is where things started to click. The moment I realized how much my thinking had changed was reading Why Nations Fail. The arguments were not novel by the time I got to them, I had already absorbed most of the institutional framework from other sources. But reading it, I realized that I agreed with its core thesis completely and naturally, and that in doing so, I no longer had any of my conspiratorial thinking left. The old map (envidia, conspiracy, maktub) had been replaced, piece by piece, by systems and incentives. The difference between rich and poor countries is institutions, specifically the difference between inclusive institutions (which distribute power and opportunity broadly) and extractive institutions (which concentrate both in the hands of a narrow elite).

A lot of other authors also impacted how I think but they are too many to name, some honorable mentions remain tho like: Taleb, Rawles, Machiavelli.

Rationalists and neo-reactionaries

After the more serious reading I got to the online intellectual world, relatively late. I read the corpus of Moldbug during Covid and was hooked on part of his premises despite remaining a staunch republican at heart. His diagnostic side (the Cathedral as self-reinforcing institutional consensus, progressivism functioning as a religion without admitting it) was compelling because it matched things I had already observed from the outside. When you grow up between multiple civilizations you can see the water that fish swim in, and Moldbug was describing water that most Westerners didn't know they were swimming in. His critique of the managerial state rhymed with Burnham, and the insight that formal and informal power structures diverge in modern democracies is just obviously true to anyone who has lived in a Mediterranean country.

Where Moldbug lost me was the prescription. The neoreactionary project of monarchy, patchwork, the CEO-state is clever as a thought experiment but fails the basic test of any political system, which is whether it can survive contact with actual humans. A joint-stock republic run by a monarch-CEO would degenerate into a kleptocracy within a generation, because that is what every system without credible checks on power has done in recorded history, and Moldbug's handwaving about "exit rights" does not solve this. I still like the idea of a world of multipolar HRE-style city-states with neo-cameralist governance that you can move between, but that is a project for another century.

I also read most of Scott Alexander's old blog posts and none of the new ones, which is the correct ratio. These 2 are truly the greatest “thinker” of the early 2000s and the fact their content remains untranslated into French or Spanish goes to show how decrepit the intellectual traditions have become, save a few interesting revivals of pre-enlightement ideas via the Catholic traditions.

Sun and Steel

In the middle of all this reading, I found probably the most important book of this decade for me: Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima.

The premise is simple: people with a natural bent towards the mind tend to neglect the body, and this neglect deforms the mind itself. Intellectuals who live entirely in words develop a contempt for physical reality that they mistake for sophistication, when it comes from cowardice. The body is the mind's corrective.

Mishima is gay and thus naturally puts many more beautiful words around it than I just did, but the core argument is this and it hit me hard because it was personal. I recognized myself in his description of the bookish child who retreats into language because language is the only arena where he can win. I had done exactly that: retreated into intellect because intellect was where I had competitive advantage, and constructed an entire worldview around the idea that physical things don't matter, that the body is irrelevant, that people who care about strength or appearance are shallow. This was, obviously, a cope. The same move as Aesop's Fox and the grapes: I couldn't compete physically, so I decided physical competition was beneath me. Very smart!

After reading Mishima I got serious about my body. I started going to the gym and between then and now I've gained around 15 kilos filling my frame. I still struggle to go consistently, but I have more muscle and look better physically than I did at 18 (or 20). The physical change mattered a lot, but the mental shift mattered more. Lifting removed an insecurity that I had been intellectualizing instead of solving. Once I could no longer tell myself that the physical world doesn't count, a whole category of cope became unavailable to me.

This also changed how I evaluated other people's ideas too. There is a specific type of political and philosophical writing, very common in the blogosphere and in academia, that is produced by people who have completely abandoned the physical dimension of life and whose theories compensate for that abandonment. You can smell it in their prose: the overelaborate hedging, the refusal to commit to any position, the endless qualifications that substitute for having a stake in the outcome. I started applying a simple filter: does the person writing this have any skin in the game beyond their reputation? Have they built anything, risked anything, put their body or their money where their words are? A surprising number of political positions collapse once you ask whether the person holding them has ever been in a fistfight, started a business, or had to make a decision where being wrong meant losing something real.

Mishima also cleaned up the last residue of how I thought about masculinity. Growing up as the scrawny intellectual kid who socialized mostly with girls, I had absorbed two contradictory sets of instructions: the feminist schoolteacher version which said masculinity is a problem to be managed, and the dating advice from women, which described the kind of man women say they want rather than the kind they actually respond to. Both were wrong in the same direction producing a model of manhood optimized for being inoffensive and unmasculine rather than being a true man. Mishima triggered in me the replacement with something older and simpler: your body is yours, your strength is yours, the physical world is real and you owe it your participation. I also just stopped fighting my nature in many cases and rolled with it.

Tying it together

So that's the answer to "Why am I who I am".

I am someone who grew up inside multiple cultures and belongs fully to none of them⁶, which means I had to build my own operating system from parts. The Maghrebi inheritance gave me the family structure, the moral architecture, the instinct for loyalty and shame. Spain gave me the loudness, the warmth, the early intellectual pressure, and a childhood spent proving I deserved to be there. France gave me the intellectual framework, the language I think in, and the first place that accepted me without conditions. English and the internet gave me the world.

I am still prickly and illegible, still unable to give anyone the one-word label they want. But this whole stack is mine, I built it myself, and it works.

Anyways, this post is already too long and I feel like I blabbed about myself more than I'm comfortable with. Thanks for the subs, I never thought this many people would read or care about what I had to say, and it feeds my ego in ways that are keeping me healthy right now. To many more posts in the future!

1. The Moldbuggians will get it

2. The word Spaniards have for Maghrebis. It can be neutral but it is usually negative, the equivalent of the n-word for North Africans in many cases.

3. A very good example of this is Yassine Meskhout as explained in his post

I Am Here Because Of Blind Dumb Luck

4. Software Engineer for you bad hombres

5. Not true anymore ^^

6. And unlike a tragic mulatto, I am not torn between them.