The Theory and Practice of Raising a Criminal

Sins of the Mother, Part 2: What Sam Bankman-Fried's ethicist mom believed about human freedom and criminal guilt.

A Note To Readers: This is part 2 of Sins of the Mother, a draft chapter in my book about the ideas, conditions, and movements that fed the FTX catastrophe. Part 1 of Sins of the Mother can be found here.

Update June 2024: This post is now unlocked and free to all readers. To get new Dark Markets content as soon as it is published, and to support this ongoing work, please consider a premium subscription at $8/mo.

While the below offers an extended free preview, full access to these chapters is restricted to premium subscribers to Dark Markets. Please consider subscribing to support continued work on this book. Soon, paid subscribers will also receive premium additional content from the Dark Markets Podcast.

These chapters are all first drafts and subject to correction and revision. Stay tuned for updates soon about how premium subscribers can help me craft the book.

“Severe Deprivation”: Barbara Fried’s Theory of the Criminal Child

“Sam will never speak an untruth … It's just not in him.”

Barbara Fried

It’s useless to deny the schadenfreude in conducting an autopsy of Barbara Fried’s philosophical corpse. She spent an immense amount of energy on theories about what makes a criminal – only to have those theories proven ridiculously off-base by the actions of her own son.

In “Beyond Blame” (which we began unpacking in part 1) Barbara Fried posits that a determinist universe makes the idea of moral blame incoherent. She instead encourages us to view people who commit crimes as having something like a mental illness – in fact, she conflates criminal behavior and mental illness quite freely. But at the same time, in the absence of any theory of choice, she seems forced to root criminality almost entirely in the circumstances of a person’s upbringing. This makes focusing attention on her as the mother of a historically nefarious criminal not just a gratifying “gotcha,” but an important rebuttal with much deeper stakes.

The irony is specifically rich because Fried envisions only one kind of background that leads to criminality: growing up poor or abused. According to her, criminality is a clear outcome of “the severe deprivation most prisoners faced growing up” – which, again, she treats as practically interchangeable with mental illness in terms of how we assign responsibility for crimes. That is, she appears to argue that the 15 percent of prisoners with symptoms of psychosis are morally equivalent to those who grew up poor.

Race, class, and education are strongly correlated to the odds of being incarcerated, often for unjust reasons. But that’s emphatically NOT the same as claiming, as Fried does, that the “severe deprivation most prisoners faced growing up” shaped their little robotic brains into criminal algorithms. In fact, her formulation lets the broader system off the hook: a Black man who grew up poor could have a perfectly happy and healthy upbringing; could adopt a firm, clear, morality; could even (with some luck and a lot of grit) get a good education. But he’d almost certainly still be at a higher chance of incarceration because the world around him is designed to put him in prison.

That is, Fried’s determinism, deployed in support of a progressive prison reform argument, still seems to reflect an intensely privileged worldview – it emphasizes how the actions of an individual are determined by their background or circumstance, rather than thinking about how a particular background can rob an individual of any agency whatsoever.

Further, Fried’s moral focus on the poor obviously does’t reflect the full spectrum of the backgrounds of people who wind up in prison – a truth that, again, her own son would drive home a decade after she penned these words. This adds to a substantive argument against determinism – after all, people with very similar backgrounds wind up taking wildly different paths through life.

Compatibilist Calvinism

Before we go on, let’s lay out the specific point of contention at the heart of the debate here: do human beings actually have free will?

As I discussed in the first half of this chapter, Barbara Fried moves quickly past this question by reference to neuroscience research (and the boldly confident prediction that future research would prove her position even more thoroughly). The most widely-known neuroscience research on the topic has found something far less concrete than determinism – what researchers have actually found is that not all decision-making is conscious, or that decisions are made before we actually experience them as decisions.

Fried seems to regard compatibilism as a kind of cowardice, characterizing it as “equivocation.” A more generous, curious mind might instead consider compatibilism a provisional attempt to reconcile two very complex, counterbalanced truths.

Findings of this sort only pan out to pure determinism if we conflate the conscious mind with the entirety of human function. That is, Barbara Fried’s leap to determinism from current brain science hinges entirely on assuming that there is no such thing as unconscious or pre-conscious thought. These concepts were most famously developed by Sigmund Freud, who we’ll encounter again in a bit. Significantly, Freud is absolutely loathed by, and has been the target of a sustained campaign of discreditation by, the precise sort of rationalist and scientistic thinkers of which Barbara Fried is a sterling representative.

(“Scientism” is a very important word in our current moment. It means not simply “belief in scientific inquiry,” but a belief that scientific inquiry is the only valid mode of inquiry and the only valid form of knowledge. Effective Altruism, with its love of made-up probabilities and pseudo-logical word games, is the absolute epitome of debased scientism, and Bankman-Fried’s destructive downfall is a real-world rebuttal of its narrowminded approach to understanding.)

John Calvin - an early determinist who nonetheless retained the concept of blame - what was then known as ‘sin.’

The problem that Barbara Fried was tackling was this: Once one accepts a deterministic universe, and specifically deterministic human behavior, there can be no such thing as morality or ethics. Moral judgment is only meaningful if an acting subject is free to choose differently than they do.

Of course, this presents a severe practical problem for, you know, having a society. As Fried herself essentially argues, it makes no sense to blame or punish human beings for violating social or ethical norms if we are all effectively robots. Instead, she essentially argues that we should conceive of punishment as strictly a reform function – sometimes you have to reprogram the robot, but there’s no such thing as a bad robot.

But this is unpalatable to most people, even if determinism itself were on more solid evidentiary grounds. As Fried reviews in her essay, this has led to a large body of thought on what’s known as “compatibilism” – efforts to reconcile morality with determinism. For her part, Fried seems to regard compatibilism as a kind of cowardice, characterizing it as “equivocation.”

A more generous, curious mind might instead consider compatibilism a provisional attempt to reconcile two very complex, counterbalancing truths. On the one hand, neuroscience aside, we can’t deny we are heavily embedded in our environment, guided by genetics and society and other things we can’t control.

On the other hand, there are very strong reasons that, as Fried says, “the majority of contemporary philosophers writing on the subject [of free will and ethics] are compatibilists.” Despite an increasing awareness of humans’ social and biological dependencies, we experience our own existence as a series of choices, and sit at the far end of a 10,000 year legacy of holding individuals responsible for their actions. Here again, as Peter Bloom put it, we give up too much if we reject this massive, concrete evidence for at least some form of validity for both free will and, in turn, blame.

Instead of grappling with this deeply challenging but fascinating loggerheads, Fried addresses what some might call a straw man – the 16^th century theologian John Calvin. Calvin preached two seemingly incompatible theological positions: predestination, and sin. Predestination was the idea that certain people were flagged to go to heaven before they were even born – an early articulation of determinism. Sin, on the other hand, is an ethos of blame and individual responsibility.

Calvin is just one example, though. “The compatibilist position,” Fried writes, “has been around for a long time, with the role of determinism played variously by fate, luck, the gods, God, and social and biological forces.” Here again one sees in Barbara the hubris that marked Sam Bankman-Fried for disaster: yes, humans have struggled with this puzzle since the dawn of conscious thought. But I alone can fix it.

(At the same time, Fried does not seem to reflect much on the fact that she, a materialist atheist, has the same reductive view of human nature as a 16^th century religious fanatic who had never heard of a germ.)

Resolving the intractable conundrum of free will isn’t my task here, so I offer only a tentative counterpoint: that free will can be theoretically grounded in the separation of the mind from the brain. The emergence of consciousness from matter may itself be a kind of miraculous conception that removes conscious beings from the flow of materialist fate by giving us the power to think and decide.

This is an extension of the concept of the self developed in Alva Noe’s recent book, The Entanglement. Noe argues that experience, perception, and ultimately consciousness arise from culture. That is, our senses and our brains may be robotic reaction-machines in some sort of theoretical state of nature. But in our interaction and communication with each other, we learn to interpret and ultimately shape not just the world, but our own desires and motivation.

If consciousness and free will are indeed related to mutual communication and self-reflection, then it’s tantalizing to reflect on the relative freedom of Sam Bankman-Fried’s will. He was a notoriously bad communicator, at least by his basic nature: As he admitted to Michael Lewis, he had to practice things like facial expressions so that others could relate to him.

Maybe Sam Bankman-Fried, at least, was never given the tools to act differently than he did. His mother’s theories were absurd and harmful – but when it came to their son, they may have been chillingly accurate.

Determinism and the Return of the Repressed

Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors. The project of human thriving, including the project of science, has always been haunted by the shadows of death, madness, and disease - symptoms of the uncontrollable world.

Fried’s subtly hidden bias against poor people seems to inform a theme of Sam Bankman-Fried’s upbringing: the implicit assumption that his strange brain implied he was uniquely brilliant.

In fact, Sam’s brain isn’t all that strange, and it certainly isn’t unique – he’s a sociopathic math whiz with ADHD, which I imagine are a dime a dozen in Palo Alto. But Barbara and Joe repeatedly saw his failure to thrive in school or society and decided it was a sign, not that he was flawed, but that he was extraordinary. As Robert Evans recently pointed out brilliantly on Behind the Bastards, Michael Lewis continued this elite habit of valorizing the strangeness of its own children, mistaking Sam’s debilitating video game addiction for some unique gift. Again and again, Lewis recounts stories of Sam being a total screwup, but paints them as evidence of genius.

This blindness could be, at least in Barbara’s case, a product of her determinism. She is a good person, and a good mother, who gave Sam a good upbringing. Ipso facto, Sam must be a good person. In comments published days before the start of Sam’s criminal trial, Barbara insisted to a New Yorker reporter that “Sam will never speak an untruth … It's just not in him.”

This is a striking moment of blindness from a person who insists on their own cold, utilitarian rationality. Barbara fails to see who her son really is, because she isn’t making a claim about her son at all – she’s making a claim about herself, and about the conceptual reality she has devoted her professional life to inventing. In that reality, poor people with bad upbringings become criminals, and her own gifted, privileged son could never tell a single tiny lie.

In conventional thinking, individuals’ varying behavior is explained using terms like “character.” Independent of their class or circumstance, some people are morally upstanding, some are indifferent, and a few may even be malevolent. By emphasizing the link between poverty and prison, Fried sidesteps the obvious problem that the mere existence of human variation presents to her argument.

Freud contra Fried

One of the humanists against whom Fried’s philosophy stands most squarely is Sigmund Freud. Freud saw how often his patients – most of them notably privileged – acted against their own interests, or lied to themselves habitually, seeming to wrestle with ghosts they didn’t even know were there. The power of the unconscious as a site of decision-making is another way of interpreting many of the recent findings in neuroscience that imply some limits to human free will – that is, just because we are not conscious of what our brain is doing, doesn’t mean it is not our brain, and ultimately our self, doing it.

One key Freudian concept that Barbara Fried has come to unintentionally embody is “the return of the repressed”: the idea that denying uncomfortable truths ultimately leaves us vulnerable to their ferocious return. In his work with patients, Freud saw the return of the repressed through symptomatic behaviors – for example, a tic or tremor might be the physical manifestation of a thought so dangerous the patient could not entertain it.

While her son was on trial, Barbara Fried seemed to be suffering an almost clinically precise episode of eroding repression: as the trial wore on, she developed a violent tremor in her jaw. According to Michael Lewis himself, who had spent extensive time with the family, this was a new tic. A Freudian would see it as a manifestation of the trauma of witnessing her career-defining philosophy pummeled to dust by the unpredictable, non-deterministic, harmful choices made by her own son.

But the return of the repressed is not simply an individualized process. Those who came after Freud have expanded the concept to include the possibility that the repressed can return from beneath society-scale acts of denial or willful ignorance, including despite collective acts of historical forgetting. Barbara Fried made herself an avatar of just this sort of social-scale repression of the uncomfortable, in her role as a professional determinist philosopher.

In the course of her son’s trial, and in the broader scope of the closing acts of her life, Fried was forced to confront the complexity, even the unknowability, of human motivation – a truth that comes easily to some of us, but that she spent decades holding at bay in her own formal philosophy. Determinism is, among other things, a simple way to sweep away human perversity: determinism offers the comforting assurance that, while some human behaviors may seem bizarre and even terrifying, a completely rational explanation does exist, somewhere, in the ether. And via that rationality, we are redeemed – we are all, indeed, perfectly innocent.

It would have allowed her to push away early suspicions that her son lacked certain basic human intuitions, that he was fundamentally flawed at the level of his soul or character – that, in some ultimate sense, Sam was evil.

The deterministic nature of the universe and humanity is also the presumption that underpins both Effective Altruism, and the quest for “general artificial intelligence.” The EAs assume determinism through time – as Edward Ongweso has put it, the EAs “thought they invented psychohistory,” the fictional science of materialist prediction posited by Isaac Asimov in his Foundation books. But even in Asimov’s fiction, a totalizing materialism is always a dangerously impossible horizon.

In the reality we live in, however, no serious thinker believes individual human behavior is functionally predictable, whatever the theoretical or neuroscientific research says. In practice, that means the assumption of total rationality only leaves more uncertainty embedded in one’s view of the world. If you think you know exactly what will happen next, you are more likely to put yourself in a position to face disastrous consequences when you are, inevitably, proven wrong. (I delve into this in my meditation on Dune and venture capital.)

This seems almost comically obvious in Sam Bankman-Fried’s downfall: it was his very confidence in his own ability to calculate probabilities that led him to take enormous and fatal risks. The tragic farce plays out Freud’s “return of the repressed,” on two levels – one for Sam, and one for Barbara.

First, Sam Bankman-Fried’s insane blindness to risk rested on two related ideas: that the universe was mathematically predictable, and that he, Sam, had a unique insight into that predictability. The first presumption seems to have come directly through the lengthy philosophical discussions Michael Lewis recounts him having with his parents, from a very young age. The second idea – that Sam was a genius – was also certainly conveyed to him first and foremost by the way his parents treated him. Again and again, Lewis depicts them mistaking his flaws and shortcomings as a young person for signs of uniqueness and virtue, just as he did decades later.

But of course, Sam had no unique insights, even if the universe is not mathematically determined. He’s headed to prison because he made hubristic assumptions on the basis of a deterministic, materialist view of the universe.

And through her son’s fatal adoption of her own worldview, Barbara Fried suffered the return of the repressed. Her determinism is a formalized, academic analogue to the therapeutic subject in denial of their own trauma, disorders, and desires. It is extremely tempting to put her 2013 writing in the context of her son Sam’s life. At the time, he would have been about 20 years old – perhaps a time when a parent starts questioning whether their child’s strange behaviors are quirks, or something more deeply flawed.

Doubling down on determinism would have forced Fried to reckon with her own role in what Sam became. But it at least would have allowed her to push away early indications that her son lacked certain basic human intuitions, that he was fundamentally flawed at the level of his soul or character – that, in some ultimate sense, Sam was evil.

As Freud saw again and again, such rejections, however strategic, inevitably fail. Barbara Fried’s nihilistic materialism, and its arid deterministic moral universe, literally gave birth to a swindling criminal. Even more ironically, while he clearly shared his mother’s determinist materialism, Sam constantly positioned himself as free from the threads of fate – he was the unique genius, the constant calculator who could transcend the binds of circumstance to become truly free. At every turn, Sam Bankman-Fried absolutely begged you to impute canny, calculated choice to every one of his decisions – a choice that his own professed philosophy assumed does not exist.

That, when it comes down to it, was the most important lesson Sam Bankman-Fried learned from his mother’s work. And it’s the same lesson that many of the rationalist tech elite still implicitly hold, from Mark Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel to Sam Altman.

The lesson was this:

That nobody was truly a person but him.