The Boy Crisis

I’ve had to read the Boy Crisis much slower than almost any book. There’s just a lot to take in. It’s not just academic. I’m a man, and a dad. And there’s so much to think about. And so much that makes me so terribly sad. I’m not great at empathy, but I can connect to the feelings of these men and these boys, even though I had a very good dad. It’s so hard to be a good dad. And it’s so hard to be a good son.

I have to agree so much with the author that it isn’t things going wrong that begs for explanation, it’s how anything ever goes right. And what a terrible situation we’ve gotten ourselves into. We think we’re so smart and so creative that we can trick our way round reality and never pay the bill. How can we ever set it straight again, unless we build up so much pain and loss that we can’t keep things together any longer? And how much longer can we hide what we’ve done, through one means or another? In prisons, behind tidy explanations and denials, with medications and counseling, with payoffs and payouts, with pills and restrictions and propaganda. What made us think we could cheat the human soul?

Comedians and courage

The way that formerly brave and controversial comedians and artists are caving in to the moral majority of the new left just goes to show that they weren’t really that brave after all, someone just needed to invent a type of social censure they were afraid of.

It’s easy to be provacative when you don’t really care about the opinions or values of the people you’re criticizing. It’s much harder to criticize or stand up to something youre actually invested in and care about. Then you suddenly become quite conservative and conformist.

Hesitation and caution in fighting back

I recently watched a video of Peter Bogosian, Douglas Murray, and Dave Rubin talking about the ongoing fight against postmodernism, wokeism, and critical theory. The overall tone was hopeful, ebullient. The fight is going well, they said. Lies were being exposed, dangers were being recognized, prejudices were being revealed, sense was being restored. And this was the response I posted to that conference.

I have been fighting and arguing against this ideological trend for a decade. And to this great culmination in that battle I say, no! Not like this. We need warriors. No doubt. There is hope. No doubt. But we need more than this belligerent, ascendant aggression.

There is so much more to be reckoned with. It is insufficient to simply identify the enemy and develop the tools to defeat them. A broader perspective must be taken, or we risk losing the fight at the moment the tide turns.

If I had Douglas Murray and Sir Roger Scruton here (RIP), I feel like we could steer this back to where it needs to go. You cannot win great wars of culture merely on what you know to be false or what you despise. It is so much easier to criticize than to create. That is half the problem with wokeism. It is a culture of blame and exclusion and criticism and deconstruction and division.
Criticism is insufficient. Shutting down the enemy, cutting out the infection, burning it out of its strongholds; those are tactics, but they are the tactics of the people you’re resisting. You are seizing upon their mistakes, not correcting them.

No, Dave, you are wrong. You do not know that they’re lying. They do not know that they’re lying. Maybe some tiny, tiny fraction do. But no, these people are captives, as much as they are enemy soldiers. We may have to face and resist them, but if you cannot understand why they are captive and cannot see any possibility of extracting them from that captivity, then you do not understand the field of battle sufficiently to win the war. Quite likely, you will only create the next enemy. Or become it.

I have been in bad churches. I have fought with them. And I also recognized long ago that the woke ideology was itself fundamentally a religious movement. The problem is that people like Peter have still not grasped the essential fact that modernism created postmodernism, or at least created the conditions for it and the necessity of something like it to arise. His idea is to just cut God out of humanity. As if religion can simply be expunged from the human heart.

Modernism tried that, and it left a gaping wound that something had to fill. And I do mean “had to”. Mankind is not a functional conceptual entity without religion. If you squashed every religion in the world, people would find some tiny fragment of what was left them to make an idol out of. And that’s exactly what did happen.

The pain and confusion that these people are feeling, the desperation that drives them to seek an identity in whatever fragment that can be found to unite them, is quite justified. What else do people have left but race or sex or some mean identity to cling to? All the wealth in the world can’t buy meaning and purpose and the feeling of being known and valued. They hope to find it here. And they’re just as ignorant and naive in their hopes as the modernists.

The modernists still dream atheistic dreams that the postmodernists will see how things are coming apart and repent. That they will come back with their hats in their hands and apologize for ever doubting the greatness and brilliance of the modernists who first divested them of everything that spiritually and psychologically and philosophically gave their life meaning, and then berated and demolished them for following that bereavement to its logical consequences, picking up the only loyalties and identities they had left.

You can’t ignore the events in the first half of the twentieth century that led to the decline and rejection of and insurrection against modernism. Until you have grasped why people were vulnerable to falling into the cult of wokeism, you’re not qualified to save them from it.

Maybe ten years ago I would have spoken the same way as Peter. But I’ve been married and had children, and I’ve come a long way since my old combative days in the philosophy department, where the battle takes place principally in the realm of ideas. Does postmodernism cheat and mislead by placing lived experience ahead of reasoning? Surely it does. But on a psychological level there is a cry trying to reach the ears of the theoreticians that something about their brilliant talk fails to capture or address the actual reality of human needs and experience. These people didn’t fall into this ideology simply because they were stupid and corrupt, but because they were hungry and deprived and searching, because they had some deep need that required somewhere to go.

I’ve also lived with resentment against bad churches. I’ve found myself pushed out and had a long journey of resentment, and I’ve acquired a great wariness of anything resembling my previous experiences. But I’ve also had an ongoing window into the lives of those people and what they were seeking, what they were doing, and how things went wrong, and what enslaved goodness was underlying their efforts that gave it the power it had. And I’ve come to realize this. You don’t save people from bad churches by simply getting them out, or by destroying the bad church. You save a bad church by turning it into a good one.

And if you don’t have a vision for how that could be done or what that would mean, then you can’t help people in the long run. They’ll only fall into a different trap. Maybe a worse one. One that they won’t recognize because they will identify the pathology with the faith itself and not what people did with it, and won’t realize that such a corruption could arise out of any structure of meaning and identity.

I’ve seen people fall right out of religious faith and straight into wokeism. And wokeism itself is a child of atheism far more than it is a child of theism (or at least). In a way it’s a return to the pagan state of nature. Of the fracturing of universal unity and truth and value before God into the natural identities and animosities of race and sex and whatever local deities you worship, where life is a struggle to see whose gods will prevail.

Is wokeism dangerous and toxic? Is it likely to cost us everything we’ve built? Certainly. But this is the world we created. These are conditions the modern world created. People couldn’t live as men without chests. So they reached into their dark recesses and found their passion and their particularity, and went all in on it to save themselves. They became all heart and subjugated their minds. The battle between modernism and postmodernism is a familial battle, not a war among strangers. Postmodernism was born in the house of confident scientific atheism and modernism. It is a judgment against it for thinking it could make men in this way and expect them to live without blood in their veins. So we got a religion of blood.

In a way, I believe that postmodernism contains the key to the redemption and renewal and resurrection of modernism. And modernism contains the key to that renewal for postmodernism. I think there is hope in both, if each could only learn the lessons the other is trying to teach them. The father figure of modernism was blind and dying. The rebellious son has tried to kill and bury him. And now the father strikes back. But it’s only when the two finally reunite in peace and reconciliation that the young will grow wise and the old will be regenerated.

What form that will, or could, or should, take, I simply don’t know. But it’s creeping toward us. If we can steer round the Charybdis and Sylla of chaotic revolution and tyrannical oppression. What I hear from these men doesn’t give me much hope that the lessons that really needed to be learned have been learned. It’s easy to figure out what is wrong about someone else and what they think. It’s much harder to figure out what’s wrong about yourself, or how you might go wrong criticizing or fixing them, still less what kind of meeting between you could yield a better version of both of you.

Dave, your mind has changed, but has your heart? Or do you find yourself feeling and saying the same things about the lefties that you used to sling against the right? The wisdom you should gain from traveling across such ideological divides isn’t as simple as realizing that you had got wrong which guys were right and which were wrong, and now you’ve got it sorted. You gain, I hope, the ability to see how either sort could go wrong, and how to find what was seeking the right in both. You gain understanding of the kind of people who take either position for granted, and seek the wisdom to guide both toward a higher knowledge.

I have greatly enjoyed Peter’s work. He is a snorting stallion. His value as an ally is inestimable. He’s a Douglas MacArthur. Great for winning battles. But this is a battle being fought on our own soil, against our own brothers and sisters. We cannot merely conquer or defeat them. We need to create a space for them, something for them to love and inhabit, something to create unity between us and give their lives meaning. Will learning that they’re simply wrong about the prospects of wokeism, that the promises of meaning and justice and purpose and identity and value and moral absolution it gives cannot be fulfilled, take away their pain and need and desire and confusion?

I think all this is something Douglas is actually aware of. I think he’s optimistic that L, with the help of those who can sweep away the poison of wokeism, the clean waters will be free to flow again. That the deep fountains of human life and meaning will rise to the surface and wash away the detritus of the last century. And maybe he’s right. I hope so. But that has often not been the case, when powers are raised to defeat a danger, but the underlying cause has not been sufficiently understood or addressed.

You get peace for a time. Then you get new tyrants, new factions, new struggles. And maybe that what history is and always will be. A kind of wobble between extremes of order and chaos, head and heart, brain and blood. Each denying some essential part of our nature, and each in turn paying the price for that blindness. But maybe, with wisdom, we can at least keep the vascilation to a wobble, and avoid a new crash.

Are women better than men?

Are women better than men? That is certainly a question that seems to have some teeth. Men can be and are blamed for a lot of the pain in the world. And it’s not unusual to see the world and history characterized as innocent women and children trying to live their lives and wicked men wrecking everything.

Often it seems like men are the problem, and that women are the innocents. And we have often treated them like that historically. And there seems to be an urge now to eliminate men. Whatever purposes they served have been taken over by technology and government. In the world of today, we don’t need men. They don’t fit into polite society. They aren’t nice, aren’t safe, and wreck everything. They’re the origin of the world’s problems.

All these arguments seem perfectly understandable. Yet it seems odd to me that it should be so. We’re one whole species, and it’s hard to see how all evil could be concentrated in one sex and all good could be concentrated in another, apparently by biological destiny. Is this simply because we teach men to be awful brutes? I can’t give much credit to the social constructionist theory. First, because I actually have children, and I have many neices and nephews, and I have actually seen how boys and girls are different close up, despite your best efforts to the contrary. Second, because of the the universal continuity of gender differences across all cultures throughout time. No matter how you alter the circumstances, no matter what you do as a parent, the same patterns emerge. They’re innate. And it’s only reasonable that large physical and genetic differences would also be expressed in behavioral adaptations, much as we see in virtually every mammalian species on the planet.

So I think we can safely agree that men and women do have some real differences, as groups, and that those differences are not merely arbitrary constructions but have some innate basis. But is it plausible that one of those differences is an innate tendency toward moral inferiority in men, or an innate moral superiority in women? Some men have certainly argued the reverse in the past. And a lot of people seem to be making this argument now. Men are primitive brutes and the future is female.

I think there is an argument that the way that the world has changed, for the moment thanks to technology, has created social situations to which certain male qualities are not well adapted. Modern schooling, complex interconnected societies, constantly shifting social and employment conditions, a lack of good manual labor jobs, the need for greater verbal communication skills, all of these are not a great fit for your traditional man, who is less agreeable, less interested in people, less verbal, less neurological flexible, less sedentary, more competitive, and more aggressive. The reduced need for hard physical labor and warriors, reduced need of women for men to provide such services (making men less attractive), and increased power of technology and government programs has made classical men somewhat obsolete.

The greater variability of men is less useful in a stable society where you don’t really need it, and the accompanying downsides of very low capability and very aggressive men, and especially criminal males, becomes a burden that is not easily eliminated or carried. Perhaps we could start chemically neutering them? Surely that’s better than filling the jails with them. Some people would argue that were already doing that with ADHD drugs and Prozac and porn and video games. That those, as well as the prisons (and profesional sports to a lesser degree), are great sinks we’ve devised to absorb the excess aggression and competitiveness of men.

Having said that, I want to set aside the assumption that men are just generally worse as a sex, period, as needlessly pessimistic and reductive. Surely some men are bad, very bad. But some men are very great. And their masculinity is part of that greatness, not simply something to be overcome or extracted and removed. Men seem to be given more to extremity, but that doesn’t mean you can reduce them to their worst extremes, or simply declare that humanity doesn’t need half of itself any more. Or that you can simply ignore or suppress it without doing harm to it.

There are certain things that are true about humans in general. The human condition includes such things as the moral struggle. Women aren’t exempt from being human. They aren’t a completely different kind of thing. And men aren’t such a radically worse kind of thing; they also participate in the higher goods of humanity. And I’m not at all convinced that harmlessness and dangerousness are themselves moral categories. They’re normally variable psychological qualities, not moral qualities. Being more dangerous doesn’t make you worse, but it does alter how you affect the world, how your strategies and outcomes are expressed. Morality is a further process of judgment that we apply across the full range of psychological qualities, not just some of them.

And I’m not convinced that women aren’t (and haven’t always been) extremely powerful and dangerous themselves. Women are human. So they might express themselves most commonly through different strategies and methods, which result in a different set of outcomes and find different avenues of expression. But that’s a matter of embodiment, not moral value.

The way that I tend to go right or wrong differs quite a bit from my brother and sister, even though they’re from my own family. The way our moral actions differ, how we make use of and apply who and what we are and what we can do, might be conveyed differently. But we’re all equally subject to moral failures, and we all have to strive for moral excellence. Someone who ignores or antagonizes a group might be more obviously antisocial than someone who manipulates or abuses a group in the name of preserving it, but it’s not clear that one is really better than the other. There are some very gentle prisons and kind abuses. There are some weapons that are so finely honed you can’t even tell they’ve cut you off at the feet until you try to step away.

And for all the men and women do differ, they also overlap enormously. Their personality curves differ in general proclivities and most especially at the extremes, but you can’t judge an entire sex purely by its extremes. And the extremes of any personality trait tend to be equally dangerous in different ways. So where exactly are men meant to smuggle in all this evil, and how are women meant to overlap so much with men and indulge in their own endemic extremes and yet avoid the universal human tendency toward moral evil?

There is some possibility that the feminine role has had some protective moral element to it. That the act of being close to people you know intimately and having to live with people of differing types and managing a host of complex values and interests in the service of a relationship with others has given them key experiences that favored a more balanced and morally excellent approach to life. Men, as the competitive cannons that humanity fires against its own external and internal challenges and defects to destroy or subdue them (and themselves), were in a more fraught situation more prone to intemperance and extremity (a tendency they already possessed).

Or perhaps both sexes had, in their own domains, their own particular virtues, as well as those that extend across all humanity. And perhaps those are what we have often striven over and misunderstood and abused and invested in and coddled and criticized. Identitarian, contingent ones rather than universal ones.

And perhaps that is what makes it so easy to mistake the other sex as lacking in the virtues we take for granted as universal but are actually particular, situational, specific, and finite. Perhaps we have even believed and internalized our rhetoric about one another. Believing in actuality that certain traits or strategies or ways of being in the world are genuinely bad, instead of merely being bad for the kind of thing weren’t trying to be, in the context we’re trying to do it. Probably that sounds intolerably vague. But I do have something in mind, conversations I’ve had where women complained about men criticizing or demeaning certain behaviors that they themselves didn’t see as problematic or even identified with (and although they havent had as much to say about it, I’ve certainly been around men with similar feelings about the criticisms of women of behaviors they don’t see as a problem or identify with).

The hard thing to explain to them is that it’s not that that kind of behavior is really bad in any universally objective sense, although some men do make that mistake of generalization, it’s just that it’s bad for men. It goes against male virtues oriented around masculine values and roles. Those same behaviors may be valued and virtuous among women. There are, after all, virtues general to all cars, but there are virtues particular to pickup trucks that differ from those of sports cars. How those qualities are used will vary as much as the individual owners of those vehicles, just as the individuals that inhabit the sexes vary immensely yet have certain commonalities.

It’s perfectly reasonable to claim that a saw makes a bad hammer. But maybe it wasn’t meant to be a great hammer, maybe it’s meant to be a great saw, so the complaints about its hammering properties aren’t really that applicable as a universal condemnation of it, but only as a specific and situational observance of mismatching of tool to use in that particular case. Maybe men aren’t meant to be great women, but are meant to be great men.

Perhaps our complaints about the other sex aren’t always truly moral complaints of character, but are rather complaints about the specificity of sex itself. Maybe we don’t like that particularity of the other. Maybe we just don’t like the complexity of having to admit and live with these differences. Maybe we don’t like sharing territory, or know how to handle having our value systems and differences laid on top of one another. Maybe we don’t like the challenge it presents to our own conception of ourselves and our values and strategies as universal. After all, if we leave room for the virtues of the other sex to exist alongside our own as legitimate, we might find ourselves subject to criticism by them, to being misunderstood and undervalued, and we might lose the ability to freely and thoughtlessly misunderstand and undervalue them.

How mamy of our grievances are with the fact of sex itself? The indignity of difference, of finitude, of dependence, of limitation, of insufficiency? The fact that we alone, as one, cannot be all, cannot be humanity as a complete and sufficient singularity. That we must be a divided god, in tension with its opposing face, instead of an all in one. There’s plenty of existential and psychological tension there to struggle with for the rest of eternity. Add on top of that the actual flaws and differences of actual people and no wonder the sexes have had a tough time with one another. Really, it’s a miracle that they’ve come together and cooperated at all and can share the same spaces at all. Some species are quite bad at that, despite their simplicity compared to us.

But that’s what’s amazing about humanity. Not what each sex can do or has done. Not what we could do on our own without the other. But what we have done together. That’s the real story of humanity. What we have been able to do as a result of our alliance, our coming together. We’re stronger together. We really benefit from having one another. We suffer too to be sure, but there are deep reasons that we are what we are. We’ve each borne different costs that have brought us to today.

On a less philosophical note, the idea that girls are somehow innately morally superior or somehow escape the general trap of the human proclivity for evil should be readily apparent as a falsehood to anyone who has had children. I have two amazing girls. But I have never had anyone ever treat me as badly as those girls have. I never even imagined anyone could. They’re aggressive, deceitful, selfish, manipulative, vengeful, demanding, greedy, proud, resentful; each one of them contains the full range of nascent human depravity. It’s contained in a tiny human, so it can’t have big effects yet, but it’s easy to see what it could grow to in an adult if left unchecked.

Don’t misunderstand me, my girls are delightful and I love them. But all these tendencies have been there since the very beginning. And as a parent I’ve had to manage and stand up to them and teach my girls how to manage and stand up to them since they were old enough to realize they had interests. And I’ve had to deal with little boys too. And they’re not better. But they are different. And I could see why certain people might prefer one over the other, boys as well as girls. It’s not like both don’t come with their own particular benefits and struggles. My girls are radically different from one another by personality, as much as night and day. And so are my nephews from one another. But they’re also very much members of the groups they’re part of.

My experiences differ from my sister’s because I have girls and she has boys, as well as they differ by the individual differences of our specific children. Each child has their own individual version of how they could be great or terrible, just as each sex does. And one parent’s lot isn’t inherently better than the other. We just have different tasks to manage, and we succeed or fail on those terms. My girls may express their dangerous proclivities differently, from one another and from their cousins, but I’m under no illusions that don’t have them. And all of us are subject to success or failure in our differing expressions.

So no, I don’t think the story of goodness and badness is so simple as we would like it to be. I don’t think the story of the past is, nor the story of the future. And any story that doesn’t carry an understanding of the value of the other sex with it, as well as a realistic understanding of the dangerous potential of both, of all humans, is not one that will help us navigate the challenges ahead. We need one another. And we are at risk from one another. And only love and respect can save us from one another and from ourselves.

We can’t bet peace and the future on everyone being the same as us, or on everyone of one group being all good or all bad. We are all much more individual than we imagine, and our struggles are as well. And yet they’re also much more universal than we imagine. There is a logic and a beauty that is all our own in its particularity and universal in its principle and proportionality. We are both the same and more unique than we give ourselves credit (or blame).

Do we really want to build a world where the sexes don’t need one another? What would that world look like? I don’t think it would be the imagined utopia some take it to be. Can we even know fully what it means to be ourselves, to inhabit our particularity, without the other, without being forced into the uncomfortable reality of our own limitations and another’s gifts? And why is it so hard to admit one another’s virtues, as well as our own faults? Do we worry that if we give one inch that the other side will simply judge and dominate and misunderstand us and walk away from us?

It’s a fear with some real grounding. And it’s easy to let it swallow up our entire interpretation of everything the other sex does and has ever done. But as real as that fear is, it’s isn’t the truth. We’ve loved one another. We’ve treasured one another, striven for one another, sacrificed, loved, suffered, died, faced terrible dangers, endured bondage, and shared hopes. We’ve fought and worked for one another, worshipped one another, journeyed into the unknown for one another. We have done great things. Not alone. Together. For one another. For our children, for our future. We have betrayed and exploited and misunderstood and resented too, as all humans do. As my own children do. As I do.

But we have loved. And we have grown and survived. We have walked the long and terrible road together, surviving only because of one another. And I am thankful for that. We would be nothing without our mothers and sisters and wives and daughters. And we would be nothing without our fathers and brothers and husbands and sons. I would be nothing without all of them. We are one species, both great and awful. And there is no life but the life we share together.

On Jingle Jangle

The song “The Square Root of Impossible” is pretty much the prime example of what I find cheap and shallow about modern children’s movies. It’s overproduced, sounds way too perfect, and is completely lacking in depth of character or struggle. It’s the shallowest idea of heroism. It’s heroic, but the broadest, most trite version of heroics.

I’m so great, I’m the solution to everything, I can do anything, I don’t need help or a hero, I can do everything myself. I found the secret to life, and it’s me. I was looking for the solution to life’s problems and realized I already had them in me because I’m f$#@ing perfect.

It’s a straight up sunshine enema, trying to blow self esteem by sheer force right out of your ears. Psychologically and spiritually, it’s completely vacant. It paints a weak vision of the struggles of life and a trite journey to nowhere to find the solutions. It’s completely bankrupt of everything but superficial glamor and a general feeling of feel-goodery.

Not that it isn’t the sort of thing kids would enjoy. And it’s hummable and nice-sounding and is sung well. But that song typifies the whole movie. Very sleek, very well made, striving to be relevant, but shallow and forgettable and trite. And it deserved more. It has a great cast and great production values.

There just isn’t enough meat on this sanitized bone to feed anyone a proper meal. Personally I find it far more unpalatable than something that is simply bad. At least the badness is on the surface. This has so much glitz and pretends like there’s something there. It’s an olestra chip. And that’s rather typical of a lot of recent movies I’ve seen. All glitz, all production value, so many talented artists. But such weak idea, weak stories, weak writing, weak creative and philosophical vision. They’re so dreadfully calculated, glitzy, and dull. The remakes especially. At least this was an original, thank God.

And what the heck does “the square root of impossible is me?” even mean? It’s typical of what I’m talking about. Sounds nice, gives the illusion of cleverness and depth. But there’s just nothing there. It’s just a hamfisted metaphor that sounds good and whose shallow depth is obscured by its vagueness and veneer of glitzy positivity.

Cries of the men’s rights movement

On listening to the lament of a rapper on the state of men and their place in the family.

I’m not one hundred percent sure what to say about all this. There’s surely a lot to learn about men from this, just as sociological data. I’m not sure that this is the most eloquent articulation of the position. It’s more of a primal cry. I’ll just assume that there is something worth hearing and understanding in it, just as I assume that there’s something worth hearing and understanding in women’s perspectives, including feminism.
It’s one of the great unsung tragedies that post-second wave feminism presided over the death of marriage as an institution, fundamentally harming so many women and reducing their power and position in the world, ironically, all in the name of increasing it. More and more men, upon noticing that women want to be independent of them, also started to wonder if maybe they could be independent of their need for women. And women and technology have (partly) solved that problem for men, as it’s been solved for women, by making sex more easily available for men just as independent provision is more easily available for women.
The value of men as providers and protectors has dropped, and substitute structures have been developed (government and law being big ones), so women don’t need to directly rely on men for those contributions so much any more. And it’s perfectly reasonable to want to seize the means for yourself. Men weren’t always great at it, to put it mildly, but they did work themselves to death quite a bit and die in defense of their families a lot, so you also shouldn’t completely discount their attempts. But they’ve been surpassed by the great modern edifices of the state like Medicare, social services, living assistance, law enforcement, welfare, public education, and other forms of public benefit. You don’t need to marry a man. Modern socieity, technology, and the government can help secure whatever you need and help you provide for yourself. Your bases are covered, so husbands can become a luxury, not a necessity.
Men have also, of late, been developing substitutes for women, particularly for wives. Women face technological competition. Men can buy a lot of the goods that women used to provide, in terms of care and production of all the small and ubiquitous items of daily comfort and craft and creative beauty. We’ve even got technological competitors for intimacy and sex. We’ve got porn, companion apps, robots, counseling, even hugging services. (And if none of that works, there’s always drugs, alcohol, and jail.)
Porn, of course, is the big one. The sex drive is pretty hard to ignore and naturally drives men toward women and out of their isolation and self-sufficiency, and makes them invest in development of themselves and the environment to make it pleasing and acceptable for women. Now, why bother? Sex is cheap. I don’t need to live or die for that, I’ve got it right here in my pocket. Maybe porn is less tangible, but it’s got more variety and flexibility and less risk and demands so much less. It’s got a competitive pitch. We can probably still get the real thing occasionally, and if we can’t, they’re working on a substitute for that too.
Understandably, we all resent needing one another. We would much rather not, and just have everything we want without being made dependent on or beholden to someone else. We want to be free. And now that more women agree with lots of men that marriage is a kind of undesirable slavery, then why have it at all? Let government and technology pick up the tab for whatever it might cost us.
I don’t really side with men or women on this issue. I don’t think it’s that simple. And I completely understand why men and women desire to be independent of each other. And why they resent paying the price of taking on a role that really costs you a lot and restricts you a lot, just so you can get some dubious benefit back from the other sex. People want to know if there is an alternative where we don’t need each other. Where we are complete on our own and don’t need to leave our security to pursue relationships except as a cherry on top of a self-sufficiency we already possess. That’s the dream. And I’m sympathetic to it. Looking to another person, especially a person of the other sex who is so different and difficult, to meet your needs is close to insanity. And clearly it won’t work out for everyone.
But still, it seems like the end result isn’t really making men or women happier. Maybe this is all a natural consequence of technology and social advancement making that devil’s bargain less and less necessary and desirable. Maybe men are just paying the price for failing to properly honor and value and love their wives, as they were commanded to in the foundational moral documents of Western society.
One thing I don’t really agree with (some members of) the men’s movement about, is that I don’t think it’s really subservience men want. I don’t even think they’re right about themselves in thinking that’s what they want from women. What they want is honor. Service is a two-way and entirely equal street. But men particularly want honor. They’re willing to trade their safety and strength and even lives in the most extreme and crazy ways for the jewel of being assigned a special status and value by women (and other men).

Men are very competitive, and that competition stems from a kind of vulnerability. Their position, their value, their status is fundamentally insecure. They have to fight for it. Genetically, this is reflected in the vastly smaller number of male ancestors you have. Not everyone reproduces, only a fraction of women are carried forward genetically to become future generations, and only half of that number of men are carried forward. So men are biologically insecure, and seek to solve that insecurity through competition for honor
Men want women to make them feel secure. Secure in their status. That they have been chosen, that they are honored. That their competition has succeeded and they have won a position. And no one can confer that honor like a wife can. A wife can make the smallest man a king. Men will work and slave and suffer and sacrifice and die for that honor. It’s a resource worth securing. It’s powerful.
This is a deep need men have, that could be used to take them out of themselves and make them useful and productive. And they’re not great at expressing or even really understanding that need and that vulnerability. But it’s what I hear here, behind the talk of so many men. It also stands behind their resentment and despondency, their depression and pathology. Men are needy and insecure. Women are needy and insecure too. We all are, we’re human. We’re pathetic little tiny, incomplete, struggling creatures. Our insufficiency may manifest differently, but we all have it. And we need one another. I don’t think you’ll solve the problems of the human race by trying to ignore or eradicate that need. That will only drive the two halves of humanity further apart. And we need them both.
Our species is fundamentally an arranged marriage. Humanity is both man and woman. We can’t discount half the species, whatever side of things you’re coming from. We have to find a path to loving and appreciating and respecting and providing for one another. We need understanding of one another, and of ourselves and our needs and our failings. We need love.

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On Borders

I think the real question about borders is permeability. You want borders because you want to select what crosses them. The state is like a living organism. Living organisms have cell membranes and cell walls. That’s one of their defining, necessary features. And there’s a selectivity that allows certain things in and certain things out, intelligently, based on what the needs and conditions are for life within that organism.

Having a purpose or logic to an organism, having a distinct nature, means a responsibility to maintain stewardship over that process. When a cell loses the integrity of its membrane, it ceases to exist. It is invaded from without and devoured, and its internal contents disperse in an uncontrolled manner into its surroundings. It ceases to be. It has no ability to maintain its biological distinctiveness.

Superorganisms like states are no different. You can argue to adjust the permeability of the membrane, that there is some useful nutrient in the surrounding environment and that it would be helpful to adjust the gating mechanisms to allow in. And cells have special internal structures that facilitate transport across the membrane. They don’t just allow things in by self-selection. They have mechanisms to restrict transport (passive and active), and they have mechanisms to facilitate transport. This is the pattern of life, and it applies across all levels of life.

So we should look to the nature of life for sense and learn to find balance. Borders are reasonable. In fact they’re necessary for life to exist. An absolutely impermeable border will keep everything out and everything in, but will bind and starve the cell. A completely permeable or non-existent border is useless and means the end of the organism. Somewhere in between lies selectivity, facility, purpose, growth, adaptation, and intelligence. If a single celled organism can figure it out, so can people.

Could anarchy work?

The answer is no. Boom, done! Fun talk.

The thing about most political questions is that you don’t need a huge social experiment or tons of theory to answer most basic questions. All you need is a single complete unit to study. Enter, one human family. All government is just a scaled up version of this. So the data you gather from studying it is an honest and useful representation of the larger social structure.
Would, or does, anarchy work as a family structure? What is the result for the kids and parents? Is it a viable general rule for human survival and flourishing in that confined context? No? Well, it really is that simple then. If it doesn’t work at that most atomistic level, then it cannot be scaled up. That is the monad at which all fundamental theories are tested, and from which they all derive and upon which they all depend. It is the fundamental physics of human society.
So no, we aren’t there. We will never get there. We live the struggle again in every generation to learn, to be socialized, to adapt, to develop our capacities, to find our place in the larger structure. Until children are born programmed being and knowing all they could possibly need, which is imposible, anarchy will be fundamentally impossible as a viable strategy. If you can’t deal with that, then you can’t deal with the reality of the human condition. If you have any illusions about it, go start a family and your illusions will be dispelled. Deluded theory melts away like fog in the light of actual experience. And this particular bit of experience is invaluable.
That’s why Rousseau was such a bad theorist. He was so in love with his fog that he discarded the one true means to testing and improving his theories, his own children. He developed all sorts of lovely ideas that real human children would just have inhibited and contradicted and gotten in the way of. So he sent them to die in orphanages with an average life expectancy of less than a year. Five in all. But he got to keep some lovely theories about how humans were all born fundamentally perfect and complete, if we could just let the perfection take its natural course. I’m sure he would have seen anarchy as a perfectly viable option. He never had to sully his tidy world with the reality of actual child-rearing.

As a minor detail, the minimum viable sample size would be a family of four: two parents and two siblings, in order to properly model inter-sibling rivalry and conflict. Four is the minimum where you start to see all the real social complexities and their solutions, the adaptations we’ve developed to manage them, emerge. Everything scales up from that point. The germ of everything already exists at that monad.

(On someone suggesting that if anarchy is so bad why isn’t there a supreme world leader, and once states are sufficiently armed everyone just leaves them alone)

I honestly don’t understand what this objection means. Are you saying that organized armed states are examples of anarchic government? Are you saying that it is the case that people naturally have no inclination toward (nor reasonable arguments for using) violence, and that includes countries? Because those all seem like counterfactuals. And in what way is it hard to answer who rules the governments of the world? They are ruled at a hundred different levels of order and administration, from the federal level, down to state, then county, then city, down more informal community leaders, right down to the rulership of a family or individual over their own specific property or territory. Or perhaps you mean that the fact that there isn’t some single collective ruler over all those dozens of levels of rulership and administration and organization, over all the world a states as a whole, means that it’s actually anarchic? In what sense is a single, supreme world leader in any way necessitated?
Human liberty is by nature contextual. It exists within limits defined by what it means to be human, to exist in a particular time, to be a member of a particular country, of a particular city, of a particular family, to be particular sort of person with this or that characteristics. Your freedom exists within all these contexts. It’s what you specifically, taking into account all that that makes you up, can do. You don’t have absolute freedom because you are limited and particular and contingent in a hundred different ways, many of which you have little to no control over. So absolute freedom is simply an illusion. It is undifferentiated being. There is no “freedom”, only “this freedom”, the freedom that you possess within your particular context. And that’s still a heck of a lot of freedom to manage.
I don’t want to be unfair to the position, but it sounds a lot like “I’m a big boy now, so I don’t need any parents”. And all the other kids will see (my idea of) sense and will all know and do exactly what (I believe) they should, because why would anyone do anything else and why would it ever affect anyone else, so everything will be fine and we won’t need any rules or structure to manage conflicts at any level, except possibly the national level. And we can extrapolate this to the whole of humanity, and it will all just work out fine at every level, so long as we’re heavily armed enough to keep any other major states away from us. Because the biggest differences between people exist at the highest, national level and not at the individual level.
None of this really has anything to do with my essential point. Which is that family demonstrates in microcosm the fundamental, actual limitations and potential of human social structures. Anarchy doesn’t work as a family structure. We all need parents. Some people will always need parents, even when they’re older. And we all learn something from being parents. The responsibility of and need for shaping and guiding and placing limits and structure around our children’s freedom, and the way that those limits actually allow them to develop, to attain and maximize the freedom and opportunity that they have, eventually becoming functioning, contributing members of the community with the appropriate amount of individual autonomy.

We can never be truly autonomous, because we simply need each other too much. And by teaching these things, by taking on this responsibility, we actually submit to a restriction of our own freedom. We become part of the structure that hands itself down across time. And we see how it is never a goal or end state that is reached, but a living process that is handed down through the generations. The same problems being confronted and negotiated and fought over and optimized again and again across ever-fluctuating conditions.

So long as humans continue to be born and to grow, we will all need more than anarchy. So long as the world is always changing and never stands still, anarchy will not be enough. If we saw history as merely leading to and ending with ourselves as the end product, perhaps we could entertain such a prospect.

Not that I’m suggesting tyranny. But if anything to the right of absolute freedom (which is a fantasy) and anarchy (which is a nightmare) is to be considered tyranny, then there isn’t really any reasonable discussion possible. Some freedom is obviously needed, and some governance. I happen to think that a true study of the art of raising a family is a very good lesson in finding that balance. Do too much and your children don’t develop. Do too little and they become pathological or die. They need leadership, structure, rules, guidance, opportunity, feedback, consequences, challenges, inspiration, negotiation, pressure, space, responsibility, understanding, encouragement. They need all these things in a complex interplay. We need all these things. Does that mean government should wield absolute control? Not in the slightest.

In fact, government should be oriented from the bottom up, with the individual at its heart, the body getting smaller and less central as you move away from the center to the extremities. Above the individual, the most foundational social unit is the family, so it is at that level, the most proximate level, where the most authority should be vested. And then as you go up, getting farther and farther away from the fundamental monad, you reduce the scope of authority and power and place progressively more and and more restrictions on it. Because as you go up that power will agrregate across higher and higher populations. So the higher you go, the more checks. The lower you go, the more protections. But you still want and need all the levels; your freedom at the lowest level still stands as a defined freedom that’s embedded in and needs and benefits from all these other levels.

You, individually, might stand at the center of the all the circles, but you aren’t just the bead in the middle, you exist as what you are and are able to do what you can do as a function of your extended identity within these other spheres. And you have a responsibility to them, as they have a responsibility to you. And those responsibilities and freedoms change and evolve across time, because even you are never standing still. You’re always becoming a different person in the context of all the other spheres, including time itself (as you age).

That process, that embeddedness, that relationship with all these structures and the other people who inhabit them, the way that they encounter you as you move through your intersection of those circles, that’s what it means to be human. To need and to be needed, to teach and be taught, to rule and be ruled. And nothing teaches you that reality like experiencing it with a new generation of tiny humans.

(On someone suggesting that anarchy would emerge naturally when people learn to rule themselves properly, become able to balance all their qualities and brain function, and willingly follow the lead of natural law.)

So, when humans stop being human, then. If it were possible to be born perfect, knowing all we need to know and able to do all we could need to do, it would already exist. But such situations only seem to exist in the lower animals, like insects. Even basic traits like personality and brain balance seem to encounter a problem so complex that the only way to solve it was through the creation of a normal distribution of variance (including some serious extremes and unfortunate combinations). No single person seems to be able to contain the necessary breadth of qualities that are needed for human survival and flourishing.
There would only be one kind of human if it were possible to avoid all this mess, an innately complete and perfect being. So as long as we’re still stuck with being human, hard as that is, we might as well make the best of it and figure out how to manage our conflicts with and need for one another in the best way possible. Which happens to include various forms of governance.

(Further notes)

The correct amount of force to use in any given situation is always the minimum necessary amount. But we also shouldn’t kid ourselves (and I do mean kid, it’s a child’s perspective to think the answer is none, even when only governing ourselves) that there isn’t a necessary minimum.

This is only a personal theory, but I think you get the leaders you deserve. It’s not a one-way street. Leaders reflect the people and the people reflect the leaders. Even in autocratic countries, the leaders are able to be what they are because they serve and reflect and embody some instinct in the people that seeks expression.
Being in leadership does seem to have a corrosive effect on any human. It’s not clear that leaders are all so bad. Many of them are extremely industrious compared to most people, and very accomplished and earnest. They’re a sort of maximized representative of a certain type within the electorate. Which is the idea, in a representative democracy.
I think we underestimate the degree to which we make what they are possible, that they are just an emergent reflection of ourselves. I remember when Trump was elected, my dad, a staunch Republican, just said “You get the leaders you deserve. This is who we’ve become.” and I think it’s true. Trump represented something conservatives wanted to be. And he helped them become more like him. AOC is that for the Democrats. Brash, outspoken, confrontational, sensational, uncompromising, unsophisticated, unapologetic, no patience for those who can’t get on board. They’re both media stars, their popularity forged in a new age of online sensationalism. We love Twitter and what it has turned conversation into (gossip), and it’s given birth to these avatars of our respective political zeitgeists. We made our leaders, so at least some portion of our disdain for them should provoke a little soul searching about what sort of people we really are, if this is what we give birth to.

Third time is the charm

This is a series of stabs I made at responding to criticism of “on expectations and minority experience”. The objection raised was essentially this: “Imagine a situation where you are good at things but no one ever gives you a chance and you get rejected entirely because of prejudice. And everyone is racist, and that’s America. And I know this because of my lived experience.” The person in question was actually very polite and earnest, if very anecdotal and simplistic in their arguments. So I wanted to respond, but I wanted to be kind and careful, because I felt that this was someone who was worth taking the time to talk to.

Attempt #1

I can definitely see what you’re saying. That is clearly the argument for the worst possible scenario. Where someone has competence but it isn’t recognized, where the feedback of the system isn’t allowed to operate because people don’t allow other people to prove they can achieve the results. That’s terrible.
But if I could offer some cause for encouragement, I think there is still a bigger story. Clearly, unfounded prejudice is awful and something Americans in general and blacks in particular are very eager to avoid and remedy. There are a few ways you can overcome this. One way is to seek achievement on ground where you have the advantage. An in-group advantage of some kind. Either from being in a majority in that space (a country, a state, a town, a business), having personal or community connections, having signitories that grant advantage like recommendations or references, etc. Basically, shift to ground where that factor is minimized so other factors emerge as more significant (your competence, experience, energy, competitiveness, etc). That’s what lots of people have done throughout history across dozens of cultures.
The second possibility is to seek a common ground where in-group advantages are less important and where people fundamentally just care more about the other factors, regardless. And America is basically the number one best place to find that that has ever existed in history, ever. Practically all culture and countries are largely ethnically homogenous. Some are statistically almost completely homogenous, like Japan. There’s no one there but the in-group, racially, so other factors emerge as those which divide and serperate people (which always happens no matter what, for some reason, people find their groups). The greatest psychological predictors of successful outcomes in America are intelligence and conscientiousness, and that’s about what you would want. There has never been any place in history where such a large and diverse assortment of cities came together to succeed and to mix together (because racial origin was no longer such a primary dividing factor for in-group identity). I’m not saying it was, or even is now, perfect, because people aren’t perfect and you can’t make them be perfect by force, so nothing ever is. But compared to everywhere else ever in history, it’s the best. The racial contingent of any particular group in America is generally the richest and sometimes even the most numerous population of that group in the world, despite their minority status. There are far more of many people groups in America than in their country of origin, they’ve done so well here, and often mixed with their own former enemies and rivals. And among the richest and most well-educated contingents of people we have to include African Americans, the richest people of African descent in the world. And that’s something to be proud of.
America cares far less about who you are and cares far more about what you can do than anyone anywhere, ever. That’s a thing to be encouraged by. So, we should take that to heart. That’s a solution we’re already enjoying the benefits of, more than anyone ever has ever enjoyed. And America is very responsive to outcomes. America is willing to give a chance and love anyone who can really perform, even more today than in the past, and in the past it was already way ahead of everywhere else. The data in support of that is just overwhelming.
In fact when it comes to bias we’re so positively biased in favor of black people in particular that were at risk of committing racism against other groups in order to favor them (for example, finding ways to hide the performance of Asians and Jews so they don’t keep monopolizing the rewards of their overperformance, and they’re starting to get genuinely annoyed about it). We’re living in a culture that literally bends over backward trying to find ways to honor and help and bring forward black people, because of the burden of guilt from knowing that they were not granted the full opportunities they deserved. If we didn’t care so much as a people about that concept, the idea that the proof is in the pudding, that you should have the freedom to succeed or fail on your own merits and be judged by the content of your character, we wouldn’t feel so compelled to address and correct it in this case. MLK didn’t invent those values, he argued that those values were already implicit in the ideals of America and its religious and philosophical foundations, and so, to avoid hypocrisy, must be applied consistently in this case.
Proving yourself is hard, especially in areas where it’s not obvious you have competence. There is some fierce competition. That’s another thing about America. Because it places such a high regard on results over all other factors, you’re competing on a world stage, against a diverse and motivated group of competitors who came from every corner of the globe for their best shot at success. But the idea that some people can’t succeed, purely on the basis of unreasoned prejudice, just isn’t true of America as a country. It’s less true of America now than anywhere ever. So if you can’t succeed here, then where? If this is the historical maximum, what conditions do you require before you can succeed? And why have some groups that have faced extremely difficult conditions and prejudice managed to succeed despite those conditions, and especially succeeded here? America isn’t just the story of white people or black people. It’s full of stories and experiences that are just as valid as the personal experiences you invoke as proof for your perspective. It contains the story of the Dutch, Germans, English, Armenians, Cubans, Mexicans, Koreans, Jews, Italians, Greeks, the Irish, the Polish, Swedes, scads of religious minorities, peasants, criminals, exiles, refugees. All these stories are what America is. They’re stories of conflict and struggle and the meeting of people who never before had to share the same spaces and maybe had been fighting for centuries, or who had never even heard of one another before. America is also their stories. And a lot of them are good. A lot of them are about getting the best chance they ever had, a better chance than where they came from.
My family emigrated here about a hundred years ago. They got tricked, cheated, and stuck. But they didn’t give up. Their dirt house collapsed and they ended up living in an abandoned railroad car a half hour from where I grew up. Most of them died or scattered, looking for help from other people of their country. My grandfather’s mother died giving birth to him, we never ever knew her maiden name or what she looked like, his father drank himself to death, and he ended up sharing space in a home with someone who didn’t even bother feeding him, so he lived off donations of day-old donuts from a creamery. He didn’t have parents to care, so he never went to high school. My dad was the first person in my family to actually graduate. That was a couple generations ago. A lot has changed since then, for my family and for the nation as a whole. I grew up surrounded by German and Mexican immigrants who were building lives in a dry corner of Colorado, and I’ve seen those lives grow and change. That story is part of America.

And so are the stories of black America, beyond just those of prejudice. There are also lots of very competent and successful blacks, and there have been for a long time. Blacks who have been heroes to people of a dozen different races here in America, who have shaped the very nature and heart of the culture. Entertainers, politicians, musicians, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, preachers, lawyers, doctors, sports stars, actors, teachers, coaches, all kinds of people. Those, of course, tend to be the most visible people in our culture, but down into the basic day to day that keeps life going there are black people at every level who are essential to what keeps our country alive.

The point is that no one person or groups experience gets to override and define what a America is. It’s a shared endeavor, a diverse story. And that story today includes some unreasoned prejudice. But just because that story exists doesn’t mean it gets to be the whole story. It gets to be heard, but so do all the other stories. All the stories of

Attempt #2

Thank you so much for your thoughts! That is clearly the argument for the worst possible scenario. Where someone has competence but it isn’t recognized, where the feedback of the system isn’t allowed to operate because people don’t allow other people to prove they can achieve the results.
I don’t think my problem is that I couldn’t conceive of or imagine a scenario such as you’ve described, I think virtually everyone in the world can imagine it and fears it. It’s a very natural and human concern.
I think the point I was just trying to make was that, compared to all other time and all other places, America cares less about unreasoned prejudice and more about what you can do, it’s more biased toward what you can do than who you are, than any other place that has ever existed. Imperfect as it is, it’s still the historical maximum.
So rather than leaning into our fears, if we really want to do well and be appreciated for what we can do, considering that there’s more opportunity here for that than there ever has been anywhere ever, we should lean in to that opportunity, take control of what we can control, and lay in our efforts where they have the best opportunity for producing the outcomes we want than any other place. I think if people actually want to succeed and have a more truly empowered outlook that makes that more likely, this kind of attitude is helpful, because it’s so easy to fall into cognitive distortions that create mental and emotional poverty. And you can’t fix that from the outside. You can only fix that from the inside, with faith and hope and courage and wisdom. And whatever anyone else say, I believe that these are the true powers in the world we live in, and Tha is where we should place our faith, not in the latest political theory. Cognitive behavioral therapy has a lot of say on this subject.
The black people I know are far too impressive and proud and competent to be known for anything other than what amazing people they are. Most of them are better and more successful people than I could ever hope to be. And that’s just the people in my own life. In the media I see all sorts of others whose grace and talent and success and wealth I could never hope to reach.
Most everything you had to say relied on the power of personal testimony for its validity, the unquestionability of lived experience. And experience is wonderful. But everyone has it. And there are so many more experiences that could be shared than just this one view. And America isn’t just one of them, it’s all of them.
Racism, unfortunately, isn’t something you can ever completely remove from the world. It’s a function of things in us that are too deeply seated and essential to how we think and judge. It has been and will always be part of the struggle of humanity with itself. But it doesnt have to be the controlling factor in our personal narrative. Some demons we can’t dispel, but we can learn to love above them. We can find a deeper dignity and center. We can commit ourselves, at least, to not perpetuate the sins we suffer on others (and that is a very, very hard thing not to do). In a world where the only thing we’re truly sovereign over is ourselves, we have to have faith that that is the true center of our power and the also most dire danger to our lives, that it is either our greatest honor or dishonor, however the world perceives us or however circumstance conspires for or against us, how we ruled ourselves is the measure of who we are.
If I could disagree with one thing I’ve heard people here say, it’s this: that the greatest differences among people are not between groups, but within them. I don’t agree with that. I think the greatest differences are between who we could be and who we are. I could be so much more and so much less than I am. Regardless of what the rest of the world does or thinks or what happens to me. I am so much worse than I seem. And I could be so much worse than I am. And I could be so much better than I am. Our lives in the world face such great changes of fortune and circumstance. There are such great turns they can take. But great as they are, they’re nothing compared to what goes on in here, inside me. That is where the greatest battles are fought, where rhe biggest difference are decided. That is where ai become who I truly am. That is where my value and capability truly reside. Whether other people know it or not.

Attempt #3

Thank you so much for your thoughts! That is clearly the argument for the worst possible scenario. Where someone has competence but it isn’t recognized, where the feedback of the system isn’t allowed to operate because people don’t allow other people to prove they can achieve the results.
I don’t think my problem is that I couldn’t conceive of or imagine a scenario such as you’ve described, I think virtually everyone in the world can imagine it and fears it. It’s a very natural and human concern. And you’re right that it’s terrifying and paralyzing and just eats rhe heart out of you.
I think the point I was just trying to make was that, compared to all other times and all other places, America cares less about unreasoned prejudice and more about what you can do, it’s more biased toward what you can do than who you are than any other place we’ve ever known. Imperfect as it is, it’s still the historical maximum.
So rather than leaning into our fears, if we really want to do well and be appreciated for what we can do, considering that there’s more opportunity here than there ever has been anywhere ever, we should lean in to that opportunity, take control of what we can control, and lay in our efforts where they have the best opportunity for producing the outcomes we want than any other place. I think if people actually want to succeed and have a more truly empowered outlook that makes that more likely, this kind of attitude is most helpful, because it’s so easy to fall into cognitive distortions that create mental and emotional poverty.
And you can’t fix that from the outside. You can only fix that from the inside, with faith and hope and courage and wisdom. And whatever anyone else says, I believe that these are the true powers in this world we live in, and that is where we should place our faith, not in the latest political theory. Anti-racism won’t save black America, white liberals won’t save black America . Only God, virtue, and themselves can do that.
No one every freed themselves from suffering by focusing on how they were a tragic martyr, even when it was perfectly true and they were. They overcame and escaped by becoming heroes. There are multitudes of black heroes, in our culture and in my own life. People whose greatness and dignity and skill and success and grace I could never hope to equal. No one can take that quality away from you, because it lives inside of you. It shines forth wherever you go. And people can’t look away. People can’t deny it without losing an advantage they need.
America loves heroes. We love it when they come from an unexpected place. We love to tell that story and celebrate it. It’s the story of what America is, at its core. It’s the myth that drives us. The hope that that next story is just around the corner, waiting to be told.
I don’t know what it would take to solve racism. But I know where great people come from. Ordinary, extraordinary people, as Condoleezza Rice put it. That is where we should place our hope.

I kept reducing my arguments. Because it’s very hard to argue with a monolithic worldview piecemeal, or to argue the value of one person’s experience against these other people. People always value their own experience and interpretations the most. So I stead of trying to deal with her beliefs, I decided it was better to just acknowledge hers, then state my own vision, state what I hold my deep alliegance to, and let that speak for itself. Arguments may or may not hit home. But an alternative vision is something positive that someone could choose. It’s a living force, not a tactic.

On Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Summers

https://youtu.be/zxWOsUOsDyU

I love these women. I grew up surrounded by smart, confident women. You can’t help but love and respect them, even when you do disagree. They’re both a delight, but Camille consistently makes me laugh out loud. She is one of rhe most entertaining people you could possible watch.
I think if there’s any problem they haven’t considered, it’s that they might not be as representative of their sex as they would wish. Now, this is a lesson I’ve learned from my own sex. I’m an atypical man, I’m a bit more androgynous. And I’ve often resented (and been the punching bag) of the more manly cadre within my sex. And I’ve often thought that they should be less like that and more like me. And maybe I’m not entirely wrong.

But that’s not what they’re like. They are more aggressive than me, less verbal, more competitive, less aesthetic, less sensitive, more technical, more typically manly than me by almost every metric. And maybe that’s how they’re supposed to be, this large middle of the group we call men. And maybe the solution for them isn’t to stop being who they are and become me. Maybe they’re meant to find balance for who they are in relationship with women, who will resist and counter and balance them out in an intimate dialectic. And over time I eventually learned to resent our differences less and understand them more. But it’s still painfully obvious to me, as a sexually atypical man (but still a man) what extremes and problems men frequently fall into.
So yes, “fainting couch” feminism, as she so glibky puts it, may be a problem. But it’s not clear that the solution is for all those women to be just like Camille, any more than the solution for “breaking couch” men is to be more like me (and it’s not clear that either is really possible). Maybe the problem is partly the isolation and seperation of the sexes. Maybe those greater extremes that are, frankly, actually the great middle of the sexes, are meant to find their balance in understanding and having relationships with one another (not just romantic relationships, I actually think parental relationships are a really big part of what’s broken).
It might be hard to hear, but it’s at least possible that a certain portion of women fundamentally want greater protections, and that Camille is a relative outlier. As for myself, I have had to learn to accept that a lot of men are fundamentally more aggressive and want to throw themselves into crazy, risky, and more competitive situations than I do. Maybe we need both of those instincts in a fully functional human society, and that’s why they are regularly and normally distributed, including according to sex. Learning to accept, while still being critical, of the eccentricities (and strengths and pathologies) of your own sex is part of becoming a mature person.
So I don’t really disagree with them at all. I’m just not convinced from my own experience that the solution of turning those other women into these women (or other men into me) is viable. Maybe they need to become the better, more healthy version of who they are, find some other kind of balance. Still, having these conversations is part of that process.
I’m glad that I have the freedom to be a man, a heterosexual man, and be the person who buys the clothes and does the decorating and shopping and laundry and cooks the meals and who likes to cuddle and snuggle and takes care of the kids during the day. I like it, I’m good at it. I’m glad that the system has that flexibility, and it doesn’t compromise my identity as a man. I hate cars and sports. My wife outearns me many times over. I’m shorter than her, I’m quite a bit younger, I have health problems that make me physically frsgile;by all typical masculine measures I’m a loser.
But I’m a full contributer to my family in these and many other ways. Yet I also recognize that I’m not typical, and I don’t expect other men to be like me. They’re who they are, and that’s good, and we need them. The vast bulk of male society and economy and culture is made by and for the more typical man. But there’s still room for me, and room for me to be the kind of man I am. So much that I even got a wife who appreciated that I was the only guy she knew in college who had a nicely decorated room, with its own tiny tree at Christmas, and who loved romantic Italian poetry. And we’ve also got room for people like Camille. And I think that, as Douglas Murray would say, would have been a great place for the train to stop. But it didn’t. It blew through the station into antagonism and denial of sexual differences, demonization of masculinity (and traditional femininity), tyrannical attempts to mandate outcomes, aggressive policing of speech and conduct, and all the other shrill demands of modern feminism (to put it as Camille would). And maybe people like Camille actually helped that happen without realizing it. Being more androgynous, she shares the appreciation of more typical male qualities, including in men, but has a resentment for and lack of appreciation for traditional femininity. Since not all women could be her, her attacks on it, in the good cause of making space for someone who wasn’t like Tha, left little room for that great middle bulk of women who learned that traditional femininity was an oppressive and reprehensible trap (at her feet, no less). So where were they all to go? So they made a space. They made third wave, postmodern, feminism. They wanted a home for who they were, and found the only place allowed them, if they wanted to be female heroes and not the despised housewives their professors told them was slavery and indignity and tawdry, banal, blonde, baking boredom and meaninglessness. They turned qualities that were a source of real power and excellence and strength into a distortion and manipulation and war on men and on their former selves, their forebears. But they don’t just want to be weak or use weakness to bully others and have the government stand as a tyrannical mother. They want to protect the weak and care for the weak and use that care in a powerful way. That’s a good instinct, and their solidarity makes them an almost irresistible force. The problem is that it’s been distorted and pathologized and misapplied, using its power to prevent it from being questioned and pushed back on and counseled into its proper, most functional form and channels.
Lower class women, on the other hand, as Camille has pointed out, just kept being women, and so retained their sense and strength. For a while. Things tend to trickle down. I love Camille, but until she can make peace with traditional femininity as well as masculinity, and make a place for it in feminism, her platform will be incomplete. I know what it’s like to suffer at the outside of the average. I spent plenty of time getting bullied and kicked around, physically and mentally and emotionally, by that ideal. I understand why she can’t stand Doris Day. I understand the longing to be free of that comparison you have no interest in fitting or ability to meet. But we have to learn to accept and understand and appreciate as well as resist and correct, especially those things it is not in our authority to change.

https://youtu.be/m7JmQD2S1gE

I would also like to bring up the perspective of people like Mary Eberstadt, who wrote Primal Screams. In her work, she carefully documents the cost of the devolution of traditional gender roles, and as well makes an argument that humans have a distinct nature, and you can’t mess with it too much without seeing some consequences, among which is that people will begin to look elsewhere to have those needs be met, those identities be defined, and to use those capacities they have. And that can have unanticipated and disruptive consequences.

This is the counterpoint to Camille Paglia, who I truly adore, much more than I adore Eberstadt. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think she has some great points. What you’re really getting from these two is exploratory, creative feminism arguing with conscientious, ordely feminism. One explores the boundaries of what it means to be a woman, the other secures the foundations. One produces all kinds of novel and interesting goods, the other preserves society and produces the fundamental goods that sustain the species.

In my mind, I can hear them arguing with one another. They both present dangers, and they both present opportunities. I think they’re both important to listen to. One says, we want the freedom to risk being raped and not having kids or stable family relationships, because we want all the opportunities to explore what else might be out there! The other says, that’s fine for you because you’re willing to pay the price personally for what that costs you. You don’t pay any personal price for being pro-pornography and pro-sadomasochism and pro-nonmanogamy. But other people, and particularly children, pay a real price for it. It’s all just a fun display for you to study and watch at art galleries and on Real Housewives. But making that attitude into the basis of popular societal values causes widespread effects, and not everyone can live a life like yours, without some serious consequences, and the rest of society ends up picking up the check for it.
And they’ve both got a point. And negotiating things between the two, creating a world where both are preserved, is a problem. And the other problem we have is that there’s a destructively anarchic and selfish and a destructively tyrannical and collectivist version of those respective viewpoints. And the most likely result is that we end up with an opposition between the two worst versions of them instead of the two best versions of those ideologies.
Radical order and radical freedom both come with costs, one for the outliers and one for the average. Ideally you want to protect both as much as possible. But if you sink the average, you’ll sink the whole ship, along with the outliers. As strange as it sounds, intrepid explorers like Camille rely on the stability of the bourgeoisie to make her life possible. They keep the whole society stable and productive and moving forward through the generations. As much as she declaims postmodernism for destroying the world she loves, it’s really just a reaction to the void opened, in part, by her own exploding of all the walls that kept the world together.
So Camille speaks to my heart, I’m almost dangerously high in openness myself. I like to explore the borders of chaos. But I know that I only have that freedom and strength because I stand within the strength of my family. If I didn’t have that I don’t think I would even be alive today.

On expectations and minority experience

When I walk into a gym, no one assumes I’m a professional basketball player. And they’re right. There aren’t a lot of short, Dutch basketball players. When my wife and girls show up somewhere wearing lovely and stylish outfits, people don’t assume that I bought them and put them together. And it’s very likely that I did. I like shopping for women’s clothes and I’m pretty good at it. But I realize that at the store and in the situations I face that I’m in the minority.

The thing is, you can’t blame people for their assumptions, especially when they’re just based on general experience. Especially when those same people are generally perfectly willing to adjust those assumptions and are amused and delighted when they find someone who is different. It’s fun to see the one little white guy on a team of tall black players. It’s fun to see the one little suburban dad surrounded by women at the clothing store. I don’t blame people for being what they are, and I don’t blame me for being what I am. It’s not necessarily a moral issue.

It can become a moral issue if, say the women told me I couldn’t shop in the women’s clothing section. And the question of competence is entirely different and unrelated. I don’t belong on the court, to be honest, because I couldn’t compete. In that case any assumptions people might have about me are perfectly justified in practice. But I do belong in the clothing shop because I am very competitive and skilled at choosing clothes, and in practice that comes out.

And generally people in America are pretty utilitarian. They may have certain low-resolution assumptions based on experience, which are perfectly natural and do provide a basic guide for what to expect when you encounter people in the world. But they really, at a higher resolution, just care about results. If you can do the job well and provide value, they don’t really care if it runs counter to their assumptions. In fact they’ll replace them quite quickly in specific cases. But neither really tells you anything morally about the person, or even how good or bad the society they’re in is.

In the same way that people aren’t morally obligated to possess counter-intuitive expectations, people aren’t morally obligated to embody counter-intuitive expectations. I don’t carry any special moral weight of the need to prove that most men aren’t great at fashion, or that short Dutch guys aren’t great at basketball. If I want to, I can do those things. Nothing is really preventing me other than competence and my own interest and pursuit (or lack of it). White people don’t have to become equally represented in rap, black people don’t have to become equally as associated with kung fu mastery as the Chinese.

It’s fine for us that be what we are, and for people to notice it and operate at a low resolution based on those experiences. Most of them are perfectly reasonable, and most of them are perfectly amenable to making room for non-conforming cases, for anyone who can actually demonstrate they have the interest and what it takes. No one really cares if you’re black when it comes to being a fighter pilot, whatever they might assume based on experience. What they really care about and that virtually everyone will immediately respond to is if you ace the exams and prove you’ve got the skill.

Expecting people to be generic and interchangeable isn’t exactly a pathway to understanding or living them either. We often characterize people by what we love and respect and appreciate about them, or what is simply different then ourselves, than what we don’t like about them (unless they have directly harmed or threatened us in some way, and even some of our negative associations are quite true about all kinds of people; we each have our endemic flaws as well as virtues).

Denying the fact that Germans are generally extremely efficient but also often lack a sense of humor doesn’t improve my idea of them, it just erases their identity and my right to notice or understand or appreciate it. You can’t deny people the right to have low resolution understandings of people. It doesn’t mean they don’t also have high resolution understandings. It doesn’t mean they aren’t ready, in any individual case, to assign a high resolution understanding to any particular person of any particular group.

But we’re heuristic machines. We learn, we deduce, we observe and abstract. We apply those frameworks situstionally. We assume that people who are dressed like they have lots of time and money are probably of an elite class, and they probably are, and that informs our navigation of the situation. We assume that a guy in a sweat stained wife beater with unkempt hair and beard probably is of a very different class, and use that to navigate.

We don’t know the majority of details about the majority of people in the world, and so we signal each other in various ways to give people relevant tidbits of information so we don’t present ourselves as completely unknown ciphers to them, so they know how to navigate around us socially. And we build up collective expectations based on our individual experience, which is likely to vary different depending on what time and place you’re standing in.
I don’t know, I think people just want to simplify and judge how everyone else thinks, as if everyone has some obligation to know exactly who you are and what your story is and why you matter. This is a country of almost 400 million people, each with their own lives and problems, and most people can really only know about 200 people in any seriously meaningful sense in their lifetime. That’s just totally unrealistic.

I think people just lack confidence and meaning in their own lives, and aren’t known sufficiently by people they really care about, and so they’re hoping to get meaning and significance and the sense of being known the way people in a small town know each other by some sort of moral or government mandate.

Any time you’re out of your close community, any time you’re out of your family, any time you’re out of your majority environment, you’re not going to be understood. Certainly not at a glance. That’s not a white or black phenomenon. That’s life.

Maybe white people seem genetic to blacks, but we seem pretty different to one another. Enough that we fought all kinds of wars against each other and see ourselves fractionated into all kinds of subgroups that we communicate our belonging to and make assumptions about based on those little markers.

I think it’s worth seeing how much sense you can make out of the large generalizations people make about white people if you’re not allowed to use the blanket term “white” and have to start talking about actual concrete people and people groups, like the Irish or Jews or Italians or the British or Germans or the Dutch or Danish. You start to realize that they all have their own stories. Their own distinctiveness. Their own rivalries and assumptions about themselves and one another. Their own struggles and histories and differences. Black and white is just too shallow an identity marker to reduce people to.
The real, actual problem is the tendency among modern Americans to have the cart backward. Expectations and assumptions don’t produce results. Results produce expectations and assumptions. Men don’t become soldiers because we expect them to. We expect them to because that’s what they do. The expectation can reinforce the result, but it doesn’t generate it ex nihilo; it follows it. We expect that things will fall when dropped because that’s what we’ve observed they do. People expected the Spartans to win battles because that’s what they did. People expected Athenians to be great poets and philosophers because that’s what they did. People create their own low resolution impressions and identities. They’re creating them all the time.

And you can’t mandate expectations or results. You can’t decide a priori what they can or can’t be, you can override people’s right to be what they are or other people’s right to notice. You can’t decide expectations by fist. But you can change them. You can be the person who achieves the result you value. And if enough other people also decide to achieve it, and want to, and demonstrate the skill, that will create the expectations and assumptions.

People don’t buy tons of Japanese cars because they expected them to be superior. At first they weren’t, and assumptions aligned with that. Then the Japanese started making awesome cars, and as a result people adjusted their expectations. That’s the way the process flows. You can’t make it flow in reverse; people are too practical and too a posteriori for that. They like to see it to believe it. But they’re often very willing to sacrifice their shallow assumptions and prejudices for more practical and actual outcomes and knowledge, if it can be offered.

You don’t change expectations to produce results. You produce results to change expectations. That’s not only how it does work, that’s how it should work. Trying to work the process in reverse, for any group, is the same kind of subversion that forms the core of truly harmful and non-adaptive prejudice, true racism. Attempting to set the rules for assumptions a priori, what you can and cannot assume, what you are or are not allowed to think or conclude, and in a way that is not subject to feedback from actual people and their behavior and accomplishments, that is true injustice.

On a side note, being in either the majority or the minority in a situation isn’t an inherently moral stance or position. It just is. And it affects your experience. A lot of people like to think that being welcomed and having an assumed position in the majority makes them a good person and confirms them be in the right or confirms the majority in the right confirmation runs both ways). And some people are tempted to think the opposite; they are affirmed by being in the minority; the positioning itself seems indicative of virtue and validation and value prejudice.

A lot of people with a shallow conception of value just want to be part of the majority or make the majority be like them and affirming of them to make them or it good. But as much as you might be able to learn something about one from the other if your survey is Broad enough, they’re really separate questions, and you can’t derive reliable, complex moral judgments and prescriptions that way, whichever position you prefer to occupy.

On a further side note, I think it’s a violation of human autonomy to stake moral value on the arrangement of people in areas of life that are largely dependent on individual difference. Yes, there are plenty of things in life that do have moral significance, where your position in regard to them, and even your whole society’s position, is indicative of moral excellence or degeneration. Some things aren’t just down to individual differences and temperaments and talents and personalities. Some thing fall outside the scope of individual freedom. And those tend to be the really important and powerful things that form the foundation of the human organism and human psyche and human social organism. Cruelty to infants isn’t a matter of valid personal freedom because the race would literally die from its adoption as a cultural feature. Some qualities and behaviors are inherently catastrophically harmful to people and to society, and some are inherently helpful. And sometimes they’re the same thing, gone good or gone bad, powerful qualities that can be leveraged either to serious help of seriously harm humanity.

But some things are normally distributed. They aren’t moral issues (though how you use them could be). Height varies. How tall you are might affect what things you can do, it might structure how you interact and compete with others. But it’s not a moral issue, being this tall or that tall. It’s a normally distributed variation. It doesn’t really matter that much. And we can argue about and discuss what things are and are not important and critical and essential to human survival and flourishing and which are variable and tertiary and aren’t worth such weighty judgments.

Those minor things are part of what make us particular and distinct. Not just human (it’s the big things that are more fixed that determine that), but this particular individual human, with these quirks and this story. Morality is important. But you run into real danger when you moralize or make primary things that are secondary or tertiary, or when you make secondary or tertiary things that are primary.

You cannot make judgements about the moral content of a whole society based in shallow, ad hoc judgements about majority or minority positions. It’s not your right to decide that a good society will be defined as one where 50% of everyone in a clothing store will be men, where 50% of the basketball players are white, where 50% of preschool teachers are men, where 50% of trash collectors and oil drillers are women, where 50% of rap artists are white suburban females. People have a right to their individuality, and you can’t mandate those outcomes as a moral prerequisite without erasing and violating the sovereignty of people’s individuality, their right to be more or less tall or short, fast or slow, extroverted or introverted, sociable or shy, object-oriented or people-oriented. These are all things that vary in non-norslly significant ways across the population. And people have a right to their own history. As a society, as a race, as a family with a particular character. Humans are not generic. You cannot decide everything that matters most deeply about them, their moral status, what they should be or do, what outcomes they should reach, by such trivial facts as things like skin color. There isn’t such a trivial formula for identifying a just society as “5% of the people are Jewish and 5% of the CEOs are Jewish”. You need some deeper, more sophisticated measures than that. Race particularly, and often gender as well, just aren’t strong enough and restricted enough categories to make those kinds of judgements. There’s far, far too much natural variation within them, there are too many other factors that matter more and better explain the results in those individual circumstances. They’re too pat an explanation for the outcome and conclusions reached, too subject to easy counterexamples.

As far as I’m concerned, the argument that someone of that race or that gender must achieve these results is just as bad as the argument that someone of that race or that gender could never achieve these results. Both deny human individuality, as well as the true foundations of moral responsibility, reducing everything down to mere prejudice. In fact to my eyes the two positions are virtually indistiguishable. They’ve both decided a priori things that it is not within people’s right to restrict and delineate.

One great failure of our educational system is the failure to articulate the true horror and heroism of the sacrifice that is being made in agreeing to the law. If you have never known the horror of a terrible crime done to you or to another that you care about, if you have never known the rage and disgust that it provokes, if you have never known the terror that such a wrong might go unrighted, then you don’t appreciate what you’re really asking. Some people act as if the demand to follow the law was an easy thing, as if giving up your absolute autonomy and pursuit of your interest were such a simple bargain to make that they could trust. Some people act as if the demand to trust the law were a trite thing, a matter of little cost, as if giving up your personal right to justice and defense and revenge to some other you don’t even know was a small matter.

Why politics is a male epiphenomenon

Males and female territories differ, and the way they police those territories differs. Men maintain wider territories but police them at a lower level of detail, but do so more confrontationally. Women maintain a smaller territory but at a very high level of detail, and do so with “soft power”, leveraging influence at many complex levels of communication and social manipulation.

Politics as we know it, as it developed, is a solution to a particular problem: the overlapping territories of men. Men needed a system to allow them to share overlapping territories without constant, disruptive, territorial disputes. Women are much better at sharing territories, and solve their problems in a powerfully communitarian way, leveraging complex psychological mechanisms. Their naturally higher agreeability makes them a collective force that forms the meat of any local community. Men, being more disagreeable and aggressive, as well as more generally variable (and with more of them collecting at the extremes), and with a drive for a more expansive territory, need some mechanism to solve the problem of conflicting and overlapping territories among them.

Now, they could just fight and kill each other. And they do and they have. They could avoid each other, and that works to some degree too, although it requires an understanding of and respect for one another’s territory, as well as an excess of desirable and available territory. But men would generally prefer to have some way to compete and maybe even collaborate a bit that doesn’t require physical confrontation and direct displays of aggression that might hurt them.

Since it’s not always great to have death or injury result from conflicts, it’s better to find some proxy mode for struggle and negotiation. Many animals, after all, do not always need to kill one another in their struggles. Deer rarely seriously injure one another in their annual rut. Their battles allow them to test one another, figure out their standing, and resolve their disputes largely without serious harm. They get the results of the negotiation from locking horns without having to be impaled on them. And this is not an uncommon phenomenon.

So what problem does politics solve? I believe it solves the problem of the particular challenges men face in negotiating their territory disputes. No doubt we could talk at length about the solutions women have come up with to manage their historical territorial disputes, but at the moment that’s not my concern, even though it makes up, in my opinion, the real bulk of all social connection and interaction.

You can see why men developed politics. You need some proxy for constant and chaotic conflict. You need some set of rules. A way to handle disputes between and within territories for this particular kind of creatures. A way to struggle and negotiate and compete without risking injury and death at every turn. The social life is a bit like a game. And games need rules. And ways of dealing with competitors and threats (and the variability, aggression, and disagreeability of men provides plenty of those), and ways of negotiating all kinds of disputes. Because these challenges exist, you need rules, and you also need allies. Men are less likely to seek the security of a group by nature, and more likely to seek it as a means to an end, as a resource for allies to respond to competitors and threats.

Politics wasn’t designed to exclude women. Women had their own politics, a very powerful and pervasive and inescapable body politic that was very detailed and strongly enforced by soft political forces. Its tendrils were everywhere, the core of family and community life. More stable and less variable and dramatic than the politics of men, more implied and less explicit. It was a different game for a different set of people with different problems to solve.

Men and women managed separate but intersecting territories that each affected the other. One was more openly codified and confrontational, the other was less codified and implied and influential. And both still exist. Men continued to formalize and improve the structures that helped them negotiate and share one another’s territories. In fact they got so good and so effective that it opened up opportunities for people who weren’t even men to enter the game.

Women still played their own social game, but now they could play the men’s too. And keep operating their own endemic social power structure within it. Which has proved a challenge for men, who never really learned how to understand or play the women’s game as well as women learned to play theirs. They also struggle more with how to bring their full competitive might, that was developed for use on one another, against a class they would much rather compete for.

The effect of men and women sharing politics is still a process that is being worked out. The consequences haven’t yet been fully understood. Not that I’m in any way against it. Reaching the point we have may be part of the natural evolution of the idea, but it may also make it harder for it to fulfill its original function, and that may have some side effects that will need to be dealt with someday.

I should mention before I close that I owe a debt to Camille Paglia for helping me focus my thinking in this area. I had a sense of this perspective, both from personal experience and from my study of the animal world (particularly tigers). But hearing her articulate her views helped me crystallize some of my own.

I feel that there is so much more to say. But this is enough of a beginning for now. It’s strange that politics takes such a consistent form across all societies throughout time, and has so many parallels in the animal world, but there is so little in the modern account that can explain sensibly why this should be so and give a proper account of how the institutions evolved historically. Instead our narratives are polluted with ideological dreck that is more concerned with pushing some agenda of how things should be or selling us on some picture of things to justify forcing through something they want than truly wondering why they are the way they are.

How slippery are slippery slopes

Both left and right are slippery slopes because they’re based in personality and instinct. That instinct is persistent; it’s not confined to a specific concern that arises gets resolved. So it keeps working on whatever the conditions are and never really knows when to stop. Absent the balancing pull of the opposition party, it inevitably keeps leaning until it falls over.

Sympathy across the sexes

I was heavily bullied and kicked around by the other boys (and girls) during my childhood. And I once was having a conversation with some women, who were complaining about men, and I mentioned that I knew what it felt like to be physically at someone else’s mercy and be thoughtlessly used for amusement and displays of strength (and in fact men are far less restrained in doing this with other men than with women).

And the women, rather than granting that I also had a valid experience that showed the universality of the hurtfulness of certain kinds of behavior (not that I was a crybaby about it, I never lowered myself to acting like a victim, which usually got me pounded more), all blew me off and refused to grant any validity to my experience, and said I couldn’t understand and had nothing to contribute.

And none of them had ever actually truly been struck or physically overpowered or thrown around as I had. I was genuinely kicked, punched, choked, thrown, tripped, restrained, locked up, shoved, dropped, yanked, immersed in trash, immersed in water, hung by my feet, hung by my neck, mocked, teased, belittled, and excluded. I know what it’s like to have to endure things by force that you don’t like. And their opinion was, you’re a man, you don’t know what it’s like to have to deal with men.

I thought their experience might make them more sympathetic and willing to see the commonalities beyond the mere male vs female dynamic, but they had no interest. I ended up getting rejected and belittled and told that what happened to me was insignificant and had no relevance. It wasn’t female suffering or oppression, so it had no relevance and no reality.

And these were good women, close friends, smart and educated and by their own description caring and empathetic. But they couldn’t see beyond their own noses, when the person in question wasn’t part of the group they were in sympathy with, or came from a group they had a grudge against. I don’t think that means they were truly insensitive or corrupt or evil. It’s just that everyone has their sympathies and prejudices, their blind spots and areas of focus. And it’s easy to assume that because someone doesn’t share your preferences, that they don’t share any of your feelings or instincts or concerns or experiences. It’s hard to see beyond context.
And I get why it wasn’t easy to admit my perspective. Everyone is a bit defensive of their area of expertise and investment and a bit wary and skeptical of outsiders. Women and men. It’s a human thing, not a “men are so specially jerks thing.” Men are more competitive, so that can make for a less welcoming and collaborative environment. But women, though more collaborative, can form a tight wall that just shuts you out if they don’t trust you.

I was also the primary caretaker for my two girls for many years. And I was always on the outside of all these groups of moms, who would eye me with suspicion. Not that I didn’t understand. It was perfectly natural, and I didn’t expect them to take me for granted as one of the girls, because I wasn’t. I hadn’t earned that appearance in their eyes.

So I never benefited from the society of moms that forms around young children in those pre-school years. They cluster together during the day and form a little society of support and camraderie. I had one mom that did make an effort to welcome me (a very sporty, boistrous, competitive mom of boys, whatever that signifies), but among most there was just a stand-offish attitude. As if I couldn’t possibly have anything to contribute in their domain. That’s not a male thing. That’s a human thing.

And the truth is that it’s just not that easy for a man to move into a predominantly female space (or the reverse). It’s not anyone’s fault, it’s not exactly a moral failing. It’s just a naturally hard situation. It’s awkward and difficult. There will be skepticism and suspicion. And there are some weird interactions of the sexual dynamic when you try to cross domains. It can be uncomfortable. There’s comfort and a sense of understanding the territory, simplifying it, when you know you’re only dealing with your own sex. And if you’re dealing with something hard and complex like child rearing (or combat, to bring up a typically male-dominated field), it helps to simplify the territory. And you can resent and fear someone who is complexifying it.

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Comments on the talk between Jordan Peterson and Michael Schermer

I think what Jordan is basically arguing about religion is that it is at least symbolically or psychologically or archetypally true. And that that’s an important, maybe the most important, way something can be true (in an almost Platonic sense, as an abstraction or a aggregate, a bit like math is true in relation to physical events; it describes them along some higher dimension of unity and organization). And so you should at least live as if these things were true, and Christianity in particular is optimized along these lines for that purpose, having been organized as it has.

So one problem is, to begin with, that some people will always want to have a leg up on God and want to use it for their own advantage. I’m here, I’m now, I’m real, in a way that the law or God or these supposed religious truths aren’t. I’m tangible and immediate to my perception in a way that they aren’t. And that gives me the right to override them where I see fit, because in some sense I am ontological superior and more complete.

One might also wonder, if it is a good thing for people to believe and act as if these things were true, simply true, so they can derive the benefits and advantages they confer, and there isn’t some position external to a religious commitment of some kind, no godlike, purely objective ground without any of the clutter of the structures that underlie perception and value and action and our own biological and psychological specificity, on which we can stand. Then what’s so terrible about people believing in the thing? What’s the big difference?

If you have to think and act as if you believed something, and this something seems like the best something, and maps well onto our fundamental phenomenological experience of ourselves and the world, then why say it’s silly to believe it? What exactly are you hoping to spoil or change or gain by calling it absurd to actually believe it as if it were real? If that’s essentially what you have to do anyway? It seems to me more like an objection to the nature of knowledge, the self, and the world as such, the kind of place it is and our limitations in it, rather than an objection to Christianity specifically.

I think that those of us who struggle with this kind of skepticism, among which I include myself, need to make some room for people to live and learn to work with the eternal truths we share and not get so hung up on the epistemological doubts and details of how those people represent and embody those truths to themselves and to others.

The Bible is very clear that our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the powers and principalities, with the invisible world of spirits, ideas, ideologies, mind viruses, mental pathogens, life giving transtemporal truths, archetypes, living structures of meaning, whatever you want to call them. They’re real, they’re powerful. They shape our reality and embodied lives. So make your peace and focus on that and don’t get more hung up on the representational framework that lets different people engage with those meanings and realities than you have to.

I understand why that’s hard, I’m a skeptic by nature. But I shouldn’t let that prevent me from engaging with these things that seem to be real in some very important sense and from engaging with other people who perceive their importance too, and from helping them and even learning from them. For all that a small town person of faith may seem dull and unlearned and unsophisticated, they may actually have a pretty good bead on life and much of its fundamental realities and be better able to navigate it and face its challenges and recognize its threats, better than I can.

I think that also plays into Thomas Sowell’s contention that it’s very easy for intellectuals to value their own individually expansive but ontologically limited experience and thoughts and discount the wisdom of common humanity, which may be less individually expansive but more ontologically extended. And I think Jordan is saying that you can’t so easily discount that, or the collective faith of mankind in some transpersonal reality.

It’s not that truth is determined by a vote. But you can’t so easily discount the collective knowledge, empirical evidence of experience, and innate biologically and psychologically embodied wisdom of a whole species. It’s at least worth a look to see what kind of work it’s actually doing.

—

The statistical model of an approach to faith isn’t really a great way to view it. I don’t think anyone ever argued that Jesus rose and saved them because that was something that was likely to happen. Even the people who wrote down the new testament, according to their own accounts, found it shocking, unprecedented, and never saw it coming. And how much of history was statistically likely? How statistically likely is it, based in a casual survey of the universe, for life to arise? Not very likely, is our best answer. So are we then to conclude that the argument that it did, in this one case, actually arise, is therefore implausible?

It’s just a silly framework to use. A more plausible framework for analysis would be something closer to the subject. What kind of evidence do we have for the lives and deeds of other persons whose existence and whose deeds we take as factual? How far removed from the events are the sources that confirm those facts? Is the fact of Jesus’ existence and his acts more or less well established than those other cases? For the record, the evidence, both in quantity and proximity, is far, far better than for other historical figures. It’s actually shocking how removed our sources are for the lives of most people we think we know all about.

It’s also worth noting that Jesus was not a Roman general or a senator or a king or member of the Sanhedrin, or even a major landowner or political leader. As far as the society of the time was concerned, he was a nobody who talked to nobodies. He was some weird guy who, along with tons of others, got executed by the Roman state, in his case for some only vaguely understood religious crimes. He was not a subject of official interest whose life could have been expected to be recorded, much less make any historical impact. His followers were, in general, neither wealthy nor powerful, now were the religious or political authorities of the time in any way desirous of granting him any special significance or notoriety. Nor was Israel at that time a country of any special significance on the world stage.

And yet we have a remarkable amount of information about Jesus, recorded very close in time (compared to other figures) to the time of the events, especially considering where he lived and who he was (or rather, who he wasn’t) and the general desire of the Jewish state and priesthood (including Paul himself) to suppress him and his followers (to the point of banishing them from the Temple, which was tantamount to being exiled from the culture, all the way up to execution).

As far as I’m concerned, though, all this doesn’t force you to accept a certain set of facts about Jesus, particularly a set of facts that touches on something both unlikely and also fundamental to people’s interpretational structures (how they determine truth and meaning). Things like that aren’t shifted so easily by facts that operate closer to the surface of our minds. They require a massive adjustment to our whole nested structure of knowledge, value, and action. Even if they’re true, we may not easily be able to see or live as if they were true. Determinism and universal nihilism may be true, but accepting them and living as if they are true is notoriously difficult for humans.

It’s also the case that people do, in fact, convert. In fact virtually all of the writers of the new testament were converted Jews, and some were even quite faithful and pious Jews like Paul and very resistant to conversion. Jews took their religion much more seriously than the Romans or Greeks (and still do, as you can tell by the fact that it still exists and Roman and Greek religions, as well as states, faded from the world long ago). As for the the converts, both past and present, it isn’t exactly the facts that change their mind, because it isn’t anything so small. It’s the whole vision of reality. The whole map it lays in the world. The whole way that we characterize the landscape and navigate it.” The facts” are merely the notes and lines of a pencil in a particular corner of that map.

Christianity particularly is and has always been and has always been intended to be a faith of choice. You can’t be born into it. You don’t default into it. That’s a false faith. You have to choose it voluntarily. You come out of something else, somewhere else, and come into this kingdom. And that kingdom isn’t even centered, exactly, on a set of propositions. There is a set of propositions. But the center from which they flow is actually a person (or an idea of a person, if you like). It’s a personal faith. You invest your trust into the person of Christ. And by that means encounter the transpersonal (God) and are transformed for the better. And maybe the main problem with that is that you can’t find sufficient evidence to know or trust that person. That’s a real hurdle. But plenty of people get over it.

The main point is that you can’t solve the problem of faith in general and Christianity in particular by fussing about at the surface level of thought. And you can’t argue that it exists only on a level that is less real or less meaningful or less legitimate than questions about stock markets.

—

If I had to pick on thing to seriously disagree with Michael on, it’s whether we are actually getting better at controlling ourselves. I don’t think we are. I think we’ve gotten better at regulating rhe conditions and consequences around us. Maybe we did get better, slowly for a long time, and that eventually yielded power and confort. And those have taken the place, structurally, of our moral control.

We don’t need to have as much control or fortitude or stability now, because we’ve learned to control the environment. And we’ve become dependent on our ability to have the environment and the consequences of our lives being managed for us. So we face three terrible possibilities.

First, that our ability to control ourselves will degrade so much that we won’t be able to hold on to or wield the power over our conditions any more. Second, that the external structural environment will change in some way that exceeds our ability to control it, forcing us to rely on internal fortitude we no longer possess. Third, that we will degenerate morally to such a degree, in tandem with our increasing power over our circumstances, that we will wield that power for our own destruction.

It’s a bit like what happens when you go a couple generations down from some successful immigrant families. The first generation had to develop great character to survive despite harsh conditions. The second generation enjoyed better conditions plus the inherited character from their parents and had a massive advantage. The third generation never knew the harsh conditions, takes the good ones for granted, and never needed to develop the character to succeed outside them, and so they waste and spoil their advantages.

—

After being called a “dullard, sheep, child, and simian” by someone for writing the previous passages.

This is clearly one of those discussions that generates more heat than light. Resorting to repeated name calling won’t convince interlocutors of good faith of your position, only the easily cowed and duped.

I doubt it’s worth explaining, but the point isn’t that reason and logic are useless and there ain’t any way of analyzing or judging whether any particular frame is more or less valid or accurate (so go nuts and start using your crystal magic). It’s a question of what conceptual framework and language is most useful to use for a given subject.

Reason doesn’t work independently, it works within a given frame. And all language is essentially symbolic, metaphorical, and analogical, allowing creatures like us to address distant realities from within our framework of psychological experience. And while the language and constructions of math may be useful for describing the actions of say, physical objects, they may not be as relevant or useful for describing other kinds of actions, such as personal relationships, phenomenal experience, psychological experience, and so on. And the reverse also applies.

The question is, are narrative and personification a useful, natural, or accurate way for humans to describe the landscape of their existential experience? I think the answer, if you have any knowledge of people, is a resounding “Yes!” People live and feel and judge and act and operate primarily in the world of narrative (and narrative value).

The primary question we address in observing a bottle of wine isn’t “What is the wine bottle made from?” (though knowing that may be very useful in its production). The central question were confronting is, “What does this thing mean to me?” It’s something I want to drink, it’s of a certain shape and color that pleases me, its something I bought for a special occasion with my wife, it cost this much that I can afford because of where I am in my personal financial life, it has a certain flavor that seems pleasurable to me, I gained that taste through this personal history, I know how much I want to drink or not to drink for the optimal experience I want to have, the wine exists because of this historical story of how grapes and the trade came to that region, it was transported to where I could buy it because of this cultural story that I am part of.

There is just so, so much to that bottle, the main things that really mean something to me, that cannot be captured in a chemical formula, nor is the atomic or chemical structure part of what I directly observe or experience. These “secondary” elements of meaning and narrative are real and they are relevant. And when it comes to describing and prescribing and navigating human behavior, what you really have is not merely the chemical composition of a human, but all these levels of meaning.

The human brain is basically the most complicated object in existence, and the human mind is so complicated that we don’t really understand exactly how one arises from or relates to the other. And human narratives encompass the complexity of many minds and many meanings and purposes and values and uses and endeavors interacting with one another.

So it is not useless or inaccurate to attempt to describe the content of human experience in those terms (narrative, personification, purposes, meanings, story) that are closest and most central to the phenomena being described (human phenomenonal, psychological, and ideological experience) and that are the most complex and sophisticated representations of those phenomena (in this case, the phenomena being people and their activities).

The phrase, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” comes to mind. That doesn’t mean that there can’t be better or worse pictures, more or less useful ones, more or less coherent pictures. But it is a way of saying that you shouldn’t underestimate the value of pictures, nor of the way in which people may actually be addressing and manipulating and understanding and acting on complex realities by means of their symbolic representation.

All thought, all language, is a kind of symbolic representation. And there are some types that, as I said, are actually nearer to the reality of and more representative of the complex realities of the underlying truths than some people are willing to recognize. I am the last person to underestimate the value of the great symbolic proposition that 1+1=2, but when used to describe a phenomenon such as, say, my marriage to my wife, it fails to exhaust the underlying meaning.

So, no, I don’t put much weight in the picture of reality that Deepak Chopra offers. Nor am I particularly impressed by those who entirely fail to see why the articulation of his narrative description of the world is so meaningful to so many people. It shows a lack of imagination and a very limited scope for the language of representation, an inability to understand the different terms by which people address different fields of human experience and endeavor. It is a shrinking of the world to fit a single perceptual and conceptual frame. Making the frame smaller may make the world seem coherent and comprehensible, by disallowing the analytical models of all others, but I think the resurgence of many diverse and contradictory, fragmenting worldviews (the postmodern explosion) is really a symptom of that failure.

Having been presented with a conceptual framework too small and limited and too distant from the actual content of human experience, people lost faith that it had anything meaningful to say to them and started seeking other gods, turning back to the pantheism and ideological isolation of the past.

People could sense that the reality of what life was was not being adequately captured and described by the intellectuals and cultural expressions around them. It wasn’t addressing the realities they experienced, or giving them knowledge enough to navigate the challenges of value, action, meaning, identity, purpose, of the narrative of their lives. So they started looking for someone who would. And so you get people like Deepak Chopra, who is addressing them at that level of primacy. And maybe he isn’t great. But people didn’t go looking for new solutions because what they had been offered was so perfect and useful and complete and they were just so dumb. They went looking because what they were offered was weak, distant, inadequate, irrelevant, simplistic, and useless.

A dream of hell, or life, or death

I dreamt I was falling through an infinite red void. Darkness, directionless, expanding forever in all dimensions. Silent and gusty. Twisting, in one forever moment. Falling, pulled forever backward into an infinite regress into myself. It was a place of infinite space, where all the world was mine and I was the only thing in it. And I knew neither purpose nor challenge. It was worse than punishment, because punishment implies attention. That someone or something is doing something with you and has some end, that there is some intention, some result, some process going on. Here there was nothing but myself and forgetfulness. Nothing to be done. Nothing being done to me. No suffering to be directed to some end. Just myself and nothing to impinge upon my own ineffective Godhood of that space.

I dreamt I fell upon a bar, like a wire walker’s rod, whose ends extended out of some infinite unguessed place to either side in that space that knew neither up nor down nor left nor right. I held onto it, looped myself over it, strove to hold to to devise some way to suspend myself from it with my clothing. Not for any purpose. Because trying to hold on was the closest thing to a purpose I had known in all that time. Just the challenge to hang on for that moment made something different, made something other than just myself, gave some texture and definition to these moments of time.

I knew there was nothing to hold on for, that it would be easier to let go, that there was no relief or purpose in holding on. That it would lead to no end. That there was not future point of change from which looking back on it, that it would matter, that anything would be other than what it was. The time of change and difference was gone. The time of struggle was gone. But in that brief moment of reminder, the struggle itself was something. It was sweet. It was something to do. It made time and the world exist. I would have held onto it forever if I could. The most precious thing in all that empty abyss. The chance to try to hang on, for one moment out of eternity, to hold my place, to steady and right myself to some orientation. Because soon even that would be gone. And all I would ever have would be that moment to remember. As I tumbled alone in my infinite space, all mine, all to myself.

What women want

What women want, or at least what my wife wants, is to feel special and valuable and precious. To be a princess. For her, it’s a guilty pleasure, but it’s also obviously a deep motivation. To be seen or discovered to be or appreciated as or treated as if or to simply be a princess. A person of near-divine value and status and preciousness and importance. Maybe that’s why the princess, or some near version of it, is such a compelling and ubiquitous archetype in the stories of so many cultures.

And I get it. You want that to be your story, to be seen for how precious you are and treated that way. To be discovered and valued and lifted up and seen and recognized. It’s Cinderella. Women want to feel that they are marrying up, at their deserved status. Whether they are or not, they want to feel like that’s what’s happening, that they are landing a prince, that it takes a prince to match their own value.

Women have a strong prejudice for mating across and up, and they want the proof that they did just that. It makes them feel good about themselves and about their lives and the men in them. They want men to measure up. And they can get unhappy very quickly if the men don’t. It degrades and disrespects their own perceived value. Their man needs to be a prince because his proving his bona fides also serves to confirm her own. And women want to see this story be repeated and reaffirmed in their lives. That’s the key element you see repeated in most romance stories aimed at women.

For a long time, I couldn’t quite figure what it was that I was missing, probably because I’m a man. This proving process isn’t a male fantasy, it’s not a male instinct. Men marry across and down. Income and status in the hierarchy have little correlation with mate choice for men. But they matter a lot for women, whether they admit it to themselves or not. It defines how they judge potential mates. And to some degree it’s only women’s shorter biological clock that forces them to compromise and just take the best that they can get out of their available options. Otherwise they might wait a heck of a lot longer than they do.

And both sexes seem to get the message, and even seem to enjoy the process most of the time. Men try to prove that they’re princes worth accepting, and women try to prove that they’re princesses worth pursuing (not just to men, but to one another, and to themselves). But it’s not all fun and games. And sometimes the whole system breaks down.

If you don’t see men pursuing women and trying to prove themselves to them, that doesn’t mean something has improved, it means that something is broken. If men aren’t outperforming and overperforming for women, it means they aren’t valuing or being valued by women. And the fallout for both can be much greater than we would ever, in our pride, wish to admit. It leaves a void that’s hard to fill.

Humans, like all animals, have their mating rituals, their displays. The ways they advertise their desireability and compete within their sex and compete for the other sex. They have deep, endemic desires, the displays they’re watching for. Women desire to be presented with gifts and to choose from among the suitors. They take the gifts presented as a proxy for the hidden value of the person. Men take the woman’s beauty as a proxy for her hidden value as a goddess. A goddess he can adore and from which he can call forth the world, creation, the future, new life.

It’s not an unrealistic desire. How men see the women they love and desire is hard to align (realistically) with what women see in themselves (but on some level want to). They want to be the goddess, the divine virgin, the untouched fertile ground, the perfect eden, the cradle of being. And they want to be watered, seeded, impregnated with the future. To become the fulfilled mother goddess. And that’s a little absurd.

Luckily, men are a bit absurd in their feelings. The degree of beauty men see in women is a kind of madness. They see the sun rising and music erupting, they see a potential far beyond the reality. They will give anything just to touch the flame and feel the heat of it. And women want someone to see them like that, to be a goddess, a queen, in the eyes of someone who is themselves a noble and worthy lover, a young god, a prince, a future king (who will be confirmed and fulfilled in that kingship by finding a queen).

It’s silly, but I’m reminded of the music video for Dark Horse, where Katy Perry is brought a litany of gifts from suitors, who she destroys when they don’t meet her standards. It’s absurd, but it also an expression of a common form of female wish fulfillment. It’s an insane idea, but not entirely unrealistic, really. I’m sure Katy’s real life has been a bit life that. Women select. They want to select. They love selecting. The power of choice, of making the most beneficial choice that they can, affirming their own elite value, is a fundamental motivation for them in life.

To turn toward a darker corner of this phenomenon, I think this may be why abortion activism has always centered around the idea of being “pro-choice” and of control over the woman’s body and what gets done with it and made from it. It’s not just that it’s a compelling argument, it’s that it’s a specifically powerful argument for women, because it touches one of their most fundamental motivations, one so strong that it can even override their desire to protect and bear their own young, their regard for the lives of the weak and innocent. Women don’t simply love or simply want men, or even children, they want to select. They want to choose, and that includes specifically rejecting unacceptable options. Which mate, which children, by whom and how will their body be used, and under what circumstances will they allow this part of themselves to be accessed?

Abortion, the elimination of undesirable life, is the result of women’s desire to choose being taken to its furthest and most unrestrained extremes, just as the production of undesirable pairings and pregnancies (sexual assault) is often the result of men’s desire to be chosen being taken to its most overwhelming and monomaniacal extreme. It’s the point at which all else is sacrificed to this value and where we see the worst perversions and outcomes of the sexual system (for each sex respectively).

The argument that I must have this right (to steal a life, or to steal access to a life) because I have a deep fundamental need that cannot be resisted or compromised, that this is owed to me and my right to it can be asserted against another to any length, is common to both sides. There is a desire to possess (on the part of the man) and a desire to not be possessed (on the part of the woman). Or perhaps you could say that both need the same thing, the man to possess the woman and the woman to possess herself, and each chafes at the limits the demands of romance and the demands of pregnancy place on them. There is a desire by both to wield personal control over their needs and not be subject to the whims of chance. To not be compromised.

To each sex this may seem strange. Perhaps the two seem less similar than I make them out to be. But that is mostly down to the differences in motivation that make one argument seem quite compelling and sensible and the other seem strange and hard to justify. They are both fundamental needs. Men need to be chosen by women. Women need to be able to choose between men. Men want to make a successful venture and be accepted. Women want to receive successful ventures and accept only those they choose. It seems a great tragedy to each to be frustrated or restricted in their respective desires. And I wouldn’t argue that they are exactly the same. But they are equivalent. They are the reciprocal. They are keenly felt by both and keenly resented by the other. They are the matching burdens of the sexes.

To carry that kind of desperate need for a whole lifetime, as it nearly tends to be, is a great pressure for a man to labor under. It is a lifelong frustration and struggle. The constant need to prove yourself worthy of something that seems as necessary for living as air and food is its own kind of hell.

For women, their needs tends to collect around the ability to make very specific choices at very specific times. The ability to say not him, not now, not like this. And now, like this. And it’s a much more settled matter, once she has chosen. It is easier to effect the removal of a negative, allowing a positive, than maintain an endless struggle for the production of a positive. You can take your value for granted, generally, in the feminine case. The resources are there. Their value is recognized. You just need to control their distribution. But for men the question is production, and it’s success is always in doubt.

The fact that we have about half as many male ancestors as females bears this thesis out. Far more men have been lost to the ash pit of history to get us to our current genetic profusion. And that’s a condition that’s hardly unique to male humans, but rather is shared across the whole mammalian kingdom. Sexual success for males is an ongoing battle for productive capacity, demonstrating value, whereas sexual success for women is about specific, selective moments of gatekeeping to maximize advantageous choices, conserving value.

Control ans selection are the deep questions for women. They can mostly assume the stability of their value and productivity. Men have to prove theirs in competition with other men, and against the prejudices and expectations of women. Both want to be valued. For women, being able to control what they choose, what they allow, allows them to assert and affirm their value by maintaining and guarding it. They establish status by how much they can be withholding and selective.

It’s not clear, however, that women actually realize they’re doing this. It seems perfectly clear, as well as strange and even frustrating and dispiriting to many men, though. Just recently I heard my wife wondering aloud why all the women in the romantic comedies she had been watching were so mean. Almost every single one eet the male lead and treated him like dirt, often in ways that were quite unfair. Usually his only great crime was failing to show the female lead the deference she deserved at their first meeting, or some other minor crime of manners. And in return she would treat him abominably. But he would slowly win her over and prove to her that he wasn’t dirt, pursue her doggedly despite her hostile behavior, slowly prove himself and win her over, and eventually bells would ring. He would engage in grand gestures of generosity, and she would deign to tolerate him. Why, my wife wondered, were these women allowed to behave this way? And my answer was, “Because they can.” In the world of these movies, which are simply female wish fulfillment, the women can be as picky and selectively harsh as they want, and they will still be pursued at great personal cost by wonderful and perfect men. It’s porn for women.

Male fantasies also focus around an idealized vision of women who validate the value of the men by giving them exactly the kind of affirmation they want. Complete acceptance, complete availability, complete access, complete openness, complete unquestioned value of what you want to give them. Men want to give and have their gift be accepted. That’s why the mantra that fantasy women repeat to fantasy men in pornography is “give it to me, give it to me.”

Not that I’m comparing all chick flicks to pornography. But the lazier, more indulgent kinds are more clear and obvious in their exploitation of female sexual fantasies. They play, without much artifice or realism, to the fulfillment of basic desires. If you’re curious why one form of fantasy should focus so much on nakedness and penetration and orgasms and the other so much on the complex personal and social and emotional journey to that point, I would suggest reading my essay on the difference between spouses and roommates.

There is a lot to be learned about what the other sex is looking for, what they want, what their desires are seeking, in their indulgent fantasies. It’s an unvarnished window into the basic drives that we hardly like to even admit to ourselves. Women would like to be so desireable that they wouldn’t have to worry about being aggressively selective. All the best men would still chase and value them and sacrifice for them and treat them like princesses. And men would like to be so desireable that they wouldn’t even have to worry about being rejected. They could simply present themselves and all the best women would see how desireable they were and want them and welcome their attentions and treat them like a king.

Both sexes want everything for nothing. They want to get it all, the best and most of everything, without any cost or compromise to themselves. Most of these indulgent romances my wife was watching at least show the female protagonist having a change of heart and attitude. They make some effort to make the protagonists sympathetic, so we can see why they would be desired. The relationship isn’t entirely one-sided and self-indulgent, not in the long run.

On the other hand, most pornography shows the women really being pleased and fulfilled and delighted by the men. It may seem self-serving, but the men are, at least, fantasizing about being capable of pleasing someone else. But in a way that is very easy and natural and comprehensible for them and doesn’t demand anything of them other than what they already are and have and want to give.

And we still aren’t far from the fantasy of the princess. A princess can afford to be picky. She deserves a prince. Why not, then, create literal fantasies about that? You get the power of control and selection, the fulfillment and ego affirmation that brings. You adorn yourself with the divinity you long to possess. The only problem is that it’s very hard to grant that kind of insane worth to yourself without seeming like a crazy person (and possibly becoming one). It’s better to have someone else do that for you. It’s better to have someone else make you a king or queen, a goddess or a god, than yourself.

Considering how much distance there is between the sexes and how annoying it is to have to work with the reality of the other sex (instead of our fantasies) it must take a pretty big carrot to get the sexes to leave their private, segregated spaces of comfort for the discomfort, disappointments, and dependence of the other sex. Luckily for the human race, the carrot, as well as the problem, is built into the other sex. Women are insanely beautiful and desireable. Men are insanely passionate and desirous. We’re both a perfect and a perfectly bloody match for one another. We’re pleased to see that the other sex has what we want, and supremely frustrated at what the other sex does with it. Still, we’ve got this far. I think it’s a fair bet that somehow we will keep on.

In defense of my criticism of WAP

I was wondering recently what would happen if I ever ran for political office, and what might come up when people inevitably connected me to my writings. I can imagine people criticizing me for my stance as a pro-family, pro-decency politician and pointing out my own tendency to talk about sex, and particularly quoting some juicy sections from the entry I once wrote about oral sex. How hypocritical am I, criticizing Cardi B for WAP and taking about decency in media, while going on myself about the same subject? How can I claim that WAP is bad on one hand and out of the other side of my mouth whisper paragraph after paragraph about how awesome it is to go down on your girl?

And at first glance it might seem hypocritical. But I’ll give my imaginary answer right now. I stand by both my positions and both my statements absolutely. In fact to my mind one entails the other. I don’t love wet ass pussy less than the next guy. I certainly don’t love it less than Cardi B. I adore wet pussy. I absolutely worship it. I could write essays about it and compose poetry about I, build monuments to it, and I could bury myself in it personally until the end of time. Cardi B doesn’t have a monopoly on pussy-loving (or being pussy-loved). In fact I consider myself a champion of Olympic quality who has commited my life in part to securing and maintaining a devoted outlet for it. I think oral sex is fantastic. I commend it at length.

In fact, my main complaint against Cardi B is that she doesn’t hold WAP in high enough regard. She throws it around in the public space casually, as if it were some small matter. She seems to use it as a way to manipulate and punish and reward men and flatter herself in a quite mercenary fashion. She flaunts it like a hairdo. And I simply think that it’s far more important and far more powerful than she gives it credit for. It’s not the tool of a cheap lay, it’s the power and beauty and gift of a goddess. Going down on wet oussy isn’t an amusement. It’s worship. And worship isn’t something you treat casually or give out casually.

Perhaps it is the fault of the moralists that they sometimes give the impression that they simply don’t like some things, that they’re avoiding them rather than protecting them. You protect things that matter because they’re precious, powerful, or valuable. You don’t lock up your rocks at night, you lock up your diamonds. You don’t make a budget for your use of leaves, you make it for your money. You don’t put restrictions on jam jars or cereal, you put them on guns and drugs and explosive chemicals. Why? Because they’re powerful! Because they matter. In many cases because they’re awesome and have amazing potential and you don’t want to wreck them or wreck other things with them.

And sex just isn’t as cheap and basic as Cardi seems to think. Maybe I haven’t made that clear enough. Sex isn’t bad. Sex is f#%@ing amazing. It’s addictive, it’s powerful, it’s complex, it’s essential, it’s creative, it’s multi-dimensional, and it can build your life up or tear your life to pieces. And it can’t be bought or handled or tossed about as casually as she does it without some serious consequences, devaluation being the least of them.

My objection to WAP isn’t that I don’t like wet pussy, it’s that it cheapens it. It makes it tacky. It turns it into a trinket, an amusement, a folly. It makes it into something you could buy and sell at a souvenir shop for a few bucks. And taking pleasure in using your power against others, to degrade them and elevate yourself, isn’t empowerment. It doesn’t empower you to treat yourself in such a mercenary manner, advertising yourself like a breakfast cereal or a midnight jewelry sale. It isn’t empowering to treat those you’re enslaving as mere consumers or marks.

Because wet ass pussy is so sacred, because it’s so important and powerful and amazing, that is what makes us keep it behind walls of protection and licensure, making sure that those who receive it will understand its value and its price and show it the proper respect. That also means that it’s hard to make a compelling (casual) public case for it. It’s not easy to make an elevated statement that’s catchy, that you can hum. And when pussy isn’t just a trinket and its meaning can’t be so easily captured, it’s so deep and exists across so many dimensions of being, that means that the art you could use to capture your vision of it, your argument for its value, gets a little complex and hard to embody. The idea of the glory of fulfilled, bountiful, adored womanhood is so vast and complex and connects to so many other realities that it gets a bit intimidating. It requires an opera or a statue or a cathedral, or a whole life’s expression. A striptease and a fresh beat don’t quite cut it.

So far as that goes, though, I apologize. This is, perhaps, the fault of people who have failed to articulate the positive vision of what they actually stand for and what their concerns and regulations are actually protecting and defending that have failed. The whole point of sexual morality is to preserve and maintain and convey the value of wet ass pussy (among other things). If some people got the wrong idea, including some confused people on the side of moral regulation, I am sorry. It’s actually all about how awesome pussy is and ensuring that the wet pussy flows forever for everyone to the maximum amount possible, in the very best and most sustainable and productive way.

The real scandal is that we’ve been caught in a deceit. It was never all about drying up the pussies or stopping those that love them. We were never on that mission. It was always all about the pussy, and about the glorious person that possesses it, and about valuing them, and about building up and glorifying the person who loves and worships them (including that wet ass pussy). We passed ourselves off as ascetics, but we’re really the biggest pussy lovers of all. And you know what the real secret is? That’s what it was always all about.

Control vs license

Since authoritarianism tracks with disgust sensitivity, anything that is viewed as a disease will essentially predict authoritarianism. The degree to which something is viewed as a contagion (not only the degree to which it literally is a contagion) will determine the balance between authoritarianism and libertarianism. It all comes down to a matrix of control vs license.

Which you pick is partly down to who you are (sensitivity to disgust positively or negatively) and how the matter is framed (and how it affects you and others). There will always be some people who are very orderly, conscientious and therefore authoritarian (particularly with themselves; that’s their life strategy), and there will always be some who are disorderly, exploratory, unconcerned by disorder, danger, mess, or contagion, who simply want to explore what seems good or useful to them (that’s their life strategy).

There are natural authoritarians and natural libertarians at all times, in all societies, and it’s generally going to be mostly the same people, regardless of how those societies and values differ. If you picked them up and transplanted them as children toa a different culture, they would mostly fill the same roles regardless of the conditional differences. Social structures and the ideologies behind them might vary, actual states might be more or less progressive or conservative, or more of less authoritarian or liberal, they might differ in what their driving values that they conserve are, in what the frontiers of freedom and explorations, and in what seems worth protecting either as a stable strategy or as an area of freedom, but the same people will mostly fall into the same positions simply because of temperament.

You find the same distributions of personality everywhere, to sum up. That’s a stable factor, even as the specific elements of societies change. So a society could change, and a person who is naturally authoritarian might go from being a right wing authoritarian at one point in their life to being a left wing authoritarian at another point. Their moral assumptions might change, the underlying personality profile that predicts authoritarianism or libertarianism does not so easily. This explains some shifts in culture that have occurred recently that may otherwise seem perplexing to outside observers. In past times, those shifts in underlying culture and assumptions happened at a much slower pace, so it wasn’t so easy to observe what had actually changed and what was really stable over time. Now it’s much easier.

What this particularly means, is that you can actually drive that shift and push people from one side to another, if you know what levers to use and how to market your idea. If you want to increase a libertarian attitude toward something, anything, you just need to find a way to portray it as something other than a contagion, as something that needn’t provoke disgust, as something benign and maybe even interesting. But banality and harmlessness is sufficient. You need repeated exposure without emotional or consequential responses, so it becomes mundane. It’s a kind of exposure therapy.

If you want to increase authoritarian resistance to something, anything, you jusy need to take it from being something ordinary and part of the natural and aasumed fabric of life to something invasive and contagious. It needs to become a disease, a mark of contamination, an object of danger and disgust that must be eliminated by the orderly for a safe environment. You need shocking examples, emotional stories of pain and danger, and the suggestion that it is spreading. The sorts of programming you used to see on daytime TV aimed at stay-at-home moms (a bulwark of orderly, pro-social conscientiousness) fairly regularly back in the old days.

And the trickiest thing about both these tactics, making something seem benign and reducing feelings of disgust, or making something seem abberant and infectious and disgusting, is that both will work regardless of the actual, real threat level of the subject. There is no shortage of dangers people have failed to recognize. And there is no shortage of dangers people have imagined. Because social dangers in particular and complex and play out across extended periods of time and over large distances and across multiple dimensions of complexity, it can be very hard to accurately assess causation and threat accurately.

So, to be honest, it’s pretty easy to raise or lower pathogenic disgust sensitivity, and therefore authoritarian or libertarian attitudes. And those conscientious, orderly, pro-social people I mentioned before; they haven’t gone anywhere. They may not be sitting at home watching daytime TV, but they might be sitting at home looking at their phones. Those people may have moved to different positions in society, but they haven’t really gone anywhere. They’re still there, still guarding the nest. Not that they’re all women in the slightest, that’s just one of the major demographics, a significant and perhaps the largest and most powerful demographic within that group (as orderliness weights more heavily on women, but has a substantial representation among men as well). And women being more agreeable are more willing to share their concerns with one another.

From a sociological perspective, these are the people who guard the nest and keep it clean and safe and in order. They keep out the pathogens, they rule the nest like a despot (in fact one old Biblical term for the position of a wife was the despot of the home), and they’re sensitive to contaminants and want things kept clean. Some decent portion of them are also particularly sensitive to the distress of others as a mechanism for altering them to potential pathogens and dangers to the integrity of the nest. They’re tilted toward a sensitivity to distress and negative emotion. That’s what their orderliness is there to protect them from. So they don’t necessarily feel more negative emotion. They’re more sensitive to it, so they do the work to arrange the world so they don’t have to feel it. They bring order to the protected and sanitary space.

The people at the other extreme from conscientiousness and agreeableness, the open, exploratory people and disagreeable people, play a different role in protecting the nest. They’re less concerned about what’s going on inside it, less orderly. They’re more interested in going out and bringing back what might be valuable and helpful, or in subduing the dangers and dangerous conditions outside the sphere of order, and they’re less bothered by the chaos and risks and contaigions they are likely to face. But they might bring back risky elements, so they’re often asked to wipe their feet as they enter the protected space. But their tendency to not be bothered by disorder and contagion, and their willingness to confront it and either subdue it or bring some bit of it back to use is a useful skill. They too are protecting the nest, in their own way, and extending its interests, even if they also seem to be a risk to it.

At the same time, the desire to maintain an ordered and fenced-in and safe environment at home can be a risk for those inside, if they are not sufficiently exploiting the resources outside it that might be valuable for them, and if the risks outside are not sufficiently dealt with or understood and become overwhelming, of if those inside are not sufficiently exposed to them to develop the necessary capacity to deal with them (the necessary immunological strength).

Life is a dance that politics could learn from. Liberalism and authoritarianism are both useful. License and control are both useful. And it takes a robust and continuous dialogue to figure out which is appropriate in which situation and to evaluate how things are going and mitigate the fallout of the strategies we employ. If we can’t learn to see how each might help and how each might go very badly wrong, then we haven’t learned the basic lessons of living with other people yet.

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On making other happy and meaning

I find that trying to make yourself happy is often far more difficult and less effective than trying to make someone else happy. Somehow, when you focus on yourself, it just doesn’t have the same effect. It’s very hard to do things for yourself and have them be very meaningful. For one thing, there is no surprise involved, no sudden and unexpected delight. There’s no social aspect, no relational dimension. And it involves no discipline, often. You’re doing what you want for you, which requires very little of you. And all of these things make it harder to get much out of it.

The main advantage of trying to make yourself happy is that you know what you like. But it’s not the same. Have you ever tried tickling yourself? What about scratching your own head or rubbing your own shoulders? It relieves the immediate need, perhaps, the deficit, but adds little special credit. Now try having someone else do those things for you. Big difference. One might as well ask, what is the difference between masturbation and having someone else giving you the same pleasure. You’ll forget one very quickly, but the other might actually have some durable meaning for you and your life. Maybe we aren’t made to be that happy alone.

I find that the easiest way to make other people happy, since I’m not really minded toward others, is to apply my wits to the problem. Figure out, like a puzzle, what that person likes to have happen, what in their environment would please them and make their day better. It’s a challenge to be overcome. That gives me some interest. Next, just do the task without thinking about whether I actually want to do it. Because I don’t. I don’t really care. But it’s a job, and endeavor. I can get interested in doing a task and doing it well, I can get distracted by it enough to not think about why I’m doing it or whether I really care about it or am properly motivated. Then, when it’s done, just move on. Let it just be something I did, that I accomplished. Good job. If it at least gets noticed, that’s usually enough recognition, and I may point it out if it would otherwise be invisible, but usually that’s not needed. So, there. Task-oriented kindness for people who aren’t that kind or caring or selfless.

Doing it at least helps you hit a certain deliberate minimum. And then at least you won’t be able to reproach yourself when you look back and say, did I ever do anything for this person, actually for them, did I ever demonstrate to them that I cared and was trying to make them happy? You can’t actually know or control whether it will make them happy, and you can’t know if you will ever see the benefits yourself. But it’s my experience that such things tend to work like small acts of gardening. We can’t make the trees grow or bear fruit. But we can water them, amend the soil, remove the weeds. And that’s all it is our job to do, all that’s in our power. But we may look over one day and see shade and fruit and know that we had a hand in helping make it possible.

The strange thing is, that when you’re working on making someone else happy, the work itself is meaningful. Somehow doing it, even if I’m not great at it or invested in it, makes me more content, even more content that trying to make myself happy. And so the question, “Am I happy?” just seems to matter less. That’s a personal existential question, and I’m not sure we even always know what we mean by it. Life and work are more meaningful when you’re trying to make others happy. And that is often enough, that seems to be a more durable substitute for happiness, which is such a fleeting emotional state. Happiness is a moment. Meaning is a structure you can live inside.

“How can you actually be happy?” is a much harder question than most people credit it. It takes up much of the space in the book of Ecclesiastes. There you have someone who went all in on trying to make himself happy by every means possible. And he has the means. But he never finds an answer to his question, exactly. But he does conclude this. “Moreover, when God gives someone wealth and possessions, and the ability to enjoy them, to accept their lot and be happy in their toil—this is a gift of God. They seldom reflect on the days of their life, because God keeps them occupied with gladness of heart.”

I think that’s what I’ve found. The question,” Am I happy?” is always going to be a problem. Because it’s always just a moment. And being happy is hard to do when you’re looking at it in the moment. And there is always enough grief in the world to pull that moment down. And simply asking the question can be enough to stall the process. Being happy is something that moves through time, a way of being. The moment you stop to question and evaluate, in that moment you’re no longer participating in the process that produces happiness. And it’s always easier to be discontent than content. Because, after all, you can’t really be that much more happy, but you could be a lot more dead or in danger. So it makes sense to build the human psyche with a negative prejudice toward recognizing problems over being blissfully ignorant.

Happiness, the teacher in Ecclesiastes seems to argue, is found in meaning. In doing and accepting your work and enjoying its results, so that your life is filled up with meaning, and you seldom need to linger to ask such questions. You’re living inside the process, not scrutinizing the individual existential moments. Maybe that isn’t exactly happiness. Maybe it’s just the cure for the question of happiness.