I have heard the following from a bunch of people, one of whom was me six months ago: “I keep on reading all these posts by really smart people who identify as Reactionaries, and I don’t have any idea what’s going on. They seem to be saying things that are either morally repugnant or utterly ridiculous. And when I ask them to explain, they say it’s complicated and there’s no one summary of their ideas. Why don’t they just write one?”

Part of me secretly thinks part of the answer is that a lot of these beliefs are not argument but poetry. Try to give a quick summary of Shelley’s Adonais: “Well there’s this guy, and he’s dead, and now this other guy is really sad.” One worries something has been lost. And just as well try to give a quick summary of the sweeping elegaic paeans to a bygone age of high culture and noble virtues that is Reaction.

But there is some content, and some of it is disconcerting. I started reading a little about Reaction after incessantly being sent links to various Mencius Moldbug posts, and then started hanging out in an IRC channel with a few Reactionaries (including the infamous Konkvistador) whom I could question about it. Obviously this makes me the world expert who is completely qualified to embark on the hitherto unattempted project of explaining it to everyone else.

Okay, maybe not. But the fact is, I’ve been itching to prsent an argument against Reactionary thought for a long time, but have been faced with the dual problem of not really having a solid target and worrying that everyone not a Reactionary would think I was wasting my time even talking to them. Trying to sum up their ideas seems like a good way to first of all get a reference point for what their ideas are, and second of all to make it clearer why I think they deserve a rebuttal.

We’ll start with the meta-level question of how confident we should be that our society is better than its predecessors in important ways. Then we’ll look on the object level about how we compare to past societies along dimensions we might care about. We’ll make a lengthy digression into social justice issues, showing how some traditional societies were actually more enlightened than our own in this area. Having judged past societies positively, we’ll then look at what aspects of their cultures, governments, and religions made them so successful, and whether we could adopt those to modern life.

Much of this will be highly politically incorrect and offensive, because that’s what Reactionaries do. I have tried to be charitable towards these ideas, which means this post will be pushing politically incorrect and offensive positions. If you do not want to read it, especially the middle parts which are about race, I would totally understand that. But if you do read it and accuse me of holding these ideas myself and get really angry, then you fail at reading comprehension forever.

I originally planned to follow this up tomorrow with the post containing my arguments against these positions, but this argument took longer than I thought to write and I expect the counterargument will as well. Expect a post critiquing reactionary ideas sometime in the next…week? month?

In any case, this is not that post. This is the post where I argue that modern society is rotten to the core, and that the only reasonable solution is to dig up King James II, clone him, and give the clone absolute control over everything.

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No One Expects The Spanish Inquisition, Especially Not In 21st Century America

People in ancient societies thought their societies were obviously great. The imperial Chinese thought nothing could beat imperial China, the medieval Spaniards thought medieval Spain was a singularly impressive example of perfection, and Communist Soviets were pretty big on Soviet Communism. Meanwhile, we think 21st-century Western civilization, with its democracy, secularism, and ethnic tolerance is pretty neat. Since the first three examples now seem laughably wrong, we should be suspicious of the hypothesis that we finally live in the one era whose claim to have gotten political philosophy right is totally justified.

But it seems like we have an advantage they don’t. Speak out against the Chinese Empire and you lose your head. Speak out against the King of Spain and you face the Inquisition. Speak out against Comrade Stalin and you get sent to Siberia. The great thing about western liberal democracy is that it has a free marketplace of ideas. Everybody criticizes some aspect of our society. Noam Chomsky made a career of criticizing our society and became rich and famous and got a cushy professorship. So our advantage is that we admit our society’s imperfections, reward those who point them out, and so keep inching closer and closer to this ideal of perfect government.

Okay, back up. Suppose you went back to Stalinist Russia and you said “You know, people just don’t respect Comrade Stalin enough. There isn’t enough Stalinism in this country! I say we need two Stalins! No, fifty Stalins!”

Congratulations. You have found a way to criticize the government in Stalinist Russia and totally get away with it. Who knows, you might even get that cushy professorship.

If you “criticize” society by telling it to keep doing exactly what it’s doing only much much more so, society recognizes you as an ally and rewards you for being a “bold iconoclast” or “having brave and revolutionary new ideas” or whatever. It’s only when you tell them something they actually don’t want to hear that you get in trouble.

Western society has been moving gradually further to the left for the past several hundred years at least. It went from divine right of kings to constutitional monarchy to libertarian democracy to federal democracy to New Deal democracy through the civil rights movement to social democracy to ???. If you catch up to society as it’s pushing leftward and say “Hey guys, I think we should go leftward even faster! Two times faster! No, fifty times faster!”, society will call you a bold revolutionary iconoclast and give you a professorship.

If you start suggesting maybe it should switch directions and move the direction opposite the one the engine is pointed, then you might have a bad time.

Try it. Mention that you think we should undo something that’s been done over the past century or two. Maybe reverse women’s right to vote. Go back to sterilizing the disabled and feeble-minded. If you really need convincing, suggest re-implementing segregation, or how about slavery? See how far freedom of speech gets you.

In America, it will get you fired from your job and ostracized by nearly everyone. Depending on how loudly you do it, people may picket your house, or throw things at you, or commit violence against you which is then excused by the judiciary because obviously they were provoked. Despite the iconic image of the dissident sent to Siberia, this is how the Soviets dealt with most of their iconoclasts too.

If you absolutely insist on imprisonment, you can always go to Europe, where there are more than enough “hate speech” laws on the book to satisfy your wishes. But a system of repression that doesn’t involve obvious state violence is little different in effect than one that does. It’s simply more efficient and harder to overthrow.

Reaction isn’t a conspiracy theory; it’s not suggesting there’s a secret campaign for organized repression. To steal an example from the other side of the aisle, it’s positing something more like patriarchy. Patriarchy doesn’t have an actual Patriarch coordinating men in their efforts to keep down women. It’s just that when lots of people share some really strong cultural norms, they manage to self-organize into a kind of immune system for rejecting new ideas. And Western society just happens to have a really strong progressivist immune system ready to gobble you up if you say anything insufficiently progressive.

And so the main difference between modern liberal democracy and older repressive societies is that older societies repressed things you liked, but modern liberal democracies only repress things you don’t like. Having only things you don’t like repressed looks from the inside a lot like there being no repression at all.

The good Catholic in medieval Spain doesn’t feel repressed, even when the Inquisition drags away her neighbor. She feels like decent people have total freedom to worship whichever saint they want, total freedom to go to whatever cathedral they choose, total freedom to debate who the next bishop should be – oh, and thank goodness someone’s around to deal with those crazy people who are trying to damn the rest of us to Hell. We medieval Spaniards are way too smart to fall for the balance fallacy!

Wait, You Mean The Invisible Multi-Tentacled Monster That Has Taken Over All Our Information Sources Might Be Trying To Mislead Us?

Since you are a citizen of a repressive society, you should be extremely skeptical of all the information you get from schools, the media, and popular books on any topic related to the areas where active repression is occurring. That means at least politics, history, economics, race, and gender. You should be especially skeptical of any book that’s praised as “a breath of fresh air” or “a good counter to the prevailing bias”, as books that garner praise in the media are probably of the “We need fifty Stalins!” variety.

This is not nearly as paranoid as it sounds. Since race is the most taboo subject in our culture, it will also be the simplest example. Almost all of our hard data on race comes from sociology programs in universities – ie the most liberal departments in the most liberal institutions in the country. Most of these sociology departments have an explicit mission statement of existing to fight racism. Many sociologists studying race will tell you quite openly that they went into the field – which is not especially high-paying or prestigious – in order to help crusade against the evil of racism.

Imagine a Pfizer laboratory whose mission statement was to prove Pfizer drugs had no side effects, and whose staff all went into pharmacology specifically to help crusade against the evil of believing Pfizer’s drugs have side effects. Imagine that this laboratory hands you their study showing that the latest Pfizer drug has zero side effects, c’mon, trust us! Is there any way you’re taking that drug?

We know that a lot of medical research, especially medical research by drug companies, turns up the wrong answer simply through the file-drawer effect. That is, studies that turn up an exciting result everyone wants to hear get published, and studies that turn up a disappointing result don’t – either because the scientist never submits it to the journals, or because the journal doesn’t want to publish it. If this happens all the time in medical research despite growing safeguards to prevent it, how often do you think it happens in sociological research?

Do you think the average sociologist selects the study design most likely to turn up evidence of racist beliefs being correct, or the study design most likely to turn up the opposite? If despite her best efforts a study does turn up evidence of racist beliefs being correct, do you think she’s going to submit it to a major journal with her name on it for everyone to see? And if by some bizarre chance she does submit it, do you think the International Journal Of We Hate Racism So We Publish Studies Proving How Dumb Racists Are is going to cheerfully include it in their next edition?

And so when people triumphantly say “Modern science has completely disproven racism, there’s not a shred of evidence in support of it”, we should consider that exactly the same level of proof as the guy from 1900 who said “Modern science has completely proven racism, there’s not a shred of evidence against it”. The field is still just made of people pushing their own dogmatic opinions and calling them science; only the dogma has changed.

And although Reactionaries love to talk about race, in the end race is nothing more than a particularly strong and obvious taboo. There are taboos in history, too, and in economics, and in political science, and although they’re less obvious and interesting they still mean you need this same skepticism when parsing results from these fields. “But every legitimate scientist disagrees with this particular Reactionary belief!” should be said with the same intonation as “But every legitimate archbishop disagrees with this particular heresy.”

This is not intended as a proof that racism is correct, or even as the slightest shred of evidence for that hypothesis (although a lot of Reactionaries are, in fact, racist as heck). No doubt the Spanish Inquisition found a couple of real Satanists, and probably some genuine murderers and rapists got sent to Siberia. Sometimes, once in a blue moon, a government will even censor an idea that happens to be false. But it’s still useful to know when something is being censored, so you don’t actually think the absence of evidence for one side of the story is evidence of anything other than people on that side being smart enough to keep their mouths shut.

The Past Is A First World Country

Even so, isn’t the evidence that modern society beats past societies kiiiind of overwhelming? We’re richer, safer, healthier, better educated, freer, happier, more equal, more peaceful, and more humane. Reactionary responses to these claims might get grouped into three categories.

The first category is “Yes, obviously”. Most countries do seem to have gotten about 100x wealthier since the year 1700. Disease rates have plummeted, and life expectancy has gone way up – albeit mostly due to changes in infant mortality. But this stands entirely explained by technology. So we’re a hundred times wealthier than in 1700. In what? Gold and diamonds? Maybe that has something to do with the fact that today we’re digging our gold mines with one of these:

This technology dividend appears even in unexpected places. The world is more peaceful today, but how much of that is the existence of global trade networks that make war unprofitable, video reporting of every casualty that makes war unpopular, and nuclear and other weapons that make war unwinnable?

The second category is “oh really?”. Let’s take safety. This is one of Mencius Moldbug’s pet issues, and he likes to quote the following from an 1876 century text on criminology:

Meanwhile, it may with little fear of contradiction be asserted that there never was, in any nation of which we have a history, a time in which life and property were so secure as they are at present in England. The sense of security is almost everywhere diffused, in town and country alike, and it is in marked contrast to the sense of insecurity which prevailed even at the beginning of the present century. There are, of course, in most great cities, some quarters of evil repute in which assault and robbery are now and again committed. There is perhaps to be found a lingering and flickering tradition of the old sanctuaries and similar resorts. But any man of average stature and strength may wander about on foot and alone, at any hour of the day or the night, through the greatest of all cities and its suburbs, along the high roads, and through unfrequented country lanes, and never have so much as the thought of danger thrust upon him, unless he goes out of his way to court it.

Moldbug then usually contrasts this with whatever recent news article has struck his fancy about entire inner-city neighborhoods where the police are terrified to go, teenagers being mowed down in crossfire among gangs, random daylight murders, and the all the other joys of life in a 21st century British ghetto.

Of course, the plural of anecdote is not data, but the British crime statistics seem to bear him out:

(recorded offenses per 100,000 people, from source)

If this is true, it is true despite technology. If crime rates have in fact multiplied by a factor of…well, it looks like at least 100x…this is true even though the country as a whole has gotten vastly richer, even though there are now CCTVs, DNA testing, police databases, heck, even fingerprinting hadn’t been figured out yet in 1876.

This suggests that there was something inherent about Victorian society, politics, or government that made their Britain a safer place to live than modern progressive Britain.

Education is another example of something we’re pretty sure we do better in. Now take a look at the 1899 entrance exam for Harvard. Remember, no calculators – they haven’t been invented yet.

I got an SAT score well above that of the average Harvard student today (I still didn’t get into Harvard, because I was a slacker in high school). But I couldn’t even begin to take much of that test.

Okay, fine. Argue “Well, of course we don’t value Latin and Greek and arithmetic and geometry and geography today, we value different things.” So fine. Tell me what the heck you think our high school students are learning that’s just as difficult and impressive as the stuff on that test that you don’t expect the 19th century Harvard students who aced that exam knew two hundred times better (and don’t say “the history of post-World War II Europe”).

Do you honestly think the student body for whom that exam was a fair ability test would be befuddled by the reading comprehension questions that pass for entrance exams today? Or would it be more like “Excuse me, teacher, I’m afraid there’s been a mistake. My exam paper is in English.”

As a fun exercise, read through Wikipedia’s list of multilingual presidents of the United States. We start with entries like this one:

Thomas Jefferson read a number of different languages. In a letter to Philadelphia publisher Joseph Delaplaine on April 12, 1817, Jefferson claimed to read and write six languages: Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and English. After his death, a number of other books, dictionaries, and grammar manuals in various languages were found in Jefferson’s library, suggesting that he studied additional languages beyond those he spoke and wrote well. Among these were books in Arabic, Gaelic, and Welsh.

and this one:

John Quincy Adams went to school in both France and the Netherlands, and spoke fluent French and conversational Dutch. Adams strove to improve his abilities in Dutch throughout his life, and at times translated a page of Dutch a day to help improve his mastery of the language. Official documents that he translated were sent to the Secretary of State of the United States, so that Adams’ studies would serve a useful purpose as well. When his father appointed him United States Ambassador to Prussia, Adams dedicated himself to becoming proficient in German in order to give him the tools to strengthen relations between the two countries. He improved his skills by translating articles from German to English, and his studies made his diplomatic efforts more successful. In addition to the two languages he spoke fluently, he also studied Italian, though he admitted to making little progress in it since he had no one with whom to practice speaking and hearing the language. Adams also read Latin very well, translated a page a day of Latin text, and studied classical Greek in his spare time.

eventually proceeding to entries more like this one:

George W. Bush speaks some amount of Spanish, and has delivered speeches in the language. His speeches in Spanish have been imperfect, with English dispersed throughout. Some pundits, like Molly Ivins, have pointedly questioned the extent to which he could speak the language, noting that he kept to similar phrasing in numerous appearances.

and this one:

Barack Obama himself claims to speak no foreign languages. However, according to the President of Indonesia Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, during a telephone conversation Obama was able to deliver a basic four-word question in “fluent Indonesian”, as well as mention the names for a few Indonesian food items. He also knows some Spanish, but admits to only knowing “15 words” and having a poor knowledge of the language.

A real Reactionary would no doubt point out that even old-timey US Presidents aren’t old-timey enough, and that we really should be looking at the British aristocracy, but this is left as an exercise for the reader.

It may be argued that yes, maybe their aristocracy was more educated than our upper-class, but we compensate for the imbalance by having education spread much more widely among the lower-classes. I endorse this position, as do, I’m sure, the hundreds of inner-city minority youth who are no doubt reading this blog post because of the massive interest in abstract political philosophy their schooling has successfully inspired in them.

Once again, today we have Wikipedia, the Internet, and as many cheap books as Amazon can supply us. Back in the old days they had to make do with whatever they could get from their local library. Even more troubling, today we start with a huge advantage – the Flynn Effect has made our average IQ 10 to 20 points higher than in 1900. Yet once again, even with our huge technological and biological head start, we are still doing worse than the Old Days, which suggest that here, too, the Old Days may have had some kind of social/political advantage.

So several of our claims of present superiority – wealth, health, peace, et cetera – have been found to be artifacts of higher technology levels. Several other claims – safety and education – have been found to be just plain wrong. That just leaves a few political advantages – namely, that we are freer, less racist, less sexist, less jingoistic and more humane. And the introduction has already started poking holes in the whole “freedom” thing.

That leaves our progress in tolerance, equality, and humaneness. Are these victories as impressive as we think?

Every Time I Hear The Word “Revolver”, I Reach For My Culture

[TRIGGER WARNING: This is the part with the racism]

One of the most solid results from social science has been large and persistent differences in outcomes across groups. Of note, these differences are highly correlated by goodness: some groups have what we would consider “good outcomes” in many different areas, and others have what we would consider “bad outcomes” in many different areas. Crime rate, drug use, teenage pregnancy, IQ, education level, median income, health, mental health, and whatever else you want to measure.

The best presentation of this result is The Spirit Level, even though the book thinks it’s proving something completely different. But pretty much any study even vaguely in this field will show the same effect. This also seems to be the intuition behind our division of countries into “First World” and “Third World”, and behind our division of races into “privileged” and “oppressed” (rather than “well, some races have good outcomes in some areas, but others have good outcomes in other areas, so it basically all balances out”) I don’t think this part should be very controversial. Let’s call this mysterious quality “luck”, in order to remain as agnostic as possible about the cause.

Three very broad categories of hypothesis have been proposed to explain luck differences among groups: the external, the cultural, and the biological.

The externalists claim that groups differ only because of the situations they find themselves in. Sometimes these situations are natural. Jared Diamond makes a cogent case for the naturalist externalist hypothesis in Guns, Germs, and Steel. The Chinese found themselves on fertile agricultural land with lots of animals and plants to domesticate and lots of trade routes to learn new ideas from. The New Guinea natives found themselves in a dense jungle without many good plants or animals and totally cut off from foreign contact. Therefore, the Chinese developed a powerful civilization and the New Guineans became a footnote to history.

But in modern times, externalists tend to focus more on external human conditions like colonialism and oppression. White people are lucky not because of any inherent virtue, but because they had a head start and numerical advantage and used this to give themselves privileges which they deny to other social groups. Black people are unlucky not because of any inherent flaw, but because they happened to be stuck around white people who are doing everything they can to oppress them and keep them down. This is true both within societies, where unlucky races are disprivileged by racism, and across societies, where unlucky countries suffer the ravages of colonialism.

The culturalists claim that luck is based on the set of implicit traditions and beliefs held by different groups. The Chinese excelled not only because of their fertile landscape, but because their civilization valued scholarship, wealth accumulation, and nonviolence. The New Guineans must have had less useful values, maybe ones that demanded strict conformity with ancient tradition, or promoted violence, or discouraged cooperation.

Like the externalists, they trace this forward to the present, saying that the values that served the Chinese so well in building Chinese civilization are the same ones that keep China strong today and the ones that make Chinese immigrants successful in countries like Malaysia and the USA. On the other hand, New Guinea continues to be impoverished and although I’ve never heard of any New Guinean immigrants I would not expect them to do very well.

The biologicalists, for whom I cannot think of a less awkward term, are probably the most notorious and require the least explanation. They are most famous for attributing between-group luck differences to genetic factors, but there are certainly more subtle theories. One of the most interesting is parasite load, the idea that areas with greater parasites make people’s bodies spend more energy fighting them off, leading to less energy for full neurological development. It’s hard to extend this to deal with group differences in a single area (for example between-race differences in the USA) but some people have certainly made valiant attempts. Nevertheless, it’s probably fair enough to just think of the biologicalists as “more or less racists”.

So who is right?

A decent amount of political wrangling over the years seems to involve a conflict between the conservatives – who are some vague mix of the culturalist and biologicalist position – and the liberals, who have embraced the externalist position with gusto.

But the externalist position is deeply flawed. This blog has already cited this graph to make a different point, but now that we have our Reactionary Hat on, let’s try it again:

And, in fact, not all races have a racial income gap, and not all those who do have it in the direction an externalist theory would predict. Jews and Asians faced astounding levels of discrimination when they first came to the United States, but both groups recovered quickly and both now do significantly better than average white Americans. Although the idea of a “Jewish conspiracy” is rightly mocked as anti-Semitic and stupid, it is only bringing the externalist hypothesis – that differences in the success of different races must always be due to oppression – to their natural conclusion.

In fact, Jews and Chinese are interesting in that both groups are widely scattered, both groups often find themselves in very hostile countries, and yet both groups are usually more successful than the native population wherever they go (income and education statistics available upon request). Whether it is Chinese in Malaysia or Jews in France, they seem to do unusually well for themselves despite the constant discrimination. If this is an experiment to distinguish between culturalist and externalist positions, it is a very well replicated one.

This difference in the success of immigrant groups is often closely correlated with the success of the countries they come from. Japan is very rich and advanced, Europe quite rich and advanced, Latin America not so rich or advanced, and Africa least rich and advanced of all. And in fact we find that Japanese-Americans do better than European-Americans do better than Latin-Americans do better than African-Americans. It is pretty amazing that white people manage to modulate their oppression in quite this precise a way, especially when it includes oppressing themselves.

And much of the difference between groups is in areas one would expect to be resistant to oppression. Unlucky groups tend to have higher teenage pregnancy rates, more drug use, and greater intra-group violence, even when comparing similar economic strata. That is, if we focus on Chinese-Americans who earn $60,000/year and African-Americans who earn $60,000/year, the Chinese will have markedly better outcomes (I’ve seen this study done in education, but I expect it would transfer). Sampling from the same economic stratum screens off effects from impoverished starting conditions or living in bad neighborhoods, and it’s hard (though of course not impossible) to figure out other ways an oppressive majority could create differential school attendance in these groups.

So luck differences are sometimes in favor of oppressed minorities, do not decrease when a minority becomes less oppressed, correlate closely across societies with widely varying amounts of oppression, and operate in areas where oppression doesn’t provide a plausible mechanism. The externalist hypothesis as a collection of natural factors a la Jared Diamond may have merit, but as an oppression-based explanation for modern-day group differences, it fails miserably.

I don’t want to dwell on the biological hypothesis too much, because it sort of creeps me out even in a “let me clearly explain a hypothesis I disagree with” way. I will mention that it leaves a lot unexplained, in that many of the “groups” that have such glaring luck differences are not biological groups at all, but rather religious groups such as the Mormons and the Sikhs, both of whom have strikingly different outcomes than the populations they originated from. Even many groups that are biologically different just aren’t different enough – the English and Irish have strikingly different luck, but attributing that to differences between which exact tiny little branch of the Indo-European tree they came from seems like a terrible explanation (although Konkvistador disagrees with me on this one).

Nevertheless, the people who dismiss the biological hypothesis as obviously stupid and totally discredited (by which I mean everyone) are doing it a disservice. For a sympathetic and extraordinarily impressive defense of the biological hypothesis I recommend this unpublished (and unpublishable) review article. I will add that I am extremely interested in comprehensive takedowns of that article (preferably a full fisking) and that if you have any counterevidence to it at all you should post it in the comments and I will be eternally grateful.

But for now I’m just going to say let’s assume by fiat that the biologicalist hypothesis is false, because even with my Reactionary Hat on I find the culturalist hypothesis much more interesting.

The culturalist hypothesis avoids the pitfalls of both the externalist and biological explanations. Unlike the externalists, it can explain why some minority groups are so successful and why group success correlates across societies and immigrant populations. And unlike the biologicalists, it can explain the striking differences between biologically similar groups like the Mormons and the non-Mormon Americans, or the Sikhs and the non-Sikh Indians.

It can also explain some other lingering mysteries, like why a country that’s put so much work into keeping black people down would then turn around and elect a black president. Obama was born to an African father and a white mother, raised in Indonesia, and then grew up in Hawaii. At no point did he have much contact with African-American culture, and so a culturalist wouldn’t expect his life outcomes to be correlated with those of other African-Americans.

Best of all, despite what the average progressive would tell you the culturalist position isn’t really that racist. It’s a bit like the externalist position in attributing groups’ luck to initial conditions, except instead of those initial conditions being how fertile their land is or who’s oppressing them, it’s what memeplexes they happened to end out with. Change the memeplexes and you can make a New Guinean population achieve Chinese-level outcomes – or vice versa.

The Other Chinese Room Experiment

Assuming we tentatively accept the culturalist hypothesis, what policies does it suggest?

Well, the plan mentioned in the last paragraph of the last section – throw Chinese memes at the people of New Guinea until they achieve Chinese-style outcomes – higher income, less teenage pregnancy, lower crime rates. It doesn’t seem like a bad idea. You could try exposing them to Chinese people and the Chinese way of life until some of it stuck. This seems like a good strategy for China, a country whose many problems definitely do not include “a shortage of Chinese people”.

On the other hand, in somewhere more like America, one could be forgiven for immediately rounding this off to some kind of dictatorial brainwashing policy of stealing New Guinean infants away from their homes and locking them in some horrible orphanage run by Chinese people who beat them every time they try to identify with their family or native culture until eventually they absorb Chinese culture through osmosis. This sounds bad.

Luckily, although we don’t have quite as many Chinese people as China, we still have a majority culture whose outcomes are almost as good as China’s and which, as has been mentioned before, permeates every facet of life and every information source like a giant metastasizing thousand-tentacled monster. So in theory, all we need to do is wait for the unstoppable monster to get them.

This strategy, with the octopoid abomination metaphor replaced with a melting pot metaphor for better branding, has been America’s strategy for most of the past few centuries – assimilation. It worked for the Irish, who were once viewed with as much racism as any Hispanic or Arab is today. It worked for the Italians, who were once thought of as creepy Papist semi-retarded mafia goons until everyone decided no, they were indistinguishable from everyone else. It worked for the fourth and fifth generation Asians, at least here in suburban California, where they’re considered about as “exotic” as the average Irishman. It certainly worked for the Jews, where there are some people of Jewish descent who aren’t even aware of it until they trace their family history back. And it should be able to work for everyone else. Why isn’t it?

The Reactionary’s answer to this is the same as the Reactionary’s answer to almost everything: because of those darned progressives!

Sometime in the latter half of this century, it became a point of political pride to help minorities resist “cultural imperialism” and the Eurocentric norms that they should feel any pressure to assimilate. Moved by this ideology, the government did everything it could to help minorities avoid assimilation and to shame and thwart anyone trying to get them to assimilate.

There’s a story – I’ve lost the original, but it might have been in Moldbug – about a state noticing that black children were getting lower test scores. It decided, as progressivists do, that the problem was that many of the classes were taught by white teachers, and that probably this meant the black children couldn’t relate to them and were feeling oppressed. So they sent the white teachers off to whiter areas and hiring only black teachers for the black schools, and – sure enough – test scores plummeted further.

California had a sort of similar problem when I was growing up. Most schools were required to teach our large Hispanic immigrant population using bilingual education – that is, teaching them in their native Spanish until they were ready to learn English. The “ready to learn English” tended not to happen, and some people proposed that bilingual education be scrapped. There was a huge ruckus where the people in favor of this change were accused of being vile racists who hated Mexicans and wanted to destroy Mexican culture. Thanks to California’s colorful proposition system, it passed anyway. And sure enough, as soon as the Hispanics started getting integrated with everyone else and taught in English, test scores went way up.

But this is a rare victory, and we are still very much in “try to prevent assimilation mode”. I went to elementary school just as the “melting pot” metaphor was being phased out in favor of the more politically correct “salad bowl” one – in a melting pot, everyone comes together and becomes alike, but in a salad bowl, everything comes together but stays different, and that’s fine.

One externalist argument why minorities sometimes do poorly in school is the fear of “acting white” – that their peers tell them that academic achievement is a form of “acting white” by which they betray their cultural heritage. Unfortunately, we seem to be promoting this on a social level, telling people that assimilating and picking up the best features of majority culture are “acting white”. If the majority culture has useful memes that help protect people against school dropout, crime, and other bad life outcomes, that is a really bad thing to do.

So let’s go back to the nightmare scenario with which we started this section – of children being seized from their homes and locked in a room with Chinese people. Is this sort of dystopia the inevitable result of trying to use culturalist theories to equalize group outcomes?

No. There is a proverb beloved of many Reactionaries: “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” We could make great strides in solving inequality merely by ceasing to exert deliberate effort to make things worse. The progressive campaign to demonize assimilation and make it taboo to even talk about some cultures being better adapted than others prevents the natural solution to inequality which worked for the Irish and the Asians and the Jews from working for the minorities of today. If we would just stop digging the hole deeper in order to make ourselves feel superior to our ancestors, we’d have gone a lot of the way – maybe not all of the way, but a lot of it – toward solving the problem.

On Second Thought, Keep Your Tired And Poor To Yourself

Immigration doesn’t have to be a problem. In a healthy society, immigrants will be encouraged to assimilate to the majority culture, and after a brief period of disorientation will be just as successful and well-adapted as everyone else.

But in an unhealthy society like ours that makes assimilation impossible, a culturalist will be very worried about immigration.

Let’s imagine an idyllic socialist utopia with a population of 100,000. In Utopia, everyone eats healthy organic food, respects the environment and one another, lives in harmony with people of other races, and is completely non-violent. One day, the Prime Minister decides to open up immigration to Americans and discourage them from assimilating.

50,000 Americans come in and move into a part of Utopia that quickly becomes known as Americatown. They bring their guns, their McDonalds, their megachurches, and their racism.

Soon, some Utopians find their family members dying in the crossfire between American street gangs. The megachurches convert a large portion of the Utopians to evangelical Christianity, and it becomes very difficult to get abortions without being harassed and belittled. Black and homosexual Utopians find themselves the target of American hatred, and worse, some young Utopians begin to get affected by American ideas and treat them the same way. American litter fills the previously pristine streets, and Americans find some loopholes in the water quality laws and start dumping industrial waste into the rivers.

By the time society has settled down, we have a society which is maybe partway between Utopia and America. The Americans are probably influenced by Utopian ideas and not quite as bad as their cousins who reminded behind in the States, but the Utopians are no longer as idyllic as their Utopian forefathers, and have inherited some of America’s problems.

Would it be racist for a Utopian to say “Man, I wish we had never let the Americans in?” Would it be hateful to suggest that the borders be closed before even more Americans can enter?

If you are a culturalist, no. Utopian culture is better, at least by Utopian standards, than American culture. Although other cultures can often contribute to enrich your own, there is no law of nature saying that only the good parts of other cultures will transfer over and that no other culture can be worse than yours in any way. The Americans were clearly worse than the Utopians, and it was dumb of the Utopians to let so many Americans in without any safeguards.

Likewise, there are countries that are worse than America. Tribal Afghanistan seems like a pretty good example. Pretty much everything about tribal Afghanistan is horrible. Their culture treats women as property, enforces sharia law, and contains honor killings as a fact of life. They tend to kill apostate Muslims and non-Muslims a lot. Not all members of Afghan tribes endorse these things, but the average Afghan tribesperson is much more likely to endorse them than the average American. If we import a bunch of Afghan tribesmen, their culture is likely to make America a worse place in the same way that American culture makes Utopia a worse place.

But it’s actually much worse than this. We are a democracy. Anyone who moves here and gains citizenship eventually gets the right to vote. People with values different from ours vote for people and laws different from those we would vote for. Progressives have traditionally viewed any opposition to this as anti-immigrant and racist – and, by total coincidence, most other countries, and therefore most immigrants, are progressive.

Imagine a country called Conservia, a sprawling empire of a billion people that has a fifth-dimensional hyperborder with America. The Conservians are all evangelical Christians who hate abortion, hate gays, hate evolution, and believe all government programs should be cut.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of Conservians hop the hyperborder fence and enter America, and sympathetic presidents then pass amnesty laws granting them citizenship. As a result, the area you live – or let’s use Berkeley, the area I live – gradually becomes more conservative. First the abortion clinics disappear, as Conservian protesters start harassing them out of business and a government that must increasingly pander to Conservians doesn’t stop them. Then gay people stop coming out of the closet, as Conservian restaurants and businesses refuse to serve them and angry Conservian writers and journalists create an anti-gay climate. Conservians vote 90% Republican in elections, so between them and the area’s native-born conservatives the Republicans easily get a majority and begin defunding public parks, libraries, and schools. Also, Conservians have one pet issue which they promote even more intently than the destruction of secular science – that all Conservians illegally in the United States must be granted voting rights, and that no one should ever block more Conservians from coming to the US.

Is this fair to the native Berkeleyans? It doesn’t seem that way to me. And what if 10 million Conservians move into America? That’s not an outrageous number – there are more Mexican immigrants than that. But it would be enough to have thrown every single Presidential election of the past fifty years to the Republicans – there has never been a Democratic candidate since LBJ who has won the native population by enough of a margin to outweight the votes of ten million Conservians.

But isn’t this incredibly racist and unrealistic? An entire nation of people whose votes skew 90% Republican? No. African-Americans’ votes have historically been around 90% Democratic (93% in the last election). Latinos went over 70% Democratic in the last election. For comparison, white people were about 60% Republicans. If there had been no Mexican immigration to the United States over the past few decades, Romney would probaby have won the last election.

Is it wrong for a liberal citizen of Berkeley in 2013 to want to close the hyperborder with Conservia so that California doesn’t become part of the Bible Belt and Republicans don’t get guaranteed presidencies forever? Would that citizen be racist for even considering this? If not, then pity the poor conservative, who is actually in this exact situation right now.

(a real Reactionary would hasten to add this is more proof that progressives control everything. Because immigration favors progressivism, any opposition to it is racist, but the second we discover the hyperborder with Conservia, the establishment will figure out some reason why allowing immigration is racist. Maybe they can call it “inverse colonialism” or something.)

None of this is an argument against immigration. It’s an argument against immigration by groups with bad Luck and with noticeably different values than the average American. Let any Japanese person who wants move over. Same with the Russians, and the Jews, and the Indians. Heck, it’s not even like it’s saying no Afghans – if they swear on a stack of Korans that they’re going to try to learn English and not do any honor killings, they could qualify as well.

The United States used to have a policy sort of like this. It was called the Immigration Act of 1924. Its actual specifics were dumb, because it banned for example Asians and Jews, but the principle behind it – groups with good outcomes and who are a good match for our values can immigrate as much as they want, everyone else has a slightly harder time – seems broadly wise. So of course progressives attacked it as racist and Worse Than Hitler and it got repealed in favor of the current policy: everyone has a really hard time immigrating but if anyone sneaks over the border under cover of darkness we grant them citizenship anyway because not doing that would be mean.

Once again, coming up with a fair and rational immigration policy wouldn’t require some incredibly interventionist act of state control. It would just require that we notice the hole we’ve been deliberately sticking ourselves in and stop digging.

Imperialism Strikes Back

In an externalist/progressive worldview, the best way to help disadvantaged minorities is to eliminate the influence of more privileged majority groups. In a culturalist/Reactionary worldview, the best way to help disadvantaged minorities is to try to maximize the influence of more privileged majority groups. This suggests re-examining colonialism. But first, a thought experiment.

Suppose you are going to be reincarnated as a black person (if you are already black, as a different black person). You may choose which country you will be born in; the rest is up to Fate. What country do you choose?

The top of my list would be Britain, with similar countries like Canada and America close behind. But what if you could only choose among majority-black African countries?

Several come to my mind as comparatively liveable. Kenya. Tanzania. Botswana. South Africa. Namibia (is your list similar?) And one thing these places all have in common was being heavily, heavily colonized by the British.

We compare the sole African country that was never colonized, Ethiopia. Ethiopia has become a byword for senseless suffering thanks to its coups, wars, genocides, and especially famines. This seems like counter-evidence to the “colonialism is the root of all evil” hypothesis.

Yes, colonization had some horrible episodes. Anyone who tries to say King Leopold II was anything less than one of the worst people who ever lived has zero right to be taken seriously. On the other hand, eventually the Belgian people got outraged enough to take it away from Leopold, after which there follows a fifty year period that was the only time in history when the Congo was actually a kind of nice place. Mencius Moldbug likes to link to a Time magazine article from the 1950s praising the peace and prosperity of the Congo as a model colony. Then in 1960 it became independent, and I don’t know what happens next because the series of civil wars and genocides and corrupt warlords after that are so horrible that I can’t even read all the way through the articles about them. Seriously, not necessarily in numbers but in sheer graphic brutality it is worse than the Holocaust, the Inquisition, and Mao combined and you do not want to know what makes me say this.

So yes, Leopold II is one of history’s great villains, but once he was taken off the scene colonial Congo improved markedly. And any attempt to attribute the nightmare that is the modern Congo to colonialism has to cope with the historical fact that the post-Leopold colonial Congo was actually pretty nice until it was decolonized at which point it immediately went to hell.

So the theory that colonialism is the source of all problems has to contend with the observation that heavily colonized countries are the most liveable, the sole never-colonized country is among the least liveable, and countries’ liveability plummeted drastically as soon as colonialism stopped.

But let’s stop picking on Africans. Suppose you are going to be reincarnated as a person of Middle Eastern descent (I would have said “Arab”, but then we would get into the whole ‘most Middle Easterners are not Arabs’ debate). Once again, you can choose your country. Where do you go?

Once again, Britain, US, or somewhere of that ilk sound like your best choices.

Okay, once again we’re ruling that out. You’ve got to go somewhere in the Middle East.

Your best choice is one of those tiny emirates where everyone is a relative of the emir and gets lots of oil money and is super-rich: I would go with Qatar. Let’s rule them out too.

Your next-best choice is Israel.

Yes, Israel. Note that I am not saying the Occupied Palestinian Territories; that would be just as bad a choice as you expect. I’m saying Israel, where 20% of the population is Arab, and about 16% Muslim.

Israeli Arabs earn on average about $6750 per year. Compare this to conditions in Israel’s Arab neighbors. In Egypt, average earnings are $6200; in Jordan, $5900; in Syria, only $5000.

Aside from the economics, there are other advantages. If you happen to be Muslim, you will have a heck of a lot easier time practicing your religion freely in Israel than in some Middle Eastern country where you follow the wrong sect of Islam. You’ll be allowed to vote for your government, something you can’t do in monarchical Jordan or war-torn Syria, and which Egypt is currently having, er, severe issues around. You can even criticize the government as much as you want (empirically quite a lot), a right Syrian and Egyptian Arabs are currently dying for. Finally, you get the benefit of living in a clean, safe, developed country with good health care and free education for all.

I’m not saying that Israeli Arabs aren’t discriminated against or have it as good as Israeli Jews. I’m just saying they have it better than Arabs in most other countries. Once again, we find that colonialism, supposed to be the root of all evil, is actually preferable to non-colonialism in most easily measurable ways.

It may be the case that pre-colonial societies were better than either colonial or post-colonial societies. I actually suspect this is true, in a weird Comanche Indians are better than all of us sort of sense. But “pre-colonial” isn’t a choice nowadays. Nowadays it’s “how much influence do we want the better parts of the West to have over countries that have already enthusiastically absorbed the worst parts of the West?” Whatever I may feel about the Safavid Dynasty, I would at least rather be born in Afghanistan-post-American-takeover than Afghanistan-pre-American-takeover.

So does this mean some sort of nightmarish “invade every country in the world, kill their leadership, and replace them with Americans, for their own good” type scenario?

Once again, no. Look at China. They’ve been quietly colonizing Africa for a decade now, and the continent has never been doing better. And by “colonizing”, I mean “investing in”, with probably some sketchy currying of influence and lobbying and property-gathering going on on the side. It’s been great for China, it’s been a hugely successful injection of money and technology into Africa, and they probably couldn’t have come up with a better humanitarian intervention if they had been trying.

Why hasn’t the West done it? Because every time an idea like that has been mooted, the progressives have shot it down with “You neo-colonialist! You’re worse than King Leopold II, who was himself worse than Hitler! By the transitive property, you are worse than Hitler!”

No one needs to go about invading anyone else or killing their government. But if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

The Uncanny Valley Of Dictatorship

I kind of skimmed over the Palestinian Territories in the last section. They are, indeed, a terrible dehumanizing place and the treatment of their citizens is an atrocity that blemishes a world which allows it to continue. Is this a strike against colonialism?

Any 19th century European aristocrat looking at the Palestinian Territories would note that Israel is being a terrible colonizer, not in a moral sense but in a purely observational sense. It’s not getting any money or resources out of its colony at all! It’s letting people totally just protest it and get away with it! They’ve even handed most of it over to a government of natives! Queen Victoria would not be amused.

Suppose a psychopath became Prime Minister of Israel (yes, obvious joke is obvious). He declares: “Today we are annexing the Palestinian territories. All Palestinians become Israeli residents with most of the rights of citizens except they can’t vote. If anyone speaks out against Israel, we’ll shoot them. If anyone commits a crime, we’ll shoot them.” What would happen?

Well, first, a lot of people would get shot. After that? The Palestinians would be in about the same position as Israeli Arabs are today, except without the right to vote, plus they get shot if they protest. This is vastly better than the position they’re in now, and better than the position of say the people of Syria who are poorer, also lack the right to vote, and also empirically get shot if they protest.

No more worries about roadblocks. No more worries about passports. No more worries about sanctions. No more worries about economic depression. The only worry is getting shot, and you can avoid that by never speaking out against Israel. Optimal? Probably not. A heck of a lot better than what the Palestinians have today? Seems possible.

It seems like there’s an uncanny valley of dictatorship. Having no dictator at all, the way it is here in America, is very good. Having a really really dictatorial dictator who controls everything, like the czar or this hypothetical Israeli psychopath, kinda sucks but it’s peaceful and you know exactly where you stand. Being somewhere in the middle, where it’s dictatorial enough to hurt, but not dictatorial enough for the dictator to feel secure enough to mostly leave you alone except when he wants something, is worse than either extreme.

Mencius Moldbug uses the fable of Fnargl, an omnipotent and invulnerable alien who becomes dictator of Earth. Fnargl is an old-fashioned greedy colonizer: he just wants to exploit Earth for as much gold as possible. He considers turning humans into slaves to work in gold mines, except some would have to be a special class of geologist slaves to plan the gold mines, and there would have to be other slaves to grow food to support the first two classes of slaves, and other slaves to be managers to coordinate all these other slaves, and so on. Eventually he realizes this is kind of dumb and there’s already a perfectly good economy. So he levies a 20% tax on every transaction (higher might hurt the economy) and uses the money to buy gold. Aside from this he just hangs out.

Fnargl has no reason to ban free speech: let people plot against him. He’s omnipotent and invulnerable; it’s not going to work. Banning free speech would just force him to spend money on jackbooted thugs which he could otherwise be spending on precious, precious gold. He has no reason to torture dissidents. What are they going to do if left unmolested? Overthrow him?

Moldbug claims that Fnargl’s government would not only be better than that of a less powerful human dictator like Mao, but that it would be literally better than the government we have today. Many real countries do restrict free speech or torture dissidents. And if you’re a libertarian, Fnargl’s “if it doesn’t disrupt gold production, I’m okay with it” line is a dream come true.

So if the Israelis want to improve the Palestinian Territories’ plight, they can do one of two things. First, they can grant it full independence. Second, they do exactly the opposite: can take away all of its independence and go full Fnargl.

We already know Israel doesn’t want to just grant full independence, which leaves “problem continues forever” or “crazy psychopath alien solution”. Could the latter really work?

Well, no. Why not? Because the Palestinians would probably freak out and start protesting en masse and the Israelis would have to shoot all of them and that would be horrible.

But it’s worth noting this is not just a natural state of the world. The British successfully colonized Palestine for several decades. They certainly tried the Fnargl approach: “No way you’re getting independence, so just sit here and deal with it or we shoot you.” It worked pretty well then. I would hazard a guess to say the average Palestinian did much better under British rule than they’re doing now. So why wouldn’t it work again?

In a word, progressivism. For fifty years, progressives have been telling the colonized people of the world “If anyone colonizes you, this is the worst thing in the world, and if you have any pride in yourself you must start a rebellion, even a futile rebellion, immediately.” This was non-obvious to people a hundred years ago, which is why people rarely did it. It was only after progressivism basically told colonized peoples “You’re not revolting yet? What are you, chicken?” that the modern difficulties in colonialism took hold. And it’s only after progressivism gained clout in the countries that rule foreign policy that it became politically impossible for a less progressive country to try colonialism.

If not for progressivism, Israel would have been able to peacefully annex the Palestinian territories as a colony with no more of a humanitarian crisis than Britain annexing New Zealand or somewhere. Everything would have been solved and everyone could have gone home in time for tea.

Once again, the problem with these holes is that we keep digging them. Maybe if we’d stop, there wouldn’t be so many holes anymore.

Humane, All Too Humane

There seem to be similar uncanny valley effects in the criminal justice system and in war.

Modern countries pride themselves on their humane treatment of prisoners. And by “humane”, I mean “lock them up in a horrible and psychologically traumatizing concrete jail for ten years of being beaten and raped and degraded, sometimes barely even seeing the sun or a green plant for that entire time, then put it on their permanent record so they can never get a good job or interact with normal people ever again when they come out.”

Compare this to what “inhumane” countries that were still into “cruel and unusual punishment” would do for the same crime. A couple of lashes with the whip, then you’re on your way.

Reader. You have just been convicted of grand theft auto (the crime, not the game). You’re innocent, but the prosecutor was very good at her job and you’ve used up all your appeals and you’re just going to have to accept the punishment. The judge gives you two options:

1) Five years in prison
2) Fifty strokes of the lash

Like everyone else except a few very interesting people who help provide erotic fantasies for the rest of us, I don’t like being whipped. But I would choose (2) in a fraction of a heartbeat.

And aside from being better for me, it would be better for society as well. We know that people who spend time in prison are both more likely to stay criminals in the future and better at being criminals. And each year in jail costs the State $50,000; more than it would cost to give a kid a year’s free tuition at Harvard. Cutting the prison system in half would free up approximately enough money to give free college tuition to all students at the best school they can get into.

But of course we don’t do that. We stick with the prisons and the rape and the kids who go work at McDonalds because they can’t afford college. Why? Progressives!

If we were to try to replace prison with some kind of corporal punishment, progressives would freak out and say we were cruel and inhumane. Since the prison population is disproportionately minority, they would probably get to use their favorite word-beginning-with-”R”, and allusions would be made to plantation owners who used to whip slaves. In fact, progressives would come up with some reason to oppose even giving criminals the option of corporal punishment (an option most would certainly take) and any politician insufficiently progressive to even recommend it would no doubt be in for some public flagellation himself, albeit of a less literal kind.

So once again, we have an uncanny valley. Being very nice to prisoners is humane and effective (Norway seems to be trying ths with some success), but we’re not going to do it because we’re dumb and it’s probably too expensive anyway. Being very strict to prisoners is humane and effective – the corporal punishment option. But being somewhere in the fuzzy middle is cruel to the prisoners and incredibly destructive to society – and it’s the only route the progressives will allow us to take.

Some Reactionaries have tried to apply the same argument to warfare. Suppose that during the Vietnam War, we had nuked Hanoi. What would have happened?

Okay, fine. The Russians would have nuked us and everyone in the world would have died. Bad example. But suppose the Russians were out of the way. Wouldn’t nuking Hanoi be a massive atrocity?

Yes. But compare it to the alternative. Nuking Hiroshima killed about 150,000 people. The Vietnam War killed about 3 million. The latter also had a much greater range of non-death effects, from people being raped and tortured and starved to tens of thousands ending up with post-traumatic stress disorder and countless lives being disrupted. If nuking Hanoi would have been an alternative to the Vietnam War, it would have been a really really good alternative.

Most of the countries America invades know they can’t defeat the US military long-term. Their victory condtion is helping US progressives bill the war as an atrocity and get the troops sent home. So the enemy’s incentive is to make the war drag on as long as possible and contain as many atrocities as possible. It’s not too hard to make the war drag on, because they can always just hide among civilians and be relatively confident the US is too humane to risk smoking them out. And it’s never too hard to commit atrocities. So they happily follow their incentives, and the progressives in the US happily hold up their side of the deal by agitating for the troops to be sent home, which they eventually are.

Compare this to the style of warfare in colonial days. “This is our country now, we’re not leaving, we don’t really care about atrocities, and we don’t really care how many civilians we end up killing.” It sounds incredibly ugly, but of colonial Britain or very-insistently-non-colonial USA, guess which one ended up pacifying Iraq after three months with only about 6,000 casualties, and guess which one took five years to re-establish a semblance of order and killed about 100,000 people in the process?

Once again we see an uncanny valley effect. Leaving Iraq alone completely would have been a reasonable humanitarian choice. Using utterly overwhelming force to pacify Iraq by any means necessary would have briefly been very ugly, but our enemies would have folded quickly and with a few assumptions this could also have been a reasonable humanitarian choice. But a wishy-washy half-hearted attempt to pacify Iraq that left the country in a state of low-grade poorly-defined war for nearly a decade was neither reasonable nor humanitarian.

Once again, the solution isn’t some drastic nightmare scenario where all prisoners are tortured and all wars are fought with sarin nerve gas. It’s that if prisoners prefer corporal punishment, progressives don’t call “racism!” or “atrocity!” so loudly that it becomes politically impossible to give them what they want. Once again, all we have to do is stop digging.

Gender! And Now That I Have Your Attention, Let’s Talk About Sex

So the two things Reactionaries like to complain about all the time are race and sex, and since we have more then gone overboard with our lengthy diversion into race, we might as well take a quick look at sex.

As far as I know, even the Reactionaries who are really into biological differences between races don’t claim that women are intellectually inferior to men. I don’t even think they necessarily believe there are biological differences between the two groups. And yet they are not really huge fans of feminism. Why?

Let’s start with some studies comparing gender roles and different outcomes.

Surveys of women show that they were on average happier fifty years ago than they are today. In fact, in the 1950s, women generally self-reported higher happiness than men; today, men report significantly higher happiness than women. So the history of the past fifty years – a history of more and more progressive attitudes toward gender – have been a history of women gradually becoming worse and worse off relative to their husbands and male friends.

This doesn’t necessarily condemn progressivism, but as the ancient proverb goes, it sure waggles its eyebrows suggestively and gestures furtively while mouthing ‘look over there’.

To confirm, we would want to look within a single moment in time: that is, are feminist women with progressive gender roles today less happy than their traditionalist peers? The answer appears to be yes.

Amusingly, because we do still live in a society where these things couldn’t be published unless someone took a progressivist tack, the New York Times article quoted above ends by saying the real problem is that men are jerks who don’t do their share of the housework.

But when we actually study this, we find that progressive marriages in which men and women split housework equally are 50% more likely to end in divorce than traditional marriages where the women mostly take care of it. The same is true of working outside the home: progressive marriages where both partners work are more likely to end in divorce than traditional marriages where the man works and the woman stays home.

Maybe this is just because the same people who are progressive enough to defy traditional gender roles are also the same people who are progressive enough not to think divorce is a sin? But this seems unlikely: in general religious people get divorced more than the irreligious. And since I did promise we’d be talking about sex, consider the studies showing people in traditional marriages have better sex lives than their feminist and progressive friends. This doesn’t seem like something that could easily be explained merely by religion, unless religion has gotten way cooler since the last time I attended synagogue.

So why is this? I have heard some reactionaries say that although there are not intellectual differences between men and women, there are emotional differences, and that women are (either for biological or cultural reasons) more “submissive” to men’s “dominant” – and a quick search of the BDSM community seems to both to validate the general rule and to showcase some very striking exceptions.

But my money would be on a simpler hypothesis. Every marriage involves conflict. The traditional concept of gender contains two roles that are divided in a time-tested way to minimize conflict as much as possible. In a perfect-spherical-cow sense, either the husband or the wife could step into either role, and it would still work just as well. But since men have been socialized for one role since childhood, and women socialized for the other role, it seems that in most cases the easiest solution is to stick them in the one they’ve been trained for.

We could also go with a third hypothesis: that women aren’t actually bizarre aliens from the planet Zygra’ax with completely inexplicable preferences. I mean, suppose you had the following two options:

1. A job working from home, where you are your own boss. The job description is “spending as much or as little time as you want with your own children and helping them grow and adjust to the adult world.” (but Sister Y also has a post on the childless alternative to this)

2. A job in the office, where you do have a boss, and she wants you to get her the Atkins report “by yesterday” or she is going to throw your sorry ass out on the street where it belongs, and there better not be any complaints about it this time.

Assume both jobs would give you exactly the same amount of social status and respect.

Now assume that suddenly a bunch of people come along saying that actually, only losers pick Job 1 and surely you’re not a loser, are you? And you have to watch all your former Job 1 buddies go out and take Job 2 and be praised for this and your husband asks why you aren’t going into Job 2 and contributing something to the family finances for once, and eventually you just give in and go to Job 2, but also you’ve got to do large portions of Job 1, and also the extra income mysteriously fails to give your family any more money and in fact you are worse off financially than before.

Is it so hard to imagine that a lot of women would be less happy under this new scenario?

Now of course (most) feminists very reasonably say that it’s Totally Okay If You Want To Stay Home And We’re Not Trying To Force Anyone. But let’s use the feminists’ own criteria on that one. Suppose Disney put out a series of movies in which they had lots of great female role models who only worked in the home and were subservient to their husbands all the time, and lauded them as real women who were courageous and awesome and sexy and not just poor oppressed stick-in-the-muds, and then at the end they flashed a brief message “But Of Course Working Outside The Home Is Totally Okay Also”. Do you think feminists would respond “Yeah, we have no problem with this, after all they did flash that message at the end”?

Aside from being better for women, traditional marriages seem to have many other benefits. They allow someone to bring up the children so that they don’t have to spend their childhood in front of the television being socialized by reruns of Drug-Using Hypersexual Gangsters With Machine Guns. They ensure that at least one member of each couple has time to be doing things that every household should be doing anyway, like keeping careful track of finances, attending parent-teacher conferences, and keeping in touch with family.

So do men need to force women to stay barefoot and in the kitchen all the time, and chase Marie Curie out of physics class so she can go home and bake for her husband?

By this point you may be noticing a trend. No, we don’t need to do that. If we stopped optimizing the media to send feminist messages as loud as possible, if we stopped actively opposing any even slightly positive portrayal of a housewife as “sexist” and “behind the times”, and if we stopped having entire huge lobby groups supported vehemently by millions of people dedicated entirely to making the problem worse, then maybe things would take care of themselves.

There’s some sort of metaphor here…something about dirt…or a shovel…nah, never mind.

Plays Well In Groups

Suppose you were kidnapped by terrorists, and you needed someone to organize a rescue. Would you prefer the task be delegated to the Unitarians, or the Mormons?

This question isn’t about whether you think an individual Unitarian or Mormon would make a better person to rush in Rambo-style and get you out of there. It’s about whether you would prefer the Unitarian Church or the Mormon Church to coordinate your rescue.

I would go with the Mormons. The Mormons seem effective in all sorts of ways. They’re effective evangelists. They’re effect fundraisers. They’re effective at keeping the average believer following their commandments. They would figure out a plan, implement it, and come in guns-blazing.

The Unitarians would be a disaster. First someone would interrupt the discussion to ask whether it’s fair to use the word “terrorists”, or whether we should use the less judgmental “militant”. Several people would note that until investigating the situation more clearly, they can’t even be sure the terrorists aren’t in the right in this case. In fact, what is “right” anyway? An attempt to shut down this discussion to focus more on the object-level problem would be met with cries of “censorship!”.

If anyone did come up with a plan, a hundred different pedants would try to display their intelligence by nitpicking meaningless details. Eventually some people would say that it’s an outrage that no one’s even considering whether the bullets being used are recyclable, and decide to split off and mount their own, ecologically-friendly rescue attempt. In the end, four different schismatic rescue attempts would run into each other, mistake each other for the enemy, and annhilate themselves while the actual terrorists never even hear about it.

(if it were Reform Jews, the story would be broadly similar, but with twenty different rescue attempts, and I say this fondly, as someone who attended a liberal synagogue for ten years)

One relevant difference between Mormons and Unitarians seems to be a cultural one. It’s not quite that the Mormons value conformity and the Unitarians value indivduality – that’s not exactly wrong, but it’s letting progressives bend language to their will, the same way as calling the two sides of the abortion debate “pro-freedom” and “anti-woman” or whatever they do nowadays. It’s more like a Mormon norm that the proper goal of a discussion is agreement, and a Unitarian norm that the proper goal of a discussion is disagreement.

There’s a saying I’ve heard in a lot of groups, which is something along the lines of “diversity is what unites us”. This is nice and memorable, but there are other groups where unity is what unites them, and they seem to be more, well, united.

Unity doesn’t just arise by a sudden and peculiar blessing of the angel Moroni. It’s the sort of thing you can create. Holidays and festivals and weird rituals create unity. If everyone jumps up and down three times on the summer solstice, then yes, objectively this is dumb, but you feel a little more bonded with the other people who do it: I’m one of the solstice-jumpers, and you’re one of the solstice-jumpers, and that makes us solstice-jumpers together.

Robert Putnam famously found that the greater the diversity in a community:

…the less people vote, the less they volunteer, and the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings. “The extent of the effect is shocking,” says Scott Paige, a University of Michigan political scientist.

I don’t think this effect is particularly related to race. I bet that if you throw together a community of white, black, Asian, Hispanic, and Martian Mormons, they act as a “non-diverse” community. As we saw before, culture trumps race.

So this sort of cultural unity is exactly the sort of thing we need to improve civic life and prevent racism…and of course, it’s exactly what progressives get enraged if we try to produce.

In America, progressivism focuses on pointing out how terrible American culture is and how much other people’s cultures are better than ours. If we celebrate Columbus Day, we have to spend the whole time hearing about what a jerk Columbus was (disclaimer: to be fair, Columbus was a huge jerk). If we celebrate Washington’s birthday, we have to spend the whole time hearing about how awful it was that Washington owned slaves. Goodness help us if someone tries to celebrate Christmas – there are now areas where if a city puts up Christmas decorations, it has to give equal space to atheist groups to put up displays about how Christmas is stupid and people who celebrate it suck. That’s…probably not the way to maximize cultural unity, exactly?

We are a culture engaged in the continuing project of subverting itself. Our heroes have been toppled, our rituals mocked, and one gains status by figuring out new and better ways to show how the things that should unite us are actually stupid and oppressive. Even the conservatives who wear American flag lapel pins and stuff spend most of their time talking about how they hate America today and the American government and everything else associated with America except for those stupid flag pins of theirs.

Compare this to olden cultures. If someone in Victorian Britain says “God save the Queen!”, then everyone else repeated “God save the Queen!”, and more important, they mean it. “England expects every man to do their duty” is actually perceived as a compelling reason why one’s duty should be done.

It would seem that the Victorian British are more on the Mormon side and modern Americans more like the Unitarians. And in fact, the Victorians managed to colonize half the planet while America can’t even get the Afghans to stop shooting each other. While one may not agree with Victorian Britain’s aims, one has to wonder what would happen if that kind of will, energy, and unity of purpose were directed towards a worthier goal (I wonder this about the Mormon Church too).

Reactionaries would go further and explore this idea in a depth I don’t have time for, besides to say that they believe many historical cultures were carefully optimized and time-tested for unifying potential, and that they really sunk deep into the bones of the populace until failing to identify with them would have been unthinkable. The three cultures they most often cite as virtuous examples here are Imperial China, medieval Catholicism, and Victorian Britain; although it would be foolish to try to re-establish one of those exactly in a population not thoroughly steeped in them, we could at least try to make our own culture a little more like they were.

Once again, the Reactionary claim is not necessarily that we have to brainwash people or drag the Jews kicking and screaming to Christmas parties. It’s just that maybe we should stop deliberately optimizing society for as little unity and shared culture as humanly possible.

Reach For The Tsars

I have noticed a tendency of mine to reply to arguments with “Well yeah, that would work for the X Czar, but there’s no such thing.”

For example, take the problems with the scientific community, which my friends in Berkeley often discuss. There’s lots of publication bias, statistics are done in a confusing and misleading way out of sheer inertia, and replications often happen very late or not at all. And sometimes someone will say something like “I can’t believe people are too dumb to fix Science. All we would have to do is require early registration of studies to avoid publication bias, turn this new and powerful statistical technique into the new standard, and accord higher status to scientists who do replication experiments. It would be really simple and it would vastly increase scientific progress. I must just be smarter than all existing scientists, since I’m able to think of this and they aren’t.”

And I answer “Well, yeah, that would work for the Science Czar. He could just make a Science Decree that everyone has to use the right statistics, and make another Science Decree that everyone must accord replications higher status. And since we all follow the Science Czar’s Science Decrees, it would all work perfectly!”

Why exactly am I being so sarcastic? Because things that work from a czar’s-eye view don’t work from within the system. No individual scientist has an incentive to unilaterally switch to the new statistical technique for her own research, since it would make her research less likely to produce earth-shattering results and since it would just confuse all the other scientists. They just have an incentive to want everybody else to do it, at which point they would follow along.

Likewise, no journal has the incentive to unilaterally demand early registration, since that just means everyone who forgot to early register their studies would switch to their competitors’ journals.

And since the system is only made of individual scientists and individual journals, no one is ever going to switch and science will stay exactly as it is.

I use this “czar” terminology a lot. Like when people talk about reforming the education system, I point out that right now students’ incentive is to go to the most prestigious college they can get into so employers will hire them, employers’ incentive is to get students from the most prestigious college they can so that they can defend their decision to their boss if it goes wrong, and colleges’ incentive is to do whatever it takes to get more prestige, as measured in US News and World Report rankings. Does this lead to huge waste and poor education? Yes. Could an Education Czar notice this and make some Education Decrees that lead to a vastly more efficient system? Easily! But since there’s no Education Czar everybody is just going to follow their own incentives, which have nothing to do with education or efficiency.

There is an extraordinarily useful pattern of refactored agency in which you view humans as basically actors playing roles determined by their incentives. Anyone who strays even slightly from their role is outcompeted and replaced by an understudy who will do better. That means the final state of a system is determined entirely by its initial state and the dance of incentives inside of it.

If a system has perverse incentives, it’s not going to magically fix itself; no one inside the system has an incentive to do that. The end user of the system – the student or consumer – is already part of the incentive flow, so they’re not going to be helpful. The only hope is that the system can get a Czar – an Unincentivized Incentivizer, someone who controls the entire system while standing outside of it.

I alluded to this a lot in my (warning: political piece even longer than this one) Non-Libertarian FAQ. I argued that because systems can’t always self-improve from the inside, every so often you need a government to coordinate things.

Reactionaries would go further and say that a standard liberal democratic government is not an Unincentivized Incentivizer. Government officials are beholden to the electorate and to their campaign donors, and they need to worry about being outcompeted by the other party. They, too, are slaves to their incentives. The obvious solution to corporate welfare is “end corporate welfare”. A three year old could think of it. But anyone who tried would get outcompeted by powerful corporate interests backing the campaigns of their opponents, or outcompeted by other states that still have corporate welfare and use it to send businesses and jobs their way. It’s obvious from outside the system, and completely impossible from the inside. It would appear we need some kind of a Government Czar.

You know who had a Government Czar? Imperial Russia. For short, they just called him “Czar”.

Everyone realizes our current model of government is screwed up and corrupt. We keep electing fresh new Washington Outsiders who promise with bright eyes to unupscrew and decorruptify it. And then they keep being exactly as screwed up and corrupt as the last group, because if you hire a new actor to play the same role, the lines are still going to come out exactly the same. Want reform? The lines to “Act V: An Attempt To Reform The System” are already written and have been delivered dozens of times already. How is changing the actors and actresses going to help?

A Czar could actually get stuff done. Imperial Decree 1: End all corporate welfare. Imperial Decree 2: Close all tax loopholes. Imperial Decree 3: Health care system that doesn’t suck. You get the idea.

Would the Czar be corrupt and greedy and tyrannical? Yes, probably. Let’s say he decided to use our tax money to build himself a mansion ten times bigger than the Palace of Versailles. The Internet suggests that building Versailles today would cost somewhere between $200M and $1B, so let’s dectuple the high range of that estimate and say the Czar built himself a $10 billion dollar palace. And he wants it plated in solid gold, so that’s another $10 billion. Fine. Corporate welfare is $200B per year. If the Czar were to tell us “I am going to take your tax money and spend it on a giant palace ten times the size of Versailles covered in solid gold”, the proper response would be “Great, but what are we going to do with the other $180 billion dollars you’re saving us?”

(here I am being facetious. A better answer might be to point out that the British royal family already lives in a giant palace, and they by all accounts earn the country more than they cost)

As for the tyranny, we have Fnargl’s shining example to inspire us. But really. Suppose Obama were named Czar. Do we really think he’d start sending Republicans to penal camps in Alaska for disagreeing with him? If Sasha took over as Czarina, do you think she’d do that?

(the Reactionaries I beta-tested this essay with say that the last paragraph deserves much more space, that there are many complicated theories of why this holds true, and that it is a central feature of Reactionary thought. I don’t understand this well enough to write about it yet, but you may want to read Moldbug on…no, on second thought, just let it pass.)

So who gets to be Czar? Probably the most important factor is a Schelling point: it should be someone everyone agrees has the unquestioned right to rule. Obama is not a bad choice, but one worries he may be a little too progressive to treat the job with the seriousness it deserves. We could import the British monarchy, but really ever since the Glorious Revolution they’ve been a bit too constitutional for our purposes. If we wanted a genuine, legitimate British monarch of the old royal line, someone with authority flowing through his very veins, our best choice is, indeed to exhume the body of King James II (ruled 1685 – 1688), clone him, and place the clone on the throne of the new United States Of The Western World.

Really, it’s just common sense.

A Brief Survey Of Not Directly Political Reactionary Philosophy

We have reached the goal we set for ourselves. Is this a comprehensive understanding of Reactionary thought?

No. This focuses on political philosophy, but Reaction is a complete philosophical movement with many other branches.

For example, Reactionary moral theories tend to focus on the dichotomy between Virtue and Decadence. Extensional definitions might do best here: consider the difference in outlook between Seneca the Stoic and the Roman Emperor Nero, or between Liu Bei and Cao Cao, or between Thomas More and Henry VIII. In each of these cases, a virtuous figure recognized the decadence of his society and willfully refused to succumb to it. Of course, an even more virtuous example would be someone like Lycurgus, who realized the decadence of his society and so went out and fixed society.

Reactionary aesthetic theories tend to be, well, reactions against progressive aesthetic theories. To Reactionaries, the epitome of the progressive aesthetic theory against which they rebel is the fairy tale of the Ugly Duckling, where one duckling is uglier than the rest, everyone mocks him, but then he turns out to be the most beautiful of all. The moral of the story is that ugly things are really the most beautiful, beautiful things are for bullies who just want to oppress the less beautiful things, and if you don’t realize this, you’re dumb and have no taste.

Therefore, decent, sophisticated people must scoff at anything outwardly beautiful and say that it’s probably oppressive in some way, while gushing over anything apparently ugly. Cathedrals are “gaudy” or “tacky”, but Brutalist concrete blocks are “revolutionary” and “groundbreaking”. An especially conventionally attractive woman is probably just “self-objectifying” and “pandering”, but someone with ten tattoos and a shaved head is “truly confident in her femininity”. Art of the sort people have been proven to like most is old-fashioned and conformist; real art is urinals that artistically convey an anti-art message, or paintings so baffling that no one can tell if they are accidentally hung upside-down.

The Reactionary aesthetic, then, is something so simple that if it weren’t specifically a reaction to something that already exists, it would sound stupid: no, beautiful things are legitimately beautiful, ugly things are legitimately ugly, any attempt to disguise this raises suspicions of ulterior motives.

Reactionaries also seem to be really into metaphysics, especially of the scholastic variety, but I have yet to be able to understand this. Blatant racism, attempts to clone long-dead monarchs, and giving a gold-obsessed alien absolute power all seem like they could sort of make sense in the right light, but why anyone would want more metaphysics is honestly completely beyond me.

But Seriously, What Do We Do About This Hole? And How Fast Should We Be Digging, Anyway?

We started with an argument that modern culture probably doesn’t give us a very impartial view on the relative merits of modern culture, and so we should investigate this more thorougly.

We noted that on many of the criteria we care about, the present is better only because of its improved technology. We further noted that on other criteria, even despite our better technology, past societies seemed to outperform us

Nevertheless, we identified some areas where the present really did seem better than the past. The present was less racist, less sexist, less colonialist, more humane, and less jingoistic.

We then went through each of those things and showed why they might not be as purely beneficial are as generally believed. We found evidence that societies many would call “racist” give minorities better measurable outcomes; that societies many would call “sexist” give women higher self-reported life satisfaction; that colonialism led to peace and economic growth that decolonialism was unable to match; and that supposedly more “humane” policies end up torturing their victims far more than just getting something superficially cruel over wit would; and even that cultural unity, which some might call “jingoism”, has been empirically shown to be an important factor in building communities and inspiring prosocial sentiment.

Therefore, we found that all the points we had previously noted as advantages of present over past societies were, when examined more closely, in fact points in the past societies’ favor.

Next, we looked at how we might replicate these advantages of past societies in a world which seems to be moving inexorably further toward so-called progressive ideals. We independently came up with the same solution that these past societies used: the idea of a monarch, either constitutional or (preferably) absolutist. We found that many of the problems we would expect such a monarch to produce are exaggerated or unlikely.

Finally, we identified this ideal monarch as a clone of James II of the United Kingdom.

We also went into a survey of a couple of other Reactionary ideas. Other such ideas I have not included simply because I was totally unable to understand or sympathize with them and so couldn’t give them fair treatment include: an obsession with chastity, highly positive feelings about Catholicism that never go as far as actually going to church or believing any Catholic doctrine in a non-ironic way, neo-formalism, and what the heck the Whigs have to do with anything.

Nevertheless, I hope that this has been a not-entirely futile exercise in trying to Ideological Turing Test an opposing belief. I think Reactionaries are correct that some liberal ideas have managed to make their way into an echo chamber that makes them hard to examine. And even though the Reactionaries themselves are way too rightist, I think it’s good to have their ideas out there in the Hegelian sense of “and then the unexamined-conservativism touched the unexamined-liberalism and in a puff of smoke they merged to magically become the perfect political system!”

-   *   –   *   -   *   -

Once again, expect my counterargument to this sometime in the next while. I would be interested in hearing other people’s counterarguments in the meantime and am very likely to steal them. I am also likely to ignore some of them if they make arguments I already agree with and so feel no need to debate, but I would still enjoy reading them. Basically I welcome comments and discussion from all sides.

With one exception. Yes, I have included the racist parts of Reactionary philosophy above. Yes, those points need to be debated, and some of that debate may be in favor. But any comment that moves away from the sort of dry scientific racism used to prove or disprove political theorems, and toward the sort where they’re just shouting ethnic slurs and attacking racial groups to make their members feel bad, will be deleted and the person involved probably IP-banned. I also reserve the right to edit comments that don’t quite reach that point but are noticeably in need of rephrasing.

Ozy keeps writing about objectification, which ze seems to use synonymously with “fetishization”. I had high hopes ze would finally be the person who uses that word in a way that makes sense, so I can stop just assuming it’s a totally made-up horrible useless concept. But this was not to be.

Ozy is bisexual and gets upset when people with a fetish for bisexuals proposition zir, describing it as “some asshole dude deciding that your sexuality is for his entertainment” and saying that “I am deeply creeped out by dudes who are more attracted to me because I’m bi”.

Ze is equally upset when people “objectify” fat people, trans people, Asian people, black people, dominant people, submissive people, et cetera. If I understand this right, ze says being attracted to a dominant person just because they’re dominant is “believing that people you’re attracted to exist for your boner”; being attracted to fat people is equivalent to telling them “look, people who are attracted to you are so rare that you should be willing to fuck literally anyone who’s attracted to you”.

It is probably a bad sign when, in order to criticize a concept, you have to make your hypothetical target example say and think things totally unrelated to that concept and much worse than it.

Look. Suppose Bob is a sadomasochistic amputee who has a fetish for fat transgender Asian women. And suppose he happens to live next to Alice, a fat transgender Asian woman who has a fetish for sadomasochistic amputees. They can either both sit alone in their rooms, feeling like approaching the other would be vaguely sinful for reasons they can’t exactly parse. Or they could, as the economists say, derive gains from trade.

I don’t think Ozy objects to Bob and Alice starting a relationship. I just think ze objects to either of them ever asking the other whether they’d like to start a relationship. If the Relationship Fairy fell out of the sky and magically informed them that they were interested in each other, then it would be totally acceptable. But if one of them has to go and check, then that’s wrong, because it might make one of them feel “objectified”.

If you lash out in anger any time someone investigates whether they can make a mutually beneficial deal with you, such that fear of this reaction prevents everyone all around the world from ever trying to make mutually beneficial deals with anyone else, then the problem is with you.

I have not had much experience with psychiatry yet but one of the things I have learned is that human fetishes are one of the most powerful forces in the world. I met a man who had used up pretty much his entire life savings going to niche prostitutes who would satisfy his fetish; eventually it came out and led to a divorce. We asked him: did you ever ask your wife if she might be interested in doing this with you, so you didn’t have to cheat on her in the most expensive possible way? “No, of course not, it would have been so embarrassing, imagine what she would have thought of me, I couldn’t degrade her like that.”

I have just enough faith in the fundamental perversity of the Universe to consider it inevitable that his wife shared the same fetish and was probably going to expensive prostitutes of her own, like a disgusting x-rated version of Gift of the Magi. If they had just talked to each other they could have sorted out the whole debacle. But no, because of this concept of “objectification” we can’t have nice things.

And I am still loading the dice in Ozy’s favor by mentioning all these sadomasochistic fetishes and amputee fetishes that make it look like objectification is something perverted. What if you like guys with red hair? Guys who dress in suits? Girls who play the harp? Girls with an unwavering committment to leave the world a better place than it was when they arrived, which shines brightly forth through their every word and action?

(I have both of the latter two fetishes. It’s terribly embarrassing and you must never tell.)

But seriously. How come we think “attracted to a girl who plays the harp” is socially acceptable, but “attracted to a transgender woman” is a disgusting fetish?

(Ohmigod. I just realized my girlfriend doesn’t actually love me for who I am. She just loves all of my characteristics.)

As far as I can tell, the distinction seems to be that liking someone because they play the harp is the sort of thing associated with wanting a long-term relationship partner, and liking them because they’re transgender is the sort of thing associated with wanting to have casual sex.

If someone likes you because you’re transgender, you have to not just politely say no, but become extremely offended and yell at them, or else people will suspect you’re the kind of person who thinks having casual sex with people is okay, ie a slut.

Which is fine, if you’re one of those conservative people who think sluttiness is a real thing and you must never have casual sex because that is wrong. Yet the people attacking “fetishization” claim to be sex-positive. For them to continue hating on “objectification” doesn’t compute.

I talked to Ozy about this, and ze finally said that zir real problem is people assuming they deserved sex with zir because they had a bisexual fetish and ze was bisexual. And that sometimes this led to them being pushy or pressuring zir for sex.

This is obviously a legitimate complaint. It’s just not even remotely a legitimate complaint about objectification.

If someone learned everything about Ozy, and fell deeply in love with zir for zir amazing personality, and then said “I deserve sex with you, whether you’re interested or not, because I’m deeply in love with your amazing personality” and then kept pressuring zir about it, then even though this is exactly the opposite situation it would be exactly as bad.

[Oh god. I just realized that this is probably part of the problem when people talk about Nice Guys (TM). They're probably actually upset about nice guys who think they deserve sex for being nice, but no one ever frickin' mentions that, they just say how much they hate when guys who are in love with them are also nice to them and their friends. If someone had JUST FRICKIN' EXPLAINED that the problem only starts when you start feeling entitled and pressuring them, they could have saved me like ten years of being terrified to befriend any girl I was attracted to for fear of being called a Nice Guy (TM) and therefore Worse Than Hitler (TM). Seriously, I should kill everyone in the world.]

But the point is, there is absolutely zero wrong with objectifying someone. There is a lot wrong with ignoring other people’s right not to consent. But we knew ignoring non-consent was bad already. All the concept of “objectification” (and for that matter, “Nice Guys”) adds is giving you an excuse to hate innocent people because they’re in the vague periphery of a bad thing. Screw that.

I wrote this about gender because people only read blog posts when they’re about gender or politics, but the same principle of “Informed consent is sufficient and all that worrying about objectification adds is preventing mutually beneficial deals” applies to pretty much all discussion of objectification including in philosophy.

[Trigger warning: people in happy loving relationships.]

I.

I explained polyamory to my father last week when we met in Utah. He just shrugged and said “I guess I’m too old-fashioned for that sort of thing to make sense.”

I feel blessed to have a father with the rare skill of being able to generate “I am old-fashioned” as a counter-hypothesis to “other people are evil”. But more than that, I sympathize with his response. I sympathize with it because it was exactly my response when Alicorn told me about polyamory two years ago or so (I can’t remember if I got it from IM conversations with her or from reading her essay). For a twenty-eight year old, I am really good at sighing and saying “Kids these days!” in a despairing tone, and that was about my response to the whole polyamory concept.

And now seven months after moving to Berkeley I’m dating three people.

II.

What changed? It just started seeming normal. I was going to make an analogy to desegregation here, how white people thought having black kids in their schools would be a disaster, and then it happened, and the world didn’t collapse into a hell dimension or anything, and after a few years it just seemed like the normal order. But that metaphor is too weak: there’s still racism, a black kid in an all white school district probably feels really out of place, there are still even fights over segregated proms.

So better analogy. Imagine a space-time rift brings a 19th-century Know-Nothing to your doorstep. He starts debating you on the relative merits and costs of allowing Irish people to mix with the rest of American society. And you have a hard time even getting the energy to debate him. You’re like “Yeah, there are some Irish people around. I think my boss might be half-Irish or something, although I’m not sure. So what?” And he just sputters “But…but…Irish people! It’s not right for Irish and non-Irish people to mix! Everyone knows that!” And not only do you not think that Irish people are a Big Deal, but you’re about 99% sure that after the Know-Nothing spends a couple of months in 21st-century America he’s going forget about the whole Irish thing too. There’s just no way someone seeing how boring and ordinary Irish-Americans are could continue to consider worrying about it a remotely good use of their time.

In fact, this Know-Nothing would have two strikes against him if he tried to hold onto his philosophy. First, there’s the empirical strike. Whatever his predictions of doom – Irish immigration would impoverish the country, Irish immigration would lead to the US being annexed by the Vatican – those predictions have clearly been disconfirmed. Second, there’s the psychological strike. He would be exposed to so many perfectly normal Irish people that his brain would have trouble even maintaining them as a separate category. It’s like the difference between your association for Chinese people being Fu Manchu versus your association being your neighbor John Chang who speaks perfect English and has a job at Google.

This was my experience with poly people upon moving to Berkeley. Alicorn makes a big deal about poly-hacking and having to valiantly overcome some sort of strong natural tendency to switch from monogamous to polyamorous relationships. This wasn’t really my experience at all. It just seemed like once the entire culture was no longer uniting to tell me polyamory was something bizarre and different and special, it wasn’t. And then it started to look like a slightly better idea to take part in it than to not take part in it. So I did.

III.

I didn’t even remember how weird it seemed to everyone else until the last few weeks. First I had to explain it to my father. Then someone commented on a blog post of mine with something about polyamory, spelling it poly-”amor”-y the whole time, as if there couldn’t possibly be any real love involved.

The plural of anecdote is not “data”. But the singular of anecdote is “enough data to disprove a universal negative claim”. So I will just say that Alicorn and Mike are probably the best couple I have ever seen. I have lived with them for seven months now and never once have I seen them get in a fight (I know there is way more to being a couple than not fighting but I’m trying to think of objective numerical evidence I can report here beyond “if you know them, you know what I mean”). They both seem to love and appreciate each other just as much if not more as they did when I first met them. They both go way out of their way to make the other happy, and although part of this is just that they’re both very nice people who go out of their way to make everybody happy, I think there’s got to be some love involved there too. They are engaged, working on the “getting married” thing, and have every intention of having lots of children and staying together for at least one lifetime.

And all this despite Mike having two other girlfriends and Alicorn having three other boyfriends including one who lives with her. I can’t even get angry with people who say polyamory is incompatible with true love. They’re just empirically wrong, like someone who remarks confidently that hippos have six legs. They’re not evil or even deluded. They just obviously haven’t seen any hippos. You don’t really want to argue with them so much as take them to a zoo, after which you are confident they will realize their mistake.

IV.

The other thing people always bring up is the jealousy issue. I feel like the correct, responsible thing to say at this point would be “Yes, of course everyone experiences jealousy, and it’s hard for the first few months or years, but eventually you just learn to live with it and the sacrifice is worth it.”

But the responsible answer is wrong, and the incredulous-stare answer is right. At least in my very limited experience, jealousy is a paper tiger, sort of the post-9/11 al-Qaeda of emotional states. You spend all this time worrying about it and preparing for it and thinking it is going to be this dreadfully imposing enemy, and in the end it sends one guy with a bomb in his shoes onto a plane, whom you arrest without incident.

I know this hasn’t been anywhere close to the experience of all polyamorous people, but it’s my experience and that of the people I’ve talked to most about this.

My roommate Mike dates the same three people I am dating, including Alicorn who also lives with us (this is not normal for polyamory, and all three people started dating Mike and then met me and started dating me too, so I guess the moral of the story is to think very hard before accepting me as a roommate). I cannot think of a single problem I have ever had with Mike, which I guess is also sort of incredulous-stare and which exceeds my normal standards for roommates let alone roommates-whose-three-girlfriends-I-am-dating. None of those three people have had any noticeable-from-the-outside jealousy about any of the others. Two weeks ago, Mike and I took all three of our mutual girlfriends on a group date to Sausalito. It went really well, everyone got along, and it is something we would do more often if not for scheduling and travel issues (also, Sausalito is really expensive).

I once felt a small pang of jealousy when one of my girlfriends was having a very public display of affection with a non-Mike person I didn’t know quite so well. But I get upset with/jealous of public displays of affection in general, even among people I don’t know, and it’s very hard for me to disentangle this feeling from jealousy and it could have just been my imagination.

As opposed to this tiny-to-nonexistant role of jealousy, I think pretty much everyone here has experienced compersion. Compersion is the opposite of jealousy, being really happy for your partner when they meet someone new and they are obviously happy. Mike and Alicorn are really good at compersion (Mike helped set me up with his girlfriend Kenzi and was really glad it worked out) and some of this has rubbed off on me. It is a good feeling and it makes you feel good to have it. If there is a Heaven, I assume compersion will be a big part of its emotional repertoire.

V.

I don’t drink much, not because I’m especially virtuous but because I hate the taste of alcohol and the atmosphere of bars and parties. In the same way, I’m not promiscuous, not because I’m especially virtuous but because I’m sort of borderline asexual. I like cuddling people, kissing people, falling in love with people, petting people’s hair, writing sonnets about people, and a few things less blogaboutable, but having sex isn’t an especially interesting experience for me. I treat it kind of like watching a chick flick – something one might do to get the nice warm feeling of doing romantic things and bonding as a couple, but wait a second why the heck is she kissing him now and that scene made no sense and THIS MOVIE HAS NO PLOT HOW DID IT MAKE $100 MILLION AT THE BOX OFFICE?

And I’m sorry for subjecting random people to details of my sex life, but I’m trying to establish credibility here for what I want to say next. What I want to say next involves the perception – I had it and a lot of other people seem to have it – that polyamory is about having sex with lots of people and monogamy is about having close loving relationships. And once again this is not my experience at all.

If you just want to have lots of sex instead of having a loving relationship, there are many ways to do it that are much more socially acceptable than polyamory. You can be one of those bachelors who “plays the field” and “doesn’t get tied down”. You can be in an “open relationship” or be “swingers”. All of these are way easier than polyamory; if your goal is sex, they’re also more effective.

Polyamory is almost the opposite of this. It’s for people who aren’t just into sex, for people who realize they could get sex without relationships with a lot less deviation from social norms but are really into the relationship part of things.

Here I will say maybe the only note of personal uncertainty or concern you’re likely to get in this essay, which is that I don’t know whether I could have maximally-close relationships with multiple people simultaneously. That is, I don’t know if I could date three people and love all of them as much as my parents love each other, or other social models for very good relationships (the Obamas? Now I’m foundering on who our non-fictional archetypes for very good relationships are) love each other. I’m not sure whether this would satisfy some deep human need for what you might politically-incorrectly call “mutual ownership”. And I’m definitely not sure (though I think it’s likely, certainly more likely than the skeptics would) that this is a great structure for child-rearing.

In practice none of this matters, because driven by some innate urge most polyamorous people I know end up having one “primary” relationship along with whatever others they are involved with. Mike and Alicorn are each other’s primaries, and that is going to develop into being each other’s spouses, and what I said above about them definitely having achieved that level of maximum-closeness remains true. This form of polyamory seems to me to be “monogamy plus”, keeping all of the advantages of monogamous relationships and ending out strictly superior. Sometimes this develops into people being so into each other that they just aren’t interested in other relationships because it takes away time they could be spending with their primary partner, but I haven’t noticed any differences in the quality of relationships where this happens and ones where it doesn’t.

I have heard of polyamorous communities where this is not how things are done, where people don’t have primaries, where they are just this complicated mass of partners without anything that looks like a traditional relationship. I predict I would not like this; something in me recoils from this situation. But that could just be more prejudice that would look as dumb as a Know-Nothing in the 21st century once I saw it up close. I’m pretty willing to take the Biblical tack on this one: “He who is able to accept it, let him accept it”. But I’m pretty sure I’m not of that number.

VI.

This is not meant as a sociological or political claim that polyamory is good or even harmless. The community here in Berkeley is several standard deviations away from the mean on practically every dimension, not to mention that they’re a highly self-selected group.

It is easy to imagine that if “bad people” got a hold of polyamory, they could mess it up. One can imagine someone threatening violence against their partner unless they agreed to become polyamorous when they weren’t really comfortable with it. It might make it a little harder for “be financially supported by your partner” to be a tenable career plan, although it might not.

Annnnnd actually I’m having trouble coming up with suitable horror scenarios. But since this shows all the signs of being a danger area for status quo bias, we apply a quick reversal test. Imagine a polyamorous society concern-trolling the potential horrors of monogamy. People would have to dump their partners if someone better came along, leading to all relationships being insecure. People could “bid” potential partners against one another forcing them to do things they were uncomfortable with to remain attached. If they broke up, they would have no other relationship to fall back on, making them dependent upon potentially violent or abusive partners. You could come up with so many reasons why monogamy would be dystopian for vulnerable and marginalized groups.

(and I am not making any of those claims, and find attempts to perform logical gymnastics to assert that something you oppose for other reasons would “harm the vulnerable” generally annoying. I’m just trying to head off the claim that polyamory would do this)

I don’t know if polyamory is, like my tongue-in-cheek discussion of modafinil, something whose social costs are useful in preserving it for people who would probably use it for good, or whether it is just an unalloyed good that everyone should switch to right away. The latter seems to match my experiences better, but the former seems to match the observation that things usually go wrong in unexpected ways. Still, the former (good for the people who use it, even if not necessarily a good thing to remove the barriers to wider adoption) seems like a floor to how bad it could possibly be.

[CONTENT WARNING: rape, violent crime, racism]

[EDIT HISTORY: This piece was widely circulated and critiqued after first being published, and I received a lot of feedback, some of which was good and some of which was bad. I have entirely rewritten the piece to try to respond to some of the complaints, especially those in the comments and those raised here. The original version of this post, without which some of the reactions and complaints will not make sense, is available here. The bottom of that post gives more information on particular edits. Thanks to everyone who gave helpful feedback both positive and negative.]

From this article:

When the odds of being assaulted are 25 percent, something is dangerous. If any other activity or object presented the same odds of injury or death, then a revolution would be ignited against it. If one-fourth of Americans faced armed robbery in their lifetime, then you’d better believe armed robbery would be a major national issue covered everywhere in the media, and it would be right up there alongside the economy and national defense in the presidential debates.

We’re all willing to make a strong, concerted efforts to see that safety is followed in cases like these, with no margin allowed for error. It’s a shocking contrast to how we deal with women’s safety from the men who harm them.

It makes me wonder, what if men were declared as a public safety hazard?

Could you imagine if they were recalled? Pulled off the street? “Sorry sir, you’ll have to come with me; we’ve had reports that men have been raping, beating, and killing women, and we can’t take the risk that you will, too.” Yes, it’s a ridiculous idea. But men are way more dangerous than Tylenol [which was recalled for being dangerous].

You may also say, “There are plenty of men out there who don’t abuse or sexually assault women — what about them?” I say: Well, what about them?

I can’t quote the whole thing, but you should probably read it if you want a clearer picture of what’s being talked about.

So when I read this article, I feel a couple things. I feel sad about the high prevalence of rape and domestic violence, of course. But I already knew that one. I also feel other emotions. As a man who hasn’t done any of these things, I feel kind of scared and singled out and unfairly guilt-by-associationed.

I know this isn’t the first time this has happened. Articles That Tar All Men With The Same Brush are pretty common, followed by Men Who Get Offended, followed by People Telling Them They Are Wrong To Be Offended Because The Problem Of Rape Is Much More Important Than The Problem Of People Getting Offended.

But, well, I still feel unfairly guilt-by-associationed. So here’s an intuition pump to try to communicate why.

A Visit To Racist Dystopia

Suppose you woke up one morning and started hearing public service announcements on your radio: “Black people are defective! Black people are a public safety hazard! Black people commit lots of violent crimes! The police should just arrest all black people, because they’re too dangerous to allow on the streets!”

You do some investigation and find that it’s just a small fraction of the population that believes this – maybe 10% – and they’re not immediately advocating any actual consequences or policy toward black people. So that’s good. But you keep hearing this same message. All your favorite blogs publish a steady stream of wildly popular articles trying to “helpfully explain” to black people why all white people are justified in fearing them. Any black person in college has to walk past posters every day listing their name and reading THIS PERSON IS A POTENTIAL MUGGER – and when they complain, they are met with indifference and an administration claiming it is merely a helpful way to raise awareness of black violence.

Hopefully you, like me, would be horrified by this state of affairs. Although certainly crime is a problem in many places, and although crime is worse in poor neighborhoods which are also disproportionately minority, this is an offensive and unproductive way of thinking about the problem.

The Value Of The Analogy

If we had to specify our exact complaints against Racist Dystopia, I think there would be at least three good ones. First, we would want to protest that only a tiny percent of black people are guilty of violence. Second, we would want to protest that people of all races are capable of violence, and that the existing campaign unfairly portrays it as solely a black problem. Third, even apart from those two complaints and even assuming raising awareness of racial violence is something we want to do, there would be ways of sending that message that encourage stereotyping and sweeping judgments and ways of discouraging them, and the current campaign seems specifically intended to promote the former.

Let’s start with the first complaint: only a tiny percent of black people are guilty of violence. How tiny? Statisticians project that about 30% of black men will go to prison sometime in their lives. Somewhere around 30-40% of prisoners are serving time for violent offenses, so if we combine those two numbers (something which requires a few assumptions, but I can’t find the statistic directly so it will have to do) we get that about 10% of black men will go to prison for violent crime sometime in their lives. If we assume that black women do not go to prison (I can’t find good data on this), then about 5% of black people will go to prison for violent crime at some point.

This number is very similar to another number: according to an article from the early 2000s in a feminist blog, about 4.5% of men are estimated to be rapists.

Our second complaint is that violence is a problem committed by people of all races: most notably to the public service campaign, it is committed by white people as well. But as noted before, violence concentrates disproportionately among poor populations, these are disproportionately likely to be minorities, and the effects scale up. America is about 50% men/50% female. Suppose that America were 50% black/50% white. We know that black people currently commit homicide at a rate 7.5x greater than white people, so in this hypothetical society – in the implausible case where nothing changed about neighborhoods or poverty or income gap – 88% of murders would be committed by black people. Murder is an unusually good statistic because almost all murders are investigated and so there’s a low chance that much of the differential is due to racist policing, but the numbers are about the same for other violent crime. For example, in New York City, which is approximately 50% white, 25% black, and 25% other, 78% of all shootings are black compared to 2.5% white. If we extrapolate New York City into a hypothetical 50% black/50% white society, we find that the black half would commit about 97% of the shootings and the white half about 3%. Let’s average these two statistics and say that in our hypothetical society where race works like gender, 95% of violent crime would be black.

And once again, these numbers are in the ballpark of male/female rape statistics. What percent of rapes are committed by men? This is very hard to determine, because rape by women is almost never reported (victim is too embarrassed) and almost never prosecuted (people just laugh and say they bet the guy liked it). I have seen claims from 99% male (which seems very high) to 75% male (which seems very low). I do not think that 95% of rapists being men to 5% women is an impossible number. Other forms of violence are even less male-dominated; male-initiated and female-initiated domestic violence seem to be about equal.

The last complaint we might have against Racist Dystopia is not statistical but moral. Even if it was socially necessary to raise awareness of violent crime, and even if everyone was so racist that the decision to fixate on black crime had already been made, there are ways to do it that are super-awful and ways to do it that are only kinda-awful. I think the most important criteria for landing a campaign in the coveted second category would be:

- Absolute avoidance of any claim or implication that the problem is with all minorities and extreme and frequent repetition of the fact that the overwhelming majority of minorities are non-violent.

- A focus on the fact that white people can commit crimes as well, made at least proportional to the amount of crime they actually commit, and if possible even a little more so in order to hammer home the message that crime is not a racial problem.

- A focus on additional reasons why you need not be terrified of every single black person you met. For example, if the majority of muggings tended to occur in a few very specific situations, like after both the mugger and the victim had been drinking, or after the mugger/victim had accepted an invitation to go to the victim/mugger’s house, that would have a pretty big effect on whether or not you should live in fear of your random black co-worker or college professor.

My thesis is that we should make these same complaints against efforts that try to tar all men as rapists.

How To Use The Analogy

There’s a possible fourth complaint here in which the two situations are not similar: black people are a really oppressed group. The more one spreads fear and stereotypes about them, the more likely it is you awaken someone’s latent racism and cause damage disproportional to the “limited” fear and stereotypes you were trying to convey. For example, traditionally people have been pretty quick to engage in hate crimes against black people based partly on stereotypes exactly like the one mentioned above.

One answer to this objection might be that some men are murdered, sometimes horribly because of the climate of fear around male rape. But since I’ve tried to stick to statistics thus far, it would be dishonest to claim that this happens in anywhere near the numbers that would be necessary to make the analogy stick.

A better objection might be that the issues of disprivilege and oppression, while important, are not necessary to make the Racist Dystopia horrible. Imagine a world in which we somehow magically prevented any white people from having their opinions influenced by the public service campaign vilifying black people. They somehow continue at exactly the same level of racism they had before, and the “only” problem with the campaign is that black people have to listen to themselves be attacked all the time and get “educated” on the importance of crime prevention if they complain. This world would be less bad than the world in which they also had to deal with the additional racism, but it wouldn’t be a walk in the park either.

Even removing the racism angle, the Dystopia above is still bad just because of the pain and dehumanization it causes people to have to read about their group in terms of some evil Other who must be a threat to all right-thinking people.

Men are blessed with many positive role models, but the divide between social and structural power is worth taking into account here, and the sort of men who are exposed to feminist articles like the one above (exactly the sort of men who are in the best position to help women!) have to take in quite a bit of information. For example, this morning when I checked Facebook I was helpfully suggested links to the “all men should be taken off the streets” article above, a blog called “Creepy White Guys”, an OKCupid app that claimed to be able to tag people you looked at as “likely rapists” based on a sketchy machine learning claim about their profiles, and a link to an article called “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Level There Is”. My RSS reader then directed me to my favorite blog, which had suspended its usual discussion of abstruse philosophy to host an article called “Submissions on Misogyny”, which included bits like where someone talked about her boyfriend raping and physically assaulting her and then claimed “You might think my ex was a sociopath, but no — he’s a normal male”.

This was, more or less, a typical day for a somewhat liberal guy on the Internet. So this idea that men never have to hear anyone speaking against them and these sorts of “all men are dangerous and defective” articles are just an unexpected breath of fresh air no longer track reality, if they ever did. And if you think that a man can’t possibly be hurt by seeing people insult and belittle his gender (which, no offense, is actually a kind of patriarchalist opinion right there), all I can say is that my personal experience begs to differ.

This is not a demand that people stop talking about rape, or even that they stop talking about the importance of preparedness for rape! I know my feelings aren’t as important as that!

But it is a polite request that you follow the three suggestions I would have made to the Racist Dystopians above:

- Absolute avoidance of any claim or implication that the problem is with all men and extreme and frequent repetition of the fact that the overwhelming majority of men are non-violent. 95% of men have never raped anyone and would be horrified by the idea. Insofar as you give yourself the task of “warning women what to expect from men”, one thing they should expect is to start with a 95% probability a given man is not a rapist, and then start adjusting from there based on evidence.

- A focus on the fact that women can commit rape and gendered violence as well, made at least proportional to the amount of rape/violence they actually commit, and if possible even a little more so in order to hammer home the message that what we’re against is rape itself and not This One Hated Out-Group.

- A focus on additional reasons why you need not be terrified of every single man you meet. This is something that feminists already do very well, in that they help explain what the warning signs of rapists are and what situations and requests are red flags for someone who might try to rape you, but this tends to be forgotten in articles like the one above which focus on scare-mongering the idea that it could be anybody! While it’s true that it could be anybody, it’s also important to keep in mind that it is somewhat more likely to be some people than others.

It’s easy to see why doing this would benefit men, and I admit that’s mostly why I’m writing this, but I can think of many reasons this would be good for women as well.

First, encouraging a woman to fear and distrust all men is probably not a useful strategy in a society that’s fifty percent male, especially if that woman happens to be heterosexual. A strategy of “be aware of this possibility and of the warning signs, but also that most of the people you interact with are nice and trustworthy” is probably both psychologically and socially more healthy.

Second, women have a vested interest in fighting sexism and sexist stereotypes. Sexism is basically a flawed cognitive algorithm. It’s the tendency to think “I can think of a bunch of people of this sex who do X, therefore I’m just going to classify that sex as X-doers and promote that idea to society.” A big part of fighting sexism is discouraging this process. Saying “No, you can’t just say that because some women like cooking in this society, cooking is a Thing Inherent About Women. Further, we can’t even create a climate where women are constantly portrayed as cooking and doing things relating to cooking, because that’s going to make non-culinary women feel bad.” And if you laboriously train people out of this habit of thought, and then say “But definitely do this for men, they don’t count because they’re privileged oppressors”, it’s not going to work for women either. You’re creating a natural Stroop effect where people have to keep conflicting category-based rules in their head.

Third, and most speculatively, I’m kind of worried that this sort of stereotype actually promotes rape. There was a very interesting study where researchers interviewed some people about their relationships, and then told half the subjects (at random) that they had been commendably faithful, and the other half that their actions suggested they were of an unfaithful personality type and their mental infidelity might destroy their relationship. Then they asked the subjects for their opinions on infidelity. The subjects who had been told they were commendably faithful told them fidelity was extremely important to them; the subjects who had been (randomly!) told they were unfaithful told them that fidelity wasn’t important to them and that infidelity wasn’t a big deal anyway.

The researchers theorized that this was a process called “cognitive dissonance”. Most people like themselves and want to continue to like themselves. If they are told that they, or their group, has a particular flaw, then instead of ceasing to like themselves it may be easier to just decide that flaw is not such a big deal and they can have it while continuing to be the awesome people they secretly know they are.

If rape is portrayed as inherent to men in some way, men have two mental choices. They can think “darn, I guess I got the evil gender.” Or they can think “well, if my gender does it, I guess it isn’t so bad”. Psychology suggests there will be at least some small tendency to react with the second.

I don’t know how important this effect is, but given that just stating the case for rape awareness respectfully and non-prejudicially is an easy and desirable solution anyway, I don’t see why one should take any chances.

Disclaimers That Should Not Be Necessary, But Are

I am not trying to compare the experience of men to the experience of black people in any way other than the very simple numerical comparisons listed.

I am not actually saying that black people should be seen as criminals, I am using this as an example of a bad argument in order to show that tarring all men with the crime of rape is also a bad argument.

I am not claiming straight white men are not privileged or do not have things easier than other groups.

I am not apologizing for rape or claiming it is anything other than really bad. I am not denying women the right to avoid or fear men if that is what makes them comfortable.

Trigger warning: discussion of rape

Someone brought up “rape culture” in the comments to my last post.

Now I really should stop criticizing feminist ideas, because doing so is both mind-numbing and mind-killing and makes me feel like a bad person. It apparently gets me emotional enough to start making bad arguments, one of which I decided to retract in the last post (see edit history at the bottom). And after this I promise not to write another post about it for a couple of months. But I just wanted to express how confused and skeptical I am of the term “rape culture”.

I mean, there’s one way it sort of makes sense, and that is in naming a certain small and circumscribed cluster of people. I’ve heard the phrase NASCAR culture to refer to people who dress up in NASCAR clothing and go to races and obsess over the sport. Total annual NASCAR race attendance is about 1% of the United States, so calling 1% of the US “involved in NASCAR culture” seems fair enough, though it also seems more philosophically perilous than just saying “1% of people like NASCAR”.

Compare the term “car culture”, as in the phrase “America is a car culture”. It means that most Americans like cars a lot, and even those Americans who don’t like cars have absorbed pro-car memes and gladly accept propositions like that everyone should have to pay taxes to help maintain the highway system. And that it’s really hard to, say, bike to work everyday, and most people have agreed to be okay with that as a society because we implicitly accept that cars are a part of the natural order. Here the claim isn’t that 1%, or 10%, or whatever, of America is a car culture. It’s that American society itself is a car culture in some fundamental way.

If someone wants to point out some rapists or rape apologists and claim they are rape culture in the same way NASCAR fans are NASCAR culture – well, this is still asking for the term to be abused. But when people try to pull the second meaning – America “is” a rape culture – this is the part that has me throwing up my hands and wondering what the heck they are thinking.

As I understand it, here are the claims involve in “rape culture”.

1. Society treats rape as less horrendous and more excusable than other crimes
2. The criminal justice system is unusually loaded in favor of rape suspects and against victims
3. People are more willing to blame rape victims than victims of other crimes
4. Misogyny in society causes sexual objectification of women, which latently condones/promotes rape
5. The general tolerance of rape is a sign that society is biased against women and doesn’t care about their problems

Every single one of these claims seems to me diametrically wrong.

Claim 1: Society treats rape as less horrendous and more excusable than other crimes

I’ve never seen Dexter, but I hear it’s about a serial killer who goes around murdering people but is otherwise a pretty neat guy.

I’ve never played Grand Theft Auto, but I hear it’s about a thief who goes around stealing people’s cars and stuff but is otherwise pretty likeable.

I’ve never seen Silence of the Lambs (I HAVE NO EXPOSURE TO POPULAR CULTURE, SORRY), but I hear it’s about a really urbane and sophisticated cannibal who eats people’s brains and who became one of film’s most popular and respected characters.

Sweeney Todd (finally, something I’ve seen!) combines theft, cannibalism, and bloody mass murder into a huge extravaganza of crime, and people happily show it to their teenage kids as a fun family movie (as well they should, because it is great)

So having likeable and sympathetic murderers, thieves, and cannibals is totally a-okay. You can even get away with likeable and sympathetic Nazis – think Franz from The Producers. Now, tell me, can you imagine a popular mass-market TV show whose hero was a serial rapist? How about a computer game in which the object was to rape as many people as possible?

Let me take a different tack. I have a file on my computer where I collect jokes that I like. I’m pretty hard to offend, so the jokes aren’t really sorted by offensiveness in any way. Looking through it, I see two jokes about cancer, one about AIDS, one about bestiality, three about murder, one about natural disasters, one about terrorism, one about cannibalism…and zero about rape.

I have no doubt that rape jokes exist, but you probably need to be listening to a particular sort of shock jock for them. As opposed to jokes about murder, jokes about cannibalism, jokes about terrorism, et cetera, which are so utterly neutral you can find them in children’s books if you want. Even Holocaust jokes are more common and more widely accepted than rape jokes.

My point here is that far from being unusually blase about rape, society treats rape as a special kind of evil, worse than murder, worse than cannibalism, worse even than the Holocaust, something that is never sympathetic and never funny. Further, it is practically alone in being treated this way.

I’m not complaining about this. Because there are so many rape survivors likely to be traumatized at discussion of rape, this is probably a good thing. But ignoring this reality and claiming we are in fact more willing to excuse lighthearted discussion of rape than other crimes is just false.

Claim 2: The criminal justice system is unusually loaded in favor of rape suspects and against victims

Conviction rates for rape are similar to or higher than those for other forms of violent crime. In Britain, About fifty seven percent of rape trials end in convictions, compared to fifty six percent of trials for other violent crimes.

The claim that the criminal justice system is loaded against rape survivors mostly comes from the difficulty of getting cases to trial in the first place. But there are more charitable explanations for this.

Most rapes are crimes without witnesses. If the accused claims the sex was consensual then even DNA cannot provide corroborating evidence against this story. The courts are presented with a “he said” / “she said” dilemma. Because the legal system enshrines the concept of “innocent until proven guilty” – that is, erring in favor of the defendant when a guilt cannot be established “beyond a reasonable doubt” – this situation usually results in acquittal.

Therefore the police have two options in a case where someone comes to them to report a rape but has no corroborating evidence.

The police can tell the survivor there is not enough evidence to press charges, thus saving them the trouble of a long and psychologically traumatizing trial which will inevitably end in an acquittal. If they go this route, then people accuse them of rape culture because of their “culture of skepticism” where they doubt all rape allegations.

Or the police can bring the case to trial, in which the jury is asked to distinguish between the prosecution’s claim that an assault was rape, versus the defense’s claim that it was consensual. If there’s no good way to establish what actually happened, the trial will usually devolve into character assassination – that is, the prosecution will try to prove the accused is the kind of person who would rape and then lie about it, and the defense will try to prove that the survivor is the kind of person who would consent to sex and then lie about it. If they go this route, then people accuse them of rape culture because of their “slut shaming” in which it is acceptable to character assassinate a rape survivor.

But I have yet to hear a good proposal about how to avoid these problems without dropping the suspect’s right to be “innocent until proven guilty” and have his “guilt proven beyond a reasonable doubt”. If you keep those in place, then somebody somewhere along the line has to be responsible for doubting the survivor’s story, and in many cases, even in the overwhelming percent of cases where rape really occurred, the evidence at hand just won’t provide any beyond-a-reasonable way to dispel those doubts.

The failure to remove “innocent until proven guilty” is not a sign of a special and unusual “rape culture” in which rape trials have a higher burden of proof. Indeed, rape shield laws make rape trials a special case where the victim has more rights, and the accused fewer, than in other sorts of crime. These are followed vigorously, sometimes off a cliff. Other than that, it’s just insisting on the same standards as every other sort of trial.

Some might claim that rape is a special case where burden of proof is unnecessary. But anti-death penalty groups have found that in fact many people are falsely convicted – and even executed for rape. The Innocence Project estimates that between 8-15% of rape convictions are false, and many of the people found to be falsely convicted were going to remain in prison for the rest of their lives (and needless to say a disproportionate number of them were minorities). The Project notes this is somewhat higher than for other crimes like murder. These numbers correspond pretty well with the generally accepted statistic that about ten percent of rape accusations are false (uh, assuming our criminal justice system has an accuracy of about equal to chance. We should probably do something about that.)

So although rape cases are incredibly heart-breaking and there are no good options, the criminal justice system seems caught between a rock and a hard place. I see no evidence for rape culture here either.

3. People are more willing to blame rape survivors than victims of other crimes

When I lived in Ireland, my friend got his bike stolen. He was immediately subjected to a barrage of questions like “Did you lock it right?”, “Are you sure you locked it right?” “Was it in a really visible spot?” “Don’t you know that brand of bike lock is easy to cut through?” and “Why did you even keep biking when you knew there was so much bike theft in this area?”.

This seems to be my experience with most types of crime. If you get mugged in a dark alley late at night, people will tell you “Well, duh, it’s your own fault for walking alone in a dark alley late at night with lots of money on you.” If you get carjacked, people will tell you the brand of car alarm you should have bought.

And goodness forbid you get scammed. People will either tell you it’s because of your own greed (“You can’t scam an honest person”), tell you all sorts of stupid signs to look for (“Did the guy have a scammy aura about him?”), or refer you to the Better Business Bureau and a bunch of other websites that no sane person possibly checks before every single time they do business with an honest-looking person.

Cracked even thinks this is an appropriate topic for a comedy article – here’s Four Types Of Victims We Have To Stop Feeling Sorry For. People who get mauled by animals are number three – why were they hanging out near animals, anyway?

In fact, it seems that in every case where someone has just had something bad happen to them, it’s a tradition to tell them ways they could have prevented it.

I do not want to justify the “advice” people give rape survivors. Some of it seems broadly good (if you’re meeting a strange man for a date or something, do it in a public place), but much of the rest seems well-intentioned but actively wrong (it’s been pretty well established that the clothes you are wearing do not affect sexual assault rate). Whether the advice is good or not, giving it to someone who has just been traumatized is without a doubt a stupid decision, and giving it in place of punishing an actual perpetrator is an obvious miscarriage of justice.

But as far as I know, this stupid decision is only ever criticized in the case of rape. The difference between rape and other forms of tragedy is not that rape is the only tragedy in which people try to advise survivors how they could have avoided it, but that rape is the only tragedy where a person giving such well-intentioned but stupid advice gets their name plastered over the national news and has a Slut Walk organized against them.

If rape culture means people being unusually tolerant of or unsympathetic to rape, I cannot find a sign of rape culture here either.

4. Misogyny in society causes sexual objectification of women, which latently condones/promotes rape

Split this one into two categories. Why is there so much sexual objectification of women? And does sexual objectification of women implicitly condone rape?

The reason there is so much sexual objectification of women seems really really obvious. People really like sex. That’s all. There is no need for any more conspiratorial or uncharitable explanation.

If you look at gay men, they sexually objectify men all the time. If you look at products aimed at women, whether it be women’s magazines, perfume, whatever, once again, they’re plastered with images of sexy men.

Heterosexual men have more social power and money than gays or women. They also are perceived, rightly or wrongly, as being especially obsessed with sex. That means if you want to sell thing to people with lots of money – the best type of people to sell things to – using pictures of sexy women is pretty much your best bet. There is no further conspiracy theory required for why people present images of sexy women in society. The idea that it has anything to do with secretly being okay with rape is somewhere around Roswell-level plausibility.

Nor does the sexual objectification of women necessarily imply that rape is okay. Let’s take actual objects. Our society is obsessed with consumer goods. It demands loudly and viciously that people try to get as many consumer goods as possible at every opportunity it gets. But no one implies that our society is secretly condoning theft.

Saying “Desire consumer goods!” is a very different message from “Be willing to break the law, hurt others, and commit morally repulsive actions in order to obtain consumer goods!” Likewise, putting up pictures of sexy women does not have to be part of a rape culture where people imply that raping those same sexy women is okay.

5. The general tolerance of rape is a sign that society is biased against women and doesn’t care about their problems

Society is obsessed with gender and gender-related issues which is exactly why rape is treated as so much more interesting a problem than anything else.

One especially interesting data set is information about cancer funding. Here’s a graph of research dollars spent on cancer type per deaths caused by that kind of cancer.

Breast cancer gets a very disproportionate amount of funding compared to other, deadlier types of cancer. No doubt this is because of successful initiatives like the Pink Ribbon campaign, but these initiatives are themselves due to the fact that any gendered issue is naturally more interesting than any ungendered issue. My guess is this is also part of why prostate cancer (gendered issue relating to men) is in second place, although that could also be its unusually high morbidity/mortality ratio.

The point of this graph isn’t to knock breast cancer research, but instead to note that people disproportionately ignoring women’s issues because they don’t care about women is the exact opposite of the way the world works.

Google Trends shows that ever since the national news story broke, more Americans are searching for information on the Steubenville rape case than on the entire country of Syria, which you may remember has during that period been undergoing a bloody civil war which risks turning into World War III at any moment. Think about it. A single rape case is more important to our culture than a war in which somewhere between 70,000 and 120,000 people have been killed.

This is not the sign of a “rape culture” that dismisses and excuses rape. This is the sign of a culture that has fixated upon it, placed it somewhere between child pornography and al-Qaeda in the List Of Things Everyone Must Talk About All The Time. This is the sign of a national obsession.

If you want to accuse the people in Steubenville who didn’t do anything to help the poor victim of being part of a “rape culture”, then go ahead (but do remember that the same thing happens in every type of crime and is a well-known cognitive bias having nothing to do with rape per se).

But if you want to accuse the American population that paid twice as much attention to it as to the entire Syrian Civil War of trying to deny that rape exists or push it under the rug or something, what are you thinking?

My last two posts have led to a lot of anti-feminist activists getting linked to my blog, so this would be a more hilarious time than usual to write the next post in my series of arguments against Reactionary politics – about why fighting racism and sexism is necessary and important.

The Reactionary argument, as I understand it, is twofold.

First, that social justice advocates irresponsibly take some undesirable outcome in minority groups, like poverty, and then assume it is the result of racism or sexism without considering other possible explanations.

Second, that a disproportionate amount of time and energy is spent worrying about this, in a way that can only be explained through wasteful signaling cascades.

My counterargument is that although the first argument is true a depressingly large amount of the time, some people do more rigorous work and get the same result – that poor outcomes for minority groups are caused in large part by racism and sexism. And second, that these poor outcomes for minority groups are a major problem even by objective quantifiable standards.

Controlled Experiments On Prejudice

The most fun experiments on prejudice are Implicit Association Tests, which test people’s reaction times in linking together different concepts. If these concepts are socially important (for example, the concepts “white person”, “black person”, “good”, and “evil”) it can test how closely two different concepts are linked. The best way to get a feel for this is to take one yourself.

88% of white Americans (and 48% of black Americans!) show an implicit racial preference for whites on this test. How does that translate into the real world?

Some of the most interesting controlled experiments are detailed in an early ’90s review article in the Journal of Black Political Economy. A consortium of interested parties such as the Fair Employment Committee teamed up with recent university graduates. They laboriously paired white and black graduates by similar attractiveness, well-spokenness, age, gender, and qualifications (in some cases, the qualifications were faked to be as similar as possible), then sent them off job-hunting to the same companies.

In these sorts of experiments, 48% of white testers and 40% of black testers received interviews, a small and in fact nonsignificant difference. However, 47% of interviewed whites were offered jobs, compared to only 11% of interviewed blacks – a gigantic difference. Multiplying these two numbers together, we find that 23% of whites and 4% of blacks involved in the experiment got jobs – a difference of almost 6x. The whites also got a few other minor advantages – very slightly higher wages and slightly more likelihood of being informed of other open positions at the company.

Another good review article is in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. It lists a few similar studies. In one such study, researchers, instead of training real applicants, send off fake resumes with extremely white-sounding or extremely black-sounding names; they find employers respond to the white-sounding names about 50% more often. But it also has some studies of in-person interview similar to the ones above. These studies, which are from the mid-2000s rather than the early 1990s, feature white:black success ratios of anywhere from 1.5x to 5x.

Along with labor discrimination, it’s harder for minorities to buy things. For example, when trying to buy a car, black men were asked to pay on average $1100 more than attribute-paired white men. Interestingly enough, black car salesmen, and black owned car dealerships, displayed this pattern to exactly the same degree as white-owned institutions.

The situation is roughtly similar in housing. In an experiment where researchers responded to Craigslist notices advertising apartments in Toronto, using names of various ethnicities, they found that Caucasian experimenters confused relative risk with odds ratios 100% of the t…ahem, sorry, they found black people experienced housing discrimination 5% of the time and Muslims 12% of the time, usually in the form of not receiving a response even when the white person was simultaneously invited to come on over. A similar study in Houston found an astronomical 80% discrimination rate for blacks, so either Houston is much worse than Toronto, someone’s not doing their studies properly, or I’m misinterpreting something.

Other experiments along the same lines include a cute little bus experiment in Sydney where someone got on bus, their travel card didn’t work, and they asked the driver to let them ride anyway. For whites (and Asians) it worked about 72% of the time; for Indians, about 50%, and for blacks, 36%. In a later survey, bus drivers (who were unaware the experiment was going on) claimed they would prefer to help black people over white people. Interestingly enough, although black bus drivers were a bit nicer to blacks than white bus drivers, they still let whites and Asians on more often.

We find much the same pattern with men and women. A famous study a few months ago found that faculty offered a female grad student a 12% lower salary than an identical male grad student (again interestingly, female faculty were more biased against female grad students than male faculty were).

A less perfect but more natural experiment is switching from an open application procedure where applicants’ genders are obvious to a blind procedure in which genders are unclear. If the percent of women hired increases (and perhaps if no similar increase is seen in competitors that don’t change procedure at the same time) this implies the institution was being unfairly biased before. When such a test was performed by the Journal of Behavioral Ecology starting in 2001, the percent of articles by female authors went up from about 29% to about 37%, about a 30% increase. Symphony orchestras are another infamous example, and studies show that the switch from open to blind auditions explains between half and a third of the recent quintupling of the percent women in symphonies over the past thirty years.

What do these show and not show? They show that, even controlling for all other factors like different preferences, different negotiating strategies, different educational backgrounds, et cetera there is a large difference in the opportunities of minority and majority groups due solely to discrimination. This difference seems large enough to explain the proportion of the income gaps that people say it explains (usually around half of the gap for each minority group) and to give minorities large amounts of trouble throughout the rest of their lives.

One thing it does not show is that racism is just about straight white men being evil. Minorities seem just as willing to screw other minorities over and discriminate in favor of white men as the white men themselves are. A better model would be that ideas of certain races and genders being superior seem to percolate into people’s consciousnesses, regardless of what race those people themselves are, and shape their actions whether they mean for them to or not.

Economic Costs of Discrimination

A beautiful experiment by Gwartney and Haworth noticed that baseball formed a natural experiment about the costs of discrimination. During the post-Jackie-Robinson 1950s, some teams had integrated but others had not and remained white-only. G&H wondered whether this affected performance. They found that in fact the five teams quickest to integrate black players were five out of the six top performers in the league, and that every additional black player on a team resulted in an addition 3.75 wins. This was partially because black players outperformed whites on average, but also because there was more low-hanging fruit in the form of black talent which could be employed more cheaply.

What is true for baseball teams is probably also true for other companies, but harder to quantify. For such a popular field, I cannot for the life of me find any attempt to quantify the economic costs of racism. There seem to be some people in Australia working on it, but they have yet to publish any results. So let’s make some up (this, uh, ends the demanding-of-rigor part of this post).

One way to do this is to take people’s estimates of the purely-discriminatory pay gap for different groups – that is, how much less they earn than straight white men when all other factors anyone can think of (like education level, IQ, height, region of residence, whatever) are adjusted away. Then multiply this by the number of people in that group and their average wage, and we get part of the cost of racism per year.

One of the review articles above suggests the black pay gap is 15%; others suggest numbers around 10% for women. Asians and gays make a bit more than straight white men, and although Latinos make much less no one has bothered adjusting for confounders so I can’t include them.

Anyway, when I add all that up, I get $374 billion.

(one might argue that the companies these people work for gain this money as profit by paying employees less, so it all evens out. I don’t think that works. In at least some cases, the lower pay must be because they have lower-level jobs than their white male counterparts. But since we already agreed they have the same skills as their white male counterparts, this suggests their skills aren’t being used fully, which means the cost really is to the economy and not just to them. I have no idea whether this argument works in real life. Like I said, the highly-demanding-of-rigor probably should have stopped with the first half of this post)

Another claim is that companies lose $64 billion dollars to discrimination-related turnover yearly. The number is generated by taking the cost of replacing a lost employee with results of surveys about how many people leave due to discrimination or hostility at their former place of employment.

Suppose we arbitrarily and implausibly stop here because we’re tired. We’ve found costs of US racism equal to at least $438 billion per year.

That’s about the annual budget of the US military.

Note what it doesn’t include. It doesn’t include any non-monetary costs like people being unhappy. It doesn’t include the costs to the prison system of overprosecuting minorities. It doesn’t include the costs to the health system of minorities getting worse preventative health. It doesn’t include the amount the government spends fighting racism, or the amount people have to pay out in racism lawsuits. It doesn’t include people who are unemployed because of racism, because I took the data from the employment records. It doesn’t include any of the income gap due to racism anywhere other than at job – for example, racism that affects how much education people of different races end up with, or racism the person’s parent suffers that then screws up their families for several generations. It doesn’t even include Latinos because I couldn’t find any good numbers about them.

It seems very unlikely to me that the actual costs are less than $1 trillion/year in the US alone. But let’s stick with the $438 billion figure.

(another way to look at this is that these arbitrarily-stopped at costs of racism/sexism are about $2-3K per minority group member in the US, counting women as a “minority group”. This seems broadly reasonable, and is in fact still way less than the observed non-adjusted income gap)

What other things cost $438 billion dollars? According to the American Cancer Society, cancer costs $200 billion/year Heart disease costs $100 billion. Adding up all of the easy-to-calculate costs of 9/11 on this page, I get about $250 billion.

So in terms of purely economic, not-even-worrying-about-human-beings costs, the costs of racism and sexism that can be pretty plausibly attributed to discrimination alone are equivalent to about heart disease plus cancer plus half a 9/11 or so per year.

One good thing about the size of this number means that small successes in fighting racism and sexism are extremely valuable. For example, decreasing racism/sexism by 1% is a $4.4 billion gain per year to the economy, which is about equal to Facebook’s 2011 annual revenue.

Effectiveness

Now none of this is meant to claim that the marginal blog on Tumblr complaining about the patriarchy has positive expected value or is anything other than a massive waste of everyone’s time.

But there are aspects of the social justice movement interested in testing what works and doing it.

As of yet, I don’t think most of them are aware of the pitfalls in claiming successful interventions – all of these “We found our intervention decreases expressions of prejudice on a seven point scale two weeks later!” things sound suspiciously like “Our drug increases ‘good cholesterol’ after three days, and we didn’t bother to check whether it actually prevents heart attacks but seriously how could it not?”

But we can’t blame them for their failure to be more rigorous than the hard sciences, and besides one day they might wise up.

With Implicit Association Tests, Ultimatum/Dictator games, and the like, I think there is a decent toolkit for people who want to wise up and seriously analyze anti-racism and anti-sexism strategies, and I bet when they are tested further some of the ones in that document will turn out to work longer-term. Maybe they could decrease racism by 1% a year and save us $4 billion or so.

The fact that racism in the sense of simple prejudice is a real problem that accounts for much of the disadvantage of minorities; that it has a huge negative effect even when you try to measure it objectively; and that it can be fought – seem to take some of the wind out of the Reactionary argument against social justice.

I have amazing parents who would never do something sneaky like install a keylogger on my computer to keep tabs on me as I move thousands of miles away from home. But if I’m wrong and they did do that, they’re probably sweating pretty hard right now. My search history for the last two days looks a lot like “efficacy of contraceptives”, “contraceptive failures”, “pregnancy risk if contraceptive failure”, “unintended pregnancy”, “unintended pregnancy abortion”, and “COME ON GOOGLE WHY WON’T YOU GIVE ME GOOD INFORMATION ON UNINTENDED PREGNANCIES AAARGH”

(this last one brings up a berkeley.edu address, which does not surprise me one bit)

My parents can relax – the searches are because of the comments on a recent post of mine. In response to a claim that pro-lifers should be in favor of contraception since it decreases abortions, I argued that moral philosophy doesn’t always work that way, but let the main point – that contraception decreases abortion – stand. Some people, especially Joe and Gilbert, challenged my assumption, leading to an unpleasant wade through the swamp of contraception-related data.

The Anti-Contraceptive Position

Let’s start with the nay-sayers. In what he claims is a long essay (ye call that long? I’ll be showin’ ye long!) Bad Catholic evaluates correlation between abortion and contraception rates in different countries. He finds – mostly using data from the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute, a huge clearinghouse of abortion data we will be returning to again and again – that:

Contraception has been shown to decrease abortion rates primarily in [ex-Soviet bloc] countries with already high abortion rates. These represent a minority of countries. Contraception has been shown to increase abortion rates primarily in [non ex-Soviet bloc] countries with already low abortion rates. These represent a majority of countries. Contraception has been shown to slightly reduce abortion rates after its initial increase of abortion rates, but has never been shown to reduce abortion rates back to pre-contraception levels. This is my claim. I have no doubt that there’s a lot more to say, given the incredible amount of studies I haven’t seen. But as far as I can tell, this is a claim far closer to the truth than the oft-repeated, always unexamined “Contraception reduces abortion rates”.

This at first sounds bizarre – how could contraception, a technology that decreases unintended pregnancy – increase abortion, a result of unintended pregnancy? Enter the Peltzman effect, aka risk compensation.

I have a deep love for the Peltzman effect. Part of this is that it’s one of the few terms we social scientists have that sounds as nifty as the one physicists and mathematicians bandy around all the time. Another part is that a girl messaged me on OKCupid once explaining the Peltzman effect to me and asking me on a date (I never claimed my life was normal). But the rest of it is that it’s jsut this really elegant and unexpected finding where across a broad set of domains people respond to hard-won advances that make them safer with “Cool! Now I can behave irresponsibly!” It’s been found with anti-lock brakes (drivers drive closer to the car in front of them), with seat belts (people just drive faster), and with childrens’ safety gear (children just behave more recklessly).

The Peltzman effect doesn’t always hold true; sometimes we expect it and can’t find it. And it rarely makes things worse – it usually is cited as keeping things at the same level they were before, and one well-studied exception, the Munich taxi study, only finds a tiny increase in accidents.

But inside view here – how many people here, if they don’t want kids, would be willing to have totally unprotected sex? And how many people would be willing to have sex using condoms? But condoms have a typical failure rate of 15% – meaning that if a couple has sex for a year using only condoms for protection, there’s a 15% chance the woman will get pregnant. With combined oral contraceptive pill, it’s 8%. So if these contraceptive methods make people about ten times more willing to have sex when they don’t want pregnancy – not at all hard to imagine! – they could raise the unintended pregnancy rate and therefore the abortion rate.

This is the context of Joe’s study showing that in Spain from 1997 – 2007, a large rise in contraceptive usage occurred simultaneous with a large rise in abortion.

A few other arguments seem transparently stupid to me – for example, some people like to point out that US states with high contraception rates also have high abortion rates, but that’s mostly a feature of those states being very liberal and so allowing abortion clinics to operate there. So lets move on to…

The Pro-Contraceptive Position

Just in case you thought you were going to escape without any graphs:

Here’s teenage birth rates over the last 75 years. Like nearly all social problems, they have been steadily and somewhat mysteriously declining, but we notice an especially sharp decline around 1960, the year the Pill was introduced. Abortion wasn’t legalized until the 70s and was pretty uncommon before then, so we can leave it out of this analysis and say that it sure looks like the invention of a new form of contraception decreased pregnancies.

Also near an all-time low are abortion rates (I assume they mean “all-time low since abortion was legalized”?). This seems to be due to both fewer unintended pregnancies and less willingness to end unintended pregnancies with abortion. Santelli et al 2002 find the decline to correspond nicely to increasing use of contraceptives. Some pro-lifers claim (data unavailable), that after 2002 abortions continued to drop even though contraception use stayed steady. Unfortunately, all I can find is the CDC saying contraceptive use continued to rise – in the absence of their contrary data, I’m giving this point to the “increased contraception helped reduce abortion” people.

(one way that we could reconcile these two results, if we were feeling very generous, is to say that overall contraception use has remained the same, but users have switched to more effective modern forms of contraception like the implant or IUD, with a failure rate less than 1/100th that of condoms)

But this is actually consistent with Bad Catholic’s claim above – contraception increases the abortion rate when first introduced, then eventually stabilizes and decreases it, but never back to the level before contraception. So let’s evaluate that one. Bad Catholic writes:

An honest look at the data shows that in virtually every country that increased the use of contraception, there was a simultaneous increase in that country’s abortion rate. In England (Rise in contraceptive use: simultaneous rise in abortions), France (Rise in contraceptive use: simultaneous rise in abortions), Australia, (Rise in contraceptive use: simultaneous rise in abortions), Portugal (Whose abortion rate only began to rise after 1999, after oral contraceptive methods were made widely available), Canada (Whose abortion rate only began to rise after the legalization of oral contraceptives in 1969), and, as the Guttmacher Institute shows, Singapore, Cuba, Denmark, the Netherlands, and South Korea, to name a few.

Let’s investigate the countries in order. The claim seems to be only that abortions and contraceptive use rose “simultaneously”, but following his links this turns out to mean “throughout the 20th century”. There is no attempt to prove that the particular shape of the contraception curve matched that of the abortion curve or anything like that, just that there was more contraception in 2000 than in 1950, and, whaddya know, more abortions as well. The same methodology could very easily correlate abortion with global temperature. His statistics on England, France, and Australia all seem to be of this type.

He makes a stronger claim about Canada: that “the abortion rate only began to rise after the legalization of oral contraceptives in 1969″. You know what else was legalized in Canada in 1969? Abortion. I’m going with “probably not a good test case”.

As for Portugal, the claim that oral contraceptive methods were legalized in 1999 seems wrong; his own link says they have been available since 1985 and that only the emergency contraceptive pill was made available in 1999. Further, his claim that “abortion rates only began to rise after 1999″ also seems wrong – his link shows what looks like a pretty linear rise in abortion rates from 1996 to 2006; I don’t think anyone eyeballing those numbers would be tempted to consider 1999 anything remotely like an inflection point. My own guess for an inflection point would be 2007, and sure enough when I Google it that was the year they fully legalized abortion.

The Guttmacher Institute doesn’t link to its sources as diligently as Bad Catholic, so I’m just going to accept their claim that six countries – Singapore, Cuba, Denmark, Netherlands, US, and South Korea – saw simultaneous increases in contraception and abortion – after all, it goes against the direction of their bias so they have no incentive to lie. They give their results the following explanation:

The reason for the confusion stems from the observation that, within particular populations, contraceptive prevalence and the incidence of induced abortion can and, indeed, often do rise in parallel, contrary to what one would expect. The explanation for these counterintuitive trends is clear.2 In societies that have not yet entered the fertility transition, both actual fertility and desired family sizes are high (or, to put it another way, childbearing is not yet considered to be “within the calculus of conscious choice”3). In such societies, couples are at little (or no) risk of unwanted pregnancies. The advent of modern contraception is associated with a destabilization of high (or “fatalistic”) fertility preferences. Thus, as contraceptive prevalence rises and fertility starts to fall, an increasing proportion of couples want no more children (or want an appreciable delay before the next child), and exposure to the risk of unintended pregnancy also increases as a result. In the early and middle phases of fertility transition, adoption and sustained use of effective methods of contraception by couples who wish to postpone or limit childbearing is still far from universal. Hence, the growing need for contraception may outstrip use itself;4 thus, the incidence of unintended and unwanted pregnancies rises, fueling increases in unwanted live births and induced abortion. In this scenario, contraceptive use and induced abortion may rise simultaneously.

As fertility decreases toward replacement level (two births per woman), or even lower, the length of potential exposure to unwanted pregnancies increases further. For instance, in a society in which the average woman is sexually active from ages 20 to 45 and wants two children, approximately 20 of those 25 years will be spent trying to avoid pregnancy. Once use of highly effective contraceptive methods rises to 80%, the potential demand for abortion, and its incidence, will fall. Demand for abortion falls to zero only in the “perfect contraceptive” population, in which women are protected by absolutely effective contraceptive use at all times, except for the relatively short periods when they want to conceive, are pregnant or are protected by lactational amenorrhea.5 Because such a state of perfect protection is never actually achieved, a residual demand for abortion always exists, although its magnitude varies considerably among low-fertility societies, according to levels of contraceptive use and choice of methods.

This seems incredibly reasonable, and we will come back to it later. Let’s abandon all of these time series type studies and see if we can find a halfway-decent controlled experiment.

Well, uh…we can find a controlled experiment. These people in St. Louis gave people free contraceptives and later found that they had a teenage pregnancy rate much lower than the rest of the population. Gilbert gives this study exactly the correct criticism – participants from a very specific population (poor people in St. Louis interested in signing up for a contraceptive study) are being compared to the general population (everyone in the United States). This is inexcusable, especially considering that Real Science has an extremely standard way of avoiding this problem (sign people up for your study, only give the intervention to a randomly selected half, and the other half is an instant control group). Other fatal issues – the study used IUDs, the most effective form of contraception, but most of the worry that contraception might increase abortion comes from less effective means like condoms and the Pill. Finally, if you’re really interested in the way that widespread availability of contraceptives makes a culture more libertine, just giving them to a couple of people within that culture isn’t going to capture that effect. I am maybe a little bit hugely disappointed that most of the media and bloggers reporting on this didn’t mention these sorts of issues.

But it does show one interesting thing, which is that when people get free contraception, they start using more effective contraception methods. Would this also cause risk compensation? I don’t know, but I feel like there has to be some amount of sex beyond which it’s just no longer fun, and some contraceptive methods are so effective that it would be really hard to have so much sex that they’re worse than nothing.

Let’s close this section with a few minor points.

Contraceptive advocates point to the Netherlands, with one of the lowest abortion rates in the world. Given the stereotypes of the Dutch, they probably didn’t get that way through careful abstinence, and indeed their government is unusually generous in providing free contraceptives.

It turns out people can just survey women having abortions and ask them if they used contraceptives or not! 54% of abortion patients were using contraception at the time, which pro-life websites get very excited about: “IT’S MORE THAN HALF!” But putting these numbers in context may diminish their enthusiasm: the four-fifths of American women who use contraception account for 54% of abortions; the fifth of women who don’t use it account for the other 46%. The Guttmacher Institute gets more or less the same numbers, but frames them in a very convincingly pro-contraceptive way:

The two-thirds of U.S. women at risk of unintended pregnancy who use contraception consistently and correctly throughout the course of any given year account for only 5% of all unintended pregnancies. The 19% of women at risk who use contraception but do so inconsistently account for 44% of all unintended pregnancies, while the 16% of women at risk who do not use contraception at all for a month or more during the year account for 52% of all unintended pregnancies.

So it seems clear that the more (and better) you use contraception, the less likely you are to have an abortion.

Summary

I think we can use these results to build a consistent picture.

Contraceptive and abortion rates often rise simultaneously. This rise is not necessarily causal, and is more likely to be due to both being parts of the same philosophy – people want to have lots of sex but not have kids. As this philosophy becomes more widespread, as it has nearly everywhere in the 20th century with the Sexual Revolution and Demographic Transition, both contraception and abortion will rise. As it gains ground, both contraception and abortion will become more legal and available, making them rise even further. It is unclear to what degree the availability of contraception itself causes the rise of this philosophy. I’m intrigued by this claim that penicillin rather than the pill started the Sexual Revolution, but if someone wants to claim that it was all due to contraceptives, I don’t have enough expertise in the area to prove her wrong.

On the other hand, once a society has undergone this transition and settled on “lots of sex, few kids” as being its dominant values, then the local application of more contraception seems to decrease abortion rates. We know this because of the surveys of abortion patients saying they are disproportionately likely not to be contraceptive users. We know this because of the decline in teenage pregnancies with the advent of the Pill. And we also notice the game-changing nature of new, more effective contraceptives with near-zero failure rates replacing older, more fallible ones, and the not-provably-causal but certainly suggestive secular decline in abortion rates that corresponds with that replacement.

Overall my guess would be that a society that legalizes contraceptives would see an increase in abortion rates (which might or might not be causal depending on that society’s situation), but that in a society like our own, where contraceptives are already legal and the demographic transition is pretty much complete, increasing access to contraceptives is probably going to decrease abortion. And increasing access to extremely effective contraceptives like the implant or RISUG, especially when they replace less effective contraceptives like the condom, are very very probably going to decrease abortion.

Mark Twain:

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

If this is true of all science, it is doubly true of social psychology.

At its best, social psychology is an unmatched window into human motivations, a “look under the hood” of the way people talk and act. The best research in social psychology is as well-supported as anything in physics or biology, and much more intuitively comprehensible. This is why it’s one of my favorite scientific fields.

But at its worst, social psychology is a flamethrower. People grab hold of it to try to fry their political opponents, then end up lighting their own hair on fire or burning down half a city. Because social psych is really hard to do right.

Social psychology experiments in the laboratory tend to throw up spectacular mind-boggling effects. Many of these fail to replicate and are later discredited. The ones that do replicate are not always generalizable – sometimes an even slightly different situation will remove the effect or create exactly the opposite effect. The effects that remain robust in the laboratory may be too short-lasting or too specific to have any importance in real life. And the ones that do matter in real life may respond unpredictably or even paradoxically to attempts to control them.

This is relevant because a lot of our political discourse revolves around ideas lifted from social psychology. Every time someone advocates banning violent videogames so that they don’t normalize violence, they’re using social psych. Anyone who says the media needs more positive role models of minority groups and fewer stereotypes, they’re taking terms out of the social psych lexicon. Whenever you complain that magazines objectify women, you’re implicitly buying into several social psych theories.

Most people are not consequentialists, but most people feel implicitly uncomfortable making moral arguments on non-consequentialist grounds. “Stop what you’re doing, it disgusts and offends me” is less noble than “stop what you’re doing, it will hurt people who can’t stand up for themselves”. This tempts people who are disgusted and offended by things to come up with just-so stories from social psychology for why the disgusting and offensive thing will also hurt people.

I tried writing a post arguing against several of these just-so stories, but it ended up being unbearably long and boring (if you’re ever stuck with insomnia, ask me to give you a trenchant analysis of every study that’s ever been written about stereotype threat). So I’m going to try something different. I’m going to write up some just-so stories using social psychology for the opposite side. I’m going to try to use well-established social psych results to prove that we should have more violence in the media, and be more tolerant of offending women and minorities.

I think some of the arguments below will be completely correct, others correct only in certain senses and situations, and still others intriguing but wrong. I think that modern pop social psychology probably contains the same three categories in about the same breakdown, so I don’t feel too bad about this.

Violence In The Media Prevents Violent Crime

Dahl and DellaVigna (2008), well aware of laboratory experiments that found violent media temporarily made subjects more violent, decided to investigate whether the opening weekends of blockbuster violent movies affected crime rates. Sure enough, they found they did…

…in the opposite of the expected direction. They found violent movies decreased crime 5% or more on their opening weekends, and that each violent movie that comes out probably prevents about 1000 assaults. Further, there’s no displacement effect – the missing crimes don’t pop back the following week, they simply never occur.

They hypothesize that every hour violent criminals are at the kind of movies that appeal to violent criminals is one hour more they’re not getting drunk or taking drugs or committing violent crimes. Although they don’t mention it directly, other analyses have suggested that the movies have a sort of cathartic effect, satisfying their urge for violence without them having to commit it themselves.

An investigation into violent video games found essentially the same pattern: violent video games decrease crime while nonviolent video games have no effect.

There are also studies that show that playing lots of violent video games is correlated with violent criminality, but a much more plausible explanation of the data is that a naturally violent personality makes people more likely to enjoy violence both in games and in real life.

Decreasing violence in the media might therefore be predicted to increase violent crime, both by putting more criminals out on the streets and by sabotaging their attempts to indulge their violent urges in an acceptable manner.

Media That Objectifies Women Prevents Rape

Just as violent movies prevent violent crime, pornography may prevent rape. It’s easy to prove that in the US every 10% increase in Internet access causes a 7.3% decline in rape, and it’s not due to any of the expected confounders. Another study points out a similar correlation in Japan. I find the particular correlation they mention very sketchy, but Japan does have a very low rate of reported sex crimes (a commenter brings up the possibility that Japanese culture merely discourages reporting). Other more rigorous studies on the Czech Republic show the same, and studies on child porn show pedophilia is less common where it’s more accessible. And these studies links to more interesting results, mentioning how sex criminals are less likely to consume pornography than the general population and start watching pornography at a later age.

This is explicable not only by the substitution effect mentioned above, but by the general tendency of orgasm to relieve frustration. If, as has been hypothesized, rape is an expression of anger and powerlessness at the world in general or women in particular, orgasming to violent porn is going to both satisfy that aggressive impulsive and replace it with general post-coital relaxation.

Saying Tests Are Biased Against Minorities Makes Minorities Perform Worse On Tests

It is relatively clear that achievement gaps on standardized tests – black-white, male-female, and the others – are not due to bias in the tests themselves. Although some sociologists raise the specter of “tests that claim to be fair by asking both rich and poor people the same questions about golf and yachting”, in real life achievement gaps remain mostly consistent across verbal tests, pure mathematical tests, symbol manipulation tests, and extremely basic and un-bias-able tests like ability to remember numbers backwards.

This has not stopped the constant repetition that various specific tests – SAT, GRE, IQ – are biased against minorities.

We know exactly what happens when minorities are told tests are biased against them: they do worse on those tests. This is the essence of the idea of “stereotype threat” – for example, one can improve women’s performance on a math test simply by telling them that the test is not biased against women. So maybe we should stop doing exactly the thing that we just proved hurts women and minorities’ educational performance.

Fighting Stereotypes Makes People More Prejudiced

The largest-ever study on diversity training, following 830 large companies over 31 years, found:

A comprehensive review of 31 years of data from 830 mid-size to large U.S. workplaces found that the kind of diversity training exercises offered at most firms were followed by a 7.5 percent drop in the number of women in management. The number of black, female managers fell by 10 percent, and the number of black men in top positions fell by 12 percent. Similar effects were seen for Latinos and Asians.

Similarly, all studies on sensitivity training find that trainees express more awareness of sexual harassment than non-employees, but a study that went further and examined results found that trainees are “less likely to perceive coercive sexual harassment, less willing to report sexual harassment, and more likely to blame the victim”.

This is not particularly unexpected: we know for example that nearly every study on DARE programs has found that they increase drug use, sometimes as much as 30%.

Why should this be? Three reasons come to mind. The first is a boomerang effect from the programs themselves. Diversity training, sensitivity training, and DARE are all things busy people are required to attend where they (essentially) are forced listen to people behave condescendingly to them. This makes them dislike the training, their instructors, and, by association, the opinions they are trying to get trained into them.

A second reason is more fundamental. The backfire effect is when people challenged with information that disproves a cherished political belief of theirs react by becoming even more certain of the belief. The link will fill you in on potential explanations.

And the third reason is what the Harvard Business Review Blog, in its discussion of the diversity training study above, described as “when people divide into categories to illustrate the idea of diversity, it reinforces the idea of the categories.”

I’ll admit I had a sheltered upbringing and may be atypical, but I would estimate about 90% of the racist stereotypes I have ever heard were part of efforts to fight racism. No one just comes up to you and says “Hey, you know black people? Pretty unintelligent, huh?” (at least not to me). But social justice people will repeat the stereotype about black people not being intelligent again, and again, and again, to anyone who is anywhere near them, in the guise of fighting it.

I can’t find the link for this, but negatively phrased information can sometimes reinforce the positive version of that information. For example, if you tell people “President Obama is not a Muslim”, then a year later, all someone will remember is “blah Obama blah blah blah Muslim”, and eventually “Ohmigod, President Obama is a Muslim!”, even if they didn’t believe that before they heard that fact “corrected”.

Imagine I told you “People from Comoros are not all homosexual! This is a damn lie, and anyone who says people from Comoros are homosexual is an insensitive jerk. Please join me in fighting the popular perception that everyone from Comoros is a flaming gay.

Go ahead, try to think of Comoros in any context other than an archipelago full of gay people now. I’ll wait. Take a whole lifetime, if you want. It won’t help. Ten years after this blog is deleted and this post is inaccessible except through archive.org, there will still be a couple dozen people who are convinced that everyone from Comoros is gay, because they “heard it somewhere”. At the very least, the idea of Comoros = homosexuality is now firmly implanted in your mind, and it will be impossible to meet a Comorosian without secretly evaluating her sexual orientation and then trying to stop yourself from doing it.

Now imagine instead of hearing this once, you heard it every day of your life.

Calling People Racist Makes Them More Racist

Foster & Misra (2013) is a jewel of a paper I stumbled across totally by chance.

They got a bunch of undergraduate students in romantic relationships and gave them a test that asked them some questions about infidelity – things like “is it unfaithful to fantasize about another girl/boy when you’re in a relationship?”. They pretended to grade the test, but in fact they ignored the test and gave fake feedback.

The control group was told that they had some of the highest faithfulness scores of anyone in the experiment, they must be really faithful, good job. The experimental group was told they had some of the lowest faithfulness scores of anyone in the experiment and that the test had pegged them as having an unfaithful personality type. Once again, all this feedback was fake and both groups got around the same average score.

Then they measured what they called “trivialization” in both groups – that is, they asked them questions about how important faithfulness was to them. Consistent with their theory, the people who were told they were faithful said faithfulness was extremely important, but the people who were told they were unfaithful “trivialized” the behavior – who cares about fidelity anyway, infidelity is maybe a minor mistake but it doesn’t really hurt anyone, people should really stop whining about infidelity all the time. To give you a feeling for the size of this effect, on a scale of one to seven, the faithful group rated the importance of being faithful at 5.4/7, and the unfaithful group rate the importance of being faithful at 2.9/7. In other words, by accusing them of being unfaithful, the experimenters had successfully gotten the participants to “trivialize” faithfulness.

The researchers theorized that this was the process called “cognitive dissonance”. Most people like themselves and want to continue to like themselves. If they are told that they, or their group, has a particular flaw, then instead of ceasing to like themselves it may be easier to just decide that flaw is not a big deal and they can have it while continuing to be the awesome people they secretly know they are.

Now not only do the experimental subjects here stop caring about being faithful, but everyone pushing a pro-fidelity line is a threat to their new identity. And the subjects weren’t even really unfaithful to begin with!

Modern political discourse tends to do a lot of things like say “All white people are racist” or all men are naturally prone to violence and potential rapists. Or it may take little things normal people do and tell them they are racist or creepy or rape-y or something because of it.

What this does is drive people into identifying with these negative labels. And instead of making them want to change their behavior to stop identifying with these labels, it may just make them think “Well, if I do it, then I guess it can’t be so bad.”

Talking About Rape Culture Causes Rape

There is a strong debate still going on about whether the death penalty decreases crime. But this hides a more settled question, which is whether punishment decreases crime at all. The relatively accepted answer is yes, it does.

Criminologists have tried to separate out the important of punishment into two aspects: severity and certainty. They have consistently found that the certainty of the punishment is more important than the severity – the most important factor in whether someone commits a crime is the likelihood she will be punished.

No criminal can see into the future to discover whether or not they will be punished; the only way certainty of punishment can influence crime is through public perception of certainty of punishment. That suggests that if you discover that an abominable crime has (contrary to popular perception) a very low chance of punishment, it would be an excellent time to practice the virtue of silence.

Or consider the claim that rape jokes cause rape. As I understand it, the claim goes that someone tells a rape joke, then everyone else laughs, no one protests or anything, and then potential rapists in the audience conclude that they are in a culture that considers rape acceptable.

You know what else could potentially cause people to think our culture considers rape acceptable? Writing and publicizing countless books and articles arguing elegantly and vehemently for the point that our culture considers rape acceptable. Seriously. If I were a demon from Hell, charged by my infernal masters with increasing rape as much as possible, I literally could not think of a better strategy than talking about rape culture all the time.

Getting angry at the rape jokes while enthusiastically taking part in the demonic campaign thing seems like (to mix metaphors) missing the mountain for the molehill.

Summary

In this post, I’ve give six social psychological just-so stories: media violence prevents crime, objectification of women prevents rape, accusations of test bias hurts minorities, fighting stereotypes makes people more prejudiced, calling people racist makes them more racist, and talking about rape culture increases rape.

These can be easily compared to six much more common social psychological just-so stories: media violence causes crime, objectification of women causes rape, accusations of minorities doing worse on tests for intrinsic reasons like their culture hurt minorities, fighting stereotypes makes people less prejudiced, calling people racist shames them out of their racism, and making rape jokes increases rape.

I don’t consider any of my six completely proven, just intriguing and intuitively plausible. And of course, there’s an element of concern-trolling in all of them.

But I don’t consider any of the second six completely proven either; again, they are merely intriguing and intuitively plausible. And they have their own element of being suspiciously congruent to the political beliefs of the people who push them, as if they’re trying to come up with consequentialist justifications for ideas they hold for other reasons.

Some will point to various studies conducted on one or another of them, but with very few exceptions all those studies have been poorly replicated investigations into the very-short-term (less than ten minutes) effect of laboratory interventions on proxy variables. These can be diametrically opposite their real social effects – for example, the laboratory experiments that experimental exposure to violence causes people to play contrived games in a more aggressive manner couldn’t catch that in the real world, violent movies decrease crime. And poorly replicated short-term laboratory interventions on proxy variables can prove nearly anything – see for example the recent controversy around whether the word “Florida” makes people walk more slowly.

The six stories above suggest some pretty radical and unpalatable action approaching social engineering. For example, the idea that research into test bias should be suppressed, even if it is scientifically rigorous, just because hearing about it might hurt women – seems pretty unfair (same with the idea that no one should be allowed to talk about rape culture) And it seems unreasonable to ask people to constantly watch their language around white people to avoid anything that sounds like accusing them of racism because that could have unpredictable negative effects on them down the line.

But the six traditional stories also suggest pretty radical and unpalatable action approaching social engineering. For example, the idea that research into gender differences should be suppressed, even if it is scientifically rigorous, because hearing about it might hurt women. Also unpopular is the idea of constantly having to watch your language around minorities to avoid anything that sounds like you’re saying something racist because that could have unpredictable negative effects down the line.

And my point is that I don’t see good enough evidence that the effects involved are real to justify either of them.

Using speculative extrapolations from social psychology to promote social engineering is dangerous and proves too much. Of course, one should still be nice, and a big part of niceness is judicious exercise of the virtue of silence . But trying to institute and enforce said virtue on a social level requires subtlety that I have not yet seen anyone involved show the slightest sign of possessing.

Post Scriptum

Think quick! What is your brain’s number one thought upon hearing “Comoros”?

“Saying ‘I’m sorry’ is the same as saying ‘I apologize.’ Except at a funeral.”
– Demetri Martin

Today was the Day of Atonement. As an atheist, I find it hard to appreciate atonement in its cosmic, maybe-not-even-possible sense. But I can certainly appreciate the power of a good apology.

A few days ago, there was a…

Actually, I just realized that since this involves a real case going on at a real hospital with possible legal ramifications, it would be a terrible idea for me to describe it, so I’m going to change it around so far that it bears no resemblance to the original except a certain ambiguity around the idea of apologies.

So, a few days ago, there was a mishap at my hospital. A patient was having some pain, but was already heavily sedated already and further painkillers might be dangerous. I am still a lowly intern and wasn’t sure what to do, so I called up my attending, who told me to go ahead and administer the drugs. This was late at night, so immediately after doing that I signed the patient over to night shift and went home.

The next morning I came in and learned the patient had gotten loopy from being over-sedated and fallen down trying to walk to the bathroom. This can start a minor panic in a hospital, because we tend to have elderly people who don’t tolerate falls very well, and a bad one can mean anything from broken bones to a big lawsuit.

But in fact, the patient hadn’t gotten any broken bones or head injuries or anything like that. He had scraped his elbow. My attending came in a little after me, heard there was a fall, and freaked out that was some critical injury. I said “Oh, don’t worry, he just scraped his elbow.” The attending was very relieved, and we went into an office and discussed how to change our painkiller policies and prevent problems like this in the future.

A nurse heard the comment and when the patient’s wife came to ask about what had happened, she told the wife that the doctor had said the injuries weren’t a big deal. The wife then very reasonably filed a complaint against me, because all she knew about me was that I had administered the drug that caused the problem and that I had dismissed the resulting fall as “not a big deal”.

The complaint made its way up to a Head Honcho, who called me in for a meeting. I explained that I had consulted my attending about using the drug, and that what I had said had been said in private as an attempt to communicate that the patient was okay. The documentation supported me on both counts and I was Cleared Of Wrongdoing (thank God).

I then said I would call up the patient’s wife to apologize. The Head Honcho told me that I was quite right to want to call the patient’s wife to explain what had happened, but that I hadn’t done anything wrong and I shouldn’t sell myself short by saying “I’m sorry” or “I apologize” or any permutation thereof. It wasn’t about legal issues – the wife has already said she’s not suing us. He was just a nice guy and and thought it would be unfair to make me “confess” to something not my fault.

This incident has gotten me thinking about what exactly “I’m sorry” is supposed to mean.

First, it can mean “This problem was entirely the fault of my own moral failings. I admit to these moral failings, will try to give you whatever recompense I can, and will do everything possible to make this not happen again.”

For example, I cheat on my wife. Then I realize that was wrong and I apologize to her. It’s unambiguously my fault I cheated, and I accept that fault.

Second, it can mean “You are sad. I am sad that you are sad. I wish that this had not happened.”

For example, as per the quote at the top, I go to a funeral and tell the family I’m sorry about their loss.

Third, it can mean “You are sad. The reason seems to be very tangentially related to me or my actions, but no reasonable person would call it my fault. I am sad that you are hurt and if I could have prevented that I would have.”

For example, a doctor tries her best to save a patient, but the patient still dies. She tells the family “I’m sorry I couldn’t do more.” Or my friend in China is upset and I say “I’m sorry I can’t be there to help you get through this.” Or the hero tells the villain “I’m sorry it had to end this way” before shooting him.

Crucially but annoyingly, the first and third meaning are almost opposite each other. The first one is a way of saying “This is my fault”. The third one is a way of saying “This isn’t my fault.” They are both polite, deferential, and respectful of the pain that the victim is suffering. But only one of them admits wrongdoing.

Unfortunately, the English language really doesn’t have a great way of politely and deferentially being respectful of someone else’s pain that you are tangentially related to other than saying “I’m sorry”.

And also unfortunately, the English language really doesn’t have a great way of saying “This was not my fault” without sounding impolite, disrespectful, and like you’re trivializing the other person’s pain.

This is why myself and the Head Honcho are having so much trouble getting together a good statement to give to the patient’s wife. All of his proposed statements sound something like

“I heard you were concerned about my conduct in the case of Mr. X. I appreciate your distress, but I was not the one who chose to administer that drug, and when I described your husband’s injury I only meant that it wasn’t medically critical. The implication that it wasn’t a big deal was a misinterpretation by the nurse who gave you that statement.”

This is completely honest, yet it oozes “I am a callous businessperson who is concerned entirely with covering his own ass and doesn’t care about your pain.”

But all of my proposed statements sound something like:

I’m very sorry that your husband fell. I handed off the decision to give painkillers to a more senior doctor, but I recognize that this was partially my fault as well. Likewise, although I only meant to say that your husband’s injuries were not medically critical, I realize I could have chosen my words better. Please accept my apologies for this distressing incident.”

This makes me sound like a potentially decent person and a responsible doctor. But as the Head Honcho points out, there’s a sort of dishonesty in admitting more blame on paper than I’m willing to admit in my heart. Like, it’s true that I could have chosen my words more carefully, but if someone else were to accuse me of this, I would instantly object that since I had no idea someone would overhear them, distort them, and report the distorted version to someone else, there’s no reason I should have wanted to. The level of misinterpretation that happened to me could have happened to practically anyone at any time if they had the same bad luck – that utterance was not unusually careless by normal human standards.

The miniature angel on my right shoulder tells me I should do everything I can to let this woman know that I care about and regret her suffering, even at the cost of my own pride. It tells me I should accept “heroic responsibility” – that anything that happens is my fault at least far enough that I can learn from it and use it to be a better person next time. But the miniature Robin Hanson on my left shoulder tells me that I am just signaling my own virtue and responsibility while secretly I don’t believe any of what I’m saying.

Right now I’m leaning towards the angel (not that it matters; I can recommend, but the Head Honcho will make the final decision). I think my outlook is that people are reasonable: the patient’s wife, upon hearing what really happened, will read between the lines and realize it wasn’t quite my fault, but will appreciate my phrasing it in a way that emphasizes the importance I place on her concerns. I have talked to the patient’s wife before, I respect her, and I trust her to be a good apology-accepter.

The Head Honcho, who doesn’t know the patient’s wife, might worry otherwise. Perhaps she will be the sort of person who, when I give my apology, won’t buy it. She’ll shout “You could have chosen your words better?! No sh*t, Sherlock!! You chose those words in a very hurtful way, you’re irresponsible, and I’m going to ask the hospital to fire you for not caring about offending people!!”

Not only have I just made her angrier, but I’ve also abandoned my one advantage in this situation – the fact that I didn’t really do anything wrong. By admitting to some wrongdoing, I can no longer make the defense I made above – the one where I couldn’t reasonably expected my words to be twisted in that particular way – without being accused of backtracking and flipflopping and outright lying.

II.

I feel privileged to be hanging around basically decent people like my patient’s wife, and so to have a lot of options in terms of how to apologize. You know who has it really bad? Politicians. I cringe every time I see a story in the media about politicians apologizing or not apologizing.

Politicians can either give the first sort of statement I mentioned – a very dry “It’s not my fault” sort of statement – and look like shifty sleazy people even if, in fact, it was not their fault.

Or they can try to give an apology of the same type I was considering above, and then have all their words twisted and used against them forever until they eventually have to backtrack on it and get torn to pieces for doing so.

Suppose that an attractive female Senator is bringing a motion to the floor, and a male Senator mutters to himself under his breath “I’d like to motion her to the floor.” Unbeknownst to him, his Official Senate Lapel Microphone is on and broadcasts his statement to the entire C-SPAN watching public (so, like, five people).

Of course, the entire nation instantly suspends talking about boring things like the war in Syria or anthropogenic global warming to focus on the new scandal. “Sexism In The Senate?” the cover of TIME says. “Are Female Senators Just Objects For Men’s Amusement?” asks the cover of US News. And eventually the sound of a million screeching voices and the occasional death threat convinces Male Senator With Microphone that he should probably apologize or something.

Male Senator With Microphone probably feels terrible. He embarassed himself in front of his colleagues, he offended the female Senator he was talking about, disrupted the proceedings of the Senate, annoyed millions of average Americans, and maybe in some vague way contributed to sexism. He certainly has every reason and every right to feel bad.

On the other hand, noticing – just to one’s self! – that other people are attractive seems like a harmless and rather universal thing to do, and is hardly anything to feel bad about.

The most honest apology he could give would probably be “I’m sorry I said that aloud instead of just thinking it. I didn’t realize my microphone was on at the time. I will be more careful in noticing when my microphone is and isn’t on in the future.”

But of course that would mean the end of his political career. Everyone would say he was so tone-deaf and out-of-touch that he couldn’t realize the problem was that he was sexist, and not that he got caught being sexist. And the cries for his head would grow three times louder.

He could go a little further than that and remain honest. He could say something like “I am sorry that lots of people were offended by my statement. I did not mean to hurt anyone’s feelings and I will try to do better in the future.”

And then the newspapers, in front page headlines, would gleefully point out that he had only apologized “that people were offended” and not actually admitted wrongdoing. People would shake their heads and talk about how politicians always gave stuttering non-apologies, and eight different activist groups would hold large public demonstrations demanding he show real contrition instead of trying to “deflect the issue”.

Or he could go all out. He could say “I’m incredibly sorry that I wronged Senator Y in that way. Clearly I have some sexism issues I need to work on. I promise I will never do it again and I hope the American people can forgive me for being a bad Senator and a bad person.”

And then he would be torn to pieces.

First, everyone will demand he resign, throwing his own words about being sexist and a bad person back at him. Then, if he doesn’t resign, they will demand he “atone” for his misdeeds by oh, let’s say doing everything that feminist lobby groups want all the time, with the threat of getting constant “I GUESS SENATOR X WASN’T REALLY SINCERE ABOUT WORKING ON HIS SEXISM” any time he can’t comply quickly enough.

And the worst part will be that he will have no defense, because deep in his heart he knows he has given up his pride, his integrity, and his right to stand up for himself in order to very temporarily quiet the hordes.

This Hobson’s Choice between three terrible options is all the average politician has when accused of anything – whether or not the original accusation is even fair (and I have a gut understanding of this, having previously been a politician myself).

So is it any wonder that the average politician usually responds by denying all wrongdoing and accusing someone else?

III.

I am okay at apologizing for intellectual mistakes. There I can get new data and realize I was wrong. This is one reason I so want to apologize for prescribing the wrong painkiller. I thought listening to my attending’s advice and giving that painkiller would be okay. Events proved me wrong. I can apologize for my misjudgment without a hint of dishonesty.

The same is true of honest mistakes, like coming to work late because I accidentally set my alarm wrong. If anything, I over-apologize for these until everyone is sick of hearing me and tries to reassure me with “Really, it’s just an alarm. Not the end of the world.”

But I’m not very good at apologizing for moral mistakes. When I think courses of action are clearly wrong, I don’t do them. When I think courses of action are clearly right, I do them, but then I tend to continue thinking they are right and don’t see anything to apologize for.

Actually, my Yom Kippur was kind of a bust. I tried really hard to repent and I couldn’t really think of anything especially bad I did. It’s not that I’m a bad person, just that my life is kind of boring. I got exasperated with a couple of people more quickly than they deserved, but I feel bad repenting for it when I know that the next time someone is equally annoying I will probably get exasperated equally quickly. I mostly just have nice conversations with nice people, browse the Internet, and do my job moderately well.

I am tempted to ask other people if I have wronged them. It might provide useful data. The problem is, I’m afraid they’re going to say yes, and they will explain the way I wronged them, and then I will say “No, you’re wrong, I acted entirely correctly in that situation”, which would sort of break the whole point of repentance.

But although I am bad at apologizing, I think I am pretty good at accepting apologies. Accepting apologies requires understanding the Principle of Charity, not to mention the Fundamental Attribution Error. It requires going into a person’s shoes, imagining whether you could have done the same thing in the same circumstances, and gradually paring away at your anger until you can picture the absolute minimum amount of wrongdoing and malice they could have had consistent with them doing what they did, which is usually the amount they actually had.

It requires thinking “Yeah, I sometimes notice other people are hot, and so me and that senator are morally equivalent, and since I don’t blame myself for sometimes admiring people’s appearances, well, there but for the grace of not having a microphone in my lapel go I.”

Or “Well, I didn’t know everything about my job immediately after I started either, so if I had called my boss and asked for help and she had been wrong, I wouldn’t want anyone to take it out on me.”

Since English has no good way to express regret and compassion without also expressing fault, I think it is appropriate to apologize for things you don’t think were completely your fault – and I also think it is appropriate to accept those apologies in the spirit in which they were offered.

0: What is this FAQ?

This is the Anti-Reactionary FAQ. It is meant to rebut some common beliefs held by the political movement called Reaction or Neoreaction.

0.1: What are the common beliefs of the political movement called Reaction or Neoreaction?

Neoreaction is a political ideology supporting a return to traditional ideas of government and society, especially traditional monarchy and an ethno-nationalist state. It sees itself opposed to modern ideas like democracy, human rights, multiculturalism, and secularism. I tried to give a more complete summary of its beliefs in Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet Sized Nutshell.

0.1.1: Will this FAQ be a rebuttal the arguments in that summary?

Some but not all. I worry I may have done too good a job of steelmanning Reactionary positions in that post, emphasizing what I thought were strong arguments, sometimes even correct arguments, but not really the arguments Reactionaries believed or considered most important.

In this FAQ, I will be attacking not steel men but what as far as I can tell are actual Reactionary positions. Some of them seem really dumb to me and I excluded them from the previous piece, but they make it in here. Other points from the previous post are real Reactionary beliefs and make it in here as well.

0.2: Do all Reactionaries believe the same things?

Obviously not. In particular, the movement seems to be divided between those who want a feudal/aristocratic monarchy, those who want an absolute monarchy, and those who want some form of state-as-corporation. Even more confusingly, sometimes the same people seem to switch among the three without giving any indication they are aware that they are doing so. In particular the difference between feudal monarchies and divine-right-of-kings monarchies seems to be sort of lost on many of them.

In general, this FAQ chooses two Reactionary bloggers as its foils – Mencius Moldbug of Unqualified Reservations, and Michael Anissimov of More Right. Mencius is probably the most famous Reactionary, one of the founders of the movement, and an exceptionally far-thinking and knowledgeable writer. Michael is also quite smart, very prolific, and best of all for my purposes unusually willing to state Reactionary theories plainly and explicitly in so many words and detail the evidence that he thinks supports them.

Mencius usually supports a state-as-corporation model and Michael seems to be more to the feudal monarchy side, with both occasionally paying lip service to divine-right-of-kings absolutism as well. Part 2 of this FAQ mostly draws from Michael’s feudal perspective and Part 4 is entirely based on Moldbug’s corporation-based ideas.

0.3: Are you going to treat Reaction and Progressivism as real things?

Grudgingly, yes.

One of the problems in exercises like this is how much to take political labels seriously. Both “Reaction” and “Progressivism” are vast umbrella concepts on whose definition no one can agree. Both combine many very diverse ideas, and sometimes exactly who falls on what side will be exactly the point at issue.

Part of Part 3 will be an attempt to define Progressivism, but for now I’m going to just sweep all of this under the rug and pretend that “Reactionary” and “Progressive” (or for that matter “leftist” and “rightist”) have obvious well-defined meanings that are exactly what you think they are.

The one point where this becomes very important is in the discussion over the word “demotist” in Part 2. Although debating the meaning of category words is almost never productive, I feel like in that case I have more than enough excuse.

1: Is everything getting worse?

It is a staple of Reactionary thought that everything is getting gradually worse. As traditional ideas cede to their Progressive replacements, the fabric of society tears apart on measurable ways. Michael Anissimov writes:

The present system has every incentive to portray itself as superior to all past systems. Reactionaries point out this is not the case, and actually see present society in a state of severe decline, pointing to historically high levels of crime, suicide, government and household debt, increasing time preference, and low levels of civic participation and self-reported happiness as a few examples of a current cultural and historical crisis.

Reactionaries usually avoid getting this specific, and with good reason. Now that Michael has revealed the domains in which he is critiquing modern society, we can start to double-check them to see whether Progressivism has indeed sent everything to Hell in a handbasket.

But I must set some strict standards here. To support the Reactionary thesis, I will want to see long-term and unmistakeable negative trends in these indicators. Nearly all Reactionaries agree that the advance of Progressivism has been a long-term affair, going on since the French Revolution if not before. If the Reactionaries can muster some data saying that something has been getting better up until 2005 but declining from 2005 to the present, that doesn’t cut it. If something else was worsening from 1950 to 1980 but has been improving since then, that doesn’t cut it either. I will not require a completely monotonic downward trend, but neither will I accept a blip of one or two years in a generally positive trend as proving all modern civilization is bankrupt.

Likewise, if something has been getting worse in Britain but not the United States, or vice versa, that will not suffice either. Progressivism is supposed to be a worldwide movement, stronger than the vagaries of local politics. I will not require complete concordance between all Western countries, but if the Anglosphere countries, France, Germany, and Japan seem split about fifty-fifty between growth and decay in a certain indicator, blaming Progressivism isn’t going to cut it.

So, without further ado, let’s start where Michael starts: with suicide.

1.1: Is suicide becoming more common?

Here’s the US suicide rate from 1960 to 2002:

In those forty years, considered by many the heyday of the leftist movement, forty years encompassing the Great Society, the civil rights movement, the explosion of feminism onto the public consciousness, the decline of the traditional family, etc, etc…suicide rates dropped about 20%.

What evidence have the Reactionaries cite for their side? Michael cites a New York Times article pointing out that suicide rates rose from 1999 to 2010. Apparently my new job is reminding Reactionaries that they cannot blindly trust New York Times articles to give them the whole truth.

Suicide rates did rise from 1999 to 2010. But if we’re going to blame leftism for rising suicide rates it’s kind of weird that it would choose the decade we had a Republican President, House, Senate, and Supreme Court to start increasing. A more likely scenario is that it had something to do with the GIANT NEVER-ENDING RECESSION going on at the time.

As we mentioned above, since Reactionaries believe that Progressivism has been advancing simultaneously in many different countries it is worthwhile to check whether other nations show the same trends as the United States. If every country that was becoming more Progressive showed increased suicide rates, this would be strong evidence that Progressivism were to blame. But if some Progressive countries experienced lower suicide rates, that would suggest country-specific problems.

In Britain, we find not only that suicide has generally been going down for the past thirty years, but that – as predicted above – there is a bit of an upward tick corresponding with the Great Recession.

Even better, we find that suicide peaked in Britain in 1905 – just after the Victorian period – and has been declining ever since.

I try to be nice. I really do. But I will say it – the Reactionary argument that suicide has been increasing during modernity from a low during some fantasized Victorian Golden Age is unacceptably shoddy.

1.2: Is everyone falling further and further into debt?

Here again the Reactionaries overstate their case. Michael tried to support his point with…

…which shows government debt rising ceaselessly and alarmingly through the simple tricks of not adjusting for inflation or rising GDP. Keep yourself honest by taking those steps, and the situation looks more like this:

To his credit, Michael fixed this when I pointed it out. But to me, the new graph looks like gradual decrease in debt since World War II up until Reagan’s big military buildup, followed by a gradual retreat from that military buildup. My God, won’t somebody stop Progressivism before it’s too late?!?!

1.3: Is crime becoming worse?

Michael’s statistics for crime deserve more attention:

Question number one: what does this graph mean by “indictable offenses”? This very broad term introduces no fewer than three dangerous biases. First, we have reporting bias – the more police there are and the more active there are, the more crimes get heard about and reported. Second, we have definition bias within individual crimes – for example, larceny in Britain fell by two thirds in 1855, but this was because Parliament passed a law raising the minimum amount of property that had to be larcened for it to count. Third, we have broader definition bias in what is or isn’t a crime – how much of that rise around 1970 was the “indictable offense” of people smoking marijuana, something that was previously neither illegal nor widely available?

Criminologists’ recommended way around this problem is to look at murder. The murder rate tends to track the crime rate in general. Murder isn’t as subject to reporting bias – if someone is killed, the police are going to want to hear about it no matter how understaffed they are. And murder is less subject to changes in definition – dead is dead.

So let’s add the homicide rate to the above chart:

Alas, I can only find the numbers since 1950 rather than 1900. But as we can see, despite the huge rise in “violent crime”, homicide rates stay very steady and perhaps even decline a little over that period.

Question number two: Michael is American. All his other statistics make reference to American numbers. Why does he suddenly switch to Britain when we talk about crime? I won’t impugn his motives – long-term US crime data is really hard to find. But it’s worth pointing out that what there is, is much less sensational:

I wish I could find longer-term US crime rate data, but it doesn’t seem to be out there. I can, however, find longer-term homicide data:

We see ups and downs but no general pattern. A Reactionary might cite the apparently very low level of homicides in 1885, but historians pretty much agree that’s a reporting artifact and that the period ending in 1887 had the highest murder rate in American history. In any case, right now we seem to be enjoying a 50 year low. And lest someone bring up that medical technology has advanced enough to turn many would-be murders into attempted murders – which is true – aggravated assaults, the category of crime that would encompass attempted murders, are less than half of what they were twenty years ago. Kind of hard to square with everything getting worse and more violent all the time.

Actually, stopping at 1885 is for losers. Let’s go really long-term. From Marginal Revolution, themselves drawing from Manuel Eisner’s Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime:

We’ve got to go deeper! From HBD Chick, citing Steven Pinker:

1.3.1: But the Victorian Era had amazingly low crime rates! People could walk out in any corner of the country unmolested! Crime was basically a half-forgotten memory!

This is one of Mencius Moldbug’s favorite points. He cites approvingly an 1870s British text which says that

Meanwhile, it may with little fear of contradiction be asserted that there never was, in any nation of which we have a history, a time in which life and property were so secure as they are at present in England. The sense of security is almost everywhere diffused, in town and country alike, and it is in marked contrast to the sense of insecurity which prevailed even at the beginning of the present century. There are, of course, in most great cities, some quarters of evil repute in which assault and robbery are now and again committed. There is perhaps to be found a lingering and flickering tradition of the old sanctuaries and similar resorts. But any man of average stature and strength may wander about on foot and alone, at any hour of the day or the night, through the greatest of all cities and its suburbs, along the high roads, and through unfrequented country lanes, and never have so much as the thought of danger thrust upon him, unless he goes out of his way to court it.

Reactionaries take this idea and run with it – past societies were so well-organized that they had completely eliminated crime, whereas our own democratic government turns a blind eye while thousands of people are beaten and mugged and murdered and…

Again, let’s concentrate on “murdered”. It’s the only crime that gives us a shot at apples-to-apples comparison. So what was the Victorian murder rate?

Homicide is regarded as a most serious offence and it is probably reported more than other forms of crime. Between 1857 and 1890, there were rarely more than 400 homicides reported to the police each year, and during the 1890s the average was below 350. In Victorian England, the homicide rate reached 2 per 100,000 of the population only once, in 1865. Generally, it was about 1.5 per 100,000 falling to rarely more than 1 per 100,000 at the end of the 1880s and declining even further after 1900. These figures do not take into account the significant number of infanticides that went undetected. The statistics for homicide are therefore probably closer to the real level of the offence.

So, Victorian murder rate of between 1 and 2 per 100,000 people. And the current British murder rate? According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, it stands at 1.2 per 100,000 people, rather lower than the Victorian average.

1.3.1.1: But if the Victorian crime rate was as high or higher than it is today, how come Victorians felt completely safe and thought that crime had been eradicated?

Normally this is where I’d start talking about how we moderns are constantly exposed to so many outrageous and terrifying stories in the media that we don’t realize how good we have it. But in this case that turns out to be explaining away a nonproblem. The Victorians were absolutely terrified of crime and thought they were in the middle of a gigantic crime wave. Here’s Understanding The Victorians on the “garroting panic”:

Violent attacks by strangers were seen as grave cause for concern. There was a disproportionate amount of attention paid to violent nighttime assaults by strangers in urban areas, called “garroting” and similar to what we might call “mugging”. There were garroting panics in 1856 and 1862, in part because of extensive press coverage. In the highest profile case, MP Hugh Pilkington as attacked and robbed in London at one o’clock in the morning on July 17, 1862, after leaving a late session in the House of Commons. Press reports of garroting increased dramatically, and the public quickly became convinced there was a serious problem. Garroting panic was so rampant that it became a topic of satire: Punch published several cartoons of men running from their own shadows or from trees that they were convinced were garrotters.

And A History of Criminal Justice In England and Wales on the same topic:

Crimes of violence were perceived to be on the increase in the 1850s and panic set in when an outbreak of garrotting occurred in various parts of the country in the period from 1856 to 1862. Garrotting involved choking, suffocating, or strangling a victim. During these years, Punch magazine carried a whole series of cartoons and lengthy jokes about the crime, including many eccentric means of defense. One advertisement appeared offering the public an “anti-garrot collar”. This was a steel collar to be hand-fitted round the neck with a large number of sharp steel spikes pointing outwards. Despite such bizarre forms of protection, the offence caused a great deal of fear among the public and it was generally regarded as a very serious threat to law and order. Letters to The Times began to appear from gentlemen who had been so attacked and robbed. In response the judges began to order severe floggings in addition to penal servitude in an attempt to stem the growth of the crime. Their example was then followed by Parliament which, against the wishes of the government, enacted the Security From Violence Act 1863.

So if there was so much panic about crime, how come the person who wrote Moldbug’s favorite book felt Victorian Britain was crimeless?

I guess it all depends on your perspective. I live less than two miles outside Detroit city limits, and I’ve never been the victim of a single crime in my life or even felt particularly threatened. Some people just live sheltered existences.

But apparently most other Americans agree with me. According to Gallup, 89% of American men currently feel safe walking alone at night in the city where they live. If 89% of modern Americans feel that way, I’m not surprised Moldbug could find one Victorian Brit willing to express the opinion.

1.3.2: Why does this matter again?

For some reason, the Reactionaries have made crime an absolute linchpin of their case. A very large portion of Reactionary thought goes implicitly or explicitly through the argument “Progressives have legitimized minorities, minorities cause crime, crime is destroying our society, therefore Progressivism must be destroyed.”

The extent of the Reactionary obsession with crime never fails to amaze me. Moldbug writes:

Security and liberty do not conflict. Security always wins. As Robert Peel put it, the absence of crime and disorder is the test of public safety, and in anything like the modern state the risk of private infringement on private liberties far exceeds the official of public infringement. No cop ever stole my bicycle.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. On the other hand, non-desperate times call for non-desperate measures. And this is a time when everything is pretty much okay. Murder and violent crime are at historic lows, and almost 90% of American men feel safe walking outside at night. Crime is very nearly a non-issue, and when designing a system of government it is probably a bad idea to give them a blank check to ruin everything else in the pursuit of decreasing it.

1.4: Are people becoming less happy?

Michael’s source for decreasing happiness levels is Blanchflower & Oswald: Well Being Over Time In Britain And The USA. But read the abstract, and you find it’s more complicated: “Reported levels of well-being have declined over the last quarter of a century in the US; life satisfaction has run approximately flat through time in Britain.”

Once again, we find these supposed effects of a global trend are very much limited to individual countries.

Second, when we check the breakdown, we find, as the paper puts it, that “[American] men’s happiness has an upward trend, yet American women’s well-being has fallen through the years.” At a guess, I’d say this is because more women are working full-time jobs. This may be a bit of a victory for Reactionaries, who are no fans of feminism, but it is a very limited victory with little broader implication for other aspects of society. If you’re a man, there’s never been a happier time to be alive.

Further, Blanchflower and Oswald aren’t the only people trying to measure happiness. Ruut Veenhoven has collected 3,651 different happiness studies into a World Database of Happiness. Inglehart, Foa, and Welzel have sorted through some of the data and find that:

Among the countries for which we have long-term data, 19 of the 26 countries show rising happiness levels. In several of these countries – India, Ireland, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and South Korea – there are steeply rising trends. The other countries with rising trends are Argentina, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, South Africa, Spain, and Sweden. Three countries, the US, Switzerland, and Norway, show flat trends. Only four countries, Austria, Belgium, UK, and West Germany, show downward trends.

Investigating further:

By far the most extensive and detailed time series comes from the US, and the full series covering the 60 years from 1946 to 2006 shows a flat trend. But the subset from 1946 to 1980 show a downward trend, while the series from 1980 to 2006 shows a rising trend. A similar picture appears from the much scantier British dataset. The entire series from 1946 to 2006 shows a downward trend, but the series from 1980 to the present shows a clear upward trend.

So there you have it. In 19/26 countries, happiness has risen since 1946, and in both America and Britain, it’s been rising since 1980.

1.5: Is time preference decreasing?

Time preference is a mathematical formalization of whether people live only for the moment like the proverbial grasshopper, or build for the future like the proverbial ant. We’d probably prefer if people had pretty low time discounting (ie are more ant-like). Michael claims that in fact we’re becoming more grasshopper-like.

He cites as his source Wang, Rieger and Hans’ How Time Preferences Differ, which is a fascinating study but which does not, as far as I can tell, make anything like the claim Michael says it does. It seems to be entirely about comparing different countries. There is only one thing that looks even close to an intertemporal comparison:

In particular, 68% of our [2011] US sample chose to wait. For comparison, in the survey by Frederick (2005) where he used the same question…only around 41% of students chose to wait.

Here we see people saving more over time, ie becoming more ant-like, although it would be absurd to think this represented a real effect over such a small time period.

Michael may be referring to a claim buried in the study that collectivism is linked to lower discount rates than individualism. This study was done entirely on Israeli Arabs and Jews, with Jews as a proxy for “individualist cultures” and Arabs as a proxy for “collectivist cultures”. Suffice it to say this is not how broad human universals are established. A similar experiment compared Western-primed Singaporeans with Eastern-primed Singaporeans to “conclude” that Confucian cultures had a “longer-term outlook” and thus a lower discount rate. This would be all nice and well except that in the main study, Canadians had a lower discount rate than Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, or Koreans. So much for Confucians.

1.6: Is civic participation decreasing?

The argument is simple. Democracy fractures traditionalist societies, destroying civic cohesion, which in turn reduces voter turnout. Therefore, the only way to increase voter turnout is to abolish democracy.

No, actually the argument is more complex, and Michael cites Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone to make his point for him. Since there is no one statistic for civic participation, I can’t refute it with pure data the same as I tried to do with the others.

But I will point out that Putnam’s own thesis is that it is technology – our options of watching TV, playing video games, or hanging out on the computer – that make us less involved in our communities. He may be right. But blaming the politically neutral force of technology acquits Progressivism.

Even so, a word to defend technology. Right now I am typing a lengthy essay that will be read by a few thousand people. A couple dozen of those will discuss it in the comments. Among those will be people with whom I’ve had interesting discussions, friendships, and even a couple of romantic relationships. Through the ensuing debate, I will meet new people with whom I will likely keep in touch and discuss my extremely niche interests with on a near daily basis for many years to come, forming bizarre but intellectually fecund communities that will inevitably end up with everyone involved moving to the Bay Area and having kids together.

And we are supposed to be upset because the technology that makes this possible has cut down on the number of bowling leagues? That’s like condemning butterfly metamorphosis for decreasing the number of caterpillars.

1.7: Are international conflicts becoming more frequent?

This isn’t in the paragraph quoted above, but Michael has expressed the opinion to me in person, and anyone familiar with Reactionary thought will recognize this as a staple. The theory is that monarchies had strong international law between them that prevented or settled conflicts quickly, but that democracies have the “sham” international law of the UN (exactly what makes it a sham is never explained) and constantly interfere in one anothers’ business as a continuation of their own internal politics or obsession with human rights.

As far as I know no Reactionary has ever dared to cite statistics that they say support this claim, which is probably for the better. But just for the record, here’s the counterclaim:

You can find a much more exhaustive discussion of this topic here.

1.7.1: What about the Concert of Europe? The great statesman Klemens von Metternich used Reactionary ideas to create a brilliant system that kept peace in Europe for nearly a century!

The Concert of Europe lasted from 1815 to 1914. During that time, Europe suffered – just counting major interstate wars involving Congress of Vienna participants – the French Invasion of Spain, the Crimean War, the Schleswig Wars, the Wars of Italian Independence, Austro-Prussian Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, and, let’s not forget, World War I.

The modern equivalent of the Concert of Europe is the European Union, but built on Progressive rather than Reactionary principles. It has existed from 1951 to 2013 so far, and In those sixty-two years, major interstate wars between EU members have included…well, none.

1.8: Okay, you’ve discussed the trends Michael listed as supporting Reaction, and found them less than convincing. Do you have any trends of your own that you think support more modern societies?

Yes. Most of the graphs below come from 31 Charts That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity.

Hours worked per person

Global illiteracy

Global poverty

World Hunger

I’m trying to keep things fair by deliberately excluding health care victories since these are at least partially due to technology, but these would include infant mortality dropping a hundredfold, the near elimination of smallpox, diphtheria, polio, tuberculosis, and typhoid from the developed world, the neutralization of AIDS.

Yet in reality, political and social trends played a role here too: for example, smallpox would not have been eliminated without the concerted effort of the WHO and other global health organizations.

1.9: Final thoughts on this section?

Of the seven categories Michael cites as especially supportive of the Reactionary thesis, zero are actually getting worse and several of them appear as best we can tell to be getting better. And I don’t want to beat Michael up too much here, because these are the same sorts of things that other Reactionaries cite, and he got picked on only because he was the one to put them all in one place and claim he had evidence.

Reactionary claims that the modern world shows disappointing performance on indicators of social success turn out to be limited to one cherry-picked country or decade or else just plain made up. The very indicators Reactionaries cite turn out, on closer inspection, to provide strong evidence for things getting better.

Progressives, on the other hand, can point to some amazing victories over the last fifty years, including global poverty cut in half, world hunger cut in half, world illiteracy cut in half, war grinding almost to a halt, GDP quintuple-ing, violent crime collapsing, and self-reported happiness increasing in almost all countries.

1.9.1: Other than crime, few of these points have data before 1950, and the crime ones are highly speculative before that date. Don’t you think that even if things have been getting better for the past few decades, they might have been getting worse over the past few millenia?

Yes. In a few cases this is obviously true. For example, Michael cites good data showing that traditional rural societies have lower suicide rates than our own. And obviously they have lower divorce rates. The same may be true with some of the other points here, though probably not as many as Reactionaries would like.

But I do think it’s important to establish that things have been getting better over the past few decades. For one thing, it suggests a different course of action. If things are constantly declining, we should go into panic mode and try a radical restructuring of everything before it’s too late. If things are getting better every day, we should hang tight and try to nudge forward trends that are already going on.

For another, it suggests a different interpretation. If things keep getting worse, we can attribute it to some process of social decay (since everyone seems to agree social decay is Getting Worse All The Time). If things are getting better now, we may perhaps separate societies into two groups, Traditional and Industrialized, admit that the transition from the first to the second caused a whole lot of problems, but be satisfied that industrialized society is gradually improving and fixing its defects.

So while I accept that traditional rural societies a thousand years ago were better on a number of social metrics, I don’t think that’s particularly actionable. What’s actionable is what’s going on within industrial societies right now, and that seems to be improvements on all levels.

2: Are traditional monarchies better places to live?

2.1: Are traditional monarchs secure?

Much of the Reactionary argument for traditional monarchy hinges on monarchs being secure. In non-monarchies, leaders must optimize for maintaining their position against challengers. In democracies, this means winning elections by pandering to the people; in dictatorships, it means avoiding revolutions and coups by oppressing the people. In monarchies, elections don’t happen and revolts are unthinkable. A monarch can ignore their own position and optimize for improving the country. See the entries on demotism and monarchy here for further Reactionary development of these arguments.

Such a formulation need not depend on the monarch’s altruism: witness the parable of Fnargl. A truly self-interested monarch, if sufficiently secure, would funnel off a small portion of taxes to himself, but otherwise do everything possible to make his country rich and peaceful.

As Moldbug puts it:

Hitler and Stalin are abortions of the democratic era – cases of what Jacob Talmon called totalitarian democracy. This is easily seen in their unprecedented efforts to control public opinion, through both propaganda and violence. Elizabeth’s legitimacy was a function of her identity – it could be removed only by killing her. Her regime was certainly not the stablest government in history, and nor was it entirely free from propaganda, but she had no need to terrorize her subjects into supporting her.

But some of my smarter readers may notice that “your power can only be removed by killing you” does not actually make you more secure. It just makes security a lot more important than if insecurity meant you’d be voted out and forced to retire to your country villa.

Let’s review how Elizabeth I came to the throne. Her grandfather, Henry VII, had won the 15th century Wars of the Roses, killing all other contenders and seizing the English throne. He survived several rebellions, including the Cornish Rebellion of 1497, and lived to pass the throne to Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII, who passed the throne to his son Edward VI, who after surviving the Prayer Book Rebellion and Kett’s Rebellion, named Elizabeth’s cousin Lady Jane Grey as heir to the throne. Elizabeth’s half-sister, Mary, raised an army, captured Lady Jane, and eventually executed her, seizing the throne for herself. An influential nobleman, Thomas Wyatt, raised another army trying to depose Mary and put Elizabeth on the throne. He was defeated and executed, and Elizabeth was thrown in the Tower of London as a traitor. Eventually Mary changed her mind and restored Elizabeth’s place on the line of succession before dying, but Elizabeth’s somethingth cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, also made a bid for the throne, got the support of the French, but was executed before she could do further damage.

Actual monarchies are less like the Reactionaries’ idealized view in which revolt is unthinkable, and more like the Greek story of Damocles – in which a courtier remarks how nice it must be to be the king, and the king forces him to sit on the throne with a sword suspended above his head by a single thread. The king’s lesson – that monarchs are well aware of how tenuous their survival is – is one Reactionaries would do well to learn.

This is true not just of England and Greece, but of monarchies the world over. China’s monarchs claimed “the mandate of Heaven”, but Wikipedia’s List of Rebellions in China serves as instructional (albeit voluminous) reading. Not for nothing does the Romance of Three Kingdoms begin by saying:

An empire long united, must divide; an empire long divided, must unite. This has been so since antiquity.

.
Brewitt-Taylor’s translation is even more succinct:

Empires wax and wane; states cleave asunder and coalesce.

And of Roman Emperors, only about thirty of eighty-four died of even remotely natural causes, according to this List Of Roman Emperors In Order Of How Hardcore Their Deaths Were.

2.2: Are traditional monarchies more free?

A corollary of Reactionaries’ “absolutely secure monarch” theory is that monarchies will be freer than democracies. Democrats and dictators need to control discourse to prevent bad news about them from getting out, and ban any institutions that might threaten the status quo. Since monarchs are absolutely secure, they can let people say and do whatever they want, knowing that their words and plans will come to naught. We revisit the Elizabeth quote above:

Hitler and Stalin are abortions of the democratic era – cases of what Jacob Talmon called totalitarian democracy. This is easily seen in their unprecedented efforts to control public opinion, through both propaganda and violence. Elizabeth’s legitimacy was a function of her identity – it could be removed only by killing her. Her regime was certainly not the stablest government in history, and nor was it entirely free from propaganda, but she had no need to terrorize her subjects into supporting her.

It is true that Elizabeth did not censor the newspapers, or bludgeon them into publishing only articles favorable to her. But that is less because of her enlightened ways, and more because all newspapers were banned in England during her reign. English language news in the Elizabethan Era had to be published in (famously progressive and non-monarchical!) Amsterdam, whence it was smuggled into England.

Likewise, Elizabeth and the other monarchs in her line were never shy about killing anyone who spoke out against them. Henry VIII, Elizabeth’s father, passed new treason laws which defined as high treason “to refer to the Sovereign offensively in public writing”, “denying the Sovereign’s official styles and titles”, and “refusing to acknowledge the Sovereign as the Supreme Head of the Church of England”. Elizabeth herself added to these offenses “to attempt to defend the jurisdiction of the Pope over the English Church…”. Needless to say, the punishment for any of these was death, often by being drawn and quartered.

But at least she didn’t have a secret police, right? Wrong. Your source here is Stephen Alford’s book on, well, the Elizabethan secret police, although reason.com’s review, The Elizabethan CIA: The Surveillance State In The 16th Century will serve as a passable summary.

2.2.1: How come we perceive traditional monarchies as less oppressive than for example Stalinist Russia?

Well, for one thing Stalin was in a category all of his own, going far beyond rational attempts to maintain his status into counterproductive paranoia. We shouldn’t expect the average communist police state to be Stalinist in its intensity, and so we need not be surprised when traditional monarchies aren’t.

But a more comprehensive answer might draw on a proverb of Oceania’s in 1984: “Animals and proles are free”. Anyone too weak and irrelevant to be dangerous doesn’t suffer the police state’s attention.

Before about the 1600s, the average non-noble neither had nor could have any power. All wealth was locked up in land, owned by nobles, and all military power was locked up in professionals like knights and men-at-arms, who could defeat an arbitrary number of untrained peasants without breaking a sweat.

After about the 1600s, wealth passed into the hands of capitalist merchants – ie non-nobles – and military power became concentrated in whoever could hold a gun – potentially untrained peasants. As a result, kings stopped worrying only about the nobility and started worrying about everyone else.

Or else they didn’t. Remember, all of the longest and most traditional monarchies in history – the Bourbons, the Romanovs, the Qing – were deposed in popular revolts, usually with poor consequences for their personal health. However paranoid and oppressive they were, clearly it would have been in their self-interest to be more so. If monarchy were for some reason to be revived, no doubt its next standard-bearers would not make the same “mistake” as their hapless predecessors.

2.3: Are traditional monarchies less bloody?

Michael Anissimov writes:

Bad kings are not nearly as bad as Demotist/Communist dictators. Bad kings are in a different universe from bad Demotist leaders. There is not even a vague comparison. In the traditional system, kings rely on the aristocracy and clergy for support, and have trouble doing anything without them. For a Demotist leader, there tends to be far fewer checks and balances. They can cause a million deaths in a place like Iraq with a snap of their fingers. Study up on the history of “death by government” to get a better perspective on what I mean. Kings and emperors very rarely, if ever, engage in mass murder against their own people.

2.3.1: Are demotist countries bloodier?

Look up demotist in a dictionary – Wiktionary will do – and you will find it means “one who is versed in ancient Egyptian demotic writing”. Mr. Anissimov’s use is entirely idiosyncratic to Reactionaries, or, to put it bluntly, made up.

It is interesting that every time Reactionaries make this argument, they use this same made-up word. Here’s Moldbug:

Let’s define demotism as rule in the name of the People. Any system of government in which the regime defines itself as representing or embodying the popular or general will can be described as “demotist.” Demotism includes all systems of government which trace their heritage to the French or American Revolutions – if anything, it errs on the broad side.

The Eastern bloc (which regularly described itself as “people’s democracy”) was certainly demotist. So was National Socialism – it is hard to see how Volk and Demos are anything but synonyms. Both Communism and Nazism were, in fact, obsessed with managing public opinion. Like all governments, their rule was certainly backed up by force, if more so in the case of Communism (the prewar Gestapo had less than 10,000 employees). But political formulae were of great importance to them. It’s hard to argue that the Nazi and Bolshevik states were any less deified than any clerical divine-right monarchy.

Why use this made-up word so often?

Suppose I wanted to argue that mice were larger than grizzly bears. I note that both mice and elephants are “eargreyish”, meaning grey animals with large ears. We note that eargreyish animals such as elephants are known to be extremely large. Therefore, eargreyish animals are larger than noneargreyish animals and mice are larger than grizzly bears.

As long as we can group two unlike things together using a made-up word that traps non-essential characteristics of each, we can prove any old thing.

None of Michael or Moldbug’s interlocutors are, I presume, in favor of Stalinism or Nazism. They are, if anything, in favor of liberal democracies such as the United States or Great Britain. Michael and Moldbug cannot bring up examples of these countries killing millions of their own people, because such examples do not exist. So they simply group them in a made-up category with countries that have, and then tar the entire group by association. This is, of course, a riff on the good old Worst Argument In The World.

If there were any nonmotivated reason to group these countries together – if they were really taxonomically related – there would already be a non-made-up word describing this fact.

So the answer to the question – are demotist countries bloodier than monarchies? – is the same as the answer to the question “are eargreyish animals larger than grizzly bears”. The answer is “Here’s a nickel, kid; buy yourself a real category .”

2.3.2: Even if the “demotist” idea was invented for this debate, and even if it has little relevance to liberal democracies, isn’t it at least a good basis for further study?

Remember Moldbug’s definition: “Let’s define demotism as rule in the name of the People. Any system of government in which the regime defines itself as representing or embodying the popular or general will can be described as demotist.”

But “the leaders have to say they rule in the name of the people” is a pretty low bar. King Louis Philippe of France said he ruled in the name of the people:

Louis-Philip wore the title of the King of the French…This title was in contrast to the King of France, which reflected a monarchy’s power over the country, instead of a king’s rule over its people. This title reflects that the king does not take his mandate from God but from the people themselves.

On the other hand, ever read Les Miserables? Yeah, that was him. Eventually the actual people hated him so much that they had a violent revolution and tried to kill him; the king managed to flee the capital in disguise and escape to England, where he died.

Why accept this stupid standard for the definition of “demotist”? Because a more reasonable one – like “elected by the people” or “liked by the people” or “not universally hated by the people and he has to have a giant army to prevent them from immediately killing him” would exclude for example Stalin, the figure Reactionaries are most desperate to paint as “demotist”.

What about the regime which Reactionaries are the second most desperate to paint as “demotist”? For this one let’s bring some class into this essay and quote Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn:

As an honest reactionary I naturally reject Nazism … fascism and all related ideologies which are, in sober fact, the reductio ad absurdum of so-called democracy and mob domination.

You heard it here first. The Nazis were baaaaasically the same as progressive liberal democrats.

To which all I can say is: you know who else opposed “so-called democracy and mob domination?”

By rejecting the authority of the individual and replacing it by the numbers of some momentary mob, the parliamentary principle of majority rule sins against the basic aristocratic principle of Nature

– Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 81

2.3.3: Even accepting all that, is Michael’s last sentence even true?

Michael’s argument ends by saying: “Kings and emperors very rarely, if ever, engage in mass murder against their own people.”

I propose a contrary hypothesis – traditional absolutist regimes have always had worse records of massacre and genocide than progressives. However, technology improves efficiency in all things, including murder. And population has been growing almost monotonically for millennia. Therefore, it is unsurprising that more modern absolutist regimes – like Nazism and Stalinism – have higher death counts than older absolutist regimes – like traditional monarchies.

On the other hand, traditional monarchies have some pretty impressive records for killing their own people. Let us take a whirlwind tour of history:

The Albigensian Crusade, run by the French monarchy against its own subjects – with the support of the Catholic Church – may have killed up to a million people, which is pretty impressive considering that at the time there were only about twelve million Frenchmen. As a proportion of total population, this is about the same as the number of Germans who died during World War II, or Chinese who died during the Great Leap Forward.

The Harrying of the North was totally a real historical event and not something I stole from Game of Thrones. William the Conquerer, angry at the murder of a local earl, managed to kill about 100,000 northern Englishmen from 1069-1070, which was probably about 5% of the entire population.

Another 100,000 people died in the 16th century German Peasants’ War, an event which so blended into the general mayhem of the time that you have never heard of it. Actually, the claim that Reactionary regimes have ever been peaceful would have trouble surviving a look merely at Wikipedia’s disambiguation page for Peasants’ War.

Third century BC emperor Qin Shi Huang was not only responsible for the Burning Of Books And Burying Of Scholars, but killed about one million out of his population of twenty million with various purges and forced labor projects, one of which was the Great Wall of China.

[This section previously included a paragraph on Chinese warlord Zhang Xianzhong. Despite living in a 17th century monarchy, he held some pretty progressive values and his Reactionary credentials have been challenged. Rather than let his story distract from the more obviously Reactionary murderers above, I will concede the point]

But Michael goes even further. He says of democracies that “[with] a Demotist leader, there tends to be far fewer checks and balances. They can cause a million deaths in a place like Iraq with a snap of their fingers.”

Ignoring for a moment the difference between snapping one’s fingers and getting a bill to declare war passed through both houses of a hostile Congress (since Michael certainly does) we note that Michael has just authorized us to also compare monarchies and democracies in their ability to wreak havoc abroad.

On this particular historical tour, we will start with King Leopold of Belgium. Belgium itself was a constitutional monarchy run on a mostly democratic system, and in fact has always been a relatively pleasant and stable place. However, Belgium’s colony, the Congo Free State, was under the direct rule of King Leopold. Not only was it responsible for the deaths of two to fifteen million Congolese – ie about as many Jews as were killed by Hitler – but the manner of those deaths was about as brutal and callous as can be imagined. Wikipedia writes:

Leopold then amassed a huge personal fortune by exploiting the Congo. The first economic focus of the colony was ivory, but this did not yield the expected levels of revenue. When the global demand for rubber exploded, attention shifted to the labor-intensive collection of sap from rubber plants. Abandoning the promises of the Berlin Conference in the late 1890s, the Free State government restricted foreign access and extorted forced labor from the natives. Abuses, especially in the rubber industry, included the effective enslavement of the native population, beatings, widespread killing, and frequent mutilation when the production quotas were not met. Missionary John Harris of Baringa, for example, was so shocked by what he had come across that he wrote to Leopold’s chief agent in the Congo saying: “I have just returned from a journey inland to the village of Insongo Mboyo. The abject misery and utter abandon is positively indescribable. I was so moved, Your Excellency, by the people’s stories that I took the liberty of promising them that in future you will only kill them for crimes they commit.”

This is an especially good example as it describes (we will see later) the ideal Reactionary state – one run by a single person identical to a corporation trying to make as much money as possible off a particular area and possessing overwhelming force.

The story does however have a happy ending – progressive elements within Belgium were so horrified that they forced the king to cede his claim – the colony was then governed by Belgium’s democratically elected legislature, which did such a good job even Mencius Moldbug cannot resist the urge to praise it, and under whose rule Congo was a relatively liveable place up until a native uprising kicked out the Belgians and restored dictatorship.

Another good example of kings and emperors at war is Imperial Japan. This state – again run under principles no Reactionary could fault – accomplished the astounding feat of reducing the Nazis to the second biggest jerks on the Axis side during World War II. During the war, Imperial Japanese troops murdered between three million and ten million foreigners, mostly Chinese. Once again the brutality of their killings is impressive. According to Wikipedia on the Rape of Nanking:

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated that 20,000 women were raped, including infants and the elderly.[40] A large portion of these rapes were systematized in a process where soldiers would search door-to-door for young girls, with many women taken captive and gang raped.[41] The women were often killed immediately after being raped, often through explicit mutilation[42] or by stabbing a bayonet, long stick of bamboo, or other objects into the vagina. Young children were not exempt from these atrocities, and were cut open to allow Japanese soldiers to rape them

Meanwhile, Michael says that “Kings and emperors very rarely, if ever, engage in mass murder” but is absolutely horrified that America caused a million deaths in Iraq (more sober sources say 100,000, of which under 10,000 were civilians directly killed by US forces) while making the utmost effort to avoid unnecessary violence and launching war crimes proceedings against anyone caught employing it.

2.3.4: Conclusion for this section?

Reactionaries believe that monarchs are wise and benevolent rulers, and that it is only “demotists” who engage in genocide and mass murder.

But this argument is based on a con – “demotist” is an unnatural category they made up solely to win this debate. When we look at the governments their opponents actually support – liberal democracies – we find they have a much better history than monarchies.

Further, the Reactionaries fail even on the terms of their own con. Monarchs have a fantastically bloody history, and the regimes they want to paint as demotist really aren’t.

2.4: Are traditional monarchs good leaders?

In his perhaps optimistically named “Ten Objections To Traditionalism And Monarchism, With Answers”, Michael Anissimov asks, with commendable bluntness: “What if the king is an idiot or psycho?” He answers:

Then the prior king appoints a regent to take over the affairs of state on behalf of his successor. There is also a debate within the Reactionary community as to whether adoptive succession is preferable to hereditary succession, which avoids the issue of stupid or crazy children. Such extreme scenarios rarely ever happened during the age of Renaissance European monarchs. One of the greatest statesmen of all time, Klemens von Metternich, strongly influenced the mentally deficient monarch Ferdinand I of Austria during his reign, sat on the regency council, and ran most important affairs, presiding over a hundred years of relative peace in Europe.

We shall start with the theoretical objections before moving on to the empirical counterexamples.

Theoretical objection the first: what if the king doesn’t become an idiot or a psycho until after he is on the throne? The onset of schizophrenia can be as late as twenty-five; later in rare cases. Traumatic brain injury, certain infectious diseases, and normal human personality change can happen at any age. Smart psychopaths will have the presence of mind to avoid revealing their psychosis until they are safely enthroned.

Theoretical objection the second: what if the king seizes power some other way? A decent number of history’s monarchs got tired of waiting and killed their fathers. We would expect these to disproportionately include those who are crazy and evil, not to mention those who think their fathers would take away their power.

Theoretical objection the third: regency councils are historically about the least stable form of government imaginable. Unless everyone has truly commendable morality, either the king kills the regent and seizes power, the regent kills the king and starts a new dynasty, or some third party kills the regent and becomes the new regent. Once again, reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms will prove instructional.

Theoretical objection the fourth: we are counting on the king’s father to object if the king is an idiot or psycho. But a lot of idiotic psychotic kings’ fathers were, in fact, idiots and psychos. The apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree.

Onto the historical counterexamples. Historical counterexample the first: Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, “Caligula” to his friends. Absolutely beloved by the Roman populace. Unclear whether he killed his uncle Tiberius to gain the Empire, or just stood by cackling kind of maniacally as he died. Took power to general acclaim, ruled well for a couple of months, gradually started showing his dark side, and after a year or two reached the point where he ordered a large section of spectators at the colosseum to be thrown into the ring and torn apart by lions because the average amount of tearing-apart-by-lions at a Roman gladiatorial games just wasn’t enough for him.

Historical counterexample the second: Ivan the Terrible. His father died of infection when Ivan was three years old. His mother was named as his regent – kind of a coincidence that the most qualified statesman in the realm would be his mother, but let’s roll with it – but she died of poisoning when Ivan was eight. In this case I’m not sure who exactly is supposed to decide whether he’s an idiot or psycho, and apparently neither were the Russians, because they crowned him Czar in 1547 . Ivan was okay until his wife died, at which point he became paranoid and started executing the nobility for unclear reasons, destroyed the economy, and burnt and pillaged the previously glorious city of Novgorod (part of his own kingdom!) with thousands of deaths. According to some sources:

Ivan himself often spent nights dreaming of unique ways to torture and kill. Some victims were fried in giant frying pans and others were flayed alive. At times, he turned on [his death squads] themselves, and subjected their membership to torture and death. In a fit of rage, he murdered his own son; however the guilt of this act obsessed him and he never recovered.

Our story does not end there! Ivan died of a stroke, leaving the throne to his intellectually disabled son. Here at least the system worked – brilliant statesman Boris Godunov was installed as regent and ruled pretty well. He did, however, eventually seize the throne – likely because if he had not seized the throne everyone else would have killed him out of suspicion that he might seize the throne. He died, there was a huge succession squabble, and thus started the Time of Troubles, whose name is pretty self-explanatory.

Historical counterexample the third: Charles II Habsburg of Spain (not to be confused with various other Charles IIs). A strong contender for the hotly contested title of “most inbred monarch in history”, Wikipedia describes him like so:

Known as “the Bewitched” (Spanish: el Hechizado), he is noted for his extensive physical, intellectual, and emotional disabilities—along with his consequent ineffectual rule…

Charles did not learn to speak until the age of four nor to walk until eight, and was treated as virtually an infant until he was ten years old. Fearing the frail child would be overtaxed, his caretakers did not force Charles to attend school. The indolence of the young Charles was indulged to such an extent that at times he was not expected to be clean. When his illegitimate half-brother Don Juan José of Austria, an illegitimate son of Philip IV, obtained power by exiling the queen mother from court, he covered his nose and insisted that the king at least brush his hair

As Charles’s father died when Charles was 3, he was given a regent – his mother (another case in which the most qualified statesman in the land is the monarch’s mother! What are the odds?!) But when his mother died, Charles took power in his own name and ruled for four years. His only notable achievement during that time was presiding over the largest auto-da-fe in history. He died at age 39. Again quoting Wikipedia:

The physician who practiced his autopsy stated that his body “did not contain a single drop of blood; his heart was the size of a peppercorn; his lungs corroded; his intestines rotten and gangrenous; he had a single testicle, black as coal, and his head was full of water.” As the American historians Will and Ariel Durant put it, Charles II was “short, lame, epileptic, senile, and completely bald before 35, he was always on the verge of death, but repeatedly baffled Christendom by continuing to live.”

Oh, and thanks to the vagaries of self-interested royal dynasties, his passing caused a gigantic succession struggle which drew in all the neighboring countries and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Historical counterexample the fourth: Henry VIII. Really? Yes, really. While perhaps calling him an idiot or psycho goes too far, he certainly thought that marrying confirmed hottie Anne Boleyn and having a son with her was worth converting England to a newly-invented Protestant religion – a decision which killed tens of thousands, displaced some of the country’s oldest and most important institutions, and set the stage for two hundred years of on-and-off warfare. Whether or not you like the Church of England (or, as it was almost named, Psychotic Bastard Religion) yourself, you have to admit this is a sort of poor reason to start a religious revolution.

King Henry wasn’t an idiot or a psycho. He was just a selfish bastard. You can’t expect his father to pick up on that. Even if you could, his father wasn’t exactly Mahatma Gandhi himself. Worst of all, his personality may have changed following traumatic brain injury from a jousting accident – something that could not have been predicted before he took the throne.

This is exactly the sort of problem non-monarchies don’t have to worry about. If Barack Obama said the entire country had to convert to Mormonism at gunpoint as part of a complicated plot for him to bone Natalie Portman, we’d just tell him no.

There’s another important aspect here too. Reactionaries – ending up more culpable of a stereotype about economists than economists themselves, who are usually pretty good at avoiding it – talk as if a self-interested monarch would be a rational money-maximizer. But a monarch may have desires much more complicated than cash. They might, like Henry, want to marry a particular woman. They might have religious preferences. They might have moral preferences. They might be sadists. They might really like the color blue. In an ordinary citizen, those preferences are barely even interesting enough for small talk. In a monarch, they might mean everyone’s forced to wear blue clothing all the time.

You think that’s a joke, but in 1987 the dictator of Burma made all existing bank notes illegitimate so he could print new ones that were multiples of nine. Because, you see, he liked that number. As Wikipedia helpfully points out, “The many Burmese whose saved money in the old large denominations lost their life savings.” For every perfectly rational economic agent out there, there’s another guy who’s really into nines.

2.5: Are traditional monarchies more politically stable?

Reactionaries often claim that traditional monarchies are stable and secure, compared to the chaos and constant danger of life in a democracy. Michael Anissimov quotes approvingly a passage by Stefan Zweig:

Michael’s comment: “[This] does a good job capturing the flavor and stability of the Austrian monarchy…it’s very interesting to read this in a world where America and Europe are characterized by political and economic instability and ethnic strife.”

I am glad Mr. Zweig (Professor Zweig? Baron Zweig?) found his life in Austria to be very secure. But we can’t just take him at his word.

Let’s consider the most recent period of Habsburg Austrian history – 1800 to 1918 – the period that Zweig and the elders he talked to in his youth might have experienced.

Habsburg Holy Roman Austria was conquered by Napoleon in 1805, forced to dissolve as a political entity in 1806, replaced with the Kingdom of Austria, itself conquered again by Napoleon in 1809, refounded in 1815 as a repressive police state under the gratifyingly evil-sounding Klemens von Metternich, suffered 11 simultaneous revolutions and was almost destroyed in 1848, had its constitution thrown out and replaced with a totally different version in 1860, dissolved entirely into the fledgling Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867, lost control of Italy and parts of Germany to revolts in the 1860s-1880s, started a World War in 1914, and was completely dissolved in 1918, by which period the reigning emperor’s wife, brother, son, and nephew/heir had all been assassinated.

Meanwhile, in Progressive Britain during the same period, people were mostly sitting around drinking tea.

This is not a historical accident. As discussed above, monarchies have traditionally been rife with dynastic disputes, succession squabbles, pretenders to the throne, popular rebellions, noble rebellions, impulsive reorganizations of the machinery of state, and bloody foreign wars of conquest.

2.5.1: And democracies are more stable?

Yes, yes, oh God yes.

Imagine the US presidency as a dynasty, the Line of Washington. The Line of Washington has currently undergone forty-three dynastic successions without a single violent dispute. As far as I know, this is unprecedented among dynasties – unless it be the dynasty of Japanese Emperors, who managed the feat only after their power was made strictly ceremonial. The closest we’ve ever come to any kind of squabble over who should be President was Bush vs. Gore, which was decided within a month in a court case, which both sides accepted amicably.

To an observer from the medieval or Renaissance world of monarchies and empires, the stability of democracies would seem utterly supernatural. Imagine telling Queen Elizabeth I – whom as we saw above suffered six rebellions just in her family’s two generations of rule up to that point – that Britain has been three hundred years without a non-colonial-related civil war. She would think either that you were putting her on, or that God Himself had sent a host of angels to personally maintain order.

Democracies are vulnerable to one kind of conflict – the regional secession. This is responsible for the only (!) major rebellion in the United States’ 250 year (!) history, and might be a good category to place Britain’s various Irish troubles. But the long-time scourge of every single large nation up to about 1800, the power struggle? Totally gone. I don’t think moderns are sufficiently able to appreciate how big a deal this is. It would be like learning that in the year 2075, no one even remembers that politicians used to sometimes lie or make false promises.

How do democracies manage this feat? It seems to involve three things:

First, there is a simple, unambiguous, and repeatable decision procedure for determining who the leader is – hold an election. This removes the possibility of competing claims of legitimacy.

Second, would-be rebels have an outlet for their dissatisfaction: organize a campaign and try to throw out the ruling party. This is both more likely to succeed and less likely to leave the country a smoking wasteland than the old-fashioned method of raising an army and trying to kill the king and everyone who supports him.

Third, it ensures that the leadership always has popular support, and so popular revolts would be superfluous.

If you remember nothing else about the superiority of democracies to other forms of government, remember the fact that in three years, we will have a change of leadership and almost no one is stocking up on canned goods to prepare for the inevitable civil war.

2.6: Are traditional monarchies more economically stable?

Once again, we come to Michael Anissimov’s claims about Austria:

Demotist systems, that is, systems ruled by the “People,” such as Democracy and Communism, are predictably less financially stable than aristocratic systems. On average, they undergo more recessions and hold more debt. They are more susceptible to market crashes. They waste more resources. Each dollar goes further towards improving standard of living for the average person in an aristocratic system than in a Democratic one.

The economic growth of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1.76% per year) “compared very favorably to that of other European nations such as Britain (1%), France (1.06%), and Germany (1.51%)”.

The growth of Austria-Hungary was higher than that of other European countries for the same reason the growth of sub-Saharan Africa right now is outpacing the growth of America or Europe – it was such a backwater that it had more room to grow.

Urbanization is a decent proxy for industrialization, and we consistently find that throughout the Kingdom of Austria and Austro-Hungarian Empire period, Austria had some of the lowest urbanization rates in Europe, just barely a third those of Britain, and well behind those of France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. In order to find a country as poorly developed as Austria-Hungary, we need to go to such economic powerhouses as Norway, Portugal and Bulgaria.

Nor was its economy especially stable. The Panic of 1873, probably the worst financial depression during the period being discussed and perhaps the worst modern economic crisis before the Great Depression, actually started in Austria-Hungary and only spread from there to the rest of the world. This is especially astounding given Austria-Hungary’s general economic irrelevance at the time.

2.6.1: What about Germany? Isn’t the German Empire a good example of an industrially successful Reactionary country?

I consider the Reactionary credentials of the German Empire extremely open to doubt.

The German Empire was a utopian project created by people who wanted to sweep away the old patchwork system of landed nobility and local traditions that formed the Holy Roman Empire and turn it into a efficient modern state. The Progressive origins of both the Italian and German unification efforts shine through almost every word of a letter from Garibaldi to German unification pioneer Karl Blind:

The progress of humanity seems to have come to a halt, and you with your superior intelligence will know why. The reason is that the world lacks a nation which possesses true leadership. Such leadership, of course, is required not to dominate other peoples, but to lead them along the path of duty, to lead them toward the brotherhood of nations where all the barriers erected by egoism will be destroyed. We need the kind of leadership which, in the true tradition of medieval chivalry, would devote itself to redressing wrongs, supporting the weak, sacrificing momentary gains and material advantage for the much finer and more satisfying achievement of relieving the suffering of our fellow men. We need a nation courageous enough to give us a lead in this direction. It would rally to its cause all those who are suffering wrong or who aspire to a better life, and all those who are now enduring foreign oppression.

This role of world leadership, left vacant as things are today, might well be occupied by the German nation. You Germans, with your grave and philosophic character, might well be the ones who could win the confidence of others and guarantee the future stability of the international community. Let us hope, then, that you can use your energy to overcome your moth-eaten thirty tyrants of the various German states. Let us hope that in the center of Europe you can then make a unified nation out of your fifty millions. All the rest of us would eagerly and joyfully follow you.

The result of this idealistic vision – the destruction of the ancien regime in Germany – was a state much stronger than the traditional-but-weak Holy Roman Empire or anything that had existed in that part of the world before.

Sure, Otto von Bismarck was no hippie, but he was first and foremost a pragmatist, and his empire combined both conservative and progressive elements. It was based on a constitution, had universal male suffrage (only 5 years after the US got same!), elected a parliament, and allowed political parties. Granted, the democratic aspect was something of a facade to cover up an authoritarian core, but real Reactionaries would not permit such a facade, saying it will invariably end in full democracy (they are likely right).

The amazing growth of the German Empire was due to two things. First, the virtues of the German populace, which allow them to continue to dominate the European economy even today with an extremely progressive and democratic government. And second, the catch-up effect mentioned earlier. Germany had been languishing under traditional feudal and aristocratic rule for centuries. As soon as the German Empire wiped away that baggage and created a modern Progressive state, it allowed the economic genius of the Germans to shine through in the form of breakneck-speed economic growth.

2.6.2: Is Progressivism destroying the economy?

Another frequent claim. But remember how Michael said Progressivism went into high gear around the time of the French Revolution in 1789. Here’s a graph of world GDP over time:

To put it lightly, I see no evidence of a decline starting around 1789?

Maybe the effect is just in the United States?

This image is actually even more astounding and important than the above, because it shows how growth keeps to a very specific trendline. On the graph above, the Reactionary might claim that technological advance was disguising the negative effects of Progressivism somehow. Here we see that no second variable that is not perfectly consistent has been interfering with the general economic growth effect.

I literally cannot conceive of a way that the data could be less consistent with the theory that Progressivism inhibits economic growth.

2.7: Are traditional monarchies just in general more successful and nicer places to live?

Great Britain and America have throughout their histories been the two most progressive nations on Earth. They’ve also been, over the past three hundred years or so, the two most successful. Other bright spots in the progressive/successful cluster include 1600s Netherlands, classical democratic Athens, republican Rome, and Cyrus’ Persia. In fact, practically every one of the great nations of history was unusually progressive for its time period, perhaps with the exception of China – which is exceptionally complicated and hard to place on a Western political spectrum. Other possible exceptions might include Philip II’s Spain, Louis XIV’s France, and Genghis Khan’s Mongolia – but the overall trend is still pretty clear.

Limiting our discussion to the present, our main obstacle to a comparison is a deficit of truly Reactionary countries. Reactionaries are never slow to bring up Singapore, a country with some unusually old-fashioned ideas and some unusually good outcomes. But as I have pointed out in a previous post, Singapore does little better than similar control countries, and the lion’s share of its success is most likely due to it being a single city inhabited by hyper-capitalist Chinese and British people on a beautiful natural harbor in the middle of the biggest chokepoint in the world’s most important trade route.

Saudi Arabia also gets brought up as a modern Reactionary state. It certainly has the absolute monarchy, the reliance on religious tradition, the monoethnic makeup, the intolerance for feminist ideals, and the cultural censorship. How does it do? Well, it’s nice and stable and relatively well-off. But a cynic (or just a person with an IQ > 10) might point out that a lot of this has to do with it controlling a fifth of the world’s oil supply. It’s pretty easy to have a good economy when the entire world is paying you bazillions of dollars to sit there and let them extract liquid from the ground. And it’s pretty easy to be stable when you can bribe the population to do what you want with your bazillions of dollars in oil money – in fact, Saudi Arabia is probably that rarest of birds – a Reactionary welfare state.

(Actually, this point requires further remark. Reactionary states tend to be quite rich. In the case of Singapore, Reactionaries trumpet this as a success of Reactionary principles. In the case of Saudi Arabia, that sort of causation is somewhat less credible. I propose an alternative theory: Reactionary states can maintain themselves only by bribing the population not to revolt. These bribes may be literal, as in the case of the Saudi welfare state. Or they may be more figurative – “Look how rich my government has made you – you let me stay in power and I’ll keep up the good work.” China is the classic example of this particular formulation. This is important because contra Moldbug’s inverted pendulum theory it suggests Reactionary regimes will be inherently unstable.)

But getting back to the issue at hand – given all these economic confounders, it’s hard to compare Reactionary and progressive regimes in an even-handed way.

This is par for the course. Political science is notorious for its inability to perform controlled experiments, and no two countries will differ only in their system of government.

2.7.1: If we could perform a controlled experiment pitting reactionary versus progressive ideals, what would it look like?

Well, assuming you were God and had infinite power and resources, you could take a very homogeneous country and split it in half.

One side gets a hereditary absolute monarch, whose rule is law and who is succeeded by his sons and by his sons’ sons. The population is inculcated with neo-Confucian values of respect for authority, respect for the family, and cultural solidarity, but these values are supplemented by a religious ideal honoring the monarch as a near-god and the country as a specially chosen holy land. American cultural influence is banned on penalty of death; all media must be produced in-country, and missionaries are shot on site. The country’s policies are put in the hands of a group of technocratic nobles hand-picked by the king.

The other side gets flooded with American missionaries preaching weird sects of Protestantism, and at the point of American guns is transformed into a parliamentary democracy. Its economy – again at the behest of American soldiers, who seem to be sticking around a sufficient long time – becomes market capitalism. It institutes a hundred billion dollar project to protect the environment, passes the strictest gun control laws in the world, develops a thriving gay culture, and elects a woman as President.

Turns out this perfect controlled experiment actually happened. Let’s see how it turned out!

Talk about your “Dark Enlightenment”!

From the Reactionary perspective, North Korea has done everything right. They’ve had three generations of absolute rulers. They’ve tried to base their social system on Confucianism. They’ve kept a strong military, resisted American influence, and totally excluded the feelings of the peasant class from any of their decisions.

Reactionaries, behold your god.

South Korea, on the other hand, ought to be a basketcase. It’s replaced its native Confucian traditions with liberal Protestant sects, it’s occupied by US troops, it’s gone through various military coups to what the CIA calls a “fully functioning modern democracy”, and it’s so culturally decadent and degraded that it managed to produce Gangnam Style. Yet I don’t think there’s a single person reading this who doesn’t know which one ze’d rather live in.

Yet according to the principles of Reaction (first quote Michael Anissimov, second Mencius Moldbug)

Legally speaking, monarchies tend to have fewer laws, but enforce them more strictly, following Tacitus’ dictum: “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.” In general, monarchies put more power into the hands of local government. A key argument in favor of monarchy is that leaders tend to have a lower time preference, meaning they have a greater personal stake in the long-term well being of the country, compared to career politicians oriented towards four-year election cycles.

A royal family is a family business. Not one king in European history can be found who ruined his own country to enrich himself, like an African dictator.

North Korea is a family business. And the Kim family has done very very well for itself. But it’s not something I would like to see spread.

3: What is progress?

Reactionaries are not the first to notice – but may be the most obsessive in analyzing – a certain directionality to history. That is, rather than being a random walk across the space of possible values, at least the past three hundred years or so seem to have shown a definite trend. Those who are in favor of this trend call it “progress”. Those who oppose it call it things like “moral decay”.

However, it is notoriously difficult to determine exactly what this trend is and what drives it. A theory to this effect is at the core of what separates Reactionaries from simple conservatives.

In the remainder of this section, I will replace the word “progress” – with its connotations of inevitability and desirability – with the preferred Reactionary term “progressivism” – that is, the political ideology which flows with the historical trend under discussion.

3.1: Might Progressivism be merely a secular strain of some Protestant religion?

Reactionaries seem to agree that Progressivism is a religion. Perhaps Calvinism. From Moldbug:

I prefer “cryptocalvinism” [as a name for progressivism], meaning two things: that, like Calvin and as a direct result of his intellectual heritage, cryptocalvinists are building the Kingdom of God on Earth, a political system that seeks to eradicate every form of unrighteousness; and that they prefer not to acknowledge this characterization of their mission and heritage. Since I’ve changed the name, let me repeat the four ideals of cryptocalvinism: Equality (the universal brotherhood of man), Peace (the futility of violence), Social Justice (the fair distribution of goods), and Community (the leadership of benevolent public servants).

Or perhaps Quakerism. From Isegoria, quoting a different Moldbug theory:

Modern progressivism is in fact a form of secular Quakerism, with its doctrine of the Inner Light only slightly modified.

Or how about Judaism? From Age of Treason:

In a nutshell I object to [Moldbug]‘s definition of Universalism, which is what he calls “the faith of our ruling caste”. It’s an important observation, but I think he gets it only half right. He associates Universalism only with Progressivism, which he blames entirely on Christianity. He does not address the Globalist tendencies of our ruling caste, and he pretty much gives Jews a pass…The close alignment of PC with Jewish interests? The Jewish support for Marxism and Bolshevism and hatred of Nazism perhaps?

Reactionaries seem much more certain that Progressivism is religious in origin than they are which religion exactly it originates from. And the differences between Calvinism and Quakerism are not subtle.

Given their total lack of consensus on a matter as basic as which religion, why is it so important to Reactionaries that progressivism be descended from a religious background? Moldbug explains:

[Progressives] believe their ideals are universal, that they can be derived from science and logic, that no reasonable and well-intentioned person can dispute them, and that their practice if applied correctly will lead to an ideal society. I believe that they are arbitrary, that they are inherited from Protestant Christianity, that they serve primarily as a justification for the rule of the cryptocalvinist establishment, or Polygon, and that they are a major cause of corruption, tyranny, poverty and war.

So the reason Reactionaries want the Left to be religious is to disprove the contention that it is based on reason. This would presumably discredit the Left and restore preeminence to Reactionary ideas such as that people should be ruled by a king, live in strong heterosexual nuclear families, avoid sexual promiscuity, and derive their values from fixed traditions rather than modern ideas of self-expression. You know, ideas with no religious background whatsoever.

3.1.1: Stop being snide and answer the question? Might Progressivism, far from deriving from some universal moral principles, actually be an arbitrary and parochial set of Calvinist customs and taboos?

The ideals commonly called progressive predate Calvin by several millennia. Consider the example of Rome. The early Romans not only overthrew their kings in a popular revolution and instituted a Republic, but experienced five plebian secessions (read: giant nationwide strikes aiming at greater rights for the poor). After the first, the Roman government created the position of tribune, a representative for the nation’s poor with significant power in the government. After the third, the government passed a sort of bill of rights guaranteeing the poor protection against arbitrary acts of government. After the fifth, the government passed the Lex Hortensiana, which said that plebians could hold a referendum among themselves and the results would be binding on the entire populace, rich and poor alike. By the later Empire, even slaves were guaranteed certain rights, including the right to file complaints against their masters.

The Empire was remarkably multicultural, even at its very highest levels. Emperor Septimus Severus was half-Libyan and some historians think his appearance might have passed for black in modern America. Emperor Maximinus Thrax was a Goth, Emperor Carausius was Gallic, and Emperor Philip the Arab was…well, take a wild guess. Although Rome did have a state religion, they were extremely supportive of the rights of minorities to continue practicing their own religions, and eventually just tried to absorb everything into a giant syncretistic mishmash that makes today’s “ecumenialism” seem half-hearted in comparison. Although their tolerance famously did not always extend as far as Christianity, when the Romans had to denounce it they claimed it was not a religion but merely a “superstition” – a distinction which itself sounds suspiciously Progressive to modern ears. Indeed, the insistence of Christianity (and Judaism) on a single god, and their unwillingness to respect other religions as equally valid (in a very modern and relativistic way) was a large part of the Roman complaint against them.

The Romans pioneered the modern welfare state, famously memorialized by its detractors as panem et circenses – bread and circuses. Did you know welfare reform was a major concern of Julius Caesar? That ancient Rome probably had a higher percent of its population on the dole than modern New York? That the Romans basically worshipped a goddess of food stamps?

And no discussion of ancient Rome would be complete without mentioning their crazy sex lives. Wikipedia explains that “It was expected and socially acceptable for a freeborn Roman man to want sex with both female and male partners, as long as he took the penetrative role. The morality of the behavior depended on the social standing of the partner, not gender per se. Gender did not determine whether a sexual partner was acceptable, as long as a man’s enjoyment did not encroach on another’s man integrity.” Gay weddings were not uncommon in ancient Rome, and were neither officially banned nor officially sanctioned. Juvenal and Martial both wrote satires condemning what they considered an epidemic of gay marriages during their era. And at least one Roman Emperor – Nero – married a man.

(well, married two men. One as groom and one as bride. And castrated one of them. And probably only married one of them because he was said to have an uncanny resemblance to Nero’s mother. Whom Nero had previously had sex with, then murdered. I didn’t say Nero was normal. Just unusually forward-thinking on the gay marriage issue.)

Moldbug listed the cryptocalvinist ie Progressive program as having four parts:

Equality (the universal brotherhood of man), Peace (the futility of violence), Social Justice (the fair distribution of goods), and Community (the leadership of benevolent public servants)

Yet Equality has a clear antecedent in the plebian secessions of ancient Rome, peace in the Pax Romana, social justice in the Roman welfare system, and community in…well, it’s so broadly defined here that it could be anything, but if we’re going to make it the leadership of benevolent public servants, let’s just throw in a reference to the philosopher-kings of Plato’s Republic (yeah, fine, it’s Greek. It still counts)

3.1.2: Yes, okay, the Romans tried to keep the peace and help the poor and stuff. That’s a pretty weak definition of Progressivism. What really defines Progressivism is this messianic fervor that if we just do this enough, we can create a perfect utopia. That is what these ancient cultures were lacking.
Even if you’ve never read The Republic, you can still get a sense of the utopian striving in the classical world from reading some of the stuff written during the reign of Emperor Augustus. Here’s Dryden’s translation of a passage from the Aeneid:

An age is ripening in revolving fate
When Troy shall overturn the Grecian state…
Then dire debate and impious war shall cease,
And the stern age be soften’d into peace:
Then banish’d Faith shall once again return,
And Vestal fires in hallow’d temples burn;
And Remus with Quirinus shall sustain
The righteous laws, and fraud and force restrain.
Janus himself before his fane shall wait,
And keep the dreadful issues of his gate,
With bolts and iron bars: within remains
Imprison’d Fury, bound in brazen chains;
High on a trophy rais’d, of useless arms,
He sits, and threats the world with vain alarms.

So please, tell me again how utopian desires for peace and social justice were invented wholesale by John Calvin in 1550.

3.2: Is the move toward Progressive social policy masterminded by “the Cathedral”?

Reactionaries have to walk a fine line. They can’t just say “people consider liberal policies, decide they would be helpful, and form grassroots movements pushing for the policies they support”, because that would make leftist policies sound like reasonable ideas pursued by decent people for normal human motives.

But they can’t just say “There’s a giant conspiracy where the heads of all the major Ivy League universities meet at midnight under the full moon”, because that would sound ridiculous and tinfoilish.

So they invent this strange creature, the distributed conspiracy. It’s not just people being convinced of something and then supporting it, it’s them conspiring to do so. Not the sort of conspiring where they talk to one another about it or coordinate. But still a conspiracy! Michael Anissimov describes it like so:

[The Cathedral is] the self-organizing consensus of Progressives and Progressive ideology represented by the universities, the media, and the civil service…the Cathedral has no central administrator, but represents a consensus acting as a coherent group that condemns other ideologies as evil [...]

Government and social policy is manufactured in universities, first and foremost at Harvard, followed by Princeton, then Yale, then the other Ivies, Berkeley, and Stanford. As far as politics is concerned, institutions outside of these are pretty much insignificant. Memetic propagation is one-way — it is formulated in the schools and pumped outwards. The universities are not significantly influenced by the outside. The civil servants that make government decisions are either borrowed from universities or almost totally influenced by them. The official mouthpiece of this ideological group is The New York Times, which is the most influential publication in the world outside of the Bible.

So now that we have this formulation of the problem, we can ask some more specific questions.

3.2.1: Are Harvard and the New York Times disproportionately linked to the Progressive ideas that now dominate society?

That depends partly on what “disproportionately” means, of course. But we can make some vague and qualitative observations.

The Roman and Persian Empires held some very Progressive ideals, all without the help of any universities or newspapers whatsoever. Parsimony suggests that whatever process pushed Rome to the left could be doing the same to the modern world.

But a better counterexample might be noting that even modern progressivism predates this institutions. The history of modern Progressivism – even as told by Reactionaries – goes from John Locke to the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution to the French Revolution to the US Civil War on through John Stuart Mill to the New Deal and the United Nations and civil rights movements and on to the present. While Harvard (est. 1636) does predate all those events, I don’t think even its most fervent critic would accord it any level of influence on world ideas until the 1850s at the earliest. And the Times was founded in 1851. It is hard to chart the precise progress of Progressivism, but I don’t notice any sharp discontinuity at any point. Once again using parsimony, we might expect the forces that promoted Progressivism during the French Revolution and before to be the same forces promoting Progressivism afterwards. This takes any special role of Harvard or the New York Times entirely out of the pictures.

And modern progressivism doesn’t seem linked to Harvard or the Times in space either. New York and Boston are pretty progressive – by American standards. But there’s a whole world out there. Canada is further left than America; Britain is further left than Canada; France is further left than Britain; the Netherlands are further left than France; and Sweden is further left than the Netherlands. Russia and China are complicated, but they’ve certainly had their super-leftist periods. In fact, pretty much the entire developed world is further left than anywhere in the United States, New York and Boston not excepted. This does not seem an entirely recent development; for example, the Netherlands’ liberalism has clear roots in the Dutch Golden Age of the 1600s.

It is true that sometimes a prophet is without honor in his own country. Yet for an American college and a newspaper read almost uniquely by Americans to have affected every other country in the Western world more effectively than they were able to affect the United States seems, well – unexpected.

3.2.2: Do Harvard and the New York Times invent Progressive dogma and then shove it down the throats of a hostile country?

Gay rights will be an interesting test here, because it’s one of the issues on which society has shifted leftward most quickly and dramatically, and because it’s relatively recent so its history should be easy to trace.

Modern gay rights movements trace their history to Germany, a country not known for having Harvard or the New York Times, or for that matter Puritans and Quakers. The German movement included such pioneering activists as Magnus Hirschfeld and Max Spohr, but Germany kind of dropped the ball on gay rights with the whole Nazi thing, and the emphasis shifted to elsewhere in Europe. In America, the movement finally gained steam in the 1960s with a picketing in Philadelphia and a community center in San Francisco, and finally the Stonewall Riots in New York.

I can’t get any good information about Harvard’s position, but the New York Times helpfully has an online archive of every article they have ever published. So what, exactly, was America’s Newspaper Of Record doing while all this was going on? It was helpfully publishing articles like GROWTH OF OVERT HOMOSEXUALITY IN CITY PROVOKES WIDE CONCERN:

The problem of homosexuality in New York became the focus yesterday of increased attention by the State Liquor Authority and the Police Department…The city’s most sensitive open secret – the presence of what is probably the greatest homosexual population in the world and its increasing openness – has become the subject of growing concern of psychiatrists, religious leaders, and the police.

Sexual inverts have colonized three areas of the city. The city’s homosexual community acts as a lodestar, attracting others from all over the country. More than a thousand inverts are arrested here annually for public misdeeds. Yet the old idea, assiduously propagated by homosexuals, that homosexuality is an inborn, incurable disease, has been exploded by modern psychiatry, in the opinion of many experts. It can be both prevented and cured, these experts say.

The overt homosexual – and those who are identifiable probably represent no more than half of the total – has become such an obtrusive part of the New York scene that the phenomenon needs public discussion, in the opinion of a number of legal and medical experts. Two conflict viewpoints converge today to overcome the silence and promote public discussion.

The first is the organized homophile movement – a minority of militant homosexuals that is openly agitating for removal of legal, social, and cultural discriminations against sexual inverts. Fundamental to this aim is the concept that homosexuality is an incurable, congenital disorder (this is disputed by the bulk of scientific evidence) and that homosexuals should be treated by an increasingly tolerant society as just another minority. This view is challenged by a second group, the analytical psychiatrists, who advocate an end to what it calls a head-in-sand approach to homosexuality…

On and on and on it goes in this vein. And that’s not even counting other such wonderful New York Times articles as WOMEN DEVIATES HELD INCREASING – PROBLEM OF HOMOSEXUALITY FOUND LARGELY IGNORED. These aren’t editorials – this is the headlines, the supposedly fact-based objective reporting section. The editorials are worse – I particularly like the one warning that we need to fight increasing gay influence in the theater industry because gays cannot authentically write plays about love or relationships.

Now, to the Times’ credit, it eventually changed its tune and is now mostly in favor of gay rights. That’s fine for the Times but not so good for Reactionaries. The story here is very clearly of a gay rights movement that began as a grassroots push in favor of more tolerance. The New York Times opposed it, but somehow the movement managed to gather steam despite that crushing blow. Eventually its tenets became accepted by more and more people, and one of these late adapters was the New York Times, which now atones for its sin by defending gay rights against even later adapters.

This is not the pattern one would expect if all Progressive ideas were fueled solely by the New York Times’ backing.

3.2.3: Do Harvard and the New York Times successfully impose their values on the rest of America and the world?

Let’s examine exactly how opinions have changed on a host of important political issues. These are taken from the National Election Survey, Pew Research, and Gallup. I’ve tried to avoid cherry-picking – I took every issue I could find, starting from the first year data was available. In cases where I could find two different polls, I kept the one with a longer data series:

Of thirty-four issues that made the cut, opinion shifted to the left on 19 and to the right on 13. There was an average shift of three points leftward per issue. Contrary to Reactionary claims that Americans do not appreciate the extent of the leftward shift affecting the country, in a recent survey based on a similar chart, most people, regardless of political affiliation, slightly overestimated the extent to which values had shifted leftward over the past generation.

Not only is the leftward shift less than people intuitively expect, it does not affect all issues equally. The left’s real advantage is limited to issues involving women and minorities. Remove these, and opinion shifts to the left on 11 issues and to the right on 12. The average shift is one point rightward per issue.

On the hottest, most politically relevant topics, society has moved leftward either very slowly or not at all. Over the past generation, it has moved to the right on gun control, the welfare state, capitalism, labor unions, and the environment. Although the particular time series on the chart does not reflect this, support for abortion has stabilized and may be dropping. This corresponds well with the DW-NOMINATE data that finds a general rightward trend in Congress over the same period. The nation seems to be shifting leftward socially but rightward politically – if that makes any sense.

If the Left had seized control of the government, or the media, or the institutions of the country, we would expect it to do a better job pushing its cherished policies like abortion rights, gun control, environmental protection, et cetera. Instead, beliefs on those issues have remained stable or shifted rightward, while issues like marijuana legalization – an issue more libertarian than progressive, and with minimal support from leftist institutions – succeed wildly. Whatever advantage the left has, it must be something skew to politics, something that institutionalized leftism, from the Democratic Party down to the Humanities Department at Harvard, can neither predict nor control.

3.3: Then where does progress come from?

So the cultural shift of the past few centuries isn’t toward some weird Christian sect. And it wasn’t caused by Harvard or the New York Times. What was it and who did it?

The World Values Survey is the official academic attempt to understand this question. They’ve been polling in eighty countries around the world for thirty years trying to figure out who has what values and how they have been changing. Maybe you’ve seen the most famous summary of their results:

There is no end to the fun one can have with WVS data, and I highly recommend at least Wikipedia’s Catalogue of Findings if not the original studies. But the most important part is that dimensionality analysis finds that answers to value questions cluster together onto two axes: survival vs. self-expression values, and traditional vs. secular-rational values.

Over time, societies tend to move from traditional and survival values to secular-rational and self-expression values. This is the more rigorous version of the “leftward shift” discussed above.

Both within a single time period and between time periods, traditional and survival values are generally associated with poverty, low industrialization, and insecurity. Secular-rational and self-expression values are generally associated with wealth, industrial or knowledge economies, and high security. The difference is not subtle:

And if you want to know why countries are becoming more democratic and less monarchist, it’s hard to get a more direct answer than this graph (although its attempt at a linear fit was a bad idea):

All of this provides a simple and elegant explanation of the distribution of leftism, both in time and space. The most progressive countries today tend to be very wealthy, very peaceful, and comparatively urbanized. The least progressive countries tend to be poor, insecure, and comparatively rural.

Remember Michael Anissimov’s description of the leftward shift above? That the world has been growing further to the left ever since the French Revolution? Take a look at the course of the world economy:

Riiiight about the time of the French Revolution – which also happens to be around the time of the Industrial Revolution – the world economy suddenly shifts into hyperdrive, starting in the USA and Western Europe, spreading to Japan after World War II, and not quite yet having reached Africa or Southeast Asia.

And, well, right about the time of the French Revolution Europe and the USA started shifting to the left, with Japan following after World War II, and Africa and Southeast Asia still lagging behind.

This progressivism/economics link is so obvious that anyone who thinks about it for a few minutes can reach the same conclusion. I wrote “A Thrive/Surive Theory Of The Political Spectrum long before I was familiar with the World Values Survey, but its conclusions match the survey’s in pretty much every respect: rightist values are those most suited for hardscrabble existence where everyone must band together to survive a dangerous frontier; leftist values are those most suited for a secure postscarcity or near postscarcity existence with surplus resources available to devote to more abstract principles.

I’d like to examine one more aspect of this before I stop beating this dead horse, which is the rural/urban divide. The history of industrialization is in many ways the history of urbanization, and the distinction between insecure frontier life and secure postscarcity life mirrors the rural/urban divide. This predicts that more rural countries should be more traditional/survival and more urban countries more secular-rational/self-expression, which in fact we see. Of the countries furthest to the top-right on the WVS diagram, Sweden, Norway and Denmark all have about 85% urban populations. Go down to the three countries at the bottom left – Jordan, Morocco, and Zimbabwe – and despite Jordan’s anomalously high level they’re still averaging about 55%.

This is true even in the United States – the denser a county, city, or state, the more likely it is to lean Democratic, as we can see from this terrible and confusing graph:

Rural counties – those with <200 people per square mile - lean red at about 65%. Once they pass that 200 person mark, they very quickly start leaning blue until the densest areas - true cities, approach 90% Democratic. Or as Dave Troy notes, "98% of the 50 most dense counties voted Obama. 98% of the 50 least dense counties voted for Romney."

This density effect applies even within cities. Here are America's largest cities graphed by density against percent Romney vote:

My sources point out that “graphs of the UK, Australia, and Canada look very similar during the same period, with left voting concentrated in urban and mining districts” and theyalso mention (just to fend off the inevitable reactionary critique) that “interestingly — and contrary to the much-stated view that Obama purchased the election with welfare, food stamps, and other entitlements, our analysis turned up no statistically significant association between Obama votes and the metro poverty rate and only a very small one for income inequality across metros.”

Why am I making such a big deal of this? Well, here’s America’s percent urban versus percent rural population over the period of time when our values were shifting to the left:

So please. Tell me again how the leftward value shift over the past two hundred years was caused entirely by a sinister conspiracy of Ivy League college professors

3.3.1: Can you give a more detailed explanation of why increasing wealth, technology, and urbanization would lead to the values we call Progressive?

Here are five specific examples.

Multiculturalism is a forced adaptation to the culturally unprecedented situation of large groups of people from different cultures being forced to live and work together. This situation arises because of technology and urbanization. Technology, because more Somalis are going to immigrate to the US when that means booking a plane ticket over the phone than when it meant a six month journey over stormy seas. Urbanization, because it’s much harder to immigrate into an agrarian society where every family knows each other and farmland is at a premium than into an urban society where you can apply for the same factory job as everyone else.

Modern gender roles are a forced adaptation to the existence of cheap and effective contraception, which decouples sex from pregnancy. Teen pregnancy is relegated to people unwilling or unable to use contraception, allowing other women to pursue the same careers as men rather than dropping out of the workforce to become full-time mothers.

The welfare state is a forced adaptation to mobile and urban societies. In agrarian societies, most people owned their own means of production – their farms – and “unemployment” wasn’t a salient concept. It was usually possible to get what you needed through the sweat of your brow, even if that meant chopping down trees to build a log cabin, and there was little sympathy for people who didn’t bother. In urban societies, people need jobs in order to support themselves, and those who cannot get them starve in full pitiful view of everyone else.

Socialized health care is a very big part of the welfare state – probably the majority depending on how you parse the numbers. As recently as a century ago there really wasn’t much in the way of health care technology for people to spend money on, and most people died quickly and simply without having to be kept alive in expensive hospitals for months. As health care gets beyond most people’s ability to afford, and the average lifespan lengthens, there becomes more demand for government to step in and fill the gap.

Secularism is a more viable intellectual option once Science has discovered things like evolution and the Big Bang. Just as “there are no atheists in foxholes”, people with a comfortable urban existence not dependent on the whims of the weather and the plague are less likely to worry about placating the Lord. Multiculturalism means that faiths no are no longer immune to challenge, as Christians and Muslims and Buddhists have to live next to each other and notice how totally unconvinced outsiders are of their ideas. And the movement from closely-knit communities to sprawling cities mean that the local church is no longer ties together your entire actual and possible social network so closely that it can exert pressure on you to conform.

And yes these are just-so stories, but the relationship between all these factors and wealth/urbanization are pretty much beyond dispute – so if it’s not true for these reasons it’s true for reasons no doubt very much like them.

3.4: Do you believe in “Whig history”?

Whig history is an approach to historical study that emphasizes how the past has been groping towards the truths and institutions of the present. It is usually used derisively, in a sense of “Oh, so you think the era in which you were born just happens to be perfect, and everyone else from Aristotle to Galileo was just failing at being an American of 2013.”

There is obviously a strong meaning of the term which cannot help but be false. The past did not share our values, it did not move linearly, and the present moment is neither perfect nor universally superior to other periods.

On the other hand, in a world where progress in areas as diverse as cars, computers, weapons and health care has been blindingly obvious, we shouldn’t place too low a prior on the possibility that there has been progress in social institutions as well. Such progress could be motivated by the same factors that advance other areas.

First, a greater store of empirical results. As time goes on, we have more virtuous examples and terrible warnings. No one pushes for prohibition of alcohol anymore because we’ve seen how that turns out – and in thirty years, people may say the same about other drugs. Very few people push full hold-a-revolution Communism anymore, and for the same reason.

Second, better data. With the invention of statistics and information technology, we now have numbers on everything from income inequality to how different types of policing affect the crime rate. Members of the civil service, politicians, lobbyists, and even voters use these numbers to decide what policies to support. Neither the data nor its interpretation is always unbiased, but it’s a heck of a lot better than the old method of doing whatever your prejudices tell you to do.

Third, social evolution. This is a complicated one, because all evolution is evolution to a niche, the niche is different in the modern world than in the medieval world, and so modern and medieval societies are optimizing for different things. But at the very least, we can say that modern institutions are better adapted to the modern niche than medieval institutions. Those governments that did not adapt were overthrown; those corporations that did not adapt went out of business; those institutions that did not adapt became unpopular and saw their influence shifted to other institutions. Those governments, corporations, and institutions that did adapt prospered and spun off copycats with small variations, and the evolutionary cycle repeated again.

To these three we could add things like greater education, better access to information, and more rational values (you can no longer get away with saying “Follow me because I’m the Messiah”, and that’s probably a good thing). So although it’s not some a priori law of nature that the modern period must be the best period in history, we do have some reasons to expect things to be getting better rather than worse. As Part I pointed out, those expectations have mostly been realized.

3.5: Is America a communist country?

Reactionaries tend to push this line by finding the platform of the US Communist Party from some year well in the past, then pointing out that a lot of their goals were achieved, then noting that since America did what the communists wanted, we are a communist country.

Moldbug and others have claimed it, it even has its own Facebook page, but Free Northerner has done by far the most complete job analyzing it and finds that of demands in the 1928 Communist Party platform, 70% of all demands, and 78% of domestic demands, have been met as of 2013.

I don’t want to belittle Free Northerner’s work – he did a great job, he was much more rigorous than I’m about to be, and anyone who writes a blog post on how awesome Turisas is is a friend of mine regardless of his political beliefs.

But although I can’t get my computer to load the platform directly, I notice when I check his transcription that the Communist demands mysteriously lack points like “workers control the means of production” or “all property held in common”, or even “not capitalism”. They do, on the other hand, include policies like “abolition of censorship”, “right to vote for everyone over 18″, and “paid maternity leave during pregnancy”.

Rather than conclude that America is a communist country, a better conclusion might be “the Communist Party of 1928 wasn’t especially “communist”, in the sense that we use that word today.” That’s no surprise. The meaning of words changes over time, and the Cold War made the more moderate elements of communism drop the “communist” label. Using a liberal definition of “communist” to claim that we satisfy the definition, then suggesting we should draw the conclusions and connotations we would from the strict definition of “communist” remains the worst argument in the world. Take out the Worst Argument In The World, and all the Communist Party platform experiment proves is that we support policies like “no child labor” and “free maternity leave” – ie things we already knew.

There’s a second counterargument, though, which is more interesting. Free Northerner writes:

I don’t have time to analyze the Democratic and Republican platform demands of the same year at this time, but I would bet significant sums that less than 80% of their demands were met and upheld by our present time.

I’ll take that bet!

I mistakenly got the Republican platform for 1920 (someone else can double-check 1928 specifically). The Republicans failed to conveniently list their demands in bullet-point format, but from their long manifesto I managed to extract 37 different points:

1. Give farms right to cooperative associations
2. Protection against discrimination for farmers
3. End to unnecessary price fixing that reduces prices of farm products
4. Facilitate acquisition of farmland
5. Reduce frequency of strikes
6. Good voluntary mediation for industry
7. Convict labor products out of interstate commerce
8. Reorganize federal government
9. Simplify income tax
10. Federal Reserve free from political influence
11. Fair hours and good working conditions for railway workers
12. Private ownership of railroads
13. Immediate resumption of trade relations with all nations at peace
14. Restrict Asian immigrants
15. No one becomes citizen until they have taken a test to ensure they are American
16. American women do not lose citizenship by marrying an alien
17. Free speech, but no one can advocate violent overthrow of the government
18. Aliens cannot speak out against government
19. End lynching
20. Money for construction of highways
21. Save national forests and promote conservation
22. Reclaim lands
23. Increase pay of postal employees
24. Full women’s suffrage in all states
25. Federal gov should aid states in vocational training
26. Physical education in schools
27. Centralize gov public health functions
28. End child labor
29. Equal pay for women
30. Limit hours of employment for women
31. Encourage homeownership for Americans
32. Make available information of housing and town planning
33. Americanize Hawaii
34. Home rule for Hawaii
35. Join international governing body such as League of Nations
36. No mandate for Armenia
37. Responsible government in Mexico

Not being too familiar with the 1920 political milieu, I don’t really know what they mean by 2, 22, 32. Others seem so broad as to be hard to judge: 4, 6, 8, and 37. That leaves 29 points.

I think the Republicans have achieved 1, 3, 5, 7, 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 33, 34, 35, and 36 – some unambiguously, others if nothing else by the very sketchy criteria Free Northerner used to rule in commie achievements. They have definitely failed 9, 12, 13, 14, and 30. As for 18, 27, and 31, these seem ambiguous – let’s count them half a point. That means they got 23.5/29 of the points they wanted – 81%. That’s better than the Commies, who only got 70%.

(if we were really trying to do this right, we’d want to have the person who evaluated the success or failure of a party plank blinded to which party it came from. I’ll leave someone else to try this).

So apparently the US is a Republican country even more than it’s a Communist country. I bet if we looked over the Democratic platform for the same time frame, we’d find it was a Republican, Democratic, and Communist country. And if we check the Nazi Party platform, we find that some of the same points Free Northerner counts as Communist victories – abolition of child labor, expansion of old age welfare – are also Nazi Party policies at the same time. So we are, in fact, a Democratic-Republican-Commie-Nazi country.

The alternative is that all parties liked to promise they would throw money at popular feel-good projects. Shorter working hours! Better welfare! Freedom of this! Freedom of that! As the country became richer it was able to support more feel-good policies, and so every party got much of what they wanted.

4: Could a country be ruled as a joint-stock corporation?

This is the plan of Mencius Moldbug, who gets points for being clever and creative rather than trying to rehash 13th century feudalism. I’ve heard different rumors as to whether he still supports it and whether it might or might not be a cover for supporting 13th century feudalism. Nevertheless the idea is interesting and deserves further investigation. However, it is missing some key details and suffers some probably irresolvable conceptual problems.

4.1: Would a joint-stock corporation prevent government decisions based on political tribalism and sacred values, in favor of government decisions based on maximizing economical value?

According to the theory, just as modern corporations like GE successfully remain dedicated to profitability, so America could be sold off in an IPO and restructured as a corporation dedicated to maximizing the value of US land.

But just calling something a corporation doesn’t make it start worrying about profitability. Making its shareholders worry about profitability turns out to be surprisingly hard problem, even though these shareholders themselves would benefit from its profits.

We can imagine two different distributions of shares: either everyone gets one, or only a few aristocrats get one (the degenerate third possibility, where only one person gets them, isn’t really a “joint-stock company”).

The first possibility might be suspected of being democracy: after all, every citizen equally has one share and therefore one vote. Moldbug argues it wouldn’t be: shares are transferable, and citizens have an incentive to maximize the value of their share.

So chew on this: suppose that banning abortion would earn the American government $10 billion dollars a year (how? I don’t know. Let’s just say it does). This corresponds to about $30 for every American.

How many leftists do you think would vote to ban abortion for $30?

What if their $30 was entirely illiquid, only accessible by the one-time event of selling their single share of stock, and would probably be so lost in noise that they would never see tangible evidence of it?

Okay, what if they don’t even know it will give them $30? No doubt Planned Parenthood will author a very scholarly report giving excellent reasons why an abortion ban will make stock shares plummet, and the Catholic Church will author an equally scholarly report giving excellent reasons why it will make everyone rich. Which side will people believe? Why, whichever side matches their natural prejudices, of course! As well ask a Democrat or a Republican whether Obamacare will increase or decrease the deficit.

The only thing that giving everyone a share of American stock would do to politics in the US is allow both the Left and the Right a chance to accuse one another of being secretly in it for the money, while both continue to do what they did before. Perhaps this wouldn’t happen in a country created de novo out of thin air, but US politics are far too entrenched for giving people little stock certificates to help anything.

Anyway, it would take about ten minutes for poor people to sell their shares for easy cash. So this case would immediately degenerate to the second possibility – one where only a small “ruling class” owns all the stock certificates. I think a few Reactionaries have proposed this, and then they can be “nobles”, and make up an “aristocracy”, and…

Hold your horses. Suppose a new ruling class of ten thousand people possess all these certificates.

By definition all of these people will be multibillionaires – once you own one ten thousandth of America, you’ve got it made. And we observe something interesting with multibillionaires – Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Page. They find other things much more interesting than money. Bill Gates is working on curing malaria. Warren Buffett is trying to give all his money away to charity. Larry Page is working on fascinating but bizarre projects with minimal chance of success during his lifetime. Once you’re a multibillionaire, you need more money less than you need to feel like you’re making some kind of wonderful contribution to the world that will make coming generations revere you.

In other words, these shareholders won’t care about the monetary value of their shares either. Take people like Ted Turner or the Koch brothers, give them a big chunk of the US government, and you expect them to focus on its monetary value just because you’re calling it a stock?

4.2 Would corporate governance at least have lower discount rates?

Likely no.

Do corporations today have low discount rates? Consider the example of Lehman Brothers and other pre-crash investment banks. They happily accepted (and invented) subprime loans that would raise their profits today at the cost of likely financial disaster tomorrow.

More broadly, reflect upon how few companies pursue long-term revolutionary technology. Even though nearly everyone agrees that the future will be less based on fossil fuels, research and development of the likely replacements – from fusion power to solar power to electric cars – is either run by the government or grudgingly performed by corporations only after being promised huge government subsidies. When companies do develop exciting new technologies of their own accord – Google’s Calico, SpaceX’s rockets – they tend to be associated with some already-super-rich Silicon Valley mogul who has enough money to play around, rather than a sober corporation driven by the bottom line or investment opportunities.

A quick reflection on corporate incentives explains this pattern nicely. In the case of Lehman Brothers, traders got bonuses linked to year-on-year profitability, and because of coordination problems each had incentive to maximize his own bonus but no incentive to maximize the solvency of the company as a whole over time.

But why would a CEO or other corporate governor create such a structure? Well, although Reactionaries mock elected politicians for having a four-year time horizon, the average CEO stays only 6.8 years. That’s less than a two-term president. And their own incentives are often also based on bonuses linked to short-term profitability.

In theory, the incentive to increase shareholder value ought to counteract short-term-ist tendencies. But it’s an open question exactly how much of a time horizon is built into stock prices. The average investor holds the average stock for about seven months. Although the hope is that stock prices are set by the market discount rate, at an weighted average cost of capital of 10%, this ideal situation still means that anything happening thirty or more years from now determines only 4% of the stock price.

In the real world, it’s even worse than this – CEOs have strong incentives to try to fool the market into short-term inflation of stock prices at the cost of real future profitability. This is both common and successful. With many investors using formulae that extrapolate from past or present earnings to determine future earnings, it is unsurprising that the CEOs of companies like Lehman Brothers or Goldman Sachs were able to increase both their stock prices and their bonuses for many years until the inevitable letdown came – hopefully on someone else’s watch.

4.3: Could a joint-stock corporate state ensure complete security by mandating cryptographic locks on all its weapons?

This is one of Moldbug’s proposals, and although I think it’s been blown out of proportion and he’s probably a little embarrassed by it now, it gets brought up enough to be worth addressing.

The idea is that shareholders of a corporate state possess cryptographic keys, and that these keys are necessary to fire the weapons in a country’s arsenal. Therefore, any military coup can be stopped in its tracks.

The first question is exactly how these keys work. Suppose there are 100 shareholders. If all keys are necessary, then a single shareholder can paralyze the military. If 51 of the 100 keys are necessary – well, I don’t know if cryptography can implement such a scheme securely, but let’s suppose that it does.

One can raise some peripheral problems with this scheme. Having all your country’s guns connected to the Internet might not be such a good idea…

…and it would be sort of unfortunate if your entire military could be brought down by a clever hacker or Scott Aaronson building a quantum computer in his basement. Further, the guns would have to be either default-on or default-off. If they were default-on, then military conspirators could disable the communications network (or just the radios on their weapons) and have free rein. If they were default-off, then a foreign military could disable the communications network and take over the country because none of the military’s weapons would work.

More important, this only protects against a small subset of rebellions. If every unit has a separate code, it may be able to give loyalist military units the advantage over treasonous units in the case of intramilitary feuding. But it can’t can’t stop a popular revolution – the type where rebels become guerillas and gradually defeat the military in combat. It happened in China, it’s happening right now in Syria, and it could happen again regardless of any cryptographic locks on weapons.

4.4: Would shareholder value maximization be a good proxy for making a country a nice place to live?

Suppose that all the above problems are solved, and we have installed a genuinely self-interested CEO with a long time horizon. Will the new policy of increasing shareholder value really make the country a nicer place as well?

In many ways the equivalence holds. If, as Moldbug suggests, a corporate state’s profits came from land value taxes, and so profits came from increasing land values, then things like decreasing crime, pollution, and poverty would be in the corporate state’s best interests. So would allowing its residents enough freedom to make moving to its land attractive.

But the ways it doesn’t hold are really horrible.

Businesses have an incentive to please their paying customers. As Mitt Romney informs us, a large proportion of Americans don’t pay taxes. In fact, they consume government resources in the form of welfare, while providing no economic value in return. In some cases, these citizens are “fixer-uppers”, people who with enough investment could become productive. In other cases – the indigent elderly, the physically and mentally handicapped, or just people with no useful skills – keeping them around would be a poor financial decision. When regular companies find they have people who aren’t producing value, they “downsize” them. It’s unclear what exactly would be involved in “downsizing” unproductive American citizens, but I’m betting it wouldn’t win any Nobel Peace Prizes.

In a post called The Dire Problem And The Virtual Option, Moldbug discusses some of these problems with his system. He admits that this is a major issues (the titular “dire problem”). With his trademark honesty:

As the King begins the transition from democracy, however, he sees at once that many Californians – certainly millions – are financial liabilities. These are unproductive citizens. Their place on the balance sheet is on the right. To put it crudely, a ten-cent bullet in the nape of each neck would send California’s market capitalization soaring – often by a cool million per neck. And we are just getting started. The ex-subject can then be dissected for his organs. Do you know what organs are worth? This is profit!

But his proposed solutions are bizarre and in many cases incomprehensible:

The simplest, broadest, and most essential prevention against this degenerate result is the observation that the royal government is a government of law, and a government of law does not commit mass murder. For instance, no such government could take office without promising to preserve and defend its new subjects, certainly precluding any such genocide.

A government of law is different from a “law-abiding citizen” or “law-abiding business” in that governments, in addition to occasionally following the law, also get to make the law. If the government had some strong incentive to shoot citizens, it could pass a law allowing it to shoot citizens. It is no more than dozens of other governments have done throughout history. Such a law need not even ruffle the feathers of its more productive “assets”: it could come up with some very clear criteria for whom to shoot and then stick to those criteria scrupulously.

No government could take office without promising to preserve and defend its new subjects in a democracy. Or, to be broader, no government could take office under such conditions as long as it was responsible to its populace and depended on their support. The entire premise of Moldbug’s utopia is a government whose rule is by force and does not depend on the consent of the governed.

If Moldbug’s King needed to gain the consent of the governed before taking power, they wouldn’t stop at making him sign a promise not to shoot anyone. They would make him sign a promise to rule for the good of the people rather than in order to maximize shareholder value. Heck, the last time we tried something like this, the people made the government sign the Bill of Rights.

Here Moldbug wants to have his cake and eat it too. His government will be unconstrained and effective because it doesn’t rule by consent of the people. But when we start examining how horrible an “unconstrained effective government” really would be, he promises that need for the consent of the people would rein it in.

Positing a government that can ignore the age-old constraint of popular consent is far-fetched enough. Positing one where the constraint only arises in those situations where it would be optimal for it to arise, but not otherwise, is just dreaming.

But do we really know it? The explanation that Royal California will not harvest the poor for their organs, because it will have promised not to harvest the poor for their organs, and its most valuable asset is its reputation, while certainly accurate, is too narrow for me. Having established this legalistic defense, let us reinforce it with further realities. More broadly, Royal California will in all cases treat her subjects as human beings. The maintenance of equity, as well as law, is crucial to her reputation. Thus, the Genickschuss is out, with or without the organ harvesting.

Our second layer of protection is that the king will preserve human rights and maintain equity among persons. I wonder if the person writing this has ever read Mencius Moldbug. He has some pretty interesting arguments against human rights and the equity of persons, and I’d be interested in hearing a debate between the two of them.

Carlylean to its core, the ideology of Royal California is that the King is God’s proxy on earth; whatever God would have him do, that is justice; the King, having done his best to divine God’s will, shall see it done. Or else he is no king, but a piece of cardboard, a “Canadian lumber-log.” Clearly, God is not in favor of harvesting the poor for their organs. You’re probably thinking of Huitzilopochtli. So this is another safeguard.

So our third layer of protection – and I am not making this up – is “the will of God”. Don’t you feel safer already? Politicians would never do bad things, even when it is in their own self interest, because God wouldn’t want them to. I think that’s pretty much all the protection citizens might need from their government, don’t you? Let’s write a letter to the libertarians and tell them they can all go home now, God has this one covered.

But I should not be too harsh on Moldbug. He goes on to admit we probably do need a fourth layer of protection, beyond the three he has mentioned. And he even steel-mans the case against him, noting that in a higher-technology world, more and more people will become unproductive until, instead of being a tiny proportion of citizens, it may become the majority or (in the post-Singularity case) everyone who has to worry about this. He gives a few possible solutions:

First, the King has no compunction whatsoever in creating economic distortions that produce employment for low-skilled humans. A good example of such a distortion in the modern world are laws prohibiting self-service gas stations, as in New Jersey or Oregon. These distortions have gotten a bad name among today’s thinkers, because makework is typically the symptom of some corrupt political combination. As the King’s will, it will have a different flavor.

As both a good Carlylean and a good Misesian, the King condemns economism – the theory that any economic indicator can measure human happiness. His goal is a fulfilled and dignified society, not maximum production of widgets. Is it better that teenagers get work experience during the summer, or that gas costs five cents a gallon less? The question is not a function of any mathematical formula. It is a question of judgment and taste. All that free-market economics will tell you is that, if you prohibit self service, there will be more jobs for gas-station attendants, and gas will cost more. It cannot tell you whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

There may be no jobs for men with an IQ of 80 in Royal California – at least, not in a Royal California whose roads are paved by asphalt rollers. But suppose its roads are paved in brick? A man with an IQ of 80 can lay brick, do it well, and obtain dignity from the task. Nothing whatsoever prevents the King from distorting markets to create demand for the supply he has.

Okay, so the corporate CEO in a government based solely on maximizing shareholder value will decide to trash his own economy in order to provide jobs for the jobless, because that’s just how much corporate CEOs respect human dignity. This is just like corporate CEOs today, who never fire anyone to increase profitability because maintaining jobs is more important. Sure, let’s roll with that.

Since we have abandoned the free market here, we no longer have the free market’s safeguards on job tolerability. Depending on how many make-work jobs the King creates, we will have either an oversupply, an undersupply, or a just-right-supply of unskilled laborers to fill them, which in turn will determine workers’ wages and living conditions. Will the King maintain them at a living wage in good conditions, or at conditions more like the immigrant farm laborers of today? If the latter, I suppose that’s better than killing off the unproductives, but it’s still pretty dystopian. If the former, then that’s quite nice of the King, but I can’t help noting that by instituting useless make-work government-provided jobs for everyone at guaranteed salaries, he has kind of just re-invented Communism, which seems to be the sort of thing I would have expected Reactionaries to try to avoid.

I would compare this idea to the idea of a Basic Income Guarantee. Both cost the economy the same amount of money. Yet in Moldbug’s plan, the poor spend their entire day digging ditches and filling them in again. In a basic income guarantee, the poor spend their days doing whatever they want – producing art, playing games, or working to make themselves more productive. Moldbug may wax rhapsodic about the dignity of work, and he is not entirely wrong, but the sort of work that has dignity is not the sort of work where you dig ditches and fill them in again to earn a government-set paycheck. I wonder if you asked the employed gas station attendant and the unemployed bohemian to rate the level of dignity they feel they have, would this support Moldbug’s thesis?

But never fear, Moldbug has yet another plan:

Or not. The low-browed man of 70 (and remember – for every 130, there is a 70) may still require special supervision. Besides a job, he needs a patron. Productivity he has, but direction and discipline he still requires. His patron may be a charity, or a profitable corporation, or even – gasp – an individual.

In the last case, of course, we have reinvented slavery. Gasp! Since the bond of natural familial kindness is not present in the case of an unrelated ward, the King keeps a close watch on this relationship to protect human dignity. Nonetheless, his wards are farmed out – it is always better to be a private ward than the ward of the State. Bureaucratic slavery is slavery at its worst. Adult foster care, as perhaps we will call it, is a far more human and dignified relationship.

So, we will force people to work for other people against their consent, but it will all be okay and humane, because the government will be keeping “a close watch on this relationship”? Darnit, I liked it better when we were being protected by “the will of God”.

If Moldbug agrees that bureaucratic slavery is “slavery at its worst”, what exactly does he mean when he says the King will “keep a close watch” on these “adult foster care” institutions. Will the King personally go out to each of them and evaluate? That seems like a lot of work in a state of 40 million people. Or will he appoint some government officials to do so, to inspect each institution and make sure it is up to code? If so, how is this different from “bureaucratic slavery”? Is it because the bureaucrats and slaveowners aren’t literally the same people?

Look, Moldbug. I know you don’t think you’re reinventing Communism, but you are.

Luckily he has one more trick up his sleeve:

If a human being cannot support himself in a civilized manner in the King’s economy, which has been carefully tweaked to match labor demand to labor supply, the King does not provide a “safety net” in the 20th-century style, in which he may lounge, sag, bob and fester forever. No – then, it is time for the Virtual Option.

If you accept the Virtual Option – always a voluntary decision, even if you have no other viable options – California will house, feed and care for you indefinitely. It will also provide you with a rich, fulfilling life offering every opportunity to obtain dignity, respect and even social status. However, this life will be a virtual life. In your real life, your freedom will be extremely restricted: to the point of imprisonment. You may even be sealed in a pod.

The result is that the ward (a) disappears from society, and (b) retains or (hopefully) increases his level of dignity and fulfillment. He remains a financial liability, because it is still necessary to prepare his meals and maintain his pod. But other residents of California no longer feel menaced by his presence. For he is no longer present among them.

This doesn’t sound so bad to me, although I’m probably a huge outlier on this and if you actually tried it on people you’d have a civil war on your hands.

But first of all, it’s impossible with current levels of technology, always a bad sign.

Second of all, it’s something that would be equally viable in a democracy and a monarchy. Compare these pods to television. Right now, we pay welfare money to the poor, and, in some cases, they use that money to watch television all day. When they complain, it generally is not due to a lack of television but to a lack of money. If we had virtual reality pods, no doubt the situation would look little different, and conservatives and Reactionaries would be the ones complaining that we pay the poor money to sit in virtual reality pods all day instead of getting a real job.

Third of all, it would probably cost more than any other option. Putting a man in prison – feeding him, boarding him, and putting some guards on the doors to make sure he doesn’t escape costs about $50,000 a year – more than sending that same man to any college in the country. The bulk of the expenses are health care and security – two problems that would be equally dire in these pods. In fact, solving the medical problems associated with prolonged immobility in a virtual environment might be further beyond our current technology than the virtual environment itself.

If the true reason behind the Virtual Option is keeping the poor out of everyday society – even though many of its residents would be old people, disabled people, and the like – why not just offer those people $40,000 a year to live in some nice community out in the country made up solely of other non-working poor? It would be cheaper, more humane, and after a few years with a stable income and a normal life the people involved might end up being unexpectedly productive.

This is, of course, a question one could ask of our own society as well as of Moldbug’s hypothetical. So let’s stick to criticizing Reactionaries, which is more fun and less depressing.

4.5: Would exit rights turn countries into business-like entities that had to compete with one another for citizens?

Exit rights are a great idea and of course having them is better than not having them. But I have yet to hear Reactionaries who cite them as a panacea explain in detail what exit rights we need beyond those we have already.

The United States allows its citizens to leave the country by buying a relatively cheap passport and go anywhere that will take them in, with the exception of a few arch-enemies like Cuba – and those exceptions are laughably easy to evade. It allows them to hold dual citizenship with various foreign powers. It even allows them to renounce their American citizenship entirely and become sole citizens of any foreign power that will accept them.

Few Americans take advantage of this opportunity in any but the most limited ways. When they do move abroad, it’s usually for business or family reasons, rather than a rational decision to move to a different country with policies more to their liking. There are constant threats by dissatisfied Americans to move to Canada, and one in a thousand even carry through with them, but the general situation seems to be that America has a very large neighbor that speaks the same language, and has an equally developed economy, and has policies that many Americans prefer to their own country’s, and isn’t too hard to move to, and almost no one takes advantage of this opportunity. Nor do I see many people, even among the rich, moving to Singapore or Dubai.

Heck, the US has fifty states. Moving from one to another is as easy as getting in a car, driving there, and renting a room, and although the federal government limits exactly how different their policies can be you better believe that there are very important differences in areas like taxes, business climate, education, crime, gun control, and many more. Yet aside from the fascinating but small-scale Free State Project there’s little politically-motivated interstate movement, nor do states seem to have been motivated to converge on their policies or be less ideologically driven.

What if we held an exit rights party, and nobody came?

Even aside from the international problems of gaining citizenship, dealing with a language barrier, and adapting to a new culture, people are just rooted – property, friends, family, jobs. The end result is that the only people who can leave their countries behind are very poor refugees with nothing to lose, and very rich jet-setters. The former aren’t very attractive customers, and the latter have all their money in tax shelters anyway.

So although the idea of being able to choose your country like a savvy consumer appeals to me, just saying “exit rights!” isn’t going to make it happen, and I haven’t heard any more elaborate plans.

5: Are modern ideas about race and gender wrongheaded and dangerous?

The past century has seen a huge opening up of racial and sexual norms, as a closed-minded traditional society willing to dismiss everything against their personal morals as disgusting or evil started first discussing and later embracing alternative ideas.

This was followed by a subsequent closing back up of those norms, as society decided it was definitely right this time, and this time for real anyone who brought up any alternative possibilities was definitely disgusting and evil.

Reactionaries deserve kudos for lampshading these taboos and pointing out various modern hypocrisies in a frank and honest way. But to invert an old saying, I will defend to the death their right to say it, but disagree with what they say.

5.1: Are modern women sluts?

This is a surprisingly important question in Reactionary thought. Just to prove I’m not strawmanning:

So you might say, Bryce, if you want an objective and useful definition of the word slut, you would have to conclude that most Western women are sluts. That’s not good. And I say “Exactly.”

– Anarcho-Papist

Obviously democracy is not working, is failing catastrophically. The productive are outvoted by the gimmedats, in large part non asian minorities and white sluts.

– blog.jim.com

Why would you take a slutty girl seriously? Once she accepted slut into her life, keep her out of yours. It is rare for a slut to truly reform so I would not even take the chance. Once a slut, always a slut. Do you really want your kids coming out the same place 10 other men have gone into? “But doesn’t that pretty much rule out about 85% of women or so?” Well, unfortunately it does. I wish there was a better answer but there is not. Do not settle for sluts, if they have such little respect for themselves imagine how little respect they will have for you. Manning up does not mean settling for a hopeless graying slut.”

– Occidental Traditionalist

We live in strange times. Recently several religious conservative bloggers have suggested that the word “slut” is a slur against all women, and that it is a type of profanity. My best guess is they feel that sluts know that what they are doing is wrong, so even using the word in general is cruel to their already convicted hearts.

– Dalrock

Telling women that sleeping around is bad just because it’s “slutty” is argument through mere connotation of words. Then again, accusing these people of “sexism” or “misogyny” would be the same. So let’s bury the insults and try to figure out what’s going on.

Are people becoming sluttier? Several studies have addressed this question (though, uh, not in those exact words). In America, we have only a few scattered studies recording a shift from an average of two lifetime sexual partners for women and six for men in 1970 to about four partners for women and six for men in 2006. But we change methodologies midstream and have to confuse means with medians to get those numbers. France is the only country to do the study properly, perhaps unsurprising given their legendary love of all things amorous. Their numbers seem similar to ours but more precise, so let’s use the French results:

Number of partners reported in the lifetime remained stable between all three surveys for men of all ages (11.8 in 1970, 11.0 in 1992, and 11.6 in 2006). For women, mean lifetime number of partners increased from 1.8 in 1970 to 3.3 in 1992 and to 4.4 in 2006.)

One of the first things we notice about these data is that they cannot possibly be true. Men cannot be having more (heterosexual) sex than women, nor can the two statistics trend in different directions. The least mathematically impossible explanation is that between 1970 and 2006, women have become less likely to lie about all the sex they’re having.

Does that contradict common sense, which tells us everyone is really slutty nowadays but was perfectly chaste in the past? Maybe, but common sense seems to be not entirely correct. Common sense would tell us that modern young people are having much more sex than youth fifteen years ago, but according to the study “no increase was observed between 1992 and 2006 in women under thirty; for men under thirty a decrease in the mean was seen in the most recent period – 10.4 in 1992 and 7.7 in 2006, p < 0.00001"

(the growth of the Muslim population in France from 7% to 10% during that time period seems insufficient to account for the changes)

5.1.1: If a woman is a slut, does that mean her future marriage is doomed to failure?

Before you answer, consider a common failure mode. Some rule catches on for some very useful reason. Like “don’t have sex with your cousin, you’ll have kids with two heads.” Biological or memetic evolution selects for people who follow the rule, and eventually the rule becomes an unquestionable taboo.

But historically no one understood Mendelian genetics. The rule didn’t make sense, but it had to be followed. And so people came up with rationalizations. Some of them were simple rationalizations for simple folk: “don’t have sex with your cousin, God hates it.” Or “Don’t have sex with your cousin, it’s disgusting.” More sophisticated people demanded more sophisticated rationalizations: eventually you get “Don’t have sex with your cousin, it could go wrong and damage the structure of trust necessary for an extended family”, or “Don’t have sex with your cousin, it is contrary to this here complicated conception of natural law”.

Then suppose the original reason for the rule is taken away. Someone wants to have protected sex with their cousin, understanding that they cannot ethically have children. Or someone invents a gene therapy that allows people to have sex with their cousins without additional risk of birth defects.

Doesn’t matter. Everyone will have had so much fun making up rationalizations that they will object to the new harmless act almost as much as to the old dangerous act. “God still hates it!” “It’s still disgusting!” “It still damages the family structure of trust!” “It’s still contrary to the natural law!”

But it would be very strange if, the original reason for the belief having been neutralized, by coincidence the belief happens to be right anyway. Imagine that an explorer comes back from a distant jungle with a tale of a humongous monster. Everyone catches monster fever and begins speculating on how the monster may have gotten there. Then the explorer admits his tale is a hoax. Objecting “But there could still be a monster there!” is fruitless. If the original reason anyone held the belief is invalid, it’s unlikely that by coincidence the belief just happens to be correct.

Let’s get back to sluttiness. (I am following the lead of my interlocutors in concentrating on female sluttiness only here, since it seems to be the only type anyone cares about. Yes, you’re very clever for pointing out that men can be promiscuous as well. Why don’t you follow it up with the phrase “double standard” or a reference to “playing the field”?)

We know two very good reasons why sluttiness has been stigmatized in nearly all societies. First, slutty women were more likely to get sexually transmitted diseases. Second, slutty women were likely to end up with children outside of wedlock. Back when men were the sole providers and didn’t have much providing to spare, that would have been just about a death sentence.

These are two huge issues. These two issues alone are more than sufficient to explain the taboo on sluttiness establishing itself on every continent and in every major religion. These are more than sufficient to explain why some people think sluts are disgusting, why they’re low status, why we have a cultural taboo on sluttiness.

But of course, most sluts today have these two issues figured out. Contraception prevents the out of wedlock births. Protection and antibiotics prevent the STDs. So the old reasons no longer hold.

It would be quite the coincidence if a taboo that formed for one reason just happened to be vitally important for society for totally different reasons.

I admit the Reactionaries have their justifications for why sluttiness is bad. They say sluttiness before marriage can lead to sluttiness after marriage, and thither to infidelity, divorce and broken families. Or the slut’s previous experiences might have given her higher expectations, leading to divorce and broken families again. And…

…no, that’s actually all the justifications I can find. There are people who think they have other justifications, but they can never explain them in so many words. Read this article. No, really, read that article. Gods! Have you ever seen so many mere assertions and Arguments From My Opponent Believes Something in one place?

So okay. They have two just-so stories. I can come up with just-so stories too! Like – if a woman sleeps with a lot of people before marriage, she’ll be better able to estimate how compatible she is with any given partner. Or – if a woman can sleep with men before marriage, she won’t be compelled by horniness to marry the first loser she meets just so she can have sex with someone. Or – if a woman has a couple of relationships before she marries, she’ll have practice with relationships and won’t screw the important one up. This is fun! How about – if a woman sleeps with people before settling down, she won’t feel curiosity that makes her stray afterwards?

The reason these sorts of just-so stories about sluttiness keep popping up is the disappearance of the good historical arguments against the practice, leaving behind only a feeling of disgust in search of a justification.

One might argue – isn’t the proof in the pudding? Divorce rates have been going up lately, infidelity rates have been going up; correlation isn’t always causation but isn’t it at least suggestive?

In this case, no. We can even check. From Social Pathology:

Women with zero or one premarital sexual partners have more stable marriages than women with two or more partners. Okay. Who gets married a virgin these days? Super-religious people. They’re not going to divorce. And from the source, I gather that most of these stably married one partner women are women who had premarital sex with their future husband. Super-religious people who slipped up. Their poor self-control earns them a 15% lower likelihood of stable marriage: harsh, but fair.

The people with two or more partners are the ones who we know are “experimenting” – having sex with at least one person other than their future husband. Among this group, likelihood of unstable marriage goes down with more partners up until you reach the 20 partner or so level – at which point you’re probably capturing prostitutes, cluster B personality disorders, and other people outside the mainstream.

The data provide some evidence that an absolute commitment to purity – no sex before marriage, or sex only with your husband-to-be – predicts marital stability. But beyond that – in the two to twenty partner range in which recent social change has been occurring – there’s no correlation between increasing sluttiness and decreasing marital stability.

5.1.2: Woman only put out for macho but antisocial men. Our society encourages that tendency and shames “beta males” who are nice and prosocial but cannot get women. This incentivizes men to become jerks, and men follow those incentives in droves. Don’t we need to do something about women’s tendency to make poor choices?

There’s no shortage of places to find this argument, but the obligatory link goes to Free Northerner for One More Condom In The Landfill, a particularly good presentation of the idea.

In a broad perspective the point is correct – empirically, men with more psychopathic traits, less agreeableness, and greater narcissism have more sexual partners.

On the other hand, it is kind of ironic that the pickup artist community – one of the few communities to be perfectly honest about the above point – has become obsessed with scoring the hottest girls and denigrating the others, no matter how perfect they might otherwise be.

The complaint tends to be “You women keep asking where the good men are, but they’re right where you left them when you refused to date them because you only cared about cockiness and bulging muscles.” The countercomplaint might be “You men keep asking where the good women are, but they’re right where you left them when you refused to date them because you only cared about stylishness and big breasts.”

I also suspect (though I have no evidence) that it is primarily the hotter women who have been socialized to be irrationally attracted to “bad boys”, and that pickup artists’ disproportionate focus on this demographic skews their assessment of the problem.

If one were to phrase the problem as “Men and women both make stupid and counterproductive sexual choices; how can we optimize for avoiding those?”, then that might make the sane 30%-or-so of feminists join the conversation and get something done.

If you phrase the problem as “Those women make stupid and counterproductive sexual choices, how can we shift the balance of power toward men?”, even the sane 30%-or-so of feminists will ignore and oppose you, and with good reason.

I have no idea how to solve the object-level problems, by the way, although I would tentatively recommend my own strategy of sidestepping the problems with both hot men and hot women by dating a hot genderqueer.

5.2: Are Progressive values responsible for rising divorce rates?

Let’s get the obvious objection out of the way first: divorce rates have been falling since about 1980. They’re now at their lowest level since 1970 or so, and dropping still.

The other thing this graph tells us is that rising divorce rates were a phenomenon very specific to the period about 1965 – 1975. This was a good decade for liberal values, but little moreso than decades before and after it. The strictly time-limited nature of the phenomenon suggests something more specific (and no, it’s not no-fault divorce laws). The Pill, which came out in 1960, is an extremely plausible candidate, but a full treatment of this topic is beyond the scope of this essay.

Now that the obvious objection is out of the way, let’s discuss some less obvious objections. If progressive values cause divorce, how come people with more progressive values are less likely to divorce? College-educated women have about half the divorce rate of the non-college-educated (source). More conservative states have higher divorce rates than more liberal states (source). Atheists have divorce rates below the national average (source). Some of these factors seem to remain even when controlling for wealth and the other usual confounders (source, source). The link between sluttiness and stable marriage mentioned above reinforces this point.

I think this data is consistent with the following theory: new technology and changing economic conditions produced a strain on family life that was reflected in an explosion in divorce rates. Society’s memetic immune system sprung into action to contain the damage through the creation of new laws, institutions, and social norms. People who adopted the new ways survived the crisis and their family lives returned to a sort of normal. People who failed to adapt…well, don’t be one of those people.

The new norms created by the memetic immune system are exactly the progressive values that Reactionaries blame for the damage: marrying later, trying more partners, using more contraception, having fewer children.

This theory explains both why the progressive values arise at the same time as the broken families, but also why people with progressive values are less likely to have broken families than others.

The data on illegitimate children and single motherhood mirror the data on divorce and do not require a separate discussion.

5.3: Are we headed for a demographic catastrophe?

First of all, before we pretend that the minutiae of who has which values and who goes to church how many times affects fertility rate much, let’s see the inevitable GDP/fertility rate graph:

And before we worry about the United States experiencing demographic collapse and tumbleweeds rolling through the streets of New York City, let’s double-check to make sure that US population isn’t a near-perfectly straight upward-trending line:

Western Europe?

A few countries do have demographic problems. Singapore, for example, has the lowest fertility rate in the world – 0.79, 224th out of 224 countries. It should probably do something about that. But given that it’s generally accepted to be the most Reactionary country in the world, it’s hard to blame this one on Progressivism or suggest Reactionary values as the answer.

5.3.1: But what if I am racist? Isn’t it possible that fertile minorities and immigrants are hiding a fertility deficit among precious, precious, white people?

According to Edmonston et al’s projection of US racial fertility trends:

In 2100, the total U.S. population will eclipse 550 million people, and the racial composition of the country will be 38.8% white, 30.6% Hispanic, 15.6% black, 14.9% Asian and Pacific Islander, and 1% American Indian.

The absolute number of white people will be only a few million less than today, 209 million. That’s more than enough to run a wide selection of excellent country clubs, or achieve whatever other strategic aims we need a large white population for.

Perhaps most gratifying if you are a racist, the percent of black people will increase only about three percentage points. The biggest increase will be in Asians, a so-called model minority.

After that? If there are still biological humans in organic bodies transmitting genes naturally much after 2100, we have much bigger problems than race on our hands.

5.3.2: Are we headed for an idiocracy?

Poor, uneducated, low-IQ people have higher fertility rates than wealthy, well-educated, high-IQ people in almost all countries. Therefore, one might worry that this will have a dysgenic effect, selecting against genes for intelligence until eventually everyone is stupid or has other undesirable quantities anticorrelated with wealth and education. This was the premise of the movie Idiocracy, and in principle people are far too quick to dismiss it.

But in practice, the effect is too small be significant. Richard Lynn, who is the closest we will get to an expert on dysgenics, calculates that American society as a whole is losing 0.9 IQ points per generation. So by 2100, people will have lost on average 4 IQ points.

Since it’s hard to get a good intuitive graph of what 4 IQ points means, consider that IQ has been increasing by about 3 points per decade (average is still 100, but only because they recalibrate it). So absent any further Flynn Effect, losing 4 IQ points would take us back to…about as smart as we were back in 2000. I won’t say that won’t be unpleasant – the people of that era elected George W. Bush, after all – but it’s not quite convert-all-written-language-to pictograms-because-everyone-has-forgotten-how-to-read level unpleasant.

And what comes after 2100 doesn’t matter, because even on the off chance we’re still using human brains to reason at that point, it sure won’t be human brains in which the genes have been left to chance. To paraphrase Keynes, in the long run we’re all either dead or cyborgs.

5.4: Aren’t modern dogmas about race and sex and sexuality stupid and evil?

Let me be clear here. There is no excuse for the sort of extremist folk social justice crusades one can find on Tumblr or Twitter or Freethought Blogs. With a few treasured exceptions they are full of nasty and hateful people devoid of intellectual integrity and basic human kindness, and I am suitably embarrassed to be in the same 50%-or-so of the political spectrum.

Then again, there are lots of nasty and hateful conservatives and reactionaries devoid of intellectual integrity and basic human kindness too. Go take a look at Free Republic. Maybe we can call it a tie?

But this has surprisingly little bearing on the particular question above. As Christians are obligated by circumstance to point out, an idea is not responsible for the quality of people who hold it. And modern dogmas about race are agreed by very nearly everyone – including most Reactionaries! – including you! – to be both correct and very important.

Three hundred years ago, a pretty high percent of Americans were okay with black people getting kidnapped, enslaved, forced into back-breaking labor on plantations, raped, separated from their children, whipped if they protested, worked to a very early death, and then replaced with other black people.

Nowadays Reactionaries like to think of themselves as racist just because they believe the average black IQ is a standard deviation below the average white IQ. But one standard deviation implies that about a fifth of black people are smarter than the average white person. If you were to go back to 1800 and tell a conference of the most extreme radical abolitionists that you thought a fifth of black people were smarter than the average white person, they would laugh and not stop laughing until they died of laughter-induced asphyxiation.

And at least there the traditional and modern stereotype are still going the same direction. Did you know there used to be a stereotype that Jews were stupid and boorish and didn’t belong in polite society? A stereotype that Chinese people were dumb? A stereotype that black people were bad at sports? To make a corny statistics pun, there seems to be very poor inter-hater reliability.

Homosexuality is little different. Reactionaries take a bold stand against sexually suggestive displays at gay pride parades or whatever, but when it comes to why two people who love each other can’t get married because they’re both the same gender, they tend to be just as confused as the rest of us. Mencius Moldbug writes:

Although I am straight as an iron spear, I happen to see nothing at all wrong with “gay marriage.” In fact I am completely sympathetic to the Universalist view, in which the fact that couples have to be of opposite sexes is a sort of bizarre holdover from the Middle Ages, like the ducking-stool or trial by fire. It’s not clear to me why homosexuality, which obviously has some extremely concrete biological cause, is so common in modern Western populations, but it is what it is. However, because I am straight etc, and also because I’m not a Universalist, I happen to think the issue is not really one of the most pressing concerns facing humanity.

Moldbug is welcome to his opinion on what is or isn’t one of the most pressing concerns facing humanity (I would have said a couple of brain-dead Internet thugs from Gawker beating up on a random Twitter celebrity isn’t one of the most pressing concerns facing humanity, but to each his own) but I wonder if Moldbug notices that merely his unconcern on this issue makes him in let’s say the 95th percentile of most Progressive Americans who have ever lived. 95% of Americans throughout history have been quite certain that eradicating sodomy was one of the most pressing concerns facing humanity, and boy did they act on that belief.

In fact, if we put a Reactionary in a time machine headed backward, and made it stop when the Reactionary was just as racist, sexist, et cetera as the US population average at the time, I predict they wouldn’t make it much past the 1970s. Go into the 1960s and you get laws banning colleges from admitting both black and white students to the same campus (one helpfully specified that the black and white campuses could not be within twenty five miles of one another).

Now, there’s no problem with this – except for Nixon and disco, the 1970s were no worse than any other period. But Reactionaries insist that all Progressivism since 1600 has been part of one vast and monstrous movement – maybe a religious cult, maybe a sinister power-play, maybe just the death throes of the western intellectual tradition – dedicated to being wrong about everything. And that a very big part of this vast movement focused on race. And when they have to whisper “Except we agree with 99% of what it did, right up until the past couple of decades, and in fact they got it right when everyone else was horribly, atrociously wrong”, that is – or at least should be – kind of embarrassing.

5.4.1: But there’s a clear difference between the past policies Reactionaries support and the modern ones they oppose. Past policies were going for equality of opportunity, modern ones for equality of results. Isn’t seeking equality of results laden with too many assumptions?

Arguing about whether a post-racial society should provide equality of opportunity or equality of results is a little like arguing about whether in the worker’s paradise, everyone should have a pony or everyone should have two ponies.

Right now, there is not even equality of opportunity. Rigorous well-controlled study after rigorous well-controlled study has shown that women and minorities face gigantic amounts of baseless discrimination in various areas, most notably employment. This remains true even when, for example, the experiment is sending perfectly identical resumes out to companies but with the photo of a black or white guy at the top.

Once we have equality of opportunity, then we can start debating whether we should go further and try for equality of results. Until then, it’s kind of a moot point.

5.4.2: What about the studies that have shown black people have lower IQ/higher violence/other undesirable trait than white people?

If genetic differences across races prove real, this would be a good argument against seeking equality of results, but no argument at all against continuing to seek equality of opportunity – which, as mentioned above, mountains of rigorous well-controlled studies continue to show we don’t have.

If, as the scientific racists suggest, black people have an average IQ of 85 compared to the white average of 100, then there is still a pretty big civil rights battle to be fought getting the average black person to do as well as the average white person with IQ 85. After controlling for IQ, the average black person is still twice as likely to be in poverty, 50% more likely to be unemployed, and 250% more likely to be in prison (source, other gaps appear to disappear or reverse once IQ is controlled; see link for a more complete analysis.)

5.4.2.1: But this is exactly the kind of discussion progressives won’t let us have! It is an unquestioned dogma of our society that all cross-racial differences must be based entirely on discrimination! In fact, people educated in public schools are incapable of even conceiving of the possibility that they could be otherwise! How are we supposed to be able to disentangle equality of opportunity from equality of results in such people?

From this Gallup poll:

83% of white people agree that the poor position of blacks in society is mostly not due to discrimination.

Want to see something even cooler?

60% of black people agree that the poor position of blacks in society is mostly not due to discrimination.

So no, doubting that all racial disparities in the US are due to discrimination isn’t a thought crime. It’s the majority position, even among black people themselves.

True, the number of people willing to consider genetic differences in particular would probably be far lower. But the great (and very legitimate) fear motivating more-than-academic interest in this question – that white people will forever be blamed for and forced to atone for minorities’ problems – is one that can be talked about productively and perhaps banished.

5.4.3: Even if the establishment has not managed to completely ban all discussion of race that contradicts their own ideas, isn’t it only a matter of time before political correctness takes over completely?

It’s hard to measure the power of the more intellectually bankrupt wing of the social justice movement, but as best I can tell it does not seem to be getting more powerful.

According to Rasmussen, support for “political correctness” is declining in America. As we saw above, fewer and fewer people are willing to attribute black-white disparities to “racism” over time. Gallup finds that in the past decade, the percent of blacks satisfied with the way blacks are treated has gone up nearly 10% (I can’t find similar numbers for white people, but I bet they’re similar). Both white and black people are about 25% less likely to consider the justice system racially biased than 20 years ago. The percent of whites who think government should play “a major role” in helping minorities has dropped by 10 percent since 2004; for blacks, there is a similar drop of 14 percent.

The percent of people who think women have equal job opportunities to men has gone up 15% in the past nine years. Women are less likely to identify as feminists than twenty years ago, and support for affirmative action is at historic lows.

Here we see really the most encouraging combination of trends possible: actual racism, perceptions of racism, and concern about racism are all decreasing at the same time.

5.4.3.2: So how come social justice people have been making so much more noise lately?

My guess is changes in the media. The Internet allows small groups to form isolated bubbles and then fester away from the rest of society, becoming more and more extremist and paranoid and certain of themselves as their members feed upon each other in a vicious cycle.

Of course, as Reactionaries, you wouldn’t possibly know anything about that.

At the same time, the relative anonymity of the Internet promotes bad manners and flame wars and general trollishness. It’s not just that the writer is anonymous and therefore doesn’t fear punishment for what he or she says. It’s that their enemy is some nameless evil, rather than a person with a face whom they will treat as a human being.

And again at the same time, the national media has become more and more efficient at detecting outrageous events associated with some small town or some B-list celebrity and publicizing them to the entire world. This allows the hatred of the entire world to be focused on a single random person for a short period of time, which usually results in that person’s life being ruined in a way that would be impossible without this media efficiency.

But these processes are at least partly nonpartisan. With a rise in extremist online social justice has also come a rise in groups that didn’t even exist before, like men’s rights advocates.

5.4.3.2.1: Still, isn’t the fact that progressivism was responsible for this sort of zealous and hateful social justice movement is a point against it?

I identify the worst parts of the social justice movement as basically reactionary in their outlook, even though from a coalition politics point of view they have been forced to ally with progressives.

Chief in this assessment is their strong beliefs that some topics should be taboo and bowdlerized from society. In the old days, you would ban books because they talked too much about sex. In the new days, we laugh at their prudishness, but still seriously debate banning books because they are “demeaning towards women” or “trivialize rape culture”. The desire to ban books that promote different sexual norms than we ourselves promote hasn’t changed, only the particular sexual norms we are enforcing.

The same is true of race. In the old days, we would ban books that insulted the King or the upper classes. In the new days, we ban books that insult the poor, or disprivileged or disadvantaged classes. Again, the desire to ban books insulting the classes we like doesn’t change, only to which classes we afford this privilege.

Real Progressivism is Enlightenment values – like the belief that free flow of information is more important than any particular person’s desire to “cleanse” society of “unsavory” ideas. Real Reaction is the belief that free expression isn’t as important as making sure people have “the right” values. Upper-class white Reactionaries will try to enforce values protecting upper-class white people. Lower-class minority Reactionaries will try to enforce values protecting lower-class minorities. Whatever. They’re still Reactionary.

Likewise, real Progressivism is color-blind. It may be sophisticatedly color-blind, which involves realizing that just saying “I’m going to be color-blind now, okay?” doesn’t work, and that affirmative-action type policies may paradoxically lead to more genuinely color-blind results. But it would be unlikely to promote the idea that people should have racial pride, or that one particular race is evil and is not allowed to have racial pride. “White people should identify strongly with white culture; black people have no culture” is the upper-class white Reactionary slogan. “Black people should identify strongly with black culture; white people have no culture” is the lower-class minority Reactionary slogan. “Lots of races have culture but let’s ignore them and let individuals identify with what they personally like” is the academically-neglected but still-popular true Progressive position.

Finally, real Progressivism opposes segregation in all its forms. Upper-class white Reaction says that it’s necessary to protect white people from being “polluted” by black culture like rap music. Lower-class minority Reaction says that it’s necessary to stop white people from “appropriating” black culture like rap music. Either way, we get white people not allowed to listen to rap music. Progressivism is the position contrary to both: that everyone can listen to whatever music they damn well please.

The conservative nature of social justice isn’t surprising if you, like me, believe the liberal/conservative divide mirrors a self-expression/survival divide – more simply, whether or not you feel safe. As society becomes more economically and politically secure, we expect it to become more liberal and progressive. But we also expect the subgroups of society that are least secure to remain conservative, and to continue to use conservative strategies to protect themselves in their unsafe environment. Those subgroups are women and minorities.

Because more liberal white people are more likely to be tolerant toward minorities and the poor, minorities and the poor are by political necessity forced to ally with liberal parties. But when we are able to separate issues out from political coalition-building and self-interest, the natural tendency of economically and physically insecure minorities to be more socially conservative shows itself. Black people are more religious, more likely to support amendments banning gay marriage, and more likely to oppose stem cell research, abortion, and out of wedlock births.

If you do not like certain extreme versions of social justice, then fighting their Reactionary memes favoring poor minorities with your own Reactionary memes favoring rich whites is unlikely to work. At best you would just end up with two angry clans demanding more power for them personally; more likely financial and signaling incentives will prevent rich whites from wanting to take their own side in a conflict and everyone will just ignore you. A better strategy would be to take the moral high ground and promote Progressive memes to both sides.

5.5: Is our society hopelessly biased in favor of minorities and prejudiced against white people?

The most visible parts of society, like affirmative action and conversational norms around political correctness, are biased in favor of minorities and against white people. But this is intended to counter less visible parts of society, which are biased in favor of white people and against minorities. Whether this gambit works is anyone’s guess. See An analysis of the formalist account of power structures in democratic societies for a more careful evaluation of this claim.

5.6: One particularly annoying politically correct idea is the demand that everyone feel guilty about colonialism. Colonialism helped industrialize the developing world. Wasn’t the Progressive attempt to “help” the developing world through enforced decolonization and self-rule actually a big step backwards?

There are a couple of studies on this question, but all have their issues. A particular problem in the comparison of colonized to uncolonized countries is the possibility that more prosperous countries would be more likely to attract colonization and more likely to successfully resist potential colonizers. This makes an attempt to formally compare colonized with never-colonized countries directly nearly impossible.

I am least dissatisfied with Sylwester 2005, which compares colonial countries before, during, and after decolonization. It finds that:

There was no decrease in growth [for newly independent countries] relative to the alternative of remaining a colony. The reason why decolonizers exhibited lower growth than did those not concurrently undergoing a political change is that decolonizers grew slower than did nascent countries. These results provide evidence against the claim that this type of political transition caused lower growth than experienced previously. There is no evidence of transitional costs.

The paper also finds that previously independent countries grew faster than did the existing colonies. Whether or not a region is independent or controlled by an external power appears important for growth outcomes”

In other words, countries grew faster after independence than they did as a colony. This provides some support for the leftist idea that colonial powers drained more resources than they introduced, at least towards the end of the colonial age.

5.6.1: Forget economics, then. Wasn’t decolonization a human rights disaster, considering all the civil wars and coups and mismanagement in former colonies that could have been prevented by a competent colonial government?

Everyone from every side of the political spectrum agrees decolonization could have been handled better. It might be that no decolonization at all would have been better than decolonization the way the Great Powers historically went about it. And it’s hard to excuse all the civil wars and mismanagement that caused.

On the other hand, the colonial era wasn’t exactly free of bloody wars either. Colonial wars included the Mahdist War (100,000 deaths), the Algerian Revolution (500,000 – 1.5 million deaths), the Rif War (70,000 deaths), the Italian-Ethiopian War (500,000 deaths), the Mau Mau Rebellion (20,000 deaths), Mozambique War Of Independence (80,000 deaths), Angolan War of Independence (50,000 deaths), the Herero Genocide (100,000 deaths), the Java Wars (200,000 deaths), Sepoy Mutiny (~100,000 deaths), the Mad Mullah Jihad (100,000 deaths, but on the brighter side, an awesome name) Philippine-American War (220,000 deaths), First Indochina War (200,000 deaths), Aceh War (100,000 deaths) et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

If we don’t limit ourselves to just wars, and include famines, genocides, and general mismanagement, we can add Congo Free State (8 million deaths), genocide of Brazilian Indians (?200,000 deaths), forced labor in Portuguese colonies (250,000 deaths), forced labor in French colonies (200,000 deaths), Italian colonial genocide in Libya (125,000 deaths), French colonization of Algeria (500,000 deaths, European eradication of Native Americans (350,000 deaths), and the Australian and New Zealander eradication of aborigines and Maori (440,000 deaths). If we are willing to count famines worsened by colonial mismanagement we can go almost arbitrarily high, 20 million deaths or more.

It is certainly possible to imagine a wise and paternalistic colonial government coming in, cleaning up after native misrule, and introducing things like sanitation and industrialization. But that’s not what happened. It’s not fair to compare an imaginary ideal version of one policy with the real-world version of another.

5.6.1.1: Weren’t a lot of those colonial wars and human rights abuses actually caused by demotism and Progressivism? If people hadn’t revolted against their colonial masters, there wouldn’t have been these bloody colonial revolts.

Not a straw man!

The first answer is that even if we accept this weird premise, there are still hundreds of colonial atrocities that do not stand excused. Many of the above conflicts occurred during original colonial invasions, and a tendency to resist those hardly requires demotism. Others were simple genocides, during which resistance was minimal.

But let’s not accept the premise. I admit placing blame is complicated. To give just one example, thousands of homosexuals were killed in Nazi Germany. We usually blame the Nazis for this. But from a formal math point of view, it would be equally valid to blame homosexuality. After all, if not for homosexuality, those people would not have been killed, Nazis or no.

How to avoid such bizarre conclusions? One method is moral – even if both Nazism and homosexuality were to blame according to purely mathematical casual models, Nazism seems more morally to blame. Another method is practical- homosexuality is as old as the human race and probably not going away, so it’s easier to view homosexuality as a constant and vary Nazism than it is to hold Nazism as constant and vary homosexuality.

We can apply these same methods to the colonial wars. Morally, the colonized people seemed to be morally in the right – they were sitting around trying to live their ordinary lives when people invaded and tried to turn them into forced laborers. And practically, the desire for self-rule is older and harder to root out than the colonialism. Indeed, colonialism pretty much died off after a century or two, and the desire for self-rule is stronger than ever.

Some Reactionaries would contest this hypothesis. They would say that it is only the spread of Progressive ideas that make people want to revolt against their colonial masters – that if not for the New York Times deliberately sowing pre-revolt memes, no one would consider this a worthwhile thing to try.

Historical counterexamples abound, but the Jewish-Roman Wars (66-135 AD) seem like a particularly good one. If they don’t appeal to you for some reason, pick your own favorite example out of Wikipedia’s List of revolutions and rebellions.

And as we saw above, if Progressivism is an inevitable historical reaction to rising technology and security, rather than a meme spread by the New York Times or anyone else, then saying “My scheme would have worked if not for the spread of Progressive ideas” is no more virtuous than saying “My scheme would have worked if not for the conservation of matter”. Congratulations, you’ve found something that might have been a good idea in an alternate universe that ran on different rules.

5.6.2: Even if colonialism was historically bloody, wouldn’t today’s human-rights-obsessed, racism-hating era be able to sustain a type of colonialism that gives the good parts without the evil?

Yes, it’s possible that modern progressive ideals would be able to rescue colonialism. But it’s hard to imagine a nation being simultaneously progressive enough to colonize other countries wisely, but still so unprogressive that it would want to. It would have to be a country whose progressivism evolved on a path much different to our own.

5.7: Are schools are places where children get brainwashed into leftist and blame-America-first values? Are all parts of history that don’t fit with a progressive worldview whitewashed from the curriculum?

Our source here is James Donald, who for example says:

History gets radically rewritten at ever shorter intervals, and all older history books are effectively banned. Consider, for example the ever more radical rewrites of the career of Daniel Boone, which ended with him being expelled from history altogether, and that today’s student has no idea what “The shores of Tripoli” refers to. Ninety nine percent of what students used to be taught not very long ago, is now unthinkably controversial, shocking, and disturbing…

Look [these things] up in a history book written before the days of hate-America-first history. The New Century Speaker for School and College, published 1905.

Of course this would require you to read old books, but old books are like kryptonite to a progressive. Since they were written by dead white males, no respectable person will read them for fear that dangerous and forbidden thoughts might contaminate his brain. Like a vampire confronted with a bible, a progressive will cringe in fear before any dangerously old book. Ever since 1905 or so, kids have been taught hate-america-first history.

I worry James is confusing the sign of a value with the sign of its derivative. Certainly schools are becoming more willing to discuss leftist issues. But are they now disproportionately willing to discuss them?

Let’s take the example of Columbus. Modern Americans are taught not only the old history that Columbus was a brave explorer who sailed forth to boldly discover that the Earth was round, but also the new history of “yeah, but he was bad for the Indians”. The feeling I got was that sure, Columbus was all nice and well, but his bold voyages paved the way for later people to settle the New World which sort of by coincidence hurt the Indians because people were squatting on their ancestral lands. This is about as far as so-called liberal schools will go, and this is probably the sort of progressivism being introduced to history classes which James is complaining about.

But actually, Columbus was…well, The Oatmeal is kind of a low-status source to link to, but I think they said this one better than I could. It starts off with :

Upon his arrival, he demanded that the Lucayan [Indians] give his men food and gold, and allow him to have sex with their women. When the Lucayans refused, Columbus responded by ordering that their ears and noses be cut off, so that the now disfigured offenders could return to their villages and serve as a warning to others. Eventually, the natives rebelled. Columbus saw this as a perfect excuse to go to war, and with heavily armed troops and advanced weaponry, it wound up being a very short war. The natives were quickly slaughtered…there are eyewitness accounts of fallen Lucayan warriors being fed to hunting dogs while they were still alive, screaming and wailing in agony as the dogs feasted on their limbs and entrails.

(a commenter points out that some of its other claims are exaggerated)

As much as James may complain about how people vaguely mutter about something something Indians something on Columbus Day, I bet he didn’t learn this in school. In fact despite his protestations, I bet he didn’t learn very much leftist history at all in school, given that he thought Eugene V. Debs was a Supreme Court case.

One day, our school curriculum may become so leftist that the Right needs a book like A People’s History of the United States or Lies My Teacher Told Me (which was created not by armchair contemplation of what society’s biases must be, but by reading twelve actual history textbooks and spotting the actual lies in them). But that day hasn’t come yet.

What is James’ own evidence for a leftist bias? As far as I can tell, they’re things like that US classrooms keep going on about US enslavement of black people, but never mention the (African) Barbary Pirates enslaving white Americans. But this may have less to do with liberal bias and more to do with the fact that, as far as I can tell, only 115 white Americans were ever enslaved by the Barbary Pirates (and then released a few years later), whereas about 500,000 African slaves were brought to America, kept in slavery for centuries, precipitated the bloodiest war in our country’s history, and then became a racial group that makes up 12% of Americans today – over forty million people.

Oh, and actually, I did learn about the Barbary Pirates in history class, thank you very much. So it seems that prediction of James’ has been disconfirmed. Although he seems to have thought the government shutdown might end with Tea Party members and lawmakers being shipped to concentration camps, so I imagine having his predictions disconfirmed is a pretty common occurrence for him.

I apologize for the insulting tone of this FAQ entry, but I was accused of cringing in fear before old books, and being vampire-to-Bible-level afraid to study history. That hurts.

6: Any last thoughts?

6.1: Does this mean you hate Reactionary ideas and think they have nothing to teach you?

Absolutely not. Compare to communism. The people who called themselves communists had some great ideas, like shorter workweeks and racial equality. It was just that the narrative they used as a framework for that idea – historical dialectic, workers controlling the means of production, violent revolution, destruction of capitalism, destruction of democracy – were horrible. Their ability to notice problems tended to be better than their specific policy proposals which in turn tended to be better than their flights of fancy.

I feel the same way about Reaction. Some Reactionaries are saying things about society that need to be said. A few even have good policy proposals. But couching them in a narrative that talks about the wonders of feudalism and the evils of the Cathedral and how we should replace democracy with an absolute monarch just discredits them entirely.

6.1.1: What exactly do you like about Reaction?

I like that they’re honestly utopian. Their scathing attacks on everyone else for being utopian merely punctuate the fact, like the fire-and-brimstone preacher denouncing homosexuality whom everyone knows is secretly gay. The Reactionaries wants to throw out the extremely carefully fine-tuned machinery of modern society which evolved over several hundred years, and replace it with a bizarre Frankenstein’s Monster of modern and traditional elements that they dreamed up in an armchair, which has never been tried before and which, they say, will instantly fix all social ills like crime and poverty and war.

And this is awesome. Utopianism – trying to think up amazing political systems that lie outside the local Overton Window – is very nearly a dead art. The failure of the Communists’ utopian designs probably killed it – the Right made “utopianism” into a dirty word so they could use it to bludgeon the Left, and the Left turned against utopianism en masse to avoid getting bludgeoned. Right now the only two permissible dreams of a better future are a society much like our own but a little more libertarian, or a society much like our own but a little more progressive. Boring!

The more utopian ideas we have the more sources we have to draw from when trying to decide which direction our own society should go in, and the broader the discourse becomes. Reactionaries are geniuses at inventing new systems that have never been tried before and some of whose components deserve serious contemplation. And if there was a science fiction book set in Moldbug’s Patchwork or Royal California, I would buy it.

6.1.1.1: But?

There are a few good things you can do with utopianism.

You can use it as a generator for ideas that become gradually adopted into the mainstream, as mentioned above. Communism was good at this – in the US, instead of starting a revolution, they just helped spark the modern labor movement, which eventually came to coexist with the rest of the economy and is now probably a useful part of the memetic ecosystem.

You can use it to start interesting intentional communities. There were a couple of communist communes within capitalist countries; some people even built phalansteries, and more modern versions like Twin Oaks are more successful. You can start a non-communal subculture, like the polyamory movement. If you happen to have a free land, you start a country or subnational government – it worked for the early American settlers, and it may yet work for seasteaders. The Free State Project is another noble goal along these lines.

But until it works in an intentional community or something, trying to push it on everyone else seems premature and irresponsible.

6.1.2: If we don’t do Reaction, does that mean we’re stuck with a boring inoffensive centrist democracy forever and ever?

No. There are lots of extremely creative ideas for radical new forms of government that don’t involve any Reactionary ideas at all. The better ones are off of the right-left spectrum entirely. Futarchy is my favorite. Or we could all just go live in the Shining Garden of Kai-Raikoth.

6.2: How can I respond to or rebut something in this FAQ?

Leave a comment below. I am unlikely to respond to all comments in a timely manner or at all. But I will try to respond to the really good ones. And if I update this FAQ, I will try to take comments into account and include links to any longer off-site rebuttals or discussions.

(see also parts 1, 2, and 3 of ∞)

Some friends of mine on Facebook were talking about rape (as you do), and one of them brought up how anti-rape public awareness campaigns targeting men have been found to be effective.

Their evidence, just like the evidence of everyone else who makes this claim, was an article in the Vancouver Globe and Mail, which noted that the city’s anti-rape campaign – called “Don’t Be That Guy” and consisted of hanging posters with catchy slogans about how men really shouldn’t have sex with non-consenting women – had successfully decreased rapes in the city. They know this because the year before the campaign, sexual assault rates went up, but the first full year of the campaign, sexual assault rates went down.

I wish I lived in a world that worked like this. If hanging up pictures of distressed-looking pretty women that say “DON’T BE THAT GUY” can reverse rising sexual assault rates within a year, maybe we could end the drug war with pictures of unhappy-looking people smoking that say “WINNERS DON’T DO DRUGS”, or prevent teenage pregnancy with pictures of smiling couples that say “TRUE LOVE WAITS”, or decrease racism with pictures of different ethnicities holding hands and the caption “DIVERSITY IS OUR GREATEST ASSET”.

But I shouldn’t be so cynical. This initiative does claim to have evidence supporting it. So let’s analyze that evidence.

The evidence is that after the “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign in Vancouver, sex crimes decreased by 10%.

But Vancouver was not the only city to try the campaign. “Don’t Be That Guy” originated in Edmonton. After that city’s “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign, sex crimes increased by 14%, even as other categories of crime were decreasing.

Am I blaming Edmonton’s “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign for causing more rape? Probably not (although if you read the links above, you know that’s not as far-fetched as it sounds). I am saying that these kinds of small changes in crime are very common for cities and mean nothing.

Just as it would be silly to seize upon a +14% increase in rapes in Edmonton as suggesting anti-rape campaigns cause rape, so it is silly to seize upon a -10% decrease in rapes in Vancouver as suggesting anti-rape campaigns prevent rape.

It is generally bad to take a single number out of context and use it to claim a causative effect. If a hundred people take homeopathic remedies, one of them will have her blood pressure go down 10%, just because blood pressure goes down sometimes. If you are the person selling the homeopathic remedy, you can say “Look! Vanessa used homeopathy, and her blood pressure decreased by 10%! Clearly it’s working!”

Likewise, if you are a movement pushing this kind of anti-rape campaign, you can publicize the article in the Vancouver newspaper that says crime rates decreased 10% after your “remedy” was tried, and just fail to publicize anything about Edmonton [1]. If you have a good enough campaign, everyone will hear about it from you, no one will bother to double-check, and it will become a well-known fact that anti-rape campaigns targeting men lowers the sexual offense rate.

The counterspell is moderate skepticism of articles in the popular media claiming amazing social science results when there is no peer-reviewed research corroborating the discovery. In the case of “Don’t Be That Guy”, as far as I know such peer-reviewed research does not exist.

This concludes the part of this essay that will not be lots of boring numbers.

Still with me? Good. There are actually some other interesting ways we can pick apart the Vancouver rape data, and for the sake of completeness we might as well try. Our source will be the Vancouver Police Department’s crime statistics reports.

These statistics confirm that in 2011, when the “Don’t Be That Guy” program was introduced, sex offenses decreased by -9.7%. But just from that number, we don’t know whether this is an effect of the program, or just the continuation of a long-term trend. Maybe sex crimes in Vancouver decrease by 9.7% every year. So the Globe and Mail article very correctly focuses on the change in the trend. They observe that in 2010, the year before the campaign, sex crimes rose +4.7%, and now in 2011 with the campaign they’re dropping -9.7%. That’s much more impressive. It’s a big switch in the trend.

The mathematical term for this kind of change in trends is “second derivatives”, and the second derivative of sex crimes from 2010 to 2011 was -14.4 (the difference between a +4.7% increase and a -9.7% decrease).

But from the same crime statistics, we see that breaking and entering was down -11.1% in 2010, but up by +5.4% in 2011, so its second derivative shifted 16.6. Possession of stolen goods shifted from -18.7% in 2010 to +3.8% in 2011, a second derivative of +22.5. Arson shifted from -6.5% in 2010 to +38% in 2011, for a second derivative of +44.5. It would be moderately unfair to include murder on this list since there are so few murders that large variations are easy to come by, but if you’ll humor me, change in murder rate went from -53.7% in 2010 to +48.1% in 2011, for a second derivative of 101.8.

My point with all these numbers is that second derivatives are volatile things, and the change in sexual offenses in 2010-2011 was equal to or less than the change in a whole bunch of other crimes, none of which had campaigns targeted against them. In other words, it’s very much the sort of thing you would expect to see by chance.

This is true across years as well as across crimes. In 2004, sex offenses were up by +21.9%, but in 2006, they were decreasing by -1.3, and the next year, in 2007, they were down -7.2%, almost as much as with the introduction of the “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign in 2011 (of course, there was no campaign in 2007) By 2009, the pendulum had swung wildly once again, and there was a huge +17.7% increase in sexual offenses. This tells the story of a city where it is common for sex offenses to go up by a large amount one year and then go down by a large amount in another year, or vice versa, whether people are putting posters on streetlights or not.

I’m not exactly sure how kosher this is, but we can try to quantify this with a third derivative – the change in the change in the change [2]. We mentioned before that the second derivative of sex crimes from 2010 to 2011, the year of the “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign, was -14.4 – a movement from +4.7 to -9.7. But from 2009 to 2010, the year before the program was introduced, the second derivative was -13.0 – it moved from +17.7% to +4.7%.

In other words, the impressive change in the second derivative of sex offenses in 2011 was the near-exact predicted continuation of a trend that had started a year earlier. There was just as big a shift in 2010 – when the program had not started yet – as in 2011, when it had.

There’s something a little sneaky about this – it should always be possible to find some level of derivative that supports the results you want – but given that the Globe and Mail article was making a second-derivative based argument, I don’t think it’s too unfair for me to follow along. Readers who know more about statistics than I can tell me whether this is already a solved problem.

Of course, the proper way to do this would be to use all the different crime statistics to figure out what the average noise in changes in Vancouver crime rates are, and then see whether the change in rape in 2011 was significantly greater than the noise at a 5% level. I have neither the time nor the intelligence to do this formally, but it’s what I’ve been doing informally throughout this article and it should be clear by now that the answer is “no, it wasn’t”.

So now we just have some mopping up to do. For example, did you know that the majority of the “sexual offenses” reported as declining in the Globe and Mail article aren’t rape at all, but things like “groping, grabbing, or kissing”, and that as far as I know no statistics have ever been published about what happened to rape itself during the campaign period? Or that according to official Vancouver statistics, the large majority of sexual offences are committed by strangers – which is contrary to what we know to be true about sexual offences in general, which suggests there’s a large bias in terms of which sexual offences get reported to the police, and which are the category of sexual offence it’s least plausible that posters defining rape would help with? Or that police attribute much the previous rise in sexual offenses to offenses committed against prostitutes, who are totally ignored by the “smiling girl asks to have a drink with you but probably doesn’t want sex” focus of the “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign?

Of course, none of this proves that campaigns like “Don’t Be That Guy” don’t work. It just shows there’s not much evidence that they do. This brings us back to our prior that putting up some posters around town can arrest major social ills. Based on the examples above like drug use and abstinence-only sex education, my prior for this is very low.

Your mileage may vary, but before deciding I urge you to consider an alternative hypothesis. That claims that the posters lower rape – never very plausible on the face of it – are fake consequentialism (I don’t have a good link for this concept yet, but search “fake consequentialism” here). That the real reason people put up “Don’t Be That Guy” posters is the same reason they put RAPE FREE ZONE posters on college classroom doors and the same reason men’s rights activists have taken to putting up “Don’t Be That Girl” posters. It’s a way of signaling your membership in a specific tribe and demonstrating the power of that tribe by being able to take over public places with your symbols.

Or maybe I’m being totally paranoid. We’ll probably know one way or the other soon enough, as its “confirmed success” in Vancouver has led to everyone everywhere adapting the “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign and we will soon have oodles of useful data that a real social scientist can use to do a real analysis. I look forward to reading what it says.

In the meantime, please don’t say that there is already evidence in the program’s favor unless you’re willing to give many more caveats than people typically do when they make that statement.

Footnotes

[1]: The only blogger I have ever seen mention Edmonton in regards to “Don’t Be That Guy” is Greta Christina, who very correctly talks about Edmonton as the birthplace and center of the campaign, says how effective it was in Edmonton and how happy the police there were with its effects, and cites as proof of this……that rape went down in Vancouver. Did you know that 100% of my uses of the phrase “what is this I don’t even” this year have been while reading Freethought Blogs?

[2]: Third derivative can also be called “jerk”, which seems appropriate when we are using it to measure the number of rapists.

[content warning: discussion of triggers. Mentions various triggers. Mentions, without using or condoning, racial slurs]

I.

I originally planned not to respond to Apophemi’s essay requesting that people not discuss potentially triggering ideas dispassionately, because my response would inevitably have to discuss a lot of triggering ideas, and it would be dispassionate, and that might not be the most effective way of conveying that I take zir concerns seriously.

(Apophemi’s essay complains about being misgendered but doesn’t give me ironclad evidence what zir gender is, so I’m going to use the gender neutral pronoun here as a least bad option. No offense is intended and if Apophemi tells me what pronoun ze prefers I’ll edit it in.)

I’m changing my mind for two reasons. First, everyone else is doing it, so Apophemi has probably reached Peak Triggering by now and the situation can’t get any worse. Second, I feel like it would be more respectful and productive to object and give zir a chance to explain why my objections are wrong, than to just say “I disagree with this but I’m not going to explain why” and dismiss the whole thing outright.

(That having been said, if Apophemi doesn’t want to read this, I am totally in favor of this; ignoring all posts on my blog tagged “race/gender/etc” is always a good life choice.)

My one worry is the comment thread. I no longer trust my commenters to be kind or reasonable, and since we’re talking specifically about triggers and giving a big list of triggery things, unkind people present a problem. So I am closing comments for this thread. If Apophemi wants to make a response, ze may email it to me or post it somewhere and I will add it in.

II.

Apophemi writes:

On the other hand, most of these things involve warning signs for opinions whose holders are frequently detrimental to my health and safety, and therefore I feel pretty entitled to these boundaries, and pretty insulted at the implication that possessing such boundaries is inferior to not possessing them.

An example: I cannot in good faith entertain the argument that high-scarcity societies are right in having restrictive, assigned-sex-based gender roles, even if these social structures result in measurable maximized utility (i.e. many much kids). I have a moral imperative against this that overrides my general impulse towards maximized utility, or rather (if you asked me about it personally) tilt-shifts my view of what sectors ‘deserve’ to see their utility maximized at the expense of a given other sector.

However, this results in a knee-jerk intellectual squick when I run across someone entertaining or endorsing these arguments. (If I were being YouTube-commenter-style punchy about this, this entire post would have been a comment reading “‘Fertile women’ my ass.”, for the record.) This is because respect for said arguments and/or the idea behind them is a warning sign for either 1) passively not respecting my personhood or 2) actively disregarding my personhood, both of which are, to use some vernacular, hella fucking dangerous to me personally.

I am reasonably confident (insert p value here) that this attitude is self-replicating among people who are accustomed to being at risk in a specific way that generally occurs to marginalized populations. (I cannot speak for people who may have a similar rhetorical roadblock without it being yoked to a line of social marginalization, other than that I suspect they happen.) This would mean that rewarding the “ability” to entertain any argument “no matter how ‘politically incorrect’” (to break out of some jargon, “no matter how likely to hurt people”) results in a system that prizes people who have not been socially marginalized or who have been socially marginalized less than a given other person in the discussion, since they will have (in general) less inbuilt safeguards limiting the topics they can discuss comfortably.

In other words, prizing discourse without limitations (I tried to find a convenient analogy for said limitations and failed. Fenders? Safety belts?) will result in an environment in which people are more comfortable speaking the more social privilege they hold. (If you prefer to not have any truck with the word ‘privilege’, substitute ‘the less likelihood of having to anticipate culturally-permissible threats to their personhood they have lived with’, since that’s the specific manifestation of privilege I mean. Sadly, that is a long and unwieldy phrase.)

This reminds me of the idea of safe spaces.

Safe spaces are places where members of disadvantaged groups can go, usually protected against people in other groups who tend to trigger them, and discuss things relevant to that group free from ridicule or attack. I know there are many for women, some for gays, and I recently heard of a college opening one up for atheists. They seem like good ideas.

I interpret Apophemi’s proposal to say that the rationalist community should endeavor to be a safe space for women, minorities, and other disadvantaged groups.

One important feature of safe spaces is that they can’t always be safe for two groups at the same time. Jews are a discriminated-against minority who need a safe space. Muslims are a discriminated-against minority who need a safe space. But the safe space for Jews should be very far way from the safe space for Muslims, or else neither space is safe for anybody.

The rationalist community is a safe space for people who obsessively focus on reason and argument even when it is socially unacceptable to do so.

I don’t think it’s unfair to say that these people need a safe space. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been called “a nerd” or “a dork” or “autistic” for saying something rational is too high to count. Just recently commenters on Marginal Revolution – not exactly known for being a haunt for intellect-hating jocks – found an old post of mine and called me among many other things “aspie”, “a pansy”, “retarded”, and an “omega” (a PUA term for a man who’s so socially inept he will never date anyone).

The reason the rationalist community tends to talk about controversial issues like race and gender on occasion is that the whole point of rationalism is giving things a fair analysis regardless of whether it’s socially popular or acceptable to talk about. So of course it will start focusing on all of the ideas that are least acceptable to talk about. I remember talking to someone who admitted, after several false starts and awkward pauses, that he found the scientific research on differences between races pretty convincing. I answered that I was still neutral on the matter but that Jensen was indeed a pretty darned meticulous researcher, and he very nearly cried with relief. He’d thought he was a terrible person for taking the research seriously, had never been able to talk about it with anyone, was stuck in a guilt spiral over it, and I was the first person to give him basic human sympathy.

And I think most people in the rationalist community have shared this reaction – not necessarily about race and gender issues, because contrary to the above we really don’t talk about those that much – but about atheism, or transhumanism, or negative utilitarianism, or simulationism, and they had finally found people who would pay them the respect to debate their ideas on merit instead of mouthing the appropriate social platitude to dismiss it as horrible or as totally obvious.

If you are the sort of person with the relevant mental quirk, living in a society of people who don’t do this is a terrifying an alienating experience. Finding people who are like you is an amazing, liberating experience. It is, in every sense of the word, a safe space.

If you want a community that is respectful to the triggers of people who don’t want to talk about controversial ideas, the Internet is full of them. Although I know it’s not true, sometimes it seems to me that half the Internet is made up of social justice people talking about how little they will tolerate people who are not entirely on board with social justice ideas and norms. Certainly this has been my impression of Tumblr, and of many (very good) blogs I read (Alas, A Blog comes to mind, proving that my brain sorts in alphabetical order). There is no shortage of very high-IQ communities that will fulfill your needs.

But you say you’re interested in and attracted to the rationalist community, that it would provide something these other communities don’t. Maybe you are one of those people with that weird mental quirk of caring more about truth and evidence than about things it is socially acceptable to care about, and you feel like the rationalist community would be a good fit for that part of you. If so, we would love to have you!

But if you want to join communities specifically because they are based around dispassionate debate and ignoring social consequences, but your condition for joining is that they stop having dispassionate debate and take social consequences into account, well, then you’re one of those people – like Groucho Marx – who refuses to belong to any club that would accept you as a member.

Imagine a Jew walking into a safe space for Muslims, and saying he finds Islam really interesting and wants to participate, but that in order for it to be a safe space for him they really need to stop talking about that whole “Allah” thing.

III.

I deliberately said “the rationalist community” above rather than “Less Wrong”, because Less Wrong explicitly does try to be a safe space. It has a (vague and very poorly enforced) ban on talking about politics or other controversial topics which successfully discourages Reactionaries and their ilk from starting threads directly about their controversial views (they often get away with discussing other results that refer to them only indirectly).

These topics nevertheless come up anyway at regular intervals. There is almost always the same pattern when this happens:

A feminist or other person in the social justice movement very prominently posts a declaration that everyone on the site needs to be more feminist and social-justice-y. They get heavily upvoted.

A few people in the comments politely disagree, sometimes with the gist of the post, other times with specific claims.

Other people express outrage that anyone would disagree, and say this just proves that the site is full of horrible people and that feminism and social justice are needed now more than ever.

World War III happens.

It happened when Daenerys gathered a whole series of feminist things from people that got posted to Discussion called things like “On Creepiness” and “On Misogyny”. It happened when Multiheaded, a Marxist somewhere to the left of Kropotkin, posted a thread complaining about people complaining that there were people complaining about controversial opinions on the site (or something). It happened when Apophemi’s essay itself got posted to the site and heavily upvoted.

I’ve downvoted all of these things, not because I disagree with them (although I often do) but because the ban on politics is really useful to avoid exactly this kind of situation. I hope in the future it is more consistently enforced, and I hope this would be more conducive to the kind of site Apophemi wants.

“But,” people object “banning politics is hard, and talking politics sometimes is fun, and besides, social justice ideas are important to disseminate. Can’t we just ban the nasty, triggering kinds of politics?”

This would be a good time to admit that I am massively, massively triggered by social justice.

I know exactly why this started. There was an incident in college when I was editing my college newspaper, I tried to include a piece of anti-racist humor, and it got misinterpreted as a piece of pro-racist humor. The college’s various social-justice-related-clubs decided to make an example out of me. I handled it poorly (“BUT GUYS! THE EVIDENCE DOESN’T SUPPORT WHAT YOU’RE DOING!”) and as a result spent a couple of weeks having everyone in the college hold rallies against me followed by equally horrifying counter-rallies for me. I received a couple of death threats, a few people tried to have me expelled, and then everyone got bored and found some other target who was even more fun to harass. Meantime, I was seriously considering suicide.

But it wasn’t just that one incident. Ever since, I have been sensitive to how much a lot of social justice argumentation resembles exactly the bullying I want a safe space from – the “aspie”, the “nerd”, that kind of thing. Just when I thought I had reached an age where it was no longer cool to call people “nerds”, someone had the bright idea of calling them “nerdy white guys” instead, and so transforming themselves from schoolyard bully to brave social justice crusader. This was the criticism I remember most from my massive Consequentialism FAQ – he’s a nerdy white dude – and it’s one I have come to expect any time I do anything more intellectual than watch American Idol, and usually from a social justicer.

(one reason I like the MsScribe story so much is that it really brings into relief how aligned social justice and bullying can be. I’m not saying that all or even most social justice is about bullying. Just enough)

The worst part was when I read some social justice essay – I can’t remember where – which claimed that it was impossible to bully a member of a privileged group. That it didn’t count. That there was no such thing. So not only did they sound suspiciously like bullies, but they were conveniently changing the rules so that it was impossible by definition for me to be bullied at all, and all my friends (except for the black ones) who had problems with bullies as a child or in the present – didn’t count, didn’t exist, didn’t deserve any sympathy.

I believe you mentioned in your essay that feeling like you’re being told you’re not a person is really scary? Well, just so.

So suffice it to say I am triggered by social justice. Any mildly confrontational piece of feminist or social justice rhetoric sends me into a panic spiral. When I read the essay this post was based on, I got only about four hours of sleep that night because my mind was racing, trying to figure out whether I was going to get in trouble about it and whether anyone who supported it could hurt me and how I could defend myself against it.

Because my mind doesn’t just let me feel sad for a minute and then move on – no, that would be too easy. It gives me this massive compulsion to “defend myself” against any piece of social justice I see by writing really long and complete rebuttals. Which inevitably attract more social justice people wanting to debate me. And unfortunately, outrage addiction is a very real thing, and I find myself actively seeking out the most horrible social justice memes in order to be horrified by them.

(…also, telling me I’m not allowed to be triggered by my triggers is itself a trigger. Whoever designed the human mind was really kind of a jerk.)

I struggle against this all the time. H.L. Mencken writes “Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.” Well, this is my temptation. It requires more willpower than anything else I do in my life – more willpower than it takes for me to get up in the morning and work a ten hour day – to resist the urge to just hoist the black flag and turn into a much less tolerant and compassionate version of Heartiste.

I don’t think I’m at all alone in this. Like, you may notice there’s a large contingent of people – mostly men, but a surprising number of women as well – who totally freak out when they hear social justice stuff and seem to loathe social justice with an unholy passion? And maybe you’ve wondered whether the classic glib dismissal of them as people benefitting from the patriarchy who are upset about “uppity women” quite explains the level of rage and terror and sudden lashing out?

If you are, indeed, someone who has been traumatized and is easily triggered, you can probably recognize the signs yourself. There’s a certain desperation, a certain terror thinly disguised by rage that doesn’t really come from anything else.

So suffice it to say I am triggered by social justice, and probably a lot of other people are too. Why do I make such a big deal of this?

First, because it has a lot of bearing on whether we can just ban triggery things. There is a certain school of thought that there are two or three excessively evil things that trigger other people, like making fun of rape, and once we make people stop those, we will live in a trigger-free paradise.

But that’s not true. I’m triggered by feminism. My girlfriend is also triggered by certain kinds of feminism (long story), but also by many discussions of charity – whenever ze hears about it, ze starts worrying ze is a bad person for not donating more money to charity, has a mental breakdown, and usually ends up shaking and crying for a little while.

Since we can never make every form of discussion respect everybody’s triggers, that leaves two solutions. First, we can try the “my triggers are important, your triggers are invalid” solutions and end up with powerful groups able to enforce their triggers, and weak groups being told to “just man up”. Second, we can try the safe space solution, where not everyone can be certain of safety everywhere, but everyone is certain of safety somewhere. I don’t expect Tumblr to stop being feminist for me, but I have managed to scrub my Facebook feed so thoroughly that I only get about two or three articles per week on how hilarious it would be if male superheroes were dressed like female superheroes. One learns to relish little victories.

Second, because I think the essay contains a false dichotomy: privileged people don’t have any triggers, oppressed people do. You guys are intact, I am broken. But truth is, everybody’s broken. The last crown prince of Nepal was raised with limitless wealth and absolute power, and he still freaked out and murdered his entire family and then killed himself. There’s probably someone somewhere who still believes in perfectly intact people, but I bet they’re not a psychiatrist.

Third, because I have not yet raised the black flag. And some of my resistance I credit to – the rationalist community. The Litany of Tarski: “If all feminism is horrible, I desire to believe that all feminism is horrible. If all feminism is not horrible, I desire to believe that all feminism is not horrible.” It is a calming litany. Sometimes it helps.

A Christian proverb says: “The Church is not a country club for saints, but a hospital for sinners”. Likewise, the rationalist community is not an ivory tower for people with no biases or strong emotional reactions, it’s a dojo for people learning to resist them.

I do not think it is always wrong for people to engage in activities that exclude certain categories of disadvantaged people. For example, music naturally excludes the deaf (someone will bring up Beethoven here. You know what I mean). Horseback riding excludes most people too poor to buy horses or live in the country. This is sad, but these activities should still continue.

But I do not think dispassionate discussion for the easily triggered is as bad as all that. It is more like marathons for people who are out of shape. They will have difficulty at first. If they want to learn, they can. If they try, they will become stronger. I can’t run a marathon and I can’t always discuss issues fairly and dispassionately, but I’m glad both activities exist as things to aspire to.

IV.

Following sufficient rinsing and repetition, it may occur to someone in a ‘discourse without limitations’ community to wonder where all the (say) queer people and/or women and/or trans* people and/or disabled people and/or people of color and/or non-American-and-Northern-European people and/or citizens of the third world and/or people whose first language is not English and/or Jewish people and/or etc. (repeat and/or for any population ‘coincidentally’ discouraged from participating) went.

Or rhetorical-you could argue that women and/or minorities and/or historically disadvantaged groups are inherently irrational / otherwise not qualified for community membership, at which point I would proceed to avoid rhetorical-you, as above.

You are implying – not saying, but I hope it is fair to read the implication – that “discourse without limitations” drives minority group members away from the communities that participate in it.

This has recently become an interest of mine because a number of communities I’m in – the atheist community, the rationalist community, the Reddit community, the Vaguely Techy Bay Area community – notably lack certain kinds of minorities. And there are many people who say this must be because of some kind of inherent flaw in the community, that it proves either that community members are racist, or at least that they are less actively non-racist than might be desired. Sometimes people say this nicely and helpfully, like you have. Other times people say it more confrontationally, often with the standard “nerdy white dudes” line thrown in.

And always they make the same dichotomy you do – between the “driving these people away” explanation, and the “are you claiming these people are inherently inferior?” explanation. And the proposed solution is always to be more “respectful”, which means talking more about feminism and social justice, and being less accepting of people who counterargue against it.

Needless to say, this is not a solution I can entirely get behind. So I am terribly biased on this point. Still, let me nevertheless present my argument for evaluation.

I have been to several yoga classes. The last one I attended consisted of about thirty women, plus me (this was in Ireland; I don’t know if American yoga has a different gender balance).

We propose two different explanations for this obviously significant result.

First, these yoga classes are somehow driving men away. Maybe they say mean things about men (maybe without intending it! we’re not saying they’re intentionally misandrist!) or they talk about issues in a way exclusionary to male viewpoints. The yoga class should invite some men’s rights activists in to lecture the participants on what they can do to make men feel comfortable, and maybe spend some of every class discussing issues that matter deeply to men, like Truckasaurus.

Second, men just don’t like yoga as much as women. One could propose a probably hilarious evolutionary genetic explanation for this (how about women being gatherers in the ancestral environment, so they needed lots of flexibility so they could bend down and pick small plants?) but much more likely is just that men and women are socialized differently in a bunch of subtle ways and the interests and values they end up with are more pro-yoga in women and more anti-yoga in men. In this case a yoga class might still benefit by making it super-clear that men are welcome and removing a couple of things that might make men uncomfortable, but short of completely re-ordering society there’s not much they can do to get equal gender balance and it shouldn’t be held against them that they don’t.

The second explanation seems much more plausible for my yoga class, and honestly it seems much more plausible for the rationalist community as well.

We’re not actually missing all those groups you mention as minorities who might be driven away. In fact, in many cases, we have far more of them than would be expected by chance. For example, we contain transgender people at about five times the rate in the general population (1.5% vs. 0.3%), and gays/lesbians/bisexuals at about three times the rate in the general population (15% vs. 4%). People who Jewish by descent are four times the national average (8% vs. 2%), and people with mental disorders are either around equal to the general population or much much higher, depending on how one interprets the data I did a terrible job collecting (sorry). We have more people with English as a second language than almost any other online community I know (the country with most rationalists per capita continues to be Finland) and members from Kenya, Pakistan, Egypt, and Indonesia.

The only groups we appear to be actually short on are women and minorities (and then only if you follow standard American practice of refusing to count Asians as a real minority, numbers be damned).

But just as you would not immediately jump from the overrepresentation of transsexuals to the assumption that we must somehow be discriminating against cissexual people, so one does not jump from the overrepresentation of men to the assumption that women are being discriminated against.

Most rationalists come from the computer science community, which is something like 80% male. A few come from hard science fields like math and physics, both of which are 80 – 90% male. There is zero need to invoke “discourse without limitations” as an explanation for why the rationalist community is heavily male-dominated, and any attempt to do so would run into the question of why the occasional dispassionate cost-benefit discussion of eugenics apparently horrifies women but heavily attracts Jews, gays, and people with mental disorders.

Worse, the hypothesis fails in the other direction as well. There are lots of groups that are horribly offensive towards minorites yet nevertheless manage to have very many of them. Across nearly every denomination, far more women than men go to church – if you go to a Catholic Mass, you will see pews full of ladies at levels the atheist community can only dream of. The atheist community is so feminist that there has been a serious movement to replace it with “Atheism Plus” that excludes all non-feminists; the Catholic Church is so regressive that it won’t let women become priests and thinks they were created as a “helpmeet” for man. And yet women, in aggregate, love the one and hate the other.

You know what other community has more women than the rationalist community? The men’s rights movement. According to the /r/mensrights survey, about 9.3% of men’s rights activists are female, which is slightly fewer women than the rationalist community on the last survey, but slightly more women than the rationalist community on the survey before that. A friend who reads Heartiste guesses that about a third of his commenters are female (though adds that some of these may be men who are pretending in order to make a point). So if we actually spent all our time belittling women and justifying their oppression, as far as I can tell our percent female readership would probably go up.

I am left pretty certain that the male-dominated rationalist community has a gender imbalance for the same reason as my female-dominated yoga class. We could always see whether it might help to inviting some feminists in, listen to them without protest, and agree to do whatever they say – but I would enjoy that about as much as you would enjoy getting lectured by men’s rights activists without being able to protest, and the end result would probably be about the same.

V.

Apophemi’s essay continues with an addendum:

there’s significant linguistic signalling that can make up the difference between people who have more to lose from apparently innocent argument participating or not. For (specific to my experience) example…

- arguments against accusations of racism/sexism/cissexism/heterocentrism/ableism/etc. that boil down to “those are silly words and they aren’t in my spellcheck”

I worry that you’re not being entirely fair here. Who the heck doesn’t have “racism” in their spellcheck? I feel like your opponents may be making a more subtle point than you think.

When I ask people to use words other than “racism”, it’s usually because I believe a Worst Argument In The World is being sprung on me – the article will explain more. I think this is a reasonable concern, and it’s always fair to ask someone to taboo their words.

But there’s another problem I sometimes run into with some other concepts, like “male privilege” or “male gaze” or “marginalized”.

You said you enjoyed my Anti-Reactionary FAQ (thanks!), so I wonder whether you enjoyed section 2.3.1, in which I deconstruct the word “demotist”.

The Reactionaries argued that “demotist” countries, meaning countries that had some notion of popular sovereignty including communisms, non-monarchical dictatorships, and democracies – had a terrible human rights record. Which is true – Maoist China (communist), Myanmar under the junta (non-monarchical dictatorship) and many others do have terrible human rights records.

But the Reactionaries were loading the debate by using the word “demotist”, which deliberately groups those regimes together with stable liberal democracies (who have fantastic human rights records compared to anyone else). My argument here was exactly that “demotist” wasn’t in my spellcheck and that in order to “win” the debate the Reactionaries had to invent new words that loaded the argument in their favor. Denied the ability to use their own words and forced to use the same vocabulary as the rest of us, their argument totally falls apart.

Not everything must be stated in ordinary language – if you didn’t let chemists use terms like “valence electron” or “ionic”, you would be denying them a useful tool that makes chemistry much easier. I get that.

But when people are trying to talk about ordinary processes, and they insist on using their own words which don’t exactly correspond to features of the world, and they can’t always make the same arguments with more standard words, I get super suspicious.

Words are hidden inferences. They encode assumptions, and sometimes those assumptions are correct and other times they are wrong. This is true more than usual with jargon, and even more than usual with partisan political jargon (don’t call them “rich”, call them “job-creators”!) It is useful and acceptable to ask people to take a step back from their words to examine whether the assumptions behind them are correct.

- conflating terms describing marginalization (such as the above) with insults (i.e. “calling me racist is an insult”, “let’s discuss this without using meaningless insults like ‘misogynist’”),
- use of insults that have a history of being specific to women or that effectively mean “this person is like a woman”

Oh God oh god oh god oh god you so do not understand oh god.

Which words are or are not slurs is not a feature of the word’s etymology or even the intent of people using those words. For example, the word “Jap”, on its own, is very clearly just a convenient shortening of “Japanese person” in the same way that “Brit” is very clearly a convenient shortening of “British person”.

Yet it is not okay to go around calling Japanese people “Japs” and then lecturing them because they are “conflating” a term describing their heritage with an insult (“ha ha, that silly Japanese person thinks I’m insulting her just because I used a shortened form of her demonym”).

Most Japanese people have a history – maybe personal, maybe just second-hand – of correctly associating the word “Jap” with an attempt to dehumanize them, marginalize them, or cause them huge amounts of personal grief. It doesn’t matter whether you think “Jap” was meant to be offensive, if a Japanese person tells you they’re triggered by it and you keep using it, you’re a jerk.

(and the same is true of a much more famous slur which is a derivation of the perfectly innocent Latin word niger meaning “black-colored”, but which has been wrenched far away from that perfect innocence by the referents of the term having more than enough opportunities to associate that word with an attempt to hurt them.)

So a neutral word can become an insult or trigger or slur if it is associated sufficiently strongly and sufficiently often with people trying to hurt you.

Now, when those people were sending me death threats because of that article in the college paper, what word do you think they used?

When the media talks about a “scandal” in which some politician or actor is accused of being offensive and then gets fired from their job and has to do a live apology on national TV during which they break down crying, what word do you think always starts the process?

When you read the MsScribe story – which a dozen people in the comments said struck incredibly true to life for them – what word did MsScribe use to deride her enemies before kicking them out of the community and making everyone refer to them as “cockroaches” and posting sexually explicit stories about them doing horrible things?

People have an incredibly reasonable terror of that specific word, and when you refuse to change it to one of many dozens of available synonyms, that has some pretty strong implications about where you are coming from. It says “I don’t respect you enough not to use this word that terrifies and triggers you” which in turn means that people’s terror and triggering is probably correct.

I am sure there are some lovely elderly Southerners who use [the n-word] simply because that was what they grew up with, and are mildly annoyed every time a black person throws a fuss about it because they honestly didn’t mean any harm. And they use that exact same argument: “I didn’t mean anything by it, it’s just what I call people like you, you’re so sensitive treating it as an insult.” But they are missing the point. It doesn’t matter what their feelings are, it matters whether it hurts other people.

And when they anticipate this, like “Oh, I’m going to call that black person the n-word, and I bet he’s going to get all upset about it, you know how they are”, that doesn’t seem innocent to me. It sounds like they know they’re hurting other people and just don’t care.

And when you say you expect people to feel insulted and triggered by the word “racist”, but you’re going to do it anyway, even though you are perfectly aware of other words you could use that would actually be more descriptively accurate, I kind of have the same worry.

And then your very next point is that you don’t want people to use terms you consider slurs. Well, yes, of course that is fair! And I try to avoid slurs as much as I can.

Yet I cannot help rounding this entire section off to “The two things that annoy me are when other people use language that triggers me, and when other people ask me to stop using language that triggers them.”

And when I have bring this up to people, they usually answer “It’s impossible to trigger a member of a privileged group” or “Triggering a member of a privileged group doesn’t count”. I am so happy you have defined away my pain. THIS IS THAT DEHUMANIZATION THING AGAIN.

In conclusion, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

Sense of being persecuted by “political correctness”…I have failed so far to find a definition of “political correctness” in this context that could not be search-and-replaced with “trying to avoid hurting people” to either no effect or increased comprehensibility. You are free to attempt to change my mind on this, I guess?

I like this sentence because it is a good example of language in fact making a difference, of words being hidden inferences, of reasonable requests not to use terms that don’t just boil down to “it isn’t in my spellcheck”. In fact, Scott Adams makes this exact point in his essay What’s The Difference Between A Sexist And A Regular Asshole? It intrigues me that both sides are trying to remove the others’ linguistic weapons by demanding they be deactivated and replaced with normal words, but are refusing to relinquish their own. Anyhow…

When I see references to “political correctness”, it’s usually followed by something like “has gone too far”. This suggests a reasonable interpretation to me – political correctness is indeed a way of trying to avoid hurting people, but like all forms of trying to avoid hurting people, it can go too far.

Trying to prevent terrorism is good. But when any vaguely Muslim looking person who tries to board a plane tends to get hauled off and strip-searched without so much as an apology, one can ask whether the legitimate goal of trying to prevent terrorism has gone too far.

Likewise, when people start saying that it’s cultural appropriation to eat latkes or owning books is privileged or a ten-year old girl can be charged with rape for playing a game of Doctor or heterosexual white people can’t be depressed or any of the other three million things of this sort I see on Tumblr every day, then I do think it’s fair to say that the legitimate goal of trying to protect disadvantaged groups is going too far in certain cases.

This is not to say that it has uniformly gone too far in every aspect of society, just that in these cases – the ones the people saying this have encountered – it has locally gone too far.

I do not really know what claim you are asserting – that political correctness never goes too far? That no one trying to protect the rights of minority groups has ever overstepped good sense? This seems more like cheering on a side than stating a defensible position to me.

See also Section II of this essay.

- pretty much any usage at any point of the word “insane” when we are not talking about a court case by now

Dammit, you just broke my girlfriend.

Ze is a mentally ill person who has attempted suicide a few times and been in and out of mental hospitals, and ze is now seething with anger. I think I see smoke coming out of zir ears. Now ze is demanding that I write an extremely angry response saying HAVEN’T YOU EVER READ ANYTHING IN THE DISABILITY RIGHTS COMMUNITY??!?! and DON’T YOU KNOW THAT LOTS OF PEOPLE USE TERMS LIKE “INSANE” AND “CRAZY” TO AVOID MEDICALIZING THEIR DISABILITY??!?! and HOW DARE YOU PURPORT TO SPEAK FOR ALL OF US WHO THE HELL APPOINTED YOU OUR REPRESENTATIVE??!

As a psychiatrist myself, avoiding medicalizing disability is not really high on my list of priorities. But as a “mentally ill person” myself, – two years on Paxil followed by eight on Prozac followed by two years of behavioral psychotherapy followed by the incredibly enjoyable process of finding a hospital that wanted to employ a psychiatrist with a mental illness because I knew I wouldn’t be able to hide it through however many years of work I will be with them – avoiding the use of the term “insane” has never been high on my list of priorities either.

I have never, ever, noticed the pattern you have – people who use the word “insane” being otherwise bad or de-legitimizing people with mental illness. In fact, it has happened more than once to me – twice, I think, spookily similar – that a mentally ill patient asks me what my diagnosis is, I say something like “schizophrenia” or whatever, and they say “Nope! I’m insane! If you want to be a good doctor, you’re going to have to learn to tell it like it is!”

Both my girlfriend and I agree that people being very concerned about people using or not using specific very common words has been a much bigger warning flag of someone who is otherwise not a nice person than use of the word “insane”.

…which is not to say that you haven’t had the exact opposite experience! That’s kind of the problem. No one can speak for an entire community and community members have very different experiences and preferences. My policy so far has been to always respect someone’s terminology preferences when talking to them personally or in a small group, and to respect terminology preferences I know to be common when talking to a large audience. In a lifetime of working with the mentally ill and dating two different disability rights bloggers I have yet to hear anyone else express a strong preference against “insane”, but if it happens more often I will update. And I will certainly avoid doing it if I ever have reason to talk to you directly.

If by “sluttiness” r-you mean “sexual promiscuity”, what is gained by using a gender-targeted insult that is likely to make a significant portion (i.e. women and/or queer people, who together are like… 55% of the world at least) of r-your potential audience uncomfortable and less likely to engage with r-your argument?

This I apologize for unreservedly. In the Anti-Reactionary FAQ, I quoted some reactionary passages using the word “sluttiness”, and then I continued using it myself afterwards. I was hoping to kind of mock the reactionaries by pointing out how much their argument depended on that one word. In the process, it seems I offended some women/queers as well. I was wrong to do this, there were very easy ways to avoid it, and I will avoid it in the future.

VI.

You probably aren’t even reading this, but I hope someone like you is.

[content warning: rape, false rape allegations]

(see also parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 of ∞)

I.

Spotted on Brute Reason but liked and reblogged 35,000 times: Five Things More Likely To Happen To You Than Being Accused Of Rape. A man is 631 times more likely to become an NFL player than to be falsely accused of rape! Thirty-two times more likely to be struck by lightning! Eleven times more likely to be hit by a comet!

Needless to say, all of these figures are completely wrong, in fact wrong by a factor of over 22,700x. I’m not really complaining – missing the mark by only a little over four orders of magnitude is actually not bad for a feminist blog. Nevertheless, it will be instructive to figure out where they erred so we may be vigilant against such things in the future, and perhaps certain moral lessons may be gleaned in the process as well.

II.

Since that article itself does not show its work, we will have to rely on its obvious inspiration, an almost-identical blog post written a few days before by the same person responsible for the Buzzfeed piece, Charles Clymer.

It starts by noting that there are about 84,000 forcible rapes per year – and that FBI statistics suggest 8% are false accusations. We will can examine these numbers later, but for now let’s just take them as given.

It then goes on to calculate that, given the average man has sex 99 times per year (who is this average man?!) there are 5.1 billion acts of sexual intercourse in the United States each year among American men 15 – 39. Divide 5.1 billion by 6,750, and therefore, in Clymer’s words “the odds of any sexually-active male between the ages of 15 and 39 has a 750,000 to 1 chance of being falsely accused of rape”

And, he goes on to say, 1/33 men are raped during their lifetime. Therefore, the average man has a 27500x higher chance of being raped than being falsely accused of rape. The average man has a 1 in 84,079 chance of being killed by lightning, so that’s 32x more likely than getting falsely accused of rape. And it adds that the average women has a 1/4 chance of being raped during her lifetime – so the odds of a woman being raped during her lifetime must be 220000x higher than the odds of a man being falsely accused of rape.

Did you spot the sleight of hand in those calculations? He calculated the odds of a man who has sex 99 times per year for 24 years being accused of rape per sex act, and then declared this was the odds of being accused of rape in your lifetime. Then he went on to compare it to various other lifetime odds, like the lifetime odds of being raped, the lifetime odds of being struck by lightning, et cetera.

This isn’t comparing apples to oranges. This isn’t even comparing apples to orangutans. This is comparing apples to the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy.

To highlight exactly how dishonest this is, suppose we wanted to trivialize rape itself through the same methodology. The average woman, as per the article’s statistics, has a 1/4 chance of getting raped during her lifetime, which means a 1/9500 or so chance of getting raped per sex act if she has sex 99 times per year from ages 15-39. And looking at the same list of statistically unlikely things provided on that article, that’s less than the odds of dying in a plane crash (1/7032). So you crow “THE AVERAGE WOMAN IS LESS LIKELY TO GET RAPED THAN TO DIE IN A PLANE CRASH! HA HA WOMEN ARE SO DUMB TO EVER WORRY ABOUT RAPE!”. And now you have a Buzzfeed article.

III.

We can do better. Let’s come up with conservative and liberal estimates of a man’s chance of getting falsely accused of rape between ages 15 and 39.

The rate of false rape accusations is notoriously difficult to study, since researchers have no failsafe way of figuring out whether a given accusation is true or not. The leading scholar in the area, David Lisak, explains that the generally accepted methodology is to count a rape accusation as false “if there is a clear and credible admission [of falsehood] from the complainant, or strong evidential grounds”, and goes on to explain what these grounds might be:

For example, if key elements of a victim’s account were internally inconsistent and directly contradicted by multiple witnesses and if the victim then altered those key elements of his or her account, investigators might conclude that the report was false

Attempts to use this methodology return varying results. Lisak lists seven studies he considers credible, which find false accusation rates of 2.1%, 2.5%, 3.0%, 5.9%, 6.8%, 8.3%, 10.3%, 10.9%. The two with 10%+ mysteriously go missing and thus we get the commonly quoted number of “two to eight percent”, which is repeated by sources as diverse as Alas, A Blog, Slate, and Wikipedia (Straight Statistics keeps the original 2% – 10% number)

Feminists make one true and important critique of these numbers – sometimes real victims, in the depths of stress we can’t even imagine, do strange things and get their story hopelessly garbled. Or they suddenly lose their nerve and don’t want to continue the legal process and tell the police they were making it up in order to drop the case as quickly as possible. All of these would go down as “false allegations” under the “victim has to admit she was lying or contradict herself” criteria. No doubt this does happen.

But the opposite critique seems much stronger: that some false accusers manage tell their story without contradicting themselves, and without changing their mind and admit they were lying. We’re not talking about making it all the way through a trial – the majority of reported rapes get quietly dropped by the police for one reason or another and never make it that far. Although keeping your story halfway straight is probably harder than it sounds sitting in an armchair without any cops grilling me, it seems very easy to imagine that most false accusers manage this task, especially since they may worry that admitting their duplicity will lead to some punishment.

The research community defines false accusations as those that can be proven false beyond a reasonable doubt, and all others as true. Yet many – maybe most – false accusations are not provably false and so will not be included.

So there’s reason to believe some of those 2-10% of presumed false accusations are actually true, and other reasons to believe that some of the 98% – 92% of presumed true accusations are actually false.

What is an upper bound on the number of false rape accusations? Researchers tend to find that police estimate 20%-40% of the rape accusations they get to be “unfounded”, (for example Philadelphia Police 1968, Chambers and Millar 1983, Grace et al 1992, Jordan 2004, Gregory and Lees 1996, etc, etc). Many scholars critique the police’s judgment, suggesting many police officers automatically dismiss anyone who doesn’t fit their profile of a “typical rape victim”. A police-based study that took pains to avoid this failure mode by investigating all cases very aggressively (Kanin 1994) was criticized for what I think are ideological reasons – they primarily seemed to amount to the worry that the aggressive investigations stigmatized rape victims, which would make them so flustered that they would falsely recant. Certainly possible. On the other hand, if you dismiss studies for not investigating thoroughly enough and for investigating thoroughly, there will never be any study you can’t dismiss. So while not necessarily endorsing Kanin and the similar studies in this range, I think they make a useful “not provably true” upper bound to contrast with the “near-provably false” lower bound of 2%-10%.

IV.

But this only represents the number of false rape accusations that get reported to the police. 80% of rapes never make it to the police. Might false rape accusations be similar?

Suppose you are a woman who wants to destroy a guy’s reputation for some reason. Do you go to the police station, open up a legal case, get yourself tested with an invasive rape kit, hire an attorney, put yourself through a trial which may take years and involve your reputation being dragged through the mud, accept that you probably won’t get a conviction anyway given that you have no evidence – and take the risk of jail time if you’re caught lying?

Or do you walk to the other side of the quad and bring it up to your school administrator, who has just declared to the national news that she thinks all men accused of rape should be automatically expelled from the college, without any investigation, regardless of whether there is any evidence?

Or if even the school administrator isn’t guilty-until-proven-innocent enough for you, why not just go to a bunch of your friends, tell them your ex-boyfriend raped you, and trust them to spread the accusation all over your community? Then it doesn’t even matter whether anyone believes you or not, the rumor is still out there.

This last one is the one that happened to me. I wasn’t the ex-boyfriend (thank God). I was the friend who was told about it. I took it very very seriously, investigated as best I could, and eventually became extremely confident that the accusation was false. No, you don’t know the people involved. No, I won’t give you personal details. No, I won’t tell you how I became certain that the accusation was false because that would involve personal details. Yes, that leaves you a lot of room to accuse me of lying if you want.

But if my word isn’t good enough for you, I happen to have witnessed two more cases of false rape accusations where I can tell you some minimal details. In a psychiatric hospital I used to work in (not the one I currently work in) during my brief time there there were two different accusations of rape by staff members against patients…

I want to take a second out to say very emphatically that all accusations of rape by psychiatric patients should be taken very seriously. Yes, psychiatric patients sometimes have complicated cognitive or personality issues that make them more likely to falsely report rape, but for exactly this reason they are much more vulnerable and people are much more likely to take advantage of them. This is a known problem and you should never dismiss their complaint.

…but in this case, there were video cameras all over the hospital and these were sufficient to prove that no assault had taken place in either case. Now I know someone is going to say that blah blah psychiatric patients blah blah doesn’t generalize to the general population, but the fact is that even if you accept that sorta-ableist dismissal, those patients were in hospital for three to seven days and then they went back out into regular society.I would love to say that we treated every single one of their problems so thoroughly it would never come back but I wouldn’t bet on it.

So I know three men who have been accused of rape in a way that did not involve the police, and none (as far as I know) who have been accused in a way that did. This suggests that like rapes themselves, most false rape accusations never reach law enforcement.

While rape victims have some incentives to report their cases to the police – a desire for justice, a desire for safety, the belief that the evidence will support them – false accusers have very strong incentives not to – too much work, easier revenge through other means, knowledge that the evidence is unlikely to support them, fear of getting in trouble for perjury if their deception gets out. So I consider it a very conservative estimate to say that the ratio of unreported to reported false accusations is 4:1 – the same as it is with rapes. A more realistic estimate might be as high as double or triple that.

V.

Now we have the data necessary to do a slightly better job calculating the risk of false rape allegations. We’ll start with the most conservative possible estimate.

We will stick with the article’s figure of 84,000 reported rapes per year and 8% false accusation rate, for a total of 6,750 falsely accused.

We go on to assume, for the sake of conservativism, that there has never been a single false accuser who did not later confess, and that there has never been a false accuser who did not go to the police (my own memories of this must be hallucinations).

Since there are 53 million men ages 15-39 in the United States, the probability of being one of these 6,750 falsely accused is 1/7850 per year. But since you have 24 years in that age range in which to be accused, your lifetime probability of being falsely accused is about 1/327, or 0.3%. This is small, but according to Clymer’s list it’s about the same as your risk of dying in a car crash. Do you worry about dying in a car crash? Then you are allowed to worry about being falsely accused of rape.

(note that this is the most conservative possible estimate, using exactly the same numbers as in the article but not lying about what math we’re doing. But the article got 1/750,000. So the absolute lower bound for how wrong the article was is “wrong by a factor of 2,300x”)

What about a slightly less hyperconservative estimate? Continuing our conservative assumption that there has never been a false accuser who has not later confused, but allowing that false accusations reach the police at only the same rate that rapes do, 1.5% of men will get falsely accused.

What estimate do I personally find most likely? Suppose we keep everything else the same, but allow that for every false accuser who later confesses, there is also one false accuser who does not later confess. This raises the false accusation rate to 16% – which, keep in mind, is still less than half of what the police think it is, so it’s not like we’re allowing rape-culture-happy cops to color our perception here. Now 3% of men will get falsely accused.

What is an upper bound for the extent of this problem? We could obtain one by using Kanin’s 40% and holding everything else constant, but no matter how many times I qualified this attempt with “I am using this as an upper bound, not endorsing this as the actual number of rapes”, someone would yell at me for using a study they disagree with and call me a rape apologist. So I will leave the difficult task of multiplying 3% by 2.5x to my readers. You might then try multiplying it even further if you think false accusations are less likely than true accusations to make it to the police.

So greater than 0.3% of men get falsely accused of rape sometime in their lives, and the most likely number is probably around 3%.

Which means the article was off by a factor of at least 2,300x and probably more like 22,700x.

And yet it got 35,000 Tumblr likes and reblogs. By blatantly lying in a sensationalist way, it became more popular than anything you or I will ever write. There are scientists dedicating their lives to making new discoveries on the frontiers of knowledge, poets making words dance and catch fire, struggling writers trying to tell the stories inside of them – all desperate for someone to pay attention to what they’re saying – and the Internet ignores these people and instead brings hundreds of thousands of hits and no doubt a big windfall in ad revenue to a guy who lies about rape and to the site that enables him.

And I would like to just let it be, except that there’s a probably one-in-thirty but definitely-no-less-than-one-in-three-hundred chance that I will be falsely accused of rape someday, and need to defend myself, and maybe I’ll have what should be an airtight alibi, and then the people who read this Buzzfeed article will dismiss it with “Well, I saw on the Internet there’s only a one in a million chance you’re telling the truth, so screw your alibi!” This is already happening. One of the Tumblr rebloggers added the comment “Yeah, so you know the dude who says he was falsely accused of rape? Now you know. He’s a rapist.” These are not just lies, these are dangerous lies.

So please permit me a second to gripe about this.

It is commonly said that a lie will get halfway across the world before the truth can get its boots on. And this is true. Except in the feminist blogosphere, where a lie will get to Alpha Centauri and back three times while the truth is locked up in a makeshift dungeon in the basement, screaming.

I have been debunking bad statistics for a long time. In medicine, in psychology, in politics. Click on the “statistics” tag of this blog if you don’t believe me. Yet the feminist blogosphere is the only place where I consistently see things wrong by factors of several thousand get reblogged by thousands of usually very smart people without anyone ever bothering to think critically about them. Like, thirty five thousand feminists – including some who self-identify as rationalists! – saw an article that literally said a guy was more likely to get hit by a comet than get falsely accused of rape, and said “Yeah, sure, that sounds plausible”.

So please permit me to keep griping just one moment longer. Do not trust anything that comes out of the feminist blogosphere. When you see something in the feminist blogosphere, your default assumption should be that it is approximately as honest as this Clymer article.

There are some honorable exceptions. I have found Alas, A Blog to be pretty scrupulous, and of course everything ever written by Ozy is wonderful and perfect in every way. But two swallows do not make a summer, and these and any similar blogs you find should be considered tiny islands of lucidity in a vast ocean of bullshytte, spewing forth tidal waves of bullshytte upon the rest of us with every passing seismic disturbance. I do not have time to debunk them all but you should view them with a prior of extraordinarily high suspicion.

Thank you for letting me get that out of my system.

VI.

Why would this happen? Why would smart people, by the tens of thousands, be so delighted by the opportunity to embrace these fabrications?

There is something called the “just world fallacy”, that says everyone gets what they deserve and moral questions are always easy and there is never any need to make scary tradeoffs.

And, as is so often the case for things with “fallacy” in the name, it is not true.

Look at how the Charles Clymer article, in its own words, describes false rape allegations:

“False rape hysteria”, it informs us, is perpetrated by “men’s rights activists, more accurately known as insecure woman-hating assholes”, because they think “women are products to be bought and sold and when these objects assert their right to human value many (if not most) men feel threatened.”

Now let’s hear from a guy on the r/mensrights community on Reddit:

Anyway, like I said, it’s been just over a year since [I was falsely accused of rape]. Since then I haven’t been the same. The most striking thing that I’ve noticed is the paranoia that I have almost every waking moment. Of everybody. Of men, of women, and even friends. I can’t bring myself to date women anymore. I have panic attacks every time I see a police officer. I constintly think that I’m being followed. The night I came home from being interviewed by the cops I drank myself to sleep and I’ve been doing that ever since. If I don’t any flicker of light makes me think that the police are here to arrest me. I’ve been able to fake a normal social life to my family and work and the friends I have left but most don’t know anything about this. I’m not looking for pity from anyone. In fact, I’m doing better than I have been. The reason I’m posting this is because I want people to know how bad being accused of something like rape can hurt and scar someone.

Man, what an “insecure, woman-hating asshole.”

But consider the alternative to this kind of glib dismissal.

3% of men are falsely accused of rape. 15% of women are raped. If someone you know gets accused of rape, your prior still is very very high that they did it.

I was extraordinarily lucky to find very strong evidence that my friend was innocent. I was extraordinarily lucky that both my co-workers had video feeds that could confirm their stories. If I hadn’t, I don’t know what I would have done. My two choices would have been to either accept the possibility that I’m staying friends with a rapist, or to accept the possibility I’m ostracizing someone for something he didn’t do.

And someone is going to expect me to conclude by recommending what the correct thing to do in these cases is, but I have no idea. Probably there is no solution that isn’t horrible. If there is, it’s way above my pay grade. Ask Ozy. Ze’s the one with the Gender Studies degree.

All I can suggest is that you not flee from the magnitude of the decision with comfortable lies.

One of those comfortable lies is to tell yourself that all women are lying sluts so the accusation can be safely ignored.

But another comfortable lie is that false rape accusations are eleven times rarer than getting hit by comets.

This is why Charles Clymer on Buzzfeed is getting more publicity and support than anything you or I will ever write.

Because people want to live in his world, where the comfortable lies are all true and no one suffers without deserving it.

Lots of no doubt very wise people avoid comment threads here, but the comments on Universal Human Experiences are really worth it. The post was about how people mistake their own unique and individual ways of experiencing the world for human universals and assume anyone who says otherwise is speaking metaphorically. And boy did people have a lot of good examples of this.

I want to turn lots of them into extended discussions eventually, but for now I’ll settle for the one that reminded me how I still fail at Principle of Charity.

Principle of Charity, remember, says you should always assume your ideological opponents’ beliefs must make sense from their perspective. If you can’t even conceive of a position you oppose being tempting to someone, you don’t understand it and are probably missing something. You might be missing a strong argument that the position is correct. Or you might just be missing something totally out of left field.

People always accuse me of going too far with this, and every time I’m tempted to believe them I always get reminded I don’t go nearly far enough.

I’m pretty good at feeling tempted by most positions I oppose, which satisfies me that I understand them enought to feel justified in continuing to reject them. The biggest exception is that opposition to homosexuality has never made sense to me. I can sort of understand where it fits into a natural law theology, but a lot of anti-gay activists are, no offense, not exactly Thomas Aquinas.

Chris Hallquist commented:

I remember hearing once on Dan Savage’s podcast that he gets letters from gay men who grew up in very conservative parts of the country, who didn’t know that being straight was a thing. They assumed all men were attracted to men, but just hid it.

Martin responded:

Dr. Paul Cameron, founder of the anti-gay Family Research Institute, is quoted as saying: “If all you want is the most satisfying orgasm you can get – and that is what homosexuality seems to be – then homosexuality seems too powerful to resist… It’s pure sexuality. It’s almost like pure heroin. It’s such a rush. They are committed in almost a religious way. And they’ll take enormous risks, do anything.” He says that for married men and women, gay sex would be irresistible. “Martial sex tends toward the boring end,” he points out. “Generally, it doesn’t deliver the kind of sheer sexual pleasure that homosexual sex does” So, Cameron believes, within a few generations homosexuality would be come the dominant form of sexual behavior. Apparently, some people build their entire lives around not knowing that being straight is a thing.

So imagine that you’re one of those people Dan Savage was talking about – a closeted gay guy who doesn’t realize he’s a closeted gay guy. He just thinks – reasonably, given his own experience! -that the natural state of the human male is to be attracted to other men, but that men grudgingly have sex with and marry women anyway because society tells them they have to.

(I don’t know if this generalizes to women)

In that case, exactly the anti-gay position conservatives push makes perfect sense for exactly the reasons they say it makes sense.

Allowing gay marriage would destroy straight marriage? Yes! If everyone’s secretly gay, then as soon as gay marriage is allowed, they will breath a sigh of relief and stop marrying opposite-sex partners whom they were never very attracted to anyway.

Gay people are depraved and licentious? Yes! Everyone else is virtuously resisting all of these unbearable homosexual impulses, and gay people are the ones who give in, who can’t resist grabbing the marshmallow as soon as it is presented to them.

(I’m referring to this experiment, not some sort of creepy sexual euphemism. Get your heads out of the gutter.)

Teaching children about homosexuality will turn them gay? Yes! The only thing preventing them all from being gay already is the social stigma against it. Teaching them in school that homosexuality is okay and shouldn’t be stigmatized cuts the last thin thread connecting them to straightness.

This can’t be a universal explanation for anti-gay attitudes. Something like half the US population is against gay marriage (previously much more) and probably five percent or less is gay. Closeted gay people don’t explain more than a small fraction of the anti-gay movement.

But it’s probably bigger than the fraction who read Thomas Aquinas. Maybe all these idiosyncratic arguments that only a few people can really appreciate turn into soundbites and justifications that get used by other people who feel vague discomfort but don’t have a good grounding for why. That means they’d have an impact larger than the size of the groups that produce them.

The Anti-Racialist Q&A – inspired by my own Anti-Reactionary FAQ and written by blogger The Prussian on SkepticInk – is an astounding essay.

It’s astounding because it is a piece of writing about race that is so good that I actually have specific criticisms of it. I didn’t even realize how strange this was until about my tenth nitpick, when I noticed that I was nitpicking individual arguments instead of shouting at my computer “WHY ARE YOU SO STUPID?! WHY?! WHY?!”

It’s astounding because I have no idea what the author’s political leanings are even though he seems to go through great trouble to explain them. One minute he will seem like a raging leftist, the next he will be talking about how racism is just as stupid as global warming alarmism. Or talking about how racism keeps people of all skin colors from uniting in brotherhood against the real enemy, Muslims.

It’s astounding because I think it was meant to actually convince people. It’s written in a style of “I can see where you’re coming from, but have you considered X?” I thought I was the only person who had figured out that this worked better than “YOU ARE DUMB AND I HATE YOU. NOW PLEASE AGREE WITH ME.”

But I think the most astounding part is that it might be one of the first things I’ve ever read to argue against racism (NO GOULD AND LEWONTIN DON’T COUNT).

I mean, I’ve read a lot of articles condemning racism, and accusing people of racism, and being very upset about the racism inherent in society. But this might be the first one I’ve ever read to argue against it.

That is worthy of note. It is the exact opposite of the attitude in Cowpox of Doubt, like someone who says “Homeopathy? I guess the responsible thing to do is to read dozens of studies before I form an opinion on it”. This may not be a very practical philosophy or a good way to win friends, but it’s an impressive signal of epistemic virtue if nothing else.

I won’t say the FAQ gets everything right – just for one example, if I’d written it I would have dropped the whole “race doesn’t exist” thing as too complicated a question to be worth debating without a longer diversion into philosophy than most people would be willing to entertain.

But it’s pretty good for a first attempt at the genre.

Prussian deserves more traffic for having written something so ambitious, and I don’t have the energy to enforce the censorship I would need for a good comments thread about race, so please take your comments on his Q&A there, not here.

[Content note: hypothetical spiders]

I complain a lot about the social justice movement. Or for a change, I sometimes complain that the media is too friendly to the social justice movement. So when the media starts challenging the movement, with articles like Trigger Warnings: New Wave Of Political Correctness and We’ve Gone Too Far With Trigger Warnings and Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Children Squirm and America’s College Kids Are A Bunch Of Mollycoddled Babies, I really ought to be happy things are finally going my way.

Instead I’m a little disturbed. Let’s fnord that last article:

poor dears demand riot in the streets shield their precious eyes anything potentially offensive cave in, the most sacrosanct doctrines are endangered, buildings being “occupied,” professors intimidated, deans confronted, generalized kindling of political correctness, self-absorption, spoiled-bratism, kids accustomed to getting their own way with just about everything, hovered over and indulged by their parents, grade-inflated carefully cushioned, precious as they are, schizy and spoiled, crop of prissy, protected and self-absorbed young people, shelter them from everything they don’t already believe and welcome

This doesn’t look good. Also, Jezebel and Baffler are against trigger warnings, as are a group of professors who teach “gender, sexuality, and critical race studies” (the last of which deals twice as much damage as regular race studies). Reversed stupidity is not intelligence, but sometimes it’s a helpful clue about where to look.

I like trigger warnings. I like them because they’re not censorship, they’re the opposite of censorship. Censorship says “Read what we tell you”. The opposite of censorship is “Read whatever you want”. The philosophy of censorship is “We know what is best for you to read”. The philosophy opposite censorship is “You are an adult and can make your own decisions about what to read”.

And part of letting people make their own decisions is giving them relevant information and trusting them to know what to do with them. Uninformed choices are worse choices. Trigger warnings are an attempt to provide you with the information to make good free choices of reading material.

And my role model here, as in so many other places, is Commissioner Lal: “Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.”

Trigger warnings fight those who would like to be our masters in another way as well. They are one of our strongest weapons against the proponents of censorship. The proponents say “We can’t let you air that opinion, it might offend people.” Trigger warnings say “I am explaining to you exactly how this might offend you, so if you continuing listening to me you have volunteered to hear whatever I have to say, on your own head be it, and let no one else purport to protect you from yourself.”

I agree that bad people could use trigger warnings to avoid ever reading anything that challenges their prejudices. This is a problem with providing people informed choices. Sometimes they misuse them.

But I could also imagine good people using trigger warnings to increase their ability to read things that challenge their views. Suppose you are a transgender person who becomes really uncomfortable when you hear people insult transgender people. Gradually you learn that a lot of people outside the social justice community do this a lot, so you stop reading anything outside the social justice community, forget about genuinely rightist sources like National Review or American Conservative. Now suppose sources start trigger warning their content. Most right-wing arguments don’t insult transgender people, so all of a sudden you have a way to steer clear of the ones that do and read all of the others free from fear.

Actually, “fear” is the wrong word, it buys into the stereotyping of triggered people as coddled or cowards or something. Maybe some people feel fear. Others would just be free from exasperation, anger, distracting dismay, the cognitive load of having to hear people insult you and not being able to respond and having to exert effort to continue to read. I feel like this might be my response to the existence of more trigger warnings (at least if anyone ever warned for my triggers, which they won’t).

And I guess I admit that the people who use trigger warnings for epistemic evil will probably outnumber those who use them for epistemic virtue. But then the question is: do “we”, as a civilization, grant ourselves the right to force people to be virtuous without their consent? There are a lot of good arguments that we should, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s not a going question. In every other area of life, we’ve already decided that we don’t. Like, it would be a spectacularly good idea to make a rule that every fifth link to Paul Krugman’s blog has to redirect people to Tyler Cowen’s blog, and vice versa, so people don’t get a chance to only read the opinions they agree with. Or that every Republican has to watch one Daily Show a month, and every Democrat has to listen to one Fox News segment. But if we’re not going to do that, it hardly seems fair to put the whole burden of epistemic virtue on the easily triggered.

II.

The strongest argument against trigger warnings that I have heard is that they allow us to politicize ever more things. Colleges run by people on the left can slap big yellow stickers on books that promote conservative ideas, saying “THIS BOOK IS RACIST AND CLASSIST”, and then act outraged if anyone requests a trigger warning that sounds conservative – like a veteran who wants one on books that vilify or mock soldiers, or a religious person who wants one on blasphemy. Then everyone has to have a big fight, the fight makes everyone worse off than either possible resolution, and it ends with somebody feeling persecuted and upset. In other words, it’s an intellectual gang sign saying “Look! We can demonstrate our mastery of this area by only allowing our symbols; your kind are second-class citizens!”

On the other hand, this is terribly easy to fix. Put trigger warnings on books, but put them on the bullshytte page. You know, the one near the front where they have the ISBN number and the city where the publishers’ head office is and something about the Library of Congress you’ve never read through even though it’s been in literally every book you’ve ever seen. Put it there, on a small non-colorful sticker. Call it a “content note” or something, so no one gets the satisfaction of hearing their pet word “trigger warning”. Put a generally agreed list of things – no sense letting every single college have its own acrimonious debate about it. The few people who actually get easily triggered will with some exertion avoid the universal human urge to flip past the bullshytte page and spend a few seconds checking if their trigger is in there. No one else will even notice.

Or if it’s about a syllabus, put it on the last page of the syllabus, in size 8 font, after the list of recommended reading for the class. As a former student and former teacher, I know no one reads the syllabus. You have to be really devoted to avoiding your trigger. Which is exactly the sort of person who should be able to have a trigger warning while everyone else goes ahead with their lives in a non-political way.

I’m sure there are some more implementation details, but it’s nothing a little bit of good faith can’t take care of. If good faith is used and some people still object because it’s not EXACTLY what they want, then I’ll tell them to go fly a kite, but not before.

I know a lot of people worry about slippery slopes; give the culture warriors an inch and they’ll take a mile. I think this is a very backwards way of looking at things. Like, the anti-gay people talked about a slippery slope and fought desperately hard against gay marriage, even though it was pretty hard to find anything actually objectionable about it other than that it might be on a slippery slope to worse things. That desperate fight didn’t delay gay marriage more than a few years, and it didn’t prevent whatever gay marriage was on a slippery slope to. What it did do was totally discredit conservatives in this area. Now any time anyone makes a family values argument, even a good family values argument, people can say that “family values” is code for homophobia, and bring up that family values conservatives really have held abhorrent positions in the past so why should we trust them now? It gave liberals huge momentum, and if there is a slippery slope then all that opposing gay marriage did was destroy the credibility of anybody who could have stopped us going down it.

Opposing a good idea on slippery slope grounds is a moral failure and a strategic failure, and I’d hate for opponents of the social justice movement to make that mistake with trigger warnings.

III.

But this is all tangential to what really bothered me, which is Pacific Standard’s The Problems With Trigger Warnings According To The Research.

You know, I love science as much as anyone, maybe more, but I have grown to dread the phrase “…according to the research”.

They say that “Confronting triggers, not avoiding them, is the best way to overcome PTSD”. They point out that “exposure therapy” is the best treatment for trauma survivors, including rape victims. And that this involves reliving the trauma and exposing yourself to traumatic stimuli, exactly what trigger warnings are intended to prevent. All this is true. But I feel like they are missing a very important point.

YOU DO NOT GIVE PSYCHOTHERAPY TO PEOPLE WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT.

Psychotherapists treat arachnophobia with exposure therapy, too. They expose people first to cute, little spiders behind a glass cage. Then bigger spiders. Then they take them out of the cage. Finally, in a carefully controlled environment with their very supportive therapist standing by, they make people experience their worst fear, like having a big tarantula crawl all over them. It usually works pretty well.

Finding an arachnophobic person, and throwing a bucket full of tarantulas at them while shouting “I’M HELPING! I’M HELPING!” works less well.

And this seems to be the arachnophobe’s equivalent of the PTSD “advice” in the Pacific Standard. There are two problems with its approach. The first is that it avoids the carefully controlled, anxiety-minimizing setup of psychotherapy.

The second is that YOU DO NOT GIVE PSYCHOTHERAPY TO PEOPLE WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT.

If a person with post-traumatic stress disorder or some other trigger-related problem doesn’t want psychotherapy, then even as a trained psychiatrist I am forbidden to override that decision unless they become an immediate danger to themselves or others.

And if they do want psychotherapy, then very likely they want to do it on their own terms. I try to read things that challenge my biases and may even insult or trigger me, but I do it when I feel like it and not a moment before. When I am feeling adventurous and want to become stronger in some way, I will set myself some strenuous self-improvement task, whether it be going on a long run or reading material I know will be unpleasant. But at the end of a really long and exasperating day when I’m at my wit’s end and just want to relax, I don’t want you chasing me with a sword and making me run for my life, and I don’t want you forcing traumatic material at me.

The angry article above with all the talk of “spoiled brats” annoys me as an amateur politics blogger, but this Pacific Standard article pushes my buttons as a (somewhat) non-amateur psychiatrist. This is not your job to meddle. If you are very concerned about helping people with PTSD, please express that concern by donating to PTSD USA or one of the other organizations that will help those with the condition get proper, well-controlled therapy. Please do not try to increase the background level of triggers in the hopes that one of them will fortuitously collide with a PTSD sufferer in a therapeutic way.

If, like me, you think the social justice movement has a really serious kindness and respect problem, then you know that it’s really hard to bring this up without getting accused of unkindness and disrespect yourself. I don’t know how to best respond to this problem. But I’m pretty sure that the very minimum one can do is not to actually be unkind and disrespectful. And I worry that some of these arguments against trigger warnings are failing to clear even this very low bar.

[Trigger warnings: sexual abuse, scary Internet mobbing.]
[Try not to link to this everywhere because I feel bad about discussing it and don't want to spread it to more of the Internet than it has to be or make this the sort of thing people associate this blog with.]

I.

A couple of months ago this blog got into a fight about false rape statistics. There has recently been some amount of – let’s call it “aftermath” – to that incident which I found interesting.

Some context: Mr. Clymer is a man who is (was?) active in the feminist movement. He wrote a popular article saying that false rape accusations were rarer than comet strikes, which the feminist movement dutifully liked and reblogged thirty thousand times. I wrote a blog post pointing out that his statistics were what we in the business sometimes technically refer to as “off by four orders of magnitude”. I may have been slightly cross about this.

A couple of weeks ago, Mr. Clymer was in the news again. More accurately, he was trending on Twitter, where a very popular #StopClymer hashtag apparently indicated he had done something that needed to be stopped. The best description of the whole incident seems to be the one here.

As far as I can tell, Clymer said on Twitter that Jesus would have been pro-feminist and that religion needs to try harder to be pro-choice and pro-feminist. Someone interpreted this as “using a women-centered hashtag to promote religious beliefs” and decided to see what else she could find on him. You may read the page and decide for yourself, but as far as I can tell, what she found was:

- He’s around the 75th percentile for Internet jerkitude and some of the people he was jerks to were women
- He banned people from his Facebook page, reasons unclear, and some of them were women
- He said he was in the feminist movement “80 percent for the cause” but that he also felt good when things he wrote became popular

This was sufficient to paint a big target on his head. We then proceeded to the ritual of Dredge Up Everything He Has Ever Written And Interpret It As Further Evidence He Is Terrible. For example, he once complimented a fan of his and added “just to be clear, I’m not hitting on you” at the bottom:

The response was reasonable and completely proportionate:

@BhasChat That is some hardcore predator grooming. It's clear why CC was able to fly under the radar so long: He's a pro abuser.

— Viridiana (@sariweather) May 30, 2014

@BhasChat Are you telling me that this mofo was after minors now too? 'Scuse me for a moment… *vomits through fingers*

— lurker (@groovyswkr) May 30, 2014

@BhasChat Just did a search for him and his profile and he is far too slick. He is a me, me, me merchant. A real predator. Stay safe.

— Andrew Dalby (@ardalby71) May 30, 2014

Then it was found that he mentioned that because he was a survivor of rape, he tried to be extra careful because he knew rape survivors were more likely to become rapists themselves. Surely no one could have a problem with…

@Jellis1snv YES!! ????

— ?James Saint-Franc? (@sirjamesa12) May 30, 2014

“@sirjamesa12: TRIGGER WARNING: Talks about sexual assault. #STOPCLYMER pic.twitter.com/azMRXoGTPe” – this dude gets worse by the day

— AspieWomanist Writer (@MochaLisaccino) May 30, 2014

That he had once had some kind of complicated disagreement with a black woman that I have trouble getting a good picture of from her description of such:

Anger is a natural reaction to oppression; anger is useful; anger is the only appropriate reaction to this sort of erasure of racial identity.

The members of the feminist group in which I expressed this anger were, for the most part, combative or unreceptive (I did receive small pockets of support, and for those individuals I am most appreciative). Multiple leaders of the group tried to tone police me, told me that movements becoming inclusive “takes time” and I should just be patient. I was begged by one of the most prominent leaders to educate everyone by writing a “powerful article” rather than express my feelings to the group itself. I was told by this same leader that they would not use the term “white supremacy” because “it was triggering” to some folks.

But failure to call evil by its name only begets more evil.

Another prominent member of the group, and a semi-well known name in the huffpo blogosphere, charles clymer, decided to pipe in to remind me that both white supremacist and anti-racist viewpoints should be valued equally. That’s white supremacy in action, right there.

Anyway, whatever the disagreement was, Charles Clymer tried to talk it out with her, but eventually got really annoyed with her tone and asked her to stop messaging him. Needless to say, she described this incident in a reasonable and completely proportionate way:

Unbeknownst to me, by criticizing charles clymer, I was awakening a psychologically abusive internet monster. And when it dissolved into an abusive mess of white tears and white-man-trying-to-force-a-black-woman-to-do-something-she-won’t-do (“yes, massa!”), that’s when I knew I had to block this fucker.

The above conversation was added to the pile of evidence. Then someone noticed he was a war veteran. I’m sure this will be dealt with reasonably and completely proportionally as well?

#StopClymer bc imperialism is ANTI FEMINIST.Youre a white supremacist& promote western hegemony #Fuckyourmansplaining pic.twitter.com/YxS4rpFkIT

— Carolyn Luby (@Carolyn_luby) June 13, 2014

Bailiff! Next piece of evidence! Accused once wrote an article saying that the words “c*nt” and “b*tch” could not be “reclaimed” and that people should stop using them. Does the prosecution have a reasonable and completely proportionate response to this?

@awhooker So in brief. His #Malesplanation about the marginalized and their reclamation is just another appropriation? #StopClymer

— Alexander Yarde (@thatalexyarde) May 30, 2014

Let it be added to the record. Prosecution, any reasonable and proportionate closing words?

#StopClymer a dudebro using his status to talk down/ police women & get laid = recipe for disaster & complicity.

— Black Paula Deen (@Capolavoro_) May 30, 2014

#CharlesClymer will not grant you respect because you are a woman. You have to earn that from him in ways he deems appropriate. #StopClymer

— Kayla Pearce (@KaylaPearce5) May 30, 2014

Reading @cmclymer's latest tweets makes me sick. He is taking all the critique and adapting behavior, which is what abusers do. #StopClymer

— Suey Park (@suey_park) May 30, 2014

QUICK! HE’S TAKING OUR CRITIQUE TO HEART! STOP HIM BEFORE HE GETS AWAY!

Annnnnnnyway, before the court could render verdict, the whole affair triggered a massive relapse of Clymer’s PTSD and he posted saying his therapist had told him not to go back on the Internet for a very long time. The idea was floated that he was making this up, but finally it was decided that yeah, rape survivor + military veteran + suddenly everyone in the world hates him, eh, maybe he is having a PTSD relapse. The announcement was greeted in a suitably compassionate manner that, may I add, was reasonable and completely proportionate:

To everyone who participated in the #StopClymer movement: THANK YOU. Our work is not done but tonight is a cause for celebration.

— kelly coviello (@KellyCoviello) June 3, 2014

Gotta say, if a guy's PTSD is triggered by resistance to his misogyny, his PTSD isn't going to be the #1 claim on my sympathies. #StopClymer

— Dan Holzman-Tweed (@HolzmanTweed) June 3, 2014

Clymer says he's going away briefly. But all of us behind #StopClymer will be here whenever he shows his slimy face.

— Natalie BauerOBrien (@NatalieOGrumpy) June 3, 2014

Far be it from me to defend Mr. Clymer. But it is hard for me to see this happen to someone and not feel at least a little bit of sympathy. I’ll just point out that when I talked to him over Facebook, he was a jerk to me. So let this be the defense he gets from me: he is an equal opportunity jerk. I don’t think he’s misogynist. I don’t think he’s racist. I don’t think he’s ‘a predator’. I think he’s just abrasive, unpleasant, and bad with statistics.

In February, I wrote:

[He] should be cast out from the community of people who have reasonable discussions and never trusted by anyone again. It might not totally succeed in making a new norm against this kind of thing. But at least it will prevent other people from seeing Clymer’s success, taking heart, and having the number of lies which are socially acceptable gradually advance.

Nevertheless, I cannot be happy with the current turn of events. Mr. Clymer deserved to lose his podium. But he didn’t deserve to lose it for this reason, and he didn’t deserve to be psychologically traumatized in this particular way. Justice is not quite served.

II.

Drew recently mentioned on Facebook his delight that there was a scandal called “Jacobinghazi”. I share his delight and his hope that -ghazi becomes a scandal suffix similar to “-gate”. Filesghazi! Climateghazi! Let’s do it!

The scandal itself was somewhat less interesting. Jacobin is a leftist magazine. I was recommended it a couple of months ago and have read it inconsistently – they have a good article on drug research I’ll be blogging about sometime. Anyway, as part of a broader point about rape they linked to someone on Twitter talking about receiving rape threats. After a multistep game of Telephone, this turned into “linking to rape threats”, “digging rape jokes”, “mocking rape threats”, “using rape threats to belittle people”, and finally, you know you expected it, “making rape threats”. Anyone who pointed out that this was completely made up and made no sense was accused of “minimizing rape threats” and “silencing voices”. But apparently the first side, the one not involved in the original accusations, was doing some pretty bad things too, even though I can’t get a clear description of exactly what they were. Needless to say, at every step hundreds of people tweeted about it and called for the heads of everybody involved.

(in Soviet Russia, Jacobins’ heads get called for by YOU!)

Finally, everyone agreed that everybody on the other side (whichever that might be) was a dudebro, treated women as things, and was super racist, even though as far as I can tell nothing about the incident seemed to involve race at all. Consensus having been achieved, the incident mostly died down.

There is an executive summary here (warning: two pages, click blue button at bottom to get second), a much less executive and more mocking summary here, and a horrible Twitter hashtag here which now mostly seems to be populated by people who are vaguely embarrassed and can’t remember what they were so angry about and definitely didn’t participate and it’s not their fault. Newsweek also wrote an article, but everyone on both sides seems to agree they got it horribly wrong.

And what I think these kinds of incidents show is that…

III.

Wait! Sorry! There’s one more set of #StopClymer tweets we haven’t gotten to yet!

Aand now I'm reading #StopClymer to remind myself how bad this "lookitme I'm a guy who Gets It" thing can go

— Arthur Chu (@arthur_affect) May 31, 2014

!!! But didn’t you…?

I once took Clymer's side in an argument & was kinda wary abt him even at the time but the guy on the other side was just SO wrong

— Arthur Chu (@arthur_affect) May 31, 2014

Oh no I can’t let you get away with that I am SO not letting you get away with that.

More context: my article condemning Clymer got discussed on Facebook. Arthur weighed in saying I was wrong to criticize Clymer’s article, because it was on the side of feminism, and feminism is good, and sometimes people need to use dirty tricks and exaggerated statistics to fight for good things. He said my problem was that I was too focused on abstract virtue, rather than the gritty reality of needing to do whatever it takes to win a battle, in this case the battle of pushing feminist ideas. Mr. Clymer’s ends justified his means, so I should have let him be.

I wrote a blog post disagreeing with that assessment, Arthur replied in the comments, I replied to him in the comments, and then it died down.

Assuming Arthur’s referring to our discussion – and I think he is, it would be very strange if circumstances had made him defend Mr. Clymer twice – then I don’t think I was, as he puts it, SO WRONG. No one disagreed with my debunking of Mr. Clymer’s statistics; there were over two hundred comments on that post and over five hundred on the followup and not one of them claimed he had gotten his math right. All that was left to argue about was my assertion that what he had done, if deliberate, was not remotely okay.

In my final discussion with Arthur, way down in the comment section of my response post, we discussed our different definitions of tolerance and in-groupishness. I said we should tolerate people who are truthful and kind, regardless of their political opinions. Arthur thought, on the contrary, we should tolerate people with the correct political opinions, regardless of whether they are truthful and kind. My exact words were:

Both of us successfully trap [actually bad people like] the KKK and Hitler on the outside of our fence. But I get to have a lot more allies than you do – allies against the actually bad people – and you have to put up with some pretty creepy friends. And if your side of the fence wins, you may find that hate is pretty darned transferable and you can’t always ensure it gets directed against the right people.

He answered:

I am deeply creeped out by many of your friends and while some of my friends might be a little loud and obnoxious, I on the whole admire them.

I don’t know if Arthur was genuinely “wary” of Mr. Clymer four months ago. He sure spent a heck of a long time defending him and being very upset that other people were criticizing him. But even if Arthur is totally telling the truth, even if he was as wary as a dockyard full of consumer goods, exactly one of us sounded the “this is maybe not the best guy to have representing the feminist movement” alarm. And exactly one of us condemned that person for doing so and said that “while some of my friends might be a little loud and obnoxious, I on the whole admire them.”

But I don’t know. Maybe, despite the topic of discussion, he wasn’t referring to Clymer in particular? Maybe you can admire someone and be wary of them at the same time. Still, I think all of this touches on a much more important question: why don’t whales get cancer more often?

I mean, think about it. Cancer results from a series of mutations occurring by chance in a single cell. So over a given time period, the cancer rate of an organism should be proportional to the number of cells in that organism. If a whale is a thousand times bigger than a person, it should have a thousand times more cells and therefore get cancer a thousand times more often. Since humans have maybe a 1% per year cancer risk, whales should get ten cancers a year. But most whales live a long time and don’t die of cancer. Why not? It can’t just be that they’ve evolved more efficient anti-cancer mechanisms, or else other animals (who also experience gains in adaptive fitness from not dying of cancer) would have evolved the same [EDIT: Carl Shulman suggests reasons why this might not be true].

(This problem is called Peto’s Paradox, was first raised in 1975, and is a great example of the rationalist skill of ‘noticing confusion’. Anyone who knows anything about cancer had the tools to notice something was really, really weird here, and other than this Peto fellow nobody did. I feel appropriately ashamed for somehow going through my entire life up to this point without picking up the glaring weirdness here.)

I don’t know which of the various proposed solutions to this puzzle is true but the most hilarious is no doubt Nagy, Victor and Cropper (2007). Whales are very big, so in order to threaten a whale, a cancer must also grow very big. In order to grow very big, a cancer must evolve a complicated internal structure determining which cells expand where and who’s going to secrete the factors necessary for blood vessels to grow and so on. Cancers can do that: even in humans, tumors develop impressive amounts of structure and cooperation among the cancerous cells inside of them. But as tumors grow bigger and more intricate, and cells have to spend more and more time altruistically working for the good of the tumor rather than just reproducing, some cells will inevitably defect from the plan and just divide uncontrollably. This ends up in an unhappy equilibrium. Whenever the balance swings too far toward defectors, the tumor can’t support itself and most of the cells die. Whenever the balance swings too far toward cooperators, the defectors have a big advantage again and start expanding. As a result, the tumor either remains at a fixed size or dies off completely. It might get a chance to metastasize, but the same will happen to its metastatic descendents.

In other words, the theory is that whales survive because they are so big that their cancers get cancer and die.

And if true, this wouldn’t be too surprising. Multicellular organisms have put a lot of evolutionary work into getting their cells to cooperate with each other, and part of that includes very strong safeguards again cancer. Your safeguards against cancer are so good that even though you will experience about 10 quadrillion (= ten million billion) cell divisions during your life time, in most people none of those ever turn into a clinically relevant cancer.

Cancerous cells are those that have lost all of those safeguards. As they grow into a functioning tumor, they need to evolve new mechanisms of cooperation, and so they do. But a couple million cells working for a couple months in your body aren’t going to do as well as all the animals in the world over 3 billion years of evolutionary history. So cancer’s cooperation enforcement mechanisms are much much worse than noncancerous cells’ cooperation mechanisms. Which is why you can live for a hundred years and have ten quadrillion cell divisions and not get cancer, but cancer can’t even take over one lousy section of a whale colon before it gets meta-cancer.

We like to call things we disagree with “social cancers”. People dislike social cancers and often inveigh against them. Here’s someone who thinks inequality is a social cancer. Here’s another guy who thinks gambling is. Here is a person who thinks that communism is, and though we may not agree with his spittle-filled rants, his web design choices, his choice of facial expression in photographs, or his assertion that “medical orgonomist” is a thing, we cannot doubt his sincerity.

I wonder if a good definition for “social cancer” might be any group that breaks the rules of cooperative behavior that bind society together in order to spread more quickly than it could legitimately achieve, and eventually take over the whole social body.

But society, like whales, is very big [citation needed]. Long before a group can take over society, it reaches a size where it needs to develop internal structure and rules about interaction between group members. If you collect a bunch of people and tell them to abandon all the social norms like honesty, politeness, respect, charity, and reason in favor of a cause – then the most likely result is that when your cause tries to develop some internal structure, it will be overrun by a swarm of people who have abandoned honesty, politeness, respect, charity, and reason.

Contrary to what our medical orgonomist friend says, I don’t think the Communists were much of a social cancer. The political communists, the kind we got in the US, mostly stuck to the rules. But look what happened to them. They got all excited about how the governing power structures were evil and needed to be destroyed. They set up various organizations dedicated to destroying the governing power structures. And people proceeded to decide that the governing power structures of those organizations were evil and needed to be destroyed. As a result, Communist parties were rent by constant factional warfare and they never got around to destroying the society they lived in at all.

And look what happened to Mr. Clymer. His whole spiel was about throwing out the virtue of charity – how when people have been accused of things, we should condemn them automatically, no chance it’s wrong, false accusations rarer than comet strikes. And then…

We have a lot of proverbs about this sort of thing. “Hoist with his own petard”. “Taste of your own medicine.” “A trap of your own making.” Jesus said “He who lives by the sword will die by the sword” – and it has been pointed out to me that Jesus himself lived as a carpenter and died by being nailed to a piece of wood, so there’s that.

Or since we’ve gradually meandered back on to the topic of sexism, there’s an ancient Sexist proverb that seems highly apropos: “Bro, if she’ll cheat with you, she’ll cheat on you”.

And in the same way, someone who will be a jerk for you will be a jerk to you. My disagreement with Arthur was about his willingness to tolerate jerks in his movement. He thinks it will help him win. But someone who is a jerk to men will, by and large, also be a jerk to women. Someone who is a jerk to men’s rights activists will, by and large, also be a jerk to feminists. They may not do so immediately, if it doesn’t serve their self-interest to do so. But in private, or as soon as the chance comes up, jerkitude will out. If you defend them as long as they’re only being jerks to outsiders, then a few months later, when – shock! horror! – you realize they’re being jerks to insiders, you end up having to retreat and mumble something about how you were “kinda wary about him” all along.

But more importantly if you elevate jerkishness into a principle, if you try to undermine the rules that keep niceness, community, and civilization going, the defenses against social cancer – then your movement will fracture, it will be hugely embarrassing, the atmosphere will become toxic, unpopular people will be thrown to the mob, everyone but the thickest-skinned will bow out, the people you need to convince will view you with a mixture of terror and loathing, and you’ll spend so much time dealing with internal conflicts that you’ll never get enough blood supply to grow large enough to kill a whale.

You will get things like #StopClymer and #Jacobinghazi.

Thus the Archipelagian Principle: Given infinite freedom of association, most people end will up in more or less the community they deserve.

A commenter asked in yesterday’s discussion on The Two-Income Trap: why did the entry of women into the workforce produce so little effect on GDP? Here’s the graph of US women’s workforce participation:

And here’s the graph of US GDP.

In about 50 years – 1935 to 1985 – we went from 20% of women in the workforce to 60% of women in the workforce. Assuming a bit under 100% of men in the workforce, that’s an increase of almost 50% over the expected trend if number of women in the workforce had stayed constant.

I’ve already admitted I find the fixedness of the GDP trend bizarre. But how on Earth do you unexpectedly raise the number of people in the workforce by 50% and still stick to exactly the same GDP trend? It would be like the US annexed Mexico one day but the GDP didn’t change a bit. Are we imagining here that if women hadn’t entered the workforce, GDP would have suddenly deviated downward from the trend, and totally by coincidence women rushed in to save the day? And then when we ran out of interested women to add to the work force, again by coincidence the GDP stabilized back to its trend line?

Possible solutions:

1. The GDP data is totally false. I am suspicious of that GDP data anyway. Maybe some joker in the Bureau of Labor Statistics just graphed out an exponential function and reported that as our GDP to see if anyone would notice.

2. The GDP data is low resolution. So low-resolution that even a change of 50% is invisible if stretched over a long enough time period.

3. Women contributed through unpaid labor in the home, and their paid labor substituted for that but didn’t add to it. But as far as I know GDP only counts paid-for goods. Not only should women’s labor in the home not have counted, but GDP should overcount the benefits of putting women to work because paid daycare and so on appear as valuable new services.

4. Somehow in total contradiction to usual economic theory, all gains made by women came out of the pockets of men, leaving the same growth as would have happened anyway.

This last one segues into a question asked by another commenter – did women entering the workforce drive down male wages?

This seems a lot like the question “do immigrants entering the workforce drive down native-born wages?” to which economists tend to answer “no” with more or fewer caveats. But the economists’ explanation for the immigrant effect is that in addition to producing, immigrants also consume, increasing demand.

Women were presumably already consuming. Back when they were housewives, they still needed houses, food, clothes, entertainment, et cetera. Their entrance into the workforce may create slightly more demand – for business clothes and office supplies, for example – but nothing like the demand created by immigrants entering the country.

If women increase the labor supply by 50% but don’t change the demand for labor, that seems like it should make wages go way down. Even if women are primarily in different jobs than men, men’s wages should still go down via a substitution effect (that is, even if women all become elementary school teachers, then a man who was planning to be an elementary school teacher before might become a fireman instead, raising the labor supply for firemen and pushing down fireman wages).

But the only study I can find to investigate this says it didn’t happen. And male wages don’t seem to have dropped dramatically starting 1950 or so. They do seem to have stagnated dramatically starting 1970 or so, but I feel like the income inequality explanation for that is on pretty solid ground. Unless you want to argue that the reason for income inequality is that between both sexes there’s now such a large reserve army of labor that the capitalists can get away with paying the workers very little. But I feel like economists would have told us if this were going on.

I hear a lot of conspiracy theories about women in the workforce. On the left, women in the workforce are being exploited and kept down by a sinister patriarchy. On the right, women in the workforce are a satanic plot to weaken our moral fiber.

But so far I’ve never heard the conspiracy theory that women never actually entered the workforce, that all the working women you see around you are animatronic robots or carefully crafted stage illusions.

Maybe this is the surest sign that the conspiracy is working.

[EDIT: Commenter Pseudo-Erasmus presents a very plausible theory that total number of hours worked stayed about the same due to men entering the work force later, retiring earlier, and working shorter weeks]

[Content note: hostility toward social justice, discussion of various prejudices]

“Words! Words! Words! I’m so sick of words! I get words all day through. First from him, now from you. Is that all you blighters can do?” – Eliza Doolittle

I.

I recently learned there is a term for the thing social justice does. But first, a png from racism school dot tumblr dot com.

So, it turns out that privilege gets used perfectly reasonably. All it means is that you’re interjecting yourself into other people’s conversations and demanding their pain be about you. I think I speak for all straight white men when I say that sounds really bad and if I was doing it I’m sorry and will try to avoid ever doing it again. Problem solved, right? Can’t believe that took us however many centuries to sort out.

A sinking feeling tells me it probably isn’t that easy.

In the comments section of the last disaster of a social justice post on my blog, someone started talking about how much they hated the term “mansplaining”, and someone else popped in to – ironically – explain what “mansplaining” was and why it was a valuable concept that couldn’t be dismissed so easily. Their explanation was lucid and reasonable. At this point I jumped in and commented:

I feel like every single term in social justice terminology has a totally unobjectionable and obviously important meaning – and then is actually used a completely different way.

The closest analogy I can think of is those religious people who say “God is just another word for the order and beauty in the Universe” – and then later pray to God to smite their enemies. And if you criticize them for doing the latter, they say “But God just means there is order and beauty in the universe, surely you’re not objecting to that?”

The result is that people can accuse people of “privilege” or “mansplaining” no matter what they do, and then when people criticize the concept of “privilege” they retreat back to “but ‘privilege’ just means you’re interrupting women in a women-only safe space. Surely no one can object to criticizing people who do that?”

…even though I get accused of “privilege” for writing things on my blog, even though there’s no possible way that could be “interrupting” or “in a women only safe space”.

When you bring this up, people just deny they’re doing it and call you paranoid.

When you record examples of yourself and others getting accused of privilege or mansplaining, and show people the list, and point out that exactly zero percent of them are anything remotely related to “interrupting women in a women-only safe space” and one hundred percent are “making a correct argument that somebody wants to shut down”, then your interlocutor can just say “You’re deliberately only engaging with straw-man feminists who don’t represent the strongest part of the movement, you can’t hold me responsible for what they do” and continue to insist that anyone who is upset by the uses of the word “privilege” just doesn’t understand that it’s wrong to interrupt women in safe spaces.

I have yet to find a good way around this tactic.

My suspicion about the gif from racism school dot tumblr dot com is that the statements on the top show the ways the majority of people will encounter “privilege” actually being used, and the statements on the bottom show the uncontroversial truisms that people will defensively claim “privilege” means if anyone calls them on it or challenges them. As such it should be taken as a sort of weird Rosetta Stone of social justicing, and I can only hope that similarly illustrative explanations are made of other equally charged terms.

Does that sound kind of paranoid? I freely admit I am paranoid in this area. But let me flesh it out with one more example.

Everyone is a little bit racist. We know this because there is a song called “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” and it is very cute. Also because most people score poorly on implicit association tests, because a lot of white people will get anxious if they see a black man on a deserted street late at night, and because if you prime people with traditionally white versus traditionally black names they will answer questions differently in psychology experiments. It is no shame to be racist as long as you admit that you are racist and you try your best to resist your racism. Everyone knows this.

Donald Sterling is racist. We know this because he made a racist comment in the privacy of his own home. As a result, he was fined $2.5 million, banned for life from an industry he’s been in for thirty-five years, banned from ever going to basketball games, forced to sell his property against his will, publicly condmened by everyone from the President of the United States on down, denounced in every media outlet from the national news to the Podunk Herald-Tribune, and got people all over the Internet gloating about how pleased they are that he will die soon. We know he deserved this, because people who argue he didn’t deserve this were also fired from their jobs. He deserved it because he was racist. Everyone knows this.

So.

Everybody is racist.

And racist people deserve to lose everything they have and be hated by everyone.

This seems like it might present a problem. Unless of course you plan to be the person who gets to decide which racists lose everything and get hated by everyone, and which racists are okay for now as long as they never cross you in any way.

Sorry, there’s that paranoia again.

Someone will argue I am equivocating between two different uses of “racist”. To which I would respond that this is exactly the point. I don’t know if racism school dot tumblr dot com has a Rosetta Stone with Donald Sterling on the top and somebody taking the Implicit Association Test on the bottom. But I think there is a strain of the social justice movement which is very much about abusing this ability to tar people with extremely dangerous labels that they are not allowed to deny, in order to further their political goals.

II.

I started this post by saying I recently learned there is a term for the thing social justice does. A reader responding to my comment above pointed out that this tactic had been described before in a paper, under the name “motte-and-bailey doctrine”.

The paper was critiquing post-modernism, an area I don’t know enough about to determine whether or not their critique was fair. It complained that post-modernists sometimes say things like “reality is socially constructed”. There’s an uncontroversial meaning here – we don’t experience the world directly, but through the categories and prejudices implicit to our society. For example, I might view a certain shade of bluish-green as blue, and someone raised in a different culture might view it as green. Okay. Then post-modernists go on to say that if someone in a different culture thinks that the sun is light glinting off the horns of the Sky Ox, that’s just as real as our own culture’s theory that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas a great big nuclear furnace. If you challenge them, they’ll say that you’re denying reality is socially constructed, which means you’re clearly very naive and think you have perfect objectivity and the senses perceive reality directly.

The writers of the paper compare this to a form of medieval castle, where there would be a field of desirable and economically productive land called a bailey, and a big ugly tower in the middle called the motte. If you were a medieval lord, you would do most of your economic activity in the bailey and get rich. If an enemy approached, you would retreat to the motte and rain down arrows on the enemy until they gave up and went away. Then you would go back to the bailey, which is the place you wanted to be all along.

By this metaphor, statements like “God is an extremely powerful supernatural being who punishes my enemies” or “The Sky Ox theory and the nuclear furnace theory are equally legitimate” or “Men should not be allowed to participate in discussions about gender” are the bailey – not defensible at all, but if you can manage to hold them you’ve got it made.

Statements like “God is just the order and love in the universe” and “No one perceives reality perfectly directly” and “Men should not interject into safe spaces for women” are the motte – extremely defensible, but useless.

As long as nobody’s challenging you, you spend time in the bailey reaping the rewards of occupying such useful territory. As soon as someone challenges you, you retreat to the impregnable motte and glare at them until they get annoyed and go away. Then you go back to the bailey.

This is a metaphor that only historians of medieval warfare could love, so maybe we can just call the whole thing “strategic equivocation”, which is perfectly clear without the digression into feudal fortifications.

III.

I probably still sound paranoid. So let me point out something I think the standard theory fails to explain, but my theory explains pretty well.

Why can’t social justice terms apply to oppressed groups?

Like, even bringing this up freaks people out. There is no way to get a quicker reaction from someone in social justice than to apply a social justice term like “privilege” or “racist” to a group that isn’t straight/white/male. And this is surprising.

If “privilege” just means “interjecting yourself into other people’s conversations”, this seems like something that women could do as well as men. Like, let’s say that a feminist woman posts a thoughtful comment to this post, and I say “Thanks for your input, but I was actually just trying to explain things to my non-feminist male friends, I’d prefer you not interject here.” Isn’t it possible she might continue to argue, and so be interjecting herself into another person’s conversation?

Or suppose “privilege” instead just means a cute story about a dog and a lizard, in which different people have trouble understanding each other’s experiences and appreciating the amount of pain they can be causing. I know a lot of men who are scared of being Forever Alone but terrified to ask women out, and I feel their pain and most of my male friends feel their pain. Yet a lot of the feminists I talk to have this feeling that this is entirely about how they think they own women’s bodies and are entitled to sex, and from their experience as attractive women it’s easy to get dates and if you can’t it’s probably because you’re a creep or not trying hard enough. This seems to me to be something of a disconnect and an underappreciation of the pain of others, of exactly the dog-lizard variety.

There are as many totally innocuous and unobjectionable definitions of “privilege” as there are people in the social justice movement, but they generally share something in common – take them at face value, and the possibility of women sometimes showing privilege toward men is so obvious as to not be worth mentioning.

Yet if anyone mentions it in real life, they are likely to have earned themselves a link to an Explanatory Article. Maybe 18 Reasons Why The Concept Of Female Privilege Is Insane. Or An Open Letter To The Sexists Who Think Female Privilege Is A Thing. Or The Idea Of Female Privilege – It Isn’t Just Wrong, It’s Dangerous. Or the one on how there is no female privilege, just benevolent sexism. Or That Thing You Call Female Privilege Is Actually Just Whiny Male Syndrome. Or Female Privilege Is Victim Blaming, which helpfully points out that people who talk about female privilege “should die in a fire” and begins “we need to talk, and no, not just about the fact that you wear fedoras and have a neck beard.”

It almost seems like you have touched a nerve. But why should there be a nerve here?

As further confirmation that we are on to something surprising, note also the phenomenon of different social justice groups debating, with desperation in their eyes, which ones do or don’t have privilege over one another.

If you are the sort of person who likes throwing rocks at hornet nests, ask anyone in social justice whether trans men (or trans women) have male privilege. You end up in places like STFU TRANSMISOGYNIST TRANS FOLKS or Cis Privilege Is Just A Tenet Of Male Privilege or On Trans People And The Male Privilege Accusation or the womyn-born-womyn movement or Against The Cisgender Privilege List or How Misogyny Hurts Trans Men: We Do Sometimes Have Male Privilege But There Are More Important Things To Talk About Here.

As far as I can tell, the debate is about whether trans women are more privileged than cis women, because they have residual male privilege from the period when they presented as men, or less privileged than cis women, because they are transsexual – plus a more or less symmetrical debate on the trans man side. The important thing to notice is that every group considers it existentially important to prove that they are less privileged than the others, and they do it with arguments like (from last link) “all examples of cis privilege are really male privileges that are not afforded to women, or are instances of resistance to trans politics. I call it patriarchy privilege when something like an unwillingness to redefine one’s own sexuality to include males is seen is labeled as offensive.”

And the trans male privilege argument is one of about seven hundred different vicious disputes in which everyone is insisting other people have more privilege than they do, fighting as if their lives depended on it.

The question here: since privilege is just a ho-hum thing about how you shouldn’t interject yourself into other people’s conversations, or something nice about dogs and lizards – but definitely not anything you should be ashamed to have or anything which implies any guilt or burden whatsoever – why are all the minority groups who participate in communities that use the term so frantic to prove they don’t have it?

We find the same unexpected pattern with racism. We all know everyone is racist, because racism just means you have unconscious biases and expectations. Everyone is a little bit racist.

People of color seem to be part of “everyone”, and they seem likely to have the same sort of in-group identification as all other humans. But they are not racist. We know this because of articles that say things like “When white people complain about reverse racism, they are complaining about losing their PRIVILEGE” and admit that “the dictionary is wrong” on this matter. Or those saying whites calling people of color racist “comes from a lack of understanding of the term, through ignorance or willful ignorance and hatred”. Or those saying that “when white people complain about experiencing reverse racism, what they’re really complaining about is losing out on or being denied their already existing privileges.” Why Are Comments About White People Not Racist, Can Black People Be Racist Toward White People? (spoiler: no), Why You Can’t Be Racist To White People, et cetera et cetera.

All of these sources make the same argument: racism means structural oppression. If some black person beats up some white person just because she’s white, that might be unfortunate, it might even be “racially motivated”, but because they’re not acting within a social structure of oppression, it’s not racist. As one of the bloggers above puts it:

Inevitably, here comes a white person either claiming that they have a similar experience because they grew up in an all black neighborhood and got chased on the way home from school a few times and OMG THAT IS SO RACIST and it is the exact same thing, or some other such bullshittery, and they expect that ignorance to be suffered in silence and with respect. If you are that kid who got chased after school, that’s horrible, and I feel bad for you…But dudes, that shit is not racism.

I can’t argue with this. No, literally, I can’t argue with this. There’s no disputing the definitions of words. If you say that “racism” is a rare species of noctural bird native to New Guinea which feeds upon morning dew and the dreams of young children, then all I can do is point out that the dictionary and common usage both disagree with you. And the sources I cited above have already admitted that “the dictionary is wrong” and “no one uses the word racism correctly”.

Source: Somebody who probably doesn’t realize they’ve just committed themselves to linguistic prescriptivism

Actually, I suppose one could escape a hostile dictionary and public by appealing to the original intent of the person who invented the word, but the man who invented the word “racism” was an activist for the forced assimilation of Indians who was known to say things like “Some say that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” My guess is that this guy was not totally on board with dismantling structures of oppression.

So we have a case where original coinage, all major dictionaries, and the overwhelming majority of common usage all define “racism” one way, and social justice bloggers insist with astonishing fervor that way is totally wrong and it must be defined another. One cannot argue definitions, but one can analyze them, so you have to ask – whence the insistence that racism have the structural-oppression definition rather than the original and more commonly used one? Why couldn’t people who want to talk about structural oppression make up their own word, thus solving the confusion? Even if they insisted on the word “racism” for their new concept, why not describe the state of affairs as it is: “The word racism can mean many things to many people, and I suppose a group of black people chasing a white kid down the street waving knives and yelling ‘KILL WHITEY’ qualifies by most people’s definition, but I prefer to idiosyncratically define it my own way, so just remember that when you’re reading stuff I write”? Or why not admit that this entire dispute is pointless and you should try to avoid being mean to people no matter what word you call the meanness by?

And how come this happens with every social justice word? How come the intertubes are clogged with pages arguing that blacks cannot be racist, that women cannot have privilege, that there is no such thing as misandry, that you should be ashamed for even thinking the word cisphobia? Who the heck cares? This would never happen in any other field. No doctor ever feels the need to declare that if we talk about antibacterial drugs we should call bacterial toxins “antihumanial drugs”. And if one did, the other doctors wouldn’t say YOU TAKE THAT BACK YOU PIECE OF GARBAGE ONLY HUMANS CAN HAVE DRUGS THIS IS A FALSE EQUIVALENCE BECAUSE BACTERIA HAVE INFECTED HUMANS FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS BUT HUMANS CANNOT INFECT BACTERIA, they would just be mildly surprised at the nonstandard terminology and continue with their normal lives. The degree to which substantive arguments have been replaced by arguments over what words we are allowed to use against which people is, as far as I know, completely unique to social justice. Why?

IV.

And so we return to my claim from earlier:

I think there is a strain of the social justice movement which is entirely about abusing the ability to tar people with extremely dangerous labels that they are not allowed to deny, in order to further their political goals.

If racism school dot tumblr dot com and the rest of the social justice community are right, “racism” and “privilege” and all the others are innocent and totally non-insulting words that simply point out some things that many people are doing and should try to avoid.

If I am right, “racism” and “privilege” and all the others are exactly what everyone loudly insists they are not – weapons – and weapons all the more powerful for the fact that you are not allowed to describe them as such or try to defend against them. The social justice movement is the mad scientist sitting at the control panel ready to direct them at whomever she chooses. Get hit, and you are marked as a terrible person who has no right to have an opinion and who deserves the same utter ruin and universal scorn as Donald Sterling. Appease the mad scientist by doing everything she wants, and you will be passed over in favor of the poor shmuck to your right and live to see another day. Because the power of the social justice movement derives from their control over these weapons, their highest priority should be to protect them, refine them, and most of all prevent them from falling into enemy hands.

If racism school dot tumblr dot com is right, people’s response to words like “racism” and “privilege” should be accepting them as a useful part of communication that can if needed also be done with other words. No one need worry too much about their definitions except insofar as it is unclear what someone meant to say. No one need worry about whether the words are used to describe them personally, except insofar as their use reveals states of the world which are independent of the words used.

If I am right, then people’s response to these words should be a frantic game of hot potato where they attack like a cornered animal against anyone who tries to use the words on them, desperately try to throw them at somebody else instead, and dispute the definitions like their lives depend on it.

And I know that social justice people like to mock straight white men for behaving in exactly that way, but man, we’re just following your lead here.

Suppose the government puts a certain drug in the water supply, saying it makes people kinder and more aware of other people’s problems and has no detrimental effects whatsoever. A couple of conspiracy nuts say it makes your fingers fall off one by one, but the government says that’s ridiculous, it’s just about being more sensitive to other people’s problems which of course no one can object to. However, government employees are all observed drinking bottled water exclusively, and if anyone suggests that government employees might also want to take the completely innocuous drug and become kinder, they freak out and call you a terrorist and a shitlord and say they hope you die. If by chance you manage to slip a little bit of tap water into a government employee’s drink, and he finds out about it, he runs around shrieking like a banshee and occasionally yelling “AAAAAAH! MY FINGERS! MY PRECIOUS FINGERS!”

At some point you might start to wonder whether the government was being entirely honest with you.

This is the current state of my relationship with social justice.

[Editor's note: This is a guest post by Ozy Frantz. I do not necessarily endorse everything it says, but I do contingently agree with a lot of it. Content note for profanity, social justice stuff, manosphere stuff, and graphic descriptions of sex. I trust that any debate this kicks up will be marked by courtesy and good manners on all sides, in a spirit of sincere collaborative truth-seeking - SA]

I. Introduction

A. What is the purpose of this post?

This is the Anti-Heartiste FAQ. It is meant to rebut some common beliefs within the “manosphere” about how human sexual interaction works. I am primarily arguing with the blogger Heartiste, as he is one of the most famous and influential writers within the manosphere, although I do briefly argue with other writers. I am also going to ignore the macro-level beliefs about how human society works, on the grounds that they are mostly derived from these micro-level observations about human sexuality and fall down when no longer grounded in them.

A1. What does Heartiste believe about human sexual interaction?

Men are primarily attracted to women who are young, thin, and hot; this accounts for approximately 90% of men’s criteria for dating women. The other 10% is femininity, sexual voraciousness, and non-promiscuity. Women have a dual sex drive, often referred to as “alpha fucks, beta bucks.” Women are primarily sexually attracted to “alpha males,” who are assholes, conventionally masculine, and popular among other women. When they are young and hot enough to hope to secure commitment from alphas or when they are ovulating and thus capable of having children, women pursue “alpha fucks.” Beta males are generally middle-class or above and do not have alpha male traits. Women seek betas when they are older or less attractive, or when they aren’t ovulating, in order to secure commitment and extract resources. Ideally, women want to get pregnant by alpha males and make betas take care of the child. There are also omega males, who are undesirable to women for any purpose.

B. I am Heartiste, and I don’t actually want to go to all the bother of reading this whole post, I just want to know what your characteristics are so I can direct ad hominem attacks at you properly.

I am 22 years old. I am 5’9″ and my weight fluctuates between 120 and 126 pounds. I have 32A breasts and a waist-to-hip ratio of .7. Pictures are available here. I have had 30 sexual partners. I am polyamorous, which means I openly and honestly date multiple people at the same time. I have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, social phobia, and generalized anxiety disorder. I have a degree in sociology and gender studies. I am currently a camgirl, which means I take off my clothes and masturbate for money on the Internet. I live with my primary partner Scott; I am also dating Esther, who when asked to describe herself for this essay called herself a ”sad weird fat girl with incredible boobs”.

I am a nonbinary trans person, but I was born with a vagina, a female-typical hormone balance, and as far as I am aware two X chromosomes. I currently possess all of these traits and will probably do so indefinitely. That means I am not a trans woman. I am heading in the totally opposite direction than trans women are. I cannot possibly be transitioning because of my autogynephilia, because if I were an autogynephile I would be like “wow, I fetishize having the body parts I was born with, this is incredibly convenient!” instead of being like “aaaaa! Get them off me!” There has previously been confusion about this, so I am making it as clear as possible.

C. You’re just one of those feminist game deniers who think sex differences don’t exist.

Nope! Actually, I am going to take this FAQ from the POV that game tactics all work exactly as stated by their advocates. What I hope to show is that even if you assume that Heartiste is totally right about his practical advice– if you should neg, qualify, do takeaways, send women ‘gay’ as a response to their text messages, and all the rest– his conclusions about how the dating marketplace works simply do not follow.

In addition, I do actually think that sex differences exist. I think that level of violence, libido, probably certain aspects of sexuality such as getting off on narrative versus getting off on visuals, and probably some stuff with emotions are all inherent, biological gender differences. I am not willing to rule out other differences nor to state that I believe in them.

It is a very boring prediction of feminist theory that the genders behave differently from each other. After all, if you divide children into two random groups and tell half of them to be courageous and half of them to be gentle, one half is probably going to be courageous and the other is going to be gentle. It is tiresome when people (both feminists and antifeminists) pretend that the existence of gender differences proves that these gender differences are not socialized. Over the course of this article, I will highlight legitimate gender differences which I think are probably social in nature rather than biological. Of course, all complex behavior has both social and biological elements: for instance, I will argue that women’s lack of interest in casual sex has both a biological and a social component.

II. Men

A. Beauty

1. Beauty norms have to be inborn on account of it feels like I have no volitional control over my boner. 

First, by the time you have your first boner at puberty, you have already experienced more than a decade of environmental influence. You’ve learned a language, how to walk and use the toilet, fashion, how to maintain a conversation, what interests are approved of in your peer group. Most of those things are now second nature to you. Is it that impossible that you learned a sexuality too?

Second, environmental influence can make things happen that feel like you can’t control them. Music sounds good to you because you’ve learned how to listen to it (just think about your mom saying “that’s just noise!”) but it doesn’t feel learned that it makes you want to get up and boogie. Girls like pink because we’ve associated pink with girls (it was different as few as a hundred years ago), but try to argue with a six-year-old at a toy store. At the extreme end, PTSD is obviously the result of the environment– you need a traumatic event to trigger it– but flashbacks and hyperarousal often feel inevitable and uncontrollable. Indeed, many fetishes are obviously environmental in origin, unless one assumes that genes for fetishes for rubber, stuffed animals, and Catholic schoolgirls lay latent in the genome for tens of thousands of years.

2. But I and my friends all agree who the hottest girls at the bar are.

If I and my friends all went to a bar and started talking about who the hottest girl was, we would probably agree it was a girl with no makeup, a Star Wars T-shirt, and glasses. I suspect this is a sign that friends tend to be similar to each other, not a sign that beauty norms are inborn.

coughcoughtypicalmindfallacycough

3. Are beauty norms a cultural universal?

In China, women bound their feet, crippling them. Love poetry was written about the beauty of the “lotus foot,” which was as small as three inches, and the swaying way a woman walked. (See, for instance, this collection of Chinese erotic poems.) In Mauritania, women are sent to camps where they are force-fed tens of thousands of calories a day in order to become attractively obese. In Renaissance England, women painted their faces white with lead, poisoning them. Oh, and one for the gay men: in ancient Greece small penises were considered heroic and manly and large penises laughable.

It seems to me you have three options here. First, you can agree that beauty norms are to a degree culturally variable, including our own. Second, you can believe that a bunch of people crippled their daughters and wrote love poetry about how beautiful it is just to fuck with Westerners or something. Third, you can say that the Chinese were mistaken for a thousand years about evolution wanting them to get boners for girls with bound feet, and mysteriously 21st-century Americans are the only culture who has figured out the correct evolved sexuality.

2. Oh, so you’re one of those people who thinks that we only believe in beauty norms because the evil patriarchy is brainwashing us, and if we didn’t we’d think that every body is beautiful.

There are actually options between “all ideas of beauty are inborn” and “all ideas of beauty are socially constructed.” For instance, one could say that our ideas of beauty are the product of biology and environment working together. You know, the way every other complex behavior is.

I do think some beauty standards are probably inborn and fairly immutable. Symmetrical faces are not simply preferred in the US and the UK: Chinese and Japanese people prefer symmetrical faces, as do the Hadza hunter-gatherer tribe. (In fact, the Hadza prefer symmetrical faces more strongly than Americans do!) This is some evidence that humans ‘naturally’ prefer symmetrical faces.

Another prominent example is waist-to-hip ratio. Initially, the evidence for WHR as a cross-cultural universal seems pretty slim. Kenyans prefer a .7 WHR, the same as modern Americans. However, Ugandans prefer a .5 WHR, significantly lower than Americans. Malaysians don’t care about waist-to-hip ratio, only caring about BMI, as do the Japanese. Hunter-gatherers seem to not care about waist to hip ratio. However, replications of the latter study suggest that when the hunter-gatherer preference for heavier women is controlled for, waist-to-hip ratio has an independent effect. I personally find the latter study incredibly interesting and think it has a lot of potential to save WHR; however, it has a very small sample size, so take it with all relevant grains of salt. Nevertheless, it provides some suggestion that WHR is culturally invariant. (I would also like to point out that “hunter gatherers like fat women, which confounds tests for WHR and attractiveness designed for thin-preferring Americans” is also a pretty solid point against the Fat Is Universally Hideous hypothesis.)

However, I think most beauty standards are the result of a more complex interaction. (Here is the wild-ass guessing with no empirical backing section.) For instance, men might be attracted to features that are familiar to them, high-status in their culture, or associated with their parents or other people they love. In Song China, women with bound feet are high-status; in modern America, thin women with large breasts are high-status, and thinness indicates other high-status traits such as wealth and free time to attend to one’s health. A similar origin produces wildly different beauty standards. Similarly, men might default to a certain preference– maybe they like brunettes– but this is culturally mutable– if they’re exposed to a lot of sexy blonde women and posters saying Blondes Have More Fun, they’ll start liking blondes. Alternately, the “sexy daughters” hypothesis (a variant of a Heartiste favorite, the “sexy sons” hypothesis): men want their daughters to be beautiful so they can get better mates, so they choose partners who fit the local standard of beauty.

3. Are pretty girls healthier?

Studies do not seem to have found meaningful correlations between rated facial attractiveness and physical health. While the second study has some correlations, they are small and fail to reach significance and are totally hyped by their abstract.

This is very odd, of course, because as I said earlier the evidence points towards symmetrical faces being a cross-cultural beauty standard. There are several possible explanations. Symmetrical faces might indicate health in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, but industrialized countries have improved health. (I believe one common hypothesis is that symmetrical faces show you aren’t infected by parasites.) Maybe humans like symmetry for other reasons, and that generalizes to sexual attraction. Maybe it’s some other cause (sexy daughters hypothesis!).

Alternately, maybe facial symmetry does indicate something interesting about health, but that’s confounded by all the other factors our culture has incorporated into facial attractiveness. This study suggests that current health and facial symmetry are basically uncorrelated, but facial symmetry is correlated with childhood health. Another study argues that facial asymmetry may be related to developmental instability, which is negative. This is interesting but tentative.

4. Does it make evolutionary sense for men to target pretty girls for casual sex?

Let’s think that you’re a man in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Human babies are extremely resource-intensive. It is generally not possible to raise a child by oneself: a woman alone will either realize this and commit infanticide, or risk both herself and her child starving to death. If you are engaging in long-term mating, then you are going to invest resources in the baby. However, if you’re engaging in short-term mating, you’re not. If your child dies, all the effort you put in and risks you took for the the short-term mating strategy are lost. Therefore, men ought to have evolved to be attracted to women with sufficient resources that they could take care of a child: women with doting and wealthy fathers, women with husbands, women who kicked ass so hard at gathering they could feed themselves and a child, women with unique skills at, I don’t know, flintknapping or shamanism or something such that people will give them food. Therefore, in the modern environment, men ought to be into rich or married women and be willing to sacrifice a considerable amount of prettiness for wealth. Only in long-term relationships should they begin to care about prettiness and whatever that indicates, since they can make up for lower resources on the part of the woman. Conversely, women who are engaging in short-term mating ought to be primarily interested in pretty dudes who will pass on good genes to their children.

I am not saying that this is an actually accurate model of how human evolution worked. I am just pointing out that this evolutionary just-so story is exactly as plausible as all of Heartiste’s evolutionary just-so stories and has opposite predictions, and that I feel like the reason that no one is coming up with that model is less related to plausible speculation about evolution and more about “shit, we have to explain why humans are genetically programmed to act the way I do.”

5. Is 95% of what men want in a relationship partner youth, beauty, and thinness?

Man, if that were true why do I keep getting hit on online by dudes who are uncertain about whether my sex is female?

(For the record, I continue to be female-sexed in pretty much every conceivable way. I just felt like I ought to repeat that, because of the amount of confusion in neoreactionary circles about the “what genitals does Ozy have?” point.)

But that is not really excellent evidence! It is possible that most of the dudes who hit on me online are Boner Georg who is an outlier adn should not be counted. (In fact, that is certain.) So let’s look at the studies!

If Heartiste had said that men are more interested in physical appearance, in general, than women are, I would basically have nothing to say here. That seems pretty much correct. However, there is an important difference between “men care about appearance more than women do” and “physical appearance is 95% of men’s criteria in selecting a romantic partner.” The latter is a much stronger claim and not remotely backed up by the evidence.

The most obvious way to find out whether men are 95% interested in physical appearance is to ask them. This study with an extremely large sample size found that men did rank good looks and facial attractiveness as more important than women did. However, across genders, the most important traits were all non-physical: things like intelligence, values, and communication skills.

On the other hand, it seems like asking people to rank their top three traits in a sexual partner is a strategy that will lead to a lot of social desirability bias. Surely if we examine studies that relate to social behavior– speed dating, correlations of attractiveness to how popular someone is among the opposite sex or how liked they are by someone they’re interacting with, experiments that manipulate the attractiveness of a stranger– we will find that the difference is much much larger. Perhaps 95%?

Oh, the sex differences are actually smaller in studies that examine social behavior. That’s awkward.

In fact, this unpaywalled study which examines speed-dating finds that there is basically no gender difference between men and women in how much physical attractiveness affects saying ‘yes’ to someone in speed-dating.

I believe the correct response here is “<3Science<3 has once again dropped to its knees and slobbered the knob of Ozy, vindicating the Ozyan observation that physical appearance is not ninety-five percent of what men care about, you dumb fuck.“

Interestingly, gender equality seems to make the gender differences in self-reported desire for a physically attractive partner stay the same, while it makes gender differences in self-reported desire for a partner with a particular personality go down. Which suggests that… men are biologically programmed to claim to be into hot women and not actually be? Or something? Very puzzling.

Again, I am not saying there is no difference between how much men prioritize physical appearance and how much women prioritize physical appearance! There clearly seems to be a difference. What I am saying is that it is not true that physical appearance is 95% of what men care about and 5% of what women care about. That is probably true of Heartiste, but that is not true of all men. I would like to thank Heartiste for making extreme claims and thus making my debunking of them easier.

B. Thinness

1. Aren’t all men in all cultures into thin women?

In addition to Mauritania and hunter gatherers, discussed above, I would like to discuss classical art. Heartiste has said that Rubens is a fatty-fucker so we’re not allowed to use him as an example. Fortunately, a feminist blogger has created a helpful “if classic works of art were photoshopped to look like modern magazine stars” set of pictures, from throughout European art history, without a Rubens in sight.

Now, to be clear, these women are mostly overweight or the thin end of obese. (The BMI Project has helpful examples of what overweight and obese women look like; most people think obese looks significantly fatter than it actually does.) They are not the sort of person that one associates with “fat woman.” However, Heartiste has been more than willing to call Lena Dunham, who is about the same size as those women, “a frumpy, dumpy, plumpy formless flesh entity”. In addition, he tends to use phrases like “the distended porcine holes of these beached whales” to talk about overweight women. So at the very least we have cultures that are really into naked women who look significantly fatter than Heartiste’s boner prefers.

2. Okay, maybe not cross-culturally, but in our culture aren’t all men most attracted to thin women?

Meet April Flores.

April Flores has been in 35 porn films. (Also she is cute as a button, but that is neither here nor there.) You can, if you wish, buy a plastic version of April Flores’s vagina, stomach, and thighs. This means, for those of us at home, that both the “into extremely fat ladies” market and the “into creepily disembodied female body parts” market are large enough, and overlap enough, that it is worth it to porn companies to create a toy directly aimed at it. Or it could be because of the noted political correctness of the industry that brought us Assault That Asian Ass IV.

3. But the only people who are into April Flores are chubby chaser omega dweebs.

So? They still exist.

I suppose you could steelman this argument into “omega dweebs are so insecure they even jerk off to fat women they’re not attracted to.” However, there seem to be many other omega dweebs who are perfectly capable of jerking off to, say, skinny anime girls with breasts the size of their heads (indeed, this is a proverbial omega dweeb thing to do). In addition, the behavior of being so insecure you jerk off to people you’re not attracted to seems quite ludicrous and I would like some evidence that that actually happens ever.

I argue in part IIIA1 that female serial killer chasing is an outlier that doesn’t show anything about female sexuality as a whole. One could make a similar argument about male chubby chasers. However, I notice that BBWs are a healthy section of the porn market, while serial-killer-themed porn-for-ladies has made less of an inroad than porn featuring men with dog dicks.

4. Isn’t being into really thin girls evolutionarily selected for?

In women, being underweight (i.e. having a BMI of less than 18.5) may cause irregular periods, lack of periods, difficulty getting pregnant, and infertility. Heartiste’s range of optimally attractive female BMI is 17.5-21, which includes some underweight women. He considers BMI of 21-24, which is on the large end of perfectly fertile, to be equally attractive to BMI of 16.6-17.5, which consists of women at serious risk of reduced fertility or infertility. This seems an unlikely trait to evolve.

It is true that being overweight or obese is also correlated with infertility. However, one must remember that for most of human history starving to death is more of a concern than death by obesity. Therefore, if anything, it seems that evolution would favor overweight women rather than underweight women– the infertility risk is outweighed by her not starving to death while breastfeeding your child.

D. Sluttiness

1. Are sluts more likely to divorce you?

Scott argues no. Several reactionaries, such as Free Northerner, have presented other charts which purport to show that it is. My position is the centrist “holy shit this data is confounded all to hell.”

Virgins and women with one partner have traditional religious values (being a virgin at marriage is a much more costly signal that you genuinely have traditional values than, say, signing an abstinence pledge or being in a red state). Women with 20+ partners, conversely, probably have libertine values and don’t think divorce is immoral. Women who lost their virginity under age 14 are usually what is more properly referred to as “rape survivors,” and it is not surprising if that’s linked with poor mental health and thus marital instability. Women with more premarital partners are typically older at first marriage, which is linked to stability; similarly, since you typically have sex before or when you get married, women who lost their virginity at a later date are more likely to get married older. I do not have access to the data set, but I predict that if you control for age at first marriage and traditional/libertine values, the predictive value of sluttiness will be basically zero.

In addition, if you are going to be married to someone, you have access to much better information about whether she’d make a good romantic partner for you. You have access to information about her character across a wide variety of situations: you can find out whether she’s kind, generous, loyal, honest. If you are interested in minimizing your risk of divorce, you can see how stable and long-lasting her friendships are, how reluctant she is to leave a relationship, whether she condemns divorce or supports it, and (perhaps more crucially) how often her words about morality line up with her actions. It is trivial to lie about your number of sexual partners. It is not trivial to lie about your entire character.

2. Is it easy to identify a slut?

“It’s Easy to Identify A Slut” is the title of one of Heartiste’s most popular posts. He says that it reveals the secret slut tells that prove that no woman can hide how many people she’s had sex with.

Unfortunately, it mostly seems like advice for identifying a woman who is telegraphing her high sociosexuality as hard as she can. I am not remotely interested in hiding that I’ve had lots of sex partners, but if I were, here is a brief list of things I would not do: go commando; wear cleavage-bearing tops; seem really really good at sex; show off my sex toy and porn collection; talk about sex constantly; implore my partners for kinky sex; brag about how much sex I’ve had (!); have so many sex partners I’m never single (!!); make out with men in bars (!!!); let men snort coke off my ass (!!!!)

I mean, Jesus, Heartiste, what does she have to do to not be trying to hide that she’s a slut, wear a shirt that says “MY BOYFRIEND SAID I NEEDED TO BE MORE AFFECTIONATE, SO NOW I HAVE TWO”?

3. Is it true that some humans are r-selected, which means they’re promiscuous and want to have lots of children, and some humans are k-selected, which means they invest in a few children?

No.

For one thing, r/k selection theory was shown to be a vast oversimplification of life-history evolution forty years ago. For another thing, it applies on a species level, not on an individual level. Humans as a species are absurdly k-selected. How many species can you think of that have young that are totally helpless for their first decade of life? r/k selection theory would argue that we wouldn’t have casual sex, because humans are not remotely r-selected on any conceivable level! Clearly, this is not the case, which ought to make one wonder how applicable this is to human beings anyway.

4. Is it a good idea to hate sluts?

OK, let’s say that marrying a slut increases your likelihood of getting divorced. As much as I hate to point this out, Heartiste, you don’t actually want to get married. You want to have lots of casual sex. And as much as you claim that you think sluts are valuable as good-time girls and virgins are valuable as women to marry and they are both equal, you don’t have any tag on your blog called “Virgins” where you recommend “a stone bold [virgin]… should be shunned by everyone, including the media, to live out her diseased days alone and isolated from normal human contact… what worse fate for the BPD attention whoring sociopathic [virgin] than being utterly ignored?” As far as I can tell, the only result of hating sluts for Heartiste is that he gets to spend a lot of time having sex with women he finds disgusting and gross, which seems like a pretty depressing life choice to me.

E. Femininity

1. Are men more interested in women with feminine personalities than women with masculine personalities?

Depends on the man.

I am going to say “feminine women” and “masculine women” from now on, because “women with feminine personalities” is hard to type. However, I would like to clarify that I am not talking about wearing lipstick or about having feminine facial features, but about possessing gender-congruent personality traits, such as being gentle, tactful, and a lover of children for women and being ambitious, competitive, and individualistic for men.

This study finds that men tend to be attracted to feminine women for romance and androgynous women platonically. That seems pretty plausibly pro-Heartiste.

However, men who believe in traditional gender roles tend to be more attracted to feminine women, while men who don’t tend to not care whether their partner is feminine or not. In this study, men who believe in traditional gender roles prefer feminine partners, while men who prefer either androgynous or feminine partners. Interestingly, this study finds that men who aren’t very masculine prefer women who aren’t very feminine, while masculine men don’t care about femininity one way or the other, suggesting the relevant variable is not masculinity as a personality trait but belief in traditional gender roles. Together, these studies suggest that the cause is not inherent biology: it’s the fact that people who support traditional gender roles tend to be into traditional gender roles in their personal life too.

2. Except that those studies don’t show that men prefer androgynous women: in fact, guys are pretty much okay with feminine women regardless. Maybe men evolved to like feminine women and not believing in traditional gender roles socializes people to like androgynous women, or at least to say that on surveys. 

Except look at women’s preferences in those studies: women consistently don’t like masculine men either. In fact, even traditional women don’t really like masculine men. I think what we’re seeing here is an interaction: traditional men may favor feminine women and, in addition, people with masculine personalities, as defined by the Bem Sex Role Inventory, are assholes and no one wants to put up with them. I mean, do you want to date someone described as aggressive, dominant, and a “strong personality” and as not understanding, sensitive to others’ needs, and compassionate? I don’t. They would probably make me cry all the time, it would be awful.

III. Women

This is an incredibly cheap shot and I feel sort of guilty about putting it in, so: I would like to point out that Heartiste seems to believe some women don’t have leg hair (question 11) and that breasts come in DD and perky without wearing a bra (questions 4 and 5). In addition, he seems to be under the impression that real skinny women carry a Photoshop filter in front of them at all times. Seriously, as someone who can see that kind of body every time I look in the mirror, the “spindly, weirdly proportioned girl” is what actual thin women actually look like. I would propose that Heartiste has perhaps never seen a non-Photoshopped naked thin woman, but perhaps the more charitable explanation is that whenever Heartiste has seen a thin woman naked he has had a Photoshop filter in the form of an erection. (This is not charitable to Heartiste. It is charitable to male virgins, most of whom are totally aware that DD breasts sag.)

So, you know, just be aware you’re taking advice about women from someone who thinks some women don’t have leg hair.

A. Jerks

1. Do women like serial killers?

The Wikipedia list of serial killers lists about 100 serial killers in the United States; let’s double it and say 200 just to bias it towards Heartiste. Let us assume that about one in every two thousand women is interested in serial killers. That means that there are 750 women interested in serial killers for every serial killer. I don’t know about you, but I feel like having 750 women interested in you would put you in a pretty good sexual marketplace position. I also feel like one in two thousand is also a fair estimate of the prevalence of, say, diaper fetishism. Since I do not say that diaper fetishists prove any deep truths about human sexuality, I can also argue that serial killer fetishism doesn’t.

It would be interesting if only women decided to date murderers. However, women are also much less likely than men to commit high-profile murders. The last high-profile female murderer I’m aware of– Casey Anthony– was deluged with marriage proposals from men.

2. What about Genghis Khan?

The most genetically successful man in history is Genghis Khan (actually his grandfather a few generations back). Heartiste has argued in the past that this is proof that women are attracted to violent men. However, I feel like Genghis Khan’s reproductive success is more than adequately explained by the fact that for several hundred years a woman whom a relative of Genghis Khan wished to fuck had a choice between fucking him or being dead. I don’t know about you, but I would fuck a lot of people I wasn’t attracted to if the other option was death.

3. What about women in abusive relationships?

It is true that women are more likely to be hit by their partners, more likely to be raped, more likely to be sent to the hospital due to domestic abuse, and more likely to be murdered. However, a statistically indistinguishable number of men and women– approximately 50%– are victims of emotional abuse in the United States.

That isn’t “women like jerks.” That is “people end up in abusive relationships.” Male abusers are more likely to be violent– but men are more violent in every sort of relationship, from high schools (boys get in fights, girls pull some Mean Girls shit) to crimes (men are far more likely to commit violent crimes). If desiring abuse is a fact about sexuality, it is a fact about everyone’s sexuality.

3a. Maybe men stay in abusive relationships or try to date serial killers because they’re desperate omegas, and women do it because they find that sort of thing attractive.

If women were into murderers and men weren’t, you would take that as evidence that there was some interesting difference going on there. (As you should.) If women and men are both into murderers, then you cannot just decide that there is a gender difference anyway– that men are into murderers because they are so desperate they can’t get anyone else, and women are into murderers because it taps into their deep-seated evolutionary desires. At least, you can’t without solid evidence which Heartiste has yet to actually present: for instance, a study of serial killer groupies which shows that male serial killer groupies are typically less sexually successful than female serial killer groupies. For further elaboration, please see conservation of expected evidence.

3b. Do people stay in abusive relationships because they are attracted to abusers?

No. Let us consider this from two angles: first, let us assume that it is possible to manipulate people. Think about how a really good salesperson can get you to buy something you don’t want. Second, let us assume that abusers are sensible people who don’t want to go through all the bother of finding a new partner every time someone says “holy shit, you just called me a whore, GTFO.”

As a reasonable abuser, you want to make sure your partner will stay. What do you do? Well, you’re charming, kind, and romantic at first, so they get really invested in the relationship. You target people who are vulnerable to begin with, such as a disabled person or an undocumented immigrant or someone without very many friends. You try to make your partner dependent on you (for money, transportation, etc.) so they can’t leave. Rats will keep pressing a button that gives them intermittent rewards (this is the psychology behind gambling and World of Warcraft); you take a similar tack towards giving your partner love and affection. You fuck with their idea of what is normal– if you can convince them that you treat them the way anyone would treat them, or the way they deserve to be treated, or better than they deserve, they won’t leave. You isolate them, both so they don’t have anyone to point out that you’re treating them like shit and so they don’t have anyone to rescue them. You appear sad and broken, so they feel compassion for you and want to keep taking care of you. If worst comes to worst, you threaten to kill them or yourself if you break up with them.

Therefore, staying with an abuser does not necessarily mean you want to be abused. Going back to an abuser does not necessarily mean you want to be abused. It means the abuser is good at abusing people.

Here is a list of reasons people stay in abusive relationships. You will notice “they turn me on” is not on there.

3b. Okay, but some people end up in abusive relationships again and again.

In fact, abuse survivors are a really excellent group to target for our rational abuser! A lot of the traits that make someone a good target for being abused remain the same: if someone is disabled, they are probably going to stay disabled even after they break up with their abuser. Abuse survivors themselves are often pretty vulnerable. Abusers are often very charming and high-status, so when the abuse survivor is like “that person abused me,” a lot of people will go “but she is so nice! Clearly you are psycho and making it up,” which means they lose their entire social group. And if you decide to abuse an abuse survivor, someone else has already isolated them and fucked with their idea of what is normal, so you have to do a lot less work. They practically come pre-abused!

For some people– usually people who have been abused, but not always– abuse is normalized. That means that they believe that all relationships are abusive. This makes them excellent targets for abusers. After all, if you believe the abuse is normal, you are not going to do silly things like “object” or “leave.” In fact, if someone is not abusing them, they may wonder about whether he really loves them. This is very sad, but it is not the same thing as wanting to be abused. If you think all food tastes like Ensure, you are probably not going to go seek out food that doesn’t taste like Ensure. That does not mean you have an all-abiding passion for Ensure.

4. What about women with rape fantasies?

I like thinking about zombies (as a subset of my fondness for thinking about apocalypses). I have a well-thumbed copy of the Zombie Survival Guide. I spend a lot of time working on zombie plans and have several mutually contradictory versions thereof. I played in my school’s game of Zombies every year for three years and won twice.

If I actually had to fight zombies and, by some bizarre chance, managed to not get eaten, I would probably end up with a massive case of PTSD. Guns make a loud noise that makes me cry so I definitely do not want to be a gunslinging zombie fighter. And on a very crucial level, I do not actually want my entire family to be eaten by the living dead. If you decided to feed my entire family to the living dead, I would be really upset.

The same thing is true of my rape fantasies. It is totally possible to be aroused by the idea of being raped without actually having the slightest interest in being raped in the real world, in the same way that it is possible to enjoy thinking about zombie plans without the slightest interest in the destruction of civilization, possible to love first-person shooters without wanting to be a mass murderer, and possible to go to Ren Faires every weekend while appreciating the benefits of modern sanitation. In fantasies, nothing permanently bad happens, you can be as psychologically unrealistic as you like, and everything is ultimately under your control.

Seriously, what kind of incredibly boring person only fantasizes about things they actually want to do?

4a. What if they want to be raped?

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that there exist women who genuinely desire to be raped, not in the sense that I want the zombie apocalypse, but in the sense that I want ice cream, backrubs, and lots of notes on Tumblr. That still does not mean it is okay to rape them.

Fifty percent of women who have been sexually assaulted have PTSD, compared to 7.8% in the general population. 94% of women who have been sexually assaulted have PTSD symptoms in the weeks after the sexual assault. This is, incidentally, a higher rate of PTSD than combat soldiers. So the best-case scenario is orgasms, and the worst-case scenario is serious trauma to the point of PTSD.

The next question is: how are you identifying them? If you ask “hey, do you enjoy being raped?” that is fine. But presumably a lot of women who genuinely want to be raped would respond with “no” on account of talking about it ahead of time would make it too consensual. So you have to come up with some strategy for identifying those women. How confident are you that your strategy doesn’t have any false positives? How are you getting feedback on how accurate it is? Remember that women who have been sexually assaulted are probably not going to go up to you and say “hey, you sexually assaulted me.” If you have a false positive, you’re probably not going to know. If it’s something like “she’s wet”… well, remember that vaginas lubricate during nonconsensual sex to prevent tissue damage, and that genitals often act without the consent of their owners. (Remember when you were fourteen and got an erection in math class?)

4b. What about Fifty Shades of Grey?

There are two points here. First, a lot of manospherians are talking about BDSM. Many women are interested in being tied up, or flogged, or called a slut during sex. (Or, to be sure, tying people up, flogging people, or calling people sluts.) This does not mean that they want to be tied up nonconsensually, in the same way that eating chocolate cake does not mean you want to be forcefed cake, or wanting to go to the movies does not mean you want to be kidnapped and stashed at a movie threater. Consent is actually pretty important.

Second, Fifty Shades of Grey actually does depict a lot of nonconsensual sex and abusive behavior. (See Cliff Pervocracy’s excellent review here.) I think this is coming back to the same point that fantasizing about something doesn’t mean you actually want to do it. For instance, Ana is pretty freaked out by Christian stalking her and buying her expensive presents she doesn’t want. However, we the readers know that she is eventually going to be fine with it, that she actually loves him, and that they are going to get together at the end of the book. And it’s pretty romantic to imagine that someone loves you so much that they will overcome any obstacle to show their devotion, even obstacles like “I am freaked out and actually kind of scared by how much you love me.” However, in the real world, there is no guarantee that you are going to be passionately in love with the person stalking you. In fact, in the real world, the opposite of that is usually true.

5. If women don’t like assholes, how come assholes have more sexual partners?

Disagreeable and high-dark-triad men have more sexual partners than agreeable and low-dark-triad men. I used to answer this conclusion with “okay, maybe psychopaths rape people and are more likely to cheat, and people break up with disagreeable and high-dark-triad people thus letting them have more relationships.” But I have recently discovered a far better explanation, namely, that sluts are evil.

I could cite a bunch of studies here, but I really think the Wikipedia page speaks for itself: “Individuals who are sociosexually unrestricted [i.e. sluts] tend to score higher on openness to experience, and be more extraverted, less agreeable, lower on honesty-humility, more erotophilic, more impulsive, more likely to take risks, and more likely to have an avoidant attachment style. Conversely, restricted individuals tend to score lower on openness to experience, and be more introverted, more agreeable, more honest and humble, more erotophobic, less impulsive, less likely to take risks and more securely attached.[12] Individuals who score high on the Dark Triad traits (i.e. narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) tend to have an unrestricted sociosexual orientation. Higher masculinity [15] and eveningness [16] in women is related to unrestricted sociosexuality. High self-monitoring is also associated with unrestricted sociosexuality, regardless of gender or sexual orientation.[17]“

Whew.

It is important to note that only a third of questions about sociosexuality in the most commonly used inventory are about number of sexual partners. It’s possible to have a very unrestricted sociosexuality and be a virgin. That is, this is not primarily measuring how attractive other people find you, it is measuring how much you want casual sex and how motivated you are to have casual sex.

People who are more motivated by casual sex tend to have more casual sex, for a couple of reasons. If you really don’t want casual sex, you’re probably going to turn it down. If you really want casual sex, you’re probably going to put a lot of effort into getting it and lower your standards of sexual partner. And if the people who are most desirous of casual sex are also the most likely to be massive assholes, we’ll see that massive assholes tend to have the most sexual partners. This is not because nice people are unattractive, it’s because nice people, in general, don’t want casual sex.

6. But women don’t like it when you worship them.

Heartiste sometimes describes beta males as “putting the pussy on a pedestal.” They pretend to agree with women even when they don’t; they suck up; they think that a woman is a goddess angel perfection who doesn’t have a single flaw. I agree! This is bad and deeply unattractive behavior. Feminists also do not want you to put the pussy on a pedestal. We have amassed a considerable amount of evidence that putting the pussy on a pedestal leads to gender inequality, the oppression of women, and other things feminists don’t like. I am glad to find some points of agreement here.

However, your two options are not being an asshole or putting her on the pedestal. There is a third option, namely, being a normal fucking human being. Interact with women you want to fuck in basically the same way that you interact with men, or with women you don’t want to fuck. (Possibly with more flirting.) To a certain extent, when you look at what Heartiste actually recommends, he’s recommending this.

It seems possible to me that there are a lot of guys to whom being a normal fucking human being to women feels like being an asshole– they have internalized “you should never disagree with her and do whatever she says and buy her tons of things” to the extent that not doing so feels like being a jerk. In that case, “be more of a jerk” is decent advice. However, you get into the all debates are bravery debates problem here. For every guy who needs to be told to be more of a jerk, there’s another guy who is already an asshole to attractive women and tone it down a notch. Instead of describing which direction to go in, you should describe the target, i.e., “normal fucking human being.”

B. Game.

1. Okay, so maybe women don’t like jerks. But game still gets at universal female sexuality, right?

Not necessarily! Look at the group of women whom PUAs target. By his own admission, Heartiste is primarily interested in twentysomething, conventionally attractive, thin, feminine women, and has very little experience hitting on other ones. But twentysomething, conventionally attractive, thin, feminine women are not a random selection of women. They are probably far more similar to each other than two randomly selected women would be. This is totally fine when you’re talking about getting laid: after all, if you want to have sex with twentysomething, conventionally attractive, thin, feminine women, there is no reason to collect data about fat, butch fortysomethings. However, when you’re making generalizations about women in general– and particularly if you’re making prescriptions about society– it is useful to note the limitations of the data collection.

Game is mostly divided into day game (hitting on female strangers on streets, in grocery stores, in libraries, etc.) and night game (hitting on female strangers in nightclubs, in bars, etc.) The data is confounded two different ways here. First, introverts exist. The usual response of the introvert to a random stranger coming up to them and talking is “maybe if I stand perfectly still they won’t eat me.” Another huge segment of the female population that game may or may not apply to. Second, women who dislike the thing you’re doing will probably notice what you’re doing and disengage fairly quickly. Even the best PUA gets blown out. Roosh V agrees with the same basic concept, calling it a fuck funnel. The women who blow you out or wander away five minutes into the conversation are disproportionately going to be women who are not attracted to the kind of game you’re running.

As far as I know, there is only one study that examines pickup artists’ techniques empirically. A woman’s tendency to find PUA strategies attractive was correlated with her score on the ambivalent sexism inventory. Women who have high levels of hostile sexism– who tend to agree with statements like “Women seek to gain power by getting control over men” and “Many women are actually seeking special favors, such as hiring policies that favor them over men, under the guise of asking for “equality.”– were attracted to PUA techniques if they were highly sociosexual (i.e. sluts). In addition, women who had high levels of benevolent sexism– who agreed with statements like “Many women have a quality of purity that few men possess.” and “A good woman should be set on a pedestal by her man.”– find PUA techniques attractive.

Let’s pause for a moment: “benevolent sexism” is usually interpreted by non-academic-feminists as “sexism that helps women out.” That is not what academic feminists mean when they use the term. “Benevolent sexism” means “the inaccurate belief that women are saintly, pure angels who can do no wrong and should be treated with special consideration by men.” If you replace “benevolent sexism” with “putting the pussy on the pedestal,” that is pretty much what it means. This idea hurts women a lot: to pick an example everyone except Heartiste thinks is bad, a common argument against women’s suffrage was that women were too pure, delicate, and refined to vote. I realize that “benevolent sexism” looks like it means “sexism that helps women out.” I did not name it and I usually use different words for the concept because of exactly this confusion. But this study uses the phrase “benevolent sexism” so now I have to write the long clarifying bit.

Let’s do this in all caps. BENEVOLENT SEXISM MEANS PUTTING THE PUSSY ON THE PEDESTAL, IT DOES NOT MEAN FAVORING WOMEN FOR JOBS OR SOMETHING. Okay.

Women who have high levels of benevolent sexism are women who believe strongly in traditional gender roles. They tend to have more gender-traditional desires in general: for instance, this study suggests that women with high levels of benevolent sexism are more likely to want a gender-conforming partner. Therefore, they’re attracted to men who perform traditional masculinity.

Of course, the causation could go either way here– perhaps benevolently sexist women believe in traditional gender roles because they like traditionally masculine men, or perhaps they like traditionally masculine men because they believe in firm gender roles. Nevertheless, what this suggests is that PUA teaches men to cater to a certain kind of woman by performing the kind of masculinity she finds attractive. This would increase men’s sexual success– after all, there are a lot of benevolently sexist women out there– but it does not necessarily mean that all women are attracted to the trait. Being more attractive to a small group of women, and filtering out the other women quickly, is a good route to sexual success.

And, yes, this does mean that not putting the pussy on the pedestal attracts women who think the pussy should be put on a pedestal. The world is amazing.

2. “Perform traditional masculinity” is a little vague. Why don’t you look at some specific game techniques?

Let us look at the most famous kind of game, the humble neg. Yes, I know negs aren’t all of game, but they’re pretty much the only game technique most feminists have heard of, so I’m using it as an example.  I think, as a feminist, I am supposed to say negs are horrible, evil, and misogynistic, but Scott compared my last haircut to Joffrey Baratheon, so I have literally 0 legs to stand on here. So let’s talk about why women might like negs.

The neg was originally developed by Mystery for use in nightclubs. Let me give you an idea of what nightclubs are like.

Let’s say you’re going to a mall which has a miniature golf rink. You like miniature golf well enough– it’s not your favorite thing to do ever, but you’ve had fun with it before and you’re open to playing some again. You’re out shopping, buying yourself some ties or whatever, and a strange man comes up to you and says, “hey, do you want to play miniature golf?” You think to yourself, “well, that’s kind of weird, and I’m not really feeling it,” then say, “no.” As you’re walking to the next store, another stranger comes up to you and says “do you want to play miniature golf with me?” You’re kind of weirded out, but you say “no, thanks,” to which he responds “Asshole. Like I wanted to play with you anyway.” You are barely two steps away when someone comes up to you and is like “do you want to play miniature golf with me?” Getting really irritated at this point, you say, “no!”

Then imagine another man comes up to you. You say, “I do not want to play miniature golf with you!” He says, “actually, you don’t look like the kind of person I want to play miniature golf with.” You are so relieved that finally someone doesn’t just want to play miniature golf with you that you talk to him. He turns out to be pretty cool, and if you happen to be in the part of the mall with miniature golf in it you might even decide to play a few rounds.

The woman’s hypothesis, when a strange man approaches her in a nightclub (night game) or on the street (day game), is that he is solely involved in this conversation because he wants to have sex with her. Even if she likes sex, that gets really annoying after a while. Negs convey that you are not interested in having sex with her, so she is more likely to be interested in the conversation. Negs are not an inherent trait of women; they are a response to a social condition.

The other thing that negs do is described by a post of Scott’s on this very blog. If you say to a girl “You know why you guys suck? Because you’ve been staring at me for fifteen minutes and haven’t said hi. Weird, and a little creepy,” you are countersignalling. The fact that you came over subcommunicates that you actually like that you are looking at them– in fact, you find it flattering. So you are saying, “actually, we are going to get along so well that I don’t have to be nice to you, because you already know that I like you.” Pulling off teasing early in a relationship signals social adroitness, which is attractive. And this sort of teasing early in a relationship establishes emotional intimacy: because it’s usually reserved for closer relationships, it gives the illusion that the relationship is much closer than it actually is. (Revelations of personal trauma are also good for this.)

Finally, there is a category of negs that no reasonable human being would interpret as an insult. Seriously, Heartiste, love, “You seem really modest. Modesty is a lost art. It’s not a bad thing… usually. Not everyone feels a need to be an exhibitionist” is a neg? Really? I have social phobia and that wouldn’t make me feel insecure. I would feel complimented!

In short, negging women probably makes them more attracted to you, and this is totally explainable without recourse to “because it lowers her self-esteem and women like that because they are crazy mutant aliens.” I am not sure why, with a bunch of reasonable and ethical explanations available, you have decided to go with the one that makes you look like a Sith Lord.

3. I don’t believe it, I think that you should give some more examples of how game works.

Let’s try a takeaway. The proposed explanation is that takeaways make women more attracted to you because it makes her feel low-status and want to compete for her attention. On the other hand, it could be that takeaway is using a very common concept in social psychology, that of scarcity. It’s the same psychology that applies to sales in stores: if this is only available for a limited time, you have to get it NOW. Black Friday does not work because people are insecure about how much Black Friday likes them.

I mean, you can have the explanation where women are crazy mutant aliens and you are Chaotic Evil, or the “women continue to obey common principles of social psychology even when they’re flirting with someone.” Up to you, really.

And, yes, the scarcity effect also works on men. Why do you think generations of mothers encouraged their daughters to play hard to get?

4. I have a good job, why don’t women want to date me?

To quote from a recent Heartiste post:

In a way they exhibit some of the same qualities of those professions—ego, arrogance, and unlimited amounts of cash. In San Francisco, said Violet, “There were a lot of men to date with disposable income who wanted to take women out. It’s just, it was so boring,” she said. “My dating life went from dating artists and writers and going on cheap but exciting dates, to men who thought the ability to buy someone an expensive meal made them interesting.”

Heartiste interprets this as Violet believing that “a cheap date with a man who has that ineffable alpha attitude is far more intoxicating… than is an expensive date with a beta male who plays by the traditional courtship rules.” This is really interesting, because over the course of the article exactly one group of people is described as arrogant, egotistical assholes, the kind of person Heartiste thinks women want to date. That group is the beta males.

This is clearly not “I’m not attracted to him so he’s a jerk.” There are specific details here. The men Heartiste considers beta males talk endlessly about their jobs, show little interest in the person they’re sharing the table with, and assign reading lists before the first date.

It is almost as if when Heartiste complains about women liking alpha assholes, he’s not talking about women liking assholes at all. He is complaining that women prefer charming, poor people with interesting jobs to charmless, rich jerks.

We see this in other places in Heartiste’s writing as well. Heartiste occasionally talks about alpha gifts and beta gifts, in which he points out that girls treasure a recording of a song written for them more than they treasure an expensive diamond bracelet. No fucking shit. You can give a diamond bracelet to literally any girl and it requires nothing other than the ability to fork over cash. However, if you wrote a song for her, it shows you are putting in time and effort and thinking about her when she’s not there (and that you are musically talented, which is sexy). However, for some reason, in Heartisteland, the former is Beta and therefore Nice and the latter is Alpha and therefore Jerkboy.

This is actually pretty common across the manosphere. My favorite examples come from Dalrock’s comment section. For example: “Does [the sexual arousal detecting bra] detect for (and open for) a male prospective partner having one or more of tattoos, needletracks, violent criminal convictions, long hair (preferably unclean), STDs, abandoned bastard progeny, motorcycle ownership, constant use of profanity, and lacks of STEM degrees or current fulltime employment?” I will accept “needletracks,” “abandoned bastard progeny,” and “violent criminal convictions” as being signs of a person you should not date. However, there are lots of people who are emotionally supportive, romantically compatible, and all-around excellent boyfriends who also happen to have long hair, tattoos, and a motorcycle. In fact, I suspect that motorcycle ownership and boyfriend quality are basically uncorrelated traits! This is not talking about women chasing jerks, it is talking about women dating men who have traits coded lower-class and alternative (and, in the case of the last, explicitly being lower-class).

In short, the manosphere needs to stop complaining that women are not golddiggers. I am very sorry that someone lied to you and told you that women are golddiggers. They are not, and it is generally considered to be a good thing to judge potential romantic partners on their personalities and romantic compatibility with you rather than their wallets. And it is generally considered bad behavior to put serial killers and poor people in the same category.

C. Do women have a rationalization hamster which makes them justify their terrible decisions in self-aggrandizing ways?

Yes.

C1. I wasn’t expecting that.

Men also have a rationalization hamster. Everyone has a rationalization hamster. People rationalize. This is not a unique trait to women and proof of their inherent evil, it is a basic fact about humans. If you think you don’t rationalize, it is probably good evidence that you rationalize so well that you don’t notice. Although I disagree with the modular model of human psychology that he espouses, Robert Kurzban’s Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite sums up a lot of the research about rationalization in a readable manner.

C2. But women rationalize more than men about sex.

Probably true! When women are asked their number of sexual partners, it is about half of men’s. When women are hooked up to lie detectors and asked their number of sexual partners, it is about the same as men’s.

However, it’s important to note that in our culture there’s still a lot of stigma against being promiscuous. This might not show that women are more prone to rationalizing in general than men are; it simply shows that women pay a higher price for being honest about their sexuality. (Which is a prediction of feminist theory, by the way.) Men may be more likely to rationalize about something that is more threatening to them, even if it is something about sex, such as whether they’ve been attracted to men in the past.

–yes, this study shows that pretty much all self-report data about sexuality is totally useless. I have used it anyway in this FAQ because it is all I have. However, I would like to encourage people to remember that women are lying fuckers about sexuality and men may or may not be lying fuckers about sexuality and that everything may be indicating not so much women’s actual behavior as what is most high-status. Also, we should clearly replicate every self-report study of sexuality with everyone hooked up to lie detectors.

C3. Does that mean that we shouldn’t listen to women about their sexual preferences and instead look at what they do?

Sort of.

You can certainly look at the data and go “goodness, a lot of women tend to stay in relationships where they are hit.” This doesn’t mean that you should go out and hit women. As unreliable as self-report data is, it is still our best source of information about why people do what they do and what it feels like to experience something. And the data about relationships where women get hit suggests, as I outlined above, that the reason that women stay in abusive relationships is that abusers are rational people who try really hard to make them leave. (It also doesn’t mean that hitting your partner makes your relationship longer. Most women do eventually leave their abusive partners, after all. “Longer than would be naively expected” is not the same thing as “longer than baseline.”) What people do gives you a correlation, but it doesn’t give you an explanation. To get an explanation, you need experiments or self-report data, as flawed as it is. And it is unfortunately impossible to randomly assign women to the Getting Hit or Not Getting Hit condition of a randomized controlled trial, so self-report it is.

D. It is terribly unfair when women have sex with alpha males in their prime and then expect to get married to me when other men had them younger, hotter, tighter, for free.

OK, y’all are really happy about the whole supply-demand model of sexuality, where men exchange resources for pussy and an increase in the supply of pussy lowers the number of resources required to pay for the pussy. The thing you are complaining about is called price discrimination and is a perfectly ordinary part of economic life. Do you complain about how unfair it is when restaurants have discounts for the elderly? Do you mutter darkly when stores stock the expensive food at eye-level so a careless person will pick it up? Do you get angry about bulk discounts? If you are willing to pay a higher price for pussy, then the producer of pussy is perfectly within her rights to attempt to capture the surplus. (If you aren’t willing to pay the higher price, then I am not sure what the harm to you is.)

Your proposed solution is that we implement a pussy price floor. Most economists think that price floors are really bad because they distort the natural functioning of the market. When there’s a price floor below the market equilibrium, the demand for the product (pussy) lowers while the supply increases, and a lot of transactions that would benefit both parties don’t happen. To translate into sexual market terms: everyone gets laid less, a lot of sad women wander around going “please marry me! Please! I am desperate to be married!”, and a lot of dudes do that Men Going Their Own Way thing. …Or, in fact, the exact consequences you guys predicted for not having a price floor. Have you taken intro economics?

Or– and I really hate doing this, because I feel like it’s not in keeping with the spirit of the game– one might point out that marriages are in fact different from prostitution in a few eensy-weensy tiny details. For instance, sometimes men want to date people they’re having casual sex with. (If you ask me, way too often.) You would think that since he was getting the sex for free, he would not want to date her and pay more for it! It is like paying an extra fifty thousand dollars for your car out of the goodness of your heart!

However, one generally gets things from relationships other than sex and resources, such as emotional support, long conversations into the night, spending time with a person you like, affection, the warmth of knowing someone loves you, and so on. It is perfectly possible that most of the time someone has casual sex with someone else, it is because they enjoy having sex with that person but that person has a really obnoxious sense of humor, doesn’t share any common interests with them, talks way too much, or is just romantically unattractive for ineffable chemistry reasons. In this model, the fact that your wife wants to marry you suggests that she likes you better than the people that she had casual sex with, because she wants to talk to you and provide you with emotional support and fuck you, whereas she just wanted to fuck the other guy.

Is it possible that your wife had casual sex with a lot of guys way hotter than you and is now settling for you and secretly seething with contempt about how hideous you are compared with the guys she used to sleep with? Of course! However, I do not think that you should assume that this is true of literally every woman who had sex before she gets married. I would suggest some helpful advice here like “why don’t you meet some of her fuckbuddies and see if they are way hotter than you first?” but then I remembered Heartiste is way into monogamy. (Or, like, monogamy except he cheats.) See, this is an advantage of polyamory. You can totally see that people tend to like their primary partners more than they like their fuckbuddies! In real time!

D1. It is terribly unfair when women follow their tingle to fuck alpha males.

Oh no. Women are fucking people they’re sexually attracted to instead of people they’re not sexually attracted to. How evil. Those monsters. They should clearly distribute sex by sortition instead.

I am sure men have never followed their tingles, except a couple of bullet points ago when you guys were saying that 95% of men’s criteria for selecting a wife was how hot they were.

E.  Do women actually experience significant behavior changes during ovulation?

The truly excellent Bayesian statistics blogger Andrew Gelman has spent a lot of time beating up on the behavior changes in ovulation literature. For instance, did you know that one of those papers defined peak fertility as days six to fourteen of the cycle even though actual peak fertility is between days ten and seventeen? And another one failed to replicate and then claimed that this is because the “women wear red when they ovulate” effect is mediated by the weather and the latter study was conducted in the summer?

I am not saying that it is impossible that women experience significant behavior changes during ovulation, but the scientific literature clearly doesn’t seem to show this. In addition, anecdotally, a lot of women get really horny on their periods, which seems difficult to square with the “menstruation makes women not interested in sex” theory.

F. Are women less interested in casual sex than men are?

In general, women seem to be less interested in casual sex than men are. There are a couple different factors here. First, testosterone seems to increase libido and estrogen seems to decrease libido. Since women usually have more estrogen and less testosterone than men do, as a class they will probably have lower libidos, which probably means they’re also less interested in sex.

Second, the orgasm gap. In relationships, women orgasm about 80% as much as men do. However, in casual sex, women have orgasms about half as often as men do, and a third as often in first-time hookups. While, of course, it is possible to have enjoyable sex without experiencing an orgasm, orgasm is an indicator of sexual satisfaction. Possibly this is related to the sex acts: sex in our culture is defined as penis in vagina intercourse, which usually doesn’t result in orgasms for women, and men receive oral sex about eighty percent of the time in first-time hookups, while women receive it less than half the time. Men, imagine if casual sex meant that you gave a woman head and then she ground against your penis until she came, and if you don’t orgasm tough. I imagine most of you would be less enthusiastic about casual sex too.

Third, we have to consider the findings of my second-favorite study of all time. Clark and Hatfield is a famous and much-replicated study in which an attractive stranger asks women and men to go to bed with them. Men very commonly say yes; women never do. Terri Conley replicated this study as a questionnaire in which she asked people to describe their perceptions of attractive strangers who come out of nowhere and ask them to have sex. It turns out that women think random strangers who approach them on street corners are likely to be dangerous and terrible at sex. In fact, only the perception that the stranger would be a good lover significantly influenced women’s desire to have sex with the person: they were more likely to have sex with a celebrity or a male friend, because both of those are more likely to be perceived as good lovers. Status? Doesn’t matter. Contribution of resources? Doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are capable of getting her off. And– as we see from the orgasm data– men clearly are not stepping up to the challenge here.

IV. Miscellaneous

A. Is Heartiste against pretty lies?

Heartiste’s slogan is “where pretty lies perish.” It’s true that he has a lot of beliefs that are deeply emotionally threatening to some groups. “Men only care about your tits and ass and not your personality, when you turn 30 you will be hideously unattractive, and every sexual partner you have makes you less attractive” is pretty fucking scary to women. However, Heartiste has cleverly managed to not have any beliefs that are upsetting to his readers.

Like, look at Heartiste’s beliefs from a man’s point of view. If you get laid a lot, you are an awesome alpha male and the entire site is about how great you are. One might assume that that means that the site is threatening to men who can’t get laid. However, it offers men who can’t get laid the best possible thing: someone to blame. It’s not your fault that you can’t get laid, it’s the fault of women. Women’s unleashed sexuality is evil and destroying civilization. They are chasing assholes and leaving you be. “You are just so good a person that no one wants to fuck you, those evil bitches” is not actually a particularly threatening statement.

Perhaps there are no statements that are threatening to men! Perhaps all true statements are actually just comfort to guys! However, I would like to offer up a few suggestions for Heartiste to consider in his future explorations of pretty lies. First, examine the following charts from Rational Male. Men’s peak attractiveness is 38, women’s peak attractiveness is 23. Now, look at OKTrends’ charts, which have the benefit of being based on data not from the Journal of Cerebrorectal Studies. Men are primarily messaging women in the 18-22 age range, thus suggesting that that is women’s peak attractiveness and Rollo actually slightly overestimated when women’s peak attractiveness is. But women are primarily messaging men roughly around their own age. This remains true no matter how old she is. Since women as a group don’t seem to have a preference for a single age the way men do, we might as well calculate peak attractiveness by which age men are most likely to date the women they prefer. And the answer is… oh dear… around 20-24.

Sorry, 38-year-old dudes. Young women do not want your old, balding, wrinkled ass. Your peak attractiveness was fifteen years ago.

You can check this by looking at your own social groups. Presumably a lot of 38-year-olds would cash in their attractiveness to date a 20-year-old… but how many late-thirties/early-twenties couples do you know? Approximately none? As for the few such couples, well, I say what Heartiste says when someone brings up a hot fortysomething celebrity: the existence of an outlier does not falsify the general rule.

What other threatening ideas can we think of? One of my personal favorites, as a classicist, is pederasty. Pederasty is extremely common cross-culturally: from Greece and Rome to China and Japan to medieval Islam to Victorian England to modern Afghanistan, as soon as men do not face significant social punishment for fucking a teenage boy they do so. Notice that our culture has a significant “no homo” pressure on straight men. As Heartiste himself says when discussing men having sex with fat women, there is not much reason to shame people into not doing things they weren’t going to do anyway. And a lot of men seem to get absurdly angry about One Direction or Justin Bieber or whoever the latest prettyboy teenager is. Could that be sublimated lust? Hm.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that heterosexual men want to fuck teenage boys. I am suggesting that that notion is deeply upsetting to most men, and supported with evidence roughly as good as the evidence behind many of Heartiste’s claims, and the fact that he hasn’t come up with this idea seems to suggest that he’s avoiding ideas he finds personally offensive and threatening and therefore he should stop gloating about how much better he is than all those other people who avoid personally offensive, threatening statements. If he begins to argue in favor of men being pederasts, then I shall certainly retract my previous statements.

B. I am a confused and lost Return of Kings reader.

I am deeply concerned about several factual inaccuracies on your blog.

First, dating girls with eating disorders is not a good way to get to date someone who is agreeable and goes along with whatever you say. Mentally ill girls, in general, are not good people to date if you want a low-drama relationship.

Second, demisexuals are only sexually attracted to people once they have an emotional connection to the person. While in general sex-positive people tend to use more weird labels and thus be more into casual sex (you’re welcome, by the way) and the indicator you’re looking for are correct, if you are aiming for casual sex on the first date, I highly advise you to avoid demisexuals.

Third, if you want to reduce your rate of false accusations of rape, it would be helpful if you stopped having sex with girls when they say ‘no’ first. I guarantee you that if you try this strategy it will reduce your rate of being accused of rape tremendously. It also seems to me that a girl who says “no” when she doesn’t mean “no” is not going to give you the peaceful, low-drama relationship you’re dating girls with eating disorders for. It seems like it would be wise to filter those girls out by not having sex with people who have said they don’t want sex.

Fourth, I empathize with your desire to date strippers. Stippers are awesome! And it is really easy to think “well, where are strippers? They are in the strip club!” Pretty much every girl in a strip club is a stripper; while some of the girls in a grocery store are strippers, you might end up asking out a non-stripper on accident, and then where would you be? Not dating strippers, is where! Unfortunately, strippers are at work! Their actual job is to make you think that you are going to have sex with them if you pay them money. If you hit on them at work, you will be put into the category “client,” and if you don’t pay for a dance, the category “terrible, timewasting client.” Instead, you should look for strippers in a place where there are a lot of strippers and they are not at work. (Anecdotally, this place is White Wolf games. However, my data on this comes from Portland and it might just be that literally everywhere in Portland is full of strippers.)

C. Okay, where should I get dating advice from?

I sympathize with your problem, O Lonely Men of the World! Most dating advice is really terrible and written by people who think that the world is a just place and nice people are rewarded and you should just be yourself. Worse, a lot of it is written by feminists. Feminists are good at many things, but they are not good at giving men dating advice. Most of the time their dating advice is like “here are the thirty thousand ways that if you hit on someone you are misogynist, memorize them all and you have a chance of not being EVIL.”

I find myself impressed by Eric S Raymond’s Sex Tips for Geeks. Although I disagree with most of the evopsych, it is honest that people are totally shallow and that expensive clothes, lifting weights, and growing out your hair help. A pickup-knowledgeable friend recommends Mark Manson and The Art of Charm. I haven’t read them and can’t vouch, but my friend is a pretty ethical and charming guy.