Men don't make politics worse. Brains do.
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Let’s just, for the sake of argument, accept all the premises in this extremely interesting thread. These include: Men are more likely than women to:
Vote for conservative candidates
Support capitalism over socialism
Engage in status-seeking behavior and support social hierarchies
The last point is, I think, the most interesting.
The thing that sucks about status is that it’s a zero-sum game. In contrast, capitalism, or at least free exchange, is a positive-sum game. If you and I make a voluntary trade, we both at least believe we’re both better off. The evidence is very strong that free exchange incentivizes innovation, which is the only way to make everyone wealthier. Socialism is arguing over how to divide up the pie. Capitalism is figuring out how to make more pies with the same amount of ingredients.
Status, on the other hand, is just one pie. It can only be divvied out. You can’t give everyone more status. Because status is definitionally finite. If someone gets more, someone else (or elses) has to have less. It’s a hierarchy.
Status is a stupid thing to go after, at least insofar as going after status markers cooperatively makes everyone better off but going after status itself only helps you.
Datepsych lists status markers as including: Having money, being physically dominant, athletic, a successful career, and sexual prowess. As long as you’re doing it ethically, getting more money, muscles, promotions, and sex skills just makes everyone better off. Why does it matter whether you have more money, etc. than anyone else?
Well, probably because throughout the history of humanity many more men than women have been total reproductive losers. Women get to worry about resources in absolute terms because the vast majority of us, even in scarcity, are going to get to reproduce. Men’s brains make them worry about resources in hierarchical terms because a lot of them are going to die virgins and so their brains are really focused on making sure they’re not among the unlucky.
“The entirety of the ‘why don't men like the left’ discourse has been political opinions,” datepsych writes. “Not much research or psychology.” Um, I think he should read Sex and the State.
But here’s where he and I really agree: “This may be a hard pill to swallow for those who think political enemies are terrible people who made a conscious decision to be evil. If they are evil, you must come to terms with the fact at least part of the variance in their evil is explained by genes.”
People don’t want to be bad! Or, even if they do want to be bad, their ability to freely choose what to want is severely limited by biological realities. Our brains don’t want us to be ethical. Just like they don’t want us to be happy. They want us to have kids who survive long enough to have kids who… That doesn’t mean human nature is bad. Humans are naturally very social and cooperative creatures. But that’s not because we’re good, either. It’s because cooperative, social humans out-reproduced less cooperative, social humans.
We can, and should, apply this same understanding to authoritarianism. According to the thread, authoritarianism is a highly heritable personality trait. It’s the most heritable after extraversion.
Like most parts of our personalities, nature and nurture play a role in authoritarianism. Everyone is born with an upper and lower limit to how authoritarian their personality can get. Just like everyone is born with a band on their height in adulthood. If I hadn’t gotten enough to eat in childhood maybe I would be 5’1” rather than 5’3. But genetically, there’s no reality in which I’d be 6’ no matter what I ate. Personality traits are less heritable than height, but still around 50% heritable.
We’ve discussed how trauma pushes people toward the top of their genetic ability for authoritarianism. And how loneliness exacerbates trauma. And now I’m reading that social rejection exacerbates authoritarianism, probably by exacerbating loneliness and therefore trauma. And in some ways social rejection is trauma.
The study authors found that in individualistic societies with more gender inequality women were actually more authoritarian than men, on average. In the US, men are only just slightly more authoritarian than women, on average.
Men in the US are increasingly experiencing more rolelessness and loneliness than women. And men, white men especially, are also losing status. Since status is a zero-sum game, women and BIPOC grabbing our share of status-markers necessarily means the average white man moves down a peg or two. Us getting more muscles, money, promotions, and sex skills literally makes everyone richer. Women entering the labor force en masse alone has unlocked billions of dollars in economic growth. But economic growth is potentially infinite, while status is definitionally finite.
So, again, I cannot stress enough that:
Status is a stupid thing to fight for
Men are more likely than women to try to enhance their status
This isn’t because men are evil. Men, like all people, are somewhat beholden to biological and social realities.
Notice the “somewhat” in there. Personality is only about half heritable. There’s no reason I can think of that we can’t moderate men’s (and women’s, when it happens) status-seeking tendencies.
What moderates authoritarian personality traits? Social acceptance, abundance, and psychological and physical safety.
What might moderate status-seeking behavior? I dunno, a good reason to be able to reassure your brain that you’re not going to die a total reproductive loser?
I feel like we’re playing with fire, in that more and more men are becoming total reproductive losers than at any point in US history.
Research shows men are most likely to be total reproductive losers under extreme resource inequality. When your kids are more likely to survive as the fifth wife of a very rich guy than as the first wife of a very poor guy, the poor guy dies childless.
Guess what we have in the US right now? Extreme resource inequality coupled with lots of men (and women) who aren’t reproducing.
Like, if you wanted to create the perfect conditions for men to fight for resources in relative rather than absolute terms, this is it. Congratulations, overlords.
And this works perfectly for leadership. There’s nothing high-status men want low-status men to do more than fight low-status women and outgroup men for their place at the top of the bottom of the hierarchy. If low-status men voted and did activism more like women, leaders might actually feel pressure to do things to help ensure everyone is better off in absolute terms.
Luckily, these are things we can change. We can help foster social acceptance, abundance, and psychological and physical safety for average men. We can encourage men to advocate for absolute, rather than relative, gain.
But first we have to stop demonizing ourselves and each other. We have to start better understanding that the enemy isn’t our political rivals. It’s our brains.
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I am going to have to read all the links & citations from that thread. At a first read there’s a lot I’m skeptical of.