The outline of Maletopia
Inspired by the idea that Eutopia is supposed to be scary. Well, some of the things I like, moreover, I figure things a lot of other people either consciously or subconsciously like are scary indeed.
In Maletopia, violence is not seen as something abhorrent. It is well understood, that the biological wiring of men (largely on the hormonal level) sees fighting and combat as something exciting and winning it is rewarded with a T boost, and on the gut level masculine men do not see fighting as something abhorrent. Videogames are a proof of this. Instead of trying to suppress these instincts and trying to engineer violence-abhorring pacifist men who would probably end up with low testosterone, lower sex appeal to many a straight women, maybe bullied, and depressed, in Maletopia the goal is to provide safe and exciting outlets for these instincts.
EDIT: The ideas being tested
Traditional masculine instincts evolved for an ancestral environment got out of synch with the modern world, became misleading, harmful, and downright dangerous. Having realized this, there were also movements to suppress them. Which is a less than ideal solution. Generally speaking the ancestral environment is fairly simple and not hard to simulate. Why not do it then?
The instincts in question are:
1) Warmongering, finding violence cool, hawkery, militarism
It is a scope insensitivity issue. War was not so costly in human lives and suffering when it was about a tribe raiding another with arrows and bows. Having the same hawkish, yee-haw, let’s kick some butt instincts in an age of world wars and nukes is incredibly dangerous.
Having realized the issue, many intellectuals promoted pacifist humanism, an abhorrence of violence, in German speaking countries there is a clearly visible line from Stefan Zweig type WWI-opposers to the hippies in the 1960′s. However these people generally ended up suppressing all aspects of masculinity. They would not let their children learn boxing, they would say it teaches them to solve problems with violence. German hippies tried to be as unmasculine in everything, hair, clothes, as they could. It is fighting against your own testosterone producing glands. Not a very good idea.
2) Tribalism, us vs. them
Obvious enoguh. Camaraderie, an esprit the corps is very important in a war. It is also very harmful when it comes to arguments between political parties. Or about preventing a war.
3) Setting up gendered standards, “a real man should so-and-so”, often combined with sexism and homophobia largely in order to set up a contrast (“You hit like a girl! That is totally gay!”)
Here the issue is largely that gender as understood today, a binary thing, is a too large scope. It is okay to say “A real marine should be strong and tough!”, that is a small and relevant enough scope. Saying “A real man should be strong and tough!”, well on one hand I do sympatize with the sentiment, but on the other hand such an expectation should not be cast over literally 50% of humankind. Why cannot we have 4-5 smaller genders, and express such expectations only inside them? And it is also wrong to contrast it to women and gay men, men of whom are strong and tough, this is simply not a properly calibrated contrast. We need to keep the general idea of gendered masculinity, but no longer think in these really broad categories like men, women or gay men. Traditional masculinity should be understood as a subculture, and on one hand it is generally correct to expect those men who want to be parts of it to try to live up to its values, but on the other this simply does not need to have anything to do with women, gay men or men outside this subculture.
4) Sexism and homophobia getting detached from serving as a contrast and becoming a problem on its own
Obvious enough. The core problem is a miscalibrated scope like expecting all men to be tough instead of a subset only, this is e.g. contrasted to the weakness of women and then becomes a stereotype of all women. Everybody loses.
5) A dislike of softness and coddling leading to the opposing of compassionate social policies, being a proud self made hard worker, not wanting to pay taxes to pay welfare lazy people
This is counter-productive in age where more and more work will be automated and sooner or later basically it is either a Basic Income or a violent revolution. A tribe fighting to survive cannot accomodate softness, but a rich modern society can, and it is especially wrong calibration when the lack of jobs is seen as soft laziness.
These instincts are out of synch and problematic. But the goal is not to suppress them, the goal is to simulate that ancestral environment where they can find an outlet.
Some boring background
Maletopia has a highly advanced social market economy where most work is done by robots, most people live on Basic Income and people have a lot of free time. The government does not provide much services directly, letting people buy education or healthcare on a competitive market, but there are also regulations wherever customers cannot really be expected to make informed decisions. They are not dogmatic libertarians, they don’t see much wrong in making the generally accepted procedures and rules of e.g. medicine mandatory and not expecting every patient to be able to choose doctors on the competitive marketplace efficiently. However, since it is a robot economy, the people are no longer assets for the state, it means having an educated or healthy population is not necessarily a competitive advantage for the state. This enables governments to be a bit relaxed about this. Some education is mandatory until puberty, but if you think at 12 you never want to see a math textbook anymore, it is no longer the government’s job to force you to, just collect your BI and live as you wish. Since politics is largely about who gets to spend whose money, and there is not much spending besides BI, most services are provided by a regulated market, politics as such is largely ignored by the populace and much simpler than today. People can directly elect a Minister of Health, Minister of Agriculture etc., this was implemented in order to push people to look more at their qualifications and not their party affilation or ideology. Besides, there is a Parliament, which is filled by a lot, not election, as here qualifications matter less than being truly representative. Governments are over smaller areas than today, modeled after Swiss Cantons. Politics is largely considered boring, people are more excited about whether it is the Aalborg Vikings or the Detroit Thug Life who wins the next World Top Raid. DTL’s top fighter Jamal has promised to put his diamond-decorated gold chain on the loot pile, can you imagine that? Word is, AV is having a golden wolf’s head made in order to be able to match the bet honorably. Why would anyone care about endless debates about car safety regulations when cool things like this happen?
EDIT: To avoid some misunderstandings
People who read the pre-edited version of this article have misunderstood some of my intentions. The basic idea is a standard post-scarcity sci-fi where there is nothing important to do and people live for their hobbies a’la Culture, with the only difference being that I don’t think people like being that isolated and generally I think people like to form fairly closely-knit like-minded groups. But what I have in mind is obviously an incredibly diverse world with a million hobby groups for every kind of people possible. The whole thing you might call Utopia, and then it has subsets, the hobby groups of gay artists may be called Gayartopia, the hobby groups of woman gamers Femgamertopia, and the hobby groups of traditionally masculine guys would be called Maletopia.
I will focus on the last subset, because it is the most controversial, interesting, unusual, and scary. But it does not mean that the rest of humankind (about maybe 90%) does not have a wonderful life pursuing their very different kinds of interests. It is just not the purpose of this article to flesh it out.
One reader assumed something like a generic mainstream pop culture exists in Utopia and it is filled with shows from its Maletopia subset. I would like to leave the question open. To me the idea of a mainstream is already outdated, let alone in the future. It will be YouTube, not CNN. But sure, Maletopia can generate some spectacular TV shows. Not sure how much it matters.
I also think social oppression is largely the factor of competing for resources or economic exploitation, and if you think some aspects of this sound oppressive, you need to explain how would that make any sort of sense in a post-scarcity world where everybody who does not like the sub-reality generated by any group has access to resources for generating their own.
A fighter’s world
The basic ideas were there at least since the early 20th century. Orwell called the spirit of sports as “war minus the shooting”, which he understood as a bad thing, Maletopia agrees but sees it as a good thing: it is precisely the shooting what is wrong with war, otherwise, war would be an exciting manly adventure. Or maybe it wouldn’t, but clearly the millions of 20th-21th century men who watched war movies and played wargames on their computer thought otherwise. They liked war, or at any rate liked the ideas they had about war, even if those ideas were completely wrong. So Maletopia is really into sports. Into sports of the kind the look a lot like war minus the shooting.
A sport like tennis is obviously a poor simulation of war. It lacks both of its major aspects: the excitement of conflict, violence and danger, and the strong us vs. them tribal spirit of camaraderie.
We have already seen simulations of both aspects in the 20th century. The tribal, us vs. them spirit of camaraderie was simulated in Europe and indeed in most of the world outside America by association football or soccer, both national teams (“Wave your flag!”) and clubs.
The fighting aspect is a bit harder to simulate. Clearly, you can simulate a shooting war with paintball or airsoft, you can fence with longswords and look rather awesome at it, but you know it is not serious, your opponent cannot hurt you seriously with those weapons. You could experiment with semi-hard half-nerf swords that kinda hurt but not so much, but there is one traditional and well-respected way to fight while causing real damage, yet keep it reasonably safe: the empty-handed martial arts or combat sports.
Again, the basics were there already at the end of the 20th century. MMA eclipsed the popularity of boxing, largely through looking more vicious, gladiatorial and flashy, yet (this is being debated) being less dangerous, and when in the first days of Maletopia an entrepreneur came up with flashier looking versions of the head protection used in amateur boxing, which were then made mandatory, the problem of concussions and brain damage largely being solved, the safety concerns were largely alleviated. It was understood that it cannot be perfectly safe and yet provide a believable simulation of real combat, there must be a trade-off, and Maletopia has good enough healthcare that lacerations or even broken bones in the ring are not a major issue.
In the first years of Maletopia, Dana Jr. figured there is still one problem left. It is an individual sport, not a team sport, it does not have the tribal, camaraderie aspects of, say, soccer fandom. To keep a long story short, a team version of MMA was made, which required a certain modification of the rules, but I don’t want to bore you with the details. Sufficient to say, it was possible to fight team against team now, to fight a simulated, yet believable enough empty-handed tribal war in the MMA ring, with real enough broken noses.
Soon, teams were called tribes and matches were called raids.
The whole thing was made even better when simulated looting was incorporated into the rules. Before a raid, the tribes are supposed to make a bet, and put the money or other valuables they bet visibly on a table. Bystanders, spectators are welcome to put more money or valuables on the pile. After the raid, the winning tribe takes it and parades it around, showing off their loot. After that they distribute it between each other.
Money does not play any other role in the sport in order to be prevent it becoming too profit-oriented. Ticket prices and advertising is only used to pay for costs like renting the venue, which is not much, and only advertisements appropriate to the mood (i.e. MMA gear) are allowed. Fighters don’t receive any other payment than their share of the loot. There is a strong rule against rich people or really anyone sponsoring teams or paying fighters salaries (they collect BI anyway), although offering them gear, a gym to train for free etc. is allowed. But generally speaking the only way a rich sponsor or a fan can get money to the tribe he supports is putting it into the loot pile: and if they lose, the opponent will get it. There is a strong social taboo against paying money to figthers or tribes any other way, there is an oft-quoted saying taking money not fought for is a cowards’ wage.
No armchair fans
There is another strong social taboo against armchair fandom. The idea of a fat slob drinking beer and eating wings in front of the TV and rooting for his tribe is considered ridiculous by all. You show respect to the fighters of your tribe by imitating them to a certain extent, by being fit, learning basic self-defense moves, doing a bit of grappling sparring and heavy bag work, so basically do the same thing that the non-competitive people who train at todays MMA, boxing or BJJ gyms do. Fandom and getting your own training is merged into one at your local tribal HQ which also doubles as a training gym. There is no clear separation between fighters and fans, it is simply that only the elite fighters participate in raids. But the idea of a fan who could not do at least some light sparring himself or would run out of breath is considered ridiculous, unless he has a physical disability.
Tribes—by that I mean both the elite fighters who raid, and the amateur fighters who are the fans - have a strong spirit of camaraderie. This is represented by flags, coats of arms, uniforms, greetings, hand signals, or anything else really, depending on what the tribe and its identity is. They are basically brotherhoods, they take solidarity and honor very importantly. Your tribal HQ is practically your second home. If you have nothing better to do, and some time to kill, you go down to the local tribal HQ to practice a bit or maybe lift some weights, watch the serious elite spar, watch recorded raids, or maybe just have a beer and chat. You can count on each other. If you move houses, your brothers will carry your furniture. There are other organized activities, usually manly fun like shooting clay pigeons.
While it is not mandatory to be a member of a tribe, many men are. Obviously there are pacifist, intellectual, low-testosterone or gay men who dislike the idea. It used to generate a lot of grief, fighters saying a real man must fight and not be a sissy, non-fighters told them their view of masculinity is toxic, sexist, patriarchical, barbarous and completely outdated, since the only place they can practice it in the modern world is a simulation, a sport—the raids are not like _actual_ raids where people die and village get burned down. This resulted in a lot of mud-flinging until a clever solution was found.
Solving the gender conundrum
The clever solution was to define more than two genders. Specifically, two different male genders were defined. Unfortunately our records are lost with regard how exactly they were called. One dubious and unverified source is saying that there were multiple terms, at and least a subset of English-speaking people preferred Mentsh vs. Mannfolk. The first is borrowed from Yiddish, where it roughly means “a good person” and it is used as a gender self-identification of those males who generally abhor the idea of fighting, focus on productive or altruistic pursuits, and if they are straight, their sexual relations with women are based on egalitarian friendships. The Mannfolk is from Old Norse, as white-skinned fighters tend to like a certain (not historically accurate) Viking ethic, they are the fighters in tribes, they have a high-testosterone ethic, and have a certain tendency to sexually objectify women. However, violence against women is strictly forbidden in the Code of Honor of most tribes, this was based on an agreement with the Fempire. As for the sneakier forms of rape, most tribes have a culture that having sex with a woman is not a masculine achievement as such: doing her so good that she comes back asking for more tomorrow is one, and it is the only proper basis of sexual bragging. It is not just ethics, but also a pride in their own manly attractiveness that makes the idea of roofing a drink unthinkably low for the vast majority of tribe members.
It is also helpful that when a member of a tribe behaves unethically outside, the whole tribe is shamed in the media and they will sort out their own punishment internally. Usually it means having to fight the elite fighters, and they will not hold back.
At any rate, inventing two male genders, Mentsh and Mannfolk, sorted out the problem nicely. From that on, sentences like “a real man should fight” or “your sense of masculinity is wrong or outdated” would be almost unintelligible, because would sound like “a real human should fight” or “your sense of what is to be human is wrong and outdated”. Instead it is widely accepted truism that real Mannfolk fight and real Mentsh usually don’t, that real Mannfolk need to be strong and tough and real Mentsh need to be empathic and sensitive. It also makes it easier for straight women to tell what they are attracted to. Instead of complicated descriptions and instead of men having endless debates like whether women like “bad boys” or not, most women openly state whether they like Mentsh or Mannfolk. This makes things quite easy. It is understood that women who like Mannfolk will be turned off by cowardice, will put up with some sexism, and expect the man to play a leader role in the relationship, while women who like Mentsh will expect equality, sensitivity, respect, and in return their men can allow themselves to show weakness.
Thus nobody talks about “real men” vs. “toxic masculinity” anymore. They see the whole human history through these glasses, nobody was simply a man, or a manly man, or unmanly man, but for example Holger Danske or Arnold or Musashi or Patton were Mannfolk and Einstein and MLK and Freddie Mercury was Mentsh. Some people who are interested in history argue about which gender did e.g. Winston Churchill belong to, but not many are interested in this.
Mentsh usually focus on intellectual, artistic etc. pursuits.
The rise of the knightly orders
There is a new trend in Maletopia that some tribes call themselves chivalrous orders. The idea is that they try to combine the ideals of Mannfolk and Mentsh. The knights, as they call themselves, think that physical fitness, courage, knowing self-defense, and having some exciting fun at a sparring is not a bad idea at all, but the higher morals and higher intellectualism of Mentsh is also something valuable. Knights generally agree that a valuable way to live is to work on the Four Virtuous Activities, namely:
1) physical fitness, fighting and physical challenges,
2) scholarship, intellectualism, learning and rationality,
3) altruism, charity and good works,
4) and protecting the Earth, animals, plants, the natural environment, or indigenous people.
Knights of the Fox are supposed to be versatile, work on all four.
Other chivalrous orders focus on one, also do other two, and are allowed to go easy on the fourth. Knights of the Sword are the closest to the tribes of Mannfolk, they focus on fighting and physical challenges, learning and knowledge matters for them too, but they will usually go easy on either altruism or environmentalism. Knights of the Scroll focus on learning and rationality, find altruism and environmentalism important, and go easy on fighting and physicality. Knights of the Heart and Knights of Earth are easy enough to figure out.
So far I have only talked about men, and mostly about the Mannfolk gender. And I named it Maletopia. Where are women and LGBT people, or the disabled who cannot fight, in all this? Are they an oppressed minority? No.
Women and everybody else in Maletopia
EDIT: as indicated above, Maletopia, i.e. the fighting tribes of the Mannfolk are only a small subset of hobby groups in Utopia. Many, many other kinds of subsets exist to cater to other people. However, we simply focus on the Mannfolk now and their interaction with everybody else.
One of the most important elements of the Grand Compromise with the Fempire was that discrimination and inequality is not allowed in general society as such, but is allowed in private organizations such as these tribes. The reason it was allowed was partially because some MRAs were adamant to be let allowed to organize tribes where only men and only masculine men—the later Mannfolk—are allowed, and be allowed to play these violent games with each other even if others find it revolting. For this reason, they wanted to prevent “entryism”, the practice where people who disagree with the values of a movement or group enter it, and then vote and exert pressure to change them.
But the main reason was that now there was hardly any important work to do, as work was done by robots, and people lived on BI, discrimination in these organizations had little affect on how succesful individuals could become. Since basically everything was a hobby now and nothing really mattered, success lost its former meaning, and if some fools wanted to form a hobby group that consisted entirely of tall ginger demisexual males, there was no good reason to not let them to.
As a result, many fighting tribes of Mannfolk consist of straight cissexual men with significantly sexist views and are often recruited from a particular culture, ethnicity or race. Such things tend to strengthen their tribal identity, their solidarity, camaraderie and this is seen as super important in Maletopia. Inclusiveness is not emphasized, since these organizations are essentially about hobbies and thus it is very easy to found many competing ones for every possible identity or need, hence they tend to be exclusive, and use the exclusiveness to form tightly knit communities with a strong esprit de corps. This also means often disturbing views, like sexism or racism are openly professed by certain tribes of Mannfolk. However it does not affect anyone outside their tribe, except others tribes they fight with, and women outside their tribe they date, but there are solutions for the worst aspects of it (see above, violence, rape), and since those women who want to be treated as equals usually completely refuse to date Mannfolk and choose to date only Mentsh, basically this sexism does not make anyone miserable.
It is not a surprise that tribes often challenge each other to raids precisely based on their conflicting identities, prejudices and discriminations, and this is seen as a feature, not a bug, a little hatred just makes the raid more real and more warlike. Thus, Steela from Bay Area Amazons likes to say that she will bathe in male tears after their upcoming raid with Italian Cowboys, and Eli from the Lions of Judah is looking forward to break some Nazi bones during their upcoming raid against the Aryan Brotherhood. As a commenter has put it, letting evil tribes exist makes better villains for the raids, and if you complain that evil people are being racist or sexist, that is obviouly stupid. Just put a tenner on the loot pile and hope the bad guys will get their noses bloodied.
The parallels between the ethnic gangs of the 20th century are obvious and intentional.
Besides the straight Mannfolk tribes, there are male fighting tribes who are not straight but androphile (masculine-gay, see Jack Donovan), there are butch amazon fighting tribes, and of course a million similar hobby organizations for people who are not fighters, for the Mentsh, for women who dislike fighting, for LGBT people, for the disabled, for all.
Of course, those groups can and should be fleshed out. All in all, the only reason I called it Maletopia is because I wanted to focus on how the fighting tribes of Mannfolk serve the emotional needs of masculine men. Really, Maletopia is simply a subset of Utopia where everybody else, too, finds groups where they can be themselves.
I don’t think “here’s my vision of eutopia, isn’t it controversial?” is a type of post we should have here. Even if we really should be discussing the possibilities it considers, this seems a particularly bad way of bringing up the ideas—it gives a particular answer to the eutopia question, instead of exploring the relevant aspects of the question, so isn’t going to promote useful discussion so much as attempts to smack down the idea.
Discussing Weirdtopias here is not exactly uncommon, we’ve had these before. And of course any interesting weirdtopia is going to be “good” at something, that is, “optimized” in some sense. It’s an interesting proof of concept regardless.
I disagree. Masculinity is an especially important and problematic set of values.
Why? What’s wrong with wanting to be masculine?
If it were wrong, it would be a problem, not problematic. That defies the dictionary definition, but “problem” can mean something with a simple solution that hasn’t yet been implemented, while “problematic” connotes a persistent problem with no easy solution.
The difficulties with it are already listed in the post, as they’re the motivation for the post. Though it might be more fair to say gender is problematic.
To me this description feels like its written by someone very far away from what he seeks. It suffers from taking a lot of stereotypes for granted thus as hippies having long hair means that they aren’t manly. Historically there nothing particularly manly about having short hair. Hippies more often have beards. Calling that femine misses the whole point. Man in the military where everything is orderly don’t have beards, but rejecting those values and growing your beard isn’t about rejecting “traditional masculinity”.
Sensitivity and intellectualism is not the same thing.
Hurting each other is not the point of most fighting. Most male animals who fight with each other don’t fight in a way that’s dangerous to each other but to test each others strength. I think you are making a mistake when you view raids as a central part of human existence. The usual violent group activity is hunting and not raiding.
High testosterone is not about aggression it’s about dominance. From my stackexchange answer: “boys who had a history of high physical aggression, from age 6 to 12, were found to have lower testosterone levels at age 13 compared with boys with no history of high physical aggression.”
Your experience of what it means to be gay is confused. Plenty of gay people do practice BDSM with is about expressing violence.
Being themselves likely isn’t about living up to 20st century stereotypes of what it means to be male.
I also say that as seeing myself in the 21st century given that the people I know who hold seminars about manliness don’t consider manliness to be at odds with being sensitive.
The problem you’re trying to solve can be solved even easier in a future where everyone are Whole Brain Emulations. You can have your raids in virtual worlds where the rules regarding pain / injury are whatever you define. Obviously, your cybernetic brain will never be damaged.
″ War was not so costly in human lives and suffering when it was about a tribe raiding another with arrows and bows.” I simply cannot agree. If you make the adjustment for per capita deaths, then the kill rates of primitve tribes are far higher than that of modern armies. The Mongols only had ponies and bows and arrows, and look at what they did. When Tamerlane lead an Islamic jihad of the Indian subcontinent, he may well have killed 5% of then existing humanity.
In World War 1, the casualty rates for Germany, Austria, and Russia were about 75%. Probably not much different in World War 2; possibly higher in the Napoleonic wars. I haven’t checked.
You’re comparing two different measures, military casualties versus total casualties. For a reasonably good apples-to-apples measure of wartime violence over time, Better Angels of our Nature is one that I found readable and informative.
IIRC, overall per capita violent death during the world wars was roughly comparable to living in a tribal society during a typical time- of course, for us, those were the exception and not the rule.
I am deliberately looking at military casualties, to highlight that tribal “military” casualties couldn’t possibly be that high. I would guess that the fraction of deaths that were civilian was higher in both world wars than in tribal conflicts. Tribal conflicts are, AFAIK, almost always strictly men killing other men. Per capita comparison is distorted by the longer lifespan of people in the 20th century. Just having more people live past the age of 40 shouldn’t, I’d think, make your age look more peaceful.
I’ve heard the claim that in some areas, 60% of the death rate for tribal men was due to homicide.
World War I also enabled the 1918 flu pandemic, which was arguably more costly than the war itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic
Admittedly, it is difficult to know how severe the pandemic would have been in the absence of war.
Wikipedia gives the German death rate as about 4% of the population, giving 8% of men. I suppose one major difference is that in a tribal conflict perhaps everyone fought (because the conflict might be over in one short clash), whereas in more modern wars many work to sustain the war effort, and others are too old to fight, given longer lifespans.
This is very low compared to tribes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization
Generally when one designs a utopia, one has to explain why the particular chosen set of rules would work, how you would get there, and why it would be better than what currently exists. You say you would have a basic income, work would be done by robots, and there would be a “highly advanced social market economy”.
You never touch on these subjects again, or explain their benefits, and immediately jump into the gender issues of a fantasy world. This reads more like a summary of a sexist 1980s pulp sci fi novel than an actual attempt to design a utopia.
Fair enough, added now an “the ideas being tested” section to accomodate some of these stuff.
For me, robots, social market economy, and basic income are not important elements, they are just next-step extensions of what exists today anyhow. I just wanted a simple, easy, believeable background on top of which to paint the important elements.
As for sexism, it depends, if it means “boring old stereotypical ways of thinking”, that I must rejected since one of the ideas is constructing new genders and that is fairly revolutionary. If it simply means “not PC” I accept that, I don’t like intellectual straightjackets and rather let my imagination run free instead of always having to check what last weeks political ruleset is. For me it is enough to not at least not be conventionally, unoriginally, unreflectedly anything-ist.
As for sci-fi summary, exactly, that is precisely my idea of a utopia: sci-fi minus the literature. Laying the groundwork on top of which a sci-fi novel could be constructed.
The problem is that you don’t explain why current gender issues could possibly by solved by your invented genders, why anyone would go along with them, why they would perform better than other alternatives, or why any of this would even happen (would knightly orders really be a predictable outcome of this?) given the basic premises. It also pathologically focuses only on perceived gender differences, not any other social or economic problems.
You haven’t designed a utopia for anyone except yourself, which generally isn’t the point of a utopia; it should accommodate everyone. Very few people living today would like to live in a world like that. So if you would like to live in this world, more power to you, but you have designed a fantasy world, not a utopia.
But I thought it is obvious?
Because it would provide a safe outlet to those instincts that otherwise tend to end up hurting everybody. Because it is a way to have the cake and eat it, letting “boys be boys” while keeping everybody else safe from fallout from this.
My knightly orders idea is just an afterthought, once two ideals, both being valuable, drift too far, some people will try to unify them.
I have designed the utopia for the following group of people: first of all those men who like traditional masculinity, but do not feel comfortable in the manosphere / red pill (I don’t) because they find it unethical (I find it unethical), because it doe not sufficiently take into the considerations of everybody else. Similarly, it is a useful utopia for all those other people, women, mentsch, gay men, who find traditional masculinity dangerous, but would not opt to entirely neuter them or suppress them, but rather want to let them have their playground as long as it does not affect others much. Furthermore, an idea that is based on one of todays most popular spectator and hobby sports is not something that very few people today would want to live. It is like claiming very few people would want to live in “insert any popular videogame universe here”. Just why?
Why not remove those instincts, either through social engineering, genetics, or some other method, or channel them into more productive avenues like art?
You seem to focus entirely on men and masculinity in your uptopia; even the section on women is called “Women and everybody else in Maletopia”, as if they are an afterthought. Your world is even called “Maletopia”. I find it hard to believe you can’t see the irony in that, and claim that non-straight non-masculine non-males would not be opressed in this society, which itself is named after a specific gender role.
There are a million other things that could happen, which you don’t bring up. If you only focus on one possibility out of millions, you can’t claim this is a practical utopia.
Why would you design a utopia first and foremost for just a subset of the entire population? You say this utopia would be for those who do not feel comfortable in the “manosphere”, but your utopia seems exactly like something the manosphere would cook up.
You say this world functions as a playground for masculine men so that they don’t affect others much. First of all, why would a utopia marginalize an entire subset of the population? Second of all, can it really be a marginalization if almost the entire society is built around this supposedly marginalized group? It’s named after them!
There are a thousand video game worlds that I would like to live in. There are also as many video game worlds I would not want to live in, even if I like playing those games. Also, I don’t like spectator sports, and many people prefer some spectator sports over others. Why should all spectator sports be interchangeable? And why would liking a sport mean you want to live there 24⁄7, forever?
What if people want the world to not be based around spectator sports, especially if those sports are entirely based around gender differences and influence the entire culture? Some places are fun to visit but no fun to live in, after all, and your created world doesn’t seem like it would be fun even then.
WHY remove them? I like having them, millions of men like having them, and if they are linked with testosterone, it has additional benefits like many women find that attractive. Why remove any human feature people like to have? Just because it is dangerous? Here is a solution for that.
WHY should everybody be productive when a post-scarcity society does not require this, and some people like other things than being productive?
OK, I repeat it third time, if it still does not come accross, I cannot do more. An affluent post-scarcity free-time society where nothing matters anymore and everything is a hobby which people largely pursue in groups of the like-minded is by definition beneficial for ALL. I have worked out the Mannfolk groups because they are the most unusual idea here, and just indicated that groups for everybody else exist. I did not flesh them out, because they are not so unusual, because it is easy to imagine e.g. art groups. The Maletopia title just reflects that one of these many kinds of groups was worked out because I wanted to divert attention to those, but I wrote quite clearly that Maletopia—the sum of these groups—is just a subset of a general Utopia for all. You can call the sum of artistic grousp Artopia and so on.
Oppression is a result of competing for resources. Have you seen any notion of this? Or you think oppressing others is just some kind of a hobby, too or what really?
I wouldn’t. I would present the generic idea of everybody pursuing their hobbies, but this is well known and not interesting in itself it was done to death i.e. Banks Culture series etc. I simply focus on an unusual subset of hobbies to make a point and test some ideas.
If the manosphere cared for ethics yes. Unfortunately they don’t, basically their goal is to preserve their exclusive socially dominant position instead of finding hobbies. However certainly there are similarities, as probably both them, me, and others I wrote it for are high-testosterone, and this predicts certain common desires and likes. So this either something a manosphere would do if you could find a way to inject them ethics, or this is something the ethical community would do if you injected them T.
Try not take a name too literally, okay? Titles are meant to be catchy, not true. The music band Scorpions are not actually scorpions, even though they are named after them, okay? The society is built around anyone pursuing any hobby in groups. I focused on describing one kind in one group, the most unusual kind.
It is a Maletopia not because it is only works for masculine men, to the contrary, it works for all, because there are a million other hobby groups not described in detail. However, most utopias don’t work for masculine men, because usually they involve some violence-abhorring values as far as I can tell from my sci-fi reading.
For most sports not, but for sports where it is true that they are war minus the shooting, yes, because being a warrior is a way of life, not just a hobby.
I am confused what the question means. I assume most other people just focus on their own groups and hobbies and the world as such is not based around anything. I don’t think such a thing as popular culture will keep existing. Just parallel subcultures. Everybody who does not like what a subculture does can do the same thing as people today who do not like e.g. Nickelback: not pay attention to it.
Did you assume a popular culture, a generic mainstream is supposed to exist? Maybe I need to put into the article it is not, it is already getting outdated even in our current reality.
Beneficial for all isn’t any part of your definition, you’re just asserting that it would be beneficial. Personally, I find the idea of a society where “nothing matters” to be dystopic, and I would not want to live there. Vacation is fine for a couple of weeks, but after that it palls.
Why not give people the option to remove them if they want to? Why build an entire society based around the idea that men should fight each other, if not everyone wants to? I don’t, for example!
I agree that if this were one of a subset of worlds, and only the people who wanted to live here could live here, then it could exist as part of the Archipelago. But I doubt more than a small minority of currently-existing people would want to live there for extended periods of time.
Status will always be a scarce resource.
Then why make your entire post about this one tiny aspect of the utopia, and neglect to mention that it is only a small part of it? And why do you assume that all men like fighting and violence? Not a single person I know likes violence, our culture is anti-violence already, and most people look down on it rightly because it causes harm by definition.
This appears to be a massive case of projection. Just as most people do not like violence, most people do not like war. And what would war without the shooting even be, anyway?
Again, if your world is just one of many subsets of a greater world, then I get your point. I fail to believe many people would want to live there, but as long as they had many options I guess it would be fine for it to be an option. But I don’t believe your article should have focused on a single subset which isn’t applicable to most of the existing population, when it is supposed to be a small part of a larger world.
Thanks for the archipelago idea, that is exactly it.
Status would be the cause of oppression? That is difficult to parse, unless you agree with the SJW kind of stuff that using slurs or inappropriate jokes constitutes oppression. I generally don’t, I consider those things oppression when for people people get beaten up for their skin color or orientation or discriminated from a job. I am European and thankfully do not have to care about the incredibly thin-skinned over-sensitivitiy American SJWs developed in the last 10-15 years, microagressions and all that, so I focus on serious stuff like discriminating people in things that matter. And serious oppression I don’t really think that can be explained merely by status. Given that usually the victim gains status and the people who make themselves look brutal bigots lose status, don’t think so.
Did you read it carefully? The Mentsch sub-gender was made for exactly those men who don’t.
WHAT culture? Is this a case of Everybody Is American On The InternetTM? Do you see an anti-violence culture in Donbass? Even in America, have you ever seen further than the Blue-Tribe, SWPL intellectual elites with college degrees? Ever talked with a blue-collar redneck who goes to destruction derbies and wrestling?
Based on videogames and films, that is kind of doubtful. These day you could write Total War on a potato and get a million pre-orders...
Using different weapons, obviously, such as hands and feet.
Again I saw no point to focus on the conventional (in the sci-fi sense) and common, I wanted to focus on the shocking and surprising, because that can teach something.
Yes, language can be a tool of oppression. It’s the main mechanism of us/them dehumanization. It’s at the border of the socially acceptable and serves as gateway for worse forms of aggression.
Yes, in extreme cases it is true. However, it is precisely those extreme cases that must be about something more important than just status. Merely status-challenging language does not dehumanize. E.g. status-challenging: “X are bad at math”, dehumanizing: “X are murderous animals without conscience”. I don’t think merely status could be a motivation for the later—economics is IMHO more likely.
If you teach your little daughter that women are bad at math, a dozen branches of her possible futures tree are cut off.
Yes. This is a bad thing. This is also not dehumanization nor a gateway for worse aggression. This is something someone would do who would expect to compete with his own daughter in math-related status.
I’m no longer sure we’re talking about the same species here.
When people still fought with arrows and swords genocide was extremely common. The Mongol invasion of China for instance halved the population. The modern world is less violent than at any other time in history, although I admit that there is the potential for things to go very bad very quickly.
I think women do this too.
But there is a gender-reversed version of this too (“you’re reading mech eng? Dyke!”)
Fair enough, expecting all men to be tough isn’t helpful because different people are different.
If capitalism is masculine and redistribution polices are feminine and pacifist then explain why every famous communist I can think of is male, and most of them killed a lot of people.
I’m not saying that this means that basic income is wrong, or will involve killing people (this time it will be different!), just that this is at best a massive oversimplification.
While I agree that men’s instincts are not adapted to the modern world and are not designed so that everyone can live in harmony, nor are women’s instincts. Broadly I quite like your idea of tribes, but the justifications for why this is necessary seem a little dubious.
Because the only communists famous enough for you to think of them (as famous communists) are famous for being in charge of big important countries, and people in charge of big important countries tend to be male and often kill a lot of people.
(Famous communists who so far as I know didn’t kill a lot of people by any reasonable definition include, e.g., Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Plus any number of people who lived in the Soviet bloc and were probably communists but are famous for other things; the USSR produced a lot of people who were famous as chess players, scientists, musicians, etc., but those aren’t so relevant here.)
[EDITED to fix garbled sentence structure.]
This certainly explains the maleness, and admittedly I don’t know what the gender ratio of communist theorists is like. Nevertheless, communist countries have been responsible for a disproportionate number of massacres.
To be fair, I seem to remember that women are more left-wing on average, but the effect size is pretty small. Equally, ‘angry young men’ are often very socialist because they want to ‘fight the power’.
And yes, I’m clearly not saying all communists are killers, that would be crazy. And if you are communist because you live in the Soviet bloc, then that’s due to completely different causal factors.
Stalin isn’t exactly famous for his redistribution policies.
Didn’t he kill thousands of Kulaks while trying to redistribute their wealth? And had the wealth already been redistributed by Lenin?
No, he killed hundreds of thousands of Kulaks while trying to eliminate political opposition.
To be fair, Rosa Luxemburg is a super-famous communist.
I wouldn’t say super-famous exactly.
I saw the thread title and assumed “Maletopia” was a Disney AU fanfic about a perfect society run by rational!Maleficent. Disappointed now.
That depends a lot of how you define unmasculine hair. German hippies male did make choices such as wearing beards.
“That depends a lot of how you define unmasculine hair” It depends on how they defined it, or more narrowly on how they thought others defined it. You can’t rebel against a norm if you don’t believe it to be a norm held by other people, but you can rebel against it even if you don’t think it should even be a norm (why else would you rebel?). So in a sense, perhaps the hippies weren’t trying to be unmanly, but “unmanly”.
I’m not the old that I can tell from my own experience but as far as I can tell few people in Germany would have said that they were rebelling against manliness (Männlichkeit) but rather authority or inequality.
That should be “Mentsch”.
No, it shouldn’t. Yiddish uses . is German, where the word is “Mensch” and doesn’t have the particular connotation.
In that way, it’s very hard to imagine that a clear gender of Mannfolk and a clear gender of Mentsh will form. You do need an overall mainstream for clear categorisation.
Saving this so I can read it after it gets deleted.
Why would it get deleted? Have I violated some rule?
I don’t see any reason why this article would be in danger of being deleted. Also, it is currently upvoted.
Hey, simply because we’re 50 years or so in this whole mess.. why not make a post about girltopia?
I am under-qualified for that one. My best guess would be technology increasing fertility up to 60 or if anything goes in a utopia, to infinity - have a career, then get bored of it and still have time to have kids. Not have to race against the calendar, be able to make these choices at any point in your life basically.
Aside this, and aside complete equality and the lack of gender roles or institutional barrier, I cannot think of anything, because I am a straight man and because I think civilized life is more female-compatible anyhow, even today, even with those barriers and prejudices, because male dreams are often about violence and war and adventure and danger, and female dreams are more of a peaceful, career, politics, art and self-expression, travel, discovery, kids type, and those are easier to satisfy even today. Of course there are many outliers in both genders, this is only a very, very rough heuristic only.
Ah, the sweaty macho fantasyland never gets old. It has been a while since the last time the neoreactionaries posted anything entertaining.
So, after the robots take charge of the cooking and mining and driving and manufacturing, the main occupation you predict humanity will devote itself to will be… breaking each other’s nose.
Woe is us.
This post reminds me of a column penned by Ann Coulter last year, where she criticized soccer because (in her deluded mind) it was not bloody and macho enough (she obviously knows nothing about soccer injuries and soccer fan culture). What social benefit can be gained from legal nose-breaking is beyond my comprehension.
You may have added a little note at the end about how this is supposed to make life more pleasant for literally everyone, but the title of it all is still Maletopia, and your proposals for gender relations are not a Consensus (which would imply common goals), but a Compromise (which presupposes conflict as the default state).
Simply put, in Maletopia it would suck to be a woman. Or a Mentsh, for that matter. (Interestingly, you don’t propose a similar division of genders for women.)
“Taking money not fought for is a cowards’ wage.” So, is it shameful to claim your basic income?
Also, Knight Orders? What’s next, Jedi Councils?
What’s the whole point of turning the world into Maletopia? It’s a boring blend of Jugger with the Society for Creative Anachronism in order to solve a problem that doesn’t even exist.
I see parts of mainstream society are now neoreactionary from your point of view.
1) its safer than illegal underground boxing clubs 2) physical excersize 3) fun
Not all martial arts result in nose-breaking. Grappling is somewhat safer.
But more to the point, we could go through hobbies you enjoy and argue why they should be made illegal. Do you drink? Do drugs? Have promiscuous anal sex? (1) All of these are dangerous, not that making them illegal would actually stop people doing them.
Or maybe you don’t do any of these things. Maybe you live an entirely cerebral life. And that’s ok, but it doesn’t give you the right to look down your nose at sweaty macho people who enjoy sport.
Why? Are you claiming that all women hate martial artists? And its explicitly stated that there are lots of tribes, so those who don’t like it can just leave.
1) not trying to be homophobic here, straight people can have anal sex too
Women would essentially be second-class citizens—after all, they’d be living in a society designed around men’s needs only.
I’m going to make an exception here from my normal practice and speak specifically as a woman: Those raids sound fun! But I’d probably be excluded from most teams. And as far as partners, my ideal partner would be a Mannfolk-type manly-man, who respects me as an equal—something that DeVliegenteHollander doesn’t seem to think exists. (Perhaps he’s right. If so, that might partially explain my series of pathetic failures at romance.)
I can’t speak for what DeVliegenteHollander believes, but he does say:
I got the impression that Maletopia was more of a hobby than a society, but even if it is a society where women are second-class citizens, if there are a million different societies then women who do not want to be treated as second-class citizens can just join egalitopia instead (and for women who do want to be second-class citizens, well, there’s nothing wrong with being a sub).
Women aren’t equal to men in terms of sheer muscle mass, and won’t be until humanity gains mastery over biology. But there are some very skilled female martial artists, and IMO its more interesting to watch a battle of skill than of brute force.
In real life competitive sports are segregated too, apart from tennis and, apparently, Muggle quidditch. But I don’t want to be subject to status quo bias—just because this is the default doesn’t mean its optimal.
Don’t get depressed, few people find romance easy, and there are egalitarian manly men. I know some of them. In many ways I am one of them.
(Not that I’m hitting on you—I don’t know you and you probably live thousands of miles away. Just saying that there’s a lot of different people out there.)
No, the NRx and the machos have overlapping Venn diagrams. Neither one is a subset of the other.
I have nothing against vigorous exercise. I have a lot against trivializing/romanticizing physical harm.
Egalitarian relationships can be expected only from one subset of the available men. The Manfolk tribe isn’t under any social pressure to treat women like sentient beings.
“sweaty macho” does sound like you are looking down your nose at sport in general, although perhaps this was not intentional. Anyway, I too am wary of martial arts that involve taking blows to the head, but I don’t think this provides sufficient justification for legislating against it.
If we extend to being against romanticizing mental/emotional harm too (and I don’t see why we shouldn’t), then we get into arguments over the superhappies from ‘three worlds collide’ and whether its meaningful to experience happiness without sadness.
If women don’t want to interact with Manfolk because they don’t treat women like sentient beings, then this creates social pressure to treat women like sentient beings. OTOH, if women do want to interact with Manfolk, then it would only suck to be a woman if women consistently make choices that make them unhappy, such as the choice to interact with Manfolk. But if women cannot make sensible choices, then they shouldn’t be in egalitarian relationships anyway.
But regardless, your statement conflates ‘Egalitarian relationships’ with ‘treat women like sentient beings’. Adults have dominant relationships over children. Do adults think that children are non-sentient?
Furthermore, you have a really stereotypical view of macho people. I know martial arts people, including one who has been in cagefights, and he is really feminist. (The rest of them are mostly into egalitarian relationships as well, except for a few those who are into consensual BDSM)
OTOH, I’ve only met one person who’s in the army, and he threatened to sexually assault me in my sleep. I’ve heard the hypothosis that 80% of people in the army are sociopaths. But there’s a difference between people who would enjoy ritualised combat in controlled conditions, and people who think that killing sounds like a good career.
I think less than half of the women I’ve dated wanted an egalitarian relationship. And I strongly prefer women who want an egalitarian relationship.
I know little about neoreactionaries but thanks, if you say they have similar ideas I will look them up. So far I have only seen Moldbug mixing libertarianism with feudalism which I did not like because social democracy IMHO works.
What exactly is wrong with breaking each others noise? Assuming a good healthcare system that fixes the damage fast, and administering painkillers quickly after the bout, the cost is a few minutes of pain, and the benefit is excitement, being proud of one’s courage, power trips, so all kinds of neurotransmitter rush. I think this is a good deal.
Of course, it is clear that you basically dislike people who have these kinds of instincts where such calculations yield positive sums, but given that the whole thing has a good enough hormonal and evolutionary basis, it is probably here to stay, and suppressing then, like the pre 1980′s era (the hippie era) has consequences.
Generally speaking every social benefit must end up as a neurotransmitter rush, as some kind of good feelings materializing in the brain, or what else is the use? What would be the point of a utopia where everything would be very “respectable”, yet boring and unsatisfying? To me the questions is simply what kinds of fun or enjoyment should be optimized for, I look at today videogames and movies to see what is popular, and the answer pops out easy.
I don’t see why would it suck to be woman or Mentsch in this Maletopia, I simply have not fleshed out their groups. But the idea is everybody is living in a very safe welfare society, and pursues hobbies in elective communities and groups. I have only fleshed out the groups of Mannfolk. But I have indicated everybody else follows other hobbies and interests in other kinds of groups, what sucks about that? The only reason to call it Maletopia is because the Mannfolk tribes are the only unusual idea about this, otherwise it would be standard sci-fi utopia, so I found it important to direct attention to it.
This is a motivating statement, not a true statement. Do you understand the difference? Some statements have the utility to predict reality, they are called truth, some statements have entirely different utilities, if you just go to getmotivated.reddit.com you can see a lot of statements whose utility is not mainly in their truth value.
Jedi Councils are a cool idea, but they depend on supernatural powers. I borrowed the idea of knightly orders not from historical e.g. Templars who were too monkish, but Dragonlance. Warriors sticking to a clear moral code. The rough idea is to hack certain motivation circuits in the brain. There is this wonderfully circular circuit. Group X is well respected, because they only take up moral people in the group. I need to be a member of that group, because that makes me respected. Hence I need to behave morally. The trick here is, that the prestige of membership of Group X is higher than what individidual morality as such could gain. Thus it is more motivating.
Hm, better write separately about.
The problem to solve is the following: masculine instincts got out of touch with modernity and dangerous. However suppressing them is not a good solution either, a good solution is creating a simulated playground.
I think that most of the time accusations of being “neoreactionary” or “progressive” (or any other political label) simply mean: you expressed ideas that disagree with my political tribe, so I model you as a member of the opposing tribe. Such labels often say more about the people who used them than they say about you. They miss the option of not belonging to any tribe, and simply playing with ideas.
Also, accusing people of belonging to the opposing political tribe is a good excuse for promoting one’s own tribe. Hey, they started first!
I have a different view in this. I think a lot of people don’t fight an opposing tribe, they fight the world, and thus if you are not in the tribe, you are in the world, and as such problematic. Two examples. I know a very conservative guy who really likes Rene Guenon and thinks the whole modern world is rotten. I also know a Marxist who thinks every tradition is a legacy of oppression and injustice of past times, so almost everything should be deleted and started anew. These people, from opposite angles, oppose most of what exists. This is what I mean by fighting the world. Since they fight the world, they are correct assuming that if you are not an ally in it, you are more or less an opponent.
Point taken.
What exactly is wrong with you?
No, that’s golf you’re thinking about.
What games need to feel exciting is creativity. I’ve had sessions of 20 Questions that felt like a massacre.
That’s why tennis begat volleyball.
That would be a huge problem. If you have followed any professional sport, you will know there’s no guarantee that an aggressive player will behave less aggressively in his private life. People (especially your Manfolk) are bad at distinguishing between appropriate and inappropriate social contexts.
If the producers are all robots, whom do you give your money when you buy something? Robots would have no use for it. Instead of a basic income, you could simply give people the food and save the extra step of purchase.
You have not made a convincing case that doing away with aggressive impulses would be harmful. Why? What’s so good and necessary about machismo?
“People (especially your Manfolk) are bad at distinguishing between appropriate and inappropriate social contexts.” Is there evidence for this concerning either people in general or people who take part in combat sports in particular?
“What games need to feel exciting is creativity.” Why do you believe this to be true for everyone? Are people psychologically constrained somehow to be excited exclusively by creativity?
Head protection was included in the article precisely for this reason.
Creativity does not simulate war, a warrior’s life, thus dues not channel aggressive or power-oriented instincts. Thus you get the same problem as today, these instincts get bottled up then expressed as e.g. joining right-wing extremist groups.
Look at these guys: http://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2014/jul/18/skinhead-fascists-italy-photography-paolo-marchetti
This is bad. This is really bad. But this happened because they have these instinct like I want to be a tribal warrior, and did not get any proper avenues to vent them.
My deal to people like you is the following: I save you from men like those in the article. As long as they exist and do not find a proper avenue to vent their instincts, they will join extremist groups and be a constant danger for democracy. I will put them into an SPQR team-MMA group and set up matches (raids) against culturally opposing ones, and they will expend all their energies there and will never think about entering politics. Do you see why it is advantageous for you?
No guarantee, but look at it this way. Only a minority of them did anything wrong. However if e.g. Tyson was not recruited into boxing or military or something similar, maybe a bodyguard, he would guaranteed to become a career criminal because a normal job would be just boring for him. On the whole, it reduced total amounts of violence.
Oh, that is solvable. Rituals. Triggers. It’s a basic Pavlov’s dog thing. Bell rings, saliva comes.
However if you don’t do this, they will go for inappropriate social contexts all the time.
Now I am a bit confused what your life experience may be. Do you think people purchase exactly the same goods? You haven’t seen people with expensive shoes but drinking cheap wine or vice versa?
Your theory about the origin of aggressiveness puts more weight on the genes; mine puts more weight on the culture. You work from the assumption that aggressiveness is an instinct; I have found it’s more a personal choice, related to each person’s degree of maturity and empathy. Obviously we will look for solutions in opposite poles.
Well...
In the utopia where I’m absolute dictator, liquors are illegal.
But in the utopia where I can expect some people to actually want to live, an apple is an apple. This means there should be no status marks linked to basic goods, so the bread I get should not be fancier than the bread you get. The same goes for clothes and housing. This allows for universal basic income to be given in the form of basic goods; if, after being fed by the state, you still want caviar, then you have to work extra to pay for it.
I think I should post my utopia in the Discussion board too. But LW would collapse in laughter.
You do know that this is a controversial topic since at least 1963 when Konrad Lorentz published his On Aggression, right? If you want to talk about theories it’s a good habit to be aware of existing literature :-/
If you want to talk about books it’s a good habit to check they’re not outdated.
Well, at least you’re being internally consistent.
This is a good and interesting discussion, finally. Upvoted.
First of all—my main point is that aggressiveness is not simply a bad thing. It is certainly dangerous. It is arguable whether it is a net negative, but it also has good aspects, or, to put differently, it is caused by things that have other effects and some of those are good, and removing the roots of aggressiveness would also remove them.
Second—aggressiveness is not really well defined term. Let’s see two examples. Let’s look at a fair and equal fight, duel-like, even with weight classes like boxing, and obviously a voluntary one. The other example is simply beating up someone who is defenseless, a victim, out of hatred.
The two things are IMHO very different and hardly ever connected. The second type aims to cause harm, the weaker and more defenseless the victim is the better. The first type looks for challenge: in the first type of encounter if the opponent is defensless or bad at defending himself the whole thing becomes boring and pointless.
So the difference is rather huge and it is not the same thing. The issue is, humanist intellectuals who hate both types tend to conflate them. I am not sure you do. I am sure Erich Fromm did conflate them in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness which is a textbook case of how to miss this kind of point.
We really need different terms for this, as I obviously endorse only of the first. The first is more of a more intense version of competition and dominance, really a more intense form of volleyball. The second is something much more evil.
The first is lot like challenging each other to a test: if I tried to do the second on you, could you defend yourself? The second is largely outgroup, it is a destroy-the-enemy ethos. The first is closer to an in-group dominance fight, more of a let’s see who is boss around here. (At this point I admit the confusion that I modeled the first type, but between out-groups, but what else can I do? )
I would not collapse in laughter. A form of communist puritanism has a certain appeal to me, but probably for the wrong reasons: it channels status-seeking to more excitingly aggressive forms. It is, quite literally, Sparta.
You say aggressiveness
What are those other effects, both good and not?
I wouldn’t be so sure about it. All it takes is one charismatic political leader that can get their sympathies… for example because he also is a good sportsman in their team.
But yeah, it is better if they have also other things they can turn their attention to.
DeVliegendeHollander, might you be a variant of a concern troll?
TLDR.
If “homophobia” derives from a crude empirical observation that a “gay germ” can infect young boys, stunt their development and turn them into gay adults, then it deserves more respect than it gets in modern culture.
I find it strange that today’s secular people will defend the rationality of biblical injunctions about isolating lepers from the community and not eating pork, but they call the ones about putting to death the men who lay with men “ignorance” and “superstition.”
I think that claims of the form “This is what you should eat” are held to a lower standard than “This is who you should kill.” Does that seem unreasonable to you?
Who said anything about killing anybody.
There is a lot of evidence about where gays live from dating sites, for instance. I dunno if any of it is available to scientists, but nevertheless I would expect to see some evidence of outbreak clusters. Please link to your empirical evidence.
Even if this is true, would it not be more proportional to bar gay adults from jobs which involve contact with children, rather than having them all killed?
This post has gone from −4, 0% positive to 8, 64% positive since I last looked at it. This is suspicious in and of itself. But you are literally calling for the murder of several million men in the US alone. Since when did advocating holocausts gain upvotes?
I think there may be an NRx upvote brigade around.
Also, isn’t advocating any sort of violence, especially holocaust-level mass murder, against the site rules?
This is recently a repeating pattern.
I consider it much less harmful than strategic downvoting of opponents (at least the innocent bystanders don’t get caught in the crossfire), but I would prefer if people who get negative feedback learned from it, instead of organizing an upvote brigade.
The line between “I upvote this comment because I like it” and “I upvote this comment because it comes from my tribe” is very thin, sometimes invisible, because people usually do genuinely like comments expressing the ideas of their tribe. I just hope that individuals who prefer to read this website will realize that the absence of tribality is what contributes to its quality.
The proper solution for having a website that follows the values of some tribe is to create another website. It is not impossible to create another website that rationalists will read: see Slate Star Codex. Unless you expect that rationalists would not be interested in reading a website of your tribe. In which case it shouldn’t be a surprise that they are also not interested in reading the same kind of content on LessWrong.
Its more than this—if people don’t realise that upvote brigades exist (probably using sockpuppets) then it gives the impression that a substantial proportion of LWers endorse mass murder.
Also, Ozy’s blog has unmoderated discussion where advocating genocide is ok, there’s ‘more right’ etc.
Additionally if you look at advancedatheist’s profile he is close to straddling 50% upvotes vs downvotes, as do an extremely large fraction of his posts as you would expect from the upvote brigade going until they just barely cancel out the downvotes, and the upvotes always come after the downvotes. Observed many times myself with things id responded to thatd gone heavily invisible universally negative going to roundabout plus 3 or 4 and then staying there as the percent positive edges ever closer to 50 percent and the inferred number of votes climbs. Id call the existence of said upvote brigade pretty much an established fact. Then combine it with AA’s habit of injecting non sequiter references to popular nrx pua etc brigade topics where they make zero sense to bring up… AA and friends are trolling us. I estimate that at least a quarter and possibly more than a third his posts in the last few months exhibit this behavior at some point, though its difficult to find a good sampling because of the way downvoted comments disappear from user pages and some of the brigaded posts subsequently slip down.
Edit: further brigade evidence. I got a mass downvote blast spread across many posts in November shortly after calling Anissimov on some of his bullshit (in one of my most upvoted comments of all time).
Yeah, I am starting to think AA sounds more like an insane troll caricature of NRx. What I find disappointing is that AA is doing this using the same username as he uses for posting actual useful stuff about cryonics and life extention, cos he has to realise he’s making these areas look bad by association. (I really don’t like guilt by association, but the halo effect is a thing) Its certainly not helping NRx either, cos firstly getting caught using upvote brigades shows they can’t win a fair argument and secondly getting caught using upvote brigades shows they are incompetent enough to get caught.
Was that when I said it was bizzare that Anissimov regards transexuals (0.1% of the population) to be a threat, he denied this was his attitude, I apologised, and then you argued that he had been trying to expel Justine Tunney from NRx because she’s trans, and a massive argument developed?
Huh, that was you. That was the time yes, though I was more reacting to him saying something along the lines of ‘when have I ever spoken about the dangers of gays and transsexuals’ and I did a google search and found a very clear example example in literally 20 seconds that I linked to and quoted and got upvoted for, and me being irritated at the fact that he was misdirecting people in a hilariously obvious fashion by using that controversy that I still don’t quite understand to give false impressions about and misrepresent himself and his posse. I gave very nearly zero shits about the particular internal controversy, though its far from clear to me how anyone can read anything from that guy and come to a different conclusion especially considering you can’t trust him to talk about himself accurately.
I do know that disgust with that whole thread and the people that cropped up both there and all over other comment threads shortly thereafter significantly increased the length of time my sabbatical from this site for the purposes of manuscript writing lasted. Took people talking big bang cosmology to tempt me back.
This happens with most of AdvancedAtheist’s trollish comments. They get downvoted then eventually quickly upvoted back to 0 or 1. It’s been noticed before (just check recent open threads.) My guess is he is self-upvoting with sockpuppets.
He didn’t literally call for the murder of anybody. He’s claiming that there’s a logical inconsistency in giving people 3000 years ago credit for the rationality of their views on lepers and pork, but condemning them for having irrational views on homosexuality. I think. Or he’s arguing that tolerating gay adults does or may make it more likely for children to become gay, and so while we might criticize their values, we shouldn’t engage in the routine practice of calling people “ignorant” because they disagree with our values.
It’s not inconsistent to acknowledge the occasional rightness of a stopped clock.
It’s inconsistent to call ideas about the transmission of homosexuality “superstition” because they turned out to be wrong (if they did; I don’t know the research), yet not call ideas about the transmission of leprosy “superstition”, just because they turned out to be right. The people at that time had roughly equal reason to believe either proposition. Detection of the transmission of leprosy is extremely hard to detect, so much so that for much of the 20th century, doctors said it was not transmissible.
I think his claim is that people are illicitly labeling people who disagree with their values as irrational.
Ok, so to be logically consistent, if your values are that homosexuality is as bad as leprosy (!) and you believe its contagious, then you isolate the homosexuals, you don’t kill them.
So… he’s claiming that the only logically consistent position is that people are right about everything or wrong about everything?
He could have said something about homosexuality being a sin, or wrong, or against his values. He didn’t. He said:
Maybe strictly speaking this isn’t an explicit call for murder, but it does seem implicit.
Incidentally, I would also be opposed to the murder of lepers, despite the fact that leprosy does objectively exist.
To make it absolutely clear, I am not bothered by the hypothesis that homosexuality is caused by pathogens, not that I think its particularly plausible. I just think that trying to fight the spread of a hypothetical non-lethal disease by murdering millions of people is … words fail me.
Even if it’s caused by a microorganism and is somehow contagious, the value judgement implied in calling those affected “stunted” is a separate issue.