Females being hoodwinked into thinking motherhood and family raising isn't the ultimate goal in life is one of the greatest blunders of modernity. Idiots are pissing away the greatest gift to be able to say they have "personal freedom", and work some dumb job.
Human extinction for the win. I don't think that'll ever happen because we'll never have a utopia where the entire world is post patriarchy but if it went that way, then fuck it. We are dying out.
Zooming out on Jordan Peterson's views, you might say a "warning" emerges. I think JP believes that all persuasive ideologies are as-such tight, internally logical, linguistic games. Language represents life, and is not life itself. In fact, language is as dead as dead can be.
When you make an argument that in the end leads to us questioning whether or not we are ok with human beings going extinct, you have crossed into anti-social reasoning. It is no longer a question of it being right or wrong, as it's goal is to provoke existential dread and submission (so, living human --> language --> understanding --> dead human).
It's like when someone says "we are JUST chemicals and brain signals." It's a statement of biological fact, a description, but it contains a connotation. And that connotation is suicidal. It proves itself "wrong" because it's conclusion maps onto meaninglessness itself.
When ideas map onto meaninglessness they are by definition nihilistic. Presenting arguments towards these ends makes MASSIVE assumptions about what human beings CAN know (currently, or ever). They are to be rejected on their face, and the person presenting it needs to humble themselves, and and re-orient their position.
Women can by far most likely be persuaded for their own interests (which would naturally include many of our own) to reproduce. One reason is extinction likely causes them terror too.
If they could not then a hard question of force vs extinction would require a lot of painful theorising. I answered forced. However this could be done through artificial means — isn’t that actually men’s real fear for the future? Luckily I already practically live that humiliation.
Anyway! If we really wanted to partially solve the population crisis I think we need to make Ozempic far more available.
Lastly Max, I would also be enraged by my girlfriend not consenting to children…
And if we do answer this, will there be any real engagement with the counter hypothetical?
Or will you admit this was a fat resentful questatement from the start?
Because a real contention with more than a hypothetical you conveniently agree with is the kind of expectation I've come to have for a thought provoking, controversial, and honest 'content' creator such as yourself.
I don't agree with the hypothetical, I don't really know. I don't think "what women actually want" is able to be defined. The point of the hypothetical is to make you think about what you would do if it could be defined.
I'd rather humanity go extinct than force women to make babies.
But I think the reason why people seemingly don't want to engage with this is because it rests upon a lot of assumptions, mainly "Birth rate is negatively correlated with female education, wealth, and IQ."
Even though this is clearly true right now, I'm not convinced it always will be. Maybe today's smarter women think it's a bad idea to have kids. But if we lived in the Star Trek utopia where the Replicator has solved all material needs, would they feel the same way?
Even if nothing changes and women don't want to make babies, there are solutions outside of coercion. The most obvious solution is to just subsidize it; put a ton of government funding into supporting new mothers. Or maybe we invent artificial wombs and make it a job to raise children. Maybe 5% of the population loves raising children and can make that their career, and they'd be really good at it
There is a dark timeline where we start forcing women to give birth to keep the human race alive. But I have enough faith in humanity that I don't believe we'll end up there
It's a tough choice to choose to coerce women instead of human extinction. I still chose coerce women because I'm imagining that we wont have to coerce that much to make women willing to prolong the human race. Coercing women to have babies doesn't seem that bad especially in comparison to extinction. I dont think that means I dont believe in womens autonomy. I think it just simply means extinction is worse. Its because I believe in womens autonomy that the hypothetical question is disturbing to consider.
If men gave birth instead of women, then women would be more willing to have casual sex because they wouldn’t have to deal with pregnancy. If men in this alternate world had the same novelty-seeking, high sex drive, and penchant for risky behavior, this would probably lead to more risky sex and unintended pregnancies. The question is whether the increase in pregnancies would be paired with an equal rise in abortions, or if there would simply be far more neglected and abandoned children around.
The fact that 37% of readers picked the coercion scenario is baffling to me. Thank fuck I was born a man because if I was a woman I would probably be some kind of murderous misandrist.
To everyone who picked coercion...
This isn’t some cataclysmic extinction where you and your loved ones die early, it’s slow, quiet, and non-violent. Nobody is really suffering. In the other scenario, we’re enslaving half the population… for what? So strangers you’ll never meet can be born? So you can have a son at your wife’s expense, or a daughter who will inevitably hate you for bringing her into a dystopian hell world where she's used as breeding stock? Do you REALLY want that?
Is that really preferable to just living life normally with the slightly disquieting knowledge that humanity will die out later on? Who fucking cares? Actually, caring is fine, but caring enough that you'd subjugate half the population to prevent it is insane and sociopathic.
Keep in mind the 'coercion' in question is all of natural history up until now. Everything and every current day society besides modern lonely, suicidal, and depressed western culture was the so called 'subjugation'.
Rebuilding a culture that doesn't hate itself, family, and anything short of passively or actively ending its own existence is unthinkable 'sociopathy'.
I've been left extremely disgruntled by traditional social dynamics and have longed for true social and economic equality between men and women since I was a child, so I think my position remains unchanged.
If I was given the option to revert social/economic dynamics to ~2007 (last year of replacement birth rates) to save us from extinction, would I? I don't know.
Keeping half the population under your thumb and incentivizing them to do something they don't want to do is sociopathic subjugation.
It feels like you're obfuscating Max's hypothetical and are defining toxic modern society as causing women to not want kids (if that wasn't your intention I apologize) but in Max's hypothetical they literally do not want kids without coercion.
It depends on what these hypothetical carrots would be. I can't really think of any that wouldn't be taking advantage of women financially or otherwise.
I don't get why you lumped my comment with the ones that tried to avoid the hypothetical. I understand what you're asking and I even answered it in the reply. But do you honestly not understand why I'm surprised at your position on this? Didn't you quote some feminist that said she'd rather be raped over and over than die or something along those lines and said that's how you feel too? Do you genuinely not see why I am surprised that you're ok with giving women veto on the existence of the species? Maybe life would not and could not exist without rape. In that case being anti-rape means being anti-life. If that's your position that's fine, I'm just surprised.
Yes, I would rather be raped than die, but we're not talking about my death.
"Do you genuinely not see why I am surprised that you're ok with giving women veto on the existence of the species?"
I am okay with that, but that isn't the point of the posts. My point is that you can't claim you believe in bodily autonomy for women and then also claim that women do not have veto power over the existence of the species, which is dependent on them having sex.
The two values of "I want the human race to survive no matter what" and "I am a progressive" are in conflict.
You wrote: "Maybe life would not and could not exist without rape. In that case being anti-rape means being anti-life. If that's your position that's fine, I'm just surprised."
This isn't a position. You just posed your own hypothetical and the necessary logical conclusion one must reach. Again, my position isn't that life can't exist without rape, my position is that this MUST BE CONSIDERED by anyone claiming to be a progressive.
Even though I was raised by liberal parents I don't think I ever self identified as a feminist. So considering this hypothetical doesn't challenge my identity or world view. But I think my answer does mean that I'm not just not a feminist but I'm anti-feminist.
I was thinking I'd be interested in you talking to actual feminists about this. But I'm assuming they'd either say yes to extinction right away, at which point I don't I don't know what else you'd talk about, especially since presumably you share their stance. Or they'd avoid acknowledging the hypothetical and you'd just make them squirm until they would inevitable leave the call.
I think it's probably better for me to talk to someone who is thinking it through for themselves and doesn't have a commercial interest in having zero ambivalence. So a conversation with a branded "feminist" or someone from any political group is always going to become about me trying to force them to admit they have mixed feelings.
You don't really talk to political streamers anymore so that's out. I enjoyed your talks with Tomás Bogardus and Holly Lawford-Smith. But I think Holly does actual feminist advocacy and activism so I guess that's a no. Maybe it could make for an interesting discussion with Tomás. I think I remember him taking the position that using contraception to prevent pregnancy is immoral or wrong. Although I'm certain I'm doing a disservice to whatever his actual argument was.
But honestly it just feels like you're in a totally different place now so maybe the only thing that makes sense is confronting your audience with things like this.
The quote you're referencing [shortened] is "I would rather be raped a thousand times than fight to the death"
Nobody is being killed in this hypothetical scenario. Creating life will not prolong yours and it will not save you from dying.
Everyone in the extinction scenario is still living out their lives as normal. In the forced procreation scenario half the population is being enslaved, raped, and tortured constantly.
Yea, that's the quote. And phrased like that it could even imply that she would rather be raped than kill her rapist which goes even further than I thought. But going back to the original hypothetical, would I personally be willing and able to rape a woman if that was the only way to continue the existence of humanity? I don't know, maybe not. But the response to all women getting together and collectively declaring that they don't actually want to have children and that it's time for humanity to go extinct is not "Ok". It's "No, you don't get to make that choice." So I guess I'd rather try to make rape as pleasant as possible than let this be the way we go extinct. Or maybe not, I'm not really sure. But mrgirl's seeming lack of ambivalence on this feels surprising, especially considering how he feels about abortion. Because in a way this could be considered an extension of that debate.
Do you honestly have no or a negligible emotional response to the thought of our species going extinct?
Can you give an explanation as to why a slow, non-violent, suffering free human extinction via infertility would be bad enough to justify mass rape and forced birth? I care about people who actually exist, not unborn future people who will functionally not exist from my perspective since I'll be dead anyways.
I'd rather just live out the rest of my days with my wife (who actually loves me because I didn't rape her) knowing that humanity will die out not long after I pass instead of taking part in mass enslavement and subjugation of women.
I do actually want kids but not enough to take part in psycho shit. The only time I'd ever rape (or sign off on someone else raping) a woman is to save myself or my loved ones from dying or being raped themselves.
I have an extremely negative emotional reaction to the idea of an asteroid hitting Earth and wiping us out (me and my loved ones would die) but everyone signing off on not having kids? Honestly, not really. I have a pretty visceral reaction to the coercion hypothetical.
What do you mean why do they not get to make that choice? Because choosing extinction feels like an unacceptable choice to me, even if it is the inevitable outcome of all life. I'm assuming you don't want to get murdered. But why? If death is inevitable why does it matter how you die?
If women decided that they're prepared to fight to the death in order to not carry and birth children and the only way to propagate the species is brutal mass rape I don't think I'd be able to participate in that. The thought of it alone makes me feel sick. But the thought of women deciding they no longer wish to participate in propagating the species and me simply being ok with it fills me with the same existential dread I feel when I think about killing myself or dying in general.
I think women should *obviously* have veto power over the continuation of the species; Having unilateral control over reproduction is the only thing that can possibly compensate us for having to suffer the burden of reproduction. It’s the necessary other side of the coin. What would even be the point of perpetuating the species if half of the species is reduced to livestock? The ‘mass rape’ version of humanity *should* go extinct! They would be made up of half rapist psychopaths and half degraded slaves. Why would that version of humanity be worth perpetuating? I say, nuke them from orbit!
I don't know what else to say except that I don't feel that giving women unilateral power to unleash nuclear holocaust on world is acceptable. I know that's not literally what you're saying or what the hypothetical is but it's starting to feel like that's what the position is. If this is actually how women feel we can figure out some sort of artificial womb system or some other way to bring new people into the world that frees women from that responsibility. But until that becomes a reality some of you will have to say yes to getting pregnant. The one thing that is required for a functional society is that it continues to exist.
We're already in this weird situation where the first world nations are supplementing the declining birthrates by importing immigrants from the developing world. And in that sense it's actually in the first world's interest to not have the rest of the world actually develop. I'd a 100% rather do pro-natalism propaganda and make policies that make having children desirable rather than whatever the fuck we're doing now.
I don't want to get murdered or die early because I want to live and have an extreme aversion to dying like most people. In either scenario I'll likely live a full life but in the coercion scenario I'd be constantly wracked with grief and anger as opposed to the extinction scenario where I'd be pensive at times but overall my life wouldn't change that much. Quality of life will be higher for me and I assume basically everyone in the extinction scenario and I don't care what happens after I die (because I'm dead)
I understand why the thought makes you feel uncomfortable (even if I don't relate) I just don't see why you'd be okay with coercion to prevent what is basically just a mental affliction that would probably be much more tolerable than enabling/participating in mass rape.
Extinction won't directly effect you either whereas coercion will be causing the suffering of billions of women + likely destroying any true love/intimacy you could have with women assuming you're not already in a relationship and have kids (and even then, your wife who already has 1-2 kids might not want more)
It just feels like you're saying you'd be willing to coerce (I'm saying coerce instead of rape here because you said you probably wouldn't be down with actual violent rape) women into having kids to ease your existential dread, which seems kind of asshole-ish.
Think about what Max says in the article about men giving birth instead of women. If genitals switched tomorrow and in this hypothetical men didn't want to have kids, wouldn't you just.... say no? Would YOU be willing to have your autonomy violated to ease that existential dread? Would you take that futanari dick balls deep and get pregnant? What about the knowledge that if you refuse they'll just do it anyways?
“Refusing to consider whether we are coercing women into motherhood is the same as choosing to do it.”
This line is what finally unlocked my understanding of this whole thing. My previous comments weren’t avoiding answering because it makes me uncomfortable. I just found the debate around what causes low birth rates more interesting. But this is also interesting.
I think the answer to that consideration is yes. Because all human relationships involve coercion, do they not? The way we court each other often involves manipulation, outright deception, and even chemical abuse as well. All to make the development of a relationship easier for ourselves. We lie about who we are to one another, or at the very least obscure ourselves and our true feelings because it’s scary, and it can feel easier to get what we want from the other person with lies and coercion than with the truth and vulnerability.
As men, being the one burdened with initiation 9/10, where do we approach women? Where we are often encouraged to try to approach women? School and work. Two places where women are forced to be. Bars. Where women are chemically altered and you can alter yourself to be more aggressive and less inhibited. So obviously the answer is yes, that women are coerced into sex which is an extension of motherhood. We have likely designed pillars of society around trying to lubricate this process.
As someone with the admittedly horrible character flaw of lying and being manipulative, can I really say that I would choose to stop coercing women? It’s easy for me to say I would choose human extinction over coercing women into motherhood, because I don’t really care if humans go extinct. I also don’t have a desire for children at the moment. But if I dig a layer deeper under the hypothetical. I have already made use of coercion with women to get what I want. And I have benefitted from the ways society coerces them to be around me. So would I really be willing to give up coercing women? It would mean I would have to be exposed and vulnerable with them instead. And I must admit that truly is an uncomfortable thought.
If "all human relationships involve coercion," then why not take the position "coercing women into sex is fine"? Why does it have to be tied to the outcome of human survival if you're willing to accept coerciveness, period?
Maybe hitting on women in bars is wrong, too. It fucking IS! Maybe that's the next essay...
To the reader of either of these essays, the author is manipulative at worse and self-deceptive at best. In American culture today, there's a rat race between creators of a certain stripe to build a cult of personality. Each in-groups's definition of intelligence is manipulated, from the trumpian "Donald Trump's playing 4D Chess", to Destiny's "Oh so you're saying he shouldn't be mean on twitter?" as he sics his audience on his critics.
The rancid hypothetical strips away nuance; people's unwillingness to engage with the hypothetical isn't stupidity as the author of these posts insinuates but it's because the hypothetical is both too fantastical and because the premise is anti-woman insofar as to how MrGirl misconstrues women and womanhood.
To the casual reader of either of these articles: The author's intent isn't to put forth an interesting hypothetical, but strip away the complex layers of this situation to set you, as a reader, on a treadmill and attach to you a carrot while MrGirl threatens you with a stick. The carrot is not hating women, the stick is being stupid and/or misogynistic for not engaging with his stripped-from-truth hypothetical as he wants you to.
You have an inner voice, an inner semblance of people and reality and if you have managed to break free from the vortex of admiration or parasociality that are a feature (and a dime a dozen, frankly) that these influencers are trying to pull you into, you did have a sense that the hypothetical is asinine. Listen to your inner voice and don't get shamed by the author of this post.
The purpose of hypotheticals is to evidentiate a truth, a point that is hidden or otherwise obsfuscated. The hypothetical originally proposed leaves you with no recourse but to admit rape is fundamentally wrong, and worse than extinction. Very deep.
I hope you can see that this essay you just read, just now, that the jig is up. The true purpose of the essay is the following.
MrGirl wants you to think how he thinks, he wants you to engage with his writings how he demands and any other sentiment or added commentary is met with the stick:
You are stupid. You did have breakfast this morning.
If you weren't stupid you would have said rape is wrong and left it at that, wouldn't you?
If you were smart you would think MrGirl is smart, right? This parasitic nu-influencer idiosyncratic trend is yet another artifact of American culture and it's narcissocratic tendencies. Insist that you're smart enough, and it becomes truth. Insist that you're the most humble, the most open minded, the least corrupt, the biggest, and people will believe it. Like an used car salesman, persuasion makes you believe that a piece of junk is worth buying.
I hope you, as a reader, can see how all these complex layers about this particular issue could be more gracefully written, or a hypothetical better constructed to include the human parts around this issue... if that's what MrGirl cared about.
He wants you to be stupid and he wants to be smart. And if you're not stupid he will twist the definition of it. Hypotheticals are a pretext: your mind is a resource and PLEASE, please take the incentive to engage -exactly- as he wants you to. Otherwise, well, you would be a misogynist or a moron, wouldn't you? You don't want to be that. You could agree with MrGirl to escape your moronhood, what a relief!
The true irony of this post is that the hypothetical posited that women's free will and their engagement with motherhood ought to be respected even at the expense of humanity, but your negative engagement with MrGirl's words is truly intolerable: he will leverage his self-appointed position as an erudite, as a writer, as a community leader, and you as the readily open-minded reader to coerce you into thinking in the same flow, manner, and way he wants you to.
I think it is an interesting and pertinent hypothetical, and something that I hadn’t honestly considered before. I don’t understand your response at all, or why you feel compelled to address his audience in this way. This seems like an odd response.
1) My reply is directed at people who have a sense that the hypothetical is asinine and wanted to speak against it. I am protesting MrG shaming/coercing such people with the carrot/stick dichotomy. You don't think the hypothetical is asinine, you hadn't considered rape/coercion is worse than protecting abstract ideals (future of humanity) before. My reply isn't directed at you. It is good the hypothetical made you realize abstract ideals should not override female autonomy.
2) The subtext of MrG's essay is shaming people who protest the hypothetical on it's grounds.
3) You are saying that the hypothetical isn't asinine (it's interesting and pertinent) because of it's usefulness to you as an individual, rather than the grounds for the hypothetical. If I deem a light bulb shitty because it flickers, but you don't deem it so because you can use it as makeshift pipe to smoke meth out of, there's no reasonable (or non-controlling) way I can wrestle with your private thoughts, definitions of pertinence & interests, and ideas (nor should anyone). You got utility of the light bulb.
4) I feel compelled to address his audience in this way because I believe MrGirl is compulsively manipulative, condescending, coercive, and abusive of his (admitted measly) influence on his audience. In other words, I think he is doing something wrong.
I don’t have a problem using social coercion in certain contexts, some level is unavoidable. ‘We live in a society’ and all that…
I do have a problem when it is pitted against bodily autonomy.
I don’t think MrG’s social coercion of ‘shame’ in an essay rises to the level of manipulation or coercion that you seem to imply. Nor do I think it indicates hypocrisy or blind cultism on my part to find it acceptable.
But by definition, cultists don’t know they are cultists, so who knows. Perhaps you are right. But I don’t think so.
The second essay's justification for shaming people was disagreeing with MrGirl. Critics have a distaste for how the hypothetical was constructed (and wasn't constructed).
This is not an acceptable context to shame people and coerce them to change their mind unless you are in fact cultist.
'Bodily autonomy' in the context of the hypothetical proposed is thought-related. Women wouldn't be raped-raped but instead 'coerced' with guilt that humanity is going extinct. The coercion is not physical but cognitive, leveraging guilt/shame to override personal consent.
Thought-coercion is correlated to bodily-autonomy. When a wimpy husband nags at his wife for not putting out for 6 months, he's coercing her even if she agrees. When Harvey Weinstein asks politely for his lead actress to have sex, he is coercing her even if she agrees. When a man flashes a knife to a woman in an alley, it is coercive even if she agrees (among many other things). If humanity asked women to breed because otherwise humanity goes extinct, it is coercive, even if they agree.
This demonstrates the point: psychological coercion negates meaningful consent, thereby violating a person's bodily autonomy. The distinction between physical and non-physical force becomes less relevant when the will of the individual is subverted.
When MrG uses shame as a stick to coerce his community, while the effects of bodily-autonomy are not immediately apparent it nevertheless uses the same mechanism to coerce people which is wrong, unless you don't care about the process and only about the outcome. Which would mean that you would be in favor of coercing women to have sex if the outcome was justified, it's just that you don't think human extinction is justified or something.
There's a story about a man in america that committed suicide because he couldn't fight in ww2. He was coerced by society, he was shamed by propaganda and society.
This is why shaming people into thinking differently and agree with you is wrong and why I think you either don't believe in the thesis, you don't understand it, you'd agree with coercing women (but disagree with the outcome) or your intent is to defend MrG and your inner voice and thoughts are secondary to the cult of personality (as all cults of personality are).
This behavioral-flow exponentially multiplies in malice when you coerce people through shame people from a position of leadership or influence, however small the influence is.
Your co worker telling you to twerk for him is different than if your boss did it.
Employing shame as a persuasive tactic is ethically indefensible (otherwise you think destiny and Dr.K are justified since the positive outcomes outweight their negatives). When wielded from a position of authority, its capacity for harm increases significantly, transforming persuasion into a form of oppression.
I invite you not to avoid this argument via minimizing it and think about it for a couple of days. It's going to be extremely tempting to let your lizard brain speak.
1) I think those same people you directed your comment at may not have considered MrG’s hypothetical as fully as you. I think there are many subtle ways this concept permeates how we construct our society and think about one another.
Good for you for having already realized this; I don’t think I had fully confronted it. Had the post not been a black-and-white hypothetical, forcing me to engage with the actual point, I may have tried to wriggle out with technicalities as other commenters have. I am glad he put ‘manipulative’ guardrails on it so I had to engage with the point.
I don’t see the need for a meta-comment warning others about how to engage with the post. Why can’t they just engage and make up their own opinion, especially if they may get something out of it as I have?
2) Many people were using assumed subtext to avoid actually engaging with the nuts and bolts of his hypothetical. This may have been because the original essay was poorly worded/formatted/argued. Or it may be that people were uncomfortable engaging with the question he raises. Either way, I think an explicit restating of the key points was necessary for people to actually confront his hypothetical, and I don’t see the issue in the ‘shaming’ attitude of the piece.
Also, since MrG posed the original hypothetical, I think it fine that he has extra ‘authorial leeway’ to define and frame the hypothetical to properly communicate his point. I think defining such efforts as manipulative/coercive may be fine, but I think it is at an acceptable level for the sake of communicating ideas.
3) See (1); just as you can’t judge the utility of the post for me and I can’t for you, I feel that you are too hastily dismissing it as possibly useful or interesting for others.
If I was MrGirl I would reply to you with a snarky image of Ed Kemper with a text bubble that reads "But I didn't have breakfast this morning."
You justify social coercion (shame) of people if you agree with the abstract ideal (the hypothetical raises a truth that people are uncomfortable engaging with) — which is a rose-tinted glasses re-framing rather than an ideal —, so we ought to shame people who think differently with a punchy second essay.
I can tell that now that you don't even truly believe/understand the thesis of the hypothetical you're pretending to defend; you are engaging in the manner in which the hypothetical was meant to scorn. Fraying at the edges of the hypothetical, for you, might be a pretext and a proxy for the narcissocratic game (the unintended true purpose of the second essay) I briefly mentioned where you're the sucker.
You are defending MrGirl from criticism.
I take what I said before about my reply not being to you back, now that I understand.
You are in fact the type of susceptible audience member I was trying to reach. You are using your reason to dig deeper in the sand trap and the more I reason with you on your terms, the more you use me as a proxy to further dig your heels in the sand.
I don't know how to make people stuck in the sandtrap consider where they are standing but reason isn't it. Audiences and cults of personalities think with their lizard brain, throwing dynamite on the sandtrap is the only way. Throwing a vine is met with anger and apathy.
womens bodies want more mrgirl merch in womens size please :)
Females being hoodwinked into thinking motherhood and family raising isn't the ultimate goal in life is one of the greatest blunders of modernity. Idiots are pissing away the greatest gift to be able to say they have "personal freedom", and work some dumb job.
"I think it would drop precipitously" - No shit. Males didn't evolve with mothering instincts. This is dull.
Human extinction for the win. I don't think that'll ever happen because we'll never have a utopia where the entire world is post patriarchy but if it went that way, then fuck it. We are dying out.
Overpopulation is a problem. Look into climate doomerism, neo-Malthusianism, collapse theory. Basically we're fucked.
The climate denialism and population is a myth stuff are insane as far as I can tell.
This is exactly what Peterson tried to warn us about..
What do you mean by "warn"?
Zooming out on Jordan Peterson's views, you might say a "warning" emerges. I think JP believes that all persuasive ideologies are as-such tight, internally logical, linguistic games. Language represents life, and is not life itself. In fact, language is as dead as dead can be.
When you make an argument that in the end leads to us questioning whether or not we are ok with human beings going extinct, you have crossed into anti-social reasoning. It is no longer a question of it being right or wrong, as it's goal is to provoke existential dread and submission (so, living human --> language --> understanding --> dead human).
It's like when someone says "we are JUST chemicals and brain signals." It's a statement of biological fact, a description, but it contains a connotation. And that connotation is suicidal. It proves itself "wrong" because it's conclusion maps onto meaninglessness itself.
When ideas map onto meaninglessness they are by definition nihilistic. Presenting arguments towards these ends makes MASSIVE assumptions about what human beings CAN know (currently, or ever). They are to be rejected on their face, and the person presenting it needs to humble themselves, and and re-orient their position.
Women can by far most likely be persuaded for their own interests (which would naturally include many of our own) to reproduce. One reason is extinction likely causes them terror too.
If they could not then a hard question of force vs extinction would require a lot of painful theorising. I answered forced. However this could be done through artificial means — isn’t that actually men’s real fear for the future? Luckily I already practically live that humiliation.
Anyway! If we really wanted to partially solve the population crisis I think we need to make Ozempic far more available.
Lastly Max, I would also be enraged by my girlfriend not consenting to children…
Please avoid making comments about my relationship. Respect my boundaries.
The purpose of the thought experiment is to test how far progressive values really go, so evading the hard question kind of evades the whole point.
And if we do answer this, will there be any real engagement with the counter hypothetical?
Or will you admit this was a fat resentful questatement from the start?
Because a real contention with more than a hypothetical you conveniently agree with is the kind of expectation I've come to have for a thought provoking, controversial, and honest 'content' creator such as yourself.
I don't agree with the hypothetical, I don't really know. I don't think "what women actually want" is able to be defined. The point of the hypothetical is to make you think about what you would do if it could be defined.
Shut the fuck up sock
Who the hell are you? ..He's not going to let you hit.
I'm your worst nightmare.
I'd rather humanity go extinct than force women to make babies.
But I think the reason why people seemingly don't want to engage with this is because it rests upon a lot of assumptions, mainly "Birth rate is negatively correlated with female education, wealth, and IQ."
Even though this is clearly true right now, I'm not convinced it always will be. Maybe today's smarter women think it's a bad idea to have kids. But if we lived in the Star Trek utopia where the Replicator has solved all material needs, would they feel the same way?
Even if nothing changes and women don't want to make babies, there are solutions outside of coercion. The most obvious solution is to just subsidize it; put a ton of government funding into supporting new mothers. Or maybe we invent artificial wombs and make it a job to raise children. Maybe 5% of the population loves raising children and can make that their career, and they'd be really good at it
There is a dark timeline where we start forcing women to give birth to keep the human race alive. But I have enough faith in humanity that I don't believe we'll end up there
It's a tough choice to choose to coerce women instead of human extinction. I still chose coerce women because I'm imagining that we wont have to coerce that much to make women willing to prolong the human race. Coercing women to have babies doesn't seem that bad especially in comparison to extinction. I dont think that means I dont believe in womens autonomy. I think it just simply means extinction is worse. Its because I believe in womens autonomy that the hypothetical question is disturbing to consider.
If men gave birth instead of women, then women would be more willing to have casual sex because they wouldn’t have to deal with pregnancy. If men in this alternate world had the same novelty-seeking, high sex drive, and penchant for risky behavior, this would probably lead to more risky sex and unintended pregnancies. The question is whether the increase in pregnancies would be paired with an equal rise in abortions, or if there would simply be far more neglected and abandoned children around.
Might the invention of artificial wombs save us from all this misery?
No artificial womb can save you from the misery of my hypothetical questions, no.
It's easy to click the Human Extinction button when it's just on Substack.
The fact that 37% of readers picked the coercion scenario is baffling to me. Thank fuck I was born a man because if I was a woman I would probably be some kind of murderous misandrist.
To everyone who picked coercion...
This isn’t some cataclysmic extinction where you and your loved ones die early, it’s slow, quiet, and non-violent. Nobody is really suffering. In the other scenario, we’re enslaving half the population… for what? So strangers you’ll never meet can be born? So you can have a son at your wife’s expense, or a daughter who will inevitably hate you for bringing her into a dystopian hell world where she's used as breeding stock? Do you REALLY want that?
Is that really preferable to just living life normally with the slightly disquieting knowledge that humanity will die out later on? Who fucking cares? Actually, caring is fine, but caring enough that you'd subjugate half the population to prevent it is insane and sociopathic.
Keep in mind the 'coercion' in question is all of natural history up until now. Everything and every current day society besides modern lonely, suicidal, and depressed western culture was the so called 'subjugation'.
Rebuilding a culture that doesn't hate itself, family, and anything short of passively or actively ending its own existence is unthinkable 'sociopathy'.
I've been left extremely disgruntled by traditional social dynamics and have longed for true social and economic equality between men and women since I was a child, so I think my position remains unchanged.
If I was given the option to revert social/economic dynamics to ~2007 (last year of replacement birth rates) to save us from extinction, would I? I don't know.
Keeping half the population under your thumb and incentivizing them to do something they don't want to do is sociopathic subjugation.
It feels like you're obfuscating Max's hypothetical and are defining toxic modern society as causing women to not want kids (if that wasn't your intention I apologize) but in Max's hypothetical they literally do not want kids without coercion.
What if by coerce we are limited to only using carrots, never sticks? And if they refuse the carrots, we accept extinction
It depends on what these hypothetical carrots would be. I can't really think of any that wouldn't be taking advantage of women financially or otherwise.
I don't get why you lumped my comment with the ones that tried to avoid the hypothetical. I understand what you're asking and I even answered it in the reply. But do you honestly not understand why I'm surprised at your position on this? Didn't you quote some feminist that said she'd rather be raped over and over than die or something along those lines and said that's how you feel too? Do you genuinely not see why I am surprised that you're ok with giving women veto on the existence of the species? Maybe life would not and could not exist without rape. In that case being anti-rape means being anti-life. If that's your position that's fine, I'm just surprised.
Yes, I would rather be raped than die, but we're not talking about my death.
"Do you genuinely not see why I am surprised that you're ok with giving women veto on the existence of the species?"
I am okay with that, but that isn't the point of the posts. My point is that you can't claim you believe in bodily autonomy for women and then also claim that women do not have veto power over the existence of the species, which is dependent on them having sex.
The two values of "I want the human race to survive no matter what" and "I am a progressive" are in conflict.
You wrote: "Maybe life would not and could not exist without rape. In that case being anti-rape means being anti-life. If that's your position that's fine, I'm just surprised."
This isn't a position. You just posed your own hypothetical and the necessary logical conclusion one must reach. Again, my position isn't that life can't exist without rape, my position is that this MUST BE CONSIDERED by anyone claiming to be a progressive.
Even though I was raised by liberal parents I don't think I ever self identified as a feminist. So considering this hypothetical doesn't challenge my identity or world view. But I think my answer does mean that I'm not just not a feminist but I'm anti-feminist.
I was thinking I'd be interested in you talking to actual feminists about this. But I'm assuming they'd either say yes to extinction right away, at which point I don't I don't know what else you'd talk about, especially since presumably you share their stance. Or they'd avoid acknowledging the hypothetical and you'd just make them squirm until they would inevitable leave the call.
I think it's probably better for me to talk to someone who is thinking it through for themselves and doesn't have a commercial interest in having zero ambivalence. So a conversation with a branded "feminist" or someone from any political group is always going to become about me trying to force them to admit they have mixed feelings.
You don't really talk to political streamers anymore so that's out. I enjoyed your talks with Tomás Bogardus and Holly Lawford-Smith. But I think Holly does actual feminist advocacy and activism so I guess that's a no. Maybe it could make for an interesting discussion with Tomás. I think I remember him taking the position that using contraception to prevent pregnancy is immoral or wrong. Although I'm certain I'm doing a disservice to whatever his actual argument was.
But honestly it just feels like you're in a totally different place now so maybe the only thing that makes sense is confronting your audience with things like this.
The quote you're referencing [shortened] is "I would rather be raped a thousand times than fight to the death"
Nobody is being killed in this hypothetical scenario. Creating life will not prolong yours and it will not save you from dying.
Everyone in the extinction scenario is still living out their lives as normal. In the forced procreation scenario half the population is being enslaved, raped, and tortured constantly.
Yea, that's the quote. And phrased like that it could even imply that she would rather be raped than kill her rapist which goes even further than I thought. But going back to the original hypothetical, would I personally be willing and able to rape a woman if that was the only way to continue the existence of humanity? I don't know, maybe not. But the response to all women getting together and collectively declaring that they don't actually want to have children and that it's time for humanity to go extinct is not "Ok". It's "No, you don't get to make that choice." So I guess I'd rather try to make rape as pleasant as possible than let this be the way we go extinct. Or maybe not, I'm not really sure. But mrgirl's seeming lack of ambivalence on this feels surprising, especially considering how he feels about abortion. Because in a way this could be considered an extension of that debate.
Do you honestly have no or a negligible emotional response to the thought of our species going extinct?
Why do they not get to make that choice?
Can you give an explanation as to why a slow, non-violent, suffering free human extinction via infertility would be bad enough to justify mass rape and forced birth? I care about people who actually exist, not unborn future people who will functionally not exist from my perspective since I'll be dead anyways.
I'd rather just live out the rest of my days with my wife (who actually loves me because I didn't rape her) knowing that humanity will die out not long after I pass instead of taking part in mass enslavement and subjugation of women.
I do actually want kids but not enough to take part in psycho shit. The only time I'd ever rape (or sign off on someone else raping) a woman is to save myself or my loved ones from dying or being raped themselves.
I have an extremely negative emotional reaction to the idea of an asteroid hitting Earth and wiping us out (me and my loved ones would die) but everyone signing off on not having kids? Honestly, not really. I have a pretty visceral reaction to the coercion hypothetical.
What do you mean why do they not get to make that choice? Because choosing extinction feels like an unacceptable choice to me, even if it is the inevitable outcome of all life. I'm assuming you don't want to get murdered. But why? If death is inevitable why does it matter how you die?
If women decided that they're prepared to fight to the death in order to not carry and birth children and the only way to propagate the species is brutal mass rape I don't think I'd be able to participate in that. The thought of it alone makes me feel sick. But the thought of women deciding they no longer wish to participate in propagating the species and me simply being ok with it fills me with the same existential dread I feel when I think about killing myself or dying in general.
I think women should *obviously* have veto power over the continuation of the species; Having unilateral control over reproduction is the only thing that can possibly compensate us for having to suffer the burden of reproduction. It’s the necessary other side of the coin. What would even be the point of perpetuating the species if half of the species is reduced to livestock? The ‘mass rape’ version of humanity *should* go extinct! They would be made up of half rapist psychopaths and half degraded slaves. Why would that version of humanity be worth perpetuating? I say, nuke them from orbit!
I don't know what else to say except that I don't feel that giving women unilateral power to unleash nuclear holocaust on world is acceptable. I know that's not literally what you're saying or what the hypothetical is but it's starting to feel like that's what the position is. If this is actually how women feel we can figure out some sort of artificial womb system or some other way to bring new people into the world that frees women from that responsibility. But until that becomes a reality some of you will have to say yes to getting pregnant. The one thing that is required for a functional society is that it continues to exist.
We're already in this weird situation where the first world nations are supplementing the declining birthrates by importing immigrants from the developing world. And in that sense it's actually in the first world's interest to not have the rest of the world actually develop. I'd a 100% rather do pro-natalism propaganda and make policies that make having children desirable rather than whatever the fuck we're doing now.
I don't want to get murdered or die early because I want to live and have an extreme aversion to dying like most people. In either scenario I'll likely live a full life but in the coercion scenario I'd be constantly wracked with grief and anger as opposed to the extinction scenario where I'd be pensive at times but overall my life wouldn't change that much. Quality of life will be higher for me and I assume basically everyone in the extinction scenario and I don't care what happens after I die (because I'm dead)
I understand why the thought makes you feel uncomfortable (even if I don't relate) I just don't see why you'd be okay with coercion to prevent what is basically just a mental affliction that would probably be much more tolerable than enabling/participating in mass rape.
Extinction won't directly effect you either whereas coercion will be causing the suffering of billions of women + likely destroying any true love/intimacy you could have with women assuming you're not already in a relationship and have kids (and even then, your wife who already has 1-2 kids might not want more)
It just feels like you're saying you'd be willing to coerce (I'm saying coerce instead of rape here because you said you probably wouldn't be down with actual violent rape) women into having kids to ease your existential dread, which seems kind of asshole-ish.
Think about what Max says in the article about men giving birth instead of women. If genitals switched tomorrow and in this hypothetical men didn't want to have kids, wouldn't you just.... say no? Would YOU be willing to have your autonomy violated to ease that existential dread? Would you take that futanari dick balls deep and get pregnant? What about the knowledge that if you refuse they'll just do it anyways?
“Refusing to consider whether we are coercing women into motherhood is the same as choosing to do it.”
This line is what finally unlocked my understanding of this whole thing. My previous comments weren’t avoiding answering because it makes me uncomfortable. I just found the debate around what causes low birth rates more interesting. But this is also interesting.
I think the answer to that consideration is yes. Because all human relationships involve coercion, do they not? The way we court each other often involves manipulation, outright deception, and even chemical abuse as well. All to make the development of a relationship easier for ourselves. We lie about who we are to one another, or at the very least obscure ourselves and our true feelings because it’s scary, and it can feel easier to get what we want from the other person with lies and coercion than with the truth and vulnerability.
As men, being the one burdened with initiation 9/10, where do we approach women? Where we are often encouraged to try to approach women? School and work. Two places where women are forced to be. Bars. Where women are chemically altered and you can alter yourself to be more aggressive and less inhibited. So obviously the answer is yes, that women are coerced into sex which is an extension of motherhood. We have likely designed pillars of society around trying to lubricate this process.
As someone with the admittedly horrible character flaw of lying and being manipulative, can I really say that I would choose to stop coercing women? It’s easy for me to say I would choose human extinction over coercing women into motherhood, because I don’t really care if humans go extinct. I also don’t have a desire for children at the moment. But if I dig a layer deeper under the hypothetical. I have already made use of coercion with women to get what I want. And I have benefitted from the ways society coerces them to be around me. So would I really be willing to give up coercing women? It would mean I would have to be exposed and vulnerable with them instead. And I must admit that truly is an uncomfortable thought.
If "all human relationships involve coercion," then why not take the position "coercing women into sex is fine"? Why does it have to be tied to the outcome of human survival if you're willing to accept coerciveness, period?
Maybe hitting on women in bars is wrong, too. It fucking IS! Maybe that's the next essay...
To the reader of either of these essays, the author is manipulative at worse and self-deceptive at best. In American culture today, there's a rat race between creators of a certain stripe to build a cult of personality. Each in-groups's definition of intelligence is manipulated, from the trumpian "Donald Trump's playing 4D Chess", to Destiny's "Oh so you're saying he shouldn't be mean on twitter?" as he sics his audience on his critics.
The rancid hypothetical strips away nuance; people's unwillingness to engage with the hypothetical isn't stupidity as the author of these posts insinuates but it's because the hypothetical is both too fantastical and because the premise is anti-woman insofar as to how MrGirl misconstrues women and womanhood.
To the casual reader of either of these articles: The author's intent isn't to put forth an interesting hypothetical, but strip away the complex layers of this situation to set you, as a reader, on a treadmill and attach to you a carrot while MrGirl threatens you with a stick. The carrot is not hating women, the stick is being stupid and/or misogynistic for not engaging with his stripped-from-truth hypothetical as he wants you to.
You have an inner voice, an inner semblance of people and reality and if you have managed to break free from the vortex of admiration or parasociality that are a feature (and a dime a dozen, frankly) that these influencers are trying to pull you into, you did have a sense that the hypothetical is asinine. Listen to your inner voice and don't get shamed by the author of this post.
The purpose of hypotheticals is to evidentiate a truth, a point that is hidden or otherwise obsfuscated. The hypothetical originally proposed leaves you with no recourse but to admit rape is fundamentally wrong, and worse than extinction. Very deep.
I hope you can see that this essay you just read, just now, that the jig is up. The true purpose of the essay is the following.
MrGirl wants you to think how he thinks, he wants you to engage with his writings how he demands and any other sentiment or added commentary is met with the stick:
You are stupid. You did have breakfast this morning.
If you weren't stupid you would have said rape is wrong and left it at that, wouldn't you?
If you were smart you would think MrGirl is smart, right? This parasitic nu-influencer idiosyncratic trend is yet another artifact of American culture and it's narcissocratic tendencies. Insist that you're smart enough, and it becomes truth. Insist that you're the most humble, the most open minded, the least corrupt, the biggest, and people will believe it. Like an used car salesman, persuasion makes you believe that a piece of junk is worth buying.
I hope you, as a reader, can see how all these complex layers about this particular issue could be more gracefully written, or a hypothetical better constructed to include the human parts around this issue... if that's what MrGirl cared about.
He wants you to be stupid and he wants to be smart. And if you're not stupid he will twist the definition of it. Hypotheticals are a pretext: your mind is a resource and PLEASE, please take the incentive to engage -exactly- as he wants you to. Otherwise, well, you would be a misogynist or a moron, wouldn't you? You don't want to be that. You could agree with MrGirl to escape your moronhood, what a relief!
The true irony of this post is that the hypothetical posited that women's free will and their engagement with motherhood ought to be respected even at the expense of humanity, but your negative engagement with MrGirl's words is truly intolerable: he will leverage his self-appointed position as an erudite, as a writer, as a community leader, and you as the readily open-minded reader to coerce you into thinking in the same flow, manner, and way he wants you to.
Listen to your inner voice.
I think it is an interesting and pertinent hypothetical, and something that I hadn’t honestly considered before. I don’t understand your response at all, or why you feel compelled to address his audience in this way. This seems like an odd response.
1) My reply is directed at people who have a sense that the hypothetical is asinine and wanted to speak against it. I am protesting MrG shaming/coercing such people with the carrot/stick dichotomy. You don't think the hypothetical is asinine, you hadn't considered rape/coercion is worse than protecting abstract ideals (future of humanity) before. My reply isn't directed at you. It is good the hypothetical made you realize abstract ideals should not override female autonomy.
2) The subtext of MrG's essay is shaming people who protest the hypothetical on it's grounds.
3) You are saying that the hypothetical isn't asinine (it's interesting and pertinent) because of it's usefulness to you as an individual, rather than the grounds for the hypothetical. If I deem a light bulb shitty because it flickers, but you don't deem it so because you can use it as makeshift pipe to smoke meth out of, there's no reasonable (or non-controlling) way I can wrestle with your private thoughts, definitions of pertinence & interests, and ideas (nor should anyone). You got utility of the light bulb.
4) I feel compelled to address his audience in this way because I believe MrGirl is compulsively manipulative, condescending, coercive, and abusive of his (admitted measly) influence on his audience. In other words, I think he is doing something wrong.
I don’t have a problem using social coercion in certain contexts, some level is unavoidable. ‘We live in a society’ and all that…
I do have a problem when it is pitted against bodily autonomy.
I don’t think MrG’s social coercion of ‘shame’ in an essay rises to the level of manipulation or coercion that you seem to imply. Nor do I think it indicates hypocrisy or blind cultism on my part to find it acceptable.
But by definition, cultists don’t know they are cultists, so who knows. Perhaps you are right. But I don’t think so.
The second essay's justification for shaming people was disagreeing with MrGirl. Critics have a distaste for how the hypothetical was constructed (and wasn't constructed).
This is not an acceptable context to shame people and coerce them to change their mind unless you are in fact cultist.
'Bodily autonomy' in the context of the hypothetical proposed is thought-related. Women wouldn't be raped-raped but instead 'coerced' with guilt that humanity is going extinct. The coercion is not physical but cognitive, leveraging guilt/shame to override personal consent.
Thought-coercion is correlated to bodily-autonomy. When a wimpy husband nags at his wife for not putting out for 6 months, he's coercing her even if she agrees. When Harvey Weinstein asks politely for his lead actress to have sex, he is coercing her even if she agrees. When a man flashes a knife to a woman in an alley, it is coercive even if she agrees (among many other things). If humanity asked women to breed because otherwise humanity goes extinct, it is coercive, even if they agree.
This demonstrates the point: psychological coercion negates meaningful consent, thereby violating a person's bodily autonomy. The distinction between physical and non-physical force becomes less relevant when the will of the individual is subverted.
When MrG uses shame as a stick to coerce his community, while the effects of bodily-autonomy are not immediately apparent it nevertheless uses the same mechanism to coerce people which is wrong, unless you don't care about the process and only about the outcome. Which would mean that you would be in favor of coercing women to have sex if the outcome was justified, it's just that you don't think human extinction is justified or something.
There's a story about a man in america that committed suicide because he couldn't fight in ww2. He was coerced by society, he was shamed by propaganda and society.
This is why shaming people into thinking differently and agree with you is wrong and why I think you either don't believe in the thesis, you don't understand it, you'd agree with coercing women (but disagree with the outcome) or your intent is to defend MrG and your inner voice and thoughts are secondary to the cult of personality (as all cults of personality are).
This behavioral-flow exponentially multiplies in malice when you coerce people through shame people from a position of leadership or influence, however small the influence is.
Your co worker telling you to twerk for him is different than if your boss did it.
Employing shame as a persuasive tactic is ethically indefensible (otherwise you think destiny and Dr.K are justified since the positive outcomes outweight their negatives). When wielded from a position of authority, its capacity for harm increases significantly, transforming persuasion into a form of oppression.
I invite you not to avoid this argument via minimizing it and think about it for a couple of days. It's going to be extremely tempting to let your lizard brain speak.
1) I think those same people you directed your comment at may not have considered MrG’s hypothetical as fully as you. I think there are many subtle ways this concept permeates how we construct our society and think about one another.
Good for you for having already realized this; I don’t think I had fully confronted it. Had the post not been a black-and-white hypothetical, forcing me to engage with the actual point, I may have tried to wriggle out with technicalities as other commenters have. I am glad he put ‘manipulative’ guardrails on it so I had to engage with the point.
I don’t see the need for a meta-comment warning others about how to engage with the post. Why can’t they just engage and make up their own opinion, especially if they may get something out of it as I have?
2) Many people were using assumed subtext to avoid actually engaging with the nuts and bolts of his hypothetical. This may have been because the original essay was poorly worded/formatted/argued. Or it may be that people were uncomfortable engaging with the question he raises. Either way, I think an explicit restating of the key points was necessary for people to actually confront his hypothetical, and I don’t see the issue in the ‘shaming’ attitude of the piece.
Also, since MrG posed the original hypothetical, I think it fine that he has extra ‘authorial leeway’ to define and frame the hypothetical to properly communicate his point. I think defining such efforts as manipulative/coercive may be fine, but I think it is at an acceptable level for the sake of communicating ideas.
3) See (1); just as you can’t judge the utility of the post for me and I can’t for you, I feel that you are too hastily dismissing it as possibly useful or interesting for others.
4) This seems hyperbolic.
If I was MrGirl I would reply to you with a snarky image of Ed Kemper with a text bubble that reads "But I didn't have breakfast this morning."
You justify social coercion (shame) of people if you agree with the abstract ideal (the hypothetical raises a truth that people are uncomfortable engaging with) — which is a rose-tinted glasses re-framing rather than an ideal —, so we ought to shame people who think differently with a punchy second essay.
I can tell that now that you don't even truly believe/understand the thesis of the hypothetical you're pretending to defend; you are engaging in the manner in which the hypothetical was meant to scorn. Fraying at the edges of the hypothetical, for you, might be a pretext and a proxy for the narcissocratic game (the unintended true purpose of the second essay) I briefly mentioned where you're the sucker.
You are defending MrGirl from criticism.
I take what I said before about my reply not being to you back, now that I understand.
You are in fact the type of susceptible audience member I was trying to reach. You are using your reason to dig deeper in the sand trap and the more I reason with you on your terms, the more you use me as a proxy to further dig your heels in the sand.
I don't know how to make people stuck in the sandtrap consider where they are standing but reason isn't it. Audiences and cults of personalities think with their lizard brain, throwing dynamite on the sandtrap is the only way. Throwing a vine is met with anger and apathy.