195C. The Unintended Effects of #MeToo

8 years after Harvey Weinstein's rein of terror came to an end, I think it is time to assess the effects of #MeToo and offer advice on a course correction.

Growing up in the USA during the tail end of the Civil Rights Movement I learned that it was our culture to notice if people were different than us when they did something wrong. Instead of “a person robbed a store” it was “a black person robbed a store.” Or instead of “A CEO stole $500M” it was “A White CEO stole $500M”. Or “A Male CEO assaulted an employee, then covered it up.”

Humans are particularly good at pattern recognition, and we have long memories. Because of this we tend to use inductive reasoning to assess situations and make decisions. A good way to understand inductive reasoning is that if it was safe to cross a street on a green light the last 99 times, you assume it will be safe to cross on the 100th time. Deductive reasoning, which is more the arena of scientists, would involve looking carefully at the intersection every time without assuming a pattern.

Deductive reasoning is more likely to be accurate, but takes more effort. In our busy lives, few have time or inclination to do that and we go about our lives following predictable patterns. We often will look to see how someone is different than us if they harm us, so that we can learn the pattern. We don’t look for characteristics we share, because obviously the other person is inferior to us and we want to identify the differences that lead to than inferiority.

This slippery slope leads to a “supremacist” world view. For instance, my father was a white supremacist even though he was not white. He changed his name to “Paul” and changed his religion to be as white as possible. Politicians (including myself when I was active in politics) know this is a vulnerability that people have, that can grant us “back door” access to their minds by appealing to these various bigotries. Because it works, our “leaders” have been attempting to maximize our bigotry for decades, reversing the gains of the Civil Rights Movement.

What is #MeToo?

This is the backdrop and culture that the #MeToo movement was born into, in reaction to the abuses of Harvey Weinstein. Harvey was hardly unique, and as I’ve pointed out in my previous two papers, humans are all born predators. We are especially successful predators, even more so than lions. But we live in denial of our nature and like to think that predators are a special minority class that cause all the problems. “Predator” is in fact a spectrum, not a binary, and all humans are on that Spectrum.

A bunch of ladies can go to lunch, and stick a piece of cow, chicken, and a dozen shrimp in their mouths and lament how much of a predator Harvey was. What we are really complaining about is who got preyed upon. If the “Food” in this case looks like us, we get alarmed. If the Food looked like someone that has harmed us in the past, we might cheer on the predator.

I was sexually abused starting at around age 7 because the people around me knew I was operating at adult maturity level and thus treated me like an adult. An adult that (because of my age and health status) could not defend themself. When I got away from my family and into nursing school when I was 19, the situation got worse despite that sounding impossible. This culminated in a fellow student asking me to come over to help them with IV drip rate math and when I got there she opened the door in see through lingerie. This woman was twice my age and I was caught completely off guard.

Given my background, I get a bit of a PTSD reaction when people try to force themselves on me sexually. So I did what I did best (since I was on the track team) and I ran as fast as I could. The next day I overheard this woman making a false allegation to the head of the nursing program, who was a well known misandrist. The day after that I was kicked out of the nursing program at Santa Monica College because “nursing school is for women and medical school is for men”.

So you can imagine I was very excited when the #MeToo movement started. But then I noticed something strange. Women were happy to have the support of men, but did not want to hear that women could also be sexual predators. This conflicted with their emerging narrative that “Men were bad”. That narrative has gotten so far that now women say they feel safer with bears than with men. I personally feel safer with bears, but I’ve talked to a lot of bears in my life and I’m safer with them because bears (like all mammalian predators other than humans) understand the Feral Code and generally leave non competing predators alone. Humans are not raised to understand the Code, and think they are above it.

Trust me, if you go alone in nature and don’t understand the Code, you will either be labelled “Food” or a “Competitor”. Either way, that’s not going to work out well for you.

One would forgive me if I engaged in inductive reasoning and had bad feelings toward women due to my background. But I use deductive reasoning and understand that despite humans being natural predators, they tend to be capable of a lot of good once their self-interest is sated. Except those with insatiable self-interest, and I’m pretty good at identifying those people. Thus after nursing school I was asked by the women at UCLA to help them as their trainer, I never asked for that role. They understood that I was a steadfast ally.

Holding an entire group responsible for the deeds of one or a few individuals is what we call “collective punishment”. It’s one of the most evil things that humans are capable of, and is universally considered a crime against humanity. Nonetheless, people do this all the time out of self interest, because they put self interest ahead of ethics.

In the case of the #MeToo movement, this became an instrument for collective punishment of men. Because “men are dangerous”, despite that the reality is that “humans are dangerous”. And humans are especially dangerous to anything they consider food. Just read a menu at any non vegan restaurant if you forget. What keeps us safe from each other is the Feral Code which teaches all mammalian predators to avoid conflict with other non competing predators.

Of course in the natural world there is a lot more food and only a limited number of predators, and they can mark out their own territory. If there is not enough room and conflict arises, those predators will war and be reduced in number. The natural balance is thus restored.

Humans followed the code until they discovered agriculture, overpopulated, and invented religion, war, land ownership, and feudalism/slavery. You know, all the things that make humans superior to animals. Because we are packed in so tight, there is not enough space and we are constantly in competition with each other. When I did neuroscience research at UCLA, we knew that putting rats in cages made them more aggressive and distorted any data we collected because of the stress this put the rats under. The more rats in a space, the more aggressive they got.

Humans are no different. The more difficult the circumstances, the more willing humans are to be aggressive to each other. If they can get away with it, they will. The #MeToo movement gave women the green light to express aggression towards men and they do.

Things have changed a lot in those 8 years. Now women are more likely to initiate domestic violence, causing lesbian relationships to be the most aggressive and gay male relationships to be the least aggressive. Because “Men are Bad”, corporations are now 17% more likely to hire women than men, according to LinkedIn’s own statistics. This is causing a lot of disruption in heterosexual relationships because men are expected to subsidize women ~$1000 per month when paired or courting. I did the math in my Gender Wars paper for any that are sceptical. If you go on social media, you can easily find female supremacists who argue that this number should be higher.

But since men are having an especially hard time getting and keeping work, the math isn’t mathing anymore in heterosexual relationships. This is a huge problem for all heterosexual couples.

Now I’m going to shock you, if I haven’t already. None of the stuff I just pointed out, except for the breaches of the Feral Code, bother me. Humans are overpopulated and aggression and cross predation are the natural outcome for any overpopulated group of predators. Reproductive rates will and are dropping, and the situation will become more balanced (and humans will become less aggressive) after we lose a few billion humans.

#MeToo’s Effects on Social Bonding

This is what bothers me.

I made a big deal about oxytocin in the previous paper. This amazing hormone and neurotransmitter that all mammals have is what prevents predators from attacking each other. It also pushes us to protect each other from attack. But as you will notice, there is a lot more attacking going on and a lot less protection going on. As long as you consider those around you as friends and family, they are protected. If they feel the same, then you are protected.

Corporations tend to be run by MBA’s and lawyers. A hammer sees every problem as a nail. MBA’s see people as labor assets and metrics. Lawyers see people as legal liabilities waiting to happen. The effect in Western companies is that people are discouraged from being friends. Sure they must act friendly, leading to “toxic positivity”, but they aren’t supposed to actually be friends. In companies that “gamify” competition via leaderboards and such, direct competition is promoted.

When you see someone as competition, they drop out of the friends and family zone. Oxytocin actually increases aggression towards competitors if they aren’t seen as friends and family. If your friends or family betray you, then oxytocin can push you towards extreme aggression that we often call “crimes of passion”. And, there’s nothing romantic about that.

Over the last 8 years as leadership and the occasional female supremacist have been vilifying heterosexual entanglements in the workplace, the result is heightened aggression. This is literally the opposite of what #MeToo was originally supposed to be about. And the people driving this are actually getting the opposite of the results they thought they would get. Of course they will blame someone else, that’s what poor leaders do. It’s also what uneducated people do when they mess around with complex biological systems without having any significant biology training.

Are There Solutions?

My initial instincts are that corporate leaders need to learn more compassion, and lawyers need to understand that they are modern day weapons. Harming people “preventatively” is another one of those universal crimes against humanity. Both could benefit from reading my papers, or hiring some sort of expensive sociologist to coach them, if that sociologist doesn’t have a racist or sexist ideology.

My practical advice, if you really want to engage in social control/engineering in the workplace, is do it properly. I talk about the possible merits of social control here. If you are going to engage in Orwellian behavior, at least make sure you get the results you intended.

When I worked in Belarus, all employees were encouraged to be friendly to each other and have in-company relationships. This kept the money in the corporate family, and actually made relationships safer because the consequences of misbehavior would be greater. This peer pressure had a suppressive effect on misdeeds, which was the whole point of #MeToo in the first place. #MeToo was never about sitting around a campfire singing kumbaya. It was intended 100% to be about social control, to mitigate an undesired activity.

The Belarusians take their relationships seriously. During WW2 the Germans occupied Belarus and used it to stage attacks into Russia. During this time the Germans killed 90% of the men aged 10 or above in the country. The ones that survived hid in the swamps. The women that survived were regularly sexually abused. After the war the surviving men were treated very well by their women, and despite the very conservative culture there was a lot of non-monogamy by necessity. The population of Belarus and Russia has never really recovered and is under constant strain due to leadership’s tendency to treat men as expendable.

So while I worked in Belarus and Russia, we were encouraged to date within the corporate Tribe. I had a partner in Belarus from my company when I worked in Russia. I made sure to get verbal approval from my supervisors before our first date. HR actually assisted me in handling flights for me and the person I was courting as we tended to meet in Western countries. Both of us were high status in the company and the cross cultural romance was seen as fascinating.

Of course both of us were on our best behavior, and we knew we had to treat each other very seriously since we were not just partners, but also coworkers. My advice to the corporations, and the corporate lawyers in particular, would be to follow our example.

If you are worried about liability and feel an intense desire to social control, then require any employee that wants to date another employee to have both parties give written consent prior to a first date. Make any overly personal communication outside of dating prohibited (as harassment). Thus you provide clear parameters for employees and make sure they give consent first. If at any time one or both people (or all the people if this is California) want out, they should say so in writing. They should be asked immediately if they want to be separated in the office from the previously involved coworker.

If both sides consent amicably, no harm no foul. If one or both people want to make a complaint against the other, treat both parties as aggressors unless the situation can be factually determined. This removes the incentive to produce false allegations. This will also discourage higher ranking employees from dating lower ranking employees as there could be a hypergamy motivation if the ranks are significantly different. Hypergamy favors the lower ranking individual. Of course both employees would very likely be fired in such a situation. That’s why it works, and that’s why people are very unlikely to misbehave. Harvey got away with what he did for so many years because he was never held accountable. But he could just eliminate anyone that resisted him with a few words, just as was done with me in nursing school.

I’m sure the lawyers will want to keep the results (or even existence) of an investigation private, but there should be some way to make dating couples public knowledge so that this does not generate false allegations against the couple when they are spotted spending time together at lunch or such.

This sort of social control might satisfy the lawyers, and still allow some natural biological interactions between coworkers without creating a full blown terror environment. Or you could just get rid of the lawyers (that would save a lot of money) and just trust your employees like they do in Belarus. That would improve productivity and lower overhead tremendously. You would still have to hold both people responsible if there was an aggression, otherwise you get the current environment where false allegations are encouraged. Also, a claim of an aggression needs to be made within 24 hours, so that one employee can’t just “bank” the accusation until they leave the company in order to ruin the career of the other.