When you’re arguing with your girlfriend, there about three million ways to completely fuck up. We all know how that feels. One of the best ways to mess things up even worse is to yell. Or insult her, or try to “win.”
An argument with your partner or spouse, as a rule of thumb, should not be about “winning.” It should be about eliminating noise, solving problems and getting back to your baseline of love and respect for each other. It should be about both people winning, not one side over the other. You’re a team. Your goal is to get back to cooperation and togetherness as efficiently as possible, with as little damage as possible. Not to put the other person down and grab some “power” or “leverage” over them.
And it certainly shouldn’t be about making the other person feel foolish or weak.
Did I learn this the hard way? Sure did.
This lesson also runs parallel to a larger human issue: how to get desirable outcomes for people, both individually and collectively. How to bring out the best in people - not just what you want, but what is best. What is most good and true and useful.
I have repeatedly found this through experience: the best way to get better outcomes for people is to raise them up, not push them down. To lift up what is good inside of them, not to push failures and shortcomings even lower. The best solutions are up solutions, not down solutions.
Now, granted, when you’re arguing with someone who you think is being completely unreasonable, this is really hard to keep in mind. Like, sometimes it’s really damn hard. If I’m arguing with someone who I think is missing something painfully obvious, it’s really hard not to get angry or frustrated or irritable. I just want them to shut up and understand. Why is this so hard to understand? Why can you not just admit that you’re wrong so we can move on already? (I also do my fair share of wrong - but you get my point here.) But I have repeatedly found that yelling and insulting are just no good. No matter how right I think I am, making someone feel low usually makes them want to shell up and walk away. Or push back harder. It doesn’t make them want to admit their faults or cooperate with me.
A calm voice and some kind observations go a long way.
Dale Carnegie, in his utterly essential How to Win Friends and Influence People, suggested that we should appeal to what is noble inside of others. Start with the places we agree, start with what we both want, and work up from there by appealing to what is noble inside people. What we recognize to be good and worthwhile in them. The same way we should when evaluating ourselves. That’s the best foundation - in fact the only foundation.
If you’re dealing with addicts, it’s almost never a good idea to insult them and make them feel low. They know what they’re doing is wrong - they just can’t help themselves. They simply cannot stop - not by willpower, not by ambition, not by fear. They simply don’t have the right systems, nor the spiritual sturdiness, to change direction. If you know any addicts, you know what I’m talking about. No matter how stupid you make them feel, they can always go lower. It’s shocking how stupidly an addict can behave. I should know - I used to know a lot of drug addicts.
Oh, and I was also one of them. Whoops.
And what about this issue with pornography? A friend of mine recently mentioned the porn problem in India, and how the unilateral ban of porn sites has potentially led to more rapes and sexual assaults (the problem they were supposedly trying to solve). I’ve done some reading on the topic, and I think it’s possible that this has exacerbated the problem. But my point isn’t about whether that’s factually correct or incorrect. My point is that it’s the wrong approach in the first place.
First of all, people in India have begun using VPNs, proxy servers, and other workarounds to just continue watching porn anyway. The problem isn’t solved - it’s just less convenient. That’s prohibition once again. You’re not making people not want to drink - you’re just making it so that they have to become criminals to drink.
You’re not making people not want to misbehave - you’re instead compounding the misbehavior.
It does no good to make an entire country of people feel like degenerates. How about a little nuance. How about separating casual porn users from sexual predators. Those are two different groups of people.
In 2018, a group of four boys lured a girl into a bathroom in India and assaulted her. When asked why he did it, one of these boys said he saw it in porn and wanted to do it.
“So then porn caused this.”
Well yes, but also no.
Was pornography a contributing factor to this assault? Yes, apparently it was. But now we’re back to the Grand Theft Auto question. Can video games and films turn you into an actual monster? Let’s start with the following stance: No. In the overwhelming majority of cases, no. That kind of thinking is what gets generalizations to push an entire nation too far. If you’re the kind of person who is capable of rape or murder, your moral compass was already broken. That’s not anybody else’s fault. To blame that on one singular piece of triggering media, and then parlay that into sweeping generalizations about media and society, is lazy, reckless and irresponsible. Normal people simply are not capable of rape or murder, no matter how much questionable media they consume. Normal people have something inside them that wouldn’t let them do this.
Did murders rise across the board after Showtime’s Dexter made killing look fun and sexy? No. If Dexter and his grisly charm couldn’t turn us all into degenerates and murderers, then no one can.
I know this is a hard issue, and there is nuance here. But if I didn’t want to tackle hard questions, I wouldn’t have a blog.
Could some school shootings be prevented by fewer homes owning guns? Yes. Of course that’s true. But would society be in even more danger if the only people who had guns were criminals and the military? Yes. That is also definitely true. Everything is a trade-off. Everything is hard and full of buts and what-ifs. All I’m saying is, making sweeping generalizations based on outliers is not the way to get good results or make intelligent decisions. You’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Let’s imagine, with a basic statistical approach, a bell curve for moral transgressions in Indian people. The most extreme behaviors in men are out on one side, where a tiny tiny fraction of men reside. That’s how it is with all human behavior and human personalities.
The culture in India is in some ways a bit archaic and hyper-conservative - it allows men too much freedom to feel superior and dominant and aggressive. It’s a bit too caveman. So let’s suppose, because of this, that the bell curve is shifted slightly to one side. What does this imply? 1. It implies that the men who are right on the boundary have been pushed just far enough to do bad things. A tiny fraction have been allowed just enough narcissistic selfishness to become monsters. Perhaps they were still salvageable as people if the culture was different. And 2. It implies that almost all men are still within moral boundaries that would not allow them to rape or murder or assault a woman.
And if you ban pornography, you are potentially introducing a new problem. I don’t think monsters are created out of thin air, but I do think there may be consequences here. You risk shifting or skewing that bell curve slightly further away from center. Because some men are too entitled, too aggressive, and now they’re frustrated and insulted too. What I’m arguing is that, instead of taking that approach, pushing men and their desires down lower, the correct approach is to lift men up from a different angle.
You can’t legislate morality. You have to put in the work to build it.
The best way, it seems to me, to make India a less dangerous place for women (well, other than the obvious - forcibly remove sexual predators from society) is to lift men up morally and philosophically. Maybe to restructure their educational institutions, their social lives, their politics - to reflect a more open-minded and humble approach to masculinity. To reinforce men being honorable and accountable. Show them how to become good men and work on staying that way. Teach them how to look out for women, to respect women from a distance, and to be noble and disciplined. The goal here is to take that bell curve back towards the center and prevent those outliers from becoming monsters. This medicine is preventative in two ways. Hopefully you can touch these outliers morally - make them want to resist such low urges and such entitlement and aggression. To teach them how to be better - to rebuild their moral compasses or keep them from breaking in the first place. But also by making the rest of the culture more willing to defend itself from their excesses. To give the culture, as a living, breathing thing, more integrity and make it more resistant to this kind of behavior.
There is also the question of how specifically the legal system should handle these crimes. It looks to me like the legal system might not be doing enough, but that’s beyond the scope of this piece. My angle of attack here is encouragement and love, not prison sentences.
If you’re going to enjoy pornography, fine - do it in the privacy of your own home, and remember that moderation is a wonderful practice. Your sexuality is not something the government should be interested in unless it violates the rights of others. Human sexuality seems to have become more exploratory, more kinky, and even more excessive over the last couple of decades. And I think that’s just because of technological access to pornographic material and discussions about sex. But 99.9% of people are not violating the rights of others - they’re just watching dumb videos on the internet.
And it’s the same in the United States. We as a nation consume more porn than the next 10 countries combined. Are we watching too much? Yes we are. Is it putting us into psychological and sexual feedback loops that are bad for us? Definitely. Is it harming our relationships? Sure is.
Should we ban it? Well, that sounds an awful lot like taking away a junkie’s stash of heroin. That sounds like a not very good idea. That sounds like everyone within two blocks of that junkie should run and hide.
Americans, and perhaps Indians, need better ideas of what relationships are. And what it means to moderate oneself and be in control of oneself. That, arguably, starts at the level of leadership. Not policy, not rules and regulations, but leadership. In all aspects of life - politics, education, and all of the other institutions that run our lives.
We used to have religion to partially help with this problem. But we gave up on God decades ago. And besides, as Sam Harris observed, “Religion gives us bad reasons to be good, where good reasons are available.”
Men in the modern West are having a very rough time. No matter what we do, we are at the mercy of feminists and grievances and modern social agendas. Most of us want to empower women and let women have every freedom they could ever want. Most of us do indeed want to strike the proper balance between masculinity and humility. But we are painted as bigots and jerks with such broad, absurd strokes that it makes it really hard for us to find an acceptable identity. We are told by other men that we’re pussies, and we’re told by society and feminists that we’re perpetuating a horrible and rapacious patriarchy. We are made to feel guilty for earning higher wages, when we ourselves are not even earning livable wages. We are told that we are the cause of literally every problem that has ever existed in human history, and then expected to go out and be productive in that field of land mines. “Go be a good man, but don’t do any of these 6,481 things or you’re an oppressive piece of garbage.”
That’s a hell of a heavy load to carry through life. To be bogged down with guilt and accusation, and to try to find a sense of decent and admirable identity in spite of it. Men, especially white men, are told that we are bad and yet expected to work on being good as measured by a moving set of goal posts. It’s difficult. It makes men feel dirty and hopeless, which is never a good way for anyone to feel. The only way to make young men worse would be to take away more of what little we feel we have. Most of us are not oppressors - we’re just trying to survive, same as everyone else. We’re hungry, lonely, and struggling to find meaning - just like everyone else.
(Note: I am fully aware that women, along with every other group, suffer from a lot of the same issues as well as their own idiosyncratic struggles. I’m just using this one for discussion since it’s the one that hits closest to home for me.)
This is why controversial modern thinkers have become so mainstream. Men are finding purpose and identity in being thinkers. We are finding meaning and structure for our lives in messages like “clean your room” and “develop a rational moral framework.” We are so exhausted of leading unfulfilling lives - we’re desperate for more. Men are tired of watching porn and feeling worthless and not having good relationships - we want someone to help lift us out of this rut. Most of us won’t admit that out loud, but it’s painfully true.
Men are desperate for someone to come along and be a hard yet encouraging father to us. Or a big brother, or a mentor. Most of us are from broken homes and divorces at this point, so it’s no surprise that our sense of masculinity is fragile to begin with. We look at our parents and see relationship failure. We look at ourselves and our own relationships and we feel fear. We don’t know how to do better. We need to be shown.
My last job showed me the value of leadership. The first couple years I was at that job, our lab director was a vibrant and energetic guy. He encouraged people. He walked around and spoke to employees and made them feel heard. He made people genuinely feel like they worked at a fun, worthwhile job. Our lab was at the top of the nationwide network in quality, timeliness, and morale.
And then for the next several years, after he left, the lab was led by a quiet, distracted woman who allowed culture and enthusiasm to slip to all time lows. She didn’t care. She was friendly, sure, but she was not encouraging or vibrant. She didn’t make people feel heard, she didn’t remind people to have fun. Our perks and privileges began to disappear. We no longer felt like worthwhile employees, and we no longer gave a damn about the job. Turnover rates went through the roof. Nobody wanted to be there anymore - and, not surprisingly, our lab slipped off the leaderboard for quality and dependability.
And that’s a big deal. Good leaders make people feel good about themselves - and therefore the people do good work and have good moral structure. Bad leaders allow people to be complacent and selfish and uncooperative - bad work, bad moral structure.
I reckon we should be focused on reading good books and having healthy conversations. I reckon we should have politics that are more cooperative and less hateful. I think we should have leaders who recognize us as worthwhile individuals instead of just cattle. The more pieces of us, as individuals, that are built up and encouraged, the more we take back control of our lives and our values. The more respectably and admirably we treat each other, the more respectable and admirable we feel. Well what has this got to do with sex or self-control or good outcomes? Everything.
What reason does someone have to be better when all you do is make him feel worse? He’ll just become Cain - he’ll lash out at the world and say “I’ll show you.” And he’ll betray the values you were trying to get him to respect in the first place.
Give a kid a cookie when he helps another kid do his chores. Thank an adult publicly when she helps you with your garage sale. The best way to get people to treat each other better is by reinforcing it. Not punishing them when they’re dicks. That just makes them even more bitter.
The best way to deliver people from misery is to give them more good things and more accountability. Not to take away what little they think they have. Treat people like they’re worthy of respect and responsibility, and the odds are in your favor that they will actually be worthy of respect and responsibility. More often than not, that’s self-fulfilling.
When people feel like poor, hopeless victims of the world, they give in to low desires and they stop taking care of themselves. “Why try,” they ask. “What good does it do.”
“Why work hard at being good when the world doesn’t give a damn.”
Well, the world does give a damn. There are plenty of good people paying attention. There are plenty of good people who will want to be around you if you act like a quality person. And what if you accidentally got your shit together and then you were the inspiration for someone else to do the same? What if someone saw you exercising self-control and integrity, and they decided they want to be just like you?
That’s how it works. That’s how good people are made. Good people are not forged in the fires of bitterness and punishment. Good people are molded with interest and encouragement. Lifting up is the better option.
Drink some water.
JDR
“That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.” -Samwise Gamgee
Feel free to share this with whomever you want - this blog will always be free.