I used to make coloring books for children’s hospitals. I would draw animals with various conditions and medical devices—a giraffe with forearm crutches, a unicorn with a trach tube—and kids in hospitals would color them. As a result, my wife and I would often see kids in the wild with different disabilities and offer their parents free coloring books. Most said yes. My wife is very extroverted and I’m an extreme introvert, so when it was just me, it would sometimes take me a bit longer to justify approaching a stranger.

One day, I spotted a woman and a boy with leg braces called AFOs, at the park where my sons and I were playing. He looked to be around six. My boys were nearby and just as I was preparing to approach the woman who would turn out to be the grandmother, something somewhat alarming stopped me in my tracks.

The boy with the leg braces was standing in the middle of one of those plank-type bridges that are so common in playground structures. They’re the kind that rock and sway and wobble about when kids are jumping up and down on them. Otherwise, they hang in a downward arch that looks as if the playground structure has a lazy smile. The boy with the leg braces wasn’t jumping, and though the bridge was smiling, an even smaller boy beneath the bridge was not.

“Ow. Ow! OW!” he shouted, trying to wriggle his little fingers free from the edge of one of the planks that he had decided looked like a perfect handhold from which to dangle. He would have been right, had the boy in the braces not taken the opportunity to grind his medicalized feet into the dangling boy’s fingers. The grandmother rushed over to pry the orthotic shoes off the other boy’s digits, and I was frozen in place.

This was no accident. The disabled boy was working his little shoe back and forth like a smoker snuffing out a discarded cigarette before returning to a shift at a barely tolerable job. He was holding the metal handrail and pushing down with all his might to get as much weight and leverage into the act as he could muster.

Now, listen. Sometimes kids are rotten. My boys are no exception, nor was I at their age. There are no perfect kids nor perfect parents. But this was different. What most unsettled me was the look of genuine pleasure on the disabled boy’s face. I’d only recently returned to college after leaving the service to study psychology, but I would have known the correct term for what I was seeing years before: sadism.

I would go on to approach the grandmother. She said yes to a coloring book. She also said, somewhat still aghast, that the little boy with leg braces did that sort of thing all the time. To kids. To his little sister. To animals. Even though I was early on in my education and eventual career in psychotherapy, I knew what that likely meant.

While I’ve yet to find a crystal ball that allows me to trace out the developmental trajectory of kids like that, that boy became a concrete example of why group identity politics could never work. I cared deeply about the plight of kids with disabilities and their families—my own son has CP—but an uncomfortable realization settled over me that day.

Every sizable demographic category has its fair share of murderers, psychopaths, sadists, and opportunists.

Which means you have to treat people as individuals and not police or legislate on the basis of demography—lest you unwittingly advantage the small but durable subpopulation of bad men and women that exist across every identity group without exception. You cannot extend blanket moral immunity to a category of people without handing that immunity to predators inside the group. One such predator—who understood exactly how to exploit a society foolish enough to overindulge in what I’ve come to call Infant-Predator Politics—was a twenty-three-year-old man named Vickrum Digwa.

BRIEFLY, THE FACTS

Henry Nowak was eighteen years old. A first-year finance student at the University of Southampton. Polish-British. By all accounts, a kid at the beginning of his life. According to the BBC, on the night of December 3rd, 2025, Nowak was walking home in Southampton after an evening out with friends when he crossed paths with Digwa. After appearing to notice a large dagger, which as of right now only Sikhs are legally allowed to carry in England, Nowak thumb-flipped off of his Snapchat conversation and began to film the strange encounter.

“Are you a bad man?” Nowak asked Digwa in what would be the last video he would ever film. Digwa answered in the affirmative. “I am a bad man,” he said and grabbed the eighteen-year-old’s phone. What happened next is only known by Digwa, but the Judge of the case believes it’s likely that Nowak tried to get his phone back and was stabbed by the so-called ceremonial blade. Nowak tried to escape over a fence to a nearby house.

At around 11:30 PM, Digwa’s brother called emergency services and claimed, despite allegedly not being on the scene until later, “We just got attacked, racially, by some white person.” Seven minutes later, when police arrived, Digwa recounted a story in which he and his brother were the victims of racism—a statement that the Judge would eventually call a “wicked lie.” Henry Nowak, meanwhile, was lying between a brick wall and a black bumper, bleeding out. Police dragged him by the belt band to where they could reach him. As they were sitting him up, having to hold him in order for him not to slump over, one officer asked, “What’s happened here, all right?”

Henry responds, “I’ve been stabbed.”

The same officer replies, “You’ve been stabbed? Whereabouts?” while he and a female officer roll the eighteen-year-old onto his side with his hands behind his back. “Don’t think you have, mate,” he says as he handcuffs Henry. Nine times, the young man told police that he couldn’t breathe. They placed him under arrest and read him his rights. He died shortly thereafter in handcuffs.

Many people are drawing parallels between the case of Henry Nowak and what happened to George Floyd in May of 2020. I’m not here to relitigate either case, they’ve both been decided in a court of law, and of course there are differences between the two circumstances. What I am noting, however, because the current situation demands it, is the asymmetry with which institutions, politicians, and media coverage have reacted to both instances.

One death triggered global protests, toppled statues, and produced a billion-dollar cultural reckoning that led to permanent reorganization and reculturation of how police forces are expected to interact with members of different groups across the Western world. Not to mention all of the photo-ops of outraged leaders in COVID masks kneeling in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, politicians calling for “unrest in the streets,” and pro basketball players wearing “I CAN’T BREATHE” shirts.

The other triggered an internal investigation and resulted in media framing the outrage with all the predictable epithets, a government minister on television warning against “misinformation and inflammatory commentary,” and activists (who supported the 2020 riots) urging everyone to “turn the temperature down.” This asymmetry is unmistakable. More importantly, to those reasonably versed in the various trait theories of personality as well as moral psychology, it’s both strikingly familiar and the almost inevitable product of two psychological phenomena colliding.

GAME THEORY AND PREDATORS

Ironically enough, in 2020, just five weeks after the George Floyd riots began, researchers published a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that still hasn’t received the cultural attention it deserves. Across a series of experiments involving more than 3,500 participants, Ok et al. demonstrated that people high in Dark Triad traits—the clinical constellation of Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy—are significantly more likely to engage in what the researchers called “virtuous victimhood signaling.”

The mechanism seems to be as straightforward as it is ugly. The combination of victim signaling with virtue signaling—I am both innocent and wronged—turns out to be a somewhat optimal strategy for extracting nonreciprocal resources from other people. People feel most inclined to help someone who is simultaneously suffering and morally blameless. Even when researchers controlled for every factor that could presumably make them a so-called target for mistreatment, the correlation between high victim signalling scores and Dark Triad traits held.

Said plainly, it seems to be the case that over and above the potential for genuine vulnerability, those who are likely to score high in psychopathy, opportunism, and a willingness to manipulate others find it an effective strategy to claim victimhood status.

Additionally, a separate body of research has established that Dark Triad traits—particularly psychopathy and machiavellianism—are among the strongest predictors of whether or not someone will defect in the age-old prisoner’s dilemma experiment (where two people can either keep faith with one another or screw the other for a better deal). In game theory, defection is when one player breaks a cooperative agreement for personal gain while the other player, operating in good faith, absorbs the cost. Machiavellians defect due to strategy and long-term scheming, while psychopaths defect on impulse. Both defect.

What Digwa did on that street in Southampton bears a striking resemblance to this dynamic. He committed an act of violence, then immediately flipped the frame—declaring himself the victim of a racist attack—and watched as officers on scene, operating within a cultural and institutional climate that increasingly treats accusations of racism as axiomatically credible claims, responded in a manner consistent with what the strategy would predict.

ASYMMETRIC RESPONSES

Here’s where things get a little complicated and go well beyond politics. One predator defecting on a social contract and signaling virtuous victimhood does not a causal mechanism make. The primary reason why the Henry Nowak and George Floyd deaths are yielding such different reactions is the same reason why this essay belongs in ManPsych Magazine rather than a more sociopolitical commentary.

Twenty years ago, neuroscientists from University College London—a mere hour and forty-five minutes northeast of the college at which Nowak was a first-year student—published a study in Nature (this is the last study I’ll quote, I promise) that has been sitting in the literature for some time and only recently begun to make its rounds in the popular culture. In the current state of the field of psychology, there’s a chance it wouldn’t have been published at all.

Most people have an intact fairness circuit. Cheaters bother them. The researchers of UCL had men and women play a monetary game with what they believed to be other participants, but who were in fact actors—some of whom played fairly and some of whom cheated openly. Afterward, participants were shown cues indicating that those actors—both those who played fairly and those who cheated—were receiving painful electric shocks.

Researchers measure both self-reported responses and brain activity. When participants observed that someone who had played fairly was to be electrocuted—no one was actually electrocuted, mind you, otherwise it never would have cleared an ethics review board—both men and women “showed” empathy. Which is to say, they self-reported concern for the person and showed increased neural activation in brain areas commonly associated with experiencing pain oneself and empathizing with others’ pain (namely, the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex).

When confronted with the notion of cheaters being electrically shocked, however, the reaction of the sexes diverged somewhat. While both men and women experienced a reduction of both reported and observed empathy, men showed significantly less empathy. In fact, they showed neural activity consistent with satisfaction.

Put bluntly, not only were the men less likely to empathize with a defector, they were more likely to show signs of satisfaction when that defector received what they considered to be earned punishment.

The head researcher of the study concluded that the findings of the experiment suggested “a predominant role for men in maintaining justice and issuing punishment.” Conclusions from moral psychology, such as Carol Gilligan’s work, would likely map well onto this finding in that men tend to score higher on what is called an Ethic of Justice, while women score reliably higher on an Ethic of Care. I think it’s fair to say that, in recent years, Western societies have become tilted too far toward the latter. Outside of laboratory games, the people most willing to defect on social contracts are often the very same sorts of people—psychopaths, Machiavellians, opportunists, and strategic victim signalers—that societies must be designed to guard against.

As I recently alluded to in a previous essay, infant-predator politics have become fairly dominant in Western cultures. This leads to civilizational reflexes that sort everyone into either a vulnerable innocent requiring protection or a predator/oppressor requiring elimination or at least marked suspicion as to their motives, with no real meaningful categories between.

An Ethic of Care— which doesn’t require much of a logical leap to associate with a greater willingness to empathize with defectors—taken to institutional dominance becomes Infant-Predator Politics. This doesn’t just inform media, politics, and policing to instinctively side with virtuous victim signalers from perceived vulnerable group identities—it is the culture from which these policies and reactions are derived.

It’s what put handcuffs onto a dying eighteen-year-old boy who was accused of racism while Vickrum and Gurpreet Digwa watched.

Already, the same media apparatus that framed years of urban unrest as “mostly peaceful” and produced unending montages of global leaders on bended knee is up to its old trick—framing any legitimate outrage at two-tiered policing and asymmetric media coverage as some variant of negative personhood. Thankfully, most people have an intact fairness circuit. So, most people aren’t listening to the spin anymore.

Instead, they’re fully aware of the extent to which they’ve been manipulated into an asymmetry of response to tragedy depending on the demographic on the receiving end of the injustice. More importantly, they’re aware of just how susceptible a society dominated by an overdeveloped Ethic of Care is to being gamed by sadists, murderers, psychopaths, and opportunists who exist within every imaginable demographic group. Already, I’m seeing asymmetry in people demanding that upset citizens “turn the temperature down” and not sow division and hate by making this about race, which feels a bit odd.

I don’t think this has to be about indicting an entire race. Digwa is, of course, not representative of all Sikhs everywhere. I find it truly unsettling—perhaps due to my still intact fairness circuit—that the same people and institutions who have insisted at every turn since 2020 that everything be seen through the lens of race and the privilege of one group in particular, can’t see that they created the very conditions necessary for a young, British man to die handcuffed and formally under arrest over a “wicked lie” about racism.

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Things have largely cooled down regarding immigration protests in the United States, but something has been needling me over the last couple of months.

There was a video that had made the rounds on the internet earlier this year, as well as being featured on a few prime-time news stations. In it, Zeteo columnist and political correspondent Prem Thakker was doing a ride-along through the snow-lined streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota, where the deployment of thousands of U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement Officers had met with moral outrage.

This particular flavor of morality is nothing new—quite the contrary—but its coming to dominate the politics of a major world power is something as novel as it is dangerous. Thakker’s mobile interview unwittingly puts this new moral-political framework on full display for anyone with eyes to see it.

If you’re anything like me, when you hear the term ride-along, your mind goes to sitting shotgun in a police cruiser or an ambulance or, perhaps even, one of those bright red fire-station ladder trucks as they scream their way across a city to put out a fire or answer a call. Thakker isn’t riding in any of those, though.

Instead, the video is shot from the backseat of a civilian vehicle, with Thakker in the passenger seat. The young woman who is driving remains strategically out of frame in order to maintain her anonymity. The vehicle drives through daytime traffic, and the reporter asks where they’re headed. The driver responds, in her highlighter-like reflective vest, calmly that there has been an ICE vehicle spotted, so they’re going to confront it. That’s because she is a part of a growing number of anti-ICE volunteers and so-called patrollers, committed to disrupting efforts to deport the area’s sizeable population of illegal immigrants.

When they arrive at the scene a few moments later, the camera pans over to the back passenger window, revealing a man on the sidewalk in a puffy vest, beanie, and a mask that covers all but a narrow strip of his face. He’s talking into the phone held in front of his fabric-obscured mouth, but it quickly becomes obvious that he’s the voice currently on speakerphone inside the car.

“They’re in front of me,” he says. “They’re just sitting in the car.”

“Hold on,” the driver says. She clicks the car into park and eagerly gets out.

The camera cuts, and she and the man in the puffy vest are approaching a vehicle parked two to three cars ahead. Then it cuts again, and Reflective Vest is laughing at the open window of a car that turns out not to be ICE afterall. “You know your car is tinted,” she says, as if that could somehow justify two citizens profiling, stalking, and confronting another citizen driving a car they wrongfully assumed was being driven by federal law enforcement officers.

A final jump-cut, and she’s working both thumbs on black glass, presumably notifying all the people in her informal network. “False alarm. False alarm,” she says. Then we’re back in the car, with Thakker asking more questions. He wants to know how she goes about regulating her emotions when confronting ICE agents—evidently, both real and imagined. What she said struck me as odd at first, but it would click into place shortly thereafter.

“There are times where I’m scared, but I’ll still approach a vehicle. Like, it doesn’t stop me or any of us from showing up,” she says, her back to the camera. “And actually, not only showing up, but putting ourselves in a position… almost like a barrier between them trying to get…” She pauses, searching for the word. Eventually, she finds it. “Vulnerablepeople—people who don’t speak the language fluently.”

Then they’re moving through the winter streets of Minneapolis again, and I realize that she’s driving what looks to be a seventh-generation Toyota Camry. I’m not a car guy, but I would recognize that dash and instrument panel anywhere, because it’s the exact same model that I bought my wife when she was pregnant with our first son. We took countless trips in that car, and I guess its aesthetic burned itself deeply into my otherwise aloof memory—perhaps because it was such a formative era of my life. Having kids will do that sort of thing to you.

It was in that moment, when all those memories collided with the words and actions of a faceless young woman confronting ICE agents to protect immigrants from deportation, that this philosophical framework snapped into place for me. Tell me if I’m wrong.

BEYOND FRIEND-ENEMY

It may be the case that there isn’t another political theorist who will be met with as much reflexive ire, rejection, and reputation-savaging dismissal as Carl Schmitt. That’s because, in addition to writing the book The Concept of the Political in 1932, Schmitt would—a year later, when Hitler came to power—join the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, better known today simply as the Nazis.

Now, I’m no fan of Nazis. I’m not a Holocaust denier, nor am I interested in laundering Schmitt’s biography. It’s likely fair to say he was a bad egg, if by no other metric than the fact that he resisted every attempt at de-Nazification after the war was over. It’s at least safe to say that Schmitt supported the regime that was responsible for the murder of tons of innocent people in the first half of the twentieth century.

However, given all of that, I think that his most notable observation regarding the nature of the political is not only true, but it may well be—when taken to the extreme—what led an entire Western nation to go crazy enough to go along with the Nazis.

The Friend-Enemy Distinction gets a lot of blowback from people who seek to shut down the idea by permanently stapling it to the actions of the collective that embodied it. Karl Marx’s ideas, however, get eighty to a hundred million passes and end up in courses like the Children’s Literature class I took at a Christian university during undergrad. Either way, I’m not out to dwell too much on the man behind the idea so much as I’m trying to set the stage for what seems to be going on in places like Minnesota.

Fundamentally, the friend-enemy distinction boils down to this: there are instances when groups can coexist and instances when they cannot. A collective is really a group of subgroups. Those subgroups can disagree and even outright compete in ways that do not fundamentally threaten the well-being of the collective. Their conflicts and disagreements—because there are always some, even within a family—are not existential in nature. In essence, the friend-enemy distinction is the spirit that underpins irreconcilable tribalism. Which resonates, at least to me, given the rhetoric, actions, and dynamics that have progressively taken root in American politics over recent years.

Turn on the news, and there seems to be no end to the othering. The number of ways in which we seem to be dividing the country into various camps of “us” and “thems.” There’s no shortage of ways to generate enemies of existential concern. When I look at the modern world, I don’t think that the existence of this sort of dynamic is up for debate—regardless of where the idea comes from. In fact, I think it’s a primal part of human nature and is certainly playing a large part in what we’re seeing in response to thousands of ICE agents being sent into places like Minneapolis-Saint Paul.

But I don’t think it’s the whole story.

INFANT-PREDATOR POLITICS

I began to hear the term “fur baby” being thrown around in the 1990s. I thought it sounded strange even then. It sounded overly sentimental and what I’d eventually come to see as a form of cross-species maternalization—I may be wrong, but I wouldn’t say it’s much of a paternal sentiment. Even now, I find it strange when my wife will (in front of our actual children) tell our dog to “go to Dad.” I’ve long since given up trying to correct her, but the reality of the matter is this: I’m not the dog’s father. I’m its owner.

That being said, I do love my dog, as demonstrated by the massive vet bill she stacked up recently that I paid when, less than a century ago, the prescription might have been a trip behind the barn and a cure delivered by something with a lever-action. Don’t freak out. I’d pay the bill again if the situation came up in the future, but I will never be a “Dog Dad,” because there is no such thing.

Yet the sentiment that you can, in fact, be a Dog Mom has somehow remained. If anything, it’s continued to grow in acceptability to the point that there are Dog Mom groups in real life, websites dedicated to the lifestyle, and even mainstream floral companies with baskets and bouquets specifically designed for Dog Moms so that they don’t feel left out on Mother’s Day. Interestingly enough, this odd but seemingly benign cultural phenomenon seems to have coincided with another: the steady decline of actual parenthood.

In reality, U.S. fertility rates have been in a steady decline in one way or another since our nation’s founding. Decreases in infant mortality and industrialization, and a whole slew of other variables, make up for a lot of this, but up until relatively recently, we’ve always managed to trend above the average of 2.1 births per woman required for a sufficient replacement rate to maintain the population. That changed in the 1970s.

Beginning in the early 1970s, for perhaps two primary reasons, fertility rates fell off a cliff and have more or less stayed there. Recent data from the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire found that there were 5.7 million more childless women (ages 20-39) than expected, beyond the previous downward trend. If you don’t believe in biologically mediated behaviors, it may sound sexist to say that I don’t think it’s a coincidence we’re seeing what seems to be a novel political framework take root in places like Minneapolis. However, I think parentlessness affects both young men and women, albeit differently.

BEYOND THE NURSERY

I remember nervously clicking in, belting down, and cinching—and recinching—the base of the Graco carseat in the back of our 7^th-generation Toyota Camry. I probably did it at least half a dozen times before the nurse finally wheeled out my wife and baby boy to the curbside pick-up area, where I had pulled the car up to. I was terrified. And, even though my wife had had a nine-month head start on bonding and getting to know the little fella, I knew instinctively that this was a creature that I was supposed to protect with my life.

The ensuing months were a blur of sleeplessness and life-altering obligations. He would cry because he was hungry. He would cry because he was uncomfortable. He would cry because he was tired and cry because he didn’t want to go to sleep. Amid all of this, my wife seemed to literally lack the capacity for frustration. Fatigue? Surely. Irritability toward me and the rest of the world? On occasion. But she seemed genuinely incapable of being angry and aggressive toward this newfound disruptor of worlds, which was a good thing.

The only logical response to an infant is care and compassion. You cannot expect an infant to pay his/her way. You can’t expect to teach them or correct them. No sane person attempts to hold them accountable in any way. No matter how exhausted or depleted you are, the moral logic doesn’t change: you feed them, protect them, and structure the entire world around their needs.

If Friend-Enemy politics leads us to categorize people as “us” and “them” (or more accurately “our tribe” and “their tribe”), the Infant-Predator Distinction dichotomously categorizes everyone as either a baby or a threat—a vulnerable and inculpable thing to be taken care of or a blood-thirsty predator. In defense of this reflex, the correct response when you come into a real nursery and find some strange creature or person where they shouldn’t be—where they can hurt your baby—is to scream loudly for help if you’re not a fighter or to attack with hands and feet and teeth and with whatever implements in reach that you can turn into impromptu weapons.

You don’t negotiate with predators. You run them off or eliminate them entirely. The stakes are simply too high—too existential—for anything else. But what happens when this ethic either scales or is inappropriately mapped onto non-infant categories? I think about the anonymous young woman, and many others like her, willing to put themselves between federal law enforcement and “vulnerable” people. Does it have anything to do with the unprecedented rates of childlessness in adults aged twenty to thirty-nine? We can’t yet say for certain.

What we can say is that we have real historical examples of instances when the Friend-Enemy ethic was taken to the extreme in varying nations. Each time, the result has been tragedy. Yet, I’m confident the required amount of friend-enemy distinction in a functioning society is not zero. Likewise, there is almost assuredly a non-zero amount of Infant-Predator politics to functioning cultures. I’m unsure, however, if we have any historical examples of countries that became similarly dominated by the spirit of the Infant-Predator Distinction as we seem to be today.

That may well be because this is an entirely novel phenomenon. After all, we’ve never seen a country as large as the U.S. experience such a durable and overwhelming population collapse. However, it may well also be that this has happened in other times and other places, but that history is written by the victors, and that societies which come to be dominated by the Infant-Predator distinction are uniquely susceptible to conquest and destruction—both from within and without—and are lost to the sands of time.

Maybe time will tell.

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Studying personality psychology is as useful as it is annoying.

It’s useful because it allows you to realize that people actually differ in how they view and experience the world. It’s annoying because it requires you to reconsider that the chatty Kathies of the world who claim to enjoy horrid things like corporate Christmas parties and small talk aren’t full of shit. Somehow, in a way that I can never fully understand, the Kathies are telling the truth.

That’s because the world manifests itself differently for people with different personalities—same world, different worldviews. To an extrovert, it’s a place of social opportunity and novel experiences. To a disagreeable person, it’s a place to compete for what you want. Creative people see it as a place to make new things, even if it requires breaking the old ones. Conservative people disagree, seeing it as a place to maintain what we’ve been given. All of them are right—some of the time.

It seems to me that a functioning community is built of opposing personalities. Introverts oppose extroverts. Creatives square off with conservatives. Optimists have pessimists. Leaders have followers—and so on. However, instead of this oppositional nature justifying endless infighting and calamity though, it can have a balancing effect on society as a whole. The problem is when it becomes imbalanced.

SOCIETY AS A ROWBOAT:

Human beings are both individually conscious and social creatures, which means we exist at two levels simultaneously. We are singular entities, completely separate from other people, as well as members of a community. As a result of this, we have to learn to cycle between the individual and the collective—something that we rarely do well. More often, we find ourselves pegging the needle to either extreme. It can take decades for a person to learn how to do this well. It takes a community longer still but how long does a society take to get the balance right? Centuries? Millennia? A better question might be how long does it take for a society that has, by some miracle, managed to balance the individual and the collective to devolve into something akin to a dysfunctional rowboat—the crew working against one another, lacking a shared destination, and destined to sink?

In evolutionary biology, there’s an idea called balanced polymorphism. Within a species, if there is a trait with durable variants, it’s likely because each version has some unique advantage in a given environmental context. I think this applies quite nicely to human personality. However, in addition to ensuring the future survivability of the species, I think it is likely that the tension between opposing personalities also serves the collective in the here and now.

Part of the troop needs to prioritize cooperation, while another elevates competition. Compassionate folks care for those who need caring for and combative folks fight those who need to be fought. Traditionalists and innovators. Thinkers and doers. No individual can be expected to be all things, so we seem to specialize in roles to ensure smooth sailing in the rowboat of society.

Yet things can devolve quite quickly when one side is stunted, leaving the lone extreme to go about unbalanced and unchecked without the counterweight of collaborative opposition. Then the rowboat lists hard to port with a single side rowing—dipping long oars into the sea and pulling like hell. The other side stares down at their oars-turned-to-stubs—lopped off at the collars—wondering why no one else seems to notice that the boat is spinning like mad and that the water is swirling around them in what looks to be on the brink of a vortex capable of sucking the whole damned thing under.

PATHOLOGICAL EMPATHY:

Agreeable people are great. They’re polite, compassionate, sympathetic, and particularly adept at feeling the emotions of others. They’re the people who tend to give more than they take, defaulting to generosity. They make exceptional caretakers and excellent teammates, prone to altruism and being highly reciprocal as they are. They’re particularly involved community members due to being genuinely concerned with the well-being of others—sometimes more concerned than they ought to be. In a world completely devoid of predation and danger, trait agreeableness may well be the personality dimension to usher in the utopia. This isn’t that world, though. This world has both danger and predators to spare. Therefore, an excess of unbridled and unbalanced trait agreeableness taken to an extreme is prone to running afoul time and time again.

Thomas Sowell said, “There are no solutions, only tradeoffs”. Carl Jung said, “No one receives free gifts from the gods”. While Sowell was talking about economics and Jung was talking about whatever the hell his psychologically mystic ass was up to, with regard to human nature, they were both right. As with every extreme in personality, being high in trait agreeableness isn’t all sunshine and rainbows—for the individual or the people around them. It’s only in recent years, however, that we’ve begun to see what it looks like when agreeableness scales well beyond its utility and leads to an unbalanced society.

Foremost among the attributes that characterize a highly agreeable person are compassion and empathy—two attributes that have reached near-religious levels of elevation as moral imperatives in our current culture. Don’t get me wrong, joining someone in their suffering (compassion) or feeling their plight as if it were your own (empathy) can be useful—especially in the case of infants, very small children, and genuine victims. However, beyond this, both tendencies have the potential to be helpful or harmful, depending on the situation. There are times when the right response is to listen to the problems of others and gently help solve them. Sometimes, though, someone saying, “Get up, stop your bitching, and rub some dirt on it” is exactly what’s needed. The absence of this latter sentiment reverberates through our current society.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard the word empathy in university, I would have been able to pay cash for grad school tuition. It has become a cure-all, a panacea, in all aspects of culture and academia alike, with little to no acknowledgment of its iatrogenic potential (when a well-intended intervention causes harm). Empathy cuts both ways. Just as too much compassion can alleviate people of the need to assume agency in their own lives, too much empathy can excuse them of a much-needed culpability for abhorrent decisions and actions—leading to a lack of negative reinforcement to dissuade undesirable and unsafe behaviors. All mercy and no justice make Trevor an entitled and unaccountable little asshole. We’re the type of creature that requires both the carrot and the stick to stay on the straight and narrow.

Agreeable people are often overly permissive and forgiving—at least until they’ve been burned a few times by people who don’t share their innate inclination toward reciprocity. Combine this with an impulse for undiscerning generosity and take it to scale, and you end up with a society of manic Oprah-like gift-giving that acts as a beacon to predators, grifters, and tricksters alike—people respond to incentives after all. Without the hard-earned wisdom needed to be judicious and discerning in these tendencies, an overly agreeable person is easily taken advantage of. Therefore, an overly agreeable society is likewise destined to be taken advantage of and, even more bleakly, would likely be short-lived.

Being highly agreeable is no different than any other personality trait extreme in that it is both integral to a functioning society and insufficient on its own. Mature individuals can learn to consider people’s feelings while managing to tell the truth. They can learn to non-impulsively apply empathy and compassion only when it’s necessary and useful. They can learn when to let things go versus when they have to have a fight. Yet, not everyone decides to develop. Some people lean into their default nature so hard, refusing to incorporate the wisdom of balance, that their personality becomes a pathology. What happens when a society does the same?

I reckon it takes to infantilizing huge swathes of the population—treating them like babies, victims, and children. I imagine it demands that all of the sharp corners and hard surfaces of life itself be rendered into safe spaces for soft heads and unsteady legs. It would certainly demand that everyone gets a turn and everyone gets a prize so that they don’t feel left out. Any sign of aggression on the playground of society would be met with phrases such as “use your words” and “violence is never the answer,” punctuated with syllabic hand-clapping.

It would no longer be enough to invite the excluded kids to join in on your game. That would be tolerance—not inclusion. Instead, you would be expected to reconstitute the rules of your game from the ground up in order to accommodate whatever game the new kids left to join yours—even though they left theirs for a reason. If you question whether or not this is all necessary—as the playground equipment sags under the weight of too many kids and you notice that a few of the little bastards brought screwdrivers and a couple of those seem hell-bent on taking off the slide and the bridge and disassembling the structure itself—you’re met with a hiss and a tight-lipped insistence to “be nice”.

Then you remember something. You’re a grown-ass man and you don’t have to apologize for well-considered aggression or for putting the well-being of the community over the need to consider a few people’s feelings. You don’t have to accept the prioritization of others’ welfare over your own just to keep the peace and so that other people give you an “I’m a good person” sticker. You don’t have to extend your game to everyone with a heartbeat, nor do you have to tolerate when people overstep and assert themselves unduly. This is the role of disagreeable people.

A society without them is a society prone to elevating tenets of agreeableness to the point of public pathology—as if these tendencies were somehow a panacea without the potential to cause problems. This makes for a society that, without the counterbalancing effect of cultural wisdom or an oppositional mode of being, is uniquely and equally susceptible to predation from without and within. The problem is, we’ve spent the last fifty years derogating the counterweight of human personality meant to balance out the cult of empathy.

DISAGREEABLE MEN:

The Five-Factor model of personality is perhaps the most valid and cross-culturally reliable framework of human personality. It’s become fairly common in recent years, to the point that most people are aware of the five domains (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism). They may not be aware, however, that each of these traits follows a normal distribution pattern—that most people score in the middle as average, while a subset of people scores very high in the trait, while another subset scores very low. They also may not know that men and women overlap considerably in all of the traits, meaning that, on net, men and women are more alike than they are different.

However, in trait agreeableness, there is a significant sex difference at the extremes of the distribution. This translates to the fact that, though there are disagreeable women and agreeable men, the vast majority of extremely disagreeable people are all men, while the vast majority of extremely agreeable people are women. Why does this matter?

Oftentimes, when people bring up that there is a “war on masculinity” in the West, they’re met with a few different tricks by apologists for the feminization of boys and men. Sometimes it’s met with outright denial. Other times, there’s this new-fangled bad-faith rhetorical tactic of asking someone to define a term and then dismissing the impromptu definition as narrow and/or reductive. Fine. One of the largest problems in our culture right now is the demonization of disagreeable men writ large and society is suffering as a result.

Disagreeable men are competitive, unempathetic, aggressive, blunt, and vengeful. It’s not hard to see why these traits would be unsettling to people who would transform the world into an existential daycare. However, their discomfort doesn’t make disagreeable men any less necessary to balance out the pathology of agreeableness taken to the extreme. There must be people who prioritize competition over inclusion in order to elevate the most competent among us so that everyone can benefit from their achievements. There must be people who prioritize truth and logic over kindness and emotion for society to stay grounded in reality rather than spinning off into an oblivion where everyone is granted their own personal truth.

We need people willing to mock bad ideas so the collective doesn’t get wrapped around the axle and warped around the ravings of crazy, stupid, and/or manipulative people. There needs to be people willing to evoke a capacity for violence and aggression in order to inhibit bad people from doing bad things. Someone has to respond to the collective whine over the cosmic injustice of it all with “What are you going to do about it—be a victim or a victor?” A functioning society is balanced by both extremes of the agreeable/disagreeable axis. Both sides must have their oars in the water to keep the whole thing from spinning away into a vortex of unhinged empathy and compassion or an equal and opposite one of aggression and competition. We find ourselves in one such downward spiral, like a rowboat careening down an oceanic toilet bowl. The question is, how do we get the other side’s paddles back into the water before it’s too late?

For a while, I thought the answer to this was to convince people to stop derogating disagreeable men—to appeal to their sensibilities for a collective need for balance. Recently, I’ve seen the already crowded room of activism be further overpopulated by those raising the alarm for masculine men. We don’t need another protected victim class, though. We simply need disagreeable men to be disagreeable, rather than conforming to society’s maladaptive agreeable insistences. They need to compete, elevate truth and reason above emotion, demand that people be judged for their actions, reject the derogation of meritorious achievement, and refuse to let the West fall on the sword of compassion in its guilt-fueled insanity.

No amount of maternal hand-clapping will alleviate disagreeable men of their role in balancing our society. Contrary to what is taught, these things don’t have to manifest as primate dominance or as selfish dragon hoarding of wealth. They can be done in a way that serves the individual, their family, their community, and society at large. You can be a disagreeable man and be a good man. If anyone tells you otherwise, simply look them in the eye and tell them that you agree to disagree.

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Let me borrow your internal movie maker for a bit. I’ll give it back, I promise.

I want you to imagine a war room. Put it inside a tent. There should be a huge map sprawled out atop a big table surrounded by hard men. What type of warriors are they? Horse-riding Samurai? Anglo-Saxons in heavy, jingling mail? Modern Spec-Ops guys kitted out in plate carriers and FAST helmets? It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that they’re all gathered around, analyzing the enemy’s position—and that at least one of them is smoking a pipe.

Picture one of the men closer to the table—preferably not the pipe smoker—pressing a dusty finger onto the map. He might be pointing at a gate, a tunnel, or any building in particular. It doesn’t make much of a difference, so long as he’s indicating a spot that an enemy would have a hell of a time defending, monitoring, and/or restricting access to. Now, imagine him speaking up, probably in a higher-pitched voice than you might have otherwise expected.

“Here’s the weakest point in the enemy’s position—the place where they’re the most vulnerable.” A few heads nod. There are a couple of grunts of agreement as the others see it, too. So, he carries on. “Then, by all means—and at all costs—we should avoid it because, you know, vulnerability is strength.” The room goes quiet.

I picture him standing up a bit taller, convinced that what he just said is both profound and useful. In my mind, he’s smacking fruit-flavored gum while everyone else in the tent is trying to wrap their heads around the nonsense that came out of his mouth. Finally, someone breaks the silence—it’s the guy with the pipe.

“What in the hell did you just say?” he says, or perhaps something a bit more colorful.

If the reply from Captain Vulnerability is anything other than a laugh and an admission that he was just fucking around, he’ll likely be stripped of command faster than a knife fight in a phone booth. Rightly so, because he’s an idiot. Vulnerability isn’t a strength. We know this intuitively, yet people (psychotherapists, teachers, life coaches, etc.) will proclaim otherwise, and they will do so loudly. This wouldn’t be a big deal, except that the way a person and, more importantly, a society defines strength actually matters. It has real-world implications, many of which we are only now beginning to see in the modern world.

VULNERABILITY:

When challenging an idea, it can be useful to start with things that both sides agree upon. So, let’s start with a list of things that any reasonable person would consider vulnerable. Since we’re talking about living things—humans—we’ll stick to examples of other living things.

Infants.

Babies are universally considered to be vulnerable. For the first few months, they’re like human larvae, covered in grubworm folds and wriggling about clumsily. Their need for protection and provision is so absolute that it’s baked into the biology of parents—most of them, anyhow. Infants have zero defenses beyond their ability to hijack our peripheral nervous system via their car-alarm-level wailing, and they rely completely on others for their survival. Babies are inarguably vulnerable.

Old people.

The older, the better. The very old among us are highly susceptible to all sorts of injury and maleficence from ne’er do wells and physics alike. Whereas young people can oftentimes take a long trip off a short set of stairs and land like Willy Wonka losing his cane in a cobblestone crack (or at least avoid catastrophic injury), a small fall for an old person can lead to serious injury—sometimes even death. Additionally, old folks are particularly soft targets for scammers and crooks alike. Any delinquent with the upper body strength of a teenage boy can overpower the vast majority of them. Elderly people are very vulnerable.

Endangered species!

Endangered species are so vulnerable that the two words are interchangeable. By definition, their entire genus is near extinction. That’s pretty vulnerable. Each of these are rock-solid examples of vulnerability. All three have a heightened susceptibility to injury, attack, and/or mortality if left alone to the natural order of things. That doesn’t remotely sound like strength to me. Vulnerability and strength can be related, in the way that fear and bravery can be related, but the two words are nowhere near synonymous. So how did an idea as bad as vulnerability is strength take hold of the collective?

A VERBAL SHELL GAME:

People manipulate language for all sorts of reasons. Good poets make art with words, bending and distorting dense and distillate forms for effect. Novelists construct vivid worlds that feel both real and familiar using only their lexicon. Comedians become masters of misdirection and wordplay in order to snap together ideas at the perfect time to ignite amphitheaters of people into shared laughter. These verbal manipulations, in their purer forms, are done in the spirit of beauty, benevolence, and play.

However, when people use language to distort public perception on a matter—attempting to reconfigure reality—the human capacity for linguistic manipulation becomes malignant. Sometimes, it’s immediately evident and stomped out quickly. Other times, the effects may take a while to fully manifest. While I’m not saying that the most well-known among those who succeeded in artificially elevating vulnerability as a virtue knew full well what they were doing, I am saying that they poured gasoline onto the embers of victimhood that have since become a raging fire of resentment capable of consuming the West.

There were many ideological chefs in the soup kitchen that cooked up the notion that vulnerability is strength. Most of them were in psychology and adjacent fields. However, no one person has put the idea more firmly and permanently on the cultural menu than Brené Brown. Brown is a social worker, self-proclaimed researcher, and sociology professor who has spent the past two decades working tirelessly to both destigmatize shame and normalize vulnerability. She’s written six number-one New York Times bestsellers. She’s been on Oprah a handful of times. At the time of writing this, her TEDx has over 65 million views. In short, she’s the heavy-hitter when it comes to how this bad idea reached escape velocity.

Brown has become so iconic in our overly psychologized culture that her books and TED talk have become a staple in graduate and undergraduate psychology programs alike. There’s one quote in particular that you’ll see plastered all over Pinterest as well as on the websites of mid-level psychotherapy private practices.

“Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness”.

There’s a trick here. Did you see it? It’s a little manipulative rhetorical device called equivocation, which is a sort of linguistic shell game by which the speaker can cycle between words quickly enough to blur the distinction between them. Usually, as is the case with Brown’s example, it’s to bend or outright replace the definition of one term in particular.

We draw two lexical comparisons almost immediately when hearing the quote. Firstly, vulnerability sounds like neither truth nor courage, but we understand what she means. She means that speaking truthfully can sometimes make a person vulnerable to attack, judgment, or ostracism from a group. This is true and something I imagine we’ve all experienced at one point or another.

Secondly, we’re told that a link exists between vulnerability and courage. This is also true. If you’re vulnerable and susceptible to injury or harm, it does take courage to run into a burning building. It’s the whole reason we laud the insanity of firefighters.

The real mastery of the trick, however, comes at the tail end of the statement—the part of the play that con artists running a shell game would call “Palming the Pea.” Brown primes us for false agreement with two more truths: both truth and courage can be uncomfortable, and neither is a weakness.

Then, she flicks her wrist and waits for you to pull up a cup that, to your astonishment, will have nothing underneath it. Did you see the play? Did you catch the if A ≈ B and B ≠ C, then A ≠ C conflation that leads so many people to a distorted notion that vulnerability can somehow be analogous to strength? Most people can’t see the sleight of hand. Why not?

A WILLINGNESS TO BE DECEIVED:

You can make a slew of arguments as to why some of us would be more susceptible to lexical manipulation than others (e.g., low verbal IQ, confirmation bias, the relief of cognitive dissonance, etc.). I think the answer as to why so many people are willing to buy into the notion that vulnerability is strength is much simpler.

People respond to incentives.

Strength—the capacity to withstand great force or pressure—is really difficult to attain. That’s true for physical strength, mental strength, emotional strength, moral strength, and any other strength you can imagine. Becoming strong takes work, whether it’s the type that resists gravity or existential suffering.

Strength is hard-earned through the time, effort, and willpower required to become the type of person who isn’t quick to buckle. It’s not easy. It’s not supposed to be. If it was, I argue that it wouldn’t be something that we instinctively, collectively, and universally value. Nor, interestingly enough, would it be something with enough benefit to make it worth subverting.

If people are assigned social status, respect, and reputation based upon the level of strength that they’ve cultivated—which they are, consciously or unconsciously—the egalitarian types run into a dilemma. What do they do about people who don’t want to “do the work” but still want to be seen as strong and formidable? Shouldn’t those people likewise have access to the admiration of others? Isn’t it unfair that they should have to voluntarily subject themselves to uncomfortable and drawn-out processes of contending with austerity, growth, and humility to be considered laudable by society?

That doesn’t seem very equitable.

The problem with this type of reasoning is that a firefighter isn’t virtuous solely for being flammable. A functioning society holds firefighters in high esteem because—despite being flammable—they voluntarily run into burning buildings to save strangers. Thankfully, not all people seek the easy path in life. Some people understand the value of becoming the type of creature who can make molehills out of mountains rather than the reverse. These people are worthy of our respect and admiration. They’ve earned it.

If the vulnerability cult were to put forth the idea that vulnerability isn’t always a bad thing—when coupled with legitimate virtues—I would be open to hearing the argument. If they were to say that discriminant vulnerability is an essential part of the sort of emotional maturity that leads to rich relationships, I’m on board with that message. An overly hard and cold man doesn’t make for a good father or husband, but neither does the opposite—a man who is incapable of being strong when those who rely upon him need it most.

Does it matter if some lady conflates words to sell books? Maybe not. Does it impact society at large if she manages to get onto talk shows and offers people an overly convenient worldview, as well as access to unearned status? It depends on how many people believe it. If enough people buy into the notion that being vulnerable is somehow strength, it erodes the value of strength itself and undermines the accomplishments of the type of people that we depend on—whether we want to admit it or not.

Physically strong men protect others. Emotionally strong men keep their feelings out of the driver’s seat when dangerous things need doing. Mentally strong men do the seemingly impossible things that allow a culture’s lights to stay on—so that the general public can continue to have access to safety, Wi-Fi, and Frappuccinos.

Strength is the primary load-bearing pillar of masculinity through which young men, in particular, find a way to earn their place in society. It’s the currency of their contribution. No amount of doublespeak or oppositional defiance on daytime talk shows will change this—nor will it change how much the world desperately needs more of it. Words have meaning. Vulnerability isn’t strength. Strength is strength. More importantly, how we define it matters.

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I recently finished a novel by B. F. Skinner, who is perhaps the most famous behavioral psychologist of all time. If you’ve ever taken so much as a survey course in psychology, you will have heard his name—likely with the term “operant conditioning” following closely behind. Skinner spent over half a century exploring the ways in which, with the right incentive structures, you can turn animals into regular circus performers—manipulating them into conducting the most odd and unexpected acts.

He trained rats to solve puzzles and play a version of rodent basketball. He trained pigeons to make art and to square off against each other in pigeon ping-pong matches. He proved against a shadow of a doubt that with enough patience and knowledge of a creature’s reward systems, you could compel it to do just about anything, regardless of how bizarre and unnatural. You probably know all of this, though.

What you might not know—what your overpriced textbooks and underwhelming professors didn’t teach you—was that Burrhus Frederic Skinner was also an inventor with a penchant for putting living things into boxes as well as a utopian novelist who would (in the book’s preface) place Karl Marx beside Jesus, Buddha, and Confucius in a list of “great men who are said to have made a difference in human affairs.” More importantly, you are almost certainly unaware of the extent to which B. F. Skinner’s work is leveraged against you on a daily basis.

SKINNER’S BOXES:

When not busy conducting research or teaching behaviorism and experimental psychology courses at Harvard, you could find B. F. Skinner tinkering. He invented lab recording devices, teaching machines, and even—during World War II—a nose-cone habitat that amounted to a pigeon-guided missile system. However, it’s for two different inventions that Skinner is most well-known for today—both of them boxes. One for rats. The other for children.

If the first of Skinner’s boxes were to have never existed, it’s unlikely that his name would have been carved into the field of psychology as deeply as phone numbers and crude haikus are knifed into the partition walls of truck stop bathrooms. Skinner initially called the small habitat for birds and rodents The Operant Conditioning Chamber. Whether it’s because that name doesn’t roll off the tongue or because it sounds like an apparatus from a dystopian torture room, researchers simply began calling it the Skinner Box.

A Skinner Box is an enclosure in which an animal’s behavior can be modified through enforcement—that is to say, reward or punishment. Skinner’s earliest versions were simple enough with a bar that, when pressed after the desired action had been performed, would dispense a food pellet into a tray. Each iteration brought more features. Bright lights that could flash, dim, and flare in all sorts of annoying manners. Speakers that would play anything from foghorns to cat yowls to whatever the rodent equivalent of Enya is.

Soundproofing. Environmental controls. Vibrating floors. Electrified floors. The boxes got more sophisticated as more and more researchers adopted them and improved upon the design. Some current models have even managed to integrate augmented and virtual reality. However, despite all the changes, the function of the Skinner Box remains more or less the same—do what your research overlords want you to, and you’ll receive a reward. Don’t, and you won’t. Though punishments were used, it was always the proverbial carrot that intrigued Skinner more than the stick.

The second box that B. F. Skinner invented still gives many parents the willies. He called it the Air Crib, and it was an attempt to solve his own problems. After finding out that his somewhat difficult-to-please wife was pregnant with their second child, good ol’ B. F. went full-on autist. He began listing every possible burden and task associated with baby rearing—then he got to work categorizing these as either essential or non-essential. He began thinking up ways to eliminate as many of the latter as possible. Unsurprisingly, the solution was a box.

Skinner trounced down to his home basement with sketchpad and tool bag in hand and, after some time, emerged with a proposed design for a product that could save his wife of the undue and menial tasks associated with raising a baby. He sought to relieve her of as many of the burdens of her ill-fated domesticity (like many academics, B. F. Skinner had a fairly negative view of stay-at-home moms). It wouldn’t be long before a prototype was completed. Then, in an effort to unshackle new moms at scale, it would become a proper product.

The Air-Crib-actual ended up being an enclosure with a big-ass viewport not unlike the reptile displays at a zoo. It was designed to be a safe space for the child to exist so as to free up the hands of new mothers for more important things than having to walk around constantly holding their baby. The box was environmentally controlled and made of enough non-porous material to be damn near hoseable. Its primary value, however, was keeping those pesky babies from being underfoot, burdening the household with all their attempts to explore their newfound habitat.

Several hundred couples jumped on board, electing to raise their babies for a good amount of the day in the human equivalent of a terrarium. Skinner’s second child, a daughter named Deborah, spent huge chunks of her days in the thing over her first two years—playing, sleeping, and lounging with limited access to her environment and her parents.

Despite the willingness of a few hundred folks to give it a go, the product failed to reach mainstream success for various reasons. Surprisingly, most parents weren’t too keen on raising their infants in boxes—least of all a box designed by a research psychologist who specialized in getting rats and birds to do weird shit in boxes that (to the lowly plebian eye) weren’t all that dissimilar to the Air Crib.

Like many people at the time, and most people today, I am struck with the oddity of Skinner’s overly sterilized and systematized view of child-rearing. However, it wasn’t the box itself that unsettled me so much as it was the willingness with which B. F. Skinner subjected his own daughter (and the children of many others) to what was, in effect, a real-time experiment in early childhood development. To me, it demonstrated a view of childhood, parenting, and human nature that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around. Yet, I couldn’t put my finger on why it bothered me so much. That is, until I began reading through Skinner’s first and only novel.

WALDEN TWO:

A century prior to B. F. Skinner putting everything and anything that couldn’t outrun him into boxes, another man was conducting a boxed experiment of his own. The philosopher Henry David Thoreau closed himself off from the world of men into a 10-foot by 15-foot cabin he built on a remote part of the land owned by his friend and renowned poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The experiment was a success, and two years, two months, and two days later, he emerged with a newfound bed of philosophies—centering around such notions as self-reliance, free will, and human nature—as well as a draft of the manuscript that would eventually become his magnum opus, Walden. Many years later, Skinner would take both the title and the themes of Thoreau’s work and, not unlike the behaviors of the creatures in his lab, bend them to his desired will in a novel that he cheekily called Walden Two.

In addition to the title, Walden Two is the name of a fictional compound that is a utopian hippie’s wet dream. It’s surrounded by lush and expansive greenery with buildings made of heaped earth and a thousand-some-odd inhabitants working in egalitarian harmony. No one person is more important than anyone else. Gone is the need to out-compete, out-perform, or out-attain anyone else. There are oddities in Skinner’s utopia that—when coupled with many of the cultural issues that have come to the forefront in recent years—most of us might recognize today.

Capitalism is, of course, bad. Personal property is abolished. Reward and recognition for one’s own individual achievements are counterproductive, and the traditional family structure has been transcended. To primitive and uneducated people (with their outdated preferences and unrefined sensibilities), this might seem like cause for concern. To the enlightened inhabitants of Walden Two, though (and their technocratic elite), these things are seen for what they are—the individual costs of the collective good.

The story arc of Walden Two follows Professor Burris, a psychologist and obvious stand-in for Skinner himself, as he and a small group of colleagues tour the utopian community. The guide of the tour is the founder of the community, as well as another thinly veiled Skinner proxy, named T. E. Frazier. Frazier spends several days showing the group of outsiders around and explaining the many behavioral interventions that have led to such an ideal way of life. One of the earliest tour stops in the novel is the community nursery—where our old friend and creepy commercial failure, the Air Crib, reappears.

Echoing Skinner’s real-life obsession with efficiencies-maxing, the unwanted burden of early childhood rearing is distributed by putting babies in boxes (Skinner strikes again) and raising them collectively. The children may or may not know who their parents are, but in order for that relationship to not interfere with the necessary primacy of loyalty to the collective, the nuclear family structure is what some in academia today would call “problematic” to the social harmony of Walden Two.

Marriage exists within Walden Two, though not in a way that we would recognize. Firstly, it’s strictly non-religious, of course. As history shows, nothing gets in the way of authoritarian or technocratic control quite like a shared religious belief structure. Secondly, monogamy—what many cultures would consider to be the bedrock of a lifelong intimate relationship and a stable environment for child development—isn’t enforced or even suggested as the baseline. Instead, marriage is reduced to something like an open relationship without the familial obligations. Gone are those loathsome gender roles and the oppressive shackles of domesticity for housewives—fully unburdened by what has been.

I would suspect plagiarism if there wasn’t at least one good rant about the unfairness and injustice of stay-at-home mummery, and Skinner doesn’t disappoint. It takes interacting with a middle-aged woman—to see if she is actually happythere—before Professor Burris finally believes that the people of Walden Two aren’t simply plastering on smiles and putting on airs for visitors. It’s as if Skinner was saying, “The utopia must be real if even a lowly housewife doesn’t have something to bitch about.”

It’s no surprise to the reader that Skinner’s main character eventually decides that he will give up the trappings of society—success, status, and socioeconomic vying of the larger culture—to join the commune. Perhaps he lives happily ever after in the collectivist utopia that Skinner, unlike all the real-world examples of Marxist-inspired movements, managed to bring into existence. Never mind that this could only be accomplished on the pages of a fictional story penned in the aftermath of the Second World War.

On the day that I finally closed the book, I didn’t get the feeling I typically get after finishing a story—neither the deep satisfaction of a well-spun yarn nor the apathy that follows a disappointing resolution set in. Instead, I was left with a lingering unease. It took me a while to figure out why that was.

WALDEN THREE:

George Orwell once famously—and, in my opinion, incorrectly—quipped that all art is propaganda. He argued that every artist embeds their beliefs, values, and political views into their work—consciously or otherwise. On this, we agree. However, when this is done consciously, it’s called propaganda. When it’s done unconsciously, it’s called projection. To that end, we can tell a lot about the man who wrote the novel Walden Two just by what he considers to be a proper utopia. At first, I thought what was nagging at me was the fact that the things I hold most dear—freedom, family, and fatherhood—were all missing from Walden Two.

It wasn’t until I picked up the novel again and began thumbing through the preface that it finally clicked. I saw the reference to Marx. I saw the citing of Lenin. I even saw the offering up of China as an example of Skinner’s proposed solutions to society’s woes, though he followed it up almost forlornly with, “…but a Communist revolution in America is hard to imagine.” I closed the book again and placed it atop my desk and was accosted with the image of what it would look like if someone were to attempt such a thing with a deep awareness of the psychological mechanisms that gave rise to slot-machine-reward schedules, mobile games, scroll-worthy algorithms, and credit card loyalty programs.

Open-mouthed, I envisioned what a Skinner Box would look like if the goal was to subdue people like me, to keep them bar-pressing in order to make that revolution in America a little “easier to imagine.” I thought of how my sometimes near automaton thumbs reach to open apps that I have no intention of opening, how I rush to click the “next episode” button while binging Netflix series, how after a rough day I might reach towards a smoke/drink/snack/app to help me zone out for a bit. That’s when I pushed the book a little further away, unconsciously looking to put more distance between it and me.

The simple white cover of the book alit as it slid into the last rays of sunlight that were bending their way through my office window, announcing the lateness of the day as the sun set in the West. For a brief moment, the thing looked fiery and set ablaze. I was struck with the realization of what it would mean for the social engineering principles of Skinner’s behaviorism to collide with the pervasive technology of today and the hubris of Marxist utopianism. That would surely be an unholy trinity of world-breaking potential. I leaned back in my office chair, unable to look away from that little book that had begun as a mediocre work of utopian fiction and was now beginning to look a whole hell of a lot like the first draft of an instruction manual.

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The very first time that my hat flooded with water, I was at around a hundred feet. I was a new diver and was wearing a KM-37 (a fiberglass helmet painted yum-yum yellow with the words U.S. NAVY written across it) that was filling up …

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