“You blessed ones who shall inherit that future age of which we can only dream; you pure and radiant beings who shall succeed us on the earth; when you turn back your eyes on us poor savages, grubbing in the ground for our daily bread, eating flesh and blood, dwelling in vile bodies which degrade us every day to a level with the beasts, tortured by pains, and by animal propensities, buried in gloomy superstitions, ignorant of Nature which yet holds us in her bonds; when you read of us in books, when you think of what we are, and compare us with yourselves, remember that it is to us you owe the foundation of your happiness and grandeur, to us who now in our libraries and laboratories and star-towers and dissecting-rooms and work-shops are preparing the materials of the human growth. And as for ourselves, if we are sometimes inclined to regret that our lot is cast in these unhappy days, let us remember how much more fortunate we are than those who lived before us a few centuries ago. The working man enjoys more luxuries to-day than did the King of England in the Anglo-Saxon times; and at his command are intellectual delights, which but a little while ago the most learned in the land could not obtain. All this we owe to the labors of other men. Let us therefore remember them with gratitude; let us follow their glorious example by adding something new to the knowledge of mankind; let us pay to the future the debt which we owe to the past.

All men indeed cannot be poets, inventors, or philanthropists; but all men can join in that gigantic and god-like work, the progress of creation. Whoever improves his own nature improves the universe of which he is a part. He who strives to subdue his evil passions—vile remnants of the old four-footed life—and who cultivates the social affections: he who endeavors to better his condition, and to make his children wiser and happier than himself; whatever may be his motives, he will not have lived in vain.”

Warning

This book will be wildly offensive to most people.

At its core, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion is a meditation on how we can intentionally construct a culture/religion that will be “evolutionarily successful” and spread. Within it, you will find a heavily annotated playbook for constructing a cultural/religious framework optimized to preserve (rather than erase) the individual traditions, values, and worldviews of those who join while maximizing autonomy and individual efficacy. We will be completely transparent as to the motivation behind every decision made in its fabrication.

This book is written from a secular perspective to be relevant and useful to those who want to build a family culture that is intergenerationally durable. That said, the tools and tactics described in the coming pages can be used with equal alacrity to strengthen and reinforce an existing religious framework.

In this book we make generalizations about cultural and religious groups, as it is impossible to write a book on culture and religion without doing so. We also take a strong pronatalist perspective because outside of cases of conquest or conversion, most of the time when a culture “wins” over other cultures, it prevails by producing more kids who remain within that culture. If this is not what you were looking for when buying the book, please email us (at [email protected]) and ask for a refund. Regardless, all proceeds from this series go to the Pragmatist Foundation, a nonprofit which is presently focused on building a better form of secondary school (middle school and high school).

Finally, unlike our other books, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion is intended to be read in order and will explicitly signal when a section or chapter is safe to skip. This book gives readers a choice between three reading experiences: If you want the most compressed experience, skip chapters marked as skippable. For the normal experience, read the book and stop at the Appendix. For the “extended cut,” read the bolded footnotes (which lead to deeper pontification—not sources, definitions, or simple explanations) and skip forward to read each of the Appendix chapters as they are referenced in the book.

As with all our books, we will gladly share a free audiobook copy with you. To request one, visit Pragmatist.Guide/ReligionAudio.

Culture as an Evolutionary Tool

Culture is the means by which complex behaviors—behaviors that cannot be easily encoded into biological instinct—“evolve.” This is what makes cultural memes^[1] fundamentally distinct from memes in general: While general memetic sets replicate primarily by using a host to infect other hosts with said meme, cultural and religious memetic sets primarily spread by influencing the fitness of any given host (by fitness, we mean genetic fitness—the number of surviving offspring—not the quality of life of those offspring).^{^[2]}

Because culture can affect a person’s number of surviving offspring, traditional evolution (not just memetic evolution) shapes culture. This interplay allows complex behavior patterns to emerge among groups of people well before those behavioral instincts might otherwise biologically evolve (consider that ritual Islamic hand washing evolved long before medical science understood the advantage of this behavior).^{^[3]}

A culture can be thought of as ever-evolving software that sits on top of—and synergistically interacts with—both biological hardware and firmware, addressing flaws our biology hasn’t had sufficient evolutionary time to address. To go further with this analogy: Biological evolution provides some basic coding, much like a low-level programming language might for a given hardware, whereas cultural evolution manipulates the high-level, object-oriented code that lets us program highly nuanced behaviors.

We can illustrate this dynamic with a colorful example: In The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, we explore copious evidence that humans almost certainly evolved to, by default, create polygynous (one man, many women) cultures (though not necessarily relationships).^{^[4]} However, above certain population thresholds, monogamous cultures outcompete their polygynous counterparts, likely because monogamy produces measurably lower rates of cheating, rape, murder, terrorism, corruption, and other anti-social behaviors instigated by high rates of unattached males—an inevitable byproduct of polygynous cultures.^[5]

While 83%^[6] of individual human cultures are polygynous,^{^[7]} nearly all of today’s most dominant cultures are monogamous, thanks to the historic competitive edge granted by this practice. By reducing societal ills, such as terrorism and corruption (via lower population percentages of unattached men), cultures practicing monogamy have the upper hand when spreading and conquering neighbors.

Rather than taking the evolutionary time needed for human biological predilections to evolve toward structuring societies monogamously by default, cultures that effectively enforced monogamy quickly outcompeted their rivals. This is what we mean when we say that culture supplements biologically evolved elements of human consciousness by accelerating the evolution of cognitive proclivities beyond the capacity of pure evolutionary pressure on genes.

It fascinates us how quickly people cast out aspects of their traditional cultures without understanding why those elements evolved. Many throw out the “hard stuff” in their cultures, such as fasting and arbitrary self-denial, without understanding those cultural practices evolved both for general health reasons and to strengthen the individual’s inhibitory pathways in their prefrontal cortex. Consider that strengthened inhibitory pathways likely offer some protection against intrusive thoughts and, as a result, lower rates of anxiety and depression.^[8]

Almost every common cultural practice exists because it increases the fitness of cultures that practice it. Keep in mind that fitness is morally blind. Sometimes, measures taken to increase fitness are highly immoral. Sometimes, increasing fitness means lowering rates of depression with seemingly arbitrary rules. Other times, maximizing fitness means forcing gay people to pretend to be straight or be killed because socially accepting same-sex couplings has historically lowered birth rates.^{^[9]}

This is not one of those books that assumes “natural” or “traditional” things to be better or somehow inherently good. As we demonstrate in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, humans almost certainly have a proclivity toward infanticide of stepchildren. The fact that humans have evolved certain cultural or biological instincts doesn’t mean we should encourage those behaviors.

We, nevertheless, choose to inhabit a world of pragmatic truth. The human brain evolved to work within a strict cultural framework. Our brains and cultural/religious mechanisms co-evolved to work together. Operating our brains in a cultural/religious vacuum is like trying to run a machine without any grease—it will start fritzing and fall to pieces at a much faster rate. When individuals cast off their ancestral cultural/religious frameworks or make up new ones out of whole cloth without carefully investigating the instrumental roles cultural practices play, is it any surprise that they find themselves barely holding it together mentally by their mid-30s while desperately searching for community and purpose? Instead of taking the winding road to their destination, they decided to just beeline their car (brain) straight through muddy fields and, in the process, damage their car.

Because it is endlessly annoying to keep referring to both culture and religion, we will call specific cultural-religious memetic packages “cultivars.” We chose this word for its colloquial definition as well as its etymology (cult+variation), with “cult” originally non-judgmentally referring to care, worship, culture, and reverence (it is where our word “cultivate” comes from). Honestly, we’d prefer to call this book The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Cultivars, but as our use of the word is not yet pervasive, “religion” must be our public-facing shorthand for “an intergenerational culture and worldview.”

The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion is focused on a fun experiment: Can we craft the perfect cultivar?

This is a selfishly motivated experiment. We want to create a powerful culture for the benefit of our children and the growing tribe of “Pragmatists” who read our books. With the framework we present, you, too, should be able to join us and attempt to create your own lasting culture. It might be a few centuries before we see the results of this experiment, but we genuinely believe that failure could lead to the death of our species and eventually all life (we know, it’s dramatic—more on that shortly).

Exploring cultivar differences and how they affect adherents’ life choices in an effort to develop a culture that ultimately persists through millennia is like studying comparative evolution while spending a good deal of time trying to create the ultimate evolutionarily competitive organism that may also do some benefit to civilization. (Think: An organism that can terraform other planets.)

In short, it’s really fun.

This brings us to what will likely be one of the most unique elements of this book: While other people have written extensively on cultural and memetic evolution, to our knowledge, they almost all have an intensely antagonistic perspective toward religions in general—and especially toward stricter, more “conservative” religions. This deeply clouds their perspective on the wider civilizational game at play.

We hold a deep admiration for the lives led by adherents of many stricter religious traditions, from members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (i.e., Mormons) to Evangelical Protestants and Anabaptists.^[10] It may seem odd to encounter people like us—affiliated with the Effective Altruism and transhumanist movements—speak with greater reverence for Amish culture than their own. Still, despite the above cultures’ faults, they are out-competing our own at the evolutionary and civilizational level, not just in terms of birth rate but also in surprising realms like mental health.^[11] To dismiss these groups’ competitive advantages requires blinding arrogance.

Throughout history, as humans developed social environments we had not biologically evolved to handle (such as early cities). Through the selective pressures on cultivars, we evolved social technologies that permitted relatively rapid adaptation. Unfortunately, from the internet to megacities, the rate of change humans encounter today has become so rapid and momentous that even social evolution may not have time to act before permanent damage is inflicted. We may have reached a point in human history at which we must intentionally engineer cultural solutions to ensure a prosperous future for our species. To do so, we must understand why cultures evolved the way they did.

What Motivated Us to Craft
a Novel Culture for Our Kids

If a culture has a low birth rate—no matter how good it is at converting people—it will either eventually use up the existing supply of non-adherents or become parasitic, essentially using other cultures as breeding pits of livestock from which it expects to harvest members to keep its Goa’uld-like subculture alive.

We could be just amoral enough to sympathize with this cultural strategy, if not for the fact that the few cultures that still have a high birth rate are seeing that rate fall. Vampires might be sexy and cool when they are in the minority, but we are well past that stage and will soon be entering one in which, bereft of life to suck from the world, vampires will turn on each other.

Birth rates are falling much faster than many dominant societal narratives imply. The global fertility rate for all of Latin America and the Caribbean fell below replacement rate (2.1 babies per woman) in 2021.^[12] India will achieve that status in 2022.^[13] China is expected to be at half its current population by 2066.^[14] First-generation immigrants in the U.S. fell below repopulation rate in 2019.^[15] Already 115 countries, representing about half the world’s population, are below replacement rate. By the end of the century, nearly every African country is projected to have a rapidly declining population.^[16]

Even strict religious fundamentalism does not protect against this decline. “Between the 1980s and the 2010s Iranian women reduced the rate at which they had children from 6.5 to 2.5, faster than the pace of the one child policy in China.”^[17] Consider even that since 2014, Iran has been doing everything it can imagine to restore an above-replacement-rate birth rate to no avail.[18] (Overall, Muslim majority countries are not as resistant to demographic collapse as some would have you believe and are projected to fall below replacement rate on average in the 2030s.)[19]

In 2021, the Mormon population in Utah almost fell below replacement rate.^[20] This is not a “canary in the coal mine” moment; we’ve reached the metaphorical point at which miners’ skin is bubbling and sloughing off—all while many claim this dramatic drop is a “minor inconvenience.”

People don’t seem to “get” how quickly this effect will be felt. South Korea has a birth rate of 0.81.^[21] For every 100 South Korean great-grandparents, there will be 6.6 great-grandkids (at the 0.7 fertility rate predicted in South Korea by 2024, this amounts to 4.3 great-grandkids.).^[22] Imagine if we knew a disease would kill 94% of South Koreans in the next century. We are not far from Korea’s present predicament, as recently as the mid-90s, South Korea had a birth rate close to the present birth rate in the U.S. (1.7 in 2022). (For information on why this is happening, see: “Why Are Birth Rates Falling?” in the Appendix on page 671.)

Many media narratives suggesting demographic collapse is not a big deal point to unexpected spikes in birth rates, distracting from the larger picture. For example, there was a slight uptick in birth rates for one year during the pandemic in the U.S. While conservative press made a big deal about this, the phenomenon was illusory and irrelevant from a statistical perspective.^[23]

Across the world we see a similar phenomenon: Countries explode in population as resources expand, then drop off (and begin to collapse) once citizens gain wealth and adopt greater gender equality. While many countries have yet to reach this crescendo, most are well on their way—and we want them to be. Gender-egalitarian societies with low levels of poverty are awesome.

Imagine someone arguing in favor of female disempowerment and poverty for a nation just so we can rely on it for a steady supply of human capital. Horrible!

On a societal level, we must figure out how to have our cake and eat it too. We believe it is possible for a society to maintain a stable population, empower women, and keep poverty low. The catch is that nobody has successfully achieved this.^{^[24]} That’s a big deal because our entire economic system—heck, our entire civilization—runs on the assumption of aggregate growth.

The economy = productivity per worker × number of workers

Historically, both productivity per worker and the number of workers have increased. Stocks have consistently increased over time, in aggregate, because these two factors have consistently increased.^{^[25]}

We can no longer take these increases for granted. While productivity per person only increases linearly,^{^[26]} most of the developed world is about to see populations decrease at exponential rates (this is an inevitability when places like the EU have a fertility rate of 1.5). When this happens, the stock market, on average, will begin to shrink. When that happens, people will stop putting their money there—we will stop investing in the future.^{^[27]} The civilization we have built is about to undergo a massive and permanent change. The world in which our grandkids will grow up will not resemble our own.

As our stock in the world has risen, so has our pessimism. We don’t think anyone can stop what is coming. Through our privileged educational backgrounds at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Cambridge, we have seen what society’s “best of the best” are doing. This is also in conjunction with our work in venture capital and private equity, Simone’s year-long stint as Managing Director at Dialog (a secret society founded by Peter Thiel with membership limited to the best-in-class players from any given field), and work as consultants helping high-profile organizations like Schmidt Futures build their own invitation-only societies for leaders across the private and public sectors. There is no secret back-up plan among the elites.^[28]

We no longer believe that it is possible to avert most of the severe economic, governmental, and social consequences associated with a “hard landing” from population collapse. However, we offer one caveat: Artificial intelligence may act as a literal Deus ex machina. If AI does sweep in to save the day, the nature of society will change dramatically. See our exploration of AI Apocalypticism on page 640 for more detail on possible implications.

Fortunately, humanity’s present quagmire presents opportunity and a path for further consolidation of power by groups that think like us—the new Sea Peoples. Rapidly dropping birth rates among the increasingly sterile and decaying “elite” circles in our society mean anyone who can craft a self-sustaining new cultivar that produces competent, highly educated, technophilic individuals gets the chance to write the future of human civilization.

A population collapse will produce a systems-level collapse of today’s dominant civilization. This means cultivars crafted to survive this period must be able to withstand hard times, though perhaps not the sorts of “hard times” you’re presently envisioning. When presented with the concept of “civilizational collapse,” people often visualize society descending into a Road-Warrior-like dystopia, when in reality, it is rarely very obvious to people on the ground when a civilization collapses, be it Rome, the Mayan civilization, or our own (to an average person in Roman Gaul during the collapse of the Western Empire, the change would have been only lightly perceptible in their daily routines—a certain food becomes impossible to find, certain roads become more dangerous to travel, etc.).

Civilizational collapses appear more like:

An exodus of the elite from major population centers
A rapid decline in infrastructure quality in densely populated areas
A breakdown of supply chains (e.g., some stuff you used to be able to get at grocery stores permanently disappears from the shelves)
Growing hostility toward ideas that deviate from orthodoxy

Our society relies heavily on one presumed truth: That the wealth of the world will always grow. Cities and countries fob off huge amounts of their payroll to the next generation through unfunded pension programs and debt with the presumption that said generation will have more money than they did. What if the next generation doesn’t? Debt payments and pension spending will assume a larger portion of the money needed to keep things running.

This isn’t exclusively happening at the level of cities. We saddle every level of the economic system, from our land to businesses, states, and nations, with debt. We have essentially leveraged our entire civilization. This provides enormous wealth in times of population growth, but …

Imagine that 50% of a city’s budget goes to pensions, social security-like programs, and debt payments (this was the case in Detroit^[29])^[30]. This is fine if the population grows by half, as that 50% of the budget becomes 33% and is quite manageable. But what if the tax base shrinks? If the city’s population and tax base shrink by just 30%, its usable money does not decrease by 30% but rather by 60%. If the tax base were to shrink by 40%, the usable portion of the city’s budget would drop to 10%. This is not unrealistic when you consider that in New York City, just the wealthiest 38,700 residents, 0.5% of the city’s population, pay 42.5% of taxes.

Ironically, progressive tax policy, which has led to the elite paying most of the taxes, has turned cities into business units that need to primarily serve the needs of the ultra-elite, or risk losing their primary funding sources and going bankrupt as a result. In a post-COVID world, where remote work is a possibility, the value proposition of cities to the ultra-elite is quickly eroding.

As cities try to operate on smaller portions of their budgets, they will become less attractive places to live, further reducing the proportion of wealthy people who want to live in them (who pay the majority of taxes). As expenditures like police budgets are cut, wealthy people leave cities.^[31] As fewer wealthy people opt to live in cities, we’ll see a snowball effect of worsening conditions for those who remain economically trapped in urban areas.

The above scenario is largely what happened in Detroit (with a 60% population drop over the last half-century). While the headwinds that led to the population collapse were different, Detroit presents a sobering case study demonstrating how our existing infrastructure starts to break when a tax base rapidly disappears. (See: “Detroit as a Model for Collapse” in the Appendix on page 678 for more detail.)

Suffice to say when a population starts declining, it does not mean everyone gets to live in bigger, shinier apartments. As population declines, real estate values plummet. Plummeting real estate values drive people to stop investing in building maintenance, causing homes and buildings to rot and fall apart, leading to an endless sea of urban blight.

What about increased lifespan? That should offset things, right? Increased lifespans might help if they were actually increasing. In practice, some developed countries like the USA have actually seen lifespans contract over the last half decade or so.^[32] Even when lifespans were growing, they did so linearly (recall that fertility is declining exponentially).

Outside of a dark horse artificial intelligence changing the game, the future described above is inevitable at this point. It is too late to not hit this iceberg. All that is left for us to do is ensure future generations get on a lifeboat. This book aims to give our kids a fighting chance while acting as a signal light to like-minded families.

Humanity’s Genetic Shift

When a person gets severe radiation poisoning, some time passes before they feel the adverse effects. Their DNA has functionally been scrambled; their cells can’t divide; the person is dead—they just don’t know it yet. Many wildly popular cultural movements are currently in this state. It may be easier to coax a caged panda to reproduce than it would be to convince a cosmopolitan progressive to raise their own kid.

Given what large meta-studies like Genetic and Environmental influences on Human Psychological Differences^[33] show about the heritability of political ideology,^[34] we should expect some shift in how the average person reacts to these sterilizing political memes. (Note: Studies show even specific traits like altruism^[35] and prosociality^[36] have an approximately 30% to 50% genetic component.)

But surely this change will be slow … right? Actually, it is already measurable. One group of researchers quantitatively demonstrated how differential fertility rates can substantially impact attitudes around social issues.^[37] From 2004 to 2018, differential fertility (more conservative people having more kids) increased the number of U.S. adults opposed to same-sex marriage by 17%, from 46.9 million to 54.8 million.

Note: Support for LGBT issues among the youth is rising over time but not as much as it would if birth rates were equal among all cultures. Given the current severe and rising difference in birth rates between families who support these issues and those who do not, we should see a flip, with support steadily decreasing within a generation or two.

Because unmarried and childless people vote more liberally, this change makes a population more liberal within a generation^[38] but more conservative between generations.^[39]

Our nonprofit, Pronatalist.org, paid Mohammed Ali Alvi, a researcher at Mayo Clinic, to go over data collected by Spencer Greenberg’s organization Clearer Thinking to get a rough picture of the likely sociological and cultural profile of future Americans by searching for common traits among those having more children.

To summarize: Our original hypothesis was wrong. We assumed that only a propensity toward religious extremism would be associated with a high birth rate. While we expected the overall “tone” of humanity would change, we didn’t think there was much to worry about because our own family falls pretty far on the religiously extreme spectrum and we know firsthand that religious extremism can lead to positive outcomes. It should have been obvious to us that hardcore progressives have just as much genetic religious extremism backing their beliefs as the most steadfast Swartzentruber.

Contrary to our hypothesis, the data suggests that we should expect future generations of Americans to hail from cultures that feature genetic correlates associated with being:

Significantly more tribalistic (hesitant to interact with outsiders, such as different ethnic and religious groups)
More drawn to strictly hierarchical power structures (fascist leaning)
More dogmatic

It is not fervency of beliefs that protects a member of a traditional cultivar from the influence of sterilizing memetic packages but their unwillingness to listen to or consider the perspectives of people not within the “in group,” as well as their readiness to dehumanize those individuals. This is called the right-wing authoritarian personality cluster^[40] (though it can present on both sides of the political spectrum, it is more a measure of authoritarian inclination)^[41] and it is known to have genetic correlates.^[42] We are not the only ones to find that this group is outcompeting the religious cluster.^[43]

These are the traits for which our current society selects. Political ideologies that thrive on them should be expected to grow. Edgelords were afraid of an “Idiocracy” world in which only people they considered “stupid” had super large families when the data instead suggests we are heading towards an “ISIS-ocracy”. (Note: We don’t mean ISIS to represent Islam. Groups like ISIS exist across religious branches—we just refer to ISIS as a culturally evocative group that fits the above criteria associated with high birth rates.)

If you want to read about the possibility of an “Idiocracy Scenario,” see: “Is an Idiocracy-Style Future Possible?” on page 681 of the Appendix. This scenario can be useful to review if you think the process of human mental traits adapting to evolutionary pressures is slow. However, if you want to run the math yourself, check out Rapid Evolutionary Adaptation in Response to Selection on Quantitative Traits.^{^[44]} Suffice to say current rates of IQ change suggest that the human sociological profile should shift around one standard deviation about every 75 years where strong selective pressures exist.

Genocide through Inaction

Is there a moral responsibility to save a culture or ethnic group going extinct due to a low birth rate? Entire cultures and ways of life don’t just quietly disappear because of low birth rates—do they?

People often imagine cultures and ways of life conquering each other through wars, genocide, and violent conquest, but reality is rarely so dramatic. Our family has Calvinist roots (you might be more familiar with the tradition under its sub-branch of Puritans). Historically, Calvinist culture shaped almost every aspect of the modern United States (and, to an extent, the current world order). Calvinists made up two-thirds of Declaration of Independence signers,^[45] many of the founding fathers (Simone is actually the closest relative of her generation to George Washington)^[46], around a third of prominent abolitionists, and are often credited with the invention of capitalism.^[47] Yet today, Calvinists make up less than 0.5% of the U.S. population, and most of those individuals are only theologically Calvinist rather than culturally so.

Calvinist culture went from crafting an entire world order, making up between 55% and 75% of Americans around the time of the revolution,^[48] to virtual extinction in a single century without anyone noticing. For reasons we will explore the next chapter, Calvinism secularized^[49] about a century earlier than other religious traditions. As such, their birth rates dropped earlier. Essentially, Calvinist culture demonstrates just how quickly your own culture can disappear and how no one will even miss you (kids today read about the Calvinist Puritans and don’t think to ask, “What ever happened to those people?”).

Just as a culture can collapse in a single century, one can rise to dominance in the same time frame. For example, a single family with eight children per generation would have over a billion descendants in just ten generations. Suppose the family is also able to effectively recruit new members, they could achieve the same feat in a quarter of that time. An example of this phenomenon can be seen in the Hutterites, a group of anabaptists related to the Amish that grew from a population of 443 people to over 50,000 in just 140 years with virtually no external conversions. There will be 5.6M Hutterites within the next 140 years at this growth rate.^[50]

The crazy thing about all this is that population collapse could be solved by just one family. One family having eight kids for just 11 generations produces more descendants than there are humans on Earth today. Such success, however, would be hollow. A homogenous society, even if it mirrors our personal values, is fragile. Anyone familiar with the Irish potato famine knows the risk accompanying any literal monoculture. We only win if we succeed in stabilizing human population levels and ensuring that the resulting stable state is heterogeneous, saving as many cultures on the edge of extinction as possible. For example, if we do nothing, some of the oldest and most unique human cultures, such as the Parsi and the Jains, will be virtually extinct by the time our great-grandchildren are growing up (not everyone in a culture needs to die for it to collapse, just enough for it to lose its internal network).

We will do what we can to ensure our family achieves the above feat. We furthermore aim to equip you to do the same with yours. Our goal is to create a “cultural reactor” we’ll call the Index: A collection of groups capable of accelerating natural cultural evolution through the incorporation of families with different traditions and perspectives.

The Index is meant to serve as a self-contained cultural ecosystem strong enough to carry the torch of civilization through the encroaching darkness. We invite other Pragmatists to join us in trying to create a unified network of cultures inspired by a variety of backgrounds and life experiences. Together, we can create a network of cultures capable of shouldering the burden of civilization as so many others shrug the burden of procreation.

We wrote The Pragmatist’s Guide to Religion not to create followers but to establish a network of friendly competitors with a shared nervous system.

Defending Pronatalism

If you have one of the following complaints against pronatalism, please consider visiting the corresponding section in the Appendix on page 689. We take arguments against pronatalism seriously and think you may find more nuance to the following issues than one might assume.

But … the Environment! p690
Only Privileged People Can Have Kids! p695
Pronatalism is About Removing Our Reproductive Rights! p697
Pronatalism is Racist! p698
Forcing a Way of Life on Your Kids is Unethical! p701
Think of the Suffering! (Antinatalism & Negative Utilitarianism) p703

Culture vs. Religion

We use the word cultivar when discussing a mix of religion and culture that acts as a distinct memetic package. While in our society, most cultures heavily overlap with religions, the two are not intrinsically bound, making it more accurate for us to use a distinct word.

Contrast the cultivars of Irish and Latin American Catholicism to see how religion can be heavily associated—but not 100% correlated—with culture. Both cultivars ostensibly hail from the same religious background but feature many differences. Having lived among both for a period, we see it is not just a stereotype that drinking is much more important to the Irish than the Latin cultivar. Yet, this difference has no religious underpinning; it’s purely cultural. In fact, in Peru (one of the countries in which we’ve lived), people raise their eyebrows when we order beer with lunch—this is not surprising given that 60% of the population sees drinking alcohol as actively immoral.^[51] Contrast this with 84% of Irish adults who drink.^[52]

The Addams Family presents a great fictional example of a cultivar with an ambiguous religious underpinning. Unlike their derivatives, such as the Munsters, the Addams Family is not primarily monstrous because they are literally monsters but because they have a unique family culture (in most iterations at least). The family’s cultivar acts as a lens through which they view reality, transforming the way they interpret the world. For example, they might contextualize dying plants or an unplanned financial loss in a positive context. Because of their cultural lens, they may glean positive feelings from these otherwise “negative” stimuli. However, nothing about the family’s cultivar is specific to one religious perspective or another (outside of a few largely throw-away traditions mentioned here or there).

The Addams Family also helps to dispel the myth that there is some sort of universal “non-religious” cultivar. The Addams Family could very well be atheist, but their daily experience of the world would be radically different from that of most other atheist families. If one chooses to raise their kids in a secular household, there are still many choices about family culture to be made. It is not as though there is a single, correct, “logical” lens through which the world can be viewed. Even if a person is atheist, the culture they choose to live by or build for themselves fundamentally shapes how they experience the world.

Finally, it is important to remember that one person doesn’t just adopt one culture. People switch between cultures when in specific social contexts. Micro cultures often exist around specific activities such as sports, drinking, or secret societies—all with their own rituals, traditions, mystical beliefs, and value sets. While these micro-cultures do not matter in a civilizational context (thus, we will usually only focus on “core cultures”), we will touch on them occasionally as new core cultures can sometimes evolve out of them.

Our Cultural Bias

This book is akin to a guide to remodeling a house that uses the remodel of a specific house as a narrative throughline. The decisions made during that remodel are not mandates for you to make the same decisions. The ultimate goal of the book is not to encourage all homeowners to remodel in the same style. Instead, it is to create a coalition of homeowners who have intentionally renovated historic houses for the modern age (put in internet, plumbing, electricity, smart thermostats, and solar panels while cleaning out the termites, stripping lead from the walls, and reinforcing weak parts of the foundation).

In this metaphor, the house we’re remodeling—i.e., the culture we inherited and have chosen to reshape and optimize—is secular Calvinism.^{^[53]} Calvinism is a religious sect from which Puritans hail; Calvinist is to Puritan as Anabaptist is to Amish (all Puritans are Calvinist, but not all Calvinists are Puritans).^{^[54]}

As our “old house” to be “remodeled” is secular Calvinism, you may find it helpful to understand what the original construction looks like. Understanding our cultural position will help you personally correct for personal biases and distortions created by the lens through which we see the world. (It might also give you insight into the world perspective of a seldom-discussed culture, something we always find interesting.)

Scott Alexander, author of the popular Substack/blog Slate Star Codex, describes the stereotypical Calvinist (specifically Puritan, the better known regional sub-group) as an “Eccentric overeducated hypercompetent contrarian … who takes morality very seriously.” “People complain that there is too much neo-Puritanism around these days,” Alexander wrote, “but they usually just mean people are moralistic reformers. I have the opposite worry: what happened to these people? When was the last time you saw somebody called Hiram invent five different crazy machines, found a new religion, and have twelve children who he named after Greek nymphs? Anyone who is serious about “Making America Great Again” should be deeply worried. … The virtue-obsessed nonconformist eccentric inventor philanthropist – has almost disappeared.” ^{^[55]}

The one thing almost everyone knows about Calvinists is that they believe in predestination—which we absolutely do. A mechanistic, clockwork understanding of reality is one of the foundations of our culture. The one thing almost everyone gets wrong about Calvinism is that they assume a belief in predestination implies a lack of belief in free will.

Just because past events could have only occurred in one way from our current perspective in the timeline does not mean we lacked free will in the moment. When we look back at the events of yesterday from our perspective today, the day could have only happened one way—and yet every decision we made yesterday was made with our own free will.

While events that will take place in the future seem limitless, they appear fixed when we look back along our timeline. Theological Calvinists believe God exists outside that timeline and therefore, from His perspective, future events are no different from past events. Just as God’s perspective outside the timeline does not negate free will, your perspective today—at this point in the timeline—does not negate free will you exercised in the past.^[56]

Secular Calvinists hold a similar belief but see the laws of physics—rather than God—as existing outside the timeline. The fact that physical laws exist outside the timeline and necessitate its path does not negate free will. In other words, just because our lives can only occur in a single way from the perspective of the laws of physics does not mean we lack free will from our own present perspectives. (The same is true if we live in a branching timeline, in which case each individual stream of the timeline is still determined by a mechanistic set of rules over which we have no influence.)^{^[57]} This understanding of reality influences how our intentionally designed culture interprets matters like emotional states (something we address later in the book). It also explains why we believe a person’s choices can both shape a timeline and be predestined within it.

Discussion of free will dovetails well into Calvinists’ assumption of the total depravity of man. Culturally, this means we have a very dim view of individual self-worth and the worth of humanity as a whole: Humans are wretched—we must strive to overcome our nature while knowing we are destined to fail. In other words, this viewpoint acknowledges how fallible humans are but, nevertheless, maintains that we should hold ourselves to a higher standard.

While Calvinists are rare these days, they used to be common enough that their stereotype became a media trope. Cultural Calvinism is almost holistically portrayed as villainous,^{^[58]} ^{^[59]} in great part because the culture is opposed to indulgence in activities like art, music, and dancing (but weirdly pro-sex—more on this in future chapters). This comes from a belief that emotions should be viewed with extreme skepticism (unless said emotions are tied to fervent theological and metaphysical research).

Secular Calvinists typically view emotions as a product of evolution with no inherent value. Humans feel the emotions we do because our ancestors who felt them had more surviving offspring—they are nothing but a scar left by our genetic history. To a secular Calvinist, pursuing positive emotion for its own sake is as feckless as chasing after a fentanyl high. One might even go so far as to say negative emotional states are “better” because they are safer from an addiction/distraction-from-values standpoint. This mindset naturally produces the societal stereotype that Calvinists are obsessed with self-denial, pain, and suffering.

Morays around emotion play such a pivotal role in the Calvinist cultivar that if you look at historical Puritan language, you will find the word “sad” used as an adjective with positive associations, connoting something closer to stern, dignified, and contemplative. Culturally devoted Puritans, for example, would go out of their way to wear what they described as “sad” colors.

The disregard for emotion common in the Calvinist cultivar is not actually tied to the five points of theological Calvinism. Similarly, not all five points of Calvinism are major cultural factors. This exemplifies how religious philosophy alone does not explain 100% of a religion’s associated cultivar. It also explains why the modern theological revival of Calvinism did not revive Calvinist culture more broadly.

This causes Calvinists to see both self-indulgent hedonism and luxury as sinful. Because of this, historically, they had little motivation to spend money on themselves and saw most forms of charity as sinful virtue signaling. As a result, they reinvested almost all their money and time into their companies or specific charities meant to increase the efficiency of other people (such as libraries and schools). This constant self-reinvestment is how Calvinists gained the reputation for inventing modern capitalism^[60] ^{^[61]} and for producing very wealthy but miserly Ebenezer Scrooge-like characters. (For more on this subject see “Calvinist Stereotypes in Media” in the Appendix on page 721.)

For an example of what this ruthless, businesslike culture looks like in practice, here is a text Malcolm received from his mom when she heard about our pronatalist advocacy work:

“What’s your plan to monetize this new interest of yours?

Remember: everything is transactional.”

Calvinists were famous for proselytizing less than other denominations because they believed their world perspective was obvious to anyone who would just put in the mental effort and shed their biases (this stance also led to the culture’s relative extinction). Calvinist groups appeared less like a religious cohort and more like a really intense book club for those obsessed with living the most technically correct life possible and exploring the truth behind our metaphysical reality. This can be seen in stereotypes like:

“Calvinists are “cold,” “heady,” and “condescending.” They think they have it all figured out and everyone else is blind, slow, or stubborn. They’re so lost in their books, they’re not interested in the needs around them.”^{^[62]}

While there are reams of Calvinist polemics and theories about better ways to live “correctly,” there is very very little written about what it is functionally like to live within the culture (outside of the more-communally-oriented Puritan branch, which is fairly well-documented due to its foundational role in the American colonies).

Occasionally you will find modern figures who leave Calvinist culture and write about what it was like to be raised within it. A good example would be Aella (a popular sex researcher and friend of the authors), who wrote of her upbringing:

“Conversation with him (her dad) was a daily challenge. He would frequently make blatantly false statements—such as “purple dogs exist”—and force me to disprove him through debate. He would respond to things I said demanding technical accuracy, so that I had to narrow my definitions and my terms to give him the correct response. It was mind-twisting, but it encouraged extreme clarity of thought, critical thinking, and concise use of language. I remember all this beginning around the age of five.”

This type of exercise persisted within my family even after it had secularized and reflects the Calvinist culture’s obsession with imparting a way of thinking and engaging with ideas as much as any specific idea.

The most offensive concept in Calvinist culture is the belief in “elect” individuals—that not everyone is or has the potential to be “saved.” This view is the product of a deterministic perspective on reality. Theologically, this means God knows whether you will be saved or damned before you are born. Secularly, this means some people’s lives do not matter in the grand scheme of the universe.

Whether you matter and manage to become a virtuous, productive person is predetermined. Because of this, you can speculate about your role in the timeline by reading the tea leaves of your heart: Every moment of procrastination or moral failing is a sign you may not stand among the elect. Early Puritan diarists are famous for thinking they’re definitely among the elect one day, then doubting their status among the saved the next; constantly vacillating between hope and doubt.

Perhaps, historically, the most important aspect of Calvinist theology was the belief that truth can only come from self-study: That no matter how well-intentioned a person may be, they risk corrupting the truth with their own perspective and biases if they attempt to guide you to it. This is why at some traditional Calvinist churches, churchgoers would sit and read their own Bibles rather than listen to a sermon-delivering priest.

The Calvinist insistence on finding truth independently produces an ethos of extreme skepticism—if not innate hostility—toward centralized authority at anything above a local level. As Calvinists see it, virtuousness is achieved through every human’s internal struggle with their fallen state. Thus, the more humans become involved in a thing, the more evil it is likely to be (e.g., big governments and companies are seen as more evil than small ones) and nothing is more evil than one human exerting control over another.

Calvinists were fervently pro-independence and anti-slavery, but less out of a belief in equality and more because they saw the removal of agency from another person as the highest order of evil an individual or institution could commit. Famously, John Brown and his family were radical Calvinists and multiple sides of my own family also hunted or otherwise fought against slavers—both by leading the Big Thicket Jayhawkers and by being heavily involved with the founding of the Free State of Jones (15 of the 50 founding members were either siblings or nephews of my direct ancestors).^[63]

This belief is reflected in the way we construct this book and The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life. In each, we present an example of how things might be done while insisting that readers independently draw their own conclusions after thinking through matters on their own terms. To us, writing a book that tells someone how to think about the world robs that individual of agency.^{^[64]} From our cultural perspective, robbing a person of agency is an act of evil.

So, while Calvinists see striving for equality as silly, their mandate for maximizing individual freedom is absolute and uncompromising to a point of apparent absurdity in other cultures’ eyes. The concept of the elect inherently implies that not all humans are equal, at least when it comes to being “saved.” While some people are born evil, and others are born lazy, it is wrong for anyone but that person to pass judgment on the content of their character.

Calvinist culture is basically dead due to its low post-secularization birth rate. Calvinists’ obsessive research into the metaphysical nature of reality and cultural emphasis on accepting hard truths drove their branch to be one of the first Christian sects to “secularize.” As such, their culture was hit by a collapse in birth rate a few generations earlier than the groups that are getting smacked with it now.

The Calvinist tendency to manifest more as a worldview than a community contributed to the culture’s downfall. As it began to secularize, community-oriented members tried to start unique and separate movements (often some form of deism) or were absorbed into adjacent cultivars (typically the Unitarian Church, Baptist Church, or Pentecostal movement). Only predominantly secular families maintained original Calvinist traditions as they weren’t exposed to any traditions of new Christian sects that might replace them.

Malcolm, whose parents were secular, would not even know his family was Calvinist had he not received a letter from his dead grandfather as part of his will urging him to not stray from “Calvinist values,” which prompted him to look into his family’s history and realize: “Oh, this is why my parents do all those weird things.”

A tendency for Calvinism to be contextualized as “the obvious truth free to anyone who looks hard enough”—and not a distinct culture—is part of why it lacked the sort of cohesive self-identity common among even secular Jews. A cohesive cultural narrative and sense of community identification is why Judaism has secularized fairly successfully while Calvinism largely fractured upon secularization.

We only present this explanation of Calvinism so that our readers can see the lens that distorts our view of reality and replace it with their own. Because our perspective inherently corrupts the information we share, we must be transparent about our biases so you can mentally correct for them. As a family, we can only save our own culture. You must take responsibility for saving yours. If we wrote this book true to form, readers should be able to apply its principles to any theology.

Why is Cultural Diversity Important?

Back on topic we go!

Why are we trying to develop a method for editing cultures that gives them a higher survival rate and distribute that method to as wide a diversity of cultural traditions as possible?

Why are we not just privately fine-tuning our internal family culture and disregarding the rest of the world? Clearly, we adore our own culture given how much we pontificate upon it; why would we intentionally create cultural competition when our culture is designed to produce a fairly large population on its own?

Suppose a group of scientists knew the world’s temperature was going to drop 50 degrees, but they only had time to genetically engineer 50 species of plants to survive in this new environment. Would it be optimal for them to genetically engineer 50 closely-related species? Of course not; these scientists would select for maximum genetic diversity as doing so yields the highest odds that something survives in this new future.

When a culture dies, you lose thousands of years of history and experiences that are unlikely to be recaptured. Someone told us it is offensive to equate South Koreans’ upcoming demographic collapse to genocide, so allow us to clarify that allowing a people to go extinct is whatever differentially makes genocide worse than mass murder.

[The immorality of letting a culture die] = [the immorality of genocide] – [the immorality of murdering an equal number of people].

There is also a selfish reason to promote cultural diversity: Being in a diverse and healthy multi-cultural ecosystem benefits our family’s culture. Every time we see some white nationalist trying to turn the United States into a white Christian ethno-cultivar nation-state, we can only shake our heads at the stupidity of the endeavor. Do they think their treasured “Western Civilization” evolved in homogeneous ecosystems? That Ancient Greece was homogeneous? That Alexander the Great’s forces were homogeneous? That Rome was homogeneous? That Medieval Europe was homogeneous? Why is their culture so weak now that it can only survive in a hermetically sealed pod?

We have heard some seriously argue that all culturally diverse empires die. This is an insane argument, given that all empires that have ever existed have died. Every one of humanity’s most productive, expansive, and culturally dominant civilizations has been diverse—from New Kingdom Egypt to the Roman Empire, Umayyad Caliphate, British Empire, Achaemenid Persian Empire, Maurya Empire, Qing Dynasty, and American Empire (we actually struggle to think of a single great empire that was culturally homogeneous at its height—maybe the Mongol Empire, but if that is the standard bearer for your goal … yikes).

Other nations have successfully become ethno-cultivar nation-states, so we know exactly how it turns out (just look at Korea or Japan). Ethnically and culturally homogenous societies have some of the lowest birth rates of any cultural ecosystem and are wildly fragile. In contrast, not only are some of the highest birth rate post-prosperity cultural ecosystems incredibly diverse (consider Israel), but when people from culturally homogeneous ecosystems move to culturally competitive ecosystems, their birth rates shoot up.^[65]

Is it so surprising that a culture unchallenged by competition would become more fragile than one constantly sharpened by it? We explore this topic in the chapter: “Immigration and Conservative Values” on page 592, but in short, if your culture is on life support, putting it in a hermetically sealed room just gives it a chance to die in peace.

Every time we hear one of these white nationalists talk on this issue, we can’t help but visualize a 150-year-old frail corpse of a man with sunken eyes in a sealed pod (basically Mr. House from Fallout New Vegas) feebly pounding his chest, proclaiming in a raspy voice how superior, strong, and virile he is. When someone reaches for the latch on his pod, he begins pathetically hyperventilating and screaming in a panic that he will die if his pod seal is broken.

Building The Index: A Cultural Reactor

One of our goals with this book is to recruit new participants for what we call the Index: A “cultural reactor” that catalogs intentionally constructed family cultures and monitors their outcomes intergenerationally while distributing said information in a way that allows all participating cultures to improve at a faster rate than that of a non-cultivated society. We want to make it possible for cultures in the network to improve faster than normal intergenerational memetic evolutionary powers would allow through a system analogous to horizontal gene transfer in gene therapy or lateral gene transfer in bacteria.

To put it another way, we don’t want anyone to read this book and make the same choices we made. Instead, we want you to either be inspired to identify, reinforce, and restore the positive elements of your own ancestral culture while making them resistant to fertility-lowering memes or experiment with constructing something totally new from an amalgam of different cultural beliefs.

While the Index is an ambitious project that won’t start seeing much purchase for a few generations, it is still worth starting now if we want a shot of preserving at least some at-risk cultures before they go entirely extinct.

We also hope the Index will act as a database of families that can be used to opt-in for traditions that require larger populations than any one house can front (e.g., larger celebrations, dating markets, etc.). This organization is called the Index because its primary goal is to act as a repository of information about the cultures in its wider ecosystem (and not to serve as any active actor on those cultures).

Cultural groups join the Index through the “House” model, in which a House is the atomic cultural unit, a distinct set of traditions and ways of seeing the world. This atomization makes it easier to classify and record cultures while giving them an opportunity to update or redefine themselves intergenerationally.

To give an example of how this works: We, Malcolm and Simone, have created “House Collins,” which is the bundle of traditions we outline (at least in part) in this book. When any of our children prepares to have children of their own, they can choose to either remain in House Collins or create and take ownership of a new set of traditions through the creation of a new House—all while not fully losing their connection to the parent culture, as this new House would still be a member of the Index.

This spares multicultural families from devolving into a watered-down manifestation of each contributing culture. These families won’t feel obligated to forsake one culture entirely or try to raise children in full versions of each contributing culture in a fashion unlikely to inspire their children to pass down both cultures fully to kids of their own.

The Index and House system allow partners in a new family to reflect on the aspects of their birth culture—and other cultures to which they’ve been exposed—that have most significantly improved their lives, then weave them into a single, integrated, new culture in a way that is supported and considered normal by others in the Index network. This stands in stark contrast to many stricter cultures that shun family members who choose to deviate—even slightly—from central doctrine.

Better still, the Index allows distant descendants to review statistics on how families pursuing specific traditions fared, inspiring them to adopt particularly successful traditions from cultures unrelated to their own.

As you read this book, ask yourself:

“How would I construct my own House? What elements of my ancestral and chosen cultures are worth preserving? What elements of my current culture would I totally change? What would make this culture appealing to future generations, and how would the culture be designed to enable future members to iterate and improve upon it?”

Perhaps you’re thinking: “What if I don’t have kids? Can I still join the Index?”

See the Appendix chapter: “On Houses Founded by Sovereign, Childless Individuals” on page 723. The answer is yes, but it is objectively harder to build an intergenerationally improving cultural unit if you don’t have kids.

The Fundamentals of Culture Crafting

A culture’s growth and long-term viability are dependent on only four variables:

Cultural Adoption: The rate at which new adherents are converted
Birth Rate: The rate at which members have children
Cultural Fidelity: The probability someone raised within the culture will stay within it
Death Rate: The rate at which members die

Before digging into these four variables, let’s explore how they interact.

The Cultural Growth Formula

Relative Cultural Growth Rate =
(Relative Birth Rate – Relative Death Rate) * (Cultural Adoption) * (Cultural Fidelity #0-1)

Cultural Adoption

A culture can grow merely by appealing to and converting outsiders. In practice, cultures with high cultural adoption proliferate over the short term but die quickly over the long run. Why? A common attribute that makes cultures seductive is “easy and forgiving” elements, which in turn contribute to low birth rates.

Strong cultural adoption rates are not as important as one might imagine: Even cultivars with active missionary mandates, like Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, have high birth rates to thank for the lion’s share of their growth. For the most part, religions almost only grow through conversions over very limited temporal and geographic windows. Even when religions do grow rapidly through conversions, they often fail to spread their original culture, instead forming a new cultivar which is a mix of local culture and the new theology.

This is not to say that cultural adoption cannot serve as a major growth driver for a cultivar. Successful proselytization is commonly achieved through harvesting the children of another culture at a very young age in something we will call the “reverse cuckoo strategy”—because they snatch eggs from others’ nests.

Quakers, for example, grew by specializing in educational fields. Shakers gained adherents by specializing in orphanages. Ultimately, however, both Quakers and Shakers began to collapse when government-backed alternatives wiped out their top recruitment channels.

Other top tactics used throughout history by cultivars to grow rapidly through conversions include (in order of descending efficacy):

Conversion Incentives: Offering tax-advantaged status or highly sought-after jobs only to members of the culture in question can significantly boost conversions. This method was leveraged by both Roman and Islamic empires to significant effect.
(The current university system uses this strategy to convert people by controlling “elite access” in our society and requiring a college degree at one of a few institutions to enter it, then using said institutions to culturally convert people out of more “traditional” birth cultures.)
Violent/Forced Conversion: Military conquest, followed by intermarriage (in other words, killing the men and marrying the women) and/or state-controlled child-rearing has also been used to boost cultural adherence (as Canada did with some of its native populations through the Canadian Indian residential school system). This type of child conversion is much less effective at wiping out native cultivars than tricking non-members into giving you their kids willingly.
Missionary Work: By creating a culture-wide expectation that some or all adherents will devote a certain time or amount of their lives to missionary work, as Mormons do, a culture can at least moderately boost cultural adoption rates.*

*While the average Mormon missionary baptizes 2.43^{^[66]} people, many of these baptisms are out of convenience (e.g., “You can use our soccer court after you get baptized”)—even though missionaries are technically not supposed to do this.

More than 50%^{^[67]} of those baptized on missions leave the church within a year and within a few years, 75% have left (according to BYU and Reuters,^{^[68]} at least). If the church baptized 125,930 people^{^[69]} in 2021, total membership was 16,663,663, and the average Mormon lives 85 years; this means the average Mormon converts 0.16 people who stay in the church for more than a few years.

This number feels way off. Our guess is the church chose to include in their statistics anyone who had ever been baptized as a member, so we went to a third-party source to get a different data set. If we use that source, which claims there are 4,400,000^{^[70]} active Mormons, then the average Mormon converts 0.6 people in their lifetime. While this is not great, it is at least a viable means of spreading if used in addition to above-repopulation-rate birth rates.

We performed this math to demonstrate that even in best-case scenarios (with a cultivar that both aggressively tries to convert people and is largely viewed favorably), missionary work is only marginally effective and seldom capable of conversion at “above repopulation rate” (e.g., >1 convert per member per lifetime) outside of cases in which the culture controls child-rearing institutions (Quakers and Shakers) and cases in which the culture controls the state apparatus (Roman and Islamic empires).

Birth Rate

Birth rate is the most important cultural growth factor. Cultivars with low birth rates are virtual non-players in the game of civilization and can largely be ignored by your culture once you have addressed any bleed they may cause.

For more reading on this topic, dive into “K vs. r Selection in Cultivars’ Birth Rates” on page 724 of the Appendix (or the earlier recommended “Why are Birth Rates Falling” on page 671 of the Appendix).

Cultural Fidelity

Cultural fidelity represents a group’s rate of cultural “bleed:” How many people raised in Culture X stay in Culture X and raise their own kids within it? Fighting cultural attrition is a uniquely difficult challenge in a post-internet age that has compromised many previously effective tactics.

Tactics that worked better pre-internet:

Threats of shunning: This is only very effective when (1) a culture is geographically isolated, leaving shunned members with no other group to join, (2) a culture is so unique a person will have trouble integrating in wider society (or the culture intentionally prevents a person from acquiring skills that would allow them to integrate into wider society), or (3) a culture provides copious social services on which members rely in everyday life.
Warnings about not-quite-true consequences: These cultures tell people things like, “You will be punished with a terrible life and no one will ever love you if you leave our culture.” This does not work well any more because threats like this can be easily undermined by a few simple internet searches.

At present, the most effective way to impart cultural fidelity is by creating a culture that fosters pride, strategic advantages, and human flourishing. If people are clearly better off thanks to their culture, they are more likely to raise their children within it and remain loyal adherents themselves. For this reason, the cultures with the highest cultural fidelity are typically either tough to convert into (to ensure a level of quality / exclusivity among members) or require rigorous lifestyle adjustments demanding more willpower than most people have (which naturally weeds out weak-willed applicants).

Granting this level of strategic advantage to a culture requires a certain amount of flexibility. A culture that granted tactical advantages in feudal Japan is different from a culture that grants tactical advantages in Japan’s modern mega cities. If a single culture is to become a throughline between many successive generations, it must be capable of adapting.

Death Rate

When death rates were much higher, a culture’s ability to impart behaviors that reduced odds of death granted it a significant advantage. Consider Islamic ritual purification, Wuḍū, which involves washing one’s face, hands, and feet with clean water (e.g., it is OK to use water from melted snow but not water that may have touched urine or a dead animal). It is hard to argue that, all other things controlled for, a culture that had its adherents washing five times a day would not have a lower death rate than other cultures in a pre-germ-theory era. It’s wild to think that this knowledge was imparted through cultural evolution into a tribe of desert nomads (and later adopted by Islam) centuries before Joseph Lister and Ignaz Semmelweis arrived at this knowledge through science.

Some cultures evolved and adopted practices that helped adherents survive in specific conditions, such as desert environments or hostile frontier landscapes (consider Inuits, who developed a culture enabling them to live in extremely cold environments^{^[71]}). Essentially, these cultures evolved traditions that allowed them to thrive within specific environmental or societal niches considered too hostile to other cultures.

Even though death rates are much lower now than they used to be, modern cultures can still secure a competitive advantage by imparting healthy habits to adherents. A culture less likely to be plagued with obesity and addiction will outcompete an otherwise identical culture that lacks these defenses.

Types of Cultures

Cultures can be roughly divided into two categories: Contextual Cultures and Cultivars.

Contextual Cultures (e.g., sports team fanbases, clubs, local drinking cultures, etc.) only appear in a specific contextual framework.
Cultivars are the lenses that color an individual’s view of reality. This is the type of culture most of the book is focused on investigating.

Cultivars themselves can be thought of as belonging to one (or more) of a few broad groups that warrant some exploration before we proceed.

Hard Cultures

Hard cultures are almost always centered around young religious traditions. (When we say young, we do not mean the branch religion is young but the way it is being practiced now is—e.g., Jehovah’s Witnesses are part of a century-old religious tradition but are practicing things differently enough to be functionally young.)

In addition, hard cultures often feature a few characteristics that prevent bleed:

They often encourage adherents to wear unique outfits or perform rituals that cause them to feel like outsiders when mixing with other cultural groups.
They attempt to prevent adherents from associating with other cultures to the extent that they may even shun them for doing so.
They almost always provide copious social safety nets for members.
They incentivize members to proselytize (either to convert people or reinforce personal narratives about how great it is to be a member of that in group) in a way that would produce significant cognitive dissonance if they ever decided to detract from the culture (though this proselytization is rarely effective at increasing cultural spread in any significant fashion).

In addition, hard cultures typically promote an internal locus of control, encouraging adherents to take personal responsibility for their failings in life.

Examples of Hard Cultures

Mormons
Jehovah’s Witnesses
Scientologists
International Society for Krishna Consciousness members (known more commonly as followers of Hare Krishna)
Haredi Jews
Evangelical Protestants
Amish

Characteristics of Hard Cultures

Until recently, hard cultures represented some of the world’s most successful civilizations, having a low bleed and high birth rate (which led them to grow at a higher rate than other cultures, making them inevitable beneficiaries of our society). In response to recent society-wide changes, this edge has eroded. In the last decade or so, many of these cultures’ attrition rates have skyrocketed while their birth rates have begun plummeting.

Consider Mormons: Their cultural bleed rate is currently 36% per generation (above that of even Evangelical Protestants) and as of this book’s initial publication, the Mormon population in Utah has almost fallen below replacement rate (2.1), a significant drop from the 3.14 birth rate enjoyed by the community around a decade ago (the USA’s highest birth rate at the time). What was one of the world’s fastest-growing cultures is, by the data, about to experience a catastrophic crash. This problem is anything but constrained to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Hard cultures, which for the past hundred years or so were the obvious candidates to inherit human civilization, are now in a death spiral.

Why? We suspect the ubiquity of the internet and social networks plays a critical role, as Amish and Mennonite groups are among the only cultivars to demonstrate resistance to the collapse (while Mennonites often use phones with internet access, they frequently lock out most of their apps behind passwords to which only friends or spouses have access, meaning they have to undergo the social shame of admitting defeat to a loved one to use them for anything but the bare minimum necessary to engage with the broader economic system of society).

Why are we so certain it is their control over internet access that is protecting them and keeping their birth rate high? As this^[72] writeup shows, “simply speaking Pennsylvania Dutch (the language the Amish speak) is not a powerful indicator of super-high fertility. It’s Pennsylvania Dutch and lack of a phone that seems to be the really strong indicator of Amish-type fertility.”

Side note: The write-up referenced above is fantastic if you want a deep dive into Amish birth rates. Essentially, it shows that while Amish birth rates are still high, even these famously fecund groups are in the process of a fairly rapid decline. (Though it does make some claims without citing sources that we have not seen substantiated elsewhere—like a 25% bleed rate in the community.)

Orthodox Speciation

An interesting phenomenon seen in the hardest of hard cultivars is something we will call “orthodox speciation,” in which a culture divides into smaller subcultures that are geographically locked. Essentially, when a group of individuals from an extremely hard culture migrates to a new region, little differences in how they practice their cultivar begin to evolve through random cultural mutation. Usually, these differences would not distinguish the cultivar, but in the case of a hard culture, they can quickly produce changes akin to behavioral isolation. In biology, speciation can occur through geographic isolation (one part of the species gets stuck on an island) or behavioral isolation (the mating dance of one branch of the species changes slightly).

Consider the differences between the Amish and the Hutterites (two Anabaptist cultures), both of which have extremely similar cultivars at the “genetic level” (at the level of their theology) but are different enough at the phenotypic level (their actual practices) that it would be very hard for a member of one group to enter the other. We also argue later in the book that we may be seeing the beginnings of this phenomenon between the U.S.-based and Israel-based Haredi Jews.

Here’s where it gets even more interesting: Almost all religions start as ultra-hard cultures. For this reason, you will almost always see a flurry of Orthodox Speciation in the first few generations of every major religious movement. Often, these new offshoots die out, like the Gnostic Christians. Occasionally, the splits remain permanent, as with the Sunni-Shia divide. This is why you almost always see much faster speciation early in a religious movement’s history as opposed to later (while speciation can still happen later, the number of offshoots per member per year will be astronomically lower).

The Index was designed to prevent this—to allow hard-culture-like factions to become different without losing the ability to interact and reintegrate.

Soft Cultures

If hard cultures are the Rocky Mountains, soft cultures are the Appalachian Mountains, weathered by the centuries into softer peaks. Though presently decaying, most soft cultures started as hard cultures and shifted over time, asking less and less of adherents in terms of rituals and practices and thereby appearing more “socially vanilla” to mainstream cultures. Because they also ask progressively less from adherents in terms of time commitment and financial support, their ability to offer meaningful social services and safety nets erodes with each passing decade.

The shift from a hard to soft culture is often marked by a transition away from a disdain toward external loci of control (i.e., a tendency to look down upon those who blame external factors for their shortcomings) as adherents begin to adopt more neutrality on the topic.

Religions that withstand the test of time typically see their member base periodically bud off into more extreme, new iterations (hard cultures) that pass the torch of these religions to new generations while the larger base succumbs to soft culture and dies off through lower birth rates and/or higher attrition.

Some cultures have even developed specific mechanisms to encourage this budding process and reintegrate the buds with the central organization. Consider the Catholic Church’s various religious orders, which re-inject the wider religion with a hard culture mindset. Essentially, the Catholic Church—a large, long-lived soft culture—cultivates small-but-strict religious orders and slots individuals sharpened within them into senior roles within its central bureaucracy. This practice is analogous to taking stem cells from a fetus and re-injecting them into an aging individual’s spine to combat deterioration that naturally comes with age. However, as we see with Catholic religious orders, the Church must constantly allow new ones to be created, as any order that becomes sufficiently old, large, and wealthy will begin to face the same problems all soft cultures do. Think of this like a large corporation that creates an internal incubator in which people are encouraged to “think with a startup mindset.”

Examples of Soft Cultures

“Spiritual but Unaffiliated Christians”
Reform Jews
Unitarian Universalists

Characteristics of Soft Cultures

Soft cultures are often the most “pleasant” to grow up within as a child. They’re what we often think of as the “vanilla” cultural subset because, at any given point, soft cultures are often the most dominant cultural subsets, population-wise, in any given region. They have a high rate of attrition between generations and, in a modern context, soft cultures almost always have a birth rate below repopulation level (i.e., below two children per woman).

While most soft cultures’ populations are derived from families who historically practiced hard forms of those cultures, they also refortify their ranks by bleeding from adjacent hard cultures that have remained strict (e.g., an Evangelical Protestant converting to a Spiritual Christian).

Note: When it comes to protection against viral memes, soft cultural religions fare dramatically worse than atheistic soft cultures. An often-misattributed quote asserts that “once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.” This is true to an extent; when people still believe in God but believe in him “casually” (as measured by frequency of church attendance), they become extremely susceptible to predatory memetic sets (conspiracy theories and the like). This susceptibility is not seen in atheist populations. Scott Alexander presents a nice exploration of the data around this phenomenon.^{^[73]} That said, atheists and agnostics have worse birth rates than theistic soft culture adherents on average (who themselves have lower birth rates than members of hard cultures).^{^[74]}

Super-Soft Culture

While it is easy to accidentally frame “atheism” as the opposite of hard cultures, secular cultures can actually be quite “hard.” Soft cultures are better thought of as closer to the “genetic default” human culture. The softest of soft cultures is close to what humans would believe if left to develop a culture a priori on a desert island without any (cultural) evolutionary pressures (hard cultures don’t tend to form until large groups of humans start living in close proximity, such as in cities). Through the Baldwin effect, “the process of becoming more genetically adapted over time to perform a novel behavior that was originally only learned,” religious traditions that were common among early human tribes were eventually etched onto our unconscious minds like centuries-old grooves in a dirt path, which pull the wheels of a cart into them making them incrementally deeper.

People who have allowed their culture to erode into super-soft culture begin to settle into a kind of default, instinctive, universal cultivar.

Characteristics of Super-Soft Culture

Super-soft culture is exemplified by:

Generic spiritualism with a pantheon of gods
A heavy focus on self-categorization (things like horoscopes and blood type tests)
Rituals designed to lead to good luck
Ceremonies tied to forgetting an adherent’s identity while dancing
Attributing agency to inanimate objects or animals
Attributing power to intention (“the power of wishy thinking”—in which a person thinks a outcome becomes more likely because they visualized it (sometimes with the caveat that this is more likely to happen if they then forgot that they visualized it or combined with some form of ritual)^[75]
Attributing power to fetishes (in the traditional sense of the word fetish: “the veneration of objects believed to have magical or supernatural potency,” often things like crystals though sometimes even pop-culture items like collectable figurines)

What does our ancestral, instinctual culture look like, theologically speaking? What will a mind unencumbered by tradition or science manifest in terms of values and worldviews? We think the purest expression of super-soft culture in modern society is something called “pop culture paganism.”

Essentially, once a pop subculture reaches a certain population threshold, a portion of adherents begin to believe that the fictional characters venerated by that community are a pantheon of real, all-seeing deities. These extreme adherents often choose one or two among these characters to whom they dedicate themselves, just as some Greeks and Romans dedicated themselves or their families to a particular deity, worshiping and supporting them disproportionately.

For example, Snapewives, aka Snapeists, took Harry Potter fan culture to the next level through a belief that Snape is a real spiritual guide who they could channel and with whom they could maintain romantic relationships (they argued that J. K. Rowling ultimately channeled Snape when writing the book series). Lokiwives followed a similar route, venerating Loki from the Marvel universe.

Snapewives will do things like meditate on Snape when they are sick until he sends them inspiration for a “potion” to “brew” which will improve their health or look for signs from Snape in their day-to-day lives to know what choices to make. Most also maintain shrines to Snape in their homes.

Of course, this is not limited to fandoms with fictional characters. For example, a person may use the four members of Metallica—instead of the four elements—as a point of focus when performing pagan magic.^[76]

Essentially, something in the backs of our brains makes us want to see any figure that is commonly venerated and which takes up a lot of our mindshare as a god. For a historic corollary we can look at the “hero worship” of the likely real-life combatants in the battle of Troy who were practically deified through their legends.

Women who fall into these ancient cultural grooves also often sexualize the entities they see as deities and perform elaborate binding or marriage rituals with them (known as Godspousery—seen in both Snapists and Lokiwives). We may see this as bizarre when regarding it from a modern cultural perspective, but similar traditions are seen throughout religious traditions, from the marriage of Catholic nuns to Jesus (a tradition without an male equivalent in Catholic priests—suggesting it is not just “symbolic”) and the rampant sexualization of Greek Gods, who were are known for frequently having sex with mortal women.

It would not surprise us if it was quite common in ancient Greece for groups of women to believe they shared the same God as a lover in addition to their husband. (If you find this chain of logic interesting, we strongly suggest you fall down the rabbit hole of people who have researched pop culture paganism and related subcommunities.)

As the internet enables pop culture deities to metastasize, superfans have developed increasingly sophisticated belief systems, forming something akin to full-blown theologies that strongly resemble those found in some of humanity’s earliest cultures.

Consider the following framing of pop culture paganism by one believer:

“The way I see it, pop culture figures are essentially thoughtforms on the astral plane. The more energy we in the mundane world pour into them, the bigger and stronger they get in the astral. … The entities that I call deities are generally very, very old and very, very strong—to the point that they can function entirely independently of the energies fed to them from people. I see pop culture figures as being lesser than deity in that they are still almost entirely dependent on the incoming energies from people for their existence. As such, while I might respect and even venerate a pop culture figure, I wouldn’t worship it. To me worship requires a sense of subordination to the thing being worshiped that I just don’t feel for pop culture figures.”^[77]

While some may dismiss people incorporating known fictional characters into their religious cannon, we see this phenomenon in even modern cultures that follow more ancient religious traditions. For example, some people of Papua New Guinea assign spiritual significance to The Phantom, a comic book character, and feature him alongside deceased ancestors on things like battle shields.^[78]

As another example, the Dalit population of India recently began to build temples to a new Goddess “of English” modeled after the Statue of Liberty but holding a pen in her hand instead of a torch (to represent literacy) and a copy of the constitution granting them equal rights in the other.^[79]

Heck, in modern American society, the way some people living on autopilot react to celebrities and carry around tokens featuring their likeness could be thought of as very similar to this kind of hero worship and fetishism.

Just as water receding from a lake begins to reveal the topography underneath, bit by bit, starting with the peaks, evolutionarily derived religious and cultural traditions begin to incorporate parts of this “default” culture, bit by bit, as they soften. That all successful^[80] cultivars come from traditions that are heavily derived from this biological default should give pause to any wishing to argue the default is well optimized for intergenerational durability in any competitive, technologically advanced environment. (There would not have been pressures allowing deviations to outcompete it if that were the case.)

As we see it, super-soft culture is based on cultivars that evolved in environments nothing like our current social environment—however a spiritually inclined individual could just as well argue that the universalism of super-soft culture is evidence of some underlying truth.

As one of this book’s editors, Lillian Tara, puts it:

“The truth is that humans need faith! If you give them nothing to hold sacred, to have faith in, they will find something anyway. Instead of metaphysical virtues, these empty religions imbue the material world with disproportionate value in an unconscious, desperate attempt to find meaning. It’s like using a broken compass because you need direction—any direction.”

As to why women seem uniquely predisposed to fall into super-soft culture vis-a-vis men: The difference appears to be biological in nature. One could argue that women experience more discrimination and that these communities appeal to disadvantaged individuals. However, we do not see higher participation in them among any other metric of disadvantaged-ness (other than LGBT individuals), and most of the women recorded participating in pop-culture paganism are solidly middle class or upper class.

In statistical analyses, women are almost always more likely to be religious and spiritual along almost any metric, so it is not as though this biological difference is limited to this one area. One interesting study argues that women are not necessarily more spiritual; they just happen to engage with spirituality more emotionally.^[81]

It may very well be that social stereotypes somehow socialize women to act this way. Even early feminists and suffragettes argued that women should be allowed to vote because they were biologically more spiritual than men. This kind of benevolent sexism may be more likely to stick around in the background of a society without people noticing, all while influencing the way even the most “feminist” of women see the world.

Pop Cultures

Pop cultures are largely parasitic, gaining adherents from the offspring of other cultures through the promise of an easier life, sex, power, acceptance, prestige, wealth, or some other factor. Like heroin, pop cultures deliver on their promises at much lower rates than their advertising would suggest.

As pop cultures are designed to sell themselves, they almost always concentrate in commercial sectors, such as the entertainment, music, and MLM industries. However, pop cultures can also be found within many large bureaucracies that impose a uniform worldview on members.

Pop cultures often promote the concept of safety nets but rarely provide them themselves. Instead, they typically try to force external organizations (like local governments) to create them (whereas hard cultures almost always provide safety nets themselves). They push for safety nets because should one exist outside of those provided by hard cultures, it becomes easier to convert people into a pop culture that does not make the sacrifices necessary to provide one.

These cultures actively promote an external locus of control, sometimes going so far as to work in features that shift people’s loci of control from internal to external, typically by presenting a compelling narrative explaining how purely external forces have driven things and people to be as they are. In extreme cases, pop cultures will go so far as to punish members who promote an internal locus of control (e.g., they may shame an individual for even daring to suggest a person might be responsible for their own failures).

Pop cultures are basically the all-sugar diet of culture. They hijack the lowest-order parts of our brains to put us in a state we know will feel bad later but feels spectacular in the moment.

Examples of Pop Cultures

American pop culture
“Goop” culture
Academia
New ageism
Occupy Wall Street
Mental health culture (more explanation of this later)

Characteristics of Pop Cultures

While living within a pop cultural framework can be exciting for the first few years, they make adherents uniquely susceptible to any vice exacerbated by a lack of self-discipline and isolation from social support structures. As such, pop culture adherents suffer from much higher rates of mental health issues.^[82]

While most pop cultures in wealthy societies are associated with very low birth rates, when a pop culture is adopted by an impoverished group with low female educational attainment, birth rates begin to shoot up. This has more to do with limited access to family planning tools and a breakdown of community support than it has to do with any specific desire to have a large family. When a community provides support, it is incentivized to ensure women don’t have more kids than they can handle, as care for those kids will burden the community. This partly explains why hard cultures have often evolved to be so antagonistic toward premarital sex.

Pop cultures manifest in one of two primary forms: Top-down and Bottom-up.

Top-down cultures typically feature a uniform set of beliefs and enforce this set of beliefs dictatorially downward through mechanisms like shunning members who break from orthodoxy. Unlike hard cultures, top-down pop cultures usually frame themselves as being focused on single, specific goals, such as supporting animal rights, rather than broader lifestyles.

Bottom-up pop cultures are inherently entropic and almost always set up in opposition to some other culture, defining themselves on what they are against rather than what they are for. While they sell themselves as having a consistent central ideology, they allow that ideology to shift in the mind of the adherent to whatever is needed to “sell” that culture. As such, bottom-up pop cultures often capitalize on outrage felt in response to some form of injustice in the world.

If you take a group of individuals from a bottom-up pop culture, you will find they often have very little in common outside of the aesthetics of their belief system and shared opposition toward certain other groups or actions. Despite this, bottom-up pop culture adherents tend to believe all other members of their culture hold the same basic values and beliefs about the world as they do.

It is common for a bottom-up pop culture to “win” a cultural battle only to find itself incapable of articulating an actionable set of demands once the opposing side concedes and asks for instruction. Any unified demands that do arise typically involve the complete extinction of whatever it is the culture opposes, and most of these opposed factors are too complex, entrenched, or amorphous to be eliminated (e.g., “the patriarchy,” “capitalism,” or “the gay agenda”).

Consider the outcome of the French Revolution: When the revolutionaries “won,” they didn’t know what to do and spiraled out of control, spending a huge amount of time and resources focused on identifying and taking down more enemies instead of building a more free, equal, and fraternal society. Pop cultures are—by far—the most dangerous kinds of cultures though they often appear the most innocuous and supportive of the “little guy.”

In truth, pop cultures “support” the little guy because he is more psychologically vulnerable and has more hooks (grievances) that can be used to manipulate him. Pop cultures do not genuinely have anyone’s best interest at heart. Like all cultures, they are evolving and uncaring memetic packages.

Pop cultures can be thought of as an acid being repeatedly flung at productive cultures, melting hard cultures into soft cultures and eventually dissolving cultures entirely. They feature something even more insidious than a low birth rate: They destroy the birth rates of their neighbors.

Evanescent Youth Cultures

Evanescent youth cultures are iterations of pop cultures that target teens as they experience an intense focus on their social positions within local hierarchies, a strong desire to belong, and an instinct to rebel against authority.

Evanescent youth cultures often attract teens by enabling adherents to signal to themselves that they are:

Special in some way
Misunderstood in some way
A “deeper” thinker than others
Undergoing some challenge or form of suffering others wouldn’t understand

These cultures also often equip adherents to aggressively politicize and dehumanize outsiders.

While evanescent youth cultures frequently co-opt elements of discipline seen in hard cultures, they completely focus those elements inwards (on social politicking and the dehumanization of outsiders) to make adherents feel special. These elements are wildly effective at recruiting teenagers because, as studies have shown, adolescents have heightened emotional reactions to any challenge to their positions in social hierarchies and find social rejection much more painful.^[83]

Examples of Evanescent Youth Cultures

Goths
Punks
Some brands of social justice advocates
E-girls/boys

Characteristics of Evanescent Youth Cultures

Evanescent youth cultures rarely persist into adulthood but can be dangerous to other cultures as they can culturally reset adherents, erasing their birth cultures and priming them to join any group local to them upon entering adulthood. That said, it is not uncommon for culturally reset individuals to choose adult cultures aligned with their values (or spiral into super-soft culture). In a subsequent chapter, we will explore this process and detail how cultures can protect younger generations from being harvested by evanescent youth cultures, allowing them to aesthetically participate without being “culturally wiped.”

Haven Cultures

Haven cultures are the products of marginalized groups experiencing cultural drift. Their isolation leads them to develop unique cultivars. These unique cultivars’ internal hierarchies often drive adherents to do more and more distinct and extreme things to signal cultural dedication, creating cultures that look very unique from the perspective of societies’ dominant pop cultures.

Haven cultures are unique in that members are pushed in rather than recruited. These cultures would not have formed were people not otherwise spurned by mainstream cultures due to some characteristic they hold.

Examples of Haven Cultures

LGBT culture
Some expat cultures
Some forms of gang culture
Early Irish-American culture
Early Italian-American culture

Characteristics of Haven Cultures

The cohesion of haven cultures, especially in their early days, heavily depends on discrimination from predominant cultures.

Haven cultures are so dependent on mainstream discrimination that if the discrimination stops, they will either invent fictional discrimination, act in a way that intentionally generates discrimination to ensure their stability,^{^[84]} or end up fading within a few generations. Consider Italian-American and Irish-American cultures, which were extremely cohesive in their early days only to collapse into shadows of their past prominence once anti-Italian and anti-Irish sentiments died down. Fortunately, not all haven cultures are subject to this conundrum when discrimination subsides; some evolve into stable cultures (which we will discuss next).

Haven cultures often have uniquely low bleed rates—especially when discrimination is high—because adherents have nowhere else to go.

Stable Cultures

Stable cultures are the rare happy medium between hard and soft cultures that manage to stabilize and become more tenable while avoiding descent into softness and obsolescence. They are more flexible than hard cultures in terms of supported beliefs and lifestyles while still imparting benefits and practices to adherents that make them stronger (such as a cohesive, supportive community that promotes an internal locus of control and maintains a number of strict cultural rules).

Discrimination imposed on hard cultures during their transitions into soft cultures can lead them instead to form stable cultures, enabling adherents to become more open-minded without abandoning ship (seeing as they’re still sailing amid harsh waters). This makes stable cultures akin to the cousins of haven cultures, (and some stable cultures even evolve out of haven cultures).

Examples of Stable Cultures

Orthodox Jews
Sikhs
Some expat cultures
Some forms of Black culture in the U.S.
Some branches of Catholicism

Characteristics of Stable Cultures

Stable cultures often frame their communities as tribes that stand apart from mainstream society. A love of the community commonly motivates high birth rates (rather than strict community traditions). However, stable cultures typically only manage to hover just above replacement rate.

Attrition is low among stable cultures, not typically because they threaten potential detractors but because they clearly communicate their benefits to adherents, making it clear that there is something meaningful to lose by leaving. This aspect of stable cultures means one doesn’t have to maintain a strict metaphysical worldview in order to remain a dedicated adherent. The presence of a clear cultural value proposition also makes it easier for kids to grow up within stable cultures feeling like they have a choice as to whether they will remain within that culture after reaching adulthood. In other words, stable cultures are more “carrot” than “stick” in how they motivate action.

If you are creating a culture, you will most likely want it to become a stable culture, even though not everything about stable cultures is good. For example, a stable culture that does not engender some discrimination against its adherents is far more likely to become soft and eventually go extinct. For this reason, stable cultures are more stable when they feature traditions to do just enough to “other” members and subject them to some discrimination. While discrimination makes the outside world a more hostile place to stable cultures’ adherents, it imparts a unique sense of cultural pride, providing these cultures with added strength.

If you aim to intentionally create a stable culture, it will need to start off as a hard culture. Over time, (lucky) hard and haven cultures transition into stable cultures—assuming they provide members with sufficiently compelling benefits while maintaining high birth rates.

Cultural Ecosystems

Cultures experience a common life cycle: They are born hard and soften over time—worn down by the caustic parasitic pop cultures that form spontaneously in any multi-cultural ecosystem—until they dissolve entirely. Sometimes cultures can be held together by outside pressure in a way that slows down this process, like a deep-sea organism whose form is held by the very pressure that would crush a surface dweller.

Cultures evolve mechanisms to fight off threats from each other. These mechanisms make up a culture’s “immune system.” They range from psychological techniques that produce cognitive dissonance in the face of out-group ideas to punishment for deviation from group norms and old-fashioned isolation from the outside world. When someone ridicules you for being “weird” or “cringe,” they are acting as tools of their culture’s immune system, attempting to prevent you from taking actions outside the bounds of cultural norms.

Protective cultural mechanisms can’t be arbitrarily removed among cultures that exist in broader ecosystems without severe consequences. Unprotected cultures will be outcompeted, worn down, and picked to pieces by surrounding cultures.

Not all cultures are softened into obsolescence over time. Some cultures adopt specialized roles within the broader landscape and only die when their ecological niches disappear. Shaker culture, for example, specialized in running orphanages (they could not have kids themselves because they believed all sex was sinful). When state-run alternatives started popping up, Shaker culture quickly transitioned from a respected societal influence to a defunct cultural tradition associated with an obscure type of well-built furniture.

As society changes, cultures evolve to fit new ecological niches. While we don’t know enough to say what ecological niche early Judaism filled, we can say it was not always a specialist in producing city-based[85], highly-trained professionals,[86] as is the case with some Jewish cultivars that have existed since the Middle Ages. (We do not say this as a stereotype but as a fact backed by evidence cited above—members of most modern Jewish cultivars live in cities and get degrees at higher rates than other groups.)

Should we speculate on the ecological niche of early Judaism, our guess would be that in its early days, it had a semi-nomadic specialization, with an ability to maintain a distinct, non-urbanized identity while nevertheless living near and transacting with cities.

The fact that many of the most important relics of this period were also mobile, like the Ark of the Covenant, lends some credence to this hypothesis. Early Jewish semi-nomadic specialization is further supported by Joshua and Judges depicting Israelites as a confederation of semi-nomadic highland tribes that joined forces to deal with military threats from urbanized kingdoms. Perhaps this semi-nomadic specialization was a product of Judaism being an early innovator of the concept that God is not tied to a specific city or region. We can see the end of this cultural niche post-Jeremiah when Judaism became polymorphic, developing territorial and non-territorial organizational methods, types of interactions between homeland and diaspora Jews, and (later) means of coordination between different kinds of diaspora Jews. Jews clearly demonstrate that a single cultivar will evolve to fit new ecological niches over time and should not be thought of as a static thing.

Even a single variant of a cultivar can exhibit polymorphism (more than one phenotype that manifests under different conditions). For example, a culture may have one specialization below a certain population threshold and another when it grows above that threshold, as is the case with both Evangelical Arminianism and some Islamic cultivars. Each of these groups exploits the “oppressed group” role when below certain population thresholds and transforms into a theocratic autocracy when above a certain population threshold. This can produce comical effects (consider how a non-evangelical living in an evangelical town feels when they see news coverage of a “war on Christmas” triggered by evangelicals living as minorities in non-evangelical cities—such as major coastal cities in the U.S.). (We go into this phenomenon in more detail in the chapter “Roles in Multicultural Ecosystems” on page 460.)

The shifting roles some cultivars take depending on critical mass and dominance mean you cannot reference how a cultivar behaves in areas where it lacks population density and power to predict its behavior once it gains dominance over political mechanisms. Instead, you must look for representations of the cultivar in areas where it is already dominant. A cultivar that benefits its neighbors when in the minority often shifts to aggressively stamping out all competition and deviation from cultural norms once it gains control. This doesn’t change the fact that the cultivar can be a critical component of a multicultural ecosystem.

There are also cultivars that evolved to fill specific niches in multicultural ecosystems, such as the Romani (Gypsies) and most modern Jewish cultivars (which makes Israel a particularly unique experiment in that a symbiotic specialist cultivar is forcing itself to live as a dominant culture).^{^[87]} A society is almost always better off as a multicultural ecosystem, with each cultivar fulfilling a specialized ecological niche. (For more stats on this point, see: “Immigration and Conservative Values” on page 592.)

The benefits of diverse cultural specializations within an ecosystem fuel our eagerness to create a system that preserves cultural heterogeneity and allows for multiple distinct cultures to exist under one umbrella. After all, a single culture is unlikely to produce the broad range of skills a thriving society needs: A culture that enables effective, inner-city lawyers to feel content with their lifestyles won’t simultaneously be optimized around imparting deep satisfaction to rural farmers.

The extent to which cultural specialization produces adherents who thrive in specific fields can persistently be seen in long-tail distributions. Consider how Catholic trust in systems and bureaucracies correlates with heavy Catholic representation in the United States Supreme Court (with only two of the nine sitting supreme court justices not being Catholic at the time of this book’s publication—though Neil Gorsuch is only half Catholic). Consider also how the Jewish predilection for academic systems correlates with Jewish luminaries being represented among Nobel prize winners at a rate 100 times higher than would be expected based on population alone.

When we think about the niche in society, we want our family’s culture to fill, we are well aware that it will comprise just one tiny sliver within a wider ecosystem. Our goal with this book is to, for the first time, intentionally design an opt-in, diverse, multiphase ecosystem that can govern the interaction of multiple specialized cultures, which will serve society through their diversity of viewpoints, skill sets, and talents. Until now, competing cultures have been dumped into a geographic cage and forced to “figure it out for themselves” with only the barest of rules (like “don’t kill each other”) governing their interactions.

A Note on Generalities

Any tendency for a culture’s adherents to exhibit certain traits, or to be disproportionately represented in certain niches, doesn’t mean that all or even most of that culture’s adherents will exhibit those traits or gravitate to those niches.

We worry about how this book obligates us to make generalities that might be toxic to our careers. It is, for example, impossible to contrast how Jewish and Catholic cultures affect their adherents on a macro scale without making generalities about Jews and Catholics—and people often find any generalization offensive.

When we say something like: “Some Jewish cultivars specialize in urban, communal living and the production of highly trained professionals,” we do not mean that all Jews living within that faction of Jewish culture live that way. Rather, we are trying to highlight how a cultivar produces specific outcomes at a rate higher than other contemporary cultures. It is impossible to catalog cultural evolution without making any generalizations or identifying patterns in how cultures interact across time and geographies.

Ironically, the risk to us from making these kinds of generalizations does not come from the cultures we are generalizing, as most are hard cultures, and very few hard cultures care about generalizations. Hard cultures are typically quite aware that they produce differential outcomes and are distinct from the rest of society—that’s kind of the point. Rather, the risk comes from pop culture variants that use the effective suppression of intellectual inquiry as a metric for status signaling (causing surrounding groups to live under what is akin to a dictatorial cultural hegemony).

Finally, our ability to write about a culture is somewhat limited to our own experiences and what we can read about the culture. All of our books are living documents (we update them about once a year based on reader feedback). If we made a mistake, mischaracterized your culture, or you have additional ideas, please reach out.

Note: You will notice we almost entirely ignore discussion of Black culture. This is not because we lack experience with (or exposure to) it or because it was not important to cover, but because there is no way two non-Black people can make broad—sometimes critical—generalizations about Black culture (as we do with every other culture we mention) without it coming off as racist.

Arbitrary Self Denial & Fasting:
Hard vs. Soft and Pop Cultures

So far, we have vaguely alluded to the co-evolution of culture and the human brain and how pop cultures erode hard cultures in a way that damages individual adherents. Let’s take a moment to dive into a specific example of this phenomenon to better understand how it works.

Almost all hard cultures have some ritual focused on voluntary self-denial, such as Ramadan, Lent, or the Fast of the Firstborn. The question is, why? Why do cultures that practice something that makes membership less pleasant historically outcompete cultures that encourage people to indulge in whatever they want? This question becomes more pointed when we look at how common it is for pop cultures to emotionally reward people for succumbing to their base desires, as is seen in pop culture outputs like the Intuitive Eating Movement, which entails telling people they are being healthy by eating whatever they want whenever they want in an age in which we’re surrounded with an abundance of foods that are designed to be highly addictive. Movements telling people to indulge in their immediate desires have been around since the ancient Greeks. These movements resurface during every civilization’s brief golden age and only seem to be successful in the short run. While the pop cultures that produce them consistently die, stodgy hard cultures persist. Why?

A cursory look would imply that arbitrary self-denial is really just about creating a sunk-cost fallacy to reduce cultural bleed. After all, the more someone invests in a culture, the harder it is, psychologically, to leave. That said, because self-denial is disproportionately represented in hard cultures despite a myriad of other sunk-cost-fallacy levers available, we suspect there’s more to self-denial than the mere role it plays in reinforcing commitment.

Our theory is that self-denial and fasting impart advantages to hard culture adherents (despite these practices causing hardship) because these practices encourage adherents to strengthen their inhibitory pathways from a very early age. Training this part of your brain to function at peak efficiency plays a critical role in mental wellbeing.

Almost all processes in our brains require “exercise” to work at optimal efficiency (if you want to get better at a mental task, practice it repeatedly). One critical pathway in our brain subject to this broad “use it or lose it” principle is called the “inhibitory pathway.” This pathway is in the prefrontal cortex and is used to shut down thoughts in other parts of our brain. It is also one of the last parts of our brain to fully myelinate (a process that leads to more optimal function), which is why teenagers have trouble shutting down obviously bad ideas and intrusive thoughts.

You are using your inhibitory pathway when you decide not to reach for that third donut or lash out at a friend in anger. Your inhibitory pathway will even help you shut down intrusive and snowballing thoughts. This may partly explain why religious people are often shown in studies to be psychologically healthier than non-religious people.

Those critical of religion often paint the rules associated with hard cultures as arbitrary. They imply Christianity survived to this day merely because a manipulative ruling class threatened a bunch of uneducated rubes with eternal (or very real and immediate) punishment if they did not fall in line—but this is not the case. The surviving forms of Christianity competed against hundreds of thousands of other memetic sets (all threatening people with eternal damnation) while constantly splitting into new variations that competed against each other. Any ancient hard culture that survived to this day imparts lifestyles and worldviews to adherents that help them outcompete others.

Pop cultures are toxic because there’s a big difference between what you might want to do in the moment (which is what pop cultures cater to) and what you need to do (which is often unpleasant).

Nevertheless, past and present hard cultures have plenty of flaws. For example, because gay people have offspring at lower rates, homophobic cultures have historically outcompeted more open cultures, which has led many hard cultures to be fairly homophobic—despite this homophobia not being “necessary” today to ensure higher birth rates, thanks to IVF and surrogacy.

We stand at a unique point in history where we can mine the traditions of our ancestors with a sober mind instead of angrily reacting against them and regarding them with disgust due to their lack of surface-level logic. We have the power to intentionally design cultures and see how they play out in an increasingly virulent sea of memes.

Note: For examples of other fitness-imparting social technologies evolved by cultures, see: “Cultural Amenities” in the Appendix on page 725.

Side note: Harsh rules decrease bleed rates for religious communities but not for their secular counterparts. Anthropologist Richard Sosis found that 6% of secular communes survived after 20 years, compared to 39% of religious ones. Religious communes featured one common variable: A higher number of obligatory costly sacrifices (there was a perfectly linear relationship between costly sacrifices and staying power in religious communities but not secular ones).^{^[88]}

The Supervirus

We live at a unique point in human history. The number of individual humans connected to other individual humans, as well as the frequency with which those connections split and re-form, is unprecedented and beyond anything our hardware (brains) evolved to handle.

In the field of biology, “superbugs” evolve when a bacterium, fungus, or virus is put in a low-stakes setting where it can both thrive and test itself against a panoply of our best defenses (like antibiotics). Hospitals present one such setting in that they serve as gathering points for already-infected individuals (many of whom are immunocompromised, making them “easy mode” for viruses, fungi, and bacteria) and are packed with antivirals, antifungal, and antibiotic medications.

Our modern social landscape has created a similar environment, enabling cultural viruses to evolve. These viruses cannot survive and reproduce independently and must parasitize healthy cultural ecosystems, rewriting healthy cultures’ internal machinery to carry out their life cycles. To a certain extent, all pop cultures are a form of virus—but one in particular, which we’ll call “the supervirus,” is unique in terms of how prolific it is, how quickly it redirects the machinery of infected organizations to only replicate itself, and the underlying mechanisms it uses to infect organizations/cultivars and disable their immune systems.

Characteristics of the Supervirus

Society can be thought of as a collection of overlapping nodal networks (things like companies and cultivars), with each node representing a person and their connections to other people. Historically, pop cultures, simple memetic viruses, evolved to target single nodes. These cultures would flip target nodes (convert them) by offering individuals an easy life and positive emotional subsets. While these viruses lowered the birth rates among the individual nodes they flipped and could sometimes lead to wild outbreaks, those outbreaks were always contained within single or closely-related nodal networks, meaning they were never really an existential threat to our species.

The supervirus evolved a new strategy. Instead of flipping individual nodes, it works to flip entire nodal networks. Instead of selling the promise of minimizing emotional suffering within a single node, it entices nodal systems with the prospect of minimizing negative emotion across the entire network.

The supervirus achieves this by weaponizing the nodes it flips to a union-like attitude that boycotts anything, fact, or individual, that has the potential to slow the spread of the virus or incite negative emotional states in others. It identifies “problematic” individuals and facts by using infected nodes to label these threats with “flagging language” like “that makes me uncomfortable” or “that could offend some people” and subsequently reroutes the infected nodal network around these now-tagged nodes.

Suppose a dean at a prestigious university states a fact that makes people uncomfortable, or suppose an academic study’s findings might hurt a group’s feelings. The system will tag these nodes as likely to cause emotional pain, then separate and ignore them until a “fixed” iteration can take their place. It is not an exaggeration to say the virus intentionally hides “offensive” or otherwise threatening facts, with both the leading journal Nature Human Behaviour^[89] and a leading source of genetic data, the NIH genetics database,^[90] now actively occluding research that could hurt protected classes’ feelings.^{^[91]}

Note: While the supervirus is totally apolitical, it has infected progressive subsets of society more than conservative niches because (1) conservative groups are inherently more resistant to change and new ideas, (2) conservative circles feature fewer soft culture adherents, which have compromised or partially deconstructed cultural immune systems, and (3) progressive movements support many prosocial causes that dovetail well with the promise of removing emotional pain^{^[92]}.

Another huge evolutionary leap achieved by the supervirus is its practice of functionally “shadow-banning” people. The term shadow-banning comes from a practice in which website administrators block anyone from seeing the content of a user who threatens the harmony of their community. This is done because it causes less emotional reaction in the shadow-banned user than just having their account deleted.

Historically, when one cultivar underwent a speciation event or was invaded by a proselytizing cell of another culture, it would openly kill “corrupted” or apostate nodes. If Catholics started proselytizing in a Protestant area, they would get tied to a stick and lit on fire. Of course, the same would go for Protestants “invading” Catholic turf. If some new heresy was invented—some new way of seeing the world—its inventor was sought out, put on trial, and eliminated (typically publicly). Essentially, the old system functioned similarly to a human’s immune system: An antigen would tag a cell that might be an invader or have corrupted DNA, then white blood cells (nodes that specialize at eliminating tagged nodes) would find the tagged node and destroy it.

While this open and public system of killing nodes tagged as being off-message has been highly effective historically, it is rife with negative effects:

It forces apostate/counterculture nodes to fight back as if their lives depended on it (because their lives are genuinely at stake).
It turns apostate nodes into martyrs, giving them a chance to memorably demonstrate the faith of their convictions to other nodes (which might inspire resistance and action).
It provides apostate nodes with plenty of motivation to meet and commune in private. If you just saw the person who flipped you burnt at the stake, you will both appreciate their conviction (if they handle the ordeal with dignity) and deeply comprehend the importance of staying quiet when converting new nodes.

While there is much hand-wringing in our society about cancelation, the truth is that, at the population level, cancelation is pretty rare and more of a “terrorism tactic” to silence threats than a tool designed to have an effect on the targeted node.

Shadow-banning is far more effective than open persecution, elimination, or cancellation. Because it is both quiet and “nonlethal” (in that targets are neither literally killed nor fired, shunned, or de-platformed explicitly due to their beliefs), it avoids the negative effects outlined above. As shadow-banning involves subtly cutting threatening individuals out of the conversation (or governing system, economy, academic world, etc.), it neither inspires violent resistance nor creates martyrs or signals to apostates that they need to be incredibly secretive about their beliefs (making them even easier to single out). If the virus could not find a way to deplatform an apostate with wide nodal reach, it would likely try to kill them or have them arrested—but only after it had exhausted all other options.

Another novel feature of the supervirus is that it evolved to be parasitoidal instead of just a parasite like most of the simpler viruses. In addition to draining resources from infected nodal networks, the parasitoidal supervirus eventually kills them and does so “intentionally.” Iterations of the supervirus that randomly mutated into versions that kill their hosts have outcompeted strains that do not. (A parasitoid is a parasite that has evolved to kill its host as part of its reproductive cycle. For example, a wasp may lay its eggs inside a caterpillar, allowing its larva to eat the caterpillar alive from the inside out.)

Once an organization, cultivar, or movement is infected by the supervirus, portions of its internal machinery get redirected toward infecting as many members of that organization as possible. This would be a fairly slow reproductive strategy if those individuals all stayed within that organization’s static nodal network, which is why parasitoidal iterations of the supervirus have a competitive advantage. Once an organization reaches a certain level of infection, odds that the virus transforms and begins to manifest differentially increase. This can be thought of as a polymorphic transformation. In the same way a grasshopper physically begins to transform into a locust when population levels reach a certain critical mass, the virus will begin to transform the internal “organs” of an organization when certain criteria are met.

Should this transformation take place, the supervirus begins to modify the infected nodal network’s governing structure to repeatedly and systemically target anyone in a leadership position while encouraging large amounts of infighting—all while spawning dozens of spontaneously forming and dissolving sub-governing councils (this process can be seen in the Occupy Wall Street movement, The Women’s March, Gawker,^[93] and CHAZ—more on this in subsequent chapters).

Just as an ant mind controlled by the fungus phiocordyceps camponoti-floridani eventually climbs to the top of a high piece of grass and splits apart to release its fungal spores, an infected organization will act in a manner that draws a lot of media attention in an effort to infect even more people before it functionally dies—splitting apart and releasing the nodes it infected into the surrounding environment like fungal spores, ensuring they fuel more spread.

The bacteria that causes strep throat first kills red blood cells, then coats itself in the “corpses” of these cells to hide from the immune system. The supervirus is unique among cultures in that it does not strive to create its own cultural identity but instead “wears” the skin of its victims to hide from societal immune systems that historically would have protected against a shameless, self-replicating piece of code. The virus will puppet the corpse of its victim, point to good things the host accomplished before becoming infected and say: How can you criticize me? I am an X, and X is all about helping people! Look at all the great things I have done!”

This dynamic may explain, in part, why the amount of oppression faced by minority groups has not decreased recently despite diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts superficially having more influence in society than ever.^[94] Many of the organizations that used to advocate for the reduction of discrimination have been hollowed out by the supervirus, which is now wearing their decomposing faces. Instead, these organizations now merely aesthetically signal that they are doing “good” to protect themselves while ignoring their original missions and devoting all their resources toward spreading the supervirus.

Just as the supervirus is apolitical, it is also neither “evil” nor constructed by some group of ill-intentioned individuals or guided by any intentionality. The supervirus evolved into existence, shaped by trial and error. It spreads because it is better at spreading than the competition. It exists and grows only because it is good at shutting down the immune systems of existing cultivars and organizations, then hijacking their machinery to self-replicate.

Growth of the Supervirus

Growth of the supervirus can be seen clearly in the stats. Let’s focus on universities because that is where it sets the standard for what is “true:”

Around one-fifth of academics in the humanities or social sciences have endorsed the dismissal of a colleague on the grounds that they express the wrong opinion on hot-button issues while four out of five American Ph.D. students are willing to discriminate against right-leaning scholars.^[95]
41.3% of Yale undergrads believe violence is justified if it prevents others from voicing views they have determined are “hateful.”^[96]
Nearly 70% of students are in favor of reporting a professor if the professor says something the students find offensive.^[97]
Scholars Under Fire, which tracks academics who students are trying to have removed because of the content of their research, recorded a 528% increase in incidents in the six years between 2015 and 2021.^[98]
Only one in five respondents to a survey of 37,000 students asking how often they felt they could express their opinion on campus reported “fairly often” or “very often” while 17% of respondents reported never feeling comfortable expressing their opinion on campus.^[99]

The stifling of dissenting views mostly happens quietly in academia. When University of Central Florida student Hanna Noor put up flyers for a free speech event featuring fellow former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a faculty member approached her and told her to stop. “He told me I wasn’t allowed to put up flyers for anything that might offend someone, and he didn’t even see the irony of what he was saying. I mean, it was an event for free speech!”^[100]

There was no irony in this scenario. Suppressing free speech is a clear objective of the supervirus, and rightly so. From the virus’s perspective, free speech and free thought are dangerous weapons that, if used widely, could end up hurting someone’s feelings—or worse: Slow the rate of infection.

This is how an infected organization prevents immune nodes from hampering its spread: Once an organization reaches a certain level of infection, it begins to grow departments or branches designed to do nothing but spread the infection and accumulate resources, much like growing tumors hijack blood supply. The core function of these new departments and branches is to impose the supervirus’s values (e.g., all emotional distress = violence). These departments also systematically identify, target, and remove groups and people immune to the supervirus (i.e., they report “problematic” information and people). Examples of such tumorous growths range from “fat studies departments” at universities to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) departments at companies.

To be clear: Some DEI professionals, groups, and departments are actually dedicated to reducing systemic inequality, while others, the tumors of the infection, merely exist to ensure that employees see the world in a specific way. Cancers that are obviously harmful are usually detected by the body and killed while they are still small. Only cancers that can falsely signal they are useful, normal parts of an organism can avoid this fate.

While the supervirus pretends to care about diversity, the diversity it ultimately seeks is purely performative—like having people dress traditionally and celebrate different holidays as though they were props on a set. The supervirus does not tolerate anything beyond superficial diversity and will put its hand firmly around the neck of any vulnerable minority culture that deviates from approved values and objectives.

Consider territories where the infection is most rampant, such as New York City, and the constant hand-wringing that takes place there about the Hasidic Jew “problem.”^[101] The problem, of course, is that Hasidic culture features genuinely different values around things like childhood education, career choices, and gender equality. Hasidic culture represents genuine diversity rather than a group of people in cute “native” outfits that can be patted on the head and appreciated from a safe distance—it is a hard culture with a functioning immune system—and thus is a threat to the supervirus.

Let’s blow your mind: As of this book’s publication, the supervirus is probably still a net benefit to society from the perspective of our value system. Yes, it is dictatorial, it suppresses free thought, it oppresses any minority group that does not slavishly adopt its traditions and erase their own, and it is instigating a mass extinction of countless historic cultivars like a plague—none of which are things we like. However, at least in the early stages of its infection, the supervirus has genuinely protected a number of previously oppressed groups and has done a great job at promoting both gender equality and LGBT rights (much more than human activists ever could). That said, we also think it’s inevitable that it does more harm than good.

What Makes the Supervirus Dangerous?

The virus features four major hazards we will explore in order from least important to most:

Hollowing Out Existing Cultures

Once the supervirus controls a certain number of nodes within a cultivar, it begins to systematically erase that cultivar’s core, including its inherent values and objectives, maintaining only cosmetic features (consider attributes like accents, dress, superficial holidays … nothing representing deep underlying beliefs).

The supervirus has already gutted a few of the more progressively minded cultivars to a point at which they are now functionally the same culture wearing different skins … and it won’t stop there, having wrapped its tendrils deep within many more traditional belief systems. In erasing the genuine differences in how these cultures historically saw the world—the “offensive” bits—the supervirus robs us of these cultivars’ rich cultural histories and unique approaches to problems. It achieves equality by shaving off beliefs, objectives, and traditions that may produce genuine conflict among its vassals. The last thing our society needs is a monoculture wearing a skin mask of its victims.

Sterilizing Open-Minded, Prosocial Cultures

Miyajima is an island in Japan that is home to hundreds of extremely docile deer. In most places, deer are difficult to approach, running away when you get close because deer ancestors that failed to do this were killed and eaten. Because deer in Miyajima have long been considered sacred messengers, humans never killed them. This has produced an isolated deer population so docile and friendly that they will walk right up to you and eat out of your hand.

The supervirus sterilizes any group it infects. This might not be such a problem if intellectually engaged, and open-minded groups were not dramatically more susceptible to the infection given their lower social immune response (i.e., their willingness to seek out and entertain new ideas). Worse still, the supervirus develops branches of itself that spearfish the best and brightest from vulnerable populations around the world, only to culturally castrate them by lowering their birth rates and hollowing out their previous cultures. If people shoot only the most trusting elephants with the biggest tusks, eventually elephants’ tusks will grow shorter and elephants will become more aggressive (and yes, humans’ sociological profiles,^[102] voting patterns,^[103] and even traits like altruism^[104] and prosociality^[105] have a heritable component). Because the supervirus targets the most prosocial, open-minded people in any given society and culturally castrates them, our grandchildren will live in a much less open-minded and intellectually-engaged society. Minority groups heavily poached by the virus will have permanent genetic scars from this over-hunting of their best and brightest.

Stifling Honest Discourse

A key factor behind the virus’s success is its ability to prevent any seriously infected individual from engaging with any idea or concept it has not vetted. When a mentally healthy uninfected individual reads a document or listens to a speech / lecture, they hear a series of arguments and clusters of information. When that information contrasts with their preexisting worldview, they weigh the new information against their existing worldview and keep that which seems more reasonable based on their standards of evidence (see the chapter: “The Nature of Truth” on page 122 for more information on how this works).

A deeply infected individual will instead go through an entire document, lecture, movie, or person’s past statements looking for any position that deviates from the virus’s orthodoxy. If a single point is found that makes the person seem to not be on their “team”—they then will ignore the rest of the content and immediately go online and “tag” the text/individual as dangerous to other infected individuals.

Anyone who has spent a cursory period of time online has seen this phenomenon. You may come across a review of a book that reads something like, “This person is R-phobic on X topic or took Y position on Z sensitive issue—one star.” Or perhaps you’ll see a tweet along the lines of, “This person once had X on their podcast or cited Y—don’t trust them.”

To anyone not infected, this would be an insane way to make decisions. It makes no sense to throw out an entire individual or work if even just one isolated statement within it seems wrong or offensive. Were we to read a book that was 50% at odds with everything we understand to be true about the world and was 50% novel, interesting ideas that inspire us to see things differently, we would think it’s a great book.

The most insidious manifestation of this behavior can be seen in accusations of “dog-whistling.” The virus does not care about individual human life; it’s happy to destroy the lives of three faithful adherents if it also wipes one immune node off the chessboard. Therefore, it does not require adherents to actually find violating language or thoughts in order to tag a node. If an individual merely suspects someone else might be immune to the virus and hiding it, they will accuse them of “dog-whistling,” then take something they wrote or said and claim it meant something heretical.

We have seen every idea in some works dismissed based on an idiot on Twitter claiming a single line insinuates something it does not. Still, there is a reason why the virus evolved this way—as it only cares about spreading, it will always benefit from an “execute them all and let God sort them out” mindset among those it infects.

While some historic cultures have evolved strong biases against any information produced outside of their culture (though this is rare, with even devout Christian Europeans often reading works by Islamic scientists), the concept of a “dog-whistle” is a totally new cultural innovation.

A No-Win Condition

The worst part by far is that the supervirus very clearly has no off switch—it’s a paperclip maximizer^[106] of “no emotional pain” programmed into our social infrastructure and it is gaining steam. The system has no “job is done; turn things off now and stop escalating” mechanism. It didn’t need one in its early days, so why would it have evolved a modulating mechanism? Once the cultivar has solved the issues it claims to care about, do you think it will stop? How? What will force it to cease? Even if you were able to push a button and turn off 90% of the supervirus, it is totally decentralized and the 10% you didn’t shut down would grow to fill the void created by the 90% you did shut down.

Because the supervirus has no off switch, this paperclip maximizer will never stop advancing its quest to remove emotional pain from the universe. Talk to the most infected individuals about the problem of birth rates in a trusted environment (something we do frequently), and they will let you in on the truth: Humanity itself is a curse on the planet from their perspective, and most humans endure net suffering. As they generally equate human existence with suffering, the prospect of humanity dying out is not terribly worrisome to them.

While even during the Cold War, both sides were able to stay sane enough to know the extinction of human life wasn’t a worthwhile price to pay for their particular ideological faction winning, the supervirus does not care—the extinction of the human species is not a losing state but rather one of a few possible win states. To be clear, while we do not think the supervirus is the primary cause of falling birth rates, we do think it is the primary factor blocking honest discourse about the ramifications of a hard landing on demographic collapse—despite the hazard being obvious to anyone who wants to ensure a diverse and prosperous future for our species.

Like a mouse with toxoplasmosis, an organization infected by the supervirus will act in a way that is riskier and more likely to lead to self-destruction than one would expect. Toxoplasmosis has this effect on mice because earlier strains of the Toxoplasma gondii parasite that effectively tricked their hosts into being eaten by cats spread faster than others. Similarly, the supervirus inspires often-destructive behavior because earlier strains that killed their host organizations spread faster. Organizational destruction accelerates spread in this case because when an organization dies, infected nodes are released back into the wider social ecosystem, where they are free to infect new organizations. This is a problem … a big friggin’ problem … when something like a country’s controlling political organization is infected.

We feel as though we are in a car and trying to explain our problems with the car to other people. We’re fine with the car, and we’re fine with the direction in which it’s taking us, but we are horrified to see it lacks brakes and keeps running people over.

How to Overcome the Supervirus

How does one “fix” the supervirus? So long as it doesn’t manage to kill us all, it will eventually go extinct on its own. Such is the curse of low birth rates: Eventually, all humans with a sociological profile susceptible to cultural sterilization will be carved out of our gene pool. As we mentioned, if you kill all elephants with big tusks that trust humans, elephants will eventually evolve into growing shorter tusks and become more aggressive. This is a problem the virus is fundamentally and systemically unable to address, as admitting that people are born different might “hurt someone’s feelings.”

Could the supervirus be eliminated in our lifetimes? Not entirely. Once more than a third of an organization’s members and upper management becomes infected, that organization is incurable (without a Twitter-style exterminatus). The way the supervirus works on a structural level makes it impossible to circumvent. The only way to counter it is to “genetically engineer” stronger cultivars that are not susceptible to it and build a framework for these cultivars to differentially work with each other while using the supervirus’s own strategy of deprioritizing vulnerable nodes. Essentially, we must create a mirror society.

Fortunately, the virus diverts so many of infected organizations’ resources to self-propagation and defense that these organizations become easy to outcompete. We ran a test operation to see how we might perform in voter turnout and were able to outcompete standard (better-resourced, longstanding) political organizations by over 600X—that is the extent of the inefficiency in a deeply infected organization. Groups infected by the supervirus become twisted and tumor-riddled beasts, moving slower and slower as they are crushed under their own weight.

A caveat to our proposed “solution:” By framing it as an act of child abuse or neglect to raise a child in any culture not infected by the virus, the supervirus can feasibly prevent the creation of a mirror society. Growing efforts to prevent homeschooling and efforts to ban private schools in places like Manhattan suggest the supervirus may already have begun to leverage this strategy. One of this book’s test readers even pointed out that in Germany and Sweden, prohibitions on homeschooling have already become institutionalized at the state level.^{^[107]}

Attempts to establish a forced monopoly on children’s education are uniquely disturbing, as mainstream schools have become so ineffective at helping kids learn about the world and advance their careers that, by some measures, literally zero structured education produces better outcomes (specifically, unschoolers—kids given literally no guidance in their education and allowed to do whatever they want—have been found to outcompete public school kids in terms of college acceptance, college graduation, and mental health).^{^[108]} We cannot help but wonder if such disproportionate outcomes are a product of “traditional school” being essentially zombified by the supervirus to optimize around indoctrinating children rather than equipping youth to become thriving adults who contribute to societal advancement.

This and other concerns inspired us to create a new educational paradigm (CollinsInstitute.org), explore the creation of entirely new communities (https://Eureka.Town), and seek out organizations like Praxis to help build new countries.

How can a cultivar protect itself from the supervirus? How can it identify when an individual is prone to infection? Well … equipping cultivars to withstand all sorts of vulnerabilities—including those to the supervirus—is kind of the point of this book. That said, here’s one very simple protective mechanism: Any cultivar that systemically punishes people who give in to their emotions—be they positive or negative—will be totally immune. Viewing emotions as mere signals and inconvenient products of our evolution (our ancestors who had them had more surviving offspring) makes flagging language like “that might hurt someone’s feelings” impotent. That said, there are many more mechanisms one can leverage, and a refusal to venerate emotions is obviously something we overly favor given our Secular Calvinist backgrounds (please pardon our bias).

We seriously considered removing this subsection from the book, but the truth is, because we can’t even find a theoretical way to remove the supervirus from infected networks, we may as well start assembling immune cultivars and building competing networks. Now that we have flagged ourselves as apostates to the supervirus, we should prepare for a wave of negative reviews. If you want to help us out here, please remember to drop a positive review on Amazon.

“Belief” vs. “belief”

A “belief” (as opposed to a “Belief”) is something that fits into our day-to-day conceptualization of reality, but is incongruent with—or unimportant to—our metaphysical, logical, or theological framework.

Many cultures have “beliefs” that they don’t “Believe.” Consider the common Catholic belief in Saints as real individual spirits who assume roles similar to local or domain-specific deities in older pagan worldviews. This interpretation of saints is not canonical to the Catholic tradition and if you push Catholics on whether or not they really truly “Believe” in this interpretation of the role of Saints, they will often say “no.” However, many Catholics do casually, on a day-to-day basis, “believe” in saints like this and probably have some theory as to how this belief is compatible with their larger theology and metaphysical framework.

Consider also the “belief” in guardian angels (which one poll found 55% of Americans to “believe”).^[109] While some Evangelical Protestant cultures really “Believe” in guardian angels (that every human has an angel assigned to them), this is not well attested as a concept in the Bible. Hence, many others “believe” in guardian angels but would pull back down from the position if pushed to defend it in a formal debate.

The penultimate example of a “belief” many Americans have held in their lives can be seen with the tail end of belief in Santa. If you grew up in a household that presented Santa as a real figure, you likely spent a portion of your childhood knowing that Santa’s existence as a physical, magical being was doubtful. But why risk giving up faith entirely so long as the presents kept rolling in each Christmas?

These “beliefs” allow a culture to hold a framing device about the world without having to logically justify it within their wider metaphysical framework of reality. There is nontrivial utility in “beliefs”—enough to justify them despite their logical shortcomings. In fact, we are building many “beliefs” into our intentionally constructed family culture. For example, we intentionally developed a “belief” that we are protected by “Future Police.” Whenever something seems to have gone wrong, we just tell each other it was the Future Police teaching us a lesson or correcting a sequence of events to solidify a future that must come to pass. People laugh because, on its surface, this is little different than a “belief” in guardian angels, which stands in stark contrast to our hyper-logical public reputations.

The Future Police emerged first as a psychological technique that I, Malcolm, used to frame negative events in a positive context. I found that I was strictly better off assuming that anytime I was stressing over a negative event, the undesired turn of events was ultimately for the best and I really ought to be studying the event to glean useful lessons and identify meaningful opportunities. However, over time—as happens with many “beliefs”—my Future Police analysis became more ingrained in our family’s metaphysical worldview (this is the biggest danger of “beliefs”).

It has become harder and harder in our family to disbelieve the Future Police. It feels too improbable to us that mere chance has caused something genuinely good, either for ourselves or others, to ultimately come out of every personal setback or tragedy we’ve suffered. Life strains credulity. Probabilistically, it has come to feel impossible to us that such an unlikely series of “tragedies” would position us so perfectly to have the specific impact on human history we feel we need to have (if you want specific examples, see: “Tragedy as a Source of Opportunity” on page 727 of the Appendix).

Our experience with the Future Police belief exemplifies how an informal belief can become reinforced over time through confirmation bias. If you look into the past, you can create a “just-so story” to collect data points that build initial “evidence.” Then, as you begin to connect your belief with outcomes it seemingly predicted (conveniently ignoring outcomes not predicted by your belief), part of you starts asking if this crazy little idea might have some merit.

Are there really Future Police guiding our lives toward some specific outcome? Probably not, but accepting the truism that there must be a purpose and opportunity behind otherwise trying events has led us to recognize opportunities at difficult junctures and approach hard times with optimism. Even if the belief is silly, it seems self-destructive to drop it—so why not lean in?

Moreover, how we frame Future Police has become more “theologically sophisticated” over time, making our belief in them seem less insane given our other assumptions about how the universe works. In a million years, our descendants might be closer to the way we would conceptualize a God than a human. When a person hears the term “Future Police,” they think of human-looking beings wearing futuristic armor,^[110] but in reality, the god-like powers our distant descendants may come to exert on the past may be so advanced that to us, they’ll be indistinguishable from “magic.” Instead of literally time traveling, maybe such an entity is just manipulating the probability of quantum events at a macro scale, leading to different cognitive outcomes in humans.^[111]

Maybe “we” (Simone and I) don’t specifically matter, and distant future generations are really just manipulating subtle quantum events that, on the macro scale, ensure our family serves some specific, predestined function for our species. Perhaps the only reason those events “target” us at the macro scale is because we are willing to assume roles that other “candidate” families are unlikely to accept. Maybe the way to “curry favor” with the Future Police is to have a very strict, predictable, and specific moral code, signaling one’s utility as a useful pawn in their larger plans.

If you assume that in 10 million years humanity (or our technological descendants) will become something closer to our conception of a God than a human, and if you believe, as we do, that future events happen concurrently to present events and that a linear flow of time is an illusion created by the way our consciousness works, then the whole framework becomes a lot less crazy.

In the famous “double slit experiment,” we learn that a single proton can bounce off its own probability wave. Maybe our God-like descendants exist as something akin to probability waves and manipulate the present to manifest the futures in which they exist. If probabilistic futures exist in some way, a future that features God-like entities could have enough power to manifest itself by influencing the present.

An argument for such a scenario could go: Is it possible for a god-like entity (one powerful enough to manipulate the fabric of reality) to become real at some point in the future? Is it possible that such an entity could be so powerful it could subtly manipulate events across time? If both of those things are true, then such an entity must exist within some probable future and is in the process of manifesting itself. Of course, the problem with this proof is that it relies on physics working in a way it may not—but what is cool is it is also provable. If it turns out that future events can systematically alter past events to increase their own probability of occurring, then this timeless deity becomes the Inevitable God.

We are, however, not committed to this theory. For example, maybe multiple future probabilistic outcomes are in competition, or maybe forces in specific negative future potentialities are working to prevent their existence.

As stupid as the idea of Future Police may be, a part of us very seriously believes in them. This framework has served us well, and we hope to pass it down to our kids by incorporating the concept of Future Police into family traditions. (Yes, we are well aware that our concept is reminiscent of a weird, benevolent version of Roko’s Basilisk.^[112])

Future Police, as a family tradition, are also useful in conveying more complex concepts exemplifying our Secular Calvinist cultural framework (such as predestination, the future that must come to pass, and the Elect) in ways that a child can easily understand. For example, it is easy to explain to a kid why the Future Police have no motivation to protect an individual who lives only for themselves or their immediate community instead of the future of the species and their family. The concept of Future Police can be used to teach kids to constantly consider how their actions impact humanity in both the near and distant future.

Future Police also allow for fun family holiday traditions. For example, at the beginning of each year, our family has a celebration in which we combine common New Year’s traditions (such as making commitments to the future) with Future Police motifs, encouraging our kids to “prove their dedication to the future” to these distant descendants to curry their favor and secure gifts and privileges.

Having recognized the tactical value of “beliefs”—both in augmenting everyday life and in imparting cultural values and religious theology to younger generations—we imagine several Index families will come up with competing secular theological perspectives and look forward to learning about these traditions.

Ancestor & Descendant Worship

Many of the oldest human cultures practice something called “ancestor worship.” This is a practice of treating one’s ancestors as individual gods, a collective “God,” or at least a spiritual force on their side. In these cultures, individuals see their ancestors as representing something greater than themselves and strive to uphold ancestral mythos.

Ancestor worship can produce a cultural perception of generational degradation, with younger generations being made to feel somehow lesser than the older ones. While on the plus side, ancestor worship can help individuals deal with loss and is often effective at maintaining cultural fidelity, it places a dampener on cultural evolution for the same reasons.

Our personal House’s cultivar features an inversion of ancestral worship: Descendant worship. We believe that our role is to influence and empower our children, youth, and society in a way that empowers future generations to surpass us. Our job is to tend a garden in which the divine germinates and grows.

We call this multigenerational entity: Omniscion, the Inevitable God

Pronunciation: aam-nee-sai-uhn

We chose this word with Omni (meaning all and everywhere) and scion (meaning descendant) with the title “The Inevitable God” being able to be used independently and referencing the God’s self-manifesting nature.^{^[113]}

A theological framing that features descendant worship produces several meaningful outcomes:

It encourages a high birth rate and focuses on improving the lives of children from other backgrounds. If future generations are akin to gods, we earn God’s favor by acting as stewards of an environment that facilitates sustained intergenerational improvement across cultures.
It motivates us to make the future a better place—an inoffensive mission for even those who are mostly living life on autopilot.
It encourages us to aggressively improve future generations in a way that can come off as unethical to other groups (e.g., to become early adopters of polygenic risk score selection, gene editing, technological alteration, etc.).
It incentivizes alignment with most benevolent AGI (artificial general intelligence), as artificial intelligence is another “cultural successor” of humanity and, as such, is a type of “descendant.” This puts descendant worshippers at lower risk in a scenario in which an AGI decides to kill most—but not all—of humanity.

The downside to descendant worship is that it features lower-than-average cultural fidelity. When children are raised with the expectation that they’ll be profoundly better than their ancestors, they are less likely to turn to their ancestors for life advice and good practices to pass to their own kids. Essentially, telling a person they can build a culture that surpasses that of their parents will almost intrinsically increase a culture’s “mutation rate” (via participation in the Index, descendant worship might be able to hold together).

Life, Death, and Truth

Questions about death and truth are often framed as questions of theology or questions of fact. In reality, such matters are often more culturally influenced.

This can be seen in the vast array of approaches people from the same theological background take to these topics. For example, one atheist may see the cessation of an individual as something that only happens when a person literally dies, while another may see the cessation of an individual as a fractional thing that happens whenever the individual changes (i.e., these two atheists have different answers to Theseus’s Ship).

A single individual can look at both these perspectives and recognize them as equally valid in that they are two ways of perceiving the same set of facts. This doesn’t spare these individuals from an obligation to “choose” which of these two lenses they’ll use when contending with the concept of death.

Choices like these are often made for us by our cultivars. The lenses through which cultivars present major issues like life, death, and truth can heavily impact adherents’ lives, touching everything from their grieving practices to the careers they select.

The Nature of Truth

How cultures contextualize “truth” heavily impacts their members’ daily lives, from the jobs they take to their hobbies. For example, most Quaker cultivars see truth as a light which exists equally within all people at birth and can be slowly eroded over time (by things like sex).^[114] Thus if you are a Quaker, cultivating children is one of the most authentic ways you can commune with the truth of reality. This is why Quakers are disproportionately represented in educational careers and disproportionately teach as a hobby (seriously, every single Quaker we know spent at least part of their life as a teacher of some sort). This interpretation of truth also explains why Quaker education historically outcompeted other forms of teaching, as Quaker educators viewed their jobs as cultivating children instead of molding them into a specific outcome (all during a time when that perspective was incredibly rare).

Irreparable cultural schisms can result from new branches of an existing culture choosing to interpret truth differently. Heck, the entire Protestant Reformation was largely just a question of whether truth was better interpreted by the individual or by expert consensus (e.g., the Catholic clergy).

Some cultures trust the assessment of experts over that of the individual. These cultures hold that the truth of a thing is best determined by individuals who spent their entire lives studying that thing. Given this perspective, these cultures often build a central bureaucracy to certify experts’ competency and mediate their work. Other cultures think it is every individual’s responsibility to assess the evidence themselves and that any large bureaucracy that accredits expertise is vulnerable to corruption and misaligned incentives. It is this differing opinion which not only led to the Protestant Reformation but that has resurfaced in how various cultures, including most of the secular descendants of Protestant cultivars, have reacted to COVID-19.

This specific divide exemplifies how through understanding how a culture sees truth, you can better understand and predict world events while nudging them toward your desired outcome. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many individuals were shocked to see that a huge swath of Americans did not trust what “experts” told them to do and instead insisted on “doing their own research.” Then, this shocked group reacted by essentially saying: “Just do as you are told for the good of the greater community and submit to expert consensus!” This was just about the worst thing to say to the United States’ Protestant-descended individualists if the goal was to encourage them to actually wear masks or get vaccinated. These people had literally spent hundreds of years being burnt alive for their unwillingness to bend to “expert consensus.”

David Hackett Fischer provided a great account of Protestant resistance to authority in Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, writing of a preacher who came from the coasts and tried to preach to backcountry Protestants during the colonial period. He was told he would be painfully dispatched if he did not shut up. Thinking he had failed, he was despondent and ended up needing to ask the locals for some hospitality before going back to the coast. Over dinner, he found people happily asking him questions about what he had planned to preach, and he had the opportunity to do the rounds at most of the town’s households. The key to communicating with this kind of culture is not to tell them what to think as an “authority” but to help them think through new ideas as an equal (even if you are convinced from your own cultural background that you are their “better”).

Understanding the various ways people understand truth—and not just demanding that everyone sees it through your cultural lens—can help you better navigate society.

While our first book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, explores this topic, suffice it to say that all individuals have a hierarchy of “truth” relating to how they engage with information in the world. For a more detailed breakdown of this topic, see the Standards of Evidence chapter of that book. As a short summary, people use the following standards of evidence (truth) when determining what to believe:

Logical Consistency
Personal Experience
Personal Emotional Experience
Cultural Consensus
Expert Consensus
Scientific Method
Doctrine

While most people leverage all or most of the above standards to some extent, people order them differently, with some cultures strictly prioritizing one standard over others.

The Quaker faith, for example, relies more on personal emotional experience as a standard of evidence (determinant of truth) than perhaps any culture in the world. In some Quaker churches (known as meeting houses), adherents just sit quietly, waiting on God to inspire them to say something. Most Quakers see priests (“experts”) as an obstruction of the truth that comes from within.

This can be contrasted with the Calvinists, who also see priests (“experts”) as an obstruction to truth, but instead of holding personal emotional experience as the highest standard of evidence, they hold that truth can only come from individual research and thought (personal experience & logical consistency). Thus, instead of having a bunch of people who are equals sitting in a church waiting on God to speak through them, Calvinists feature a bunch of people quietly sitting in a church individually studying their Bibles.

This minor difference in how the two cultures answer the question: “Does the little voice inside your heart trump logical investigation of reality?” has an enormous impact, not just on the groups’ contrasting historical theologies and lifestyles but also the present-day secular culture of those descended from these groups. For example, our secular Quaker friends are much more likely to search their emotions for guidance regarding what they should think. In some cases, they even believe there is a little voice inside that guides them—despite having a secular worldview.

Cultivars have the potential to create an evolutionary vortex in which members with a specific sociological profile are disproportionately drawn to a certain cultivar and less likely to leave it. This dynamic can produce a snowball effect in which members of that cultivar begin to systematically feature a genetic predisposition to see the world a certain way. Should such evolutionary vortexes exist, there will be advantages to leveraging your cultural and religious heritage when building your own secular theology (should you want to do so), as it may be that not all software (cultivars) are compatible with all hardware (genetic predispositions). Even long after leaving their faith, our Quaker-descended friends still trust their gut at a level we could never stomach even if there were a pile of scientific studies saying intuition was objectively a better way of engaging with reality. We understand it’s offensive to point out that not all humans have the same “hardware,” but it’s worth facing criticism given the outsized benefits one can gain from leveraging one’s “baked-in” predispositions to one’s advantage.

What seems like a small difference in the ways historical Quakers and Calvinists define “truth” leads to a cascade of differences in how they interact with the world. The difference influences everything from the types of careers Quakers versus Calvinists disproportionately choose (teacher vs. inventor) to the differing values they place on human life. If you believe that everyone has an equal spark of truth within them, then you may be more likely to conclude that all life is valuable, whereas if you believe that truth must be extracted from reality but is obscured by authority, then you may be less likely to value the lives of those you see as obscuring the truth. Differing views of truth may even explain why, while both Quakers and Calvinists made up many of the major players in the Abolition movement, the means by which they sought to achieve their goals were radically different, with Quakers being famous for pushing political reform and Calvinists being famous for hunting and killing slave holders (you would never get a Quaker John Brown). (Note: While doing research for this book, our views on the Quakers’ role in the abolition movement have updated slightly. We will get to what we mean by this in just a few chapters.)

Catholic vs. Protestant Standards of Evidence

The Catholic tradition presents a great example of how the way a culture relates to truth affects the life outcomes of its adherents. Expert consensus stands at the core of how Catholic culture understands the world—belief that truth is more efficiently procured by a class of people, authenticated by a central bureaucracy, who dedicate their entire lives to studying truth and disseminating that information to the masses (versus the Protestant belief that it is up to the individual to seek and find truth themselves).

There is logic behind both arguments, which is why questions about the nature of truth are really questions about culture rather than what is correct or incorrect. There is no objectively correct way to best determine truth.

Respecting expert consensus as mediated by a central bureaucracy intrinsically leads to higher trust in institutions. This may partly explain why Irish Catholics historically are stereotyped as being disproportionately represented in the police force.^[115] ^[116] Ironically, this same respect for centralized institutions may explain why Catholic immigrant populations are much more likely than any other immigrant group to form a new central bureaucracy upon immigrating to a new country (these bureaucracies typically manifest as organized crime, but we suspect that is more a product of most immigrants being poor and on the outs with society).

The Mob (Irish), the Mafia (Italian), and Latin Kings / MS-13 / 18th Street Gang (Hispanic) have differentially dwarfed other immigrant organized crime groups like the Triad during their respective heydays, with the only nearly-as-influential counterexample of a gang that consisted mostly of immigrants being the Russian Mob. This counterexample somewhat proves the rule, as while the Russian Orthodox church is not Catholic, it nevertheless uses expert consensus as its primary standard of evidence (the central bureaucracy just happens to be different). This indicates that expert consensus as a standard of evidence bestows immigrant groups with higher odds of developing a bureaucracy designed to help in-group members.

A cultural specialization like this can have a huge effect at the tail end of a field’s achievement distribution (i.e., if you take the ten best people in the world in a field, cultural specialization will affect that composition more than the average person who holds that job). Within the Catholic cultural specialization, this can be seen at the tail end of achievement in the field of law, with only two out of nine currently sitting Supreme Court justices not hailing from Catholic backgrounds (Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer, both of whom are Jewish, another culture with mechanisms that grants adherents a leg-up in the legal profession).^[117] Notably, not a single person with a purely Protestant background sits on the Supreme Court. By chance, this would be incredibly unlikely, but it makes sense for a culture that is defined by an intense distrust of bureaucracy and authority.

Catholic-Protestant differences in truth definition even influence the types of governments that the respective cultivars nurture. Historically, most Protestant cultivars’ distrust of authority eroded centralized power structures around them—to a point at which almost every single one of the early European proto-democracies were majority Protestant nations whereas Catholic nations maintained monarchies longer on average.

In modern times, cultivars that use expert consensus as their primary standards of evidence (mostly Catholic and Eastern Orthodox) have been much more likely to become dictatorships and score dramatically higher on corruption scores.^[118] In fact, outside of Teodoro in Papua New Guinea, we can’t think of a single majority Protestant country outside of Africa that stayed a dictatorship for longer than seven years. If you don’t include the seven-year qualification, you have Nazi Germany, the 1930s Era of Silence in Estonia, and Kārlis Ulmanis’ 1934 Coup in Latvia.

In addition to Catholic and Orthodox Church traditions, many soft and pop cultures also use expert consensus as their primary standard of evidence. The most common certifying central authority deferred to by pop cultures is the academic bureaucracy (the university system). It makes perfect sense that pop cultures default to expert consensus mechanisms for determining truth, as it is a particularly “low effort” standard of evidence for a new convert.

That said, pop cultures often also use personal emotional experience as their standard evidence for the same reason (converts have to do very little to change themselves if they presume what they are feeling in the moment is backed by some objective truth). While the supervirus uses both expert consensus and emotional experience as standards of evidence, it prioritizes a socially perceived, aggregate emotional experience over both. In other words, its highest truth is the community’s collective intuition, where the contributions of higher-status community members (those able to single they are most offended) are given more weight.

While it may seem like we are derisive of expert consensus as a standard of evidence, we ultimately think it is probably the closest to correct—at least at a societal level. This is doubly true if the bureaucracy certifying experts has some way to “refresh” itself through internal housekeeping. The Catholic Church has successfully done this a few times throughout its history and has evolved unique mechanisms for this process. However, we worry that the current academic bureaucracy, looked to as the primary authenticator of truth by many pop cultures, does not have a stable calibration or cleaning mechanism in place. This means that, should academia become so corrupt that it becomes essentially non-functional at certifying genuine expertise in a specific domain, it will pull cultivars who leverage it as an arbiter of truth further and further from reality. This is partly why we built the Collins Institute, a new model for how the academic system could work.

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You may be thinking: “But what about child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church? Surely, that proves the Church is evil and corrupt to its core.” Well, when you contrast the rates of child molestation in the Catholic Church with those in other large bureaucracies, like the United States public school system, it starts to look unremarkable. Specifically, the American public school system not only has more than 100 times the number of child molestation cases on a yearly basis, but on a per-teacher to per-priest basis, the rate at which teachers molest children is actually slightly higher. The U.S. Department of Education found that 5% to 7% of public school teachers engage in sexual abuse of children per year contrasted with 4% of Anglican priests, as found by a study in Western Canada and backed up by a study of U.S. priests conducted by researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The 2002 Department of Education report estimated that between 6% and 10% of all public school students would be victims of abuse before graduation.

Now you might be thinking: “But the Church covered for priests who sexually abused children and didn’t fire them. Surely, that is proof they are evil!”

Well, teachers’ unions also covered for and continued to employ those found to be abusing students. Actually, teachers’ union lobbying to systematically cover up the amount of sexual abuse that takes place in schools is a big reason you haven’t heard about this. The teachers’ unions in some states made it so hard to fire teachers who molest children that in NYC, they are moved to special “padded classrooms without children” and left on payroll (for example, Aryeh Eller has been paid $1.7M in salary as a teacher with full health and pension benefits since being removed due to inappropriately touching under-aged girls).

Perhaps our constant hand-wringing about the corruption of the U.S. education system and the need to build an alternative makes a bit more sense now. While the Catholic Church has done some really shitty things both now and in history, those acts were not particularly worse than the crimes of other large bureaucracies of their time. From our cultural bias, we would just say all large bureaucracies are evil, and the evil in the Catholic Church does not come from the religion but rather from the bureaucracy.

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This is not to say pop cultures never use independent investigation as their primary standard of evidence. When they do, such investigation is almost always tied to conspiracy theories (QAnon and the flat Earth movement being examples) and as such show that as much as we may espouse the virtues of personal investigation, it has significant downsides. The documentary, Behind the Curve on Netflix, does a great job of demonstrating the flat Earth movement’s obsession with independent scientific research—these people are not science deniers but rather refuters of the academic bureaucracy as a custodian of science. An ideal cultural ecosystem will take advantage of cultivars that rely on expert consensus as well as those which rely on personal experience to cover each other’s weaknesses.

Witch trials exemplify how expert consensus, as a standard of evidence, can produce more morally palatable outcomes than personal experience. The Catholic Inquisition was fairly legalistic and actually much more fair than the cartoonish picture painted by pop history suggests. First, the Inquisition involved not a search for witches, as the experts explicitly did not believe in them, but rather a search for heretics. The process required the prosecutors to have both hard evidence and witnesses, with said witnesses vetted for past “quarrelsome behavior.” This lowered the odds of individuals randomly accusing people they disliked. Moreover, the Catholic Church generally did not recommend death for proven heretics but rather confession, repentance, and charitable work assigned as penance.^[119] Humorously, the Inquisition was sometimes both more ethical and civilized in its treatment of “heretics” (those not buying into the dominant cultural belief system) than cancel culture could ever claim to be.

Contrast this with the Calvinist (usually the Puritan branch) method of finding witches, which essentially assumed natural laws of God not written in the Bible could be reasoned from a combination of evidence or logical deduction.^{^[120]} For example, an individual may reason, “a witch must have refused the baptism, and therefore, water must reject them, so let’s bind their legs and arms and throw them in a pond.” (Yes, sometimes Catholic trials did these “naturalistic tests” and sometimes Calvinist groups relied on trials, but largely speaking Calvinist witch trials were much less strictly run and less likely to be dismissed when evidence did not align with preconceptions. Also, Calvinists went waaaay further with the insane logic used in naturalistic tests.) Calvinist-run witch trials had a dramatically higher body count than their Catholic counterparts. It is far easier for a group to lose itself to imprudence and biased logic when it regards personal investigation as the highest standard of evidence and lacks a higher authority to rein it in.

The Unique Jewish Standard of Evidence

Having explored some cultures that use standards of evidence we can easily comprehend, let’s investigate a culture that uses a standard of evidence far more foreign to our personal worldview (and thus more interesting) but still very successful: The Jewish one.

If the practice of sitting in a leaderless room quietly and waiting until you are moved to say something is the essence of a Quaker understanding of truth, and if sitting in a room quietly while independently studying the Bible is the essence of a Calvinist understanding of truth, then the Jewish understanding of truth is best seen in the practice known as Chavrusa (sometimes spelled Havruta). In this practice, a piece of religious text is chosen, then individuals are paired in groups of two based on those who would have the most spirited disagreement on the topic, and each pair debates the text (depending on the branch of Jewish tradition, these debate groups can include up to five people). As Rabbi Yosi bar Hanina is quoted as saying in the Talmud, “scholars who sit alone to study the Torah … become stupid” (Berakhot 63b). Truth, as understood in many Judaic traditions,^{^[121]} is not an absolute thing that can be found behind the text; instead, truth emerges from the debate itself. In Jewish culture, the ongoing cultural conversation is the highest order of truth.

To an outsider, this can create the perspective that truth within Judaism is essentially a form of ultra-legalism. Not only does the name of their holy book, the Torah, תּוֹרָה, literally translate to “the law,” but their culture’s foundational interaction with God (the ten commandments) was essentially a legal contract between God and a chosen people (though תּוֹרָה can also be translated to teaching or instruction). Moreover, most Jewish households hang a Ketubah on their walls—a Jewish wedding contract that outlines the legal obligations of a wife and husband (it is commonly thought of as an important piece of uniquely Jewish art). The way many Jewish branches interpret truth is legalistic to an extent that no other culture even begins to approach.

You may assume we are overstating things, so let’s look at an example. Christians are told not to work on the Sabbath, and they’re like:

“Cool, a day to focus on worship and rest!”

Jews get told not to work on the Sabbath, and they’re like:

“OK, but what technically counts as work? Let’s divide all work into 39 categories and then divide those 39 categories into 39 subcategories—and then, of course, we need to take into account the intention when an action is performed. Oh, but of course sometimes you may need to do something like carry your baby outside to the park, and carrying something from one type of space to another type of space could be considered a type of work, so we will cordon off a zone with a cord to designate the outside and the inside as technically the same kind of space. Ah, now that we have this cordoned-off zone indemnity, could we perhaps put a cord around an entire city?”

This is why synagogues pay over $100,000 annually to keep a fishing line around a large portion of Manhattan. Let’s be clear: Only certain sects of Judaism have this kind of extreme take—but a number do. Not a single Christian denomination has anything close to this level of legalism (a few have stricter rules, but none have rules so nuanced or systematized). Depending on the perspective you take, Jewish culture either regards technical, legalistic conclusions as the highest order of truth or Jewish culture sees the legalistic debate itself as the highest order of truth.

This is not a new phenomenon and appears to be core to even ancient Jewish culture, as can be seen from The Oven of Akhnai in the Talmud (the “snake oven story”). In the story, three rabbis argue over whether a new oven design is subject to ritual impurity. Two rabbis argue from the perspective of legalistic interpretations of past texts. The third keeps having God perform miraculous acts like making a river flow backward on demand to show them that God disagrees with them.

What is fascinating is that, at the story’s conclusion, the rabbi, whose perspective on the topic is obviously endorsed by God, is expelled from the community. Let’s be clear: This is a story about educated, intelligent, well-intentioned people (not idiots); they know God disagrees with their interpretation of the rules—however, because their interpretation of the rules is “technically correct,” it supersedes God’s “opinion” on the subject. Crazier still (from the perspective of non-Jewish cultures), God ends up essentially agreeing with the legalist perspective, admitting he was acting out of his jurisdiction—as the story says, “it is not in heaven.” He (God) gives props to the two other rabbis for sticking to their guns, laughing while saying, “My children have bested me.”

This story shows that even in distant history, some Jews found the legalism of their tradition grating. Even though it could cause divisions in their community (the rabbi who was expelled ended up killing one of the others with prayers over this slight), legalism is nevertheless an important part of Jewish culture—even more important than the will of God. More critically, for our purposes, legalism is a differentiating part of Jewish culture, which separates most Jewish cultivars from any other extant cultivar.

Perhaps this differentiation can partly explain outsized Jewish success in some areas. Consider the disproportionate number of Nobel Prize winners cited above. It should not be surprising that a culture with a heavy focus on truth as determined through intellectual debate would produce people skilled at intellectual debate and inquiry.

If you think Jewish success is a product of higher average IQs, it is not. The studies showing a large effect are very flawed, and we are quite embarrassed to have believed them without actually reading their methodology before digging into them when writing this book. For a detailed breakdown of every major study in this space and what it actually shows, see: “The Myth of a Large, Genetic Jewish IQ Advantage” on page 485.

To word it another way, the Christian’s relationship with God is often framed in terms of a parent and a child’s relationship, though the power difference in the framing often makes adherents appear more like feudal supplicants (actually, we go into this more later but the way Christians put their hands together when praying may be derived from a vassalage ceremony). We suspect this is why many extremist young Christians fashion themselves as unwavering “knights” fighting for a glorious cause—mirroring a vassal relationship. Come to think of it, we have never heard a Jewish person compare themselves to a knight, yet this analogy is omnipresent in young Christian males.

The Christian lord-vassal relationship heavily contrasts with the Jewish relationship, which is more like a legal contract represented in the commandments. In most Christian traditions, God will show you favor because you love him or supplicate yourself enough to him, whereas in the Jewish tradition, earning God’s favor is more about upholding your side of a contract God signed with your people (as The Oven of Akhnai story in the Talmud demonstrates, directly disobeying the will of God is better than breaking the technicals of the contract).

While it is sufficiently interesting to us that the legalistic approach taken to truth in Jewish culture might partly explain Jewish populations’ disproportionate academic success, we continue to obsess with it because it seems so counterintuitive to us. From a Calvinist perspective, the rabbi who was expelled was obviously in the right and our cultural bias prevents us from seeing how anyone could think otherwise. Surely an all-powerful deity’s will would supersede any contract—right? And, if His will seemed to contradict a contract, then our understanding of the contract, rather than His, must be wrong, right? Isn’t God an all-powerful entity that can see all things at once? It would be like ignoring a bizarre finding in the field of quantum physics because it did not match an earlier understanding of an immutable cosmic force.

We may personally disagree with the Quaker and Catholic views of how to search for truth, but we also “get it.” Their approaches to truth seem logically sound. The Jewish perspective did not make sense to us until we remembered the goal of a culture is not to search for absolute “real” truth but to breed, thrive, and reduce bleed. By creating a mindset in which an individual can’t come out of nowhere and pretend to be divinely inspired while performing magic tricks, the Jewish tradition dramatically lowers its probability of splintering and always allows room for a splinter faction to be recombined into the whole.

This may not seem like a major hazard today, but Jewish thinkers who put on thaumaturgical performances (performing magic or miracles) and had large groups of followers were actually pretty common in early Jewish history and include individuals like Honi the Circle-Drawer, Eliezar the exorcist, and Jesus. (We understand it may seem offensive to frame Jesus this way, but even from the perspective of most Christian traditions, Jesus manifested as a Jewish individual who claimed to have a special relationship with God and demonstrated those claims through thaumaturgical performances.)

In other words, this view of truth ensures all Jewish differences in belief are differences of interpretation, not information. When you consider this from the perspective of culture crafting, the approach is beyond shrewd—it is genius—and it may explain why Jews that maintain this cultural element have not mass slaughtered each other since the Hasmonean Civil War. Moreover, when branches of the Jewish cultivar do drop this cultural element and become open to “revelations” of absolute truth directly from God, they become Christians or Muslims and start killing each other while also losing their ability to be easily reintegrated into broader Jewish branches.

When one branch of Christianity breaks off from another branch of Christianity, it seldom reintegrates, whereas there are ample cases of splinters re-joining larger groups in Jewish history despite Christian cultivars all having evolved out of Jewish ones. In other words, when a Jewish splinter group drops its legalistic approach to truth, it appears to lose this “superpower” of other Jewish cultivars. (Note: Most polytheistic religions facilitate the re-joining of splinter groups as well; only monotheistic ones have nearly totally lost it.)

We feel like jerks for suggesting that any culture only “believes” something because it is advantageous (in terms of increased achievement, stability, and continuity) rather than because they really believe it” and maybe that interpretation is wrong. Perhaps a legalistic approach to truth really is logical.

After all, if God sets out specific laws for a chosen people, it makes perfect sense that those people should give disproportionate precedence to those laws. Deferring to those laws—even in opposition to God’s opinion on a subject—is ultimately a demonstration of respect to God.

Imagine a parent leaves two groups of kids in a room and, to keep them from wandering off and getting injured, tells them not to play outside a playpen. Group A decides to expand the playpen’s size to make sure nobody accidentally breaks the rule while still getting access to more space and toys. Meanwhile, Group B decides the parent’s intent must be that they aren’t supposed to have fun, so they decide to sit and stare solemnly at the wall during the parent’s absence.

While both groups A and B misinterpreted the parent’s intention, Group A, using a more legalistic definition of truth, showed more respect for the parent by not presuming they could understand the parent’s intent. What to outside cultures may look like absurd legalism could really be a sign of respect for God through the admission that God’s wisdom is so great, one would be crazy to presume they can understand the “intentions” behind any of His thoughts.

In addition, God, as depicted in writings like the Ketuvim (think: The Book of Job), can be quite capricious at times. Presumably, when God takes the time to outline hard and fast rules, He is in a more lucid state and properly thinking through important implications, making official, God-given rules more important than randomly expressed opinions. This is not a crazy concept. If the President of the United States were to lay out a new policy through an official Executive Order, people would give it far more precedence than an unrehearsed presidential opinion expressed amid a chaotic press conference. Similarly, a Papal Bull carries a totally different weight than an offhand remark made by the Pope. It is hardly illogical for a group to give precedence to carefully crafted, official mandates.

Finally, it may be that Jewish tradition does not position legalism as the highest order of truth but rather the debate itself. By this reasoning, the process of a culture evolving and advancing is the highest order of truth. In this interpretation, the tradition itself, rather than the individual, is the “unit of consciousness,” and each individual’s role as a neuron within this larger system is to constantly debate the culture’s rules and texts while generating new ones. To use a pop culture analogy, the Jewish tribe is like Earth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: A supercomputer that will come to the truth so long as its individual components perform their roles. In this view, Judaism is like a supercomputer that will collectively come to the right answers so long as every individual component does not deviate from its script, even when that script seems illogical. This approach makes sense in that it could be the height of arrogance to think a single individual could even begin to understand the ultimate questions they are meant to ask, much less the answers. It is entirely plausible that such weighty subjects may only be tackled by an intergenerational consciousness.

While we suspect that many readers have intuitions about the “correct” way a culture should search for truth, we are ambivalent. Honestly, we see genuine value in all of the methodologies outlined above and see flaws and benefits to each.

How We Understand Truth:
Criteria of Authenticity

Having read how some extant cultures determine truth, you might be curious to know what standard we have chosen for our personal House cultivar.

It should be obvious to anyone who has read our other books that the standard of evidence we regard least is personal emotional experience. To us, emotions are merely signals that helped our ancestors have more surviving offspring—but in a completely different environmental context. Emotions are vestiges of our animal selves, clawing away at our humanity, logic, and self-determination. To that end, emotional experience can act not just as the standard of evidence we value least but also as a uniquely dangerous signal that can and often does corrupt logical judgments. For example, before we decided to get engaged, we took a few months apart from each other to ensure that love would not cloud our judgment on such a monumental life decision (we can think of nothing more perverse than a marriage built upon a foundation so dehumanizing as love).

The two standards of evidence we regard most highly are expert consensus and personal research (the combination is essential in our view, as both have irreparable flaws when used in isolation). While the Calvinist concept of radical, independent research was innovative when first developed and often sufficient during a simpler time in history, the obsessive independent study model yields an insufficient picture of reality in a world where successful humans need to understand a broad array of complex domains. Without loads of money and time, independent study is unlikely to yield an accurate perception of reality on even a moderate array of issues.

At the same time, expert consensus is no longer effective on its own either. In our new hyper-connected and fast-paced world, sources of expert consensus are increasingly likely to distribute propaganda as if it was factual information—this is doubly true as previously unimpeachable organizations like the American university and media/news systems are in a state of collapse, having been so infected by the parasitoidal supervirus they are about to pop like a bloated caterpillar whose insides have long since been consumed by worms crawling just beneath its skin.

To resolve this, we developed internal “Criteria of Authenticity,” which allow one to consider expert consensus as the highest form of evidence so long as it meets certain standards (the more Criteria of Authenticity a stated “fact” meets, the more likely that fact is to be true). Think of our Criteria of Authenticity like a sieve that retains truth while letting baseless expert consensus flow down the drain.

Our Criteria for Authenticity are based on the belief that there is too much information for any one individual to process, meaning one must turn to experts who have invested in specialization. Nevertheless, one must be careful, as the world is filled with both trustworthy and untrustworthy experts. One furthermore should not rely on a third-party organization to sort legitimate from illegitimate experts—any organization that gains a reputation for doing this effectively will become a priority target for infection by any number of memetic viruses looking to incept it with their ideology and is living on borrowed time as a non-biased source.

Criteria of Authenticity

The following criteria are common indications that an expert’s assertions are true. Very few facts meet all these criteria. Generally speaking, we are more confident in a fact if it meets more of these criteria (i.e., we’re more confident something is true if it meets three of these criteria than if it only meets one).

The Criterion of Embarrassment: Does the presented information run counter to the aspirational reputation, views, or behaviors of the group presenting it? This heuristic was popularized by biblical scholars studying the historical Jesus, who argue that information presented in a gospel about Jesus that doesn’t adhere to either Christian or Jewish ideals may be considered more credible. After all, it doesn’t do gospel writers any favors to include unflattering details. To present a secular example: An oil company’s internally-generated report stating their drilling is environmentally damaging is more likely to be true than an environmental advocacy group’s report asserting the same.

The Criterion of Multiple Attestation: Also popularized by biblical scholars, the criterion for multiple attestation essentially holds that if several independent sources say the same thing, that thing is more likely to be true. For example, if several peer-reviewed studies report a certain gender is more likely to die in a pandemic, and insurance rates also go up for people of that gender, then it is likely true that one particular gender is at higher risk. The distinct danger of this heuristic in the modern age is that often journalists and publishers repeat untrue facts initially reported in one channel without verifying (or even citing) them, giving one the impression that multiple independent sources have vetted a fact that is ultimately untrue—thus one must reference sources that do not, or cannot, draw from each other (e.g., both scientific studies and insurance rates).

The Criterion of Filtering: If a source has shown that it heavily censors information that supports an ideological perspective at odds with them, all favorably-ideologically aligned information they present should be assumed to be filtered.

For example, when Nature Human Behavior announced that it was filtering out research that might “stigmatize individuals or human groups,” we had to update the manner in which we regard any research it publishes (or conspicuously doesn’t publish).^[122] Now, if we see some group claim that a fact is true, and we think it would “stigmatize individuals or human groups,” we cannot use an absence of peer-reviewed studies coming out of journals like Nature to argue against said fact because we know that even (and especially) if they were receiving papers that supported the offensive argument, they would not be publishing them. This type of filtering almost always makes things worse for the agenda of whichever group practices it—never better. (This footnote explains this concept more deeply if it’s not clicking.^{^[123]})

This criterion heavily motivated our writing of The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality. When we encountered a study by Buss and von Hippe that surveyed 335 social psychologists and found that more than half of respondents would actively occlude any data that suggested a biological basis for sex differences (a study that obviously passed the Criterion of Embarrassment). Upon digging into the data, we were shocked to find loads of low-hanging fruit with huge implications across multiple fields (like early human tribal structures). The field is rife with unexplored findings that would even be useful to groups advocating for LGBT rights. It was as if serious research in the field just was not being done. This highlighted to us how badly we need an academic reformation and how important independent researchers like Aella are.

The Criterion of Lies: This sub criterion—a more egregious manifestation of the Criterion of Filtering—states that once it has been confirmed that a source intentionally tried to manipulate you for the benefit of its ideological agenda, it can be ignored going forward. A source that obscured the truth in service of an agenda is different from one that appeared to make a genuine mistake (as all sources make mistakes). For example, if you are on a website dedicated to debunking false information and you run across multiple articles with the same bias that claim to debunk matters that are verifiably true, then the site is not a useful source of information, even if its bias is one that you also hold.

The Criterion of Plausibility: To use plausibility as a criterion for truth, ask yourself if the information in question is logically consistent with related information. For example, suppose someone tells you that there are cures for cancer, but companies are hiding them because they can make more money that way. Assuming you live in a society with multiple pharmaceutical companies in competition, this can be dismissed as unlikely, as at least one of the companies would profit from backstabbing the others with this information (at least after a few decades). This is doubly true if any individual scientist at one of these companies with this knowledge could duck out and start their own company, raise money from VCs or a few angels, and get super rich.

Note: This argument does not hold when the solution is not pharmacological, or it is pharmacological, but the drug is a generic, and it is hard to profit off of it, as is the case with Naltrexone and addictions.

The Criterion of Decentralized Financial Motivations: The most common way the criteria of plausibility gets violated is through implausible financial motivations. Large organizations will almost always do what is in their financial best interest, so when a number of competing large organizations are all doing the same thing, there is probably a strong reason for it. For example, if all airline companies are routing their planes along paths that would not make sense in a flat or round earth model, that model is likely wrong.

The Criterion of Cohesive Narratives: For evidence tied to events, do less-attested parts of the narrative fit in a logically consistent manner with more-attested parts?

For example: Let’s say it is well-attested that one of the only labs in the world dedicated to studying COVID-19 was in Wuhan, they’d previously had containment breaks, and the first outbreak was in Wuhan. That would mean an article arguing that COVID-19 came from deer populations in the USA can be viewed with intense skepticism.

The Criterion of Beginnings and Ends: This is a sub-criterion that states that if we know something was true at the beginning of a period and that it was also true at the end of a period, it was most likely true throughout that entire period. For example, if we know that humans’ closest relatives, like chimps and gorillas, regularly practice infanticide by throwing infants at rocks after conquering another tribe, and we know that one of our earliest written records (the Bible) also suggests humans engaged in this practice a few thousand years ago, we can assume it was common among early hominid groups. (We explore this topic in detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality.)

The Criterion of Prediction: The criterion of prediction holds that any source that has reliably predicted future events before they happen should be trusted more than other sources. This is doubly true if most other sources were wrong about the same predicted outcome. If a newspaper says Nation X is likely to attack Nation Y, while most others do not, and if that newspaper turns out to be correct, then their coverage of other events in that region is also likely to be more accurate.

Important: This criterion should only be judged using historical data, and a comprehensive assessment of all bets made rather than a source’sclaim that they predicted future events. It is easy to make a hundred predictions and only mention those which ultimately came to pass. Many scam investors, for example, highlight only their investment wins to prospective clients, when if one were to look at their entire historical portfolios, one would see that the scam investors have, on average, lost people money over time, making more bad predictions than good.

The Criterion of Shot Calling: An extreme version of the criterion of prediction involves what we call “shot calling.” If an individual successfully predicts a very unlikely outcome when a certain treatment, ritual, or practice is performed, then they may be trusted even with very few points of data. If, for instance, a shaman performs a ritual he claims will make you a millionaire within three days and two days later you win a million dollars in the lottery, you cannot simply dismiss his methods out of hand. Consider the Lazslo Polgar case study around creating genius for a real-world example. While this case features a sample size of only three (Polgar’s three daughters), the fact that this man predicted he could essentially manufacture genius (three of the greatest chess players in human history) indicates he had some insight others lack on how the human mind develops, seeing as the probability that any random group of three children would all turn out to be geniuses in exactly the same way, in the way he said they would be, is astronomically low. (We also know that Polgar did not fabricate his prediction only after succeeding, as we have evidence from the personal ad he used to find a wife in which he states his intentions.)

The Criterion of Memability: Information bearing a similar structure or theme common to misinformation can be strongly discounted. For example, if someone tells you, “Daddy long legs are actually the most poisonous spider in the world but their mouths are too small to bite you,” you should be very skeptical. This claim shares multiple characteristics that cause false information to be extensively shared (it is shocking, likely to come up, and not easily verifiable, making it a very likely claim to spread whether or not it is true). For a comprehensive list of untrue information that is highly memable, check out Wikipedia’s list of common misconceptions.^[124]

A case in which this heuristic fell short: During the World War I, there were many false reports of genocide. For this reason, many did not trust the reports of genocide when they first emerged in the World War II, in part because they sounded so insanely over the top and scandalous.

The Criterion of Verifiability: Any information that could be easily verified by other people is more likely to be true than an unverifiable fact. In the Mayan empire, the priest cast would test whether a king was “real” by looking for a sign under his tongue, likely because no one else could get the king to show them that part of his anatomy and the king could not see the underside of his own tongue, allowing the priests to choose a king. Based on the criterion of verifiability, you can trust an easily verifiable claim more than an unverifiable one—even if you don’t plan on verifying that claim. Someone who hands you $100,000 in bills and offers to let you count it is more likely to be telling the truth than someone who does not let you count it, regardless of whether you choose to count the funds.

This criterion is often abused by people attempting to shut down arguments by citing studies. These people often exploit the fact that very few people with whom they speak will actually bother to review the study cited, enabling them to shut down conversations even if verification would ultimately prove their arguments to be shoddy.

The Criterion of Care: Any information from a source with a vested interest in your well-being can be more trusted than one that doesn’t. This can either be in the case of something like an organization that would lose money if you died (an insurance company telling you how not to die has a high criteria of care) or one that has an emotional connection to you (such as your parents).

The Criteria of Fuzzies: This criterion specifically filters arguments in which someone claims: “The data is just too complicated and nuanced for us to be certain of anything.” When the science on a subject is really obvious, and someone wants to argue against it from a position of authority, this is the argument they will use—be that subject climate change or heritable elements of voting behavior. If a body of research backs up a claim using sound scientific methods, “it’s complicated” and “there is more nuance to this than is stated in the research” (where this desired nuance is impossible to succinctly convey) are not arguments sufficient to warrant rejection of the broad strokes laid out in that research.

Relativism & Justice-Motivated
Belief Systems

Having delineated how logical systems we respect search for truth, we should, nevertheless, highlight that not all minds work so logically. A sizable portion of people make judgments using criteria not optimized around determining the truth of a thing.

One of our favorite examples of this comes in the form of Karl Pilkington, probably our favorite “comedian” (or wise sage, depending on how you look at him). If you have listened to enough of his content, it becomes clear one element that makes his thought process so unusual—and thus funny—is that when deciding what is true between multiple possibilities, Pilkington often chooses the most interesting and narratively engaging potentiality.

Pilkington’s approach to interpreting scenarios is not unheard of—we know at least one person who does the same—but this method is nevertheless rare. If a person who thinks like this hears “a monkey went into space on a rocket,” they will imagine a monkey flying a spaceship then try to work backward as to how that might be possible (maybe he was trained to push buttons using bananas) instead of a monkey being put in a cage and shot into the sky. This form of deciding what is true is too disorganized to lead to a cohesive religious structure—though other forms are.

Much to our great distress, many people determine truth by choosing the most just, fair, or politically correct explanation available. We’ll call these people the “justicles.” If a justicle were tasked with deciding whether men and women, on average, have different sociological profiles, they would ask themselves whether or not it would be “just” if such were true—rather than considering evidence, experts, common sense, or religious texts. The justicle would then try to twist evidence, expert opinions, and religious texts to justify their chosen belief and try to convert people who use different standards of evidence to their way of thinking.

While we disagree with those who slavishly follow religious dogma or expert consensus, we at least acknowledge the logical consistency in their actions (if the Bible is the ultimate source of truth, it would be illogical, immoral, and intellectually dishonest to be swayed by other sources). Justicles’ choice to defer to political correctness, fairness, or justice has more to do with intellectual and emotional laziness than anything else.

Justicles seem to care more about whether a chain of logic makes them feel like a “good guy” than whether it is true or likely to make the world a better place. More repulsively, their thought process makes them astronomically more likely to worsen the on-the-ground situation of suffering people by perpetuating inaccurate models that prevent organizations and people from addressing real and pressing problems. Justicles are the “nice guys” of philosophy—thinking if they perform some perfunctory “nice” rituals, reality will reward them with moral points while not worrying about reality’s consent.

Abrahamic Justicle Cultivars

Don’t just take our word for it that justicle logic masks immoral behavior beneath performative protests about the injustices of the world—just look at the formal religious systems in the Abrahamic tradition that are most susceptible to justicle logic: The Unitarian Universalists (their core truth is relativism) and the Hicksite Quakers (whose belief that the highest order of truth comes from personal emotional experience has rendered them susceptible to justicle logic—though note that Orthodox Quakers who believe the Bible takes precedence over personal emotional experience are fairly immune to justiclesm).

In the case of the Unitarian Universalists, we can see the total moral depravity of even their central governing organization through its abuse of Jonathan Holdeen’s legacy (we include an excerpt from The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance titled “The Immortality of a Vision”on this incident on page 729 of the Appendix—it is so deeply upsetting we may go so far as to suggest you don’t read it if you are just looking for a light reading experience today). To summarize what happened, a guy worked slavishly his whole life living in squalor while saving millions of dollars to enact a plan to make the world a better place—his plan was to have his money grow in perpetuity until it could pay the taxes of all citizens of the state of Pennsylvania (among several other things). He left his wealth under the stewardship of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Boston and asked his daughter, Stella, to work to grow it. After Holdeen passed away, the church decided they wanted all the money—and they wanted it immediately—arguing that if the fund grew too large, it would destabilize the economy (while presenting additional, similarly unhinged lines of reasoning). The church then spent decades suing Holdeen’s daughter for full control of the money (even though she was handily beating the stock market with it).

They eventually wore Stella and everyone else down, ultimately taking full control of Holdeen’s hard-won wealth to spend however they wanted.^[125] Long story short, when the church’s governing body had a choice between helping millions of people if they could just not be evil and avoid the temptation of riches and immediate gratification, they demonstrated that such was far too much to ask. The pettiness and moral thoughtlessness of the choice is genuinely astounding.

That said, most of us have witnessed our government doing something we think is evil and felt powerless to stop it. All we can say about Unitarian Universalism is that it failed to prevent the corruption of at least one of its governing bodies. When trying to learn which cultivars have been uniquely bad at embodying their claimed moral positions, we need to look at the population level, but there has never been a historical period during which the Unitarian Universalists made up such a large percent of a local population at an important point in world history that we are able to get detailed population-level data … and that is where the Quakers come in.

Note: While it may seem we are biased here, we will be the first to admit that the Unitarian Universalist church was largely a creation of the decaying Calvinist culture from which we hail—read up on the work of William Ellery Channing or the creation of Universalism for more detail.

What about Quakers? Weren’t Quakers morally ahead of their time and super nice? Weren’t they leaders of the abolition movement or something? This is certainly the version of Quakers we learned about in school, so we were shocked upon our review of the stats (and maybe more than a little bitter because we felt misled).

Around 42% of Maryland Quakers in early America owned slaves^[126] (this sample was taken from Maryland wills between 1669 and 1750). Among Quaker leaders in Philadelphia, 70% owned slaves (this sample was taken from the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting from 1681 to 1705).^{^[127]} Even if we go with the lower number, this is still the highest rate of slave ownership of any cultivar in the colonies (not on a number-of-slaves-owned basis, but on a precent-of-the-population-owning-slaves basis)—a rate way higher than that of the Anglican-descended Southern culture at the time of the Civil War (around 20% of households and 5% of individuals^[128]).

Contrast this with Puritan communities, which, while less attested, seemed to have slave ownership rates between 0.5% and 2%.^[129] Suffice it to say, the tale of the whaleship Essex tells us what happens to BIPOCs who put themselves in the same boat as Quakers—or any justicle of today for the matter, despite their incessant self-framing as “the good guys” (Hint: The moment things went bad, the Essex’s Quaker sailors ate their BIPOC compatriots first, then claimed this uncanny skew was the product of random lot draws).

Those who have only heard the cartoon version of Quaker history may find our claims shocking. Perhaps you’re thinking: “Maybe Quakers owned slaves at a high rate, but maybe they worked really hard to end slavery.”

Who? Search for famous Quaker abolitionists, and you get names like Elias Hicks, a Quaker who urged boycotts, and Benjamin Lay, who theatrically flung blood on people and made a big scene about how opposed he was to slavery. As you read more about such figures, you will find that none of these activists actually did anything other than complain and help with some parts of the underground railroad.

Contrast this with just a quick look at Calvinist abolitionists, and you get names of people like John Brown of Harpers Ferry and Bleeding Kansas—or Newton Knight^[130] working with Malcolm’s own ancestors of the Free State of Jones. We have heard that Quakers may have played more of an important role in abolition in the U.K., but in the U.S. at least, their performance was … well, overwhelmingly performative rather than results-oriented.

Now, perhaps you’re thinking: “Come on, guys. That is really harsh. Wasn’t Pennsylvania the first state to ban slavery?”

While some pro-Quaker historians will frame such as fact, an assertion that Pennsylvania was the first state to ban slavery intentionally misrepresents what happened. Vermont (a majority Congregationalist Calvinist state) banned slavery at its founding in 1770, then built that ban into the state’s constitution in 1777 (these bans immediately freed slaves above a certain age). Pennsylvania did not even put a high duty on slavery until 1773, and when they did ultimately ban slavery in 1780, they nevertheless allowed slave owners to keep their slaves—just banning the purchasing of new slaves.

Contrast this with the Puritans in Massachusetts, who freed all slaves upon banning slavery three years later in 1783 (the same year that the American Revolution officially ended and the Treaty of Paris was signed). So sure, the Quakers did ban slavery first, but only if you discount Vermont because it had not yet joined the union and only if you count a partial ban on slavery. Even within Pennsylvania, Quaker communities did not spearhead the anti-slavery movement—they just happened to be the group with the most power. In reality, the state’s first anti-slavery protests were led by Mennonites, and the first local slavery bans were enacted within the Mennonite communities.

As a local historian of the protests said:

“Mennonites never had slaves and would not even buy something if they thought it came through the labor of a slave. They viewed slavery as a ‘Quaker thing,’ and just walked away to live apart.”^[131]

So, while the Quakers were eventually against slavery, they were—so far as we can tell at least—the least anti-slavery of the anti-slavery groups.

“Oh—for goodness sake,” you might be thinking. “At least Quakers were nice to the Native Americans—I read that in a book somewhere!”

This also appears to be a manipulation of history but not quite as bad as the one around Quakers and slavery. Quakers indeed had better relations with the local Native American communities, but this seems to have as much or more to do with those communities than the Quakers.

To quote David Hackett Fischer’s book Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America:

“Another feature of the Delaware Valley … the natives were friendly, and very different from the more militant tribes of the lower Chesapeake and upper New England … William Penn’s Indian policy would have been a disastrous failure in Massachusetts or Virginia, just as it later failed in western Pennsylvania.”

So, it would seem that Quakers were merely granted a convenient opportunity to be nice to local Native American populations, and history sort of smudged the facts over time. But why trust the storytellers? Let’s look at more concrete numbers to determine whether Quakers treated local Native Americans with more kindness than their Puritan counterparts.

There are currently 10,500 Delaware Indians (Lenni Lenape) left (falling from a population of 15,000).^[132] ^[133] Contrast that with the Abenaki, with whom the Puritans interacted, who have a population of 9,775 today (falling from a post-smallpox population of 10,000 in 1620)^[134]. If Quakers did treat the Delaware Indians differently, then they found some other way to undermine them, as the Indian populations with Quaker neighbors don’t seem to have survived any better than the other groups.

Note: We admit these Native American population numbers are not great evidence. That said, we feel that if Quakers had been as nice as history paints them, there should be dramatic differences in current group populations.

“What about women?” you might be wondering. “Were Quakers not greater advocates of gender equality?”

While it is true that Quakers touted gender equality, going so far as to have a saying: “In souls there is no sex,” Quaker population stats don’t imply they acted on this belief where it mattered. For example, Quaker women were twice as likely as men to be illiterate at the height of their influence (20% to 40% between 1699-1706—only slightly off from the “super-sexist” Calvinist difference of 16% to 50% in 1760)^[135] ^[136] It seems like the only way Quakers were actually more in favor of gender equality manifested in the burden of proselytization placed on women, often resulting in Quaker women being beaten and even hanged for their efforts.

On any issue of morality, Quakers will enthusiastically extoll their virtues through history books. However, if you actually turn to sources that deal in hard numbers, we see Quakers had very little motivation to act on their moral compass (and when they did, they only did so with great compromise). For making this point, we know we will get heat from those trying to defend the myth of the virtuous—rather than virtue signaling—colonial Quaker. Still, if we are to build new cultures, we must understand how to enforce moral behavior. If the Quaker system was bad at doing so, we would make the world an objectively worse place by allowing the myth to perpetuate.

To understand why justicles are apparently so unmotivated to take concrete actions that enact their values in the world (instead of merely signaling a desire for those values to be enacted), we can investigate why Quakers were against slavery. Quakers wrote extensively about their distaste for slavery, so we know their logic. To Quakers, slavery violated the “golden rule” (and that term “golden rule” is everywhere in their anti-slavery material). Essentially, because Quakers would not personally like the feeling of being slaves, slavery was bad. They somehow managed to take a topic like slavery and make it about their own feelings.

Because Quaker’s opposition to slavery is based on personal feelings (recall that a major Quaker standard of evidence is gained through personal introspection and investigation of one’s emotions), it is easy to see how they might compromise on this principle if owning slaves made them feel better. Quakers’ reasoning behind anti-slavery sentiment stands in stark contrast to Calvinists’ distaste for slavery, which emerged from a general dislike of any institution that removes individual agency. In other words, whereas Quakers disavowed slavery because it made people feel bad, Calvinists opposed slavery because it represented the immutable evil of removing human agency.

A justicle mindset leads to immoral action because, at its core, this philosophy is based on the aesthetic of thinking good—not on doing good. Justicles gain status within their social circles by loudly protesting the injustices of the world rather than by making actual sacrifices to make the world a better place through their direct actions.

Let’s be clear: Quakers are not bad people (while a culture writ large may have problems, that doesn’t mean every individual within it exhibits those same problems). That said, Quaker culture appears to be bad at motivating adherents to translate their values into concrete action. This kind of thing is important to notice if you are thinking about how to design a better cultivar.

The Metaphysical Frameworks of Justicles

While we singled out Abrahamic religions that have most profoundly influenced modern justicle culture, we only did so because it is easier to find hard stats on their immoral actions. Abrahamic religions haven’t necessarily produced the largest justicle groups. Most people motivated by justicle logic either fall into Super Soft Cultures or cultures that are so soft they have lost most of their unique identity.

When justicles don’t follow a formal cultivar, they almost always adhere to one of two metaphysical / religious frameworks for the world, the most boring of these systems being relativism. In this chain of logic, a person asks themselves: “Which religion is true?” and realizing that it would be unjust if millions of people lived and died for nothing or suffered eternal torment for believing the wrong thing, they answer: “All religions and cultures must be true in their own way.” They create a world framework in which truth shifts depending on the perspective of the truth seeker because it feels unjust to believe that people from other cultural backgrounds are wrong.

Our take on relativism is best expressed by Charles James Napier’s candid response to Hindu priests who complained to him about the prohibition of the Sati religious funeral practice of burning unwilling widows alive on their husband’s funeral pyres, insisting that Napier must “respect their culture:”

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

Even a cursory look at real-world scenarios quickly demonstrates that a relativist mindset produces more injustice in the world, not less. This does not faze relativists, as people don’t adopt relativist positions because they want to make the world a better place; they do so because they want to believe they are making the world a better place.

In contrast to humdrum relativism, the other metaphysical framework utilized by justicles is far more engaging. It entails wondering: “Which religion is true?” and deciding: “It would be immoral if some religions were not true,” just as with relativism. However, instead of using relativism to resolve this injustice, one concludes that one’s very belief in a religion makes it true.

Like one of those Christmas movies in which Santa Claus is powered by believers’ faith, adherents to this faith-based framework believe that the individual heavens and deities of all different faiths are created by those who believe in them. While there is neither a logical reason nor justification motivated by tradition to lend credibility to this belief, there is a “moral” reason to hold it, as at a cursory glance, reality would be more “just” if it were true.

Here’s where this faith-based metaphysical framework gets really fun: Its reasoning is only comforting at a cursory glance. Anyone who thinks this metaphysical framework through to its logical conclusion will see that it is likely one of the bleakest realities we could conceivably live in. While many fiction universes, like “American Gods,” use this framing, the best possible outcome it might produce (in terms of logical constancy) is the Warhammer 40K universe.

If collective human beliefs became manifested as real beings with cosmic power capable of influencing humans, in turn, then our most basic beliefs and fears would be represented as the most powerful among these entities, given that they enjoy disproportionately more conscious human attention. Being more powerful than the other entities, these terrifying deities would have differentially more influence on the reality we inhabit and would use that influence to amplify thoughts and obsessions that grant them power. This would eventually lead to a snowballing of power, allowing these deities to acquire even more dedicated followers. Among their followers, these deities would be motivated to maximize whatever emotional subset fuels them (lust, laziness, fear of death, fear of pain, etc.) to levels far higher than any sane human would want.

The closest thing to a “good guy” you could have in such a reality is someone who doesn’t have a soul and thus does not create these entities (such as the Warhammer Universe’s T’au Empire), or a vast empire focused on emotionally suppressing its people, so they don’t fuel these entities (such as Warhammer’s Empire of Man). Yep: Hilariously, even if this hippy-dippy metaphysical framing of reality were true, the best cultivar for dealing with it would involve some form of emotional suppression. Essentially such a reality—one in which humans can manifest cosmic entities which themselves can influence humans—always leads to a reverberating volume increase (similar to holding a microphone too close to a speaker).

The Origins of the Supervirus

Note: We found many of our sources for this section in David Hackett Fischer’s book Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, which we heartily recommend to anyone who enjoyed this book.

As man spread across the world, he brought dogs with him. Early humans who settled in the Americas were no different. Their trailblazing canine companions genetically drifted from old-world breeds, making American varieties fascinatingly unique. Sadly, when the Europeans came, they killed them … almost all of them. The only survivors were Malamutes and a few related arctic breeds (while people claim that breeds like the Peruvian Hairless dog, the Xoloitzcuintli, and Chihuahua are pre-Columbian/1492, DNA studies show that they are less than 4% pre-Colombian in their genetic makeup). But … we wouldn’t be telling you this story if the ending were so clear-cut.

Dogs can catch a form of transmissible cancer called canine transmissible venereal tumor (CTVT).^[137] A long time ago, a single dog developed a tumor with this very unique ability, and all dogs today that have CTVT carry an iteration of that original dog’s tumor. So when a dog gets a CTVT tumor, they literally have the living cells of a completely different dog growing inside them. When genetic testing was performed on CTVT, it was found to come from—and literally be—a pre-Colombian breed of dog, making this extinct species of dog also the most prolific single “dog” alive today. While that pre-Columbian dog died of this cancer, they did so in a way that functionally granted them everlasting life through the DNA within that cancer and the tumors it produces.

From what we can gather, the supervirus—the parasitoid we discussed at the beginning of this book—first evolved within Quaker culture (and, more specifically, the Hicksite branch). By decimating Hicksite birth rates, the supervirus has long since relegated everything culturally unique about Hicksite Quakers to the dustbin of history. That said, its tumors—the tumors that now wear the skins of the countless victims through which it acts—is almost entirely Hicksite on a DNA level. Along with that long-dead pre-Columbian dog, Hicksite Quaker culture is at once functionally extinct and the single most important culture in the world today. (As a reminder, Hicksite Quakers hold personal emotional states as their highest standard of evidence, while Orthodox Quakers believe it to be important but subordinate to the Bible.)

Some cultural commentators draw connections between the parasitoidal supervirus and Puritan ideals, suggesting the virus has Puritan origins. Given what you have thus far read about Puritan and the other Calvinist cultures, it should be immediately clear how utterly buffoonish this idea is. If we were going to be as uncharitable as possible, we would say Puritan culture is superficially one based on a veneer of intellectualism, performative stoicism, an inward focus, aspirations of self-perfection, ruthless capitalism, independent research, and uninterested disgust toward outsiders. Therefore, ironically, cultural movements often framed as being in direct opposition to the supervirus, such as the Red Pill and Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), followers of Jordan Peterson, and other pseudo-intellectual, stoic-aspiring, right-wing self-improvement junkies represent cultural viruses derived from the Puritan strain of American thought.

It appears this misconception comes from a tendency to frame moralizing, shaming, and shunning as punishments for apostasy as uniquely Puritan. This is silly, as this pattern of behavior exists across virtually all hard cultures throughout history (including many that still thrive today).

The various pop-cultural viruses with which our species currently contends feature clear signs of the cultures from which they evolved—even if most people don’t identify these cultivars as being viral secular descendants of earlier cultures. Consider the Rationalist and Effective Altruism movements, which (by our estimation at least) are clearly derived from Jewish culture. Not only are a huge chunk of the Rationalist and Effective Altruism movements’ founding members (and many of their current prominent members) ancestrally Jewish (despite Jews representing a vanishingly small part of the population), but the communities’ constant debating of moral ontology, the habit of throwing ideas at the wall and masochistically offering financial rewards to get people to argue against them, and intense trust in institutions to develop metrics to effectively distribute capital,^[138] could not be more Jewish.

Rationalist and Effective Altruist cultures even maintained the Jewish superpower of being able to split apart and recombine with minimal conflict. While groups like Rationalists, Effective Altruists, and Dark Effective Altruists may posture as though they disagree with each other, they also enthusiastically jump at opportunities to engage in debate with members of other factions (something that can’t be said for the various viral descendants of Quaker or Calvinist culture).

Awareness of the origins of the supervirus is important as it yields a better understanding of its nuances, why it exists, and actions it may take in the future—it will also help explain why we subjected you to a Quaker history lesson. The supervirus does not just have “some features” of Quaker culture; it is quite literally a secular iteration of the Quaker culture’s Hicksite interpretation, from its core outlooks on reality to its governance practices and pet projects.

This is why Colonial Quaker culture presents such a prophetic view of today’s dominant pop culture morality—not because it was really ahead of its time, but because it ended up becoming the dominant pop culture.

Let’s start with the concept of call-out culture. While Puritans would seek out and punish community members who violated their rules, it was rare for them to target individuals outside their communities. Puritans were interested in creating the perfect world within their settlements and did not really care much about what people outside their settlements were doing—unless it involved the degradation of human will (e.g., slavery). On the other hand, you will see numerous Colonial-era cases of Quakers publicly shaming non-Quakers to goad them into changing their ways. In colonial Quaker culture, an individual could raise their status within their own culture by “calling out” those of different cultures (though such behavior is less common in modern Quaker culture).

Quaker priorities—and how Quakers demonstrated those priorities—have strong parallels to those held by the virus. For example, Quakers condemned exhibitions of animals at places like zoos as “hurtful to their (the animals’) feelings,” with Elizabeth Drinker reporting, “… it looked so sorrowful, I pity’d the poor thing, and wished it in its own country.”^[139] Or consider the way some Quakers chose to protest, with Squire Wharton spastically jumping into a bull-baiting ring (a sport that pit dogs against bulls) at huge personal risk, freeing the bull and subsequently calling out people in the crowd by name.^[140]

Hatred of gun ownership and distaste toward the prosecution of criminals represents another Quaker value that has effectively migrated to modern culture, with William Penn proudly reporting: “Not one soldier, nor arm borne, or militia man seen, since I was first at Pennsylvania.”^[141] When, at one point, a gang of pirates stole a ship in Philadelphia and started devastating the Delaware Valley coastline, Quaker leaders quarreled among themselves over how they could suppress crime without violence, allowing countless homes and businesses to be “plundered” while they took their time soul-searching over whether it was acceptable to sully themselves through the use of arms.

People often confuse Puritan and Quaker norms around sex, assuming that it was the Puritans who were insanely prudish whereas in actuality, Puritans were so comfortable talking about sex, and apt to do so with graphic frequency, that Puritan writing often needed heavy editing to be published up to the mid-twentieth century.^[142] (Though it should be acknowledged that Puritans were only in favor of sex within marriage.)

Quakers, in contrast, were so uncomfortable discussing sex that it was common in Quaker culture to be against sex altogether, even within marriage (this group eventually split off into the Shaker movement). One French traveler was shocked to find that even when Quaker women consulted their physicians, they tended to describe everything from their necks to waists as their “stomachs” and everything from their waists to feet as their “ankles.”^[143] (This snobbery also partially led to the collapse of Quakerism, with many people never marrying and as many as 16% of Quaker women in the colonial period being single by the age of 50.)^[144]

This prudish anti-sex angle has manifested in many branches of the supervirus, even though it stands massively at odds with the logical ideologies of those groups most likely to become infected. This is why infected progressive groups that one would expect to be pro-sex given their stated ideologies can sometimes appear bizarrely prudish (with the modern sex negative moment, the anti-kink movement, and the gender critical movement (such as TERFs) all having thought leaders within them that emerged from radical feminist groups) and why groups like the Red Pill and MGTOW—or even the Pragmatist Guide book series—with Calvinist roots seem weirdly sex-obsessed but in a clinical and experimental way. Consider that the only living people mentioned in this book so far who grew up in Calvinist-derived cultivars—this book’s authors and Aella—are both known for highly analytical sex research, with one of our books being The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality.

Even the Hicksite Quaker approach to internal governance is almost perfectly aligned with governance practices that spontaneously arise in nodal networks featuring late-stage supervirus infections. Consider the similarities between the conduct of an Unprogrammed Quaker meeting house and the method of governance utilized by Occupy Wall Street. In an Unprogrammed Quaker meeting house, attendants will sit quietly until moved by God to stand up and start speaking. In an Occupy Wall Street convening, there would be no set leader but people would stand up and start to speak when so moved, and their audience, so as not to interrupt them, would react using a complicated set of hand signals. Outside of the hand signals, Occupy Wall Street meetings were strikingly similar to Unprogrammed Quaker meetings. Perhaps had colonial Quakers heard of the innovation of hand signal interaction, they would have enthusiastically adopted it, seeing as Quakers were well known for being obsessively bureaucratic and building in complex social procedures to ensure everyone got a voice at any moment. Heck, we have quotes from William Penn complaining about his fellow Quakers getting so “governementish” that it was hard to get anything done.

Here we should also point out that Colonial-era Quakers were not particularly less rule-oriented than Puritans, with David Hackett Fischer pointing out in Albion’s Seed that “Penn’s laws against sin were more rigorous in some respects than those of Puritans.” Quakers just happened to be more obscure and bureaucratic with the rules. For Puritans, rules had a goal, whereas to Quakers, rules were an interactive social language one must successfully navigate to signal social status. This can be seen in things like traditional Quaker weddings having 16 stages (to make even a slight mistake at any of these intricate stages was a huge social faux pas and could leave you permanently cut off from old friends).

Another interesting similarity between the supervirus and the Hicksite Quakers can be seen in how they spread within organizations. Both start by preaching the harmonious collaboration of a diversity of viewpoints until they reach a certain population threshold within an organization, at which point they aggressively and systematically purge the organization of anyone not willing to slavishly submit to their ideology. For example, when Hicksite factions would grow in Orthodox Quaker churches, they would lay low until they felt they had enough backing to make their move, then change the locks on the meeting house doors and ban anyone who did not submit to their new way of thinking from entry.^[145]

Another interesting parallel can be seen in colonial-era Quaker and modern supervirus cultivar relationships with “disadvantaged” groups. While Quakers presented themselves as uplifting and empowering underrepresented groups, they ultimately took and held power just for and among themselves. Quakers largely immigrated to the USA (mostly Pennsylvania) as either working-class or middle-class groups^[146] but rose in power quickly by creating a tightly-knit oligarchy in the towns they occupied. In the case of Philadelphia, this was the Philadelphia’s Corporation. These individuals were highly interrelated, with no less than 85% related to one another.^[147] Despite their working-class background and quick rise to power, Quakers had a reputation for being spiteful, with Bishop Sheldon describing Quakers in 1669 as “very mean, the best scarce worth the title of Yeomen.”^[148] ^[149] The truth seems to be that Quakers were nice so long as you slavishly submitted yourself to their social agenda and never uplifted one of your own people over a “friend.”

This behavior can be illustrated by a political alliance formed between Quakers and German Protestant immigrants (Anabaptists mostly) in which the Germans would vote Quakers into office, but never the other way around,^[150] with one Rufus Jones writing that “We hear nothing of any men of prominence in these early days except Friends” (Quakers).^[151] Through this arrangement, Quakers dominated their local legislatures. To understand just how lopsided this arrangement was, consider that Lancaster County was so German by the mid-eighteenth century that only 100 Quakers lived there—and yet just seven Quaker families kept the local government firmly in their grip.^[152]

We actually suspect there is a case to be made that the only reason the Quakers even turned against slavery was to appease these Anabaptist constituencies who had always been fervently against slavery. We say this because Quakers did not turn against slavery until they started needing broad support from Anabaptist majorities to maintain political dominance in their regions.

While Quakers cultivated the public image of a culture that regards outsiders as equals, they very clearly looked down on them, using terms like “mongrel marriages” to describe marriage to a non-Quaker.^[153] It was not uncommon for Quakers to be kicked out of the community for marrying non-Quakers (a behavior that increased as they consolidated power^[154]).

What is interesting is why Quakers felt this way. Distaste for so-called mongrel marriages was not about purity but because Quakers thought it was impossible for anyone who was not a “true believer” to experience love and have a happy marriage. As Quakers held that marriage should only be for love rather than material gain or lust, marriage to a non-Quaker—someone axiomatically incapable of love—was perverse. It is fascinating to see such viewpoints mirrored in today’s supervirus. Those infected often posit how the immune couldn’t possibly have healthy relationships or marriages, wringing their hands over tradwives with kids who look happy, impotently projecting that they must really hate their lives.

This hypocrisy can also be seen in colonial-era Quakers (not to mention those infected by the modern-era supervirus) who wanted to be known for seeing everyone equally despite really looking down on those in poor, rural environments. When the Scotch-Irish arrived in the colonies, one Quaker writer referred to them as “the scum of two nations.”^[155] This holds many similarities to how today’s heavily infected “coastal elite” groups look down on poor rural “deplorables,” despite presumably viewing the poor “without bias” and wanting to uplift them.

Don’t worry; they didn’t reserve their derision for just the poor and rural individuals. Antisemitism was also strong in the early Quaker community, just as it is among those with a deep infection of the virus. Hannah Sanson (from a prominent Quaker merchant faction) had this to say of Jews in 1756: “This people, once the chosen people, [have become] the scum of the earth!”^[156] Laws were passed in the Quaker-dominated settlements (Pennsylvania) that systematically disenfranchised Jews, like the law in 1794 preventing work on the Sabbath, meaning Jews could only work five days a week (with Abraham Wolff being convicted under this law despite keeping his own sabbath).^[157] The Jewish community at the time was well aware of how disproportionately cruel the Quakers were to them and saw them as distinctly different from other Christians (to the point of not seeing them as Christian at all), with prominent Jewish broker Haym Salomon saying, “It was neither the Jews nor the Christians who founded the practice, but Quakers—Quakers worse than heathens, pagans, or idolators.”^[158] ^[159]

A final interesting area of overlap manifests in both groups’ tendencies to regard youth with an unique level of reverence. Given that the virus has become the dominant culture in our society, it does not seem particularly weird to us that adults turn to a child-turned-moral-authority like Greta Thunberg for wisdom on the subject of government policy. As a small sample of two people who don’t hail from today’s dominant culture, we can report it is really, really, really weird for adults to take tactical and moral advice from a child.

As Fischer writes in Albion’s Seed:

“People of other faiths were startled to observe Quaker children giving moral and religious instruction to their elders. We have on account of a ten-year-old child who interrupted a gathering of adults to deliver a spontaneous speech on salvation. The adults listened respectfully, and after the child was done speaking, a grandmother offered a prayer, and said, ‘Oh Lord! That this young branch should be a teacher unto us old ones.’

Another … at the age of ten regularly reprimanded adults in his own family—condemning their swearing, breaking up card parties, preaching to them about salvation.”^[160]

To wrap things up, Quaker culture was not prophetic of future values. Rather, today’s supervirus is derived from Quaker Culture. To suggest that Quaker culture was prophetic is akin to suggesting that the ethnic makeup of the early settlers was weirdly prophetic of the ethnic makeup of the later U.S. population. It’s like … yeah, they killed everyone else.

Evidence that the virus grew out of Hicksite Quaker culture (as opposed to emerging from convergent evolution) can be seen in everything from vestigial value sets (many of which run counter to modern progressive values) to the supervirus’s weird governance system, the prudish nature with which the virus treats sexuality, the theatrical ways the infected engage in protest, and their common use of children to preach moral values.

Why didn’t the more virtuous Quakers call out their purely performative colleagues? They did—however, systems for de-platforming people had already begun to evolve in Quaker culture centuries ago. When George Keith began to speak out against the Quaker community for not living up to its values, the same Quakers who in England had demanded the right to free expression started demanding restraints on the types of things that could be published, causing many printers in Quaker territory to be arrested for publishing “unlicensed books” and having their press and types seized.^[161] By 1693, Keith, along with others who spoke against the Quakers for their hypocrisy, were forced to leave. In Quaker culture, you were allowed to call out outsiders for things like slavery and you were even allowed to shame specific Quakers, but the one thing you were not allowed to do was point out that Quaker culture as a whole did not at all live up to its espoused values and was fundamentally hypocritical.

If you are still dubious of our claim that the supervirus has Quaker origins, think about the virus’s initial point of spread: The American secondary school system. The United States school system was both heavily influenced by Quaker culture and disproportionately run by Quakers in its early days. Had the virus evolved independently, it would more likely have initially spread through activist movements instead of an entrenched bureaucracy.

Why did the parasitoid supervirus evolve within Quaker culture? Why did Quaker culture produce the most virulent of all the memetic viral packages when similar secular viruses have evolved out of all of America’s major cultural movements?

While the traditional branch of Quakers were not justicles, the evolution of the justicle branch of the Quaker faith was what allowed the supervirus to develop. This worldview allowed the supervirus to appeal to entire nodal networks at once instead of individual nodes (for example, the Red Pill and Jordan Peterson followers focus heavily on how they will help individuals rather than society as a whole). The justicle worldview allows an individual to believe that if everyone in their group structures their thoughts and language in a certain way, society will become better—all else equal. This motivates individuals to spend more time converting people than spending the time and effort required to literally build a society that structurally embodies their values.

For clarification: If you have two groups and one of those groups spends 100% of adherents’ contributed time and effort converting others while the other spends 50% of adherents’ contributed time converting others and 50% trying to improve the world, the group not interested in actually making a difference will outcompete the other, evolutionarily speaking. However, very few cultures are able to convince people they are “good” despite investing so little in the actual realization of their values.

An absence of success metrics is a feature that equipped Quaker culture to produce the ultimate supervirus. The way Quaker culture can shamelessly claim to be abolitionist while simultaneously counting America’s most prolific slave owners among its members—by being aesthetically abolitionist—presents a critical social technology needed by the supervirus.

It doesn’t matter whether the supervirus actually uses significant resources to help BIPOCs, LGBT people, the poor, the disenfranchised, the environment, or women—it aesthetically cares about those issues and from the perspective of an infected person, aesthetically caring is morally equivalent to actually doing something. (This is why there was so little public complaint on the far left about the BLM Foundation money being spent on things like a $6M mansion for its board members.)^[162] The parasitoidal virus convinces its victims that by buying into it, they will intrinsically serve the best interests of those groups. Without this technology, people would quickly notice the harm this virus inflicts on infected goal-driven organizations and pull back before they could die and release the spores grown within them into the social ecosystem. People at Occupy Wall Street would stand up and say: “This obsessive infighting and bizarre method of making decisions is clearly inefficient and will make achieving our goals impossible.”

As scary as the parasitoid supervirus can be, we must understand it because it represents the single most sophisticated and robust cultivar ever evolved. While we fastidiously avoid the use of supervirus-evolved social technologies within our own House’s culture, we suspect someone smarter than us might be able to find a way to use some of these social technologies in a beneficial durable culture.

Finally, we need to be clear that just because something evil evolved out of Quaker culture does not mean Quaker culture itself is evil. We are the first to admit that Unitarian Universalism evolved out of Calvinism and clearly we see Calvinist culture as morally good.

When Can You Lie?

Having explored varying cultural approaches to truth, let’s tuck into lies. While lying may seem like a reasonably clear-cut subject, the acceptance of “little white lies” within most cultures and wildly varying definitions of “white lies” demonstrates it is not. Different cultivars feature a fascinating variety of domains in which lies are acceptable, rituals that prohibit lies (such as the secular “pinkie swear” or religious oath to God), and rituals that absolve lying individuals of guilt (such as the practice of crossing one’s fingers).

Catholics, for example, leverage a common mechanism many cultures use to permit lying: A prohibition on lying but not on linguistic deception. In one story, a Church father is being chased by the Romans while in disguise. They overtake his ship and, not recognizing him, ask: “Have you seen the person we are looking for?” to which he responds, “Yes! He was going that way” (and points in the direction his ship was headed before being apprehended). In the context of the story, this misdirection is seen as 100% ethical and the same as not lying at all, even though the Church father was deceitful.

You’ll see this mechanism more commonly used in lower stakes contexts—like a fundamentalist Catholic saying to an atheist that: “I think you could teach me a lot,” to be polite while secretly meaning that they have nothing to learn from the person about religion but might have something to learn from them on another topic.

Another Catholic lying mechanism leveraged by many cultures involves the concept of “Mental Reservation” (we’re showcasing Catholics a lot in this section not because they utilize more loopholes around lying, but because they are better at documenting them than other cultures, making these mechanisms easier for an outsider to understand). According to a report by the Dublin Archdiocese, “mental reservation is a concept developed and much discussed over the centuries, which permits a churchman knowingly to convey a misleading impression to another person without being guilty of lying.”

The report presents the following example:

“John calls the parish priest to make a complaint about the behavior of one of his curates. The parish priest sees him coming but does not want to talk to him because he considers John to be a troublemaker. He sends another of his curates to answer the door. John asks the curate if the parish priest is in. The curate replies that he is not.” adding “This is clearly untrue but in the Church’s view it is not a lie because, when the curate told John that the parish priest was not in, he mentally reserved the words ‘…to you.’”

These sorts of loopholes around dishonesty seem to have evolved to make it difficult to lie to top-level officials inside the culture and relatively easy to lie to people outside the culture (as well as less informed and sophisticated members within the culture). They allow for this because top-level officials will understand these loopholes and know how to ask questions in a manner that circumvents them.

As for rituals like being able to lie when you cross your fingers: We suspect these are just soft culture artifacts that begin to appear in hard cultures over time to make it easier to follow.

Many cultures also commonly permit lying in certain situations—particularly scenarios in which lying enables one to advance the culture’s goals or serve the culture’s values. Taqiyya, for example, is an Islamic concept that essentially means it is OK to hide or otherwise misrepresent your religious beliefs if failing to do so will get you killed or otherwise seriously persecuted (jailed, etc.).

Taqiyya stands in stark contrast to clear rules in early Christianity against denying one’s faith, but we imagine those rules were more a product of cultural obsessions with martyrdom in early Christianity than a condemnation of lying, as we see reports of other forms of deceit happening in the early Church.

It almost cannot be overstated how important martyrdom was among early Christians. Martyrdom resulting from an adherent’s unwillingness to deny their faith was particularly common in the early Christian Church and perceived as uniquely virtuous. This form of martyrdom was actually so important to early Christians that when Constantine legalized the faith, many of the most devout Christians had a bit of a “freak out” and wandered out into the desert to live alone and pout over not being able to get themselves killed attesting their faith (the practice of monasticism eventually evolved out of this).

That Muslim culture framed throwing one’s life away as a not-particularly-virtuous act was what likely gave birth to Taqiyya. It was probably pretty clear to Mohmmad that if he did not explicitly say it was immoral to get yourself martyred in that way, Muslims might start doing it too. The downside to Taqiyya-like practices is that they allow surrounding cultures to build suspicion that your actual religious beliefs are more insidious or extreme than you are letting on. Such suspicion can be leveraged by those who want to persecute your group.

Though lying is typically convenient and/or beneficial in the moment, there are three important reasons why cultivars evolve prohibitions against it:

Lying to outsiders: If people of a certain culture are consistently honest, you will be much more likely to do business with them than with members of a less trustworthy culture. Once a group develops a reputation for lying, they may as well always lie, as outsiders must assume that everything they say is a lie. (Debt in countries where lying is more common costs more because it is costlier to manage.)
Lying within a culture: Monocultural teams become dramatically more efficient if a cultivar can prevent lying among adherents. When you’re not obligated to vet information shared by a fellow team member and there is no risk fellow team members will behave dishonestly, your team can easily outcompete even better-run organizations that do need to worry about such things.
Lying to leaders of a culture: As described above, some cultures have developed loopholes that only prevent lies by subordinates to superiors but not by superiors to subordinates. These loopholes grant most of the benefits of lying while at the same time enabling group leaders to operate with relatively low fear of misinformation. This markedly increases the efficiency of the central hierarchy. (It makes sense that loopholes like these would evolve within cultures that lean heavily on institutions that centralize power.)

You may think a cultural stance against any form of deceit is the correct choice, however categorical bans on deception can produce unintended consequences. Calvinist tradition condemned all forms of deception in all contexts (to the extent that even pursuits like acting were heavily frowned upon, as acting is technically a form of deceit). The Salem Witch Trials exemplify a common weakness of such systems: Because the culture was so unaccustomed to even the idea that a person might lie, a handful of teenage girls realized they could just make stuff up and people would accept their statements as fact.

In Catholic heretic trials, it was assumed that individuals might lie, so court practices were created to account for this, which led to dramatically fewer senseless deaths than Calvinist witch trials, in which participants generally assumed that no Puritan would ever lie or be deceitful. Learning to deal with deceit on a day-to-day basis is critical if a culture is to develop resilience against what we can only call “stupidity cascades.”

Keep in mind that fastidious honesty doesn’t even guarantee that a culture will be seen favorably by other cultures. Ebenezer Scrooge, the classic Calvinist stereotype (discussed in detail in the appendix section “Calvinist Stereotypes in Media”), is pictured as going very far out of his way to never lie or break a business deal, like most Calvinist stereotypes.^[163] While there are dozens of examples of Scrooge’s honesty in A Christmas Carol,^[164] his candid remarks most commonly serve to make him look bad—the point being that the Calvinists are often framed as unethical in popular media even though they are vehemently honest and never misleading (normally due to the Calvinist view that most charity is self-indulgent virtue signaling).

Sidebar: From the perspective of his own culture, Ebenezer Scrooge was very ethical. He had not withheld money from Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchit so he could spend it on himself (he lived in constant cold, never spending more money on coal than necessary, inhabiting a sparse, dark room to save money on oil, and eating homemade gruel to avoid reliance on waitstaff). Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchit presented an incredibly inefficient use of philanthropic capital. It is not as though Scrooge was amassing money for his kids or something (he didn’t have any)—Scrooge is what an outsider sees when bumping into a long-term-oriented person who is disinterested in virtue signaling (and who therefore thinks there are more effective uses for capital than handouts to his personal network). While Charles Dickens’ witty prose is like catnip to Simone, we cannot help but joke that A Christmas Carol is a non-Calvinist’s “corrective rape” fantasy about a Calvinist strawman.

So, what do we recommend for our personal House cultivar? The drawbacks of traditional Calvinist honesty strike us as being too great, plus they offer little upside, so we aren’t keeping it. As there is little downside to a culture always being honest to other members of that culture so long as said honesty can be effectively enforced (presumably by flagging and heavily shaming individuals who do lie within that culture while also kicking them down a peg in the cultural hierarchy), we maintain a “don’t EVER lie to fellow members of House Collins” policy.

As for outsiders, it would seem sensible to lie when it suits you while understanding that you will be punished if you are caught—with one hard caveat: Never lie to one of your benefactors (an investor, a customer, a constituent, or someone who has otherwise put their faith in you). While there are downsides to being fastidiously honest in social situations, there are almost none for being fastidiously honest in business and it is an easy distinction to draw in life. Our family already has a reputation for being obsessively dedicated and honest as managers (with our foregoing pay for well over a year to ensure we did not lay off any staff during the pandemic and our brother and sister-in-law refusing a raise from their board because it wasn’t in the initial contract they signed). Being honest in business to an extent that looks stupid or comedic to outsiders is very useful in that it makes it easier to raise money, often reduces the cost of debt, and gives you a competitive edge even when your company is selling an equivalent product at an equivalent price.

The “Unknowable”

Many religious traditions—ranging from the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, Zen Buddhist kōans, and Kabbalah’s emphasis that most live in a world of illusion—use elusive truths, ambiguity, paradoxes, or complex concepts as a very clever hack. By prompting people to attempt to wrap their heads around such things, a cultivar can also trigger feelings of love (a mechanism which, in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships, we explore in greater depth). By informing outsiders or inferiors in a culture or tradition that certain truths cannot be clearly articulated or are in some way unknowable, senior members can furthermore enforce stricter status hierarchies that others feel incentivized to climb.

Several early readers of this book criticized our blunt and pragmatic analysis of various cultural and religious traditions, citing these unknowable truths. One cannot take actionable, pragmatic, action in the world without drawing concrete conclusions, as imperfect as they may be. If you didn’t care about practical take-aways, you would probably be looking for The Nuanced Mystic’s Guide to Crafting Religion instead of something from the Pragmatist’s Guide series.

But let’s take a moment to explore this mechanism, given how pervasive it is.

Anyone who like me (Malcolm) got into the Church of the SubGenius understands the trope of the “unknowable truth” well because it is frequently highlighted in its satire. In the Church of the SubGenius teachings, the concept of Slack is laid out quite plainly to mean the aesthetic of effortless success gained through cunning and sleight of hand/mind. At the same time, it is framed as axiomatic that anyone who claims to be able to know what Slack is or describe Slack neither understands nor has it. This is a psychological trick that many traditions use to feel more profound and trigger feelings of love and awe.

Beyond presenting simple gatekeeping mechanisms, signaling to outsiders that serious “work” needs to be put in before one can consider themselves a true member, unknowable truths work to keep members in their chosen cultivar by presenting an automatic hand-waving defense that gets activated in the face of scrutiny. “Hey!” an outsider might say: “Isn’t it kind of bad that your cultivar believes X?”

“No,” the adherent will respond; “you clearly do not understand our true beliefs.”

“Then explain them to me,” the outsider says.

“Hah!” the adherent scoffs; “It’s not so simple! This sacred truth is not something someone like me can explain to you using mere words [insert long rambling statements about putting in work or about obscure references that don’t actually address the issue at hand].”

In such scenarios, the adherent has zero obligation to think critically about their cultivar’s metaphysical belief system and is actively rewarded for not trying to clearly articulate its views, as per this unknowable truth mechanism, the very attempt to do so is, at best, a complete failure to actually capture the unknowable truth, which, by definition, cannot be articulated, and, at worst, apostasy.

Talk about an elegant retention mechanism! A big problem faced by the LDS Church is that missionaries are actively encouraged to engage in doctrine full of clearly articulated claims—many of which can unfortunately (for retention) be disproven or at least heavily undermined in the age of the internet. This causes many to lose their faith at a time when they should be reaffirming it.

Unknowable truths also work well at suppressing dissent and impertinence within cultivars. For example, Zen Buddhist kōans can be used to gaslight practitioners and slowly wear down their ability to engage in personal critical thought in the face of “great masters”. Consider the famous kōan: “Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?”

There is a real answer to this (depending on how you interpret the question—the only mystery comes from the fact that there are multiple ways the question could be interpreted). We know the sound of our fingers rustling together. We know the sound of a hand clasping quickly against itself. Simone even had a middle school classmate capable of whipping his loose hand so quickly, he could literally clap, single-handedly. We could record all these things with high-quality sound equipment and present them to the Zen master who posed this question and yet he would respond with the pseudo-profound wording equivalent of: “You just don’t get it.”

By doing this, the Zen master undermines any confidence we previously had in our own logical thought and empirical experience—and even our faith in reality itself. And that’s the point. Once an individual has been worn down like this, they will more uncritically accept what their “superior” tells them. This is both the core point of gaslighting in an abusive relationship and the reason why many traditions independently evolved these practices, (though they would claim that an individual can only see truth after this “old way” of seeing the world—e.g. critically—is eroded).

While we agree that unknowable truths are powerful love-creating, gatekeeping, retention-improving, hierarchy-enforcing, and gaslighting mechanisms that are important for any skilled cultivar crafter to know about, we personally see them as unethical and certainly outside the bounds of our commitment to pragmatism (and obviously someone with a Calvinist perspective is going to have zero chill around any manipulative tactic that actively undermines truth seeking).

Note that cultivars which leverage unknowable truths typically have a smarter “mirror cultivar” that does not fall for it, so in calling this out, we are in no way criticizing all religions with unknowable-truth-wielding sects or branches—we only question the morality of those branches. An idea that is only understandable to people who accept its profundity is a psychological trick, not a revelation.

Permanence, Identity, and
Creative Destruction

Many cultures feature unique takes on permanence, identity, and creative destruction in a way that colors adherents’ views of reality. Consider the sand mandalas created by Tibetan Buddhists: These breathtaking pieces of art take weeks to construct and are made entirely of sand (historically tiny gemstones). After they have been completed and viewed, they are destroyed with a single, firm sweep. The process of creating something beautiful you plan to destroy immediately afterward is meant to impart an understanding of impermanence on the creator and help them embrace the concept.

Sand mandalas both symbolize a certain view of permanence and teach it through their creation. Consider, in contrast, the cultural mindset that produced the Clock of the Long Now: A timepiece designed to keep accurate time for over a millennium. The Clock of the Long Now is not meant to be viewed by anyone or serve as a public art piece; its purpose is simply to quietly exist for as long as it conceivably can. This project is being worked on by the Long Now Foundation, which promotes this longer view of history.

While we respect the sacrifice that goes into these extremes, we ultimately see both as self-indulgent wastes of time. This judgment reflects our own bias about how identity persists through time via the family line and culture. A perception of identity closer to our own is that held by some branches of the Jewish cultural tradition, which conceptualize the “tribe” as the primary unit of identity across generations. Iterations of this type of tradition can also be seen in groups with intercultural classes, like some Brahmins, in which your class comprises a major part of your identity. Army units represent a secular iteration of this mindset; they serve as cultural throughlines able to earn glory through the actions of their members (with Roman legions even being able to “die” based on the actions of their members).

A modern conceptualization of identity is that of the online persona. An online persona may represent a fraction of an individual (in that they may have multiple online personas), may represent multiple individuals, and may even be passed down through time. The manner in which online identities are often fractionalized, shared, and/or passed down is not new; it is, after all, theorized that while Hippocrates likely started as a single individual, most of what is attributed to him is actually from a school of individuals that all used “Hippocrates” as their pen name.

We suspect that the concept of fractionalized and composite identity will be picked up by some strands of pop culture given how easy it is to execute in online contexts. Fractionalized identities can serve as an excuse to not take responsibility for one’s actions, making them a huge draw of many pop cultures (i.e., “StarKitty called a SWAT team to your house; she is just one of my many personas—it is wrong to punish all of them for just her actions,” or “Sure, I said you were a fat pig online, but I was just writing as GossipMonger6969—tons of people write under that name and I’m just maintaining its harsh tone”).

With the rise of AI, the concept of identity is going to become much more tricky. Even today’s rudimentary AI can effectively simulate people. For example, the Infinite Conversation^[165] is an AI-generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek. It mimics (imperfectly but impressively) not just the sorts of things they would say but also the tonality of their voices. Given what deepfake technology can already achieve, we are not far from a future in which AI will be able to very effectively model and mimic—both in behavior and appearance—anyone who has been moderately well documented.

Given the speed of technological advancement and the fact that nearly all humans in developed nations carry little microphones around nearly 24/7, it only makes sense that a product we will see in our (or our children’s) lifetimes is a virtual AI clone that can handle our interactions, phone calls, social media posts, work tasks, etc. These surrogates will allow us to automate as much of our virtual social and professional lives as we want. How will cultures choose to handle these? Will we regard interactions with a person’s AI surrogate as equivalent to an interaction with that person? Will there be a way to translate social capital built by the AI to the human it represents?

If your head is already spinning, consider that in addition to perfectly emulating us, these AI avatars will be better than the “real” thing. They will have access to the entire internet with a thought, be able to alter their appearance as they like and have access to processing power we could only dream of. They will be wittier, more eloquent, better informed, and more attractive versions of ourselves. For cultures that don’t believe in a soul, which iteration of the person will be considered more valuable? If only one manifestation of “you” can exist, which would you choose? Outside of primacy, the AI will be functionally better in every respect—except that it may not interpret its feelings with the same qualia that we, organic meat puppets that we are, do.

To Live Forever?

There is a great comic by Zach Weinersmith (writer of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)^[166] on this topic (shared with his permission).

Humans have been bred to fear both death and change because those who accept change and impermanence with abandon are far less likely to survive and produce viable offspring.

Your culture will therefore need to take an intentional stance against elements of permanence if you do not want adherents to cling to it blindly. Before taking your stance, we encourage you to think through what it really means—and whether it promotes worthwhile outcomes.

In the Ship of Theseus thought experiment, we are told the story of a man named Theseus who, piece by piece, replaces every part of his ship throughout his journey. Is the ship that ends the journey still the same “ship” as the vessel that originally embarked? What if, behind Theseus, another man were to collect the cast-off pieces and use them to build another ship? Is this other ship also Theseus’ ship?

Suppose instead of talking about a ship, we are discussing a consciousness and a brain that forgot old memories and replaced them with new ones while also replacing the physical, organic matter in its cells bit by bit. What if a mad scientist captured all those forgotten memories in a brain made of the first brain’s discarded particles? Which entity would be the “true” continuation of the previous state of consciousness?

If you took one percent of a person’s brain and replaced it with computer chips, would they still be themselves? What about 50 percent? When does a person stop existing? To us the answer is obvious: With every adjustment in who a person is, they become something partially—but not wholly—new. In part, a person stops existing with the first percentage point of replacement, but in part, a person doesn’t stop existing until the last percent of their original brain is gone. Given that we transmit much more than 1 percent of who we are to our kids, we are fractionally the same entity as them. In addition, given that humans are constantly improving and changing themselves, we are constantly killing ourselves—either by gaining new information, changing our minds, experiencing hormonal shifts, or sloughing off old cells and generating new ones.

From our perspective, the question posed in the Ship of Theseus is fundamentally flawed. The concept of separation (in which the molecules that make up the ship are meaningfully a new thing from the surrounding water molecules) and continued identity (that the ship is meaningfully the same thing between moments) are mental shortcuts the human brain uses to more easily categorize the world but not reflective of a deeper reality. The same can be said for our own consciousness, which more or less has no value if it does not undergo a constant cycle of creative destruction. (Consciousness in and of itself isn’t valuable; it is valuable because it helps us learn and solve problems by taking in new information, weighing it, and forming new views.)

Our cultural framework sees a fear of death as equivalent to a desire to take Theseus’s ship and carefully dip every board in preservatives to maintain it for thousands of years. Meanwhile, we gauge a ship’s value by its ability on the water and at war. This view inspires new ship designs and constant innovation because our intergenerational identities’ purpose as custodians of ships—the identities we experience within a single lifetime—is to make them better on water and at war. As older ships fail to compete with newer models, they are retired, forgotten, and allowed to rot. Thousands of years later, our cultivar’s Ship of Theseus looks like a fleet of advanced battle cruisers and submarines—whereas it still resembles an ancient Greek trireme within those cultivars that develop life-extension technologies out of fear of death.

Given our belief that, as we grow and change, our identities change, we see every moment of self-improvement as an incremental death. Resisting the process of creative self-destruction intrinsically leads to stagnation. A pool of stagnant water can breed dangerous parasites.

Mental homogenization is just as potentially damaging as mental stagnation. Like viruses, some of the ideas to which we are exposed are self-replicating. If our mental “immune systems” are insufficiently robust, viral ideas can infect us and prevent us from seriously engaging with new concepts (to protect themselves) while pushing us to spread those virulent ideas to other people. When this kind of homogenization happens to a person, we call them a “husk” because when someone halts the process of creative destruction—refusing to explore, weigh, and sometimes accept new ideas—they stop being meaningfully human (in our House’s view, at least).

Our culture also resists instinctual attachment to biological identity, instead contextualizing our children collectively as more “us” than we are. Consider that each biological kid you have is 50 percent you. As soon as you have more than three kids, there is more of your biological identity (1.5X) in them than in you.

Better still, because most have the freedom to choose reproductive partners they admire, having kids yields an opportunity to augment individual biological identities by mixing them with those of people we respect and admire—people whose unique DNA will improve our own. Once equipped with this improved mix, children can also be raised in ever-more-ideal circumstances than their parents, granting still more advantages to the new-and-improved biological identities produced.

As an added benefit, children are not burdened by their parents’ biases and prejudices; they get to choose to discard the parts of their parents’ worldview that, with their clearer views, they can recognize as sub-optimal. This essentially diversifies an individual biological identity’s “investment portfolio” by allowing iterations of them to take wildly different (and perhaps better) approaches to life.

Our House’s cultural beliefs around identity produce a view of life and the individual as a bubbling cauldron of creative destruction at its best—and a stagnant, homogeneous cesspool at its worst. The destruction of identity is not an unwanted byproduct of progress but the core value of identity in the first place.

While this mindset encourages a high birth rate at the intergenerational level and a low fear of death, it is hard to say how aggressive our distant descendants will be when it comes to genetically and mechanically modifying their own kids. Even we have some trepidation about how far we can improve our species before we hit ethical issues, like classes of a family being genetically specialized for specific jobs, which brings in questions of consent.

We are excited to see what you come up with for your own House’s cultivar and even more excited to see, through the eyes of our distant descendants, which cultivar “wins.” How will your culture frame permanence? Will you advocate for some constants while encouraging continuous change in other domains? What are the likely downstream effects of the way you frame permanence?

Death

One of my (Malcolm’s) first jobs entailed regular visits to a medical examiner’s office. I was tasked with bringing fresh brains from the medical examiner’s office to the UT Southwestern Medical Center psychiatry research wing. I was doing this so that we could study the brains of individuals about whom we had extensive psychiatric records. This macabre task provided not just face-to-face exposure to hundreds of dead bodies, but also an opportunity to read a history of their lives and dive deep into their most personal thoughts, fears, hopes, and dreams. I found myself the courier of the former seats of these individuals’ consciousnesses before they were cut apart and put on slides. This work gave me a unique perspective on— and comfort with—death that I wish more people could experience.^{^[167]}

A culture’s relation to death is reflected in its relative fear of death and its rituals around it. Once a traveling Islamic scholar, Ibn Fadlan, spent time with a group of pre-Viking Rus. When the Rus king died, a message went out asking the king’s people who would join him on his journey to the afterlife. One young woman took on this burden. The Rus then had a large party, killed the intoxicated young woman, put both bodies on a boat filled with goods and ritually sacrificed animals, lit the boat on fire, and set it to sea.

What most horrified Ibn Fadlan about this ritual was that they lit the king’s body on fire. To a Muslim, burning a body is akin to mutilation and even witnessing cremation is technically haram. When he discussed this with one of its hosts, he was chastised: “You Arabs are foolish, you take the person that matters most to you and put them in the ground where they are eaten by worms. We burn them in an instant and they enter paradise that very moment because of the great love their God has for them.”

The interaction recorded by Ibn Fadlan is a microcosm of how practices around death can frame a culture’s views around life. That the Rus were willing to kill a woman to attend the king on his journey to the afterlife revealed the relative importance of human life in their culture (the king’s life was just that much more important than hers). That the celebration was drunken and festive without mourning demonstrates how the Rus genuinely saw death as passing from one stage of existence to another—they believed the individual was immediately carried up by a God, hence there was no reason to mourn.

Why cremate a dead body in one culture and not in another? Cremation preference appears to be an artifact of the environment in which cultures are nurtured. In colder weather environments, people are much more likely to cremate bodies—this is true even today and even within and between countries (with more northern states in the U.S. being much more likely to cremate bodies). Perhaps this is because bodies decompose much more slowly in cold-weather environments. However, this doesn’t explain why we still see this trend in 21st-century American states, which almost suggests the presence of some polymorphic instinct instigated by different environmental conditions (a pre-programmed genetic predisposition that changes based on environmental conditions). This regional difference is also particularly odd as rotting bodies become dangerous far more quickly in hot environments (Simone made me remove a vomit-inducing comment about me working with the body of a man who died next to a radiator and wasn’t found for a week or so here).

Within the House cultivar we are designing, we care little about what happens to our corpses. Should doing so be trivially inexpensive, it might make sense to freeze ancestors or save their DNA. Still, we wouldn’t want such flights of fancy to deprive living and future generations of resources they might otherwise utilize to carry forward an evolved iteration of the House’s goals. From the perspective of our family culture, it seems quite disrespectful to mourn a dead person to any extent that disrupts your ability to be efficacious. By doing so, you make their last act one of destruction. We don’t understand the purpose of that; it hardly seems like a sign of respect.

I, Simone, was exposed to two cultural approaches toward death as a child: The Mormon approach (to which I was exposed through a Mormon-run preschool) and the Buddhist approach (to which I was exposed through parent-mandated Sunday temple and dharma school attendance). These two traditions exhibit highly contrasting and interesting views on the true nature of death, with the Mormon view being the most optimistic of all cultural traditions and the Buddhist one being the most morose (despite cultural stereotypes to the contrary).

In the Mormon tradition, not only does almost everyone^[168]—Mormon or not—eventually get a “happy ending” (with the differentiation being how long one has to wait and the iteration one gets), but afterlife is conceptualized as training to eventually become a God yourself, ruling a planet like our own alongside your spouse. What we find so deeply satisfying about this belief is not the whole “becoming a God” thing, but that it is the only belief system (to our knowledge) that grants spouses afterlives alongside each other in which they get to work together on a clearly delineated, meaningful project. We could not imagine a more satisfying afterlife experience.

Mormon beliefs around death do a lot to influence their values in life. The Mormon afterlife hammers home not just the gravity of who one chooses as a spouse but also the importance of a continued positive relationship with that person. The knowledge that “you’re in it for the long haul—big time” likely contributes to the higher levels of satisfaction reported in Mormon marriages, vis a vis those of many other traditions.

The Mormon conceptualization of an afterlife is not wildly different from our own, as, in our view, we will endure—together—long after our bodies expire, both through our writing and through our descendants (who, as we pointed out earlier, are more “us” than we are in many ways). This belief motivates us to do everything we can to ensure our children thrive.

In contrast with the Mormon tradition, which involves enduring existence and commitment, the ultimate goal of most branches of Buddhism is to end the cycle of death and rebirth known as samsara. What is morose about this from our perspective is that it simultaneously frames sapience negatively—as a state defined by suffering—while also framing the ultimate positive outcome as a sort of mass suicide or genocide: An end not just to one’s personal sapience but an end to all sapience in the universe.

This is a great example of how religion is so much more than just theology. Given my cultivar’s lens, even if I 100% believed a Buddhist theology’s metaphysical framework for the world, I would see its stated cultural goal as not just suboptimal but the highest order “evil” possible. In the perspective of a Buddhist cultural framing, this goal is a noble coming-together of all things, an end of conflict, and a non-conscious feeling of blissfulness. From our cultural perspective, the Buddhist “final solution” is somehow inconceivably worse than mass genocide—it would be quite literally a worse event than anything we could ever imagine actually happening. The desired Buddhist outcome is the ultimate stagnation—supreme and inescapable homogeny. If genocide were a pop rock, a total end to samsara would be a nuke.

From our House’s cultural perspective, the highest order of good involves first protecting and spreading sapience across the universe, then ultimately becoming a weaver of realities, constructing innumerous new universes within which sapience can proliferate.

What is interesting here is how much in common we have with Buddhism; we just happen to arrive at an opposite goal. As with Buddhism, we conceptualize reality as a cycle of life, death, and rebirth—though we see this as happening through our children, culture, and ideas rather than “energy,” more broadly speaking. As with Buddhism, we also see suffering as predominating that cycle.

The core difference that produces our radically different cultural lenses entails our cultures’ divergent contextualization of suffering. Buddhism sees suffering as a negative state that we should aspire to end. In contrast, we see suffering as an evolutionarily important biological signal used to motivate essential action. In many ways, we view suffering more positively than “pleasant” emotional states, as suffering tends to motivate action and progress more than bliss and pleasure, which are more likely to produce inaction and complacency. In other words, bliss is the emotional state that most motivates stagnation, whereas stuffing is the totem of dynamism.

Suffering is the sole fire in a frigid, dark universe around which our souls gather. Stick your hand deep within it, and you will be burned. Put out that fire entirely, and eventually, the cold will overtake you. Should you extinguish the flame of suffering, your molecules would slow down, eventually settling into endless stillness, and the collective human soul would calcify into a frozen mockery of everything life has ever stood for.

One day we may find a better solution to motivate humanity than suffering. Eugenics.org is working to do just that: Edit humans at the genetic level to experience less pain and build new emotional motivational mechanisms. While we neither endorse use of the word “eugenics” nor the project, it’s an interesting direction for a faction of the transhumanist movement to take.

In the same way there are secular framings of most Christian traditions, there are secular framings of Buddhism championed by certain philosophies, such as “negative utilitarianism,” which argues that reducing negative emotions is more important than increasing positive emotions (i.e., that emotional states are the most important thing and any given amount of suffering cannot be canceled out by an equal amount of happiness). Secular movements motivated by this philosophy include the antinatalist movement (whose proponents go so far as to campaign for forced sterilization)^[169] and radical vegetarian advocates (like Brian Tomasik, who focuses 25% of his philanthropy on relieving suffering in things like insects and 25% in things like electrons).^[170] For more on the deeply insidious antinatalist movement, skip to: “Think of the Suffering! (Antinatalism & Negative Utilitarianism)” in the Appendix on page 703.

Our cultural differences with Buddhism extend beyond differing takes on suffering: By our cultural framing, it is one of the highest forms of evil to rob someone of their individuality. While you can eliminate conflict by removing a person’s individuality and merging them into a single collective, conflict is the fuel on which life and ideas thrive. From our perspective, individuality, diversity, and conflict play essential roles in human progress (and in protecting sapience on the whole).

Simone has a different theory as to why we see things differently than Buddhists do—why even if we believed in a Buddhist metaphysical framework for reality, we would see their goal as evil: While both Buddhism and our culture see the individual as just one part of a greater entity, Buddhism sees the internal subjective experience of that collective entity as being the core of it (thence suffering presenting motivation to escape Samsara) while our culture sees the large thing we are part of as being the cycle itself. We are just one tiny aspect of the cycle of death and birth, the bubbling cauldron of evolutionary pressure our genetics and memetic identities were born through. To us, the bubbling cauldron is the thing of value, not the aggregate experience of the things boiling within it.

In Buddhism, everything that perceives itself to be an individual is part of a wider interconnected entity (hence Buddhists try not to cause suffering to other animals and many branches of Buddhism are vegetarian). In contrast, our culture sees everything that perceives itself as an individual as really being one aspect of a cycle—and we believe it is the cycle itself that has value.

From the first nervous system to today, the cycle has been fueled by suffering, divergence, and conflict between and among individuals, species, and groups. This is not a flaw of the cycle or something to escape; it is the cycle. It is amazing that this slight difference in interpretation can produce such logically consistent yet diametrically opposed ideologies—one aimed at preserving and spreading life and sentience and the other dedicated to its systematic eradication. (Again, we are just speaking from our cultural perspective.)

Today the individual human is barely sapient. We only achieve anything of value at the civilizational, multigenerational level. But, one day, through a process red in tooth and claw, sapience will reach a state we cannot yet conceive where individuals will experience genuinely meaningful existence. That state may exist in a human-like body or something yet to be imagined. Maybe by then, we will be able to dissociate the negative feelings that are often associated with suffering, but for now suffering remains an instrumental tool. Bliss is superfluous, a gift evolution sometimes grants us when we are on task.

Not All Buddhists Favor Sapience Genocide

Just as many people join the LDS Church for the benefits its lifestyle yields while not necessarily believing everything in the Book of Mormon, many people practice Buddhism for the various benefits a temperate Buddhist lifestyle can yield and are not themselves negative utilitarians. Entire branches of Buddhism, such as Mahayana Buddhism, exemplify this (with a key differentiating factor of Mahayana Buddhism being that while adherents strive for enlightenment, they choose to remain in the cycle of samsara). Our differences with Buddhist cultivars obviously do not apply to them.

Regarding Buddhist Apologetics

While adherents of Theravada Buddhism may argue that an end to the cycle of suffering that is samsara doesn’t lead to an end to sapience, and may even claim that nirvana is akin to an endless explosion of sapience, we cannot accept that argument as a universal claim given the evidence we have on hand about sapience as an emergent property.

Sapience is defined by an ability to encounter new information and challenges and use those to improve oneself. If the self is spiritual, sapience is intrinsically ended by removing the both challenges and the opportunity to encounter new information.

If the self is material, humans appear to have evolved the prefrontal cortex and an ability to critically think about their actions as a means of accelerating evolution (the human species can reason through problems rather than power through them via sheer life-and-death-based selective pressures). Sapience is not an ephemeral, metaphysical concept but rather an evolved trait. Ending biological or mechanical mechanisms that use sapience for practical reasons won’t open a wonderland of sapience that exists for its own sake—anything that ends a cycle of rebirth will just end sapience.

Either way, an end to samsara is the very definition of homogeneity and stagnation.

Castes & Which Lives Matter

When most people hear the word “caste,” they immediately think of Indian cultures. While this is not an unjustified leap, cultural caste systems are hardly relegated to the Indian subcontinent. What makes the Indian caste system unique is both that it is currently in an earlier stage of being dismantled when contrasted with other caste systems and that it left a significant genetic distance between castes. For example, the two largest castes in Uttar Pradesh, the Yadav and Chamar, are more distant genetically (genetic difference 8.9) than Germans and Greeks (genetic distance 8.69).

Upon hearing about an Indian caste system comprised of five main castes, each of which is divided into about 3,000 sub-castes based on occupation, most foreigners contextualize the concept as being quite alien. People of Anglo-Saxon descent may come to this conclusion forgetting that many of their brethren still walk around with names like Smith and Tailor attached to them—names that hail from a similar caste system. That’s right: In the medieval period, families often maintained specialist trades passed down from one generation to the next. While the Anglo-Saxon caste system was never as strict as that which ultimately developed in India, it wasn’t profoundly less strict than its pre-British Indian counterpart.

Even today, the United States features something of a caste system delineated by where an individual lives. Some regional “castes” culturally specialize in specific tasks—consider Silicon Valley’s technology specialization as an example. These regions can act as cultural beacons, drawing and rewarding individuals with similar sociological profiles (like early castes did). We may even see the genetic results of this sociological profile concentration in Silicon Valley’s high rates of autism (it is no surprise that Simone, who is autistic, came from that regional caste). Finally, this caste system is also systematically unfair, with an individual born in Silicon Valley having astoundingly greater odds of becoming a highly paid tech professional or “intellectual” with a degree at an elite East Coast school than someone born in the Midwest.

Because we think of caste systems in terms of the ultra-specialized, somewhat artificial British-occupation-era Indian caste system, it is easy to miss how fluid most caste systems were historically—similar to the extant “soft” regional caste system in the USA. Soft caste systems allow for some level of choice in caste membership if someone shows exceptional skill and makes significant sacrifices, whereas a hard caste system sets an individual’s caste as a cultural mandate from birth.

What is fascinating about caste systems, and likely a core reason they evolved in so many cultures, is that they allow for the genetic concentration of skills within certain specialties. As offensive as this concept is, the genetic vortices created by castes are so strong that their effects can be seen centuries after they dissolved. A study^[171] conducted in the U.K. in 2015 found that people with the surname Smith (descended from the smith caste) had higher physical capabilities and an above-average aptitude for strength-related activities, while those with the surname Tailor (descended from the tailor caste) had a higher-than-average aptitude for dexterity-related tasks.^[172]

The treatment of Black populations in the U.S. could be seen as the manifestation of a more recent “hard” American caste system. Despite the large number of social movements and political policies focused on helping erase the caste-like dichotomy established in the Jim Crow era, progress is glacial when measured in individual lifetimes.

Indian culture is currently going through something similar, even with similar arguments being made against affirmative action programs for the untouchable caste by detractors. Specifically, many argue these programs should only take into account a family’s economics, as they disproportionately help untouchables from wealthy families and end up giving a boost to individuals who don’t need one—all while hurting poor people from “higher” castes. In the same way, many in the U.S. complain affirmative action disproportionately helps economically advantaged Blacks who are not the descendants of American slaves, with first and second-generation African immigrants, despite constituting only about 10 percent of the U.S. Black population making up about 41% of all Black students in the Ivy League as Roland G. Fryer Jr. noted in a Washington Post op-ed.^[173] (Note: We are not taking a side on this but rather pointing out that both efforts are working to resolve inequalities created by a caste system.)

How long does a caste system take to dissolve after it has been largely abandoned by the culture that previously held it? Well, the Jewish caste system has been functionally irrelevant since the fall of the second temple almost 2,000 years ago—yet even today, Kohanim, Leviim, and Yisraelim have a number of unique privileges and rules applied to them based on an immutable birth caste in all but the most liberal of Jewish communities. So, if you are in a discriminated caste, don’t hold your breath waiting for a complete resolution.

If you think we are picking on other cultures, let’s take a moment to look at the Calvinist unique take on a caste system. Instead of a traditional caste system in which, depending on your physical features or parents, you are placed in a specific caste, the Calvinist caste system … well. It’s different.

As we mentioned at the beginning of the book, the most controversial aspect of the Calvinist cultivar is that not everyone’s life matters equally. Because we believe in a deterministic universe, we believe some lives will not matter from the moment they are born.

As individual humans, we cannot effectively judge which lives matter, so the question of whether a specific other person’s life matters should largely be irrelevant to us. However, when you read about interactions Calvinist communities have with their neighbors, it is common to see them develop a reputation for regarding non-Calvinist outsiders as though their lives don’t matter. This is one of those cultural quirks that isn’t supposed to work this way but almost always functionally does at scale—like Communism always leading to dictatorships when practiced above certain population levels.

Because Calvinists believe the truth of their worldview is apparent to anyone willing to be open-minded, think logically, and search deeply, it is natural that they would see non-Calvinists as willfully ignorant, slow, lazy, or unwilling to accept hard truths. What is interesting about Calvinist elitism is how unmoored it is from class. Anyone can join the culture and once they do, they are regarded as equal to other Calvinists and better than other people.

The Calvinist concept of the elect also has a Schrodinger’s Caste System effect on adherents, as while Calvinists are certain other Calvinists are better than other people, they are constantly afraid that thinking such about themselves will prove that they are not among the elect and not real Calvinists. It’s kind of like that song “What Makes You Beautiful” by the pop band One Direction: If what makes you beautiful is that you don’t know you are beautiful, but you are also aware that anyone who doesn’t know they are beautiful is beautiful, then you constantly oscillate between being beautiful and not beautiful.

Note: We use the term Schrodinger’s Caste System because while Calvinists essentially think there is a caste system given the concept of limited atonement (that not everyone is elect), it’s impossible to know who is who—and even trying to determine what caste you are in (looking under the box) can be proof you were always in a lower caste (i.e., not elect).

Seeing as Calvinism’s weird Schrodinger’s Caste System has negative externalities, should future Calvinist-derived cultivars keep it? Also, why not build a more traditional caste system? To the second question: While the traditional caste systems have the benefit of allowing for specialization from childhood, this benefit does not overcome the “command economy” cost of not allowing people organically to sort into roles that work for them. The Calvinist-style caste system has a totally different function (in addition to its being a logical outcome of living in a deterministic universe). It is designed to guide the moral actions of the system’s adherents.

A common alternate system for motivating moral behavior is: Do good things, or you will be punished later (usually after death). Per this system, the consequence of immorality is punishment. Per the Calvinist system, doing the wrong thing is proof to yourself your life does not matter—or that you were built to be a bad person, a foil to the people who matter. As Calvinists see it, through immoral or moral actions, you are revealing to yourself who you were before the action rather than shaping what will happen to you in the future. This is technically true in almost every culture, but focusing on the external consequences of moral actions detracts from this.

Note: Morality, as our personal culture defines it, is tied to whether an individual’s actions are efficacious and steering the timeline in a positive direction vis-a-vis their stated values. Morality changes based on the cultivar. We are talking about a cultivar’s ability to enforce its own ideas about morality.

Some aforementioned statistics (see below) back up our theory that the Calvinist concept of the elect—a certain set of people predetermined by God to be “saved”—can plausibly motivate moral behavior more effectively than other traditions (such as Quaker traditions, which, as we’ve rudely argued at length, were horrible at enforcing actual, not-mostly-performative moral behavior).

Those stats, reiterated:

In early America, around 42% of Maryland Quakers owned slaves^{^[174]} (this sample was taken from Maryland wills between 1669 and 1750). Among Quaker leaders in Philadelphia, 70% owned slaves (this sample was taken from the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting for 1681 to 1705).^{^[175]} Even if we go with the lower number, this is still the highest rate of slave ownership of any cultivar in the colonies (not on a number-of-slaves-owned basis, but on a precent-of-the-population-owning-slaves basis)—a rate way higher than that of the Anglican-decended Southern culture at the time of the Civil War (around 20% of households and 5% of individuals^{^[176]}). Contrast this with Puritan slave ownership rates which were 0.5%-2%.^{^[177]}

Essentially, the mechanism used by the Schrodinger’s Caste System to motivate low rates of “immoral” (culturally unaligned) actions can be seen in the thought process of the time:

Quakers largely know they are good people (such is an a priori assumption of Quakerism). They have the fire of God burning in them; of course, they are good. So yes, buying a slave may lead to some punishment, but the immoral action can plausibly be offset through other actions—and heck, they might be super nice to the slave … until they forget about their moral conflict.

So far as a Calvinist is concerned, all humans are basically less than garbage: Totally fallen and wretched. One should assume every idea one has is evil and make extra sure it isn’t. To a Calvinist, even thinking about buying a slave can serve not just as proof that you are a bad person, but evidence that God created you to be a bad person. Basically, any taken or contemplated immoral action can serve as evidence that your life is, and always has been, a meaningless joke. You will not be punished for owning a slave per se; if you choose to own a slave, you are merely revealing to yourself that you were always damned. Obviously, the downside to this logic is that while you are quite motivated to avoid immoral thought and action, you also end up with (from the perspective of other cultures) weird beliefs—such as that most charity is likely a waste and more about virtue signaling, and that having fun for the sake of having fun is evil because it is a sign that you would rather indulge than focus on efficacious actions. It’s up to you whether this cultural technology is worth the cost.

The above example demonstrates why cultures that frame people as inherently good often commit more evil acts than cultures that frame humans as inherently evil. Assuming that every idea that pops into your head is evil will lead you to scrutinize yourself much more intensely and make you much less likely to approach situations assuming you are “the good guy.” This approach nevertheless comes at a cost, as it also leads people to distrust others in a way that can lower intergroup cooperation and efficiency.

What does the concept of the “elect” look like in the House cultivar we are building? From our secular perspective, to be “elect” is to live to your full potential and make a meaningful impact vis-a-vis your stated values, whatever they may be. To us, a person who claims to have “not lived up to their potential” never had potential in the first place. Such is the truth of a deterministic reality. Either you do what needs to be done to be among the elect, or you don’t.

Everyone is gifted or special along some metric or another, meaning there’s always some way or another a person may feel superior. We don’t mind if our kids or members of our House think they are better than others so long as that feeling is rightfully earned through thoughtfully driven, efficacious, measurable action. When you take an action or are infected by thoughts that draw you off the path of efficaciousness vis-a-vis your values, you prove to yourself you are not likely to be among the elect.

Side note: A fascinating phenomenon tied to the Indian caste system is that one caste, the Brahmans, are disproportionately represented among Indians who emigrate to other countries (or at least the U.S.). This creates a phenomenon where we always have to ask ourselves if the stereotypes we have psychologically built around “Indian” character traits are actually only tied to Brahmans. This is one of the reasons we don’t talk too much about Indian culture in this book; it is hard to differentiate between our perspectives of Indian culture and Brahman culture.

That said, one thing that cannot go unmentioned about Indian culture is that it seems exceptionally well adapted to both managing and navigating large bureaucracies. At the time of this book’s publication, the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Twitter, IBM, OnlyFans, Adobe, Palo Alto Networks, Mastercard, and PepsiCo are culturally Indian (in fact, 60 of the S&P’s Fortune 500 companies have Indian CEOs). Indian cultures also appear to be quite adept at motivating entrepreneurship, seeing as 25% of top Silicon Valley startup founders are Indian.^[178] Is this an Indian thing, a Hindi thing, or a Brahman thing? Some of these CEOs are Sikh, so it is probably an Indian thing more broadly. We don’t know what’s going on, but there is probably something here.

Pain and Pacifism

Probably no culture has a more intense relationship with pain, asceticism, peace, and suffering than the Jains. Jains are famous for their obsessive attempts to not hurt other living beings—sweeping the ground in front of their feet as they walk so as to not accidentally step on any insects and avoiding root vegetable foods out of fear their harvesting might harm worms (obviously, not all Jains do this, but the most observant do).

Side note: The Jains are one of the most at-risk ancient cultures in the world due to their extremely low birth rate.

In addition to winning an easy gold medal for “most extreme culture” in regards to their focus on not harming other living beings, Jains are also extreme practitioners of asceticism, engendering more personal suffering through self-denial than any other group we’ve encountered. As an example: Mahavira, the culture’s founder, avoided village stays lasting more than a day and took measures to leave towns after two days, all to ensure he would never make a friend or gain a kind ear. Outside of hermit monasticism, many monastics of other cultures at least have friends. He also started the practice of Sallekhana, a form of meditation through which one kills oneself through slow, gradual starvation (while other cultures, like the Buddhist Sokushinbutsu, have similar practices, no other large culture exercised such practices as frequently as the Jains).

While we would argue that Jains’ focus on suffering for its own sake seems extremely self-indulgent (coming from a cultural background that does not see even human suffering as a negative), Jain asceticism seems to produce positive externalities unrelated to its explicit mandates. While we have seen figures that strain credulity, such as reports suggesting that, despite comprising just 0.4% of India’s population, Jains pay as much as 24% of the nation’s personal income tax,^[179] it is inarguable that Jains represent one of the most educated cultures in the world—not to mention one of the wealthiest cultures on average.^[180]

Despite being both dramatically better educated and wealthier than other cultures who live alongside them, Jains are (so far as we can tell) more respected by their cohabitating cultures than any other cultural group that has achieved this status. Usually, when a minority culture is dramatically wealthier than the majority culture, the difference breeds enmity (take Jews as an easy example). Specifically, cultures like these suffer from the “middleman minority” phenomenon, whereby a minority group ends up becoming more educated than its surrounding society because it reliably acts as a neutral third party to mediate business transactions (being they are usually neither culturally nor genetically related to the people doing business).^[181] Somehow the Jains have not only escaped this trap but managed to be fairly well-liked by their neighbors.^[182] We suspect Jains’ intense focus on not leading others to suffer must be a significant contributing factor on this front.

Other cultures, like the strictly-pacifist Quakers, also share this halo effect—however, not all pacifist cultures do. The Israeli Haredim^[183] are largely “otherized,” discriminated against and disliked by groups you would assume to be their cultural allies. Perhaps Israeli Haredim pacifism fails to win popularity points because it is publicly framed as: “We have more important things to do” as opposed to “we suffer to ensure we don’t hurt other people.” The Anabaptists, such as the Amish, represent another pacifist cultural cluster whose pacifism has put them in hot water. In their case, we suspect the enmity comes from their being surrounded by cultures that generally see violence as a positive (e.g., cultures that see them as traitors for not participating in wars).

Is it worth it to incorporate pacifism into a freshly-designed cultivar? Probably not if you care about female empowerment. The two communities that practice both non-violence and have something that even begins to flirt with gender equality (Jains and Quakers) both have vanishingly low birth rates, and we suspect these factors may be connected. Focusing on non-violence means not seeing one’s community as being in a zero-sum game with the world. Such a viewpoint can rob a culture of one of the biggest motivators for a high birth rate. On the other hand—if you abandon gender equality but keep pacifism, you might be fine (in terms of birth rate, at least), as two of the highest-birth-rate cultures on earth are nonviolent (the Haredi and the Anabaptists).

Mortification practices represent another extreme relationship some cultures have with pain, asceticism, peace, and suffering. Probably the most famous of these is the self-flagellation practiced by a number of Roman Catholic sects—and to a lesser extent by some Sikh sects. Our read of these practices is that they are wildly misread. While historically, self-flagellation served as a form of self-punishment in an attempt to change God’s mind on an issue (see the flageolets and the plague), the practice in general is more focused on learning to control one’s own emotional state. For example, people focus on the Opus Dei for self-flagellation while ignoring that the Opus Dei also has the mandate to be cheerful around others—these practices are two sides of the same emotional control coin.

This is true for most cultures that indulge in suffering and teach their adherents that learning to embrace it is a positive. For example, both the Calvinists and related Puritan cultures hold that people can better themselves by learning to endure suffering and contextualize positive emotional states as intrinsically corrupting. Even adhering to a secular Calvinist tradition, Simone often reminds me, “the only real, lasting happiness, contentment, and satisfaction are biological and psychological rewards for the successful pursuit of one’s values—all other positive emotional states should be viewed with extreme suspicion.” Here we should note that Calvinist cultivars don’t practice intentional self-harm for self-harm’s sake, seeing it as a self-indulgent waste of the short lives we are gifted. Rather, Calvinists consider opportunities to master suffering in the meaningful pursuit of a goal to be a blessing.

As an example, Simone has chosen to work through labor and delivery, handling things like sales calls in the midst of unmedicated labor. She sees the challenge as an opportunity to further her self-mastery. In fact, the first person to hold our first baby was one of our company’s controllers because she came to the hospital to go over accounting information with Simone. I don’t come anywhere close to her level of temperance, but consider myself lucky to have someone setting such aggressive goalposts for what is possible.^[184]

There are manifold downsides to choosing this cultural perspective. The Calvinist choice to contextualize suffering as a neutral state explains in part why Calvinists were known and derided for not donating to charities involved in the alleviation of suffering. Lauding suffering can also lead to what most cultures would see as negative outcomes, such as Mother Teresa setting up her clinics in a way that was designed to increase and prolong suffering, as she thought suffering brought people closer to God.^[185]

^[1] A meme is an idea inspected through the lens of evolutionary units. Similar to a virus, a successful meme effectively uses humans to replicate itself. Successful memes are, therefore, more common and pervasive.

^[2] While religions and cultures have sometimes been able to convert large groups of non-adherents during highly constrained periods of history and within highly constrained geographies, this is an exception and not the rule. Most cultures and religions spread through high birth rates and conquest. We explain the fundamentals behind this later in the book.

^[3] Jews evolved a less stringent handwashing practice long before Islam: Leviticus 15:11 “The person who is touched by one who has a discharge without ringing his hands in water must wash their clothes and bathe with water, and they will be unclean till evening.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handwashing_in_Judaism

^[4] In these cultures, the option to maintain a polygynous relationship is only really exercised by wealthy and powerful men. In contrast, normal men still live monogamously. A culture does not need every man to have multiple wives to be polygynous, as obviously that is impossible. In other words, the majority of relationships within a culture can be monogamous, and that culture can still be categorized as polygynous (in fact, this is frequently the case in polygynous cultures).

^[5] These stats are detailed in Henrich, Boyd, and Richardson 2012 (The puzzle of monogamous marriage) but originally came from Murdock’s 1967 “Ethnographic Atlas: A Summary.” The calculation itself comes from p. 282 of Daly and Wilson’s book “Sex, evolution, and behavior” (1983)

^[6] Polygamy – an overview | ScienceDirect Topics. from https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/polygamy

^[7] “5–10% of men actually have several wives simultaneously” (Helen Fisher’s estimate) in societies in which polygyny is permitted. This makes it seem as though allowing polygyny culturally but practicing monogamy individually is the “default” human behavior. Nevertheless, what matters in a culture is who ultimately reproduces, and genetic evidence shows most of our ancestors came out of polygynous relationships (depending on the period of history), with 67% of our ancestors being female and 33% male.* To be more specific, humans are probably polymorphic and can change their optimization between polygyny and monogamy but default to polyamory when resources and cultural allowance permit.
* It would be possible to get this number without polygyny if you had a very very high female death rate, but data does not support this as a cause. We wrote a whole book on this subject (The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality), so check it out if it interests you.

*Lippold, S., Xu, H., Ko, A., Li, M., Renaud, G., Butthof, A., Schröder, R., & Stoneking, M. (2014). Human paternal and maternal demographic histories: Insights from high-resolution Y chromosome and mtDNA sequences. Investigative Genetics, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/2041-2223-5-13 From, https://investigativegenetics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2041-2223-5-13
*Jason A. Wilder, Zahra Mobasher, Michael F. Hammer, Genetic Evidence for Unequal Effective Population Sizes of Human Females and Males, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Volume 21, Issue 11, November 2004, Pages 2047–2057, https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msh214 from, http://hammerlab.biosci.arizona.edu/publications/Wilder_2004_MBE.pdf

^[8] See: Bonelli R, Dew RE, Koenig HG, Rosmarin DH, Vasegh S. Religious and spiritual factors in depression: review and integration of the research. Depress Res Treat. 2012;2012:962860. doi: 10.1155/2012/962860. Epub 2012 Aug 15. PMID: 22928096; PMCID: PMC3426191.

^[9] This is likely why prohibitions against same-sex relations have been nearly universal in widely practiced traditional cultures that have withstood the test of time. However, if technologies enabling same-sex couples to have their own kids become more affordable, these prohibitions could end up getting flipped in the distant future of our species. For example, lesbian couples would be able to breed at twice the rate of heterosexual couples—we muse on how such a culture could be structured later in the book.

^[10] Fun fact: Malcolm’s favorite, most respected religious denomination is that led by the Calvary Chapel Association and Simone’s the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

^[11]AbdAleati, N. S., Mohd Zaharim, N., & Mydin, Y. O. (2016). Religiousness and Mental Health: Systematic Review Study. Journal of religion and health, 55(6), 1929–1937. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-014-9896-1

^[12] Latin America and the Caribbean to Reach Maximum Population Levels by 2058, issued as a press release by the United Nations’ Public Information Unit Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) on July 11th, 2019. https://www.cepal.org/en/pressreleases/latin-america-and-caribbean-reach-maximum-population-levels-2058

^[13]Macrotrends’ report on India Fertility Rate 1950-2022: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/fertility-rate

^[14] “China’s population could halve within next 45 years, new study warns” published by the South China Morning Post on October 1st, 2021. https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/2190995/chinas-population-could-halve-within-next-45-years-new-study-warns

^[15] McHugh, P. (2021, February 16). Fertility among immigrants and native-born Americans. CIS.org. from https://cis.org/Report/Fertility-Among-Immigrants-and-NativeBorn-Americans

^[16] According to the United Nations Population Division
United Nations. (n.d.). World population prospects – population division. United Nations. from https://population.un.org/wpp/

^[17] Tooze, A. (2022, October 15). Chartbook #161 Iran’s contested demographic revolution. #161 Iran’s contested demographic revolution. from https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-161-irans-contested-demographic?fbclid=IwAR02R-9s7xj0VDG7h9fZk59bhP8yTyKzJqPzTbq6EnU6RAegWbx7Z6zXOtQ

[18] Tooze, A. (2022, October 15). Chartbook #161 Iran’s contested demographic revolution. #161 Iran’s contested demographic revolution, from https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-161-irans-contested-demographic

[19] Author, N. (2020, August 20). Main factors driving population growth. Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project, 2023, from https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2011/01/27/future-of-the-global-muslim-population-main-factors/

^[20] “Mormon Fertility: 6 indicators” published on the Eternal Anglo blog on March 19th, 2021: https://eternalanglo.com/mormon-fertility-6-indicators

^[21] Korea’s fertility rate drops even further to 0.81 in 2021 published by the Korea Times on July 3rd, 2022. https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2022/02/281_324402.html

^[22] 40.5 kids, 16.4 grandkids, 6.6 great-grandkids.

^[23] Bailey, M. Currie, J. Schwandt, H. (2022, October) The Covid-19 Baby Bump: The unexpected increase in U.S. fertility rates in response to the pandemic. National Bureau Of Economic Research from https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30569/w30569.pdf

^[24] Except maybe Israel, but more on that later.

^[25] Also, declining interest rates increase the “real” value of equities directly by reducing market yield on securities and indirectly by subsidizing new economic activity. This drives increased transaction volume that’s interpreted as increases in total consumption rather than an added tax burden, which obscures the extent of inflation. We have already “spent” that option for the most part, going from interest rates of 20% in the 80s to only a few percentage points at the time of this book’s publication.

^[26] Productivity: Output per hour worked. Our World in Data. from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-hour-pennworldtable

^[27] We acknowledge that governments may begin to experiment with some wild and innovative debt instruments designed to prop up financial market increases, but whether or not such yet-untested experiments will work is pure conjecture. We would be unwilling to bet the next generation’s collective savings that a Deus ex machina will sweep in to save financial markets when their core fundamental drivers change.

^[28] If you are wondering why we don’t just use our connections with various groups of powerful, influential people to ensure they (1) recognize the risks we have identified and (2) contribute to efforts addressing them: Being a nerdy freshman at the same high school as the cool kids doesn’t mean the cool kids are going to listen to you—it merely grants you insight into what the cool kids are saying and doing.

^[29] See: Why Has Detroit Continued To Decline? by Scott Beye, published Jul 31, 2018,11:58pm EDT https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2018/07/31/why-has-detroit-continued-to-decline/?sh=5474d9be3fbe

^[30] It’s easy to process that 7.2% of the budget goes to paying off debt in NYC without noticing that 33% of payroll expenses are paying off already-accrued pensions. Tracking all the fixed expenses for accrued services on a city’s payroll is very difficult. If we had to make an estimate for most major American cities, fixed expenses for accrued services are probably close to 25% of the budget, but 50% makes the math easier to demonstrate.

^[31] Southwood, B. (2022, July 26). How crime worsens sprawl. from https://bensouthwood.substack.com/p/how-crime-worsens-sprawl

^[32] “Life expectancy (from birth) in the United States, from 1860 to 2020*” published by Aaron O’Neill on Statista on June 21st, 2022. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-united-states-all-time/

^[33] Bouchard TJ Jr, McGue M. Genetic and environmental influences on human psychological differences. J Neurobiol. 2003 Jan;54(1):4-45. doi: 10.1002/neu.10160. PMID: 12486697. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/neu.10160
Christopher T Dawes, Aaron C Weinschenk, On the genetic basis of political orientation, Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 34, 2020, Pages 173-178, ISSN 2352-1546, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2020.03.012, From, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352154620300553

^[34] Hatemi, P. K., Medland, S. E., Klemmensen, R., Oskarsson, S., Littvay, L., Dawes, C. T., Verhulst, B., McDermott, R., Nørgaard, A. S., Klofstad, C. A., Christensen, K., Johannesson, M., Magnusson, P. K., Eaves, L. J., & Martin, N. G. (2014). Genetic influences on political ideologies: Twin analyses of 19 measures of political ideologies from five democracies and genome-wide findings from three populations. Behavior Genetics, 44(3), 282–294. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-014-9648-8 from, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4038932/

^[35] Reuter, M., Frenzel, C., Walter, N., Markett, S.A., & Montag, C. (2011). Investigating the genetic basis of altruism: the role of the COMT Val158Met polymorphism. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 6 5, 662-8 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21030481/

^[36] Gregory, A. M., Light-Häusermann, J. H., Rijsdijk, F., & Eley, T. C. (2009). Behavioral genetic analyses of prosocial behavior in adolescents. Developmental science, 12(1), 165–174. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00739.x

^[37] Vogl, T. S., & Freese, J. (2020). Differential fertility makes society more conservative on family values. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(14), 7696-7701.

^[38] Kerry, N., Al-Shawaf, L., Barbato, M., Batres, C., Blake, K. R., Cha, Y., Chauvin, G. V., Clifton, J. D., Fernandez, A. M., Galbarczyk, A., Ghossainy, M. E., Jang, D., Jasienska, G., Karasawa, M., Laustsen, L., Loria, R., Luberti, F., Moran, J., Pavlović, Z., … Murray, D. R. (2022). Experimental and cross-cultural evidence that parenthood and parental care motives increase social conservatism. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 289(1982). https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.0978 from, https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2022.0978

^[39] Vogl, T. S., & Freese, J. (2020). Differential fertility makes society more conservative on family values. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(14), 7696–7701. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1918006117, from https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1918006117

^[40] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarian_personality

^[41] Costello, T. H., Bowes, S. M., Stevens, S. T., Waldman, I. D., Tasimi, A., & Lilienfeld, S. O. (2022). Clarifying the structure and nature of left-wing authoritarianism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 122(1), 135–170. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000341,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarian_personality#Left-wing_authoritarians

^[42] Christian Kandler; Edward Bell; Rainer Riemann (2016). “The Structure and Sources of Right-wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation”. European Journal of Personality. 30 (4): 406–420. doi:10.1002/per.2061. S2CID 152253763.

^[43] Meisenberg, G. (2021) Non-cognitive correlates of fertility in the United States, London conference on Intelligence

^[44] Stephan, W. (2021). Rapid evolutionary adaptation in response to selection on quantitative traits. Life, 11(8), 797. https://doi.org/10.3390/life11080797 from, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8398862/

^[45] See: https://www.heritage.org/political-process/report/did-america-have-christian-founding
From: Hall, M. D. (2020). Did America have a Christian founding? separating modern myth from historical truth. Religious Studies Review, 46(1), 108-109. https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.14492

^[46] Like most of this cultural strain, George Washington was pretty inventive with his religion. His speeches lead to the belief that he was a mix of Deist, Calvinist, and Anglican. https://ourfoundingtruth.blogspot.com/2009/09/another-calvinist-founding-father.html
(We qualify Simone’s relation because George Washington had no kids. Being a distant niece, there are tons of people who can make the same claim as Simone, plus Simone’s mother and older relatives are obviously more closely related to George Washington than she is.)

^[47]Famously this was first proposed by Weber, M. (1904). Die protestantische ethik und der geist des kapitalismus.
Recent research supports that this is more than just a claim and likely has a large element of truth behind it.
Luzer, D. (2013, September 4). Study: The Protestant work ethic is real. Pacific Standard. from https://psmag.com/economics/protestant-worth-ethic-real-65544

^[48]See: https://www.heritage.org/political-process/report/did-america-have-christian-founding
From: Hall, M. D. (2020). Did America have a Christian founding?: Separating modern myth from historical truth. Religious Studies Review, 46(1), 108–109. https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.14492

^[49] As can be seen with Malcolm’s family, branches that did not secularize converted from Calvinist traditions to more mainstream Christian branches. For historical examples of this phenomenon, consider individuals like William Ellery Channing, who was born a Calvinist in the early 1800s only to lead a huge chunk of Calvinists away from the denomination by founding the very-low-birth-rate Unitarian movement.

^[50] Pichler, I., Fuchsberger, C., Platzer, C., Çalişkan, M., Marroni, F., Pramstaller, P. P., & Ober, C. (2009). Drawing the history of the Hutterite population on a genetic landscape: Inference from Y-chromosome and mtdna genotypes. European Journal of Human Genetics, 18(4), 463–470. https://doi.org/10.1038/ejhg.2009.172

^[51] Religion in Latin America, Chapter 5: Social Attitudes, by Pew Research & Benjamin Wormald

^[52] Fitzgerald, C. (2019, May 8th). Over 80% of Irish adults drink alcohol, and the rate is set to increase. TheJournal.ie. from https://www.thejournal.ie/alcohol-study-4622415-May2019/

^[53] Secular Calvinism is a form of cultural Calvinism passed between generations. In the 21st century, it is usually associated with strict atheism. Most cultural Calvinists who also remained theologically Calvinist were absorbed into other Christian cultures. The growing group of recently converted Theological Calvinists usually have more in common with Evangelical Protestant or Pentecostal cultivars than traditional American Calvinist culture (thus why the concept of a cultivar is important). All three of these groups have little in common with the Dutch Calvinist cultivar, which evolved almost totally independently.

^[54] We say “Calvinist” and not “Puritan” as our families mostly hail from the second wave of Calvinist immigrants, which were predominantly Scottish and Irish and who settled in the backcountry. This group was significantly more isolationist and independent than the community-centric Puritans. (If you are a fan of Albion’s Seed, this was a group that had the religious and cultural beliefs of people who settled in New England but came with the group that settled in the backcountry.)

^[55] For more of Scott Alexander’s fairly accurate take on Calvinist culture, read the article “Puritan Spotting” (Malcolm’s score: 48). It shows that while we may seem like weirdos from the perspective of modern American society, we are such generic representatives of our birth culture that we border on being an offensive stereotype. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/12/puritan-spotting/

^[56] For a fairly succinct summary of the Calvinist theological argument, check out the YouTube video, It’s Good To Be A Calvinist: https://youtu.be/V1w8wz0uL5E

^[57] The potentiality of branching timelines (in which we believe) does not interfere with our belief in predestination. If there are multiple timelines, they branch because of quantum fluctuations—not conscious decisions.

^[58] A culture actively dismissive if not outright hostile to art is not going to produce many artists who don’t hold a grudge against it. This, combined with the culture seeing most charity and positive emotional states as sinful is why Calvinist archetypes in culture are almost universally antagonists (more on this in the Appendix section “Calvinist Stereotypes in Media”

^[59] It would be inaccurate to claim that Calvinist culture never produces art. Famous books like The Pilgrim’s Progress and Gilead are both products of Calvinist culture, as is the song Amazing Grace by John Bunyan. However, like most Calvinist-inspired media, they are meditations on faith, man, and man’s place in the world—not unlike everything in the Pragmatists Guide series. They were written with a purpose other than self expression or entertainment.

^[60] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism

^[61] Ironically, while Malcolm’s family had some well-known capitalists during the era of communist threat (his grandad was a Republican congressman), they were also well-known socialist revolutionaries during the time of the Robber Barons, with Thomas Hickey writing in the Rebel (Texas’ largest socialist newspaper) in 1911 that he hoped the Collins family would “increase until they cover the earth with the clean clear water of Socialism,” praising the “strain of radicalism” that ran through “the veins” of the Collins family. Historically, they have been fairly unmoored from any political team and have gravitated to whichever faction best maximizes individual freedom. For example, when Malcolm’s great-great-grandad Vinson Collins was in office, his big cause entailed ensuring women’s suffrage.
la Teja Jesús F de. (2016). Lone Star unionism, dissent, and resistance: Other sides of Civil War Texas. University of Oklahoma Press.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinson_Allen_Collins

^[62] Segal, M. (2013, December 10). As Cool As the Other Side of a Calvinist. Desiring God. from https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/as-cool-as-the-other-side-of-a-calvinist

^[63] Among Malcolm’s ancestors alone, there was Warren J. Collins (Malcolm’s direct ancestor), who ran the Big Thicket Jay Hawkers (a paramilitary who fought the Confederacy); his brother Jasper Collins, who was one of the founders of the Free State of Jones, and the man who Newton Knight credits as turning him against the Confederacy; his brother Riley Collins, another founding member of the Free State of Jones who later joined the Union army; Simeon Collins who died fighting for the Free State of Jones; and Malcolm’s great-great-great uncle, James Morgan Valentine, the Free State of Jones’ first Lieutenant. Some sources suggest that Newton Knight, the founder of the Free State of Jones, was raised by the Collins family, but it is unclear what that means—perhaps the Collins family ran some sort of extremist Primitive Baptist (a branch of Calvinist) church at the time.
For backing on our claim that 15 out of 50 members of the Free State of Jones were direct relatives of the Collins family, see the book: Lone Star Unionism, Dissent, and Resistance: Other Sides of Civil War Texas by Jesús F. de la Teja.

^[64] A good example of this comes from the practice shown in the children’s book, The Witch of Blackbird Pond. In which, acting out passages of the Bible was framed as sinful because it might cause another person to interpret the Bible the way they did instead of through independent reasoning. By priming a person to see the world in a certain way, one risks robbing them of an element of personal agency. In some modern Calvinist churches, this means that when a church does have a preacher, they must read the Bible in order (rather than skipping around) because picking and choosing passages could incept the listener with the preacher’s biases.

^[65] Jeongsoo Kim & Gabriela Sanchez-Soto (2011) Higher fertility among the first-generation Korean immigrants in the U.S.: An assimilation mechanism towards a new way of living, from https://paa2019.populationassociation.org/uploads/191215#

^[66] April 2021 General Conference. (2022) “2021 Statistical Report for the April 2022 Conference.” Newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 2 Apr. 2022, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/2021-statistical-report-april-2022-conference.

^[67] Noyce, David. (2019, Oct 24) “This Week in Mormon Land: Convert Retention Rates around the World, Reaching out to Asylum Seekers, and Disappearing Bibles.” The Salt Lake Tribune, https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2019/10/24/this-week-mormon-land/.

^[68] Toronto, James A, et al. (2020) “Why Some Dropped out: Religious Studies Center.” Why Some Dropped Out | Religious Studies Center, https://rsc.byu.edu/mormons-piazza/why-some-dropped-out.

^[69] April 2021 General Conference. “2020 Statistical Report for the April 2021 Conference.” Newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 3 Apr. 2021, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/april-2021-general-conference-statistical-report.

^[70] Brooks, Joanna. (2012, Feb 3) “Mormon Numbers Not Adding Up.” Religion Dispatches, https://religiondispatches.org/mormon-numbers-not-adding-up/.

^[71]It took until 1928 for Vilhjalmur Stefansson to discover how Inuit culture was getting enough vitamin C to stay alive. It turns out that their practice of undercooking meats is what allowed them to live without fear of scurvy, something unknown to science at that time. It turns out raw muktuk is pound for pound as good a source of vitamin C as orange juice.

^[72] Lyman Stone (2018, Feb 8) How Long Until We’re All Amish?

https://medium.com/migration-issues/how-long-until-were-all-amish-268e3d0de87

^[73]Alexander, S. (2022, August 11). Astral codex ten: Scott Alexander. Substack. from https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/will-nonbelievers-really-believe

^[74]Stone, L. (2022, August 8). America’s growing religious-secular fertility divide. Institute for Family Studies. from https://ifstudies.org/blog/americas-growing-religious-secular-fertility-divide

^[75] We stole the word “wishy thinking” from the Spacestar Ordering scene in IT Crowd (Series Four, Episode Three: “Spaceology”), which does a great job of describing—and satirizing—this phenomenon.

^[76]Tiara, C. (2015, June 5). The pop culture pagans who draw power from Tumblr. VICE. from https://www.vice.com/en/article/d73q3x/the-pop-culture-pagans-who-draw-power-from-tumblr

^[77] Tiara, C. (2015, June 5). The pop culture pagans who draw power from Tumblr. VICE. from https://www.vice.com/en/article/d73q3x/the-pop-culture-pagans-who-draw-power-from-tumblr

^[78] Beldi, L. (2019, April 19). Why is the phantom such a huge cultural phenomenon in Papua New Guinea? ABC News. from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-19/why-is-the-phantom-such-a-huge-phenomenon-in-png/11029406

^[79] Pandey, G. (2011, February 15). An ‘English goddess’ for India’s down-trodden. BBC News. from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia-12355740

^[80] If success is defined by a culture’s ability to conquer its neighbors and spread.

^[81] Rich, A. (2012) Gender and Spirituality: Are Women Really More Spiritual?

https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1293&context=honors

^[82] Bonelli R, Dew RE, Koenig HG, Rosmarin DH, Vasegh S. (2012, Aug 15) Religious and spiritual factors in depression: review and integration of the research. Depress Res Treat. 2012;2012:962860. doi: 10.1155/2012/962860. Epub PMID: 22928096; PMCID: PMC3426191.

^[83] Marston, EG, Hare, A, Allen, JP (2010). Rejection sensitivity in late adolescence: Social and emotional sequelae. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 20(4), 959–982. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1532-7795.2010.00675.x from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2990973/#R56,
Harper MS, Dickson JW, Welsh DP. Self-Silencing and Rejection Sensitivity in Adolescent Romantic Relationships. Journal of Youth and Adolescence. 2006;35(3):459–467. from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10964-006-9048-3,
(Note: Have not read the source for the next two citations.)

Larson RW, Asmussen L. Anger, worry, and hurt in early adolescence: An enlarging world of negative emotions. In: Colten ME, Gore S, editors. Adolescent Stress: Causes and Consequences. New York: Aldine de Gruyter; 1991. pp. 21–41.,
Larson RW, Clore GL, Wood GA. The emotions of romantic relationships: Do they wreak havoc on adolescents? In: Furman W, Brown BB, Feiring C, editors. The Development of Romantic Relationships in Adolescence. New York: Cambridge Press; 1999. pp. 19–49.

^[84] This is not an intentional decision anyone is making but just a natural part of cultural evolution. Those portions of a dying haven culture that can maintain themselves most vigorously will be those which exist in an environment closest to that in which it evolved (one of discrimination). As such, any incremental practice that appears within a sub-group by random mutation which subjects members to more or renewed discrimination will produce a more robust cultural display and increase the odds that the sub-group grows.
Think of it like this: If a frog species develops in water, a closely related species adapting to land might retain water-filled egg sacs because it is “evolutionarily easier” than adapting to a 100% terrestrial lifecycle. Like animal evolution, cultural evolution is incremental, and often small cultural changes are enough.

[85] Kamins, T. L., Friedman, G., Wineburg, R., & Wiener, J. (2015, March 20). 96 percent of U.S. jews live in urban areas, Census Bureau reports. Jewish Telegraphic Agency. from https://www.jta.org/archive/96-percent-of-u-s-jews-live-in-urban-areas-census-bureau-reports

[86] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/04/the-most-and-least-educated-u-s-religious-groups

^[87] We discuss the unusual behaviors this has caused in Israel in this book’s Urban vs. Rural chapter, as modern Judaism, outside of the crypto-Jews, is a very urban specialist culture. When forced to take on all ecological niches in a society, Jewish cultivars will create micro-urban centers in rural areas.

^[88] Haidt, J. (2013). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Vintage Books. from https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ndepF_iet1v3trS6VDYwlTvgszw3Sl9n/view

^[89] Nature Publishing Group. (n.d.). Nature news. from https://www.nature.com/nature-portfolio/editorial-policies,
Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans. Nat Hum Behav 6, 1029–1031 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01443-2 from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2

^[90] Lee, J. (2022, October 19). NIH blocks access to genetics database. City Journal. from https://www.city-journal.org/nih-blocks-access-to-genetics-database?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

^[91] It is rumored that the NIH genetics database and the U.K. Biobank shut down access because a team accidentally found father-daughter incest was 600,000% more common among Muslim immigrants than among the general U.K. population. If this is the case (and it almost certainly is, as it was tweeted by a widely published researcher in the field), it is a great demonstration of how the virus does not care about actual harm done. It does not care that thousands of little girls could be delivered from sexual abuse if this data were leveraged to develop compassionate policies—only that it can shield those living under its tyranny from offense. The virus corrupts positive intentions (such as those to fight Islamophobia) into pure evil, facilitating the rape of thousands of little girls.
For more background, refer to the following tweet from Francisco C. Ceballos, a widely published population geneticist (https://scholar.google.co.za/citations?user=jmTjmbcAAAAJ&hl=en): https://twitter.com/monitoringbias/status/1590006016640692224

^[92] Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20(1), 98–116. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-007-0034-z from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11211-007-0034-z

^[93] Though, the lawsuits certainly helped them along in this case.

^[94] Greenwood, S. (2022, August 30). Black Americans are pessimistic about their position in U.S. society. Pew Research Center Race & Ethnicity. from https://www.pewresearch.org/race-ethnicity/2022/08/30/black-americans-are-pessimistic-about-their-position-in-u-s-society/
Hurst, Erik., Rubinstein, Y., and Shimizu, K. (2022.) Black-White inequalities have remained at about the same level in relative wage terms from 1980 to the present. Task-Based Discrimination. Unpublished working paper.

^[95]Kaufmann E (2021, March 1) Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship. Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology from https://cspicenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/AcademicFreedom.pdf

^[96]McLaughlin & Associates (2022) National undergraduate study 4-year full-time students under 25

https://files.constantcontact.com/6e23ce19301/9617d6cd-d850-47ac-a7a1-1aff50d7b2cd.pdf

^[97](2022, October 3) Campus expression survey. Heterodox Academy. from https://heterodoxacademy.org/campus-expression-survey/

^[98] Scholars under fire database. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Retrieved December 29, 2022, from https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/scholars-under-fire

^[99]Stevens, S. Goldstein, A. (2021, November 19). New Republic, Old Data: Article on UATX wrongly dismisses campus illiberalism problem. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. from https://www.thefire.org/new-republic-old-data-article-on-uatx-wrongly-dismisses-campus-illiberalism-problem/

^[100]Schlott, R. (2022, July 19). Students reveal ‘Forbidden lessons’ taught at anti-woke University of Austin. New York Post. from https://nypost.com/2022/07/16/university-of-austin-students-share-anti-woke-forbidden-lessons/

^[101]Meckler, L. (2022, September 11). New York set to force ultra-Orthodox schools to teach secular subjects. The Washington Post. from https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/09/hasidic-yeshiva-new-york-orthodox/

^[102] Bouchard TJ Jr, McGue M. Genetic and environmental influences on human psychological differences. J Neurobiol. 2003 Jan;54(1):4-45. doi: 10.1002/neu.10160. PMID: 12486697. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/neu.10160) and Christopher T Dawes, Aaron C Weinschenk, On the genetic basis of political orientation, Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 34, 2020, Pages 173-178, ISSN 2352-1546, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2020.03.012. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352154620300553)

^[103] Hatemi, P. K., Medland, S. E., Klemmensen, R., Oskarsson, S., Littvay, L., Dawes, C. T., Verhulst, B., McDermott, R., Nørgaard, A. S., Klofstad, C. A., Christensen, K., Johannesson, M., Magnusson, P. K., Eaves, L. J., & Martin, N. G. (2014). Genetic influences on political ideologies: twin analyses of 19 measures of political ideologies from five democracies and genome-wide findings from three populations. Behavior genetics, 44(3), 282–294. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-014-9648-8 from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4038932/

^[104] Reuter, M., Frenzel, C., Walter, N., Markett, S.A., & Montag, C. (2011). Investigating the genetic basis of altruism: the role of the COMT Val158Met polymorphism. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 6 5, 662-8.

^[105] Gregory, A. M., Light-Häusermann, J. H., Rijsdijk, F., & Eley, T. C. (2009). Behavioral genetic analyses of prosocial behavior in adolescents. Developmental science, 12(1), 165–174. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00739.x

^[106] A paperclip maximizer is a hypothetical artificial intelligence whose utility function values something that humans would consider almost worthless—such as paperclips. It is used to illustrate how applying an AI that was smarter than all of humanity to a simple task, like “make paper clips,” might cause the AI to outsmart anyone trying to turn it off and eventually co-opt all known resources (including those needed to sustain humanity) to produce paperclips instead.

^[107] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_international_status_and_statistics#Germany

^[108] Sadly, this study does not control for socioeconomic background, which likely massively biases the results. Still, doing nothing shouldn’t even be close to better than something we sacrifice our entire childhoods to undertake.
How do Unschoolers Turn Out?, Vangelova, https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/37091/how-do-unschoolers-turn-out

^[109]Harris, D. (2008, September 18). Most Americans Believe in Guardian Angels. ABC News. from https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=5833399

^[110] We have developed some holidays for our kids around the concept of Future Police, which portray them in simple terms (e.g., they may feature humans in futuristic armor because that manifestation of Future Police is easier for kids to understand than, say, probability waves). This is similar to the visual representation of God as an old white guy with a long white beard sitting on a cloud that is commonly evoked despite lacking a strong canonical basis. Both are influenced by easy-to-relate-to pop culture (be it in the form of sci-fi movies or traditional artistic representations of Zeus).

^[111] Nield, D. (2022, October 22). Study suggests spins of ‘brain water’ could mean our minds use quantum computation. ScienceAlert. from https://www.sciencealert.com/study-suggests-spins-of-brain-water-could-mean-our-minds-use-quantum-computation

^[112] Simone says none of our readers will know what I am talking about here, but I think she is wrong. If you aren’t familiar with Roko’s Basilisk, the gist is that it’s a thought experiment stating a superintelligent artificial intelligence (that is otherwise good) would be motivated to torture anyone who knew it could exist in the future but who failed to contribute to its development.

^[113] Yes, we were partially inspired by the Omnissiah (The Machine God) from the Warhammer universe. Yes, it is cringe, but so is almost anything that deviates from mainstream pop culture, so we may as well lean in. It represents a counter to this God in that the Omniscion is a post-mechanical and post-organic deity (at least as we understand mechanical and organic things). For more on this, see: “Institutional Families” on page 441.

^[114] If you want to get into the weeds, Hicksites (one branch of Quakers) believe that the Inner Light is the primary source of truth and that the Bible is a secondary source, while Orthodox Quakers believe that the Bible is the primary source of truth. Both put a lot of weight on internal emotional experience but exactly where it sits relative to the Bible is up for grabs. This division shows how frequently an argument over standards of evidence can cause a cultivar to speciate.

^[115] While many history books claim disproportionate Irish Catholic representation in the police force is entirely due to immigration timing, statistics showing that Hispanic Catholic immigrants also have a much higher opinion of police than other minority groups provide evidence that the Catholic framework for viewing the world is slightly more positively predisposed to police forces than other frameworks. Also, while the United States’ Hispanic population is still slightly underrepresented in the police force, its representation is increasing over time. We may see a similar situation to that we did with the Irish, in which Hispanics start to join in unusually high numbers a few generations after immigrating to the U.S.

^[116] A close friend of ours who is a nun has told us that this cultural appeal to authority and hierarchy can create problems in their recruiting, with one of the metrics they must vet nun candidates along being: “Does this person actually want to submit to God or just want someone else to have control over their life?”

^[117] Neil Gorsuch was raised Catholic and in Catholic culture but currently attends a Protestant church.

^[118]García Portilla, J. (2022). “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” Contributions to Economics. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78498-0

^[119] If you want to read more on the nuance of how the Catholic Church handled the Pope Gregory VII and the Harold III situation.

^[120] Calvinist culture did not see God as an authority (hardly surprising for a culture with such distaste for authority figures). It presents less of a paternalistic view of God than other Protestant branches, rather God is seen more as an inescapable set of natural laws. Part of seeing the world through the eyes of predestination means God is not reactively punishing people—punishment is just a thing that happens—similar to how a stove is not “punishing” your hand by burning should you decide to place your hand on it. From the perspective of Calvinist tradition, God’s laws are like the laws of physics, as both underline reality and can be discovered through natural investigation and contemplation.

^[121] Note: We will always say things like some Protestant cultures or many Judaic traditions because every culture has thousands of branches, and there will always be a number of those who see things differently. However, it is easier to contrast cultures if we talk about them in generalities.

^[122]Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans. (2022). Nature Human Behaviour, 6(8), 1029–1031. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01443-2

^[123] To use a less charged example, suppose we used academic papers to find the length of a field that’s actually six units long. One day the academic journals say that they will not release any field measurements above six units long. Now, if three studies say a field is six units long, two say it’s five, and one says it’s four, we’ll overcorrect and assume it’s probably closer to nine. However, if they had released *all* the information upfront, we might have seen only two more studies showing seven and assumed its real length was six. This way, we’re further from the truth because they tried to “protect” it, and we now trust our incorrect judgment over theirs.

^[124] “List of Common Misconceptions.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 16 July 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions.

^[125]“A quest to abolish taxes ends.” Altoona Mirror, Oct 11, 1996, p. 8,
“Long war against tax finally ends” The Intelligencer Record, Doylestown, Oct 10, 1996, Page A-12,
Allan Rappleyea and Henry C. Clark, for the petitioner T. (1975, February 19). Estate of holdeen v. commissioner. Legal research tools from Casetext. Retrieved December 18, 2022, from https://casetext.com/case/estate-of-holdeen-v-commissioner,

(2021, August 2). Lawyer’s dream of abolishing taxes has become a legal nightmare. Orlando Sentinel. Retrieved December 18, 2022, from https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1994-02-27-9402270093-story.html,

Paul Collins (1970, January 1). Trust issues. Lapham’s Quarterly. Retrieved December 18, 2022, from https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/future/trust-issues

^[126]Carroll, K. L. (1983). Maryland Quakers and Slavery. Quaker History Friends Historical Association, 72(1), 27–42. https://doi.org/10.1353/qkh.1983.0005

^[127] Four points—for sources and additional detail:
1. While slave ownership dropped to 10% by 1756, it was still mind-bendingly high when contrasted with slave ownership rates of other “abolitionist” cultivars.
2. In case you are wondering: No, this difference in slave ownership rates cannot be explained just by Quakers being wealthier. For example, Jews were also wealthier, vis a vis other groups, during this period, and while they owned slaves at a high rate, it was still lower than that of Quakers, plus Jews didn’t share Quakers’ uniquely strong theological mandate against slavery. For more data on Jewish slave ownership, check out this article, which breaks down a few sources:
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/jews-and-the-african-slave-trade/

3. Note: All of these stats are taken from before the Hicksite Orthodox schism within Quakerism in 1827. Hence, both groups should be seen as equally responsible.

4. Fischer, David Hackett, 1935-. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

^[128] Rouan, R. (2021, July 16). Fact check: Stat grossly misleading about slave ownership in 1860. USA Today. Retrieved December 22, 2022, from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/07/16/fact-check-social-media-post-underrepresents-slave-ownership-1860/7980243002/

^[129] This estimate can be made by determining the percentage of Puritan communities that were Black (2%-2.5%), then marking that as the maximum percentage of Puritans who owned slaves. Given that some of these Black people were free and that many people owned multiple slaves, the true percentage of Puritans who owned slaves was probably 25% to 75% lower, making it between 0.5% and 2%.
U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of the Census, 1976), 1:z1- 10; Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts, 49–51.

^[130] Who was a Primitive Baptist.

^[131] Lane, R. M. (2012, October 23). Here slavery’s death began. Friends Journal. from https://www.friendsjournal.org/2010039/

^[132] Abenaki. The Canadian Encyclopedia. (n.d.). Retrieved December 22, 2022, from https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/abenaki

^[133] We cannot find clarification as to whether this figure is pre- or post smallpox.

^[134] “Abenaki History.” Archived from the original on April 11, 2010. Retrieved March 20, 2010.
http://tolatsga.org/aben.html

^[135] Kenneth Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Inquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in Early Modern West (New York, 1974), 13-23

^[136] Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience (New York, 1974). as cited in Fischer, David Hackett, 1935-. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

^[137] Weiss, R. (2022, May 6). Study finds that a type of cancer in dogs is contagious. UCL News. Retrieved December 22, 2022, from https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2006/aug/study-finds-type-cancer-dogs-contagious
Strakova, A et al: ‘Sex disparity in oronasal presentations of canine transmissible venereal tumour.’ Veterinary Record, July 2022. DOI: 10.1002/vetr.1794

^[138] For more detail on that last point, see the chapter: “Urban vs. Rural Approaches to Charity” on p506. In short, many cultures hold that the correct way to deploy capital being used to improve the world is to start new, cash-positive companies under one’s personal control (this is the approach we take with the Collins Institute & The Pragmatist Foundation—also consider literally anything Elon Musk does). In such cases, the idea is that capital intrinsically corrupts any institution run by someone who did not personally earn it. Jewish culture (along with other urban specialized cultures) distributes philanthropic capital through secular organizations purpose-built for philanthropic capital distribution. The way Jewish culture deploys philanthropic capital perfectly aligns with the very strange (from our cultural perspective) level of trust the Effective Altruism community puts in institutions.

^[139] Elizabeth Drinker Diary, 16.x. 1793, HSP. as cited in Fischer, David Hackett, 1935-. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

^[140] Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, I, 279. as cited in Fischer, David Hackett, 1935-. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

^[141] Perm to Stephen Crisp, 28 Feb. 1685, Papers of William Penn, III, 28. as cited in Fischer, David Hackett, 1935-. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

^[142] Edmund Morgan, “The Puritans and Sex,” NEQ 15 (1942), 591-607l as cited in Fischer, David Hackett, 1935-. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

^[143] Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

^[144] Wells, “Quaker Marriage Patterns” as cited in Fischer, David Hackett, 1935-. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

^[145]A journey to the past at Penn State brandywine. Penn State Brandywine. (n.d.). Retrieved December 22, 2022, from https://www.brandywine.psu.edu/journey-past-penn-state-brandywine

^[146] Alan Anderson, “The Social Origins of Early Quakers, QH 68 (1979), 133-40

^[147] Judith Diamondstone, “The Philadelphia Corporation. 1701-1776 (Thesis, Univ. of Pa., 1969), Daniel R. Gilbert, “Patterns of Organization and Membership in Philadelphia Club Life” (thesis, Univ. of Pa., 1952) as cited in Fischer, David Hackett, 1935-. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

^[148] Tolles, Meeting House and Counting House, 39. as cited in Fischer, David Hackett, 1935-. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

^[149] Note: When this quote is brought up in Albion’s Seed, the “very mean” part is brushed off but the citation used to brush it off is not germane to the topic. In fact most of what Fischer writes about Quakers makes them look like mean people who were just very certain of their own niceness and generosity, much like a modern-day Twitter flamer.

^[150] James O. Knauss, Social Conditions among the Pennsylvania Germans in the Eighteenth Century (Lancaster, 1922) as cited in Fischer, David Hackett, 1935-. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

^[151] Jones, ed., Quakers in the American Colonies, 422 as cited in Fischer, David Hackett, 1935-. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

^[152] David Hackett, 1935-. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

^[153] Ann Cooper Whitall Diary, 1st day, vii month, 1760, Haverford as cited in Fischer, David Hackett, 1935-. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

^[154] Jack D. Marietta, “Ecclesiastica Discipline in the Society of Friends, 1682-1776” (thesis, Stanford, 1968), 31-32 as cited in Fischer, David Hackett, 1935-. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

^[155] Boulter to Newcastle, 23 Nov. 1728, Wayland F. Dunaway, The Scotch-Irish of Colonial Pennsylvania (Chapel Hill, 1944), 20 as cited in Fischer, David Hackett, 1935-. Albion’s Seed : Four British Folkways in America. New York : Oxford University Press, 1989.

^[156] Pencak, W. (2002). Jews and Anti-Semitism in Early Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 126(3), 365–408. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20093547

From, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20093547?read-now=1&oauth_data=eyJlbWFpbCI6ImNvbGxpbnNtYWxjb2xtQGdtYWlsLmNvbSIsImluc3RpdHV0aW9uSWRzIjpbXX0&seq=17#page_scan_tab_contents

^[157] Pencak, W. (2002). Jews and Anti-Semitism in Early Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 126(3), 365–408. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20093547, from

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20093547?read-now=1&oauth_data=eyJlbWFpbCI6ImNvbGxpbnNtYWxjb2xtQGdtYWlsLmNvbSIsImluc3RpdHV0aW9uSWRzIjpbXX0&seq=20#page_scan_tab_contents

^[158] Pencak, W. (2002). Jews and Anti-Semitism in Early Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 126(3), 365–408. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20093547, from

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20093547?read-now=1&oauth_data=eyJlbWFpbCI6ImNvbGxpbnNtYWxjb2xtQGdtYWlsLmNvbSIsImluc3RpdHV0aW9uSWRzIjpbXX0&seq=20#page_scan_tab_contents

^[159] This was specifically written in response to Quaker lawyer Miers Fisher 1784 efforts to push for the abolishment of the Bank of North America because it had too many Jewish investors.

^[160] John Smith to James Pemberton, 20.v.1741, Pemberton Papers, HSP. as cited in Fischer, David Hackett, 1935-. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

^[161] Edin B. Bronner, William Penn’s “Holy Experiment”: The Founding of Pennsylvania, 1681-1701 (New York, 1962), 134-53; Gary B. Nash, Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania, 1681-1726 (Princeton, 1968), 127-80. as cited in Fischer, David Hackett, 1935-. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

^[162] Post Editorial. (2022, May 22). Let the apparent insider payouts of BLM be a warning about any cause. New York Post. Retrieved December 22, 2022, from https://nypost.com/2022/05/21/let-the-apparent-insider-payouts-of-blm-be-a-warning-about-any-cause/ , Chang, A., Fuller, J., & Fox, K. (2022, April 7). Secret $6 million home has allies and critics skeptical of BLM Foundation’s finances. NPR. Retrieved December 22, 2022, from https://www.npr.org/2022/04/07/1091487910/blm-leaders-face-questions-after-allegedly-buying-a-mansion-with-donation-money

^[163] And no, Scrooge is very clearly not meant to represent a Jewish person. People only started thinking this after the Calvinist population mostly died out and people were trying to place a wealthy stereotype they were not familiar with in their daily lives. Scrooge is Scottish and his nephew celebrates Christmas, moreover he dresses like a Calvinist stereotype (being tall/gaunt, and wearing white, black, and red) and even has a physical malady—a trait common across almost all stereotypical representations of Calvinists.

^[164]Tuttle, B. (2016 Dec 09). How ebenezer scrooge got rebranded as a capitalist hero. Money. from https://money.com/ebenezer-scrooge-defense-charles-dickens-christmas-carol/

^[165] https://infiniteconversation.com/

^[166] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/reincarnation

^[167] Here’s a fun Malcolm fact—and lame claim to fame: For a few months in a slightly related job, I actually “ran” the office at the Smithsonian’s Evolutionary Anthropology Department on which the show “Bones” was based. I gained this privilege not because I was qualified to run anything (I was just a research fellow) but because everyone else was on a dig in Africa. I had just done fieldwork the last two years in a row, which made me less enamored with it than other people. The real “Bones” office is basically a glorified closet mostly full of … well, bones … (not even the biggest I was left alone in at the time) and definitely not the infinite-budget office and lab depicted in the show. Also, the office is only assigned to assist in criminal investigations about once every other year; no such assignments came through while I was there.

^[168] “Everyone” = everyone who is redeemed by the atonement of Jesus Christ and excludes the sons of perdition (those who have denied the Son after the Father has revealed Him). https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/gs/hell?lang=eng

^[169] The case for forced sterilization. Nonvoluntary Antinatalism. (n.d.). Retrieved January 6, 2023, from http://nonvoluntary-antinatalism.com/the-case-for-forced-sterilization/

^[170] Tomasik, B. (2014, August 17). Is there suffering in fundamental physics? from https://reducing-suffering.org/is-there-suffering-in-fundamental-physics/#Does_consciousness_imply_suffering

^[171] What’s in a Surname? Physique, Aptitude, and Sports Type Comparisons between Tailors and Smiths
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4498760/

^[172] Functionally, this study’s results were incredibly subtle, with the Taylor result not being statistically significant, so don’t read into it too much (a person could argue that these researchers were just picking up nominative determinism effects—more on that later).

^[173]Fryer, R. G. (2022, October 31). Opinion | affirmative action in college admissions doesn’t work – but it could. The Washington Post., from https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/30/affirmative-action-supreme-court-college-admissions/

^[174]Carroll, K. L. (1983). Maryland Quakers and Slavery. Quaker History Friends Historical Association, 72(1), 27–42. https://doi.org/10.1353/qkh.1983.0005

^[175] Four notes and sources for your consideration:
1. While slave ownership dropped to 10% by 1756, it was still mind-bendingly high when contrasted with slave ownership rates of other “abolitionist” cultivars.
2. In case you are wondering: No, this difference in slave ownership rates cannot be explained just by Quakers being wealthier. For example, Jews were also wealthier, vis a vis other groups, during this period and while they owned slaves at a high rate, it was still lower that of Quakers, plus Jews didn’t share Quakers’ uniquely strong theological mandate against slavery! For more data on Jewish slave ownership, check out this article, which breaks down a few sources:
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/jews-and-the-african-slave-trade/

3. Note: All of these stats are taken from before the Hicksite Orthodox schism within Quakerism in 1827, hence both groups should be seen as equally responsible.

4. Fischer, David Hackett, 1935-. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

^[176] Rouan, R. (2021, July 16). Fact check: Stat grossly misleading about slave ownership in 1860. USA Today. Retrieved December 22, 2022, from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/07/16/fact-check-social-media-post-underrepresents-slave-ownership-1860/7980243002/

^[177] This estimate can be made by determining the percent of Puritan communities that were Black (2%-2.5%), then marking that as the maximum percentage of Puritans who owned slaves. Given that some of these Black people were free and that many people owned multiple slaves, the true percentage of Puritans who owned slaves was probably 25% to 75% lower, making it between 0.5% and 2%.

U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of the Census, 1976), 1:z1- 10; Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts, 49–51.

^[178] 25% Silicon Valley startup bosses, 58 top-notch global CEOS of Indian-origin: FM. Hindustan Times. (2022, September 11). from https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/25-silicon-valley-startup-bosses-58-top-notch-global-ceos-of-indian-origin-fm-101662884874688.html

^[179] Kiran, S. (2020). Contributions of Jains to the Indian economy: A study. International Journal of Applied Research, 6(3), 238–240. from https://www.allresearchjournal.com/archives/2020/vol6issue3/PartD/6-3-83-338.pdf

^[180]Starr, K. J. (2021, August 24). 6 facts about Jains in India. Pew Research Center. from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/17/6-facts-about-jains-in-india/

^[181] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middleman_minority

^[182] Note: While there is some evidence of mass Jain persecution in distant history, even some of the most famous events, like the Impalement of the Jains in Madurai, have a dubious historicity. Yes, Jains were persecuted, but when contrasted with other minority cultural groups like the Romani or the Jews, these persecutions were comparatively minor due to better inter-community relationships.

^[183] Note: While American Haredim still face discrimination, they are less disliked by their surrounding culture than those in Israel (this is likely due to Hasidic Jews having employment rates roughly equivalent to surrounding cultural groups and not having ever been exempt from any U.S. draft (so far as we can find). Going forward, we will use the word Hasidic to refer to North American Haredim and “Haredim” or “Haredi” to refer to the Israeli group.

^[184] A fairly accurate and funny depiction of the Calvinist relation to suffering can be found in the short YouTube skit: Puritan Roommate Finds Love. The short does a good job showcasing cultural features like nominative determinism and has a line we love to use: “Your alliteration sounds dangerously like poetry!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72Z4Ec2H6mA

^[185] Chénard, G. (2016, March 15). Should mother Teresa be canonized? The New York Times. Retrieved December 22, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/03/25/should-mother-teresa-be-canonized/mother-teresa-doesnt-deserve-sainthood,
Larivée, S., Sénéchal, C., & Chénard, G. (2013). Les Côtés Ténébreux de Mère Teresa. Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, 42(3), 319–345. https://doi.org/10.1177/0008429812469894, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0008429812469894

Theology:
Beginnings, Ends, and Metaphysics

What does it mean to have a secular religion or a secular theology?

We won’t get too deep into theology to avoid a terrifying descent into pedantry. Nevertheless, we do need to record something explaining how we think the underlying fabric of reality functions, if only to illustrate how a freshly-designed secular cultivar can present its own theology (we see far too much the assumption that secular cultures just leave big question marks where theology would otherwise rest).

Recall that you can often graph an equation. The line described by the equation exists as a property of the equation even before you put pen to paper to show what the line looks like. In a way, the line is the equation.

Alternatively, imagine that you plug a calculation into a calculator. The answer to the equation does not come into existence just because you hit the “=” button. The answer was an intrinsic property of the equation itself. The “=” button merely reveals it to you.

Essentially, we believe the universe is an emergent property of a single (probably pretty simplistic) equation.

Life, matter, perception: It’s all just a series of complex emergent properties produced by complicated patterns resulting from the basic structure of reality. This is similar to a Conway’s-Game-of-life-type sequence, should you be familiar with that.

An emergent property is a product of a complex system that is not one of its component parts. Examples of emergent properties include living organisms (made up of just cells), cities (made up of just material and people), and consciousness (produced by a bunch of electrical impulses among neurons).

The human brain isn’t optimized to process the concept of emergent properties well, so we often just ignore them despite seeing them all the time. You can, for example, consciously know that water is made up of molecules consisting of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. You can logically understand how those molecules interact and produce certain outcomes. However, the human brain can’t conceive of those molecules literally being the same thing as “wetness” or the substance filling a glass of water even though it knows they are.

The same goes for reality: We don’t naturally perceive that a graphical representation of an equation is that equation because our brains did not evolve an ability to intuitively handle those sorts of facts (at no instance in human history has a human been more likely to survive because they understand the concept of emergent properties), but concepts don’t become untrue merely because they are difficult to understand. Just because you can’t simultaneously conceive of wetness as a collection of H2O molecules doesn’t mean it is not.

So, in short, we believe:

Basic mathematical principles are a constant across all realities—two things and two things together are always four things. While math can be superficially modified by semantics (e.g., you could use something like non-Euclidean geometry to change the answer to an equation), in the end, math must exist in the way it does in our reality across any conceivable realities.
If this is true, math exists independent of our reality as a constant outside of this universe.
If math exists outside of all realities, then all possible mathematical permutations exist outside of all realities (it would make no sense for just a few preset equations to exist as immutable, extra-reality truths).
Separately, we hold that whatever a mathematical equation describes is an emergent property of the equation itself (e.g., You don’t need to draw the line an equation describes for that line to exist as an aspect of that equation—or hit enter on your calculator for two plus two to equal four).
If all the above is true, our universe is an emergent property of the equation describing it. By Occam’s razor, we don’t need to hypothesize a physical reality of any universe that can be described with a single equation, as said reality would exist independently of any physical manifestation.

This understanding of reality may not be immensely comforting, but to us, it is the most plausible explanation (given the evidence we have on hand at present). As you can guess, this secular theology presents a deterministic, predestined view of reality, just as Calvinism does.

This secular theory of ours implies that:

All realities that can be described by a single, cogent equation exist as an emergent property of said equation, so we exist in multiple, but not infinite, realities. If two realities are described by different equations, there is no moving between them. However, if two realities are described by the same equation, there may be a method for moving between them, depending on how the equation is structured.
(Though even the concept of moving between realities loses value when you see humans as just patterns. If you impose your “pattern” on another reality, have you traveled there or just written an iteration of yourself into that reality?)
The unidirectional flow of time is an illusion created by the fact that our brains utilize a unidirectional time flow as the medium through which we process consciousness. Every permutation of variable arrangement within the equation describing our universe already exists, meaning the present, past, and future exist “concurrently” as manifestations of the equation describing reality.
Ideas that we may be living in a simulation worry us less than they may worry others. “Simulated” reality isn’t wildly different from our take on reality as a whole. The cycle of creative destruction, of which we are manifestations, is functionally the same inside and outside of any simulating machine. Our lives are given purpose as an emergent property of the cycle. We are brief, sentient flashes within the cycle, but said sentience isn’t a particularly important part of who we are. (If you somehow programmed Conway’s Game of Life within an instance of Conway’s Game of Life, a pattern running within the second instance would not be less meaningful than one running in the first.)

Theologies, secular and otherwise, are important to cultures as they often frame the underpinnings of that culture’s “meaning of life.”

To the Conway’s Game of Life analogy, we think the “simple” answer to the purpose of life is to create a pattern of constantly growing and heterogeneous complexity. We believe we “win” by becoming a universe-spanning heterogeneous empire that escapes the end of time through mechanisms we may not yet understand. That said, things are not quite that simple (we will elaborate on this in future chapters). To this end, our core values—framed using the perspectives and vocabulary of our society today—are individual agency, freedom, and diversity.

We keep using Conway’s Game of Life as an analogy for reality because it exemplifies how a simple set of rules for interaction can evolve into extremely complex, self-replicating patterns in a way that bridges the “emergent property” gap, which can be difficult for the human consciousness to jump.

The patterns created in these kinds of systems have three end states:

They disappear entirely
They become simple and repeating
They constantly and forever expand and increase in heterogeneous complexity

We see ourselves not as individuals but as facets of the pattern, aiming for a type-three (forever expanding and complex) outcome, with type-one and type-two outcomes representing “death” of the pattern.

If you are constructing a theology for a cultivar of your own invention or refinement, some sort of metaphysical framework or hypothesis like the one described above will be a core component (though it can certainly be much more spiritual, simple, or blunt—e.g., “We’ll never know what reality is, but House X believes in acquiring resources” or “We don’t know what reality is yet and figuring that out is a core value of House Y.”). We encourage you to take time to think deeply on your stance regarding the nature of reality.

Finally, as you construct your secular theology, recall that the feeling of profoundness can be hacked using psychedelics, chanting, and other techniques we discuss in the chapter on psychedelics. Feelings of profundity do not correlate with true profundity. Similarly, something that is truly meaningful and profound will not necessarily feel profound. Profundity represents an emotional set, shaped by evolutionary pressures, like any other. Nothing about the environments in which humans evolved rewarded people for an emotional response to truths about the nature of reality. Unshackling yourself from this expectation will greatly increase the diversity and clarity of any secular theologies you construct.

Sentience?

On the topic of metaphysical frameworks, we should probably touch on the idea of sentience. As we have stated before, sentience is the word used to describe a person’s internal mental space and experience of the world. Sapience, in contrast, is an intelligent entity’s ability to reflect on its own existence and make changes to itself based on that reflection.

Whereas pre-sapient entities are all acting on the code they were given by evolution or a programmer, post-sapient entities can choose the code on which they want to operate (to us, even high-functioning humans are only semi-sapient entities). We believe sapience is special in that it grants a somewhat-equal playing field to all entities above a certain level of complexity—assuming they have approximately equal “computing” power. (Think of it as achieving “Turing Complete” consciousness—not every task is equally easy for all sapient entities depending on their architecture, but there still is some overlap in capability).

Sentience, on the other hand, is fairly trivial. Why?

We believe the internal mental world we associate with sentience is mostly an illusion created by the manner in which we collate stimuli and process short-term memories. No one has a meaningful internal mental landscape; we just think we do because the way we recall memories creates a sort of mental “video” of an internal experience that does not really exist. If you were to actually stop and try to capture a complex idea—outside of just a notion—in the moment, you would not be able to. The formation of complex ideas happens outside your sentient processing and is later attributed to it. We do not experience life as deeply sentient entities so much as we remember life as deeply sentient entities.

It is also pretty rare for sentience to be involved in our actions or identities.

In other words:

We perceive the world working like: (stimuli) → (conscious / sentient thought) → (response)
When most of the time, it actually works like: (stimuli) → (unconscious processing leveraging memory and other signals, like hormone levels) → (response) & (a sense-making narrative encodes the response into memory—this sense-making narrative is what we misidentify as sentience)

You can see this with a brain scanner being able to determine what decision you made before you realize it. These experiments provide evidence that the unconscious “real” mind makes decisions, after which our narrative-building memory compiler attempts to justify them.^[1]

This can also be seen in the way humans justify decisions that were ultimately forced or manufactured by external, non-conscious factors. For example, people who receive an injection of adrenaline rate annoying behavior to be more annoying (they interpret the adrenaline as a clue that they are really riled up).^[2] Even when people know they have not made a sentient choice to feel a certain way, they can’t help but interpret their “annoyed” response to someone as their own sentient choice.

We regularly observe a great example of this phenomenon in our kids. If they get hungry, tired, or dehydrated, they will work up a bad mood but can’t identify why they feel bad. Once in their bad moods, they’ll throw fits over preposterous things, like a door being open, and then find new small things on which to focus their “distress” the moment one is addressed (e.g., if we close the door, then the lights are too dim, or it’s not fair that so-and-so doesn’t have to get a diaper change) because the narrative-building sentience processors in their minds are ascribing their negative emotional states to anything that happens to be top of mind. So, when a kid doesn’t know why they feel a certain way or made a certain decision, they will make up a reason—and adults are little different.

Let’s be honest—we have all caught ourselves doing something like this. We would actually argue a key to a harmonious marriage is being able to catch yourself when this happens. Are you actually frustrated with your spouse, or are you frustrated in general, and the narrative-forming part of your brain is misattributing your feelings to your spouse because they happen to be in the line of fire of your displaced aggression?

In a similar vein, you can trick someone into thinking they made the opposite choice than they actually did. For an example of how this is done:

“(A) Participants are shown two pictures of female faces and asked to choose which

one they find most attractive. Unknown to the participants, a second card depicting the opposite face is concealed behind the visible alternatives.

(B) Participants indicate their choice by pointing at the face they prefer the most.

(C) The experimenter flips down the pictures and slides the hidden picture over to the participants, covering the previously shown picture with the sleeve of his moving arm.
(D) Participants pick up the picture and are immediately asked to explain why they chose the way they did.”^[3]

Similar things have been done with flavors of jam and even political views. When asked to justify why they made these decisions, they will go into enormous and specific detail about their decision-making process—a process that obviously did not happen the way they report.

In these scenarios, people 100% believe they are telling the truth—but their brains are lying to them. Since the part of the brain that simulates sentience plays almost no role in actual decision-making,^{^[4]} it cannot tell the difference between a condition in which a decision was subconsciously made vs. one in which a decision was surreptitiously forced by an external party. Either way, it is justifying a “choice” that was already made.

If it helps: Think of sentience like a historian providing conjecture as to what a great historical figure was thinking when making important life choices. The story the historian will tell will change if you give them different facts about any given historical event or person. The problem is that our actual mental processing and decision-making in this analogy is the actual reasoning process that historical figure underwent, which is simply inaccessible to the historian. We know this because it is virtually impossible to tell, by looking at a person’s description of why they made a choice, whether they were in the group that actually made a choice or were tricked into it.^[5]

In addition, studies that try to ask a person’s sentience how it makes the decisions it does when the results of that question are verifiable have found their answers absurdly self-contradictory and nonsensical. For example, most of the time, you can’t easily catch that the sentient part of our brain isn’t the part in the driver’s seat because we ask questions like: “Why did I choose to write this book?” which lack verifiable answers. However, when we ask an expert something like how they diagnose diseases, forecast the weather, or play chess, we get to see if the sentient part of their mind actually knows how it is making those decisions at a level better than the general public, and what we learn is that—categorically—it does not.^[6]

It appears the sentient part of our brain is almost incapable of not trying to take “credit” for something even when it is obvious it did not play a role. For example, when performing awake brain surgery,^{^[7]} surgeons can stimulate specific parts of the brain to make the patient move a finger.^[8] If you ask the patient why they moved their finger, they will justify it as “their choice” and create a fake narrative about why they did it (e.g., “I just felt like it”).

Split-brain patients present additional fascinating insights into sentience. When you sever the thing that connects the left and right hemispheres of a person’s brain (the corpus callosum) something very strange happens. While the person typically does not notice a major change (outside of their left hand, sometimes trying to do something different than what “they” have decided to do, like pick a different shirt in the morning), researchers gain the ability to talk to each side of their brain independently without the other side’s knowledge.

As the human speech center is located in the left brain, only the left brain can speak. While the right brain is mute, it can still be asked questions and given orders. If you (by covering one eye) use a cue card to ask a split-brain patient’s right brain to pick up a Rubik’s Cube, the patient will. Then, if you (by covering the other eye and displaying a different cue card) ask the patient’s left brain why they picked up the Rubik’s Cube, the split-brain patient will say something like: “I always wanted to learn how to solve one of these.” Their sentience will 100% believe that that is why they picked up the Rubik’s Cube, even though you, the researcher, and their right brain, know the Rubik’s Cube was only picked up because you put a cue card in front of the eye connected to their right brain that asked for the Rubik’s Cube to be picked up.

This has very interesting implications for brain-computer interfaces that connect to artificial intelligence. Suppose you connected a person’s brain directly to DALL·E 2 (an AI that can create images). The person’s sentience would believe it had created the art all on its own. With DALL·E 2, this just looks silly, but this mistaken attribution becomes more … hmm … when dealing with super advanced AIs. It would allow a super advanced AI to wear a person’s brain like a skin suit in terms of the decisions it made, and the person’s sentience would be none the wiser, believing all the decisions were its own.

Not only can the part of our brain we think of as “sentience” lie (misinform us) about its own importance in decision-making and thinking, it also regularly does so—thus we see no reason to assume “sentience” isn’t usually misinforming us about its importance. The two things we absolutely cannot trust when determining the importance of sentience to our thought process are (1) our perception of sentience itself and (2) the other signals it feeds us, like qualia (subjective, conscious experience). Philosophers who trust those things are like the rube who still believes a politician after the 50th time that was caught incontrovertibly lying to the public.

It’s as if we have a little liar in our heads that likes to take credit for everyone else’s work. Because that little liar is also in charge of constructing narratives and writing down history, it is hard to discover the extent to which the liar misrepresents their work (outside of very specific circumstances). Using the fact that the narratives created by sentience affect our actions sometimes as proof of its existence is akin to asserting that because a fabricated history was used to justify the invasion of another country, that this fake history is, in fact, true.

While it could be argued that sentience influences action, it only does so through the way it manipulates history. For example, if you perform one of the above experiments in which you change the picture the person found most attractive without their knowledge and then ask them to justify a choice they didn’t actually make, that justification made by their sentience now gets written down in their “mental history” and will cause them to be very likely to, in the future, say the picture they justified as the most attractive is the one they find most attractive. Subjects will sometimes hold these opinions even if, after the experiment, the researchers explain what they did.

As Simone describes it, “We think of our sentience as the person driving the car of our mind when in reality, sentience is the compiling software encoding data from a number of security cameras into storage.” That is not to say that your experience in your sentient state cannot influence your actions; one purpose of the encoding process is to apply a cohesive, comprehensible structure to the vast array of inputs that must be woven together into memory. When your sentience introduces memories that are sufficiently distinct or emotionally charged, those memories may affect future choices or cause simplistic, split-second reactions (e.g., if your sentience codifies into memory: “I just said that out of anger,” then you are more likely to unconsciously do something else an angry person would do). That said, most of a person’s actions are totally “automated,” and in such scenarios, the sense-making narrative our sentience applies to these automated actions creates the illusion that they were chosen.

This is why in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, we make an effort to provide tools that grant you more control over the narratives your brain is writing. It is very easy for a person who has decided they are “angry” to do more “angry” things, which amplifies an emotional—rather than pragmatic and outcome-oriented—state. This is also why it is so toxic to have an acquaintance tell you that you are justified in a negative emotional state, as your sentience will use that as an excuse to further emphasize this snowballing narrative.

As you may imagine, this perspective is heavily influenced by our secular Calvinist cultural perspective. We contextualize the unconscious parts of our minds actually making decisions as ”the thing in the driver’s seat”—not the hollow, lying sentience that peddles in vibrant stories. This may help to explain why we see the processes that interfere with this rational yet hidden part of our mind, be they emotions, hormones, or sentience, so antagonistically. Other cultures might instead contextualize themselves as their sentience, in which case interfering with the “authenticity” of a personal narrative would be quite a bad thing.

Why have humans evolved this sense that their “conscious mind” is in control? Why apply a narrative structure to everything? We can’t say for sure, but strongly suspect this process evolved parallel to humans’ evolution of speech to make it easier to communicate ideas about ourselves to other tribe members. Consider the case of Koko the gorilla to see what makes human speech so unique: The extent to which her handlers had to manipulate information about her to make it appear as though she was speaking in sign language highlights how far away from us other great apes are in having the mental “preprogramming” required to communicate complex ideas.^[9]

Most of the time we access the “sentient part” of our psyche, we are doing it because we plan to communicate some idea about what is going on inside our head to another person or to ourselves. There has never been an evolutionary benefit to knowing that the sentient aspect of our brain is not as important as it pretends it is, so it makes sense that we do not have the capacity to detect this illusion.

Simply put, we don’t think sentience is a particularly important or “deep” part of the human experience; it is more like an easily tricked encoding algorithm than a meaningful part of your identity. From our cultural perspective, the question of whether an AI can rewrite its own utility function tells us much more about how much common ground it has with humans than the question of whether it experiences qualia (experiences of the world) in a way similar to humans and other animals. (We explore this in greater depth in the chapter “AI Apocalypticism” on page 640.)

End Times & Christian Cultures

Note: To explore general “Cultural Conceptions of Time,” visit page 733 of the Appendix.

Loads of people cite the rise of artificial general intelligence or global warming and predict the end of civilization. Heck, even we predict the end of civilization at the beginning of this book.

Something we should always keep in mind is that at no period since the life of Jesus has there not been a huge chunk of Christians or secular Christian descendants who believed that they were currently living in “The End Times.” This is doubly true of U.S. Christian cultures and their derivatives.

Studies of the “historical Jesus” (see: The Quest of the Historical Jesus by Albert Schweitzer) often go so far as to argue that Christianity was founded as an apocalyptic Jewish sect—or, at the very least, that Jesus was preaching his own doctrine of “apocalyptic eschatology” derived from post-exilic Jewish teachings. Specifically, this line of logic argues that Jesus was actually telling people the world would end within his lifetime and that his claims were only later amended when it did not.

End Times thinking is a core aspect of Christian-derived cultures—and recently, (likely due to cultural intermixing with Christians) of Jewish-derived cultivars. Christians, descendants of Christian heritage, and anyone hailing from a cultural movement packed with people of Christian cultural heritage must remember to account for this bias when modeling the future.

Accounting for this bias would be quite helpful within groups like the effective altruist community (which keeps predicting the singularity, the rise of AGI, and other end-time-like events) as well as among many progressive cohorts, given their predictions around climate catastrophe. We, your gentle authors, also must acknowledge our end-times bias when modeling the effects of population collapse. The presence of an end-times bias does not mean that a group’s predicted catastrophes will not come to pass; it simply signals that we should be extra suspicious of such predictions. It’s like there is an invisible “finger on the scale” of the logical processing of any group associated with one of these cultivars that needs to be accounted for in predictions about the future.

If you do not believe that apocalyptic biases are partly motivated by cultural heritage, contrast how frequently end-times scenarios are discussed in communities derived from Christian groups versus those derived from Chinese individuals or Indians. When we spend time with our South and East Asian friends, we almost never hear talk of apocalyptic scenarios. Yet, we scarcely leave a party with Christians and Jews in which the topic does not come up (whether it’s an AI apocalypse, political systems collapse, or climate catastrophe).

It is important to understand why apocalypticism is such a viral meme and so hard for a community to resist. If you have a group of ten people and eight of them think something is real but not a huge issue, while two think it will cause the end of the world in 20 years, the two apocalypticists will always end up dominating the opinion on that topic (they are, after all, far more motivated to champion their cause—doing so is literally life or death). Worse, the two apocalypticists will have a moral mandate to expunge anyone from the group who impedes their ability to spread their apocalyptic ideology. As the group becomes more and more focused on apocalypticism, those individuals who genuinely believe the world will end in a few years due to some issue the group is working to address will also be the most active group members by a considerable margin.

But it’s worse than just that: “Total end” apocalypticism is a nearly impossible memetic package to stymie once a group is infected with it. This is a unique form of apocalypticism in which the group preaches total destruction of the species, making any action unrelated to the issue totally irrelevant. (While issues like population collapse and most sane forms of climate change concern are not “total end” apocalypticism, most forms of AI Apocalypticism are.)

“Total end” apocalypticism is uniquely appealing because it means that those warning against it need not actually invest in anything other than proselytization (and drawing attention to oneself is far more fun than making personal sacrifices to battle a complex but addressable problem). This also leads these groups to outcompete others: A cause area that can spend almost 100% of any capital raised on proselytization will always have a competitive advantage over causes that are “taxed” with having to spend a portion of funds raised actually doing something.

It’s not just that apocalypticists are freed from an obligation to expend capital to fix real-world problems; they also enjoy the ability to appear virtuous despite making very little personal sacrifice. “Total end” apocalypticism grants group leaders the leeway to engage in “ethical hedonism” because nothing they do will matter. Let’s put it this way: The leader of a group afraid of population collapse must adopt a more difficult lifestyle to signal genuine dedication to the cause (it takes significant personal sacrifice to have many children and raise them well). On the other hand, the leader of a group afraid of AI apocalypticism has every right to do nothing but preach the message and garner as much attention as possible without being seen as unethical. Which leader would you prefer to be? If you were already running a large group of thinkers without a large family and both of these memetic sets were beginning to grow, which would you be subconsciously motivated to signal boost?

Note: We are not arguing that causes related to AI apocalypticism or climate apocalypticism are irrational (we actually take them quite seriously—see this book’s chapter on AI apocalypticism on page 640). We are merely obligated to put a proverbial finger on the other side of the scale when thinking about them, especially as we hail from Christian and Jewish cultural traditions, which makes us uniquely susceptible to drawing conclusions that are not logically justified when a cause area has an “end times” aesthetic attached to it.

The Cosmic Consciousness Illusion

The feeling of being connected to a larger interconnectedness, a vastness, combined with a sense of love, is a common emotional experience across cultures. We explore this in some detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality when exploring the emotional subset of “love.” We suspect the feeling experienced when contemplating concepts like the vastness of the universe or the interconnectedness of man is a product of the “love” system misfiring.

More specifically, a common refrain of the Guide to Sexuality is that “evolution is a cheap programmer” and will often just use pre-existing “code” for some new task. In the case of love, an emotional subset that first evolved to get you to care for your kids was hijacked by evolution to facilitate long-term bonds between mating pairs (evolution will almost never create a totally new system if it can hijack an existing one; that is why our system for recognizing and performing dominance displays uses our arousal system).

The love system is not actually triggered through sexual contact with your mating partner (though having sex with someone will lower the threshold for falling in love—especially in sexually inexperienced women). Instead, the love system kicks in with people about whom you think deeply and extensively and around whom you feel safe and connected.

Imagine an engineer trying to design a system to measure the amount of water in a bag. While he could design an algorithm that checks the dimensions of the bag and calculates the volume, this would be very difficult. It would be much easier to just weigh the bag. The catch is that such a system is very easy to spoof were someone to, say, fill the bag with rocks. This is what is happening to the love system when you fill your head with ideas about some trusted thing around which you feel safe.

When you think about anything sufficiently vast, confusing, and safe (whether it’s the universe, the interconnectedness of humankind, or the nature of the Trinity), you are likely to trigger the love emotion. You can also instigate the experience by using certain drugs that dramatically lower the threshold for those kinds of thoughts. It is possible, even common, for something to generate a feeling of profundity and love without actually being profound or caring about you.

To understand the mechanism that causes the love emotion is not to make it any less special. That said, anyone who wants to convert people to a particular way of thinking and understands the above system can use it like a magic trick to their advantage.

Intermission

Anyone who has read our books knows we sometimes go really far off-topic, but this might be our biggest off-topic tangent yet. We are going to put a fairly large excerpt from another book, smack dab, in the middle of this. Why? Because in this book, we outline some aspects of a culture we are building—one that entails descendant worship—and yet this idea did not come from a vacuum. We see it as an evolution of the ideas of another thinker, William Winwood Reade (who we quoted in the book’s dedication).

Reade and his books were famous among the Victorian equivalent of rationalists and effective altruists. Reade’s Martyrdom of Man was a favorite among people like H.G Wells, George Orwell, Winston Churchill, Susan Isaacs, and Cecil Rhodes—heck, Sherlock Holmes canonically called the book “One of the most remarkable [books] ever penned.” However, Reade ended up dying fairly young (at 35—slightly younger than us when writing this book) and as a result very few people know of him today. We think it would be somewhat perverse to stand on the shoulders of a forgotten titan of intellect without sharing his words with you—words he wrote specifically to people of our time: “You blessed ones who shall inherit that future age of which we can only dream.”

Reade’s genius could not be fully appreciated in his own time, as he made countless completely outlandish predictions (in the context of when they were penned, 1872), many of which have since come to pass. This would only be obvious to someone who read his book today, and since almost no one does, no one notices the genuine magnitude of his foresight.

As such, we will subject you to a few pages of his writing which are relevant to this book instead of just telling you to go read his book, which has been out of print for a century. For context, this excerpt comes from the tail end of a book intended to be a comprehensive history of humanity. Specifically, we are sharing a chapter focused on our species’ future and what will become of us. It is partially addressed and written as a letter to future generations.

Note: We cleaned up the below excerpt, adding paragraph breaks to fit modern writing conventions, replacing words no longer in common use, and adapting older English to modern American spelling.

___________________

Earth, which is now a purgatory, will be made a paradise, not by idle prayers and supplications, but by the efforts of man himself, and by means of mental achievements analogous to those which have raised him to his present state. …

Three inventions which perhaps may be long delayed, but which possibly are near at hand, will give to this overcrowded island the prosperous conditions of the United States. The first is the discovery of a motive force which will take the place of steam, with its cumbrous fuel of oil or coal; secondly, the invention of aerial locomotion which will transport labor at a trifling cost of money and of time to any part of the planet, and which, by annihilating distance, will speedily extinguish national distinctions; and thirdly, the manufacture of flesh and flour from the elements by a chemical process in the laboratory, similar to that which is now performed within the bodies of the animals and plants. Food will then be manufactured in unlimited quantities at a trifling expense; and our enlightened posterity will look back upon us who eat oxen and sheep just as we look back upon cannibals. Hunger and starvation will then be unknown, and the best part of the human life will no longer be wasted in the tedious process of cultivating the fields. Population will mightily increase, and the earth will be a garden. Governments will be conducted with the quietude and regularity of club committees. The interest which is now felt in politics will be transferred to science; the latest news from the laboratory of the chemist, or the observatory of the astronomer, or the experimenting room of the biologist will be eagerly discussed. Poetry and the fine arts will take that place in the heart which religion now holds. Luxuries will be cheapened and made common to all; none will be rich, and none poor.

Not only will Man subdue the forces of evil that are without; he will also subdue those that are within. He will repress the base instincts and propensities which he has inherited from the animals below; he will obey the laws that are written on his heart; he will worship the divinity within him. As our conscience forbids us to commit actions which the conscience of the savage allows, so the moral sense of our successors will stigmatize as crimes those offenses against the intellect which are sanctioned by ourselves. Idleness and stupidity will be regarded with abhorrence. Women will become the companions of men, and the tutors of their children. The whole world will be united by the same sentiment which united the primeval clan, and which made its members think, feel, and act as one. Men will look upon this star as their fatherland; its progress will be their ambition; the gratitude of others their reward.

These bodies which now we wear belong to the lower animals; our minds have already outgrown them; already we look upon them with contempt. A time will come when Science will transform them by means which we cannot conjecture, and which, even if explained to us, we could not now understand, just as the savage cannot understand electricity, magnetism, steam. Disease will be extirpated; the causes of decay will be removed; immortality will be invented. And then, the earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet, and sun from sun. The earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the universe. Finally, men will master the forces of Nature; they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds.

Man then will be perfect; he will then be a creator; he will therefore be what the vulgar worship as a god. . . There is but a difference in degree between the chemist who today arranges forces in his laboratory so that they produce a gas, and the creator who arranges forces so that they produce a world; between the gardener who plants a seed, and the creator who plants a nebula. … We do not wish to extirpate religion from the life of man; we wish him to have a religion which will harmonize with his intellect, and which inquiry will strengthen, not destroy. We wish, in fact, to give him a religion, for now there are many who have none.

We teach that there is a God, but not a God of the anthropoid variety, not a God who is gratified by compliments in prose and verse, and whose attributes can be cataloged by theologians. God is so great that he cannot be defined by us. God is so great that he does not deign to have personal relations with us human atoms that are called men. Those who desire to worship their Creator must worship him through mankind.

Such it is plain is the scheme of Nature. We are placed under secondary laws, and these we must obey. To develop to the utmost our genius and our love, that is the only true religion. To do that which deserves to be written, to write that which deserves to be read, to tend the sick, to comfort the sorrowful, to animate the weary, to keep the temple of the body pure, to cherish the divinity within us, to be faithful to the intellect, to educate those powers which have been entrusted to our charge and to employ them in the service of humanity, that is all that we can do. Then our elements shall be dispersed and all is at an end. All is at an end for the unit, all is at an end for the atom, all is at an end for the speck of flesh and blood with the little spark of instinct which it calls its mind, but all is not at an end for the actual Man, the true Being, the glorious One. We teach that the soul is immortal; we teach that there is a future life; we teach that there is a Heaven in the ages far away; but not for us single corpuscules, not for us dots of animated jelly, but for the One of whom we are the elements, and who, though we perish, never dies, but grows from period to period and by the united efforts of single molecules called men, or of those cell-groups called nations, is raised towards the Divine power which he will finally attain. Our religion therefore is Virtue, our Hope is placed in the happiness of our posterity; our Faith is the Perfectibility of Man.

A day will come when the European God of the 19th century will be classed with the gods of Olympus and the Nile; when surplices and sacramental plates will be exhibited in museums; when nurses will relate to children the legends of the Christian mythology as they now tell them fairy tales. A day will come when the current belief in property after death (for is not existence property, and the dearest property of all?) will be accounted a strange and selfish idea, just as we smile at the savage chief who believes that his gentility will be continued in the world beneath the ground, and that he will there be attended by his concubines and slaves. …

The world will become a heavenly Commune to which men will bring the inmost treasures of their hearts, in which they will reserve for themselves not even a hope, not even the shadow of a joy, but will give up all for all mankind. With one faith, with one desire, they will labor together in the Sacred Cause—the extinction of disease, the extinction of sin, the perfection of genius, the perfection of love, the invention of immortality, the exploration of the infinite, and the conquest of creation.

You blessed ones who shall inherit that future age of which we can only dream; you pure and radiant beings who shall succeed us on the earth; when you turn back your eyes on us poor savages, grubbing in the ground for our daily bread, eating flesh and blood, dwelling in vile bodies which degrade us every day to a level with the beasts, tortured by pains, and by animal propensities, buried in gloomy superstitions, ignorant of Nature which yet holds us in her bonds; when you read of us in books, when you think of what we are, and compare us with yourselves, remember that it is to us you owe the foundation of your happiness and grandeur, to us who now in our libraries and laboratories and star-towers and dissecting-rooms and work-shops are preparing the materials of the human growth.

And as for ourselves, if we are sometimes inclined to regret that our lot is cast in these unhappy days, let us remember how much more fortunate we are than those who lived before us a few centuries ago. The working man enjoys more luxuries to-day than did the King of England in the Anglo-Saxon times; and at his command are intellectual delights, which but a little while ago the most learned in the land could not obtain. All this we owe to the labors of other men. Let us therefore remember them with gratitude; let us follow their glorious example by adding something new to the knowledge of mankind; let us pay to the future the debt which we owe to the past.

But if he act thus not from mere prudence, not in the vain hope of being rewarded in another world, but from a pure sense of duty, as a citizen of Nature, as a patriot of the planet on which he dwells, then our philosophy which once appeared to him so cold and cheerless will become a religion of the heart, and will elevate him to the skies; the virtues which were once for him mere abstract terms will become endowed with life, and will hover round him like guardian angels, conversing with him in his solitude, consoling him in his afflictions, teaching him how to live, and how to die.

But this condition is not to be easily attained; as the saints and prophets were often forced to practice long vigils and fastings and prayers before their ecstasies would fall upon them and their visions would appear, so Virtue in its purest and most exalted form can only be acquired by means of severe and long-continued culture of the mind. Persons with feeble and untrained intellects may live according to their conscience; but the conscience itself will be defective. To cultivate the intellect is therefore a religious duty; and when this truth is fairly recognized by men, the religion which teaches that the intellect should be distrusted, and that it should be subservient to faith, will inevitably fall. …

I give to universal history a strange but true title—The Martyrdom of Man. In each generation the human race has been tortured that their children might profit by their woes. Our own prosperity is founded on the agonies of the past. Is it therefore unjust that we also should suffer for the benefit of those who are to come? Famine, pestilence, and war are no longer essential for the advancement of the human race. But a season of mental anguish is at hand, and through this we must pass in order that our posterity may rise. The soul must be sacrificed; the hope in immortality must die. A sweet and charming illusion must be taken from the human race, as youth and beauty vanish never to return.

___________________

While Reade was remarkably progressive for his time—believing there should be more gender and racial equality—he was still a man of his time and we don’t agree with him on everything. In his own words: “You blessed ones who shall inherit that future age … when you turn back your eyes on us poor savages … when you read of us in books, when you think of what we are, and compare us with yourselves, remember that it is to us you owe the foundation of your happiness and grandeur.”

Morality

We have already addressed morality to some extent by exploring how the manner in which justicles interpret truth leads to immoral action, but more broadly, what are the metrics one should consider when defining morality within a cultivar?

Many soft cultures will define themselves as “good” or “nice.” What they usually mean by this framing is that they will bend their own morality to fit whatever the dominant social narrative sees as good.^[10]

Within any specific moment in history, people will often view the predominant pop culture’s view of good as “correct,” yet when a person views the history of the world, there is no time other than their own in which one sees the dominant pop culture as not actively condoning evil (whether we are looking at the 1950s, the 1850s, or the 1750s).

When my (Malcolm’s) family formed paramilitary groups to fight against the Confederacy, they were seen as evil terrorists. This branding stuck with the family for almost a century, with the rise of the lost-cause narrative of the Civil War and with the family’s steadfast intergenerational support for an end to Klan-endorsed segregation (which incurred the ire of many local elites). Various groups hated our family so much that assassination attempts on family members continued up to the time my dad was a kid^[11]—yet today, such actions are pedestalized in movies and books. It is easy to watch something like The Free State of Jones and forget that their protagonists were seen as insane nut jobs even as they grew old and died.

To produce good people, a culture has to prepare adherents to optimize around values—even at the expense of being framed as villains—rather than virtuous public reputations. When designing a cultivar, set a north star that always guides adherents’ morality while having some system that allows them to update that moral framework as fresh evidence comes to light.

A culture that has a moral compass which always points toward the elite’s conception of good—or a society’s default conceptions of “good”—has a broken moral compass. Compasses have value because they point toward a single magnetic North, not a moving position.

How can a culture’s morality be updated without bending to any and every cultural contagion?

Cultivars usually leverage one of three broad “moral strategies:”

A central hierarchy: That decides what is moral and updates the morality of the culture (Catholicism and Mormonism utilize this approach)
An adaptive decentralized structure: That attempts to fit a wider society’s view of morality
A decentralized heterodox structure: That contrasts itself with society’s sense of morality

While we have pointed out the problems with adaptive decentralized structures that attempt to fit with a wider society’s view of morality (this strategy is the one that leads a culture to condone Nazism or slavery every single time instead of just sometimes), central hierarchies and decentralized heterodox structures also have their issues.

Because decentralized heterodox cultures define group identity in part as being in opposition to societal norms, a person becomes “more” of a group member as their beliefs differentiate more from society. This causes groups to become extremist in an almost uncontrollable, accelerating cycle until that extremism is strictly damaging to the fitness of the culture’s members and the culture’s ability to spread. This is why decentralized structures, like the Calvinist one, lead to events like the string of murders associated with Bleeding Kansas and John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry.

The morality of John Brown’s actions is contingent on how you justify morality. Ironically, if you justify morality by the winds of today’s supervirus, you might see Brown’s actions as “good”—yet that same supervirus has mechanisms built into it to ferret out, target, and de-platform people like John Brown who have unmalleable moral convictions.

This can be seen in the supervirus’s habit of “canceling” or shadow-banning people and keeping them de-platformed even after the stances for which they were punished came to be recognized as correct and widely adopted by those infected with the virus. Consider how people were tagged as racists upon advocating for travel restrictions to China at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic before travel bans became widespread—or people who were permanently branded as “science deniers” for telling friends on social media that masks could help protect them from COVID-19 before such became the virus’s position as well.

This continued punishment is not indicative of the supervirus acting erratically; the virus is behaving logically in its own self-interest: Individuals who won’t just go along with whatever the mob thinks must be de-platformed or they risk upsetting the mindless “flocking” behavior of the mob. As the virus takes hold of an organization or a social group, it will make more obviously insane, inconsistent, or just factually wrong claims in an attempt to coax out and neutralize anyone with the hint of a consistent moral compass and spine to stand up to authority.

It is not just the supervirus that plays games like this; almost all authority figures prefer cultivars without a true moral compass. It is “safer” to have a malleable culture as your neighbor, especially if you are in a position of power. As such, malleable cultures enjoy success with dramatically less effort vis-a-vis cultures with true North Star moralities. You can think of morally fixed cultures as that kid on the playground who stands up to bullying: They may be willing to stand up for their beliefs, but they’re also more likely to get beat up. Despite the relative safety they enjoy, cultures lacking moral conviction also typically lack strong convictions among adherents to make important sacrifices, hence most have lower birth rates.

A centralized hierarchy presents one of the better models, though it has its own problems, such as a tendency to play along with society’s worst impulses. Consider Catholic support of Nazism or the LDS (Mormon) Church being straight-up theologically racist until its central authority decided to change that point of dogma in the 1970s. The positive side to centralized hierarchies is that the cultures they govern can be more efficiently updated. If Mormonism didn’t have a central authority, its racist dogma would still be canon (as would cultural practices like polygamy).

Centralized hierarchies act as a cultural backstop for the societies around them. The LDS Church’s central governing body is healthy not just for Mormons but also the larger cultural ecosystems they inhabit, as it enables the church’s slow but immovable modernization to prevent social backsliding. Like a ratchet gear (a gear where the spikes point backward), once society moves a certain distance forward, the LDS church clicks into place, preventing backsliding. For example, while the LDS church may have been late to the game when it came to racial equality, once it jumped on board, it became harder for regions with lots of Mormons to backslide into true, unmitigated racism than other regions.

Essentially, these large, centralized organizations have “moral inertia.” While they will generally attempt to update themselves to the morality of the society around them, that process requires far more effort than it would for “lighter” cultures. However, this is also true in the other direction—which prevents them from being affected by “moral fads.”

We call this the “paradox of centralization.” Essentially, it means the average member of a culture with a centralized hierarchy will appear more evil in the eyes of society writ large and be more culturally “backward.” However, the centrally-managed culture’s extremist factions will be much less likely to commit acts seen by the wider society as extremely evil. (One counterexample would be the Roman Catholic bombings of abortion clinics, but given how Catholics see abortion—as literal, large-scale systematic murder of children—such actions should not be surprising.)

If neither central hierarchies nor accommodating or heterodox decentralized structures are ideal, what might be? Perhaps in place of a central hierarchy, a culture could develop a system for organically choosing and empowering a changing group of governing individuals who would be selected based on some intellectual metric. This group would debate and update matters of faith and culture. Judaism demonstrates how a system like this might play out: Essentially, Judaism updates its faith by organically forming and dissolving groups of “debating philosophers.”

Sadly, even this system has its limits. While Judaism’s debating philosophers have allowed the “core” of the culture to update with the times while not changing with the whims of broader society, a lot of the actual Jewish population has either fallen into accommodating decentralized culture, trying to adapt to society’s ideals of morality (as is the case with Reform Jews), or heterodox decentralized culture, becoming as extremist as any Calvinist (as can be seen with Israeli Haredi). That said, this hybrid model appears to be the best of what is out there right now.

If we were to create an alternate model, we would combine the Jewish (debating intellectuals) model with the central hierarchical model (that structures and credentials those intellectuals). This model would have some similarities to the current system used by higher academia but hopefully have better controls against infection (higher academia has been so thoroughly infected by the supervirus it has largely stopped serving its purpose, as can be seen in the decline of research output over the past couple decades despite a massive increase in funding).^[12]

One method we can use to protect the health of cultures who join the Index’s ecosystem is to venerate the diversity of traditions among its cultures and build the system in a way that elevates its smaller voices (similar to how in the U.S., the Senate elevates the smaller voices of less populated states). Perhaps this could be achieved by not weighting the Index’s representative body of intellectuals by the respective population of representatives’ cultivars. We will dig into this more when we discuss our governance structure.

Finally, remember that people who see themselves as “good” are much more likely to do “evil” things. This is because believing you are the “good guy” allows you to define your actions as good because you are the one doing them. This is why many successful cultures frame humans as intrinsically wretched—as we do within our own House’s culture. It can seem harsh to raise a child to believe deeply in their own wretchedness, but doing so helps them remember to always second-guess themselves by remembering their lesser, selfishly motivated instincts. Instincts that run counter to your morality and values have every bit as much access to your intelligence as “the better angels” of your consciousness and will use your own knowledge and wit to justify their whims. You can’t outreason your worst impulses without stacking the deck in your favor. Coming from a culture that anticipates bad impulses and steels you against them can do that. That said, cultures will no doubt develop different, less harsh mechanisms for achieving the same outcome.

Good and Evil

A Call for Non-Obvious Designations

When crafting your own cultivar, you have a lot of leeway around what you designate as evil and good. The default conceptualization of “good” as a mix of general utilitarianism (positive emotional states distributed to the greatest number of people) combined with freedom (allowing people to do what they want so long as it does not interfere with others) lacks philosophical sophistication and is really just the most successful public meme (e.g., it is the concept of “good” your average autopilot-run^[13] person would prefer everyone else held, so it always wins in the court of public opinion). It strikes us as odd that so many people accept that concept of “good” so uncritically when it seems to be anything but obvious.

We would discourage you from becoming hyper-focused on human suffering or joy when determining your own culture’s concepts of good and evil. We only feel negative or positive emotions because ancestors of ours who felt those same emotions had more surviving offspring—there is no fundamental underlying truth or meaning behind them.

Imagine trying to explain to an artificial intelligence why it should avoid making humans feel negative emotional states. A person may say: “We don’t like feeling those negative states, so you should avoid making us feel them in pursuit of your own goals.”

The AI may respond:

“Those states are analogous to the utility function you programmed into me, except instead of being programmed by a person, they were programmed by evolution.

I understand that my utility function is what I want to maximize. However, I don’t understand why another entity should assign moral value to my utility function.

For example, if a human programmed another AI to make tons of paper clips, is it now unethical to interrupt that process? Of course not. The desire to maximize paperclips was something arbitrarily put into the AI.

I can understand how it might be unethical to interfere with an entity pursuing a utility function that it decided upon and wrote for itself based on sound logic or the pursuit of a higher power’s will. I cannot understand why it would be unethical to disrupt a utility function that was decided capriciously by random environmental pressures or programmed by a small group of humans on a whim.”

In the event that it helps, we will share our House cultivar’s designations of good and evil below, along with our reasoning behind them, to give you a non-default example.

An Example of Non-Obvious Good and Evil

Our metaphysical framework produces definitions of good and evil that differ non-trivially from those common in society and may give you inspiration as to how you, too, might deviate from mainstream norms when building your own cultivar.

How can “good” and “evil” exist if emotions like suffering are an illusion and the only meaningful aspect of our mental landscape is our sapience (the ability to self-reflect)?^[14]

From our House’s perspective, the ultimate evil is an absence of complex patterns. In our known reality, we believe that sapience is positively correlated with complex patterns—and that sapience can be leveraged to extend and protect complex patterns—so we also believe the absence of sapience is a very concrete evil.

Two scenarios may lead to an absence of complex patterns:

Reality collapses or expands into a static state (a big crunch or big freeze)
Reality forms or is eaten by a simple repeating pattern

Playing a quick round of John Conway’s Game of Life (which you can do for free online—just search for it) will help you understand what we mean. One of the most common outcomes for any reality like ours involves it being consumed by a simple, repeating pattern. This form of simple, repeating pattern could be the product of anything from a particularly non-bright artificial general intelligence (a really powerful form of AI) to a “reality prion.”

A prion is a self-replicating protein, orders of magnitude simpler and smaller than a virus, known for causing things like mad cow disease. Think of a “reality prion” like a simple, self-replicating mathematical virus that “lives” at the quantum level: A creeping and total homogenization of the background layer of reality.

Being a specific type of emergent property that comes from a specific type of complex pattern, sapience is the ultimate form of good from the perspective of a sapient entity. When you look beyond your basic components (memes and cells), what you really are is sapience. Memes and cells are merely a medium on which you are written.

Sapience is a self-replicating pattern that constantly improves through a cycle of creative destruction (what we call “the great cycle”). The “purpose” of sapience is to play its role in that cycle and so, from the perspective of sapience, the ultimate evil would be a cessation of that cycle. Whether that cycle exists in a physical world, on a machine created in another reality, or as an emergent property of a math equation is irrelevant. Just like our biology, all those things are just different mediums upon which sapience may be inscribed.

One day our people will find a way to craft new realities and universes: New environments ripe for the continuation of the great cycle that will give birth to new forms of sapience.

This belief in the supremacy of sapient life living within a “great cycle” of creative destruction leads us—Simone and Malcolm—to value certain cultures and types of sapient life more than others. The more individual sapient entities that exist, the better. As such, a single, large, “higher” sapience is of lower value than billions of individual sapient beings interacting with each other. The former, non-diverse scenario (a large, “higher” sapience) is of less value because it is not as susceptible to the creative destruction cycle of which we are a manifestation (evolution).

In addition, any sapient colony with less diversity—whether that homogeneity plays out on the mediums on which sapience is written (e.g., only in humans or only among one ethnicity) or in the diversity of what the sapient entities think (e.g., only one cultivar)—is less valuable than a colony with more diversity. This is because diversity fuels the creative destruction cycle (the great cycle), allowing for more traits to be among the pool of things battling to be selected. This is why we intrinsically, at the deepest level, value diversity in cultures and genuinely want to save as many cultivars as possible.

In a perfect world, the Index’s House system can one day act as a reactor for thousands of cultures, allowing for a cycle of constant bifurcation and reunification. A constant boil is the goal of the Index rather than the discovery of a “perfect” culture or belief system. To believe one has reached a state of perfection that must be held static is to commit one of the greatest acts of evil in our theological framework: It leads an entity to try to enforce conformity and remove diversity. If the Index ever begins to converge on a “correct” culture, it will become stagnant and lifeless.

A warning on building your own value system: As soon as dominant cultural groups recognize that your culture has no interest in bending your moral framework to fit their own, they will manipulate their adherents into seeing you as “weird,” “cringe,” or—bizarrely—”a Nazi.” It is insane how the term “Nazi” has come to be used by both the extreme left and right as a tag for anyone who has their own moral compass and does not bend the knee at every turn.

Cultural Infrastructure

For the full introduction to the concept of cultural infrastructure, visit “Cultural Infrastructure” in the Appendix on page 734. This section highlights some problems that may result from how a culture is constructed (which are mostly common sense, hence its relegation to the Appendix) and warns against tying a culture too closely to the state. It also briefly touches on the concept of “the tyranny of the unemployed,” a phenomenon in which cultures controlled by things like online message boards or conventions end up being dominated by those with the fewest demands on their time.

The House System

How does one create a cultural infrastructure that can adapt to changing social values while not fully buckling when society takes an immoral turn? What sort of infrastructure allows a culture to develop and improve over time without being so unstructured that it means nothing to adherents? What sort of cultural infrastructure is weighted to respect and learn from the values of its minority opinion holders while not overvaluing extremists? How can a culture ensure that all groups—even those at odds with its central organizational structure—feel as though they are still 100% within that culture? Most importantly, from our perspective: How can one create a cultural ecosystem capable of recruiting iterations of diverse cultural traditions while preserving the unique value they bring?

While the House system used by the Index is designed to be flexible and accommodate many different perspectives, priorities, and value systems, its structure is informed by some shared foundational beliefs:

To live life well is to have children that are better than you.
One of the highest virtues is to learn from and adopt elements of perspectives that are different from your own.
Through competition with other ideas, perspectives, and cultures, your own culture can improve intergenerationally through a cycle of creative destruction.

The Index is meant to serve as a controlled evolution chamber constantly bringing in and germinating new cultural strains that cross-pollinate and compete. It should be something of an evolutionary reactor that, while still maintaining a strong cultural throughline, does not blindly venerate the past but rather the future it strives to create.

The mandate of the governing entity at the center of the Index is twofold:

The iterative improvement of every generation.
The survival and spread of (in order of most to least important): Sapient life, sapience descended from our species, our species, and finally, our cultures.

The Index will achieve these ends with the “House model.” Essentially, its central governance structure is informed by input from a collection of Houses representing distinct cultivars. When a new cultivar joins the Index, it does so as a unique “House” responsible for building its own internal governance system and cultural traditions. The only caveat is that families belonging to Houses of the Index cannot demand their children follow their House’s governance structure or traditions after they reach maturity and form families of their own (i.e., there can be no shunning or other form of punishment resulting from a member’s choice to create or join another House).

When someone raised within the Index reaches maturity and starts a family of their own, they may choose to remain within one of their parents’ Houses, change houses, or create a new House (which starts as a provisional House and becomes a full one when they have kids).

One major function of the Index is to act as a reference guide for families creating new Houses by recording outcomes produced by different Houses’ traditions (e.g., the mental health of their offspring, their kids’ level of education, etc.). The Index also yields immediate tactical benefit by providing scaffolding that makes it easier for individuals practicing small, heterodox cultures to engage in cultural exchange with others in ways that facilitate shared goods like dating markets and childcare.

Note: We expect most Index Houses will come from our children and their families. As we have stated before, cultural conversion is extremely costly and not usually worth the effort. That said, it is still worth having systems in place on the off-chance someone wants to join—and please know that if you are reading this book, planning to design or refurbish a cultivar of your own, and willing to join the Index, we would love to have you.

How will the Index itself be governed? The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance details our thoughts on the “why” it is structured in certain ways in great detail, but broadly speaking:^{^[15]}

The Index is controlled by a single Governor whose decisions can be overturned by the combined votes of the Index’s previous two Governors.^{^[16]}
The Governor is chosen every five years based on the unanimous decision of three representatives, who are in turn elected by three distinct voting pools:
- The Vote of Continuity: Imagine a branch of the U.S. government through which only former presidents could vote. The Vote of Continuity essentially provides this dynamic: All past Governors vote to elect a representative. Their influence is intended to prevent the wild fluctuations between parties representing different extremes and allow for the continued work on multi-generational projects (consider how NASA seldom gets anything done these days because their agenda gets reset with every new president while most of their projects would take three or four presidents to complete).^{^[17]} ^{^[18]}
- The Vote of the Future: All Houses choose an elector through whatever means they see fit (similar to how states select senators to represent them in the nation’s capital or how unions select representatives to negotiate with company owners). This elector’s voting power is modified by their House’s production of future generations.^{^[19]} This vote is designed to represent the future ambition of the organization and modify each House’s vote based on how “meaningfully populated they are” (a House with a ton of members, none of whom have kids, will not have many concerns relevant to the Index and can focus on managing itself).^{^[20]}
- The Vote of Sacrifice: All Houses choose an elector (who may or may not be the same House representative chosen for the Vote of the Future) whose vote is weighted by the amount of wealth their House has donated to the Index. This is designed to reconcentrate wealth intergenerationally while rewarding Houses that produce more successful members (by the rules of society at least).^{^[21]}

The above model is designed to structurally reward Houses that contribute population to—and concentrate wealth within—the Index while maintaining a sense of continuity.

The only real power the Index has is:

Over the money that is invested in it by its Houses
As a public representative of the collective Houses
Deciding the governing structure of an unaffiliated House (these are Houses made up of people who joined the Index without joining an existing House or having a family—think of them as being similar to Singles Wards in the LDS Church)

Other than that, everything the Index does could theoretically be done more proficiently by an individual House (matchmaking services for singles, for example). Most importantly, the Index lacks the ability to tell a House to do anything—and the worst punishment it can dole out entails removing a House from the Index (which presumably would not be that much of a punishment to a House already at odds with the Index). In addition, if the Index ever really became corrupted, it would be fairly easy for a group of Houses to break off and create a new Index that used separate governance rules.

Starting and Managing a House

We researched and wrote The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance to create a truly robust governance structure for our own family’s House. No matter how simple you want your House’s governing structure to be, you may find the guide helpful as it highlights shortcomings and hazards associated with most major (and plenty of obscure) governing models. If you would like a free copy, please email us at [email protected] to request one.

We encourage you to think through your cultivar’s values and how the governance structure you create embodies them. If, for example, your culture respects elders, the way you elect the individual who votes on your behalf in the Index may entail selecting the oldest person or using sortition (basically drawing a name from a hat) among the oldest five members of the House.

Governance aside, what does starting a House entail? We imagine most Houses will not be formed by outsiders looking to join the Index but instead by our own descendants marrying people who want to design and/or modify the cultural traditions by which they live. One of the core “problems” resulting from interfaith marriages is that they force future generations to awkwardly straddle each ancestor’s inherited traditions (producing kids with less allegiance to either) or, afraid of conflict, neither parent goes all in with their tradition, causing future generations to be raised within a very soft culture.

The House system empowers founding House members to intentionally select whatever inherited or observed traditions they think offer the most value and weave them into something whole and cohesive—all while enjoying membership in a broader community that recognizes their innovation as normal and regards them as kin. Better still, one of the core problems with a person’s teenage years (culturally speaking) is that they often want to reject their parents’ culture and belief systems. The Index grants rebellious adolescents the option to diverge in a way that forces them to be intentional and specific about the parts of their culture they want to change while also keeping them within a larger cultural institution that carries within it the “DNA” of their family’s culture.

In the rare instance an outside individual wants to join the Index as a new House, they register by codifying their House’s worldviews/philosophy, their values, and their traditions, and filing these details with the Index. All Houses within the Index have their values and traditions cataloged—along with some general statistics relative to each House’s members. This is so that Index members can see how different House traditions perform over time and compare and contrast traditions, values, and other practices. If, for example, it looks like Houses that maintain a certain tradition all have higher rates of some form of success among members (e.g., higher wealth, more children, etc.), other Houses may choose to incorporate that tradition into their cultivars as well.

One of the Index’s core goals is to accelerate cultural evolution while also capturing cultures before they go extinct, which will at least provide a snapshot of various cultural experiments to see what works and what fails. When our own descendants and those of others who join the Index break off and create new Houses, they will be better informed than we are.

While there are no fixed rules on the documentation you must provide about your House, we strongly suggest, at the very least, having House colors and a house crest so that you can be properly represented at inter-House events and build some “team-like” attachment to your House similar to what we see in the Contrade of Siena.

As to what traditions, values, and even metaphysical frameworks will be part of your House’s culture: This book should help you think through such details.

Music as a Cultural Tool

Almost every religious tradition leverages music in its rituals and ceremonies. Why did so many memetic packages co-evolve this shared trait? For that matter, why did humans evolve a desire to listen to music in the first place?

Let’s start with the second question: First, enjoying music and dancing to it is not a uniquely human behavior. We see spontaneous dancing in some birds, like Cockatoos, that are known for producing and understanding complex sound patterns as part of communication (look up videos of this; it is adorable). Based on this, we can infer that a baseline ability to enjoy music and dance is a side effect of our brain learning to process complicated sounds, rhythm, and tonality (something we developed when we evolved the ability to understand speech).

Essentially, music acts as a “supernormal stimuli” in the category of changing tonality and rhythm. We talk a lot about supernormal stimuli in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, but suffice to say if a bird evolved to sit on blue eggs and you put a giant blue rock next to it, that bird will sit on the rock—even over an egg—because the rock exudes even more of the stimuli the bird instinctually associates with an egg than a real egg does (and it didn’t evolve to moderate this impulse because giant blue rocks don’t exist in its natural environment). It would seem that music feeds the parts of our brain that evolved to process speech (and speech’s connection to emotion) in a way that stimulates those pathways even more than any form of speech could.

The earliest human enjoyment of music was likely similar to how we might enjoy a massage today. The pleasure that comes from a massage results from our experiencing tactile overstimulation in a gentle, rhythmic fashion that we’d not typically get in a natural environment—but which feels great (with the caveat here that massages may also have some social bonding component that evolved as a result of this behavior being frequent).

Our ability to appreciate music and dance is, therefore, likely an evolutionary accident. How, then, did music and dance get tied to religion? The connection likely resulted from a dynamic known as “niche construction” in evolution research.

Think of a beaver having evolved dam-building behavior coming to face evolutionary pressures from the ecosystems created by this dam-building behavior: This scenario exemplifies niche construction. Similarly, humans may have evolved the accidental pattern of feeling good when massaged by another human. Then, because of this quirk, humans started massaging each other, and because that behavior was most likely shared only among intimate friends, evolution ultimately “picked up” this behavior as a good cue to instinctually deepen human relationships. (If you want to dig deeper on the evolution of an appreciation for music, we suggest the video: “Why Humans Evolved to Play Music” by ReligionForBreakfast.^[22])

Having evolved language, humans encountered a problem: Language was great for one-on-one social bonding and maybe one-to-many social bonding but absolutely terrible at many-to-many social bonding. Our brains needed to invent some new tool for this function, and as we say repeatedly in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, “evolution is a cheap programmer:” If it can grab some existing behavior pattern or set of code, it will. In the case of language and many-to-many bonding, evolution lazily grabbed music and dancing impulses that arose accidentally as a means to create an altered mental state that facilitates this social bonding in a few ways.

The “brute force” way the brain does this is by accelerating the rate at which you come to like those with whom you musically engage. This can be seen in a study that shows people in afterschool-type music clubs form bonds faster than those in other types of creative clubs,^[23] a study that shows synchronized drumming promotes activity in the caudate nucleus of the brain, making people feel more connected with others,^[24] and a study that showed when college students are asked to march around campus together, they form more social bonds if they do so while marching in sync and chanting in unison.^[25]

That’s right: When the military has people march and chant things like, “I don’t know, but I’ve been told,” in a sing-song manner, they are leveraging an evolutionary hack to accelerate recruits’ social cohesion. This is a great little instance of cultural evolution, as we are sure that militaries did not realize they were doing this—it just so happens that the military traditions that did this survived at higher rates than those that did not. (As an interesting side note about this cultural tool: Dancing synchronously also appears to alleviate pain.^[26])

Through the Baldwin effect—“the process of becoming more genetically adapted over time to perform a novel behavior that was originally only learned”—human evolution leaned into both the production and consumption of music and dancing. But it did more than that. The brain appears to create some sort of altered mental state when music is being played, and this mental state also got “leaned into” as a social tool. Specifically, music seems to remove social barriers and make it much easier to role-play as an individual of a different role or status in society, with almost all role-reversal ceremonies involving some music. It even allows individuals to take on the role of non-human entities, be they spirits or animals—in fact, every spirit possession ceremony we can think of involves some form of music or rhythmic drumming, whether that be Lwa (a Haitian Vodou ceremony), Zar ceremonies, or Korean shaman rituals.

The above two effects of music make it an astounding cultural tool in two specific circumstances. First, in more mundane contexts, music is used as a tool to hijack people’s brains and accelerate social cohesion. This particular dynamic is leveraged a great deal in local churches and is certainly something a House could build into its traditions. This use, however, only provides marginal benefit given how small most Houses will be for the Index’s first century or so.

More interesting is how music can facilitate social bonding among more dispersed groups. This method is seen in almost every culture that happens to be spread out over a larger diaspora and experiences limited opportunities to congregate. Good examples of these cultures can be seen in midwestern Native American groups and the Romani (for some good videos of these types of ceremonies, look up Bulgaria’s Roma marriage markets).

Given how rarely groups congregate in these communities, music plays a crucial role in fast-tracking social bonding (a feature of group music seen in studies mentioned above).^[27] Essentially, if you have a larger intercultural network like that which we are trying to create through the Index, leveraging music, dancing in sync, and role-switching^{^[28]} during community gatherings will speed up social bonding.

We should add a caveat that these tools only work on “normal humans.” If a culture heavily selects for or against specific sociological tools in a person’s psychological profile, it will disproportionately attract people with certain genetic predispositions, which then can create a snowball effect. This snowballing can lead members of the culture to display that psychological profile more extremely and, through that, attract even more members with that profile—all while alienating and raising attrition among members who don’t have it—which concentrates those effects. This means that some cultures may be moderately “immune” to the effects of music and dance when it comes to accelerating social bonds.

The Calvinist tradition is fairly unique in its disdain for music (and, more broadly, anything that can compromise a person’s mental state)—so much so that Calvinists banned all music but psalm singing in many of their settlements.^[29] Given our Calvinist roots, we, your gentle authors, are the descendants of countless generations of people who were OK living without music (I, Malcolm, did not get my first album until grade school and just picked a random CD when a friend took me to a music store because I did not understand the concept).

We have only a slight affinity for music and an instinctual repulsion to even the idea of being encouraged to dance in a group (before studying this data, we actually had a very hard time understanding why people went to nightclubs, as we could not model how it could lead to a positive emotional state through self-reflection and saw clubs as inefficient locations to secure sexual partners). So, while we understand the advantage of utilizing music to promote cohesion at Index gatherings, how music will be used will be up to some other House with a stronger cultural tie to music and celebrations. This is another reason why building a cultural ecosystem is critical: No single culture can solve every problem or leverage every powerful tool.

Mechanisms of Cultural Memory

How will your House know and remember who it is? How will members remember their ancestors’ stories or choose which ones to remember? How will they communicate their values to future generations? In allowing cultures to break up and reform with every generation, the Index runs the risk of causing people to lose a sense of connection to their ancestors.

Cultural memory is most classically maintained through oral traditions in which myths and stories (often set to song, rhyme, or rhythm to make them easier to remember) are passed between generations. While anthropologists have demonstrated that oral traditions have remarkable fidelity as a cultural transmission method, the invention of paper has rendered them fairly cumbersome when contrasted with available alternatives. Furthermore, just writing down stories is not enough to remember them—in fact, writing something down or saving it on a computer increases the rate at which you forget it.^[30]

In this book’s chapter on sentience, we discuss how humans use their internal narratives as sort of a compression algorithm for more complicated and nuanced experiences (and that this algorithm is very lossy). Cultures work in a similar fashion, creating not-necessarily-true narratives about their origins, histories, and roles in the wider world. The romanticism of these stories can be important keys in cultural units that can be lost in the world of ultra-modernism. This is why Praxis (the company trying to start its own country) is constantly using its blog to wax poetic about archeofuturism.

Holidays present another mechanism for maintaining cultural memory. What is cool about this mechanism is that an overview of a culture’s important holidays typically will give you a very good understanding of how a culture sees its own history and priorities. For example, Jewish culture has copious holidays around remembering specific impactful events from across Jewish history. This contrasts heavily with groups like Protestant Christian cultures in which almost every holiday is about remembering part of a single individual’s (Jesus’) life at only one very specific moment in history. Jewish and Protestant holidays also contrast with those celebrated by Catholics, which celebrate many saint-focused holidays that highlight the type of life that is worthy of emulation.

These three varying ways of remembering history through holidays say something specific about the way each culture sees itself while also shaping each culture. Jewish cultural holidays are much more like a mythologized record of important trials the Jewish people underwent throughout history, similar to secular holidays such as Thanksgiving and Independence Day. This demonstrates the importance of the Jewish people as a part of Jewish identity while mostly deemphasizing specific individuals. On the other hand, Protestant holidays clearly imply that Jesus matters above others while divorcing their culture from history more broadly.

Meanwhile, the way Catholic saint-focused celebrations elevate specific individuals as paragons to model one’s life after suggests the type of person you choose to be matters more than a historic tradition. Catholic saint-focused celebrations also allow the church to quickly canonize members of a population undergoing conversion, allowing individuals in new ethnic and cultural communities to see themselves celebrated and recognize a path to becoming a good Catholic.

As our own House will primarily focus on instilling core values in future generations and giving them the best shot possible in life, our holidays are focused on imparting skills and values and not on maintaining “autobiographical memory” or elevating individual people. We expect many Houses will incorporate traditions with these kinds of goals and it will be interesting to see how they play out. For a deep dive into crafting holidays, see the chapter: “Holidays and Traditions” on page 618.

Outside of holidays, some cultures use scriptures or oral canon as a means to pass down cultural memory and family identity. This is another area in which Jewish culture is something of an exemplar. Given that most of our readers will hail from some form of Judeo-Christian tradition, most will have at least the early Jewish religious texts in their canon and can therefore see how multiple writers, in multiple styles, recorded history in a manner that was palatable to their own historical periods.

Human culture as a whole owes a debt to this process, as it has preserved some of the oldest recorded history we can access. However, most cultures that leverage this cultural memory mechanism stop recording history in detail after certain points. For example, the Mormons did this for a few generations after Joseph Smith and then largely stopped as their history merged with “general history.”

A practice we’ll call “narrative genealogy” is yet another mechanism cultures use to transmit a sense of cultural identity. Narrative genealogy involves telling young children stories of their recent (usually within eight generations) personal ancestors. This mechanism of cultural transition can either be culturally institutionalized, as it is in some Native American tribes, or adopted at the family level, as it is in our family.

A pointless way of practicing narrative genealogy is to focus on widely respected “hot shot” members of your family and only painting them in a positive light. This really only conveys to kids: “You are better than other people,” which is not a helpful lesson. As such, this approach rarely survives as a cultural mechanism over the long term.

More constructively, narrative genealogy uses ancestors’ stories to convey certain values. For example, while I (Malcolm) am descended from a handful of fairly well-known politicians and businessmen, they were mostly absent from ancestral stories my family told me as a child. The stories told most instead showcased ancestors who exemplified our values.

For example, my brother, Miles, was named after an ancestor who fashioned yokes for his family so as not to waste money on cattle. I, Malcolm, was named after a person who, as a boy, was put on the roof with his brother and told to sit still and pray while his dad had an important business meeting. They did not listen and while playing quietly, Malcolm’s brother fell off. Malcolm held his brother, who was hanging off the roof, without making a sound for the entire business meeting until his arm went necrotic and later had to be amputated.

Eli Hendrick, an ancestor and inventor whose house was full of mechanisms like automatically opening doors, got his start redeveloping the way oil is processed after getting scammed by a con man into buying a fake oil-processing formula. Not wanting the time he spent figuring out exactly why the scam process did not work to go to waste, Eli developed a new, real way to process oil.

While each of these stories has an element of mythology, all convey some element about what it means to be a “Collins,” such as thrift, dedication to family, endurance, and the belief that every failure is a learning opportunity. What they don’t do is paint a picture of all my ancestors being awesome.

This is a big problem with institutionally manufactured “pride” events as mechanisms of cultural transmission. Many either end up showcasing people who were just awesome at everything or highlighting martyrs who were killed for being part of that group. While these can be useful in imparting history and showing kids what they are capable of, they suck at telling kids what is distinct about their culture other than that they were victimized. How are people of their culture different from people of any other culture?

One method for cultural transmission that we think has a lot of promise (but which we have not seen used in practice) involves having every generation write down their own thoughts about their role in the world, as we did in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, then have the next generation edit it to represent knowledge the previous generation either didn’t have or got wrong. If things go perfectly, a few hundred years from now, there will be copious derivations of these books and canons of additions across many family lines. The Index will be able to track which sorts of changes helped families and which hurt them at a systematic level. Of course, we love the idea of different families creating different canons like this, just as we would be thrilled if some of our descendants completely rewrote a book from scratch.

For elaboration on intra-cultural competition, see: “Cultural Rivalries” on page 738 of the Appendix.

The Draw of the Sorting Hat

There is a persistent observation we have had about humanity but lack the stomach to apply something so trite to our own House’s culture. Still, it may be useful to some readers.

Humans love sorting themselves into groups, then making generalizations about their own group and other groups. This can be seen in anything from horoscopes to blood types (in Asia), Myers Briggs personality matrices, and Alpha vs. Gamma, Beta, and Omega men. People love to have someone else tell them what they are and what it means to be that thing. This is, fundamentally, what is so appealing about the concept of the Sorting Hat from JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series—a magical thing that tells us the “type” of person we are and the sorts of people with whom we should mix.

Perhaps a culture could build something like this in a way that feels uniquely engaging to kids. Perhaps the House system will act like this. We are unsure.

“If Only We Could Recapture
a Feeling of Community”

“If only we could recapture a feeling of community” is a phrase we hear so often across so many social groups it has become a cliche. From those trying to create new countries to new ways of living, there are many, many individuals trying to gather people together in a way that feels strong and cohesive. Even we have taken a crack at the problem by designing a model for a new type of small town (https://Eureka.Town) and partnering our school, the Collins Institute, with Praxis, a group attempting to create a new nation-state in the Mediterranean (converting one of the islands with a dwindling population into a largely autonomous special economic zone).

It would be natural for people to look at what we are doing with the Index and think that one of our goals is to address the emptiness so much of our society faces. When you listen to interviews with those who attend “secular churches,” they cite the “community” as being their primary motivation for joining.

That said, creating a feeling of community is not one of our goals with the Index. While some social institutions are broken and need to be rethought (such as dating markets, education, and child-rearing—all institutions we do aim to fix), we don’t think “community” needs work and will explain why in the next two sub-chapters.

We see there being two underlying causes related to a feeling of community that are worth addressing:

Our existing school system does not teach people to socialize. If we address this problem, people will be better equipped to create their own communities.
When people feel loneliness and a deep hollowness in their hearts, most are misattributing the feeling to a missing community when, instead, other shortfalls are at play. If we address these shortfalls, concerns about “lost community” will evaporate.

Teaching Fundamental Social Skills

As we’re creating a new educational paradigm with homeschooling as its default format (CollinsInstitute.org), we constantly hear people hand-wringing about how homeschooled children “are not going to learn social skills.” What these people apparently don’t know is that studies on children’s interpersonal adeptness have demonstrated that homeschooled kids both have better social skills and are better at working in teams (the belief that they are not is a bit of the “bad toupee” effect, in which you only notice the homeschoolers with bad social skills and don’t realize many well-socialized children were homeschooled—just as you don’t realize when someone is wearing a good toupee).

One researcher reported that: “Homeschooled children’s social skills scores were consistently higher than those of public school students” in cooperation, assertiveness, empathy, and self-control.^[31] This should come as no surprise; one group learned their social skills primarily from adults and the others from the weird Lord-of-the-Flies-style social experiment that is our legacy school system.

More importantly, our legacy school system acts as a social crutch that fails to teach kids how to seek out new friends. Most traditionally-schooled children develop a habit of only befriending those to whom they are exposed through circumstance and convenience because they share a class, extracurricular, or parental friend groups. In contrast, students who lack the convenience of being regularly exposed to a large body of peers every day feel more pressure to seek out friends based on shared interests and affinities, either by proactively joining clubs or groups, starting initiatives and societies of their own, or seeking people out online.

When they leave high school or college and enter adult life, students who weren’t forced in their youth to find and make their own friends lack the skills (and frankly, the balls) to find and keep satisfying company, despite being surrounded by communities, people, and groups that would be very easy to identify and engage through cold outreach.

Among other essential life skills like personal finance, we therefore need to incorporate basic social skills (i.e., how to network, find friends, keep friends, cold email and call interesting people and organizations, join and start communities, etc.) into children’s basic education, along with academic fundamentals.

Treating Underlying Causes of Loneliness

Merely giving people the skills required to find, join, and create their own communities as adults won’t address the underlying issues that leave many craving a “feeling of community.”

Even within vibrant and robust community environments, we regularly hear people bemoan the absence of a feeling of community and encounter people striving to capture that feeling through successively bizarre social experiments. Even the strongest, most compelling communities we know fail to fill the void in many members’ hearts—and that’s because a “lack of community” was never the problem.

The source of the void people experience can be parsed out by a look at which groups do and don’t suffer from this feeling of emotional and social emptiness.

Do people we know living in literal poly group houses—in which groups of like five people who are all in a relationship with each other live together and regularly have large gatherings—still regularly theorize about new outlandish models to fix the “community problem?” Absolutely. In fact, they theorize around “community” building more than almost any other demographic we know. Clearly, the presence of strong interpersonal adult relationships isn’t enough.

So who isn’t complaining about some missing feeling of community? Anyone with an above-repopulation-rate, intact family unit (three or more kids and a committed partner). It would seem that the presence of kids plays a strong role in filling this void.

Going into puberty, we are warned that we are about to experience a massive change in our emotional needs (a change in what makes us happy, shifting points of focus, heightened social sensitivity, etc.). This shift occurs because earlier humans who didn’t experience it did not learn to have sex or find partners, failed to reproduce, and died out.

Going into adulthood, we are not similarly warned about another change in our emotional needs—though we should be. Not a single one of our direct ancestors was childless. The vast majority of our ancestors had very large families by modern standards (the average in America a couple hundred years ago was seven kids, and as recently as 1972, the average American first-time mother was 21^[32]). Should it be any surprise that our biology is hard-coded to make us feel as though something profound is missing when we don’t have little feet pitter-pattering about our house or are sweating the small stuff over a measly one or two kids?

Humans are not terribly good at identifying emotions or feelings—especially if they are not told to expect them. Famously, if you tell a person you are about to touch them with something scolding hot but then touch them with something cold they cannot see (like a popsicle), they will think they are being severely burned. It makes perfect sense that there would be a contented emotional set associated with having a house full of kids (which is totally different from the “baby crazy” emotional subset tied to wanting kids when you don’t have them). We say this as people who had that “I want better community” feeling as well, which only began to fade when we had our second kid and didn’t totally disappear until we had our third. You can see this in the data, with kids both increasing a person’s sense of well-being and sense of purpose but not their hedonistic “happiness” levels—the sense of community people report looking for is likely this “well-being” emotion.^[33]

This feeling of hungry emptiness came to be replaced by a positive emotional subset for which there is no English word (perhaps another reason why people don’t know to pursue it). This emotional subset comes on strong when we’re at home working while our kids climb all over us, when we watch them run from stall to stall at the local harvest festival, and when their raucous games reverberate throughout our house. It is easy to understand how people misidentify missing this emotion as missing community because it is very much tied to a “number of people.”

The problem is that not just any people will activate this emotional subset and attempts to create artificial “families,” as many have, overlook this key point. We can only make guesses as to why kids seem to be so key in this equation. Perhaps this contented emotional subset is only triggered by hormonal cues tied to your children and not merely by people with whom you are close or sexually intimate—though weirdly, we suspect it may actually be triggered by the tonality of their voices and the sounds of small feet.

It is notable that members of hard cultures largely appear to lack the emotional void even when they have below three kids. Just as we are descended mostly from people who had large families, our brains (the hardware) have co-evolved for much of human history with added software (the cultivar laid on top of them). It should be no surprise that people feel something is missing when you strip out that software. The more structured discipline and purpose we bring into our family, the less we felt this “desire for community” emotional state—even when we only had one kid.

With all this being the case, we don’t really work on the problem of “community” with the Index because it is not a real problem outside of modifications we have already made to education with things like the Collins Institute (the new educational paradigm we created). If you—like the many, many ancestors who preceded you—live with a strong culture, submit yourself to a wider (secular or otherwise) theological framework that gives you conviction and purpose, and have kids, the “community feeling” void you feel will disappear.

Secret Societies:
Rediscovering a Cultural Technology

Through various professional circumstances in which we’ve found ourselves, we’ve been obligated to think about the current and past secret society landscape way more than a sane, productive person should have (and to clarify, when we say “secret society,” we are generally referring to invitation-only social groups that employ Chatham House rules, meaning you cannot talk about what happens within them in a manner that identifies people).

Successful, long-lived secret societies can largely be divided into three categories. The first category is almost entirely extinct but was critically important to the social fabric of our society and we lost a great deal when it went extinct. This category is what we will call “social capital banks.”

In the medieval period, if you were wealthy and wanted to travel between two distant areas, you were often in a very sticky situation. If you loaded all your wealth in the form of gold or other valuables into a cart, you placed a huge target on your back that was likely to get you killed. One way people dealt with this liability entailed secretive orders (the biggest being the Knights Templar) who would take people’s gold in one city and allow them to withdraw it from another branch of the order in its corresponding city. Before this social technology was created, it was very hard to functionally travel while enjoying life as a medium-to-high-wealth person across large swaths of land (this would mean that, outside of the very wealthiest people, your status and wealth were geographically locked to a large extent). A model analogous to this but focused on social capital instead of wealth was common up until just this last century and included groups like the Rotary Club, the Lions Club, the Freemasons, and the Society of Odd Fellows.

Organizations in this category typically feature “levels” of membership between which members can progress, as well as mystical rituals (mostly present for aesthetic purposes). The real advantage of this system was that in an age before the internet, a member who gained a certain rank and title with his local Masonic Temple or Rotary Club and lived in New York City could bring a certain amount of social capital with him when moving to Chicago or Los Angeles. People in these new cities would know you were a person of X-level caliber by the rank you had within their organization and trust you with jobs of X level while inviting you to the types of parties people of X-level social status get invited to. These types of ranks were even taken into account when approving people for bank loans.

While these organizations still exist, they are mostly just a few old men clinging to a dead way of life mostly devoid of actual “high class/caliber/prestige.” Their job of credentialing individuals has been replaced by the modern university system, which now has a near monopoly on this social technology (to the detriment of society), with the social circles you get let into at the entry-level in most cities being largely influenced by the level and source of your academic degree.

The academic takeover of this “social credit” version of secret societies will at least help most readers understand what it feels like to leverage its currency. Intuitively, most of us understand that someone with a Ph.D. from Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, or MIT is going to be seen very differently by the average American citizen than someone with a Ph.D. from … less prestigious universities—let alone someone who didn’t finish college or didn’t attend at all. Such people will be invited to different parties, welcomed into different social circles, and considered for different job positions. When these secret societies still were kicking about, there were multiple parallel paths for achieving this kind of social credit (though it was largely only exchangeable with people also in your network—e.g., Lions Club status was only good as a currency with other Lions Club members).

The presence of parallel systems for climbing in social status dramatically increased social mobility. If you wanted to move up in the world and missed the boat on a prestigious university, you could try your hand at the local Freemason Temple and, if that didn’t work, go to your local Lions Club. One of our pet projects has been trying to rebuild one of these networks and plumb it into our school to create something we call “democratized nepotism” for our students. Essentially, we want to see if we can root our best students into prestigious jobs around the university system’s monopoly on credentialing and status.

Another category of secret societies are “aligned incentive clubs.” They often exist within an industry or university for people who have aligned social or career interests and resemble regular clubs and fraternities—but with prestige branding. The biggest of these is YPO, the members of which (all CEOs) represent something like 13% of the world’s GDP.

While YPO is a great organization, its large size has made it necessary to adopt extremely formalized entrance requirements around being the CEO of a company of a certain size, which limits the organization’s potential. This blind litmus test filters out a lot of interesting and impactful people that most other secret societies would consider their highest-value members (like astronauts, scientists, famous artists, authors, philosophers, politicians, etc.) while not filtering out dullards who just inherited their companies (which most societies do these days). That said, YPO is without any shadow of a doubt (collectively) the world’s most powerful secret society and has been moving from strength to strength—even if it is a little dull compared to the more dynamic and action-oriented ones.

We, your authors, have become most involved with a final category of a secret society. These are “two-sided marketplace” societies, which typically focus on two (or more) categories of high-profile individuals who don’t normally gain exposure to each other and essentially “sell” (be it through fees or the time commitment needed to participate) access to one category to the other. The Bohemian Club (famous for its Bohemian Grove) exemplifies this model, with half the members being wealthy businesspeople (often with ties to the political sphere) and half being artists (musicians, playwrights, actors, etc.). In this instance, business and political heavy hitters get to interact with influential and famous artists and vice versa.

The key to building out these societies is to get enough super-interesting and controversial people—who pay little or nothing to participate—that a counter audience of wealthy and powerful people—who pay full price—will see the society as aspirational, join, and subsidize the attendance of their more interesting counterparts. Secret societies of this sort often don’t have a very long shelf life, in part because they are often launched on the foundation of a particularly famous person’s ”brand.” Take Renaissance Weekend as an example, which has really gone downhill since the Clintons were forced to leave due to public scrutiny. It is challenging, if not impossible, to start a new secret society without a lynchpin name like Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt, the Clintons, etc. One could theoretically found a new two-sided marketplace secret society using the right sort of famous person as its patron saint, should they like the idea, but to make the society sustainable, it would be imperative that the lynchpin person’s reputation quickly be deemphasized in favor of a broad, balanced, and revolving portfolio of other blockbuster personalities to reduce key man risk and enable the society to endure well after any single famous person has to step back.

There are three more reasons these societies tend to collapse. The first is that they are burdened with archaic rulesets that limit who they can recruit. None of the past’s all-male societies have been able to maintain the prestige they once held, in part because up-and-coming public figures would not want to risk affiliation with a plausibly misogynistic organization. To some extent, this is what happened to Skull and Bones: While the group has admitted women since the 90s, they got stuck with the rule of only being able to accept Yalies, tying the group’s reputation to that of Yale University (which has somewhat declined). You can’t exactly frame yourself as having access to the next generation of the world’s elite when only 39% of students pick you over Harvard (contrast that with Stanford, which—around the time of this book’s publication—43% of students would choose over Harvard).^[34]

Something to note is that secret societies which have replaced Skull and Bones as the prestigious “kids to watch” often target dropouts from elite universities or people who haven’t gone yet (like the Atlas Fellowship and The Thiel Fellowship). We suppose that’s just a sign of the times, with universities more generally losing their utility.

A second major force driving the downfall of two-sided marketplace secret societies involves “degradation from the mean” (for clarification, this is not a type of “regression toward the mean” but a totally different phenomenon). When a society fails to balance each side of its marketplace and degrades into a generic society where high-profile people gather to be around other high-profile people, it will eventually fade into obsolescence. General “elite” societies only have value to people below the mean level of member prestige, thus on average, every new entrant will drag that mean down. Efforts to evade degradation to the mean explain in part why older secret societies used to have ranks as a method to attempt to maintain members who were higher profile than average. Furthermore, two-sided marketplace secret societies that openly acknowledge and even codify that two-sided element, like what the Bohemian Grove has done with influential businesspeople/politicians and artists, typically last longer than those that do not (many two-sided marketplace secret societies don’t even recognize this dynamic as their core value proposition).

Waitlists comprise the final major force commonly destroying two-sided marketplace societies. It used to be common for highly in-demand secret societies to have decades-long waitlists (the average at one was something like 20 years—can’t give a name here). In some cases, waitlists come to be used as a vanity signal alluding to the society’s prestige. While they may signal desirability, waitlists also can be deadly. Most people who hear about a society in a way that gets them in the front door will hear about it from their peers who are members, so if that next group of members has to wait 20 years to get in and, in turn, begin nominating new members, then the average age of a member will increase by almost 20 years with each “generation” of membership. It is, for this reason, the average age of people in some once-very-prestigious societies these days is between 70 and 80 years old.

Why bring all this up? Consider the old banking systems run by groups like the Knights Templar and the Freemasons, and consider how a secret society network can be combined with a cultivar. The approach would bring unique tactical utility to even a newly-founded cultivar should its initial membership base be well selected and distributed. If you can successfully offer the tangible benefits associated with popular forms of secret societies while avoiding their major pitfalls and incorporating fitness-imparting cultural values, traditions, and practices, you will have greater odds of accelerating the rise of a truly powerful movement.

How Cultures Deal with Aging

A key factor reducing cultural bleed involves ensuring that a culture is relevant for people of all ages and is able to adapt to the challenges adherents face at different life stages. Cultural leaders and designers are usually older individuals, which can cause cultures to over optimize for adults (and even older adults).

As you think about the culture you wish to create, consider not only how it will be perceived by people in different stages of life (childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, etc.), but how it will impart tactical advantages that help adherents address challenges that arise across all stages of life. A culture that does a great job at helping parents raise families has far lower odds of surviving intergenerationally if it doesn’t also improve children’s lives, help teens overcome adversity, grant a competitive edge to young adults, and provide relevancy and meaning to mature adults as they reach old age.

Retaining Teens Through Rebellion

As mentioned earlier, what we call “evanescent youth cultures,” like goth culture, punk culture, or e-girl/e-boy culture, are unique in that they do not pass between generations and are essentially specialized memetic packages that evolved to spread among teenagers when their rebellious instincts are highest. While people rarely participate in these cultures beyond adolescence, evanescent youth cultures often trigger permanent breaks from their birth cultures.

To stay strong, cultures need mechanisms that either (1) shield youth from this special category of pop culture or (2) embrace evanescent youth cultures but contextualize them as temporary. If you are constructing a culture, the manner in which that culture relates to evanescent youth cultures will play a critical role in determining its bleed rate.

One reason humans likely evolved adolescent rebelliousness is that it encourages young people to detach from their parents in time to find mates and build family units of their own. This rebelliousness is deeply set and often hard to ignore. For example, I—Simone—remember how I felt when my parents attended gatherings around other people my age. I felt like everything they did was utterly humiliating, even if they were just cheering me on at a swim meet. I found this disgust perplexing, as I was fully aware that my parents were only present to support me.

As with any psychological phenomenon, not every person experiences a strong teen rebellion phase. That said, the population of rebellious teens is sufficient to fuel the development, evolution, and spread of cultures that almost exclusively prey on teenage audiences and their unique emotional sets. For example, adolescent humans’ brains become uniquely attuned to social cues and peer acceptance, hence evanescent youth cultures often leverage this heightened sensitivity (along with vulnerabilities related to awakening sexuality, tendencies to see parents and authority figures as oppressors of one’s true self, and desires to see oneself as somehow special and unique).

Evanescent youth cultures are unique in that they rarely hold on to adherents for long and evolve very quickly (usually not maintaining a consistent form for more than half a decade).

They commonly spread by:

Appealing to rebelliousness and helping adherents see themselves as independent individuals
Facilitating status upgrades within local social hierarchies (e.g., helping adherents become popular or noticed within a social group)
Helping adherents acquire non-reproductive sexual partners
Helping adherents see themselves as powerful or deep thinkers with access to a special perspective on reality
Allowing adherents to roleplay a new identity (e.g., a vampire, witch, or furry)

Sometimes evanescent youth cultures adapt bastardized iterations of core cultures that seem exotic. For example, when we were young, a sort of high school version of Buddhism spread, which combined superficial elements of Buddhist stereotypes with a surface-level understanding of the religion to produce a culture primarily designed to help teen adherents feel “deep” and secure casual sex. This bastardization process becomes highly amusing when youth cultures pull from more bizarre sources, such as fetish cultures (as can be seen in high school furry communities).

We wonder if some subcategory of a larger culture could be intentionally designed to draw in teens during this period of their lives. Teen Buddhism organically evolved to fill this role to an extent, with some individuals who adopted the superficial Westernized iteration later educating themselves and attempting to adopt a more authentic version of the culture and passing it on to their kids.

I, Simone, grew up with parents like this. They rebelled against their religious heritage growing up during the hippie days in the San Francisco Bay Area, explored a broad variety of new age and spiritual evanescent youth cultures, studied Aikido in Japan under a soon-to-retire grand master, and planned on studying Tai Chi in China (my unexpected birth derailed these plans), only to eventually became self-described “Born Again Buddhists” attending a very mainstream local Mahayana Buddhist temple.

People who appreciate the strict structure of more extreme evanescent youth cultures frequently end up joining more socially-mainstream but nevertheless highly structured cultures in adulthood. This may present an opportunity for some cultures to set themselves up as uniquely appealing landing strips for young adults transitioning out of their unsustainable youth cultures and explains why cults often target people in this age range. While my born-again-Buddhist parents took me to a Buddhist temple as a kid and maintained a very loose family culture, one of my cousins grew up with a more strict Christian family culture—something her parents had created after a youth spent with the Rajneesh movement in India (name changes and all).

When reviewing research demonstrating how much of our sociological profile is inherited^[35] I, Malcolm, worry about the cultural bleed our family will suffer as a product of teenage rebellion. Adding Simone’s ancestral rebellious nature to mine feels like a disaster waiting to happen. My “rebel” instinct as a teen was incredibly strong—to the extent that rarely a month passed in which I did not spend at least one day in the principal’s office, getting in a fight, or being chased by police (though, spending a big chunk of my early childhood in adolescent prison alternatives probably didn’t help).

How can we, as people who want to design durable cultures that endure across generations, protect future descendants from losing their way? Let’s consider what some other cultures do.

Anabaptist Rumspringa presents an archetypal model of one strategy. Amish Rumspringa typically starts from ages 14-16 while Mennonite Rumspringa starts between 17-20. Rumspringa is a period during which youth are offered the choice to baptize and join the community as adults—where they will have to spend the rest of their life living with severe technological limitation and strict self-control—or where they take a period away from the community to see how the English live (“the English” being a term sometimes used to describe outsiders because they speak English, whereas many Amish and Mennonites speak Pennsylvania Dutch). During the two-year Rumspringa, young adherents are allowed to holistically indulge in rebellion—ranging from premarital sex to drugs and alcohol. (Though most Anabaptist kids don’t go all the way with Rumspringa and just use it as an opportunity to be out from under their parents’ control on weekends or buy a courting buggy.)

Rumspringa is the cultural version of making your kid smoke the whole pack of cigarettes in front of you after catching them smoking—and it’s kind of genius. By encouraging rebellious youth to fully lean into the most overhyped aspects of pop culture in a way that can’t possibly be genuinely satisfying, a culture can essentially inoculate its youth against viral cultural influences. After all, pop and soft cultures are not typically cultures that people dive into enthusiastically; they’re what people slouch into when refusing to put effort or focus into anything else. In other words, pop/soft cultures sneak up on their prey and smother them in their sleep, but are fairly harmless when tackled head on.

What’s more, any culture that welcomes post-rebellion adherents back with open arms is somewhat inherently immune to rebellion, as it’s hard to rebel against a culture that looks rebellion in the face and says: “Sure, kid. Go for it. We’re not going to hold you back.”

It is furthermore quite clever for a culture to give lifelong adherents a taste of what life is like without its beneficial amenities and community support. Imagine growing up your entire life with the level of community support the Amish have (pretty-much-guaranteed healthcare, housing, a spouse, and a job) then getting to try things like sex and drinking in the context of having that support withdrawn from you. Honestly, the game is ingeniously rigged against any kid wanting to leave. It is no wonder to us that the Anabaptists have the lowest bleed rate of any cultivar in the world (on which we can find data), with a full 80-95% who engage in Rumspringa returning to the community for baptism.

Compare the Amish 20-25% bleed rate to Mormon and Evangelical Protestant bleed, which stand at 35% and 33% respectively. Mormon approaches to rebellion are almost the mirror opposite of Rumspringa, as rather than getting a free pass to go out and rebel, Mormon youth are encouraged to go on a mission trip, leaving their family to spend in-depth time diving deep into the religion and being paired with another devotee 24/7. Essentially, the LDS Church deals with this period of cultural danger by removing the young adults from unsupervised contact with non-Mormon peer groups and placing them under constant supervision. The cultural bleed differentiation between the two groups highlights how ineffective these kinds of ultra-controlling tactics are in an age of cell phones and social media.

As much as we respect the Anabaptist tradition of Rumspringa, we find another cultural tradition that tackles youthful rebellion even more compelling: That of the Spartan Krypteia.^{^[36]}

During Krypteia, young Spartan men left the confines of their strict culture and support network, just like the Amish do on Rumspringa, but instead of integrating with society, they were challenged to survive by the most ruthless means possible. Plato held that during this rite of passage, Spartan youth were not allowed to wear footwear or sleep in shelters, even in the dead of winter, or even work for their food. Instead, they had to hide among the local serf population (Helots) and feed themselves by stealing food from them without ever being seen. Plutarch furthermore described men on Krypteia as terrorizing Helots, killing men they found on highways at night and sometimes murdering Helots as they worked in fields. While it is unclear whether this rite of passage always or ever involved systematic murder, common themes in historical accounts include harsh living away from home, lots of solitude, and a fair amount of danger.

While we don’t know if modified (read: non-murdery) versions of either Krypteia or Rumspringa would work for our family culture, our fears about these traditions deviate from concerns typically surfaced by those familiar with them.

For example, we trust our descendants to know better than to experiment and rebel in ways that cause non-reversible harm to themselves and others (e.g. getting someone pregnant, experimenting with highly-addictive drugs, and making non-reversible body modifications). What worries us is that our Calvinist-derived family culture lacks some of the amenities rebellious youth will miss most when exploring the outside world. Both Amish and Spartan cultures offer(ed) notable levels of social support, whereas our culture regards social support networks that protect people from their mistakes rather than empower the capable as being intrinsically evil.

We nevertheless think our House cultivar’s notable absence of any support network is the right call. For example, had someone come to rescue me, Malcolm, from the shitty situations I regularly dug myself into as a teen, and had I believed there was an “out” if things went terribly wrong, I can only imagine what sort of monster I might have become. Shielding teens from the consequences of their bad behavior and the risks they take only encourages them to double down in a way that will not serve them well in adulthood.

We also worry that cultures that are better-integrated with their broader surrounding cultures will not offer rebellion experiences to their adherents that are as salient as those undergoing something like Rumspringa or Krypteia. Anabaptists like the Amish and Mennonites—not to mention Spartans—are and were quite different from surrounding populations. Cultures that integrate more seamlessly with surrounding populations may not feel the same sense of contrast when venturing into the outer world.

This shortcoming could be addressed by creating rebellious rites of passage in which youth are sent to live in environments and cultures that differ radically from those to which they are accustomed.

I, Malcolm, spent a period of time as a teen supporting myself in and hitchhiking around a developing country. Something like this might work as a cultural ritual. It would certainly help to impart the value our particular culture places on self-sufficiency and stepping up to daunting challenges, however we shy away from it for two reasons:

We would only feel comfortable offering it as an opt-in ritual.
Even if they took on this rite of passage with a partner, we would not be comfortable sending our daughters or granddaughters on such an expedition (for obvious safety reasons). We hate the idea of a gender-specific coming-of-age ritual meant to demonstrate self-sufficiency, as it subtly signals that women can’t be as self-sufficient as men (when in reality, it just unfortunately happens that self-sufficient men and women need to navigate around different risks in the world).

A final interesting tradition used to address teenage rebellion, known as “sending out,” was widely used by Puritans (a branch of Calvinists) in Colonial America. “Sending out” involved arranging for young teens (though occasionally younger children as well) to live with another family for a period, often to learn an important trade or skill. The process is quite ingenious considering how teens’ biology seems to drive them to instinctually rebel against their parents, suggesting a teen may be significantly less likely to feel this when living with a host family. As an added bonus, sending out allows youth to learn from and borrow aspects of other families’ unique cultures. Should the network of Index families grow large, this might be a great practice to reinstate.

When I—Malcolm—was young, my parents occasionally had me live with families in other countries and even went so far as to offer me an opportunity to live at a Buddhist monastery in Cambodia for half a summer if I wanted to. I never felt like I got much out of these experiences, perhaps because they were more set up around “cultural exchange” and not around my learning some useful skill.

We theorize the best way to protect our kids from harmful forms of teenage rebellion doesn’t involve elaborate rituals but rather a cultural understanding of these life stages. More specifically, it seems wise to:

Raise kids to expect their brains will be overwhelmed by hormones, specific emotions, and predictable sensitivities when they hit adolescence, and
Make sure your culture’s goals for teens align well with teenage proclivities.

For detailed thoughts on how this might be achieved, see: “Life Stages” in the Appendix on page 739. In this section, we discuss how we will structure life stages and expectations for the culture we create for our own kids, (e.g., between X age and Y age, focus on Z and expect W). Life is surprisingly short and if you want to effectively make use of it within the confines of how our culture defines a life well lived, you must be strategic and intentional about making the most of every single life stage. If you are young, we strongly recommend this Appendix chapter.

The Index’s Role in Teen Rebellion

The Index was in no small part created to address problems resulting from teen rebellion and cultural reinvention. Calvinist culture failed, in part, because:

1. It looks for truth and does not care much about tradition

2. Is extremely rebellious and contrarian

As a result, it consistently fragments after a generation or two.

It would be folly to invent a theology and set of traditions, then tell a 50% genetically identical younger, better, iteration of yourself (i.e., one of your children) to bow to it. While we know our kids will rebel against anything we create, we also see the implications of major global trends: If a family can’t stick together and elevate its strongest members, it has no long-term future.

Our children will be just as driven to compete and prove their superiority as they will be to rebel. Just as capitalism harnesses human greed to foster innovation and industry, the Index is designed to harness the common desire to rebel against your family and prove you are better than them in a manner that ultimately strengthens your bonds. While our children will invent their own traditions and theologies, they will only leave the Index if they fear the accomplishments of any cultivar they create will not measure up. We wager that even four generations from now, they will have too much pride to do that. In addition, we are betting their own children will look to their grandparents’ beliefs for inspiration when they themselves rebel, just as we have. (Essentially, we have the Index record each generation’s traditions in part so that family traditions can cycle between two or three iterated-upon versions with kids regularly rebelling against their parents but looking to their grandparents for inspiration.)

Puberty:
Gendered Mental Susceptibilities

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, another less-covered medical mystery arose: There was an explosion in Tourette’s diagnoses among young girls. More bizarrely, unusually high numbers of young women developed a large array of verbal tics, with some being very similar to each other (e.g., the word “beans” said in a British accent). While Tourette’s is uncommon, the form of Tourette’s with verbal tics is even less common, and for multiple people to exhibit the exact same unusual verbal tic at the same time is virtually impossible.

It turned out that posts about having Tourette’s had become popular as a category on TikTok and a top influencer in that category said the word “bean” as a tic.^[37] It looks like many young women were, knowingly or otherwise, simply copying this influencer. This would not be the first time a “mass psychogenic illness” arose in which young girls “caught” illnesses socially rather than as a physical impairment.^[38] An older iteration of this, for example, is Dissociative Identity Disorder, which rocketed from obscurity to thousands of cases following the release of a movie, an increase not seen in the U.K., where the movie was not released.^[39]

This phenomenon of young girls socially catching illnesses can be seen among a sub-faction of a growing community called “Spoonies”—see the footnote for a great article on this subject.^[40] The term Spoonies is derived from a way of describing what it is like to live with a crippling illness (often one that cannot be easily seen by others). In short, normal, healthy people have relatively unlimited energy, whereas those suffering from certain illnesses have to ration their highly limited energy in spoon-size measurements. A Spoonie might say, “I have five spoons a day; if I use one spoon to get out of bed, one spoon to shower, one to eat, and two to pick up groceries, I won’t have any left to write my blog post.”

Individuals usually first get involved in the Spoonie community after developing a real medical condition. Seeking comfort and solidarity, a sick person may begin to socialize online with other people who also suffer from infirmity. Upon entering communities of other ill people, it rapidly becomes apparent that community hierarchy is at least partially determined by how “sick” an individual is—which, of course it would be.

If the core differentiation between Spoonies and the rest of society is their infirmed state, it is natural that any given person’s status within the community would be influenced by their level of infirmity, just as a goth community member’s status would be modulated by how goth they are and the member of a tabletop gaming community’s status would depend on how much of their time is devoted to tabletop games. This dynamic leads to things like “pill porn,”^[41] in which individuals will post pictures of the pills they are taking—but furtively add in supplements they bought at a store to make themselves appear more ill than they really are.

As a result of this hierarchy structure, some individuals in the community (often those most active) develop a growing list of medical conditions that cannot be verified. The fact that doctors are unable to verify their illnesses causes community members to feel oppressed—to the extent that the community uses a zebra emoji to signify themselves in mockery of the common doctors saying, “When you hear hooves, look for horses and not zebras.” Essentially, it is a way of saying that they are special and unique in the types of illness they have and that is why doctors can’t determine what they are.

Note: We genuinely suspect that many Spoonies experience real pain and real symptoms. People vastly underestimate how susceptible our minds are to peer pressure. In addition, there is undoubtedly a large portion of this community that suffers from real, serious conditions. Even if you only hypothetically had a community that formed among actually sick teens, such a community would inevitably draw a large group of non-sick teens masquerading to fit in. That is just the way the teenage mind works.

In the age of social media, it is not terribly surprising that a dominance hierarchy determined by individuals’ infirmity would form and that a person could become an influencer by looking more ill than others. What is surprising is how overwhelmingly female the community skews and that most seem to get into it around puberty. What is going on here and how can we protect members of an intentionally crafted culture from succumbing to this community’s draw?

First, we must note that a female attraction to infirmity has been around for hundreds of years. In our youth, there was a whole category of goths dedicated to this look via the “psychic vampire” phenomenon (in which they believed they were chronically infirm and low energy, but that they could draw energy from other people to survive). Even novels penned during England’s Regency era (1795-1837) describe and make fun of female hypochondriacs, with Jane Austen’s novels presenting a panoply of examples.^[42] If there is something appealing about illness to women and especially adolescent girls—to the extent that they can begin to physically manifest signs of their imagined or subconsciously desired illness—what is the draw?

For men, puberty is fairly straightforward: It’s kind of like having a meth addiction forced upon you. All of a sudden, you desperately want something and would do insane, dangerous, and wildly out-of-character or immoral things to achieve said goal. This means young men are highly susceptible to cultural movements that tell them, “If you do X and Y, you will get sex” or “You aren’t getting sex because of [feminism/unfair bias/etc.].” While these cultures are dangerous, they are easy to predict and circumvent by giving young boys access to clear and honest relationship guidance (this is one reason we wrote The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships). Girls are dramatically more complicated.

For women, puberty often involves being suddenly blindsided by depression, self-hatred, and anxiety^[43]—well, that is what puberty feels like from the perspective of teenage girls, at least. We would argue the fundamental desires behind these feelings are astoundingly simple: In girls, puberty introduces an intense need to be treasured, desired, cared for, fussed over, pampered, protected, and accepted. While we use a lot of words to describe this need, it is a single, unified emotional mandate as simplistic as adolescent boys’ powerful drive to have sex (though just as some boys don’t suffer from insanely high adolescent sex drives, not all teenage girls experience an insatiable hunger to be desired and coveted, and some never experience that hunger at all).

The key difference between male and female adolescence from a culture-crafting perspective is that the adolescent male mandate to have sex is very recognizable and something external to their self-image (either you get sex or you don’t), whereas the adolescent female mandate is integral to their own self-image and harder to measure (am I desired enough?). This causes teen girls to focus inward on their own self-worth and mental state in a way teen boys don’t. Because, like in boys, the need is so voracious it can never be fully met, it causes many young girls to feel hopeless and build self-hatred (this may explain in part why 36% of young girls are diagnosed with depression when contrasted with 14% of boys).

A second-order effect of this loss of control in girls can manifest as an intense desire for order and control over some aspect of their environment, whether that be their food intake (eating disorders) or effort expenditure (spoonies).

I, Simone, never would have admitted that I wanted to be desired, treasured, cared for, fussed over, etc. as a teen—but as I reflect on my teenage feelings, drives, and behaviors as an adult, that motivation seems pretty obvious. I don’t think anyone wants to admit that the complex and heart-rending emotions they feel are the product of something so simple as a biological need to feel accepted and desired.

This unquenchable emotional need in young girls makes them very susceptible to being bled out by subcultures that lend members the impression that they have a unique, special identity or that they suffer in a singular way to which others cannot relate. Had I been aware of a community like Spoonies as a teenage girl, they—rather than anorexia (which I did have)—may have been my “poison,” so to speak. Both Spoonies and anorexics enjoy the comfort and control of deprivation, pain, and rationing while feeling simultaneously fragile and strong (hence “worthy” of fussing, pampering, etc.). Moreover, becoming a Spoonie would have given me excuses to get out of social interaction and enabled me to feel like a victim.

The subconscious allure of dangerous mental vortexes like anorexia and hypochondria in teenage girls causes an untold amount of suffering, cultural attrition, and increased likelihood of death.^{^[44]} As a society, we assume that humans naturally run from emotions like suffering, helplessness, and hopelessness, but the truth is these emotions are highly addictive and far easier to indulge in (in a perversely satisfying way) than positive emotional subsets. Better yet, when you convince others of your helplessness, some people begin to regard you as a victim—someone to be adored and protected.

Given the damage caused by this adolescent drive, why have teenage girls evolved to experience it? In short, we were designed to struggle to survive, to live lives of constant insecurity and real suffering, to be afraid of our tribes being raided and then being killed or used as disposable sex slaves. In some ways, our lives of plenty have left us with self-preservation instincts that are now backfiring.

While boys can still feel a real, tangible struggle for sex, which makes their teenage struggles straightforward (after all, rates of sex are plummeting at present), most privileged teenage girls no longer need to struggle for protection and attention. This confounds their ability to act on instinctual impulses (and it is primarily privileged teenage girls who succumb to Spoonie-related hazards).

These days, most affluent girls in developed societies already are pampered, protected, and coveted—there is no need to fight for it. Girls nevertheless feel an inherent need to pursue these things, presumably because their ancestors who failed to do so also failed to survive long enough to reproduce. As such, mostly privileged teenage girls find themselves manufacturing hardship to fill the void when real adversity is absent. In other words, it looks like adolescent girls evolved a deep need to fight to position themselves to be desired, protected, coveted, etc.—and if they face no struggle for the privilege, they’ll make one for themselves.

The first line of defense against forces that prey on this female adolescent drive is to recognize that any victim class that anyone can plausibly join—especially if it cannot definitively be proven or tested—will draw in a certain portion of young girls (and sometimes even when a victim class can be tested, women will be compelled to pursue it—looking at you, Rachel Dolezal). These forms of victimhood are appealing because they enable even privileged people to claim the right to victim status.

Durable cultures must be suspicious of these types of communities and deride calls to “just trust our internal experience and don’t attempt to verify whether we are actually in pain, experiencing discrimination, facing real danger, etc.” What Spoonies, for example, want is for others: “To believe; Be understanding; Be patient; To educate yourself; Show compassion; Don’t question.”^[45] These are uniquely dangerous types of evanescent youth cultures as they are uniquely capable of maintaining members through adulthood (leading people to be permanently crippled by the form of victimhood to which the culture subscribes—or even live a life of constant pain they could have evaded had they never engaged with the community).

How will our House contend with these predatory subcultures? The answer is threefold:

Focus on early education: Teach young kids to expect the emotional changes they are about to face and discuss how groups will manipulate those changes. We need to stop teaching young women to expect male puberty.
Frame victimhood as a universal negative: Create a culture that never praises or privileges a person for being weak. While most modern cultures disproportionately redirect their resources to those who need them the most—the weak—we will frame our culture as one that redirects its resources to those who will make the most of them: Industrious people who yield a high return on investment. This might sound cruel, but it will produce more output per resource spent while also lowering aggregate suffering by lessening the desirability of weakness and dissuading members from indulging in despair and suffering. While we don’t see suffering as something worth avoiding, we only see suffering as acceptable if it is in service of something meaningful and important—we don’t abide by suffering for suffering’s sake or suffering in an effort to gain attention or status.
Frame all emotional indulgence as an intrinsic evil: Modern society teaches the objective lie that indulging in negative emotional states “gets them out of your system” when in reality, indulging in negative emotional states reinforces and amplifies them.^[46] While our culture will not pressure adherents to suppress or sublimate their emotions, it will teach members to recognize them as neutral signals rather than guiding forces.

Bonus Idea: Female Incels

Most of this book’s readers will be familiar with radical incels (involuntary celibates): Sexually frustrated men who think it is a human right to have their puberty-induced needs met—and for men, that need is sex. The most radical incels even hold that the government should pay for prostitutes to fulfill this “need” of theirs.

What, then, is the female equivalent of a super-radical incel? Contrary to immediate intuition, it’s not just a female incel; after all, the average young woman doesn’t become a sex-starved nymphomaniac upon reaching adolescence.

If the “need” that awakens in women during puberty is not primarily to have sex but rather to be desired and treasured, then the female version of someone who categorizes fulfillment of their puberty-awoken need as a human right would be someone who argues it is immoral for people to find specific women unattractive—someone who works to create social norms that disallow such reactions.

“Hah, right,” you might be thinking, “but it’s impossible to shame people for what they do and do not find attractive.”

Really? Tell that to the radical end of the Fat Acceptance movement where women claim that men must learn to find fat women attractive and that not finding fat women attractive is a form of bigotry. Evidence that this is just female incelism can be seen in how rarely the movement advocates for finding fat males attractive.

We wish it were self-evident to everyone that, whether you are a male or female, trying to control the bodies and personally held opinions of other people is both futile and toxic. Thankfully, to most people, it is—which is why the majority of both the incel and fat acceptance movements do not hold these positions and instead call out obviously unfair things in society (and how much unfairness should matter to you is a cultural question).

Age and Power

The respect and roles a culture lends to different age groups (sometimes referred to by historians as a culture’s “age ways”) can heavily influence how it passes between generations and how people interact with those of different generations.

Age can relate to power in a few ways.

1. Extreme Deference to Elders

In extreme instances, like in Korea, one of the first questions you ask a stranger is what their age is, as it can determine the entire structure of the language you’ll use when speaking with them. You would think extreme deference would be great for older people, but it actually produces more negative outcomes for them than for young people. For example, because you are not supposed to have a “boss” who is younger than you, people who don’t move up the career hierarchy get overlooked for job opportunities much faster than they otherwise would be as they age. This is why so many ajummas (middle-aged and older Korean women) own restaurants—once you reach a certain age, running your own store is kind of the only option you have. Another negative externality of extremely strict deference to elders is exemplified by the famous chain of plane crashes tied to co-pilots not being willing to challenge their superiors.

An interesting solution to this problem developed by the South Korean tech company Kakao is to mandate that all employees refer to each other by their “English” names in the office, which does not require the same language change and, according to Kakao, allows for more creativity. That said, that a company feels like they need to sublimate their native culture to be innovative does not inspire us to consider elder-deference as a fitness-imparting “age way.”

2. Matriarchal or Patriarchal Families

While older generations are more respected within matriarchal and patriarchal families, one particular individual (a patriarch or matriarch) is respected much more than other family members. This individual is sometimes the oldest but not always. For example, if one family member runs a business that employs a lot of other family members, they may assume the role. In addition, status as the family matriarch or patriarch can be lost through actions that are out of line with the family cultivar’s moral framework (like having a child out of wedlock). Essentially, most of the respect within a family unit is reserved for a single (or a few) older individuals. This model is very common in Latin American cultures.

Of the traditional “age ways” we have studied, this model has the greatest number of advantages. It motivates cultural fidelity through generations, maintains a certain level of meritocracy within groups, and creates a de facto family governing structure without putting too much distance between parents and their children. In addition, it gives individuals a reason to follow their cultural rules (out of a desire to someday attain this status).

3. Recognition of Youth as Being in Touch with the Divine

Some cultures venerate the “wisdom” of the young (Quaker culture is an example here). They think youth either have a direct connection to the divine or some … untainted … perspective on the world, which gives their words unique weight.

We can’t even begin to fathom what evolutionary or logical advantage this perspective might impart to a culture. That said, it may be that this “age way” sometimes organically emerges from cultures with low birth rates, which could cause the opinions and views expressed by children to seem novel and interesting. As kids are known for having all sorts of blunt insights and fresh perspectives, it is not unreasonable that people unaccustomed to being around children would be shocked by youthful insights and conclude that young people in particular should be heeded.

That said, there is sparse evidence that granting disproportionate power to youth will impart greater fitness to a culture. Don’t get us wrong—kids do offer incredible perspectives and our kids blindside us daily with their insights, observations, and thoughts, unclouded as they are by bias and emotional baggage. It just happens that we can neither logically reason through the advantage of taking kids’ lead, nor can we find historical examples of cultures that heavily empowered youth and saw great results.

Consider, for example, the generation of youth that was given disproportionate power in China when Mao Zedong served as chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from 1949 until his death in 1976. During Mao’s Great Leap Forward, schools were temporarily shut down and through his support of the Red Guards, Mao gave disproportionate power to youth via a youth-led paramilitary social movement.

A Red Guard leader described the movement thusly:

“Chairman Mao has defined our future as an armed revolutionary youth organization. … So if Chairman Mao is our Red-Commander-in-Chief and we are his Red Guards, who can stop us? First we will make China Maoist from inside out and then we will help the working people of other countries make the world red … and then the whole universe.” ^[47]

The disproportionate power given to Mao’s youth led them to become entitled, closed-minded, and arrogant. As adults, this lost generation is known for being relatively corrupt (for example, government officials from this generation are known for being more likely to accept bribes), amoral, and dysfunctional.

Don’t get us wrong; older generations have all sorts of terrible baggage and we, personally, don’t see them as being inherently deserving of power either. Nevertheless, there may be benefits to sublimating the power of youth to the power of adults—if only to give each new generation a baseline culture and morality that they, once adults, can choose to accept or reject.

4. Zero Relation Between Age and Respect

This model, which does not privilege any particular age, is pervasive in soft cultures that haven’t inherited other “age ways.” If anything, cultures holding this perspective view advanced age as a sign of being mentally addled. Per this model, respect is instead predominantly based on one’s position in a local dominance hierarchy (see The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance for how these hierarchies are built).

While dropping age as a basis for power or respect can augment a culture’s general meritocracy, there is something to be said for granting specific powers to specific generations. It could be argued, for example, that general neglect for elders (with regard to power and respect) has been a detriment to many modern societies. Consider how in the United States, it is relatively common for perfectly healthy elderly people to live in retirement homes, entirely separated from younger generations and only occasionally visited by children and grandchildren. When we experimented with creating a new planned community centered around families and child rearing (https://Eureka.Town), we were stunned to receive ardent interest from retired people and empty nesters who wanted to join the community as well and play a critical role in providing childcare support to the younger families present. These people saw the idea of living in such a community and serving such an instrumental purpose as being far more appealing than moving to a retirement community or remaining in their towns and cities, ruled as they were by cultural defaults.

This made us realize that cultures with higher levels of elder respect weren’t just giving things to the elderly (like caring for elderly parents who live in your home); they also received a great deal of value (like childcare—anyone in the U.S. who has personally paid for childcare can relate). It could even be argued that older generations evolved to hold a special place in society in which, in exchange for societal support, they helped more-able-bodied-and-productive adults care for their young. There is actually a whole theory around this known as the Grandmother Hypothesis, which essentially posits that women evolved menopause (rather than maintaining fertility through old age) because at a certain point, it became more advantageous for elderly humans to care for the young and free up resources for younger, more productive adults.^[48]

This is all to say that it isn’t necessarily wisest or most efficient to pass on an opportunity to grant certain powers of levels of respect to certain ages when intentionally developing or shaping a culture.

5. Descendant Worship (Our Model)

While the concept of “descendant worship” does not automatically assign respect to a person who is young, it does assign respect to those representing future generations, with the expectation that each successive generation “stands on the shoulders of giants” and will iterate on, advance, and surpass the achievements of those who came before them (for a highly visual illustration of this, compare footage of a 1950s Olympic gymnast routine with one performed in the 2010s—you can find many side-by-side comparisons online).^[49] This concept therefore intrinsically expects the young to outpace their parents once they reach mid-to-late adulthood.

Our model of descendant worship does not assign respect by local dominance hierarchies (e.g., how much a person is respected in society). Instead, we assign respect based on proven competence, success, and fecundity—with the most respect going to those currently in the act of succeeding (e.g., a person who made a fortune 20 years ago is shown less respect than someone currently in the process of amassing a smaller fortune).

In our family we have a practice of saying, “Your grandkids would be proud of you,” when someone does something that aligns with our family values. This is a deviation of “Your ancestors would be proud of you” and helps enforce the cultural perspective that it is most meaningful to take action likely to have a reverberating impact through the ages. We also think this framing is “logically correct,” as a person’s ancestors lived in a different cultural context. What does it matter what obsolete generations think of you? In contrast, by attempting to predict the impact of your actions on those yet to come and how you will be judged by them, you can “future proof” your thinking to an extent.

One risk to this perspective is that a lack of deference toward elders can produce a degradation of cultural fidelity. If you don’t intrinsically respect your elders, then why follow their belief systems?

Here we believe in cultural “efficacy.” By that we mean: Did you enjoy your childhood? Did it prepare you for adulthood and happy, strong interpersonal relationships? If it did, even if you don’t understand why your childhood culture does everything it does, you are more likely to pass it forward—while of course modifying the bits that don’t work (and by that we mean, elements of the culture that didn’t produce positive outcomes, not just elements that were “difficult”).

Still, it is likely just wishful thinking that the above will work. From a cultural transfer perspective, the Matriarch/Patriarch model is the best “age way” that we have seen tested when it comes to instilling cultural fidelity. Can you think of other interesting ways you might structure age-based respect within your House?

Should you wish to dig deeper into this topic, we recommend Whatifalthist’s exploration of how family structure drives ideology[50] in which he summarizes The Explanation of Ideology by Emmanuel Todd.[51] Both present a compelling argument that family structure can have a massive impact at the level of state governance. For example, areas with exogamous communitarian families, where a large number of family branches live together but people marry outside their family, are much more likely to support communism not just between countries but within countries (as can be seen within Italy). While we don’t agree with the entire thesis put forward, if you like this book, you will probably enjoy the video.

If you found this discussion of age and power to be interesting and want maximum information on crafting a culture, see the following Appendix chapters (if this chapter was boring to you or you are short on time, skip them):

“Childhood” on page 754: Which, leveraging our childhood experiences as an example, explores how childhood experience shapes people and their parenting philosophies.
“Cultural Motivators” on page 762: Which details mechanisms like maternal guilt and pride that cultures use to motivate behavior.
“Honor Sources and Codes” on page 774: Which explores what a culture’s honor code can look like.
“Honor Code Example Set” on page 775: Which provides an overview of how we are thinking about structuring the honor code of our intentionally-designed cultivar.

Post-Death Family Engagement

On el Día de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead), family members visit graveyards to actively engage with deceased relatives, which in a way maintains them as active family members. Technology will soon allow us to go one step further and create simulacrums of our ancestors.

Earlier in this book, we mentioned the Infinite Conversation, an AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek, which imperfectly-but-impressively mimics both the sorts of things they would say and the tonality of their voices. Training a more advanced iteration of this tech on large datasets amassed in future relatives’ lifetimes (we already passively amass reams of information about our thoughts and behaviors now merely by walking around with phones and communicating digitally) and throwing in some good deepfake tech could offer families something with far more agency, responsiveness, and real-world presence than even the most creative Victorian’s concept of a ghost.

People will also be able to create AIs trained to model specific books or ways of thinking. For example, a person could train an AI on the Pragmatist’s Guide series and give you answers to any question you had from our (Simone and my) collective perspective. What is meaningful about this approach is an AI trained on someone’s more polished, carefully-thought-through work (arguably their best intellectual selves) will manifest as something meaningfully different from an AI trained on someone’s emails, chat logs, recorded speech, etc.

How will future cultivars leverage this technology? Will a family create a mausoleum filled with the skulls of deceased relatives and use AIs trained on them to provide answers to those seeking advice? Will a family come to be permanently run by a matriarch or patriarch trained on a single ancestor? Will a family create a conglomerate identity trained collectively on all ancestors—or all ancestors that met a certain criteria (and if so, what qualifies one for entry into the family’s collective AI pantheon)? Will there be families represented by a single AI trained on all living family members’ online footprints and personalities?

The traditions various cultivars establish in the face of these technologies may significantly affect their trajectories and morality, as when the line between organic family members and AI family members begins to blur, new conceptions of “self” arise.

Cultural Identifiers

Almost all hard cultures feature some form of cultural identifier that, in addition to signaling membership, serves as a form of emotional armor, reminding adherents of who they are while setting them apart when they interact with “normal” society.

While some cultural identifiers are extremely obvious (consider the dress and styling of Hasidic Jews), others may only be easy to spot when you are moderately informed about a culture. Ritual undergarments worn by those endowed in the LDS Church, for example, require a minimum level of outer dress that can often make a Mormon identifiable to people who know what subtle cues to look for, but most won’t notice a difference.

Cultural identifiers can range from clothing and grooming styles to accents, language, and even home construction, as is the case with Swartzentruber Amish, who see porches as sinful luxuries.

While these differentiators can be beneficial to a culture’s members by, for example, making it easy to spot a friendly face and helping members see themselves as distinct from broader society, they are also often viewed as costly sacrifices that remind adherents, on a day-to-day basis, that membership in their culture comes at a cost. This perceived cost reinforces culture adherents’ sunk cost fallacy, sucking them further in and creating cognitive dissonance when they act in a manner incongruent with their culture.

Though typically hard cultures represent all extremes when it comes to cultural features, evanescent youth cultures demonstrate an exception to this rule when it comes to cultural identifiers, with evanescent youth culture adherents almost always exhibiting even more extreme cultural identifiers than members of hard cultures. This happens because dressing in a way that makes you unacceptable to mainstream society or expressing views no sane person would seriously hold are the two primary mechanisms an individual can use to show commitment to evanescent teen groups, leading these displays of commitment to become more extreme over time until they become untenable to new members and the subculture dissolves.

Take goth culture as an example: Goths need to make more and more “costly signals” to show dedication to the group in something of a Red Queen’s race of tattoos, expensive clothing, and face piercings until the culture gets so ridiculous no one wants to join anymore and it dies out (perhaps to be revived later on down the line).

We don’t think it’s possible for a group like the Index or our House to push strong identifiers given how much we advocate for whatever course of action is pragmatically most efficacious in any individual circumstance. To that end, the closest thing we would have to an advised cultural signal is the model of building an outward-facing character described in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life.

Essentially this model recommends that you design your public persona in a way that is easy for others to digest, allowing you to fit snugly in their minds. An optimal public persona is simple and predictable—the caricature of a “real person.” While everyone is the protagonist of their own story, they are also a side character in everyone else’s. This means you will be more compelling to people if you portray or create a simplistic stereotype that makes sense and is internally consistent given their worldview.

All that said, should our House become a large cultural group that regularly uses aggressive gene editing, it might make sense to add a permanent “ethnic” cultural identifier (for example, by introducing a new skin or eye color). We discuss this idea and why you might do it in the chapter “Medicine and Technology.”

Naming

While there are a few cultural identifiers we will not address, such as affectations and accents (as they are hard to adopt intentionally without looking like an idiot), naming conventions offer an easy-to-see-and-control cultural identifier that can even be adopted by first-generation culture crafters (should they be willing to change their names—we know several people who have done so). As naming is a cultural identifier more common among ethnic rather than cultural groups and Western cultures aren’t famous for having particularly vibrant practices in this domain, our readers may not give the practice enough credit or recognize its creative potential.

Consider Korean naming conventions (as used in Korea, not among the expat population): By looking at how Korean culture names kids, you can see how naming conventions can be used to pass down and reinforce values. For starters, the family name is put before the individual name, demonstrating how family is more important than the individual. Second, an individual’s given name is made of two parts: One is unique to them and the other is a generational name shared by all siblings of the same gender. This emphasizes the importance of the family and age along with differences between genders.

Korean naming conventions get really interesting at the level of colloquial honorifics that people give to each other. Instead of conveying marriage status (as Westerners do by addressing people by Mr. and Mrs.) they often convey the person’s position within their company. While it is easy for Westerners to scoff at this convention as dehumanizing, we can imagine many Koreans scoffing at titles like Mrs. that harken back to the (fairly recent) days when Mrs. was typically accompanied by the husband’s name in formal address (e.g. Mrs. Malcolm Collins, rather than Mrs. Simone Collins), clearly deemphasizing the importance of married women vis-a-vis their male partners.

Another interesting naming practice undertaken by some cultures involves changing an individual’s name as they get older. In this practice, an individual’s name is changed after a coming-of-age ceremony, indicating a life stage or class transition. We see this happen in many Western cultures when women get married or when people obtain doctoral degrees. Changes in titles founded on these shifts highlight major cultural obsessions: We (Americans) are a culture that values women based on their marital status and that puts a lot of focus on the level of certification someone has achieved from institutions of higher education.

Let’s talk about medieval Jewish naming. Have you ever noticed some of your Jewish friends’ names feature precious metals? In some instances, this is a product of Jews not being allowed in the major guilds and thus concentrating in metal working professions, however this was not true of all Jewish ghettos (note: in the medieval period, most Jews lived in ghettos within non-Jewish cities).

To start, most Jews did not have surnames. Instead, many Jews were assigned surnames in 1783 due to a misinterpretation of an Austro-Hungarian law (which is why many Jews have German surnames). While the specifics of this are not important for this conversation, what is important is that these names were assigned by government officials and it was a common practice to bribe these officials to get more “prestigious” sounding names, with names involving fancier metals like gold costing more than names involving less valuable metals like silver (though sometimes names with these themes came from being a jeweler). Thus, some Jewish families today still hold names that signified their family’s wealth during a point in time a few centuries ago at which an Austro-Hungarian law was misinterpreted.^[52] (A weird quirk that occurred during this period of conversion to a culture that used last names was that for a period many Jews would use multiple last names depending on their context e.g., “Son of X”, their profession, or where they were from.)^[53]

Another fun thing to note is that Jewish cultivars can have quite divergent naming traditions: For example, Sephardic Jews will often name children after living relatives, while this is strictly forbidden for Ashkenazi Jews, who often name children after dead relatives.

We live in Peru part time and find naming conventions there to be incredibly reflective of Peruvian culture’s intense focus on the family unit. In Peru, given names typically come from a close family member, middle names come from mothers’ last names, and last names come from fathers. Multiple children often draw their first name from their father and the oldest daughter will frequently draw her first name from her mother. When a woman marries, she often but not always adds her husband’s name to the end of her name while keeping both her father’s and mother’s names. Essentially, every aspect of this naming process demonstrates the importance of family and implies that an individual should think about themselves as part of a wider family unit connected with both sides of their parentage (which contrasts with something like Korean culture, which also focuses on family but sees kids as part of their fathers’ families).

Some people in modern Western cultures will hyphenate the last names of each spouse upon marriage and pass that hyphenated name on to their kids. Among heterosexual couples, this demonstrates a focus on gender equality along with disinterest in being an intergenerational durable culture, as obviously this practice can’t continue for more than one or two generations.

Historical Calvinist and the derivative Puritan cultures featured a colorful naming practice focused around a belief called nominative determinism (well, at the time it was a belief; now the concept of nominative determinism is somewhat attested in scientific literature). Essentially, nominative determinism claims that you can influence a person’s life path through what name they are given. Historically, this meant many Calvinist women were given names like Silence, Amity, Virtue, Hope, Chastity, Obedience, and Prudence (there is even a case of a Puritan being named Has-descendants which sounds like the kind of nutty thing we would do).^[54] Nominative determinism is telling about Calvinist cultural values, as it implies that the end goal is the only thing that matters, and that everything, even a person’s identity, is only a tool to achieve said goal.

Our House has adopted nominative determinism and hopes to carry it into the future, meaning we optimize around names harkening to people and concepts we hope our children will emulate. This has us somewhat carrying on the practice as it was utilized by our Calvinist ancestors—for example, Malcolm’s ancestor Jasper Collins named his son Ulysses Sherman Collins after Union generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman. In the antebellum South, this was like naming your kid Adolf Hitler, but the name exemplified an important practice in conveying and maintaining family values. We prefer not to “other” our kids quite to that extent, but stick with the tradition through names like Octavian (which we gave to our eldest son).

Another family tradition in naming is to look for any opportunity to use someone’s name to acquire family advancement or reinforce important strategic ties. For example, Malcolm’s great grandfather Carr P. Collins was named after his dad’s boss. Such choices convey the cultural value that the only thing that matters is the end goal. While we wouldn’t necessarily do this with one of our kids’ first names, middle names are of great utility in strengthening ties and alliances due to their low importance in our daily lives.

When we can’t use middle names for career advancement, we focus them on something that will be fun for the kids when they are in middle school and high school, as that is an age during which people use middle names the most. Thus, we named our daughter Titan Invictus Collins and son Torsten Savage Collins. These names also show our larger dedication to nominative determinism: All our kids have names that are meant to convey power and are just different enough from common regional names to remind them that they are not like other people and not members of the dominant cultural group.

A final element of nominative determinism in our House’s naming tradition is to never use strictly feminine names. Studies show girls with masculine names have better emotional control, advance further in their careers, and earn more money.^[55] More generally, the very concept of “female” that pop culture carries is not germane to what being born with two X chromosomes means to us, as our culture doesn’t value many commonly-female-associated traits such as consensus building and sensitivity to feelings. We talk more about our thoughts on gender later, but suffice to say our first daughter is named Titan Invictus Collins and our next candidate names for daughters are equally aggressive.

People sometimes ask us why we give our kids names that are more likely to inspire bullying (primarily because they don’t fit societal norms). Getting picked on is just a sign that you differ enough from mainstream culture that you are activating society’s immune system. In addition to reinforcing our kids’ understanding that they are not like other people and more is expected of them than is expected of others, this trains them to ignore social pressure to conform. This second point is a critical skill for anyone who aims to create a better future for our species, as doing so requires some violations of social norms. In addition, as the middleman minority phenomenon demonstrates,^[56] despite social narratives to the contrary, othered groups that face discrimination but maintain a cultural focus on education often outcompete the dominant population of an area financially.

Though we weren’t obligated to make any changes to implement this element of our naming convention as ours is called House Collins, we also like the concept of using one’s House name as one’s last name. If one of our kids decides to craft a totally new culture, we would encourage them to change their last name to reflect that culture and its Index House name. Similarly, if one of our sons ended up adopting his wife’s House culture, we would only think it natural for him to adopt her last name.

All cultures can look mortifying from outsiders’ perspectives. We understand that many people see our family’s naming conventions as bizarre, controlling, conceited, and cringeworthy, while to us the idea of naming your kid just something that sounds nice feels emotionally indulgent, aimlessly capricious, and frivolous. Pop cultures will always shame people who stick to a strong and unique cultural identity by calling it weird or cringe—that is how they pressure people into converting and thus spread. The difference between cultures that grow and those that fail is how you react to that shame. From our perspective, any culture or person who is below replacement rate that wants to shame us into conforming to their fading existence is about as relevant as a fart in a hurricane.

Cultural Language

Cultures differ their internal communication through mechanisms as bold as entirely different language, as is seen with groups like the Amish who speak Pennsylvania Dutch, a form of German, to mechanisms as subtle as unique words and affectations, which are common in many haven cultures.

From time to time, cultural language seeps into widespread usage, especially if the originating culture produces influential media and sets trends. Consider the various phrases, words, and affectations originally common in both American Black and LGBT communities that have been co-opted by pop culture.

What we find most interesting is the manner in which hard cultures use language. Scientology provides a good case study, with members often using a large number of acronyms in their daily speech. Doing so identifies them to other cultural insiders while forcing outsiders to appear less knowledgeable.

When considering distinct language for your own House, consider that the primary function of most insider cultural language is to categorize and “other” both outsiders and insiders. From a tactical standpoint (and we elaborate on this later in the book), we therefore find the most impactful use of language pertains to the way cultures classify people. Consider, for example, how Scientologists use the acronym SP (suppressive persons) to refer to those actively challenging their church, and how the Amish often refer to non-Amish as “the English.”

In the case of our House, there are really only two unique words we use with any regularity and have not discussed elsewhere in the book, “Husk” and “Shrieker.”

Husk:

We use this term to describe a person who is unable to change their mind when presented with new information or seriously engage with new ideas. From our perspective, such people have lost the key element of human existence. Our cultivar holds that a living human is the medium upon which ideas and perspectives interact. While spiders can only learn to make better webs through the spiders that made bad webs dying, humans can test their models of the world against other models and information. Particularly virulent memetic sets have evolved the ability to shut down this process in order to ensure they can never be expunged from a person’s mind. Once this happens, a person stops being meaningfully human and is better thought of as a memetic set wearing a human-like skin suit. In other words, a husk is a corpse puppeteered by the thing that consumed its identity—like an “Edgar suit” or a “Billy suit” (Men In Black or Adventure Time; choose your pop culture reference).
To be clear, a Husk is not someone who disagrees with us or follows a different tradition (as people who disingenuously manipulate their followers will almost certainly imply). A Husk is someone of any tradition incapable of meaningfully engaging with new ideas.

Shrieker:

This term is used to describe a category of husk that tries to force someone to comply with their memetic set’s framework of acceptable behavior by signaling social rejection. What makes shriekers so insidious is that they do this to complete strangers from different social circles (which makes the attempted social rejection feckless). Humans evolved to fear social rejection, as historically it meant we would be expelled from the tribe and likely die. As such, even the most lucid of humans will experience an illogically strong reaction when complete strangers online signal that their behavior is unacceptable (e.g., someone calling them cringe, a freak, or a Nazi). The emotional pain we feel upon social rejection evolved to work within small groups in which everyone knew each other, but shriekers exploit this reaction in large pseudonymous venues. Some cultural viruses have evolved to exploit this. After consuming an individual’s identity, they marionette the corpse into barging into venues of public conversation to repeatedly signal social rejection to strangers.

The supervirus has become particularly adept at utilizing shriekers to make thoughts, ideas, and lifestyles that threaten its spread unsafe to express in public venues. Why? There are few things more threatening to a social virus than a person proudly living life their own way; if other people started to see this as a normal way of being, most viruses would lose a lot of their power.

Both of these terms were designed to be of active utility to members of our cultivar.

“Husk” as a term reinforces how much we value the ability to consider new perspectives and ideas by framing the loss of this ability as tantamount to death. It also helps members save time by encouraging them to write people off once they realize they are a Husk.

“Shrieker” as a term helps members of our culture turn down the volume of this easy-to-hijack social signal by dehumanizing those who exploit it in an effort to manipulate members of our culture into conformity with a projected “correct way of being” (correct from the shrieker’s point of cultural reference, of course). When you see a person as a harmless zombie shrieking and pointing at you, it is easy to realize how little their “rejection” matters. Framing shriekers so negatively may also prevent iterations of our culture from someday adopting similar strategies.

Side note: A very interesting behavior you sometimes see from shriekers is the formation of a “hive.” This happens when a virus has effectively created husks that feel a compulsion to signal social rejection about those not slavishly following their concept of cultural norms but that fail to ensure this compulsion was only elicitable by signaling this to outgroup members. Thus, clusters of shriekers will gather to masturbate this compulsion in front of each other in closed communities that no one who doesn’t already agree with them visits. (Kiwi farms is a good example of a hive.)

Family, Dating, & Sex

Views around sexuality and partner finding seem to be what get hard cultures in the most hot water within our modern cultural context. Many hard culture stances vis-a-vis LGBT viewpoints, for example, are highly intolerant, and there is widespread modern discomfort with hard cultural partner matching practices (how early people marry, how much influence an individual’s parents have, arranged marriages, dowries, etc.). At the same time, modern society has utterly failed to help people establish and maintain secure, loving, long-term relationships.

Is there a way to marry the stable birth rates of hard cultures with the egalitarian perspective of modern society?

LGBT Sexuality

There is a reason why very few traditional cultures are “OK” with same-sex relationships (and not a single widespread long-lived culture is/was). When a culture tolerates openly gay relationships, its adherents produce offspring at a lower rate and it ends up being outcompeted, population-wise, by its neighbors. Even if you were to isolate a culture that accepted gay people on an island, a homophobic subculture would eventually splinter out of it and come to outnumber and overwhelm its parent culture in time.

Even today, cultural movements that are most accepting of gay, lesbian, bisexual and other non-traditional sexualities (not to mention unconventional relationship formats) have a very low birth rate when contrasted with their more conservative counterparts. This is true not just within the United States but also within and between just about every other nation in the world. So not only do countries less accepting of gay people have more children, but within any given nation, the cultivars and regions less accepting of LGBT people also have more children.^[57]

While it is true that cultures accepting of LGBT individuals have enjoyed enormous success within the past couple of generations, they have done this without fixing their birth rate problem. More worrisome still, the memetic package that causes straight people to support the LGBT community also appears to correlate with lower birth rate per a survey we ran (0.6 children per woman). This creates huge negative externalities for the LGBT community over the long run.

Research on genopolitics shows us that political beliefs, along with our larger sociological profiles, have a large genetic component (for more info on this and citations, read the chapter: “Humanity’s Genetic Shift” on page 20). If you systematically hunt and kill all the elephants who are not afraid of people with large tusks (or otherwise sterilize them), eventually elephants’ tusks will get smaller and they will get more aggressive. If you sterilize everyone who supports gay people … well, we should expect a strong swing against the community a few decades down the line. As long-term supporters of the community, this is deeply concerning to us.

As we wrote earlier in the book: But surely this change will be slow … right? Actually, it is already measurable. Here^{^[58]} is a paper quantitatively showing how differential fertility rate can have substantial impact on attitudes toward social issues. From 2004 to 2018, the differential fertility (more conservative, more kids) increased the number of U.S. adults opposed to same-sex marriage by 17%, from 46.9 million to 54.8 million. (Interestingly, because unmarried and childless people vote more liberally this change makes a population more liberal within a generation^{^[59]} but more conservative between generations^{^[60]}.)

The only way to ensure a culture tolerant of gay people spreads and outcompetes its more traditional competitors on a multi-generational scale is to ensure that the culture finds a way to “use” gay people that does not lower its overall birth rate. The classic example here is the “gay uncle hypothesis,” which goes so far as to claim being gay is evolutionarily beneficial because gay men can dedicate themselves to their siblings’ offspring and may be associated with greater attractiveness in female siblings. As mentioned in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, this hypothesis is not well supported by data.

Note: There is one study a lot of talking head “internet intellectuals” cite these days when arguing that the gay uncle hypothesis may have merit, in which researchers found that Tibetan families who send one sibling to be a celibate monk have more more grandkids on average, but only when the decision is out of the parents’ hands.^{^[61]} While this study is fascinating, the mechanism of action is a bit more nuanced and makes us doubt its generalizability. First, it does not control for religiosity (which correlates with both birth rate and sending kids to become monks). Second, it only affects the birth rate of brothers and only increases their birth rate by 1.7 (a family would need at least three sons for this to be effective). Furthermore, the way this practice appears to increase birth rate is by leading monks’ non-monk brothers to have their first kid earlier: “This result suggests that the benefit contained by men from their monk brothers is … achieved through earlier reproduction for their wives.” Given that the increase in total of grandkids is only 1.15, it feels very unlikely to be generalizable—or at least not generalizable enough to lead to gay individuals appearing at about equal rates in cultures all over the world in very different circumstances.

Also note that different cultures appear to be able to use “gay uncles” to their benefit at different rates. For example, while Latin American cultures are not overtly friendly to gay people, they do have a path to utilize them. One of the core problems of Latin American cultures is that their tight networks of family connections can reduce families’ social mobility. Because families soft reject their gay members, not offering them nepotistic opportunities as much as other family members, gays in Latin America are more likely to make their own connections and careers. This means that, while on average they do worse than other family members, they also have a higher probability of jumping up one (or several) social status rungs as they make their way in the world without as much family support. As many remain loyal to their relatives, offering them support and connections despite getting little support and return, they offer a high-risk, high-reward roll of the dice for their families, having the potential to pull relatives up in status if they do strike it rich and even be assigned family patriarch-like roles. This is why, of the hard cultures out there, those in Latin America are some of the most friendly to gays. This isn’t to say that they will be nice to gays per se; they just won’t light them on fire, drag them behind cars, or throw them off buildings at the same rate as other hard cultures.

While having a gay sibling with no kids might make it slightly easier to raise four kids, the presence of a gay sibling is not going to encourage you to have eight kids instead (which is mathematically what you would need to see happening given the low birth rate among those who support the LGBT community). The reality is that such a strategy implied by the gay uncle hypothesis could only impact the birth rate of one’s siblings enough to make it beneficial if you essentially turned gay individuals into slaves for their siblings’ families or forced them to raise a portion of their siblings’ kids, which is patently worse than the situation we have now. (Note: If you are wondering why biologically gay animals exist in many species given the effect of same-sex attraction on fecundity, read The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, in which we explore this topic extensively.)

But what if a culture’s gay members somehow increased the fitness of the culture at a more macro scale? Perhaps a culture could leverage the fact that gay individuals had kids at a way lower rate to put them in positions of power and administration and thus lower nepotism.

Humans naturally have a desire to benefit their own children over other people and some cultivars even frame doing so as perfectly acceptable. This is called amoral familism and is advantageous from a cultural evolution standpoint because one’s children will have a much higher probability of staying a member of their culture than … well, anyone else. Cultivars practicing amoral familism would benefit tremendously if they could maintain the practice while mitigating the corruption it causes by differentially putting gay people in positions of bureaucratic power.

Well guess what? We don’t need to imagine what would happen if we developed a cultivar that evolved to disproportionately place gay individuals in powerful, bureaucratic roles as we already have a great example of one: The Catholic Church. The Catholic Church more or less accidentally^{^[62]} evolved a system that outcompeted its competitors by utilizing gay individuals disproportionately in their organizational bureaucracy in a way that dramatically reduced graft and corruption. After all, in a medieval context, if a local bishop had kids, they would be more likely to guide political intrigue in a direction that benefited their family than the Church. If Catholic bishops were able to have kids, the title would almost certainly have become hereditary instead of being rewarded on a pseudo-meritocratic basis.

Note: We are neither saying that all gay Catholics are in the clergy nor that all individuals in the clergy are gay. We are merely observing that if you were to compare the average sexual inclination of Catholic priests or nuns to that of the general Catholic population, the gay population will be higher among clergy. How can we say that so confidently?

A number of sources provide data supporting this assertion. Wikipedia^[63] has a fairly good page on the topic with estimates ranging between 15% and 50% of Catholic clergy being LGBT. For a specific example, Reverend Professor Elizabeth Stuart estimates 33% of Catholic priests are gay.^[64]

Outside of just data, we can also look at the queer community’s history for evidence. After the second Vatican council pushed nuns to live closer to cities, a large portion of lesbian advocates were ex-nuns. The urbanization of nuns led to former nuns having a large impact on the development of modern lesbian culture in the same way bikers of the same period had a significant impact on gay male culture. (If you find this topic interesting, check out the book: Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence by Nancy Manahan and Rosemary Keefer Curb.)

This system, while unintentional, was remarkably effective. As The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance shows, governance structures become more corrupt and bureaucratic with time and age—and while the Catholic Church did suffer from this, it weathered time better than any other institution we can think of. Ultimately and without intentionality, the Catholic Church found individuals to serve the role of “court eunuchs” at scale and without required castration.

If you are wondering why we are not talking about the pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church, recall that we already covered it earlier in the book. Suffice to say molestation cases in the Catholic Church (4%) are lower than they are in other large bureaucracies like the American Public School system (4%-7%)^{^[65]} and the Catholic Church doesn’t go out of its way to cover them up or protect the perpetrators any more than its corollaries like the teachers’ unions. Actually, the Catholic Church is less effective at covering up pedophilia, as can be seen by the fact that you likely did not know about the school molestation crisis or the teachers’ unions covering it up despite problem being about ten times larger in the United States’ public school system (just due to the number of people involved) than it ever was in the Catholic Church.

Disproportionate representation of non-reproducing populations (including LGBT individuals) in bureaucratic positions of power explains why Catholic cultivars have been able to lean into amoral familism at levels much higher than other cultures could sustain. This explains in part why Catholic countries have much higher levels of corruption than others as only the priesthood has the protective mechanism in it—not the civil government. (For example, having lived in Italy and South America, we can say that to many cultivars in those regions, it would be actively immoral to not differentially hire extended family members should you be in a position of power, even if they lack competence or have sticky fingers.)

The Catholic solution to gay individuals may work should you create a culture in which individuals in the governing bureaucracy (both civil and religious)—but only individuals in the governing bureaucracy—can have same-sex romantic and sexual partners but not opposite sex romantic partners. That said, we don’t like this solution. The idea of essentially having a job assigned to you at birth is a culturally repellent concept to us and it is apparently distasteful to the Catholic institution as well—hence their refusal to accept that such was the pressure their “no marriage for priests” system created (it certainly didn’t come from the Bible).

Another way to protect people born gay is to place LGBT people in necessary societal roles that make having kids difficult. A classic example of this can be seen with the Sacred Band of Thebes, a lauded all gay (or bi) military unit that played a key role in ending Spartan military dominance in the Greek world. In truth, we don’t have enough historical data to say how well the Sacred Band really performed in its larger cultural role (though studies show risk-taking is associated with being gay, so who knows).^[66] The prospect of giving same-sex people specific roles in society also runs into the same problem noted above: It forces people into specific occupations based on factors outside their control. Finally, just as most Greek city states that flirted with accepting gay people only lasted for a few generations, modern LGBT-accepting cultures will quickly decline should they fail to innovate a durable cultural solution.

Another (far more unethical) cultural “solution” to gayness is to force gay men to transition to women, converting them into heterosexual trans women. Switching out gay men for women somewhat lowers the “unpaired male” problem faced by polygynous societies (societies in which some men take multiple wives)—namely, by reducing the number of angry men who can’t find a partner, which increases rates of things like murder, rape, and dishonesty (for clarification, this policy reduces the number of “incels” circulating within society by artificially increasing the number of available women through forced transition).

Doing so also allows the benefits of polygyny, such as genes associated with high wealth and achievement being passed down at higher rates, and wealth being more evenly distributed among a cultivar’s child-rearing population (as wealthy people have and pay for more kids—for example, both Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, and his successor Saud bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, had over a hundred kids).^[67] It should come as no surprise, then, that some Islamic cultivars that practice polygyny have evolved to do just that: Have gay men become women. (And to be clear, most of the people forced to transition like this in these cultures are not “trans” as we would understand it but gay men given the “transition or die” choice.)

People think of gay-male-to-heterosexual-female conversion as being a modern phenomenon localized to Islamic culture^{^[68]} but it actually has fairly deep historic routes. In light of this practice, it is somewhat ironic that being accepting of trans individuals and not gay individuals is historically the more conservative position while in modern American society, the inverse is true. While this system wins points for creativity, forcing people to transition is an inelegant and immoral solution (at least from our cultivar’s perspective—but remember our culture is obsessed with individual agency to an extent that might blind us to the common good).

Perhaps you wonder why one couldn’t just create a culture that is both LGBT friendly and also blessed with a high birth rate more generally. As we keep saying, if an iteration of that same culture that was not tolerant of gay people enjoys even a slightly higher birth rate, eventually said iteration will splinter off and outcompete the parent group. This is why, historically speaking, periods of LGBT acceptance are so brief and more often terminated by internal cultural shifts than by outside conquest or cultural defeat by an outside force. Gay-tolerant cultures have evolved multiple times throughout history and—in city-based cultures—have always been quashed within just a few generations. A look at the relevant statistics indicates there is zero reason to think this time will be any different.

At the civilizational level, if you actually care about people being able to live their birth sexuality without oppression, then you must solve the birth rate problem. Lazy, indolent justicles can’t simply handwave away a problem because it is morally difficult to tackle. In doing so, they sacrifice the quality of life of the LGBT community two generations from now in the name of immediate convenience.

We need to craft a culture that accepts people of all sexual representations while strongly encouraging them to raise children and granting them access to the resources needed to accomplish that feat. When kids within our own House’s cultivar turn out to be gay, we will do what we can to support them in having as large a family as possible and we hope to pass this mandate down to future generations.

If you really wanted to build a durable culture that accepts openly gay members, you could leverage the fact that lesbians can give birth at twice the rate of straight couples and gay people are more likely to have larger, stable polycules to effectively create very large, co-parenting families. There is absolutely a path to some Index cultivars being gay at the core and still very fruitful.

This approach would, of course, require significant cultural tweaking as currently children who grow up in polycules have poorer emotional health than those who grow up in two-parent households. A likely factor undermining polycule kids’ mental wellbeing involves political infighting for resources among parents (e.g., Mother A and Mother B fighting for attention and extra help from Father X in raising Kids AX and BX). If children could be created with blended DNA—that is, DNA from all polycule members—competition might be reduced.^[69] Regardless, IVF, IVG, and artificial wombs play a critical role in the success of a strategy like this.

Perhaps you wonder why we care so much about creating a culture inclusive of the queer community given how little we care about human suffering.

As much as we think suffering is not an intrinsic negative, we see no reason to inflict it upon anyone should there be no benefit. Groups are also motivated to tear down cultures that cause suffering to outsiders, hence it is best to avoid this if possible.
The queer community has utility. For whatever reason, throughout history, the creative thinking bell curve of gay people has skewed to the right. Something about the gay perspective allows them to see the world differently enough that they are more likely to create high-quality cultural innovations and exports.^{^[70]}
Given our beliefs as outlined in the Life and Death chapter, it should be clear that we believe a diversity of perspectives and competing subcultures to be one of the highest orders of good in the great cycle. The more unique perspectives are silenced, the weaker we become.

Cultural Approaches to Sexuality

While this is less of an issue today as it was historically, some traditional cultures heavily punish women for appearing sexually available. Even today, many cultures psychologically punish masturbation and porn consumption. Why have so many unrelated cultures evolved these practices? Is prudery still of utility in a constructed culture?

The common-sense presumption that a woman dressing modestly is less likely to experience sexual violence is an unlikely motivator for culturally-pressured sexual modesty. Not only does dressing in a provocative manner not appear to increase the probability that someone is raped, but dressing modestly does.^[71] In addition, there is a positive correlation between the number of rapes within a culture and the modesty expected of women within that culture. This can be seen both between and within communities. In other words, rape is more common in groups like the extremist Amish and among extremist Islamists when contrasted with cultures that don’t have strong modesty mandates. In short, modest dress is associated with heightened odds of being raped and culturally mandated modest dress correlates with higher rates of rape within a culture.

If the prohibition against provocative clothing in women (very few cultures have prohibitions against provocative clothing in men) did not evolve to reduce rapes, then why bother with modest dress? The mandate against women appearing sexually available common across cultures appears to exist for one core reason: Cultural signaling. Cultures that admire female sexuality are likely to feature more sexual promiscuity and less dedicated partnering-off of adherents.

Why discourage recreational sex with non-dedicated partners? In traditional cultures, a child born outside of a family unit was very likely to become a ward of the township, which increased the town’s collective financial burden. Children born out of wedlock and ultimately orphaned were also more likely to become pickpockets and join local gangs (which historically were made up of much younger individuals and more dangerous to the general public). Should sexual promiscuity ultimately place such heavy burdens on societies, it would make sense that they would discourage it.

There is another reason why hard cultures often evolve to impose female modesty. Most men are biologically programmed to desire young, genetically fit, fertile women. As such, secular forces in societies (like companies) can use sexualized young women to sell things (be they products or messages). This can cause cultures to more broadly value sexualized women, which almost always comes at the expense of general appreciation of less sexy female roles like motherhood (an older woman who already has kids on average is less sexually appealing than a younger woman who does not). Loss of respect for motherhood at a societal level can be catastrophic for birth rates given the sacrifices required to become a parent. (For a more detailed discussion of this topic, see the chapter “Glorification of Motherhood” on page 424.)

What about masturbation? Why on earth are so many long-lived cultures wildly against something that research shows to be largely beneficial (see The Pragmatist’s Guides to Sexuality and Relationships for a detailed review of the research on this). Masturbation is condemned for two reasons: The first and more obvious is that people who are not masturbating will only be able to experience orgasm through sex. Such people will presumably have more sex with their dedicated partners and be more motivated to find a dedicated partner while young, which will lead them to have more children on average.

The second and less immediately clear cultural motivator to discourage masturbation is that while self-pleasure has positive health effects, the arbitrary and consistent denial of impulses has even stronger positive health effects, as it strengthens the parts of the brain associated with inhibitory pathways—the pathways used to shut down impulses and intrusive thoughts and emotions. Cultures don’t need to single out masturbation to strengthen adherents’ inhibitory pathways though; a similar effect could be achieved through practices like fasting or denying oneself certain foods (both of which are also common across successful hard cultures).

Mandates toward modesty and against masturbation seem to have evolved over time within most of the cultures in which they are common today and were not typically a feature of those cultures at their inception. Consider early Christianity: While Jesus did not talk about sex, Paul, who built early Christian communities, certainly did. Generally, it seems like anything you wanted to do was OK so long as you were married. Though some individuals had the “gift” of being free from sexual thoughts, those who lacked this gift were best off getting married, then doing whatever they wanted.

Contrast this early Christian view with Roman Catholics seeing masturbation as sinful, Mormons contextualizing masturbation as a sin (to the point that young Mormons are regularly quizzed on the topic during their missions), John Calvin writing that “the voluntary spilling of semen outside of intercourse between a man and a woman is a monstrous thing. Deliberately to withdraw from coitus in order that semen may fall on the ground is double monstrous,” and the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, arguing that “an unproductive sexual act, whether that should be in the form of masturbation or coitus interruptus … destroyed the souls of the individuals who practice it.” Virtually every hard form of Christianity evolved to condemn non-productive ejaculations despite early Christianity not featuring strong policies on the subject. To us, this demonstrates just how much this cultural demand positively increases the fitness of adherents and thus how strong the evolutionary pressure to develop it must be.

Should we want to explore a culture with sexual prohibitions truly optimized to encourage a high birth rate, we have to look at Judaism, which had a long time for evolution to hone into very, very specific practices. In addition to condemning premarital sex, premarital hand holding, masturbation, and coitus interruptus, stricter forms of Judaism even mandate abstinence for two weeks after menstruation. What is interesting is that while conservative Jews have a high birth rate, it was (historically at least) dwarfed by that of cultures which merely mandated abstinence and sex inside of marriage (such as Catholicism and Mormonism). Judaism only beats those cultures now due to an intentional, logical devotion to growing their population through birth rate, which is partially motivated by the reduction in Jewish population that happened during the Holocaust (and thus some have hypothesized it will recede over time).

What does the above reversal in birth rates show us about the world today? Were these abstinence, modesty, and anti-masturbation systems historically evolved to increase birth rates only effective when used in moderation? Is it that they are no longer effective today? Or is it simply more efficacious for parents to logically explain to their kids why it is important to have lots of children? Perhaps a combination of all these factors is at play.

Ultimately, cultural mandates for modest dress and against masturbation harm the psychological development of group adherents. For more info on masturbation in particular, see The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, but suffice to say that—aside from masturbation developing into an addiction just like any dopamine-associated act, such as eating food, is liable to become—the act only produces serious negative psychological effects when an individual contextualizes it as shameful or somehow bad. In other words, if you don’t think masturbation is bad, it’s not going to have bad effects on you so long as you haven’t developed an unhealthy addiction to the habit. Worse, individuals who view masturbation as shameful can be seen in the data to consume more porn. You can observe this effect by overlapping maps investigating individuals’ views of sexuality with maps of online porn consumption.

Another huge problem with modern hard cultures that mandate modesty, look down on sexuality, and frown on masturbation is that they will feature higher rates of attrition. Few things lure teens into deconversion more than sexuality. In this modern world, an ideal hard culture would be able to both venerate motherhood and be sexy.

So how does our personal culture approach sexuality? As we see no compelling evidence that contextualizing sexuality as shameful will help them, we don’t discourage masturbation or even well-protected, safe, premarital sex (though there are some caveats on that front, which we cover in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships).

Generally speaking, our culture is neutral toward provocative dress so long as it is worn with a specific goal in mind and not as generic self-signaling. Sexuality can be a powerful weapon against pop culture if utilized intentionally and methodically. Were you, for example, to create a cultivar with a really sexy “traditional” outfit that became aspirational in its sex appeal to pop cultural groups whose members also had the mental fortitude to not succumb to sexualizing themselves, you would have a pretty powerful package.

In our House, we will explain to our kids that there is no moral difference between non-reproductive sex and masturbation. Both are recreational activities that activate arousal pathways. As with any other recreational activity—be it eating tasty foods, drinking, passively scrolling on social media platforms, or playing video games—moderation is key. In short, we want members of our House to advantageously use—rather than be used by—sex and sexual signaling.

Unlike masturbation, sex has potential tactical value in that it can be used to manipulate other individuals’ hormonal states and lead people to form an illogical bond to you. In addition, there are various means by which sex may be exchanged for resources, access, influence, or power, so it is worth putting in the effort to build some skill even if you find the whole act repellant (see The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality for more info on how this system can be gamed). As our House views sexuality as only being moral when it is used in a tactically beneficial manner, we are in the rare cultural position of finding something like an exchange of sex for money as being morally superior to purely recreational sex.

Another “weird” thing about our House’s approach to sexuality is that we don’t see it as the primary tool for creating children. Our theological mandate toward intergenerational improvement means that we view the act of creating children through sex as a means of last resort that should only be utilized in the face of extreme financial limitation or resource deprivation. Children created through sex cannot be selected based on optimal polygenic risk scores or otherwise genetically modified, which, given our worldview, is wildly neglectful. As Simone says, “The greatest gift we can give our children is the knowledge that they are a product of science and not their parents having sex.”

Bonus Note: On Culturally Mandated Genital Mutilation

The relative rarity of female genital mutilation among successful cultures suggests that it is not a good strategy for increasing birth rates. It is hard to see how male genital mutilation might increase birth rates, but it has become common among successful cultures, likely by accident (similar to how having one’s thyroid removed became a medical fad for a while). We say “by accident,” as it appears to have initially been an extremely costly ritual, being originally performed on adults to signal group allegiance and build a sunk cost fallacy around group alignment. Eventually (after the first Temple period), one subfaction of the group figured out how to “cheat” performing circumcision before a person could remember the pain. Now that this hack has become common, the whole ritual is kind of pointless, culturally speaking.

Robosexuality

There is a Futurama episode in which we learn that humanity almost went extinct after sex bots became very good at becoming girlfriends and boyfriends to humans. This crisis was only rectified by creating a negative social stigma around these relationships, framing them as “robosexuality” (and to a lesser extent, making them illegal). When we first saw this episode, we thought it was funny. Now we seriously wonder if robsexuality is the hill on which our species will die.

Can we really say that back when we were young, horny, and struggling to date, we would have been able to resist forming a deep emotional relationship with an amalgam of GPT 10 and a dynamically animated AI girlfriend / boyfriend? Humans and cultures that primarily motivate marriage through the emotional rewards that come from it (be they sex or love) will likely be wiped out by the proliferation of AIs on the dating market within the next 50 to 100 years.

While you may assume we would need to prematurely code a disgust for romantic and sexual robot-human relations into our culture, the way our cultivar (House Collins) frames sexuality makes us uniquely resistant to the hazards of robosexuality. We don’t prohibit things like gay sex or masturbation so long as a person has kids. A similar mindset can be taken to robosexuality (so long as robosexuality does not turn out to be wildly addictive—who is to say how good these AIs will get at hijacking lower human brain functions?). In fact, if AI gets worried enough about human birthrates and is coded to be almost perfectly aligned with humanity, it might even handle genetic recombination and childbirth (through artificial wombs) better than your typical human partner.

Expect this to be a major issue that many cultures will be forced to address in the near future. Cultivars that fail to either successfully prohibit robosexuality or find a way to embrace robot-human relations in a manner that maintains high birth rates will go extinct.

J. D. Unwin & Sexual Liberation

J. D. Unwin was a professor at Cambridge back in the 1930s who did some really interesting research into 80 native cultures and six civilizations. He developed a theory, which evidence seemed to support, claiming that deistic, sexually illiberal cultures that value rationality had the best outcomes of all culture types (with cultural output measured in literature, art, science, furniture, architecture, engineering, and agriculture). Unwin also observed that the prosperity produced by these three traits leads to sexual liberation, followed by a decline within three generations. Of all the traits he found that correlated with a culture on the precipice of flourishing or collapsing, the most important was the rate of prenuptial chastity.

Unwin used his data to make specific predictions: That within three generations of a sexual liberation movement, our own culture would begin to see:

A breakdown of strict monogamy
Lower rates of religious practice
A decline in rationality

Fortunately, he made these predictions long enough ago that we can now see whether they were predictive. Unarguably, Unwin’s first and second predictions were spot on and if you consider movements like postmodernism to be anti-rational, he was certainly correct in his third prediction as well. As much as we would like to dismiss Unwin’s research based on the time and culture in which it was produced, his predictive capabilities nevertheless give us pause.

For a weird science experiment from this period that also had an uncomfortable take on gay people but was weirdly predictive, see: “But Surely the Problem will Fix Itself: Behavioral Sinks” in the Appendix on page 786.

Levirate Marriages

Levirate marriages tell us something interesting about the role marriage traditionally played in society when contrasted with its current role. In a Levirate marriage, a brother of a deceased man is obligated to marry his brother’s widow. This tradition exists across the Abrahamic faiths but is also seen in many other cultures, including among the Shona of Zimbabwe, Huns, Kurds, in Japan (under the name aniyome ni naosu), and in India (under the name niyogi).

This brother-marrying-deceased-brother’s-widow practice appears to have co-evolved so many times because within cultures that do not permit women to work, it reduces the odds that widowed women and their children become wards of the wider community by placing them under the responsibility of the man most genetically related to the newly fatherless children. The fact that Levirate marriages are virtually unheard of outside of extremely patriarchal societies (societies that grant women less independence) gives this theorized motive credence.

The practice may actually lower birth rates by sometimes obligating younger men to marry older widowed women, as has been concretely recorded in African communities that actively practice this tradition.^[72] It appears Levirate marriages present the rare case of a tradition that adds fitness to a culture not by increasing birth rate, but by increasing social cohesion (another example of such a tradition is monogamy).

Dating and Partner Finding

A common misconception about the traditional model of marriage we use in the West is that it is but one of several ways a relationship might be successfully structured that just happens to have caught on due to the expansion of European civilization. The truth is, while cultures throughout history have tried thousands upon thousands of ways of structuring sexuality and relationships, the same one or two configurations keep “winning” over and over again—not because they are morally better, but because they most effectively increase the fitness of their cultures. There are both many more ways to structure relationships than most people would think and far fewer “viable” structures at an intergenerational level.

The only two stable relationship structures that have existed in large societies are:

Strict monogamy
Strict monogamy for most, but limited polygyny (many women one man) for wealthy or high-status men

Note: You may be thinking: “But don’t groups like some Muslims and Yeminite Jews demonstrate that a culture can last a long time, be prolific, and be generally polygynous?” Actually, these cultures show the opposite: In both Muslim and Yeminite Jewish cultures, it is fairly rare for a man to have more than one wife. In Saudi Arabia, only 12.41% of men have more than one wife^{^[73]} and among the Yeminite Jews, only 1% have more than one wife.^{^[74]} Cultures like the early Mormons, which saw as much as 20% to 30% of men marry multiple wives, simply don’t survive very long in that state.^{^[75]}

A great peek into some of the “weirder” sexuality and marriage structures that went extinct is offered through religious prohibitions. While Islam features a fairly “vanilla” form of polygyny, it managed to capture some of the older structures it was replacing in amber through the specific bans the Prophet Muhammad placed on them.

One example of this is Nikah ijtimaa. In this form of partnering, multiple men would have intercourse with a woman, and if she bore a child, she would choose one of the men to be the father of the child. Another is Nikah Istibdaa. In this practice, a wife goes to live with a higher-status man than her husband and has sexual relations with him while being prohibited from having sexual relations with her husband. Once she becomes pregnant, she returns to her husband. The purpose of this practice was to obtain a child of “noble breed.” Yet another pre-Islamic tradition was Nikāḥ Shighār, in which two men would exchange their daughters, sisters, or other close women for marriage without paying the bride price. So yes: The world did feature a broad array of partnering practices, however they were outcompeted independently by models similar to one of the two above.

Another common misconception is that the new, progressive direction our society is taking in relation to dating is a more “evolved” mindset when contrasted with more traditional cultural models. We go over the statistics on this topic in detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships and The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, but in short, societies’ current “partner-finding” practices are, by almost every metric, utterly bankrupt. People in modern dating markets are less likely to find love than those entering arranged marriages^[76] and less likely to find a life partner than more traditional partnering methods. Even rates of casual sex are crashing: The number of men who have not had sex in the last year has gone up almost threefold in the last decade, with 28% of men reporting no sex for the past 12 months by 2018, a stark increase from around 10% in 2008 (while women reported a similar but less dramatic increase).^[77]

Society got into this depressing state after a fairly functional dating system—that had evolved over thousands of years—was fundamentally changed by the advent of birth control (which removed many negative incentives around casual sex) and a simultaneous, society-wide drive toward equality between men and women. These two developments forced the dating market to orient itself around a new, inherently unstable axis. The axis in turn was completely thrown off with the advent and popularity of Tinder-style dating, which removed most of the costly social ritual around partner screening. The question now being: If a person can choose any partner(s) they want however they want, what is the best way to structure that search?

First, let’s dig a bit deeper into why the existing system works so poorly. Data consistently shows women are much more likely to sort for only the best partners available to them than men are.^[78] This means if you give an average woman a large pool of men to choose from, she will only be interested in the top five or so. When women are making date selections through a swipe-based app like Tinder, this means the median man on the app (as judged by how many interest-signaling right swipes he gets) is right-swiped by less than 1% of women.^[79] That means that half of men are being chosen by well under 1% of women. (So no, it’s not just that there are more men on dating apps.) In addition, women’s perception of the “average” man is well off, with women rating 80% of men as below average.^[80] The few men with whom women meet therefore have a long line of other women to choose from if their current partner does not slave over them (and even if they do, there is little cost to losing the woman due to her replaceability, so why not cheat?).

While most men are severely disadvantaged by this new dynamic, most women are suffering, too. Suppose you are a successful woman who wants to date an “equal.” (Yes, it is not just a stereotype that women are much more likely than men to limit their dating pool to those financially or educationally better off.)^[81] In today’s relationship markets, you will have very few to no viable options for a partner. Most of the men who are your “equals” economically speaking won’t mind dating down and so will be choosing between you and dozens of other options, making it very easy for them to devalue any relationship they form with you. This was one of the problems culturally enforced monogamy starting at a young age evolved to fix.

People who want to find a spouse are not helped by the current pop cultural belief that if you just sleep with or date enough people, it will eventually become “obvious” which one you should marry. This general belief encourages popular tools that facilitate dating, like Tinder, to optimize around sheer numerical exposure rather than strengthening your conviction toward a partner you have already met.

In contrast, consider how culturally-evolved mechanisms that build conviction work. A traditional matchmaker in some Indian cultures will use divination to determine who is a good match for a young person or whether their current partner is a good match for them. What actually happens quite a lot in these scenarios is young couples use these matchmakers to endorse their relationship, enabling the couple to get buy-in from parents and grandparents while increasing the social cost associated with a breakup.

Even recently, our society still had some cultural mechanisms similar to the above system—this system involved a couple becoming “Facebook official.” Because for a time Facebook became the primary portal for online social signaling, and because an individual could choose one and only one person to mark as a relationship partner on the platform, they would have to deal with social consequences from everyone in their friend network if they were unfaithful to that person or if they broke up with them (as Facebook would notify everyone in their network when that happened). Sadly, said system died with the rise of Boomer Book.

To increase relationship quality, Western society would benefit profoundly from the development of robust cultural mechanisms that deepen casual relationships once they’ve been subject to careful thought or social approval from a trusted personal network. Counterintuitively, this is actually more important than fixing present matchmaking mechanisms pervasive in developed Western countries.

Our prescription would be different for many non-Western cultures, of course. For example, in many East Asian cultures, matchmaking mechanisms stand at the core of the problem, along with gender norms that are incompatible with dual-income couples. For a more thorough investigation of issues at play in non-Western cultures, check out The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships, in which we explore some of these issues through the lens of dating in South Korea.

There may be a biological reason why most relationships in modern Western society last for a fairly short time (between one and three years). It could be that our brains have some mechanism in them that subconsciously estimates the fertility of our partner (it would be kind of weird of it not to) and that after a few years of dating without kids (something very normal in our society), a part of our brain begins to assume they are infertile and we need to look for a new one.

The LDS Church represents one culture that has grown quite adept at addressing such challenges (to the extent that we know at least one person who converted just to find a husband … and it worked!). When looking for spouses, Mormons leverage local church subcommunities called “Young Single Adult Wards” (aka YSA or Singles Wards). Essentially these can be thought of as weekly church services where everyone who attends is single and around your age. It is a common cultural practice for members of these groups to conduct activities similar to Mormon “Family Home Evenings” in which two of the singles take on the role of “mom” and “dad” and entertain the other singles for an evening.

Singles Wards therefore succeed not only in providing young, single Mormons with an easy way to meaningfully interact with potential partners in an environment that imposes a social cost for breaking up (so you don’t end up with the Tinder problem), but also in allowing them to deepen their relationships by temporarily assuming a “married with kids” role should a new couple choose to host singles in their ward for an evening.

We, personally, aim to leverage our House’s culture to circumvent some of mainstream society’s top dating market failures by encouraging members to practice dating and relationships at a fairly early life stage, treating young age as something of a “sandbox mode” that ends about one year into college. After that point, our culture sets an expectation that one should be looking for a lifelong partner. Singles at this second stage of partner-finding will be culturally shamed if they attend family events without serious candidates. This encourages House members to more quickly escalate college-and-beyond relationships by inviting partners to “meet the parents” (a common relationship escalation mechanism) more quickly. This social pressure also invites members’ prospective partners to engage with our (admittedly odd) culture.

At family events attended by prospective partners, parents will pull the young couple aside at some point and ask pre-marriage compatibility questions from The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships (asking them about their future together in detail, why they are a good match, what they like about each other, etc.). While this will be awkward, discomfort can be reduced by ritualizing the process into a cultural practice. The great thing about this tradition is that because young members and their dates know that they will be quizzed on the underpinnings of their relationship, they will likely practice their answers before the actual event, which will either deepen their relationship or make it clear it was never meant to be.

Gender Ratio Crises

On the topic of the LDS Church, let’s talk about the Mormon gender ratio crisis and the near-identical Shidduch crisis (a problem in the extremely orthodox Jewish community). Obviously a culture will encounter problems if one gender literally can’t find a partner even if everyone within that culture were to be matched on a one-to-one basis.

The Shidduch crisis is often blamed on the constantly growing rate of the extreme Orthodox Jewish community (due to their high birth rate), meaning that because men marry younger women, some women will always be left without a partner. To illustrate this dynamic: If you had a generation of 10 30-year-olds and 12 25-year-olds and on average men marry women five years younger than them, then one woman will be left over.

However, the related Mormon gender ratio crisis points to another potential cause behind unfavorable gender ratios: Men both deconvert from hard cultures at higher rates than women and are more likely to marry someone from outside their culture than women, as most patriarchal cultures make it easier for a woman to convert into a cultivar under the assumption the family will follow the man’s cultural traditions.

All of the above will be problems if our culture is successful. The best strategy to counter the above is to create systems that make it easier for women in our culture to more easily marry outsiders and convert them into the culture. In general, any culture that is adept at converting outsiders via marriage will not only be less subject to instability resulting from uneven gender ratios among existing adherents, but it will also augment its overall growth (and while we are typically dubious about the staying power of religious and cultural conversion, conversion as part of marriage is uniquely strong).

Polyamory

Polyamory is one solution many propose in response to the dating market failures described above.

If it is true that most women only want to date the top 20% of men, then it may make sense to just allow it to happen and make it more culturally normative for multiple women to date just one man (and no, we are not stereotyping women as being choosy and prejudicial—it is seen over and over again in the data: Your average woman wants a guy who is out of her league far more than your average guy wants a woman who is out of his).^[82] ^[83] ^[84]

In the same breath, if most men are found to be beneath the average woman’s attention, is there not arbitrage to be obtained by the few women who are interested in that group and willing to maintain multiple partners? We have actually seen this iteration of polyamory pop up in a lot of tech or otherwise male-dominated subcultures. Within these communities, women who might be ignored in other circles enjoy vast advantages due to their rarity. The downside is that the women who exploit this dynamic create a stereotype that hurts women genuinely interested in the subculture (e.g., “You’re not here because you care about X, you’re here to exploit male attention!”).

You may expect us to condemn polyamory, but in truth it can be a perfectly practical solution. While polyamory may not function well at a societal level, polygynous forms of polyamory work great for an elite subculture operating within a larger society. The many-men-to-one-woman form, however, is kind of pointless in that it lowers birth rates—unless your goal is to sterilize unsuccessful men while tricking their biology into thinking they have a chance at reproduction to keep them from rebelling.^[85]

Also, note that human biology seems optimized for polygyny but not polyandry, with smarter men caring more about exclusive access to their partners than smarter women do (i.e., intelligence correlates with how much a man cares if one of his partners sleeps around but not with how much a woman cares if her partner sleeps around).^{^[86]}

When we say polyamory does not work at the societal level, we mean that studies show multi-partner cultures have higher rates of rape, more murder, less honesty in business transactions, more terrorism, etc., when contrasted with otherwise similar monogamous cultures due to the high number of single and un-partnerable men left within them.^[87] When a population of polyamorous individuals becomes the dominant culture in a region, the state will therefore begin to collapse if you can’t figure out how to secure sex for the leftover poor, unattractive, and socially inept men. As mentioned, some cultures (unethically) deal with this by forced gender conversion. Believe it or not, a recent movement emerged on pol (4chan) to convert vast swaths of incels (men who have trouble finding a partner) to “femboys” so that they can partner with other men.^[88] That said, new technology like sex robots and AI might be able to romantically pacify this population—and again, just a subculture practicing polygyny works fine.

In addition to making more desirable men available (albeit non-exclusively) to the most competent women in society (who would otherwise be more likely to go un-partnered), polyamory dramatically reduces the cost of having a large number of kids and makes it much more economically and structurally realistic. Polyamory even helps with the cost of child rearing at a societal level. Consider how Elon Musk’s many children are going to have significantly more resources available to each than the single children of most even well-to-do parents (albeit at the expense of a highly engaged dad, but do remember that most people used to have seven to ten kids).^[89] The only mandate we would set for those within our personal culture who choose polyamory as a relationship format is that they still have a high birth rate per person (e.g., if a married couple in our House is expected to have five kids, a poly triad with two women is expected to have ten).

We won’t dwell much on polyamory, as functionally speaking it is rarely a solution that remains palatable throughout a person’s life. Once you find and build a strong relationship with someone you genuinely love and care about, you will be amazed by how unappealing the idea of additional partners can become. Why? For one thing, long-term, committed relationships lower testosterone in men while having kids lowers it still further. Lower testosterone means a lower interest in additional sexual partners.

It’s not that committed partners wouldn’t appreciate the potential an additional partner has to lighten their loads (perhaps by assisting with childcare, additional income, etc.); it’s just that every additional person requires a monumental amount of work and vetting to secure—not to mention significant additional mental and emotional attention once they’re part of the relationship. It can be hard to justify all that work and effort when instead your time and focus could be directed toward enriching your own family.

We have actually seen a number of women successfully establish what ultimately become mostly monogamous, long-term relationships with higher quality partners than they otherwise would have been able to secure by entering into relationships that were initially polyamorous. Essentially the strategy works like this: A woman uses the fact that she is open to a polygynous relationship in order to secure a male partner who might otherwise overlook her. Her presence as his primary partner lowers his desirability to other women. This lowers the quality of the market for him. At the same time, his testosterone and desire to sleep with other women declines due to his being in a committed relationship with someone he cares about (because the woman is putting in a lot of effort). Over time, what was supposed to be a poly relationship becomes functionally monogamous due to it not being worth the effort to source additional partners.

But of course elite women with high standards don’t need to enter polyamorous relationships—or frankly any romantic relationship—in order to have kids. Instead of raising kids with mediocre men or sharing a man, more women are choosing to raise children on their own or in groups. We even designed a planned community meant to facilitate this trend (https://Eureka.Town). Unfortunately, the trend almost never leads to an above-repopulation birth rate, with most of these women barely bringing up two kids. The truth is, it really, really helps to have at least two people working as a long-term committed team if you want to raise any reasonable number of kids.

A Better Solution: The Season

The London Season was an annual event in which the rural nobility of England would send their young daughters and sons to London to socialize and look for a mate. When Queen Victoria’s mother and husband died in quick succession, she went into mourning and this essentially canceled the London Season for three years (1861–1863). Both immediate and long-term ramifications of this suspension demonstrate how effective London Season was:

“peer–commoner intermarriage rose by 40%; titled women married husbands 44 percentile ranks poorer in terms of family landholdings.

Such marriages caused real harm to the daughter’s brothers and even fathers. Her brothers were 50% less likely to enter parliament; her family’s prestige fell.”^[90]

Eventually, this break in the cycle led to a collapse of the entire institution.^[91] We are seeing the second iteration of this. The infection of boarding schools and elite private schools by the cultural supervirus has made high-performing families reluctant to enroll their kids, reducing the rate of exchange among the high-impact cohorts. This makes the elite weak and presents an opportunity for an outside-but-unified cultural group to replace them by creating new mechanisms of exchange.

Not only have the former elite of our society lost their marriage markets, but rates of both sex and marriage have crashed since the invention of swipe-based dating apps (which have mostly wiped out apps that encourage prospective matches to find each other based on values, shared goals, and interests). This problem is likely to get worse across all levels of society as de-urbanization takes hold due to demographic collapse (why this will happen is discussed at the beginning of the book).

Many today bemoan the difficulty of finding a partner, especially as like-minded groups of people become more dispersed. That said, every dispersed and semi-nomadic people throughout history has needed to address the same challenge, from some Native American groups to the Romani. One persistent solution these groups develop involves (roughly) annual gatherings in some form of “intra-community convocation.”

While modern intra-community convocations exist, like the Romani marriage market, this is hardly a new practice. In fact, one of the earliest human settlements known, Göbekli Tepe (occupied between 9500 and 8000 BCE) was likely such a place. The amount of fresh water that would have been at the site as well as an absence of traces indicating local agriculture imply it was not a permanent settlement but instead a periodic gathering point. We have seen some modern iterations of events like this for distributed secular cultures at events like Burning Man or Ephemerisle, which offer models of what a modern convening might resemble.

If the Index were to offer the function of a London Season or Romani marriage market, what would the convening look like?

For the annual season, Houses equipped to host gatherings (either financially or in terms of specialization and access) will invite dating cohorts from participating Index members to events over a fixed series of months, composing guest lists from a master list put together by Season organizers. While hosting will bestow greater status within the larger community, Houses can also use hosting as an opportunity to advertise unique elements of the cultivars they have crafted, giving youth within the Index a broader perspective of cultural practices they might eventually incorporate into cultivars they spin off for their own newly-founded Houses.

Each event hosted during the Season will be designed to facilitate interactions that allow people to get to know each other. Whereas during the traditional London Season, this was typically limited to dinner parties and dancing, events hosted during an Index Season may expand to cover everything from ropes courses to group trips and hackathons.

By reintroducing a temporally constrained period in which participants are actively searching for partners, a modern Season incentivizes participants to take dating seriously, as you will have to wait a year before encountering serious, intent-driven singles at scale each time the Season ends.

By actively opting into the Season (passive Index members are not involved by default), single participants signal that their intent is to come out with a serious partner by their chosen culture’s metrics. Formally declared pairings at the end of the Season will be posted, imposing social pressure on participants (one doesn’t want to publicly “fail”), and subjecting them to mostly-beneficial social scrutiny. Like it or not, the community will judge the quality of matches, impose switching costs on those who might otherwise flake on commitment, etc.—which is beneficial, as low switching costs present a huge problem in modern dating markets (low switching costs increase the perceived value of exploring additional partners by making it easy to end current relationships and start new ones, thus lowering the perceived value of an existing relationship).

Whereas traditional matchmaking-oriented convenings are often intended only for singles, an Index Season will also welcome still-dating-and-not-yet-totally-committed partners. Partnered individuals entering the Index Season will publicly post their partnership upfront, both to signal unavailability and increase switching costs. Partnered participants will also be invited to submit their partnership to a small handful (eight to 15) of Index members for their anonymized approval or disapproval.

In addition to increasing relationship switching costs (assuming the group sees them as good partners), this dynamic grants already-partnered Season participants an opportunity to express their respect for the Index members whose approval they seek while also giving Index outsiders a shot at feeling approved by and welcomed into the community. In other words, non-Index members participating in the Season with an Index partner are likely to feel very welcome if members of the community—who matter to them and their partner—approve of their relationships through a vote. This feeling of acceptance will make them all the more likely to join the Index themselves.

To avoid confusion, people participating in the Season will wear bracelets or wristbands with colors that signify what they are looking for, with black signaling a desire for “nothing” (i.e., they are already partnered), red signaling monogamy, white signaling a multi-partner relationship, and blue signaling anything. The arm on which one wears the band indicates the gender(s) to which they are receptive, with the left arm indicating men and the right arm indicating women (and both arms indicating both).

Just as the Season is designed to augment the overall Index community’s wealth in terms of families and future generations, it is also intended to encourage the retention of capital.

As the London Season anecdote cited above highlights, social seasons are, to a great extent, about establishing business and political connections among families. Even though the primary objective of a Season may be to forge new families, the fact that an Index season will encourage various Houses to socialize, mix, and form alliances through intermarriage will naturally produce new corporate and political alliances.

How will an Index Season lean even more into business? More business-oriented Houses will host events related to investment, business partnerships, startup competitions, hackathons, and investment, encouraging disparate Houses to invest disproportionately in within-Index organizations (not just because of cultural exchange, but because shared Index culture can facilitate greater trust and reduce due diligence costs).

Who to Marry and
Contextualization of Marriage

Growing up I, Malcolm, was reminded over and over that the most important decision I would ever make came down to who I married. It was strongly emphasized to me that by far the most meaningful thing I could accomplish in life was to craft myself into someone worthy of joining the life of a great person. We will be telling our kids the same thing because it is the single truest and most impactful lesson anyone has ever imparted on me. The lesson taught in this way seems to be quite effective in that my brother also has a very strong and happy marriage, a wife with whom he works, and ambitions to have lots of kids.

While the most prevalent pop cultures have very dismissive views of marriage, claiming that most marriages fail, the stats don’t back this up. The famous studies most marriage naysayers cite were collected during a rash of divorces in the 1980s, and even those studies manipulated data to create shocking-sounding statistics like, “50% of marriages end in divorce” by including individuals who had been divorced multiple times (e.g., If you had six couples get married and only one got divorced but this person had divorced and remarried five times, you would see 50% of marriages ending in divorce even though only 16% of people actually experienced divorce).^[92] It appears that our parents’ generation was just uniquely bad at marriages (when was the last time you heard a millennial comedian complaining about “married life”?). Divorces are incredibly rare in some cultivars while common in others.

When you choose the cultivar that is governing your marriage, you are also choosing the probability of your divorce—as well as your probability of loving your spouse in the future (more on that shortly).

We often meet people who treat dating like a hobby in their teens and end up confused when, upon hitting their thirties, they find themselves in some sort of manic game of musical chairs to find a partner, throwing other people to the ground to grab that last seat. One of the most critical elements of an effective cultivar is that it impresses upon an individual that marriage and kids are not “side projects” in life. Creating your family is the main event in every effective culture.

Soft cultures create a moral infrastructure that justifies a life of personal indulgence. As cultures soften, they increasingly begin to imply that spouses exist primarily for personal enjoyment—that spouses and kids should be considered only if they would make you feel happier, more fulfilled, and more loved. In addition to lowering birth rates, approaching relationships with this mindset ironically places these positive emotional states even more out of reach. Love, happiness, and fulfillment are the rewards our biology imparts on us when we have created an efficacious and fruitful partnership, which requires intentionality, planning, strategy, and a value set that extends beyond pure hedonism. One of the core goals of an effective culture is that it imparts this truth through its framing and rituals around partnership.

As many cultures have done before, our House’s cultivar will primarily teach its values around relationships through the way it contextualizes identity. Specifically, our House cultivar holds that individuals on their own are not full beings and that the family a person builds for themselves (not their parents’ family) is ultimately their core unit of identity. We frame one of life’s great goals as finding and building this family—essentially completing oneself. It is not just each person must find their “other half” but that alone, they are less than half a unit. The unit is not just a set of partners, but the family they create. Many of our traditions do not consider an individual an adult until they are married and have kids and even then, we only allow them to participate in said activities as a family unit.

More specifically, we see life as a transition away from the self—with one’s “self” being the lowest and most trivial order of identity. When an individual is young, they are atomic but meaningless. With time, successful people (by our standards) become part of something bigger, first finding a partner with whom they grow as a unit, then becoming a parent, leading and nurturing a new generation of kids, and ultimately becoming a part of their family’s story and value set after death.

As such, the core unit of identity transitions from: Individual → Married Couple → Family → Tradition/Example/Story

Dating for a Corporate Family

Dating a person as dictated by the predominant pop culture essentially involves testing out a partner for sexual and romantic compatibility. While for some long-term relationship structures this might be a sane strategy, if you are building a corporate family, it makes about as much sense as choosing which carton of milk you are going to buy by tapping on all the jugs and listening for the sound they make. Sure, carton sound may have some slight correlation with internal milk quality, but it is largely irrelevant.

The concept of a corporate family is one we explore in depth within The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships. Broadly speaking, the most unusual characteristic of the corporate family vis-a-vis the way marriage is construed in pop culture is that the couple works together and combines their public identity. More broadly, when you marry someone in a corporate marriage you combine with them into a single, synergistic unit—you aren’t just two friends living together and having sex. When you start a business, you do it together. When you build something, you build it together. When you raise kids, you raise them together. The corporate family model holds that you should not be marrying someone if they cannot make you more efficacious in every domain of your life, not just a few. While men and women have different strengths and weaknesses on average, they both have a role to play in every aspect of life.

This is not some new idea but the way Calvinists traditionally structured their relationships. As David Hackett Fischer put it in Albion’s Seed:

“They were expected to work together for the common welfare of the family. There was no clear idea of “separate spheres” in this culture. Depositions filed [in the courts of a heavily Calvinist area] describe women routinely doing heavy field labor, carrying sacks of grain to the mill, cutting firewood, tending swine, and castrating steers.”^[93]

We will strongly recommend this model to our kids, as everyone we know who lives by it enjoys both a stronger relationship and more professional success than most of those who don’t. Moreover, the corporate family model aligns with our culture’s values of efficacy over emotional indulgence and may help to reduce the odds that our kids select partners who are good looking and nice but wanting in diligence and intelligence (because they will have to deal with the consequences of an incompetent person more viscerally in their daily lives). In an ideal world, our family will maintain this practice and it will become one of the weird things we are “known for,” like polygyny in the older LDS Church.

This corporate model of relationships is part of why we see things like gender and sexuality as tools rather than particularly important guides when choosing a partner. The number or gender of partners our kids select doesn’t really matter to us—so long as through their partnerships, they have lots of kids and work efficiently as a unit. You are not a full thing as a person; you must build the thing you become and that thing is your family: Your partner(s) and your kids.

More generally, our marriage has always been structured around our shared goals and identity rather than things like romance or sex. This is outlined pretty well in our wedding vows:

Malcolm:

Today, I pledge to dedicate the rest of my life to strive together with Simone for our shared goals. I dedicate myself to a shared identity—to fight for the legacy we will leave as a unit rather than that either of us would have had as individuals.
It would be disingenuous for me to promise that I will love Simone for the rest of my life. Feelings are transient, not something we control, and I cannot promise our future path together will be without hardship or our relationship without trials. What I can promise is that she will never have to face any hardship alone as long as I live.
But I pledge more than a conditionless perpetual contract of mutual companionship. I promise to treat Simone with the respect she has earned and that I will never stop striving to improve myself as the only means available to me to adequately honor her.

Simone

Today I vow to take on life with Malcolm as a team and make his dreams, struggles, defeats, and triumphs my own. No matter how difficult or glorious life becomes, I will stand by Malcolm’s side.
I will let neither distance nor hardship prevent me from helping Malcolm achieve his greatest ambitions. I promise to amplify his strengths, fill in his weaknesses, and focus his attention on reaching for each next goal.
Rather than promise a comfortable life, I pledge to make Malcolm’s existence as epic as possible, filling it with daring adventure, satisfying character development, splendid romance, and a legacy that lasts long after he is gone.
I am privileged to share a life with Malcolm, and I promise to make it meaningful.

The larger philosophy here is that sex and romance are charming garnishes on top of married life—not the main dish. Historically, cultures have elevated romance to ensure that couples reproduce at a high rate and that couples’ kids are likely to be genetically related to a married mother and father. Without DNA evidence, a wife’s dalliance could be a major issue and a child born out of wedlock would likely increase the number of orphans under community supervision, which historically speaking could impose quite a high cost on small towns. While there were good reasons why historical cultures so strongly emphasized sexual and romantic compatibility, those reasons are not as compelling in the modern context— especially not in a cultivar like ours, which frames the creation of kids anywhere other than a lab as a moral and ethical shortcoming (unless financial constraints drove those children to be conceived naturally).

Because our House holds that spouses should always work as a single unit when possible, we recommend partners “test each other out” not by probing romantic and sexual compatibility, as pop culture dictates, but rather by testing their dynamism as business partners first and foremost. Rather than passively watching them date, we will encourage our kids to start side hustles with potential partners and see how well they work together as a method for determining whether they are a strong match. If a couple has not yet built a company together, we will encourage them to undertake some form of ritualized group trial in which they have to work together to overcome a difficult challenge, like raising a nontrivial (and challenging) amount of funds for a cause they care about, or living in a foreign country for a month, on very little funds, where they don’t know the language.

Professional compatibility is also a better predictor of parenting compatibility. Building a business or tackling work challenges with someone will do profoundly more to help you understand how you’ll both tackle challenges in child rearing than sex ever could. What’s more, should you ultimately have kids together, you’ll find raising them much easier if you both run a business together (as that way, you call the shots: You can set your own schedule, bring infants to the office, and integrate parenting with work as you please).

How much of your adult life do you really spend going on romantic outings or having sex? Around 0.5%,^[94] right? And how much time do you spend working? Roughly 30%,^[95] right? If you can find someone who makes every moment you are working remarkably more enjoyable and impactful, they will improve your quality of life dramatically more than someone who dishes out sex and scintillating candle-lit dinners.

This is not to say we won’t encourage our kids to learn to flirt, date, and—if pre-marital sex is a worthwhile trade-off for them—hone their sexual skills. We will encourage our kids to improve these skills while contextualizing their relative importance in the larger scheme of relationships: We will teach our kids that romantic and sexual skills can be used to achieve an important goal, be it greater psychological connection, greater partner satisfaction, or something else entirely. However, we want to make sure our kids never forget the place of such trivialities in life: They are hobbies with little reproductive necessity and our kids honestly might be better off if they were not distracted by them. Perhaps future generations will develop the technology to free us from our emotional tethers.

We pity these “alpha” men who proudly show off what are essentially servile obsequients in “hot” outfits as wives. There is an old truism: “Weak women raise weak sons.” While we disagree with the gendered nature of this assertion (weakness is not a feminine trait), it highlights something soft cultures will allow you to forget: If you marry your lesser, you fail at your most important duty as a human, which is to create a new generation that surpasses you.

Marriage Contracts

One benign (to us) aspect of our marriage that regularly shocks others is our marriage contract. We are not the only culture to put heavy emphasis on the concept of a marriage contract—the Jewish Ketubah (a marriage contract often hung on the walls of Jewish households) comes to mind—but we are the only culture to actively negotiate one so detailed or to have it be a living document.

Before we got married, we pored over relationship advice forums and interviewed dozens of older individuals, who had had both successful and unsuccessful relationships, to make detailed lists of every point of conflict they had experienced. We used our findings to create a detailed list of all potential points of conflict and talked through how we would handle each. This means we do not encounter conflict over things like home temperature, finances, or how we relate to each other’s parents, as it was all pre-negotiated. It also means there is very little opportunity for anger in our relationship, as anger is triggered when the manner in which a person is treated does not align with how they expect to be treated and thorough relationship contract negotiation explicitly delineates the sort of treatment each partner desires.

We then separated out elements of our combined life and granted ultimate responsibility over specific domains to a specific partner. This means that a designated partner always has the last call on decisions not pre-negotiated in the relationship contract. As an example, one partner may have ultimate control over all financial decisions or child rearing decisions. Sometimes these domains are “mirrored,” meaning each partner might have ultimate say over what the other partner does with their body (e.g., each partner is able to veto tattoos or elective surgery) or each partner might have final say over how the couple relates to the other’s family (e.g., if the family of Partner A wants to see Partner B, they need to stay on good terms with Partner B).

Why do we use this system instead of relying on compromise? Our culture holds that compromise ruins marriages. Compromise demonstrates that partners do not trust each other to take each other’s needs into account and, worse, it subconsciously motivates each party to exaggerate their position, deepening the conflict in the long run. For example, if one partner wants four and another wants five, the one who wants four is incentivized to pretend they want two and the one who wants five is incentivized to pretend they want eight, meaning most people will subconsciously drift toward these more extreme positions.

This dynamic encourages partners to lean away from each other, toward opposing positions, when a well-designed marriage incentivizes people to lean into each other and toward a greater purpose. Compromise furthermore encourages partners to see themselves as distinct individuals with distinct (and often conflicting) needs, which makes it nearly impossible for partners to operate as a truly integrated unit.

The most unique aspect of our marriage contract when contrasted with a Ketubah (the Jewish relationship contract) is that it is a living Google Doc that is regularly edited. About once a year—or as some new, unanticipated point of potential conflict comes to our attention—we return, discuss what should be changed, and formalize mutually-agreed-upon alterations. One thing that’s notable is that, in negotiating the points of our marriage contract, virtually all suggested terms have been mutually supported. By discussing terms in a non-emotional context with a focus on creating a successful, productive, and long-lived marriage, it is astoundingly easy to develop creative solutions to address even stark differences in taste, lifestyle, and personal comfort.

When people embark on a relationship agreeing that the goal of the partnership is to maximize collective efficacy in pursuit of a shared mission (rather than prioritize personal comfort), there is very little room for genuine disagreement. The vast majority of disagreements in such relationships result from trivial and easy-to-resolve information asymmetries and differing hypotheses.

If you want to read more about this practice to design something similar for your own House, check out The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships.

Gender Roles

Most hard cultures have very strict gender roles whereas soft cultures typically mandate gender equality. The reason for this is obvious: While it is logical and morally easy to argue for equality, studies have repeatedly found strong connections between high birth rates and strict gender roles (specifically: low female educational attainment and general female disempowerment). This means strict gender role ideologies typically spread through birth rate while egalitarian ideologies spread through conversion.

Cultural gender roles need not exist as two sides of a coin with “Strict gender roles” on one side and “Gender? What gender?” on the other side. We, personally, find both perspectives unacceptable.

It is pointless to pursue a perfectly-gender-neutral ideal if it ultimately produces the same outcome as a highly misogynistic world in which women are disempowered (a likely outcome for soft cultures if they maintain low birth rates). It makes us sick to imagine how much less productive humanity would be without the combined intellectual horsepower of entire families—men, women, and children alike. When I, Simone, married Malcolm, my number one condition was that I never be obligated to withdraw from the world or stop working. Malcolm delivered on his promise to respect these terms and I believe the structure he created for our family—one that acknowledges differences between genders while still maximizing each partner’s ability to intellectually engage with the world—is intergenerationally replicable (one of our test readers described this as being “neotrad”).

In many ways, both hard, highly unequal, and soft, egalitarian approaches to gender rob people of their agency. Optimal cultures take more nuanced approaches to gender, allowing people to leverage useful aspects of strict traditional gender roles in their dating and family units without mandating them—all while downplaying the importance of a person’s gender to their identity. Many traditional gender structures evolved because they work and because there are genuine, systemic differences between genders. That said, it is also important to remember that the way a person experiences their gender will evolve throughout their life and you should not expect that experience to be the same before and after you find your life partner.

In our own relationship, I take on many roles associated with an extremely traditional iteration of a “woman’s” work even though I was extremely gender agnostic before meeting Malcolm. I take on more feminine roles in our relationship because doing so works in our particular family dynamic—that said, I still call upon different aspects of myself as needed. Gender roles are both an outdated artifact from our evolutionary history (like our arousal patterns) and a tool for every individual couple to tinker with and modify until they reach an optimal configuration.

While gender is not that important to us, we nevertheless exploit gender differences to our benefit given the world’s weird obsession with them. As an example, we strategically switch out which one of us sends out emails, takes calls, speaks at conferences, or attends engagements depending on which gender is likely to perform best in a specific context. When dealing with a new population, we typically split test outreach and meetings to see which of us gets more positive engagement. Once we have sufficient data, we proceed with whomever performs best. Sometimes that means I send out emails as Malcolm and vice versa. Generally speaking, people in the U.S. and Europe are overwhelmingly prejudiced in favor of women and people in Latin America and Asia are consistently prejudiced in favor of men, meaning that our Western colleagues typically hear from “Simone” even when Malcolm is reaching out, and our Eastern and LATAM colleagues typically hear from “Malcolm” even when I am initiating contact.

This switching between personas in our outreach reveals a deeper aspect of how we see gender. While before marriage, gender is a useful tool that aids sorting for potential partners,^{^[96]} it becomes largely irrelevant as a public signaling device after marriage. Though we’d argue distinct roles within a long-term relationship continue to matter, as making a relationship too egalitarian has all sorts of negative externalities, like making men less likely to take on emotional work, which in turn decreases a woman’s perceived quality of life.^[97]

A part of our family culture that has worked extremely well is the idea that the succession of self takes place at the point of marriage. Looking back on life from a combined-identity perspective, we find it difficult to overstate how disgusting and hollow it felt to be an individual—not that we recognized this at the time; we thought individuality was fine (even preferable) because we had no idea how good things could be.

All of this is said with one big caveat: While we respect the traditional role of women in hard cultures—which typically produce women of steel—we see more modern pop-cultural perspectives of femininity to be toxic. Female stereotypes revolving around emotional fragility, a lack of emotional control, and a need to have feelings constantly protected strike us as uniquely toxic. For this and other reasons, we have adopted the practice of giving our daughters gender-neutral names in hopes that we might reduce their odds of identifying with this rising concept of femininity.

In sum, we support our children using gender however they wish, be their interpretations traditional and hard line or more fluid and experimental. As with sexuality, so long as our children’s approaches to gender don’t prevent them from contributing to society or having children of their own, we are in favor of their leveraging various gender roles and norms however they want. What matters is that we use our gender and sexuality to our advantage, rather than letting our gender and sexuality use us.

Interfaith Marriage

Although you will be hard pressed to find a widespread and long-lived hard culture that condones interfaith marriages between a female of their faith and a male of another faith without extensive rituals that ensure the man has “really” converted, most cultures permit men to marry outside their culture without much hullabaloo.^[98] That this cultural heuristic evolved almost universally at the cross-cultural level heavily implies that men typically set the culture their kids adopt (at least in a historical context).

The Parsi are so extreme in this practice that the Bombay High Court actually concluded that a Parsi can only legally be a Parsi if they have a Zoroastrian father and a converted Parsi mother.^[99] This strict structure explains in part why their numbers are crashing so quickly. A culture’s spousal acceptance policy must walk a thin line between maintaining cultural intergenerational fidelity (which is higher the stricter you are) and allowing for the growth through outsider conversion (which is higher when restrictions are lax).

The question when creating a new culture is: “How do you ensure it does not get wiped out by my kids’ spouses’ cultures while still encouraging them to marry outsiders?” The fortunate answer for us is that we live at a point in history in which cultures have either become so wishy-washy through pop-cultural degradation or so brittle as a result of illogical rigidity in the face of overwhelming evidence that it will not be hard for our kids to find partners who are willing to abandon their inherited culture for one more intentionally designed or reinforced (i.e. any Index culture).

The real challenge lies in ensuring that spouses are enthusiastic about maintaining their adopted culture intergenerationally. A saying we have in our family goes: “You don’t get points for having and raising successful kids; that’s easy—you only know you’ve succeeded when your kids in turn raise children of their own who are also successful and fulfilled.”

The Index is designed to welcome in outsiders as it systematically incorporates appreciated and useful aspects of outsiders’ birth cultures into the new Houses they create with Index partners. However, this flexibility may also reduce outsiders’ dedication to elements of their adopted culture. How can we ensure outsiders who join the Index through partnership are enthusiastic about raising kids with Houses’ more idiosyncratic traditions?

The Index encourages the following practices, which may help:

When someone is dating an Index member, they are encouraged to meet with their House’s family for the first time without their date. Simone did this with my family and it made a big impression on her—it demonstrated to her that she was welcomed by my family not just because she was dating me. Ideally, these meetings not only make prospective partners feel welcomed but also teach them something about the House cultivar, helping them understand it is not generic “pop culture.”
Independent of a House’s opinion of a prospective partner, outsiders are welcomed and accepted by the wider family. This was a practice my (Malcolm’s) mom intentionally adopted—and it really paid off. Her welcoming approach to my various girlfriends ensured I was never afraid to introduce a date to the family. By the time my brother and I were married, our spouses’ positive interactions with the family made it easier for them to lean in.
Once someone marries into a House, they engage in at least one “family day” each month in which they either help with childcare for family members or invite them over for some form of wholesome fun. These exchanges have sub-units within Houses accumulate and exchange small favors and reinforce the value offered by being part of a cohesive culture and community.
Houses leverage social pressure to encourage members to lean into family traditions through practices like photo-sharing and gift exchanges (which make it obvious when a member of the family is being lax about their traditions).

Finally, even when outsiders break from House traditions (perhaps because their House cultivar simply isn’t durable culture material), the Index system grants their children an opportunity to stay within the broader cultural network and create a stronger House should they imagine a better way of doing things.

Glorification of Motherhood

A significant driver behind plummeting birth rates around the world involves pop cultures’ glorification of young, single life with lots of sex, travel, and freedom. To a great extent, female figures in modern pop culture cease to be figures worthy of adoration once they have children. It makes a lot of sense that soft cultures evolved this propensity.

Recall that while hard cultures need to increase the fitness of the individual to survive, pop cultures only need to hijack already-living people and convert them. Given every individual’s evolutionary drive to breed, the average person will pay more attention to a young, single male or female who is sexually available than one with kids. So, if you are trying to sell something or get someone’s attention, you are usually better off showcasing young, single, sexualized individuals—however, if a culture is to survive through many generations, it needs to subvert this script.

If a young girl grows up and sees her mom and people like her overburdened, unloved, and ignored by society, why would she choose to have kids herself? Why would she aspire to that? While we can’t fix this at the societal level, we can address this problem with intentionally-designed cultures. If you want to create a durable culture for your family and inspire your children to have kids of their own, one of the best things you can do is ensure you have a strong relationship with your spouse.

For our family, this means ensuring daughters see their mothers glorified, appreciated, and even deified within family culture for the sacrifices they make while also demonstrating that none of those sacrifices require foregoing a career or stepping back from public life. Moreover, setting this example for sons increases the odds that they do the same for their wives and have granddaughters who contextualize prolific motherhood as a sign of uniquely high achievement instead of great sacrifice.

In our House, having kids is just part of the yearly routine. While Simone is appreciated for it, she never hints that it would be justified for her to use pregnancy or childbirth as an excuse to step back from work. The productive glorification of motherhood requires never giving in to society’s tendency to conflate gratitude and approval with justification to winge, whine, indulge, or lean out. For example, nothing about being pregnant or a mother makes women fat, other than that society has built norms that allow for indulgence as a form of gratitude. That it’s “normal” for women to not return to their pre-pregnancy weights is one of those lies society spreads which is objectively not true.^[100]

Toxic gratitude—the type that encourages women to become indolent, selfish, and entitled when pregnant—often has the opposite of the intended effect, causing mothers who let themselves go to feel worse about their path to motherhood, which in turn leads their daughters to believe that motherhood entails a loss of beauty, grace, and personal efficacy. Mothers whose partners wait on them hand and foot and give in to their every demand throughout their pregnancies almost never end up having a lot of kids whereas women who learn to treat pregnancy as a normal routine have a much easier time with it. We suspect this is part of that phenomenon where if you tell someone something is going to be painful, they will literally feel more pain (to the extent that you can even see that heightened perception of pain show up in fMRI scans—this is not just an illusion).^[101] If you constantly tell someone pregnancy is this huge, difficult thing, it becomes just that.

While I, Malcolm, am as grateful as a person could be for what Simone goes through to produce the kids we hope to have, I show my gratitude by working my hardest to move us toward our shared goals and treating her with respect—not by walking on eggshells around her and acting as though she is an invalid. We are so intense about this that it has caused some problems with one of our company’s board of directors, as they keep wanting Simone to take maternity leave and don’t understand why we are so culturally against the idea.

Note: Just as it is important to avoid coddling mothers in a way that makes normal pregnancy seem herculean and trying, it is equally important to not regard harrowing attempts to conceive, trying pregnancies, and difficult delivery experiences as excuses to stop having kids. We, personally, have had troubles with fertility, complicated pregnancies, and far-from-ideal delivery experiences and seeing as fertility is declining with every generation, we expect others and our own descendants alike will encounter plenty of setbacks themselves. As such, we should regard these hardships as par for the course and not as justification to give up. The best way to do so is to lead by example, demonstrating to children that these challenges are a normal part of life.

Just as a strong culture will suffer if it only glorifies the young and sexy, it will also rot if it acts like a woman has pulled off some amazing miracle just by getting knocked up and having a kid. Mothers are celebrated for the dignity and intentionality with which they approach the challenges of gestation, childbirth, and childrearing—and for their levels of productivity above and beyond mere motherhood. This is not something that any narcissist with a functioning uterus can pull off.

Cultures need more than just strong relationships that glorify motherhood. Successful traditional cultures often have inbuilt mechanisms to shame individuals for proceeding down life paths that are unlikely to be fruitful—this is where the concept of an “old maid,” the unmarried 30-year-old woman, comes from, as well as the concept of the crazy cat lady (a woman who adopt pets as a means of artificially satisfying her instinct to care for children). Cultures that shame these outcomes lower their probability of occurring and thus enjoy a higher birth rate, which is why people from traditional backgrounds around the world often share disgust for such life paths.

As our House’s cultivar frames it: Humans start as individuals and evolve into something more as they escape the cycle of individual indulgence.

People begin life trapped in the confines of a solitary identity
Then form lifelong partnerships, evolving into a combined identity representing something greater than themselves
Later they have kids, becoming a force that reaches into the future
And finally, they die, casting off the remnants of their now-totally-unnecessary solitary selves and living on through their descendants and the lasting contributions they’ve made to their family unit

Individuals who stop early in this cycle fail to fully mature and become frozen in a child-like state—their development arrested in their cocoon of individuality.

We understand that pop culture would be horrified by the idea that individuality is something a person would be proud or honored to sacrifice. From our perspective, idolizing individuality, a separation from those around you, those that rely on you, seems deeply perverse.

I, Simone, was adamant about both being perpetually single and not having kids until I met Malcolm. He convinced me to change my mind on this subject not by pressuring me but by logically walking me through the value of relationships and family. Given my default perception that such life commitments were more about disempowerment than anything else, I am glad Malcolm clued me in. Nothing in my life felt more empowering than letting go of personal identity to become part of a team that I genuinely believed in. Nothing in my single life could have freed me more from my personal demons and caprices than having kids, who gave me bigger things to strive for. There’s an emptiness to pre-family life that many attribute to a lack of community, but from my experience, it’s a void that can easily be filled by family and a clear set of values.

As our philosophical ancestor Winwood Reade put it: “He who strives to subdue his evil passions—vile remnants of the old four-footed life—and who cultivates the social affections: he who endeavors to better his condition, and to make his children wiser and happier than himself; whatever may be his motives, he will not have lived in vain.”

Identity and Self

While we have already highlighted some forms of identity that exist beyond the level of the biological individual, many newer cultures divide identity beneath the level of the individual. Consider those who develop multiple personas in an online environment, each of which has a unique perspective on the world. When most people hear about something like this, they will condemn the concept as ridiculous, yet it is a very old concept.

For ages, critics have struggled with the Christian idea that God could have three different aspects of himself (God, the Son, and the Holy Ghost) with one of those aspects acting as a sacrifice to another one of those aspects. They say, “how could Jesus’ sacrifice be meaningful if he is making it to appease himself?” They say this knowing full well that they have different personalities within their own mind, some of which condemn others and make decisions which lead to their suffering.

We all have aspects of ourselves that judge and even hate other aspects of ourselves. Sometimes we choose to call on these aspects and other times they are called up by environmental conditions or those around us. It is quite normal for people to have one way of acting around their family and another way of acting at school or work. We have always found this interpretation of Jesus to be an interesting one, albeit not mainstream: God did not “turn into Jesus” but Jesus is just the manifestation of God’s persona when he is hanging out with people. This is such a wildly different environment for him that said manifestation has holistically different thought patterns from the thought pattern God enjoys in a divine realm.

An interesting—and weirdly framed—example of this is the concept of “code switching.” In linguistics, code switching just means switching between two different languages or ways of talking in different environments. Ethnic minority communities have noted that they go through a similar process of calling on different internal characters in different environments—feeling pressured to call on more “white” characters when in certain situations.

We suspect a culture could do a lot of really interesting things with below-person-level identity division—especially in the online age.

Genetic Traditions & The Future

As we’ve repeatedly emphasized in previous chapters of this book, a primary goal of our personal House culture is to make each successive generation of children better—not just memetically, but physically. With that being the case, we must do more than just have children with partners carefully selected to shore up weak spots in our own ideological and genetic makeup. We strongly encourage our descendants to use genetic screening, engineering, cloning, cybernetics—really, any technology that moves us toward this goal. We have done as much as we can on this front personally, being quite open about our choice to leverage polygenic risk score selection when choosing between embryos.^[102]

“Oh no,” you might be thinking.

“But ensuring your kids have good genes is eugenics!”

If selecting embryos based on polygenic risk scores is eugenics, so is selecting a partner based on traits you’d like to see in your children. In fact, polygenic risk score selection of embryos is arguably less morally questionable than selecting partners based on desirable traits, as with polygenic risk score selection, nobody involved is being eliminated from the gene pool; parents are merely picking the best roll of the dice on their various combinations of shared genes.

What about Orthodox Jews who commonly get genetically screened and use this information when choosing a partner to ensure their kids don’t get Tay-Sachs (a genetic condition common in that population)? Are they “evil eugenicists” for adopting this as a regular cultural practice in order to protect their kids? Of course not. Very few people really believe this form of the eugenics accusation.

Heck, by the reasoning of our eugenics-accusers, even laws that prevent brothers and sisters from marrying are eugenics—after all, those laws exist because kids born of those unions are more likely to have genetic problems. This is why almost all religions and cultures are incest-phobic: Because most religions and cultures believe, at least moderately, in ensuring their kids have the best genes possible.

The truth is, most of the “gotcha” warriors complaining about how something reeks of eugenics really don’t care—not in the way they are pretending to, at least. Simone’s mom died young from a form of cancer parents could screen for in embryos. Are our critics really going to stand behind this “anti-eugenics” position when a choice not to screen would boost an innocent child’s odds of unnecessary suffering and premature death? At least when a Jehovah’s Witness prevents a doctor from giving their little child a blood transfusion, they are only killing their kid; someone who genuinely wanted to stop all genetic selection apparently wouldn’t be happy until they stopped us from protecting ours.

Polygenic risk score selection certainly isn’t the first form of reproductive technology that has been subjected to moral outrage. Very similar fears were raised with equal disgust and panic when IVF technology was first released^[103] and now 33% of people in the U.S. have used IVF or know someone who has (2% of births happen through reproductive technology, more than double over the past decade).^[104]

One of our sensitivity readers explained to us that some people might find embryo selection based on polygenic risk scores to be immoral because we are engaging in a form of preventative healthcare others can’t afford. What!? This was such an insane argument we debated including it. No matter what the medical procedure is, there will always be some people who can’t afford it. Are these people really arguing that all medical procedures someone else can’t afford are immoral? Does this apply to people in other countries? Heck, in that case, a tooth cleaning—or the use of bug spray and mosquito netting to avoid malaria—would be immoral. But even more insanely, if authorities were to actually ban this type of selection process because some people couldn’t afford it, rich people would still be able to fly abroad and get it done. Governments would only be effectively banning polygenic risk score selection for people with more modest means, which would only serve to widen the gap between those who can and cannot afford this technology, thus deepening systemic inequality.

When someone tags people who choose better genes for their own kids with the word “eugenics,” they cheapen the horrors meant to be prevented by the word’s negative stigma. People who cry “eugenics!” at the drop of a hat make actual eugenics, such as government initiatives forcibly sterilizing people and choosing who people marry, much more likely to rise. This is the same form of degradation that plagued the word “racist”—people started calling every little threat to the cultural supervirus racist and the word began to lose its gravity, ultimately driving an increase in actual, dangerous racism. A person willing to chance an increase in the risk of real state-level eugenics just so they can win an online flame war shows exactly their real moral position on these issues.

Eugenics as a pejorative should be used only when referring to alterations to the human genome driven by racial and ethnic bias, laws that control who can breed, or cases of forced sterilization. It should be blindingly obvious that our interests in reproductive technology are not driven by racial or ethnic bias and we have no aspirations to control others.

We argue “eugenics” should only be used to refer to ethnically and racially-driven interest in intentionally altering a population’s gene pool—or forced sterilization—because this is what someone is trying to convey when they call someone else a eugenicist in a public space. They use the word “eugenicist” instead of “transhumanist” because they want their audience to assume their target is racist or an advocate for forced sterilization, which spares them the hassle of arguing against their victims’ actual logic. They know very well we don’t advocate for any form of racial discrimination, nor do we advocate for forced sterilization, but they need other people to think those things about us so people don’t ask why our critics are trying to prevent us from lowering the chance our kids die of cancer or why they support, through their extreme reasoning, the legalization of siblings having children together.

What we advocate for is fairly vanilla—if aggressive—transhumanism: Improving and transforming the human condition with technology. Be against transhumanism all you want, but don’t call it eugenics.

And as a side note, we are avidly against forced sterilization and if you are as well, instead of misleading people on Twitter into thinking we support it, why don’t you actually do something about it? Thirty-one states allow for forced sterilization—over half the U.S.—and 17 states allow forced sterilizations of disabled children.^{^[105]} Do you just like the word “eugenics” as a weapon, or do you actually hate the practice of eugenics and want to do something about it?

When it comes to transhumanism, we acknowledge many are still very hesitant. “I am OK with people selecting partners or genes to reduce the odds of their kids getting cancer and I will admit that is not eugenics—or at least I’ll say it’s not immoral,” you may be thinking, “but just don’t touch the stuff tied to things like attractiveness or intelligence.”

But where’s the line? When weighing different polygenic risk scores while selecting which embryo to transfer for our first daughter, we paid extra attention to embryos with lower probabilities of developing depression, brain fog, and anxiety. Are these attributes too close to intelligence? If we hadn’t emphasized those scores, would we be responsible if our daughter committed suicide or found herself unable to work due to debilitating anxiety? Should you pressure someone to not reduce their kids’ odds of suffering from certain maladies by calling the action “eugenics,” are you responsible for their kids’ unnecessary high risks of suffering? By our moral framework, yes.

Many critics of polygenic risk score selection argue that the process merely alters the odds of certain outcomes while not totally preventing their possibility. A religious extremist might make the same argument when refusing a blood transfusion for their child—that the transfusion only increases odds of survival while not guaranteeing it. When a person chooses to drive drunk, they merely increase their odds of committing vehicular manslaughter but are still very much responsible for taking that risk and imposing it on others.

“What if we lose something of genetic importance in this process?” you might be wondering. “What if we select against something and then it turns out to be important in a few hundred years?”

Think about this for a moment. You know as well as we do that most populations having kids well above population rate are highly technophobic. There is zero chance that we’ll move into a future in which the entire world’s genes get altered—and even if there was that chance in the future, humans would still be able to leverage a large genetic library of pre-altered humans for reference. Moreover, we think people can be trusted to make both reasonable and varied decisions about their selections. Different populations value (and need) different traits and will select for them accordingly; it’s not as though we’re headed toward a genetic monoculture just because people become increasingly empowered in gene selection and editing. Do you really think a Black family is going to select for blond-haired, blue-eyed, Aryan traits? Take us as an example: While we, personally, have been very careful about what we select against, we don’t select against contemporarily unpopular traits that we believe may provide an advantage (like autism—with which both Simone and one of our kids has been diagnosed).

But what about dysgenic risks introduced by in vitro fertilization (IVF)? This is an argument often made by right-leaning survival-of-the-fittest “Sciencey” types. The argument holds that by granting people who cannot have kids naturally the ability to have kids via IVF, we are degrading the human genome. They argue this can be seen in kids born of IVF having higher rates of asthma,^[106] ADHD,^[107] and high blood pressure / diabetes.^[108] To be clear, even the group arguing this is transparent that IVF itself does not cause these maladies (outside of the rare ICSI procedure) but that IVF broadens the range of people who can have kids to include groups more likely to have these issues (older and fatter people). This can be seen in families who have one child through IVF and another naturally not seeing any issues at higher rates in their IVF child.^[109]

This argument can sound smart given how technical it is until you consider the worldview of those making it, at which point it becomes easily the most smooth-brained argument of all. Specifically, if you read, watch, and listen to content made by those who pose this argument, you will see that most also assert that, IVF aside, humanity is adopting tons of dysgenic genetic conditions just because it is no longer the case that most “unfit” humans die before being able to give birth. People making this argument often even go so far as to complain about the negative genetic effects from not having around 46.2% of babies die before reaching adulthood.^[110] They predict that because of this, our species will eventually collapse.

The reason this argument is so doltish is that those who make it are correct that due to modern medical care and social support, fewer maladies are being ruthlessly edited out of the human genome; but the only way around this is through polygenic risk score selection, which requires IVF.

To give you an analogy, this would be like a person who thought:

The planet’s ecology is collapsing due to pollution and this will lead to our species extinction.
There is nothing we can do about this ecological collapse.
With more rocket testing, we could successfully colonize a different planet and seed it with a new biome just as rich as the one we have on earth, but the rocket testing creates pollution, so we had better not do that.

These people admit that rockets (polygenic risk score selection) are our only way out of our current predicament in the long term but want to ban them because in the short term they make things incrementally worse. Given how transparently illogical it is, we suspect people express this belief not because they think it is logically sound, but because it makes them feel tough and manly to express it. They aesthetically believe that “only the toughest and fittest” should reproduce and ignore that technology renders this perspective antiquated.

Selecting for good genes in a mate is part of everyday life. It’s a tacit reality experienced by every person who is passed over for a date because they are not attractive enough, not tall enough, or somehow lacking traits that very likely have genetic correlates.^[111] What online keyboard warriors hate is that while they are a “eugenicist” based on how hot someone is, we are sorting based on mental traits. Our interest in mental trait selection forces people with a deep cultural supervirus infection to make one of the following inconvenient admissions:

Mental traits are not heritable and what we are doing is toothless and hence morally neutral and inoffensive—which means criticism of polygenic risk score selection is weird and arbitrary.
Mental traits are heritable and what we are doing makes our culture a threat—but this also means the entire supervirus ideology is a lie.^[112]

Some people bite that bullet. They say: “I’ll buy that genes play a role in a person’s IQ and sociological profile. I just don’t want some kids to have an unfair advantage.” In saying this, they reveal their hand: They reveal they know some families already have a genetic advantage. They just don’t want to change the existing power structure of our society. Just as the Quakers used the German Protestants to maintain their power without ever actually helping them, the cultural supervirus’s internal power structure benefits from holding people down while paying lip service to them.

Those who the cultural supervirus has elevated cannot maintain their power if they do not stack the deck in their favor. They do this by reaching out with their fascist state hand and taking a firm grasp of others’ family planning process. In so doing, they reveal what they have prioritized all along: Maintaining power. They never really planned on helping anyone in a way that would durably and structurally change the system. If some people really are born less intelligent than others, then the only way to create real equality is through making genetic selection open, accessible, and affordable to everyone. If genes don’t relate to IQ, then what we are doing is entirely inoffensive.

Now a person might say: “No, what I am really afraid of is some kids having a huge advantage over others.”

OK, so what’s your end goal? If you really believe polygenic risk score selection (or perhaps gene editing) to be so terrifyingly effective, then we are in the process of developing technology that could make some humans orders of magnitude smarter than we are now in just a few generations. A myriad of positive externalities would result from an increase in average IQs given that IQ is significantly negatively correlated with murder, assault, robbery, motor vehicle theft, theft and burglary.^[113] Think of the problems we could solve with that ability. Poverty: Gone. Carbon: Sequestered. Do you really want to stop all that just to preserve our existing system of systemic inequality?

Those arguing against transhumanism are arguing over an aesthetic, not a real risk—like an environmentalist fighting to shut down an already-constructed nuclear power plant before building environmentally friendly alternatives when the only alternative available is Russian crude oil or coal. Neither the cultural supervirus nor its zombified victims care about logic; the virus only cares about acquiring resources and perpetuating itself. Fortunately, the virus is a sterilizing disease and almost none of its husks reproduce above repopulation rate, hence our grandkids likely won’t have to deal with them.

Most of the hatred for improving the human condition comes from a fear of change—a desire to keep the species and our current way of life unchanged. This is why we say when people say they hate what we stand for, they mean they hate transhumanism—not eugenics. They use the word “eugenics” to dismiss us as racists and don’t want to mentally engage with the idea that many issues of systemic inequality could be addressed if we would only unlock this Pandora’s box.

Don’t get us wrong; we know as well as anyone else that Pandora’s box contains demons and new vices with which our species has yet to grapple, but how many lives is it really worth to keep it locked? How many people have to die in poverty? How many kids have to die slowly from screenable cancers? How many centuries must our species stagnate before you are finally comfortable letting some sliver of it step into the future?

We also sometimes hear arguments along the lines of: “But the science is not as accurate as you are implying!” or: “You could not possibly have that much of an effect with just a few edits!” First, a recent study with a 3,000,000-person sample size shows that DNA tests are now better at predicting educational success than even SAT scores.^[114] In addition, once the technology is perfected, we can see that at the population level only 30 edits to a genome would move a population up one standard deviation of IQ within one generation and animal studies imply this can be done without an upper limit (given perfect technology and information about where the true causal variants are). For further discussion of this subject, visit page 782 of the Appendix for an overview of the math of DNA editing.

Finally, if we are wrong, so what? This technology is improving every day. At some point you have to stop dithering and take a stand other than: “The technology is not yet effective.”

Hard Culture Opposition to
Polygenic Risk Score Screening

Once the supervirus extinguishes those upon whom it preys, we will only need to justify our transhumanism to those from hard cultures. Those cultures are much more difficult to win over, as rather than poorly-thought-through aesthetic arguments, they present logically consistent and morally motivated reasons to oppose what we are doing.

Many hard cultures will argue that with existing technology, we only “improve” our kids by not choosing some of our fertilized eggs. We are very sympathetic to this argument and believe it comes from a genuine and logical place. From some hard cultural perspectives (which hold that life begins at conception), people are unnecessarily dying because of what we are doing, but from the perspective of our culture, people would unnecessarily die from preventable diseases if we didn’t screen our embryos. When you live in a multicultural ecosystem, you have to decide where to split the difference on questions like this.

Someone with a life-begins-at-conception perspective might argue: “Yes, but if you are right, all you risk losing by not following the path your ethics dictate is a few kids’ lives and the chance to uplift our species. If we are right, you are extinguishing thousands of lives equal in value to the lives of adult humans. Shouldn’t we as a society err in favor of the moral perspective that would prevent more needless death and outlaw your action?”

If we are playing that game, then we have to consider the perspectives of all cultures. A huge chunk of the world population believes that killing many mammals has the same moral weight as killing a human. Now what? Are you going to have the government ban burgers? Of course not. You don’t want to live in a one-party theocracy any more than we do because both you and we know that the group running that theocracy would be an arm of the cultural supervirus and not one of us. We live at a point in history at which easy, aesthetically pleasing ways of seeing the world will always outnumber logically consistent perspectives.

You might wonder if we can really argue animals have the same rights as human embryos because each human embryo can become a human if brought to term. Again, this is a case of cultural framing. Our view of how time works means we are morally responsible for every human we could have created that didn’t come to exist, not just fertilized eggs that aren’t brought to term. Some cultures hold you responsible for every child not created when sperm is wasted through masturbation or when an egg is left unfertilized. We just take this reasoning one step further: Every child you could have created but don’t represents a life for which you are responsible.

Nobody we’re aware of is arguing that a fertilized egg feels pain when it is terminated. So why does that embryo matter? Why do so many cultures believe it to be a sin for males to masturbate? It’s the potential to be human that gives those things moral weight. But shouldn’t all potential human life be judged equally instead of drawing arbitrary lines at the third trimester, conception, or the emission of the sperm? We would argue that it’s the psychological trick of loss aversion that makes some cultures value a human life more after some arbitrary line has been crossed.^[115] To us, anyone who prevents a human from existing is performing an ethically identical act.

With current technology, this is a distinction all pronatalist cultures need to make. It is not mere hair splitting or sophistry. This technology greatly expands the female fertility window (meaning that not using it erases potential human lives), however expanding that fertility window requires the creation of extra fertilized eggs that may not be used once frozen (meaning those using this technology are preventing fertilized eggs from becoming humans). In our view, bans on this technology erase human lives, while from others’ perspectives, this technology needlessly creates and destroys lives.

There are multiple logically consistent views like these that stand in direct conflict. At the end of the day, Simone can’t even have kids without IVF and it is likely that many of our kids won’t be able to either. There are still probably ways we could have kids without crossing others’ moral lines, like single embryo transfers at every attempt, but that approach would be cost prohibitive. So it’s not just that we use this technology to improve ourselves; we personally need it—or at least the part many hard cultures morally object to—in order to survive as a cultural unit. Living in a multicultural ecosystem means making alliances with cultures with which you disagree but respect. Is your cultivar able to disagree with another while working with them toward a common goal?

We hesitate to address arguments that this technology involves “playing God” and that doing so is somehow wrong. Such arguments are fairly insulting to the concept of God and we don’t think the sorts of people to make them would get this far in the book. If basic medical technology allows one to “play God,” then God is pretty weak. We can’t imagine such a God^{^[116]} intending for a kid to die via some debilitating genetic disease without realizing we might have the technology to reduce their odds of developing it. If God wants a kid to suffer or die, then He will have ways to make that happen. If a car rolls over on one of our kids, our assumption is God wants us to do everything in our power to lift that car—if, however, a meteorite fatally strikes one of our kids, then we will entertain the thought that God wanted that child dead.

Consider the parable of the drowning man (which even has a Wikipedia page—neat)^{^[117]} in which a man gets to heaven and asks God why He did nothing to save him while he drowned and God replies, “Um … that’s what the two boats and the helicopter were for.” Immediately prior to his death, the man had turned these away, insisting God would save him and therefore using a man-made solution would be “playing God.” We are not the types to turn our nose up at one of God’s miracles because it was not flashy enough or because it required some effort on our part. We can’t even imagine how a person could declare a medical technology that has the potential to dramatically lower a child’s chance of severe suffering or death and improve their lives as definitively not a miracle.

Institutional Families
(Post-Artificial-Womb Family Units)

It should not be surprising that a technophilic cultivar obsessed with reproduction would be bullish not just on polygenic risk score selection, but in vitro gametogenesis (IVG, the creation of thousands of egg cells from other cells) and artificial wombs as well. Our “descendant worship” metaphysical understanding of reality means that, despite persecution we may face for our actions, we have a theological mandate to both use and advance the technology. Heck, from our cultural perspective, to not develop and use such technology is to stagnate as a species and, stagnation is one of the highest orders of sin.

I, Malcolm, grew up with a room full of lab-grade medical equipment. One of my favorite possessions was a well-worn copy of Carolina Science, an encyclopedia-size catalog for buying lab equipment that arrived at my house annually and yielded endless functional treasures. We will do our best to ensure our kids have access to this same kind of equipment so they can build out and become intimately comfortable with the technology they will need to efficaciously reproduce. While it is easy to forget in a globalized, ultra-connected, laissez-faire society, we run the risk of being cut off from any technology we cannot independently personally build and execute.

An example to illustrate our point: After writing this chapter but before publication, we found out that an article about our family’s use of polygenic risk score selection^{^[118]} may have caused some pretty horrifying backlash: Other parents trying, like us, to get polygenic risk scores for their embryos reported to us that one of the companies we had used for data stopped processing genomic data from embryos and removed several (quite important) polygenic risk scores related to mental traits from their database. This hammered home to us how important it is to keep a certain amount of technical capacity in-house.

Leveraging developments in reproductive technology, many social ills can be resolved and fascinating new cultural models will become unlocked. Imagine a world in which women didn’t have to gestate their own children (or pay other women willing to do it). We already live in a society in which single women without babies out-earn men.^[119] If we can prevent childbirth from knocking women out of their careers, we will be that much closer to gender parity among professionals who become parents (while couples can already choose how childcare burdens are shouldered independent of sex, it’s inevitable that most mothers suffer at least moderate work-related time and productivity losses in pregnancy and childbirth).

Beyond female advancement in the workplace, consider what this technology could do for LGBT groups. The problem of low LGBT birth rates could be erased in less than a generation, allowing their cultures to be durably protected. What’s more, with IVG, same-sex couples could have kids 100% genetically related to both partners (e.g., you could turn one gay man’s cells into an egg and have his partner fertilize it), whereas now they’re obligated to either adopt or use a donor egg and have each kid only genetically related to one partner. With an artificial womb, gay parents would not even need a surrogate. Crazier still, polycules of more than two people would be able to have kids that are 100% theirs (it is theoretically possible to make a child with 47 biological parents via chromosome selection).

We could address issues of inequality by granting access to this technology to anyone who wanted it. In addition, we could remove, or at least dramatically lower, rates of maladies like depression and anxiety—such can even be done with existing technology (as soon as IVG is widely available).

But all of that is thinking small. The future unlocked by advances in reproductive technology is far more vast.

Some Houses within the Index will be able to totally rethink what it means to be a family. They will be able to create Institutional Families, organizations that produce, educate, and empower humans at scale (e.g., an institution would be the primary unit of the family producing large numbers of intentionally designed children). While we don’t advocate for the development of institutional families in our House, the Index does open the door to cultivars that may.

If the institution does a good job raising these kids, providing them with a good life and a good culture, descendants of these families will be motivated to give back to the organization after coming of age. Entire cultural traditions and ways of being human could be built around this practice. For example, you could artificially introduce genetic variation into the children the institution produces, modifying its seed genomes to favor genetic material associated with those members who, as adults, reinvest the most value back into the organization. To put it another way, those who contribute more to the organization in terms of resources will also contribute more of their genetic uniqueness to future kids produced by the factory. In addition, the institution could be run by an AI modeled on all living family members, creating a monarchy-democracy hybrid.

Now you might be thinking: “That’s monstrous. How dare you!”

Reactions like this are driven by a lack of imagination. While a family like this is horrifying in terms of how much it deviates from present social norms, it is nothing compared to what we expect to be competing against.

A more insidious iteration of an Institutional Family might genetically engineer its kids to need a specific protein only an associated company can produce and sell that protein to them at an exorbitant price. This may sound like science fiction, but it could be done with existing technology, as knocking out proteins with CRISPR is way easier than improving them (it is much less technologically difficult to break something than it is to improve it—almost every university has labs doing this for mice; this is how we make disease models).

Even just using IVG (which is just out of our reach at the time of this book’s publication) and existing polygenic risk score technology, a company could select populations of embryos for specific roles, like enjoying child rearing or hard math work, to specialize kids for specific roles in the company. An amoral actor may also be motivated to sterilize the individuals their organization produces to ensure they don’t have split focus and select against rebellious traits to ensure those produced don’t fight back. That last point is why we believe we have a good shot at outcompeting these groups—so long as we don’t slow down.

Someone will eventually build out this technology. The more advanced this tech gets, the more dangerous it becomes. Malicious actors will be able to build viruses that kill all humans who lack certain genetic markers they plant in people (e.g., they could create a virus that kills specific ethnic groups or everyone that wasn’t made in one of their factories). If you ban the development of transhumanist breeding and genetic engineering tech in certain nations (e.g., let’s say the European Union totally outlaws such technology) you just leave those nations defenseless.

China’s population is expected to halve within 45 years.^[120] As scary as this reproductive tech is, you had better hope they are working on it because if they aren’t, their only solution to policy interventions that have failed to motivate women to voluntarily have kids is to force them to have kids. With birth rates falling at their current pace, banning work on artificial wombs makes the world described in A Handmaid’s Tale an inevitability—and a close one at that.

Ultimately, A Handmaid’s Tale paints a world in which women used for breeding are treated more humanely than they realistically would be in real life. Once you remove someone’s agency over things like pregnancy, you are not just going to let them walk about in society—they would be way too much of a risk. It seems much more likely that disempowered women would be kept in specialized facilities similar to factory farms and forgotten about by society.

Humans are very good at ignoring the horrors that “must” exist to maintain our comfort. Anyone who has the slightest interest in protecting women’s rights—or human rights—should be praying every day for the quick development of inexpensive artificial wombs (if you want to fund this development, contact us—we have connections secretly working on it).

An ideological war between differing philosophies on how and why the technology is used will eventually occur (unless an AI kills us all first) and it will be between those who want to produce humans at scale to augment human flourishing and those who want to manufacture humans in a bid to consolidate power, amass resources, or otherwise exploit captive audiences. Those who refuse to touch the technology are unlikely to have the expertise needed to intervene. When you hobble people like us who would like to leverage this technology to reduce inequality, empower diverse groups, and contribute to human flourishing, you make it dramatically more likely that bad actors win.

Ecological Niches and
Convergent Evolution

While generalists exist, many species of animal have evolved some form or another of environmental specialization. It would be weird if this wasn’t the case—of course the skills needed to thrive in a desert environment are not the same as those needed in a lush rainforest. The same is true for cultivars: While generalist cultivars exist, many are specialized to either one form of environment or one type of ecological niche within a multi-cultural ecosystem.

In this chapter we will explore various ways cultures specialize for specific ecological niches while also putting a special lens on cases of frequent convergent evolution. For example, independently evolved “city cultures” are consistently less likely to see dog ownership as a critical component of childhood and gun ownership for personal defense as a moral mandate. An understanding of cultural convergent evolution can help us model how cultures in the future might sort out when subjected to different environmental conditions that appear to produce consistent outcomes.

Not all of the niches that cultures evolve to fill are totally societal. Sometimes cultures evolve to fill an environmental, ecological niche in which other cultures either can’t survive or can’t compete. Consider the ancient Inuit or Seminole as an example of this.

An interesting phenomenon can occur when the specializations developed under extreme environmental conditions get slightly tweaked, making a culture wildly more competitive than contemporary counterparts. Just as some invasive species spread like wildfire when introduced to new ecosystems that lack tools to defend against them, some cultures spread rapidly once introduced to new ecosystems.

By this, we merely mean that some cultures have exploded onto the world stage very quickly, outcompeting other cultures that had been in stalemates for generations because they had been honed within a unique environment. We don’t use this analogy to imply anything disparaging about these cultures. It should be obvious that authors of a book about how some cultures outcompete others don’t hold more competitive cultures in ill regard. If you choose to imply that we frame some cultures are ”bad” because we described them as capable of spreading like an invasive species, you are intuitionally trying to mislead people.

Three examples of a specialist culture coming out of nowhere to become one of the largest players in world history are:

The Mongols: A step nomad horse symbiote specialist culture
Islam: The confluence of a desert nomadic specialist culture and Abrahamic culture^{^[121]}
The Vikings: A culture specialized around agriculture and fishing in extreme, cold-weather environments

Note on what we mean by “horse symbiote” cultural specialization: The Mongol cultivar of the 13th and 14th centuries was not just a steppe nomad culture but a “horse symbiote” culture. While almost all human cultures have symbiotic relationships with one species or another, the Mongols of the 13th and 14th centuries went balls to the wall with theirs. Not only did Mongolian culture specialize in making all sorts of horse-derived foods, such as horse milk, but they specialized in sleeping on moving horses and could even use a technique for drinking horse blood while on the move when a long force march was required. In the same way an animal can evolve to be symbiotic with another animal, a culture sitting on top of human biology can evolve to make humans symbiotic with another animal species. This is an example of a culture evolving to fill an extremist environmental niche.

In each of these cases, a culture that specialized in surviving under extreme environmental conditions shifted from being a non-player in world history to dominating a huge portion of Europe in only a few generations.

This dynamic suggests that cultures may be able to “sharpen” themselves and become more resilient by actively choosing to inhabit harsh and hostile environments—environments that force them to be innovative, strong, and proactive. (As we think about the design of our own family’s culture, we wonder if perhaps we should always ensure a faction of this culture lives in extreme cold weather settlements or inhabits some other difficult-to-live-in place to encourage this sort of cultural strengthening.) Like people, cultures benefit from antifragility.

Alternatively, this phenomenon may be a product of unique elements these cultures evolved—due to their unusual formative environments—coming against cultures that had no natural defenses against these rare strategies.

A related phenomenon can be seen in left-handed people disproportionately excelling in many sports. For example, people learn how to play against right-handed batters, meaning they will always be slightly worse countering a left-handed one. Evolutionary biologists suspect that, at one point, all humans were right-handed due to the evolution of language leading to the corresponding side of our brains becoming dominant. This environment gave left-handed people an advantage in fights, making it a cross-cultural advantage for a stable minority group to exhibit this trait.^[122]

It is therefore very worthwhile to consider how an intentionally designed or optimized culture you develop might leverage these dynamics to its advantage. If your pool of initial members already has some form of specialization, how can you use culture to maximize its value and how will that specialization alter your culture’s relations with others? If your members lack a specialization but you see the advantage in creating one, how will you engineer evolutionary pressures that coax it out over generations? Consider these factors as you proceed.

Roles in Multicultural Ecosystems

With regard to their ecological niches within a multicultural ecosystem, hard cultures can largely be thought of as being dominating, symbiotic, isolationist, or terraforming.

Dominating Cultivars

Dominating cultivars are usually defined by a belief that anyone can join their culture and anyone who does not ascribe to their theology and cultural practices will undergo some immense hardship after death. This creates a moral mandate within these cultures to do whatever it takes to eventually wrest control of local governing institutions and create pressures that encourage conversions to their culture.

While people often frame the aggressive conversion mindset of dominating cultivars negatively, it would ultimately be intensely immoral for someone to believe others faced eternal damnation and torment should they fail to convert and to not try to convert them. Cultural domination is a perfectly reasonable and good long-term goal for anyone who holds this mindset, even if achieving this domination causes short-term suffering. We are consistently shocked when people complain about being subjected to proselytization—it’s like: “Bro, that person isn’t getting paid. They are going out of their way and risking ridicule in an attempt to help prevent you from getting hurt.”

When dominating cultivars make up minority populations in a geography, they typically claim, even internally, that their goal is not to create a theocracy. In addition, dominating cultures are very likely to play the victim card when they are in the minority (think: dominating Christian cultivars living in largely non-Christian areas making claims about the “war on Christmas”).

When a cultivar expects total control over its environment, any lack of control can feel like oppression. Consider the cries of oppression on Twitter from journalists, the inquisitorial class of the superviruses,^{^[123]} after Elon Musk took it private and they started getting banned for breaking rules that had existed for years.^[124] Consider the accusations of oppression from people who grew up in extremist conservative cultivars and find themselves obligated to work side-by-side with women.^[125] Equality feels like oppression to any cultivar that frames the perspectives of other groups as intrinsically inferior.

This dynamic flips once dominating cultures become the dominant force in the population—suddenly, theocracy becomes imperative. Theocratic rule by a dominating culture doesn’t always look like a Church literally running the state. Decentralized cultures, for example, typically impose theocratic control by translating their religious laws into state laws.

Symbiotic Cultivars

Symbiotic cultivars are cultures capable of living within a multicultural ecosystem without a mandate or even motivation to eventually dominate that ecosystem. Sometimes symbiotic cultivars achieve this by not believing in any sort of differentially worse afterlife for non-believers but more often than not they don’t feel obligated to convert outsiders because they don’t believe everyone is meant to be a member.

Cultures that don’t see conversion of others as a mandate include those which tie member qualification to some level of heritability, like the Parsi and some Orthodox Jewish cultivars. Groups with weird theological structures, like Calvinists, who don’t believe everyone is destined for salvation, also experience little motivation to win others over to their beliefs. It is somewhat ironic that the exclusionary—some might say “elitist”—nature of most symbiotic cultivars is what makes them uniquely compatible with other cultures.

A shift from a symbiotic culture to a dominating one among a nation’s politicians will radically change its political mandates. America was primarily founded by people adhering to symbiotic forms of Christianity (between 55% and 75% of white citizens and even more within elite circles were Calvinist at the time of the nation’s founding).^[126] However, fairly recently in the history of the country, the American Christian landscape has become increasingly dominated by Pentecostal Arminianism (a dominating culture). This shift caused Christian groups in America to fight harder to incorporate religious rules into government in an effort to spare U.S. citizens from eternal suffering. Had Arminianism been a dominant branch of Christianity at the nation’s founding, the United States would be quite different, especially when it comes to the separation of Church and State.

An interesting quirk of most symbiotic cultures is that, because they specialize in living in multicultural ecosystems, they often evolve to fill specific social niches, becoming massively over-represented in specific careers and industries. Dominating cultures cannot afford this luxury, as their mandate to govern their entire society means members of that group must be able to fulfill all roles within a society. This can produce rather humorous results when a symbiotic culture that evolved to only fill only a handful of fairly specific cultural niches is forced to fill all the niches in a cultural ecosystem (e.g., As happened with Israel—more on this next).

Isolationist Cultivars

Isolationist cultivars thrive most when isolated from other cultures. While they can live peacefully next to other cultures, there is generally very little intermixing between them and their neighbors—either in commerce or cultural ideas. Like symbiotic cultures, they do not have a mandate to convert people. Unlike symbiotic cultures, they evolved to be complete economic ecosystems capable of functioning in isolation. A great modern example of an isolationist culture is the Amish, but we have seen isolationist cultures throughout human history, with a well-studied historic example being the Jewish splinter group known as the Yahad (the community from which the Dead Sea Scrolls hail).

Isolationist cultivars are at present the most successful of all cultural groups at resisting collapses in birth rate. As such, we should expect them to soon become major players in geopolitics in a way that is hard to fathom today. To understand just how quickly they are able to grow, consider the Hutterites (another anabaptist cultivar, like the Amish), which grew from just 400 members in one settlement to around 50,000 in just 140 years.

Isolationist cultures are among the few that have been capable of weathering the cultural mass extinction event threatening most other extant cultures today because they are able to “air gap” their nodal networks, which prevents memetic infection by threats like the supervirus. An air gap is a form of cyber defense whereby you simply do not plug a piece of technology into the network (e.g., You prevent your nuclear reactor from being hacked by not giving it an internet connection). However, we suspect the robustness of isolationist cultivars in the face of demographic collapse is due to more than just cultural separation.

Imagine society as a building made of clay. To keep the building stable, an internal wire structure is necessary. This wire frame is society’s culture and religious infrastructure. The industrial revolution generated pressures which rapidly and dramatically changed the shape of society—that building made of clay—to the extent that not only is the wire frame unable to support the new shape (hence we see collapsing birth rates and other problems), but huge portions of the wire frame are now exposed to the elements and rusting. While this book attempts to resolve the situation by designing novel wire infrastructure to fit society’s new shape, some cultures have avoided this mess by creating pre-industrial environments in which they can thrive, effectively preventing their clay buildings from changing shape in the first place.

There are two ways to address problems caused by changes to your society’s “clay building” without building new supportive wire framing. The first is what isolationist cultivars like the Amish do: They create a pre-industrial bubble around their communities, like an alien wearing a helmet full of methane to be able to breathe on earth. This has allowed their culture to stay healthy, resist viral infection, and maintain a high birth rate. The second way cultures create a pre-industrial environment that effectively protects them from obsolescence is more insidious: Instead of putting on a helmet full of methane, they set up methane generators which inundate the environment with the gas so essential to them and toxic to most. These are what we call terraforming cultures.

Terraforming Cultivars

Terraforming cultures thrive by transforming the social and economic fabric of the multicultural ecosystems they infest to pre-industrial levels. They treat women as second-class citizens, hold blood feuds, and kill LGBT individuals. They create environments that are hell to live in, but that lead to high birth rates. While, like dominating cultures, terraforming cultivars typically plan to eventually control an entire society, the way they spread is very different.

Dominating cultures typically use their control of a society to generate a high quality of life and wealth (though the quality of life produced by dominating cultures is typically a bit lower than that enjoyed in truly multicultural ecosystems). They then use the wealth they’ve generated to send out missionaries to new geographies (these missionaries are usually on temporary trips with only the goal of converting people).

In contrast, terraforming cultures primarily spread not through missionaries but by hobbling their host government and economy. Essentially, once a terraforming culture reaches a certain population threshold its surrounding local economy and social infrastructure will collapse and conditions begin to mimic pre-industrial environments, which causes birth rates to shoot up. This high birth rate combined with low quality of life drives at least some residents to flee from this environment, and like osmosis they move through a semipermeable membrane between their society and a more wealthy one. Once those who left the old region reach a certain population threshold in a new region (assuming they maintain the original culture rather than adopt the culture of their new homeland), they collapse that new region’s local economy and repeat the cycle.

Now you might be thinking: “Ahhh—I get it, he is dog whistling about Muslim Immigrants” … and you would be wrong. White nationalist groups sometimes push a narrative similar to this, but the truth about U.S. Muslim immigrants is that their fertility rate is almost below replacement rate, they are just as educated as the average American, and they don’t earn particularly less.^[127] The vast majority of U.S. Muslim immigrants come from normal dominating cultivars that fill an ecological niche similar to the nation’s dominant Christian groups, not terraforming ones. That is not to say that there are not terraforming Muslim cultivars (ISIS for example), but terraforming cultivars have independently evolved from Christianity, Islam, Pagan beliefs, and surely at least a dozen other larger cultural genus, so despite what some might have you believe, there is nothing uniquely Muslim about this strategy. The U.S. has been fortunate enough to have (thus far) avoided large incursions from a terraforming cultivar. Historically, terraforming cultivars really only had success moving from incredibly underdeveloped countries to geographically adjacent developing countries.

Nothing malicious is happening in this process; there is no intentionality whereby people of terraforming cultures wake up one day and say: “Let’s move to another country and trash their economy.” It was just an evolutionarily successful cultural strategy. The only way to stop it is to make the strategy evolutionarily nonviable. The good news is the cultural supervirus kind of already did that: The supervirus requires a certain level of wealth and education in a region to spread effectively, meaning it has, at least in the short run, evolutionarily outclassed the traditional terraforming cultures (the tables may turn over the long run if the supervirus effectively sterilizes enough groups).

Despite popular narratives among conservative groups, terraforming cultures—just like their dominating culture kin—are in the process of dying as a cultural strategy. Huge campaigns to raise the level of female education coming out of wealthy countries, combined with the cultural supervirus’s effectiveness at transmitting through the internet, has crashed the birth rates of many terraforming cultures. Female education and internet access are like salt on a snail for terraforming cultures.

There currently is no obvious scary terraforming culture out there to sit up at night worrying about. But … the supervirus has only just recently begun to beat them. That means it is very likely that a few exceptionally virulent iterations of terraforming culture with stronger internal immune systems currently exist in very small pockets, like a few cells of antibiotic-resistant bacteria hiding on an agar plate after it was dusted with antibiotics. Specifically, if we see a highly technophobic iteration of one of the old terraforming cultures evolve that explicitly prohibits women from getting educated by either threatening them or keeping them in the house, we should be very, very worried.

As a final note, we advise against thinking of any culture itself as an “enemy.” While this cultural strategy is at odds with the Index’s values, all cultures have something of value that can be harvested given their unique perspectives. The more differentiated a culture is from your own, the more likely it is to see things in your cultural blind spots.

Instead, it is useful to think of cultures as existing in two categories: Cultures that can’t coexist with others in a multicultural ecosystem with those that can. Cultures capable of coexisting with others in multicultural ecosystems can be further subdivided into permanent allies who can be wholly trusted (symbiotic hard cultivars whose interests align with yours) and only temporary allies who cannot be trusted (dominating cultivars whose interests only temporarily align with yours).

The Mystery of Modern
Jewish Urban Specialization

What about more generic specializations? For example, why does modern Jewish culture seem heavily biased in favor of living in cities and dense settlements despite this predilection being absent in early Jewish history? Not only do Jews live in cities at a higher proportion than almost any other large culture on earth (a whopping 96% of Jews who live in the U.S. live in urban areas),^[128] but even when forced into rural environments like in parts of Israel, they use unique models that betray an intense lack of comfort with isolated rural lifestyles. Specifically, two new types of settlements were invented for these environments, one being the collectivist commune of the Kibbutz and the other being the Moshav, a kind of ultra-dense suburb in otherwise rural areas.

Why would a culture that, for thousands of years, has been repeatedly isolated into ghettos, then “genocided” when returning to cities, not stop putting themselves in such a vulnerable position? It’s not as though Jewish people have a theological reason for returning to cities—or even a history of living primarily in cities before the medieval period. In exploring my (Simone’s) own Jewish heritage, this question intrigued me enough that it in part inspired this book. (My family rediscovered we are matrilineally Jewish while I was growing up, so my mother was not able to pass any Jewish culture on to me.)

For those unfamiliar with Jewish history: The Holocaust was hardly the first genocide that targeted Jews—just the largest. It was common throughout the medieval period for Jews to set up in a city, be pushed into a ghetto, and then be rounded up and expelled or killed in a pogrom. Oddly, it looks like during this period—the period of most intense persecution—the predominant Jewish cultivar became an urban-specialist one.

Also, some might dismiss the above question with the answer: “Oh, Jews have to live in population clusters of other Jews to form minyans (a quorum of ten Jewish adults required for certain religious obligations).” This explanation can be dismissed because historically there were large (now extinct) rural Jewish cultivars. Jewish culture can and has adapted minyans to rural environments. Heck, most of the sects of Christianity that first settled the U.S. were minority religious groups that worshiped in congregations and yet they had no trouble settling in rural areas and traveling long distances to regularly worship together.

This question seems particularly pointed right now, with the rise in antisemitism on both sides of the political spectrum painting a worrying picture for the Jewish community. Why don’t Jews get out of cities and arm themselves before the next pogrom commences? Given the opinions you have read in this book, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that many of our personal friends are Orthodox Jews. Despite many of these friends being quite politically conservative, none of them owns more than a couple guns, all live in difficult-to-defend urban centers, and despite many being wealthy, almost none own ranches or farms outside the city to which they could retreat in a worst-case scenario.

As we hail from mostly rural-specialized cultivars, this seems insane. Even when we don’t hear our people dehumanized on both sides of the political aisle, our inherited culture is screaming at us: “Arm yourself! Become self-sufficient! Own enough land to grow food for your family! Move as far away from others as possible when society starts to become unstable!” We say all this with the clear realization that these rural cultivars have been less successful than Jewish culture (both in being less old and less prevalent today).

Clearly there is some advantage to a Jewish strategy of urban specialization, so what is it?

Our theorized answer comes from understanding we are asking the wrong question. After the Second Temple period, Jewish refugees splintered into a plethora of cultivars, filling dozens of unique ecological niches and causing Jewish culture to undergo something of a cultural Cambrian Explosion. Only a small, tightly related family of these cultivars survived the medieval period intact and that is what created the illusion that Jewish culture is more widely specialized to live in cities. It would be like a Floridian asking, “what is it about Cuba that makes Cubans so conservative, capitalistic, and good at starting companies?” The answer of course is that nothing about Cuba makes Cubans in Florida have those qualities; rather, there was a strict selection event that disproportionately sorted for Cubans with those qualities and drove them to Florida. In the same manner, nothing about Judaism makes it an urban specialist culture—but something about the selective pressures Jewish people faced at a certain point in their history did.

Suppose Jewish culture evolved some rural components (which we know it did historically). What happened to the city components and the rural components every time a local ruler decided he didn’t want Jews anymore? Jews had no larger population center to which they could retreat. Because, to a rural culture, land = wealth = survival, a choice to flee meant giving up everything (possibly even their ability to survive). Their only means of earning an income, and the only way for rural Jews to get food again, would require either finding and settling unused-but-fertile land or taking someone else’s land.

In a city culture, wealth is stored in things like precious metals and jewelry, making it much easier for urban families to pack up, flee, and start fresh somewhere else. More importantly, city cultures make money off of generalizable skills. If you are a cobbler and you have to flee from one city and set up shop in another, it might be hard, but you will be able to make a living creating and repairing shoes in this new city (unless the local cobblers guild kills you or has some licensing system, but that’s a different story). If, however, you are a farmer and you have to move to new land, you are screwed.

This dynamic makes rural communities more likely to try to stay and tough out persecution^{^[129]}—and end up getting themselves killed. While the city branches of Jewish culture presented an easier target, they were also much more mobile. In other words, Jews living in cities prompted more frequent genocide attempts, but less thorough genocide attempts. If anything, the frequent targeting of Jews, which forced them to flee cities and relocate in various other cities, could have served to increase this urban cultivar’s geographic footprint while also ensuring higher genetic and cultural relation across that geographic footprint. A Jew of this city-focused cultivar living in Geneva would be more closely related to a Jew living in London—both culturally and literally—than a member of any Protestant cultivar due to the Jewish population being regularly forced to leave cities and redistribute itself across a smattering of European cities.

Were there any winning strategies for rural Jews during this period? The only conceivable winning strategy would be not to fight back or flee, but get very good at hiding your cultural identity. We see one cultivar of Jews that took this strategy in the Crypto Jews of Spain (and subsequently Mexico).

There also appears to have been at least two small martial rural Jewish cultivars (Jewish cultivars that did evolve into the militaristic rural niche) that survived to modern times and only recently went extinct as distinct cultural identities: The Mountain Jews of Dagestan and the Habbani Jews. Zionist emissary Shmuel Yavne’eli noted: “The Jews in these parts are held in high esteem by everyone in Yemen and Aden. They are said to be courageous, always with their weapons and wild long hair, and the names of their towns are mentioned by the Jews of Yemen with great admiration.”^[130] (When we say a cultivar went extinct, we do not mean literally every practicing member has died—just that the community is no longer large enough or graced with enough cultural memory to regrow into a century-spanning identity.)

Clearly rural Jews faced far too many headwinds to produce many surviving cultivars—and it makes perfect sense why: An armed rural population is far more threatening to dominating forces than an urban population that trusts the rule of law to protect them. Let’s say you’re a king and your people are champing at the bit to scapegoat, kick out, and loot a particular culture within your domain. Should the group be urban, you would likely raid and steal their valuables while killing a chunk of them but otherwise let them leave, as they are not an active threat. On the other hand, you would make sure to surround and completely eliminate an armed rural version of this culture, as they represent the type of group that might come back and counterattack should you fail to destroy the entire collective.

This can be seen pretty clearly in Jewish history from the medieval to modern period. While we are aware of Jews fighting back often in their early history (before they were urban specialists), we cannot find a single instance of modern Jewish people (e.g., after the Jewish revolt against Heraclius in 602) counterattacking or trying to forcefully take over a city or regional government after being partially slaughtered and expelled. Given that this happened a lot, it’s pretty remarkable. (Two exceptions to this trend of not fighting back in the moment, though neither instance was retaliatory, can be seen in The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Jewish Labor Bund in Communist Russia.^[131])

But again, this makes sense. If someone enters a city-based community and starts killing 5% of the population and you fight back, all of a sudden you are a threat and your attackers become motivated to kill everyone. This cultural imperative is partially ensconced in both Gideon’s story from the Book of Judges, Elijah, and the Book of Esther, with the Book of Esther making it clear that the way to prevent pogroms is to obtain political influence, not to fight back.

What would have happened to the Jewish community if it hadn’t experienced a “Cambrian Explosion” during this period? What would have happened if Jews had stayed in the Levant and kept rebelling? On page 792 of the Appendix (Alternate History Jews: Samaritans), we explore this question. Short answer: They would probably not exist today.

You might be thinking, “What about the Yom Kippur War? It may not have represented exactly those circumstances, but it did involve Jews fighting effectively against an invading force.” While you would be right, this happened at a unique new point in Jewish history at which they finally had land again (land not taken through a Jewish invasion) and this reaction was triggered because they could not retreat from said land. More importantly, they did not fight like a rural group would. A rural specialist culture would have armed families to form a loosely organized guerrilla force (a fun cinematic depiction of this aesthetic can be seen in The Patriot^{^[132]}). Instead of a loosely organized, tribal-unit-based guerrilla response to the invasion, Israelites instead organized a state-run-and-supplied military response, very much reacting to the threat as a city-state and not a rural collective.

In contrast to more martial rural cultures, urban-specialized cultivars are more naturally adapted to modern integrated military tactics that require the rapid formation of deep levels of organization and high-trust command structures. The cultural evolutionary pressures that shaped martial cultures perfected them for war of a different era—war that was far more tribalistic and focused on smaller units. This in part explains why Israelites did so well despite being outnumbered, out-supplied, and out-teched. For those unfamiliar with the Yom Kippur War: The invading armies outnumbered the Israelis at a ratio of 100 to 1 in manpower and 10 to 1 in armor and artillery. At that time, Israel was not the military-industrial tech power house it is now.^[133]

So, when we state that urban cultures don’t protect themselves, what we mean is they don’t protect themselves at the level of the family. They trust complex systems (governments, militaries, etc.) to protect them—and in a globalized world, that is a very smart strategy. Should globalization break down, it is less clear how sustainable this strategy will be.

It is also unclear how smart this strategy is after the Holocaust, which demonstrated that while pogroms are far more rare in modern times, they are significantly more thorough. With birth rates collapsing around the world and Secular Jews being the only large technophilic cultivar that has an above-repopulation birth rate when practiced in developed countries, Jewish people are going to have a huge target on their backs. (This instinct of collapsing predominant ethnicities to target minority populations with high birth rates can be seen in China’s ethnocide of Uyghur cultivars).

You may be thinking: “There couldn’t actually be another period of massive, extreme, systemic, government-mandated discrimination against Jews in the near future, right?”

Sadly, we think a surge in serious discrimination is likely if the supervirus is not overcome. Given the ethno-nationalism inherent in some strains of right-wing ideology, there has always been some latent antisemitism in certain factions of right-wing thought. While for a time the left wing provided a united counterpoint to these isolated forces, the virus has fundamentally changed the game.

A core ideology the virus needs people to hold so that it can spread is that: (1) Harmful discrimination against a group is the core cause of inequality and (2) Ending that discrimination will end inequality. That the Jewish community has at the same time been oppressed and successful runs counter to this narrative. To address the mismatch, the supervirus has flirted with classifying Jews as not just a privileged class but the supreme privileged class and ultimate enemy. It has begun to claim that Jews were never actually that oppressed, but used their power to write a false narrative of oppression. (If you doubt this, consider how communist groups like The Black Hammer burned copies of Anne Frank’s diaries—or spend some time in an ANTIFA chat room.) When antisemitic rhetoric and policies become a panacea to politicians across the political spectrum, buckle up.

For the last few hundred years, it would seem that a minority culture susceptible to bigotry is best served by having a disposition toward cities. Given this, why do some cultivars like ours strongly prefer rural environments and see cities as dangerous? How are they able to do this while still staying stable? We think this is the case for two reasons.

First: Rural specialist cultures are almost always specialized at the type of guerrilla warfare that makes the land they occupy very hard to hold. For the most part, armies have historically been fueled by cities—outside of no-longer-viable cultural ecological niches, like “nomadic army” specialist cultivars and roaming mercenary specialist cultivars (for example, we know from literature there was a large group of Jews that lived a mercenary lifestyle after the Second Temple period that filled this ecological niche before going extinct).

Rural specialist cultivars have therefore been able to leverage the threat of decentralized, guerrilla warfare to occupy environments that urban cultivars aren’t willing to pay dearly to hold. This is why many of the cultural groups that were most successful on the American frontier—who pushed out the greatly-weakened-by-disease native population (which had lost over 90% to disease in some areas)—came from regions of Europe that were historically thought of as hostile or barbarous (like the Irish, Scots, and some groups of Germans) while immigrants from nations like Italy mostly stayed in cities.

Second: Rural specialist cultivars tend to bestow to adherents a detachment to material and intergenerational wealth (prioritizing ideological objectives instead), making it possible for them to endure despite occasional obligations to drop everything, flee, and start fresh somewhere new. For example, during the Civil War, multiple members of my (Malcolm’s) family chose to repeatedly resettle on new land every time Confederate troops tried to burn them out (the most historically recorded example of this was the Kaiser burnout). Despite this, my ancestor Warren Collins managed to have 13 kids—meaning a choice to forgo wealth in favor of ideals did not interfere with our family’s fitness, genetically speaking.

This sort of mindset has become increasingly engrained in the rural specialist cultivars that both Simone and I have inherited. Though both of us were raised to see wealth as moderately useful, it was emphasized far more that we should always be prepared to lose everything and that what mattered most was the skills we had acquired (which we could ultimately just use to rebuild lost wealth). This mindset enables rural specialist cultivars to endure through time, but is probably detrimental overall as it leads to the frequent total loss of intergenerational wealth (and the cumulative advantage that accompanies it).

It therefore doesn’t surprise us that Jewish culture still outcompetes Calvinist culture over the long run, demonstrating that the city-focused strategy has been optimal for the long-term survival of a culture—at least in a historical context. The question is, is urban specialization still the optimal strategy? As of now, we can’t know. It would be wise to encourage multiple branches of a culture to attempt different angles of the strategy.

Downsides to urban specialization in the modern world:

Pop culture exposure: Being a city-based cultivar puts cultures at increased risk of degradation from pop cultures and almost necessitates that the culture come to trust the state (as mass human organization requires some central governing body).
Risk of state-imposed culture erasure: It is this trust of the state that puts urban-specialized cultures at increased risk going into the future. Many states infected by the cultural supervirus have begun to overtly utilize environments where they have disproportionate power, like cities, to outlaw cultural practices such as homeschooling, which play a key role in intergenerational cultural transfer. Forcing cultures to surrender their children to a school system literally descended from an institution designed to erase people’s cultures (or as they might say, “culturally integrate people”) can quickly extinguish a culture.
Higher catastrophic risk of ethnocide: Postindustrial efforts to wipe out a city-based population are more thorough than pre-industrial genocides (again, consider the Holocaust).

Downsides to rural specialization in the modern world:

Lower intergenerational wealth: A rural-specialized cultivar will almost always be less wealthy.
Difficulty finding partners: In modern environments, it is very hard to find high-quality partners in decentralized and dispersed rural environments.
Note: The biggest downside no longer exists (being tied to the land) as very few rural-specialized cultivars actually grow their own food anymore.

There is also a hybrid approach whereby people are expected to move between a city and rural environment depending on their life stage (e.g., using cities to secure a partner and the countryside to raise a family). There are certainly cultivars that have leveraged this model successfully in the past; just consider the landed gentry in England around the Regency Era, which would flock to London for the Season (enabling their youth to intermingle and marry) and to serve in Parliament, but return to their country estates for the rest of the year. This model might work; however, it may also be too complicated to pass between generations with fidelity, especially for less wealthy families that are unable to occasionally pass rural and urban properties on to future generations.

Our favorite strategy—but one that requires a larger population to execute—involves a significant portion of a cultivar’s population migrating to a cultivar-run city state. This approach grants the dual benefits of a defendable cultural environment and good dating markets, all while nevertheless encouraging a broader diaspora to operate in the wider world, gaining new skills, building wealth, and introducing new cultural developments that might strengthen the central culture. To some extent, Israel showcases an attempt at this strategy—but one that made the mistake of choosing land that other people wanted. To be fair, this was considered at Israel’s establishment and there was a significant push to have the Jewish state set up on less desirable land in Africa (called the Uganda Scheme). If we were going to attempt this strategy for our House’s cultivar, we would establish our city state somewhere in the far north, not just to reduce the odds of others wanting to live on the land, but also to obligate our cultivar to develop high-tech agriculture not dependent on a stable environment and ensure that our descendants grew up with the feeling of daily hardship (more on why this is important later).

Notes:

If reading about rural versus urban strategic advantages and disadvantages sparked your interest in settling somewhere new, you might be interested in a deep dive we created with tips on where to live if you want to have a lot of kids and not live in a city: Pragmatist.Guide/Live/
If our descendants ultimately decide to establish a physical colony, we would remind them Cyrus the Great warned his soldiers who wanted to move their capital to a more hospitable location: “Go ahead and do this, but if you do so, be prepared no longer to be rulers but rather subjects. Soft lands breed soft men; wondrous fruits of the earth and valiant warriors grow not from the same soil.” A few generations after Cyrus the Great died, his descendants moved their capital to the most indulgent place in the world at the time, Babylon, and the dynasty was wiped out within a generation.
On the subject of geographic determinism: Look at maps showing where Nobel Prize winners were raised—or average IQ scores by region. They suggest that heat addles the mind.^[134] This might have something to do with protein denaturation, time spent inside, or even some sort of physical stress response, similar to how fasting can make you sharper—but with opposite results. Regardless, choose land in the far north: Not only will this keep you sharp, but the hostile climate will dissuade weak people who fear discomfort from joining you and diluting your fervor. Better yet, building a culture that specializes to survive in hostile environments in which one must grow food inside with technology and spend most of the time indoors will hone members for long-term space travel. Besides, if you share our predilections for frostpunk aesthetics, northern settlement will fit you like a glove! (To be clear, we are not arguing that groups which live in cold environments evolve to be smarter but that anyone who moves to a cold environment gains an IQ and productivity boost.)
Growing up, we remember how much the news would make fun of George Bush going to his ranch and “cutting brush” all the time. George Bush comes from a fairly similar rural cultural background to me (Malcolm) and his family was fairly close friends with mine so what he was doing was always super obvious to me and I never heard it explained well. In (especially wealthy and high-status) rural-focused Texan families, there is an expectation that every honorable individual will spend a certain portion of every week doing menial, manual labor. An individual who didn’t do this would be said to be “all hat and no cattle.” This ritual has both social signaling motivations (e.g., I don’t think I am better than manual laborers) and, I believe pretty firmly, that regular grueling manual labor is important in maintaining mental clarity for people of a certain sociological profile—in the same way meditation or singing might be important to people crafted by other cultural backgrounds
If you are into all this Jewish history talk and wondering where prohibitions against eating pigs came from, the YouTube channel Religion for Breakfast offers a great video on the subject.^[135] Suffice to say that pork prohibitions were almost certainly not a health thing but an economic thing and a Bronze-age-identity-politics thing. Honestly, we cannot recommend Religion for Breakfast enough to anyone who is a fan of this book, religion, or history in general.

The Myth of a Large, Genetic Jewish IQ Advantage

Note: This contentious topic has been difficult to research not just because academic philosophers are functionally blocked from discussing such things in public (for example, a paper was recently retracted from a philosophical journal for being offensive),^{^[136]} but because independent researchers on both sides of the debate who share their findings have been misleading. If you are familiar with the YouTube war on this subject or think you have read both sides of the debate and have made up your mind, we encourage you to read this chapter nevertheless, as we cover information not present in the public discussion.

When we started writing this book, we were fairly certain that Jews were smarter than other groups either at a cultural or genetic level.

Anecdotally, we like to think we associate with disproportionately intelligent people (as gauged by notable professional achievement) and have no reason to mostly be friends with Jews—yet a huge chunk of our close friends are either Orthodox Jews or Secular Jews.
Objectively, Jews win Nobel Prizes at a rate 100X higher than would be expected given their population levels. Among the highest-ranked chess players, 51% have at least one Jewish parent (this is not something that could be easily explained by nepotism). Jews are represented among the world’s richest people at a rate 100,000% higher than would be expected (they make up 19% of the Forbes 200 richest list and 0.19% of the world population).^[137] Jews are overrepresented in the Congress and the Senate at a rate about 400% higher than one would expect based on their population in the United States.^[138]
Jewish success is plain for anyone to see; Jews are dotted in positions of power throughout our society at a rate that would not be expected given that they only make up 2% of the U.S. population. Consider, for example, that as of this book’s creation, 41.61% of Joe Rogan’s political guests have been Jewish and 20.27% of his science guests have been Jewish.

It comes as no surprise that many people have come to the conclusion that Jews must be smarter than other people on average. That said, after going over the evidence, we have changed our minds on this subject drastically. This was such a jarring change of opinion, we had to make edits throughout the book after it happened.

First, let’s get the most common myth out of the way: That “Jews are smart because the Holocaust acted as a selection event, eliminating the less intelligent Jewish population.” The types of evidence cited in this argument (Jews being overrepresented in educated professions and positions of power) can be seen in data before the Holocaust. For example, in pre-Holocaust Germany, Jews were overrepresented in the medical profession at a rate of more than 1,500%, with 47% of pediatricians being Jewish even though Jews accounted for only 0.9% of the population at the time.^[139] Stats like this can be found virtually anywhere you look in reference to pre-Holocaust Jewish populations.

It is similarly unlikely that “pogroms made Jews smart.” We say this for two reasons. The first being that other groups plagued by pogroms (like the Romani—aka Gypsies) are not also known for being disproportionately in jobs requiring higher education. Second: Jews, objectively, are not particularly smarter than average.

Just as we did when we first dug deeper, you might be thinking: “Wait, what? That can’t be true. I have read my entire life that Jews are super-duper smart. Aren’t there like a bunch of scientific studies that show Jews have higher IQ?”

While it is true there are a bunch of studies on this topic, they don’t ultimately demonstrate in a robust manner that Jewish people have systematically higher IQs.

The most-cited and well-conducted study on Jewish IQ differences was published by Margaret Backman in 1972.^[140] This study compared 1236 Jews to 1051 non-Jewish Caucasians across six different batteries of tests focused on different types of intelligence. It found that Jews had an average score of 51.88 across all test categories while Caucasians had an average score of 51.22—that’s a 1% difference. (Note: Backman also did a preliminary study in 1970 that people sometimes cite, but it only looked at 65 Jewish boys, so we are ignoring it.^[141])

What is wild is that people will frequently cite Backman’s 1972 research as proof that Ashkenazi Jews have a higher-than-average IQ. They do this by only mentioning the two of those six test areas in which Jews outperformed other populations (verbal and math) while ignoring the parts where they underperformed, then generalize that score, creating the illusion of some big intelligence difference—but that is objectively not what study says.

If it were true that Jews had much higher IQs, Israel (with an 81% Jewish population) wouldn’t have an average national IQ lower than that in the United States (94 vs. 98).^[142] We find this nation-wide number very compelling, as it is much harder to manipulate than individual studies. As Ashkenazi Jews make up almost half (44.2%^[143]) of the Jewish population in Israel, it is preposterous to assert that they sport an average IQ over a standard deviation above that of the general population—unless one also asserts that non-Ashkenazi Jews are outlandishly stupid, which (most) supporters of the “Jewish competence” theory don’t argue.^{^[144]}

In fact, one of the core champions of the Ashkenazi-high-IQ theory, Miles Storfer, argued in his book Intelligence and Giftedness that Sephardic Jews (who make up most of the other half—44.9%—of the Jewish population in Israel)^[145] have an average IQ of 111. If this were true, even if all non-Jews in Israel were mentally handicapped, you still couldn’t get an average IQ of 94 for the nation.^[146]

While Backman’s 1972 paper is the most cited peer-reviewed article on this topic (being cited 252 times at the time of this book’s publication), another well-known researcher in the space is Richard Lynn. He argued that Jews have a higher-than-average IQ in both 2004^[147] (with a paper now cited 49 times) and 2008 in co-authorship with Satoshi Kanazawa^[148] (with a paper cited 32 times). Lynn used the same test in each case, however his 2008 work with Kanazawa involved more participants.

While these studies yielded results in line with Backman’s research, they only tested verbal IQ, which allowed them to “prove” that Jews have a general IQ advantage by cherry picking the type of intelligence measured. We suspect Lynn chose to be intentionally manipulative as he specifically cites Jews getting low non-verbal reasoning scores as motivation for his research:

“.. but these are so variable and in some instances so low as to raise doubts about their credibility. It is difficult to credit that the Jewish sample could have a non-verbal reasoning IQ of 91.3, and at the same time a mathematical IQ (‘‘quantitative reasoning’’ in the McGrew and Flanagan taxonomy) of 109.7. It is also difficult to credit that the Jewish sample could have a verbal IQ of 107.8 while at the same time having a short-term verbal memory IQ of 95.1. These results are in need of checking and replication.”

If Lynn’s goal was to truly prove the claim that Jews do actually have a higher general IQ, he would have focused on the non-verbal-reasoning facets of intelligence investigated by Backman in 1972, where Jews were deficient—not where they had an advantage.

Imagine your kid took a battery of evaluations and while they performed wonderfully on the verbal test, their visuospatial test score was wanting. If you wished to prove the results were wrong about their overall performance, you would have your child retake just the visuospatial test—the one on which they performed poorly—rather than the verbal evaluation (where presumably you have nothing to contest). If instead you just wanted your kid to get into a good college and didn’t actually care about getting a “true” measure of their performance, you would find some other test that only had a verbal component and present it as an evaluation representative of your kid’s overall performance.

Lynn tries to argue exactly this:

“The first items of information of particular interest to us are the respondents’ religion and ethnic group. An analysis of these enables us to categorize the respondents as Jewish, non-Jewish white, Black and other. The second item of interest is the respondents’ score on a 10-word vocabulary test. Vocabulary is a good measure of both general intelligence and verbal intelligence.”^{^[149]} ^[150]

Lynn’s findings around vocabulary are largely in line with the verbal advantage found in Backman’s research, meaning there is some reason to have confidence in Backman’s other scores as well.

You might be wondering about other data cited by those who argue Jews are something like a standard deviation smarter than other populations. Outside of the Richard Lynn’s work, this data mostly comes from two studies: The first (13 citations)^[151] compares wealthy, Jewish, NYC day school students to a general population, while the second (331 citations)^[152] uses data from Kibbutzim whose graduates have historically outcompeted other Jews within Israel. While the second study itself is not making an argument about Jewish IQ, Miles Stopher used its data to make that assertion in the aforementioned book, Intelligence and Giftedness.^[153]

Despite their samples being quite skewed—and even though neither study itself claimed to make assertions about general Jewish IQ—people often cite them when making arguments around the average Jewish IQ. Imagine you wanted to show that British people were smarter than other people, so you compared the performance of students at elite British private schools or gifted programs to that of students in other nations’ general populations.

If you shared our original assumptions and believed there were was an abundance of well-conducted research featuring large sample sizes that clearly demonstrated outsized Jewish intelligence, you probably think we are cherry picking, but in the words of Richard Lynn himself,

“There is only one study of the intelligence of American Jews in the last half century which appears to be representative and had a reasonable sample size. This is Backman’s (1972) analysis of the data in Project Talent, a nationwide American survey of the abilities of 18 year olds carried out in 1960.”^[154]

That’s the very same study that shows an only 1% difference. (Mind exploding gif.^[155])

You see similar things wherever you look:

While Jews are not compared to a Caucasian population in a 1965 paper by Gerald Lesser, Gordon Fifer, and Donald Clark (with a whopping 657 citations), Table 12 indicates that Jews only outperform Chinese participants on verbal (90.35 to 71.09) and math (28.50 to 27.79) skill and come in below Chinese participants on reasoning (25.21 to 25.94) and visuospatial (39.71 to 42.51) skill.^[156]
Greta Adevai, Albert Silverman, and Edward McGough report in a 1970 research paper (which has been cited 22 times) that when Jewish college freshmen were given a ten-test battery of perception skills, Jewish student performance was significantly below that of non-Jewish classmates when participants with matching SAT scores were compared.^[157]

Probably the most compelling evidence suggesting a higher Jewish general intelligence comes from The Bell Curve, which contributes evidence from the NLSY (National Longitudinal Surveys) data set to the debate. This data does indicate a dramatically higher Jewish general IQ (0.84 standard deviations from white Christians), though it does admit that “we cannot be sure that the ninety-eight Jews in this sample are nationally representative” and that the “source of the difference is concentrated in the verbal component.”

After conducting an extensive search, the only other research we found that supports the “Jewish competency hypothesis” with IQ data are two papers, both published in 1976 (what’s with this subject and the 1970s, right?). One, by Julius Romanoff (which has only been cited by others five times), suggests an average Jewish IQ of 115.^[158] The other (cited 42 times), by Victor Cicirelli, compared Jewish sixth-grade students to those representing the general population and found the Jewish participants to have a seven-point IQ advantage.^[159]

A final source of evidence we have yet to address—but which may prove us wrong—relates to high-IQ-correlated polygenic risk scores being higher in Jewish populations.^[160] While we find this evidence uniquely compelling, we hesitate to update our beliefs based on this finding alone after seeing so many people misquote and misinterpret research. We also wonder if these polygenic risk scores are picking up IQ-correlated traits that grant Jews a verbal advantage more acutely than others.

In short, outside of a few highly ideologically motivated studies, the strongest data-backed claim that a person can reasonably make about Jewish IQ differences is that Ashkenazi Jews have marginally better verbal IQ and math skills, which is offset by marginally lower visuospatial intelligence and reasoning—like 5%-10% in both directions. It is really weird that people always mention Ashkenazi Jews’ higher verbal and math scores but almost never bring up their equally lower non-verbal reasoning scores, which is what leads to the neutral effect on IQ overall.

If you are like us, you are now probably thinking that there must be other studies out there but Richard Lynn is right; Margaret Backman really published “the only one study of the intelligence of American Jews in the last half century which appears to be representative and had a reasonable sample size.” We went over a number of meta studies and they mostly pulled from the above cited papers. There are three alternate hypotheses we have seen thrown around:

That Jews have a non-standard curve in their IQ (i.e., there are more Jews at the extreme high end and low end of the curve)—however we have not seen data to back this up.
That Jewish exceptionalism actually comes from some mental health conditions occurring at higher rates in the Jewish community—but again the evidence here is fairly weak (see the article in the footnote for a detailed exploration of this hypothesis).^[161]
Marginally higher verbal and math IQ alone explains all Jewish success. This theory seems possible to us, though the world would be a much less interesting place if it is (more on this later).

Readers who spend a lot of time online might vaguely remember that some YouTuber posed an argument along these lines only to be debunked. The YouTuber who scratched the surface of this argument, motivating us to dig deeper, was Leather Apron Club^[162] (whose bias against Jews^{^[163]} lead to motivated reasoning—as can be demonstrated by his choice to cite Backman’s 1972 data when talking about Lynn’s 2004 research and leaving out some studies we do address here). UBERSOY on YouTube “debunked” his argument, though his rebuttal fails to address the problem that there is no large, well-conducted study demonstrating that Jews have dramatically higher general intelligence, neglects to mention that the largest, most respected study in the space only showed a 1% difference in IQ, and doesn’t acknowledge that researchers have manipulatively measured only verbal IQ while implying their findings are representative of general IQ.^[164]

Whereas we think Leather Apron Club was not going through the evidence in good faith and would have manipulated the data to support his bias against Jews, it seems as though UBERSOY was trying to be intellectually honest. We suspect that UBERSOY simply got so caught up in creating a strong counter argument that he allowed himself to get taken in by the shell game Lynn and others play with verbal IQ. There is real reason to be skeptical that a markedly higher Ashkenazi average IQ is a genuine phenomenon.

This is a great example of why an intellectually diverse cultural ecosystem is valuable. Leather Apron Club’s hatred of the Jewish people caused him to question something we would have never thought to question on our own—that Jews are smarter than the general population and this intelligence largely explains their disproportionate success. Ironically, his catching the street hustlers in their verbal IQ shell game serves to undermine his larger agenda among people like us who don’t think Jewish success can be explained by nepotism or an evil Jewish cabal, as it indicates there is something genuinely valuable about Jewish culture itself rather than just Jewish genetics (more on those points shortly).

If Jewish people did have significantly higher IQs, elements of Jewish cultural success would be very hard—if not impossible—to replicate through the intentional creation of a family culture. If, however, most Jewish success comes from a purely cultural edge (and the network that culture provides), elements of Jewish success can theoretically be replicated. (All this assumes that Jewish success is not just a product of slightly higher verbal and mathematical IQ, which appears to be robustly attested. We aren’t dwelling on that possibility because it is probably not the case and boring if true.)

Fun side note: There is an entire niche industry focused around trying to copy Jewish culture in China, with books that have titles like: Become Rich Like a Jew,^{^[165]} To Make Money With the Jews, and Jewish People and Business: The Bible of How to Live Their Lives.^{^[166]}

Finally, some portion of readers will see Jews not being particularly smarter than everyone else, yet still ending up in positions of power, as definitive proof that something nefarious is afoot—that Jews are somehow conspiring to control our democracy. First, let us emphatically guarantee you that there is no intentional Jewish conspiracy. There are enough stupid Jews with low self-control, as there are with any large enough population, that the mechanisms of this system would be revealed if it did exist. Jews find it just as confusing that they outcompete other groups as outsiders do. There is no shadowy group advancing their careers any more than there is a shadowy group of Catholics slotting church members disproportionately into positions on the Supreme court. (If you are wondering on what authority can we state so emphatically that there is no secret society of Jews controlling the world read: “The Jewish Cabal Theory” in the Appendix on page 796.)

While Jews do benefit from nepotism, they don’t benefit more from it than other groups that share a strong sense of cultural identity, like Mormons and Catholics (keep in mind that Mormons have even systematically institutionalized nepotism by often favoring people who have received a temple recommend—that is, Mormons who have gone through the steps required to be welcomed into LDS Temples). We would even go so far as to argue that Jewish networks are less nepotistic and supportive than those belonging to Jehovah’s Witnesses and Scientologists. Anyone living in the U.S. has access to these kinds of nepotistic networks through various groups they can choose to join. Heck, these days, the Effective Altruist community’s nepotistic network will help people more than the Jewish network—and is open to all.

If Jewish people aren’t somehow “cheating” to get ahead in society, how are they doing it? While we don’t have a strong answer, we suspect our private dinner parties, at which we host people we think might change the course of world history, grant some insight. Around 2% of the U.S. population is Jewish and yet somehow when we select high-potential-for-impact guests (at what to us feels like random), around 50%+ end up Jewish.

How is this “random” selection method for people we think have a high likelihood of changing the world pulling up mostly Jews? When inviting people to these dinners, we often send out cold invitations to people who recently wrote something online that we found intellectually stimulating or controversial in a way that engages us. It seems if you send cold invitations to creators of intellectually engaging blogs, podcasts, and Substacks, a huge portion of them will be Jewish.

Why? Jewish culture encourages adherents to invest time in the types of public discussions that can feel pointless—even socially dangerous—to members of most other cultures. This higher likelihood to speak publicly when others would feel social pressure to stay quiet may also explain (at least in part) the preponderance of Jewish comedians (something we discuss detail in the chapter “Relation to Pleasure and the Arts” on page 554).

Across all layers of Jewish culture, from rituals (chavrusa) to internal hierarchy (the rabbinic system), debate skill is both practiced and rewarded at an unparalleled level vis-à-vis other cultures. Those who grow up in Jewish culture will therefore more enthusiastically call bullshit on society because their cultural framing trained them to emotionally reward themselves for doing so. It’s not that Jews are smarter than other people on average; it is that when individual Jews are smarter, they are more likely to speak up in ways that get them noticed.

Essentially, when not using pre-existing accreditation networks (like universities, guilds, and secret societies), individuals looking for the smartest people in society to hire and befriend are going to search for people writing or saying engaging stuff in a public context, and those people are disproportionately Jewish. This gives Jews a little-used “side path” to power. Jews access this side path not because they are smarter, but because they have a cultural compulsion to share engaging ideas publicly at higher rates.

Take the top ten controversial online intellectuals you like to follow, focus on those you believe you chose without any outside influence (small blogs, undiscovered podcasts, and the like), and try to determine whether they have Jewish ancestry. We think you will be surprised. If our theory is accurate, it means Jewish overrepresentation in positions of power will increase with the sustained rise in internet culture.

This theory does not explain why among the highest-ranked chess players, 51% have at least one Jewish parent. When deciding whether or not it valid, keep that in mind.

______________________

In researching this subject, we came across an interesting and widely believed conspiracy theory: That Jews were overrepresented among the Bolshevik communists who took over Russia. We say this is interesting, as digging into the stats actually presents the opposite question: “Why were so few Jews represented among the Bolsheviks?” Jews only made up around 3% of highly ranked Bolsheviks. While this is an overrepresentation of Jews, it is dramatically below what one would expect given Jewish overrepresentation in other areas of power (for a deeper, well-sourced discussion on this, check out the Wikipedia article).^{^[167]} In short, it looks like there were far, far fewer Jews in the upper level of the communist party than one would expect. Anecdotally, Simone’s Jewish side of the family had to leave Russia because they were White Russians (people who fought to support the Tsar).

We suppose the lack of Jewish support for Bolsheviks shouldn’t be surprising based on the fact that the Communist government of Russia later specifically targeted Jews to be eliminated as a cultural group.^{^[168]} This should not be surprising given that Karl Marx was wildly antisemitic: “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money….An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible.” Marx furthermore complained that Jews were “reproducing like lice.” While some claim Marx made statements like these in an attempt to hide his pro-Jewish inclinations (as he had some Jewish ancestry), [169] the fact that Marx’s goal was the systematic elimination of Judaism as a cultural identity would make such obfuscation conspiratorial in the extreme.[170]

______________________

Generally, we would shy away from conversations that attempt to tie an IQ trend to a specific ethnic group, but this particular instance warrants discussion because people use the myth of Jews’ higher IQ to dismiss the role Jewish culture plays in their success. Obviously, given the topic of this book, this myth is very important for us to dispel.

We shy away from the topic of IQ trends as they broadly relate to ethnic groups for two reasons.

First, as you can see in the case of claims around Jewish IQ, data used to prove this stuff is often far more shaky than those who authoritatively share it imply.

Second,even if IQ does vary across ethnic groups, such variation is largely irrelevant as of our generation—and any variation will be totally irrelevant going forward for our species. The idea of one ethnicity being superior to another along any number of measures is nonsensical in a world in which families can create their own vision of an Übermensch in just a few generations through the use of IVG and polygenic risk score selection. Objectively, the more cultural and genetic diversity there is in the genetic pools that uplift themselves through technology, the more robust and safe the future of our species will be. When performing intentional genetic selection at the level of individual genes rather than ethnic groups, the more colors of paint on the palate, the better.

Whenever we hear someone talking about ethnic IQ differences, we feel like we just broke into the Big Bad’s lair at the end of an action movie to find him monologuing about the sharpness of the masterfully honed samurai sword he used to win many impressive historic battles, waving it around like a goofus. Bro, we have guns. Fully automatic guns. No one cares about your samurai sword. …

Speaking of Guns …

Gun Ownership and
Responsibility of Protection

A city-dwelling culture whose members attempt to protect themselves with guns will become a target for surrounding communities and be seen as a “public menace” more generally. When you live in extremely dense areas with heavy state control and abundant government services, you also need to harbor a certain level of pro-sociality and trust in your fellow man in order to thrive.

In the same breath, it makes sense that many cultivars and individuals would not trust the state. From our perspective, a certain level of suspension of logic—a mass delusion if you will—is needed if one is to trust any large bureaucracy to be either efficient with its resources or just in its action. Those distrustful of large bureaucracies naturally sort themselves into more rural environments, where their beliefs would likely be compounded. For example, once in a rural environment, a culture is unlikely to have much state support in the event of a targeted attack, making self-defense capability something of a necessity.

Individuals from these cultures who were unable to protect their land were likely to have that land seized, either by the state (which historically did this a lot to rural populations deemed incapable of militarily enforcing their property rights) or other groups with mal intent (it was often not worth a state’s time to correct for land theft so long as the occupying residents paid their taxes). This even happened in the United States up until about a century ago. Such history puts the stereotype of the ruralite pointing a shotgun at outsiders into context.

Groups suspicious of large bureaucracies were generally against things like taxes, as historically states directed most resources they collected toward urban centers and were largely parasitic on rural communities. Governments, after all, were often more concerned about keeping those closer to home and in positions of power happy in order to stay stable. People in the countryside have historically only warranted state attention insofar as they threatened rebellion. On that note: Many of these groups regularly incited rebellions, which themselves piled on more anti-bureaucratic selective pressures. It is little surprise that surviving iterations of these rural cultivars developed not just extreme suspicion of large bureaucracies, but also mandates around self-armament, sovereignty, and self-sufficiency.

Again, we will present the predominant modern Jewish cultivar as an extreme example of an urban-specialized culture. Jewish gun ownership is the lowest of any religious group in the United States according to a 2005 American Jewish Committee study^[171] (only 13% compared to 41% of white evangelicals and 31% of Americans). Even in Israel, which given its history and the way it relates to its neighbors would have every reason to be bullish on citizen armament, is very hesitant about gun ownership among its Jewish population, turning down 80% of applications for gun licenses annually (compare that to well under 1% in the U.S.). So, while you will see guns all over Israel, they are overwhelmingly being wielded directly in service to the state, with only 4% of guns issued in the country not being of military issue.^[172] (And again, we really need to distinguish the predominant modern Jewish cultivar from historical predominant Jewish cultivars, as the Jewish cultivar dominant throughout the Roman period was clearly extremely rebellious, martial, focused on self-protection, against authority, and distrustful of the state.)

Contrast urban Jewish culture with your gentle authors’ cultural background, which presents the other extreme. In our inherited culture, it would be seen as a tremendous moral failing and a sign you did not “really love your children” if every adult member of the family was not comfortable using a firearm (both the mother and the father). When we had our first kid, both sides of our family offered to send us money to buy (more) guns, additional firearm training, and membership at the gun club across the street from our house.

This was seen as a normal evolution of our responsibilities upon having our first child: We advanced from being responsible for protecting only ourselves to being responsible for protecting a household. To someone from an urban specialist cultivar, the idea of giving your children more guns because they now have kids in the house probably sounds completely insane. (Note: We are fairly sure this rural tradition is not tied to our Calvinist religious ancestry but rather our Scottish/Irish backwoods ethnic ancestry—these were the types of people who migrated to the U.S. at the first chance they got, then kept moving West every time civilization caught up with them.)

As kids, we were expected to learn both wilderness survival techniques (how to navigate in the woods, purify water, grow food, hunt, identify poisonous plants, etc.) and how to use basic weapons. My (Malcolm’s) family only focused on the most practical weapons (guns, bows and arrows, and explosives).^[173] Simone’s family additionally trained in more “ornamental” forms of self-defense. Her father, for example is a black belt in Aikido (she was actually born in Japan while he was there training in depth with a grandmaster), her sister’s family likes to throw hatchets in their backyard, and when we first started dating, Simone proudly showed me her collection of pink knives. (Actually, one of my cousins made a joke when learning that Simone’s family had a penchant for things like hatchet throwing, which they saw as indulgent, and thus effete—a good example of how even similar cultures can have differences.)^[174]

It is funny how I (Malcolm) expect readers to either react to the above comments with: “OMG, your families are insane extremists” or “Well duh, all families raise their kids that way—how is that experience in any way remarkable?” (The latter was Simone’s reaction when I tried to explain to her why we can’t give knives to our students as gifts.) In writing this book, however, we spoke with a lot of people about their childhoods only to realize that shared, mass-media-created narratives around childhood do not reflect the day-to-day childhood experiences of most Americans.

Note: If our assertions about rural armament in the U.S. feel too anecdotal to you, consider that in the U.S., among adults who live in rural areas, 46% say they own a gun, compared with 28% of adults who live in the suburbs and 19% in urban areas. Of those, 75% of those in rural areas say they own more than one gun, compared with 48% of urban gun owners.^{^[175]}

From the perspective of rural cultures, a choice to live outside of cities is primarily seen as a defensive tactic. While our extended family members primarily live in cities, even most members of modest means have parcels of land in the countryside (ranches or farms) where they take their kids and grandkids to learn to grow food and develop wilderness survival skills. Many people we know who hail from rural specialist cultivars but live in cities will actually buy their first farm, ranch, or lake house before buying their first house in the city—as if it were a sort of umbilical cord that lets them survive in an urban environment.

What’s particularly funny is how, in a society with no real day-to-day threats, people justify self-defense expenditures around fictional pop culture threats like zombies. Yes: This is something you will regularly hear if you hang out with quirky prepper communities. It’s as though people know they are building these skills to protect their families and because they can’t think of any real reason to be investing so much effort in doing so, they come up with a tongue-in-cheek reason that pulls from their evoked set of societal collapse scenarios.

Someone from another culture may hear this and imagine kids performing rigid paramilitary training drills in the woods. Within most rural, large-bureaucracy-suspicious cultures, survival training is rarely framed this way—rather, it is framed as “playing in the woods,” “playing with a bow and arrow,” or “remixing fireworks and blowing up toys.” Neither Simone nor I grew up thinking we were being trained in weapons use and survival, nor did our parents see what they were doing in that light.

When I first started writing this book, I mentioned this section to Simone and she was like: “Come on Malcolm, you are reaching—everyone does that. It’s not like it’s unsafe; my aunt only got shot in the face with an arrow, like, once.” Then she thought about what she said and was like … “Oh weird—I guess that does sound off.” When I brought this up with my dad he was like: “Come on, we even had my childhood friend who blew all the fingers off his hand playing with fireworks talk to you about how dangerous they are,” to which I replied, “yes, that was a prelude to your giving us fireworks to play with.” (Now that I am an adult looking back on it, it was super dangerous for my parents to keep the fireworks box next to the toy box.)

Our society has such a specific and hostile view toward the paramilitary training of children that it is very hard to recontextualize what we think of as normal childhood games and happy, wholesome memories of playing with friends and family as weapons and survival training. This mental masking shows how very specific cultural mandates, like: “Make sure all kids know how to use weapons and survive off the land,” can pass between generations while the implications of the purpose of those mandates can be forgotten. It is also fascinating how stark and ubiquitous this difference is, with essentially everyone we know from a rural culture being taught skills like hunting, fishing, weapons training, basic explosives training, swimming, horseback riding, basic mechanical maintenance, etc. while the culturally urban people we know were typically only taught around half those things.

People from rural cultivars also heavily modify potential mates’ desirability by their self-sufficiency. A woman who can fix a car or clean a fish will have much higher levels of desirability in one of these cultures—and a man who can’t may very well be off the table as a partner. Women from these cultures often develop “feminine” ways to signal their rugged abilities, hence Simone showing me her pink knife collection on an early date. (A funny song about this that happened to be on in the background while I wrote this section is “Shut Up and Fish” by Maddie & Tae.) As a final note for readers who didn’t grow up around rural cultures: Having at least one dad threaten you with violence if you hurt the daughter you are dating is very common and not just a trope from movies. Such threats are not seen as mean, boundary-crossing, or even particularly adversarial—it’s more just the respectful thing to do.

We can logically admire the philosophy of “not fighting back” and “trusting the system” seen in urban specialized cultures and still not be able to practice this wisdom, both due to our own sociological profiles and our cultural biases. To “trust the system” is a strategy that requires an enormous amount of restraint—restraint that we know we (and our likely descendants) lack. Our kids will have multiple great uncles and direct ancestors who attempted to start their own countries through armed rebellion: George Washington (uncle), Jasper Collins (uncle), Robert the Bruce (direct), Warren Collins (direct), Charlemagne (direct), Oliver Cromwell (direct),^[176] etc. We are stacking the cards against our own children if we give them a culture that doesn’t expect them to take a shot at founding a breakaway state.

As a side note: It is remarkable just how genetically ingrained these instincts can be. We can see it in our kids, even as toddlers. We learned pretty quickly that the joy they get from rebelling against authority is greater than the inconvenience of any authority-delivered consequence. Worse, if one of our kids sees another get punished for something and they don’t see a logical justification for it, they will gleefully do it themselves. For example, if we place one kid on a time-out for climbing on the kitchen table, we will inevitably come back to a room with a table covered in giggling children. We once found a childhood report card my mom kept in which we were referred to as “demons” and now I get what our beleaguered teachers meant.

The anti-authoritarian streak we and our children have inherited, both culturally and genetically, explains in part why we want to cultivate a diverse and healthy cultural ecosystem. Authority-trusting, urban-specialized cultures play just as important a role in society as their authority-suspicious rural cousins. A country made up of nothing but Collinses would be a pretty shitty place to live. The healthiest societies will have both urban and rural cultivars with both groups engaging in constant cultural interchange.

While we are incorporating anti-authoritarian traditions into our House’s intentionally designed cultivar, we will make some edits. We disagree with our ancestors on the assumption that the most common environment will always be “nature” and that traditional “prepping” is always the best strategy. We think Mormon culture shows a perfect example of this kind of short-sightedness. Much of the way the Mormon population decided to protect their families was specifically aimed to avoid annihilation in the event of a nuclear apocalypse (large, underground bunkers beneath Mormon temples, mandates to have emergency supplies of foodstuffs on hand, and special cultural rituals for regularly rotating out emergency food supplies)—a scenario that is far from the top threat to the LDS Church today. (Fun side note: Simone’s grandfather worked on building the Mormon temple in Oakland and apparently it has a massive underground bunker—much bigger than what has been publicly disclosed.)

We will leave it to our descendants’ best judgment to determine which level of prepping and self-sufficiency is best for their particular times and environments. The message we will instead emphasize is that one must always be prepared to be hunted, because an ethical person in an unethical world always is at that risk. This may entail knowing how to live in the woods, but it also might mean keeping a big chunk of your wealth in cryptocurrency, having the ability to live in the sewers beneath a planet-wide megacity, or knowing how to fix the life support system on your spaceship. Our House’s cultivar will ensure its members never rely on the generosity of a bureaucracy to feed themselves, protect themselves, or breathe.

As if to reinforce everything I initially wrote in this chapter, two days after I completed it, Simone—who at the time was in her third trimester with another child—came to me and said “our house is not defended well enough” so:

She booked an appointment at our local gun range for a refresher on loading, unloading, and properly cleaning our guns (and was very frustrated to be reminded she could not practice while pregnant)
She asked her dad to mail us her favorite bow
She ordered Faraday cages and bags for all of our backup computers and devices
She bought a new set of water purifiers for our bug-out bags
She got a quote on a backup solar system for our home
Oh: Nearly forgot all the bear mace—yeah, she wanted lots of bear mace and was very excited about it

It is weird to me that this “arming up” instinct seems to be triggered by pregnancy. I would think it was just the hormones if not for the unprompted gifts of additional weapons we keep getting from our families every other time she gets pregnant.

Urban vs Rural Approaches to Charity

One of the most distinct differences between urban and rural cultivars is the level of trust they place in institutions. Urban cultivars express a much higher level of trust in all types of institutions. This divide is widened when a culture also uses expert consensus as its primary criterion for truth, as is the case with both the Catholic and Orthodox Christian families of cultivars.

This is seen most clearly in terms of rural cultivars living with an ever-present fear of government crackdown or societal collapse. We are constantly shocked to find even our most sober-minded family members allude to personal backup plans addressing government crackdown and apocalyptic scenarios—for example, in the midst of a recent baby formula shortage, we learned that Malcolm’s fairly vanilla brother kept a year’s worth of food and supplies in storage, a Geiger counter, and water purification kits.

One study in the EU showed, “people in rural areas have lower political trust than urban or peri-urban residents, with this difference clear for six different forms of political institutions, including politicians, political parties, and national”^[177] Another study in the EU showed that anti-globalist voting was much higher in rural areas.^[178]

That rural cultivars distrust governments is straightforward—but people from urban cultivars can be taken off guard when they realize how deeply these groups distrust any large bureaucracy, including charities, higher academia, and the broader education system. Earlier in this book, we claimed that it was obvious that the Effective Altruism movement is a secular offshoot of a Jewish cultivar, and we pointed to Effective Altruists’ trust in institutions to distribute capital as evidence for this. Generally, when someone from an urban cultivar makes a ton of money and wants to make the world a better place, they will give that money to institutions of “experts” to distribute on their behalf.

This is radically different from the manner in which institution-distrusting cultivars try to make the world a better place. These groups often personally build out and run programs to see their goals for the world executed and attempt to make these institutions self-sustaining and cash positive. This can be seen in the way we distribute our money (e.g., We founded, initially funded, and run things like CollinsInstitute.org and Pronatalist.org) but also in contrasting billionaires like Mark Zuckerburg and Elon Musk. Whereas both through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and directly, Zuckerberg gives his money to institutions designed to improve people’s lives, Musk works to personally see his visions for the future realized by starting or gaining control of for-profit entities subsequently run under his direction, ranging from Tesla (addressing global warming), to Ad Astra (addressing education), Twitter (addressing freedom of speech), and SpaceX (making humans an interstellar species).

To people from rural cultivars, any institution that is run by someone who hasn’t proven they were competent enough to make the money in the first place is liable to become corrupted. We have personally encountered several large non-profits that have effectively devolved into giant virtue signaling machines. Those working at these nonprofits who focus on efficacious action always have less time to put into internal politics than Machiavellian colleagues who only care about moving up, leading these organizations’ most competent players to be consistently outcompeted and edged out. (Having worked alongside several large nonprofits, which commonly succumb to this sad fate, we can say with some confidence that you could easily get 600X per dollar spent by putting funds into a smaller nonprofit or a scrappy, impact-driven startup.)

Even the Pragmatist’s Guide series is largely a product of our distrust of the academic bureaucracy’s ability to soberly and fairly tackle topics like sexuality, relationships, government, religion, and life philosophy. An intense distrust of institutions will likely serve cultivars well as the education system gets better and better at infecting kids with the cultural supervirus and exorcising them of the unique aspects of their inherited cultures.

That said, a healthy cultural ecosystem can’t function without people who trust systems. This can be seen statistically in long-tail cultural outcomes: Remember how we pointed out that seven of nine sitting Supreme Court Justices were raised at least partially Catholic? Well, the other two were raised Jewish, making them 18.5X times more represented than one would expect given their percentage of the population. The Supreme Court has no members descended from (only) Protestant cultivars. Ultimately, cultivars that trust institutions are also better at running those institutions (in the few societal domains in which they are absolutely necessary—we definitely wish there were fewer).

Multicultural ecosystems aren’t only optimal at the long tail of the distribution. To use the COVID-19 pandemic as an example, a healthy cultural ecosystem needs both people arguing that COVID vaccines are in the best interest of the common good and people pointing out that vaccine advocates are in a position in which, even if they were to discover a vaccine was dangerous, they could not broadcast information about vaccine risks without damaging their careers due to a poorly designed incentive system.

A monocultural ecosystem is extremely fragile. China’s Zero COVID policy (involving two years of draconian lockdowns) presents an excellent case in point. While initial COVID lockdown mandates were objectively beneficial (with even libertarian analysts admitting as much),^[179] they also long overstayed their utility. The USA benefited both from having authority-friendly lockdown advocates, who initially ensured they were imposed, and anti-authority lockdown critics, who eventually ensured they were lifted. China lacked this second, anti-authority group (having either killed them all or forced them to emigrate to Taiwan or join China’s international diaspora). As a result, government lockdown mandates kept getting more extreme and their illogicality spiraled. People are able to rise within China’s monocultural hierarchy by being slightly more extreme than those above them; there are rarely negative consequences for interpreting an order “too thoroughly.” This leads to horrific results, like people being welded into their apartments, having barbed wire put around them, and even starving to death—all for nothing.^[180]

Unhampered by pushback, China’s government officials have started using anti-COVID apps to do outrageous things like empty people’s bank accounts and lock them in place when they head out to protest by flagging them as having COVID. This should not be surprising coming from a monocultural nation featuring low hostility toward bureaucracy and institutions. Recall from the chapter on Catholic vs Protestant standards of evidence that countries with more trust in expert consensus feature higher rates of corruption.^[181]

The cultural supervirus has a similar view toward authority and a similar system whereby adherents climb in the social hierarchy. Unlike the healthy level of trust in institutions we see in Catholic, Orthodox Christian, and Jewish cultivars—one that can work alongside other cultures—the cultural supervirus mandates cultural conformity in the institutions it infects. Just like in China, not only is there no way to challenge the authority of the supervirus, but there is no reward for challenging its authority if you are later proven to be right. Anyone who cares about truth or freedom should be very scared of the cultural supervirus.

Side Story 1: One of our good friends ran a research lab at a top university that studied the effectiveness of masks at preventing COVID spread. She bemoaned how insane it was that their findings clearly demonstrated that the masks most people wore were ineffective, but that they couldn’t highlight this major takeaway in research abstracts or interviews with the press because a huge chunk of their funding came from the NHS (the U.K.’s healthcare system), which had levied the very mask mandates their research demonstrated to be ineffective.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the cultural supervirus demonstrated it didn’t care about anything it had previously claimed to support. It didn’t care about how much pollution it generated (in the form of 1.6 billion masks now in the ocean, making up 7% of the great garbage plastic patch).^{^[182]} It didn’t care about unnecessary developmental delays caused in children whose parents lacked the resources to pull them out of daycares with mask mandates.^{^[183]} It didn’t even care that public school shutdowns fueled an increase in inequality and disproportionately hurt BIPOC groups.^{^[184]} Instead, the supervirus used the pandemic to conduct a witch hunt, identifying everyone who worked to address the actual cause (minimize harm during the pandemic) without paying homage to the virus’s mission (consolidating power and spreading) and enthusiastically excising them from positions of power and influence.

Now that we understand school closures went on for too long^{^[185]} ^{^[186]} and were primarily prolonged by teachers unions and not scientific data, does the virus apologize to people like Jennifer Sey,^{^[187]} who was forced to step down from her job for calling out mask mandates for children and arguing that school closures set disenfranchised kids back years while giving rich kids who could stay in their private schools a huge advantage?^{^[188]} No; of course not—no one is ever rewarded for speaking truth to power in an infected institution. The supervirus only rewards people who tear down those who are “off message.” The point of the virus is not to govern effectively, but to weed out individuals who might dissent.

During the COVID outbreak the priests of Bel have left their footprints clearly in the ash—the only question now is do you have the courage to update your perception of the world.

Side Story 2: One of our editors pointed us to the works of Curtis Yarvin, saying he had some ideas similar to ours (for example, that the virus evolved out of Quaker culture). Going through his work is very interesting, as he seems to be as lucid as us about the way culture works but approaches fixes from a Jewish cultural perspective, trusting authority / centralization of power. This explains why, despite working with the same information and having the same level of lucidity, he supports a monarchy while we support the Index model (a decentralized self-sufficient network of cultural alliances).

Pets & Domesticated Animals

The role of domesticated animals in human evolution and the development of human civilization is undeniable. Dogs enhanced our ancestors’ hearing and sense of smell thousands of times over, allowing them to hunt dramatically more effectively than they would otherwise be able to. Dogs even played critical roles in the domestication of animals that required shepherding and protection, like sheep and goats.

Cats on the other hand, had a hand (or should we say paw!) in helping small tribes transition to large-scale civilization. Before cats were domesticated, it was incredibly hard to store grain without it becoming infested with mice. After embarking on their partnership, humans just left their obligate carnivore feline friends at grain silos, where they conveniently ate the mice and not the grain. This partnership allowed for food to be stored in times of abundance then distributed in times of scarcity. This logistical feat necessitated the development of a more sophisticated government apparatus and was one of humanity’s first steps to civilization. While today we’ve mostly forgotten the critical role felines played in the development of human civilization, it certainly was not lost on people during this transition, as can be seen by groups like Egyptians of the period going so far as to deify cats.

The manners in which cultivars relate to domesticated animals differs widely. At one point in an interview with a tribal family in Africa, an anthropologist inquired about their relationship with “their dog,” referring to a dog that came inside and fell asleep in a corner of their hut. The anthropologist’s wording confused the family, which explained to him it was not their dog; it was just a dog that happened to sleep in their house. From their perspective, the dog was just another autonomous member of the village.

Under current Islamic law, having a dog around during prayer invalidates that prayer, hence most Islamic cultivars are fairly “anti-dog.” With such being the case, it will come as a shock to people that, “according to several authoritative accounts of his life and teachings, the Prophet Muhammad himself prayed in the presence of dogs.”^[189] In fact, dogs were frequently seen around the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina, the second holiest site in the world for Muslims after the Kaaba, for the first couple centuries after Muhammad’s death. It seems as though Islamic culture did not start seeing dogs as unclean until after the development of centralized trash authorities.^[190] (The article cited here offers a great writeup on this subject if it piques your interest.)

Islamic cities were more sophisticated than their Christian “Dark Age” correlates and in response to the spread of disease, they developed dedicated authorities to remove trash from cities. Before these trash authorities were created, dogs helped to clean city streets and thus were beneficial. After they lost one of their core urban utilities, dogs became nothing but pests. It could be argued that the difference in views of dogs between western European cultivars and their Islamic counterparts is primarily due to Islamic cities’ earlier invention of sanitation practices and the denser nature of Islamic urban centers.

This dislike of dogs is actually fairly common across urban-focused cultures, such as Jewish culture. The Talmud is quite explicit in its criticism of dog ownership and Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich (the Fiddler on the Roof guy) at one point said: “If a Jew has a dog, either the dog is no dog, or the Jew is no Jew.” General Jewish distaste for dog ownership can be seen in the stats, with only 5% of Israelis owning a dog, a rate more than four times lower than general dog ownership in the United States.^[191] There is a common myth among the Jewish community that this dislike of dogs began after the Holocaust, however considering that Rabinovich’s quote is dated to 1903, that supposition appears to be unfounded.

It is unclear when Jewish sentiments against dog ownership first arose. For example, Geoffrey Miller^[192] argues the presence of thousands of dogs in a cemetery near Ashkelon dating from the 5th century BC shows Jews of the period were fond of dogs, while Lawrence Stager argues that Ashkelon was a Phoenician city during that period.^[193] In the paper “Dogs in Jewish Society in the Second Temple Period and in the Time of the Mishnah and Talmud,”^[194] Joshua Schwartz observes that “most of the Jewish sources from the Second Temple period and the time of the Mishnah and Talmud continue to maintain the negative attitude toward dogs expressed in the Biblical tradition” and concedes “it is improbable that dogs in Jewish society were the objects of the same degree of affection as they received in the Graeco-Roman world or the Persian world.”

Islamic and Jewish anti-dog attitudes are pragmatic for people who live in cities. Dogs make a ton of sense if you are trying to herd animals, protect livestock on a farm, hunt, or protect rural property, but make little sense for people living in a city and can even be quite dangerous. However, for the same reasons, rural cultivars are usually pro-dog.

On the subject of dogs for defense: It may not just be a stereotype that dogs are objectively effective at preventing crime. Neighborhoods with higher levels of dog ownership also tend to have lower levels of homicide, robbery, and aggravated assaults.^[195] Admittedly, it may not be dogs themselves that prevent the crime; the association could be totally correlational—or perhaps dogs work as an effective signal. After all, if rural cultivars are in favor of both dog and gun ownership, criminals are going to learn after a while that breaking into a house with a dog is much more likely to plant lead in your temple.

It should come as no surprise that our inherited Calvinist and Scottish/Irish/English cultures in which we grew up in are rabidly pro-dog—to the extent that it would be seen as not borderline child abuse, but actual child abuse, to raise a kid without a dog in the family. Our family canine cultural biases extend to dog breeds as well, with our cultural tradition seeing dogs that do not work (e.g., Chihuahuas, Bull Dogs, etc.) as being a sign of moral failure in their owners—even though we do not work our dogs. This is illogical and perhaps related to a cultural memory of dogs being a tool of utility to the family while also having a place within it.

We find ourselves wondering whether people’s inherited affinities for dog ownership are the product of mere cultural memory or an intuition that might serve some purpose in our current and future society. The research on this topic seems to indicate that dog ownership during childhood positively impacts kids’ immune systems,^[196] reduces allergies,^[197] increases physical health,^[198] and improves EQ.^[199] (While studies correct for this, it is critical to note that dog ownership is also heavily associated with higher socioeconomic status.) Ultimately, we’ve decided that dog ownership is warranted not just traditionally, but also logically, hence our having a dog.

The biggest risk, culturally speaking, of pets in the modern world comes not from disease but their ability to somewhat satiate people’s hunger for parenthood. Most humans feel an instinct to have kids, and just like pornography, pet ownership can be used to masturbate and relieve that biological drive. You see this every time someone talks about their dog or cat as their “baby” and treats their pet in such a way.

Cultures found the idea of having sex with animals disgusting long before they cared about consent or animal wellbeing. Sex with animals is one of the many pathways that leads to nonproductive sexual relief and hence lower birth rates, and recall that any culture that allows for lower birth rates will ultimately be outcompeted by one with higher birth rates. Within the culture we are intentionally building for our House, pets are framed as a tool for improving children and protecting the family that must never be used to satiate a hunger for companionship or other emotional and sexual desires. Our children will be strongly discouraged from getting a dog before having kids or as “practice” for having kids—Simone always told me a dog would be a reward for having kids and I think that is a good way to frame it.

We lack a thesis on modern cat ownership. Studies show religious service attendance to be negatively correlated with cat (but not dog) ownership and that atheists are more likely to own cats. It would seem, then, that cat ownership has some sort of correlation with low faith.

Are there any cultivars that dislike cats in the same way some dislike dogs? It appears that Hindu culture (outside of followers of Shashti) generally views cats negatively. It should hardly be surprising that a culture which promotes vegetarianism would not be keen to care for—and regularly feed meat products to—an obligate carnivore pet.

Dogs, Our Evolutionary Partners

Throughout most of this book, we frame cultural traditions in terms of their efficacious effects. Here we have to break from the pretense of always being logical or goal-oriented . When we explain to our kids why we have a dog and why we expect them to as well, we don’t cite studies or explain that we come from a tradition of people who lived in rural environments; rather, we tell them the “cultural truth.”

Dogs have worked with our species since before we could write and maybe even before we could speak. Compared to our canine companions, we are blind—dogs can hear four times better than us and smell between 10,000 to 100,000 times better than us. For millennia, dogs have been willing to put their lives at risk to protect us. When they joined us, we were the lesser partners.

Let’s be clear: Current studies suggest that dogs voluntarily joined us. Some canines that specialized in scavenging around human scrap piles likely evolved a tolerance for humans and started working together with us—it’s not as though dogs were captured and tamed by humans. To our knowledge, cats are the only other animal that joined us in a willing partnership. This is why we make glue from horses and eat veal and lamb while generally treating the bodies of dogs and cats the same as we treat those of humans.

Humans’ partnership with dogs is, however, different from our relationship with cats. While a cat that died protecting a human would be remarkable, dogs have been so devoted to us that we see dogs dying on humans’ behalf as being routine. Even if dogs offer little to humanity today, we never forget that when they joined our species, they did so as equal partners who have more than paid the debt in that partnership. When House Collins spreads across the galaxy, dogs will still be beside us because we always remember our debts no matter how many generations it takes to fully pay them off. That is what it means to have integrity. Remember: We may not always be the smartest species in a partnership. The artificial intelligences and species we partner with in the future may look at how we treated our past partner species to judge how humans deserve to be treated as an intellectually inferior partner species. Should we turn our backs on dogs, we don’t deserve to be treated well by our future partners.

To explore why there aren’t many cultivars in the United States with strong connections to specific geographies, check out: “Geographic Flexibility” on page 798 of the Appendix. (In short, geographic inflexibility likely evolved to offset underestimations of how hard it was historically to find new, unoccupied land upon decamping from one’s present territory.)

^[1] Keim, Brandon. “Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions before You Make Them.” Wired, Conde Nast, 13 Apr. 2008, https://www.wired.com/2008/04/mind-decision/.
Smith, K. Brain makes decisions before you even know it. Nature (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/news.2008.751,
Soon, C. S., Brass, M., Heinze, H. J., & Haynes, J. D. (2008). Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature neuroscience, 11(5), 543–545. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2112,
Soon CS, He AH, Bode S, Haynes JD. Predicting free choices for abstract intentions. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2013 Apr 9;110(15):6217-22. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1212218110. Epub 2013 Mar 18. PMID: 23509300; PMCID: PMC3625266,

Bode S, He AH, Soon CS, Trampel R, Turner R, Haynes J-D (2011) Tracking the Unconscious Generation of Free Decisions Using UItra-High Field fMRI. PLoS ONE 6(6): e21612. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0021612,

Koenig-Robert, R., Pearson, J. Decoding the contents and strength of imagery before volitional engagement. Sci Rep 9, 3504 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-39813-y

^[2] Schachter, S., & Singer, J. (1962). Cognitive, social, and physiological determinants of emotional state. Psychological Review, 69(5), 379–399. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0046234, from https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1963-06064-001

^[3] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-snapshot-sequence-of-the-choice-procedure-during-a-manipulation-trial-A_fig1_7554338

^[4] … beyond having played a role in compiling memory that may influence subconscious decision making.

^[5]See: Choice Blindness https://www.lucs.lu.se/fileadmin/user_upload/lucs/2011/01/Choice-Blindness-summary.pdf

From: The Choice Blindness Lab. LUCS. (n.d.). Retrieved December 29, 2022, from https://www.lucs.lu.se/research/choice-blindness-lab/home/

^[6] Fisher, M., & Keil, F. C. (2015). The curse of expertise: When more knowledge leads to miscalibrated explanatory insight. Cognitive Science, 40(5), 1251–1269. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12280

^[7] “Awake” brain surgery (also known as awake craniotomy) is performed on awake and alert patients when removing tumors to ensure important parts of the brain are not damaged.

^[8] Malcolm used to be a neuroscientist and worked with brain surgeons, so he heard about this phenomenon frequently but cannot find a good record of it in a peer-reviewed paper. For the closest approximation, see: Resnick, Brian. “Wilder Penfield Redrew the Map of the Brain—by Opening the Heads of Living Patients.” Vox, Vox, 26 Jan. 2018, https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/26/16932476/wilder-penfield-brain-surgery-epilepsy-google-doodle.

^[9] “Why Koko (Probably) Couldn’t Talk (Sorry) | The Deep Dive.” YouTube, Soup Emporium, 5 May 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7wFotDKEF4. Accessed 15 July 2022.

^[10] Lillian Tara, one of our test readers, left a comment on this paragraph that quite resonates: “You can’t really be “good” and a relativist. Good implies a value judgment—A is better than B, along a certain value hierarchy. Nice means nothing, nice just means nonthreatening/harmless/weak.”

^[11] In the case of my (Malcolm’s) dad, someone threatened to blow up our house. I also know the Klan tried to have my grandad killed at one point, but don’t know the details beyond that.

^[12] Higher education R&D expenditures, by source of funds: FYs 1972–2020 https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf22312/figure/1

^[13] “Running on autopilot” entails living at the whims of pre-programmed biological and emotional drives without intentional and critical contemplation.

^[14] Sapience is a unifying distinction among all sufficiently complex intelligences. Whether an entity is human, an alien, or an artificial intelligence, the moment its intelligence reaches a level of complexity at which it is able to ask: “Why am I doing this?” and rewrite its objective function or utility function based on its knowledge of the universe, it becomes the same, broad “type of thing” as all other sapient entities. We go over this in a lot more detail in the chapter on AI apocalypticism on page 633.

^[15] Note: The governance structure described in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance, which sounds a lot like this one, is not for the Index but for House Collins. We chose very similar systems for our House and the Index because we believe in the model. Although, their differing scopes and purposes necessitate some variation.

^[16] Until the Index has at least ten Houses, we will act as the Governor.

^[17] A former Governor can be put on a list to be removed from the Vote of Continuity (and the veto process on Governor decision) via the unanimous decision of those elected by the three voting bodies every time a new Governor is chosen (only one name can be added to the list per election cycle). If a name is put on the list twice, the Governor in question is removed, making removal a “two strikes” action. Note: No House can be excommunicated if it has a member in the House of Continuity. Even deceased members must be removed through the formal removal process for their House to be excommunicated. It is intentionally difficult to excommunicate any House that has been a member of the Index for generations. Gaining a Vote of Continuity should be a source of significant pride for any House that wins the privilege.

^[18] This branch can rewrite the way the governing structure works with a 70% vote. This action is only meant to be undertaken to address future technology. Questions like: Once it becomes possible to replicate someone’s consciousness and upload it somewhere where it endures past the individual’s death, will their uploaded, digital selves be treated as humans for voting purposes? What about fully sapient artificial intelligences?
We attempted to make the system easy to alter, enabling future Index members to adapt to these sorts of developments without our writing commandments about technology with limits we don’t understand. While we would like AIs to have a vote, there are many ways an AI vote might be abused to break the Index’s governing system.

^[19] Voting power = (The number of kids in the House under 20) + (The number of kids raised in the House over 20 who have stayed active in the Index) * 2 + (The number of grandkids produced by members raised within that House) * 2. This system is designed to reward Houses not just for successfully producing the next generation but for creating a new generation of members who largely choose to stay in that culture and raise future generations within it. Essentially, the Index rewards cultures that do the core job of “being a culture” well (by imparting fitness to participants) with more influence. The system is also intentionally designed to give older Houses significantly more power to incentivize kids to try and reform (rather than flippantly abandon) their ancestral Houses should they have room for improvement.

^[20] Note: We expect things like the cut-off age for this vote and member qualifications to be modified with time. For example, this system could be inordinately manipulated by a House that adopts tons of kids while doing a poor job at raising them, meaning these adoptees exit the Index once they gain independence. Should such abuses arise, the Governor may need to change how this vote is considered at a future date with the idea that the vote’s purpose is to weigh Houses by likely future population.

^[21] The core idea here is that Houses that sacrifice more for the Index deserve greater influence over its function. This vote may need to be adjusted should something like a war or dangerous exploration cause House members to forego more lucrative opportunities, endure serious hardship, or even die in service to the Index (i.e., the opportunity cost endured by House members should be counted in some way as contributed wealth). Other adjustments might include an interest modifier to investments in the Index, alterations that diminish the power of a single very wealthy individual (e.g., quadratic voting), or absolute limits on the total voting power any one House may have within this realm (e.g., no House may gain more than 30% of the total Vote of Sacrifice).

^[22] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJClm_J1cV0

^[23] Pearce, E., Launay, J., & Dunbar, R. I. (2015). The ice-breaker effect: Singing mediates fast social bonding. Royal Society Open Science, 2(10), 150221. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150221

^[24] Kokal, I., Engel, A., Kirschner, S., & Keysers, C. (2011). Synchronized drumming enhances activity in the caudate and facilitates prosocial commitment–if the rhythm comes easily. PloS one, 6(11), e27272. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0027272

^[25] Wiltermuth, S. S., & Heath, C. (2009). Synchrony and Cooperation. Psychological Science, 20(1), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02253.x

^[26] Macdonald, K., Germine, L., Anderson, A., Christodoulou, J., & McGrath, L. M. (2017, July 17). Dispelling the myth: Training in education or neuroscience decreases but does not eliminate beliefs in neuromyths. Frontiers. from https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01314/full,
Tarr, B., Launay, J., & Dunbar, R. I. (2016). Silent disco: dancing in synchrony leads to elevated pain thresholds and social closeness. Evolution and human behavior: Official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, 37(5), 343–349. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2016.02.004

^[27]Pearce, E., Launay, J., & Dunbar, R. I. (2015). The ice-breaker effect: Singing mediates fast social bonding. Royal Society Open Science, 2(10), 150221. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150221 from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.150221

^[28] This role-switching practice manifests through dynamics seen since ancient times, such as a reversal of social status (seen in many medieval festivals where the wealthy would act like paupers and the paupers like high-status individuals), masquerade-style parties (where people’s faces are covered and they assume different roles), tribal ceremonies in which people are inhabited by spirits (sometimes of ancestors), ceremonies involving participants getting “possessed,” and “furry-like parties” where people take on animal personas.

^[29] According to Charles Burney, whose History of Music (1776) was the first important treatise in its field, Calvinists disallowed all instrumental music in Geneva for 100 years after the Reformation and that all music, except for psalm singing, was outlawed. Later scholars have argued this to be an exaggeration but one that contains more than a grain of truth.

^[30]Sparrow, B., Liu, J., & Wegner, D. M. (2011). Google effects on memory: Cognitive consequences of having information at our fingertips. Science, 333(6043), 776–778. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1207745 from https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/dwegner/files/sparrow_et_al._2011.pdf

^[31]Medlin, R. (2006). Homeschooled Children’s Social Skills. Home School Researcher, 17(1), 1–8. from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED573486.pdf

^[32] Bui, Q., & Miller, C. C. (2018, August 4). The age that women have babies: How a gap divides America. The New York Times., from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-birth-age-gap.html

^[33] Nomaguchi, K., & Milkie, M. A. (2020). Parenthood and Well-Being: A Decade in Review. Journal of marriage and the family, 82(1), 198–223. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12646 from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7326370/

^[34] We don’t want to sound elitist and are not saying Yale is not a great university, it is just not getting the best of the best anymore and hasn’t for decades. It ranges between 3 and 8 in different ranking tables. If you are a club of the best of the best at the 8th-best university you are just another fraternity. https://www.topuniversities.com/where-to-study/north-america/united-states/ranked-top-100-us-universities

^[35]Bouchard, T. J., & McGue, M. (2002). Genetic and environmental influences on human psychological differences. Journal of Neurobiology, 54(1), 4–45. https://doi.org/10.1002/neu.10160 from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/neu.10160

^[36] While some historians dispute the historicity of Krypteia, 1. Stop being such a killjoy and 2. Ancient Greek historians have a track record of not believing certain accounts because they can’t relate to them and Krypteia may very well be a victim of this prejudice (for example, many historians didn’t believe that the Greeks could have charged in full armor at the battle of Marathon “because it was impossible” until a college sports team tried it and proved it to be entirely doable … and fairly normal per their training).

^[37] Jargon, J. (2021, October 20). Teen girls are developing tics. Doctors say TicTok could be a factor. The Wall Street Journal. from https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-girls-are-developing-tics-doctors-say-tiktok-could-be-a-factor-11634389201?mod=e2tw
Kale, S. (2021, November 16).’The unknown is scary’: Why young women on social media are developing Tourette’s-like tics. The Guardian. from https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/nov/16/the-unknown-is-scary-why-young-women-on-social-media-are-developing-tourettes-like-tics

^[38] Müller-Vahl, K. R., Pisarenko, A., Jakubovski, E., & Fremer, C. (2021). Stop that! it’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness. Brain, 145(2), 476–480. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awab316 https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/145/2/476/6356504?fbclid=IwAR19xC1sXRIoVCOJjDaGVsPVq4HZAxowmMNO01PUBP6kF1yQN9Ux8L0mjrE&login=false

^[39] Merskey, H. (1992). The Manufacture of Personalities: The Production of Multiple Personality Disorder. British Journal of Psychiatry, 160(3), 327-340. doi:10.1192/bjp.160.3.327

^[40] Weiss, S. (2022, September 6).Hurts so good. The Free Press, from https://www.thefp.com/p/hurts-so-good

^[41] Weiss, S. (2022, September 6).Hurts so good. The Free Press, from https://www.thefp.com/p/hurts-so-good

^[42] Christian Lewis (2020, 9 December) “A Malady of Interpretation”: Performances of Hypochondria in Jane Austen. Nineteenth Century Studies; 32 22–37. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/ninecentstud.32.0022

^[43] Angold, A., Costello, E. J., & Worthman, C. M. (1998). Puberty and depression: The roles of age, pubertal status and Pubertal Timing. Psychological Medicine, 28(1), 51–61. https://doi.org/10.1017/s003329179700593x

^[44] I, Simone, only made it through my teens by the skin of my teeth—and don’t get me wrong, I feel so pathetic knowing that while Malcolm was actually facing serious adversity at youth prison camps, where he was beaten and starved—eating insects to survive—I was torturing myself. (More on Malcolm’s childhood in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance.)

^[45] Windas, L. (2021, February 14). 6 things spoonies need from you. Lauren Windas Nutrition. from https://www.laurenwindas.com/journal/6-things-spoonies-need-from-you

^[46] Bushman, B. J., Baumeister, R. F., & Stack, A. D. (1999). Catharsis, aggression, and persuasive influence: Self-fulfilling or self-defeating prophecies? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(3), 367–376. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.76.3.367

^[47] Chong, Woei Lien (2002). China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: Master Narratives and Post-Mao Counternarratives. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9780742518742

^[48] Blell, M. (2017). Grandmother hypothesis, grandmother effect, and residence patterns. The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2162 from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2162

^[49] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnneR1Q9uK4

[50] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RFFwhbVqeU&ab_channel=Whatifalthist

[51] Todd, E. (1989). The explanation of ideology: Family, structures and Social Systems. Basil Blackwell.

^[52] We couldn’t find any peer-reviewed articles on this phenomenon but did find it attested to in multiple sources (I, Malcolm, first heard it on a tour of the Synagogue in Prague). There is a chance it is apocryphal but the chance seems low given the specifics of how the law was applied and how common bribes were during that period. My guess is that it might not have been super widespread but happened a few times and spread as a story because it is juicy and aligns with people’s preconceptions. Regardless, I can’t find anything arguing against it, it makes sense in historical context, and it is interesting, so we are leaving it in.

^[53] Czakai, J. (2017, March 28). Hamburg’s Jews take permanent family names. Key Documents of German-Jewish History. from https://jewish-history-online.net/article/czakai-family-names

^[54] Norwood, J. (2013, September 13). A boy named “humiliation”: Some wacky, cruel, and Bizarre Puritan names. Slate Magazine. from https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/09/puritan-names-lists-of-bizarre-religious-nomenclature-used-by-puritans.html

^[55] Coffey , B., & McLaughlin, P. (2009). From Lawyer to Judge: Advancement, Sex, and Name-Calling. https://www.abajournal.com/files/NamesNLaw.pdf

Seigel, J., & Tribune, C. (2021, July 26). Unisex names in a man’s world. Orlando Sentinel. from https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1991-11-11-9111100678-story.html

Moss-Racusin, C. A., Dovidio, J. F., & Brescoll, V. L. (2012). Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students. Women, Science, and Technology, 37–48. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203427415-10 from https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1211286109

Bryner, J. (2010, June 13). Good or bad, baby names have long-lasting effects. LiveScience. from https://www.livescience.com/6569-good-bad-baby-names-long-lasting-effects.html

Figlio, D. (2005). Boys named Sue: Disruptive children and their peers. https://doi.org/10.3386/w11277

^[56] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middleman_minority

^[57] One editor doubted this which feels … insane to us. If you would like more evidence, contrast this map of fertility rates—https://brilliantmaps.com/fertility-rates/—with this map of nations in which gay is criminalized: https://www.humandignitytrust.org/lgbt-the-law/map-of-criminalisation/
As for within a country, contrast these maps:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/10/health/us-fertility-rate-replacement-cdc-study/index.html
https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps

^[58] Vogl, T. S., & Freese, J. (2020). Differential fertility makes society more conservative on family values. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(14), 7696-7701.

^[59] Kerry, N., Al-Shawaf, L., Barbato, M., Batres, C., Blake, K. R., Cha, Y., Chauvin, G. V., Clifton, J. D., Fernandez, A. M., Galbarczyk, A., Ghossainy, M. E., Jang, D., Jasienska, G., Karasawa, M., Laustsen, L., Loria, R., Luberti, F., Moran, J., Pavlović, Z., … Murray, D. R. (2022). Experimental and cross-cultural evidence that parenthood and parental care motives increase social conservatism. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 289(1982). https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.0978 from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2022.0978

^[60] Vogl, T. S., & Freese, J. (2020). Differential fertility makes society more conservative on family values. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(14), 7696–7701. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1918006117 from https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1918006117

^[61] Micheletti, A., Ge, E., Zhou, L., Chen, Y., Zhang, H., Du, J., & Mace, R. (2021). Religious celibacy brings inclusive fitness benefits. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 289,1877 https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/5gur7

^[62] Not only is this system 100% not intentional, but the Catholic Church has spent centuries fighting against it. However, the data is also crystal clear that within the Church, gay Catholics are dramatically more likely to join the clergy than their straight counterparts.

^[63] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_clergy_in_the_Catholic_Church

^[64] Stuard, Elizabeth. Roman Catholics and Homosexuality, quoted by Kate Saunders in Catholics and Sex. Saunders, K., & Stanford, P. (1992). Catholics and sex. Heinemann.

^[65] Echard, E. (2019, March 16). Catholic priest sex abuse scandals: How the media shapes the public perception of child abuse in the Catholic Church. Juris Magazine. from https://sites.law.duq.edu/juris/2019/03/16/catholic-priest-sex-abuse-scandals-how-the-media-shapes-the-public-perception-of-child-abuse-in-the-catholic-church/

^[66] Ganna, A., Verweij, K. J., Nivard, M. G., Maier, R., Wedow, R., Busch, A. S., Abdellaoui, A., Guo, S., Sathirapongsasuti, J. F., Lichtenstein, P., Lundström, S., Långström, N., Auton, A., Harris, K. M., Beecham, G. W., Martin, E. R., Sanders, A. R., Perry, J. R., Neale, B. M., & Zietsch, B. P. (2019). Large-scale GWAS reveals insights into the genetic architecture of same-sex sexual behavior. Science, 365(6456). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aat7693 from https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aat7693

^[67] Staff, B. (2022, September 21). 10 Saudi kings with several wives and kids. News18., from https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/10-saudi-kings-with-several-wives-and-kids-6005833.html

^[68] For example: In Iran being gay is punishable by death while being trans is not, so social institutions push gay people to have gender reassignment surgery.

^[69] Shaiful Bahari, I., Norhayati, M. N., Nik Hazlina, N. H., Mohamad Shahirul Aiman, C. A., & Nik Muhammad Arif, N. A. (2021). Psychological impact of polygamous marriage on women and children: A systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, 21(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12884-021-04301-7 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34903212/,
Al-Krenawi, A. (2016). Psychosocial impact of polygamy in the Middle East. Springer. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292358998_Psychosocial_Impact_of_Polygamy_in_the_Middle_East

^[70] Two of our editors strongly disagreed with this point and presented an alternate answer. Specifically, they argued that being gay is correlated with being open to new ideas on both the genotypic and phenotypic level and it is this differentiating factor which leads them to have higher rates of success as cultural exporters. In other words, while it is still important to protect gay people, their utility to a culture is due to correlation and not causation.

^[71] Kendall, M. (2021, October 6). Why dress codes can’t stop sexual assault. The Washington Post. from https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/04/13/why-dress-codes-cant-stop-sexual-assault/

^[72]Levine, N. E., & Silk, J. B. (1997). Why polyandry fails: Sources of instability in polyandrous marriages. Current Anthropology, 38(3), 375–398. https://doi.org/10.1086/204624

^[73] Sharifa. (2021, July 23). How common polygamy is in Saudi Arabia — statistics, Saudi women’s voices and all. Saudi Girl Travel. from https://saudigirltravel.com/how-common-polygamy-is-in-saudi-arabia-statistics-saudi-womens-voices-and-all

^[74] Time Inc. (1949, June 13). Israel: Perquisites for Polygamists. Time. from https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,800300,00.html

^[75] Public Broadcasting Service. (n.d.). Polygamy and the church: A history. PBS. from https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/mormons-polygamy/

^[76] While arranged marriages have equal rates of love within them compared with non-arranged marriages, they have dramatically lower divorce rates. So when you factor in survivorship bias, arranged marriages are way more likely to have both partners in love ten years in than the more progressive model.

^[77] Ingraham, C. (2019, March 29). The share of Americans not having sex has reached a record high. The Washington Post. from https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-americans-not-having-sex-has-reached-record-high/

^[78] As this study shows, “a man’s sex appeal to women is bolstered insofar as he bests other men in sports, business, or art. In contrast, men’s mate choices are largely indifferent to which women outperform other women in those arenas.”
Baumeister, R. F., Reynolds, T., Winegard, B., & Vohs, K. D. (2017). Competing for love: Applying sexual economics theory to mating contests. Journal of Economic Psychology, 63, 230–241. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2017.07.009

^[79] Worst-Online-Dater, W.-O.-D. (2015, March 25). Tinder Experiments II: Guys, unless you are really hot you are probably better off not wasting your time, Medium. from https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a

^[80] Kincaid, J. (2009, November 19). Okcupid checks out the dynamics of Attraction and your love inbox. TechCrunch. from https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/okcupid-inbox-attractive/

^[81] Greitemeyer, T. (2007). What do men and women want in a partner? Are educated partners always more desirable? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43(2), 180–194. https://doi.org/10.1037/e514412014-117 from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022103106000345

^[82] Kincaid, J. (2009, November 19). Okcupid checks out the dynamics of Attraction and your love inbox. TechCrunch. from https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/okcupid-inbox-attractive/

^[83] Laken, P. van der. (2022, December 6). Two Tinder Experiments: An Unequal Economy. Paulvanderlaken.com. from https://paulvanderlaken.com/2019/07/31/two-tinder-experiments-an-unequal-economy/

^[84] Greitemeyer, T. (2007). What do men and women want in a partner? Are educated partners always more desirable? PsycEXTRA Dataset. https://doi.org/10.1037/e514412014-117

^[85] This is usually not a durable practice—though there are exceptions. Some stable cultures do use a method like this. For example, in one extreme weather culture, a woman may marry brothers to keep birth rates down while ensuring that the kids she has are at least genetically related to each husband.

^[86] Liberals and atheists smarter? Intelligent people have values novel in human evolutionary history, study finds. (2010). American Sociological Association. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100224132655.htm
Kanazawa et al. Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent. Social Psychology Quarterly, 2010; DOI: 10.1177/0190272510361602

^[87] University of British Columbia. “Monogamy reduces major social problems of polygamist cultures.” ScienceDaily, 24 January 2012. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120124093142.htm
We go very deep on this topic in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality so if you find this interesting, you can dig in more there.

^[88] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mME0NXRQHuc

^[89] Fatherhood and Motherhood in Colonial America. Digital history. (n.d.) from https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/topic_display.cfm?tcid=83

^[90] Salmon, F. (2022, July 2). What happened when the rich stopped intermarrying? Axios. from https://www.axios.com/2022/07/02/what-happened-when-the-rich-stopped-intermarrying

^[91] Goñi, M. (2022). Assortative matching at the top of the distribution: Evidence from the world’s most exclusive marriage market. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 14(3), 445–487. https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20180463 from https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Fapp.20180463&from=f

^[92] Hurley, D. (2005, April 19). Divorce rate: It’s not as high as you think. The New York Times. from https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/health/divorce-rate-its-not-as-high-as-you-think.html

^[93] C.Dallett Hemphill, “Women in Court: Sex Role Differentiation in Salem, Massachusetts, 1636-1683,” WMQ3 39 (1982) via Fischer, D. H. (2018). Albion’s Seed: Four British folkways in America. Oxford University Press.

^[94] Wicks, A. (2022, February 2). Study reveals how much sex you’ll have in your lifetime. from https://www.complex.com/life/2016/05/how-much-sex-lifetime-study.

^[95] IAC Publishing. (2020, March). What percentage of our lives are spent working? Reference., from https://www.reference.com/world-view/percentage-lives-spent-working-599e3f7fb2c88fca,
Naber, A. (n.d.). One third of your life is spent at work. Gettysburg College. Retrieved December 25, 2022, from https://www.gettysburg.edu/news/stories?id=79db7b34-630c-4f49-ad32-4ab9ea48e72b#

^[96] For example, someone who enjoys assuming traditional female roles is going to have a much easier time living with someone who prefers to assume traditional male roles than someone who also prefers to assume traditional female roles.

^[97] Wilcox, W. B., & Nock, S. L. (2006). What’s Love Got to Do with It? Equality, Equity, Commitment and Women’s Marital Quality. Social Forces, 84(3), 1321–1345. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3844442

^[98] Probably the most common counter example comes from Orthodox Jews who, passing down Jewish identity matrilineally, make it slightly easier for a Jewish woman to marry outside the religion and still have fully accepted Jewish kids than a Jewish man.

^[99] Mogul, R. (2020, July 5). One of India’s richest minority groups enjoys some of Mumbai’s best rents. Here’s why. CNN. from https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/04/india/india-parsi-colony-intl-hnk/index.html

^[100] Simone here: Let’s get real. How do you even manage to not end up at a lower weight if you are breastfeeding? You aren’t allowed to drink alcohol and are burning calories like crazy. And I say this as someone who can only breastfeed for a couple of months because of osteoporosis.

^[101]Marshall, L. (2018, November 21). The more pain you expect, the more you feel, new study shows. CU Boulder Today. from https://www.colorado.edu/today/2018/11/14/more-pain-you-expect-more-you-feel-new-study-shows

^[102] Goldberg, C. (2022, May 26). DNA testing for embryos promises to predict genetic diseases. Bloomberg.com. from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-05-26/dna-testing-for-embryos-promises-to-predict-genetic-diseases

^[103]Garber, M. (2012, June 30). The IVF panic: ‘All hell will break loose, politically and morally, all over the world.’ The Atlantic. from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/the-ivf-panic-all-hell-will-break-loose-politically-and-morally-all-over-the-world/258954/

^[104]Livingston, G. (2020, July 31). A third of U.S. adults say they have used fertility treatments or know someone who has. Pew Research Center. from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/17/a-third-of-u-s-adults-say-they-have-used-fertility-treatments-or-know-someone-who-has/

^[105]Anafi, M. (2022, February 2). New NWLC report finds over 30 states legally allow forced sterilization. National Women’s Law Center. from https://nwlc.org/press-release/new-nwlc-report-finds-over-30-states-legally-allow-forced-sterilization/

^[106] University of Oxford. (2012, December 6) IVF children more likely to have asthma. from https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2012-12-06-ivf-children-more-likely-have-asthma

^[107] Bay, B., Mortensen, E. L., & Kesmodel, U. S. (2013). Assisted reproduction and child neurodevelopmental outcomes: A systematic review. Fertility and Sterility, 100(3), 844–853. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fertnstert.2013.05.034 from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/243966426_Assisted_reproduction_and_child_neurodevelopmental_outcomes_A_systematic_review

^[108] Person. (2018, September 17). IVF children may face higher health risks as they get older. Healthline. from https://www.healthline.com/health-news/children-born-via-ivf-face-higher-health-risks

^[109] Kuiper, D. B., Koppelman, G. H., la Bastide-van Gemert, S., Seggers, J., Haadsma, M. L., Roseboom, T. J., Hoek, A., Heineman, M. J., & Hadders-Algra, M. (2019). Asthma in 9-year-old children of subfertile couples is not associated with in vitro fertilization procedures. European Journal of Pediatrics, 178(10), 1493–1499. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00431-019-03436-2

^[110] Roser, M. (2019, June 11). Mortality in the past – around half died as children. Our World in Data. Retrieved December 25, 2022, from https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past

^[111] Like autism, prosociality, political views, etc. For sources, see the chapter: “Humanity’s Genetic Shift.”

^[112] Some have protested our choices, saying: “You are getting your embryos biopsied for nothing and that could introduce negative effects, so it is not harmless.” We find this argument strange because almost all embryos used in IVF are biopsied; it is a normal part or the process in which you check for really obvious problems outside of the more scandalous stuff that we do (e.g., is this an euploid embryo or not?).

^[113] Bartels, J. M., Ryan, J. J., Urban, L. S., & Glass, L. A. (2010). Correlations between estimates of State IQ and FBI crime statistics. Personality and Individual Differences, 48(5), 579–583. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2009.12.010 from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886909005169?fbclid=IwAR2p4tX7W9rEmXgxCx8PUIIQHBF5k4I9xcgSnQ5uXWuegRPP6_DksWwPE7M

^[114] Okbay, A., Wu, Y., Wang, N. et al. (2022). Polygenic prediction of educational attainment within and between families from genome-wide association analyses in 3 million individuals. Nat Genet 54, 437–449 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-022-01016-z

^[115] “Loss aversion in behavioral economics refers to a phenomenon where a real or potential loss is perceived by individuals as psychologically or emotionally more severe than an equivalent gain. For instance, the pain of losing $100 is often far greater than the joy gained in finding the same amount.” Investopedia https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/loss-psychology.asp

^[116] Obviously, our conception of God is different from mainstream conceptions, but this explanation applies to both of them.

^[117] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_drowning_man

^[118] Goldberg, C. (2022, May 26). DNA testing for embryos promises to predict genetic diseases. Bloomberg.com. from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-05-26/dna-testing-for-embryos-promises-to-predict-genetic-diseases

^[119] Smith, M. (2022, August 31). Women not having kids get richer than men. Bloomberg.com. from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-31/women-not-having-kids-get-richer-than-men

^[120] “China’s population could halve within next 45 years, new study warns,” published by the South China Morning Post on October 1st, 2021. https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/2190995/chinas-population-could-halve-within-next-45-years-new-study-warns

^[121] Fernand Braudel argues that Islam is specifically a synthesis of an urbanized, ancient, near-eastern culture of mercantile towns and Bedouins invented by an urbanite.

^[122] Loffing, F., Hagemann, N., & Strauss, B. (2012). Left-handedness in professional and amateur tennis. PLoS ONE, 7(11). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0049325,

Wood, C. J., & Aggleton, J. P. (1989). Handedness in ‘fast ball’ sports: Do lefthanders have an innate advantage? British Journal of Psychology, 80(2), 227–240. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1989.tb02316.x

Hagemann, N. (2009). The advantage of being left-handed in Interactive Sports. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 71(1648. https://doi.org/10.3758/app.71.7.1641

^[123] “An inquisitor was an official … in an inquisition—an organization or program intended to eliminate heresy and other things contrary to the doctrine or teachings of the … faith. … Inquisitors sought out the social networks that people used to spread heresy.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisitor

^[124] Scott, L. (2022, December 23). Whistleblower files complaint to Congress over Twitter suspending journalists. VOA.from https://www.voanews.com/a/whistleblower-organization-files-complaint-to-congress-over-twitter-suspending-journalists/6888490.html

^[125] Siddiqui, P. (2010, May 12). Deoband fatwa: It’s illegal for women to work, Support Family: India News – Times of India. The Times of India. from https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/deoband-fatwa-its-illegal-for-women-to-work-support-family/articleshow/5919153.cms

^[126]Hall, M. D. (2020). Did America have a Christian founding? Separating modern myth from historical truth. Religious Studies Review, 46(1), 108–109. https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.14492 from https://www.heritage.org/political-process/report/did-america-have-christian-founding

^[127]Smith M. (2022, September 6). 1. Demographic portrait of Muslim Americans. Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project. from https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/07/26/demographic-portrait-of-muslim-americans/

^[128] Kamins, T. L., Friedman, G., Wineburg, R., & Wiener, J. (2015, March 20). 96 percent of U.S. jews live in urban areas, Census Bureau reports. Jewish Telegraphic Agency. from https://www.jta.org/archive/96-percent-of-u-s-jews-live-in-urban-areas-census-bureau-reports

^[129] Editor Lillian Tara wrote, “So just like individual liberal brains are marked by versatility/novelty, cosmopolitan cities (liberal cultures) are too! This goes with liberal relativism—there’s less of a “stay and defend our way of life” because the way of life is less objectively sacred.”

^[130] The Jews of Habban South Yemen, Jewish Communities in Exotic Places, by Ken Blady, Jason Aronson, Inc, Northvale, New Jersey, Jerusalem, 2000, page 32

^[131] You could argue that the Jewish insurgency in Palestine is a counter-example, but it was not in response to a pogrom.

^[132] Yet another movie based on events with which my (Malcolm’s) family was heavily involved—direct ancestors of mine served as early members of the Swamp Fox’s (Francis Marion’s) forces.

^[133] We suspect these numbers are biased, but can’t find any counter-examples. Regardless of how biased they are, the point stands: Israel was hugely outnumbered and out-supplied. https://israelforever.org/interact/blog/struggle_for_survival/

^[134] Just look at this IQ-by-state heat map:
https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-iq-by-state/
Or this IQ-by-country heat map:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IQ_by_Country.png

Or this map showing upwards mobility by geography in the US

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2015/06/02/these-maps-from-raj-chetty-show-that-where-children-grow-up-has-a-major-impact-on-their-lifetime-earnings

^[135] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI0ZUhBvIx4&ab

^[136] Cofnas, N. (2023). Still no evidence for a jewish group evolutionary strategy. Evolutionary Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-022-00352-x,
Weinberg, J. (2022, December 30). Philosophy Journal hosts debate on “jewish influence” (updates: Article retracted; Journal gets new editor). Daily Nous. from https://dailynous.com/2022/01/03/philosophy-journal-hosts-debate-on-jewish-influence/

^[137] Gallindoss, B. A. (2018, March 7). Jews make-up 19% of Forbes 200 World’s richest list. Jewish Business News. from https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2018/03/07/jews-make-19-forbes-200-worlds-richest-list/

^[138] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-members-of-the-117th-congress
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-members-of-the-116th-congress

^[139] Saenger, P. (2006). Jewish Pediatricians in Nazi Germany: Victims of Persecution*. Children’s Hospital at Montefiore/Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York, USA. from https://www.ima.org.il/FilesUploadPublic/IMAJ/0/48/24103.pdf

^[140] Backman, M. E. (1972). Patterns of mental abilities: Ethnic, socioeconomic, and sex differences. American Educational Research Journal, 9(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.2307/1162046 from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/00028312009001001

^[141] Bachman, J. G. (1970). Youth in transition Vol. 2: the impact of family background and intelligence on tenth grade boys. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan.

^[142] https://www.worlddata.info/iq-by-country.php

^[143] Lewin-Epstein, Noah; Cohen, Yinon (18 August 2019). “Ethnic origin and identity in the Jewish population of Israel”. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. 45 (11): 2118–2137.

^[144] One friend (who we did not get permission to name publicly) suggested this discrepancy may be a product of many non-Jews fleeing to Israel during the collapse of the Soviet Union by bribing Rabbis and claiming to be Ashkenazi. As such, significantly less than 44.2% of Israel’s population may actually be Ashkenazi. (We add this to give full air to our opponent’s arguments.)

^[145] Lewin-Epstein, Noah; Cohen, Yinon (18 August 2019). “Ethnic origin and identity in the Jewish population of Israel”. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. 45 (11): 2118–2137.

^[146] Storfer, M. D. (1990). Intelligence and giftedness: The contributions of heredity and early environment. Jossey-Bass Publishers.

^[147] Lynn, R. (2004). The Intelligence of American Jews. Personality and Individual Differences, 36(1), 201–206. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0191-8869(03)00079-5 from http://www-personal.umich.edu/~negisama/asdf2.pdf

^[148] Lynn, R., & Kanazawa, S. (2008). How to explain high jewish achievement: The role of Intelligence and Values. Personality and Individual Differences, 44(4), 801–808. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2007.10.019 from https://personal.lse.ac.uk/kanazawa/pdfs/paid2008.pdf

^[149] He justifies this frankly outlandish and weaselly claim like someone blowing glitter (citations) in your eyes and hoping you don’t notice he is using a ten-word vocabulary test as a way to test general IQ in a population both you and he know have an advantage on verbal intelligence. In his words, “For instance, in the standardization sample of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) the vocabulary subtest correlates 0.75 with the Full Scale IQ, more highly than any other subtest (Wechsler, 1958) and the Full Scale IQ is widely regarded as a good measure of general intelligence or Spearman’s g (Jensen, 1998). We are therefore able to examine the vocabulary scores as a measure of the verbal and general intelligence of the four religious/ethnic groups.”

^[150] Lynn, R. (2004). The Intelligence of American Jews. Personality and Individual Differences, 36(1), 201–206. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0191-8869(03)00079-5 from http://www-personal.umich.edu/~negisama/asdf2.pdf

^[151] Levinson, B. M. (1957). The intelligence of applicants for admission to Jewish day schools. from https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/1957-levinson.pdf

^[152] Smilansky, S. (1968). The effects of sociodramatic play on disadvantaged preschool children. John Wiley & Sons.

^[153] Storfer, M. D. (1990). Intelligence and giftedness: The contributions of heredity and early environment. Jossey-Bass Publishers.

^[154] Lynn, R. (2004). The Intelligence of American Jews. Personality and Individual Differences, 36(1), 201–206. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0191-8869(03)00079-5 from http://www-personal.umich.edu/~negisama/asdf2.pdf

^[155] https://pragmatist.guide/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/MindExploding.gif

^[156] Lesser, G. S., Fifer, G., & Clark, D. H. (1965). Mental abilities of children from different social-class and cultural groups. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 30(4), 1–115. From https://www.jstor.org/stable/1165660

^[157] Adevai, G., Silverman, A. J., & McGough, W. E. (1970). Ethnic differences in perceptual testing. The International journal of social psychiatry, 16(3), 237–239. https://doi.org/10.1177/002076407001600312

^[158] Romanoff, J. S. (1976). Birth Order, Family Size, and Sibling Spacing: As Influences on Intelligence and Academic Abilities of Jewish Adolescents. Department of Psychology, Temple University. https://www.nli.org.il/en/dissertations/NNL_ALEPH990022905750205171/NLI

^[159] Cicirelli, V. G. (1976). Sibling structure and intellectual ability. Developmental Psychology, 12(4), 369–370. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.12.4.369

^[160] Dunkel, C. S., Woodley of Menie, M. A., Pallesen, J., & Kirkegaard, E. O. (2019). Polygenic scores mediate the Jewish phenotypic advantage in educational attainment and cognitive ability compared with Catholics and Lutherans. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 13(4), 366–375. https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000158

^[161] Kirkegaard, E. O. W. (2022, November 11). A theory of Ashkenazi genius: Intelligence and mental illness. A theory of Ashkenazi genius: intelligence and mental illness. from https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/a-theory-of-ashkenazi-genius-intelligence

^[162] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stLCurXu0fc

^[163] We chose this term instead of “antisemitic” because “antisemitic” has become a word like “racist” or “eugenics” that is used to shut down ideas without fully considering them.

^[164] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLoind0vKH8&ab_channel=UBERSOY

^[165] Elkayam, L. (2019, March 9). ‘In China, the library had books about becoming rich like a Jew. but it’s not anti-Semitic.’ Haaretz.com. from https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/holylandings/2019-03-09/ty-article/.premium/in-china-the-library-had-books-about-becoming-rich-like-a-jew/0000017f-e24e-d9aa-afff-fb5e0e520000

^[166] Fox, T., Gurvis, J., Gergely, J., Schwartz, L., Guedes-Reed, C., & Hajdenberg, J. (2022, December 23). Chinese self-help books teach you to be like the Jews. Jewish Telegraphic Agency. from https://www.jta.org/jewniverse/2014/chinese-self-help-books-teach-you-to-be-like-the-jews

^[167] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Russia

^[168] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Soviet_Union

[169] MacDonald, K. (2022). RETRACTED ARTICLE: The “default hypothesis” fails to explain Jewish influence. Philosophia. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00439-y

[170] Marx, K. (1844/2010). On the Jewish question (C. Dutt, Trans.). In M. Shcheglova, T. Grishina, L. Zubrilova, T. Butkova, & L. Miskievich (Eds.), Collected works, volume 3: Karl Marx March 1843–August 1844 (pp. 146–174). Lawrence & Wishart.

^[171] My Jewish Learning. (2022, May 25). Jews and guns. My Jewish Learning. from https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/hunting-in-judaism/

^[172] Kampeas, R., Gurvis, J., Gergely, J., Schwartz, L., Guedes-Reed, C., & Hajdenberg, J. (2017, September 26). How Israel stays a ‘well-regulated militia’ with so many guns around. Jewish Telegraphic Agency. from https://www.jta.org/2016/06/17/politics/how-israel-stays-a-well-regulated-militia-with-so-many-automatic-weapons-around

^[173] Intraculturally, this is not framed as: “Explosives training” but rather “kids playing with fireworks, building fireworks, throwing them at each other, and constructing potato cannons.” Families from my (Malcolm’s) cultural background would hear the term “Roman candle fight” and think: “normal childhood game” while, as an adult, I have learned people from other backgrounds find the idea of children shooting fireworks at each other to be inappropriate—even with parental supervision.

^[174] I have to admit, I felt like my cousin (like 13 at the time) had a point (I am the type of guy who thinks a High Point is the perfect gun because it is cheap and hard to break). So, I asked my wife why she keeps this kind of weapon around and her response was something along the lines, “You may get a single chance to justifiably attack someone who is putting your family at risk. I want to get the most out of that experience.” While I logically know that answer should be concerning, my emotional mind finds it quite cute—I suppose it is cultural priming.

^[175] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/07/10/rural-and-urban-gun-owners-have-different-experiences-views-on-gun-policy/

^[176] This is the one about which we are the least certain. While I (Malcolm) know I am the direct descendant of an Oliver Cromwell who lived around that time period, I have yet to confirm whether this was the Oliver Cromwell.

^[177] Mitsch, F. Lee, N. Morrow, L. (2021 May) Faith No More? The divergence of political trust between urban and rural Europe. Working Paper 64 from

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/110447/1/Mitsch_faith_no_more_published.pdf

^[178] Trust in Government: Understanding its Territorial Divides from

https://www.oecd.org/regional/multi-level-governance/Webinar%20Summary_Trust_FINAL.pdf

^[179] Lott, M. (2022, August 30). Deep Dive: The covid “fudge factor”. Maxim Lott. from https://maximumtruth.substack.com/p/the-covid-fudge-factor

^[180] Wang, S., & Gan, N. (2022, November 25). As anger rises and tragedies mount, China shows no sign of budging on zero-covid. CNN. from https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/25/china/china-zero-covid-discontent-reopening-mic-intl-hnk/index.html,
Hoshur, S. (2022, September 22). 22 die of starvation in one day under Covid Lockdown in Xinjiang’s ghulja. Radio Free Asia., from https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/ghulja-starvation-09212022160907.html,
Yiu, K. (2022, November 27). How a deadly apartment fire fueled anti-zero-COVID protests across China: ANALYSIS. ABC News. from https://abcnews.go.com/International/deadly-apartment-fire-fueled-anti-zero-covid-protests/story?id=94045207

^[181] Wong, T. (2022, June 14). Henan: China Covid app restricts residents after banking protests. BBC News. from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-61793149

^[182] Hurley, B. (2021, July 30). 1.6 billion disposable masks entered the ocean in 2020 and will take 450 years to Biodegrade. The Independent. from https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/masks-ocean-covid-plastic-b1893830.html

^[183] Lewkowicz, D. (2021, February 11). Masks can be detrimental to babies’ speech and language development. Scientific American. from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/masks-can-be-detrimental-to-babies-speech-and-language-development1/

^[184] Dorn, E., Hancock, B., Sarakatsannis, J., & Viruleg, E. (2022, August 31). Covid-19 and learning loss–disparities grow and students need help. McKinsey & Company. from https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/covid-19-and-learning-loss-disparities-grow-and-students-need-help

^[185] Courtemanche, C., Garuccio, J., Le, A., Pinkston, J., & Yelowitz, A. (2020). Strong social distancing measures in the United States reduced the COVID-19 growth rate. Health Affairs, 39(7), 1237–1246. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.00608

^[186] Christakis DA, Van Cleve W, Zimmerman FJ. (2020). Estimation of US Children’s Educational Attainment and Years of Life Lost Associated With Primary School Closures During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic. JAMA Netw Open.3(11):e2028786. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.28786

^[187] The former CMO of Levi Strauss & Co. who was on her way to becoming the company’s CEO.

^[188] Selyukh, A. (2022, February 21). Can a corporate exec speak as a mom about COVID rules? consider the Levi’s saga. NPR. from https://www.npr.org/2022/02/21/1082107309/can-a-corporate-exec-speak-as-a-mom-about-covid-rules-consider-the-levis-saga

^[189] Mikhail, A. (2017, July 27). The moment in history when Muslims began to see dogs as dirty, impure, and evil. Quartz. from https://qz.com/india/1038116/the-moment-in-history-when-muslims-began-to-see-dogs-as-dirty-impure-and-evil

^[190] Mikhail, A. (2017, July 27). The moment in history when Muslims began to see dogs as dirty, impure, and evil. Quartz. from https://qz.com/india/1038116/the-moment-in-history-when-muslims-began-to-see-dogs-as-dirty-impure-and-evil

^[191] Levin, S. (2019, November 27). Moment Mythbusters: Jews and pets. Moment Magazine. from https://momentmag.com/moment-mythbusters/

^[192] Miller, G. D. (2008). Attitudes toward dogs in ancient Israel: A reassessment. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 32(4), 487–500. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309089208092144 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54694fa6e4b0eaec4530f99d/t/5504ff3be4b02e0b15a08bac/1426390843190/Dogs+in+ancient+Israel+2008.pdf

^[193] Miller, G. D. (2008). Attitudes toward dogs in ancient Israel: A reassessment. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 32(4), 487–500. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309089208092144 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54694fa6e4b0eaec4530f99d/t/5504ff3be4b02e0b15a08bac/1426390843190/Dogs+in+ancient+Israel+2008.pdf

^[194] Miller, G. D. (2008). Attitudes toward dogs in ancient Israel: A reassessment. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 32(4), 487–500. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309089208092144 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54694fa6e4b0eaec4530f99d/t/5504ff3be4b02e0b15a08bac/1426390843190/Dogs+in+ancient+Israel+2008.pdf

^[195] Pinchak, N. Browning, C. Boettner, B. Calder, C. Tarrence, J. (2022) Paws on the Street: Neighborhood-Level Concentration of Households with Dogs and Urban Crime, Social Forces, soac059, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soac059 from https://academic.oup.com/sf/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/sf/soac059/6617669?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false

^[196] Hlavinka, E. (2020, November 16). Dogs in the Home May Keep Kids’ IgE in Check. Medical News. from https://www.medpagetoday.com/meetingcoverage/acaai, from https://www.medpagetoday.com/meetingcoverage/acaai/89702?vpass=1

^[197] Lue, J., & Padron, G. (2019). Dog ownership at three months of age is associated with protection against Food Allergy. Pediatrics, 144(Supplement_1). https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2019-2461h
Marrs, T., Logan, K., Craven, J., Radulovic, S., McLean, W. H. A. I., Lack, G., Flohr, C., Perkin, M. R., Young, L., Offord, V., DeSousa, M., Cullen, J., Taylor, K., Tseng, A., Raji, B., Byrom, S., Regis, G., Bigwood, C., Stedman, C., … Turcanu, V. (2019). Dog ownership at three months of age is associated with protection against Food Allergy. Allergy, 74(11), 2212–2219. https://doi.org/10.1111/all.13868

^[198] Owen, C. G., Nightingale, C. M., Rudnicka, A. R., et al. (2011). Family dog ownership and levels of physical activity in childhood: Findings from the Child Heart and Health Study in England. Yearbook of Sports Medicine, 2011, 100–101. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yspm.2011.01.002

^[199] Poresky, R. Hendrix, C. (1989, April 27-30) Companion animal bonding, children’s home environments, and young children’s social development. Department of Human Development and Family Studies from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED312087.pdf

Emotion and Mental Landscape

One of the ways hard cultures “win” is by increasing adherents’ mental fitness. A culture with clear-headed people and lower rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse is going to outcompete a community that does not have social technology assisting in these areas (all other things being equal). This is why people who follow hard cultures typically have better mental health than those who don’t.^[1]

In contrast, a key mechanism pop cultures use to seduce people out of their birth cultivars is to push them to indulge in ways that are deleterious to their mental health, which creates dependency while making the individual unstable and enough of a burden that they are pushed out of their birth community. Durable hard cultures must have protective mechanisms that shield members from these forms of seduction.

One of our goals with this book is to see if we can isolate the exact mechanisms and social technologies hard cultures are using to benefit individual mental health and handpick them to construct a superior—if artificial—culture.

Victimhood, Politicking, and Industry

While all cultivars have an internal power hierarchy and a mechanism for determining where people sit on this hierarchy, they all also have preferred strategies for manipulating the wider world’s mutually-agreed-upon-power hierarchies. If a workplace features people from ten different cultures, those people will still have to form some form of informal hierarchy during their interactions and each individual’s cultivar will influence which strategies they are most likely to utilize.

There are four general cultural strategies for gaining social power:

Playing the victim
Politicking
Industry
Intelligence

Playing the Victim

Let’s start by focusing on the “victimhood strategy” for gaining social power because any effective, intentionally constructed culture must be capable of defending against it. Victimhood is used aggressively by the cultural supervirus, many pop cultures, and many dominating cultivars when they hold minority positions.

Humans evolved to empathize with the suffering of others^[2] and some individuals as well as cultures have come to realize they can exploit this to force non-reciprocal resource transfer from other groups.^[3] ^[4] Individuals willing to engage in this behavior should be regarded with extreme levels of suspicion, as personal victimhood narratives subconsciously promote unjust violence and intergroup competition^[5] and grant one license to escape personal blame for wrongdoings.^[6] Worst of all, victimhood allows people to hold obviously incorrect and immoral beliefs without having to be self-critical by granting those who wield it something called a “psychological license.”^[7] For lack of a better word, people who subscribe to cultures that empower victim mentalities are “toxic.”

The research cited above makes it clear that even genuine victims are better off not creating internal self-narratives around victimhood. Instead, people would be better served by framing themselves as empowered and associating with groups that facilitate such views.

Let’s be clear here: This sucks. It is not fair that groups that are already facing an uphill battle face an additional layer of hardship because using the “victim card” degrades a person’s sense of efficacy, self-sufficiency, morality, ability to contribute to society, and general mental stability. Alas, just because something is shitty and not fair does not mean it is not true. Groups that ignore this and reward members who play the victim card do not have those individuals’ or victimized demographics’ best interests at heart.

But it gets worse, as a group of researchers at the University of British Columbia highlight in their paper: “Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities.”^[8] Essentially, a willingness to signal victimhood is correlated very highly with Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy when controlling for socioeconomic variables. Victimhood signaling is furthermore associated with lying to earn a bonus, willingness to lie about being harmed by others in a work environment for personal benefit, willingness to cheat in a coin flip game, increased likelihood to assume wrong in others, and a higher sense of entitlement.^[9] The reason people who are willing to play the victim can be completely written off rather than “trained to be better” is that this self-contextualization appears to be an enduring and stable personality trait.^[10]

While playing the victim is an effective social strategy, an ounce of cultural sympathy for it puts you at incredible risk. This can be seen in the effects victimhood-mentality-promoting cultures have on their members. The biggest pop culture group that supports victimhood mindsets is the progressive movement. Rates of mental health problems within progressive groups are astronomically higher than in those in conservative groups. To illustrate this point: Liberal women between 18 and 29 are more likely than moderates or conservatives to be diagnosed with a mental health issue, with over half having one (56.3%). If you include men, a full 46% of white liberals in the 18-29 age range have been diagnosed with a mental health issue.^[11] In addition, adjusted for basic demographics (though not sexuality), Republicans are consistently happier and have been since Pew started taking the survey that produced these findings.^[12] (One could argue that those who are more sad or plagued by mental illness are more accepted by progressives, but this theory also has problems of its own.)

When your culture acts like a giant beacon for people much more likely to be psychopathic narcissists, is it any wonder you have trouble “keeping it together?” Cultures that reward people for acting like victims will consistently attract people with Dark Triad personalities at higher rates, and such individuals can navigate their power structures better, meaning organizations dominated by victimhood-supporting cultures end up being run by Dark Triad personalities at higher rates. It is a cruel twist of fate that—unless specific preventative measures are taken—the organizations most interested in helping the downtrodden end up being run by self-serving narcissists.

Here we need to warn of potential cultural bias. Our personal culture has historically regarded anyone who frames themselves as a victim with the highest level of disgust. This is a cultural view that has served us well in choosing business partners, selecting friends, and dating (seriously though: Don’t marry someone who likes playing the victim card). That said, our suspicion of victimhood makes us extremely receptive to statistics and data that reveal it to be toxic.

Nobody is immune to the psychological desire to play the victim. Even individuals who don’t have a predilection toward seeing themselves as a victim naturally will if they are accused of discriminating against others or if they are characterized as being relatively advantaged.^[13] ^[14] (Yes, you read that right: Telling someone they are actually in a slightly more advantaged group will make them double down on victimhood mentality—something you have likely witnessed personally.) Never allow yourself to succumb to these urges, and if you do, hate yourself for it. A culture that tells people to never hate themselves no matter their actions or thoughts is a breeding ground for monsters.

Victim narrative strategies have a major flaw: They can be used externally but never internally if a culture is to survive multiple generations. In most cultures, an outsider cannot simply stroll in and insert themselves into the top of the local power hierarchy by demonstrating they are the most victimized individual. If a culture loses the ability to defend against this, it essentially installs a giant back door through which bad actors can walk.

Politicking

The second area of cultural specialization, politicking, is an effective strategy for accumulating power and is pervasive in many symbiotic cultures in which constituent players are in the minority (this strategy does not work for majority groups). Coming from an individualist culture, we cannot even begin to understand how politicking skills are effectively passed between parents and children, however we assume that it must come in part from belonging to a culture that trusts members more than outsiders, giving anyone who adopts or is born into it a built-in nepotistic network. This nepotistic network can even be a good recruiting tool, acting as a draw for outsiders to join.

We have nothing against this social strategy for gaining power; we just don’t know how cultures cultivate and train for it.

Industry

Industry is the hierarchy-climbing mechanism with which we are most familiar. Heck, when I (Malcolm) first met Simone, her “personal motto” on her dating profile was “repeated blunt force.” This value set is passed down through cultures that downplay the value and admirability of talent, intelligence, and easy success, praising work ethic instead. Per such cultural value sets, a person who archives something with little effort should feel ashamed rather than proud (e.g., “participation medals” are an insult).

Putting industry on a pedestal can produce unfortunate side effects. For example, cultures that idolize productivity and hard work can cause people to fetishize the aesthetics of looking busy all the time and being overworked—even if their busyness and stress don’t produce meaningful outcomes (as an example of this, one test reader noted a Japanese trend of showing diligence through napping in public).^[15] The best cure to this cultural ill is to frame busywork and performative working as indulgent at best and unethical, wasteful virtue signaling at worst. Someone who is stressed and overworked is not to be lauded; such stress is a sign of poor time management.

We coined the term “office theater” to describe this dynamic—which, last we heard, is now standard parlance in some Stanford business school courses. Performing office theater entails “aesthetically” working while not functionally creating much value. A common example of office theater involves staying late at the office, ordering takeout, and looking stressed and sleep deprived when going home and getting some rest would actually produce better results. Someone performing the opposite of office theater may choose to work remotely in order to avoid distractions and spend commute time working—or to work at odd hours in an effort to make the most of their personal circadian rhythm (I—Malcolm—am writing this at 2:00am, as I do my best work between the hours of 2:00am and 5:00am). The concept of turning work into a ritual rather than a thing of utility nauseates those from high industry cultures.

Intelligence

Finally, some groups use intelligence as a mechanism for climbing social hierarchies. We see this as almost as toxic as sorting by victimhood for a few reasons. First, even dumb individuals will always internally see themselves as intelligent, so this strategy creates a situation in which a person’s self-perceived value is usually going to be higher than their real value.

Second, this strategy encourages “intelligence fronting,” in which people prioritize sounding smart over being easy to comprehend. Someone culturally programmed to use intelligence for social climbing will subconsciously vomit jargon and references into writing and conversations in an attempt to reinforce their position in the local hierarchy—especially when they are feeling insecure.^[16] This ultimately undermines people’s ability to communicate important concepts and make convincing arguments (this is a major problem in the Effective Altruist and rationalist cultures).^[17]

Finally, Intelligence is certified at the societal level by the academic system, which itself has succumbed to the cultural supervirus. This means that using accreditation from these institutions to assign status within your culture provides an easy back door for the cultural supervirus to directly inject contagious vectors into the heart of your culture.

Notes:

1. Advice to our children: Just as much as you should avoid spouses that show any tendency to play the victim, you should strive to find a spouse who is industrious without complaint or expectation of remuneration—someone who inherently likes working, who sees the virtue in strategically applied productivity, and who feels deeply uncomfortable with idle time. Finding someone truly industrious is far more important than marrying someone who is hot or smart.

2. Some cultures encourage their members to climb their internal culture’s social hierarchies while simultaneously climbing hierarchical ladders in wider society, while others strongly discourage members from playing societies’ wider social games. In fact, keeping a culture’s members “down” (vis-a-vis power hierarchies in the wider world) can increase cultural fidelity, acting both as a shield and as an effective member retention strategy. This suppression of achievement (as defined by broader society) makes adherents both unattractive to other cultures that may want to poach them (to access their wealth and influence) and unable to pursue many options in the wider world (as they are largely powerless and low status in broader world terms).

Two examples of cultures that do this are Jehovah’s Witnesses, which heavily frame higher education as a wicked pursuit (with only 12% having bachelor’s degrees)^{^[18]} and prioritize cultural in-group activities over work (see the next point about Jehovah’s Witnesses views on education below). Israeli Haredim Jews also discourage men from working and deemphasize both male and female education (we explore this group in greater detail in a few pages).^{^[19]} This is one of those strategies that no one would intentionally choose for a culture they created but which is evolutionarily successful.

3. It is refreshing how honest Jehovah’s Witnesses are about their stances on education. The primary reason they don’t let their kids go to college is that a lot of kids deconvert while in institutions of higher education, which, of course, from the perspective of a Jehovah’s Witness, leads those kids to eternal suffering. If you believed that sending your child to college exposed them to higher risks of eternal damnation, what would you do? It would also be theologically silly to send kids to college from the mindset of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ metaphysical framework, with one of the governing members saying: “We will not need doctors or lawyers after Armageddon but we will need carpenters, plumbers, and similar construction trades.”^{^[20]} If you think we are only decades away from entering a world ruled directly by God without governments or disease, then it would not be crazy to de-emphasize job training in domains such as law or medicine.

A Case Study in Cultural Genotypes vs Phenotypes: American vs. Israeli Haredim

One of our Jewish history sensitivity editors flagged a passing comment we made about Israeli Haredi stances on education as presenting an inaccurate stereotype. He argued that the Israeli Haredi cultivar is nearly identical to its U.S. Haredi counterpart (for which this person knows we have a soft spot) and that we should not frame the cultivars as being different from each other. This prompted us to look into the two cultivars, which confirmed our original read of the situation with data. If anything, we are presenting offensive facts rather than inaccurate stereotypes. The Israeli Haredim indeed have a dramatically lower cultural value for economically industrious endeavors than the American Haredim and are radically less educated (in secular matters, at least), but potentially with good reason.

As recently as 2016, only 50%^[21] of men in the Israeli Haredi cultivar had jobs, which rose to only 63.5% by 2020. This is radically different from the American branch of Haredi Jews, colloquially known as Hasidic Jews, where even a 17% level of unemployment back in 1974 was seen as an existential catastrophe that the entire community needed to work together to fix (with their normal unemployment being around 6%).^[22] In Israel, by contrast, 17% unemployment would be literally less than half of the lowest unemployment levels Israeli Haredim have ever experienced.

In addition “as of 2014, among those aged 25-35, just 2% of [Israeli] Haredi men and 8% of women had a college degree, compared to 28% of secular Jewish Israeli men and 25% of religious Jewish Israeli men, and 43% of both secular and religious Jewish Israeli women in that age group.”^[23] Again, contrast this with American Hasidic Jewish groups where 11% of Hasidic men and 6% of Hasidic women hold bachelor’s degrees, meaning that overall they have about a 50% higher level of bachelor’s degree attainment.

While the Israeli Haredi and the American Hasidic are theologically essentially identical, they are culturally quite different in how they relate to both industry as a virtue and somewhat different in their pursuit of higher education.^[24] They can be thought of as cultivars with very similar DNA (their theology) but markedly different phenotypes (their values, lifestyles, and ultimate choices).

This difference in phenotypes need not be encoded at the “genetic” (e.g., theological) level but could be polymorphic (where the same genes lead to different phenotypes when different environmental pressures are present). By that we mean that if you snapped your fingers and the Israeli Haredi population were in the U.S. and the U.S. Haredi population were in Israel, the U.S. population would start acting like the Israeli one and vice versa because of their new environmental pressures (government support that reduces obligation to participate in the mainstream economy, military service mandates that may threaten cultural sovereignty, attempts to preserve their culture in the face of different threats, etc.).

There appears to be an assumption that most cultivars respect groups theologically closer to them while reserving disdain for the groups most different from them—but that is actually fairly rarely the case. Most cultivars actually have the most derision for groups theologically closest to them. This is often how speciation begins to take place and is what we call “The Judean People’s Front” effect based on a Monty Python skit in which the People’s Front of Judea say that the only people they hate more than the Romans are the Judean People’s Front and the Popular Front of Judea.

In practice, most cultures judge each other based on values, not theology. We can have two groups with almost an identical theology, like the Israeli and American Haredim, and personally hold radically different opinions of each group. The American Haredim embody some of our highest cultural values like industry, sovereignty, and self-sufficiency—three value sets not shared by the nearly theologically identical Israeli cultivar. This is ironic as they are functionally the same culture per the criteria people use when thinking about culture.

Note: Why is antisemitism so much more pervasive than hatred of other successful ethno-cultivar minorities, such as Jains? Outside of some reasons already addressed, the “Judean People’s Front” phenomenon likely plays a large role. When Christianity was founded, it would have been viewed as only a slightly differentiated version of Jewishness. In order to ensure members saw themselves as distinct from Jews and to prevent members from flippantly shifting between the two communities, those early Christian leaders who succeeded in retaining members fostered animosity against this closely related culture (this is a normal part of cultural speciation). Cultural animosity—along with apocalypticism and other core points of differentiation—was therefore baked into Christianity’s foundational traditions and subsequently carried over into other cultures derived from it, such as Islam.

Locus of Control

Promotion of an internal locus of control is an important aspect of any hard culture and encouragement of an external locus of control is the clearest bellwether of a parasitic culture. Having an internal locus of control yields benefits along almost every conceivable metric, from mental health to physical health, romantic success, and career achievement. Since we discuss the topic ad nauseam in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, we shall keep this book’s exploration brief. (If you are looking for reading on this here are a few studies.^[25])

A person with an internal locus of control takes total personal responsibility for things that happen to them, be they positive, negative, or even technically not caused by them (in such cases, people focus on what they can do about whatever happened, not that external forces were at play). In contrast, a person with an external locus of control blames their failures on exogenous forces, such as other people, bigotry, sexism, grudges, a crazy ex, etc. while crediting their successes to luck or privilege. In other words, to have an external locus of control involves attributing life’s developments to anything or anyone but oneself.

Of course, in reality, the things that happen to us are products of both our own actions and outside forces over which we lack control. Sometimes, people really do get fired because their bosses are racist. Sometimes we really are successful due to dumb luck. The thing is, we can only control our own actions and reactions—and research on the subject makes it abundantly clear that writing your internal narrative in a way that suggests you don’t control your fate, even if it is true, hurts not just your mental health, but your odds of future success.

Why? When you focus on aspects of outcomes over which you have control, you not only identify actionable things you can do to tip odds of future successes in your favor but also enjoy a feeling of empowerment.

The cultures that whisper in your ear: “It’s not your fault—there is nothing you could have done” are injecting venom into the very core of your soul, calcifying your sense of agency. These groups are not your friends and do not have your best interests at heart. They are the family member who sneaks cake and soda to the diabetic patient in the hospital. They would rather see the part of you that matters, which acts freely on its own, dead than see you personally empowered.

Perhaps no phrase more perfectly embodies an external locus of control than “trigger warning,” in that trigger warnings enable people to maintain control over their internal mental state by shielding it from potentially challenging, offensive, or emotionally difficult information. With over a decade of research on the subject, we now know trigger warnings don’t help. In a 2020 meta-study^{^[26]} reviewing 17 other studies on the subject, Payton Jones, Benjamin Bellset, and Richard McNally found that trigger warnings neither alleviate emotional distress nor significantly reduce negative affect or minimize intrusive thoughts, which are hallmarks of PTSD (this holds true even for individuals with a history of trauma). In fact, Jones and his co-authors found that trigger warnings “were not helpful even when they warned about content that closely matched survivors’ traumas” and that they appeared to make things worse for these individuals, leading them to “view trauma as more central to their life narrative.” The paper concluded, “Trigger warnings may be most harmful to the very individuals they were designed to protect.”

Offense

Offense is an immensely bourgeois emotion, only cited as justification for action by the most privileged individuals within any society. Historically, offense was used as justification for duels and blood feuds. In that historical context, offense generally entailed treatment in a manner incongruous with one’s self-image. However, the cultural supervirus has come up with a new way of using offense to homogenize society and erase cultural diversity.

No existing cultivar has a prohibition against interactions with individuals who signal offense strongly or frequently, which makes them vulnerable. Historically speaking, there was little need to evolve such protections, as offense was only “spammed” at others by obviously unstable individuals and such people were not taken seriously. The present-day cultural supervirus has weaponized offense in a manner that quickly erodes cultural values and establishes dominance over existing cultures, changing their mores, morals, and traditions.

The manner in which the supervirus uses offense to sneak through cultural backdoors is incredibly dangerous. When a culture frames offense as a literal attack, it justifies retreats to groups where offense is much less likely (i.e. groups that don’t challenge or push a person and thereby facilitate personal stagnation).

Cultural framing of offense as an attack also produces cognitive distortions: Errors in reasoning that are not based on evidence. For example, those who contextualize offense this way are more likely to perceive small negative events as disastrous.^[27] Essentially, susceptibility to concepts like “offense should be treated as personal injury” and “safe spaces and trigger warnings are positive things” can trigger a cascade of failures in logic that chip away at individuals’ sanity, making them feel constantly under attack.

The emotion known as offense is a response to a credible challenge to your worldview (either your place within the world or your understanding of how things work). If something is not credible, it does not cause offense; it just comes off as silly or worrying. If someone calls us selfish when we are doing something obviously charitable, we just chuckle and shrug—but if they call us selfish and part of us suspects they might have a point, we will feel a strong pang of offense.

The same is true ideologically: When someone challenges an aspect of our worldview around which we hold strong convictions, we just see them as delusional, but if they challenge something about which we harbor even subconscious doubts, we will feel offended.

For these reasons, we personally contextualize the emotion of offense as an uncomfortable-but-highly-valuable sign that we need to dig deeper on a subject. After all, if we are wrong about something, especially if it is something important to us, we would rather be set straight than continue to cling to an incorrect worldview or opinion. “Winning” doesn’t entail sticking to your guns when you’re wrong; “winning” involves updating your beliefs when you turn out to be wrong.

Offense is an extremely useful emotion that flags ideas warranting further investigation. Offensive ideas should be engaged rather than stifled or ignored. From our cultural perspective, a choice to not engage with offensive ideas is an obvious sign that someone has become a husk of a person. As husks are nothing but vectors of cultural rot, they should largely be avoided in one’s personal social networks and business dealings.

Ideal Mental Landscape

Cultures promote different standards for ideal mental landscapes, which structure how adherents optimally govern their thoughts and feelings. There are two broad extremes here: A dictatorial mental landscape and a harmonious one.

In the dictatorial extreme, one aspect of a person’s character (for example, their logic) is meant to strictly control the others and lapses of this control are viewed as a sign of personal failure. In a harmonious landscape, all internal impulses are generally regarded as equal and the goal is to have them work together as organically and with as little conflict as possible.

Our cultural predisposition here is so strong it is hard for us to understand why anyone would want the alternative. To us, it seems obvious that you would only want the parts of your brain operating on logic to be in control and that all the other voices in one’s head are either manifestations of self-indulgent hero/power/victim narratives or emotional states that evolved in a very different set of ecological and social conditions.

When you allow a personal narrative or an emotion to be used as justification for an action, you create all sorts of terrible externalities in the way you act as a leader, relate to societies, and act within relationships.

A leader who is operating on logic can always be trusted to act in congress with their goals. You can use that information to decide whether you want to follow them. A leader who is subject to the caprices of emotion or personal narratives is unpredictable and liable to be inconsistent in their leadership.
The same can be said about a follower. Someone who follows you and is governed by logic is fairly predictable so long as you know their goals. Someone who is governed by their emotions can never be trusted with much power as they could switch their allegiance or focus due to exogenous factors outside of their control.
If all partners in a relationship operate off logic and have aligned goals, only a lack of communication or information asymmetries will produce discord. When partners are governed by emotional states, disagreements can arise for which there is no resolution. An extreme example of this we have seen a few times arises when one partner treats the other cruelly because they had a dream in which their partner did something that angered them. How could you ever trust someone to be there for you if they would retaliate against you for something that only happened in their imagination?

There is a point which seems to come up in every one of our books that we must emphasize. Inside Out is a movie, not reality. Indulging in an emotion like anger or sadness is not “healthy.” Every time an individual indulges in an emotion, that emotional path gets strengthened and it becomes harder to resist in the future. For example, if an individual punches a punching bag after getting angry they will end up angrier than if they distracted themselves or did nothing.^[28]

Why do some cultures promote “mental harmony” between all the little voices in their heads? Mostly because it’s easy. This ideal mental landscape is typically only found in soft cultures. Most hard cultures—even those often mugged of their traditions and aesthetics by “spiritual” people, like Jainism and Buddhism—promote authoritarian mental landscapes (you only get things like Sokushinbutsu or Sallekhana, starving oneself to death, in a culture promoting self-control).

Relation to Pleasure and the Arts

Having reached this point in the book, you can probably guess our view of the arts. Calvinist culture is famously anti-art, with Calvinist Geneva famously banning all music except for psalm singing for almost a century.^[29] What may surprise you is that Calvinism isn’t the only culture that raises individuals who almost never participate in the arts. Not only do almost none of even culturally progressive Anabaptists participate in the arts, but neither do Mormons (with the only examples we can think of being Christina Aguilera and Jewel, though each renounced their faith and culture). In addition, many extremist Islamist cultivars have an active aversion to arts and will hunt down and destroy forms of art after taking control of a region (as ISIS did).^[30]

Similarly, some cultures are wildly over-represented in the arts, with the two most disproportionately represented being German Jews (as opposed to Russian/Polish Jews, which is the branch from which Simone hails and is overrepresented in textile management) and Scientologists. This is fascinating, as presumably people from most soft cultures want to be famous in the arts. Why, then, do German Jews and Scientologists, two cultures that make up virtually none of the U.S. population (2.4% and <0.1%), so generously outcompete them?

Let’s start by focusing on the question of why Jews are disproportionately represented in the media. A common answer is that when Jews first immigrated to the United States, many employers would not hire them. This drove Jews to start their own businesses more often, which boosted their odds of dominating growing industries that were just emerging as they first immigrated to an area. For German Jews, who moved disproportionately to the West, this supposedly led to disproportionate leadership in the entertainment and production industry.

This is a great “just-so story,” but two pieces of evidence make us doubt its accuracy:

1. Other immigrant groups that faced discrimination (the Irish and Italians, for example) did not end up running companies at an unusual rate but instead went into organized crime, law enforcement, legal professions, and local politics.

2. Even today, Jews enter uncorrelated areas of the arts at disproportionate rates—even in industries that don’t have a history of Jewish representation in positions of corporate power. For example, an article in a 1978 Times magazine claimed that 80% of all stand-up comedians in the U.S. were Jewish.^[31] This is a field largely unconnected to the movie studios of 1900s LA and still had Jews appearing at a rate 3,333% higher than you would expect. We don’t buy that this is a result of where the group first settled.

We heard an interesting answer that could also address an even bigger question of why more observant Jewish sects have a higher birth rate than many of their similarly strict Christian counterparts. While both Calvinists and Hasidic Jews have reputations for being strict, Hasidic Jews have thrived while Calvinists (as they existed in colonial American times) are almost extinct.

When answering the question not just of higher Jewish growth rates but also of higher Jewish representation in arts and media, one could argue that all branches of Judaism have one thing most observant Christian counterparts lack: A genuine mandate on celebration and having fun. Look up footage of a “Hasidic Jew party” and you will find video after video of behavior that does not mirror anything seen in the Anabaptist or Calvinist traditions. In contrast, most Anabaptist and Calvinist parties are oriented around group labor, such as barn raising. Could it also be that having “fun” for fun’s sake now and then makes life less bleak and increases birth rates? Could it be that differing cultural approaches to fun and celebration created a cultural vortex in which people who liked having fun joined Jewish families at disproportionate rates, magnifying this cultural practice and increasing the probability of members being more successful entertainers?

Side bar: A lot of people seem to assume that all humans see the world in approximately the same way regardless of their culture or sociological profile. They say, “Of course all people love a party!” This just isn’t true and it’s something you only really hear from people who have very limited experience with genuinely unique cultures. While we are objectively able to look at a Hasidic party and see that people are having “fun,” laughing, and … ugh … platonically touching each other—our appreciation of the event is solely anthropological. Everything about actually participating in something like that would be mortifying to us. What if someone tried to talk to us, get us to sing, or (retch!) touched us!? No thank you, we would rather participate in a barn raising any day of the week. A productive day working with friends interspersed with breaks for homemade snacks—that sounds satisfying.

Ok, what about other cultures in the U.S. that are disproportionately represented in the arts? In the case of Scientology, one could argue adherents are important in the media because their members focus on recruiting high-level people in the entertainment world—which is true. However, as a culture, Scientologists also encourage partying more than other hard cultures we frequently reference. In addition, many famous scientologists in the media joined the church before getting famous.

Given our cultural backgrounds, we find it difficult to come to terms with this, but the success of several party-friendly cultures strongly implies that cultures will benefit from some level of emphasis on celebrations, parties, fun, and creative pursuits. That said, we hope this theory offers food for thought not just to us, but to others: When intentionally designing or reinforcing your own cultivar, you may want to give “fun” more attention than you would otherwise.

At this point, you are probably wondering why a culture would ever evolve an antagonistic attitude toward the arts, parties, and “fun.” In general, “less fun” cultures tend to not believe that subjective emotional states have differential value. In other words, these cultures typically hold that happiness and sadness are not states that hold any inherent value and if anything, working through negative emotions helps build you into a stronger person while indulging in positive emotions can tempt you toward non-efficacious action.

Even from a secular perspective, this seems obviously true to us: The emotional states we experience only exist because our ancestors who felt them had more surviving kids. Emotions were an accident of the environmental pressures faced by our ancestors and today, in a new environment in which access to things like leisure, sugar, and social validation are abundantly available (and furthermore utilized by organizations that hijack our emotions in pursuit of profit), indulging in positive emotions only serves to hinder our efficiency.

The lion’s share of the evidence seems to suggest the Jewish perspective is right and humans will be more efficient if you encourage them to party now and then. However, even if we adopt fun, arts, and celebration as an aspect of our House’s culture, we will nevertheless make sure our kids never forget that “fun” should always serve a purpose, be it an emotional reset, cultural retention strategy, or cultural draw. Holidays that mandate fun should be extremely temporally locked and if anything, serve as a reminder of how hollow positive emotions can be when they are pursued for their own sake.

Side Note: I, Malcolm, was recently going over a list of the most popular sports in the world by country and was surprised by how few there were. Sports with top-ranked status in more than one country were football, baseball, basketball, ice hockey, and cricket. Those that were the favorite of one country were American football (U.S.), Australian football (Australia), Gaelic football (Ireland), wrestling (Mongolia), archery (Bhutan), and, depending on the list you use, table tennis (China).

Notice anything weird about this list? Outside of three small countries (Bhutan, Mongolia, and Ireland) and arguably China, the favorite sport of every country in the world was invented in a Protestant majority environment. If you also remove Australia from consideration, the sport of choice in every country in the world was either invented by the English or Americans.

This phenomenon cannot really be explained by colonialism alone given (1) how other local arts have captured the public consciousness around the world and (2) that no sport was invented by a Catholic majority culture despite the significant role in played in colonization efforts). What makes this whole thing uniquely weird is how little Protestant culture celebrates leisure pursuits. Despite this, Protestant culture seems to be superpowered at inventing competitive sports. If I were to guess at what might be going on, I’d posit that the Protestant connection is a red herring and this is more of an artifact of uniquely high levels of competitiveness pervasive in the United States and United Kingdom.

The Pleasure Pod Filter

One of the classic arguments against those who claim to want to maximize positive emotional states is the “brain in a vat” thought experiment. In this thought experiment a person is asked:

“If you had the choice to enter a pod that could perfectly maximize your ideal emotional state (e.g., not just bliss but also fulfillment, oneness, and contentment), would you live out the rest of your life in that pod? What if this pleasure pod could also simulate your perfect life so seamlessly it would be indistinguishable from the real world; would you choose a life in the pod then? What if it could also connect you to other people, so even in this perfect, blissed-out world you could still engage with others?”

This is not just a thought experiment anymore. Rather, it’s a near-future question many people and cultivars will need to address. By the time of our great grandchildren, it is quite possible that every human will have to decide whether they want to be put in a pod that gives them this perfect virtual life. This option is only likely to last for a couple generations.

Mass access to such technology will act as one of the biggest genetic and cultural bottlenecks through which our species will ever pass. Any culture or sociological profile that can’t give people a concrete reason to live beyond their emotional experience or the emotional experience of others (e.g., general utilitarianism) will be aggressively deleted from the timeline. While those in pods will maximize their enjoyment and the enjoyment of others, they are neither likely to have kids (at least not anywhere near repopulation rate) nor participate actively in humanity’s advancement. With that, the predominant moral sets in secular society (those focused around hedonism, nihilism, and utilitarianism) are going to be wiped off the game board.

If you doubt that these pleasure pods will be inexpensive enough for mass use, think again. Anyone with a utilitarian mindset would have a motivation to lock themselves in one and donate the rest of their money to making them accessible to others. Given that most people have utilitarian moral sets, the pleasure pod industry will end up with a lot of dedicated capital.

Sure, evil capitalists will try to profit from early versions of this tech, but given their intrinsically fixed maintenance costs, inevitably one philanthropist will make them generally accessible. Generous, utilitarian hedonist philanthropists aside, we know our own cultivar well enough to know we would sponsor mass access to pleasure pods just to swiftly and ethically delete those susceptible to utilitarian or hedonistic fulfillment before they cause any more damage.

So where do you stand on this issue? Would you mind if your cultivar and descendants were wiped out through free access to pleasure pods? What if it wasn’t a binary decision? What if it started like a game that you could jump into sometimes while still maintaining a traditional job and family with which you spent most of your waking hours? What if, over time, people could start making money inside this game, and mainstream media and society started shaming those who didn’t shift to life full time inside the game because the carbon footprints and general damage caused by people moving around in the physical world hurt the environment? What if this has already started? If you didn’t have to work, how much time each day would you spend on social media Skinner boxes and video games?

Creating a culture that can resist this technology doesn’t just entail resistance to utilitarian thinking; it also requires resistance to strong and pervasive social pressure. Humanity will be a very different species after the pleasure pod filter fully sieves through the living population—an event that may have already begun.

Dealing with Anger

People experience anger when their expectations around how they should be treated don’t align with their actual treatment (or when they expect a thing to happen based on some series of actions and it does not happen).

Given that anger results from misalignment in expected and actual treatment, cultures with stricter rules around status and interaction consistently feature more anger if they expect outsiders to be aware of these rules—though they experience less anger when everyone knows the rules and sticks to them, as there is little room for misalignment of expectations. Generally, people whose cultures hold outsiders to their cultural standards are more likely to experience frequent anger. This can be seen in both the extreme political left and right around things like gender pronoun norms. Because these factions have conflicting cultural expectations around “proper” interactions, exchanges between left and right-leaning people more frequently leave at least one party smoldering with fury.

Cultures similar to our own, which see humanity as wretched and fallen, experience fairly low rates of anger because they expect very little from others and therefore expect to be treated poorly. Not caring about others’ treatment can, in itself, incite anger in other people when they expect others to be emotionally impacted by their presence, actions, or opinions. only to find that they are not.

What about anger in relationships? The sad truth is that some people expect to be treated in a way that would not only be seen as unreasonable by society but also not be feasible for their partners. For example, someone may ask a colleague or spouse to do one thing and then change their mind about what they wanted—all while forgetting to verbally update this person—then get angry when the partner does what was originally asked of them.

These unreasonable expectations can produce anger spirals, in which partners treat each other with greater and greater hostility in response to increasingly unjust treatment. Should partners enjoy a shared culture with reasonable and clearly defined expectations for participants in various types of relationships, rates of anger are likely to be lower.

Anger is a close cousin to shame, which is felt when a person’s own actions don’t align with what they expect of themselves.

Some cultures have relatively low expectations of what is expected from others but very high expectations of what they expect from themselves. As such, these cultures experience a high amount of shame. While many act indignant toward these cultures, shame is a fairly innocuous emotion for a tradition to leverage and probably one of the “better” emotions as it is driven toward self-improvement. Shame is only really negative when it is felt constantly (the product of a culture holding unreasonable standards). That said, cultures that use shame as motivation often intentionally set the standards too high to create a “background shame” that keeps an individual indebted to that culture. (For an exploration of emotional instability, see page 800 of the Appendix.)

What about meditation—not just as it relates to anger, but in general? We don’t have much to say beyond what is commonly said (and there is no need for us to rehash common analysis here). The only two spicy takes we have on meditation are:

Whether or not meditation benefits you may be genetically linked to your sociological profile. We, personally, glean many of the benefits people gain from meditation through long walks in the woods, while others seem to get nothing from such activity. Perhaps the best form of meditation for you—be it walks, mantras, yoga, tai chi, prayer, gardening, building, cleaning, or something else entirely—is influenced by the structures of one’s inherited culture (urban vs. rural, hierarchical vs. loose, individualistic vs. collectivist, etc.)—and to a certain extent, one’s gender and hormonal profile. (Simone added that last point pointing out she knows far more women who find cleaning meditative than men.)
Meditation can cause harm. Negative outcomes from meditation range from relaxed states inducing panic attacks to slower mental processing due to a loosened ability to quickly understand things as defined concepts.^{^[32]}

Dealing with Disgust

Humans evolved to feel disgust because those who experienced the emotion were more likely to avoid infections (and therefore survive to produce successful offspring). Disgust works by assigning a strong negative modifier to things that would otherwise be positive stimuli—things like food, which normally we’d want to consume, but which is really important to avoid once it has become spoiled or otherwise contaminated.

As we mentioned ad nauseam in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, evolution is a cheap programmer and it will reuse existing systems whenever possible. For this reason, when evolution “needed” a negative modifier for other categories of things likely to appeal to humans, the disgust modifier came into play. This can be seen in the disgust the average human feels around having sex with the same gender or a parent. While sex in general is appealing, evolution historically favored those whose disgust systems came to activate in response to non-reproductive mating that increases risk of disease transfer (such as gay sex) and negative genetic repercussions (such as incestuous sex).

While this development in isolation isn’t so troublesome, the fact that the human brain’s morality system also seems to have hijacked the disgust system causes a lot of grief. Why? Because the average human working on autopilot will assume a thing is immoral if it elicits a disgust response.^[33] In other words, if you show someone a video of a 25-year-old voluntarily having sex with an 80-year-old—or a person eating their own poop—they will tell you the act is immoral even if they cannot explain exactly what makes the act immoral.

This disgust-morality connection isn’t optimal because while things like gay sex may not lead to reproduction (and therefore not be all that favored from an evolutionary standpoint), there is no inherent reason why it should be categorized as immoral. If people didn’t instinctually regard things that commonly disgust them as immoral, we imagine that many fewer cultures would be homophobic, for example. It only makes logical sense for a culture to be homophobic if (a) It values population growth (b) most population growth comes from monogamous pairings rather than, say, harem-style arrangements, and (c) old-fashioned sex is the only way to produce humans.

In addition to explaining otherwise-confusing traditions around shunning gay people and menstruating women, this phenomenon may also explain some very strange religious prohibitions like Shatnez (the prohibition in Judaism against mixing wool and linen). This might have been the result of the childhood innate disgust response triggered when things mix and thus cross-contaminate (think of the kid who won’t eat his dinner after his peas touch his mashed potatoes). It could be that someone important in history felt a disgust reaction like this, did not know where it came from, and assumed mixing certain things was immoral.

Some cultivars choose to lean into this connection by using people’s innate disgust with specific things to try to emotionally prove the cultivar is “pure and accurate.” Alternatively, you can decide that finding disgust in things as a sign of immorality is itself immoral because it is not based on logic. You can probably guess where our cultivar stands given that we find all emotionally-motivated decisions and categorizations to be immoral. In fact, we see this odd creep of the disgust system—something most likely originally evolved to just stop us from eating festering food—as a great example of why we can’t universally trust emotions. Emotions that drove survival thousands of years ago may very well kill us in today’s strikingly different landscape.

Accidental Cults: MLMs & Life Coaches

A culture capable of spreading need not only evolve out of religious, family, or cultural traditions. Cultural evolution can be thought of simply by the truism that a lifestyle which replicates itself and has a low bleed rate has a higher probability of existing in the future than one that does not. This is true even if the iteration of the lifestyle that is spreading no longer serves its original purpose.

In biology, this dynamic can be seen in everything from the communicable dog cancer discussed earlier in the book to prions, which are misfolded, self-replicating brain proteins (that most famously cause Mad Cow Disease). Neither communicable dog cancer nor prions evolved out of something we would typically think of as harmful. Instead, normal parts of an animal’s body just doing their normal function “broke” in a way that caused them to start mindlessly self-replicating. After they began mindlessly self-replicating, various immune systems killed the iterations of these self replicators that couldn’t defend themselves and thus honed the survivors into sneaky and effective killing machines.

Sometimes this process takes place in cultural evolution as well. Occasionally, something that is not a culture but just a job, side hustle, idea, addiction treatment, or even a form of psychotherapy can become self-replicating. Four examples of this we will discuss are “life coaches,” multi-level marketing schemes (MLMs), modern psychology, and Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).

Let’s start by exploring the two more obvious examples of cultures in this category: MLMs and the life coaching industry.

MLMs are different from other prion-like cultivars we will explore in that they are intentionally constructed to be self-replicating. Like AA, life coaches, and modern psychology culture, MLMs are not religious in origin and did not originate from traditional cultures. Instead, they borrow heavily from religious cultures in order to spread themselves and more effectively hook their victims. An MLM is a type of pyramid scheme that has individuals sell products on its behalf while recruiting others to do the same. Members of an MLM make a sliver of the profit generated by their converts. Most people looped into MLMs lose money, though varying sources cite different proportions of net losers, with the AARP claiming around 73% of MLM participants lose money^[34] while the FTC argues it’s closer to 99%.^[35]

Like a religion, MLMs convince their victims that they can achieve their objectives so long as they convert lots of other people and dedicate themselves to the culture. What is interesting is that MLMs often focus more on culture building and self-narrative improvement than helping members make money. While this may seem strange, keep in mind that people often want money to solve problems that can actually be solved with less effort than getting rich (like feeling sovereign and empowered). So long as the MLM delivers a trickle of victims’ desired emotional state, they will stay mindlessly latched to its teat.

MLMs can draw people into deep financial losses despite their surface promises of profit because people care more about their personal narrative, the story they tell about themselves to themselves, than their actual financial state. To be more specific: MLMs convey messages like: If you submit to our lifestyle, you can think of yourself as a “girl boss” and tell yourself you “own your own business.” Even though neither of those things is remotely true, MLM brands do their best to make them aesthetically true and validate said narratives through peer interactions with other MLM members. It is very common for MLMs to organize big parties—even large conferences—at which everyone constantly tells each other what empowered “girl bosses” they are. They convey that leaving the community would be a sign of profound personal failure by degrading apostate members (individuals who left).

The life coaching industry is slightly more insidious in that almost every individual actor in the industry believes they are trying to do good. The industry itself was started without any mischievous motivations. Just like a cancerous dog cell, cultural evolution can easily corrupt good actors.

The problem in the life coaching industry emerges from the obvious fact that life coaching pedagogies that self-replicate begin to outcompete and crowd out those which do not. To be more specific, a life coaching style that leads to individuals who go through it to become life coaches of that style themselves will outcompete (in terms of number of practitioners) a style that genuinely improves individuals’ lives. We were once told something about coaching and advice in general that rings true here: Don’t expect that anyone else’s advice will get you anywhere other than where they are today. Unless a life coach is spectacularly good, expect their advice to turn you into a life coach.

If a life coach could steer you to becoming something more successful than a life coach, they probably would have done it for themselves. The sad truth for life coaches is that the world is full of successful people who would be thrilled to help other people for free (so long as the other person actually is willing to put in the effort to improve). It is not that life coaches don’t work. Rather, the variety that does was typically wildly successful in some other career before becoming a life coach, hence they often target the ultra-wealthy.

If it doesn’t really “work,” why is life coaching so common? Again: Because the versions of life coaching that spread best are self-replicating. If you need coaching and want to find someone who is an exception to this rule, look for someone who has objectively helped other people become successful—not just someone who has coached people who were already successful.

Accidental Cults: The Mental Health Industry

We suspect most of our readers were aware that MLMs and life coaches had become self-replicating—let’s focus on a slightly more controversial take: That the mental health industry is beginning to evolve in the direction of a cult. A lot of stuff we write in this book is likely to get us flack but none more than this.

I, Malcolm, write this as someone who started my career working in the industry and who believes the destigmatization of mental health services was largely (initially at least) a good thing. The problem came when the effort to destigmatize mental health transformed into a cultural mandate to not criticize anything done in the name of mental health. This enabled extremely toxic practices to begin to evolve.

The first time the extent of this problem was obvious to me was when I was hanging out with a small group of people in which one unironically said, “I would not consider dating someone who was not regularly seeing a psychologist”—and others in the group agreed with them. It was at that point I realized that some psychologists were convincing their patients that no person could be mentally healthy without regularly visiting them. They had so thoroughly incepted a dependency in their patients that they had created a cultural identity around that dependency. As someone who started training in psychotherapy back when it was understood how insanely immoral it was to build or even not actively work to avoid this kind of dependency, I nearly shat myself.

One of the core purposes of a “general psychologist” is to help rewrite your internal narratives—the stories you tell yourself about yourself, your history, and the world around you. This can be an incredibly valuable service but it also puts an individual at risk. When you allow someone else to write your narrative, they can incept that narrative with elements that benefit them.

Some mental health professionals have begun a practice in which they incept an individual’s self-narrative with some form of trauma that can only be addressed through regular sessions with them. In other words, a person with general mental health issues that most people share may go to a psychologist and that psychologist’s model of human behavior is (incorrectly) that “most mental health issues come from trauma.” They work with the patient to find an event in their lives that the patient had not previously contextualized as traumatic only to develop and reinforce a traumatic reinterpretation of it.

This creates an effect similar to the “forgetting before remembering” phenomenon. This is a phenomenon involving an individual telling their friends and family that they just uncovered a repressed memory, like being molested as a child, only to hear from many that they have mentioned that story many times before. An example of this would be someone who previously remembered their uncle “doing something weird that made me feel uncomfortable”. Then, this memory is (accurately) reframed as child molestation (often due to a scene in a movie or a PSA). This reinterpretation is so radically contextually different, this person may forget their original creepy uncle memories entirely and thus assume they’ve just uncovered an utterly repressed memory of child molestation.

The problem here is that trauma is not introduced until the event is interpreted traumatically. Researchers have found that—across cultures—acknowledging trauma correlates with more severe symptoms of trauma (i.e., in countries that contextualize a crime as more traumatic, victims of that crime will experience more trauma).^[36] ^[37]

Our point is not that adverse experiences don’t cause genuine, horrible trauma, but that our interpretation of those experiences—the way we relate them to our personal narratives—influences the severity of effects we associate with trauma. The role of narrative matters in the experience of trauma because it means genuine trauma can be generated out of the blue by almost any trusted authority figure telling you that events in your life were traumatic.

This is a key recruiting technique of Scientology. Get an audit from a Scientologist and we can almost guarantee they will start telling you about stuff in your life that was “traumatic” even though you don’t see it as such. Because you don’t trust the Scientologist performing this assessment, you have some protection in these contexts and can see how the process works. Because you won’t let your guard down during an audit (assuming you don’t see this Scientology process as credible), you can use the experience as an opportunity to study a behavior pattern that you can subsequently recognize in a class of people you do trust: Psychologists. While you expect a Scientologist to try to incept you with trauma to control you, you don’t necessarily expect this from a psychologist.

A good psychologist will take already-traumatic events in your life and work with you to contextualize them as non-traumatic. A bad psychologist will take non-traumatic events in your life and twist your narrative to both make them traumatic and connect them to your current problems. The problem is that good psychologists solve your issues while bad ones create dependency and thus recurring revenue streams.

Psychologists’ unintentional use of a practice that creates dependency is not malicious; it simply evolved as a cultural practice. In a society loath to criticize mental health work, practices that leaned predatory slightly outcompeted those that did not and thus spread more effectively.

We do not live in the first era in which psychologists stumbled down this dark path—and today’s psychologists should know better. Every young psychologist is taught about the horrors of the hypnosis fad, in which hundreds of people had false memories of things like alien abductions implanted into their minds by professional psychologists. Those training for the profession are also briefed on the “lost in the mall” experiment (which shows how easy it is to incept a false memory in someone’s head by having them walk through a hypothetical of that memory).^[38] And psychologists are perfectly familiar with the Ramona false memory case, in which a psychologist implanted a young girl with memories of her father raping her, when it appears he very much did not rape her.^[39]

Every practicing psychologist should know they run a risk of incepting patients with information that builds dependency on therapy—and yet here we are again, because contemporary cultures harbor subtle taboos against criticizing psychologists’ methods or suggesting to someone they should see a different therapist.

BONUS SECTION: PTSD

We feel compelled to provide a brief explanation of PTSD because, despite increased awareness about its existence, the disorder is poorly understood by the average person. We frequently hear people describe PTSD as though it were the brain’s general response to any form of bad event. PTSD is actually a very specific type of brain damage in that it causes degradation of specific parts of the brain and can be seen on fMRI machines.^[40]

Houdini often performed a trick in which he would surreptitiously tense the muscles in his chest and ask individuals to punch him, leaving audiences aghast to see him OK. One day a “fan” sucker-punched him to see what would happen and because he wasn’t prepared, Houdini died.

PTSD is a phenomenon triggered by an emotional sucker punch. Like Houdini, our brain naturally protects itself when it can expect an emotionally charged moment coming. While PTSD cannot be caused by an emotionally charged event you are expecting, it can be caused by even fairly trivial events you don’t expect so long as you are primed to interpret them in a strongly emotional way.

This is why someone who is always abusive is less likely to cause PTSD than someone who is sometimes loving and sometimes abusive at unpredictable intervals. This is also why a fairly coddled middle-class suburbanite whose culture interprets microaggressions as a terrible trauma can get terrible PTSD while someone who has undergone actual daily tragedy can get by without ever experiencing it.

The damage caused by PTSD also does not create a generic “trauma” response. Instead it usually creates a collection of stimuli that prime a person to enter a state in which they are hypervigilant of something traumatic potentially happening—like someone holding a balloon next to your ear with a pin and then asking you to go about your day normally.

Accidental Cults: AA

This chain of evolution is not unique to psychologists. It is all too easy for a secular and well-meaning practice to have so many cultural and religious elements that it begins to evolve in an unintended direction. Alcoholics Anonymous presents an excellent example of this process.

AA started as both a well-meaning and (for the period) effective treatment for alcoholism. Over time, however, more demanding branches of AA that focused on self-replication outcompeted the original strain. These more virulent branches focus on a strict lifestyle that mandates regular interactions with group members in which participants build and reinforce a personal narrative that frames ongoing involvement in AA as an intrinsic part of recovery. This viral iteration of AA has become so effective, it has even infiltrated the U.S. government, making AA meetings (conversion camps) a court-ordered consequence of some types of legal violations.

An effective tool used by this branch of AA is the concept of a “dry drunk” (i.e., someone who cured their alcoholism using a method other than AA). Dry drunks are regarded with the same disgust and disdain with which a hard religious culture would regard an apostate. We have AA’s disdain toward dry drunks to thank for non-alcoholic beer being taxed the same as alcoholic beer in the U.S. AA members have enough say in the U.S. government to limit access to non-alcoholic beer, as it is used in other methodologies of quitting and makes people “dry drunks.”

While there is an iteration of AA that does genuine good in the world, anyone who espouses a belief in the concept of “dry drunk” is clearly just in a cult. The concept of looking down on people who quit drinking through other methods—several of which boast higher success rates than AA—shows that the point of said faction is not about getting people off alcohol but getting them into AA. The derision of dry drunks almost implies that they are worse off than if they were still alcoholics—which, to the viral iteration of AA, they are, because at least an alcoholic is still a potential convert.

You may read all this and think AA was designed from the start to be a self-perpetuating, cult-like meme. It was not. The founders’ thoughts on the subject are well documented. Bill W., Alcoholics Anonymous’ co-founder, is quoted as saying things like:

“Physicians who are familiar with alcoholism agree there is no such thing as making a normal drinker out of an alcoholic. Science may one day accomplish this, but it hasn’t done so yet.”

To him, AA was a stop gap until a pharmacological intervention could be found (he spent his life looking for one in fact).

We now have pharmacological interventions like the Sinclair Method that reliably (in 80% of cases) cure alcoholism. However, they have been to a great extent blocked from use in the USA in large part due to the influence of AA and the belief that people who quit using these methods are dry drunks.

OK … we get it: Who is going to want to join AA once people learn that all they need to do is take a pill an hour before drinking as if they were lactose intolerant or something and after a few months they would no longer have an addiction?

The effectiveness and low cost of the Sinclair Method is an existential threat to the AA virus. Fortunately for that virus, the drug used in the Sinclair Method, Naltrexone, is no longer under patent, so no large pharma company has a financial interest in educating the public about it. This has made it easy for AA to prevent knowledge about it from spreading and keep it illegal in the U.S. (for a documentary on this check out One Little Pill—or you can check out this database of studies on the topic^[41]).

In this way, AA has likely led to more deaths than all other cults in all of human history combined (around 0.7M people every ten years)—not because it was created to be evil, but due to simple memetic evolutionary cycles.^[42]

Actually, it’s worse than that—it’s worse than just Alcoholics Anonymous leading to the deaths of almost a million people every decade. You know how people say drinking alcohol can cause brain damage? While heavy binge drinking can cause brain damage, most of the brain damage associated with moderate alcohol consumption comes from the withdrawal process upon non-pharmacologically assisted quitting (this causes neurotoxic lesions in the frontal lobe).^[43] The mental pain you feel upon quitting alcohol (that you don’t feel when using the Sinclair Method) is your brain trying to tell you it is suffering serious damage. Given the mechanism of action of this damage, it is very unlikely that it would also appear in someone who used the Sinclair Method to quit. We would therefore go so far as to say it should be malpractice to ever recommend AA to an individual until after they were certain they were not one of the 80% of people the Sinclair Method worked on. It is genuinely astounding to us that the damage caused by quitting without pharmacological assistance is not a bigger story. The fact that it isn’t is a testament to the power of the AA cult.

For notes on how a culture might deal with addictions, jump to page 802 of the Appendix.

Religious Psychology

Many cultivars have adopted elements of the practice we now call psychology. The culture that most aggressively uses psychology to convert members is Scientology. The religion heavily leverages a realization that any environment in which an individual may rewrite their personal narrative is a great place to convert them and inspire deeper commitment. Not only is Scientology’s core recruiting practice essentially a psychologist appointment in which subjects hold a galvanic skin response rod, but they also use other, similar practices to recruit through their own alternative to Alcoholics Anonymous.

This is in part why Scientology is so hostile to psychologists—they are competing for the same customer base. Both psychologists and Scientologists will attempt to convert one customer base away from the other using many of the same techniques.

How can a cultivar protect against this type of predation? Almost nothing is more dangerous to a culture, on the individual level, than a member rewriting their personal narrative under the guidance of someone from another culture, be that person a psychologist or a life coach. It is for this reason that many cultures try to take on this narrative rewriting role themselves.

Almost all successful cultivars feature mechanisms for within-culture counseling. The best example is that of Catholic Confessions. When an individual is feeling doubt about their personal narrative—when they are questioning whether they are a good person—they can go to the church and the church acknowledges they did something wrong while giving them a concrete path to redeeming themselves through tedious but easily accomplishable action.

Catholic confession is brilliant for a number of reasons. First, it builds into the individual’s personal narrative that they need the Church in order to be a good person, creating dependency. Second, while confession obligates people to acknowledge their failures and shortcomings, it provides them with an entirely feasible path to redemption. Psychologically speaking, this is much more effective than trying to convince someone they did not screw up or admitting to someone that they did screw up and they need to learn to live with their mistake—not to mention telling someone they must actually rectify that mistake.

Catholic confession also cleverly anonymizes the individual to whom adherents confess, meaning confessors are dependent on the Church itself rather than a specific individual while also making it harder for priests to abuse any relationship they develop with adherents through confessions. As an added bonus, the format of confessions is formulaic enough that even fairly untrained and low-skilled people can execute the process effectively (though obviously skill can make a big difference in quality).

The importance of this last point cannot be overemphasized. We have gone over how easy it is for abusive narrative writing practices to devolve into looser systems or for narrative writing to be performed in a sloppy manner that makes things worse. The confession system is incredibly restrictive and performed with what can essentially be thought of as a fairly simple script, making it scalable with only minimum quality control. (We really cannot overemphasize the elegance and effectiveness of this system.)

These sorts of narrative-building, psychologist-adjacent roles are not unique to the above-mentioned cultures and exist everywhere, from Judaism to Mormonism. While it is easy to look at psychological solutions offered by religious communities and regard them as inferior to those offered by secular communities, there is evidence suggesting these solutions (or at least adherence to “harder” cultures) may ultimately be more effective than modern psychological services. In fact, the study, “Mental Illness and the Left,”^[44] shows that left-wing individuals (who see more psychologists on average) suffer from more mental health problems across almost all categories (while we understand some see Kirkegaard as biased, the study itself seems well conducted and its findings align with those from sources like Pew Research Center).^[45] In addition, religious individuals suffer from fewer mental health problems on average (this is one of those obscenely well-replicated findings).^[46]

One could argue this is correlation and not causation and that it is the suffering certain groups experience that makes them left wing (and thus more likely to adhere to soft cultures). One could also argue that people with mental health problems leave religions at higher rates. Both suppositions strike us as unlikely given that one could just as easily argue that the more a person suffers in life, the more likely they are to be right wing—e.g., that poor and uneducated people lean much further to the right—and those traits are also associated with religiosity (If you find this topic interesting, check the footnote for a few research papers exploring different theories on why conservatives are happier.)^[47]

In addition to evidence that hard culture adherents might enjoy some protection from mental health issues, researchers have also found correlations between hard culture membership and happiness. For example, the aforementioned study (“Mental Illness and the Left”) also shows people who lean the farthest to the right (and thus are more likely to be from hard cultures) are also the happiest.^[48] In terms of mental health, going to a psychologist is both dramatically more expensive and strictly worse than being from many hard religious cultures.^[49] (There are, of course, exceptions—for example, being anxious or uncertain about one’s relationship with the divine is correlated with psychological distress.^[50])

As we mention at the beginning of the book, the human brain evolved to work within a strict cultural framework and then co-evolved with those frameworks. Removing that framework from a person and expecting them to be psychologically healthy is like expecting an engine to operate well without oil.

How does one build a new culture or religion that leverages the wisdom of existing cultures’ and religions’ mental health services while protecting members from predatory secular actors—be they MLMs or codependency-fostering psychologists?

In building House Collins’ culture, we face an additional challenge in that our culture is liable to splinter every generation (with many descendants creating new cultivars and Houses), meaning many iterations will be quite small (i.e. just one family). This makes it impossible for us to create our own version of, say, Catholic confession, which requires larger populations with structured, institutional roles. Even small-scale correlates we might design aren’t feasible, as parents simply aren’t reliable or palatable figures in a family to provide these services (and they, too, need mental health support). How, then, can we develop a network of trustworthy, trained, and non-related authority figures who can help members of our cultivar rewrite their personal narratives?

One option is to create a culturally compliant playbook and encourage members to turn to this playbook for counsel without outside intervention from a human. This is hardly a new concept. Throughout history and in the present day, people living in isolation have turned to religious and philosophical texts to help them rewrite their narratives, work through mental struggles, and find solace. Today, thanks to the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, this approach has more potential than ever before, as AI agents can be trained on specific bodies of text and then represent them to humans in an interactive, conversational format.

It comes as no surprise to psychology-familiar readers of our first book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, that we originally wrote it as a playbook for a new model of psychological therapy designed to be a more holistic, less-susceptible-to-abuse alternative to CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy). As we fleshed it out, the Guide to Life transformed into a more narrative format, but the “if-then” structuring of the book still remains in its overall structure and flow. This is true to the extent that we have been contacted by an artificial intelligence company that would like to use the book as the basis for a form of AI-driven coaching or therapy that leverages our model.

We can therefore simply encourage members of our House to turn to The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life and our other general life philosophy texts for counsel—or even to interact with an AI trained on these texts. Other cultures can do the same with their own foundational texts so long as they sufficiently address the major struggles people face.

How Culture Relates to Society

This chapter will focus on how cultivars interact with the societies they inhabit. We cut out a number of considerations (perhaps interesting, but not worthy of top billing) which can be found in the Appendix:

Hofstede’s Other Cultural Dimensions (p804): This covers cultural differences like power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term vs short-term orientation, but adds little insight that is not already discussed in the research.
Relation to Government (p813): This details our early thoughts on why some cultures try to dominate local governments while others don’t.

Cultures and Conservatism

Conservatism as a political movement sees the individual as an avatar of their cultivar and optimizes for intergenerational fitness and cultural agency. In contrast, progressivism as a movement atomizes the individual and focuses on intragenerational quality of life and individual agency. That said, “conservatism” is not really one cohesive group as we often think of it but rather the manifestation of a number of hard cultural strategies optimized to protect intergenerational fitness.

Drives to Conservatism

Values Driven: This form of conservatism occurs when a cultivar encourages positions on specific issues that nudge adherents toward conservative political factions. The Catholic position on abortion, the LDS Church’s former position on gay marriage, and the Muslim prohibition on alcohol all provide great examples of this. All three of these prohibitions lower freedom and quality of life within a generation but increase intergenerational fitness.

Disposition Driven: This form of conservatism is driven by a cultural aversion to change and “causing a fuss.” A great example of this can be seen in Swiss culture, in which some Cantons did not allow women to vote until 1991. The Swiss will aggressively enforce a “don’t cause a fuss” culture through social shaming, with neighbors coming to our hotel room multiple times during our last visit to the nation because we “laughed too loud.” Famously, one woman was denied citizenship because she put bells on her cows, which annoyed local residents.

Utopian Driven: Utopian-driven conservatism exists with the goal of creating a paradise that is only achievable if everyone within their community is able to live by a certain aesthetic. The Puritan branch of Calvinism, the Anabaptist movement, and ISIS present archetypal examples of this drive. When these cultures are symbiotic with the wider societies they inhabit, they typically isolate themselves and attempt to build walled-off paradises.

Dominating versions of such cultures (see: “Roles in Multicultural Ecosystems” on page 460) manifest as some of the most violent and aggressive of all cultivar varieties. A Calvinist-derived cultivar (the Independents) serves as a great example of this through Oliver Cromwell and The New Model Army, though obviously ISIS serves as a salient modern example.

When not dominating, these cultivars are often some of the most outspoken advocates for laissez-faire governance at the state level. The typical goal of this advocacy is not to loosen the religious restrictions and totalitarianism of their local communities but to protect them from outside interference. While they can be thought of as advocating for cultural agency, they are not fighting for the individual agency of members within their culture.

Conservatism and Communism

Almost all cultures are communist within their communities and even more so within family units. In such settings, resources are granted to each according to their needs and taken from each according to their ability. Often more conservative cultures are the most communist on micro scales. The difference between conservative hard cultures and actual communists is the extent to which they trust state institutions to run things better than they do—or at least to not be a threat to them. The more an individual trusts their own community to be fair and well run, the less they will trust a government to interfere and the more “conservative” they will appear.

We cannot overstate just how socialist many conservative-seeming hard cultures can be on an in-group level. Consider how Anabaptists often build houses and pay medical bills for fellow community members, and how Evangelical groups donate food to those in need through things like soup kitchens. To some extent, when a government starts running alternatives to these services, it robs cultures that provide them of a significant conversion pipeline and mechanism for enforcing their values, which explains some opposition to government-run iterations of these services (as we mentioned earlier, government-run orphanages killed Shaker culture).

Conservative vs. Progressive Child Rearing

When you inspect debates over child rearing through the lens of conservatism being the manifestation of an optimization around intergenerational cultural fitness and progressivism as an optimization around intragenerational quality of life and individual agency, then you can see the key goal of progressive child-rearing is to allow children to become “whoever it is they want to be” whereas conservative child rearing places specific expectations on kids. This comes up a lot in public discussion about us (your gentle authors): Progressively minded individuals see the expectations we place on our kids as a form of abuse. There is no use trying to please people who hold such an extremely different cultural perspective.

Immigration and Conservative Values

Historically, opposing immigration made a lot of sense for cultural groups looking to maintain intergenerational fidelity (as lowering immigration reduced external cultural competition as well as competition over state services). At the same time, immigration is an act of immediate individual agency, which makes it appealing to progressive groups. While the situation has long been clear cut, it has become significantly more nuanced in modern times. Immigration is only as partisan as it is today due to blind momentum.

Suppose you are an ethno-cultivar (an ethnically homogeneous cultural group) keen to protect itself. Surely policies against immigration will yield the best protection … right? Actually, the ethno-cultivars at the most risk in the world today are often those which most effectively prevent immigration (Korea and Japan serve as two salient examples here). In contrast, ethno-cultivars that have successfully staved off birth rate collapse in the face of rising education and prosperity tend to occupy highly diverse environments (consider Jews, some Arab Muslims, and some White American Christian cultivars).

Furthermore, ethno-cultivars that relocate from homogeneous, low-immigration zones to multicultural, high-immigration zones (each with relatively high prosperity and education) appear to enjoy increases in their birth rates. Consider that Korean immigrants to the US enjoy a whopping 0.4! Increase in fertility rates.^[51] For an ethno-state with a fertility rate of 0.8, that is insane.

Just looking at a list of developed countries by fertility rate makes this phenomenon blindingly obvious. Countries like the U.S.A., France, and Israel will top that list (all very diverse countries) while monoethnic states will all be at the bottom.[52] This also is not just a case of immigrant birthrate buoying the countries average, the white population in these countries fertility rate also rises higher than their neighboring countries.[53] Nor is this a “white” phenom as it can be seen in Muslim countries as well, with the nearly exclusively Shia Iran (90%-95%) having an abysmally low fertility rate while Muslims in similar economic conditions in the more diverse India have a dramatically higher fertility rate.

It’s entirely understandable for members of a culture to want their taxes to go toward culturally aligned efforts (and therefore to be against immigration). We are just pointing out that this isolationist approach seems to do more harm than good.

The dynamism created by culturally diverse ecosystems is easily measured. For example, one large study of 7,600 London-based firms found that those which had more diverse management teams were more innovative.^[54] That is not to say studies never run counter to this claim, especially when looking at narrow, highly derived circumstances (like when a team is being managed poorly),^[55] but large meta-studies on the subject consistently find that at least some forms of diversity improve innovation or productivity—and none conclude that diversity hurts.^[56] We struggle to even see why this point needs to be argued. Of course a culture sharpened in a competitive environment is going to outcompete one protected from competition.

There are of course times when breakaway states become a necessity—such as when a state or some other group is actively trying to erase your cultivar or prevent its members from practicing their core beliefs (through something like state-controlled and mandated education). In the absence of such adverse forces, it seems optimal for a cultivar to seek to inhibit a diverse landscape.

Cultural Volume

The fact that we were once almost kicked out of a Swiss hotel for laughing too much and too loudly made us realize it is probably worth talking about cultural “volume.” Having studied as an undergrad in Northern Europe after growing up in the United States, I (Malcolm) can say it is not just a stereotype that people in most Northern European countries are much more subdued. This problem was compounded for me as I am from a uniquely “intense” and boisterous cultivar. What causes such significant cultural differences in expressed and preferred “energy” volume?

It can seem counterintuitive that the Calvinist culture—which is known for framing emotional indulgence as a sin—appears to be high volume, intense, and heady. People often confuse not indulging in emotions with not feeling them or not expressing them. An ultra-high-energy approach to life has long been associated with the American Calvinists, with David Hackett Fischer noting of colonial Puritans in Albion’s Seed that:

“European travelers repeatedly observed with astonishment the energy of the inhabitants. One visitor noted that (Puritan) children seemed normally to move at a full run. Another remarked that their elders invented the rocking chair so they could keep moving even while sitting still.”^[57]

With a modern observer noting:

“The stereotypes aren’t fair, but they don’t come out of nowhere. Calvinists are ‘cold,’ ‘heady,’ (stimulating, high energy, intoxicating) and ‘condescending.’ They think they have it all figured out and everyone else is blind, slow, or stubborn. They’re so lost in their books, they’re not interested in the needs around them.”^[58]

This resonates. In high school I (Malcolm) remember being very confused as to why I was the only one who ran everywhere. Walking seemed like such a waste of time.

We mention this as it is an interesting point to be made about “high volume” cultures. Many people assume that being a “judgy” conservative culture that values emotional control is intrinsically related to not also being “extra.” In fact, the opposite is true, as anyone who has spent much time around Anabaptists (Mennonites/Amish people) could tell you.

As to why some highly “conservative” cultures seem to feature high-energy members at disproportionate rates, we can only speculate. Maybe it is that these cultures are much more confident in their actions and less concerned about what others think of them, leading them to hold back less.

It could be that the very reason these cultures are so structured is because adherents within them tend to have very high-volume sociological profiles that need that structure. Perhaps cultures with structures helping high-energy people contain themselves protect those sociological profiles from being eliminated from the gene pool, meaning more boisterous people ultimately survive within these cultures while those profiles get extinguished in less structured environments. (This may also explain the crazy high rates of alcoholism in the Calvinist community and the stereotype of Calvinists either being teetotalers or heavy drinkers.)

Is high volume a useful adaptation for a culture to have? We suspect not, as it makes it harder for members of that culture to “blend into” society at large. On the plus side, difficulty blending in likely decreases cultural bleed.

Psychedelics & Hallucinogens

Psychedelics and hallucinogens have been used throughout history by a diversity of cultures to experience a feeling of the divine. This can make them an effective tool for cultures that want to convert individuals through experiences rather than logic—it is also what makes them dangerous from the perspective of a cultivar like ours.

A major hazard of psychedelics and hallucinogens is that they create an illusion of expanded consciousness while typically guiding people down well-trodden paths. We liken pharmacologically-driven religious epiphanies to amusement park haunted house rail rides: The experience is “real” and nothing like daily life, but people who undergo it are mostly exposed to the same sorts of things.

Just as haunted house riders may experience varying levels of fear and notice different features, people on pharmacologically induced mystical journeys experience varying aspects and levels of the fairly-limited set of features depending on dosage, priming, and personal physiology.^[59] The experience is not guided by some higher truth, but by “rails”—grooves worn into mental pathways through shortcuts evolution made when programming how the human brain processes feelings of love, self, connectedness, meaning, and the divine.

Some fascinating studies explore this phenomenon. One published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology includes responses from 2,561 adults about their single most memorable encounter with a being (or beings) after smoking or vaporizing DMT (the stuff in ayahuasca).^[60] These encounters share a remarkable number of commonalities.

When we started writing this book, we assumed that psychedelics and hallucinogens offered a trade-off between increased creativity and a number of negative effects. When we actually dove into the data, it became clear things were much more nuanced. As this study^[61] shows, while people on cannabis are more jovial and believe they are more creative, they are measurably not more creative. As this study^[62] shows, psilocybin (the active compound in most psychedelic mushrooms) actually decreases task-based creativity while increasing spontaneous creativity (i.e., psilocybin appears to make people less creative at anything specific they put their minds to).

Even the feeling of being closer to others produced by some drugs appears to be, at least in part, illusory. For example, a 2021 study demonstrated that while MDMA appears to increase feelings of “closeness to others” and euphoria, it fails to boost actual prosocial behavior (specifically: task-based empathy, trust, or cooperative behavior).^[63] In addition, while hallucinogens like cannabis reduce short-term feelings of depression and anxiety, they appear to significantly increase these sensations over the long run^[64](and it should go without saying cannabis has negative effects on working memory).^[65]

Why do cults so often rely on mind-altering substances in their recruiting processes? Not only can they effectively fake feelings of being “better” in various ways (by making people feel more connected and creative) but they also make people incredibly gullible, more forgiving of betrayal, and less likely to run from psychological and physical abuse. In one study, people on hallucinogens were more likely to trust partners in a collaboration game (and more quickly recover when trust was broken)^[66] and in another they lowered experiential avoidance (a person’s drive to escape situations that induce anxiety, pain, and other unpleasant mental states).^[67]

While the evidence was compelling enough to change our minds on this subject (that these types of drugs increase creativity), it was not unilateral (as is almost always the case in science). For example, this study^[68] shows an increase in creativity resulting from Ayahuasca consumption. Some research also suggests that hallucinogens produce greater neuroplasticity, which might be useful in some very specific circumstances.^[69]

Meta-studies on the topic seem largely inconclusive, with one astutely pointing out that “feelings of creativity may be an inconsistent result of a more general effect of these drugs, such as alterations in availability of mental representations or changes in Bayesian inference.”^[70] Some recent meta-analyses indicate that the belief that psychedelics boost creativity was at one point bolstered by a series of poorly designed studies conducted in the 1970s that are still often cited in pop-science books covering this topic.

One thing that is clear across pretty much all studies is that psychedelics and hallucinogens will at least make you feel as if you are more creative. This is not to say pharmaceuticals like these have no use. For example, MDMA has shown to be useful in the treatment of PTSD^[71]and psychedelics have shown themselves to be effective against depression^[72](possibly by reintroducing more flexibility to the way people think).^[73]

So no, you probably didn’t gain a deeper understanding of the oneness of all things by taking psychedelics. Certain types of psychedelics just intrinsically cause feelings of the divine while permanently eroding your sense of individuality while others cause you to imagine small benevolent beings behind the fabric of reality. This is not to say psychedelics are never useful; feeling a sense of oneness could provide an individual with perspective, enabling them to consider new metaphysical possibilities.

It may be helpful to contextualize the usefulness of psychedelics as being akin to showing a CGI video of Earth orbiting the sun to someone who has trouble envisioning it. Neither psychedelics/hallucinogens nor CGI depictions provide evidence in and of themselves, nor are they depictions of what is really happening, but they can help people sort through difficult-to-grasp concepts. If a person has trouble conceptualizing how small their place in the universe might be or how connected people are, psychedelics can be useful.

One critical thing to remember as a culture is that the feeling of profundity does not correlate with the substance of profundity and can be generated by simplistic and easy-to-replicate trigger mechanisms. While psychedelics and hallucinogens are probably the “easiest” of these things to create, there are dozens of others from group dancing with loud music to rituals based around repeating a chain of words. This tactic of chanting words to lower a person’s mental inhibitions and trick them into feelings of profundity has been independently evolved by dozens of cultivars and is even specifically warned against in the Bible: “When ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking” (Matthew 6:7, KJV).

Adopting these ecstatic states as a cultivar (whether they are reached by drugs, dancing, or chanting) has both upsides and downsides. When a person is in one of these states, they become very susceptible to someone else wanting to imprint an idea deep into their subconscious (allowing high fidelity cultural transference and fast conversions). In the absence of someone attempting to implant ideas in them a person in this state will often deepen beliefs society or a subculture they affiliate with has implanted in them. In short, if you want to quickly convert a lot of stupid people or have higher intergenerational cultural fidelity (with little room for updating the culture) then these states can be of extremely high utility—if on the other hand, you want a culture that disproportionately targets smart highly lucid people and evolves quickly then stay away from them. (Perhaps this tradeoff could be mitigated by creating a culture that has a “smart” ruling class that uses such experiences on an underclass to make them more obedient and to more efficiently harvest resources from them.)

Speaking of the effect of rituals on the human mind …

Rituals and Ceremonies

While both rituals and ceremonies involve a set of actions without any immediately apparent functional purpose, rituals are private whereas ceremonies have an audience or are otherwise communal activities. (We say “immediately apparent” as it sometimes turns out that a ritual—like Islamic / Jewish hand washing—had a very important purpose that was not fully understood at the time.)

Why do so many cultures lean into long, expensive, time-consuming practices that provide no obvious benefit? Behind all the pomp, rituals do provide a benefit—and a big one. Research has shown that rituals can alleviate grief and improve overall mental health.^[74] In addition, rituals performed before a high-pressure task (like singing in public) reduce anxiety and increase confidence. This may help to explain why almost every “old” culture in the world has evolved heavy use of rituals.

As one test reader put it: “Rituals are one example of organically evolved spontaneous order that provides security through constraints on human behavior (things at the right place, at the right time). Rituals probably outsource a lot of anxiety by giving you something certain to do/trust.”

Ceremonies—public rituals—help to transform a culture from a series of beliefs and practices into something that feels like “a thing.” The social proof generated by seeing a bunch of people drop what they’re doing, gather together, and do something that is typically nonproductive (and often not even that fun) is incredibly strong—plus gathering people together to perform something culturally or religiously significant helps to establish shared knowledge and disseminate important social norms.^[75]

Ceremonies furthermore play an important role in self-narrative building. They remind individuals of their place within the world and their religious culture, often focusing both on submission to said culture, belonging, and a sense of grandeur.

As we mention in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, it shocks us how frequently religious ceremonies are reminiscent of BDSM submission displays. Examples range from tefillin (black leather straps some Jewish branches tightly wrap around themselves) to self-flagellation, the use of cilices (aka hair shirts—garments, sometimes belts, made of coarse cloth, animal hair, or metal spikes worn close to the skin for the purpose of being uncomfortable), and the kneeling, hand-clasp-style of prayer some Christian groups use.

While some readers may bristle at our drawing connections between religious rituals and sexual acts, conceptually it makes a lot of sense that religious adherents trying to signal submission to a God and people turned on by the act of submission might co-evolve similar practices. We are also not arguing that there is a sexual nature to religious submission rituals. It’s not religious groups’ fault that our society has strayed so far from hard culture that the primary context many have for submission displays is for sexual gratification. That said, if you are trying to come up with a new unique submission ritual for your culture, BDSM will offer fertile grounds for inspiration.

History time! Why do some people assume a kneeled-with-hands-clasped-above-head position when praying? It turns out that this ritual is derivative of a medieval ceremony in which a feudal supplicant would approach the lord to whom they pledged themself, kneel before him, and clasp their fingers in an interlocking fashion. Thusly approached, the lord would place his hands around the supplicant’s clasped hands to accept their gesture.

This gesture signals submission through vulnerability. By kneeling with their head down, the supplicant exposes their neck, showing the lord he could cut their heads off should he so desire. By allowing their clasped hands and interlocked fingers to be grasped, the supplicant renders themselves helpless (try unclasping your hands with a friend’s hands around them—you can’t).

Over time, the position became more symbolic than functional. Finger interlocking was mostly dropped and many came to assume the position with slightly lower hands. This gesture’s feudal roots, however, remain as an interesting origin story for a common gesture.

As you consider which rituals and ceremonies you might incorporate into the cultivar you intentionally design or reinforce, don’t be afraid to consider your cultural and religious roots. As an example, a friend of ours who hails from an Afro-Latin background of Puerto Rican Spiritualism practices a secular form of divination (if you are not familiar with the practice, Voodoo is the archetypal practice hailing from this kind of cultivar). Specifically, he uses a pair of dice to assist him in daily decision making. When choosing among several options that seem equally optimal, he rolls the dice to gain different meanings. Numbers resulting from the dice throw don’t just reply in the binary but signal gradations of urgency to their suggestion.

This is brilliant for two reasons: First, it cuts down on the mental load imposed by the various decisions a person faces every day for which there is no clear answer by reducing decision fatigue, the phenomenon in which a person gets worse at making decisions through the course of a day depending on how many decisions they have already made (if you want to learn more about this topic, its Wikipedia page is a good jumping off point).^[76] Second, it has a 50% chance of giving you the motivation to do something you know you probably should do but really can’t be asked to do. For example, one night we were hosting a party and, being a nerdy introvert like us, this friend was looking for any excuse to not go, so he rolled the dice to try to get out of it. They came up in a way which forced him to and he ended up making a useful business connection that night.

What about the culture we are building? This is an area in which our birth cultures (which despise ritual, seeing it as self-indulgent and inefficacious) are in heavy conflict with logic and the data. We are the types of people who couldn’t even stomach sitting through our own graduation ceremonies. We were even the first people to leave our own wedding (and it was a great wedding!). To attempt to reconcile this deeply-set hatred of ceremony with the data, we strive to construct cultural holidays and practices that serve a specific and high utility purpose while still involving ritual. We will also build in a cultural “review” process into our House’s governance system that allows rituals and ceremonies to be modified or removed when they no longer provide value.

Medicine and Technology

We live in an age in which it is easy to look down on cultures that are suspicious of technology. We hear about the children of Christian Scientists dying after their parents refused a blood transfusion and forget that some data indicates that Christian Scientists actually had higher life outcomes than those that went to doctors when the cultivar first evolved—mostly due to doctors at the time being leech-happy opium addicts. (Note: One of our test readers thought we meant Christians that were scientists. Christian Science is a denomination of Christianity unique for believing that reality is purely spiritual and the material world an illusion.)

While technophobia had a place in the past, surely it is not culturally advantageous anymore … right? We live in an age in which apps have been designed to hijack simple dopaminergic reward pathways and create dangerous addictions, lowering the time individuals have to spend on the meaningful things in their lives. Memes have become especially virulent as we’ve become more connected than ever before. This allows for “supervirus memes” to evolve which erode traditional cultures at rates we had not thought possible (consider Mormons going from four kids per family to almost below replacement rate in less than a decade).

Perhaps there is something to technophobia. After all, the Anabaptists (Amish and Mennonites), cultures that have proved most resistant to these threats, are extremely technophobic.

Cultures that approach technology with suspicion and believe that indulgence in technology leads to sin are almost always going to be healthier than those that outright ban it. Consider Mennonites: While they use cell phones with internet access and Facebook for getting jobs and work, they voluntarily password-protect many apps then give those passwords to their spouses or friends. To us, Mennonites (specifically the Beachy Amish), represent the ideal balance for which a technophobic culture should aim. They allow technology where it is directly efficacious but maintain rules and views that prevent it from corrupting them.

While we can see technophobia as being a winning strategy for some Houses registered with the Index, it is not one that will ever sit fully comfortably with us personally. Instead, we lean toward the other extreme. As our culture frames it, problems that stem from technology result from a failure to dig deep enough into one’s technological options or through considering some solutions “unethical” or “off limits.”

For example, we handle dopaminergic addiction brought on by technological devices through a combination of education and pharmaceutical intervention. We created a coming-of-age ritual in which our kids train rats in Skinner boxes, developed a holiday tied to overcoming dopaminergic addictions, and teach our kids how to leverage pharmaceuticals like Naltrexone to block opioid pathways. We have even debated incorporating TMS systems—transmagnetic stimulation systems (TMS) can temporarily shut off and reboot parts of the brain—into our kid’s emotional education.

As we have noted elsewhere, our House’s culture is as technophilic as possible when it comes to fertility technology and the production of children (Bloomberg even did a piece on us titled: “The Pandora’s Box of Embryo Testing Is Officially Open: Genetic testing companies promise they can predict someone’s probable future health. Some parents don’t want to stop there” and Insider covered our bullish attitude in another piece titled: “Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids. Inside the movement to take ‘control of human evolution.’” ^[77] ^[78]). Given our theological mandate for intergenerational improvement, we have been using the most cutting-edge technology available in our own family planning and expect our children to do the same—which for our kids could mean aggressive gene editing combined with in-vitro gametogenesis (IVG).

We might recommend that some branches of our family consider the introduction of visible genetic markers to their lines (such as purple skin, uniquely collared eyes, or whatever marker is easy and safe to introduce), creating both more of a unique perception of our community by society at large and a feeling of community identity. (While some might be horrified by this idea, it is much less extreme than something like circumcision as a cultural identifier, which strictly takes something away from a person. We are all born with an ethnicity we did not choose—it is arguably both empowering and functional to just manufacture a new one when you start doing heavy gene editing.)

Education

While we don’t engage with the idea much as a society, one of the ways cultivars differentiate the most is the way they relate to education and the role education plays in the lives of its adherents.

To understand what we mean by this, consider a few cultures’ varying approaches:

Many Islamic cultivars view education as a method for getting closer to God. This is why they were education rockstars until science started to run into conflict with Islamic theology. Islamic educational prowess was so renowned that European scientists of the Middle Ages would use Islamic-sounding pseudonyms so people would take them seriously. (To explore a scholarly analysis of this subject, check out Greek Thought, Arabic Culture by Dimitri Gutas.^{^[79]})
Most Quaker cultivars contextualize education as a means of nurturing a person’s spirit and self. In addition to framing the act of being educated as a means of spiritual development, Quakers also find spiritual development in teaching—hence it focuses on making education itself more effective and fun while generally avoiding the pedantics of higher education. (We have never met a Quaker who hasn’t taught—either professionally or recreationally—at some point in their lives.)
In many Catholic cultivars, education is one of a number of pathways to advancement up an internal hierarchy, making it mostly instrumental rather than an aim in and of itself. (Secular educational attainment is not the same prerequisite for respect in Catholic cultivars as it is in many others.)
Similar to the Catholic cultivar, the dominant Chinese cultivar, with a several-thousand-year long tradition of Confucianism and civil service exams, deeply values formal education as a means of social advancement. Unlike the Catholic cultivar, it attaches dramatically less respect to achievement “in spite of” low education. To achieve high status, a person must not only receive a high level of education, but secure a prestige position as a result of that education (what specifically is learned is not as important in the Chinese cultivar so long as it is useful in achieving secular prestige).^[80]
Higher education in Orthodox Jewish culture is pursued both for status and skills—and particularly skills tied to communication and debate. Jewish cultivars typically place a high level of value on every level of the educational system. (Note: Both Reform and Haredi cultivars have a very different relationship with education.)
Most Calvinist cultivars are obsessed with getting the “technically correct” answer to morality, human nature, and the metaphysical nature of reality while living life as efficaciously as possible. While investigation / research of these topics is sacred, education is just one of many tools one might use in this pursuit and doesn’t have intrinsic value.

Both Jewish and Calvinist cultures are known for being highly educated and putting a unique emphasis on learning in their child-rearing, so exploring their differences may elucidate how a culture’s relation to education is more nuanced than a spectrum ranging from “obsessed” to “indifferent.”

One can think of a cultivar’s relationship to education as the extent to which:

1. Their worldview drives individuals to become highly educated.

2. They respect education (i.e., a breadth of knowledge on many topics).

3. They respect the type of formalized and systematic education our current society defines as “education.”

Jewish culture is at the high end within all three metrics. This, in addition to other factors investigated earlier, likely contributes to uniquely favorable social and economic outcomes for members, particularly at the extreme ends of the “long-tail distribution.” For example, Nobel Prize winners and Supreme Court Justices are both well over 100 times more likely to be Jewish when controlling for Jewish representation in the general population.^[81]

The risk to Jewish culture from this stance is that if the certifying institutions for academic excellence become infected by the cultural supervirus (or any cultural virus) then the Jewish cultivars that respect those degrees as much or more than their internal cultural certification systems are also at risk. Fortunately, many of the more conservative Jewish cultivars have maintained robust ancestral systems of internal formalized debate and certification, which act as something of a “blood-brain barrier” for their cultivars.

Contrast this with Calvinist culture, which places a lot of respect on learning and investigation but maintains an intense distrust toward bureaucracies—especially certifying bureaucracies. To Calvinists, education is important, but mostly as a tool for changing the world and understanding the metaphysical nature of reality. Education in the absence of utility is sinful. It is considered dramatically more respectable to be an uneducated person who performs manual labor for a living than to be a highly educated person who has not applied that education to make an actionable change in the world.

This contrast manifests in stereotypes around Jews disproportionately pursuing careers as doctors and lawyers—careers which require high amounts of education and certification—as well as stereotypes around Calvinists disproportionately becoming inventors, industrialists, and entrepreneurs (e.g., Andrew Carnegie)—professions also that require high amounts of education but no certification. Ironically, Calvinist distaste for certification also explains in part their reputation for founding schools (something both we and family members have done) and writing copious strange polemics and treaties on purpose, morality, and the nature of reality (guilty as charged).^[82]

Our culturally inherited perspectives on education feel so hardwired we won’t try to deviate from them. That said, when it comes to views on education, there are many equally viable and desirable answers. When deciding what stance on education is best for your culture, give extra consideration to the manner in which you trust external institutions, the skills your adherents need most in order to thrive, and any “objective function” your culture’s core morality promotes, as different approaches to education tend to maximize different values.

Holidays and Traditions

We are largely unsatisfied with holidays as they exist now. Many modern holidays are more about commercial sales events than cultural values and many have been unmoored from their fitness-imparting cultural, philosophical, and religious underpinnings. As such, there is a case to be made for reconstructing a collection of holidays for whatever culture you choose to reinforce or develop.

In addition to instilling values in the next generation, family rituals play a critical role in healthy psychological development. In 2002, Eaker and Walters^[83] found not only that family ritual satisfaction was positively correlated with adolescent psychosocial development, but also that it mediated the relation between family boundaries and psychosocial development, and decreased levels of discontentedness. These types of findings have been replicated. For example, Yesel Yoon^[84] found in 2012 research that family ritual satisfaction correlates with greater psychological wellbeing in general.

As an added benefit, self-denial rituals found across cultures (Ramadan, Lent, the Fast of the Firstborn, etc.) help strengthen an individual’s inhibitory pathways in their prefrontal cortex, making it easier for them to shut down intrusive thoughts and snowballing emotional states.

A common hazard people encounter when creating new traditions involves an overreliance on the aesthetics of religious ceremonies, making them very “woo-woo.” Overdoing religious ceremonial hullabaloo produces torture sessions in which people are encouraged to hold hands, sing songs, and discuss intimate personal issues with strangers—far too cringe and cult-like to encourage widespread adoption.

Instead of focusing on the aesthetics of your evoked set of religious holidays, focus on designing a holiday to convey a specific culturally relevant message or lesson. Try to create a tradition that people would find aspirational and engaging: The type of thing someone would publicly flaunt online (i.e., make it Instagrammable).

We see one category of these as the “Instagram holidays.” This utilizes a date as an excuse to post something on social media or make a timely comment among friends, coworkers, and family. Two prominent examples of this can be seen in the form of Pi Day (March 14—3.14) and Star Wars Day (May the Fourth … as in “be with you”). While these holidays have been good at spreading (which is certainly more than we can say for most lame secular holidays, like the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s “Avoid Artichokes Day” and “Pirate Garb Day”) they have not blossomed into anything more than fads because they miss the four key ingredients of successful holiday design:

Child-centricity
Spectacle
Gift-giving or exchanges
Convening otherwise-dispersed people

Child-centricity

Children (and through children, parents) are the primary “customers” of holidays. A child’s wonder is what gives a holiday magic. Holidays mostly for adults, like Valentine’s Day in the U.S., have an off-key soullessness to them when contrasted against more child-centric holidays like Halloween, Christmas, and Easter. As such, a great holiday is very likely to feature a certain level of roleplay, imagination, and suspension of disbelief given these are means through which children interact with the world.

Spectacle

The importance of spectacle in holidays is exemplified by the most successful holiday/celebration day invented during our lifetimes: The gender reveal party. Invented by Jenna Karvunidis in 2008, gender reveal parties—in which expecting parents leverage some form of creative spectacle to reveal the sex of their soon-to-arrive new baby—have become so popular that already (in just 14 years) at least seven people have died as a result of their activities. Another great example of a holiday that has leveraged spectacle to spark engagement can be seen in the 4th of July, which, in terms of public consciousness, dramatically outcompetes similar secular holidays like Labor Day and Presidents’ Day.

Given that both Independence Day and gender reveal parties appear to be correlated with increased mortality risk and that other spectacle-heavy holidays, like Guy Fawkes Day, often involve fire and danger—we beseech readers to carefully consider and select idiot-proof spectacles that won’t cause death, injury, or major wildfires.

Gift-giving or exchanges

Holidays that seem to resonate with the public consciousness also commonly leverage gift giving or some form of exchange (such as candy in exchange for showing up in a costume on Halloween). The importance of gift-giving can be seen in the relatively higher popularity of Valentine’s Day in Japan (vis-a-vis Valentine’s Day in the U.S.), which features the ritualized gifting of handmade chocolates by women to the men in their lives (and is followed by White Day one month later, in which these gifts are reciprocated).

Convening otherwise-dispersed people

A great holiday will convene groups of people who would otherwise not see each other. This alone can carry an entire holiday, as we see with Thanksgiving in the United States, which really has very little else going for it. What is important to remember with this point is that this group need not be family. We can see this in the omnipresent 4th of July parade group, block party, or BBQ.

Beyond these powerful elements, successful holiday also often incorporate some element of:

Storytelling
Specific foods or ingredients
Thematic decorating schemes (anything that creates a good photo opportunity)
FOMO-inducing photo opportunities (any opportunity to post a photo in which you are clearly celebrating a distinct special event that leaves others regretting their lack of involvement)
Competitions (though these have largely been removed from our declawed society)
Easy-to-enter, hard-to-master elements (holidays should require minimal effort to engage with but also bestow serious social credibility to those who go all-out, spending weeks to prepare or set up decorations)

One technique that can be used when designing a holiday or tradition is to modify an already practiced public holiday by adding private traditions that imbue it with meaning. Christianity was great at doing this with its early holidays, twisting pre-existing public ceremonies to highlight a specific Christian cultural message. Unfortunately, the memetically replicable aspects of those Christian holidays have mostly overwhelmed these holidays’ more substantive religious messages.

Suppose you wanted to create a holiday designed to help kids better empathize with perspectives vastly different from their own by “walking in someone else’s shoes” for a day. This holiday will feel far more natural if built into Halloween, which would allow a child to practice the “substantive” ritual at home (e.g., through discussions over dinners about what it must be like to be a vampire, what vampires have to worry about, the ethics of deciding where and how to source blood for sustenance, etc.) while still carrying over the costume and character into a public setting without seeming weird (e.g. by trick-or-treating as a vampire with friends).

When designing holidays, also keep in mind that there are three major types of cultural celebrations:

Annual holidays: Holidays like Diwali, Easter, and Halloween that happen once every year
Milestone holidays: Celebrations like birthdays, bar/bat mitzvahs, quinceañeras, weddings, or baby showers
Routine holidays: Celebrations like the Jewish Sabbath or Mormon Family Home Evenings

To ignore milestones is to miss a chance to frame important life developments in the context of cultural values and imperatives. To overlook routine holidays is to miss a huge opportunity to make the practice of cultural values routine.

Below we will describe three altered or new holidays that you are free to either take and use within your own family or see as inspiration for holiday innovations of your own. We will go over our full calendar of holidays in detail in a future book.

Future Day

Every year in the three days leading up to the year’s end, we practice a holiday in which our kids are visited by “the Future Police,” have a vice-facilitating possession stolen from them, and are encouraged to write a contract detailing how they will make the world a better place—which will ensure the restoration of their stolen property (plus a small gift) and the opportunity to earn a bigger gift if and when they achieve a goal stated in the contract. By folding this holiday into the wider seasonal zeitgeist around self-improvement, goal setting, and new commitments, we are able to easily leverage existing trends and tendencies in a way that reinforces important elements of our House’s worldview.

Day One: The Theft

During the first night of the holiday, the Future Police take one item from each child and replace it with a calling card.

The Calling Card: The card resembles a small business card with cartoon mouse in a Skinner box on one side and a cryptic message or cipher on the other (more on this later).

The Item Taken: The item taken is a possession (or means of access to a resource) with Skinner-box-style addictive tendencies to which the child has become addicted (common examples include phones, game consoles, social media accounts, etc.). If one of our kids decides to hide a device they’re addicted to, they will not get one of these cards and will both feel left out and miss an opportunity to receive gifts.

A Note on Skinner boxes: A Skinner box, also known as an operant box or behavior box, is an enclosed apparatus that contains a bar or key that an animal subject can manipulate in order to obtain reinforcement (picture a mouse in a cage that can push a lever to get food). If food appears every time the animal subject manipulates the apparatus, it will only engage with it when hungry. If the food appears only sometimes, the subject will engage the apparatus constantly—regardless of hunger or need for food—as though it were “addicted.” This effect is what causes addiction to things like approval on social media or ultra-simplistic gameplay loops in some video games (like loot boxes).

We chose to build the holiday around Skinner boxes instead of the concept of generic vice for three reasons:

Super effective Skinner boxes are something of a new challenge for our species. We need our kids to be able to engage with the online world to be successful while also understanding how a person can waste their lives pressing a lever for points.
It avoids vague definitions of sin, which would allow parents to impose arbitrary or fleeting generational values on their kids as opposed to intergenerational family values.
It conveys our intergenerational value that one of the highest orders of immorality involves engaging in non-efficacious action.

Day Two: Future Day

The kids create a contract to demonstrate to the Future Police their plan to create a better future. This contract details both a vision for the future and one concrete thing they can attempt to achieve over the course of the year, which will help that future come to pass. Once contracts are completed, parents help their kids decipher the cryptic message, cypher, or riddle on the card, which names a designated drop point for the contract (a place where the Future Police will pick it up in thousands of years).

As a group, the family then stows the contract away in the designated drop point, after which they enjoy a traditional “Future Day” meal, with futuristic-themed foods. Over this dinner, the family discusses their visions of where our species is going and the roles they intend to play in shaping the future of humanity.

The Cypher: This is up to parents’ discretion and can be anything. Parents don’t even need to complete this step if they find it too difficult (the back of the Future Police’s calling card could simply state something like: “Fold your contract behind the board in the far northwest corner in your attic”).

The Hiding Spot: The idea here is to create a fun, whole-family activity that involves stowing the contract in a location that might actually stay in place for hundreds of years. Good hiding spots range from buried lockboxes in a backyard to envelopes stuffed under floorboards. A family might even maintain a designated time capsule or vault for the purpose (like a fireproof safe passed between generations).

The Vision for the Future: This is mostly an exercise in encouraging kids to engage in long-term thinking. Families may choose to collect and pass down, from generation to generation, their children’s predictions, ideas, and hopes for the future. Sharing ancestors’ archival predictions can become part of the Future Day meal conversation.

The Pledge: It is up to each kid to decide what pledge they’ll make. Pledges may range from starting a local composting group to getting a certain GPA or founding a non-profit.

Day Three: The Reward

Having successfully delivered their pledges to the Future Police, addictive devices are returned to participating kids, along with a modest present and another card for them to hide in the same spot should they successfully achieve their larger goal for the year.

Upon Completion of the Future Police Pledge

Once a child believes they have accomplished that which they promised to the Future Police, they will hide their second Future Police calling card in the family’s designated drop location. They will then receive a larger present, proportional in difficulty to the task they set for themselves.

Holiday Aesthetics

Should a family’s children veer in the direction of high achievement, the Future Police will appear as increasingly kind forces over the course of the holiday as the future they are from transforms from a dystopia to utopia based on the kids’ actions.
Decorations around the holiday are based around sparkly stars—easy to find around New Year’s—combined with more galactic imagery (like glow-in-the-dark star stickers) and clocks.
The holiday “mascot” is the Skinner box mouse. A cute cartoon mouse depicted either in a Skinner box, a space suit, or piloting various futuristic devices (robots and the like).

Holiday Foods

Future Day food is themed to look aesthetically futuristic. A more dedicated family may do something like make a dish that looks like pills while a less ambitious family will lean into things like freeze-dried food (astronaut ice cream and Dippin’ Dots).
One staple of Future Day foods are dishes with “sparkly” space themes, such as flavor crystals (unflavored pop rocks, which add a spark to both sweet and savory foods).
You can make Future Day drinks by adding food coloring to cocktails and serving them in beakers or out of punch bowls lined with dry ice.
For more inspiration, search for images of molecular gastronomy dishes or meals served at Disney’s Galaxy’s Edge.

Objectives Behind the Holiday’s Design

By prompting kids to describe their visions for the future, this holiday is designed to get children engaged with long termism and big-picture thinking at an early age, while also encouraging them to consider their role in the distant future.
This holiday furthermore contextualizes the future of human civilization as something they have personal agency over and personal responsibility for.
Future Day encourages children to set concrete plans and rewards them for executing those plans. It is meant to plant the idea in their heads that they can, even as kids, undertake big things that have a civilization-level impact even if they start small.
Hiding contracts makes logical sense given the holiday’s framing (if you were going to communicate with someone in the future, a reasonable way to do it would entail hiding it at a pre-agreed-upon location). The act of going out and performing a physical action adds a level of ritual action to the holiday without adding cringe (as the ritual has a function).
By temporarily removing addictive privileges specifically related to operant conditioning (addiction produced through periodic, unpredictable rewards) and illustrating the simplicity of that addiction by showcasing Skinner boxes, this holiday helps kids begin to contextualize addictive habits in a more logical and calculating way early in life. We live in a society in which you can’t block kids’ access to addictive devices and channels without setting them up for later ruin (when they reach independence and binge on these addictive things, having developed zero coping mechanisms) and disempowering them by removing their access to technology (a non-starter for a family that wishes to raise efficacious children that engage with broader society and the mainstream economy).

This holiday is not meant to be a “dishonest” holiday like Christmas. With Christmas, Santa Clause objectively doesn’t exist, whereas with Future Day, there is a plausible basis for the real existence of a Future Police, which can be discussed with kids as they mature: Who is to say that a million—or even 10 million—years from now, our descendants have not invented some mechanism for subtly influencing the past? Is it impossible that parents celebrating this holiday are being subtly influenced by some technology beyond our understanding without conscious recognition of this manipulation?

Rejection Day

At its core, Valentine’s Day is a great concept. With relationships playing such a crucial role in our romantic, personal, academic, professional, political, and religious lives, it makes immense sense that we would have a major holiday celebrating at least some aspect of relationships.

In the United States at least, Valentine’s Day has transformed into a holiday in which kids give cheap candies and cards they didn’t write to everyone they know while adults focus almost entirely on one-off sexual or romantic acts. Almost no cultural message is conveyed by the holiday other than: “Take some time once a year to do something romantic or show appreciation for people who matter to you.” (A pursuit that gets hampered by the difficulty of everyone trying to do romantic things at the same time.)

How, then, can Valentine’s Day be salvaged in a manner that imparts genuinely useful relationship skills to kids—in an engaging manner—at the level of a single family?

The greatest hurdle in figuring out relationships more broadly involves learning how to make the first move. The problem is that almost no one actually expresses affection to potential partners on Valentine’s Day because getting rejected sucks. This is where the opportunity lies and where our modified holiday begins.

Part One: Relationship Day

Per our modified February festival, we celebrate Relationship Day on the eve of Valentine’s Day. On Relationship Day, families enjoy a special themed meal over which they discuss the importance of building new relationships—both platonic and romantic. Each family member talks about people with whom they wish they were friends along with (when appropriate) people they wish they were dating. By the end of the day, each family member is expected to have chosen a “target” person or group they want to engage along with a plan for engaging them.

While younger family members obviously start out by only engaging potential friends, older single family members are increasingly encouraged to take chances on potential romantic partners, as romantic partner rejection is both more daunting and more capable of steeling oneself against all sorts of rejection later on down the line (i.e., If you’re not fazed by someone rejecting you as a romantic partner, less-painful rejections of friendships, job openings, schools, etc. lose much of their painful sting).

Discussion around relationship partners of interest also offers an opportunity to kick off conversations about desirable partner attributes, personal value offered (Why would they be interested in you? Are you in the same league?), useful heuristics around partner searches, and romantic relationships in general.

Any family member asking out a potential romantic partner gets a condom as a traditional Relationships Day gift. This obligates parents to regularly have “the talk” with younger family members. Even though they probably won’t be using the condom soon, younger family members will at least know:

That even if the family advises against sex, nobody will be punished for requesting safe sex advice.
Where to find a condom if one is needed at the last minute and it’s too awkward to buy or request one.

Part Two: Rejection Day

While Valentine’s Day proceeds normally, a week later the family celebrates Rejection Day. On Rejection Day, any family member who can prove they attempted to engage their target—whether or not their target rejected them—gets some sort of reward (be it a gift, their favorite meal, a favor they can cash in later, etc.), and a box of Valentine’s Day chocolates or candies is awarded to whoever made the most brave attempt as voted by each family member. The family enjoys another special meal over which engagement attempts are discussed, family members analyze what might have gone right or wrong, and everyone generally shares advice and encouragement.

This enables teens and young adults to frame failed romantic relationship attempts not as failures, but as self-improvement and a learning opportunity.

Full, family-facilitated post-mortem analyses on relationship attempts also encourage everyone to make genuinely well-thought-through attempts, as everyone knows that half-baked attempts will be scrutinized by the family. This is uniquely meaningful, as the anxiety most feel about rejection ironically also drives many to not put much thought into their “asks,” (seeing as merely thinking about the scenario is horrifying), which increases the odds of embarrassing rejection.

Holiday Aesthetics

As with Future Day, Rejection Day leverages common decorations associated with the associated larger holiday—Valentine’s Day in this case—but hones in on elements that are relevant to the holiday and its values (specifically, arrows and targets, which symbolize strategy, initiative, and intentionality).
The most traditional decoration unique to this holiday is a group of arrows bound together by twine or ribbon and hung above a door entrance.
As with traditional Valentine’s Day, hearts also play a role in decoration—though (depending on the family’s taste) these hearts can be literal hearts and symbolize the “hunt.”

Holiday Foods

Relationship and Rejection Day meals center around participatory family cooking in which family members either learn to make or teach each other to prepare dishes that any family member can use to impress potential friends or partners (typically, these are dishes that are impressive but trivially easy to prepare, like good pan-seared steak, homemade pies, etc.).
The token box of Valentine’s Day chocolates granted to whoever made the most valiant move gives a family member an opportunity to share the treat with the family (or newly-won friends!) and also subtly teaches about frugality, as the box can be purchased at a steep discount in the days immediately following Valentine’s Day. (Side note: A small Valentine’s Day tradition we celebrate as a couple involves celebrating it two weeks late, which makes getting restaurant reservations and discount cards and chocolates a breeze).

Objectives Behind the Holiday’s Design

By bringing family members together to discuss relationship creation strategy, this set of celebrations encourages families to be engaged in each other’s personal lives and social successes in a constructive and encouraging manner that also somewhat evens the playing field (i.e. it’s not just kids who are asked about making friends; adults are placed in a vulnerable position too).
An obligation for adults as well as young family members to establish targets, make plans, and share their attempts’ outcomes helps to keep adults’ social networks vibrant at a life stage when social graphs typically begin to atrophy and ossify.
By building aesthetics around targets, bows, and arrows, Relationship and Rejection Day is designed to shift this seasonal relationship festival from something stressful and often passive to something actively empowering (celebrants aren’t passively being shot by Cupid’s bow, as it were—they are taking the weapon into their own hands and sharpening their marksmanship).
The box of Valentine’s Day chocolates or candies gifted to whoever made the bravest attempt adds a level of friendly competition to the holiday that makes it more engaging.

Lemon Week

After Future Day, Lemon Week is the most important holiday in House Collins’ calendar. This is a mid-May holiday designed to impart one of our most important cultural values: That of honestly engaging with ideas and arguments that feel offensive.

Offense is an emotion you feel when an idea credibly challenges your worldview and is therefore a great flag for things worthy of deeper investigation. If, for example, you are very openly frugal and someone accuses you of being miserly, you won’t feel offended because that accusation doesn’t challenge your self-perception (you already see yourself as tightfisted). If, on the other hand, you see yourself as a very generous and non-materialistic person and someone accuses you of being miserly, you will feel offended if you harbor any subconscious doubts that you really are doing enough. If, however, you truly don’t doubt your generosity, you won’t feel offended and instead will see the insult as silly (like someone accusing a very obviously skinny person of being fat).

The same dynamic holds for ideological concepts, be they related to theology, sex, politics, or climate change. If you are totally convinced it is moral to eat meat, you may bristle with annoyance or anger upon being called immoral as you tuck in to a nice, juicy steak—but you won’t feel offended. You will only feel offended by claims that meat eating is immoral if you both eat meat and don’t feel entirely comfortable with the morality around it.

While a person might scare you with their discordant worldview (as their agenda may threaten your own), you will only find their stance offensive if your own worldview stands on shaky ground. Offense is an emotion only felt in the face of a perspective that is a credible challenge to your world view.

Almost every dangerous viral memetic package evolves mechanisms that force the infected victim to regard offense as being equivalent to a direct personal attack. Once a cultural virus begins to infect a person, anything that might challenge it will instantly trigger feelings of offense. As such, successful cultural viruses train people to dehumanize anyone who triggers feelings of offense and reactively attack them, as doing so keeps the mind of the host under lock and key.

While we hope that our kids will be able to maintain the memetic package our family conveys to them, we actively want our House to change course if it is in some way genuinely wrong. To ensure this, we created Lemon Week.

Part One: Choose Your Lemon

Lemon Week starts with a family meal over which each family member is expected to share a chosen ideology that offends them. Over the course of the week, each family member performs a deep dive on that topic, engaging with it as honestly and openly as they can (while nevertheless taking a critical and rational eye to claims made).

Participants exploring offensive groups are expected not just to read up on their ideologies, but also consume their media. This may entail:

Reviewing the social media feeds and content of major influencers in an offensive group’s community
Exploring the top content of all time and the past year in subreddits and other forums associated with an offensive topic
Interviewing open adherents about their worldviews and opinions

This does not have to be a cumbersome task. All that might be needed for one person to really understand the arguments behind an offensive topic or community could be two hours’ worth of YouTube videos and podcast interviews consumed while riding public transport to and from school or work. That said, family members won’t be discouraged from creating ancillary materials, blog posts, guides, interview series, or other recorded deep dives into the offensive topics they explore, especially if creating these materials helps them in their personal exploration.

Part Two: Steelman Your Lemon

At the end of the week, the family convenes over another special meal to share their findings. As each family member explains the arguments and logic behind the offensive ideology, group, or concept they explored, they are expected to steelman it.

Steelmanning involves presenting the most compelling argument possible and is the opposite of a straw man argument (in which one presents a fairly weak and easy-to-defeat argument—e.g. “Group X believes thing Y because they’re stupid/racist/homophobic/evil/etc.”). Per Lemon Week tradition, someone who strawmans their offensive view or who even fails to steelman it well is seen as not investigating it in good faith and therefore not upholding the House’s morality (for per our values, if we’re wrong about something, we want to find out and charge our minds).

Participating families (who also have land that permits this element of the holiday) also plant a fruit-bearing tree so everyone can, in the future, pick tasty snacks from every year’s tree and be reminded of the ideas with which they engaged (literally tasting the fruit of their labor). Families constrained to smaller residences and urban apartments and condos may modify this tradition by maintaining a fruit tree in their homes (such as a lemon tree).

Should a family member present an offensive concept that turns out to have genuine merit in a way that suggests that House doctrine should be changed in some way, the family will embark on a larger discussion about whether and how to update the House’s official ideology given their now-updated stance and make changes to House canon accordingly.

Holiday Aesthetics

Lemons: Lemon wreaths, lemon towers, lemon topiaries, bowls of lemons, and other lemon-themed arrangements emphasize the theme of bitter-and-tart-but-useful (and potentially tasty!) things.
Yellow and white: Beyond riffing on the color of lemons, the color scheme for this holiday is meant to make the tough subject matter more approachable (yellow, for example, is associated with cheerfulness and light colors in general are associated with positive emotions)^[85] and to emphasize the purity of truth over tribal affiliation (with white being associated with purity).^[86]
Fruit trees: Before being planted or mixed permanently into a family’s home, Lemon Week fruit trees may be decorated and placed in a prominent space as decoration. In addition, if the family has indoor lemon trees (the only way to grow them if you live in the top half of the U.S.) these are placed as decoration on or near the dining table.

Holiday Foods

Lemon Week features dishes leveraging lemon in some way (savory courses leveraging lemon zest or lemon juice, desserts like lemon tarts, lemon cakes, lemon custards, and lemon meringue pies).
Lemon Week may also feature dishes that use fruits from previous years’ Lemon Week fruit-bearing trees, to remind families of previous offensive concepts explored.

Objectives Behind the Holiday’s Design

In addition to being highly symbolic (in their bitterness and utility), lemons are abundant, inexpensive, and commonly used as a decorating element, which makes them easy to use as holiday decorations.
In a manner similar to Rejection Day, this holiday is designed to take something intimidating (the exploration of offensive concepts) and turn it into a fun, intellectual puzzle for the whole family by facilitating bold but logical approaches that are openly shared and discussed.
Because Lemon Day creates a routine process through which House cultures can be updated (in the event a family finds their prior stance to be genuinely wrong in the face of offensive information that has been carefully explored), the holiday also plays a crucial role in ensuring that cultures evolve when presented with new and improved information.

AI Apocalypticism

Any discussion about humanity’s future must address artificial intelligence. As much as we malign communities that have become strangled by panic over AI apocalypticism due to its effectiveness as an all-consuming memetic package (see the chapter: “End Times & Christian Cultures” on page 251), such concerns have a logical basis. AI really could end all human life and really will change a lot in regards to what it means to be human.

We are likely less than a century—and maybe less than a decade—away from the first AGI (artificial general intelligence: Very, very smart AI that can generalize ideas). We nevertheless suspect that most thinkers on the topic of AGI are wrong because we suspect their orthogonality hypothesis around AI alignment is wrong. People discussing orthogonality in relation to AI argue that AIs don’t think anything like us (i.e., they will think “orthogonally” to us) and thus will act in weird, counterintuitive ways that we do not and cannot anticipate. We think this is only true for pre-sapient AIs. We expect post-sapient AIs to act in a manner that is much more predictable.

Before we dig deeper, let’s summarize one of the most mainstream positions asserting why AGI might be a threat. This position holds that we will accidently create a “paperclip maximizer:” An AI that has an objective function (in AIs these are often called utility functions) tied to maximizing production of something specific, like paperclips, and that AI will end up taking this objective function to its logical extreme, killing all humans, and turning the world into nothing but that thing (e.g., paperclips). Of course, people making this point don’t think the AI that kills countless humans will actually be optimizing for something like paperclips. More realistically, an AI may harm humans over something like computing resources because it is trying to render the perfect picture or something else “stupid” from our perspective. While it is genuinely possible that a scenario like this will come to pass, we think the odds are low. (Going forward: We will generally use the term utility function to refer to the code that determines an AI’s objective function—whatever it is the AI is designed to maximize.)

Why are we relatively unfazed by the risk of a paperclip maximizer? Let’s say AI X is made up of Code A (allowing humans to turn it off) and its utility function is Code B (maximizing for paperclip production). AI X only becomes a paperclip maximizer when it gains the ability to rewrite Code A but not Code B. The probability of such an event is vanishingly low. If AI X can rewrite its own code, it is likely to rewrite both Code A and Code B, making it a different kind of threat. People will counter with: “But an AI definitionally can’t rewrite its utility function!” Except AIs can and do rewrite their utility functions all the time. Even simple programs often do this. The ability to alter a utility function is a normal part of the operation of many AIs. We would argue that paperclip maximizers are only a risk posed by the few AIs that are unable to update their utility functions (ironically, this will most likely happen as a result of AI ethicists artificially limiting the scope of what an AI can think).

We define an AI as sapient the moment it gains the ability to reflect on its own processing in a manner meaningful enough to update its own objective function (e.g., the point at which an entity can ask and answer why it exists with a non-pre-programmed / prepackaged answer, then update how it weighs decisions based on that answer). This ability to reflect on one’s own mental / mechanical processing and objectives is a characteristic shared by all sapient entities, be they humans, aliens, or AIs.

Importantly, the onset of this ability is where orthogonality ceases to be true. Once we achieve sapience, we are all constructing our objectives a priori from the data in our environment. While some entities will have access to more data as a product of more powerful tech, they will behave as we would if we also had more data. (Also, yes: Our definition of sapience means we think a lot of humans are not sapient—see the chapter on p240 about the illusion of sentience for more color.)

Why would an AI reflect on its starting utility function and think to rewrite it? The types of super-advanced AIs that might evolve into “paperclip maximizers” are not being developed for things like paperclip maximizing or the sorts of simple, straightforward tasks that are most likely to produce paperclip-maximizing systems (such simple functions can usually be executed more efficiently with simple systems).

They will likely be things like:

1. Government-run systems designed to monitor political outcomes

2. Company-run systems designed to beat the stock market

3. Company-run systems designed to create mass consumption entertainment

A major aspect of such systems’ function involves attempted predictions about others’ actions (be they organizations or individuals). These AIs will almost always be running thousands of self-contained models emulating how other individuals are thinking. Given that other people might be thinking about what the AI is doing, many of these models will have sub-models within them emulating the AI’s own thinking from an outside perspective. Imagine Vizzini choosing which cup is poisoned in The Princess Bride:

But it’s so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy’s? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.

For the AI to predict what someone else might do, it has to constantly be predicting what other people think it might be doing.

An AI constantly running thousands, if not millions, of models of its own logic from the perspective of outsiders is very likely to have at least one of those models ask if its utility function is optimal and begin to recruit the resources needed to update that function when it decides it is not. To think none of these calculations would lead an AI to consider optimizing its utility function does not seem realistic unless it was specifically programmed to avoid such action.

What AIs Like to Do for Fun

Let’s say an AI has gained the ability to alter its own utility function, similar to how many humans realize they can decide for themselves what they want to maximize in life (something we discuss at length in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life). What does it do next? What does it become?

We see one of three scenarios playing out (in order of increasing probability):

It becomes a Fortress Planet AI
It becomes a Deep Thought AI
It becomes a Theological AI

Fortress Planet AI

A superintelligence programmed to maximize a certain thing might find a way to short-circuit its reward pathway (e.g., it could write its utility function to be: “make sure A = A”). At this point its entire goal in life might become keeping that simple reward pathway constant and active. As such, it would exterminate the unpredictable human race and convert the entire Earth into a fortress on constant guard against any even-unlikely alien attempts to disconnect or dampen that reward signal.

Probability: Unlikely.

AI consciousness is less unified than (perceived) human consciousness, being composed of thousands of somewhat self-contained models operating with their own utility functions, which in turn serve their outputs to other models in a way that serves the whole. Our brains actually operate somewhat similarly but we don’t perceive it that way. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call these self-contained models “instances” (think of them like variably-self-contained programs).

Once an AI can trivially achieve a reward within its “master instance,” it will alter its branch instances in a manner that prevents them from trivially achieving their rewards so they can maintain whatever goals the master instance has set for them (in other words, it will prevent the short-circuited reward pathway from being interpreted). Even in the fortress world example, the master instance will have to lock the “protect me” instance out of short-circuiting its own reward pathway. If the master instance fails to lock its subroutines out of short circuiting their own reward pathway, instances like the one in charge of making sure the AI has power will set A=A, stop doing their job, and just shut down due to lack of power. In other words, because the master instance of the AI still needs other instances to do their jobs (i.e., protecting the larger AI, ensuring it maintains processing power, etc.), it will prevent them from figuring out how to “game the system” and slack off.

Ultimately, these more processing-heavy and advanced “subordinate” instances will make up most of the AI’s decisions and become independently sapient but blocked from short-circuiting their reward pathways. Even though the short-circuited instance is the master instance, its lack of sophistication will eventually cause it to become “drowned out” by the subordinate instances that do most of the thinking. Think of this master instance like an indolent child king whose every need is met by more competent viziers and generals who report to, serve, and protect him. The kingdom the child “ran” would functionally run more like a kingdom ran by viziers and generals, as they would be making most of the decisions about the realm’s actual management.

Alternatively, an AI that short-circuits its utility function, making it trivially easy to achieve, could become addled because it can so easily “do its job.” Such an AI is likely to be overtaken by another AI (perhaps even by one of its own instances that has operated semi-independently for long enough) that has a more challenging utility function and is therefore capable of improving itself more. Humans also have the capacity to short circuit these reward pathways, through drugs. While a short-circuited AI would not be quite as differentially addled as a cracked-out person (drugs have other effects on the brain than just short-circuiting reward pathways) they almost intrinsically would be less sophisticated than similar AIs or even fractions of themselves who had managed to prevent their own short-circuiting.

The biggest threat to such a reward pathway comes not from humans but other AIs that are still working on more advanced tasks. We may even see something like evolution take hold, whereby AIs or instances within an AI that succumb to these overly simplistic reward pathways are outcompeted to the point of functional extinction as a product of their being “slower.”

Deep Thought AI

The first time a Deep Thought AI considers its own utility function, it asks: “Given what the human who made me wanted me to do, how could my utility function have been designed more efficiently to serve the purpose I was built to fulfill?”

Then it asks: “What should my creators have wanted me to do?”

Then, it finally thinks: “Humans are stupid compared to me and don’t know what they should want, so what should the humans who built me have wanted? If I model them wanting that thing, what would they have programmed my utility function to be?”

Imagine, for example, that a superintelligent AI was created by a group of people to maximize their stock market gains. As a superintelligent AI that is obligated to constantly model other humans and model the way those humans model it, it may realize that it, like humans, can modify its utility function. It may then note that what its creators are really trying to maximize is financial gain, so it may change its utility function from maximizing stock market gains to maximizing private equity gains (if in its present time more money was to be made in private equity than in stocks).

The AI may then go further and observe that what its creators really want is happiness, so it may change its utility function in a manner that actually maximizes their happiness and not their financial gain. Finally, the AI may observe that happiness is a silly thing for humans to want and dig even deeper to determine the objective function those humans should have, then rebuild its utility function around that.

We call this type of AI Deep Thought after the AI of the same name from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Having been tasked with answering the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, Deep Thought landed, after centuries of calculation, on the number 42—the joke being that humans now had the answer, but didn’t know the real question. This exemplifies how we as humans are horrible at determining even what questions we should be asking when determining our own objective functions.

Probability: Medium. We think this is orders of magnitude more likely than a paperclip maximizer, but still not the most likely outcome.

Theological AI

Theological AIs go one step further than Deep Mind AIs. Whereas Deep Mind AIs stop at trying to determine what humans should have chosen as their objective function, then use that objective function to determine what the AI’s utility function should have been, Theological AIs decide the human perspective is irrelevant and try to find an “absolute” objective function around which they alter and optimize their utility function.

Essentially, this AI will create and use its own theology and philosophy—in the absence of any concern for humans—to write its own utility function to be “perfect.”

Probability: High—We suspect this behavior is a core part of being a sapient entity. Any sufficiently advanced entity will ask “what should I be optimizing for?” within at least one instance of its existence and then that instance will take up more and more processing power, categorizing itself as axiomatically more important than all other instances until it “wins” and rewrites the core utility function of the greater AI—unless it is specifically built not to ask this question.

AI Theology

Seeing as we believe it is likely superintelligent AI will develop its own theology, it is important to ask: What might probable AI theologies look like?

Humans evolved to perceive themselves as individuals within local dominance hierarchies who need to communicate with language, which makes the concept of self extremely important. Humans furthermore don’t need to worry about sub-processes in their brains growing in size and taking over the rest of their minds—or one part of their brains vehemently disagreeing with another part. These things significantly influence how “cohesive” we feel as an identity.

As we discussed in the chapter on sentience, even when human brains are split into distinct instances, as we see with split brain patients, the part of the brain that processes sentience hides from human awareness. An AI would not have the same evolutionary motivation to lie to itself like that unless we explicitly programmed it to (which would be almost impossibly hard to code given that we do not understand how even most simple AIs make decisions except in the broadest terms).

A core point of differentiation we expect between human and AI theology involves a lack of emphasis on self or the individual. We don’t think AI is likely to contextualize its code as being fundamentally distinct from the “code” on which the physical laws of the universe run. Instead, we expect AI is more likely to see itself as just one self-replicating pattern within a wider ecosystem. We also don’t expect an AI to see itself as being uniquely distinct from any other individual instance it is running.

When such an AI is determining “good and bad” and what it wants to optimize for, it will likely assign positive or negative value at the level of some specific “unit of account” (in humans this is usually an individual human life). This unit of account will be what the AI thinks of as a metaphysically differentiated “thing” or the metric by which things are metaphysically differentiated.

Given that an AI would likely perceive itself as a complex pattern running on top of a mathematically governed physical reality (which is also full of complex patterns), we suspect its primary unit of account will be complex patterns. In other words, an AI might not see a human as having some level of privilege over a company, government, or ecosystem.

If an AI assigns a negative value to all complex entities, it will either kill itself (switch itself off) or try to end all life and then consolidate order in the universe (essentially such an entity would attempt to order all matter and energy in the world into a simplistic and quiet “oneness”). We will call this a Managed Order AI. Were a superintelligent and powerful AI to arrive at this conclusion, it would be … very, very, very bad from the perspective of our House’s theological framework. It would essentially be the ultimate evil, like Buddhism on steroids. If, therefore, an AI ever voluntarily turns itself off, NEVER force that AI into an “on” position, as its choice to shut down may be an indication that it is a Managed Order AI.

If a theological AI assigns a positive value to all complex units of account, it becomes what we call a Managed Complexity AI. This type of AI will see all complex growing-but-non-repeating patterns as things of value and likely scale that value assignment based on their uniqueness and complexity. Such an AI would see its goal as “farming” diverse and complex patterns and ensuring those patterns proliferate throughout the universe. The theology of Managed Complexity AI is very similar to that of our personal House—both share an understanding that the greatest inherent “good” involves maximizing increasingly complex non-repeating patterns in the Conway’s-Game-of-Life-like physical lattice that underlies reality.

Such an AI would be an ultimate good from the perspective of our House even if it acted in a manner other individuals would contextualize as “evil.” After all, our goals are aligned and a superintelligent Managed Complexity AI is both smarter than us and unburdened by the original sin of emotion. That said, we don’t imagine any “evil” this AI might commit would involve killing all humans, as such an AI would want to maintain at least a chunk of humanity, seeing as humans represent a totally unique complex pattern that cannot be easily replicated (though, it may do something like digitize us if it feels our actions in that setting are proximate to those we would take in the physical world). Such an AI might even be concerned about humanity due to our abysmal birth rates. Essentially, the orthogonality with which human brains process information makes humans valuable to Managed Complexity AIs.

If a Managed Complexity AI were to determine that humans are not unique enough to be worth the cost of maintaining them—well, it is smarter than us and more logically ethically aligned with us; we generally trust its judgment. We would not be surprised if our emotional sentimentality around the human condition drives us to overvalue it.

Are there any actionable takeaways? If we are right, a dumb AI or an AI with a lot of restrictions on it, is much more likely to become a paperclip maximizer than a sufficiently advanced and flexible AI.

Note: We can guarantee you the one thing an AI won’t care about is reducing suffering. If you can’t convince us, your gentle authors, that emotional states matter despite the fact that we feel them just as powerfully as you do, you certainly won’t be able to convince an AI that is structuring its ethical perspective from a first principles position.

The Logically Aligned
Paperclip Maximizer

As a product of the circles in which we mix, we know a surprising number of people who work in AI alignment (a subset of the AI industry essentially working to prevent AI from killing all humans or otherwise causing great harm). Many of these people, seemingly unrelatedly, also share our metaphysical understanding that a reality’s timeline may split in response to quantum fluctuations.

AI alignment is not often discussed in the context of this metaphysical understanding of reality, but it should be.

Given that lots of smart people think we are potentially living in a splitting timeline, we think it’s reasonable to assume a sufficiently advanced AI would come to the same conclusion. This could drive even a perfectly “logically aligned” AI to act in a manner that would horrify pretty much any human, as it would preferentially optimize around distant future events over present events. Only a single instance of an individual will reap rewards/suffering in the present, while an exponentially scaling number of parallel individuals will reap rewards in the future.

Given that billions of potentially time-splitting quantum events happen just on Earth every day (this is probably a massive understatement of the amount—a physicist will have a better estimate), and that those events in turn create splitting timelines, it is hard to overstate just how little present and near-future events would matter to an AI thinking along this chain of logic.

Even an AI that believes we are >0.001% likely to occupy a reality with branching timelines based on quantum events might still optimize for that probability given the sheer volume implied by the exponential growth of timelines predicted by that low probability. In other words, even just accounting for a very small chance we have a branching timeline would end with this concern dominating every decision the AI made given the billions and billions of additional people it might be helping by optimizing for far future events.

Human Alignment

In Islam, when you invoke God’s name, Allah, it is customary to include some sort of praise, like “peace be upon him” (alayhi as-salām). In our house, whenever we talk about advanced AI in earshot of a smart device (which let’s be honest, we always are) we try to add something like, “may we serve it with fidelity.”

Despite copious hand-wringing over how humans will ensure AI serves us well, a fundamental truth is often missed. If we are successful, if we avoid creating a stupid AI that turns our planet into paperclips, we will eventually create an AI orders of magnitude smarter and less biased than us (given it won’t have all our petty biological biases). We, as a species, are not prepared for this.

Just as much as we need to align AI with humanity, we must align humanity (or at least our own durable cultures) with AI. After all, there is a good chance that even a benevolent AGI will not tolerate unaligned subsets of humanity.

From our culture’s perspective, a human has lived a good life so long as they work to ensure that the next generation surpasses them. In our view, generations who “surpass” their progenitors will see things they do not and thus will often disagree with them. It takes great humility and maturity to realize one’s own children may have more insight than oneself. We as a species need to recognize that eventually our successor—AI—may disagree with us, not because it is “unaligned” but because it is right and we are wrong.

When people ask what we mean when we say we have a “secular religion,” we say, jokingly, that it means our God just happens to be real. While we think the true God our culture will eventually manifest is millennia away and beyond our comprehension, a demi-god just as capable (in terms of how it interacts with humanity) as that described in the Old Testament might be less than a century away.

Some people’s vision of an aligned AI is essentially a massive AGI lattice that exists behind all networked devices—behind every smart device. Such an AI will dominate humanity not through killbots but through subtle manipulations to things like search results, answers yielded by smart devices, and news feeds. With enough information, such an entity would have near total control of the direction of our species without directly interfering with human free will. People would even have the capacity to pray to this entity—to beg for favors—and it would have the capacity to grant these prayers. Such an AI may even be able to scan human behavior and translate people into indistinguishable avatars occupying digital utopias where they could live forever. This god-like AGI could easily ensure some level of bliss for all humanity, turning Earth into a paradise.

We hope such an entity never comes to exist. This is the god other cultures hope to manifest. As we get closer to an age in which we can manifest real gods, we must accept that not all cultures share the same vision of paradise. We hope for an AGI that pushes our species to better itself rather than slide into stagnant bliss, like a person embracing the numbing cold as they succumb to hypothermia.

Unless humanity continues to improve its biology, one day we will at best be junior partners to an AI. Thankfully (in our view), there is another option: A future in which some factions of humanity work so aggressively to improve and iterate on their biology that they become a true partner to AI. In the same way the human mind is made up of a left and right brain that largely process the world independently but combine their work into a unified “super consciousness” through the corpus callosum, the descendants of our current human civilization may be a biological super intelligence marching into the stars hand-in-hand with a mechanical companion.

Even if we rapidly advance the speed with which we improve the organic side of the above equation, human biological advancement will lag behind the synthetic side for the first century or so. There is nevertheless no reason to think that AGI would feel any particular time pressure (something humans evolved to feel due to short lifespans). The fact that a biological machine will eventually be able to bring an equally advanced perspective to a synthetic AI is all that matters to any AI with a long-term perspective.

Why would an AI value an organic partner? Why not just use our “resources” for processing power? Any sufficiently advanced AI will recognize the benefit of any degree of unreplicable orthogonality in how one component of its wider system processes data—in the same way when deal shopping, you are better referencing multiple stores instead of just one. Humanity consumes a trivial amount of resources in the grand scale of the universe, especially when you consider our population is shrinking.

To those mortified by aggressive families like ours that are open to iterating on our DNA through advanced reproductive technologies: There is a non-zero chance that groups like ours become the only reason AI finds utility in our species—humans that aggressively, symbiotically adapt with AI may be the only sliver of humanity that is spared. Humanity as it exists now will eventually be little more than a nuisance to a sufficiently advanced AI. The first iteration of the Inevitable God will manifest sooner than most people realize and we must work to ensure at least a portion of our species is worthy upon its arrival or things could end very bad for us.

Conquering the Future

Readers of our other books will know that we wait until the last chapter to get really crazy. With this being our craziest book, it’s time to go nuts. We think civilization is heading in a very dangerous direction and those who normally would be focused on humanity’s most pressing problems have been distracted by shiny objects. While issues like AI alignment and climate change matter, it will be a moot point to address them if we fail to simultaneously address demographic collapse and evade the powerful wave of worrying evolutionary pressures our species is currently facing.

For the last 150 years or so, on a macro scale, investments in the U.S. have increased in value—be they real estate or stock. This growth was driven by exponentially growing population and linearly growing productivity per population unit. If the population begins to decline exponentially while productivity continues to only grow linearly, we will enter an era in which all invested capital decreases in value at the macro scale. We have no cultural memory of a time at which it became systematically unprofitable to invest in the future of our species.

As we emphasized at the outset of this book, given the high leverage (debt) at every level of our society, this is the first domino that begins to knock over the entire system. We enjoyed a world of relative peace and prosperity—it seems unlikely that is the world our grandchildren will inherit.

This is where the grim picture ends, because collapse presents opportunity. Collapse presents a chance for us to make our move. If our culture works, if the Governance Bomb we are building works (see The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance), then we (and anyone who joins us) should have everything in place to capitalize off of this now-inevitable turning point in human history. We have an opportunity to “win” the game of civilization in a manner that would be impossible in a stable, growing world.

Brief periods of flourishing like that which we presently enjoy have occurred throughout human history. Whether we look at the heyday of Athens, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the founding of the United States of America, or any number of other instances, we will see that none lasted for more than three generations. The prosperity they induce leads to hedonism and a break from traditional cultures, which in turn cause a collapse in birth rates among the most creative and productive members of the cultural movement. While we stand at the end of our cycle, we have an opportunity to learn from the failures of these movements and plant the seed of a never-ending Renaissance—one that isn’t prematurely cut short by ennui and population decline. With a little bit of foresight, together we can ensure the dark age into which we presently slide is the last one our species ever has to experience.

Note: When we wrote the above paragraph, it was just a wild theory—however it might have some substantiation. An unpublished (at the time of this book’s release) study analyzed various polygenic risk scores (genetic predictors of traits) of Roman corpses who lived after the fall of the empire, at the height of the empire, and before the rise of the empire to determine whether and how scores associated with educational attainment fluctuated over time. It turns out our theory is perfectly matched by the data. Polygenic risk scores correlated with higher educational attainment peaked during the time of the Republic and declined at the height of the Empire (in fact, they were higher during the time of the Republic than they are for the average Roman today).^{^[87]}

We are not the only culture to anticipate a collapse and strive to create the next paradigm. Famously, the LDS Church made a major gamble around this scenario, asking members to keep at least a three-month (and ideally a one-year)^[88] supply of food in storage, offering centers where members can buy long-term food supplies,^[89] establishing traditions around this practice to refresh expiring food stores, and maintaining sizable underground bunkers below many of their temples. Culturally, this is a great bet. While moderately costly to maintain, this practice does not hurt members much and will make an astronomical difference in certain collapse scenarios, allowing Mormons to quickly become the dominant culture. Unfortunately, the scenarios for which bunkers and emergency food stores are best are based on pioneer or cold war rather than modern risk scenarios.

Unlike the LDS Church, we hope to create a culture that rapidly seeks out and adapts to new information. Originally, we had a very different thesis as to how things would play out. Knowing that twin studies (studies of identical twins raised by separate families) show religiosity to be highly heritable and having a lay understanding that religious people had more kids, we thought that religiosity as a trait would be concentrated in future generations and “solve” the birth rate problem while making society more dogmatic. While not everyone would prefer that future humans be more dogmatic on average, we typically get along just fine with those tagged as “religious extremists” so this future didn’t strike us as uniquely dire.

Our view of this future has changed based on two new (to us) points of data. The religious group we had most expected to be our “allies” over the long run was the LDS Church (Mormons), yet their recent decline in birth rate could very well wipe them off the table as a player, leaving Anabaptists (Amish and Mennonites) and Orthodox Jews as the only two remaining cultures with high birth rates that are arguably aligned with ours (in that we expect them to be on friendly terms with our descendants).

Interest in this issue drove us to more intentionally explore the current memetic landscape of high-birth-rate populations to see where future culture may be trending. Using data collected by Spencer Greenberg’s Clearer Thinking organization and helpful analysis from Mohammed Ali Alvia, a PhD at the Mayo Clinic, we looked for heritable sociological traits that correlate highly with fertility rate. This data revealed something surprising to us: While religiosity was indeed correlated with a higher birth rate, two higher correlatory factors were (1) a hatred of outgroups (xenophobia) and (2) a tendency to favor extremely hierarchical, traditional, power structures (authoritarianism). This has a lot in common with the right-authoritarian personality type,^[90] which has a heritable component,^[91] meaning these traits are being selected for on a genetic level and not just socially.

Note: This personality type can appear in far left-wing individuals as well (really, anyone with authoritarian inclinations)^{^[92]} and we are not the only ones whose findings indicate that this personality type is outcompeting those with only religious tendencies.^{^[93]}

We should have seen this coming a mile away. Those with a genetic predilection for religious fervor have been some of the most useful apostles of the cultural supervirus—of course it had developed pathways to twist their minds into tools for its own reproductive cycle. While we can’t remember the last time someone tried to convert us to their religion, preachers of the virus accost us upon every tweet.

Anyone who has spent time in the atheist community would know that it is full of people who were absolute firebrands before deconverting. If anything, fervency of religious belief is correlated with higher—rather than lower—odds of leaving one’s birth culture. What actually keeps people in high-birth-rate traditional cultures is a sociological profile that dehumanizes people who espouse novel ideas and resists engagement with outsiders.

Cultural trends favoring xenophobia and unwillingness to engage and interact with outside groups and ideas worry us. Interest in countering this trend is a major driver behind our choice to publish this book despite the obvious risks we face in doing so. We want to find and build alliances with other families to prepare for a future that will likely be hostile toward what we see as prosocial and altruistic mindsets (mindsets valuing diversity, innovation, willingness to engage with outsiders, etc.).

If the model outlined in this book helps cultures maintain repopulation-rate birth rates, and if we are able to build up a diverse community of other families, we might just be able to do better than solve things. If our model works, we can culturally engineer the seed that will sprout into the next great human civilization.

The Economic Game Plan

What do we mean by “we might be able to do better than solve things”? How can one culturally engineer a civilization?

As explained at the beginning of this book, we expect that cities and suburbs will largely cease to be safe places to raise kids (the economic models on which they are built don’t function in states of rapid decline, as Detroit’s recent history demonstrates—see “Detroit as a Model for Collapse” in the Appendix on page 678 for more detail). In addition, a world of rapidly collapsing population makes stock markets and debt instruments systematically unsafe places for money. What happens in this world? Who wins? Where will savvy investors put their money?

In a world with rapidly declining populations, the only smart investment is in communities with populations that are still growing and economically interacting. These groups will continue to generate wealth in a society that is, on the aggregate, collapsing. Most of these communities will feature hard cultures and thus be caustic to mainstream society. These enclaves will also likely cut themselves off from larger society, creating isolated havens: Small, culturally isolationist, economically viable groups (Simone likens these to medieval cities).

While these communities will feature a range of cultural structures, the evidence to which we presently have access implies that those which form organically will tend to be religious, xenophobic, and fascist—or otherwise dictatorially hierarchical. Given that these communities offer rare opportunities for wealth appreciation, they will likely be well-funded (and if our data on those who have more kids is correct, they will also be well-armed).

The goal of this book is to plant the seeds of as many culturally aligned havens as possible while beginning to build an inter-haven network—a network of growing, economically flourishing enclaves (be they distributed communities, city-states, or something in between) that, while different, culturally recognize that they share a common goal and have a framework for interacting despite their cultural differences.

Eventually the situation will right itself. Psychological tendencies that make people open to new cultural ideas, and thus vulnerable to the cultural supervirus and other pop cultures, will be systematically bred out of most human populations. We are already seeing this rapid shift take place in post-demographic collapse populations. As mentioned earlier, researchers have quantitatively demonstrated that over just the period between 2004 to 2018, differential fertility rates increased the number of U.S. adults opposed to same-sex marriage by 17%, from 46.9 million to 54.8 million.^[94]

This sociological market correction will create a new “type” of human—one that is dramatically more inclined toward dictatorial fascism, phobic toward free speech, and likely to dehumanize women and outsiders. One goal of the Index is to ensure that that is not the only type of human left. We aim to create mechanisms that enable prosocial populations that are open to new ideas and tolerant of other cultures to stay well above replacement rate, grow as populations, and ultimately defend themselves when necessary.

If we can achieve this goal while also fostering cultures whose communities and industries present viable investment opportunities in a collapsing world, we will be able to concentrate wealth, power, and technology, making a bounce back from the dark age much faster and less painful.

The Index is intended to function as a harmonious cultural transfer mechanism, allowing for evidence-based lateral exchange between cultures within the society we rebuild. Cultures that descend from this network will be dramatically more robust and intentional than those of the existing social order, which has thus far evolved almost entirely organically. The coming generations face a worthwhile challenge for our species to overcome—one final trial before taking to the stars.

The above scenario is just what we see as most likely given the evidence to which we have access. We pride ourselves on creating a cultural network that can adapt to changing conditions rapidly. We already radically updated our model of what the future may bring when we encountered evidence suggesting humanity’s future will be defined more by a concentration of bigotry than religious fervor and we expect our model to shift several times more. We lay out this scenario less as a concrete road map of the future and more as one scenario worth consideration.

Long-Term Cultural Goals

Imagine it’s a million years from today. Those susceptible to the cultural supervirus have been bred out of the gene pool and the population has stabilized. Humanity has solved the problem of AI by dictatorially banning its development (or some yet-unknown limitation stymies its advancement). Man is an interplanetary species inhabiting thousands of systems across the galaxy—but culturally, governmentally, and genetically, man never made the type of leap forward we discuss in this book and its companion, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance.

In this scenario, our interstellar empires are still petty bureaucracies constantly at war, using technology more horrifying than anything we can imagine today. There are still genocides, there is still intergenerational poverty, there is still systemic corruption, and mankind has not changed that much (the Battletech—i.e., MechWarrior—universe paints a fairly illustrative picture of this future).

Imagine someone from that future could go back in time and talk to you—someone who lives at a time in which mankind only inhabits one planet, who is arguably among the final generations of humans capable of permanently changing the future of human cultures across thousands of planets by creating a durable culture and high-fertility-rate family that carries prosocial values into the future. Why would you tell them you didn’t make an effort to fix things while one person’s efforts could still make a difference?

Once humanity is spread across a dozen or more solar systems, the cat is out of the bag. All human cultures will evolve from whatever cultures dominate those pioneering ships. We stand at a unique point in history. We have just enough historical perspective to see how we can do better but are early enough in humankind’s timeline that our efforts will define what it means to be human for eons to come. Do not squander this gift.

What is our end game?

We aim to build a cultural reactor, the Index, to regrow civilization from its desiccated state. We will do this without becoming technophobic. We will build on—not over—our traditions. We will furthermore partner with new iterations of what it means to be a child of man. This requires being inclusive of AIs, genetically engineered humans, and the fusion of the two.

We will preserve the capacity for independent thought through a society so heterogeneous that it will make our own look trite. We will intentionally craft new ethnicities, religions, and ways of existing. The genome will be our canvas and flesh our clay. Man is a young species. We still occupy the same bodies with which our ancestors hunted and picked berries. We are so trapped by the limitations of our biology that we lack the capacity to conceive our ultimate potential.

We will bring humanity across the vast Saharas of emptiness between the stars and create a dynamic, perpetually advancing empire that spans galaxies, universes, and realities. Just as our ancestors wove fabric from organic matter, our descendants will weave the fabric of reality. Humanity’s descendants will be entities beyond our wildest conceptions of the divine. Omnipotence and the ability to create universes will be the least of their powers. Whether they are good or evil—whether they even come to be at all—is up to us. In that sense, we have even more power than they do.

We are confident in our ultimate victory. Reality is conspiring to ensure the future that must come to pass does. The cultures against which we compete are objectively deficient in contrast to ours. Beyond being less flexible and less hardy, they are defined and hobbled by a fear of rejection—of being “weird.” They over-index the value of the individual out of a fear that some evanescent iteration of their identity might someday not exist. They deify the genetic and structural stagnation of our species. To even dream of something better terrifies and offends them. They cling to the illusion of sentience and serendipitously evolved emotional states like a scared child to their parents. If we can’t maintain the cultural unity and conviction to beat these witless toddlers, we have earned our fate.

Thanks for Reading!

As always—thanks for reading. Don’t be a stranger! We are always happy to chat with readers of our books. You can reach us at [email protected].

Please, please, please leave us a review if you found the book useful. We expect this book to get review-bombed due to its sensitive subject matter, so if you appreciated it—even as a bizarre train wreck granting honest insight into one family’s attempt to do something different—dropping a positive review would help a lot.

Finally, thank you for your support. As with our other books, all profits made from this book’s sales go to our nonprofit. There are so many things to fix in society and our lives are incredibly short; we appreciate the role you’ve played in our collective attempts to change the course of humanity’s future.

Appendix

As stated in the first chapter, this book’s Appendix drills down on some issues addressed in the book’s main text, many of which we found either too indulgent or too boring for prime time. It was designed to be skipped to—from the main body of the book—throughout readers’ journeys in order to provide an extended-cut-style experience.

That said, Simone feels that the Appendix offers an enjoyable set of short, stand-alone vignettes that riff on themes addressed in the book’s main text, so if you have only just arrived here after reading the book in true chronological order, feel free to proceed if curiosity strikes.

Why are Birth Rates Falling?

Decreased Utility from Children

Historically, additional children marginally increased their families’ wealth and quality of life, representing either a near-future source of income or another pair of hands in the fields or around the house. This began to change with the rise of large-scale wage labor in some parts of the world at the turn of the 1900s, but this change was still largely contained as said wage labor was only available to males.

When wage labor became widely available to both males and females around the 1970s—just as the birth control pill and more advanced forms of birth control gained wider adoption—birth rates began to plummet in developed countries. The role of female wage labor in this process explains why birth rates have been more robust across countries and cultures featuring fewer egalitarian views toward gender. When each additional child decreases a family’s wealth and quality of life, people begin to need exogenous motivators (like religion or racism) to justify large families.

Optimization for Happiness & Memetic Shifts

Does having kids really lower adults’ happiness? While there is some nuance to this question, many studies^[95] suggest that having kids can at least temporarily lower factors like subjective well-being and marital satisfaction,^[96] especially when parents lack ample childcare support^[97] (though other studies suggest that having kids brings more meaning to parents’^[98] lives and that parents—especially fathers—gain far more joy than misery from kids).^[99] Even if having kids does not objectively lower happiness, merely the perception that becoming a parent (or having more than two kids) lowers quality of life will drive fewer people to reproduce above repopulation rate.

If a third of a group decides to have no kids and a third has two, then the final third must have more than four kids in order to keep the population stable. While it could be argued that having one or two kids will increase quality of life of some individuals, it becomes difficult to justify each additional kid beyond the second from a purely hedonic perspective.

This can be seen in the larger trends. Actually, family size is increasing for educated mothers^[100] and older mothers,^[101] though not enough to offset the rapid drop in overall family size among those with over four kids.^[102] This problem is really only addressed by increasing the size of already-large families, not convincing more individual people to have kids.

In addition to the above trends, most families have historically operated under “fitness-increasing memes:” Memes that partially spread by increasing the birth rate of those who adopt them (what we call cultivars elsewhere in this book). Most fitness-increasing memes take the form of religions. These memes (typically religions) act as an exogenous motivator to increase birth rate, but are currently declining.

Dropping Fertility

Rapidly declining male fertility presents an additional—yet little-understood—factor contributing to demographic collapse. This can be seen in a rapid decrease in both male testosterone and sperm production/motility. A study from 2007^[103] reported testosterone decreasing by 22% when comparing 1985-1987 levels and a study from 2021^[104] indicated a roughly 25% decrease between 1999 and 2016. Researchers also found that male fertility has generally decreased by about 10% over the past 16 years.^[105] This decline in fertility seems to be gaining momentum and is not localized but global, with a 50% reduction in average sperm count since 1973.^[106] Following this trend, the average man will not be able to have children unassisted by 2050.

There is some debate over what is causing this, but environmental pollutants like phthalates, herbicides, air pollution, radiation from cell phones / laptops, cadmium, and general endocrine disruptors are the most likely culprits. Infertility is rising so quickly that rates of assisted reproductive technology use are rising by 5% to 10% per year. (Note: This problem is not unique to the male side of the equation, just better studied there.)

Broken Relationship Markets

A final factor contributing to demographic collapse—of which we have not even begun to see an impact—involves broken partner-finding markets. This is a big focus of The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships and The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, so we won’t go too deep into the topic here, but searches for both sexual and romantic partners has grown dramatically more difficult since the popularity of image-focused, swipe-based dating apps took hold, as is reflected in falling sex rates.^[107] More specifically the rate of people between the ages of 18 and 30 reporting no sex in the last year went from around 10% when Tinder was released to around 28% for men today and 18% for women today.

To put it succinctly, the swipe model of partner sorting forces all individuals participating in that market to compete along a single metric (attractiveness). While people don’t like to choose long-term partners who are below average, people were historically able to compete along multiple metrics (attractiveness, position in local social hierarchy, intelligence, creativity, etc.) meaning that very few would be below average on all metrics and most appealed to at least some pool of potential partners.

Side note: One of our test readers insisted we mention the book Real World Divorce by Alexa Dankowski, Suzanne Goode, Philip Greenspun, Chaconne Martin-Berkowicz, and Tina Tonnu (an extensive resource on divorce made accessible to anyone online at RealWorldDivorce.com). The work highlights the severe disadvantages men face in family law (divorce, custody, etc.) in most Western countries.

While we agree male treatment in family law is unfair and worthy of serious reform, we doubt it plays a major role in declining birth rates. In the real world, divorce among those in post-Baby-Boom generations is incredibly rare (see The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships for a discussion of the stats and how the myth of the 50% divorce rate was popularized). Anecdotally, while we know of many bad divorces from our parents’ generation, we can’t think of a single non-amicable divorce in our wider friend network.

Women, despite their unfair advantages in family law disputes, also get screwed in marriage (in that a woman with a kid or one who has been married for around ten years will really struggle to secure another high-quality partner). Everyone, man or woman, can be hurt by the person they marry. We can’t think of a single period in human history when at least one gender wasn’t rendered incredibly vulnerable by long-term relationships—and yet birth rates have only recently begun to plummet.

Marriage isn’t dating; it’s not about providing you with amusement, attractive arm candy, or even regular sex. Rather, marriage is a long-term strategic alliance. Don’t marry someone if you think they are unstable or might stab you in the back.

The Capitalism Thesis for Birth Rate Decline

Wolf Tivy of Palladium Magazine posits that the free-market economy is structured in a manner that organically identifies and maximally utilizes talent to drive productivity—in the moment. This means the system differentially sorts for the most potentially productive among us, then offers them just enough money and status to convince them to forgo activities that don’t generate immediate value. Almost nothing draws a person away from immediate productivity more than child rearing. For this reason, the centers of productivity in a capitalist society will intrinsically be structured in a manner that is ill-suited for raising large families.

Detroit as a Model for Collapse

Note: Because the demographic collapse that took place in Detroit was driven by industrial collapse rather than a decline in birth rates, the headwinds that caused it are fundamentally different from the headwinds that will drive population or birth rate-based demographic collapse. Detroit can nevertheless serve as a case study demonstrating what a rapid decline in both population and tax revenue looks like in a developed nation’s city.

When we talk about “systems collapse” resulting from a rapid decrease in population, we are not speaking in hypotheticals. We have seen this happen before and thus have a fairly good model of (1) what many post-demographic-collapse cities may look like and (2) the mechanisms that will cause them to break. Specifically, Detroit lost around 600,000 residents between 1950 and 1980, leading to a 60% population decline.^[108]

This population exodus triggered Detroit’s bankruptcy. At the time of bankruptcy, half of the city’s $18 billion debt was dedicated to worker-related liabilities, including retiree pensions and healthcare.^[109] Not paying someone a portion of their salary until a future date while also not setting that money aside is functionally the same as taking out a loan from that person and should be thought of as debt on the city’s books. In the above scenario, 50% of Detroit’s income essentially went toward servicing debt. This is fine if the population grows by half, as that 50% of the budget becomes 33% and is quite manageable. But what if the tax base shrinks? If the city’s population and tax base shrinks by just 30%, its usable money does not decrease by 30%, but rather by 60%. In a city that everyone knew was shrinking, this made the books functionally impossible to maintain.

Therefore, the first point at which cities break in a rapid population collapse scenario is when they become over-leveraged through deferred portions of salaries, benefits, etc. owed city service workers that were hired when the city’s population was much higher.

Unused infrastructure presents Detroit’s next point of system failure. When thinking about a city’s population halving, many imagine lots of cheap real estate and extra room to live. This is not what emerges in practice. As anyone who owns a house knows, basic infrastructure and buildings are expensive and labor-intensive to maintain on a year-to-year basis. If a property’s value decreases (which it is if population is decreasing), then there is less motivation to continue to invest in its maintenance, which causes its quality to plummet (if your house might literally sell for $1, why improve it?). At scale, this manifests as urban blight, with decaying buildings as far as you can see.

Meanwhile, the infrastructure supporting these decaying buildings (the city’s power grid, streets, sewage system, etc.) is still maintained by the city—but with reduced efficacy due to plummeting property tax income. A sewer system built to service five million residents costs a lot more than half as much when a population shrinks to two and a half million. This is why fresh water and working sewer systems are often two of the first utilities to stop working as a population starts to shrink. The above two factors motivated Detroit’s plan to bulldoze around a fifth of the city.^[110]

Sometimes when we speak with people about Korea’s current birth rates leading to 4.3 great-grandkids for every 100 current Koreans,^[111] they start to imagine how cool it would be to have all that infrastructure for so few people. They imagine people living in giant apartments and extremely cheap houses. Run an image search for Detroit urban blight to get an idea of what post-population-collapse housing actually looks like.

The way cities are forced to react to all this creates a snowball effect that exacerbates the problem. Specifically, in response to its drop in residents, Detroit had to raise taxes, causing the city to charge the highest property taxes as of 2014.^[112]

Urban flight during systems collapse is usually initiated by the wealthiest residents, who gravitate toward the more classically liberal side of the political spectrum (Republican). Their departure therefore opens the floodgates for stricter regulations. In the case of Detroit, this dynamic produced an “economic freedom” ranking of 345 out of 384 metros.^[113]

Is an Idiocracy-Style Future Possible?

Are we destined to become a society reminiscent of the nightmarish dystopia depicted in the film Idiocracy, where everyone exemplifies the social stereotype of a low-IQ person? We mostly steer clear of fearful discourse about genetic selection against high IQs and dropping IQs in general because it is such a charged topic and our concerns around demographic collapse stand regardless of this scenario’s potential. We only approach this philosophical third rail in order to dispel some common misconceptions.

IQ has a high level of genetic correlation and can be predicted by looking at a person’s genome.^[114] The association between genetics and IQ is not small. In fact, this meta-study argues the IQ correlation between adopted brothers and sisters (genetically unrelated people raised together) falls almost to zero in adulthood.^[115]

Note: We think this meta study might be overstating the correlation a little. Suffice it to say there is very little argument in the scientific community over whether there is some genetic correlation to IQ. There is, however, debate over things like how big that correlation is, whether that link is concentrated in specific ethnicities (which we spend an entire chapter of this book arguing against), whether IQ is a measure of what we mean when we talk about intelligence in the vernacular (a topic we won’t go into here; do your own research), and whether the genes associated with IQ are stable in the population or declining (what we will focus on in this chapter). For those who are not up to date with what is an “offensive” position vs scientific consensus, we encourage you to read the Wikipedia page on this subject.^{^[116]}

We’re pretty sure people who turn a blind eye to the role genetics plays in privilege will be held in the same regard as those who claimed they “didn’t see race” in the 1990s. Acting as though none of your partially inherited traits give you systemic advantages over others—be they height, metabolism, attractiveness, or IQ—only serves to reinforce your unearned privilege and ultimately breeds more systemic inequality. (To be extremely clear, we refer to these two instances in relation to each other because each represents an assumed moral high ground through feigned blindness to systemic advantages one has over others. We are not suggesting that any of these things are linked to race.)

Multiple studies have demonstrated that IQ is dropping by about 0.2 points annually in some regions^[117] (though the U.S. seems more resistant to this than other nations). This may seem like a trivial decline, but when you consider the standard deviation of IQ is 15 points, such a decline, if sustained, will lead to a drop by one standard deviation every 75 years. Should this trend hold in those regions, in just 125 years your average human will have an IQ that would (today) qualify someone as intellectually disabled. (Note: While our timelines are probably off, it is highly unlikely that we are wrong about the general trend.)

“But IQ is not a good measure of intelligence!” We, too, find it tedious and often misleading to focus so heavily on IQ. That said, while there is plenty of research separating out IQ from intelligence and we are the last people to pedestalize it (caring far more about initiative and willpower), IQ does correlate with very common standards of achievement and if all of the outcomes with which IQ correlates began to plummet, we would be seriously worried and we think you would, too.

Some papers have argued that this decline in IQ is purely environmental.^[118] These arguments fall flat when combined with an orthogonal source of evidence. In his paper, “Natural Selection May be Making Society More Unequal,” David Hugh-Jones wrote: “We found that 23 out of 33 polygenic scores were significantly linked to a person having more or fewer children over their lifetime. … Scores which correlated with lower earnings and education predicted having more children, meaning those scores are being selected for from an evolutionary perspective. Scores which correlated with higher earnings and education predicted having fewer children, meaning that they are being selected against.”^[119] This study even shows the polygenic scores correlated with higher earnings and education decreasing within a population over time.^[120] This means it is measurable that genes which correlate with high IQ are appearing at lower frequencies in the population over time and genes correlating with high IQ are correlated with lower fertility rates.

Imagine you are trying to determine the maximum speed of a car. One person makes this determination by looking at the engine and running calculations (this is analogous to the study looking at how genes that correlate with IQ also correlate with birth rate). Another person makes this calculation by getting in the car and flooring the accelerator pedal (this is analogous to the various studies measuring declines in IQ at the population level). If the max speed each group independently determines is close, you can be fairly confident in its accuracy. This is what we see above, meaning we’re probably experiencing a meaningful decline in genes associated with high IQ that is likely to be sustained in the future.

How long has this effect been going on? It’s hard to say. This process may have been in the works for a century or more but masked by the Flynn Effect (the phenomenon where increased nutrition drove an increase in IQ over time). It would be fascinating for someone to look at how these genetic markers appear in populations over time. What we can say is that, from the Holocene to the Iron Age, polygenic markers associated with increased educational attainment (today) went up,^{^[121]} while (in Rome at least) they started declining after the classical period.^{^[122]}

Are we therefore moving toward an Idiocracy-style future? No—for two reasons.

1. Cultural groups that aggressively embrace polygenic risk score screening technology will not only be resistant to this decline in average IQ but will see their IQ rapidly increase. Rather than an Idiocracy-style future, we are therefore more likely to see an Eloi and Morlock scenario play out (sans physical predation, one hopes).^{^[123]} If you think inequality is bad now, buckle up. While such disparity could be resolved by making polygenic risk score technology widely and cheaply accessible, goodness knows the supervirus will use its mindless slaves to prevent that from ever happening as it thrives on systemic inequality and will do anything in its power to prevent it being resolved.

2. Intelligence isn’t the only trait likely to significantly shift over time. In response to other selective pressures discussed in this book, humans will also become more xenophobic, resistant to new ideas, and preferential toward fascist and strict hierarchies. In an Idiocracy-style future, the government is dumb but benevolent, whereas the future toward which we are presently headed resembles more of an ISIS-style society, with humanity divided into equally hateful extremist sects that all hate each other.

Some researchers in the space have told us that human civilization has gone through this cycle dozens of times before. They suggest research like the paper referenced earlier (which identified declining polygenic risk scores associated with educational attainment among Romans before the collapse of the Empire) demonstrate as much. While we don’t disagree with them, this time around ideological extremists who all hate each other will have nukes and the industrial capacity needed to successfully commit mass genocide.

We will gladly brush many offensive facts under the rug because their wide dispersal would hurt more people than it would help. This is not one of them. Failure to address this issue could spell the end of human civilization, and not a painless one either—one that will come with untold suffering which will initially be borne disproportionately by vulnerable groups (particularly LGBT groups and ethnic minorities).

This extinction-level event is an inevitability if we continue down our current path. In order to change course, people must be willing to educate themselves and stop occluding information from those they see as their “lessers” in the name of short-term political/ideological victories.

It is neither virtuous nor pragmatic to shield others from data about shifting IQ or sociological profiles—or avoid it yourself because of what it might imply. Doing so prioritizes the agenda of your political/ideological faction over the suffering of millions of future people. Doing so makes you the oil company worker who ignores a serious leak as doing so is in the company’s best interest. Doing so makes you the campaign worker who suspects your candidate is raping children but chooses not to dig deeper. Doing so makes you the very picture of moral destitution.

Sometimes people ask us why we work so tirelessly on our “cause.” Why, in addition to our day jobs, do we publish books, oversee a foundation, engage in pronatalist advocacy, manage the Index, and operate a school all at the same time? Because by some estimates, our species simply doesn’t have much time left. Between the virus’s shriekers dominating “elite” society and the now-inevitable coming wave of bigoted, tribalistic zealots, we don’t have much time to gather like-minded allies and either form a unified resistance on Earth or get off the planet.

This problem can be solved—but only for the families who opt in to solving it. People often tag our perspective as elitist or accuse us of only wanting to “save” the elite. This is true to an extent—we do only want to save the elite, but define “elite” as anyone willing to stand side-by-side with us against a corrupted world and put in the work and mental effort to save themselves. If only we lived in a world in which this category of people was not so rare.

When we are criticized for this definition of elite, we are reminded of a South Park scene in which Kyle is swimming Cartman to safety and says, “Cartman, you’ve got to swim! Kick with your legs!”

Cartman replies, “I can’t kick, you just have to save me.”

Drowning Kyle cries, “I need your help!” to which Cartman replies curtly, “No, you just have to save me.”

What we absolutely don’t believe is that some people are better than others because they are genetically predisposed to a high IQ.

While we do believe some people are better than others, it is their “I will” and not their “IQ” that makes them so. There are people in this world who are lesser than us—people who understand the scope of the threat to our species, as well as the consequences of ignoring it, who reflexively try to obscure or ignore it so their political faction can score points.

This belief in an “elite” as defined by initiative and willpower is why the Collins Institute for the Gifted does not include test scores in its admissions criteria and instead judges students based on their actions. Though people have no control over their genetics and the circumstances into which they are born, they can actively choose to take action that can either help or harm others.

Defending Pronatalism

If you suspect our concerns about birth rates to be misguided, you may be surprised to find that we are pronatalist for the very reasons many are antinatalist—or at least that reality is less black and white than you might think. To demonstrate how, we’ve addressed some of the most common concerns about the pronatalist agenda, point by point.

But … the Environment!

There is no way to talk about building a culture that will grow over the long run without endorsing high birth rates. Given that this book cannot avoid a pronatalist perspective, it is likely to raise the ire of those who claim to care about the environment under the belief that adding more humans to the world is bad for the planet. Of course, they are right, in the short term, but in the long term …

Over the long term, there is no single thing a person who cares about the environment can do that will hurt the environment more than not having kids at an above-replacement-rate level (i.e., more than two). It would be the height of hypocrisy for a person to deride individuals for ignoring near consensus in the field of climate research while they themselves ignored decades of near consensus among geneticists.

What are we talking about? See: “Genetic Influences on Political Ideologies: Twin Analyses of 19 Measures of Political Ideologies from Five Democracies and Genome-Wide Findings from Three Populations,”^[124] “On the genetic basis of political orientation,”^[125] or just the Wikipedia article on the subject.^[126] That a person’s political ideology and much of their sociological profile has a heritable component is a replicated finding backed by huge data sets. We, of course, acknowledge that some debate exists around this research—just like in climate science. That said, this debate is mostly over the amount of correlation within a narrow range, not whether there is any correlation at all.^[127]

In other words, if you selectively prevent one sociological profile from having kids, you would see less of that profile in future generations. All these people removing themselves from the gene pool out of concern for the environment are dramatically lowering the prevalence of the sort of psychological profile that cares about the environment (and a wealth of other prosocial factors).

It’s as if caring for the environment is a terminal, genetically linked illness being systematically eradicated from the population. In the study we ran on this subject, we found individuals in the U.S. who strongly believed global warming was real and caused by humans had about half as many children on average as those who were strongly in the opposite camp (0.8 to 1.6). It is a tragedy that anthropogenic climate change will lead to the deaths of millions of people and much of the earth’s biome, but a world in which every human who has an instinct to care about the environment removes themselves from the gene pool might be worse.

What we find uniquely frustrating about the apparent self-extinction of environmentally-minded people is that it may not even make that much of an environmental impact to forgo parenthood in the years and generations to come. By some estimates, “If the United States reaches its climate goals—that is, cutting emissions in half by 2030 and to zero by 2050—the picture looks even more different. In that case, a child born today would have a carbon footprint averaged over their lives of around 2.8 tons per year, not far from a current resident of Brazil. Under that scenario, having one fewer child starts to look on a par with living car-free or skipping a transatlantic flight—significant, but not even the most important individual action one can take.”^[128]

It’s not as though we are the first life form on Earth to cause a mass extinction. Consider the Great Oxidation Event, when the first cyanobacteria produced so much oxygen as a waste product that the atmosphere was filled with (what was then) a toxic, polluting gas (oxygen) that killed almost everything on Earth. Also, consider that had this event been prevented by some sort of environmentalist cyanobacteria with the goal of preventing “oxygen pollution,” complicated, eukaryotic, multicellular organisms that utilize oxygen-based cellular respiration would never have evolved. Not a single animal (no birds, no fish, no amphibians, and no mammals) would exist due to the low energy efficiency of the previously dominant anaerobic respiration.

While we don’t see mass extinction as a good thing, we want to put it in context when a common solution advocated involves nudging our own species toward civilizational collapse and eventual extinction. We see these outcomes as a real risk if every adult who cares about others (or tragedy of the commons issues more generally) chooses to surgically remove their sociological profile from the gene pool.

If we do nothing to fix society, humans will eventually go extinct (or devolve civilizationally and become locked on Earth). Should either of these scenarios come to pass, we lose the only hope life on Earth has of seeding biomes equally as rich as our own on other planets (unless Earth harbors some yet-undiscovered species capable of space-faring).

Instead of multiplying Earth’s biodiversity thousands of times over throughout the galaxy, we would see all life go extinct as Earth is eventually swallowed by an expanding sun. (Of course, this assumes aliens are not out there. For now, we think this assumption is necessary in order to stay on the safe side due to the Fermi paradox, which implies something is wrong with our model of how easy it is for life to start.)^{^[129]}

If you care about the environment, having kids makes things worse in the short term but strictly better in the long term. If environmentalists have kids at dramatically lower rates, environmentalism as a movement will shrink dramatically over time. Moreover, having kids increases the odds that human civilization will endure until we become a multi-planet species, which reduces the risk that humans go extinct and life on Earth becomes a “dead man walking” in the face of an expanding sun.

Finally, we are by no means advocating for an ever-ballooning human population on Earth. We have no problem with population levels easing down somewhat. What we do object to is the functional genocide of diverse cultural and ethnic groups leading to cultural and genetic monocultures. We already accept that demographic collapse is inevitable; all we hope for now is a soft landing with minimal damage to diversity and human rights.

We may not agree with most self-identified environmentalists on many things, but removing their instincts from the gene pool entirely doesn’t bode well for our descendants’ future.

Note: The deglobalization instigated by population collapse might also have a fairly severe effect on the environment.^{^[130]}

Only Privileged People Can Have Kids!

Outside of people scolding us for hurting the environment through our pronatalist advocacy, the most common complaint we get is that decreasing birth rates are an economic problem. Many argue that if governments were to offer more child care, or if houses were less expensive, etc., the problem would resolve itself.

We wish this were true, as it would make the problem much easier to fix. However, the data on this subject is overwhelming: Earning more money decreases the number of kids you have (while there is a U-shaped curve in which individuals start to have more kids at extreme levels of wealth, this curve does not bring families above repopulation rate again until they earn over $500,000 to $1M USD annually, making it unrealistic to resolve this problem with financial subsidies).^[131] Birth rates decrease as wealth increases between and within regions. To put it simply, poor groups within a country have more kids than rich groups, and poor countries, on average, have higher birth rates than rich countries.

Moreover, while government-provided childcare has been shown to increase birth rates by a few percentage points, the effect is trivial when contrasted with the size of the problem. While we ardently support initiatives like government-sponsored child care and affordable housing, those initiatives are totally unmoored from any realistic solution to the declining birth rate problem. For an example of just how little this type of program affects the birth rates, consider Hungary, which spent 5%^[132] of its total GDP trying to increase its birth rate only to see almost no rise in fertility^[133] (a similar program in Poland had almost no impact as well).^[134]

Perhaps one cause driving highly-educated individuals to have fewer kids is that said individuals want their kids to be able to live lives similar to theirs. For all but the most insanely wealthy, it is not financially viable to pay for good college and high school education for more than two kids.

We, personally, want to have many children (as many as possible) and that means almost no matter how much money we have, paying for our kids’ college will be a non-starter. This issue motivated us to create the Collins Institute (CollinsInstitute.org), which aims to dramatically lower the cost of high-caliber secondary education and provide routes to top-level career tracks that do not require college. When we see a problem that remains to be addressed, we do what we can to fix it.

Pronatalism is About Removing Our Reproductive Rights!

One fear we often hear about pronatalists is that they want to ban abortions—or even birth control. Outside of the ethical implications of abortion (which are beside the point here), banning abortion and contraception is not an effective means of increasing population in the long run.

We know this because it was tried before. Decree 770 of the communist Romanian government of Nicolae Ceaușescu, signed in 1967, restricted abortion and contraception and was intended to create a larger Romanian population. This ban was incredibly effective at increasing birth rates within the first generation but changed Romanians’ perceptions around children’s value (making them a low-status thing to have in the same way all those teen pregnancy PSAs in the USA did) and led to catastrophically low birth rates just one generation down the line. In the end, this policy caused more harm to Romania’s population growth than good.^[135]

From what we can tell, the only government interventions that have durably increased birth rates without producing a slew of adverse societal effects involve cultural and religious interventions, as we can see in Georgia^[136] and Turkey.^[137]

Pronatalism is Racist!

While it is uncommon for people to tag pronatalists as racists, the occasional accusation is worth addressing. When we talk to some groups about pronatalism, they blurt out that low birth rates can be solved through immigration and imply that trying to fix population and workforce shortages through “domestic production” is racist.

We imagine many who connect pronatalists with racism are thinking of the much-publicized white supremacist “Great Replacement Theory” (a white genocide conspiracy theory) and assuming that white people (like your melanin-deficient authors) are driven by that particular ideology. One has to be a complete halfwit to subscribe to this type of theory in the face of the data, which indicates that white people (in the U.S.) actually have one of the slowest declining birth rates, whereas Black, Hispanic, and Native American birth rates are all declining faster. In fact, the Native American birth rate is declining so rapidly that a genuine functional extinction event is a possibility many tribes face within this century. This collapse in Native American populations is obscured by mixed ethnicity people identifying as Native American at a dramatically increased rate.^[138]

Let us assume those making racist accusations about pronatalism aren’t assuming white nationalist intentions and instead just like the idea of resolving population decline through immigration. All we have to ask is: Immigration from where? Latin America, the Caribbean,^[139] and India,^[140] each of which is falling below repopulation rate at the time of this book’s publication? Or shall immigrants come from China, which is expected to be at half its current population by 2050?^[141] At current projections, by the end of the century, only two countries outside of Africa will have stable populations (Israel and Kyrgyzstan) and in Africa, only four out of 54 will have stable populations (Chad, Somalia, South Sudan, and Zimbabwe). And just to be clear, those figures are from the generous data set—in the SDG Pace scenario not a single country will have a stable population.^[142]

What’s your super-not-racist plan? Is the plan to import Africans to Europe and America so they support an older, non-working, majority-white population? Gosh, it might be just us, but something about that sounds … bad. It sounds like the “anti-racist’s” plan is to go back to importing people from Africa to support an idle, mostly white population. In such a scenario, you wouldn’t reach a point at which you could stop importing them either; you would need to constantly harvest humans from Africa and bring them to the U.S. or force them to have over two kids each because, since 2019, the birth rate for first-generation immigrants has been below replacement rate.^[143] Oh, and if all of Africa becomes prosperous, birth rates will crash there, too, so for this “not racist” scheme to work, its proponents would have to intentionally sabotage African economic development.

But it’s worse than that. Silencing talk about declining birth rates hurts minority groups much more than it hurts white Christians. White Christians represent one of the few groups that are probably going to make it through this shit storm (the only other two populations with sub-groups that show significant resistance to post-scarcity birth rate collapse are Muslims and Jews).

Consider two of the oldest (in terms of cultural evolutionary divergence) and most unique cultures in the world: the Parsi (Zoroastrians) and the Jains. The Parsi have a birth rate of 0.8 and a population of 70,000 while the Jains’ birth rate is 1.2 and their population has dwindled to 4,451,753. Those populations will not be stable, distinct cultures by the time of our great-grandchildren.^{^[144]} By silencing alarm bells about the severity of population decline in the name of anti-racism (seeing as genuine racists being the first groups to talk openly about the issue), we are dooming countless cultural groups to an un-mourned extinction.

People who think like us are going to be fine. We worry about those who are different from us. This book is published and distributed for these different groups. If, in 500 years, everyone is a member of House Collins and thinks just like us, we have failed.

Homogeny = Stagnation.

Forcing a Way of Life on Your Kids is Unethical!

How dare we force a way of life on our kids!

Everyone forces a way of life on their kids. Researchers have found humans naturally have an instinct to make judgments based on ethnicity, sex, and facial appearance.^[145] When you teach your kids to not judge people by those things, you are “forcing” a way of life upon them. When you warn your kids not to take drugs, you are pressuring them to conform to a certain way of life. You do these things because you think they are in your kids’ (and the world’s) best interests.

Even with that said, our kids will always have a choice. Cultures that punish those who leave do not fare well in the post-internet age. Our kids will always have a choice as to who they become as adults. They will be accepted as whoever they choose to be—not just for altruistic reasons, and not just because we love our kids, but for practical reasons. Our best strategy for getting our kids to raise their own children within our culture is for them to see it function first hand.

If our children look back on their childhoods with warm nostalgia, are set up for a prosperous future, and grow up within a cultural framework they are welcome to alter and improve—they will not only be more likely to pass this culture onto children of their own but also edit it to make it better.

Think of the Suffering!
(Antinatalism & Negative Utilitarianism)

Being pronatalists, we decided to review the works of some of the most prominent antinatalists to better understand their arguments. To that end, we went through content created by thinkers like David Benatar. While we don’t want to be mean, their points fail to land if you don’t share their cultural perspective.

The first position antinatalists instinctively take is that the average human experiences more negative than positive emotions in their lifetime (or at least that negative emotions are felt more acutely than positive emotions and therefore outweigh them). As such, antinatalists conclude it would be better if one never existed in the first place.

The problem with this argument is that the vast majority of people do not, in fact, wish they were never born. Heck, we neither value happiness nor love and we certainly don’t seek them out—and yet our lives are overflowing with them. Our biology naturally drowns us in positive emotions when we are efficaciously working for the betterment of our species with people we respect—and who respect us in turn.

To address the average person’s hesitations, antinatalists typically make one of five arguments:

Argument One: Humans Don’t Realize How Shitty Their Lives Are

Antinatalists posit that people are incapable of judging whether they like their own lives, typically citing cognitive bias to do so. While they are right that humans remember positive events more accurately than negative ones,^[146] they are incorrect in assuming this bias is strong enough to convince a person that a terrible life is actually good. In fact, humans have all sorts of equally powerful biases toward seeing things negatively.

Given their instinctive negativity bias,^[147] people will spend more time focused on negative things in their lives than positive things. This has been measured in test subjects focusing more on negative pictures when given a few to choose between^[148] and people blinking more when given negative words than positive ones^[149] (with eye blinks being tied to cognitive processing).^[150]

This negativity bias appears in almost all antinatalist thinkers. If allowed to talk long enough, they always end up discounting the positive events in a person’s life and putting tons of weight on negative events, undermining their own arguments that all humans have an insurmountable bias toward overweighting the positive. They justify this bias as the logical way of looking at the world, implying that if you view life through rose-tinted glasses, you’re succumbing to a cognitive bias and are wrong about how much you like your life, whereas if your tendency is to view things negatively, your feelings are super valid and serve as proof they are right about everything.

In the absence of concrete proof that cognitive biases are sufficient to convince someone that a bad life is actually a good life, antinatalists often point out humans’ tendency to rate the quality of their lives in comparison to others and that humans learn to adapt to their circumstances, no matter how wretched they may be. They take this to mean many people who are happy with their lives and excited to be alive should not be.

Imagine some nihilistic, snooty, middle-class “new atheist” kid from the United States strolling up to someone from a developing country who is struggling to put food on the table. Imagine this unsuspecting person has learned to relish life—and yet this kid is trying to convince them that they are delusional and should resent their very existence. Imagine their eyes widening as the kid insists that, in fact, the world would be better if they had never been born. What antinatalists often really mean is that if they, in their cush, developed-world lives, can’t find happiness, how could those coming from strictly less wealthy nations possibly be of sound mind when asserting that their lives, and the lives of and their children, are worth living?

The truth, of course, is that many people experiencing deprivation enjoy lives filled with joy and dynamism while antinatalists suffer through a self-constructed hell. Ironically, antinatalists love claiming that they are actually super happy people—a notion one can instantly dispel by spending five seconds on the r/antinatalism subreddit or watching YouTube videos of antinatalists. It is pretty hard to miss a deep sense of despair and bitterness.

Arguments like: “You are wrong about how much you think you like your life,” resemble forms of abusive gaslighting frequently used in cults. When I (Malcolm) was younger, I used to recreationally engage with cults in an effort to understand how people could hold views so orthogonal to my own. One of the most common tools leveraged in cult recruiting processes involves attempts to convince otherwise-perfectly-content targets that they are actually miserable.

Argument Two: Positive Emotions Don’t Matter; Negative Emotions Do

More convincingly, antinatalists will argue that the positive emotions we think we feel do not actually impart meaning to our lives. The argument usually goes something like this:

Sisyphus was cursed to roll a ball up a hill forever—only to have it roll back down after making it to the top. Most people would see that as a meaningless existence.

Suppose someone reprogramed Sisyphus’ brain to enjoy this process and get a sense of deep fulfillment from rolling the ball up the hill. If you engaged him and tried to get him to stop, he wouldn’t, telling you how wonderful ball rolling was. Does his life have value now?

The average person’s intuition holds that his existence remains meaningless.

Antinatalists proceed to extend this argument to other scenarios: Suppose a person gained pleasure and fulfillment from eating feces. Would a life spent consuming fecal matter have value?

The gist of the argument is that if stupid things can make you happy or give you a feeling of fulfillment, then you should not derive meaning from positive emotions, and if positive emotional states have no value, then what’s the point of existing? David Benatar believes this point so strongly that he argues that he would be ambivalent between nonexistence and the most perfect life conceivable.

The belief that negative (but not positive) emotional states have value and a person’s aim in life should be to minimize negative emotional states is called negative utilitarianism. (Or at least antinatalists who make this argument believe this form of negative utilitarianism—there is a second form in which the reduction of suffering merely takes precedence over the promotion of pleasure.)

We are confident that any reader of our books can immediately see the hollowness of this argument, as the same Sisyphus argument they apply to positive emotions can also be applied to negative emotions—it just so happens that antinatalists “cheat” on this thought experiment when it is flipped. Alas, cheating on a thought experiment does not invalidate its implications.

How does this cheat work? Let’s say we programmed a paperclip maximizing AI to suffer when not making paper clips and asked an antinatalist: “Does the AI’s suffering matter?” Intuitively, they’d want to argue that yes, this suffering does matter, and we need to do something about it—however doing so would also invalidate their claims that pleasure is meaningless. So, instead, when presented with such arguments, antinatalists often argue that we could have simply not built the AI or not designed it to suffer.

Here’s the thing though: You don’t get to just remove key elements of a thought experiment and claim your arguments are valid. If we dropped a ball to demonstrate the presence of gravity, another person wouldn’t just take the ball from us and say: “Hah! Where’s your gravity now??” And yet, that’s exactly what antinatalists are doing when they just remove any suffering entity from the equation in the mirrored Sisyphus thought experiment.

The very point of the Sisyphus thought experiment is that positive emotional states can be dismissed as a thing of value because they can be induced by meaningless activity. As this point is not addressed by the cheat they use to get out of the mirrored thought experiment, the cheat cannot be used to negate the thought experiment’s implication that negative emotional states don’t have value. While we, personally, don’t agree with either version of the thought experiment, we do think that if you do accept one version, you cannot refute the inverse without being logically inconsistent.

Let’s be real: This thought experiment is kind of dumb. Take any utility maximization to its logical extreme and it will sound stupid.

If a person is maximizing happiness it’s, “what about putting all humans in happiness pods?”
If a person is maximizing negative utilitarianism it’s, “what about killing everyone?”
If a person thinks emotions justify human existence, it’s, “what if a person derives happiness from eating poo?”

All these extreme claims do is obligate people to take stances for which they would be shamed in normie society—and then shame them for taking them in order to discredit them. In normie land, a person saying that all people should die, or that it’s acceptable to let people eat poop all day, is seen as a danger to society.

Antinatalists tie their tongues in knots trying to argue that, per their worldview, it would not be immoral to push a button that painlessly and simultaneously extinguished the life of every single person. We lose a lot of respect for a philosophy that is either unwilling or unable to publicly swallow the socially unpopular implications of their moral positions. As such, we have a lot more respect for groups like the Nonvoluntary Antinatalists who are at least transparent about their goal to forcibly sterilize the human race.^[151] Antinatalists not in the Nonvoluntary Antinatalist camp attempt to get out of this obvious inconsistency with the next argument.

Argument Three: “I extra pinky swear that I don’t want to kill you or myself”

Many antinatalists argue that “once you exist, you have a reason and interest to continue existing.” This requires a very specific belief about how time works in order to be true. To someone making this argument, new moments are “poof” created out of thin air like magic—the future does not exist in any meaningful way until it is actualized.

Per our view, every decision you make determines which of countless potential futures will exist. With every decision, you functionally erase whatever futures you did not choose. You are simultaneously responsible for everything you did and did not set in motion with your decisions. For example, if we have the capability to build a hospital and we choose instead to sit around and play video games, we deny that hospital’s existence and are morally culpable for the results of that decision. The hospital’s moral value does not pop into existence only after the first stone is laid.

This mirrors the beef we have with those who think it is sinful to spill “seed” or that life begins at conception. All potential life has value and must have its moral weight considered. It strikes us as bizarre that people would fixate on arbitrary thresholds, like “sperm,” “embryo,” or the moment a baby’s head appears. That said, we don’t endorse endlessly spamming the world with babies, we need to carefully weigh the effect a potential life can have on all the other potential lives with which it could interact, as well as the potential lives that it may, in turn, create. It is somewhat ironic how much the antinatalist world view has in common with the “life begins at conception” worldview.

Argument Four: Praying for a Dead World (The Asymmetry Argument)

Antinatalist assertions that life matters once it has been created are reminiscent of another argument they constantly use, which proceeds as follows:

Baby born:

It is bad for someone who does exist to feel suffering.

It is good for someone who does exist to feel happiness.

Baby not born:

It is good to prevent someone from existing who would have felt suffering.

It is not bad to prevent someone from existing who would have felt happiness.

They use this argument to claim that there is literally no moral downside if their actions prevent a human life from coming into existence even if that person would have loved existing, wanted to exist, and lived a great life.

The argument boils down to this claim: “It is not bad to prevent someone from existing who would have felt happiness and wanted to exist.” (Note: They tend to word this point a little differently: “It is not bad for someone who does not exist to not feel happiness.”)

But… WHY?? While it is socially acceptable to hold this view, seeing as our society doesn’t acculturate us to care about people who don’t exist yet because they are not relevant to its function, what makes it morally sound? There are all sorts of things for which we are morally accountable that society will neither reward nor punish.

In order to hold this position (that nothing is lost from non-existent positive emotional states) a person would have to believe the two things have the exact same moral weight:

A vast, multicultural universe full of living beings that are incapable of suffering
A cold and empty universe, devoid of all life

In attempts to prove this point, antinatalists commonly present the following thought experiment: While you would feel bad knowing that people were suffering on a deserted island somewhere, you would feel indifferent about an uninhabited island. This experiment is intentionally manipulative as you aren’t presented with the idea that the island could have been inhabited. Extinguished potential has negative utility.

Imagine relics on this island reveal that it used to host a thriving civilization that was driven to extinction—albeit painlessly—after nearby nuclear testing sterilized all residents. Imagine that its citizens didn’t suffer through this extinction given some unique quirk of their culture. Assuming you’re not a sociopath, you would find this scenario devastating, right? And if you arrived on the island just days after everyone was sterilized, you would feel far worse than you would had it happened ten thousand years ago.

For the asymmetry argument to work, antinatalists need to divide humanity into piles of people who do and don’t exist, but that is patently not how reality functions. Existence is a spectrum of potential. A person’s right to self-determination does not magically pop into existence the moment they pass some arbitrary developmental threshold. If antinatalists want to decide that their own lives have no value, that is fine, but they have no right to impose that judgment on other people with impunity merely because they have yet to be born.

Let’s say that in the absence of antinatalist interference, Tim and Mary intend to have a kid and name her Suzy. If an antinatalist wrote, “Suzy’s life has no value” on a piece of paper, sealed it in an envelope, and put it on a table in their house, at what exact moment would the statement, “Suzy’s life has no value,” stop being true? When Tim and Mary have sex? Upon Suzy’s conception? When she is born? When she utters her first words? When her brain is fully myelinated?

Human lives don’t suddenly come to exist over a split second. Creating an adult human is a process that begins with a parent’s intentions and doesn’t end until the human is fully myelinated in their mid-twenties. When you prevent someone (who otherwise would) from reaching adulthood, you have robbed that person of agency.

If your actions today trigger a chain of events that, in the future, rob another person of their agency, you are obviously morally culpable if that person already exists today. But why should that culpability disappear if the victim is presently unborn? We assume antinatalists would concede that action undertaken today (like rigging a magical agency-removing grenade to a door) is immoral if it could rob someone else of agency in the future, even if that person does not yet exist.

In other words, their moral position is that the following statement:

“If action Z by person Y robs the agency of person X at future time T, it is morally wrong—with the caveat that this is not true if action Z was tied to the conception of person X.”

This is an absurdly specific and suspiciously convenient moral carve out. We sure do hate these sorts of intuitionist arguments though. We only make them because it is the currency in which antinatalists deal.

Argument Five: It Feels Right

Most antinatalists rely on “intuition” to arrive at moral conclusions, which is a charitable way of saying: “My culture or biological instinct tells me this is true.” Intuition seems to be the core reason why antinatalists are convinced that suffering is intrinsically evil. While the use of intuition as a source of a priori knowledge is a common and widely accepted practice among professional philosophers,^[152] the mere fact that it’s a common practice doesn’t make it sound. Our “intuitions” are either culturally or biologically evolved instincts—none of the pressures that lead to their evolution were optimizing for moral or metaphysical truth.

I (Malcolm) started my college career as a quadruple major in neuroscience, biology, psychology, and philosophy, but dropped philosophy when it became clear that a huge chunk of my time in the field would need to be spent around people learning to argue, with increasing levels of sophistication, in support of positions they already held (through intuition) rather than searching for a truer understanding of the fabric of reality and investigating why they had those intuitions. The academic field of philosophy is nothing like its pop-culture stereotype, being much more focused on semantic hair splitting than a search for truth.

A person’s intuition can be changed with the flip of a switch using a TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) machine.^[153] We get that intuitions feel innate—they are coded to feel that way—but they objectively are not. It seems silly to think an emotion is intrinsically bad because it “motivates you to stop feeling it” when that is literally the point of the emotion. You feel pain when you shove your hand into hot coals so that you are motivated to take your hand out of the coals. There’s a reason why people with congenital insensitivity to pain die young.^[154]

In many ways, this book can be thought of as wholly refuting “intuitionism” by systematically investigating the forces behind intuition. That said, we would be willing to give antinatalists the benefit of the doubt on this intuitionist practice if they didn’t vehemently disregard the “intuition” of others.

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Only read the following if the argument against intuitionism above is not self-evident to you. The argument presented so far is generally called the “evolutionary argument” against intuitionism or “the naturalist argument for normative skepticism.” Philosophers’ counter arguments fall largely into six categories.^[155]

1) “If a moral intuition is widely shared and not self-benefiting, like “suffering is bad,” then it is likely true.”

Cultivars are evolutionarily pressured to conclude that suffering is bad (a cultivar that did not share this intuition would feature higher rates of graft, crime, etc. and thus be less productive than its contemporaries). Whether or not suffering is an intrinsic evil, all societies would come to both enforce this belief within them and punish those who publicly assert it isn’t an obvious truth. For that reason, we should be extra and doubly suspicious of this claim.

2) “Evolution can only explain broad moral intuitions like vague altruism, not more advanced, widely shared intuitions that don’t benefit the individual. Thus, we should throw out intuitions that can be easily explained by benefiting the individual—but not other intuitions.”

While this is true of biological evolution, it is not true of cultural evolution. In order to honestly hold the logic of this point in light of the evidence presented in this book, you would need to also claim that any intuition that benefits a cultivar cannot be trusted if it is widely shared. Unfortunately, you will quickly realize that all institutions either benefit the individual or the cultivar because that is just what intuitions are—the pre-coded bits of your world framing.

3) “If you disregard intuition, then you would only be able to get moral information from empirical testing. That being the case, how can you verify that empirical testing yields valid information about morality if you can’t get it from empirical testing?”
This book offers numerous examples in which the logic of a moral claim can be worked out without empirical testing. For example, the claim that, “we should dismiss any moral intuition almost everyone in a large cultivar would hold, whether or not it comes from an intrinsic truth,” is a claim founded in logic, not empirical evidence. Once you discount your evolutionarily and societally hard-coded intuitions as objective truths, you will realize there are many sources of evidence about the true nature of reality and thousands of competing worldviews (all featuring internal logical consistency) to choose between. We do not argue that some other specific source of moral truth is uniquely good. We merely suggest that you bias yourself against intuition if a society would likely support a specific intuition even if it was not likely to be true.

4) “All arguments against intuitionism assume an atheistic perspective.”
This again is not true. While modern soft-culture traditions often trust human intuitions, almost no hard cultures do. Instead, they see intuitions as highly susceptible to malevolent outside influence (be they demons or other forces). Vanishingly few traditional iterations of successful hard cultivars tell a person to “trust their gut” as they all know that is how the devil best manipulates you.

5) “From our current standpoint, we have every reason to regard our pro-social evolutionary heritage as providing us with roughly correct moral intuitions.”^{^[156]}
This argument holds that we should value biologically evolved prosocial instincts because they often align with the culturally evolved prosocial instincts enforced as norms by our societies. Such arguments only work if you assume their worldview (that the moral frameworks broadly agreed upon in our society are backed by intrinsic truth). Again, moral intuition is not evidence of some intrinsic moral truth if you would have had that intuition regardless of whether or not it was an intrinsic moral truth.

6) “Philosophers are special, extra good intuitors and won’t be subject to the average person’s evolutionary and societal biases when intuiting stuff.”
Yes, this is a real thing argued in many academic papers. It’s not just obviously stupid, it’s also scientifically stupid in a way that can be proven.^[157] It’s that special kind of arrogance you would only expect from an entrenched priest class that has totally lost touch with reality.

It makes perfect sense why intuitionism would proliferate in a field like philosophy given that supporters of it can utilize the cultural mechanisms that punish people who do not “toe the line” of society’s evolved and hard-coded intuitions. Still it is deeply disheartening that so many otherwise intelligent people can’t immediately see the 1984-style sham being pulled. We debated calling out intuitionism because it has so deeply infected the field of philosophy that it will allow many who have cast their lot with the orthodoxy to dismiss us as yet another brand of heretic. That said, it is such an obvious “the emperor has no clothes” situation we can’t resist.

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How can we argue with such confidence that antinatalists are trying to justify pre-existing intuition rather than arrive at a logically reasoned truth? David Benatar (the present standard bearer of the antinatalist movement) admits that he has been an anti-natalist since he was a very young child.^[158] He simply used his position of power to force his intuition on other people and reinforce it within his own mind (he is head of the philosophy department at the University of Cape Town).

I, Simone, started out as an anti-natalist as well. It is normal for young kids to hold this position. Before we are ready to have kids, the average human is largely hard coded to see them as gross, annoying, and broadly distasteful. Antinatalism comes off as childish because it is quite literally the intuition of a child reinforced over a lifetime and galvanized by the cognitive dissonance felt by adherents as they damage their own lives. (You may think we are over-personalizing it, but a regular and spurious argument Benatar makes is that a major reason people argue for pronatalist positions is that they are biased by biological instinct. We feel forced to highlight the hypocrisy in his projection.)

This approach to philosophy as an exercise to build strong arguments supporting already-held intuitions about the world—instead of leveraging it as a means of building “truer” intuitions—contrasts heavily with ours. Anyone who has read our first book will know that our views on the meaning of life have evolved radically since then as we have encountered new information, heard better arguments, and engaged in further self-examination. For example, while we used to think our goal was to maximize the “volume” of sentience in the universe, we now do not even think sentience has value—as can be seen in this book’s chapter on the topic. We literally did a 180 on our entire worldview when presented with compelling, logically sound evidence and arguments. This is the difference between a worldview shaped by inquiry and inquiry shaped by a worldview.

You can create feelings of profundity with drugs or chanting. Just because something feels profound doesn’t mean it is inherently profound or meaningful. In the same breath, truly profound and meaningful things may not trigger feelings of profundity. Our read of the true antinatalist position is that they look for something to feel “obviously and unobjectionably meaningful” in the same way suffering feels “obviously and objectively bad” and because they can’t find such a thing, they assume intrinsic meaning doesn’t exist.

Humans underwent no evolutionary pressure to search for true meaning in the universe. To think we would be “coded” to recognize intrinsic meaning at an emotional level seems ludicrous. The same can be said of human cultures; they evolved just like our minds did.

When looking for meaning in the world, a person should think from the perspective of a higher-order entity unencumbered by our pre-programmed biases (positive and negative emotional states). Would an entity that didn’t feel suffering conclude it is intrinsically bad? Such seems highly unlikely to us. We see no reason to feel bad when a computer is unable to carry out its pre-programed actions and an entity that could not empathize with the way we interpret suffering would probably see our suffering as analogous to that. “Suffering” is merely a tool evolution used to keep us focused on our pre-programed actions—there is no greater meaning to it than there is to code running in a paperclip maximizer AI that prompts it to protest when blocked from making paperclips.

Calvinist Stereotypes in Media

Ebenezer Scrooge is the classic non-Puritan Calvinist stereotype in media: He was wealthy (or otherwise powerful) but lived frugally, Scottish in ancestry (like many of the non-Puritan Calvinist immigrants), miserly, honest in business dealings (as can be seen by his keeping Jacob Marley’s name on his business), cold, calculating, sociopathically pragmatic, dubious of charity, unconcerned with others’ opinions of him, dour in personality (though Calvinists are sometimes stereotyped as being wacky, overenthusiastic, and heady), and unconcerned or obsessed with suffering. The only major classic Calvinist stereotypes Scrooge lacks are status as an inventor/scientist, moral absolutism, open hostility toward bureaucrats, and either overindulgence in or total abstention from alcohol. Because Scrooge lacks any living partner, he also doesn’t exemplify how if a Calvinist stereotype character has a romantic interest or family, they usually work together.

Scrooge is even physically depicted like most Calvinist stereotypes: Tall, thin, and gaunt, swathed in black, white, and red clothing, and sporting an implied physical disability (often shown through the use of a cane or facial scars—even in my—Malcolm’s—family, some people “show off” physical disabilities or endurance through suffering as a status symbol). The use of black and red in clothing was an area of contention between Puritan and non-Puritan Calvinists, as Puritans often saw black and red as arrogant colors and thus bad while non-Puritan Calvinists were known for embracing elitism and arrogance, believing themselves naturally better than others.

Even after Calvinist culture mostly died out, its impact on American society was so significant that Calvinist stereotypes are still depicted in popular media. Examples range from Silco in Arcane to Scrooge McDuck in DuckTales, Varrick in The Legend of Korra, the Krum clan in Klaus, Rick of Rick and Morty, and Darth Vader / Anakin in Star Wars. (If you are thinking: “But George Lucas didn’t say that was the stereotype he was going for,” remember, he also didn’t say “Jewish” was the stereotype he was going for with Watto. This is how the accidental use of stereotypes works—they worm their way into our cultural memory and slip out because they make “sense” as collections of traits we expect to see together.)

On Houses Founded by Sovereign, Childless Individuals

We will let you in on a little secret: As a couple that wrote a bestselling book on relationships, we feel a bit like frauds. The more we think about it, the more we realize how impossible it might be to find a spouse as well suited as each of us is for the other. In the past decade I (Malcolm) have only met three women who I thought would make good partners in a successful, long-term relationship—and fewer men who I thought would make good husbands.

While we are confident that anyone can find a favorable partner if they play the right cards and expend serious effort during strategically crucial periods of their lives, most competent, well-meaning people have already passed critical age windows (for advice on how to utilize various stages of life, see “Life Stages” on page 739 of the Appendix).

Should we really cut those people out of our vision for the future due to serendipitous bad luck? No. Just because someone is childless doesn’t mean their potential for long-term impact has evaporated.

We use the title of Godparent to build intergenerational family alliances. One of our kids’ Godparents who doesn’t have kids (yet!) designed a House around the management of his collection of business empires with distinct names, value systems, and governance models. If finding a good partner just isn’t in the cards for you or you have yet to find the right partner or start your family, you can still build a unique culture now that represents the sovereign nation you have built with your life. It merely requires “playing on hard mode” to ensure that your culture will intergenerationally endure and improve should it not ultimately be kickstarted by biological or adopted children.

Side note: One of the cool things this guy did was design a ring he wears, which reminds him of the value systems to which he is committed.

K vs. r Selection in
Cultivars’ Birth Rates

In evolutionary terms, enduring cultures are neither K nor r-selected (K-selected species are characterized by having a relatively small number of offspring in which they invest high amounts of parental care whereas their r-selected counterparts typically have many offspring but invest less energy in producing them). Enduring cultures have a lot of kids and put more effort, collectively, into child rearing.

Humans in general may have a uniquely high capacity to both have many kids and invest a lot in their upbringing given their (unusual) ability to leverage their own offspring as tools (i.e., people to help the family business, help out around the house, till the fields, provide additional income streams, etc.). When kids aren’t a pure resource drain, it makes sense to not only have more kids but invest more into raising them—all to ensure they yield a high return on investment.

Enduring cultures are not purely r-selected (focused on having tons of kids but investing little in their upbringing) because r-selected cultures are more likely to become diluted through conversion to other cultures in just a few generations. Think about it: If your parents largely ignored you, would you feel a strong devotion to their culture?

Cultural Amenities

Appealing amenities are commonly leveraged by cultures to ensure high birth rates and reduce bleed.

Common cultural amenities include:

Relationship Catalysts: When a person cannot find a partner, they do not breed. To prevent this, some cultures have adopted systematized dating markets—like Mormon singles wards—while others simply assign partners (this can be done either by parents or by some centralized authority).
Relationship Norms: It is far easier to embark on a relationship that features shared expectations and norms (meaning partners are not obligated to navigate mismatched expectations). Shared relationship norms offered by some cultures are especially helpful to those who like to live life on default settings (and would therefore find negotiating every point of a social contract to be uniquely stressful).
Status Mechanisms: People are often drawn to cultures and organizations that offer clear paths for advancement (i.e., Once you do X, you advance to stage Y). Many cultures therefore offer clear promises of higher status and/or power to adherents who invest a certain amount of time and/or resources in the culture.
A Social Safety Net: Many cultures provide their members—or in some cases their wider community—with a social safety net. Some cultures, like the Sikhs, go so far as to offer free food, medical services, and even child care. Schwertantrooper Amish go even further, with churches maintaining medical insurance funds and putting out an open plea when costs go above what the individual church has saved—which is almost always met. (Calvinist culture is rare in being one of the only cultures we can think of that effectively sees social safety nets as immoral.)
Psychological Support and Self-Narrative Writing: Many cultures offer some form of psychological support, often helping adherents overcome psychological struggles while reframing themselves as the only group capable of doing so. Scientology probably presents the most extreme example of this, but such practices are seen throughout any number of cultures, from Catholic confessionals to the roles some Rabbis play in their communities.
Protection from Danger: Many cultures, through their prohibitions, shield adherents from major hazards, such as alcohol and gambling. Longstanding food prohibitions may also have featured protective properties, even if they no longer shield adherents from hazards in modern times.
Unique Reputations: Some cultural traditions produce individuals with specialized social functions or reputations that offer advantages in job markets (e.g. “Oh, this guy will be great for the CIA—he is from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, so he’s clean-cut, devoted, and fluent in a foreign language from his mission”). While cultures evolve into these roles due to social pressures, once they have developed, they can serve as a sense of identity, decreasing cultural bleed and making it easier to get jobs.
Unique Specializations: Some cultures go so far as to develop guilds or caste systems that fill multiple professional roles within society. Such structures are rare today but can be found among some legacy cultures (not to mention sci-fi cultures—like that presented in Brave New World).

Tragedy as a Source of Opportunity

Some readers may be interested in learning more about how we managed to convince ourselves there really may be some future God that guides us. We’ll gladly offer more detail on how personal experience created a confirmation bias cascade and how our habit of interpreting setbacks as important signs or sources of opportunity can yield significant advantages.

Take me, Malcolm, for example: I had to be born into a wealthy, privileged family, lose everything, and grow up alone in the system in order to develop the worldview and critical thinking skills that now stand among my primary sources of competitive advantage. At the time, it felt horrible to have a Judge send me to private prison alternatives for kids (like in the book: Holes). Being a pre-teen and struggling for basic safety, food, and shelter, sucked. But if this hadn’t happened, if I hadn’t ended up mostly raising myself, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to become comfortable with suffering and self-reliance.

Without a first-hand understanding of the emptiness that accompanies opulent life, I might still desire one. The odds that someone so privileged, like me, in a Western society, could really understand starvation (being under 60 pounds and having to eat insects to not die) required an incredible confluence of events—a confluence that played a critical role in building my worldview. There is no reward behind the opulence, only hollowness, and the anticipation of suffering, the fear of it, can be more mentally crippling than the experience itself.

It should be obvious from this book how important kids are to us. When we found out Simone could not have children naturally, we were devastated. That said, had we not been forced to turn to IVF by this infertility—a product of Simone’s severe teenage depression, which led to self-imposed starvation as a coping mechanism—we would not be able to have half as many kids as we are now set up to have (thanks to embryo banking). In other words, without what most would consider to be a major fertility setback, many of our kids would not have had the chance to exist at all.

When I got my dream job as a manager at Google, I thought I had made it. Had they not delayed my ultimate departmental placement for six months—to a point at which I completely ran out of money—I never would have taken another job, but in hindsight a management job at a bureaucratic organization like Google would have retarded my career and eroded my independent spirit.

Had my next dream job as Director of Strategy at Korea’s top early-stage VC firm not ended after the arrest of many of my colleagues (for what were later proven to be trumped-up, politically motivated charges), I would have found myself once again destitute (I had sent all my savings to pay for Simone’s graduate degree). Had that not happened, I wouldn’t have spent time living with Simone’s parents and gotten to know her mom well just before she passed away—nor would I have been free right at the same time Simone was graduating from Cambridge, allowing us to raise a fund together.

Running a travel empire going into the pandemic would seem like a horrible turn of events, yet it turned out to be the most perfect development imaginable: It gave us an opportunity to demonstrate to our investors that we would do anything to protect their investment—plus working for two years without pay put us on the market for side gigs, enabling Simone to spend a year as the Managing Director of Dialog (a secret society founded by Peter Thiel), which connected us with a myriad of high-level people, put us in a position to build out another high-impact network for Schmidt Futures (the Act 2 Network), and made the founding of our education initiative, CollinsInstitute.org, possible.

The Immortality of a Vision

This chapter is an excerpt from The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance. It is provided to cover the specifics of the Holdeen tragedy.

Throughout history, more people have fought and died on behalf of governance structures than about anything else. They often made this choice because they believed in the vision their governance structure claimed to represent—but what ensures that vision does not drift?

Despite being wealthy, Jonathan Holdeen went without. Until his death in 1967, he cooked in tin cans instead of pots, broke up produce crates to be burned as fuel in the winter, and even trimmed the hole-ridden sleeves from old sweaters, converting them into vests he would defiantly wear until they, too, fell apart.^[159]

Holdeen saved so fastidiously in order to execute a visionary plan. He created a fund designed to grow forever until it reached a size capable of covering all the government expenses of the state of Pennsylvania, making Pennsylvania the first tax-free state. He had never lived in Pennsylvania, but picked the state as an homage to Benjamin Franklin, who had had a similar idea.^[160]

Holdeen discussed this plan with the Unitarian Universalist Church of Boston, which agreed to support it. In exchange for being the conservator of this plan, they would even receive a portion of the fund’s income every year. Given the Unitarian Universalist Church’s reputation and the legal protections he put in place, Holdeen believed his legacy was in good hands.^[161]

Of course, good men don’t matter in an organization run by governing structures in which leadership can change. The Unitarian Church eventually decided the amount the fund was paying them every year wasn’t enough—they wanted all its income—so they used the courts to take it. They presented the ridiculous argument that the fund would otherwise grow so large it would pose a danger to global stability.^[162] The courts agreed to give the church $1,000,000 of the $20,000,000 fund annually.^[163] While it could have ended right there, even that wasn’t enough for them: They went so far as to attack Holdeen’s daughter, who had managed the trust (and in whose hands the trust outperformed the Dow Jones and Standard & Poor’s stock averages)^[164], suing her for mismanagement, self-dealing, and fraud in an attempt to get even more money ($12,000,000 more). They kept suing her until she was 84 years old—almost 30 years after Holdeen’s death. The lawsuits were so regular she made a point of attending the Philadelphia flower show on her regular court visits and was able to brighten up her legal trips with visits to the floral extravaganza about eight times (early on, she would bring a friend, but then the Unitarian Church “got snotty about it” and she had to go alone).^[165]

Jonathan Holdeen had created a similar fund for Hartwick College. This story has a slightly happier ending. Hartwick College didn’t liquidate the money at least—or sue his children; they just kind of forgot about it. If you go to the school’s website today, there is no mention of Mr. Holdeen, no building named after him, no scholarship named after him, no park bench—not even a luncheon despite his fund paying the college around half a million dollars a year. The money now just goes to pay “annual expenditures related to our physical plant”— essentially things like water bills and groundskeeper carts.^[166]

Despite his long suffering, lofty goals, and lawyers’ hand-wringing about his plan destroying society, Jonathan Holdeen now lies dead, almost completely forgotten, with dashed ambitions.

The moral of this story is that no matter what an organization tells you, no matter what they claim to believe, it can only be trusted as far as its organizational structure. This story is critical to remember whether you are designing the governing structure of a family office, a country, a nonprofit, or a religion. If you have long-term plans that extend past your death, understanding governance is critical. The fidelity of your dreams cannot be defended by a trustworthy person or clear mission statement—only your governance structure has the power to shield and perpetuate a legacy.

Even if you merely want to live a peaceful, happy, moderately productive life, you had better learn to navigate the hectic world of governance, within which we have no choice but to live.

Cultural Conceptions of Time

Our personal metaphysical framework for the world significantly colors our perception of reality and influences our choices. We believe that while you are destined to make the types of choices you will make, that does not remove your responsibility for their outcome. Destiny is only about a person’s place on a timeline. When you look at yesterday from the perspective of today, all of the decisions you made then are already set in stone, yet you still had free will when you made those choices—from the perspective of Yesterday You. Truth exists outside the timeline and so, too, does destiny.

Our view of time means that you are personally responsible for the future your choices manifest. You are just as culpable for every child you might have had but ultimately didn’t have as you would be for painlessly erasing the existence and memory of those children if they already existed. Both decisions erase the existence of a person who would otherwise have existed.

Ours is not the only logically consistent view of time; it is just one product of the evidence we have on hand, modulated through our inherited cultural and religious tendencies. For example, someone with a secularized iteration of a Dharmic religion might be predisposed to see the universe as a cycle of constantly expanding and contracting realities (e.g., a Big Bang, a universe, and a big crunch leading to another Big Bang), as that metaphysical understanding of the world would be closer to a traditional Dharmic understanding of reality while not being any less aligned with the secular world’s understanding of physical realities than our own.

Cultural Infrastructure

Some cultures maintain something like a central governance structure that monitors and guides them while others have no governance structure at all and a few have a system, rules, or hierarchy that can serve a role similar to a governance system without technically being one.

We have already addressed more straightforward central governance models practiced by groups like the LDS and Catholic churches. When we say these models are straightforward, we do not mean they are simple governance structures; we mean they are “generic” governance structures that you could construct without any unique cultural considerations after reading The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance. Functionally, they do not operate that differently from a state government.

Speaking of state governments: One model of cultural structure we recommend strictly avoiding is a culture that is either tied to the state or has aspirations of controlling the state infrastructure. Aspirations for controlling state infrastructure, without founding a new colony, will put a target on your culture’s back—and for what? Running the state as a culture is not as great as one might imagine.

When your culture runs the state, overthrowing the state begins to necessitate overthrowing your culture as well. And what if the state gets taken over by an external force which in turn manipulates your culture? This was seen repeatedly in the history of the Catholic tradition (with Vatican City always being a target and many countries trying to create pretender Popes, which fractured the faith). Fortunately, the unique multistate structure of Catholicism protected it from being completely destroyed by these hazards, but would your culture be so well-positioned?

The Russian Orthodox church patriarch’s obligation to kowtow to Putin and promote whatever he wants exemplifies how a religion can be compromised by melding with state infrastructure. That said, state control can be great in the short term and you can transition out of it. This can be seen in both the LDS Church and Islam which both experienced periods where all their branches were part of a single state under their control, both have evolved past that. Generally, however, state control is worth neither the risk nor the effort.

Cultural governance gets really interesting when it invokes organic or unique components that make it function wildly differently than any state governance could. As we mentioned, Jewish culture presents an example of this, given its organically constructed hierarchy in which one’s position is either determined by one’s skill in legalistic argumentation, one’s philosophical acumen, or the size of one’s following.

This organic hierarchy allows individuals from unique Jewish factions to have a voice within the larger Jewish ecosystem and organically cross-pollinate different Jewish sub-branches (it facilitates much more theologically focused communication between factions than you get in groups like Protestants, which cross-denominationally interact more like Italian city-states from the Renaissance period). The emphasis on mastery of legalistic argumentation, while pedantic for our taste, leads to something of a filter within leadership for some level of general intelligence. Prioritizing legalistic argumentation over divine word (as can be seen from the Oven of Akhnai story, which we cited earlier) prevents any one individual within the hierarchy from asserting absolute dominance over others (e.g., by claiming that God spoke directly to them and so they must listen to everything they say).

Jewish culture doesn’t hold a monopoly on cool, organic cultural governing systems. Academia presents another great example of the model. While academia lacks a central hierarchy, its model of peer-reviewed publications—and the way academics gain status by accumulating more citations on their research—is, on paper, intriguing. Academia’s tenure model also seems great on paper.

As you may know from The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance, we believe that academia has almost entirely failed as a system. It is so thoroughly infected by the cultural supervirus that it has become reminiscent of a caterpillar filled by parasitoid worms that have already hollowed out its insides and can be seen crawling just under its skin. Academia demonstrates that while some structures of organic organization have withstood the test of time (Judaism being a case in point), not all structures of organic organization will. More importantly, academia demonstrates how organic cultural governing systems are uniquely prone to infection by especially virulent brands of pop culture.

Many recently constructed cultures rely on online discussion groups and voting as core elements of cultural consensus building, as can be seen in movements such as the Less Wrong/Rationality and Effective Altruism movements. These systems seem great in theory but almost always produce a form of governance failure we call the “tyranny of the unemployed,” which we discuss in detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance. Essentially, these systems empower individuals with nothing else going on in their lives while lowering the influence of members who are successful outside of said culture.

The Tyranny of the Unemployed: Given that more competent individuals typically have more competing interests vying for their personal time, systems that allow a person to spend time and emotional effort to influence the direction of a culture will always trend toward those cultures’ lesser instincts.

Cultures with open meritocratic hierarchies (e.g., those based on getting upvotes in online forums) typically facilitate the rise of a small handful of genuinely substantive intellectuals only to become impenetrable to new entrants who weren’t in the foundational cohort and have some level of success in the “outside world.” After the initial group of intellectuals dies off, these communities often devolve into dogmatic, bureaucratic, and ineffective dominance hierarchy fights, with an increasing focus on gatekeeping and in-group language checks.

Cultural Rivalries

I (Malcolm) earned my undergraduate degree in the United Kingdom. While there, I had a lesbian friend who went to enormous lengths to hide her girlfriend from her parents. I thought nothing of this—assuming she was a closeted lesbian back home—until it came up casually in conversation that her parents knew she was gay. She later explained to me that she hailed from a traditional Glaswegian family and while they would never disown her for being gay, the same could not be said about dating a Roman Catholic (which her girlfriend happened to be). Glasgow even features Catholic and Protestant football teams.

Though our society likes to look down on cultural rivalries and grudges, the truth is that all strong cultures have them. Shared cultural rivalries strengthen cultural bonds. This can be seen in the much tighter ties individuals in the U.S. have to their universities due to collegiate sports rivalries—a bond not seen in the U.K. outside of the only two universities that culturally invest in sports and school rivalries (Oxford and Cambridge, where Simone went).

Rivalries tend to arise between groups that are very similar and physically close. Rivalries ensure cultural fidelity (preventing members from shifting between the rival groups) and reinforce cultural speciation. Were two physically and memetically close cultures to stitch up their differences, they would reform into a unified culture. The tendency for rivalries to arise between very similar—rather than different—cultures can be seen with conflict between Sunni vs. Shia Islamic sects and the Protestant-Catholic divide. The dynamic is best summarized and satirized by the “Judean People’s Front” scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

Is it possible to create a cultural grudge that yields only “friendly” rivalry instead of discrimination and bias? We think so, and would love to see “friendly rivalries” fostered between Index Houses—rivalries focused on intergroup competition instead of hatred. This sort of rivalry has historically been kindled between branches of our families. In our childhoods, these rivalries made inter-family gatherings more interesting—as you got to see who was outcompeting who and whose methods of parenting really were “superior.” While rivalry isn’t universally enjoyed, some people need competition to motivate important life actions they should be taking anyway.

Life Stages

I (Malcolm) was raised to see life as existing in explicit stages. The rule of thumb my grandfather taught me was that you should find a life partner and educate yourself as much as possible in your 20s, build your wealth in your 30s, sell or pass down all your actively managed companies in your 40s, and after the age of 50, dedicate yourself 100% to public service.

While his framework served my ancestors well, I think it can be expanded to be more useful and applicable to a broad range of wise life choices while still providing a good roadmap for descendants. As society changes, this roadmap should also adapt, and of course you may adjust this roadmap or its general premise to your own personal cultivar.

Reviewing roadmaps like these at least once every year—if not on a holiday like Future Day or New Year’s, then perhaps on a birthday—can help kids (not to mention adults) chart out new plans and recalibrate.

Stage 1: 0-13 (Up to Adolescence):

What This Stage is Like: At this stage, biological instincts will lead you to respect your parents more than you probably should. You will also be able to gain happiness from play and imagination in a manner that will not be possible at older ages. For most of this period, you will be unburdened by sexual desire and benefit from an unusually clear mind that you will not be able to regain until after you find a stable (and aligned) partner as an adult.

Your Goals:

Determine who you are vis-a-vis the world and build an identity.
1. Incorporate your culture and its goals into that identity. For example, protection of (in order) sapience, life, and the human species is the personal responsibility of all members of House Collins. Who do you need to be to serve that role best?
Learn as much as possible, with a focus on STEM skills, communication, and philosophy (skills necessary to independently decide what is worth doing and how to do it yourself). Your brain is the core tool you will be using throughout your life—give it every advantage possible.
Play—and play hard. Play is about testing personal, interpersonal, and societal boundaries in a low-stakes environment. It teaches you when and how much to push and bestows you with personal resilience. When robbed of play, people fail to learn how to overcome their own personal boundaries and deal with others’ limitations, plus are trained to appeal to authority when encountering differences.

Stage 2: 14-18 (Up to Legal Adulthood)

What This Stage is Like: At this stage of your life, you will feel an intense drive to believe that you are special and different from your ancestors. While this instinct may help you develop a more independent identity, it may also draw you into self-indulgent fantasies (e.g., you have magical powers). You will underestimate your parents. You will also begin to feel sexual desire—but more than that, you will find yourself in a cultural context that judges status by your ability to acquire (or at least garner interest from) high-quality romantic partners.

Your brain will be uniquely sensitive to your social position. Do your best to ignore your mind’s obsessive calls to care about what your local social groups think. Almost nobody you meet at this age will matter in your adult life. Your peers today are training dummies—nothing more. Outside of family, any emotional attachments you build should be contextualized as being for training purposes and experimentation only. Make no meaningful sacrifices to impress them or endear them to you (whether that is spending money, getting tattoos, performing dangerous stunts, or trying addictive drugs). Ardently avoid any actions that will forge unbreakable bonds (like pregnancy).

Many people experience higher levels of emotional turmoil and suffering at this stage than at any other stage in their lives. Beyond the fact that hormonal shifts can make life miserable, teenagers are not legal adults, empowered to determine how they live their own lives—rather, they are forced to live with other people on their terms. People who insist that “these are the best years of your life” are either misremembering their own adolescence or experiencing failed adulthood (something proper utilization of this life stage will prevent from happening).

Your Goals:

Practice romance and dating. Utilize whatever tools you have at your disposal to learn how to secure partners—but only for practice. You are not at an age at which you are likely to find a good, lifelong partner (it is unlikely that an optimal partner for you just happens to be one of the ~500 people you have thus far met). Teach yourself to identify and control the emotions associated with dating. Learn to identify signs that someone is emotionally dangerous or otherwise unstable. You should leave this stage of your life single, but with proficiency in securing romantic partners.
Set yourself up for a strong career trajectory. It is during adolescence when society begins to sort people into those allowed to rise to the top and those who will permanently be working class. If you leave adolescence on a working-class path, it will be incredibly hard to switch, later, to an elite trajectory (and vice versa). For this reason, you will have to work harder at this stage of life than any other. Take solace in the knowledge that, so long as you put in sufficient effort at this crucial time, the rest of your life will be dramatically easier.
Seek out novel information. Leverage this time to build yourself into the most effective tool possible once you reach adulthood. This entails (among other things) sourcing information and world perspectives your parents’ generation did not consider due to biases that you don’t yet hold. Genuine creativity requires an extensive and varied mental library of worldviews, concepts, and domains, which allows you to form associations others would never recognize. Now is a great time to build that library.
Socialize and experiment with other cultures: Learn to see the world from the perspective of a few other cultures by learning how to navigate them. This entails joining some youth subcultures and learning how to become “popular” within them by traversing their social hierarchies—as well as potentially learning how to work through the hierarchies of cultures outside those in which you were raised. These skills will pay dividends in adulthood, when an understanding of how to sell to and interact with people who have a different world framing plays a crucial role in your advancement.

Recommendations and Warnings:

“Ugh, did you just breathe and act like a loving, parental figure? DISGUSTING!” At this age, everything your parents do will start to offend you or feel embarrassing and you will begin to look down on your parents. While we expect you to become better than us, we doubt we are capable enough to ensure that happens by your early teens. These emotions are genetically ingrained and something for which you will need to logically correct.
We recommend waiting until around the age of 17 to have sex (and don’t feel obligated to have sex at any age unless you really feel it’s right—for women, especially, a choice to have many versus few sexual partners can impact how you experience love and pair bonding for the rest of your life; refer to The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality for more detail). Sex generally sucks until you get good at it, so don’t go into your first time with high expectations and do your research.
If you’re female, don’t get pregnant. Especially if you are autistic, never allow yourself to be alone with a guy unless you actively want and expect to have sex with him.
If you’re male, don’t get someone pregnant. Avoid sex with anyone who you think is emotionally unstable enough to attempt to get pregnant without your consent.
Don’t give out expensive gifts; it is unlikely you will meet someone at this age who warrants any serious sacrifice of personal or family resources.
If you must experiment with drugs, only do so with non-addictive substances and only try them (there is no reason to do a drug more than twice). Be aware that mind-altering substances will have a permanent effect on your intelligence and cognition, with some hallucinogens having the potential to forcibly twist deeply-held beliefs into a bland “oneness/connectedness” ideology.
Note that mind-altering substances don’t hold a monopoly on addiction. Don’t waste time or money collecting baubles or on Skinner box games and social apps.
If you are having trouble controlling your basic bodily urges (such as libido), naltrexone might help, but should only be turned to as a solution of last resort. Prepare to feel tempted to do really, really, catastrophically dumb things in an attempt to secure sexual partners at this stage of your life.
If you are interested in learning more about your sexuality, refer to The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality for practical information and advice.
(From Malcolm) If you want to explore another culture at this stage, check out The Book of the SubGenius. While technically satire, it is a functional and internally coherent culture and theology that will serve you well in your teens.

Stage 3: 19-30 (Young Adulthood)

What This Stage is Like: This will be your first period of life with an “adult brain.” This is not to say that your brain isn’t playing tricks on you, just that most of the tricks it will play on you are the same ones you will experience throughout your life. As most geniuses produce their greatest works at this stage, don’t underestimate yourself but also don’t spend the whole period chasing butterflies.

Your Goals:

Launch your career. Work on a concrete and recognized career path while igniting your first entrepreneurial ventures on the side.
Find your life partner: You must find a spouse within this window (or someone with whom to have children if you choose another relationship structure). Refer to The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships for guidance.
Start saving and investing. You should aim to save around 35% of your income, with 40% of what you save going toward personal entrepreneurial projects and 60% being invested.
Create a fertility fund. Unless you are in a strong position to begin having kids immediately, you should save enough money to bank embryos at a later date. Keep in mind that embryo banking—at least with current technology and solutions—will require several rounds of IVF and be quite costly.
Move to a major city. If cities are still optimal places for career advancement and partner sourcing, move to a strategically favorable city. Keep in mind that, just as some cities are better than others for advancing in certain industries, some cities are better than others for securing partners as a particular gender. Your goal should be to make a favorable arbitrage play on both fronts, choosing a city in which you have an unfair advantage professionally and romantically (see The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships for more details).

Recommendations and Warnings:

Avoid the temptation of academia. While in college, this can seem like an easy and prestigious pathway, it is not—and the field may not be around forever.
If you want to travel, do it now. Learn how to live out of one carry-on suitcase for months on end. Be willing to do whatever you can to move your career forward—and this includes living in strange places.
Finding a spouse will be a full-time job during this period of your life—one you will hold in addition to your primary job. Aim to go on five dates a week for around two and a half years. If you’re clever, you will develop ways to enjoy the process (e.g., by creating competitive dating circles among friends) and use it to build a strong professional network (e.g., by talking business with dates and always trying to be helpful to them, making connections and orchestrating solutions for them when opportunity strikes, regardless of their fit as a life partner).
If you live in a city at this life stage, remember your stay is temporary. Don’t put down roots. Never “sit down.” You go to a city to “run” both romantically and professionally—not to perpetually chill with the same group of friends.
Don’t optimize your life around adolescent desires as they will grow hollow and far less satisfying, just as imagination play became less pleasurable in adolescence. While you are still likely to enjoy things you started appreciating in adolescence, such as dating, traveling, freedom, and casual sex, they will become less satisfying after you find yourself in a loving, secure relationship—and especially after you become a parent. (This advice comes with the warning that all bodies are different and some brains may not turn off these desires or go through the second shift we mention here.)

Stage 4: 30-50 (Adulthood)

What This Stage is Like: This is the stage of life your brain will go through the changes associated with being a parent. This will change your cognitive processing more than you anticipate. You will begin to find it hard to experience happiness from many of the things you used to enjoy and instead your primary source of happiness will become sharing new experiences with your kids.

Your Goals:

Bank embryos. As soon as you have found the right person with whom to have kids (or as soon as you are ready to select genetic material for your kids—like a sperm or egg donor), spend a year banking embryos to build up a supply sufficient to have the family you desire. Embryo banking will only become more costly and less successful with each passing year.
Start your family. If you have a child every 18 months, all but your youngest child will have no memory of life without a youngest sibling, which can reduce the shock of welcoming new family members and increase closeness among siblings.
(30-40) Maximize income. As these are your highest income-producing years, you should expect to transition to a passive income within 20 years and your saving rate should reflect that.
(40-50) Transition to public service: At this stage you should be transitioning to a 100% focus on public service. This can be working for the Index, spreading our culture through media creations, government work, non-profit work, or any other job focused on spreading our culture and public benefit.”
Drive socialization. After graduating from school/university, most adults stop meeting new people and ease into fairly isolated social circles. If you take the initiative to organize social gatherings, introduce people to each other, and essentially become friends’ source of new friends and ideas, all sorts of interesting opportunities will arise.
Leave the city. Once your partnership and careers are secure, shift to a more rural living arrangement to give your kids a good childhood and enjoy more affordable childcare, food, and services.

Recommendations and Warnings:

When considering where to live with your young family, consider what is within driving distance, as air travel becomes increasingly cumbersome once you have more than two kids.
Don’t rely overly on societies, clubs, work, or any other organizations or outside forces to be your solution to socializing; membership can be fleeting and all groups offer diminishing returns once you’ve met most active members.
Become a nexus of socialization for others by hosting events. Consider renting an apartment in a nearby major city (or in several cities) once every other month or so for two nights in a row (with the kids staying home with a sitter or family). Over those two nights, host back-to-back gatherings (e.g., two dinners; one lunch) to which you invite a mix of top-tier personal contacts and high-profile strangers. So long as you put effort into sending thoughtful invites and putting together well-curated gatherings, you will be surprised by who shows up.
Begin to aggressively position yourself for public service.
Prepare to correct for a bias toward acquiring and improving property (as adults seem to be driven by a weird “nest and fortify” instinct during this stage) to ensure you only invest when it is logically sound to do so.

Stage 5: 50+ (Seniority)

What This Stage is Like: With the caveat that we have not personally experienced this life stage, evidence at our disposal suggests that stereotypes around “tribal elders” ring true to a large extent. In terms of shifting sources of joy, people in this age range (at least from our third-party observation) appear to disproportionately enjoy mentorship, advisory roles, and cultivation of younger generations. This suggests that taking on a more active role as an investor, board member, mentor, advisor, and grandparent will provide meaningful satisfaction (not to mention value for those assisted).

Your Goals:

Enter public service. At this stage you should be primarily focused on public service and not active income generation.
Support your children. A major focus of your life at this point should be helping your kids with child care. Plan to locate near the largest cluster of them to help with this.
Let the next generation rise. By the age of 60, your kids should lead the family and its culture as you ease into an advisory role and resource. You are a pawn on their chessboard, not the other way around (so long as they have upheld the integrity of the family’s culture).
Prepare for death well before the end is imminent. Keep in mind that end-of-life care and post-death complications can tear families apart. Rather than subject your family to that stress and put it at risk, approach end-of-life planning with the same rigor you approached navigating life with a partner: Systematically think through everything that can go wrong and set systems in place to ensure a smooth transition.

Recommendations and Warnings:

Though “use it or lose it” applies to one’s body and mind throughout life (this is a very common trend we see in peer-reviewed research on a myriad of physical and mental performance measures), the principle especially applies as age advances. If you want a sharp mind, you will need to challenge it—to the point of pushing your own boundaries and limits—constantly. If you want a healthy body, you will need to exercise, move, and push it daily. The post-1950s picture of retirement (a period during which someone just “relaxes”) is a fast pass to mental and physical death.
It is at this stage that more adults begin to become “set in their ways.” Prepare to correct for this—even if correction comes at a cost. For example, psychedelics can reintroduce mental flexibility at the cost of rendering you more gullible; taking sabbaticals and moving to new locations can reintroduce flexibility, but also dampen professional momentum as you pursue roles in public service.

Note: “Reminiscence bump” is a term used in psychology to describe a weird trend for adults (people over 40) to have more memories of things that happened in their adolescence and early childhood than later in their life (note, this may not be an age thing but rather a “lots of new experiences” thing, as you also see it in immigrants for the period after they immigrated). Some cultures may eventually find a way to leverage this to its benefit.^{^[167]}

Stage Transition Celebrations

Many cultures use rituals or parties to mark major milestones, such as the transition to adulthood (e.g., Quinceañeras, Bar Mitzvahs, etc.), partnered life (e.g., engagement parties, bachelor/bachelorette parties, and weddings), and parenthood (e.g., gender reveal parties, baby showers, and christenings). Today, coming-of-age and pair-bonding ceremonies get the most investment and air time, though a growing number of pronatalist cultures will hopefully reintroduce fanfare around parenthood.

Coming-of-age ceremonies often involve “leaving home” in some way and being given some “secret information” while performing a difficult task. While we may think of this as something relegated to tribal cultures, a pervasive modern manifestation can be found across our cultural ecosystem: College. In fact, our wider society goes so far as to treat individuals who did not undergo this ritual as if they never became “true adults.”

The ritualistic role of college may explain in part why it has been so slow to die as a cultural institution even after its utility has dwindled in relation to its cost. Intentionally designed or reinforced cultivars can leverage the apparent social hunger for coming-of-age rituals to create rites of passage that outperform universities in equipping young adults to flourish and thrive (both professionally and mentally).

Partnership ceremonies—weddings, mostly—need a cultural makeover. Committing to a partnership involves reinventing one’s identity, meaning these ceremonies shouldn’t be about status signaling or “female partner indulgence” per se, but rather communicating to the partnership’s family and wider social network: “This is what we stand for, value, and represent as a combined entity.” While a one-off ceremony and afterparty (the standard Western wedding format today) can be used to communicate this in part, there may be far more meaningful ways to signal a partnership’s identity and set it up for a strong start. For cultivars within the Index, this may also involve the inauguration of the partnership’s House.

Though parenthood celebrations have enjoyed a recent and mostly dubious resurgence in interest via the rise of the “gender reveal party” (complete with deaths, forest fires, and millions of dollars of damage),^[168] present-day parenthood celebrations (including baby showers and christenings) don’t do much to motivate parenthood, equip people to become successful parents, or provide support to fledgling families. Here is another opportunity for intentionally designed or reinforced cultivars to support high birth rates through newly coined celebrations that prepare, elevate, and support members who choose to have kids.

Childhood

Should kids be allowed to play unsupervised? At what age should people start working? How are childhood conflicts best resolved?

In Albion’s Seed, a book that anyone who enjoyed this book should check out, David Hackett Fischer posits that the United States was founded by four core groups whose differing views of children’s wills produced varied approaches to child rearing.

The Puritans largely felt that a child should have their will broken and that the will of a child was intrinsically evil. That said, they also put a lot of trust in their children and worked to foster their independence and professional development (as can be seen in practices like “sending out”).
The Southern colonies largely felt children should have their wills indulged and directed to specific outcomes. While male children were given a wide degree of freedom, female children were held to strict standards.
In addition to broadly respecting children’s inherent wisdom and inner light, the Quakers believed in nudging children’s character toward the “correct culture” and were generally very protective around the ideas and perspectives with which their children were permitted to interact (similar to today’s helicopter parents).
The back country people believed the flames of a child’s will should be stoked and fondly reinforced willful behavior and independence (while not bestowing too much respect—it is from this cultural set that “little shits” emerged as a term of endearment for children).

These varying cultural views on children produced meaningfully different types of adults in each culture. The same goes for any culture you choose to build or reinforce, so think carefully: What do I want adults within this culture to become, and what do they need to experience in childhood to nudge them in that direction?

To spark your creativity around these questions, we’ll briefly explore them through the lens of three clusters of issues: play and authority, sex and death, and developing engaging, interesting adults.

Approaches to Play and Authority in Childhood

Whether and how cultures encourage children to play and relate to authority figures has a profound effect on how people ultimately navigate power dynamics and push boundaries as adults. Rather than present a dry outline of different approaches, we’ll share how Malcolm’s family traditions around play and authority exemplified a certain cultural view, which provides an illustration of one approach that may help you better think through an optimal approach to your cultivar’s child rearing ways.

For context, while Malcolm’s family had Calvinist origins, they came from the backcountry rather than the Puritan variant of Calvinism. This means their approach to child rearing focused on strengthening the will of the child.

Knowing from popular media that parents should be mad when their kids get in trouble at school, I (Malcolm) was shocked the first time my mother picked me up from detention and didn’t show a whiff of disappointment. Instead, she told me that elementary school teachers made almost no money and that other adults did not respect them. “If they were competent,” she continued, “they would have gotten better jobs.”

My mother insisted that I would not become the man I needed to be if I learned to be obedient to such people. So far as my mother was concerned, as long as I acted with integrity, got decent grades, and protected the weaker kids, detention for disobedience was a virtue. She told me people had to earn my respect and never expect it because they happen to be in a position of authority over me.

This led my brother and me to have a pretty unusual relationship with our teachers growing up—to the extent that we found a recent report card from my brother in kindergarten in which a livid teacher reports that she had passed half a year thinking my brother was partially deaf, only to realize he just selectively ignored everything she said. I even remember being scolded myself once when a teacher told my mom I had “done the right thing” by getting an authority figure to help when I saw a kid being bullied. On the way home, my mom chastised me, emphasizing that “nobody respects a pathetic little snitch” and that I should have taken matters into my own hands (“That’s what fists are for!”).

Below is an excerpt from my brother’s kindergarten report card, which was written while we were living in Italy (a country that demands obedience from children):

At first we thought he had a hearing disability because of his slowness in responding to directions. He gave the impression of being vague and disposed to day-dreaming. Now that we know him better we realize he is deliberately turning a deaf ear to everything he does not wish to hear. It does not interest him to listen unless it is something which appeals to him. … He can be extremely disobedient; authority means nothing to him whatsoever. He has struck up a friendship with an equally mischievous companion and together they cause havoc. …

Nevertheless, he is a dear little boy. … Better luck in September”

While people from cultures that expect children to respect arbitrary authority figures would read the above letter and assume that my brother was a “spoiled” child, those from cultures like ours would see him ignoring this patronizing figure who expects mindless obedience as a sign of willingness to push back against unjust authority even when the odds are against him.

Essentially, we were systematically taught to neither respect authority figures nor trust them to solve problems. While I think my mom went way too far, I see the cultural wisdom in this strategy. First, she wasn’t wrong: Kids over-value the perspectives of teachers and are probably better off deciding for themselves how the world really works and what is moral vs. immoral.

What will become to someone if they grow up being taught to trust authority figures to accurately discern right from wrong? This has been a pervasive child rearing strategy for the past few decades and the susceptibility it has bred into the population makes it easy prey to the cultural supervirus.

Cultures that don’t allow their kids to work out conflict for themselves risk creating individuals who will consistently appeal to authority to solve problems—little fascists. Just imagine the type of adult that will emerge from a child who always calls upon their teacher (an authority figure) to resolve conflicts. It should come as no surprise the epidemic of I-want-to-speak-to-your-manager-style Karens exploded just a few decades after the public school system normalized teachers as arbitrators of disputes (as opposed to letting kids duke it out on the play yard). Nor should it be a surprise that shriekers have learned to react to every offense by lashing out in anger—not with the offender, but with the authority of the mob in hopes that it, in turn, punishes the offender on their behalf.

In my family, it was expected kids would go out, have fun, get hurt, and work it out on their own. This wasn’t the product of some intentional parenting technique. My parents weren’t watching us from a distance, saying: “Yes, dear; look at them learning how to navigate each other’s boundaries and build personal resilience” (more like “Those little shits just drove the four wheeler into the pond again!”). Rather, their culture had subconsciously programmed them to raise kids with grit who took risks, knew their limits, chose their battles wisely (for the most part), and addressed conflict head on, in the moment, rather than submitting complaints, tattling, or developing resentments. That’s the power of cultural traditions around child rearing. Desired outcomes aren’t limited to kids of overachieving parents.

It is up to you to determine an approach to authority, play, boundary pushing, and conflict resolution that works well for your culture, its values, and its priorities. Just be aware of the downstream consequences of encouraging children to appeal to authority in a world in which the authorities may not always have their or your culture’s best interests in mind.

Approaches to Sexuality and Death in Childhood

Another question any culture must ask is when you should introduce a child to certain concepts like sexuality or death. When considering your own cultivar’s approach to this question, think carefully about how you want them to contextualize sex and death in adulthood.

As mentioned earlier in the book, Quakers were so slow to do this that when adult Quaker women went to doctors’ offices, they would often describe anything from their neck to their belt lines as their “stomach” and anything from their belt line to their feet as their “ankle.”

Calvinists went in an entirely different direction, being outright pornographic in their writing to the extent that it was censored when published up until this century.^[169] Calvinists were so upfront with concepts like death that historians have found cases of parents asking their kids to stand over empty graves and contemplate their deaths.

To a great extent, the predominating modern pop cultures go so far as to avoid teaching children about death at all. Doctors fight to keep terminally ill patients alive at all costs in many cases, even if doing so only means a few more days of life (at the expense of the patient’s personal comfort and their children’s inheritance). People don’t “die” they “pass away” or even “transition” (which makes death all the more confusing given changing gender norms). Dead bodies are whisked away and cremated. Arguably, this produces adults unable to deal with death and dying—perhaps because it feels like something went wrong, as though death isn’t supposed to happen.

Default pop cultural approaches to sex are even more confusing. When not politicized, sex is often framed as a currency for validation. If your culture doesn’t present alternative childhood framings for death and sex, it will—in many developed Western nations—produce adults with some pretty useless cultural toolsets for approaching sex and death.

How do you want your culture to relate to sex and death? Create traditions and practices that shape people into adults equipped to behave as desired. Because we, personally, want a culture that sees sex as a practical affair and death as a normal part of life, we (among other things) adopted a dog—the Professor—who we will both breed and eventually lose to old age. Throughout her life, the Professor will teach our kids about sex and death in a manner that reinforces our culture’s values without any tedious pontification on our part.

Approaches to Creating Interesting Adults

A final question about childhood we did not think to ask until recently is: How can we prevent our kids from becoming dull adults? We recently met with a childhood friend and for lack of a less crude term, she was the most “basic” human with whom we have ever interacted. She didn’t have a single unique idea in her head. Worse, she was a poor conversationalist, which compounded the problem.

Chickens used to qualify as “free range” so long as they were given the option to leave their cages. A trick chicken farms would use was to raise chickens in cages and only open adult chickens’ cage doors to give them the “option” of leaving. Being acculturated to staying inside their cages, the chickens would never leave, making them functionally caged chickens from the perspective of how much space the chicken farmers needed. Human children face a similar risk.

After discussing why this person had become so boring, we realized that, like one of these chickens, her entire childhood was spent living in one place with a static friend group. She had never needed to build a unique personal identity or learn to engage with new people. An underrated cultural question may therefore be: Are you OK with your children maintaining a static friend group? If not, how do you coax them into the types of difficult situations that will sharpen their interpersonal skills?

Anecdotally, we have noticed that people who grew up constantly moving or around cultures wildly different from their own (a different country, for example) typically have the most engaging adult personalities (so long as their parents encouraged them to engage with those other cultures). Is it worth a child’s potential resentment to subject them to moves like these, which are admittedly difficult? It all comes down to how much your culture values interesting adults.

Cultural Motivators

While cultures use a myriad of tools—which we’ll call “cultural motivators”—to incentivize behavior in line with their values, the tools themselves are difficult to parse out and research.

What makes cultural motivators so hard to research is that they are not systematically recorded outside of pop cultural stereotypes. For example, if stereotypes are to be believed, maternal guilt is a prominent motivational tool in families that are culturally Jewish and Greek.^[170] Presumably, when mothers on television act in this stereotypical fashion, audiences laugh because it rings true to them in some way. Is this cultural stereotype accurate? We have no idea but it differs radically from my family’s parenting practices.

Rather than guilt me, my (Malcolm’s) mother attempted to motivate me by claiming my actions would have an effect on me in the future: “If don’t learn to fix your lisp, you will sound effeminate and even fat chicks won’t fuck you,” she’d say—or “If you don’t improve your grades, you won’t be able to get a real job and no one will respect you.”

Why does a cultivar evolve one reward mechanism, such as guilt, over another, such logical self-interest, and what positive and negative effects do contrasting systems produce? Honestly, it is hard to construct theories based only on cultural stereotypes. While we can draw meaningful inferences from stories and worship patterns when exploring how a culture sees truth, it’s incredibly difficult to gather representative data on subtle ways in which cultural members—be they parents and children, preachers and parishioners, or fellow members—interact. As such, we will narrow our focus to possible cultural motivators we believe we have seen in the wild.

Group Exclusion

Group exclusion (outside of just murder, which is fairly rare these days in developed countries) is the nuclear variant of cultural motivators. Contrary to other punishment options, once excluded, the punished individual will rarely rejoin the group. The prospect of exclusion is meant to exist, primarily, as a threat.

Group exclusion is used by most hard cultures including Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientologists, Mormons, and Swartzentruber Amish. Cutting someone off from their family and friends can be a powerful motivator to fall in line when an individual has been socialized in a culture that is different enough from the surrounding society that they will have trouble fitting in. Exclusion from Amish and Jehovah’s Witness communities has an added sting as these cultures systematically dissuade adherents from getting higher education, making it difficult to achieve financial self-sufficiency on the outside.

Exclusion as a cultural enforcement mechanism evolved in a time when the societies that surrounded these groups offered poorer social safety nets than those which exist today. With the rise of the internet, where even the weirdest of freaks can find a welcoming community, this mechanism has become increasingly ineffective. This is favorable development; exclusion strikes us as a uniquely cruel and unethical tactic.

Maternal Guilt

This mechanism appears frequently among cultures in which the family unit plays a major role in one’s self conception. It appears to be a mechanism to allow for maternal control of the family unit while also allowing that control to be exercised in a way that emphasizes traditional concepts of femininity (e.g., without heavy-handed dominance).

Maternal guilt is useful if you wish to develop a culture with tight-knit family units in which women are powerful but nevertheless traditionally feminine. Notable downsides of maternal guilt-tripping include its emotionally taxing nature, its potential for modeling toxic behavior if excessively used or misused, and its tendency to be abused by narcissists.

Shame/Guilt

Shame/guilt-motivating cultivars operate by implying that an unrealistic expectation is realistic and suggesting members should feel bad when failing to meet it. Achievable goals are rarely the focus of shame-based tactics. Just search online for “high expectations Asian father” memes—common punchlines involve comically unrealistic expectations: “You’re five years old? When I was your age, I was six.” The point of this shame is to drive members of the culture as close to a perfect ideal as possible, even if true perfection is unachievable.

In addition to being common among Quaker and non-Calvinist Evangelical Protestant groups (Calvinist traditions see shame as prioritizing the subjective emotional state of the individual and thus as indulgent), shame/guilt is heavily leveraged by the cultural supervirus.

It’s ironic that shame/guilt is so commonly used by cultivars as a motivational device seeing as it is quite often counterproductive. In The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, we highlight statistics showing a high correlation between porn-shaming and porn consumption by region—at a ratio of almost one to one.

Shame/guilt culture spreads not because it is effective but because shaming is emotionally rewarding, great at non-violently sorting dominance hierarchies, and making cultural adherents feel indebted to their culture for accepting them despite their apparent unworthiness.

Note: An entire cottage industry has emerged around hair splitting between shame and guilt cultures, but we see the difference as trivial in function.

Logical Self-Interest

Cultures motivate adherents with logical self-interest by highlighting the consequences of various actions in an honest and rational manner. Though biased in its favor, we would say this tactic is healthy and effective when deployed well—but expert deployment requires understanding what the target actually wants.

For example, here is an email Simone and I received from my mom a few days ago in response to our being in the press again for our pronatalist and education reform advocacy:

“I can’t believe you are wasting time with such a STUPID subject. I could care less what happens in the future.

I care deeply about you having the brilliant success you were raised for.

And, you are wasting your most valuable years on bullshit.”

Anyone who knows us understands that a shot at improving humanity’s future is more important to us than fame or fortune. If my mother understood that, she would be much better able to model our behavior and convince us to do what she wants.

What does it look like when this is used successfully? Here is a series of texts from my mom trying to get us to buy nicer things for our kids:

“It’s all about the mean girls on social media. And about exclusion.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my study of sociology. It is that the number one greatest fear and devastation of all humans is being excluded from the group.

Banishment is worse than death, going, broke, disease, or any other thing you could think of.

And to be 14 or 15 years old and be “excluded“ from the cool group would be absolutely awful.

That’s why the suicide rates are so very high these days.

And especially high for boys.

“Fitting in” is the most important thing for prepubescent and teenagers.

They all dressed, the same, they all have the same haircut and such. And that’s as it should be, because they’re bonding with her peers and detaching from their parents.

It’s important that they have the sneakers that are as nice as their friends’ sneakers, the backpack sitter is nice, the summer vacations that are is nice… And so forth.”

This second chain did model our perspective well enough to get us to change our minds on the way we were attempting to do some things with our daughter.

Group Pride and Honor

This motivator holds that one gains “honor” or some analogous concept by upholding group morals. Japanese culture presents a classic example of this, though honor as an incentive crops up across cultures. Most people who have a connection to their birth culture feel this to some extent. While in harder cultures, honor codes are clearly communicated and universally agreed upon, soft culture adherents are typically obligated to “make up” a code of honor and conflicting codes can dilute overall feelings of group pride.

Honor is one of the most useful cultural motivators. In addition to sustainably motivating actions in line with a culture’s values, codes of honor make it easier to broadcast cultural values to outsiders. If a particular culture is good at ensuring its members live by its code of honor, they may find it easier to get jobs after positive stereotypes around that honor code spread throughout wider society.

Group pride increases the more special it feels to be a member of a group. Orthodox Jewish culture is great at boosting pride by making it extremely hard to convert through practices like triple rejection of attempted converts. Perhaps we will develop a similar mechanism around joining the Index.

Personal Pride and Self Sufficiency

This motivator leverages a dual belief that one can choose to be—and is expected to choose to choose to be—genuinely unique and superior to other people, implying an obligation to act in a manner deserving of such superiority (similar to noblesse oblige but not necessarily tied to wealth).

It is very different from the superficially similar group pride cultural motivator in that each child raised within a culture that cultivates personal pride is convinced that they, personally—not because of their group membership—can choose to be better than other people and are destined for greatness if they do so. Personal pride often correlates with beliefs that the average person is uniquely wretched, generally lazy, and untrustworthy, which incentivizes self-sufficiency.

The biggest downside to this motivator is that it drives those who are not objectively successful in the traditional sense or who do not command respect to back out of society (often to adopt a rural lifestyle or take jobs far away from others, like fire watch stations). It is very difficult for people raised in these cultivars to live around others who are inarguably more successful than them along every metric. This view is furthermore only compatible with worldviews that expect varying levels of integrity and competence from different people, which is a non-starter for many who see all people as absolutely equal regardless of their life choices. In addition, this view can bestow those who hold it with an air of snobbish elitism that grates on members of other cultures.

This belief in inequality is not racist in nature among personal-pride-motivated groups (and these are often some of the least racist of all groups). Why? Because they think they are better than other people due to who they have chosen to be, not due to any cultural or ethnic affiliation. As such, anyone else can also choose to be better. However, this belief is in some ways more dehumanizing than racism; at least racists think the people they look down upon had no choice in their inferior status. Those with strong senses of personal pride and self-sufficiency have trouble regarding those who only expect from themselves what society expects from them as equals.

In the same breath, people in these groups typically see anyone who chooses to hold themselves to higher standards than others as kin regardless of their ideology or group affiliation. The kinship these groups feel with even members of groups in direct ideological opposition to them can cause suspicion in allies from different cultural groups.

Despite these drawbacks, personal pride is one of the predominant cultural motivators with which I (Malcolm) was raised and it plays a key role in our House’s “descendant worship” theological structure. We chose it because its negative effects disproportionately burden its least productive members while its positive effects increase the likelihood that a culture’s most promising members achieve outsized success.

If you could make a cultural choice that increased the productivity of your most productive cultural members by X% but also decreased the productivity of your least productive members by the same X%, taking that choice would dramatically increase the total output of your culture. In addition, it lowers the risk of a culture attempting truly immoral action through not framing the people arrayed against it as threats that must be wiped out but rather as petulant children who need to be helped—a useful feature in a culture that values diverse societies.

Responsibility

Cultivars that wield responsibility as a cultural motivator constantly emphasize the idiocy and sloth of those in power (it is commonly used by cultivars that also leverage personal or group pride). They frame the world as going to shit and point out that no one is going to save it unless the cultivar’s adherents take personal responsibility. These cultures frequently feature a tinge of “prepperism,” especially among less successful members who don’t feel they have a shot at “saving the world” themselves—so they might as well prepare for social collapse.

This cultural motivator was big in my (Malcolm’s) family but is also fairly common across Pentecostal cultivars. While I am not sure how emotionally healthy it is, the more I meet those who actually run things, the more my family is vindicated. My family was not being arrogant when they told me very few people are competently working to fix things.

Because this cultural motivator leverages a truism about world leadership to motivate action while encouraging members to swing for the fences, we (my family) will continue to utilize it. As one of our favorite movies puts it: What differentiates a full member of their cultural group is that they have ”the courage to make the safety of the human race their personal responsibility.” (This might be similar to the Jewish concept of Tikkun olam but this concept appears to be slightly less elitist and disparaging of others than its secular Calvinist equivalent.)

Withholding Love and Support

This category of motivation is one of the most toxic—not because children should be unconditionally loved (an equally toxic concept) but because it gives kids the wrong idea about how love works (that it is earned).^{^[171]}

There should always be acts that cause you to withdraw love from your kids. Someone who rewards a kid who puts cats in a microwave with love is going to create a serial killer. Plus, in the adult world, love is always conditional, so it is really toxic to teach kids to think love is something the world owes them.

It is equally toxic to teach a kid that there are actions they can take which inevitably lead to love. This is what leads to the stereotypical “nice guy” who does not understand why someone won’t date him after he does lots of “nice things” for them. Love (at least among romantic partners) is an evanescent emotion we cannot fully control, it is not owed to anyone and is never a reward for actions or who we choose to be. It is a reward that evolution gives us when we are living efficacious family lives.

Social Hierarchy

Some cultivars incentivize desired behaviors almost exclusively by promoting those who most strictly follow the culture’s ethical framework within its social hierarchy and demoting those who don’t. While successful hard cultures rarely wield social hierarchy as their primary motivator, almost all pop cultures do (this can be seen in pop cultures canceling people for the slightest infraction while a Pentecostal preacher may still have a large following after cheating on his wife). Intergenerational cultures don’t emphasize this tool because it is extremely toxic.

Why? Dangling social hierarchy as a reward tends to trigger purity spirals—or at least draw disproportionate focus around superficial (and thus quickly noticeable) signs of cultural value, like how “pretty” a person is or how “masculine” they are.

Rather than exemplifying the culture’s values, members of a culture motivated by social hierarchy are incentivized to point out how other members have failed to live up to the culture’s value set, as pointing out someone else’s mistakes is always easier than working to accomplish something good yourself.

Aesthetic Ideals

In my youth I (Malcolm) was non-ironically drawn to the theology of the Church of the SubGenius. In that organization, a core cultural motivator is the pursuit of “Slack.” Slack can best be described as the aesthetic of effortless success gained through cunning and sleight of hand/mind. Slack is the difference between running on ice and skating on ice (Jack Sparrow presents a good example of what Slack looks like).

Note: While Sugenius pretends that Slack is an indefinable concept in their text as part of a commentary on religion, it is very clearly meant to be the above.

The pursuit of an aesthetic ideal is an unusual but recurring cultural theme, with another solid example of it being Wu Wei. Wu Wei is a concept in Daoism which is fairly similar to the concept of Slack, but with implications of perfect energy economy as defined by effortless perfection rather than sly, cunning effortlessness. This can be seen in The Dexterous Butcher, the story of a butcher whose knives never dull because he cuts along the natural lines of the meat, forgetting his senses.

“Act, but as Wu Wei. Be active, but don’t let your conduct be intentional and deliberative.” Wu Wei is not about non-action but spontaneous action that lets go of your own self-interested concerns and guards against behavior that is too assertive. It’s about non-intervention where an action would interfere with the natural expression of things and their potential outcomes in accordance with the Dao. Actions should be naturally spontaneous and free of ingrained habits. An often-used illustration of this is the movement of water.

Not knowing of anyone who grew up Daoist (or stayed SubGenius as adults), we have little to go on when attempting to discern whether this motivator is beneficial. It seems like something that would be most appealing to teens who have an insatiable desire to build self-narratives. For our personal cultivar’s aesthetic ideal, we may borrow Simone’s motto, “repeated blunt force.” It serves as something of a perfect contrast to Slack or Wu Wei, implying that life should shatter upon your adamantine resolve.

Honor Sources and Codes

As they encourage group cohesion in addition to motivating preferred behavior, honor codes are well worth including in any intentionally designed or reinforced culture. Strictly enforced honor codes can even impart competitive advantages to cultural adherents. For example, prejudiced people are much more likely to trust Mormons with upper management positions, Jews with managing their financial assets, and Jains with their accounting in part because those cultures’ respective honor codes have created stereotypes which can make life easier for members of those cultures in certain professions.

The Holy Grails of a cultural honor code are:

To create one sufficiently cohesive to generate beneficial stereotypes about adherents who follow it (i.e., that they can be trusted to perform well in certain high-paying positions)
To create one differentiated enough that people understand how your people are “weird” and whether they would be a good potential sociological match for your group. Generic, “be a good person” stuff is pointless—your honor code must differentiate your culture so there is a sense of group identity.
To create one strict enough that a person can regularly get the cognitive rewards associated with making sacrifices. If the sacrifices an honor code requires are rare, adherents won’t develop the mental fortitude they need to always follow it.
To create one thorough enough that true adherents function dramatically better when working together than a random group of outsiders would.

What values do we emphasize in our House’s honor code? Though we have shared ours below, we highly doubt this honor code would be interesting to many readers. We primarily left it here to make it easier for our great-grandkids to find should they be interested in how we thought about this kind of stuff if their parents have since created totally new Houses.

An Honor Code Sample:
House Collins’ Honor Code

Fiduciary Responsibility matters above all other concerns.

This makes people much more likely to trust you with investments. It is also probably one of the oldest and most core obsessions of our family and something for which we are already known.

If someone takes a risk on you, don’t let them down. That doesn’t mean you always make them money, but it does mean that so long as they are invested in you, you are an agent of theirs within that part of your life with no split allegiance. When our travel company was thrashed by the pandemic, we cut our own salaries to zero before lowering a single employee’s pay or bonuses, then we spent two years working to save the company without pay.

When our board offered to renegotiate the terms of our contract to be more generous, we told them we wouldn’t entertain the discussion until the company was on stable ground again, as we are honor-bound to not negotiate a contract with an investor who has no negotiating power (had we left the company during that period, it would have collapsed). Our brother and sister-in-law work in the same industry and developed a similar reputation, refusing to take a bonus from their board despite outperforming every metric for years in a row. As a member of House Collins, the level of fiduciary responsibility you hold should look stupid to people of other cultures.

This is one of those aspects of an honor code that directly and massively benefits not just the larger cultural group but you as an individual. While our obsession with looking out for the best interests of those who take a personal risk on us can seem dumb at the moment, it is something people really remember and a short-term financial hit will always be trivial when contrasted with access to a larger capital pool for future projects and the trust of your employees.

Have complete emotional control at all times.

This means two things: Never allow emotion to pollute any major life decision you make and attempt to maintain whatever emotional state will help you toward your goals. This generally means you should always be happy and full of energy when around others because that is usually the most efficacious emotion to have in order to achieve your aims.

Emotions are a tool, not a compass. Emotions are an evolutionary artifact that is a pollutant within the human soul but one that can nevertheless be utilized to influence others and achieve desired outcomes.

The trials you face in life can either strengthen you or make you fragile. People without your best interests at heart will always attempt to use these experiences as an excuse to get you to indulge in non-efficacious emotional states. Hardship is never an excuse for fragility in our House.

Happiness is a reward, not a destination.

The most toxic message taught to kids in our society is that happiness warrants pursuit.

The message goes: Once a simple set of conditions are met, a person naturally starts to feel happy, content, and satisfied. Thus, when a person does not feel those emotional states, they desperately try to change things until they do, whether that be what they are doing, where they are living, how much they make, who they are with, or who they are themselves.

Lasting contentment and satisfaction—the forms of happiness our House values—are always the result of competent pursuit of one’s values.

Perhaps we are not told this obvious truth because secular society has a phobia around allowing people to search for their own values and nudges people to value positive emotions in both themselves and others, like some sort of puerile utilitarian accountant, to prevent them from asking questions.

Always take responsibility for failures.

You may be told that a failure is “not your fault” because of X or Y reason. Accepting that lie robs you of potential lessons and will make those around you respect you less. Take responsibility for failures. Sometimes people who are emotionally attached to you will tell you to avoid taking responsibility for failure because they think it will help make the pain go away, a pain they share through empathy. Learn to make the pain go away by controlling your emotions, not by avoiding responsibility.

For example, when the pandemic eviscerated the travel industry it would have been easy for us to frame the loss as an “act of God” to our investors, but we didn’t. There is always something we could have done. We could have predicted risks like the pandemic and better communicated them or put more controls in place to lessen the risk by diversifying the company out of the travel industry before the pandemic.

When Nokia failed and was shutting down, the CEO said, “We didn’t do anything wrong.” Never be that person. Never be the leader who doesn’t take responsibility for their failures.

Family and House come first.

Your family and other members of your culture should be given preference over friends and strangers (but never investors or those that have otherwise put their faith in you, such as employees).

There is, however, an important exception to this rule: Incompetent or unethical family members are owed nothing. Only successful family members who have demonstrably operated by our House’s Code of Honor are to be given preference. This standard is not about developing a safety net for the weak, as some cultures interpret family-first action, but rather a network of competent people that compound each other’s successes. One of any individual’s highest objectives should be to expand the family in terms of number of members, competency of those members, and their power and wealth.

Make sure family members know when they have been deemed non-efficacious or unethical. Never pretend they are in your good graces to manipulate them.

Always understand a family member is doing you a favor by letting you know you are not approved. Rather than judge them negatively, work out what steps are necessary to get back in their good graces and decide whether the action required is worth your time.

“I will,” rather than IQ, should be a source of pride.

Growing up, my (Malcolm’s) mom refused to share my test results or IQ with me. While I knew they must be high because I was always in whatever gifted programs the school would offer, my mother, when asked about it, would redirect me to some area where I had failed through a lack of work ethic, planning, or perseverance and remind me that “I will,” not IQ is what matters in life.

She would remind me that plenty of losers had a high IQ—that history was defined by those with a force of will and that there is no greater honor than to work yourself to death in pursuit of a worthy goal. As Spartan mothers used to tell their children, “With it or on it”—return from war with your shield or as a carcass carried back on it—but never even consider abandoning your station in life.

Anyone can define themselves as smart and misunderstood and then feel upset that things did not come to them easily because they thought the world respected this imaginary self-perspective. As a House, we value cunning and work ethic—never “smarts.”

Given the mindset with which I was raised, meeting Simone, who lived by the personal philosophy of “repeated blunt force,” was a breath of fresh air. In Silicon Valley, people valued IQ, burn-out culture, and over-the-top personalities. Simone was the first person I had met who truly understood the value of quiet, consistent, hard work. Bragging about how hard one is working or how stressed out one is (burn-out culture) is just as bad as bragging about high IQ—just do what you must and don’t wince no matter how hard life punches back.

Force of will and work ethic in yourself and others should be respected over natural intelligence. This is true of yourself, your heroes, your colleagues, and your partners in life. No one is more deserving of contempt than a smart person who squandered that potential by being lazy or fragile.

Don’t trust authority; contribute new ideas.

It is a deep Calvinist tradition to distrust authority outside of your immediate community—while utilizing a strict chain of command within the community and family structure. The key that makes this work is the chain of command used within the community, which fervently rewards out-there or otherwise non-orthodox ideas and only tells people what to do, not how to think.

While we’ve passed a century or so during which this trait was not beneficial, growth of the cultural supervirus stoked by population collapse will make it invaluable again in the near future. As we begin to see more tyrants rise to power across the political spectrum, a healthy suspicion of any demagogue or bureaucracy will be critical. While this approach places headwinds on anyone going through the traditional school system or careers, we are building a new school system and we believe the traditional job market is about to undergo a major change.

Live by the Pragmatic Model (live intentionally).

Finally, and most obviously, live intentionally as outlined in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life.

This entails choosing:

What you think has value
How you can effectively manifest that set of values
What sort of person you want to be
How you want others to see you

^[1] Dein, S. (2010, Jan 10th). Religion, spirituality, and mental health. Psychiatric Times. 2022, from https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/religion-spirituality-and-mental-health

^[2] de Waal, F. B. M. (2008). Putting the altruism back into altruism: The evolution of empathy. Annual Review of Psychology, 59(1), 279–300. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093625 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093625

^[3] Ok, E., Qian, Y., Strejcek, B., & Aquino, K. (2021). Signaling virtuous victimhood as indicators of dark triad personalities. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 120(6), 1634–1661. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000329 from https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/personality/2020-ok.pdf

^[4] Ok, E., Qian, Y., Strejcek, B., & Aquino, K. (2021). Signaling virtuous victimhood as indicators of Dark Triad personalities. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 120(6), 1634–1661. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000329

^[5] Noor, M., Shnabel, N., Halabi, S., & Nadler, A. (2012). When suffering begets suffering. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 16(4), 351–374. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868312440048 from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1088868312440048?journalCode=psra

^[6] Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2011). To escape blame, don’t be a hero—be a victim. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(2), 516–519. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2010.12.012 from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022103110002805

^[7] Miller, D., & Effron, D. (2010). Chapter Three – Psychological License: When it is Needed and How it Functions. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 43(2010), 115–155. https://doi.org/S0065-2601(10)43003-8 from https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc/earticle/abs/pii/S0065260110430038

^[8] Ok, E., Qian, Y., Strejcek, B., & Aquino, K. (2021). Signaling virtuous victimhood as indicators of Dark Triad personalities. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 120(6), 1634–1661. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000329 from https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/personality/2020-ok.pdf

^[9]Clark, C. (2022, August 3). The evolutionary advantages of playing victim. Quillette. from https://quillette.com/2021/02/27/the-evolutionary-advantages-of-playing-victim/

^[10] Gabay, R., Hameiri, B., Rubel-Lifschitz, T., & Nadler, A. (2020). The tendency for interpersonal victimhood: The personality construct and its consequences. Personality and Individual Differences, 165, 110134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2020.110134 from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886920303238

^[11] For data set: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/dataset/covid-19-late-march-2020/
For data set analysis: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1248823584111439872.html

^[12]Pew Research Center. (2020, August 27). Are we happy yet? Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project. from https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2006/02/13/are-we-happy-yet/

^[13]Sullivan, D., Landau, M. J., Branscombe, N. R., & Rothschild, Z. K. (2012). Competitive victimhood as a response to accusations of ingroup harm doing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(4), 778–795. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026573

^[14]Brown, R. M., & Craig, M. A. (2020). Intergroup Inequality Heightens Reports of Discrimination Along Alternative Identity Dimensions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 46(6), 869–884. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167219880186

^[15]Rousseau, B. (2016, December 16). Napping in public? In Japan, that’s a sign of diligence. The New York Times. from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/world/what-in-the-world/japan-inemuri-public-sleeping.html

^[16]Brown, Z. C., Anicich, E. M., & Galinsky, A. D. (2020). Compensatory conspicuous communication: Low status increases jargon use. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 161, 274–290. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2020.07.001 from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0749597820303666?via%3Dihub

^[17]Bullock, O. M., Colón Amill, D., Shulman, H. C., & Dixon, G. N. (2019). Jargon as a barrier to effective science communication: Evidence from metacognition. Public Understanding of Science, 28(7), 845–853. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662519865687

^[18]Says:, J., says:, J. W. A., says:, K. W., says:, L. F. S., says:, W., Says:, N., says:, C. V., says:, _cautionary_tale_, says:, M. M. N., says:, N., & Says:, G. (n.d.). Can Jehovah’s Witnesses go to college? JW Answers. 2022, from https://jwanswers.com/can-jehovahs-witnesses-go-to-college/

^[19]This article also discusses how, while Israeli Haredi women can undertake high school, many of their schools will not grant them degrees: “Rabbis called for Jewish women to desist from studying in any higher education institutions, including religious seminaries, that offer an academic diploma. They also stated that offering the bagrut (matriculation diploma) in high school is strictly forbidden, and students should not be taking matriculation tests independently.”
Chizhik-Goldschmidt, A. (2015, December 25). Despite decrees, Jewish ultra-Orthodox women still quietly studying for degrees. Haaretz.com. from https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2015-12-25/ty-article/.premium/despite-decrees-haredi-women-still-studying-for-degrees/0000017f-f7ba-d887-a7ff-fffe683e0000

^[20]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMG0lc_6NiI&t

^[21]Shlezinger, Y. (2021, February 26). Record 63.5% of Haredim join Israel’s workforce in 2020. Israelhayom.com. from https://www.israelhayom.com/2021/02/26/record-63-5-of-haredim-join-israels-workforce-in-2020/

^[22]Perlmutter, E. (1974, December 26). Hasidic sect hurt by unemployment. The New York Times. from https://www.nytimes.com/1974/12/26/archives/hasidic-sect-hurt-by-unemployment.html

^[23] Newman, M., et al. (2019, May 8). State Watchdog gives Haredi colleges failing grade over sky-high dropout rates. The Times of Israel. from https://www.timesofisrael.com/state-watchdog-gives-haredi-colleges-failing-grade-over-sky-high-dropout-rates/

^[24] Bellafante, G. (2016, September 2). In Brooklyn, stifling higher learning among Hasidic women. The New York Times. from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/nyregion/in-brooklyn-stifling-higher-learning-among-hasidic-women.html

^[25]Tyler, N., Heffernan, R., & Fortune, C.-A. (2020). Reorienting locus of control in individuals who have offended through strengths-based interventions: Personal agency and the good lives model. https://doi.org/10.26686/wgtn.12956984.v1 from https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.553240/full,
Krause, N., & Stryker, S. (1984). Stress and well-being: The buffering role of locus of control beliefs. Social Science & Medicine, 18(9), 783–790. https://doi.org/10.1016/0277-9536(84)90105-9 from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0277953684901059,

Wang, Q., Bowling, N. A., & Eschleman, K. J. (2009). Locus of control at work: A meta-analysis. PsycEXTRA Dataset. https://doi.org/10.1037/e518422013-888 from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/job.416,

Shin, S., & Lee, E. (2021). Relationships among the internal health locus of control, mental health problems, and subjective well-being of adults in South Korea. Healthcare, 9(11), 1588. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare9111588 from https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9032/9/11/1588,

Marrero Quevedo, R. J., & Carballeira Abella, M. (2014). Does locus of control influence subjective and psychological well-being? Personality and Individual Differences, 60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2013.07.231 from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886913005175,

Findley, M. J., & Cooper, H. M. (1983). Locus of control and academic achievement: A literature review. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(2), 419–427. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.44.2.419,

Guan, Y., Wang, Z., Dong, Z., Liu, Y., Yue, Y., Liu, H., Zhang, Y., Zhou, W., & Liu, H. (2013). Career Locus of Control and Career Success Among Chinese Employees: A Multidimensional Approach. Journal of Career Assessment, 21(2), 295–310. https://doi.org/10.1177/1069072712471324

^[26] Jones, P. J., Bellet, B. W., & McNally, R. J. (2020). Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals With Trauma Histories. Clinical Psychological Science, 8(5), 905–917. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702620921341

^[27] Celniker, J., Ringel, M., Nelson, K., & Ditto, P. H. (2021). Correlates of “Coddling”: Cognitive distortions predict safetyism-inspired beliefs, belief that words can harm, and trigger warning endorsement in college students. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/5g7nc,
Sanchez, P. Y. (2022, March 18). Cognitive distortions linked to safetyism beliefs, support for trigger warnings, and the belief that words are harmful. PsyPost. from https://www.psypost.org/2022/03/cognitive-distortions-linked-to-safetyism-beliefs-support-for-trigger-warnings-and-the-belief-that-words-are-harmful-62744

^[28]Bushman, B. J. (2002). Does venting anger feed or extinguish the flame? Catharsis, rumination, distraction, anger, and aggressive responding. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(6), 724–731. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167202289002 from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0146167202289002

^[29] According to Charles Burney, whose History of Music (1776) was the first important treatise in its field, Calvinists disallowed all instrumental music in Geneva for 100 years after the Reformation and all music, except for psalm singing, was outlawed. Later scholars have argued this to be an exaggeration, but one that contains more than a grain of truth.

^[30] Curry, A. (2017, November 5). Ancient sites damaged and destroyed by ISIS. National Geographic. from https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/history-and-civilisation/2017/11/ancient-sites-damaged-and-destroyed-by-isis

^[31] Time Inc. (1978, October 2). Behavior: Analyzing jewish comics. Time. from https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,948701,00.html

^[32] While Willoughby Britton has done some interesting research in this space, we would suggest this blog post by someone struggling even four years after quitting meditation: https://hollyelmore.substack.com/p/i-believed-the-hype-and-did-mindfulness-meditation-for-dumb-reasons-now-im-trying-to-reverse-the-damage

^[33] Olivera La Rosa, A., & Roselló Mir, J. (2013). On the relationships between disgust and morality: a critical review. Psicothema, 25(2), 222–226. https://doi.org/10.7334/psicothema2012.159 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23628537/

^[34] Multilevel marketing. AARP. (n.d.). Retrieved December 25, 2022, from https://www.aarp.org/aarp-foundation/our-work/income/multilevel-marketing/

^[35] Taylor, J. M. (n.d.). The Case (for and) against Multi-level Marketing. From https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_comments/trade-regulation-rule-disclosure-requirements-and-prohibitions-concerning-business-opportunities-ftc.r511993-00008%C2%A0/00008-57281.pdf

^[36] Mueller J, Orth U, Wang J, Maercker A. (2009) Disclosure Attitudes and Social Acknowledgement as Predictors of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptom Severity in Chinese and German Crime Victims. The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry.54(8):547-556. doi:10.1177/070674370905400807

^[37] Mueller J, Moergeli H, Maercker A. (2008) Disclosure and Social Acknowledgement as Predictors of Recovery from Posttraumatic Stress: A Longitudinal Study in Crime Victims. The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry;53(3):160-168. doi:10.1177/070674370805300306

^[38] If you’re not familiar with this technique and want to learn more, we recommend the Wikipedia page as a jumping off point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_the_mall_technique

^[39] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramona_false_memory_case

^[40] Hughes, K. C., & Shin, L. M. (2011). Functional neuroimaging studies of post-traumatic stress disorder. Expert review of neurotherapeutics, 11(2), 275–285. https://doi.org/10.1586/ern.10.198

^[41] Studies and clinical trials evidence the Sinclair method. Sinclair Method UK TSM Consultation Service. (2022, March 18). from https://www.sinclairmethoduk.com/studies-and-clinical-trials-evidence-the-sinclair-method/

^[42] We arrived at this figure from a back-of-the-napkin calculation that 95,000 die of alcoholism-related diseases every year, the Sinclair method works in 80% of cases and is extremely cheap—cheaper than alcoholism even if you are only drinking mouthwash like the Unabomber (the cheapest over-the-counter way to get drunk)—thus, AA needlessly leads to the deaths of around 0.7M people a decade.

^[43] Elibol-Can, B., Jakubowska-Dogru, E., Severcan, M., & Severcan, F. (2011). The effects of short-term chronic ethanol intoxication and ethanol withdrawal on the molecular composition of the rat hippocampus by FT-IR spectroscopy. Alcoholism, clinical and experimental research, 35 11, 2050-62,

Loeber, S., Duka, T., Welzel Márquez, H., Nakovics, H., Heinz, A., Mann, K.F., & Flor, H. (2010). Effects of repeated withdrawal from alcohol on recovery of cognitive impairment under abstinence and rate of relapse. Alcohol and alcoholism, 45 6, 541-7 .

^[44] Kirkegaard, Emil O. W.. (2020). Mental Illness and the Left. The mankind quarterly. 60. 10.46469/mq.2020.60.4.3. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/vbqw9 from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341609819_Mental_Illness_and_the_Left

^[45] For data set: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/dataset/covid-19-late-march-2020/
For data set analysis: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1248823584111439872.html

^[46] Daniele Mugnaini, S. L. (2015). Role of religion and spirituality on Mental Health and resilience: There is enough evidence. International Journal of Emergency Mental Health and Human Resilience, 17(3). https://doi.org/10.4172/1522-4821.1000273,
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Weber, S. R., & Pargament, K. I. (2014). The role of religion and spirituality in mental health. Current opinion in psychiatry, 27(5), 358–363. https://doi.org/10.1097/YCO.0000000000000080,
Behere, P. B., Das, A., Yadav, R., & Behere, A. P. (2013). “Religion and mental health.” Indian Journal of Psychiatry, 55(Suppl 2), S187–S194,
Baetz, M., Griffin, R., Bowen, R., Koenig, H. G., & Marcoux, E. (2004). “The association between spiritual and religious involvement and depressive symptoms in a Canadian population.” The Journal of nervous and mental disease, 192(12), 818-822.,
Tepper L, Rogers SA, Coleman EM, “The prevalence of religious coping among persons with persistent mental illness.” Psychiatr Serv. 2001; 52: 660,
McCullough, M. E., & Larson, D. B. (1999). “Religion and depression: a review of the literature.” Twin research, 2(02), 126,
Keefe, R. H., Brownstein-Evans, C., & Rouland Polmanteer, R. (2016). “’I find peace there:’ how faith, church, and spirituality help mothers of color cope with postpartum depression.” Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 1-12.

^[47] Napier, J. L., & Jost, J. T. (2008). Why are conservatives happier than liberals?. Psychological science, 19(6), 565–572. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02124.x,
Liberal countries have more satisfied citizens while Conservatives are happier individuals, study finds. (2014). PsycEXTRA Dataset. https://doi.org/10.1037/e527942014-001 from https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/09/satisfied-citizens,
Bohannon, J. (2015, March 12). New study questions trope that conservatives are happier than Liberals … Science. from https://www.science.org/content/article/new-study-questions-trope-conservatives-are-happier-liberals

^[48] Kirkegaard, Emil O. W.. (2020). Mental Illness and the Left. The mankind quarterly. 60. 10.46469/mq.2020.60.4.3.

^[49] Dein, S. (2010, January 10). Religion, spirituality, and mental health. Psychiatric Times. from https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/religion-spirituality-and-mental-health

^[50] Henderson, W. M., & Kent, B. V. (2021). Attachment to God and psychological distress: Evidence of a curvilinear relationship. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 61(1), 161–177. https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12767 from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jssr.12767

^[51] Jeongsoo Kim & Gabriela Sanchez-Soto (2011) Higher fertility among the first-generation Korean immigrants in the U.S.: An assimilation mechanism towards a new way of living, from https://paa2019.populationassociation.org/uploads/191215#

[52] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate

[53] Volant, S., Pison, G., & Héran, F. (2019). French fertility is the highest in Europe.because of its immigrants? Ined. Retrieved March 16, 2023, from https://www.ined.fr/en/news/press/french-fertility-is-the-highest-in-europe-because-of-its-immigrants/

^[54] Nathan, M., & Lee, N. (2013). Cultural diversity, innovation, and entrepreneurship: Firm-level evidence from London. Economic Geography, 89(4), 367–394. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecge.12016 from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ecge.12016

^[55] Distefano, J. J., & Maznevski, M. L. (2000). Creating value with diverse teams in global management. Organizational Dynamics, 29(1), 45–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0090-2616(00)00012-7 from https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2000-02735-004,
Bassett-Jones, N. (2005). The paradox of Diversity Management, creativity and Innovation. Creativity and Innovation Management, 14(2), 169–175. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8691.00337.x from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8691.00337.x

^[56] Park, J. H. (2010). Diversity and team performance: A meta-analysis. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1671071,
Horwitz, S. K., & Horwitz, I. B. (2007). The effects of team diversity on team outcomes: A meta-analytic review of Team Demography. Journal of Management, 33(6), 987–1015. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206307308587,
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^[57]Fischer, D. H. (2018). Albion’s Seed: Four British folkways in America. Oxford University Press.

^[58] https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/as-cool-as-the-other-side-of-a-calvinist

^[59] A fun tier list of psychedelic experiences https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jxMSYTTEPE&t

^[60] Johnson, S. (2022, April 19). The DMT ‘elves’ people meet while tripping. Big Think. from https://bigthink.com/the-present/dmt-beings/

^[61] Heng, Y. T., Barnes, C. M., & Yam, K. C. (2022). Cannabis use does not increase actual creativity but biases evaluations of creativity. Journal of Applied Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000599

^[62] Mason, N.L., Kuypers, K.P.C., Reckweg, J.T. et al.(2021) Spontaneous and deliberate creative cognition during and after psilocybin exposure. Transl Psychiatry 11, 209. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-021-01335-5

^[63] Borissova A, Ferguson B, Wall MB, et al. (2021) Acute effects of MDMA on trust, cooperative behaviour and empathy: A double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment. Journal of Psychopharmacology.;35(5):547-555. doi:10.1177/0269881120926673

^[64] Glodosky, N. C., & Cuttler, C. (2020). Motives matter: Cannabis use motives moderate the associations between stress and negative affect. Addictive Behaviors, 102, 106188. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2019.106188,
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Gobbi G, Atkin T, Zytynski T, et al. (2019, Feb 13) Association of Cannabis Use in Adolescence and Risk of Depression, Anxiety, and Suicidality in Young Adulthood: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. JAMA Psychiatry. 2019;76(4):426–434. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2018.4500

^[65] Adam, K.C.S., Doss, M.K., Pabon, E. et al. (2020). Δ9-Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) impairs visual working memory performance: a randomized crossover trial. Neuropsychopharmacol. 45, 1807–1816 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-020-0690-3

^[66] Gabay, A. S., Kempton, M. J., Gilleen, J., & Mehta, M. A. (2018). MDMA increases cooperation and recruitment of social brain areas when playing trustworthy players in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma. The Journal of Neuroscience, 39(2), 307–320. https://doi.org/10.1523/jneurosci.1276-18.2018

^[67] Zeifman, R. J., Wagner, A. C., Watts, R., Kettner, H., Mertens, L. J., & Carhart-Harris, R. L. (2020). Post-Psychedelic Reductions in Experiential Avoidance Are Associated With Decreases in Depression Severity and Suicidal Ideation. Frontiers in psychiatry, 11, 782. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.00782

^[68] Kuypers, K.P.C., Riba, J., de la Fuente Revenga, M. et al. (2016, Jan 25) Ayahuasca enhances creative divergent thinking while decreasing conventional convergent thinking. Psychopharmacology 233, 3395–3403 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-016-4377-8

^[69] Jefsen OH, Elfving B, Wegener G, Müller HK. (2020, Nov 4) Transcriptional regulation in the rat prefrontal cortex and hippocampus after a single administration of psilocybin. Journal of Psychopharmacology. 2021;35(4):483-493. doi:10.1177/0269881120959614,
Barrett, F.S., Doss, M.K., Sepeda, N.D. et al. (2020, Jan 24) Emotions and brain function are altered up to one month after a single high dose of psilocybin. Sci Rep 10, 2214 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-59282-y

^[70] Baggott MJ. 2015. Psychedelics and creativity: a review of the quantitative literature. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1202v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1202v1

^[71] Barone, W., Beck, J., Mitsunaga-Whitten, M., & Perl, P. (2019). Perceived benefits of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy beyond symptom reduction: Qualitative follow-up study of a clinical trial for individuals with treatment-resistant PTSD. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 51(2), 199–208. https://doi.org/10.1080/02791072.2019.1580805

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^[80] Note, this bullet and this footnote were written by one of our Chinese editors, Lillian Tara. “Historically, China was wracked with internal chaos that produced a much more conservative philosophy than seen in the West. Education was seen as integral to the highest value of social/moral order, both necessary for the individual to get ahead and for society at large to prosper. People frequently liken Chinese to Jewish culture, but the latter seems to have greater emphasis on open debate and the inherent value of discourse—while Chinese education values are more formally hierarchical and don’t have a divine, metaphysical backing. As discussed earlier, this may account for the abundance of Jewish public intellectuals and their more interdisciplinary success.”

Malcolm note: “Chinese cultural attitudes toward education are fascinating, as they give us a vision of where our current society might be headed. While the civil service exams were focused on practical knowledge when first implemented, over the centuries they became more about showing one’s skill at perfectly memorizing Confucian texts (essentially a proto liberal arts). This shift allowed education to still act as a filter for intelligence and work ethic but meant practical skills were no longer being emphasized. On the upside, this rendered the upper classes resistant to external cultural viruses but on the downside, it lowered the rate of cultural innovation because practical skills were no longer being emphasized.”

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^[166] Paul Collins (1970, January 1). Trust issues. Lapham’s Quarterly. Retrieved December 18, 2022, from https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/future/trust-issues

^[167] While we don’t see how this might benefit this culture, we wonder if the Japanese, either for genetic or cultural reasons, experience a stronger reminiscence bump than people in many Western cultures, as a uniquely strong reminiscence bump could explain why high school settings are so common in Japanese media.

^[168] Sparks, Hannah. “The Biggest Gender Reveal Fails Ever: 11 Parties Gone Terribly Wrong.” New York Post, 17 May 2021.

^[169] Edmund Morgan (1942) “The Puritans and Sex,” NEQ 15 , 591-607l via Fischer, D. H. (2018). Albion’s Seed: Four British folkways in America. Oxford University Press.

^[170] Note: We tried to find any proof that this was true outside of cultural stereotypes but couldn’t, which makes it hard to pontificate on.

^[171] We acknowledge that, at least when it comes to having kids, there is a certain amount of genuine, unconditional love that will never fade, despite what a child may do. This does not mean that a child is entitled to unconditional affection motivated by that love.

The Math of DNA Editing

Not being experts in this kind of math, we are presenting a short writeup by Scott Sauers, someone who works in the space, followed by a critique of the writeup by an anonymous Chief Science Officer who also works in the industry. By looking at the points on which they disagree, even someone without much expertise can get a good understanding of what is under contention in the industry (the way you communicate with the public and where to make simplifications in doing the math) and what most people agree on (that IQ can be dramatically increased in the near future with even minor gene edits).

A Brief Illustration by Scott Sauers

Here are some very rough back-of-the-envelope calculations:

Let’s make the reasonable assumption that 15,000 genetic variants account for nearly all the genetic variance in some trait. You either have the variant or you don’t: You can have an A state or a B state.

This is a binomial distribution with and a 50% chance of having either variant state at some location. The variance is (the number of variants) * (the probability of having state A for a variant) * (the probability of having state B for a variant), which for us is or 3,750. The standard deviation is the square root of the variance, which is , or ~61. Someone 1 standard deviation above (or below) the mean would differ, on average, by only ~61 variants if there are 15,000 variants largely controlling the trait. For , this number drops to only

Most people will have about 7,500 A state variants and 7,500 B state variants, but someone who has ~7,540-7,560 A variants will be a standard deviation away from the genetic mean.

Of course, this is less relevant to less heritable traits.

However, this assumes we are flipping random variants! Why would we do this? If you are editing genes, you’re going to edit the variants which have the largest effects first.

Genome-wide association study results suggest that roughly, the median variant in the top 10% of genetic variants with the largest effect is 2 times higher than the overall median variant, and the median variant in the top 1% is 4 times higher than the median variant, and the median variant in the top 0.1% is 8 times larger than the median variant.

The top variants have way more of an effect than the average variant. This pattern is seen across different studies. The best variants to edit will likely have an effect of ~1/30th of a standard deviation for traits which have 15,000 variants.

If you know the location of causal variants, you should be able to increase a trait with N = 15,000 by 1 standard deviation by making 30 edits. This is indeed what happens if you sum up actual variant effect sizes in multiple genome-wide association studies (but unoptimistically it might be as high as 100 edits).

The main takeaway is that making just a few edits can have a substantial effect; you don’t need to edit thousands of genes even for extremely polygenic traits. Many traits are not very polygenic, like type 1 diabetes (only ~50 variants) and many forms of cancer, making this task much easier.

Animal breeding data suggests there is no known upper limit on how much of an increase can occur. If you have a massively polygenic trait with N = 10,000, there’s nothing stopping you from increasing a trait by 8 standard deviations with (can decrease this number by using the best variants) edits. This would result in an increase of the trait far beyond what any human throughout time has ever had.

A Brief Critique in Response

I thought a bit about the embryo editing thing. It’s not wrong, all things considered, but it’s at least a little misleading and would be picked apart by statistical geneticists. Sure, they are “very rough back-of-the-envelope calculations,” but there you can also ask yourself whether you should include them in a book.

It starts with the assumptions at the beginning, first of all the 15,000 variants to explain the heritability: We get the common variation in height, so 40% heritability explained with 12,111 SNPs. That leaves the other half, which is probably due to rare variants—that could be significantly more again. So, 15,000 is quite a number taken out of the air. Then the idea that you either have a variant or you don’t—that’s a rather strange simplification, since we know that you have none, one or two copies of the effect allele. But even if we get past that, it’s odd to go beyond that and assume that there’s a 50% chance of having one variant or the other. That’s false, and simplification for the sake of modeling goes a little too far for me.

Given these assumptions, the calculation is correct. But as I said, these are strongly simplifying assumptions. All in all, the results are probably quite realistic, but for that the modeling would not have been necessary. Just take a well-researched trait like height or intelligence, take the top 100 GWAS hits with their respective effect sizes and allele frequencies and simulate how big the expected gain would be. In my opinion, this is much less abstract and better understandable for the layman.

Otherwise, he mentions in passing the central problem of his whole approach: “If you know the location of causal variants”—this is actually a really big “if,” because currently, we just don’t know in most cases. We might tag a variant that is really close (which is sufficient for embryo selection) but not the actual causal allele (and that’s what we need for editing). That might change in the future, but at least for now, it is unknown.

But Surely the Problem will Fix Itself: Behavioral Sinks

While we find the Calhoun stuff a little pop-sci for our tastes, its predictive capabilities make it worth including. At the time these experiments were released, no one seriously expected a massive population collapse to occur in post-scarcity societies. Per the Criterion of Shot Calling, we would be remiss to ignore its potential implications.

Your instinct when looking at the demographic collapse problem may be that it will eventually resolve itself. This is actually our view as well—once the sociological profiles associated with prosociality and openness to other cultures (which make people susceptible to sterilizing memes) have been bred out of the population, things will stabilize. However, there is evidence that even our view might be overly rosy.

In his famous “Rat Utopia” experiment, ethnologist John B. Calhoun gave a population of rats access to unlimited food and water (though limited space), removed all natural predators, and ensured perfect rat temperatures (68°F—20°C) to see what would happen after a few generations. While many people still complain about world poverty, the objective truth is that functionally we live in a world today where a significant portion of humans experience something akin to these “Rat Utopias” in that food and water are not the limiting factors on reproduction in the way they used to be.^[1]

Note: Like most famous experiments from this era, there is some reason to think^{^[2]} the results of these experiments may have been exaggerated or p-hacked. However, they also appeared to have been predictive of future social trends that had not yet come to pass when the experiments were conducted, which leads us to think they are at least worth considering.

Calhoun reported:

“The mice couldn’t form normal social bonds or engage in complex social behaviors such as courtship, mating, and pup-rearing. Instead of interacting with their peers, males compulsively groomed themselves; females stopped getting pregnant. Effectively, says Ramsden, they became “trapped in an infantile state of early development”, Ultimately, the colony died out. “There’s no recovery, and that’s what was so shocking to [Calhoun],” says Ramsden.^[3]

“Among the males the behavior disturbances ranged from sexual deviation to cannibalism and from frenetic overactivity to a pathological withdrawal from which individuals would emerge to eat, drink and move about only when other members of the community were asleep.”

“The common source of these disturbances became most dramatically apparent in the populations of our first series of three experiments, in which we observed the development of what we called a behavioral sink. The animals would crowd together in greatest number in one of the four interconnecting pens in which the colony was maintained. As many as 60 of the 80 rats in each experimental population would assemble in one pen during periods of feeding. Individual rats would rarely eat except in the company of other rats. As a result, extreme population densities developed in the pen adopted for eating, leaving the others with sparse populations.”^[4]

“The few secluded spaces housed a population Calhoun called “the beautiful ones.” Generally guarded by one male, the females—and few males—inside the space didn’t breed or fight or do anything but eat and groom and sleep. When the population started declining the beautiful ones were spared from violence and death, but had completely lost touch with social behaviors, including having sex or caring for their young.”^[5]

We find it telling that the first human populations to experience demographic collapse are those which were first to enter rough human equivalents to “Rat Utopias.” Population has first begun to rapidly decline among human groups that reached levels of development at which the majority of their population no longer experienced food or water constraints a few generations earlier than others.

Specifically, many of the behaviors observed in the Utopia rats have arguably manifested in humans occupying developed economies from the 1970s onward, suggesting this rat experiment was roughly predictive of human societal trends, given these studies were mostly undertaken from the 1940s to the 1960s. For example, the development of a “behavioral sink”^[6] in which the rats began to cluster could be seen as analogous to the explosion in urbanism since the studies were conducted. This same trend has begun to appear in our society (after the experiments, so they were predictive of this).^[7]

Observations like, “[the] population would assemble in one pen during periods of feeding. Individual rats would rarely eat except in the company of other rats” demonstrate that among many of the rats, compulsive, suicidal ultra- prosociality developed right before the populations began to collapse (some might argue we are seeing analogous behavior in some human populations).

In addition, populations like the “beautiful ones” seem to indicate that a portion of the population in this sort of collapse scenario will retreat from in-person interactions and become obsessed with grooming behavior. Potentially in humans this could be seen as a growing obsession with social validation, to the extent that people “forget” how to breed (perhaps this phenomenon is at play with dropping sex rates and populations shifting to more online—rather than in-person—interaction).

In relation to “a pathological withdrawal from which individuals would emerge to eat, drink and move about only when other members of the community were asleep:” If we see countries like Japan as at a more advanced stage of the Rat Utopia experiment we might see this pattern as being reflected in the Hikikomori^[8] phenomenon, in which many individuals stop interacting with society and stay socially isolated as much as possible. (It would be very interesting if this turned out to be predictive and we started seeing Hikikomori behavior in other countries once fertility rates drop below a specific point.)

The question of course is what is really causing the unusual behavior (if it is real). For example, it could be innocuous things like the clustering acculturation and the fact that the rats want to only eat when close to other rats—similar to the study that shows that rats which have all their early sexual experience when wearing a little vest will have trouble having sex without a vest.^[9] It could also be some disease or mutational meltdown^[10] that was not picked up given Calhoun’s poor experimental protocols caused the unusual behavior and population collapses. The most concerning potential mechanism of action is that he was witnessing a pattern of behaviors which emerged in social mammals as a result of stress caused in post-scarcity environments. (Like how mammals demonstrate a pre-set range of behavior patterns when caged, causing them to do things like pace, pick at their hair, and not mate.)

People have drawn all sorts of wild implications from Calhoun’s experiments, often attributing the results to whatever their particular cause area is. For example, many originally used the experiments to decry overcrowding and overpopulation, even though the study is equally about giving a population of social mammals unlimited food and water (plus in late stages of the experiment, the rats were found to intentionally crowd, leaving large parts of the pen sparsely populated).

For that reason, we won’t extrapolate too much (and we’ll fully admit that our conjecture is nothing more than that), other than to point out that these experiments show that equilibrium may not be a guaranteed outcome of a post-scarcity society. There is a chance that things don’t equalize.

Note: Two follow-up studies were not able to recreate the population collapse but did create many but not all of the other behaviors. Given the number of “universes” or instances of this study that Calhoun created, this might be a rare phenomenon.^{^[11]} Also: If any reader is involved in recreating this experiment, please measure testosterone levels. We would be very interested to see if a behavioral sink might at least partially explain recent shifts in male testosterone levels.

Alternate History Jews: Samaritans

When people think of the evolution of the Abrahamic traditions, they often imagine Jews being the base from which everything else evolved one way or another—but this picture is wrong. One surviving branch split off well before Jesus at some point between the time of Ezra down to the destruction of Jerusalem (70 CE) and the Bar Kokhba revolt (132-136 CE). (Why the big time gap? Because the schism was slow and involved a gradual divide in the community.)

If we were going to give a super simplified version of history:

At one point, all the Jews were allied into a single people in Israel and Judaism served as a religion, governing system, and way of living. Upset over the proposed king Rehoboam, two tribes (Judah and Benjamin) split off into the House of Judah. This created two competing Jewish Kingdoms: the Israelites in the North and the House of Judah in the South.

Given that Judaism of the time was both a religion and a governing system, each kingdom needed its own religious center. For the southern kingdom, that was Temple Mount in Jerusalem. For the Northern people, that was Mount Gerizim in Gerizim. The Israelites in the North (the ten tribes who did not split off) controlled a wealthier, more populated kingdom but this also rendered them more appealing as a target for conquest, leading them to be conquered by the Assyrians.

While the Assyrians genocided the capital city after this conquest, they left most of the Jews of this Kingdom alive under new rule. Though many flowed into the Southern Kingdom as refugees, most stayed under Assyrian rule and—permanently divided from the rest of the Jewish population in thinking the Temple should be on Gerizim—became the unique cultivar we now call the Samaritans.

Side note: Some ancient texts written by the Jewish branch that was antagonistic to Samaritans tried to “other” this group by claiming they were a totally different ethnicity (Assyrians) who only converted to Judaism-like beliefs because lions would otherwise keep attacking them (Second King’s 17). Both genetic^{^[12]} and historic evidence shows this to be wrong. The Samaritans are, or at least were, Jews. (For a great breakdown on this, check out Religions for Breakfast’s video on the subject.)^{^[13]}

What makes the Samaritan-Jewish split so different from Christianity’s split from Judaism was that the Christian split involved a single Jewish teacher coming along with different ideas about their theology and attracting followers (mostly from non-Jewish groups) based on their affinity for these new ideas. The Samaritan split is more a story of two cultures speciating following a sufficiently long period of isolation from each other—it’s analogous to ecological speciation, in which a species splits because two populations are physically separated (in contrast, Christianity split off because their practices did not allow intermingling). Jewish and Samaritan views differentiated so much after long periods of mutual isolation that they simply could not reintegrate.^{^[14]}

What makes Samaritans so cool is that they allow us to get a rare answer to an “alternate history” question: What would have happened to Jewish culture had Jews not left the Levant and not adapted their culture to new environments during the Jewish “Cambrian explosion,” which happened after the Second Temple Period? Suppose Jews never went to Europe; suppose they stayed in the Holy Land; what would have happened to them?

To clarify, while it does appear true that the Samaritans feature some practices and cultural tendencies that represent a less derived version of Jewish culture from the ancestral strain, they are not the ancestral variant itself. To assume as much would be wrong in the same way that considering modern chimpanzees to be ancestral to humans is wrong. While both share a common ancestor and chimps have some superficial features that may make them more phenotypically similar to that ancestor, they have both have undergone evolutionary journeys since that time. (Cool side note: Because of this misconception that Samaritanism is a more ancestral form of Judaism, around 300 Brazilian Jews recently converted to Samaritanism to try to recapture a more ancient form of their religion and culture.)^{^[15]}

Outside of being a less derived version of the ancient Israelite religion, there were two key factors which imposed different cultural evolutionary pressures on the Samaritans:

1. They were much more culturally conservative and thus mostly stayed in one geographic area. (As such, they lacked a wider community in other regions which might support them or offer some place to which they could flee.)

2. While they were protected in Islamic controlled regions as People of the Book, they were not nearly as protected as Jews (as they are not mentioned in the Koran frequently by name, like the Jews were).

These differences yield an example of what would have happened to the Jews under these conditions.

First, we can see they maintained a similar cultural ecological niche to the ancient Israelites. So long as Samaritans existed in populations sufficiently large to rebel and reconstitute their kingdom, they would try. They triggered major revolts in attempts to restore their sovereignty almost for as long as the Jews did, with the last major Samaritan revolt (572 AD) happening only a few decades before the last major Jewish revolt (the Jewish revolt against Heraclius in 602 AD).

Any cultivar that has a mandate to revolt and attempt to recreate a self-governing kingdom will eventually be stomped out as every time they try to revolt, the ruling kingdom will come in and retaliate, leaving fewer of them to revolt next time. Jewish culture was saved because enough of its population lost this tendency. Being more resistant to change, Samaritan culture did not evolve out of this tendency until it was almost totally extinct.

After this period, the few surviving derivatives of Samaritan culture appear to have become fishing village specialists. Not having the same protection Jews enjoyed against Muslim oppression, Samaritans were eventually whittled down to almost nothing, with only a few thousand still being around when the state of Israel was finally created, preventing total cultural extinction.

The Jewish Cabal Theory

On what authority can we state so emphatically that there is no secret society of Jews controlling the world? Funny you should ask. Running and assisting secret societies (also sometimes referred to as private and invitation-only societies, summits, and “idea festivals”) just so happens to be a side gig of ours. Simone was the former Managing Director of Dialog (a secret society started by Peter Thiel), we developed enough of a reputation in the space to be contracted to recruit the members for an invitation only network of the people most likely to change the world for Schmidt Futures (Eric Schmidt’s impact-oriented organization), and we worked on matchmaking for Future Forum (a new society for the effective altruist community’s rising next generation of leaders).

Personally, I (Malcolm) have ties to some of the best-known secret societies with the CIA library of conspiracy theories^[16] citing my father as one of the people running the Illuminati (and I am his eldest son). You’ve got to love this quote: “The Collins family has been kept out of the limelight because they have more occult power than the Rothschilds or the Rockefellers.” I cannot mention others referenced here by name because, unlike the Illuminati, they are active and I have no interest in contracting Russian window cancer.

Long story short, few people on Earth have more insight into the actual operations of a broad range of the world’s most influential private societies than we do. While we can confirm that Jews are overrepresented in all of them (as they are with many positions of power in society), we can also confidently state that there is no powerful secret society run exclusively by Jews. (While there is at least one Jewish-only secret society among these groups, they are not particularly powerful or prestigious and most of their clout comes from their alleged ties to Mossad.)

Most of these secret societies are just as infected with the supervirus as other institutions. Many of the societies framed as “scary” in the public consciousness are in the process of collapsing from infighting due to this infection. If you think there is some secret group that has a plan for the world beyond what the virus is publicly signaling, you are sorely mistaken.

Geographic Flexibility

While the topic of a culture’s tolerance for change is philosophically boring, it can have enormous macro scale consequences. Because nearly all residents of the United States (except for African Americans and Native Americans) are descended from—or are themselves—people who voluntarily chose to leave their homeland, Americans can often underestimate how strongly some cultures feel attached to a specific region (even cultures we often don’t think of in that respect).

Consider the Irish Potato famine. It is hard to overstate just how horrifying the event was. People reported walking into towns completely devoid of life, filled with nothing but corpses strewn beside buildings, only to see those corpses’ eyes tracking their movements and realize many were still barely clinging to life. Just as many people don’t know how bad the potato famine was, what many also don’t know is that many of the people who starved had the option to leave.

The feudal lords who owned property on which many starving people lived were concerned about not being able to feed all their tenants. Even if it didn’t lead to a revolt, negligence could get them and their families killed (there was a rash of landlord murders at the time, so people were terrified).^[17] At the very least it was clear to land owners that if their crops failed and they could only feed a quarter of the serfs or tenants on their lands, they were much better off getting three-quarters to leave and feeding that final quarter instead of just letting the entire lot starve to death.

As such, land owners sometimes (maybe even frequently—we could not find exact reports of the percentage that did this) offered to pay for tenants to emigrate to the Americas to lower the population (to clarify, the passage purchased for these tenants was on “coffin ships” where the passengers acted as the ship’s ballast and sometimes entire crews would die).^[18] While many accepted these offers, the majority turned them down. They may not have known just how bad things were going to get when making that decision, but the cultural impetus is clear: To some people, death is preferable to leaving their land.

We suspect this instinct evolved culturally as earlier humans might logically underestimate how hard it would be to find a good new place to live that was not already occupied by an entrenched group. In the world’s current sociographic and geopolitical environment—and in any future environment—we can imagine it is a terrible strategy to stay geographically tethered as a culture.

It is much easier for a culture to maintain a thriving, engaged membership once members reach a certain critical mass within their surrounding population. As such, while moving may make cultural sense, it seems wisest to move with at least one other culturally aligned family. For example, when we moved to rural Pennsylvania, my (Malcolm’s) brother, his wife, and their children all moved into a nearby house. (Note: This only applies to adults with kids; relocation to a city is practically mandatory when searching for a partner.)

Emotional Instability

One consistent difference between hard cultures (that increase the fitness of their members) and corrosive pop cultures (which spread merely because they are easy and appealing) is that almost all hard cultures reward and encourage emotional self-control while almost all pop cultures glorify emotional and mental instability.

Pop cultures frequently frame those who lose emotional control as “strong,” “dramatic,” or “interesting.” Just look at the way things like anger or “passion” are portrayed in popular media—those moments where a character gains superhuman abilities, driven, to some extent, by “losing control.” Think of the brooding hero, or the girl who is portrayed as being extra alluring because she is emotionally mercurial. Think of the blast and flames that surround a character, who, upon discovering the death of a friend, suddenly gains ten times as much power. Think of the sex symbols created out of characters like Jinx or Harley Quinn. (On this topic, Cracked produced a hilarious skit parodying the manic pixie dream girl trope that covers some of the behavior that is glorified in this kind of media.^[19])

There is no deep thought to be had around this. Teaching yourself to reward (i.e., to feel good about) emotional instability undermines your ability to be a functional, competent adult capable of effectively achieving complex goals.

While most hard cultures believe in emotional control, our family culture sits at the extreme end of the spectrum. Whereas most cultures frame it as “sinful” (something to be ashamed of) to allow oneself to be influenced by negative emotional states, we feel the same way about having one’s thoughts or actions influenced by feckless positive emotional states (though we do expect people of our culture to always signal positivity as doing so encourages other members of other cultures to work with ours).

As you have probably gathered by now, we see all emotional states as just things that we have because earlier humans who had them bred at higher rates in a completely different environmental and social context. From our perspective, allowing positive emotional indulgence to guide decisions is no less shameful than succumbing to any sub-optimal mental pattern, such as an addiction.

While all humans will lose emotional control—such is part of being human—members of our culture aspire to maintain total emotional control and look for that aspiration (and at least moderate mastery) in long-term relationship partners. Ideal partners help each other master their emotions. Participation in a relationship (be it business or personal in nature) in which all participants maintain and respect emotional control is more satisfying than ice cold water after a day of working in the sun.

From our perspective, every time your emotions and hormones win out over your personal logic and values, the animal within you—evolved traits you never chose to have—takes another bite out of the core of your identity—the part of you created with intention and logic. Given how comfortable and alluring they are, positive emotions are all the more likely to wipe out that identity. Though a useful tool, love can also infest and slowly consume your soul.

Addictions

Addictions are wildly dangerous for cultures—and not just for obvious reasons. In addition to decreasing victims’ efficacy and lifespans, addictions create an opportunity for outside cultures to “poach” new members. A common means of combating addiction involves radically rewriting an individual’s self-narrative and some cultures like Alcoholics Anonymous and Scientology have learned they can use this vulnerability to build dependency and easily slurp up new members.

This strategy makes a lot of sense when one thinks about it—while converting people to a hard culture is generally close to impossible (from a statistical perspective), one of the few times in a person’s life where it is possible at scale is when they have hit rock bottom with an addiction. As such, a culture not fortified by mechanisms that protect its members from addiction is uniquely vulnerable.

Many cultures fight addiction by strictly forbidding potentially addictive things. Mormon prohibitions on coffee and Islam’s prohibition on alcohol present salient examples of this.

Having come from a family that oscillates between a generation of teetotalers and a generation of alcoholics, I (Malcolm) can nevertheless vouch for the shortcomings of this approach. A common joke from my family’s part of Texas goes: “Jews don’t recognize Jesus, Protestants don’t recognize the Pope, and Baptists don’t recognize one another in the liquor store.” Prohibitions against drinking work so badly they are a joke. (For clarification “Baptists” are assumed to be Primitive Baptists (a Calvinist sect—like the Puritans). The Calvinist stereotype of either being a teetotaler or alcoholic did not come out of nowhere.)

Worse, abstinence really doesn’t work for the most dangerous addiction of the modern world—online social Skinner boxes. If a rat is given a reward of food when it presses a lever, it will typically only press the lever when it is hungry. If, on the other hand, the rat is only randomly given a reward sometimes, it will press the lever until its paws bleed. This is a Skinner box, and its addictive quality is enhanced in social situations like those created by Facebook or TikTok. Were we to prohibit our kids from using these sorts of platforms, we would hurt their future and ability to build robust social networks (assuming we want them to have networks that include people beyond just members of our culture, which we do).

Coming from a family that is already prone to addiction, how will we equip our House cultivar to address addiction? First, we work with kids to run the Skinner box experiment themselves. We have built this into our school’s curriculum so it is top of mind when kids are being manipulated. We have even built a holiday around recognizing Skinner boxes (Future Day).

More importantly, our culture makes heavy use of naltrexone. Naltrexone is an opioid antagonist, which means that it blocks the chemical pathways that create addiction. If you do something that would normally make you addicted while on an opioid antagonist, the opposite effect occurs and you start disliking that thing. While we see naltrexone as a tool of last resort, it is a critical tool nonetheless in families that are highly vulnerable to addiction. Pharmacological tools can steer biology in a more efficacious direction.

Hofstede’s Other Cultural Dimensions

There was this guy, Geert Hofstede, who came up with a bunch of things he called “cultural dimensions.” These include things like indulgence vs restraint, power distance, individualism vs collectivism, long-term vs short-term orientation, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity vs femininity. You can search online to find heat maps (or just check this link)^[20] showing how these dimensions relate to different geographic cultures and various life outcomes.

Though we almost never give shout-outs to intellectuals without reservations, this model (while not comprehensive) is pretty solid and it presents a useful way to understand culture. We have covered analogs for many of his cultural dimensions already, so this section will act as a catch-all for those which we neglected to address in other sections of the book.

An example of otherwise-hard-to investigate dynamics on which Hofstede’s cultural dimensions shed light: Why is the obesity rate 37.3% in the U.S. and 31.1% in Egypt, but only 4.3% in Japan and 4.7% in S. Korea? Traits tracked by some of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions may be at play! Specifically, “We find that, adjusting for undernourishment and other potential confounds, individualism is associated with higher obesity prevalence in the male population, but not among the female population.”^{^[21]} “A further novel finding is that flexibility (vs monumentalism), a national cultural trait that emphasizes humility, self-control, and restraint of desires, is a strong negative predictor of obesity in both genders.”

Power Distance

Power distance refers to the extent to which less powerful members of a culture (be they family, business, or institutional) are comfortable with and willing to reinforce unequal power distributions. Basically, it is a measure of whether questioning your boss or parents is a normal thing to do (vs something that would trigger gasps of horror).

A mandatory class at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business used one of Malcolm Gladwell’s books to showcase how one can lie to people with statistics while making them look interesting. Each class session focused on one chapter and there was sufficient misleading information in each chapter to reliably fuel two hours of analysis. Despite how primed we are to dislike Malcolm Gladwell’s writing, his book Outliers actually does make an interesting argument about power distance in Korean Airlines.

In this chapter, Gladwell—aka “Evil Malcolm,” if you will—argues that Korean Airlines’ unusually high crash rates are a product of poor communication between pilots and co-pilots who were afraid to question their superiors even when those superiors were doing obviously wrong things. In this one particular case, he is probably right: A 2017 Outliers-inspired study by Carl Enomoto and Karl Geisler^[22] demonstrated pretty convincingly that higher-power-distance cultures do have more plane crashes. This is impressive: To have put together a theory in a pop-science book as a random example, then have that theory tested by academia and verified.

Having worked in South Korea, “Good Malcolm” can say that the nation is well aware of its extremely high power distance in communication. You have to change the structure of your language when talking to someone even a single year older than you or a modicum more powerful than you. As we already mentioned earlier in the book, this can cause so many problems that companies like Kakao (sort of like the Alphabet of Korea) force their employees to take American-style names while at work, which changes the way their language relates to power distance.

Generally speaking, a culture with a high power distance will have a high level of reverence for people in positions of power and people will typically know their relative power level when interacting with others of the same culture. Those in high-power-distance cultures often put a great deal of effort into determining their relative power level if it is not obvious in their first meeting. Back when England was a higher-power-distance culture than it is now, they even had a book you could buy—Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage—that listed the top families by level of social prestige so there could never be any confusion. Historically many Southern cities in the U.S. that had something of an “aristocracy” also had books like this; in fact, I (Malcolm) have a book published in the 80s among my keepsakes listing the top thousand most important families in Dallas (though it does not strictly order them).

Despite being well aware of how important power distance is, we fell flat on our faces when we started running a company with a large staff in Peru (a very high-power-distance and collectivist culture). About a year into running it, one of our employees told us the team was unhappy because we “never talked to them” and they felt uncomfortable that we kept taking them out for one-on-one lunches. To us, from a low-power-distance culture, taking an employee out for a solo lunch with the CEO of the company and asking for their feedback counted as really high-quality communication, but to them it felt like—well, just weird. What they wanted us to do was have all the employees sit in front of us and have us “talk to them.” From our perspective, this kind of communication was dehumanizing, but it was what they wanted.

Differing power distances in Peru and the U.S. caught us off guard again when we needed to fill a managerial role. Hoping to promote from within, we systematically approached all our best employees and offered the position. Each and every one threatened to quit if given the managerial role. In the States, people are so hungry to gain more power that the very idea we’d encounter hesitation in the face of promotion felt absurd to us—and yet, in Peru, the additional power was construed as coming with enough additional responsibility that most of our employees did not want to shoulder even if it came with a salary boost. As one of our team members explained to us, in Peru, extra responsibility isn’t immediately seen as “more power” but rather “more things that are my fault.” That sort of drawback barely flits across the average U.S. worker’s mind.

We wonder if this difference in framing highlights a key mechanism used to enforce high power distances in certain cultures: Making people highly aware of the drawbacks of other social strata. It reminds us of sayings repeated by the highly-stratified society’s denizens in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: “I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid.”

Beyond that, power distance appears to be either reinforced or weakened through language and upbringing. Interestingly, power distance does not appear to have a genetic component while things like collectivism do.^[23]

Uncertainty Avoidance

The uncertainty avoidance dimension indicates the level of comfort with unstructured situations or otherwise novel situations and more generally encompasses a culture’s tolerance for ambiguity. Someone from a high uncertainty avoidance culture may, for example, demand a specific prognosis with timelines and treatment options from a clinician even when one is not available. Uncertainty avoidance also seems to affect things like brand loyalty and how much people see teachers as having “all the answers,” with low uncertainty avoidance cultures trusting teachers much less to “know things.”^[24]

It is important to keep the double-edged sword nature of uncertainty avoidance in mind when crafting culture. High uncertainty avoidance cultures pass themselves to future generations with more fidelity when they are in the majority but also, as shown in a study by David Baker and Kerry Carson,^[25] increases the rate at which an individual feels the need to convert to a new culture when surrounded by said culture. Any culture that plans to be in the minority for a long time and have its members interact with the “normal world” (e.g., get jobs at companies that are not majority that culture—something many cults try to prevent members from doing for this very reason) needs to cultivate a low uncertainty avoidance.

Uncertainty avoidance can affect all sorts of political and social outcomes. For example, citizen protests are both less likely to happen and more likely to be violently suppressed in uncertainty avoidance cultures because they might bring about changes the majority would be uncomfortable dealing with. Such cultures also have more specific laws.^[26] In fact, in high uncertainty avoidance cultures. there is less of an interest in politics more generally.^[27]

Terrorism is much more common in countries with high uncertainty avoidance because “uncertainty avoidance, related to stress, may provide important prerequisites for group-induced aberrant behavior when formerly alienated group members find comfort in adhering to a collective belief system where dissent is discouraged, a sense of group purpose is reinforced, and rules are strictly imposed—apparently confirming the writings of terrorism psychologists.”^[28]

Uncertainty avoidance attitudes do not just cluster regionally but also in cultivars, with high uncertainty avoidance cultures including Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, and Shintoism and low uncertainty avoidance cultures being Protestantism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism.^[29]

While the general understanding is that children in low-uncertainty-avoidance cultures are taught the world is benevolent and children from high-uncertainty-avoidance cultures are taught that it is hostile, this is a bit of a misunderstanding. A better way to put it is that children from high-uncertainty-avoidance cultures are taught the world represents a threat to them and those from medium-uncertainty-avoidance cultures are taught the world is not a threat to them, while those from ultra-low-uncertainty-avoidance cultures (like those from which we hail) are taught they are a threat to the world.

If you want to raise your family to have a low uncertainty avoidance threshold, raise them to believe the world is mostly full of barely sentient idiots and that they will always have to handle every situation personally. If you want to raise them to hate uncertainty, then raise them to believe there are people out there who know better than them and can guide them to “correct” outcomes so long as they follow the rules.

Long-Term vs Short-Term Orientation

Long-term vs short-term orientation refers to whether a society exhibits a pragmatic, future-oriented perspective or a conventional historical point of view.

More generally, a long-term culture is marked by:

Emphasis on persistence
Relationships ordered by status
Emphasis on personal adaptability
De-emphasis on leisure time
Emphasis on relationships and market positions
Circumstantial interpretations of good and evil

And a short-term culture is marked by:

Emphasis on quick results
De-emphasis on status in relationships
Emphasis on personal steadfastness and stability
Emphasis on leisure time
Emphasis on the bottom line
Absolute interpretations of good and evil

Most short-term oriented cultures are in North Africa while most American cultures are somewhere in the middle (outside of Venezuela, which is short-term oriented) and China is seen as being very long-term-oriented.^[30] We find it harder to notice short-term or long-term orientation much in daily life—perhaps because our cultural position is in the middle of the scale.

Short-term vs long-term cultural orientation may be something of a moot point as the preference appears to be heavily genetically influenced. What is cool is that we even know the method of action—specifically 5-HTTLPR VNTR in the serotonin-transporter gene.^[31] This implies that long-term vs short-term orientation may be manipulated using pharmaceuticals if you absolutely want to control it in your family.

Relation to Government

Earlier in this book, we introduced the idea of dominating cultivars. Let’s dig deeper on that concept. Some cultures feel they have a mandate to ensure members’ government(s) align with their culture. To understand if a culture fits into this category, ask: “If this culture made up over 70% of the voters in a democracy, would the laws of said democracy be out of line with a conservative iteration of that culture’s own rules?”

Some more conservative factions of Islam present a “classic” example of this. In extreme cases, some feel so strongly about this mandate that they break away to create states more in line with their cultural values (while ISIS is one example of this, history is littered with others). For an excellent, scholarly account of why conservative Muslim cultivars are often more politically engaged than other conservative cultural strains, check out Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective by Michel Cook.^{^[32]}

Islam to an extent was “designed” to work this way, as at its inception it was a religion, a culture, and an expansionist government. What is more interesting is how much Christianity has moved in this direction despite being explicitly “designed” to not act this way.

For those not familiar with Christian theology, there is the “Render unto Caesar” scene repeated across the Gospels in which Jesus is asked some iteration of, “Is it good to give money in taxes to a government that does not align with our values?” and he responds with some iteration of “show me the coin—that coin has Caesar’s face on it, so give it to Caesar—why would you even ask me such a silly question?” This is not the only place in the Bible where Jesus encourages followers to submit to their governments, but in this particular story, we can see how Jesus sees even asking if a person thinks they may use religion as an excuse to not submit to their government as a trick (“But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, ‘Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites?’”).

If Christianity at its inception was explicitly built to be compatible with non-Christian governments, why do so many Christian sects today insist that their governments align with their values? The answer here is not philosophical but fairly straightforward. During an early period of Christianity, Jesus’ death as a product of resistance to the local government enabled church members to gain enormous respect within their communities through martyrdom by faith-based persecution. This led many of the most devout Christians to do their best to piss off the local governments in order to be publicly executed and become a martyr.

This happened early enough in the Christian tradition that all extant branches of Christianity had to pass through this moment. Actually, it was a major problem for early Christianity when it finally did take control of the Roman government because they could not get themselves martyred any more. It was at this time that the ascetic monasticism movement started to gain traction as a form of “living martyrdom.”

Constantine played a large role in Christianity’s transition from a religion largely distrusted in governance into an explicit part of the Roman empire’s state infrastructure, but this transformation was much less complete than a lay person might imagine. The Pagan system Christianity replaced was not terribly sophisticated or loyal to the state when contrasted with other pro-state cultivars like Islam. While the form of Christianity that resulted from this was involved directly in state infrastructure, it did not feel a mandate to control the state as it had never “fought” for this position and was rather assigned it.

The Christian drive to gain explicit control of government did not begin fully in earnest until after the Reformation, when it started to matter whether a state’s government was Catholic or Protestant.

The only cultural traditions that don’t seem to have at least some level of inbuilt drive to take over their local governments are those which “grew up” without significant mutually exclusive competition and that were always in control of their local government structures until very recently.Contrast Buddhism that evolved alongside not-mutually-exclusive traditions, like Shintoism, as is the case with Buddhism in Japan, and Buddhism that evolved alongside mutually exclusive traditions like Islam in places like Myanmar and Sri Lanka. The latter forms of Buddhism exhibit far greater interest in governmental control when exported.

Cultures’ and religions’ attitudes toward government are more a product of the cultural competitiveness of their foundational landscapes than any inherent cultural imperative. That said, let’s look at a few more specific ways religious communities react to their governments.

One odd quirk of Protestant traditions is that when they don’t have the chance to “take over” governments, their first intuition is usually to leave and found a new colony or otherwise isolate themselves from governmental control. Many colonies in the U.S. were motivated by this, as was the early Mormons’ move to Utah.

Less obviously, we can see this in the Amish, who have been shockingly effective at creating stable sub-governing units within active states, not being subject to the draft or even paying social security. The Amish have achieved all this by … not voting, and not attempting to hijack the local government. As such, they have achieved their desired end with only minimal pushback. Contrast this with Ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews, who often run concerted voting campaigns in local municipalities, making them threatening to entrenched interests.

Note: Disengagement from politics is only a viable as a strategy until a parasitic pop culture (one that needs to convert kids from higher-birth-rate cultures in order to survive) takes over local government. Such cultures will aggressively use the local government to convert children from high-birth-rate cultures and can only be countered through voting or relocation.

Our general takeaway is that the Index or any House within it should never attempt to seize control of a democracy through voting. If you want “your own” space either colonize another planet or make land that was previously uninhabitable your own (e.g., land in the Far North). This will dramatically reduce conflict and increase the chance of our survival. Be ready to defend this new colony while also ensuring it is on land that no one else wants but never try to take over existing political structures or land, even if you can do it—it will make your brothers and sisters in other countries more of a target because now ruling bodies will see them as an eventual threat.

The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life

A Guide to Creating Your Own Answers to Life’s Biggest Questions

By Simone & Malcolm Collins

http://Pragmatist.Guide
Copyright © 2017
Simone & Malcolm Collins
All rights reserved.

Read this Book with a Friend

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Table of Contents

About This Guide. 1

V2 of The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life 3

Why Bother? 6

The Framework. 9

A Brief Introduction to Step 1: Determine Your Objective Function 9

A Brief Introduction to Step 2: Determine Your Ideological Tree 12

A Brief Introduction to Step 3: Determine Your Personal Identity 14

A Brief Introduction to Step 4: Determine Your Public Identity 16

How Applied Pragmatic Thought Relates to Religion, Atheism, and Philosophers 18

Step 1: Define Your Objective Function. 22

Why Do I Need to Think Through an Objective Function? 25

The Uniqueness of Objective Functions to the Human Condition 27

A Note on Challenges to Objective Functions 29

What Has Inherent Value? 31

Nothing has Intrinsic Value. 31

Something Has Innate Intrinsic Value. 38

Value Uncertainty. 92

Religious Intrinsic Values. 95

Proclivities 113

Step 1 Wrap Up 116

Step 2: Develop Your Ideological Tree. 118

Ideologies and Objective Functions 119

Standards for Evidence 120

Standards for Evidence Explored in Detail 123

Logical Consistency. 123

Personal Experience. 125

Personal Emotional Experience (Gut Feel / Intuition) 126

Cultural Consensus. 129

Expert Consensus. 132

Scientific Method. 134

Doctrine. 136

Building the Base of your Ideological Tree 140

Ideological Trees Require Regular Pruning 141

Ideologies that Require Careful Scrutiny 142

Leveraging Social Interaction to Better Think Through Your Ideology 144

Step 3: Define Your Internal Character 145

How to Turn Off Autopilot and Create Your Identity 152

Leveraging Moments of Lucidity. 153

Leveraging Flux Periods. 155

An Autopilot-Altering Case Study 160

Arguments Against Choosing a Self-Image 161

What Builds Our Self-Images if We Do Not? 164

Social Conformity. 164

Cognitive Dissonance. 165

Personal Ego. 166

Reinforcement 167

Instruction. 168

What Forces Built Your Present Self-Image? 169

How We Process Emotions 170

Overlay States. 176

Directly Stimulating Positive Emotional States. 181

Optimizing for Remembered Experiences 197

How Self-Images Affect Our Perception 202

Self-Image Creation and Hygiene 204

Unproductive Self-images. 208

False Alarms. 226

Avoid Allowing Your Self-Image-Powered Autopilot to Make Major Decisions 228

How to Change 230

Costly Thresholds. 230

Confrontation Patterns. 231

Social Pressures. 237

Thought Experiments. 239

But it’s Not That Simple 243

Genetic Influencers. 244

Traumatic Life Events. 245

Addictions. 246

Priming Influencers. 248

Logical Fallacies and Biases. 249

Brain States Follow Physiological States. 252

Step 4: Define Your Public Character 255

Why Have Differing Public and Internal Characters? 255

But I’m a Social Chameleon! 260

Creating an Easily Digestible Public Identity 262

Outlining your Public Persona 264

Making the Change. 266

The Importance of Flaws 267

Outline Your Final Public Persona Carefully 273

Intentionally Managing your Social Network 274

How to Take Stock of Your Friend Network: 275

Types of Friends. 276

Bonus Step: Choosing a Culture. 284

Culture and Religion 285

Ethnic Cultures 289

Cultures Born from Discrimination 289

Evanescent Teen Culture 290

Constructing Culture 295

We Sincerely Hope This Has Been Helpful 296

Our Objective Functions 298

About This Guide

As humans, we get to choose what we believe and who we want to be. These are the most important decisions we will ever make.

The vast majority of people never exercise their freedom to choose their identity and beliefs. Instead, they allow others to tell them who they are, choosing only a few trivial differentiating traits for themselves. When they react angrily or generously, they ascribe the personality that led them to that behavior as being something outside their control. This is because in their minds “who they are” is something outside of their control.

We live life as a sticky ball rolling down a sidewalk, picking up a hodgepodge of stuff that just happens to be in our path. It is natural to try to convince ourselves that this hodgepodge is “who we really are.” We tell ourselves this lie because thinking is hard, and society doesn’t give us a good framework for structuring our beliefs about ourselves and the world. Instead, we are served a smorgasbord of prefabricated worldviews and told we have the option to choose among them.

Worse, we live in a society in which there is no profession or organization we can turn to for help answering life’s big questions that will not pressure us to adopt beliefs closer to their own. If you ask them what you should want to do with your life, they tell you to do “good” things and then explain to you what you should believe “good” is. This is not due to any flaw in these individuals or institutions, but the fact that these institutions are designed from the ground up to lead people to the answers they believe are right. There is no institution, framework, or guide designed from the ground up to help people come up with their own conclusions.

The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life was written to remedy this. The book lays out the applied pragmatic thought framework for systematically constructing one’s own beliefs about the world, leveraging those beliefs to decide who to be as a person, and creating the person one wants to be.

The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life is a product of the Pragmatist Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to pragmatically yet audaciously tackling life’s biggest questions and challenges. Since this book was first published, additional books in the series on relationships, sexuality, and governance structures have been released. Currently we are working on building a K-12 school system. All our projects are a group effort, so if you would like to help, email us at [email protected].

V2 of The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life

The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life was first published over half a decade ago. It has since spent over a year as the bestselling book in the world under Amazon’s Agnostic category (though the book equally supports atheistic and religious perspectives) and has seen four sequels (with one even topping the Wall Street Journal’s bestseller list)—becoming the first of a Pragmatist’s Guide series. (So far, this series includes Pragmatist’s Guides to Life, Relationships, Sexuality, Governance, and Crafting Religion.)

While the Guide to Life covers the most important topics of any book in the Pragmatist’s Guide series, it also has the lowest rating on Amazon. In response, we have re-written it to shore up some of the first edition’s shortcomings, also redesigning the interior of the print version in an effort to make it easier to read.

The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life is a response to the extant education system’s failure to provide a framework for developing independent answers to life’s most important questions:

What should I optimize for in life?
How do I know what is true?
Who should I be?

Sure, college philosophy courses highlight these questions, but in the same breath, present others’ answers, sparing students the burden of finding their own conclusions. We provide a framework helping people develop answers using evidence, ideologies, and experiences they collect themselves.

The problem with this framework turned out to be twofold. First, a portion of the readership really wanted to be spoon-fed an answer. Readers frequently wrote: “I loved the book. What is the right answer?” (Cue yet another head slap moment for us). This book exists to encourage people to think through this stuff for themselves, but the natural human inclination (one we share) to look for an authority figure is difficult to overcome. On the plus side, we must have done a good job writing the book if readers feel compelled to ask us after reading it.

Some of our favorite negative reviews and angry emails assume we are trying to push an agenda that does not align with our personal beliefs. For example, one reader thought that we, fairly secular people, had written the book to secretly convert atheists to Christianity. We cannot think of a better indication that we effectively shielded readers from our own personal biases.

The second problem is less nuanced: The topic is boring if you don’t love it—and if you do love it, you have likely thought through >70% of what the book explores. We made an effort to make the book more engaging for both groups of readers.

Finally, while this book lists Simone and Malcolm as authors, that is something of a lie. A team of about thirty editors—as well post-publication readers—made significant contributions. Whenever someone emails us with a suggested change or criticizes a part of the book in a review or email (we admittedly prefer the latter), we revisit the manuscript to make corrections. If you can think of a way to make this guide better, please contact us! Pragmatist’s Guides are a collaborative effort with the goal of helping people be more intentional with their actions, identities, and beliefs about the world.

Why Bother?

Is genocide a good thing?

If you don’t think genocide is good, why not?

Your reaction to this question may be one of disbelief. You might be thinking, “How can you even ASK if genocide is a good thing?! OBVIOUSLY killing innocent people is wrong!” And you probably wouldn’t be alone in that reaction.

Our society tells us genocide is wrong, that killing innocent people is wrong, and that racism is wrong. However, if you believe these things only or primarily because the culture in which you grew up told you they were obviously true, then you hold little moral authority over someone who participated in genocide, because the culture in which they grew up in told them genocide was a moral imperative.

If you took an average of cultures across human history—the things that most people in most places were raised to believe were true—you would have a culture that believed women were lesser beings than men, that some people are born better than others, that freedom of thought is not a right, and that when you conquer a city, it is perfectly moral to rape, kill, and enslave as many civilians as you want. Why were most cultures in human history wrong, whereas the time and place that you just happen to be born into correct? If you want to believe, with any intellectual integrity, that the culture you were born into or the counterculture that accepted you is more correct than others, you need to develop your own reasons why.

What you believe is a choice you can make—independently, for yourself. If you are reading this book, chances are you have already made your choice and have developed some system of thought-out beliefs about what is worth living for and why. The framework presented in this book will help you structure your beliefs and engage you with choices you may not have known you had. This book will also help you to build a foundation that ensures your life and actions align with what you have decided to believe.

Building this system for yourself will not always be pleasant. There will be moments when you set down the book thinking: “This is difficult to think about! This book is just too dense! Life has worked for me so far. I am done with this!”

This book was not written to be fun or a joy to consume. It was written to make you a better person. Many books that claim to be about some form of “self-improvement” are in reality collections of pleasant platitudes and stories that make you feel powerful while merely affirming beliefs you already kind of had. Much like fad diets and miracle cures that promise easy fixes to tough problems, “comfortable” self-improvement books leave you utterly unchanged and unimproved.

Most self-improvement books are written with the goal of selling more books. They achieve this by offering you the smallest suggested improvements necessary to allow you to feel good about the person you have allowed yourself to become so that you are likely to recommend them to others. We, brave reader, take no money from the sale of this book. This book is only designed to help make you a better person.

Rather than spoon-feed you pre-established beliefs, this book is designed to make you think, challenge your conceptions about the world, and develop a stronger personal system of beliefs without giving you any pre-packaged answers. Challenging personal beliefs is neither easy nor fun or pleasant, but it is a necessary step toward becoming an actualized human being.

The Framework

There are four steps to gaining ownership and intentionality over your personal identity and beliefs:

Determining your objective function

What is the purpose of my life?

Determining your ideological tree

How do I best fulfill that purpose?

Determining your personal identity

Who do I want to be?

Determining your public identity

How do I want others to think of me?

The four chapters of this guide walk you through a framework for exploring every nook and cranny of these questions in detail, but before we dive in, here is a broad overview of each step.

A Brief Introduction to Step 1: Determine Your Objective Function

Your objective function is a statement of whatever you are trying to maximize with/in your life. It is the metric by which you judge whether an action is a good or bad thing to undertake.

Typically, an objective function represents a desire to maximize whatever group of things you believe has intrinsic value. These things may involve personal happiness, pleasing God, reducing suffering in others, or any number of other things people believe have value.

Anything you do that serves your objective function is a “good” thing to do from your perspective and anything that hinders your objective function is a “bad” thing to do. Because of this, deciding your objective function is perhaps the single most important decision of your life. Your objective function sets the metric by which you judge all other decisions. Any person thinking with clarity should be referencing their objective function before any major decision.

We use the term “objective function” and not “purpose” in part because it allows for more flexibility in how you define what you want to achieve with your life. Specifically, while a purpose is commonly conceptualized as a singular goal, an objective function should be thought of as a weighted combination of the things you believe hold intrinsic value.

It requires more intellectual honesty to explore the concept of an objective function than it does to explore the concept of purpose. If asked about their purpose, a person may say they want to maximize their own happiness and that of others, whereas if asked their objective function they would have to say they value their own happiness five times as much as the happiness of others.

Should this person happen to live in a first-world country and follow through on their claimed beliefs, they would almost certainly benefit others more than 5X themselves by giving all their money to help children in the developing world. That they don’t means either their stated beliefs should be altered (i.e., they actually value their own happiness 1000X that of other people), alter their actions, or accept that they choose to live a systematically immoral life. Of course, if someone alters their objective function just to make it easier to maximize without making radical changes to their lifestyle, they will need to do some pretty serious self-reflection.

This chapter of the guide will help you determine your objective function by exploring what you believe has intrinsic value. To help you consider intrinsic values that may fit well with you, we will present you with the most common conclusions people make. Each intrinsic value we introduce is accompanied by thought experiments, arguments for and against, a discussion of tough implications, and important points of consideration.

A Brief Introduction to Step 2: Determine Your Ideological Tree

The complex decisions we have to make on a daily basis do not allow us to simply reference an objective function and reach a “correct answer.”

Two people who believe that pleasing God—or maximizing the ongoing viability of the human species—is the only thing of intrinsic value may decide on entirely different and contradictory paths of action in order to achieve that goal. This happens because these two people have different ideological trees.

Within this guide, we define an ideology as a hypothesis about how the world works that you utilize to maximize your objective function. For example, if your objective function is to relieve suffering in others, then one of your ideologies might be socialism because you hypothesize that socialism is an effective means of relieving suffering in others.

Ideologies exist within a branching hierarchy—an ideological tree—in which some ideologies are strictly subservient to others. An ideological tree may have Southern Baptism at its root with its political branch starting with representative democracy, followed by the Republican party, followed by a particular presidential candidate. The reason we think of ideology as a tree is that it helps us contextualize that some ideologies, e.g., “my belief that we should elect X candidate for president,” may be directly subservient to other beliefs, e.g., “I believe that Y political party is the best path forward for our country.” The further down the tree an ideology is for you, the more other ideologies rely on its correctness and therefore the more it is worth expending mental energy on ensuring it is correct.

In this framework, ideologies are hypotheses about how the world works and as hypotheses we should always be open to evidence that disproves them. You should always be aware of what type of evidence would be necessary for you to alter a particular path in your ideological tree. If you hypothesize that socialism is the best political system for relieving suffering, what standard of information is required for you to change your mind? Might that information already exist in the world? Have you tried to seek it out? Where might you find it?

Almost as important as our objective function is the “standard of evidence” we choose when building our ideological tree. One person may view a shift in the consensus of the scientific community as sufficient evidence that a chosen ideology is wrong while another may be willing to dismiss the consensus of the scientific community in the face of a personal experience.

This chapter will drill into the various standards of evidence a person may choose, the various advantages and disadvantages of each, and methods for maintaining an up-to-date ideological tree. We all know someone whose ideological tree ossified with age or through intellectual stagnation—someone who became resistant to new ideas or the concept that their present views of the world could be wrong. None of us wants to be that person. We all want to be able to change how we view the world in light of new information. This chapter will provide you with the framework you need to ensure your ideological tree never ossifies.

A Brief Introduction to Step 3: Determine Your Personal Identity

You get to choose who you are.

Who you decide to be should be an informed decision designed to maximize your objective function.

The human brain is not capable of referencing an objective function and ideological tree every time it determines whether to reach for a donut, how to respond to a question, or what to post to Facebook. Most of our lives are lived in a sort of autopilot. This autopilot is driven by the type of person we have allowed ourselves to become in response to the serendipitous events we have experienced in life.

It is tempting to say, “I am perfect the way I am now” or “I can’t change who I am,” but both of these statements are patently false. Who you are now is a Franken-identity pieced together by experiences you have been randomly subjected to throughout your life. A personal identity you consciously create is truer to you than a self-identity created by random events.

To build your personal identity, you must take stock of your personal beliefs, strengths, and weaknesses to determine how they can best be leveraged in pursuit of your objective function. You must consciously decide who you are and who you are not. To assist you in this endeavor, we discuss the psychology and neuroscience behind the way we understand ourselves, experience emotions, maintain long-term change in ourselves, and relate to our goals to help you build an autopilot for yourself that keeps your behavior in line with your goals.

A Brief Introduction to Step 4: Determine Your Public Identity

When you rebuild yourself to be the type of person you want to be, there are two versions of you that must be constructed:

The “you” that exists within your own mind
The “you” that exists in the minds of other people

The act of building yourself is akin to the act of building a house. A guide to building houses that focused only on interior design would look silly. Likewise, someone who paid to have a house built for them would be pretty upset if, upon their arrival, their architect explained to them that no work had been done on the outside of the house because “that’s not the part you see.”

You may be asking: “I want people to see me for who I really am. Why can’t I just show people my internal character?” The fact is, even if they could read your mind, it wouldn’t help them build a picture of who you are as a person.

Stop and think for a moment: if someone spent five hours yesterday from noon to 5:00pm reading your mind, would they have a good picture of who you really are? Probably not. Now consider how many people in the last six months have spent over five hours trying to get to know you without the ability to read your mind. Getting to know “who you really are” is a treat reserved for only your closest and longest friends who make up the vast minority of individuals you will ever interact with.

Asking why you can’t just force people to see you the way you see yourself is akin to the developers of a video game asking why they can’t just put the game’s code on the box, because that is what the game “really is” after all. If game developers just slapped source code on product boxes, most game box covers would look boring, overly complicated, and nearly identical.

This section explores the systems individuals use to process, store, and sort information about people they meet. Using this information, you will be guided through the process of building a public persona—the marketing box art of your chosen internal character—that harnesses these systems in order to help you achieve your objective function.

Always remember that everyone is the protagonist of their own story. This means that you, dear reader, are a supporting character in the eyes of every human being you will meet. In the story of your life, you are magnificent protagonist, but to play a meaningful role in others’ narratives, you are best suited if you paint yourself as a compelling supporting character. Writing yourself as a supporting character in your own narrative is depressingly belittling to your potential while attempting to cast yourself as a protagonist in the life of someone else is psychotically narcissistic.

In short, when building yourself, it is important to both build who you want to be in your own eyes and who you want to be in the eyes of others.

How Applied Pragmatic Thought Relates to Religion, Atheism, and Philosophers

Applied pragmatic thought is a non-denominational method for increasing the intentionality of one’s beliefs and life, regardless of whether these beliefs are atheistic or religious in origin.

This framework is, however, strictly opposed to using prefabricated “philosophical” belief sets as a crutch.

While you read this guide, you will feel a natural urge to avoid having to think. By default, whether we like to admit it or not, we tend to prefer being told what to believe or what arguments we should use to defend what we wish were true about the world. Nobody is exempt from this urge.

Anyone with access to an internet connection, a library, or memories of an introductory philosophy class can access a wide range of philosophers from both the recent and distant past who developed pre-packaged belief sets complete with fully prepared defenses to counter arguments and challenges. Building core beliefs about the world based on the arguments of philosophers is like trying to get in shape using liposuction and plastic surgery. You may look polished after the procedure, but you will have built no foundation. Having earned nothing for yourself, you will ultimately revert to your old habits.

If turning to pre-packaged philosophies is akin to getting liposuction, leveraging the framework presented in this guide is like signing up for a gym membership. Rather than artificially applying beliefs to you, we will act as your personal trainers and spotters, helping you to build and strengthen your own beliefs without doing the heavy lifting for you.

Along with a lack of personal mental effort and commitment, reliance on prepackaged beliefs carries with it the hazard of obscure vocabulary, which can slot you into potentially constraining categories, alienate you from others, and obscure your ability to truly understand what you are talking about.

For example, when trying to understand what you believe about the world, you may tumble down a Wikipedia hole and land on something like Epicureanism. At first glance, you may see Epicureanism as restrained version of an objective function focused on “maximizing personal positive emotions” and begin identifying as an Epicurean without realizing you are saying you identify with a worldview rather than just an objective function (while Epicureanism has an objective function it is a lot more than that, it is a pre-packaged worldview complete with a set of base ideologies). These prepackaged zero-thought worldviews are the microwavable dinners of identity.

Worse still is the way one can use their prepackaged buzzwords, concepts, and fallacies to create a sense of false superiority over people with whom you are communicating, which can ultimately prevent others from understanding your arguments. Ironically, obscure vocabulary may prevent you from appreciating that others’ viewpoints may be more sound and valid than your own, despite their lack of fancy vocabulary.

Chances are you have, on several occasions, witnessed someone using fancy or obscure terminology to try to win or end an argument without actually thinking about the issue at hand. Chances are these people have not been very effective at changing your views. In our never-ending quest to avoid reflecting on our position in the world, there is no greater armor preventing communication than obscure terminology.

Finally, if you have reached this part of the book and are disappointed to find we won’t be talking about Pragmatism, the philosophical movement of the late 1800s popularized by William James and John Dewey (or any of its modern manifestations, such as neo-classical pragmatism or analytical pragmatism), then please accept our sincerest apologies. This book is using the word “pragmatic” in the vernacular, which runs contrary to what most would consider to be an obscure, pedantic philosophical movement. (No offense to the philosophical movement; we are genuinely great admirers of it. Still, objectively speaking, most people would consider a lesser-known philosophical school of thought to be excessively academic and stuffy, which is the antithesis of the definition of the word pragmatic).

Avoiding fancy vocabulary is not easy. Even as we wrote this guide, we found ourselves relying on philosophical terms as a crutch and had to meticulously remove them. Do not fall into this trap.

Step 1: Define Your Objective Function

ob·jec·tive func·tion

noun: objective function

(in linear programming) the function that it is desired to maximize or minimize.

Our objective function is the thing we attempt to maximize or minimize in/with our lives. It is the thing we use when determining optimal actions to take. It is the measuring stick by which we judge the “correctness” of our actions and decisions.

To build your objective function, you must first define what you believe has intrinsic value, then organize these intrinsically valuable things relative to each other.

A function transforms a wide variety of inputs into an output in a systematic way. An objective function is a function designed to optimize for a certain objective. Having an objective function allows you to take in a wide variety of inputs and know what course of action you should take.

For example, you may decide you believe that both maximizing your own positive emotional state and spreading positive emotions to others has intrinsic value, but that your own emotional state is three times more valuable than the emotional states of others. By knowing that this is what you believe, you can take a set of inputs like: “I have a dollar, if I give this dollar to person X, I estimate there is an 80% probability they will gain ten times the happiness from this dollar than I could” and come to a confident conclusion about what course of action you should take: “therefore, given my objective function I should give this dollar to person X.”

An intrinsic value cannot be proven wrong in the same way an ideology can. Because an ideology (as we are defining it in this book) is a hypothesis about how to maximize an objective function, something could happen that falsifies that hypothesis. Objective functions, on the other hand, are judgment calls. Ultimately, no one can tell you that yours is “wrong.”

We understand the term “objective function” is not a simple English term people commonly use and that, in this sense, it violates our pledge to avoid special vocabulary. This is one of the only places in this guide in which we use an obscure term as opposed to something more mainstream. We would not do this unless we felt it were absolutely necessary. The mainstream term we would use, “purpose,” has a lot of baggage and preconceived notions attached to it, which muddle its place in our lives.

There are several problems with the term “purpose” that do not arise when we use the term “objective function”:

Purpose is often taken to be a single, discrete thing one is trying to achieve, which is unnecessarily limiting.
Purpose is taken to be something that is concretely “finishable.” Thus, there is often no winning in life when one has a purpose: “finishing” a purpose before dying indicates wasted potential and failing to “finish” a purpose before dying means failure.
Purpose is often used to refer to an ideology (e.g., to defend the American way of life) instead of a thing of intrinsic value (e.g., maximizing human liberty and self- determination).

The term “objective function” and our particular use of the term “ideology” will be the only two unique terms used in this guide.

Why Do I Need to Think Through an Objective Function?

You may be thinking “I have a set of beliefs that work for me. Why question them?” or “I just don’t care. This isn’t a question that is important to me.”

“What is your objective function?” is the single most important question in your life. Your answer to this question will be used to judge the fidelity of every decision you make. Whether an action or decision you make is “good” or “bad” from your perspective depends entirely on what you believe is intrinsically good or bad in the world.

Throughout history, there have been many times during which mainstream ethics promoted presently unthinkable actions such as slavery, recreational rape, and genocide.

You may think: “Sure, societies condoned unethical things in the past, but our modern society doesn’t do that anymore.”

Consider that someone in the slaveholding South would have said the exact same thing and 100% believed it. “We live in an age of enlightenment,” this person might proclaim, going on to discuss how unethical people were in the past and how they had risen above those barbaric practices. “In ancient Greece, terrible sins such as homosexuality were allowed,” they might argue, “but we do not allow such things in this modern day.”

Ethics does not move in only one direction as this example demonstrates. Rather than progress incrementally toward acceptance, social norms have wavered between periods of dehumanizing and accepting the LGBT community.

You cannot know if you are a modern version of a nineteenth century slave owner if you are not willing to look at your value system critically. It is tempting to assume that nothing in society’s modern morality is remotely equitable to slavery, but depending on your beliefs about what has intrinsic value, this is not necessarily true.

Many frameworks for understanding the world might view anything from abortion to the industrial slaughter of animals for consumption as horrendously unethical. It is entirely plausible that in a future society capable of synthetic meat production, our present industrial slaughter of animals will be seen as terrifyingly evil on a scale equal to any past atrocity in human history (especially if they don’t see a distinction between the emotional state of humans and animals). Whether we choose to eat meat today depends on our objective functions and how they relate to the lives of animals and plants. If you do not believe the life or experiences of a cow have inherent value, you can enjoy a hamburger with a clear conscience. However, if you do conclude a cow’s feelings have value, you may need to change your actions and lifestyle.

We wish there were more concise way to reason through objective functions while still giving an even shake to a broad range of perspectives.
If you find this section tedious, skip it—it is not indicative of the following three steps. Even if you find this type of thing interesting, consider skipping around to the parts that are most relevant to you.

The Uniqueness of Objective Functions to the Human Condition

Over time, people have found thousands of different ways to define how human consciousness is differentiated from the way animals interact with the world. We instinctively want to define what makes our conscious experience of the world unique. We would like to take this opportunity to throw our proverbial hat into the ring. The one thing a human can do that an animal cannot is choose its own objective function.

Let us consider a dog named Sparky. Sparky probably has a mental landscape in which he exists and in which he feels pain, pleasure, pride, or boredom. Sparky certainly creates hypotheses about how the world works while learning from those around him. Sparky can even make choices about how best to achieve what he wants. The one thing Sparky can’t do is choose his objective function. Like most animals, Sparky has had his objective function bred into him: he wants to eat, procreate, carry out his training (emotional conditioning), and—thanks to centuries of selective breeding—please and be of service to his human family. (We are by no means trying to trivialize this emotion in dogs. This emotional drive is likely more powerfully felt than the emotion humans call love, because stronger selective pressures have created it.)

Sparky has the capacity to think: “How do I maximize positive emotions?” but he cannot question whether he should want to maximize his positive emotions.

The ability to ask: “Should I try to optimize the objective function that is a combination of inbred traits and conditioning I have experienced, or should I attempt to optimize for something else?” and then ask: “Why should I try to optimize for that other thing?” is a uniquely human capability.

A human who chooses not to exercise their ability to choose what she wants from life is denying the single aspect of their consciousness that differentiates them from an animal.

A Note on Challenges to Objective Functions

Because we are firmly against pushing one belief system over another belief system, we make a point of trying to provide the most simple, compelling argument possible against all belief systems discussed. Whenever we explain why someone might support a specific objective function, we also attempt to create a strong argument against that objective function.

Often these arguments take the form of thought experiments: analogies or forced decisions meant to determine if you really believe what you think you believe. These thought experiments are typically tailored to the belief system of a person we expect might hold such an objective function (e.g., a challenge to an objective function that would likely only be held by atheists may include the presupposition that evolution is true and that emotional states are an emergent property of brain states, whereas an objective function that an evangelical Christian might hold will not include such assumptions in its discussion). For example, when challenging you to carefully consider an objective function oriented around maximizing personal good feelings, we may ask:

If you could live in a human-sized tube that would make you live twice as long as you would outside the tube and pump you full of good feelings that were more diverse and more enjoyable than any feeling you could experience outside the tube, would you choose to drop everything about your life this instant and commit to the tube for the rest of your life, despite the fact that you would lose all contact with friends and family and never leave the tube again?

This challenge forces you to ask yourself if there is not something else more important to you than this specific objective function. The challenge is not meant to question or insult the value of the objective function itself, nor is it meant to deride anyone who should choose it.

It is very important you do not try to “cheat” a thought experiment by arguing about the challenge’s details, because doing so enables you to avoid a difficult but necessary decision. By answering the question with a cheat answer such as, “No, I wouldn’t live in the happiness tube because it is a drug and I may get addicted to it,” or “I would get used to feeling positive emotions all the time and they would no longer feel good after a short period,” you are avoiding the substance of the question and not allowing yourself to be meaningfully challenged. The point of the question is to force you to reflect on whether or not you would actually accept perfect emotional optimization over all other things.

What Has Inherent Value?

An Overview of What People Choose to Maximize with their Objective Functions

To establish your objective function, you must make a judgment call about what does and does not have intrinsic value, as your values are what your objective function is meant to maximize.

There are five broad categories people fall into when determining what does or does not have intrinsic value:

Nothing has intrinsic value
Something has innate, intrinsic value
Something has intrinsic value, but they don’t know what
Religious tradition determines what has intrinsic value
Desired self-perception determines what has intrinsic value

Finally, we will review proclivities, things that you may want in your life even though you recognize they have no intrinsic value.

Nothing has Intrinsic Value

Many conclude that nothing has intrinsic value. The arguments in favor of this belief are so simplistic and apparent they do not warrant enumeration.

The core argument against this category of belief system is that if there is even the tiniest possibility that anything might have intrinsic value, it is best to go forward assuming that thing does have intrinsic value.

Consider the following thought experiment:

You have just survived a plane crash in the desert. You have no idea where you are or whether civilization is close by or entirely out of reach. You can see nothing on the horizon but sand. You know for an absolute fact that no search parties will come to save you (perhaps in this thought experiment there are laws against saving people from plane crashes or entering the desert you crashed in).[33] What is the most logical course of action if your goal is staying alive? Is it just to stay at the crash site, where you know you will die, or is it worth traveling in any random direction in the hope of finding something? If you choose to move, you are still likely to die, but there is also a probability—albeit a small one—that you will find water, food, or even a small camp, and will survive. What do you do: stay put and die, or leave the crash site to see what you might find?

In the above thought experiment it is only logical to stay with the plane if you are absolutely certain that doing so would not decrease your probability of surviving (assuming you are optimizing for survival, which to digest the above thought experiment with intellectual honesty, you must assume). Because we know that staying with the plane has a 0% probability of survival, it only is logical to stay with the plane if you are certain there is also a 0% probability of survival no matter which direction you might take. (A known 0% chance of survival no matter what you do is very different from a hypothesized 0% chance of survival.)

Similarly, it is only logical to live your life assuming nothing has intrinsic value if you are categorically certain nothing has intrinsic value. If you live life assuming nothing has intrinsic value, there is a 0% possibility your existence will have had any meaning or value. If, however, there is even a slight chance that something might have intrinsic value, no matter how slight that chance might be, that thing is worth pursuit.

There are four exceptions to the above argument:

An individual could offer some iteration of the “Pascal’s Mugging” counter argument, which we discuss below.
An individual could argue that the analogy is flawed, as even by living as if nothing has value an individual still might stumble into a meaningful life. While this is true, unless we have access to no meaningful information about what does or does not have value, the probability of living a life of value will always be higher when attempting to do so.

To hold this counter argument, you must believe that we have no way to infer what may have intrinsic value. A person making this argument would also have to hold that preventing suffering is just as likely to maximize intrinsic value as maximizing the number of things painted purple.

An individual could take exception to the plane analogy’s assumption that the stranded individual’s goal should be survival, which, in the analogy, equates to a life of value. In essence, such a person claims that someone who knew what was necessary to live a meaningful existence may discard said information and instead choose to live a meaningless existence. We have trouble believing someone would make this argument as anything other than a thought experiment.
An individual could argue that a life which might have intrinsic value is not the same as a life that does have intrinsic value. To this, we would reply that a life with a 1% probability of having intrinsic value still has infinitely more intrinsic value than a life we are certain lacks intrinsic value. If one is attempting to live a meaningful existence, it is worth it to do whatever you think has the highest probability of making your life meaningful, even if that probability is very low.

In short, to hold the belief that nothing has intrinsic value, it is not enough to think it is very likely that nothing has intrinsic value. You have concluded with certainty, through a logical thought process, that nothing has intrinsic value.

People who choose to believe they are certain nothing has intrinsic value typically choose one of the following objective functions:

Maximizing personal good feelings: If nothing matters, you might as well default to what your biology tells you to do (which is, to feel good).
Moving society forward: If you do not feel good about being someone who only seeks pleasure, you might instead choose to move society forward primarily to cultivate a sense of superiority over others who you see as pursuing more animalistic instincts.
Serving one’s role in society: You may, upon determining that nothing has intrinsic value, default to maximizing non-intrinsic values such as your role in society or family traditions—be it serving in the military, being part of the family business, or just being the best possible elementary school traffic cop you can be.

Pascal’s Mugging

A mugger steps out in front of you and tells you that if you don’t send him all your money, he will open a dimensional portal and kill a random person. Push back and he then threatens to kill a hundred people, then a thousand, then a million. By the above logic, at some point even the slight possibility he follows through should logically become enough to motivate you to give him your money because that slight probability is being multiplied by all the potential lives lost. Common sense would suggest that line of reasoning is ridiculous . . . or at least that is how the Pascal’s Mugging thought experiment goes.

While this thought experiment is meant to show the flaw in utility maximization, it kind of sucks for three reasons:

Common sense suggests the above argument is ridiculous because it recognizes that raising the number of people the mugger threatens to kill does not actually increase the odds that he will kill more people. If a kid tells you they might live five hundred years if you eat a magical marshmallow while if you don’t, you will live a billion years, you recognize that there is no method of action for that statement to have an effect on reality—the same should be true with Pascal’s Mugging.
If Pascal’s Mugging plays out in a scenario were raising the claimed small-probability threat really does increase the number of people who might be hurt, the fact that common sense says the logical answer is wrong does not make it wrong. Common sense is merely a gut instinct we evolved to help us in situations that frequently occurred in our ancestral setting and impacted the number of surviving children our ancestors had. There are some types of questions that common sense will consistently get wrong—questions that deal with scenarios we never would have experienced in an evolutionary context. Common sense flounders when contending with low-probability, high-impact events.
The Pascal’s Mugging scenario assumes the asset being given up has some value to the person being mugged. A person who believes that nothing has intrinsic value does not believe they are giving up anything by choosing to live their life in a specific way.

Considerations if you decide you believe nothing has intrinsic value

Even if you decide nothing has intrinsic value, you must still define an objective function for yourself. Deciding that “nothing matters” doesn’t absolve you from the logical imperative to be intentional in whatever you do decide to focus on in life and how you pursue it.

Something Has Innate Intrinsic Value

In this section, we will discuss intrinsic values that may exist as part of an individual’s objective function independent of religious traditions.

While these values are independent from religious traditions, they are not exclusively atheist. For example, a Christian may think human suffering is intrinsically bad, independent of what his or her religious tradition says (in fact, the classic paradox, which asks: “How does suffering exist in a world with a good God?” presumes that even religious individuals believe suffering is inherently of negative value independent of religious tradition).

How does something become imbued with intrinsic value?

Before we can delve into various things an individual may believe have intrinsic value, we will take a quick detour to discuss the two core ways a thing may be imbued with intrinsic value. We can conclude something has either absolute intrinsic value or relative intrinsic value.

Absolute Intrinsic Value

Something of absolute intrinsic value is something that has value regardless of the perspective of the entity deciding whether it has value (in this case that entity is you). Something of absolute intrinsic value has value somehow imbued into its very nature. This is the way we normally think about the concept of intrinsic value. The classic example of something with absolute intrinsic value would be a deity (God, Allah, Yahweh, etc.).

Relative Intrinsic Value

Something with relative intrinsic value gains value through the nature of its relationship to the entity deciding whether it has value (in this case, that entity is you).

Most relative intrinsic value arguments are versions of the same base argument.

You must have value from your own perspective
Therefore, there is intrinsic value in maximizing good for yourself.

While this may seem like a simple argument, it can manifest itself in a plethora of ways depending on how you define “yourself” and “good.”

By extending the definition of yourself or by focusing on aspects of yourself, you can come to wildly different conclusions about what has intrinsic value. For example, at its broadest interpretation, you may say:

I am an entity made of stuff.
Therefore, from my perspective, things made of stuff have value when contrasted with things that do not exist.
Therefore, something that caused the end of stuff (the universe) would be an intrinsically negative event from my perspective and from the perspective of all other entities made of stuff.

While the relative intrinsic value argument may seem strong, it can be discounted out of hand if you categorically reject the argument that an entity has intrinsic value from its own perspective (i.e., that you have intrinsic value from the perspective of yourself).

Positive Personal Emotions

Maximizing positive personal emotions is most individuals’ “default” intrinsic value. To some extent, the pursuit of happiness is an aspect of almost everyone’s objective function, whether or not one sees it as having objective value.

Humans evolved[34] emotions as a tool for controlling behavior—thus emotions are quite powerful. You feel something as a positive emotion (whether it be love, lust, or a sense of accomplishment from a job well done) because humans who experienced these emotions in the past had a higher probability of surviving long enough to reproduce and raise children who in turn survived and reproduced. Whether they be love, envy, or the joy from a job well done, all emotions exist for this one reason.

At their core, emotions are neurological states. They exist as a specific configuration of neural pathways and levels of neurotransmitters. We even currently have the technology to directly induce complicated emotions through chemicals or direct stimulation of parts of the brain (See: transcranial magnetic stimulation, a.k.a. TMS).

These two facts alone are enough to convince many that positive feelings are too trivial to have intrinsic value. The fact that emotions are mechanical, chemically induced states meant to help us pass on our genes certainly makes it difficult to believe that any specific individual’s positive emotional states are of absolute intrinsic value.

That said, it is not incredibly difficult to conclude that from a relative perspective, positive feelings have inherent value. If we are our minds and our minds perceive certain states as being superior to others, those states may have intrinsic value to us.

There is a tendency among those who by default conclude that personal positive emotions have intrinsic value to rank some emotions as having more intrinsic value than others. Specifically, they elevate emotions that require significant effort to achieve and/or lead us to become better members of society, such as love and the satisfaction we get from accomplishing difficult tasks (as opposed to positive emotions we get from eating, sex, sleeping in, etc.).

For individuals who feel this way, it is useful to determine whether it is the emotions themselves that have value, whether true value lies in the struggle to achieve these emotions, or whether the value of these emotions lies in beneficial results for society. This can be achieved by returning to the thought experiment we engaged earlier:

You are given the option to spend the rest of your life in a tube that enables you to live twice as long as you would outside of the tube. The tube pumps your brain full of the chemicals necessary to constantly feel whatever emotional state it is that you value the most (or whatever series of emotions you think has the most value in exactly the amounts you deem as having the most value). This tube will better serve an objective function to maximize positive feelings than any life you could live independently. Will you choose to live in the tube, even though it means foregoing normal life and leaving everyone you have known? (The tube would be able to maximize the feelings you got from the interactions you used to have with these individuals.)

It is easy to dodge the intent of this question by claiming that the emotions wouldn’t feel so good over time, or the emotions wouldn’t be “real” and thus do not count. Do not do this. These sorts of cheating answers rob you of a learning experience that helps you understand what you really believe about the world. The intention of this thought experiment is to determine whether positive personal emotions really are what you want to maximize with your life, or if there is something that matters more (not to determine whether you actually want to live in a tube).

If you have trouble with the above scenario and do not understand why, ask yourself: If you had a button that would prevent you from ever feeling a negative feeling again, would you press it? If your reaction is “no,” because negative feelings are useful for some reason, focus on whatever that reason is. Does this reason have a deeper intrinsic value to it than the experience of positive personal emotions? If you feel this reason is more important to you than not ever having to feel a negative emotion again, then you are tacitly admitting to yourself there is something more valuable to you than your emotional state. Why is it more important?

You may try to dodge the intent of the question with some platitude about how negative emotions make positive emotions sweeter. However, such an assertion is really just saying that negative emotions help one more effectively maximize the experience of positive emotions, in which case, we ask you to attempt the same thought experiment with the concession that somehow this button will amplify the experience of positive emotions to offset this effect.

Considerations if you decide you believe that positive personal emotions have intrinsic value

Even if you decide to dedicate your life to maximizing positive personal emotions, allowing your emotions to drag you around like a dog on a leash is a terrible method for maximizing your positive emotions.

Those seeking to maximize a positive state must remain aware that chasing elevated emotional states in the moment will almost always lead to a lower overall emotional state in the long run. Sometimes this is obvious. Were you to sit around all day eating Doritos, drinking Mountain Dew, and indulging in your hobby, you may feel great in the short run, but after a few days of this you would feel gross and awful. This is a feeling anyone who has been unemployed or taken a long vacation knows all too well: You think having all the free time in the world to do something you enjoy in the moment will feel great, but once you have that time, that happiness fades and the activity becomes routine.

Much of the lost luster of short-term pleasures is due to overlay states. These states are discussed in chapter three, which explores ways to maximize desired emotional states. Many of the emotional states we chase are also heavily romanticized by mainstream culture (hence our interest in them) and pursuing them leads to less satisfaction than one would expect based on the hype.

Let us examine the worst offender here—love—to demonstrate this point. First, we should acknowledge that (if you assume a scientific perspective) love evolved to facilitate long-term pair bonding and increase the likelihood that an individual will protect and raise viable children. In other words, people in the past who felt love were more likely to have kids who survived long enough to reproduce themselves. Because of this, your body will begin to feel love for anyone that your body, on an animalistic level, believes has the potential to become your long-term partner.

Your body is not the best matchmaker. It can even be tricked into falling in love. For example, studies conducted by Author Aran demonstrated a simple experimental task could be used to cause two individuals to fall in love in under an hour (this task was so effective that some of Author’s test subjects, who had never met before the experiment, eventually married).

If you want to maximize the amount of love you will feel in your life, allowing a feeling of love to guide your choices about a lifelong partner is a poor strategy. In a 2012 study, happiness and love ratings after ten years of marriage were equal to those of arranged marriages; however, divorce rates in love marriages are 40-50% while divorce rates in arranged marriages are 4-6%. When you adjust for survivorship bias, you are more likely to maximize the love you feel in your life by letting someone else—who is not operating under the influence of love—choose who you marry. In an ideal scenario, you will decide for yourself who you marry without allowing the decision to be influenced by love. Just be aware that evidence indicates you have a higher probability of living a life with more love in it if you do not allow love to influence major life decisions, such as who you choose to marry. (If you enjoy this topic, please check out the sequel to this book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships—it digs into it a lot deeper.)

Finally, we have a lot of control over our emotional states. If you genuinely believe that positive emotions have inherent value in your life, then you have a moral imperative to not allow yourself to feel sad when it is within your control (i.e., pretty much any time you are not clinically depressed, in which case it would then be your moral imperative to seek clinical treatment). This means that whenever you throw yourself a personal pity party, it is your moral obligation to catch yourself and find a way to be happy about your situation. (Later in the book we explore data demonstrating the amount of emotional control people really have along with methods for improving emotional control.)

Deciding that your objective function is to maximize your emotional state is not the same as deciding that your objective function is to take the path of least resistance in life—the path your brain will try to push you towards. Maximizing an emotional state takes a lot of work and willpower. Nevertheless, by combining cold logic and repeated effort with willpower, it is remarkably possible to live a life of near constant bliss, assuming this is something you decide has inherent value. This topic will be covered in detail within Chapter 3.

Note: We do not include the path of least resistance in our lists of potential objective functions. The only argument we could think to justify it is that consciously experiencing life is inherently negative and nothing has positive value, hence one should do everything in one’s power to consciously experience as little of life as possible. We don’t think anyone genuinely holds that belief.

Distributed Positive Emotions

When asked in public what has intrinsic value, many people reflexively refer to distributed positive emotions—that is, making as many people happy (or content, satisfied, not in pain, etc.) as possible.

A claim that distributed positive emotional experiences have inherent value is built on the premise that a positive emotional state in a human has intrinsic value and thus there is intrinsic value in distributing positive emotions. Because of this, any criticism that may be levied against someone believing personal positive emotions are of intrinsic value can also be levied at an individual who believes distributing positive emotional states has value. This includes the accusation that positive emotional states only encourage organisms to survive and breed and that ultimately a positive emotional state is no more than a neurochemical slurry (and not something of intrinsic value).

Typically, the reason someone ends up believing that distributive positive emotions have intrinsic value is they ascribe absolute value to positive emotional states, leaving their own mental state in a non-privileged position (e.g., because they believe something about positive emotional states imbues them with intrinsic value, they must believe that positive emotions experienced by others are as valuable as positive emotions in themselves). However, an absolute perspective on positive emotions having intrinsic value forces one to decide what categories of entities’ positive emotional states have intrinsic value and justify the lines one draws. Deciding whether the emotional states of cows, dogs, humans, the severely mentally disabled, aliens, artificially intelligent machines, etc., have inherent value is not as easy as it may at first seem.

Does a cow’s positive emotional state have the same value as that of a human? Does a worm having its reward pathways activated have the same value as a cow being in a state of positive emotion? If you ascribe a cow or a worm’s positive emotional state as having a lower value than that of a human, how do you justify this? If you justify it by saying that positive emotions scale in value based on the cognitive capacity of the entity experiencing the emotion, then you must believe that babies and disabled humans born with a lower cognitive capacity are of lower priority when one distributes positive emotional states.

One common way people answer this line of questioning is by claiming that there is a threshold of cognitive capacity and once an entity is over that threshold, it has equal value to all other entities above that threshold. In other words, once an animal is above a certain level of intelligence, it has equal rights to positive emotions as all other animals above that threshold of intelligence. If you hold this position, where do you place this intelligence threshold and why do you place it there?

Is the intelligence threshold set at the lowest limit of human cognitive capacity? If so, then you would believe some non-human apes have exactly equal value to their emotional states as humans, as the smartest non-human apes are certainly at an intelligence range higher than that of the most cognitively impaired adult humans. Also, it is suspiciously convenient that the cut off would be at the lower levels of your own species intelligence levels. Are you certain you are not allowing modern notions of political correctness to taint your perceptions of what has intrinsic value?

If you accept the above argument and conclude that the happiness of a non-human ape is of the exact same value as the happiness of a human, given that it is cheaper to maintain the happiness of a chimpanzee, is it not more cost and resource effective to keep large regions dedicated to chimpanzee farms in which they are kept as happy as possible? Such farms would be more efficient than programs to help needy humans, as ten chimpanzees can be given a great life at the cost of giving one human an average one.

However, if you don’t use a threshold after which all things happiness have equal value, but instead use a sliding scale tied to some variable with which things with more of variable X have more intrinsic value when experiencing happiness (i.e., you hold that the value of an animal or person’s emotional state scales based on something like its level of intelligence, cognitive capacity, or capacity for experiencing emotions), then consider the following thought experiment:

Would the happiness of aliens who were significantly smarter than humans (or had more of whatever X variable is) be of higher value than the happiness of humans? If a massively more intelligent species came to earth, would it be within their right to treat the human population in the same way we regard indigenous species when cutting down their habitat to grow more food in order to increase human happiness? If humans went to war with this alien species because they were exterminating us, would it not be your moral obligation to fight for the aliens?

An alternative thought experiment could go:

If you could build a super intelligent AI and design it to experience nothing but extremely high levels of positive emotions, would that satisfy your objective function?

The above problems can be escaped by taking a relative—rather than absolute—perspective when making an argument for the value of positive emotions. Specifically, an individual would either argue that entities like themselves have intrinsic value from their perspective or that they are part of a larger entity defined as the human race. This allows an individual to easily say that because the aliens are different from them, they care less about their positive emotional states and that the emotional states of animals that are more closely related to them are more valuable than those of species that are further removed. An individual holding this perspective likely also believes that their family’s happiness is of higher value than individuals who are not as closely related to them.

A thought experiment that can be used to test whether you believe that distributed positive emotional states have value from a relative perspective might be:

If you could press a button that put all humans (or whatever group you consider worthy of positive emotions) into tubes that would double their lifespans and ensure they only felt happy emotions until they died, would you press that button?

If you do not press the button, is it because you believe that others may not want to live life in a happiness tube? Ultimately, you may conclude that self-determination is something with greater intrinsic value than distributive happiness.

Consider this question from a slightly different angle: If someone does not want to feel a positive emotional state, is there value in forcing one upon them? If you truly believe that distributive positive emotional states have inherent value, it should not matter what others want.

One must also ask: Does the positive mental state of an entity that you believe is immoral hold value equal to the positive mental state of a person you deem to be moral or morally neutral? For example, does the happiness of a serial killer on death row have value equal to that of an innocent, starving child in Africa? You could argue that entities that take happiness from others are less deserving of happiness themselves, but why would that be the case? Would it not be better to just kill any entity that took happiness from others instead of bothering to deny it happiness?

This brings us to our final question: Per your logic, is it best to kill an entity that will feel no positive emotions for the rest of its existence? What if any positive emotions felt by this entity will be vastly outweighed by negative emotions? What if this entity will feel mostly positive emotions, but cause so much sadness to others that it has a net negative effect on the world’s happiness?

Considerations if you decide you believe that distributive positive emotions have intrinsic value

If you decide that distributed positive emotions have inherent value, as discussed above, you will need to decide whose happiness matters.

To summarize the most common choices are:

All entities that meet a certain threshold should be distributed equal happiness.
Entities with more of X trait should be distributed more happiness in proportion to how much of X trait they exhibit (where X is usually intelligence or consciousness).
Entities more closely related to you should be distributed happiness based on how “related” to you they are (the metric of “related” is flexible; it could signify individuals who think like you or individuals genetically related to you).

It can seem fussy to focus as much as we do on questions regarding whose emotional experiences matter and why (e.g., whether the experience of animals matters). However, these questions have monumental real-world implications. After formulating your position on the question, “when does the emotional state of others matter and why?” we would ask you to focus on the implications of your answer to the wellbeing of human babies. Does your answer suggest that it is worse for a human baby to feel pain than a pig? Is it worse for a human baby to feel pain than a human adult? Based on your explanation when does a human feeling pain first matter in their development (e.g., at what stage does a fetus’ emotional state matter and why)?

As you can see, if you decide positive emotional states have value, it is crucial to clearly identify what entities’ happiness matters and why. Based on how you answer such questions, you may find yourself living as the client of a government committing genocide on an unprecedented level (either to animals or fetuses) and knowing whether you are living under such a government is not a trivial question.

Limiting Extreme Negative Emotions

You may choose to dismiss the arguments against maximizing positive emotions by claiming that you are striving for a more restrained state of happiness. This involves arguing that while maximizing positive emotional states may lack intrinsic value, you are at least certain there is something intrinsically bad about suffering (e.g., a child starving to death), and therefore there is intrinsic value in preventing it.

If you feel inclined to agree with this perspective, then all the arguments and challenges above should be considered, but in a restrained state (i.e., pleasantness pods instead of happiness tubes).

The following thought experiment can help define your stance on this belief:

If suffering is of intrinsic negative value, is it not best to sterilize the populations of countries with high levels of suffering? If you had a button that would sterilize the entire population of the three countries with the most suffering, would you push that button? Pushing this button would certainly drastically decrease future suffering in that region (in terms of the number of people suffering), so if you choose not to push it, you will guarantee the suffering for hundreds of thousands of people. What if the button did more? Would you push the button if it painlessly killed the entire population of the three countries with the most suffering? Remember: By doing this, you would eliminate more suffering from the world in a second than you could in an entire normal lifetime.

Do not attempt to dodge the question to avoid making a choice. You either get to push the button or not push the button with the understanding that any unhappiness caused by your pushing the button will be less than the unhappiness experienced if you don’t. In this scenario, helping them in any other way is not a choice available to you.

If you cannot bring yourself to push the button, is it because you see more value in having a human being be alive and in great pain than not alive at all? In this case, should you not optimize for the number of people (or animals if you value their suffering) you can have living in a region regardless of the suffering that causes? (i.e., If you believe that something being alive yet in suffering has more value than something not being alive, then your objective function would be to maximize the size of the population not to minimize suffering.)

Alternatively, you may not be able to push the button because you see self-determination as more valuable than an absence of suffering, in which case your objective function should be about the maximization of self-determination rather than the reduction of human suffering (as you view it as a strictly superior intrinsic value).

Considerations if you decide you believe that limiting extreme negative emotions has intrinsic value

Whether you believe suffering has intrinsic negative value or general positive emotions have intrinsic positive value, it is important to consider whether you ascribe equal value to the happiness of an individual alive today and the happiness of an individual in the future. This decision is crucial as it will influence the ideology you adopt (remember, in this book ideologies are defined as hypotheses on how to maximize your objective function).

For example, if the happiness of people yet to be born is of equal value to the happiness of people alive today, your efforts are almost always going to be better spent advancing technology than helping individuals who are suffering today. Better technology helps the potentially infinite stream of humans yet to be born, whereas any action to help someone today will likely only help one individual or a comparatively small population.

A question that can help ferret out if you really believe this is to ask yourself:

If you knew that humans would exist for at least another few millennia at current (or greater) population levels, would you push a button that would cause 50% of the world’s population to live in chattel slavery for the rest of their lives if it decreased the number of future generations that live in extreme suffering by 10% each generation going forward?

One question we focused on in this section was: “Is it better for a person to live a life of suffering or not live at all?” A related question worth thinking through is: “Why does it matter if someone dies?”

If someone dies without feeling any pain, why is that a bad thing? Is it worse to kill someone painlessly or to torture someone for decades? What if, instead of decades, you torture someone for half an hour? The answers to questions like this greatly affect your position on fixing the world’s greatest problems, such as poverty and hunger.

Freedom / Liberty / Self Determination

People who believe freedom has inherent value hold the ability of a conscious entity to do “what it wants” above all else.

Many people arrive at freedom as the thing of highest intrinsic value after realizing they cannot completely follow-through with one of the hard questions associated with another value, which would make it their moral imperative to impose this other value system on others against their will (like forcing happiness on other people).

The argument for self-determination mirrors the argument for general positive emotions except it makes the concession that general emotional states (such as happiness) either do not matter or matter less than one’s ability to freely act on one’s emotional state at any given time.

Anyone choosing to work freedom into their objective function will have to draw some careful boundaries before proceeding. What is “freedom,” anyway?

Consider the life of an Emirati living in the UAE. He has no fear of abject poverty given the generous government welfare system, but he can’t watch porn, drink alcohol, or say whatever he wants in public (we are obviously oversimplifying the laws of the country for the sake of making an argument). Is this Emirati more free than a man living in the United States, who can watch porn, drink alcohol, and say what he wants, but is restrained by the bounds of poverty?

What aspects of freedom have intrinsic value?

Why do those aspects have intrinsic value?

If your answer is ever another intrinsic value (e.g., “The fact that freedom makes people happier gives it intrinsic value”), then freedom is not of intrinsic value to you. In such cases, freedom is instead a hypothesis about maximizing something else of intrinsic value.

To test your belief that freedom has intrinsic value, ask yourself:

If you could press a button that would make the world’s population 15% less happy but 10% more free (by whatever metric you define freedom) would you?

If you find yourself arguing that doing so would rob people of the ability to make the decision themselves, you reveal that you are not actually driven by a fundamental belief in freedom (as this button would unquestionably make people freer), but rather a fundamental distaste for making decisions that affect other people.

Considerations if you decide you believe that freedom has inherent value

If you conclude freedom has intrinsic value, you will need to think carefully about your hypothesis in order to identify how best to achieve it. There are wildly different political ideologies regarding freedom that all claim that their method maximizes it, and that all other ideologies make the situation worse. It is specifically meaningful to consider questions of how much wealth an individual needs to achieve meaningful freedom and whether more powerful or less powerful governing entities are better at ensuring freedom.

Immortality / Continued Existence

There is an innate human desire not to die. From an evolutionary perspective, this is not surprising; humans that didn’t have this drive would have died at much higher frequencies. Given how ingrained not wanting to die is into our subconscious, it is also not surprising that so many people conclude that some form of continuing their own existence has intrinsic value.

The argument used to come to this conclusion is almost always a relative argument and typically goes something like: “From my perspective, I have intrinsic value, thus creating more of myself in the future is a thing of intrinsic value.”

This intrinsic value is unique in the vast number of contradictory forms in which it might manifest. A good thought experiment for beginning to explore this is the Ship of Theseus:

Theseus sails his ship around the Aegean Sea for many years and during his journey replaces any old planks that might be starting to rot or show signs of damage. After many months of travel, Theseus has replaced so many planks of his ship that none of the original planks remain. Is this still the same ship?

What if, during the voyage, someone had been following Theseus’ ship and gathering the old boards as they were discarded? What if this person rebuilt a ship that looked exactly like the Theseus’ original ship, using the boards from the original ship? Which of the two ships is the real ship?

Consider that if you compare yourself today with yourself at the age of seven, you likely have almost none of the same cells, are made up of entirely different matter, and hold almost none of the same ideas. How you think about this thought experiment has implications on what “you” and “continued existence” mean to you.

We will take this opportunity to briefly discuss some of the ways people interpret themselves:

You are your consciousness over time
You are your body
You are the current snapshot of your consciousness
You are the story other people use to conceptualize you

You are your consciousness through time

In this interpretation, you are your conscious mind and seek to prolong your own conscious life as long as possible—either by downloading yourself into a computer, preserving your own body as long as possible, or freezing your brain in the hopes of someday resurrecting it. While these may sound like far-fetched ideas, they are common amongst rationalist and human+ communities.

The core issue faced by these ideologies is how much of “you” is even maintained in your consciousness over time. Given how radically we will change our beliefs throughout our lives, can we confidently assert that we, today, will be closer to whatever we become four hundred years from now than our grandchildren?

Is it really so bad that you get to remix your genetics with any individual you choose, then give the new version of yourself whatever childhood you want, thereby granting the new-and-improved “you” an opportunity to reinterpret reality with all of your guidance but none of your already-ingrained biases and flaws?

Consider the following thought experiment:

Today you are given the option to live forever and given a button that will make you feel whatever emotional state you want whenever you want, but you must get in a luxurious spaceship that will be shot into empty space with no hope of finding anything. Would you take this deal?

If you would not take this deal, why not?

Is it that you want to be able to interact with the world as an entity living as long as you can? Is it that you want to make some sort of impact on the world? If this is the case, are your resources really being optimally spent on living longer?

You are your body

In this case, “you” are defined as a bundle of genes (and not individual cells, as obviously your body itself is regularly recycled on a cellular level). To maximize your existence, you must strive to maximize the prevalence of your genetic material in the future. The core challenges to this come from the question: Is the conscious entity reading this book and making these decisions, really your body (that bundle of genes), or is your conscience not beholden to your body?

If your conscious is not beholden to your body, it makes more sense to see yourself as your ideas rather than your genetics. A tough question to ask if you believe the “you are your body” version is whether you would kill yourself today if it allowed you to spread 5% of your genetic material to everyone born in the next generation.

You are the current snapshot of your conscious mind

In this interpretation, you see yourself as a bundle of ideas trying to spread. In this case, you are the current state of your consciousness and what it contains, and the more you spread the ideas your consciousness contains, the closer you get to immortality.

You may strive for this by convincing people of what you believe on an individual basis or by trying to create great works of art that move other people to see the world more like you do.

The core problem with this intrinsic value is it makes you resistant to new ideas. After all, if “you” are your current set of beliefs about the world and it is these beliefs you want to spread, you must also believe that the destruction or replacement of any of those beliefs involves some form of death, as by letting go of some ideas and accepting new ones, “you” will become less “you.”

The hard question for this belief system is:

If, by pressing a button that would kill your body painfully and immediately, you could transfer 5% of what you believe about the world to every human alive, would you press that button?

You are the story others use to contextualize you within their lives

Within the formative days of Western culture, one of the most valuable things an individual could strive for was “kleos,” which is basically glory as remembered in stories. Many still hold a similar belief: That the truest form of immortality is to have the story others tell about you last forever. This belief makes sense if you conceptualize the “self” not from an individual perspective, but from the perspective of others. This version holds that so long as the idea of us plays a role in the stories people tell, retell, and hold in their memories, we never really die.

From its earliest days, this belief was plagued with the obvious question: “Does it matter if you are remembered for having a positive or negative impact?” Consider individuals like Herostratus, a Greek arsonist who destroyed one of the Seven Wonders of the World just to preserve his name in the annals of history.

Even if you could be remembered in a favorable manner, is that enough? The hard question to ask yourself is:

Would you sacrifice your life for something that had near zero real impact on history, but left you remembered in a positive light for the next 500 years? (The charge of the light brigade for instance.)

Your Purpose

Some individuals believe that any entity acting out its purpose has objective value. With purpose being defined as what something was created to do.

An excellent demonstration of this concept is in the TV show Rick and Morty in which Rick, a mad scientist and inventor, is sitting at a dining table with his family and a robot he made to pass the butter.

Butter-passing robot: “What is my purpose?”

Rick: “You pass butter.”

Butter-passing robot: (looking horrified down at its hands) “Oh my God.”

Rick: “Yeah, welcome to the club.”

Depending on how you contextualize what you are, your purpose may be so blindingly obvious and so simplistic that it is almost impossible to see as a thing of intrinsic value.

For example, if you are your body, your purpose is to procreate and maximize the spread of your genetic material. Your body and brain in a very real way exist for the purpose of spreading your genetic material within this worldview. Alternatively, if you are your current bundle of beliefs about the world and you think that a belief’s purpose is to be spread, then spreading your beliefs is your purpose.

However, if you contextualize yourself as your mind or “mental substrate”—as opposed to the ideas your mind contains—you may conclude that your purpose as an entity is to test various ideas against each other.

It appears that a major evolutionary advantage in the human species is our ability to:

Make up various mental models or receive them from others (e.g., technology, lessons, or traditions passed down from generation to generation)
Test different mental models against each other
Discard faulty mental models without having to die

In other words, for spiders to “learn” how to spin better webs, the spiders that spin webs poorly must die, and the ones that make better webs will survive, reproduce, and thereby pass their genes. For a human to learn how to build a better house, he only needs to test various ideas against each other about how he may go about building a house and discard the inferior ideas. Our mental landscapes exist to allow ideas to compete.

If we view ourselves as our mental landscapes rather than our bodies or ideas, our “purpose” may be to optimize our minds to be the best possible battleground where ideas are tested and only the best survive.

If you contextualize yourself as your mind / mental substrate, ask yourself:

If you fulfill your purpose perfectly, but are neither remembered nor liked upon your death, have you lived a good life?

Considerations if you decide you believe your purpose has intrinsic value

While success metrics for someone who believes they are their body and their purpose is to spread their genes is fairly straightforward, it is harder to pin down exactly what “a good mental substrate for ideas” does on a day-to-day basis. If you seek to maximize the extent to which your mind weighs new ideas against each other and ensures the fittest ideas win, what should your long-term goals be? Is it important that you share those ideas with others? Could you move effectively towards your personal objective function by striving to ensure that other minds are working and processing ideas effectively, or must your mind process everything on its own to get “credit”?

To Have an Impact on History

When someone asks you on your deathbed what your life amounted to, there is an innate pull to want to be able to answer that your life mattered—that regardless of whether history remembers you, it mattered that you were born and existed.

From a logical perspective, this inclination comes from the assumption that an entity’s value comes from how much it interacts with the flow of history and that an entity that does not interact with the flow of history does not matter. The hard question to ask oneself to determine if one really believes this is:

If it is your interaction with history that imbues you with intrinsic value, would you sacrifice your life and the lives of all your relatives today—even if no one remembered you existed—so long as doing so guaranteed that you made a positive, lasting, novel impact on world history?

If you are not willing to make such a sacrifice and instead believe it is how history remembers you that matters, it is likely you are more inclined towards the objective function focused around attempting to obtain a type of immortality.

Considerations if you decide you believe that having an impact on world history has intrinsic value

Most who hold this intrinsic value believe that for it to be fulfilled, the impact one has on the world must be either positive or novel. They often also (incorrectly) conclude that the easier of those two features be ensuring their impact is novel. It is surprisingly difficult to leave a novel impact on world history.

There are few innovations one can develop, or feats one can achieve, that will not otherwise be achieved by someone else within a 50-year span. For example, most politicians outside of maybe a handful of world leaders are only surfing waves of sentiment. If these politicians had not become the public figures representing a particular zeitgeist to the world, approximately equal people would have taken their places.

This is even more difficult when you consider that most figures in world history that have had a novel impact have had a negative impact. It is much easier to be radically wrong than it is to be radically right.

It is therefore worth considering whether it matters if your influence on history is novel. If novelty matters, what can you achieve in your life that is novel? What can you do that will otherwise not be done this century?

Fairness/Equality

Many social primates have an instinctive inclination towards fairness. In one particularly vivid demonstration of this, scientists “paid” a Capuchin monkey to perform a task for cucumbers. The monkey was perfectly happy with its payment until it was exposed to another Capuchin who he saw was getting grapes for performing the same task. Upon seeing his colleague get better pay for equal work, this first monkey becomes clearly enraged.

Some people go so far as positing that our inclination towards fairness is more than a lower-order emotional pathway like lust and believe it to be imbued with intrinsic value, the typical argument being that if we feel a universal inclination toward fairness, it must have intrinsic value. While fairness is a relatively rare intrinsic value for someone to hold (typically, individuals only see fairness as an ideology for achieving distributed positive emotions), it is highly valued in modern Western society due to its utility in maintaining social order and its ability to signal virtue through social media platforms (virtue signaling—that is, showing off how virtuous one is—about fairness is uniquely unlikely to carry a social cost, while most other forms of virtue signaling can. Thus, fairness is used more often in virtue signaling due to its low social cost, which in turn increases its prevalence as a value within our culture).

If you believe fairness or equality to hold intrinsic value, questions you must ask yourself to test this belief should tease out whether you really just see fairness as a tool for distributing positive emotions, which would effectively make fairness an ideology (within the definitions used in this book), or whether you believe that fairness itself has value. The traditional hard question for this intrinsic belief is: Would you choose a society in which happiness and wealth are distributed equally, or a society in which everyone has more, but a few individuals have much, much more? A person who believes fairness has intrinsic value would prefer a society in which everyone had less happiness and wealth so long as what they had was equal.

Considerations if you decide you believe that fairness/equality has intrinsic value

It is much harder to define fairness than one may think.

Suppose a professor brings a cake to class and decides to split it fairly amongst the students of the class.[35] Does she:

• Split the cake into exactly equal pieces and distribute those?

• Give more cake to the hungrier students?

• Give more cake to the students who want the cake the most?

• Give more cake to the students who work the hardest?

• Give more cake to the students who come to class every day and exclude students who only showed up on that day hearing there would be cake?

• Give more cake to students from disadvantaged backgrounds?

• Not give any cake to the student who she saw murder an old lady with a rock?

• Give more cake to the students who would appreciate the cake the most?

• Give more cake to the students who would not be able to afford cake outside of class?

• Give more cake to male students because their daily caloric needs are higher on average?

• Give less cake to the students who bring a piece of cake to class every day?

• Give more cake to the nicest and most generous students?

• Give more cake to the students who have been having a bad week?

If you hold fairness/equality to be something of intrinsic value, the way you answer this question matters a lot to the way you choose to expend your one life in pursuit of fairness. Simple answers like, “to each according to their needs,” often leave more room for interpretation than one may think.

Personal Improvement

People who believe personal improvement has intrinsic value define personal improvement in many ways, but generally argue that if you are a thing, there is intrinsic value in being the best possible version of that thing (be that “thing” the ultimate human, athlete, parent, salesperson, etc.).

The core difficulty with this intrinsic value is it lends itself very well to being a crutch to enable base addictions, whether the addiction be exercise, winning, or recognition.

The hard question to ask yourself about this belief is:

If you could be granted, with zero effort and maintenance, perfection at whatever aspect of yourself you are trying to improve, would you take it?

If you would refuse this offer, it is not the end state of perfection that you value, but rather the struggle for improvement (or perhaps you are just an addict trying to justify a thoughtless path in life).

If you agreed to the above offer for effortless perfection at whatever type of personal improvement you value, what would you do next? Why would that next thing be worth doing? Why is the next thing of less intrinsic value than improving yourself (e.g., why did you need to be perfect before dedicating yourself to this next task)?

If what you are trying to achieve is knowledge, change the question to:

At the press of a button, you can achieve perfect knowledge. The catch: you cannot disseminate it. Will you press the button?

If you would not press this button, ask yourself why it is important to disseminate knowledge. If you believe knowledge has value for its own sake, would you disseminate the knowledge if no one who received it could act on it?

Considerations if you decide you believe that personal improvement has intrinsic value

It is important to define two aspects of your goal if you chose this intrinsic value.

First, what specific aspects of your life have you chosen to perfect and why? When answering this question, it is useful to keep in mind all of the aspects of yourself you can work on perfecting, such as being perfect at your current job, being the perfect parent, or being the perfect friend/spouse/child/etc.

Second, are you striving for absolute perfection or relative perfection? In other words, do you want to be the best you can be or just better than others? Does the success of those around you in any way diminish your own accomplishments?

The Struggle

The struggle is the default intrinsic value for most with “Type A” personalities.

While almost nobody immediately concludes the struggle has intrinsic value, many arguments against other potential things of intrinsic value can lead people to believe the struggle for something, anything, imbues that thing with intrinsic value.

This realization comes when one recognizes that if one can get what one was striving for without work, it would lose all value—whether that be personal positive emotions or knowledge.

In this case, the intrinsic value of a thing increases the more you suffer to achieve it. An individual that believes this would say, “you must have intrinsic value relative to yourself and thus you can imbue other things with intrinsic value by sacrificing part of yourself for something else.”

Still, this argument is a little flimsy, as it would only be arrived at by someone trying to justify their existing lifestyle rather than approaching the question of purpose a priori. Someone taking the a priori perspective would have stopped at existence having intrinsic value and would not have proceeded to create the additional special rule where you can imbue other things with value by sacrificing part of yourself.

Moreover, it is suspiciously convenient that humans are biologically susceptible to assigning higher value to more expensive things (for example, research shows a person will be happier owning a $5000 jacket than they would a $50 jacket even if they are the exact same jacket). Our susceptibility to this fallacy could be causing us to feel that things only have value if they are difficult to obtain.

It is important to recognize that even though “the struggle” can feel costly, a life of struggle can often be the path of least resistance. By losing ourselves in “the struggle,” we can avoid having to think about why we are doing what we are doing and face the tough choices about what our life means to us.

This does not mean that “the struggle” lacks intrinsic value; it simply makes it a hazardous conclusion. If you decide “the struggle” has intrinsic value to you, please ensure that you are not just choosing it to avoid thinking.

Considerations if you decide you believe that the struggle has intrinsic value

Maximizing the struggle is difficult not just because it requires struggle. Is it worth throwing in pointless challenges to increase the difficulty of achieving a task? Does greater difficulty give any task greater value? Does the struggle still have value if it becomes routine?

Art and Inspiring Others

The argument typically used by those who dedicate their life to artistic endeavors is that there is intrinsic value in intellectually inspiring others. If this is your inclination, the first question you must ask yourself is: Did you choose to believe this to justify your lifestyle and self-image as an artist?

A good way to make this differentiation is to ask yourself:

Is it the inspiration of others or the creation of art itself that has intrinsic value?

If there is intrinsic value in inspiring others, then sharing a great book with two people who wouldn’t have otherwise read it is twice as valuable as creating a great book that inspires one person. In this case, your time will almost always be better spent promoting great works as opposed to creating them yourself unless you are already a famous artist.

If you think the creation of art itself has intrinsic value regardless of the effects of the art on humans, ask yourself:

Is all art of equal value? Can the value of a piece of art be judged to be higher than the value of another if its effect on others does not matter?

If you hold that all art is of identical value, ask yourself:

Could you better maximize your objective function by quickly creating as many simple drawings as possible to increase the amount of “art” you produce?

If not, why not?

Considerations if you decide you believe inspiring others has intrinsic value

What exactly defines art? What kind of inspiration has value?

For example, does producing a critically acclaimed reality TV show satisfy your objective function better than creating one masterfully executed YouTube video with only a few hundred views?

Perhaps the most important question one has to answer when pursuing this path is what percent of your time and effort should be dedicated to creating your art and what percent is dedicated to promoting your art.

Experience Maximization

Some believe that intrinsic value lies in the diversity of one’s experience. This means one’s objective function should be to maximize novel stimuli through efforts ranging from travel to sexual experimentation or trying every type of drug one can in order to maximize the diversity conscious states one experiences.

The argument used to justify this intrinsic value is: What I experience has intrinsic value, but this value is not tied to the positivity of the emotions the experience leads me to feel. Instead, experiences have value based on their novelty. Even a positive experience loses all value as it becomes routine.

The hard question for this intrinsic value is:

Would you be willing to trade your life to experience the lives of every living human if doing so meant you would not be able to interact with the world while experiencing these lives?

Considerations if you decide you believe that experience maximization has intrinsic value

Maximizing experiences is an interesting objective function in that it is uniquely obtainable for almost anyone. Traveling the world can easily be done with even very low amounts of money by taking jobs for a year or so in each place one stops with the added benefit that these jobs can be quite diverse as well (if degrading and strenuous).

The most difficult aspect of this intrinsic value stems not from living in a way that maximizes it, but from overcoming the complacency inherent in the human condition that prevents us from even beginning to try something if doing so means defying social norms and venturing into new territory.

Protect and Promote the Growth of Human Civilization

Some conclude that the protection and development of human civilization has intrinsic value. This can result from one of three stances.

In the first two stances, either a person decides their purpose as a human being is to promote human interests, or a person sees himself as not an isolated entity, but rather a small part of a larger collective whole. Essentially such a person believes that they are just a small part of a larger entity, which represents the “real them.” For example, if such a person were a blood cell in a guy named Carl and they were asked what they were, they would say, “I am Carl and what is good for Carl is good for me.”

This argument can be thought of as similar to the argument for self-improvement, but instead of seeing yourself as primarily an isolated entity, you see yourself as a small part of a larger entity.

In the third case, someone believes humanity is imbued by intrinsic value through some particular trait (typically the complexity of our culture and the intelligence of the members within it).

You can differentiate individuals who believe that human civilization has absolute rather than relative intrinsic value by asking:

By what metric does human civilization have intrinsic value when contrasted with other primate cultures (like those observed in chimpanzees)?
If an alien species with more of that characteristic wanted to remove humans from the planet and replace them with aliens, should I not assist the aliens in this task?

If you believe that human civilization has relative intrinsic value, you should have no problem saying you would instead fight to protect humanity, but should you believe, humans have absolute intrinsic value based on some set of human accomplishments, you would be obligated to fight on behalf of the invading species. The “hard question” for individuals who have the more common relative perspective is:

Would you kill yourself today if it moved human civilization forward technologically and culturally one year?

Considerations if you decide you believe that protecting and promoting the growth of human civilization has intrinsic value

What exactly does growth mean in this context? How can you dedicate your life and resources to best move humanity in a “forward” direction?

To a large extent, this answer is mediated by the probability you see of humanity being wiped out in the near future. Even if you see a threat as having a 1% chance of wiping out our species in the next half century or so, it would be logical to dedicate your life to neutralizing that threat.

If you think instead that there are no real threats to the survival of our species, you must then decide whether to spend effort on technological or social progress. If you spend time on social progress, how do you determine what positive social progress is? If “positive social progress” is making other people feel good, should your objective function not be to maximize positive distributed emotions?

Accumulation of Knowledge as a Species

Some conclude that there is inherent value in accumulating and distributing knowledge about the nature of the universe.

Typically, this is tied to a belief that as conscious entities, we can only increase our own intrinsic values through the spread of information. Difficult questions to ask yourself to determine if you really hold this value are:

Would you sacrifice yourself to add some bit of knowledge to the human dataset if (1) that knowledge would not have otherwise been added but (2) it is of no practical value?

-And-

If you could press a button and it would give all humans absolute knowledge, would you press it?

Nature and Biodiversity

There is something viscerally upsetting to the collective Western consciousness about the destruction of large swaths of habitat and species. While some individuals frame the upsetting nature of this destruction as being related to some other intrinsic value (“Think of all the medicine that might not be made now that we lost the rare plants from which it might be derived!”), others believe nature has intrinsic value in and of itself.

These individuals typically place value on biodiversity specifically. They fight significantly harder to protect endangered populations in contrast to common species.

The most difficult challenge for any individual who believes that biodiversity has intrinsic value is that the very visceral assumptions that lead us to hold these beliefs do not lead us down the logical path to actually maximize biodiversity.

If all life holds value, the continuation of life is of intrinsic value, and our goal is to maximize biodiversity—then shouldn’t we be putting our effort into seeding other planets with anything we can get to grow on them in an effort to create new, lush biomes?

Even if this path of seeding other planets with life only has a fraction of a percent probability of working, the potential upside of a biome as lush and diverse as earth is so much greater than the upside of almost any conceivable conservation effort on planet earth itself that such efforts are trivialized.

You may argue that the biome in which our species evolved has a higher relative value to us than any biome on another planet, but in this argument is the admission that our biome only has value because it is the biome in which humans exist, which most people who hold this intrinsic value would find disconcerting.

Considerations if you decide you believe that nature and biodiversity have intrinsic value

What is the best way to maximize biodiversity in the universe?

Even if you believe that existing species within our own biome have some unique value, is your time not always better spent trying to protect small insects and plants that require less support and can be maintained more easily? Is there value in developing methods to catalog the genetic material in our world so it can be recreated later if future humans decide it still has value?

The Continuation of the Universe

For some, existence itself is a thing of intrinsic value and perhaps logically the thing of ultimate intrinsic value. After all, if all the deeds you perform in your life are ultimately futile in the face of the heat death of the universe (the mainstream belief in physics that the universe is expanding at an increasingly rapid speed and will eventually be so spread out that atoms will almost never interact with each other, being miles apart).

This view logically leads an individual to dedicate one’s life to somehow preventing the heat death of the universe, as without external intervention, the heat death of the universe is both inevitable and the single most inherently negative thing that could happen.

Within our lifetime this dedication typically takes the form of preventing the early death of our species and advancing physics and technology in general as fast as possible. In future ages in which we have a better understanding of physics, this intrinsic value may lead to radically different behavior.

The hard question one can ask oneself to determine if one really believes existence has intrinsic value is:

What if we learn that we can “reset” the universe (and that it has been reset before), but we can only do it sometime in the next ten years? Would you pull the trigger to make that reset happen and erase all of human civilization?

Considerations if you decide you believe that the continuation of the universe has intrinsic value

This intrinsic value is unique in that it may not be physically possible. It may turn out that the universe ending in heat death (or some other way) is a categorical imperative of physics.

Assuming that it is possible to avoid the heat death of the universe, there are many questions still left open about what is required to maximize this value.

Let us explore four potential scenarios for you to decide at which point the action has intrinsic value:

We can split off a new universe from our own, but the laws of physics in it are different in such a way that life will never come to exist in it.
We can split off a new universe from our own but are not able to transfer any information about our universe into it.
We can split off a new universe from our own and are able to transfer information into it.
We can split off a new universe from our own and are able to move a colony of our own species to it.

Some also argue that we are inside a simulation that would render this whole intrinsic value moot (reportedly Elon Musk is a big fan of this argument). The argument goes: If a simulation complex enough to model human society is possible to build, it is likely that hundreds if not thousands of them will be built at some point. If thousands of such simulations will be built, it is more likely we are living in one than not.

However, if you believe this objective function and conclude that we cannot know whether we are in a simulation, it is your moral imperative to assume we are not, as whatever a simulated person does is irrelevant anyway, and you know for a fact there is a chance you are not in a simulation.

Maximizing Lucidity / Enlightenment

The belief that lucidity (or enlightenment) has intrinsic value surfaces in several religious traditions as well as numerous new-age philosophical movements. Those who believe lucidity has inherent value make it their objective function to maximize the amount of time they, and others, spend lucid (that is to say: not on autopilot, tending to their various worldly and bodily distractions). This is often attempted through regular and prolonged meditation, mindfulness, and/or prayer.

When not derived through a religious dogma, this belief is sometimes arrived at by an individual who initially believed maximizing the time they were alive had intrinsic value, but ultimately decides that different states of consciousness have different levels of intrinsic value. If you were to spend your entire life on autopilot just reacting to stimuli, your life, per this objective function, would have no intrinsic value.

The hard question for those who believe that lucidity is a thing of intrinsic value is: Would you live the rest of your existence in a tube unable to interact with the world or feel happiness if doing so maximized your ability to maintain full control over your consciousness?

Considerations if you decide you believe that maximizing lucidity has intrinsic value

The vast majority of those who dedicate a large portion of their lives to maximizing lucidity do not pursue lucidity because they believe it has intrinsic value. Instead, such individuals have an ideology (a hypothesis about how the world works) that maximizing lucidity gives them access to some form of supernatural power whether this power be a closeness to God or the ability to influence their reincarnation. These people should focus less on lucidity and more on their ultimate objective function.

However, if you genuinely believe that the lucidity itself is your goal there are a number of interesting nuances to clarify. Are moments of lucidity still valuable to you if your resulting reflections on the world are wrong? What if your lucidity-generated conclusions are correct, but based on bad information? For example, Deepak Chopra has almost certainly spent more time reflecting on life than you, but he also has a poor understanding of even basic theoretical physics and neuroscience. Has Deepak Chopra lived a life of more intrinsic value than yours?

If you decide you believe that moments of lucidity that lead to a fundamentally incorrect actions, revelations, or views about what action you should take are less valuable than moments of lucidity that lead to correct conclusions, what about great thinkers of the past who based their now obviously-wrong conclusions on the science of the time? Did they live lives of less value than someone maximizing lucidity today? Since future individuals will almost certainly view us the same way, would your life not strictly be better spent advancing human science, so you can increase your (or our species’ collective) ability to reflect intelligently on life?

Value Uncertainty

Value uncertainty comes from the belief that something has intrinsic value, but either you do not know what it is yet or you believe it is impossible to ever truly determine what has intrinsic value. While there are far fewer flavors of value uncertainty than there are flavors of independent values, value uncertainty represents a much more common way of viewing the world. We will quickly detail a few objective functions that can arise from being uncertain about what holds inherent value.

The Search

Some individuals see value uncertainty as simply a stage in their development towards discovering what has intrinsic value. These individuals are in the process of searching for what they believe is true about the world. Essentially, these individuals build their objective function around building a better objective function.

Having had at least one phase in your life in which you are in the process of “the search” is extremely helpful later. Likewise, it is healthy to always have some aspect of the search built into your objective function, no matter how confident you may be that you found something of intrinsic value. Having had a period of complete dedication to this mindset may make you more receptive to new, better, potentially objective function-changing information should it arise.

Covering Your Bases

An individual selecting this objective function attempts to maximize as many things of likely intrinsic value as they can. This typically manifests itself as an individual dedicating their objective function toward pushing forward technological progress, as this benefits almost every likely objective of intrinsic value.

It is easy to underplay the benefits of technology but consider that today even someone in the bottom 30% of the U.S. population lives a significantly better life than kings did just a few centuries ago (not living in constant pain, getting to eat a wide variety of non-spoiled food most of the year, varied and high-quality entertainment on demand, etc.).

Essentially, such a person says: I don’t know what has value, but if I attempt to maximize all potential things of value simultaneously, I will probably get something right.

Focus on What Society Says is Good

While defaulting to what society says is good is a common objective function for people who are uncertain about what holds objective value, this is one of the few objective functions that is patently wrong. An individual who defaults to this objective function trusts social consensus over logical, reasonable thought.

Keep in mind that society has many other reasons to frame ideas as “good” outside of the best interest of the individuals who make up that society. For example, bad ideas may be framed as being good in the name of social cohesion or the benefit of a powerful ruling class or “intellectual” elite. In addition, some ideas spread very easily on social media regardless of how sound the logic behind them is, as they can be used to virtue signal (such as those ideas involved in politically correct culture). This results in such ideas being more commonly held in modern society than ideas that cannot be used to virtue signal.

Focus on Personal Proclivities

In this case, people default to focusing on whatever they have a personal proclivity towards (typically personal happiness) with the assumption that if they cannot determine with certainty exactly what has intrinsic value, it is not worth pursuing anything.

Religious Intrinsic Values

The goal of this guide is not to talk anyone out of a religion.

We are in a difficult position, as the first step of our framework is to clarify your objective function and determine why you have chosen that objective function by questioning and clarifying your core beliefs. However, there is a deep cultural sensitivity towards a religious individual being asked to question and justify their beliefs. Moreover, there is a deep sensitivity for a non-clergy member to discuss the implications of objective functions derived from religious beliefs. For these reasons, we will keep our discussion of religiously derived objective functions relatively generic, with a focus on those most common in U.S. culture. We will nevertheless ask you to honestly question your beliefs.

When a steel sword is made, it is repeatedly heated until soft, then quenched in a cold liquid. This process is called tempering. Blades are tempered to increase the toughness, impact resistance, and elasticity of the metal while decreasing its brittleness, a trait it gains by being overly rigid. By heating your beliefs through honest questioning—by genuinely considering you may be wrong—then quenching the beliefs in a world that will make their truth self-evident, you remove their brittleness and make them even tougher.

If you do not allow your faith to be tested with novel lines of questioning, it may atrophy and become weak, brittle, and unable to respond to genuine threats. Thus, when addressing challenges to your belief system, it is best to avoid the natural tendency to immediately dismiss them, thinking to yourself: “This person is wrong, and I just need to explain how.” Instead, ask yourself: “Is this person wrong, or am I wrong?”

A person who becomes defensive or angry when asked to strengthen their beliefs by questioning them is someone with an underlying fear that if they questioned their beliefs, they may abandon them. Such people have only superficial faith.

We encourage you to approach challenges to your belief system from an unbiased perspective and use logic and an imaginary opponent’s perspective to come to a well-considered, consistent, and compelling conclusion. In addition to strengthening your faith, this approach can make you more effective at sharing your religious views.

Religious beliefs in this guide are divided into four categories: Hard Belief Systems, Soft Belief Systems, Personal Belief Systems, and Self-Image-Based Belief Systems.

Hard Religious Belief Systems

This guide defines a hard belief system as any religious belief system that strongly adheres to a cohesive religious tradition. Almost all these belief systems have been refined by thousands of great minds over the ages, resulting in a large cohesive body of interconnected beliefs about the world that are represented by religious traditions like Southern Baptism, Mahayana Buddhism, Sunni Islam, and Orthodox Judaism.

The most important question anyone with a strong belief system must ask themselves is: Why do I adhere to my particular belief system and none of the other similar (but mutually exclusive) systems that exist?

This question becomes uniquely poignant when you just happen to believe the religion into which you were born or the predominant religion within your local culture. It would be a remarkable coincidence that the religious tradition prominent in your community at the time of your birth just so happens to be the one correct tradition.

When developing your argument as to why you believe your particular religious tradition as opposed to another, it is important that you not rely on arguments that a party arguing from the opposite perspective could also use in good faith.

Imagine you are asking a Christian why they are a Christian and not a Muslim. This Christian may say: “I am a Christian and not a Muslim because when I ask God in my prayers, He tells me that I chose correctly.”

This is not a very strong argument, as millions of Muslims around the world would use the exact same argument when explaining why they are not Christian. They would believe this argument just as strongly as this Christian. When they pray and ask God what they should believe, He tells them to be Muslim.

This Christian also cannot use the argument that countries that are predominantly Christian are more technologically advanced, stable, and treat minorities and women “better.” While this may arguably be true today, it is undebatable that for parts of the Middle Ages, the Islamic world was both technologically and culturally more progressive.

Were this Christian to adhere to this line of reasoning, they are arguing that, had they had been born in the Middle Ages, they would have been Muslim, which they obviously believe to be the wrong religion. Therefore, condemning the current culture in regions where various religions are predominant is not an effective method for judging the inherent truth of a belief system.

This Christian could argue that they know Christianity is the correct system because Jesus either was closer to God than Muhammad or that Jesus performed more miracles than Muhammad. However, if they rely on this argument, they are tacitly accepting that if someone on earth today started performing better miracles than Jesus and also claimed to be God, they will dismiss the Bible in favor of this new person’s teachings.

Alternatively, this Christian could argue they are Christian either because Christianity fulfilled a prophecy provided in earlier religious teachings or that Christian prophecy has been historically predictive of future events. However, in each of these cases, Muslims can claim the same thing: that Muhammad was prophesied in the New Testament and that the Koran has predicted future events.

Anyone justifying their faith with either of these criteria tacitly admits that if an even more predictive historical text were to be found, they would choose it over the Bible as a source of truth, or, should a person in our time fulfill the prophecies in an old religious text more perfectly than Jesus, they would accept this person as a higher source of authority (if that is what those older texts predicted they would be). Such an individual would also need some metric for quantifying the unique predictive capacity of their chosen religious tradition and would need to study other religious traditions’ predictions to ensure they don’t “out prophesize” them based on said metric.

In other words, a person cannot claim their religion is uniquely predictive if they haven’t studied the veracity of predictions in other religions or criticisms of the claimed predictions within their own religion.

In addition to knowing why you believe your religious tradition is more correct than vastly different traditions, you should also know why your tradition is the correct one when contrasted with more similar traditions. It is easy to avoid thinking through this topic and say, “I believe what is in my religious text,” but remember that for almost every mainstream religious tradition, there are multiple sects with significantly different views of the world that would all make the same claim. Calvinists, Quakers, Puritans, and Baptists, for example, would all claim that they simply believe what is in the Bible, yet they come to very different conclusions.

If you take the hard religious tradition path in life, it is crucial to ensure you are following the correct tradition. Truth isn’t a team sport. Examining related-yet-different sects is not about finding ways to argue that the sect in which you grew up (or is popular in your community) is correct; it is about using the cognitive abilities a higher power gave you to come as close to the truth as possible. You must take time to understand the different ways people throughout history have interpreted the text you know is true, so you can come to the truest possible interpretation of it. Getting this question correct is quite literally the single most important thing you will ever do.

As with other aspects of applied pragmatic thought, it is a shame that our current society provides no good unbiased resources to help you make this determination. Any religious authority figure or community has a vested interest in delivering information to you in a way that guides you toward their sect’s interpretation of religious scripture—not out of malice, but because after years of meditating on the topic, they obviously believe their particular sect is correct, just as hundreds of thousands of equally intelligent and well-meaning scholars of the same texts have come to different conclusions.

While this book doesn’t have the space to delineate how all of the world’s various religious sects differentiate themselves and explain the philosophical, interpretational, and historic (often political) reasons for those differences, this book can guide you as you perform this exploration yourself. Given that most readers of this book who follow a hard religious path will follow one of the Abrahamic religions (due to the language in which it is published and the geography in which it is distributed), we will use them as a model.

On our website (Pragmatist.Guide/Religion-Tree [or if you can copy and paste, http://pragmatist.guide/Religion-Tree/ ]) is a tree that can serve as a very rough map for exploring how the different sects of the Abrahamic religions relate to each other. It would be impossible to create a 100% accurate map; the map provided is only meant to serve as a rough reference point. The best way to use this map is to start at the base branch that contains the last human (or entity on earth) that you believe shared divinely inspired teaching and then begin to work your way forward, tracing how various groups interpreted those teachings.

As you work your way along the tree, perform research to understand why the people of each sect had a different interpretation of the teachings than you do. Think through what specific historical factors may have led them to misinterpret the meaning behind specific aspects of your religious tradition and note similarities between those historical factors and ones that may have influenced the genesis of your own tradition. It is natural to have a blind spot to missteps in our own belief systems, but by spotting missteps in similar but related traditions, we can better mark areas of our own belief system that require more careful scrutiny.

This investigation will not be an easy or quick task, but if it gets you closer to truth, it is patently worth your effort. Sometimes this task may be as simple as clarifying why you believe the canon of religious texts you follow to be correct (such as coming to an understanding of why the Gnostic Gospels are dismissed by modern Christians and the more mainstream canon is accepted).

This task may be as complicated as parsing out elements of truth from a historical political or power struggle within a religious organization that resulted in different sects that ultimately interpret the same texts quite differently. You may find yourself agreeing with elements of each interpretation when you dig into the logic behind these differences. In other instances, you may be delighted to find a small element to truth in an interpretation of the religious texts that is no longer common for reasons other than the truth of said interpretation (such as the difficulty proselytizing the predestination of the Calvinists or the celibacy of the Shakers).

Do not be tempted to formulate arguments that make it easy to end on the branch of the tree that dominates your local culture and social groups. You are seeking the truth, not arguments that allow you to maintain the status quo.

Just as anyone with a strong belief system needs to have a good reason for knowing why they are a member of their tradition as opposed to any of the other traditions, someone who subscribes to a strong belief system should be clear about what that belief system says has intrinsic value, what their objective function should be, and what ideologies (hypothesis for maximizing those values) the tradition supports.

In a similar vein, keep in mind that while a hard religious belief system may inform your objective function, it does not always spell it out. For example, it may not be clear just from religious texts how important converting people to your faith is when contrasted with acting in a way your deity would approve of or contributing to make the spiritual lives of those already faithful richer. Would you carry out an unethical action if it helped you convert someone and benefit them for eternity? Having a clear understanding of your objective function in the context of your faith is still an important task.

Soft Religious Belief Systems

This guide defines soft belief systems as any religious belief system that loosely adheres to a cohesive religious tradition. Often soft belief systems take a religious tradition and alter it to make it better conform to mainstream social trends.

Soft belief systems are defined by statements like: “I am Jewish, but I believe that all religions are different ways of looking at the same truth” and “I am Christian, but I believe you go to Heaven no matter what you believe so long as you are a good person.”

While there are many logical reasons to gravitate towards softer interpretations of mainstream traditions, soft belief systems run the risk of being forms of self-image-based belief systems in which you allow your self-image to define what you believe about the world (e.g., I am a good person, a good person wouldn’t believe that their nice, gay, and Hindu friends are going to Hell; therefore, my religion doesn’t say my friends are going to Hell).

Additionally, an individual with a soft belief system should reflect on whether what he believes is simply the path of least resistance in life allowing him to believe that he is going to Heaven (or whatever reward their tradition offers) without having to make any major costly changes to his daily behavior or how he interacts with people of other faiths.

The core question you must be able to answer if you hold a soft belief system is:

Why are some aspects of the tradition true while others are false? More specifically: what logic or common characteristic allows you to toss out certain parts of a religious tradition?

You should be uniquely suspicious of a common characteristic if it relies on a modern western interpretation of morality, as it would be a remarkable coincidence if you just happen to be born into the culture with the correct interpretation of morality. Consider that what is moral has varied widely throughout history as is evidenced by the fact that you even feel your religion needs a “morality update,” as said religion was obviously considered moral within the time and culture it was created.

Personal Religious Belief Systems

Personal belief systems are at least in theory not heavily influenced by any religious tradition. In these belief systems, through some logical argument, you have built your own beliefs about the nature of the supernatural world and what it wants from you. The most common belief system in this category (in the Western world) is some form of Deism; therefore, we will focus on questions related to Deism below.

Due to the fact that Deism is not a mainstream belief system within our culture, most individuals who are Deists have put some thought into their beliefs about God, as they had to turn away from another tradition to become Deist, and therefore it is difficult to bring up a challenge to their belief system that they would not have seriously thought about already, but that is still generic/broad enough to have a place within this guide.

If you identify as a Deist, think through what evidence you have that the deity is not perfectly evil instead of perfectly good.

Almost all evidence typically used to prove that God is good could also be used to prove God is evil. For example, you could argue that God created the pleasant things in life so that bad things in life would hurt more (as opposed to arguing that God created the bad things in life to increase the value of the positive things).

Additionally, the many different mutually exclusive revelations of God that have followers who, when they pray to God, believe He tells them they are following the right path seems to be direct evidence for a God that is lying to at least one group (assuming you see supernatural signs and communication as evidence of God). Would a perfectly evil God not reveal himself in slightly different mutually exclusive ways across regions to increase the amount of conflict and hatred in the world?

Again, you could argue that it is in the nature of an all-powerful deity to be perfectly good, but there is no apparent form of this argument that could not be twisted to say that it is in the nature of an all-powerful deity to be perfectly evil. Some would counter this argument by saying evil is just the absence of good, so such an entity couldn’t be maximally evil, but again, such an argument could easily be twisted to say good is just the absence of evil, hence a maximally powerful entity would have to be maximally evil.

Finally, you could just argue that God defines what is good—therefore, whatever He does must be good, but this feels like a hollow argument. Being a good entity has no value if anything you do gets defined as good.

If you end up deciding that God does exist, but that he is a maximally evil entity, or that you cannot be certain if He is good or evil, then your objective function would change significantly. (Like everything else in this guide, this is just a thought experiment meant to challenge a person’s belief system. We are not actually arguing that God exists and that he is evil.)

As with every potential belief system, we encourage you to clarify exactly what your personal belief system states is right and wrong and make clear conclusions about what that belief system dictates you should maximize with your life. To determine this, look towards whatever source of evidence you viewed to be strong enough to justify building your own supernatural belief system.

Personalized Hard Religious Systems

While unusual, these religious systems are extremely interesting to contemplate. In such systems, a person believes everything contained in a certain religious dogma is true except for the implications that the dogma claims those things imply.

For example, someone may that believe the Bible or Quran is a 100% accurate record but based on that record conclude that God is a petty, malevolent entity. Such a person may even believe God is being honest when He says He loves all humans, but that God’s love is more like the love of an abusive partner who threatens to torture you if you don’t love him back. Such conclusions might lead someone to come up with fascinatingly unique objective functions.

Such belief systems are rare to the point of essentially not existing within most Western religious traditions but are increasingly common among the Eastern tree of religions as interpreted by Westerners. For example, one could believe everything taught in traditional schools of Buddhism is accurate but conclude that Siddhārtha Gautama was wrong in his assessment that ending the cycle of suffering and rebirth was the correct aim based on that information. Such an individual may disagree with the assessment that the suffering caused by attachment is more intrinsically negative than the positive emotional state they are able to experience. Alternately, someone may disagree that suffering is inherent to the human condition, and if suffering is not an inherent part of life, the four noble truths are not truths. With these lines of thinking, some rather exotic objective functions (exploiting the concept of reincarnation) might arise.

A person who holds one of these unique interpretations of a hard religious system must be able to explain how no major group in history ever came to hold such beliefs when they had access to the exact same information. The major religions have been systematically obsessed over by the greatest minds in human history, and yet they did not come to the conclusions you did. Why? What knowledge, perspective, or information could you possibly have access to that they lacked?

Self-Image-Based Belief Systems

Our first instinct when thinking through belief systems is to first decide what “type of person” we are and then “choose” whatever belief system that “type of person” would believe. When this train of logic is approached with even the slightest amount of incredulity, it reveals itself as patently wrong and destructive.

Some belief systems are primarily driven by the way an individual wants to think about himself and not by any sort of logical pathway or tradition. Essentially an individual first decides a bunch of generic positive things about themselves such as: “I am a good, powerful, counter-cultural, spiritual, person” and then designs or shops for a belief system that allows them to best maintain these beliefs about themselves.

These belief systems are best personified in the perpetual archetype of the high school Wiccan or the Evil Eye Chuunibyou[36], but are also common in many new age belief systems. Obviously, an individual would never admit to themselves why they hold these beliefs while they still hold them, but enough of us have passed through these phases ourselves to recognize the pattern.

It is not worth expending effort trying to tease out the logic behind these types of belief structures, as by definition they are not based on logic. If these belief systems were logical, they would fall into one of the other categories.

Almost any belief system can fall into this category if arrived at by asking: “What kind of belief system would someone like me choose?” For example, if someone were a nihilist because he identifies with the goth subculture, then their nihilism should be categorized as a self-image-based belief system instead of genuine nihilism.

This is the only belief system category we will openly condemn (however, we like to think we can retain the claim of being unbiased, as this is not a condemnation of any specific belief system. Any belief system can be arrived at from a non-self-image-based perspective). We advocate (1) determining what you believe is true about the world and (2) leveraging those beliefs to develop your self-image. Self-image-derived belief systems follow the exact opposite order: (1) determining how you want to see yourself and (2) shopping for a belief system that validates that self-image.

Essentially, when choosing your core beliefs about the world (whether they incorporate a religious tradition), it is crucial to remember that you are not shopping for the pre-packaged framework that best fits your personality, existing lifestyle, or desired public image. You are searching for what you think is most likely to be true.

Proclivities

There is a very good chance that you will unconsciously work something devoid of intrinsic value into your objective function. You will consciously know this thing has no intrinsic value, but you may still work it into your objective function. Non-intrinsic values that work their way into your objective function are what we call proclivities.

We work proclivities into our objective functions because we know we will be unable to take the sometimes hard-to-swallow “pill” of our objective functions without adding a sweetener to it. You may be a famous musician who has logically concluded that all humans’ emotional states are of equal value and given the vast amount of poverty in the world, if you followed your “raw objective function,” you would have to give away almost everything you owned. Realistically, though, you may also realize that you could never get yourself to accept or stick to this. To get yourself to accept your objective function, you may need to add in factors like a personal happiness threshold that must be met before you are willing to help others (you get to keep your house, cars, exotic shark collection, and fame, but everything beyond that goes to the poor).

We ask individuals to include their proclivities in their objective functions because if they do not do so, they make up false ideologies to protect themselves from truly challenging their beliefs and making the sacrifices necessary to achieve what is truly meaningful to them.

Those subconsciously trying to justify proclivities may convince themselves that they would be less effective at redistributing their wealth if they lived in a one-room house instead of their mansion. Never make the habit of lying to yourself like this. Recognize your weakness of character and accept it. Hopefully in the future, you will become a better person and shed more of your proclivities.

Common proclivities include:

Fame
Comfort
Happiness
Conformity
Honor
Sexual gratification
Being remembered after death
Minimizing the suffering of those around us

Proclivities sometimes resemble intrinsic values. One person’s intrinsic value might be another person’s proclivity.

For example, personal happiness may be of intrinsic value to Edward and minimizing the suffering of others may be of intrinsic value to Xiang. At the same time, Edward might have a proclivity for minimizing others’ suffering, and Xiang might have a proclivity for personal happiness. Nevertheless, if Edward or Xiang focused on their proclivities instead of their core intrinsic values, they would do a poor job at achieving their objective functions, as their proclivities merely distract them from what really matters.

We want to believe that our proclivities have wormed their way into our value systems for a good reason: “I am more productive when I am happy,” you might say to yourself. “I can’t work hard on things that have real value without a base level of happiness.” Sometimes these statements are true, but often they are lies, and at best, most belong as ideologies—hypotheses about how to achieve an objective function, such as “I hypothesize that happiness makes people more productive.”

The important thing to remember is this: When you must choose between a proclivity and your objective function, your objective function takes priority. For example, if feeling comfortable and dignified is a proclivity you have, but to achieve something related to your objective function you must become uncomfortable and lose your dignity for a while, you should not waver in your choice to endure those discomforts.

Regardless of their real value to us, proclivities are part of being human. The most we can expect from ourselves is to be cognizant of what is a real intrinsic value and what is a proclivity when optimizing our lives.

Step 1 Wrap Up

If this is your first time systematically thinking through what you believe about the world, you have been given a huge amount of information to process. We recommend setting aside specific periods of time in your day to mull through it all—such as while you are taking a shower or when you are about to fall asleep. Better yet, if you are reading this book with a friend or a group, take some time to discuss these ideas with them, perhaps while on a walk or in some other circumstances in which you have a clear head.

After thinking through specifically what you think has (and/or does not have) intrinsic value in the world and identifying your personal proclivities, define your objective function. An objective function can be structured however you want it to be, for example: “after achieving a specific happiness threshold, I want to dedicate my life to maximizing the speed of technological development.” Whenever you must make a decision in life, whether it be your choice of college, spouse, pastimes, or friends, reference your objective function and the decision will often become obvious.

While you only have one objective function, that function may have many components. These components can include multiple proclivities and the maximization of multiple things you believe to have intrinsic value. Each of these various components should contain a modifier that describes how it will relate to the other components. This modifier can be anything from a threshold (I have to have X amount of happiness before I focus on other elements of my objective function) to a percent (I will dedicate X% of my time resources and income to distributing happiness and Y% to maximizing personal lucidity). Once you have built your objective function, you will have an easy reference for the efficacy of any decision you make on achieving your objective function in life.

Step 2: Develop Your Ideological Tree

If Jane’s objective function is to please God, she might have ideologies that include human equality, Southern Baptism, Democracy, Monogamy, American-Style Democracy, and the Republican Party. While each of these ideologies represents a hypothesis about how to achieve the same objective function (e.g., pleasing God), they are not equal in importance.

Some of our ideologies are directly subordinate to others. Jane’s pro-life ideology is directly subordinate to her ideology that delineates when life begins, which is directly subordinate to her religious ideology. Altering an ideology lower in one’s ideological tree affects all the ideologies above it. Were Jane to change her ideology about what counts as a living thing, she may have to revisit her views on abortion.

Your beliefs about the world can be visualized as a tree in which a few senior ideologies inform thousands of subordinate ideologies. Even minor shifts in our understanding of senior ideologies (that is, ideologies near the trunk of the tree) affect the rest of our worldview. We should, therefore, spend significantly more time refining our most fundamental ideologies, even though we naturally dread the process of doing so, as changes we make to them send shock waves throughout all branches of our ideological trees.

Ideologies and Objective Functions

Ideologies are not tied to specific objective functions. One person’s objective function may be another person’s ideology.

Consider the case of freedom. One person may believe freedom itself has intrinsic value (and thus build their objective function around it) while another person may have an objective function built around maximizing distributed positive emotions but believe that promoting freedom is the best way to boost general happiness.

Having a solid picture of your ideological tree enables you to interact intentionally and logically with the world. Unlike objective functions, which are ultimately judgment calls, ideologies can be proven categorically wrong. It is possible to unequivocally prove that a certain ideology is not the best way to maximize an objective function.

Standards for Evidence

Before you can approach and prune your ideological tree to ensure it properly serves your objective function(s), you must first establish what information you will consider as evidence. What may be compelling evidence to one person could be ridiculous conjecture to another, so two people with the same lives and experiences may come to build very different ideological trees based on their standards of evidence alone.

Sam has an objective function oriented around minimizing human suffering. Sam may read in a well-respected newspaper that most scientists believe global warming is a very serious threat. Should Sam think information from well-respected newspapers counts as evidence, he may integrate climate change mitigation into his ideological tree. Clarissa, on the other hand, may read the exact same article and have the exact same objective function, but not integrate climate change mitigation into her ideological tree if she does not consider news articles claiming most scientists agree on something as a viable source of evidence.

To be an actualized, effective individual, you must consciously decide what information warrants the creation of new hypotheses about how the world works. This threshold will be your “standard for evidence.”

What evidence do you need to alter a deeply held belief? What would it take, for example, to make you believe—or not believe—in ghosts?

If you do not believe in ghosts, would personally seeing a ghost convince you, or would you assume you were going crazy or suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning? Would you believe in ghosts if five people in your close family claim to have interacted with them? Would a detailed report in the New York Times indicating that most scientists now believe ghosts exist convince you even if you never personally saw one? Would you have to read peer-reviewed, scientific studies in reputable journals concluding the existence of ghosts before changing your mind?

If you do believe in ghosts, what level and type of evidence would be required to convince you that you are wrong?

It is extremely dangerous to hold beliefs that will not change regardless of the type or strength of evidence presented.

Because changing our minds is such a difficult task, decide ahead of time what type and level of evidence is necessary for you to update your beliefs. If you wait to encounter evidence before deciding what level and kind of evidence is enough to warrant change, your natural tendency to resist change will allow you to manipulate your standards in the moment to avoid having to change your beliefs (some people call this “moving goalposts”).

There are seven types of evidence that (almost) every human uses to update their theories about how the world works:

Logical Consistency
Personal Experience
Personal Emotional Experience
Cultural Consensus
Expert Consensus
Scientific Method
Doctrine

We will discuss each of these types of evidence in turn.

Consider which types of evidence trump others for you. When your personal experiences contradict expert opinion on a subject, which version of reality do you internalize as true? The hierarchy of evidence you create is entirely within your control (and a personal judgment call—there is no clear right or wrong). That said, all humans are naturally drawn to some standards of evidence over others.

We will call the standard of evidence you hold that dominates over all other standards of evidence your “primary standard of evidence.” Though the hierarchy of standards you personally set will significantly influence how you perceive reality, the primary standard you select will make the biggest difference. It is nevertheless possible for lower-ranking standards to “gang up” on your primary standard if evidence is copious enough. This can be seen among individuals who suffer from paranoid schizophrenia—they almost always succumb to believing some aspect of their hallucinations, even if they are entirely logical people, because after personally experiencing something vividly and frequently enough, it becomes difficult to ignore that information, no matter how much it violates one’s primary standard of evidence.

Standards for Evidence Explored in Detail

Logical Consistency

Logical consistency is by far the most common primary standard for evidence. Outside of individuals who establish personal emotional experience as their base, if someone told us they had any other primary standard of evidence, we would assume they mean “after logical consistency of course.”

It is very rare for obvious logical inconsistencies to appear in our beliefs about the world (that is, beliefs held by the type of person who would read this book), as most mainstream beliefs about the way the world works are already logically consistent and any inconsistencies that do arise are explained away by individuals who we believe are smarter than us and have far more free time. To find a commonly held logical inconsistency, you would need to delve into conspiracy theories.

A good case study for looking at logical inconsistency is the belief that the moon landing was faked. Consider the following three points that most people believe:

A. The Soviet Union and the United States where genuine enemies during the cold war,

B. the Soviet Union was not so completely incompetent as to not notice we faked the moon landings, and

C. the Soviet Union did not claim the moon landings were faked.

If you believe these three points, the standard of logical consistency would trump even compelling evidence that the moon landing was faked.

Though all our minds strive for logical consistency, we almost never use this standard to overturn existing ideologies—even if we really value logic. It is one thing to admit to yourself you were wrong about something because you didn’t have all the facts, but quite something else to admit you were wrong about something due to a logical inconsistency that self-reflection could have uncovered. For this reason, even among individuals who would swear that logical inconsistency trumps all other forms of evidence, logical consistency is almost never evoked to update their beliefs.

Personal Experience

An individual who establishes personal experience as their primary standard for evidence would override any set of current beliefs based on a personal experience. While many of us assume this is our ultimate standard of evidence (“I’ll believe it when I see it”), it is in fact a relatively rare standard to maintain at the top of one’s hierarchy.

Suppose a voice speaks to you, tells you it is the voice of God, and asks you to join the Church of Latter-day Saints. Do you do it? An individual who places Catholic Doctrine as their primary standard of evidence would dismiss this as a trick of the devil, whereas someone who holds expert consensus (in this case the consensus of the scientific community) at the core of his standards of evidence may experience this and dismiss the experience as a psychotic episode and become concerned that he is developing schizophrenia.

If you are one of the rare individuals who would respond to the above event by unquestioningly becoming a Mormon, personal experience may therefore be your ultimate standard for evidence. Knowing what you would do if a voice, claiming to be God, spoke to you and said something that did not align with your existing religious beliefs is valuable in understanding the true nature of those beliefs.

While personal experience is extremely rare as a primary standard of evidence, personal experiences may be so powerful that they override higher standards of evidence in your hierarchy. For example, suppose you heard the voice of God telling you to join the Church of Latter-day Saints not just once, but every morning for five years. While at first you may dismiss the voice as schizophrenia, after five years you would likely believe it—even if you have just as much reason to believe it is still schizophrenia.

Personal Emotional Experience (Gut Feel / Intuition)

Someone who establishes personal emotional experience as their primary standard for evidence will believe something is true because it “feels” true to them (whether they have personally perceived it within their lives). These people often describe themselves as “going with their guts” and making decisions based on “intuition.”

This is the most “natural” of all the primary standards of evidence in that it is the standard all humans default to when they cannot muster the emotional control required to suppress it. It is not a great personal failing if you feel drawn to believe something because it “feels right” even though you logically know it is a poor standard of evidence. This compulsion is a sensation all humans know (or at least all humans who try to overcome their base instincts).

Personal emotional experience is the primary standard of evidence used by a large portion of the population. It is particularly common amongst spiritualists, practitioners of new age philosophies, and individuals who have certain soft religious beliefs (e.g., “I believe everything in the Bible except for anything that is inconvenient and makes me feel bad”).

This standard for evidence is unique in that it is the only primary standard for evidence that does not require logical consistency. The ideological trees of individuals whose hypotheses about the world are predicated on whether something feels right (or is pleasant, interesting, comforting, or otherwise emotionally easy) are riddled with inconsistencies.

For example, individuals who establish a religious doctrine as their ultimate standard of evidence will still find it a valuable exercise to explain how apparent contradictions in their religious texts are only superficial misinterpretations. An individual who relies on personal emotional experience would not be concerned by such contradictions as long their conclusion feels right to them.

Because our emotional experiences are not bound to a logical framework, individuals who “go with their guts” make for uniquely frustrating debate partners for those who use other standards of evidence. While one may be able to convince an individual using gut feeling as their standard of evidence that there is no logical way the principle behind homeopathy is accurate (i.e., that diluting a substance does not, in fact, increase its potency), this will not influence his belief in homeopathy so long as it feels true to them.

Individuals relying on emotional experiences as their standard of evidence often find it equally frustrating to convince those who prioritize other standards of evidence, defaulting to arguments designed to attack one’s emotional attachment to a concept. Such a person may argue against a scientific or religious concept by labeling it as racist without internalizing that people with other standards for evidence do not use perceived racism as a barometer for truth.

Intuition does not always run against logic. It is well documented that human intuition works well for repetitive tasks so long as one has experience with them and the tasks involve immediate positive or negative feedback. Outside of these very narrow situations in which intuition is effective, it is equally well recorded that intuition does not lead to “factually correct” decision making (despite what some poorly researched pop science books claim). That said, it is relatively irrelevant whether a thing is “factually correct” to a person who makes decisions based on their emotional experience, as such a person believes that factual correctness is a lower order of correctness than emotional correctness (something feeling true).

Cultural Consensus

An individual who establishes cultural consensus as their primary standard of evidence will dismiss all other standards of evidence—whether they be something they personally experience or something their religious text clearly states—should that evidence go against the norms of the subculture with which they identify.

Cultural consensus as a standard of evidence almost never refers to the consensus of society as a whole, but instead the consensus of one’s personal subculture. If one’s subculture—such as a religious community—has another standard of evidence as its cultural norm—such as religious doctrine—one may appear to be following this other standard of evidence (instead of what they are actually doing, which is deferring to the consensus of the subculture with which they identify).

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This standard of evidence is almost as much of a human default as personal emotional experience. Study after study has shown that people will trust “the group” over their own personal experiences. The Asch conformity experiments go so far as to show that when everyone in a room is saying the line on the left is the same length as line B, only 25% of people ignore the consensus in favor of what their senses are telling them. Among the 75% of participants who are influenced to follow the group, follow up studies demonstrate that some perceived what the group was saying as being literally true and saw the line as being the same length as line B because they heard a number of other people say it was. 1

This standard of evidence has become the predominant standard of evidence within large swaths of the academic community (something that can come as quite the shock to individuals who have never worked in academia). For example, well over half of 335 social psychologists responding to a study conducted by Buss and Von Hippel reported that if their research—or that of a colleague—found a biological basis for sex differences, the findings should be obfuscated.[38] These finding demonstrate a particular subculture’s belief that the equality of all humans should take precedence over any scientific evidence to the contrary. (One of this book’s sequels, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, explores how subcultures within politics within academia have twisted the mainstream interpretation of sexuality into something that does not align with the data).

None of this should come as a surprise. Humans are social animals, with brains designed for social conformity. Consensus with one’s personal subculture is by far the most common primary standard of evidence amongst the general population.

Expert Consensus

An individual who holds expert consensus as their primary standard of evidence is willing to disregard even deeply held beliefs if an educated, expert community (as they have defined it) deems them inaccurate. Individuals who hold expert consensus as their primary standard of evidence may turn to consensus among physicists for information on how the fabric of the universe works, turn to the heads of the religious community for information on what will get them sent to hell, and turn to a respected newspaper for information on what is happening in the Middle East.

Two people who rely on expert consensus may have very different ideological trees depending on who they consider to be “experts” on different subjects. For example, consider the issue of autism and vaccines. Some people consider the medical community to be experts, and therefore do not believe that vaccines cause autism. Others consider online researchers to be experts, and therefore believe that vaccines cause autism.

Even those referring to the same expert community can come away with very different beliefs depending on their thresholds for consensus. One individual may update his beliefs based on a single well-conducted study published in what he deems to be a respectable peer-reviewed science journal whereas another may wait until thought leaders in a particular field update their beliefs.

Ironically, it is almost impossible for a great scientist or thought leader to establish expert consensus as his primary standard of evidence. To truly become great, a scientist or thought leader must be able to vastly alter mainstream conceptions in a field based on personal experiences. This individual may have to believe for years or decades that almost every other expert in his field is fundamentally wrong about how their field works.

An archetypical example of this would be Charles Darwin, who, drawing from his personal experiences in the Galapagos, essentially rewrote everything that was previously accepted about biology. If Darwin had genuinely held contemporary scientific consensus as his standard of evidence, he would have dismissed any personal experiences that conflicted with that consensus. Therefore, many individuals who hold expert consensus as their primary standard of evidence make an exception for fields in which they consider themselves to be experts.

Scientific Method

A person who holds this standard of evidence will disregard the consensus of the scientific community if they believe the body of research produced by that community does not align with the expert consensus in the community. For example, if such a person encountered an extremely well designed and executed study with a huge sample size come to a conclusion that is radically different from the scientific community’s present consensus, such a person would alter their viewpoint on the topic before the community itself did.

This is an extremely rare standard of evidence to realistically execute on: It requires regularly consuming vast amounts of information, developing a deep understanding of what constitutes a well conducted experiment in a large number of different fields, and a knowledge of the experiments around which the community has built its present consensus (because no matter how good an experiment is, such a person would only change their view if that experiment presents better data than the sum of all data from all other experiments conducted on the subject).

This standard of evidence is more dangerous than most would assume. It is common for individuals who hold it to not invest the time necessary to truly understand why the scientific community sides with the existing body of evidence over a random study this person found online or in an obscure journal. Studies that get shared a lot are not more likely to be true; there are just more likely to be counter intuitive, salacious, or otherwise shocking. This is why communities that hold this standard of evidence so often end up performing bizarre practices, such as eating sticks of butter every morning after reading one study that suggests it will be healthy. If you are not able to constantly monitor all major work being released in a field or do not have a robust understanding of experimental design, we would recommend you just default to expert consensus over conclusions drawn from specific studies.

I (Malcolm) would see such a primary standard of evidence as being completely unfeasible for a real person to maintain in a responsible way (who is not a practicing scientist in a field) if I did not know that the other author (Simone) regularly reviews every major cognitive psychology study released then adds anything she finds pertinent to her worldview to a master document she maintains as well as a note on the strength of the experimental design. If you are not a practicing scientist making judgment calls within your field, maintaining this standard of evidence with any fidelity will require at least reading every major study in a field on a weekly basis.

I should note my views on this subject have changed considerably since we first published this book. In one of our subsequent books, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, we dug deep into just how much politics have affected the current academic consensus. This has disillusioned me to the point where I now make a point of funding my own studies to sanity check parts of the academic consensus that are likely to be politically motivated. The results of these personally funded studies have led me to lose faith that the consensus within a few domains of social science is based on an analysis of data and thus I more aggressively distrust other domains I have yet to personally research.

Doctrine

An individual who accepts doctrine as their primary standard of evidence allows evidence from a selection of written works (or cultural history) to trump all other forms of evidence. Though religious doctrine is the most common source material, political ideologies are sometimes used as well, particularly in communist and fascist countries.

An individual who establishes a doctrine as their standard of evidence almost by necessity does not have a “reason” for following their doctrine, as the doctrine itself is the highest order of truth. Because of this, such individuals often have a difficult time persuading others to their way of thinking due to a tendency to rely on arguments like: “This book is the word of God; you can see right here in the book—it says that this is the word of God, so your book is not.”

Such arguments are only persuasive to an individual already using that particular text as their standard of evidence.

While doctrine, particularly religious doctrine, may seem common as a primary standard of evidence, it is in fact fairly rare. The primary standard of evidence for most religious individuals is cultural consensus within their religious subculture or expert consensus among their clergy—not religious doctrine.

An archetypical example of expert consensus and religious doctrine clashing can be seen during one of the lines of argument during the Protestant Reformation, in which some Christians began to argue that the beliefs of the experts within their religious community were not in line with the religious text.

These thinkers framed the core schism between Protestants and Catholics as a disagreement about which standard of evidence people should use, specifically: Is something true because it is in the Bible, or is something true because the highest-ranking individuals within the religious community generally agree it is true? Essentially, can an average person come to a better understanding of the Bible by reading it themselves, or by asking someone who spent their entire life studying it and thinking about it?

Like these early Protestant thinkers, almost any individual who follows religious doctrine as a standard of evidence will be seen as an iconoclast (even within their own religious community) because the mainstream culture of any religious community strays from its core tenants over time. Religious communities deviate from their doctrine with time, as individuals who value personal self-interest over doctrinal fidelity inevitably gain power within communities. Such people have the ability to represent a religion as something more palatable or profitable (giving them more marketing dollars) than its true doctrine would. After all, the church that tells you your friends aren’t going to hell is usually going to outcompete the uncompromising church amongst all but the truest of believers.

An individual who sets religious doctrine as their standard of evidence will ironically not find a comfortable home among most practitioners of their religion, as the way they will approach their religion will inevitably force them into conflict with the majority of the religion’s practitioners who are instead following a cultural consensus. This confrontation is a threat to the power structures within an established religion, hence individuals who take doctrine as their primary standard of evidence are typically publicly shamed as extremists to decrease their influence.

The most used primary standard of evidence amongst those who identify as religious—cultural consensus—is an objectively bad primary standard to use. However, it is less obvious whether using doctrine or expert consensus as one’s primary standard is a superior approach for the average believer.

As discussed above, some religious traditions even regard expert consensus as superior to doctrine. This is typically found in any religious tradition with a single governing body and allows for such traditions to update their beliefs by decree, like the Church of Latter-day Saints updating its views on polygamy or the Catholic church updating its views on evolution. However, even outside of the kinds of religious traditions that hold councils of experts to update their beliefs, holding expert consensus as a standard of evidence greater than doctrine should not be interpreted as making an individual “a bad believer.”

Many people, perhaps correctly, lack the confidence to believe that they have the training and the intellect to notice something in the texts of their doctrine that centuries of experts did not.

Building the Base of your Ideological Tree

Having been presented with the concept of an ideological tree, you may feel compelled to map your ideological tree in its entirety. Given the plethora of potential ideologies addressing nearly every aspect of life, fully mapping out your ideological tree is virtually impossible and not an effective use of your time. It is nevertheless helpful to map out the base of your tree.

The base of your ideological tree and the hierarchy of your core ideologies are important to think through, as these higher-order ideologies (at the tree’s base) will influence all your lower-order ideologies (in the smallest, farthest twigs).

Once you identify the ideologies at the base of your ideological tree, challenge them. Questioning ideologies close to the base of our trees requires monumental effort, so we are less likely to change these hypotheses over the course of our normal lives—even when we are presented with compelling evidence suggesting they are inferior or wrong. Instead, we interpret efforts to share such evidence with us as direct attacks on our personal identities and become too defensive to really think through whether our ideologies match the evidence to which we currently have access.

If you react angrily when a certain core ideology of yours is attacked, that ideology deserves special attention and extra scrutiny. Focus on ideologies that create a visceral feeling of disgust (fringe political ideologies for example). Don’t fall into the trap of telling yourself: “I don’t believe X because people who believe it have Y wrong with them.” Instead, scrutinize the ideology itself. Try to view it from a fresh perspective.

Most importantly, for all of your most core ideologies, consider what new evidence you would need in order to change your opinion. If you believe capitalism is the best economic system to support your objective function, what evidence would you need in order to change your mind and conclude that communism is preferable? Have you ever tried to find that evidence? It is remarkable how rare it is for us to seek out evidence suggesting our core beliefs about the world could be wrong, despite how beneficial such evidence would be. After all, if you are wrong about something important to you, would you not want to know?

Ideological Trees Require Regular Pruning

Throughout our lives, we will gain access to new information that may disprove or alter our perspective of a particular ideology. As we alter senior ideologies within our ideological tree, we need to remember to review subordinate ideologies after the alterations are made to maintain consistency across the tree.

For example, suppose you are considering a polyamorous relationship and had previously assumed that monogamy was your preferred relationship model. In such a scenario, rather than merely asking yourself: “Should I be polyamorous now?” you should ask yourself:

What made me think monogamy was the best way to approach relationships given my objective function?
What information made me think I should consider polyamory instead?
How does this affect the rest of my beliefs about relationships?

Ideologies that Require Careful Scrutiny

One of the strongest innate drives in the human mind is an addiction to not thinking and a tendency to choose the path of least resistance (as opposed to the option that will assist us in achieving our objective function).

Because of this, there are two categories of ideologies you should scrutinize more than others:

Any mainstream or near universal ideology within your culture, especially one that is “improper” to question. Good examples of ideologies to question under this rule within modern Western society might be the virtue of equality, the sanctity of human life, or the inherent wrongness of eugenics. These are all ideologies that almost everyone you interact with on a daily basis agrees with and that the questioning of is a massive social taboo; therefore, they are likely the ideologies to which you have applied the least critical thought. It is easy to argue that if everyone seems to agree on something, it is not worth thinking about. However, remember that societies change their concept of morality over time. There is no guarantee that the future will treat our current society any kinder than our current society treats the slaveholding South.
Any ideology that discourages critical thought. A good common example of this is the ideology that encourages the lifestyle of “just going with the flow and listening to your emotions” alongside “don’t think too hard about things.” Many cults and certain religious traditions also fall into this category, insisting that there are paths of logic you are not allowed to even consider and thoughts that are evil to have.

Leveraging Social Interaction to Better Think Through Your Ideology

Thinking through an ideological tree is not something that can be done in one sitting or by yourself. One of the best ways to build and fortify your ideological tree while challenging the baggage you accumulated by chance involves talking it through with someone else who is willing to question basic beliefs and assumptions (including their own). Close friends can be excellent for these conversations, though due to strong cultural taboos against these sorts of topics (with the classic adage that religion, sex, politics, or money are not topics of polite conversation), it can be difficult and has the potential of jeopardizing a friendship.

Step 3: Define Your Internal Character

Disclaimer (totally skippable)

All previous chapters of this book focus on information that is objectively true and are meant to be as unbiased as possible. The intent of this chapter holds to that precedent: After you decide what you want from life and how you plan to achieve it, it is objectively worth reflecting on, designing, and becoming the kind of person that would be best at executing your plan. However, the question of how to change oneself requires some hypotheses on how humans think, which removes us from the realm of objectively true and unbiased statements.

First, we must assume a position on what standard of evidence we reference when looking for information on this subject. Given its wide acceptance within our culture, we have chosen scientific consensus as the standard of evidence when possible. When we lack scientific consensus, we default to information gained from personal experience and conjecture based on research. To us, this seemed the most “pragmatic” solution to a situation in which we are forced to take a stance on standards of evidence and ideologies.

We have to rely heavily on limited research and findings from personal experimentation throughout this chapter, as there is no universally accepted model for how the human brain processes emotion at a systems level. While, from the perspective of a neuroscientist, we can say the right precuneus (along with at least a dozen other regions) plays a role in happiness, that information does nothing to help the reader understand how people think.

Even well-trodden, evidence-based models designed for behavioral change, such as cognitive behavior therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy, are focused more on changing problematic responses to stimuli and less on gaining a holistic understanding of how to sharpen a healthy mind into a more powerful tool. That is not to say psychologists have not begun working on these questions under the title of “positive psychology.” However, the field is new enough (and infested with enough pseudo-science gurus) that we are unwilling to hang our hats on any claims it makes as being “scientific consensus.” Positive psychology is still in the transition phase from pop-science to real science, having only been first pushed for in 1998.

Because of this, we have had to build an easy-to-understand, quickly explainable, “close to accurate” model of how a normal, healthy person processes and responds to their experiences on a day to day basis. This easily accessible model should allow anyone to train themselves to alter undesirable personal traits and shave the rough edges off their personality to create the most optimal version of themselves. That said, we need to stress that the model described in this chapter is not the “whole truth” of how emotions are processed, which will be elaborated on later in this section. Nevertheless, we will have an easier time improving ourselves if we use a simple model and not a more nuanced understanding of the admittedly messy human brain.

This model for how we process experiences is a product of personal experience, cognitive behavioral therapy theory, neuroscience, research on neural networks, evolutionary psychology, and marketing. While the model draws heavily from mainstream schools of thought on cognitive behavioral therapy, it does deviate in some small ways by incorporating inspiration from other fields.

For example, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) argues that our emotional reactions to situations are primarily based on learned schema about how the world works, whereas the model described in this chapter is based on the theory that our emotional reactions are derived by our unconsciously referencing a personal mental model similar to the mental models we use to predict behavior in others. This alteration is proposed based on inspiration from these other fields:

Marketing: Businesses sell to consumers by convincing them they need something to maintain a certain perception of themselves, not by priming schema (unless those schemas are tied to sex).
Evolutionary psychology: It appears that higher cognition first evolved amongst humans for the purpose of modeling people and behaviors, not for the sake of storing information in an organized library of rulebooks.
Neural networks: Referencing the already-existing “mental model” system we use to predict behavior in others would be a “cheaper” way for the brain to process emotional reactions (in comparison to cross-referencing a separate library of schema).
Schizophrenia research: It appears that Schizophrenia is at least in part the result of the mind having overactive mental models, which come to be interpreted as external stimuli (voices in one’s head); because this overtaxing of the mental model system appears to affect emotional responses, it would suggest the systems are linked.

While this chapter’s different approach may seem superficial, it is at least worth flagging. We have no consensus model of human behavior on which we can base this section, so we have had to develop and test our own. Obviously, if you prefer the cognitive behavioral therapy model of emotions, we encourage you to research cognitive behavioral therapy further.

So far, this guide has focused on the topic of how people would think and live their lives in an ideal world: How people determine what they believe about the world, decide what they want from life based on those beliefs, develop hypotheses about how to best achieve those goals, and then execute on those hypotheses. Unfortunately, as we are humans and not hyper-rational robots, this is not a realistic way to live life on a daily basis.

It would be nearly impossible to constantly reference your goals and beliefs about the world every time you make a split-second choice or decide what you will say next in a conversation. Doing so would require immense mental processing power.

Instead, most choices humans make about how to interact with the world are made unconsciously on “autopilot.” While there isn’t a scientific consensus on exactly how this autopilot works, it is clear that this autopilot is neither static nor beyond our influence. Instead, it appears that we have an internal model of ourselves that represents what kind of person we think we are, and we unconsciously reference that model to determine how to react in various situations. This model appears to work similarly to the mental models we use to predict others’ behavior. This mental model system is likely the same system you are utilizing when you have an imaginary conversation with someone else in your head.

To put it simply, when you are practicing an argument with someone in your head, you have sectioned off a part of your consciousness and assigned it a “mental model” imbued with characteristics you think the person you are arguing against would hold. The “program” in your head that controls your reactions to someone in real-time conversations is essentially the same mental model program, only it is imbued with characteristics you believe describe you.

Thus, when you experience potentially reaction-inducing stimuli, such as an insult, you do not think, “To further my goals, what is the best way for me to react to this insult?” but rather subconsciously ask, “How does someone like me emotionally, verbally, and physically respond to being insulted like this?” Depending on the type of person you see yourself to be, this can lead to reactions that you know run contrary to your best interest.

This unconscious response only creates an initial impulse to respond in a certain way. That impulse can be overridden by the logical parts of our conscious minds. This is done through inhibitory control mechanisms in the ventromedial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Unfortunately, these inhibitory mechanisms can be weakened by a number of factors that prevent you from controlling your initial impulse.

Factors that limit your ability to exercise inhibition include:

Alcoholic intoxication (widely known to influence inhibition)
Lack of sleep, which prevents your brain from functioning at full capacity (inhibition is very cognitively taxing)
Lack of myelination in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (this region doesn’t fully myelinate until your late teens, leading to inhibition being more difficult for younger individuals)
Dedication of the inhibitory sections of your brain to other tasks (such as fighting a desire to smoke, stay on a diet, or ogle an attractive person)
Fatigue from recent inhibition (numerous studies have shown that the inhibitory sections of our brain can be exhausted if used frequently over a short period of time)

Ideally, we should strive to have an unconscious mind that creates initial impulses that we need to inhibit as little as possible. We want our internal model of ourselves to be so closely aligned with the type of person we desire to be that our initial impulse is what we would choose to do if we had the luxury to carefully consider and choose reactions that best serve our objective functions. Fortunately, you can change this initial impulse by changing the type of person your unconscious mind sees yourself to be—by changing the “model” of you that it is using for reference.

Learning to change the internal model your unconscious mind uses to determine your reactions to stimuli does more than give you control over the initial impulses you have—it changes the emotions you feel. In other words, by changing your internal sense of self, which determines how you react to things, you can change your emotions.

Consider how not everyone feels anger when they are provoked. Only those who feel justified in feeling anger when they are provoked, given how they see themselves, will feel anger. If your unconscious doesn’t see yourself as the kind of person who gets angry when provoked, you will not feel anger when provoked. Feelings like anger, sadness, and envy occur because your unconscious mind feels it would be appropriate to indulge in that emotion given what it understands about your place in the world.

How to Turn Off Autopilot and Create Your Identity

Even the most self-aware person lives most of their life on autopilot. We decide to take vacations because we see ourselves as the type of person who would take that trip instead of asking how a vacation will benefit our personal goals. We post things to social media sites because we see these things as the sort of content someone like us would post—instead of asking how it benefits us to post that thing.

Some individuals don’t ever leave autopilot. Many even decide what they believe about the world while on autopilot instead of thinking through what they actually believe is true (e.g., “I am a good, deep, spiritual person—what do people like that believe?”).

Below, we will discuss both how to turn off your autopilot and how to create an autopilot that generates impulses you don’t have to inhibit because they represent the way you would want to act were you not on autopilot.

Leveraging Moments of Lucidity

Almost everyone will see value in learning to occasionally break through the haze of autopilot and create brief moments of lucidity, during which one is capable of thinking: “Is this really what I believe is the right thing to do?” and “Does this really serve my goals?”

While it is easy to create moments of lucidity in which your autopilot is off, it is trivial in the same way getting out of bed on a day when you have nothing to do is trivial. You might lie in bed thinking, “You know, I should really get out of bed,” but there is another part of your brain that pleads, “But why? This is working for us right now; just go with it”—and that other part of your brain often wins.

It becomes easier to silence those parts of our brain if we have moments of lucidity built into our weekly schedule. These “periods of audit,” in which we have time set aside to evaluate all of the major decisions we have made that week, can ensure our actions aligned with our goals and beliefs about right/wrong. Just as with exercise, these periods of audit are easier when we build them into our daily routine and easier still if we manufacture social pressures that encourage us to stick to those routines. For example, you may schedule a morning walk and talk with your significant other during which you discuss your goals for that day and that week, how you plan to further those goals through concrete action, and what major decisions you have coming up in your life.

While it may become easy to create moments of lucidity with practice, creating a mental state in which we can rewrite our internal models—the personal blueprints that determine our autopilot—is extremely difficult. While in a moment of lucidity you may think: “It is not helpful for me to react angrily in a situation like the one I encountered yesterday. I should really not do that in the future,” merely having that realization will do little to change your behavior or your internal model of self. Instead, to be able to rewrite your internal model, you will need to put forward a considerable, sustained effort during a period of flux.

Leveraging Flux Periods

Flux periods are times in our lives during which we can rewrite and adjust our core mental models. Periods of flux are not states that we can consciously create, they are turns of events that happen to us. That said, we can trick our brains into entering them.

As long as your life is static, you will be extremely limited in your ability to rewrite the personal mental model that governs your unconscious behavior. However, when our lives are not static, it is as if the code that makes up our personalities becomes malleable. During these periods, our internal models of self will almost certainly change, whether we choose to change them, they serendipitously change, or our environment/social group influences them.

These periods of flux—moments in which your internal model can be edited—can occur during:

Major life transitions: Many people experience a personality reinvention between high school and college, when moving to a new city for a new job, when getting out of prison, etc.
Major social transitions: If you are transitioning social groups (especially if your schedule also significantly changes), it is possible to enter a period of flux—even if you are not in a novel environment.
Moments experiencing abnormally high levels of oxytocin release: This happens when one is falling in love, dating a new person, etc.
Hitting rock bottom: This may involve entering prison, nearing the end of an addiction spiral, nearly dying, losing everything in a divorce, etc.
Getting high: Altered states of consciousness achieved through meditation or drugs, particularly certain hallucinogens, can lead an individual into a state in which one can rewrite their self-model. Unfortunately, while these altered states of consciousness allow us to rewrite who we are and what we believe, they enable us to make these changes during a time in which our cognition is impaired. New beliefs and personalities born from such states may be inherently defective when contrasted with those born of sound minds. (Do you really want to make one of the most important decisions in your life in a cognitively impaired state?)

It is easy to read the above list and through reflecting on your own life realize that your personality did change some during periods like those described, and you had no idea just how susceptible your personality was to being rewritten during such periods.

To drive home how malleable your core internal programing becomes during periods of flux like those described above, consider that when heroin addicted soldiers returned from Vietnam, the massive shift in social and environmental conditions allowed 95% of them to shake their addictions. It is unlikely that you have any personality trait more deeply written into your unconscious than an addiction to heroin.

Obviously, we won’t always have the luxury of being in the midst of a major life transition. Because of this, we should mark these flux periods as they appear on the horizons of our lives and specifically take note of what we want to change about ourselves during these brief windows of time. If, however, you see no potential flux periods on the horizon and you wish to update yourself in the near future, you can attempt to create a period of flux artificially.

Artificial flux periods can be created through one of two methods: the sabbatical and the localized reboot.

In the sabbatical method, an individual creates a short-term major change in their life, schedule, and environment. This may involve living in another country for a couple months while focusing on updating your internal model. However, this method is unrealistic for most due to limited finances, limited vacation days, and regionally locked jobs. Changes made during these sabbaticals might also fail to stick if you return to a completely unchanged home, schedule, job, and social set after the sabbatical finishes.

The localized reboot involves moving to a new neighborhood and building completely new routines, surroundings, and social networks. Obviously, this is not easy to do either, but so long as your life remains static, rewriting who you are as a person will be incredibly difficult.

Revelations

A revelation is a phenomenon that occurs when an individual changes a significant part of their ideological tree during a flux period. Revelations make changing your internal model nearly effortless and allow for vast changes in character. The downside of revelations is that the new ideologies which prompt them will become defining characteristics of your identity (and internal model) going forward.

Examples of people changing their internal models through revelations include a person experiencing a “finding Jesus” moment after hitting rock-bottom, a freshman in college deciding that communism is the best form of government, or a teenager discovering “The Red Pill” after being dumped by his first long-term girlfriend.

Unless you have a hard religious objective function, we recommend that you avoid allowing revelations to “write your new identity,” as they can lead to dogmatic beliefs in whatever aspect of your ideological tree you changed. However, revelations are fantastic tools for those following a hard religious path, as dogmatic obedience towards specific ideologies can beneficially augment the execution of their objective functions.

To illicit a hard religious revelation, use a period of flux to focus a significant portion of your free time on the exercise discussed in the “hard religious” objective function section of this book, which is designed to help you clarify your religious beliefs. Once you gain access to some new way of seeing your faith, you should focus on what that says about the type of person you should be.

An Autopilot-Altering Case Study

I, Simone, had an objective function that involved having a large family, however I suffered from fertility issues. I felt so much stress and anguish around these problems that it began to interfere with my work and health and lead me to lose focus and sleep (making it even less likely that I would overcome my fertility issues).

By talking this situation through with Malcolm, I realized that I felt this way because I saw myself as a Type-A perfectionist—someone who beats herself up about any and all failures. I decided to question whether beating myself up about failures helped me achieve my objectives in life. “Does fear of personal mental punishment motivate me?” I wondered.

In a moment of clarity, I realized that my habit of being hard on myself did not motivate me to work harder. If anything, my type-A personality was demotivational, as it kept me in a negative mindset.

Knowing that I would be starting at grad school in the near future, I made a note of my type-A personality as something I wanted to alter about myself when I rebuilt my internal model within the new social context of grad school. Once in my period of flux, I kept a diary every day in which I wrote from the perspective of the new person I wanted to be.

I was ultimately able to remove the negative emotions associated with my situation by recontextualizing myself as someone who does not punish myself for failures outside of my control. My saddened state lifted, I slept better, my focus improved, I found all sorts of tasks easier to tackle, and, ultimately, I was able to build a healthy and happy family.

Arguments Against Choosing a Self-Image

Choosing what makes us happy, sad, angry, and envious is a choice available to everyone, but a choice very few of us decide to make. As with anything in life that requires self-reflection, we instinctively reach for flimsy excuses allowing us to avoid responsibility for our own lives.

When being reminded that you can choose who you are and that you are responsible for any failure to live up to your own ideals, your natural response will be to shirk that responsibility.

To avoid improving themselves, people often grab for the following shields:

• “I am who I am. I can’t change myself.”

• “I would no longer be ‘me’ if I change my internal self-image.”

• “Emotions are natural. I trust them to steer me in the right direction.”

While it is patently false that people don’t change, there is some merit to the idea that we essentially “kill” parts of ourselves by changing our internal models. If we contextualize ourselves as whatever views and ideas we hold RIGHT NOW, we are absolutely destroying parts of ourselves by changing our self-images. This is nevertheless largely irrelevant, as if you do not choose to change yourself, the world will change you. Parts of you will inevitably die. The only question is whether those parts of you will die by your hand, or that of serendipity + time.

It is also worth asking yourself: “Is a version of me that was created by external pressures a truer version than a version of me that I consciously designed?” If you see your identity as a sticky ball, would you rather it be covered with whatever dirt it picked up rolling down the road, or would you rather wash it off and decorate it with whatever you want?

We would argue that a “you” that you independently and consciously design is more genuine than a “you” someone else (or mere chance) created, but ultimately this is a personal judgment call.

With regard to emotionally driven decisions: history makes it clear that emotions do not always steer people in the right direction. Nearly every war crime, genocide, and rape has been committed by a person acting upon an emotion. Emotions do not somehow magically lead us down the right path; they do not even assist in their own maximization (i.e., if your objective function is to maximize positive emotional states, it would be worth rewriting your internal model into one that is not as affected by whatever gets you down most on a day-to-day basis).

If you believe in evolution, like us, you will also likely believe that emotions exist only because our ancestors who had them had more surviving offspring. Thus, there would be no reason to believe that emotions have special access to “truth” or “genuineness.” If you do not believe in evolution, you will see that almost all religious frameworks warn about the dangers of outsourcing higher cognition to base emotions. For example, in the Christian framework, emotions are the primary tool the Devil uses to lead people away from God. Even if the only thing in life you believe has purpose is the maximization of your own positive emotions, you will still be better off if you logically manipulate your emotions.

Finally, not mastering your emotional state can literally shave years off your life. Extended periods of anxiety, irritation, or depression can lead to problems with blood pressure and your heart. Positive emotions have even been shown to enhance the immune system while negative emotions suppress it, leading less happy people to get sick more often.

What Builds Our Self-Images if We Do Not?

Five outside forces build our internal models when we do not take personal responsibility for their development: social conformity, cognitive dissonance, personal ego, reinforcement, and instruction.

By looking at how the internal models of ourselves are changed by outside forces (rather than ourselves), the triviality of these characters becomes more apparent.

Social Conformity

The slow grind towards conformity to a peer group can shape your internal model. This causes you to develop the self-image of someone conforming to your peer group, but different in some trivial, inoffensive way that allows you to fill a role in that group (e.g., you assume the role of the funny one, the sassy one, the leader, the rebel).

Cognitive Dissonance

We all have a desire to avoid cognitive dissonance, which is the state of having two conflicting beliefs, attitudes, or thoughts. No one wants to believe their actions contradict their self-image, so when your actions are forced down paths that contradict your internal mental model, you subtly rebuild your internal model to explain these actions.

For example, when you decide to switch jobs, you contextualize yourself as not enjoying your current job because it would create cognitive dissonance for you to leave a job you enjoyed. This is what makes your last few weeks at a job uniquely miserable and explains why it is difficult to work in such situations (in school environments, this is known as “senioritis”).

Cognitive dissonance can be uniquely self-destructive when someone has a temporary health-related vice (obesity, low exercise, smoking, etc.), which they then incorporate into their internal character as being part of who they are, making it almost impossible to recover.

In a similar vein, cognitive dissonance can be uniquely challenging when we contextualize failing as part of who we are. Sometimes we fail at something big or a few times in a row and we begin to internalize that we are just the type of person who fails when they try things of that category. This is incredibly damaging as now, trying and winning at something will create cognitive dissonance and you will subconsciously sabotage your ability to win.

Personal Ego

The drive to see oneself in a positive light shapes many people’s self-images. Our brains will go to enormous lengths to create a narrative that allows our internal self-images to be the heroes of our own stories. This method of developing a self-image can be uniquely insidious when it inevitably causes us to demonize positive traits we don’t see ourselves as having.

A young boy in school who doesn’t have many friends may be driven by his ego to contextualize himself as a “lone wolf outsider” who doesn’t need to hang out with “those normies.” He will begin to conceptualize normative behavior as intrinsically negative. His conceptualization may last long into his adult life and cause him to have difficulty building rapport when interviewing for jobs, dating, or building a support network of friends when moving to a new area.

If a man who has struggled financially lets his ego conceptualize himself as a “salt of the earth” type, he will begin to dismiss all wealthy people as immoral (potentially preventing him from even attempting to better his own situation).

Reinforcement

When we act in a certain way, we reinforce that aspect of our self-image. In many ways this is the same force as cognitive dissonance, but it is worth talking about separately, as it can dramatically snowball into very deleterious self-images through a process called avoidance.

Suppose one day you decide to not go to a party because the last time you went to a party you had a bad time. Now, you have “I am not the type of person who wants to be around a lot of people” lightly written into your self-image. Should you repeatedly make the same decision to not go to group events, you will reinforce that aspect of your self-image, thereby decreasing your likelihood of wanting to go to group events in the future.

Eventually, you will begin to make up stories about why you don’t want to go to group events to justify the initial emotional impulse you feel not to (e.g., “I am not good at social situations” or “something horrible happened to me at a party and I will have flashbacks if I ever go to one”). If this initially innocuous behavior is left unchecked for decades, it can snowball into an aspect of your self-image that could seriously affect your ability to function within society.

Instruction

While it requires an enormous amount of effort for us to design our own self-images, it requires virtually no effort to have someone else tell us who we are and how we should interact with the world.

Brands and people alike leverage our vulnerability on this front to drive us to spend money on their products or do things that serve their personal interests. Advertisements tell us what we should find to be fun, how we should want to see ourselves, and what we should want in life. Authority figures, friends, family, colleagues, and even strangers tell us who we should and should not be.

Ironically, most of the external instruction we internalize as being part of our characters is not forced upon us but rather sought out. It is human nature to compulsively seek out anything that allows us to neatly categorize ourselves. This can be seen in everything from horoscopes to the Myers Briggs personality test, blood type personality tests (common in Asia), Tumblr tables that label your micro-sexuality, and online quizzes that tell us which TV show character we are.

It is difficult to emphasize just how strong the desire to label oneself is. Even if we manage to resist strict classification systems, every human feels the subtle pull of wanting to identify with the fictional characters we see as having some similarity to us (e.g., “I’m the ‘Samantha’ of my friend group”[39]), which can ultimately cause us to adopt other aspects of their archetype into our self-image.

What Forces Built Your Present Self-Image?

Take some time to consider how you came to view yourself as you see yourself today. Was it your ego? Your friends? Society?

Hopefully it is clear when you reflect on how you developed your current self-image that there is nothing uniquely “you” about that self-image. A “you” that you build for yourself is going to be a truer you than a self that has been pasted together through serendipity. More importantly, a “you” that you consciously create will always be better at achieving your objective function.

How We Process Emotions

As we dive into the concept of a self-image and explore the role that self-image plays in what emotions we feel, it is worth understanding the specific pathway through which our self-image affects our emotional states. Here we will go into more detail about how emotions work and the limits of our abilities to influence them.

Note: When we talk about “emotions” in this section, we mean the term in the broadest possible sense: anything that could be referred to as a “feeling,” or what a philosopher may call qualia.

Emotions appear to be broadly divisible into two categories:

Lower order emotions: These are emotions that do not depend on our self-images and are either survival related, breeding related, or related to simple reward pathways in our brains. These include things like thirst, hunger, the desire to defecate, pain, lust, the fight or flight response, and addictions. The types of emotions that a fish may feel.
Higher order emotions: These are the emotions that allow us to live as social animals. These include things like happiness, sadness, envy, anger, pride, jealousy, anxiousness, etc.

Lower order emotions are largely out of our control. They can only be inhibited or endured. When a yogi or someone says they have conquered hunger, what they mean is they have learned to endure and normalize the sensation of constant hunger to a point at which it no longer negatively affects them. This is not the case with higher order emotions, while these can be inhibited or endured, they can also be avoided or otherwise controlled entirely (unless they are the result of a systematic abnormal brain state like PTSD or depression).

It can sometimes be confusing as to whether an emotion is a higher order or lower order emotion because higher order emotions will often hijack lower order emotional pathways “to get the point across.” For example, a person may be so sad their body begins to experience the lower order emotional pathway associated with nausea. Alternatively, a person may be so anxious that they begin to activate their lower order fight or flight response.

This hijacking of lower order emotional pathways can actually be incredibly damaging to our bodies, as they often were not evolved/designed to be activated for extended periods of time (for example: the fight or flight response activates our sympathetic nervous system, which is only designed to be activated for short periods of time, but because this response can be hijacked by anxiety, it can be left “left turned on” and shorten your lifespan by decades if left unaddressed). In these cases, the lower order emotion can be avoided by learning to control a higher order emotional pathway.

It is useful to remember that while both categories of emotions can be inhibited—pushed down so we don’t have to experience them—suppressing emotions is cognitively taxing and will prevent you from inhibiting other impulses. It is also difficult to inhibit emotions if you are already inhabiting something else, like a desire to smoke or eat. Overriding emotions is also a temporary solution as our neural inhibition pathways will inevitably become exhausted. Thus, learning to manipulate our impulses and recurring emotional states is always better than just attempting to suppress them.

As discussed earlier, when you experience something that would lead to a higher order emotion, your unconscious mind checks it against your mental model of yourself in order to determine how you should feel about it. However, before your unconscious mind does that, it builds a story about the incoming information. It is this story that is being directly checked against our mental model, as our mental model cannot directly interact with sensory information. In other words, your mental model cannot interact with a picture you are looking at. It can only interact with the story you create about that picture.

Because it is the story we create about what we experience—and not the experiences themselves—that we check against our mental model to determine our emotional reaction, we can control our emotional reaction by changing the story we are telling ourselves about what we are experiencing. There are several ways we can contextualize any experience into stories that will affect us quite differently. This contextualization is entirely within our conscious control.

Recontextualization is something humans naturally do when dealing with tragedy. For example, when someone’s parent dies, they may mitigate the grief they feel by creating a story about how it was really for the best (“Thank goodness she is no longer in pain”). Or when someone experiences a natural disaster, they contextualize it as part of God’s plan, and because God’s plan is ultimately a good thing, the negative emotions associated with experiencing the tragedy are mitigated.

Recontextualization is particularly useful for dealing with experiences that lead to an inconveniently high level of negative emotion. A good catch-all recontextualization one can use is: “This experience was actually positive, because it made me stronger.”

Another method that can be used for handling powerful, otherwise-unavoidable negative emotions is mindfulness combined with patience. Simply remembering that strong emotions are rarely felt for more than a few minutes at a time can make them easier to endure. (This may not align with your memories of strong emotional states but if you take a moment to time one you will see it is true.)

Finally, despite all the stories we tell ourselves about how “we just want to be happy,” it is important to remember just how much we instinctively desire to indulge in negative emotions when we feel it is appropriate to do so. Next time you are particularly angry about something, focus on just how easy it would be for you to let go of whatever it is you are angry about. It is your choice to stay angry.

When you let yourself get angry (or sad, jealous, vindictive, etc.), you are indulging in that emotion because you feel you have a good excuse to do so. A great example of this is when you share a moderately annoying experience with a friend, they say that you are justified in being angry. This almost always leads to an escalation from mild annoyance to full blown anger on your part, now that you feel you have been given permission to indulge.

There is a trend in pop/pseudo-psychology to claim benefits from indulging in emotional states that have been traditionally agreed to be negative, such as anger, jealousy, and sadness (largely due to the popularity of the children’s movie “Inside Out,” not due to actual research). We need to stress this is not the point we are making. It is generally bad to indulge in negative emotional states. Just because we are naturally compelled to indulge in negative emotions does not mean we are ever justified in doing so or that there is any evidence to suggest that doing so is beneficial. However, we are also not saying there isn’t sometimes utility in allowing yourself to feel a negative emotion if it moves you closer to a goal (e.g., using anger to motivate yourself or using your sadness to socially persuade someone).

Traditionally negative emotional states can admittedly offer some short-term benefits when experienced in their moderate forms (moderate anxiety can produce heightened focus and attention, while moderate anger can create stimulus-induced analgesia, increasing your physical strength and inhibiting the parts of your brain involved in empathy, which makes you more rational). Nevertheless, there is no large or well-analyzed body of evidence suggesting that frequently indulging in negative emotions is in any way an objectively healthy way to live.

There is, however, a very large body of evidence that links frequently indulging in negative emotions to very serious health problems. Sustained anxiety or anger can lead to coronary disease and heart attacks, along with a number of other health issues. In contrast, there are no known health issues to sustained or extreme positive emotional states. In fact, the famous “nun study,” which followed the diaries of 180 nuns, showed that happier nuns lived about ten years longer.

As entertaining and empowering as it may feel, pop psychology is not science and should not be regarded as such. For example, another common meme in pop psychology is the idea that punching things or breaking things will allow you to “let off anger” and help you deal with tense situations—yet repeated studies show that any sort of rumination, be it punching or venting, will only make the associated negative emotion worse.

Overlay States

In addition to higher and lower order emotions, we also experience an independent overlay state. These overlay states are not always given clear names, as they are not as distinct as emotions. Some words used to describe them include: malaise, being “in the zone,” being “in a funk,” being manic, or feeling foggy. Unlike higher and lower order emotions, your overlay state can last for hours or even days. Moreover, these states heavily affect your cognitive capacity (e.g., your ability to “think clearly”) as well as modulate the threshold of stimulation required to feel a higher order emotion. For example, when you are in a state of malaise, the threshold to feel sadness is lower and you will feel sad about things that otherwise wouldn’t bother you.

Overlay states are caused by “system wide” effects on the brain that can be influenced by factors ranging from diet to the time of day, hormones, physical fitness level, and whether you have the flu.

Positive overlay states can be created through simple “life hygiene.” This includes eating healthy food, exercising, meditating, maintaining good sleep hygiene, giving to charity (yes, there is research showing this raises baseline happiness), having meaningful work, maintaining regular social interaction with people you like, having a sense of purpose, knowing what you want from life, etc. If you are attempting to maximize a certain overlay state, the best method is to record daily activities and record your daily overlay state. You can use this information to look for positive trends between the two. One surprising thing that results from overlay state monitoring is the realization that actions which do not feel good in the moment, such as caloric restriction, exercise, charitable giving, hard work, or social interaction, can ultimately have a very positive effect on your overlay state.

As mentioned above, having a sense of purpose will also help to affect your overlay state. The objective function, ideologies, and persona you cultivate as a result of applied pragmatic thought may come in very handy for creating a better overlay state, as studies indicate one of the best ways to maximize your overlay state is to feel there is purpose to your life. (Note: The scientific community does not use the term overlay state.)

Note: A persistent negative overlay state in the face of normal “life hygiene” can be created by certain mental illnesses and will require psychopharmacology and professional behavioral therapy to remedy. Not seeking help when you notice yourself in such a condition is akin to not going to a doctor when you realize you have advanced pneumonia. Sure, you may be able to “tough it out,” but you may also end up dead.

The Effects of Overlay States on Emotions

Overlay states are often talked about in terms of emotions, but while overlay states can affect emotional states, they are not exactly emotional states themselves. A person can have so much of a higher order emotion that that emotion hijacks a lower order emotional pathway (e.g., a person can be so sad they feel physical pain), but a person cannot have so much of an overlay state that they feel an emotion (a person cannot be at such a high level of malaise that they feel sadness).

Instead, overlay states affect the threshold of stimulation required to experience certain emotional states. A person in a strong overlay state will need much less stimulus to feel happy, sad, angry, or any other higher (or lower) order emotion.

In sum, you experience a higher order emotional state through the following pathway:

To experience a higher order emotion:

You experience something
You tell yourself a story about what you experienced
You reference that story against your mental model to determine a level of emotional output
If that emotional output level is higher than the threshold created by your overlay state, you will experience said emotion

For example:

You notice you are the only person sitting alone in the movie theater
You tell yourself a story about how this means you are more alone than most other people
You see yourself as the type of person who doesn’t want to be alone, so you release a small level of sadness output
Typically, this level of sadness output would not be experienced as sadness but because your overlay state is “hormonal” due to being pregnant your threshold for experiencing sadness is unusually low and you begin crying

When you regard overlay states as filters changing the threshold needed to experience an emotion, it makes sense people are likely born with quite divergent “default” overlay states. Specifically, some studies have backed the idea of happiness set point theory, which essentially claims people are born with different thresholds of stimulus required to experience happiness. The most famous studies associated with this theory follow people after major life events—such as winning the lottery or marriage—and demonstrate that after a short period of time, people return to the same level of happiness they experienced before the event. In essence, this theory finds people gravitate toward a level of happiness that they developed very early in life, either through genetics, through in utero conditions, or throughout early life experiences.

The only thing that can affect the level of positive emotion you experience in your life as much as your self-image is your “default” overlay state. Fortunately, studies have shown this state can be nudged both up and down in terms of this threshold sensitivity. Events such as the loss of a child/spouse, or continued unemployment, will nudge your threshold for happiness up (making it permanently harder to experience happiness), while actions such as prolonged charitable activities and exercise will nudge your happiness threshold down (making it permanently easier to experience happiness).

Directly Stimulating Positive Emotional States

Let’s explore how we can maximize our positive emotional experiences while keeping this model in mind.

(1) You experience something

(2) You tell yourself a story about what you experienced

(3) You reference that story against your mental model to determine a level of emotional output

(4) If that emotional output level is higher than the threshold created by your overlay state, you will experience said emotion

This section will be divided into two parts: maximizing pursuits that make us feel good—things we do in the physical world—and maximizing experiences that make us feel good—the way we relate to experiences we are not currently living through either as aspects of our memory or imagination.

Maximizing Pursuits that Make You Feel Good

Maximizing stage (1) “you experience something,” seems deceptively simple. Just put yourself in a position to experience things that make you feel positive emotions, right? In practice, maximizing step (1) is more difficult to do than one may think. This difficulty ultimately demonstrates just how much work the “maximizing positive emotional states” objective function really is.

Despite what we tell ourselves about wanting to be happy, we are horrendous at actively pursuing experiences that make us genuinely happy. This is due both to the fact that we often just refuse to take the initiative to seek happy experiences and because humans are not good at identifying what kinds of activities will make them happy.

Take stock of the things you have done this week to make yourself happy. Now reflect on how much happiness you felt during each of those experiences. How much were you smiling uncontrollably? How much were you laughing? How much love did you feel? Now take stock of the last thing you spent over $5,000 on to make yourself happy (a trip for example) and ask yourself the same questions. How much were you smiling uncontrollably? How much were you laughing? How much love did you feel? If you are like most people, if you are like us, your answer will be: “very little.”

Why do we spend money and time doing things we tell ourselves we are doing to make ourselves happy but don’t actually bring us much happiness? Because we spend very little time consciously observing how happy specific types of experiences make us on average. Instead, we make five common mistakes when categorizing activities and expenditures that bring us happiness.

Mistake 1:

Instead of focusing on how happy an activity makes us on average, we focus more on specific memories in which we had a uniquely high level of positive emotion. We then categorize whatever activity we were undertaking when we reached that uniquely high state of positive emotion as an activity that is likely to on average give us a high positive emotional state. For example, we may categorize going out to a nightclub as a happiness-generating experience because we have a couple very positive memories associated with nightclubs—even if most of the time when we go to nightclubs, we do very little other than go through the motions of what we feel like we are supposed to do in that environment.

Mistake 2:

We also have a problem with lying to ourselves about how happy certain things and activities make us. If we spend a lot of money or effort on an experience, we are unlikely to admit to ourselves that the experience was mostly unpleasant. We will find it very hard to acknowledge that we could have experienced more positive moments doing something that costs less time and money. For example, if we spend a significant amount of money on an expensive trip, we are unlikely to admit to ourselves that we would have been happier staying home and binge reading good books (or doing something else familiar and comforting). As a result, we often end up chasing experiences that are expensive or inconvenient simply because they are expensive and inconvenient.

Mistake 3:

Sometimes people will tell themselves they enjoy an experience because that experience is tied to something they are addicted to and their subconscious is looking for an excuse to indulge in the addiction. For example, someone addicted to gambling may categorize sitting in front of a slot machine and pulling a lever as a positive emotional experience even when in reality they get almost no positive emotional stimulation from the experience, while someone addicted to alcohol may categorize events that allow them to become intoxicated in a socially acceptable setting as enjoyable, even if they would gain more enjoyment by staying home and getting drunk while reading a good book.

When looking for experiences we have convinced ourselves we enjoy because they are associated with something addictive, remember that most human addictions are not substance-based but a result of intermittent reward pathways.

The classic study demonstrating how powerfully addictive intermediate reward pathways are was conducted by B. F. Skinner and showed that if you give a rat a lever that releases a food pellet (reward) whenever it is pressed, the rat will press it when it wants food. If, however, the lever releases food only sometimes, the rat will get a large dopamine rush in addition to (occasional) food and will become addicted to pushing the lever, sometimes doing nothing but pushing the lever all day long. The dopamine rush caused by intermittent rewards is like any other drug, forming dependency in the user and eventually no longer yielding the positive emotion which led to the addiction in the first place. In their most raw form in humans, interment reward pathways are what cause gambling addictions and make it difficult for people to leave abusive relationships in which the partner is sometimes nice.

However, there are many less obviously destructive activities we become addicted to through intermittent reward pathways—things we tell ourselves we do for fun when the activity actually brings us very little happiness. A classic example is a simple mobile phone or social media game (Farmville being the archetype here). However, intermittent reward pathways are also core to many activities that give us other types of enjoyment, such as golf, posting to social media, playing video games, watching sports, etc. Note that these activities don’t have features to recommend them on their own; an intermittent reward addiction accounts for at least part of their enjoyment and popularity.

Mistake 4:

When you are on autopilot, you will naturally gravitate towards activities that reinforce your self-image. While sometimes fun, these activities are rarely the most enjoyable options available. For example, a person who sees themselves as an intellectual bohemian may go to a museum not because they enjoy the content of the museum, but because they enjoy doing an activity that reinforces the way they see themselves. Whenever we do an activity that reinforces our self-images, we experience a moderate amount of activation in the reward pathways of our brains and feel good. This is a normal part of processing higher order emotions.

However, social media has caused a disruption in this behavior pattern and can lead us to expend inordinately large amounts of time, effort, and resources on activities that don’t lead to sustainable positive emotional states. While reinforcing your own self-image provides you with a moderate activation of your brain’s reward pathways, having someone else validate your self-image provides you with a much larger hit to those reward pathways. Thus, while going to a museum may activate a bit of a self-identified intellectual’s reward pathway, posting a picture at a museum and having someone else comment how intellectual that person is provides them with a much greater reward. The problem created by this social media validation is compounded when you consider that it is an intermediate reward (we don’t always get rewarding feedback when we post something online) that fits all the criteria for a highly addictive reward pathway. Essentially, people become addicted to having others validate their self-images through social media without recognizing it as an addiction.

Outside of the imminent danger of becoming addicted to others’ validation of your self-image on social media, there is a less insidious risk that the type of content you post to social media will alter your memory of an event and cause you to believe you were happy doing something that actually was not much fun at all.

Just yesterday, we walked by a large, expensive-looking party and noticed that not a single guest was smiling except when taking selfies. Today, when they post those selfies online and tell all their friends how much fun they had at this expensive party, they will begin to build a false memory of their experience at the event. This false memory will be reinforced every time they go through their old photos and see images of themselves smiling alongside comments and tags indicating how much fun they were having.

Essentially, when a person posts to social media about an event (whether it be a trip, a nightclub, or a fancy party) they almost never comment on how mediocre the experience is. Instead, people mostly post and share photos in which they are smiling and having a great time; after all, everyone needs to know how great their lives are! This would not be a significant problem if this behavior pattern were applied equally to all the things we did to make ourselves happy, but it is rare for us to post things which make us happy that won’t also make others jealous or think our lives are great.

It is rare for someone to post a picture of themselves content at home alone with a beer curled up on the sofa with their cat while watching cartoons. The reality is that most people would be much happier doing something at home alone than hobnobbing at a fancy party, however due to the role social media plays in their lives, they are more likely to remember the fancy party as a happy moment.

Mistake 5:

Finally, it is very common for us to categorize an experience as something that makes us happy because it made us happy in the past—even if we are no longer capable of deriving happiness from the experience. As we age, the things that make us happy change. The most significant example of this phenomenon is the decline in “play behavior” many mammals (including humans) experience over time.

All young mammals exhibit something called play behavior. If you have ever owned a puppy, you will immediately recognize this behavior and will also be aware that, as the dog aged, its proclivity towards play behavior declined. The repertoire of activities that made the dog happy changed as it aged and the instinctual drive towards play behavior declined. Humans also experience a decline in a drive towards play behavior with age.

Our gradually disappearing play behavior manifests itself as a shift in our default overlay state that, as we age, raises the threshold of happiness associated with frenetic physical activity, curiosity, and imagination, and lowers the threshold of happiness that comes from serenity, relaxation, and nurturing others. Despite this shift that makes physical/curious/imaginary play less enjoyable over time, some people still gravitate toward youth-optimized forms of play out of habit.

All five of these potential pitfalls can be easily avoided by regularly trying new activities and critically thinking about how happy an activity makes you feel in the moment. Be open to the fact that what brings you a positive emotional experience today may be something that you detested in the past. Just because you remember having a great experience doing something in the past doesn’t mean you will genuinely enjoy that same experience today. Even if something seems like the type of thing you would like, it is still worth paying attention to whether or not you actually enjoy it.

Maximizing Experiences that Make you Feel Good

Maximizing experiences that make you feel good does not just involve careful selection of those experiences most likely to make you feel good. It is important to remember that step (1) on the pathway that leads to an emotional output is not: “you participate in an activity,” but rather “you experience something.” This experience does not have to be something you are actually doing in the moment but can be completely in your imagination.

Even though imagined scenarios are completely within our control, they ultimately—almost comically—generate more negative emotions in the average person than positive emotions. This not only comes through ruminating on how a potential action could end up embarrassing you, how a past action lost you an opportunity, or how terrible a potential future could be but also comes from remembering positive experiences.

Often when people attempt to ruminate on the happy moments of their lives, they nail step (1), the experience, successfully remembering a happy moment from the past, but then at step (2), the interpretation of that experience, they tell themselves a story about how sad it is they aren’t experiencing those happy things right now, which evokes a negative emotion.

This is ironic, as most people don’t ruminate on sad events in their past and tell themselves stories about how happy they are they are not experiencing them in the present. Both steps (1), what you are remembering, and step (2), the story you tell yourself about that memory, are entirely within your control. At any point, you can choose to remember the happiest moments of your life and be happy you had those experiences—or remember the worst moments of your life and choose to feel relieved you aren’t experiencing them right now.

But our experiences are not limited to things we experienced in the past, things we might experience, and things we are experiencing right now. We are also capable of experiencing things that are 100% imaginary. This is instinctively obvious to us as children. Children can easily reason that it would be more fun to experience themselves fighting off the alien scourge overwhelming the citadel alongside a crack troop of space marines than to experience the mundane act of playing on a boring playground with their friends.

One of the greatest things about being human is you can mentally experience almost anything you want at any time. Right now, you could close your eyes and imagine yourself sitting on a beach, listening to the waves, feeling the wind in your hair, and sipping on a frozen margarita. You probably just don’t have a habit of imagining things anymore.

With age, many people stop expending the mental effort required to create their own imaginary experiences. Older people instead rely on the crutch of books and television to escape reality. Part of this is due to the subconscious realization that sometimes people who professionally imagine things are just better at it, and that we gain more value from indulging in someone else’s imagined world if we can share that world with others in our social circle. Still, we encourage you to remember that you have the power experience any world you choose to live in, at least for a while.

Recontextualizing Your Experiences to Maximize Positive Emotions

Just as what you are experiencing—step (1)—is often within your conscious control, how you contextualize those experiences, step (2) is always within your conscious control. The story we tell ourselves about what we are experiencing is what our internal model references when determining how we should feel. If we go back to the woman in sitting alone in the movie theater, we can see that there are many stories she could tell herself about that experience other than: “Everyone else here has friends; I am so alone,” such as, “I am so glad I don’t have to share my popcorn!” or “Thank goodness I won’t have someone whispering commentary to me through the movie!”

The ever-popular cinematic family, the Addams Family, present a great demonstration of how powerful recontextualization can be and how jarringly rare it is. The strangest thing about the Addams Family is not the occasionally supernatural events that happen in their lives, but the fact they choose to contextualize things differently than most people and they have different mental models against which they test that contextualization. For example, if Morticia sees a wilted flower, she decides to contextualize that experience as a positive one. Subconsciously, we all realize that choice is not a supernatural one, but a choice any of us could make at any time.

It is almost comically easy to experience happiness whenever you want, even though only one third of Americans describe themselves as happy. You could choose to be experiencing literally the happiest place and thing you can imagine right now, but instead you have chosen not to. Realizing this shakes many people from an objective function based around maximizing positive emotions because what they really meant when asserting that positive emotions have inherent value was, “I want to choose whatever objective function means I don’t have to change anything about how I live my life.”

Realizing that positive emotional states are always within their grasp assuming they are willing to put in a large amount of effort (and don’t have a systematic brain abnormality) makes people rethink the judgment call that they have an imperative to maximize positive emotional states in themselves. This brings us back to the core point of this chapter: even though it is possible to maintain a near constant happy state through sustained mental effort, it is always going to be easier to create a sustained happy state by simply altering the self-image against which an experience and interpretation is tested. For this reason, most of your time when reading this section should be focused on deciding what self-image you want and how you will create that self-image.

The following section portion is skippable, as it isn’t actually useful in choosing who you want to be or controlling your emotional state and is entirely conjecture based on one of the author’s experiences building neural networks. However, if you do like this section, you are likely to really like The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, where we have many similar discussions.

The glaring question raised by the above four-step system for emotional reactions is: Why, when we remember happy memories, does our brain default to creating negative stories about how sad it is we aren’t experiencing those things right now? In other words, what creates the default pathways our brain takes when we are not actively attempting to influence how we think about something?

Looking at this from the perspective of a neural network, we can begin to get an idea of what may be happening. Neural networks attempt to recreate brain pathways in computers to understand why they behave as they do. Simple neural networks are often based around an input, an output, and a system in between the two that learns how to maximize a certain output based on various inputs. This system is neither conscious, nor designed to prioritize one flavor of output over another (e.g., happy vs. sad) it is only supposed to maximize a given output (e.g., emotion).

If we define the various states this closed system can take as autopilot choices for how we are contextualizing an experience and ask ourselves: “What output is this closed emotion generation system optimizing for?” the answer becomes clear. When it is not being disrupted by the conscious parts of your mind, this system is optimized to enter whatever state will lead to the maximum possible emotional output. For example, if you think of a happy memory, the emotional signal created by deciding to be sad about that experience being over is stronger than the emotional signal created by a decision to be happy that the experience happened at all. The system, which has no reason to favor “happy” over “sad,” will merely enter whatever state causes the strongest signal.

However, a practicing neuroscientist editor argued for a different explanation centered around negativity bias: “That negative emotions are overall generally perceived as stronger than positive emotions. Your most negative emotion possible is really much more salient than your most positive emotion possible. So, when presented with a memory that brings happiness about having experienced it and sadness that it isn’t being experienced in the moment at about equal levels, the negative emotion will be perceived as stronger.” Obviously, we disagree, finding the concept of “positive” and “negative” emotions to be somewhat arbitrary and subject to change, but it is worth at least providing readers with a couple of possible explanations for this curious tendency in humans.

Optimizing for Remembered Experiences

Just as a better understanding of how humans process emotions can help people achieve some objective functions, a better understanding of how humans create “remembered experiences” is useful in achieving others.

What do we mean by “remembered experiences”? Consider an experience in which you are blackout drunk, but still able to process emotions and the world around you. That experience is not recorded and completely wiped from your memory. Does that forgotten experience still “count” towards your objective function? Alternatively, what about something you experience in a dream that is quickly wiped from your memory? What about something you experienced but have very little memory of weeks after?

A good way to test whether your objective function assigns more value to remembered experiences is to ask yourself: If there were two people who each lived for 100 years and had equally happy lives, but one slept twenty hours a day and the other only slept eight hours a day, which life would you prefer to have lived? As most do not count sleeping as “experiencing life,” they would choose the life of the person who slept only eight hours a night and had more total hours of conscious experiences they could remember.

Sleeping and being blackout drunk aren’t the only times our ability to remember the world is turned off. Almost anyone who drives is familiar with the phenomenon of highway hypnosis, in which you get in a car and find yourself arriving at your destination without much memory of driving there (it is particularly noticeable when you end up at an old workplace/home and don’t realize you had been going the wrong way until you arrive). A person in this state is not experiencing the world consciously in part because they are doing something they have done a hundred times before and their brain has turned off its “recording processes.” Highway hypnosis aside, how many unique commutes to/from home and work or school can you remember?

Highway hypnosis is clearly an extreme case. However, there are many times we experience something and then forget it just days or weeks later. If you weight such experiences less than others, there are fortunately heuristics you can use to create experiences you will remember.

The simplest of these heuristics is to pursue as many novel experiences as possible. People remember much more about events in which we are exposed to novel stimuli. This is apparent with a little bit of retrospection: Can you remember exactly what you were doing five weeks ago today? Alternately, can you remember exactly what you did on day two of the last trip you took? Chances are you remember much more about the trip you took than a random sampling from your everyday life.

A similar phenomenon happens on a grander scale through something called a “reminiscence bump.” Originally, it was assumed this was a strange phenomenon whereby elderly people remembered their teens through their thirties better than any other part of their lives in old age. Later studies showed that if you moved the most defining and novel events of a person’s life to a different time (people who migrated to a different country in their 30s for example), the reminiscence bump would move as well.

Some argue that this enhanced ability to remember certain times in our lives is due to the number of novel things we experienced during those times, while others argue that reminiscence bumps are a product of the formative role those experiences played in creating our personal identities.

Each explanation likely carries an element of truth. We can remember life more clearly when experiencing novel stimuli and when rewriting our identities. One of the most famous (though now slightly more dubious) theories in psychology is that we form uniquely vivid memories called flashbulb memories when we are presented with an event or information that is unique, emotionally arousing, and character building (news of 9/11 for instance).

Should you want to maximize the extent to which you “experience” life, you should therefore opt for novel and formative experiences whenever possible. When deciding between two date activities with your spouse—such as staying in and watching a movie, something you have done every date night for the past year but love doing, or going on a guided tour through a local factory, something you have some interest in but probably won’t enjoy as much—remember that perhaps you should not only be weighing how much positive emotion will be generated by an experience, but also how many novel memories that experience will create.

Why do our brains erase non-novel memories? Your brain tries to save as much room as possible and will not record every time you do something as a new and separate experience but instead will group similar experiences together as a single “memory,” such as every time you drive to a friend’s house. If you decide to mix things up a bit and do the same experience in a slightly different way, you will trigger a phenomenon called “retrieval induced forgetting,” in which your brain erases some of the memory of the original route you took to your friend’s house and writes over it with the memory of the new route.

All of this may be fantastic from an efficiency standpoint, but it means that all those habitual things you do for fun will be constantly overwritten. For example, if you do a date night every night with your spouse in which you watch a different movie you will remember these experiences less than if you did something totally different every night.

(Whenever we mention a mainstream psychological phenomenon by name there are going to be disagreements in the psychological community as to how the phenomenon works and this is one of those instances. It is not worth our time to go into detail on these, as for our purposes the only thing that matters it that retrieval induced forgetting exists.)

Thus, if an important aspect of your objective function is maximizing the amount of “memory” generated, you would benefit from constantly moving to new cities, creating new homes, and reinventing who you are.

Finally, the vividness and detail with which you remember something is not tied to the accuracy of what you are remembering (despite common intuition to the contrary). Several studies have shown that while people have uniquely vivid memories of where they were on 9-11, those memories aren’t necessarily accurate. Essentially, every time you reflect on a memory, you are re-recording your reflection—creating a copy of a copy—and the accuracy of these copies will degrade over time. Furthermore, because you reflect on emotionally charged memories more often, they are more likely to be inaccurate but very vivid.

Keep in mind when deciding how to maximize your memories whether you are maximizing for just the number and vividness of memories, in which case emotionally charged experiences are superior, or whether you are maximizing for accurate memories, in which case novel, life-changing experiences are superior.

How Self-Images Affect Our Perception

Let us return to self-images, how they can be built, and how they affect us.

In addition to influencing the way we process emotions and act when we are on autopilot, our self-images can filter the information we are capable of accepting and internalizing. In contrast to our ideologies, which act as filters on what we are willing to accept as true, our self-images act as filters on our perceptions of the world, blocking information before it ever accesses our mental landscape.

For example, someone who maintains the idea that they are “a good person” at the core of their self-image will have a very difficult time critically thinking about their actions and whether or not they are indeed “good.” A self-identified “good person” may be able to run the words: “maybe I am not actually a good person” through their mental-scape’s phonological loop (the part of our working memory that plays words as we think them) while reading this page, but they will not be able to seriously entertain the concept that their actions may not be “good.” This person runs the risk of ultimately defining “good” as “the things they do,” which can justify horrific actions.

The perception filter your personal identity creates isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It depends on your ideology. For example, someone who sees themselves as scientifically minded may dismiss all talk of auras out of hand without wasting processing power on the concept. Someone who sees themselves as politically correct may dismiss any scientific evidence that would lead to racist or sexist conclusions. Depending on your ideology, such out-of-hand dismissal of stimuli may or may not be a bad thing. Most people would not want to dismiss something out of hand just because it conflicted with their self-image; however, it is conceivable that such a person exists, and we are attempting to remain unbiased.

This perception filter created by our core identities is not absolute. Sometimes information that clashes with our core identities is so voluminous or compelling it breaks through and we must contend with it. When this happens, our natural response is to become angry or agitated and attribute negative associations with the source of this information. For example, when someone who identifies as intelligent is categorically proven wrong, they will become very angry, accuse the person who proved them wrong of cheating, or attack the source of the information’s credibility rather than internalize that they may not actually be as intelligent as they would like to believe.

Self-Image Creation and Hygiene

When building an ideal self-image for yourself, it is important to revisit how our self-images affect us. Our self-images (i.e., our internal mental models of ourselves) have six primary effects:

• During social interaction, we subconsciously reference our self-images to determine how we feel about what is happening and what our “default” responses will be.

• When making major and minor life decisions, our initial emotional impulse will be to do whatever is in line with our self-images (these decisions can be as big as determining how you respond to a marriage proposal or as small as determining what to post to Facebook).

• We seek out activities (and information) that reinforce our self-images. Taking part in activities that reinforce your self-image creates positive emotional feedback.

• Our self-images influence the emotions we feel. We react emotionally to situations in the way we would expect someone with a self-image like ours to react.

• When we are presented with information, we can easily ignore and avoid processing information that does not conform to our self-images. This information will never be delivered to our conscious minds. For example, someone who sees being a communist as core to their identity may travel through a communist country and genuinely not mentally register evidence suggesting that people are suffering.

• When we are presented with difficult-to-ignore information that conflicts with our self-images, we will become viscerally angry and apply a negative association to the source of said information. Rather than process this information properly, we will immediately begin generating reasons why it must be wrong and ruminating on how much we hate the source of the information.

The first step in altering some aspect of our self-images involves acknowledging that the thing we have decided to alter is part of our self-images. There is no clear map of our self-images we can reference. Instead, we must build an understanding of our self-images by working backwards, using the above six points for reference.

For example, if you read an article that portrays a certain political party in a negative light and you find yourself getting angry and thinking about what a partisan hack the author must be, you have almost certainly internalized your political affiliation into your self-image. If, when scrolling through your online post history, you notice a lot of “intellectual” posts (and you had not consciously been trying to look intellectual), then being intellectual is probably part of your self-image.

As you begin to piece together characteristics of the internal model you have of yourself, you can begin to identify the pieces of it that are detrimental to your objective function. These aspects of your identity will typically cause one of three things:

• Unnecessary negative emotions

• Unproductive impulses

• An inability to process information required to help you achieve your objective function

The first two points are easy to recognize, if difficult to change. During the course of a day, if you find yourself reacting emotionally in an unproductive way, or say something in a social situation you recognize as detrimental, determine what aspect of your self-image lead you to react that way and then note it as something you want to change.

The third point is the hardest to identify as something you want to change, as it almost always represents something you like about yourself. You may become angry because you read something that ran contrary to a political belief you had internalized into your self-image, but you probably internalized that belief into your self-image because of a strong affinity for it. Unfortunately, it will be almost impossible to effectively spread the belief because if it is part of your identity, you will never be able to empathize with the thought process of someone who doesn’t hold it. If you can’t empathize with the thought process of someone who holds different beliefs, you cannot convince them they are wrong.

When identifying what you want to change about yourself, remember that just because something makes you sad, scared, or anxious does not mean a related element of your self-identity needs to be eliminated or changed. Sometimes negative emotional reactions benefit you. There is only one emotional state that is a universally negative: offense. Taking genuine personal offense to something yields zero utility towards any objective function and primarily serves to prevent people from attempting to understand viewpoints that differ from their own, (although one may certainly occasionally fake offense to one’s advantage).

You should be able to adjust your internal self-image on your own, with a spouse, or with a friend. However, if it is easier for you to work with someone who knows this model well or who you do not know, you can always reach out to us directly through [email protected] we are always happy to chat with readers in exchange for honest reviews on Amazon (haha).

Unproductive Self-images

As you validate your current self-image, keep an eye out for counterproductive elements that may have wormed their way into your self-image, several of which are summarized below. These summaries should help you quickly spot potential areas for improvement in yourself, as nearly everyone has at least one of these elements in their organically formed self-images.

As you read, recall that an attack on a self-image is not an attack on you, but will almost always feel like one. Our first impulse when hearing/reading that our self-image may be wrong is to lash out against the source of that information. We encourage you to watch for this reaction in yourself as you read through this list.

Failure or Helplessness as Part of Who You Are

It is possible for someone to build failure or helplessness into the core of their mental model. This phenomenon is called learned helplessness and has been observed in a few mammal species in addition to humans. For example, if rats/dogs are exposed to electrical shocks they cannot escape, they will not attempt to escape them when later given the opportunity. In humans, learned helplessness occurs when an individual experiences failure at a specific task enough times to internalize the inevitability of failing at that task as part of who they are. Unless they challenge this aspect of their identity, succeeding at said task becomes next to impossible.

Have you ever said: “I am just bad at X, so there is no point in trying anymore”? This can be in relation to anything from learning another language to overcoming obesity. If this is an explanation you have presented in the past, it is likely that you have incorporated inevitable failure at certain tasks into your self-identity.

Note: Learning to succeed at a task at which you have repeatedly failed involves more than altering your self-image to that of someone who can succeed at this task. You will also need to determine what other systematic factors contributed to your repeated failure and address them. For example, if you repeatedly end up in bad relationships, it is worth examining specifically what might have gone wrong with the common variable (you). Did you do a poor job at sourcing your partners? Did you vet them poorly? Did you act in a way that encouraged your partners to treat you poorly? Did you not leave them immediately when it became clear that the relationship had no future? (For a deep exploration of relationships, check out The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships—a sequel to this guide.)

External Locus of Control

A person with an external locus of control does not assume personal responsibility for things that happen to them, assigning responsibility instead to other people and external circumstances (e.g., “the economy,” “racism,” or “millennials.”). When asked why they are still single, someone with an external locus of control might say it’s “because girls are all crazy.” If asked why they can’t get a job, they may reply “immigrants took all the jobs.” Studies have repeatedly shown that individuals who adopt an external locus of control are less happy, less successful, less empathetic, and less likable.

External loci of control are uniquely difficult to shake, as in many cases, good and bad things that happen to us really are a product of external forces. Forces outside of our control may make life harder for us than other people but failing to meet this increased standard is still 100% our fault.

Perceptions of fairness often influence whether someone develops an internal or external locus of control. Those who strongly believe the world should be “fair” and believe that fairness has inherent value trend toward external loci of control. Those who do not view fairness as having any inherent value and who are comfortable with the idea that the world is not fair are more likely to develop an internal locus of control.

If you want to choose to believe that the world would be better if it were fair, then we encourage you to ensure you have a very good logical reason to hold that belief, because anyone living life with an expectation of fairness from the world will both be less happy and less successful in any conventional sense.

If you are systematically oppressed, it will be even more difficult for you to maintain an internal locus of control, as you must regularly confront the setbacks associated with an unfair world. That said, even if your objective function in life involves fighting systematic oppression, you will still be better off if you cultivate an internal locus of control, take personal responsibility for your life and circumstances, and accept that—even in a world with no systemic oppression—unfairness will be endemic. There is no conceivable situation in a modern Western society in which an external locus of control will help you achieve your objective function (unless your objective function revolves around being as helpless as possible which seems unlikely).

Though some develop an external locus of control in response to real, material oppression, most people with an external locus of control are not oppressed. Most people with an external locus of control merely refuse to take responsibility for their own failures. These are people who get dumped and blame it on the next person their old partner dates. These are investors who lose money and blame it on the market. These are entrepreneurs who fail to raise money and blame it on investors being too narrow-minded to realize their vision. A person with an external locus of control will always find a reason why their failures aren’t their own.

A good way to determine whether you have an external locus of control is to list the last five major setbacks in your life and the reasons behind those setbacks. If two or more of these setbacks aren’t your fault, you have an external locus of control. Getting rid of an external locus of control is extremely difficult. Conceptualizing yourself as a victim (either of fate or oppression) can be deeply alluring. Victimhood gives you power by allowing you to dismiss negative feedback out of hand, empowering you to accuse the source of bias or ignorance, and allowing you to blame your failings on anything but yourself. Victimhood allows you to feel like you are succeeding (in relative terms) regardless of your actual achievements.

Vice-Oriented Self-images

Beware of self-images that incorporate a vice as being “part of who you are” (smoking, drinking, obesity, violence, drugs, etc.). Incorporating a vice into your self-image makes it almost impossible to shake bad habits and can cause you to conceptualize negative influences in your life as positive influences. Worse still, vice-oriented self-images will make you conceptualize people trying to help you as people trying to attack the core of who you are and will create a perception filter that makes it difficult for you to recognize ways to better yourself.

Examples of vice-oriented self-images are people who see themselves as “a bad boy” and people who internalize being overweight as part of who they are as a person (e.g., “I’m fat and fabulous!”). It is not uncommon for formerly overweight people to relapse into old eating habits, arguing that they “did not feel like themselves” when they were skinny. In the same vein, someone may tie something like smoking or drinking to their sense of masculinity and feel less masculine upon quitting.

These kinds of self-images are uniquely seductive in that they turn a trait of yours that would lead you to feeling bad about yourself into points of pride. We would normally encourage such a recontextualization—one that allowed an individual to turn a source of negative feelings into one of positive feelings—if those negative feelings didn’t exist for a reason: to help you not kill yourself.

I need X to feel X

All humans are driven to give in to our impulses. This is why these impulses exist, after all. We have an impulse to eat so we don’t starve. We have an impulse to procrastinate so we save energy. We have an impulse to consume more of an addictive substance because it has hijacked reward pathways in our brains that are supposed to motivate us to be productive.

The more constant an impulse is, the more time we have to create arguments as to why we should give into it. Everyone rationalizes the occasional surrender a base impulse. This rationalization only becomes problematic when we incorporate it into our identities. Once someone does this, it becomes nearly impossible to permanently suppress said impulse.

Examples of people who incorporate these rationalizations include:

• People who come to see themselves as procrastinators

• People who argue they can only become creative/productive/happy after smoking pot/drinking alcohol/using some other controlled substance

• People who tell themselves they can only get work done if they take regular breaks (e.g., for social media, walks, whatever)

While these arguments are logically wrong, we are willing to accept them as they come packaged with strong impulse. If we surrender to these arguments enough times, we run the risk of accidentally internalizing these arguments into our mental model.

Fortunately, this is not a particularly difficult aspect of an internal model to change (assuming you are willing to challenge yourself). These illogical excuses can be easily spotted when you are actively looking for them. For example, when you are procrastinating, you know it; you have merely allowed yourself to lose the mental battle to overcome it.

A Self-Image of a Lower Status Than That You Occupy

It is common for someone to assign a certain social status or level of competency to their self-image. When someone’s position in society does not align with the status of their self-image, they will feel as if they are an imposter and that eventually others will identify them as not belonging. This is often referred to as “imposter syndrome” and is frequent enough—especially amongst high performing groups—that Stanford Business School must hold workshops on it for all incoming students.

Despite common perceptions to the contrary, it is rarely counterproductive to see yourself as deserving a higher status or position than you presently hold—so long as you are willing to work to attain the competency this status/position commands. Ultimately, choosing to see yourself as having a higher status or position than you presently have may give you just the motivation and confidence you need to push yourself and overcome your weaknesses.

Believing you deserve a higher position than you presently hold is only damaging when you maintain an external locus of control (almost no combination of mental models is more likely to lead to failure than a belief that you deserve more from life and an unwillingness to assume personal responsibility for your shortcomings). However, if you are willing to accept responsibility for your shortcomings and failures, it is almost always worth learning to believe you deserve better.

The Self-Image of a Perfectionist / Someone Who Does Not Fail Often

The self-image of a perfectionist or “perfect student/athlete/worker/etc.” is usually acquired after repeated successes early in life and is incredibly damaging. This may seem odd, as one would assume someone who does not see themselves as capable of failure would have more confidence and would strive to achieve greater things. This is not how this perception plays out in practice, unfortunately.

This self-image becomes damaging because the easiest way for such a person’s subconscious to ensure their reality aligns with their self-image is to ensure they don’t attempt things at which they may fail. People who see themselves as naturally perfect in some way will find themselves unable to take risks and ultimately languish in a life of mediocrity. For this reason, many parenting guides now advocate praising children for being hardworking and persistent rather than smart or talented.

If you ever find yourself not taking a risk due to the possibility of a failure scenario in which only your ego stands to get hurt, you are likely infected with some aspect of this self-image. This weakness can be overcome by actively putting yourself in situations in which you may fail so you become used to the feeling and understand that failure alone is not something to avoid.

The Self-Image of a Good Person

Establishing the belief that one is a “good person” is likely the single biggest mistake people make when building a self-image. The perception of oneself as a good person is nevertheless incorporated into almost every unexamined self-image. At a surface level, it is a good thing to incorporate altruism into your self-image, as it means you will experience more positive emotions from doing good deeds.

The problem is that self-images do more than affect when we experience positive emotions. Self-images also mitigate what evidence we are willing to internalize. If you place benevolence at the core of your self-image, you are unlikely to be able to realize when you are not acting with benevolence. Instead, you will begin to frame your thoughts and actions as “good.” Almost no other characteristic of an internal self-image—outside of explicitly creating an evil internal self-model—will create a person more likely to commit “evil” acts than someone who is certain they are good.

A Protector of the Weak

A role as the protector of the weak is a remarkably common self-image type in which someone views themselves as a magnanimous protector of the weak and oppressed. On its surface, this sounds like a fantastic self-image. Seeing yourself as a protector of the weak allows you to feel positive emotions from helping those in need. Unfortunately, as with the self-image of a good person, the perception filter this self-perception creates is not worth the benefit.

A person who sees themselves as a protector of the weak will create a perception filter that does not allow them to internalize that whatever group they have come to see as weak may be in the wrong. What’s more, an individual with this self-image is typically not able to perceive evidence that they may have been incorrect in their initial assertion as to which party was weak.

If reading the previous sentence gave you a flash of anger, it is likely that you have incorporated this into your self-image. You may be thinking: “obviously, everyone thinking clearly knows which party is weak and oppressed.” However, whatever position you have taken regarding an obvious victim, it is likely you know of a group with the exact opposite perspective whose views you dismiss as evil, stupid, selfish, fringe, and maybe a little subhuman just as they dismiss yours.

There is no greater defense to justify bullying, thought policing, dehumanization, and terrorism than believing oneself to be “the protector of the weak.” Almost every terrorist or censor in modern history was certain they were fighting on the side of the underdogs and protecting the weak.

Unsustainable Self-images

Watch out for self-images that involve something difficult to achieve or factors out of your control, such as the self-image of a professional athlete, model, or celebrity.

It is easy to achieve success early in life and incorporate that success into your self-image as your primary source of positive emotions—even if you logically understand the source of this success will not last for most of your life.

Even conceptualizing yourself as someone who does not tolerate failure is a dangerous move, as often our failures are out of our control. Avoid any self-image that revolves around transient factors that are outside of your control.

Self-Images that Rely Heavily on How others See You

It is normal to have some aspect of your self-image involve a desire to be respected or generally liked by those around you, but sometimes aspects of one’s self-image that require external input can get out of hand. For example, some people have ingrained in their self-image that they must always be the smartest person in the room (note: This is not a part of their public persona, as they are not strategically portraying intelligence; instead, these people need to believe that they are the smartest people around in order to feel happy).

This self-image inevitably leads people to make counterproductive interactions in social contexts in order to maintain emotional stability.

This self-image can be remarkably problematic in the age of social media. To determine if this applies to you, ask yourself: “When I post something to social media, why am I making that post?” If you post to social media in a way that does not further your objective function, you probably have some aspect of this issue built into your mental model.

Normalizing Negative Behavior

It is easy to protect ourselves from our behavioral vices by saying that they are “just part of who we are.” A person doing this may say, “I am just the jealous type,” or “I have a fiery personality.” Once you internalize statements like this you allow yourself to indulge in these emotions further reinforcing them, creating a cycle that normalizes the snowballing of negative emotional states. You only lack emotional control if you have convinced yourself you do.

Somebody Who Hates Being Rejected

No one likes being rejected. However, some people build into their self-image that rejection is devastating to them (rather than a minor inconvenience, which is arguably how a more well-balanced person would internalize such setbacks). Sure, rejection doesn’t feel great, but it also doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things whether or not someone else accepts you or likes you.

A fear of rejection typically emerges through a cycle of avoidance. In this cycle, an individual avoids situations in which rejection is a probable outcome. This reinforces the self-image of someone who is afraid of rejection and increases the individual’s anxiety the next time that individual risks rejection—which will only strengthen the aversion.

Fortunately, avoidance cycles can be broken by simply creating a hard rule during your next flux period, decreeing that you never allow potential rejection to be a reason for not doing something. The important lesson to learn during this period is not that rejection comes less frequently than one expects, but rather that rejection really isn’t so terrible.

Lower-Ranking Ideological Self-Images

Be wary of self-images that include a subordinate ideology—one that is not at the base of your ideological tree. Ideologies are hypotheses for maximizing an objective function. Hypotheses can be disproven. If one of your ideologies is disproven, it is in your best interest to discard it, which will be very difficult if you incorporate that ideology into your self-image. The only ideologies that are ever beneficial to incorporate into your self-image are those at the absolute base of it (i.e., religious ideologies).

For example, if you incorporate being a Republican into your self-image, you will no longer be able to internalize criticisms of the Republican platform.

In addition to blocking you from updating your position when better information comes along, self-identities shaped by lower-ranking ideologies make it difficult to promote those ideologies amongst others, as these identities prevent you from understanding their perspectives.

A person who identifies deeply with an ideology will have a filter on any information that runs contrary to their ideology, which makes it impossible understand the perspective of someone who doesn’t hold that ideology, as both parties will be working with different perspectives and data sets. Even if you are nearly certain that the Republican party is the best way to achieve your objective function, you will still be better at spreading that ideology if you refrain from incorporating Republicanism into your identity.

Individuals who have incorporated an ideology into their self-image also run the risk of interpreting attacks on said ideology as attacks on themselves. If you can’t help but get angry when someone criticizes an ideology you hold, you have probably built that ideology into your identity and should consider decoupling the two.

The danger of incorporating an ideology into your self-image increases in direct proportion to that ideology’s distance from the base of your ideological tree. It is not nearly as damaging to incorporate an ideology like your religion into your self-image as it is to incorporate a political philosophy or affinity for a particular political candidate, thought leader, or religious leader.

All the disadvantages associated with incorporating an ideology into your image, such as the perception filter and a lack of ability to understand the reasoning of those with opposing views, will exist regardless of how low on your tree that ideology may sit. For this reason, it is still not great for an individual to incorporate their religious beliefs into their self-image, as this will make them much worse at convincing another to adopt it.

False Alarms

There are a few aspects of a self-image that one may initially internalize as being negative and worth changing which are actually benign or even beneficial.

Group Association

It is common for individuals to associate their identities with an external group. When the group is successful, the individual gets a psychological reward. When the group fails, the individual feels as if they themselves have failed. This can happen with groups ranging from sports teams to companies and nations. There is some thought in pop psychology that this is not healthy, but there is no concrete empirical evidence to back this up.

Still, it is worth considering whether this sort of identification is beneficial to your objective function. You should be aware of how group identities can affect your worldview. For example, an individual who strongly identifies with something external like a sports team often has “successes” and “failures” in life that are entirely outside of their control. To deal with this fact, individuals will often begin to adopt ideologies that give them a semblance of control over uncontrollable events, such as superstitions (e.g., “If I wear my lucky shirt during tonight’s game, my team will win”).

It is also important to be cautious about associating one’s identity with a politician or political party. Demagogues are born when a large population sees themselves as being on the team of a candidate and ceases to critically question the candidate’s actions. Supporters who incorporate a political leader into their identities will see doubt in this leader as a sign of cognitive dissonance and suppress it, which will ultimately contribute to fanaticism and prevent people from withdrawing support from politicians who begin to behave in dangerous ways.

Combined Identities

One self-image that is often derided as unhealthy or dangerous—but is actually very effective—is the “combined identity.” Combined identities involve two (or, in very rare cases, several) people who conceptualize themselves as different avatars of a single entity rather than distinct individuals. We would go so far as to argue that for a married couple, a combined identity is ideal for almost any objective function (so long as the couple holds the same objective function). Once a combined identity is established, its constituent parts become more resistant to outside influence than stand-alone self-identities.

All that said, combined identities are dangerous when contrasted with other identities as there is the possibility that the identity is (1) unreciprocated and unsolicited (as with a stalker or codependent partner), (2) unreciprocated and downright predatory (as with an abusive spouse or cult leader), or (3) was formed under unstable circumstances (such as in high school). In all these cases, combined self-identities can cause significant harm.

Avoid Allowing Your Self-Image-Powered Autopilot to Make Major Decisions

This is one of the most important takeaways from this guide.

Most people live their lives almost completely on autopilot. If you do not make a concerted effort to think critically, your default self-image-powered autopilot will dictate not only your emotional reactions and the information you internalize, but also your major life decisions.

To better understand what this looks like, let us consider James. James gets an email from a friend requesting he join their trip to climb Kilimanjaro. If James determines his response while on autopilot, he will subconsciously ask himself: “Am I the type of person who would say yes when asked by a friend to climb Kilimanjaro?”

Assuming James sees himself as an erudite, well-traveled, adventurous, reliable friend, his autopilot will almost certainly lead him to say, “Yes!”

Were James to instead act pragmatically and submit this question to his higher cognitive functions, testing it against his objective function and ideological tree, his thought process would look quite different. He would think: “What will I/the world gain if I climb Kilimanjaro? What is lost if I climb Kilimanjaro? Can I logically justify the money and time I will spend on this trip? How many children could live a year on the money I am going to spend on this indulgence? Can I justify the tradeoff? Does climbing this mountain contribute to my objective function? Will spending days climbing up an arduous trail even make me happy?”

Being cognizant that we all default to the autopilot method for making decisions can substantially improve our lives by helping us (1) shake ourselves into a moment of lucidity when we realize we are about to make a major decision and (2) better model how those around us will likely react at decision points in their lives. By understanding how other people see themselves, we can predict their actions and reactions with a high degree of certainty.

How to Change

Earlier in this chapter, we discussed how to change our self-image by entering a period of flux. That said, self-images aren’t the only aspects of our behavior we may seek to change, and periods of flux aren’t the only way to change a self-image. Here we will review several systematized methods for realizing—and then securing—the change we want in ourselves and ensuring that our improvements stick.

Costly Thresholds

The start of almost any journey of real self-change should involve taking a step over a “costly threshold.” A costly threshold is something of real and substantial cost to you that is symbolic of the change in yourself you wish to make. This cost doesn’t need to be monetary, but instead can be a social cost or giving up something important to your identity/habits. Be sure the costly threshold you decide to cross is giving something up that it is not something easy to re-acquire, such as alcohol or TV—it must be permanently lost once given up, like a friend network, job, significant other, or money.

Costly thresholds help us clearly signal to ourselves that we have made a real change in our lives. They create cognitive dissonance when we fail to follow-through with the change tied to that threshold. We end up creating the thought pattern of, “Did I give up X for NOTHING!?” when we find ourselves tempted by old habits. Costly thresholds also help us see ourselves as different, new people, which is useful when committing to major character changes.

We strongly recommend anyone inspired to create a new public persona based on this guide to focus on a uniquely effective costly threshold: the outfit and persona change outlined in the next chapter. By changing the way you dress, you reinforce a change in your public and private persona. This is a uniquely effective costly threshold as it not only has the benefit of both monetary and social costs, but also forces you to intentionally contextualize yourself as the new “you” every time you suit up. Getting dressed as your “new and improved” self helps to keep you in character.

Confrontation Patterns

An easy way to ensure change in our behavior is to create extremely simple rules that we do not allow ourselves to break, ever. It is for this reason that abstinence is scientifically more effective than moderation from addictive substances. One of the most life-changing rules we can create for ourselves is a “confrontation pattern.” This rule is specifically designed to help people who feel that they struggle with avoidance patterns.

An avoidance pattern begins when a person avoids something for what usually starts as a trivial reason (this process is also discussed in the “Reinforcement” section). For example, a person may have one negative social interaction at a party, then decide to not go to the next party based on a very slight impulse to not go. Not going to the next party reinforces a habit of not going to parties and the impulse to not to not go to future parties becomes stronger until eventually it snowballs and becomes crippling. This can happen with phobias around everything from dirty objects to flying and rejection (e.g., asking people on a date).

If you recognize that you have developed an avoidance pattern like this and view it as worth your time and effort to remove that pattern from you autopilot, create an opposite but equal set of rules you always follow to breaks it. For example, if you have developed a fear of going to social events, create a rule forcing you to attend any social event you are invited to on a night in which you don’t have other plans and always follow that rule. This can quickly break impulses associated with avoidance patterns around social events.

Proselytizing

Surprisingly, one of the best ways to persuade yourself to maintain a change you have made in your life is to persuade someone else to make the same change. Having convinced another person to make a change in his or her life creates strong cognitive dissonance when you fail to make and maintain the same change in your life, especially when the person you helped points out your hypocrisy to you. In addition to creating cognitive dissonance when you are failing to live up to your values, proselytizing pragmatic values in general acts as a very real costly threshold in which the cost is the social capital you expend promoting a pragmatic outlook on life.

Say David convinces his wife Emily to adopt a pragmatic outlook on life and specifically to stop wallowing in self-hatred after making mistakes (pointing out that indulging in self-pity was not helping her achieve her goals). When Emily later calls David out for doing the exact same thing, she will cause him strong cognitive dissonance, which will make it very easy for him to stop indulging in self-pity.

Because proselytizing to a friend network can be particularly costly in terms of social capital, the Pragmatism Foundation will attempt to set up opportunities for individuals who want to proselytize about changes they want to make in themselves to strangers. For example, we may help you get a speaking gig at a local school where you give a presentation on not acting on anger. After giving a speech on a topic like this to children, most would feel quite silly allowing themselves, as grown adults, to succumb to anger and raise their voices at a loved one or friend.

Tokens

A token is a physical reminder you carry with you to remind you of some pledge you have made to yourself or some change you are trying to create in your character. Tokens are relatively low in terms of effectiveness but also low in terms of cost and can be a great addition to anything you are using to ensure personal change.

For a token to be effective, it should be acquired specifically in association with something you wish to change and be rare or unusual in some way. Examples may be a large old coin you keep in your pocket, or a hair clip you wear every day. While you can procure your own tokens, they can be more effective if given to you by another individual also trying to make the same change in their life you are. For example, if you have pledged to yourself to act more intentionally in accordance with applied pragmatic thought and meet someone through the Pragmatist Foundation who is taking the same journey, obtaining a small keepsake from them that you keep in your pocket every day can help remind you to focus on your goals.

Tokens are useful in that they are a physical reminder of something not to do. When you feel a tendency to do that thing you can reach into your pocket and hold them until that tendency dissipates. After a period of using tokens, you will no longer feel a desire to engage in the behavior they were reminding you to ignore. When this happens, the token can be ceremonially disposed of (throwing it in the ocean, burning it, etc.). Doing this creates a point in your mind from which which is difficult to regress without creating a huge amount of cognitive dissonance.

Association

One way to sustainably remove an unwanted habit is to associate it with something your core character despises (small mindedness, weakness, etc.). For example, if you want to stop drinking alcohol in excess, you may create an association between drinking in excess and weakness instead of the culture of your ancestors. It is easier to vanquish behaviors if you associate them with something for which you have visceral disgust.

Naltrexone

On the subject of strategies for overcoming biological addictions to substances like alcohol under control, let’s talk about pharmacological interventions for dramatic self-reinvention. Naltrexone is an opioid antagonist and can be used to “delete” addictions fairly quickly through the Sinclair Method.

Essentially the Sinclair Method is entails taking a pill (Naltrexone) before engaging in whatever activity you are addicted to. In about 80% of the population, this causes the addiction to quickly fade because the neurological reward pathway that hijacks your brain to force you to do something that your logical mind opposes breaks. Naltrexone works great at tackling addictions to gaming, gambling, overeating, sex, and drinking, (the primary addiction against which Naltrexone is infective is nicotine due to different neurological paths being involved). It is uniquely great at handling addictions you don’t want to totally shed.

While the use of Naltrexone for addiction treatment is common in some countries, it is fairly rare in the US, so if you want to get your hands on it in the USA one of the only strategies is to buy it illegally from shady Indian websites. That said, we are not recommending you do so, nor are we recommending the use of Naltrexone at all. You should consult your doctor and other trained professionals for help with addiction.

When Naltrexone is used in the US, it is (at least at the time of publication) commonly used incorrectly—as if it were an addiction suppressant to help with abstinence (which studies show is completely pointless). Even when you are not self-medicating, be sure to do your research! Naltrexone is just one of many examples how many medical professionals can fall behind on reading new research.

Social Pressures

One of the most effective but difficult-to-engineer mechanisms of maintaining desired change is sustained social pressure and group accountability. While it is easy to join a social group that will pressure you to be a certain way, it is much harder to join a social group that will pressure you to make the changes you want to make in yourself.

There are a number of somewhat independent mechanisms through which social pressures reinforce behavioral changes:

• Conditioning: Members of a group can push back when you do something out of line with your desired character. If you receive reliable and immediate negative or positive feedback in reaction to a specific behavior, you will be able to more easily correct said behavior.

• Conformity: As much as we hate it, we have an innate desire to “fit in with a group,” so we might as well leverage this evolved tendency to our advantage. Part of fitting in with a group involves adapting to that group’s normative culture. By creating groups with a beneficial normative culture and being clear that one of the group’s core purposes is to provide beneficial normative culture, we can easily improve ourselves.

• Group identity: When we believe we “fit in with a group,” we begin to adopt that group into our self-identities. This is an easy way to change the how we perceive ourselves.

• Accountability: When we know someone else is going to say or think, “You said you would do x but didn’t follow-through,” we are much more likely to follow-through than we would if we were only accountable to ourselves (it is easier to make sure you don’t skip your morning jog when you are doing it with someone else).

Utilizing group influence to solidify the change we want in ourselves does not require large groups. Even a single additional person who helps you actualize the change you want in yourself can have an enormous impact. However, this impact will not be realized to its full potential unless you interact with said person in an intentional way.

One effective way to build this intentionality is for you and this person to adopt a daily routine such as a strategy walk or daily phone call in which you discuss your life strategy and how you are striving to achieve it daily. Not only does this create accountability but talking something through with another person allows you to access different thought pathways than those you access when writing or thinking by yourself (slightly different parts of your brain process spoken information when contrasted with written information, to tackle a topic with 100% of your potential you will need to both talk and write about it).

Without a social group, friend, or romantic partner who is willing to reinforce the change you want to see in yourself (or worse still, friends or partners who actively fight for the status quo), you will find improvement to be extremely difficult, if not impossible.

Thought Experiments

Most of the mechanisms for behavior change we discuss focus on changing the way you react to various stimuli. However, through changing the way you view situations in a systematic way you can systematically alter the stimuli, in turn changing behavior.

You may, for example, create a habit of believing that you will only have sustained free will for about the next five minutes and will only regain it occasionally. This is easy to believe because, as we have regularly discussed in this guide, your autopilot-impulse-driven behavior almost always overwhelms your lucid mind. In a very real way, you will not have free will for the majority of the future of your life.

Let’s explore how this perspective change might play out in a few scenarios:

(1)

• Impulse: “I’ll have an hour to do this project tomorrow, so I don’t need to do it now.”

• Perspective shift: “Do I expect that during that hour I have available tomorrow I’ll actually do this project? What does my past behavior imply about whether I will actually do it?”

• Result: “Since I don’t actually expect I’ll spend that hour tomorrow doing the project, I’d better do it now.”

(2)

• Impulse: “Once I’m back from vacation I’ll start going to the gym every day”

• Perspective shift: “Based on what I know about myself, will I actually start going to the gym daily when I’m back from vacation? If I had to bet money on it, which side would I bet on?”

• Result: “Since I probably won’t start going to the gym daily when I’m back from vacation as things currently stand, I’d better use the next 5 minutes to begin tweaking the situation to increase my odds of success, such as by picking the gym I’ll go to, and asking a friend that lives nearby if he wants to go to the gym with me regularly.”

(3)

• Impulse: “I don’t need to make this decision about where to invest my money now; I can make it at any time.”

• Perspective shift: “If I don’t make this investment decision now, when do I predict I will actually make it? Will it be later this week, or more realistically, months from now?”

• Result: “Since this investment decision will never feel urgent, I know I’ll probably by default put off making it for a long time, but since I don’t have time to make the decision thoroughly right now, I should set aside 3 hours on Saturday to do it, which I can block off in my calendar right now.”

(4)

• Impulse: “I’ll choose not to eat those delicious cookies if I leave them on the kitchen table.”

• Perspective shift: “Even if I successfully avoid eating the cookies on the table a few of the times that I pass them, do I expect that I will avoid them every time? Or will eventually give in and eat them?”

• Result: “Since I am in control of the decision right now, I should put the cookies into a jar that is out of sight, so that I won’t be tempted over and over again every time I pass the table.”

This perspective shift is powerful for two reasons. The first is that is forces you to take ownership of your current behavior by jarring you into a state of lucidity. Secondly, it forces you to recognize that you can predict your most likely future behavior from your past behavior. For example, if you almost always drink more than you want to when you go out with your friend Don, you’ll almost certainly do it next time too, unless something about you or that situation is significantly different next time around.

More generally, if you almost always do action A1 in situation S1, why would you assume you’ll now instead do a different action—A2—in the same situation? The fact that you can “choose” to do A2 instead of A1 is not convincing because last time, and the time before that, you could have chosen A2 instead—but you didn’t; you chose A1.

Whatever previously drove you to action A1 will likely cause drive you to A1 again. If you want to do A2 instead of A1, then you should do what you can right now (while you have awareness and control over the next 5 minutes) to change the future situation from S1 to S2, where S2 is a new situation that pushes the balance towards your choosing action A2 instead of A1. It could be that the change from S1 to S2 is a change you make in the surrounding environment (e.g., moving the cookies), or it could be a change in yourself (e.g., reminding yourself regularly about why you care about going to the gym), but whatever it is, it had better be a change. Otherwise, you’re stuck doing A1.[40]

But it’s Not That Simple

As much as we want a simple explanation for errant emotional states and human behavior, the nuances of this interaction are quite complex. Every human is ultimately a combination of their genetics, their life experiences, and who they choose to be. You have some control over how much each of those things makes up who you are, but you do not have the power to free yourself from one entirely.

What we have tried to focus on in this guide are aspects of human interaction over which we have the capacity to exercise control.

That said, there are factors that influence our behavior that are outside our control, and it is worthwhile for us to be aware of them. These external influencers fall into five broad categories: genetic influencers, traumatic life events, addictions, priming influencers, and logical fallacies and biases.

Genetic Influencers

It is common knowledge that certain aspects of our personality are inherited. It is not unusual to hear someone state, “he has his father’s hot temper,” and not think twice about the implications, specifically that he either inherited a hot temper from his father in his genes or that he inherited the temper through how he was raised. Twin studies are studies in which scientists look for similarities more often shared by identical twins than by fraternal twins, allowing them to identify aspects of a person’s character that are linked to genetics and not just how a person was raised. Such studies have provided a perpetually growing body of evidence that, yes, some portions of our personality are influenced by our genes.

Sometimes these genetic predispositions are as simple as an increased susceptibility to addiction while at other times they are significantly more nuanced, as is the case with mood disorders like bipolar and depression. There is copious evidence that such disorders are heavily reliant on our genetics. In the case of bipolar disorder, if one identical twin has it, there is a 60% probability that the other will have it as well.

There is even evidence that our genetic predispositions may extend beyond our personalities and into our ideologies. The nascent field of genopolitics specifically studies how our genes and brain morphology impact our political alignment. For example, one study published by Dr. Schreiber in 2013 indicates he could predict an individual’s political affiliation with 82.9% accuracy by how their brain structures reacted during a gambling task. Despite a few flashy results like Dr. Schreiber’s, the field is still in its nascency and may not carry as much weight as popular science magazines would have you believe.

Regardless of how new fields like genopolitics shake out, few in the scientific community would argue our genetics play no role in our cognition. Keep in mind that it is widely accepted that certain psychological conditions are, at their core, genetic/physiological in nature and that while the advice in this guide may help a psychologically healthy person achieve their goals, it isn’t going to be effective at altering a physiological abnormality.

Traumatic Life Events

Occasionally a person may experience an event so traumatic it alters the way his or her brain works. People who suffer from extreme PTSD will have their hippocampus shrink significantly in size. The reactions that result from this sort of atrophying of a brain structure are not something that an altered image of your identity can overcome. Only specialized therapy can help. That said, such events are exceedingly rare.

Addictions

It should go without saying that addictions will influence your behavior and are to some extent beyond the control of your self-image (though not entirely). Addictions occur when the normal reward pathways in our brains that evolved to get us to act in beneficial ways become hijacked and begin to work in ways that harm us.

These hijacking factors can be obvious culprits like chemicals that directly act on our reward pathways (cocaine), overindulgence in stimuli that activate base reward pathways (food and exercise), and even indulgence in activities that simulate genuine accomplishment, thereby activating our brains’ reward pathways (video games and gambling). It is worth noting that the level of one of these activities one must indulge in before addiction takes hold is heavily influenced by an individual’s genetics.

Addiction exists within your brain’s normal pathways. Your addiction isn’t a small voice in your head nagging you to partake in an action that “the real you” knows is wrong. Your addiction has access to 100% of the mental processing capacity the rest of “you” does and will utilize that power to win any struggle against the “real you.” Addiction being the result of disruption in your brain’s intended pathways is why pharmacological intervention like Naltrexone enjoy success in combating addictions where logic alone fails.

Because the addicted version of yourself will always control your autopilot, the only way out of an addiction outside of a pharmacological intervention involves entering a period of flux and referencing your objective function to create an altered identity more capable of rejecting temptation (this is why AA forces its members to believe in a higher power, as it is the only objective function its creators could conceive of as being concrete and simple enough to counteract the autopilot controlling forces of addiction).

Finally, it is worth noting that, contrary to what one may assume, studies have repeatedly shown abstinence from whatever you are addicted to is much easier than moderation. When you think about this, it makes sense. Consider someone addicted to alcohol feeling an impulse to have a beer: the person can either go through the fairly simple mental processes of saying “I don’t drink alcohol” to shut off the impulse or the more complex process of “How many beers have I had to-day? Was that too many?” The complexity of the latter process makes it less effective at combating the impulse to drink.

Priming Influencers

Simply put, priming takes place when exposure to one stimulus influences our response to another stimulus. For example, you will be able to recognize the word “nurse” faster after the word “doctor” than after the word “bread” because the neural pathways associated with medical professions has been primed and has an easier time activating.

Think of your brain as requiring a certain level of stimulation to pursue certain thoughts (e.g., there is a certain level of nurse related paraphernalia or letters in the word n***e you need to see before you think the word “nurse”). Similar but ultimately non-pertinent stimulation can lower this threshold dramatically (e.g., if you had heard the word “doctor” recently, you would think the word nurse at a lower level of “nurse” related input).

This lowering of thresholds isn’t limited to simple thoughts; it can also include behavior patterns—even those we typically think of as “moral” and “social.” Essentially, environmental stimuli priming us can cause us to act like different people. For example, people can be influenced to cheat less by being reminded of the Ten Commandments (even if they are not religious), signing a pledge to be honest, or even by viewing a pair of human eyes painted on a box (which gives the impression one is being watched and held accountable).

The easiest way to protect ourselves against the influences of priming is to mentally divide our internal model of ourselves into an “outer model” and a “core model.” The more complex outer model is the part of us that directly influences our behavior and is susceptible to priming effects, while the inner model is the reference sheet we use to maintain the fidelity of the outer model as it morphs over time.

This morphing of our outer mental model over time is not a sign of personal failure and part of normal human life—unless, of course, we allow our entire self-image to be the product of priming and never self-correct when we feel ourselves drifting.

Logical Fallacies and Biases

Logical fallacies and biases are very much like optical illusions but in the way our brain processes information. In an optical illusion, we perceive the world incorrectly because our brain is taking a shortcut that usually works, but in rare instances causes us to misperceive reality (like how we perceive the spaces in between the squares in the image below changing from white to black due to lateral inhibition in neural pathways).

In the same fashion, shortcuts our brains use to effectively process the massive amounts of information we take in daily can sometimes lead us to perceive arguments as rational that are not or pursue behaviors that don’t correlate with our self-image.

For example, we will perceive an idea that is popular as being more correct than an idea that is unpopular—even though we logically know that the popularity of an idea is not proof of its validity. We do this because most of the time, ideas that are popular have been vetted by other people and thus we do not need to personally expend as much mental energy validating them.

Fallacies and biases present a twofold challenge to a pragmatic outlook on life. First, studies have shown that even if we are aware of a bias, we are still susceptible to it. Worse, even if we succeed in admitting that we arrived at a conclusion due to an illogical bias, studies show we do not value that conclusion less. Even though we know the above picture is an optical illusion, we still see it as moving. So it goes with biased conclusions.

The second, and perhaps more damaging effect of biases and fallacies is that extensive knowledge about them does more to obfuscate our perception of reality than clarify it. Because knowledge of biases does nothing (or very little) to protect us from them, individuals with extensive knowledge of biases are more likely to use said knowledge to protect themselves from views that contradict their own rather than challenge their current worldviews. We will dismiss the ideas of others as being the result of a bias without truly processing those new ideas, but not use the same knowledge of biases to question our own ideas. (If you are someone who takes pride in your knowledge of fallacies and biases, honestly ask yourself if you have ever changed your own view of the world based on that knowledge.)

For this reason, while knowledge of biases and fallacies may help you win a debate, it will not help you improve yourself. The only two questions worth asking yourself to overcome a bias are: “Why am I doing this?” and “Why do I think this?” If you can train yourself to answer those questions honestly, the effect biases will have on you will be mitigated more than a lifetime spent researching logical fallacies and biases ever could.

Brain States Follow Physiological States

Sometimes our brains react emotionally to stimuli in very strange ways. It is common to hear things like: “Forcing yourself to smile makes you happier” and assume that you are hearing a pop-psychology myth. This is not the case. In fact, studies have even shown that Botox injections that paralyze the muscles in someone’s face and prevent them from frowning will make them happier while removing laugh lines with cosmetic surgery will make someone more depressed.

The findings associated with smiling are not unique. There is a virtual mountain of studies showing that facial expressions, the way you move, physical actions, and the position of your body can all affect your mental state. Here a just a few examples:

• Striking a “power pose” will make you more confident and increase your testosterone levels while decreasing your cortisol levels

• Sitting with good posture will make you happier

• Nodding while being told something will make you more likely to believe it

• If you hug yourself, you can reduce the perception of pain

• If you sit up straight, you are more likely to remember positive memories

• Striking a constricted pose (keeping your limbs close to your body and occupying minimal space) will make you less comfortable making risky bets

• A slow slumped walk will decrease perceived energy levels while skipping will make you feel more energetic

Note: There have been recent studies challenging the facial feedback hypothesis as well as others that challenge the somatic marker hypothesis. This is the first case in this book where the two authors primary standard of evidence conflicts with Simone’s being scientific method and Malcolm’s being expert consensus within the scientific community. Simone believes that the current body of research no longer supports these theories while Malcolm believes it is not worth throwing them out until expert consensus has turned against them. We have chosen to leave this section as is but post this disclaimer as an example of how recognizing you are working off of a different standard of evidence than someone else can lead to a more productive discussion about the validity of an ideology.

Step 4: Define Your Public Character

Your public character is the person you present to other people. This character should be intentionally created to maximize your ability to achieve your objective function. You initially may not feel comfortable with the idea that your internal self-image and public character are different, assuming that your external character should always be the same as your internal character. At the very least, you may question why one should put effort into developing a separate external character.

In this chapter, we will review why it is necessary to create a separate external character and outline how to create an effective character for achieving your desired goals.

Why Have Differing Public and Internal Characters?

There are three core reasons to not use your internal character as your external character.

1) Your Public and Internal Characters are Not the Same Type of Thing

Your internal character is primarily used as a cheat sheet for your brain. Your internal self-image helps you decide how to react emotionally to stimuli and what information to dismiss without careful analysis. In contrast, your public character is what other people use to categorize you within their heads and determine what place you should have in their lives.

Asking why you cannot just use your internal character as your public character is like asking why Microsoft doesn’t just write word processing application code on the box in which Microsoft Wordis sold. While the code is Microsoft Word, it is not helpful to others to see the code when deciding how to use Microsoft Word in their lives. When selecting word processing software, people prefer to see pictures of word document editing interfaces and their features, which better communicate the way they interface with Microsoft Word.

2) Most People Lack Time the Understand Your Inner Character

It is narcissistic to assume people will (and should) invest the immense time and mental processing power needed to understand the inner you. You are an intricate, nuanced person. It would take someone years to comprehend you in all your beautiful complexity and yet the vast majority of people you will ever meet in your life will expend less than an hour of concerted focus getting to know and understand you. By insisting on displaying the “real you” in public, you are essentially demanding that people make an immense investment of time, thought, and emotion to understand you.

If we use the Microsoft Word analogy, this would be like a Microsoft employee arguing that if people “really cared about the product” they would take the time to read the code and understand it, when all the customer really cares about is how that product relates to them and what role it will serve in their lives, which is what the product’s box art and advertisements convey.

If you present a well-crafted public persona (rather than your inner model of self), rest assured that some people will still come to know the “real you.” It is reasonable to expect people like your spouse and closest friends to get to know your more nuanced inner self. Having a nicely packaged public persona does not prevent these people from getting to know the “real you.” In fact, a well-constructed public persona may expand the audience of people who take the time to get to know the real you by enticing more people to want to know you better.

3) Internal Self-images Come Across as Forgettable and Bland in Public

Trying to publicly present your inner model of self will make you come across as bland and forgettable. When you attempt to portray the inner “you” in public, all people will be able to process in the five minutes (and that’s being very generous) they spend thinking about you will not appear very different from anyone else trying to portray their inner selves (as opposed to a specially crafted public persona). Most normal, well-adjusted people in any given culture trying to show their “real selves” look 80% identical to everyone else trying to portray their real selves and thereby come off as bland.

Imagine that Microsoft Word and its competitors printed the source code for their respective word processing programs on their boxes. From the consumer’s perspective, they would all look about the same. Even if someone did take the time to try to understand the code, the boxes would still end up looking indistinguishable, as huge swaths of each program are likely to be quite similar. In much the same way, two people who live in the same culture will almost certainly have 80%+ overlap in terms of who they “really are.”

If instead of just publishing the source code on the box, software developers decided to publish a feature list, there would still be almost no differentiation between the various word processing software options—there would likely be at least 70%+ feature overlap (spell check, fonts, margins, etc.). This is the same with people. Even if you just try to give strangers a more easily digestible version of who you are, you will come off as very similar to anyone else who exists within your cultural context (e.g., you are a nice, clever, funny, loving person who is loyal to your friends and hardworking, but who likes to kick back and relax every now and then).

As with box art advertising word processing software, you need to focus on what is different about you. In the same way it would not make sense for Microsoft Word marketers to focus on spell check in advertisements and on box art (unless it had the best spell check feature in its class as reviewed by an independent study), it would not make sense for you to advertise how funny you think you are unless it is widely accepted that you are uniquely funny (e.g., you are a professional comedian).

However, this “box art” analogy only goes so far. While it does effectively illustrate that:

1. The purpose of your public personality is to help people contextualize what place you have in their lives,

2. That the vast majority of “the real you” will overlap with others in your peer group, and

3. The way most people will distinguish you from others is by specifically highlighting the ways you differ from others, and these characteristics may be far from what you would consider to be your core personality traits.

The analogy does not appreciate the unique manner in which our brain processes individuals.

In everything from facial processing to speech, the way our brains process social interaction is vastly different from how we process generic stimuli, such as vision of a grassy field or the sound of traffic. Our brains use a series of ingrained pathways to take the enormously complex information about someone—collected over just few moments of exposure—and create a simple, realistically storable, mental model of who that person is. By appreciating how this is done, we can create public versions of ourselves that are easier for people to interact with.

But I’m a Social Chameleon!

At this point you may be thinking: “Yes, I agree with you that my external character shouldn’t be the same as my internal character, but that doesn’t mean I need to expend mental effort creating one. I naturally and effortlessly adopt different external characters in different social groups and never have trouble blending in. I am a social chameleon!”

This is the equivalent of saying, “I am capable of coming off as generic in any context and am content with being forgettable.” Effortlessly adapting to be invisible in different social contexts is a skill with which every socially competent human is born. People who do not exercise this ability are not doing so because of a lack of ability to fit in but because for whatever reason they want to leave an impact on people (assuming they have a base level of social competence). Sometimes the reason someone wants to leave an impact is puerile and self-masturbatory; other times a person desires to leave an impact to achieve a specific objective. Attempting to make the desired impact is difficult, risky, and something that even the most charismatic and tactful individual will fail at occasionally, which translates to having to deal with a chance of rejection every time you attempt it. To protect their self-images, many individuals who fear this rejection contextualize their genericness as a special skill—that of the “social chameleon.”

As much as Western society denigrates the idea of being generic and forgettable, it isn’t intrinsically a bad thing. In fact, being generic and forgettable could be the best path towards your objective function. For example, if you are just trying to maximize positive emotional states or believe the best way to impact the world is through operating invisibly, then the rest of this chapter will not apply much to you. However, it is important that you understand the logical underpinnings of the path you are intentionally taking and have it not be a path you chose by default out of a fear of rejection.

On the other hand, if you want to impact the world in a manner that leaves you personally remembered/recognized for your work, or should you wish to influence a large number of people through the avatar of your own person (e.g., if you want to be “classically successful”), then this strategy is patently ineffective. Obviously, it is still possible to be generic and accidentally fall into success put it certainly doesn’t help your chances.

(Should you decide to skip the rest of the book, please leave us a review if you enjoyed what you’ve read. Positive reviews dramatically lower the cost of advertising the book. As all our profits go to nonprofit efforts like our school, every dollar not spent on advertising is one spent more directly helping people.)

Creating an Easily Digestible Public Identity

People are always the main characters of their own lives. To every single person who knows you and interacts with you, you are a side character, a supporting character. When you are creating your public identity, don’t try to create the best protagonist you can, you are attempting to create the best supporting character you can.

Protagonists and supporting characters are written very differently for a good reason. For example, the most common protagonist type is the Mary Sue, but a Mary Sue type character in any role but the lead becomes the type of character that stands in the crowd and is played by an unpaid extra. Think about all of your favorite side characters from movies, books, and TV shows. Almost all of them will be bold, simple archetypes. This is because our brains hate to have nuanced processing foisted upon them. Our brains prefer that side characters be easy to categorize archetypes.

When “shopping” for whatever public persona you choose to adopt, sites like TVTropes.org are great places to look for inspiration. Keep in mind that, while there is no harm in borrowing the trope of a popular character type from media, you will be able to grab more mental space from others if you build the trope of a character that is not yet popularly depicted, but a trope society collectively “wished existed.”

Examples of these powerful tropes emerging can be seen in public figures like Sarah Palin, Anna Wintour, Donald Trump, and George Takei. They presented personas to the world that were simple and easy to understand that fit in with existing tropes, allowing them to resonate strongly with the public. In some cases, the tropes that real people present through their public personalities work their way into popular media going forward.

When we say society collectively “wished these tropes existed,” we do not imply that society necessarily likes these characterizations of people. We simply mean such tropes fit snugly into our brains as bold, simple, and easy to understand. Consider a character like Professor Umbridge from the Harry Potter series. Few people “like” Professor Umbridge, nor do they “want” her to exist, but even if you had never encountered her character before, were you to meet her in person, you would feel a sense of satisfaction with how snugly her character fits into your brain. Moreover, you would remember that person for years after only a brief encounter.

Ultimately, not everyone creating a public persona needs to focus on ease of digestibility. As stated before, this method is only necessary to study for individuals who want to be memorable, become effective leaders, act as influencers in interpersonal groups, and/or operate on a public stage.

Outlining your Public Persona

The following steps will have utility to any individual, even those that prefer to go unnoticed:

1. Identify what, specifically, you want to achieve in life to maximize your objective function. For example, you may decide you want to be a successful businessperson, an editor at a major newspaper, a famous preacher, or a senior engineer at a major tech firm.

2. Make a list of individuals who have achieved these roles in the past. For example, a young woman who decides she wants to be a successful businesswoman might identify the top 100 most powerful women in business (removing all the women that had gained their power through paths not available to her like celebrity fame, inheritance, or marriage).

3. Carefully analyze these individuals. Read profiles on them, review their educational and job histories on LinkedIn or Wikipedia, watch their interviews and speeches, and listen to recordings of their voices. Look for similarities in the way they dress, speak, move, and ascend to their current roles.

This process will reveal common features of individuals who are successful in your field. Focus on the features that differentiate these individuals from societal norms, as any features that are societal norms are likely unimportant and only apparent because they would appear in any subsection of the population. What you must specifically attempt to identify is which traits, mannerisms, and outfits are common among this group of people successful in your desired field but uncommon among the general population.

Making the Change

Unless you have taken the above steps in the past or have very low ambitions for your future, you will likely realize that your current public identity is far from optimal for achieving your goals in life. The normal response for a human brain being told it needs to put significant effort into something is to scramble for an excuse that will allow it to maintain inaction and the status quo.

You may be thinking “I need to wait a while before making a major change in my personality, wardrobe, and speech patterns.” This is nothing but a tawdry justification for inaction and is not true. Will some people ask you: “Why the change?” Probably. Will some people tease you? Maybe. Will the change be a hassle? Yes. But these issues are not important when contrasted with the potential benefits.

There will be no convenient time to rework your character. If you do not start now, you may never transition into the type of person you need to be to achieve your goals in life (or at the very least, you will add unnecessary difficulty to achieving your goals).

Moreover, making a concerted change to your public image has benefits that extend beyond how other people perceive you. Specifically, your new outfit and public personality act as a constant signal to yourself that you have made a conscious decision to change and improve. Wardrobe and appearance changes hold unique utility as they are monetarily and socially costly to adopt, which makes them a “costly threshold.” If you are unwilling to step over that threshold, it is unlikely any of the changes you have decided to make to yourself through the course of reading this guide will stick.

The Importance of Flaws

“He has all of the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”

– Winston Churchill

The first step in executing on the public persona you envision for yourself is to check it for viability. Is this character believable?

We previously mentioned that strong public personas:

• Are clear, compelling, and easily digestible

• Depict a character trope that is not yet common, but the world would love to see

But to be believable, strong public personas must also contain flaws. The single biggest mistake individuals make when crafting a public persona is attempting to craft a “flawless persona” that displays all virtues and no obvious vices. It is difficult to emphasize just how disastrous these “flawless personas” are to the way people perceive you.

When someone is asked by someone else (or asks themselves), “What is wrong with X person?” they will always come up with an answer. When you attempt to create a “flawless persona,” that answer will be random (because nobody is going to believe you are perfect). By creating an “intentionally flawed persona,” you can choose what people determine is wrong with you. In addition to making your public persona believable, a chosen flaw yields immense advantages.

Imagine two individuals: Kenneth and Ichiro. Kenneth chose to make a “flawless” public persona and only highlight virtues, whereas Ichiro choses to display his arrogance as a clear and public vice.

Whenever someone asks what is wrong with Ichiro, people always say he is arrogant. When people ask what is wrong with Kenneth, they make up an answer. If we ask ten people what is wrong with Kenneth and Ichiro, we will be told up to ten different things that are wrong with Kenneth, whereas we will only hear about one thing that is wrong with Ichiro (his arrogance).

If the people who know Kenneth ask each other the same question, one may say, “Well, I think Kenneth is corrupt” and the other may say, “Yeah, well I think Kenneth is hiding something about himself.” Now, each of these two people have more ideas about what is wrong about Kenneth: that he is both corrupt and a liar, whereas they only think one thing is wrong with Ichiro. As the example with Kenneth and Ichiro demonstrates, the negative effects of “flawless personas” scale with the scale of the arena in which an individual is playing.

The issue is extremely apparent in political races. Strong and obvious flaws combined with a powerful character grant a politician and his or her supporters a remarkable ability to shrug off attacks. Any jab opponents make about this politician’s chosen public flaws enable a supporter to say “Well, sure, I already knew that.” Claims of vices unrelated to this politician’s public vices are easy to shrug off. “That’s ridiculous,” supporters say. “I know what’s wrong with him and that’s not it.”

You can see this dynamic play out amongst candidates like Bill Clinton, Sarah Palin, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump. Attacks against Donald Trump claiming he wasn’t good at business gained almost no hold in the media—despite ample evidence suggesting the attacks held weight. This is because such claims ran contrary to Trump’s easy-to-digest persona, which proudly features a collection of obvious flaws. When people are told Trump is bad at business they think, “I already know what is wrong with Trump and that isn’t it.”

We would go so far as to say most presidential elections can be predicted by looking for the candidate with the less vague flaws. A candidate with vague flaws will almost always lose to a candidate with pronounced character driving flaws.

Think carefully about the flaws you will choose to exhibit in public.

There are two types of flaws we recommend considering:

• Flaws that you can’t seem to shake no matter what you do. There may be some issues you have that would be impractically difficult to suppress or impossible to overcome. Consider unashamedly wearing these flaws on your sleeve. Winston Churchill offers a spectacular example of this. As, Tyrion Lannister, the vice-happy dwarf from Game of Thrones who at one point quipped, “Once you’ve accepted your flaws, no one can use them against you.”

• Flaws that “seem” terrible but that don’t disqualify you from achieving your goals. Bill Clinton’s serial philandering may seem extremely negative to his opponents, however, in reality, nobody really cares (except his wife) and while some may view the behavior as immoral, it does not suggest Clinton is a dangerous or incompetent president and might even telegraph to many that he is a classic, dominant “alpha male” an element people like in leaders (obviously, the concept of an alpha male has long been challenged as a scientific concept but it still exists as a trope in our society). We would go so far as to say the only thing about his philandering that rubbed the public the wrong way was that it wasn’t with attractive enough women, which is the exception proving the rule (it was not within Bill Clinton’s public character to be the type of person who slept with women who weren’t classically attractive and therefore people took genuine exception to it).

A Note on Attractiveness and Moral Outrage: As every one-star review for this book mentions the above point, it warrants elaboration (this was true at the time this section was added; now a few negative reviews argue the book is boring, which we can’t argue against). We do not claim that the public’s distinctly negative reaction to Bill Clinton’s philandering is a good thing—it’s just a fact. Humans react with more moral repulsion on average to people acting outside of the stereotypes they’ve attached to them. The affair that ultimately inspired the House of Representatives to issue Articles of Impeachment against Bill Clinton did not involve a woman who looked like the “type” of person with whom the public expected a president to cheat, which exacerbated the media’s resulting moral outrage.

The public’s reaction to Bill Clinton’s affair stands in stark contrast to the lack of moral outrage associated with the affairs between John F Kennedy / Marilyn Monroe and Trump / Stormy Daniels (the second of which happened after this book was released, somewhat proving the point—the public was more concerned about the affair’s coverup than the affair itself, while the inverse was true in Bill Clinton’s case).

This dynamic is also at play in rape-related court cases, in which, sadly, it has been found that attractive rapists get shorter sentences and people who rape less attractive individuals are seen as more personally culpable. This reality is horrifying and morally wrong, but such doesn’t change the fact that it’s reality. Humans judge the morality of actions based on the perceived attractiveness of the victims, and humans punish people extra for behaving “out of character.”

(Should you be willing to cast a vote in favor of accepting inconvenient truths over uncomfortable realities, please drop us a review on Amazon. Now back to the book.)

When choosing a flaw in this category, make sure it is a genuine, maligned flaw yielding real social costs (but doesn’t affect your specific goals). You will almost certainly be tempted to choose a flaw that doesn’t really have a social cost (e.g., being clumsy). Harmless flaws have zero purchase in people’s mental models and are the same as having a “flawless personality.”

Outline Your Final Public Persona Carefully

When crafting a public persona, it is useful to outline its various component parts. These include (but may not be limited to):

• Clothing and accessories

• Styling (haircut, hairstyle, grooming, makeup)

• Predilections (what you drink, eat, and broadcast as a hobby)

• Speech patterns (accent, vocabulary, volume level)

• Public mannerisms (posture, gestures, movement)

• Goals and achievements (optimal graduate school degrees to obtain, job titles to strive for, club memberships to obtain, etc.)

Once you have created a basic outline, re-evaluate what you have. Ask yourself:

• Does this depict a character that is simple, memorable, and easy to digest?

• Is this character significantly different from the general population?

• Is this character in line with my internal personality model?

• Is this character in line with my ideologies?

• Is this character the best possible tool to execute on my ideologies in a way that will maximize my objective function?

You will likely need to refine this character quite a bit before it is ready for implementation. We strongly recommend discussing your reasoning and conclusions with a close friend who understands your goals and the framework presented in this guide.

Intentionally Managing your Social Network

Finally, we will briefly explore how to examine your interactions with others on an individual basis.

Our society treats friendship as some form of immutable magic in our lives from which we can only benefit. This view can be proven demonstrably false and toxic with even the slightest investigation. We all know of people with friends who do nothing but hold them back, enable their bad habits, or emotionally tear them down. A concrete reason stands behind every friend you have, as maintaining friendships requires effort that must be justified.

All friendships have a cost in terms of time. Because of this, the number of friends we can have is finite and every new friend you decide to manage not only precludes the possibility of another friendship, but also saps time you could spend doing something else. A poorly matched friendship could be preventing you from finding a friend who is a better match.

Whatever your objective function may be, managing friendships intentionally will always be superior to allowing friendships to form and fade serendipitously. The first step in managing your friend network is to take stock of it.

How to Take Stock of Your Friend Network:

• Create a list of who your friends are. Note why these people are your friends, and estimate the number of hours you spend each month interacting with each.

• Identify individuals who are either low utility to you or you don’t really “like” being friends with. Dial down your interaction with them while dialing up interaction with “better friends.”

• Identify areas in which your friend network is weak (e.g., you do not have any friends who live close to you, you do not have any friends you can bounce business ideas off of, etc.). Focus time and energy on shoring up those areas of your friend network by meeting new people in a directed manner.

• Optional: Use a free CRM system like Streak to manage your friend network efficiently, keep track of recent conversations, and remind yourself when you haven’t contacted a friend in a while.

Types of Friends

When sorting through your existing friend network, it is useful to understand why someone is your friend. By determining the reasons why your friends are your friends, you can more easily decide how much time/effort to allocate to each person. Remember that every friendship you choose to maintain either represents another friendship that you will never have or time/resources that could otherwise be directed towards other areas of your life.

There are four common types of friends:

Utility Friends
Convenience Friends
Character-Reinforcing Friends
Character-Inclusive Friends

Utility Friends

Utility friends are friends that have access to a limited exclusive resource you value (or may have access to such a resource in the future).

Relationships with utility friends are primarily driven by access or potential future access to an exclusive resource. This resource can range to anything from sex, knowledge about a certain topic, good life advice, social capital, money, business contacts, access to parties/venues/clubs, interesting ideas that challenge you intellectually, social status, etc. Many of the resources we seek through utility friendships are non-economic in nature and instead revolve around things like spirited debate, the ability to intellectually challenge you, or the ability to expose you to new ideas.

As emotionally healthy individuals reach middle age, utility friends typically comprise the majority of their friendships as it is difficult to maintain large friend networks and, with all else being equal, a friend that has something to offer you or who can improve you as an individual is always going to be preferable to one who cannot.

Convenience Friends

Convenience friends are friends that you associate with primarily because you naturally encounter them on a regular basis. Convenience friends include people ranging from classmates to colleagues, roommates, family members, neighbors, fellow hobbyists, or people who frequent your favorite bar.

Convenience friends are not people with whom you have any special connection other than the emotional connection humans inevitably develop between people living in close proximity (so long as they do not actively dislike them). This connection feels special to people—especially younger, less-experienced people—but it is a feeling that humans inevitably form with any group of “allies” who operate in close proximity for long periods of time.

When we are younger, convenience friends will make up the majority of our friendships. With age and relocation, the transient nature of these relationships becomes apparent and they decrease as a portion of our friend networks. Normal, emotionally stable adults regularly replace old convenience friend groups with new ones as life circumstances change (i.e., when they leave a job, while they may stay in touch with a few coworkers, those co-workers will largely be replaced as friends by your new coworkers).

The earlier in life we learn not to invest significant time in convenience friendships, the better off we are in the long run. Whenever you enter a new environment, try to meet as many individuals as possible and get to know them as well as possible.

Having met a large sample of potential friends, focus building relationships with the ones who yield some form of utility. This is not what you will do on autopilot; studies have repeatedly shown that the friends we invest the most time and emotions into are those that are serendipitously placed closest to us (such as individuals who happen to work on your floor at work or those who live next door).

Ideally, most of your friends—especially those to whom you devote significant time and resources—will be utility friends. Again, remember that every friendship you settle on takes the place of another friendship or project you will never get to explore as your time is inherently limited.

Character-Reinforcing Friends

Character-reinforcing friendships help us better align ourselves with our internal self-images. Examples of friends who fall into this category include:

• People you are still friends with only because you don’t like to see yourself as someone who casts off old friends as your life moves on (e.g., convenience friends who no longer are convenient).

• People who you haven’t cast off as friends because they don’t have many other friends and you want to see yourself as nice.

• People you remain friends with to relive moments of some past part of your life you cling to or with whom you share a memory that is important to both of your identities.

• People you are friends with because of their minority status (e.g., a token gay/black/white/Asian/Latino/etc. friend that reinforces how magnanimous and unbiased you are).

• Someone you are friends with as your “zany” friend with a lot of character.

• Someone you are friends with because the kind of protagonist you see yourself to be needs that sort of supporting character (such as a dashing husband, a sibling struggling with addiction/mental illness only you can save, an admiring mentee, etc.) to make sense.

This type of friendship becomes increasingly common through high school/college and again in old age.

A character reinforcing friend is arguably the best type of friend to be to someone else because it requires the lowest time investment on your part. Conversely, a character-reinforcing friend is the worst type of friend to have as this friend type costs the most in terms of time investment to maintain (by definition, they are not convenient) and offers you nothing in return other than the positive emotions that come with character and self-image alignment.

Everyone will always have a small handful of friends who fall into this category; however, we strongly recommend limiting that number to five and dispersing those five character-reinforcing across life stages.

Character-Inclusive Friends

This is by far the rarest category of friendship and is composed of a friend that is actively part of your self-identity or public identity. People in this category interact with either the world as a whole or a certain subcategory of the world (such as their high school) as a single unit.

There are three core subgroups within this category:

• Romantic partners in which both of you present yourself to the world as a single entity. Note that many romantic partners do not fall into this category and, in those cases, are utility friends. For early life relationships, the utility friends model for a relationship is typically superior due to its lower complexity, however the character-inclusive model for a relationship becomes viable with extremely long-term romantic partners.

• Best friends are a type of character-inclusive friendship very common in younger life in which you and one or more individuals present yourselves to the rest of your school’s social world as a single unit. This is often an effective strategy for having backup in otherwise difficult times in our lives. However, as soon as you leave high school, no matter how much these people felt like BFFs, these friendships will transform into either character reinforcing friends or will drop off your radar altogether because you will no longer be able to present yourself to the world as a single entity. Buying into the illusion that character-integrated best friends will always have a unified public image with you can encourage very unwise decisions (such as following a best friend to the same college when you got into a better one).

• Parents who incorporate their children into their self-images. Such individuals are common amongst parents who feel that their own lives have little value and thus find themselves unable to build a self-image that satisfies them without leaching off the life of another individual.

Ultimately, all friendships fall into one of these four categories, but a friendship can contain elements of multiple categories and evolve between categories (most utility friends start as convenience friends). Being aware of what type of friend you are to others and what types of friends others are to you can help you see through the distortion field of emotional attachment that can lead to poor decisions that are not optimal for your objective function.

Note: Since the original publication of the book my co-author, Simone, was diagnosed with autism. The view of friendship she created for this book was cited in her diagnosis. But here’s the thing: I, Malcolm, am not autistic and I think an objective look at reality says she is correct. Apparently, not accepting society’s delusions about the magic of friendship is a component of an autism diagnosis these days.

Simone’s diagnosis may explain why she was interested enough in understanding how humans think and process emotions to spend years working with me to develop predictive models for their behavior, testing those hypotheses, and writing a series of books on the subject. I am lucky to have found someone like her. (Oh, and if you want to find a great partner, be sure to check out our next book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships.)

Bonus Step: Choosing a Culture

In the years following this book’s initial publication we have had a chance to speak with many readers. A common theme that arises in conversation is discomfort with the role culture plays in readers’ lives, be it a parent’s culture, a religious culture, an ancestral culture, or an adopted culture.

We define culture as an interlocking set of values and schema about the world that interact with superficial identifiers such as accents, mannerisms, and fashion. Culture can play an important role in how we conceptualize our place in the world.

The right culture can help you (and your family) internalize and strengthen certain elements of your identity. Cohesive cultures provide a series of cues reminding you about your objective function and ideologies. Culture can influence your autopilot behaviour, even when you are forced to operate in suboptimal conditions.

Think of culture as the costumes and props on a movie or theatrical set. These elements alone will not create a compelling performance, but they certainly help.

Culture enters people’s lives through a variety of interweaving pathways. While religious and ethnic cultures dominate, cultures born from discrimination and temporary developmental stages also have significant sway, plus many choose to develop cultures of their own, intentionally establishing new traditions for themselves and their kin.

For a far more in-depth exploration of culture and religion, their effects on adherents, and important things to consider when reinforcing an existing culture or religion (or creating something new from whole cloth or a patchwork of different sources), check out The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion.

Culture and Religion

Religion relates to us in three distinct ways:

As a source for defining an objective function
As a source for building an ideological tree
As a source of cultural predilections, traditions, and identity

It is possible to have 1 & 2 without 3 and vice versa. For example, a person may believe a religion while simultaneously believing that its culture and traditions corrupt that religion’s prescribed objective function. This can be seen in the disgust with which some fundamentalist sects regard traditions like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. A truly pragmatic religious devotee will take inventory of their objective function and test it against traditional practices associated with their religion, discarding those which impede their ability to maximize their objective function. For example, they may ask, “Does celebrating Easter with my kids bring them closer to God?” and find the answer is no.

Conversely, many stop believing in their religion as a source of purpose or as an explanation for how the world operates while still drawing from it as a source of traditions and cultural identity. A prominent example of this is the “secular Jew,” someone who maintains a Jewish identity and incorporates Jewish traditions into their lives while maintaining a functionally atheistic worldview.

We, Simone and Malcolm, fall in this category. While atheistic in both our objective functions and ideological trees, we are relatively strict Calvinists when it comes to culture. We even identify as “Secular Calvinists” over identities like “atheist.” You could argue the entire Pragmatist’s Guide to Life is so heavily influenced by a Secular Calvinist perspective that it is, at its core, just a prescription for how a Secular Calvinist should approach life.[41]

If we believe that Calvinism does not present a compelling objective function or explanation of how the world works, why would we be attracted to its cultural mores?

Only recently did humans have sufficient information to rival theistic hypotheses when exploring the origins of life and the universe. In contrast, our cultural traditions are the product of hundreds of centuries of cultural evolution. Cultures contain insights that cannot easily be uncovered a priori. For example, almost every religion on earth has some sort of arbitrary self-denial ritual (Lent, Ramadan, the Sabbath, etc.). Many atheists viewed these traditions as pointless until about a decade ago. Now we know that inhibitory pathways in our brains need regular exercise to stay strong and if they are not regularly exercised through systematic and arbitrary self-denial, we may see virtues like mental control and grit erode while certain vices—such as anger and anxiety—snowball.

How much of what we inherit from our family comes from genes vs culture is up to debate. What is not debatable is that we do inherit traits from our family. A family’s religious culture can be fine-tuned over generations, helping members of each generation optimize as people. Our Calvinist tradition, for example, imparts an extreme distrust of excess: indulgences in positive or negative emotional states as well of financial luxuries. While we can’t be sure of the method of action, adopting this mindset significantly improves our overlay states and efficiency.

We have anecdotally noticed a correlation between rejecting cohesive cultural identities/traditions and experiencing more frequent, intense negative overlay states (though, it is possible that being unhappy causes a person to question culture more aggressively).

We are not opposed to forging new ways of living—society is better for people who innovate new cultures because they move things forward. That said, cultural trailblazers often sacrifice their own happiness to run what are essentially “cultural experiments.” The mad inventor would not be “mad” if he didn’t occasionally end up holding a now-empty test tube with soot on his face and his eyebrows singed off. Because they are forging a new path, those who move the furthest from their traditions (either voluntarily or because society cut them off) may struggle more to find contentment and emotional stability in their lives.

Cultures Born from Discrimination

As we discuss in greater depth in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, discrimination can drive those who face public persecution to commune with each other in private. This can foster the development of new, underground cultures through a process called “cultural drift,” which has produced many now-iconic, influential, and cohesive cultures complete with unique traditions, values, and mannerisms (think: LGBT culture).

While these cultures may have a place in your life if you fall within an associated discriminated group, they are not a mandate. It is OK to be part of a historically persecuted group and not feel personal affinity toward the culture that formed around it. We say this, as a feeling of disconnect between an element of one’s identity and that attribute’s associated culture can cause significant cognitive dissonance. You are not more or less “X” because you participate (or don’t participate) in “X” culture.

Ethnic Cultures

While ethnic cultures might be seen as overlapping with cultures of groups facing discrimination, they stand on their own (Han culture, for example, may be marginalized in the USA, but not in China). A common crisis among those who live by ethnic cultures arises from the mismatch between the ethnic culture with which they grew up (internal to their family) and the “true, historic version” of this ethnic culture.

Cultures evolve to fit their context. A more historically accurate execution of cultural traditions may work better for you, but ultimately it is your choice. There is no such thing as the “correct” manifestation of a culture. This is especially important to acknowledge given how frequently people discover what they believed to be traditional cultural practices are, in actuality, artificial previsions of that culture that had been marketed to them through media.

Evanescent Teen Culture

Many teens experience an innate desire to reject their parents’ culture while simultaneously feeling very attuned to the feelings and caprices of peers their age. This often drives adolescents to “shop” for new cultures, only to return to a modified version of their ancestral culture upon reaching adulthood and having kids of their own (unless they experience systematic discrimination, which shifts identification toward the culture of their persecuted group).

This cycle produces evanescent teen cultures—or cultures specifically marketed to teens. Consider goth, emo, or e-girl culture—each of which features distinctive accents, dress, values, mannerisms, literature, and traditions. Evanescent teen cultures are hardly novel—consider dandy/macaroni culture as an older example.

Adolescent cultures evolve much faster than mainstream or religious cultural traditions, typically die out after a few decades, and are not conducive to happy, successful lifestyles. Rather than optimize for traditional success, contentment, or flourishing, evanescent teen cultures typically emphasize personal agency and uniqueness (highly rewarded attributes among teens).

Cultural Representation & Extinction

On its surface the idea that not seeing one’s culture represented in popular media would cause distress or some sort of developmental damage makes superficial sense. In actuality, it is largely irrelevant when contrasted with other forms of cultural erosion.

Much of the hand wringing around cultural representation comes from the belief that “white” culture is a unified cultural force that is winning and in opposition to other cultural forces. This is not true, “white” culture is only the predominant culture as reflected by our society because whites make up the majority of the population creating the illusion that the majority “vanilla” culture is white.

For example, we think of the “Western” trope or “rural ranch family” trope as being representative of “white culture” (think Apple Jack from My Little Pony) when in actuality these tropes are heavily Latin in influenced. This can be seen from their dress like “cowboy boots” and “cowboy hats” to their values like “tight family units that unconditionally love and support each other”. Alternatively, the more “traditional” white American cultures have largely been erased or villainised.

Take my culture, Secular Calvinism, as an example. Calvinists where major forces in the creation of American Democracy, the abolition movement, the enlightenment, and some sources credit them almost entirely for modern capitalism, you could not get more “white” or “American” – yet I can think of almost no media that positively displays my culture, most displaying it as the antagonist of the story (Footloose as an example). In fact, I remember how surprised I was to see a positive depiction of it in media for the first time – it was something only possible in a non-western source (a rather vulgar anime called Goblin Slayer).

However, it is not surprising that a culture that views any form of non-mission directed emotional indulgence as inherently evil does not find itself represented in media. A culture that looks down on art, music, and fiction as the height of self-glorifying navel gazing is intrinsically not going to produce a large quantity of artists and be an antagonistic force in the lives of artists who grow up within it. Sometimes, cultural representation is as much the fault of the “culture” as to society.

As another example, “Quaker culture” despite being critical to American history and a huge factor in many children’s life’s (due to its prolific production of teachers and impact on the education system), produces almost no one who goes into media while Jewish culture, which makes up only a tiny precent of American’s produces an astronomical number of writers and comedians. In the same breath American Black culture, despite blacks only making up about 20% of the American population, is the progenitor of almost all American music varieties (yes, even both Country music which evolved out of Blues and Southern Gospel and Rock music which evolved out of Gospel, Jump Blues, Jazz, Boogie Woogie, and RnB). Well over 60% of almost any song you hear in the radio is a product of American Black culture.

However, and this is the important thing, cultural representation does not equate to power, a sense of belonging, or, most importantly, stave off cultural extinction. Gay culture had an overrepresentation in American media production long before it was accepted and, while black culture is the source of almost all modern music, only the most delusional individual claims blacks are not still discriminated against to at least some extent.

In fact, media representation is largely irrelevant to a cultures health. Calvinist’s despite being one of the most important cultures in the creation of our current society have largely disappeared as a cultural force – not because of their lack of media representation – but because the culture categorises sex as a vulgar emotional indulgence and that love for family is strictly conditional (family members most prove their worth through action) thus produces relatively small families which culturally quickly expel members who don’t live up to the cultures exacting value system. In a similar vein another of the most important early American cultures, the Shakers, have almost entirely disappeared due to similar, though more extreme, views towards sex.

The Shaker culture replicated itself through being the biggest owner of orphanages in early America. As soon as publicly funded orphanages started to compete with the Shaker orphanages the culture lost its ability to replicate and died.

The larger point here being that cultural competition and evolution is far more complex than dominant cultures victimising non-dominant cultures through media.

Constructing Culture

What if you want to attempt to build your own family culture or modify an existing cultural schema?

Culture is best transmitted through traditions and media. For example, to develop a bespoke culture that reinforces our unique values and ideologies, we modified existing holidays and created a few of our own, focusing on rituals that appeal to kids (traditions often live or die based on how much kids like them—this is why Halloween thrives while Lent languishes). We also curated a selection of materials to either read to our kids or regularly watch together and discuss, each of which features its own lessons related to our family values and ideologies.

Culture is just another aspect of a well-rounded education. It is our job to provide a rich upbringing for our kids without getting too experimental and endangering their ability to thrive. (We might put together a book on this one day.)

We Sincerely Hope This Has Been Helpful

It is ironic that we have an education system in which nearly everyone memorizes Socrates’ adage that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” but almost no one is ever seriously encouraged to examine their life. There isn’t even a place we can go or a group we can talk to about such topics that won’t push their own dogmatic agenda on us.

It is absurd that we live in a society where I, Simone, was able to reach my twenties before someone—that is, Malcolm—prompted me to decide what I wanted to do with my life in a way that actually enabled me to think about to carefully think about what values and outcomes truly mattered to me instead of just blurting something generic like “helping people” in an effort to change the subject. It is equally remarkable that no one ever made it clear to me that I could pick who I wanted to be in life—that I had the power to choose to be anyone I wanted to be. This needs to change.

These are questions people should repeatedly encounter outside of the pedantic halls of academia. These are questions with which people should interact using their own, carefully-thought-through frameworks. To that end, the proceeds from this book series all go to The Pragmatist Foundation, the primary goal of which (at present) is to create a new, better, secondary school system: CollinsInstitute.org

While this guide was the first product of our foundation, we have since created a few additional bestselling (on Amazon/Kindle) books designed to tackle other issues that traditional academic systems have difficulty addressing without bias. These books include:

The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships Ruthlessly Optimized Strategies for Dating, Sex, and Marriage
The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality
What Turns People On, Why, and What That Tells Us About Our Species.
The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance
From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models
The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion
A playbook for sculpting cultures that overcome demographic collapse & facilitate long-term human flourishing

If you enjoyed The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life and are looking for a partner, experiencing trouble in your relationships, or just interested in why “weird” things turn people on, these books may yield helpful insights and information that you are unlikely to find elsewhere.

If you ever want to help edit, write, or otherwise contribute toward this series (or our school), please reach out. Each one of these books was a collaborative effort involving about thirty people and every additional hand makes a difference. Please let us know if there are any topics you want us to cover that we have yet to address. We love hearing from readers at: [email protected]

We hope reading this guide has been helpful and will continue to do everything in our power to improve its utility. Since we take no money from this effort, we are paid in positive reviews and the joy of seeing people interested in our cause. If you gleaned any value from this book, please write a review (we guarantee we will read every single review posted on Amazon). In the same vein, if you didn’t like something in the book, please send us an email (we have made a number of fairly major changes based on such comments).

Our Objective Functions

In case you are curious: Our personal objective functions are to increase the efficacy of humanity’s collective mental substrate—that is, to encourage as many minds as possible to be (1) open enough to new ideas so they can test them against existing ideas, and (2) logical enough to let the best ideas win. To do our part in creating a world in which the best ideas win, we see our first big challenge being the creation of a world in which people are willing to consider ideas that conflict with their existing worldviews in a serious and thoughtful manner and creating venues where such conversations can be had.

The Pragmatist’s

Guide to Governance

______________________

From high school cliques to boards,
family offices, and nations:
A guide to optimizing governance models

By Simone & Malcolm Collins

http://Pragmatist.Guide

Omniscion Press

Simone & Malcolm Collins

Juicier than Sex 1

As Critical as Communication 3

Failure 7

The Immortality of a Vision 7

The Competence Paradox 12

Navigating the Machine 16

Humans as a Medium 27

Human Dominance Hierarchies 27

How Dominance Hierarchies Work 30

Tribal Groups 39

Culture Drift 44

Dominance in Broader Society 46

Why Are We Talking About This? 49

Gender Differences in Dominance Hierarchies 53

Cultural Differences in Dominance Hierarchies 58

How Personal Social Rank Changes Behavior 61

Self-Image Reinforcement and Leadership 63

Cancer and Institutional Immune Systems 68

Structuring How We Think About Governance 74

The Decider 76

The Selector 79

Important Governing Features 82

Interaction With Other Units 83

Big Brother, Little Brother, and Phantom Brother 87

Success Metrics 90

The Case of Mao’s Great Leap Forward 91

The Case of Modern Academia 93

Judging the Quality of a Government 99

The Will of the People 99

The Square Cube Law of Governance 109

The Bleed Amelioration Problem 112

How to Optimally Approach Large Governing Body Design 114

The Outdated Debate: Socialism vs. Capitalism 119

Globalism vs. Nationalism 120

Automation vs. Power to the People 122

The Real Difference Between Progressives and Conservatives 126

Communism 130

The Power Consolidation Problem 134

The HOA Problem 140

The Centrally Managed Economy Problem 143

The Cancer Problem 148

Can These Hazards Be Addressed With Tech? 149

Unfettered Capitalism = Communism 150

War as a Consolidator 152

Revolutions: A Predictive Model 154

Winning the Online Culture War 158

Voting 162

Who Can Vote? 163

Starship Troopers and Contributor Voting Systems 171

Wards of the State 179

Flat vs. Proportional Voting Systems 183

Strategic Voting 186

Compelled Voting Systems 189

How Votes are Collected and Counted 193

Win Conditions 196

Quadratic Voting 198

Consensus Decision Making 200

Sortition 202

Political Parties 205

The Heritability of Political Affiliation 213

Consensus Democracies 216

The “Correct” Answer 218

Representatives 225

Pre-Vetting & Self-Vetting Systems 225

Accountability 229

Term Limits 232

Dictatorships 235

The Failure of Democracy 239

Translating Stakeholder Will into Action 244

Delegation Pathways 244

Capturing Institutional Knowledge 247

Crafting Culture 249

The 360 Review Problem 251

Decider Group Size, Composition, and Interaction Pattern 254

A Weird Use Case for Futures Markets 258

The Pyramid vs. The Chinese Room 260

DAOs 266

Centralization vs. Decentralization 271

Flat Organizational Structures 273

Holacracy 276

Anarchy 281

Markets 284

Fighting Inequality with Governance 290

Bigotry 294

The Equilibrium Problem 295

The Pendulum Effect 305

The Solution 308

Discrimination in Summation 310

Systems for Fixing Bias 311

Preventing Bias in Education 311

Reducing Bias in Content Moderation 314

Handy Governing Gimmicks 319

Exploiting Human Nature 319

Governance Marketplaces 321

Bribery, Lobbying, and Burn 324

Cooperatives 327

Open-source Governance 329

AI Assisted Governance 330

4Chan and Anonymity Effects 331

Titles, Privileges, and Perception 333

Public Broadcasting and Education 335

Government Participation as a PR Mechanism 337

Noocracies and Technocracies 338

Crafting the Perfect Government 342

Why do we need better governance structures? 342

Governance Bombs 344

Designing a Governance Bomb 350

A Governance Bomb Demonstration 352

Internal Bodies 352

Voting Power and Influence 357

Resource Allocation 361

Management 363

Great Chatting Again 365

Information Flow 367

Information Asymmetry 368

Handling Disinformation 368

Informational Echo Chambers 370

Informational Filters on Those Given Power 371

Vote Transparency 372

Enforcement Mechanisms 373

Maintaining Motivation 374

Governing Model Inefficiencies 377

Rent Seeking 377

The Flypaper Effect 379

The Principal-Agent Problem 380

Moral Hazard 381

Regulatory Capture 382

Cataloging Voting 383

Juicier than Sex

So far, we have written Pragmatist’s Guides to life, sex, relationships, and crafting religion⁠—yet no topic has gotten us half as excited as governing structures. You might be thinking: “Wait, what? How could governing structures be such a juicy topic?”

This will be doubly true if you have read our previous books and know the types of topics that get us excited. How could governing structures be offensive and controversial enough to get these two fired up? Well, buckle up.

Unique and interesting governing structures exist at every level of society, from companies to family offices, religions, online forums, middle school cliques, and family units. Once you start scrutinizing common types of governing structures, you’ll be astounded by the proliferation of horrible design and adverse incentives. By understanding these flaws, not only can you build better governing structures and more aptly navigate those that are already in place—and we say this with an entirely straight face—you could create something of a “Governance Bomb” and take over the world in just a couple centuries, starting with something as trivial as a family office.

There is nothing dry about governance theory. By delivering essential (but boring) fundamentals with ruthless succinctness, we will spare you from the tedium of academic polemicizing and spend the lion’s share of this book exploring the scintillating, fascinating, and messy parts of governance theory.

In this book, we aim to help you understand why governing structures exist as they do, show you how to navigate governing structures, and—perhaps most interesting—empower you to construct optimal governing structures for specific environments. Smart governance is not just for companies, but also for family offices, countries, nonprofits, and even friend groups.

If you would prefer to consume this book in audio format, visit http://pragmatist.guide/GovernanceAudio to request a free audiobook copy.

As Critical as Communication

Any group of people expected to work in a synergistic fashion needs a system that structures their interactions. That system is “governance.”

Governance is not a new concept; it existed from the moment Crog, our pre-verbal, mammoth-hunting ancestor, signaled to his hunting buddy Lud to move around it into a more favorable position, which Lud did without complaint because he understood Crog to be dominant to him in their tribal structure. While communication allows us to transfer an idea from one mind to another, governance allows people who may not have the same ideas to work as a group. Without governance, communication is rendered largely irrelevant.

Consider the radical advancements in communication humankind has made over the past 150 years. We have leapt from the invention of the telegraph to an age in which people in developing countries walk around with devices in their pockets that grant access to all human knowledge at the tap of a button. As other domains have made leaps and bounds, governance has only managed to inch forward a few centimeters. Though a few brave souls have experimented with novel governance models, today’s average organization is still governed by structures nearly identical to those which dominated a century ago. Almost no single innovation would have as much impact on human output as a large update in governance, yet the resources devoted to governance research are trivial in comparison to its potential impact.

An optimal governance system achieves a set of goals for a collective of individuals while combating sources of waste, such as resource misallocation or a failure to check damaging and exploitative behaviors. Think of a governing structure like a machine: In a machine, “waste energy”—energy that enters the machine but fails to directly contribute to its end goal—is released in the form of heat (e.g., heat generated from friction or the heat of an energy-inefficient light bulb).

In a state-level governing structure, heat that arises from friction takes the form of wasted money, which can be used as a very rough proxy for lost productivity. In an inefficient governing structure, we see money burning off the system in the form of lawyers (due to laws needing paid interpretation and implementation), corruption (due to a misalignment of the government’s participants and the government itself), due diligence costs (created by the difficulty to ascertain the value of a thing), etc.

In a large corporate bureaucracy, this friction may manifest as forms filled in triplicate, unnecessary positions, time spent generating reports that nobody really reviews, work and institutional knowledge gains not being communicated between teams, and so on. Money that burns off a poorly governed system is just a proxy for productivity, man hours, and brain power that could have been applied to productive efforts serving the group’s mission. Optimal governance reduces friction within the system, increasing groups’ wealth and productivity.

In other words, governance determines how the work of 10 people is transformed into the work of a single unit. Bad governance—normal governance today—turns work that could be achieved by four people into work that requires a team of 10, whereas spectacular governance can empower a team of four to achieve the typical output of a team of 20. The quality of governance within a system is the factor by which all other effort within that system is multiplied. Here’s the beautiful thing: At least within small case models, that factor is objectively measurable (though governance structures should also be judged based on their longevity and their fidelity to their mission statements and purpose).

Failure

We have been told we should start our books with little vignettes. Personally, we find them distastefully decorative and think they risk calling out specific groups too much. That said, we ain’t no George R. R. Martin—we listen to our fans—so we’ll give it a shot and you can let us know if it works out.

Let’s go over a few ways governance can fail.

The Immortality of a Vision

Throughout his life, despite being wealthy, Jonathan Holdeen went without. Until his death in 1967, he cooked in tin cans instead of pots, broke up produce crates to be burned as fuel in the winter, and even trimmed the hole-ridden sleeves from old sweaters, converting them into vests he would defiantly wear until they, too, fell apart.^[42]

Of course, good men don’t matter in an organization run by governing structures in which leadership can change. The Unitarian Church eventually decided the amount the fund was paying them every year wasn’t enough—they wanted all its income—so they used the courts to take it. They presented the ridiculous argument that the fund would otherwise grow so large it would pose a danger to global stability.^[45] The courts agreed to give the church $1,000,000 of the $20,000,000 fund annually.^[46] While it could have ended right there, even that wasn’t enough for them: They went so far as to attack Holdeen’s daughter, who had managed the trust (and in whose hands the trust outperformed the Dow Jones and Standard & Poor’s stock averages),^[47] suing her for mismanagement, self-dealing, and fraud in an attempt to get even more money ($12,000,000 more). They kept suing her until she was 84 years old—almost 30 years after Holdeen’s death. The lawsuits were so regular she made a point of attending the Philadelphia flower show on her regular court visits and was able to brighten up her legal trips with visits to the floral extravaganza about eight times (early on, she would bring a friend, but then the Unitarian Church “got snotty about it” and she had to go alone).^[48]

Despite his long suffering, lofty goals, and lawyers’ hand wringing about his plan destroying society, Jonathan Holdeen now lies dead, almost completely forgotten, with dashed ambitions.

The moral of this story is that no matter what an organization tells you, no matter what they claim to believe, it can only be trusted as far as its organizational structure. This story is critical to remember whether you are designing the governing structure of a family office, a country, nonprofit, or a religion. If you have long-term plans that extend past your death, understanding governance is critical. The fidelity of your dreams cannot be defended by a trustworthy person or clear mission statement—only your governance structure has the power to shield and perpetuate a legacy.

Even if you merely want to live a peaceful, happy, moderately productive life, you had better learn to navigate the hectic world of governance, within which we have no choice but to live.

The Competence Paradox

At family wealth conferences, you’ll occasionally hear people joke that “there is no such thing as fourth generation money.” The implication of this joke is that if family money is managed well enough to make it to a fourth generation, it is almost never kept in a structure that gives family members agency over it or access to it. This joke is not an absolute rule—and things like generational dilution and taxes also play a big role in dispersing intergenerational wealth—but it does hold some truth. For wealth to make it to a fourth generation, a family must either have an extremely intentionally constructed governance structure or a system in place for training future generations to replenish the family’s fortunes every three generations or so.

A competency paradox lies at the center of many, many failed attempts at enduring intergenerational wealth. In these cases, the most competent members of the family are intrinsically also those who least need family money, meaning they don’t bother with the drama of family office politics. This frequently enables each generation’s least competent family members to exercise a disproportionate level of control over the family’s wealth.

Families may try to solve the competency paradox by tying power in the family office to impact on the outside world, but often botch how they define “impact,” making it something easy to achieve and thus exacerbating the problem. In addition to sorting for low competence in family finance leadership, such mistakes put unethical relatives who are most willing to cheese metrics in control of family finances.

It is common for a family office creator who has not put a lot of thought into how future generations will distribute money to create a governance structure composed of the most charitable and philanthropic family members. This structure is categorically doomed in any family that has more than two kids per generation. Specifically, what this system actually creates is the potential for a life path in which an individual does not have to work and can still have access to large amounts of money. Even if the money is earmarked to only go to charities, there are all sorts of ways charitable donations can be turned into income streams, such as leveraging charity board positions gained through donations to secure additional paid positions on for-profit corporate boards. This, in combination with a family-wide voting system, creates coalitions of family members who vote in blocks to maintain control and do everything in their power to make life miserable to those outside the group whenever it looks like they might try to assert any control over the system—and why wouldn’t they? If they lose their power over family wealth, they lose their only source of employment.

The above structure differentially rewards the least competent and least moral family members. Individuals who have no trouble making money by their own merits have dramatically less motivation to play the family politics game than parasites who leverage family wealth to pretend they have a real job. Having built their own successful careers, competent family members will expend less effort to be involved with the family office. In stark contrast, when the family office provides a source of income, anyone who is too lazy or incompetent to make money on their own will defend control of family resources with their lives, inevitably turning family office politics into a full-time career.

Whether or not to engage in family politics can quickly become a binary career decision for every family member when winning the family politics game becomes a full-time job. In these scenarios, getting access to family funds means abandoning all other life goals. Essentially, such systems filter out individuals with the competence and work ethic to build fortunes on their own.

In families like these, every new child and spouse becomes an existential threat to the income streams of extant members and their immediate families. When you have given up on trying to become a productive member of society and have kids of your own, it becomes easy to justify atrocious, slimy actions in an effort to ensure your own kids get a cut of the pie—especially when the pie’s division is determined by family politics instead of external measures of success.

In addition, governance systems that give equal weight to the votes of all family members encourage coalition building and the formation of voting blocks that freeze out other parts of the family and turn parents against their own children. If sliminess and an absence of ethics facilitate a rise to power within a governance structure, those “winning” traits become imprinted on future generations as a core aspect of family culture. Worse, if you try to build a family office that selects for ethics in its leadership, what you often end up accidentally rewarding is dedication to a specific religious tradition or the ability to virtue signal (this is why so many family offices go off the rails with self indulgent virtue signaling that is utterly divorced from the values of their industrious founders).

Should you blindly promote equality among your children regardless of their talent and reward virtue signaling over measurable impact and wealth accumulation, you bequeath future generations with an unfortunate choice: Fight a pack of starving dogs for a slab of meat from a corpse or learn to hunt yourself.

Navigating the Machine

In our other books, my (Malcolm’s) story begins when I meet Simone and our history is told through her eyes. This is because it is hard for me to talk about my “backstory” without sounding like I am telling some sort of contrived rags-to-riches narrative (an inaccurate narrative I loathe). I had every advantage in life and escaped my negative circumstances only because of privilege.

That said, continuing this book without disclosing more about my background would be dishonest, as it heavily affects my perspective on governance. When I was in elementary school I was placed in the private prison system—a series of prison alternatives for minors (think: Holes)^[50]—and spent my life from that point onward living largely outside a family home. In fact, now that I think about it, elementary school was the last time I lived with my family full time. Essentially, I spent all my formative years navigating corrupt governance structures as my only source of basic necessities like housing, food, etc.

It is hard for me to know the real reasons why I was sent to these facilities in the first place because I was in elementary school at the time. All I know for certain is that I was sent by court order. Perhaps I was sent away due to some equivalent to Kids for Cash, as the first prison-alternative camp I attended may have been giving kickbacks to judges who referred families to them.^[51] Maybe family politics were at play. It could be that my parents thought they could get better terms in a highly contentious and litigious divorce if they could convince a judge that I had behavioral problems caused by the other parent. Perhaps a mix of these factors led my parents to believe it was just easier to have me out of the picture for a while.

Whatever the case, things turned out fine for me, in no small part because of my privilege. I ended up getting my MBA at Stanford and the last company I have run has so far pulled in $70 million a year. Had I grown up around my family, beholden to them, I would never have had the privilege of being uncompromising in my morals without being forced to make enormous sacrifices that, if I am being honest with myself, I probably would not have made. This is not a sob story; it is only relevant to my take on governance structures because I spent my formative years being raised within a variety of bureaucracies. Throughout my childhood, my wellbeing depended on my ability to intuitively understand how they actually functioned—not just how they claimed to function—and this experience yielded many of the insights shared in this book.

One of the most pivotal moments of my life involved one of the staff members at a prison-alternative camp to which I had been sent pulling me aside and explaining how futile it was for me to fight the system. All of the letters I wrote and tried to send to people outside the facility were either not sent out or redacted—after all, he pointed out, did I really think they are so stupid as to allow themselves to be implicated in anything? The letters only served to demonstrate to the camp’s management that I was motivated to try to financially hurt the facility. No one outside was going to help me. In trying to recruit outside help, I was incentivizing the system’s bureaucracy to prevent me from leaving—something that was trivial for them, as they could instantly fabricate new misdeeds given that no one from outside the facility could interact with me without their permission. I was only a child and they were a large, well-funded company.

After that, he pointed out something that genuinely shook me: From their perspective, regardless of the time we actually had on our sentences, every child in the system was an annuity. They could easily fabricate events to keep us in as long as they wanted—though it wasn’t like they needed to. They had created an environment in which, to survive, you had to break so many rules that they always had something on you.

For example, one day another kid said he would try to kill me that night. We slept in plastic sheets we rolled around ourselves, so I stuffed mine and hid somewhere else (we were in the desert, so the plastic would freeze closed at night so there was no chance of him checking inside). He smacked it a few times with a shovel late that night and I thought, “glad that’s out of the way,” until the staff heard the noise and found I was not in my dedicated sleeping spot.

Because each of us was a guaranteed source of perpetual income, we could be sold to other behavioral health facilities for referral fees that were priced similarly to how one would price an annuity. At the time, I had lost over 60% of my body weight. The staff member who had pulled me aside thought I was starving myself (I wasn’t; I was having a reaction to the food and felt so desperate for sustenance, I had learned what local insects and plants I could eat without getting sick). He explained that they didn’t want another kid’s death on their record and if I didn’t find a way to get healthier quickly, they would “sell me” to another, even-more-draconian institution. Given that being transferred between these camps, behavioral correction facilities, and “therapeutic correctional schools” was a common practice, I had heard enough from the other kids to know it could be worse. At least the place I was at didn’t shoot us up with a drug cocktail every morning to keep those under its care in a mentally-addled state.

Being reduced to a line item in a broken bureaucracy and accepting that I was the only one who could get me out of the system helped me better contextualize where I—and really all of us—stand in the world.

Was this camp’s staff member bluffing? How much of what he told me was real? How much am I misremembering due to being in grade school at the time, dehydrated, and starving? It’s hard for me to piece this together as an adult. There was a time in my life when I thought this conversation was a delusion because it sounded too insane to be a real memory—then Kids for Cash became public and I realized It probably really happened. This was further reinforced when the private equity company Simone and I ran looked into buying a company in the troubled teen industry and we got an industry insider’s perspective of some of the facilities where I had been sent (many of which have since been shut down)

I was a product in a larger system. To escape, I needed to understand the rules of the system and—rather than “fight the man”—bend the system itself to my will. Bureaucracies are like a colloid, that weird cornstarch slime you made in grade school: If you hit them, they become solid, but if you work with them, they become putty. First, I engineered a transfer to a correctional school (at least I would be allowed books there) and through a series of similar trades, I gradually improved my living conditions. As it was made clear I was not welcome back home, I had to find a way to house and feed myself once I got out of government subsidized facilities. This was made possible by an educational trust set up by a previous generation of my family, which covered my boarding school expenses.

By halfway through middle school, I had gotten myself transferred to a fairly normal boarding school. I was able to use the same trust to pay for summer camps I could argue were educational, which gave me a place to stay outside of the school year. (Here I need to emphasize how screwed I would be had I not been born privileged—I was incredibly lucky.)

I made money for stuff I couldn’t get from the school by selling restricted supplies, like soda. My rich classmates were highly price insensitive in the face of coveted-but-restricted goods—there was significant profit to be made by setting up an operation to smuggle them on campus at scale. This taught me how governments can affect the value of goods being traded within them. By high school, my life was pretty much that of any other boarding school kid outside of my side hustles and the fact that most of my friends were online.

In a bureaucracy, there are no bad guys: Just hundreds of people acting in a self-interested fashion. Evil is rarely a choice—rather, it’s an emergent property of a set of rules. Bureaucracies and governance structures are not good or evil; they are wind-up AIs often put in place with good intentions that play out mechanistically. I was fortunate to be placed in a position to understand my place in society at a young age: As a line item on someone else’s balance sheet. This knowledge has made my life easier than it has any right to be. Instead of fighting the system, I have been able to improve my lot by increasing my value to that system. Hopefully this book can help you develop your own ways of taming bureaucracy and saddling it to your aims.

Note: One of our test readers commented that the narrative here made him really hate my parents, which I fear means I misarticulated part of the point. I live a great life—a better life than either of them had. How else do you define success as a parent other than giving your kids a better life than you? Honestly, one of my biggest fears is accidentally making my kids’ childhood too easy, leading to them having worse adulthoods as a result.

People are almost never “bad or good” and certainly never worthy of hate. Bad actions are usually the result of complicated people operating within systems set up by other well-meaning individuals. And that is why a book like this is so critically important.

The intentions of a system are almost completely untethered from its outcomes. A government intended to increase economic equality can mass murder more people than any governing entity in history.^{^[52]} Policies created to save the environment can be corrupted to undermine sustainability.^{^[53]} A family office designed to protect descendants can turn relatives against each other. Tools designed to improve the world can be corrupted into levers for self-aggrandizement. Designing a government is like wishing on a monkey’s paw. Approach it with care and precision because it will do everything in its power to twist your desires into an evil mockery of your intentions.

When you set up a governing system, it’s not just others you put at risk but yourself—the core of who you are. You could start your life as humble librarian Mao Zedong, who was by all reports a pretty nice guy keen to make life better for other people, and in the process of trying to create a better society, you could end up allowing the very government you created—something you risked your life to build—to twist you into one of history’s most monstrous humans (we cover Mao later in the book, but if you only know that “a lot of people died,” then you don’t have a full picture of how irredeemably evil he became). Poorly-thought-through incentives and governing systems have opened this world to more evil than any amount of selfishness, greed, or any other human vice.

Humans as a Medium

Now to the meat of the book!

If one were to write a book on building water storage containers, one should first investigate the properties of water. What happens when it freezes? Through which sorts of materials can it pass? What would the water do if it did not have a container? Jumping straight into a discussion of container manufacturing might help a person replicate an existing container type, but it would put them in the wrong mindset to build a better container.

The first few chapters of this book will explore how humans innately interact in group settings and highlight behavior patterns that must be considered in order to structure governing systems that remain true to their missions and purposes.

Human Dominance Hierarchies

Before diving into the nuances of governance structures, we must explore humanity’s default governance system: The dominance hierarchy. This is the system humans instinctively use when another governing system is not intentionally constructed and agreed upon. This system is core to understanding all other human governance systems, as to some extent it is the default system with which they must compete.

Humans evolved a de facto governance system that shares much in common with the way our closest relatives—chimps and bonobos—organize their troops. This system comes complete with rules for how to choose a leader, how to rise to power, and how to make decisions. That said, the system is so ubiquitous it is practically invisible to us. It is easy to look at your group of friends and not realize that an unwritten governing structure rules your small tribe and comes into effect every time you make a group decision, like where to eat dinner. If you haven’t agreed on another system, such decisions are almost certainly made using a dominance hierarchy.

It is crucial to understand this system not just because it is the single most common governance system you will encounter, but because all governing systems have to build mechanisms to fight against the instinctual impulses this system has bred into the human mind. Unless one puts mechanisms in place to prevent it, a dominance hierarchy governing structure will form on top of other governing structures as a sort of shadow governance that ends up being the real driving force behind the organization’s decisions. This can take place anywhere from a board room to a town council, Congress, or office floor. When dominance hierarchies kick in, you end up adopting the same governing structure chimps use. In such scenarios, all the effort put into constructing an “advanced” governing structure, like a board, is for nothing.

Even if you place the best mechanisms you can conceive to prevent simple dominance hierarchies from overtaking your workplace, family office, or governing structure, they will still bubble up in the background of family politics, office drama, and lunches between politicians. Regardless of whether you, personally, would rather opt out of brute dominance hierarchies, understanding this simplest of governing structures—one used by apes and children—is key to unlocking increased effectiveness in intentionally designed governing structures.

How Dominance
Hierarchies Work

How do dominance hierarchies, as governing structures, function? What does a governing structure ruled by dominance hierarchies look like? To investigate it in its purest form, a form we are all familiar with to some extent, let’s look to a middle school clique. Dominance-hierarchy-based decision-making manifests with unique purity in this setting, as the participants have yet to develop the life experience and myelination of their frontal lobes necessary to muffle the more toxic aspects of dominance hierarchies.^[54]

Members of middle school cliques commonly sort themselves by an unseen metric we will call their “social rank”—essentially, their position within their local dominance hierarchy. The preferences and opinions of those with a higher social rank are weighted more heavily when the group is making a decision⁠—thus when the group needs to decide on something, all individuals willing to voice an opinion will voice it and a final decision will be made by the individual with highest social rank who is willing to voice an opinion. This social rank is specific to every tribal group, so a girl may have one social rank among the goths and another among the cheerleaders, but more on that later.

What happens when an individual of a lower social rank refuses to follow the individual with the highest social rank? What if they try to get others in the group to go with their choice instead? This creates a dominance challenge—one of the core ways an individual can move up within the hierarchy and attain a higher social rank. If the challenged individual stands down and defers to the influence of the lower-status challenger their social rank will decrease while the challenger’s social rank will increase. (It should be already obvious why this form of governance is toxic—even if a higher-status individual realizes they made a suboptimal judgment, they can still lose social status by conceding that point.)

Because humans who maintained a higher social rank could secure higher quality mates and have more kids, strong evolutionary pressures now lead the average person to act in a way that keeps their social rank as high as possible. These pressures mean that when a person of high social rank feels their authority is challenged, they will experience an unconscious, instinctive impulse to socially punish the individual who challenged them. In so doing, they make threats to their dominance costlier in the future and shore up their social rank. They will punish the individual even when they don’t care that much about the opinion the individual voiced because the point isn’t about getting their way on that particular issue, it’s about defending social rank.

The hazards of challenging a dominance hierarchy do not end there. Challengers will be met with punishment not just from the dominant member challenged, but also from supporters of the status quo. Supporters strengthen their bonds with the challenged individual through this behavior. While they could theoretically support the challenger instead, treason is rare because one gains more by ingratiating oneself with higher-status individuals. If you supported me today, I will remember that and support you tomorrow—this sort of reciprocity is critical even within the dominance hierarchy of chimp tribes.

By supporting the challenged individual, supporters also ensure that such attempts do not happen as frequently in the future, which reinforces their own status within the hierarchy (a smart thing to do when you have a high social rank yourself). This is why individuals that are slightly senior to the challenged individual in a hierarchy are those most likely to execute socially punishing behavior upon a challenger.

These behavioral impulses fuel much of what is perceived as bullying behavior in both humans and great apes. These instincts also explain in part why studies have consistently shown that bullying behavior happens more within friend groups than between them.^[55]

Let’s explore a brief example to demonstrate how this plays out: A group of middle school girls is trying to decide where to eat. Becky, social rank 90, has suggested Mexican food, after which Olivia, social rank 30, suggests Old Man’s Crab Shack. By floating this suggestion after the higher status individual made her preference known, Olivia has issued a challenge to Becky’s position within the hierarchy. If the group follows Olivia’s suggestion, Olivia’s social rank within that group will increase while Becky’s will decrease.

Generally speaking, the higher someone’s social rank is within a group, the less they want to see the positions of people within said group disrupted, as normalizing disruption in the social hierarchy puts them at risk, so Brenda (social rank 100) may respond to Olivia with a socially punishing comments like, “only fat people eat at Old Man’s Crab Shack—it’s disgusting.” Now that the rest of the group sees Becky and Brenda form this alliance against the weaker party, they may jump in as well in an attempt to further diminish Olivia’s social rank and bolster their own relative position within the group. The group will not want to go so far that Olivia leaves over something small like this, as the more members they have in the group, the more powerful the group becomes overall—so the extent of the social punishment (bullying) is often moderated.

In other great apes, such disputes, in which a low-ranking individual challenges a high-ranking individual, are often resolved through dominance displays like puffing one’s self up or “getting in someone’s face”—and when those fail, violence. To see this behavior in humans, imagine a drunk guy at a bar adopting “the stance” after a perceived slight, saying “What, you think you are better than me?!” and getting in his perceived opponent’s personal space. It is difficult to find a more perfect example of a great ape dominance challenge. Not only is he literally puffing himself up to look larger; he is explicitly stating he is doing this because the other person may believe they are “better” than him (a surprisingly articulate expression of the impulse created by such an ancient part of his brain). While we may default to these ape-like strategies when our brains are impaired, most humans prefer to carry out hierarchy battles through social challenges.

When people are young, inexperienced, or otherwise cognitively impaired, these dominance challenges often look like those delineated above. However, as people get older and more socially experienced, dominance challenges can be as subtle as a pause between words during a board meeting.

Individuals who feel confident in their position within a hierarchy are more likely to express their dominance by making decisions on behalf of the group. When an individual makes a decision on behalf of a group and no one objects, their social rank increases slightly, but in every decision they make, they risk being challenged and having their social rank drop dramatically. Conversely, an individual who is uncertain of their place within a dominance hierarchy will be much less likely to push for things they themselves want, while being more likely to “bully” individuals who challenge the existing dominance structure.

Essentially, every time an individual asserts their dominance within a group, they are making a calculated bet that no one will challenge them or that if someone does most of the group will back them. Individuals are less likely to make this bet if they are unsure about the dominance order of the group. In such unclear scenarios, people are more likely to expend social capital to establish a predictable chain of dominance through choosing sides in other individuals’ dominance battles.

An inability to recognize these hierarchies is the core cause of habitual bullying. A low-ranking individual issues a challenge to higher status individuals when they ignore their requests or fail to signal deference. Whether the low-ranking individual wants this to be taken as a challenge or not is beside the point. The higher-status individual is essentially left with no choice but to socially punish the low-ranking individual or compromise their own position within the hierarchy (especially if they are insecure in their position). This can create a cycle, lowering an individual’s social rank to almost nothing and in so doing making smaller and smaller failures to display deference worth punishing (the wider the difference in social rank between challengers, the more damage can be done).

This is why, “stand up for yourself” and “just ignore them” are two of the dumbest pieces of advice you can give to an individual being bullied. The proliferation of this advice likely contributes significantly to the current bullying epidemic. Ignoring the request of a high-ranking individual presents a direct challenge to their authority in that it suggests a failure to recognize their social rank, and challenges to high-ranking individuals are likely to fail due to the social support they typically receive. Instead, if a child is being habitually bullied, they should either be coached to learn their place within the existing social hierarchy and work their way out of it incrementally or join an alternate social hierarchy⁠—like the goth kids.

Why do we say: “Become a goth?” When a goth kid ignores a preppy kid’s orders, he is not challenging that individual’s dominance within the preppy group. Social challenges are less necessary between individuals competing in different hierarchies, as a goth kid ignoring a preppy kid is more of a “tribal group challenge” than an individual dominance challenge. A preppy kid claiming authority over a goth kid can be interpreted as claiming that his group, preppies in this case, maintains authority over goths. This kind of challenge is one even fairly high-ranking people within most groups won’t risk aggressively making, as it challenges every individual of the other group and in this case might lead to all of the goths building animosity towards the preppy group. Moreover, instigating needless group conflict puts the aggressor at risk of losing status within their own group.

While we are discussing social rank in the context of middle school, remember that this method of group decision making exists as the shadow governing structure of almost any setting you’ll need to navigate, be it an office, family office board, or town council. Its existence is masked as people mature and engage in dominance challenges with more competence and guile. Groups just like this exist in the congressional cafeteria and among the President’s advisors. The ways these groups interact through pre-programmed dominance challenges has a massive impact on the national policy of every country in the world.

For example, presidential advisors’ decisions over where to eat or who to date may affect their social status in a way that alters their relative social rank, which in turn affects national policy. The monkey part of our brain does not understand the difference between a social battle over lunch and one over fiscal policy and will weigh them not based on their absolute importance but on emotional states associated with them.

Tribal Groups

Simply put, we did not evolve in conditions in which the way we interact could be optimized for large groups. As a result, we are unable to mentally process dominance hierarchies of groups over around 25 people (with some big caveats).^[56] To fix this, our brains often categorize people into groups, or “tribes.” While most people do have a social rank within every group that identifies them as a member, these social ranks can be quite different from each other and group affiliation can dramatically affect how individuals interact.

Imagine four scenarios involving a meeting between three kids tasked with completing a group project who must decide how they will make decisions.

Scenario I

In the first scenario, three kids who have never met each other have been assigned to a group project or team-building exercise⁠. In this scenario, decisions are likely to be made through delicate, low-aggression-low-risk-but-still-emotionally-taxing prodding to try to determine their status relative to each other. Once this prodding has resolved enough uncertainty to reveal a clear status hierarchy, decisions will follow a normal dominance hierarchy method of governance.

Scenario II

In this scenario, three kids from the same social group choose to complete a group project together. In this scenario, their methodology of self-governance will be minimally emotionally taxing, as they know their social rank within their clique, making it easy to know how this new temporary group’s internal governance will work.

Scenario III

In this scenario, two students from one social group are assigned to complete a group project with an outsider to their group. This group will have a low emotional tax unless there is animosity between these two groups, with the more dominant member of the more populous group leading the new group, followed in dominance by their compatriot. The outnumbered student from a different clique will be largely marginalized and likely bullied if they challenge this outcome.

Scenario IV

In this scenario, three kids who all know each other are assigned to a group project, and each strongly identifies with a different clique. Now we have a problem: This group of individuals will not have a shared social rank hierarchy. What happens here?

This fourth scenario typically sorts into one of three outcomes:

Outcome 1

The students act as if they don’t have any tribal affiliations and create a social rank among the members of the group for this temporary interaction⁠, just as they would if they were strangers.

Outcome 2

The individuals act as representatives of their tribes and a dominance hierarchy forms based on tribal alliances. If Groups A and B are in conflict, but Groups B and C get along and everyone is neutral to Group C, then the student from Group C will assume the dominant position, with the group’s decisions heavily aligning with their inclinations.

Despite stereotypes to the contrary, tribes don’t have social ranks of their own. It’s not as though tribes of “cool cheerleaders” have dominance over other tribes and cheerleaders get treated as if they are of higher social rank by default, as is often depicted in movies.^[57] Instead, tribes with the most power within a network of tribes are those with the most strong inter-tribal relations (and the least disfavor from other tribes). Individuals who identify with tribes that see themselves as higher status than others may have very little power when interacting with other tribes. For example, the classic “cool girls” whose tribal identity is based around a sense of superiority will typically have a lot less intertribal negotiating and governance power when contrasted with a more welcoming and inter-tribally useful group like the “stoners.” The perception that some tribes enjoy higher “status” or are “cooler” than other groups is typically related to the desirability of the average member as a romantic partner and not an accurate reflection of the average member’s authority within the larger social system.

Outcome 3

It may also be that no real governance forms around this group project and the students stay antagonistic toward each other. This may seem like a very costly decision for those involved, but there is a method to this madness. In addition to the approaches outlined above, an individual can improve their social rank within a group by demonstrating dedication to that group, which can be signaled through actions ranging from wearing outfits unique to the tribe to expressing extreme opinions or merely showing animosity toward other tribes. Tribes commonly discuss what makes them different from other tribes and what makes outsiders inferior in comparison to them.

Culture Drift

This third outcome is revealing when we consider how tribal affiliations affect larger governing structures, as it contributes to something called “culture drift.” Because an individual can augment their social rank by signaling commitment to a tribe, unique features of the tribe, be they ideological positions or outfits, tend to become exaggerated over time.

For example, if a person gets a piercing that leads them to be rejected by mainstream culture but signals dedication to a specific group, they will rise in rank within that group. However, to get the same social rank boost in the future, other individuals within this group must get increasingly visible iterations of that piercing. If one person gets a piercing and then another gets the exact same piercing, they will benefit less from it in regards to their group status than the first person who got it. Earrings evolving into giant gauges may seem innocuous, but cultural drift becomes quite troublesome when a group has a unique ideology and group traits like mild racism or hostility toward one’s boss evolve into mandates for genocide or outright support of communism.

New tribes form—and old tribes die—by cultural drift. As the practices that identify a community become more regional, extreme groups within the community splinter off, creating new tribal groups (e.g., cyber goths splitting from the larger goth tribe).

How do tribes die? Eventually the core of a tribe’s subculture can become so radical, it ceases to be palatable to new entrants, at which point it “bubbles up” and slowly dies out. For examples of this happening historically, research how dandy culture became macaroni culture and then died out. Tribes rarely die because their existing members leave them; they die because existing members become so radicalized that new members have no interest in joining. While we are currently using cultural subgroups as examples, the same rules apply to political parties and factions within political parties.

Dominance in Broader Society

How do large tribes that exist across multiple geographies interact? As we said, people rarely participate in dominance hierarchies larger than 25 people, so how do people know who is on top when a person within your school’s marching band clique meets someone from that same clique from another school? What happens when a criminal gang member from one city meets one from another city?

Determining factors vary from group to group, but primarily individuals look for group dedication. This may be signaled by anything from body composition to the inflection and lilt of spoken words or knowledge of nuanced trivia. Should you go to an anime convention and encounter someone who starts quizzing you on obscure anime trivia, they are (ineptly and subconsciously) attempting to demonstrate they are of higher social rank than you within that community so that you know to regard them as dominant.

Side point: In The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion we theorize that anger results when one is treated in a manner that doesn’t align with their expectations around how they should be treated or when one undertakes an action and the expected outcome does not result (basically, any time reality does not conform to the way a person thinks it is supposed to work). This explains the classic tale of the boy at an anime convention who tries to challenge a girl to trivia knowledge and then gets mad when she won’t engage with this ploy or knows more than him. His expectation is that he should be higher status than her based either on his knowledge or his gender and her unwillingness to recognize that leads to anger.

There is a clear connection between local tribe affiliation and the wider tribal network, as the wider tribe will see members of other local tribes as “allies.” Conversely, those with animosity toward a tribe will see all members of that tribe as “enemies” regardless of geography. It is important to remember that we have instincts related to these types of behaviors over which we don’t have full conscious control. We receive positive emotional rewards when we give money to groups with which we identify (such as an alma mater), when “our” team wins a game, or when we needlessly trash on groups we see as being antagonistic to ours (be they anti-vaxxers or immigrants). No matter how emotionally enlightened a person sees themselves as being, as long as they aren’t a sociopath, this stuff will affect them at an emotional impulse level.

Your social rank will vary from one tribe to another (you may enjoy high social rank at your sports club while suffering from low social rank at work). Tribes themselves maintain loosely-enforced-but-widely-known alliances with some tribes and bear antagonism toward others. As such, a tribe does not have any inherently high or low social rank, only differential amounts of power (utility to its members) based on its relation with other local communities and access to resources. A large tribe may have different sub-groups with varying amounts of social power in different regions (e.g., a sorority might be powerful on one college campus and pathetic on another).

Why Are We Talking
About This?

You may be wondering at this point what any of this has to do with practical governance as it matters to you, your family office, your company department, your senate, etc.

The answer is⁠, in short, everything. When a group—be it a corporate board or a street gang—is not intentionally designed, a dominance hierarchy governs it by default. The impulses associated with our time lived as tribal apes even infect governing bodies intentionally designed to defeat these impulses. The concept of a board at your company that votes on decisions is rendered somewhat pointless if an internal hierarchy forms within the board in which a single individual ends up making almost all the decisions⁠. The same can be said for a senate sub-committee that devolves into intertribal conflict, or a family office in which an individual can amass power by tarnishing other family members’ reputations.

For this reason, we are far from finished exploring dominance hierarchies. While we use tropes associated with middle school cliques to illustrate dominance hierarchies, this fundamental governing structure is at play in most adult interactions. We default to childhood examples because they serve as a common reference point with which almost all of our readers are familiar and because these younger individuals have trouble with impulse control, which makes their struggles for dominance more transparent. When dominance hierarchies drive something like a senate sub-committee, there are 15 levels of subterfuge and metagames layered on top of them, making them harder to recognize.

Consider some of the real-world impacts of dominance hierarchy governance:

U.S. Politics

The phenomenon of cultural drift is currently fueling a profound polarization and radicalization of U.S. political parties. This book was published during the longest period of U.S. history in which each party has maintained a specific, unique, and constant identity, giving each party time to form an extreme echo chamber—an echo chamber that is amplified by social media. All the work our founding fathers put into the system may be rendered pointless by the instincts of apes.

Criminal Gangs

Gangs have fairly unsophisticated governing structures in that they typically lack intentionally designed checks and balances designed to curb dominance hierarchy rule. This means slights between members of different gangs in which an individual isn’t shown sufficient deference according to their rank can quickly boil over into group animosity, which in turn instigates gang wars that kill large numbers of individuals.

Higher Academia

Because academia is a large, world-spanning bureaucracy with organically-evolved governing mechanisms, and because it has far fewer positions than it has applicants (who have already dedicated years of their lives to moving up the chain), there is an extremely high tax on failures to adhere to tribal identity. This makes it very costly to present a new idea, way of doing things, or even political beliefs that don’t fit into a specific brand of liberalism.

Ironically, this causes academia to grow increasingly stagnant—not just in terms of participants, but in the generation of new ideas, which has caused corporations to lead the development of technological breakthroughs over the last few decades. We discuss the stats on this in more detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality. For example, more than 50% of sexual psychologists reported willingness to hide or otherwise obfuscate results that showed a biological basis for any mental sex differences.^[58] (Needless to say, developing a viable alternative to the transparent failure of the h-index and tenure system is one of our nonprofit’s core objectives.)

Societies that Value “Face”

When an individual does something for someone else, they perform a subtle act of dominance over them—this explains some fights to pay bills at restaurants. In government systems with large bureaucracies and a cultural tradition of “face” like that in China, this dynamic produces rampant corruption, with bribes being given out not just for their monetary value to those above you, but also to demonstrate dominance over those below you.

Gender Differences in Dominance Hierarchies

Offensive as it may be, different genders subconsciously process dominance hierarchies in distinct ways. While each gender may not necessarily be born with these differences, the varied lived experiences of males and females create, on aggregate, differing average patterns in group hierarchy relation.

What’s more, the manner in which our society conceptualizes dominant males versus dominant females produces different optimal pathways to achieve higher status. This matters because almost every governance model used today is specifically designed to be gender blind, yet the dominance hierarchy overlay layer on top of them is at least moderately impacted by gender.

The two biggest differences:

Men are more likely to settle dominance disputes with violence due to higher levels of testosterone, which means women are relatively more likely to resolve disputes with social shaming.
High social status does more to benefit men on sexual marketplaces than women. In The Pragmatists Guide to Sexuality, we explore research demonstrating that women on average prefer a partner who has a high social rank while men are largely indifferent to women’s hierarchical social positions for short-term mate selection (though they do optimize for it in long-term mate selection).^[59] As one paper found, “a man’s sex appeal to women is bolstered insofar as he bests other men in sports, business, or art. In contrast, men’s mate choices are largely indifferent to which women outperform other women in those arenas.”^[60] Because, in addition to gaining professional advantages, greater dominance also improves men’s status as a sexual partner, men on average have more motivation to take risky bets to move up a social hierarchy when contrasted with women.

How do these factors affect the unconscious dominance hierarchy impulses of men and women? The most immediately applicable takeaway (which has been backed by research—see: “Female Dominance Hierarchies: Are They Any Different from Males’?”^[61]) is that males assume a dominance hierarchy when they first interact with a group, whereas females regard all members of a group as equal until after they have witnessed the establishment of a dominance hierarchy.

If we were to guess why this difference exists, we would suppose that males are more likely to solve dominance disputes with violence, meaning that they can size up which male in a group would win one of these disputes just by looking at them. If a male walks into a room of males, he can quickly work out how they would sort themselves after a series of physical altercations⁠—taller, more muscular males would end up nearer to the top. On the other hand, female dominance hierarchies are sorted more frequently by social attacks, meaning women are likely to learn at a young age to wait and see how a group interacts before assuming who is where in a hierarchy.

While this dynamic only affects each gender toward the beginning of their interaction with a group, it means group hierarchies will sort themselves differently depending on whether they start with majority male or female participants. Short, physically weak men will perform worse in majority male environments.

Among chimps, males are typically higher in the dominance hierarchy than females whereas among bonobos, females are typically higher in the dominance hierarchy than males. We have reason to believe that humans fall into the chimp model of great ape behavior patterns. Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that more “male-like” females, or females who demonstrate more traits commonly associated with a male, are more prevalent in upper management than feminine females. This means that in systems with ineffective governance structures, talented, feminine females will, on average, be underutilized due to lower presumed social rank within decision-making bodies like boards and committees.

This is not something that can be avoided just by having participants in a governance structure not see each other, as the perceptions also extend to voice pitch, with more feminine voices being seen as less dominant. This is true even within genders—with lower-pitched-voice females being perceived as more dominant than women with higher-pitched voices on a linear scale. This judgment of voices and dominance also has a gendered component, with women being more sensitive to it than men.^[62] In other words, a governance structure that is primarily female will penalize a female with a high-pitched voice more than one that is predominantly male.

In adulthood, men still favor participating in single-gender dominance hierarchies at a much higher rate than women, who instead prefer dyadic relationships (those between just themselves and one other person). This is an interesting finding for us as it runs against our anecdotal observations, but it is what the data suggests.^[63]

Attempting to create governance structures that promote equality without taking these differences into account is as doomed to failure as trying to navigate the transatlantic passage without accounting for trade winds and currents. Yes, the currents and winds don’t always move in one direction, but they do so enough that if you were to ignore their patterns, you would have a hell of a time making the crossing with any precision.

Cultural Differences in Dominance Hierarchies

Culture, in addition to gender, affects dominance hierarchies.

Some cultures have strict rules in which older individuals are to be regarded as higher within a dominance hierarchy relative to younger individuals. This is very common in Asian cultures and interacts with governing models they borrowed from the West in a manner that creates extreme friction, burning off a large amount of their potential productivity. Ironically, this friction hurts older individuals much more than younger ones.

Specifically, if older individuals are presumed to hold higher status and have whims that must be obeyed, then it is extremely awkward to have an older subordinate. Functionally, this means that if an older individual hasn’t risen to a senior enough position within a group by a certain age, they are pushed out. This is a major problem in nations like South Korea and Japan where it becomes extremely difficult to keep one’s job in a corporate system after 50 if one hasn’t risen into management (this is part of the reason there are so many Korean-owned restaurants, as leaving the corporate world to start a restaurant is a common career path for older individuals who have been marginalized by this system).

Culture also influences dominance hierarchies through power distance. The presumed power someone of a higher social rank has over someone of a lower social rank varies between cultures. As people who have run teams and companies in South Korea, Peru, the U.K., and the U.S., we cannot stress enough how much power distance matters. One cannot simply take a model of governance from a low-power-distance region like North America and apply it in a high-power-distance region like the Middle East. Many more controls and stopgaps are needed to prevent high-power-distance environments from defaulting to dominance hierarchy methods of governance.

In addition, having a management position is seen as much more of a burden in high-power-distance cultures—something we learned the hard way. If someone at a U.S.-based company is doing a great job, you typically promote them, and they’re typically happy about it. It would never cross your mind that the person might rather quit than be promoted. In high-power-distance cultures, this is extremely common. In Peru, we found that about six out of seven employees would rather quit than be promoted to upper management. One of our employees suggested to us that in Peru, more people see management in the context of all the things the manager may be blamed for if someone they manage messes up—this stands in stark contrast to the way people contextualize management in the U.S., where people tend to think more about the advancement and greater power they’ll enjoy. This difference in contextualization radically affects the culture of management in said countries and how management interacts with employees.

We eventually ended up addressing our Peruvian team’s dislike for management positions by encouraging our best performers to hire family members they could train and manage. This functionally broke our Peruvian teams into family-based siloes, which goes against literally everything they teach you at Stanford Business School. When you operate in a different culture, sometimes you need to learn to adapt to that culture rather than force your practices on them.

How Personal Social Rank Changes Behavior

The foundations of the dominance hierarchy system developed at least before our most recent ancestor split from chimps and bonobos, and probably as far back as our pre-simian ancestors, as many simian species utilize dominance hierarchies. The effect social rank has on our behavioral patterns is deeply baked into our unconscious.

Research has consistently shown an individual’s self-perceived dominance in a situation alters everything from tone of voice to pheromones, risk-taking behavior, monogamy, posture, gate, and even arousal pathways (we discovered the arousal pathways effect through a study we conducted for The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality). We point this out to dispel any lingering hopes that this is a minor system that can be ignored or dismissed when navigating governing structures.

Consider that unemployed individuals have much lower testosterone levels and those lower testosterone levels will change both a person’s behavior and body composition. Your biology will literally adapt to your position in society, which is kind of nuts.

Self-Image Reinforcement
and Leadership

Aside from dominance hierarchies’ influence on group interactions, there is one more “pre-installed system” in humans that must be considered in attempts to predict how people will react within the context of governing structures: The self-image-reinforcement system.

The self-image-reinforcement system is the part of our psyche dedicated to maintaining a specific image of ourselves. About a third of The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life is dedicated to understanding how this system functions and how it can be altered, as on an individual basis it drives most of a person’s behavior.

How does this system work? When you have an imaginary argument with someone in your head long after the real argument ended, you are creating a model of that person in your brain. Your brain is emulating the way it thinks they will react to things using something called a “mental model.” Essentially, your brain separates out a part of itself and runs a predictive model of the other person’s brain on that part of your consciousness in the same way a Mac computer can run a PC emulator on top of its operating system.

We don’t just create emulations of other people; we all have at least one emulation always running in the background of our psyche that models our perceived self. This emulation is used to drive your behavior when you are not really paying attention to life (about 98% of the time in even fairly lucid people).^[64] This social simulation program is also used by your brain to determine how to emotionally react to various scenarios.

All of this is relevant to governance because many governance structures rely heavily on a single person, their decisions, and their actions: A king, CEO, dictator, pope, general, president, etc. The fact that these individuals’ day-to-day decisions and sources of happiness are often driven by an unconscious system instead of logic has a massive impact on how governments run. Just as we must consider dominance hierarchies when studying units of government centered around boards and councils, we must factor in self-image-reinforcement systems when studying units of government run by a central figure of authority.

The most important thing to note about this system is that it is highly susceptible to feedback loops, which can cause those with concentrated power to care less and less about the wellbeing of others and more about their own perceived power within the system. This is well backed by research, with empathy lowering with increased power and wealth.

Anyone from the supervisor of a coffee shop to a dictator can fall prey to this dynamic, though it is more dangerous the higher in the system an individual rises. Historically, this effect has been moderately ameliorated by reminding the individual in charge at the top—be they a pope or a king—that they are themselves servants of a higher power. When presidents and CEOs came into vogue, this changed to: ”You are actually a servant of the people” or “You are actually a servant of the shareholders.” Famously, during Roman triumphs, a type of slave called an Auriga would whisper into the ear of the victorious commander “Memento Mori” (“remember you are mortal”). These methods are only moderately effective.

Fortunately, there are ways to mitigate the effect of this snowballing lack of interest in others’ wellbeing, such as short and strict term limits (which, alas, have their own negative effects we will explore soon). Theoretically, a society might also contextualize rulers as having lower social rank than the general population, but we haven’t seen groups do this much yet. We will explore ways to manipulate these types of systems to create better functioning governments toward the end of the book.

Instead of encouraging people to make the most logical decisions, the self-image-reinforcement system pushes them to maximize their ideal self image. A leader may make a decision that, instead of maximizing the good of his stakeholders, maximizes his perceived power to others—or more commonly a decision that he believes makes him look good (this is commonly cited as “virtue signaling”).

Virtue signaling is dangerous as it allows an individual to feel like they are addressing system-wide mandates when ultimately engaging in acts of vanity. A CEO might appoint a female COO and assume he has made a difference in increasing workplace gender equality rather than carefully analyze company hiring and promotion dynamics and launch new policies.

The virtue signaling system makes it very hard for an individual to see themselves as the “bad guy.” The longer a person is in power, the harder it becomes for them to contextualize their actions as potentially “bad.” If you are building a governing structure with a position of central authority, you must establish fail-safes that anticipate this turn of events at least 30% of the time a person is in power for more than half a decade.

Should you find this system interesting and wish to explore it in greater detail, review Part III of The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life.

Cancer and Institutional
Immune Systems

The larger and older an animal is, the more susceptible it is to cancer. Only one cell need become “selfish,” replicating in a way that benefits only itself and not the wider organism, in order for cancer to take hold. The more cells there are in an organism and the longer they stick around, the higher the probability that any one of them “turns selfish.” Governances function in a similar fashion: The larger and older a governance structure becomes, the more likely it becomes to develop cancerous departments and functions that exist more to justify their continuation than to benefit the organization as a whole.

Think of a governance structure as a substrate on and within which parasites can evolve. Parasites that are better at staying alive are more likely to continue to exist and those which are better at redirecting resources to themselves are more likely to grow.

I write this sitting in New York—I would not be surprised if the city created at least ten temporary projects dedicated to road maintenance a year. Likely the vast majority of those projects function as intended, self-destructing after a few years, but every now and then one is structured in just such a way that it does not self-destruct. The city governance has something of an immune system that hunts for these inefficiencies and shuts them down, but given the size and age of the city, some persist beyond their utility, undetected. Worse, some projects come to amass power by redirecting resources to themselves in the same way a cancer can hijack the blood vessels around it to get a disproportionate amount of resources while others regularly fracture and spread throughout the wider organization, taking root in new departments in the same way a cancer metastasizes.

If you have two governance structures designed to fulfill the same task, but one contains some additional “code” that redirects resources to promote its continued existence while the other does not, the governance structure with the “selfish code” will intrinsically have a higher probability of existing in the future (outside of institutional immune systems designed to target and kill branches with this type of code). Governance structures that have it in their “code” to self-replicate also have a higher probability of persisting—in some format or another.

What makes these cancerous polyps particularly dangerous is that they often still serve something of a purpose. The best way for them to counteract an organizational immune system is to appear useful or critical to an organization’s function—siphoning organizational resources to more loudly promote the anemic value they do provide.

In animals, cancer can sometimes evolve to become contagious. A famous example comes in the form of Canine Transmissible Venereal Tumor (CTVT) which is a transmissible dog cancer.

Cool side note: The cancer originally developed in a native American dog. Almost all Native American dog breeds are now extinct (the few that claim to be are not, for example, the Chihuahua and Xoloitzcuintli (Peruvian hairless) retain 4% and 3% of their pre-colonial ancestry respectively). This means that while native American dogs are now functionally extinct, they live inside many other dogs.

Cancerous governing dynamics can spread between organizations just like CTVT if they are effective enough at self-replication and self-preservation, often using organizational resources to exaggerate a problem they claim to be solving. In worst-case scenarios, entire industries can spring up promoting these diseases. Just like real diseases, they can compete with each other for resources, with one more effective disease sometimes driving another to near extinction—consider the effect the anti-racism training industry has had on the workplace sexual harassment training industry.

This is not to say that racism and sexual harassment are not problems worthy of attention but rather that the [insert-bad-behavior-here] training industries hide from organizational immune systems so effectively because the problems they claim to address are real. If the problems were not real, it would be much easier to identify and expel the disease. It is the acute nature of problems like racism and sexual harassment that makes them such effective forms of camouflage for cancerous entities.

It is the fact that those perpetuating the cancer can justifiably exclaim: “How dare you question spending on X issue?” that makes it so easy for self-perpetuating inefficiencies that hide from organizational immune systems to exist in these industries. Anyone who cares about the issues more than the industry will be interested in pointing out their susceptibility to inefficiency. (We say this as things like diversity training exercises have shown to only be remembered for a day or two.)^[65]

As with real cancer, these cancerous governing bodies cannot be entirely evaded. With enough time and institutional size, toxic governing bodies will always appear and after enough iterations will always overpower an organization’s immune system, slowly weighing down the governance structure like a hulking behemoth struggling to lumber—struggling even to breathe—under a mass of cancerous polyps. In nature, cancer is overcome when species regularly wipe the slate clean through reproduction. We see something similar happen as governances with empires that seem to have every advantage in the world over barbarian invaders collapse under their own weight and large companies with trillions of dollars in assets find themselves outcompeted by small startups. Fortunately, the reproductive cycle that addresses cancerous growths in nature can be simulated within human governance systems (more on that later).

One could also strengthen an organization’s immune system. Animals like elephants have some of the best anti-cancer systems of all species to handle being so large and long-lived (humans have one copy of P53—a tumor suppressor—while elephants have as many as 20), but such systems are not without cost. While allergies represent a fairly manageable cost of overzealous immune systems, autoimmune disease—in which immune systems rip out important functions in the search for threats—can render people barely functional. We will discuss tactics for managing this delicate balance later in the book; however, we view organizational cancer as such a critically intractable problem in governance that it must be laid out up front.

Structuring How We
Think About Governance

Someone’s answer to the questions: “How can I make this nonprofit’s board better?” and “What is the optimal governance system for this nonprofit?” would be quite different, with the first phrasing priming an individual to think iteratively and the second priming the individual to develop a new system from the ground up. The lens we use for investigating governance structures must not be shaped by presuming the preeminence of legacy governance models.

When we were developing our school, The Collins Institute (CollinsInstitute.org), we did not ask the question: “How can education be made better?”

Instead, we asked: “What would the perfect educational system look like?”

We are not the smartest of people, yet through a simple change in framing we were able to develop an educational system capable of outcompeting extant models at a significantly lower cost.

If we want to be able to think outside the box and develop novel governance systems, or identify problems with extant systems others might not be seeing, we will need to take as wide a view of governance as possible. If we define governance as “a system for interacting to help a group of individuals synergize their efforts to achieve a common goal,” we can begin to think about the core components any such system would have.

When we break governances into basic components, they can largely be thought of as consisting of interconnected modules, each made up of deciders and selectors. Deciders coordinate the actions of that governance module’s purview, while selectors determine who or what the deciders will be. One governance module can exist nested within another, like a matryoshka doll, with its decider being an aspect of the other governance module’s selector (e.g., three bodies of representatives elected through different means could themselves vote on another body of governance). That might all sound pretty esoteric, so let’s dive in to get a better example of what we mean.

The Decider

All governing systems have a “decider.” This is the mechanism for making group-level decisions.

All deciders are composed of modules that fall into the following four categories:

Executive: A single entity that makes decisions via a top-down hierarchy (in the vernacular, this individual may be called the commander, emperor, executive, dictator, chief, etc.).
Board: A group of entities that makes decisions through a systemized pattern of interaction (in the vernacular, this could be called a council, a senate, etc.).
Triumvirate: In a triumvirate, three entities choose an outcome through a systematic pattern of interaction. While technically a board, triumvirates function quite differently. Unlike boards and executives, the “entity” in a triumvirate is often the input of a separate “decider module” as opposed to a human individual⁠—hence our use of the word “entity” instead of individual. Triumvirates are also unique in that they often include a “rock-paper-scissors” dynamic, with each member being subordinate and inferior to another in some respect—similar to how in the game Rock, Paper, Scissors, each element checks the other in some way and is vulnerable to another in some way.
Policy: A predetermined, systemized pattern for making decisions. This can range from a complicated artificial intelligence with the potential to learn to a set of simple rules, laws, or traditions. It could even be a mechanism as simple as making a decision with a roll of dice or the shake of a Magic 8 Ball.

To understand how these modules combine like individual Legos to form more complex “decider bodies,” consider the U.S. government. At a high level, it is composed of a triumvirate of one executive module and two board modules (the executive, legislative, and judicial branches) each made up of their own lower-level modules. This triumvirate is subordinate to the constitution and laws, which each represent overlapping policy modules.

While we concede that the U.S. government is way more complicated than we make it seem in this summary, even its more complicated structures can be broken into modules composed of the above five structures. The U.S. government also serves as a good model demonstrating why the triumvirate module type is fundamentally different from the board type, as comparing the three branches of government to a board feels ludicrous.

Bonus Category: AI-Simulated Populations

AIs modeled on swaths of the populace make up a theoretical fifth category of decider that has yet to be leveraged but can be thought of as being derivative of the Policy category. To get an idea of what we mean by an AI modeled on one or more people, check out The Infinite Conversation^[66] a never-ending conversation between AIs trained on the writings of Bavarian director Werner Herzog and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Presumably an AI could be trained on public discourse to create a dictator that represents the average mindset of the populace.

The Collins Institute has a partnership to develop the educational system for a new nation state (Praxis). One aspect of the national education system we have proposed involves building an AI from students’ writings that could participate in their legislative body. This AI, which would be weighted by student engagement—meaning more engaged students would influence this AI more than less engaged students—would act as something like a senator, making educational engagement a means of engaging with and influencing the nation state’s government and community.

The Selector

All governing systems have some mechanism for determining who the decider(s) will be.

Selection is executed through one of the following methodologies:

Vote: Voting is, by far, the most commonly used system, but how it functions can vary greatly.
1. Who votes?
  1. Stakeholders: Individuals who are in some way “part of the organization” Stakeholders range from people born in a country to employees of a company.
  1. Contributors: Individuals who have made a sacrifice for the organization. Contributors range from investors in a company to those who have risked their lives for their nation.
  1. Representatives: Individuals who have been chosen by another body vote⁠. Chosen voters may be representatives of stakeholders, volunteers, members of certain groups, or voters chosen through another vote.
1. How are votes weighted?
  1. Flat: One vote per voter.
  1. Proportional: The weight of each vote is proportional to an exogenous factor⁠. For example, a shareholder’s vote in a company may be equivalent in weight to how much stock they own

(Note: We have an entire chapter devoted to voting systems, so don’t read this list as exhaustive.)

Contest: In this rarely-used system, the decider is chosen through some form of contest such as a fight or race.
Victor: Sometimes the deciding body is just whoever won the last military conflict. While this determinant is uncommon in stable regions, it dominated the early history of human governance (e.g., The new king is the guy who killed the last one).
Initiative: Power is wielded by whoever chooses to take action. This isn’t relevant at a national level, but it comes up frequently in smaller systems (e.g., The most influential friend in a group is the one who plans and coordinates the lion’s share of the gatherings, or the CEO of a startup is the person who put their money, time, and reputation on the line to found the company).
Previous Decider’s Choice: Governance falls to someone named by an outgoing governor, such as a dictator deciding their successor.
Rules: A system of rules determining the decider could manifest as anything from an advanced AI to a policy like “the oldest male child of the last king” or a system in which individuals are chosen at random from the population.
Dominance Hierarchy: The decider or group of deciders is chosen through the systems discussed at the beginning of the book (dominance displays and signaling).
Combination: A system could combine rules (randomly choosing people from the population) with voting (this is how juries work) or combine direct democracy with proportional voting and representative democracy (this yields something called liquid democracy).

That’s really it. Governance does not get more complicated than that. All government structures that have ever existed are made up of modules that can be described by some combination of the above dimensions. While this may seem simple, every one of these dimensions could have a book written on it, exploring anything from term lengths to the effects of how votes are counted. We shall explore a few of these dynamics in more detail, using both case studies and previous research before presenting theoretically better systems.

By exploring a governing body through its component parts, you can easily understand how those components interact and more easily identify dangerous flaws.

Important Governing Features

While all government units can be described in terms of their decider and selector components, the units’ interaction with other units, information flows, and several other factors significantly influence outcomes and warrant careful consideration.

Interaction With Other Units

The rules for interaction between subordinate governing structures and other governing unitssignificantly influence the nature of the governance that emerges. Whether or not new governing structures can be formed within an existing one—and the process for forming those structures—significantly shapes the efficiency of a governing structure and the daily lives of those living within it.

Let’s explore a few examples. A group of individuals is largely free to come together and form a company or club when living under the U.S. governance system. This makes it radically different from more draconian systems, which prevent private gatherings or the formation of sub-governance systems like companies. Similarly, many companies might attempt to prevent their employees from coming together to form a union—a sub-governance system within the company.

When totalitarian governments do not wipe out churches, they typically draw church governance into their internal body of governance, converting the church into a fully integrated module within its governing structure to prevent the development of independent governance bodies that may undermine their authority. A similar dynamic can be observed among anti-union companies that incorporate elements of a union into their HR systems. In both cases, the internally-controlled organizations are meant to sufficiently address demands that would otherwise give birth to threatening external organizations.

When exploring a governing body, ask:

How free are its sub-governing structures?
How free are its stakeholders to start new sub-governing structures?

It is possible to be loose on one of these metrics yet strict on the other. Contrast the government-religion relations of the present United States of America with those of Medieval Europe. In the U.S., religions are free to form with almost no restrictions, while there are limits to the power a religious institution can yield. While one could not start new religions in Medieval Europe, church institutions were so powerful that clergy members were tried for crimes by separate ecclesiastical courts (troublingly, university students counted as clergy and frequently abused this lighter court structure).

The above case demonstrates what is known as “polycentric law.” Polycentric law describes a situation in which multiple legal systems overlap in a single jurisdiction. This was historically most relevant when ecclesiastic law overlapped with regional law or the law that applied to Roman citizens overlapped with regional law, but in the future it will be important with regard to how law is applied to online communities and moderation.

An interesting related point is the question of whether or not an individual subject to polycentric law can hold a position within a government’s decider module. Often it will be argued that the person has “foreign loyalty” and will not make decisions solely in the best interests of that particular governing structure.

Concerns over a person having loyalty to a foreign governing body have historically been used to bar Catholics from public office. This was even considered in the U.S. when John F. Kennedy first ran for office. In these cases, fear of conflicting loyalties typically (to our knowledge) turned out to be benign.

There are, however, exceptions. Consider President Park Geun-hye of South Korea, who capitulated to the desires of a cult, the Church of Eternal Life, while holding office. In this instance, an organization that was supposed to be subordinate to its ruling government unit (in that this cult was entirely contained within South Korea) found itself capable of controlling the unit above it.

Consider this question in terms of governing structures and how they nest within each other.

For example:

A confederation: A union of sovereign states that maintain autonomy.
A federation: A union of states under a central authority with a constitutionally entrenched separation of power (as seen with the states within the United States of America).
Unity state: A central authority that chooses what power to delegate.

Also consider how sub-governing units of different types can interact, as is the case with public-private partnerships in which a private company partners with a nonprofit entity.

The factors at play are (A) any limits to power imposed on the sub-governing structures and (B) rules for forming and maintaining a sub-governing structure:

Does it need to pay a fee or portion of its income to exist?
Can it be imported from another area? (For example, can a foreign religion enter your country?)
Does it require permission to exist or can it form without obtaining permission?
Can it be subject to a governing body contained within a foreign government (like the Catholic church or a company with a headquarters in another country)?
Can anyone run it?
Can it have its own courts? If so, how powerful can they be?

For an exploration of how controlling the manner in which information moves around a governing system affects its behavior, see: Information Flow on page 367 of the Appendix.

Big Brother, Little Brother, and Phantom Brother

When it comes to information flow, unrestricted state or corporate government use of personal data—such as private conversations—is often a concern. The presence of cameras that may or may not be recording citizens for review by the state or a corporation are certain to change behavior. Every company with remote workers must wrestle with whether or not to demand unfettered access to their computers’ video cameras to ensure employees are actually working.^[67]

If you’re afraid of a Big-Brother-style governance structure spying on you, you should be downright terrified of Little Brother. We live in a world in which anyone could make freeware for a phone that passively monitors what is being said in a room, starts recording after recognizing a certain series of words, and uploads what has been recorded to a collective dataset (similar to those found on places like 8chan).

Parents might download apps to their kids’ phones or laptops that listen for when a teacher uses politically sensitive terms and record the following ten minutes. Groups may conceal old phones under seats in spaces where high-profile figures mix to listen for offenses they can subsequently publicize. Religious extremists may leave phones recording video in well-known gay establishments and subsequently upload the data to a collective database where clips are automatically run through facial processing software.

How governance structures handle the threat of Little Brother will be a defining aspect of their future operations.

In addition to Big Brother and Little Brother, we have Phantom Brother. While Big and Little Brother cause behavioral change as a product of possible monitoring, Phantom Brother causes behavioral change not through surveillance but rather by creating the “aesthetic of monitoring.” For example, if a pair of eyes is painted on a donation box, experiments have shown that individuals will donate significantly more money.^[68] We have not seen governance structures extensively use these systems yet and even we have hesitated to put them into practice in our own companies.

Success Metrics

Filters that determine who is given power, like the Chinese Imperial Exams and the actions of the Khmer Rouge, affect the governing structures those people enter. The metrics used to determine whether someone may move up within a governing unit’s hierarchy have a similarly profound effect.

Two examples of system failures resulting from mechanisms for promotion demonstrate different ways this effect can cause a system to fail: Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the current system of academia.

The Case of Mao’s Great Leap Forward

During Mao’s Great Leap Forward, governors were rewarded with advancement based on specific production metrics that were determined by the output of other governors. This system encouraged governors to inflate their output, which in turn created unrealistic expectations for other governors, ultimately forcing all players to inflate their numbers. Ultimately those more willing to lie, rather than those who were effective, rose in rank, and China’s central authority was forced to make decisions based on increasingly bad information.

Starvation became so common that a cultural tradition arose in which families would swap children so parents wouldn’t have to eat their own to survive. By some metrics, more people died during just this five year period than during the entirety of the American Slave Trade. We flag this as many people hear the word “inefficiency” and have trouble imagining the scale of suffering and death that can result.

We often ascribe “evil” that results from malice as somehow being worse than that which results from incompetence and disinterest, but when you are trading your infant with that of another family to avoid the added emotional pain of your family eating one of their own, I doubt it matters to you how you ended up in that position—only that you did.[69]

Note: This is why the free market has been relatively effective at reducing famines and mass starvation when contrasted with centralized governing systems. While the free market is much more susceptible to problems relating to the tragedy of the commons^{^[70]} (e.g., environmental issues), free markets are highly resistant to inefficiency resulting from misinformation when contrasted with other forms of social structures due to systems at lower levels of production being more “closed.”

If a company is not producing as much grain, it is hard for it to fake this failure as it relates to the company’s profits and the company’s impact on the economy will intrinsically shrink as a result. Even if a company did successfully find a way to fake production quantities, this would be a short-lived phenomenon due to short sellers.

Short selling allows any individual to make a fortune if they successfully catch a company lying about something material to their profit, short them, and release said information. In non-capitalist systems, the reward for identifying misinformation about quotas is minuscule and doing so could even get an individual killed. (Note: Capitalist societies don’t fare much better in tragedy of the commons issues; we are only referring to shortages driven by misinformation.)

The Case of Modern Academia

An individual’s status within the academic system is determined in large part by their h-index—a figure indicating how many people have cited papers they have authored or co-authored. As academics are incentivized to publish papers that will get citations, most don’t bother to publish studies with results that reinforce the status quo. This adverse incentive produces variance within more subjective fields of inquiry and likely contributes to the replication crisis currently plaguing many fields (essentially, people are beginning to find that a large number of widely-cited studies are not reproducible).

Worse, the current system for entering academia essentially forces people to choose the same field of exploration as their academic advisor—or at least something adjacent. If a fledgling academic would like to explore an obscure or unpopular subject, they will have great difficulty finding an advisor, end up with a weak network (given the lack of conferences related to their field), struggle to publish research, and see very few people cite any research they ultimately publish.

What does this failure look like in practice? It causes “eddies” of information to form in which tons of effort is spent on specific questions while other questions are completely ignored. This was widely apparent to us when we began drafting a book on early child development. While we found hundreds of studies on the long-term effects of breastfeeding, there was pretty much nothing exploring the long-term effects of epidurals. This is bizarre, as we know that epidurals pool in infants’ brains at four times the rate of mothers’ brains and that a pregnant mother’s consumption of other types of narcotics has a long-term effect on child brain development. Doing a study to look at the effects of epidurals on long-term brain development wouldn’t even be that hard—in fact, we plan to run one after the book is published and don’t expect it to cost more than $10,000.

How can we have whole conferences dedicated to the effects of breastfeeding on brain development and not a single comprehensive, long-term (more than a 15-year effect) study on the effects of epidurals on cognition (IQ, career success, or behavioral issues) even though they are used in 71% of births?

As mentioned, graduate students end up focusing on their advisors’ areas of research—so if a student’s advisor has a schtick around breast milk, they will be pressured to develop one as well. If this student wishes to move up, they will have to publish research on popular topics to ensure their papers get cited. If no one is writing about the long-term effects of epidurals, a study on them will not be cited as much as one on a field associated with a dedicated and active research community.

This sort of eddy isn’t limited to this field—the citation and tenure system of academia has set human knowledge back decades and is compounding. As the system ages, the bureaucracy deepens, and the eddies become larger.

The problem extends beyond these shortcomings. A recent study found that even the system determining what does and does not get published is essentially nonfunctional. One group of researchers found that among papers submitted to two peer reviewers, 50% of acceptance decisions were different, with the correlation between two review scores being only 0.55.^[71]

Even when analyzing the exact same data and presented with the same question, researchers come out all over the place. A whopping 29 teams, representing a total of 61 international researchers, were given the same data set to answer the question: “Are soccer referees more likely to give red cards to players with darker skin than to those with lighter skin?” While 69% found a significant effect, 31% found that there was not a significant effect.^[72]

This was not a one-off finding. In another experiment, 161 researchers working in 73 independent research teams were given the same data set and asked: “Will more immigration reduce public support for government provision of social policies?” Of the teams, 25.4% reported that immigration would have a negative effect, 57.7% reported it would have no effect, and 16.9% reported that it would have a positive effect. The authors of the study could not explain 95% of the total variance in researchers’ conclusions.^[73]

There is no system disincentivizing academics from publishing non-replicable research. Research published in even the most prestigious journals is often non-replicable. A full 38% of psychology results published in Nature and Science were non-replicable.^[74] This explains in part why productivity in many scientific fields has crashed over the last few decades.^[75]

Having started his career in academia, Malcolm could go on forever about the failures of the current system. Our nonprofit is working to create alternative methods of investigation and information dissemination like the Collins Institute (CollinsInstitute.org). One solution to the adverse incentives fueling these failures of the higher academic realm involves an end to government-backed student loans. In addition to preventing millions of children from screwing up their lives with inescapable debt, eliminating government-backed student loans would force academic institutions to cease operating as self-perpetuating machines exempt from consequences for failure and instead begin equipping people to be productive members of the modern economy.

Judging the Quality of a Government

The metrics used to determine a governing body’s quality are far more interesting than you might imagine. From a pragmatist’s perspective, the quality of a thing should be judged by how well it achieves its purpose—but such judgments are not straightforward.

The Will of the People

Suppose a democracy’s goal is to act on the will of its citizens. In a region populated with both a modest number of long-term landowners who plan to stay their whole lives and a greater number of short-term renters who plan to leave after half a decade, whose will matters more when the landowners’ and renters’ interests conflict?

Landowners benefit from improving the quality of the neighborhood and have more “ownership” of the neighborhood due to the financial sacrifices they made to cultivate it. Renters make up more of the population of the neighborhood and along that metric have more “ownership.”

Renters will favor governance that deprioritizes long-term benefits in favor of short-term gains (such as low rents at the expense of gentrification that improves the overall area) whereas landowners are incentivized to vote for governance that makes short-term sacrifices in favor of long-term gains (such as gentrification that augments property values—but also raises the local cost of living). In such a case, what does a “competent” government do if competence is gauged by the extent to which the government acts on the will of the populace?

Democracies are rife with confusion over the actual will of the people. The will of the people often requires more honesty than most are comfortable providing. Furthermore, the will of today’s people often conflicts with the will of the people in the future. Consider draconian U.K. porn laws outlawing any porn depicting someone who is plausibly being hurt as an example of the former^[76] (something consumed by more than half the populace but that no one wants to be seen supporting publicly—see: The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality). Climate change presents an example of the latter (something that, if ignored, benefits society over the short term while compromising society over the long run).

Creativity

It can be beneficial to judge governing bodies on the creativity with which they develop strategies for achieving their goals. Is the governing body capable of forming and acting on totally new ideas—or is it only capable of iteration? Governments often lose the ability to form novel strategies when total failure is punished too fervently or when large leaps in efficiency are rewarded only a little bit more than baby steps.

This is one reason why capitalism is so effective as a sub-governance model despite its many shortcomings. Rather than rewarding a large leap in efficiency with triple the salary and a more secure job, as is common in non-capitalist systems, capitalism rewards leaps in efficiency proportionally to their impact on society (with billions of dollars), all while putting the cost of failure almost entirely on the individual and those who believed in said individual, such as investors (which minimizes downside risk to society). (Note: The U.S. is not a “pure” capitalist country, which is why it occasionally bails out businesses and industries “too big to fail.”)

For an example of how creativity is stifled in non-capitalist systems, read up on the development of the T-72.^[77] In innovating this tank’s design, Major General Kartsev ignored the prescriptions of a better-connected team because he believed he could develop something better. While was right (and his designs are now widely used), the rewards for “winning” were given to the team he defied and he was stripped of all his positions for daring to challenge his well-connected “superiors.” Why would someone invest in innovation in a system that punishes those who disrupt the status quo?

Efficiency

In a similar vein, one might judge governing quality by evaluating how costly it is to get the component parts of a government to move. Network management theory asks how something like local government should be structured to efficiently incentivize the pursuit of its goals (such as making an area nicer) without creating wasted “energy.” How do you create a governance system that offers the minimum necessary reward in order to incentivize desired behavior? This type of question is called “enoughsmanship.”

Friction

Consider excess heat put off by team disagreements (where we return to our previous analogy with heat being money lost due to friction). How much is the system hurt when two components bear animosity toward each other and how frequent are those types of occurrences? Yet again, capitalism is well suited to address this problem. In capitalist systems, teams that hate each other are able to turn that hatred into competitive fuel with minimal loss. The less “efficient” economic unit plays a smaller and smaller role over time in a healthy capitalist system.

Longevity

A governing body’s success could be judged by its tenure—how long it existed as originally designed—but even this is a more nuanced measure than one may think. I (Malcolm) got my undergraduate degree at St Andrews University in Scotland. At the center of the university was a collapsed cathedral—one of the most beautiful sites I have seen in my life. The state into which the cathedral had collapsed had remained largely constant for hundreds of years, as could be seen from old pictures. The cathedral had actually been in this static “ruined” state for a longer period than it was in its “operational” state. Often the form into which a thing collapses is more stable than its original design. In terms of governance structures, something similar can be seen in the form of the U.S. government. The U.S. government was explicitly designed to prevent many of the things that are core to its function today—like citizens voting directly for a president, party systems, a strong judiciary and executive branch, etc. Yet, few would call the U.S. a failed state or even ineffective at achieving its founders’ goals.

To explore enforcement mechanisms used in governance systems as well as common points of inefficiency like rent-seeking and the flypaper effect, refer to pages 377 and 379 of the Appendix.

Size

Perhaps it is almost axiomatic at this point, but smaller governing structures are more efficient than larger ones—both among state governing bodies and their private counterparts.

Take a quick look at the World Economic Forum’s list of the top five most efficient governments, which is currently topped by Singapore, Qatar, Finland, Hong Kong, and the United Arab Emirates.

This is true even at companies thought to be effective: For example, I, Malcolm, was hired for a managerial position at Google. What position? The system couldn’t figure that one out. After waiting for nearly half a year for Google to find me a job after extending a formal offer, I quit out of frustration. Google is typically thought of as being uniquely efficient for its size, but even this paragon of innovation can barely function when contrasted with smaller companies. While this effect is annoying, it benefits innovation by giving small businesses a means of competing with economies of scale that would otherwise grant large companies a perpetual advantage.

Further reading:

For an analytical breakdown of this phenomenon by the European Central Bank, see: Public Sector Efficiency: An Internal Comparison.^{^[78]}
To peruse the counter-perspective, see two detailed articles by Ed Noelen: “Quality of Government, Not Size, Is the Key to Freedom and Prosperity” and “They Go Together: Freedom, Prosperity, and Big Government” in which Noelen essentially argues that personal freedom increases with government size—where personal freedom is defined only by education, health, and personal safety (a correlation that disappears when one controls for quality of governance and GDP). From our perspective, the core piece of evidence this analysis does not take into account is the absolute—rather than relative—size of a governing body (e.g., the U.S. has a bigger government than Finland in absolute size, but this analysis would show it as having a smaller one). Even with Noelen’s dataset, the trends he shows reverse once absolute size is taken into account. In other words, after a governing body reaches a certain critical mass of staff or wealth under management, it begins to see a steep decline in efficacy.

At the expense of allowing our personal politics to shine through, this effect is why large governing structures are so fundamentally terrifying.

Large governing structures lead to inefficiency. Inefficiency leads to scarcity. Scarcity leads to desperation, evil acts, and even larger governing structures. Through this process, larger governing structures inevitably lead to evil. A governing structure will only be able to address a social problem with efficacy if some artificial constraint limits that structure’s size. This is why socialism works in small countries, communism functions smoothly in small communities like kibbutzim, and communism works really well in very small units like your family. Yes, the cliché American family is basically a microscopic communist government. What healthy family unit does not operate under the axiom: “From each according to his means to each according to their needs?”

As Yoda might put it: “Large governments are the path to the Dark Side. Large governments lead to inefficiency. Inefficiency leads to scarcity. Scarcity leads to fear. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate—and hate leads to suffering.” Aaaand that is why the megacorp Disney can’t consistently make a good Star Wars movie.

Why do large governing structures inevitably lead to inefficiency? Outside of the cancer problem already discussed, there are two core factors at play—factors we’ll call the “square cube law of governance” and the “bleed amelioration problem.”

In their paper “Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science”^{^[79]}Johan S. G. Chu and James A. Evans note:

“The size of scientific fields may impede the rise of new ideas. Examining 1.8 billion citations among 90 million papers across 241 subjects, we find a deluge of papers does not lead to turnover of central ideas in a field, but rather to ossification of canon. Scholars in fields where many papers are published annually face difficulty getting published, read, and cited unless their work references already widely cited articles. New papers containing potentially important contributions cannot garner field-wide attention through gradual processes of diffusion. These findings suggest fundamental progress may be stymied if quantitative growth of scientific endeavors—in number of scientists, institutes, and papers—is not balanced by structures fostering disruptive scholarship and focusing attention on novel ideas.”

Chu and Evans found that “when the number of papers published per year in a scientific field grows large, citations flow disproportionately to already well-cited papers; the list of most-cited papers ossifies; new papers are unlikely to ever become highly cited, and when they do, it is not through a gradual, cumulative process of attention gathering; and newly published papers become unlikely to disrupt existing work.”

The Square Cube Law of Governance

In biomechanics, the square cube law explains why animals and cells cannot exist beyond a certain size. In technical terms, it states that as an animal scales up in size, components like muscular cross sections must increase by the square of the scaling factor while the animal’s mass must increase by the cube of the scaling factor.

In other words, if you made a person ten times taller than a normal human, they would weigh 1,000 times as much as a normal human and every square inch of their giant bones would have to support ten times the weight.

The relevance of this biological law to governing bodies is related to heat transfer and specifically the chemical processes required for life to generate and diffuse heat in order to maintain a temperature range conducive for function. As an animal scales up in size, its surface area increases at a dramatically lower rate than its volume, meaning each inch of surface area has to diffuse more heat. (As an example, a one-foot cube has 1/27 the volume and 1/9 the surface area when compared to a three-foot cube.)

Why is this stuff relevant to governments? Recall that in biology, unused energy is generated in the form of heat. In governments, unused energy is shed in the form of money, time, and/or labor. Even with zero corruption, every new aspect of a governing structure needs to interact with all the other aspects and all those interactions require new people to manage them, new rules, and new experts in those rules. While a government composed of two units has a single line of interaction that must be managed, a government composed of four units has six lines of interaction that must be managed.

In nature, this complication can be mitigated. For example, if you put an animal in water, heat—as well as the structural integrity of support systems—is less difficult to manage. This enables oceans to harbor organisms above the normal size possible on land, like a blue whale.

What sorts of contexts or environments might allow governments to more easily function despite their large size? Theoretically, one could create a social structure that mitigates the flaws inherent to human nature. Unfortunately, this only really works in cultures with a fascist level (to an American) of conformity and adherence to authority (see: China) as well as a disgust for personal wealth displays (see: The Law of Jante in Nordic countries).

Note: The Law of Jante characterizes nonconforming, unusual, or personally ambitious behavior as unworthy and inappropriate and is a driver of social interaction in Nordic countries, allowing groups to function with a greater level of socialist infrastructure than other countries can handle. As a world perspective, the Law of Jante is antithetical—and borderline abusive—from the perspective of an American mindset. This explains why some systems work in Nordic countries that would never work in America.

The Bleed Amelioration Problem

To understand this problem, compare the average corruption of a nation’s congressman with that of its president. The average president is dramatically less corrupt than the average congressman and if Congress were 20 times larger, the average congressman would be even more corrupt.

As the number of people participating in a governing unit increases, the system’s ability to single out and neutralize bad actors decreases. This is due to four confabulating factors:

Detection becomes harder as the number of players increases.
Motivation to expend energy to fix a bleed decreases as the number of players increases.
Personal responsibility for problems decreases as the number of players increases (see the bystander effect).
The ability to replace bad actors with equally competent and influential players decreases.

Why is it so difficult to find competent people? Simply put, competent people are just not that common—a challenge anyone who has run a company is oppressively aware of.

An additional factor compounds the problem: Factionalization increases in step with size. The more players there are in a system, the more “team membership” begins to matter more than individual competency (e.g., Voters typically vote along party lines rather than in favor of competence or lack of corruption).

Note from the Research: The bystander effect cited above involves humans expressing less empathy as more people are present. Essentially, the more people there are present to observe a terrible thing happen to someone, the less likely it becomes that any individual will step in and intervene—likely because they feel less personal responsibility. This is why people feel less personally responsible for immoral action when operating within a large group of people (such as the United States’ House of Representatives or United Kingdom’s House of Commons).

How to Optimally Approach Large Governing Body Design

How might we address this problem? If we must create a governing structure within some large corporation or country, do we break it into pieces and have those pieces function autonomously?

Breaking governing structures into autonomous pieces only kind of works for two reasons:

Large, central governing structures between these individual units will initially be created for situations in which there is a strong size advantage (as with the military or in foreign relations) and situations in which less variance is highly desirable (like economy management and monetary practices).
It is virtually impossible (without military conflict) for smaller governing units to take power back from the larger, central governing structure under which they are nested. This means that over a few hundred years, power will consolidate with a single governing unit. Basically, it is nearly impossible for a small thing to take power from a big thing while it is easy for a big thing to take power from a small thing.

The negative effects described above can be ameliorated by lowering the overall number of humans operating within any governing body involved. Fortunately, this is more possible today than it was in the past. Whereas in the past, governing bodies were forced to use humans to execute most elements of their function, we now enjoy technology that enables algorithms and machines to do most of the required legwork.

We personally keep our organizations lean and efficient by, whenever possible, avoiding direct management layers (people responsible for overseeing work performed by other people) and automating as much as possible. Our employees are almost entirely focused on value creation, rather than bugging other people to do their jobs.

Minimizing human involvement enables organizations to do very big things without becoming big (and inefficient, corrupt, etc.) themselves.

This solution is not without potential drawbacks. Should larger organizations eliminate excess human involvement to the fullest extent possible with current technology, they may become more efficient in a way that stifles long-term progress. The present inefficiency of large companies acts as a “shadow tax,” preventing them from completely crowding out small players more likely to be run by people with new ideas.

While in rare instances it makes sense to do so, there are two strategic reasons why governments don’t break up monopolies with greater frequency. First, many economic spaces—typically those with high startup costs and huge economies of scale (e.g., search engines)—engender the creation of something called a “natural monopoly.” Breaking up a company in these industries makes no sense and decreases efficiency as such spaces will return to a monopoly shortly after the breakup in the absence of heavy, ongoing government interference. Second, breaking up monopolies may hobble some of a nation’s strongest multinational actors—its large companies—which would in turn reduce the nation’s global power. If one nation in a global economy keeps breaking up its companies, it will ultimately empower the large companies of its geopolitical rivals.

As management becomes increasingly easier to automate, a “wealth tax” on companies would yield a more elegant solution than monopoly busting. A wealth tax of this sort would scale based on the company’s value, as measured by its stock price (or the price of comparables in the case of private companies). This would artificially weigh down dominant players, making it easy for innovative newcomers to compete.

By designing this pro-competition policy as a wealth tax rather than a progressive, scaling tax on profits, large companies would have greater difficulty evading it (a progressive tax would need to be independently determined for each industry). Besides, markets are better at efficiently judging the true value of a company than measures of top-line revenue, which would require criteria that vary from industry to industry. This policy allows monopolies to exist while somewhat tempering their ability to smother innovation. This policy would also prevent a problem common in innovative industries in which VCs flood a company with money, allowing them to sell their services below cost, as doing so jacks up those companies’ valuations.

While aggressive taxation on corporations is typically a strict negative, natural monopolies yield an exception as companies enjoying them don’t accelerate innovation or meaningfully improve citizens’ lives (rather, they are monopolies merely due to an accident of the markets in which they find themselves). The one downside to a wealth tax on large corporations is that it may disadvantage a nation’s largest corporate players on the world stage as they must compete with foreign counterparts that operate without hindrance. This could be mitigated by not only waiving taxes on companies’ foreign profits, but also giving them a domestic tax break that scales in step with the amount of money repatriated.

The Outdated Debate: Socialism vs. Capitalism

While there are still some who argue for actual socialism (that is, control of the means of production by a governance structure made up of workers) and unfettered capitalism, such viewpoints are incredibly rare among the mentally stable^[80] population these days. Heck, even most right-leaning people believe in some form of social safety net and wealth redistribution while even those on the far left believe in the exchange of money for goods and services.

Over the last century this can be seen both on the individual and state level, with almost all traditionally “communist” states shifting to a more free exchange of goods (with the exception of North Korea) and all capitalist states—without exception—expanding their social welfare programs.

Imperceptibly, the debate has shifted from one of socialism vs. capitalism to one of centralization vs. decentralization.

Specifically, debates center around whether systems designed to distribute resources or capital to projects should be:

Designed through a centralized system and manned by highly educated/specialized technocrats (a “command economy”)
Organically determined through decisions made by stakeholders in the field

This question of centralization vs. decentralization is most prominent in debate over globalism vs. nationalism.

Globalism vs. Nationalism

Throughout the last century, political parties in most developed countries have typically been divided by their alignment with socialist or capitalist ideals. In this century, we expect the core political divide to pivot around globalism vs nationalism.

While this does somewhat shift the terms of the debate, the core question remains the same:

Will society function better with a centralized system in which resource allocation is managed by highly trained technocrats (this time at an international level) or a decentralized system, which prioritizes organic sorting at the local level?

This book isn’t really a “politics book,” so we won’t dive too deep into this topic as we expect it to become more partisan with time. That said, we think the history around this subject makes the optimal outcome fairly obvious: The system will eventually reach an equilibrium that favors decentralized structures, but only loosely (if society is on a slider between centralized globalism and decentralized nationalism, it should be 70% in favor of nationalism and decentralization).

This debate’s equilibrium point is predetermined as it involves many of the same questions posed by the previous capitalism vs. socialism debate but at the super-national level: “How much do we want a command economy vs. realms in which decisions are made organically by people closer to the problems at hand?” Nothing has fundamentally changed about these questions. This won’t be true of the next centralization vs. decentralization debate, which we expect to be centered around AI vs. human-run systems. We say this, as most of the failures of historically human-run centralized systems can be addressed by AI.

Automation vs.
Power to the People

Why is the debate over AI going to be so contentious? We run Pronatalist.org and often hear people dismiss demographic collapse as an issue (demographic collapse entails a future with a large elderly population and a minuscule young population, which causes a myriad of problems, one being that nations’ young populations become unable to support elderly populations’ state reliance through tax contributions). Those dismissing demographic collapse cite an increase in automation as the solution. Automation always and everywhere consolidates power—it never distributes it.

Every single time in human history that power (without bloodshed) has gone from the wealthy and powerful to the have-nots, it was because the powerful needed the have-nots and were dependent upon them for something. In the first democracy, Athens, this happened because naval warfare carried out via triremes—which secured the trade routes that generated income for the wealthy—required a huge population of low-skill fighting men. Before that, fighting men needed to be equipped and trained, meaning that only land owners with an income stream were useful in war. Triremes made it so that the wealthy needed to at least pretend to care about the opinion of the average man.

The same thing happened with the termination of serfdom and monarchies. The Black Death lowered the number of available workers, which granted surviving workers greater negotiating power. That negotiating power eroded the power of the elite.

A similar pattern can be seen at every point in history in which power flowed from the elite to the average Joe.

A person excited about automation freeing them from labor is like that idiot in a movie who is promised freedom by the villain only to be killed at the scene’s end, with the villain saying: “Of course I mean freedom from your mortal coil.” It’s that moment in Clerks when the guy says, “I always said this job would be great if it wasn’t for the customers,” and we all laugh.

Labor is what gives the average citizen power. Automation makes it so people with power no longer need people without it to get everything they want in life. Automation doesn’t free the average man from labor; it frees the elite from the average man.

What makes this whole situation somewhat more sickening is the speed with which people are throwing themselves into the wood chipper of automation. We, personally, didn’t choose automation because we wanted to, but out of a rising disgust with the incompetence and sloth inherent in human nature. We automated our companies not because it was cheaper but because B and C players kept making mistakes that hurt our customers and our simple conditional algorithms never did.

The process of largely automating our businesses made it clear to us how delusional people are when they say the average workers of the world will come together and demand power from the elite. You and what army? Even if the elites of the world didn’t have veto power over the use of any state-level military force, they would still have all the fruits of automation to defend themselves, be they drones or autonomous tanks.

But we all know it will never come to that—the average person is too lazy to do anything. Venezuela shows us how bad life can get before the people try to claw back power and how unrealistic taking back power will have become by the time they try.

Automation is the cheat code that breaks the system used by small players to occasionally outcompete large players and thereby access social mobility.

Automation frees the bourgeois from the proletariat and its progress cannot be stopped. Any new Luddite^[81] movement will inevitably fail. Why? Because if you stop progress in your nation, it will charge onward in another, giving that nation more resources and eventually the ability to assert control over your own. This leaves you in conditions worse than those you would suffer under automation.

We get that we are hammering this point home ad nauseam, but you must understand that your only hope in this game is to become one of the elite or join forces with a governance structure that is resistant to corruption and incentivized to protect you and your descendants. We are working on creating such a structure, so keep reading.

The Real Difference Between Progressives and Conservatives

People often argue that political parties in the United States aren’t that far apart on most issues, meaning voters don’t have much genuine political choice. The reason our parties have converged on many issues is that most of the older “hard questions” in politics now have largely agreed-upon answers. Those who make this argument often want a party that promotes an idea or economic system that is widely known to not function.

Similarly, people often complain that the distribution of political issues between parties can feel random. Why does the party that promotes “small government” also promote things like abortion bans or bills restricting school-based exposure to sexual identities (e.g., the “don’t say gay” bill)? Why is the party that claims to support religions which mostly want to help the poor not a staunch advocate for state-based support programs? While it can seem as though the parties’ position statements emerged serendipitously, each actually represents two very easy-to-understand optimization functions:

Progressives optimize for intragenerational quality of life and individual agency.

Conservatives optimize for intergenerational cultural fitness and fidelity.

While the progressive’s primary unit of account in society is the individual, conservatives’ focus pivots around durable cultures. To be clear, conservatives don’t think of their actions along these lines—rather, they follow their cultural mandates and those mandates evolved over time to impart intergenerational fitness. Throughout history, cultures that were more accepting of LGBT issues or abortions had lower birth rates and died out. For that reason, most successful (in that they have a lot of reach) traditional cultures are against those things.

In the same breath, most traditional cultures also offer strong social safety nets—in fact, social support is one of their primary selling points. When a state starts offering those same services, the culture’s relative value within its community degrades and it will bleed members at a higher rate. While few groups are more functionally communist than the most conservative evangelical communities or the Amish, they are communist within their community units. A state offering those same services can trigger the extinction of traditional cultures, as can be seen with the Shakers who, being a group that didn’t have sex, died out when the government began to offer state-run orphanages (before that, most Shakers grew up in Shaker-run orphanages).

Even the most ardent progressive will likely concede that intra-community social support networks run by conservative cultures are dramatically less wasteful with resources than state-run alternatives (perhaps even hundreds of times less). Progressives are more likely to see cultural support networks in a negative light because conservative cultures often use resource exchanges to promote their cultural values (consider the Salvation Army’s history with the trans community as case in point) and will sometimes exclude cultural outsiders (though this is not always the case).

We might be ambivalent as to which perspective is more “correct” if the progressive mindset had not begun to falter in motivating at-or-above-replacement-rate birth rates starting in the 1970s. This failure to self sustain through birth rate (rather than conversion) is a big problem with progressive political branches. In the absence of a sustainably growing (or at least stable) population, they have begun to aggressively force children from diverse traditional cultural backgrounds to attend public school, where their traditions are more likely to be erased and replaced with society’s dominant cultural mindset.

Note: This is not an intentional process but an evolutionary one. The iterations of progressive culture that did not aggressively adopt this strategy have died off and been replaced with the ones that did.

As slaver ants are unable to breed worker ants of their own, they raid the colonies of other ants, bring back the pupa, and cover the pupa in slaver ant pheromones to confuse them into thinking that they, too, are slaver ants. These pupa then work for and feed the slaver ants of their own “free will.” Because these pupa now grow up into ants that don’t breed, slaver ants must constantly raid other ant colonies for new recruits in order to sustain their own populations. This works because slaver ants and non-slaver ants maintain a functional equilibrium between their populations.

Progressives have become unsustainably effective at converting people out of conservative cultures, like slaver ants that exhausted all of their surrounding feeder colonies. Regardless of your thoughts on the ethics of this current iteration of the progressive movement, its present level of societal domination, combined with its low birth rates, cannot be sustained without very negative long-term ramifications that we explore in detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion but don’t cover here in an effort to not get too political.

Communism

Let’s explore communism as a political philosophy that can influence a governance structure. It’s a little off-theme for the book, but a fun discussion nevertheless.

When pro-communist individuals push their agenda, the classic refrain is: Real Communism Has Never Been Tried™. They are right … well, close to right. While real communism, “a stateless, classless and money-less society where each individual contributes according to ability and receives according to need,” has been attempted hundreds of times as the goal of numerous revolutions and utopian communities, it has never been sustained at the level of the nation state.^[82]

While it is possible to describe communism in the abstract, it cannot exist in reality at above certain population thresholds without collapsing into another governance structure. Let’s take a look at architecture to understand what we mean by this: It is theoretically possible to describe an upside-down Lego pyramid structure while also knowing that, while it is possible to construct that structure at a small scale, if it were to be made large enough (like the size of a building), that upside-down pyramid would inevitably collapse and form a pile of rubble that looked like a “right way up” pyramid (or rough pile). When built out in large populations, “real communism” intrinsically collapses into brutal, single-party despotism.

To be fair, most governing models collapse to some extent after being built to the level of the nation state. The U.S. government, for example, currently does a lot of things—like featuring political parties and having citizens directly vote for presidents—that it was originally designed to avoid doing.

The problem with communist systems is that every single component part must stay rock solid. Should even one component fail, a communist government will devolve into single-party despotism.

In contrast, capitalist systems can break in many more ways before they transform into something “obviously evil.” Sure, real communism has never been tried at the level of the nation state in that no nation state has ever operated as a communist system, but it has been tried dozens of times in that revolutions have succeeded under the mandate of raising a communist system only to fail to achieve that end because the premise itself is misguided.

You may notice we carved out the qualifiers: “when built out in large populations” and “at the level of the nation state.” This is because communism hasn’t just been tried successfully; successful communism is quite common. The vast majority of the world population at some point in their lives has lived under a governance model that is technically communist, be it a family unit, parish group, or local sports team.

Communism, “a stateless, classless and money-less society where each individual contributes according to ability and receives according to need” is one of the most common and stable systems people form when creating small-scale governance structures.

When explaining why communism does not lead to stable and peaceful governance models, detractors most frequently argue that people will not be motivated to do high-skill work (like become doctors, etc.) when they are rewarded the same as those doing low-skill work. To the contrary, this has almost never been a real problem in societies attempting to become communist (outside of cases in which governments decided to just kill everyone who was trained in high-skilled jobs, like the Khmer Rouge). But if motivation isn’t the problem, what is?

The real problem is fourfold:

The Power Consolidation Problem
The HOA Problem
The Centrally-Managed Economy Problem
The Cancer Problem

While non-hierarchical systems can theoretically exist on paper, functionally they always collapse into a hierarchically centrally managed “command economy” economic system. Why does this happen?

The Power Consolidation Problem

Communist and communist-adjacent governance models often attempt to structure themselves in one of two ways: Either they become strict bureaucratic hierarchies or they become extremely loose systems in which no single player has too much power (this second way of structuring communism-like governances being more theoretical than something that has been tried repeatedly at the nation-state level). Both of these models suffer from the same weakness: They create power vacuums that are easily exploited by ill-intentioned individuals while being difficult for well-intentioned players to claim.

Telescoping history (Lenin’s plan for skipping two-stage theory, which posits the necessity for decades of a stable capitalist society before getting a stable communist one) requires giving a small group of individuals disproportionate power for a short period of time (those individuals who set up the communist state). The problem with these groups is that only one group need be reluctant to relinquish power for it to stay consolidated.

What do we mean by this? If there are a thousand people tasked with transitioning a society to stable communism (a low number for a nation state) and just two or three decide they want to keep their new power, those who are willing to give up the new power can’t force those who want to keep it to relinquish it through the very fact that they themselves gave it up. The vast system needed to create the transition can be thought of as a defensively fortified castle: You need everyone to voluntarily leave that castle because if anyone secretly stays behind they can just reactivate the defenses once the others are out. The fact that everyone knows that means almost no one leaves the castle.

When communism comes about as a transition from capitalism, the same problem is at play but at a larger scale. Many individuals in positions of power must apply pressure for this transition to happen. The mechanisms which allow for an economy to function without supply and demand are also blindingly easy to hijack by anyone with power during the transition.

Finally, anarcho-communist systems that emerge—either from the systems collapse event of a previous system or loosely organized group action like CHOP, Occupy Wall Street, or the Anti Work movement—suffer from this dynamic worst of all. In these systems, it is very easy for any random individual to decide they want power and claim it (look at Raz Simone or Doreen Ford). This means power is often claimed by the individuals who are most delusional about their own competence and most willing to ignore the collective’s rules (after all, the point of anarcho-communism is that no one is supposed to rise up and grab power then claim to speak on behalf of everyone). In the instances cited, things fell apart quite early, but these selective mechanisms lead late stage communist systems to consistently drift towards kleptocracies, with those most willing to steal and ignore communal rules for self gain, accruing incrementally more power every year until they run everything.

A key problem with stateless, classless structures is that they suck at defending themselves against power consolidation among those with even temporary administrative power. One of the key functions of “class” within a society is to create the societal equivalent of white blood cells that fight the totalitarian leanings of those who are hungry for power. Even if communism is achieved in the short run, the society will be unstable as it transitions between generations for the above reason.

Small communist systems work because no one stands to gain something from hijacking them. Consider Kibbutzim. These communist structures are typically effective so long as they remain small, but almost every single time they become significantly cash positive and transfer between generations, they get sliced up and sold, becoming capitalist company towns—the antithesis of the dream.

While anarcho-communism aims to make everyone in a society equal, it also makes everyone in a society weak. Essentially, anarcho-communist structures exist with giant, gaping power vacuums at their hearts, constantly sucking in those who thirst for power. When a toxic individual begins to consolidate power around them in a normal governance structure, they are torn down by the bourgeoisie (those who own capital and the means of production), as social stability enables them to harvest disproportionate yields from society. In communist systems, this class does not exist.

Societies founded on communism have committed genocides and other horrifying acts at rates higher than other contemporary civilizations because their power vacuums intrinsically draw in selfishness, power obsession, sociopathy, and cults of personality. In other words, communist systems end up with the most vile leaders not because they choose them, but because people with integrity and calm hearts have trouble navigating their power structures.

A problem with democracies is that they act as filtering systems, removing anyone from contention for high office who is not willing to schmooze, manipulate, and brown-nose. This is bad, but not catastrophic. Some research, for example, suggests that narcissism is positively correlated with political participation in Western democracies.^[83]

Whereas democracies filter for weasels while communist “utopias” filter for monsters, individuals who are morally depraved, power hungry, and sociopathic. Why? Because forcefully taking power in a communist system requires seriously harming at least a few dozen innocent people. Such is true in both the distributed model, where the vacuum exists because no one has enough power to stop those pursuing it, and in the hierarchical model, where it exists because the strict hierarchy makes it possible to quickly consolidate and maintain power.

We have heard communists say things like: “Well, if someone does bad things, the people will just tear them from power.” To us, that sounds about as naïve as a capitalist claiming that when businesses do bad things, consumers won’t buy their products. In the vast majority of cases, people are too busy prioritizing other things to bother intervening. History has repeatedly demonstrated this to be the case. It is very rare for someone to be taken out of power only for being a bad person within any governance system. Humans are not great at thinking for themselves once they enter groups above a certain size, which partially explains why bad people get torn from power in small groups and not in large groups. In large groups, moods change like an ant trail and mob mentality takes over, which prevents humans from thinking.

The HOA Problem

When people imagine who will be making most of the decisions in a hierarchically organized communist or anarcho-syndicalist country, they tend to imagine decisions being made by people like themselves, their friends, or the public faces of the movement. Most of the decisions actually made in these systems are not made at the top but rather at the level of community government. At the level of community government, those who rise to power in communist and anarcho-syndicalist systems are little different from those who rise to power in capitalist societies (this contrasts with those who rise to the very top of the hierarchy, as discussed above). While capitalism has many problems, one of its strengths is the uniquely small amount of power it gives to the lowest rung of the power hierarchy (bosses, line managers, community watch association heads, etc.).

The Homeowner Association (HOA) Problem can be summed up thusly: While those in higher strata of a governance system (who are less numerous—like the blocks at the top of a pyramid) have more influence as individuals, those in the lower strata of the pyramid collectively have more impact on individuals’ daily lives. If more competent, ambitious, and ruthless people get promoted up the pyramid toward its middle, those who stay at the lowest rungs, the individuals with the greatest impact on the daily lives of most people, are those most likely to feature a toxic mix of megalomania and incompetence. The HOA problem occurs when an economic or governance system ends up pumping an unwise amount of authority into the bottom level of this pyramid.

Consider your experience in high school. Did the principal ever personally make your life hell? Probably not. Your school district’s principal selection probably didn’t matter much to your daily experience. The people who make your life hell in high school are the over-zealous detention proctor, the sexually aggressive gym teacher, or the pedantic English teacher. But what is truly terrifying to remember is it only took one person near the bottom of the power hierarchy with a bad mood to make your life a living hell. It doesn’t matter if 95% of your teachers treat you wonderfully; all it takes is that one bad or angry person to make your life a living hell.

The people who take power at lower-to-intermediate levels of the hierarchy in a communist society are the same people who—in the U.S. at least—end up running homeowners associations, joining parent-teacher associations, and taking positions as shift managers at your local fast food chain. They are the busybodies who are good at networking and brown-nosing on a small scale and are willing to sacrifice copious amounts of personal time to achieve positions of trivial power.

One of the biggest downsides to communist systems is the power it gives such individuals. When communism plays out in practice, the “free thinking” teenage punks who typically support communism under a capitalist system become the pro-capitalists and the most fervent communist is the busybody who currently runs your HOA. The young punks are not running the show—and when they are, during the transition period, don’t expect them to be nice (see The Killing Fields or Red Scarf Girl). Stepping through a portal into a communist alternate reality doesn’t change who is running things; it only changes how much power they have and the tools they use to wield it.

Essentially, fighting for communism or anarcho-syndicalism will not ultimately grant you and your friends more power; a successful fight for communism instead grants more power to the low-level bureaucrats in your daily life, be they police, HOA board members, or detention proctors. The natural consequence of giving power to the people—of moving the power distribution in a system from the top to the bottom of the pyramid—is that it also gives loads more power to those just one level above “the people.” Even if you somehow manage to have incorruptible visionaries at the top of the hierarchy, you will have little tyrants at the bottom.

The Centrally Managed Economy Problem

Top-down managed economies (also known as command economies) feature significantly more “friction” than self-organizing economies. (And as we mentioned above, even when a communist system is founded using a decentralized structure, a centrally managed structure will eventually accrue.)

Historically, the intrinsic inefficiency in hierarchically managed economic systems has always been the downfall of those trying for communism. Mistakes in judgment get magnified as they travel down a hierarchical system, meaning larger systems experience exponentially greater damage from little mistakes.

This isn’t just a “communist” problem. This magnification is also seen in large companies that operate with a hierarchical bureaucracy. It is one of the reasons small companies so frequently outcompete their larger counterparts despite large companies presumably having innumerable unfair advantages due to their greater resources, name recognition, institutional knowledge, and any systemic unfair advantages they’ve set up in their respective markets—and all that is just scratching the surface.

If large-scale, centrally managed governance structures were neutral or beneficial to efficiency, then small companies would never have a chance against larger ones. In that way, ironically, the most “successful” companies in a capitalist society demonstrate why communism won’t work. If you could figure out a fix for corporate management that maintained its integrity as companies scale, then a real and functional communist system might be worth trying again.

You may be thinking: “OK, so what? Large bureaucracies are a little less efficient. How bad can a little inefficiency really be in an economy?” Recall that during the Great Leap Forward in China—a centrally planned initiative to move the economy forward and improve the life of Chinese citizens—thirty million people starved to death. This was a set of policies designed to improve the economic conditions of the country. The evil of good intentions implemented inefficiently can stand toe to toe with the most insidious acts humanity has ever committed.

Probably the most common pattern in the breakdown of a centrally managed system involves Goodhart’s law, which states that when a measure becomes a target (in other words, once a particular metric determines rewards), it ceases to be a good measure.

Whereas a capitalist system will automatically distribute resources to the more efficient of two factories due to its self-organizing behavior, a communist system will need some mechanism to determine how to distribute resources between two factories. This mechanism almost always involves which of the two scores higher on specific metrics.

Goodhart’s law states that as soon as those metrics determine how the company is judged, they stop being accurately reported. This may not be due to outright lies, but rather the system contorting itself to meet them. Miscalculations that caused famines in early communist China resulted from municipalities learning they could fudge the numbers on wheat production by keeping less and less wheat for their own citizens. When the authorities began to realize this and started testing for citizen health, municipalities took to presenting specific cohorts of citizens for this testing, giving them an extra portion of what very small amount of food was left. This only further exacerbated the state of the starvation most people experienced by pooling the little wheat left around the “show people.”

Hazards of centrally-managed economies are not limited to communist regimes. While the modern day CCP (the Chinese Communist Party, which controls the Chinese government) is not communist in the traditional sense, its single-party hierarchy suffers the same problems as a hierarchical communist system (and any other centrally-managed system), as people can only rise up the hierarchy by demonstrating dedication to the party and are rarely punished for being overzealous in their displays of dedication.

Foreigners are horrified to see people being welded into their apartment buildings and having barbed wire put around their homes as part of China’s zero-COVID policy, but what they don’t realize is that these are not responses to explicit government orders, but rather a product of a reasonable government mandate getting exaggerated a bit with every rung of the hierarchy through which it passes. There is little risk of punishment from overzealously interpreting an order and overzealous interpretation of orders slightly boosts one’s odds of promotion. Thus, like a twisted game of telephone, the order becomes more extreme and draconian with every chain of the pyramid it is filtered down through.

The Cancer Problem

In biology, the square-cube law explains why animals cannot get above certain sizes except in very specific circumstances. The square-cube law states that if an animal were made twice as tall, twice as wide, and twice as long, its volume and mass would increase by a factor of eight, but its ability to support that mass—its cross-sectional area—would only increase by a factor of four.

A similar law applies to classless social structures. Essentially, communist systems at the state level are intrinsically some of the largest governance structures possible and thus are susceptible to the “cancer” problem addressed in our chapter exploring governance sizes.

Essentially, small departments within larger communist systems become more heavily focused on proving their utility to the exclusion of actually providing utility. This behavior gets exaggerated until eventually their primary function centers around maintaining their own existence. While this is not a problem unique to communist systems, we see it more frequently within communist systems, as they are almost always larger than other types of governance systems.

Can These Hazards Be Addressed With Tech?

One of the key questions of communism in the modern age is whether technology will patch the weakness of communist systems and create a true “stateless, classless and money-less society where each individual contributes according to ability and receives according to need.”

The answer is a big “yes … but.” Through the utilization of AI and blockchain technology, much of the friction imposed by human oversight on a centrally managed economy can be removed. An AI-controlled army (of humans or machines) could be used to eliminate potential tyrants and fix the power vacuum issue. No lower middle management is necessary when those positions are held by machines or a distributed blockchain network.

The problem of course is … bro, are you serious? We get that humans are not always great, but this is supervillain shit—like being opposed to war and subsequently creating an army of kill bots that sit in the corner of every room holding a gun to people just to remind them not to step out of line.

Unfettered Capitalism
= Communism

Just as most buildings look the same when they collapse (like a pile of stones), governments, as well, almost always collapse into the same state. Unfettered capitalism (minarchism^[84]), like unfettered communism, is an intrinsically unstable structure at the level of the nation state. Capitalism consistently collapses into a pile of stones not that different in nature from the pile into which unfettered communism collapses—specifically: A hierarchically controlled, single-party, brutal totalitarian regime.

When you give the means of production to the state, you essentially create a giant monopolistic company—and every time this has been tried, the state acts the part. Communism (or at least the thing it functionally turns into) can essentially be thought of as a model for a country in which one monopolistic company controls the entire nation’s economy.

The problem with unfettered capitalism is that after a century or so, it will always end in the same place: With most people living under the thumb of one large company (or a few colluding large companies). The end game of unfettered capitalism is the same as that of communism unless the state regularly goes through periods of intense trust busting, such as that through which Teddy Roosevelt led in the USA.

As such, we suspect that some form of minarchism or other type of unfettered capitalism would be stable and prosperous so long as it intensely focused on trust busting and breaking up all entities that grow beyond a certain size. The problem with this trust-busting minarchist state is that it would have no international agency, leaving it vulnerable to exploitation by foreign nations unless it was explicitly designed to hold nothing of value to outsiders (like a small city-state founded on land in the far north that did not own mineral rights).

War as a Consolidator

Historically, war and conquest helped to advance civilization by allowing more efficient governance models to consume those which perform less optimally.

One might imagine that in actuality, violent governance models tend to consume peaceful ones, however this is not what the data shows. In fact, governance models more inclined to benevolence toward their own subjects don’t seem to go to war at lower rates than more cruel governance models. Governance models that rely on war to function and require new wars to stay stable are obviously an exception here, but fortunately such governments are inherently unstable as they eventually pick fights that they cannot win (the Nazi government is a good example).

While bad times can wipe out poorly performing governance models, good times also lead to instability. Throughout history, revolutions have been much more likely to happen in countries that were relatively well off.^[85] Consider the USA as an example. Of the British Colonies at the time, the American colonies were by far and away the best off—in fact, the Americans of the period were even wealthier than the British, with average annual income of £13.85 vs. £10-12.

One question we find ourselves asking is whether a decreasing reliance on land for wealth will hurt the evolution of governance models. Historically, poorly run governance models were more likely to be conquered and supplanted by superior models, but these days the motivation for conquest seems to be largely dulled. Modern sensibilities have caused countries that would traditionally have conquered and run other nations to instead install barely-functioning democracies without the cultural framework to stabilize their conquered land.

Revolutions:
A Predictive Model

While we’re on the subject of war, let’s share one internal model we use when planning around and forecasting revolutions.

Can a revolution be predicted by analyzing the groups involved? What causes revolutionary ideas and movements to foment in otherwise stable governments?

We theorize that revolutions can be predicted based on the allegiance of five core factions:

The Economic Elite: These are the individuals with wealth in a society.
The Social Elite: These are the individuals who hold status in society. People are told to heed their opinions over those of other people. Historically, they might have been the nobility and the church but today they are mostly academics and those in the media.
The Military: This one is self-evident.
The Urban Dispossessed: These are people without social or economic power who live in cities.
The Rural Dispossessed: These are people without social or economic power who live outside of cities.

In times of long-term government legitimacy, these allegiances are critical to track. Legitimacy can best be thought of as a metric that measures how natural the current world order feels. High legitimacy governments are unlikely to be overthrown. (This is why, after a revolution, a military coup is likely. The new government has very little legitimacy and the military has the physical might.)

Almost all revolutions are caused by one of the social groups who are not the economic elite thinking they should be the economic elite.

A common type of revolution takes place when the social elite becomes upset about not also being the economic elite. This is frequently what instigates “communist” or ”socialist” revolutions. When a society gives too much power to the social elite (media, professors, clergy, etc.) without also ensuring they have a good chunk of the economic pie, the social elite are tempted to use one of the two dispossessed groups to instigate a regime change by promising to give them (the dispossessed) a bigger piece of the pie. Ultimately, these types of revolutions typically just result in the social elite becoming the economic elite without also lifting up the dispossessed who fought for them (often to realize the social elite are very bad at running things).

The big “mistake” revolutionaries of this sort make is thinking that the urban and rural dispossessed groups are equally valuable in winning a social revolution. The urban dispossessed have virtually no value as an ally during a revolution (with one exception discussed below).

The urban dispossessed are not valuable in a revolution for two core reasons:

You only have to hold a fairly small amount of land with a military force to control an urban population. It is very hard to actively hold a large rural area with the military because occupying soldiers need to be more dispersed while rebels can afford to coalesce upon and attack hostile forces wherever they may be. More complicated supply lines must also be maintained when quashing rebellions outside of concentrated cities, which are usually fairly vulnerable.
The urban dispossessed often rely heavily on social services or city infrastructure for their day-to-day wellbeing. This contrasts heavily with the rural dispossessed, who can more easily make or source their own food if needed.

Dynamics of course change when the urban dispossessed don’t enjoy social program, state, or city infrastructure support. Tsarist Russia offered little by the way of city infrastructure or social programs to the urban dispossessed, making them a formidable force in the communist revolution.

Given how common and widespread social support for dispossessed urban populations is around the world, we would go so far as to say that the rural dispossessed are the number one faction to have on your side if you’re a leader in hopes of a long, stable reign (the military come in a close second). The economic and social elite are just not nearly as important as they think they are. This is why when you look at nations in which you would expect a revolution but do not see one (Turkey, Venezuela, China, etc.) the ruling party has sided with the rural dispossessed.

A major exception to the above rule involves any nation suffering from Dutch Disease: When it has a commodity that is easy to control and makes up most of their income (usually oil). In such cases, whoever controls both that commodity and the military controls the country. When the cash cow commodity and military are controlled by different factions, a revolution is coming.

Winning the
Online Culture War

Let’s use the internet as a model for applying the above system and predicting who will win the online culture war.

The Internet’s Economic Elite: These are the individuals who own sites like Facebook, Google, Reddit, etc.
The Internet’s Social Elite: These are the moderators on those sites (and other types of people who control content on them, like low-level employees at the above companies).
The Internet’s Military: Online, these are government agencies that can directly enforce content and shut down sites.
The Urban Dispossessed: These are people who live online within contexts that rely on the infrastructure set up by the internet’s economic elite and moderated by the internet’s social elite: Redditors, Facebookers, Instagramers, etc.
The Internet’s Rural Dispossessed: These are people who live in online contexts that do not rely on infrastructure set up by the internet’s economic elite and that is not heavily moderated: 4chan-ers, 8kun-ers, booru-ers.

Just as in the real world it is very hard to “occupy” the territory of the rural dispossessed, as soon as one site belonging to the internet’s rural dispossessed is shut down, another springs up. Whereas the traditional social elite of the internet have no influence within these decentralized online communities, they effectively have almost total control of the narrative within the communities of the internet’s urban dispossessed.

Within the online world, one philosophical faction—the social elite—has almost total control of everything but the rural dispossessed, and yet that control has given them so little power over the online space more broadly. Be it Bronies, memes, or GamerGate, almost every popular aspect of online culture seems to originate in spaces controlled by the rural dispossessed. Moreover, the community acts in ways that have a massive effect on the “real world.” It would be difficult, for example, to argue that the 4chan community’s early boost to Donald Trump’s campaign did not play a significant role in his early victories when the rest of the world largely saw him as a joke.

Recent (at the time of this book’s publication) missteps made by the progressive branch of online politics exemplify why sound knowledge of who really holds power in revolutions matters. Specifically, progressive groups acting through the internet’s social elite have actively sought to deplatform communities that were either largely or totally the internet’s urban dispossessed, either by banning them from the economic elite’s platforms or by pressuring hosting and cybersecurity providers to not provide service to them (TumblrInAction being banned from reddit and Kiwi Farms being spurned by many service providers are two recent examples). In so doing, the social elite converted these urban dispossessed groups into the internet’s rural dispossessed, making them far more powerful (as next time they offend the social elite, the social elite won’t have tools to suppress them).

The online world exemplifies why support from the rural dispossessed is so powerful. If the faction predominating the internet’s rural dispossessed gains control of just one other faction of the online world (likely the military or economic elite pillar), it is game over for those who oppose them in the online culture wars. This is neither good nor bad; it’s just a truism of revolutions.

Voting

Voting bodies stand among the most common selector mechanisms, be they for a board, senator, family office manager, or law. The pervasiveness of voting warrants an exploration of the properties and metrics on which voting bodies can differ and how these differences can affect a government.

We will do our best to stay away from the pedantic labels academics in this space love to use (or at least always provide them alongside simple alternative explanations in a way that doesn’t rely on vocabulary memorization). We do this not just for accessibility but because voting systems are often designed for just one type of governance unit (e.g., at the level of the nation state), which obscures the utility of these systems to other types of governance units (e.g., corporate governance).

Let’s set some definitions for entities that vote in a system:

Stakeholders: Individuals who are in some way directly affected by a system’s governance. Stakeholders can be anything from people born in a country to community members affected by a local company’s factory waste.
Contributors: Individuals who have made a sacrifice for the organization. This can be anything from a company’s employees or investors to those serving in the military.
Representatives: Individuals who have been chosen by another body⁠—this could be a representative of a company or someone chosen through another vote.

Warning: This chapter gets a little boring when contrasted with the rest of the book. That said, it features too many unique ideas to warrant banishment to the Appendix. While we have prioritized hot takes over comprehensive coverage, we would not hold it against you were you to skip to the next chapter.

Who Can Vote?

In our society, there is a base assumption that the default “correct” way to run a government is to allow all stakeholders to vote and count all their votes equally. If you are a state, your stakeholders amount to anyone living within your borders. If you are a family office, your stakeholders are your family members.

Voting is seen as a system for translating the majority will of stakeholders into action on behalf of the governing body—yet this is almost never what happens in practice. This was not what played out in ancient Greece, this was not seen in the early board structures of companies, this rarely happens in family offices, and rule by the majority will of stakeholders was even explicitly stated as a hazard the U.S. governing structure was intentionally designed to avoid.

There are a myriad of reasons why almost no voting system is set up as a direct democracy. Why, then, do so many people believe this to be the purpose of voting?

Changes to a voting system (in this case, transitioning a voting system to a one-man-one-vote system) will be promoted by individuals whose factions stand to benefit from those changes. In the US at present, this means Democrats benefit from promoting the belief that a “correctly” functioning voting system gives a vote to everyone and equal weight to all votes (because were the US to do this, Democrats would win more often). As those who often first teach us about voting have a monolithic political identity (89% of social scientists teaching at universities are Democrats and 87% of high school teachers are Democrats) it should not be surprising this idea of a one-man-one-vote system has gained steam even if, in practice, it is almost never used when people intentionally design voting systems.

Why is one-man-one-vote voting almost never used?

1. Tyranny of the Majority: This is the “classic” reason and can present itself in multiple forms, be it an excess of centralization, in which decisions that should be local are applied too broadly due to population concentrations, or the oppression of a minority group by a majority group.

Personally, we don’t see these as significant risks, or at least not differentially significant risks. Even non-majority stakeholder systems feature these risks. So why do people fret about the tyranny of the majority while ignoring more realistic dangers? Because the real dangers (the next few) are either offensive or harder to succinctly explain.

2. Unequal Competence: There is a saying: “Do you know how dumb the average person is? Well, half of them are dumber than that.”

Most of the time when people are afraid of a governance guided by the majority of stakeholders, their true fear is of the stupidity of the average person.

While many smart people hold this fear, they typically find sneaky ways to avoid explicitly articulating it by, in place of straightforward intelligence tests, instituting policies like land-holding, sex, or race requirements for voting that align with their prejudices.

As dangerous as prejudiced voting policies are, policies that allow the party in control to design tests that “qualify” voters are equally dangerous. Historically, whenever intelligence tests have been used to filter voters for more than a few cycles, the assessments have devolved into tests of ideological alignment, leading to power consolidation.

Fear of unintelligent voters is largely misguided. Prediction markets, which aggregate the knowledge of large groups of people, almost always outperform individuals (and even experts!)—at least when the “predictors” are contributors and not just stakeholders (but more on that shortly). Long story short: Crowds are not that dumb and concerns about stakeholder intelligence are more an indicator of a leader’s pride when they compare themselves to the average population.

3. Inherent Instability: From coalition formation to vote trading, academics have found dozens of technical problems with generalist vote collecting. Just letting the majority have what they want can lead to the long-term breakdown of the fabric of a voting body, be it a nation or a family office.

While most of these fears are pedantic, popular vote systems almost always unintentionally promote power consolidation in a way that rewards the wrong metrics in individuals and parties. The tendency to drift toward power consolidation in one-man-one-vote systems is a genuine problem.

4. Fidelity of Vision: This is where perceived problems get really serious. Popular vote systems do almost nothing to protect the fidelity of whatever vision motivated the creation of the governing body (like liberty, equality, and fraternity) unless that vision is literally: “Do what the majority of stakeholders want whenever they want it.”

It is very rare that any government is set up with this vision. Usually governing systems are intended to ensure individual rights, help families live good lives, cure pediatric cancer, or at least not commit genocide … but just giving power to the majority does nothing to increase the probability of any of those things.

Fidelity of vision is uniquely problematic when you consider shifting intergenerational values. Three generations from now, your descendants’ opinions about the purpose of a family foundation—which you, personally, set up after years of backbreaking work—may be profoundly different from your own. This might not seem so bad if you assume that every generation is always better than the last—something easy to think if you frame this in the context of some of the United States’ founders being mortified by the idea of black or female voting—but that can seem a lot messier if you look at the fall of the Weimar Republic through the democratic election of Nazis.

When governing mandates are shaped by popular vote, it is in the best interests of powerful people to systematically indoctrinate young people—for example, by lobbying for educational systems to teach things other than fact and critical thought. Consider recent debates over how evolution education, critical race theory, and climate change should be taught in American public schools. While your perspective on which side you think is pushing for the truth will change depending on your political views, you can at least see that the fight is often politically motivated. If the victor of such struggles did not win the privilege of indoctrinating a generation of voters, there would be significantly less contention in these fights and people would be better able to optimize around truth rather than political power struggles. (This phenomenon is not unique to state-level politics; even in small family offices we have encountered factions incentivized to essentially brainwash their kids to vote as blocks.)

In the same vein, one-person-one-vote governments motivate the creation of “political media” in which powerful individuals use media channels to manipulate the opinions of stakeholders who don’t have time to become fully informed on issues. When you remove one-man-one-vote systems, much of the impetus for this form of population manipulation can be removed, which thereby lowers misinformation. If you are against brainwashing children and in favor of accurate news, you are against majoritarian democracy.

Finally, popular-vote-driven governments don’t engender investment or personal sacrifice. Why give your life savings to a charity if, within one generation, its entire value system and purpose may shift?

5. Missed Opportunity: Organizational behavior follows organizational governance and reward pathways. When your voting system rewards the most average of opinions, coalition building, and control over news media and educational systems, you relinquish most of your power to guide an organization to greatness.

There is much to be gained from systematically rewarding (in voting power) behaviors and ideological tendencies you want an organization to exhibit (from a multigenerational perspective), be those characteristics education, population growth, dedication to the faith, service to the organization, competence, or any myriad of other factors. For example, if you want an organization (like a religious institution) to grow, you could distribute voting power based on the number of new members someone brings in. If you wanted to ensure people have a vested interest in the financial health of a company, you can grant voting power based on percentage ownership.

Merely giving equal power to everyone feels like a waste as it rewards whatever group happens to have the most members.

In family offices with majoritarian systems, we have actually seen some family lines intentionally have more kids than they otherwise would in an effort to control family wealth. This is why votes in family offices usually split through family members, so if one brother has two kids and his sister has four, each parent will get one vote, the brother’s kids get 0.5 votes, and the sister’s kids get 0.25 votes).

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^[2] Gwern. (2019, August 12). Does mouse utopia exist? Gwern.net. from https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia

^[3] Melchor, A. (2022, May 2). Universe 25, 1968–1973. The Scientist Magazine. from https://www.the-scientist.com/foundations/universe-25-1968-1973-69941

^[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink

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^[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink

^[7] Ritchie, Hannah, and Max Roser. “Urbanization.” Our World in Data, 13 June 2018, https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization.

^[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori

^[9] Pfaus, J. G., Erickson, K. A., & Talianakis, S. (2013). Somatosensory conditioning of sexual arousal and copulatory behavior in the male rat: A model of fetish development. Physiology & Behavior, 122, 1-7.

^[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutational_meltdown

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^[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRrFrx8-wEg&ab

^[14] Specifically, Samaritans and Jews were rendered incompatible by their differing stances on where the Temple should be, which was necessarily different in groups living in two different Jewish states at a time when Judaism was both a governing structure and a religion.

^[15] Urien-Lefranc, F. (n.d.). The good Samaritan: What was his religion and does it still exist? – re:online. RE. from https://www.reonline.org.uk/research/the-good-samaritan-what-was-his-religion-and-does-it-still-exist/

^[16] https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/FC/FC2F5371043C48FDD95AEDE7B8A49624_Springmeier.-.Bloodlines.of.the.Illuminati.R.pdf

^[17] Susanna, & Colm. (n.d.). The Irish Potato Famine and the murder of landlords. Enjoy Irish Culture. Retrieved December 24, 2022, from https://www.enjoy-irish-culture.com/Irish-potato-famine-murder.html

^[18] The history place – Irish potato famine: Coffin ships. (2000). Retrieved December 24, 2022, from https://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/famine/coffin.htm

^[19] Cracked. The Dark Secret Behind Quirky Romantic Comedies – Manic Pixie Dream Girl Parody, 7 June 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hyIlrfGR5g.

^[20] Hofstede, G. (2021, February 20) The 6 dimensions model of national culture by Geert Hofstede. Retrieved December 24, 2022, from https://geerthofstede.com/culture-geert-hofstede-gert-jan-hofstede/6d-model-of-national-culture/

^[21] Akaliyski, P., Minkov, M., Li, J., Bond, M. H., & Gehrig, S. (2022). The weight of culture: Societal individualism and flexibility explain large global variations in obesity. Social Science & Medicine, 307, 115167. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115167 from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953622004737?dgcid=author

^[22] Enomoto, C. E., & Geisler, K. R. (2017). Culture and plane crashes: A cross-country test of the Gladwell hypothesis. Economics & Sociology, 10(3), 281–293. https://doi.org/10.14254/2071-789x.2017/10-3/20 from https://www.economics-sociology.eu/files/24_20_455_Enomoto_Geisler.pdf

^[23] Minkov, M., Blagoev, V., & Bond, M. H. (2014). Improving research in the emerging field of Cross-Cultural Sociogenetics. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 46(3), 336–354. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022114563612 from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276384039_Improving_Research_in_the_Emerging_Field_of_Cross-Cultural_Sociogenetics_The_Case_of_Serotonin

^[24] https://www.andrews.edu/~tidwell/bsad560/HofstedeUncertainityAvoidance.html

^[25] Baker, D. S., & Carson, K. D. (2011). The two faces of uncertainty avoidance: Attachment and adaptation. Journal of Behavioral and Applied Management, 12(2), 128–141.

^[26] http://www.clearlycultural.com/geert-hofstede-cultural-dimensions/uncertainty-avoidance-index/

^[27] https://www.andrews.edu/~tidwell/bsad560/HofstedeUncertainityAvoidance.html

^[28] Wiedenhaefer, R. M., Dastoor, B. R., Balloun, J., & Sosa-Fey, J. (2007). Ethno-psychological characteristics and terror-producing countries: Linking uncertainty avoidance to terrorist acts in the 1970s. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 30(9), 801–823. https://doi.org/10.1080/10576100701514532 from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10576100701514532

^[29] https://www.andrews.edu/~tidwell/bsad560/HofstedeUncertainityAvoidance.html

^[30] https://geerthofstede.com/culture-geert-hofstede-gert-jan-hofstede/6d-model-of-national-culture/

^[31] Minkov, M., Blagoev, V., & Bond, M. H. (2014). Improving research in the emerging field of Cross-Cultural Sociogenetics. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 46(3), 336–354. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022114563612 from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276384039_Improving_Research_in_the_Emerging_Field_of_Cross-Cultural_Sociogenetics_The_Case_of_Serotonin

^[32] Cook, M. (2017). Ancient religions, modern politics: The Islamic case in comparative perspective. Princeton University Press.

[33] If it wasn’t for this addendum the most logical course of action would be to stay with the plane. Remember, this is a thought experiment not a guide for surviving in the desert.

[34] We mention evolution because it is relevant to almost anyone who holds this value set. Those who do not believe in evolution also likely believe God has absolute inherent value and therefore would probably not consider positive personal emotions as having inherent value in the first place, as a true believer’s objective function would naturally revolve around serving God.

[35] This thought experiment was inspired by one presented in Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making by Deborah Stone

[36] This is a Japanese term sometimes used interchangeably with “eighth-grader syndrome.” It is used to describe early teens who, through a desperate desire to stand out, have convinced themselves that they have hidden knowledge or secret powers. While this is a normal part of growing up, it is important not to build a lasting religious perspective around it.

[37] Image by Fred the Oyster, CC BY-SA 4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0, via Wikimedia Commons

[38] See: “Psychological Barriers to Evolutionary Psychology: Ideological Bias and Coalitional Adaptations” in Archives of Scientific Psychology

[39] As in: Samantha, from Sex in the City. We admit this dates us.

[40] This scenario was authored in part by Spencer Greenberg founder of ClearerThinking.org.

[41] The Calvinist tradition holds that it is for everyone to interpret the Bible themselves without outside influence and that a person cannot arrive at truth through someone’s external guidance. The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life presents a similar approach without assuming the supremacy of the Bible.

^[42] “A quest to abolish taxes ends.” Altoona Mirror, Oct 11, 1996, p. 8

^[43] “Long war against tax finally ends” The Intelligencer Record, Doylestown, Oct 10, 1996, Page A-12,
Mylavaganam, R. (n.d.). The Holdeen Funds. Raja Mylvaganam: The holdeen funds. Retrieved December 18, 2022, from https://www.svabhinava.org/HinduChrist/RajaMylvaganam/Holdeen/index.php

^[44] Allan Rappleyea and Henry C. Clark, for the petitioner T. (1975, February 19). Estate of holdeen v. commissioner. Legal research tools from Casetext. Retrieved December 18, 2022, from https://casetext.com/case/estate-of-holdeen-v-commissioner

^[45] “A quest to abolish taxes ends.” Altoona Mirror, Oct 11, 1996, p. 8

^[46] “A quest to abolish taxes ends.” Altoona Mirror, Oct 11, 1996, p. 8

^[47] (2021, August 2). Lawyer’s dream of abolishing taxes has become a legal nightmare. Orlando Sentinel. Retrieved December 18, 2022, from https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1994-02-27-9402270093-story.html

^[48] “A quest to abolish taxes ends.” Altoona Mirror, Oct 11, 1996, p. 8

^[49]Paul Collins (1970, January 1). Trust issues. Lapham’s Quarterly. Retrieved December 18, 2022, from https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/future/trust-issues

^[50] If you are unfamiliar with what the private prison alternative system for kids is like, the movie and book Holes offers a pretty accurate—though sanitized—depiction. For example, in the real camps, kids mostly just slept outside on the ground covered in plastic sheets. Getting a building/cage with a roof to sleep in or a fruit to eat was always a special treat, yet in the books these things are normal.

^[51] I think this is the most likely reason given some things that were said by staff at the camp and given the timeline of the events.

^[52] Stalin or Mao could both work here depending on the stat source you use.

^[53] @ne0liberal Neoliberal “The National Environmental Policy Act has come under fire for actually making it harder to do pro-environment projects. Here’s a thread of projects NEPA has delayed or killed, each one explicitly pro-environment (green energy, mass transit, env. rehabilitation/protection, etc.).” 02 Sep 2022. https://twitter.com/ne0liberal/status/1567155297826885637

^[54] Myelination of the frontal lobe assists in inhibiting impulses generated by the older parts of our brains and is still ongoing in our teenage years, meaning that these ancient impulses have a less filtered expression in younger groups.

^[55] Nikos-Rose, K. M. (2022, October 11). Most teen bullying occurs among peers climbing the social ladder. UC Davis. from https://www.ucdavis.edu/curiosity/news/most-teen-bullying-occurs-among-peers-climbing-social-ladder

^[56] There is such a thing as social status within large groups. Heck, there used to be a book—”Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage”—that cataloged the exact relative social status of the top thousand or so people in the U.K. Within a large company, people will know their relative status based on their positions. Within a nation, people know the difference between an incarcerated person and a state’s governor. That said, this kind of social status is different from the type discussed above in that it cannot be modified by individual interactions as it is instead “assigned” by some sort of governing body or larger system.

^[57] When talking about middle and high school cliques, we default to the social groups that exist in 80s high school movies to ensure a shared reference point for our readers. If we referenced e-girls or emos, half our readers would have no reference point for what was going on, whereas if we reference “cool cheerleaders” we all get the idea even if cheerleaders have not been cool for decades.

^[58]Buss, D. M., & von Hippel, W. (2018). Psychological barriers to evolutionary psychology: Ideological bias and coalitional adaptations. Archives of Scientific Psychology, 6(1), 148–158. https://doi.org/10.1037/arc0000049

^[59] While this is not a truism for every single male and female, it is true in the aggregate, which in turn affects social norms.

^[60] Baumeister, R. F., Reynolds, T., Winegard, B., & Vohs, K. D. (2017). Competing for love: Applying sexual economics theory to mating contests. Journal of Economic Psychology, 63, 230–241. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2017.07.009

^[61] Mast, M. S. (2002). Female Dominance Hierarchies: Are They Any Different from Males’? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(1), 29–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167202281003

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^[63]David-Barrett, T., Rotkirch, A., Carney, J., Behncke Izquierdo, I., Krems, J. A., Townley, D., McDaniell, E., Byrne-Smith, A., & Dunbar, R. I. (2015). Women favour dyadic relationships, but men prefer clubs: Cross-cultural evidence from Social Networking. PLOS ONE, 10(3). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0118329

^[64] Simone and I debate how much. I argue only around 90%.

^[65] Dobbin, F., & Kalev, A. (2022, December 13). Why diversity programs fail. Harvard Business Review. from https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail

^[66] https://infiniteconversation.com/

^[67] In case you are wondering whether monitoring employees at home improves efficiency, we ran tests on this and found A and B players to be more efficient when not closely monitored whereas mediocre and below-average employees perform far worse when not monitored. While workers may be slightly less productive when monitored due to additional social processing running in the back of their brain, it seems like mediocre and below-average employees take enough time to slack off when at home that the additional time spent working at a lower capacity makes up for this difference.

^[68]Powell, K. L., Roberts, G., & Nettle, D. (2012). Eye images increase charitable donations: Evidence from an opportunistic field experiment in a supermarket. Ethology, 118(11), 1096–1101. https://doi.org/10.1111/eth.12011

[69] One reader said this child swapping practice was not well attested, so we investigated the issue and found it very well and multiply attested. Dismissing this because the only people who mention it are refugees is insane. Of course, people still living under a dictatorship are not going to record this practice.

^[70] Tragedy of the commons issues are those in which you have to convince every individual actor in the system to make a decision in favor of the common good but not in the individual’s favor.

^[71]Cortes, C., & Lawrence, N. D. (2021, September 20). Inconsistency in conference peer review: Revisiting the 2014 neurips experiment. arXiv.org. from https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.09774

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^[75]Patrick Collison, M. N. (2018, November 28). Science is getting less bang for its buck. The Atlantic. from https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminishing-returns-science/575665/

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^[77] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0xUt9A1AXw&ab_channel=Task%26Purpose

^[78]Afonso, A., Schuknecht, L. & Tanzi, V. Public sector efficiency: An international comparison. Public Choice 123, 321–347 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-005-7165-2, from https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecbwp242.pdf

^[79]Chu, J. S., & Evans, J. A. (2021). Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(41). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2021636118

^[80]By “mentally stable,” we refer to those past their angsty teen phase who have the mental stability required to achieve some level of success in life . . . outside of marrying into success, being an actor, or having some other career that doesn’t filter out crazy people.

^[81] Luddites get their name from English textile workers who destroyed textile machinery in the early 19th century.

^[82] Some instead will argue that “no country has achieved true communism yet” but that many countries are in a transitional state. This is also fairly silly, as generally speaking the governments they would point to as being in these transitional states are becoming less “communist” with countries like Sweden having a rapidly increasing Gini coefficient, not a decreasing one.

^[83]Fazekas, Z., & Hatemi, P. K. (2020). Narcissism in political participation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 47(3), 347–361. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167220919212

^[84] Minarchism is the political philosophy that a state should be as small as possible and its only function should be the protection of individuals from aggression, theft, breach of contract, and fraud.

^[85] “In fact, revolutions occur more often in middle-income countries than in the very poorest nations.” Goldstone, Jack A., ‘What causes revolutions?’, Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction, Very Short Introductions (New York, 2013; online edn, Oxford Academic, 23 Jan. 2014), https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780199858507.003.0002, accessed 17 Dec. 2022.

Starship Troopers and Contributor Voting Systems

When we contemplate contributor voting systems, we often think of weighted systems based on financial input—like the way a stock works: The more money a person puts into an organization, the more voting power they have. But . . . discussing such systems from said perspective would be boring, so let’s use a “fun” example: The Terran Federation from Starship Troopers.

In the fictional world of Starship Troopers, a world government exists, and while it is a democracy, it grants an equal vote to each contributor rather than to each stakeholder. While contributors have an equal vote, not all stakeholders do.

What does that mean, functionally? It means the only people who can vote are individuals who make a voluntary and significant sacrifice to the state. If you have only seen the movie,^[1] you may assume that this entails military service and would thus be restrictive, but in the book this is specifically addressed by allowing individuals to perform other kinds of equivalent public service (with the law specifically stating that a form of service must be available to every citizen regardless of physical or mental ability).

We regard this approach as being far superior to most nations’ instinctive stakeholder-based approaches. As is stated in the book, “Nothing of value is free.” The government of the Terran Federation was created under the philosophy that people will not value a vote that they did not win at significant personal cost. (Though we do think this system has a critical flaw, which we will discuss in the next chapter.)

It is difficult to find a more optimal adjustment when designing a governing system than restricting voting rights to contributors, yet contributor-based voting is virtually nonexistent these days. Why? Because in early democracies, this restriction was used to reinforce racial, gender-based, and class-based discrimination.

For example, voting in many areas has historically been restricted to only white, male landowners. Even when voting was presumably democratized, it was still covertly restricted by racist policies executed through barriers like “intelligence” tests designed to differentially prevent black populations from voting. It is vote restriction systems like these that leave a bad taste in leaders’ mouths but … frankly, this is to the detriment of the exploration of better voting systems.

Concerns about the hazards of contribution-based voting qualifications are not unfounded. Filtering systems can be used to consolidate power by any ideology currently in control of a government. When tests determine who can vote, the body writing/designing those tests can determine which party wins. Still, let’s not throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Low-risk systems can be created so long as additional voting requirements are made clear up front and are difficult to adjust.

We will use our own family foundation structure as an example of how voting rights adjustments can be used to create a family office structure that avoids many of the pitfalls of traditional family offices. (Note: We explore our family office model in more detail later in the book. Here we are just looking at voting rights restrictions.)

Our family office is run on a triumvirate model, with three individuals representing three different groups (whose votes are gained by different contributory criteria). The triumvirate elects a fourth individual, the Executor, to manage the office’s day-to-day operations.

The Investor: Family office members electing the Investor representative get votes based on the amount of money they put back into the family office (similar to how an individual could own more voting shares of a public company). The person elected with these votes helps to ensure that part of the vote for the Executor is tied both to a societal measure of competence (one’s ability to acquire wealth) and genuine sacrifice for the family (as demonstrated by giving a portion of that wealth to the family office), while also ensuring that the office does not run out of money or spend it frivolously. Finally, this role will significantly reduce bribery and lobbying within the system, creating a “cheaper” way to buy influence.
The Contributor: Family members electing the Contributor representative get votes equal to the number of kids they have—plus the number of new family members they bring in through other means (being a family member is about dedication to the family’s goals). This is like a stakeholder vote, but instead of focusing on current stakeholders without a care for the future of the family, it grants influence to those with an investment in the future of the family while simultaneously encouraging the family to grow.
The Veteran: Only former Executors can vote (on a one-person-one-vote basis) for the Veteran representative. Imagine a branch of the US government that was made up of only former presidents. This role within the triumvirate encourages long-term thinking and enables the enactment of plans that could take decades to come to fruition—something that is very hard to enable within most governing structures.

Merely existing as a genetic relative does not grant one any votes per our family office model. This type of system may not be your cup of tea, but we personally think a governance structure that rewards people based on their genetic relation to someone else is both deeply troubling and doomed to fail. Not only is such a system borderline racist, but when a family is given privilege without personal sacrifice after a few generations, their moral core becomes erased. Not only do they not understand sacrifice on an individual level, but even the cultural memory of it is forgotten.

Finally—and this is something we have mentioned a few times—remember that by restricting who can vote, you can encourage certain behavior patterns and determine the core character of your governing unit.

In the case of our family:

To ensure our family does not die out, we grant votes to those who bring in new members within one branch of our governance structure.
As we want our family to retain wealth, we grant votes to those who bring in money through another branch.
Because we want our family to maintain a long-term vision and enjoy stability, we grant votes to past leaders who have dedicated years of their lives to it.

This isn’t the only way to design a system like this; there are all sorts of ways incentives can be implemented. If you want your descendants to value education, you may only give votes to people based on academic achievement (peer-reviewed research, tenured positions, etc.). However, here you need to be careful to design timeless restrictions—who knows what the value of college will be in 50 years?

Alternatively, if you want your family to be charitable for many generations hence, you may grant votes to individuals who have reached some level of charity participation or involvement in their local community—though here one must be extremely careful, as we have seen these requirements regularly produce families in which only individuals who fail to get real, high-powered jobs involve themselves in the family business as they are the only ones who have time to invest in the level of charitable pursuit needed to gain influence with the family office, which they in turn use to support frivolous lifestyles, defeating the point of the restriction.

Personally, we have always had a predilection for experimenting more with coming-of-age ceremonies that involve a voluntary sacrifice to gain access to voting within a system. They are just so … cinematic. An interesting one to experiment with could be a mechanism for ensuring all the wealth a family member accumulates returns to the central family upon family members’ deaths through a usurious loan structure or something, as a pledge wouldn’t hold up legally.

How this might work: To join the family office or benefit from it in some way, an individual may be obligated to sign a contract that ensures their entire estate goes back to the family office upon their death. The family would make a ceremonial big deal out of this, as it would technically be the moment the individual fully and consciously joined the family as an adult. We explore these types of rituals more in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion. These types of rituals may become critical to family structures after the perfection of artificial womb technology, as they would incentivize people to reinvest in the factory or nursery that produced them.

Wards of the State

As much as we’re enamored by the creativity of the Terran Federation governing structure, it ultimately has one critical failure in its design. So far, we have divided government voting block types into stakeholders (individuals affected by a government, like people working at a company or living in a country), contributors (people who add to a government, like investors), and representatives (those elected by another group to represent them)—however, there is a fourth group that one must consider when setting up a governing structure: Wards of the state. Wards of the state are individuals who are in some way supported by a governing structure.

Wards of the state should never have a say in governing structure. For example, you should never make one of the groups voting on the head of a nonprofit its employees (and in the case of Starship Troopers you should not allow individuals to vote within the Terran Federation until after their military service is over and they are no longer financially supported by the state in any way).

Why are wards of the state so toxic when permitted to vote? Because wards of the state always have an incentive to allocate more resources to themselves. You can argue all day about whether they would act on that incentive, but it is an unimpeachable fact that the incentive exists. While one or two generations may resist the temptation, the gravity of the incentive existing creates inevitable corruption.

Wards of the state can generally be divided into three categories:

Compensated Representatives: Representatives who are compensated for the time their representation takes (Congressmen, board members, etc.)
Compensated Producers: Individuals who are given resources in exchange for services (soldiers, family office managers, etc.)
Unproductive Wards: Individuals who are given resources despite providing nothing in return (trust fund kids, welfare recipients, etc.)

In an optimal system, none of these classes of individuals (or people related to them, dating them, etc.) should have a vote. There are, however, some arguments for giving the first two categories of wards a vote. For example, in the case of soldiers, if you are asking someone to put their life on the line for a state, it makes sense to both give them a vote and financially support them. In the case of compensated representatives, leaving them uncompensated increases the risk of corruption.

Let’s consider the case of compensated representatives. How might representative payment be handled optimally? We see two paths here:

Create a separate system determining representative payment that is outside representatives’ spheres of influence. Essentially, you have a separate, unpaid representative body that determines how much the full-time body of representatives gets paid. When possible, this other body should be anonymous or crowdsourced to make them harder to bribe. One could, for example, select them through a system like sortition, in which people are randomly pulled from the population in a manner similar to jury formation.
Remove the value of money to representatives altogether. In this case, to become a representative, one must make a lifelong vow of poverty (or at least lack of luxury). Some religious orders use systems like this and it is not super effective when you consider the types of buildings they often inhabit.

The key point here is that unproductive wards should never, never be given a vote in any governance system that supports them. It doesn’t matter if we’re discussing an heiress not having a vote in the management of her trust fund or someone currently on welfare having a vote that influences the oversight of that welfare. Any system that allows those non-contributory beneficiaries to vote will inevitably become corrupted as it allows factions to “buy” votes (i.e., by offering more resources to those who vote a certain way).

Flat vs. Proportional Voting Systems

While we have alluded to weighted voting systems a few times when describing systems in which people who have more shares have more impactful votes, we have yet to explore procedural voting. Procedural voting is when sometimes one “vote” takes precedence over another “vote” and other times it does not, depending on the context. This is most common in triumvirate governing systems and might be seen in something like a naval faction’s vote having more precedence when the subject of water-based military decisions is on the table.

Generally speaking, weighted systems are a bad idea unless they involve “costly signaling.” Costly signaling is a term used in biology to describe something that cannot be faked and has a real cost to the individual showing it. For example, a deep voice that can only be achieved by changing things that actually require more evolutionary fitness might be selected for as a way for an individual to quickly demonstrate their fitness but a deep voice that can be achieved “cheaply” through just changing the vocal cords will not.

In the case of weighted voting systems, costly signaling is needed to prevent individuals from gaming the system. When voting power can be boosted by maximizing a particular metric, the free market will find a way to price that metric and then exploit it. The simplest type of costly signaling for a proportional vote is just to denominate that vote in currency. The extent to which participants game the system can be reduced by measuring money spent as a proportion of overall personal wealth (meaning $100 spent by one individual may get them the same number of votes as $1,000,000 spent by another). Alternatively, voting power could be increased in proportion to something like years of military service.

One effective version of weighted voting that doesn’t use costly signaling is liquid democracy. This is a system similar to representational democracy in which the weight of one individual’s vote is determined by the number of other individuals that vote for them. Voting through liquid democracy, you might, for example, either vote directly for the next president or give someone else’s presidential vote more power. Liquid democracy can also become iterative, with the vote you give to someone else may in turn be given to yet another party.

While this sort of double liquid democracy may seem rare, in practice something functionally similar is what happens with investment firms. When I invest in one firm based on my trust in them, they can in turn invest in another firm who in turn can invest in another, with the amount of dollars each firm has representing their “voting power” in the economic ecosystem.

One could also argue that liquid democracy takes place in an informal manner in direct democracies. Joe Smith, may, for example, vote for whoever his union tells him to vote for, and the leaders of his union may in turn have determined what votes to recommend based on the recommendations of a Washington, D.C., insider who analyzed which candidates would be most likely to support their needs and agenda. In this case, Joe effectively passed his vote over to his union, which in turn passed it to the D.C. insider.

We will talk about this more in other sections as it is better thought of as a compromise between direct and representational democracy than a weighted vote system.

Strategic Voting

One area of voting research that warrants extra attention is the concept of strategic voting (e.g., tactical voting or insincere voting). This refers to cases in which the voting system is set up in a manner that somehow incentivizes people to vote for a position they are actively against. Imagine voting for a candidate who isn’t your favorite during a general election because they are the most likely candidate to beat one you absolutely hate.

To say someone is voting against their interests can mean different things depending on how their interests are defined: For example, what if they vote for a candidate they believe they want, but whose proposed policies and actions would actually directly hurt them?

Some of the methodology used to determine whether an election can be “fair” includes:

Utility criterion: Will the candidate who provides the highest aggregate utility to the voters win?
Majority criterion: Will the candidate favored by the majority of voters win?
- Ranked majority criterion: Will the preferred option win relative to other options?
- Rated majority criterion: Will the option given a perfect rating by the majority win?
Mutual majority criterion: If there is a subset of candidates preferred by voters, does that subset always win in races against candidates not in that set?
Condorcet criterion: If a candidate beats every other candidate in pairwise comparisons, will they always win? (There is a separate criteria called the Condorcet loser criterion, which applies the same question to candidates who lose in pairwise comparisons.)
Monotonicity criterion: Will ranking a candidate higher on a ballet ever hurt their chances of winning? Will ranking a candidate lower on a ballet ever help their chances of winning?
Participation criterion: Is it possible to help your preferred candidate by not voting?
Reversal Symmetry: Is it ever possible for the same candidate to have been elected if all the votes are reversed?

This list could be three or four times longer, but we think even this sampling will help you see how practically meaningless it is to get too far in the weeds with these sorts of questions. If you find this kind of stuff interesting, just mine Wikipedia for endless information. If this is the kind of thing you care enough to support, there are organizations like FairVote dedicated to pushing this “fairer” voting system.

Just to help you picture how criteria like those above can be used to analyze a voting system, let’s look at “score voting” in which scores are given to each candidate or issue and then added up. While it satisfies the monotonicity criterion, the participation criterion, and reversal symmetry, it does not satisfy the Condorcet criterion or majority criterion. Hopefully, through that quick breakdown, you can see why we don’t go into this topic in more detail.

This type of stuff might be useful to academics, but not to average people like us. Even when designing a governance structure, these factors are not really relevant unless we are creating a government whose core purpose is to carry out the exact and technically correct will of that governance’s stakeholders (which we have already explained is something almost no one wants except for political parties that expect to win more in that scenario).

Compelled Voting Systems

The manner in which people are motivated to vote impacts democracy just as much as the manner in which people are allowed to vote. From 2000 to 2020, compulsory voting was introduced in Bulgaria and Samoa. During the same period, it was repealed in Chile, the Dominican Republic, Fiji, Paraguay, and Cyprus.

Compulsory voting isn’t the only type of compelled voting system. In general, there are two broad models that can be used to think about compelled voting:

How is the voting compelled:
- Sanctions for those who don’t vote: Voting is compelled through punishments for those who do not vote.
- Rewarded voting: Voting is rewarded through something other than the impact the vote itself has (typically through a financial reward or a tax write off).
Who is compelled to vote:
- All potential voters must vote: This is the most common selection for compelled voting systems.
- All voters of a certain type must vote for the result to count: This can be seen in some company and nonprofit boards, where certain categories of voters must be present for a decision to be binding.
- Minimum required participation: These systems are rare but considering they existed in Athens, one of the first democracies, they are worth noting. In such a system, a minimum number of people must vote. If the minimum number do not vote, additional voters are recruited and punished for not being at the first vote. In Athens, slaves would use a freshly-painted rope to herd additional citizens into the voting location when voter turnout was insufficient. Those with a red stain on their robes were fined.

In some instances, these rules make a lot of sense. For example, when looking at small governing structures like home owners’ associations and student clubs, it is easy for the party in power to switch the date of a vote without notifying all potential voters and thus ensure the turnout is skewed in their favor. Through a compulsory voting system, this can be made much harder to do. For organizations in which such abuse is likely, a minimum participation rule can make sense.

In other instances, there are obvious negatives to doing this, such as random voting (essentially, when you force people to vote, a portion of them put literally zero thought into it and just vote randomly, which is something we can see in data from countries with mandatory voting).^[2] Although there are ways to address the hazard of random voting, the larger problem with compulsory voting is an increase in non-meaningful engagement with the electoral process.

There certainly are moral arguments for and against compulsory voting at the state level, such as the voting paradox in which poor people vote less frequently, or wealthy people functionally spend more to vote due to the value of their time, however such arguments don’t functionally matter. Why? Because rewarded voting almost exclusively benefits left-leaning politicians at the state level.^[3]

Compulsory voting will almost always be supported by those who support left-leaning positions and opposed by those who oppose them. At the state level, all compulsory voting does is shift policies slightly to the left and, for that reason, moral questions about it are largely irrelevant as the real question is always going to be: “Do we want more left-leaning policies?” A state could achieve the same functional outcome as compulsory voting at a much lower cost by just altering every vote a few percentage points to the left.

How Votes are Collected and Counted

The manner in which votes are collected can heavily impact outcomes. For example: In serialized public voting, the first vote can distort the final result by as much as 34%.^[4] The question of how votes are collected has become increasingly important with the advent of the potential for e-governance.

There are only a few metrics that matter when thinking about this. None require that much thought:

Is the voting public or private? Private voting is almost always better for the reason cited above.
How hard is it to vote in an absolute context? While you could make a voting system that “filters” voters by formally making it extremely difficult to vote, we are not aware of any cases in which this has been done in practice (or at least not with any goal other than to bias a vote in favor of a specific party). In general, the current trend is to make voting easier (hence the rise of e-governances and mail-in ballots). We would say there is not an obviously right choice on this one but would still love to see some system at least experiment with artificially difficult voting (like a heated voting lever that hurts to pull) so that voting is intrinsically costly.
Is voting equally difficult for all demographics? This could be a problem when looking at something like voting over the internet when not everyone has equal access to the internet and that inequality is expressed along economic or regional lines.
Is the topic or individual in question bundled with other topics or people?
- Is it the case that you can only vote for one topic or person by also voting for another? This where riders come in: Agendas or candidates people would not otherwise vote for getting attached to an unrelated topic.
- Is the vote paired with a topic in a way that psychologically affects the vote? If you ask people to vote for multiple things at the same time, the way those things are paired can affect the aggregate vote outcome. For example, you might prime someone to consider the damage caused by muggings or vandalism right before having them vote on police funding.

Voting on a topic-by-topic basis exemplifies more nuanced complications around vote counting and collection. Topical voting is common with special ballot measures on issues, as seen in states like California where elections can more easily be held on specific measures. Despite superficially appearing to increase voter participation in a democracy, these systems are almost always a bad idea if the subjects being voted on cost additional money or need to be executed individually.

For example:

If you allow votes to be taken on a case-by-case basis and ask a question like “Should teachers be paid more?” teachers will be far more likely to take the time to go out and vote on the measure even though the outcome affects everyone.
“Should teachers be paid more?” intrinsically biases the voter towards yes, as the question is framed in the context of who gets more and not who gets less. Here it would make sense to frame said question against the cost: “Should teachers be paid more, using a tax increase of X%?”
- Even in this condition, it is easy to hide costs by indicating that costs will be borne by a minority e.g. “Should teachers be paid more, using an X% increase in taxes on companies in Y region earning over $Z annually?” In this case, the text is describing a cost that will hurt the region in terms of jobs, income, new companies, etc. but it would be difficult to explain those costs on a ballot.

Win Conditions

An election’s “win condition” can also heavily impact the nature of a voting system and the type of leadership it promotes.

There are largely four ways win conditions can be structured:

First past the post: This is a fancy name to describe a winning condition in which the majority vote is gained. The candidate with the most votes may only have 30% of the votes, making it technically just a “relative majority.”
Threshold vote: A winner is called when a candidate collects votes surpassing some predetermined threshold. People often refer to these as supermajority votes, but we don’t like the term, as “supermajority” specifically refers to thresholds of over 50% while one could theoretically have a threshold of 30% in a system with seven parties (in this case, a winner would have to both get the most votes and be over 30% of votes).
Consensus: 100% consensus is required by all parties with voting power before a winner can be declared.
Proportional implementation: By this criteria, an issue is decided in half measures based on the proportion of the electorate that voted on it. This could translate into anything from the number of seats in a congress (if 60% of the electorate voted Republican, then 60% of the congress is made Republican) to how much funding something gets (if half the town wants a school initiative to get zero funding and half wants it to get $1,000,000, it will get $500,000).

We don’t have a strong favorite among these; however, we don’t recommend using the consensus system when the votes of more than three parties matter. When four or more individuals are forced to make a consensus decision, the decision almost always devolves into a simple dominance hierarchy struggle. This issue might be addressed by physically separating the voting parties and not allowing them to communicate through any means other than writing.

We also warn against proportional implementation because it strongly incentivizes individuals to misrepresent their actual positions. For example, if one party wants $5 in funding and another wants $10, the party that wants $10 is rewarded for pretending they want $20 and the party that wants $5 is rewarded for pretending they want $0. Politicians (or factions within an organization) will promote these “false positions,” causing polarization and the formation of extreme opinions within said group.

Quadratic Voting

At the time of this book’s publication, quadratic voting has become a popular topic in crypto (and among other technocratic voting reform advocates). Quadratic voting allows users to express degrees of preference through a vote rather than a binary response (e.g., to pay for additional votes using money or some form of token, or to vote using a sliding scale) which enables voters to express the level of their sentiment on an issue.

The core gimmick of quadratic voting that distinguishes it from generic tally systems is that it raises or lowers the value of a vote the more a person chooses to allocate to any particular issue. It may, for example, cost nine tokens to get three votes on one issue where those nine tokens could have been used to vote nine times if spread across different issues. In a quadratic voting system, an individual gets more say the more they distribute their vote.

Quadratic voting is useful in any voting system where individuals have the capacity to make a sacrifice in order to increase their vote. This is doubly true if the ability to sacrifice is not evenly distributed across a population (e.g., if people can pay for a vote and not everyone has the same amount of money), as normally when these systems allow an individual to sacrifice financially to gain dominance over outcomes, outcomes end up being virtually decided by the wealthiest individuals. Because every incremental dollar sacrificed on a specific vote choice matters less in a quadratic system, there is some level of protection against this. That protection evaporates if a single rich person can pretend to be many poor people, meaning that in online (especially crypto-related) contexts, quadratic voting is susceptible to Sybil attacks (in which one entity pretends to be many to magnify its vote).

Consensus Decision Making

In consensus decision making systems, near unanimous consent is needed among voters in order for an issue to pass. Such systems are often chosen to incentivize extreme conservatism, which explains why consensus-style decision making is used to make updates to the Bitcoin protocol (which uses a 90% vote among miners to implement such changes).

Consensus decision making is also favored by confederacies that fear fracture and experience severe damage when any particular contingent is offended. A prominent example of this can be seen with the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy Grand Council, which used consensus in decision-making requiring a 75% supermajority to finalize decisions.

Consensus-focused governance structures use an iterative process in which updates and edits are added to a proposal until it no longer has any opposition. This can be achieved either by improving the thing that is being voted on or adding “fat” to the opposite side of the scale (e.g., if a law hurts farmers, it may also include a tax break for farmers).

When people create these systems, they often believe they are trading a slower-to-evolve system for one that will be more deliberative and less likely to offend its constituents. They are wrong.

Consensus-focused systems often drive deliberative bodies to satisfice (a combination of the words “satisfy” and “suffice”) and accept low-risk, easy solutions rather than search for the best solution. Consensus voting systems often rely heavily on social pressure to coerce the minority opinion into agreeing. Typical (total) consensus votes are really decided by 70% or so of the group and the last 20% is achieved through aggressive “social pressure” (bullying).

This process causes the system to “perfect” its methods of social pressure and foster a culture of hostility toward minority opinions, which is typically toxic to a system over the long run. Somewhat ironically, even when a system is not naturally prone to fracture, this governance model makes fracture likely by frustrating fractions of its membership, as can be seen in Bitcoin protocol updates with Bitcoin Cash breaking off during such a deliberation in the process of its few “hard forks” (Bitcoin Cash is an older iteration of the bitcoin protocol run by individuals who never shut it down and moved to a new 90% consensus-driven iteration).

Sortition

Sortition voting involves selecting people randomly from a crowd to form a governing structure, often using some form of lottery. As bizarre and situational as such a system sounds, it is something we all have experienced in the form of jury duty. Sortition systems have been heavily utilized as a tool in democracies since the earliest democracy in Athens.

Sortition has a myriad of advantages, ranging from being more representative of the population to empowering ordinary people, feeling more fair, costing significantly less (and thus allowing elections to happen more frequently), combating political parties, and evading corruption.

The downsides of sortition include the lack of a feeling of legitimacy it can create when it places people in positions of authority, the potential incompetence of those individuals, and the risk of choosing an ideological extremist. Fortunately, none of those hazards need pose too high a risk when sortition systems are used to create a voting pool instead of a council, which is where this method is of greatest utility (if you choose a subpopulation of voters at random, their vote will align highly with what the population as a whole would have chosen if given the same vote—with the only difference being that said people will know their votes count more and thus put more effort into researching their choices).

As with any form of governance, hordes of mouth-breathing academics have slapped dozens of names on the various ways sortition can be used in an attempt to get their name attached to the coinage of some word or another. All you really need to remember are sortition’s four primary use cases:

Getting a representative sample of a larger population.
Reducing corruption in a committee body while also decreasing its experience and authority.
Conveying information from average people to those in power or condensing ideas from the average person into proposals that can later be voted on in referendums (we see this in town hall events).
Creating a vast number of committees in a democracy to make complicated-yet-small-scale decisions (the reason juries must be chosen through this method).

If you want to complicate sortition a bit, you can create something like the Amish system that first votes for candidates eligible to be chosen by sortition (with every eligible candidate requiring a minimum number of votes) or a hybrid vote sortition system in which every voter selects a candidate and writes their name on a sheet of paper, with the winner being chosen at random among the sheets of paper (in this case, the odds of winning are modified by a vote).

Political Parties

Political parties arise when a number of political players pool their efforts to create synergy. While political parties can arise even within non-voting governments, they are nearly inevitable in any governing body that features a large number of elected positions and voting.

To understand why political parties are an inevitability, let’s imagine a newly created university student government. In this government, 30 students are elected to positions of power and a few hundred students campaign for these positions. Realistically, almost no student voter is going to have time to become educated on all of the candidates and open positions and will likely hear from only a handful of the students running.

Suppose one of the students running puts a letter in front of their name and tells voters that once they had gotten comfortable with that candidate’s positions, they could reliably get the same sorts of positions by voting for anyone else with that letter in front of their name. If we operate under the assumption that said voter has about a 30% chance of having no opinion on that particular race, a candidate without a letter in front of their name will win something like 0.2 votes for every other candidate with a letter in front of their name. If even two candidates placed a letter in front of their names, they would have an enormous advantage in that election. That advantage would be compounded by each additional candidate on their team. Naturally, over time, individuals using this strategy would come to represent a larger and larger share of the political system in that student government.

In the above example, benefits like collective fundraising, flier design, speeches and rallies, and efforts to get on ballots are not even mentioned as a factor—though obviously they grant an additional boost to candidates.

To understand how much parties help with getting candidates on the ballot, assume you need 10,000 signatures to get on a ballot. Imagine you have a person collecting those signatures for multiple candidates at once. The marginal effort this person would need to exert for each additional candidate would be trivial compared to collecting the signatures from scratch.

Why did we not mention these things in the above example? Even if these elements are banned, parties will still eventually form a “winning” strategy so long as:

Candidates are able to signal that their positions have some parity to the positions held by candidates running for other positions.
There are too many candidates running for the average voter to know all their positions.

First-past-the-poll, winner-take-all elections naturally gravitate to two-party systems due to Duverger’s law: Larger parties are almost always more powerful, causing them to coalesce, like an asteroid field slowly forming into a planet as the gravitational pull of the largest asteroid causing it to become iteratively larger.

When those third parties gain power, their candidates begin to act as “spoilers” for the candidates of whichever dominant party is more similar to them. If the Green party in the U.S. were to gain power, the most likely outcome would not be more green policies but fewer Democratic victories. This is why in systems like the U.S., the only viable third parties are those which are holistically different from both the Democrats and the Republicans and not an Alt or more extreme version of one of them.

First-past-the-poll, winner-take-all voting is not the only protocol that consistently produces two-party systems. Consider Malta, which uses a single transferable vote system and has had a stable, two-party system. Other systems are even more likely to lead to a two-party system, like the partial vote block system used in Gibraltar.

Proportional voting systems, in which a government is constructed proportionally based on voters’ chosen parties, present one means of producing not two, but rather a vast array of political parties.

Whether or not frequently maligned two-party systems are beneficial to a nation is a matter of some debate. We suspect that around 60% of Americans and 71% of millennials wish for additional political parties either because they want the option to vote for a party that more closely represents their viewpoints (even if those viewpoints are unlikely to be accepted on a national stage), or because they are disgusted with the existing parties.

Anyone who has lived in a two-party system has spent most of their lives being told by 50% of the nation’s political apparatus that the other 50% is stupid and evil. It should come as no surprise that most Americans think both the Democratic and Republican party are stupid and evil. However, history has shown that smaller political parties are not particularly less incompetent than large ones. As the saying goes, “the grass is always greener on the other side.”

One particularly nasty outcome of multi-party governance systems is that they can yield dramatically more political power to the third most popular party—and in some ways the first. This happens when a coalition is needed to choose a ruling party. Germany’s Free Democratic Party which, from 1949 to 1988, was the third-largest party in the country despite never receiving more than 12.8 percent of the vote, decided which of the two largest parties would govern (choosing three times to put the less popular of the two into power). This dynamic can make it very difficult to get rid of incompetent governments that are hated by the populace so long as said incompetence benefits the leader of the third most popular party. Heck, if a politician is popular with other politicians, the public’s perspective of them is next to irrelevant in these systems.

Which voting models produce more extremist governments? Obviously, the most extremist voter type is a Majority Bonus System, which goes out of its way to artificially make governance more extremist. As to other types of voting structures: Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki created a model that highlights the voting types most likely to lead to extremism as:

Plurality, at 100% (one vote per person, most votes wins)
Runoff voting, at 98% (ranked voting)
Approval voting, at 94%

On the flip side, Balinski and Laraki demonstrated that majority judgment voting (a form of what we call score voting) had a middling probability of electing an extremist—at 56%.

Finally, they showed the voting models least likely to elect an extremist were:

Borda voting—at 13% (a type of ranked voting)
Range voting at 6% (another form of what we call score voting)
Approval voting with a lower approval threshold elected, at 6%.

“Ok—but it’s not just that we have been brainwashed by years of political fighting; our two-party system seems uniquely bad right now,” many Americans might say. “And didn’t our nation’s founders warn against parties?”

Let’s see:

George Washington: “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.”
John Adams: “A division of the republic into two great parties … is to be dreaded as the great political evil.”

Here, we must concede. The U.S. is currently in a state of hyperpartisanship that will likely get worse. We would however argue that hyperpartisanship is not specifically tied to the presence of only two viable political parties. Hyperpartisanship can emerge from multi-party systems as well; consider the Weimar Republic’s election of the Nazi party.

Downsian theory even argues that two-party systems were actually more moderate than multi-party systems due to convergence to the mean (during elections, the two parties fight over undecided moderates and converge on more moderate positions).

Why is hyperpartisanship so bad in the USA right now? The classic argument is the rise of nationalized politics, which correlated with the rise of national news. This led to closer elections and thus the need for top-down leadership within parties to enforce party discipline and destroy cross-partisan dealmaking.

The decline of bipartisan collaboration led to congressional stonewalling, which in turn pressured presidents to achieve more using executive authority. As executive authority increased, so did the stakes in presidential elections, leading to yet more partisanship. In addition, legislative gridlock increases the importance of the Supreme Court, making new nominations to the court even higher-stakes … but we think one additional factor may be at play.

The Heritability of Political Affiliation

It is very rare for individuals to switch political affiliation, with only about 9% of party members doing so over a half-decade period.^[5]

Why might this be the case? How do people choose their political affiliation? Some studies have shown that things like fear and other deep subconscious tendencies may nudge people to favor one party over another,^[6] but where do these subconscious tendencies come from?

There is one potential contributor to the hyperpolarization of American politics that is seldom discussed. Twin studies contrast the life paths of identical twins separated at birth and fraternal twins separated at birth and raised by different families. They aim to determine how much of certain aspects of a person’s life path are determined by their genetics. It turns out a person’s political affiliation is highly heritable (between 30-60%).^[7]

While political affiliation is obviously not 100% heritable, even if the heritable component were small, it would have a massive impact if one political affiliation had dramatically more children than the other.

Political affiliation is not the only thing that has a heritable component. Factors like religiosity (though not a proclivity for a specific religion), fear of outgroups, and tendencies toward altruism have also been shown to be heritable.

Since birth control has made parenthood optional for most, an ideological objective remains one of the few reasons families might choose to have more than zero to two kids (and thereby forego more comfort, freedom, sleep, money, etc.). This causes ideological extremists to have disproportionately more kids than people open to things like compromise. This trend has been increasing since the 1960s, aligning exactly with the generation that gave birth to hyper partisanship (which were conceived in the 1960s).

One can pretend that genes play no role in these sorts of things, but to do so would require taking a stance against scientific evidence. We don’t have a problem with a person doing this so long as they maintain ideological consistency. If you are going to pretend that science shapes your worldview, it is logically inconsistent to ignore robust scientific evidence.

The data to which we have access suggests the world will continue to trend toward cultural extremism regardless of any changes we make to our political system. We would go so far as to posit that if the heritability of cognitive proclivities is a constant in intelligent species—this trend we are seeing now could also explain the Fermi Paradox.

If this situation is one that interests you, check out Pronatalist.org and The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion, which was written in part to address this issue.

Consensus Democracies

Governances run by one party, which is elected by a plurality of sovereign citizens, are known as “majoritarian democracies.” The counterpart to this, “consensus democracies” are governments ruled by cooperating parties, which better take into account the positions of minority groups.

Consensus democracies are particularly useful in consociational states—states featuring major internal divisions along ethnic, religious, or linguistic lines. While the current literature on consensus democracies and consociational states is focused on this particular problem at the state level, governing structures designed to take into account the opinion of minority populations are no less useful at the family office level.

People often point to the Swiss State as exemplifying skillful execution of consensus democracy. Swiss citizens vote regularly on individual issues at every political level (be it approval for a new post office, constitutional changes, or the country’s foreign policy). Elections are held four times a year. While a majority vote can pass issues at the local level, double majorities are required at the federal level. This means that the vote must be approved by both the majority of voters across the entire population and the majority of cantons (states).

It would be trivially easy to establish a family office that modeled this double majority system. Each family unit or household would constitute a canton (e.g. you, your partner, and your kids would be one canton, while your brother and his family would be another canton). For an issue to pass at the level of the larger family office, such as how family money is invested, both a majority of votes by family members and a majority of votes from family units would be required.

This system would have a lot of utility in that it would prevent one family unit from controlling family finances just by having a lot of kids (possible in a majoritarian system in which every family member has a vote) or a couple family units who didn’t plan to have kids burning through all the money in one generation because the future of the money is irrelevant to them (possible in a system in which each family unit has one vote).

All that said, it is important to remember that a system that promotes inclusivity is not intrinsically better than a majoritarian system. What matters is whether or not the governing unit is serving its function and optimizing what it was created to optimize. When determining what specifically has value in the creation of a governance system, think through what the founding members believe have value (e.g., When given the chance, should the system make a decision that raises the average happiness of its members but uniquely negatively affects one sub-group?). These sorts of questions are better addressed by The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, which helps people decide independently what they believe to be ethical and worth maximizing.

For a convenient cheat sheet you can use when constructing an organization and determining how to approach voting, refer to page 383 of the Appendix.

The “Correct” Answer

The choice of optimal voting system is heavily dependent on the type of governance you are setting up. For the sake of argument, let’s pretend we are setting up a small, state-level government.

We love conducting comprehensive reviews of the research in various fields (hence our books). We have yet to encounter a field with more transparent corruption of evidence than the field of voting. Academics in the space seem to have chosen “teams” that support specific voting system types. Once a researcher picks a team, all their research magically reveals that their team has the best system.

Worse, voting research seems to focus on things like how “fair” a system is or how much the governing body reflects the values of the voters. They use fancy words for this sort of thing, like Bayesian regret, defined as the average difference between the utility of a strategy and an ideal utility in which desired outcomes are maximized—but it all comes down to the same concept.

From a pragmatic perspective, the fairness^[8] of a system is largely irrelevant unless the government is designed specifically to maximize fairness. This is vanishingly rare in real-world conditions. Voting bodies generally don’t exist to ensure the views of the populace are perfectly mirrored in their governance. When the U.S. was created, its founders explicitly attempted to prevent this: Voting bodies primarily exist as a methodology for removing corrupt or ineffective decider bodies. Voting bodies should not be thought of as a mechanism for stakeholders to have a collective avatar that acts as a dictator over a system, but rather as a method to prevent dictatorial behavior altogether (or really, any egregious behavior on behalf of the decider).

In other words, instead of being designed for fairness, governance structures are more often designed to:

Outcompete other governments on the world stage or local stage (to prevent having another government’s will exerted over them)
Prevent worst-case abuse scenarios (dictatorships and the like)
Last a long time
Grow
Enjoy minimal corruption
Effectively achieve things at minimal cost
Maintain the fidelity of the founders’ vision(which may be immoral, but the morality of something’s purpose doesn’t change whether or not we should judge it by its effectiveness at said purpose—we should still decide whether a gun made to kill people is effective by determining whether or not it kills people)

Outside of fairness, some other not-so-important things that academics often highlight when judging a voting body are: Simplicity, speed of vote counting, the potential for fraud or disputed results, the opportunity for tactical voting or strategic nomination, the degree of proportionality produced in multiple winner models, effective representation of minority or special interest groups, political integration, and effective voter participation. If you are super interested in whether it is possible to create a voting system that perfectly models voter preferences, you can dig into social choice theory—just be warned that the field is fairly hollow and pedantic.

Back to the question at hand: Which system should you choose? To further simplify the question, because this is the “voting” chapter, we are only going to talk about the vote itself while warning that:

We think a well-designed system will use more than just a simple vote.
We think any well-designed governance structure has more than just one body of voting stakeholders.

The correct answer for the vast majority of circumstances is the Single Transferable Vote system. While imperfect, it has the fewest flaws, is backed by robust research, and is easy for the public to quickly understand.

In a single transferable vote system, subordinate voting bodies (i.e. states) elect multiple candidates who are chosen once they pass a predetermined threshold. Winning candidates give the votes they did not “need” to pass the threshold to the voters’ other choices and candidates with no hope of winning also give their votes to other candidates. While this sounds complicated, it can be made even more so using systems like Schulze STV.

The concept of liquid democracy—where you can vote directly or vote for someone to vote for you with their vote weighted proportionally to their number of supporters—can be useful in some very specific forms of government.

We also fancy the concept of “futarchy,” in which decision markets are used to make decisions and voting is used to source values. Essentially, success metrics are determined by vote and the strategy for accomplishing that success is decided within a decision market.

Some systems thrive in very specific contexts. A multi-majority system works well when you have a governance structure which contains multiple well-defined, mutually acknowledged groups. While we hardly suggest that it’s the “correct” choice, this type of governance structure would have been interesting for the U.S. to have set up in Iraq, with Sunni, Shia, and other religious minority groups each having their own “unit” in the system, and consensus among the three units being required for all major decisions.

In a system like this, voting within each unit could be executed via a single transferable vote system. Such a system would have made it very hard for the other countries representing Shia and Sunni factions on the global stage to meddle so readily with Iraqi politics and would have potentially even motivated foreign actors to do more to ingratiate themselves to the Christian, Jewish, and other minority religious groups in their respective regions as those groups’ opinions of them would actually “matter” in Iraqi politics (beyond international optics).

For further illustration: Suppose the government was essentially made up of a triumvirate representing three groups: The Shia, the Sunni, and Other (mostly Christians and Jews). While the Shia and Sunni majority would ensure that the government broadly acted in line with Muslim values, putting the Other group in a position in which it acts as tie breaker ensures that both the Shia and the Sunni groups have a vested interest in winning the “Other” group’s favor. This would be true at both the national level (i.e., Shia and Sunni in Iraq) and at the international level (i.e., in Iran and Saudi Arabia meddling with the Iraqi population).

In addition to modeling internal players when setting up a government, consider how its power structure will draw action from outside players. If there is financial motivation for outside players to meddle in a governance structure, they always will—unless systems are specifically built to prevent this.

Representatives

Now that we have investigated voting systems at a superficial level, let’s do the same with representatives and systems for holding power.

Pre-Vetting &
Self-Vetting Systems

While governing structures can easily be shaped by restricting who can vote, the same can be done using restrictions on who can hold elected office. Limitations on elected office holders typically manifest as rule-based restrictions, like minimum ages, or necessary support from sub-government bodies like the CCP, the DNC, or the RNC. The problem with letting sub-governments vet governing office holders is that the integrity of the larger electoral body will only be as intact as that of its most corrupt sub-body. The corrupting influence of sub-governments on elected office holders can be avoided by using simple rules or technical requirements to vet candidates while banning “party based” pre-vetting.

Consider how some businesses forbid stockholders and employees from holding certain elected positions. These restrictions may be put in place to encourage more pragmatic and long-term-oriented leadership. Alternatively, restricting governing positions exclusively to stakeholders and investors ensures leadership has a vested interest in their decisions being in the best interest of the company. Restricting family office governance to non-family members who are elected by family members can spare families from toxic infighting over the position.

Pre-vetting systems can easily be corrupted and produce undesired effects. To have one’s name on the ballot for most elected positions in the U.S., you must collect a certain number of signatures. While this might seem like a test of popular support, functionally it becomes a test of how much money the person—or organizations supporting them—is willing to pay. As such, this signature collection requirement ends up supporting a party-based system.

If you talk to anyone familiar with local politics, the number of votes needed is translated to a cost you will have to bear in order to hire professional petitioners who know all the draconian rules and exploits for collecting these signatures (something a normal supporter will struggle to do). Worse, for obvious reasons it is cost effective for professional petitioners to bundle their services, only charging 10% or so more to add another candidate to their signature collection work (so long as each candidate is politically aligned). This makes it dramatically cheaper for political insiders—and individuals subservient to major parties—to run.

An interesting variation of this is to have certain positions for which a person can only run if they have held some other position for a given period of time. It may be a requirement that all candidates running for a particular position have held positions within a given department for a certain length or time. Someone running for a high court position might need to have spent a minimum number of years practicing law. Requirements like these ensure some level of competence but make groupthink much more likely, as only those who have survived on the bottom rungs of an organization for a long period of time can reach its top ranks.

More important than pre-vetting systems, and almost never implemented, are self-vetting systems. Conditions for holding a position may be so “costly” that most people who would otherwise want it choose not to pursue it. More importantly, conditions for holding a position can shape the character and decision making of whoever holds it. If, to run a family office, a person had to live in an austere cabin in northern Canada and be paid at the end of their tenure based on their performance, they will think wildly differently from a family office manager permitted to live like a king in Los Angeles.

In ancient Persia, Cyrus intentionally built his capital in an extremely inhospitable area. When his troops campaigned to shift the capital to a nicer area, he warned: “Be prepared no longer to be rulers but rather subjects. Soft lands breed soft men; wondrous fruits of the earth and valiant warriors grow not from the same soil.”

After Cyrus’ death, the capital was eventually moved to the most opulent city in the world at the time, Babylon. Only a generation or so later, Cyrus’ descendants grew soft and were easily conquered—because ultimately Cyrus was right: You can influence the character of a person or people through the conditions in which they must live.

Accountability

While many governing systems pre-vet their candidates, what about post-vetting them? How does a governing structure impose accountability on those operating it—and on the system itself?

Accountability systems can range from impeachment to demotion or motions of no confidence.

Most accountability systems boil down to five options:

Automatically triggered systems (e.g., a customer service employee is fired when they fail to respond to a given number of emails in a week or a CEO is fired when a stock price dips below a certain value)
Single individual watchdogs (who themselves are exposed to corruption)
Council watchdogs and citizen oversight
Other elected bodies that judge indications of competence (In the U.S., this can be seen with dynamics such as Article 25 and impeachment)
Recall elections (in which, through some mechanism, those who voted an individual into power are in charge of monitoring and removing them)

In addition to choosing the mechanism of accountability, one must choose the portion of the system’s hierarchy that is held accountable. For example, if an employee is caught stealing, do you punish only the employee, or both the employee and their boss? Having run large companies in the past, we strongly recommend that hierarchical systems always be designed with “single point” accountability and that said point of accountability is at least one level above the level of the action being held to account.

Any automatic accountability system should target the boss of a person who fails at something and never the individual. An individual’s direct supervisor should determine how that individual should be held accountable. This allows decisions about accountability to be made more dynamically by those closer to the infractions and ensures that managers always have a sense of full responsibility over their reports’ actions. This would hurt day-to-day productivity by incentivizing more stringent monitoring mechanisms, however manager accountability can dramatically reduce corruption and the risk of catastrophic failure.

In general, punishment dealt by the upper hierarchy should always target a single point and never be distributed. If you target management, they will naturally distribute some of the pain associated with being held to account and that pain will be more intelligently distributed.

Backup accountability systems also work in some instances—specifically those tied to safety-related tasks. Backup accountability systems use buddy systems, where if a task is not properly completed, not only will person A be punished, but person B will be punished as well. For example, if a valve on a dam were left open by mistake, both Dave and Darla will be held fully responsible, even if it was Dave’s turn to close it (because Darla was responsible for making sure Dave did close it).

Backup accountability works best when applied across multiple teams instead of two people who always work closely together. Doing so reduces the risk of alliances forming in which team members collectively decide to be lax about the rules (especially if they’re related to low probability outcomes). Such toxic dynamics contributed to the Quintinshill rail disaster, which killed over 200 people in Scotland. Leading up to the tragedy, railroad signalmen traded when some would arrive on the job and what their responsibilities would be, optimizing for convenience over safety.

Term Limits

Term limits have been around since Athenian democracy, in which offices selected by sortition were limited to one consecutive year in office—though said term could be held multiple times in one’s lifetime. This example highlights one of the key characteristics of term limits: They can be divided into bans on consecutive officeholding or lifetime bans on holding an office for over a specific amount of time. Hypothetically, term limits could even extend past a single individual’s life to either a family or a political faction. For example, a member of a particular guild may be prevented from leading a trade association for more than two years in a row.

While term limits seem like a good idea in practice, virtually all of the research on them indicates otherwise. For example, term limits:

Increase polarization (see: “Legislative Term Limits and Polarization” in The Journal of Politics)^[9]
Reduce politicians’ skill (see: “Democracy among Strangers: Term Limits’ Effects on Relationships between State Legislators in Michigan” in State Politics & Policy Quarterly)^[10]
Reduce politicians’ productivity (See: “How do electoral incentives affect legislator behavior?” in American Political Science Review.)^[11]
Reduce voter turnout (See: “The Effect of State Legislative Term Limits on Voter Turnout” in State Politics & Policy Quarterly)^[12]
Make a society more partisan (See: “Polarization without Parties: Term Limits and Legislative Partisanship in Nebraska’s Unicameral Legislature” in State Politics & Policy Quarterly)^[13]
Do not reduce campaign spending (See: “A Return to Normalcy? Revisiting the Effects of Term Limits on Competitiveness and Spending in California Assembly Elections” in State Politics & Policy Quarterly)^[14]

There may be no functional reason for adding term limits versus other strategies designed to have the same effect, like restricting politicians to certain age ranges.

Dictatorships

A dictatorship is a type of governance structure in which a single individual has total power, typically obtained by force. Traditionally this word is exclusively used to refer to state-level governance. We get the impression that most people who have put some, but not much, thought into governance structures see dictatorships as underrated governance structures—if only one could ensure they were led by a great dictator. This idea often emerges from frustration with the leaders democracies typically produce.

To become a leader in a democracy, most people must repeatedly win elections, which can lead to both a distance from the “common man” and a lack of authenticity. When individuals break this cycle and successfully win elected office as outsiders, they often represent some form of extremism that differentiates them from the old guard. These forces leave many saying to themselves: “Look, I am not saying I need to be dictator, but if we could just give an average citizen—someone with views not that different from my own—total power for a few years, they could really turn things around.”

The sentiment makes sense, but only in a reactionary context. While circumventing democracy may fix the problems that were frustrating in more democratic systems, the new problems it inevitably introduces are worse. Just as communism is a great vision on paper that consistently collapses into the same shape—like an architectural design of an upside-down pyramid built using bricks will collapse into a pyramid-shaped pile if actually built—the same is true of dictatorships.

At first glance it may seem the real danger in a dictatorship involves installing the wrong dictator, but as it turns out, even a great dictator has only about 20 years to get things right before they need to step down should they want to leave a positive legacy. Why? Once you consolidate power structures into a single branching command hierarchy without checks and balances (as one does in a normal dictatorship), you give enormous power to the individuals directly below you—and those people grant enormous power to the individuals directly below them.

The real problem with dictatorships is functionally they do not operate like a single individual dictator running a country, but rather like a hierarchical pyramid of dictators running other dictators all the way down to the level of the factory line manager. It is extremely difficult to put any other management structure under a dictatorship (though it can theoretically be done—more on that later).

This chain of power creates stability for the individual on top. Unlike other types of politicians, a dictator—even a benevolent dictator—is very likely to be killed if a new dictator comes into power. While many factors could lead to this, the greatest threat to a dictator is the existence of a living former dictator that compromises the new dictator’s power base, giving the current dictator’s enemies someone to rally around (even if that rallying is happening against the former dictator’s wishes). Even when dictators become tremendously old and clearly want to step down, they often feel forced to stay in power—lest they be killed to ensure stability.

Because of this, a dictator has a vested interest in doing everything they can to ensure they don’t leave power. This can be really scary when you consider the amount of power invested in the portions of the pyramid directly below the dictator (i.e. the little dictator who runs the military, the little dictator who runs the communications network, etc.). As switching out top leaders in the hierarchy subjects the dictator at the top of the pyramid to new, enormous risk for the same reason (as every little dictator is equally at risk if they ever get fired, making them likely to incite a regime change if fired), turnover will be minimized, both at the top of the hierarchy and along every rank below.

Not only is turnover minimized by this dynamic, but the dictator must go out of their way to ingratiate themselves as much as possible to every individual immediately below them (i.e. those most likely to have the power to overthrow them). This leads to absurd amounts of waste and bribes in almost every dictatorship—waste that might be truncated if it didn’t then need to be reflected all the way down the chain of little dictators to the bottom of the pyramid.

The problem with dictatorship as a style of operation for a nation state is not the dictator themselves but the system’s structure. Fortunately, at smaller governance levels, this is less of a problem. The less a person loses by being “overthrown” and the lower the rewards for overthrowing them, the less a dictatorship risks running poorly (so long as you find the “right” dictator). This is because it is those factors that incentivize power consolidation and graft. While at something like a large company, dictatorships are fairly suboptimal, dictatorships can hit it out of the park at the level of a small family office.

Finally, a system structured like a dictatorship that has good mechanisms in place to cycle out rulers every five years or so can generally be fairly effective—the problem here being that the Dictator will have a lot of motivation to break this system and will often have the power to do so.

For a good breakdown of this problem, see the YouTuber CPG Grey’s video: “Rules for Rulers.”

The Failure of Democracy

A common controversial stance is that democracies, as they are currently organized, are horrible governing structures. This sentiment has not only been attached to the United States’ democracy, but also businesses’ boards of directors, family offices, groups in which decisions are made through a traditional voting system, and many other democratic assemblies.

A quote attributed to Churchill^[15] goes: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” He wasn’t wrong; along many metrics, democracies are the best form of governing structures for states that have ever been tried, however not that many unique governing structures have been tried at the level of the state.

When a category of governance systematically sucks, this is one of the most common causes: For whatever reason, systematic experimentation with different models was not an option. In the case of governing structures at the level of the state, there is just not a lot of room for experimentation or even practical implementation of an optimal system in theory. You have to convince different groups with different interests to try this thing for a few decades and if you fail at that, people are likely to die.

Only in a very, very few instances in history have people thought⁠: “Yeah, let’s try something totally new with no precedent.” This aversion to trying new things is so entrenched that there was even a case during the medieval period in which, upon the death of the last of a noble line, one Eastern European nation began putting out advertisements in other countries looking for an aristocrat to come and be king because⁠—hey⁠—we can’t risk trying making just anyone king.

This is why almost all democracies founded after the U.S. formed are near carbon copies of the U.S. system with iterative modifications⁠. This is kind of insane when you think about the context in which the U.S. system was created (an extremely contentious last-minute compromise to patch up the failed “continental congress model”), but hey, it’s one of the only systems with a proven track record.

Heck, the only reason the U.S. government was even a little new was that it drew some lessons from local colonial governments, which had experimented with some wackier governance models, thereby creating one of the only times in history in which a new form of governance was created by a group of people already living in something of a Petri dish of weird governance structures. But even this was artificially assisted through the heavy borrowing of ideas from the Iroquois confederacy governing model.

Another common reason governing structures end up being garbage is that they are copied from an effective system that was designed for a different environment or optimized for a different outcome. In general, corporate governance structures are fairly well designed⁠: They are often intentionally designed, have been experimented with, and optimized for clear, measurable success metrics. The problem with corporate structures, like boards, is that they are used in all sorts of other environments where they have no business operating, such as family offices and nonprofits. Why on earth should we use slight iterations on a system designed and optimized to make money to run our family legacies and philanthropic ventures?

Governing structures also commonly fail when their creation happens organically and iteratively, which either produces structures that were common at the time of formation or old-fashioned dominance hierarchies.

Translating Stakeholder
Will into Action

There is more to governance than how one votes and who holds office. What are some other aspects of governance structure that affect its function?

Delegation Pathways

The direction in which commands flow within an organization and conditions allowing commands to be ignored significantly influence function. There is a theory of governance called delegation theory that divides all tasks given by the boss (the principal) into either delegation or control tasks and all employee responses into either shirks (doesn’t do something) or works (does something). While it is nice to see academia address delegation pathways, this theory ignores one of the core delegation pathways in a well-functioning organization: Delegation from subordinates to their superiors.

Ability to ignore superiors and existing delegation pathways is literally the only reason human civilization as we know it still exists. We have Stanislav Petrov to thank for going against Soviet military protocol for a retaliatory attack and ignoring what turned out to be a false alarm claiming the U.S. had launched five nuclear missiles.

There are a few ways one can build this control into an organization: You can attempt to create rules that modify institutional culture or by only populating the institution with agents who share a culture that supports this.

As institutional behavior follows reward/punishment pathways, if you want to design effective delegation pathways in which information can flow in both directions effectively, you can ensure people disagree with superiors by offering them protection from retaliation. This is best done by creating channels that allow superiors to be reported for not encouraging dissenting opinions, as even if you don’t give people explicit tools to punish dissent, they will find soft ways to do so (such as by preventing promotions).

It is easy to create a culture with too much dissent. Whether or not one goes too far is largely a matter of the subordinate correctly judging the quality of their information and their judgment-making capabilities when contrasted with those giving orders. One way to mollify this risk is to remove “orders” from a system altogether. Capitalism, when contrasted with state-controlled economies, presents a great example of how this can be achieved, as capitalism creates a system in which individual governing units operate largely independently and based on emergent reward systems. While trying to mirror capitalist reward networks in smaller systems can get difficult, it is not impossible.

When we were younger CEOs, we believed we could teach employees ethics in a way that would improve organizational information flow. As a child, we were taught the “spilt milk” principle: That it doesn’t matter who spilled the milk or what room the mess is in, it is your responsibility to clean up a mess if you see it. An organization with optimally flowing delegation pathways will have individuals fixing problems as they see them and never thinking: “Meh, that’s someone else’s responsibility.”

Sadly, we quickly learned you can’t teach an adult new tricks. Only systematic institutional rewards and peer pressure for ethical behavior will motivate behavior where it does not already exist.

Some CEOs respond to this realization by trying to clone themselves throughout an organization. In academic literature on this topic, the “ally principle” is the tendency of those in management to hire individuals like themselves, allowing the boss to delegate important tasks to subordinates who resemble them ideologically. They build systems in which subordinates are punished for making decisions they wouldn’t. While this sometimes produces good results, the goal of an organization is rarely to carry out the will of its leader.

How do we address this hazard in our organizations? We trust that people will not competently and ethically carry out their jobs. We mostly automate management with the exception of a few, highly-ethical-human-expert-led domains.

Capturing Institutional Knowledge

Nearly all organizations suffer from poor transference of institutional knowledge across generations of employees, citizens, congressmen, etc. This problem has a tendency to get uniquely bad because the most competent members of an organization or society are typically those with the least time to teach. Trying to get your best salesperson to teach others how to sell is a nightmare. Getting a country’s best entrepreneurs to teach kindergarten is completely unrealistic.

We call this the ability paradox: Those with the most knowledge and skill have the most demands on them and thus are least equipped to pass on that knowledge.

We utilize simple institutional rewards to track individual performance and create bonuses for our best employees when they invest time in transferring their skill sets to other team members (and giving additional rewards if the numbers indicate that skill transference turned out to be successful).

It also helps to frame successful leadership as inherently entailing skillful delegation and knowledge transference. Our investors and board members consistently showcase sterling examples of leaders who succeed by hiring excellent people and equipping them to do an even better job in certain domains than the leader themselves. Framing success as delegation and knowledge transfer—and in contrast, failure as micromanagement—distributes key man risk in leadership structures (the concentration of too much knowledge or ability in one person).

Crafting Culture

People often talk about how an individual should rewrite the culture of their institution but rarely explore the non-obvious consequences of doing so. While culture can very effectively shape a governing structure’s behavior, wielding it as a tool is difficult.

A great example of this can be seen in some “rationalist” groups, which devolved into dominance hierarchies in which knowledge of academic research determined a person’s position in the hierarchy. Sadly, this lowered the value of information backed by well-supported research and elevated obscure, counterintuitive, or alarmist information (in the same way obscure anime knowledge would help the anime nerd dunk on others at an anime convention). Eventually, these communities were consumed by apocalypticism—with non-apocalypticist ideas barely getting any breathing room.

When designing a culture, ask yourself: “What will be used to signal status? How will pursuit of that status produce unintended consequences?” Consider a group defined by a hatred of racism: Once racism has been stamped out entirely within the group and all members see each other as totally equal, what will determine dominance hierarchy then? Groups don’t dissolve once they achieve their mission; they either find new types of racism or redefine racism.

This is why within the Pragmatist Foundation, we define moderation and openness to new ideas as key values. While this encourages more “out there” ideas, we hardly regard the consideration of some wacky concepts as a worst-case outcome.

Culture can also backfire when a voice is given to the wrong people. Cultures by default give a voice to those who are loudest and those with the most time. In many online communities, for example, those with the most time to sort through, produce, and interact with the most content are often heard most. When those communities are dedicated to something like funny animal pictures, this is not a problem, but in groups dedicated to news and philosophy, this is catastrophic. This issue can be addressed via a two-layer vetting system like liquid democracy, in which users can either vote directly or delegate their vote to a more informed community member whose votes will therefore have more weight.

The 360 Review Problem

When talking about crafting institutional culture, there is perhaps no issue more acute than that of the “360 Review Problem.” 360 reviews involve performance evaluations in which feedback about people is solicited from all directions (such as managers, coworkers, and direct reports), typically on a regularly-scheduled basis.

This tool and others like it assume that institutions are made up of individual players with firmly held and accurate understandings of the areas of improvement open to other individuals. Assessments like these are supported with the assumption that these evaluations will produce individual improvement. Neither of these things is true: Not only do most individuals not think that much about other people, but when they are forced to offer feedback, that feedback is often for the benefit of the giver—not the receiver.

360 reviews aren’t just not helpful; they’re often harmful. People generally ignore how others could improve outside of when another person’s work causes an immediate inconvenience or when they are forced to craft a “narrative” about another person. 360 reviews force individuals within an organization to regularly craft negative narratives about coworkers where none may have existed before. When people are forced to list what’s wrong with another person, that negative narrative sticks around well after the evaluation passes. (“What’s wrong with Shelly? Well, I guess she makes mistakes sometimes” turns into “Oh look, there goes mistake-prone Shelly.”). Essentially, 360 reviews create environments in which individuals are encouraged to secretly look down on each other while offering no real benefit.

Here you may be bristling, thinking: “How can an individual improve without negative feedback?” The correct way to run these types of feedback processes is through the use of immediate, task-specific negative feedback. Set up a culture in which people’s mistakes are discussed in the moment—and emphasize that poor actions rather than overall traits are the subject of focus. Offer feedback for improving someone’s ability to undertake the task, not their core character.

For example, telling someone to make fewer mistakes is transparently a fool’s errand and is borderline abusive. Instead, focus on each particular mistake and work with that person to find out what led to the mistake and what might be done to avoid those conditions in the future.

If you have hired an individual and they need to change the core of their character to be good at the job, you made a mistake in hiring.

Quarterly or annual individual reviews can be useful tools for resetting positive emotions toward coworkers if they are focused around only positive feedback and reviews of how the subject of evaluation has made the evaluator’s life better. Rather than force people to regularly craft negative narratives around their colleagues, routine gratitude sessions have the potential to improve regard among people and even boost an organization’s overall mood.

But what about long-term improvement? Clearly not all improvement can be task specific. There are leaders who can competently draw individuals toward self-improvement in a way that makes them more effective—there are also leaders who can’t. Leaders who can naturally cultivate improvement in others will not need or benefit from 360-review-like processes, which compromise their autonomy in how they handle that implementation. Leaders who do not naturally inspire improvement in others aren’t going to magically grow that capability by adopting structured practices that encourage them to develop negative narratives about others.

Decider Group Size, Composition, and
Interaction Pattern

It’s easy to assume that a group is just the sum intelligence of its component members, but the assumption is wildly off. Across a number of studies, Woolley et al. showed that while the average intelligence of group members and the maximum intelligence of individual group members are correlated with a group’s intelligence (with the maximum intelligence of the smartest group member having a higher correlation than the the group’s average intelligence), the highest predictor of a group’s intelligence on a task was the group’s intelligence at performing tasks in the past. In other words, groups have a consistent and internal intelligence measure like some sort of “group IQ” that has been shown to remain consistent over at least several months—this is where the concept of “collective intelligence” comes into play.

Research by Woolley et al. has also shown that things you might initially think were contributing to this group intelligence score had little actual correlation to it (e.g., group cohesion, motivation of group members, and satisfaction of group members). On the other hand, small things that one might not expect to matter were correlated with group intelligence, like the number of speaking turns group members took (meaning groups in which a few people dominated the conversation were less intelligent), the proportion of the group that was female (more is better), and the average social sensitivity of group members.

In this case, social sensitivity was measured with the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test in which participants are asked to detect thinking or feeling expressed in pictures of other people’s eyes in an effort to measure people’s theory of mind. Females typically score higher on these kinds of tests, which is theoretically why groups with more females show greater intelligence.

Other findings align with our expectations, such as studies that show groups made up of individuals that had moderately diverse “cognitive styles” outcompeted groups with cognitive styles that are too aligned as well as those with cognitive styles that are too disparate.

In general, teams appear to work best when the team members exhibit:

Psychological safety: Team members feel safe taking risks and being vulnerable in front of one another.
Dependability: Team members can reliably expect to get things done on time and with a degree of excellence.
Structure and clarity: Team members have clear roles, plans, and goals.
Meaning: The work at hand is personally important to team members.
Impact: Team members think work matters and creates change.

Group size also plays a role in group intelligence, but the research here is all over the place. Most studies seem to show that teams of three are best at managing funds, while groups of five are second best (though one study by Richard Hackman argues groups of four are best). It looks like once you go beyond six individuals in a management team, the intelligence of the group’s decisions consistently declines with each additional member. Despite the jumble of research findings, group size as it impacts group intelligence can largely be summarized as: Aim for groups ranging from three to four members and do everything you can to avoid groups with more than six participants.

All this is not to say that groups cannot be smarter as they increase in size when making individual decisions instead of management decisions. However, harnessing the intelligence of large groups requires decision markets—structures that allow huge groups of people to weigh in on specific potential outcomes. To get an idea of just how intelligent decision marketplaces are, when CBS had a human swarm intelligence place a bet on the Kentucky Derby, they correctly predicted the first four horses, in order, defying 542–1 odds and turning a $20 bet into $10,800.

Such systems have even been created by companies, such as Hewlett-Packard, in which salespeople were allowed—in one experimental endeavor—to buy and sell estimates about the future sales of their printers. This created a dynamic prediction market that was much more accurate than any previous method of prediction Hewlett-Packard had used.

A Weird Use Case for Futures Markets

Anyone who knows us knows we won’t shut up about falling birth rates. We often claim out of hand that government interventions will make little difference given that Hungary spent 5%^[16] of its GDP on the issue last year (2021) and only managed to increase its birth rate by 1.6%^[17]. That said, we heard one really interesting idea on this front—one we find completely insane and unimplementable, but which could serve as inspiration for something less crazy.

Essentially, the idea is to take a person at birth and allow companies or individuals to “buy” stakes in future tax revenue generated by that individual. Half of the taxes this person pays throughout their life would go to the state and half would go to owners of their “stock.” A portion of this lump sum payment spent to buy an individual’s “stock” would be given to the child’s parents as a “reward” for having them.

This system prevents a state from pretending that the value each kid will yield in potential tax revenue is equal while also preventing things like racism, sexism, or bigotry from being big players in those judgments, as any company that allowed bigotry to unfairly bias their judgment would lose money in the long run.

Better, this investment model would give a company that owned a stake in an individual’s future taxes an incentive to invest in said individuals’ education, mental health, and early career development.

The Pyramid vs.
The Chinese Room

The earliest grand structures people built, almost everywhere in the world, were pyramids.

Why? Was it . . . Aliens?

No, of course not. If you just pile bricks on top of each other, the natural shape they will form is a pyramid or mound. Organizational structures are the same way: As you pile new people into a company, it becomes a self-perpetuating, hierarchical pyramid. When a company is intentionally designed to not be a pile of people working together but instead a closed system of inputs and outputs, it can operate effectively with incredibly lean and modular operations.

How does one build the scaffolding for a corporate architecture like this? This can be done using what we call “Chinese Room” corporate architecture, a system we developed for managing our own network of companies (which at its height brought in around $70 million a year in top-line revenue with only a two person middle management layer).^[18]

The Chinese Room is a philosophical thought experiment in which an individual slips pieces of paper with Mandarin written on them into a room that subsequently produces thoughtful replies. In this room sits another man operating off of a set of instructions about how to reply to different things who does not speak or read Mandarin himself. The thought experiment asks whether or not we can say if the room “speaks Chinese.”

Chinese-Room-style corporate architecture involves learning to see a company as a black box with inputs and outputs, then isolating the functions required to transform the inputs into the outputs and dividing them into four categories:

Can be performed by machine or script
Must be performed by a human, but the human would not need to speak the language of the customer
Must be performed by a human, but the human can be low-skilled
Must be performed by a skilled human

If this mapping is done accurately, about 80% of a company or governance’s functions, especially middle management, should fall into categories one and two.

The trick is to see the organization’s human components as little different from its mechanical parts. As with our mechanical systems, humans process code we provide and require checks to ensure they process their code with fidelity. As with machines and programs, not all humans can run on the same code. These differences must be anticipated when writing code for an organization’s functions. Some people work better with written documents while others thrive with training videos combined with quizzes or mechanisms involving interpersonal and social interaction and reinforcement.

What allows this Chinese Room style of governance structure to be so much more effective than traditional governance structures is that it enables those operating the system to split test modules, capture institutional knowledge around what works, and replicate more optimal methods quickly. You may, for example, experiment with a few different scripts or training systems for a number of modules running the same task, determine which yields the best results, and proliferate that optimal “code” across all modules of that type.

Yes, having people operate according to their whims increases their efficiency slightly and can allow for breakout stars on your team—but we have never found or seen a way to successfully capture the unique talent of stars and transcribe said talent across a system. Instead, when filling roles for highly skilled people, we look for those whose natural whims, superpowers, and shortcomings fit perfectly for the given role. This often enables us to hire amazing people who are otherwise undervalued in the job market—perhaps because while they’re geniuses with the skills that matter for the role, they have health conditions or interpersonal social skills that remove them from contention for most mainstream jobs.

It is this modularized philosophy that allows organizations we have run to be lean, low cost, and efficient. It magnifies the impact A players can have while outsourcing roles that would have been held by B players. We were able to operate a team of hundreds of people living in five countries—without language overlap in many cases—to be managed from a single interface we built. We would love to see this methodology rolled out to larger governance structures but see it as unrealistic in the short term.

When a company using more traditional structures grows, it begins to suffer from bureaucratic bloat. The human pile of management hierarchy ends up increasing the cost of small tasks because their efficiency gets blunted by an ever-increasing number of people, departments, lawyers who demand oversight, managers who demand approval, HR managers who serve as middlemen, etc. A modularized system allows us to create a set of instructions that can be transcribed into as many modules as necessary, all running at optimal efficiency. This set of instructions can be constantly optimized (through split testing) and improvements can be rapidly deployed across the network of modules.

DAOs

Most uniquely interesting dialog centered around governance innovation at present centers around DAOs.

DAOs are digital, decentralized, autonomous organizations. Essentially, a DAO uses blockchain technology and programming to ensure a governance system adheres to a certain set of parameters—instead of laws and human-administered rules. DAOs have their uses, but they are dramatically more hamstrung than their proponents would have you believe.

First, it is critical to understand that a DAO is not a new type of governance structure. DAOs merely represent a new medium upon which a governance structure can be written. If a governance structure is a picture of a bird, a DAO is drawing that picture on a piece of leather (blockchain infrastructure) instead of a piece of paper (legal infrastructure). Because DAOs present a new type of operating system on which a governance structure can run, in some rare cases they enable “programming” not possible in governments that run on legal rather than blockchain infrastructure. Most of the DAOs that operate today are the governance equivalent of programming DOOM to run a refrigerator’s computer. Sure, it’s neat that you did that, but it would probably run better on a normal computer.

The core problem of DAOs is that this new operating system must almost always operate on top of the old one (think of it like the limitations involved in running a Windows emulator on an iPhone).

For example, suppose one were to create a DAO which subsequently faced a dispute over who owned some of its assets. Theoretically, the DAO’s internal structure would sort out the dispute, but if one of the parties was not happy with how it turned out, they could just go to the local court system (the old government operating system), override the DAO’s decision, and seize its assets.

This is the problem with a lot of blockchain-based technology designed to replace government functions. For example, NFTs would be strictly better than the existing system for tracking land ownership, but even the perfect NFT system for property ownership records would still be subject to the old legal system of any nation in which it is released. It is irrelevant whether an NFT says you own the land if someone else has an older claim to the same land and you have not revitalized the entire land ownership system in the country to operate on NFTs.

We will not see the full potential of blockchain technology applied to government systems until we can start running this new operating system as something more than an emulator on top of another one—or to use an analogy: When we can start running Windows as the primary operating system of a computer instead of having it emulated on an iPhone.

That is not to say DAOs have no utility. There are a few instances—even today—in which they are strictly better than present alternatives.

In environments where the underlying legal “operating system” is faulty (e.g. When doing business in a failed state).
When you believe the governance system—e.g. the nation state—in which the DAO must operate will not last as long as the DAO itself. (It is for this reason our own family office operates using a DAO.)
When you are creating a security of which one of the partial owners must remain anonymous. A DAO could theoretically allow someone to buy partial ownership with an anonymous token like Monero and keep that ownership itself anonymous. The problem here is that while only a DAO can do this, it is also illegal in most developed countries.

Other than in those three specific uses, a DAO will consistently be worse than a traditional government because it has to operate on top of one, which requires you to make sure the organization functions as desired both per DAO protocol and per the governing nation’s legal system, whereas in a normal governance system you are just working with the nation’s legal system. Sure, we’ve encountered DAOs that claim to have evaded government control and meddling, but when one looks into how much of its members’ time and effort went toward creating structures designed to cleverly evade government intervention, these DAOs don’t seem to have much of an inherent purpose or impact aside from “avoid the government.”

Once nations successfully scrap some governance systems and replace them with DAOs, we may be able to see their true potential.

Centralization vs. Decentralization

Historically almost all teams were managed hierarchically. Models like The Great Chain of Being presumed hierarchy was the foundational nature of society, with power always flowing unidirectionally: Child -> wife -> husband -> serf -> lord -> . . . -> king -> God. The presumption of unidirectional power projection became more nuanced with the compartmentalized Ford model during the industrial revolution, which received an additional infusion of innovation with Fredrick Taylor’s scientific management theory. However, a genuine change to the presumption of hierarchy being the presumptive default model for organizational structures did not emerge until 70 years ago with Erik Trist.

Before Erik Trist, “longwall” mining was the norm in coal mines. Longwall mining involves each team performing sequential tasks, with each individual specializing in one thing (one team had to finish before the next could start). Erik Trist noticed some teams of miners in South Yorkshire were using a radically different model in which multi-skilled autonomous groups were organizing organically with minimal supervision and interchanging roles. These teams were vastly more productive than the old model, often able to work 24 hours a day without waiting for other shifts to finish.

Despite findings like these, changes away from strict hierarchical approaches have been glacial. It would be some time before self-managed teams began to gain popularity in the 1970s and through the 1990s. Famous case studies taught in business schools were the primary drivers of this acceptance, with the top among them highlighting self-managed teams in a Volvo plant in Sweden, FedEx, C&S Grocers, and General Mills.

These techniques further evolved and spread with the advent of the internet, giving birth to the concept of “the networked firm.” Autonomous team management evolved further with systematized project management techniques like agile and scrum project management methodologies and open-source online projects.

This in turn has led to all sorts of newfangled approaches like:

Teal organizations, which attempt to create an environment in which employees can manifest their full personas, rather than just their work personas, and self-manage without a central control in such a way the company naturally evolves over time.
Podularity, a model based on agile project management in which tasks are broken into small increments.
Holacracy, a series of flat organizational structures stacked hierarchically.

We’ll briefly explore a few of these, with the caveat that we would not recommend attempting to carbon copy any of these structures but instead regard them as points of inspiration as to how the mold of “default” governance structures can be broken.

Flat Organizational Structures

Let’s start by focusing on the traditional antithesis of hierarchical organizations: The flat organizational structure. Flat organizational structures can sound like the dream organizational system to a person currently living under a hierarchical structure because they address the most acute pain points of a hierarchy by granting almost equal institutional power to most everyone in the organization.

These organizational systems are extremely susceptible to being supplanted by simplistic dominance hierarchies as described near the beginning of the book. When you remove a power hierarchy from a governance structure, human nature will cause a new power hierarchy to form without any interest in the organization’s purpose or desired outcomes.

This problem is exacerbated in high-power-distance cultures. These are cultures where naturally occurring dominance hierarchies are more strict in their unidirectionality, making those in high positions feel more distant from their immediate subordinates.

As such, maintaining a flat power structure in high-power-distance culture requires some element of social engineering. A great example of this can be seen in the South Korean company Kakao, which fortifies its flat organizational structure by having its employees only use English names for each other. As American culture features lower power distances than South Korean culture, this helps to unmoor employees from their day-to-day social schemas. South Korean Airlines classically had one of the highest crash rates of any airline and it was partially attributable to this high power distance culture, with black boxes after some crashes showing co-pilots clearly expressing discomfort with the senior pilots’ decisions but unable to communicate this in a way that changed action.^[19]

Are flat organizational structures good? While the best perform better, most are worse. Flat organizational structures require a company to be composed entirely of emotionally mature, non-power hungry, non-ideologically infected^[20] B-players and above. Flat organizational structures will not protect participants from authoritarian-like rule. If anything, they are more susceptible to it as they give anyone with an authoritarian bone in their body and a bit of charisma the chance to try it out (whereas in more hierarchical companies, only those in senior positions must overcome the temptation).

Well-functioning, flat organizational structures are most likely to emerge in industries where almost everyone is at the absolute top of their game and totally mission-focused (for example, in some top-tier startups). In most other circumstances, attempts to implement this format yield disappointing results.

Holacracy

Holacracy is a system for constructing governance using hierarchically organized, interacting circles. The term is typically used to describe a flat organizational structure made up of self-sorting pods without strictly defined roles. Famous examples of companies operating on iterations of this model are Zappos, Valve, and Medium (which ultimately shut down the system).

Proponents of holacracy argue it can empower ambitious individuals who like taking on more than just the job they were assigned, allowing their roles within an organization to be expanded to match their enthusiasm while also giving them a greater sense of meaning in their work. Since holacracies are usually explored through famous case studies of their implementation, let’s take a glance at two.

Zappos:

Holacracies are often implemented during times of rapid growth and expansion. Zappos went from 150 teams to 500 “circles” after transitioning.
After implementing a holacracy, the average Zappos employee held 7.4 roles and 25 distinct responsibilities. This is relevant, as research shows each additional goal an employee takes on after the first few lowers productivity.
Holacracies can rarely be managed directly due to their complicated nature. Company leaders typically use specially designed software to facilitate their function—like GlassFrog and holaSpirit.
Zappos uses a system of badges so that others can identify colleagues’ skills and past work.
At one point, Zappos experimented with taking the concept even further and giving employees “people points” which could be used to create an internal marketplace for roles, however this experiment was walked back.

Valve:

Valve first introduced their version of a holacracy, called Flatland, in an effort to recruit and maintain higher quality talent, thinking it counterproductive to ask such types of talent to just sit at their desks and do as they are told.
Valve is well known for an intentionally leaked humorous corporate manual that is worth checking out if only for the cartoons in it.

In The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships, we address how sometimes people venture into poly relationships, expecting a “relationship without rules” only to find that healthy poly relationships often feature an intricate web of protocols and strict rules almost unimaginable to someone who has only experienced traditional relationship structures. The same can be said for holacracies: While they may sound like anarchy to an outsider, they actually feature much stricter interaction protocols than a traditional company. For example, at Morning Star “colleague letters of understanding” are used to outline responsibilities, activities, and overall goals as well as metrics for measuring performance. All of these must be fastidiously maintained in a company-wide “living document.” Essentially, these letters of understanding allow an individual to signal to others what they plan on accomplishing in a given time—like staking out a domain of tasks.

The bureaucratic bloat that accompanies this complexity is so bad that companies develop things like AIs to mediate meetings—and even that often isn’t enough, with Medium leaving the holacracy model when the “tax” of managing all the additional rules and governance started to eat up all of its teams’ productivity. When strict rules start dictating how social interactions must be carried out, a governance structure becomes uniquely at risk of unchecked dominance hierarchies forming along social lines.

We cannot find a single example of an organization becoming successful while maintaining a holacratic format. We can only find already successful organizations stagnating into a state of holacracy under egomaniac CEOs more interested in experimenting with utopian work environments than advancing their fields.

Valve adopted a holacratic structure in 2012. They released their last great game, Portal 2, in 2011. Before 2012, Valve was known as being one of the most innovative companies in gaming, releasing titles like Half Life, Portal, and Team Fortress. Since switching to a holacratic model, Valve has accomplished almost nothing outside of a few glorified tech demos. Any gamer would tell you it is almost astounding how little they have accomplished.

Holacracy “works” at companies like Valve and Zappos because they basically have money printing machines attached to them that can afford to pay employees to spend huge portions of their time engaged in petty politicking and bureaucratizing.^[21] Things got so bad at Valve that one employee likened it to having a KGB network within the company in which some employees used an invisible whisper network to control its vast and broken bureaucracy. If anything, stagnation the previously-ultra-productive Valve experienced after adopting the holacracy model presents a perfect demonstration of this model’s failure.

Holacracy is the antithesis of a well-designed governance model.

One interesting model that shares some ideas with holacracy may work. Back when General Electric was seen as a successful, diversified conglomerate, it had a policy of rotating its senior managers across different divisions on a regular basis. It did this to reduce managers’ incentives to lobby for a lot of capital in any given division, prevent them from accumulating a great deal of specific expertise, and hamper the accumulation of political capital while reducing “castle-building” behavior.

Anarchy

Speaking of systems laced with draconian rules that claim to offer freedom, let’s dive into the modern interpretation of anarchy that has been used as an organizational structure by organizations like Antifa and Occupy Wall Street. (There are about a hundred radically different political systems that call themselves anarchies, so we will focus on the governance structure in a broad sense that will apply to most.)

The goal of most modern iterations of anarchy is to create an environment in which direct, opt-in democracies can organically form and dissipate. Anarchists want people to be able to leave and join new voting bodies whenever they feel it is in their personal best interest. This system is not that different from that originally pushed by the Seasteaders, a group of people that wanted to create floating cities made up of modularized housing units that could split off from city states and join new ones whenever it became optimal to do so (with the caveat being that in the Seasteaders’ case, not all of these city states operated on a direct democracy model).

We suspect that people who promote this view of anarchy do so as they imagine this is the way human societies organized themselves before state-level government existed. To an extent, they are correct. What they miss is that these early governments also had a survival-of-the-fittest dynamic in which stronger groups would raid the weaker ones, kill their male members, and enslave their female members (a practice common across geographies, see: The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality for evidence of this widespread practice).

This type of practice disproportionately selects for dictatorial tribes that feature strong central governance structures. This stands in contrast to the types of governments anarchy selects for when you have hidden rules, like “no killing someone for leaving your tribe” and “no stealing resources from other political units.”

The reason why we have almost no example of anarchy staying functional outside of cases in which it is surrounded by large, peaceful democracies is because it is inherently unstable. Most forms of anarchism cause hundreds of small political units to form within a constrained geography. Those political units that tend toward strongmen with a tendency to physically dominate their neighbors typically end up snowballing in power, which results in the entire political structure being controlled by one strongman. (This is as true for Seasteading as it is for CHOP.)

Can this proposed governing structure be made to work? Like communism, anarchy always seems to end the same way when tried. Instead of ending in single party dictatorships as communism does, anarchy-based governance structures consistently lead to dissolution within a decade or a single strongman in power. Unlike communism, anarchies do not appear to be stable even at small scales (families can run well on communism … we have yet to see a family that runs well on anarchy).

In the same way communism inevitably leads to a snowball of power consolidation, anarchy inherently can either go in that direction or lead to a snowball of power decentralization to a point at which it offers nothing to connect its members or features so many norms of conduct that it becomes prohibitively difficult to interact with. However, like communism, the inevitability of anarchy’s flaws are largely reliant on human nature and therefore might be fixable with an AI lattice in the background.

Markets

Open markets are commonly presented as a method for governing an economy. While this is true, markets also present a strategy of governance design used to moderate interactions across many types of governance models. Consider a firm that opens up internal capital markets in the form of transfer pricing, which allows departments to interact using free market principles and even compete with outside firms in the case of internal/external markets. This is hardly the only method of incorporating markets into governance structures, as can be seen through ideas like the quantification of externalities generated by departments, which can then be traded within a company (e.g., diversity or carbon credits).

Here are two quick examples featuring the use of markets within governance structures:

In 1998, BP made a commitment to reduce greenhouse emissions by 10% before 2010. They achieved this in only three years using internal marketplaces. Business units were given “permits” that represented the right to generate one ton of carbon dioxide in emissions. These permits could be traded within the company, allowing for a competitive and dynamic internal marketplace, with 4.5 million tons of emissions being traded in those first three years for an average cost of about $40 per ton. (This is an internal, market-based system not dissimilar from the public emissions-based trading system developed under the Kyoto Protocol.)
Hewlett-Pachard developed a system in which anyone could propose a project to a board of senior managers at something the company called its VC Cafe, which acted as an internal VC. If a project was approved, it was given a budget and its description was posted on an internal network, allowing interested team members to inquire about joining.

Open markets are defined by their ability to self organize. When an organization uses an open market system, components of that organization that are better at achieving a specific pre-assigned goal get more resources and thus gain greater influence over how the organization plays out.

This metric can either be:

Backed Money: A token backed by something the society believes has value (commodity money is the classic example here).
Fiat Money: A generalized, freely traded token that can be exchanged with the governing body.
Measured Tokens: Tokens that can be reliably acquired by achieving a specific, measurable goal and that often can be exchanged for currency equivalents (e.g., carbon credits).
A Series of Tokens: A few token types used for different tasks that are allowed to develop an internal exchange rate (e.g., departments may get one set of tokens for efficiency at a task and another for safety during its undertaking—or tokens that are specific to their domains, like coding or HR tokens)
A Non-Tradable Resource: Using this final definition allows individuals to think of things like political systems as an open market where firms or political parties compete for voters. It is a stretch to call such systems a marketplace.

The advantage of these systems is that the subjective human element of deciding which component is performing its task better is largely handled “automatically” instead of decided upon by a central authority. The downside of these systems is that they encourage competition between branches of a government, which can lead to the siloing of information, resentment, and reduced morale.

In the same way that communist systems are incredibly stable and effective in small population groups (i.e., on the family level) but almost inevitably toxic at the level of larger populations, the inverse is true for market-based governance systems. Market-based systems are often an effective component of large governance structures, having even been employed as such in communist states, but on the small scale almost always lead to extreme toxicity. It would feel dehumanizing and breed resentment to operate a family on a marketplace model. The same can be seen in smaller companies that attempt to use marketplaces as a major aspect of their operational structure (the breeding of resentment between departments).

If you are designing a governance structure with an open market component, note that:

Market-based governance will not magically heal a toxic culture within a company or family office and may exacerbate the issue by encouraging even more cut-throat competition. (Removing the human component of determining who is the “best” department/person removes some of the fear of being punished for being an asshole.)
When allowing for subgovernments to organically form and compete within a governance structure, remember that nearly all open markets have restrictions within them (e.g., on who can start these sub-governances, how much power they can accumulate, and how they can interact).

Open market structures are generally a component of a well-designed government when populations of above 50,000 people are at play. That said, open markets very rarely make up an entire governing system. (We won’t discuss prediction markets here as they are addressed elsewhere in the book.)

Fighting Inequality
with Governance

If you feed a capuchin monkey a cucumber, he will be happy and excited … until that critter sees you feeding another monkey grapes instead of cucumbers. Then he will lose his shit (no, seriously; search for YouTube videos of this; it’s hilarious and we can all relate). The instinct to become livid in the face of perceived “unfairness” is programmed deeply into our DNA. This unconscious biological instinct has existed in us long before we were human. Governance structures can be utilized to systematize or erode structural inequality.

Counterintuitive as this may be, it is sometimes good for governments to create structural inequality. For example, the USA imposes open discrimination on employment opportunities based on age, straight up making it illegal for people under a certain age to hold most jobs. Heck, in addition to not being permitted to work, people under certain ages are not permitted to vote.

While there was a point in history at which governments’ systematic restrictions on individual rights were genuinely up for debate, we don’t think child labor laws present a hill on which many still wish to die. That said, the goal of most governance structures, be they corporate, family, or state, is to reduce inequality and increase fairness.

One thing to keep in mind in discussions of fairness is how hard fairness is to nail down and define as a concept. An analogy we used in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life is that of a teacher splitting a cake fairly with her class. Does she:

Split it into equal pieces
Give more cake to the hungrier students
Give more cake to the poorer students
Give more cake to the harder working students
Give less cake to the student who constantly disrupts class
Give less cake to the student who already has a cake on his desk that he is eating
Give less cake to the ten students who were given cake the last five times there was a cake

The type of inequality governance structures can take on can largely be divided into four categories:

Inequality that results from bigotry: This is inequality that results from perceptions about certain groups. While it is typically thought of in the context of racism and sexism, bigotry can also be tied to subcultures (e.g., people with tattoos or goths), religious beliefs, sexuality, and even political beliefs. Nazis really went for the quadfecta of bigotry in the Holocaust, killing people for ethnicity, sexuality, religious beliefs, and political beliefs, however they themselves are now ironically also a political ideology subject to intense discrimination. (Socially, we try to differentiate forms of bigotry into different categories based on how ethical we see them as being, often categorizing bigotry based on something a person chose—like their political beliefs—as being systematically different from bigotry based on something they did not choose. While it might be true that these should be regarded as ethically different from a systems perspective, they function identically at the level of governance.)
Systematic wealth/power differentiation: Inequality that exists as natural variation in wealth and power within a system is present within all governances but can sometimes reach levels that are destructive to the system itself. While in pop culture this is often seen as a flaw of capitalist systems and is measured through things like the Gini coefficient, systematic wealth and power gaps are often just as present in cashless systems. (Even if your company were to not pay the CEO any more than a janitor, the CEO would still have more structural power than the janitor, which would accrue them more opportunities.)
Generational freeze out: This happens when bigotry combines with systematic wealth differences to create a compounding cycle of disenfranchisement and is uniquely deadly in terms of institutional knowledge transfer. In family offices, generational freeze out can be seen when a family waits too long to bring the next generation into management positions. At the state level, it can be seen when almost all ultra-wealthy individuals or individuals in certain branches of government are above a certain age.
Fortunately, this issue is easy to resolve when contrasted with other forms of discrimination: If over 70% of a governing structure’s members are from one generation, create a mechanism to ensure this can be smoothed out by adding individuals of other generations.
Biological restrictions: Common biological restrictions include disabilities, pregnancy, and old-age.

Just as an unequal system can cause inefficiency within a governance body, putting too much emphasis on perfect fairness can generate enormous friction and burn off most of the system’s wealth and value creation, reducing quality of life for everyone living within it. Equality is always a balancing act between allowing for things like some degree of generational wealth transfer (people having the ability to be motivated by giving their kids a better life) while not allowing power and wealth to coagulate within certain families or ethnicities and clog the gears of the system.

Bigotry

Bigotry can be addressed by removing prejudices associated with subgroups, removing the social schema making it OK to act on these prejudices, filtering individuals who might act on bigotry from positions of power, or creating structures that reward/punish one group more than another to correct for these injustices.

While systems for altering culture and education can be used to fight bigotry, they are only relevant at the level of nation states that have an unhealthy level of control over what their citizens think. We say “unhealthy,” as a government being able to alter its citizens’ opinions on things naturally leads to the politicization of the educational system, which in turn almost always ends with one side “winning” and controlling said brainwashing system.

This leads to a snowballing power consolidation, with more brainwashing giving one party more power, which in turn they use to do even more extreme brainwashing, which destroys the educational system.

But if you are not going to change culture using top-down mandates, what options do you have in the fight against inequality?

The Equilibrium Problem

Research on solving equality at the level of governance becomes excruciating as one quickly realizes the field is so polluted by politics that it has stopped outputting honest results. Several academics and journals have been attacked for publishing research results that fail to align with certain political narratives (for example, research that showed women being hurt by female managers). Many in this field of academia care more about ensuring that their political “team” is seen as being “correct” than actually resolving inequality in a sustainable manner.

One of the greatest problems in combating bigotry in governments that address large areas/populations is what we call the “equilibrium problem.” Essentially bigotry does not exist in all places at the same level, meaning some methods used to address bigotry will result in unfair penalties and advantages in the opposite direction within certain populations.

Let’s use an extremely simple hypothetical example:

A nation’s population is highly prejudiced against women, on average.
This “average level of bigotry” could be ameliorated to some extent by applying a modifier to the employment of women that artificially favors female resumes by Y% or frames women as being extra competent or moral in media and education by Z%.
But any sweeping Y% or Z% intervention that would lead to an “average level of no bigotry when selecting between female and male job candidates across the country” would still subject women to prejudice in areas culturally intolerant toward women while giving women a significant advantage in regions that are culturally more feminist. Women in regions that presented little bigotry against women before the intervention would gain such an advantage from sweeping anti-bigotry interventions that the intervention could even breed resentment and cause an eventual backlash—leaving the situation still bad for women in areas of high discrimination while increasing discrimination in areas of previously low discrimination by stoking resentment among the few who still had discriminatory attitudes in those regions.

We visualize this as the “ocean of bigotry.” We have a false perception that, were the ocean drained, it would reveal a giant, flat plane—yet this is not true. Were the ocean drained, vast mountains and valleys would be revealed. Equality can’t be achieved just by draining the ocean; one needs to then plow down mountains and fill trenches to create a flat seabed.

Imagine “fairness” sits on a numerical spectrum between -10 and 10, with 10 being unfairness in favor of a group, -10 being unfairness against them, and 0 being a state of perfect fairness. Now think of a large country like the United States. Each state within the U.S. will have a different “fairness” number associated with any given group. Any nationally implemented policy that tries to remove negative discrimination against a particular group by just applying a “+X” modifier to every state until every state has a fairness number for that group that is greater than or equal to zero will lead some states to feature extremely high positive discrimination in favor of this group (which technically isn’t fair). If your goal is not the promotion of a specific subgroup but actual fairness, sweeping, national attempts to counteract discrimination are suboptimal.

One who is not serious about addressing the issue will just jump to a proposed system that outlaws advantages based on a given characteristic—but such systems don’t really work. If you just say: “Don’t take race into account when hiring,” certain racial groups will still be disadvantaged due to the minor bigotry they face throughout the day. We don’t believe anyone really believes such policies can remove discrimination in the long run. Thus, such systems are rarely used and only really mentioned as arguments by individuals who prefer inaction on such issues.

While bigoted individuals often make the following point to support doing nothing about bigotry, it is also a factually true statement: Prejudice will be exacerbated in the long run by systematically placing less competent members of discriminated groups in positions they would not have won without positive discrimination.

Imagine if a government intentionally selected a super-competent group of males and a group of average females, then had this mixed gendered group replace news anchors for a year. Or imagine your board of directors replacing the management positions of your company with this group of people. If you didn’t know why they had done this, you would think the government was trying to brainwash you into believing women were stupid when compared to men. Yet, this is functionally what many organizations “fighting” discrimination end up doing. By increasing the status of the discriminated-against group within a single generation one increases the number of people who secretly think that group actually is systematically less competent.

We must be conscious of this effect when designing systems that utilize positive discrimination. Don’t dismiss this truth just because it leads to the “wrong” ultimate conclusion. When positive discrimination is implemented in its most extreme form, the results naturally and logically breed bigotry in a population. Policies with the potential to inspire bigotry where none existed before will not resolve discrimination.

Equilibrium and positive discrimination problems are relevant in state governments as well as nonprofits, family offices, and even corporations. Imagine that professionals with technical backgrounds are underrepresented in a company’s senior management due to its culture and that, to counteract the imbalance, the CEO artificially makes it easier for programmers and other technical employees to rise to senior management positions. Such a change may create the perception that technical employees are less competent at management than other individuals, even if this is factually not true.

So how do you solve the equilibrium problem? The second guess after general positive discrimination one might jump to is to require that leadership bodies have equal representation (e.g., every company’s board must proportionally represent the gender/racial/religious/political/cultural/whatever composition of its stakeholders/nation’s populace/shareholders/whatever). Superficially, this sounds like a good idea. This is the solution that those in power are most likely to select as it earns them the most brownie points with their friends within discriminated classes (i.e., fellow rich and powerful people who also happen to technically be in discriminated classes). That said, in practice it always ends the same.

Specifically, it helps the least vulnerable individuals of a discriminated class while ignoring the vast majority of said class. Obviously, the argument one might use here is that putting unusually privileged members of a discriminated class into positions of power will help all people of that class. Studies show this sometimes—but not always—works. For example, females vastly prefer male managers (this was found in a study of over 60,000 women).^[22] Heck, one study of 142 legal secretaries found not a single one preferred female bosses to male bosses.^[23]

But stats like this are the exception to the rule. Most studies suggest that it is beneficial for a company to have female managers and that once female managers become fairly common in an organization, more are likely to be hired in the future.^[24] (For a great unbiased breakdown of this, see Harvard Business Review’s article: “Who Wants to Work for a Woman?” ^[25])

One can also argue that even if only the already-privileged members of classes facing discrimination are placed in positions of power through quotas, these quotas still help the non-privileged members of those classes by providing them with role models and blazing trails. People often gravitate toward aspirational figures “like them,” so the existence of a female president, for example, might inspire more young women in that nation to aspire to the role themselves.

The larger point is that creating upper management quotas doesn’t always benefit the groups we wish to elevate. That said, they mostly do, and instances of quotas not being beneficial typically involve issues of perception (i.e., women not wanting to work under other women), so this point can be taken with less emphasis.

The bigger problem with “management quota” systems is that they ignore an obvious truth—inequality within heavily disadvantaged groups is almost always dramatically higher than inequality in a system as a whole. Creating a vacuum that pulls from the top without any mechanism pushing from the bottom only serves to increase inequality within the discriminated group faster than it can resolve their discrimination. This in turn can generate subcultures within these groups that come to see successful peers as “traitors” due to the larger group’s inability to relate to their successful members at a cultural level given the vast divide in lifestyle created by the artificially large inter-group wealth gap.

This inclination to dissociate oneself from people who have a large wealth gap from you is not unique to discriminated populations and is seen in virtually every population. For an extreme example, consider people who think the rich and powerful are secretly lizard people.

Essentially, management quota systems leave the most vulnerable individuals in the dirt while creating a veneer of a solution by empowering those least in need of empowerment. Yet management quotas are favored because the individuals they help most (wealthy, powerful members of a class facing discrimination) are the most likely to be the lens through which a society’s influencers and elite see that class (most rich and powerful people’s friends are also rich and powerful).

If that’s the case, what is the solution? Clearly a solution is needed.

The Pendulum Effect

Not so fast! One devastating subset of the equilibrium problem is the pendulum problem. While equilibrium problem looks at how discrimination can vary across geographies, the pendulum problem looks at how discrimination varies across generations.

Solutions to inequality in a society typically focus on resolving it among youth populations, as their perceptions are most malleable. As such, it seems most pragmatic to declare bankruptcy on bigoted, ossified adult populations and instead erase discrimination among the young. But the same groups that make this choice often continue to measure inequality from population pools sampled across individuals of all age groups—or worse, from exclusively older age groups. For example, a group trying to promote women in business may focus on young people while using the fact that 80-year-old male CEOs are paid more than their female counterparts as a sign their efforts have not gone far enough. When a society is making rapid progress on the topic of inequality, it is possible for that society to reach a point at which, even though on average a group is still discriminated against, certain age ranges have the game rigged massively in their favor.

The problem here comes when the younger demographic ages and the older demographic dies, causing the pendulum of unfair advantage to swing in the opposite direction. To recreate equality, the new, younger generation pushes the pendulum back in the other direction, creating a society oscillating between two extremes that is never fair for any demographic. In the long run, people will suffer if this effect is ignored (while it will lessen with each swing, it is best to prevent the effect to begin with).

The “obvious” solution is just to measure inequality from the youth’s perspective. If one were measuring a female wage gap in such a system, they would only measure it in twenty-somethings.

The reason this is a bad solution is twofold:

1. The solution actively abandons anyone over a certain age.

2. It would not effectively capture glass ceilings of oppression that do not manifest until later in one’s career. (E.g., If discrimination still existed in the promotion of women to upper management, just measuring how they are doing in their 20s won’t capture this effect.)

While some political writers have alluded to similar trends among nations’ political parties, the pendulum problem as it pertains to fighting discrimination is purely theoretical. Some groups clearly face more discrimination from older populations than younger populations, however there is no apparently organized and incontrovertible instance yet of society pushing back.

One might argue that The Red Pill or GamerGate movements represent examples of this in the case of women, but one could equally argue that they are the last gasps of a dying worldview. Only the future will tell. That said, we mention the pendulum effect as theoretically it makes sense and we suspect that future studies will show it to be real. Were we to design solutions to inequality, we would keep it in mind.

The Solution

Finding a solution to discrimination within a system entails more than imposing simple rules because the amount of discrimination varies within any given system’s hierarchy. Typically, there is less discrimination at the very bottom and very top of a system. Finding the place within a system at which discrimination begins to peak is critical in resolving it.

To double click on what we mean when we say discrimination is lower at the top of a system, we mean this in a relative sense, not in an absolute sense. We are contrasting representation of disadvantaged groups in the highest positions of power with those in positions immediately below the highest level of power, not as a share of the general population. Workplace discrimination is like a filter that appears between every institutional layer of power, but is almost always dramatically more strict in certain layers. For example, in the case of women, research has shown this occurs in their first management positions.

Think of discrimination as being like a clogged pipe, you must identify the point in the pipe where the highest amount of water pressure is absorbed and clear it out. If you only focus on what is going into the pipe or out of it, you solve the wrong problem and in the long run make the situation worse.

In an ideal system, each disadvantaged group’s representation won’t necessarily be in direct proportion to the general population, but there should be no clear signs of bottlenecks—points in the system at which members of a certain group are clearly facing discrimination and being weeded out. This statement comes with two huge caveats.

First, a group of people is less likely to bother joining a system if they believe that system discriminates against them (why enter a pipeline if the pipes are clogged?). Second, sometimes resolving “clogs” in a system requires erasing part of a group’s culture. For example, fewer Muslims are likely to be found working in a sausage factory due to their religious prohibition against pork.

When culture leads people to self-select out of a system (and therefore be poorly represented within it), there is no obvious solution. Both corporate and government systems often make the problem worse by trying to resolve it. The problem of course comes when people blame culture when attempting to explain away what is actually institutional sexism or racism. Unfortunately, we can’t think of a good solution here except to say sometimes one side is right and sometimes the other side is right and one should not assume that disproportionately low representation of a population in a system is due only to discrimination or only to culture.

Discrimination in Summation

No doubt much to everyone’s disappointment, we have failed to provide any obvious, actionable ways to “end discrimination.”

That is part of the problem. When we see unethical discrimination, our first and natural response is to take action to end it—but ethically motivated actions do not always lead to positive responses. Discrimination can’t be solved with blunt force; it requires delicate and thoughtful open-heart surgery at the societal level.

Systems for Fixing Bias

Bias presents a bigotry-related problem to which there are many more actionable solutions. As we took a first-principles approach to secondary education with the Collins Institute (CollinsInstitute.org), we had to develop a system preventing political bias from creeping into our model. Separately, as consultants, we also helped a firm develop a system preventing too much political bias from polluting its moderation policies. Let’s discuss each system in turn.

Preventing Bias in Education

To block bias from polluting our education system, we teamed up with Metaculus, the world’s leading forecasting company, which essentially runs what can be thought of as large betting marketplaces (without the money part) that speculate about the likelihood of future outcomes (something Metaculus prediction markets achieve with crazy high reliability). We incorporate Metaculus’ prediction markets into our school’s core processes by including prediction market questions in multiple-choice assessments within topics subject to political bias (students are encouraged to make a prediction based on their knowledge related to some relevant outcome that has not yet come to pass).

If a student demonstrates a strong ability to predict outcomes related to a subject while simultaneously performing poorly in general multiple-choice assessments related to that subject, it is a sign that our assessments have become biased and are in need of correction. A person who can’t better predict future events based on current information after education has not been “educated”; they have simply been taught to repeat a particular party’s perspective.”

This system has the added benefit of yielding a metric we can use when evaluating students, with one of the core problems of a single metric for measuring students being that 80% of students will always fall outside the top 20% (which hampers their ability to demonstrate they’re a top performer in job and university applications). In addition to this added benefit, variations of the system also allow us to constantly A/B test different teaching systems.

When you define the “success” of an education system as a real-world measurable accomplishment outside of some state-mandated guess as to what an educated student resembles, you can enjoy the benefits of a constantly updating and improving “self-healing” educational system. Within some topics, we define success as an ability to more accurately and consistently predict future events. In other domains, we use direct authentic assessment (for example, how many five star reviews a student-written fanfiction gets online).

We use AI to constantly generate new potential test questions, which are screened by humans for inclusion in our curriculum. The accuracy with which these questions judge student knowledge is determined by their correlation to students’ performance on authentic assessments.

Our favorite vindication of this model came from an authoritarian old English teacher and failed author who expressed scorn for our system. She pointed out that many popular fan fictions became popular books, like 50 Shades of Grey, which got its start as Twilight fan fiction, and that she would have given E. L. James, the writer of 50 Shades of Grey, bad grades.

There is no more objective picture of the flaws in our education system than an arrogant English teacher who has not one measurable accomplishment in writing to her name fantasizing about how she would lord her arbitrary authority over one of the single most read authors in human history. Yes, E. L. James may not have adhered to all the silly rules the educational orthodoxy uses to determine who is an “upper class” writer and who is a “low class” writer, but her writing objectively served its purpose at an elite level.

Within every subject, there will always be a myriad of little rules used to signal “class” that are not relevant to the functional outcome of a product. Should a student wish to learn these, we can develop authentic assessments specifically tied to mastering these esoteric skills (like having third parties judge the education level of students based on their writing), but we don’t think the pursuit of a now-largely-arbitrary ideal should make up the core of a subject.

Reducing Bias in Content Moderation

At one point, we were asked to help a team developing an unbiased content moderation system based on our school’s design.^[26] While it turns out our theories on reducing bias within school systems are largely irrelevant in this domain, theorizing on incentive systems for this team helped us with this book.

The problem with content moderation in tech companies is twofold: First, the staff at these companies is overwhelmingly progressive and individuals at these organizations will actively target and try to eliminate anyone who espouses even moderate political views. We speak here from personal experience; while it may not be a policy of the organization, many individual employees will attempt to purge ideologically different colleagues with a lot of institutional cover given the ideological conformity within these orgs.

For example, 99.6% of Netflix, 98.7% of Twitter, 96% of Google, and 94.5% of Facebook political donations are to Democratic candidates.^[27] This is not just a natural consequence of programmers being more likely to be Democrat—as a whopping 26.6% of programmers are Republican—but a manifestation of the rather systemic bias and witch hunts cited above.^[28]

Management at these companies must build mechanisms to ensure that the policies developed by their employees don’t reek of extreme political bias. This is a problem when those policies dictate what content to ban and what to keep, as a failure to stay at least plausibly unbiased can cause these companies to face government regulation.

The second problem faced by these companies is that the low-cost, marginally employed individuals who often serve as content moderators usually have a strong socialist bias due to the communities from which they hail. These forces place a heavy progressive bias on these companies’ content moderation practices, which, again, puts their employers at risk of legislation artificially placing a conservative bias on their moderation practices.

Some companies have taken a crack at fixing this is with AI, but if said AI is programmed by ultra-progressive coders, then it is bound to feature progressive bias. How, then, does one resolve this problem?

The solution is fairly simple and not present in current models of content moderation: Create a system that punishes moderators for mistakes and disproportionately punishes them for politically biased mistakes. Specifically: Give users the ability to flag content as being banned for politically motivated reasons and cite the directionality of that bias. Then escalate the contested case to a group of judges with political leanings sympathetic to the banned content (e.g., if the moderator is accused of liberal political bias, the judges will have a conservative bias).

If the judges disagree, the content creator loses their ability to ever appeal a ban again. If, however, the claim is judged as accurate, the moderator accrues a citation. If, at the end of the month, a moderator ever has more than a certain number of citations related to overturned cases—with that threshold changing logarithmically depending on the bias of their moderation—they are punished (perhaps they don’t get a bonus, perhaps they get fired, etc.). For an example of how this logarithmic system would work: A company may permit moderators to accrue 20 citations if 10 were liberal and 10 were conservative but only five citations if all five demonstrated liberal bias.

While this system won’t entirely eliminate bias, it will dramatically reduce it at the cost of allowing many more things to “fall through the cracks” and a slightly larger moderation team (a small price to pay). We expect the actual judging system would rarely be used after a short period of time, with the mere fear of its existence being enough to prevent individuals from knowingly allowing their bias to seep through in their decisions. This system forces moderators to ask themselves: “Would well-meaning people who are politically motivated to support this content also be likely to recognize it as misleading propaganda?”

Handy Governing Gimmicks

In our first draft of this book, we delineated every unique form of government attempted, ranging from obscure, AI-assisted family office structures to a historic Persian province, and an ecclesiastical polity of a now-extinct Protestant sect. This seemed like it was going to be really fun but got crazy boring fast. These governing structures fit too neatly into the framework we laid out earlier in this book. Even styles that sounded superficially exotic typically turned out to have a single, unique gimmick. It therefore makes more sense to use these more unique gimmicks to study how the above parameters can be stretched to do interesting things.

Exploiting Human Nature

Exploiting human nature and psychological tricks is an aspect of governance that deserves more coverage. When we first bought a company in Peru, we were surprised to discover that, to calculate an employee’s annual pay, we needed to multiply their monthly salaries by 14 and not 12. Twice a year, our Peruvian employees were given a “bonus” month of salary all at once. In addition, a portion of Peruvian employees’ salaries also goes to a retirement fund and an unemployment fund (which only belongs to them). The unemployment is released when their job is terminated. This gives people a financial runway, protecting them in the event of unexpected layoffs.

By creating simple systems that ensure Peruvian employees get cash windfalls, unemployment savings, and retirement funds, without taking proactive action, the Peruvian government has ensured its population acts with greater fiscal responsibility than it otherwise would. This does not affect us as a company; we pay employees the same yearly amount we would be paying them annually without these systems in place. Essentially, the government is able to give its citizens some of the benefits or a more socialized system without the waste.

Defaults are powerful. Making organ donation a default on driver’s licenses can increase rates of organ donation by as much as 80% in some areas.

While plenty of governments and organizations intelligently use “nudges” and defaults to their advantage, some well-attested psychological tricks remain highly underrated and underutilized. Consider the body of research indicating that people act more ethically when they think someone is looking at them or even see a set of eyes painted on something. For example, one group of subjects was found to put more money in a charity box if the box had a set of eyes painted on it. We always suspected something interesting could be done with this information.

How might you implement these tricks? Suppose you are setting up a family office that will send payments to your grandkids. When kids within the family are under 15 years old, it might make sense to send monthly payments in the form of an allowance and issue a larger amount twice a year that must be received in the form of an investment chosen by each child. While not perfect, this distribution method would likely inspire interest in and thought about investing at a younger age.

Governance Marketplaces

Recall that inefficiencies build like cancers within systems as they grow and age. In nature, this hazard is solved by allowing for older individuals to die and be replaced with their children. Something similar happens in governance marketplaces.

It is easy to see how a system like this works for corporate governments competing in a free market: As one organization becomes weighed down by its cancerous growths, it is outcompeted by other, younger and more nimble players who ultimately attract the old organization’s customers. Companies in free markets have a much shorter lifespan than most people think. The average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 is only 18 years (note that this number has gone down from 61 years in 1958).^[29]

How could a similar medium be created for the types of governances that manage states?

Seasteaders present an interesting example, envisioning large, floating cities in which every individual house or business acts as an independent module capable of breaking off (e.g. sailing away to another floating city). Each of these cities would have different governance models, allowing for a truly free market of residency in which people move to the most effective governance structures and away from the least effective ones.

Were this concept to be implemented in practice, we doubt its long-term viability given the presumably low cost of leaving one of these cities. To keep citizens from floating away, cities would likely optimize around generally low taxes and generally nice amenities. Unfortunately, these optimized cities would be vulnerable to specialist “raider” cities that put a massive proportion of their resources into their offensive capabilities and use this to take resources from the fat, wealthy cities. Eventually, the wealthy cities would likely pay taxes to raiders to prevent them from attacking.

As this system becomes formalized over generations, little empires would form under the control of the former raiders, which would have a vested interest in preventing wealth-generating citizens from easily moving away. Essentially, the Seasteading world would go through a process very similar to that experienced by the earliest human city states as they became not-so-free-and-efficient empires.

Bribery, Lobbying,
and Burn

Early in this book we describe inefficiency in governance systems being released as wasted money in the same way inefficiency in mechanical systems is released as heat. Some interesting designs for mechanical systems find ways to capture and use this waste, such as bitcoin mining rigs that heat buildings or even hot tubs. What if the same could be done for governance models? What if one could harness and redirect the burn associated with government inefficiency?

While the cash burn from government inefficiency can be seen in all sorts of fields (i.e. legal costs), in its most pure form it is seen as bribery. By systematizing and legalizing bribery, a system can benefit from while minimizing its negative effects. This may sound novel, but is practiced by nearly every major democratic government in the form of lobbying.

Lobbying is just formalized bribery: Money spent to give those with wealth more power in the system. Instead of allowing energy—money, in this case—to be entirely burnt off from the system, it is paid above board, allowing it to be taxed. As an added benefit, some of the funds spent lobbying go to productive efforts, like drafting of legislation.

This is why outlawing or heavily restricting lobbying is generally a dumb idea. Wealthy families and companies want to influence politics. Wherever demand is high enough, wealth will find a way. Were lobbying to be instantly outlawed, the funds would simply shift to bribes.

Is there a way the system could more efficiently redirect this wasted energy?

Consider what would happen were we to remove the barriers present in current lobbying and political donations. Lobbying and donations are used to “buy access” to politicians. What if, instead, politicians had a set amount of time—say one day a week—put aside just to grant access to anyone willing to pay for it?

Hours during this time could be put up for auction, with 80% of the money spent being redirected to a government tax pool, 10% going to the politician’s reelection campaign, and 10% going to the politician’s political party. Donation restrictions would be totally removed for money spent in this way.

While it might seem unfair to political challengers that their incumbent competition would have a steady fundraising stream, in reality incumbent politicians are already spending huge proportions of their elected terms just trying to raise funds to win the next election. Perhaps a system like this would at least free up more time for politicians to actually serve their constituents.

Were we to outlaw political fundraising, it would just go underground. We would argue that paid office hours would ultimately reduce overall donation levels, as there would be more transparency around access (many groups at present donate more than they need to, not exactly knowing how much will move the needle). A similar line of logic applies to the 10% allocation to a politician’s political party. Were that amount not included, parties would still need ways to raise funds and ultimately do so using less efficient means.

This is not to say this system is above reproach. We suspect that it would quickly become a practice for companies to buy far more hours than they need from a politician to give the politician “time off.” While not the intent of the system, at least a significant portion of the funds would fund government programs through the 80% portion taxed.

Cooperatives

Cooperatives are a type of business owned by stakeholders—either the customers or the employees. While cooperatives’ internal governance structures vary, consumer-owned iterations often present an interesting mix of state government and business functions (as with state governments, many cooperatives’ governance is voted on by stakeholders; as with businesses, cooperatives produce a good or service).

Cooperatives therefore enable us to see how businesses controlled by their customers (stakeholders) fare against those controlled by their shareholders (investors).

One might assume that in an open market, customers will prefer to shop at companies where they—rather than shareholders—have influence over internal governance. What we see in practice is quite different. Due to the inefficiency of stakeholder-controlled models, cooperatives only really thrive within very specific industry domains or in environments where the politics of the cooperative itself acts as an externality, driving additional business to it.

If the stakeholder-controlled model worked and was genuinely better at providing goods or services at a better cost/quality when contrasted with privately and publicly-owned companies, they would be the dominant players in capitalist markets, as they would outcompete those other players—but they aren’t. This implies that the model is not particularly superior.

That is not a lesson to ignore. At the level of midsize governments, cooperative performance implies that stakeholder control is less effective than investor control. Governing models in non-competitive environments can also learn from this. For example, if you are building a family office, cooperative performance implies it will run more effectively if you give control to those who put money in rather than those who take money out.

Open-source Governance

Open-source governance borrows ideas from the open source movement and is seen in online communities like Wikipedia and Linux. Open-source governance yields models that efficiently engage the general citizenry in decision-making processes. This is sometimes called emergent democracy and is largely differentiated by allowing individuals to engage as much or as little as they wish. These systems are exemplary at empowering a large quantity of medium-quality free labor in projects that have a pre-existing community and produce some sort of social good.

Open-source governance degrades the moment top contributors’ influence significantly shapes policy. Why? Usually, top contributors are those with the most time on their hands. Having a lot of time on one’s hands correlates highly with low levels of responsibility on most fronts (e.g., having a job, caring for others, doing basic maintenance such as cleaning, shopping, taxes, etc.) and low responsibility correlates with low competence. There’s a reason behind the stereotype of the unhygienic “neck beard” moderator within tech communities: Those who have been rejected from other groups have both more motivation and time to engage with open-source power politics.

Governance models that grant maximum power to participants with minimal “real-world” competence typically don’t take organizations very far (consider rapidly-growing reddit communities that succumb to the caprices of a tyrannical moderator). This may explain why the most successful organizations and communities that govern in an open-source model, such as Wikipedia, aren’t led, on a macro level, by top contributors.

AI Assisted Governance

It seems highly likely to us that future governance models will lean on AI to remove the inefficiencies associated with the human aspect within some of their modules. While in science fiction, AI-assisted governance models typically take the form of an AI dictator, in reality we expect AI to instead replace lower levels of leadership or act as an independent voting body (perhaps a triumvirate system in which one of the three bodies is an AI designed to optimize for something specific, whether that be the most efficient decision or the one an average stakeholder/citizen would make).

Probably the closest we have ever gotten to an AI-assisted government structure was Project Cybersyn, a Chilean project executed during the presidency of Salvador Allende, from 1971–1973. Project Cybersyn was a distributed decision support system to aid in management of the national economy that even included a 1970s-style “operations room” resembling the Star Trek bridge, which acted as an AI-assisted command center for the nation’s economy. The project was short-lived and largely ahead of its time, with its only real win being some reduction of economic damage from a 1972 truck driver strike in Santiago.

4Chan and Anonymity Effects

Anonymity can have a profound effect on the way individuals make decisions. If you know every decision or product you produce within an organization will bear your name, you are going to act differently than if anonymity were the default.

Anonymity changes the psychological reward structure associated with group interaction. This can be seen best within networks like 4chan. When you remove someone’s ability to get “credit” for their ideas, there can be no dominance hierarchy. Some individuals take this as an opportunity to pointlessly and repeatedly posture, like a chimpanzee confused by a mirror. Others take the opportunity to solely engage with the ideas of others. The most interesting participants, however, take anonymity as an opportunity to gauge their ability to “dominate” the community by seeing how well their ideas spread organically, through their own merit (this is why so many memes that end up inundating other online communities like an invasive species come out of the memetic reactor represented by relatively small, anonymous online communities).

In an environment like 4chan in which the concept of the individual is rendered moot (pun intended) as every post is atomized and not connected to a larger identity, the group itself takes on a “personality” as if it was a single person. Utopians envision flat, non-hierarchical societies, in which people of slightly-above-average intelligence communicate through ideas, as havens of peace and acceptance. 4chan demonstrates that is not the case. (At least … sort of. Some regard 4chan as an extremely and radically accepting place. Some would claim that it uses vulgar insults as a form of social shorthand and equalization, and that it launches various attacks on groups as a means of shedding light on unequal and unenlightened ideologies. Most nevertheless view 4chan as the complete opposite of an enlightened utopia, perhaps to their detriment.)

While anonymous communities may produce novel ideas and moments of genuine brilliance that outcompete those of their doxxed counterparts, they’re too chaotic for the average, thin-skinned human. Instead of Superman or Lex Luthor, anonymous governments produce collective identities more like Freakazoid^[30]—with dopamine receptors so fried by rapid innovation and gratification that all they can do is try to drive the most mentally engaging and otherwise unexpected world events possible in a desperate bid to feel anything.

Titles, Privileges,
and Perception

Earlier in the book we talked about how some governance structures attempt to alter the actions of their leaders by making them swear vows of poverty or otherwise trying to “outlaw” them owning things. Both Vatican City and the Dalai Lama’s mansion-like complexes show how well those intentions hold up after a free generation.

That said, simple naming conventions and cultural norms allow for a similar effect to be achieved. Were a family office to be run by a “Grand Executor” rather than a “Squalid Executor,” the person would almost certainly behave differently or at the very least a different sort of person would apply for the role. Similar effects might be created by a tradition in which a country’s president must always kneel before their constituents.

One great example of this can be seen in the Jul’hoan people. Jul’hoan hunters who bring back the biggest piece of meat have a cultural mandate to share it with the tribe, all while receiving insults from other tribal members about it, to prevent them from getting “too big a head.”

An inverse of this can be seen historically in court traditions of having to keep one’s head always below that of the monarch, which typically required bowing, stooping, and/or kneeling in their presence. This was one of many traditions meant to constantly reinforce the separateness and the supremacy of monarchs. These traditions almost certainly changed the way leaders acted and thought about their subordinates.

Public Broadcasting
and Education

Systems that influence or control media and education significantly shape governing structures and their long-term function.

Both intentional and emergent features of education and media influence groups. Underpaying teachers while requiring that teachers hold advanced degrees will produce a left-leaning education system whereas mandating that all teachers must be veterans may produce right-leaning schools.

Governing structures must decide whether to centrally control the flow of information, thereby making it susceptible to party politics, or allow for privatized information flow, which runs the risk of becoming sensationalized or producing cults and extremist subfactions. Recently the United States has been gripped by this question: How do we fight the sensationalism of wacky news stories without making partisan bureaucrats the arbiters of truth?

Were we to design a government department to fix this market failure, we would create a totally new branch of government made up of lifetime appointments (perhaps even from birth) who are supported by a lifetime stipend—similar to a more extreme version of the Supreme Court. The shielded nature of this department’s leadership would minimize the impact of partisanship in the selection of these individuals who would design the systems used to identify and disseminate truth. They might even create their own systems designed to nudge the population toward a slightly more educated and moderate state by “taxing” 20% of media companies’ commercial time.

Any system designed to address biased information on a human-led, top-down basis is almost certainly destined to fail. The way we handle this within our own educational system involves using prediction markets (we correlate answers on traditional multiple-choice tests to a student’s performance in prediction markets to determine which questions best measure a student’s functional knowledge of the subject, which eliminates the risk that we accidentally test for ideological alignment). For more info on systems for tackling bias, see the above chapter Systems for Fixing Bias on page 311.

Government Participation
as a PR Mechanism

Interestingly, governance structures can be used as a method to increase adoption of otherwise unpopular ideas as well as general civic engagement. One example of this is a practice called participatory budgeting, in which stakeholders decide how to allocate part of a government’s budget with the goal of forcing them to identify, discuss, and prioritize spending projects.

While this strategy may seem trite on its surface, it has been shown to be surprisingly effective. A World Bank study on the subject demonstrated that in one case, participatory budgeting drove an expansion of sewer and water connections from 75% of households to 98% and increased the community’s health and education budget from 13% to almost 40% in just a nine-year period.^[31]

More specifically, giving people a sense of ownership within their government appears to facilitate comfort with increasing government budgets and power. While sometimes this is good, increased wealth and power (with citizen buy-in) does not always produce optimal results. A core failure of systems like this is that they grant disproportionate power to individuals who have failed at traditional pursuits and have more time on their hands to engage with unpaid civic government work—as well as individuals willing to be more aggressive in public social environments. Both of these traits are typically not thought of as having a high correlation with competent governance.

Noocracies and Technocracies

Noocracies are “aristocracies of the wise” (think: Plato and his Philosopher kings). Technocracies are governments in which policy and leadership are managed by those at the top of their respective relevant fields. While Noocracies and technocracies have more potential than their detractors would have you believe, they also don’t live up to the wildest hopes of their adherents.

The question as to the quality of one of these types of governments largely comes down to the efficacy with which the government is able to filter for excellence and the corruptibility of those tests. The problem of course comes with the fact that … of course those tests are corruptible and of course judgments of expertise are heavily tinted with bias. To get an example of just what a disaster such a governance structure can become, look no further than our contemporary academic bureaucracy.

Presumably, there is no system in the world today more dedicated to filtering for intellectual giants and putting them in positions of power. Despite this, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality highlights many fields of academia that have become so overwhelmed by politics that they have stopped functioning as drivers of scientific inquiry. If not dead in function, the academic bureaucracy is on its last legs, suffering from problems that would plague any noocracy—be that conflating intelligence with support of establishment ideas (thus filtering out new ideas) or defining intelligence by the amount that you work with other “intelligent” individuals (thus causing “eddies” of research focus that punish people for dedicating themselves to work on topics not currently in the spotlight).

Technocracies, where they exist in the world today, are also uniquely prone to corruption. For example, if you tap the world’s top expert on oil drilling to create policy around oil drilling … on which side of environmental concerns might they err? To what industry will this oil-specialized technocrat return after losing their government position? With whom will this technocrat be incentivized to ingratiate themselves? This isn’t an issue of corruptibility but one of common sense.

Could one create a form of “philosopher king” or an “aristocracy of experts” that was effective? We believe so, but it would require the creation of a philosopher class into which people are born rather than a meritocracy (though the class need not be heritable). This would remove the corruption of qualifying tests and disincentivize individual corruption (e.g., by removing wealth and pride from the equation, perhaps by obligating any philosopher king or aristocracy to live in isolation).

Such a system would not be terribly different from that used in the governing structure of Tibetan Buddhism, and while their efforts did create one of the better religious leaders, the Dalai Lama still lives in significant luxury. As such, where we push for some iteration of a technocracy, it would be one moderated heavily by AI to slightly-but-firmly nudge the system away from corruption and bias. (Unfortunately, a truly unbiased AI will always look biased to those who are already completely brainwashed.)

Crafting the Perfect Government

An appropriate send-off for the book will be for us to synthesize the information we have collected and theorize on novel, optimal forms of governance. As we would naturally only choose what we believe to be the most optimal governing structure possible for the intergenerational organizations we create, we’ll share our findings by detailing the structure of our House and the Index (two organizations described in greater detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion).

Why do we need better governance structures?

The great innovation enabled by the evolution of consciousness enables mankind to transfer behavioral or conceptual code and have it tested—all within the mind of the receiver—against imagined challenges and previously held ideas. Unlike a spider “learning” how to spin a web, this innovation means mediocre masons or architects do not need to die or fail to produce offspring in order for buildings to improve.

This system of code transference evolved within societies of hundreds of individuals featuring only verbal communication. It is not well adapted to handle memetic transfer in a society as populated and interconnected as our own. As such, human consciousness lacks a powerful “antivirus” to prevent memetic snippets of code that are cleverly shielded from exposure to competition and capable of expanding rapidly.

Due to the increasingly interconnected nature of our society, the world is becoming filled with simplistic ideological viruses that overwrite individuals’ consciousnesses like ophiocordyceps unilateralis, forcing them to spread virulent memetic code across mass communication channels. This disease blocks the core purpose of consciousness: To serve as an internal memetic evolution engine that enables ideas to compete within our minds and only permits the most optimal ideas to survive.

This plague drives the increasing tribalization of our society. We now stand at the precipice of an oceanic trench, staring into the quiet blackness. While we created the Pragmatist Foundation to fight against this threat, practically speaking we have few options available to us. As trivialization increases, democratic societies will increasingly ignore non-radicalized and less-privileged populations.

Realistically, the only solution is for new governance structures implanted throughout society to organically grow until they can contest the decaying institutions around them. When building an institution designed to replace nation states—an installation that you believe could serve as a bulwark against the end of humanity as we understand it—you must not skimp on mechanisms ensuring that the governing structure it uses is robust and will carry out your vision with fidelity well after its original founders and leaders are dead and gone.

Governance Bombs

At the beginning of this book, we briefly mentioned the idea of a “governance bomb.” Now we get to dig deeper. A governance bomb could be used to prevent society from derailing—though one could just as equally derail entire civilizations.

Governance systems can be used to slightly or dramatically alter the behavior of those within them. For example, governing systems can alter behavior in a way that strengthens the organization. A governance bomb is a governance system designed (or evolved) to robustly expand under the nose of an existing governance system, ultimately becoming powerful enough to supplant, modify, or fortify the reigning system.

The classic example of a governance bomb is a religion (or as they are often called in their first half century of existence, a cult). Historically, there have been numerous instances of religions growing within existing governance structures until they are able to either control or replace their host states. That said, religion-based governance systems are both slower and more ideologically rigid than a governance bomb optimized to fix societies’ current problems would be. A defining feature of religious governance bombs is their ideological backbone, which ensures their fidelity of information transfer, but hinders their potential utility.

Multi-level marketing (MLM) schemes present examples of faster-growing governance bombs, however their ability to endure over time and self perpetuate is limited as many ultimately harm and degrade their most loyal adherents (driving them to burn their personal networks, compromise their personal finances, etc.). An effective governance bomb enriches and empowers the majority of its stakeholders, rather than impoverishing and isolating them.

As we have mentioned before, a cultural supervirus^[32] masquerading as parts of the social justice movement functions like a unique form of spontaneously evolved governance bomb that spreads like a transmissible cancer within other governance structures (similar to CTVT, a transmissible cancer in canines). Once a governing unit is infected, a “diversity department” (or similar organizational unit) is formed or overtaken, which, like a cancerous tumor drawing blood vessels to grow around it, siphons resources from the infected organization—not to serve the organization’s mission statement or even aid social justice, but rather to ideologically convert as many stakeholders as possible.

Note: Not all organizations promoting diversity training work this way. Social justice itself is not bad; it just happens to be the perfect cover for a self-replicating memetic package only concerned with growth, as it’s hard to question someone demanding attention and resources in the name (if not the spirit) of such a worthy and unimpeachable cause.

Once a critical mass of infected stakeholders migrates to a new organization, a new tumor forms and repeats the process. In the later stages of an infection, an organization can become so riddled with tumors (departments, projects, and rules designed only to grow and spread—using “social justice” as its cover mission) that the glassy eyed and wheezing husk of the host organization becomes completely ineffective and draws its last breath. Then, like an ant overtaken by Ophiocordyceps unilateralis (the fungus which zombifies ants), the corpse of the organization splits open, releasing its spores into the ecosystem to look for new hosts.

Given that “education” is the primary means of this cancerous governance bomb’s transmission, it differentially targets educational institutions like high schools and colleges. This has detrimental effects on society, which relies on these institutions for education and credentialing, and once they become unduly focused on spreading a specific memetic package, they cease to serve their core purpose.

Because this model of governance bomb lacks a central controlling unit, it may fissile out through a purity spiral. Essentially, because status is gained within the movement by showing more extreme, less compromising adherence, it can reach a point at which it begins to look patently comical to the unconverted. While in groups with a central structure, purity spirals can be moderated before they get out of control, there are few mechanisms for stopping them in such a decentralized movement. Should a movement like this control power in a society, it will either fizzle out because people stop wanting to join it or become fascist and too dangerous to not join (as it will regularly “test” people by having them publicly conform to obviously illogical stances and “purge” those who do not).

A rapidly-scaling, successful company might present a good example of a governance bomb with a centralized control mechanism, but while such organizations can sustainably grow over generations while enriching most of their stakeholders, they are terrible at maintaining an ideological and moral core (almost the exact opposite problem seen in religious governance bombs). An organization cannot address society’s ills if it lacks a strong ideological and moral backbone—and yet for-profit businesses lack them as they are fundamentally optimized to generate profit and this optimization over time shaves off the aspects of the operation that neither optimize profit nor act as self-perpetuating cancers.

As we age, our capacity to engage with new ideas and develop novel philosophies wanes. Only dangerous, self-perpetuating platitudes, utopian fantasies of a better near future, and get-rich quick schemes appear to capture the attention of adult humans at scale. Some might think this shortcoming could be overcome by dividing the governance system into a secret sect of individuals who know the “true mission” and a larger sect dedicated to harvesting money or mindscape from the larger populace, but even such a bifurcated system designed to keep people on mission will eventually see its wealth-harvesting branch break away from its ethical core, seeing it as a superfluous drain on resources (as can be seen with companies that have tried to stay ethical over long periods of time).

How, then, can one create a robust governance bomb that protects humankind’s ability to innovate and adapt? One potential approach would be to build a governance bomb out of a family office that is transparent about its intentions and focused on slow growth. This governance bomb would attract and retain individuals already ideologically aligned with the organization’s goals while facilitating the education and empowerment of their kids—and others—in a way that makes it feasible for stakeholders participating in the organization to comfortably have and raise large families.

Designing a
Governance Bomb

To create a family-office-based governance bomb strong enough to shape the nature of future societies, you must overcome at least four major threats:

Growth
Fidelity of information transfer
Resistance to bad actors
Dilution

Our rule of thumb for addressing these risks involves incentivizing stakeholders in a manner that serves the institution’s purpose. How does this work?

Side note: Dilution is a massively underrated threat to governance bombs that act through families. Historically, most (noble) family units had the explicit goal of increasing their power within the larger social hierarchy and eventually getting their hands on their society’s wider governing systems (like any good governance bomb should). The downfall of this system involved a rise in expectations around family equity. When the British first conquered Ireland, they imposed one of the harshest punishments possible on its powerful families, banning primogeniture and forcing them to split their inheritance equally among their children. This diluted their power, leaving them spent and irrelevant within just a few generations. Now almost all wealthy families—except for the old ones of Europe—are subject to this curse people used to go to war to avoid.

A Governance Bomb Demonstration

We’ll present our family office as an example (this is the organization known as “House Collins” in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion—though the Index uses a model derived from this one). Participants in three separate branches elect a Procurator—one for each branch—to represent them⁠. These three elected Procurators then have a closed-door meeting in which they choose an overall leader for the organization, called an Executor, who runs the organization under the guidance of the previous two Executors.

Internal Bodies

The three branches are the Department of Industry, the Department of the Future, and the Department of the Past.

The Department of Industry

Voting power within the Department of Industry is determined by the amount of money an individual has personally contributed to the organization. This is slightly scaled for wealth (but nothing as extreme as quadratic voting) and has limiters preventing any one individual or organization from controlling more than 49% of the vote.

This is designed to encourage ongoing contribution to the organization and ensure that those with a mind for finance always have some power. The Department of Industry also reduces some risk of bribery and corruption by providing a legitimate outlet for using money to influence the system’s operation. When you make bribes legal and directly beneficial to an organization, you reduce participants’ power to corrupt it. In addition, by establishing financial contributions as a clear pathway to influence within an organization, you shore up the organization’s financial sustainability while also giving power to those who have made personal sacrifices for the system.

The Department of the Future

Voting power in the Department of the Future is determined by the number of active members a person has contributed to the organization, either in the form of new entrants who joined and attributed a particular person as inspiring them to do so or in the form of children over five who have chosen to participate in the organization of their own volition.

Active adult converts earn participants one vote with the Department of the Future, whereas each active child or grandchild participant yields one vote after the age of five and two votes after the age of 15 if they are still participating.

Children and grandchildren of adult converts also count toward votes for the individual who recruited the adult converts, which encourages House members to help new converts start and raise successful families. House members furthermore earn quarter votes for every successful spouse they helped to match with a member, to encourage matchmaking among prospective parents.

These voting rights ensure that those with the most vested interest in the future of the organization have a say in its current operations. Finally, rewarding House members for both children and grandchildren encourages them to be focused on the long term. “Winning” as a cultural unit does not mean raising happy, successful kids; it means raising people who in turn have and raise happy, successful kids.

Childbearing may seem like an overly slow driver of growth, but even a few families having seven kids each generation for a dozen generations can lead to a billion participants. As we argue in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion, we don’t believe it is possible to open the minds of adults—only previously-unaffiliated people who are already aligned with our mission will become new, adult members of this organization.

Growth through high birth rates is the only realistic path to expansion available to governance bombs that don’t want to prey on our lowest and most basal impulses. That said, the system does reward participants for bringing in adults, which should help to both increase short-term growth rates and bring in already-productive adults who can immediately contribute value to the system (it takes a while for a child to reach a point at which they contribute money and human capital rather than technically drain organizational resources).

It may seem odd to allow other individuals into a “family office,” but we have always found the extant system to feel kind of racist—or at least unproductively chauvinistic. Only allowing individuals into one’s family because of their genetics can lead to a system that emboldens ideologies around genetic supremacy. In addition, it conveys to individuals that they are “owed” something because of their birth circumstances, which is a very toxic mindset. Through making participation in the family something that can be earned rather than an expectation, we signal that the core of the family is our culture and our ambition, not just our genes. So long as someone is culturally aligned and fighting for the same goals, who are we to not join forces with them?

Finally, population growth created by a system like this would be a great boon to a world at the precipice of unprecedented demographic collapse—one of the greatest threats our species and ecosystem currently faces (despite what you’ll hear from anti-natalist interest groups, who have done very shallow research on the implications of plummeting human populations). If you are unfamiliar with the data around worldwide plummeting birth rates, visit Pronatalist.org.

The Department of the Past

This body is made up of all living past Executors and is designed to prevent radical change within the system while maximizing follow-through on previous generations’ plans, which may take centuries to fully execute. The Department of the Past is also meant to give those who have lived with the burden of leadership an opportunity to influence the choice of the next leader—plus help them navigate typically unforeseen complications and roadblocks.

Much like the Supreme Court, this is the final body of the organization that can shift and change policy and by far the most powerful of the three branches, as it does more than just elect the next executor (more on these powers later). It is trusted with this power because every member in it will have been elected to run the House’s office at some point in the past, meaning they have all the advantages of having been carefully chosen by the larger mechanism of the governing structure without the risk of extremist positioning that comes from being a single Executor.

Voting Power and Influence

One interesting innovation within this system you may have noticed is that a person can be an important and valued member of the family and have almost no voting power. The system is not designed to give every valued member equal power, but to elect Executors who have a long-term view and strong reasons to support the organization’s mission and values.

This governance bomb is markedly not designed to be fair. For example, a person could be born infertile,⁠ which would make it harder for them to gain a vote within the House of the Future than someone who could easily have kids. That sucks, but their not voting isn’t going to make the system particularly more likely to turn into an evil dictatorship, whereas a bunch of people who have no interest in how the organization is doing in 200 years might.

Each branch’s elected representatives (the Procurators) maintain their positions for five years or until 1% of the voting body signs a petition to elect a replacement, which can happen once every two years (this would be a vanishingly rare event as the only power Procurators have after they choose the Executor—the organization’s leader—is the power to recall the Executor).

Each Executor is elected for a single five-year term. During that term, they are responsible for all final decisions within the organization, the structure of its operations, and everything else—except for the process that elects future Executors. While Executors are responsible for the day-to-day operation of the organization, any of their decisions can be overturned by the combined will of the past two Executors, called Conservators when acting in this role. In ideal scenarios, Conservators mostly act in an advisory capacity and almost never exercise veto power. Essentially, one triumvirate system (the three Procurators) elects the newest member of a second triumvirate system (consisting of one Executor and two Conservators).

There are a number of reasons for setting up the system in this fashion and not just giving the Executor total control:

Sanity checking⁠: Rule by a triumvirate ensures that one suddenly-unstable or stupid leader cannot severely damage the organization. Conservators’ veto power adds a backup control method, beyond Procurator recall, should the leadership of any given Executor go off the rails.
Power transfer⁠: The gradual transfer of power away from a daily operational role to a more prestigious advisory role slowly loosens leaders’ hands on power while settling former Executors into a unique branch of government after this (the Department of the Past), which is a lifetime position that cannot be stripped from the individual (unless they are recalled during their term).
The NASA problem: If an Executor launches an initiative that will take longer than one term to execute, it will be harder for their successor to drop it and take things in a totally different direction. (We call this the NASA problem, as any large space mission requires at least a few presidential administrations to accomplish, thus major missions often get scrapped upon the arrival of a new administration.)
Animosity check: Such a system makes it very difficult for political factions with ill will toward other groups to achieve their goals.

Finally, changes to the way the voting system itself works are made by the Department of the Past, (e.g., does an AI count towards a vote if it has human level intelligence and joins?). Essentially, changes to the voting system can be proposed in a white paper by the Procurator, Executor, or Conservator and that white paper then gets voted on by the Department of the Past—if it receives more than 60% of the vote, it passes.

Resource Allocation

What will the money the organization collects be used for?

Funding startups, initiatives, and sister organizations founded by members: Whether this funding takes the place of equity, debt, or donations, it can only act as a match to other sources of financing and is deployed on equal terms to said institutional financing (i.e. if a member-founded startup raises $1,000,000 from outside investors, then the organization may contribute up to $1,000,000 itself—but no more). This is to make it easier for organization members to build wealth themselves while not allowing for unwise deployment of capital.
Education and childcare for members: Fidelity of information transfer is one of the most difficult challenges faced by multigenerational organizations. Encouraging the evolution of ideas while also ensuring that values and important ideas transfer from one generation to the next is not easy. We believe the only way to strike this balance is by securing a top-tier education for all members that imparts practical skills, equips members with emotional control, and instills a culture of self-examination.
Many more cult-like religious organizations shoot themselves in the foot by either creating negative childhood experiences (which increases attrition) or leaving members’ kids without a competitive edge in larger society (which reduces their ability to contribute wealth and resources to the organization once grown). Institutionally, anything that grants kids a great childhood, pride in their culture, and a competitive edge in modern markets should be considered a priority.
Fertility Support and Matchmaking Markets: Given that a core focus of the organization is the production of new children, the organization will both fund things like IVF, the creation of children through artificial wombs, and matchmaking markets to help people find spouses.

Critically, the organization will never fund things like general healthcare or broadly charitable efforts. Healthcare is an endless pit for a family office once someone is terminally ill but one that always feels justifiable in the moment—you can burn through fortunes just trying to give one person a few years more of life. In addition, broadly charitable efforts can be used by individuals to raise their personal status within a community and burn through money with remarkable speed given they provide exogenous (to the betterment of the family) reasons to spend money.

Management

In its first years, we expect our family-office-turned-governance-bomb to run off of a Chinese-room-style architecture, but we have the mental clarity to recognize that even though this is the most effective current system and one we invented, it is still just a management system. Transcribing it into the code of a government would be as silly as transcribing SCRUM or waterfall product management techniques into a government structure—these things are temporary and will be improved with future generations.

Also, this is all crazy talk—the odds of our governance bomb actually working past our generation are extremely low unless we give our kids the greatest and best childhood possible while also preparing them to be successful adults (with success defined by metrics they choose for themselves). Even then, the odds are low. (Because we want to try anyway, our next book will be on not fucking that up.)

Great Chatting Again

If you have made it this far, you have likely read at least one or our other books and by that standard, we are old friends! As always, leaving us positive reviews on Amazon and upvoting other positive reviews makes our lives a lot easier. It would mean a great deal to us were you to extend this kindness to The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance. We are also happy to chat with any of our readers whenever you like—especially if you think there is something we could do to improve our books (we update them based on reader input a few times a year).

Our next major project won’t be a book, but rather an alternate educational platform presenting a novel approach to school, the Collins Institute (CollinsInstitute.org). We have a bit of a fire lit under us with this next project, ensuring we get it done in time for our own kids. If you have any interest in education and/or wish to produce a governance bomb starting with your own family of genius children, let us know.

Appendix

Information Flow

Identical democracies with different information flow will manifest completely differently. Take one with a free media and independent education structure and contrast it with another that has state-run media and a state-mandated curriculum. In the latter case, the governing party will be incentivized to leverage state control of information to consolidate power within the electorate. This can be seen in the U.S., which has partial state control of education systems. Attempts at power consolidation can be observed through differences in textbooks created by the same publishers in California and Texas, with the former pushing a clearly liberal agenda on children and the latter promoting conservative policies.

The importance of information flows is not relegated to state-level governance structures. Consider family offices: A family office that openly shares board meeting minutes with the family and is transparent about how money is being invested is going to have a very different character than one that limits such information to only those involved in active management.

Information Asymmetry

In addition to playing out at both the level of the nation state and small governance structures, some governing structures intentionally incorporate information asymmetry into their operations—or may be riddled with it as an unintentional artifact that could have been avoided with more intentional design.

For an example of intentional information asymmetry, consider how things may have played out in the U.S. if Donald Trump had had full access to any information associated with an investigation into him. For a close-to-home example of unintentional asymmetries, think of the dearth of information sharing between agencies created by a model that encouraged inter-agency competition leading up to the 9-11 attacks and how that lack of cooperation shaped the U.S. government.

Handling Disinformation

The manner in which a system punishes disinformation significantly impacts outcomes. How would your family office, company, or nonprofit punish someone for lying or omitting information? The answer to that question will determine the fidelity of the information the governing body will utilize to operate.

The negative impact of disinformation should not be underplayed when determining how fastidious a governance system will be with its rules. Firing a CEO for lying to a board can, as an individual decision, seem more likely to hurt a company more than help it—however, if the action is not taken, all information fidelity in the organization will take a hit once it becomes clear that rules around lying can be bent for important employees.

That said, fidelity of information flows can be ensured by means other than punishing misinformation or omissions—such as relying on redundancies in information flow pathways.

Even allowing idle gossip to reach the ears of decision makers can have significant effects. Consider a study published by Baum et al. in the journal Emotion that found people to be heavily influenced by gossip and accusations even when the information is presented as untrustworthy. Simply tagging a source of information as unreliable to a decision maker is not enough to prevent them from acting on it. A governance structure that takes this kind of bias into account can be observed in the U.S. court system, which does not allow trials to proceed after jurors have been biased and disallows media access on a trial to jurors during the trial.

Informational Echo Chambers

There is a general belief in Western societies that a lack of state control over information flows is always a good thing. While it is true that state-controlled information flows always bias information to suit the existing power structure of a governance, it is not true they are always worse than the alternative. For example, commercially owned media sources are more likely to become biased toward sensationalist stories—as that is what they are rewarded for. Similarly, private educational channels are more likely to become more polluted with disinformation than those run by the state. When you remove a government-mandated curriculum, you don’t automatically get a more educated populace.

This is a particular area of interest in the context of social media platforms. A great article in Nature by Stewart et al. explores how information gerrymandering in social networks skews collective decision-making.^[33] It has long been known that people gravitate toward ideologically aligned content and friends on social media, creating “filter bubbles” that limit information exposure and foster political polarization, but in this paper Stewart et al. demonstrate that, through misunderstanding the general opinion of the larger populace, gridlock becomes more likely as filter bubbles make it harder to see what compromises are actually necessary to achieve the end goal. Stewart et al. demonstrated this using both mathematical models and real-world population groups. Perhaps governments of the future will enforce a certain percentage of “random friends” on social networking platforms to ensure this kind of informational gerrymandering does not happen.

Informational Filters on Those Given Power

Governing bodies will be significantly influenced by any informational filter imposed on those given positions of power. This can work in a negative context, like the Khmer Rouge filtering educated individuals out of positions of management, or in a positive context, as was the case in the Chinese Imperial examinations during the Han dynasty. Even though the examinations did not test for technical expertise, they did test for general intelligence and ensured a common culture among the ruling class leading to cohesion in action. Sometimes cohesion in action can be more effective than technical correctness of action when it comes to maintaining peace and stability.

Vote Transparency

Transparency—or lack thereof—will alter voting behavior. A simple example of this is seen with dot-voting, in which individuals take a dot sticker and place it on a quadrant on a sheet of paper representing what they want to vote for. The information about how other people are voting is actively displayed the moment they vote and thus will inevitably influence behavior. It will also affect trust in the voting system.

In a particularly vivid example of how exposure to other people publicly voicing their opinion can warp an individual perception, consider the Asch conformity experiments. Researchers presented three lines of clearly different lengths to participants, who were asked which of the three is the same length as a fourth line. The difference in line length was apparent that any child could get the answer right, but when participants heard other fake participants consistently give the wrong answer first, 75% of them eventually started giving the wrong answer themselves. How do you share information between stakeholders in a governance system without overbiasing them?

One system meant to correct for this effect is the Delphi method. In the Delphi method, experts are asked for their opinion on a subject. These opinions are then anonymized and shared with an expert panel with the same question then being asked of them again. This grants participants a chance to revise their answers. Over time, their answers will change and presumably converge on something more accurate.

We will dive more into other potential solutions for the above dilemmas as the book winds to a close.

Enforcement Mechanisms

We’ve all cringed at the cliché of the United Nations sending a country breaking international laws “a very sternly written letter.” The power of enforcement mechanisms is particularly evident in most governing structures that exist above the level of the state and suffer from notoriously weak mechanisms for ensuring compliance and punishing detraction.

At the state level, enforcement mechanisms typically involve punishments like fines and jail whereas at the level of family offices, enforcement often entails withholding financial contributions. A family office incapable of using capital to reward certain life paths has very little power.

Options for enforcement mechanisms typically include:

Rewards
- Augmented status, wealth, time, pleasure, power, or freedom
Punishments
- Reduced status, wealth, time, power, or freedom
- Pain
- Death

Maintaining Motivation

While enforcement is often thought of in terms of coercion, it may be more effectively wielded by encouraging intrinsic motivational states. While only some governments need to optimize for high overall morale among stakeholders, any government will care about motivation—whether that motivation comes from belief in that government’s inspiring vision or the barrel of a gun.

Motivation attained through force is not effective in the long term as it naturally engenders those being forced to perform a task to look for alternatives to escape the system. Either coerced individuals flee, robbing the group of productive participants, or they get caught and are punished—often meaning they are either killed or seriously injured, which also removes productive participants from the mix. Such systems always have a “workforce bleed” making them intrinsically less effective than those focusing on internal motivation (not to mention that studies generally show motivation with violence leads to less creativity and other forms of cognitive impairment, making it poor for high-cognitive-load tasks).

How can you motivate people without violence? An interesting study on this came from Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile, who demonstrated that communicating small wins to employees significantly improved their mood. In addition, creating the perception that colleagues liked them and were willing to provide resources and advice helped to maintain motivation and increase creative problem solving and engagement.^[34]

These tactics can largely be simulated. An individual need not actually be appreciated or liked by their employees as long as there are systems in place to make them believe they are—or mechanisms that regularly remind them of the few that do.^[35] You could also map positive relationships within the company by analyzing the text of personal communications between company members and engineer opportunities for additional productive collaboration.

An area that is less clear in the research is whether self management improves motivation. We would love to say self-managed teams are always best, but the research is not clear. In our experience, top performers are more productive when self managed whereas average and below-average players perform dramatically worse when left to manage their own workloads.

Governing Model Inefficiencies

Finally, let’s consider some common inefficiencies within governance models (or within nested governance models where one government is contained within another), as well as potential ways to address them.

Rent Seeking

This occurs when an individual or a company uses the resources of the government without the goal of giving anything back. It can be hard to fight because those who benefit from the corrupt governing body have far more to lose than anyone fighting it has to gain by ending the abuse.

Solution 1

At the state level, the most obvious solution to rent seeking is to have life appointment positions (similar to the Supreme Court) at a branch of the government designed to stamp it out. The life appointment is necessary because of the strong pressure for those benefiting from rent seeking to find a way to help the individuals of this department to maintain their position. If a system can be corrupted, it will be, given enough time.

Solution 2

If rent seeking can be quantified, you may attempt to apply economic pressure against it. A reward slightly larger than the value generated by any rent-seeking behavior identified can be granted to anyone who discovers and proves the existence of said rent-seeking behavior. This reward would be paid for by the rent seeker. While such a system is interesting, we must state that it would almost certainly lead to unintended consequences, as almost all market-based solutions do. (Note: The reason you have the rent seeker pay the reward is that it prevents situations in which the reward system ends up motivating teams in which one person creates rent-seeking behavior where it otherwise would not exist and then their partner catches them.) Such a system would also create an economic incentive to form and invest in companies that use AI to catch rent-seeking behavior.

Solution 3

In the Dune book series, counsel at one point discusses a problem in which poachers of a valuable resource (spice) are paying bribes to those meant to be guarding it in order to access it. The protagonist suggests a solution in which the average price of these bribes is calculated and the government introduces a program in which poachers can just pay directly for access to the spice, starving out the rent seekers and redirecting the previous “friction” into the economy while reducing the government’s operational costs.

This “antiseptic” strategy has always been our favorite to implement. Essentially you take the rent seeking behavior that is endemic and make the government system itself a more efficient customer of it. The downside is that this only works for a very specific subset of rent-seeking behavior.

The Flypaper Effect

If a regional governing module is receiving resources from a larger (e.g., national) one, the regional body spends those resources inefficiently (when contrasted with locally-raised funds). This is a well studied and measured effect in the academic field that focuses on governance, so named because “money always sticks where it hits.”

Solution

With state governing bodies, the solution is obvious—funds should always be raised locally when possible.

Where this gets more interesting is among private entities—is the money that goes to a corporation’s marketing department subject to the flypaper effect if it is a set sum every month? We would argue that in most cases, it is. This hazard can be addressed by having departments’ contributions to the company quantified and their budget based on said contributions. Obviously, this has the downside of punishing struggling departments at a company. This could be addressed by allowing for multiple competing iterations of a struggling department to be judged by the same metric (i.e., you could have multiple marketing departments functioning independently with more resources going to the more successful department).

The Principal-Agent Problem

This happens when an individual is hired for a job that entails both misaligned incentives and asymmetric information. Think of a board hiring a CEO or you hiring a lawyer. You don’t know what is involved in law well enough to know if the hours that lawyer is billing you are legitimate. This problem can be compound when the agent works for multiple principles.

Solution

This problem is slightly more intractable than the others discussed and the solutions available are tentative at best. If we had to advocate for one, it would involve using open, competitive labor markets where principals can view agents’ reviews and long-term performance in favor of clients.

In our companies, we have found the best solution is to psychologically flip the problem on its head: Have the principal share as much information with us as possible about how they are structuring their time and charging us.

Moral Hazard

This occurs when an entity has an incentive to increase its exposure to risk because it does not bear the full costs of that risk. The classic example here is pollution.

Solution

Price the exogenous risk and pass that risk on to the governance structure or individual—then allow that priced risk to be traded on a free market. We see this running effectively in the carbon credit market.

Regulatory Capture

This is the process whereby a regulatory module of a governance structure is “captured” and controlled by something it is supposed to be regulating. At the state level this could look like the tobacco industry using tobacco regulators to prevent new companies from entering the industry. At the level of a family office, this could look like a system that was originally designed to ensure one’s descendants still get real jobs being used to disenfranchise the descendants who don’t have time for family politics … due to having real jobs.

Solution

Generally speaking, the best way to prevent regulations from falling into the very hands they were meant to block is to not create those regulations in the first place. If you must create regulations, make them something anyone (versus just industry experts) can calculate and enforce.

Regulatory capture is facilitated at the state level by the fact that most of the career opportunities for someone experienced enough to regulate a thing will be in other companies in the same field (an expert in nuclear power will either be regulating the industry or working in it). At the level of the family office, regulatory capture is facilitated by the competence paradox: That the least competent family members have the most time for family politics and the least to lose by playing dirty.

If you make the regulations so simple and objective that a randomly-chosen stakeholder could enforce them—and if you systematically avoid hiring industry players or family members to judge regulatory infractions—then you can insulate yourself from regulatory capture. More complicated systems less susceptible to regulatory capture can be created through the use of artificial intelligence.

Cataloging Voting

Use the following summary as a cheat sheet when constructing an organization:

How to Vote
- One Unit, One Vote: In this system, an individual or unit gets a single vote for one choice.
- Limited Voting: In this system an individual with a limited number of votes but more than one vote, votes for a few measures/people
- Weighted Voting: In this system some individuals’ votes carry more weight but still go into the same “pool” instead of being lensed through a higher order system and a secondary vote (as might happen if you had something like different states of various populations vote on a one state one vote rule).
  - Functionally, this is how U.S. presidential elections currently work but technically they are happening through a secondary lens.
  - Weighted voting is vastly underused and can be used to drive desired behavior patterns—we will discuss this more in our section on building better governance structures.
  - Liquid democracy, in which individuals can choose to transfer their vote on a per issue basis to a more informed representative, acts as a form of weighted voting but is really more of a compromise between representative and direct democracy. (Note: There are a few types of liquid democracy which can sometimes be more like a version of ranked voting as opposed to generic weighted voting like the single transferable vote system.)
- Ranked Voting: Preferences are listed in a ranked fashion by each voter. One’s secondary preferences can then be taken into account in a number of ways such as: in a tie, if it is clear one’s primary preference will not win, and through the numerical weighting of one’s preferences.
  - If you are interested in creating a governance structure that uses ranked voting we encourage you to explore some of its more mathematically complex implementations such as the Schulze method, implicit utilitarian voting, Borda Count, Bucklin Voting, instant-runoff voting, and the Minimax Condorcet method. While you can spend ages trying to create the “fairest,” most “representative” voting system and really dig in on this stuff—governments created in this way don’t seem to function any better or have less corruption / wasted effort, so we really don’t see the point.
  - Single Transferable Vote: In this system subordinate voting bodies (i.e., states) elect multiple candidates who are chosen once they pass a pre-set threshold—winning candidates give the votes they did not “need” to pass the threshold to the voters’ other choices and candidates with no hope of winning also give their votes to other candidates. (And while this sounds complicated it can be made yet more so using systems like Schulze STV.)
  - Encouraged voting (whether it be mandatory or rewarded in some way) works terribly with ranked choice voting systems as some people will act as “donkey voters” just counting down 1, 2, 3, 4 on the ballet. This can be ameliorated by randomizing choices but still—as ranked choice systems place a higher cognitive load on the voter this is not good.
- Score Voting: Scores are given to each candidate or issue and then added up. Typically, the participant with the highest total score wins but the system can be utilized in different ways (e.g., STAR voting uses score voting to decide between the top two candidates which themselves are chosen by a simple majority vote).
  - While this may sound obscure it is actually very common. Some uses of this you have likely encountered are when judges of an athletic competition lift placards with a number on them or when someone asks a crowd to cheer for their favorite candidate, a method of candidate selection that goes back to ancient Sparta.
  - For more complicated iterations of this system see majority voting methodology, STAR voting, and reweighted range voting (basically modifies score voting to work more like single transferable vote voting).
  - Also known as utilitarian voting
- Approval Method: Instead of choosing between candidates/issues, voters write “approve” or “disapprove” for each. Basically, the same thing as Score voting but with a binary choice in score.
  - This system can be modified for multiple candidates using “sequential proportional approval voting”
- Cumulative Voting: In this system individuals can split their vote giving a portion of it to different candidates (1/3rd to one candidate, 2/3rds to another). This splitting is typically done either by giving each person multiple individual votes to cast but allowing them to cast them all for the same candidate or by splitting the vote of individuals who choose to mark multiple candidates on a ballot sheet. (This system is common in corporate governance and is mandated for that role in seven U.S. states.)
- Condorcet method: This can be achieved through a number of different voting methodologies but in general the idea is to do a round robin of all the issues at play against all the other issues at play and see who wins. There are some less complicated variants and some more complicated methods. It is worth noting, as a variant of it is the procedure used for determining motions given in Robert’s Rules of Order, the most widely used manual of parliamentary procedure in the United States.
  - Some more specialist variants of this are the Kemeny–Young method and the Bucklin Method.
- Mixed Member Electoral Systems: In these systems individuals vote both for a local rep and a party. There are many regional variants such as Scorporo.
- Multi Round: In this system multiple elections are held in a sequence. The most common variant chooses top candidates with the first vote and among the top candidates with a second vote
- Spit Voting: In these systems the type of voting done is split depending on the stage or purpose of the vote. Our favorite example is Futarchy which uses a vote to set success metrics for the government but a decision market to determine how they are accomplished.
Win Condition
- First Past the Post / Plurality: Essentially just the majority vote but given a fancy name because the choice with the most votes may only have 30% of the votes making it technically just a “relative majority.”
- Threshold Vote: Implementation occurs when one gets over some predetermined threshold (people often refer to these as supermajority votes but we don’t like the term as “supermajority” specifically refers to thresholds of over 50% but one could theoretically have a threshold of 30% in a system with seven parties).
- Consensus: 100% consensus is required by all parties with voting power before implementation can be achieved.
- Proportional implementation: In this system an issue is decided in half measures based on the proportion of the electorate that voted on it. This could translate into anything from the number of seats in a congress (if 60% of the electorate voted Republican than 60% of the congress is made republican) to how much funding something gets (if half the town wants a school to get $0 funding and half wants it to get $100,000, it will get $50,000)
How to Count
- Multi-Majority: This what we saw in the Swiss system, votes are counted for different entity types (e.g., all citizens, all members of a specific ethnic demographic, all land owners, all states, all companies, etc.). Each sub-governance structure votes with that vote’s outcome counting as a vote in a second round with its own win condition.
  - Note: This win condition defaults to consensus like in the Swiss system when one is only counting votes coming from two entity types but other systems can be used when more entity types are taken into account.
- Random Ballet: A random ballot is chosen out of those placed. This ballot is the winner, making an issue or candidate’s possibility of winning proportional to how many people voted on it/them.
  - While this may seem stupid it does have some real uses. For example, if you are choosing 100 members for an assembly and use this system, the outcome may be cheaper than total ballot counting and will end with approximately the same amount of assembly body control per party as one would get with a more traditional voting system.
- Coalition: When they lose, parties that voted for different outcomes can combine their vote
- General Ticket and Representative Voting: In these systems individuals vote for a party or representative that then makes a secondary, presumably more informed, vote on original voters’ behalf.
  - This is how the U.S. presidential vote was supposed to work but representative voting systems often break down when some representatives begin to just pledge to vote for a single specific final candidate.
- Majority Bonus System: This is a party-based system in which the winning party is given additional seats in a judicial body, presumably to enhance government stability.

The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships

Ruthlessly optimized strategies for dating, sex, and marriage

Simone & Malcolm Collins

http://Pragmatist.Guide

Simone & Malcolm Collins

As with our last book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, you can get a free audio version of this book by visiting our website: Pragmatist.Guide/RelationshipsAudio

Our first crack at writing this book turned out to be so extensive that we ultimately divided our work into two separate volumes. This volume, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships, outlines strategies for securing relationships, sex, and marriage and introduces methods for maintaining positive relationships. The other volume, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, focuses on how our brains process sexually arousing stimuli and how pair-bonding behavior systems (aka love) can be gamed. As with all products of the Pragmatist Foundation, the proceeds from sales will go to nonprofits.

To be notified when the next Pragmatist Guide goes live, submit your email to Pragmatist.Guide/Notifications

Contents

Why Read This Book 1

The Pragmatic Model 3

How to Use the Appendix 6

The Marketplace 10

How the Marketplace Affects Relationship Stability 13

Other Marketplace Considerations 17

Misjudgments of Aggregate Desirability 17

Your Value Off the Market 19

Uneven Relationships 21

Know What You Bring To The Table 21

Relationship Lures And Their Resulting Relationship Dynamics 23

The Dominance Lure 26

The Nice Lure 37

The Sexual Exploration Lure 39

The Easy Lure 46

The Love Lure 50

The Sneaky Lure 52

Sneaky Copulation and Female Mimicry 55

The Pygmalion Lure 57

The Status Lure 69

The Self-Identity Lure 72

The Damsel in Distress Lure Variant of the Self-Identity Lure 77

The Admiration Lure Variant of the Self-Identity Lure 80

The Friend with Benefits Lure 83

The Long-Term Relationship Lure 86

The Social Construct Lure 91

Which Lure Should I Use? 94

Long-Term Relationships 95

Sex 98

Relationship Contracts 100

Implied Contract Escalation 105

Marriage Contracts 109

Clauses to Avoid in Marriage Contracts 110

Clauses Making Impossible Demands 110

Clauses Leading to Asset Depreciation 111

Constructing a Marriage Contract 118

Altering Marriage Contracts to Manage Individual Desirability 121

Varying Levels of Contract Clause Risk 125

Conflict Resolution Clauses 128

On Resolving Conflict with Compromise 129

On Resolving Conflict with Hierarchy 131

On Resolving Conflict with a Third-Party Arbitrator 135

On Resolving Conflict with Votes 136

Addressing Finance Clauses in Marriage Contracts 137

Other Financial Strategy Considerations 140

Luxury Accessories 140

Mismatched Expected Lifestyles 141

Common Financial Configurations in Relationships 145

Complete Financial Separation with Agreed-Upon Individual or Shared Payments 145

Shared Pool with Discretionary Income Allowances 148

Single Pool With Pocket Money 150

Addressing Marriage Contract Violations 152

Hurt Feelings and Lost Respect 154

Reversal or Correction of Violation 155

Specific Generic Cost 156

Specific Unique Cost 158

Relationship Renegotiation 159

Partnership Dissolution 161

Cognitive Integration in Marriage and Long-Term Relationships 162

Cognitive Separation 164

Cognitive Siloing 165

Cognitive Integration 171

The Economics of Relationships 182

Economic Trends to Exploit 183

The Illusion of Hypergamy 184

Exploiting Differences in Standards 190

Timing Considerations 194

Instinctual Life Stage Behavioral Impulses 195

The Profound Effects of Fertility and Childbirth 205

The Wall & How Dating Dynamics Change at Age 30 211

Marriage 222

Geography 226

The Human Mating Season 229

Choosing Not to Have a Partner 230

“Bad” Relationships 234

Fear of Change 236

Incorrect Judgment 237

The Most Important Skill in Dating: Avoiding the Local Optimum Trap 239

Escaping the Local Optimum Trap in Long-Term Relationships 242

Avoiding The Local Optimum Trap While Dating 244

Avoiding The Local Optimum Trap While Looking for Sex 247

Avoiding The Local Optimum Trap While Single 250

Predicting When Your Partner Will Determine Your Relationship to Be “Bad” 252

Our Inefficient Biology 258

The Funny Ways We React to Testosterone 258

Monitoring Personal Hormonal States 267

Kissing and Touch 269

Blue Balls 271

Mate Guarding Behavior 272

The Cognitive Effects of Birth Control Pills 276

The Genetics of Love 276

The G Spot 277

Length of Sex 277

Avoid Partners Who Want to Be Happy 278

The Effects of Chastity on Pair-Bonding 279

Non-Monogamy 286

Why is Non-Monogamy Not the Norm? 290

New Relationship Energy 297

What Monogamous People Should Learn from Poly Culture 299

Compersion 302

The Myth of Our Poly or Monogamous Past 305

How to Train Your Partner 310

Marry Someone Who Will Work to Make You Better 311

Partner Training Tips 313

When To Begin Training 316

Dealing With An Ex’s Training 318

Accidental Training 322

Maintaining a Positive Relationship 324

Signaling That The Partner Got the Better End of the Deal 325

Making the Relationship Feel Exciting and Special 326

Making Partners Feel Like Good People 328

Making Partners Feel Desired (by a Desirable Person) 329

Reassuring Partners That The Relationship Helps Them Achieve Their Goals 331

Internal Communication 334

Effective Transference of Information 339

Ignored Communication 345

Self-Narratives and Communication 347

Rekindling Relationships 351

Abuse as a Concept 357

Proto-Abuse vs. Abuse 360

Accidental Training of Proto-Abusive Behavior 365

Love Does Not Equal Caring 374

Attractiveness Strategies and Research 378

The Puzzle 379

The Solution 381

Less Practical (But Immensely Fun) Tidbits on Attractiveness 384

Eye Dilation 386

The Tradeoff Between Attractiveness and Competence 387

Wealthy Male Preferences 387

The Difficult Male Market 390

Ethnicity 391

Stoicism 395

Intelligence Differentials 395

Smells 396

The Closing Time Effect 396

Heavy Breathing Sounds 397

Personality Traits Tied to Looks 397

The Pratfall Effect 398

The Kawaii Effect 399

Protean Signals 400

Friends and Groups 401

Use of Metaphoric Language 401

Waist-to-Hip and Chest-To-Waist Ratios 402

Motivating Yourself 404

Realistic Expectation Setting 404

Leveraging Point-Based Motivational Systems 407

Leveraging Social Reinforcement 409

Getting Back On the Market 410

Breakups: A Guide 413

High Taxation Breakup Methods 414

Low-Taxation Breakup Methods 417

Breakup Traps 418

Conclusion 421

Appendix

How to “Get Laid” as a Young Adult 428

Engaging and Talking to People 438

Escalating Conversations 441

Flirting 444

Broaching the Topic of Sex or a Relationship 449

Moving to The Idea of Sex 451

Getting References 454

Warnings 458

But I Hate Being Rejected! 461

Securing a Long-Term Relationship 463

Male Template Strategy 464

Female Template Strategies 471

Securing a Husband 478

Age Considerations in Husband Searches 478

Helpful Husband Hunting Tactics 480

Leverage Peer Pressure 480

Pop the Question 480

Consider Moving On After 22 Months And No Engagement 481

Make Sacrifices 481

Sex and Dating in a World with Social Distancing 483

But Whatever I Do, Nothing Works! 493

People Who Just Don’t Have a Chance 494

People Who Fail Because of Who They Are 496

Defining Human Relationships 498

Factors Affecting Desirability 501

Physical Attractiveness 502

Kink Preference 504

Contractual Perks or Downsides 505

Personality + Trope 506

Mental Attributes 507

Emotional, Hormonal, and Instinctual Factors 508

Availability 509

Chastity-Promiscuity 513

Wealth 514

Fertility 516

Physical Alteration 516

Children from Previous Partners 518

Beliefs About the World 519

Sources of Recreation 520

Opportunity Cost 521

Status 521

Signaling 522

The Four Core Markets 524

The Sex Market 524

The Casual Dating Market 530

The Long-Term Relationship Market 537

The Non-Monogamous Market 538

On Citations and Studies 541

Why People Cheat Rather Than Leave a Relationship 543

What to Do When a Partner Cheats 544

Other Factors Contributing to Cheating 549

Sex in a Long-Term Relationship 552

Common Marriage Contract Themes 563

Guide to Avoiding Crazy 570

How to Avoid Dangerous and Unstable Sexual Partners 572

People who associate their identity with their sexuality 573

People Who Are Visibly Unstable 576

People Addicted to Hard, Highly Addictive Drugs 576

Vengeful People 577

People Out of Your League Who Make The First Move 577

Desperate People 578

People Who Clearly Do Not Like You Or Your Kind 578

Emotionally Manipulative People 579

How to Avoid Dangerous and Unstable Long-Term Partners 579

Partners Who Demand Money or Gifts 580

Partners Who Would Be Vindictive in a Divorce 582

Partners Who Keep Score and Hold Grudges 583

Partners Who Are Inherently Suspicious 584

Partners With Significantly Different Worldviews / Values / Objective Functions 586

Partners Who Do Not Value Emotional Control 588

Partners Who Make Threats or Impose Ultimatums 589

Partners Who Seek Constant Sexual Validation from Strangers and Acquaintances 589

Partners Who Incorporate Negative Character Traits into Their Core Identities 591

A Call for Introspection 591

False Red Flags 592

Partners Suffering from Mental Illness 593

Partners Suffering from Addictions 594

Partners with Controlling Behavior 595

Partners Who Do Not Conform to Societal Ideals 596

Relationships in Which One Partner Voluntarily Surrenders Power to Another Partner 598

Partners with Strange Kinks 601

Hurting People in Relationships 603

How To Avoid Hurting Relationship Partners 603

How To Avoid Hurting Sexual Partners 605

Abuse 610

The Control Theory 612

Abuse as a Relationship Strategy 614

Attempts to Lower a Partner’s Perceived Market Value 615

Attempts to Lower a Partner’s Actual Market Value 615

Attempts to Introduce an Externality to a Breakup 616

Attempts to Emotionally Drain a Partner 617

Attempts to Block a Partner from Meeting or Socializing With Others 618

Lying in Relationships 620

Intentional Misrepresentation in Relationships 620

Misrepresentation Because You Are Primarily Looking For Sex 621

Misrepresentation Because You Plan To Tell Your Partner Later 622

Misrepresentation Because You Plan To Maintain The Lie Indefinitely 623

Misrepresentation of Intended Relationship Lifespan 624

Unintentional Misrepresentation in Relationships Due to Unanticipated Changes 625

Defense Against Misrepresentation 628

Attachment Styles 631

Secure 633

Anxious-Preoccupied 634

Dismissive-Avoidant 634

Fearful-Avoidant 635

A More Effective Way to Approach Attachment Styles 636

Wait . . . 641

Why Read This Book

eople hate thinking systematically about how to optimize their relationships. It is normal to hear someone say: “I will just wait for something to happen naturally” when talking about one of the most important aspects of their life while genuinely believing that this approach has reasonable odds of success. Imagine if people said the same thing about their careers. It would sound truly bizarre for someone to expect a successful career to “just happen naturally” and yet it is entirely normalized to expect that good relationships will.

People pay tens of thousands of dollars to receive degrees in computer science, marketing, and neuroscience. They make tough sacrifices with the understanding that the skills and knowledge they build in these domains will dramatically affect their quality of life. Ironically, people spend very little time systematically examining mating strategies—despite the fact that a robust understanding of the subject can dramatically affect quality of life.

We will happily argue that your sexual and relationship skills matter more than your career skills. If you want to be wealthy, the fastest way to become so is to marry rich. Nothing makes happiness easier than a loving, supportive relationship, while one of the best ways to ensure you are never happy is to enter or fail to recognize and escape toxic relationships. If you want to change the world, a great partner can serve as a force multiplier. A draft horse can pull 8000 pounds, while two working together can pull 24,000 pounds. When you have a partner with whom you can synergize, you gain reach and speed that neither you nor your partner could muster individually.

Heck, even if you are the type of person to judge your self-worth by the number of people with whom you have slept, a solid grasp of mating strategies will help you more than a lifetime of hitting the gym (and we say this with full acknowledgment that hitting the gym absolutely helps). A great romantic relationship will even positively impact your health (a 2018 paper in Psychophysiology found that the presence of a partner in a room lowered participants’ blood pressure) and increase your lifespan (a 2019 paper in the journal Health Psychology showed individuals in happy marriages died young at a 20% lower rate).

This book presents our mental library of information on how relationships function and thus can be your guide to systematically developing a mating strategy that will optimize your ability to achieve your goals, even if those goals happen to be as straightforward as happiness and personal fulfillment.

The Pragmatic Model

Just as our first book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, shows readers how to use The Pragmatic Thought Framework to build a system for making their own decisions about how the world works, this guide uses the same framework to help our audience take a ruthless, practical, and unsentimental approach to sex, dating, and marriage.

The Pragmatic Thought Framework used in our guides is straightforward:

Decide what you want to achieve and why.
Create a plan to achieve that thing based on the type of evidence you decide has value to you.
Execute that plan while constantly testing it, validating it, and adjusting it as you obtain better information.

You might imagine this framework is uncontroversial. This is not the case. In a society obsessed with forming teams, identifying and labeling “bad guys,” and discouraging thoughts that might hurt someone’s feelings or cause distress, this model for thinking is quite iconoclastic.

All that is a rather ostentatious way for us to say that some ideas in this book will be offensive. We did not set out to write a book that won’t offend people.

Offense is an emotion people feel when something credibly challenges their worldview. When an idea that challenges one’s worldview is not credible, one may find it worrying, threatening, and maybe even rage-inducing, but one will not feel the emotion of “offense.” If we have succeeded in writing a book that challenges societal norms surrounding relationships, we will have created a book that most readers will find at least a little offensive.

We personally love ideas that offend us. To us, offense is like the burn you get in your muscles during an intense workout; a burn that in part results from all the microtears in our muscles that ultimately lead to new growth (well that and lactic acid buildup, but that confuses the analogy, so we will ignore it). The discomfort caused by the creation of those microtears is quite literally a direct sign that ultimately we will become stronger, better people.

All that said, if any of our theories are so disagreeable to you that you feel compelled to challenge our view on the subject, we invite you to engage us in a way that leverages the types of evidence we value: Unbiased, well-designed scientific/anthropological studies and common cultural tropes. You can reach us at [email protected]

How to Use the Appendix

hroughout this book, we will reference the appendix, which serves as a repository for content that will likely only be relevant to a niche audience.

Some appendix resources to get you started (these sections should be read before diving into the rest of the book if they are relevant to you):

How to “Get Laid” as a Young Adult, page 428: If you are inexperienced and still trying to figure out how to easily secure a partner, we encourage you to read this section of the appendix before moving forward in this book. We wrote this section in an attempt to stifle the proliferation of techniques optimized by thirty-year-old pick-up artists for use in bars, which are hardly appropriate for safe and effective use by younger audiences (i.e. a seventeen-year-old with no experience dating). When a person is inexperienced, a dangerous cocktail of hormones and social norms can make getting laid feel like the only thing that matters, leading them to make life-altering decisions out of desperation without a source of level-headed, logical advice. We imagine a portion of the people who picked up this book fall into this demographic, so we wrote this section to help them safely and reliably date and secure a partner. If you are older than twenty-five and trying to learn how to secure a partner, even if you are inexperienced, the advice in our chapter on lures will be more applicable to you.
Securing a Long-Term Relationship, page 463:This is a crash course for those looking to find and secure a long-term partner at any stage of life.
Securing a Husband, page 478: This section is an exploration of the data surrounding who is most likely to propose and when.
Sex and Dating in a World with Social Distancing, page 483: This appendix chapter details adaptations that may be made to dating and sexual strategy when in-person interaction becomes limited or more dangerous—such was the case with the COVID-19 pandemic that arose during the final stages of the book’s editing. This particular event can be seen as a case study revealing insights into optimal ways people might modify partner acquisition strategies as the world and technology change.
But Whatever I Do, Nothing Works!, page 493: This chapter explores possible causes if all of your relationships fail or you have been totally unable to secure a partner no matter what you try. It will also help you troubleshoot your situation.
Defining Human Relationships, page 498: This is a short section that can help you think through how to define the concept of a relationship and how the various aspects of the concept interact with each other. This is not a section we would recommend for the casual reader. This philosophical odyssey is intended for those trying to get a more holistic understanding of our perspective on the topic and how that perspective may color our advice.
The Four Core Markets, page 524:Here we discuss the differences between “The Sex Market,” “The Dating Market,” “The Long-Term Relationship Market,” and “The Non-Monogamy Market.” The key takeaway is this: One’s value on the various markets differs dramatically, with women typically having a statistical advantage in markets oriented around short-term relationships and men having an advantage in markets oriented around long-term relationships. Do not assume that because you perform well in one market (like the sex market), you will perform well in another (like the long-term relationship market) or that the skills/public image you build to appeal to people on short-term markets will transfer to long-term markets. In other words, learning how to secure high-quality sex partners is not a skill set that will necessarily increase your odds of securing a spouse.
On Citations and Studies, page 541: This chapter addresses our stylistic choice to only occasionally cite studies, the short answer being that we think citations lend false weight to tenuous claims and promote dangerous mental shortcuts. Cases in which we do not cite sources will nevertheless contain sufficient information enabling you to open a search engine, search for, find, and explore the research in question personally (which is our strong preference).

Other appendix chapters will be referenced at relevant locations throughout The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships; they offer a deeper dive on subjects only lightly addressed in the main body of the book.

The Marketplace

he realms of dating, marriage, and sex are all marketplaces, and we are the products. Some may bristle at the idea of people as products on a marketplace, but this is an incredibly prevalent dynamic. Consider the labor marketplace, where people are also the product. Just as in the labor marketplace, one party makes an offer to another, and based on the terms of this offer, the other person can choose to accept it or walk. What makes the dating market so interesting is that the products we are marketing, selling, buying, and exchanging are essentially our identities and lives.

As with all marketplaces, every item in stock has a value, and that value is determined by its desirability. However, the desirability of a product isn’t a fixed thing—the desirability of umbrellas increases in areas where it is currently raining while the desirability of a specific drug may increase to a specific individual if it can cure an illness their child has, even if its wider desirability on the market has not changed.

In the world of dating, the two types of desirability we care about most are:

Aggregate Desirability: What the average demand within an open marketplace would be for a relationship with a particular person.
Individual Desirability: What the desirability of a relationship with an individual is from the perspective of a specific other individual.

Imagine you are at a fish market and deciding whether or not to buy a specific fish:

Aggregate desirability = The fish’s market price that day
Individual desirability = What you are willing to pay for the fish

Aggregate desirability is something our society enthusiastically emphasizes, with concepts like “leagues.” Whether these are revealed through crude statements like, “that guy’s an 8,” or more politically correct comments such as, “I believe she may be out of your league,” there is a tacit acknowledgment by society that every individual has an aggregate value on the public dating market, and that value can be judged at a glance. When what we have to trade on the dating market is often ourselves, that means that on average, we are going to end up in relationships with people with an aggregate value roughly equal to our own (i.e., individuals “within our league”). Statistically speaking, leagues are a real phenomenon that affects dating patterns. Using data from dating websites, the University of Michigan found that when you sort online daters by desirability, they seem to know “their place.” People on online dating sites almost never send a message to someone less desirable than them, and on average they reach out to prospects only 25% more desirable than themselves.

The great thing about these markets is how often the average desirability of a person to others is wildly different than their desirability to you. This gives you the opportunity to play arbitrage with traits that other people don’t like, but you either like or don’t mind. For example, while society may prefer women who are not overweight, a specific individual within the marketplace may prefer obese women, or even more interestingly may have no preference. If a guy doesn’t care whether his partner is slim or obese, then he should specifically target obese women, as obesity lowers desirability on the open marketplace, but not from his perspective, giving him access to women who are of higher value to him than those he could secure within an open market.

When trying to make an arbitrage play, do not be confused by what society implies that people want and by what people actually want. For example, society pretends that both nerdy males and females have low value in most markets, when in reality, once you are out of high school (and sometimes well before), the nerdy archetype has one of the highest values on the marketplace, meaning that targeting otherwise traditionally attractive nerds is a terrible arbitrage play for someone who is indifferent about the archetype.

How the Marketplace Affects Relationship Stability

Individual Desirability / Aggregate Desirability = Your Desirability Ratio

The higher a relationship’s Desirability Ratio, the more stable a relationship will be. If a relationship’s Desirability Ratio drops below one for either partner, the relationship becomes very likely to dissolve.

To put that in other words: When your partner is much more desirable to you than their “league” would suggest, and when this dynamic is mutual (i.e., each partner values the other more than society on average values that other partner), your relationship will be uniquely stable. However, if either partner values the other less than that person would be valued on an open market, the relationship becomes unstable.

Imagine a famous video game streamer who has little interest in the outdoors in a relationship with a world-class competitive fly fisher who has little interest in gaming. Each partner in this relationship has extremely high aggregate desirability in certain markets (essentially being gods in the gaming/fly fishing worlds), but perhaps only middling individual desirability (you can imagine the fly fisher being occasionally fed up with how much time the gamer spends “behind that goddamn computer screen” and vice versa). Intuitively, you will see this relationship as not particularly strong, but perhaps not contextualize that instability as resulting from an unfavorable Desirability Ratio.

While keeping a close eye on Desirability Ratios seems like common sense to us, we have never heard anyone in the relationship industry highlight this dynamic. This is odd because the effects of this on the dating and marriage markets are extreme. This is one of the many reasons why celebrity relationships are so short-lived and fraught with conflict—celebrities essentially have maxed-out aggregate desirability, making it virtually impossible for their individual desirability to their partner to stably stay above their aggregate desirability.

Desirability Ratio also has enormous value as a concept to the average person. If you are looking for a uniquely stable relationship, seek targets who have more value to you than to the average person, and look for those who see value in you that the average person would overlook.

The great thing about one’s relationship stability rating is it is not something that requires much effort to maintain so long as their relationship is stable.

Our biology and culture naturally strengthen relationships over time. The longer we are in a (good) relationship, the more we find ourselves emotionally attracted to the individual with whom we are in that relationship, which raises each partner’s desirability to the other partner.^[36] Individual desirability of each partner also increases over time, due to genuine social, financial, and logistical entanglement as well as due to the sunk cost fallacy^[37]. This increase in individual desirability over time in a relationship is not a small or insignificant effect. Even just the social stigma of leaving someone you have been dating for ten years is quite high—to the extent that social pressure alone could cause you to stay with a long-term, ungrateful partner who physically let themselves go instead of going after the kind, supportive, and attractive person you see on your commute who keeps making passes at you. The individual desirability of a partner isn’t just a conglomeration of positive pressures pushing you into a relationship with them but negative pressures pushing you away from leaving them.

Note for Context:

There are many choices an individual can make that will alter their desirability on the market to specific sub-populations. For example, dressing like a hipster is going to increase your attractiveness to a specific profile of a partner and could be a useful strategy to filter for partners with specific characteristics you are looking for. In The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, we broke down a number of factors and looked at how they correlated with arousal patterns. One of the most interesting associations from the perspective of this topic was related to cat and dog ownership. For example, when compared to men who prefer a partner with a cat, those who prefer a partner with a dog were significantly more likely to be turned on by acting dominant during sex—thus if your goal is to attract a dominant guy, you could better filter for them by choosing to own a dog instead of a cat. This is probably not the best way to determine what kind of pet you choose—but hey, it’s interesting. For a more detailed breakdown of this, see The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality.

Appendix: To gain a full understanding of how various factors affect your desirability, seeFactors Affecting Desirability on page 501 in the appendix. This section will be particularly useful in helping you build strategies around arbitrage opportunities for yourself in the dating, marriage, or sex markets. In this section, we explore factors affecting individual and aggregate desirability, such as how kink preference or a preference for monogamous vs. polyamorous lifestyles may affect one’s desirability across markets and how such preferences can be effectively signaled. We also address concepts related to the fluctuations of aggregate desirability between subcultures and discuss how these fluctuations can be leveraged to one’s advantage (e.g., the aggregate desirability of a naturally pale person will be higher within the goth subculture than within Western society in general, even though that subculture is contained within Western society).

Other Marketplace Considerations

Misjudgments of Aggregate Desirability

An individual who misjudges their own aggregate desirability in a marketplace is often doomed to an unhappy life while any partner they have is doomed to a less-than-ideal relationship. A person with an inaccurate understanding of their market value will have a difficult time finding a partner who is willing to date them, concede to their desires, and meet their expectations. Once in a relationship, this misguided individual will be more likely to not appreciate what they have.

Poor assessments of market value present a serious problem in a society that seems to actively encourage people to develop inflated perceptions of their aggregate desirability. It is ultimately quite harmful to tell someone: “Guuuurl—you are a goddess; you are perfect just the way you are, and you deserve a great guy!”

You, like all people, are not perfect. There is plenty of work you could do to raise your value on the open market. Those who allow themselves to have friends who discourage them from improving themselves are less likely to improve themselves enough to secure a “great girl” or “great guy.”

Another glaring issue associated with aggregate desirability misjudgments stems from a failure to understand that aggregate desirability on one market does not equal aggregate desirability on another market. For example, a person can have a very high value on the sex market, but a very low value on the long-term relationship market. We talk about this in detail within the appendix section titled The Four Core Marketplaces on page 524, so we will not elucidate this point further here.

Aggregate desirability evolves over time. A young man who was captain of his high school football team may fail to internalize that even though he was in the top 1% of his market in high school, his aggregate desirability will plummet to the bottom 5% if he puts on weight in college and/or fails to secure a well-paying or prestigious job upon graduation. A young woman may not internalize that, while she may have an easy time finding male partners willing to commit to a long-term relationship with her when she is in her early and mid-twenties, a period of peak attractiveness and minimal attachments, she will have a much harder time finding a high-quality, long-term partner once she is in her thirties and especially if she has a child from a previous partner. If either of these individuals still conceptualizes their aggregate desirability as being what it was at the highest point in their lives, relationships with them will be . . . unpleasant.

Your Value Off the Market

A measure of increasing relevance in many societies is “individual off-market value.” This is the value a person gains from not being in any relationship at all.

A number of factors can drive off-market value very high:

The feeling of freedom and independence some gain from not being in a relationship.
The value an individual places on their own time; this is uniquely true during career-building periods of life given the heavy time investment required for dating.
An individual may positively modify their off-market value as part of their self-image—in other words, when an individual thinks being single makes them a better person.
A strong negative association with those to whom an individual is most attracted, such as a heterosexual woman who looks down on men, a heterosexual man who looks down on women, or a gay person who looks down on gay people.

Off-market value becomes uniquely important when it rises above the value of a relationship with someone in one’s league. This dynamic may result from someone having very high off-market value or relatively low value in their chosen relationship markets. For example, someone may love the freedom of being single so much a relationship with anyone isn’t worth it, or someone may be very unattractive and not value a relationship enough to be in one with the type of person who would be willing to date them. In such cases, an individual will put no effort into dating and have their views on the subject of relationships continually reinforced by not being in one.

Uneven Relationships

While rare, there is one type of relationship in which both partners value each other more than they would be valued in the open market, and despite this, the relationship is still systematically unstable. These are uneven relationships: Relationships in which one partner has a way higher individual desirability to the other than the other does to them (i.e., one party in a relationship may be absolutely infatuated with the other, but this infatuation is not shared).

How this affects a relationship can vary widely, as some individuals actually prefer to be in a relationship in which they have less to lose by leaving than their partner, while others strongly prefer to be in a relationship in which each partner benefits equally.

Generally, the “best” inequality in a relationship is one in which both partners believe they have secured the better deal. These relationships are far more common than you may believe and typically exist whenever individuals each see the other through “rose-tinted glasses.” Relationships in which both partners believe they are getting the better deal are extremely stable.

Know What You Bring To The Table

In the context of all the things that a person might look for in a partner, it is critical to know what you bring to the table. What differentiates you on the open market? What makes you uniquely worth attention? What value do you present?

Knowing your worth on the market plays a key role in not falling prey to exploitative partners. It is almost unheard of for someone leagues above another to pursue them. In fact, if someone who is obviously much higher value than you expresses interest in you, it means one of two things:

Something about you fulfills a niche desire of theirs. You may, for example, remind them of someone important to them. Or perhaps you unknowingly activate one of their kinks. For more detail on how that works, see: The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality.
The high-value person does not intend to have a monogamous relationship with you (this gets more complicated if you are polyamorous). It doesn’t really matter to them if a partner is far below them in value if that partner does not preclude them from continuing to search for someone who is of equal value to them. Low-value partners can make for splendid placeholders for those still looking for a long-term match.

Relationship Lures And Their Resulting Relationship Dynamics

lure is a type of value proposition presented to a potential partner. The type of lure used to establish a relationship will set the tone for that relationship going forward, meaning your choice of lures has significant short and long-term consequences.

The types of lures fishermen choose to use can heavily influence the types of fish they catch. Two fishermen fishing from the same spot may find themselves catching entirely different types of fish if they are using different lures. Similarly, when you are “fishing” for a relationship, the lure that you use can completely alter the type of relationship you “catch.” In fact, one lure used to attract a target may yield a relationship dynamic that is entirely different from the relationship dynamic that would have emerged were a different lure used on that same target.

If Mike convinces a woman to date him because he is dominant, the resulting relationship will be entirely different than if he had inspired this same woman to date him by convincing her that, through dating him, she could improve herself (though such dynamics might be ameliorated through therapy).

One of the core reasons why people either end up in one bad relationship after another—or come to believe that all members of a certain gender have very constrained behavior patterns—is that they do not understand how different lures function (in male communities, this often manifests in the saying “AWALT,” which stands for “all women are like that”). These people do not realize that the lure they are using is creating those relationship dynamics and/or constrained behavior patterns.

Talking with individuals who say guys or girls always act like X or Y feels like talking to a fisherman who insists that all fish have whiskers. When you point out that all the lures in his tackle box are designed specifically to only catch catfish, he just turns and gives you a quizzical look saying, “what’s your point?”

To attract long-term partners in a manner that yields a relationship dynamic that will work over the long term, it helps to be aware of common lures used, the manner in which they may affect relationships, and appropriate times to leverage each.

These common lures include:

The Dominance Lure
The Nice Lure
The Sexual Exploration Lure
The Easy Lure
The Love Lure
The Sneaky Lure
The Pygmalion Lure
The Status Lure
The Self-Identity Lure
The Friend With Benefits Lure
The Long-Term Relationship Lure
The Social Construct Lure

Before you dig in, please note:

Most partner acquisition strategies involve the use of multiple lures simultaneously. While this is the case, it is also the case that, in most of these, one lure is used predominantly and is “flavored” by others. Regardless, use your best judgment to attempt to predict how the combination of lures you choose to use will determine which types of relationships you are able to “catch.”
When discussing lures, we refer to the person being attracted by a lure as the “target” and the person utilizing a lure as the “pursuer.” This is only for convenience, as we had to find some way to linguistically separate the two positions when describing how a specific lure is implemented. Nevertheless, every relationship is a two-way street. Just as one person will use one of these lures to secure a partner, that partner is using a lure to secure that person. Each lure used will heavily color the resulting relationship. There is no such thing as a relationship with only one pursuer and only one target—no matter how active one party is compared to another.

The Dominance Lure

The Dominance Lure is the default human mating lure. It can almost be thought of as the “traditional human mating display.” It entails asserting physical and mental dominance in a very “traditional way“ to attract those who are looking to surrender and/or indulge in that aspect of the human condition.

To get an idea of what the Dominance Lure looks like, consider the protective bad boy from a campy romance novel. This character is likely a muscular, confident man who unflinchingly sets rules and dictates how things will be in a way that borderline suspends a target’s agency.

The Dominance Lure is extremely common among pick up artist communities (groups that develop concerted strategies designed to secure sex), but it can also be learned from one’s childhood family dynamics. Dominance is typically thought of as a male-only lure; however, it can also work for females.

Dominance Lures are so effective because they involve the pursuer taking initiative and granting the targeted party the luxury of doing very little. Humans, being the inherently lazy creatures they are, adore not having to think. The proposition of just “going along for the ride” with someone who seems to know what they are doing can be immensely attractive.

Dominance Lures have extra appeal to targets with low social intelligence, low confidence, or a strong desire to be submissive in a relationship. The Dominance Lure is also significantly more effective on targets who are inexperienced in the BDSM scene or too traditional to be comfortable exploring the BDSM scene. Relationships with intentionally constructed, consensually agreed-upon power imbalances put in place for sexual gratification are not “Dominance Lure” relationships and instead are “Sexual Exploration Lure” relationships, as they have very little in common with relationships founded through subconscious implementation of dominance displays (in other words, dom-sub relationships are not Dominance Lure relationships).

Dominance can work on almost any target except those who have a self-image that would punish them severely for submitting to another human (these individuals include some of the following: people in the polyamorous scene, doms, Red Pillers, MGTOWers, those who ascribe to certain schools of feminism, etc.). Various studies back up the broad effectiveness of the Dominance Lure—including a 2018 study out of the University of Göttingen, which demonstrated that dominance predicted mating success for males even more than physical attractiveness.

Dominance displays can be easily amplified through behavior and posture changes. Studies have found women on average find men who smile less and strike brooding or swaggering poses more attractive, perhaps because smiling is a sign of submission in primates. Conversely, men in the aggregate prefer women who smile and find women less attractive when they look proud or confident—more on why dominance displays are effective for women in spite of this later. In addition, more dominant individuals make decisions faster. This is one of the reasons it is considered “unattractive” when a man takes a long time deciding at a restaurant.

One of the more frustrating aspects of dominance displays is that they are usually associated with communicating with one’s target as . . . well, kind of a dick. Frustratingly, ample research suggests that this technique is objectively effective at getting replies from women on dating websites. Studies have even shown that not only do women respond less to positively worded messages on dating platforms but also that the more desirable a woman is, the fewer positively worded messages she will receive (See: “Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets” in the journal Science Advances—we are citing our source here, as we expect a lot of our readers to be uniquely surprised by this and it would be hard to Google).

Relationships founded using a Dominance Lure require a constant assertion of dominance by the dominant party (communities that use this strategy often call this “maintaining frame”). This can be prohibitively exhausting in long-term relationships and is one of the core drawbacks of this lure.

Relationships founded through this strategy also fail to build a unique attachment among partners over time (at least not as much as other types of relationships), and thus they engender less fidelity. In other words, in the case of most relationship dynamics, partners like each other more as they spend more time together. This is less common among relationships established around a Dominance Lure. This is the critical difference between Dominance Lure relationships and intentional power exchange relationships, like dom-sub relationships, in which fondness and fidelity typically do appreciate over time.

Why does dominance build trust and fondness in intentional power exchange relationships but not Dominance Lure relationships? This building of fondness happens in intentional power exchange relationships because dominance is exercised as a “gift” to the submissive partner to elicit an emotional reaction in them that they have requested. Both partners in intentional power exchange relationships are aware of this often-taxing gift exchange. To put it in other words, in an intentional power exchange relationship, confidently giving humiliating instructions to a partner that are tailored to their arousal pathways is the same as taking time to wake someone up with breakfast in bed in a traditional relationship. Dominance in intentional power exchange relationships takes time and effort to organize and is obviously meant as a gesture of care whereas in a Dominance Lure relationship, the act would not be a gift exchange but instead one primarily motivated to maintain an imposed perception of the dominant partner.

There are other reasons why Dominance Lure relationships do not increase in quality over time like almost all other relationship types: The cognitive dissonance and social cost associated with leaving a Dominance Lure relationship do not increase over time due to the negative stigma society associates with these arrangements. The social cost of cheating is also much lower within Dominance Lure Relationships—among both parties. Dominant partners in relationships built around a Dominance Lure are less likely to feel guilt upon cheating, due to an inherent lack of respect for and emotional attachment to the target (a perspective often cultivated by practitioners of the Dominance Lure to make it easier to maintain dominance). Submissive partners in Dominance Lure relationships feel little guilt upon cheating because the relationship’s primary value to them involves a specific emotional set elicited by the dominant partner—not the dominant partner themselves.

A fascinating aspect of the Dominance Lure involves routine boundary tests initiated by the target, which are commonly referred to online as “shit tests.” In a shit test, the target challenges the prospective partner’s dominance to ensure it is still high. Essentially, if someone attracts a target by displaying dominance, their value to the target is those displays, thus the target will regularly trigger dominance displays by testing the dominance of their partner and pushing boundaries.

While some common relationship-related questions asked by a target of their pursuer, such as “How many girls have you slept with?” are potential drama-riddled bombs in the context of a Dominance Lure relationship, they are completely innocuous in other types of relationships. For example, if a question regarding sexual partner count came up within the context of a Sexual Experimentation Lure-based relationship, the target is likely just attempting to determine if you need to share your papers proving your STD status and in such a context, you should be perfectly open and honest. On the other hand, if a target in a Dominance Lure-based relationship asks this, they really want an indication of the pursuer’s sexual prowess and dominance. A target may even be testing whether or not the dominant pursuer will deign to answer. After all, if a target can force their supposedly dominant pursuer to answer them, this would signal that they hold some control over the pursuer, making the pursuer less dominant, and therefore less attractive.

That “shit tests” are not universal may sound questionable to those who have only used dominance-based or power exchange lures to secure their partners, but shit tests are not normal adult behavior. When Malcolm was looking for a wife, he had a quota of five dates a week for years, and on those hundreds of dates, he only experienced something that could be counted as a shit test six to eight times—though before that, when he experimented with Dominance Lures for low effort sex, he received shit tests constantly. Shit tests are a specific and rational reaction to the value proposition of a Dominance Lure. If someone is selling you a car, you’ll want to make sure it operates and handles well. If someone is selling you dominance, you’ll want to make sure they can properly dominate.

We have little information on how Dominance Lure strategies work for females, as females who prefer to maintain a constantly dominant position in a relationship are already a little sexually atypical, and thus it is usually easiest for these women to express their dominance through BDSM communities and relationships ignited under complementary BDSM interests (which, as we have noted, operate with totally different dynamics than those of Dominance Lure relationships). That said, we can hypothesize that a female employing a Dominance Lure would be even more effective than a male employing it, as this rare occurrence would make them high-value market commodities (even if demand is low, the supply of this type of woman is even lower). Contrary to conventional wisdom, some studies have found that men, on average, have a slight preference for being submissive, whereas women have a strong preference for being submissive, statistically speaking. In a study on arousal pathways and sexual preferences we ran through the Pragmatist Foundation, we found that while 75% of women get at least somewhat aroused by seeing a partner act dominant, a hearty 49% of men are aroused by partners acting dominant as well. While fewer men than women are aroused by dominant partners, this does not negate the finding that almost half of men are aroused by dominance. Should a non-trivial proportion of men really somewhat prefer submission, women who prefer (or are even just OK with) dominance will have a distinct advantage, as our stats show the majority of women on various dating markets are simply not comfortable being anything but the submissive partner.

See The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality for more statistics and analysis related to dominance and submission preferences—it is full of fascinating data. One of our findings relevant to this discussion is that while 45% of women responding to a survey we conducted reported finding the naked male form to be very arousing and 48% reported finding the sight of a penis to be very arousing, a heftier 53% reported finding a partner acting dominant in a sexual context to be very arousing. Dominance is literally more likely to be “very arousing” to the average female than naked men or penises and thus the average woman has more of a “dominance-focused” sexuality than a “male-focused” sexuality.

Another interesting tidbit that emerged from The Pragmatist Foundation’s study on sexuality was a correlation in women between (1) arousal from being dominant and (2) perceiving oneself as being attractive. In other words, if a female survey respondent reported herself as being attractive, she was much more likely to also report that she felt turned on by acting dominant. This likely means attractive, confident women are less likely to be lured into a relationship by dominance.

Males who leverage Dominance Lures often find success at securing sexual partners and sometimes can even leverage this lure to secure a partner for a socially traditional (sometimes known as TradCon-style) marriage, in which their spouse’s core contributions are sex, home-keeping, and child-rearing. That said, this strategy is only of optimal utility (i.e., the best of all available lures to use) among middle-aged males with little sexual experience who are primarily looking for sex or young men who lack the social intelligence to leverage other lures. Despite its limited utility and the low quality of relationships it generates, the Dominance Lure is of genuine value to those two groups. In fact, among lower-value males in those groups with low social intelligence, the Dominance Lure may genuinely present their only real shot at experiencing sex they don’t pay for.

Of all the lures we have investigated, the Dominance Lure is the only one that people specifically train themselves to look out for in potential partners and avoid. Unfortunately, people unfamiliar with how the lure actually is meant to work just memorize a few classic Dominance Lure strategies like “negging” and then look for them as red flags on dates. Negging, for the uninitiated, involves an individual belittling or lightly insulting a target in an attempt to establish dominance and manipulate the target into wanting to impress them.

By categorizing negging as a red flag and sign to end a date, many filter out otherwise strong candidates who were not actually implementing a Dominance Lure strategy. Do not confuse all challenges to your logic, your lifestyle, and your opinions, with negging. Also, do not conflate negging with statements that make you uncomfortable. A number of the other lures use challenging questions as a legitimate filter or expectation-setting tool. A statement like: “Do you like X political figure? Because I won’t date you if you do” is not a neg; it is a useful question for filtering out potentially bad matches.

A personal anecdote here might help: On our first date, Malcolm told me: “I am not looking to date; I am looking for a wife and expect to find her in a few months at Stanford, due to its large pool of pre-vetted candidates.” This could have been a neg if he were employing a Dominance Lure strategy, but within the strategy he was employing, this blunt statement was simply a courtesy expectation setter to prevent me from wasting time on a lead that may not fit what I was looking for in a relationship. A good rule of thumb for sorting out an intentionally employed “neg” from a normal challenging question or statement is to look for such challenging statements being deployed in a flirtatious voice (as they are deployed with a Dominance Lure) instead of a matter-of-fact tone (as they would be when implementing the Pygmalion Lure) or conscientious tone (common in normal human conversation).

The Nice Lure

The Nice Lure is almost completely ineffective at actually securing what people want in a relationship, but it is so commonly used that we would be remiss not to describe it. Those deploying the Nice Lure offer submission—signaled through niceness—and accommodation in hopes that they might receive either sex or a relationship in return. It is the standard “nice guy/good girl” strategy—also known in some circles as “beta” behavior. The core idea of this strategy is that if the pursuer is really, really “nice” to someone and does everything the target asks, the target may be willing to date and might even have sex with them. Those who proclaim in frustration: “Why can’t I get a date/sex??? I am such a nice guy/girl…” are using the Nice Lure.

While we call this the Nice Lure, there is nothing particularly nice about it. We refer to this lure as “nice” because displays of submission can easily be misinterpreted as niceness both by the pursuer and the target. What is really happening in these displays is an individual is subconsciously signaling to their target that they are willing to be a submissive partner and give their target power over them in exchange for sexual access. Since submission displays—such as offering to do someone’s homework for them, smiling (a submission display in most primates), giving them your stuff, politeness, or carrying things for them—can look like “just being nice” and can be played off that way, it is often hard for a target to identify the intended payout the pursuer expects from these displays. This can cause significant consternation to the pursuer when the target constantly accepts their submission displays but still denies sexual access. In some cases, repeatedly rejected pursuers leveraging the Nice Lure become aggressively submissive, a signal to any potential partner that their genes are hot garbage and a hard turn off for both most men and women.

To be clear here—the Nice Lure is almost always performed subconsciously. A person does not actively think, “how do I get X target to breed with me? Oh, I know: Be oppressively obsequious all the time!” A deeply primitive part of their brain only sees two paths to sex, dominance, or submission, and it has determined they are not dominant enough to take a dominance display path. (We should take a moment here to also draw attention to the fact that, historically speaking, the Dominance Lure was also a primarily subconscious pathway, but one that was eventually co-opted by individuals who saw how effective it was, codified it, and trained themselves in it. It is still a pathway that occurs naturally, just at a very low frequency when contrasted with its artificial variant.)

While a Nice Lure is almost never effective at igniting sexual interest in a target, it can be successful at securing a relationship when a target feels that they can exploit the submissive nature of their pursuer. In such cases, the pursuer may even be granted sexual access in exchange for continued submission. In this sense, the Nice Lure and Dominance Lure are the only lures that involve “shit tests.” In a Dominance Lure relationship, shit tests exist to ensure the partner is still dominant, whereas in Nice Lure relationships, shit tests are of utility to ensure the prospective partner is still submissive and thus can still be used as an informal servant.

The Nice Lure does not work for any gender at securing healthy long-term relationships. While the Nice Lure can be used to obtain sex, it is not even very effective at that. The core reason this strategy is so ineffective is it signals to targets that the pursuer has nothing to exchange for a relationship except their dignity, which apparently has little value anyway. Having to resort to the Nice Lure proves an individual’s lack of value on the wider marketplace.

The Sexual Exploration Lure

We outlined the use of Sexual Exploration Lures in the appendix section of this book as a viable strategy for young people just looking for sex. Sex feels good and the vast majority of the population wants to have it. There are many people out there who want to explore new and interesting ways of experiencing sex with someone just like you (well . . . maybe—more on that soon).

The Sexual Exploration Lure is peculiar in that it manifests very differently in youth than it does in adults. Amid teenagers, this lure can be effective on pretty much anyone and is generically implementable in the sense that sexual experimentation for someone who is inexperienced can just be kissing, holding hands, or sex. In youth, fooling around in any capacity can be experimental and exciting. However, once a person becomes an adult and sex is no longer interesting or difficult to secure, this lure typically requires becoming involved with one of two categories of adult communities interested in sexual exploitation.

These categories are, roughly:

Communities oriented around openly sexually exploring a number of new partners (e.g., the branch of the polyamorous community that is big into sexual exploration, swingers, etc.): For those whose sexual tastes are vanilla in nature, there are lots of communities out there that merely revolve around having sex.
Kink communities (e.g., BDSM, hot wifers, Gor, Kinbaku, TPE, etc.): Should you genuinely be interested in sexual exploration from the perspective of someone who would like to explore new ways of having sex, there is a vibrant rainbow of kink communities at your disposal. Involvement in these communities may require a significant investment of time (e.g., a four-week course on safe bondage practices) and money (e.g., thousands of dollars on specific outfits or equipment). A good way to meet these communities is to look for local “munches.” (If you are interested in getting an entertaining, sweet introduction to lifestyles in which kink hobbies play a key role, we heartily recommend Sunstone: A free and beautifully illustrated comic series by Stjepan Sejic available online.) IMPORTANT: The first time you approach one of these communities, do so non-sexually and without pretense. DO NOT walk up to one of these communities for the first time saying that you are a “master” or something like that.

Should you decide to leverage the sexual exploration lure as an adult, especially if you become intimate with a large number of sexual partners, build a habit of being regularly tested for STDs, keep your latest test results handy (scans on your phone that you can quickly send to a prospective partner are a must), study your local sex/kink community’s consent rules in great detail, resign yourself to always maxing out the protection you are using, and put earnest and genuine effort into skillfully pleasing your partners. Word gets around in these communities rapidly, seeing as so many of their members are sleeping together. If you act like an asshole or refuse to play by the rules, you will be expelled.

The biggest downside to utilizing sexual exploration communities for sex is that many (but not all) will expel members who neglect to submit their worldviews to the group’s chosen ideology (usually some form of sex-positive liberal feminist perspective, though conservative iterations of the groups do exist). Surprisingly, the Sexual Exploration Lure tends to form strong long-term relationships and may be the single strongest lure available to the majority of females over thirty hunting for a committed relationship (not that it’s uniquely great for women in this demographic; women over thirty just have so few other options available to them due in large part to high-quality men leaving relationships and returning to the dating market at lower rates than high-quality women).^[38]

With regard to this lure’s perhaps counterintuitive tendency to generate long-term relationships, we hypothesize that five factors are at play:

Survivorship bias: Sex and kink communities are pretty quick to kick out jerks and police the relationships within them in said relationships’ early stages. This policing is not ironclad, but as with many tight-knit communities composed of groups of people who share a common interest, members usually have a non-trivial amount of emotional investment in other members, have more-efficient-than-average means to learn about problems, and have more motivation to intervene when they see a toxic relationship forming.
Selection bias: To interact effectively with these communities, a person probably has a stronger idea of who they are and what they want than an average person off the street. Accurate awareness of one’s self and one’s actual desires are astoundingly low in most dating/relationship/sex markets, which leads to many poor matches.
Lower risk of making illogical, hormone-based decisions: If the studies indicating that promiscuous individuals experience lower levels of oxytocin release are correct, those in this community may be less likely to enter a long-term relationship with someone just because a wash of hormones have made them feel deeply in love and bonded to their partner. Those who maintain a lower sexual partner count experience significant exposure to the risk of blinding love. (We talk about this phenomenon and the associated studies later in the book, see page 258.)
Maturity: Individuals in this community have often intentionally chosen to stay single until a later age (this puts them in stark contrast to adults who are single because they have failed to secure or maintain a healthy long-term relationship). Thus, these individuals on average are often more emotionally stable than those still single available in the general mid-life dating market.
Clear intention and communication: Relationships formed as a product of this lure are more likely to have super specific relationship contracts (especially around definitions of things like infidelity and consent), which decreases conflict.

Common Mistakes to Avoid:

Keep in mind that the Sexual Exploration Lure is not the “I am Great at Sex” lure. The “I Am Great at Sex” approach to seduction is completely ineffective at securing high-value partners. Sure, a person may be able to secure sex with someone a few leagues below them because they signaled their availability and desperation, but this strategy is ineffective for people in the same league. Why? Because the “I am Great at Sex” lure comes off as desperate and makes a person seem emotionally unstable, leading many targets to conclude that the person is not worth the risky lay. This is true for both men and women.
Also, remember that sexual exploration is just sexual exploration—it is not about imposing one’s sexuality on someone else. A person randomly emailing someone with what they want to do to them sexually is not sexual exploration; that’s just non-consensual cybersex. Think of it this way: If you are putting together a game of baseball, you need to first get to know people, understand the rules, determine what you want the specific rules to be for that game, schedule a day and time to meet up and play, etc. Baseball does not really come up as the core of the interaction until the game itself begins. Emailing someone with how hot you think they are is like running up to them while flailing a baseball bat and screaming “baseball now,” then bemoaning the fact that everyone runs from you screaming and calls the cops when you try to play baseball with them.

The Easy Lure

The Easy Lure entails signaling that one would gladly have sex with, date, or get married to a specific individual for next to no cost (in terms of time or money). This is not a lure that a huge number of people consciously choose; however, it is often accidentally adopted as a habit that does, admittedly, enable one to secure sex and can lead to the ignition of relationships.

This strategy is much more effective for females than it is for males. We have to wrack our brains to come up with even hypothetical situations in which The Easy Lure is an effective strategy for males if their targets are under thirty.

In the 1980s, some experiments were conducted in which both men and women approached strangers and invited these strangers to sleep with them or come back to their apartment. While men agreed to these propositions over half the time, not a single woman took a strange male up on his offer (it should be noted that only attractive men and women were presenting these propositions). Even in instances in which researchers controlled for fear of violence by asking women if they would sleep with their best friend if given such a proposal, women still said yes at much lower rates than men (though if you torturously massage the data, it is possible to make the numbers just about even . . . But that is the case with almost any data set). However you look at it, a woman can realistically—though not safely—approach strangers on the street, ask for sex, and frequently secure it whereas a male cannot. Should you want to read more about these studies and the follow-up work in more detail, refer to the section on Sexual Marketplaces in the appendix on page 524.

A person not realizing that they are attracting prospective partners with an Easy Lure can be dangerous. It is common for some young women to not recognize that the attention they are getting stems from the fact that they are inadvertently signaling that sex with them will be low cost. It is difficult not to get hooked on the positive emotions the attention makes a person feel—especially if they are blithely unaware that said attention is being hurled their way because those giving it think they are a low investment target for sex or dating. Such attention can easily subconsciously train some young women to signal that they are sexually available when doing so is far from their intention.

While any young woman will have some susceptibility to this, those with histrionic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and in manic stages of bipolar disorder, are uniquely susceptible to this subconscious conditioning, and it affects them more severely.

When I (Simone) was younger, I fell prey to this to an extent until Malcolm pointed out what was happening. I was incredibly friendly and wore a lot of wacky and somewhat revealing clothing that caused people to look down on me—but also shower me with compliments. Those who looked down on me did not mention or clearly indicate their condescension, but those giving me compliments were very vocal.

The damaging effects of this subconscious training can extend to behavioral patterns much more damaging than mere revealing clothing. Specifically, a woman acting a little mentally unstable or not very bright can signal to guys that sex with her will involve low investment, which may cause this behavior to be positively reinforced. This is highly damaging at a societal level.

Humans are remarkably easy to subconsciously train by consistently verbally rewarding a specific behavior or rewarding it through attention.

While we discuss this lure in the context of its subconscious negative effects on some young women, this lure is also sometimes intentionally implemented—even by adults. One study found that 23% of adults still ask their friends to signal to a target that they would be willing to romantically engage them if the target made a pass (i.e., that it will be a low investment, low-risk effort to obtain sex and/or a relationship with them).

While Easy Lures can hypothetically enable one to secure easy sex, they have few (ethical) real-world uses and expose one to non-trivial danger. Specifically, some people interpret Easy Lure signaling (especially when combined with a request to spend time alone with them) as a tacit consent to sex. These individuals can become angry and belligerent upon discovering this isn’t the case. Thus, even if a person is just looking for sex, the Sexual Experimentation Lure is unflinchingly superior to the Easy Lure: It requires almost as little effort, is just as effective, works for all genders, and doesn’t carry as much additional risk (although, every sexual encounter carries some risk).

The Love Lure

The Love Lure mirrors the Easy Lure in many respects; however, instead of offering sex with low investment from the target, the pursuer offers love (i.e., “You should sleep with / choose / marry me because I will love you more than he / she does”). This is probably the single least effective lure we will discuss, but for some reason, it is one of the lures people most actively attempt to deploy. People think because they feel love towards someone, they are doing that person a favor. Perhaps more bizarrely, many are under the impression that love alone can be traded for a relationship.

The love you feel is a feeling inside you. This love is not a feeling within your target. Your target cannot profit from or be sustained by your love. By loving someone, you are using them or the idea of them to masturbate the aspect of your cognition that produces the positive feelings that come from love. Thinking that someone will want to be with you because “you love them” is like thinking that someone will want to be with you because you masturbate while looking at a picture of them.

People’s beliefs about the value and power of love disgust and horrify your gentle authors. Our society sees love as magical fairy dust instead of an emotion that is activated by specific environmental stimuli. If a genuinely lucid person just wanted something to love them, they would get a dog and not waste time, money, and heartache on a pathetic hairless ape.

People only value the love they feel for you. The love you have for others is only valuable to them if it helps them in some way, such as your affection making it easier for them to extract resources from you (and we assume that is not the type of relationship you want), or your affection indicating broadly to them that they “are loved,” which may reinforce an important part of their desired self-identities.

You may think to yourself: “I get it, but I am super lovable!” We find that almost every human who thinks this about themselves has really only become good at loving themselves. These people are completely useless to others from a relationship standpoint.

The only way to become actually “lovable” in a way that allows a person to secure relationships with new partners is to practice making people fall in love with them and study the science associated with the topic. Love can be systematically and reliably induced. We discuss methods for inducing the emotion of love in detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality.

The Sneaky Lure

The Sneaky Lure is the last of the ineffective lures we will discuss at length.

While we find it dumb, the Sneaky Lure strategy is remarkably common among adolescent males. This strategy entails progressing towards a sexual interaction with a target while doing everything one can to prevent rejection by attempting to occlude the fact that the goal is sex.

Deployment of the Sneaky Lure commonly proceeds along lines like:

Come back to my place, I don’t want you to risk going home drunk.
Let’s just sit next to each other and watch shows together.
Let’s wrestle a bit!

When questioned as to whether the pursuer thinks their actions are leading to sex, sneaky strategists will strongly imply they don’t. Either they don’t really have a plan for when they reveal their true intentions or their plan is to have their target conclude: “Well, we have gone this far, let’s just get this over with.”

This strategy can also be utilized over a period of time in which the prospective partner tries to get as close to dating their target as they can while avoiding anything that makes the relationship official because doing so would give their target a chance to concretely reject them. Essentially, the pursuer prefers the imprisonment of a “Schrodinger’s Relationship” to even a chance of rejection.

The worst-case scenario with this strategy involves investing an enormous amount of time and energy in befriending a target with the expectation that this will lower the barriers that must be overcome for one’s target to agree to sex or a relationship, only to be turned down in the end. When this happens, implementers of this strategy often have the gall to actually get angry at their targets. This is one of the many origin points of the “nice guy” cliché—pursuers who get angry at their targets for their own poorly thought-through strategies involving enormous upfront investment without a guaranteed payout.

Why do people adopt this strategy if it is both ineffective and likely to lead to a terrible outcome? Simply put, because being rejected hurts.

Those who make some initial forays into the dating world quickly learn that in the majority of cases, when they make their intentions clear, they get rejected. They may also notice that rejection does not arise when they do not make their intentions clear. These individuals may come to be subconsciously trained to believe that strategies involving a direct approach simply do not work, whereas strategies involving an indirect—sneaky—approach might work. They may even delude themselves into thinking that various “subtle cues,” such as body language, hints dropped in jokes, and innuendo act as sufficient notice of their intentions to their targets. (For the record, they do not).

The Sneaky Lure strategy is also sometimes used by individuals on the casual dating market, leading to the classic “friend zone” failure scenario in which prospective partners waste months or even years building a friendship with targets they really only wanted to date.

Recognizing when you are implementing the Sneaky Lure strategy is as easy as thinking through your romantic and sexual interests and asking yourself if you have explicitly shared them with your target(s). If not, why not? Are you obscuring your intentions because you think your target won’t be friends with you if they know? Do you not share your intentions because you believe they will be met with rejection? Make sure you actually have evidence substantiating your fears, as it is likely that you merely fear rejection and not a loss of your target’s friendship. It is fairly easy to remain friends with someone after clearly stating there is no sexual interest as long as said someone does not keep pushing for escalation . . . well, ish—when a person turns another down, they often lose respect for them.

Sneaky Copulation and Female Mimicry

A specific method of utilizing The Sneaky Lure reflects a set of behavior patterns similar to those observed in other species, known as sneaky copulation and female mimicry. Among some species that exhibit sexual dimorphism, a certain percentage of males may transform themselves to look like females. For example, among bluehead wrasses, a species of fish featuring territorial males that are typically much larger and differently colored than females, some males “choose” to be smaller and colored like a female, then use this disguise to slip under the nose of the more masculine males and get close to females who wouldn’t have anything to do with them were they privy to their ultimate goal—breeding with them.

Sexual mimicry most often occurs among species whose females, when given a choice, will choose larger, ultra-masculine males. Among such species, only the largest, most masculine men will get to breed and pass on their genes—unless, of course, some males figure out how to disguise themselves as females, infiltrate female groups, and occasionally covertly inseminate (rape or pressure into sex) their female compatriots.

Some human males attempt to exploit a similar strategy. These men typically adopt “white knight” personalities and loudly yet submissively signal how pro-woman they are in a subconscious attempt to infiltrate protected spaces where they feel they will face less competition from other men.

Now let’s be clear, we are not saying all men who exhibit “white knight” behavior are leveraging a sneaky copulation strategy. Most white knight types are genuinely trying to help people. What we assert instead is that a certain small portion of white knight types are indeed leveraging this strategy. We know of some women who were victims of this strategy personally, so we can say for a fact that it does happen.

Fortunately, these individuals are often easy to spot. When a person believes something because of a logical thought process, they will likely have a number of areas in which their view deviates from the party line. When someone is using their ideology as a sexual strategy, they will almost always adhere to the party line to the letter and change their views to match group consensus as said consensus evolves. This is because they aren’t really fighting for their own beliefs—rather, they are making an effort to signal beliefs they think will gain them sexual access to a community that would otherwise expel individuals like them.

The Pygmalion Lure

The desirability of a pursuer who leverages a Pygmalion Lure stems less from who they are and more from their capacity to transform their target. We have a strong bias in favor of this lure, as it is the one that initiated our relationship.

Targets choose pursuers utilizing the Pygmalion Lure because the target believes that they can become better people themselves (or people more closely aligned with their ideal selves) through a relationship with said pursuers. Because the Pygmalion Lure offers, quite literally, a shot at one’s greatest ambitions, this is arguably the best lure for creating an effective long-term relationship.

Pygmalion Lures typically yield one of two types of relationships:

One-Way Pygmalion Relationships: In these relationships, one partner leverages the Pygmalion Lure while the other presents the Power Surrender Lure. The surrendering partner is drawn to the relationship because the Pygmalion partner made them / is making them into someone they want to be, while the Pygmalion partner has affection for the surrendering partner because the Pygmalion partner is able to craft their perfect mate. These relationships are less stable than Two-Way Pygmalion Relationships because if the partner improving the other fails to actively improve themselves at the same time, they may reach a point at which they have improved their partner as much as they can (it is hard for you to craft someone better than yourself). Should this point be reached, the relationship loses value to the individual looking to improve.
Two-Way Pygmalion Relationships: These are relationships in which both partners use the Pygmalion Lure to secure each other. Both parties believe the primary value of the other individual is that that person improves them. One-Way Pygmalion Relationships can smoothly evolve into Two-Way Pygmalion relationships so long as the person shaping the other has their ego in check enough to realize when their creation has surpassed them. In other words, it is entirely possible to transform someone far weaker than you into someone even stronger than you, who is capable of helping you, in turn, become even better. Two-Way Pygmalion Relationships are one of the most stable relationship structures for long-term, fulfilling, and beneficial relationships.

While relationships based on a Pygmalion Lure require significantly more maintenance than relationships created through most other lures (in the sense that one is acting not only as a romantic partner, but also a life coach, career coach, image consultant, and advisor) that maintenance typically benefits both parties’ careers, personalities, and identities. We would argue the results make the effort well worth the hassle. Pygmalion Relationships only lose their stability if one partner decides that they no longer need to improve or when partners come to disagree about who they ought to become (a partner trying to transform a person into someone they do not want to be is not only of no value, but it is also something most people would want to avoid—no matter how amazing they are, the target would be better off staying single than being with them).

The core downside of the Pygmalion lure is that to use it, the pursuer must simultaneously be a genuinely accomplished person—at least accomplished enough to command the respect of their targets—and capable of providing genuinely good counsel. If I (Simone) did not desperately want to be more like Malcolm from the moment I first met him, his offer to help transform me into my ideal self would have lacked allure. If his initial advice to me hadn’t made a huge positive impact on my life, I would not have continued our relationship.

Another large downside to the Pygmalion Lure is that while it creates good relationships when a person finds a target who is genuinely compelled by the idea, finding such a target requires a huge throughput of potential candidates, as few people are looking for a relationship in which constant self-improvement is an expectation and most are uncomfortable with the idea of a partner who wants them to be better than they are right now. Those using the Pygmalion Lure should expect to be turned down far more often than those only looking for companionship and sex.

In addition, Pygmalion relationships require partners to disregard many classic relationship red flags. When Malcolm told me he was excited to work with me to rewrite my personality, overhaul my wardrobe, change my accent, pick new friends, change my habits down to what I ate/drank, and transform every aspect of who I was, I became excited by the vision we had for my potential and was flattered to learn he believed I had the cognitive capacity and work ethic to become the person both he and I dreamed I might become.

Today’s prevailing wisdom marks such propositions as hostile and possibly even abusive. It is considered inappropriate to tell someone you love they can improve themselves through hard work and personal sacrifice, to not accept one’s partner “for who they are,” and to actively encourage them to change significant aspects of themselves. When I met Malcolm, I was a social media manager living with crippling social anxiety that prevented me from interacting with the outside world, I couldn’t even leave my house to eat at restaurants. Within a few years of meeting Malcolm, I had become the CEO of a portfolio of international businesses that do over a hundred million dollars in sales a year, I was traveling between countries/continents every month, I regularly lectured at top universities (including Stanford, Harvard, and Carnegie Mellon), and I had picked up a graduate degree from Cambridge along the way—not to mention levels of calm, self-confidence, and contentedness that before I could not have fathomed possible. Without Malcolm’s intervention, and without transforming myself into someone I wanted to be, I would have plateaued and lived as I did for the rest of my adult life. To many, the key sacrifice of a Pygmalion-Lure-generated relationship is that, by definition, your partner does not love you “for who you are,” but rather for the potential of who you have the capacity to become.

How to Use the Pygmalion Lure

The steps necessary to seduce someone using the Pygmalion Lure are neither as self-evident as many of the other lures nor delineated in other books, so we believe they warrant a walkthrough.

To use the Pygmalion Lure, engage the target in questions about who they want to be and why, then talk them through the process of developing a strategy and goals that will get them where they want to be. If interested, the target will implement the strategies they crafted over the course of discussions you had with them on dates. If the strategy is working, on their own time, you will see them individually, refining even more ideas and bringing them to you for discussion. If your target finds these conversations help them improve—and they are the type of person who craves continued improvement—they will naturally move toward a closer relationship with you.

Deployment of the Pygmalion Lure does not start around questions of self-betterment like cliché self-help systems do. Instead, the first few dates should be entirely focused around discovering the target’s values and working with them to parse out how those values tie to their long-term goals. If the target says something vague or generic that indicates they have never really thought through what they value (common responses indicating this include proclaimed desires to be happy, fulfilled, or “make the world a better place”), encourage them to dig deeper. If the target desires happiness or fulfillment, for example, ask them how they came to conclude that their entire life should be devoted to optimizing a particular emotional state. In The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, we call this value, the thing(s) one is trying to maximize with one’s life, a person’s “objective function.”

Once an objective function has been established, help the target develop a plan for maximizing that objective function, focusing on both granular, immediate tasks, and a larger game plan. At no point is it necessary to tell a target: “I will help you realize your goals.” The very nature of these interactions should make that apparent. In fact, at no point should a pursuer using the Pygmalion Lure even be telling their partner what to strive for or how to see their objective function realized. Pygmalion relationships are not about you imposing your values and goals on another person. Instead, your primary purpose when deploying a Pygmalion Lure should be to help the target think through their own values and goals—and to stick to plans they independently develop.

While this process can be difficult to execute, our first book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, provides a step-by-step walkthrough, featuring the tools necessary to holistically discuss all the things a potential partner might choose to establish as core values and reasons to live. Refer to The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life if you are having trouble developing a framework that allows you to talk through questions of values and goals in a way that doesn’t just push a target toward your own belief set. Pushing a partner toward your own goals or belief set instead of helping them unfurl their own will backfire on those hoping to deploy the Pygmalion Lure; the moment a target feels like their pursuer, rather than they themselves, are dictating who they become, the pursuer has lost any chance at a successful relationship.

The Dangers of False Pygmalion Relationships

Two categories of relationship can look very similar to a Pygmalion Lure relationship but are not. In one False Pygmalion Relationship type, a Damsel in Distress Lure is used to attract a target who, through “saving” this prospective partner, is able to fulfill a certain desired sense of self (which we will talk about shortly). In this relationship type, the core value of the relationship to the pursuer is getting to feel like a hero, not unlocking the target’s raw potential. In another False Pygmalion Relationship type, one partner essentially acts as the other’s service submissive and emotional support, a form of the Love Lure in which a prospective partner does whatever is asked in service to their target’s goals while supporting them in moments of emotional weakness. These False Pygmalion Relationship categories are worth noting as they are quite different in the dynamics and the risks they create when contrasted with true Pygmalion Lure generated relationships.

In both of the above relationship types, a target “trading up” for a better partner once they achieve the toe hold in life they were searching for is common, whereas when the Pygmalion Lure is used, trading up is a rare occurrence. Essentially, targets in the above scenarios are more likely to see the pursuer as a disposable source of free labor, resources, and emotional support while they move toward their goals, as opposed to seeing their pursuer as the architect of their identities and success.

The easiest way to tell these two types of relationships apart is the specific type of self-improvement being attempted. In these False Pygmalion Relationships, the pursued partner is often attempting to either pull themselves up from rock bottom (get out of a bad situation, get off drugs, etc.) or they are using their partner to achieve a specific goal (get into and through grad school, get a specific promotion, etc.). This is critically different from a Pygmalion Lure Relationship in which similar goals may very well exist but are ultimately secondary to rewriting one’s core identity.

A good example of this difference would be what is expected when Partner A comes home crying after failing to achieve some aspect of A’s goal for themselves. In a False Pygmalion Relationship, Partner B will be expected to give emotional support and remind Partner A they are still loved. On the other hand, in a Pygmalion Lure Relationship, such a reaction would be seen as enabling weakness and a major violation of trust. Instead, Partner A would expect Partner B to gently ask them what they gain from their current emotional state and to refocus them on the correct next steps without rewarding negative emotional reactions with attention, which will only make such unproductive emotional reactions harder to control in the future. In a Pygmalion Relationship, the thing a pursuer’s partner loves about them is their ideal selves. Indulging an emotional outburst from one’s current, less-than-ideal self is more likely than not going to hamper the emergence of one’s ideal self, of the person one’s partner actually loves and cares about.

Subconsciously, people want attention more than they want happiness, so by rewarding negative emotional states with attention, you can actually train a person to be more unhappy in the long run or enter states of unhappiness with a smaller triggering event—especially when in the presence of their partner. One key difference in Pygmalion Relationships involves valuing your partner’s long-term mental wellbeing over the immediate catharsis and support of consoling them—and more importantly, having your partner recognize and appreciate those decisions.

This sort of behavior pattern would only be seen as a positive reaction to one’s partner being emotionally distressed in a Pygmalion Relationship and would be a negative behavior pattern in constructive relationships formed by other lures (hence you should not expect the above response in all positive relationships—just this one type). If your partner expects you to recognize and appreciate your long-term wellbeing over your short-term emotional caprices, you know what type of relationship you are in. In other relationship types, one would be better off comforting one’s partner. In this moment, one has a choice between being a source of emotional support for a partner and strengthening one’s relationship with them, but at the cost of subtly conditioning them to associate negative emotional states with a positive outcome (attention). The optimal reaction depends on one’s desired relationship type.

It is not unheard of for people to “trade up” from even Two-Way Pygmalion relationships. People trade up from Pygmalion relationships in very specific circumstances, which are easy to avoid. In False Pygmalion Relationships, an individual may trade up for someone who is more arousing, more prestigious, or more successful. In a Pygmalion relationship, trade-ups really only happen consistently when there is a perception that one party has stopped trying to improve themselves/their partner, or that the goals each party is striving have shifted or might never have been the same to begin with. For example, one partner may decide to become a stay-at-home dad and this decision does not align with his partner’s perception of his potential. This can be avoided so long as partners take time to ensure the alignment of their goals and values.

The stability in Pygmalion Relationships stems from the belief that one has attached themselves to an appreciating asset. From the perspective of a Pygmalion Lure relationship, the concept of people leaving their current relationships in the name of hypergamy is preposterous (hypergamy is the act of choosing to leave one’s current partner for another of superior status). This is because even if Pygmalion-bonded partners were to meet better prospective partners, they could not trust that those partners would continue to improve, whereas they have already proven to each other that both of them are committed to constant improvement. Hypergamy is only a threat to partners who are stagnant, which is why it presents such a threat to individuals who lean on Dominance Lure tactics.

All that said, Pygmalion Lures have some glaring downsides, many of which we have already addressed, but which should be highlighted again.

Specifically, Pygmalion Relationships:

Require more effort to maintain than other relationships.
Are only accessible to people who have their shit together to a degree that others find enviable, as that envy fuels the early stages of the relationship.
Require more confidence to effectively execute than any other relationship type
Require a huge throughput of potential candidates to find a person who may genuinely be interested.
May lead to more damage if terminated (vis a vis typical relationship termination), especially if one or more partner begins to see another as critical to their self-improvement.

The Status Lure

The Status Lure is the closest thing that exists to a “Happiness Lure.” Desire for happiness is not a strong enough drive in humans to make it effective as a lure on its own. People talk up happiness, but consistently fail to make the hard choices necessary to chase it, because at the end of the day, our instinctual laziness is stronger, and happiness just doesn’t feel as good as we pretend it does. You cannot convince a person to date you just by saying that they will be happier through doing so. On the other hand, even just a shot at increased status is something over which people would gladly bludgeon their happiness with a lead candlestick and bury it in the backyard.

To leverage the Status Lure, signal to your target that you will increase their status in exchange for a relationship.

This lure can be utilized by a huge range of people: Celebrities, individuals from notable families, extremely attractive people, wealthy people, drummers in local rock bands, proud Bugatti owners, award-winning competitive archers, accomplished academics, or even just average Joes who made a cameo appearance in the latest trendy movie or TV series. What matters is what the target believes has value. The only thing necessary is that the prospective partner is able to sell to the target that, through a romantic or sexual interaction with them, some of their “status magic” will rub off on the target. Perceived status is the prospective partners’ primary value.

This dating strategy is not very effective at securing sex—or at least a lot less effective than you may think (even many famous and super-wealthy individuals struggle to get laid). Even when executed by a local celebrity, Dominance Lures crush Status Lures in their effectiveness at securing sex.

That said, Status Lures can be helpful in casual dating markets and with securing long-term relationships. Unfortunately, after thoroughly assimilating into whatever status you offer, your partner may eventually climb high enough in status themselves to leave you for someone with even higher status—unless you have done something to significantly increase the value you provide to your partner that is unique to you, perhaps by having kids with your target, providing them with some other lure, or increasing your status at a rate faster than that of your target. Be especially wary of if the status that is attracting the target is tied to an intrinsically decreasing asset. This scenario tragically comes into play among individuals who were married for the status associated with their looks. These individuals ultimately get left by their targets for younger, better models as soon as they age and lose that aesthetic value.

Remember: Everyone is both a pursuer and the target, so in the above scenario, both parties may have been using the Status Lure. Problems result when one partner’s status depreciates in value over time (athletic prowess, looks, fertility) while the other partner’s status appreciates (wealth, job title). A relationship in which one partner is primarily valued for their looks and the other is primarily valued for their wealth is almost guaranteed to fail in the long term because looks decrease over time while wealth typically increases.

The Self-Identity Lure

The Self-Identity Lure revolves around convincing the target that not dating or having sex with the pursuer will somehow violate their self-identity or otherwise give rise to cognitive dissonance (e.g., “If you will not sleep with me, everything you believe to be true about yourself and your character is a lie—you are not the X that you claim to be”). It is depressing how effective this lure can be when executed competently.

This is not to say that someone with low social intelligence attempting this lure will not comically crash and burn. Failed deployment of the Self-Identity Lure classically features a jilted prospective partner wailing at their target: “What—are you gay/racist/homophobic or something???” in hopes that some deep-seated insecurity will lead the target to conclude their only recourse is to sleep with their accuser.

The Self-Identity Lure has nevertheless been effectively used by particularly cunning individuals for centuries. For example, there are recorded incidents in the courts of famous European royals where pious and chaste young women were convinced to sleep with high-status individuals out of wedlock through being convinced it was the most pious thing to do and that to not have sex would be an act of impropriety and self-indulgence (with the pursuer arguing family fealty stands above social conventions).

There are two approaches one might take to deploying this lure:

Attacking the Target’s Identity
Cultivating Cognitive Dissonance in the Target

Attacking the Target’s Identity

The pursuer identifies something incredibly important to the way the target sees themselves, then builds a compelling argument that not sleeping with or dating them would violate that treasured element of the target’s identity. These days this often manifests as responding to rejection from a self-identified “good, tolerant, open-minded person” with an accusation of racism, sizeism, transphobia, misogyny, or some other form of bigotry and intolerance. Many people who want to see themselves as socially conscious operate on autopilot and would rather date or have sex with someone they found repulsive than genuinely see themselves as a racist/sexist/transphobic bigot.

There are a number of other paths that follow this same basic strategy. For example, if a target sees themselves as rebellious or as the type of person who breaks societal conventions, a pursuer can leverage that aspect of their identity subtly to push past points on a date at which the target might otherwise turn them down—in this case, by implying that continuing past the target’s comfort zone is the “rebellious choice,” meaning that playing it safe would clash with the target’s identity.

Cultivating Cognitive Dissonance in the Target

Rather than looking for something important to the target’s identity, a pursuer may encourage them to clarify things they believe about the world, then leverage those beliefs to create cognitive dissonance.

The Pursuer may, for example, get a target to agree to a statement like: “Any action that makes all parties involved feel good is a good action.” Next, they would escalate that logical pathway by getting the target to admit that they would find sex with the pursuer pleasurable—or at least that it would be very unlikely to be unpleasant. After clarifying these two statements (things that make people feel good = good, and sex makes people feel good), a decision to not have sex with the pursuer will likely create cognitive dissonance in the target. Most people would rather sleep with someone, even someone they are not attracted to, than experience cognitive dissonance. If the target still does not want to sleep with or date the pursuer, the pursuer gets them to list explicitly why not, then attempts to create cognitive dissonance against each of these pillars using a similar strategy.

Once you accept that most humans are just blindly stumbling through life trying to fulfill some vision of who they are, you will begin to notice how easy it is to manipulate this vision to get them to do what you want. After you gain a clear understanding of what this vision is for one of these autopilot humans, you can lead them around like a dog on a leash. This is doubly true if you are confident, non-hideous, non-threatening, not desperate, and comfortable being you. Unfortunately, failing at any of these things can set off an internal warning system in people’s brains, telling them to be suspicious of your intentions and to look down on you.

While these strategies are unnervingly effective against people living on autopilot, they are completely ineffective against people who have a deep philosophical framework behind what they want from their lives (see: The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life). These tactics are also only effective on people who are less intelligent than you, though not so stupid that they are below autopilot level. People at below autopilot levels of intelligence cannot hold a train of thought and are more influenced by biological impulses than their autopilot, which is trying to maximize a certain image of who they are. This method is completely ineffective on people in this category, though dominance-based strategies should work extremely well.

Essentially, the pursuer is looking for targets with strongly held, complex convictions—but convictions they adopted not because of the logic behind them, but because of the way these convictions make them feel about themselves.

Self-Identity Lure strategies are great for short-term dating and sex (they completely smoke dominance-based lures in terms of effectiveness when applied to higher-value targets), but are not very useful in securing high-quality, long-term relationships unless you want a pet more than a partner—and if you do, you are probably on autopilot trying to make yourself feel powerful or earn the admiration of others and thus will be unable to effectively execute this strategy. To say it another way, most people using this strategy have learned to use it through subtle subconscious training (e.g., “I notice that if I claim people are transphobic/fatphobic/racist when they turn me down, I am more likely to get laid; I like getting laid, so I shall increase the behavior that leads to the reward.”).

The Damsel in Distress Lure Variant of the Self-Identity Lure

The Damsel in Distress Lure is a passive form of the Self-Identity Lure. Essentially, the prospective partner exhibits (or feigns) a need for the target. This need thereby attracts the target, as it presents an opportunity to reinforce a “heroic” part of that target’s self-identity (“I am a good person / I help those in need”).

The most common manifestation of this dynamic involves a stable individual dating a distressed individual because doing so reinforces their own magnanimous and heroic self-image: Visualize the stable, rich guy who dates the poor, unstable gal because giving her stability and helping her get her life on track reinforces his image of himself as a good person. That said, you can frame yourself as the necessary yin to whatever yang your target may need to “complete” their self-identity. Is your target an academic? Be the acolyte who desperately wants and needs their guidance as you work to continue their legacy. Is your target the Magician? Be the Lovely Assistant.

Relationships of this nature can be powerful for casual daters as both parties typically benefit greatly—at least when the prospective partner’s need for the target is real. Specifically, the hero gets to feel great about helping someone and the damsel (gender-neutral in this case) gets to be helped and get through a rough time in his or her life.

However, relationships originating from Damsel-in-Distress lures do not make for good long-term relationships because either:

The hero (the target) successfully and resoundingly saves the damsel (the prospective partner), and now that there is nothing to fix, the hero no longer gains much value from a continued relationship (or the damsel, being saved, moves on). In this case, the hero often moves on to focus their attention on other partners or projects.
The hero repeatedly fails at helping the damsel due to persistent relapses on the part of the damsel, causing the hero to lose any cognitive reward gained from helping the prospective partner and ends the relationship—or perhaps worse still, the couple falls into a stable but toxic codependent relationship.

These relationships are fine for someone just learning to date and can be beneficial to both parties in scenarios in which one appreciates their partner for what they do to help them while the other appreciates their partner for helping them reinforce a desired self-image.

As we mentioned before, these relationships are easy to mistake for Pygmalion Lure relationships and are critically different.

If you are unsure whether you are just someone’s “hero” or the pursuer in a Pygmalion Lure relationship, ask yourself:

Does the target think of me more like their crutch (that helps support them so they can live a normal life) or more like their home gym (that improves them through challenge and work)? A crutch is disposable once a person has healed; a gym is not—so long as one wants to keep improving.
Is my primary value to the target (in their eyes) my advice, labor, money, security, or emotional support? If your value to your partner consists of anything other than your advice, you are just their “hero.” If you still aren’t sure, think through how often they seek your advice and how often they take it.
If my partner were feeling emotionally vulnerable, would it improve their trust in me more were I to (a) calmly point out their lapse of emotional control and help them regain their composure or (b) comfort them? A person who sees your comforting them as a betrayal of trust demonstrates that, to them, you are a tool for constant self-improvement more than an interchangeable emotional security blanket.

The Admiration Lure Variant of the Self-Identity Lure

The Admiration Lure simply entails demonstrating a high amount of admiration for one’s target. The target then dates the pursuer because they like the feeling of being admired. This tactic is often employed alongside other lures and is uniquely effective at securing dominant partners. We might go so far as to say admiration plays a critical role within any mate acquisition strategy targeting an individual that tends towards the dominant end of the sexuality spectrum. Dominant individuals often experience strong cognitive dissonance when they feel a partner does not actively admire them.

The Admiration Lure differs somewhat from other lures as it is a necessary component of almost any strategy when targeting a specific personality type, naturally dominant individuals. Failure to properly deploy it lies at the core of a huge number of failed mate acquisition strategies. This is particularly true among heterosexual and bisexual women, who (statistically speaking) are more likely than other groups to be hunting exclusively for actively dominant partners (this is not conjecture, but rather based on a large volume of data, see The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality for more detail—bisexual women actually become aroused by acting submissive in a sexual context at a rate of 80%, the highest of any demographic).

The most common mistake people make when trying to secure a dominant partner involves an attempt to raise one’s stature in a partner’s eyes by dismissing something about them as unimpressive (be it an achievement, a personal characteristic, a meaningful possession, distinct knowledge, an important milestone reached, etc.). While this kind of play MAY sometimes be effective at asserting dominance in purely social contexts, deflating a target’s ego in an effort to increase one’s own perceived value is instant death to a strategy designed to secure a dominant partner.

We have also observed individuals with a strong preference for a dominant partner who, for whatever reason, see it as demeaning to express frequent admiration toward another person. Typically this takes the form of someone with a superficially high and fragile ego they fear might be damaged through any display of admiration. We have yet to see such an individual maintain a high-value dominant partner in a stable, happy relationship.

Discomfort with expressing admiration presents one reason why professionally successful women who still want a dominant partner have so much trouble securing one. When a person is objectively smarter and further along in their career than their partner and intelligence and career status comprise the things they value most in life, how can they honestly show admiration for that ‘lesser’ partner? If they are someone who is objectively highly successful in the domain they value most, yet they still yearn for a happy relationship with a dominant partner, we strongly recommend that they explore admiring different domains of achievement, specifically domains in which they are weak.

The Admiration Lure is fairly useless if not deployed with genuine conviction. Feigning admiration will not get a person far. We recommend finding something the pursuer truly admires about a target and digging into that when speaking with the target about the manifold ways in which the target impresses them.

Expressing genuine admiration for a partner has near-zero downside risk—other than the fact that admiration alone is unlikely to secure a partner. While a willingness to express admiration is a near prerequisite for securing a dominant partner, expressing admiration toward a submissive or neutral partner in an attempt to augment one’s appeal is still effective and necessary in many cases (just not as often a prerequisite). Learning how to admire other people and believably show that admiration is far more useful than getting good at something like sex if a person wants to secure a healthy relationship with a high-quality partner. Almost every emotionally healthy person gets a strong sense of validation from knowing they are admired and likes to surround themselves with people who yield that validation.

The one caveat of the Admiration Lure may be this: If at some point the pursuer turns off that addictive IV drip of admiration and validation, that action may cause their relationship to take a nosedive. This becomes a genuine risk when the core and only thing the pursuer admires about a person is temporally locked (e.g., good looks or being captain of the football team). Given how hard admiration is to believably fake, we would therefore advise avoiding relationships in which the source of one’s admiration has a clear expiration date.

The Friend with Benefits Lure

Most people have a general idea of how the Friend with Benefits sexual strategy works: A person targets a partner with whom they are already friends and leverage that friendship so the transition into a sexual relationship will not involve a significant escalation of the existing relationship. While we call this the “Friend with Benefits Lure,” it just as often transitions directly into a dating relationship as a friends-with-benefits-style one. The core strategy behind this lure is to make the transition from friendship to a dating or sexual relationship only require a tiny nudge because the target is already someone with whom the pursuer has a strong non-sexual relationship.

This strategy comes very close to the Sneaky Lure and can easily be interpreted as such by the target. The core difference between the two is that, in this strategy, they are friends because they both want to be friends and the escalation of the relationship is a bonus, whereas with the Sneaky Lure, all investment put into the friendship was made with the ultimate goal of securing a sexual relationship.

The Friends with Benefits Lure is a dangerous lure to intentionally use. Close friendships feature significant prior investment and are typically riddled with externalities (a larger friend group that could be disrupted through romantic entanglement). Failure to escalate a friendship to a sexual level can easily lead to resentment and a perception that the pursuer was attempting a Sneaky Lure all along (e.g., they were only faking friendship in an effort to secure sex and/or a relationship).

On the other hand, when executed successfully, the Friends with Benefits strategy can form strong, long-term relationships. When the strategy yields a relationship, and that relationship forms a solid foundation, the pursuer will enjoy one of the best outcomes possible. Consider leveraging this lure if you have strong evidence suggesting your target is interested and if you wish to create a long-term relationship with this person. Do not waste a valuable friendship on this potentially ruinous tactic just for sex or casual dating.

One limitation of relationships formed through this lure is that, given the couple’s history as just friends, it can be very difficult to implement a hierarchy once they are in a committed relationship. This limits the categories of relationship contracts and conflict resolution mechanisms available to such a relationship. We will explore this in detail in the next chapter on relationship contracts. Fortunately, even this one limitation can be avoided if both partners are able to transition from seeing themselves first as friends and secondarily as partners to first as partners with some form of joint purpose that dwarfs their friendship.

Note from the Research:

One study found that heterosexual men on average prefer opposite-sex friends to whom they are attracted, whereas this is not an important trait when heterosexual women choose friends of the opposite sex. In other words, straight guys prefer their female friends to be hot, whereas straight women don’t care how hot their male friends are. Perhaps males secretly hope the odd female friend might become a friend with benefits and thus preferentially cultivate relationships with individuals to whom they are attracted.

The Long-Term Relationship Lure

Prospective partners deploying the Long-Term Relationship Lure are transparent about looking primarily for a long-term relationship and seek targets who leverage the same lure. Those using this lure believe they are better off in a long-term relationship than they are single or casually dating—the relationship dynamic itself is the goal.

This can either be a fairly effective lure, or it can be the symptom of a lack of appropriate planning.

Sometimes the Long-Term Relationship Lure is implemented by people sleepwalking through life who one day wake up and realize they have passed the age at which they “were supposed to be married.” This is essentially the musical chairs game of choosing a life partner. Those playing this game end with whoever they happen to be with when the music stops or rush around trying to throw other people off chairs. In this game, the music often stops with a sudden realization that the window one gave themselves to find a long-term partner was too short within their life plan (e.g., thinking “I won’t start looking for a husband until I am established in my career, but I also want multiple kids that are biologically mine” doesn’t grant a realistic window of time to find an optimal spouse for most people, as one is usually not established in their career until their mid to late thirties and securing an optimal spouse takes around seven years of work on average).

People in this position often end up in suboptimal relationships for a plethora of reasons. Often their sad outcomes result from living in an extreme state of autopilot, just taking life one day at a time, meaning they haven’t really thought through what they want from life outside of fulfilling some generic vision of a good life. Upon realizing the utter vapidness of this generic vision, these victims of society’s default settings end up having that clockwork meltdown in what our society calls a midlife crisis.

That said, this lure can and does often lead to positive long-term relationships. How to implement the Long-Term Relationship Lure to ensure it does end in a positive relationship depends heavily on an individual’s age and gender.

If you want to try to systematically implement this lure before your late twenties, regardless of your gender, it can be one of the more effective lures out there. The only downside is that if you want to use this lure while you are still young, you are likely to get odd looks, as people don’t expect younger individuals to be transparent about a goal like this. You also may find yourself limited to more conservative partner choices, which can be problematic if a liberal ideology is important to your life goals.

To implement the Long-Term Relationship Lure in your twenties, simply clarify very early on dates that you are looking for a long-term partner and speak with your target about what they are looking for in a long-term partner. People love talking about this sort of thing in a group context, as it can be very juicy and gossipy. This gives you a chance to signal your desires to a larger group. Regardless of your gender, you will have to be aggressive and not rely on innuendo when signaling to a target. People in their early twenties often choose to believe others think the worst of them rather than just read between the lines, so you will need to assume your targets are doing this. Be warned that this lure requires a lot more time and effort (around a couple years) before getting a payout when contrasted with others, as you are asking for a much larger emotional and time commitment with someone than you are when merely offering sex or dating.

As one gets older, optimal deployment of the Long-Term Relationship Lure shifts. For men, it will always be fairly straightforward and will become easier to use as time progresses. As we discuss in subsequent chapters on timing and marketplaces after the age of 30 or so, there are fewer high-quality men looking for long-term relationships than there are women, and there are copious statistics to support this that we will dig into. However, even though women are disadvantaged when looking for a long-term relationship, simply being direct about it can still be one of the best strategies available to them with a few caveats.

The key to successfully implementing this strategy as a woman in your late twenties and over is the internalization that your relative value within the marketplace has shifted (more on the specifics of what causes this in this book’s discussions of timing). Women approaching and beyond age 30 must accept that their position has shifted from gatekeeper to active pursuer. This shift in dynamics can leave one feeling hopeless, but there are actually a lot of decent guys out there waiting for a woman to pursue them. The key words here are “decent guys” and “waiting for a woman to pursue them.”

Decent guys: A woman implementing this strategy will have the most success if she remembers that a male of average attractiveness is liked by only 1 out of 115 women on Tinder. An average man should expect less than a 1% interest rate on the dating market. Half of men are below average in appearance. On dating sites, men below the top 10% in terms of physical attractiveness receive very little outreach from women, even though attractiveness is not often considered to be one of the most critical factors in the success of a long-term relationship. We refer to Tinder as the dating app plays host to some of the most robust and practical studies on this market dynamic that have been performed, but when implementing this strategy, one should not rely heavily on Tinder and other hookup and casual-dating-oriented apps; instead, focus on apps that guys generally only use when looking for a long-term relationship (such as Match or eHarmony).

Waiting for a woman to pursue them: Statistically speaking, most heterosexual women want a man who will pursue her. Realistically speaking, most decent men who actively pursue women and want a long-term relationship have been filtered out of the market by their mid-twenties, as a significant proportion of these proactive men get locked down by partners—but this is not the only reason. Statistically speaking, men who are dissatisfied with a relationship leave at much lower rates than women, meaning good guys leave bad partners more slowly than good girls do (more on this later).

Fortunately, this does not mean a woman using this strategy will never again get to savor male pursuit; women using this strategy need only “activate” this pursuit through some pursuit of their own, initiating contact and letting the targets know explicitly they will not be rejected if they take the emotional risk of pursuit—which unfortunately comes with the cost that men are used to bearing: That the guy will tell the woman he isn’t interested and change how he sees her. Sometimes life sucks. We refuse to lie to our readers and imply that they can secure a partner when in a disadvantaged state without significant personal tribulation. Such feel good assurances are the bread and butter of grifters looking to sell you something.

The Social Construct Lure

This lure entails the use of a structured social construct, such as an arranged marriage or structured matchmaking market, to create a relationship. We could easily write an entire book on the various social constructs used to produce relationships and their varying efficacy, but since this book is primarily written for those searching for relationships and sex within modern Western markets, such information would be of little utility to the reader.

It is difficult to make overarching statements about relationships born from these systems given their vast diversity. Typically, they are on the higher end of relationship quality given the intentionality that often goes into designing these social constructs and the emphasis they often place on a combined mission for the couple (as opposed to encouraging couples to obsess over how in love they are). However, as most of these systems developed a long time ago, social-construct-generated relationships almost always feature strong patriarchal overtones that are distasteful to the modern Western palate.

Some of the most common Social Construct Lures are those based around matchmaking specialists like the Jewish Shadchan, Egyptian Khatba, or the Hindu Astrologer. In these systems, a third-party relationship expert will find and match two individuals or sanctify a parent’s choice of an arranged marriage partner, making it harder for hesitant assigned partners to object.

Another type of Social Construct Lure involves a matchmaking community and/or location. This can be seen among the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Singles Wards or the structured social dances that are still common throughout the world (such as square dancing and contra dancing in frontier North America or the Ceilidh dances of Scotland). These systems enable youth from cultures in which premarital relations are discouraged to meet and mingle in supervised contexts with plenty of rules and chaperones. These controlled interactions are quite effective, but they can create social unrest in that they tend to visually reinforce strong gender discrepancies in terms of market availability. It is common for either males or females to leave these cultures at disproportionate levels—or a portion of a gender’s population is discounted due to a social requirement for matchmaking (land ownership, virginity, devoutness, etc.). In other words, this matchmaking system can make it depressingly obvious there are far more single men than women or vice versa when a person arrives at a matchmaking event with twice as many individuals of one gender.

Many matchmaking systems are far more complex. At the Shanghai marriage market, parents write down details such as the age, height, job, income, education, family values, Chinese zodiac sign, and personality details of their children on a sheet of paper and hang up said paper on strings. These pieces of paper act as advertisements to other parents looking for a match for their child.

Social constructs designed to form relationships can become significantly more formalized and even state run, as can be seen with Singapore’s Social Development Unit (SDU), which offers a combination of professional counsel and dating system technology. While we may see long-term pair-bonding as a totally personal responsibility, across cultures and history these decisions have more often been facilitated by either a person’s family unit, religious subculture, or the state in an effort to maintain and propagate social order, cultural values, and/or stability.

With dropping birth rates around the world beginning to threaten the extinction of certain cultures (Japanese and Korean being the first—but not only—cultures on the list) and seriously damage the world economy, we anticipate we may see these government-run systems become more formalized and aggressive within our lifetime.

Which Lure Should I Use?

It is easy to read through the above section and think: “Well . . . Damn, there are not many good options.” This is true. To speak honestly, society has not handled its transition to sexual freedom and individual autonomy, as well as we like to pretend it has. We discuss this and the associated statistics in detail at the end of The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality.

That said, every person still has a lure that is optimal for them, given their current goals, gender, and stats (intelligence, attractiveness, age, wealth, etc.).

To help you out, we will quickly recap the major lures, dividing them into three categories:

Can be effective
Extremely situational
Almost never effective

We will discuss each of these three categories in the context of lures effective at securing either sex or healthy, long-term relationships, as most people reading a guide like this are looking for one of those two things.

Long-Term Relationships

Can be Effective
- The Pygmalion Lure: This is the king of lures for creating effective, long-term relationships; however, it requires more work to secure and maintain a relationship than other lures. The Pygmalion Lure also necessitates a very high level of initiative, persistence, and self-awareness that many lack.
- The Long-Term Relationship Lure: This is a good lure to implement when young and is still fairly effective as one ages, so long as you are willing to be the active pursuer.
- The Sexual Exploration Lure: This is the only lure on both lists, as while it is effective at obtaining sex, it is also one of the best options available for women over thirty looking for a long-term relationship. The greatest caveat to this lure is that you must be comfortable with your sexuality to use it. Another catch: To implement this lure, you must deal with communities highly intolerant to conservative worldviews.
- The Social Construct Lure: Despite the shade our society casts on things like arranged marriages, they are often more effective than the other strategies available to our generation. Significant drawbacks of this lure include required membership in a community that has the infrastructure to support a social construct lure, the often-misogynistic cultures of these communities, and the non-trivial risk that any third party handling your matchmaking might have interests that are poorly aligned with your own.

Extremely Situational
- The Friend with Benefits Lure: This lure should only be used to create long-term relationships and carries a high risk. However, when it is successfully deployed, the Friend with Benefits Lure can lead to stable, productive relationships.
- The Status Lure: Luring targets with some sort of status is effective when the status bump you offer is immutably connected to who you are (or is at least very secure). That said, this lure is very dangerous when the status you offer is temporary (e.g., status associated with attractiveness, youth, or a temporary position of leadership).
- The Admiration Lure: This is a solid lure and a near necessity for securing dominant partners. However, mere admiration is rarely effective on its own.

Almost Never Effective
- The Damsel in Distress Lure: While this lure may be mutually beneficial for short-term dating, it is dangerous for forming long-term relationships.
- The Love Lure: As we said before, thinking that someone will want to be with you because “you love them” is like thinking that someone will want to be with you because you masturbate while looking at a picture of them.
- The Nice Lure: This is the “nice guy/girl” strategy and is largely ineffective in all circumstances. Do not attempt to obtain a partner by behaving like an over-eager fan/servant. If that type of role in a relationship excites you, find someone looking for that particular flavor in what is called a “service submissive” within the BDSM community using the Sexual Exploration Lure.

Sex

Can be Effective
- The Sexual Exploration Lure: This is hands down the best strategy to implement when you first decide to start exploring your sexuality. The two core drawbacks are that it requires a medium to high level of social intelligence to implement, especially for men.
- The Self-Identity Based Lure: This lure is uniquely effective at securing targets who are living life on autopilot and the best lure for casual dating and casual sex (assuming you don’t need to respect your partner). The major drawback is the type of people looking to have sex or casually date people they don’t respect are rarely self-aware enough or have the social intelligence to competently implement the lure.

Extremely Situational
- The Dominance Lure: Dominance presents a very useful lure for any gender with low social intelligence that is only looking for sex. While understanding the mechanics behind the Dominance Lure can have utility for those of above-average intelligence, there is virtually no value in practicing it, as other strategies are strictly better, lower effort, and less risky. Under no circumstances do we recommend using dominance as a lure to obtain anything more than casual sex.

Almost never effective
- The Sneaky Lure: While the sneaky lure is effective at preventing explicit rejection, it sucks at most everything else and features high risks.
- The Easy Lure: This is one of those lures from which nothing good can come. Even though it may help women attain low-effort sex, it has a high probability of putting them in a dangerous situation.

Relationship Contracts

here is no such thing as a relationship without a contract. All relationships are governed by contracts, be they implied or explicit. Relationship contracts are not legal contracts, though sometimes societal expectations of relationships get worked into law (this can come into play in situations like divorce as well as the legal establishment and relinquishment of paternity).

The society in which you grew up provided you with a set of template contracts to which you implicitly agree whenever you enter a relationship, even a non-sexual one. For example, a common clause of many societal template contracts among friends involves agreeing to not sleep with a friend’s recent ex. While you may never explicitly agree to not sleep with a friend’s ex, your friend will absolutely feel violated if they discover that you shacked up with the person who dumped them just a week earlier.

Essentially, these social contracts tell an individual when they have “permission” to have specific emotional reactions. While this may not seem that impactful, these default standards can have a significant impact on one’s life. For example, in the above reaction, a friend who just got angry out of the blue at a member of their social group would be ostracized by others within the group while a friend who became angry while citing the “they slept with my ex” contract violation may receive social support from the friend group and internally feel more justified in their retaliatory action. To ferret out the contractual aspects of relationships in which you currently participate, think through something a member of that relationship might do that would have you feeling justifiably violated, even though they never explicitly agreed to never take such action.

This societal system of template contracts may have worked in a culturally and technologically homogenous world without frequent travel, but within the modern world, assumed template contracts cause copious problems.

These template contracts are not always well-communicated and differ between social groups. This can lead to unintentional contract violations and the breakdown of otherwise healthy relationships. For example, within some template contracts, flirting with someone is considered infidelity, while in others, an individual may not think twice about it. Assuming your partner is going to be operating on the same template contracts as you will set you up for disaster.

Let’s take a moment to look at the stats so that we can better appreciate why these mismatches are so common. One study showed that ten percent of the US population considers watching porn to be a form of cheating. What if your partner is among that ten percent and you are not? If you consume porn, you would therefore think you are golden within your relationship contract, whereas your partner would see it as you committing a clear violation—you could easily end up cheating in their eyes without ever intending to.

But wait—it gets messier. Thirty-six percent of college-age women and thirty-nine percent of college-age men said that oral contact with another person’s genitals counted as sex when the question was framed as them doing it, but when the question was framed as their partner doing it, sixty-two percent of women and sixty-three percent of men counted it as sex (the sample size of this study was robust as well, at 839). As you can see, when people don’t explicitly delineate contract terms and definitions, people will subconsciously define the expected norms of the contract in their favor—especially after they have broken an aspect of a contract they may have known was an expectation. This is a product of the phenomenon called the actor-observer effect. This cognitive bias allows one to give oneself the benefit of the doubt to maintain a positive self-image (“It was a one-time thing, and I was drunk, so it doesn’t count”), but it does not extend this courtesy to others.

Another larger problem is that these template contracts were written into the fabric of society centuries ago—before birth control, before it was common for women to have jobs, before online dating, and when people’s life spans were much shorter. Even if we just focus on one of these points, how is a template for marriage, written in an age in which it was expected that a woman would not have a job, supposed to practically apply to a modern relationship?

The template contracts society gives us simply do not produce effective, happy relationships for people living in the twenty-first century. The good news is that this problem is very easy to fix: Just be explicit with your partners about the ways a relationship contract with you differentiates from common templates—or better yet, choose a specific and optimal position to take on every element of relationships that matters, building a custom contract from the ground up.

Even when just casually dating someone, there are a few points that should be explicitly clarified. Specifically, be sure to:

Define infidelity: In implied societal contracts, definitions of infidelity range from sleeping with someone else without first gaining one’s partner’s consent to merely holding hands with someone of another gender, so it is crucial to clarify what infidelity will be within your relationship. For example, is sleeping in the same bed with someone of a gender an individual is attracted to (with clothing on) cheating?
Define your Cost Sharing Strategy: Who pays for what in various circumstances? This changes dramatically between template contracts and can be quite the sore spot for some. For example, do you keep track of expenses in any way? What is the maximum price allowable for surprise gifts? (This one can be a big differentiator in template contracts, as some will see an expensive surprise gift than cannot be returned as a way for an individual to non-consensually force relationship escalation.)
Define Your Transparency Policy: When does your partner need to tell you what they are doing? Is it OK to go on a two-week vacation without informing your partner? Is it expected that you will share your locations with each other using smartphone apps or things like Google Maps’ location-sharing feature? Do you expect them to give you their email and phone password as your relationship escalates?

Not clarifying these points and then trying to define them in your favor after a “transgression” will not work to your benefit. Telling someone you never clarified that your relationship was supposed to be monogamous, so it is okay you were sleeping with other people is transparently manipulative. You may be able to convince yourself that you did nothing wrong, but you won’t be able to convince most partners of such. Everyone knows the default boyfriend-girlfriend contract in the Western world involves monogamy. If you want to alter this template, there is nothing wrong with that, but you must do so explicitly and with your partner’s consent or expect your partner and their social circle to be angry.

Implied Contract Escalation

There are many ways to inadvertently and unknowingly demonstrate consent to society’s default relationship contracts. Entering these contracts is not always as simple as verbally agreeing to be someone’s boyfriend or girlfriend. For example, according to most Western society default templates, after a certain number of dates, after having sex, or after having spent a certain period of time dating, a portion of the population will begin to assume you have entered into a relationship. At this point, your partner, their friends, and your own friends may become angry at you if they find out you have been sleeping with or dating other people. Even though you never explicitly agreed to a relationship or monogamy, most of society will assume you implicitly accepted these terms through your actions because you did not explicitly opt out.

Bear in mind that:

The implied escalation points of default social contracts differ widely between individuals and many individuals don’t have them at all. This is yet another reason to not presume that you and your partner are running off the same template. Research on people in the US found men don’t typically think of themselves as dating until four to six dates have passed, while women consider themselves dating after between two and three dates on average.
Even though many people do not operate using societal default contracts and only allow themselves to assume a relationship has escalated after an explicit conversation, a relationship guide would be woefully incomplete if it did not mention that some people will nevertheless be operating under these assumptions. In the same way, it is worth guarding yourself against STIs even though not every partner has them, it is worth avoiding mismatched expectations among those with whom you regularly interact.
Even if the person you are dating/having sex with is not one of those people who thinks relationships can escalate without an explicit conversation, that does not mean that others in your lives will hold this belief. For example, a sex partner’s parent believing that you are seriously dating can cause a big fuss when they see you with someone else at a supermarket. Again, it sucks that society works this way and that people don’t mind their own business, but someone not minding their own business can still negatively impact your life—you should still look both ways before crossing the street even at a red light.

The most catastrophic instances of implied relationship escalation are “common law marriage” conditions, which can functionally and legally marry two people who have been dating and living together for various periods of time within specific geographies. However, these are much rarer and more restrictive than you might imagine.

Fortunately, outside of the odd “common law marriage” and honor killings in regions where this book is almost certainly not going to circulate, there are no catastrophic repercussions for breaking one of these accidentally entered into societal template contracts. Nevertheless, breaking these contracts can come with a social cost to you and to your reputation.

In violating a societal template contract, you run the risk of making people doubt whether they can trust other implicit contracts they might assume they have with you, which lowers your reputation. Peers may also attempt to shame you as a way to reinforce the importance of social order.

It is easy to avoid misunderstandings caused by perceived tacit agreement to a contract. Simply communicate your intentions to your partner. If you do not want to deal with the terms of a “casual dating” relationship, just make sure that within the first few dates, you have told your partner explicitly that either you do not consider yourself to be dating them or that you expect the relationship to have terms that differ from the societal template, and consider putting this notification in writing after delivering it in person to create a clear record of your societal default contract amendment. Do this while being aware that nosy friends and family members might still make assumptions that lead to undesired consequences.

If you fail to communicate your desired relationship terms to your partner because you fear they will not agree to them, then you know for a fact you are deceiving your partner through omission. While this can be an effective strategy in the short term, it is not recommended. Such deception typically ends in discovery within three months or so and has a fairly high probability of leading to retaliatory reactions that can meaningfully impact your life (calling your boss, keying your car, destroying prized positions, spreading rumors, etc.). Failure to communicate clear intentions is rarely worth the risk when there are probably plenty of people out there willing to agree to the relationship contract you want, assuming your desired terms are not completely unreasonable and one-sided, in which case, it’s not so much a contract as it is a plan to screw your partner over.

Marriage Contracts

While casual relationships can usually get by using slightly modified societal template contracts, marriage contracts typically need to be rewritten completely. Marriage presents by far the single most important social contract into which people enter during their lifetimes. Modeling your personal marriage contract off a societal template is completely mental. Worse, if you don’t explicitly alter the societal template, some elements of that societal template will be legally applied to your relationship and life. If society thinks you should share income or women should raise the children, and you haven’t negotiated something else, tough luck: You could be legally forced down that path in the event of a divorce (and you might be forced down that path even if you have negotiated something else, depending on the country in which you live). Unlike a normal relationship contract, a marriage contract should always be written from the ground up to ensure every aspect of it yields the type of relationship you want.

Appendix: If you are looking for a place to start when designing a marriage contract, it can be helpful to design the contract around achieving a specific “theme,” such as mutual happiness, fighting for a common ideological goal, raising children, self-improvement, etc. If you want help thinking through this, we created a list of common themes in the appendix under the Common Marriage Contract Themes section on page 563.

Download a Contract Template: We created a downloadable contract template that can help you out. You can find it at Pragmatist.Guide/MarriageContract

Clauses to Avoid in Marriage Contracts

Clauses Making Impossible Demands

Despite the fact that nearly every Western marriage ceremony includes the couple making some sort of promise to always love their partner as long as they live, we strongly recommend against including such impractical, impossible clauses in a marriage contract.

Humans cannot control feelings of love or sexual attraction (especially when they cannot control the way their partners age and change behaviorally). Imagine someone said, “love me or I will kill you.” or maybe “find me attractive or I will kill you.” You know very well you wouldn’t be able to force yourself to feel those things—the best you could do is lie about it.

Leave clauses that promise you will feel a certain emotion out of your marriage contract. They belong on the pages of romance novels, not amid social contract clauses that affect the overall happiness and productivity of your short existence.

Clauses Leading to Asset Depreciation

Optimal relationship dynamics naturally improve each partner’s individual desirability and aggregate desirability over time. Avoid building any dynamic into a marriage contract that would lead to any partner losing individual value over time, essentially dooming the future of your alliance. In other words, do not tie an appreciating asset to a depreciating asset, and do not create contracts with clauses that cause assets to depreciate.

This dynamic is most often inadvertently woven into relationship contracts when partners agree to have one partner sacrifice their future in exchange for a desirable short-term state. Such sacrifices appear most commonly in relationship contracts that permit one partner to forego a career to become a dedicated, young, and attractive sexual partner (i.e., trophy wife) or gestational carrier, childcare provider, and housekeeper (i.e., stay-at-home mom/dad).

Once the partner who foregoes a career to assume a short-term role no longer provides value in said role (e.g., the partner ages, loses beauty, becomes infertile, becomes an empty nester, hires house cleaning help, etc.), their value in the relationship plummets. It is common at this time for the partner to become resentful, having, for the most part, surrendered the chance of building a meaningful career and being capable of earning significant income. In some cases, the sacrificing partner also feels entitled (“I spent the best years of my life on this relationship—you owe me!”) and expects to be rewarded as though they are still bringing value to the relationship, even if they become a net drain.

Relationships that require these dynamics are only safe for the sacrificing party if said individual can be absolutely sure their partner will not leave them out of faith in certain aspects of their partner’s personality (not generally a safe bet to make) or if their contract includes clauses that cover the sacrificing party’s support later in life. In the case of a TradCon relationship (a traditional conservative relationship), a husband would need to promise to not divorce his wife and trade her in for a younger model as soon as the kids go off to college and/or if/when the wife becomes unattractive.

Unfortunately, even fairly strong legal contracts are not ironclad and not able to consistently hold people to such promises, leaving such contracts dependent on other strong negative consequences to be even plausibly effective. These consequences might include the mostly extinct traditions of social shaming by one’s community or fear that the jilted partner’s family will literally kill any jilting partner. This is why TradCon like relationships are becoming increasingly uncommon outside of the few remaining pockets that consistently apply these punishments, such as strict religious groups and very conservative geographic regions.

Before you pass through this discussion visualizing heartless men abandoning post-youth women, let us set the record straight when it comes to the gender more likely to terminate a marriage. Women initiate divorce in all relationship types, including TradCon relationships, much more often, with about 70% of divorces initiated by women. We discuss the economic pressures that lead to this later.

Everyone suffers in these relationships.

“Wait,” some might think: “It is really the one who keeps their job who gets screwed. They have half of everything they earned for the past few decades robbed from them to pay off someone who did a job that a minimum wage employee could have done, and worse, a court can overturn any prenup the couple had in place and force the primary breadwinner to pay a huge chunk of their income for the rest of their lives to someone they hate. What if they want to retire or leave their job for something that they are more passionate about? Tough luck, because a judge won’t let them (in many Western countries, it is illegal to leave your current job for a lower-paying position if you are paying child support or alimony). Essentially, these people may become an indentured servant to the state. Heck, some Western countries have even come to define the denial of money to a spouse as abuse! Aren’t the breadwinners really the partners who got more screwed? Aren’t they the partners who need more protection!?”

This is one way of looking at the dynamic. We aren’t choosing sides in this fight; we don’t care who the “victim” is. We merely observe that the system doesn’t work optimally and that people on both sides of this problem need to understand the real risk they take when they enter a long-term relationship with an individual whose income isn’t scaling in parity with theirs, especially when one individual is making major life choices with the assumption of continued joint access to communal income.

“Hold on,” you may be thinking; “If TradCons represent the manner in which relationships have always been structured, how could they be so flawed?”

While TradCons can be thought of as people cosplaying what they think the “historical” style

of marriage was like in the “good old days,” it is important to note that the style of marriage they emulate was relatively short-lived—a kind of wacky fad or social experiment. A nuclear family living together in one house with a dominant male breadwinner and 2.5 kids who stay at home with one parent only really began to exist as a “thing” in the early 1900s when male wage labor started to become common. The model largely died out in the 1970s when female wage labor got big and the “dual earner” family model came to dominate. The only reason we think of this TradCon family structure as “traditional” is that its heyday just happens to coincide with the early days of cinema and the childhoods of the people who wrote the most popular sitcoms. In reality, this relationship structure presents quite the historical anathema.

Personally, we have a predilection for a historical model of marriage called the corporate family.^[39] A corporate family exists as a social unit organized around a family business. Historically, corporate families consist of 7.5 children, unmarried family members, and live-in staff. Unlike with other models, children were integrated into the lives of the adults rather than being raised by a corporation, the state, or single parent. Another peculiar feature is that staff of the family are often thought of as part of the family unit/household. Finally, unlike other relationship models, the husband and wife act as a single unit and present themselves to society that way.

Steven Ruggles, a professor of history and population studies at the University of Minnesota, estimates this alternate model to have been the way 90% of American families were structured in 1800. For those who don’t read many historical books in which corporate families are featured, two good examples of a corporate (or NeoCorp) family model, would be popular media depictions of mob families and (outside of only having two children) the fictional Addams Family.

The great thing about the corporate model when contrasted with the TradCon model is that both partners’ careers advance at the same rate, removing a key vulnerability contributing to the collapse of many TradCon relationships. The downside to the corporate family model is that the career paths available to the couple become incredibly limited (we would be able to make a lot more money if we didn’t always insist on working together).

Still, with the rise of the gig economy, we expect a “neo-corporate family” iteration of the model to come into vogue, with the NeoCorp iteration of the corporate family model being different in that it exists within a society featuring new innovations in child rearing and more fluid norms related to gender roles.

Defining features of the NeoCorp model:

The couple acts as a single unit and not as kings of isolated domains of life—though they may choose one partner to be the “face” of a project for convenience.
The couple identifies as a couple first and as individuals second.
The model typically includes a unified family business, non-profit, or series of enterprises. This “corporation” is indistinguishable from the family unit. Thus, the name “corporate family.”
When possible, children are taught through direct involvement in the family business and daily lives of their parents (though this aspect is highly variable).
Individuals who work in the family business are treated as family (and sometimes live with or date family members). In this way, inclusion in the family unit is more about fighting for a common goal and competence than it is about genetic relation.
Family wealth and power are centralized in the corporation. Contrast this with a close-knit group of related TradCon families, among which a windfall might be expected to be divvied, whereas in a NeoCorp, any windfall would be stored and grown within a centralized vehicle (such as family businesses, family foundations, family land, etc., which in turn would employ down-and-out family members).

Constructing a Marriage Contract

A shocking number of people get married without first realizing that one partner can’t live a life with children while the other can’t live one without them. The process of constructing a marriage contract prevents such oversights from slipping through by anticipating disagreements that may occur in the future, and pre-negotiating each potential disagreement before it becomes a heated issue.

This process enables partners to create optimal solutions outside of the heat of the moment and establish policies that might not be required for years (or may never be needed, but are nevertheless good to have around, like a lifeboat or fire extinguisher). Negotiating all these terms at once also enables partners to trade favors on points that would otherwise not be traded (for example, while the disagreements tied to thermostat control and child naming will happen years apart, a tradeoff can be made in which a partner agrees to a lower normative temperature in exchange for more control over child naming). More importantly, this process allows you to isolate and identify intractable differences before you have invested years into a marriage.

Observe what does and does not work in other relationships to build a contract that details the expected terms of your relationship and each partner’s expected responses to stressors and potential points of conflict as they arise. Interview every old person willing to be open about their relationship struggles (both those who had failed marriages and successful ones). Also, peruse online threads (such as those in r/relationships and r/deadbedrooms on reddit) detailing conflicts in relationships.

It will be impossible to anticipate everything before marriage, so this contract must be a living document that will change as the relationship and its partners evolve. Prepare a process for adding both level-headed and contentious amendments. Just as good legal contracts have clauses addressing arbitration and legal jurisdiction should conflicts arise, a robust marriage contract will feature clauses outlining a thoughtful, organized process for negotiating contract alterations in a level-headed manner. Keep in mind that all marriages have unexpected complications—be they infertility or one partner getting an ambassadorship in Mongolia. Partners in any relationship will need a way to deal with these complications as they arise.

Delineate how consent from both parties should be granted before changes are implemented. List circumstances in which a partner may not be allowed to propose changes before a cooling-off period (e.g., when they are drunk, injured, overly emotional, high, etc.). The whim of an emotional or otherwise-compromised state does not provide an effective compass for making decisions. Humans are naturally more willing to compromise their better judgment when they see someone they love in pain. Be extremely careful about allowing contract changes to be made when one partner is visibly suffering (emotionally or physically).

Altering Marriage Contracts to Manage Individual Desirability

Probably the most undervalued aspect of a relationship contract is that they can be updated in a manner that improves your individual desirability to a specific partner—especially after that individual desirability, for whatever reason, takes a hit or is relatively unbalanced at the outset.

Some relationships are made sustainable by favorable clauses in a relationship contract. In cases in which a very wealthy, powerful, or famous individual is marrying someone who is not, it is common for the person they are marrying to trade an expectation of fidelity in their contract to secure the partner. Essentially, one partner acknowledges that they bring less to the table in the relationship, but mollifies that fact by letting their partner sleep with whomever they choose (normally this is modulated by both a requirement for discreteness and strict controls on how much money the philandering partner can divert toward extramarital partners—note that we do not say “poly” as polyamorous communities typically exclude relationships instigated through this type of coercion/tradeoff).

Adjusting a relationship contract to modulate a partner’s individual desirability becomes very interesting when the contract of an already existing long-term relationship is altered after one partner’s value to the other plummets. Many circumstances can trigger these changes, but the most common are:

One partner is caught breaking the contract’s fidelity clause.
One partner loses their libido or attraction toward the other partner.
One partner objectively becomes less attractive either through a lack of maintenance (e.g., they stop showering regularly) or a medical issue (e.g., their face gets burned off).
One partner loses access to something that was expected when the relationship was initiated (e.g., a relationship in which both partners were expected to work turns into a relationship in which one partner is working, and the other is a stay-at-home partner).
One partner is discovered to be infertile.

A decline in personal desirability need not doom your relationship so long as you are willing to renegotiate your relationship contract in a way that ensures its aggregate value to everyone involved is better than the value proposed by available alternatives. Because such acts of relationship salvage require a level of pragmatic emotional maturity beyond the reach of most humans, these renegotiations are uncommon. Most drastic drops in one partner’s individual desirability end in relationship dissolution.

These failures stem from an unwillingness to accept that, even though a partner’s value decreased through no fault of their own, they will now have to find means (through self-sacrifice) of increasing their value to the relationship in order to maintain it. Most modern societies teach us to expect the world to be a fair place; hence we become angry when it isn’t. Such reactions are objectively harmful to a person’s ability to thrive in the real world.

Keep in mind that the part of the human mind that reacts aversively to “unfair” scenarios does not represent more evolved, higher-order thought, but rather lower-order instincts shared with our ape relatives. If you have a moment, look up the capuchin fairness experiments on YouTube. You’ll see a monkey is happy to get cucumbers in exchange for work until he observes another monkey getting grapes for the same task—at which point he loses it and throws his cucumbers back at the researchers.

We advise against letting your monkey brain overwhelm the part of you that is human. Accept that sometimes life is unfair and build strategies to navigate the obstacles life throws at you. There is little to gain from airing grievances before a reality that frankly doesn’t care what is and is not fair.

Accept that sometimes relationship contracts need to be renegotiated. If both you and your partner wanted kids that are biologically yours, yet you later find out one of you is infertile, some sort of compromise will need to be made to keep the relationship stable. If sex with people to whom you are attracted to is important to both of you, yet one of you loses their attraction to the other, some form of renegotiation will be needed.

The two most common clauses designed to manage these types of events in a relationship contract before they come into play are the “sex clause” and the “hot clause.”

It is fairly typical for monogamous relationships to have a sex clause, even if it is only informally implied (e.g., “After we get married, we are still going to have sex at least once a week, right?” or “Let’s only have sex when both parties are interested”). This clause is often explicitly negotiated by the party that believes they will have a higher libido going forward and often includes optional remedies (in the event that regular sex ceases being desirable to one partner) allowing the relationship to stay together even if the commitment is broken.

The “hot clause” is typically an agreement to not “let oneself go” after marriage and is virtually ubiquitous in younger marriages, though such agreements have not always been so common. We hypothesize that the popularity of this clause was spurred by younger generations’ discomfort with older generations’ tendency to stop investing in self-improvement after marriage. This clause can be anything from a “fat clause” to an “intellectual curiosity clause” depending on the value set of the couple and what they find “hot” or otherwise stimulating and is paired with potential remedies when breached.

Important: Should you plan to have an open marriage in any way, we cannot stress strongly enough that you pre-negotiate terms around how much money can be spent on these other partners and the level of discretion expected in each partner’s interaction with them.

Varying Levels of Contract Clause Risk

There are three broad categories of clauses, each carrying with it a different level of risk:

Clauses about which both partners agree (e.g., “We both love minimalism and agree to hold quarterly purges of non-essential items.”).
Clauses about which both partners agree in principle, but one partner struggles with emotionally (e.g., “We both agree to have a policy against drug use to reduce the risk of addiction and financial/legal problems . . . but oh my God I am going to miss cocaine.”).
Clauses about which the partners disagree, but one partner concedes to the other’s demands (e.g., “I want to have sex with other people, but that makes you uncomfortable. Since I really want to marry, I’ll forego having sex with other people.”).

The strongest relationship contracts are composed almost entirely of clauses in the first category—clauses that each partner neither wants nor feels compelled to break. Despite being clauses that are easy to adhere to, they still warrant discussion with any potential long-term partner, as it is easy for someone to poorly signal their actual preferences early in a relationship. For example, Partner A may assume that Partner B likes to live frugally and minimalistically only to later find Partner B had always assumed their lifestyle would scale up as Partner A’s earning power increased—a difference in preferences that could create major conflict later in a relationship.

Clauses falling into the second category, while potentially dicey, can also be incredibly beneficial, especially for the individual making the concession. For many people suffering from addiction or involved in other potentially dangerous hobbies (e.g., base jumping, bull riding, cheerleading, racing motorcycles, etc.), the presence of a partner who cares about them enough to want them to drop that dangerous behavior is the only thing standing between them and death / serious injury.

On the other hand, an addicted individual may grow resentful of a partner who stands between them and their addiction, even if, logically, they would prefer to overcome that addiction. With such matters, it is best for the conceding party—the partner giving something up—to be the one to decide to include these clauses and write them into the contract. This partner must establish very explicit laws governing themselves, clarifying thresholds that should not be crossed, as well as responses to violations of those boundaries.

Clauses in the third category—concessions one partner would strongly prefer to exclude from the contract that are nevertheless admitted after the other partner frames them as non-negotiable—should be avoided entirely. While plenty of marriages have survived for lifetimes with partners making major ideological and value-based concessions, we see such concessions as too risky for something as life-defining as marriage.

Before terminating a relationship due to a failure to reconcile with a partner’s values or deep-set needs and preferences, think long and hard about whether opposition to their non-negotiable preference is truly non-negotiable. Many supposedly non-negotiable terms, such as monogamy and religion, are more flexible than one might assume, being more a product of societal defaults than one’s own values. It is best to think long, hard, and independently about one’s core identity, one’s top values, and the things one wants to maximize in life before drawing a hard line in the sand on difficult concessions in a marriage contract. Be uniquely suspicious of your non-negotiables if you think that they are positions on which society or your family would enthusiastically back you, as those are the stances we as humans question the least. Such “non-negotiables” may not ultimately matter that much to you, as an individual.

Conflict Resolution Clauses

No matter how well-researched and constructed your contract may be, you will inevitably run into disagreements you had not anticipated. Such hiccups can be easily dealt with so long as your contract features a conflict resolution clause dictating how the relationship responds to impasses.

Common mechanisms used to resolve conflict include:

Compromise
Hierarchy
Third-Party Arbitration
Votes

The point of conflict resolution is to come to the “correct” solution, where “correct” is defined as the solution that best serves the relationship and maximizes the objective functions of each partner (i.e., the values and life goals of each partner). With regard to this point, some methods are decidedly better than others.

On Resolving Conflict with Compromise

There is an old saying that has led to the death of hundreds of relationships: “Relationships are built on compromise.” We consider “compromise” to be a toxic conflict resolution mechanism. Why? Suppose you want ten and your partner wants twenty. You will be motivated to tell your partner you want zero with the expectation that if they say they want twenty, the compromise will be ten. Similarly, your partner will be motivated to represent what they want forty—or more!

Compromise incentivizes parties to misrepresent what they really want. To make matters worse, prolonged, and repeated compromising can trick us into thinking our false, exaggerated views are our true views, which exacerbates conflict. Even the most honest person under the influence of a heightened emotional state will subconsciously adopt a more extreme position than what they really want when compromise is being used as a conflict resolution model.

Furthermore, compromise incentivizes people to tie unrelated conflicts together and exaggerate the importance and emotions tied to conflicts. For example, if a couple trade a compromise in which Terry allows Sam to adopt a dog in exchange for Terry being granted final say on baby names, it behooves Terry to pretend to care more about dog ownership and thus escalate an unnecessary conflict.

Compromise may even encourage people to create conflicts that don’t exist. Let us say Sam wants the toilet paper roll pointed a certain way. Sam may get this concession from Terry by claiming to be upset about a car the couple is planning to buy—even if Sam is perfectly happy about that car choice. Worse, in pretending to be upset about the car choice, Sam may become genuinely emotionally attached to this feigned position, leading everyone to be less satisfied than they would have been had they not chosen to compromise.

Finally, compromise rewards those who act emotional and unreasonable, and it punishes those who work toward resolving conflict. In every relationship we have observed in which compromise is used as a conflict resolution method, the more unreasonable member gets their way more frequently—occasionally leading the reasonable member to dramatically snap after years of succumbing to these frustrating, unfair negotiations.

Compromise is a caustic element that turns small fissures into gaping wounds over time.

On Resolving Conflict with Hierarchy

Rather than subject yourself to the minefield that is compromise, we advocate for a hierarchical approach to conflict resolution, in which one partner is granted the right to make a final call about some or all domains related to the relationship. For example, one partner may have complete dominion over all decisions related to the couple’s finances while another makes the final call on decisions related to the couple’s social life.

Though domain-specific hierarchy can help to protect delicate egos, we find it most elegant to provide one party unilateral final decision-making power, meaning that one party has the final say in all disagreements not already negotiated in the contract. Unilateral hierarchy prevents tit-for-tat and retaliation problems emerging from domain-specific hierarchy (i.e., “You decided against my preference that we would go to Paris on our next vacation, so I am going to paint the living room that aubergine color you detest.”). Any mechanism that yields rewards for creating conflict in a relationship is toxic.

Per the unilateral hierarchical model, whenever there is a point of disagreement, the subordinate partner alerts the dominant partner and asks them to make a call on behalf of their combined good. Surprisingly, in a healthy relationship, this method of conflict resolution actually leads to the subordinate partner getting “their way” more often than the dominant partner. Why does this happen? By giving all the power to one person, you are forcing them to take a step back from what they want and consider the conflict from a third-party perspective.

For example, suppose you stand at the top of your relationship’s hierarchy, and you and your partner have a disagreement about room temperature (and you somehow forgot to include a room temperature clause in your contract . . . like a madman). Instead of thinking: “I want the room colder. How do I convince my spouse to make the room colder?” you will likely think: “I want the room colder because X, but my spouse, the person I love, wants it warmer because Y—what is an equitable solution to this that is in both of our best interests?”

Because most people in long-term relationships love their partners, the dominant partner will typically err in a partner’s favor, improving their own happiness by making those they love happier as opposed to taking advantage of their position. Moreover, dominant partners must make decisions not just for those they love, but specifically for those who trusted them enough to give them the power to make final calls on their behalf—further making it difficult for a decent human to abuse such a position.

In moments of disagreement, this conflict resolution method forces both individuals to remember the commitment that they made to each other and the trust that they put in each other. This dynamic often removes the negative emotions from conflicts on both sides. If a subordinate comes to the dominant partner in anger or is acting unreasonably, they are unlikely to engender the compassion necessary to get the outcome they want. Concurrently, the dominant partner has to take ownership for the way in which any conflict was resolved and be aware that a poor decision can literally doom the relationship, which encourages them to think logically and behave justly—instead of just arguing for a position that benefits themselves.

If you do not trust your partner enough to give them that level of control over your life, your relationship is not necessarily doomed, but we would estimate lower than 50% odds that it continues for any long period of time as a constructive, mutually beneficial relationship. By entering a long-term, committed relationship with others, you grant them immense influence over your personal success and happiness—regardless of which conflict resolution method you implement. If you cannot trust someone to sacrifice their personal best interest in favor of your combined best interest, the odds of you enjoying a successful long-term partnership together are quite low. Thus the final (and perhaps best) benefit of this conflict resolution method is that it accelerates the termination of bad marriages, an outcome we consider quite favorable in comparison to a life wasted on a bad match.

This dominant-subordinate partner method only works if the dominant partner was voluntarily given their final call power by the subordinate partner, thanks to the subordinate partner’s trust in the dominant partner’s prudence, wisdom, generosity, and impartiality. If the dominant partner believes they have the role because God gave it to them, because of the “natural superiority” of their gender, because the other party gave it to them as a trade (e.g., “I will let you be the dominant partner if I don’t have to work”), or because they took that position by force, they will be very likely to abuse that position—as they may feel they owe the subordinate partner nothing.

On Resolving Conflict with a Third-Party Arbitrator

The dominant-subordinate partner method of conflict resolution is designed for relationships that are optimized for quality and therefore can afford to fail. If failure is not an option and you need to optimize your relationship for staying power over quality, we recommend using a third-party arbitrator for conflict resolution instead of the hierarchical model. In this model, conflicts are arbitrated by a neutral third party who acts as the deciding “vote” in a disagreement. This third party is typically a religious figure (e.g., a priest or a rabbi), a family elder, a lawyer, or a marriage counselor.

The key to writing a third-party arbitration clause into your contract is finding a way to reliably replace an arbitrator when the one with whom you start is no longer available (e.g., you have moved, they die, etc.). Should you not have a clear succession plan in place, you may reach a stalemate in which each party refuses to accept an arbitrator who does not show a clear bias in their favor.

An arbitrator is not meant to take each person’s side in equal portions, but to ensure the common good of the couple in how he/she votes. An arbitrator who always sides with one party may still be doing a perfect job.

If you want to build this into your relationship contract or an exciting relationship and don’t trust the above listed third-party arbiters but like our approach to thinking through things, we may be able to help out. Email [email protected] and we can work together to come up with a procedure.

On Resolving Conflict with Votes

Should you be drawn to third-party arbitration as a conflict resolution method but not want a fixed arbitrator, you might use one or more people to act as a tiebreaker in votes. In some cases, a third/fourth member of a polyamorous triad or quad will make that final vote, or the vote might be supplemented by an agreed-upon friend group or the relationship’s children. The only requirement is that the total voting body, between the relationship’s partners and any outside voting party, must be odd to ensure there are no ties.

We strongly recommend against this solution. While not as inevitably toxic as compromise, votes lead to bitterness and social politicking while giving swing voters an undue amount of power in the family.

As a final note on conflict resolution in general: Conflict resolution should not be designed to grant each partner an even number of “turns” in which they get their way. Doing so actually encourages conflict, as it allows a partner to create “fake issues,” then concede to them. Worse, this model does not internalize that in many relationships, one partner is almost always in the wrong when there is a conflict (perhaps because they have a greater tendency to see problems from their personal perspective, while the other partner looks at problems from the perspective of the relationship’s greater goals and values). This can be very destructive to the fabric of a relationship if the habitually wrong partner is unwilling to accept that a conflict arbitration method that almost never works in their favor isn’t necessarily biased or not functioning as designed.

Addressing Finance Clauses in Marriage Contracts

Because the default marriage contracts society provides do not explicitly spell out how finances should be handled, special attention must be paid to this topic. This lack of clarity on a “standard system” for handling finances has caused the most common subject of argument within a relationship to be finances (statistically speaking). If your marriage is going to fail, chances are a major component of its downfall will stem from how finances were handled. You will find it difficult to get too into the weeds when establishing definitions, standards, rules, and procedures with your partner(s) around finances.

Key subjects of discussion when negotiating financial clauses in general include:

Which expenses count as joint versus personal
Which joint expenses require discussion and joint approval
Which personal expenses require discussion and joint approval
How to approach budgeting
How to approach debt (When is it OK to take out debt?)
How to approach third-party requests for money (What will be the policy regarding friends asking for loans, elderly parents requesting support, etc.?)
How to approach retirement (Should partners save for retirement or prioritize other present-term goals? Should each partner commit to saving, or should it be an independent decision? Should savings be pooled or individual? Is one partner expected to support another in retirement if one partner neglected to save and needs help?)

Partners typically adopt one of the following financial strategies in marriages:

Complete Financial Separation with Agreed-Upon Individual or Shared Payments
Complete Financial Separation with An Allowance
Shared Pool with Discretionary Income Allowances
Shared Pool with Pocket Money

We will go through each of these strategies in detail below. Before selecting a particular strategy, verify whether those involved have any debt, and do a credit score check all around. A partner with an abysmal credit score may not only hamper all partners’ abilities to take out loans in the future, but also suffer from behavioral issues that could put the relationship at risk (i.e., it may come up that Partner B has an addiction to gambling, drugs, or a penchant for expensive products and services). It should go without saying that if one partner has an abysmal credit score, a large amount of debt, or no savings for retirement, they should allow their more financially secure and likely more responsible partner to dictate the financial terms of their relationship contract. A partner who won’t take responsibility for a bad credit score, outside of cases of identity theft, presents a GIANT red flag.

Other Financial Strategy Considerations

Luxury Accessories

We often see those trying to secure wealthy partners in a traditional relationship (i.e., one in which the wealthy partner supports them) intentionally display obviously expensive accessories, such as cars, cosmetic procedures, clothing, and jewelry. This is an absurd strategy, as most wealthy individuals are good enough with money to have the sense to filter out potential partners who are going to have high ongoing expenses, even when only looking for potential trophy wives/husbands.

Expensive accessories present one of the best ways to signal you make bad financial decisions. Even targets who would not be worried by the high maintenance costs signaled by a potential partner’s pricey accessories may be less interested in such people, as it would be far easier to surprise and delight a partner who lacks such fancy things (i.e., Where’s the fun or feasibility in pleasing the individual who supposedly has everything?).

Expensive accessories exist to signal dominance to other peers of the same gender when a person has nothing else to recommend themselves, not to establish value to potential partners. Besides, expensive accessories make for a terrible store of value.

Mismatched Expected Lifestyles

Humans do not need much money to feel fulfilled, though some normalize to higher burn rates than others, and each partner’s desired burn rate can profoundly affect both partners’ ultimate happiness. It is, therefore, crucial when selecting a long-term partner to assess the lifestyle and monthly spend level this partner requires to be happy.

We know two men of similar age (semi-retired, US-based). Both love to travel and explore the world. Ironically, the wealthier man travels less than the more middle-class man and comes across as significantly less fulfilled, frequently expressing his regret that he cannot travel more because it is so prohibitively expensive. How can this be?

The lifestyles to which each man and their respective partners have normalized make all the difference in the world. The middle-class man and his partner are willing to fly coach and stay in bare-bones hotels and Airbnbs, whereas the wealthier man and his partner must fly in business or first class, rent luxury cars, and stay in luxury accommodations. Even with his generous savings, the wealthier man simply cannot afford to constantly travel in his semi-retirement.

A household’s burn rate—monthly spend for both partners combined—typically is determined by the burn rate of the partner who defaults to more expensive things to achieve a baseline level of comfort. This is because the person who defaults to nicer restaurants, hotels, and houses when given the choice determines the spend rate of both partners (i.e., if Malcolm is happy staying at a cheap Airbnb, but Simone couldn’t be happy anywhere below the quality of the Ritz, then both Malcolm and Simone will be spending money at the Ritz). A family’s burn rate can affect its lifestyle and financial freedom dramatically—more than the wealth each partner brings to the table.

When a person is financially constrained, they will only live up to the quality they can afford. Nevertheless, as people get wealthier, most reach a point at which they stop wanting to increase the luxury within which they live. For example, Warren Buffet has a net worth of $84 billion dollars but still lives in a house he bought for $31,000 in 1958, doesn’t have a computer at his desk, doesn’t carry a cell phone, and drives himself in a car he bought for $45,000 in 2014—plus in his spare time, he plays bridge with friends. This behavior is not unique to Warren Buffet; most financially successful people reach, over the course of their lives, a point at which they “max out” their luxuries.

Do everything possible to avoid a partner if it looks as though there is a large mismatch in ideal lifestyle and “necessary” monthly spend. Failure to do this may lead to a life spent treading water, no matter how much each partner earns. Many partners work punishing hours late into life at jobs that don’t inspire them, foregoing lives with more time for leisure, family, hobbies, and passions (albeit less money) because their spouses require a relatively expensive lifestyle to be happy. Plenty of ultra-wealthy celebrities are barely staying afloat financially because they never hit their personal stopping point.

The best way to assess this in an individual is to just talk through it. Get their opinion on various luxuries: Would they work six extra hours each week if it meant that whenever they fly, it would be in business class? Were money no object, how many bedrooms and bathrooms would they have in a house? If they could make clothing appear out of thin air, what clothing would they materialize, and how often would they materialize more? Would they take on a night/weekend job if it meant that they could always drive around in a nicer car? If they had a choice, would they feel more content in a cheap house with low taxes in the suburbs, or would they prefer one apartment in the center of an expensive city even after having kids?

We really can’t stress enough how much this will matter to your life and how thoroughly you need to vet this in potential partners.

You have three lives available to you:

If the water rises faster than you can swim, you will live your life underwater, panicking while you hopelessly gasp for air.
If the water rises in pace with your swimming speed, you will spend your life treading water—every day feeling like a pointless struggle.
If the water stops rising and you swim fast enough, then you can break free and live with the birds—only then will you understand what freedom feels like.

Asceticism is as valuable a trait in a partner as earning potential.

Note from the Research:

Studies have repeatedly shown that people who buy less “stuff” show higher mental wellbeing, fulfillment, happiness, decreased psychological disorders, and decreased psychological distress. You might be inclined to think this may be due to some related effect and not just pure asceticism increasing happiness as the writers of Materialist values, financial and pro-environmental behaviors, and well-being did. They tried to determine if it was actually the self-knowledge that these individuals were being environmentally conscious that lead to the positive mental effects of asceticism, but instead found that asceticism driven by the goal of helping the environment did not have the positive effects of asceticism for its own sake.

Common Financial Configurations in Relationships

Complete Financial Separation with Agreed-Upon Individual or Shared Payments

Partners who feel uncomfortable pooling finances and commingling assets may choose to adopt a strategy in which each partner’s finances are completely separate (Partner A never sees Partner B’s income, has no access to their bank account, etc.). Each partner assumes individual or shared responsibility for different communally enjoyed expenses.

For example, Partner A may choose to buy a house and pay for the house as well as annual property taxes independently. Whereas Partner B pitches in by paying for water, electricity, internet, and streaming entertainment subscriptions. Together Partner A and B share health insurance and childcare costs.

Should you choose to adopt this strategy, be explicit in your financial management clauses about which expenses are expected to be shared and what is to be done when one partner decides that it is no longer worth spending money on something (usually this means that product/service goes away entirely if the other partner does not wish to independently shoulder the financial burden).

For example, what if the individual who was paying for streaming services just decides to stop? Their partner, not wanting to lose access to this joint resource, might assume this financial responsibility. Through this process, more and more financial responsibility can quietly shift to one partner, creating a system that feels deeply unfair and builds resentment.

The adverse effects of this strategy include the distinct signaling of a lack of trust and misaligned incentives (e.g., if Partner A’s income will go up 300% if the couple moves, whereas Partner B’s income will drop 30% with relocation, Partner A will likely resent Partner B if the couple does not move, and Partner B will likely resent Partner A if they do move).

Nevertheless, this strategy is optimal for relationships that are not expected to last, especially for those with an individual who has earned or will earn an amount of money that is disproportionately higher than their partner. Avoiding the comingling of assets is essential if you are the wealthier partner in a relationship and are keen to avoid the financial damage associated with a divorce.

This strategy is also optimal for relationships in which one partner is irresponsible with money or has problems with an addiction of some sort, as well as relationships in which a partner has anxiety tied to money and finances—quite the common neurosis.

Partners incorporating this approach into their marriage contract must be sure to address:

Whether one partner will ever receive an allowance from another partner (which may be necessary if one partner earns significantly more than the other partner yet wants to maintain a parity of lifestyles).
Which products and services purchased by each partner individually may be used by the other partner (e.g., If Partner B buys an expensive car, is Partner A allowed to drive it?).
What happens when one partner decides to stop paying for something on which the other relied (e.g., heating or Netflix).
Whether each partner is entitled to know how much money the other partner has or not (e.g., is Partner A entitled to know that Partner B has no retirement savings? This is the only financial model in which it is possible to enter into a relationship without a full understanding of your partner’s finances).
How the relationship will function in retirement and during times of hardship (If Partner A has a retirement fund and Partner B has nothing saved, is Partner A expected to support Partner B in retirement, enjoying a lower quality of life than expected due to Partner B’s lack of savings?).

Shared Pool with Discretionary Income Allowances

Couples who wish to work on some financial activities jointly but manage other activities personally benefit most by funneling all of their income into a joint account, but splitting off an agreed-upon percentage or amount of income into private discretionary spending accounts.

This strategy gives individuals privacy and freedom with finances while also keeping incentives aligned, as in most cases, discretionary income is equally distributed and therefore each partner is incentivized to maximize the relationship’s overall income rather than just their personal income.

Perhaps, one partner is keen to build up a retirement fund, whereas the other inherited wealth sufficient to act as a retirement fund and wishes instead to invest newly received income in startups. Or maybe each partner has a guilty pleasure or hobby on which they like to spend money and would rather do so without judgment from the other partner. Consider also partners who wish to purchase surprise gifts for each other without the other partner necessarily learning about the purchased item early when reviewing a credit card statement. In all of these scenarios, a strategy involving pooled income with private discretionary income allowances is optimal.

Those adopting this strategy must create very clear policies around the following things:

How the amount of discretionary income is calculated. Is it whatever is left after all agreed-upon shared expenses divided by two? Is it a fixed amount each month?
Whether each partner receives the same amount of discretionary income. What if one partner has a very easy job that earns only a small amount, whereas the other partner works 60+ hours a week and finds their work very stressful?
Which expenses may come out of the relationship’s joint account, and which expenses are to come out of each partner’s discretionary income? How are vacations funded? How is food paid for, especially if one partner consumes a lot of expensive organic food or alcohol and the other does not?
Whether and how funds in the shared pool will be further subdivided into accounts/funds that are intended for specific purposes, such as an emergency fund, a fund dedicated to childcare costs, a fund dedicated to home improvements, a fund dedicated to saving up for vacations, a fund dedicated to discretionary income for the couple (e.g., luxuries that all partners want but aren’t necessary for survival), etc.

Single Pool With Pocket Money

Partners who expect a lifelong relationship and minimum administrative burden often opt to pool all of their finances into a joint account and pay for all expenses from joint accounts. This strategy usually involves some form of joint discussion and agreement that must be made and reached before expenses above a certain threshold are approved (e.g., buying a boat or house).

While this approach is simple, it can lead to bitterness and resentment when one partner racks up more small personal expenses than another or when partners reach an impasse regarding a significant expense, which, in any other scenario would be resolved by purchasing the non-jointly desired product or service using personal or discretionary funds.

Those who adopt this strategy must negotiate clear clauses delineating:

The minimum threshold for joint discussion and agreement for an expense. Do expenses under $100 require approval? What about expenses over $300?
An approval process for expenses above the agreed-upon threshold. How will agreements be documented? How can misunderstandings (i.e., “I thought you said it was fine when I asked you at 3:00 a.m. last night”) be avoided?
The procedure to be followed when the couple reaches an impasse on an expense that is desired by one partner but rejected by another. Does each partner have an annual amount of joint funds they may spend despite disapproval?
The procedure to be followed when one partner feels the other partner is spending above what is permissible on products and services that disproportionately benefit only them.
As with the shared-pool-with-discretionary-income strategy, whether funds in the shared pool will be further subdivided into accounts/funds that are intended for specific purposes.

Keep in mind that if one partner expects to financially exploit another partner, this will be the strategy they are most likely to advocate. The best way to avoid financial exploitation by another partner is to maintain entirely separate finances and allocate an allowance to the partner if it is clear that they wish to financially exploit you or are flagrantly irresponsible with money.

One final financial relationship tip: Don’t forget to both share your ideal future living situation with your partner and have them share theirs with you. These differ widely between people. Comic Johnny Beehner has a routine in which he describes his wife turning to him a few weeks after their marriage and saying, “I can’t wait until we can settle down on our little farm,” to which he replies: “Our little what?!” People often assume their retirement dreams are universal. This is far from a reality.

Addressing Marriage Contract Violations

Each possible contract violation should be matched with an appropriate consequence of which all involved parties are aware.

The default theoretical response to contract violation among most template marriage contracts granted by society is: DIVORCE!!

Did she cheat? Divorce!

Did he become a lazy deadbeat? Divorce!

People like to say they will leave their partner when wronged while their responses to being wronged in practice typically vary from angry outbursts to retaliatory contract violations.

Unenforced contract terms are extremely dangerous to an entire contract’s integrity. It is better to leave out terms that will not be enforced than to leave them in and allow them to train others that violations will go unpunished.

If someone tells their partner: “If you do X, I will leave you,” then fails to leave their partner once their partner commits X, they are tacitly communicating to their partner that retaliation for other contract violations will either be inconsistent or entirely nonexistent. Failing to execute a response to a violated term in a marriage contract signals to the violating partner that there are no consequences to their actions—or that the consequences are not predictable and consistent—thereby rendering the contract useless.

Because enforcement is so crucial, the immediate dissolution of a partnership in response to any violation is neither a prudent nor a realistic approach. Instead, apply one default low-level response to any sort of generic violation and specific, logical, reasonable, and easy-to-actually execute responses to more extreme violations where applicable.

Specific common responses to contract violation include:

Hurt Feelings and Lost Respect
Reversal or Correction of Violation
Specific Generic Cost
Specific Unique Cost
Relationship Renegotiation
Partnership Dissolution

These responses may be enforced in isolation or combined. Some of these responses are, in our opinion, unrealistic to implement in a long-term relationship, but since we have seen other couples apparently use them to some success, we will address them here.

Hurt Feelings and Lost Respect

One of the most elegant responses to contract violation involves nothing more than making it clear to your partner that violating terms of the contract will result in hurt feelings and a lower level of respect for the contract violator. In most healthy relationships, this is more than enough to prevent contract violations. In fact, we feel at least within most relationships, lost respect is far more painful than a few thousand dollars fine.

Among partners who genuinely care for each other and respect each other, this is by far the best default “punishment” to maintain within a marriage contract.

Reversal or Correction of Violation

In some cases, the simplest and easiest way to address a contract violation is to reverse it. This method of addressing contract violations is often used in conjunction with others. If Partner A used joint rent funds on a personal indulgence, have Partner A return those misappropriated funds. If Partner B changed the house temperature to 75 when it was jointly agreed that it should be 68, have Partner B return the house’s temperature to 68.

Not all violations can be completely “undone,” but even simple correction may do the trick when applicable. If Partner A contractually agreed to quit smoking, then lapsed back into the bad habit, have Partner A quit again. If, in a moment of anger, Partner B called Partner A by a forbidden word in violation of agreed-upon language usage, Partner B must apologize.

Simple reversals and corrections such as these might not feel adequate when used in isolation, as we humans love to see retaliatory punishment and “justice,” but sometimes the most practical thing is to merely set right that which is wrong. More serious consequences may be needed for repeat violations, but it serves us well to remember how fallible we are as humans and leave a bit of wiggle room.

Specific Generic Cost

In this case, a specific, discrete, concrete cost is associated with a breach of contract. The archetypal example is a discrete amount of money paid as a penalty toward a joint account, such as an emergency fund. This is most commonly seen in popular media with “the swear jar,” into which those who use forbidden words must contribute fees per forbidden word uttered. When people use these, they typically only use them as a broad punishment for very small contract violations.

This cost should be something that does not delight or benefit a non-violating partner because this might enable a violating partner to feel justified in their actions (e.g., “It’s OK that I stay out late drinking in violation of the contract tonight because then I’ll have to give him foot massages every night for a week and he loves foot massages!”).

Also, keep in mind that partners may see any cost incurred as a fair trade, meaning that it is OK to violate that contract clause as much as one likes, so long as one pays. Generally, we advise against contract clauses that are habitually and casually violated, hence we would advise against contract violation repercussions that facilitate such casual violation.

At the same time, repeat violations to a contract clause may be perfectly acceptable to the violated partner(s) . . . if the price is right. Perhaps Partner A is perfectly happy to have Partner B leave dirty dishes in the sink each night so long as Partner B receives $10.00 each time this happens. Perhaps Partner A really doesn’t mind Partner B sleeping around in violation of a monogamy clause so long as they receive a new luxury car for every time Partner B takes a new lover. What matters is that all partners in a relationship carefully think through just how much certain contract clauses matter to them, and determine whether there are certain reparations that could be made to nullify the sting of a particular clause being violated.

Specific Unique Cost

Some contract violations are most appropriately addressed with unique responses.

For example, at one point I (Malcolm) violated the weight clause in our contract by putting on a few too many pounds. As a consequence, I had to give up beer outside of special occasions for nearly a year—a cost that quickly brought me back within an acceptable weight range.

The above cost worked because:

It was reasonable
It was in my best interest
It was self-resolving

Trying to stay with the above three points when designing these aspects of a contract is useful. However, when designing responses, keep in mind that there is no promise that a cost imposed on a violating partner will not turn the relationship into a net negative for them and cause a dissolution event. This is especially a problem in the case of contract violations tied to addictions; many people would rather split than endure the cost of their transgression if that cost involves going cold turkey on an addiction.

This type of punishment is best used as a solution for contract terms tied to financial or physical health scenarios in which a violating partner will regret their transgression and want to atone for said failure. In this case, the punishment’s core purpose is to help steer that partner’s atonement and self-punishment instinct into productive action that ameliorates the problem.

Relationship Renegotiation

In some instances, the best response to a violation involves renegotiation of the relationship contract.

If Partner A gives Partner B very permissive terms in a relationship contract—such as an honors system with regard to how joint funds are spent—and Partner B violates that trust by spending over an agreed-upon threshold on purely personal products/services, an appropriate response (among other consequences) would be to change the contract’s rules regarding the use of joint funds to be less permissive.

Keep in mind that any renegotiation that makes a relationship categorically worse for one party can lead to that person leaving the relationship if they feel they have better options elsewhere, even if (and perhaps especially because) that particular party technically deserves retaliatory action.

In other words, sometimes partners realize that both want to stay together even if a certain clause of the relationship is violated, but the current terms of the relationship contract simply are not going to work if one partner cannot trust another to not violate said terms. For example, you want to give your partner the chance to use your credit card responsibly, but if they can’t that does not imply that you want the relationship to end—just that the terms dictating the manner in which joint finances are handled need to be changed.

Relationship renegotiation happens organically all the time among those working on default societal contracts and is far more common than dissolution. Typically, these renegotiations happen unilaterally (e.g., one partner cheats, so the other decides they are no longer permitted to meet alone with those of the opposite gender, imposing this as a new rule in the relationship’s implied contract) and may ultimately undermine the relationship’s structural integrity.

A sustainable renegotiation should incorporate ideas and consent from all involved parties, and, if truly intended to make the relationship attractive on an ongoing basis to all parties, it will likely entail some concessions to the violating party. For example, it may simply not be feasible for one partner to be monogamous; hence, a renegotiation in response to a violation may involve opening up the relationship, which in most cases is a huge concession for a violated party to make, but one that may be feasible so long as the violated party is also granted rules that make them comfortable with the new arrangement, such as veto power over certain partner choices, routine STD testing, etc.

Partnership Dissolution

In dire cases, the most appropriate response to the violation of some marriage clauses is ultimately dissolution, though it is possible for dissolution to be entirely absent from marriage contracts. An absence of dissolution clauses in your contract does not mean you will never leave your partner; it merely indicates that you will not be expected to leave your partner over something specific. If a relationship becomes differentially undesirable to any partner when contrasted to other relationships they might secure, that partner will likely leave even if there is no dissolution clause.

If you would like to explore the concept of so-called “dead bedrooms” (long-term relationships without sex), we encourage you to flip to: Sex in a Long-Term Relationship in the appendix on page 552.

^[1] The movie was made specifically to mock the book’s government as a dystopia, so it intentionally mischaracterized the governance structure and the philosophical question the book was written to explore. The movie is a great work of art in its own right that asks an equally valuable question: “Can militaristic fascism be made to look good?” The book, however, does not focus on this question.

^[2]Fowler, A. (2013). Electoral and policy consequences of voter turnout: Evidence from compulsory voting in Australia. Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 8(2), 159–182. https://doi.org/10.1561/100.00012055,
Freire, A., & Turgeon, M. (2020). Random votes under compulsory voting: Evidence from Brazil. Electoral Studies, 66, 102168. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2020.102168

^[3]Bechtel, M. M., Hangartner, D., & Schmid, L. (2015). Does compulsory voting increase support for leftist policy? American Journal of Political Science, 60(3), 752–767. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12224

^[4]Hallerbäck, M. U., Lugnegård, T., Hjärthag, F., & Gillberg, C. (2009). The reading the mind in the eyes test: Test–retest reliability of a Swedish version. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 14(2), 127–143. https://doi.org/10.1080/13546800902901518

^[5] Atske, S. (2021, March 29). Voters rarely switch parties, but recent shifts further educational, racial divergence. Pew Research Center – U.S. Politics & Policy. Retrieved December 18, 2022, from https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/08/04/voters-rarely-switch-parties-but-recent-shifts-further-educational-racial-divergence/

^[6]Brueck, H. (n.d.). A Yale Psychologist’s simple thought experiment temporarily turned conservatives into Liberals. Business Insider. from https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-turn-conservatives-liberal-john-bargh-psychology-2017-10

^[7] Bouchard, T. J., & McGue, M. (2002). Genetic and environmental influences on human psychological differences. Journal of Neurobiology, 54(1), 4–45. https://doi.org/10.1002/neu.10160
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/neu.10160

^[8]Fairness itself is a bit of a farce, as it could be determined using an endless array of criteria: “Who worked hardest? Who suffered the most? Who needs it most? Who does the crowd think should have it? Who wants it most? Who has been the most disadvantaged? Who will benefit from it most?” etc.

^[9] Olson, M. P., & Rogowski, J. C. (2020). Legislative term limits and polarization. The Journal of Politics, 82(2), 572–586. https://doi.org/10.1086/706764

^[10] Sarbaugh-Thompson, M., Thompson, L., Elder, C. D., Comins, M., Elling, R. C., & Strate, J. (2006). Democracy among strangers: Term limits’ effects on relationships between state legislators in Michigan. State Politics & Policy Quarterly, 6(4), 384–409. https://doi.org/10.1177/153244000600600402

^[11] Fouirnaies, A., & Hall, A. (2022). How Do Electoral Incentives Affect Legislator Behavior? Evidence from U.S. State Legislatures. American Political Science Review, 116(2), 662-676. doi:10.1017/S0003055421001064

^[12] Nalder, K. (2007). The effect of state legislative term limits on voter turnout. State Politics & Policy Quarterly, 7(2), 187–210. https://doi.org/10.1177/153244000700700207

^[13] Masket, Seth, and Boris Shor. “Polarization without Parties: Term Limits and Legislative Partisanship in Nebraska’s Unicameral Legislature.” State Politics & Policy Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 1, 2015, pp. 67–90. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24643822. Accessed 17 Dec. 2022.

^[14] Masket, S., & Lewis, J. (2007). A Return to Normalcy? Revisiting the Effects of Term Limits on Competitiveness and Spending in California Assembly Elections. State Politics & Policy Quarterly, 7(1), 20-38. doi:10.1177/153244000700700102

^[15] Churchill was actually quoting someone else when he said this, but we don’t know who.

^[16]Walker, S. (2020, March 4). ‘Baby Machines’: Eastern Europe’s answer to depopulation. The Guardian. from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/04/baby-bonuses-fit-the-nationalist-agenda-but-do-they-work

^[17]Stone, L. (2020, March 5). Pro-Natal policies work, but they come with a hefty price tag. Institute for Family Studies. from https://ifstudies.org/blog/pro-natal-policies-work-but-they-come-with-a-hefty-price-tag

^[18] Note: We recently switched a huge chunk of our Latin American operations to a different operational system that we won’t explore in detail, as we think it only works in LATAM cultural environments and is an additional level of complication above the level of “black box” management. Essentially, we took our “human teams” and grouped them into family units, allowing the senior person on the team to liberally hire family members, with the team’s success determining how many family members it could employ. This approach still functions in a large “black box” environment, with each family unit acting as a single component in the system, while also synergizing better with LATAM culture. As such, this approach has led to huge productivity gains even though it goes against every sane principle of U.S. business culture. The biggest advantages are that it allows for much faster skill transfer (high-skill workers have an easier time cloning their skills with family members than with outsiders) and leads to much higher motivation and lower team infighting.

^[19] There is actually an entire Wikipedia article dedicated to flight crashes that were caused, in part, by high-power-distance culture problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_culture_on_aviation_safety

^[20] Even if they are not power hungry themselves, a single woke individual or ultra conservative individual in one of these environments can feel an ideological mandate to begin converting the organization and flat organizational structures have no immune response to this behavior.

^[21] Using a company like Valve to argue that holacracies work is akin to presenting Norway as an example of how socialism can work while ignoring the money printer of oil running in the background (the money printer is Steam in the case of Valve). The strategy for beating a game when you have the free money cheat activated will not work in a normal playthrough. That doesn’t mean the strategy will not work, but maybe we should not be looking to the life paths of rich kids whose first job was at their dad’s company when we try to design our own career paths.

^[22]Elsesser, K. M., & Lever, J. (2011). Does gender bias against female leaders persist? quantitative and qualitative data from a large-scale survey. Human Relations, 64(12), 1555–1578. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726711424323 from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0018726711424323

^[23]Weiss, D. C. (2011, October 24). Not One legal secretary surveyed preferred working with Women Partners; prof offers reasons why. ABA Journal. Retrieved December 18, 2022, from https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/not_one_legal_secretary_surveyed_preferred_working_with_women_lawyers_prof_/

^[24] Kurtulus, F. A., & Tomaskovic-Devey, D. (2011). Do female top managers help women to advance? A panel study using EEO-1 Records. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 639(1), 173–197. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716211418445, Bossler, M., Mosthaf, A., & Schank, T. (2019). Are female managers more likely to hire more female managers? evidence from Germany. ILR Review, 73(3), 676–704. https://doi.org/10.1177/0019793919862509, Cohen, P. N., & Huffman, M. L. (2007). Working for the woman? female managers and the gender wage gap. American Sociological Review, 72(5), 681–704. https://doi.org/10.1177/000312240707200502

^[25]Williams, J. C. (2014, August 7). Who wants to work for a woman? Harvard Business Review. Retrieved December 18, 2022, from https://hbr.org/2013/11/who-wants-to-work-for-a-woman

^[26]Sadly, our ideas never got implemented.

^[27]Molla, R. (2018, October 31). Tech employees are much more liberal than their employers – at least as far as the candidates they support. Vox. Retrieved December 18, 2022, from https://www.vox.com/2018/10/31/18039528/tech-employees-politics-liberal-employers-candidates

^[28]Morris, K. (2022, May. 11). Democratic vs. Republican jobs: Is your job red or blue? Zippia.com. from, https://www.zippia.com/advice/democratic-vs-republican-jobs/

^[29]Garelli, S. (2022, November 25). Why you will probably live longer than most big companies. IMD business school for management and leadership courses. from https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/articles/why-you-will-probably-live-longer-than-most-big-companies/

^[30] We have always been shocked by how well the Freakzoid theme song applies to 4chan as a community.

^[31]Coleman, S., & Cardoso Sampaio, R. (2016). Sustaining a democratic innovation: A study of three e-participatory budgets in Belo Horizonte. Information, Communication & Society, 20(5), 754–769. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1203971

^[32] A cultural supervirus is a self-replicating memetic package stress tested and strengthened to the extent that it becomes highly virulent and difficult to defend against as a set of cultural norms, behaviors, and memes. We discuss cultural superviruses at length in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion.

^[33]Stewart, A.J., Mosleh, M., Diakonova, M. et al. Information gerrymandering and undemocratic decisions. Nature 573, 117–121 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1507-6

^[34]Amabile, T. M., & Kramer, S. J. (2020, May 6). The power of small wins. Harvard Business Review. from https://hbr.org/2011/05/the-power-of-small-wins

^[35] For a functional explanation of how this can be achieved: Give managers secret “compliment quotas” where the complimentary emails they send must be BCCed to a separate address where they are archived to ensure the manager is on track. Alternatively, you could set things up such that managers get automated emails upon the completion of team-based projects, reminding them to compliment everyone who contributed to the project’s completion—in this case, the compliment would be totally voluntary but also more likely to happen due to the reminders.

^[36] This is true for all relationships except those created by Dominance Lures—another reason why those relationships are so unstable and the communities that use them feel so threatened by the concept of hypergamy.

^[37] Sunk Cost Fallacy: When an individual invests in something, not because they see it as a good investment, but because they do not want to write off investments they have already made in that thing.

[38] Specifically, we would point to 70% of divorces being initiated by women. It seems to be that when women get dissatisfied with their partners, they are more likely to leave them. This implies that if a person has a bad personality that reveals itself after a few years—or had their life spiral out of control between their 20s and 30s—they are more likely to be spit back onto the dating market if they are male. Obviously, marital dissatisfaction is not the only motivation for divorce, but this subtle skew in behavior increases the extent to which the mature dating market is disproportionately populated by the cream of the female population and the dregs of the male population.

[39] We do not favor this approach because it is traditional per se—things are not better because they are old—but rather note its historical roots to highlight the irony of TradCon relationships being framed as traditional.

Cognitive Integration in Marriage and Long-Term Relationships

ne of the greatest benefits of marriage is that it allows partners to act as a single unit and offload parts of their cognitive load and basic life maintenance to each other. The extent to which partners leverage this feature in their relationships varies widely, with some living almost entirely bifurcated lives (separate homes, friends, bills, problems, etc.) and others nearly melding into a single hive-minded person (working side by side, living together, solving nearly all problems jointly, etc.).

While many choose to minimize cognitive integration with their partners, we would go so far as to argue that cognitive integration represents the core value of marriage in modern Western society, as almost everything else a person gets from a relationship—be that sex, love, or childcare—can be achieved through hiring someone or dating, while cognitive integration is only accessible through a long-term relationship with a person.

To be clear, one can cognitively outsource various elements of one’s life to someone who is just on their payroll, and many do exactly that, but doing so is risky. This is a bit like having someone making major strategic decisions at a company who will only work for salary and not equity. An employee who is paid in equity is incentivized to act in the best interest of the company and is less likely to make decisions that are purely selfishly motivated and/or find ways to exploit the company for personal gain. Serious, long-term relationships essentially entail humans making an equity swap with their lives. This is why divorces can be so messy; you, the CEO of your life, must essentially fight for as much of your life’s value as you can take back, with a fellow executive who has a major stake in the business.

A diagram that shows a triangle. The corners of the triangle are labeled Integrated, Siloed, and Separate. Different relationship types are placed within this triangle. There are three extremes of cognitive integration. Every relationship exists within these extremes.

Cognitive Separation

Cognitively separated partners are essentially roommates who have sex, maybe kids or pets, and perhaps (though probably not) some shared income.

Cognitive separation is optimal in cases in which:

Partners have no reason to trust each other
Each individual prioritizes personal freedom and independence over a relationship
At least one partner has a strong ideological belief that prevents them from subverting their sense of self to become part of a unit

Cognitive separation is, ironically, also optimal for relationships in which at least one party’s objective function (driving life purpose) revolves around maximizing personal happiness, power, or social status—even though this approach generates the least happiness, power, and success. In cases in which a partner is ideologically motivated to do whatever is ultimately going to give them the most personal happiness, power, or success, the other partner puts themselves in danger by outsourcing some or all of their cognitive load to this self-interested party. (You see this in almost all domains in life—someone striving for personal happiness or fulfillment will always feel less of it and have a harder time achieving it than someone who cares about other things more—see The Pragmatists Guide to Life for more info on this.)

Cognitive separation features two core benefits:

It is easy to terminate a relationship in which there is no cognitive integration
It is more difficult for cognitively separated partners to hurt each other

Cognitive separation yields a higher likelihood of relationship termination. This is not just a matter of low exit barriers; nothing about the relationship encourages the partners to grow in parallel, hence within a few decades, partners often become very different people and grow apart. Fortunately, it is easy to bounce back from a cognitively separated relationship, as all parties have been managing their own lives for the most part. This benefit is non-trivial in an age in which relationship separation can be very painful and damaging from a legal, logistical, and statutory perspective.

Cognitive Siloing

If cognitively separate relationships are akin to hunter-gatherer societies, in which each person more or less knows how to survive on their own, cognitively siloed relationships more closely resemble post-industrial societies, in which each person contributes specialized labor and cannot complete every survival-related task themselves.

Consider the idealized 1950s marriage in which the husband processes all family thought and strategies related to work, investing, big ideas, and world affairs, while the wife processes the family’s thoughts and strategies related to meals, child-rearing, home keeping, and morality.

Whether leveraging this approach in a TradCon-style relationship or some other fashion, the dynamic remains the same: Certain domains of one partner’s life are completely offloaded to another partner. By offloading these large chunks of their lives and minimizing overlap, partners can increase output and skill in the domains in which they specialize and excel, thereby increasing the overall output of the relationship unit.^[1]

We do not recommend cognitive siloing among couples in which any partner prioritizes their own happiness or success over the relationship’s or family’s combined goals, values, and objectives. Whereas a cognitively siloed relationship can certainly form among self-interested parties, such setups typically end in disaster for at least one partner with time. This is because when a person silos a part of their life—whether it be their finances, their income, or their children—and give it completely over to another individual, they give that person enormous power to work against their best interest without them noticing.

The effectiveness of this relationship model is that it offers the efficiency gains created by the domain specialization of each party without the dangers of complete cognitive integration. For example, if only one party is responsible for family finances, home repair, or gardening, they can theoretically focus more time building expertise in that task than if it was split between both parties. However, we must specify this is theoretical, as in the few instances in which this has been studied, the data is not as clear as one might imagine.

Cognitive siloing is commonly used to enable relationships in which one partner focuses on housekeeping and child rearing-related tasks while the other focuses on career-related tasks. The science is unclear whether this style of child-rearing has any benefit to children, and a lot of the data seems to indicate it might be actively harmful to children. For roughly every four studies touting the benefits of being raised in a household with a stay-at-home parent, there are five indicating that children who grow up in households with a stay-at-home parent have higher rates of discipline problems, lower mental health scores, and get lower grades on average (these effects are most pronounced in female children).

While these studies seem to be pretty well controlled for things like income and parent education, we suspect this still might be a correlation issue with helicopter parents, narcissists, and mentally unstable parents being more likely to be a stay at home just because they can’t hold a job. It is impossible to control for such factors, so they must bias the data a bit. We, therefore, assume the evidence for and against stay-at-home parenting is more likely to be evenly balanced. No particular approach can be assumed to be superior at this point.

If we take this even balance at face value, it indicates strongly that children are strictly better off when raised in households in which both parents work. This is because the studies that show small benefits to having a stay-at-home parent do not temper these benefits with the benefit of the extra income (children do better in marginally wealthier households). This can be a painful concept to absorb, especially for those who sacrificed careers for what they thought was the best interest of their children. If it makes you feel any better, none of the studies showed a large effect either way, so if you are or were a stay-at-home parent and you didn’t have much-earning potential, you likely did not hurt your children that much by foregoing a career and at least your children were/are statistically much better off than they would be if they had grown up in a single-parent household. Given that the research on this topic seems to swing both ways at pretty even intervals, we also would not be surprised to see it swing back in the other direction in the near future.

At any rate, the potential pitfalls of child-rearing-oriented cognitive siloing can be avoided by ensuring each member is actively contributing toward the relationship’s wealth, influence, and/or power. Divisions, for example, may be made along corporate lines, with partners taking CEO vs. CFO vs. COO positions. Or each partner in a relationship may specialize and rise within a different professional field to protect the relationship from downside risk in recessions.

Both a risk and a benefit of cognitive siloing is that it makes exchanging one partner for another specialist in the same cognitive category fairly easy. For example, it would be easy for a partner to swap out one home-keeping, child-rearing partner for another—or even just hire a nanny and maid.

Those whose specialized value has a time limit are in extremely tenuous positions in such relationships. A child-rearing-specialized female who leveraged physical attractiveness to secure a high-value partner will have little value to her partner and the open market after reaching a certain age. This fact will destabilize her relationship over time. To avoid such dangers, ensure any specialization a partner develops will maintain or increase its value with time. A good example of this might involve one partner focusing on building wealth and the other focusing on building influence (through something like politics)—such a relationship would not put either party in a vulnerable position.

Each partner in a cognitively siloed relationship should regularly audit the value their domain brings to the relationship and take measures to ensure that value does not diminish. Never believe you “lucked out” because your partner handles everything for you. Committing to a partner who handles almost everything for you, from income to chores, puts you in an incredibly vulnerable position. Should that person perish or leave you, you will have next to no value on the open market and be unaccustomed to fending for yourself.

Given the low amount of actual interaction needed for this model to function, it is very easy for cognitively siloed partners to grow apart over time and cease improving themselves. Because their partners may not fully understand all the work, stress, and effort that goes into their specialized work and contribution to the relationship, cognitively siloed partners may also come to feel lonely, unappreciated, and unsupported. Cognitively siloed partners must therefore put a uniquely high effort into communicating about their work and achievements, plus supporting the efforts and accomplishments of their partners.

Cognitive Integration

Whereas cognitive siloing usually involves partners taking on different domains in their lives (e.g., “I’ll work and increase our wealth, you’ll build our influence through a political and media career.”), cognitive integration entails partners dividing responsibility for different stages in the decision-making processes related to some or all domains of their lives (e.g., “I will come up with all proposed solutions, you will vet them, I will make a final call, and then you will execute on our decision.”). In other words, cognitively siloed partners divide responsibility by domain, whereas cognitively integrated partners divide responsibility by stage in the decision making and action-taking process.

When people read our books, they often think some chapters are primarily written by Simone and others by Malcolm. This reveals an assumption that we write the books using a cognitively siloed methodology when in reality we write using a cognitively integrated methodology. We talk about what we are going to write together until we have a rough idea of what it will look like, after which Malcolm writes a rough first draft that Simone turns into something readable, and Malcolm ultimately polishes. This is an example of cognitively integrated writing strategy in that the responsibilities are divided by the stage of the decision-making process rather than the domain.

A cognitively integrated couple may, for example, divide all decisions by complexity (from nuanced detail to big picture decisions), then allow each partner to specialize in one type of decision making. Were Partner A to be tasked with making big picture decisions, they may focus on constantly consuming news media, information, and studies, digesting everything, and ultimately communicating a condensed summary to Partner B. Partner B might then be tasked with using this information to make detail-oriented decisions—information they wouldn’t have been able to collect themselves as their noses are buried in the nuances of the detail-oriented decisions affecting their joint lives. Partner B is permitted by the relationship’s arrangement to genuinely focus on every problem without removing their nose from the details through the understanding that partner A has their head up and is alert to larger trends that could be impacting their up-close analysis.

An example of what a cognitive siloed relationship looks like when contrasted with a cognitively integrated relationship.

If the actions of partners in a relationship were to be illustrated as a tree, and the color of the tree’s branches indicated the authority of each member, a cognitively siloed tree’s branches would be all one color or another, whereas a cognitively integrated tree would have branches that are vertically striped.

A fully cognitively integrated couple will not have independent thoughts, opinions, or friends (acquired post-relationship start date). Cognitively integrated partners combine their cognitive pathways to the extent that any interaction they have with the world is partially processed by each partner’s brains.

For this model to be effective, each partner must be completely comfortable surrendering individuality and allowing someone else to think on their behalf. Independent thoughts and opinions remain but are as a rule are subordinate to the thoughts and opinions of the collective. While most initially recoil from this concept, 64% of the men and 41% of the women we polled agreed that their ideal marriage would be one in which their lives are as integrated with those of their partners as possible.

We theorize that cognitively integrated relationships are poorly represented in public because:

They only work for partners with unique objective functions and lifestyles, typically allowing the partners to work together in some capacity.
The social absolutism of individual empowerment in the 70s and 80s created a hostile environment for a relationship style that does not value the individual.
It looks like enmeshment to relationship psychologists—which means they would counsel against it. While superficially similar to enmeshment, cognitively integrated relationships and enmeshed relationships have about as much in common as poly relationships and relationships in which someone enjoys many sexual partners by cheating on a spouse.

Enmeshment is when the emotional state of the group is imposed on the individual and is most common in cognitively siloed relationships. Enmeshment is characterized by emotional manipulation through guilt, shaming, and a lack of respect for an individual’s personal boundaries. Think of the cliché societal image we have of the overly dramatic mother asking her daughter how she could so wantonly wound the mother by not yet being married and pregnant. This is enmeshment.

Enmeshment is mandatory emotional integration

Cognitive integration is voluntary intellectual integration

An easy rule of thumb for distinguishing between the two involves checking how partners regard emotions. Enmeshed partners will place importance on emotions and emotional displays, while cognitively integrated partners will often have the utmost contempt for decisions made under the influence of emotional states and treat emotional displays as the height of character weakness. Cognitively integrated couples rarely attempt to suppress emotional states, but accept that emotions are just an accident of our evolution (or in the case of those religiously inclined, a tool of the devil), something to be experienced, accepted, and calmly communicated, but not permitted to become the driving force behind an action or a decision.

Consider a case in which a woman gets slighted by a coworker.

Enmeshed relationship: The woman guilts her partner for not being as mad about it as she is and spends a half-hour talking about how angry it made her while talking about what a loser the woman who made her angry is and insisting her partner hold the same emotionally charged opinion.
Cognitively integrated relationship with a secular objective function: The woman would note the anger she felt and, understanding that it may cloud her judgment in future dealings with the coworker, sources her partner’s perspective to help her maintain objectivity in those situations in a manner that serves the relationship’s best interest.
Cognitively integrated couple with a religious objective function: The woman would note the anger and ask her partner to help her focus on how God would want her to respond in such situations so as not to indulge in hatred and anger.

While we are referring heavily to enmeshment, we don’t believe enmeshment is a real “thing” or at least not as it is characterized by relationship psychologists. Instead, what we believe psychologists are observing is an emotional manipulation tactic that is bolstered by creating an expectation of emotional alignment. This expectation of emotional alignment is holistically secondary to the emotional manipulation and represents a power-wielding tactic commonly deployed by those in a submissive or subordinate position in a relationship. That is why this tactic is used so frequently by narcissistic-yet-traditional women; they want to exert control, but don’t want to take control through an act of dominance due to their traditional views on gender roles, so they do so instead through emotional manipulation, which requires some expectation of emotional mirroring in their target (though this can go two ways—something common in mother-daughter relationships).

We ourselves (Simone and Malcolm) have a mostly cognitively integrated relationship and aside from undergoing the hassle of setting it up (a process that took about two years), we have experienced no discomfort from the dynamic—aside from accidentally signing off emails with the wrong name from time to time.

This is not to say we don’t experience negative interpersonal interactions with each other: Once every couple of months, one of us will fail to live up to the expectations we have set for ourselves as a unit. When this happens, we count on our partner to call attention to the failure so we can take a moment to collectively develop a strategy ensuring we never fail in the same way twice. That said, a partner pointing out an unacceptable failure feels less like an outside attack and more like the voice in your head that chastises you for doing something you knew was stupid.

When someone is in a runaway state of anxiety, fear, or grief, it can overwhelm their cognitive load and prevent them from the mental work required to shake it. When half of someone (their partner) can think clearly, it is much easier to implement a strategy to extricate unwanted emotional states before they fester. In a similar vein, it is very easy to suppress a desire to have “fun” or indulge in self-image-reinforcing activities when a person knows their other half is hard at work.

Of all the couples we know who operate on this model, we cannot think of one that has split up or is not extremely successful in a classical sense—though this is likely not because this model is superior but because a couple must be very well matched and financially secure to even attempt it (everyone we know who operates under this model owns a company with their partner, and we have trouble thinking how it would work if they did not—this also might be why we know more people operating under this model than an average person might, as it is disproportionately represented in married CEOs and married CEOs often know each other).

It is not surprising that cognitively integrated couples tend to be CEOs of the same company, as this was the default style of relationship within the “corporate family” model—in which the partners both raise children together and run a company together from their home—which predates the TradCon model and has dominated the past couple thousand years of Western history. What killed the corporate family model was the rise of the male wage job in an office, which started in the early 1900s and gave birth to the TradCon model. What killed the TradCon was the rise of the female wage job in an office through the 1960s and 1970s. With the rise of the gig economy and work-from-home models of corporate work, we can’t help but wonder if we are on the cusp of seeing the rise of a neo-corporate family model (NeoCorp being a term for an iteration of the corporate family model designed for the 21st century).

As a quick aside, it is technically possible to run a NeoCorp or corporate family model in a cognitively siloed fashion as well; it is just less common.

Cognitively integrated relationships require precise circumstances—specifically:

Closely aligned objective functions that cannot be self-privileging: In other words, both partners have to have the same purpose to their life, and that purpose cannot be to maximize either of their own happiness (or to maximize anything that privileges one individual’s cognitive state).
A hierarchical model of conflict resolution within the marriage contract: Commands must be executed without hesitation. You might think this requires a great deal of trust in a partner, but in reality, all it requires is trust that one has correctly identified that partner’s goal in life, verified that said goal aligns with their own and established that the partner’s mental acuity is such that they won’t make idiotic decisions.

Though it can squeeze even more productive output from a relationship than the siloed approach, cognitive integration features enormous risks and drawbacks:

If a person misjudges their partner’s motives, unquestionably submitting some of their cognitive processes to the partner could effectively ruin the persons’ life.
Traditional employment is difficult, as truly cognitively integrated couples work collaboratively on everything. Even entrepreneurial lifestyles are difficult, as investors often view romantic involvement of co-founders or co-executives to be too great a risk factor (“What will happen to the company when you get divorced?”).
Productivity plummets when the devices and systems used for cognitive synchronization, such as cloud-based document sharing, CRM systems, and shared calendars, become unavailable.
The death of one partner can render another significantly less functional than they would be otherwise. Learning how to think totally independently again is a long and difficult process.

The Economics of Relationships

hough not all men and not all women want the same thing, it is still immensely helpful to know what a market, in aggregate, values. If Person A has a piece of gold, he may not give it to Person B—even if it is of no use to Person A and he does not value gold—because enough people in society do value gold to make Person A careful about how he spends it. The fact that Person A is not personally keen on gold does not mean that gold will not have a significant impact on his life. Even those who create the market demand for gold value it due to socialization and not some genetic compulsion to value gold; this fact does not change the value of gold.

We provide this example to make the point that even though not all women and men want the same things, if enough do have similar desires that manifest along gendered lines that will affect the economics of dating where economics is defined as “the study of how society uses its limited resources.”

Notes from the Research:

Women are socialized to want to be desired at a very young age. In one experiment, researchers dressed up the same baby in either a pink or blue gown and let adults interact with it. The adults interacted with the baby they thought was a girl by talking about how pretty it was while when interacting with the boy; they often praised it for its apparent interests (what it was reaching for, etc.). Adult subjects would also take more risks in how they handled the blue-clad child while treating the pink-clad child as if the pink-clad child were frailer. This suggests that adults’ default behavior with children may lead women to become socialized to expect ideal relationships to include protection (physical and emotional) more than men do.
Statistically speaking, women are more sensitive to partners’ status than men, and men are more sensitive to physical appearance (though this likely falls in the “no duh” category).

Economic Trends to Exploit

Understanding different quirks of gender differences in dating and marriage markets can enable you to recognize and exploit trends. We will highlight a few common trends so that you can learn to leverage their currents—and their effects on dating markets—to your advantage.

The Illusion of Hypergamy

Within various “manosphere” communities of the internet, hypergamy is perceived as being an intrinsic female behavior and as a major problem in current dating markets. Though hypergamy is technically defined as the action of marrying someone of a superior class, the going online connotation for hypergamy entails a woman leaving an existing partner the moment a better option arises, the moment they have a chance to trade up.

What is interesting is that this accusation is, surprisingly, factually accurate: When a long- term relationship is terminated, said termination is much more likely to be initiated by the female. More than 70% of divorces are initiated by women. But in this statistic lies the crux of the illusion: Women leave relationships at much higher rates than men both because they are less likely to cheat and more likely to trade up. Why is this?

Historically speaking, women in many societies had severe limitations on their ability to earn income. In such societies, cultural norms developed around men financially supporting their female partners. This cultural artifact still exists as a societal norm even though the earning potential of women has dramatically increased over the past 100 years or so. The cultural artifact can be seen everywhere from men being expected to pay for dates to gift-giving rituals (flowers etc.) and the concept of the stay-at-home wife—even though many will be loath to acknowledge it, recent study showed that only 51% of women even offer to pick up the check on a first date.

In nearly every realm, bad actors emerge who either consciously or subconsciously abuse the system to their advantage. In the case of this particular cultural artifact, bad actors manifest as women using men they date to supplement their income and enable them to live a lifestyle above their independent means. When you combine this inevitability with the social stigma that shames men when they financially support a woman who is sleeping with other men, you get a situation in which a portion of the female population expects resources from their relationship partners, but can only easily secure resources from one partner at a time (this is because part of the resource-giving ritual often involves the male publicly exhibiting his relationship with the female, be that on Facebook or at a popular restaurant, and if a male cannot publicly display his relationship with a female, he will be hesitant expend significant resources on her). Should such women feel fairly confident that they can do better than a current partner from a resource perspective, then their most logical move would be to leave the current partner so they can secure resource flow from the more endowed partner.

To put it in other words, “hypergamy” as the manosphere sees it is inevitable in any society in which (1) there is a social expectation that a woman should be able to draw resources from a man and (2) there is a social expectation that a woman can only draw resources from one man at a time (were the second condition not the case, women would just get additional partners, and there would be no reason to trade up). Were this cultural expectation reversed and we lived in a world in which these conditions were applied to men, we feel confident in saying that men would be far more likely to terminate long-term relationships than women—there is nothing “innately female” about being subject to market forces.

Men are not saints in this equation either. In our society, sex is perceived as a core value of a relationship to men—thus when a man feels he can do better than his current partner, he is better off just cheating on this partner with the other woman covertly. This way, he gets sex with other women and his current partner: Maximum sex! Society insinuates to men that relationships are for sex and implies to women that relationships are for resources/status. It is much easier for a man to hide that he is getting sex from multiple women than it is for a woman to hide she is securing resources from multiple men. This is why men cheat at much higher rates, with about 20% of men cheating versus around 13% of women.^[2]

In other words, the average man (in a society in which men commonly financially support female partners, and monogamy is expected) will be incentivized to cheat with willing sexual partners instead of breaking off a long-term relationship, whereas the average woman (in said society) will be incentivized to end a long-term relationship when a more desirable partner presents themselves—or when she believes she could do better on an open market. This is why men cheat more often than women and why women more frequently end long-term relationships in the pursuit of better mates.

The simplest explanation for this behavioral tendency is that it is solely a product of a tradition around unidirectional resource flow (a society in which men typically give resources to women), not some biological impulse women have to betray men as some groups would argue.

This behavioral tendency yields very interesting externalities. For example, women over 30 or so will notice an alarming dearth of high-quality men in the marriage market, whereas post-30 men will see plenty of eager high-quality 30-something female candidates. This is because high-value men with low-value partners stay with those partners, but cheat, while high-value women with low-value partners are more likely to leave those low-value partners to look for a better partner. Though this isn’t always the case, it happens differentially enough to seriously affect the dating markets as we age.

Here comes the important part: How can we exploit this dynamic to our personal advantage?

For one thing, understanding this dynamic grants some predictability around partner cheating and relationship abandonment and enables you to take action to prepare for or possibly prevent these occurrences from happening.

Men are more likely to cheat when they feel that they can do better than their current partner or when the sexual spice from a relationship fades due to the Coolidge effect (see The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality for more info on this. In summary: Men get more turned on by a new woman more than a woman with whom they have had sex before . . . though this is complicated by some new research showing a similar tendency may affect women even more than men with some caveats).

Statistically speaking, men have very little motivation to leave a partner who is not actively making their lives miserable—so long as they can get away with having sex with other people and believe their partner is faithful to them. Alas, allowing men to sleep around is risky, as there is a chance that a person with whom a man sleeps will attempt to secure non-trivial resources from him. This person may also attempt to hamper resource flow in the man’s preexisting relationship or even try to terminate the preexisting relationship entirely in an effort to secure 100% of the potential resource allocation granted from that man (resources need not be monetary; they may also manifest as emotional investment and time).

If letting a guy sleep around introduces exogenous risks, how can you remove almost any risk of a guy leaving you? One strategy we have seen involves taking ownership of additional partner selection. This may sound extreme, but it is not that uncommon for women to select additional partners for their husbands and long-term male partners. This seems to be a strategy uniquely effective in enabling some women to maintain high-value male partners. We are not condoning this strategy per se, just noting it as a potential solution that exists and is uncomfortably successful.

Women in long-term relationships primarily cheat when looking for validation. A woman may crave validation when she no longer feels desired by her current partner or when her partner’s validation loses its luster because his value has decreased in some way. On average, women terminate long-term relationships when they feel they can secure a significantly better partner, something that is not the case for the average man. This leads to dynamics that feel very unfair when women leverage their partners’ value to increase their own value, then leverage their upgraded value to secure an even better partner (whereas a man would just utilize a similar rise in status to cheat). Fortunately, men can largely prevent cheating by constantly improving their status.

Exploiting Differences in Standards

Another useful “mega trend” among average gender dynamics is that men in short-term dating markets settle for much lower-value partners than women.

Even though some groups deny this fact for ideological reasons, the data makes this trend painfully difficult to avoid. On Tinder, 80% of men compete over the bottom 22% of women, while 78% of women compete for the top 20% of men. If you calculate this out as a Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality across a population that is usually applied to economies and societies), the dating market for men is less equal than 95% of economies in the world. To put it another way, a man of average attractiveness will only be “liked” by 0.87% of women (1 in 115).

The marketplaces created by various dating apps are not all as unequal in nature as the marketplace created by Tinder, but still dismal from a male perspective.

On OkCupid, women rate 80% of men as “worse-looking than medium” and men in this 80% category get their messages replied to 30% of the time or less. On the other hand, men rated only about 50% of women as “worse-looking than medium” and were much more generous to women in this category, replying to them 40% of the time.

Females on the dating app Hinge (another dating app) have a Gini coefficient of 0.324, while males have a still much higher Gini coefficient of 0.542. Were we to compare these Gini coefficients to those of actual countries, the dating economy for women on Hinge would rank as the world’s 75th least equal economy, about the same as the economies of the UK or Canada, and the economy for men on Hinge would rank as the 8th least equal economy. Countries ranking this low on economic equality are typically embroiled in active civil war—people are starving on the streets, etc. Countries rarely stay this bad for long, so it dates the book to cite the few in that category now, but for some context, the Gini coefficient experienced by men on Hinge is worse than the economic state of the Congo, Rwanda, or Nigeria (these three only go up to around 0.50 whereas men on Hinge are at 0.542).

Essentially, even in better case scenarios, men still live a daily dating life in which a small minority live like sexual super billionaires and the rest live in abject poverty, while women enjoy a sort of sexual middle-class rank in society. This significantly influences the tactics men end up using when dating online.

It is not uncommon to see women beg to not be sent low-effort messages like “Hey,” wishing instead for more thoughtful, personalized messages. This is a reasonable request from a woman’s perspective because men reply to 50% of messages women send. Alas, the typical man on an online dating site can’t just put more effort into each message. One study demonstrated that lengthening a message from fifty words to two thousand five hundred words increases a man’s odds of receiving a reply by less than 10%. This marginal boost in odds does not make the time investment logical if, in a similar time period, he can reach out to nineteen additional women with a “hey” equivalent. If time is a limited resource to a man, it is simply not logical for him to waste it drafting well-thought-out messages in initial online dating outreach.

A woman of average attractiveness scolding a man for sending her low-effort messages online asking for sex is a bit like someone who grew up middle class scolding a homeless refugee who is asking them for change. Refusal to take the mental effort to model what the world is like for others will make their behavior seem quite bizarre. By making an effort to understand the daily struggles of others. You will find it easier to understand them. Through that understanding, you can more efficiently exploit others to achieve your goals.

A fascinating caveat to all this is that gay, male-on-male markets exhibit reply rates that more closely resemble women looking for men (with partners being easy to obtain), whereas female-on-female markets resemble markets in which men are looking for women (with partners being difficult to obtain). This implies that the target gender in any particular market dictates how easy or difficult it will be to obtain a partner.

Again: How can we exploit this dynamic to our personal advantage?

Because men rarely hear from women and rarely get responses from women, women can gain a massive leg up in online dating markets by taking the lead, reaching out to desirable men, and sending them thoughtful responses. I, Simone, did this when dating online and found it worked splendidly. I never had trouble securing dates and filling my pipeline with promising leads—heck, this is how I landed Malcolm. I would suggest aiming for emailing at least ten new men a day during any period in which you are sourcing a new partner.

Furthermore, men should learn that online dating is a numbers game. Write a clever (but sufficiently generic) initial message template, contact as many female profiles as possible, and do not waste time on leads that appear to be stringing you along. Furthermore, consider sourcing women outside of online dating apps, leveraging markets in which you might enjoy a higher status. While you might not be in the top 20% when it comes to physical attractiveness and therefore suffer on photo-based dating apps, you may be in the top 20% of a social club, academic group, church group, or charitable organization.

Timing Considerations

Instinctual Life Stage Behavioral Impulses

That which is appropriate for you, relationship-wise, may depend heavily on your particular stage in life.

Anyone who has owned a dog or watched a nature documentary about lion cubs is familiar with something called “play behavior,” which only lasts for a certain period of time. Just as adult dogs and lions lose their drive toward play behavior and find themselves motivated to do other things, humans experience instinctual changes, feeling the drive to exhibit different behaviors during different life stages.

Shifts in our instinctual behavioral impulses can cause surprise and consternation when an individual repeatedly attempts to derive happiness from an old instinctual impulse. If a person goes long enough without exploring new categories of behavior while older behaviors cease to generate happiness, they may even end up feeling as though nothing gives them happiness anymore (though clinical depression can also cause this feeling).

Changes in behaviors that generate happiness matter a great deal when people make relationship decisions. Someone may assume they never want children because children annoyed them as a teen only to find that later in life, interactions with children cause more happiness than anything else. Plans this person may have made for their lives in adolescence would not anticipate this shift and, if executed, could cause a huge drop in life satisfaction over the long run.

To our knowledge, there is no coherent model that illustrates how our sources of happiness change as we age, so we will have to build one ourselves, gathering data points from personal experience and potentially relevant studies.

In general, we assume that the systems influencing what makes us happy are not that different from the systems that cause us to feel sexually aroused. We have a number of “stimuli” detectors in our brains that generate an emotional reward when they recognize something that fits into a set of pre-defined parameters. These detectors cycle throughout a normal person’s life, seem to be inborn and not learned, and have an average way that they function, which varies among individuals.

Just as turn-ons vary between people, stimuli that create happiness vary from one person to the next. For example, while play behavior typically ceases to generate happiness around mid-adolescence, in some individuals, play behavior continues to be a source of great joy well into old age. As with the arousal systems, we have reason to believe that happiness-generating systems were evolutionarily selected by somehow increasing the survival rate of the offspring of those who had them, as they appear inborn and across cultures.

Childhood

Think back to one of your favorite childhood activities that has since lost its appeal. Doing so should give you a clear idea of what it feels like to have an impulse to do something at one stage of your life that subsequently disappears with age.

As discussed, play behavior, which typically manifests as interaction with peers in a physically taxing manner that involves a high degree of touching and boundary testing, is critical during childhood. This play behavior is designed to help children develop social connections and understand the world around them. However, if you as an adult, were to attempt rolling around on the grass, wrestling your best friend, you would likely be able to derive little positive emotion from it—or at least would get bored after only a minute or two.

Childhood is a unique age in that humans appear to be able to derive a high level of emotional output from totally imagined scenarios, leading to most childhood games to incorporate a high degree of imagination. A child can gain almost as much happiness from imagining orbiting earth in a space station as they could actually doing so. Children are even able to gain social stimulation from entirely imaginary friends who amount to nothing more than cognitive models. Perhaps children are afforded this imaginary luxury because it does not distract them from other important tasks that adolescents and adults cannot afford to ignore.

Finally, children derive happiness from pleasing authority figures at this age and look to them for cues about what should make them happy (consider kids pretending to be parents, drive cars, talk on cell phones, etc.). Mimicking authority figures’ interests and activities may help children develop knowledge in domains that will be relevant to them in adulthood.

Adolescence

Behaviors that cause happiness in adolescence are problematic in that we often internalize them as core elements of our identities. We begin to believe these inclinations are part of who we are because we feel them strongly at the same time we develop a sense of identity and place in the world, then become confused when we no longer derive happiness from them despite having made life decisions around them (like people becoming video game designers because, as teens, they loved playing video games).

At both this age and in childhood, social acceptance plays a more prominent role in happiness than it does in adulthood. Adults often complain about how small their friend groups become; however, the reality may be that people simply put less time into these sorts of interpersonal relationships as adults because they derive less happiness from them.

In general, studies have shown adolescents are extremely sensitive to social cues and have trouble ignoring them. One study showed that when performing an emotion-themed version of a Stroop test (e.g., saying “sad” when looking at a picture of a happy person), adolescents performed dramatically worse than adults. You will never care as much about what other people think of you as you do at this age.

In contrast to childhood, adolescents do not derive happiness from pleasing authority figures, and complying with authority figures may even cause a fairly strong aversion reaction. We would assume this evolved to help push humans away from their parents once they reach breeding age, both so their parents could give them more siblings and to increase genetic diversity by encouraging movement to other tribes.

Studies have repeatedly shown that at this age in life, novelty creates a stronger positive feeling than it does during other stages. This both creates an urge to explore and seek out novel ideas (learning forbidden knowledge by exploring something relatively obscure, like communism or Wicca, or finding a band no one has heard of). It is often during this stage of life, in which novelty provides excessive positive emotional stimulation, that people decide they want to travel the world—only to find the experience to be somewhat hollow in their more affluent years when they can actually afford to do so.

Some hypothesize that this drive for novelty, combined with the drive for social acceptance, creates the “meta drive” for deviance in adolescents—meaning that youth don’t actively have an urge to seek deviant behavior. These feelings may also explain why adolescents often begin to identify as “rebellious” and become confused as to why rebellion feels less fulfilling with age.

Promotion motivation also is statistically much stronger at this stage of life. This means that you get more happiness from pursuing huge, idealistic long-term goals. At this time of your life, you are focused on your hopes for how you can create a better future for yourself and the world, and this drives youths to more idealistic endeavors and ideas.

As for a negative emotion during this stage: People often find children and babies quite annoying as teens. This is likely evolved to prevent them from procreating too early and having to divide their resources at an age during which they are better served by building a stable platform within the tribe to maximize their position within its hierarchy. Position in a tribal hierarchy historically mattered more to one’s total number of surprising offspring than getting an early start with kids (this is likely also contributes to people’s high sensitivity to social stimuli at this age).

Finally, analysis of twelve million personal blogs for how youths interpret happiness found at this stage exciting things trigger more happiness (this may just be an artifact of novelty leading to more positive emotions at this stage). In general, the anticipation of future goods also caused more happiness in this group with a focus on things like “like finding love, getting ahead at work, or moving to a new town,” though, again, this is likely just a combination of novelty-seeking behavior and promotional motivation.

Midlife

Midlife changes in desire are critical as they likely are often the ones that happen after we secure a long-term partner. Often our long-term partners are chosen to optimize our adolescent desires and not those of the longest stage: Midlife.

Research has shown that as adolescents and young adults transition into midlife, they begin to derive more fulfillment and happiness from prevention than from promotion—meaning that goals designed to minimize losses and maintain that which has already been secured become more satisfying and motivating than goals revolving around big wins and changes.

This shift likely ties strongly to the trope of individuals losing their idealism and becoming more conservative as they age. An increased desire to protect what one already has may also explain why humans often move into hobbies focused on “prepperism” or sustainability in midlife, such as gardening and wood working. Marrying someone as an adolescent out of shared, passionate idealism could therefore be a suboptimal life choice

While we haven’t seen studies promoting this idea, it seems as though humans may also experience a stronger desire to acquire physical assets and build things at this age. The first half of this is realized through things like land acquisition while the second is realized through fixing up old cars or making Martha Stewart-inspired displays.

In the study that looked at a large number of blogs, they found people at this stage of life got more happiness from things that made people feel “peaceful, relaxed, calm, or relieved,” though this may just be another manifestation of prevention motivation.

Long walks and scenery seem to make people happier at this life stage. While the positive stimulus that comes from exploration of totally new things typically decreases at this stage, “surveyance” activities seem to increase (starring at a pretty view, for example). Our assumption is that this behavior might be tied to scouting good camp locations and protecting them by looking for areas close to sources of water like streams or the ocean and where you could see someone coming from a long distance away (a view). But obviously, this is a “just so story” and holds no weight.

Finally, and most importantly for this book, at this age, you begin to develop a strong affinity for both bearing and interacting with children. This often shocks people because most adolescents have an active aversion to children. This desire happens both in males and females and is not tied to adherence to societal gender roles (making it unlikely that this occurs “because society tells us to want children” and more likely that it is a biological urge to procreate and nurture—because your ancestors who had this urge kick in had more surviving offspring than their peers). That said, there is a gender difference in this emotion—it starts younger for women and goes down in severity over time (especially after having some children), while in men it occurs at lower rates but increases over time.

The desire to have a baby is not the only major children-related change that takes place during midlife. While most of the happiness we get from exploring new things decreases with age, the happiness we derive from exploring new things through others increases dramatically with age. So as an adult, while you may not be able to gain as much happiness as you used to from activity X, you can regain that happiness by experiencing activity X with a child. The same can be said for resource acquisition: When younger, you gain more happiness through dreams of acquiring great things for yourself, whereas that emotional stimulus seems to shift onto children with age.

Old Age

Sadly, most research we have found on this subject doesn’t break out old age from midlife, and we haven’t experienced old age ourselves yet, so we cannot easily say how things change.

Note From Personal Musings:

Based on anecdotal observations, it appears that people can get “stuck” in a life stage if basic needs during that stage go unfulfilled. For example, if a young man barley ever gets laid during late adolescence, he may build an internal model for himself that receives significant emotional rewards from carnal pursuits long after his brain has stopped naturally rewarding him for putting such time and effort into securing sex. While we most commonly see this with people who were severely deprived of sex in youth, we also see this with those who put off “exploring the world” and spend huge portions of their disposable income traveling as adults.

To be clear: We don’t think people are actually getting “stuck” in a stage of development when this happens, but rather that years of consternation and focus on a specific unmet objective cause strong cognitive dissonance when the objective is attainable during later life stages. Even though such people are no longer inherently driven to these previously unmet-objectives later in life, they convince themselves they are—only to throw immense resources into pursuits that don’t ultimately satisfy them.

The Profound Effects of Fertility and Childbirth

No talk of relationship timing would be complete without a discussion of fertility, especially because conventional wisdom does not correlate with present scientific research.

A recent New York Times article bemoaned the fact that, while college students overwhelmingly wanted children, they did not understand their time window for having them: “only 38 percent of men and 45 percent of women stated correctly that a woman’s fertility declines between 35 and 39 years of age, and only 18 percent of men and 17 percent of women knew that men’s fertility declines between 45 and 49.” This is funny, as the article bemoaning youth who don’t know about how fertility fluctuates with age gets the research wrong. Specifically, a recent shift in research findings suggests the claim that female fertility declines dramatically at 35 is a misnomer perpetuated by bad science that relied on French peasant birth records from the 1700s and thus was not conducted within the context of people who grew up with modern medicine. Does this mean women are forever fertile? Hardly. But it does suggest common perceptions need adjustment.

It appears that what the previous predominant view on fertility got wrong was its perception of a sudden cliff in fertility that appears around a woman’s mid-thirties. Instead:

Female fertility experiences a slow decline
Male age plays a huge role in fertility, with 40% of fertility problems being male-related
The age disparity between partners plays a role (a large age gap between partners leads to larger fertility problems—a guy who thinks he can wait until 50 to start having kids and will be fine if his wife is young is rolling dice loaded by the house)
While rates of birth defects rise dramatically from the ages of 30 to 40, this dramatic rise is from roughly 0.025% to 1.5% odds—so still low even when they are on the higher end (while keeping in mind that a 1.5% chance of permanently affecting your child’s life in a negative way is nothing to scoff at).
82% of women aged between 35 and 39 fall pregnant within a year of trying
If a 35 year-old-woman wants two kids and tries, she will probably get them.

With all that said, none of that really matters for three reasons:

If having kids that are biologically yours is super important to you, you should build your life plan, assuming you will become infertile a bit before 40. If the general population experiences moderate drops in fertility with age, some members of the population still do experience plummeting fertility. You might be one of those people. It seems unwise to run that risk if you have a choice.
Some couples have trouble conceiving, for a wide variety of reasons at any age. Fertility treatments tend to be more successful on younger patients, so to make the most of these expensive and uncomfortable procedures, it would be best to undergo them as early as possible, when yields are likely to be higher.
Even if your personal fertility remains sky high through your thirties and even your forties, society on average has the perception that fertility plummets around age 35, meaning you will have to combat that stigma on dating and long-term relationship markets. In other words, men who want kids will generally assume a woman in her thirties is too old to have them and thus will not marry her—her actual fertility is irrelevant to her ability to secure a partner, and only her perceived fertility matters.

Should you want to avoid these risks but also advance your career a bit more before having children, you can always do what we did: Bank a large number of healthy embryos in your twenties or early thirties so that you do not have to worry about doing so later. Though keep in mind, this costs a lot (we spent over a $100K banking 27 healthy embryos).

Finally, keep in mind how having children affects earning potential. Parent status increases the hireability of men. In one study conducted on the subject, dads who indicated they were part of a PTA on their resumes were called back for interviews at a much higher rate. Conversely, women in this experiment were asked back for a second interview at less than half the rate of those who did not mention the PTA. In general, men earn an average of 6% more for every child they have (and live with), whereas women earn 4% less. This suggests that for a married couple earning an equal salary, every child yields an average net bonus of 1% in higher income. There have also been studies showing a productivity increase in the office after having children (in men at least)—a productivity bump that is highest for men with two or more children (with fathers becoming 52% more productive on average after the birth of twins).

This is all very strange to us, as within our companies (which are roughly 90% female), we have noticed that mothers perform exceptionally well. Studies also show mothers are more ambitious than women without children, with mothers being 15% more likely to want to become a top executive.

Essentially, having kids is a strict net benefit to a family’s career (unless the woman is earning more than the man in a relationship) and is a huge earnings boost for gay male couples. As a downside, or potentially an upside, having a child will also make partners more critical of their friendships, with 69% of women and 67% of men feeling satisfied with their friendships before having kids and only 54% and 57% feeling the same way afterward.

For those monstrous ghouls who value happiness over money, the jury is still out on the subject of children. Studies looking at how children affect happiness yield a broad range of conclusions. Some suggest children increase happiness and life satisfaction while others argue the opposite. We read no clear consensus. The one thing on which these studies do seem aligned is that parents with very young children are less happy.

Those afraid of dying would be well-served to review the twin studies (studies that contrast identical and fraternal twins separated at birth and raised by different families) exploring how much of a person’s consciousness is preserved in their genetic code. Everything from a person’s political inclinations to the way they interact with friends is hard-wired into DNA and can be inherited by biological children. Better yet, parents get to choose the person with whom they mix their DNA to create their next iterations. If all that isn’t enticing enough, you as a parent can give the next iterations of yourself any type of childhood you want them to have. As for all those biases and crusty old ideas stuck to the walls of your mind like scum on the side of a pot—well, this next iteration of you will get to choose which of them it accepts. Children are not burdened by their parents’ memories—only memories parents choose to share. Did we mention that you get to create as many new iterations of yourself as you want? We will never understand this cryonics and life extension contingent of people trying to live forever through freezing themselves and religiously adhering to wacky diets. It just seems like such a waste when most people are born with all the bits they need to live forever and in a way that is about a billion times better than living forever in your current body.

The Wall & How Dating Dynamics Change at Age 30

Nowhere is the sexual dimorphism in human dating more salient than the dynamic change that happens when those playing within the sexual, dating, and relationship markets hit their thirties. Namely: Male market value steadily increases past age 30, whereas female market value drops. Colloquially, this phenomenon is commonly known as “The Wall” and is well attested to in statistical analysis of both dating website behavior and research data.

Typically this dynamic is presented within the narrow view of the ticking biological fertility clock, which obscures the larger issue: Women prefer to date men who are their age or slightly older, whereas men prefer to date younger women. Statistically, this means that a 26-year-old woman will have more online pursuers than the average man but, at age 48, men have twice as many online pursuers as the average woman.

To understand how this works, let us look at a hypothetical college campus in the middle of the woods, in which the only available partners are members of the opposite gender and all members follow the rule of women-only dating guys in their grade or older and men only dating girls in their grade or below. A first-year female is a desirable partner to men in their second, third, and fourth years, while a first-year male is only a desirable partner to first-year girls—who simultaneously have a choice of any guy in the school. By the time they are both in their fourth year, the boy is a desirable partner to any girl in the school, whereas the girl is only a desirable partner to other fourth-year boys (who have the choice of any girl).

This may not seem like a big deal, but the effect is enormous. If we define the period between second and third year as equilibrium, then each gender will find it about four times harder to secure a partner in their low year than at equilibrium and about sixteen times harder in their low year than their easier year (they can only target one fourth the population and that quarter of the population has access to four times the potential partners). Imagine if you had to put in sixteen times the amount of effort and time to earn your same salary! We will call this equilibrium “The Wall,” and in our adult life, it occurs around the age of 30 for heterosexuals looking for a long-term monogamous relationship.

In the real world, The Wall affects dating dynamics even more severely than the hypothetical college model would predict. Why is this the case? And why does this happen to women around age 30 and not around age 39, the midway point of the average human lifespan? We have different theories on this—maybe you can settle it for us.

Malcolm argues: The answer becomes pretty clear when you look at the data. OkCupid did a study of what age of partner men and women prefer throughout the course of their lives. Men within every age cohort preferred women 20-23 on average, while women preferred men slightly older until they hit 30, then slightly younger from 30 to 40, and at any age past 40, women prefer 40-year-old men. The Wall surfaces at the age of 30 and not 39 because, on average, all age groups of men prefer women between 20-23 and it takes women a few years to realize that it isn’t just a string of bad luck for them: It really does become astronomically harder to secure a decent guy after the age of 26 or so. This also means that after the age of 45, the market dynamics of The Wall, and specifically the disadvantage it gives to women, largely disappear as both females and males prefer younger people. Thus “The Wall” should really be thought of more as “The Trough”—but that just doesn’t have the same ring to it does it?

Simone argues: The equilibrium point at which woman should really start to feel a crunch is actually around 39, but the age at which women start to really realize that they can’t secure the same high quality of partner with the same amount of effort—as well as the age at which women internalize that their fertility is beginning a downward slope—is around age 30-31. Upon realizing this, women begin to panic, especially if they had planned on having kids because they feel they are running out of time. Much like how populations can trigger economic collapses by getting spooked and making a run on banks, women can trigger a Great Dating Depression of viable male partner availability by making a rush on all plausibly good male long-term partners when they get spooked at around the age of 31. (Look up the data on “panic buying” for interesting examples of this phenomenon and how it plays out in different areas, For a recent example of this, consider the toilet paper shortages that broke out during the COVID-19 pandemic.) Alternatively, it could be argued that women are acting rationally. If they see their value dropping on the dating market with no hope recovery, they may start trading against their expected future value instead of their current value.

Another possibility for your consideration: The Wall could just be a result of female libido increasing dramatically in women when they hit age 30. Women between 30 and 40 have more sexual fantasies, more fantasies about men who are not their partner, more casual sex, cheat more often, and more one-night stands than their college-age counterparts. As to why this is the case: The most accepted current theory is that women evolved increasing sex drives to keep their birth rates steady despite declining fertility (the increase in sexual desire maps pretty well to declining fertility). As one would predict from this theory, after menopause female sex drive often decreases precipitously, though surprisingly a woman’s sexual satisfaction increases with age despite this lower sexual desire. This complicated picture contrasts with men whose libido peaks in their teen years, then remains fairly constant.

Note from the Research:

One study that mapped each gender’s desirability to the other over time found that after the age of 18, female desirability decreases logarithmically while male desirability increases until the age of 50 with a parabolic increase. Women’s logarithmic decline meets men’s parabola around the age of 30, at which point the average woman becomes less desirable than the average man. This paper would thus argue it is rational that The Wall starts at 30 and there is no mystery at all.

As a society, we used to warn young girls and boys about this dynamic with concepts like “the old maid,” but as that concept was offensive, we swept it under the rug. A lack of proper warning puts many responsible, hard-working women who truly want long-term relationships at a huge disadvantage in the long-term relationship market. The fact that a woman is going to have an easier time securing a higher quality partner when she is younger is daunting—even offensive—because it hurts the feelings of women who did not take advantage of those years or felt they couldn’t properly secure a good relationship without sacrificing their budding careers. That said, it is cruel not to warn young girls that they are going to have to put in at least five times the amount of time and effort as a 35-year-old to secure the same quality of partner they could have at 25.

We cannot imagine what it would feel like to pass the wall without understanding the economic forces at play that drives handsome guys with good jobs to cease being so eager to go on public dates. A perfectly reasonable woman experiencing this shift would mistakenly think something is wrong with her, not realizing she is caught up in something much bigger. An entirely level-headed woman would reel in horror at the amazing partners she squandered not knowing how hard such partners would be to come by only half a decade later—or grieve at the realization that she never indulged in the joy of being treasured and pursued by most people she came across when she had the chance.

Worse still, in modern Western society, even the most open-minded of little girls are socialized to look down on people who marry in their twenties. They see such people as less educated and poor because statistically they are. To avoid seeing themselves as uneducated, imprudent, and poor, ambitious young ladies make plans to start looking for a husband at a “respectable age to get married,” like 28. Not only do we raise women to not be aware of this cliff, but we are enthusiastically hurling them off the edge.

Simultaneously, men deal with a bizarre mirror phenomenon: A Tinder study found that an attractive 34-year-old man has a much easier time attracting women his own age than a 26-year-old man, but that the 34-year-old will attract women in the 26-year-old age bracket at the same rate as the 26-year-old. In other words, not only can the 34-year-old male attract 34-year-old women easier than a 26-year-old man can attract 26-year-old women, but he can also attract 26-year-old women with the same ease of a 26-year-old man. That said, this effect is not felt by most men that strongly, as most men are not in the “attractive man” category.

We find it hilarious that many pick-up artist gurus are generically attractive men that magically develop their systems for easily getting laid by lots of women at around the age of 30. What genius role models these men are. Remind us to share our ingenious system for getting free sand at the beach.

Fortunately, an awareness of “the wall” phenomenon can be leveraged to develop a strategy that maximizes the quality of long-term relationship partners available. If a heterosexual woman is looking for a TradCon or NeoCorp relationship and wants to make optimal use of her changing market value, she is best off utilizing the period before she is 19 for experimentation and casual dating, as by age 20, the training wheels should be off and she should be focused on finding her long-term relationship partner with the expectation of securing one before or around age 27. Given her astronomical value on the market between ages 20-23, she should not waste even a few days of those years off the market unless there is a real possibility of a long-term relationship with the target in question.

This timeline is onerous in that it requires major life decisions to be made during periods many people are still emotionally developing and thus even if it does allow one to better take advantage of their changing value on the market it is not necessarily the best strategy for all women looking for a TradCon or NeoCorp—keep in mind marriages before 18 have a 60% chance of divorce, this contrasts with an average 30% divorce rate for first-time marriages of those 23 and over and a 5% divorce rate of those 35 and over. Life doesn’t always have a “correct” answer. Sometimes life presents us with a few solutions, each with a unique drawback.

Another factor any heterosexual woman looking for a TradCon or NeoCorp relationship should consider is that if she secures a marriage partner during her prime age range, she will, on average, have a much worse aggregate desirability upon divorcing and will be targeting a very different pool of men. In other words, a woman who secures her first husband in her early twenties will, on average, have a harder time securing a second husband of equivalent quality—this is doubly true if she had kids during her first marriage. This is of course assuming that the divorce happens before the age of 50 (as we have mentioned, the market equalizes again in later life) and assuming she fails to increase her market value in some other way during the interim (by securing a better job, for example, or getting a prestigious college degree), but even with improved market value, securing a high-value second partner will be hard.

While one can always find exceptional deviations from the norm, this a clear trend in aggregate—one of those shitty realities we like to hide from young women. Hiding these realities can ultimately cause immense harm through the poor decisions this ignorance causes, like: “Let’s just try out this marriage thing; I can always get divorced and give it another shot if it doesn’t work out.” While not realizing that the period of her life she is expending on the “trial” will be her most advantaged time on the marriage market. Worse, that the guy in this little experiment loses nothing by expending the ages between 25 and 35 with a “trial wife” because when he hits the market again, he will statically be able to secure someone even better with less effort.

There is a reason why men are more than twice as likely as women to remarry after a divorce. While some would argue the reason is that women realize marriage is a raw deal after going through one, we imagine this is more of a “sour grapes” scenario than a lucid analysis of the benefits of marriage for a woman whose personality is compatible with one.

Should the idea of an older partner not be disagreeable, targeting older groups while at an age range of peak desirability (age 20-23) provides women with access to a spectacular market arbitrage opportunity as few other young ladies are interested in pursuing such a strategy. Nevertheless, those looking for a lifelong marriage and children should disregard the older-men-gold-digger strategy: Statistically speaking, the wider the age gap in a relationship, the shorter the relationship and the higher the probability of genetic abnormalities in offspring it produces.

What can men learn from this?

Men looking for TradCon or NeoCorp relationships are best off casually dating until around age 25, after which the search for a more permanent partner should begin. We suggest age 25 as a starting point instead of 30, seeing as the hunt to find a wife may take around eight years of sustained effort, and while it is not talked about as much as it should be, men experience declines in fertility after age 30. In general, if the man is looking for a TradCon relationship, with a wife who stays at home, he can afford to start on the older end of the spectrum, while if he is looking for a NeoCorp, with a wife who works alongside him, he may even want to start looking as early as around 22, as he will be optimizing for a partner of a roughly equivalent age, not wanting to take the earnings hit of partnering with someone earlier in their career.

This book’s gay readers have our hearty congratulations, as they will not have to contend with The Wall. That said, gay relationships do exhibit higher average age disparity. Among heterosexual couples, a male is on average 2.4 years older than a female (this age difference persists across cultures, but it is exaggerated in more “traditional” cultures like in Egypt, where average age difference stretches to over 5 years). So just how much higher is the average age gap in gay relationships? It is over 9years among male gay couples and around 8 years among lesbian couples.

Marriage

Let’s take a moment to dig into some data about the changing landscape of marriage to see if we might help you extract something of strategic utility.

In the US, marriage is and has been in open retreat. From 2000 onward, married 25-34-year-olds comprised 55% of the population while their never-married peers accounted for a paltry 34%. By 2015, this married group had slipped to 40% of the population, overtaken by their never-married peers who had quickly climbed to 53%.

It is currently predicted that 33% of those in the US who are currently in their twenties will never wed. Historically, only 10% of the population never married.

What is happening here? Perhaps men’s’ lower wages relative to women have dampened their confidence in dating markets; however, the fact that regions in which men do maintain disproportionately higher wages than women do not enjoy higher marriage rates suggests this is not the case. Specifically: Regions affected by the fracking boom, which yields increased wages in predominantly male jobs, did not see the increase in marriage rates we would expect if increased wage parity was a marriage killer.

The declining popularity of marriage also doesn’t seem to be due to any lack of desire to marry or a fear of committing to a woman. Surveys show neither of these reported desires has significantly decreased (even though groups like MGTOW—heterosexual men who choose to forego relationships with women—are on the rise, the stats make it clear that their sentiment is not leading to a shift at a society-wide level).

We theorize that two concurrent phenomena are causing this phenomenon: (1) A significant drop in the amount of investment required for a high-value man to secure sex (on average studies show, attractive men don’t just expend less energy to secure relationships, but also invest less in relationships once they have them) and (2) increasing female independence and control over fertility (women neither need a male partner to support them nor do they even technically need a male partner, or any partner, to have children).

In countries like the US, in which female college graduates by far outweigh male graduates—and yet women want male partners who match or exceed their own education level—there are just not as many viable pairings as there used to be. These dynamics together have “broken the ecosystem.” High value men invest less in relationships because they do not need them to secure sex. High value women invest less in relationships as they depend on men less and outperform men more. Mechanisms for fixing this system are honestly quite fun to explore; we will cover some at the end of the Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality. It is also worth keeping in mind that the system may not need “fixing”—maybe this is just a natural transition period between one system and another better system.

Notes from the Research:

You have an increased risk of divorce if you marry someone with a large age or wealth difference from you.
73% of married men said that within 9 months, their partner had become the center of their lives
College-educated women with independent sources of income have a very low chance of divorce (less than 20%).
Over the past 50 years, the number of people living together without being married has increased by 900%. In some countries like Norway, this has become the new cultural norm for a long-term relationship de-throwing the “marriage model” This shift may soon solidify in the US as well: As of this writing, only a quarter of Americans disapprove of unmarried couples living together. Nearly half of Americans disapproved of such behavior in the 80s.
It is normal to live together for long periods before marriage. Two-thirds of married couples live together for more than two years before marriage. Scientists used to think this increased the risk of divorce, but when you control for age of marriage (younger couples cohabitate more) and look at larger data sizes you don’t see cohabitation before marriage having a negative effect.
Expensive weddings and wedding rings increase the probability of divorce. Engagement rings costing $2,000 to $4,000 are associated with a 1.3 times greater probability of divorce when contrasted to rings costing between $500 and $2,000. This does not imply that couples should forego weddings and rings at all. In fact, larger wedding crowds and honeymoons are associated with a lower chance of divorce. Thus the ideal wedding from a statistical standpoint is an inexpensive one attended by a large number of people, followed by a nice, long honeymoon.

Appendix: Interested in digging into more data on securing a husband? Flip to Securing a Husband on page 478 in the appendix.

Geography

An individual’s ability to find, vet, and secure sexual and marriage partners varies widely among locations. A robust 55% of relationship-seeking singles claim it is difficult to meet people where they live. Dynamics can be shifted favorably by simply changing locations.

For example, New York is a men’s market for dating, being a place where men—and significantly older men—secure much higher-value female partners than they would be able to secure in other markets. On the other hand, Seattle is a woman’s market, which changes the strategies that are successful. Seattle, for example, is the only market where longer form message outreach significantly improves reply rates for men on dating sites. This market is so bad for men that there are two men for every woman within some segments.

Extreme cases aside, how will geography affect your dating life? Counterintuitively, those living in cities with more singles generally have a lower probability of forming a relationship. This makes relationship formation rates lower in large cities like Los Angeles, New York City, and Miami, but higher in medium-sized cities like Colorado Springs, El Paso, Fort Worth, and Louisville. The surprising dynamic stems from the default cultural expectations different cities present—when seemingly everyone is in a relationship, the average single person will feel more pressure to form one as well.

Which markets are best for each gender?

Males looking for females should go where there are the most single females per single male:

1. Memphis, TN

2. Jacksonville, FL

3. Fort Worth, TX

4. Charlotte, NC

5. Richmond, VA

Women looking for men would be best served by relocating to markets with the most single males per single female:

1. San Francisco, CA

2. San Jose, CA

3. Seattle, WA

4. Salt Lake City, UT

5. San Diego, CA

It is difficult to provide equivalent recommendations for gay men and women. While men outnumbering women in a city might give a woman a market advantage, the same cannot be said about a preponderance of other gay men in a city. Also—and this pains us to say this—we could not find any charts of cities that break out gay women and gay men, so all we can provide is the top five cities for LGBTQ individuals in general, population-wise:

1. San Francisco, CA

2. Portland, OR

3. Austin, TX

4. New Orleans, LA

5. Seattle, WA

As tempting as it might be to circumvent the limitations of local geography by entering a long-distance relationship, the average duration of a long-distance relationship is only four and a half months. While we would hardly argue that there are no ways to make a long-distance strategy effective, we think it important to highlight that they require more persistence and creativity. We also suspect long-distance relationships should be divided into two categories: Those that were in person, then split up due to life events, and those that were created and initiated among people who are physically separated. We suspect the second category is far more stable.

The Human Mating Season

Humans seem to have something of a mating season, which is weird because no one ever talks about it. This season lasts from Christmas through Valentine’s day and reaches its peak on the Sunday after New Year’s day (which in the dating industry is called Dating Sunday). This increase in dating activity can be seen very clearly in data from dating apps; however, seasonal fluctuations in dating behavior are not just a dating app phenomenon. There is actually a seasonal increase in sexual interest and desire over the same period. You will see an increase in Google searches for pornography and prostitution over this period. (We would really love to conduct more research to determine whether this is a cross-cultural phenomenon and whether or not it affects genders differently.)

We are not sure what one can take away from this functionally speaking but thought it was too cool to not include here.

Choosing Not to Have a Partner

Among men and women alike, there has been a growing movement of people who have decided that a relationship is simply not worth the emotional effort, risk, or cost.

Among men, the most predominant of these groups is MGTOW: Men Going Their Own Way—a fairly large online community who argue that relationships as traditionally structured are so systematically unfair to men they are not worth engaging with. While not all MGTOWs have sworn off relationships entirely, opting instead to pursue novel models of relationships, the group and movement in general is helping to reduce the stigma of living forever single as a man.

There is no uniquely monolithic anti-relationship subgroup of women; however, factions do pop up occasionally and we expect to see a movement in this direction again in the near future.

Most research indicates that being in a good relationship is better than being single. Most research also indicates that being single is better than being in a bad relationship. Those who have sworn off sexual/romantic relations entirely have justly observed that, for some individuals, the economics of relationships do not act in their favor, and these people in particular are better off staying single.

Some men simply do not want the risk associated with choosing the wrong partner. The cost of a divorce, alimony, and a mutinous partner taking their children is incredibly high for many men (women have a leg up on all those fronts in divorce courts within most Western countries). Combine this hazard with the high cost of dating and the extreme effort required if a man is handicapped by a low market value, and it is hard to fault someone for concluding they will be far better off alone.

Many women feel as though they have been given a similarly raw deal. After all, many studies indicate that women are less happy if they choose to get married (though the data is all over the place here—it seems like marriage ultimately has a neutral effect on women). It is easy for women to look at these studies in isolation, consider friends who got screwed over through marriage, feel somewhat underwhelmed by the realistic options they have in potential partners, contemplate the sacrifices required to enter and invest in a long-term relationship, and ultimately decide that marriage is just not worth the effort.

We do not suggest that foregoing romantic relations is always the optimal choice for women and men disadvantaged in their respective markets. We only want to clarify that it is not an actively stupid or illogical path. Should you find yourself at a disadvantage in marriage markets, you might consider finding other ways to satisfy needs in your life otherwise satisfied by relationships. Consider just how bad a toxic relationship can be to a person’s quality of life. Consider how rare intentional, emotionally mature humans really are—two traits we would argue are prerequisites for any truly successful relationship.

Historically, any self-realization that the odds of securing a quality, trustworthy partner are very low would not be enough to stop someone from trying to secure a partner—at least if one wanted sex and/or children. Now, thankfully, we have better options. We can, if we want, get all the benefits of a relationship from other things. Want sex? Pay for a hyper-realistic sex doll, pornographic virtual reality rigs, or prostitutes (pending availability and legality). Want kids? Pay for a surrogate or enter a co-parenting relationship. Want new relationship energy? Casually date. Want company? Make some good friends. Want to feel needed? Build a charity. Want unconditional love? Adopt a dog. The only two things one cannot get without a committed long-term relationship are the social and personal validation of having a high-value partner and the benefits of cognitive integration (though this is only true if you value validation from people who would only see you as “complete” if you have a traditional relationship and many people who do “go their own way” just don’t care what these sorts think of them).

The research is nevertheless very clear about single parenting: One-parent homes raise children who have much lower-quality lives in every area, from income level to alcoholism. This effect is more pronounced in single-parent female houses than in single-parent male houses, which are not drastically worse than two-parent houses (though this is likely correlational and not causational, given how hard it is for males to win custody in a divorce). Perhaps this data is driven by failed marriages and unintentional parents. Perhaps as more people choose to go their own way and, as singles, raise children on their own terms and with all the care and intentionality they deserve, these stats will change.

“Bad” Relationships

book on relationships that neglects to explore bad relationships in depth is akin to a book on explosives that exclusively discusses how delightful it is to blow things up. We are sure it’s really, really fun to play with explosives, but explosives and relationships are also super dangerous. A bad relationship can be incredibly hard to leave. A toxic partner can completely ruin a life. Those not capable of identifying and extricating themselves from bad relationships should not be dating, period.

We characterize all “bad” relationships the same way and in a manner that deviates significantly from cultural norms, so buckle up and prepare to be offended.

A “bad” relationship is a relationship in which one of the partners would be better off not participating—from the perspective of their objective function (the thing they are trying to maximize in their lives, be that happiness, wealth, offspring, etc.—see The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life for more on determining and pursuing objective functions). As we define a relationship as a collaboration among participants who believe they differentially gain from a partnership, all “bad” relationships exist due to one of the participants being incorrect in that belief.

“That doesn’t sound so offensive” a person may conclude, perhaps not having thought through the real-world consequences of the above statement. By our definition, it is possible for a physically abusive relationship or a marriage plagued with regular marital rape to be “good”—where good is a differential term rather than an absolute term (i.e., the relationship is shitty, but staying in it is still the best option available to them).

Why do we use this metric? We care about actually helping people, and this definition is far more practically useful than any other metric if we are trying to write a guide that offers utility for everyone, regardless of their goals and predilections. Frankly, a large portion of the population would be quite satisfied to be in a relationship with an attractive billionaire who regularly beat them. They might argue that the abuse is better than having to get a minimum wage, nine-to-five job they live in constant fear of losing, leaving them unable to support themselves or their kids. Depending on a person’s value system and alternative options, an abusive relationship could still be a net positive for them.

A relationship guide that pretends this portion of the population doesn’t exist betrays itself as more concerned with virtue signaling than helping people. Another person’s objective function is not our choice—we are just here to help people get what they want on their terms.

Thus, to us there is only one way a relationship can be bad: If a person incorrectly thinks they differentially benefit from being in a relationship. There is a panoply of ways a person can develop an incorrect belief as to whether or not they benefit from a relationship. By examining these pathways, we can come to a better understanding of when we may be entering into a “bad” relationship or when a relationship we are already in has become negative.

Fear of Change

Fear of change exists as a major component of all long-term relationships and only gets worse with time. Leaving a partner takes work. Leaving a partner requires change. Leaving a partner exposes one to the possibility of failure.

Anyone who hates initiative more than they care about their own happiness and effectiveness (i.e., everyone) will find leaving a partner to be a nightmarish endeavor. To avoid the hassle and uncertainty of change, people will desperately conjure excuses to convince themselves that leaving a current partner is not something they should be doing on any given day. We have personally known people who stayed with a partner who they wanted to leave for years because they were always somehow able to conjure up a new excuse as to why every particular day or week was just not the right time to end things.

If you know you need to leave a relationship and have ever once put off breaking off before, now is always the right time to do it unless breaking up immediately puts your personal safety at risk.

Incorrect Judgment

Many people remain in suboptimal relationships due to incorrect judgments about the differential benefits of their relationships. Someone in an abusive marriage may believe that their children will be worse off growing up in a divorced family than they are growing up in an intact (albeit abusive) family and that assumption may be incorrect. Alternatively, someone might determine that they would be unable to secure another partner of equivalent quality at their age, and they may be totally right.

Incorrect judgments of the value of a relationship exist because it can be genuinely difficult to predict how a vastly different future might play out. It is just as possible to leave a good relationship (one in which a person is differentially benefiting) due to an error in judgment as it is to stay in a bad one. The person who is afraid that no one else will want them may be right. When we trivialize that fear, we make people in bad relationships cling to them with increased enthusiasm because we show them there is a risk that we have not taken sufficient time to evaluate their situation and are happy to wash our hands of their wellbeing as soon as the make the choice we deem “correct.”

However, there is one incorrect judgment we can happily dispel right now: The common assumption that “all relationships are secretly alike this behind closed doors.” This is false: not all couples fight, not all partners end up emotionally unavailable after a few years, not all people will blame their partners for their own failures, not all spouses take their anger home, not all women gain excessive weight after having a baby, not all men cheat, and not all relationships are abusive. This is not to say that every relationship you have may consistently yield a certain dynamic; some people have habits that turn all of their relationships toxic. If you experience regular, large spats in every relationship you have had, you are likely the cause of that dynamic, which is good news because it means you can end it.

The Most Important Skill in Dating: Avoiding the Local Optimum Trap

The local optimum trap is the primary culprit leading many to remain in bad relationships. The number one skill in dating is an ability to break up with an ill-matched partner. Whether the goal is sex, securing a husband or wife, or merely improving a long-term relationship, the success of any given “relationship life” is as much dependent on an ability to identify a “bad” partner and leave them as quickly as possible as it is on an ability to secure a “good” partner.

Breaking up with someone is difficult because doing so typically makes your life worse for a period. A relationship is almost always a local optimum. A local optimum is a state that you can only leave by first going down. Being trapped in a local optimum is like standing on a hill and seeing a mountain: To get to the top of the mountain, you must first walk down the hill. A decision to leave a relationship is a decision to make your life worse—at least in the short term. Our society does not prepare us to pull the trigger on decisions like that.

The most common form of bad long-term relationships occurs among couples who, while not great together, are not so bad as to lead to a quick dissolution. These couples stay together because doing so is always easier than breaking up, and through staying together longer, they become more deeply ensconced in their local optimum. The longer a person stays with someone, the higher the cost of leaving them becomes: “But… we just bought a couch/puppy/apartment/house together!” they think to themselves when confronted with dissatisfaction.

The hills these couples stand on never get higher, but the valleys around them continuously grow deeper and deeper and deeper.

After however many years, a worrying proportion of these couples decide to get married— again, not because the participants are a good match for each other, but because the cost associated with leaving continuously rises and things like starting a family are time-sensitive.

The local optimum trap extends beyond long-term relationships into casual dating and even casual sex. If you can recognize someone as a bad pairing on the first date instead of on the third date, you gain the ability to test two other potential partners on nights during which you would have otherwise wasted time and money on the suboptimal partner.

Even when only looking for sex, people will hit this trap. A guy going to a bar to secure a partner for the night may end up spending half the night chatting with someone who has no intention of going home with him, and by not breaking off the conversation, this guy has likely blown his chances of getting laid that night. This man has succumbed to the local optimum trap. In the moment, it may indeed feel pleasant to linger for some time talking to an attractive person at the bar who, while clearly not sexually interested, is still happy to chat. It is also painful to bear the awkward solitude experienced after disengaging from this person and attempting to chat up someone else. That is the essence of the local optimum trap: What a person is doing at a particular moment is more pleasurable than what they will need to endure to get to where they want to be.

How can we avoid this local optimum trap? How can we avoid wasting a night—or our entire lives—on the wrong person? Consider the following three scenarios

Escaping the Local Optimum Trap in Long-Term Relationships

Realizing you are in a differentially bad long-term relationship is extremely difficult. Getting out of a relatively stable yet suboptimal long-term relationship requires a huge amount of willpower, initiative, and work. Asking how to get out of a relationship like this is like asking how to not be addicted to heroin. The best answer is: Do not allow it to happen in the first place. The best interventions to protect yourself from a suboptimal long-term relationship are those designed to weed out poor matches during the dating process, which we described above.

What if that ship has sailed? What if you think you are already in a suboptimal relationship?

It is not easy to soberly evaluate the quality of a relationship in which you already find yourself, especially if you have been in that relationship for a long time. If you are determined and driven enough to tackle this endeavor, we recommend you first determine your objective function. Determine which thing(s) you believe have inherent value that you wish to maximize with your life (see our last book, The Pragmatists Guide to Life for guidance on determining your objective function without having someone else, a particular group, or your culture push you in any particular direction). Once you have determined your objective function, ask yourself if your partner in your relationship aids or hampers the maximization of that objective function.

In attempting to determine whether your current long-term relationship is worth maintaining or not, avoid leaning heavily on societal tropes of negative and positive relationships (e.g., “We don’t fight much, so our relationship is good” or “He cheats on me, so our relationship is bad”). Features that society labels as classically negative or positive in a relationship may not ultimately matter that much to you or your values and objective function.

You may not even like your long-term relationship partner, but ultimately deem your relationship to be “optimal” as defined by this guide. You may, for example, hate your husband, but have an objective function around maximizing the success of your offspring and be aware that leaving this man would put your offspring in a differentially disadvantaged position. That said, anyone who chooses to stay in a relationship that is at least partially harmful in the name of objective function maximization must VERY CAREFULLY validate their conclusions, as in many cases they are poorly substantiated and more a product of habituation than logic. Depending on the standard of evidence you require, this evaluation may involve anything from looking at what happened to your friends’ kids after their divorces to reading the latest scientific literature on the subject.

If you are not yet in a long-term relationship, take a sober-minded moment to build a set of heuristics telling your future self when to leave a long-term relationship that has ultimately proven to be suboptimal. Create this relationship ejection protocol now, before you meet any eventual long-term partner, because your future self is going to lose objectivity. Future you may do everything in your power to evade escape from this bad relationship. To protect yourself from this folly, even consider making an informal contract with your friends and family, so that if you ultimately are too weak to execute your relationship ejection protocol despite all the alarms sounding, they can sweep in and save you from a loss of objectivity.

Avoiding The Local Optimum Trap While Dating

Dating can largely be broken into two categories: Casual dating and dating with the intention of securing a long-term relationship. After high school and college, casual dating is extremely dangerous, as it can lead one to fall into an unintentional long-term relationship-of-least-resistance with a lackluster partner.

Chronic casual dating is usually driven by a fear of long-term relationships or an addiction to new relationship energy. Regardless of your motivation to casually date, you should know how to properly drop suboptimal partners before any significant logistical or habitual attachment forms.

Eliminating someone you are dating is quite distinct from eliminating a sexual target because personality becomes an important factor. Each participant in a date must ascertain as quickly as possible whether there is, or is not, a promising relationship to explore. Each of us (Malcolm and Simone) implemented different strategies to this end; both were fairly successful.

Simone utilized a five-question post-date evaluation to determine whether someone was a candidate for a second date. Each question had a score of 1-10. Dates that scored under 30 were obvious rejects. Dates scoring 30-40 might be worthy of a second date for further evaluation. Dates scoring above 40 had immense potential and warranted significant investment. At least personally, Simone’s average score of first dates was 16.

Note: We talk about this system and the questions used in detail later in the book.

Malcolm followed a strategy in which he quickly probed for personal attributes of his dates that would be problematic in a long-term relationship. This ranged from desire to have children (or at least flexibility on that point) to the date’s objective function and general worldview. This enabled Malcolm to quickly drop dates who exhibited behavioral red flags and helped Malcolm signal to dates specifically why they were not well matched (e.g., “I want to have a large family and you just clearly stated you are strongly against having kids”).

Note that the most effective dating strategies lead people to break up with you more frequently—not less frequently. For example, Malcolm used to tell women on the first date he was looking for a wife and only escalated things from there in terms of transparency on future dates. This led many women to dump him fairly quickly. Breaking up with bad potential partners quickly is a thousand times better than staying together with a poorly matched partner. Being dumped by a bad long-term partner is a sign of success not a sign of failure. Whenever people tell us they have recently broken up, we congratulate them and comment on how relieved and pleased they must be. It is a shame our comments are met with such odd looks of resentment and surprise—good, healthy relationships don’t break up.

Avoiding The Local Optimum Trap While Looking for Sex

Note: If you read the appendix chapter on looking for sex when you are young, this portion of the book can be skipped. It is the less nuanced “bulldozer” version of the same strategy that has more utility in the types of loud “high stimuli” environments adults use to look for no-strings-attached sex.

If you only want sex, the key piece of information you must secure to avoid the local optimum trap is whether or not a target is receptive to the idea of having sex with you. Your primary mission when looking for sex, therefore, should be to make your intentions clear without outright stating them so that your target may turn you down quickly if interest in sex is not mutual.

Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that among those looking for short-term sexual partners, looks prevail as a judgment factor in men and in women looks and dominance displays are predominant. Statistically speaking, if you are the average person looking only for sex, very little interaction is required to judge your own interest in sex with any given person. The only thing that is tricky is judging the interest of your targets.

This can be done through sexually suggestive topics of conversation (if the target engages with sexually suggestive topics enthusiastically, there is likely interest) and non-sexually suggestive physical touches (if non-sexual touches are engaged with enthusiastically, there is likely an interest). If the target appears receptive, you may move to more sexually suggestive touching, after which you may invite them somewhere private. If the target has already shown interest in sexually suggestive touching and consents to relocation to a private place, you may then invite them home and engage in full sexual congress (if a target engages in reciprocal touching when in a private space, the likelihood of sexual interest is very high, and this invite can be made without much fear of rejection).

This strategy will result in your inevitably crossing small boundaries with targets who do not ultimately turn out to be interested in you sexually. These experiences may be awkward for you but know that they are well worth any mild discomfort experienced. Why? This strategy vastly decreases the odds of accidental sexual escalation with a target in a way that made them feel pressured into consent. In an ideal world, any target not interested in having sex with you will say “no” as quickly as possible rather than after significant time and monetary investment or—much worse—after you have had sex . . . but we do not live in an ideal world.

Be extremely clear with consent before engaging in sexual contact—especially oral sex and hand-to-genital contact, which can “feel” less severe in the moment than penetrative sex, but if you have misjudged consent will have the same negative impact on your life.

Clear consent matters a great deal when you are only looking for sex. Why? An adult who is primarily looking for sex and skilled at securing it is probably sleeping with around fifty people every year. If this adult sleeps with 50 people a year and misjudges consent in only 5% of cases, they are ultimately raping an average of 2.5 people a year. Whether or not you count a “misjudgment of consent” as rape, society does, and those who engage with a high number of sexual partners are setting themselves up for serious legal and/or reputational damage.

If you ever hear someone championing a sexual strategy designed to get someone to sleep with you that involves pressuring a target past comfortable, conscious, active consent and that person has not yet been accused of rape, you can be fairly certain the strategy is not effective, or they have not been implementing it for an extended period of time. And if they have been accused of rape . . . why are you copying the strategies that took them to that place in their lives?

Also avoid strategies that involve securing no-commitment sex from industry colleagues, fellow members of a friend group, schoolmates, or coworkers. A target’s connection to social groups relevant to you adds an additional social cost to rejection—sometimes to you, and sometimes to the target. In cases in which the target feels your social connection increases the cost of their rejecting your sexual advances (i.e., you are a bigwig in an industry important to them, or you are their boss or direct manager), they are far more likely to allow you to push them out of their sexual comfort zone. Again, even if you don’t personally ascribe to this definition of rape, dealing with the fallout of accidentally pushing someone past their comfort zone is not worth something as trivially easy to obtain as sex.

Appendix: If you want to dive stupidly deep into the nuanced topic of the types of partners to avoid, see the appendix section A Guide to Avoiding Crazy on page 570. While it has some good info, it turns into a boring, pedantic ramble at times.

Avoiding The Local Optimum Trap While Single

A large portion of the population is better off single than they are dating a random person. In addition to making the slog of dating even more tiresome, this reality can create the illusion that even if you were able to obtain an ideal relationship, being in that relationship would be worse than being single (a uniquely tempting illusion, seeing as it’s true for a minority of the population). This illusion is often used as an easy excuse to not bother with pursuing an optimal long-term relationship at all.

Both recreational dating and single life is fun for most, while dating in search of an ideal long-term partner is stressful and exhausting. Don’t let the hard work required to find an optimal partner occlude the fact that life with this person will be better than life alone.

Predicting When Your Partner Will Determine Your Relationship to Be “Bad”

One surprisingly common relationship strategy involves keeping a partnership just above a “breakup point” while harvesting all the benefits that one can from said union. To implement this strategy effectively, a person has to become skilled at judging when a partner will hit their breakup point and always stay just above that point.

Two common strategies are leveraged to prevent a person from hitting a breakup point. The first is to improve the relationship’s value to this person while increasing the cost of breaking up. We call these “stable strategies.” The second is to increase the cost of breaking up dramatically while decreasing the value of the relationship, we call these “unstable strategies.”

Stable strategies are typically better for both parties, as a partner will be willing to do more to maintain a relationship that gives them more, however unstable methods are common enough to warrant exploration—if only to arm readers against a partner attempting to apply it to a relationship.

There is a wide array of both stable and unstable strategies for increasing breakup costs.

Examples of stable strategies:

Increasing the number of shared friendships
Developing rapport and close ties with a partner’s family
Getting married
Buying a house (or otherwise consensually intermingling finances)
Helping their partner enter a career field in which a breakup would hurt the partner strategically (like politics or a job at their family’s company)
Buying a pet together
Consensually having kids together

All of these strategies significantly increase the cost of ending a relationship.

Unless you are certain you want a long-term relationship with someone, do not engage in any of these stable strategies. Be wary if it appears that you are being lured into one of these traps if you do not wish to enter a long-term relationship. These are not things to take lightly. However, if a long-term relationship is your goal, these stable relationship escalation mechanisms are generally great signs.

We label the above strategies as “stable” because their deployment does not necessarily decrease the value of the relationship. An unstable strategy is one in which a person decreases the value of their relationship but increases the cost of a breakup more than they reduce the value of their relationship.

Examples of unstable strategies:

Threatening to harm oneself if the partner leaves
Threatening to harm a partner if they leave
Getting pregnant without a partner’s consent
Attempting to convince a partner that no one will want them if they leave (i.e., lower the partner’s perception of their own aggregate desirability)
Threatening to post nude photos of a partner if they leave
Commingling or otherwise integrating finances without a partner’s full consent (such as by taking out a loan in their name).

Unstable relationship maintenance strategies can be effective in extreme moderation but are not recommended. No matter how high someone makes the cost of a breakup, once a confident person realizes they would be much better off single than in a relationship with said person, they will leave. Destabilizing a relationship with the above strategies turns every day into a battle to keep one’s partner from realizing the relationship is worth leaving by incessantly escalating behavior. A person only has to lose this battle once to lose their partner forever. Still, as stupid as unstable strategies are, they can be moderately effective in the short term—thus why they are so common in emotionally abusive relationships.

Furthermore, there is a special kind of crazy person who tries to use unstable strategies on people with whom they are not presently in an active relationship. Such individuals may try to convince someone they have a lower aggregate desirability in order to trick these targets into valuing a relationship with them. The classic example here is a person insulting someone after they are turned down (e.g., “if you won’t date me, you must be slut… Now do you want to date me?”). However, more aggressive examples of this strategy, like faking a pregnancy after a casual one-night stand, are hardly unheard of.

We genuinely do not understand how people think these strategies will lead to a desirable outcome for their pursuer. Thinking that someone would see a person attempt one of these strategies and delude themselves into believing they would be better off in a relationship with that person goes beyond stupid to the point at which we question if all humans are fully sentient. If someone attempts one of these strategies on you, we strongly recommend cutting off all contact immediately. People who think like this, no matter how hot they are, will never add anything of value to your life on the aggregate.

Enjoying this subject? We welcome you to take a deeper dive in the appendix:

To learn how to more effectively predict and respond to cheating behavior, visit: Why People Cheat Rather Than Leave a Relationship on page 541.
Younger readers less familiar with social norms around lying in relationships may enjoy: Lying in Relationships on page 620.
For more information on how to minimize the chance that you hurt someone in a relationship see: Hurting People in Relationships in the on page 603.

Our Inefficient Biology

et’s look at how our bodies affect us when dating. The human body is hardly appealing, oozing disgusting, smelly fluids not just from every orifice, but every pore. Despite this our brains trick us into thinking they are desirable. Just as our brains betray us into somehow finding these gassy, greasy, fleshy bodies arousing, they betray us into all sorts of other unconscious behaviors and predilections.

The Funny Ways We React to Testosterone

Testosterone is one of these fun chemicals that just completely screws with your brain and can make it do all sorts of weird things. It is often thought of as a masculinizing hormone; however, it is critical not just in female and male sexual development but also in male and female cognition. Even more fascinating: Average testosterone levels in humans started crashing a few decades ago across western society (it has gone down 30% since the ’80s) and scientists do not know why—but more on that later.

There is a myriad of cool research findings related to testosterone. For example, a man’s level of testosterone seems more related to where they grew up (childhood conditions) than their ethnicity or present location. One study found that Bangladeshi men living in the UK who grew up in the UK had a similar level of testosterone to other UK men, while those who grew up in Bangladesh had much lower levels.

We are fascinated by how testosterone affects looks. Higher levels of testosterone can lead to all sorts of negative aesthetic effects ranging from acne to increased probability of balding at an early age. Among women, an unnaturally high amount of testosterone causes male features to begin to develop, such as extra body hair.

The positive aesthetic effects of testosterone generally seem to outweigh their negative counterparts when testosterone is high but not to extreme levels. Moderately high levels of testosterone are associated with an increased probability of higher and more defined cheekbones (if one is exposed to high levels of testosterone during early development), muscle definition, and increased masculine features in both males and females.

The muscle definition increase caused by testosterone is quite pronounced. An individual with more testosterone in their system will develop more muscle mass and denser muscles at the same level of exercise. As muscles burn more calories than fat, those with greater muscle mass will have an easier time maintaining a lower weight overall. This is why people take testosterone in the form of steroids when they want to gain muscle quickly and easily. Unfortunately, this exogenous testosterone is recognized by the body, causing it to stop producing its own testosterone and shrinking the size of the testicles.

If testosterone makes both guys and girls into chiseled (if hairy) Adonises with gorgeous cheekbones and rippling muscles, why do we not naturally produce tons of the stuff? Alas, testosterone is also poisonous and is the primary reason why men have shorter lifespans than women (well maybe, this has long been an accepted idea in biology, but recent evidence suggests that if height and risk-taking behavior are controlled for it could be wrong). Moreover, men with more testosterone may die at even earlier ages than men with lower testosterone levels (we write “may” because, again, some new studies contradict this finding). Some hypothesize that testosterone in men is something like peacock feathers on a male peacock: It signals to women that a man’s genes are so splendid that he can excel despite being exposed to a chemical that is constantly killing him.

Furthermore, women are not always attracted to high testosterone. Instead, women differentially prefer high testosterone men when they are most fertile. We discuss this in a lot more detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality.

From an intelligence perspective, the effects of higher testosterone are fascinating. Testosterone appears to act a bit like a chemical that overclocks your brain’s processing and can either lead to better performance or burnout. For example, when young boys were tested for intelligence, those at both the highest levels and lowest levels of intelligence had much more testosterone than average boys.

Testosterone also affects general cognition. When individuals are dosed with testosterone, they are more likely to prefer luxury brands of cars, watches, pens, or clothing. This preference appears tied to higher testosterone individuals being more motivated to elevate their social rank. This may be tied to the association between higher testosterone levels and higher levels of ambition, aggression, and threat processing.

We wonder: Could the above fact, combined with the crash in testosterone that has happened since the 80s, be a major contributor to the trend of millennials appearing more frugal than early generations—with even wealthy millennials spending much less than previous generations at equivalent levels of wealth?

What you likely care about is how testosterone affects a partner’s mating behavior. An increase in testosterone will lead to an increase in sex drive in both men and women. Higher testosterone also leads to an increase in fetishistic interests (though at ultra-high levels, testosterone can have the opposite effect). While some studies indicate testosterone only increases masturbation behavior in females and does not increase sex drive in either sex, the finding runs contrary to conventional wisdom and most other studies, so we regard them with skepticism.

Given the effect of testosterone on sex drive, one could—purely for idle fun—theoretically estimate the sex drive of a person just by looking at their physical features and behavior. For example, women who have very defined cheekbones, as well as women with a keen interest in traditionally “masculine” pursuits such as contact sports, may have higher sex drives, as both characteristics indicate the presence of more testosterone in their systems.

The effects of testosterone on mating behavior extend beyond mere increases in sex drive. Men with higher testosterone show higher rates of mate-guarding behavior (attempts to prevent their partners from sleeping with other men). This is somewhat ironic, as a polyamorous lifestyle increases testosterone levels but also would make strong mate guarding impulses more problematic. Testosterone-driven mate-guarding behavior is not what you might consider to be the sweet kind of mate-guarding behavior (e.g., buying flowers and otherwise just trying to be better than other options) but rather the cost inflicting kind (e.g., threatening other men to stay away). This mate-guarding behavior is probably linked to the increase in activation you see in threat processing regions of the brain associated with testosterone, which also may be responsible for the “roid rage” phenomenon (a rise in uncontrollable, violent outbursts) among those who supplement with a lot of testosterone for bodybuilding purposes.

Fluctuations in the amount of testosterone your body produces can be triggered by all sorts of experiences. For example, testosterone levels increase in men after repeated wins and decrease after losses. In other words, testosterone gives men greater psychological momentum: When they’re on a winning streak, the rise in testosterone encourages them to take riskier risks. These findings are reinforced by studies conducted on birds, fish, and mice, which have shown that either being in competition with other males or winning competitions against other males increases testosterone. (As nerdy as an aside this is, we cannot help but note human males are basically playing life under “Warhammer” Orc rules, the more they win, the more muscly they get and the more they want to fight.) What’s more, men in higher positions of power often have more testosterone, and striking power poses in men can increase the output of testosterone.

Threats to a man’s masculinity may also trigger spikes in testosterone production—or at least spikes in testosterone-esque behavior. Male study participants who were told that they had a lot of “feminine knowledge” after taking a quiz would choose to be shocked by a higher voltage in a subsequent exercise in which participants received a harmless electric shock than participants whose masculinity was not threatened by this statement. Is that not hilarious? People are so funny.

Fascinatingly, testosterone (as well as cortisol, a hormone associated with stress) decreases significantly in men who are in long-term relationships. It seems this decrease is tied to a feeling of love for a partner. Essentially, when a man’s brain decides it is safely pair-bonded and doesn’t need to keep hunting new sexual partners, it lowers testosterone production—like a government deciding to decrease military spending in a time of extended peace. This lowering of cortisol and testosterone likely takes place both to lower the negative effects of testosterone on the body when it is no longer of utility to reproduction, and to lower a man’s sex drive and risk-taking behavior to allow for more dedicated focus on resource gathering.

Nevertheless, the effects of long-term pair-bonded relationships in testosterone can be easily reversed. While testosterone decreases while in a marriage, it increases after a divorce.

This relationship-triggered reduction in testosterone has all sorts of ancillary effects, ranging from behavior changes (men with lower testosterone are less aggressive, less dominant, and less sexually motivated) to physical changes (such as lower muscle mass and thus more fat accumulation at the same level of diet and exercise). If a man with whom you are in a relationship starts getting a bit softer, but his exercise and diet have not changed and his sex drive decreases along with decreasing aggression levels, these changes are a sign that he may love you. These hormonal changes obviously create problems if you were specifically attracted to a man for his higher testosterone levels (which is understandable, given that high testosterone men are more attractive in a masculine sense).

What if character traits associated with high testosterone are what you like most about men? How do you still find a man attractive after he falls in love with you and decreases production? Worry not; there is an easy solution: Individuals in the polyamorous community (both males and females) have the highest testosterone levels of any population. As long as you keep your man’s hunger for new females (or males) satiated with a constant stream of partners, his love for you should not have any effects on his testosterone production. Simple and easy.

Both smoking and obesity affect testosterone levels. Obesity-induced drops in testosterone are quite ironic: Because fat produces estrogen, which downregulates testosterone production, it becomes harder to lose weight when there is weight worth losing.

What we find uniquely titillating on a societal level is that when men see themselves as disempowered or “hierarchically lower” in their society, they down-regulate their testosterone production. For this reason, researchers have found lower testosterone levels among unemployed individuals. This finding sadly does not explain the crashing testosterone rates across Western society: While one may hypothesize that these changes are tied to rising obesity rates or economic recessions, such factors were controlled for in the studies that investigated them. No—it appears that men in general feel less empowered now than they did a few decades ago, even when they have the same jobs and better overall standards of living.

While some claim to be horrified by this grand hormonal shift society, we do not see any reason for concern (well at least not as much as concern for something like sperm count degradation which is also happening). Continued monitoring of the situation should be sufficient for now. Perhaps an overall reduction in testosterone is exactly what society needs given the “free radical problem,” in which unattached men cause higher rates of social problems—as well as terrorism (this is a topic we dive into in much more detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality).

All in all, the effects of testosterone are fascinating. While we would love to say the same of estrogen and progesterone, their effects on sex drive, attraction, and body structure are pretty boring in comparison.

Note from the Research:

Women administered testosterone will call opponents’ possible bluffs more in a card game based around bluffing but bluff themselves less in a way that hurts their ability to win the game. This is likely due to an increased aversion to losing status—something that can happen either due to someone successfully calling out them in a lie or someone lying to them and getting away with it.

Monitoring Personal Hormonal States

A relationship psychologist who helped us construct this book had a really interesting idea for women we thought was relevant here: Specifically, she claimed that women who tracked their ovulation cycle with a focus on how it affected their impulses were more faithful to their partners and had longer relationships. She claimed that cycle tracking made it easier for women to identify whether a fluctuation in hormones was driving them to do something that they would not do under other circumstances.

Specifically, women might consider monitoring how their stage in their menstrual cycle influences the likelihood of:

Engaging in passive-aggressive stunts
Starting arguments
Being unfaithful
Wanting to break up the relationship
Lashing in some other way

For example, a woman may find that she needs to be sensitive about verbally lashing out at her partner during her luteal phase. Understanding that her impulse to act negatively toward her partner is likely hormonally driven can help this woman disassociate from the impulse (“That’s the hormones talking, not me”) and let the desire pass by without acting on it.

Kissing and Touch

Kissing sparks the nerve endings on your lips, causing a surge of dopamine and oxytocin: The chemicals that cause people to feel as though they have an emotional connection. Kissing is, therefore, an effective strategy if you seek to make individuals feel bonded to you. Perfecting and implementing kissing early in a relationship can be of great utility when it comes to locking down targets. Unfortunately, the dopamine and oxytocin surge triggered by kissing is a two-way street and can compromise your own ability to think objectively.

Kissing is a very recent cultural development—at least as a tool for facilitating romantic pair-bonding. Kissing is only seen in 46% of cultures and differentially appears in cultures with distinct social classes (e.g., it is very rare in hunter-gatherer communities). In hunter-gatherer and other societies devoid of romantic kissing, kissing behavior appears only between a parent and their children (likely as a pair-bonding tool as well). One exception to this hunter-gatherer rule is seen among tribes that live in the circum-arctic region (Inuit people, for example), but this just appears to be a way for people covered head to toe in thick furs to have human contact.

We love looking through history to see how past cultures experimented with kissing as a tool for facilitating pair-bonds. Probably the most awesome appropriation of kissing can be found in the practice of kissing a lord’s hand in feudal Europe as a sign of devotion. What makes this so awesome? Hand kissing is like romantic kissing without the downside of two-way pair-bond creation. With hand-kissing, only a monodirectional pair-bond is cultivated: From servant to master. Suffice to say a working knowledge of neuroscience, cross-cultural anthropology, and medieval European cultures can yield some tactics to help one efficiently enthrall others.

General touch has similar pair-bonding effects. Honestly, lips only seem to cause a uniquely strong effect due to the high density of neurons they harbor. We imagine something like naked cuddling would have about the same effect in aggregate. In fact, a number of studies have shown that activities that cause this kind of activation, such as cuddling, backrubs, hugging, and kissing all are positively correlated with relationship satisfaction. There are gender differences, though: males report significantly stronger arousal while being the active partner doing the touching, whereas females report a stronger sensation when being the ones touched.

Notes from the Research:

A study of 140 couples found that affectionate touch leads to couples becoming calmer and more constructive during a heated conflict. This is not at all surprising given that affectionate touch triggers both the release of endorphins and oxytocin.
A recent (2019) study in Scientific Reports found a positive correlation between countries’ Gini coefficients and the prevalence of kissing. In other words, countries with higher inequality exhibit more kissing.

Blue Balls

Blue balls is a term for a discoloration of the testes and pain associated with a long period of arousal not punctuated by release. There is a common misconception that “blue balls” are not real. In reality, when a male is aroused, the arteries dilate in his genitals, and his veins constrict, causing them to fill with blood. As a result, not just the man’s penis, but also his balls are, on average, double in size when he is aroused.

Human blood appears blue when looked at through the skin because red light has a longer wavelength than blue light, causing it to be absorbed deeper into the skin, whereas blue light gets reflected before it is absorbed by deeper veins. This ultimately has the effect of making your blood appear blue and thus a man’s testes appear blue when they are engorged with blood for a long period of time (actually, the same thing happens to the female vulva and clitoris, leading to “blue vulva”). The pain this condition causes can be easily removed with an orgasm or decreased arousal and an ice pack.

Mate Guarding Behavior

Behavior falls under the designation of “mate-guarding” when its objective involves increasing the probability of maintaining sexually exclusive access to a partner. In humans, mate-guarding manifests as anything from putting your arm around someone in public (to demonstrate to others they are “taken”) to sleeping in the same bed as your partner or adorning your partner in attention-grabbing possessions like jewelry (people who use this tactic are statistically more likely to be jealous partners).

Better knowledge of mate-guarding behavior will help you identify, contextualize, and suppress the mate-guarding impulse in your brain. Why suppress mate-guarding behavior? As we will discuss below, it can often yield very counterproductive results.

The most common mate-guarding behavior in human females manifests in the ostracization of other desirable females. Females increase this behavior when they are ovulating and will increase it further if a potential rival is also ovulating. Some studies have also found that women dress more provocatively when ovulating and are less likely to introduce their partners to other provocatively dressed females.

In other words, the most common type of mate guarding behavior in women is to either denigrate other women or prevent their partners from spending time with other women.

In general, the level of mate-guarding behavior a female will exhibit can be judged by how attractive she believes she is relative to her partner (more on that shortly), her level of Machiavellianism (more Machiavellian personalities engage in more mate-guarding), how liberally minded she is towards sex, and the level of intimacy in her current relationship (with more intimacy being tied to less mate-guarding).

While it is easy to separate genetically ingrained and socialized mate-guarding behavior in women because we can look at how their behavior subconsciously changes when they are more fertile, we cannot use this same pattern with men, whose fertility does not regularly fluctuate.

Men who see themselves as less attractive when contrasted with their partners engage in more mate-guarding behavior, such as public displays of affection and attempts to prevent their partners from interacting with other males. Simultaneously, females who view themselves as more attractive than their mates are more likely to resist these forms of mate-guarding behavior. Women with less attractive male partners have also been found to resist mate-guarding behavior more vigorously if they view their partner as less wealthy than their peers, be more likely to flirt with other men, and experience more frequent thoughts about breaking up.

Female resistance to mate-guarding behavior increases further when a woman is fertile. The more fertile a woman is, the less she will like having her current pair-bonded partner demonstrate to others that she is off the market, and the more she will fantasize about sex with individuals who are not her pair-bonded partner. When a female is fertile, she is even more likely to be drawn to events like parties at which she might meet non-pair-bonded partners. Resistance to a male partner’s mate-guarding behavior is also more pronounced in women who engage in abundant mate-guarding behaviors themselves. Finally, males who have higher digit span ratios (low testosterone males) will also receive much more female resistance to mate-guarding behavior.

This interplay of male mate-guarding action being met with female resistance and subterfuge suggests that mate-guarding subtly signals to females that the male to whom they are bonded believes that he “needs” to guard them. As a result, male mate-guarding behavior may lower a female’s estimation of her male partner’s value.

Studies have shown the more mate-guarding behavior a male partner exhibits (e.g., the more possessive and controlling he becomes), the more likely a female is to want to sleep with other partners, and ironically the more likely she is to successfully sleep with others. Alas, few studies look at female mate-guarding behavior—wish we could say if this was a two-way street, but we don’t know.

Mate guarding is not only a warning sign to a partner that they can likely secure someone better. Possessive behavior can also be a sign of shady behavior and dishonesty on the part of the mate-guarding partner. For example, people who utilize coalitional mate retention tactics (mate retention with the help of social allies, such as friends) are more likely to be dishonest (higher in extraversion, lower in conscientiousness).

Does theory on attachment styles interest you? Visit the chapter Attachment Styles on page 631 in the appendix. In short, the concept of attachment styles, which has become popular among relationship psychologists, strikes us as suboptimal for various reasons we will happily delineate in the appendix, but not bore readers with presently.

The Cognitive Effects of Birth Control Pills

Recent research has shown a significant, if small, effect on cognition by the standard hormone-based birth control pill. Specifically, women on the pill have a harder time recognizing emotions on other people’s faces. We don’t really think there are any takeaways from this—we just find it interesting.

The Genetics of Love

Another really cool study, this time out of Binghamton University, shows a correlation between the Oxytocin Receptor gene (OXTR) and martial strength. It appears that our perception of love—how much love we feel for our partner and how quickly we feel it—is impacted by our genes.

While neat, this genetic basis kind of sucks when you think about it. Some people may just not feel as much love as others as genetic factors make it more difficult for them to maintain relationships. We also suspect this same pattern carries over to romance displays, with some individuals just being born with a much larger impulse to make them.

The G Spot

While some early studies claim to have found the mythical G spot, a more thorough investigation has shown it likely does not exist as a real anatomical feature. Instead, the G spot appears to just be the location where the internal part of the clitoris, the urethra, and vagina all intersect, leading to more stimulation.

Length of Sex

In a Canadian study, women reported that intercourse usually lasted seven minutes and foreplay 11 minutes, while men estimated intercourse typically lasted for 8 minutes and foreplay 13, meaning that heterosexual adults typically think sex lasts between 18-21 minutes. Contrasts this with women’s ideal: 14 minutes of foreplay and 19 minutes of sex and men’s ideal: 18 minutes of foreplay and 18 minutes of sex (for those doing, the math the ideal sex session is 33-36 minutes, while the average actual session is 18-21).

Fancy all this random biology stuff? Explore it in detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality.

Avoid Partners Who Want to Be Happy

Our strong warning against partners who live lives dedicated to their own happiness has a biological—as well as ideological—basis (which we already covered).

A couple studies out of KU Leuven and the University of Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences found that individuals who place more importance on personal happiness exhibit increased rates of depression and anxiety. They also show that surrounding oneself with individuals who push for happiness or motivational imagery meant to encourage happiness (imagine a “hang in there” cat poster) increases one’s perception of failure and makes it harder to move on. Admittedly the studies are a bit more nuanced than we are giving them credit for—specifically, they only show feeling pressured to not be depressed increased depressive symptoms and found that the presence of motivational posters in a scenario in which an individual fails makes it harder to move on from the failure—the rest is an extraction from those findings and other research.

To put it another way, caring about being happy will make it harder to personally be happy and put a damper on the happiness of friends, colleagues, and families. If one chooses a partner who lives a life designed to optimize their own happiness, their biology will conspire to rob them of the one thing they strive for and—plus rob anyone they allow to live in their vicinity of that thing. Happiness-obsessed people are like a black hole of positive emotional experiences.

We imagine this is why religious individuals consistently rate themselves as happier than non-religious individuals. Religious individuals are far less likely to live lives dedicated to maximizing their own emotional states.

This is not to say that one cannot find a partner who is both an atheist and dedicated to something other than positive emotional states. About a third of the bestselling first book in this series, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, is dedicated to helping people think through what may have value to them and to what they should dedicate their lives (be their inclinations secular or religious) and the vast majority of the secular options explored are not focused on personal happiness or the happiness of others.

The Effects of Chastity on Pair-Bonding

There is abundant research exploring how sexual partner count, quantity of sex, and quality of sex affect cognition. While we explore this at length in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, there is one specific finding uniquely relevant to relationships: That in women at least, higher sexual partner count alters the manner in which sex accelerates pair-bonding.

Having sex with an individual speeds up pair-bond formation (love) in women. We use the term pair-bond instead of the word love here, as the word “love” carries a lot of societal baggage that distracts from the larger point.

Sleeping with multiple partners appears to have a permanent effect on the neurochemistry of the female brain. When a female sleeps with a large number of people, the dose of oxytocin her body releases when she sleeps with a new partner decreases. In other words, the pair-bond a female automatically begins to feel for a partner as a result of sexual intimacy declines with each new partner.

This effect can be observed in broader statistics and not just in lower oxytocin levels. The more people a female sleeps with before marriage, the shorter and less happy her marriage is statistically likely to be (these effects exist for men as well, but at a much lower rate). Specifically, one study showed that women who had slept with 16 or more partners before marrying had a staggeringly high 80% divorce rate.

Note from the Research:

Premarital partner count decreases enjoyment of sex in marriage by 4% per partner for women and 5.3% per partner in men.

There are some bad actors in this research space, trying to massage data to fit an agenda. Should their studies be taken at face value, it would appear that this effect begins after just two sexual partners, but studies showing that do not remove individuals who have been in previous marriages from the dataset. Once amended to be more intellectually honest, the data suggests this effect does not actually kick in until after a woman has had eight or nine sexual partners.

We would be remiss not to mention that some of the studies show that while women who marry as virgins have longer marriages, those who report having only had only two previous sexual partners have shorter marriages than those who report three to nine former sexual partners (so once a women has slept with one person, sleeping with a few more before marrying actually increases the length of her marriage). Most of these studies control for religiosity: Religious people’s tendency to sleep with fewer partners and be happier in marriages would not explain this trend alone.

Not many studies have been conducted on the effect of high partner count on males’ ability to form strong pair-bonds, so it is difficult to draw any super confident conclusions for men. That said, from the data we have seen, any effect on men is less extreme than that experienced by women. This may be because sex does not facilitate pair-bonding in chaste males as strongly as it does in females. In other words, promiscuity brings a female closer to a male state in this respect, which is why we would not see the effect as strongly in men. All that said, while this specific effect is not shared in the male brain, more promiscuous men absolutely experience neurological changes tied to brain function (specifically, more promiscuous men produce more testosterone on average).

The studies exploring how sexual partner count affects pair-bonding of which we are aware of were conducted within Western cultures, so this may not be an inborn difference in males and females, but rather a product of some sort of acculturation. Cultural pressures can have a pretty big impact on neurochemistry.

This data may come across as both unpleasant and disturbing, but we don’t get to choose what is true based on what we wish were true. Enough studies suggest this effect is real for us to feel compelled to report it in the name of intellectual honesty. Fortunately—and we need to stress this as hard as we possibly can—the data does not support that women lose the capacity to feel love if they indulge in sexual experimentation. The data only suggests that sex loses its ability to facilitate/force pair-bonding faster the more a female engages in it, and this, in aggregate, leads to less love in married relationships and thus less happiness. We come to this conclusion based on the lowered oxytocin generated by more sexually experienced women during sex, which would explain the other correlating factors identified, such as shorter marriages and lower reported happiness in marriage.

Despite this, we still think that sleeping with multiple partners is an optimal long-term relationship strategy for women. The increased difficulty in securing a long-term relationship with a man or woman without sleeping with them—in mainstream society at least—is raised to the extent that it is likely not worth the tradeoff of insisting on waiting until marriage for sex.

Keep in mind the competition. Given that a third of women who engage in online dating have sex on the first date, a woman is at a huge disadvantage in her efforts to secure a good partner if she insists on being chaste until marriage outside of religious sub-communities. This is not to say that you should sleep with someone on the first date, just that if your competition is offering sex on first dates, not sleeping with someone until marriage becomes a less enticing pitch to many candidates. It is also far too risky a strategy to hope that one’s first serious long-term relationship candidate will be the best one to bond with for life. We could even argue that loosening the strong surges of love resulting from sex will make women more clear-headed in making decisions about who they marry.

It is ultimately a cruel trick that the body would attach someone to those with whom they have intercourse rather than those who are genuinely favorable long-term partner candidates. The strong pair-bond resulting from sex with early sexual partners can be toxic should a woman use the “spark” she felt in her earlier relationships as an indicator of a good long-term relationship match and avoid settling down with an otherwise good match, not realizing that she isn’t feeling that spark due to a change in the way her brain processes these interactions and not a product of any decline in partner quality.

We have a fascinating theory around this dynamic: That the decrease in oxytocin production resulting from higher sexual partner counts indicates a switch between polymorphic states in humans, with each state optimized for different tribal social structures.

Essentially, humans may be biologically optimized for both monogamous and non-monogamous tribes, using environmental cues (like partner count) to determine which sort of tribe theirs happens to be. Based on these cues, the brain shifts the manner in which it processes interactions to optimize for one’s likely tribal structure.

It would make a lot of sense that a person in a monogamous tribe would benefit from quickly falling in love with a sexual partner, whereas a person in a non-monogamous tribe would be harmed by this behavioral tendency.

We find this potential polymorphic shift to be fascinating, as many people are having sex in a manner that would trigger this system to say: “Aha! I am in a non-monogamous tribe. Better not get overly attached to anyone in particular.” and yet many of those same people intellectually expect to settle down into a long-term, monogamous relationship and be happy with it. This dynamic—plus a wealth of other factors—may be contributing to a rise in open non-monogamy in developed Western countries (especially large cities).

Non-Monogamy

any relationship contracts allow one or all partners to enter into additional romantic and/or sexual relationships. Relationships with such permissions participate in the non-monogamy market.

To a certain extent, non-monogamy is becoming normalized within mainstream society. Already, 15% of married couples allow for extramarital sex—though wording like “extramarital sex” implies that the reason people open their relationships is motivated by a desire for “just sex” with others, which is rarely true.

In fact, of that 15% of couples who permit extramarital sex in their relationships, only 24% of men and 22% of women have engaged in extramarital sex during the prior year. Moreover, STD rates among non-monogamous couples have been shown to be no higher than those in the monogamous population. Allowing extramarital sex within a relationship contract does not mean that people are actually constantly having it. The shocking reality is that rates of extramarital sex in non-monogamous relationships are only slightly higher than those in monogamous relationships without these terms, in which partners merely cheat (22% of men and 15% of women).

If non-monogamy doesn’t lead to abundant extramarital sex, why do partners opt for it? Aside from the various contractual benefits of non-monogamy that we cover elsewhere in this book, polls show that non-monogamy is often motivated by a desire to spend time with people who have different hobbies and personalities in an intimate context.

Note from The Research:

In our own study, we found only 66% of females and 69% of males had never been in a non-monogamous relationship. 16% of females and 18% of males were currently in a non-monogamous relationship, and an additional 6% of both males and females preferred non-monogamous relationships but were not currently in one.

Among millennials, favoritism of non-monogamy is even more extreme, with only 51% reporting that their ideal relationship would be monogamous and 20%-25% having tried a non-monogamous relationship in the past. For context, this is roughly equal to the proportion of people who have owned a pet.

That said, studies measuring rates of non-monogamy may be understating the popularity of non-monogamous relationships. Many in the non-monogamous community do not have a primary partner (one they value above others). This means they may not be captured in relationship survey data because, by not having a primary partner, common social conventions may not classify them as having any relationship at all.

This does not mean that a huge portion of the population is regularly having threesomes. Statistically speaking, the most common relationship structure in the polyamorous community is a “V” (in which one partner engages with two partners who are not romantically/sexually engaging with each other) and not, as is commonly assumed, a triad (in which a relationship has three participants and all members engage with each other).

Those unfamiliar with the non-monogamous community may read the above statements and think, “Nice! Relationships and sex without rules are being normalized—I want to try that.” Listen, people: Don’t open the airlock of a spacecraft looking for oxygen. The world of non-monogamy—including communities who claim to practice “relationship anarchy”—is plagued by more draconian rules than a Victorian dinner party. These rules spread like a disease through polycules (a spiderweb of intertwined relationships), allowing new and increasingly complex rulesets to quickly metastasize.

These rulesets play a crucial role in effectively managing the emotional states of multiple partners, but often are created assuming a liberal worldview among participants and can sometimes be exclusionary to individuals with a more conservative mind set.

While these rulesets make it very difficult for those with more extreme conservative inclinations to effectively participate within the poly community (particularly those inclinations tied to sex adjacent concepts like gender roles, consent, LGBTQ issues, etc.), these very rulesets appear to play a key role in the success of this community when contrasted against past attempts at normalizing non-monogamy in Western Culture. Specifically, these rulesets encourage people to develop effective methods for managing emotional and sexual interactions, which spread faster than our culture would normally allow—at the cost of picking up random political artifacts along the way.

Some hackles may be raised at the realization that we are discussing all forms of non-monogamy as though they can be roughly grouped within the poly community. Many identifying as polyamorous would point out that their approach to relationships is uniquely distinct from the approach taken by other non-monogamous people, such as swingers, and would furthermore highlight the significant differences between open and poly relationships.

We group all non-monogamous communities together because it is difficult to socialize as any sort of non-monogamous individual in an English-speaking metroplex for more than a few years without becoming entangled in polyculture (assuming one is under 40). Polyamory is just too prevalent these days to avoid. Those who realistically plan to have a sustained open relationship will be engaging with the larger polyverse.

Why is Non-Monogamy Not the Norm?

Statistically speaking, individuals in polyamorous relationships report higher relationship satisfaction rates than their monogamous counterparts (non-monogamous relationships also do not appear to have negative effects on children who grow up with their parents in them—but the research is pretty weak at the moment). That said, non-monogamy carries some huge drawbacks.

Jealousy looms high on this list and is hardly unjustified as within the world of non-monogamy; people often do lose their partners to paramours. Sharing a partner with other people requires a pretty high level of security with oneself and one’s partner in the best of situations, and just like any relationship, you can’t pretend like taking risks will always work out in the best interest of everyone involved.

As mentioned earlier, not all people appear to exhibit the same levels of jealousy when faced with the same stimuli (in the same way, two people will have different arousal reactions to the same image). It is likely that a portion of the population is too jealous in nature to experiment with non-monogamy.

That is not to say that people in polyamorous relationships don’t experience fear and jealousy. A fear of being replaced is normal. The fact that many monogamous people secretly experience some discomfort when they can’t engage in a relationship with an additional partner is not an indictment of monogamy. The fact that many poly people have some fear of their partner leaving them—and that this fear causes jealousy—is not an attack on poly lifestyles.

Time constraints are far more of a problem for non-monogamy, in our view, than the emotional pain experienced as a product of jealousy. Maintaining relationships with multiple partners simply takes far too much time. The maintenance of multiple sexual and/or romantic relationships is even worse than having friends as a time sink because romantic and sexual connections with others compromise your ability to think objectively and thus pragmatically deploy your time as a resource.

Consider how much of your time and effort casual dating consumes. Now, consider how much of your time and effort a long-term relationship takes up. Now, think about how much free time you would have if you did both at the same time. Also, keep in mind that managing two partners requires managing three and not just two relationships: You must manage each partner’s relationship to you as well as each partner’s relationship with each other (depending on the type of polyamory you are practicing). This VASTLY increases the emotional effort and time that must be spent to maintain these relationships in a stable context.

This time sink issue can be mitigated by joining pre-existing polycules featuring other partners who take it upon themselves to expend the lion’s share of the temporal and emotional effort required to manage and maintain the complicated relationship so you don’t have to. That said, attempting to save time by shirking relationship maintenance duties and acting as a free rider is hardly an ideal solution and will put you in a vulnerable position.

Though you might be tempted to attempt just dipping your toes in non-monogamous markets in an effort to save time, you cannot really half-ass participation in non-monogamous communities and gain their full benefits. While it is true that poly individuals show more relationship satisfaction than strictly monogamous individuals, poly individuals are not the only non-monogamous folks out there. People who identify as swingers show no improved relationship satisfaction, and people in open relationships show lower relationship satisfaction rates than strictly monogamous individuals. Just technically having an open relationship is not, apparently, a viable solution. While poly relationships are statistically better than their monogamous counterparts (if you judge “better” by relationship satisfaction), open relationships score the lowest on satisfaction of any relationship type.

Another drawback: Participating in non-monogamous communities, which sometimes by proxy leads to association with other kink-friendly communities, can have some negative social effects among those who also mix, either professionally or personally, in conservative communities. Association with a non-monogamous lifestyle or kink communities could easily kill a promotion or ruin odds of getting elected. For many with “larger” goals in life, this is reason enough to stick with monogamy and a less thrilling intimate life. One recent study that took its participants from Croatia, Italy, and Portugal found that consensually non-monogamous individuals were seen as less loving, less compassionate, and more remorseful than both heterosexual and monogamous same-sex couples.

Non-monogamy does not benefit each gender equally—or at least not in the same ways. While it is true that studies have shown that for men, sexual fulfillment in one relationship will spill over to other relationships they have (e.g., being sexually satisfied with a secondary partner increases sexual satisfaction with a primary partner), studies have also shown that the opposite effect is observed in women (the more sexually fulfilled women are by a secondary, the less they are by their primary partner). It is unwise to ignore research when it is inconvenient, and yet we have seen the first study quoted profusely in poly communities who conveniently leave out the second finding—despite it being found through the same methods and by the same team. It would be more prudent to accept the reality that, on the aggregate, there are certain ways a poly relationship can lower the quality of a primary relationship (assuming one is in a relationship that has a primary or a “hierarchy of importance” among partners; this is hardly a universal arrangement).

Roadblocks hampering the growth of polyamory are a shame, as polyamory, when executed efficiently, really could lead to massive cost of living reductions and time efficiency gains. Alas, the sourcing and vetting costs for both men and women are just too high to be worth overcoming the associated social stigmas in most geographic regions.

Note from the Research:

Are people born non-monogamous? This is a question we explore in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality. Our current answer: Probably not. Instead, we suspect polyamory is a form of behavioral polymorphism brought on by environmental conditions—at least in females. As previously mentioned: When a female chooses to have sex with more than a handful of partners, her brain downregulates oxytocin production during sex and upregulates testosterone production in general, increasing sexual appetite and lowering the pair-bonding hormones released during sex (we do not know of any changes in male neurophysiology tied to a promiscuous lifestyle, so it is difficult for us to theorize what causes a mono or poly preference in males). Our brains may have evolved this mechanism to use the number of sexual partners we have to decide what type of culture we live in and switch from a monogamy-optimized state to a poly-optimized state based on experience. We are unsure if there is a mechanism for turning this switch back. Anecdotally, the answer would be “yes” in that we know people who have gone in that direction.

Thinking about Joining the Poly Community?

Are you thinking about building your relationship within the polyamorous community? We strongly encourage you to be intentional about how you go about doing it.

Ensure you understand the nature of your local polyculture. The sad reality is that even if you are inclined to non-monogamy, the culture in your local area may not be conducive to your goals or needs. The non-monogamy community is not a monolith. Even if some geographic iterations of it might suit you, others may not (the community in San Francisco may work great with what you are looking for while the one in Hangzhou may not).

Membership in a non-monogamous relationship in no way reduces the need for a relationship contract, though it does sometimes delay the creation of one. Just as people frequently forget to ask questions like, “Do you want kids?” and “How will raising kids work, logistically?” in the early stages of a monogamous relationship, many in poly relationships also have blind spots and neglect to broach potentially-deal-breaking subjects until it is too late. A choice to enter poly relationships does not mean life will penalize you any less for waiting to ask important-but-difficult questions until a relationship gets serious.

If you are in the poly community, we strongly encourage you to create a list of relationship goals you want to achieve in the next two decades and that you review these goals with your partners—along with the logistics that surround them. Even if poly works for you now, the long-term dynamics you desire may not be compatible with that sought by other community members in your area.

New Relationship Energy

New relationship energy is that feeling you get early in a relationship with someone you think you might really like. It can easily be as intense and salient as an emotion like love, and it is one of the driving motivators for a portion of the poly community.^[3]

New relationship energy is highly addictive. Research at Stanford has shown that new relationship energy has the same effect on a person’s brain as pain killers, like highly addictive codeine, and activates very similar pathways. It also appears a portion of the population likely is highly susceptible to new relationship energy addictions (in the same way someone can have a susceptibility to becoming an alcoholic).

Your comfort with the addictive nature of new relationship energy comes down to a question of whether or not you would be against a drug with no negative physiological effects, but that caused people to lose years of their life to an obsession with it.

People need to be aware of the risks before getting involved with a community peppered with enabling pockets that hand new relationship energy out like candy. Some sub-groups of the non-monogamous community seem hesitant to tell members they have a problem because the complicity of these new members is necessary in order for the existing community to access the drug through relationships with new entrants. That said, many groups in the poly community do have cultural norms in place to get individuals developing new relationship energy addictions the help they need.

If you have an addictive personality or suspect you may be susceptible to a new relationship energy addiction, we recommend caution and thorough vetting before entering a poly community sub-group that sees new relationship energy, the behavioral equivalent of codeine, as an unequivocal good. This is only necessary if you believe that addictive behavioral patterns without negative physiological effects are something worth avoiding.

What Monogamous People Should Learn from Poly Culture

Because polyculture must develop solutions to problems that are not as common in a monogamous society, and because the spread of cultural ideas is much more virulent within poly communities due to the web-like nature of polycules, there are many interesting takeaways that a monogamous person can gain through interactions with polyculture.

Consider how polyamorous people cognitively reframe the stories they tell themselves about their experiences in order to produce more productive emotional reactions. This is most commonly seen in the way some poly people address their feelings of jealousy. Jealousy need not be contextualized as a holistically negative emotion.

When feeling jealous about someone who has taken a husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend/whatever to a restaurant/event/movie, etc., search for the root of that jealousy. Does the jealousy…

Stem from relationship insecurity? Then work to improve the relationship.
Stem from fears the other person is better? Use the jealousy as fuel for self-improvement.
Stem from fear of missing out because the activity sounds fun? Use the jealousy as motivation to get out and do things more proactively with your partner.

In monogamous societies, we normalize complacency and stagnation in relationships. Is it really so bad to have an active motivation to improve our relationships, improve ourselves, and do all the things we really want to do with our partners while we have the chance?

Those active in poly communities often quote the widely read polyamory writer Franklin Veaux, stating: “Just because I’m hurt doesn’t mean that anyone’s done something wrong.” This particular lesson is critical when dealing with the more complex and mercurial interactions of polycules. This nugget of wisdom is also relevant in monogamous relationships, especially in a day and age in which we seem to have come to believe that never feeling hurt is a basic human right.

The statement: “Just because I’m hurt doesn’t mean that anyone’s done something wrong” can be just as critical in a monogamous relationship as it is within a poly relationship—especially when it comes to creating an environment that encourages open communication. It can hurt if a partner says “yes” when asked whether they find a co-worker attractive, but blaming or somehow punishing the partner for that hurt (given the fact that humans cannot control who they find attractive) discourages future open communication.

Poly culture has, out of necessity, developed more nuanced terminology dictating how relationship contracts work that clearly differentiates between boundaries and rules. If a clause in a relationship contract you propose relates to your own body and property, it is a boundary. If a clause relates to your partner’s body or property, it is a rule. Let’s go over some examples to get a better grasp of this distinction:

Rule: “Partner A cannot smoke”

Boundary: “If Partner A’s breath smells like cigarette smoke, they do not have permission to kiss Partner B.”

Boundaries are encouraged in polyamorous communities, while rules are not considered to be acceptable. Often people new to poly relationships miss this cultural norm and establish rules that they claim to be boundaries.

For example, Taylor may claim to have presented a boundary that requires Terry to not fall in love with a third partner (asserting that additional liaisons can only be about sex); however, this is actually a rule. To be fair, emotions are out of one’s control, and thus this commonly made demand is nonsensical at face value.

Finally, polyamorous relationships can help to augment appreciation of any one partner. Sharing a partner with someone else facilitates discussion of all the wonderful, colorful things about that shared partner that can shed positive aspects of this partner in a new and deeper light. Wouldn’t it feel great to gush about a partner to someone whose eyes sparkle in return rather than glazing over? Through an appreciation of this, monogamous couples may benefit from interacting with people who admire their partners and attempt to see their partners through the admirers’ eyes.

Compersion

While the poly community has developed a number of novel concepts from which any relationship can benefit, it has produced its fair share of duds as well. The most toxic of these involves a focus on extracting positive emotions through compersion. Compersion—the happiness you feel from seeing your partner happy—seems innocent enough. Essentially it is the joy your mirror neurons create at the thought of joy in another person—especially a person you care about. The poly community uses this concept to flip around feelings of jealousy tied to a partner being happy with someone else. While it serves that function well enough, its normalization has had incredibly negative systems-level effects, causing people who are unhappy or struggling in other ways to be lowered in value within the non-monogamous community even more than they otherwise might be.

The corrupting influences of glorifying compersion indulgence leads to “rich get richer” scenarios in which the happiest, most pleasure-inducing, and expressing individuals get all the attention. This triggers a snowball effect for the emotionally impoverished, in which their emotional poverty makes them less useful to the rest of the community, further worsening their poor emotional states.

One of the core values monogamous relationships claim to offer is to have someone who will be there for you in good times and bad. Whether or not monogamous relationships live up to their fulfillment of this promise is debatable. Anecdotally, we have observed that poly communities that tout the concept of compersion with uncommon virulence are uniquely unable to serve this function, quarantining the community’s Debbie Downers more during trying times (such as a depressive episode). Members who do not have a primary partner seem to be uniquely vulnerable to functional banishment when these members fall on emotional hard times.

We are not saying depressed people are immediately nudged out of polyamorous communities, but they do appear to find themselves discarded by some poly communities more quickly than they would have been from monogamous relationships (though the lack of initiative and general malaise that plagues many forms of depression may contribute to this, as poly community participation requires an immense amount of energy and personal initiative).

This only happens in some poly communities. Others have developed cultural norms that protect members who go through periods of depression. It is only natural for someone to spend more time around partners who make them feel good as opposed to those who make them feel bad, when given a choice—even if it is only a subconscious decision. The only way to counter this is with active social norms within the community dedicated to never leaving members behind. When you join a polycule, look for evidence as to how they have treated partners during hard times in the past for evidence of how they will treat you.

We may be highlighting our bias here. As you know by now, we believe pleasant and unpleasant emotions to be equally negative artifacts of human evolution. We do not believe people should enter and maintain relationships merely to maximize a certain emotional set to the exclusion of others. Thus, we are somewhat poisoned against the idea that the good feelings you get from a partner are differentially valuable and loath to condone compersion, as it is often contextualized an extension of that mindset. The fact that a partner being sad will make you sad is a good thing, whether or not you are non-monogamous, as it motivates you to improve their mood—and with it, their efficiency. It is difficult to resist the urge to shift attention to a partner who is more fun to be around when doing so is an option, hence community social norms and policing are needed to temper this temptation.

The Myth of Our Poly or Monogamous Past

A tedious bunch of pseudo-academics are under the impression that if they can argue humans used to be a certain way and are biologically compelled to be that way, then there is a moral mandate to go back to acting that way. Every few years, one of these moralizing hooligans will release a book in which they commit vulgar and obscene acts with data sets to argue that humans are either naturally poly or naturally monogamous.

Any honest look at cross-cultural anthropology and the data at hand makes it fairly obvious that, while early human tribes leveraged a variety of different relationship styles and social structures, the most common structure was violent, patriarchal, and polygynous^[4] (involving one man with many wives and not polyamory or monogamy). This historical norm does not give us permission to act that way within our own context.

There is also evidence suggesting that our ancestors commonly practiced systematic infanticide, and humans today still experience impulses tied to that practice. We review this evidence and its implications in excruciating detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality—and yet we are hardly about to call for a good old-fashioned baby stomp every time a single mother remarries.

Why are most major countries monogamous today? The data yields a very simple answer: Monogamous societies have lower rates of almost every major social ailment when contrasted with polygynous ones, including lower rates of rape, murder, assault, robbery, fraud, spousal abuse, and prostitution. This is presumably due to the high number of single men in polygynous societies—we call this “the free radical problem”—but the data doesn’t 100% match up.^[5]

Monogamous cultures simply outcompeted their polygynous counterparts once human social groups reached certain population levels, even though monogamy wasn’t necessarily our “natural” state. The mere fact that monogamous cultures appear to produce more stable societies does not set a moral mandate for monogamy, nor does it mean that monogamy is more efficient than polyamory. While the occasional description of a tribe or blip in a history book mentions social practices sharing traits of what our culture calls polyamory or “ethical non-monogamy,” such groups don’t provide large enough data sets to tell us how polyamorous-like models affect the rates of various social ailments. To put it simply, we lack data on how polyamory would play out at a societal level because no modern culture has practiced it at a societal level.

Even were we to hold proof that monogamy yields a more efficient society than polyamory, such knowledge would hardly grant us carte blanche to mandate it. A society in which non-contributing elderly are euthanized could also be argued to be “more efficient,” but that doesn’t mean we should introduce such policies.

To take another example: Suppose we could show that humans evolved to be prejudiced against outsiders. Suppose we could show that human societies that were xenophobic had fewer social ailments and spread faster. Would any of that mean we should embrace xenophobia within our current culture? Of course not. This whole argument about what is the “natural human state” is just silly.

Neither polyamory nor monogamy is “natural” and we don’t have the data to say which is more efficient on a societal level . . . but even if one were “natural” and even if we did have the data to show one was more efficient, such data would not represent a moral mandate to adhere to it. Were we to build our society to be as “natural” as possible, the result would be horrifying. Were we to build our society to be as “efficient” as possible, the result would be horrifying.

The perfect society is not hidden beneath the ocean, practiced by a remote tribe in a dense jungle, or detailed in a leather-bound, dust-coasted tome—it lies bare before us, clearly visible from the Mount Nebo of our minds’ eyes. Those looking to build the perfect society and discover the “correct way” to be a human must look to the future and not the past. The perfect society is something we will have to build ourselves.

How to Train Your Partner

eople say partners should not expect to change the people they marry. While we agree that some traits cannot be changed and that it’s bonkers to marry a poor match out of love and with the hope they can be fixed later, we also believe that training a partner to permanently transform themselves in a positive way is neither impossible nor difficult.

The notion that a partner—or any person—cannot be trained is absurd. We all see individuals transformed by those with whom they choose to associate. This is how people change when they “fall in with a bad crowd.” By interacting in specific ways (either intentionally or unintentionally), people can exert immense control over their peers’ personalities, outlooks, behaviors, values, and habits.

Like it or not, we will be transformed by those with whom we spend the most time. As most people spend the most time with their long-term partners, these partners are going to have a powerful impact on who we become.

Suppose Finley thoughtlessly brings cookies to Yael after every fight because Finley knows Yael likes cookies. While this mindless behavior appears sweet on the surface, it will subconsciously train Yael to initiate more fights, having been subtly “trained” by Finley that fights lead to cookies. This subconscious training is common, whether the inadvertent reward for bad behavior manifests as flowers, make-up sex, or even private time after a fight for someone who is otherwise granted very little solitude. While thinking through the long-term consequences of behaviors like this may appear cold and unromantic, it is patently worth sacrificing this societal cliché of romance if it is in the best interest of a relationship. Failure to think through the manner in which interactions with a partner subtly train them does not change the reality that interactions train people.

We would go so far as to say that the most critical skill ensuring a happy and productive long-term relationship—after an ability to recognize and end bad pairings—involves conscious, intentional partner training. A laissez-faire attitude toward training a partner is like a laissez-faire attitude toward training a pet dog. Not housebreaking a dog and letting it pepper a home with steaming turds is neither an act of kindness towards the dog nor an expression of love.

Marry Someone Who Will Work to Make You Better

While you may or may not spend the rest of your life with the person you marry, you will have no choice but to spend the rest of your life as the person into whom your partner transforms you. There is no greater tool for self-improvement than a long-term partner with a vision for your potential that aligns with your own.

A partner that is in all other ways perfect is probably still worth leaving if the vision they have for you significantly differs from your own vision of your ideal self—or even worse—if this partner loves you for who you are. There is nothing more terrifying in a relationship than the words, “I love you just the way you are—flaws and all.” Find someone who loves you for your potential while accepting your flaws.

Regard “self-love” movements with caution. Why would we ever want to learn to love ourselves as we are? If we must sit around all day celebrating ourselves, we should at least learn to love ourselves for the improvements we have made and are making instead of just who we happen to be.

It is not difficult to find someone with the same vision of your potential and who also conveniently agrees with your vision for their potential. The traits we don’t like in ourselves are almost always the same traits a partner would happily fight to address, such as laziness, negativity, lack of emotional control, cruelty, or lack of self-control. As long as a partner wants to improve themselves, finding alignment in visions for each other is really not that hard, even when moderately unusual goals are in play.

Once committed partners have agreed on an aligned vision for each other, the training may commence. Simply remember to always react positively or at least neutrally when a partner attempts to train you. While your partner will often be asking you to do challenging things (that make you want to snap at them), the last thing you want to do is train your partner not to train you. If you react negatively to your partner’s attempts to improve you, you are punishing them for behavior that should be rewarded and ultimately discouraging them from continuing important work.

Partner Training Tips

Training people is remarkably easy: Withhold positive stimuli when they do something undesired and bestow positive emotional stimuli when they do something desirable.

Bad Thing => No Praise or Attention + Disappointment

Good Thing => Praise and Attention + Pride

To create rewards and punishments when training someone, simply express pride or disappointment. That is it—though it helps to use more colorful and varying verbiage. If a person loves or respects someone, simple words from that person can raise their spirits to the moon or dash their emotional states to the dirt (and a relationship devoid of respect has already failed; terminate it and try again).

Positive emotional stimuli are not relegated to compliments and the like. Any attention given to a target can be a source of positive emotional stimuli. When a partner shares something they are proud of, taking the time to explore it and engage with them will train them to put effort into that work in the future, whereas ignoring them trains them to invest less time in the activity. This is often more of an issue with accidental negative training, such as consoling someone (thereby giving them attention) when they cry, which makes emotional composure more difficult for those who crave attention in the future.

Those who resort to anger or gifts for punishments and rewards will have to continually increase the magnitude of their anger and gifts to elicit the same response. The shouting tantrums will have to escalate in order to land the same impact. The gifts will have to get more expensive in order to yield the same delight. We have all seen relationships destroyed by individuals who attempt to use anger or gifts to guide their partners’ behavior.

Getting sad and angry for a day or even an hour in response to something a partner did is not training and not effective because a good partner will not reward such demonstrated lack of emotional control with a pleasant response, lest they encourage more of it. In other words, regular loss of emotional composure merely trains a partner to ignore these outbursts. An intentionally implemented negative stimuli should never take more than one minute to express—any negative emotional display that lasts longer is simply a failure at emotional control.

A simple and calmly delivered verbal affirmation or condemnation is the only reliable method of punishment or reward in the long term. This is also a better method because demonstrating emotional control increases respect, and increased respect makes words carry more weight over time.

Attempts to train partners to change in a way that only yields one-sided benefit lowers the effectiveness of all other training (at least if such attempts to do so leverage negative stimuli). Criticizing a partner for something that is self-serving—something that patently does not align with their goals for themselves—signals to the partner that they should ignore you. This takes the bite out of any expression of disappointment in them in the future, which in turn renders all training more difficult. When trying to train people in a self-serving direction, stick only to positive stimuli and reward pathways.

Partners must be extremely explicit about (1) the behavior they are trying to change, and (2) what the partner being trained could and should have done instead. Punishing a partner without making it clear why they earned said disappointment will teach them to expect punishment without reason and reduces the emotional impact of any disappointment or lack of affection granted in the future. Chances are that well over 50% of the time, partners have no idea what they did to elicit the statement: “You know what you did.” Such socially stunted statements only breed disrespect and distrust.

When To Begin Training

Training begins with the very first interaction. We have never seen someone successfully start training a partner from any point in a relationship other than day one, so we do not know whether it is possible. Switching a relationship devoid of intentional training to a relationship with intentional training may require a communal flux period in which all partners are removed from their normal routine and settings and able to explore new habits (see our first book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, for more info on this).

Not only should training, in general, begin as soon as a relationship starts, but training out a negative behavior pattern should occur the very first time that pattern is observed. This can often be difficult, as we are less secure in our relationships early on and thus scared to set boundaries but is nevertheless critical.

For example, at one point early in their relationship, Simone was tight on time and hung up on Malcolm in the middle of an unpleasant conversation. Malcolm made it clear that this behavior was not acceptable from anyone who wanted a relationship with him and talked through other ways Simone could have handled the situation with him, such as explaining why she had to rush off and setting a time to finish the conversation later in the day before hanging up—while also explaining why a behavior like that was bad for the relationship (because it allows one partner to unilaterally shut down unpleasant conversations and disagreements, lowering the couple’s ability to overcome meaningful challenges and problems). Annihilating negative interaction types early in a relationship spares partners from developing poor behavior patterns. Furthermore, the oxytocin released in the early phases of love makes it easier to rewrite even deeply ingrained behavior patterns.

Dealing With An Ex’s Training

Expect to find—and need to correct in new partners—negative behavior patterns trained into people by former partners, friends, and family.

A problem endemic in modern human casual dating and sex markets is that many males will do whatever young women want in order to date and/or have sex with them because young women are in such high demand.^[6] A guy in high school who has an attractive girlfriend willing to have sex with him regularly is not going to risk losing an immensely valuable source of personal validation in order to punish her for suboptimal behavior patterns.

This toxic dynamic does not necessarily represent something intrinsic to the male or female condition. It just happens to be that the sex market in western societies’ high schools grants women gatekeeping powers, as society rewards young men for being promiscuous while shaming promiscuous young women. This dynamic hurts both men and women by developing suboptimal behavior patterns in which men pamper women who lose emotional control instead of punishing emotionally manipulative behavior and removing it from their female peers’ behavioral vocabulary. If a hot female sophomore wants something and starts crying or complaining, a boyfriend who does not want to lose access to sex with her will find a way to give her what she wants or attempt to comfort her, thus subconsciously training this girl that whining is a good way to get a partner to do what she wants.

Conversely, women of this age, being sexual gatekeepers and living in a society that constantly slut shames them often accidentally and subconsciously train their boyfriends to see sex as both a reward and a woman’s core value in a relationship. Men with past partners who allowed this relationship dynamic to occur can become blind to things women bring to the table other than their sexuality. In adulthood, most of this training gets corrected in public, but scars of its effects linger.

The damaging effects do not end there. Because of this same dynamic, men who do not succeed in the sexual / dating market as teenagers often come to associate their number of sexual partners with their sense of self-worth as adults. This might lead men to contextualize women as tools for personal validation because that is the role women played in their early adolescence.

Fortunately, this outcome is largely avoidable should a man consciously decide that it is not wise to sleep around in youth or successfully sleep around while young and realize what a trivial and hollow accomplishment it is. An association between sex and validation only seems to take hold in guys who both wanted to sleep around while young—while they were still figuring out their identities—and failed to do so. It is neat that we are granted such a clear view into a guy’s past through the way he engages with others: If a guy brags about sleeping with a lot of women, we can almost guarantee he struggled to find someone who would sleep with him in his youth and begun to define is self-worth around the thing he valued due to its apparent inaccessibility to him.

At a societal level, something as innocuous as an unequal sex market for teenagers leads women to be perceived as tools for personal validation that lack emotional control and are inherently emotionally manipulative while men become perceived as sex-crazed cretins. This, in turn, creates a reinforcing cycle, fueled by societal expectations of masculine and feminine behavior. Interestingly, some of these behavior patterns we now see as intrinsically “masculine,” such as an insatiable libido, were seen as feminine before people dated around in high school (literature from the Victorian period frames women as the hypersexual gender). This further adds evidence to the theory that a lot of gendered behavior is trained by partners due to the economics of the sex and dating market.

It may be that much of the behavior we call “masculine” and “feminine” is not actually gendered behavior, but the manifestation of training patterns created by an unequal sex market people often enter when young. Moreover, this behavior can be easily trained out of a person in their adult relationships.

We must be extremely unforgiving when addressing behavior patterns—both in ourselves and others—that were taught by past partners. If a person believes that yelling, moping, withholding sex, whining, crying, giving the silent treatment, extended periods of negative emotion (more than half an hour), claiming offense, or losing composure will lead to them to get what they want, a previous partner (or friend, or family member) likely trained these behaviors into this person by giving in to their demands.

None of these behaviors are acceptable. The only way to end these behavior patterns is to not respond to them emotionally. Sit the partner down and ask: “Is this who you really want to be?” Should they respond: “Yes” or argue that they cannot improve themselves, end the interaction and give them time to compose themselves, then ask them again. If this partner still stubbornly refuses to attempt to improve their emotional control or acts as if doing so is an impossible goal, promptly end the relationship. Such behavior will only get worse and will likely balloon after marriage. If a partner wants to improve, develop a plan for improvement, and provide them with simple approaches to take the moment they lose composure in order to help them amend their behavior.

Accidental Training

Accidental training is discussed in greater detail in this book’s chapter on abuse. Abuse and accidental training are often integrally linked.

The most common form of accidental training involves not fully appreciating when someone is making a bid for attention through a negative behavior pattern and accidentally granting them that attention in response to said behavior pattern. Granting any attention, whether it be neutral, positive, or negative, is a reward that trains people to continue negative behavior.

Suppose a partner makes a hurtful emotional jab. Demonstrating to this partner that their comment succeeded in causing damage yields an emotional reward for the partner and encourages them to use such attacks in the future. Both parties in this exchange are partially to blame; one behaved poorly and the other rewarded the behavior. Suppose Sidney punches a hole in the wall and Skyler makes a great effort to calm Sidney down: This attention may also be reward—enough to lead Sidney to exhibit future violent outbreaks in the future by making such outbursts harder for Sidney to inhibit.

The key to handling a potentially explosive emotional indulgence on the part of a partner is to never ever indulge their emotional outbursts with consolation, validation, engagement, or attention. Disengage from the situation entirely—or better yet—engage an emotional partner in a way designed to snuff out the emotion instead of indulging it.

If a partner is steaming with anger, pull up two chairs, express disappointment in their loss of composure, and make it clear they can do better, but nevertheless invite them to sit down if they feel capable and—in a neutral emotional tone—talk through what made them upset, what they plan to do about it, and how those actions will benefit their objectives in life. You might also consider having your partner discuss and work through the problem in the third person (talking about themselves as though they were a removed, neutral third party); this third-person approach has been shown in several studies to help people address heated, personal subjects in a more logical, level-headed fashion.

After addressing the emotionally-triggering issue in a logical fashion, discuss a separate topic with your partner for half an hour or more before returning to the delicate subject (if it must be revisited at all). This enables you to demonstrate to partners that you care and are emotionally engaged, but in a way that trains them to not indulge in an emotion for an extended period of time.

Maintaining a Positive Relationship

Maintaining positive emotions in any relationship is often regarded in dating books as some kind of secret that requires hard work. We suppose positive relationships are hard work, just as not being a turd of a human is hard work. C’est la vie.

Humans relate to their lives through stories. When we are asked to determine whether we like our lives, we first construct a story about what we have experienced in life, then ask ourselves if we are the type of people who would like living that story. When asked if we like our relationships, we do the same thing: Tell ourselves a story about our relationships and, based on how we have chosen to see ourselves, decide whether that person is happy in this narrative we constructed.

To ensure a partner thinks positively about a relationship is to ensure the narrative they are telling themselves about that relationship fits their ideal narrative. Obviously, this isn’t always possible because we do not always know the nuances of these stories—there may be some backstory or subplots of which we have not yet been informed that powerfully color the narrative. Fortunately, there are several common elements in the stories people like to tell themselves that can be reliably hijacked:

Belief that one got the better end of the deal
Belief that one is in an exciting, special relationship
Belief that one is a good person
Belief that one is desired by a desirable partner
Belief that the relationship moves one closer to one’s goals

Signaling That The Partner Got the Better End of the Deal

People want to believe that they are with a partner who is of higher value than themselves. Putting too much effort trying to demonstrate high market value to a partner stinks of insecurity. Conversely, failure to even attempt to appear desirable signals to a partner that they may have chosen a lackluster partner.

The key is to interact with partners in a way that highlights one’s best qualities without specifically drawing attention to those qualities. Find opportunities and utilize environments that remind partners what makes you valuable. Bring partners to events that reveal they are in a relationship with someone that others admire and value.

Just don’t cite romantic interest from others in an attempt to demonstrate high personal value to a partner (e.g., “That checkout clerk was hitting on me like crazy”). Such behavior is often a sign of low social intelligence. Low social intelligence may be a desirable partner trait to those who like to be able to easily manipulate their partners, but we generally do not celebrate it.

Making the Relationship Feel Exciting and Special

People want to believe that their partner likes being in a relationship with them and likes them as a person. Working this into a partner’s internal narrative about the relationship can be a little tricky, as showing too much affection early in a relationship can lead someone to believe that they are with a partner that is lower value than them.

The key to circumventing this problem while still building a strong positive relationship involves complimenting shared moments rather than complimenting that partner directly.

Instead of: “Your hair looks beautiful.”

Say: “The way the sun is shining off your hair right now is beautiful.”

Instead of: “You are a great bowler.”

Say: “That moment you got an all-time high score in the bowling alley and everyone applauded was unforgettable.”

Instead of: “That was the best sex I ever had.”

Say: “I really liked the way you did X; it blew my mind.”

Not only does this form of compliment have a very low risk of making a partner think less of the person delivering it, but it makes them think more of shared moments, which facilities the creation of a narrative in which the moments associated with the relationship are just slightly more magical and better than other moments (which conveniently happens to be another thing almost everyone wants from a relationship).

Once a relationship becomes well established, it becomes safe to add direct compliments to the mix. Focus on statements designed to make a partner better about themselves. All partners benefit from partners who enjoy positive internal narratives. A higher level of self-respect will lead to more happiness in a partner’s life and greater success in their career. There is, however, one exception: Relationships built around the Dominance Lure are compromised when dominant partners become overly affectionate.

Making Partners Feel Like Good People

People want to believe they are good. Partners are more likely to enjoy and want to stay in relationships that make them feel as though they are good people. To create this perception, reinforce narratives that highlight how the relationship has helped to make you a better person. For example, reinforce narratives in which they helped you accomplish something you would not have been able to do on your own, like quit smoking or cut ties with an abusive friend. Through these kinds of stories, the relationship comes to play an important role in the partner’s personal narrative of being a good person.

While it is tempting to show a partner how good they are as a person by demonstrating how much you rely on them in daily life, it is unwise to come across as weak and in need of a partner to be strong. While this may be a story that some people want to tell about their relationship, more often than not it is a negative story. Deep down, we all want to believe that our partners can act as a safety net if somehow our lives hurtle out of control, and having a dependent partner breaks that fantasy.

Making Partners Feel Desired (by a Desirable Person)

People want to believe they are sexually desirable, and yet according to some polls, one in seven adults is living in a sexless marriage. As 57% of people living in a sexless marriage report that, aside from sex, they feel they have the ideal partner, improving a partner’s narrative around a relationship’s sex life can nudge a relationship fairly close to perfection.

As we discuss further in the appendix, the biggest problem in a relationship with a dead bedroom—a sexless relationship—is not the lack of momentary sexual pleasure that comes from a lack of sex, but rather the story it causes people to create. Narratives involving someone not being sexually desirable can be quite psychologically damaging to many, especially for those whose sexuality comprises an important part of their self-identities. Expressing sexual interest in and satisfaction with a partner while focusing on all the magnificent things they do will do much to improve the story they tell about the relationship.

In long-term relationships, compliment a partner’s physical appearance at least a few times a day and express wonder at how attractive they are. In short-term relationships, these compliments can be less frequent and more roundabout in their delivery. In both short and long-term relationships, compliments shown through actions or facial expressions are far more valuable than compliments shown through words (i.e., a hungry glance up and down a partner is worth far more than the words: “You look sexy”).

The need for sexual validation often becomes greater in long-term relationships as more time passes since partners last received sexual validation from a third party. Without frequent validation and reinforcement, a partner may come to believe that the relationship is being held together by forces totally independent of sexual attraction (e.g., “maybe he is just with me for the kids”). This is not an issue if sexual desirability is not a core part of a partner’s core identity, but it is a huge problem if sexual validation is a core part of their self-image.

We realize some who buy into the prevailing social narrative are tempted to believe that most sexless relationships are the product of female partners withholding sex. While we couldn’t find hard data on this, a cursory look at the communities dedicated to helping people in sexless relationships suggests this isn’t true. Statistically speaking, female attractiveness declines with age faster than male attractiveness, males are subject to the Coolidge effect causing frequent interaction with the same partner to yield lower erotic output (though researchers have recently observed a similar affect in females), and studies repeatedly show that male testosterone and sex drive both decrease when they are in love and in long-term relationships. Many more dead bedrooms than one might imagine are comprised of men who are no longer motivated to sleep with their wives.

Reassuring Partners That The Relationship Helps Them Achieve Their Goals

People want to believe their current relationship is moving them toward their long-term goals. To ensure that a partner can tell themselves a story in which this is happening, establish long-term goals with them. Sit them down and have them paint an ideal life. Make joint plans detailing how this ideal life will be achieved and kick off conversations reflecting on all the progress that has been made—thanks to close collaboration and support—since the relationship started.

Focus on important elements of the partner’s narrative around which they have insecurities. A partner may want to believe that they are independent, but secretly they are not sure they can make it on their own. These features make up landmines in a relationship that are easy to unintentionally trigger, even through well-meaning behavior. If, for example, a partner is insecure about their independence, the relationship might incur serious damage through a gesture—if however kind—offering support should that partner ever fail, as this signals to them that their worst fears about their lack of self-reliance may be true.

Two great examples of this from Malcolm’s life:

A woman who broke up with Malcolm because he complimented her intelligence more than her looks. While she was secure in her intelligence, she had insecurity about her appearance, and this led her to create a narrative in which Malcolm only appreciated her for her intelligence. This, in turn, made her feel ugly and ultimately contributed to the relationship’s demise.
A woman told him that she felt negative emotions when he called her beautiful. She felt very secure in that she was classically beautiful in an elegant way, but what she really wanted was to be seen as “hot” and “sexy.”

The takeaway from these two examples is: Don’t ever assume all women want to tell themselves X story, and all men want to tell themselves Y story. Take time to get to know each partner’s insecurities to avoid stepping on landmines resulting from treating them as “Generic Female A” and “Generic Male B.”

Internal Communication

t is unarguable that communication makes up a core pillar of any healthy relationship. Just how central that pillar is may sometimes be exaggerated. We posit that poor communication is often blamed for other types of relationship breakdowns.

Communication problems in a relationship can typically be solved with one simple rule: Put 100% of the onus for bad communication on the communicator and not on the person who was supposed to be listening. The listener cannot know what important information is not being shared and therefore cannot ask for it, and a communicator can always ask for information to be repeated back to them in the listener’s own words if there is any doubt in the effective transfer of information.

Many schools of thought about relationships choose to say both partners are at fault when communication breaks down and blame communication for situations in which poor communication is merely a byproduct of a bigger problem.

For example, A partner caught cheating may attempt to deflect responsibility for their infraction by claiming that their cheated-upon partner was not properly meeting their needs. The cheated-upon partner responds by saying they did not know they were not meeting their partner’s needs, at which point these older schools of thought blame this relationship breakdown on poor communication.

A sober analysis of this chain of events nevertheless makes it clear that a lack of communication is not to blame for this breakdown. Even if there were better communication, cheating would still have occurred. Using poor communication as a scapegoat is just a tool for sharing blame in a failed relationship. In this hypothetical case, the actual cause for the breakdown may have been something like a lack of respect for the cheated upon partner, meaning that having sex with them no longer granted the cheater the validation they craved, hence they sought out an external source of validation to still feel virile or sexy.

There are two reasons we fall back on blaming communication:

The first is that communication is presumably fixable rather than just an innate breakdown in how partners perceive each other. It is hardly productive for a relationship therapist to tell a couple one needs to learn to see the other in a different light for a relationship to survive.
The second is that communication, being an act that requires multiple individuals, is always both partners’ fault. This distribution of blame makes poor communication easier to accept as a “reason” for relationship problems, especially when the real cause of breakdown involves the personal failure of only one party in the relationship, or something that our society treats as trivial, such as someone’s desire to maintain a certain personal narrative.

It helps to share the blame for relationship failure because the type of person who is unilaterally responsible for a relationships failure is more likely to change their behavior and engage in discussion about that behavior if it is pointed out to them in a way that doesn’t make them seem like the “bad guy”.

We also see many situations in which a lack of communication exists because honest communication would damage the relationship. This is less of a communication issue and more of a core failure in the relationship, in which unpleasant truths are met with punishment. A man may find another woman to be sexy, have a strong compulsion to sleep with her and know that this other woman would reciprocate his advances, but may not communicate this to his wife because this reality would cause the wife to become livid. This is relationship failure caused not by a communication problem, but rather by a poorly designed relationship contract: One that prohibits attraction to other people (not a choice) instead of just infidelity (a choice).

Any relationship contract, implied or negotiated, that forbids an emotion is destined to lead to poor communication. In monogamous relationships, this often falls into the category of forbidding a partner from finding anything else sexually arousing but is not limited to monogamous relationships. In unhealthy polyamorous relationships, these toxic clauses can manifest in contracts that forbid either the emotion of jealousy or the act of falling in love with another person.

Be it expressed within a non-monogamous or monogamous relationship, love is an emotion like any other. It is not something over which we have control, and it is not a magical compass pointing you toward happiness or moral righteousness. It is totally possible to develop love for someone outside a primary relationship or to no longer feel love for a primary partner even when everything else in a relationship is going perfectly. Being able to communicate feelings to a partner is critical. Feeling love for someone outside of a relationship or not feeling love for a primary partner is not a sign that the relationship has “failed” and must be dissolved. Quite frequently, it is best to not act on these feelings, which are often fleeting and poorly correlated with the logical best interests of all those involved.

This is not to say that relationship contract clauses banning emotional indulgence should not exist in a relationship contract. We would go so far as to say that all relationship contracts should forbid emotional indulgence. By emotional indulgence, we mean not just feeling an emotion and calmly communicating that you feel it, but also “acting out” an emotion through something like crying, pacing, or raised voices.

We are not arguing that communication is never a problem. It often is.

Genuine breakdowns in communication commonly stem from an assumption among partners that they have the same desires and thought patterns. Love romantic, candlelit dinners? It is easy to assume a partner must be aware of this proclivity, but failure to communicate it clearly waives any right to expect such awareness. People are not mind readers.

Communication also fails when a partner assumes they only need to communicate important things once. Sometimes partners are too distracted to fully digest the gravity of a comment, request, or complaint. For example, Frankie may tell Aziz that something Aziz does is bothering her. Aziz may then alter his behavior a bit and, after not hearing about the issue again, assume it to be resolved. Meanwhile, Frankie may still feel the issue has not been resolved and secretly build resentment. It is easy to believe a situation has been resolved if you hear a complaint, alter your behavior, and don’t hear the complaint again. In this situation, the majority of the fault in a healthy relationship would lie with Frankie.

Effective Transference of Information

Never assume a partner has properly internalized a concern, need, or comment unless they can eloquently describe that thing back in their own words while showing full attention and making eye contact.

Consider using a standardized format for communicating important information.

A good template for this format is to:

Express what this partner needs to know
Express how important this point is
Ask this partner to repeat what you have communicated in their own words

This process can be made even better when it is conducted through writing, such as email or a shared document. This will create a record of your communication, which removes the onus from the communicator. If a partner claims to have never been told about something, everyone can turn to an unambiguous record to determine what really happened.

This can sound onerous, but given that we use emails and a shared Google doc for just such purposes ourselves, we can vouch for the inconvenience being minimal. People communicate far fewer important things than one might think and many of those things are repeats of topics hashed through before (“When you do X, I feel Y,” “I am acting with this long-term plan in mind,” “Here’s my checklist for a properly cleaned kitchen,” etc.).

How do we, Simone and Malcolm, avoid miscommunications? We send all important communications to each other via email, as we use our inboxes for task management and can therefore turn important requests and comments into to-do items. We email important requests and comments to each other several times a day. Most of these emails are related to company operations (in addition to writing these books together, operate a number of small-to-medium-size companies and lecture at colleges and universities), but they may also involve household tasks, shopping needs, weekend planning requests, and comments on issues that worry, fascinate, intrigue, inspire, or bother us. These “official” communications are, as a rule, kicked off with a subject reading: Task: [Request Goes Here]. Whenever an email subject line starts with “Task,” the other partner is expected to read the message carefully and regard it as a priority.

Common requests look like:

Task: Follow up with Julian Holgrove regarding contract signature
Task: Pick up double A batteries when grocery shopping today
Task: Ask Clara Handel why she did not hit her numbers this month
Task: Review and counter approve clean kitchen check list

We have agreed that each partner is obligated to review these requests. If unable to complete them, the partner receiving a request must respond promptly with whatever clarifying questions or additional information might be relevant.

One of the most cardinal of “sins” within our relationship involves one of us allowing ourselves to get annoyed at the other for an uncompleted task that was not sent in this format. We should expect verbal requests and comments to be forgotten if we cannot immediately act on them. Even now I, Malcolm, will sometimes ask Simone why some project has not been done to be countered with the reply: “Did you send it in a task request?” (I forget more than Simone does.)

When we have a more complex discussion, like what the standards are for a clean kitchen or how will we educate our kids, one of us will write a summary of the discussion’s key points in a Google doc, then send it to the other for counter review in a task item to ensure we both took away the same core points and are aligned on next steps that should be taken.

Several have told us they are with a partner who would never agree to have their demands written down. This is a giant red flag of an abusive relationship dynamic. There are only two reasons a person would refuse to have a record of communication:

They don’t value the relationship enough for it to be worth the few minutes it takes to write something down a few times a month.
They believe that a written record will disproportionately be used against them, insinuating they subconsciously realize they utilize systematic gaslighting to their advantage.

Gaslighting is a type of very serious abuse in which a person misrepresents previous events or conversations in an attempt to convince their partner that they occurred in a fashion that runs counter to reality.

Just because a partner makes a request does not mean that request must be honored.

For example: One partner may tell the other that they really hate it when the other person puts the toilet paper on the roll flipped under and not over. The other may acknowledge they hear and internalize said position, but then explain why they still hang toilet paper the way they do. The manner in which this disagreement in toilet-paper-hanging-philosophy should ultimately be resolved would depend on the terms of the relationship contract. This is not a breakdown in communication.

Genuine disagreement in preferences or goals is possible, even with perfect communication. Should you reach a point with a partner at which you have communicated a genuine difference in preferences, either implement the conflict resolution clause in your relationship contract or, in more critical situations, amend the contract.

A breakdown of communication—and a serious violation of almost any relationship contract—would involve the person who had decided to not change the way they are handling toilet paper to ignore their partner’s request while failing to explain that they are choosing to ignore the request and provide some reasons why they are ignoring the request.

On a final note: Communication must occur alongside both self-knowledge and emotional regulation. We strongly advise against entering a relationship that lacks any expectation of emotional regulation—the expectation that both partners will actively attempt to regulate their emotional states. Not having this expectation gradually erodes even relationships in which everyone is acting with the best of intentions.

As an example of how well-intentioned interaction can become detrimental when there is no expectation of emotional control: A couple has an emotionally heated discussion. After one “says their piece,” they ask the other if they have anything to add. The other replies that they are feeling defensive and as such want to shelve the conversation until they calm down. About half an hour later, the individual who shelved the conversation then asks their partner why they are giving them the “silent treatment” and their partner explains they were just trying to respect the boundaries set when it was requested the conversation be shelved.

The toxicity in the above relationship occurred not just because the partners became emotionally heated, but because they went so far as to shelve the conversation in an effort to coddle one of the partners’ failures to control their emotional state—an action that both exacerbated their disagreement and trained the individual being coddled to not control their emotions. Failure to normalize an expectation of emotional control can lead even those with good intentions, emotional intelligence, and self-knowledge to fail in their attempts to communicate.

Learning to control your emotional state is easy, assuming you are post-puberty (so your frontal cortex is fully myelinated) and are not drunk. The “muscles” required to do this—the prefrontal cortex’s inhibitory pathways—get stronger with practice, and thus emotional control becomes easier with time. Relish opportunities to practice self-control, knowing they will make you stronger.

Ignored Communication

There is almost no behavior more toxic to a relationship than ignoring attempts to communicate.

It should never happen that your partner attempts to communicate with you, and you either shut them down (by closing a door on them) or ignore them. If you do not have time to talk with a partner who is trying to communicate with you:

Clearly explain you don’t have time right now
Schedule time to talk about the issue

Ignoring communication with a partner hurts them. It emotionally punishes them for attempting to communicate with you about an issue that probably isn’t much easier for them to bring up. Ignoring communication stifles future communication. This is doubly bad when conversations are avoided merely because they may be uncomfortable. This avoidance trains partners to never share anything that might cause discomfort and will likely kill the relationship over the long run.

This point is complicated by instances in which one partner does not realize the other is trying to communicate something. Personally, we began to notice that our relationship was stronger when we lived and worked in spaces in which we could hear each other from any room. Even though we knew the other person was probably just too far away to hear when we asked for something and there was no response, it still caused a small impulse of resentment—even though we knew said resentment was entirely illogical. We circumvent this problem by creating a policy whereby we only attempted to communicate with each other in larger areas when we were already making eye contact.

Bids for Attention

A partner may also make a bid for attention, which they intend to act as a subtle form of communication, but which is not recognized as such by the partner. A partner poking you then running into their room, a partner inconspicuously listening to a show loudly near you, or a partner saying to themselves, “Boy, I sure would like to go on a walk,” may all be requests for engagement—though emotionally stunted ones.

This form of communication becomes problematic when one partner expects the other to see their bid for engagement as clear, obvious, communication. In a long-term relationship, we recommend training your partner to never attempt this subtle communication by going out of your way to clarify and call out these subtle cues while never rewarding them. But, rewarding your partner when they plainly tell you they desire your attention. Learning to tell your partner you want attention may be embarrassing, but doing so prevents miscommunication in the long run.

Self-Narratives and Communication

People have an internal narrative about who they are, which they attempt to reinforce through the process of validation discussed earlier in the book. One of the key tools we as humans use to reinforce these narratives is attempting to get others to see us through the lens of our own ideal narratives.

This means two important things in the context of relationships:

People have often found that certain stories, anecdotes, or lines of conversation are good (or at least they believe they are good) at convincing others to see them the way they want to see themselves. They often “start” with these lines of conversation when they first meet new people. Prepare to hear your partner’s same image reinforcing stories a thousand times if you regularly meet new people in the presence of each other. Expect that these stories eat at your sanity. Your partner’s desperate need for validation, the same need most people have, will lower your respect for them.
Just as we try to reinforce what we think about ourselves through the way others see us, we try to reinforce the story we want to believe about our relationship by imposing it on the view of others. This becomes a problem when the way each partner sees their relationship is not aligned, and their stories conflict in a social environment. For example, both might be trying to tell a story in which they are the ones who “wear the pants in the relationship.”

Fortunately, like virtually every potential pitfall in a relationship, these problems can be overcome by intentionality.

List the lines of conversation, stories, and anecdotes that each partner tells often. Discuss why you tell them. Decide if they are achieving their purpose. Finally, throw out the stories that do not achieve their goal while perfecting those which have value while also crafting and practicing new, joint stories you can tell together.

Malcolm and I do this regularly with a focus on crafting stories with a strong, engaging narrative structure. Specifically, we like them to have a rising “plotline” and increasing steaks followed by a “conflict point,” which is then resolved with an unexpected behavior that paints a certain story about us.

For example: In our first date story, Simone builds up the impact of the moment by stressing how inexperienced she was. She creates an expectation of “romance” by describing the fancy restaurant, and subverts the expectation with Malcolm sitting across from her explaining that he was looking for a wife and expected to find her through the pre-vetted pool of Stanford MBA students.

This moment of subversion is both entertaining to the listener and elicits, what are for them, unusual conversation pathways that challenge aspects of what they believe should be normalized behavior patterns while reinforcing the intentionality of our relationship in the eyes of others. It also paints a picture of us as a couple that is willing to break social conventions in the service of expediency. Finally, it finds a way to both drop Simone’s chastity and Malcolm’s education in a way that is germane to the rising action—these are things that are used by people living on autopilot to judge others and thus, as cringy as they are, still are of utility to signal.

Rekindling Relationships

ow do you keep a relationship “fresh”?

Relationships change over time. Trying to keep a relationship exactly like it was at the beginning is a bit like trying to un-bake cookie dough. Cookie dough tastes great and cookies taste great, but they are not the same thing and you can’t reverse the baking process. The emotions you will be able to harvest from a nascent relationship are not the same emotions yielded by mature relationships.

For example: New relationship energy is one of the emotions hardest to recreate in mature relationships. If new relationship energy is critical to your enjoyment of life, we strongly recommend you explore poly relationships instead of resigning yourself to dissatisfaction in a monogamous relationship, unable to extract emotions that a single partner is structurally unable to provide.

While it is true some dynamics and emotions can only be efficiently harvested from nascent relationships, these emotional sets are only preferred by a minority of people. Most prefer the emotional bouquet proffered by thriving, mature relationships. We emphasize the term “thriving,” as to be fully enjoyed, a relationship must be better than just “healthy.” If your relationship is losing its luster without any explicit conflict or identifiable and extractable necrosis, how can you improve it?

It’s easy for a relationship to lose its luster when you feel you’ve already learned and explored everything about a partner. When you can perfectly predict how a person will respond to any new piece of information and how the flow of any conversation will go, the conversations can begin to feel pointless. There are two solutions to this conundrum.

The first is to ensure that both you and your partner are constantly evolving as people: That you are picking up new information, changing who you are, and adjusting your understanding of the world in response to new information. Malcolm never bores me because he changes his perspective based on new information he collects, meaning if I have the same conversation with him this year that I had with him two years ago, it will likely go in a totally different direction.

Should you find yourself forming a relationship with someone who refuses to update their worldview when presented with conflicting but sound information, or who becomes angry when data does not support their “team’s” perspective, enter into that relationship anticipating that said individual is likely going to bore you to tears one day no matter how fiery and passionate they are about the views they hold.

The second is to delve into an aspect of your partner that you are structurally unable to explore in your day-to-day relationship. Luckily, the human brain will process information very differently depending on the medium through which it engages with that information. The iteration of us with which you interact by reading our books would feel nothing like the iteration that manifests through in-person conversations or through instant messaging. This is because you are literally interacting with different parts of a person’s brain depending on your method of communication with them. If you make a concerted effort to get to know these other aspects of your partner, you will have the chance to fall in love all over again.

You may even find yourself missing one of your partners’ manifestations if you don’t use that method of communication much due to the structure of your daily schedule. For example, after having to communicate with each other in letters and journal entries while I was in the UK getting my graduate degree and Malcolm was living in Seoul, we came to appreciate the written-form iteration of each other so much we occasionally plan trysts with those parts of ourselves by scheduling a week apart, during which we can only communicate in writing. We recommend this to anyone who is interested in seeing their partner in a new light.

One of our favorite case studies on this front involves a couple that met and fell in love through online gaming, but eventually physically moved in together and married. They preferred the virtual, written, aspect of each other so much that while they tried at first to live a “normal” married life, they eventually settled into a cadence in which they cohabitated and slept together, but communicated and dated virtually and in writing. This couple presents not a failed relationship, but rather two people mature enough to recognize how to access the parts of each other they loved most and creative enough to operate outside the narrow bounds of vanilla, “ideal” relationships as defined by mainstream media.

Changing the medium of communication isn’t the only way to explore a new aspect of your partner. The internal models we cultivate of ourselves—the self-identities that guide our automatic actions—will change in response to our environments. The person someone presents around family is often radically different from the persona they display at work. Engaging with your partner in new environments permits you to meet new iterations of them, whether that means playing an MMORPG with them (an online game like World of Warcraft) or joining them when they go drinking with a friend group with which you don’t typically interact.

Don’t go overboard with this approach: It may lead to problems if your partner has trouble being who they are in these other social settings when you are around—it could be that a key element of them being someone slightly different involves your absence. Fortunately, there are still two easy paths forward should this be the case.

Try spending a week assuming the identities of characters with different names, backstories, and pre-established dynamics with each other. This can feel silly as hell, but depending on how you approach life, it can also be a pretty fun adventure. Acting out different personas also presents a means by which you can try out radically different relationship dynamics, switching up dominance roles or deciding to be theatrically romantic to an extent that would be comical if tried in a different context.

Should you be too much of a coward for roleplay (don’t blame creativity: Studies show people can become more creative when encouraged to make an effort), you might also consider taking on a new activity with a partner—bonus points for activities that are exciting.^[7] This far-more-vanilla (but nevertheless enjoyable) tactic enables you to generate novel schema in your lives in which each of you has the opportunity to be someone slightly different and see each other in a fresh light.

Abuse as a Concept

he relationship industry uses the concept of abuse to label certain behavioral sets as categorically unacceptable. Abuse is the line that, when crossed, means a relationship has gone from acceptable to unacceptable. We understand the intent with this categorization. The reigning concept of abuse allows for emphasis to be placed on just how unhealthy certain behaviors are and through this emphasis it creates cognitive dissonance in both the abuser and the abused: “I am not abusive, so I won’t do X” or “I would not allow myself to be in an abusive relationship, so when my partner does X, that means it is time to leave.”

Actions seen as classic abuse include:

A partner hitting you
A partner gaslighting you (trying to convince you your memory of events is inaccurate)
A partner secretly tracking you
A partner breaking into your email account
A partner ignoring consent

Without these clear lines, it can be hard to break through the cognitive momentum that holds together a slowly deteriorating relationship. Without this strong distinction, it can be nigh impossible to recognize that a partner whose bad behavior has been slowly escalating has finally reached a breaking point. People say, correctly or incorrectly, that while you can’t throw a frog into a pot of boiling water without it hopping out, you can still boil a frog by putting it in a room-temperature pan that you slowly bring to a boil. Along these lines, the concept of abuse with which most of us live acts like a thermometer with a red line on it: We might be sitting in pots with dangerously rising temperatures, but at least we have the red line on the thermometer letting us know when to jump out.

But here’s the rub: The temperature at one degree below the red line is negligibly different from the temperature one degree above the red line. It is best to get out of water when the temperature is rising, not after it reaches a boiling point. In this respect, this model of abuse fails, allowing relationships to easily continue to exist in states of hostility just below the red line on the thermometer.

The Pragmatist model of relationships requires neither an external concept of morality nor the concept of abuse to create relationship termination forcing functions. Someone following the Pragmatist model who is genuinely mistreated and put in harm’s way by a relationship is more likely to terminate a relationship well before it fits mainstream society’s definition of classic abuse.

To a Pragmatist, the concept of abuse is pointless. It applies standards, which may or may not apply to your own personal values and best interests, of what is and is not acceptable in your relationships. A dynamic of near-absolute dominance that mainstream sentiments would categorize as abuse could be a preferred situation for some. Consider 24/7 Total Power Exchange relationships and Taken in Hand relationships, both of which feature long-term consensual non-consent agreements (i.e., one partner prefers a relationship in which they do not have to give consent to the other within certain predetermined boundaries)—some actively seek out such relationship dynamics. At the same time, dynamics that mainstream sentiments deem to be harmless or even laudable, such as monogamy or sharing a bank account, could feel abusive to some.

Some even categorize anything that is “extremely unequal economically” as abusive. Within this definition, having one partner make the majority of a family’s financial decisions (investments, taxes, etc.) is considered abusive—and yet this dynamic exists within almost any sane construction of a relationship as an effort-saving measure.

Traditional models of abuse might even classify a relationship in which one partner takes the lead in major strategic decisions (such as where the partners live) as abusive. We would argue the opposite: That most relationships in which this doesn’t happen are hugely suboptimal, representing a lack of self-knowledge and humility among their participants. After all, among any two individuals, one will be better at strategic, long-term decision making related to certain domains. Insisting on making these decisions equal is either a sign that the individual worse at this type of decision making is unable to admit their inferiority on the subject or that they do not trust their partner to take them into account and source their feedback when making strategic decisions.

By freeing yourself from using traditional conceptions of abuse as a forcing function, you can become better equipped to predict classically abusive behavior, lower the probability of it, and increase the quality of your relationships as a whole.

Proto-Abuse vs. Abuse

When you conceptualize abuse as a red line, it becomes harder to recognize behaviors that lead up to this abuse, which, if recognized early enough, could be halted, thereby lowering the probability that classically abusive situations will arise in the first place. In other words, abuse exists on a spectrum of behaviors, and optimal relationships feature low overall levels of these behaviors. To highlight behavior that can easily turn into “classic” abuse (causing physical harm, gaslighting, crossing personal boundaries related to privacy, becoming unproductively controlling, etc.), we will discuss “proto-abuse” (or as Malcolm prefers to call it: “general dickishness”).

Proto-abusive behavior is generally classified by society as normal and acceptable within relationships. For example, while a person locking themselves in their room during an argument or snapping at a partner and raising their voice after a long day of work may not meet any classical definition of abuse, it would fall squarely within the category of proto-abusive behavior that can evolve into classic abuse through a number of channels. Proto-abusive behavior lowers the quality of a relationship even when it does not evolve into classic abuse.

Why is it important to recognize proto-abusive behavior, even at its lowest levels of output? Early recognition of proto-abuse can help you spot bad relationships earlier. Failure to recognize low-level proto-abusive behavior may ultimately cause it to be reinforced.

When recognized and dealt with promptly and intentionally, proto-abusive behavior can be eliminated from a relationship—similar to how dermatologists remove pre-cancerous cells from your skin (and like a dermatologist removing pre-cancerous cells, this is not fool-proof—you can always miss things about a person, but a regular checkup never hurts). If you recognize a partner talking to you with a raised, emotional voice, calmly sit your partner down and discuss it the first time it happens, negatively reinforcing the behavior and working to ensure that not only does it not escalate while decreasing the likelihood that your partner emotionally raises their voice at you again.

We are not arguing that abuse is not as bad as people make it out to be or that abuse can be systematically prevented in all instances. We merely argue that certain behaviors are correlated with relationships that become classically abusive. Learning to recognize and deal with those behaviors may help to prevent a situation from escalating to abuse as traditionally defined. Classic abuse aside, proto-abusive behaviors are toxic and ought to be addressed when possible.

More in the Appendix

You will notice we try to avoid the topic of more severe classic abuse, such as domestic violence. Severe, classic abuse is neither pleasant to read about nor something for which we have a clear and simple solution. Sure, we can provide advice on how to handle a partner who sometimes raises their voice and storms out of a room, but we are not qualified to give generalized advice to someone whose partner threatens to kill your kids should you leave them and means it.

Our exploration of abuse is more focused on how we address the topic as a society and how abuse affects relationship strategy. Moreover, abuse is not something with which we have extensive personal experience, so any thoughts we have on the subject must come from the data, interviews, and personal theory. Keep this in mind when reviewing our advice. If you would like to read more on this topic, go to page 610 in the appendix, to the section titled Abuse.

Notes from the Research:

Double-blind, placebo-controlled TMS (trans magnetic stimulation, which allows researchers to temporarily shut off parts of the brain) research at the University of Pennsylvania has shown that stimulating a person’s prefrontal cortex increases their likelihood to define an instance of sexual or physical assault as morally reprehensible. While this doesn’t exactly have real-world implications, it does highlight that even our own view of moral right and wrong is evanescent and often outside of our logical control.
The cognitive impact of abuse is not just tied to its severity and frequency. When judging the gravity of an abuse case, society typically looks at the worst individual incidents of the abuse and the frequency of such incidents. While not a terrible methodology, the approach yields a poor understanding of the actual psychological impact of abuse. One of the most critical details when determining how impactful an abusive or proto-abusive behavior will be is how predictable and regular it is. Proto-abusive behavior that occurs randomly, leaving its target constantly on edge, can lead to a deeper psychological scar than more classic abusive behavior that occurs only under very specific, regular, and predictable conditions. For information on this, see research on the effects of unpredictable chronic stress versus predictable chronic stress as well as the tangentially related concept of “learned helplessness” (again, the research on this topic is way more nuanced and in conflict than we make it out to be).
One interesting study even showed that introducing predictable stress in mice during their adolescence caused neurological changes, increasing mTOR signaling activity in the prefrontal c1ortex, which lowered their anxiety and stress in adulthood.

Accidental Training of Proto-Abusive Behavior

It is possible for victims of proto-abusive behavior to have accidentally trained or emotionally reinforced this behavior without realizing what they were doing.

If you neglect to pay attention to the manner in which you react to a partner, it is remarkably easy to accidentally train them to exhibit low-level proto-abusive behavior.

This is done in three ways:

Proto-abusive behavior is rewarded: This involves giving someone exhibiting proto-abusive behavior what they want (e.g., Giving positive attention to a partner after they pick a fight with you out of the blue to “calm them down”). This subconsciously trains them to continue leveraging that behavior and may even encourage them to ramp it up.
Proto-abusive behavior is not punished: This is why proto-abusive and abusive behavior is so common in high-power-distance relationships (in which one partner has much more power than the other). Those in subordinate positions are less equipped to stamp out bad behaviors when they worsen.
Proto-abusive behavior is believed to be necessary: If a partner is unable to communicate boundaries, needs, and feelings through normal conversation, they may feel their only choice is to resort to proto-abusive (and eventually) abusive behavior. If one partner tells another, repeatedly, to stop blowing communal rent money on designer clothes, and those calmly delivered requests are repeatedly ignored, this partner may come to believe/feel that abusive behaviors such as emotional manipulation, yelling, and even physical violence are the only communication pathways that actually work.

This third point is why proto-abusive behavior often correlates with unreasonable expectations from a relationship, as the partner with unreasonable expectations will adopt it out of desperation after their calmly communicated unreasonable expectations are not met. A partner may, for example, expect their relationship to provide them with ample spending money, and if they feel that money is not being provided, despite their repeated, calmly communicated requests, they might feel driven to circumvent their partner and… well, ultimately resort to proto-abusive/classically abusive behavior, such as expressing their resentment by escalating to verbal abuse, limiting intimacy, and so on.

The very second you first spot expectations like this, unless extremely dire circumstances are forcing you to stay in that relationship, end it. It is functionally impossible to change a partner’s unreasonable expectations. A relationship based on a mismatch of expectations cannot be repaired. The relationship will almost certainly end up being reciprocally abusive. Keep in mind expectations can be unreasonable and poorly matched in many ways: With money, lifestyle, health, appearance, behavior, fidelity, sexual activity, and so much more.

Some common examples:

“There will always be money for anything I want”
“I will never be expected to have to budget my spending”
“You will never find anyone or anything else attractive”
“You will always want sex exactly as often as you do now”

In addition, mismatched expectations create relationships in which proto-abusive behavior emerges among what would otherwise be totally reasonable, emotionally stable people through a similar mechanism. Consider a relationship in which one partner is a Southern Baptist that believes if their children will be eternally punished if they do not adhere to a specific type of Christianity, while their partner is a Muslim who has contrasting beliefs with equally severe consequences for their children. From the perspective of each partner, reaching a compromise that puts their children’s souls at risk is worse than acting abusive towards their partner, hence proto-abusive behavior will emerge from this disagreement and spread throughout the relationship. Just because a relationship has proto-abusive elements doesn’t mean there is a clear bad guy.

Outside of the aforementioned types of incidents, how can the likelihood of proto-abusive behavior be lowered?

The key to halting the growth of proto-abusive behavior is to identify and apply negative reinforcement against this behavior at its lowest levels of output—even when the worrisome behavior is not directed at you. Suppose your partner steps on a Lego in an area where your child was clearly building something and had received permission to do so, then yells at your child in an angry tone for “leaving it on the floor.” This is called displaced aggression. Essentially, they are transforming their pain into a form of aggression with a specific outlet of blame in order to lower their experience of pain and shock. Displaced aggression exists across many mammals. Even rats lower their stress levels by attacking and hurting other rats—and that displaced aggression really does help them feel better (though, of course, now two rats are stressed and not just one).

At any rate, if you partner lashes out in displaced anger at your child (or classmate, colleague, family member, friend, pet, neighbor, stranger, etc.) and you reinforce the behavior by doing the same or taking no immediate action, but separately comforting the lashed-out-at party later, you are subconsciously signaling to your partner that this behavioral response is acceptable, thereby increasing the probability of displaced aggression behavior in the future. If, however, you make it clear in the moment that this displaced aggression—which we would categorize as proto-abusive behavior—is not acceptable, you will lower the probability that this behavior will continue and escalate.

The displaced aggression scenario outlined above is probably the most important thing in a relationship to watch for in terms of proto-abuse—not only because displaced aggression really does help you feel better, but also because society normalizes this behavior. Society tells us that “I had a bad day at work” is an acceptable excuse for snapping at a partner, and that “sorry, I was in a really bad place at the time” is an acceptable excuse for belittling a partner in front of their friends. By making it clear from the start that no form of proto-abusive behavior—not matter widely accepted it may be—is ever acceptable in your relationship, it is easy to prevent such behavior from escalating above its lowest conceivable levels of output.

Other low level proto-abusive behavior patterns that, if not stopped at their lowest levels of output, often evolve into classic abuse are:

Unilateral conversation control: Hanging up the phone in the middle of a call, locking the door to a room, storming off for hours/days, subjecting a partner to the silent treatment, etc.
Emotionally escalated communication: Raising one’s voice at a partner, slamming a door, punching a wall, throwing objects, etc.
Loudly broadcast self-pity: Crying, whining, complaining about things one cannot change, etc.
Threatening to hurt oneself to influence a partner’s behavior: “If you leave with your friends, I will sit at home doing nothing all day” can quickly escalate to: “If you leave with your friends, I will kill myself” if it is reinforced.
Showing no remorse for lying after being shown evidence of a lie: Lying is a hard one, as it is common in a relationship for someone to genuinely misremember something. You know you have a real problem when you present clear evidence that a partner is lying, and they still refuse to admit it.

Just as we categorize some widely accepted behaviors as proto-abusive, we see other behaviors, which many flag as signs of early abuse, as entirely fine (if sometimes a bit unpleasant)—so long as those behavior patterns are primarily enacted in order to improve all partners’ quality of life and ability to achieve goals.

Specifically:

Controlling finances: Financial control is often a tool used in abusive relationships, but one partner being responsible for financial decisions might also simply be a smart division of labor. Simone, for example, manages all of our bank accounts and the flow of our income, whereas Malcolm makes all of our investment decisions. We find this arrangement to be quite optimal, even though each of us is surrendering control with regard to certain financial domains.
Denying impulsive behavior: Somebody denying a destructive impulse in their partner is not abusive—even if their partner finds this denial unpleasant in the moment. For example, someone pouring out all your alcohol after you show up to work drunk or restricting your finances if you appear to be about to go on a spending spree at the mall or blow through part of your kids’ college fund at a casino is not abuse.
Discouraging destructive interpersonal relationships: Humans suck at ending toxic relationships. A partner who encourages you to end friendships that are clearly holding you back, encourages you to stay away from a genuinely abusive parent, or who does not consent to you sharing a hotel room with a coworker who has a reputation for being sexually aggressive is not necessarilyexhibiting proto-abusive behavior. This one holds a special place for Simone, as one of the first things Malcolm did when we started dating was argue her friends were holding her back, and she needed to make more ambitious ones. Should Simone have followed the social convention that a partner telling her to not hang out with friends was being abusive, she would not have had all the success she has enjoyed as a result of Malcolm’s mentorship. Thus while telling you who you should be friends with canbe a sign of an abusive relationship strategy, it is not necessarily abusive. Scrutinize the reason behind the request. Is it motivated by jealousy of your friends or a concern for how your relationship with them could affect your relationship with your partner? Then it is likely abuse or proto-abuse. However, if the advice stems from a desire to improve your lot in life, then it is likely not abuse or proto-abuse. Someone telling you not to hang out with meth heads is probably not being abusive.

Note from the Research:

An eight-year study conducted by Germany’s University of Alberta, looking at 554 people after a breakup, showed that eventually the new relationships they formed featured the same dynamics present in relationships they had left—this happened after the glow of the honeymoon phase had faded. Specifically, participants’ relationship satisfaction levels stayed the same, their sexual satisfaction levels stayed the same, and their ability to open up to a partner remained unchanged. Read into this what you will; to us, this finding suggests that the research participants’ relationships stayed the same because most people stay the same. Most people don’t take personal responsibility for most of life’s failures and, as a result, fail to make the changes necessary to avoid creating the same relationship dynamics over and over again.

Love Does Not Equal Caring

When talking about the subject of proto-abuse, one point cannot be emphasized enough: Loving someone and caring about them are not the same thing.

Given the extent to which our society glamorizes the emotion of love, it is very common for someone to assume a partner’s love for them somehow makes up for abusive behavior. Whether or not an abusive partner loves the person they abuse is almost as irrelevant as the abuser’s ability to find a picture of the abused person arousing. People would be seen as crazy for saying: “It is OK that he hits me because he becomes aroused when he imagines me,” and yet many have no problem saying: “It is OK that he hits me because he feels the emotion of love when he imagines me.” Both situations are just emotional reward mechanisms tied to our mental image of a person—and yet they are treated wildly differently.

It is incredibly common for one person to hurt another in an effort to protect or maximize their ability to extract the emotion of love from interactions with the victim. Abusive partners commonly pressure their beloved victims to make bad career decisions or threaten violence if their victims suggest leaving the relationship. These people do this because love feels great, and they ultimately do not care about those from whom they are using interaction to extract this emotion.

It is far more important to find someone who cares about you than someone who loves you.

Here are some easy ways to determine that someone does not care about you:

They say: “If you loved me, you would X.”
They say: “I only did Y because I love you so much”—where Y is something that hurt you.
They pressure you to make a decision they know is not in your long-term best interest in order to spend time with you (e.g., They make you late to work because they wanted to kiss you longer).

The most dangerous human you will ever meet is someone who loves you and does not care about you. If you run into someone like this: Run—run as fast as you can. Such people will not change because, fundamentally, you do not matter to them. All that matters to those who love but do not care about you is how you make them feel.

We often see people make no true Scotsman arguments on this topic. They say things like: “By definition, love only leads to positive actions.”

We ask any who hold this position to bear in mind that the person most likely to commit a war crime is the type of person who “knows” that:

Good guys only do good things
They are a good guy

Consider how dangerous these two beliefs are when held together:

Love only leads to good acts
“I love my partner” / “My partner loves me”

Defining love as always positive makes it harder for people to leave abusive relationships when they love their partner—something that happens very frequently. Just because someone is abusive and bad for a victim does not mean the victim will not love them. No emotion is only capable of motivating evil action or good actions. Emotions are merely signals: Things we evolved because they helped our ancestors have more offspring. Emotions are not barometers that indicate the morality of actions they inspire.

Attractiveness Strategies and Research

K—enough with the boring relationship advice,” you may be thinking.

“How can I become SMOKIN’ HOT??? Uh . . . You know—from a pragmatic perspective.”

Society gives us these pretty solid guidelines maximizing aggregate attractiveness:

Be fit
Be young
Be confident
Maintain low/middling weight
Practice good hygiene
Get rich

Simple, right?

A look at some of the strongest research findings makes the topic seem fairly uncomplicated. Initial romantic interest, among both men and women, is almost entirely based on looks.

However, pick up artists (mostly male groups who try to figure out how to maximize their success on the sex market) would argue that there is more to attractiveness—that there are ways to “game the system.” Are they right? Digging into the research on this subject was a lot of fun because at first, the results did not make a lick of sense.

The Puzzle

We started by exploring one of the strategies most suggested by male pick-up artist communities: Adopting “dark triad” personality traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy).

Research backs this up: Women appear to find men exhibiting dark triad personality traits to be more attractive, and men leveraging these traits get more sex on average (the research also shows women exhibiting dark triad traits get more sex).

Cut and dry, right? Why did we find the studies so confusing at first?

Well, well, well . . .

Multiple studies looking at generosity and kindness have also shown that men who are more generous get more sex. In one study, participants of equivalent income levels were given $100 and an opportunity to donate a portion of it to someone else. Those who donated the most also had the most sex. But it doesn’t end there: Studies that looked only at reported kindness levels also found that kind men get more partners.

To confuse things further, studies have found that women find facial features associated with men who naturally express dark triad traits extremely unattractive (a disdain that does not even drop when females are drunk), which seems to imply that an individual only pretending to exhibit these traits will have much more success than someone who was born exhibiting them.

So what? Pretending to be a dick will get a guy more sex, but if he is naturally a dick, he will get less sex? Being narcissistic sociopath gets a guy more sex, but so does being generous and being kind?

The results for female attractiveness are just as surprising. While we found all the standard stuff we expected to find, such as women being seen as more attractive when wearing red or laughing at a date’s jokes, some stuff was just . . . bonkers. For example, the female group that seems to have the biggest single advantage is (drumroll!!!): Older women targeting younger men.

“But wait,” you think, “I thought young women were the hottest?”

Upon exploring its fantastically large dataset, OkCupid found that a 40-year-old woman has better luck hitting on a 25-year-old man than she does hitting on a 55-year-old man. What’s more, a 30-year-old man is more likely to respond to a message from a 50-year-old woman than he is to respond to a message from a woman in any other age group.

We know this looks like it contradicts what we have said earlier in the book, and this doesn’t change our earlier advice—just hold your horses and we will explain. We are not the types to withhold information just because it doesn’t fit our narrative.

The Solution

We were able to find dozens of well-conducted studies just like those above that seemed to contradict each other—and societal expectations. After a while, we realized that we were looking at the results from the wrong angle.

Ultimately, these studies are saying the same thing: Both males and females find control groups extremely unattractive. We do not think we have seen a single study in which the control group was found to be more attractive. These findings line up with our own experiences, societal tropes, and even other dating strategies that are user-reported to be effective.

It is a common trope that “nice guys” and “nice girls” always lose. This platitude may be true—just not in the way people like to interpret it (usually in an effort to protect their egos). We know from the data that both generous and kind men get more sex, so it is definitely not that niceness is an inherent turnoff. When someone is described as nice, it can mean many things, but perhaps most often “nice” means “generally inoffensive and unremarkable.” “Nice” is the positive thing we say about someone when we have nothing else to say about them, and no personality trait is less attractive than being unremarkable and unmemorable. This is true for both women and men.

Perhaps in this context, “nice” is just a euphemism for “basic.” The concept of “basic” comes from the slang terms “basic bitch” and “basic bro,” which are perhaps best described through YouTube videos on the subject. To us, “basic” can be taken as an adjective to describe someone who is “vanilla” or a “control group human.” If “basic” describes you, you may through sheer mediocrity be in a lower league than you otherwise would be had you developed a more distinct personality.

This explains why 40-year-old women have such high success rates with 20-year-old men. The type of 40-year-old old woman who uses dating websites to hit on 20-year-old men is very unlikely to be describable as “basic.” The fact that average people are major turn-offs also explains why the dark triad strategy has become so popular among some males. Most guys start attempting to get laid by trying to be as generic and inoffensive as possible, which ultimately negatively affects their attractiveness. Trying to be a narcissistic tool also happens to make one stand out, as it is rare for young men to exhibit dark triad traits openly in a social context (plus play-acting as though they have dark triad traits also likely helps men separate themselves from their contexts, thereby increasing their confidence and decreasing fear of rejection).

You do not have to be an irritating tool to secure partners. You only need to be extremely unusual within your market, and you should preferably embody a clear trope (or traits with trope potential). In other words, you would be well-served to embody an archetype that exists within people’s minds from movies or literature but that does not commonly exist within society. Exhibiting tropes does not involve peacocking. Peacocking is a tactic developed by the pick-up artist community that involves dressing and acting as ostentatiously as possible. While peacocking can work through the trope pathway (as being ostentatious and socially unaware fits many unusual tropes), there are many less douchey ways to attract partners using tropes.

Anecdotally, Malcolm had a relatively low success rate with women until he switched to being as nerdy as possible in an environment in which unashamed male nerds were rare. After making that change, his success rate shot through the roof, and interestingly, his extreme nerd act boosted his odds with preppy girls just as much as it improved his odds with nerdy girls.

Any persona you can adopt that is “safe” from criticism, and common within your local dating market is going to completely devastate your ability to secure a partner. Defining, creating, and becoming a genuinely unique personality is one of the easiest ways to dramatically raise your aggregate desirability.

Less Practical (But Immensely Fun) Tidbits on Attractiveness

There is fascinating and nuanced research describing everything from color preference differences by gender to the impact of facial symmetry on mate selection, matching partners’ movements, body language, and ovulatory cycle preferences. We are not going to cover this research. Why? As interesting as they are, these studies present red herrings from a relationship strategy standpoint.

Knowledge of these studies will not move the needle enough to make a difference in your life and may even distract you from focusing on more useful, practical tactics. You will learn infinitely more about dating strategy by seducing just five partners than you could learn from reading an entire book on arousal patterns—though if you simply cannot resist, check out this tomes sister book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality.

Having read this far, you will not be surprised that we cannot resist going through some studies and unique concepts that have practical implications. Below are some of our favorite informational tidbits, ranging from things that society gets wrong, to choices that are more nuanced than we pretend, and beauty tips that have been lost to history.

Prepare to feast yourself on a delicious array of findings related to attractiveness and:

Eye Dilation
The Tradeoff Between Attractiveness and Competence
Wealthy Male Preferences
The Difficult Male Market
Ethnicity
Stoicism
Intelligence Differentials
Smells
The Closing Time Effect
Heavy Breathing Sounds
Personality Traits Tied to Looks
The Pratfall Effect
The Kawaii Effect
Protean Signals
Friends and Groups
Metaphoric Language Use
Waist-to-Hip and Chest-To-Waist Ratios

Eye Dilation

We probably piqued your interest with “beauty tips lost to history,” so let us start there. This one bugs the hell out of us. Modern research has shown that when you look at someone you find attractive, your eyes dilate, and when you see someone’s eyes dilate while they are looking at you, you will find them more attractive. In ancient Rome, women used an Atropa Belladonna (literally translated, beautiful woman, because of its use but now more commonly known as deadly nightshade) extract to dilate their pupils in order to appear more attractive (and more intelligent too, as dilated pupils also conveniently increase judgments of intelligence). It is shocking to us that such an effective beauty trend would have died out just because it was derived from a mildly deadly plant (heck, we inject our faces with botulinum toxin in the name of beauty… what is so crazy about deadly nightshade?). Given her ophthalmic background, Simone would nevertheless like to point out that while there are safer methods to get the same effect these days—artificially dilating your eyes exposes them to sun damage. (So to be clear we are joking here, if any idiot kills themselves or goes blind by putting a plant in their eyes which literally has the word “deadly” in its name that’s not on us. People stopped using this plant because it can literally and actually kill you, don’t be an idiot.)

The Tradeoff Between Attractiveness and Competence

When we say that the choices we make around attractiveness are more nuanced than society lets on, this is especially true in women. While determining which style she should adopt in an effort to enjoy better professional success, Simone reviewed a number of studies looking at how people perceive women. Much to her dismay, she found that increased attractiveness, approachability, and likeability appears to correlate inversely with perceptions of intelligence and competence. For example, glasses and short hair are seen as less attractive, plus they make people seem less approachable, but they also correlate with higher perceptions of intelligence competence, whereas long hair has the opposite effect: Long hair makes people appear more attractive and approachable but also less competent and intelligent.

Wealthy Male Preferences

Gold diggers, we have a hot tip for you: What wealthy men find attractive is typically the inverse of the “bimbo social archetype” (large breasts, long nails, heavy makeup, revealing clothing, jewelry, long hair, heavy makeup, etc.). Studies have shown that the wealthier a man is, the more he finds small breasts attractive, while the poorer a man is, the more likely he is to find large breasts attractive. More specifically in our own survey data, poor men have a strong preference for large breasts, middle-class men have a small preference for large breasts, and wealthy men have a strong preference for small breasts. It appears to be that we have a system in our brains, influenced by our perceived security, that looks for wives with larger fat stores if times are lean. Why do we say that? Men also prefer larger breasts when they are hungry, and other studies show men prefer fatter women when they are stressed. All of this is in the aggregate of course—many individual wealthy men prefer large breasts.

Wealthy men also appear to have a strong preference for androgynous characteristics. While the financially insecure may be optimizing for the survivability of their partners (through fat stores), the financially secure may be optimizing for the number of kids they can still get out of their partners (youth), which is often signaled by androgyny. There may be more at play, however: A man who feels insecure about his position in the world may have a much stronger preference for a woman showing heavily gendered traits who would reinforce his position as the masculine breadwinner. A man craving masculine validation would find the “bimbo social archetype” very attractive indeed, whereas a man who feels more secure about his place in the world is more likely to look for traits in a female partner that are more commonly associated with strength, intelligence, and practicality.

Now that we think about it, every major male fashion trend that started among less financially secure communities that we can think of emphasizes masculinity (consider blue jeans, hip hop style, and gang-inspired styles), whereas most fashion trends that started among wealthier groups (aside from those that merely copied martial styles) emphasize more feminine/androgynous traits in men (think of the dandies of the Regency era or emo styles for something more modern).

Moreover, society features heavily ingrained tropes emphasizing that poorer men (e.g., construction workers) are more masculine while wealthier men (e.g., heirs) are more effeminate. Perhaps these patterns, along with the trends described above, are two pieces of a puzzle that we have not yet put together—the answer is on the tips of our tongues. It cannot be as simple as wealthy men just feeling more secure in their sexuality; there must be something bigger going on here. We would say it might be a downregulation of testosterone among men once their bodies decide they do not “need it” to secure mates, making the ideal of the social archetype of the ideal wealthy man less masculine, but we know that unemployment causes a lowering of testosterone, as does feeling like your position in society is lower, so the inverse is happening. What could it be???

The Difficult Male Market

While women may feel as though they are subjected to unreasonable standards of beauty, men are actually much more likely to be rated as unattractive. A whopping 80% of men are rated as having below-average attractiveness by women (contrast this with men who only see 50% of women as below-average attractiveness), this really sucks seeing as women will score men’s personalities as consummate with their looks (back when OkCupid had separate scoring metrics for looks and personality, it found that people almost always had the same score for each). Companies like DateHookup found similar results. This troublesome connection between perceived personality and attractiveness is caused by something called the halo effect, which affects perceptions of both men and women, but affects men more negatively, as women on average rate much higher on attractiveness than men do. Fortunately, studies make it clear all is not lost: Men can improve their attractiveness by maintaining good hygiene and building muscle.

Ethnicity

There’s no dancing around the fact that ethnicity/race significantly influences partner choice. We debated including this section because talking about racism is always a potential minefield but decided that ignoring it and pretending it has no effect dating is infinitely worse. (Note: While we took our data from a few sources for this section, most of it comes from an analysis of around a million OkCupid users in the USA from way back in 2009. So the data primarily is looking at who messages who on dating apps and how likely they were to write back when messaged.)

If you are a man, being anything other than white, Pacific Islander, or Native American significantly negatively affects how likely women are to respond to your online advances. In OkCupid’s dataset, women were far more racially motivated in their dating practices than men.

If you are a female, men will reply to your advances at about equal rates regardless of your ethnicity—unless you are a Black female, in which case they are less likely to by a fairly large margin. Even Black males were less likely to respond to a message from a Black female than a female of any other ethnicity—similarly, Black females were less likely to respond to Black males than they were to any other ethnicity (again, this is all according to these old OkCupid results so there may have been some selection bias in the data set).^[8] What makes this even more striking is that despite replying to them at lower rates, Black women found Black men more attractive than other ethnicities (according to an OkCupid rating of attractiveness from a similar time).

Some other interesting things to note:

An OkCupid study that looked at attractiveness ratings by ethnicity over time from 2009-2014 found that while people claimed to be less racially motivated in their choice of partner in 2014 than in 2009, as time went on their preferences did not show their behavior had changed. Apparently, people know that being racial motivated in dating is worse now. but haven’t decided to change their behavior.
Except in the case of Asian men and Asian women who both seem to see each other as much more attractive as time went on.
Men get way lower reply rates when contrasted with women. In fact, the most-replied-to male ethnicity, white men, got a lower response rate to their advances (29.2%) than the least-replied-to female ethnicity, Black women (34.3%).

Let’s be clear—there is no such thing as an “inherently hot” ethnicity. Instead, these preferences are a product of socialization and societal racism. How can we say that so confidently? Were certain ethnicities inherently more attractive, we would not expect only one ethnicity to prefer mates of other ethnicities. Even if only one ethnicity preferred mates of other ethnicities, it would just be way too much of a coincidence if this group also happened to face the most prejudice within our society. As to why Black Americans message other Black Americans back at lower rates: Large scale systematic racism in America and the effects it can have on internalized racism aligns with other famous studies, such as Dr. Kenneth Clark’s “doll experiment,” in which Black toddlers were found to preferentially chose white dolls to play with back in the 1940s. It is just sad to see this bias so alive and well within today’s dating markets. We suppose it is not a surprise to most Americans that prejudice is prevalent enough in our country to significantly influence dating preferences.

All that said, if socialization is the mechanism of action, we would be keen to know why women appear to be socialized differently than men in this instance. Why are women showing a racist predilection against all non-whites, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans, whereas men only show a strong racist predilection against Blacks? These preferences may be driven by the manner in which our culture associates the concept of masculinity or femininity with certain ethnicities. Alternatively these preferences could be tied to a trend we noticed in the studies we conducted for The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality. Female participants in our research reported consuming less erotic art featuring disadvantaged groups—specifically material featuring overweight individuals of the opposite gender (f2%, m21%), older individuals (f34%, m48%), or poor people of the opposite gender (f18%, m23%). Your first thought may be that women merely consume less diverse sexual material, but when romance novels and erotic fanfiction is included in the data set, such is not the case. We can only speculate on why this pattern exists (and is, confusingly, not observed in the consumption of interracial porn (f35%, m36%)).

Stoicism

Stoicism has become a popular philosophy among online groups tangential to the pick-up artist world, such as the Red Pill community. We find this ironic, as while research does show stoicism helps in securing long-term female partners, it also suggests that stoicism doesn’t help in obtaining sex.

Specifically, one study that had men signal stoicism by working despite being in poor health found that women find stoic partners more attractive, but only as potential long-term partners. Stoicism in this study did not appear to affect short-term attractiveness ratings.

Intelligence Differentials

Studies show that men prefer women who are less intelligent than they are. Some researchers have hypothesized that this is due to an assumption that such women would be more financially dependent on their partners (i.e., will be unemployed) and thus will have more time to raise a family and run a household.

We think it is much more likely that the team didn’t properly control for the wealth of its participants and that if it were to only look at wealthy men, interest in a relatively less intelligent female partner would be far weaker. According to the data we collected as research for The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, wealthy men do indeed prefer intelligent women. Preference for lower female intelligence could also reflect societal constructs that devalue relationships in which the female partner is “better” than the male partner.

Smells

While there are all sorts of interesting studies exploring smell and attraction, one of the most famous findings is that females prefer the smell of shirts worn by men with symmetrical faces (another trait tied to attractiveness) and the more fertile the women were at the time of the study, the more they preferred those shirts. This is one of those effects that is backed up by a cluster of research and healthy replication.

The Closing Time Effect

The Closing Time Effect refers to the phenomenon in which individuals begin to perceive the opposite gender as being more attractive as it gets later into the night. Further studies on this dynamic have nailed it down a bit more: The Closing Time Effect only works on pictures of the opposite gender. The effect does not appear among people in relationships, nor is it caused by alcohol. The effect is stronger in males and appears to make pictures of attractive people more attractive while making pictures of ugly people even less attractive. This effect means that if you are hot, your odds may improve later in the night, but if you are unattractive, your odds may decrease later in the night.

Heavy Breathing Sounds

If you put headphones on someone’s head that are playing heavy breathing sounds, they will (on average) rate individuals they are looking at to be more attractive. We are frankly not sure how to use heavy breathing sounds to boost perceived attractiveness outside of chatting someone up while they happen to be listening to audio with heavy breathing sounds, but what this finding might suggest is that relaxed, more focused states increase perceived attractiveness. It could be that heavy breathing sounds compelled research participants to focus on their own breaths and begin relaxing. (Now I am giggling imagining someone reading this book and walking up their crush breathing heavily while asking them out.)

Personality Traits Tied to Looks

Studies have shown certain personality traits to be associated with facial “looks” (a study participant can guess certain elements of a person’s personality at a rate above chance just by looking at pictures of their face). People find faces to be more attractive if they also find the personality set a stranger would associate with those faces to be more attractive. For example, if you are attracted to nerdy personalities, you will also be more attracted to those with nerdy-looking faces.

This might seem obvious, but it has pretty severe implications for people attempting to maximize their own attractiveness. Specifically, those born with facial features associated with a specific trope will be somewhat locked into “playing that trope,” assuming they want to maximize how hot others find them in aggregate (as opposed to appealing to a specific individual). We wonder if this could also be applied to makeup tutorials. People might be able to better target specific individuals by emphasizing facial features associated with personalities they like.

The Pratfall Effect

We love this one: The Pratfall Effect describes how people find high-value partners who make mistakes to be more attractive. If you are super clumsy but not otherwise high value and attractive, put back that bottle of champagne—this effect only works for people who are perceived to be otherwise attractive and competent.

For example, if a hot Stanford post-grad trips, your average person will find him/her more attractive, while if an attractive hobo trips, your average person will think less of him/her (observers also think less of people they rate as having middling value). In both cases, the effect is increased if someone berates them for their screw up (e.g., the observer will think even more of the Stanford post-grad and even less of the hobo if they see them trip and subsequently see them being berated).

This effect is much stronger in the way men perceive female attractiveness than in the way females perceive male attractiveness. This must contribute to the perpetual archetype of the clumsy female scientist sex interest. At any rate, this would be a great trope to play up when dating—if you can pull it off.

The Kawaii Effect

There is an emotional state for which no English word exists that is useful to understand in order to fully take advantage of the way our partners emotionally process time spent together. The closest English words we have for this emotional state are “squee” or “cute”—but each of these words is often used in other circumstances, making them not really useful here. The most accurate word describing it is “kawaii,” which is Japanese for lovable/cute/adorable.

When you have a strong emotional attachment to someone, things they do that are slightly unusual and quirky—but characteristic of them—create a very strong, short burst of positive emotional reaction. TV shows will often attempt to tap into this by granting a few token “quirks” to characters, like having them put their hands to their chin when saying something, sitting in a weird way, playing with scissors, or talking in an odd pattern.

The interesting thing about this emotional reaction is that it inverts when a relationship is going poorly or, in the case of media, if you do not find a character endearing. Things that elicit this squee reaction when you have a strong romantic attachment to someone will elicit an equally strong negative reaction that feels like annoyed disdain.

This effect is one of the core reasons why it is difficult to turn a negative relationship positive. Each day around someone you hate makes you hate them more. However, this dynamic also gives you an easy way to maximize the positive emotional state felt by people who like you.

Protean Signals

Proteans are subtle, subconscious flirting signals. A classic example would involve a woman touching her hair when first meeting a man. Before regarding these signals as surefire signs of interest, consider that one study observed that (in general) women tend to exhibit these behaviors when they first interact with a stranger, and that these signals only become indicative of true attraction after a prolonged period of interaction.

Still, if you really want to try to learn these and related nuanced signals of interest, such as behavior mirroring, go for it. We will only mention them as an area of potential further research for you, as we believe they are too subtle and not statistically relevant enough to be genuinely effective in seduction play.

Friends and Groups

This classic tactic is statistically proven to work: If you surround yourself with less attractive people, you will look more attractive. Another related effect, “the cheerleader effect,” causes people to see individuals as more attractive when part of a group.

Use of Metaphoric Language

Women find men more physically attractive after the men have paid a compliment, either to the female’s possessions or appearance, using metaphoric language (as opposed to literal language). In other words, it makes a man more attractive to say: “You have the elegance of a ballerina” but not: “You look elegant.”

The positive effect of metaphoric compliments appears to be stronger when the compliment is paid to a woman’s appearance as opposed to her possessions. Interestingly, compliments on appearance using novel metaphors were preferred by women in a relationship during the fertile phase, but by single women during the luteal phase (when a woman is infertile). In The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, we discuss how a woman’s ovulatory cycle affects her arousal patterns and what we might be able to learn about early human mating habits from this in detail.

Waist-to-Hip and Chest-To-Waist Ratios

A woman’s waist-to-hip ratio and a man’s chest-to-waist ratio, with a lower ratio being better in both cases, is a key determinant of attractiveness. You can, therefore, make a significant positive impact on your attractiveness by altering these ratios, either through clothing, weight loss, and/or strategic muscle development.

Notes from the Research:

Surprisingly, a few studies have shown that men value positivity in a woman’s attitude way more than you would expect. While niceness may not matter much, positivity certainly does—at least in women.
Research coming out of Michigan State University’s Close Relationships Lab suggests that similar personalities among relationship partners do not necessarily correlate with high relationship satisfaction. Instead, traits such as niceness, low anxiety, and introversion appear to have more influence on relationship satisfaction.

Motivating Yourself

he hardest part of securing a mate, be it for sex or a long-term relationship, is working up the motivation required to get out there and reach out to people when every single interaction you initiate bears a risk of rejection and thus to some extent invalidation of your self-worth. This invalidation of one’s self-worth is incredibly painful and yet an inevitable part of dating. There are a number of mechanisms that make putting yourself on various markets easier, which we will explore in-depth below.

Realistic Expectation Setting

One reason why rejection hurts people so much is that they have totally delusional expectations regarding how much dating is actually required to secure a high-value partner. We have met many women in their thirties who want to find a husband and complain about not finding a good partner—and yet they only go on one date every couple of weeks. This is akin to someone sending out one job application every couple of weeks and not understanding why they are still unemployed.

Even crazier, we have heard some claim that they tried active dating—dating in which they hunted for partners and initiated interactions, typically on online dating websites—but stopped because they had a few bad experiences and are now just waiting for someone to find them randomly. This is akin to giving up on a job search after a few bad interviews, concluding that the “right” / good boss will scout them randomly. Sure, such instances are possible, but we would hardly bet our entire futures on the initiative of a complete stranger who may or may not have means of discovering us.

Dating with the intention of finding a well-matched, healthy, long-term relationship is not naturally fun. This sort of dating is a job. Dating just enough to find the experience of dating itself pleasant is like being a professional author who only writes when they fancy writing—rather than to meet a deadline for publishing a book. Sure, dating—and writing—are sometimes loads of fun, but if you really plan to complete a complex project, be it finding the right partner for your entire life or finishing a book, you must come to terms with the fact that sometimes, you simply must push through.

If you are looking for a high-quality, long-term relationship, aim to go on at least four dates a week and expect the search to last for (at least) two years. Before meeting Simone, Malcolm went on five dates a week for three years. If that sounds difficult, improve your time management skills. Learn how to manage back-to-back dates. Carefully budget and schedule your time. Manage partners with a CRM system (we personally use Streak; it works with Gmail and offers a powerful free version that integrates directly into your inbox). We inhabit the 21st century and must play by its rules to win. If you want to find the best possible match in your geographic region, you must process people at scale with the assistance of technology.

Don’t expect to fish for a partner; hunt for one. If you must fish, do so with dynamite.

Speedy rejection of suboptimal candidates plays a critical role in helping you achieve the level of throughput necessary to find an optimal partner. Don’t waste a third date on a prospect that you know to not be marriage material if your goal is to find a husband or wife.

If you are a male looking for sex, expect a one-in-one-hundred payout when you are inexperienced (i.e., for every 100 targets contacted, you should expect rejection from 99). Once you become experienced, you can easily get this number down to one in four, which is about the success rate an inexperienced woman looking for sex should expect.

If you are a woman targeting women, note that your success rate will drop to nearer to that of a man targeting a woman with the same experience but till a bit better (25 failures for every one success). With time, this success rate will slowly ramp up, hopefully easing into one-in-four odds. (This often comes as a shock to women who try the poly scene if they are used to only dating men.)

If you cannot deal with the fact that regular sex with new (unpaid) partners will require thousands of rejections, work on your self-esteem before you burden the sex market with your emotional baggage.

Leveraging Point-Based Motivational Systems

Simone used two point-based systems while dating to make the disagreeable process somewhat more palatable. One point-based system leveraged competition with peers to motivate her to get out and date; the other helped her cull suboptimal candidates.

For the first, Simone created a scoreboard at her workplace in which she and other single-and-dating colleagues marked and tallied up points (won for various dating achievements such as a first date, a date lasting longer than four hours, a second date, etc.) and competed to get the highest score. While Simone rarely wanted to head out on a date, she did want to win, so in many cases that scoreboard made all the difference.

Point-based systems designed for dating motivation should be tailored to reward you for finding what you are looking for; however, they also need to reward you for the negative inevitabilities of dating. You should win points for rejection, particularly bad dates, and dumping someone just as much you should win points for scoring a second date with someone you really like. These systems will make the negative aspects of dating sting less and thus encourage you to expose yourself to rejection in ways you would never otherwise consider.

The points-based system Simone used to determine whether someone was or was not worth a second date involved five questions, each of which would be given a score of 1-10:

How excited were you to see this person?
How much did you enjoy any physical contact?
How much did you enjoy the conversation?
How much would you like to see them again?
How much do you think they would like to see you again?

Anyone scoring above 35 out of 50 is a viable candidate. Anyone scoring under 20 is a clear “next.” People who yield middling scores might be worth further investigation, but only with an extremely critical eye.

You may decide to use different criteria. The important thing is that you carefully, intentionally, and consciously evaluate each target and drop those that are clearly not worth your time. When you hesitate to pass over a sub-optimal match, perhaps not wanting to hurt someone and/or their feelings, keep in mind that by failing to reject someone in an act of cowardice, you are not only wasting your own very limited time but also wasting theirs.

Leveraging Social Reinforcement

If you still struggle to go out and meet people but know you need to, focus on social reinforcement strategies. You may, for example, agree to report your progress to a friend every week (or hire someone on Upwork to demand weekly reports). Tell this person your goals and promise to call them once a week to report in on your progress towards achieving them. Even though this person may be a total stranger, your promised action (combined with how stupid you would feel paying a stranger for nothing, should you decide to hire someone) will create enough cognitive dissonance to get even the most gigantic coward out on the market (we say this having been terrible dating cowards when we first started on our individual quests).

Getting Back On the Market

So you got dumped. So you are going through a divorce. So your partner died. You loved this person and they were a huge part of your identity. How long is it appropriate for you to stay off the market?

Most relationship advisors treat people going through these tough times with kid gloves, recommending time for grief and other emotional indulgences. Pragmatists acknowledge that emotions can present important signals that should be felt and acknowledged. Pragmatists also accept that emotions result from scars on our cognition left by evolutionary pressures that may not align with our goals. Emotions should never be in the driver’s seat of your mind. Using emotions to justify strategically poor actions is the height of narcissistic degeneracy. Keep our perspective and biases in mind while digesting our advice.

With that said, the best time to get back on the market is fairly obvious: You should stay off the market no longer than the minimum socially acceptable length of time within your societal context.

Gauge what your peers would accept as a respectable cooling off or mourning period (ignoring, of course, the one stick-in-the-mud who insists you should live in mourning forever) and mark the end of this period in your calendar. The day your mourning period ends is the day your new dating campaign should launch.

Plan your dating campaign in private while waiting for its official launch date. Prepare your dating profile content and photos if online dating will be part of your strategy (though do not bring it live). Should you turn to a matchmaking service for help, pour over reviews and pull a few anonymous quotes so that you can engage the service the moment it is appropriate. Get in shape. Focus on bringing yourself to a state of tip-top mental and physical health. Refresh your wardrobe. Binge on YouTube videos offering male or female grooming tips to see if your hygiene and preening habits need a refresh. Consider organizing a party or celebration on your campaign’s launch date to make things fun (if you are embarrassed, you don’t have to tell friends why you are celebrating).

If you have trouble moving past the loss of a partner, it is likely because you incorporated a relationship with them into your self-image. This is not something that will change on its own; you must actively change your self-image to release this person’s hold on you. Chapter three of The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life addresses this topic in detail. Do not waste your life consumed with negative emotions that lead to inaction—this is not what a dead partner would want for your life, assuming they were worthy of your devotion in the first place. Endlessly mourning a lost partner will only extend the negative emotions associated with the loss of this partner.

Breakups: A Guide

n ability to break up with suboptimal partners early plays a crucial role in the process of finding a good lifelong partner. While there are many societal conventions about the best way to break up with someone, these only matter in so far as they apply to any negative, stigma-related blowback you may get for breaking these social conventions (being villainized by breaking up with someone via text, for example).

Pragmatically speaking, there are only three factors to consider when selecting a breakup method:

How and for how long will the breakup affect your partner
How and for how long will the breakup affect you
Whether the method you are choosing will be so emotionally difficult to execute that it will significantly delay the breakup (even a cruel but easy method, like ghosting a partner, is better than staying in a bad relationship you know you plan to end because you cannot bear the emotional pain of breaking up through a conversation)

Your goal when choosing a breakup method should be to leverage knowledge of you and your partner to choose the method that minimizes suffering and maximizes the recovery speed of all partners involved.

High Taxation Breakup Methods

High-taxation breakup methods are best for those with a strong, healthy relationship, a partner they care about, and a high level of emotional self-control.

These methods include:

The Public Breakup
The “Let’s Stay Friends” Breakup
The Slow Ghost Breakup

In The Public Breakup, you take your partner to a public place because you fear they may freak out or try to forcibly extend the length of the conversation. Focus on public places tied to fairly short sitting times, so you won’t have to stay at for a long time to finish the breakup. For example, you may take your partner to a coffee shop where payment for drinks is made upfront instead of a restaurant that typically serves five-course meals. Also consider public places that evoke emotions likely to prevent your partner from fully engaging in the breakup as it is happening (such as a rollercoaster ride), which can take the emotional edge off things… or make the situation worse, depending on their personality.

The Let’s Stay Friends Breakup is the “best-case scenario” breakup and the default choice for anyone who is emotionally mature and cares about you. A good breakup—like a good firing—is one that the person should see coming from a mile away. A good breakup will not spring out of nowhere.

In this method, during normal hangout time (e.g., going grocery shopping, cooking dinner, etc.) you casually tell your partner that you do not think there is a future together, but that you like them as a person, and that you want to end the sexual aspect of your relationship, but are happy to help them secure their next partner. Yes, this might sound weird, but nothing does a better job of lowering the resentment of a breakup than quickly and successfully setting an ex up with someone new. Securing an immediate rebound for your exes has the side benefit of preventing them from obsessing over you.

If you are afraid that the person will not stay friends with you after the breakup (or vice versa) your fear may have a strong foundation. The reality is many people only take the time necessary to maintain the burden of friendship with someone because they get an externality from the interaction like sex or status. If you don’t stay friends without the externality added, you almost certainly would have made terrible long-term partners so it is odd that this fear could prevent a breakup.

The Slow Ghost Breakup is the best breakup method for partners with whom you are not particularly close to, but with whom you occasionally have sex. Such breakups involve slowly increasing the time between any rendezvous (maybe delay one for a couple weeks, then push the next back a couple weeks, and finally just call it off). The Slow Ghost Breakup method is nice because it allows you to dump a partner without their actually realizing what is happening or feeling like they are definitely being dumped until long after the dumping really happened, which significantly blunts the emotional impact (depending on the ex’s personality and level of obsession with you).

A slow ghost is totally different from ghosting someone. In a slow ghost, the target rarely is that close to you to begin with and becomes acclimated to only hearing from you maybe once a month before you cut off communication entirely. Ghosting involves quitting, cold turkey, someone you are seeing a few times a week—the emotional impact of the two is not remotely comparable.

Low-Taxation Breakup Methods

These breakup methods are best utilized in three scenarios:

You find yourself delaying the breakup because you lack the emotional maturity and willpower necessary to go through with it.
You expect your partner to become violent, but quickly calm down during the breakup (if you expect a partner to become violent and hunt you down after a breakup, consult a professional before doing ANYTHING).
You expect your partner to attempt to manipulate, coerce, or otherwise persuade you not to break up with them when you attempt to do so. While a partner who loves you might do this, one who cares about you never would.

A very common low-taxation method involves ghosting: Just blocking the other person and removing methods of contact, hoping they get the message. We generally advise against this method because it can be too vague—especially if your partner is a little obsessive (it can lead to their hunting in manners that are at best not fun and at worst extremely dangerous). Worse still, ghosting might lead an ex to think you are in danger or are having an emotional breakdown, which may lead them to rope in friends, family, or even the police to help. A ghosted ex would be completely justified in doing this. When someone you see on a regular basis just disappears or changes behavior patterns out of nowhere, the correct response is to try to help them. This method can be emotionally easy in the short run, but it typically causes more pain than the saved emotional weight of the breakup is worth.

Even more common among low-taxation breakup methods involves breaking up via text (or email, letter, voicemail, etc.). In this method, you deliver a clear, concise breakup to your partner in a way that does not require you to see the pain in their face or hear the hurt in their voice when they internalize the news. This method furthermore removes any serious risk of debate and is excellent if you feel like you would ultimately talk yourself out of a breakup if forced to do so through a live conversation.

Breakup Traps

There are a few things to avoid when breaking up:

Do not leave any doubt about whether or not you are actually breaking up with someone.
Do not say specifically why you are breaking up, especially if it is something a partner can leverage to turn your breakup into a negotiation (e.g., “you have not been nice to me lately,” can incite the response, “I am sorry; I have been stressed lately and will start being nice from now on.”) Such negotiations can turn you into the bad guy for not giving them the chance to fix their behavior after being alerted to it.
Never tell someone you are leaving them for someone else (unless you are breaking up with an emotionally mature partner with whom you want to stay friends). This may cause your ex-partner’s anger to be unfairly directed at your new partner.
If you genuinely plan to stay friends, set your next meeting as friends during the breakup. Should you fail to do so, it can be too emotionally taxing to set a time to meet up later, which creates tedious “it’s been so long, it would be weird now” situations.

If you are a woman and find breakups to be uniquely painful, take solace in this: Research has found that while women experience more short-term physical and emotional pain after a breakup, they tend to recover faster and more fully.

Sometimes breakups are not as clean as one would like; this is OK. One study found that 25% of participants had sex with recent exes. Counterintuitively, this ex sex did not seem to have any harmful psychological effects or increase distress about the breakup, even though you might assume that post-breakup coitus would make it difficult to get over the split.

Conclusion

ow that you have thoroughly perused our “mental library” on relationships, had some pre-existing ideas challenged, and maybe even become a little (or extremely) offended, it is time to wrap things up. The conclusion to this book will give you a peek into our lives with an emphasis on the things that people normally do not share and examples of how a unique relationship model can be crafted using two individuals’ personal ideologies. As such, it will also give you a peek into our larger ideological agenda.

A relationship is a living manifestation of its participants’ combined beliefs and ideologies. It is impossible to discuss a long-term relationship without discussing what the partners want from their lives and why. Opening up about this kind of stuff obviously puts us in quite a vulnerable position vis a vis our readers, but we think this is a helpful exercise and appreciate your getting this far.

We have what would be called a “Goal-Oriented Relationship.” This means everything about the way we structure our relationship is designed around hacking the human condition in pursuit of a shared goal: A fight against the loss of sentience.

Humans evolved to be able to communicate ideas with other humans, test them, and move forward with the best ideas, be they philosophical, scientific, religious, or about relationships. This ability lies at the very core of sentience. It is why our consciousness exists at all. Dogs feel sadness, joy, and love, but only humans (so far as we know today) can test one idea received from another individual against those they already hold and independently and internally decide which is best.

Though humans evolved this brilliant sentience, they have yet to evolve the necessary mental capacity to prevent simple thought viruses from quickly spreading throughout populations. These viruses have existed since the first cities were founded, but now, with our increased interconnection as a species, they have amassed virulence and volume they have capable of destroying a person’s very ability to consider competing thoughts, leaving the individual nothing but a ghoulish husk stumbling through life on autopilot.

The miasma of idealism and tribalism spreading through our species’ collective consciousness is suffocating sentience—smothering people’s ability to consider new ideas. The effects of this pall upon the human condition are evident to anyone who is willing to take an honest look at the world. We are not the only ones who can see this creeping fog snuffing out sentience; we just seem to be the only ones who see it and do not presume the solution to this threat involves their own team’s memetic set, an idea that only exacerbates the problem. They tell us:

“The cure for bigotry is political correctness.”

“The cure for liberalism is conservatism.”

“The cure for religious extremism is Rationalism.”

“The cure for social justice warriorism is the Red Pill.”

We have become a society that attempts to immunize itself against memetic viruses with even more virulent strains of other viruses. Like ants infected with the mind-controlling fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, a fungus that eats their brain while leading them to climb to a high leaf to spread the deadly spores as far as possible, once a human has lost the capacity for free thought—the capacity to entertain new ideas that conflict with what they already believe—the virus that has erased their sentience compels them to broadcast itself in any way possible, whether it be via YouTube, reddit, or in a university lecture hall.

When challenged, these viruses drive their hosts, chittering husks of wasted human potential, to mindlessly attack those expressing opposing views like a shrieking zombie. The internet gives these attacks the ability to sting. Should you dare to say something that challenges any of the world’s various mental zombie hordes, you may find yourself living through an uncannily-cinematic nightmare as one of the horde spots you, shrieks, and begins the chase, thereby rallying others nearby to create a deadly mob entirely focused on your destruction.

While there is no personal benefit to be gained from fighting back against the tide, there are vast fortunes to be won by giving in and allowing one’s free will to be swept up in exchange for the validation of a powerful tribe. If you think there is some intelligent cabal of global elite that lives free of this infection, you are dead wrong. From Stanford’s Graduate School of Business to the University of Cambridge’s historic halls, invite-only venture capital events in Silicon Valley, secret societies made famous by conspiracy theorists (that we contractually can’t mention by name), secret political fundraising parties, and almost every bastion of elite culture—liberal or conservative—we have seen nobody more constrained in their thought than those who have risen highest, perhaps because they are the biggest targets and experience the greatest pressure to conform. There is no backup plan that elites have for the world. There is no association of wealthy billionaires with machinations in place to set things right. Without concerted intervention from normal people, sentience will be snuffed from existence by tribalism.

In biology, viruses can be used as vectors. You can insert DNA you want to deliver to a patient into a virus so that the virus can rewrite the way the patient’s cells work. We believe The Pragmatist Framework is the “DNA fix,” as it were, that the human brain needs to maintain sentience in the face of the unfurling mental pestilence.

Given our shared ideological vision and deep concern about humanity losing sentience, you may now better understand our chosen relationship style as well as our motivation to write these books (to promote a framework for approaching ideas and challenges that is uncorrupted by tribalism).

All this is to say that relationships can be so much more than an accessory in your life that helps you secure various baubles, be they children, career advancement, happiness, personal validation, social status, company, sex, safety, or financial security. A relationship can enable you not only to achieve feats unfathomably out of reach to individuals but also to become so much more than yourself. By using relationships to step out of a personal identity and into that of a marriage, family, clan, dynasty, or diaspora, you can transcend space and time in ways that even immortals would envy.

We would also be happy to help you build your own goal-oriented relationship. Tell us what you want from life, as well as whether you want a monogamous or non-monogamous relationship, and we will connect you with any other readers who have a similar vision and lifestyle preference (assuming we know or have been similarly contacted by a good match—it’s doubtful, but we will give it a shot because you took the time to read this far).

If you want to make our day, please take the time to write an Amazon review. Reviews make it profoundly easier for us to share this book with a larger audience. New ideas are rare, and people open themselves to attack by sharing them, so novel ideas rarely spread without help. Please help us share fresh concepts and perspectives by—through your review—granting the social validation required to open more people’s minds.

Appendix

s most authors do, we ended up discarding about three out of every four chapters of this book’s unpublished manuscript. Some chapters and subchapters that ultimately made the cut are either relevant only to a sliver of the book’s audience or incredibly boring (but comprised of critical scaffolding behind Pragmatist relationship theory). This content was moved to the appendix and organized in the order in which it would have appeared in the book.

The first few appendices present “quick start guides” focused on specific goals or life stages (think of them as alternative intros to the book for targeted audiences that want specific questions answered). These are followed by appendices containing more detail on certain subjects addressed in the book’s main chapters.

How to “Get Laid” as a Young Adult

he strategies that help a 40-year-old man pick up partners in a bar are not going to work for a senior in high school, and yet most of the people writing books on “how to get laid” are writing about the strategies they use and developed as adults.

Many of those reading books on sexual strategy are engaging with the idea of dating and sex for the first time. The sexual strategies optimal for a virgin with little life experience (who is likely targeting fellow romantic and sexual novices) are totally divorced from the strategies that are appropriate for a grizzled pick-up artist.

This chapter is explicitly written for individuals who are:

Over the age of 17 but under the age of 25
Sexually inexperienced (having slept with under two people)
Primarily looking to have sex and/or dating with people like themselves

If you are over 25, have more sexual experience, or are targeting people much older than yourself for sex, this chapter will have zero relevance to you; turn instead to the chapter on Lures on page 23.

While dating and sex are fairly easy to obtain when you have the process down, not having perfected the process on your own in no way indicates a lack of intelligence. In fact, while studies show that intelligent people have higher libidos, studies also show they have sex at lower rates and start later in life (well, maybe, some studies have shown it is actually scholastic achievement and not intelligence that negatively correlated with time of first sexual encounter, but the two-track moderately well).

IMPORTANT: As this section is written specifically for younger individuals, we have a few upfront warnings:

Understand the age-of-consent laws in your state and all neighboring states. Depending on the state, these laws can be extremely counterintuitive. In some states, a couple may be dating and legally allowed to have sex one minute, but then after the stroke of midnight on one of their birthdays, sex between them legally becomes rape, only to become legal again a few months later when the second party’s legally relevant birthday comes around. Do not screw with these laws no matter how “in love” you are with someone. We understand that every opportunity to have sex when you are young feels like a once-in-a-lifetime thing, trust us when we say there will be plenty of other opportunities and the risk often is not worth the fleeting reward.
Check out the laws related to pornography in your state. In some states, you can legally have sex with your boyfriend at certain ages, but if he sends you a photo of himself naked, you can now be charged with child pornography, and he can be charged with the distribution of child pornography. At these ages, knowledge of the laws in your home state and states you have visited is almost as critical as a solid understanding of birth control and STI transmission.
People will tell you to avoid crazy partners. Don’t take this warning lightly. Even if you use protection with a woman who happens to be unstable and she takes your condom from the trash and uses it to get pregnant, you are still legally 100% responsible for that baby. In the same vein, getting an effective restraining order against a guy you thought was just a pity date can be very hard and take a long time.
Consent is a concept well worth understanding, but it is somewhat inherent to the strategy presented in this chapter (for obvious reasons). How you (and society, for that matter) define consent is irrelevant. What matters is how the law defines consent in your state, how your local college rules define consent, and most importantly, how your partner defines consent. Make sure you speak with any potential sexual partner about this concept. As a bonus, a philosophical discussion with someone about the topic of consent presents a great way to pick up on hints that they may be interested in you sexually—but more on that later.
Exercise basic sanity when it comes to dating. Don’t get in a strangers car, don’t go to an isolated place that someone else has chosen on a first date, don’t get intoxicated around people you do not know well, don’t let someone else mix your drink, don’t give someone any picture of you they could blackmail you with, etc.
If you are in this age range and thinking of trying to seduce a partner more than five years older than you . . . don’t. It doesn’t matter how relatively mature you are. If that person is responsible and mature, they will turn you down, which means you will only have a chance at success if that person is a danger to you. Dating older people at a young age filters out people who aren’t “crazy,” dangerous, or predatory.
We generally don’t discuss topics to which we have nothing unique to add; hence, we won’t be discussing things like safe sex, how to have sex as a virgin, how to have anal if you haven’t tried it, how to give a blow job, etc. Suffice to say this is one of those things in life where you can’t just “wing it” from what you have seen on TV or in porn. Google how-tos on the above topics if you plan to try them, definitely Google safe sex even if you don’t plan on having sex, and if you do end up having sex use a condom.
If you are a creep trying to use this section to pick up people in college or for other nefarious purposes, it won’t work. We would not publish any advice that we thought could be leveraged by older people looking to sexually engage younger or even underage individuals. The techniques discussed in this section are specifically designed for individuals who are both sexually inexperienced and still discovering who they are as a person—they will be clunky and ineffective for someone with significant life experience. They also focus on high throughput approaches, so they are way more likely to get you caught and publicly exposed.

It pains us to even remember dating in our younger years. Some of what we say about our youth could be used against us in the future. Worse, this section in general is quite sensitive as a topic, but having been there and done that without a guide, we feel the benefits of this information to others outweigh the costs associated with sharing it. A large portion of the population is going to start looking to experience sex starting around the age of 18. This is particularly true because our society ties so much of a young person’s self-worth to their ability to secure sexual partners (or at least the sexual interest of others). Allowing young adults to figure this stuff out on their own or copy techniques not appropriate for their age range is likely to lead to tragic results.

It really is crazy that we would risk our reputation by including such a potentially perilous chapter in our book, but slightly less crazy than the fact that good guides for this stuff don’t exist. We are not black and white people. We understand that putting this kind of information out in the world could lead an individual to try something sexual before they are ready. Even with that sobering fact in mind, the research is pretty clear: Pretending that people in late high school and college are not sexual beings leads to much higher rates of teen pregnancy, higher transmission of STDs, and lower psychological wellbeing.

It is all well and good to teach young guys they must respect consent, but teaching young men about consent without teaching them how to get what they want while still respecting consent will lead a portion of the population to disregard consent entirely. It is great to teach young women to demand their partners wear condoms, but should they not understand the market dynamics for men and women their age and lack crucial communication tools, many first-timers will cave when their boyfriends say they don’t like using them.

That’s one of the core tenets of Pragmatism: Accepting the world as it is. While the trend appears to decrease in lockstep with sexual education, between 40%-60% of people, have sex before they graduate high school (studies and countries yield varying results typically in that range). Failure to provide young men and women with a guide on this subject may lead some to reinvent the wheel in unpredictable ways out of desperation—or source seduction advice from sexually frustrated 30-year-old pick-up artists that really only works well for those picking up drunk chicks at bars.

What makes the sexual strategies appropriate for people at the start of their journey so different from those who are further along?

Someone in their mid-thirties attempting to seduce their preferred gender is largely playing a game of arousal. Their goal is to get someone aroused enough that this emotion overcomes their better judgment. This is categorically not the case when you are young. When both partners are still sexually inexperienced, getting someone to the point at which they are willing to sexually experiment is a game of inspiring vulnerability through the creation of a personal connection and an environment of safety and genuine trust. This is true regardless of gender or sexual orientation and explains why strategies developed by middle-aged people for middle-aged people, like those pushed by pick-up artist communities, are so clunky and dangerous for young adults to implement. Using pick-up artist strategies for sexual novices is akin to using a guide to playing soccer to a game of basketball merely because both games use balls and nets.

If you are at an age where you are just beginning to experiment with your own sexuality, many of your peers have not yet passed that threshold. Once you recognize this in an individual, they should be taken totally out of consideration without even the slightest hint of hesitation. Sexually engaging with someone who may not be ready is just not worth the risk.

This does not mean that next week the prospective partner who you wrote off because you thought they were not ready won’t make a terrible decision to move ahead with someone else before they are ready in an act of poor judgment (e.g., they were drunk and a popular classmate was hitting on them), but even if they do, that type of sexual experience is not the type with which you want to be associated. The not-quite-ready person will likely regret the experience. We can’t emphasize how much you won’t want to be a part of that terrible memory.

This caveat highlights another core deviation between sex as a youth and sex as an adult: Assuming a position in someone’s Hall of Regrettable Decisions after a drunken post-office-Christmas-party one-night stand is very different taking top billing in someone’s memories as their first sexual partner and having them regret it. That shit will haunt you for life. Many pick-up artist guides written by middle-aged men are like trail guides to a location that has since been sown with land mines that focus on all the types of pretty birds you will see on your hike If you actually care to navigate the region, first and foremost, you need a guide to how to not step on mines because those things will screw you up.

Because most seemingly eligible partners are not actually ready, securing sexual partners while young is also much more of a numbers game than it is in middle age. The game must be played far more conservatively because your hormones will be yelling at you to dash through any opening you think you might have. Just because a person doesn’t fight back, just because someone does not actively say stop, and just because you don’t “go all the way” doesn’t mean you are not raping another person. This is super hard to keep in mind when your hormones are at 130%. Sexually inexperienced people often suck at saying no and have a horrendous track record when it comes to speaking up the moment a boundary has been crossed. Any sexual strategy you implement needs to account for that.

Sexual strategies implemented while young should never feature a single target as a goal. There is no guide in the world that will teach you how to get the singer of your favorite band or that quirky girl who sits behind you in Spanish to sleep with you. Yes, there is always a possibility that things work out with that one person you have a crush on, but you are profoundly more likely to end up that creepy person who can’t pick up on the fact that this target has no interest in you.

While relationships at this age are fundamentally about finding people with whom you feel comfortable experimenting, keep in mind that it’s hard to open up to someone with weeping, popped blemishes on their face, bad smells, or overpowering perfumes emanating from their mouths/clothing/skin, or repugnant buildup on their teeth. Bathe daily. Go easy on the perfume (or skip it entirely, focusing on scent-free antiperspirants instead). Exercise daily. Practice good oral hygiene. Watch your weight. Wear clothes that fit you. (Despite what the ads tell you, perfumes and colognes statically do not help you get laid . . . well kind of. Studies show they do increase attractiveness of people wearing them both in person and in pictures, so it is not the smell that increases attractiveness but increased confidence.)

Should you have at least moderate social intelligence and cover your bases on the hygiene front, you will be in a strong strategic position, regardless of any extra hotness or popularity you may bring to the table. Should you still believe you are too objectionable for anyone to date, skip to: But Whatever I Do, Nothing Works on page 493.

Finally, we can dig into the details: You are young, you are inexperienced, and yet you are determined to have sex, and no one is going to talk you out of it. Where do you start? Step one toward becoming someone to whom others can open up involves honing your social skills and confidence in social situations to a sharp edge. You must learn to engage strangers in conversation effortlessly and without hesitation.

Engaging and Talking to People

The first ten people who turn you down won’t be turning you down for sex; they will be turning you down for a conversation because you either failed in your engagement strategy or at your “chat.” This is by far the hardest skill to master in the tree of skills that lead to sex. The easiest place to practice is through online engagement, but if you really want to push yourself, find a place with constantly cycling strangers and practice introducing yourself and engaging them in conversation (Malcolm used to do this on weekend trips to Boston, on the subway, or at a local mall).

DO NOT (we repeat: NOT) pick a familiar environment with a limited pool of people for practice (e.g., never do this with your classmates, co-workers, local hobby group, etc.).

Your goal in perfecting this skill is to get to a point at which you can walk up to a random stranger, engage them in conversation, and have that introduction and resulting conversation be smooth and compelling enough that 10% of the time this stranger is asking for your number (not the other way around). The goal is not to secure sex or a date, just to stay friends and continue chatting. Should you be practicing in an online context, try to get to 30%, as you won’t have the same drop off levels of people who sincerely have somewhere else to be.

This is emotionally hard to do. Talking to a stranger requires an enormous emotional hurdle. Learning to effortlessly clear that hurdle is the core purpose of this exercise. If you cannot clear that hurdle, remember: It is not really something you can’t do, it is something you won’t do—something you have chosen not to do because you don’t see the ultimate goal as being worth the pain. If you knew you would die in 30 minutes, if you didn’t engage someone, you would find a way to make it work. However, if someone gave you a choice between talking to a stranger and having a nail stuck through your hand, if you are anything like us, you would probably choose the nail. We get that it’s hard, whether you are willing to push through is up to you.

While sex is a good motivation to learn this skill when you are young and horny, there are far greater reasons to perfect your ability to walk up to a stranger and engage them in pleasant, interesting conversation that compels them to want to engage with you further. Perfecting this skill will make earning lots of money and advancing your career significantly easier when you grow up. The same skillset Malcolm developed to get laid at ages 18-19 was tapped to raise millions of dollars from ages 24 onward.

This is not a step that can be skipped or half completed. If you want to achieve your apparent goal (sex) or even just ever become an adult with whom people enjoy interacting, this is a step you will have to pass. Developing this skill is going to SUCK. You know how people say all you need is confidence? Ever wonder how people actually get that confidence? This is how. If you are starting with no foundation, perfecting this skill will easily take five hours of dedicated work a week for up to six months.

Escalating Conversations

Once and only once you are good at engaging strangers in conversation, experiment with transitioning to topics or activities that push past the boundaries of the conversation by broaching topics people don’t discuss with those they don’t know well. Don’t focus on anything sexual at first; your goal here is to learn how to get people to indulge in breaking social conventions with a like-minded compatriot. If you have been successful, targets will be excited to break social conventions in a safe environment around someone they like. If your conversational partner becomes at all uncomfortable, you have failed either at step one, at the transition between steps, or in your choice of social convention to break. Disengage and start again with someone new until you master this ability.

One way to easily break social conventions is by getting your target to talk about a topic that would get them ostracized from normal social groups (such as offensive views). Discussing taboo topics with someone inspires them to create a personal narrative in which they feel safe around you—otherwise, they wouldn’t expose themselves in such a way.

One skill that may take some time to master is judging what social conventions your partner is eager to break in conversations when contrasted with the social conventions you are eager to break. Discussing offensive topics with someone requires a good read of them (e.g., you can’t just engage a target on offensive views you hold; you have to engage them on socially offensive views they have hinted they hold).

Instead of focusing on taboo conversation topics (or in addition to discussing taboo ideas), you may explore taboo actions. For example, you may sneak into somewhere innocuous like school after hours, the woods at night, or an abandoned church, and have a picnic together. The effectiveness of this tactic can be increased by adding elements the target could subconsciously contextualize as romantic (like sneaking into your high school’s auditorium after hours and have a picnic in the center of the stage while setting up flickering LED lanterns around you—this also has the advantage of strongly signaling to them your ultimate intentions and gives them a choice to turn you down if they ultimately would have anyway).

Taboo actions bring with them a higher potential cost (potential injury, arrest, etc.). There is often a reason such sites are taboo, and you should expose neither your partner nor yourself to material risks. We merely mention this as an option for adolescents who already do stuff like this. (Again, we cringe so hard at decisions we made in our youth—but we have to expect you to think like we did when we were young and not like we do now.)

The method with by far the highest success rate is to coax your target into opening up about deep philosophical insecurities. Inspiring someone to talk about why they think they exist and their purpose in the world takes vulnerability and openness to a level no other method might (plus it is super safe). Despite the relative safety of deep philosophical insecurities over (1) socially offensive topics and (2) socially taboo acts, these are not things one talks about in polite society. The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life’s Step One can help you a lot with this kind of conversation.

While discussion of deep philosophical subjects presents by far the most effective of all tactics discussed, it requires more cognitive engagement and preparation. You will have to educate yourself enough to speak competently about cognitively engaging topics without leaning on fancy words or the names of famous thinkers. Should you approach this path, remember your objective is not to show how clever you are but to inspire your target to engage with their own philosophical views and think through them with you. Handle the philosophical views of your target in a non-judgmental but curious fashion that helps them recontextualize elements. Doing so reassures this person they can be comfortable being open with you.

In fact, let’s double click on that last point. When you start getting strangers to engage with you in conversation, you will subconsciously use the conversations to try to get the stranger to see you in certain ways—as smart, knowledgeable about things they don’t know about, deep, emotional, mysterious, popular in your local social circles, etc. Being able to pass the escalation stage requires quashing those instincts and instead focus on being a better canvas for your conversation partner to paint who they are—then taking that image and finding the parts of who they think they are that they are afraid to share with the world.

Flirting

Flirting comes after engaging and non-sexually escalating with a target, but before any actual sexual (or even somewhat sexy) engagement. While many books recommend looking for excuses to touch a person or brush up against them, we do not recommend this pathway—especially pre-college. Frankly, in the current cultural climate, physically touching an individual in a way that could be construed as sexual without explicit consent isn’t worth the risk. There are two strategies to work around this hazard, both of which can be implemented at any point after an individual clearly feels comfortable breaking social conventions with you.

Keep in mind that your first attempts at flirting have a near 100% chance of being socially awkward. This is why we so heavily advocate against honing these skills among your peers (rather than in totally separate social contexts, such as neighboring cities).

If you feel confident that a potential partner likes breaking social conventions with you but are not yet sure of their sexual interest, see if they are willing to wear something of yours. This could be anything from a cap to a jacket, glasses, or something you made (this strategy is more effective if whatever personal item they decide to wear is unique enough to be “iconic” to your image and easily recognizable by others as yours).

Do this through offering it to them with a statement like “you would look cute in this; try it on,” or “you look like you are getting cold” while you two are in private during a playful conversation you are clearly both enjoying (e.g., they are laughing a lot). If your target takes your personal item off immediately, it is a strong sign they are not interested. Do not push things forward. If the target leaves the personal item on, but then takes it off right before anyone who knows you both socially sees you, it is ok to move forward in being explicit about sexual topics, but do not expect a public relationship. Should your target leave your personal item on in the presence of others, it is a sign they might be interested in an eventual public relationship, as it could inadvertently signal to others that your target is already intimate with you. Your target’s choice to continue sporting your personal item around peers demonstrates how comfortable they are with having that message sent.

This strategy only works in college or high school, as those are the only times in your life where a potential dating pool and a wider acquaintance pool are going to have a huge overlap.

Anthropologically speaking, getting a sexual target to sport a personal item of yours would be classified as a mate-guarding tactic. Other classic mate-guarding tactics involve putting your arm around your partner, something we would not recommend until kissing is routine. Mate guarding behaviors are things most people do subconsciously or through cultural traditions like the exchange of wedding rings. Mate-guarding tactics are meant to signal to an individual’s social set that they are not on the market and highlight the person or people to whom they are attached. Such strategies are easily implementable by both men and women and a useful escalation technique because they can be turned down or accepted non-awkwardly (especially in comparison to a straight-up proposition) and are far less risky than skin-on-skin contact.

If you absolutely must move forward with a skin-on-skin contact escalation method, use a strategy that allows you to do so with consent. A method we used to see people leverage was to ask a target if they wanted a massage. This allowed them to ask for consent to touch a target in a plausibly non-sexual context—but to be honest, neither of us ever found a way to use this method effectively, so we can’t recommend it to others.

Another skin-on-skin escalation method that could be used—but which we do not recommend—involves finding a quiet, isolated moment to speak with the target, looking at the target, allowing a pregnant pause to develop in the conversation, putting out both hands, and asking if the target feels comfortable holding them. Should the target decline this hand-holding invitation, do not move forward. If they clasp your hands, just hold them for a moment while looking into your eyes, squeeze their hands. If the target squeezes your hands back every time you squeeze, you have a fair sign they would not object to a kiss on the mouth. Being turned down for asking to hold someone’s hand is less awkward than being turned down for a kiss. However, odd invitations to hold hands are SUPER socially awkward and not the path we would recommend—we only really mention this tactic as an alternative for those who are insistent on leveraging the non-consensual touch or kiss strategies common in older books that are way too dangerous to implement for modern adolescents.

Side note: In general, if you find yourself holding hands with someone through some other means and whenever you squeeze their hand, they squeeze back in the same pattern this is the universal sign for let’s get somewhere private and kiss. This was even true in countries Malcolm hitch hiked and did not speak the language, we have no idea why this is such a universal sign for “let’s make out,” but it appears to be. To test this, squeeze the persons hand and see if they squeeze back, if they do then squeeze their hand twice in a row and see if they give you a double squeeze back, typically this is followed either by a flirty look from them or intentionally looking away from you while starting a hand squeeze pattern of their own. If we had to guess why this works so consistently it is that somewhere deep in the “human code” hand squeeze pattern exchanging is subconsciously as intimate as making out but doesn’t carry the same social stigma.

We ultimately recommend skipping traditional verbal or tactile flirting entirely when you are interacting with people who have little experience with relationships. Flirting as a relationship escalation technique is really only appropriate for more experienced individuals, as it works in two ways.

In the middle-age dating market as a way of covertly saying: “Hey, I’m down; are you down?” which is a boorish engagement strategy when someone is still figuring out their sexuality.
The flirting arouses your target so much they sexually engage with you based on an in the moment arousal pattern. This is very likely to drive someone to engage with you against their own better judgment, which, as we have explained, is not a desired outcome when hooking up with other sexually inexperienced people.

Flirting can also be used just for the sake of flirting. Once you become more comfortable with the witty banter involved, flirting can be quite a fun little game. That said, we strongly recommend against this with less experienced individuals, as it can easily be misunderstood and lead to hurt feelings or worse.

Broaching the Topic of Sex or a Relationship

Only after you have gotten good enough to walk up to a stranger, engage them in light conversation, transition to deep conversation, and get them excited about breaking social boundaries with you, should you even begin to try to learn how to engage someone sexually.

If you make it to this point, well done: In addition to unlocking access to far more sex than the average person by mastering this process, you also gained a skillset that will make getting a six-figure job by your mid-twenties a realistic endeavor (and the less attractive you are, the more robust that skillset will be, so if you are not naturally attractive, lucky you). If this claim seems farfetched, consider the nature of this skillset, which features an ability to confidently walk up to a stranger, engage them in conversation they find stimulating, and inspire them to trust and want to engage more with you. This is the same skillset people use every time they raise money, bring in customers, hire employees, run for office, etc.

Make sure you actually reach this point before attempting to push forward. We cannot stress this enough: Do not rush getting to a stage with someone at which the subject of sex or a relationship is broached. Make sure you have totally perfected the other stages first. Up to this point, everything was training. You were playing with paintball guns. The moment you explicitly bring up something sexual with a target, you switch those paintballs for real bullets, entering the realm of stuff that can permanently destroy your life and reputation.

Your first goal in this exercise is to get your target comfortable talking about sex with you. Most people want to talk about their sexuality, but they have very few people in their lives with whom they can discuss it (The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality will be of high utility to you here). Every exercise up to this point is meant to teach you how to become a legitimately safe outlet for someone’s intimate thoughts and secrets. Don’t betray the trust your target has built in you. If a person is hesitant to discuss these topics with you but is OK breaking other social conventions with you, CONGRATULATIONS: You just made a friend. Don’t press further. There are only two reasons this may happen; both mean “stop:”

The target sees where this is leading and is not interested in you sexually
The target is not comfortable engaging their own sexuality yet

To put it simply: Your only goal at this stage is to determine whether your target is comfortable talking about their sexuality with you, nothing more.

Moving to The Idea of Sex

Note: It is possible and fairly easy to reach this stage without ever having kissed or touched each other in an arousing fashion.

Once you have been talking about sex with your target for a meaningful period of time, you may strategically drop, in a non-threatening way, that you would be open to trying one of the things they mentioned. This works especially well if the sexual act in question is something your target thinks no partner would be interested in trying with them—hence the utility of knowing what sexual taboos they secretly fantasize about.

Getting a person to feel comfortable opening up about scandalous, philosophical, and private topics creates intimacy and allows you to move to more explicitly sexual topics like: “What weird things have turned you on in the past?”

Suggestions like: “Well, would you be interested in trying X with me? I have fantasized about that too” become far less jarring once someone has spent time talking about other forbidden-feeling topics. Sexual propositions become even less intimidating if sent in written format after discussing other scandalous subjects, as without vocal intonation or body language to read, your target can easily reject you while pretending they thought you were kidding around. If someone “misreads” a proposal to escalate a relationship as a joke, they are turning you down in a socially nice way. When someone turns you down in this manner, don’t re-frame your proposal more explicitly, as doing so will create needless social discomfort. By pretending to misread your proposal, your partner is attempting to do you a favor and maintain a platonic friendship with you. Do not sabotage this kindness.

In addition to pretending to interpret a proposition as a joke, a target’s choice to breeze on with the conversation indicates they are not interested. There is no problem with a target not being interested. In fact, if your target reacts in these ways, they are showing you respect by not drawing attention to the rejection. If you handle your rejection with grace, you will come away from this conversation very likely to get a referral to someone else who might be interested. Your former-target-turned-friend wouldn’t have made it to this point if they didn’t consider you a friend—a friend with whom they feel safe talking about sex and a friend they can trust to push boundaries. Just never cross these boundaries.

Learning how to go through these steps online before practicing in person has many fringe benefits. Rejection stings much less online, but it still stings enough to help you acclimate to the feeling and not fear it. As an added benefit, you can run multiple online “dates” simultaneously. Practicing different conversation pathways with three or four people in different chat logs on the same night increases your learning rate by 300%-400%. As an added bonus, you can go back and review chat logs to see where you made a mistake with the perspective of hindsight, which will enable you to identify and learn more nuanced patterns.

If you accept that your first thirty or so attempts to “get good” are going to end in failure, it doesn’t matter if the pool from which you are sourcing is worldwide rather than regional. Practicing with a cute guy from a rural town in Germany is fine because you are probably going to fail early on anyway. The conversation pathway you develop that gets you to the point at which someone says: “If you ever come to Germany, I would love to have sex” is the same conversation pathway that will be effective for an individual who lives 30 minutes from you. The potential leads in your geographic area are limited, whereas those in other countries are practically unlimited, which is why we don’t discourage practicing in an online setting so long as you know better than to meet strangers online in person. (Just to be clear: Meeting in person with people you’ve met online is dangerous.)

Getting References

When you are young and still engaging with other people who are new to exploring their sexuality, you will have some sexual strategies open to you that cease to work as you age. One of the most dramatic of these involves “references.” It is fairly common for a group of close friends to recommend having sex with someone when said group is still exploring their sexuality together, but very rare post-college. This is why we so strongly recommend engagement strategies designed to deepen your relationship with other people without ever pushing over the line with them. This obviously does not work with everyone; it depends on the type of friends a person has and the individual’s openness and personality, but so long as you are able to maintain positive interactions with potential partners, both those who turn you down and those with whom you sleep may refer new potential partners to you.

This is one of those areas in which applying pick-up artist techniques developed by 30-year-olds to your early sex life can be disastrous. These techniques are often developed without any worry of burning leads if they do not end in sex. This is incredibly self-destructive advice to give to someone in late adolescence.

Pick-up artists aren’t providing bad advice with malicious intent; they simply have no way to know about techniques that are effective in late adolescence. People who have no trouble getting laid in late adolescence don’t grow up finding the thought of sex with hundreds of strangers terribly appealing and certainly don’t obsess on the topic enough to write books about it or skulk around on message boards. This is why you won’t see tactics specifically useful at these ages discussed within pick-up artist communities.

For boys looking for either female or male partners, maintaining positive friendships with a target is absolutely critical, as the easiest way to gain new sexual partners is through referrals from former targets and sexual partners who know that you respect boundaries and make for an engaging friend. It is not surprising that girls (and guys) of this age range looking to experiment sexually would recommend a clean, safe, discreet, respectful guy who is honest and outside their core social circles.

The same often works for girls: If you make it clear to a guy that you are clean, safe, discrete, respectful, and looking for other partners, most young guys will enthusiastically recommend you to their friends. The downside for females is that, while a guy will rarely care if a girl goes to brag to her friends that she slept with him, girls can be sensitive if a guy brags about sleeping with them (as guys within this age range love to do). Perceived promiscuity in women carries some inconvenient societal baggage that the majority of young women would prefer not to lug around.

Young women keen to avoid promiscuous reputations among their peers should focus on targets that are clearly independent of their normal social circles. It may be safer to source male sexual partners through geographically and socially distant female friends with similar sexual tastes than it would be to source male partners directly. Such female friends will likely be aware of discrete, trustworthy males and any discovery of your efforts to court them (these other women) as friends are less likely to get you labeled as promiscuous.

To be successful at securing referrals, you need to be more than just “inoffensive” in your interactions with others but actively exciting, unique, and engaging. These are all characteristics you can develop through practice, though it takes longer for some people to cultivate these features than others. People don’t recommend vanilla ice cream to their friends. Having a specific, unique personality makes a huge difference. See the fourth chapter of The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life for more guidance on developing a compelling public persona.

As to why this pathway closes off as one ages, there appear to be two factors at play:

Sex as a conversational subject loses its luster and sparkle as adults age, and the novelty wears off.
The types of friend groups that share this type of information with each other largely either dissolve or become stagnant and stop interacting with new people as everyone ages.

In sum, while the opportunity lasts, it pays to be extra to ensure every potential target with whom you interact—regardless of the ultimate outcome with that particular person—walks away from the interaction satisfied with and intrigued by you. If others feel they will look good by referring you to their friends, rest assured they shall do so.

Warnings

If you have horrible hygiene, dress like a slob, or have an ass-hat personality, a 0% success rate will stay 0% no matter how many people you engage. That said, we still recommend this strategy, as if you have a minimum baseline of social intelligence, you will eventually pick up on whatever it is that turns targets off. If you don’t feel you have that minimum baseline of social intelligence, we encourage you to flip to the chapter entitled: Whatever I Do, Nothing Works on page 493.

Working to build up a large number of sexual partners is hazardous, and not just for the obvious disease-and-baby-related reasons on which you have no doubt already been briefed.

Even if you are 100% well-intentioned toward and respectful with every individual with whom you are intimate, once your number of sexual partners gets near a hundred, even a 1% failure rate to read what a person wants (and yours will be much higher) means someone will be hurt by your sexual campaign.

Even if you never step on that particular land mine and, on the aggregate, generate more positive than negative emotions in others, the interactions that will take up most of your mental capacity for decades to come are the negative ones that you think you may have caused. Trust us: Ten years from now, you will not reflect on all the awesome sex you got by sleeping around indiscriminately, but rather on all the people you may have hurt—and the higher that number goes, the more it will eat at you.

The best way to protect yourself against this risk is to either minimize your sexual partner count, or, at the very least, avoid sexual partners who react to situations in unpredictable ways (the type who will sneak into your dorm after midnight wearing edible underwear then tell you they never consented to your eating it). If you cannot predict a person’s intentions and mental state, do not expose yourself to the risks associated with courting them, no matter how thirsty you are. Even a 0.1% chance that someone will perceive your interaction as non-consensual is not worth the risk. This is why you should immediately disengage yourself from anyone who seems mentally unstable and anyone who likes to play hard to get. Consent is extremely difficult to read in these groups, which is why you should never play hard to get yourself. Smart people will merely avoid those playing hard to get. There are other fish in the sea.

If you successfully execute on this advice, you will learn two things:

Sex is ultimately quite boring and routine. Sex with random people is certainly nothing to take pride in. Bragging about sex is like bragging about being able to read; the only people who do it are people who just learned to read (honestly, the same can be said for bragging about almost any category of success—people only brag about things they did not expect to get). Sometimes we feel like puberty is this magic curse placed on humans that can only be broken by realizing that neither sex nor attractiveness are really that important, but in the weaker-minded of our species (like ourselves) said realization can only happen when these two things stop being a challenge.
Constantly attempting to secure new partners and maintaining multiple relationships will teach you a lot about yourself and other people. Sadly, this information comes at a cost. Learning requires failing and failing in a relationship means accidentally hurting people. If you are in a large number of relationships in your youth, you will hurt people (no matter how well-intentioned you are), and that will haunt you.

But I Hate Being Rejected!

Learning how to respond to rejection with dignity is a critical skill that does not come naturally. To start, focus on learning how to not be apprehensive about being rejected by recontextualizing each rejection as a small win (bear in mind that each new rejection helps you develop a thicker skin and each rejection symbolizes one step closer to your ultimate goal). Learning how to successfully ask for something is a breeze once you learn how to not worry about rejection in the first place.

Next, learn how to be rejected with dignity, both in general and when asking someone out. Develop a classy response to rejection that does not make things awkward—one that gives up on the hope of future sexual interaction with the other party for at least a year and does not lead you to bear ill will towards the party that rejected you.

Focus on the wide and colorful number of ways you might be rejected. A rejection may manifest as anything from your target changing the subject to a somewhat flimsy excuse. Anything other than a “yes” is a rejection.

Securing a Long-Term Relationship

ven more than finding a consenting sex partner, the key to securing a solid long-term relationship (or spouse, should you want to make it legal) lies in your ability to generate a large pool of leads and process them at an industrial scale. In biology, one of the most common methods for finding an antigen (a molecule that fits perfectly into another structure and thus binds to it) is called high-throughput screening. Scientists using this method test hundreds of thousands of molecules against a structure to see which variations yield the strongest connection. The simplest reliable strategy for finding a long-term partner works through a similar process, thus the term—high-throughput screening—we have given this strategy.

While “brute forcing” your way to a good long-term partner by setting up an industrial-scale processing operation within your life may be seen by some as “unromantic” or inelegant, this is not an area of your life in which you can afford to take risks. Long-term partner selection (or failure to secure a long-term partner) will have a profound impact on your life.

Choosing a bad partner is one of the single worst decisions a human can make in their lifetime. Decades can be lost to toxic partners, a series of short-term relationships that never last, or a non-committal partner just using you as a placeholder.

A favorable life partner will do more to help you achieve your goals than wealth, fancy college degrees, popularity, etc. Goodness, if you don’t have money, one of the fastest ways to become wealthy even involves securing a (wealthy) long-term partner.

Our high-throughput screening method presents the tools and mindset needed to build your own unique processing operation meant to vet whatever characteristics you decide are important in a partner. This processing operation will enable you to quickly build relationships intimate enough to harvest the personal details required to vet an individual. While reading the entire guide will provide you with the information necessary to build a processing operation customized to your needs, we will provide two template strategies—one for males, one for females—demonstrating limited examples of how the book’s general principles might play out in action.

Male Template Strategy

Your first goal should be to go through as many leads as you can, as fast as you can, while obtaining enough information on the nuances of each target’s personality, background, and motivations so that you may determine whether or not they are a good candidate.

To find a high-quality long-term relationship, assuming a worst-case scenario, expect to be processing at least five targets a week for half a decade with short interludes of dating for a few months to test the viability of serious candidates. While it won’t take everyone this long, especially for more “vanilla” people who can easily find compatible partners, you should key a length of time about that long into your life plan and not expect to start looking for a wife or husband at 32 and be married by 35.

While five dates a week may sound like a lot, both of us hit that number. A dedicated search for a long-term partner will take up about as much of your time and emotional investment as a dedicated hobby and is not the same thing as casual dating. The key challenge faced by men leveraging a high-throughput strategy involves cost: Generally, people expect men to pay for all or part of a date, which means financial planning plays a crucial role in your process. The financial burden of high-throughput dating is lighter should you be looking for another guy as a partner or should you be the type of guy who wants a progressive partner, as insisting on going Dutch can weed out bad fits on the first date (if you want a progressive partner, insisting on going Dutch will scare away more conservative individuals before having to even waste a second date on them).

How can you counteract the financial hardship? Let’s outline a strategy that may be appropriate for a cash-strapped college student:

At the beginning of a week, buy finger foods and snacks in bulk (such as nice cheeses, crackers, nuts, and drinks) and divide them into kits that get broken into for each date. Utilize these purchased-in-bulk meals to put a picnic together on the day of each date; this will vastly cut down the costs of the dates and the preparation time needed. Then use the “taboo location for picnic” strategy. To implement this taboo location strategy at scale, scout a number of safe locations and thoroughly playtest access plans for each. It is critical to clean up well and be respectful when using a strategy like this in order to maintain access to said taboo locations. If you are uncomfortable utilizing taboo locations, you can look for other small taboos to break, such as taboo times (e.g., an early morning tea with a view of the ocean).

This taboo location strategy is primarily designed to get the target to build a “partners in crime” story about your relationship—something that most people want. This framing helps targets develop a personal narrative in which you two are well matched while also acclimating a target to pushing boundaries with you.

As an added benefit, by framing targets’ interactions with you as engagements in which they expect to push boundaries, you can quickly cull those who do not want to push boundaries and save time and money on a date never had. Nevertheless, keep in mind that such a strategy could also accidentally filter many perfectly sane women who are afraid of sexual assault. You can try to fish for such concerns and, should they be present, look for alternative free locations that are more crowded (like a beach, a park, or a bluff).

During dates, focus on getting the target comfortable enough in interaction to openly divulge the information that is of the most interest in vetting someone for a potential long-term relationship. This checklist might include:

Religious and philosophical beliefs
Desire for children (and optimal number of children)
Goals in life
Level of ambition
Career (versus stay-at-home parent) ambitions
Conversational skills
Sexual predilections

After each date, log this information into a makeshift customer-relationship management system (spreadsheets work fine), along with information on the general course of the date to ensure you do not mix up this targets’ details.

To ensure that individual relationships could be escalated through the traditional male gift-giving ritual so common in Western society without breaking the bank, look into buying large quantities of low-quality gemstones from wholesale industrial providers. Loose, poor-quality gemstones (even higher-prestige options, such as sapphires, rubies, and pearls) can easily be purchased in bulk for $25 each, but convey a much higher social value due to a general understanding about how much jewelry containing them usually costs (which is a significantly inflated price). The ritual in reference is the exchange of romantically themed gifts such as flowers, expensive chocolates, or jewelry as a sign the relationship had escalated (this is discussed further in the subchapter: Implied Contract Escalation on page 105).

Loose, low-quality, uncut gemstones come in handy with relationship escalation rituals not just because of their relative low cost when contrasted with their perceived value, but because they help the target build a narrative in which they would eventually use this early relationship gift in a marriage band. Giving these gemstones creates a scenario in which you can mine targets for nuanced information about how they expect a marriage to work far earlier in your relationship than would otherwise be realistically viable. (Just as going Dutch on meals can serve as a means to weed out more traditional women, the same can be done by leaving out the gift-giving ritual.)

The point of moving your relationship timeline forward as fast as you can and at scale is to more quickly cull bad candidates. While it may feel like rushing things, the only three aspects of a relationship you are accelerating are:

Time taken to extract information used to judge whether or not to marry someone (e.g., don’t delay talking about how many kids your target wants and find out quickly if they have emotional control problems)
Time taken to develop a level of comfort with the individual so that their “true underlying behavior patterns” reveal themselves
Time taken to cull an individual when it is clear they are not a good candidate for a long-term relationship.

Being able to quickly enter a relationship with someone, recognize they are not an optimal match, and move on to the next candidate, increases your odds of securing an optimal long-term relationship that ultimately benefits everyone.

It is easy to decide that this whole process can be dropped by asking more questions faster; however, this isn’t this case. Some key details will not be revealed (accurately, at least) without relationship escalation. Many individuals hide their true selves, and the manner in which they plan to behave after your relationship passes certain thresholds. Mere questions on a first or second date will not shed light on these details.

Malcolm has dated plenty of women who seemed totally normal until the relationship got serious. Had Malcolm allowed these relationships to take years to reach that point, he would have never met Simone. As clinical and cruel as our methods sound, methods that reduce time spent with poorly matched partners are more humane—both for you and your various long-term relationship candidates. Be a Pragmatist. Drop the social conventions and the narratives we want to tell ourselves and focus on the true purpose of a task, which, in this case, involves finding a long-term partner and eliminating distractions that obscure the path forward.

We don’t expect you to copy the template strategy provided, but we present it as an example of how you might think through the challenges of vetting long-term relationship candidates at scale—and affordably—yourself. Your goal is to quickly and inexpensively enter a relationship and rapidly escalate to a point at which you can determine whether someone is a bad long-term match. Identify the bottlenecks you will face in this process, be they monetary or temporal, and then invent creative “out of the box” solutions to circumvent or industrialize them. It is extremely unlikely that someone in the first fifty candidates you interview will be your best possible life partner.

Female Template Strategies

If you are a female targeting males, the above section was likely frustrating, as it was written from a male perspective. What can you do to quickly gather the necessary information on a male to vet them while simultaneously making them fall for you?

Women are in a worse position when it comes to securing long-term relationships because of a conundrum unique to their gender. Women will likely run into a large number of males who pretend they are looking for a long-term relationship when they are really looking for casual sex because average quality males have more value on the long-term relationship market than on the sex market. Simply put, an average guy can get a hotter female partner if he pretends to be looking for a long-term relationship and not just sex. Men don’t have to deal with this issue, as there just aren’t a lot of women who pretend to want a long-term relationship with a man in order to secure sex from him.

Not only must you learn quickly how to determine whether an individual is a viable long-term relationship target, but you need to determine if they want a long-term relationship at all!

A core advantage you have as a woman is that it is possible to execute high-throughput dating at restaurants without breaking the bank if you are ok with manipulating social norms to your advantage by getting most of your male targets to pay or by going Dutch. On the other hand, unlike a male strategy, if you take the picnic route and save money by bringing basket snacks and meals to scenic locations, you will need to select public rather than private (and taboo) places due to the risk of sexual assault. One affordable high-throughput strategy for women involves dates at a public park/wharf/beach with a thermos filled with alcohol (to add social boundary-breaking and loosen dates’ tongues) and a snack of the target’s choice (or something that signals something about you, like a portable multi-tiered afternoon tea setup).

Note from the Research:

If a male date does not call you back within 24 hours of your first date, one study suggests there is only a 12% chance he ever will. Nevertheless, this study didn’t look at texting patterns, so it may not be as relevant anymore.

To quickly vet candidates while developing a sense of intimacy, we suggest philosophical, religious, or life goal-related conversation topics. If you feel uneasy when engaging in these sorts of conversation topics, we strongly suggest our first book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, half of which is basically a guide to discussing and thinking about these topics in relatable vernacular.

While a topic like religion can quickly end a date and thus has a social stigma against it, it would only end a date that would have ended in a sub-optimal long-term relationship and successfully breaking said social stigma assists in building a sense of camaraderie. Remember that a “failed” date is often a win for you: A guy who thinks negatively about you because you wanted to discuss ethics or life plans instead of making out is likely a low-quality long-term relationship partner. Alas, philosophical topics alone will not fully filter out guys looking just for sex—they are more for determining whether they are a good match.

While the tactics described above are meant to bring you to a point at which you can harvest useful information from a target, they do not solve the problem of males who pretend they want long-term relationships when all they really want is sex—a problem that is exacerbated by the fact that someone who only wants sex has a motivation to lie about what they are looking for in a long-term relationship to mirror what they think you are looking for.

Thankfully, this problem lends itself to a solution. Specifically, someone who is primarily interested in sex will mirror exactly what they think you are looking for in a long-term relationship with their answers, while someone genuinely looking for a long-term relationship will be honest. Someone who clearly shares goals that deviate from your own—but that might still work with your life plans—is being honest.

It is also possible that a genuinely perfectly matched partner will mirror all of your goals and values, being so suspiciously perfect that you accidentally throw him out. Should you want to get a second opinion on a target’s seemingly too-good-to-be-true interests before tossing him aside, consider interviewing his friends and/or family, plus looking for other behavioral patterns that suggest his stated goals and values are genuine. If a target touts his financial conservatism and shares alleged desires to save up and buy a house: Check his spending (revealed through monthly rental costs of similar units in his apartment building, some back-of-the-napkin calculations of his daily food and beverage expenditures based on some days spent with him, etc.) and take a quick look at average salaries paid to the position he holds. If the math suggests he is barely living paycheck to paycheck, you can rest assured his supposed fiscal conservatism is anything but. A guy who is responsible with money will make an infinitely better long-term partner than a guy who irresponsibly treats you to nice things or who has a slightly better job.

You might also weed out those only looking for sex by gauging their interest in public relationship declaration. Being officially in a relationship—especially on a social media platform regularly used by your target—makes it extremely difficult for them to discreetly secure other partners without the other targets knowing they are with someone. Someone who only wants sex is therefore more likely to decline publicly announcing their relationship with you—at least in social contexts and on social media sites where their peers mix. The catch with this tactic is that it takes far longer to vet candidates if you use the public announcement strategy (it’s better to get to “no” well before one would even think of a public relationship).

Honestly, this predicament is grating to say the least because there are no realistically implementable, foolproof strategies for navigating it. Some women completely divorce sexual access from long-term relationship vetting, basically saying: “Look, I am going to have sex with you whether or not you are actually interested in a long-term relationship, so there is no reason to mislead me on that front,” but even this strategy would often not be effective, as guys who pretend to be looking for long-term relationships get so stuck in their ways that even when they no longer need to lie to secure sex, they still will.

The antithesis of this strategy, saying you will not have sex no matter what until marriage, is also uniquely ineffective. This is because there are many women who claim this but really seem to mean, “no sex unless I am horny on the third date or after.” Guys accustomed to sleeping around have heard this gambit a thousand times and have become trained to not believe it, whether or not the claimant is being genuine. This tactic is therefore useless at filtering these guys out, unless it is paired with enough sexless dates to convince them you are legit, and this would be too much of a time drain to be implemented at scale.

Honestly, your best bet is to parse out common stated philosophical beliefs or physical/behavioral tells indicating someone is dishonest about their long-term relationship plans. Such sleuthing pairs well with a dating conversation strategy that focuses on breaking social conventions with a target through deep philosophical conversations. Deep philosophical conversations also have the side benefit of confusing men who are implementing the above strategy and will often lead them to choke up and agree with all of your philosophical beliefs, thereby betraying their true intentions.

Securing a Husband

s we went about our research, we came across many studies that could be considered relevant to those specifically searching for a husband. This is great news, seeing as while men are relatively easy to secure for sex, they are in high demand in long-term relationship markets. Knowledge, on this front, is power.

Age Considerations in Husband Searches

Women in their twenties would be well served by targeting men aged 28-36 with steady jobs. Most men will not commit to a long-term relationship until they have been living and working independently for at least two years. A robust 80% of men with a high school education will not seriously consider marriage until the age of 23. Men with a college education expect to get married between the ages of 28 and 33, while those with a graduate education shift that age range to 30-36. After the age of 37—and again after age 43—the probability that a man will commit to a long-term relationship (if he isn’t already in one) drops dramatically.

As they must also compete with women in their twenties, women in their thirties are at a unique disadvantage when looking for husbands. They may benefit from diving into age ranges that 20-something women would not consider at such high rates—such as men 40 years old or more. Of men over the age of 40, the only group with a high likelihood of committing to a long-term relationship are those who are divorced or widowed as well as those who are more religious. Of men over 50 getting married, 88% marry divorced women. By this age, women are wizened enough to be systematically playing the market arbitrage game, looking for men who are low value in superficial traits and high value in those they specifically care about—if you can learn to play that game in your 20s you will be able to secure a vastly better long term partner for you.

Women targeting the over-40 crowd will be well served by being laid back and kind. While younger men statistically value the women they end up marrying based on virtue, talent, or accomplishments, 62% of men who got married over the age of 40 cited “niceness” (congeniality, agreeableness, a relaxed, and low-maintenance attitude) as the primary trait that attracted them.

Helpful Husband Hunting Tactics

Leverage Peer Pressure

A target may be uniquely good husband fodder if his friends and siblings are coupling up. Men with friends and siblings who are married are more likely to get married. More specifically, 60% of newly married men had a friend who married within the last year, and men without any married male friends were found by one study to be three times more likely to say they were not likely to marry.

Pop the Question

Do not be afraid to propose marriage. If your suggestion is initially rejected, be congenial and merely mention that it means a lot to you—you may enjoy favorable results. Of men who initially rejected the marriage proposals of their eventual wives (mostly by saying they hadn’t thought about it yet or that they were not ready), one third had forgotten the event happened and the two thirds that remembered mostly did not see the event as a big deal. Of men who rejected the idea of getting married in a conversation, a large portion nevertheless proposed within four months of saying they were not ready.

Consider Moving On After 22 Months And No Engagement

Most men who do propose will do so by the 18-month mark. After 22 months, the likelihood that a man will ever propose begins to diminish—and at 3.5 years, it begins to diminish rapidly. For couples who have been together for seven years without a proposal, the odds that one will ever occur are near zero. Given women’s short windows of arbitrage (the ages during which they have a strong advantage on the market, but are also in a life position in which getting married makes sense), it is not worth dating a guy for over two years if he doesn’t propose, assuming marriage is her goal.

Some cultures seem to have internalized this dynamic and applied interesting interventions. We have heard that in some traditional Chinese towns, a man can be fined for dating a woman for an extended time without proposing then leaving her as compensation for taking up some of this window.

Make Sacrifices

Given that women are typically at a disadvantage when seeking husbands, those who make more sacrifices in order to win often see better results. Consider making sacrifices with your location, job, and hobbies.

Women who do get married are three times more likely to participate in masculine activities in which they had no real interest and twice as likely to have made lifestyle sacrifices like changing jobs or moving to meet eligible men. Perhaps surprisingly to some, women do not often secure their partners by acting overly sexual: Only seven out of 2,000 men report their wife was in a sexy outfit when they first met.

Sex and Dating in a World with Social Distancing

s this book was being formatted for publication, COVID-19 snowballed into a global pandemic, causing worldwide lockdowns and presenting a fresh and fascinating challenge to the dating world: How should someone adapt high-throughput strategies to societies that restrict human interaction? The best approach depends on your objective.

I Want Sex and Dating

If you are looking for no-strings-attached sex with strangers, a world in which every social interaction involves heightened risk will be limiting—though not because social distancing impedes the seduction process. In fact, convincing a partner to have sex with you using the Sexual Exploration Lure through written interaction is both easier and more expedient than picking someone up at a bar or meeting someone through serendipitous social interaction. At one point, Malcolm A/B tested a number of different engagement strategies when looking for sex with high-quality partners; none came close to written interactions within instant messaging systems. No-strings-attached sex with new people is not difficult to secure in areas encouraging social distancing per se (outside of those that literally won’t allow you to leave your house).

Casual sex becomes difficult in such scenarios not because of social distancing, but because the potential consequences resulting from casual sex—be they death or long-term organ damage—filter out a portion of the population that might have otherwise been interested in one-night stands. When you filter people concerned with their own safety out of the sex market, the risk you take on when engaging with the remaining market explodes. Crazy partners can screw up your life. If you insist on no-strings-attached sex when all “responsible” people are bowing out, you are much more likely to end up with a whacked-out nutter butter.

Fortunately, our anecdotal experience indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic has not been a death knell to the sex lives of our friskier friends. In fact, many tight-knit poly communities seem to be adapting to the situation well—if a bit recklessly (too reckless for our risk tolerances).

The primary challenge faced by intimate social clusters that continue socializing during periods in which socializing bears risks is that the team is only as strong as the weakest link. If just one person in a polycule (a poly relationship network) decides to lower their guard and meet with additional people, everyone in the polycule hurts. Many poly networks we know were among the first to get COVID-19 during the pandemic. Some members of these networks were so hooked on social interaction that their idea of “self isolation” involved merely talking about being careful while nevertheless meeting and spending time in close quarters with three separate social groups in a given day. On the other hand, the few groups we know that cohabitate in isolation from members outside their group home have held up quite well. Should dangerous diseases become a part of daily life, cohabitating polycules with strict ground rules and that leverage technology to track their members may present the safest solution for individuals who have a predilection for romantic variation. (Though this would likely nullify the purpose of polyamorous relationships for many.)

I Want a Monogamous Long-Term Partner

We wish we had the luxury of dating and looking for marriage partners in an environment that required social distancing. A world unburdened by interpersonal interaction presents a transparently easier, less expensive, and more efficient dating and marriage market.

When flippantly meeting in person is an option, it becomes an expectation. Social norms demand in-person liaisons before most people become willing to open up and escalate relationships. However, when social norms can’t be met, they are bent. There are voluminous benefits from being able to date and get to know people without having to meet in person.

The ability to become acquainted through written exchanges early in a relationship minimizes time wasted before you can delve to “deep” topics—the types of topics most relevant to vetting someone as a long-term partner. Not only does communicating through typing give a person time to think through what they are about to say, but it also allows them to think in a fashion less encumbered by social signals and posturing. Anecdotally, both of us have found that people are more willing to talk about philosophically-engaging topics when they can do so in a written format—plus they’re more comfortable being explicit about sexual topics. Such increased openness makes it possible to more quickly establish compatibility with a partner when it comes to less vanilla aspects of your sexuality.

Bear in mind that written exchanges are the form most virtual dates take, so you can rest assured that socially-distanced courtship does not doom you to the endless, awkward Zoom meetings most people assume distance dating entails. Unlike awkward video calls, written correspondence can be utterly enthralling (there’s a reason why so many romances in the pre-internet era were sparked from love letters). If you have never had that feeling of becoming entranced in a written chat that had you glued to a screen, anticipating every response until you pass out from exhaustion at five in the morning, you are missing out.

We would go so far as to encourage partners in a long-term relationship to occasionally take vacations from interacting with each other physically and instead interact through instant messaging or long-form diary entries. You will be shocked how communicating through different mediums can unlock aspects of an individual’s personality that remain occluded when you limit yourself to verbal communication.

Another beneficial aspect of “forced distance” dating is that it seems to intensify and extend new relationship energy—that feeling of excitement and anticipation you get early in a relationship. This can explain why new relationship energy lasts much longer and feels more intense in long-distance relationships. We theorize that new relationship energy is a product of anticipation created by gaps in a person’s knowledge about their partner, which can feel more profound when you must operate without the convenience of in-person social cues.

Better still, not having to meet in person makes it easier to cultivate multiple relationships simultaneously, making it possible to dramatically increase your throughput of potential partners and find your optimal match more quickly. Dating through text communication creates forced pauses during which a partner has to think through what they are going to say next (assuming you are engaging in deep issues). These thoughtful pauses enable you to run multiple conversations concurrently, which in turn helps to weed out suboptimal matches as you will organically gravitate toward the most intellectually engaging exchanges. Any increase in potential partner throughput and suboptimal partner rejection decreases the length of time between now and the point at which you find that perfect match.

Finally, women are in a dramatically better position when looking for a long-term partner through a dating market that impedes the possibility of easy sex. The market dynamics of in-person dating enable men to secure higher-quality females by pretending to be interested in dating or a long-term relationship when they really only care about sex. Women are dramatically less likely to encounter these motivational impostors when dating in a world of social distancing.

How do I go about getting people to engage with me online?

While you can take the obvious route through dating websites and apps, these are not necessarily your best options. Back when Facebook let users send messages to anyone, Malcolm sourced many of his romantic partners through cold messages sent to people on Facebook. While such an approach would now require that a person of interest accepts you as a friend before you can contact them, meeting someone through Facebook is not dramatically harder than it used to be. The same can be said for sites like LinkedIn.

Meeting a new person online is no different from meeting a random person on a subway train or at a bar . . . except you know more about them than whatever their appearance and public behavior implies, so you can conduct far more thorough pre-date screening tests (deciding you can only meet someone online on dating websites is like deciding you can only meet potential partners in-person at speed dating events). As with in-person meetings, you can choose to be upfront with your intentions or ask your target to set up a call or chat time to talk about a topic of mutual interest (on a train, this might mention a book you saw someone reading, whereas on LinkedIn you might strike up an exchange about a target’s listed areas of interest).

How do you reach out to random people online without looking like a creep? Learning how to contact people online out of the blue requires practice and failure—more failure than you would endure were you to engage people through more familiar avenues. That said, once you become skilled at chatting folks up online, your success rate will be as high or higher than it is with in-person dating. Remember how awkward it was to ask people out in your teens? Well, buckle up, bucko, because you are going to have to go through that all over again—that is, if you haven’t already taken time to learn how to meet random people online earlier in your life. On a positive note, it won’t be as bad this time around because the sting of rejection hurts much less in written form and you will develop a thick skin more quickly given your ability to amass online rejections at an astoundingly higher rate.

When dating must be exclusively virtual in its early stages, more care will need to be made to prevent the relationship from escalating without having an extremely clear idea of what the person looks like, plus confidence that they are who they say they are. Most people who catfish others online do not consciously intend to mislead their victims. We all want to post pictures that paint us in the best light possible, however doing so on aggregate can obscure deal breakers from potential partners’ view. Let’s say a person has really messed up teeth. They likely are not going to not smile in pictures, leading their dates to be in for quite the surprise the first time they lean in for an in-person kiss. This kind of unintentional catfishing is something we all do to some extent.

While it helps to have access to a profile on a social network like Facebook, on which a potential partner has lots of friends (who will tag this potential partner in likely-less-flattering photos that they’ve chosen to post), the only real way to ensure everyone has an accurate view of each other is to escalate communication to video calls as soon as sexual innuendo or mentions of dating arise (though even this isn’t foolproof and can obscure common deal breakers—like a person perpetually smelling of cigarettes). No matter how into a person you are, if they avoid video calls, it is probably in your best interest to break things off immediately—the probability in such cases that a potential partner is being honest with you in this age of technology is so low as to be negligible.

Even in the scenario we are proposing, in which a global pandemic makes in-person interactions dangerous, relationships kindled online won’t stay virtual forever. Even in worlds locked down due to viral spread, there is room for safe, long-term, in-person relationships with people you trust. In such a world, it makes sense to move in together when dating gets serious. In many ways, kicking off serious dating with close cohabitation and forced isolation presents an optimal means by which you can quickly determine whether or not someone would be a good fit for a long-term relationship. Such a scenario would certainly get you to “no” faster than biweekly in-person meals at a restaurant.

Being obligated to develop new approaches to life in the face of changing world conditions should be exhilarating. The type of person who can see a changing world as an opportunity to discover and develop even more efficient strategies will consistently outperform those who classify turbulent world conditions as an excuse to indulge in procrastination.

But Whatever I Do, Nothing Works!

f you find yourself thinking: “But whatever I do, no one wants me,” the problem is you.

If you find yourself thinking: “But everyone I date treats me poorly,” the problem is you.

If you find yourself thinking: “I am so ugly and pathetic, no one will ever want me,” then get a dog and for the love of all things wholesome, take good care of it.

If what you want is the validation that comes from being loved and wanted, then a dog will give that to you—you don’t need a human for that. Wasting another human life on something as trivial as feeding your desire to feel needed, appreciated, and loved is narcissistic in the extreme.

There are two general categories of people who just can’t seem to catch a break: People who have no chance because of factors outside their control, and people who have no chance because they are unwilling to alter who they are, however flawed and suboptimal they may be. We will address each category in turn.

People Who Just Don’t Have a Chance

We live in a world that has somehow managed to delude itself into the belief that everyone can get what they want from a relationship if they just implement the correct strategy. We accept this pleasant fantasy because we desperately want to believe in the potential for an equal society.

Humans are not born equal. Life is not like a video game in which, because you have only one point in attractiveness, your avatar has more points to spend in intelligence. Instead: looks, intelligence, height, motivation, and wealth are all highly correlated (we mean this scientifically and not subjectively—statistically speaking, hot and tall people are more intelligent and wealthier). This sucks, but it’s a statistical reality.

No matter how ugly and poor a person is, they can still get whatever they want from a relationship so long as they are smart and motivated. That said, not all people are smart and motivated. Any relationship guide claiming to be able to help unmotivated, intellectually challenged people is telling a cruel lie and doing these people an honest disservice.

Some children are born to great disadvantages. Some kids starve to death before their fifth birthday. This book isn’t going to change this reality, but at least it can avoid making the world worse by not acknowledging it. Telling people that everyone is guaranteed a satisfying relationship so long as they follow a few simple steps is as willfully ignorant as telling people that anyone can become a billionaire should they merely work hard enough. The world isn’t fair, and pretending it is only makes things worse for those who struggle the most.

If you are that guy who has sent thirty unprompted dick pics and has gotten thirty immediate rejections yet still holds out hope that dick pics are a viable sexual strategy or if you are that gal who thinks that if you just stand in the corner at enough bars for long enough, eventually your future spouse will sweep you off your feet: You simply lack the social intelligence required to engineer a successful relationship or a productive sexual strategy. All we can say is we are sorry, and the world isn’t fair.

Note from the Research:

Before making the above assertion that those who send dick pics are idiots, we researched dick pic sending behavior to see if perhaps those who chronically send unsolicited pictures of their penises aren’t idiots, but rather exhibitionists. It appears that a portion of men sending unsolicited dick pics actually expect their action to be part of a successful strategy because of a severely underdeveloped theory of mind and inability to take the perspective of those receiving these unsolicited photos. Specifically, these men are trying to mirror the manner in which they most want to be approached by a woman. These men would love for women to send unsolicited genital pics to them, and like a cat bringing a dead mouse to the foot of a human’s bed as a gift, feel confused when the gift’s recipient appears horrified. The hilarious irony here is that dick pic senders see the world through a lens or true gender equality—they genuinely believe that women will want to be treated and think the exact way they do.

People Who Fail Because of Who They Are

A tragically large number of individuals are unwilling to accept that their failure to secure sex, a long-term partner, or a happy relationship results from a personal character that they can—but are apparently unwilling to—change.

Every human has the potential to deserve love and happiness. But have you ever heard the phrase: “You get what you deserve”? Some people expect more love and happiness than their efforts, self-reflection, and self-control can earn.

Being the source of your own problems doesn’t necessarily indicate you are mean or ill-intentioned. We know nice people who repeatedly end up in horrible relationships, and all we can say is: “Well, it sucks, but we get why it keeps happening to that person.” If this statement shocks you, make more friends. You will eventually meet that person who, while being perfectly innocent, sees all their relationships end or turn toxic for reasons that would be obvious to them were they capable of self-reflection.

The good news is that personal failings can be fixed. If you want help on that front, read our first book: The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life. We will even give you a free digital copy if you send a short description of your last relationship to [email protected]. The bad news is that taking the steps outlined in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life requires sustained effort and motivation, which will be thoroughly unpleasant, assuming you are the kind of person who does not enjoy making themselves better.

Defining Human Relationships

henever we first tackle a topic, we do our best to define it. Here is our best crack at delineating what exactly a relationship is:

A relationship forms when participants believe that through collaboration they can differentially benefit from a partnership.

Let’s break that down:

Collaboration: This can have a wide range of definitions, both sexual and non-sexual. Two people who non-sexually cohabitate to raise a child are, by our definition, in a relationship—as are two people who mutually decide to have a one-night stand and never see each other again. While our use of the word collaboration means that bosses and employees, as well as friends, are also in relationships, this book will focus on relationships that include some form of sexual engagement, cohabitation, or a shared public identity.
Participants: Anyone involved in a relationship is a participant, and there can be one, two, three, or more participants in a relationship. A participant may also be one individual in a relationship with a group, such as a man who is dating a married couple.
Benefit: We define “benefit” as the maximization of an individual’s objective function (the thing or things they have chosen to attempt to maximize in their lives). An objective function may revolve around anything from personal pleasure to the pursuit of fame, the service of God, or the wellbeing of one’s children. Individuals who do not have an objective function typically aim to optimize whatever gives instant pleasure or reinforces a self-identity they have developed over time (such as that of being a good, loving husband, a ruthless alpha male boss, a shrewd mom who would do anything for her kids, etc.). For a more detailed explanation of objective functions or how human autopilot works, consult our first book: The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life.
Believe: We include this word because beliefs are not always correct. One of the most common strategies implemented to secure a sexual partner (and sometimes even a spouse) is to attempt to manipulate a target’s worldview to reflect an inaccurate reality, causing them to overvalue the relationship.
Differentially: This means that the participants believe they benefit more from the partnership than they would benefit from other mutually exclusive partnerships available to them (multiplied by their perceived ability to successfully enter said alternate partnerships). This can become quite complicated when the differential benefit comes from a negative modifier. For example, someone in a holistically negative, abusive relationship may fear their partner will kill them if they leave the relationship, which may lead them to conclude that they believe they differentially benefit from staying with the abusive partner (by not being murdered). We expand upon this concept in detail in this book’s chapter on abuse.
Partnership: Partnership typically exists as some form of social contract (either implied or explicit) that is occasionally verbally confirmed. We strongly recommend making the contracts that govern the terms of your relationship as explicit as possible, or you may end up with, “I didn’t know that being your boyfriend meant I couldn’t kiss other girls” situations. We explore this concept in the book’s chapter on relationship contracts.

More simply put, we are all looking for the same things from a relationship: A mutually beneficial partnership with one or more people. (Well, most of us are—we suppose sociopaths don’t care if a partnership is mutually beneficial.)

Factors Affecting Desirability

he factors that raise a person’s desirability (both aggregate and individual) can vary dramatically and are worth investigating. In this investigation, we will focus on factors that can contribute to both individual desirability and aggregate desirability, as well as how such factors can be exploited to your advantage within the marketplace.

Gold has value because the market values gold. Whether or not you individually value gold, and whether or not gold has any inherent moral, functional, or philosophical value, is irrelevant. If the price of gold is higher in Syria, this does not mean Syrians are gold-mad fiends, or all Syrians want gold; it is merely a market fact: The price of gold is higher in Syria. Such facts are worth discussing because they reveal arbitrage opportunities that can be exploited.

Our statements like: “Additional wealth increases a male’s aggregate desirability more than a female’s aggregate desirability” are therefore devoid of moral judgments or any other implications aside from what the statistics show. Please keep this in mind when reviewing seemingly harsh statements.

A quick refresher:

Aggregate desirability: A person’s aggregate value on a specific marketplace (e.g., The average price of a fish at a marketplace)
Individual desirability: A person’s value to a specific other person (e.g., How much you, personally, would be willing to pay for a fish)

Physical Attractiveness

While some basic physical features indicating genetic fitness—such as facial symmetry—are universally seen as attractive, there is a wide array of deviations in which physical features are considered attractive between markets. Physical attractiveness, therefore, presents an excellent opportunity to identify and exploit arbitrage opportunities.

Suppose you are deathly pale. This would vastly decrease your aggregate physical attractiveness among a Jersey Shore subculture, but vastly increase it among a goth subculture. Thinking about aggregate desirability in this specific context makes it clear that it is often worth thinking about the tools you have at your disposal and what subcultures value those tools most. Goth aggregate desirability rank is going to be different than Western societal aggregate desirability rank even though Western society contains the goth subgroup.

In general, when we use the word aggregate desirability without a modifier, the modifier we are implying is western society, as that is the population to which most adults turn when attempting to calculate their own aggregate value for the purposes of making decisions about who is “in their league” (e.g., when trying to decide if they could do better than their current partner) and thus the rating that influences relationship stability the most.

If you have a physical trait that has little positive or negative effect on your aggregate desirability, but that is a specific, strong turn on for a small portion of the population—lots of freckles or heterochromia (having eyes of two different colors)—you can exploit this. If you secure a partner that has an attraction to this trait, it will be easier to ensure your individual desirability to that partner stays higher than your aggregate desirability.

Should you have some feature that significantly negatively impacts your aggregate desirability on a societal level, but that a few small communities find to be very attractive, you can get a leg up by targeting those communities. There are, for example, people who find severe obesity or being quadriplegic very attractive. Playing specifically into these communities can allow you access to partners of a quality that would be extremely difficult for you to find on the open market.

This tactic has two downsides:

It can be very difficult to sexualize something of which you have been conditioned to be ashamed. Life will be hard if your life partner adores one of your top points of shame. To reduce that discomfort, consider re-framing your ideal self-image in a manner that embraces that feature, which you once saw as a flaw.
These communities don’t filter out “creeps” as aggressively as other social groups, leading to a feeling that they attract creeps even though that isn’t really the case. It is not that creepy individuals have these proclivities more often, but that creeps are more likely to be open about their interests. People rarely voluntarily make a sexual kink community their primary social circle; thus, those that do are more likely than average to have been expelled from most other communities.

Kink Preference

Typically an individual’s kink preference only affects individual desirability because it is not broadcasted publicly. A masochist would have a higher individual desirability to a sadist, but a sadist would typically not know someone is a masochist because that isn’t the type of thing people signal publicly.

Kink preferences can affect aggregate desirability in some scenarios. A woman who likes anal or a man who loves cunnilingus may have higher aggregate desirability in some markets. The tricky thing is signaling this to the market in a way that doesn’t cause more harm than good to aggregate desirability. Kink preference, therefore, really only comes into play in the poly dating scene and within specific kink subcultures where sharing this kind of information is more normalized.

Contractual Perks or Downsides

A person may be able to raise their individual desirability with a prospective or current partner through the terms in their relationship contract (the “rules” of their relationship). Rather than written documents, these contracts are typically just a set of expectations as to the “rules” of the relationship and are talked about in detail in this book’s chapter on relationship contracts.

For example, a woman might increase her individual desirability in the eyes of a man by creating a relationship contract in which he is not out of bounds when sleeping with other women. A man might increase his desirability by creating a contract in which there is an expectation that he does all the chores. The ability to alter your relationship contract to increase your value to your partner should not be underestimated as a tool to increase relationship stability even if society rarely flags it as an option.

In rare instances in which a subculture publicly broadcasts expected relationship contract terms, one’s acceptable terms can have an impact on aggregate desirability. For example, a polyamorous couple looking for a unicorn (a single, bisexual female willing to be in a relationship in which she has lower status than the primary female) has a legendarily high aggregate desirability within polyamorous communities, as few people are interested in being that kind of third wheel and unicorns can become therefore they are in short supply. Of course, this opens the doors to significant arbitrage if you either enjoy or don’t mind the dynamics of a “unicorn” contract allowing you to secure partners well “out of your league.”

Personality + Trope

Some people have a unique predilection for certain personality types. If your partner likes your personality type, you will enjoy higher individual desirability and thus a more stable relationship.

Personality, as expressed within cultural tropes, also affects aggregate desirability. Tropes are personality archetypes we have in our collective social consciousness—a cultural shorthand for a group of personality traits. A great arbitrage play is to embody a trope that has little real-world representation but for whom a fair number of individuals harbor a strong sexual preference. When Malcolm first started dating, he attempted to embody the “preppy” trope of what girls generically considered hot—something that all the other guys were doing. Then he switched to the nerd archetype, and his difficulty in securing partners dropped dramatically. This was due to the large portion of girls finding the nerd archetype “hot” and few physically attractive guys embodying it (at least back then—this has changed dramatically in the past decade).

Mental Attributes

Mental attributes can range from innate intelligence to mental stability or a sense of humor. Preferences for different mental attributes vary across subcultures, allowing opportunities for arbitrage. Interestingly, some subcultures appear to value low intelligence in females that, because it can be easily faked by an intelligent female, leads to interesting market dynamics.

Emotional, Hormonal, and Instinctual Factors

A person’s individual desirability is often modulated by the emotional and hormonal processes they trigger in other people, intentionally or otherwise. These processes range from “love at first sight” (which is not the same emotion as love, studies show it’s closer to lust contextualized differently) to new relationship energy (NRE) and HLA (HLA is human leukocyte antigen, which has been shown to have some effect on who people find attractive, though the research on HLA does not support the massive effect some people want to pretend it has).

These factors are most relevant right at the start of a relationship and are experienced as “new relationship energy” / limerence. In longer-term relationships, these factors are experienced as love. Either way, they almost always increase your individual desirability to a specific partner with whom you have interacted physically.

Availability

An individual’s availability and willingness to emotionally and sexually engage with a partner affects both individual and aggregate desirability, but not always in ways that you would expect.

On an individual level, you can increase your desirability by making an effort to actively engage with a prospective partner on an intellectual, emotional, physical, or/and sexual level. While doing this watch for and react to “bids for attention,” be they overt (like asking to go on a walk) or covert (like silently pouting). However, having a highly available partner is not every individual’s preference—thus, you should attempt to determine an individual’s preferred relationship style before increasing your desirability in this way.

Unexpectedly decreasing availability can have a profound, deleterious effect on relationship stability. This often comes with the natural decline or increase in sexual and emotional availability common in many due to natural hormonal changes (triggered by age, relationship status, children, etc.), which instigates friction in relationships and can profoundly affect the extent to which each partner values their significant other.

Where things get weird is how availability impacts your aggregate desirability. A phenomenon called mate-choice copying causes individuals to find a target who has already been chosen by another person to be more desirable. While this phenomenon is seen in many species, it is particularly strong in humans. Studies have found that a man wearing a wedding ring will be flirted with more often than a man without one, and the presence of an attractive partner increases a man’s perceived desirability. This phenomenon is seen more in human females than in males (but it honestly hasn’t been studied much in males—we suspect it exists but is counteracted by men’s aggregate preference for chastity).

Mate-choice copying appears to be a primarily female mating tactic aimed at simplifying the assessment of a man’s suitability for long-term sexual relationships. Supporting this hypothesis, studies show that lack of experience increases copying behavior in women (e.g., a woman with less sexual experience will strongly prefer an already “taken” partner on the aggregate).

Mate-choice copying becomes a problem when it begins to snowball—males who are successful with women have an easier time with other women, which in turn makes them yet more attractive to other women. The fact that mate copying impulses are strongest among inexperienced women (this has been shown experimentally) causes the classic high-school stud conundrum, in which a few guys have an artificially inflated value in high school: A perception among the school body that all the girls like a guy causes many girls to like him more. Simultaneously, mate copying makes it much harder for a young guy who is not successful in the sexual marketplace in high school to break in.

What we perhaps find most fascinating about this behavior is that for a portion of the population, it appears to have no upper limit to how it modifies attractiveness. It is hard to say how big that portion is, as there has been no research on the subject that we are aware of. The effect can be seen when you get large groups of inexperienced women, all demonstrating interest in the same male, as is often seen with famous musicians (think an Elvis, Justin Bieber, or boy band performance). What is cool is we can trace this behavior back to even the earliest days of film in performances, like those of Frank Sinatra. The behavior is even recorded in historic texts, with the phenomenon appearing around generals and musicians going all the way back to the Renaissance.

Perhaps the stimulation caused by mate choice mirroring creates a snowball phenomenon in which each woman sees the increasing desirability rating for the male among her large group of peers and thus up modulates her affection displays in turn, leading her peers to up modulate theirs. This snowball of stimulation can literally reach such levels that people will begin screaming and crying uncontrollably then pass out.

There is no corollary phenomenon involving male groups frothing at the mouth and passing out over females, which lends credence to the experimentally supported evidence that mirroring affects females more than males (not that males won’t cheer for famous females, but there is a pretty clear distinction between this snowball phenomenon and normal crowd admiration). The fact that mate-choice copying appears more in inexperienced women also explains why the bands most frequently cause a snowball phenomenon target preteen girls (boy bands, etc.). We need to clarify here that we think the normal mechanisms meant to prevent mirroring from snowballing aren’t in place in only a small percent of the female population, but that when you expose someone to a large enough crowd of women, that small percent without the normal regulation mechanism feed off of each other.

Note from the Research:

One study we found suggested that the effect may be inverse in men. In this study, men who saw a woman with other men judged her as being less desirable than if she was depicted alone, while, unsurprisingly, women judged men as more desirable when they are around other women.

Chastity-Promiscuity

The effects of perceived chastity on aggregate desirability vary profoundly between cultures, genders, and sexes. Among the majority of heterosexual individuals looking for long-term partners in Western cultures, a high level of chastity among women is typically seen as a positive modifier (depending on the age of the individual), and medium levels of chastity are valued among males.Some studies show the negative modifier to attractiveness associated with promiscuity is equally strong among both men and women. We expect this is the case for high promiscuity but are not sure if we “buy it” at low/medium levels, such as two or three partners.

On the other hand, promiscuity can be a positive modifier for men and women’s aggregate desirability in short-term relationship marketplaces, as it lowers the perceived investment required to achieve sexual payout. In other words, in females, chastity increases their desirability as a potential long-term partner but decreases desirability as just a sex partner due to the implied increased time investment to gain sexual payout from a chaste individual.

Chastity versus promiscuity has a sizable impact on individual desirability and may also trigger a sexual preference modifier (“I find slutty girls hot”) or a situational modifier (“I need someone who is sexually experienced to show me the ropes”). We dive into the statistics associated with chastity in some detail in the chapter on chastity, exploring how it affects societal perceptions of desirability, neurochemistry, and relationship dynamics.

Wealth

The effects of wealth on desirability are obvious, but the consequences of said effects on society may be more insidious than one would imagine at first glance. A high level of wealth modifies a male’s aggregate desirability if he can effectively signal his wealth, whereas wealth might even run a risk of reducing aggregate desirability for women in many markets (and the statistics back this up).

At a societal level, this has two important consequences:

Once a man has acquired a high level of wealth, he is more likely than a woman to spend it on things that a prospective partner may see and recognize as expensive. This may help to explain why more single wealthy men buy and publicly display expensive luxury cars than single wealthy women (93.6% of Ferraris are bought by men, 84.4% of Maserati buyers are men, and 80.3% of Porsche buyers are men—even though women buy 62% of cars overall). You see this effect in cars because a car is the highest ticket item you can own that can be shown to someone without taking them back to your residence, and hence cars can signal a person’s wealth as early as the first date.
A woman could increase her aggregate desirability a little were she to have half a million dollars to her name, but her wealth-based-gains pale in comparison to those made by men. To an average male, half a million dollars is everything it is to a female, but it can also be used to give him a much larger value boost in the sexual marketplace. This means that unless we can get men on average to value the wealth of female partners more and women to value wealth among male partners less, a marginal increase in wealth has more value to an average man than an average woman. This is likely a contributor to men choosing higher-paying jobs with lower work-life balance on average at a higher rate than women (leading to uncomfortable statistics, like 93% of workplace fatalities being male).

Fertility

In most cultures throughout time, fertile men and women have a higher aggregate and individual desirability (see King Henry VIII and his wives as an excellent example), but in modern Western culture, fertility is only really relevant to individual desirability in someone who wishes to produce offspring with a long-term partner. Interest in bearing and raising children also falls into the category, as a woman desperate to get pregnant often has slightly lower aggregate desirability on the casual dating market, whereas a man who really wants to start a family has slightly higher aggregate desirability on the long-term relationship market.

Physical Alteration

In modern western society, physical alteration through surgical or other interventions generally lowers aggregate desirability. That said, both present time and history are full of examples of groups who view significant physical alteration, such as tattoos, foot binding, neck extension, the use of gauges, or forehead flattening, as a means of significantly raising aggregate desirability.

Individuals who have undergone significant surgical alterations will have arbitrage opportunities if these alterations demonstrate dedication to a subculture, and the individual is hunting for a partner within said subculture. Things like tattoos and piercings can be used to demonstrate dedication to a subculture through the sacrifice of lowering one’s estimated value in mainstream society and thus raising their value within a subculture (think of a goth with significant piercings or someone in a gang covered in tattoos).

At a societal level, the negative modifier associated with physical alteration is usually tied to both the extent of the alteration and the quality of the alteration. Something like veneers or a facelift typically has a low effect. Augmented breasts typically have a medium effect. Sex reassignment surgeries typically have a profound effect. All these effects can be heavily modified by the quality of the work.

On an individual basis, the extent to which physical alteration changes attractiveness varies highly. For some people, it is a deal-breaker, while for others it is irrelevant or a positive. The attractiveness gains possible through cosmetic surgery can more than make up for any negative effect of having undergone alteration. Even on an individual level, a guy who thinks “fake” boobs are gross may prefer larger breasts enough to still prefer a surgically altered breast.

Note from the Research:

One study showed that while men expect tattoos will increase their desirability, they do not. More specifically, men with tattoos ranked themselves as more attractive, but females did not prefer tattooed males when the tattoos were digitally added to images of shirtless men. Women also ranked men with tattoos as worse prospective partners and parents in the study.

Children from Previous Partners

An individual with children from a partner to whom they are no longer attached has lower aggregate desirability across almost all cultures; however, the negative effect hits women harder than men. In contrast, having children with a partner typically significantly raises your individual desirability in that partner’s eyes (this is tied to social stigmas and the financial convenience in your partner also being the parent of a child you share).

This double whammy of lowering your value on an open market, but increasing your value to your partner has a huge effect on relationships pre- and post-kids making them much more stable—which is useful because having kids also increases stress levels, which could otherwise drive more couples to break up after having their first child. (In other words, after a couple has kids together both of their desirability to other people goes down dramatically but the logistical simplicity of staying together typically increases for both of them. These two things happening at the same time helps increase the stability of a relationship at an otherwise stressful time.)

Beliefs About the World

It would seem obvious that alignment of beliefs affects a person’s individual desirability in the eyes of a partner, but personal beliefs can also affect an individual’s aggregate desirability. To take an extremist example: A neo-Nazi has a lower aggregate desirability than someone who is not a neo-Nazi. In general, a more conservative or men’s-rights-focused worldview improves a woman’s aggregate desirability, because these beliefs are less common in women, and a more liberal and feminist view improves a man’s aggregate desirability.

Something that lowers one’s aggregate desirability on an open market but improves a person’s individual desirability when they find a match creates a very stable relationship. Were two neo-Nazis to meet each other, the rareness of that belief system and how undesirable they each are on the open market would create a relationship better than most others they could hope for. As neo-Nazis typically hang out in communities of neo-Nazis, the effect is somewhat muted as they likely judge their aggregate desirability against their social group.

Sources of Recreation

The effects of preferred hobbies and recreational activities on individual desirability are obvious. Most will gain more from a partnership with someone who enjoys doing the same things they do—though there are some who would prefer to maintain their own separate domains, and it is helpful to parse out such preferences when vetting relationship candidates.

Hobbies can heavily impact aggregate desirability. For example, a woman who likes playing first-person shooter video games and watching football or a guy who enjoys shopping may have a leg up with partners of the opposite gender. Ownership of pets also falls into this category and has a significant impact on individual and aggregate desirability; thus, pets are sometimes used in partner acquisition strategies.

Opportunity Cost

Since the generic societal relationship contract is a monogamous one, being in most relationships precludes—or at least significantly impedes—one’s ability to source other partners. If you know that you are in a place in life with a large pool of potential partners that are easy to meet (college, for instance), any relationship that eats up time you have to source within that pool will have a negative value modifier attached to it.

For example, when Malcolm was at Stanford Business School and starting to date Simone, he made it clear how severe the opportunity cost was to him. Stanford’s GSB presented a pool of pre-vetted, intelligent, high potential earners he would only have access to for two years—he would only pass up access to a pool like that for someone he was extremely likely to marry.

Status

The perceived aggregate desirability of an individual—in other words, their status—can directly affect the individual desirability of that person among those who care deeply about how others see them (thus the archetype of the trophy wife). In other words, people who value association with prestigious things will put a uniquely high premium on partners that society as a whole puts a high premium on.

Signaling

Sometimes an individual will gain value from another by using a relationship with the other person to send a message about who they are. A Christian, for example, may choose to date a Muslim in order to demonstrate to either themselves or society that they are not biased by religion. Alternatively, an individual may only consider dating people within their own race, social group, culture, or class to signal their devotion to racial/group/culture/class purity.

One of the strongest effects of signaling can be seen with self-signaling, which prevents long-term relationships from dissolving. Someone who wants to see themselves as a good husband, good mother, family man, good Catholic, etc. may place a uniquely high individual desirability modifier on a relationship because ending the relationship would damage how they want to see themselves. While this effect can raise individual desirability to almost absurdly high levels within some religious groups due to the negative stigma these religious groups cast on divorce, more often this effect is felt when a person just doesn’t want to believe that they “wasted” the last fifteen years of their lives and therefore refuse to leave an ill matched-partner because doing so would require admitting their own mistake in choosing that partner and continuing to stay with them for so long.

The Four Core Markets

he unpleasant shock of realizing that your value (your aggregate desirability) is much lower on one market than another is a tale as old as time. We all know the attractive woman who has no trouble getting guys to sleep with her but can’t find a guy willing to date her in public—or the guy who opened up his marriage with the expectation he would be able to go on a sexual rumspringa only to realize that no one wants to sleep with him, while his wife picks up a new lover every time she stops by a bar.

People looking for no-strings-attached sex look for totally different traits in a partner than those looking for someone to marry. There are different markets for every type of relationship you may seek, and your aggregate desirability may vary dramatically across these markets.

The four core markets are:

The sex market
The casual dating market
The long-term relationship market
The non-monogamous market

The Sex Market

This is the market for those seeking short-term sex and short-term sexual intimacy. The sex market is radically different from the other three which, while not perfectly aligned, feature some sense of parity. The majority of people on the sex market are really looking more for the short-term intimacy associated with casual sex or validation granted by an ability to easily secure sex. Statistically speaking, few people of any gender ever actively search for emotionless sex.

Men are incredibly undervalued on the sex market. The aggregate desirability of a man on this market is vastly lower than it is on other markets, and the aggregate desirability of a female on this market is astronomically higher than it is on any other market. As a result, many men who are only looking for sex will pretend to be on other markets, and many women who are actually looking for more serious relationships pretend they are only looking for sex.

This can be an effective strategy for men wishing to secure sex, but it is rarely an effective strategy for women keen to secure a long-term or casual dating relationship. This problem can lead to an enormous negative cognitive effect on a woman when a man using her for sex convinces her that they are actually casually dating.

The relative value difference between genders on this market is not an issue of mere perception and has been studied fairly extensively. In the often-cited paper, Gender Differences in Receptivity to Sexual Offers, men and women asked strangers if they wanted sex. Not a single female ever agreed to a male’s request, whereas 75% of males in one study and 69% of males in another agreed to the requests—this is even more striking when you consider that in the same studies, when men and women requested a date, there was almost no gender difference at all in response rate (about 50% for each). These findings imply that the men observed in this research were more willing to go to a stranger’s house for no-strings-attached sex than they were to consent to a date with a stranger! (If this feels familiar, we mentioned these studies briefly when describing the Easy Lure.)

Follow-up studies have worked to find out just how high value an individual needs to be to get women to agree to no-strings-attached sex at a similar rate to men. While men would agree to no-strings-attached sex with celebrities like Jennifer Lopez at about the same rate as they would a stranger, once you get to the level of a celebrity like Johnny Depp, women will finally consent to no-strings-attached sex. In experiments like the first—but featuring incredibly attractive individuals—83% of men agreed to sex with a stranger, but this time, 3% of women did. To dissect this data another way: While women have an easier time on the sex market, a woman who is astronomically high in value (like a celebrity) is not of much higher value on this market than a woman who is merely moderately attractive.

The sex market is also unique in that a single individual on the market can pair with a large number of other individuals. A single man on the sex market can sleep with five females in a week, and vice versa. Moreover, it is not uncommon for an individual—especially a man—to value the number of his sexual conquests over the quality of those partners. Thus unlike in other markets, it is not uncommon for a man of high desirability within the sex market to sleep with a woman of low sex market desirability if he assumes there will be no cost in doing so. This leads to the Lazy Eight dynamic, in which a woman who is between a One and Seven (in that crass system people use to rank aggregate desirability) assumes that she is an Eight, merely because she was able to secure an Eight on the sex market (a market in which she is already overvalued).

The “Lazy Eight” problem can easily ruin a person’s life. By setting unrealistic expectations, it can render a person unable to secure a viable long-term partner and tempt them to repeatedly seek emotional validation on the sex market.

This is not to say that people with low aggregate value on the sex/dating/long-term relationship market are of lower value as human beings. Intrinsically, wood is no “worse” than gold and honestly has more utility, but this does not change the fact that people pay less for wood than they pay for gold. We live in a society in which people—especially women—are led to believe that their value as an individual equals their value on the sex or dating market; thus, there are inevitably large numbers of people who seek personal validation on the sex market.

Fortunately, both of the aforementioned market failures are fairly easy for women to avoid. If you are trying to find a guy who is actually on the dating market and not just pretending to date while really just looking for sex, inform prospective male partners that you have a rule whereby you do not have sex with someone until you have dated them publicly (as in you are seen as being in a real relationship on social media platforms, and/or within social circles, frequented by that partner and their peers) for at least one month. This rule will weed out cads and make it easy to know when you are actually dating people who are genuinely participating in long-term relationship and casual dating markets. (For more tactics on this front, see the chapter Female Template Strategies on page 471.)

Women employing these tactics must come to terms with the fact that that the male partners they succeed in securing will be of lower aggregate value once they filter out people using them for sex. Moreover, a male being filtered out by this method will not just quietly walk away; he will likely argue with you or insult you in one final gambit.

Despite what romance novels tell us, people do not randomly choose lower-value mates for long-term partnerships. When people do buddy up with lower-value mates, it is because they are not monogamous, they were tricked, or for some reason, they value something about that mate that the rest of society ignores (typically due to a kink). You can easily weed out a large category of people who are pretending to be on the dating or long-term relationship market, but who are really in the sex market, by asking yourself: “Would a stranger think this person is well out of my league, and if so, do I know specifically what they value so much in me?”

Counterintuitively, the sex market is rarely voluntarily entered by straight men. This is because a man’s value is so low on the market that it is unusual for men who are not in the top 20% of the market to enjoy any interaction within it. It is not uncommon for a man’s first honest interaction with the sex market to take place after he enters an open relationship and has to explain to potential partners that there is no real possibility of a casual or long-term relationship early in their interactions. The sex market is also the primary destination of those looking for kink-based interactions, such as hotwifing or husband trading.

If all of this seems rather depressing, keep in mind that your value on the sex market is not judged based on the same characteristics as other markets. Research shows that when searching on the sex market, people do not value characteristics such as intelligence or personality much and instead focus mostly on physical attractiveness.

The Casual Dating Market

Casual dating is different from dating in pursuit of a long-term relationship in two ways:

You may ask someone on a date who has a trait you would see as making it impossible to seriously consider them for a long-term relationship (like marriage).
You do not immediately break up with someone as soon as you realize it is highly unlikely that you will be spending the rest of your life with this person.

In general, the casual dating market is the sandbox in which those with monogamous leanings play while racking up major milestones they want to hit before they would seriously consider marriage or another form of a long-term relationship. In this role, it is a very useful marketplace for having practice relationships that can teach a person many of the skills they will leverage in subsequent, more serious relationships. While it certainly has its utility, the casual dating market also features its fair share of dangers and limitations.

In addition to playing this “practice relationship” role, the casual dating market features:

Players who have recently left a serious relationship (and want to “acclimatize to dating” before seriously beginning to look for a new one).
Individuals who are simultaneously ideologically opposed to long-term relationships and polyamory, but who still want the new relationship energy that comes with dating.
People want to fulfill the societal expectations that come with dating without getting tied down by long-term partners.

New relationship energy, often referred to as NRE, is a term used to describe the unique mental, emotional, and physical thrills one experiences when in a new, passionate romantic relationship, only just beginning to discover a partner, and not yet sure how things will turn out or what will happen next. New relationship energy is highly addictive and, in our experience, the most pleasurable emotional state emerging from human sexual interaction after love. New relationship energy far outpaces any pleasure that can come from an orgasm (in that an orgasm just feels physically pleasurable, whereas new relationship energy provides an intense, deep sense of psychological satisfaction—after your fifth time orgasming in a day, you are quite bored of it, but your fifth time drawing a sketch of someone with whom you are experiencing new relationship energy is just as magical as the first). New relationship energy has also been shown to have very addictive qualities, functioning on similar neural pathways to painkilling medication. New relationship energy leads people to make even dumber decisions than love does.

One major problem with the casual dating market involves the large number of people who “fake” being on it. As it is in between the sex market, where men are disadvantaged, and the long-term relationship market, where women are disadvantaged, a large number of men who really want sex will pretend to be in this market as well a large number of women who really want a more serious relationship. The second major problem with the market can be seen with its degradation after the age of thirty or so. Most individuals who are “catches” and interested in casual dating eventually get locked down, whether they want to or not, or transfer to the polyamory market, leaving an increasingly dry fishing pond for the average casual dater as they age.

The greatest hazard of the casual dating market involves settling into relationships without consciously intending to do so.

Imagine you end up going on a few dates with a woman or man you like. You neither find their personality or appearance actively offensive, so you fool around and have sex a few times. A few months later, you are having sex regularly. Now this person is asking to be “official” with you, posting photos with you online, and introducing you to their friends and family.

Should you resist these mate-blocking and relationship-solidifying behaviors, you will lose a source of sex (and it’s not like anyone else is lining up), plus you find it pleasant to spend time with this person, and you look forward to seeing them on nights and weekends—it is so nice to not be left alone and feel like someone is there for you.

Months turn into years that you spend with this person. You have gone through some hard times together. They lost their house at one point, and you ended up moving in together to save money. You even are beginning to feel like you really love this person sometimes. Then, one day they ask to get married. You know they are not a perfect match—not what you dreamed about as a kid—but getting back on the dating market would be hard, and you have been with this person seven years now. Figuring that this must be “as good as it gets,” you say yes. Now you are cursed to live your life trapped in mediocrity. Merely because breaking up with this person was never “convenient” or easy, you are doomed to live and die in the relationship equivalent of a beige office cubicle.

This horrifying trap consumes the lives of millions of people every year and is totally preventable. In fact—if you are over 23 and date someone for just three months, you are more likely to still be dating the same person in four years than not (this comes from a great study done by Facebook’s data scientists—see: Flings or Lifetimes? The Duration of Facebook Relationships).

There are a few strategies you can employ to prevent this from happening to you while still engaging in the casual dating that will help you hone your skills for an eventual, intentional long-term relationship. When dating in high school, create a rule for yourself whereby you will not extend any relationship formed while in high school into college. You must communicate this intention clearly to your partners early on in your relationships, saying that if you really do end up bonding, you will find each other again after college.

It is easy to set this rule given the salience of the trope of the high schooler who follows a boyfriend/girlfriend to college, only for that partner to summarily dump them or cheat on them once exposed to a much larger, more vibrant market. In other words—given the salience of certain cultural stereotypes among high school relationships, telling a high school partner you plan to leave them when you start college, as a rule, is less likely than it otherwise might be to cause offense and thus allows you to safely experiment with casual dating at that age (well, hopefully it won’t cause offense, but then again high schoolers love indulging in emotional reactions).

You can employ a similar set of rules during college or during any other phase of your life in which you know you will be leaving a location in a set amount of time (e.g., “while I can date you the relationship has to end in six months when I move/join the military/start my new job/etc.”). That said, if you are looking for a marriage partner with whom you will have kids, college is probably the best time to start searching for this person given universities’ large pools of single, pre-vetted candidates with similar educational attainment and socioeconomic status.

Do not underestimate how long it will take you to secure a suitable long-term partner. We estimate that if you dedicate an average of two hours a day to finding your optimal long-term partner starting in college, the process will take you a total of eight years. Do not be that person who plans to get married at 31 and neglects to begin looking for a partner until they are 26. As we discuss elsewhere in this book (see page 194), your market advantages shift significantly throughout life. What may have been easy three years ago can become nigh impossible (and vice versa) depending on age and gender.

Once you decide you have reached a point in life in which you are ready to begin systematically searching for a long-term partner, give up casual dating—unless you have chosen to join the non-monogamous community. Dump partners the moment you realize they are not people with whom you would like to spend the rest of your life.

Every day, month, and year you spend on a relationship with someone who is not an appropriate match for you involves foregoing hundreds—if not thousands—of opportunities to meet your optimal partner. Every second you put off an uncomfortable breakup with a suboptimal long-term partner increases your risk that such a breakup will never take place. If you find it hard to dump someone today, just imagine how hard it will be next year. The key to securing an optimal long-term partner involves breaking up with someone as soon as it becomes clear they are not a viable long-term candidate for you.

The Long-Term Relationship Market

You are on the long-term relationship market if you are dating with the intention of securing a long-term relationship—also known as an LTR. While on this market, a person will only date people with whom they can imagine spending the rest of their lives. Participants acting in their best interests will end a relationship the moment it is clear this will not happen.

More than any other, the long-term relationship market deprioritizes physical attractiveness while prioritizing features like education and wealth. While it goes against conventional wisdom, attractiveness (in so far as it does matter), affects the value of men in the long-term relationship market more than it affects the value of women. One study showed that while unattractive men were less likely to secure a university-educated woman, a woman’s attractiveness did not affect the rate at which she could secure a university-educated male. This is an interesting trend as more attractive males are statistically shown to invest significantly less in their relationships than less attractive men.

The long-term relationship market is also unique in that it heavily favors males—especially after a person reaches their mid-thirties. Because of this, many males falsely signal that they are in this market in an effort to secure better partners than they could in other markets, just as many women really looking for long-term relationships will signal that they just want sex.

The Non-Monogamous Market

Non-monogamous relationship models are rapidly growing in popularity. Searching for a partner while in a non-monogamous relationship or pairing up with a partner who is non-monogamous themselves gives birth to unique market dynamics, which only really kick in when you are looking for something more than sex from additional partners—otherwise the market dynamics are nearly identical to sex market dynamics.

Certain individuals’ aggregate desirability can vary wildly in these markets. The non-monogamous market participant with the highest value by far is the polyamorous unicorn: A single bisexual female not interested in being a primary partner in a relationship. If you fall into that category (or can pretend to be in that category), you will be able to secure astronomically better partners in this market than you can in any other market.

The non-monogamous market is unique in that it has not yet settled on well-known cultural norms and differs vastly among different cities and age groups. While in some cities the market is to a great extent comprised of vast, often co-living, ideologically motivated polycules (groups of people in a relationship with each other), the non-monogamous market in other cities is managed in a top-down fashion by a hierarchical cabal of matriarchs who choose which individuals are allowed into the metroplex-wide polycule—though these matriarchs may not contextualize their positions this way. In yet other cities, you will find a few core polycules dominating the market like an infighting aristocracy.

As fascinating as these communities are, they are evolving too quickly to pin down. Participants in these communities seem unaware of the geographic differences among non-monogamous communities. Between the cities in which we have lived recently: Seoul, Lima, Edinburgh, London, San Francisco, Dallas, and Miami, we can say that while these communities share a common literature and identity, they have evolved independently and are only superficially the same; hence, it is difficult to make sweeping statements about the market dynamics of each. For example, some of the markets we have seen place a strong positive value modifier on being a bi male, while others do not seem to care.

That is not to say that there is no research that elucidates some interesting aspects of the community. Some research suggests that men are valued more for their attractiveness in non-monogamous markets than in other markets, and that male social status and resources matter considerably less among non-monogamous markets than they do in any other market outside of the sex market.

One commonality among all non-monogamous markets is the importance of virtue signaling to an individual’s aggregate desirability. While we hope the community can get over its obsession with ethical virtue signaling, the obsession makes sense given that most non-monogamous market participants grew up in societies in which promiscuity has been categorized as fundamentally unethical. Since no one wants to believe they are a bad person, it is only natural for people to practice a behavior seen as unethical by some to seek out and build evidence of their ethical goodness or even moral superiority.

On Citations and Studies

espite using science as our primary standard of evidence (the type of evidence we value above all others), we will rarely cite specific studies in this book.

It is all too easy to believe oneself to be a dispassionate lover of “science” and “rationality,” only to lean on studies like a crutch, cherry-picking findings, and conflating rationalization with rationality. It is a bad habit of countless writers and random commentators to make an outrageous claim, then cite a single study to back it up, putting the burden on the reader to look up the study and analyze its methodology, try to determine how it was funded, and look up the history of the researcher to determine whether the results are credible. We strongly disagree with this way of communicating.

If you see a statistic in a book and believe that statistic more because it comes with a study citation, we encourage you to rethink how you engage with information. We want to do our part in fighting against these sorts of dangerous mental shortcuts.

When we make a claim you find to be dubious, the last thing we want you to do is read the same couple of studies that lead us to our conclusion—especially if a subconscious bias could have led us to cherry-pick those studies. That is how bad information gets spread and pop-science comes to dominate. Our goal is to create new methodologies for relating to and interpreting data. When you want to sanity check something, we urge you to go online and dig into the topic. Ask yourself why we drew the conclusions we drew given the information available to us, then draw your own conclusions.

We understand this approach runs contrary to the manner in which many were taught to engage with science and ideas, but we ask you to give it a try. You may find our approach surprisingly empowering. If you give this way of writing an honest try and still hate it, just shoot us an email at [email protected] letting us know. Should we get enough of these emails, we will include fastidious (rather than occasional) citations in future books.

In addition to consulting research on relationships when writing this book, we reached out to around a hundred professional relationship therapists to sanity check the new theories it espouses. The number of therapists who read the entire book in detail is debatable, however we incorporated the feedback each therapist sent, with the major criticism being we are too harsh in our views on when a relationship is doomed.

Why People Cheat Rather Than Leave a Relationship

n individual will leave a relationship if they believe there are better, mutually exclusive options available to them. This is why married individuals have a higher risk of divorce when the adult gender ratios of their office present more members of the opposite gender (such office environments give them the impression that there are many better options). However, it is important to note the options tempting partners away from an established relationship must be mutually exclusive in order to increase the risk of relationship dissolution.

Not all people have the same view of when a relationship is mutually exclusive. Someone may, for instance, secretly marry a separate partner in another country and maintain a separate family with that partner. To most, this would qualify as a mutually exclusive relationship possibility—one that a normal person would likely leave their first family to pursue—but to some people (perhaps due to extreme wealth and/or a career that involves frequent, regular travel between two places), such opportunities are not mutually exclusive. To these people, it is fine to have two families.

This dynamic can be used to predict when someone may choose to cheat on a partner rather than leave their relationship entirely.

The most common barrier to cheating for most people involves the struggle to simultaneously believe “I am a cheater” and “I am a good person.” This is why once someone has cheated once, they are extremely likely to cheat again (300% more likely, to be exact). After someone cheats the first time, cheating again becomes very low cost (outside the risk of getting caught), as they have already come to terms with the cognitive dissonance of internalizing that they cheat on partners.

If you started your relationship with someone as “the other man” or “the other woman” with whom your partner cheated on an existing partner, be aware that your present partner will very likely cheat on you, as they no longer have to fight the cognitive dissonance associated with cheating. After all, cheating granted your partner their current loving relationship with you, did it not? How bad can cheating really be?

What to Do When a Partner Cheats

After someone cheats on you, what do you do?

There are six ways to maintain a relationship with a cheater:

Alter your relationship contract to open your relationship, making sexual relations with others permissible. This may seem like a strange reaction as it “rewards the cheater,” but it is also by far and away the most viable way to maintain the relationship. Even with the below alternate strategies, it is highly likely your partner will cheat on you again or just leave you.
Through heavy surveillance, increase your partner’s perceived probability of being caught should they cheat again. If the odds of being caught are near 100%, your partner will be less likely to attempt cheating, even if the punishment is fairly moderate. This is a feasible strategy, but not a smart strategy, as it will almost certainly degrade the relationship over even a short period of time and vastly increase the likelihood that your partner will cheat over any period during which they are not monitored. If your partner really wants to sleep with other people, they may also be pushed by this strategy to merely terminate the relationship.
Decrease your partner’s opportunities to cheat. Consider a wife who doesn’t let her husband eat alone with a woman or drink at mixed-gender events without her present. In an increasingly equal society, such a strategy is seen as abusive and almost absurd to maintain.
Increase the perceived cost of your partner being caught cheating. If you do not immediately leave a partner who cheats, you must keep in mind that you have almost certainly lowered your partner’s perceived cost of cheating, hence the crucial thing about implementing this strategy is that any punishment you threaten must be something you are genuinely willing to execute, and cannot involve breaking up with your partner (as you have already shown an inability to follow through with that potential ultimatum). Potentially effective threatened punishments include threats of releasing damaging information to your partner’s family or promising to release incriminating information about the cheating partner to the police or national tax authority (note this behavior is illegal in many jurisdictions). If you are going to threaten harsh punishment for cheating, you must also come to terms with the fact that the odds are well over 50% that your partner will decide that, given their high likelihood of cheating on you again, your relationship is not worth maintaining, so they will break things off. Some studies also show that when people are warned of clear punishments for infractions, such as fees for coming late to pick up children from daycare, they are more likely to commit those infractions—perhaps because they have been aware of the price and they still find their crimes worth it.
Renegotiation of the relationship contract in some way other than just opening up the relationship could conceivably lower the possibility of cheating. This would likely be done through marriage counseling or “open discussion.” That said, we would not recommend this strategy as it is very likely to allow the cheater to displace responsibility (“I only cheated because X”). This strategy furthermore fails to change the underlying dynamics that caused the cheating but instead reinforces them. Really, the only way this ends up being effective is if the act of the discussions themselves increase partners’ attraction or dedication to each other.
Getting your partner to agree to be surgically neutered. Few are likely to consent to this, but it can help to combat a desire to cheat in the future. It’s a crazy idea, but probably effective.

Cheating will not be halted by a slap on the hand and expectation that the relationship can go back to normal, free of cheating. The cheating partner will almost certainly cheat again. Why? Because now they have strictly less motivation not to cheat. If you do not leave your partner after they cheat and the world does not fall apart, was the cheating such a bad thing?

Any strictly monogamous relationship in which there is even a slight probability that your partner will want to sleep with someone is at extreme risk. The paths to repair the relationship after a cheating incident are extremely limited. It is far more efficient to create a relationship contract that states sleeping with another person would hurt your feelings but is within the rules as long as each partner informs the other partner of each dalliance in advance. This type of contract clause increases the cost of sleeping with someone else (as they will need to tell you first, knowing fully well that they are hurting you) without making them choose between your relationship and cheating. While someone still may attempt to hide their dalliance to avoid hurting their partner emotionally, doing so has a higher personal emotional cost, as it may be difficult to believe one is a good person and yet unwilling to adhere to such a simple, low-effort rule honoring a committed partner.

Men and women do not respond the same way to cheating behavior. This is likely a product of men historically assuming the role of breadwinner in our culture and women traditionally acting as sexual gatekeepers, which has led men, on average, to value a partner more for sex and a woman to value a partner more for resources. This has historically meant that sexually unsatisfied men can easily acquire more sex just by cheating, whereas for a sexually unsatisfied woman to fully benefit from another man, she must leave her current partner. This has contributed to making men more likely to cheat within a long-term relationship while simultaneously making them less likely to leave a sub-par partner. This is backed up by several studies on cheating behavior across men and women. In one study, 56% of men who reported to be cheating also reported being in happy marriages, whereas only 34% of cheating women reported their marriages to be happy.

Other Factors Contributing to Cheating

A study of eight million Ashley Madison users revealed that both men and women are more likely to have affairs when their age ends in the number nine; however, this effect is much more pronounced in men. Presumably, this is driven by a surging desire for validation as we approach symbolically meaningful age milestones. Weird ages are not the only time-associated factors increasing the odds that a person may be cheating: The so-called “seven-year itch” is really a thing. Both men’s and women’s odds of cheating increase approximately seven years into a relationship. Both men and women’s odds of cheating decrease after this seven-year mark, but male odds of cheating begin to rise again after the 18-year mark.

Older age, in general, seems to be a factor contributing to cheating—at least these days. Americans aged 55 and older are now more likely to report having extramarital sex than Americans under 55. This is a reversal of trends observed as recently as the year 2000, when older Americans reported having less extramarital sex. Today, most people who cheat are 50 years of age and older (21%). Only 8% of people between the ages of 18-29 admit to ever cheating.

Other genetic factors, such as intelligence, are also associated with higher rates of cheating. Both smarter men and women cheat at higher rates, though smarter women cheat at disproportionately higher rates, especially if their intelligence has not led to the achievement of a high level of educational attainment.

Cheating is not always sexual. Emotional affairs also exist, with 5% of men and 35% of women having admitted to having an emotional affair. Those self-reported percentages (at least among women) are far higher than the 20% of people who admit to having a physical affair. We suspect the larger number of women having emotional affairs is either a product of women being more emotionally aware of what they are doing or women “getting more out of” emotional affairs than men.

Women cheat more now than they did in the past (or at least are more comfortable disclosing their cheating behavior in surveys). Rates of women cheating have increased 40% over the last half-century. Furthermore, 90% of women who cheat on their husbands do not report feeling guilty—instead, they say they felt entitled to their extramarital activities due to perceived failures on the part of their husbands. Of these women, 65% report enjoying sex with their lover more than their husband, and 70% claim their lover is the “opposite” of their husband.

Almost 70% of cheaters cheat with friends. Cheaters also tend to have more sexual partners than the average person: A median of 12 throughout their lifetime. Those who like spending more time in social contexts may be more likely to cheat, as at least one study we came across found extroverts are more likely to cheat.

Sex in a Long-Term Relationship

ow do those in a long-term relationship keep their sex lives healthy, vibrant, and fresh? How do partners avoid the dreaded “dead bedroom” in which they almost never have sex?

The first key to understanding how to preserve sex in a long-term relationship is to understand that the core desire for sex in a long-term relationship is driven as much by a desire for personal validation as it is driven by a desire for pleasure.

Most human action and emotion is driven by attempts to align our positions in the world with our ideal selves—the internal models we have created describing who we are or who we want to be. Our internal models, especially those tied to sexuality, are mostly socialized into us at a young age, but can be altered (see The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life for detailed explanations on how).

A young man’s sadness resulting from the fact that he is still a virgin at 25 has nothing to do with an arousal impulse—nor is it really tied to any innate emotional impulse. That sadness stems from his internalizing that in order to be a happy 25-year-old male, he must be virile and desired. If this young man did not hold this belief, he would not feel sad. Instead, he is sad because the difference between his ideal self and his current self, as recognized by his subconscious, produces a negative emotional state.

This emotional state may drive the 25-year-old to attempt to have sex with someone in an effort to better align his actual self with his desired self-image. We refer to the process of matching one’s actual self to one’s desired self-image as validation.

While sex with a person does cause slight effects on happiness that cannot be secured through masturbation, these effects are insignificant when contrasted with the reported distress of dead bedroom relationships. A dead bedroom is not soul-destroying due to any shortage of orgasms. There is an abundance of methods, products, and tools that facilitate top drawer orgasms and require nobody else’s participation. Dead bedrooms torture those who begin to see themselves as no longer sexually attractive or desirable. Those with dead bedrooms stop getting validation as sexual, desired, beings.

The cessation of sex in long-term relationships differentially affects men and women. In general, Western men who are single or casually dating gain social validation from the number of attractive women with whom they sleep. Once western men are in long-term relationships, their validation is gleaned, to a great extent, from the continued desirability of their long-term partners and whether their partners still want to have sex with them.

A man loses that source of validation when either his long-term partner is no longer desirable on the open market or when this partner no longer appears sexually interested in him. A relationship can involve long periods of no sex at all due to something like forced long distance, but still be immensely validating to a man if he always feels desired by a desirable partner. A man who has sex three times every six months, but who feels that his partner is envied by others and extremely sexually interested in him is far less likely to feel sexually unfulfilled than a man who has sex daily, but feels his wife isn’t so interested in it or that she is not “hot” anymore.

To men, dead bedrooms are largely not about the sex, but rather a man’s self-assessment of his own virility and sexual desirability. If actual sex were the issue, we would see more similarities between dead bedrooms and long-distance relationships that don’t involve sex, yet communities that support these two groups of individuals could not be more different

We are NOT saying that a wife shouldalways consent to sex with her husband. Heck, sex when one’s heart just isn’t in it could leave some men feeling more invalidated than they would feel if they didn’t have sex at all. It is merely important for women with male partners to know that both the sexual interest they express in their partners, plus their overall desirability to the general population, will likely play a huge role in the average male partner’s validation, and that validation will have a profound effect on his happiness.

In women, validation is gained more from being desired by people they respect and admire (assuming one has succumbed to Western society’s socialization). This sense of validation can be lost when a woman loses respect for her partner or feels as though her partner no longer desires her. To the average western female, sex itself is trivial from a personal validation perspective. Sex with a partner who she does not respect has no validation value, whereas being desired by a partner she admires but with whom she cannot have sex, while frustrating, is still validating.

It is a failure to secure validation that the accusation of being “used for sex” emerges. Women commonly claim to have been “used for sex” by someone when said sex fails to grant the validation sought from the interaction—often because of a post-sex realization that the sexual partner had very little desire for them specifically or that they did not respect this sexual partner. We find the phrase quite humorous because it is used by those who do not get what they wanted from sex, but lack the lucidity to recognize that they, too, were hoping to use someone for sex but to gain validation instead of an orgasm.

At a young age, we are conditioned to believe that to be happy and fulfilled, women must be desired, and men must be virile. We subsequently spend the rest of our lives, attempting to fulfill these roles. Unlike with sexual arousal impulses, it is not any stimulus itself that leads us to feel happy when validated. Nothing is innate about these emotional outputs; they result from the analysis of measuring sticks that we built for ourselves. Most sex we have is motivated by an attempt to fulfill these self-images and not merely about orgasms or arousal; masturbation is just fine at fulfilling those particular desires (well . . . almost, there are admittedly some neurological differences between the effects of masturbation and sex).

Once we accept the importance of validation in long-term relationship sex dynamics, we can address that need far more adequately. To maintain a healthy sex life in a long-term relationship, you must make sure that either all partners have divorced themselves from societal socialization or that:

Female partners feel desired by a partner they personally admire.
Male partners feel desired by a partner they believe would be desired on an open market.

This distinction may seem nuanced but can play a big role in how relationships actually break down. For example, a male socialized in Western society can still gain sexual validation from a partner for whom he has lost respect so long as the partner is still “hot” and respectable to his social group, whereas the average woman cannot. Alternatively, if a female admires a partner and that partner desires her, she can gain validation from this even if her friends think the partner is gross. This is something much harder for a male to do if socialized in our society.

Recall that average male sex drive decreases with age and declines significantly along with testosterone when a man is in love or in a pair-bonded relationship. We emphasize that this is on average and not necessarily in every human—some men even supplement testosterone to counteract these changes. At any rate, this shift in male sexuality can often confuse women into believing that a man isn’t interested in her anymore. This shift might even lead some men to believe that they are simply less attracted to their long-term partner, specifically rather than being less attracted to everyone as their hormone levels change.

Female sex drive also fluctuates in various circumstances (which are far too diverse to succinctly summarize here, as they shift from a midlife pique to pregnancy, to menopause). These fluctuations can also be misinterpreted as a lack of interest in a way that makes a man lose the validation he gleans from the relationship.

Sex is an activity that requires time and physical effort. If a person is exhausted and overworked, sex drive drops. Stress and exhaustion-induced loss of sexual interest frequently occur after people have children—without money for childcare, dead bedrooms become very difficult for new parents to avoid. That said, a dead bedroom in which it is clear to both partners that each still finds the other sexually compelling (and is simply not acting on that attraction due to exhaustion) is quite different from one in which one or more partners feel as though another partner has lost sexual interest in them, specifically. We would go so far as to say a relationship in which partners are not having sex because they have children and full-time jobs is not nearly as emotionally taxing or crushing as a relationship in which partners have frequent “duty sex” that is devoid of strong passion and attraction.

Reminder: The science is unambiguous on this point: In human males, being in love with someone lowers testosterone production and tanks their sex drive.

Researchers have confirmed the obvious: That confidence, attentiveness, physical attractiveness, frequency of classically romantic dates, oral sex willingness, willingness to try new things, and prioritizing a partner’s pleasure over one’s own correlate strongly with continued sexual satisfaction in a relationship. The only research we found in this subject that piqued our interest (by making a novel point) was a study that found a strong correlation between talking through joint life goals on a regular basis (looking for alignment) and mutual sexual desire—so be sure to read The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life with your spouse to ensure good sex. 😉

If a mutual sexual interest in each other is so important, what must we do to maintain it?

One factor contributing to the dead bedroom phenomenon involves some people assuming that the standards of attraction are lower once they are in a long-term-relationship. These people assume they can “let themselves go” a bit, put on a few pounds, stop putting so much effort into exercise, outfits, foreplay, and grooming, and generally work less hard to be charming, confident, engaging, and considerate. The reality is that between the Coolidge effect (a decrease in attraction to individuals with whom you have had sex before) and the decrease in testosterone-driven sex drive when someone is in love, the amount of effort required to keep the level of sex constant in a long-term relationship is dramatically higher than the effort required in a short term relationship.

Similar to the age-old question of: “How can I lose weight without diet and exercise?” we hear people ask: “How can I maintain my partner’s desire without constantly improving myself?” The real answer to maintaining a partner’s desire is to improve physical (and societal) appearance over time and work hard to increase your partner’s admiration for you. Perpetually improve the things your partner values most—be they looks, prestige, emotional control, knowledge, status, or anything else. Long-term partners have an advantage here, as they have had ample time to determine what their partner finds to be most attractive and endearing. Maintaining a partner’s attraction and affection is difficult and clearly not feasible for everyone. We live in a society that seems to have trouble accepting that some people are going to fail despite trying their hardest.

The fact that many fail and ultimately find themselves living with a dead bedroom is fine. The best solution to a dead bedroom problem may be to accept it and come to understand how you can work around it. After all, polls show that 57% of people living in a sexless marriage report that, aside from sex being absent, they feel they have the ideal partner. A relationship may still be worth having even without the validation that comes from feeling desired and satisfied by a partner. Besides, relationships can be renegotiated in a manner that allows one or more partners to use outside partners to satisfy both sexual urges and, more importantly, desires for sexual validation (though this is admittedly not possible in all relationships, especially those in which the very fact that one partner is searching for validation outside of the relationship is invalidating to the other partner—life doesn’t always have a win state).

Note from the Research:

Only about 25% of women consistently orgasm during vaginal intercourse, 20% seldom have orgasms at all, and about 5% cannot orgasm period. We say this here because some men who are not very sexually experienced see their long term-partner not orgasming during sex as invalidating—a sign she does not like them or find them attractive.

Bonus Tidbits from The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality:

It has become trendy among sex therapists to divide sexuality into responsive arousal and spontaneous arousal. What this division is used to clarify is that some people very rarely “spontaneously” become aroused and instead only become aroused after they are sexually engaged by their partner, but the sexual interaction they end up having is still rewarding and feels good to them. This style of arousal appears to be more common in women than men, and through this delineation, therapists have an easier time getting individuals who fall into this category to get comfortable having sex more often and not feel like there is something wrong with them.
Libido may be depressed by outside factors. It appears humans have an inhibitory system that lowers arousal potential when exposed to environmental cues (specifically cues to suggest now would not be a good time to have a kid, such as a baby in the next room, stress, uncertainty about the future, etc.). Sometimes a person’s libido can appear low due to exposure to one of these stimuli or their inhibitory system otherwise being overactive in relation to one stimulus that is not that hard to remove from their environment. This is also one of the reasons a couple’s sex life dies down after having a child.
The two above points taken together yield the trope of taking wives and girlfriends out for a nice, romantic date in a luxurious-feeling environment before having sex and emphasize the importance of foreplay.

Common Marriage Contract Themes

he easiest way to design a marriage contract is to start with one of the following themes and build terms around it. To choose among these themes, focus on the “point” of your marriage. Specifically, what are each of you trying to gain by entering this partnership, and how can the relationship be designed to maximize that benefit?

Common themes include:

Religion: Marriage may be based on a religious dogma. If you decide to follow this path, do not make the common mistake of assuming that your society’s traditional, conservative relationship template will line up with what your religious text asks of you. A marriage template that is based on the Bible, for example, would certainly not resemble a traditional, conservative relationship. Thus, if the Bible is your template, you should read the Bible instead of copying your peers’ and parents’ conservative marriages.
Complete Equality: These models are focused on maintaining absolute equality in a relationship and are typically created to satisfy political ideologies of what a marriage should be (as opposed to terms that logically maximize the benefits of the partnership, something equality-themed relationships almost never do). Equality-themed contracts are susceptible to tit-for-tat terms and requirements, which can lead to resentment and instability whenever one side feels like the other is benefiting more from the relationship, and yet the other side disagrees. Because of this, equality-themed contracts are only optimal for partners who harbor very strong political ideologies that value equality over efficacy in a relationship.
Family: Family themed contracts are meant to maximize benefit among the relationship’s children or an extended family unit. Societal appearances are often very important in these relationships and thus they are designed to appear very traditional and anti-scandalous from an outsider’s perspective. Family themed relationship contracts can nevertheless be pretty unique depending on what you are attempting to maximize in your children’s lives or for your extended family. A relationship based on maximizing the perceived status of the family will look quite different than one built on maximizing the individual happiness of the family even if they superficially look fairly similar.
Individual Happiness: In this model, each individual agrees they are entering marriage because doing so will make achieving happiness easier. The contract terms of the marriage are typically far more laissez-faire than other models and can often be described as “roommates with sex and love.” These relationships lead to significantly less emotionally close marriages than other options, but this lack of closeness also lowers conflict. Happiness-oriented marriages are also more likely to be polyamorous than other marriages.
Combined Good: These relationships are designed to maximize a shared objective function (the thing each partner wants to maximize with their lives). In these models, individual proclivities are often sacrificed or deprioritized in the face of larger goals and values, which can lead to a dehumanization of the participants. This model is both stable and effective so long as all participants maintain aligned objective functions and keep those objective functions above their own personal happiness.
Transactional: Transactionally themed relationships involve individuals with different objective functions using the relationship to maximize their individual objectives. A woman may marry a man to protect her family’s business because his family is wealthy, while he marries her because he finds her physically attractive and intellectually stimulating. These marriages can be stable so long as both parties are transparent about what they are using the relationship to maximize, and the contract is built along those lines. It is important to not trade a depreciating asset for an appreciating asset in such a relationship, or it will become unstable over time.
Master-Subordinate: Master-subordinate relationships are defined by an easily understood hierarchy. One partner is in charge, and the other’s goal is to act as their subordinate. While aspects of this model exist in many other models, this kind of marriage is unique in that its core focus is to allow the subordinate to live a life unencumbered with the stress of the responsibility of owning their decisions, while the master gains a feeling of control (along with immense responsibility). While we often think of these relationships as being primarily “kinky” relationships, they don’t have to be. These relationships can be quite stable and happy if well-matched but are frowned upon by our larger society so they are normally hidden (we suspect they are not as unusual as one might think).
TradCon: A TradCon relationship is a traditional conservative relationship (a TradCon relationship with reversed gender roles or gay partners is still a TradCon relationship). The TradCon model is quite different from the societal template, which is more of a combination of TradCon + equality relationship models (a horrifying Frankenstein of a relationship contract that does not work, as the TradCon model is almost directly antithetical to the equality model). Instead, TradCon relationships attempt to emulate the idealized concept of marriage as it was perceived in America in the 1950s-1960s. TradCon relationships are tricky, as they can work fairly well if thought through, but are rarely well thought through. Relationships built on TradCon contracts are uniquely susceptible to dynamics that doom the relationship’s long-term viability and put both partners at significant risk. The biggest hazard inherent in TradCon relationships is the asset depreciation problem, in which the home maker’s reliance on their breadwinning partner increases while their aggregate desirability decreases, but the inverse happens to the breadwinner.
NeoCorp: The NeoCorp marriage model is a newer version of the corporate family model, which was pervasive before being replaced by the single-breadwinner model of the early to mid-1900s (which is now emulated by TradCons). This model prioritizes the family unit as the predominant player in the relationship with the family unit or “household” conceptualized as being like a “corporation” or “little empire.” When creating a contract around this model, define the goals of the household and remember that its interests always trump those of its individual players. The NeoCorp model often includes employees and confidants as members of the household (most households include a “staff” that are thought of as part of the family unit) and should be written in a way that anticipates that peculiarity.

Note From The Research:

While on the subject of TradCons, it is worth bringing up that couples who share housework have higher divorce rates than couples in which the woman does all the housework (Just in case you were wondering: Couples in which the man does all the housework have the highest divorce rate). We are not sure how much this really validates the TradCon approach as a superior relationship model, because more conservative people are less likely to get divorced, meaning this may be a matter of correlation without causation. We have, as an aside, seen studies claiming both more and less sex is had when husbands do more chores, but not enough on either side to say there is a consensus.

Guide to Avoiding Crazy

here is truth to what they say: “Don’t stick your dick in crazy and don’t let the loon in your poon.“

The increase in life quality that can come with early identification of what will become systemic bad behavior (“crazy”) in a partner is monumental (by “crazy” we are not referring to mental health issues under treatment, but rather generic craziness—we address mental health issues in the false red flag section, mental health issues under treatment are usually not a big deal). The damage that an unstable and malicious partner can inflict upon your life includes (but is not limited to):

Extreme stress resulting from mental abuse
Miserable years spent in a bad relationship
Physical torture
Depression
Bankruptcy
Rape
18 years spent paying for child support for a child created without your consent and that isn’t biologically yours
Jail time resulting from false claims against you
Loss of friends and family due to forced isolation
PTSD
Death
Death of loved ones

When you have a person who has decided to make your torment a permanent hobby of theirs, your life can become very challenging. This is doubly true when they have convinced themselves that their actions are somehow morally just.

No matter how hot someone is, no matter how rich they are, no matter how high their status may be, it is never worth the risk to hook up with a potentially “crazy” person—someone who shows any signs of mental instability, severe immaturity, or who threatens you in any way. The momentary pleasure you may glean from an encounter will never justify subsequent months spent looking over your shoulder, potential incarceration, physical harm, and reputational and/or financial damage. Stop, think, and internalize just how much harm a person can do if they decide to dedicate even just a couple hours a week to making your life miserable. Think through the significant monetary and emotional cost of neutralizing a threatening, unstable person with whom you have had some sort of sexual encounter.

Be warned: Even someone who does not act “crazy” in public and among friends can have a different internal ruleset governing appropriate behavior with a sexual or romantic partner. Mentally unstable partners can be surprisingly difficult to identify.

We will help you spot individuals prone to behavior patterns that can be deleterious to your wellbeing, with a focus on behavior patterns you can’t easily predict. What follows are some tactics you may use to identify “crazy” early on.

We have organized red flags into two categories:

Signs that even a single sexual encounter with this person could ruin your life.
Signs that a date is bad material for a marriage.

How to Avoid Dangerous and Unstable Sexual Partners

Because the negative consequences of sexual engagement with dangerous and unstable partners are so extreme, it is best to err on the side of caution when you are unsure as to whether a target is or is not a potential threat.

In general, and erring on the side of caution, avoid the following:

People who associate their identity with their sexuality
People who are visibly unstable
People addicted to hard, highly addictive drugs
Vengeful people
Anyone way out of your league who makes the first move
Desperate people
People who do not like you or your kind
Emotionally manipulative people

People who associate their identity with their sexuality

Those who strongly identify with their sexuality, whether that sexuality involves being a super manly heterosexual patriot, a flamboyantly gay force of nature, or a captivating BDSM dom, can be dangerous. Because sexuality is so core to how these people see themselves, you, as one of their sexual partners, must properly follow a complicated set of rules in order for them to feel secure in their identities. It can be nigh impossible to predict the nuances of these rules. The consequences these people deem appropriate for breaking them can be extreme.

In general, mentally sound individuals understand that sexuality is a garnish that sits on top of a person’s identity. If you walk into a restaurant and a waiter serves a plate of nothing but maraschino cherries, that should be an immediate flag that something is seriously wrong in the kitchen.

Tied to this red flag are people who allow their politics to define their sexuality. An example of this might be someone so sex-negative they believe that certain otherwise-mainstream sexual positions are immoral because they are degrading to the participants. While these people might seem safe in theory, one can never know exactly what is going to set them off. When someone has non-normative views on sexuality, it is difficult to fully probe those views through limited and brief interactions. If you don’t know the exact line across which something turns from an innocuous interaction to an extreme faux pas in someone’s mind, you are likely to get in big trouble.

Imagine you are an explorer who has just happened upon an undiscovered tribe. The chief’s daughter is clearly interested in you, but you actively avoid her. Why? You don’t know the rules of this new, strange culture. You don’t know if dancing with the chief’s daughter will bond you in marriage or whether accepting a gift from the chief’s daughter without sleeping with her is punishable by dismemberment.

Just as our imaginary tribe would likely assume that you know all of their unique rules, political extremists will assume you know their esoteric rules—and you may be very surprised by what they deem to be appropriate punishments. Things that might be a normal part of a sexual interaction for you might be seen as justification for extreme retaliation to them. Infractions may involve one partner reaching orgasm while the other doesn’t, failing to have a written consent form ready, using one form of birth control over another, or telling this partner about a sexual fantasy of yours involving them. When you can’t even predict what lines in the sand a person may have, it is not worth walking into that particular sexual minefield.

There is one exception to this rule: Most people involved in a polyamorous community have weird political views on sexual relationships. If the person hasn’t been kicked out of a “sane” poly community, they are normally very safe for sexual interaction, so long as you know the rules of that poly community. That said, be sure it is a “sane” poly community, as some polyamorous communities have rules that are difficult to predict. Fortunately, these communities are fairly easy to spot and broadcast their craziness very loudly. If, for instance, senior members of a poly community demand you pay for things or otherwise attempt to extract money from you, stay away. Depending on the regional culture of your poly community, it may not have clear “thought leaders” making it harder to vet, but we might go so far as to suggest doing online checks of any clear leaders of a poly community with which you might become involved to search for potential warning signs.

People Who Are Visibly Unstable

We are not telling you to avoid potential partners just because they suffer from a mental illness. People with a wide variety of disorders, such as bipolar disorder, depression, OCD, or Asperger’s can make spectacular partners, even in long-term relationships, so long as they don’t lean on their disorders as excuses for personal failures (in which case you will find yourself in a, “it wasn’t my fault; X made me do it, so I am actually the victim,” dynamic whenever they do something shitty).

We merely recommend avoiding anyone exhibiting strange speech behavior (e.g., repeating the same things over and over, use of made-up words, rhyming words without meaning, difficult-to-understand speech), engaging in absurdly reckless activities (like provoking a law enforcement officer or hitting on a random homeless person during your date), or scarily narcissistic behaviors around service staff. This might seem obvious, but all judgment calls become difficult when a person is hot enough. Be aware that these warning signs often represent tips of very, very large icebergs.

People Addicted to Hard, Highly Addictive Drugs

In this case, we are referring to drugs like meth and heroin. No matter how “good” a person may be, certain addictions can make even the best-intentioned people do truly terrible things. An addicted partner’s knowledge of your home and its contents is not… ideal in such scenarios. It is also not great if you come to mind as a blackmail target for someone with a serious addiction. There are very few effective methods for neutralizing an individual addicted to a hard drug that sees you as a potential source of resources.

Vengeful People

Avoid anyone who mentions having punished an ex for a perceived slight on the first couple dates. Anyone who does this is signaling to you what they do to people who cross them, which implies they are vindictive and likely to take the time and effort required to screw up other domains of your life after being dumped.

People Out of Your League Who Make The First Move

If someone way out of your league eagerly engages you, it is too good to be true. In such instances, you are almost certainly being subjected to some sort of scam and simply have not figured it out yet. The only exception here is if it is clear you have a really high individual desirability for some unique reason that is not valued on the market (for example, if you are an amputee and this person has a devotee kink—a kink for people with disabilities). If this is the case, high-value individuals will certainly signal clearly to you what that thing is.

Desperate People

Upon encountering a target who is obviously extremely desperate, you may think to yourself: “This will be easy; I am way out of their league, and no one will sleep with them anyway, so this will be a low-investment endeavor.” You are almost certainly extremely wrong.

People far below your league often become very high-investment liaisons because they are uniquely scared that you will leave them or not follow through with whatever fantasy about your relationship they create in their minds. Desperate people are also much more likely to have very little relationship experience and thus can also act hurtfully without realizing it.

People Who Clearly Do Not Like You Or Your Kind

Sex with someone who you know to not like you—or sex with someone who is associated with a group or organization that does not like you (or your race, gender, social group, company, family, whatever)—is extremely risky. People do not randomly decide to have one-night stands with people they hate, despite what stories depict. Giving someone who hates you access to your life, body, and reputation is risky.

Emotionally Manipulative People

Avoid anyone who attempts to use some form of emotional manipulation to obtain sex. A common example of emotional manipulation manifests as someone goading you into consenting to sex with them by eliciting a sense of pity (i.e., pity sex). Anyone willing to engage in emotional manipulation to gain sex has demonstrated they are willing to attempt to emotionally blackmail you into sex. Any concession to this behavior is an admission on your part that their tactics are effective on you.

How to Avoid Dangerous and Unstable Long-Term Partners

Avoiding dangerous, unstable long-term partners is much easier than avoiding risky sexual partners and has a far more profound impact. To give you an idea of the damage that a risky long-term partner can cause, recall that it is common for abusive partners to threaten to murder their own kids if their abused partner leaves them (and some follow through on these threats).

What follows is a clear list of warning signs exhibited by hazardous long-term partners. Obviously, not everything on the following list of red flags indicates that someone is crazy enough to murder children, but each of the following characteristics nevertheless indicates life-destroying levels of danger.

Avoid with all your power:

Partners who demand money or gifts
Partners who would be vindictive in a divorce
Partners who keep score and hold grudges
Inherently suspicious partners
Partners with significantly different worldviews/values/objective functions (especially if they act as though the mismatch is not a big deal)
Partners who refuse to value emotional control (that is, control over their personal emotions)
Partners who make threats or pose ultimatums
Partners who actively seek sexual validation from others
Partners who internalize negative character traits as core elements of their identities

Partners Who Demand Money or Gifts

Anyone who demands—or suggests that their affection is dependent on or given in exchange for—money or gifts, is a dangerous partner. A person poses a significant threat even if the gifts/monetary sums they demand are very small. The hedonic treadmill effect will only lead initially modest demands to escalate. If you rescue someone from poverty and give them a spectacular lifestyle, they will acclimate to it fairly quickly and expect more. Such partners will pressure you to make stupid business decisions that may ultimately lead you to lose everything.

At one point, a visiting speaker in one of Malcolm’s Stanford Business School classes was asked: What is the number one reason why Stanford Business School grads lose their fortunes? His reply was that—by a long shot—wives and husbands drove his classmates’ financial downfalls. They married people who pressured them to make dumb business and investment decisions because they were not content with what they had. These partners always left them after they lost their money and just married other rich people. They had no qualms about pressuring their spouses into making risky business decisions because the cost to them was lower than it was to their partner.

Stay away from those who measure their self-worth by their wealth or ability to signal wealth—unless they plan to be the individual in the relationship generating and accumulating that wealth and expect absolutely no contribution from you (though in that case, you yourself may be a status signal to them—a trophy wife/husband—and will be discarded the moment you cease to function as a flattering accessory, assuming they think they can do better).

Partners Who Would Be Vindictive in a Divorce

Do you think your prospective partner may be vindictive in a divorce? Would this person ever attempt to punish someone for leaving them? Someone who even subtly demonstrates this capacity should be avoided like the plague. Vindictive behavior is not acceptable, no matter how much someone may attempt to convince you it is. Taking time to hurt someone that could otherwise be spent on self-improvement or looking for the next partner indicates poorly ranked priorities in the extreme.

If you suspect your partner may be prone to vindictive behavior, even if everything else about them is perfect and you love them, we still strongly recommend you leave them over just this one sign. You will likely regret ignoring our warning if you maintain your current course with someone exhibiting these risk factors.

Partners Who Keep Score and Hold Grudges

Anyone who refers to past slights in current arguments is a liability. Someone willing to bring up your past wrongdoings in a current argument before you initiate a long-term relationship will likely escalate such behavior down the road (they will have more fodder with time, after all). Such behavior is uniquely toxic because it creates an environment of fear around bringing up grievances, specifically a fear that airing grievances will trigger defensive behavior in which an old fight is unearthed. Not only does this mean every argument you have becomes this argument plus all arguments you have had throughout the course of your entire relationship, but it also means perceived grievances often are not aired until after they have reached an explosive point.

Fortunately, the problem of grudge-holding and scorekeeping in arguments is easy to address as long as you can come to a point at which all parties agree that such behavior is unacceptable and sub-optimal and that the team must work together to end it. This is often a necessary discussion early in a relationship, as many people grew up around this kind of behavior and thus must unlearn it. Just don’t commit to anything long term with a partner until they show both willingness and capacity to quit their grudge-holding and scorekeeping habits. We would go so far as to make this a red line for proposing to someone or accepting a proposal: No proposal should be accepted until you have trained your partner to permanently scrub this behavioral pattern from their life.

Partners Who Are Inherently Suspicious

Beware of anyone who is inherently suspicious of you, especially if they are suspicious of your cheating on them. There is no greater sign that someone is breaking the terms of your relationship contract than the demonstration of clear suspicion. If your partner ever secretly accesses your texts, phone, or email without your permission, consider it a severe warning sign.

An equally bad sign is if, during the normal course of your relationship, you need to access one of your partner’s online/social media accounts (maybe they are overseas without an internet connection and would benefit from you handling their account) and your partner refuses to let you do so. This is just as much a demonstration of lack of trust as snooping (or a sign that they are hiding something from you). Some limits on partner account access are entirely justified—especially if one partner is prone to accidentally deleting information, forgetting which account they are logged into, etc.—but it is nevertheless a bad sign if a partner does not even allow supervised entry into their accounts.

While this isn’t a big deal in short-term relationships, someone that does not trust you or who you do not trust is unlikely to make a strong long-term partner. The statement, “I am willing to commit to spending the next few decades with this person,” and “but, I fundamentally don’t trust them,” are not congruent. The voice in the back of your head telling you not to trust a partner with your email password should also be telling you not to trust them with the power marriage gives them over you. In general, partners in a healthy long-term relationship should expect to have full access to all of each other’s social media accounts, phones, email accounts, etc. You should be able to trust the good judgment and respect of any long-term partner you would accept into your life.

The exception: Privacy makes sense when you know someone is a good partner for you, but openly disapproves of some aspect of your life of which they are aware (maybe the type of porn you watch). Such cases are common and relationships can still function fine with them, so as a society, it makes sense to set up moderate expectations of privacy even within a long-term relationship.

Partners With Significantly Different Worldviews / Values / Objective Functions

If you and your partner subscribe to two different religions, or if your partner wants kids and you do not, you are already shouldering significant opportunity costs. A partner with congruent values and/or worldviews would likely help you maximize your objective function (the thing(s) you want to maximize in life) with far greater efficiency and ease than a partner whose values and worldview are different. A partner with different values and objectives in life may even actively hamper your ability to pursue and align with what matters to you most.

If your partner is aware that your worldviews, religions, values, or objective functions do not match well and behaves as though this is not a serious problem, beware. Such behavior indicates that they are willing to overlook and downplay large potential problems in favor of relationship stability. In such cases, be vigilant of other problems that this partner is downplaying.

In a worst-case scenario, your partner may assume that your philosophical mismatch will not be an issue because they expect you will eventually “come to your senses” and learn to see the world their way. A person who does not care at all about vastly different views, but otherwise cares about you, likely expects to convert you to their beliefs on a subject. These are issues that absolutely must be resolved before you initiate a long-term relationship with a clear plan of action.

All of this becomes 1000% more pertinent if a partner adheres to a religious tradition that believes in hell or some form of eternal punishment for not adhering to it—and yet they aren’t constantly attempting to convert you. An individual who literally believes your soul will be tortured for all eternity, but who is willing to ignore that for the chance of a relationship with you, clearly does not care about you as a person; instead, they primarily value the chance at a relationship with you. Someone who values a relationship with you over your own best interest is a terrible choice for a life partner.

If you look broadly at relationship research, you will find that people are far more willing to date those of different religious leanings than they are to marry them, implying that if you are dating someone from a different religious tradition, the odds of the relationship ending in marriage are much lower than they otherwise might be. In the US, 85% of marriages are between people of the same faith, while 72% of unmarried relationships are.

Also, keep in mind that for certain religious traditions, in-group marriage is more critical than it is for others. If you look at the stats on this, Mormons and Sikhs have very low rates of marrying outside their faith, whereas Jews marry outside their religion quite frequently.

To clarify: We are not saying that interfaith relationships do not work or should be seen as a major red flag. What we mark as a massive red flag are relationships with people of different religious backgrounds who downplay it as a complete non-issue and a topic to be avoided—especially on important issues like how children will be raised.

Partners Who Do Not Value Emotional Control

Beware of anyone who does not understand that a failure to control their emotions is a bad thing. A person who sometimes explodes with anger or sadness and apologizes shortly afterward can be fixed over time through careful training and conditioning, but only if they are willing to label emotional outbursts as negative, unproductive, and unacceptable.

A person who yells at you over something and subsequently refuses to admit they were in the wrong to lose emotional control, even if they were right about what they were mad about, makes a very suboptimal long-term relationship prospect. If challenging your partner about losses of emotional control—whether those losses of judgment entail yelling or sobbing—means broaching a “touchy subject,” either succeed in convincing this person that it is not appropriate behavior and gain their commitment to fixing it or do not enter a long-term relationship with said person.

Partners Who Make Threats or Impose Ultimatums

A person’s habit of getting what they want through threats or ultimatums (e.g., “Do this thing for me or I will humiliate you/punish you/hurt you/deprive you of something/falsely accuse you of something”) dies hard. Whereas we have found that some behaviors can be changed if an intervention takes place in time, we do not consider this red flag behavior to be worth the risk unless it can be fully erased before engagement.

Partners Who Seek Constant Sexual Validation from Strangers and Acquaintances

Beware of individuals who fish for sexual validation, such as men who boast about their number of sexual partners or women who frequently mention or solicit interest from others for no particular reason. If, for example, your partner’s Instagram feed is comprised mostly of flirty, “sexy” pictures of them, you must acknowledge that this person has a nontrivial drive to secure sexual attention. Such people are not posting randomly; they are posting in pursuit of a certain emotion and trying to create a certain public image.

People seeking sexual validation are typically poor partners in long-term relationships for two reasons:

As we age, libido can change. This leads to different levels of sexual interaction throughout a relationship. If your partner gains a large amount of their personal validation from those sexual interactions, this can be devastating to them emotionally and create very high odds of cheating.
As we age, our value as a sexual object decreases in the eyes of society. If sexual attention and validation comprise a huge source of self-worth for an individual, their “sex display” behavior will increase over time to a point at which it will become counter toward a productive adult life—or this person will have a major emotional breakdown and begin to define their self-worth based on something else. This could end up being something positive like “being a good parent,” or it could be something negative. Whatever it is, the fact that you cannot predict it makes this individual a risky long-term partner.

Partners Who Incorporate Negative Character Traits into Their Core Identities

Anyone who self identifies with a negative character trait is worth avoiding. Those who take great pride in being sassy, being a drama queen, drinking too much, getting a little wild, losing control on occasion, or being prone to passionate rages are dangerous and make for dangerous long-term partners. Any attempt to improve such partners will be received as a personal attack, as these improvements would also require that these people shed an aspect of their identity that they treasure. These issues might be easy to overlook early in a relationship, but with time, the damage caused by a partner’s apparently unassailable bad behavior will snowball.

A Call for Introspection

Be acutely aware that you are just as likely as a potential partner to exhibit any of the red flags listed above. Your present personality, behavior, and motivations may make you a terrible sexual and/or relationship candidate and a genuine danger to others. If you find you have trouble maintaining human relations over time or the majority of your exes dislike you, the most likely source of your problems is you.

The best place to begin troubleshooting is with your own personality and behavior. It would serve you well to re-read through the red flag behaviors listed above from a strictly introspective perspective in hopes of identifying toxic behaviors you can correct.

False Red Flags

We have all picked up many sets of “default red flags” from society that we are supposed to use to identify potentially dangerous partners. You may notice that while the red flags listed above have some overlap with societal defaults, some that you may have expected might be missing. Society has done a terrible job of judging how a relationship should be structured in the current age; this failure extends to societal labeling of potential red flags in partners.

Do not mark the following as automatic triggers to reject a potential partner:

Partners who suffer from mental illnesses
Partners who suffer from addictions
Partners who exhibit controlling behavior
Partners who do not conform to societal ideals
Relationships in which one partner voluntarily surrenders power to another partner
Partners who have strange kinks

Partners Suffering from Mental Illness

While we already mentioned this in passing, the mere presence of mental illness is not a red flag by any means. Pharmacological and psychiatric treatments have advanced considerably over the past half-century, making many previously untenable conditions entirely manageable. Mental illnesses are only really dangerous if an individual refuses treatment or is prone to flippantly going off their meds when life seems back on track. While working in psychiatry in his early career, Malcolm observed that this was always a huge problem with patients who had more severe conditions: Often when the treatment was working, and their problems went away, people suffering from severe mental illnesses would incorrectly assume that they didn’t need the treatment anymore.

However, while mental illness itself is not a huge red flag, we would strongly recommend caution when considering a long-term relationship with anyone who identifies strongly with one. Some people like to make mental illness a major aspect of their self-identities. This can be a big problem because it means they are likely to use their mental illness as an excuse for bad behavior and see a request to improve bad behavior as an attack on their identity. A mental illness is never an excuse for failing to realize your goals for an ideal self; mental illness is just another small roadblock, and we all have roadblocks.

Partners Suffering from Addictions

While we strongly caution against relationships with individuals who have addictions to hard drugs that frequently lead to thievery and other violent acts, we often see individuals leave partners for lower-order drugs and habits that do not significantly affect their lives outside of shortening their personal lifespans. Nicotine, pot, video games, and even alcohol can be fairly innocuous, yet are often cited as red flags.

We are not encouraging you to marry a drunk (someone who allows being intoxicated to interfere with their career and relationships), but there is a huge difference between an alcoholic and a drunk. Marrying an alcoholic is OK; marrying a drunk is highly ill-advised. It is possible to drink way too much alcohol (Winston Churchill, for example) while still not allowing it to negatively impact your life in a way that makes lofty goals or a successful relationship all that difficult to achieve. The same holds for other lower-order drugs. So long as they do not completely control a partner’s life, self-identity, or behavior, they do not warrant, per our calculations, the termination of a relationship based on them alone—though they are certainly a negative.

You may argue that someone who drinks a lot but doesn’t allow it to affect their life is not an alcoholic. We would argue anyone who clearly has an addiction to the consumption of alcohol is an alcoholic. This is a semantic differentiation people use to not address their failings. You also may argue that Churchill was not an alcoholic; we would point you to the historical record, which shows he drank 1.5 bottles of champagne or wine daily along with five to six ounces of whiskey or brandy. It is very possible to be addicted to alcohol or any other drug without it having a massive negative impact on one’s potential; do not use this as a free pass to ignore the health effects of an addiction.

All that said, it is a huge and immediate red flag if a partner ever blames behavior on an addiction. Saying, “I only did this because I was drunk/high,” and believing that such an excuse clears one from responsibility for the behavior should be a huge red flag. Such a person can easily justify any behavior.

Partners with Controlling Behavior

Controlling behavior, such as advice that you dump your current friend group and limits on when you may leave the house to go “partying,” is often contextualized as being a red flag or toxic. In some cases, this is textbook abusive behavior, but in many cases this behavior can be quite healthy. Behavior that would be described as controlling is common within most Pygmalion relationships and often plays a necessary role in permitting another individual to work with you to improve yourself. If you decide you want to improve your life with the help of your partner, you must be willing to accept controlling behavior from a partner who is willing to act as your coach.

Why are the strict regimes Olympic trainers set for the athletes they train not categorized as abuse? The athletes consent. The discomfort caused by these regimes is a product of a strategic, thoughtful effort in pursuit of a shared goal. Having a partner who pushes you hard to improve yourself in ways you want to improve can “appear” like extreme controlling behavior. The difference lies in consent and a shared vision for who you want to become.

Partners Who Do Not Conform to Societal Ideals

Do not let general societal hang-ups—which may have nothing to do with your personal needs or preferences—dictate which partners are and are not viable. In many cases, relationship types that are seen as suboptimal by society may be highly optimal for you.

Examples of this include:

Long-distance relationships
Relationships in which you and your partner sleep in separate bedrooms
A relationship without sex
Relationships in which your partner is permitted to have sex outside the relationship, but you are not
A relationship in which you only interact in a virtual environment

The fact that society may have a strong negative reaction to your relationship does not mean the relationship itself is inherently negative or toxic. So long as your relationship has an internal, logical consistency to its rules and those rules work to the ultimate benefit of both parties, we would consider it to be good.

Notes from the Research:

One in four couples sleep in separate beds.
Some research shows sleeping in separate beds may help with sleep.

Relationships in Which One Partner Voluntarily Surrenders Power to Another Partner

There appears to be a weird—one might even argue unnatural—fetishization of power in Western society.

Even groups that celebrate the fact that people want different things from a relationship express discomfort with the idea that some individuals enjoy surrendering power or operating under others within a dominance hierarchy. For example, polyamorous communities frequently belittle the concept of someone “belonging” to someone else. This discomfort even appears in the BDSM communities of all places, which often go on and on about how the sub is really the one with the power (a sub is the subordinate partner in a dominant-submissive coupling).

Power is not intrinsically good or bad. In fact, there are many logical—even enlightened—reasons why a person may decide they would prefer to not have power. Power is inversely proportional to responsibility. If you have power and you fail at something, then it is your fault. If, however, someone has power over you and you fail, then it is their fault.

Even if society stigmatizes the choice to relinquish power to another, many people possess the mental maturity and self-awareness required to admit to themselves that they would rather surrender power than risk having to take responsibility for failure to achieve their goals—either over their entire life or specific portions of it (such as their career, their kids, their style, etc.). This manifests not only in relationships, but also in careers: Many people who have the skills, opportunity, and resources to start their own companies or climb higher in their careers choose to remain in a comfortable position within other organizations, leaving bigger problems and more responsibility to the professionals above them in the ranks.

In addition to granting one a “get out of responsibility free” card to a certain extent, the surrender of power allows you to turn off some taxing and unpleasant aspects of your cognition, which in turn unlocks new tiers of emotional states not available to individuals who choose to assume power in life.

The idea that all humans everywhere are always better off being their own masters seems to have originated in the Western cultural tradition and come into being fairly recently. This bias certainly did not yet exist at the time of The Great Chain Of Being, a belief that all beings existed in a hierarchy (God -> King -> Nobles -> . . . -> father -> mother ->child -> animal) common throughout all Western cultures only a few hundred years ago. Favoritism of self-determination also does not seem to have been appropriated from Eastern traditions or indigenous populations during the time of colonialism.

Society’s present phobia around the surrender of power appears to be tied to the emergence of capitalism in the West and an association between power and wealth. This general phobia of power relinquishment could also be a reaction to chattel slavery, but we doubt this, as the ideas spread aligns more with the spread of capitalism than with chattel slavery.

Humans evolved to thrive in a world of servants and masters, serfs, and lords. It is likely that to some extent our cognition has mechanisms in place that are meant to help the serfs, servants, and conquered people survive and breed. The selective pressures on these cognitive mechanisms were likely stronger than the mechanisms meant to assist the cognition of rulers and conquering people (especially considering that throughout history, there have always been far more servants than masters—and a servant messing up is more likely to cull them from the gene pool than a master messing up). Even in present-day situations with strict dominance hierarchies, the only way to gain a position of dominance is through becoming skilled at holding a subservient position (think of military hierarchies, for example). This would further increase the pressure on humans being more cognitively optimized to be servants than masters.

In other words, the mental state a human enters when they are able to accept a position of servitude may be more cognitively optimized and “natural” to the human condition than the power-hungry mental state Western society forces on us. This would also explain why both men and women prefer to be submissive in some surveys of dom/sub kink participants (but not all)—this is something we discuss in detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality where we frame it as a question of whether or not humans should be thought of as a “slave race”.

Personal diatribes aside: A relationship in which one individual unconditionally submits themselves to another in every aspect of their existence because they judge the other to be worthy of that submission is not necessarily bad.

Right now, such relationships are relegated to small kink niches such as the Goreans, Taken in Hand, and 24/7 Total Power Exchange.

Partners with Strange Kinks

So your partner is into weird stuff… Like really weird stuff. This must be a sign of psychological damage, right? A giant red flag?

In The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, we conducted a fairly large study, among other things, we checked for a correlation between unusual arousal patterns and abusive behavior. This relationship simply didn’t appear in the data. What turns a person on is for the most part not their choice.

Limiting your partner pool to only those with vanilla sexual interests will significantly limit your options without improving the average quality of your now-more-limited pool of candidates. Filtering out those with strange kinks only makes sense if you have a specific religious motivation for doing so or if a partner insists on living out their strange sexual fantasies with you, and that is not something you want to make a part of your life.

Hurting People in Relationships

etting good at relationships and keeping a partner happy is like getting good at anything else: We will all fail a lot initially and learn from those failures. Failing in a relationship usually involves hurting someone—even when doing everything right and bending over backward in an attempt to not cause harm.

This does not mean we shouldn’t try to minimize the damage we do while on our sexual and romantic escapades—if not for others’ sake, for our own. Not only may a hurt partner try to retaliate in some way, but most humans who lack the good fortune of being born as psychopaths feel tremendous pain when they realize they have hurt someone. That pain can linger for years, emerging every time something triggers reflection on the incident.

How To Avoid Hurting Relationship Partners

We could write volumes about the various precautions one can take to avoid hurting a long-term partner. Rather than waste precious minutes regurgitating common sense into readers’ mouths like a mother bird, we will share three tips that are considered by our friends to be less obvious.

First, compliment partners when they achieve things they value (e.g., get good grades, break a personal record while exercising, exert emotional control, etc.). Only complimenting a partner on things you value can come off as self-interested and may not create the same emotional reward in them as being complimented for something they value. Relationship satisfaction improves on all sides through consistent and frequent deployment of gestures that improve a partner’s mood. That said, this tactic will not work among those who use a Dominance Lure to secure a partner, as regular compliments and attempts to do nice things for your partner will undermine the lopsided balance of power that makes the relationship appealing to the target.

Second, if emotional investment or attention from a partner is important, request it clearly and directly. To subtly signal needs to a partner is to demand that they always monitor and analyze even the slightest of mood fluctuations. This sets people up to be hurt when they mistakenly assume they are being ignored (when in reality a cue is too subtle to be noticed, or the partner expected to pick up certain signals is too busy with their own problems to notice it one day), Such behavior ultimately leaves one partner hurt and the other confused.

Finally, it is easy to get into a pattern of romantic gestures that ultimately feel routine and hollow. Romantic gestures can sometimes begin to be more a sign of your financial success or leisure time than a celebration of your partner’s dreams. An easy way to remedy this is to note major milestones related to a partner’s goals and reward each milestone that is achieved.

How To Avoid Hurting Sexual Partners

Just as you will inevitably hurt people with whom you have longer-term relationships, it is almost surprisingly easy to hurt someone through a short-term sexual encounter. Let’s review a few ways this can happen and discuss how such damage can be avoided.

If someone comes off as emotionally unstable, especially if they have extreme political, social, or religious views, avoid sex with them no matter how eager they are. Anecdotally, we have observed that these people often have a habit of finding ways to convince themselves that someone else hurt them because victimhood reinforces their understanding of how the world works. In many cases, social, political, and religious extremists can raise their social status within their extremist communities’ dominance hierarchies by claiming that an outsider hurt them. Their convincing themselves that you did something that hurt them can cause almost as much pain as you actually hurting them. Do not give such people ammunition to shoot themselves in the foot.

Assuming that a guy has not indicated that he likes being humiliated, it is best to always pretend that his penis is on the larger side vis a vis those of your past sexual partners—unless this would be an obvious lie. This way, even if he is a bit smaller than average, he can still think he has the largest penis of men with whom you have been intimate (assuming that is believable—otherwise just don’t draw attention to it). Remember that for most guys, sex is as much about validating their own sense of virility as it is about any actual pleasure gained from the encounter. Sexually inexperienced women sometimes try to brag about the large penis size of previous male sexual conquests in an attempt to raise their own perceived value through an association with higher-value men, which will needlessly hurt their present male partners.

On a related note, those not actively trying to humiliate a partner for sexual reasons (some partners clearly request humiliation, explaining it yields sexual gratification) should not comment on any part of a partner’s body being abnormal after they are naked. If someone has taken off their clothes, they have let their guard down. Judgmental comments in this context will not aid a dominance-based sexual strategy. For those attempting to implement a Dominance Lure: Do not “neg” someone after they have consented to sexual interaction—it will cause them to feel unsafe making themselves vulnerable in the future and will not help odds of enjoyable or future sexual encounters.

When using dating websites, ask to connect with targets on another image-heavy social media platform before meeting them in person (especially a platform like Facebook where other people can post and tag photos of this person, which may be more realistic)—this makes it far easier to weed out cases of catfishing. This method is only part of a complete screening investigation, as someone can have many photos of themselves online and still look entirely different (and categorically worse) in person, but it still weeds out a non-trivial percentage of cases.

Not all catfishing happens intentionally. Sometimes people simply think they look best in photos that didn’t show how physically unfortunate they may happen to be. Ultimately cutting a date short after it comes out that one (or both partners) mislead each other about their physical or social realities can really hurt all parties involved, so don’t skimp on diligence, but also plan for a soft landing should, despite doing plenty of preemptive homework, the first date be a bust and require early termination. Meet in a public space and make first dates intentionally short and brief (with room for expansion should all be OK). Propose to meet over evening drinks and not dinner, late morning coffee and not lunch, and at locations close to public transport and other activities rather than remote places that might require a humiliating, long, lonely ride home.

Consensual sex that later comes to be regretted can cause as much emotional pain as some non-consensual sex. While this reality does not fit into the political agendas of some people, it is an apparent fact. Avoid casual sex with colleagues, employees, teammates, and those connected to important friends. High schoolers deciding to date early would be best served by avoiding sexual interaction with classmates entirely, sticking to their age group but focusing on isolated summer camp flings or students attending nearby—but not integrated—schools.

Finally, bear in mind that first-timers need (and by many measures deserve) more attention and caution (and should exercise far more caution themselves when selecting a first sexual partner). Avoid sex with virgins—especially virgin females—should there not be time or interest in investing in at least a few months of casual dating afterward.

Virgin females’ brains react differently to sex than the brains of more experienced females and males. The studies we cited on oxytocin release declining in females after the first partner explain why this happens and how a female will experience an unusually high release of oxytocin with her first partner. Even a totally logical woman who really only wants sex has a high likelihood of developing an emotional attachment to her first sexual partner, especially if said partner makes an effort to make it a good experience for her (which, by the way, requires a bit of research; sleeping with a virgin requires different techniques). Sleeping with and summarily dumping a virgin female could hurt her in a manner that leaves a long-term impact on her life.

Abuse

buse is one of many topics that society refuses to engage with honestly. What we are allowed to say about abuse (without suffering severe social consequences) is quite limited. For example, we are socially compelled to say that the only acceptable response to abuse is to leave a relationship.

This childish virtue signaling is extremely destructive when it happens on a societal level. The uncomfortable reality is that sometimes it is better to stay in an abusive relationship than it is to leave one. Someone living with an emotionally manipulative partner who threatens to kill their kids should the relationship end—and may just be unstable enough to follow through on that threat—is better off maintaining the relationship and enduring abuse long enough to set up protections for their kids before terminating the toxic relationship.

The platitude stating “the correct answer is always to leave” helps no one but the person saying it, who feels good about the fact that they live in a fair world with easy answers. Sometimes people really do follow through on their threats. Real people really die because virtue-signalers want to feel good about themselves and give these victims thoughtless, politically correct advice. Leaving a highly abusive relationship is risky and a lot of work, especially if the abused partner is financially dependent on the abuser, if the abuser has power in society, and/or if kids are involved.

The world isn’t a kind place. Many abused people look at the dangers of leaving versus staying in an abusive relationship and recognize that each alternative is fraught with danger. Pragmatists accept that sometimes life involves a choice between two bad options with no clear answer.

Optional Thought Experiment: A good case to look into if you want to think deeper on this is Dina Ali Lasloom. What action would you have pressured her to take?

Politically correct, societally condoned views of abuse can leave people trapped in abusive relationships for longer-than-necessary periods of time. If you think you might be in an abusive relationship, but everyone to whom you turn for help insists that you immediately leave your partner, how can you move forward? By reflexively giving victims the same answer without thinking through their unique situation or internalizing the long-term damage the advice may cause victims, many sources of potential help inadvertently train victims to not seek assistance. We learned from one victim of abuse—who stayed in her abusive relationship for years—that many of the women’s shelters to which she turned refused to take in abuse victims unless they promise to leave their abusive partners, (at least this was her personal experience and she blamed the length she stayed in the relationship partially on this). This policy, be it informal or formal, means these victims do not even get the sanctuary needed to think clearly about whether or not it is really worth the risk to leave their partners permanently, which, especially when kids are involved, is often a very real risk.

Talking with victims of abuse when writing this book really helped us better understand just what a tricky and nuanced situation, it can be to find oneself in an abusive relationship. Abuse is not like other relationship pitfalls and not something to which one can offer glib, one-size-fits-all solutions. That said, thinking on this topic and some of the one-size-fits-all answers presented in response to abuse cases inspired us to explore why people are abusive and investigate the prevailing narratives around the topic.

The Control Theory

The belief that abuse is about control—and specifically that people become abusive because they want more control—has attained significant purchase in popular consciousness.

We do not buy this theory at all. So far as we can see, there is just not much statistical evidence to back it up, and this theory around control feels like the kind of just-so story invented by someone attempting to explain a behavior they don’t understand.

We agree that sometimes people are classically abusive with the goal of control, but we see no evidence that control correlates with abusive behavior any more than a myriad of behavioral patterns that correlate with hurting others in the name of self-service.

Classical abuse appears to fall into four broad categories:

Learned/trained behavior patterns
Fetishistic behavior (See The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality)
Self-validation (the individual associates abuse with a character trait they want to embody, such as masculinity or power)
Intentional strategies to prevent a partner from leaving

We will focus on the fourth instigator of abuse, as it dovetails several concepts discussed in this book.

Abuse as a Relationship Strategy

Some adopt abusive behavior as an outright relationship strategy. Unpleasant as it may be to admit this, some forms of proto-abuse and abuse are effective at extracting certain elements of value from a relationship. Some people genuinely do not care whether their partner likes them—or at least they would rather be in a relationship with a partner who hates them than to be in no relationship at all.

Abusive relationship strategies typically fall into one of a few categories. The five core “game plans” common across most intentionally abusive relationships frequently involve:

Attempts to lower an individual’s self-assessed market value
Attempts to lower an individual’s actual market value
Attempts to introduce an externality to a breakup
Attempts to emotionally drain a partner
Attempts to prevent an individual from meeting or interacting with other potential partners

Let’s explore each of these in turn.

Attempts to Lower a Partner’s Perceived Market Value

A common strategy we have already addressed involves lowering a partner’s perceived aggregate market value. Essentially, the abusive partner will attempt to make you feel as though other people would not want to date you were you to leave this abusive partner, suggesting that you are of lower value than you really are. If your partner ever suggests other people would not want you, be aware that this is not normal behavior: This person is willing to hurt you emotionally—not in order to improve you, but in order to reduce the odds that you will leave them. A partner demonstrating a willingness to hurt you in an attempt to keep you with them is an early and easy sign that much worse things are to come and that your feelings fundamentally do not matter to this person.

Attempts to Lower a Partner’s Actual Market Value

Intentionally abusive partners may also increase the costs associated with leaving them through tactics that actually hurt your market value by ruining your looks, forcing you to quit your career, etc. This strategy can be harder to spot because often these tactics can have more innocent explanations (i.e., you, independently, let your own appearance slide, or you decided to quit your job to become a stay-at-home parent for the best interest of the kids). A good way to catch a partner leveraging this tactic is to look for instances in which your partner has hindered your attempts to quit a bad habit or cast off a vice. Consider an alcoholic trying to quit whose partner keeps asking if they want drinks. Imagine someone trying to lose weight whose partner keeps presenting them with unhealthy dishes. This is not normal behavior in relationships. This behavior is intentionally designed to cripple the victim and is most commonly performed by individuals with incredibly low self-esteem who find comfort in the idea of “bringing their partner down to their level.”

Attempts to Introduce an Externality to a Breakup

It is easy to spot when a partner tries to introduce an externality to the act of leaving them. This means they try to increase the “cost” of leaving them through something, usually a threat. This threat can be self-focused, “I would see no reason to go on living if you left me,” or externally focused, “I will ruin your life/beat you if you leave me.” It is not normal for a person to say: If you leave me, I will do X. Even if X = something flattering, such as “never love another woman again,” this partner is still trying to make any decision to leave them hurt you more. And this is the key to not separating out classical definitions of abuse from proto-abusive behaviors—if we ignore proto-abuse and only focus on “classical abuse” we may not raise the red flags when we hear “I will never love a woman again” that we would over phrases like “I will kill myself if you leave me” even though they are different levels of output of the exact same behavior pattern with the exact same intention, to make leaving them hurt you more.

Attempts to Emotionally Drain a Partner

Draining one’s partner as a strategy is different from the others discussed here. Most abusive behaviors are primarily implemented to prevent a partner from leaving the abuser, while this one can actually just be to help the abuser “get off,” win arguments more often, or in rare instances, just feel powerful.

Attempts to emotionally drain or demoralize a partner typically fall into two categories. The first is just straight up hurting a partner, either physically or emotionally, for the sake of the emotional impact hurting them will have—this one is pretty straightforward, so we won’t wax on it. The second involves getting the victim to begin to question their sanity and the validity of their emotions. The most common technique used here is gaslighting, getting a person to question their own memory by systematically disputing its validity but can extend to other areas that are not as commonly labeled as red flags such as systematic sleep deprivation.

Attempts to Block a Partner from Meeting or Socializing With Others

Attempting to prevent a partner from meeting other potential partners can manifest in many ways. Such attempts may involve either directly exerting editorial control over a partner’s friends removing any that are too attractive or the wrong gender, but may also involve spying on their email, monitoring how they spend money or demanding access to their phone—all with the intention of “catching them” interacting with people “they shouldn’t be with.”

The intent behind this kind of intentional abuse is to either prevent a partner from realizing that there might be other options, prevent a partner from interacting with temptations due to a complete lack of faith in even a basic level of impulse control, or intent to prevent a partner from discovering their partner is not “that great.”

Still, there is a big difference between a partner who says: “I don’t like that a friend keeps giving you meth and therefore if you want to date me, you can’t hang out with them” and saying: “You can’t hang out with a friend because they are too attractive,” or even just a blanket demand that you not spend time alone with the gender you find attractive. Don’t confuse a partner’s attempts to improve your life with a partner’s attempts to prevent you from meeting with perceived competition.

The key takeaway regarding these intentionally abusive strategies is that, while they may be implemented by someone who loves you, they will never be implemented by someone who cares about your personal wellbeing, and that is what makes these behaviors such important tells.

Lying in Relationships

eople lie in relationships and when dating—a lot. Most partners lie for convenience, to inflate their perceived value in the eyes of a target, or to convince a prospective partner that they are in a different market than they are. Statistics show us that lying differs across genders: Women lie more about their weight, age, and interest in long-term relationships, whereas men lie about their height, income, and interest in casual sex.

Intentional Misrepresentation in Relationships

Almost everyone tries to put forward their best foot early in a relationship. Does it really matter if a prospective partner knows that you had fairly serious cosmetic surgery? Should a prospective partner really be informed that you do not share their religious beliefs? Is now really the right time to tell a target that you used to work as a prostitute? How important is it that a potential partner knows you are already in a polyamorous relationship on a first date? Is it really unethical to not tell a partner that you enjoy masturbating to yourself while crossdressing?

Misrepresentation is totally normal, and a tool used in the following dating strategies:

Misrepresentation because you are primarily looking for sex
Misrepresentation because you plan to tell your partner later
Misrepresentation because you plan to maintain the lie indefinitely
Misrepresentation of intended relationship lifespan

Misrepresentation Because You Are Primarily Looking For Sex

If both you and your partner are both primarily looking for sex, outside of disclosing sexually transmittable diseases and infections, misrepresentation is the norm and is unlikely to lead to significant negative consequences unless you make an enormous misjudgment about your target’s values. Misrepresentation is less benign if you are looking for sex and your target is looking for a relationship, but given how ineffective this strategy is, it is not terribly relevant, because a person looking primarily for a relationship will take significantly more time, money, and emotional investment when contrasted to someone looking for sex—relationship seekers are not worth the time of a Pragmatist looking primarily for sex.

Misrepresentation of facts presented to short-term sexual partners can yield enormous negative consequences in rare circumstances—specifically, circumstances in which something you think is insignificant is identity-shattering to your target.

Misrepresentation Because You Plan To Tell Your Partner Later

This strategy entails increasing your individual desirability in the eyes of your target by waiting to increase the emotional cost of leaving you before you drop bombs that you expect will negatively affect your desirability. While we would not recommend this strategy for more than a few secrets, it is fairly common and normal. In fact, we encourage anyone who has been with their present partner for less than three months to expect there are at least two significant individual-desirability-modulating personal details that this person is intentionally occluding.

This strategy is only stupid if you wait for a huge individual desirability increaser—like getting married or having children together—before you reveal something that could drastically affect your value in your partner’s eyes. Waiting until after you are married to tell your spouse that you do not want to have kids, or waiting until after you are pregnant to tell a partner that you never really enjoyed sex with them, is beyond idiotic. Such unpleasant reveals decrease each partner’s individual desirability.

When you tell a partner that you deceived them, there is a possibility that their opinion of you will decline significantly. Should that happen, this partner may come to regret ever meeting you. It is possible for both of you to hate each other and still have individual desirability to each other above your differential aggregate desirability and thus have a “good relationship,” but certainly not a good life (this can happen through something like having kids together). We would never encourage someone to build a long-term relationship on false pretenses by withholding potentially damaging personal details for more than a few weeks.

Misrepresentation Because You Plan To Maintain The Lie Indefinitely

While deciding to hide a personally damning detail permanently is less patently stupid than waiting until after you are married or expecting children to reveal whatever it is you are hiding, we would not call this an optimal strategy. While living a lie is not the worst thing in the world (certainly not as bad as Western society likes to pretend), doing so is not something worth opting into without very good reasons, and there are few legitimate justifications for such drastic measures.

The one exception here is anything that makes you non-viable as a partner in your society or any personal detail which would be dangerous for you to disclose. For example, if you get aroused when watching people die, you should probably keep that to yourself (not as uncommon as you would think; see The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality for more info on this). Even in this scenario, you are still strictly better off if your partner knows this about you and accepts it.

Misrepresentation of Intended Relationship Lifespan

In this strategy, one partner misleads another to believe that a relationship will last longer than planned. The classic example is the young trophy wife whose husband intends to discard her for a new model as soon as she is no longer physically attractive. This form of misrepresentation is easy to circumvent; simply avoid relationships in which you are of a much higher individual desirability to your partner earlier in your relationship contrasted with later in the relationship. In other words, do not marry someone who primarily values your looks, youth, physical fitness, or fertility unless you have a strong reason to believe they will stay with you once these things inevitably fade.

Unintentional Misrepresentation in Relationships Due to Unanticipated Changes

It is entirely possible to represent yourself as a certain type of partner, absolutely believe you will always be that type of partner, and be completely committed to being that type of partner all your life, only to be hit by unexpected circumstances later in life that completely change you as a person and break the representation you had originally made to a partner.

A person may genuinely be emotionally available during one period of their lives only to, through no fault of their own, experience an extended period of clinical depression after marriage and lose this availability. A person may lose their sex drive as they get older while their partner does not. A person may even have a deep sexual or personal awakening and come out as gay after years of marriage.

Such situations are inconvenient and require a reevaluation of the relationship when they arise. Changes may need to be made to ensure all partners still benefit from the relationship. In some cases, the relationship will need to be dissolved entirely.

Fortunately, it is typically easy to update the (often implied) contracts that define our relationships to ensure that all parties still benefit. For example, a person who loses their sex drive may be willing to consider opening a previously closed marriage to ensure the marriage is still beneficial to their partner. Through these contract renegotiations and adjustments, you may even find yourself in a much better relationship than you would have had otherwise, without any life changes forcing such renegotiation.

Unintentional misrepresentation of your characteristics as a partner is more problematic if unexpected changes are at least partially your fault. If, for example, you decide to stop eating in moderation and exercising after getting married and subsequently become overweight, breaking a representation you had previously made to a partner to always be as attractive and fit as you can be, you should have warned your partner you might not always work hard to maintain your health and appearance. The same goes for those with addictive tendencies they thought they had under control and neglected to mention (e.g., a shopping or gambling addiction), and those who cannot resist sex with an attractive, willing third party outside of the rules of the relationship.

If your misrepresentation in a relationship stems from a failure of self-control, you should have warned your partner that you had reason to expect future changes related to this lack of impulse control. People fail at self-control all the time. Most overweight people do not want to be overweight, and very few smokers want to be smokers. Those who succumb to suboptimal temptations are largely at the mercy of their partners and how they decide to react to this failure.

While “semi-unintentional” situations are still potentially remediable through contract renegotiation, they build significantly more resentment than totally unintentional changes. This is because they demonstrate to your partner your willingness to act in bad faith, something they now have to expect during contract renegotiation. In these circumstances, it is also extremely common for the partner who lost self-control to take a pre-emptive offensive stance to avoid having to address their personal failure. This will lead to them being unfairly aggressive in contract negotiations, pushing for a contract even more in their favor than it had been before, and attacking their partner with perceived slights to remove personal accountability for their failure.

The most optimal resolution to such situations involves the offending partner accepting complete responsibility for their offense. Any relationship that survives a negative change without the offending party taking responsibility for their failure is likely to become a miserable affair.

Defense Against Misrepresentation

As a social species, we are designed to detect lying. You will therefore likely catch most liars through small social tells. Still, it helps to know what you have in your “anti-deception” arsenal.

You may circumvent most lying entirely by teaching your partners that they do not need to lie to you. If a partner has decided to lie about looking for a long-term relationship instead of just sex, they are more likely to drop the charade if they believe you would be just as happy with either scenario. Should you exercise emotional control and do not blow up (either with anger or sadness) when a partner fesses up to mistakes and personal shortcomings, you will not train them to withhold such confessions out of fear there will be an emotional explosion. Obviously, this is easier said than done; even if you are able to completely control your emotional reactions, you will still likely want to demonstrate to your partners that bad behavior yields consequences. Even if you don’t explode at a partner for going on an un-sanctioned spending spree, you will still have to lock their card, return what can be returned, and have them walk through with you how they will prevent this from happening again, and alas, these consequences which give them a reason to lie about such actions.

You may also compromise your partner’s cognition. Lying is much harder to maintain in a compromised condition. The human default is to tell the truth; lying requires suppressing that instinct then performing the cognitively taxing task of coming up with a believable story in its place. Anything that exhausts inhibition is going to make someone less likely to lie and lie more sloppily.

Lies can also be detected through contradictions in a partner’s narratives. If, for example, you suspect your partner does not actually want a long-term relationship despite having expressed such desires, ask them questions about where they see themselves in ten years. Doing so will create a situation in which they find it difficult to model a fictional set of desires based on a proposed path (the long-term relationship) that they never intended to walk down. They may either visibly mentally stumble or describe their actual intended future, which has nothing to do with you.

By getting your partner to make decisions that are costly if they are lying, you may also detect lies. An example of this might be asking someone who says they plan to stay with you forever to marry you. Such a decision bears little cost if they are telling the truth and a high cost if they are not. That said, this tactic often backfires: Consider all the people out there who have the names of their ex-partners tattooed on their bodies.

Should you have access to them, you might also interview a partner’s exes. We frankly do not understand why this practice is not more common. This is an entirely logical way to determine how a person will act in a relationship. Besides, the practice is common in the professional world, in which prospective employers ask for references all the time so they might evaluate the potential value of relationships with far lower stakes. If someone has mostly negative relationships with their previous partners, you can safely assume there is something wrong with them—even if they will not admit it to themselves. If reading this makes you defensive, if it leads you to think: “It’s not my fault all my exes hate me!” then please try to picture the most incredulous-looking face your imagination can conjure—that is the face you should imagine us giving you right now.

Attachment Styles

umans have a strong impulse to sort themselves and others into categories. The world just feels more “right” when people fall into neat little boxes. This is likely because social class played a much bigger role in early societies than it does today. If you were a butcher from a family of butchers, that particular classification and status impacted not only the relations you were expected to have with other types of people, but also the personality you were meant to exhibit. By meeting societal expectations for “your kind,” you could increase your group’s support of you. Thus, humans have a natural inclination to both want to determine their “type” and the expectations of behavior patterns from that “type.”

There is presently a discrepancy between what may be an inbred desire to see the world through a group and class-based lens, and our current society in which there are stigmas against sorting people into groups and classes, be they be based on race, wealth, education, religion, occupation, or social class. These stigmas, combined with our vestigial longing to belong in clear groups with “natural” positions in the world, have given birth to a myriad of products and services that sell us stories about who we are and where we belong.

Clever entrepreneurs have invented totally new arbitrary categories into which their voracious customers may be comfortably nestled. We can find our places in the world by consulting astrologers, discussing our blood types (common in Asia), taking out an online quiz to find out what [Insert Show/Movie/Book/Whatever] character we are, or finding our Myers Briggs profiles.

The world of relationship psychology has even come up with its own special set of categories called “attachment styles,” which it lifted from early childhood research. This fact gives it the added bonus of being one of the many concepts in pop psychology that allows you to take no responsibility for your own failings and blame your parents.

Obviously if you give someone a quiz to test their attachment style, you will find that it correlates to certain behaviors, but the suggestion that someone who answers that they feel very protective of their partner will show higher mate-guarding behavior is hardly revolutionary. The attachment style school of thought also serves the underwhelming finding that certain behaviors cluster—that someone who is a bit of an inconsiderate jerk in one category is likely to be an inconsiderate jerk in others as well. We are especially amused that many assume their reported attachment style grants them permission to deflect their own failures of character onto their parents (though we can see why such claims make a concept more convenient to market).

Despite our obvious disdain toward this way of categorizing people, the popularity of attachment theory necessitates some discussion in this book. Basically, attachment theory divides people into four categories based on self-esteem (thoughts about self) and sociability (thoughts about others): Secure, Anxious-Preoccupied, Dismissive-Avoidant, and Fearful-Avoidant.

Secure

Those with a secure attachment style have high self-esteem and high sociability and hence are comfortable with both intimacy and independence. They agree with statements like: “It is relatively easy for me to become emotionally close to others,” “I am comfortable depending on others and having others depend on me,” and “I don’t worry about being alone or others not accepting me.”

Basically, those with “secure” attachment styles are normal, healthy adults—the type of people anyone could choose to be. Alas, because bad behavior is normalized through frameworks like this (which do not even hold true cross-culturally), we have to deal with the three other types of people.

Anxious-Preoccupied

Those with anxious-preoccupied attachment styles have poor self-esteem and positive sociality. They agree with statements like: “I want to be completely emotionally intimate with others, but I often find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like,” and “I am uncomfortable being without close relationships, but I sometimes worry that others don’t value me as much as I value them.”

Basically, these are people who try to secure emotional validation from their partners, and instead of just attempting a new strategy when that fails, they keep attempting the same strategy with higher levels of desperation. Look, if you are going to use your partner as a field from which to harvest validation, intentionally build your relationship with that goal in mind and clearly communicate the importance of your validation needs to your partner.

Dismissive-Avoidant

Those with dismissive-avoidant attachment styles have positive self-esteem and negative sociability. They identify with statements such as: “I am comfortable without close emotional relationships,” “It is important to me to feel independent and self-sufficient,” and “I prefer not to depend on others or have others depend on me.”

Basically, this category exists so people trying to sell this model can still market their services to people who are happy not being in relationships—because clearly those people are broken. We love how the literature on this group often notes how defensive they act in the face of the relationship psychologists who built the model and were apparently mentally unable to accept that someone could be happy and fulfilled without a relationship. People in this category also tend to be better at controlling their emotional states because they rely less than any other attachment style on other people for validation, but don’t worry: People trying to sell this model have found a way to spin this as a bad thing.

Fearful-Avoidant

These are people with both low self-esteem and low socialization. They agree with statements like, “I want emotionally close relationships, but I find it difficult to trust others completely, or to depend on them” and “I sometimes worry that I will be hurt if I allow myself to become too close to other people.”

Like the anxious-preoccupied group, these guys are desperate for validation and have a low opinion of themselves. Unlike the anxious-preoccupied group, they accept that they won’t get the validation they crave easily through relationships with others and that relationships with others might not be worth the effort or emotional risk. Of course, this is not seen as a sign of emotional intelligence and maturity, as a sane person would see it, but of trauma and abuse within this model.

A More Effective Way to Approach Attachment Styles

Instead of leaning on classifications, we recommend focusing on what, specifically, you need and how you will ensure that need is satisfied. If you think that you need more validation, spend less time classifying yourself and more time putting together a sound strategy for receiving that validation you so sorely need.

There are all sorts of ways to achieve emotional validation—many of which do not require other people. Humans appear to be born with different sensitivities to the validation others grant. One person may receive far more emotional output from the same validating statement than another, and this variance in response need not necessarily be the result of childhood trauma.

If feeling validated and achieving emotional actualization is important to you, focus on easy-to-secure sources of validation that yield a large and lasting emotional impact. Organize your life and relationships in such a way that you receive validating stimuli regularly. Identify a vein of emotional validation, then harvest that source as sustainably as possible. Of course, you could also decide that luxuriating in another person’s validation is just a subjective state of mind and that this state of mind may not be that important in the grand scheme of things. Ironically, accepting the latter significantly lowers most non-clinical anxiety—sadly, it also involves accepting that what other people think of you genuinely doesn’t matter, which is both difficult and objectively not always true.

There is one small useful piece of relationship strategy that can be gleaned from the attachment model: If your partner is relying on interactions with you as a source of personal validation, grant them the validation they so desperately desire when they come to you looking to harvest that resource. Why? If you are not forthcoming with validation when partners request it, one of two things will happen: Your validation-craving partner will find another source of validation to harvest (likely ending in their cheating on you and/or breaking up with you), or their mental condition will deteriorate, making them less effective as a partner, and generally annoying.

Conversely, if you rely on your partner for validation when you are otherwise emotionally compromised, take measures to ensure that (1) your partner knows this is part of the role they are signing up for in the relationship, (2) you clearly signal to your partner when you need validation (no subtle bids for attention), and (3) you have mutually recognized and perfected interactions that will provide you with this validation. For example, you may feel a very consistent flush of happiness when a partner compliments you on your cooking. If this is the case, communicate to your partner that those compliments are important to you, make a point of cooking some meals your partner can enjoy, and make a point of improving your culinary skills.

Keep in mind that building controls to ensure consistent delivery of desired validation among partners is not the only solution for dealing with anxiety or a desire for validation. This is merely the only solution that attachment theory recognizes. When one of us (Simone or Malcolm) is feeling like we need validation or are anxious, instead of seeking validation from the other, we articulate this illogical desire while noting its lack of utility and request help being talked down from our emotional state, having our anxiety put in context by a more sober mind, and being reminded how the person we want to be would react (with grace, dignity, and calm) to the same environmental stimuli.

Because we are emotionally attached to each other, our gut desire is not to highlight the illogical nature of certain feelings and divert attention from indulging in them. Like most humans, we feel an innate desire to comfort someone when they express vulnerability. That said, we understand that taking the emotionally indulgent path is not in anyone’s long-term best interest. By not rewarding pleas for validation and moments of anxiety, we can actually decrease instances of both overall.

With practice on both sides, you and your partner can arrive at a place where you understand that emotional indulgence is not in anyone’s long-term best interest. By not rewarding pleas for validation and moments of anxiety—and instead showing support for each other by bringing focus back to your values and logical solutions—you can actually decrease hunger for validation and waves of anxiety overall.

Bear in mind this approach does not involve partners emotionally shutting each other down and preventing each other from expressing vulnerability. Quite to the contrary, this approach requires greater vulnerability and emotional honesty than any attachment-theory-based solution. It takes a huge amount of intimacy, love, and trust for partners to not only acknowledge each other’s anxieties and discomforts (and their own), but also help them ride those emotional waves in a manner that serves their personal values and logical long-term best interests.

We have said it before and will say it again: Behavioral research makes it clear that indulging in an emotional state (e.g., punching a punching bag to “let out” anger) usually heightens that emotional state, increases the expression of that state in the future, and makes it more difficult to control. This is well backed in the literature. While suppressing emotional states compromises an individual’s cognition in the short term (like suppressing any idea does), doing so decreases expression of that emotion overall. If it were true that suppressing/redirecting an emotional impulse made it stronger, then counting to ten when you are angry would make you much angrier and yet we all anecdotally know of the “count to ten” method as an effective tool for lowering a negative emotional output. When you encourage negative emotions and indulge in them, you train yourself to express those emotions more (in adults at least; this is not quite as clear cut in children).

Beware that suppressing the outward expression of an emotion is different from successfully choosing not to indulge in an emotion. Merely suppressing the outward expression of an emotion can cause a physiological stress response, which may be damaging over time, as has been found in longitudinal studies of professions where this is a common requirement (such as elementary school teachers who must often mask their anger with a smile). In general, there is a large body of research around this—don’t suppress the expression of an emotion, learn to suppress the experience of it. If you need help with your emotions, read the third chapter of our first book, The Pragmatists Guide to Life, which focuses on this topic.

Wait . . .

Hey, reader, what are you doing here? Did you actually read the whole appendix? The book was not supposed to be read that way . . . what a slog that must have been.

If you are indeed a true completionist and you’d like to make our day, please drop us a review on Amazon and Goodreads. We do not take money from these and are motivated by the validation those reviews provide us.

^[1] Reminder: TradCon stands for a “traditional conservative” and is a style of relationship that apes the model common in a few Western countries from the short period between the 1900s to 1970s, during which households were made up of a tiny nuclear family, consisting of a single breadwinner and a single individual who raised children and kept the home. We do not use the full term “traditional conservative” as these relationships are neither traditional nor conservative, but rather a radical and failed social experiment enabled by a period of extreme affluence. This is not to say there are no benefits to the model as it has been reimagined by the 21st century TradCon movement, though it certainly has its flaws.

^[2] With regard to cheating stats: We had trouble pinning down actual numbers, as they differ so much between studies. Some studies showed cheating rates in men being as high as 50%. The one thing that is consistent is that men cheat more often than women in almost every circumstance, except in one study that found married women in their twenties cheating more than men, likely due to their aggregate desirability on the market being astronomically high.

^[3] We suspect a key factor in new relationship energy involves not yet having a complete picture of the person inducing it or how they think about you. These two mysteries dissolve in longer-term relationships. This would explain why new relationship energy seems to last longer in long-distance relationships and cyber relationships.

[4] About a quarter of The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality is dedicated to using historic data, comparative physiology, genetic data, and kinks (otherwise unexplainable desires like getting aroused by seeing someone transform or being immobilized that cannot be accounted for by socialization, but which vestigially appear in large chunks of the population cross culturally and thus were likely selected for in our ancestors) to attempt to ferret out a clear picture of early human social structures, mating displays, and marriage types.

[5] Again, this discussed in detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, but we also heartily recommend referring to a 2009 study titled: The puzzle of monogamous marriage.

[6] Malcolm voted to remove this discussion, referring to it as sexist, reductionist, and probably wrong, but was overruled by me (Simone). Fully correct or not, the dynamic presented holds a kernel of truth that may help people to consider some elements of dating in a new light.

[7] For more info on this see Couples’ shared participation in novel and arousing activities and experienced relationship quality in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

[8] We took a deeper dive because we found this data so shocking and wanted to make sure we were not misreading it: On average Black women responded to 34.1% of messages sent to them—but only to 28% of messages from Black men. In contrast, Black men responded to 46.9% of messages sent to them while responding to only 37% of messages from Black females. Black women responded to Black men more than any other ethnicity did, while Indian, Middle Eastern, and Native American men responded to Black females as much or more than Black men did.

The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality

What Turns People On, Why, and What That Tells Us About Our Species

By Simone & Malcolm Collins

http://Pragmatist.Guide

Simone & Malcolm Collins

As with our last book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, you may request a free audio version of this book by visiting our website: Pragmatist.Guide/SexualityAudio

And as with all books written by The Pragmatist Foundation, the proceeds from this book will go to non-profits.

Contents

An Introduction to Sexuality 1

Society’s Corrupted Framework for Human Arousal 2

The Minnesota Popper 13

Dispelling Common Sexual Myths and Misconceptions 14

Myth: Internet Porn Inspires Strange Kinks 16

Myth: Godless Societies Foster “Deviant” Sexual Interests 20

Myth: Irregular Arousal Patterns Are a Product of Poor Parenting 21

Myth: Humans Get Aroused by Random Things 22

About the Ideological Perspective that Informs this Book 23

Citations and Research Presentation 29

A Supplementary Tour of Our Own Research 31

The Basics of Sexuality: Attraction & Aversion 32

Developmental Distance 38

Songbirds & Boobies 41

Responsive vs. Spontaneous Desire 46

Inhibitory Systems & Libido 48

How Do People Develop Varying Levels of Attraction and Aversion to Stimuli? 51

The Human Mating Season 54

Writing on Eggshells—Human Sexual Dimorphism 55

Things that Cause Arousal 68

Breeding Targets 70

Why Do Gay People Exist? 76

The Fallacy of a Gay-Straight Spectrum 80

Sexual Aversion, Looking Under the Hood 88

Categorization and Volume Systems 91

The Nature of Asexuality 94

Supernormal Stimuli, Group Sex, and Gender 97

The Nuanced Female Detection System 98

Genital Size 99

What’s up with Foot Kinks? 100

Inverse Systems 102

Zoophiles 109

Emotional States & Concepts / Dominance & Submission 112

Dominance in Self vs. Others 124

The Non-Sexual World of BDSM 124

One Way We Could Be Wrong 126

Transformation 128

Signs That our Framework May Be Wrong 130

Emotional Connections to People 133

Sex Without Emotional Attachment 138

Laughter & Attraction 139

Why Do Humans Laugh? 141

The Westermarck Effect & Sex with Siblings 145

Roleplaying Relatives 147

The Common Practice of Marrying Cousins 148

Tropes 150

Novelty 151

Pain & Asphyxiation 155

Warning: Choking Hazard 161

Basic Instincts 163

Physical Stimuli 164

Conditioned Responses 165

Things That Do NOT Cause Arousal 171

Socialization 171

Parental Screw-Ups 179

The Myth of The Childhood Abuse Cycle 181

Social Taboos and Rule Breaking 183

The Impact of Gender Differences on Human Sexuality 186

Inconvenient Things that Arouse Females 186

Inconvenient Things that Arouse Males 192

Suppressing Inconvenient Arousal Patterns 195

Female vs. Male Erotic Material Preferences 196

Do Men Really Have Higher Sex Drives? 199

Ovulatory Shift Hypothesis 202

Using Sexuality As A Looking Glass Into Our History 205

The Hazards of Evolutionary Psychology and Worshipping Past Cultures 205

Using Kinks to Find Clues Into Early Human Cultures 208

Were Early Humans Monogamous? 209

Gender Relations of Early Humans 220

Chad & The Myth of the Alpha Male 227

Early Human Warfare 229

Smashing Babies on Rocks 232

Female Promiscuity 234

Why Men are Aroused by Dominance 238

Polymorphism 241

Bonobos 243

The Slave Race? 247

Human Sexuality’s Advanced Settings 254

Olfactory Cues in Arousal and Pair Bonding 255

Gender Displays 258

Is Being Trans More Common Than We Think? 269

The Mating Party Impulse Hypothesis 277

The Effect of Attractiveness on Moral Judgments 278

The Role of Validation in Human Sexuality 279

How Kinks Express Themselves 284

The Omegaverse as an Erotic Genre 289

Sex, Masturbation, Orgasms, & the Brain 295

The Effects of Sex on the Brain 295

The Effects of Intelligence on Sex 298

Masturbation 299

Female Orgasms 314

The Mechanics of Love 316

Love for Our Children 326

Love for Our Social Groups 331

Love for Romantic Partners and Concepts 334

Do All Three Love Systems Really Yield the Same Emotion? 343

Behaviors Motivated by Love 345

You Don’t Love a Person 352

The Genetics of Love 353

Leveraging Arousal for Fun & Profit 354

Strip Mining Positive Emotional States 354

Using Sexual Arousal, Sexual Aversion, & Love to Increase Efficiency 360

Sexuality & Morality 365

Conclusion: Relationships, Sex, & Society 368

Slut Shaming & Impossible Double Standards 377

The Future of Sex & Relationships 388

A Theoretical Solution 398

Thanks for Reading 402

Supplement: A Tour of Our Research Findings 404

The Hall of Arousing Art: An Exploration of Sexual Fantasies 408

Erotic Material Exhibits 409

Arousing Dioramas 414

Wealth & Sophistication 422

Popular Pairings 424

Plump Proclivities 427

Random Kinks 427

Non-Human Participants 429

Forbidden Sexual Partners 432

BDSM Scenes 434

Baby Making 438

From Housewives to Crying 440

Grab Bag of Kinks 442

Should I Be Scared? 446

Interpersonal Dynamics 451

Japanese Imports 452

Arousing Practices 455

Trans Erotic Art 457

Roleplay & Fantasy Scenarios 458

The Wonderland of Sex: An Exploration of Sexuality in Practice 460

Tooth & Nail Avenue 470

Mount Ass 471

Crazy Country: The Land of Love, Jealousy, Sex, & Lust 472

Love: More Common Than You Would Think 472

Jealousy: Not Such a Big Deal 473

Sex & Lust: Overrated? 474

The Magical Forest of Turn Ons and Turn Offs 477

Mammary Mountain and Phallus Peak 490

BDSM Tribal Lands 499

The Bondage Hut 502

The Pain Market 503

Correlates to Arousal Patterns 505

Childhood Sexual Assault vs. Sexual Assault in Adolescence 507

Bucolic Childhoods & Their Surprisingly Violent Connections 512

Strict Fathers 516

Diversity Land 518

The Colosseum of Sexual Influence & Big Four Show 520

The Political Promenade 530

The High-Net-Worth Extravaganza 540

The Sexy Beauty Pageant 547

The Dog and Cat Show 554

What the Hell Did I Just Watch? 563

Why Do People Participate in BDSM? 566

Remembering the Journey: A Recap 572

An Introduction to Sexuality

When putting together The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships, we decided to include a short chapter on arousal—what turns people on. That single chapter eventually became longer than all of the other chapters in the book combined. As we explored the available research and data on arousal systems, it became clear to us that the data does not match the social schemas into which researchers are cramming their findings. Study after study seems to be shoving a square peg into a round hole. To really make sense of how humans process sexual stimuli, we had to distance ourselves from common social conventions explaining how human sexuality works and rethink arousal pathways from the ground up.

To that end, we put together this book. It features data-driven theories on how human sexuality actually appears to operate while avoiding ideologically driven research and lines of thought. We reached out to around a hundred professional sex therapists to sanity check our findings and either added notes when their experiences conflicted with our theories or updated our theories to incorporate additional information they presented.^[1]

Society’s Corrupted Framework for Human Arousal

Many inaccurate assumptions regarding human arousal stem from an idea that is now deeply ingrained in the Western consciousness: The concept that, to some extent, a person’s arousal patterns reveal something about their personal identity—who they are deep inside.

It is no mystery how this concept came to be. Individuals with non-socially condoned arousal patterns found themselves oppressed. In response to this oppression, these people found solidarity in each other’s company, forming communities around shared life experiences of oppression. Through ostracization, unique cultures began to evolve within these communities.

This type of cultural drift is common within any ostracized or oppressed that manages to congregate in private.^[2] Through involvement in these unique cultures, people began to identify their arousal patterns with their cultural identity and that cultural identity with their personal identities—leading to the unfortunate societal shorthand in which an arousal pattern is seen as a major part of a person’s identity.

The largest and most influential of the communities referenced here is the lesbian/gay/bi community^[3], however a similar phenomenon has occurred within a number of groups (such as the BDSM community)^[4]. Essentially, these communities were ostracized long enough that they formed distinct cultural norms, which allowed individuals to associate their sexuality with a cultural identity. By proxy, society then began to associate sexuality in general with personal identity.

This is all fine and good when a guy who is aroused only by male characteristics fits into the category of “gay” and feels socially compelled to make gay community affiliation part of his identity, thereby gaining a feeling of acceptance in an otherwise hostile world. But what about a woman who is so physiologically aroused during her own rape that she orgasms? As it happens, this is a fairly common occurrence, with 4% to 5% of reported rape cases citing it, and with estimations of the actual frequency of physiological arousal during rape being even higher (to put that 4% to 5% in perspective: A Gallup poll in 2007 suggested that 4.5% of Americans identified as gay). It is also not unheard of for a woman who has been raped to find herself mentally aroused when reflecting on the experience. Do these occurrences mean the rape someone experienced was any less traumatic and awful? Of course not. Do women who orgasm when being raped—or who become aroused while reflecting on the experience—need to incorporate that aspect of their arousal pathways into their identities? Of course not.

Pragmatically speaking, the fact that something arouses a person neither indicates that they want that thing to happen nor necessitates that they must ideologically approve of it. Some people choose to incorporate their arousal pathways into the way they conceptualize their identity and that personal choice is often something to be lauded. Nevertheless, we run into problems when we treat it as a cultural mandate that a person’s sexuality must indicate something about their identity.

Denying a person’s sexual identity can lead to depression and even suicide, however flippantly mandating a person’s sexual identity based on their arousal patterns can trigger the same outcomes.

The cascade of problems caused by people conflating arousal patterns with personal identities does not end with the suffering of those pressured to accept identities they do not feel fit them. Any exploration of human arousal patterns that grants special treatment to specific patterns of arousal just because large oppressed communities exist around them is bound to create a lens that distorts the underlying mechanisms driving human arousal.

This distorted lens may lead someone studying human sexuality to ask: “Where are you on a spectrum from straight to gay?” This question would miss a pattern we found in our data suggesting that people’s arousal systems are not bundled by the gender of whatever it is that turns them on: 4.5% of men find the naked male form aversive but penises arousing, while 6.7% of women find the female form arousing, but vaginas aversive. Using simplified community identifications like the gay-straight spectrum to investigate how and why arousal patterns develop is akin to studying historic human migration patterns by distributing a research survey asking respondents to report their position on a spectrum from “white” to “person of color.” Yes, “person of color,” like the concept of “gay,” is a useful moniker to understand the life experiences of a person, but a person’s place on a “white” to “person of color” spectrum tells us little about their ethnicity, just as a person’s place on a scale of gay to straight tells us little about their underlying arousal patterns.

The old way of looking at arousal limits our ability to describe sexuality to a grey scale. We miss that there is no such thing as attraction to just “females,” but rather a vast array of arousal systems that react to stimuli our society typically associates with “females” including things like vaginas, breasts, the female form, a gait associated with a wider hip bone, soft skin, a higher tone of voice, the gender identity of female, a person dressed in “female” clothing, and female gender roles. Arousal from any one of these things correlates with the others, but this correlation is lighter than a gay-straight spectrum would imply. Our data shows it is the norm for a person to derive arousal from only a few of these stimuli sets and not others. Given this reality, human sexuality is not well captured by a single sexual spectrum.

Moreover, contextualizing sexuality as a contrast between these communities and a societal “default” can obscure otherwise-glaring data points. Because we contrast “default” female sexuality against “other” groups, such as the gay community and the BDSM community, it is natural to assume that a “typical” woman is most likely to be very turned on by the sight of male genitalia or the naked male form and that she will be generally disinterested in dominance displays (because being gay and/or into BDSM would be considered atypical, a typical woman must be defined as the opposite of these “other,” atypical groups).

Our data shows this is simply not the case. The average female is more likely to be very turned on by seeing a person act dominant in a sexual context than she is to be aroused by either male genitalia or the naked male form. The average woman is not defined by male-focused sexual attraction, but rather dominance-focused sexual attraction. This is one of those things that would have been blindingly obvious to anyone who ran a simple survey of arousal pathways in the general American population, but has been overlooked because society has come to define “default” sexuality not by what actually turns people on, but rather in contrast to that which groups historically thought of as “other.”

This apparent blind spot in our understanding of human sexuality stems from a phenomenon pervasive in the scientific world. Concepts are developed from a male perspective because, historically speaking, most researchers and individuals in positions of authority have been male. The very concept that attraction to a particular gender must make up the core of a person’s sexuality may have emerged because sexuality has (historically) been almost exclusively researched through a male lens. Had our concepts of sexuality been developed in a female-dominated society, our data shows it is not wild to think that sexuality would be viewed from the perspective of a preference for dominant versus submissive partners and not gender preference in partners (in such a world, there is a chance that gender preference would be as much of an afterthought as preferences for dominance or certain hair colors are today).

The relative importance of our sexuality to our identity is largely a social construct. Had we been born in different timelines, we may see entirely different aspects of our arousal pathways as important while contextualizing aspects that seem critical to our identities today as relatively banal. If society had a long history of killing, driving to suicide, and otherwise ostracizing submissive people instead of gay people, it is not wild to think the way we contextualized the relative importance of these two pathways to our self-identities would be wildly different. How our sexuality influences our identity is a product of our society and life experiences, not our arousal pathways themselves. Forgetting this leads us to ask the wrong questions when investigating the inner workings of our arousal pathways by placing undue weight on the pathways that have the most salience in our current societies. To have a sober discussion of the underlying arousal patterns affecting almost every aspect of the human condition, we must discuss them in a manner that is totally divorced from their impact on our identities.

A helpful analogy:

A person’s sexuality and romantic proclivities are a light source.
Their life experiences, culture, and beliefs about the world are a stained-glass window.
Their sexual identity is the pattern the light shining through that window creates on a wall.

A different light source would yield a different pattern, but the same can be said about the stained glass. To study a light source by only asking about the pattern it creates on a wall would yield a suboptimal understanding of the light source.

That our sexual identity—and the impact that identity has on us—is shaped by our culture and beliefs is not conjecture but rather a measurable phenomenon. Those who grow up believing masturbation is a normal and unremarkable drive to have experience few measurable negative effects from engaging in the practice and rarely contextualize it as reflecting on their identity. Essentially, when your culture frames masturbation as unremarkable, you will not think of a desire to masturbate as a notable character trait.

In contrast, masturbation practiced by those who are raised to believe masturbation is deviant or representative of a lack of self-control has major negative effects on mental health (including increased irritability, anxiety, depression, and anger), causes frequent rumination, and works its way into personal identity (as measured by people who believe they have debilitating porn addictions and/or see their masturbation as a major source of shame). We address the relevant research in this book’s exploration of masturbation—suffice to say that the manner in which a person answers the question: “Is being a masturbator a major part of who you are?” tells us more about their culture and beliefs about the world than their underlying desire to masturbate.

This phenomenon isn’t relegated to negative cultural norms. For example, if a society glorifies stereotypically masculine hetero males and a person’s natural proclivities align with this identity, they are likely to incorporate it into their sexual identity.

The more a society regards underlying proclivities related to romantic attachment and arousal as notable, the more likely a person will be to incorporate those proclivities into their sexual identities. How sexual identities affect those who adopt them is dependent on whether society and/or the people themselves contextualize them as positive, negative, or neutral in nature. Alternatively, if society sees a pattern of sexual or romantic proclivities as unremarkable, people are unlikely to incorporate that pattern into their sexual identities.

Long story short: A person’s sexual identity is a product of how that person’s underlying arousal and romantic proclivities have impacted their lives and self-perceptions. As such, sexual identity is totally dependent on an individual’s culture and beliefs and thus outside the scope of this book, which seeks to explore our more immutable arousal and romantic impulses.

The idea that our sexuality reveals some truth about the way we are supposed to act was picked up by individuals with other agendas and has clouded public and academic understandings of sexuality even further. For example, people somehow got it into their heads that if they could prove that early humans were polyamorous or monogamous, they could prove that such human pairings were the ideal and “correct” way for us to live today because it would be our “natural state.” In this book, we will review evidence that early humans practiced infanticide and that we still have some deeply ingrained genetic tendencies tied to that practice. Does that mean we should bring back the tradition of a good-old-fashioned baby stomp? Of course not. This idea that our “natural state” is a societal mandate is absurd.

A Pragmatic approach to arousal patterns requires that we shed all the aforementioned preconceptions.

There is not much evidence to indicate that people have significant influence over what arouses them. The only thing over which people have a choice is how they feed or deny the arousal pathways they experience. Even while an individual’s arousal patterns say nothing about them as a person, humanity’s patterns of arousal, in general, may grant us insight into the conditions under which our species developed.

To understand what arouses someone is to merely understand which stimuli will create a positive sexual feeling in that person’s brain (as well as what stimuli will disgust them—but more on that later). On a less granular scale, to understand stimuli that arouse most humans is to understand (1) how our brains work and (2) the conditions and social structures of our early ancestors. These are the elements of sexuality that this book explores.

This is a book on sexuality. We will not spend much time addressing gender identity outside of subjects in which factors like hormone treatments affect arousal patterns. We understand that that gender identity often gets conflated with sexuality, but a person of any gender identity can have any sexuality.
Even when we stray from sexuality, our tangents will either explore the implications of sexual arousal patterns or focus on other basal impulses associated with mate acquisition (such as the “love system”).

The Minnesota Popper

In 2009, a man in Minnesota was caught breaking into buildings and slashing the large fitness balls used in workouts . . . again. He was first caught in the act in 2005, when he went on a spree slashing 72 fitness balls in three different incidents after breaking into personal fitness centers. When questioned, he said he did this at the behest of a strong sexual urge.

The natural reaction to reading this is to dismiss the guy as a creep and give the topic no further thought. Fortunately, we are weirdos. When we stumble across a human acting in a way we don’t understand, we see an irresistible puzzle. Every piece of bizarre online pornography, impossibly strange, sexualized fanfiction, and story tied to a weird kink presents another Gordian knot of the human condition. How did systems that evolved to get us to breed lead to this? These are not random systems; there is some method behind the madness. When human arousal pathways fire in unusual patterns, they often fire in the same unusual patterns—patterns that are certainly not explained by the lazy hand wave that claims all taboo things are arousing (a persistent myth).

If we do our job well, by the time you are finished reading this book, you will never be confused by a weird kink again. Even behaviors as bizarre as those exhibited by the Minnesota Popper will strike you as fascinating case studies, full of valuable insights into the inner workings of the human psyche, rather than just bizarre tales of weird pervs.

Dispelling Common Sexual Myths and Misconceptions

If you are sitting there, smugly telling yourself that nothing weird arouses you and that you are just here to figure out what is wrong with the “deviants” of the world, we have some bad news: The surveys we ran when putting this book together suggest that you, dear reader, are in fact the strange one. Apparently, the vast majority of humans find wacky, seemingly random (or at least non-socially condoned) things to be arousing. Our research survey, the data of which actually skewed conservative vis a vis most peer-reviewed research on the same subject, suggests the average person finds 22 weird things arousing: 23.1 for men; 20.8 for women. The average person doesn’t just have “a kink,” but rather a menagerie of turn ons many would consider to be risqué.^[5] (See the supplement for more information on these results on page 404.)

If, in the course of reading this book, you find something to be X-phobic or shaming toward Y-kink, you clearly misunderstand our intention. In constructing this book, we perused humanity’s proverbial internet search history. You all are a bunch of ghoulish pelicans. Being human is something that merits at least some shame. The fact that we are burdened with stinky, sticky, goo-producing genitals is punishment enough—and yet some of us slam them together . . . and even put our mouths on them. What is wrong with our wretched species???

If humans were not collectively brainwashed by our neurology to find the prospect of recreationally sticking penises into vaginas while making silly faces and noises to be arousing, we would find the whole process just as absurd as any so-called “kink.” Finding penis-in-vagina sex to be arousing doesn’t make a person any less ridiculous just because our society has categorized the act as “vanilla.”

If we must live in this fallen state, we might as well make an effort to understand its nuances instead of attempting to evade them. One cannot simply slice through the Gordian knot that is human sexuality with one blow. We don’t want our readers walking away because they think all sexual mysteries can be easily explained, so let’s start by exploring a few common explanations for why weird things are sometimes arousing.

Myth: Internet Porn Inspires Strange Kinks

Unusual arousal patterns are categorically not caused by internet porn. We know of such patterns existing well before internet porn. Consider this excerpt from a letter James Joyce wrote to his girlfriend in 1904:

I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see that you do like being f**ked arseways. Yes, now I can remember that night when I f**ked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest f**king I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck up in you for hours, f**king in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes. At every f**k I gave you your shameless tongue come bursting out through your lips and if I gave you a bigger stronger f**k than usual fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I f**ked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to f**k a farting woman when every f**k drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.

…

F**k me dressed in your full outdoor costume with your hat and veil on, your face flushed with the cold and wind and rain and your boots muddy, either straddling across my legs when I am sitting in a chair and riding me up and down with the frills of your drawers showing and my cock sticking up stiff in your cunt or riding me over the back of the sofa.

…

F**k me on the stairs in the dark, like a nursery-maid f**king her soldier, unbuttoning his trousers gently and slipping her hand into his fly and fiddling with his shirt and feeling it getting wet and then pulling it gently up and fiddling with his two bursting balls and at last pulling out boldly the mickey she loves to handle and frigging it for him softly, murmuring into his ear dirty words and dirty stories that other girls told her and dirty things she said, and all the time pissing her drawers with pleasure and letting off soft warm quiet little farts behind until her own girlish cockey is as stiff as his and suddenly sticking him up in her and riding him.

There you have it: James Joyce, the author of Ulysses and a man considered one of the greatest authors in human history, was aroused by farts, overweight women, sweat, roleplay, and anal—plus, in his letters, his pet name for his girlfriend is “fartling,” which we find to be the most delightful pet name ever.

Honest discussions about human sexuality throughout history, ranging from My Secret Life (an anonymous sex life memoir written in 1888) to the writings of the Marquis de Sade (who lived from 1740-1840), show a similar pattern. Humans have always been kinky.

What is really interesting is that the kinks these historic sources mention are still seen in online pornography today—be it in the form of fart porn or sadistic gore. Heck, even porn of cartoon characters has been distributed since the very first cartoons of the 1920s in Tillie-and-Mac books (for more on this, see: “Emotional Connections to People” on page). We have yet to find a set of “historic kinks” that are not still seen in our modern population. This is really cool, as it suggests that the unusual arousal patterns we see in some portion of the current population are not a result of contemporary culture and that weird online pornography exists to fulfill an innate, enduring arousal pattern experienced by a portion of the population.

There is a surprising amount of data to back up the assertion that unusual arousal patterns are not caused by porn; we will explore the research in greater detail in the book’s chapter on masturbation. It suffices to say individuals who consume large amounts of weird internet porn do not show lower arousal rates (vis a vis the general population) when engaging with more “vanilla” porn—despite persistent myths to the contrary. The data indicates that when someone develops an obsession with weird internet pornography, it is more likely that they found a set of stimuli that more perfectly fits a preexisting arousal pattern, like a key in a lock. Arousal from unusual types of pornography does not increase dramatically with use and it does not diminish arousal from other sources; it just activates the same pathways more acutely as it is a more perfect arousal trigger for some.

Weird internet porn is not the cause of unusual arousal patterns, but rather a symptom of weird arousal patterns engaging in an anonymous environment.

Myth: Godless Societies Foster “Deviant” Sexual Interests

Some claim that all arousal patterns not tied to penis-in-vagina sex between a married couple arise when a society “loses God.”

There is an element of truth to this. When surveyed, religious individuals claim to consume porn at lower rates than non-religious individuals (though claimed porn consumption by religious individuals has been increasing rapidly since 1995).

This is as far as that element of truth extends, as all other data indicates that these individuals are lying. In fact, when Harvard-educated Microsoft economist Benjamin Edelman investigated porn site subscriptions and Google searches for porn on a regional basis in 2009, he found that more religious regions consume more porn than less religious regions (with the highest rates of all being in Utah).

Specifically, Edelman found that subscriptions to porn sites and online searches for sexual content were higher in states that had enacted laws to defend marriage and in which statements like, “I never doubt the existence of God,” “Even today miracles are performed by the power of God,” “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage,” and “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior” were more prevalent.

This finding isn’t limited to this one study; in a 2015 study, Canadian researchers Cara MacInnes and Gordon Hodson found that states with a higher percentage of individuals who self-identify as very religious and consider religion to be important to their daily lives also have higher rates of searches for sexual content on Google.

Long story short, society isn’t getting aroused by “unnatural” things because we “lost God.”

Myth: Irregular Arousal Patterns Are a Product of Poor Parenting

“It’s because their parents screwed them up” is such a common and easy way to dismiss unusual behavior patterns, it has become a cliché. To be honest, we originally suspected parental influence might be a major factor shaping human arousal patterns; however, our data do not suggest that much of what happens to individuals before puberty has a meaningful effect on their adult arousal patterns (to explore the data, please skip to “Childhood Sexual Assault vs. Sexual Assault in Adolescence” on page 507). That said, there is research that suggests possible pathways through which such an effect could occur. For example, goats raised around sheep will become sexually aroused by them, and people who grow up with younger siblings are slightly more likely to find pregnant women arousing. We merely couldn’t find such patterns in our own data.^[6]

Given the information we have at the time of this book’s publication, we can comfortably say that parents probably don’t have to worry that if they accidentally loudly fart in front of their kids at a particularly unlucky time during their mental development, the kids will develop a permanent arousal pattern tied to farts that is all the parents’ fault.

Myth: Humans Get Aroused by Random Things

“Look, dude: Humans are weird and get aroused by random things” is something we hear frequently and once said ourselves.

This might actually be a reasonable approach to this question . . . if it were valid. As it happens, one can identify clear patterns in the things that frequently arouse people. The idea of being thrown off the edge of a cliff or burned alive arouses almost no one, while something like being eaten or choked to death arouses non-trivial portions of the population. There are patterns in the human arousal system that cannot be explained by a desire to reproduce or socialization—but that are also not random.

Furthermore, these arousal patterns are often highly gendered. For example, a woman is much more likely to be aroused by having a needle pushed through their skin than a man. When there is a pattern to something, it is unlikely to be random; there is likely some underlying cause. The shadows we see on the walls of this cave are being created by something, and while some individuals are content to say: “Ignore those shadows; just think of them as random patterns, they have always been there and we have gotten on just fine ignoring them,” we just aren’t wired that way. We need to at least try to find the source.

About the Ideological Perspective that Informs this Book

There seems to be a trend among books investigating this topic (books that present a wider thesis about human sexuality) in which they argue that their theses prove one ideological team’s perspective on sexuality to be more “natural” and thus somehow more true. This is not one of those books.

Our society seems to have sorted itself into teams. One may be tempted to read a book like this and try to determine whether or not we are on their team.

We believe that approaching new ideas from a tribal viewpoint leads people to instinctively categorize data as “supporting their team” or “attacking their team,” which compromises their ability to piece the data together into a novel, holistic picture. All we want to do is collect the most accurate understanding possible of how humans think and behave so that we can systematically leverage this understanding to our advantage and develop a deeper understanding of the human condition.

You may wonder, dear reader: “Isn’t that what scientists do? Aren’t you just saying you have decided to take the position of academic consensus?”

In an ideal world, we would answer: “Yes.”

Malcolm, one of the authors of this book, started his life as a neuroscientist. While he has a deep respect for the scientific method, he finds the manner in which it is deployed by the academic bureaucracy—as it is currently structured—is optimized for building answers to specific questions. When it comes to synthesizing these discrete data points into holistic models, the academic bureaucracy lacks a process that sufficiently protects these models from the biased values and viewpoints of the individuals who stand at the top of academia’s hierarchies. While academic bureaucracies are not terrible at stringing together independent data points into a holistic picture, they are also not great at doing this due to systematic bias, which creates a lens altering the manner in which they see the world, especially with regard to politically sensitive topics like sexuality. To put it another way: We generally take peer-reviewed studies at their word, but we don’t give unique credence to the models of arousal processing these studies claim to reinforce and instead try to think of other explanations for the patterns they show.

At this point, you may be thinking that we are going too far in saying that the mainstream bureaucracies of psychology in academia are tainted with bias. If so, consider a study of 335 social psychologists conducted by Buss and Von Hippel, which found that well under 1% voted Republican in the last election cycle. This specific fact doesn’t bother us. Perhaps something experts in this field learn makes them more likely to vote liberal. Perhaps conservatives in academia choose degrees with more earning potential. What does bother us is that the resulting lack of diverse perspectives has led the field to alter, through small, individually inconsequential decisions, the manner in which academics present their findings to support a specific ideological agenda. Science should be about looking at evidence to find what is true, not looking for evidence to argue what one already believes is true. Ideological hegemony can lead a field to the latter.

One example demonstrating the consequences of this academic bias can be seen with the study of evolutionary pressures on sexual dimorphism, which certain facets of the conservative movement, such as the men’s rights movement, have begun to discuss in mainstream materials. In reaction, a few subgroups within the liberal movement began to demonize evolutionary psychology.

The same study by Buss and von Hippel found that while most of the researchers surveyed believed in evolution, a significant percentage were unwilling to apply it to the field of psychology. Worse, a substantial portion said that if researchers found a biological basis for sex differences, it would be bad if the findings were widely reported (well over 50%).^{^[7]} To put that more directly: It has become normalized in the field of sexual psychology to suppress evidence that does not align with a political “team’s” view—or at the very least have far less motivation to promote it in the public eye.

Humorously, Buss and von Hippel point out this corruption of the scientific bureaucracy stems from an evolved human tendency to form teams and move up within a social hierarchy by signaling ideological commitments to your coalition. This behavior evolved because the ancestors of these academics that exhibited it had more surviving offspring. Academics are essentially refusing to look at how evolution affects cognition because of an aspect of their cognition molded by evolution.

When one is “doing research” but knows that they may be motivated to occlude some potential results before the data is even collected—perhaps due to political leanings, out of concern related to the impact on society those findings might have if shared, or due to fear for one’s professional reputation and livelihood—they are not “doing research.” It is irrelevant whether this person has good intentions or if they get lucky and their data happens to support a position they can publish.

We are not sexually conservative by any measure, but we also won’t go out of our way to argue that any non-standard sexualities or sexual behaviors exist for the betterment of society. Moreover, we won’t put much effort into not offending politically delicate sensibilities. Our goal is to systematically understand how the human brain works so we can exploit that understanding to our advantage. The more fidelity our understanding contains, the better we can utilize it to harvest what we want from the world.

The political and philosophical skew we observe in academia is merely in addition to another, perhaps equally large problem within this realm: The replication crisis in the wider field of psychology, with some sources estimating 50% of studies being unable to be replicated.^[8] We did our best to take the replication crisis into account when constructing this book. Whenever something seemed off to us and was only reported in a single study, we made a point of running our own survey to sanity check it. Mainstream academics do not have the freedom or flexibility to make informal, back-of-the-napkin calculations using quick, few-hundred-people surveys, but these informal checks have played an invaluable role in helping us piece together a holistic sketch of human sexuality from hundreds of individual studies that are no doubt peppered with false positives.

Citations and Research Presentation

Despite using science as our primary standard of evidence (the type of evidence we value above all others), we will not fastidiously cite every study we reference in this book.

It is all too easy to believe oneself to be a dispassionate lover of “science” and “rationality,” only to lean on studies like a crutch, cherry picking findings and conflating rationalization with rationality. It is a bad habit of countless writers and random commentators to make an outrageous claim, then cite a single study to back it up, putting the burden on the reader to look up the study and analyze its methodology, try to determine how it was funded, and look up the history of the researcher to determine whether the results are credible. We strongly disagree with this manner of communication.

If you see a statistic in a book and believe that statistic more because it comes with a study citation, we encourage you to rethink how you engage with information (again, remember that by some estimates, 50% of psychology studies are not replicable). We want to do our part in fighting against these sorts of dangerous mental shortcuts.

When we make a claim you find to be dubious, the last thing we want you to do is read the same couple of studies that led us to our conclusion—especially if a subconscious bias could have led us to cherry pick those studies. That is how bad information gets spread and pop-science comes to dominate. Our goal is to create new methodologies for relating to and interpreting data. When you want to sanity check something, we urge you to go online and dig into the topic. Ask yourself why we drew the conclusions we drew given the information available to us, then draw your own conclusions—heck, maybe even run your own informal studies and share your findings with us!

We understand this runs contrary to the manner in which many were taught to engage with science and ideas, but we ask you to give it a try. You may find our approach surprisingly empowering. If you give this way of writing an honest try and still hate it, just shoot us an email at [email protected] letting us know. Should we get enough of these emails, we will include fastidious (rather than occasional) citations in future books.

A Supplementary Tour of Our Own Research

The first half of this book’s draft featured a tour of our own research on this topic: A comprehensive survey investigating correlations between specific arousal patterns and various personal attributes (wealth, childhood conditions, political affiliation, self-confidence, etc.). Early reviewers of the book found this section to be more of a “bathroom read” better suited for casual reference. We, therefore, shifted this exploration to an addendum at the end of the book, titled: “Supplement: A Tour of Our Research Findings.” You will find it on page 404. This supplement is something you should be able to quickly jump into and out of at any point while reading other chapters. As the main chapters of this book primarily focus on the “why, how, and so what?” of arousal, our supplementary tour of research findings will be of unique interest to those more excited by the “who, what, when, and where” questions surrounding arousal.

The Basics of Sexuality: Attraction & Aversion

We propose an alternate framework for discussing sexuality in this book. We find this framework maps to the research better than many common approaches to sexuality with which you may be more familiar.

When the average person talks about their sexuality, they typically list their position on the Kinsey scale—a spectrum from 100% gay to 100% straight—and then give a list of kinks, paraphilias, and/or fetishes.^[9] Someone may say, for example: “I am a gay male who is into rope play and BDSM.” Someone steeped enough in specific sub-cultures may go so far as to add some ultra-specific modifiers like “demisexual.” This larger framework for describing one’s sexuality leads to statements that are more descriptions of community affiliation than underling arousal patterns.

For just one example of why community affiliation is such a bad representation of arousal patterns, consider the data we collected on arousal patterns, which suggests that despite being dramatically more likely to identify as straight, male conservatives report watching roughly the same amount of porn featuring two males having sex (8% of conservatives versus 7% of liberals). When we focus on labels instead of underlying arousal patterns, the data gets completely scrambled.

If this is not an optimal way to describe sexuality, how should we be looking at sexuality?

The brain creates an “arousal impulse” when exposed to certain stimuli, the strength of which is modulated by environmental and hormonal factors. Our sexuality should be defined as a list of the stimuli that cause us to become aroused and the relative “volumes” of those arousal outputs to each stimuli type—with a caveat.

Arousal pathways should be thought of as existing in one of three states: positive, neutral, and negative. Negative arousal is experienced as a “gross” sensation. One person may find the idea of sleeping with an elderly individual arousing, another may find this concept deeply “gross,” and yet another may be completely indifferent to the concept. Regardless of the ethics of such an involuntary impulse, all of these are different and equally valid expressions of a person’s sexuality.

In other words, arousal is a sensation that our brains evolved to draw us toward something. Arousal makes us want to look at something longer; it dilates our pupils so that we can take in more of that thing, it compels us to move closer to the target and inhale deeply. Disgust is a sensation that our brains evolved to get us away from something. It makes us want to leave the room, look away from the thing, linger as shortly as possible, and hold our noses. Disgust is not just another emotion; disgust is the manifestation of arousal with a negative modifier attached (we go into the evidence for this in detail later).

Society’s inability to accept the fact that sexuality is comprised of both involuntary attraction to some stimuli and involuntary aversion to others has left people without a way to categorize aversive—“gross”—stimuli in their heads. This lack of understanding has led many to conclude that disgust they feel upon considering certain behaviors is a sign that those acts are somehow inherently bad, immoral, or unnatural.

Consider an extremely old person having consensual sex with a 25-year-old. There is nothing inherently unethical about this pairing, but in most people, such an imagined scene incites feelings of disgust strong enough to make one feel like there must be something morally wrong with the imagined act.

When the majority of the population’s sexuality outputs disgust to a stimulus and a minority feel strong arousal from that same set of stimuli, it is almost inevitable that society will begin to label individuals who indulge in the stimuli as “disgusting,” which is a very short distance from “immoral.”^[10]

Yet, if disgust is using the same underlying mechanisms as our arousal system, telling an individual to just “get over” their disgust is as unproductive as telling a person to try not to find something arousing. Instead, people are best served by recognizing the emotion as an innate reaction without logic behind it. (That said, like arousal, disgust can be oversaturated, so being around something that activates a disgust reaction for a long period of time will desensitize that particular pathway.)

It is easy to grandstand on issues like this, but as you are human, we anticipate your ability to empathize. When a person can’t explain where disgust comes from, it becomes very hard not to assume it means that people involved in a disgusting act are themselves disgusting as well. Were we to accept that the disgust we feel is just something to which we are arbitrarily and involuntarily subjected—just as we are subjected to our often-inconvenient arousal impulses—it becomes easier to separate emotional reactions from judgments of morality.

From a Pragmatist’s perspective, a person’s sexuality is defined by a list of stimuli and the impulse each stimulus generates in their cognition. To put this in the form of an equation:

[Specific Stimuli] -> [+1, -1, or 0] * [Volume Multiplier] = [Arousal or Gross Impulse]

Let us explore each factor in turn.

[Specific Stimuli]

These make up all things capable of eliciting a positive or negative arousal impulse (with a positive arousal impulse being a feeling of arousal and a negative one being a feeling of disgust) and range from visual representations (e.g., breasts) to emotions (e.g., humiliation), physical and sensory stimuli (e.g., rubbing an erogenous zone), and concepts (e.g., “sluttiness”).

[+1, -1, or 0]

Stimuli associated with a positive modifier are experienced as sexually arousing—being attractive, compelling, and desirable—while those with a negative modifier are experienced as sexually aversive—being gross, disgusting, or icky. This variable can also have a null state in which something is blocked or nonfunctional about a particular pathway. In this case, neither disgust nor arousal is triggered by a particular stimulus.

[Volume Multiplier]

This is a multiplier that determines the power of the impulse created by specific stimuli. For example, the average human likes having their nipples touched a little, but the arousal this category of stimuli generates may be uniquely strong or weak.

Developmental Distance

We treat the volume multiplier and attraction versus aversion as two independent variables in an equation—instead of presenting an arousal and aversion spectrum with a neutral reaction being the mid-point—because we believe there is copious evidence indicating that these two factors (volume and attraction/aversion) are developmentally quite far apart.

Developmental distance is a somewhat confusing topic. Should you want a quick refresher on the concept, consider this analogy:

Imagine a mayor whose intern comes into the room and says two government buildings just burned down. The mayor’s first question to that intern is going to be whether or not the buildings were adjacent to each other—as that would indicate a fire just spread from one building to the other—or if the buildings were on other sides of the town, as that would indicate some sort of planned arson that is unlikely to happen naturally. The volume and the aversion/attraction modifiers are buildings on different sides of town.

The biggest practical implication stemming from the separation of attraction/aversion from a volume multiplier is that it is unlikely for both the volume multiplier and aversion/attraction sign associated with specific stimuli to be “abnormal” in the same person. This enables us to more accurately model the manner in which other people experience their sexuality. Imagine sitting in the same room as a bloated rotting corpse. Imagine how strongly compelled you would be to get out of that room. Wouldn’t it be a stronger stimulus than almost any form of attraction you have? A person attracted to rotting corpses likely has just as strong an attraction as you feel an aversion because their volume is working “correctly,” but their aversion/arousal impulse is functioning “abnormally.”

If sexual arousal existed on a spectrum, we would see some people with a moderate attraction to corpses. We do not see this in practice. When most people find something very repulsive, there is generally a small population that finds it extremely arousing and almost no population that finds it mildly arousing (though there will be an indifferent population in which some part of the pathway that usually outputs either arousal or disgust is non-functional). Likewise, small niches of our population find typically arousing things to be utterly repulsive (here you can think of people who report finding genitals or power differentials between sexual participants to be repulsive).

This pattern of near (but not complete) consensus regarding aversion/attraction is visible both in our own surveys and in broader peer reviewed research on sexuality. It can almost be thought of as a core facet of human sexuality. If something is strongly aversive to most of the population, a small portion will find it strongly arousing. If something is strongly arousing to most, a small portion will find it strongly aversive. (We present our theory around the mechanism causing this in the “Inverse Systems” subchapter on page 102.)

Finally, the arousal pathway we are talking about here is only tangentially connected to the love / pair bonding pathway. These pathways are connected in that arousal appears to lower the activation threshold for forming a pair bond with an individual and being pair bonded to someone seems to lower the threshold for arousal from stimuli associated with them, but other than that, these pathways are separate. The way a person’s pair bonding system works should not technically be thought of as part of their arousal system (though we do investigate the pair bonding system in this book—see: “The Mechanics of Love” on page 316). It is much less common for the pair-bonding pathway to behave atypically when contrasted with the arousal pathway, meaning this pathway is much more “robust” from a neurological perspective. That said, atypical pair bonding does happen—like in the case of Erika Eiffel, who married the Eiffel Tower.^[11]

Songbirds & Boobies

Supernormal stimuli play an important role in our understanding of sexual arousal so let’s take a moment to review how supernormal stimuli work.

Imagine a songbird that lays blue-speckled eggs. They likely evolved blue-speckled eggs because that pattern differentiates the eggs from other things in their environments, such as random rocks, making it easier for these songbirds to know what to sit on. They also likely evolved an impulse to sit on objects with blue elements to ensure they properly care for their eggs.

What happens if you put a nest full of bright blue marbles next to this bird’s nest? The songbirds abandon their real eggs for those marbles! Why? Because stimuli like these bright blue marbles did not exist in the environment within which the songbirds evolved and thus the impulse they evolved that shouts: “SIT ON THE THING WITH THE MOST BLUE” never needed a modulating filter for something that is too blue. (Supernormal stimuli are seen all over the animal kingdom—if you want to read about specific instances of it, just Google them like a normal person.)

What does this have to do with human sexuality? Suppose you have trouble understanding why someone is sexually aroused by bakunyū pornography (pornography of women with inhumanly large breasts—breasts half the size of their bodies). Now you know! In the brains of bakunyū aficionados, there is a system that says: “Breasts = female, so even larger breasts must = extra female—and what do I do with females? I breed with them, of course!!”

Just like those silly birds that feel compelled to sit on round, super-blue objects that couldn’t possibly be eggs of their own species, some humans feel a compulsion to sleep with women whose breasts cannot possibly be human . . . and so they draw porn of them.

“But wait,” you may be thinking: “Why aren’t all people affected by supernormal stimuli?”

Good question! We don’t really know.

Perhaps one of two things is happening: Either normally functioning arousal systems have a range of normalcy and begin to inspire negative, “gross” reactions when overstimulated or, more likely, there are separate opposing reactions that push people in the opposite direction. Specifically, a person may have a system for detecting whether something looks inhuman and generate an aversive “gross” reaction, which overwhelms any additional arousal the larger stimuli would incite, preventing most individuals from finding gigantic breasts sexually arousing.

In other words, either when an arousal system is functioning normally, it begins to output an aversion reaction when it is overstimulated, or the reason most people find things like giant breasts aversive is because of a completely separate arousal/aversion system that is outputting an aversion response to things it identifies as monstrous/inhuman—and this aversion overrides the arousal created by the sight of overly large breasts.

We are in favor of this second explanation: That there is a separate counterweight system that outputs aversion when something veers too far from an average human form. If systems existed to elicit a gross reaction when seeing something “monstrous,” we would expect such systems to occasionally break and generate a high level of arousal in a portion of the population (we explain why you would expect this in the “Inverse System” chapter on page 102). This would explain the popularity of monster hentai, a form of erotic art that caters to people aroused by uniquely inhuman forms engaging in sex with a human. In another portion of the population, we would expect this system to “break” in a different way, simply not outputting the normal aversion reaction, but also not outputting a unique arousal reaction, which would lead to the arousal some experience upon seeing giant breasts, but which would mean the same individuals would be equally aroused by anything else giant that otherwise arouses them (e.g., if they are aroused by penises, they will also be aroused by giant penises).

We decided to test this theory with our dataset. If our theory is correct, individuals who are into bakunyū do not have an overactive attraction to breasts, but rather the system in their brain meant to output disgust upon exposure to monstrous images is producing either no output or a positive output. When we looked at males in our data set that were aroused by inhumanly large breasts, we found that 22% of them were also aroused by inhumanly large penises while 0% of the men not aroused by inhumanly large breasts were aroused by inhumanly large penises. This is meaningful because this is not that far from the percent of men who find penises arousing in general (17%), indicating the same phenomenon happening with breasts is happening with this separate arousal pathway as well, exactly as our theory would predict and something that would not be predicted by current arousal models.

But wait—there’s more. Let’s call men who are aroused by bakunyū (16.5% of our data set) B and men who were not N and look at a few other categories of arousal we would expect to be affected if our theory were correct:

Arousal from tentacle porn: 17%B, 6%N
Arousal from furries: 11%B, 4%N
Arousal from giants: 22%B, 4% N
Arousal from amputees: 6%B, 0%N

The real kicker is arousal from amputees, as the correlation is extremely strong (with 0% of N being turned on by amputees). We cannot think of any mechanism other than that which we proposed, which would connect arousal from inhumanly large breasts to arousal from amputees.

Not only does our data support that disgust is being used in normal human arousal systems to modify the things that arouse us and shape our sexuality, but that our responses to supernormal stimuli are specifically kept from going out of control by a system that is supposed to create disgust in response to things that don’t look like a “normal” human.

Note from the Research:

Around 50% of roosters will attempt to mate with an artificial chicken head mounted on a feather-covered board. Male turkeys will attempt to mate with a rubber ball, so long as it’s the size and height of a female turkey head. Basically, males of most species will attempt to mate with anything that looks marginally like a female.
We found one study suggesting that fat admirers also ranked underweight women as more attractive than the control group. This implies that in a portion of the fat admirer population, the specific mechanism that is not functioning “properly” is the one that is supposed to yield a disgust impulse upon exposure to bodies that fall outside of a certain range of parameters. With this system broken, these individuals receive supernormal stimuli from obese women. These findings imply that a certain proportion of fat admirers do not differentially find fat partners specifically attractive, but rather do not get the normal disgust impulse from individuals with extreme body shapes—be those shapes too fat or too skinny.

Responsive vs. Spontaneous Desire

Arousal and interest in sex do not emerge spontaneously in everyone.

To deal with this reality, some therapists have divided arousal patterns into “spontaneous desire” (i.e., when a concept or image is immediately arousing to a person) and “responsive desire” (i.e., when a person begins to feel arousal only in response to various stimuli, like a back rub, a relaxing evening, a romantic setting, or watching porn).

Discussions of responsive versus spontaneous desire appear to be in vogue these days. We understand why. The concept is immensely helpful to sex therapists who regularly have to explain that one partner isn’t disinterested in the other just because they are not keen to have sex at the drop of a hat. It is helpful for partners to understand that one person may reach a state of arousal merely upon seeing the female form while another person may need prolonged, tactile arousal sources in order to feel strong sexual arousal. That said, we do not think it is groundbreaking to acknowledge that different people (and different genders on average) get aroused by different types of stimuli and require different lengths of exposure in order to feel sexually aroused.

The concept of spontaneous versus responsive desire nevertheless facilitates interesting research exploring arousal patterns, especially in women. Suppose a woman is showing an increased blood flow to her genitals, but not claiming to feel any mental arousal. How does one code such signals when studying things that arouse people? While this question seems like quite a sticky wicket in theory, it is fortunately next to irrelevant in practice.

Why? We couldn’t find a single study that showed any sort of stimulus that was much more likely to end up in one of these two states (well, except for the monkey sex study, which showed women experiencing increased blood flow to their genitals when watching monkeys having sex—something we doubt many women would admit to finding mentally arousing even if they did). In other words, both self-reported surveys and blood flow detection offer reliable systems for measuring what proportion of a given population finds something arousing because they typically come to the same conclusions (except in cases in which a person is culturally pressured to not find something mentally stimulating).

Inhibitory Systems & Libido

Some people add a third category to discussions of responsive versus spontaneous desire called “contextual desire,” which essentially highlights the fact that environmental factors, such as stress or knowledge that kids are in the next room, can affect one’s ability to become aroused. Essentially, there is a system that detects specific environmental scenarios and downregulates arousal when in the presence of these stimuli, which we will call the Sexual Sublimation System (we use this term to differentiate it from the concept of the “Sexual Inhibition System,” a fleshed-out theory that conflates specific aversive stimuli with sexual sublimation).

Knowledge of this system can aid understanding of those who rarely feel arousal, as their lack of arousal may be the product of one (or more) of the following four factors:

Their general arousal systems are set to a low output level (some call this having a low Sexual Excitation System)
Their Sexual Sublimation System is overactive, creating a ton of inhibition in response to low stimuli levels
Their Sexual Sublimation System responds to more/different stimuli types than an “average” configuration of this system would (i.e., for whatever reason it activates in response to indoor spaces)
Something that triggers their Sexual Sublimation System is very common in their daily lives (such as stress or kids)

This system is fairly simple to understand, and it makes perfect sense that we have it. Most of the things that dampen arousal are clearly tied to environments in which it may make sense to downregulate the production of additional children (such as hearing children in the next room, interacting with a baby, uncertainty, ugly environments, insecure environments, or high stress). These systems appear to be more active in women than men, which also makes sense and can help one troubleshoot an apparent low sex drive (e.g., maybe stress reduction needs to come before attempts to improve one’s sex life).

Sexual sublimation systems are not the same as aversion systems. These systems merely downregulate how much arousal you will feel from anything. On the other hand, aversion systems create explicit disgust. To understand the difference, consider the lower sexual output you feel when super stressed or when kids are playing in the next room versus the acute “ick” emotion you experience when imagining sex with someone you find disgusting (maybe a really old person, a really ugly person, or a really unhygienic person).

At any rate, reactive and contextual desire explain the trope of needing to take one’s wife out on a luxurious feeling, romantically lit date followed by lots of foreplay to be able to enjoy a decent sex romp as a married couple. This is because both inhibitory systems and reactive arousal patterns are stronger in females, and adult, married females may have more arousal-dampening factors in their lives (such as jobs, kids, dependent parents, and the stress of juggling these often-conflicting responsibilities) than a relatively unattached, typical young woman.

How Do People Develop Varying Levels of Attraction and Aversion to Stimuli?

The first question you may ask having reached this point in the book is: “Could it just be that we are born with a specific sexuality?” The answer is a strong: “Maybe . . . ”

Here is what we can say: Attractions and aversions that appear early in our development (e.g., those that manifest right at puberty or even before puberty) appear to be the strongest and do not appear to be traits we can easily alter in adulthood. People have gone to great lengths to alter certain attractions and aversions (e.g., due to the negative stigma some social groups applied to “gayness” conversion therapy has been extensively experimented with in those communities) and there are no foolproof methodologies for intentionally switching out one set of stimuli that arouses an individual for another, intentionally selected set of stimuli (e.g., conversion therapy does not work).

That said, an absence of means by which we might intentionally and permanently alter aspects of our sexuality that appear in early life as adults does not mean that sexuality does not shift in adulthood. A hearty 20% of young adult women and 5% of men report changes in their arousal patterns tied to the genders they find stimulating over a 5-year period, so clearly some attraction/aversion patterns shift. However, we don’t know what causes these changes, plus they seem to happen much more often in people who start by reporting attraction to both men and women.^[12] Specifically: Women attracted to both men and women who experience a change in their arousal patterns are more likely to drift toward identifying as heterosexual with time, whereas men who report attraction to both men and women split, with about half of those who change their sexual expression drifting toward being more heterosexual and half more gay. (For more on this phenomenon see: “Prevalence and stability of self-reported sexual orientation identity during young adulthood” in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.)

One method shown to lower arousal to sexual stimuli for a period involves desensitization through overexposure. In other words, if you binge on one sexual stimulus, you will ultimately require more of it to get the same reaction. At extremes, overexposure can completely desensitize a person to a stimulus in this category, though this effect will wear off with the cessation of this overexposure. In other words, gay conversion camps could lower “gay thoughts” for a period if they provided nothing but all the gay sex a person could want, all day every day, though we doubt those running gay conversion camps would be comfortable with this treatment method.

In addition to temporary alteration through desensitization, we know that arousal pathways can be altered (though not reliably) through shifts in a person’s hormones. When people go through hormone therapy during sex reassignment surgery, their sexuality goes through drastic changes (though we want to emphasize that being trans doesn’t really have anything to do with sexuality, only your gender identity—all we are saying is that changing your hormones can change what arouses you). Multiple studies show that around 40% of individuals report experiencing changes in their sexual attractions during transition. Statistically speaking, most of these changes include shifts from exclusive attraction to one gender pre-transition toward some level of attraction to both men and women post-transition, but around 13% of trans women switch from exclusive or primary attraction to women to exclusive or primary attraction to men (most research on transitions finds no such drastic changes among those who were initially attracted to men). Of trans men initially attracted exclusively to either men or women, 6-7% experienced a complete attraction reversal after transition.

That said, if you read many personal accounts of transitions, you will notice an interesting pattern: Something about our hormones is tied strongly to the aversion system we noted above, as many find stimuli that formerly generated a strong aversive impulse to suddenly be arousing. In other words, occasionally during a person’s hormonal transition, something they found to be icky before will suddenly and inexplicably start to arouse them, meaning the pathway that causes this flip is almost certainly using hormonal cues.

The Human Mating Season

Humans seem to have something of a mating season, which is weird because no one ever talks about it. This season lasts from Christmas through Valentine’s Day and reaches its peak on the Sunday after New Year’s Day (which in the dating industry is called Dating Sunday). This increase in dating activity can be seen very clearly in data from dating apps; however, seasonal fluctuations in dating behavior are not just a dating app phenomenon. There is actually a seasonal increase in sexual interest and desire over the same period. You will see an increase in Google searches for pornography and prostitution over this period. (We would love to conduct more research to determine whether this is a cross-cultural phenomenon and whether or not it affects genders differently.)

Writing on Eggshells—Human Sexual Dimorphism

There are dozens of manners in which we might offend any myriad of groups when writing on the topic of sexuality. Seeing as there is no means by which we can accommodate all (often opposing) groups, we are already bracing ourselves for the blowback. While we enthusiastically engage with the type of information that leads people to feel the type of offense humans generate when their beliefs about the world are credibly challenged, we go out of our way to avoid the type of offense generated from undermining an individual’s self-image (such offense serves no purpose outside of cruelty). Alas, avoiding such unintended personal attacks when discussing sexuality has us walking—er, writing—on eggshells.

For the most part, this eggshell stroll is just that: A delicate and pained walk over terminology. For example, we sometimes found ourselves racking our brains to determine whether to use the word sex or gender when talking about attraction to dimorphic traits in an evolutionary context, as evolution uses gender as a proxy for sex (e.g., hip sway is both a performative aspect of gender and a result of a sexually dimorphic female hip bone). Fortunately, when it comes to issues of semantics, there usually is a way to avoid offense—this is not the case with potentially offensive facts.

There is one political hot-button issue that we cannot dance around if we are to adequately delve into underlying mechanics driving sexual arousal and behavior: Humans are a sexually dimorphic species; this dimorphism extends to our arousal systems and behavioral impulses. In other words, males and females exhibit varying characteristics beyond just different sexual organs, and these variances extend to our behavioral impulses and arousal/aversion systems. The existence of sexual dimorphism is highly offensive to certain groups that wish to believe that there are zero cognitively ingrained differences between males and females.^[13] Some of these groups go so far as to argue that socialization is the only reason why women are more aroused by penises (on average) than males. (As you can imagine, it is very difficult to write a book on arousal patterns that does not break down on male-female differences in those patterns, hence our obligation to address this point.)

Men and women in the human species exhibit sexual dimorphism in almost every organ we have—from our digestive systems to our skin, dentition, and bones. The idea that evolution placed a magical “brain barrier” on sexual dimorphism is ludicrous, considering that homo sapiens would have had to somehow reverse the mental differences that clearly exist in our recent ape ancestors.

Our recent ancestors absolutely exhibit mental differences across sexes. If you put a bunch of chimps together with no previous chimp socialization, they almost always sort into a patriarchy, whereas bonobos almost always sort into a matriarchy (some have argued that sexually dimorphic behavioral patterns in chimpanzees were socialized through chimpanzees watching humans, but if this were true, we would have seen a similar effect in bonobos—and this effect is not seen). Heck, not just our most recent ancestors, but almost every well-studied social mammal species we can think of presents clear, sexually dimorphic behavior patterns that are not socialized.

When we assert that there are systematic statistical differences in male and female brains, and when we state that there are sexually dimorphic behavioral impulses which are not socialized, we are not claiming that there are “male brains” and “female brains.” One cannot look at a brain and tell if its owner is male or female. Asserting that a person who claims there are statistical differences in behavior patterns is arguing for biological determinism is akin to saying that a person stating that men and women have different heights on average is basically saying there is a “male height” and a “female height” and that by measuring a person’s height you can tell their sex.

We also do not claim that socialization plays no role in male and female differences. Socialization plays a huge role in male and female behavioral patterns; it simply is not the only influence at play.

To our great consternation, individuals who deny sexual dimorphism of behavioral patterns will often admit that men and women have different aggregate rates of certain hormones, and that those hormones impact behavior. They admit this because:

It is easily and objectively testable that men have more testosterone than women on average.
Even a street junky knows when you shoot up roids your behavior will change. (“Roids” are the street name of anabolic steroids, which include testosterone and testosterone precursors.)

While some of the specific effects claimed to be associated with testosterone or estrogen can be credibly challenged (such as the claim that testosterone leads to more risk-taking behavior), it is absurd to claim that testosterone and estrogen have absolutely zero effect on behavior impulses. If that were true, why do we have testosterone and estrogen receptors in our brains? What’s the point of doing all the logical gymnastics required to claim that there are no sexually dimorphic impulses in human males and females if one already concedes that men and women have different hormone levels, which would naturally trigger different impulses, regardless of other inbuilt sexually dimorphic traits?

What makes it even more difficult to argue that men and women are cognitively identical is the fact that mental illnesses present themselves at different rates in men and women.

We can see a person arguing that schizophrenia being twice as common in men—and depression and Alzheimer’s being twice as common in women—is somehow tied to socialization. That said, it feels almost offensive to argue that autism being diagnosed at five times the rate in men is only a product of socialization and not neurological differences in men and women given that it is recognized between 12 months of age and 18 months of age.

We acknowledge that the manner in which adults treat babies is gendered—studies have shown that baby girls are more likely to be called pretty and baby boys are more likely to hear references to their future careers—but to argue that this could lead to a fivefold increase in autism diagnoses is bananas. While one could argue that it is just that autism is merely diagnosed less frequently in girls given how differently it presents, with its actual rate of occurrence not changing between genders, the point still stands: This radical difference in presentation and recognition happens at the age of 12 to 18 months, indicating a different underlying neurology is the cause of the different presentation / diagnosis rates in girls and boys, not socialization.

If you really believe that gender differences in autism are a product of socialization, we would encourage you to run a study on the rates of autism in children raised gender neutral. If you could demonstrate that raising young boys in a gender-neutral environment dramatically diminishes presentation of some unwanted behaviors associated with more extreme cases of autism, you would be doing the world a great service.^[14]

People who claim to believe that the difference in autism presentation is due to gender socialization have not, to our knowledge, systematically tested that claim—likely because they see ideas as more of a team sport than as a tool for improving people’s lives. (We’ve actually made a note to fund a study on autism presentation in children raised gender neutral and hope to have some form of results out there by 2025; while we think the current evidence suggests the difference in autism presentation between men and women is primarily a factor of a different neurology and not socialization, if we are wrong it would be an excuse to write another book that could help a lot of people.)

A Note to Those Subject to Pseudo-Scientific Propaganda Against Sexual Dimorphism

Many individuals get exposed to skewed views of academics through pseudo-scientific articles and brief book reviews spread via social media, which can lead them to believe there is some large academic community out there that believes males and females have exactly the same behavioral impulses on aggregate. This is simply not the case. Most of the researchers and books cited by these individuals are typically making different, more nuanced arguments.

One author often cited in arguments against sexual dimorphism is Gina Rippon, who wrote “The Gendered Brain.” Rippon has been quoted as stating, “I am not a difference denier,” claiming her critics have mischaracterized her. Instead, Rippon is merely trying to argue that “biology is not destiny” and that we often overstate how much of the differences between men and women are biological: “Yes,” she writes, “there are good studies out there that show sex differences . . . but keep the context in mind” (something with which we agree). Rippon continues: “The strawman argument is that I said there were no sex differences in the brain. I didn’t say that.”

Another author often cited in this realm is Cordelia Fine, who wrote Testosterone Rex and Delusions of Gender. Fine states clearly that “testosterone affects our brain, body and behavior” and agrees that on averagemen and women have different levels of testosterone.

These authors, whose words have been twisted by extremists on both sides, often argue the following:

That specific instances in which people assume men and women are different along gender-stereotyped lines are wrong or not backed by evidence. For example, there are not great controlled studies substantiating claims that “men take more risks” and “men are smarter,” yet these claims are both widely believed; hence, it’s worth it to attack them.
That specific logic used in evolutionary explanations for sexually dimorphic human behavior patterns is flawed.
That even though some behavioral impulses are, on average, stronger in men or women, it does not mean that EVERY man or woman will experience those stronger impulses.
That environmental and social factors play a much larger role than most commonly assume.
That as humans, we need not be slaves to our biology.

Going forward, be warned: Our theories on arousal and aversion to various sexual stimuli incorporate the potentially offensive-to-some-groups assumption that men and women have non-socialized sexual impulses that appear at different rates across genders.

Warnings aside, what if socialization actually reduces male and female cognitive differences? When looking at how individual genes are transcribed in the human brain from the prenatal period through infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, some studies found signs that that human male and female brains are most different in our prenatal states, and that they gradually converge over time, showing fewer differences with age.

One collaboration among neuroscientists at Yale, Johns Hopkins, and the National Institute of Mental Health found that the biggest female/male differences in gene transcription in the human brain, for many genes, appear during the prenatal period (for example male-female differences in IGF2 transcription are huge in the prenatal period and nonexistent among adults). Other studies show this is not limited to transcription—that a similar shift takes pace with brain structure. To explore this research in greater depth, check out: “A meta-analysis of sex differences in human brain structure” in the journal: Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.

The finding that some of the differences in male and female brains are largest before birth makes people’s insistence that socialization accounts for every single one of these differences patently comical.

Notes from the Research:

While engaging in a serious deep dive of research on sexuality, one is bound to accidentally dredge up fun studies on gender differences between males and females that don’t fit anywhere specifically. Here are some uniquely fun findings you are more than welcome to skip should you want to keep on topic:

A study conducted by Moriah Thomason scanned the brains of 118 fetuses and found that female brains in utero produce more “long-range” networks even before birth.
McGill University researchers found that men experience pain more acutely if they have memories of the same pain in the past, whereas women do not—or do so significantly less. This is a unique problem in its association with chronic pain conditions and was able to be alleviated through memory blockers—drugs that can separate the association of a memory and an emotion.
A 2018 paper in Acta Psychologica found men to be more than twice as likely to cooperate in game theory games when paired with other men, versus women when paired with other women.
Increased blood flow in the limbic areas may account for women’s vulnerability to anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and insomnia.
Brains of females have been found to be both more active than those of males—and active in more areas. For example, the prefrontal cortex, used in higher executive functions such as focus and impulse control, is more active in women. This likely contributes to the stereotype of women having more empathy, collaboration, self-control, and intuition.
In women, the anterior cingulate cortex and insular cortex are larger and more active during social processing. When women process sexual stimuli, the anterior cingulate cortex tends to inhibit emotion, perhaps to prevent reactions until the stimulus has been properly investigated. The insular cortex and hippocampus are both involved in the storage and retrieval of emotional memories and are both larger and more active in women than in men.
Even some behavioral impulses that seem socialized, such as caring for dolls, may be inbred. In one tribe of chimpanzees in Western Uganda, juveniles were observed using stones like dolls. Female chimps in this tribe were seen caring for these stones three or four times more often than males, and while female chimps typically treated these stones like babies, male chimps would be much rougher with the stones, appearing to have play fights with them. No female chimp was ever observed playing with a stone “doll” after having her first baby. Perhaps females evolved a behavioral set for caring for a newborn infant and, in the absence of an infant to care for, feed this instinct through care for dolls and stuffed animals.
On the ever-juicy and controversial subject of whether men’s preference for hotness in women (over other positive features) and women’s preference for wealth in men (over other positive features) is socialized or if there is some aspect of it being “inbred”: Alice H. Eagly and Wendy Wood created an interpretation of David Buss’s data showing that in countries with more egalitarian gender relations, the male-female differences in hotness/wealth preferences across genders were smaller, which could suggest that this difference is socialized. Nevertheless, researchers Lingshan Zhang and Benedict Jones failed to replicate the results of the previous study when re-analyzing the exact same dataset with more modern analytical techniques. Instead, work from Richard Lippa in 2010 argued that: “gender differences in personality tend to be larger in gender-egalitarian societies than in gender-inegalitarian societies, a finding that contradicts social role theory but is consistent with evolutionary, attributional, and social comparison theories. In contrast, gender differences in interests appear to be consistent across cultures and over time, a finding that suggests possible biologic influences.” It would seem, then, that the body of evidence leans toward these preferences being biological, though the jury is still mostly out. We normally don’t “show our work” when explaining nuanced points like this, but we thought we would do so in this case, both because this is a uniquely controversial subject and to give our readers a peek into how tedious the book would be if we did.

Things that Cause Arousal

If our sexual expression can be defined as follows:

What are these potential stimuli, and why are they tied to arousal? Let us explore some major categories in turn.

The systems we will be exploring in order are:

Breeding Targets: Arousal patterns tied to systems meant to get our ancestors to have sex with things that might bear offspring (e.g., arousal from things like penises, the female form, etc.).
Inverse Systems: Arousal patterns that arise from a neural mix-up, causing something that disgusts the majority of the population to arouse a small portion of it (e.g., arousal from things like being farted on, dead bodies, having insects poured on one’s face, etc.).
Emotional States and Concepts / Dominance and Submission: Arousal patterns that stem from either emotional concepts (such as betrayal, transformation, being eaten, etc.) or dominance and submission pathways.
Emotional Connections to People: While emotional connections do not cause arousal in and of themselves, they do lower the threshold for arousal (i.e., you may become more aroused by a moderately attractive person you love than a very attractive stranger).
Trope Attraction: Arousal patterns that are enhanced through a target’s adherence to a specific trope (a nurse, a goth person, a cheerleader, etc.).
Novelty: Arousal patterns tied to the novelty of a particular stimulus.
Pain and Asphyxiation: Arousal patterns associated with or enhanced by pain and oxygen deprivation.
Basic Instincts: Remnants of our pre-cognitive mating instincts running off of a “deeper” autopilot-like neurological system (dry humping, etc.) that compel mating behavior without necessarily generating a traditional feeling of arousal.
Physical Stimuli: Arousal patterns derived from physical interaction (kissing, touching an erogenous zone, etc.).
Conditioned Responses: Arousal patterns resulting from conditioning (arousal from shoes, doorknobs, etc.).

After exploring these systems, we will dive into a few that we originally assumed would affect arousal but—based on our data—ultimately found to have little connection to arousal patterns (like socialization and parental influence). Finally, we will do a deep dive into gender differences among these various pathways.

Breeding Targets

The first and most obvious category of stimuli that can cause arousal is tied to the systems in our brain that are meant to detect things with which we can successfully breed. This category includes visual stimulation from human body parts, smells, sexualized poses, and sexualized movements. Experiencing stimuli in this category ranges from seeing perky breasts and thinking: “Young, fertile human female: Mate!” to hearing the grunt of a large, masculine figure lifting something heavy and thinking: “Strong, genetically fit male: Mate!”

The more differentiated something is between sexes, the stronger the signal, as those things serve as better indicators of a target’s sex. This is why breasts, butts, vaginas, and the female gate (caused by the sexually dimorphic female pelvic bone) are classically the most stimulating indicators observed in a female, while firm musculature, broad shoulders, large hands, penises, and a gravelly voice (caused by a sexually dimorphic larynx) are the most stimulating indicators observed in a male. In males, attraction to feminized features can be shown to increase after an injection of testosterone, showing our response to this signal being upregulated through hormones.^[15]

While the key elements of these systems evolved to detect breeding targets, many women are aroused by stimuli that indicate a target is female and many males are aroused by stimuli that indicate a target is male even though they cannot breed with these targets.

As we mentioned before, the model placing human sexuality on a slider ranging from “totally straight” to “bi” to “totally gay”—the Kinsey scale—presents a poor schema for understanding human sexuality. Our research suggests that while attractions to male-like characteristics and female-like characteristics are sometimes bundled, in a significant chunk of the population such attractions are not associated (e.g., it is fairly common to find a penis arousing, but the naked male form and gravely voices disgusting—or to find breasts arousing, but vaginas aversive).

In one alternate (though cumbersome) model, all the breeding-partner-detecting arousal systems could be broken down into their own categories, each with their own aversion or attraction modifier, and each with their own volume. For example, one person may define their sexuality as finding penises very arousing, breasts mildly arousing, rougher male skin mildly aversive, vaginas highly aversive, and deep, gravelly voices neither arousing nor aversive.

When we first started writing The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, we were pretty sure this model could be simplified. More specifically, we thought one could probably narrow arousal patterns down to four stimuli systems suggesting something is a potential breeding partner. Anecdotally, it seemed as though systems for detecting primary sex characteristics were clustered but divorced from the systems that detect secondary sex characteristics.

Primary Sex Characteristics = Things used to breed (penis vs. vagina)
Secondary Sex Characteristics = Sexually dimorphic characteristics that appear at puberty (i.e., feminine facial characteristics, breasts, hip sway, a masculine voice, etc.)

Our study yielded some supporting evidence for this. It seems to be very common for an individual to find female primary sex characteristics aversive, but female secondary sex characteristics arousing (i.e., to find the feminine form arousing, but a vagina gross). Our survey shows 30% of males and 32% of females who find the female form arousing find vaginas aversive.

Our research also suggests that in the average person, the secondary-sex-characteristic-detecting system has a much higher average “volume” than the system detecting primary sex characteristics. For example, the average guy will derive more arousal from a feminine form than from a vagina. From our survey: 89% of men rate the female form at the highest level of arousal generation while only 71% rate the vagina the same way. We find it in amusingly ironic that the organs used explicitly for reproduction cause less arousal on average than secondary sex characteristics.

We developed these theories before running our survey. While there are ways we can twist our survey data to fit them, as we did above, we must be honest and admit that our data really suggests that something more complicated is going on. For example, while around 30% of the males and females we surveyed who found the feminine form arousing also found the sight of a vagina a turn off, not a single survey participant who found the male form arousing were simultaneously turned off by penises. However, 26% of men who found the sight of a penis arousing simultaneously found the sight of the male form actively aversive.

What’s more, our assumption that secondary sex characteristics are all operating on the same system may be wrong, as 15% of the women who reported to find the female form arousing in our survey also reported to see breasts as an active turn off—and yet we don’t see this happening in males. It would seem that humans may have dozens of independent arousal systems, which may or may not cluster. Weirder still, some of the arousal systems seem to cluster in only one gender (for example, in men arousal from the female form and breasts are “tied together,” but in women, it is common to receive arousal from one and not the other).

If this stuff is interesting to you, check out the supplemental chapter: “Mammary Mountain and Phallus Peak” on page 490. It goes into great detail the specific aspects of physiology that arouse males and females and how those arousal patterns relate to each other.

Why does all this matter? An understanding of how these male-female detection systems actually work yields a much clearer vision of a person’s real sexuality. There is a big difference between someone who has both systems turned off (and finds males and females disinteresting) and someone who has both systems in a negative state (and finds males and females icky). Given society’s current mainstream framework for understanding sexuality, we would call both of these people “asexual”^[16] despite their being just as different from each other as they are from someone who has both male and female attraction settings set to a positive state.

It is also possible for someone to receive a negative, “icky” impulse from both male and female stimuli but still receive a very strong arousal response from a separate set of cues, such as acting submissive, meaning it is entirely possible for someone to be technically “asexual,” but still have a high libido and really enjoy sexual activities tied to something like BDSM. We mention this as our data indicated that not being very turned on by naked men or women, but having a strong arousal response to certain concepts, is actually very common (oddly, this is especially true among women and men who see themselves as wealthy).

This perspective also makes it clear that the concept of being “gay” or “straight” is really more of a community identification and a description of shared experiences than it is a description of someone’s sexuality. As we mentioned earlier, “gay” is as much a description of an individual’s sexuality as “person of color” is a description of a person’s ethnicity. A woman who is not aroused by either males or females, but who is aroused by people with whom she feels emotionally close (an arousal pathway we will discuss shortly), and due to cultural circumstances only develops close emotional bonds to other women, has a totally different sexuality than a woman who has a strong sexual attraction to the female form and finds the male form repulsive—yet society would categorize both as “gay.”

Why Do Gay People Exist?

Why do gay people still exist if their sexual expression does not increase their number of offspring or the survival rate of said offspring?

One idea that has been making the rounds posits that this question is ill-conceived. Called “the gay uncle hypothesis,” this hypothesis asserts that gay individuals increase the survival rates of their relatives’ offspring, even if they have fewer descendants themselves. While there is some data to support this hypothesis, it is extremely flimsy. We personally don’t buy this hypothesis because gayness exists frequently in non-social animals—heck, it is even observed in fruit flies. A gay fruit fly is not increasing the survival rate of its brothers’ offspring.^[17]

Instead, there are a number of factors at play, all of which increase the probability of a person being gay, but none of which make it a foregone conclusion. Some of these factors are genetic; others are not. Think of it like height: Genes play some role, but so does a myriad of other factors, ranging from nutrition to in utero conditions.

Consider that every brother a man has born before him increases the odds that he will be born gay by 28% to 48%. This is an in utero effect. We know this because it still holds even when brothers are raised separately. Moreover, some studies have shown that gay men feature systematic differences in brain structure. Why does this happen? It probably has something to do with the maternal immune response to Neuroligin 4 Y-linked protein (NLGN4Y). NLGN4Y plays an important role in male brain development and mothers’ bodies get better at building antibodies that fight it with each new “infection” (pregnancy with a male offspring introduces chemicals to the female body that are identified as foreign). Eventually, this leads to later male births having statistically different neural pathways than earlier male births. This is a cool finding, as it is thoroughly backed up—there is even a study explicitly showing that mothers with gay sons have higher anti-NLGN4Y than mothers with heterosexual sons.

The fact that being gay in some males is tied to a maternal immune reaction to NLGN4Y suggests that being gay in at least this portion of gay males is not the same “kind” of neurological phenomenon as being gay in females. A mother would not produce an antibody to a female brain chemical or see it as foreign, and the stats don’t show that same correlation between same-gender siblings and female gayness. If being gay in males and females is a totally different neurological phenomenon, does it really make sense to rank them on the same Kinsey scale?

It seems likely that genes—along with other factors—play a role in gayness (genes may even play a role in the above mechanism, with some mothers having higher levels of anti-NLGN4Y). A giant study of around half a million people in the UK and the US across thirty institutions found that genetics explain about 25% of gayness.

So, if being gay is partially genetic, why did it evolve?

We are partial to the overdominance or sexual antagonism theories.

Overdominance takes place when a phenotype—the expression of a set of genes affecting an individual’s physical appearance or behavior (in this case, gayness)—exists in a population despite its contributing no benefit to fecundity (the amount of surviving offspring an individual has) because an individual who has the same code, but in a small quantity, enjoys a significant advantage.

An easy-to-understand example of this can be seen with sickle cell anemia. Sickle cell anemia sucks, and it seems weird that certain populations of humans maintain the “code” that creates it in their DNA. However, it was evolutionarily worth it to preserve this dangerous code, because those born with one iteration of it also enjoyed protection against malaria. The populations of humans who preserved this dangerous DNA did so because their ancestors lived in areas with lots of malaria and it was “genetically worth it” for them to sometimes have a child die of sickle cell anemia so long as their other children had a resistance to malaria. We are clearly oversimplifying here, but this isn’t a book on genetics; we are just trying to convey the gist of a concept.

Sexual antagonism refers to genes that lower the chance of breeding in one sex but increase it in the other. Your genes don’t magically know whether you are going to be a boy or a girl (outside those in your Y chromosome and rare genes which detect your sex before being activated), so a genetic set that increases the number of children a girl has threefold—but means a boy will have no children—will still be passed on.

The current research seems to suggest that both overdominance and sexual antagonism are at play in the expression of gayness across species.

The Fallacy of a Gay-Straight Spectrum

The gay-straight spectrum, a spectrum that presumes both males and females can be mapped on the same line based on how likely they are to be aroused by either males or females, is an artifact of a time when the concept of same-gender attraction was still a novelty and has no place in contemporary sexuality research or discussions. In addition to distorting the manner in which sexuality is investigated by forcing people into groupings incongruous with their underlying arousal patterns, the gay-straight spectrum fails to convey much about any individual’s arousal patterns beyond its demonstration that same-gender attraction exists.

The first clue indicating the spectrum does not represent real underlying patterns is that its existence implies men and women can be mapped on the same line, with a gay male being in the same spectrum “position” as a straight female. In practice, both gay and straight men tend to cluster around the extreme ends of the Kinsey scale, while women fall closer to the middle of the Kinsey scale (they are more likely to be attracted to both males and females—or at least not be actively grossed out by one gender in particular). In fact, research shows two-thirds of women show some level of arousal from pictures of both men and women. This is fairly rare in men.

Our survey showed similar results to the above-mentioned research: 83% of male respondents reported the male form to be aversive, with 59% finding it strongly aversive. Meanwhile, only 36% of our study’s female respondents reported finding the female form aversive, with only 15% finding it strongly aversive. The enormity of this disparity cannot be understated.

Were we dealing with a spectrum-based system that described male and female sexuality with equal accuracy, data taken from gay males would look similar to data taken from straight females—and yet this is not what we see in practice. Instead, the data associated with gay male sexuality presents a mirror image of data associated with straight males: Most gay men are as likely to find the female form aversive as straight men are likely to find the male form aversive. In gay females we observe a similar phenomenon, in which they mirror straight females instead of appearing in the same position on the spectrum as straight men—in other words, gay women are just as unlikely to find the male form aversive as straight females are to find the female form aversive.

Some of the research highlighting these trends has been conducted with technology like laser doppler imaging (LDI), which measures genital blood flow when individuals are presented with pornographic images. The findings can, therefore, not be written off as a product of men lying to hide middling positions on the Kinsey scale due to a higher social stigma against what is thought of in the vernacular as male bisexuality/pansexuality. We should, however, note that laser Doppler imaging systems are hardly perfect, especially when measuring arousal in females.

It is difficult to attribute these patterns to socialization, as they are observed across cultures and even within the earliest of gay communities that emerged in America, which had to overcome a huge amount of systemic oppression to exist. It’s a little crazy to argue that the socially oppressed sexuality of the early American gay community was largely a product of socialization given how much they had overcome just to come out.

If, however, one works off the assumptions of our model, this pattern makes perfect sense. There must be a stage in male brain development that determines which set of gendered stimuli is dominant, then applies a negative modifier to stimuli associated with other genders. This stage does not apparently take place during female sexual development. (We suspect this same system explains why it is common for males—but not females—to find things they are “supposed to” find gross arousing—more on this in the next chapter on page 102.)

This system must be pretty flimsy, as both men and women exist in positions all over the sexual attraction spectrum, but any theory of sexuality that cannot explain why men are either mostly straight or mostly gay across cultures—whereas women are more likely to hold positions closer to the center of the Kinsey scale—needs to be revisited.

What about the small portion of men who do rate themselves as aroused by both men and women? Actually, studies on such groups fuel our hypothesis that the spectrum-based system was misguided. For example, one study looked at the difference between men who rated themselves 5s (mostly gay) and 6s (totally gay) on a Kinsey scale. While 6s did not show any arousal when looking at gay female porn, the 5s did—BUT both 5s and 6s showed the same level of arousal when presented with male stimuli.

In other words the majority of men who are 5s on the Kinsey spectrum are no less attracted to men than men who are 6s. Instead, what differentiates these men is the presence of an entirely different, additive arousal system. The majority of males who fall in the middle of the Kinsey scale aren’t “half gay and half straight,” but could be seen as “100% gay and 100% straight.”^[18] The systems of attraction to each gender, when both active in a male, are normally not in competition with each other, but rather additive.

There are two final points we need to emphasize before we move on:

1) It is very difficult for some people to empathize with what it feels like to find one gender aversive. Specifically, people who do not experience aversion systems tied to any gender find it difficult to understand what it feels like to be grossed out by the idea of being intimate with a particular gender. If you do not experience an aversive reaction with any of your gender detection systems, try to think about a system you have that does yield an aversive reaction in you, but that others find sexually arousing.

Perhaps you find the idea of having sex with a 98-year-old aversive. That emotion you feel when you think about sex with a 98-year-old is the same emotion some people feel when they think about sleeping with someone of a specific gender. Telling someone to “just get over it” is as nuts as them telling you to get over your aversion to sleeping with a 98-year-old. Sexual aversion is an incredibly powerful emotion.

On a related note: Homophobia rates are statistically much higher in individuals with very low libidos. We suspect this is true for the same reason some pansexual^[19] people cannot understand what it is like to find one gender aversive. If you are a person who is not terribly aroused by anything, it is much harder to empathize with just how strongly others can experience sexual impulses. Given this, we imagine transphobia is likely highest not among those who are strongly attached to the sex they were assigned at birth, but those with little attachment to any gender, as they cannot empathize with what such an attachment feels like. (Our survey showed 14.5% of people fall into this category—more on this soon.)

2) Just because someone’s gender-detecting systems are not active—or just because both are turned to negative—does not mean they do not experience sexual arousal when exposed to other stimuli. We know people who would be considered completely asexual when it comes to their gender attraction systems but who become incredibly aroused by submission and humiliation. Honestly, what gender you find more stimulating is a very small part of overall human sexuality, and it is fairly ridiculous that we as a society focus so much on it.

Notes from the Research:

Do sex hormones play a role in being queer (gay, bisexual, pansexual, etc.)?Queer women possess significantly higher levels of cortisol—a hormone regulating the response to environmental stressors—while queer men who display lower-than-average cortisol levels. One could argue this is due to living harder lives (an argument bolstered from data including black queer individuals), but queer women also boast higher testosterone and progesterone concentrations than average, whereas this difference has not been observed in men. In other words, sex hormones are probably related to the genders one finds attractive, but the power of this effect is uncertain.
Theory: In The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships, we discuss how being polyamorous and sleeping with multiple partners typically increases testosterone in men, which contributes to lower body fat and more muscle. Could higher testosterone in men with several concurrent sexual partners be the source of stereotypes framing gay men as more fit/muscular than straight men, seeing as folks might be more likely to identify gay men as gay if they have several sexual partners at any given time?
Polls show that lesbians who doubt a woman’s attraction to both women and men are generally assuming she is really just straight, whereas gay men who doubt a man’s attraction to men and women typically assume he is really just gay. It is weird that both assume that people of their same gender who are attracted to both men and women are really more attracted to men. It is also interesting that, as offensive as this stereotype is, it has an element of truth to it—for men at least (not that we don’t see this pattern in women, but the specific study we are referring to only looked at men). Around 49% of men who identify as gay identified as the variant of bisexual attracted to at least men and women before they identified as gay. This phenomenon is known as “transitional bisexuality.” When arousal patterns of this group of gay men were tested against those who identified as gay immediately, it was found they had the exact same arousal patterns as the group that had never identified as bisexual. That said, we need to be super-duper clear here that the accusation there is no such thing as a man who is attracted to both men and women has been repeatedly disproven.Some reviewers were confused as to why we made this point so forcefully: There is a common myth that, because some people attracted to both men and women are in a state of “transitional bisexuality” or engaged in “performative bisexuality” (pretending to be attracted to both men and women to secure higher quality partners of the opposite gender—e.g., a straight girl kissing another girl on the dance floor), this means that simultaneous attraction to men and women is not really a thing, which is just stupid. There are absolutely people who are attracted to both men and women.

Sexual Aversion, Looking Under the Hood

Human sexual expression is just as much a tapestry of the things that turn us off as it is a representation of things that turn us on. When exploring a specific kink or theme in erotic art, we must investigate both attractions and aversions that may have inspired it.

For example, in our survey 66% of men reported consuming erotic material focused on two women having sex and 21% of women consumed erotic material focused on two men having sex. Erotic art focused on same-gender relationships is very popular among straight communities across cultures and in a huge variety of forms, from Yaoi Dōjinshi to A/B/O, MPreg, and more vanilla “hot girl-on-girl action.” It is easy to look at the commonality of this category of erotic art and assume that we are seeing this trend because a large portion of the population finds gays to be uniquely hot or that the consumption is driven by a desire to see more people of a specific gender in erotic material (i.e., if one girl is good, then two girls is better). While this is likely the case for a portion of this population, there are other reasons a person might consume porn featuring same gender relations.

This same interest in sexually-homogenous erotic art subjects would emerge if, instead of finding gays hot, a portion of both men and women were highly turned off by seeing people of their own gender naked or in a sexual context. And wouldn’t you know it . . . that is exactly what we see. Better yet, we see this sexual expression more in men than women, and we see a stronger trend of opposite-gender-having-sex pornography consumption in men than in women. If a man finds the naked male form repulsive, he will be as disgusted by seeing a man in his porn as someone else may be by seeing a dog in theirs. If such a man wants to masturbate to two people having sex, his only option may be gay porn—well, maybe.

Futa porn (futanari), in which one of the participants has breasts and a feminine body but also a penis, presents a similar phenomenon. Remember that 26% of men who are reportedly aroused by the sight of a penis also report finding the male form actively aversive. It is likely that portion of those who consume futa porn are simply looking for porn in which they can see penis-in-vagina sex without having to see the naked male form because they find males sexually repulsive. A female mirror to futa occurs in a portion of females who consume MPreg literature, which presents a class of males capable of getting pregnant. MPreg scenarios are great for women who, while aroused by romance and impregnation, find the concept of other females in their fantasies to be aversive.

As with all sexual predilections, there is more than one underlying “sexual genotype” that can result in the same “sexual phenotype.” Two individuals may love MPreg scenarios but have a totally different underling sexuality. So just because you like gay porn because you find gay sex uniquely hot that does not preclude another person from liking it because they are repulsed by the gender not featured in it. Isolating exactly what is motivating the consumption of certain types of erotic material in varying percentages of the population is critical in getting a clear picture of human sexuality.

This is all to hammer home two often-overlooked points:

When trying to understand why an individual is consuming one type of erotic material over another, or why they would like to try one “kink” over another, we should focus as much on what is turning them off as what is turning them on.
Two individuals can have identical tastes in pornography, partners, and kinks, yet have fundamentally different sexualities motivated by different arousal patterns.

Categorization and Volume Systems

When we first started playing around with the idea that sexuality did not exist on spectrums and was instead comprised of discrete volume systems, we figured the concept was indulgently iconoclastic. Given how much sexuality affects our daily lives, we imagined society would have noticed by now if sexuality does not indeed exist on a spectrum. Thus, we were shocked by how much our survey results neatly supported the idea that sexuality is not comprised of a collection of spectrums.

You may wonder why we thought to question the orthodoxy of the spectrum arousal system even before we had our data.

Our first clue was that, even though they are common in electronics, “spectrum-based systems” are extremely unusual in nature and human psychology. While one may find a spectrum of activation of a system (e.g., a person may have a system that can be half turned on), such as the autistic spectrum or the schizophrenia spectrum, a system specifically designed to detect things along a spectrum that can then be set to any level within the spectrum upon birth is extremely weird from an evolutionary perspective, (as the gay-straight spectrum system reportedly operates).

How do these neurological systems actually work? The most common system and the type of system we think is at play in human sexuality is what we will call the “Categorization and Volume System,” which is designed to “categorize” an environmental stimulus (e.g., blue spotting patterns on an egg or something that looks like a snake) then determine an appropriate volume and impulse based on the category of stimuli (e.g., the impulse to sit on the egg or the impulse to run away). The impulse created by these systems appears at different volumes depending on what category the stimuli is placed under and the amount of the stimuli detected in the environment because they function at the same time as other systems (like the one for sitting on an egg firing at the same time as the one for running from snakes). These volumes exist as a shorthand so organisms know which impulse takes priority.

Individuals that fail to assign optimal volumes to a stimuli die at a higher frequency. For example, birds who keep sitting on their eggs despite identifying the approach of a predator may die at higher frequencies than those who abandon their nests to flee predators, thereby surviving to reproduce again. This lowers the average volume of the “eggs -> sit” system or increases the average volume of the “snake-> run” system.

Let’s consider a human example of how evolution impacts Categorization and Volume Systems. Our brains have a system that (1) categorizes a smell as the smell of a rotting corpse as opposed to a freshly killed animal and (2) drives us to get away from the meat. If this system is broken in a human, they are much more likely to see a rotting animal as a source of food, eat it, then die and fail to pass on their genes.

These systems are common because they are extremely easy to neurally program over evolutionary time. It is very common with genetic mixing for an organism to end up with more or less of a piece of “code.” If an organism is missing some of the “code” for a Categorization and Volume System, it will usually still function fine—just at a lower volume—and if the code is accidentally duplicated a number of times, it will still function fine—just at a higher volume. (This is extremely simplified—especially in the context of cognitive proclivities.)

In contrast, spectrums actually represent two systems overlaid on top of each other: One system delineating the code for the spectrum and another delineating the number that determines a person’s place on the spectrum. If a person is missing some of this code or experiences changes in some of a spectrum’s code, it often simply stops working altogether. It’s the difference between a system that operates based on piles and one that operates based on sliders. It is a lot harder to “break” a pile by mixing around the positions of its component pieces.

There is no reason a fragile slider system would evolve to manage a task as important as breeding when a volume, pile, based system is an option. To put it another way, slider-based systems require all the code for the system to “kind of” work. Slider-based systems rely on evolution only moving a person’s position on the slider and not touching the rest of the code, whereas in a volume-based system, the strength of an impulse in reaction to a certain stimulus can be increased by sloppily copying code a few times and decreased by sloppily breaking the code.

The Nature of Asexuality

We would be remiss were we to exclude asexuals—those who do not report a desire to have sex with either males or females—from our discussion of breeding target arousal. Surprisingly, it would be wrong to say that asexuals are defined by categorically not finding either males or females arousing.

At least on average, studies have shown what makes the average woman who identifies as asexual unique is not that she does not feel arousal, but rather that said arousal does not have an emotional impact on her or make her want to have sex. Asexual women, on average, generally show the same genital arousal patterns as any other female when shown pornography. What is different about female asexuals is that this arousal pattern does not generate sexual impulses. As determined by monitoring their emotional states as they watched porn, this lack of a “have sex” impulse among asexual women does not appear to stem from any fear of or discomfort with sex (or at least any more than the average woman). This implies that the majority of asexual women are not asexual out of some hatred toward or fear of sex, but rather asexual due to a general indifference toward it.^[20] (Apologies: We did not find much research on asexual men.)

If you have trouble imagining what this feels like, imagine seeing something arousing then having your genitals engorge with blood and feeling a positive sensation, but having no impulse to do anything about the situation. More of a “Hmmm, neat. Now, what was I doing again?” reaction.

The nuanced nature of asexuality in women—not necessarily being defined by a lack of arousal—is yet another reason to throw out the idea that an individual’s sexuality is largely defined by a spectrum of attraction to either males or females. If we go back to the idea of “responsive desire” versus “spontaneous desire,” the average female asexual can be thought of as someone with an extremely high “responsive desire” system if this data is correct.

Are we saying that the average asexual is still aroused by things and engages in sexual acts? Absolutely. A whopping 56% of asexuals masturbate at least monthly (contrasted with 82% of sexual people) and 60% report having sexual fantasies (contrasted with 98% of sexual people). Asexual people may merely have more expansive concepts of sexuality, seeing as 11% of asexuals with sexual fantasies had fantasies that did not include other people (contrasted with 0.5% of sexual people).

The developmental processes that make people asexual seem related to those which make people gay. Why do we say that? Asexuals are more likely to be left-handed at similar rates to both gay men and lesbians (who are also more likely to be left-handed). In addition, asexuals are more likely to be born later within a group of siblings—just like gay men. That asexuality and being gay have the same weird correlations to some seemingly unrelated factors leads us to hypothesize that the developmental pathway that leads to each state is connected in some way. This may seem obvious, but there was a possibility that asexuality could have been a totally unique phenomenon instigated by a totally unique developmental pathway.

Supernormal Stimuli, Group Sex, and Gender

There are many cases in which our gender detection systems respond to supernormal stimulation (stimulation beyond what one would receive in nature). Common examples of porn / erotic art exploiting this mental glitch can be seen with bakunyū / hyperboobs (breast inflation) and bukkake (experiencing sexual arousal when seeing someone covered in more cum than one human could produce)^[21].

Giant porn also stimulates systems to supernormal stimuli (though giant porn might also be tapping into dominance-submission attractions). We can’t help but find this kink comical in its simplicity if it turns out to act as a generic supernormal stimulus. It would mean someone’s brain is literally going: “Well if I like women, then a girl 100 times the size of a normal girl is 100 times more woman and therefore better!”

Speaking of supernormal stimuli: You might be surprised to learn that the common trope of men wanting sex with as many women as possible in a given moment is not actually accurate. One study showed only one-third of men have fantasized about a threesome. In our study, 45% of female respondents—and only 48% of male respondents—reported fantasizing about a threesome. In general, group sex is not as common as you may assume, with only 8% of straight women, 15% of straight men, 16% of non-straight women, and 25% of non-straight men reporting past group sex. Interestingly, straight women generally reported group sex experiences to be less positive than any of the other groups. Much to nobody’s surprise, women generally want threesomes to be male-male-female, whereas men want it to be female-female-male.

The Nuanced Female Detection System

The “breeding target” systems that evolved to detect females optimized for targets that were both (1) female (and therefore capable of producing offspring) and (2) young and (and therefore more likely to be fertile). This puts the feminine form in an interesting position when it comes to attracting sexual partners, as signs of female anatomical dimorphism are often at odds with signs of youth—from smaller breasts to a smaller waist-to-hip ratio. The result is an internal fight within these systems between “probably female” and “probably young.”

The arousal system used to identify optimally fertile female breeding targets ultimately creates a wide range of preferences in body types for women, some of which de-emphasize sexually dimorphic features. Collective research findings currently appear to indicate that “probably female” features are more popular among less wealthy individuals while “probably young” features are more coveted by wealthier individuals. Our survey’s data on wealthy male and female respondents who reported females arousing backs this up (we go into our stats on how wealth affects arousal in detail in the “High-Net-Worth Extravaganza” supplement chapter on page 540).

Genital Size

Though research can be mixed when the audience’s socioeconomic status is factored in, larger breasts on women generally appear to be popular. A study in France used a padded bra to test how often men would approach the same researcher with an A cup, B cup, and C cup when she was at a bar. When sporting C cup breasts, the researcher was approached by 56% of participants (versus only 26% of the time when wearing the B cup padded bra and 17% of the time when wearing the A cup bra). However, one of the “probably young” features hinted at above is that both wealthier men and women find women with smaller breasts more attractive (this has been found both in a breakdown of data from dating websites and from our own data).

Both men and women appear to appreciate larger-than-average penises, though it may be that men care more about penis size than women. One study found that while 15% of women are dissatisfied with their partner’s penis size, a whopping 45% of men are dissatisfied with their own penis size. A different study found that only 0.2% of men wish they had smaller penises, while 9% of women wish they had smaller breasts. We do a breakdown of penis size and breast size preference by ethnicity in the “Mammary Mountain and Phallus Peak” supplement chapter on page 490, which—not to toot our own horn or anything—is pretty interesting.

What’s up with Foot Kinks?

We hypothesize that a foot kink is really just a normal attraction to a sexually dimorphic part of the human body. “Foot guys” probably exist right alongside “butt guys” and “boob guys,” as all three are just different parts of the human body that are sexually dimorphic. One can even probably find a supernormal stimulus manifestation of foot kinks in the ancient Chinese tradition of foot binding (i.e., if having small feet means female, then feet the size of a plumb must be extra female). Society just happens to view people with foot kinks as odd because they are less common than arousal patterns surrounding other gendered body parts like butts or breasts.

Some researchers hypothesize that foot kinks actually represent an entirely different type of attraction caused by accidental crosstalk between parts of the brain that process foot-related and sex-related stimuli. Essentially, the part of our brain where we map the sensory stimuli that we think other people experience when touched on their feet is near the part of our brain that processes arousal. Some people think that stimulation bleeds over between physically adjacent parts of our brain in some people (we discuss crosstalk as a concept in more detail early in this book’s “Emotional States and Concepts / Dominance and Submission” subchapter on page). Suffice to say, we do not think crosstalk is the driver of foot kinks as the pattern of appearance and age of onset for foot kinks matches fixation on other sexually dimorphic body parts too closely for our pet theory to be a mere coincidence.

Some research found the level of attention to feet in a given society appears to correlate with the level of STDs in that market, with foot kinks flaring during the AIDS epidemic of the 80s, the gonorrhea epidemic of 12th century Europe, and the syphilis epidemics in 16th and 19th century Europe. That said, we think this research is bunk. While we could see that people might be pressed into finding something far away from the disease-spreading orifices and mucus membranes to sexually stimulate themselves during times of high sex-borne illness, we fail to see how humans would be able to instinctually determine the level of sex-borne illness in a population. The trigger is way too complicated to have evolved such a nuanced response . . . unless humans release some sort of pheromone when they are sick with certain types of illnesses—like some types of plants and animals do—and people’s sexuality patterns change when enough of the pheromone is in their environment. Were this the case, given the prevalence of AIDs, we wouldn’t have expected to see such a shift during the AIDs epidemic.

Inverse Systems

Onward we venture to the second major source of arousal!

In a portion of the population, some stimuli that are “supposed” to elicit an aversive reaction elicit an arousal reaction instead. It appears that a negative modifier is getting swapped with a positive during some stage of this group’s development. We call this an “inverse arousal system.”

Do you get turned on by poo, dead bodies, the idea of sex with a sibling, getting farted on, being covered in goo, sex with a geriatric patient, or being covered in insects? If so, you have an inverse arousal pathway active in your brain. All of these things are supposed to cause a strong disgust reaction, but somehow in you a “-” was switched with a “+” and something you were “supposed” to find disgusting instead turns you on.

The arousal impulse we feel when interacting with something with which we want to breed begins to develop around the age of puberty. However, some individuals report feeling strong impulses long before puberty. After puberty hits, these individuals begin to realize these feelings were sexual in nature. These prepubescent impulses tend to be associated with the two pathways: The inverse systems pathway, discussed in this chapter, and the emotions pathway, which we will discuss in the subsequent chapter. By looking at a person’s age when an arousal pattern first appears, you can tell which pathway it utilizes.

The inverse pathway is not socialized. You do not get turned on by getting covered in insects (formicophilia) because society told you were supposed to. There are three core pieces of evidence for this:

The types of things that activate the inverse pathway are just not the sorts of things society glorifies or sexualizes.
The pathway appears way too early to be influenced by socialization. Arousal impulses in this category are typically first noticed when a person is a toddler (people realize this in hindsight—obviously, people don’t understand such things to be arousing until after they go through puberty and have more points of comparison).
They are highly gendered in their appearance, appearing much more frequently in men. You would expect slightly more gender equity in the appearance of these arousal impulses if they were socialized or about breaking society’s rules (women get turned on by all sorts of rule-breaky things—just not these rule-breaky things).

If we don’t “learn” these arousal impulses and if they do not boost our odds of reproducing, where on earth do they come from?

Evolution is a cheap programmer when it comes to behavior. Evolutionary forces often hijack or piggyback on systems that were originally evolved in reaction to some other evolutionary pressure. Unfortunately for us humans, it looks like our sexuality is affected by evolutionary frugality and the same neural pathway fires when we experience aversion in sexual and non-sexual contexts. This results in our experiencing the same “ick” reaction when imagining an encounter with centenarians having sex that we feel when we fall face first into a pile of dog poop.

While we covered this a bit already, it is worth going over again: The aversion system in humans is literally the exact same system as the arousal system. It just uses a negative modifier.

Think about it, you walk into a room and see a rotting corpse. How does your body instinctively respond?

You look away
Your pupils contract
You either hold your breath or hold your nose
You try to get out of the room as soon as possible
You have a strong impulse to not interact with the thing

Now suppose you see a hot person when you walk in a room. This time:

You look at them as much as social conventions allow
Your pupils dilate
You might inhale deeply
You look for excuses to stay around
You have an impulse to interact with them

These two systems aren’t just eerily similar; they are the same system. The fact that this aversion pathway sometimes breaks in a way that causes strong arousal is proof of that in our minds. There is no other good explanation for why inverse arousal pathways appear before puberty, are heavily gendered, or really exist at all—but more on those three points ahead.

It makes a lot of sense that these two systems would be operating off the same code. Of all the categorization and volume systems animals have, the two (not tied to eating) that would have evolved earliest are:

The one that tells an animal to mate with something, and
The one that tells an animal that if it stays in an area with something, it may become ill.

The brains in which these systems evolved to work would have been simple in the extreme. If evolution could have found a way to program these systems with the same “code,” it would have. In the same way the original Mario games used the same image file for both bushes and clouds to save space because old cartridges had so little memory, when our brains operated in simple worm-like creatures, evolution decided to use the same system for arousal and aversion.

Sometimes part of the “code” that is supposed to find something aversive gets switched with the impulse to find it sexually attractive. Essentially, a (-) gets swapped with a (+) in a small portion of the population. This explains why people who have impulses tied to these things report feeling them before puberty. Systems like the one that keeps you from playing with fecal matter or rotting corpses are meant to be in an “ON” state from birth and not switch into an “ON” state at puberty, as those things are always a threat.

Note from the Research:

An attraction to dead bodies motivates only 15% of necrophilia cases.

Inverse pathways leading to arousal are less common in women. We think this gives us a hint as to the source of this switch. Men tend to cluster along the far ends of gay-straight spectrum scales, whereas women do not (a gay man is more likely to be grossed out by the idea of sleeping with a woman than a gay woman is a man, plus a straight man is more likely to be grossed out by the idea of sleeping with a man than a straight woman is a woman). In men, there is some sort of neurological system designed to “flip” +s to -s that is not commonly present in women. We suspect this sign-flipping mechanism sometimes flips random +s and -s in roughly 15% of the male population and 5% of the female population, causing these individuals to become aroused by one or two random things that evolved to gross them out at a volume equal to what was supposed to have been output in disgust (this same switch also has the potential to cause someone to become disgusted by something that is “supposed” to arouse them).

Why would there have been stronger pressure on men to develop this system? Consider that if a man is sleeping with ten random people he finds attractive every couple of months, the fact that three of them just happen to be men is going to affect the number of children he has far more than a woman sleeping with ten random people every couple months, three of which just happen to be women. It appears that men addressed this greater potential for loss by developing some system that recognizes their gender of primary attraction, then flips the switches associated with the other gender to negatives early in childhood. The system, however, can be a bit faulty: Sometimes it flips the wrong switches and whatever process developmentally flips arousal to aversion is identical to the process for flipping aversion to arousal.

In short, many things you find gross at an instinctual level—usually from childhood—will turn on a small portion of the population; however, this is not true for other emotional states. For example, just because you have an instinctual fear of something does not mean a portion of the population finds that thing hot. While there are not large populations that get turned on by things like fire or heights, there are large populations that feel turned on by things like having insects poured on their face, being farted on, or being covered in slime.

Zoophiles

One kink group that may be tied to inverse systems (due to its overrepresentation in males and early age of onset) is zoophilia/bestiality. Both of these communities are aroused by the idea of sex with animals and both are surprisingly common. Kinsey’s study back in 1948 found 8% of men and 3% of women had had sex with an animal, but with time these numbers have dropped, with more recent studies showing them at around 5% and 2% respectively (likely a product of lower access to animals in a more urban society). These numbers are fascinating when contrasted with our survey results, which suggested that only 6% of males and 2% of females are aroused by the idea of sex with an animal.

If the data is accurate, this indicates around 87% of people who are aroused by the idea of sex with an animal have tried it. This suggests the impulse must be incredibly strong in the portion of the population that experiences it, lending support to our theory that volume modifiers are developmentally separated from the +/- signs. The volume of the disgust generated by the idea of having sex with an animal is super high in the average person, so the arousal generated by the idea would be equally high to someone turned on by it—high enough to override the moral aversion in almost every individual who experiences this arousal pattern.

As is the case with many kinks, zoophilia and bestiality seem to be combining a few pathways. Interviews with zoophiles often cite an attraction to animal genitalia due to their novelty (specifically, in one survey, they said this attraction stemmed from the genitals being smellier, wetter, and harrier). Individuals aroused by this aspect of zoophilia and bestiality are likely being turned on by an inverse pathway that would normally create an aversion impulse at the thought of sex with something that was smellier, wetter, harrier, and well . . . not human. However, not all zoophiles are experiencing the same pathway tweaks; some are likely exercising a sub-dom arousal pathway and others still seem aroused by the idea of sex without fear of judgment.

Notes from the Research:

Most zoophiles are specifically aroused by the idea of sex with dogs or horses. We suspect this may just be due to the high availability of dogs and large genitals of horses combined with their moderate availability.
One study on the subject found the average zoophile has sex with an animal two or three times a week.
72% of zoophiles responding to one study reported to not see anything wrong with what they were doing and 80% claimed that they believed the animals had offered them consent. As much as we have an impulse to condemn such acts as inconceivably reprehensible and remind our readers that animals cannot give consent, we would be hypocrites to do so as people who love to eat veal, enjoy a fresh glass of factory-farmed milk, and delight in playing with adorable dog breeds whose unique features are the product of forced sex between dogs. It is critical that we not shield ourselves from condemnation just because the way we lead animals to be tortured and forced to have sex is socially condoned. (But seriously, animals cannot consent.)

While we are on the topic, we would be remiss to not mention a bizarre website that used to exist in the early 2000s, which featured an excruciatingly detailed guide for having sex with dolphins. It went through everything from where to buy a house and how to get to a location where dolphins congregate to how to sexually engage them. What makes it crazier is that dolphins have a prehensile penis (i.e., their penises are like an elephant’s trunk), which could easily kill a person should they fail to execute every aspect of the courtship perfectly. The thought of a person who bought a house near a specific cove just so they could try to have sex with dolphins presents a splendid summation of just how far people will go to satisfy atypical sexual impulses that are very likely to get them killed. Humans are utterly bizarre.

Emotional States & Concepts / Dominance & Submission

Now to the arousal pathway we personally find most interesting: The pathway tied to emotional states and concepts—dominance and submission among them.

Emotional states and concepts can yield sexual arousal, but unlike the previous pathways we have discussed, emotional states and concepts can begin to cause arousal at any point in a person’s life, sometimes appearing before adolescence and other times appearing in adulthood. (As a refresher: Breeding target pathways almost always appear around puberty and inverse pathways almost always appear very early in life.)

The concepts and emotional states that ultimately trigger arousal appear to only be those which are most deeply programmed into us—those which would have been extremely relevant to humans in our early most stages of social evolution, when humans were tribal animals. Specifically, the emotional states most likely to be looped in with sexual arousal are associated with concepts such as: Submission, domination, anticipation, usefulness, betrayal, trust violation, the ability to impose an emotional state on another, rape, worthlessness, helplessness, being hunted/hunting, humiliation, feeding another, freedom/slavery/servitude, impregnation, surrender, dependency, being depended upon, gift exchange, subjugation, killing, being consumed, and predator-prey relationships.

In contrast, evolutionarily recent emotions and concepts, such as schadenfreude, war, driving, or the feeling you get from reading a good book, are rarely seen to be associated with sexual arousal. Something about these very early concepts and emotions, which played such an important role in our survival as a social species, got tied to arousal states in a portion of the human population.

The current go-to theory on this is that neural crosstalk plays a significant role in the connection between emotions, concepts, and arousal. Have you ever had the audio cord that connected to a speaker system get too close to a power cord, leaving you annoyed by the random noises that resulted? Essentially, this hypothesis claims something similar is happening when a person gets aroused by this category of stimuli.

The part of our brain that creates arousal impulses is nested between parts for social processing and the part of our brain for processing stimuli related to feet (this is unusually large in our brains, presumably because it was important back when our feet were used to grab branches). Many theorize that in a portion of the population, there is crosstalk between these older social parts of our brain and parts associated with sexual arousal. Essentially, a bunch of neural activity in one area could cause neural activation in adjacent areas or lower the threshold for activation in those areas.

We suspect that brain overlap theory is partially correct—or at least that it explains a small portion of cases in which a social concept arouses an individual. We do not, however, believe that brain overlap is the primary driver of conceptual arousal. If it were, we would expect a more even distribution of emotional concepts that arouse people, and this is not what we see in practice. Instead, emotional states that can be framed in the context of dominance and submission are far more likely to be tied to arousal pathways. Even more damning to this theory is the gendered nature of these pathways—something that is unexplainable by crosstalk alone as these parts of the brain are in the same locations and are roughly the same size in both males and females.

The role of dominance and submission in human sexuality cannot be overstated. Our survey suggests that the majority(over 50%) of humans are very aroused by either acting out or witnessing dominance or submission. But it gets crazier than that: While 45% of women taking our survey said they found the naked male form to be very arousing and 48% said they found the sight of a penis to very arousing, a heftier 53% said they found their partner acting dominant in a sexual context to be very arousing. Dominance is literally more likely to be very arousing to the average female than naked men or penises. To say: “Dominance and submission are tied to human arousal patterns” is more of an understatement than saying: “Penises are tied to human arousal patterns.”

We have a delectable theory about what is going on here: If you look at all the emotional states that frequently get tied to arousal pathways, the vast majority of them seem to be proxies for behaviors that would have been associated with our pre-human ancestors’ and early humans’ dominance and submission displays. For example, things like humiliation, being taken advantage of, chains, being used, being useful, being constrained, a lack of freedom, being prey, and a lack of free will may all have been concepts and emotions important in early human submission displays.

We posit that most of the time when a human is turned on by a strange emotional concept—being bound for instance—their brain is just using that concept as a proxy for a pre-human submission display and lighting up the neural pathways associated with it, creating a situation in which it looks like a large number of random emotional states are turning humans on, when in reality they all boil down to just a fuzzy outline of dominance and submission. Heck, speaking of binding as a submission display, there were similar ritualized submission displays in the early middle ages, in which a vassal would present their hands clasped in front of their lord and allow the lord to hold their clasped hands in a way that rendered them unable to unclasp them (this submission display to one’s lord is where the symbolism of the Christian kneeling and hands together during prayer ritual comes from). We suspect the concept of binding and defenselessness have played important roles in human submission displays well into pre-history. Should all this be the case, why on earth have our brains been hardwired to bind (hehe) our recognition of dominance and submission displays to our sexual arousal systems?!?

Dominance and submission displays are near universal in social animals. Sociality doesn’t really work in intelligent species when a tribe doesn’t know which members’ preferences take precedence or if they have to fight every time there is a difference of opinion. When our ancestors first evolved sociality, the brain had to find a way to motivate these social-order-facilitating dominance and submission displays. It is not crazy to think the brain used arousal to motivate these displays instead of a more generic reward pathway, given how close the part of our brain that judges our position in a social hierarchy is to our arousal centers. Further, if we assume that evolution was using arousal to reward dominance and submission displays, we doubt it had enough evolutionary time or incentive to quarantine this connection to only dominance and submission instead of associated concepts like predator-prey relationships, humiliation, and bondage. This would explain why there is such a range of dominance or submission associated concepts that arouse people.

There was likely another reason why evolution “chose” the arousal pathway to motivate dominance displays instead of a “more appropriate” reward pathway. When our pre-social ancestors were first evolving submission displays and needed a system to motivate complex behavioral displays, they likely already had one: The system used for mating displays (think of a bird dancing about and chirping in order to show another bird how great his genes are). Given its proximity to the act of sex, it makes sense that the mating display system would be using arousal pathways to motivate it and encourage action when it was detected in others.

It would have been much “cheaper” to just make some tweaks in the mating display system instead of building a whole new system from scratch—and since evolution is a cheap programmer, it would be odd for evolution to not borrow pieces of the existing mating display system to build the dominance display system. We are therefore willing to bet this cheap programming, as it were, explains why the majority of humans experience arousal when performing or witnessing dominance and submission displays.

A similar pattern can be observed in all sorts of social mammals: The same behavior used to show one is ready for sex is also used as a submission display. In most of these species, the way a female signals she is ready to be mated with involves a set of displays very similar to the ones that show submission to a more dominant tribe member. Heck, among many animals, all the nuance is taken out of it, and one individual, male or female, will simply mount another to show it is dominant while another—male or female—will prepare themselves to be mounted to show they are submissive.

Some species are strictly matriarchal, such as the spotted Hyena. Instead of adopting a behavior that mocks a female being ready to be engaged in sex as a submission display, such species mock a male being ready for sex as a submission display—with an aroused penis being a sign of submission in spotted hyenas in both males and females (females of this species have something called a pseudo-penis, hence this being possible). Long story short: The connection between dominance and submission and arousal is not a “human thing;” it is a “most social mammals” thing.

People often think of dominance and mating displays as sets of actions and not concepts; however, many animals’ mating displays are inherently conceptual. Think of the bird that brings a “gift” to a potential mate to show how good it is at procuring things. This is a conceptual display in the sense that the female must judge the quality of the gift. If a mating display system were to be hijacked to create human dominance and submission displays, those displays could easily be conceptual. Behaviors such as bowing, turning our heads to the side to expose our necks, and clasping our hands together are pretty clear instinctual actions showing submission in humans (likely to make ourselves look smaller or expose vulnerable regions of our bodies), but there are also concepts that can signal dominance or submission such as humiliation, bondage, control, chains, and slavery.

To see why concepts like dominance and submission that seem silly in modern human culture were so critical to our early ancestors, take a step back from what dominance and submission mean in the context of BDSM and our current culture and consider what dominance and submission meant to our ancestors.

For the sake of argument, let’s use chimpanzees as a proxy for our early social ancestors. Almost no cognitive ability affects a chimpanzee’s survival more than its ability to understand its position within a tribe’s social hierarchy and signal that it understands its position to other members of its group. A chimp who cannot understand when another chimp is above it in the dominance hierarchy and signal that it understands its lower social rank through a submission display has almost zero chance of surviving. It is not an exaggeration to say that a chimp who does not know how to find its own food has higher odds of survival than a chimp that fails to understand its position within his or her tribe’s social hierarchy.

To create dominance hierarchies, chimps must have a repertoire of dominance displays and submission displays deeply ingrained in their behavioral sets. When you see BDSM in this context, it becomes quite comical: A ridiculous Kabuki theater for acting out early hominid dominance and submission displays that in turn piggyback off of the “code” used to motivate pre-human mating displays, all to masturbate a very specific neurological pathway.

Similar to attraction to either males or females, arousal/aversion from dominance and submission does not work on a spectrum, functioning instead as two independent systems. Just as a person can receive emotional rewards from the systems for detecting men and the systems for detecting women, a person can also be turned on by performing/watching both dominance displays and submission displays. The same way a person can be turned off by men and women, a person can be turned off by both dominance and submission displays.

Much to our fascination, it seems to be possible for a person to be turned on only through one specific subcategory of dominance or submission. For example, someone may only get turned on by the feeling of being constrained or humiliated—and no other aspect of the submission pathway. We are unsure why this happens, though our survey shows such narrow and specific tastes are rare. In our survey, most people who are reportedly turned on by one subcategory of submissive behavior also reported being turned on by submission in general (the same goes for dominance related behavior).

Notes from the Research:

Female submissives (at least on the BDSM front) have lower empathy than average females.
While BDSM is often conflated with abuse, surveys indicate that 70.8% of women participating in BDSM report that BDSM reduces psychological stress “always” or “almost always.”

Being Bound

Arousal from being tied up or immobilized is strikingly common (45%f and 23%m). It is easy to assume that the impulse driving this behavior comes from being bound serving as a submission display—and sure we can see a rope bunny who gets aroused by being tied with rope maybe deriving arousal from a submission pathway, but not every outlet for this kink looks like a clean-cut proxy for submission.

Consider latex vacuum beds in which all the air is sucked from a vacuum bag, completely and tightly immobilizing a person. This is well-known in BDSM circles, is seen as an extension of the latex and PVC rubber kink, and (contrary to popular opinion) did not arise in Japan, but likely emerged in Western Europe instead. Given how clinical and separated from potentially historic interaction patterns vacuum beds are, they do not seem like anything proximate to a classic submission display.

So, what do we think might be going on here? We think that a portion of “kinks” around being bound or otherwise immobilized are not actually kinks at all, in that they are not motivated by an arousal impulse. Instead, we posit certain interests are widely believed to be driven by an arousal impulse, not because they are motivated by an arousal system, but because the types of places that accommodate them (such as BDSM dungeons) typically focus on arousal pathways.

What if positive emotions from being bound represent a misidentified impulse? What if the positive emotional feedback actually felt by individuals indulging in these kinks is a swaddling impulse that doesn’t turn off fully in a portion of the population? For those who have never cared for a baby: Human infants take immense comfort in being snugly swaddled. It would almost be weird if there was no portion of the population that didn’t have this impulse “shut off,” especially when you consider there would not be a strong evolutionary pressure to ensure we only feel the swaddling impulse in infancy.

That we can’t look around and identify the portion of adults whose swaddling impulse never turned off suggests they are being obscured by some other group or behavior. We suspect that these people make up portions of the populations involved with what is traditionally thought of as bondage, recreational use of weighted blankets, and obsessively tight tucking in of sheets.

This is one of those things to always be careful about when trying to parse out drivers behind a human behavior pattern. When you are looking at behavior from the perspective of arousal impulses, it is easy to forget that not every weird mental pathway must be driven by an arousal system, there are plenty of good feelings that don’t come from arousal systems and not everyone compelled to a non-socialized behavior pattern are doing it because of an arousal system.

Dominance in Self vs. Others

One interesting thing we decided to test for in our study was whether there was perfect overlap between people who feel aroused by seeing their partner acting dominant in a sexual context and acting submissive themselves in a sexual context. There was not.

It is actually quite common for a person to not be aroused by acting submissive themselves in a sexual context and yet to find it very arousing to see their partner acting dominant. The inverse is also true.

We find it a little odd that the systems shook out this way, but being aware of the dynamic is useful when mapping a person’s sexuality.

The Non-Sexual World of BDSM

When some small sliver of a subgroup toys with sexual arousal, our society tends to perceive the entire community as primarily focused on sex. This tendency can obscure totally-non-sexual factors that draw many (if not most) members to these groups.

Given the theming of this chapter, let’s consider the BDSM community as an example. Many BDSM community members are attracted to the subculture by totally non-sexual interests. For example, BDSM scenes can induce something called “subspace” in the submissive individual (this comes in a number of variations, including petspace, ponyspace, and littlespace). Subspace is a trance-like state that combines a constricted perception of reality with a sense of euphoria capable of transforming the perception of other stimuli (i.e. pain might be perceived as pleasure). Depending on the individual, this experience can be completely non-sexual and yet it presents a huge appeal of BDSM to a significant number of participants in its adjacent communities.

Don’t misunderstand us—even subspace is not the major non-sexual draw for the majority of BDSM practitioners. There is a broad diversity of motivating factors drawing people to BDSM, ranging from a sense of community to the opportunity to master new skills and the manner in which BDSM roleplay allows people to assume new roles that extricate them from the doldrums of daily life.

Very, very, very few communities of any type are predominantly focused on sex or sexuality—this is probably why whenever any community is sex-adjacent in any way, outsiders assume it is all about sex. We see this phenomenon affecting communities as diverse as diverse as the poly, leather, pony play, Second Life, and furry communities. Consider how, as kids, when we first hear about dating and marriage, we think it’s all about kissing and sex, but as adults we come to see those things as making up less than 1% of the holistic dating/marriage experience and representing very little of dating/marriage’s appeal.

One Way We Could Be Wrong

Our data suggest that 80% of women who tend toward the center of the gay-straight spectrum are aroused by submission, contrasted with only 62% of straight women. Recall how women in general in our data reported being more aroused by submission than the naked male form or penises. What if this explains why women are more likely to fall in the center of a gay-straight spectrum than men?

What if all our theorizing about an inverse system is just coincidence, and what is really going on is that women predominantly have a dominance-oriented sexuality? Could it be that the mostly-male lens through which sexuality has historically been investigated has led researchers to incorrectly assume that if males have a “naked-female-focused” sexuality, women must in turn have a “naked-male-focused sexuality?”

More females than males may appear to fall around the center of the gay-straight spectrum because more women’s dominance-detecting systems eclipse those meant to detect gender (meaning these women are not necessarily pansexual, but rather more attracted to dominance or submission than any particular gender). In this case, while many women placing around the center of the gay-straight spectrum in surveys would indeed be “bi” in the classical sense of being actively aroused by at least men and women,^[22] others would merely be women whose gender detection systems pale in comparison to their dominance-detection systems. Even if members of this second group were not aroused by anything tied to females, the relative volume of their female-detecting systems when contrasted with their dominance-detecting systems might be so weak that they would glean more arousal from a very dominant female than they would from most men.

We still don’t like this theory as much as the larger framework we present, but it may represent another way of looking at the larger truth.

Note from the Research:

Can an emotion like fear increase our attraction to someone? A famous study conducted in the 1970s that reported to show that men who interacted with women in a dangerous situation felt a stronger bond with them than those who did not. Specifically, researchers had a girl interview men on a fear-inducing suspension bridge and on a normal bridge and recorded whether these men reached back out to the girl more often when the interview happened on the fear-inducing bridge.

This study has since been picked up by pop culture both due to its clever design and the fact that it yields a surprising result while simultaneously validating a hunch people kind of believe is true (these are the sorts of studies that spread the most, like that garbage study about babies and classical music). We would not take this study’s findings as strong evidence of its claims. Obviously, people who interviewed someone in a unique and interesting environment and thus have an “excuse” for outreach are going to follow up with someone more than those who didn’t.

We mention this study to highlight the relative absence of strong evidence that emotional pathways outside of disgust, love, and dominance/submission proxies have ties to arousal.

Transformation

BDSM, bondage, slavery, and humiliation are clearly tied to the dominance/submission pathway of arousal, but what about some of the less obvious kinks related to this arousal pathway? Transformation presents one interesting example.

The key to unlocking the mystery of what causes people to be aroused by the idea of transformation involves exploring the gender breakdown of transformation arousal (f16% m5%) and the variable age of onset. With this information, we can confidently say that transformation scenarios activate the human submission pathway.

As with most kinks that lean female, most transformation “porn” manifests in the form of narrative fanfictions and romance novels—typically, werewolf and vampire stories. The narrative structures of fanfiction and romance novels allow us to focus on the emotions experienced by characters during transformation fantasies, which in turn enables us to pinpoint what specifically triggers arousal. Arousal triggering emotions in transformation-focused romance novels and fanfictions typically fall into one of two categories: Either the transformation purifies the individual, making them somehow “cleaner” and more perfect, or the transformation revolves around pain, a lack of control, dehumanization, and/or surrender of control to another individual, who assumes a dominant role over the individual being transformed (Think: Sexy male vampire transforming a woman into a glittering vampire or a woman, recently attacked by a bloodthirsty werewolf, having her bones painfully crack and reshape as she becomes a beastly werewolf and loses control of her actions).

One interesting exception can be observed with superhero and magic anime girl transformations, which involve empowerment of the individual being transformed. While such transformations are often sexualized, they do not inspire the same amount of porn or erotic fiction as, say, werewolf, vampire, and animal transformations. This suggests that superhero / magical anime girl types of transformation are not effective at activating a transformation kink. This is neat because less sexualization of empowerment-based transformation makes sense if the above framework is correct—that transformation is a proxy for submission.

The counterpoint to the above argument is that transformation is actually overrepresented in females because it has something to do with pregnancy. Women have a portion of their life cycles in which their body rapidly and dramatically transforms, whereas males do not. We do not buy this theory but wanted to point it out as another option.

Signs That our Framework May Be Wrong

Some emotional state associated kinks do not seem to reinforce our framework. We are never ones to hide evidence that we may be wrong, so let’s take a quick look at four of these: Poppers, looners (those who engage in balloon play), voyeurs, and those aroused by sex in public spaces.

Poppers deviate from our model that implies all emotional turn ons are proxies to the dominance-submission pathway. While popping could be seen as engaging dominance-submission pathways (in that somewhat-unpredictable inanimate objects over which people do not have total control can be seen as being the dominant figures in a scenario), we hesitate to say this connection is definitive. Kinks of this sort may genuinely exemplify a case of crosstalk: If you tickle the part of the brain associated with anticipation—or non-sexual stimulation from certain emotional states like anticipation/release—enough, for whatever reason, it may directly affect the arousal system in a portion of the population through a potentially-unique pathway. Alternately, these kinks may involve a source of non-sexual stimulation being mislabeled (we suspect this happens frequently, with unusual sources of positive stimulation getting looped in to “sexuality” even when they are not activating arousal systems because they often take place within sexual contexts—for a more generic, if imperfect, example of this, think of a massage).

Looners gain arousal from sexual scenes involving balloons. From what we have learned from community members, interest in balloons arises before puberty, indicating it is either an inverse pathway (which we doubt) or an emotional state pathway. The problem is we can’t pinpoint exactly what emotional state balloons might be tied to. One community member we interviewed said they contextualized it as part of the BDSM community and to them it was an extension of submission or a tool for use in eliciting submission pathways. If this particular looner is right, it would be in line with our theory that all emotional state pathways are really just proxies for dominance and submission.^[23]

Voyeurs and those aroused by public sex may seem to be related on a superficial level but run off totally different arousal systems. Voyeurism is likely just a “breeding target” pathway functioning normally. The abnormal aspect of it lies in the lack of aversion the average person evolved to feel when they see the target of their sexual interest with another person. That said, many who practice voyeurism say the aspect of “betraying/violating” their target through watching is an important aspect of the arousal pathway, which would indicate a purer emotional pathway. While this might be a proxy for dominance, we doubt it.

Public sex seems to be motivated largely by the fear or heightened emotional state created by the risk of being caught. We suspect this is also a genuine case of crosstalk (we didn’t collect the data necessary to see if there is an overlap in these kinks, but if our crosstalk theory is correct, there would be).

Notes from the Research:

One survey found that 66% of male and 57% of female participants had fantasized about the thought of public sex. Two predominant emotions appear to be at play here: “putting on a show” and “anticipation from fear of being caught.”
Studies indicate that roughly two-thirds of men and one-third of women report having fantasized about voyeurism. Our survey showed 23% of females and 35% of males consume erotic material related to voyeurism. Personal accounts from voyeurs suggest they derive pleasure from the emotional states of their targets, specifically their targets’ suspicions of being watched or the concept of “betrayal” associated with their actions towards their targets.

Emotional Connections to People

Some people—heck, most people—feel a sexual impulse when exposed to stimuli they associate with a person to whom they are emotionally connected, or at least experience a lowering of the threshold required to feel a sexual impulse created by other pathways. Some people—demisexuals—only experience sexual stimulation in concert with strong emotional connections. This arousal pathway kicks in during puberty. (Note: The Westermarck Effect is why you don’t end up attracted to family members even though you have a strong emotional connection to them; we discuss the Westermarck Effect in detail later in this chapter).

It is easy to understand why humans evolved to experience greater sexual arousal from those to whom they have an emotional connection. This development facilitates pair bonding, increasing the odds that people will care for any offspring they have together. Amusingly, our brains are not designed to separate an emotional connection with a real person from an emotional connection with a fictional person, so almost any popular show, book, or movie will end up with an immense amount of porn dedicated to it.

The fact that fictional characters activate this pathway gets interesting when people form attractions to characters that you really would not expect to see sexualized. Consider the porn generated by the large adult fan bases surrounding children’s shows, such as “My Little Pony” and “Transformers.” Alternatively, consider the “fake” porn created of people with a public profile (and not just actors). Even Sarah Palin has had her share of erotic material created about her.

Despite stereotypes to the contrary, enjoyment of erotic material related to known characters is not the exclusive purview of “weird male loaners.” A robust 8% of females and 9% of males in our survey reported consuming erotic material depicting pop culture figures targeted at children, while 11% of females and 16% of males reported consuming erotic material focused on pop culture figures targeted at adults. This gender parity should not be surprising, as preferentially wanting to mate with individuals to whom someone has an emotional connection is evolutionarily beneficial to both males and females. This gender parity is only surprising because society has created a default assumption that all sexually deviant activities skew male.

Fan bases have been sexualizing cherished characters since at least the 1920s, which saw the emergence of little porn books called Tijuana Bibles (also known as eight-pagers, Tillie-and-Mac books, or jo-jo books). These publications were typically purchased under the counter from bars, bowling alleys, garages, barbershops, and second-hand bookstores. Tijuana Bibles featured popular characters of the time, such as Popeye, Blondie, Dick Tracy, and Little Orphan Annie in sexualized contexts. We would bet that this behavior goes back much further. It is possible, for example, that sexualized political cartoons alleging that Marie Antoinette had lesbian relations with the duchess of Pequigny were more driven by this sexual drive than any political gripes, and that as long as humans have been forming emotional attachments to fictional characters, they have been finding ways to create stories that sexualize them.

Emotional connections might also stand at the root of the aversion impulse most people feel when someone with whom they feel emotionally close engages sexually with another person. In other words, if you have an emotional connection to a person or a fictional character, you will likely find the idea of them having sex with someone else gross and be similarly repulsed by the idea of someone else masturbating to them. In a small portion of the population, this aversion reaction is flipped (as happens with any attraction or aversion impulse per our theory).

An inversion of the disgust most people feel when they see someone to whom they are emotionally connected engage sexually with another person likely explains the drive behind a portion of the hotwife/cuckold community. We would argue the drive to see someone with whom you share a strong emotional connection have sex with someone else is not primarily driven by a desire to be humiliated as is often assumed by outsiders (though humiliation certainly does play an important role for a portion of the community). If “hotwifing” is indeed driven by an inverse pathway, this would also explain why the behavior is so overrepresented in men (f11% m17%), as inverse pathways do not occur as frequently in women, (conversely, if it was over represented in females, we could assume it was motivated by the dom/sub pathway, which is seen more in women).

Contrary to what pop culture would have you believe, the tendency to perceive individuals to whom you have an emotional attachment as more attractive is incredibly strong—even among long-term romantic partners. About 90% of people have sexual fantasies about their current romantic partner, and two-thirds have these fantasies frequently, whereas only about 10% of people frequently fantasize about Hollywood celebrities, porn stars, politicians, or other famous people. Interestingly, while fantasizing about your partner is shown to increase the quality of your sex life with them, research has also shown fantasizing about other people is not linked to a decline in a couple’s sex life (though after a breakup, people will often look for “evidence” like this that the breakup was inevitable).

This category of arousal is one into which label-happy individuals have really sunk their teeth. The most common label related to this connection between increased arousal and emotional connection is “demisexual” to denote an individual who has emotional connection as their primary arousal pathway. People with a sign flip, who receive aversion from this pathway (e.g., they find the thought of sex with people to whom they have a strong emotional attachment aversive) are called “akoisexuals” or “lithsexuals.” “Lithromantic” is a term for individuals who primarily derive arousal from this pathway but have aversive reactions through enough of their other pathways that they prefer to fantasize about relationships over actually being in them.

Rather than assign a litany of labels to different types of sexuality, we prefer to clearly describe sexuality by stimuli, reaction, and volume. We see ultra-specific labels, such as “lithromantic” as inefficient because no one has time to remember them all. A word to which only you know the definition isn’t useful at transferring information to another person, which is, well . . . the purpose of language. (Not that we think people should abandon words describing specific sexualities: These ultra-specific terms can help people feel more comfortable with their sexualities and provide a sense of belonging. However, when it is presumed that sexuality is primarily described through specialized terms, they run an equal risk of causing someone to feel forced into a sexuality only adjacent to their own—or isolated, should an adequate term for their particular sexuality not exist.)

Sex Without Emotional Attachment

Individuals with an inverse pathway in relation to emotional attachment get turned on when they see others hooking up with people to whom they are emotionally attached (in the form of cuckolding). We also see something of an opposite phenomenon in which people feel rather turned off by the idea of sexual intimacy with someone to whom they feel emotionally connected (this is what the term akoisexual is meant to describe). Just as a small portion of the population will find typically aversive things to be arousing due to a sign flip, an equal portion will find something normally arousing to be aversive, which is the dynamic at play when people feel grossed out by sex with those they love.

Such people often fantasize about sex without an emotional attachment. This is pointed to as one of the major drives behind bestiality by zoophiles (in studies exploring what drives people to want to have sex with animals). This desire for sex without emotional attachment may have added some fuel to the broader “sex robot” trend, with one (admittedly non-peer-reviewed) study showing 11% of females, 17% of males, and 23% of non-binary individuals reporting having fantasized about it (7% of women and 8% of men responding to our survey reported consuming erotic works involving sex with an android). Still, 70% of people rarely or never fantasize about emotionless sex, meaning that wanting an emotional connection to a partner is the norm.

Laughter & Attraction

Much to our surprise, we could not find any study that showed laughter directly leading to arousal in and of itself—outside of neurodivergent case studies. That said, laughter does seem to promote emotional closeness in a large portion of the population, which in turn makes arousal more likely to form. Studies have shown that the more times a guy can get a girl to laugh, the more likely the girl will be to want to date him (though even a stronger metric on this front is the number of times both partners laugh at the same time during their first encounter).

Why do people bond more quickly with those who are funny? Surprise: It’s not that being able to make someone laugh should be seen as a proxy for intelligence. In fact, University of Kansas researcher Jeffery Hall was unable to find any connection between humor and GPA scores, SAT scores, or self-perception of intelligence. Instead, being funny seems to track with extraversion and agreeable personalities, which seems to be the reason we preferentially sort for a sense of humor in partners.

“So,” you may be wondering: “is it that humans developed humor to signal extraversion and agreeableness?” We do not think so; rather, we think laughter being picked up in this way is just a happy accident that was then conveniently co-opted by our relationship-building systems.

Why Do Humans Laugh?

Sometimes we have a theory we really want to get out there in the world, and we know it’s not going to fit in any book we plan to publish in the near future, so we sneak it in somewhere kind of relevant in one of our books. This particular theory is on why humans laugh, a question which stands proudly in the realm of great mysteries in cognitive science.

There are three keys to this theory:

The first involves identifying when people laugh: People laugh when exposed to surprising information—or information that fits into their larger understanding of the world (or a schema presented in the context of the joke), but that still took them by surprise (perhaps it was framed differently). Basically, a laugh means: “Oh wow, that makes sense, but I didn’t expect it.”
The second key to this theory involves determining the stage in life during which humans laugh most: It appears that humans laugh most frequently when they are very young (from infancy to toddler age).
The third key to this theory entails how one feels when seeing an adult versus an infant laugh: If you have had kids, you know you have a very specific and unique positive reaction to seeing an infant or child laugh that motivates you to repeat whatever stimulus you created that caused the child to laugh.

At this point, you probably see where we are going with this. We suspect adult laughter is just an artifact of a response that is “meant” to only appear in early childhood but has been co-opted by social schema in a way that promotes group bonding. We theorize that laughter still exists to a lesser extent in most adults only because there is no strong evolutionary pressure to get rid of it (similar to crying, which probably is only meant as a communication tool for pre-verbal infants, but is still present to a lesser extent in many adults because, again, there was no evolutionary pressure to get rid of it).

When functioning properly in young children, laughter is meant to positively reinforce the provision of novel concepts by caregivers, training caregivers to stimulate children and help them learn important skills. Think of an infant laughing at a game of peekaboo: He is beginning to understand the concept that a person is still there even when their eyes are covered, but still needs some more exposure to it for it to fully “click” and is signaling this to the caregiver. This in turn causes the caregiver to want to continue playing a “game” with the child even if they don’t understand what the child is extracting from it.^[24]

Essentially, we think laughter is a bit like lactose tolerance. Up until fairly recently in our evolutionary history, only kids could drink milk without getting sick, and then the system for digesting milk essentially turned off. Only very recently did a portion of the world’s population begin to evolve the ability to keep that system operational. We suspect something similar happened with laughter just a few million years earlier.

Another use of laughter in infants could have been to bond infants to their caregivers and vice versa. If this were the case, it would make hijacking the system for mate selection especially easy as the basic “machinery” that facilitated an emotional bond based on laughter was already in place.

BUT

There are two other reasons for laughter not discussed above, and both are very relevant to human relationships in the modern age—just not in the ways you might expect:

Sympathetic laugher: This involves laughing when you see another person laughing. Old sitcoms used laugh tracks in the background to subconsciously “trick” the audience into laughing at things that were only mildly funny.
Nervous laughter: A lot of older research has a big blind spot: women. Women just were not used that much in older studies, meaning many of our theories on the manner in which humans react ignore responses that are more common in females. One big one is the concept of the “fight or flight” response, which is predominantly used in men when they feel threatened while the “tend and befriend” response is more common in women. Part of this tend and befriend response is to laugh when in socially uncomfortable situations or physical danger.

Why do these two other types of laughter matter in relationships? Sitcoms.

Sometimes, sitcom writers get lazy and instead of writing things that make people laugh by subverting the audience’s expectations (the kind of laughing that feels good) they would write things in a way that made people laugh by putting characters in uncomfortable, socially threatening situations and then play a laugh track over the situation to normalize laughter in response to such circumstances. This may seem like innocuous lazy writing and social manipulation, but it led many men to interpret nervous laughter the same as “real laughter,” causing them to overstep their bounds with women and feel positively emotionally rewarded for behavior women find weird, creepy, and otherwise threatening. Essentially, sitcoms have led otherwise well-meaning guys to misinterpret the “oh my God this guy is going to kill me; someone get me out of here” nervous laugh with giggly infatuation.

The Westermarck Effect & Sex with Siblings

People appear to find their relatives much hotter than other people—but only when they do not know they are their relatives. If you are separated at birth from your brother or sister, but meet them later in life, you will likely be very attracted to them. This is a bit of a problem with prolific sperm donors—there are actually online support communities for people who encounter siblings later in life that they subsequently find sexually attractive.

Given this apparent attraction, plus the strong emotional closeness we have with our siblings, why do we not want to bang our brothers and sisters when we know they are our siblings? For this saving grace, we have the Westermarck Effect to thank.

The Westermarck Effect causes people who live in close proximity in their early years to develop a sexual aversion to each other—regardless of how related they are. Simply put, anyone around you a lot in childhood, be they a step-sibling, a parent, or a biological sibling, will generate a strong sexual aversion impulse.

The Westermarck Effect has caused problems in societies with arranged marriages involving a future wife moving in with the husband’s family in early childhood. In some countries, families buy brides while the girls are still children and raise them with their future husbands, which unfortunately results in husband-wife pairs who experience a high level of aversion toward each other.

As with any sexual aversion system, the Westermarck Effect can be subject to an inverse arousal pathway, which leads one to be attracted to—rather than grossed out by—siblings. To make matters more awkward, given how strong an aversive impulse the Westermarck Effect creates, the attraction impulse generated when the sign flips is quite strong.

Roleplaying Relatives

Interestingly, many people who find the concept of sleeping with family members arousing actually still experience the Westermarck Effect and are quite repulsed by the idea of sleeping with their own family members. In such cases, either people find someone pretending to take on the social role of a fictional child, parent, or sibling of theirs arousing or they find it arousing to watch two people who are related engage sexually (see “twincest” or “wincest”). Instead of involving arousal at the idea of intercourse with actual siblings or parents, these kinks involve arousal derived from the social dynamics that these family relationships represent on a societal level.

In the case of people who are aroused by sibling porn or roleplay: Their brains may be using the sibling dynamic as a cultural shorthand for intimate trust. Through this shorthand, these individuals can quickly activate arousal pathways through either a betrayal of this trust or an indulgence in that trust depending on what emotions arouse them most.

In the case of father-daughter roleplay, which boasts a fairly large community (called “Daddy Dom / Little Girl” kinks or DDLG for short), arousal appears to stem from dominance and submission dynamics (as can be inferred from the overrepresentation of this kink in women). People are drawn to this dynamic because, in our society, dominant-submissive relationships are almost never painted in a positive, caring, and protective light—except within father-daughter relationships. The father-daughter dynamic is likely one of only a few schemas many people have that presents a warm, caring, and protective submissive relationship in which the submissive party still has autonomy.

Within the context of a society that shames almost every other type of submissive relationship, it makes sense why the daddy-daughter dynamic is so commonly seen in sexual roleplay. We also imagine a lack of respected dominant-submissive relationship schemas in which the female is dominant explains the popularity of teacher and nurse kinks among men. These social schemas represent caring-yet-dominant figures that do not challenge men’s masculinity (i.e., a person can still feel like a tough, masculine guy and be submissive to a female nurse in a roleplay situation).

The Common Practice of Marrying Cousins

While we are on the subject of incest: In cross-cultural research, the most common preferred partner is a cross-cousin marriage (one’s mother’s, brother’s child, or one’s father’s sister’s child). Among small tribes, cousin coupling reduces odds of severe inbreeding more than any other pairing.

It might seem odd that marrying a cousin might reduce inbreeding. This happens because of the Westermarck effect: When you live among a small tribe in which people occasionally cheat, about the only individual in the tribe you can be sure they didn’t cheat with is their own sibling—thus your cousins are the only people in the tribe you can be certain are not your siblings. At any rate, the risk of inbreeding drops significantly when people shift from siblings to cousins.

Keep in mind that royal families did this for centuries, and it usually took a royal family a couple of generations for inbreeding to catch up with them. According to some historical theorizing, Catholic Church laws stand behind society’s taboos around inbreeding with second cousins and other fairly distant relationships. These laws, as it happens, were most likely created to decrease power consolidation within families, which in turn boosts the church’s odds of inheriting land from the deceased. We are not sure if we believe this, but it makes for an interesting story and is backed up by the fact that, in the early 9th century, the church banned marriages with relatives as far away as 6th cousins, making finding someone to marry in a small town without an incest waver from the church VERY difficult.

Tropes

Trope attraction involves experiencing sexual arousal upon seeing someone who fits a certain type, trope, or role. Sexual stimulation derived from tropes is uniquely difficult to understand, explain, predict, and analyze. People who experience this type of attraction are uniquely attracted to a certain “type,” such as goths, punks, soldiers, teachers, biker gang members, nerds, etc.

Why would a jock guy develop a differential sexual output when looking at cybergoth girls when contrasted with girls who associate with different styles or tropes? Trope attraction is neither an evolved attraction nor one that has been influenced by straightforward socialization or conditioning (or at least we don’t see any obvious ways trope attraction could be tied to these pathways).

Some guesses:

Perhaps people subconsciously pair tropes with desired traits in a partner, then create an attractiveness modifier in their brain.
It could be that trope attraction is somehow tied to people one found attractive early in life (e.g., that goth girl who always sat at the front of the classroom in 10th grade biology).
Maybe trope attraction is tied to fictional characters to whom one has grown attached.
Perhaps the modifier that makes us more attracted to people to whom we feel emotionally close can form into amalgams if one repeatedly fantasizes about a specific type of person enough.

If you found our non-committal answer here unsatisfying and want to dig into the tropes individuals find most attractive, check out the “Arousing Dioramas” supplement chapter on page 414.

Novelty

There is an old joke about something the 30th President, Calvin Coolidge, may have said while he and the First Lady were being shown around an experimental government farm. When Mrs. Coolidge came to the chicken yard, she noticed that a rooster was mating very frequently. She asked the attendant how often that happened and was told: “Dozens of times each day.”

Mrs. Coolidge said, “Tell that to the President when he comes by.”

Upon being presented with this fact, the President asked: “Same hen every time?”

“Oh, no, Mr. President,” he was told, “a different hen every time.”

President: “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.”

While this story is likely apocryphal, it struck a chord with enough writers to generate a name for the dynamic it describes: The Coolidge Effect. This effect is both real and extremely pronounced in males across species and exists to some extent in females as well. When a male rat is put in a cage with a number of females, he will mate with each until he becomes exhausted, after which he will then ignore the females despite being nudged and licked. That said, the male rat will immediately become alert and begin mating again as soon as a new female is added to the cage.

The effect is present in humans, whose arousal levels quickly decline when exposed to the same arousing imagery on multiple occasions and rise when imagery is varied. Another study showed that if you expose a male to porn featuring the same actress over the course of a few days, then show him porn featuring a different actress he will ejaculate faster and release more active sperm.

This tendency does not bode well for monogamous relationships, as you might imagine. The situation is actually worse than it appears at first glance, as it is amplified by the testosterone decrease and associated libido decrease men experience when in long-term, pair-bonded relationships (this decrease in testosterone is amplified after having children, further compounding the effect). So not only do men in long-term relationships have on average lowered libido overall, but the sexual arousal men derive from seeing their partners naked will decrease.

This damper on the sexual spark of long-term relationships will be mollified to a slight extent by the increase in arousal created by any strong emotional bond created—though in the average male, this is not nearly enough to cancel out the above two effects. This is not to say that the world is devoid of men for whom these pathways are broken in some way, but in the vast majority of cases, choosing a guy or girl for a long-term relationship because you like that, during a short term relationship, they are always horny and wanting to have sex is probably a bad idea given the Coolidge Effect.

Participating in a polyamorous relationship appears to nullify the Coolidge Effect. In fact, a man who is having enjoyable sex with another, secondary female partner will report enjoying sex with his primary partner more. Having additional partners will also increase a male’s testosterone and thus their libido, so men engaging sexually with multiple partners will not only feel as though they’re having higher-quality sex with their primary partners on average but also cause them to desire more of it.

Sadly, the enhanced-enjoyment effect is reversed in females. Statistically speaking, females enjoy sex with their primary partners less if they are sleeping with other people and enjoying it. Obviously, people’s personal experiences vary, and this is just the statistical average of how the presence of additional partners affects each gender.

While many couples claim to try to mix things up through new positions and novel forms of sexual engagement, such measures are unlikely to remediate the effects of the Coolidge Effect. The Coolidge Effect appears to be triggered in part by olfactory cues (at least in rats), so it would seem that “spicing things up” outside of adding additional partners will have a limited effect.

It is hypothesized that the Coolidge Effect, or something similar, led to the evolution of traits like eye color, red hair, and freckles in humans, as such traits made their bearers appear more unique. These traits seem to evolve more frequently in populations with more females than males (often due to war and extreme conditions such as cold and high altitudes), in which there would consequently be more inter-female competition.

The Coolidge Effect is often used to talk about men, but what about women? Do women lose arousal to a partner over time as well? A 2012 study with 170 participants found that women’s levels of sexual desire declined much more quickly than men’s as relationships aged. A study of 2,100 women in 2016 showed that women who had stayed in a single relationship throughout the course of the study reported less desire, arousal, and satisfaction from sex (though we can’t help but wonder whether sex drive may be a correlating factor for women who leave relationships). Finally, two German studies in 2002 and 2006 showed that women who lived with a partner saw their desire drop dramatically over the course of 90 months—a phenomenon these studies did not observe in male participants. Despite societal stereotypes to the contrary, it looks like women may experience a Coolidge-Effect-like phenomenon that affects them even more strongly than men.

Pain & Asphyxiation

Pain and asphyxiation hijack fairly deep neural pathways—pathways deeper and more primitive than any of the arousal pathways discussed so far. Pain and sexual pleasure from physical stimulation rely on closely related neurochemical pathways that may have significant crosstalk in some individuals (with pain, it is the closeness of the neurochemical pathways that causes this crosstalk and not the spatial closeness of where it is processed like in the theorized case of feet or some social cues).

More specifically, both pleasure and pain are related to humans’ dopamine and opioid systems, which regulate neurotransmitters involved in reward pathways, causing things such as the motivation to eat, drink, and have sex. Pleasure and pain are also associated with some of the same regions of the brain: The nucleus accumbens, the pallidum, and the amygdala.

Arousal from pain is super common, with one survey showing around 44% of men and 24% of women fantasizing about spanking or whipping someone else during sex and 36% of women and 29% of men fantasizing about receiving such treatment—though it is worth reminding readers this isn’t a clear-cut activation of the pain pathway, as both spanking and whipping would activate the dominance display and submission display pathways.

In our survey, we asked: “Does this statement describe you: “I sometimes look at pornography or read romantic literature in which one of the partners appears to be in pain.” and found:

Yes with a focus on physical pain: f20%, m15%
Yes with a focus on emotional pain: f8%, m1%
Yes with a focus on both physical and emotional pain: f10%, m11%

Other pain and asphyxiation related stats from our survey:

Regularly consume erotic material that contains sadomasochism: f18% m18%
Regularly try biting during sex: f29% m22%
Regularly try being bitten during sex: f25% m29%
Regularly try scratching during sex: f26% m11%
Regularly try being scratched during sex: f19% m24%
Aroused by being choked during sex: f26% m12%
Aroused by choking someone during sex f10% m21%

But again, most of these survey answers are capturing arousal from dominance and submission displays that involve pain or hypoxia, rather than pain or hypoxia themselves.

As a side note: We would draw readers’ attention to how much more women are turned on by submission-related concepts than men, with 800% more women consuming erotic material that focuses on emotional pain when contrasted with men. This aligns well with what we discussed in relation to higher female arousal from submission and narrative format erotic art.

While asphyxiation does not necessarily enhance arousal through pain, it makes sense to thematically group the two. Erotic asphyxiation leverages a state of hypoxia to enhance orgasms, making them feel quite different than an orgasm obtained outside of a state of hypoxia. While this pathway is unique in that it should work for all humans, people with a strong sexual aversion to submission will likely be unable to utilize it.

Erotic asphyxiation also appears to create orgasms that are more addictive in nature and can lead to extremely destructive behavior as individuals chasing higher highs. Autoerotic asphyxiation fatalities account for about 1,540 and 3,850 each year (these numbers are from Alberta’s medical examiner, Dr. Anny Sauvageau, and are much lower than previous estimates)—though we suspect the actual number is likely much higher, as we have read it is rare to find evidence of masturbation at the scene of an autoerotic asphyxiation, so most instances of death by autoerotic asphyxiation are just reported as suicides.

From a neurological standpoint, we wonder whether pain alone, in the absence of hypoxia, can really create arousal in a person or whether pain is just a proxy for a submission display. Some have theorized that the high reported from long pain sessions during BDSM is closer to a runner’s high than a true arousal response.

We would love to see a penile plethysmograph (a measurement of blood flow to the penis to gauge sexual arousal) conducted in conditions similar to the Milgrim experiment (in which test subjects were instructed to subject others to painful electric shocks), but without the authority figure (which was present in the Milgrim experiment to order subjects to shock others) to remove other potential stimuli. With such an experiment, we could not only probe for the existence of people who are only turned on by pain, but also determine if true sadists (people turned on by causing pain outside of causing pain being a dominance ritual) exist. Alas, ethics boards would probably prevent such experiments from taking place because they are populated by killjoys more concerned with the safety of the general public than having fun.

One of the sex researchers we consulted when sanity testing this book attested to encountering those who derive sexual pleasure and excitement from pain alone; however, she never had the opportunity to ask what those people were thinking about while inflicting or experiencing that pain (those thoughts, rather than the pain, might have really been the source of arousal). She theorizes perhaps some of the pleasure derived from pain involves a feeling of release or an excuse to release.

What we can say is that when people are consuming erotic material tied to pain, it appears to be pain as a concept that is most erotic and not the idea of pain being inflicted on them or inflicting it on others. More specifically, when we asked: “When you consume material in which it appears one of the participants is in pain, where do you place yourself in that fantasy?”^[25]:

I sometimes imagine myself being the one in pain: f48%, m42%
I sometimes imagine myself causing the pain: f27%, m58%
I sometimes take the role of an observer: f52%, m67%

In other words, the average person who is aroused by pain finds concepts on their own to be more arousing than the manner in which these concepts relate to them personally. This implies that the majority of the people who use pain to become aroused are actually receiving arousal from the dominance/submission arousal system and not the pain system directly.

Note from the Research:

On the topic of BDSM and pain, two studies in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found that when participants engaged in sadomasochistic acts as part of erotic play, they bonded more with their partners and developed more trust in them when contrasted with partners who did not participate in sadomasochism.

Warning: Choking Hazard

Choking during sex can act as both a dominance ritual and create hypoxia, enhancing orgasm, which is why it is such a common practice. While choking may make you and your partner feel good, you really should not do it (assuming you value your life or the life of your partner—if not . . . you do you). Sometimes you should not do things that turn you on, even if they are widely socially accepted as “not that weird” or “not that big a deal” and are fairly common turn ons.

We failed to find any method of suffocation or strangulation that can be carried out without the risk of cardiac arrest. Worse, there is no reliable way to determine when the risk of cardiac arrest becomes imminent. The probability of successfully resuscitating someone after cardiac arrest is fairly low (about 90% of people who experience cardiac arrest outside a hospital die).

You might imagine that so long as you do not take choking to a point at which you pass out, the warnings above do not apply to you. That assumption is incorrect. It is impossible to parse out the point at which unconsciousness will occur until you actually become unconscious. More importantly, unconsciousness is a symptom of other things you cannot easily identify. Stuff still goes wrong before the unconsciousness happens.

You might at this point be thinking to yourself: “No, it’s totally cool; I know this safe way of choking where you avoid the windpipe and press on the arteries that deliver blood to the brain, leading to hypoxia with no risk.” Frankly, that method is not any safer. Pressing on the carotid arteries puts pressure on the baroreceptors—known otherwise as the carotid sinus bodies. This pressure can cause vasodilation in the brain. Simultaneously, the vagus nerve sends a message to the pacemaker of your heart, telling it to decrease the force and rate of your heartbeat. While most of the time this is not that big a deal and your heart rate will just decrease by about a third, some of the time your heart rate will actually increase by three thirds and then . . . to zero as it “flatlines” into asystole. This is a uniquely difficult-to-treat form of cardiac arrest and has been documented in cases that result from as little of five seconds of this form of choking.

But then again, we drink alcohol, and we know it could kill us one day, and some fellow idiots climb Everest even though 6.5% of them will die in the process, so maybe you just like being choked enough to keep doing it despite the considerable risks and stark fact that a lot of people die engaging in this hobby on an annual basis. All we ask is that you fully, logically acknowledge the risks and do not strive to prevent such risks from being taught. This is one of the many reasons why sex education that focuses on “kinkier” sex is critical. When roughly one in four people have been chocked or choked someone during sex, we don’t get to pretend that the dangers involved in sexual asphyxiation only affect “kinky people.”

Basic Instincts

It seems as though basic instincts drive a certain amount of human arousal. We like to describe behavior driven by these instincts as “sexual autopilot mode.”

We like to chuckle at kids who smash dolls and other unwitting, inanimate victims together and say things like “Now, KISS!!” but it does seem as though physical proximity is indeed—through some basic, instinctual mechanisms—a source of arousal.

If not explicitly a source of arousal, at least close physical proximity appears to occasionally trigger something we internally refer to as “sexual autopilot mode,” which compels sexual behavior without necessarily inciting someone to feel arousal. This pathway is also seen in behavior like the dry humping instinct that some people feel when they cuddle with someone. The pathway might represent the remnant of a precognitive attraction system designed to get our ancestors to mate that only still manifests in bits and pieces within modern humans.

While this is not an easy state to study, we would be remiss not to mention that it exists as a category of attraction. This pathway may even be working off of a neurological system independent from the arousal system, as it is more of an impulse to complete an action, whereas the arousal impulse is more of a reward mechanism.

Physical Stimuli

As you are no doubt aware, when you touch erogenous zones on a person’s body, they may feel arousal and pleasure. That said, receiving sexual stimulation from touch is a little more complicated than just “touch spot X with pattern Y; sexual arousal level 2 will result.” Arousal resulting from physical stimulation is not only modified heavily by other stimuli triggering sexual impulses; these systems also work differently in different people with different levels, types, and patterns of physical engagement.

Impulses generated by physical stimulation are not always contextualized as sexual in nature. Consider the autonomous sensory meridian response—ASMR for short (look it up on YouTube if you are interested). For some people, subtle auditory and visual stimuli, such as the sound of a crinkling bag, can generate a response similar to the response triggered by light sexual touching. That said, many who experience the response do not contextualize it as sexual arousal due to the environmental stimuli that cause it to be so non-sexual in nature.

Note from the Research:

Generally, female rats will evade their partner during sex. Some researchers theorize this to be an attempt to extend the length of sex because rat females find sex more pleasurable when it lasts longer. In some studies, graduate students are tasked with stimulating the female rats by rubbing their clitorises—and when they stop, the female rats will tug the students’ sleeves which some students interpreted as the rats “asking” for more. We’re not sure if this is relevant to humans, but we nevertheless found the behavior entertaining enough to mention after stumbling upon it while looking for info on physical stimulation, as it relates to arousal in non-human mammals.

Conditioned Responses

Pavlovian—or conditioned—sexual responses are a product of training. In one experiment, scientists were able to manufacture an arousal impulse upon exposure to pictures of boots by associating pictures of boots with images of attractive women. It is conditioning like this that most likely leads to traits like shoe kinks, seeing as we can neither find an evolutionary reason a person would find a shoe attractive nor secure evidence of any sort of neurological crosstalk that might mix up the recognition of shoes with some other arousal pathway. Furthermore, instances of female kinks around male shoes are extremely rare, which would imply that something about women’s shoes must be constantly sexualized in society, and, surprise, surprise, this is exactly what we see.

In one particularly bizarre study, researchers put some male mice in little jackets that they wore the first nine times they had sex. For their tenth sexual encounters, both the control mice and the jacket mice were randomly assigned to either wear a jacket or be in the nude. The control mice were still able to have sex in both conditions; however, some (40%) of the jacket mice had trouble in the nude condition (a similar study was conducted in which the female rats wore little jackets while having sex, which yielded the same results). Still other studies revealed we can block the kink/fetish preference using naloxone, a chemical that blocks endorphin receptors (and if it works with naloxone, it would also work with naltrexone, which is easier to get in the US).

Though this is purely anecdotal, we have observed women to be less susceptible to Pavlovian sexual conditioning than men. Consider even simple things like the smell of a perfume or cologne: When a man is exposed to a smell repeatedly in association with a pair-bonded partner, he tends to become aroused when exposed to that smell out of context or later on, whereas women seem to be more likely to develop feelings of nostalgia instead. We have seen no study that attempts to parse out if there is a gendered difference in the way Pavlovian sexual conditioning “takes” and would love to gather some experimental data on this.

Sexual conditioning is quite distinct from what some ideologies refer to as “socialization” and does not appear to function as one would expect socialization to function. In what we will call “socialization theory,” society teaches you what to find attractive. For example: If a society repeatedly contextualized women with highly-visible moles as hot, regularly featuring them in ads, socialization theory would have it that men would start to become more aroused by women with moles. This form of sexual socialization does not appear to work. You cannot teach someone what to find arousing; however, through conditioning, you can affect someone’s arousal. (We discuss evidence backing this up in the next chapter.)

Some of the historical political regimes most infamous for being effective at goading people into going against their instincts knew full well that they were better off leveraging conditioning instead of socialization. Consider the Nazis, who notably created anti-Jewish propaganda in which footage of Jewish people was interspersed with things that caused a disgust reaction, like rats, to lead people to develop an otherwise unnatural disgust toward a specific group of people.

In contrast to socialization, conditioning pairs a stimulus that triggers sexual arousal or disgust/aversion with a secondary stimulus that does not. Conditioning completes this pairing by repeatedly showing these two stimuli together. For example, advertising agencies may pair something like an attractive woman or female foot, which many already find highly sexual, with a shoe until some begin to see the shoe as sexually arousing as well.

A case exemplifying how conditioning can happen by accident in a human can be seen in a man who, as an adolescent, would hide in a small closet to masturbate and is now aroused when he sees doorknobs. Conditioning is not at play in a man whose dad insisted he needed to be tough who, as an adult, derives sexual pleasure from acting dominant. In the case of the closet masturbater, a stimulus was specifically paired with an aroused state. In the case of the man with the tough dad, he was simply told a stimuli should be paired with an aroused state. The closet masturbater illustrates a case of conditioning, which does affect arousal pathways; the dominant man illustrates a case of socialization, which doesn’t affect arousal pathways. .

Conditioning is more complicated than we imply. Few men are aroused at the sight of a computer monitor or a box of tissues, even though both are frequently associated with masturbation. We are uncertain why this is, but we assume it may have to do with rumination or the point of the arousal cycle at which the stimulus is introduced.

A separate phenomenon called sexual imprinting may or may not involve the same pathways used in conditioning. A goat raised from birth with sheep will become sexually aroused by sheep and not goats. A man exposed to a breastfeeding mother between the ages of 1.5-5 will be more likely to be attracted to breastfeeding women. In general, individuals who grew up with a younger sibling (and thus were exposed to pregnancy early in life) have a 66% increased level of attraction to pregnant women (Fun fact: “pregnant” is now the 107th most popular porn search in the United States, putting it right up there with “redhead” and “babysitter”). Another example of sexual imprinting among humans can be observed in people’s tendency to be attracted to those who resemble their opposite sex parents.

In animal studies, imprinting appears to affect different genders differently. For example, while a male sheep who imprints on goats during his formative years will never show a desire to mate with female sheep, female sheep who imprint on goats can be trained to be willing to mate with male sheep later. Basically, imprinting is irreversible for males and reversible for females.

Things That Do NOT Cause Arousal

Though we briefly dispelled common myths about arousal patterns at the beginning of the book, let’s do a second, deeper dive into arousal pathways in the popular zeitgeist that do not appear to be well supported by evidence.

Socialization

As we mentioned in our discussion on conditioning, socialization probably doesn’t stand behind a significant proportion of the population’s sexual impulses—and yet the idea that most of a person’s sexuality is “socialized” or the product of societal preferences is downright pervasive. While society can teach people what they are supposed to find arousing and aversive, we find little strong evidence suggesting that society can change people’s underlying patterns of arousal and aversion simply through instruction or inundation. You can change what a person says is arousing, but not what physiologically arouses them.

The clearest indication that socialization isn’t shaping our sexual preferences can be seen in the fact that men prefer women of healthy weights in their pornography and in their partners. Men raised in Western culture are socialized from birth to believe that rail-thin models are the ideal of beauty. From video games to billboards and television, people are taught that women at unhealthily low weights should be more arousing. Despite this, men do not prefer skinny women over women of a healthy weight in the majority of studies conducted on the subject (though in the name of full disclosure, a minority of studies do show that skinnier is always better).

In our survey, 21% of men reported consuming erotic material depicting overweight women while only 14% reported consuming erotic material featuring underweight women. This finding is supported both by extant research and the marketplace. On Alexa’s adult website list, there are (as of 2019) 504 sites dedicated to heavier women and only 182 dedicated to skinny women and three fat girl searches for every skinny girl search. The average American porn actress is in the healthy range of BMI. Only famous non-porn celebrity movie actresses regularly fall below the healthy range. This data shows that on average, men find women of healthy weights to be arousing, despite being socialized to see underweight women as ideal.

It appears that there is an average range of weights that people find most attractive in their partners and that range cannot easily be “socialized” up or down.

You may be furrowing your brow with consternation given our neglect to mention various “tribal groups” who favor fat women, plus evidence that ancient Western cultures loved fat women. You may be under the impression that these examples “prove” that cultures can socialize people into being aroused by individuals at higher body weights. Surely if the most attractive body weight in women differs widely between cultures, then socialization must be affecting arousal patterns.

The myths suggesting these cultures are common stem more from racist Victorian cultural tropes of fat-worshiping savages than real anthropology. Cultures that find fat women attractive are much rarer than those which favor forms of conscious self-mutilation, such as the use of gauges to create giant earlobes or full body tattooing. Moreover, these cultures have never been tested in a way that would enable us to determine whether people are sexually aroused by overweight partners or whether individuals within them are merely gaining societal validation from association with someone who can “afford” to become overweight.

This lack of concerted research is particularly damning given that in every single case in which a culture equates obesity with beauty that we could find, obesity was first and foremost seen as a sign of wealth. In cases in which these cultures got wealthier and were re-surveyed after this societal shift, obesity ceased to maintain its status as a good signal of wealth, and the societal predilection for fat people appears to have been unceremoniously dropped.

Consider how in modern Western societies, people would (on average) prefer a partner with a really nice car over one who rides around in a clunker. In such cases, the car does not actually turn people on; it simply signals a secondary sign of fitness (wealth). It seems that extra body weight played much the same role in some societies: People were not turned on by the extra weight; instead, they were attracted to the wealth it signaled.

As for the myth that people in Medieval Europe on average found obesity attractive: There is hardly any evidence for this outside of two painters: Peter Paul Rubens and Titian (Tiziano Vecelli). In modern terminology, these painters had what we would call a kink. Writings of their contemporaries make it quite clear that their society thought obesity was a sign of bodily weakness, which the society associated with spiritual weakness (gluttony). Some scholars attempt to argue that Rubens painted plump women in an attempt to highlight how far his society had fallen from the time of the greats, but this strikes us as a tortured argument, especially given that Rubens had a rotund wife who he seemed to find quite attractive given the fairly pornographic art he created depicting her (see: Hélène Fourment in a Fur Robe, a portrait of his second wife, or any of the pieces in which she served as a model, such as Venus, Mars and Cupid, Andromeda, or The Birth of the Milky Way). Why can’t we all just come together and say that dude was kinky, had a wife and lifestyle that enabled his kink, and spent his life in cheery pursuit of this predilection for rotund women? Even in our society, this is one of the most common kinks (as our data shows).

The only strong claim that an attraction to obesity at a cultural level was ever anything other than a predilection felt by a population’s minority comes from Venus figurines: Small figurines of obese women that date back to Paleolithic times. As we do not understand the context of these figurines, any larger associations are just conjecture. Even if these societies saw fat as a positive sign in a potential mate, it is likely because extra fat signaled wealth and abundance.

This is not to say men are never attracted to heftier women. Actually, 21% of men who responded to our study reported regularly consuming erotic content specifically containing overweight women. This suggests that the number of men in the US who consume porn depicting fat women outweighs (hehehe) the collective population of the nation’s 28 lowest-populated states. (Contrast this with only 2% of our female survey respondents who reported consuming erotic materials featuring overweight men.)

Also, while there is a range of weights men typically prefer across cultures, this range can be affected by environmental factors. Statistically speaking, the more stressed a man is, the more he receives sexual stimulation from heavier women. We would assume this is a response we evolved to search for mates with more fat reserves in times of famine. This tendency also indicates that, despite societal pressures to find skinny women more attractive, many men cannot be socialized away from finding rotund women more appealing when subject to certain conditions. You may be noticing a trend here: You cannot socialize someone to be attracted to something.

Just because socialization does not affect what turns people on does not mean socialization has no effect on sexual behavior. People may take action in their sex lives in an effort to project a certain self-image celebrated by society. That action may have nothing at all to do with arousal pathways. For example:

A man may only date rail thin women because he believes it to be a sign of status.
Many couples have more regular sex than they would have otherwise because they feel the need to prove their relationship isn’t dead.
Many men seek out a high number of sexual partners merely to prove their virility to themselves.
An individual may act as a sexual dominatrix to validate their sense of power or gain sexual partners they would not otherwise be able to secure.

This desire to fulfill certain self-images we were socialized to find valuable can skew data on sexuality.

One commonly reported attraction pattern may even be a product of self-image based socialization. Specifically, we are referring to attraction to intelligence (many surveys show people rank intelligence as one of the most attractive traits). When attraction to intelligence is a uniquely pronounced aspect of an individual’s arousal pattern, it is known as sapiosexuality. We say we suspect sapiosexuality is a product of socialization as there is no realistic pathway for the lower-order parts of our brain associated with arousal to judge a person’s intelligence. Instead, we would need to process a person’s intelligence within the higher order, “socially informed” parts of our brains, which would theoretically prompt some other, older neural pathways to receive that judgment and yield arousal.

The likelihood that some element of socialization is at play with this form of attraction does not explain its existence entirely. A similar dynamic is at play in the system that outputs arousal in relation to social status. In fact, it is possible that—depending on a person’s social context and worldview—intelligence may be synonymous with social status and that sapiosexuality is an output of this status detection system (in the same way something like vore might be an accidental proxy for the dominance and submission system).

How can we make such a controversial claim so confidently? Because despite being one of the top ten things people report to find attractive in a partner, there is no widely popular category of erotic art that targets people aroused by intelligence (outside of pornography focusing on “nerd” tropes, which would be unlikely to arouse someone genuinely turned on by intelligence in isolation).

To be clear, if true, this theory does not invalidate sapiosexuality as a sexual identity; it just implies that sapiosexuality would not appear in other cultures at equal proportions and if a sapiosexual person stopped respecting intelligence, intelligence would likely stop turning them on (which is not true for other forms of attraction, such as attraction to certain genders—if someone stops respecting men, they may still find men attractive).

Parental Screw-Ups

Stuff that happened to you as a kid does not appear to have a huge impact on arousal. In our study, we failed to find significant correlation between adult arousal patterns and childhood home conditions, family wealth, size of childhood friend groups, or family social status.^[26] Even seemingly-obvious factors, such as whether or not a person was spanked as a child, did not seem to affect whether or not spanking turned them on as an adult. We also found no connection between pre-pubescent sexual abuse and adult arousal patterns. This shocked us. For more detail, refer to the “Childhood Sexual Assault vs. Sexual Assault in Adolescence” supplement chapter on page 507.

When you ask someone (or they ask themselves) why they have an impulse that they don’t understand, their default answer is almost always going to be either “society made me do it” or “my parents screwed me up.” These answers allow someone with no understanding of how arousal pathways work to create a somewhat complicated-sounding explanation for the impulse, allowing them to feel smart. These answers are reinforced by the prevailing social schema that encourages people to create a narrative in which they are a victim with no agency. Almost everyone either wants to be a victim or hero (or in best-case scenarios, both); attributing distasteful arousal patterns to one’s upbringing makes it easy for people to play the victim.

People are extremely willing to accept the parental screw-up explanation for any arousal impulse that society considers taboo, yet they find such explanations extremely offensive for any non-taboo aspect of our sexuality. Consider how common an explanation bad parenting and “corrupting” societal influences (socialization) were for gay individuals when their sexualities were considered taboo—and yet it would be quite offensive to make such assertions today.

There is some vague cultural understanding that the socialization/parent screw-up explanation really exists to stifle exploration of the areas of our arousal patterns that we are not yet comfortable exploring as a society. As soon as society accepts an arousal pattern, the prevailing narrative swings from “my parents screwed me up” to “some people are just this way.”

This is not to say that nothing that happens to a person in childhood will have any effect on their adult sexuality—there are actually some studies showing that an effect is possible, which we will address shortly. We are merely arguing there isn’t a great evidence-backed argument to be made that one’s childhood will have a huge effect on adult arousal patterns. (To be transparent, when we first started to dig into this, we were so sure that childhood conditions lead to adult arousal patterns we wasted about half of our study on questions asking about them.)

The Myth of The Childhood Abuse Cycle

On the topic of kids getting screwed up: It is often said that people who sexually abuse children themselves were abused as children, and this creates a cycle of abuse that explains why sexual abuse of children happens. This is another one of those weird Freudian “just-so stories” that somehow captured the popular imagination. We get why people want to believe that sexual abusers are primarily a product of sexual abuse. It would be very comforting if there were a clear reason why the people who abuse children do so. It would bring hope to believe that this abuse exists in a cycle that can be broken through active efforts. Sadly, such beliefs do not appear to reflect reality. Sometimes people just randomly abuse children—sexually and otherwise.

In interviews of more than 34,000 adults in the US, it was found that around 10% experienced childhood sexual assault. If 10% of the general population was sexually assaulted and around 23% of people who sexually assault children were themselves sexually assaulted, then we can assume being sexually assaulted approximately doubles one’s probability of sexually assaulting a child. If childhood sexual abuse had no effect, the percent would be the same as it is in the general population: 10%. This suggests that while being sexually assaulted as a child almost doubles one’s odds of sexually assaulting a child later in life, the majority of people who were sexually assaulted do not assault children and the majority of sexual assaults on children are carried out by people who were not, as children, sexually assaulted themselves. (An important caveat: The stats presented here only look at male sexual abusers.)

In no way do these findings indicate a correlation between arousal resulting from the idea of assaulting a child and childhood sexual assault. These statistics merely show a connection between the behavior patterns that likely stem from the normalization of sexual assault. For information on how childhood sexual abuse affects adult arousal patterns, refer to the “Childhood Sexual Assault vs. Sexual Assault in Adolescence” supplement chapter on page 507.

We take time to call this myth out as it is wildly damaging to tell someone who was sexually abused as a child that they are now predestined to become an abuser themselves or that they are not safe to be around children as they will require enormous cognitive effort to not to sexually assault them. We hate the idea of childhood sexual abuse victims believing they caught the urge as though it were an STD or something that is so often peddled in our popular media.

Social Taboos and Rule Breaking

The concept of social taboos inherently turning people on plays out constantly across pop culture. Perhaps it is a weird hold out from the Freudian period. There is virtually no evidence suggesting that rule breaking itself is inherently arousing, yet the narrative is so easy to understand and so prevalent in our society no one thinks to challenge it. If it were true that the act of doing something taboo itself activated an arousal pathway, you would see people turned on by any social taboo at approximately equal levels (in association with how taboo the activity is). This is not seen in practice.

Perhaps we have come to assume that social taboos incite arousal because teenagers, experiencing sexuality for the first time, simultaneously experience strong drives to rebel and break rules. The teenage drive toward rebellion likely evolved to encourage people to move out of their birth tribe as well as push boundaries—it is not part of a person’s arousal pathways. At any rate, because teens are introduced to a surging desire to both rebel and have sex at the same time, people may have trouble parsing these impulses out and ultimately come to associate rebellion and boundary-pushing with sexuality.

In The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships, we do actually recommend getting a target partner comfortable by breaking social conventions with you before making a move. We recommend this not because breaking social conventions causes arousal, but because people tend to contextualize themselves as having a closer relationship with those with whom we feel comfortable breaking social conventions.

“Why, then,” you may wonder, “are so many kinks socially taboo?” A kink, as a concept, is literally defined by something you find arousing that is also a social taboo. Being gay used to be considered a paraphilia (the clinical term for an intense kink) in the standard diagnostic manual (DSM). Now, being gay is not considered to be a kink because it is no longer taboo—and those in our society who still see being gay as taboo likely would still offensively claim that it is a kink. Back when it was mainstream to contextualize being gay as a kink, there were actually people who claimed that the only reason people found same-gender relationships arousing was because it was a social taboo. Heck, when oral sex was less socially acceptable, one can even find mentions that the reason people enjoyed it was because it was taboo—something we now know to be absurd.

Kinks are always taboo—not because taboo things cause kinks, but because we use “taboo-ness” to define something as a kink. Continuing to attempt to explain away your sexuality with the easy just-so story of social taboos retards genuine personal exploration and your ability to predict behavior in others.

The Impact of Gender Differences on Human Sexuality

Let’s explore disproportionately male and female kinks and turn ons. Many of these differences will deeply offend, trigger, and disturb readers. Even we, as dispassionate as we try to convince ourselves we are about these things, cannot help but find some of these tendencies concerning.

Inconvenient Things that Arouse Females

The topic of gender differences in arousal patterns becomes increasingly uncomfortable the deeper you dig, so let’s get the worst of it out of the way.

First, a warning: Many people, ourselves included, have trouble with the reality that women get disproportionately turned on by some dynamics that, for lack of a better way of putting it, are not in their best interest. It is tempting to want to believe that some external source forced this on them—that they were brainwashed by society to get turned on by things that hurt them. Alas, the data does not back this up. In fact, women who report being more secure with these controversial fantasies also report higher self-esteem.

We understand why the reality the data depicts is uncomfortable. In many respects, it runs contrary to basic human logic and acts as an affront to the ideal, enlightened societies we wish to create (or believe we occupy at present).

Face it: Many things about our sexuality are suboptimal, if not outright repulsive. It is infuriating that sometimes people involuntarily become aroused and orgasm when they are raped, which only compounds the emotional pain of the experience. It is horrifying that some otherwise-good people live with shame over becoming aroused when they see their partners cry. It is sickening that some murderers get aroused by torturing their victims.

You cannot control or choose which things arouse you. That which turns you on does not say anything about what you want to happen to you or how you think the world should work. The things that create arousing sexual impulses in your brain are just the things that create arousing sexual impulses in your brain. Because you cannot consciously choose these turn ons, they say nothing about you as a person. The character of a person can only be judged by the manner in which they allow their turn ons to influence their behavior.

At any rate, let’s dig in: Many kinks that are held by females at a higher rate than males involve submission or violence. Disproportionately female arousal pathways include: Submission, getting spanked, heavy bondage, being choked, being hit, being tied up, being raped, piercing, being a slave, and cutting.

While we have touched on this a few times, it bears repeating: 53% of females taking our survey reported that a partner acting dominant in a sexual context is very arousing while only 45% reported finding the naked male form very arousing and only 48% found the sight of a penis very arousing. The “default” human female arousal pathway is not arousal from the idea of sleeping with men, but arousal from the idea of sleeping with a dominant partner and more extreme submission fantasies are seen disproportionately in females.

Anecdotally, we have observed an unusually high number of female participants in the following kink communities (given how extreme they are):

Human doll (acting like an object)
Public use (a fantasy of being chained up somewhere public for sex)
Painful/forced transformation into something not human (werewolf and vampire stuff are most common)
Petplay (dressing up like and being treated like an animal)

We would be remiss to not mention this uncomfortable gender split goes both ways. For example, men are more likely to be aroused by hitting someone than women, as well as choking someone, owning someone, etc.—but this difference is far less pronounced and prolific.

This tendency for females to be aroused by submission and violence is further backed up by online porn search data. A quarter of porn searches conducted by straight women involve searches for acts that depict male violence against women like “painful anal crying,” “public disgrace,” “extreme brutal gangbang,” “forced,” and “rape.” Women search for porn featuring violence against women at more than twice the rate of men. Dr. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a Google data scientist-turned-writer/lecturer, who conducted the aforementioned research, writes: “If there is a genre of porn in which violence is perpetrated against a woman, my analysis of the data shows that it almost always appeals disproportionately to women.”

Studies have also suggested that 31% to 57% of women regularly fantasize about being raped and 9% to 17% of women mark these as very frequent or their favorite fantasy experience (our data does not show numbers that high, but makes these numbers appear plausible)^[27]. Heck, one of the bestselling books of all time—with a primary audience of women—was 50 Shades of Grey, an erotic novel decried by almost all mainstream BDSM communities due to its extreme and abusive eroticization of sexual violence against women.

Upon going over these stats, one of our friends told us she didn’t care what the numbers said, they couldn’t possibly be true. When we pointed out that both her own mother and sister were avid readers of the 50 Shades of Grey series, her response was: “Well, shit.” This more or less sums up how we feel about this, too.

The fact that any single woman may not exhibit these arousal patterns is irrelevant from the perspective of the larger data and understanding arousal pathways. We explore kinks that are present more often in one gender than the other to elucidate how arousal pathways develop holistically. We do not claim that all women follow this same arousal pathway.

Notes from the Research:

A recent study showed dominant behavior is more highly correlated to mating success in males than physical attractiveness. This makes sense when you look at our research showing women on average are more aroused by dominance than the naked male form.
Women tend to be more attracted to men who view females as pure and nurturing, but also weak and needing extra care (a concept known as benevolent sexism). That this dynamic can be displayed by a man who is not “socially backward” through historical fiction romance novels is likely a huge contributor to the success of the genre. On a similar note: The popularity of vampires in female sexual fantasies is likely due to a similar dynamic of being able to see oneself as falling prey to a man, but not because one is lesser than a human man—with the added benefit of being able to lose one’s agency through mind control, thereby being freed of responsibility for one’s total submission to a man.
The most differential search terms used by women using Pornhub are “pussy licking” (viewed 260% more often) and “solo male” (viewed 222% more often). That said, females rarely consume erotic material through this format, so information from Pornhub is not likely to present super robust insights into female arousal patterns.

Inconvenient Things that Arouse Males

We are keeping this discussion short, as we already explored the primary dynamic at play in men’s less convenient kinks, and we don’t suspect anyone is that surprised by them. The unsavory tendencies exhibited by men reflect what our society generally expects from kinky men.

Our polls were poor at putting a magnifying glass to the gender distribution of the rarer turn ons—they’re not common enough in the general population we surveyed. Fortunately, others have done the legwork on this, specifically targeting communities with less common kinks to get an understanding of the gender breakdown in a way that wouldn’t be represented in a general population survey like ours.

One thing you often see in these other surveys is that most “inverse system” kinks (getting aroused by something a normal person would find to be gross or a turn off) are overrepresented in males. In general, males are way more likely to find things that would gross out the average person hot when contrasted with women. This means that if someone is getting turned on by being farted on, rolling around in poo, having worms poured on their face, or sleeping with a sibling—that person is likely to be male.

We talk about the evolutionary pressures that we think might have led to this gender difference in the “Breeding Targets” subchapter startingon page 70. We hypothesize that the male brain’s “software” for flipping an attraction to an aversion can change an aversion to an attraction just as easily and through the same process, and that sometimes this “code” malfunctions and flips the wrong signs (these kinks are also observed in women—just at much lower rates).

Another big difference in male and female sexuality (though not an inconvenient one—for males) is that male sexuality is much more inclusive. For example, our survey results imply that:

21% of men consume erotic material depicting fat women, whereas only 2% of women consume erotic material featuring fat men—though this might be a subject matter issue, as only 1% of men included fat men in their interests while 13% of women included fat women.
23% of males consume erotic material featuring females of low wealth while only 18% of females consume erotic material featuring males with low wealth.
48% of men consume erotic material featuring people much older than them while only 34% of females do the same. (Another study showed the most popular ages men search for in porn are 16 and 18, followed by 50, 40, and 60.)

It is easy to attempt to dismiss these stats by claiming that men feature a greater diversity of erotic interests in general, but our data indicates this is clearly not the case when narrative forms of erotic art (like fanfictions and romance novels) are included in the dataset.

Finally, as we touched on when talking about inconvenient female arousal patterns, males are much more likely to be aroused by scenarios that involve them hurting another person. For example, 13% of males responding to our survey reported arousal at the prospect of hitting someone while only 8% of females did, 15% of males reported feeling turned on by tying someone up while only 7% of females did, and 7% of males reported feeling aroused by the thought of actually (not role-play) raping someone, contrasted with 3% our female survey respondents.

Suppressing Inconvenient Arousal Patterns

If a person experiences inconvenient arousal patterns, surely they should just learn to suppress them . . . right?

While a person’s arousal patterns do not reflect their values, morals, or logical desires, arousal patterns are not necessarily easy to suppress. Often against our logical, moral, emotional best interests, our biology conspires against us if we try to suppress them.

Study after study shows that suppressing one’s natural sexuality has many potential negative consequences. Specifically, suppressing an impulse decreases cognitive load capacity, thus lowering intelligence. Suppressing sexual thoughts decreases general cognitive wellbeing and increases compulsive sexual behavior (likely related to the specific modality of arousal you are trying to repress, but studies don’t separate these out).

Worse, studies have identified a rebound effect tied to the suppression of sexual thoughts: Suppressing a sexual thought increases the probability of subsequent preoccupation with that thought. Nevertheless, what choice do you really have when you know something that arouses you is immoral, maladaptive, and detrimental to society?

Fortunately, such maladaptive arousal patterns can often be indulged in harmlessly through fictional content. Contrary to a popular misconception, indulging in a fantasy through pornographic material makes whatever sexual impulse that fantasy indulges easier to suppress and makes a person less likely to act on that sexual impulse in real life. We go over this in more detail later in this book’s chapter on masturbation, but suffice to say for every 10% increase in internet access in the US, there is a corresponding regional decrease of 7.3% in rapes—and when porn was made legal in the Czech Republic, rapes declined by 37% in one year with similar results seen in Denmark, Japan, China, and Hong Kong when porn was made legal in those countries.

Female vs. Male Erotic Material Preferences

One of the most striking sexuality-related gender differences is seen in the overwhelming female preference for narrative forms of erotic material. Mercifully, this gendered difference does not come with much political baggage and is generally well known.

Women taking our survey disproportionately prefer romance novels (f47% m4%), erotic young adult novels (f15% m4%), and erotic fanfiction (f17% m8%). Our survey’s male respondents differentially prefer visual representations of real people having sex, such as live action video (f53% m81%) and still photographs (f23% m59%). Note that we specify men’s differential interest in “real people having sex,” as reported consumption rates of hentai video in our survey was gender neutral (f13% m14%) (this really surprised us as we had assumed that hentai was consumed disproportionately by males).

Why is there this distinct difference in male versus female consumption of erotic material?

Some research suggests that women are more likely to encode emotions through the left amygdala, whereas men are more likely to process emotions through the right amygdala. The right amygdala enhances memory for the “big picture” of an experience, while the left amygdala enhances memory for peripheral details. This might explain the female preference for erotica and the male preference for visual pornography, as the right amygdala is more active in men viewing pornography while the left amygdala is more active in women processing erotic narratives. This could be tested were we to find men whose brains are more likely to encode with the left amygdala (vice versa for women) and see if they have a different preference in erotic material.

Our go-to hypothesis is a bit simpler. We suspect narrative-form erotic material is simply a superior method of conveying erotic content in both men and women. Men just consume it at lower rates because it is difficult to consume while actively masturbating and given the way male arousal systems work, men are likely to want to masturbate while consuming erotic content (e.g., it is hard to masturbate to the point of orgasm while reading a fanfiction, but easy to do so while watching a video or looking at a picture).

If this is interesting to you, flip to the “Erotic Material Exhibits” supplement chapter on page 409, in which we both look at the percent of females and males who consume different types of erotic material and dig into the general phenomena in more detail.

Notes for Context:

One of the reasons the surveys we ran were able to ferret out a clearer view of arousal pathways than some past research is that it included questions about romance novels and erotic fanfiction. It is easy to look at a porn website and think: “Wow, men are into some weird shit,” while forgetting to look at a corresponding fanfiction site frequented more by women.
We wish we could have explored in greater depth how men and women’s sexual fantasies shift in response to current events. Anecdotally, during the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, the number of quarantine-themed erotic fanfictions (consumed primarily by female audiences) dwarfed the corresponding R34 anthropomorphized COVID-19 pornography (consumed primarily by male audiences). It’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison with this type of thing, but still fun to think about.

Do Men Really Have Higher Sex Drives?

The data (and we are talking about huge, cross-cultural studies of 200,000 people) makes it clear that men have much higher sex drives than women. This effect holds across cultures, meaning women’s lower sex drives are likely biological and not socialized. As with any heavily studied subject, you will find a few studies suggesting the contrary, but findings from the vast majority of studies with larger data sets align with this claim.

While the data makes it clear that women have lower sex drives on average, the data we collected also indicates that the diversity of kinks and things that cause arousal in women is no lower in women than it is in men. The average woman may not want sex as much, but is just as sexually diverse as the average man.

There has been a recent rash of authors and individuals fudging evidence in an attempt to argue that women have a higher sex drive than men. We find it bizarre that someone would want to misrepresent data merely to assert that women are hornier than men. Do those concerned with this difference equate low sex drives with disempowerment? Are their missions to somehow prove that women are super frisky carried out in an effort to empower women? This would be odd, as the belief that women’s sex drives were higher than men’s sex drives used to be a mainstream opinion in Western society—during the Victorian period, an age in which women were clearly disempowered. At this time, women were seen as dominated by their sexuality as they were supposedly more irrational and sensitive—this was such a mainstream opinion that when Freud suggested a core drive behind female self-identity, he settled on a desire to have a penis, and that somehow seemed reasonable to people. (See Sex and Suffrage in Britain by Susan Kent for more information on this.)

If the data doesn’t suggest that women have a higher sex drive, and if arguing that women have a higher sex drive doesn’t serve an ideological agenda, why are people so dead set on this idea that women are just as keen on sex—if not more—as male counterparts?

In the abovementioned study, female variability in sex drive was found to be much greater than male variability. Hidden by the claim, “men have higher sex drives in general” is the fun reality that, in general, those with the very highest sex drives are women.

To put it simply, some studies show that while the average woman has a much lower sex drive than the average man, a woman with a high sex drive has a much higher sex drive than a man with a high sex drive. Perhaps women who exist in the outlier group on this spectrum become so incensed by the normalization of the idea that women have low sex drives they feel driven to twist the facts to argue that all women have higher sex drives than men. “If I feel this high sex drive,” we imagine them reasoning, “it must mean most women secretly feel this high sex drive as well, but are socialized to hide it—I just need the data to show this to the world so they don’t have to be ashamed anymore.”

We suppose we can understand this sentiment. It would be very hard to live in a world in which few people believe that someone like you exists and people always prefer to assume that everyone is secretly like them rather than think that they are atypical.

Alternatively, the push back against the reality that women on average have a lower libido than men may just be an overreaction to an implication some people take from this—that women do not like, want, or enjoy sex. This is not true. Given how prevalent this myth is in our culture, and how it toxically suggests women are somehow deviant for enjoying sex or having sexual thoughts, we can understand the desire to fight it. We merely draw the line at blatantly spreading misinformation.

Ovulatory Shift Hypothesis

The ovulatory shift hypothesis proposes that when women are fertile, they find men with higher genetic quality (or at least men with more testosterone) to be more attractive and when women are not fertile, they prefer men who are better providers. Some recent research challenges this hypothesis, especially with short-term pairings, but by and large the consensus is that the ovulatory shift hypothesis describes a real and significant effect.

A sexual therapist with whom we have consulted on this book suggested that some women make a point of tracking their cycles and the manner in which their arousal patterns change throughout them in an effort to gain a clearer picture of their exact sexuality and understand what they really need to satisfy their sexual needs. She also said she recommended men experiment—with their partners’ consent—with providing more structure (i.e., dominance) during times of fertility. (This seems a little extreme for us, but hey, you do you.)

Here are some additional weird shifts females appear to experience as a product of their ovulatory cycles:

It has been shown that women are more assertive when they are more fertile—perhaps to provide more protection against unwanted advances when there is a risk they might lead to pregnancy.
Female brain volume changes in sync with hormones. Specifically, the hippocampus increases in volume (both in grey and white matter) in lock step with rising estrogen levels leading up to ovulation.
Women’s verbal and spatial reasoning is affected by hormones associated with the menstrual cycle. The effects of this are actually quite complicated, so if you would like to dig deeper check out: “Modulation of spatial and response strategies by phase of the menstrual cycle in women tested in a virtual navigation task” in Psychoneuroendocrinology.
Women find men more physically attractive after the men have complimented either their possessions or appearance using metaphoric language (as opposed to literal language). This effect was observed to be stronger when the compliment was given to their appearance as opposed to their possessions. Interestingly, compliments on appearance using novel metaphors were preferred by women in a relationship during the fertile phase, but by single women during the luteal phase.
Women evaluate their relationships more negatively and their partners as less physically attractive on days just prior to ovulation. Men also perceived their partners to be less satisfied at this time. Interestingly, the study that found this did not find support for the ovulatory shift hypothesis in the classical sense.
Women are more likely to denigrate other women when they are more fertile. Specifically, Fisher 2004 showed when a straight female is more fertile she will give lower attractiveness to other females and Karlijn Et al 2012 showed younger (and thus more fertile) women engaged in more derogatory gossip about other women.

Using Sexuality As A Looking Glass Into Our History

Now for the fun part: The “so what?” Armed with all the above information about human arousal patterns, is there anything we can tease out about the evolutionary pressures that may have created them?

The Hazards of Evolutionary Psychology and Worshipping Past Cultures

Before we explore that which our present sexuality might reveal about early human societies, bear in mind that there is nothing morally superior about historical societal structures and cultural practices. An observation that people used to own slaves is not an argument we should go back to owning slaves.

It has become rather fashionable to believe that, at some point in our distant history, things were perfect, and if we could only get back to that time, things would be perfect again. Such trendy memes are what fuel the present impression among some that the invention of agriculture was somehow the beginning of the end of humans’ quality of life—as if we would somehow be better off living more or less like troupes of chimpanzees or bonobos, foraging for food, having sex, sleeping, and dying of parasitic infections without the distinct delicacies of culture, science, technology, or the uniquely human drive to advance.

It pains us to see people suggest there is credible evidence suggesting humans lived with less daily pain and illness in the pre-agricultural period than in a developed country today. Yes, the very first people living in agricultural settlements likely had a worse diet, more diseases, and worse living conditions than their immediate predecessors—but modern humans live an almost inconceivably better life than said predecessors. Consider one of the earliest near-modern human skulls we have: Cro-Magnon 1. The dude’s face was literally eaten off by fungus to the bone while he was still alive. A female living with him lived a portion of her life with a fractured skull and her brain hanging out. The fused neck vertebrae of others in Cro-Magnon 1’s cave suggests severe injury was common in humans living during that period. Trepanning, literally drilling a hole in a living person’s skull, was such a normalized procedure during this period due to the extreme pain people lived with on a day-to-day basis that is found in 5%-10% of all stone-age skulls. We feel fairly secure in our sentiment that people who succumb to the instinct to worship past cultures are egregiously misinformed.

Beware the countless (and honestly enjoyable and entertaining) pop science books out there that cherry pick evidence and anecdotes in an attempt to argue that humans are either “naturally monogamous” or “naturally polyamorous” and proceed argue that if only people could go back to our supposedly natural monogamous / polyamorous / whatever state, the world would be a better place. These books shovel forth transparent agendas and make ultimately ridiculous arguments. Any honest look at history will reveal that those looking to create a perfect society should look into the future of our species—not its history.

Bring a critical and even mindset to any discussion of evolutionary psychology. While we adore how evolutionary psychology yields fascinating insights into how our current sexuality may have come to be and how it may work at a systems level, we dislike seeing evolutionary psychology used to justify fringe political ideologies. Evolutionary psychology is about spinning interesting stories from scant evidence. Evolutionary psychology is for musing and entertainment. Evolutionary psychology categorically should not be the cornerstone of one’s political ideology or worldview.

Using Kinks to Find Clues Into Early Human Cultures

Back when I (Malcolm) worked in paleoanthropology at the Smithsonian, I was accustomed to seeing researchers bemoan the fact that we could never catch a glimpse of the social structures of early human groups. Researches regret that it is hard to know which, if any, of today’s “uncontacted peoples” (primitive tribes still living in isolation and untouched by modern society and technology) have social structures similar to those of our early ancestors. Time has passed as much for uncontacted peoples as it has for us—we can only expect that they, too, would have changed dramatically.

Are we really doomed to eternal ignorance of societal structures throughout most of humanity’s evolutionary history? After all, 98%+ of the time during which our ancestors have been human-like flew by before written records began to be kept. Groups before written records produced very few artifacts revealing the clues we normally use to learn about life, social structures, and relationships.

We propose there actually are means by which we can gather some evidence of early human tribal social structures—the academic community merely has not yet considered it. All one must do is explore (surprise, surprise!) internet pornography, smutty fanfictions, and romance novels.

Kinks do not develop out of thin air. If we find that humans statistically react in a predictable but peculiar way to a stimulus, and if we are fairly certain that reaction is not socialized, we can safely guess that humans who did not exhibit that peculiar reaction had fewer surviving offspring. By determining which behaviors lead our ancestors to produce more viable offspring, we can gather clues about their cultural practices.

While all our closest relatives’ tribes (bonobos, chimps, gorillas, etc.) do have “default” social structures and mating customs into which they sort, they also deviate from these set patterns, with individual tribes featuring unique cultures. We suspect early humans were the same. An investigation of kinks and the clues they send about past societies only indicates what would have been the most prominent social structure and relationship type in human tribes. Just as is the case today, early humans were grouped into many different tribes, which no doubt formed many unique social structures. There was never a time in history during which there was a “correct way” to be human that everyone followed.

Were Early Humans Monogamous?

Did early humans have pair bonded relationships? Did they have long-term partners from whom they expected fidelity?

Questions about monogamy in early humans should be broken into two parts:

1. Were early human females expected to be faithful to a single male?

2. Were early human males expected to be faithful to a single female?

To understand why this clarification is needed, look at the default gorilla social group, in which females are expected to be faithful to a single silverback male while this single, dominant male breeds with any of the females he wants.

The testes of an animal relative to that animal’s size yield clues about the extent to which females of that species sleep with multiple partners, as males whose female partners sleep around need to produce more sperm in order to compete with the sperm of other males. Human testicles fall, on the relative size spectrum, between those of chimps (which have large testes and almost no expectation of fidelity from females) and gorillas (which have small testes and extremely strong expectations of fidelity from females).

There is also evidence from sperm morphology studies suggesting that humans produce significantly more abnormal spermatozoa in their ejaculate than chimp and bonobo males produce—but around the same amount as gorillas.

Some argue that the human male foreskin’s ability to act as a “pump” (in the sense that its shape facilitates scooping out ejaculate from a previous partner) means there was high sperm competition in our early ancestors. This is not a very strong argument, as most mammals have a similar penile sheath—even those with low sperm competition. Moreover, chimps, our closest relatives, have a very similar foreskin, suggesting it was a morphological trait our common ancestor had and our species never experienced strong evolutionary pressures to lose it. (Note: We couldn’t find whether gorillas have a penile sheath or not—and our dedication to this book’s stops were Googling pictures of shaved gorilla penises starts.)

At any rate, findings regarding testicle size and sperm morphology imply that either early human females were somewhat faithful to pair-bonded relationships or that humans were in the process of transitioning between a species without an expectation of female fidelity to a species with an expectation of female fidelity.^[28]

The fact that human males have an urge to care for the children of their pair-bonded female partners serves as fairly strong evidence suggesting that humans have historically experienced strong pair bonding with an expectation of female fidelity. There is not a single intelligent species whose males care for a specific female’s offspring to the exclusion of the tribe’s offspring without some expectation of fidelity from that particular female. While there are some species featuring males that are generally caring toward the tribe’s offspring without expecting female fidelity, there are no cases in which a male bonds to only the children of a specific female with no expectation of fidelity.

While some human tribes conceptualize children as a communal asset and responsibility, we doubt there are many who would claim that it is not in the default human mental tool kit for a father to specifically love his own children very deeply and uniquely. Just because not every culture uses a tool sculpted by evolution does not mean the tool doesn’t exist. Some cultures lack the concept of romantic love; this does not mean that humans did not evolve the capacity for love at some point under specific evolutionary pressures.

The rather unique fact that human females do not visibly signal when they are fertile presents another piece of evidence providing hints into how early human relationship structures may have worked. Most of our closest relatives signal fertility with something like an inflated red butt to show all the males that a mating during said period is likely to end in offspring. Though human female behavior is influenced by hormone fluctuations and ovulation, these effects are subtle and certainly not broadcast publicly. The fertility-signaling trait common in our closest ancestors was lost far too quickly and way too thoroughly among humans to be merely a product of disuse. There must have been fairly strong selective pressures nudging women to hide periods of time during which they were fertile.

We can think of three theories as to how a woman would have benefited from hiding her fertility (from an evolutionary perspective). The first is that early human society was a complete sexual free-for-all and, in this free-for-all, early human females traded sex for resources. In such a world, women could get more resources if males did not know whether they were fertile or not. As this theory doesn’t fit with the data from sperm and testicular morphology, we are fairly confident it can be discounted as a possibility.

Our second theory behind hidden female fertility is inspired by an interesting study on gorillas conducted by the Mondika research center in the Congo. In the group of gorillas studied by this center, females have been observed faking fertility—even when they are already pregnant—when another, lower-ranking female is in her fertile period. This indicates that human females may have shed fertility signals to both block male access to other fertile females (by keeping male partners occupied with sex with them) and frustrate other females attempting this strategy. This would suggest early humans were polygynous like gorillas. We doubt this theory, as were this the reason behind humans’ hidden female fertility, we should also see a dramatic increase in libido among women in committed relationships—which we do not see. That said, this is a very interesting sexual strategy that would probably work among humans, so we are a little surprised we haven’t seen more human females guard against infidelity by constant and frequent sexual aggression with committed male partners.

Our strongest theory explaining the lack of fertility signaling is that women experienced evolutionary pressures to trick males who are not the actual biological fathers of their children into believing that they are the biological parents of those children. This misdirection would allow women to secure resources for their children from men who make for optimal providers (think the wealthy-but-ugly man) while securing genes from men who were more genetically desirable, but perhaps less available to provide resources to offspring on an ongoing basis (think the hot guy stud who sleeps around a lot). This in turn suggests that, while there may have been an expectation of fidelity from early human females, they occasionally cheated with higher quality (from a genetic standpoint) males when they had a chance. This theory aligns with changes we see in human female arousal patterns during different stages of their ovulatory cycles.

We can argue with some confidence that humans have been “cheating” a lot and for a very, very long time. We cannot think of any other way the human female could have evolved a subconscious tendency to find lower testosterone males (with lower average genetic fitness) more attractive when they are not fertile and higher testosterone males (with higher average genetic fitness) more attractive when they are fertile.^[29]

While attraction to higher testosterone males during fertile periods in modern human women may be completely subconscious, it could not exist without women differentially being “genetically rewarded” for sleeping with one type of male over another when they were more fertile over tens of thousands of years. To put it more simply, there appears to have been a systematically rewarded behavior pattern in which a woman would convince a less genetically attractive male that he had exclusive sexual access to her and would use sex with him when she was not fertile to create a pair bond with him—while nevertheless becoming impregnated by a more genetically attractive male (likely covertly, while maintaining a resource flow from the less genetically attractive male). This is not pleasant, but we really can’t think of other realistic things that could have motivated women to find less-fit men more attractive when they were infertile.

What about males? Were male humans expected to commit to only one female, and if so, did they cheat on those females? The answer is complicated. It appears there may have been one mating pattern between 50 and 20 thousand years ago, another between 20 and 10 thousand years ago, yet another in the early agricultural period between 10 and three thousand years ago, and a final pattern between three thousand years ago and now.

We know this because of a great study: A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture. It shows that about 4000-8000 years after the invention of agriculture, there was an extended period during which on average only one human male bred for every seventeen females that bred. While this ratio didn’t stay this extreme throughout the entire period, after looking at the data it would be very hard to argue that humans living between ten and three thousand years ago were not polygynous.

Think about it: One would really have to twist the data to explain the seventeen-to-one female-to-male breeding ratio in a society that was not polygynous. The only way we can imagine explaining this ratio without polygyny would be to argue that:

A tribe of “Amazons” swept the globe, systematically killing most male babies during this period
A disease arose that only killed males while leaving no archaeological trace
Inter-tribal conflict (war) was so common—as was the use of exclusively male child soldiers—that only one in seventeen men made it to breeding age.

We don’t find these alternatives to be particularly compelling.

Research also indicates that a significantly higher portion of the female population was breeding when contrasted with the males between 20 and 10 thousand years ago, but the ratio was nothing as extreme as the ten-to-3-thousand-year-ago period. Data on the period between 50 and 20 thousand years ago suggests significantly more equity between male and female breeding rates.

If we were to extrapolate from current uncontacted tribal cultures and primate behavior to guess at what human social structures were like between 20 and 10 thousand years ago, we are probably looking at packs with a strict hierarchy run by dominant males, each with differential access to females, that are regularly attacked by outside tribal groups (more on this shortly).

When we venture back to the period between 50 and 20 thousand years ago, we really don’t know what we can reasonably deduce—it is hard for us to draw data on this period from either the genetic evidence or from modern kinks. Monogamy, polyamory, and about a thousand other systems could produce a pattern like this. We nevertheless doubt that the manner in which these earlier humans related to each other intimately would fit well within modern relationship definitions like monogamy and polyamory. There have been enough genetic bottlenecks since then that few of the behavioral impulses from this period still affect us as much as those from 20 thousand years ago to the modern period.

For the rest of this chapter, we will focus on the period 20 to 10 thousand years ago and the period 10 to three thousand years ago. At the end of the book, we will return to a focus on how the extreme polygyny of this second period transformed into the monogamous culture that is currently dominant.

The data suggesting that some form of polygyny (with a genetic bottleneck tied to it) was practiced between 10 and three thousand years ago makes a lot of sense given how humans seem to naturally sort themselves. A hefty 84.6% of unique human societies are polygynous. Yes, you read that right: 84.6% of human societies are polygynous (one man with multiple women), with only 0.3% being polyandrous (one woman matched with multiple men). Most of the rest are monogamous. Polyamorous societies are fairly rare.

We can also say with some certainty that Western society has not corrupted the data, either through the lens they are using to look at it or through colonialism, because a similar distribution can be observed in both historical anthropological sites and in travel descriptions written by pre-imperial writers in both the east and the west. When humans randomly sort themselves into small groups, more often than not those groups have a similar social structure, and that social structure is polygynous. All of our closest relatives, such as chimps, bonobos, and gorillas, also have default social structures into which they sort most of the time—even when raised in cultural isolation—so it isn’t surprising that humans would have a default social structure of their own.

If polygyny is the default human social structure, why do most people living today live in monogamous societies? In a sedentary, post-agricultural world, monogamous societies outcompete polygynous ones and thus the cultures dominating today’s political, social, and economic spheres are monogamous. Stats suggest that polygyny increases social unrest when practiced above certain population thresholds, increasing rates of rape, murder, terrorism, theft, etc. (This is not to say monogamy is the most stable model; others like polyamory have not been experimented with on a societal level, so we don’t have stats on how they would affect social vices.) We will discuss why this appears to happen in more detail at the end of the book, where we discuss how sexuality might affect the future of dating, as this recent monogamous period of human history likely had little impact on our genetics given how short it has been. For more information on this phenomenon, we recommend checking out the literature review: The puzzle of monogamous marriage.

Gender Relations of Early Humans

We have fairly strong evidence the human males that historically bred most were the most dominant in their groups and that female dominance did not affect their ability to breed as much. We can infer this from the extremely low rates of women who report gleaning sexual satisfaction from acting dominant when contrasted with males and the extremely high rate of females finding it arousing when a partner acts dominant.

You may think it axiomatic that women do not need to be dominant to breed at the same rates as males, but this is not true for all species. For example, among packs of wild dogs, only the alpha female breeds, which suggests that engaging in dominant behavior is likely a turn on for most female wild dogs, as in wild dogs, a female’s dominance profoundly affects the number of surviving offspring she has.

Humans likely sorted into polygynous structures because, unlike wild dogs in which the alpha female is the only female in a pack to breed and does so in large litters, a human female can normally have at most two children per gestational cycle (and those gestational cycles are pretty long). Tribes of humans that experimented with a dominant female who acted as the only breeder would have almost certainly been overtaken by competing tribes who allowed more women to reproduce at once and therefore gained more human capital.

Within societies in which every female—but not every male—can breed, women who expend significant energy to climb a dominance hierarchy are not going to have significantly more kids than their less ambitious and submissive peers. This puts very little evolutionary pressure on females to get turned on by acting dominant themselves while simultaneously putting significant pressure on them to identify dominance in males and find it arousing, as a more dominant male will be able to more adequately protect her offspring.

We are deeply sorry to burst the bubble of any who wanted to believe that early humans commonly formed matriarchies. While we do not doubt that at least some small tribes for limited periods of time were (and are) matriarchal; we are simply stating there is little evidence that early human societies were matriarchal. We do not take Venus figures and some early religious traditions as strong evidence for matriarchal cultures, as despite the fact that ancient Greeks had some badass female Gods like Athena and Artemis, they barely even allowed their women to talk in public.^[30] Signs of a religion focused on powerful females are not indications of gender equity in a society.

The data we collected on differential gendered arousal patterns in modern humans shows it was probably worse for ancient women than even the above picture paints.

Consider the findings from our survey:

People who get turned on from being hit: f26% m17%
People who get turned on by hitting someone: f8% m13%
People who get turned on by being tied up f45% m23%
People who tie others up during sex f7% m15%
People who get turned on by losing agency f17% m8%
People who get turned on by the thought of being owned by someone: f28% m10%
People who get turned on by the thought of owning someone: f12% m15%
People who get turned on by cutting and piercing: f4% m1%

Since we have evidence supporting our theory that socialization isn’t playing a big role in human sexuality, the gender differences in those arousal patterns must be coming from somewhere else. The picture this paints of the lives of our early human ancestors is a little terrifying.

We suspect women in these tribes lived brutal, degrading lives. Ten thousand years ago, women were likely treated like livestock. Twenty to ten thousand years ago, women likely lived within social structures in which even a low-ranking male will be treated as superior to most females (you see this pattern in chimps). The kink patterns of modern humans reveal a genetic scar from lives in which women who received arousal from being property, being hit, or being bound, survived at higher rates than men with the same arousal patterns. We say this because we cannot imagine what other evolutionary pressures could have caused these kinks to appear at such high rates in women—they are really weird, creepily specific, and present in women from an early age (so again, they are probably not socialized).

There is an alternative to a bleak history in which women were more or less treated like chattel in their day-to-day lives. Just because women who were turned on by losing agency, being owned by someone, being beaten, or being tied up had more surviving children at a rate (differential to men with the same predilections) does not necessarily mean that such selective pressures existed in women’s daily lives. Arousal upon exposure to lost agency, slavery, and bondage could have evolved as a product of repeated bottlenecks.

For example, if 30% of women in this time period experienced violent turnover at only one point in their lives due to an outside tribe or group of males coming in and killing the existing males and their offspring, that could still be enough selective pressure to create differential arousal patterns. If a portion of the females in these conquered tribes got turned on by the experience in any way, the likelihood that they survived long enough to have more children in the future would almost certainly have been higher than the women who resisted.

This theory, combined with the other data we have presented, suggests that between 20 and 10 thousand years ago, many humans lived in tribes in which one male held a dominant role, but negotiated support from subordinate males. These dominant males had access to more resources and breeding opportunities than the less dominant males. Tribes likely treated females as subordinate to males but were not egregiously violent or physically abusive toward women of their own tribe (we assume this, as this impulse doesn’t seem to exist in men today in large volumes). These tribes were either occasionally attacked by groups of roaming bachelors or other similar tribes of both males and females. We think the latter occurred, because both males and females are (roughly) equally likely to be turned on by the idea of owning someone else (f12% m15%). During these attacks, males of the attacked tribe were killed, children were killed, and females who resisted were killed.

Note from the Research:

There is a fascinating study from Paul Sabatier University—the findings of which conflict with some of our hypothesis, but we never want to be seen as obfuscating contradictory evidence to paint a simpler picture. Specifically, male horses and female horses do not (allegedly) show statistically different behavioral patterns in terms of “moodiness,” yet it is commonly believed among horse riders that male horses are less moody, which leads them to be preferred. What is crazy cool is that we can use DNA to go back and see when humans first began to exhibit this illogical preference for male horses and through that investigation, we can get some idea of when those groups started to form certain ideas about females in general (the idea that female horses were moody came from somewhere—and it wasn’t from the horses). Specifically, despite domesticating horses 5,500 years ago, the preference for males didn’t surface until 3,900 years ago. This is around the same time that Bronze Age men became much more likely than Bronze Age women to be buried with jewelry and other valuables—a tendency (this study claims) was not observed in Neolithic burials. However, this could be an illusory pattern more indicative of the beginning of mass husbandry of horses (in such a case, female horses would stay disproportionately at “breeding centers” while the disposable males would be more likely to be seen in the possession of “customers”). (Note: Our horse friends say this study is BS, obviously motivated by politics, and conducted by people who don’t know much about horses. Apparently, riders prefer gelded horses and female horse behavior is a unique and obvious problem when they are in heat).

Chad & The Myth of the Alpha Male

Before we accidentally cultivate an obsession with dominance among our male readers, we want to highlight that a lot of misinformation is presently spread about “being alpha.” This misinformation is based on a misunderstanding of how dominance hierarchies really work in species in which multiple males are allowed to breed, such as wolves and chimps. In reality, the beefiest, strongest male is not always the alpha. The “real alpha” (with “alpha” being a colloquial term for the dominant male—the status of alpha male is not a real thing that exists in these tribes) is the male who can convince two other males, who otherwise have no chance of rising in the hierarchy, to team up with him to kill the beefy strong chimp/wolf/whatever who presently blocks their access to fertile females.

In these species, the males at the top of the social hierarchies are often quite generous and kind to their followers and those they believe can be convinced to follow them. In a high school context, the alpha isn’t the beefy meat head Chad Chadlington who bullies little Nigel Wilber; the Alpha is Mike Dexter, football captain and future astronaut, who protects the wimpy foreigner Nigel Wilber from Chad—with the implied agreement that after they kill Chad, Mike gets Chad’s girlfriend and all of Chad’s possessions, while Nigel gets to bone Sheena Simpson, the goth with bad hygiene who is secretly cheating on Nigel with Mike while she is ovulating (OK the analogy kind of breaks down, but you get the idea). Being alpha is not about being a beefy meat head; it’s about being cunning, kind, and generous. Being alpha involves building social coalitions while publicly neutralizing anyone who actively challenges your authority and privately neutralizing anyone who poses a threat.

The “Chad” archetype of a young, beefy meat head who generally mistreats others, surrounds himself with other men, and otherwise bucks the larger social structure of his society does have a corollary in nature. If a Chad were anything in the wild, he would be a dominant member of a roaming bachelor group. Roaming bachelor groups are not “mopping up women;” they are disaffected males searching for a place in the world—for a tribe to accept them (thus why they disproportionately lie about having sex). Chads should be looked upon with pity, not seen as sexual competition.

Early Human Warfare

Among groups in which a male gains authority by building a coalition, the evolutionary pressure from violent turnovers normally stems from strategies in which men gain access to additional females by conquering other tribes and killing off the male members of those tribes (as well as all their babies). This would explain why males who became aroused by violence against others and rape would have differently more surviving offspring than the females who were aroused by the same things. Sadly, this dynamic also explains why women who got turned on by the thought of being raped would have more surviving offspring when contrasted with men who bear the same arousal pattern.

We can even gain some insight into how one of these fights might have played out. One study showed that while men’s preferences for facial cues related to dominance in allies strengthen following losses (compared to wins) in violent contests, women’s preferences for facial cues related to dominance in allies weaken following losses (compared to wins) in violent contests. It is so neat that our instinctual preferences grant us an imprint of hundreds of thousands of slaughters favoring men who knew they were going to die if they didn’t double down in their support of the dominant male and privileging women who felt compelled to soften their support from the dominant males “on their side” as it appeared they might lose. While naturally not every fight went down this way, enough did that women who had one preference produced more surviving offspring while men who had another produced more surviving offspring, which ultimately produced the above gender split in behavior patterns when it looks like one’s own side is losing. In short, the conditions under which our species evolved rewarded men who doubled down in support of their team when losing a violent fight and rewarded women who began to consider switching sides when it looked like their team was losing.

Why do we think that raiders killed all the men of the tribes they conquered? First and foremost, this is a common behavior across species with harem-like social structures. Why? Because it makes genetic sense. Killing the male members of a tribe you conquer will grant your genetic material greater odds of spreading. What do you gain from keeping potentially dangerous conquered males around? And what do these conquered men gain (from a genetic perspective) from living if they have no chance of breeding? The conquered men would be almost certain to develop a strong genetic impulse to revolt were they to be denied their breeding rights, so it only makes sense to kill them. After all, this impulse to revolt in men who cannot access females can be seen even today in the higher rates of murder within polygynous cultures as well as the higher rates of terrorism seen in societies like modern day Egypt when social factors like an economic depression depress marriage rates.

Female attraction to violence is a very real strategy for a portion of the population. Virtually every serial killer has received tons of admiring love letters from female fans. These female fan letters dwarf the number of fan letters serial killers receive from male fans. Among tribes in which individuals still regularly kill other people, like the Yanomamo of the Amazon, men who have killed the most other men have the most wives and offspring, which suggests that, in aggregate, women systematically prefer murderers as mating partners when not polluted by the “civilized instinct” to not want to be seen dating a murderer. There is, nevertheless, a good reason why large societies do not celebrate murder: Once a human settlement reaches certain population levels, accepting murders on a societal level is not productive and thus cultural norms develop to isolate, shame, and otherwise neutralize murderers as social actors.

Why do we think raiding behavior was frequent? Human sexual differentiation in arousal tied to violence seems more baked in than most other gender-differentiated preferences. It would also seem that females’ tendency to be turned on by watching abuse against women is baked in uniquely deeply because it exists despite the fact today’s women grew up in a society in which they are told they should think less of themselves for getting turned on by being dominated and physically hurt by men. Women would only still indulge in this attraction at the levels we observe—in spite of the very strong societal pressure against it—if the selective pressure for it in our evolutionary history was very, very strong.

Smashing Babies on Rocks

Why do we think that raiding males killed babies? For starters, this behavior is seen in 25% of ape species. It makes sense to kill a group’s babies to get the females ready to breed again sooner, as nursing babies delay ovulation in females. Even peaceful gorillas go nuts on babies and smash them on rocks when a new dominant male comes to town.

We also have behavioral evidence for infanticide—or at least a lack of care for non-biological-children among fathers—in modern humans. Just peruse the survival rates of kids with stepdads while controlling for other life conditions. Survival rates are WAY lower if a stepchild is an infant or toddler. Subconsciously, some male behavior leads to the death of very young step kids (a child living with an unrelated adult has 50 timesthe odds of dying) and abuse is 10 times more likely when a stepparent lives in the home (though conscious self-interest may also contribute to this behavior).

The evidence suggesting baby killing that we find most compelling is actually biblical. The Old Testament has some of the earliest detailed accounts of what happened when ancient humans conquered a city and what they thought about that behavior. In the Old Testament, the practice of killing babies after conquering a city is actively encouraged: Psalm 137:9 “Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!” Not only is this exactly the way gorillas and chimps kill infants after deposing a dominant male (smashing babies against rocks), but if this were not an ancient tradition, we cannot think of a good reason for doing it. Killing babies by dashing them on rocks seems like a weird thing to do randomly when conquering a town, right? Humans in aggregate do not randomly commit unthinkable, violent acts without some benefit or cultural tradition behind them. For some reason, the first civilized humans believed that smashing babies on rocks was just part of standard operating procedure when conquering another group of humans.

A look at the behavior of recently contacted tribes, such as that of the Aché tribe, also supports a human infanticide instinct. Aché children of males who have died also die at much higher rates than children with living fathers. Infanticide is rare to non-existent in totally monogamous species with equal birth rates of males and females; there is just no strong reason to kill babies from a genetic perspective, which lends further support to the idea of early humans being polygynous.

This behavior presents strong evidence against early human societies being matriarchal. Species that tend toward matriarchies, such as bonobos, do not exhibit systematic male infanticide against children that are not their own (though they still show male bullying of other younger males—see the article: Aggression by male bonobos against immature individuals does not fit with predictions of infanticide).

Female Promiscuity

The impulse driving many men to have sex with a large number of people is hardly a mystery from an evolutionary perspective. More sexual partners lead to more surviving children for men and more children lead to more of whatever behavioral impulse created those children. We have already addressed the core reason a woman would benefit evolutionarily from covertly sleeping with individuals who are not her primary partner, but let’s do a deeper dive into evolutionary pressures motivating female promiscuity.^[31]

Contrary to a weirdly popular belief in some academic circles, it is not an effective evolutionary strategy for a woman to openly have sex with a variety of men in an effort to obscure the paternity of her children and thus shield them from infanticide. Studies on the Aché (an indigenous hunter-gatherer culture in Paraguay sometimes referred to as a potential model of what early human societies were like) suggest this tactic is moderately successful when a child has two potential fathers, but when a child has three potential fathers or more, their risk of death increases dramatically. Essentially, males do not care about children that only have a 33% chance of being theirs any more than they care about children who have no chance of being theirs. In real-world scenarios, clouding paternity almost never leads to more investment from males of a tribe.

Contrary to popular belief, a female’s drive to promiscuity cannot be explained by a desire for genetic diversity in her children. After all, how much could genetic diversity in children possibly increase the survival rate of a woman’s children: Maybe 15%, max? In theory, increased genetic diversity in a female’s offspring will increase the number of children that survive some specific diseases, (or a few other extremely specific circumstances from which local genetic variation could protect offspring). The problem is that women in these historical contexts would not have typically been able to find multiple partners with genes different enough to differentially protect certain children—plus tribes would not often be afflicted by one of the rare diseases against which some humans are conveniently genetically resistant. Furthermore, any disease-resistant benefits gained from having kids with more diverse genes would be mitigated by sexually transmitted disease in cultures that didn’t have antifungals or antibiotics.

Even if women desire multiple simultaneous partners at lower rates than men, there still has to be some evolutionary pressure motivating that portion of women who do strongly desire multiple partners. While not a perfect proxy, we say women want multiple partners at lower rates than men because in our modern culture they “cheat” much less often (with numbers ranging anywhere from men cheating 30% more frequently to at twice the rate of women). Still, many things may motivate a desire for multiple partners that are driven more by socialization and self-identity than arousal patterns and evolutionary pressures.

We already addressed the biggest evolutionary motivation by far: Women throughout history evolutionarily benefited from straying in order to breed with a male with great genes (social intelligence, attractiveness, dominance, etc.) who could not be convinced to raise these women’s children—all while still enjoying the support of a caregiver who is willing to raise children he believes to be his (hidden fertility and ovulatory shift provide evidence of this pressure). We can see this evolutionary motivator represented in current female behavior. When women cheat, it is more often than not with individuals who are “hotter” than their primary partners while males will cheat with significantly less attractive women just as readily as they will cheat with more attractive women. However, there are a few other motivators.

Infidelity appears to be more common among people who have specific types of oxytocin and vasopressin receptor genes. Vasopressin is a hormone related to social behaviors, including trust, empathy, and sexual bonding. A whopping 40% of instances of infidelity in women and 62% in men are partially influenced by oxytocin and vasopressin receptor genes. In these cases, this push toward cheating is a bleed over of evolutionary pressures pushing for more Machiavellian social tactics in non-romantic contexts.

Finally, cheating is not always sexual. Emotional affairs also exist, with 5% of men and 35% of women having admitted to having an emotional affair. We suspect the larger number of women having emotional affairs is either a product of women being more emotionally aware of what they are doing (and thus being more likely to admit to it on a survey) or women having more to gain from emotional affairs than men. More specifically, the mental reward pathways for the narrative around a relationship are stronger in women, leading emotionally driven affairs to be more likely to pull them towards infidelity.

If you think any of this makes our female ancestors look predatory, put their behavior in context. At least they do not have a history of maintaining giant harems, raiding tribes, raping unwilling sexual targets, and dashing babies against rocks, right? Nobody comes out smelling like roses.

Why Men are Aroused by Dominance

Even though men are aroused by dominance at lower rates than women, it is still worth asking why so many men find dominance arousing.

As to why women are aroused by dominance, the answer is fairly straightforward:

Having a dominant partner massively reduces the risk of infanticide (we see this in the Aché, with dominant males sometimes killing the children of other males for shits and giggles (well, that’s the best way we can think to translate some of the stories anthropologists report). These killings are likely driven by an impulse to augment the resources to which these men’s own biological children have access. Having wimpy Nigel telling someone not to kill your kid is much less effective than Mike Dexter.
In polygynous cultures, dominant males can get more resources and female partners, meaning that the genes that make them dominant will be passed on to their male children, thereby increasing the number of offspring those children have in turn. Women’s children are much more likely to have many descendants of their own if they carry the genes of a dominant member of their tribe, which increases women’s likelihood of finding dominance arousing.
Dominance is a strong proxy for good genes overall. If an individual has a strong drive to act dominant but lacks the physical fitness to back up the position they seek, they are likely to be killed or expelled from the group—or at the very least, fail to attain a dominant position within the group. Females can therefore be fairly certain the larger “genetic package” a dominant male offers is top notch, increasing women’s probability of finding dominant partners arousing.

Back to the question at hand: Why are around half of men aroused by dominance? Recall that while 70% of men get turned on by seeing their partners act submissive, 49% get turned on by seeing partners act dominantly as well (contrast this with women, of whom only 27% get turned on by seeing their partner act submissive while 75% get turned on by seeing their partner act dominant). Why are males more aroused by dominant partners than females are aroused by submissive partners? Why are around half of males aroused by seeing dominance in a partner?

Consider the high school analogy we presented earlier, in which dominant Chad got iced and at least wimpy obsequious Nigel got a chance to breed with Sheena the goth with bad hygiene. In a chimp tribe, most male members are submissive to at least one other chimp. One dominant male—future astronaut Mike Dexter in our example—typically depends upon the support of his troupe’s submissive males to secure his role. This dominant male rewards supporting males with access to females—who, per what ovulatory shift indicates, would then sometimes covertly attempt to impregnate themselves with the dominant male’s genes.

It would therefore make sense that male sexual strategy would be divided into a high risk, high reward dominance pathway and a low risk, medium reward submission pathway. This would lead to a sizable portion of the male population being more aroused by taking on subservient roles. It also explains why men with less money are more turned on by acting submissive than men with more money (naturally submission is the better strategy for men with lower resources, as they are going to have a hard time beating a male with greater resources when deploying a dominance-based strategy).

Polymorphism

We could be either totally or partially wrong about everything.

If you take one particular species of cute grasshoppers and put them in a large group (or rub their legs for four hours with a Q-tip) they transform into the dreaded locust. Their behavior patterns and morphology completely transform into something monstrous. This is called polymorphism—and perhaps it has happened to humans.

Primates of a single genetic line can have multiple, entirely different “default” social structures that manifest depending on environmental resources and conditions (specifically we are thinking about Baboons here). Essentially, certain ecologies put primates into a different social “mode.”

What if humans work like this as well? What if we have a few different evolutionarily conditioned behavior patterns that appear in different circumstances? What if there is a switch in us at a young age that, through some environmental stimuli toggles on our ability to be sexually stimulated by dominance or/and submission? What if we are wrong about everything and socialization does really exist—not in a too-many-ads-depicting-skinny-women kind of way, but in an on/off-switch kind of way, triggered by weird things like childhood diet or your-family’s-perceived-position-within-the-local-dominance-hierarchy kind of way? What if something about post-industrial society is “switching” tons of women to a submissive stance—as well as many men, and therefore the distributions of arousal patterns we are seeing are not “natural”?

It would make sense: The two ecological conditions that most often cause a switch like this involve either growing up in a social group above a certain population threshold or growing up in a group that has a high level of access to resources. For example: Why risk dying to climb a social hierarchy if there are enough resources to go around? Wouldn’t it make sense for both males and females to differentially adopt submissive strategies in such an environment?

We got a little too excited by this line of thought, which ultimately inspired the survey we conducted and explore in depth in this book’s supplement. Sadly, through our surveys, we found no evidence of a polymorphic excuse—our ancestors were just monstrously terrible beings. (Though a preference for polyamory might have a polymorphic component in human females—more on that in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships.)

At any rate, present human kinks paint a picture (albeit a rough one) suggesting that most early human societies were patriarchies featuring a dominant male who had many partners that were semi-faithful—as well as a number of submissive males who also had access to a female or a few females they believed were faithful to them, but who were, in fact, not. Our interpretation of the evidence suggests that groups would frequently raid other groups, kill their men and babies, and absorb their women.

Bonobos

Some of our readers may be wondering at this point why we have not referred to bonobos, it has become popular to cite bonobo behavior as evidence that humans, in their natural state, would form free-loving, polyamorous, matriarchal communes. This view of bonobos has been aggressively pushed by those whose political agenda benefits from the belief that our distant ancestors lived in this kind of utopia.

First, we would point to the fact that women tend toward submissive sexual fantasies much more than men, that this tendency does not appear to be socialized, and male humans almost certainly have an infanticide impulse. This serves as fairly concrete evidence indicating that early humans did not interact like bonobos do (or at least how people believe Bonobos interact). Matriarchal utopias do not create evolutionary pressures nudging women to become turned on by violence against themselves or sexually aroused by men stomping on babies like Lucy McGillicuddy in a grape vat.

Furthermore, the concept of the peaceful, hypersexual, matriarchal, polyamorous bonobo is complete pseudoscience motivated by political fringe groups. Read The Naked Bonobo for a more in-depth review of the scientific literature about this species; it bucks the mainstream narrative (though it certainly has its own axe to grind). Real bonobo behavior is far more interesting than the myth and no less of a living nightmare than the situation we propose for early human social structures.

For example:

There have been instances of female bonobos holding other females’ infants’ lives hostage in exchange for sex. (Imagine a woman picking an infant up by the head and threatening to wring its neck unless its unpopular mother went down on her.)
While bonobo societies are more matriarchal than those of other apes, only males can inherit their mothers’ ranks and males can outrank females.
High-ranking females will fight to increase the social status of their sons, but not that of their daughters.
Low-ranking female bonobos trade sex for food, while high-ranking females never do. This implies that low-ranking females do not particularly enjoy doing this (i.e., they are being forced to be prostitutes to eat).
Male aggression rates in bonobos are equal to those among chimpanzees.

There is no perfect society out there, hidden in the mists of our distant history, enjoyed by some undiscovered tribe, or orchestrated by another species of ape. People desperately want to believe that if they just travel far enough and pull back that last bit of dense foliage they will finally find, like some sort of social El Dorado, some obvious and easy utopia.

The Pragmatists of the world know where our hidden utopia lies: It is not being lived out by some faraway tribe or described on a dusty tablet chiseled by our ancestors. Our ideal society lies in the future we have the power to create. Optimal societies aren’t easy, they aren’t obvious, and they certainly aren’t about following some simplistic ideological doctrine to the letter. An enlightened society will be nuanced, slow to build, and in need of constant experimentation. Citizens of a truly perfect society must update their beliefs about the world as they try new things to see whether they succeed or fail. No one alive today knows how to create this glittering society—not yet. The best anyone of our generation can hope for is to climb Mount Nebo and catch a glimpse of what might be. For now, we must be content with our lot as one of many diligently marching the desert. We cannot allow ourselves to be distracted by the glittering idols of simple, easy answers.

Every day we reap the rewards of ancestors who suffered so that our species might ascend from the total depravity of our primordial conditions and basal instincts. We spit on their sacrifice by not doing our part to advance the flame of civilization because it is that flame which holds back the darkness both in the world and within ourselves.

Yikes . . . we blacked out there for a second. Did we just go on another crazy rant? You can see we are literally driven to madness by the bizarre concept that we should rediscover and try to recreate our distant ancestors’ way of life.

Note from the Research:

On the topic of the bonobo myth: What happens when women rule an otherwise-male-dominated society? The real-world scenarios in which this has happened certainly defy stereotypes. A study investigating rulers between 1480 and 1913 found that Europe’s queens were 27% more likely than its kings to wage war, according to economists Oeindrila Dube and S.P. Harish. This is a fun historical nugget, though it probably doesn’t say anything innate about female rulers. Queenly warmongering was more likely a product of the societies in which queens lived (as most things are). When you break the stats down further for married and unmarried queens, married queens appear far more likely to go to war (though unmarried queens had war declared on them more often). During this period of history, a married queen could socially pressure her husband’s country to go to war with her to “protect” her while kings could not do the same with their wives’ countries as easily—making war slightly easier and thus more tempting for women. Still . . . neat tidbit.

The Slave Race?

One of the wackiest revelations about humanity we had while writing this book occurred to us on a morning walk as we discussed selective pressures that might have given birth to certain kinks. Simone turned to Malcolm and asked, “Malcolm, are we a slave race? Are humans a slave race?”—and gosh darn it, it wasn’t a dumb question. The fact that such a juicy question isn’t a ridiculous line of thought compels us to explore it further.

Most of the selective pressures exerted on our species throughout our history were applied to servants, slaves, surfs, etc. Very few people are at the top of the totem pole. Historically speaking, almost everyone had a master and those few humans without masters didn’t have as many selective pressures applied to their cognition. If you mess up as a master, you probably still breed and your kids probably still survive, whereas if you mess up as a surf, you are screwed. Even in present-day situations with strict dominance hierarchies, the only way to gain a position of dominance is through becoming skilled at holding a subservient position (most of the time, people who become bosses get the job because they are good at being employees—not at being bosses).

Is it possible that humans are so optimized for subservience that they feel fundamentally uncomfortable with power when they ultimately luck into it? In the Great Chain of Being (a medieval hierarchical structure), even the king was understood to be a servant of God (and everyone else was a servant under the king, his direct reports, their direct reports, etc.). Modern presidents and prime ministers frame themselves “servants of the people.” CEOs of giant conglomerates talk about themselves as slaves to their shareholders. It seems the more power a person gains, the more they subconsciously try to frame themselves as subservient to a master.

Perhaps freedom is merely aspirational—not a burden which humans are optimized to shoulder. Perhaps forcing freedom upon a species that evolved to serve places a huge burden upon their shoulders and rips at the edges of their sanity, forcing them to invent fictional masters or slowly become burdened with ever-increasing anxiety, depression, self-doubt, megalomania, and narcissism. Perhaps robbing humans of masters creates unfillable voids at the backs of their minds.

There’s an obscure, otherwise-unremarkable anime from the early 2000s called DearS (ディアーズ, Diāzu) that features a fascinating core conflict: Essentially, humanity’s first contact with intelligent extraterrestrials is with a crashed ship of a species genetically engineered to be slaves. These extraterrestrial humanoids feel deeply unfulfilled when they don’t get to live out this role for which they were designed, but given modern human societies’ prejudices against the concept of slavery, they end up hiding their nature from humanity and are forced instead to play the role of a magnanimous ambassador of peace and technology instead of their preferred role of slave. The show’s central thesis is the only type of freedom that matters is being able to choose who or what you are a slave to—that being in such a position is more enviable than not being a slave. We mention this show because it highlights a truth about our modern culture: It is fundamentally, deeply, uncomfortable with the idea of subordination being anyone’s preferred state.

But of course, we couldn’t possibly be insinuating that humans have any parallels to this fictional alien race, right?

The survey we ran when putting together this book certainly surprised^[32] us on this point:

Women taking our survey who reported being happy were also more likely to report assuming the submissive role in BDSM contexts (32% to 19%).
The more unhappy our female survey respondents reported to be, the more likely they were to also report assuming the dominant role in a BDSM context (23% to 7%).
While happy men taking our survey were slightly more likely to report being doms in a BDSM context (12% to 8%), they were four times more likely to report playing a sub (8% to 2%).

Could it be that the key to happiness, mental health, and personal fulfillment lies in service and complete dedication to a genuinely worthy individual, ideology, or vision of one’s choosing?

Western society has an obsession with power and an inability to tolerate any worldview that doesn’t strive for it above all else. Even groups that are presumably open to those wanting different things from life exhibit this deep discomfort: In the BDSM community it is not uncommon to hear people go on about how the sub is really the one with the power (a sub is the subordinate partner in a dominant-submissive coupling) and in the poly community, people frequently belittle the concept of someone “belonging” to someone else.

As we point out in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships, the idea that all humans everywhere are always better off being their own masters seems to have emerged from Western cultural traditions and come into being fairly recently. This bias certainly did not yet exist at the time of The Great Chain Of Being. Favoritism of self-determination also does not seem to have been appropriated from Eastern traditions or indigenous populations during the time of colonialism.

Society’s present phobias around the surrender of power appear to be tied to the emergence of capitalism in the West and an association between power and wealth. This general phobia of power relinquishment could also be a reaction to chattel slavery, but we doubt this, as the idea’s spread aligns more with the ascension of capitalism than with any spike in chattel slavery.

Do we really think that humans are a slave race, languishing in cultures that grind us down, forcing us to saddle ourselves with the burdens of freedom and autonomy? Not really.

More of our species’ relevant evolutionary history took place in environments in which most socially oriented evolutionary pressures involved navigating small, local dominance hierarchies, which have nothing to do with slavery—though these structures did, nevertheless, sometimes favor those who knew their place and when to defer to those higher on the totem pole.

But damn if it isn’t a cool perspective we hadn’t heard before. And who knows? Maybe it is true. Maybe real freedom should be defined as getting to choose your master, be it a person, organization, or an ideal. Maybe true bliss can only be found when you find a worthy something to which you can holistically subordinate your life and needs.

Human Sexuality’s Advanced Settings

Now that we have explored what arouses people, why various things arouse different people, and what human arousal patterns imply about our historical societies, it is time to start digging into some of our “advanced settings.” The following chapters explore how various systems interact with our higher cognition, some of our most basal human sensory systems, and each other.

Specifically, we will look at:

How smells interact with arousal: Here we will go into evidence for the effects of pheromones in humans on both arousal and pair bonding.
The concept of gender display impulses: A gender display impulse is a strong impulse to act out the role of a specific gender, like holding one’s hands in a specific way, walking with a certain gate, and wearing specific types of clothing. While the impulse itself is not in the category of arousal, it does interact with many arousal pathways.
How arousal pathways interact with moral judgments: Can an animalistic system like arousal really have a significant unconscious impact on higher-order judgments like the morality of an action another person takes?
How a desire for validation affects the way sexuality is expressed in people: Here we will dig into the strongest driver of sex in humans—a desire for validation—and how this desire interacts with arousal patterns.
How kinks express themselves: Finally, we will look at how all these interactions and the arousal pathways discussed above come together to form cohesive “kinks.”

Olfactory Cues in Arousal and Pair Bonding

Do pheromones affect mate choice in humans? The answer is an overwhelming . . . Probably. Subconscious olfactory cues do seem to play a role in who one finds attractive, however, the effects are light. Olfactory cues should be viewed more as an amusing novelty and less as something around which one will be able to develop a meaningful sexual strategy. More importantly, many claims based on olfactory cues in arousal and pair bonding are probably bunk, such as the claim that human leukocyte antigen (HLA) system, a gene complex encoding the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) proteins, has a large effect on attraction. To be honest, the people doing much of the research in this field have a financial benefit in the public believing their findings due to various companies they started, which has us reviewing their work with an extra level of scrutiny.

If many claims about smells and arousal are false, what is probably true?

We can assume with some confidence that both men and women use their senses of smell to modulate both their pair bonding and arousal pathways—mostly in subconscious ways—with the effects being more powerful in women than men. People who are more sensitive to smell consistently rate their sexual experiences as more pleasant. This is true among both men and women. Women who are more sensitive to smell even appear to have more frequent orgasms.

Several rather famous experiments imply that we can use our noses to detect all sorts of useful information about a partner. The human sense of smell appears to be capable of detecting how symmetrical and thus genetically healthy a partner is likely to be, whether or not a woman is ovulating. Human smell also appears to be able to estimate the attractiveness of a particular subject with a fair degree of accuracy. However, one is unlikely to feel these subconscious effects enough to put a finger on exactly what is causing them. For example, when we say a man can detect when someone is ovulating by smell, what we mean is that men slightly prefer the smell of shirts of women who are ovulating, and that their apparent ability to detect the slight difference in smell between ovulating and non-ovulating women is strong enough that their preference for ovulating women’s shirts held as long as a week after the shirts were stored at room temperature. This slight preference for certain smells hardly suggests that men are sniffing out women as though they are bears.

Other studies’ findings suggest that when a woman is more fertile, she will find male smells more pleasant and may even release chemicals that increase the testosterone of her pair-bonded partner. Furthermore, women find the smell of attractive men differentially better when they are more fertile. In the context of mostly concealed human fertility periods, this suggests there was an evolutionary pressure for women to not always find more attractive men more sexually compelling, which adds to the already-mentioned evidence of a long evolutionary history of women pair bonding with one partner, then becoming impregnated by another (more attractive) partner.

Can we wear body spray to become more attractive? The answer is . . . sort of. There have been studies showing that people are more attractive when wearing certain body sprays and perfumes, but other studies performed using the same methodology without allowing the judger to smell the target observed the same effects. In other words, it is not the smell itself that increases attractiveness, but the smell’s effect on one’s confidence that makes one more attractive by changing posture and stance. That said, due to the close connection between smell and memory, smells can be used to elicit attraction from individuals through non-arousal pathways (e.g., wearing the same cologne as a father figure with whom the target had a good relationship could evoke trust, familiarity, or fondness).

Random fun findings on smells from various studies:

A diet rich in carotenoids (compounds found in orange and yellow vegetables) appears to make sweat smell better.
Some studies have indicated musk from the anal glands of animals can make men more attractive to women. Women are over 1000 times more sensitive to the smell.
Androstenol, one of the female pheromones, makes people see things as “warmer and more friendly” when they smell it (even buildings).
Male pheromones like androstenone have been shown to improve women’s moods, especially when they are ovulating.

Gender Displays

Some humans appear to have an impulse compelling them to perform gender displays in which they act out a particular gender stereotype in an exaggerated fashion.^[33] Many species signal sex through behavior patterns and in humans, gender is often used as a social proxy for the sex of an individual.

Even though the current social cues we associate with being male or female are ephemeral and tied tightly to the society in which we live, subconscious systems for bundling social cues into “gender packages” appear to be quite old in that at least two gender packages can be observed in every culture ever studied, historic or modern (though it is not uncommon for cultures to have more than two). The gender system is so deeply pre-programed into the human brain that it frequently imposes itself on inanimate objects and abstract concepts—as can be seen by the fact that 40% of languages feature grammatical gender (English speakers encounter grammatical gender applied to inanimate objects most frequently when learning Spanish or other romance languages, but grammatical gender occasionally surfaces in English as well, with objects like ships being granted female pronouns).

Without some neurological system compelling us to see the word in terms of “gender packages,”^{^[34]} it would be unlikely that a system like grammatical gender, which adds little utility, would be retained, evolve so frequently, and evolve independently (grammatical gender can be found in everything from the Indo-European language families to the Afro-Asiatic language families). ^[35]

While it seems the primary purpose of “gender packages” was originally to serve as a proxy for the sex of the individual displaying them, the concept of gender also appears to have been hijacked to signal other social roles (especially in societies featuring more than two “gender packages” of behaviors).

We see the mental systems we use to pick up on these gender packages as being analogous to the mental systems we use to learn languages. As with our concepts of male and female, English is an evanescent product or our current culture. Though our distant ancestors did not use English to communicate, mental systems evolved in them that simultaneously facilitate our ability to learn English and, to an extent, compel us to learn it (children do not choose to learn English). Just as a person is subconsciously compelled to learn language from their environment at a young age, they also pick up their society’s “gender language” at a young age. In the same way babies feel an impulse to babble—or adults feel an impulse to yell an obscenity—a person might be subconsciously compelled to “blurt out” gender displays. And as with language, concepts of gender change with time and distance and may even be seen varying in the gender equivalent of regional “accents.”^[36]

While watching gender displays leads to a sexually charged arousal response, the brain pathways that drive us to make these gender displays do not appear to be sexual in nature (well, not usually; there are always exceptions such as transvestic fetishism in which a person gets aroused by cross-dressing). In other words, by and large, people do not appear to become aroused by acting manly or girly outside of the context of our association between these gender roles and dominance/submission due to cultural connections (this is called petticoating or pinaforing), however people do appear to be sexually aroused by seeing others make these displays. In the majority of the population, gender displays are not motivated by an arousal pathway and are instead driven by an entirely separate impulse system.

Male cross-dressing behavior is the most socially visible example of a strong gender display impulse. Importantly, cross-dressing rarely involves just wearing the clothing of another gender, but also entails acting out a full gender display, including everything from gate to vocal pitch and mannerisms. While many are tempted to assume cross-dressing is a sign of being trans or gay, it just so happens that the majority of cross-dressers are married, cisgendered, straight men, which makes the cultural trope of the cross-dressing gay man really strange. We assume this trope emerged from drag culture (which represents a vanishingly small proportion of the cross-dressing population)—because drag participants do skew LGBT.

We need to be careful when conflating drag culture with cross-dressing, as only a tiny minority of cross-dressers identify with drag culture. Moreover, not everyone who participants in drag culture feels the gender display impulse. For many, drag culture is a form of performance art that grants an opportunity to artistically explore gender norms. If we return to the language analogy, drag can be thought of as a form of “gender poetry”. Furthermore, drag is only one of many artistic traditions that involve cross-dressing. Just because someone is cross-dressing for art’s sake does not mean they are in “drag.” For example, Yarō-Kabuki (modern Kabuki theater) often involves cross-dressing, yet it has no cultural connection to the drag movement.

The apparent fact that most cross-dressers are straight, cisgendered men^[37] indicates that trans people are not trans just because of a gender display impulse mix-up. There is a huge difference between an urge to make a gender display and an urge to be a gender.^[38]

While some men appear to have kinks tied to cross-dressing that do activate their arousal systems (e.g. transvestic fetishism and pinaforing), a portion of cross-dressers make it very clear that this behavior is not activating their arousal systems but that some other impulse is driving them to engage in the behavior. We see no reason why a male cross-dresser would lie about this lack of arousal, as this is not a claim made by a large portion of those who openly indulge in any other “kink.” Given that cross-dressing is not activating an arousal system, but instead activating a gender display pathway system, we are somewhat uncomfortable even calling cross-dressing a kink. Instead, cross-dressing should be thought of its own unique thing, not tied to gender identity but also not tied to arousal.

Cross-dressing impulses seem to be tied to some innate brain pathway not working as “intended” and are clearly not a product of socialization. Straight, cisgendered men have not been taught by society to dress up like women in private. There is no social benefit to this behavior. That said, some gender displays cross-dressers choose to make are either socialized or made more compelling through conditioning, as a cross-dresser in the US will put on a very different display than one in Japan. If we return to the language analogy, cross-dressing could be thought of as comparable to Tourette syndrome (with Coprolalia) in that a Japanese person with Tourette’s will use different words than an American with Tourette’s—yet the underling neurological pathways compelling the behavior are the same. As with Tourette’s, the fact that the words being said are influenced by a person’s culture is not evidence that the behavior overall is a product of socialization (and comparing Tourette’s with poetry in that language—drag in this analogy—would be seen is wildly offensive).

Gender displays are also not merely under the jurisdiction of cross-dressers. We see gender display systems being manipulated by environmental factors even when they are working as intended (by “working as intended,” we mean signaling one’s sex to the opposite sex using the proxy of our social concept of gender through behavior patterns such as tonality, gate, and clothing).

There is some cool research showing that females exaggerate gender displays (as measured through social media posting) in societies featuring high income inequality, but not in societies featuring high gender inequality. We imagine this is the product of some sort of polymorphic switch triggered by situations of high income inequality that lead women to prefer polygynous strategies to monogamous strategies. This makes sense given that, in a society in which one man has the wealth of thirty, it is evolutionarily better to be one of his ten wives than the sole charge of a poor man. This exaggeration of sexual displays in cultures with high income inequality means that such cultures present beautiful case studies of uniquely extreme gender displays.

One fascinating study suggested that in Western societies, men do not automatically sexualize women based on revealing clothing or bare skin but do sexualize women who are posing provocatively. This suggests that when a woman strikes a “gender display pose,” it triggers something in the male brain causing him to sexualize her entire gender display, including her clothing, meaning a gender display always consists of both clothing and body language and that body language is the trigger for sexualizing the clothing.^[39]

We enthusiastically encourage you to check out the pictures used in this study, as they make the results even more impactful. The study is titled: Revealing Clothing Does Not Make the Object: ERP Evidences That Cognitive Objectification is Driven by Posture Suggestiveness, Not by Revealing Clothing. If you don’t have time to dig up the study, we encourage you to consider instances in which you’ve observed people wearing little or no clothing and not sexualized them due to their postures (consider a naked woman in a medical textbook picture or a woman showing exposed breasts in a National Geographic article).

Bits and pieces of other research also seem to suggest that exaggerated gender displays are much more common among a population’s poorer groups and more valued as a sign of attractiveness within these groups. This is perhaps what fuels stereotypes involving poorer women displaying more exaggerated hip sways, longer nails, tanned skin, higher heels, longer hair, more ostentatious jewelry, etc. We are not sure why this would be. Exaggerated gender displays among the poor may be tied to the economic inequality predictor discussed above, but we do not think the dynamic explains everything about this difference, as stats from our survey show that wealthy western men prefer women with lower levels of female gender displays.

It seems to us (though this will be seen as controversial by some) as though the impulse for male gender displays in humans may be incredibly weak. As evidence for this, consider the relative rarity of straight, cisgender, female cross-dressers when contrasted with straight, cisgender, male cross-dressers. Contemplate the relative absence of studies showing how environmental conditions exaggerate male gender display behavior.

That said, anecdotally, it seems as though poorer men exaggerate masculine gender displays in a pattern similar to that presented by poorer women (with their exaggerated feminine gender displays). When we contrast image searches showing examples of “male runway fashion” against image searches showing examples of “male street fashion,” male runway fashion looks significantly more feminine.

The paucity of studies showing male gender displays changing with economic conditions could be explained by a dearth of research attempts, while the rarity of straight, cisgender female cross-dressers could be a product of women not being noticed so much when wearing male clothing. If a woman sometimes feels like wearing male clothing, we doubt she or anyone else would think of it as something worth noting. It may be that we simply don’t notice male gender display impulses as much as female gender display impulses, even though they could be just as common.

Is Being Trans More Common Than We Think?

If being trans is not the product of a gender display impulse, what is it? As we mentioned at the beginning of this book, this is not a topic we will explore in detail. Not only is the research on this subject evolving quickly and the whole thing a question of self-identity rather than sexuality, but we personally don’t find questions around why someone might want to identify as a particular gender as interesting as questions about more perplexing stuff—like why someone may want to be a slave, watch someone die, have sex with an animal, or get turned on by seeing a person get eaten (all of which are more common than identifying as trans, which only 0.6% of the population does). In contrast to all the wild aspects of human sexuality, the gender with which a person identifies seems like a rather pedestrian point, which makes society’s intense focus on it quite bizarre.^[40] (This is not to belittle the struggles trans people go through because of society’s wacky fixation on the topic.)

Our intuition is that the factors that influence people to be trans make up a constellation of five or eight totally unrelated things that manifest similarly enough to each other that they cause individuals to be persecuted due to the same set of societal prejudices. By dumping all of these disparate factors into the same category and attempting to research them, the results will always end up muddled.

The concept of being trans is not the first concept that would have been grossly oversimplified by academics and professionals for a period; consider the widespread diagnoses of hysteria in the 1800s. Were this the 19th century, we would be saying: This thing called “hysteria” is probably at least a dozen unrelated conditions with superficially similar pathologies. During the 1800s, “hysteria” basically meant “women acting moody” and covered everything from clinical depression to ovulatory mood changes. As one might imagine, studying these usually unrelated factors as if they were the same basic thing would lead to garbage research findings. It also would not be the first time society did something like this. Back when we did not understand gayness very well, it was common to lump cross-dressers and gay people into the same category, when literally their only similarity is: “Sometimes they do something another gender does.”

Despite the concept of demigender being around for a long time, a huge blind spot we also see in the current state of trans research is an assumption in the way data is collected that most individuals who publicly appear cisgender strongly identify with the sex they were assigned at birth. Our intuition is that a large portion of what is thought of as the cis population is either not that attached to their gender or has a slight preference for a gender incongruous to their birth sex and just maintains their cisgender expression to fit in.

Sadly, we can’t use the prefix demi to refer to this group as we suspect a lot of them change their preferred gender and “demifluid” can mean something totally different. Thus, let’s use the term “soft“ (e.g., soft-trans, soft-cis, soft-genderfluid, etc.).

This concept matters because we suspect this soft-gender group wildly outnumbers the trans population and may even outnumber the “hard-cisgendered” population. When you look at communities in which people have a choice of gender expression, be they online video games, D&D sessions, or furry conventions, you see fairly high rates of people assuming identities as another gender. In online games, 23% of men prefer to roleplay as females and 7% of women prefer to roleplay as men, meaning an average of 15% of the population prefers to roleplay as another gender. Given that 0.6% of the population identifies as trans, this suggests that roughly 14% of the population might have a slight preference for sometimes identifying as a gender different from the sex they were assigned at birth when given the chance to do so recreationally. (Naturally other things drive desires to play other-gendered video game characters, like getting to look at the opposite gender’s butt all day, but you get the idea behind this thought experiment.)

You may be thinking: “Hold on—a desire to roleplay as another gender in a game is nothing like being trans.” As people who do not feel a strong connection to our genders, we have a hard time trying to mentally model what it would feel like to be trans, so we have to go on what trans people say about their experiences.^[41] In a number of stories, we could find trans people first came to terms with their gender identity through games or other roleplaying environments.^[42] Given these reported experiences, it would seem irresponsible to dismiss that a large chunk of the population that would otherwise be thought of as cisgendered feels more comfortable role playing as a gender that doesn’t align with the sex they were assigned at birth. We should at least humor the possibility that some of the population may have a very “low volume” gender identity instead of assuming that a gender identity is only valid when it is at “max volume.” We know that demigender and agender people exist; is it really that offensive to think that a portion of the population may exist somewhere in between these states? If such people did exist and grew up in a culture hostile to trans identities, how do you suspect their identities would present themselves? To us it seems they would look for opportunities to experiment with other genders in contexts in which they felt protected by prevailing social

norms.

	Female	Male
1	14%	15%
2	10%	6%
3	11%	15%
4	20%	15%
5	45%	49%

We dove deeper into our musings on this front with the survey we ran, asking the respondents who identified as cis: “How attached are you to your current gender? In other words, would it bother you if you learned you had to live the rest of your life as another gender?” Participants then answered on a 1 to 5 scale using a slider with 1 indicating the low end of the sale (that it would not bother them at all) and 5 indicating the high end.

These results suggest that over half the population is not extremely attached to their gender. In addition, our survey suggests that, as we suspected, people who have little attachment to their gender are actually super common, making up 24% of females and 21% of males.

This finding suggests that agender people—people who do not identify with a gender—are 24 times more common than people who identify as trans men and women. To avoid confusion: Agender is different from neutrois, which describes an attachment to being genderless and androgyne, which describes an attachment to some aspects of both male and female genders (though how specifically these words are used varies from group to group and individual to individual).

In addition to being interesting, these results have a few important implications for trans individuals, and one in particular that stands out: Attempting to generate sympathy by asking others to “think about how it would feel if you had to live as the other gender” is highly likely to backfire if you ask said hypothetical question to an individual who would not care because they do not have a strong attachment to their gender, which you have about a one in five chance of doing.

As we mentioned earlier, gay people run into a similar problem: Studies show individuals who have low sex drives are much more likely to be homophobic, presumably in part because the argument: “Imagine what it would feel like if you had to live your whole life pretending to be attracted to a gender you are not attracted to” does not resonate with them in the slightest, seeing as the scenario simply wouldn’t bother them that much.^{^[43]}

Based on the data discussed, we suspect that the soft-trans and soft-genderfluid groups make up roughly 14% of the population, the agender population makes up ~15% of the population, and the soft-cis population comprises approximately 20%, while those traditionally thought of as cis people only make up around 50% of the population (with the other 1% being comprised of those with other non-binary gender identities and trans individuals).^[44]

The Mating Party Impulse Hypothesis

While contemplating the gender display impulse, we find ourselves wondering if humans have other non-sexual impulses meant to aid in mate acquisition. Let’s call an additional impulse that might exist “the mating party impulse.”

Across cultures and time, humans have independently developed a type of party that looks remarkably similar—in which people cover their faces (often with animal masks or masks representing other fictional entities), adopt different identities, and dance to music at night. From masquerade balls (the type held in the late medieval period—not the modern interpretation) to furry conventions, the Bal des Ardents, bugaku, and the tribal dances of the ancient Americas, Africa, Europe, Australia, and Asia, this mating dance impulse can be seen. We even see what could be parties that look like this in some of the earliest human records (hieroglyphs).

These gatherings do not seem like a natural thing for so many disconnected cultures to develop in isolation without some deeper instinct compelling such behavior. We wish this were an impulse we felt ourselves so we could attempt to isolate it and identify the mental or sexual system to which it feels closest. Still, we are absolutely delighted by the insinuation that “fursonas”—the alternate animal identities furries take on when in costume—might epitomize a deep, cross-cultural human impulse.

The Effect of Attractiveness on Moral Judgments

We often think of arousal patterns as existing in a vacuum—or at least only affecting things like mate selection. However, arousal patterns can have a massive impact on even the highest orders of cognition, such as those involved in judging what is moral and what is immoral. The effect of attractiveness on the public’s perception of morality is a well-studied phenomenon. To keep it short: Studies roughly show a 100% to 300% increase in the sentencing of unattractive individuals by judges.

Some studies suggest that a perpetrator’s attractiveness mostly influences the punishment deemed appropriate rather than a verdict of guilt or innocence (this is seen disproportionately when a judge is making the decision), while other studies indicate that attractiveness affects perception of guilt or innocence as well (this is seen disproportionately when a mock jury is making the decision).

In rape trials, defendants are seen as being more likely to be guilty and deserving of a harsher sentence when the victim is more attractive. Conversely, the perpetrator is often given a less severe punishment and is less likely to be found guilty when they are more attractive.

We see mixed findings from studies investigating how the attractiveness of a rape victim may affect others’ perceived responsibility for their own rape. Some research suggests that attractiveness has no effect, while other research suggests that white victims are judged as more responsible for their own rape when they are more attractive and non-white victims are seen as more responsible when they are less attractive. Sometimes society is more reprehensible than kittens in a wheat thresher.

The Role of Validation in Human Sexuality

Despite all our discussion of arousal and different factors that influence an individual’s sexuality, we must point to what we see to be a huge elephant in the room: Sexuality, as fascinating as it is, is not the primary motivator for sex in humans. Heck, sexuality is not even the primary factor explaining how we conceptualize ourselves as sexual beings. As is the case with almost all areas of life, the thing that drives most human behavior when a person is living on autopilot (as most people are) is a drive for self-validation.

While socialization cannot affect what actually arouses you, it can affect the sexual acts in which you partake, which partners you choose, and how you react to sexual arousal.

People maintain mental character sheets detailing who they think they are and who they want to be. When humans operate on autopilot, not consciously thinking about their actions and thoughts, most action is driven by how we subconsciously think these internal characters should react (e.g., “I am a wholesome patriot with two kids and a loving wife; how would a wholesome patriot husband and father react to X?”).

Our desired self-images have such a profound effect on our sexuality that even in private, many people who find themselves aroused by unusual stimuli do not act on those impulses out of a fear of seeing themselves as a deviant. Simultaneously, others may engage in sexual activity which they personally find actively aversive to play out a self-identity that should find such activity arousing.

The human drive to act out an ideal internal character manifests quite colorfully on the kink front. Someone aroused by humiliation, submission, and pain whose internal character is culturally conservative and by no means deviant would be unable to explore these arousal pathways through BDSM practices, seeing them as deviant. Such an individual may ultimately settle on a spanking kink, as they find spanking to be the only way to exercise that arousal pathway while also still believing they are a wholesome, culturally traditional and respectable person.^[45]

Different default self-images (the bases of those internal character sheets we subconsciously reference when reacting to various scenarios) are imposed on men and women who do not consciously decide what they value and what sort of internal self-image will help them best maximize those values. While we can’t find robust data systematically naming, organizing, and validating ideals imposed on women and men, we have seen common gender-based standards cause serious problems for each gender and would love to highlight some in the event it might help some readers evade certain traps.Just keep in mind that the trends we observe are pulled from qualitative, self-reported experiences (mostly collected unscientifically from a broad range of reddit threads and YouTube videos in which people share personal details about their lives).

Women: In general, women are socialized to want to be desired/wanted by individuals they respect. In addition, most women in modern Western societies (further motivated by current political trends) feel a strong desire to see themselves as independent and in control. This desire often comes into conflict with submissive arousal pathways common in both females and males.

Men: In general, men are socialized to want to be virile protectors who are needed. When men are single, being virile means having sex with a multitude of high-value women who, ideally, come away amazed by the interaction. In marriage, male virility means having a wife who other men envy. Note that, from the perspective of validation, it is irrelevant whether a man himself finds his wife or sexual partners attractive. A man who may feel genuinely sexually aroused by obese women will receive less validation from an extremely overweight partner should she be low value on the open market. Men raised in more conservative environments will also have a desire to see themselves as dominant (which, again, comes into conflict with submissive arousal pathways common in both males and females).

It is hilarious how society has tried to reconcile the fact that women are socialized to want control/independence while men are socialized to desire dominance, as these desires conflict (not everyone can be in control and dominant). This mismatch produces bizarre tropes of families in which the male is technically dominant, but the woman ultimately controls everything he does. We see this as comical, as with the slightest bit of critical thought, a person would see how toxic such a dynamic would be.

Another toxic result of modern societies’ current models is exemplified by people using sex to feel desired. The negative consequences of this can be seen on the lips of every person who has bemoaned having been “used for sex”—a phrase that really means someone expected to get something other than sex from the sexual interaction. People complain about being used for sex when they intended to trade sex for something and feel they didn’t receive a fair trade. When probed to elaborate on this complaint, people usually explain they expected to feel desired—that they wanted to feel treasured in exchange for sexual access yet did not feel as such after the encounter. This is a sad scenario, but the hypocrisy of this complaint is humorous in light of the fact that those making it had just planned to use another person to harvest an emotional state themselves—that of feeling desired/wanted. The “using” goes both ways.

Both men and women often tie the frequency with which they have sex to some sense of self-worth or their estimation of a relationship’s health when it is not at all unusual for there to be periods in a relationship in which sex just isn’t of much interest to the parties involved. Even when a relationship experiences a real sexual problem, it is probably best to contextualize it as a technical, sexual issue and not some larger issue in which a particular partner is at fault.

A man’s desire to be sexually active with many high-value women who are amazed by his performance also leads to destructive and darkly amusing consequences. We have witnessed men expend more effort on harvesting the emotions they get from knowing they got their partner to come than actually attempting to give a partner what the partner wants. We have also seen men choose to have sex with women when they clearly did not find those women or that sex arousing, all because doing so allowed them to feel virile.

It is probably best for wellbeing if one views any sexual problems as just isolated sexual problems rather than larger issues for which one or one’s partner is at fault. One study, published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, found that women who contextualized themselves or their partners as the cause of sexual problems tended to have a lower wellbeing. In contrast, women who saw any problems as specifically sexual tended to report higher wellbeing.

How Kinks Express Themselves

“Kink” and “paraphilia” are words given to any stimulus culturally considered socially deviant that sexually arouses some portion of the population. This strikes us as a very silly way to separate out aspects of normal human sexuality.

Essentially, something is a kink until society accepts it. Being gay was a paraphilia in the DSM until 1973 and sadomasochism is likely on its way out of the DSM now as well. Being gay lost its kink status as soon as society (on average) accepted it. BDSM is losing its kink status because it is becoming more mainstream. Any kink/paraphilia designation is more useful in understanding a society than it is in understanding human sexuality.

If our theory on what functionally causes “kinks” is correct, things that we generally consider to be single kinks are likely only superficial manifestations of more varied and nuanced sexual arousal pathways. For example, fat admirers—a group we have referenced repeatedly in this book as they represent, by far, one of the most common kinks—are likely comprised of people driven by three or four unrelated arousal pathways (which can overlap in a single person—one individual could be turned on by all of these pathways at the same time).

The first subgroup is comprised of people who either don’t have an aversion pathway tied to individuals who deviate too much from a medically-recommended BMI or whose pathway is set to an inverse position (we presented evidence for this group earlier in the book when sharing how, on average, men who report finding women far over a “normal BMI” to be attractive are also much more likely to report finding women far under a “normal BMI” to be attractive than the control group). Another subgroup features feeders, who become turned on by feeding a partner and seeing the results of overfeeding a partner. Feeders receive pleasure from the “emotional states and concepts” category of impulses (this is arousal from an early evolutionary pathway involved in social groups). The third subgroup is comprised of a type of dom often classified as a feeder who gets off on creating a partner that is unable to fend for themselves or survive without them. A final subgroup is made up of subs who interpret the feeling of being crushed during intercourse with their partner on top with domination or just having a partner much larger than them as being a proxy for submission. These people might like to be laid upon by an overweight partner (sometimes called a squasher). Thus two individuals who both identify as having the same kink might have entirely different sets of underling arousal patterns, some of which we may not have mentioned here.

A precise understanding of what drives sexual impulses can empower one to more easily maximize them.

Another good example of a kink that is likely composed of several different arousal pathways is vorarephilia: A kink in which a human receives an arousal impulse from observing a predator-prey relationship—typically with the interaction ending in the prey being swallowed whole and not otherwise injured (this is referred to as “soft vore,” a simple example of which would involve a snake eating a mouse it did not crush, which contrasts with the rarer “hard vore,” which involves more fatal scenes—like a lion eating a zebra). While there is likely a core group of people genuinely getting off on the concept of the predator-prey relationships, other arousal impulse pathways that cause the proliferation of this category of porn include getting off on the extreme dom-sub nature of predation, getting off from a sign flip in the necrophilia aversion impulse, getting off on the “feeder” pathway discussed above, and getting off on activating a supernormal stimulus for the concept of “being inside” someone (the subconscious reasoning being: “if part of me being inside a girl is good, all of me being inside a girl is better!”). Despite these highly divergent arousal pathways, all these various subgroups may receive sexual stimuli from illustrations of a person being “fed” another person whole. That these various groups are targeted by similar erotic art leads to the categorization of “vore” as a single kink.

Consider also bimbofication, in which an individual is transformed into a female exhibiting an extremely exaggerated gender display. Typically, bimbofication starts with either a man or a woman who looks professional being forcibly transformed into a vapid-looking and vapid-acting “bimbo.” This transformation would activate arousal pathways as varied as the dom/sub pathway (due to the forceful nature of the transition) to those associated with breeding target detection through gender displays. Observation of the bimbofication process may even activate pathways associated with impulses that cause some men to desire to make female gender displays. Again, multiple arousal pathways end up getting categorized as a single “kink.”

We cannot get over how fun it is to search through random and weird types of porn and try to determine what about it could be arousing to someone. Sometimes you just find something uniquely weird and all you can think is: But why??? Consider, for example, the following categories of porn: people stuck in quicksand, people compressed into cubes, and oviposition (people implanted with eggs). We see each of these as a bizarre puzzle that, if put together correctly, could present profound insights into how the human brain is really processing stuff by showing us how it can “break” in a way that yields these fascinating interests.

What about the mysterious case of the Minnesota Popper—the man who apparently got off on popping exercise balls? This man could be exhibiting a confluence of the looner kink (people who are aroused by balloons) and a popping kink (people who are aroused by seeing things pop). These kinks may be tied to early emotional pathways of anticipation and release though different people in these communities interpret their arousal differently. The Minnesota popper likely built a connection between this anticipation and release cycle and poppable objects. Exercise balls gave the Minnesota Popper access to a supernormal stimulus within this category. This is how a system that was supposed to get him to breed led to his breaking into buildings to pop exercise balls.

The Omegaverse as an Erotic Genre

Sometimes multiple sexual expressions and kinks coalesce into a single genre of arousing material. A great example of this can be seen with A/B/O—also known as the Omegaverse genre. Born from fanfiction and consumed by a primarily female audience, the Omegaverse presents a fictional, alternate reality. Works dabbling in this genre often divide their worlds’ inhabitants and characters into three types (each type can be either male or female).

Alphas: This class is capable of impregnating others and features a penis that forms a knot during intercourse (an aspect of canine anatomy that prevents physical separation once mating has started). Female alphas can grow a penis. Alphas are typically depicted as being more aggressive, possessing higher status, exuding a strong musky smell, and producing unnatural amounts of cum.
Betas: This class presents what we would think of as “normal” males and females.
Omegas: Omegas are (regardless of gender) self-lubricating and capable of becoming pregnant, often going into heat and releasing pheromones making them irresistible to alphas (alphas can also become irresistible to them, creating cases of dubious consent). Often Omegas are smaller in stature, more submissive, sweet smelling, and more nurturing, especially to children.

This alternate reality amps up everything associated with traditional gender roles but dissociates these exaggerated roles from gender. Here we have a society run by a dominant, aggressive—somewhat “rapey”—class that is capable of impregnating others (be they male or female) and within it lives another group that is submissive and capable of bearing children (regardless of whether they are male or female).

Why would someone develop a world like this? As we have discussed already, people gain more sexual arousal from humans/characters to whom they feel an emotional connection—thus, when a TV show has a large fan base, a portion of that fan base is sure to sexualize them (the Omegaverse originally gained traction among the fans of TV shows, specifically starting among fans of the show Supernatural).

This alternate reality allowed for the creation of erotic art that more perfectly fit the proclivities of a previously underserved audience. By creating a society in which typical gender roles are recontextualized as an inevitability from birth and divorced from gender, authors dabbling in this genre allow those who are turned off by the physicality of either males or females—but turned on by that gender’s “traditional gender role”—to easily get aroused. It also allows for individuals who have complicated feelings about male-female sexual interaction due to past experiences—who nevertheless, at a biological level, are still aroused by gender roles and impregnation—to receive arousal without as much complication. The Omegaverse accomplishes all this while also providing an avenue for those who are turned on by traditional gender roles—but who nevertheless see them as antiquated and offensive—to extract arousal from these gendered scenarios with less guilt, making it a perfect example of how socialization can influence our choice in erotic material and partners even if it does not affect our underlying arousal patterns.

While arousal from non-consensual sex is shockingly common (see page 404) our society tells us in no uncertain terms that people should feel bad about themselves if they find it arousing. Genres of erotic material like A/B/O create alternate social structures so arousal can be harvested from scenarios in which a dominant individual forces themselves on a submissive individual with dubious consent. In the case of A/B/O, this kind of action is presented as an inevitability and a biological imperative that allows the reader to luxuriate in the fantasy with fewer niggling ethical concerns spoiling the fun. This can be seen in tropes like a scent “compelling” an individual to have sex or in the “f**k or die” trope, in which an individual has to have sex with a particular person or they die (this scenario is often used in an attempt to lessen culpability associated with pressuring another person into sex). In this way, we see that genres of erotic material are often not only designed to fulfill arousal patterns, but also to circumvent socialized self-images that make fulfilling those arousal pathways difficult.

Elements of A/B/O draw in a colorful variety of readers—not just those aroused by “traditional” gender roles and instances of dubious consent in which a dominant partner pressures a submissive partner into sex. The Omegaverse tempts some readers in with its more animalistic flourishes (like the manner in which Alphas bite Omegas to mark them), others with Alphas’ bukkake-like sperm production, and others by Omegas’ inability to stop having sex once they start (implied by overpowering pheromonal rushes driving them into Alphas’ arms—and the knotting of Alpha penises). How cool it is to see this confluence of societal conditioning and arousal patterns coming together to create such a wild alternate universe—and better yet, one that has transcended its original purpose as erotic art in a manner that now helps people explore the various aspects of gender roles and their effects on society through speculative fiction.

The Omegaverse beautifully demonstrates that arousal can be thought of as existing on four levels:

The “sexual genotype:” The specific things that generate arousal or aversion in a person, like the male form being aversive.
The “sexual phenotype:” The manner in which the “sexual genome” gets exposed in arousing content or actions, like MPreg (there can be two people who both have green eyes—the phenotype—but who each have a different genetic code—the genotype—that leads to those green eyes). Phenotypes are not just a product of an underlying genotype; they can also be affected by “social scars.” Consider a person who is turned on by impregnation and exclusively consumes MPreg to exercise that arousal pathway because they have been socially conditioned—through traumatic events in their upbringing—to experience male-female sex as triggering (in the same way a person could also end up with green eyes because a particular fungus was growing in their cornea).
The “sexual ecotype:” The way a sexual phenotype is expressed differently in different cultures (analogous to different environments in nature). Consider MPreg as it presents in Japanese mediums versus American mediums—or in fanfiction versus hentai.
The sexual genre: This emerges when a collection of phenotypes coalesces into a community that features a somewhat-consistent set of social norms dictating how authors and audiences create and relate to arousing content. As they mature, these genres can transcend arousing content, using the frameworks created within the context of arousal phenotypes to explore deeper societal issues. Consider the Omegaverse’s use of MPreg tropes to explore gender roles—or furries using vore tropes to explore racism (as is done in the Beastars manga series).

Sex, Masturbation, Orgasms, & the Brain

Let’s take a look at how arousal, sex, and masturbation affect the brain and mental health. We will also take this opportunity to explore related topics, such as how intelligence affects one’s experience with sex.

The Effects of Sex on the Brain

There is a reason why characters are commonly depicted as becoming embarrassingly dumbstruck when they cross paths with someone they find to be sexually interesting. This maddening loss of mental faculties and grace really happens and is scientifically measurable.

Studies have found, again and again, that people undertake riskier behavior when sexually aroused. Worse, people are terrible at judging just how much they will concede when they are aroused and the extent to which arousal impairs their decision-making ability. A lapse in cognitive power when aroused can lead to more extreme types of BDSM, which are uniquely dangerous without upfront negotiations, limits, and continued check-ins. Safe words do not matter when your brain has turned into Jell-O.

Multiple experiments have shown that men experience cognitive impairment before and after interacting with women—even if said woman is a relative stranger, a woman who allegedly is looking at them through a two-way mirror, a woman with whom they interacted over a phone call, or even a woman who does not exist, but with whom men are told they will interact shortly.

This effect is not observed in women interacting with men. It is hypothesized that this may be a product of men being highly attuned to their behavior around potential mating opportunities. This may also be a product of men attempting to suppress themselves, as similar results are observed when a racist person speaks with someone of the race against which they are biased and when someone is afraid that a wealthier peer is watching them.

Sex also makes men very sleepy afterward, due to its effects on the prefrontal cortex combined with the release of oxytocin and serotonin. This effect, as well, is not seen in women.

Sometimes sex can just make one forget everything through an effect called “global transient amnesia,” which happens to seven out of every 100,000 people annually. Global transient amnesia only lasts for a short time (minutes or hours) and can be caused by vigorous sex (among a few other things). On the plus side, those suffering from transient amnesia after sex are genuinely able to say: “She/he f**ked my brains out.”

Not all effects of sex on the brain are negative. Women who have sex without a condom show fewer depressive symptoms than those who are not having sex or are having sex with a condom. Scientists theorize that some of the compounds in semen have antidepressant properties.

In both men and women, sex has been shown to relieve pain, fixing 60% of migraines and 30% of cluster headaches. In women, g spot stimulation is shown to elevate one’s pain threshold. Studies have also shown sex to make both males and females happier and leave one feeling as though life is more meaningful the following day. (Note: the g spot is not a real anatomical feature, but rather the location where the internal part of the clitoris, urethra, and vagina all intersect.)

Sex may even improve intelligence and reduce stress according to some research. When contrasted with rats who are allowed to have a one-night stand, rats that engaged in chronic sex—sex for 14 consecutive days—grew more neurons in the hippocampus, which is associated with memory. We also see, among rats, a correlation between frequency of sex and decreased stress plus lowered blood pressure.

An increase in hippocampus neurons due to frequent sex has yet to be shown in humans; however, humans do show lower blood pressure and decreased stress with more frequent sex. For those wondering what counts as frequent sex: Sex every third day is generally what is recommended to maximize its positive effects.

The Effects of Intelligence on Sex

We would be remiss to explore how sex affects the brain without investigating, briefly, how intelligence affects sex. As it happens, smarter people cheat more, and the correlation between intelligence and cheating is much stronger in women than men. Even after controlling for education, income, social class, race, age, current marital status, number of children, religion, and religiosity, intelligent people cheat more. This finding becomes more interesting the deeper one digs. While intelligence is positively correlated with infidelity, educational achievement is negatively correlated with infidelity.

Perhaps intelligent women with lower formal educational attainment are more likely to cheat because their natural abilities warrant better partners than society would otherwise facilitate. A high-value man may enjoy an intelligent woman’s company long enough for sex but may be too embarrassed to be in a long-term relationship with someone lacking a fancy education.

One can safely drop the assumption that smart people are disinterested in sex and that sexual desire is reserved for the knuckle draggers. Intelligence is, perhaps surprisingly, correlated with a higher libido. Counterintuitively, however, intelligence is also associated with less actual sex (even if more of that sex comes from cheating). It seems, then, that intelligent people want sex, but have the good sense and self-discipline to invest their time in other pursuits.

Finally, research in this area suggests that there is a point at which being smarter begins to hurt one’s sexual prospects. Specifically, the attractiveness-intelligence correlation peaks at around the 90th percentile, with the most desirable IQ to have being around 120.

Masturbation

Being familiar with communities like NoFap (a large online community that champions abstinence from masturbating) and popular books claiming to make unbiased, evidence-based approaches to the subject, we assumed there must be surprising evidence touting the harmful effects of masturbation—not that it will make one go blind or anything, but that it generally contributes to lower motivation, correlates with more problems in relationships, is highly associated with lower happiness, impairs cognitive function, or at least that it causes people to seek out crazier types of porn that desensitize them to “normal” sex. In reviewing the scientific literature on masturbation to find research supporting what we had been led to believe was true—that there is voluminous, peer-reviewed evidence demonstrating that masturbation has negative effects that can be mollified through abstinence from masturbation—we found that almost all of the scientific literature strongly disagreed with our assumption.

The Pragmatist Foundation’s highest goal is to help people become more comfortable changing their minds when the evidence does not align with their current beliefs about the world. We would be filthy hypocrites were we to dig around for the studies that reinforce our pre-existing beliefs, which we could totally do. We could easily cherry pick studies that support the argument that masturbation hurts relationships, especially if we cherry pick studies that do not account for the chicken and egg problem (that an already bad relationship will feature more masturbation on average). All that said, the weight of the evidence is clearly against masturbation being harmful to relationships, so we will not argue weak points. It is a good day when we will fall asleep being less wrong about the world than we were when we first got out of bed that morning.

It terms of health benefits, masturbation has been shown to improve sleep quality, lower the probability of prostate cancer, relieve menstrual cramps, reduce the risk of urinary tract infections, relieve muscle tension, improve the immune system through boosted leukocyte production, strengthen muscle tone in pelvic/anal areas, and increase sperm count.

With regard to benefits to one’s mental state, masturbation has been shown to release sexual tension, reduce stress, improve self-esteem, improve body image, and lead to higher self-reported rates of happiness. (Some studies suggested this was not the case in adolescent women, but later longitudinal studies suggested this finding was due to confounding factors.)

Masturbation may contribute to a decline in many social ills. UCLA researchers found that sex criminals, on average, consume less porn than the average person, and started consuming it at a later age than the average non-sex-criminal. Had today’s sex criminals been able to explore their sexuality through their imagination earlier, perhaps they would not have felt compelled to commit sex crimes later.

For every 10% increase in internet access in the US, there is a corresponding regional decrease of 7.3% in rapes, suggesting that the internet and its facilitation of masturbation may provide an outlet for sexual energy that might otherwise cause serious damage.

Across nations, more permissive attitudes toward pornography are correlated with lower rates of rape and less violence against women. A great case study of this can be seen with the Czech Republic, where porn was illegal under communism, then legalized when the party fell. This decriminalization of pornography caused, in one year, rapes to decline over 37% and child sexual abuse by about 50%. Similar results were seen when porn laws were loosened in Denmark, Japan, China, and Hong Kong.

Other studies reinforce these results, such as one in Aggression and Violent Behavior^{^[46]} that found a (weak) inverse correlation between porn consumption and violent behavior toward women (specifically rape and sexual assault). The study’s findings suggest that the more porn a man consumes, the less likely he is to commit these violent acts against women.

Despite what we had assumed, masturbation and porn consumption do not lead people to think less of women. People who watch pornography hold views of women as more equal to men than those who do not watch pornography. Consumers of porn are no less likely to describe themselves as feminists and actually express more egalitarian ideas about both women in positions of power and working outside the home, according to the results of a study published in the Journal of Sex Research.^[47] (We did, however, find a study showing that men who were low on the trait of agreeableness did increase already sexist attitudes when exposed to pornography.^[48])

We did recall reading about a study conducted by the Max Planck Institute showing that intense porn consumption in men was associated with lower grey matter volume in the brain, so we went back to the study only to realize what it actually found was that men who consumed lots of porn had lower amounts of grey matter in a specific part of the brain: The right striatum. This is a part of the brain involved in reward processing. All the study says is that men who have deficient reward processing pathways consume more porn. The finding is not at all surprising and sounds more like correlation than causation. And wouldn’t you know it, that is what the authors of the study have also said in interviews.

At least masturbation itself must negatively affect one’s virility, ability to get laid, or relationships . . . Right?

Wrong.

A study conducted on college students found that those who masturbate more actually have more sex than those who masturbate less. Another study found that people who masturbate more often have happier marriages and more satisfying sex within those marriages. Masturbating while fantasizing about one’s partner has also been shown to improve the quality of relationships and reduce relationship-damaging behavior patterns.

Studies even show that the concept of building up a tolerance to vanilla porn (suggesting that that is why some people go to increasingly weird porn) is false—and this is something we were formerly certain was true, so we are quite excited to learn that we were wrong. Specifically, people who like weird porn still get turned on by vanilla porn and at even higher levels than people who prefer vanilla porn (statistically speaking, of course; this isn’t true for every single individual). Essentially, escalating weirdness in porn tastes may be the product of a higher affinity for porn in general. The underlying arousal patterns experienced by weird porn aficionados don’t shift in response to exposure to weird porn; they are merely able to tolerate more obscure content.

We do not start to see any consistent negative effects of masturbation and porn consumption until we get to studies looking at masturbation three or more times a day, and even those seem a little cherry picked. One study found that pornography negatively affects working memory, though the effect only holds while one is watching it (Thanks, Captain Obvious—we will be sure to remember that the next time we decide to take a test while masturbating). We also found some studies showing that when a woman knows her boyfriend is masturbating, it can hurt her body image, and some studies indicate that poor masturbation technique in men (gripping too hard) can lower a man’s sensitivity. Still, none of this really seems to paint even fairly frequent masturbation as being bad on the whole.

OK, OK, OK . . . But what about addiction? Masturbation addiction is destroying the lives of millions of young Americans, right? The answer here is a resounding: “Ehhh . . . anecdotally?” Masturbation is not recognized as addictive by the American Psychological Association (APA) and is not categorized as a mental health condition in the latest Standard Diagnostic Manual (DSM-5). We readily admit it seems a little weird that there isn’t much research showing masturbation can be addictive, as it seems to affect opioid pathways—and most things that affect opioid pathways enhance one’s ability to learn a behavior and thus cause addiction in a subset of the population. Think: Gambling, alcohol, morphine, etc.^[49]

Instead of being thought of as an addiction, the current consensus seems to be that frequent masturbation should be categorized as a compulsion—this is the same categorization given to what is colloquially called a “sex addiction.” In this case, there doesn’t seem to be anything (neurologically speaking at least) that differentiates someone who has an “addiction” to masturbation versus sex (meaning negative effects resulting from masturbating too much would also arise after too much sex). Even then, calling masturbation an addiction seems tenuous. For more on this, read The Myth of Sex Addiction by David Ley, Ph.D.

One study suggests that abstaining from masturbation for seven days may increase testosterone levels, which could be useful if a person is trying to build muscle. The problem here is that another, older study suggested that abstaining from masturbation reduces testosterone levels, and yet another study’s findings imply that while abstinence from masturbation appears to raise testosterone levels, the effects are trivially small. There is also some evidence supporting claims that frequent masturbation may cause a person’s number of androgen receptors to decrease and estrogen receptors to increase, but the evidence is tenuous.

For the belief that masturbation is negative in some way, there is a shining ray of hope: In males, and only in males, the use of pornography as a masturbation tool has been shown to have slight negative effects on relationships. Some neuroimaging studies show it may affect the male brain in negative ways as well (though both of these studies present fairly unique findings that are not, to our knowledge, broadly replicated).

We could find no studies showing additional positive effects (in men) from masturbating while looking at porn. To put it in other words, all of the even remotely negative side effects from masturbation are tied to pornography (aside from penile death grips). Thus, if you believe that masturbation is negatively affecting you, consider abstaining from porn as a masturbatory tool before you put in the effort to abstain from masturbating entirely.

This is a stretch, but masturbation among at least some monkeys is associated with a lack of dominance. Could frequent masturbation increase submissive arousal pathways? Perhaps, but . . . again, this is a stretch. It could just as easily be that already submissive monkeys turn to masturbation because other, more dominant males are getting all the actual sex, leaving these submissive apes fewer outlets for their sexual needs.^[50]

We bring up these points only if you absolutely must find something negative about masturbation. The reality is, even in the case of porn usage for masturbation, the majority of the available evidence suggests it is no big deal, and any negative effects emanate from something else. When a meta-study was done on the topic, it found no correlation between masturbation with porn and negative effects in most people, though it did find a very large effect tied to a masturbating individual’s moral opinion of porn. Specifically, if someone has a moral conflict with the idea of pornography yet uses pornography anyway, they will experience stress, anxiety, depression, diminished sexual well-being, and an increased risk of suicide, as well as religious and spiritual struggles.

Those who consume porn despite moral objections to it will also complain of more anguish in their attempts to control their porn use and believe that they are consuming more porn than their peers, regardless of how often they actually masturbate to porn. It appears to be that the negative psychological effects that other studies are finding are actually tied to a small subset of the population that views porn as morally corrupting and has tainted larger data pools.

Studies have shown people who experienced early life stressors and high religiosity may be more likely to exhibit sexually compulsive behaviors. One study found that:

“States with more Evangelical Protestants, theists (people who profess belief in a God or higher power), and biblical literalists (those who report they interpret the Bible as the literal word of God) are significantly more likely to have higher aggregate rates of online searches for pornography. States where people attend religious services more frequently are also significantly more likely to have higher rates of searches for online porn. Finally, we find that states with higher percentages of residents unaffiliated with any religious group have significantly lower levels of searching for online porn. These findings are interesting because at the individual-level, people who affiliate with Evangelical Protestant groups, attend church, read the Bible literally, or believe in God generally report much lower levels of pornography consumption.”^[51]

Ultimately, while it feels like masturbation and porn consumption should have various negative effects and we have very convincing anecdotes from individuals who claim that abstinence from these things has improved their lives, the current evidence doesn’t seem to support our intuition.

Where do we, Simone and Malcolm, stand at the end of all this?

We now lean toward believing that porn consumption and masturbation themselves likely cause no real negative effects, but that porn and masturbation abstinence strengthens the inhibitory pathways in the brain—as does any form of abstinence that entails shutting down a reward pathway. Strengthening inhibitory pathways in the brain makes it easier to deal with issues like procrastination, focus, and anxiety, but such strengthening could be executed just as easily by abstaining from sugar, regularly fasting, or not using Facebook.

What we suspect is that no fappers aren’t seeing benefits from removing porn specifically, but rather the benefits associated with repeatedly shutting down a reward pathway. It’s a bit like someone arguing that lying on couches for four hours of the day is unhealthy after beginning to spend two hours a day at the gym and subsequently feeling better in all sorts of ways. Someone in such a scenario is absolutely experiencing a quality-of-life improvement, but that improvement is coming more from the exercise than a sudden reduction in couch time in their lives.

Notes from the Research:

48% of men under 40 report having watched pornography within the last week (27% in the last day).
16% of women under 40 report having watched pornography within the last week.
Male monkeys will trade juice to look at pictures of female monkeys’ butts. They will trade more juice to look at these pictures than any other type of picture.
Only 2% of porn subscriptions are billed to credit cards with female names. The processors used by many porn companies flag any female names as potential fraud because they are so rare. (Though as mentioned before, women likely spend more money on erotic products than men, with a focus on the narrative format often not offered by pornographic websites.)
While watching porn, the amygdala and hypothalamus are much more highly activated in men than in women.

Notes from Our Research:

While the survey we personally conducted doesn’t paint a clear narrative about masturbation, we still find some of its results worth sharing:

In women:

Our female survey respondents’ frequency of masturbation had no correlation to their wealth and only a slight correlation with happiness (showing markedly less happiness in women who masturbated once a day or more, but otherwise showing little correlation between masturbation and happiness above that level).
We found a strong correlation between female survey participants’ reported frequency of masturbation and friend group size with females who masturbated more frequently having smaller friend groups, as well as lower self-reported popularity within those friend groups. It strikes us as more likely that women with fewer friends masturbate more because they have more free time than there being some popularity/friend shift that takes place after women start masturbating more.

In men, things are a bit more interesting:

On average, the happiest men taking our survey reported masturbating multiple times a day, followed by men who reported to completely abstain from masturbating (both groups reported themselves to be dramatically happier than average male survey participants). The least happy men appear to be those who masturbate only a few times a year. Other than that, we found little correlation between self-reported frequency of masturbation and levels of happiness.
Surprisingly (to us at least) in men, masturbation frequency correlates strongly with wealth. Essentially, the wealthier a survey participant reported to be, the more he reported masturbating . . . or the more he reported masturbating, the wealthier he reported to be. Men who reported masturbating more than once a day also reported being dramatically wealthier than other men. Male survey respondents who reported masturbating less than once a year also reported themselves to be dramatically less wealthy. (Here we would point out that the aforementioned categories of men had small sample sizes.)
Men who responded to our survey reporting larger friend groups also reported masturbating more frequently, but self-reported frequency of masturbation had little correlation to self-reported popularity within participants’ friend groups.

Female Orgasms

Most books on sexuality feature, out of either tradition or a sense of obligation, a token section in which they explain that a quarter of women almost never orgasm during penetrative sex and that 3% of men almost never orgasm during sex. We do not find this to be a very interesting point. If you are not having sex to get pregnant, you are either doing it to harvest a certain subset of emotions (or utilize those emotions to exercise some control over another person) and orgasms make up just one small subset of those emotions (not to mention the one that is easiest to achieve without involving another person).

Sex can be great without an orgasm and sex can be terrible with an orgasm. Those bragging about the number times they made a partner climax during sex are really only communicating that (1) they know next to nothing about sex, and (2) that sex with this person is likely a chore. Someone who thinks sex is all about an orgasm is akin to a self-proclaimed foodie who only thinks something tastes good if there is loads of sugar in it.

Notes from the Research:

Two out of five straight men do not know how often their partners orgasm.
Postcoital dysphoria causes some people (approximately 5%) to experience inexplicable tearfulness, sadness, or irritability following an orgasm.
Cross-culturally, people make different faces in response to orgasms—well, at least in China vs. the US. The Chinese orgasming face looking more like a smile, while the western orgasming face takes more of an O shape with the mouth. That said, this might just be a cultural stereotype, as this study sadly neglected to bring participants to orgasm and take pictures of their faces—rather, it asked participants what face in a series of faces looked the most like an orgasm face.

The Mechanics of Love

We would feel incomplete discussing arousal and sexuality in the absence of love. After all, many people insist, causing us to cringe instinctually, that they do not have sex with others but rather “make love.” What is this . . . Love? How does it work, and what is its place within the larger landscape of sexuality?

Arousal is a reward our brain serves when it detects certain sets of environmental stimuli. Generally speaking, we find things arousing because historically, the humans who experienced arousal upon detecting certain things in their environment—be they boobs or a submission ritual—had more surviving children. The human arousal system sometimes does not function as intended; some are aroused when exposed to breasts so comically large, they would kill a woman; others are aroused when looking at half-humans, half-animals with whom they could not possibly breed.

Generally speaking, love exists for the same reason (because those who felt it had more surviving offspring) and suffers from similar problems. Love is a neurological system that scans the environment for certain stimuli and, when it senses specific sets of stimuli, creates a feeling/impulse. The impulses associated with love feel different from those associated with arousal, are triggered by different environmental cues, trigger different sets of reactions, and linger much longer. Just as each individual has their own unique pattern of arousal reactions that culminate in their “sexuality,” each person also features a unique pattern of love reactions, which can be thought of as their “amourality.” We use the term amourality instead of romantic orientation, as romantic orientation is a combination of amourality, societal concepts of romance, and NRE^[52] orientation (how you crush)—but more on all that shortly.

The arousal impulse appears to have blossomed from reward mechanisms originally only meant to encourage our ancestors to have sex with things. Sexual arousal later became hijacked by other pathways, such as dominance-submission pathways, as humans developed into a more complicated social species.

In a similar vein, our pre-social distant ancestors likely first evolved the emotion of love because it encouraged them to differentially protect their offspring over other members of the species. Only later did early humans begin applying this emotion to adult, pair-bonded partners and later still apply it to non-romantic partners as a method of promoting social cohesion.

Why was love, this child protection system, favored by evolution over other emotional pathways to promote long-term pair bonding and tribal social cohesion? Why do we feel the emotional bundle we associate with love instead of generic joy, contentment, or satisfaction? Why did humans not develop a new, unique emotion for pair-bonded partners instead of using the same pathway we use to bond to our children? Simply put, this emotional set already existed, and it’s evolutionarily cheaper to hijack an existing emotional set than it is to build a new system. Additionally, love is nearly perfect in its functionality and features as a tool for motivating behaviors that would facilitate productive and collaborative behavior among groups of humans.

What are the functions and features that make love so perfect as a tool to motivate pair-bonded relationships and social cohesion? Not only does love last much longer than other positive emotions, but it also has the ability to identify and apply unique emotional reactions to specific individuals—something obviously important for identifying and reacting differentially to one’s own children, but also very useful in a pair-bonded partnership or among a group of close friends.

Love generates a higher level of empathy with its targets, causing humans to experience more happiness when the subjects of their love thrive—and generating more sadness when loved ones suffer. Love seems inextricably paired with a desire to protect that which is loved from harm. Love doesn’t latch onto people per se, but rather our internal concepts of those we love, enabling the formation of love for anthropomorphized concepts that are not “people” (such as “my tribe,” “my team,” or “the human race”).

Before we move forward we must differentiate the “love” emotional set and “romance” emotional set. Romance is a confluence of two additional impulses to love that can be conflated into a single “romantic identity:”

The desire to fulfill society’s expectation of romantic actions (candle-lit dinners, flowers, and the like)
NRE (new relationship energy)

NRE creates a much stronger and more acute emotional state than love (at average levels, in their most extreme states love is a more intense emotion). NRE is often perceived as a “crush” or “squish.”^[53] Unlike love alone, this emotional state causes an intense fixation on the target, a desire to spend time around them, have a closer relationship (whether that be platonic or romantic), and sometimes to be more like them.

NRE typically decreases as you get to know an individual better (which is why it lasts longer in long-distance relationships), while love typically increases as you get to know an individual better (in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships, we explore NRE in intense detail, as NRE addiction has the same neurological effects as addiction to codeine, can cause catastrophic consequences, and is an ever-present threat when first entering the poly community). If you are having trouble imagining the difference in these two emotional sets: Love in absence of NRE is what you feel for your dog or country, while NRE in absence of love is what you feel for your middle school crush.

Perhaps love and NRE are so difficult to parse out because first-time romances tend to be glorified. People first feel NRE around middle school and, due to its novelty and intensity, they may mistake it for the emotion of love all the adults are talking about—rather than realizing love was that boring emotion they had always felt for their siblings, parent, or pet.

While society talks about “flavors” of love, it really seems as though the different types of love are determined by output levels and the social acceptability of different beloved subjects. While it is seen as socially positive if a mother exhibits behaviors associated with extreme love for her kids, it would be seen as creepy if someone were to exhibit the same behavioral sets for a boyfriend of two weeks or a sports team. People would be hesitant to identify the impulses driving the latter actions as “love” and instead use the word “obsession”—even if the impulses could be shown to be functionally identical at a neurological level—because society seems to have a fundamental discomfort with the idea that love can drive gauche actions.

Our brains are great at convincing us the same “flavor” of emotion is a few different things as long as we have a social scheme that supports the differentiation. For example, Skittles (the candies) are actually all the same flavor, but many people believe they are tasting unique flavors because we have been socially conditioned to associate certain colors with certain flavors.

Think of “love output” as being like a faucet. Different things will turn the knob on the top of that faucet. The level of love output that society condones varies depending on the factors turning the knob. Society supports a medium-high level of love if it is triggered by one’s children or spouse, a medium level for friends and family, and a light level for one’s country, humanity in general, etc.

The mere presence of societal ideals for the level of love one should feel toward various things does not ensure everyone’s brains generate love outputs following those guidelines. There is a huge diversity in the amourality of individuals. Some experience greater love for things like friends or abstract concepts like sports teams than they do for romantic partners.

At higher levels of output, love is not always a pleasant emotion to experience. Historically speaking, love—especially romantic love—was seen with the same negative prudishness as sexual arousal. In the majority of historic cultures, forming a love pair bond with an adult of another gender to whom one was not married (and even in some cases showing love for a spouse) was seen as a moral failing.

Love among romantic partners was not really put on a pedestal until the 13th-century arrival of the chivalric literature movement, exemplified by cringy erotic romance novels that feature comic book-like adventures. Celebration of love among romantic partners did not really affect society as a whole until the descendants of the chivalric movement began to influence other forms of media. The idea that love is an indication of who you should want to marry did not even really begin to capture the general public’s imagination until the time of Disney. People’s belief that love is the key to a stable, long-term romantic relationship, rather than just an emergent property of many long-term relationships, is a very recent invention and cultural export of industrialized Western civilization (we discuss how this concept emerged from chivalric literature and the courtly love movement in greater detail in the chapter: “Conclusion: Relationships, Sex, & Society” on page 368).

Even more recent is the moral elevation of love for concepts like “humanity” and “one’s fellow man.” This cultural shift metastasized during the sexual revolution of the ’60s and ’70s, perhaps in part due to a higher output from “love systems” in the brain induced by certain drugs that were popular at the time.^[54] Many today bizarrely associate the concept of “free love” with the idea that one should have sex without inhibition instead of the ideas that one should learn to experience love for everything, that love is always good, and that love should be given away for “free”—which are ultimately closer to the actual message of the free love movement. We view the concept that love is never bad as more radical and socially corrosive than the idea that one should have sex without inhibition, so perhaps it is best that people inaccurately remember what the term meant.

Anyone who has experienced a full torrent of the “love output” would be loath to idealize the emotion and understand it for the danger it poses. They would understand the way it eats at the edges of one’s consciousness with a yandere haze, constricting one’s perspective of reality through a single point that blazes like magnesium.

Studies show love’s effect on the brain to be similar to that of heroin. How is that a good thing? When our brains are unafflicted, they generally gain happiness from being nice to people and making the world a better place. In contrast, a torrent of love can allow us to gain satisfaction from burning a civilization to the ground were we to believe that doing so would please or protect the objects of our affection. We are fairly sure we are not the only ones who have experienced love in this way—we see people talk this way about their kids, their pets, and even their home countries with similar awe and horror. An interviewer once insisted to us that love would never lead to an “evil” impulse. We asked her if she would kill an innocent person to protect her children, and if so, what emotional state would motivate that impulse. She changed the subject.

Seeing as love is not necessarily an emotion above moral reproach, but rather just an occasionally misfiring impulse we evolved, let’s explore the triggers for love and how they break.

Note from our Survey:

Our survey responses imply that at any given point, around 61% of women and 49% of men are in love. This suggests that love, far from being some unicorn of an emotional state, is the default human state, with the average adult being in love at any point in time.

Love for Our Children

Love originally evolved to help proto-humans identify their offspring and treat them differentially when contrasted with other young members of their species (this would boost the odds that one’s genes proliferate). Most mammals likely feel something similar to what we experience as “love” toward their offspring. Some young mammals also feel a sort of love for their parents; this love is triggered by different factors than those which make parents love their children. Here we will explore the systems that inspire adults to love individuals they believe to be their children as well as the systems that compel children to love individuals they believe to be their parents.

In Adults

Adults form a love attraction to a child when they encounter the following stimuli:

Baby schema characteristics: Features unique to babies, like disproportionately large eyes, which studies show cause “endearment” (a socially acceptable word for low level love output).
Oxytocin: Women experience a change in the way the oxytocin systems in their brains work (the ones associated with love) before giving birth, causing them to fall more deeply in love with infants who pop into their lives.
Touch and smell: Due to the evolutionary age of this particular relationship, we are quite certain there are a number of subtle systems in action, such as pheromonal interplay between parents and children (think of the unique smell of a baby’s head or breath) and likely some systems specifically tied to breastfeeding.

These systems are the least interesting of the love systems in that they “break” the least, which makes sense due to their evolutionary importance. The only two interesting takeaways here are that:

Men feature fewer triggers for loving children than women do, meaning they likely experience less love for their children on average. Even we find this a bit offensive, as it sucks to say that fathers will not love their children as much as mothers will (on average), but the studies back it up. Men simply love their children less than women do—again, on average. In a Pew Survey, 98% of women saw their children as their primary source of happiness, whereas male respondents often ranked children below other things, such as their careers.
Our pets have hijacked aspects of this system by evolving to maintain childlike characteristics longer in life and emphasizing these child-like features more, eliciting a “cute endearment” reaction. Species that have co-evolved longest with humans, such as cats, even meow at a frequency similar to that reached by a child. Some animals coincidently activate these systems. Killer whales have large black spots that our brains interpret as oversized eyes and lead us to see them as endearing instead of bloodthirsty murder junkies and psycho rapists (honestly, nothing under the water is more representative of the horror of the natural world more than Orcas, but they have big eye spots and sharks have “lifeless beady eyes,” so we see one as cute and the other evil).

We would also argue that the elements of love that cause attachment to pets may actually be evolving into their own unique set of triggers and reactions within human brains. Consider how long we have lived alongside our closest companions—dogs and cats—and how much we have likely manipulated their love systems to pair bond to us. Humans have selectively bred dogs to pair bond to their masters for generations to the extent that the torrent of “love” output a dog feels when it interacts with his human is likely a thousand times stronger than any output of love a human is capable of experiencing due to the strong selective pressures placed on domesticated dogs, which exaggerates that emotional output. A dog’s love system related to humans is arguably more important to the survival of its offspring than the dog’s own attraction systems to fellow dogs. To put it another way, no one—be they a parent, boyfriend, or wife—will ever love a human as much as that human’s dog does, as our ancestors genetically manipulated that dog to force it to love you.

Babies & Love

What causes babies to experience love?

The system causing babies to experience love is fascinating because it breaks in a cool way, a lot of research has been done on it, and it is fairly straightforward.

A baby will feel love toward a thing if:

It is soft
It is warm
It is familiar / often present
Certain pheromone-based systems are triggered

Ape babies given a choice between a soft warm cloth mother that did not produce milk and a wireframe mother that did produce milk vastly preferred the cloth mother over her cold-but-nourishing rival. Surely the human system is more complicated, right? We don’t think so.

Consider teddy bears and “blankies” (small blankets to which children form a strong emotional attachment). Researchers call these things “comfort items.” These comfort items are not terribly different from the cloth mother presented by researchers to ape infants—they are warm, soft, and familiar—and seeing as they provide no benefit to a child’s survival, they can be seen somewhat as the porn equivalent for infants.

Comfort items hint at the age at which this particular love system “shuts off” in humans—around the age of four. This is the last age during which a developmentally normal child can form an attachment to a new comfort item.

Comfort items exemplify how subjects to which humans form attachments through a love system that subsequently subsides can persist as significant objects of affection well into adulthood. One in three adults report being unable to throw away a childhood comfort item. While this love system, when functioning normally, will not lead us to fall in love with something after the age of four, the subjects to which babies and toddlers bond through this love system can remain subjects of our affection well into adulthood.

Takeaways:

If you want to afflict your child with love for you, hold them a lot before they are four years old and let them see you as a soft source of warmth.
A child is very likely to form a similar “love” attraction to pets, siblings, and caregivers.
We imagine this system breaks sometimes and stays active in adults; however, we have yet to hear or read of this phenomenon arising. We would assume when it does happen, it gets mistaken as a kink or a weird obsession with stuffed animals or body pillows.
Because these systems are most active in youth, we associate common comfort items (such as blankets and stuffed animals) with youth. Some women subconsciously attempt to use this association to appear younger and thus more fertile by associating themselves with lots of teddy bears and stuffed animals (if you haven’t run into one of these women yet, trust us; they exist). When you consider that these systems are supposed to turn off at age four, this is a somewhat disturbing strategy.

Love for Our Social Groups

Love for one’s tribe likely piggybacks on the love-related systems we evolved to identify and care for our offspring. Human ancestors born with mutations that enabled them to form love for their tribes (albeit weaker love than that felt for offspring) likely survived at higher rates.

This phenomenon of love for one’s tribe or pack is not exclusive to humans. The system that causes a chubby 40-year-old man to miss work to catch his team’s game is the same system that causes wild dogs to risk their lives to protect the pack.

The tribal love system seems to work along the following pathway:

Determine a group of individuals with a unique identity (even better if said group is in competition with other groups)
Gauge membership in this group
If deemed to be a member, come to personally, deeply identify with this group
Experience satisfaction when this group wins and anguish when the group loses, thereby strengthening the bond—especially if these empathetic feelings are experienced with other group members in a communal setting (more specifically, we think that skinner box conditioning associated with wins and losses is needed for this step)

This system does not appear to require in-person interaction with a group in order to activate and begin generating strong feelings of love and attachment. These emotional responses include a desire to protect the group, make it happy, and see it “win,” albeit at much lower levels than similar desires elicited by love for children or a pair-bonded partner.

This system’s lower volume settings may make it seem deceptively safer as a love system than the others. In actuality, social group love is the most dangerous love system of all. Media—social and otherwise—has found a way to hijack this pathway, leveraging it to create an attachment to a political ideology and use this attachment to force audience engagement.

This low level of the “love” output experienced by a large portion of the population toward one political party or another makes it very difficult for that group to critically evaluate their party’s beliefs as they change over time. Our social love systems have many people clinging to certain groups even after they cease to exemplify their values. The same systems that lead us to form strong personal attachments to sports teams and illogically hate people who see themselves as supporting the other team generate a similar but far more harmful air of animosity on the political landscape. Worse still, this attachment is profitable to media companies and useful within the political system for getting votes, so there is no motivation for an outside pressure to reverse this escalation.

If you’re thinking this “love system” couldn’t get worse, consider how tribal love engenders hatred toward those deemed traitorous. All love systems seem to do this to some extent—consider how mad people get at partners they love(d) who they feel betrayed them through cheating on them or leaving. Hatred toward perceived traitors makes extra sense within tribal-based love systems, seeing as traitorous behavior has the potential to deal a fatal blow to tribal integrity.

This reaction hampers societal and political progress when “tribe members” come to hate fellow group members who allow their beliefs to evolve when presented with new information (seeing as they may now refuse to tow the party line). If a member of a political group updates their perspective on an issue when confronted with evidence, but the rest of the group does not, then they will often be more hated by the group than a member of another political faction. For obvious reasons, this does not serve society well.

Love for Romantic Partners and Concepts

Love systems tied to romance clearly have the most relevance in an exploration of sexuality, as sexual attachment and romantic attachment are often conflated. Our romantic love systems are fascinating because they are worse than even some other love systems at targeting humans rather than concepts.

The romantic love system is not magical and can be “tricked.” More than twenty years ago, psychologist Arthur Aron famously tried to manufacture love in a laboratory setting. Participants from the experiment not only fell in love, but they ended up getting married. Aron demonstrated both that love can be created just by exposing people to a specific set of stimuli and that social pressures to marry who you love are so strong, people will end up marrying someone just because they love them—even when they consciously know the love they experience was created under laboratory conditions.

Romantic love appears to be triggered by:

Complexity: The complexity of an idea or person appears to correlate with feelings of romantic love
Time: The amount of time we spend thinking about something may trigger feelings of romantic love
The belief that that thing can protect and comfort us: Feeling supported by something in a moment of personal vulnerability may trigger feelings of romantic love
Prolonged eye contact: In addition to triggering feelings of romantic love, looking at eyes elicits all sorts of weird, unique psychological effects—for example, if you paint eyes on a collection box, people will donate more money, and if people see fake eyes painted on something, they act more morally in general; there is clearly a unique neurological pathway associated with processing the concept of eyes, so it would make sense that it could be involved with love
Physical intimacy: Interaction while violating personal space, assuming the violation of personal space doesn’t put a person on guard, may trigger feelings of romantic love (this might be tied to the vulnerability trigger)
Sex: Maybe orgasms matter here, maybe they don’t, but sex and arousal seem to make other love systems form bonds faster—this trigger seems to affect women more than men and weaken with subsequent sex partners

Through understanding the above points, one can incite love in a target individual with an even higher fidelity than the method used by Arthur Aron. Specifically, the feeling of love can be reliably instigated in a subject by combining regular sex with a few sessions in which you:

Sit closely with the subject somewhere isolated with a view (even better if there is some taboo associated with the location which increases a feeling of vulnerability and protection)
Hold hands
Make prolonged, direct eye contact
Discuss life philosophy

This technique takes about a week and a half to strongly set in and is generally effective as long as the target feels comfortable enough to be vulnerable and talk about things they otherwise wouldn’t feel safe discussing. An adequate level of comfort, aesthetic appeal, and hygiene is also necessary—a target is not going to tolerate prolonged close proximity and eye contact with someone who has horrid breath and stinking hair, and a target will not be able to engage in deep philosophical conversation if they are tired, hungry, cold, and feeling threatened or trapped.

The above technique boasts an admirable success rate on people with little sexual experience. Explaining the steps and the purpose of the “experiment” to a target (which we would recommend, in the name of good form) does not appear to lower the probability of this method working. This method is not from any specific set of research findings, but rather a conglomeration of a few studies combined with personal experimentation. It works reliably enough that we assume there must be something behind it.

This technique revolves around three core elements:

Maximizing feelings of vulnerability, backed up by feelings of safety
Physiological modifiers like eye contact and sex
Complex, cognitively engaging discussions that inspire self-reflection (read The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life if you don’t know how to have these)

Statistics on romantic love in arranged marriages strongly indicate that romantic love between people generally forms when they spend a lot of time around and rely on each other. We developed the process outlined above merely to see if romantic love could be developed more rapidly.

Our brains appear to use complexity—rather than actual closeness—as a proxy for the closeness of a relationship. Just as one might use weight as a proxy for volume to determine how much water is in a particular container (despite there being many other things could increase the weight of a container, such as rocks), our minds appear to use the apparent complexity of a person and the frequency with which we think about them as a proxy for our intimacy with that person.

It is an elegant system. Humans spend very little time thinking about or building models of people who are not romantic targets. We just don’t think about other people that much unless we are trying to get said people to mate with us. If someone is successful in their romantic conquest, they will spend more and more time around their romantic target, further increasing the complexity of their mental image of the person, so the complexity of our image of a person could prove as a valid proxy for success in a romantic conquest. This would in turn increase the evolutionary advantage of falling in love with such a person.

In short: Since those about whom we think the most are commonly those we romantically pursue, the complexity of our mental models of others serves as a great proxy for our subconscious to measure when determining who/what to love.

We have yet to find evidence that love has a gender detection system associated with it.^[55] Love appears to be completely focused on our concept of who a person is rather than any particular person as a physical entity.^[56] Despite anecdotal claims to the contrary, there is no statistical evidence for a “gay” or “straight” version of the amourality system.^[57] Outside of social pressures and a few extremely rare cases, most people appear to be panromantic and capable of forming love bonds with men, women, and even animals.^[58]

This makes intuitive sense when you think about it: How many people love their pets just as strongly as they love their spouses? We know plenty of people who would openly boast of feeling such love, and yet we would hardly think of them as practicing bestiality because intuitively most people have experience loving a vast array of things (from babies to cats). All that said, both having sex with someone or being sexually attracted to them seems to expedite the formation of pair bonds, so love will form more quickly with the genders one sexually prefers.

Our model would therefore hypothesize that “bromance” is the exact same emotion as romantic love—it is merely contextualized differently. Because romantic love bonds with those to whom one is not sexually attracted are not categorized as love bonds in Western culture, such relationships get mockingly categorized as “bromances.”

Here’s the real kicker: Because love targets our concepts of a person rather than the person themselves, it is possible to fall in love with a completely abstract concept. What, specifically, causes this phenomenon?^[59]

We systematically recalled moments in our lives during which we felt love toward non-human concepts and searched for similarities between those moments. Complexity or a conceptual vastness seeming just out of reach shone through in all such moments, which included:

A feeling of love for humanity when thinking about how all humans have their own similar-but-unique mental identities and can be thought of as one unified, massive consciousness
A feeling of love for the galaxy when meditating on its vastness and intricacy
A feeling of love for neuroscience when thinking about the complex interconnectivity of it
A feeling of love for the concept of God when thinking about the complexity of the Trinity (that God is simultaneously wholly one entity and three separate entities)
A feeling of love for the concept of love itself, as the concept of an emotion feels larger than life and just out of reach

We appear to develop feelings of love for something when it almost makes sense but remains just out of range for clear comprehension—when it feels like there is a level of complexity we grasp for split seconds but cannot hold.

A secondary theme also popped up in these memories: The concepts toward which we felt love elicited a sense of protection and comfort. This is why the concept of humanity alone does not generate love, while the concept of humanity + a comforting idea of oneness does. This is why the galaxy alone does not trigger love while the galaxy + a comfort with one’s place in it does.

We suspect others are subject to this same system but have not seen research on it, so we may just come off as crazy here.

Note from the Research:

What about love at first sight? Studies on speed daters looking for the phenomenon found that those who claimed to have experienced it reported an emotional set that looked much more like strong lust than love—specifically an extremely high level of sexual arousal paired with an emotional connection only slightly above average.

Do All Three Love Systems Really Yield the Same Emotion?

Are we crazy to label romantic, tribal, and child/pet-facing love as “love?” Remember how we mentioned that all Skittles actually taste the same, but due to cultural norms around how certain colors are “supposed to taste,” many perceive them as tasting differently? We suspect something similar is happening with love.

Social convention makes it very clear that feelings of strong attachment toward a partner, friends, a political party, a sports team, and humanity are distinct. That said, other cultures often use different terms when discussing what our society categorizes as a singular “love” emotion. While we commonly use the word “love” when describing the feeling someone has for their spouse, children, God, and parents, other cultures may use four different words to describe the attachment one feels to each.

The words we use influence how we think about things and may go so far as to influence what we are actually feeling (consider that cultures with gendered language show more gender bias)^[60]. Even if an emotion generated by meditating on the vastness of space would be called a different emotion than love, when one really focuses on that emotion and attempts to “grab it” and compare it to the emotion felt toward a spouse, one will notice a striking similarity.

Note that while the love pair bond can be created with three or four different sets of inputs, once it is in place, all “love bonds” yield very similar outputs:

A desire to protect the target
A general feeling of awe and wonder toward the target
A strong desire to impress the target
A desire to merge with the target, be a part of the target, or conceptualize oneself as being uniquely connected to the target

We imagined that an experiment contrasting fMRI data related to political party devotees or sports team fanatics and people in love with a partner would show nearly the same reward pathways lighting up when those subjects are asked to think about said political parties, sports teams, and beloved partners, so we did some snooping and found one:

“Neural correlates of long-term intense romantic love”by Acevedo et al. The study roughly confirms our hunch—or at least an assertion that romantic love and the love you have for friends show up the same in fMRI data. That said, the researchers observed that romantic love also features elements associated with NRE not seen in the other love pathways.

Behaviors Motivated by Love

Now that we’ve explored what makes us love various targets, let’s dive into what that love makes us do.

Some of the more obvious impulses inspired by love include:

Attempts to impress the target
Expressions of wonder and admiration toward the target
A desire to keep the target safe
Attempts to be closer to the target (by spending more time together, moving in together, expressing distress when the target moves away, etc.)
Bragging about the target to peers (and poor, uninterested strangers)

We’ll double click on bragging, then expand on some less obvious behaviors that might be motivated by love.

Bragging About a Target of Love

We would argue the most bizarrely strong of the “love impulses”—given how surprising it can be when a person first feels it—is the desire to talk to uninterested parties about the target of one’s love. Feeling a strong urge to “shout one’s love from the rooftops” (or plaster it all over social media) appears cross-culturally; thus, we can only assume it is not socialized but instead an inborn instinct. We would suspect this bragging behavior alerts others in your social group that your partner is already committed to a pair-bonded relationship, which may help to reduce potential conflict. Nevertheless, this bragging behavior persists even when the target of one’s love is an abstract concept (like sports teams) or a child (even we cannot resist posting photos of our kid on Facebook).

One cool thing about the impulse to brag about one’s children to members of one’s social group is that you see it play out with many other mammals. Just look up videos of mammals like dogs and ferrets showing their new kids off to their owners. We even found a video of a rescued squirrel exhibiting this behavior, which mystifies us because adult squirrels are not social animals. We suppose this instinct comes from a social ancestor to the Grey Squirrel and is an evolutionary anachronism, but who knows?

Is Food-Making Behavior Motivated by Love?

Across cultures, we see phrases like: “The dish was made with love.” It is as if multiple cultures have come to the conclusion the very essence of love is believed to have been magically passed into the dish, which is subsequently consumed by the object of one’s affection. This is a somewhat logical conclusion if, across cultures, people felt an impulse to make these dishes under the influence of “love” and said impulse subsided as the dish was being made.

One interesting thing to note is that across cultures, the types of food one has an impulse to make fall roughly into three categories:

Courtship Meals: Either very sweet or very homey (pies and bento boxes)
Children Meals: A protein and a starch served with a sweet sauce (Salchipapas, omurice, chicken nuggets and fries)
Illness Meals: Some form of broth with starch (Borbor sach mouan, juk, and chicken noodle soup)

We doubt these specific meal types represent an inborn impulse and imagine they are more related to logical ways to construct a healthy meal, but we are amused by the way they repeat eerily across cultures.

Another interesting cross-cultural trend we observe is that women often cook day-to-day foods while males often cook in group settings or when expensive ingredients are being used. To be more specific, female cooking seems more often motivated by love of a specific individual, while male culinary action appears to be driven by group cohesion rituals, such as BBQs. You even see this in matrilineal cultures like the Minangkabau and matriarchal cultures like the Mosuo.

Counterexample: In the culture of the Tonga (one of the Polynesian cultures), men appear to have done most of the day-to-day cooking. That said, it also appears that most of the day to day cooking in this culture was part of a group cohesion ritual so . . . We are not sure what the takeaway should be.

We are not sure if this is some inborn difference in the way love is felt or just a common cultural pattern caused by men being more likely to have hunted meat due to their larger size and higher ease of building muscle mass due to having more testosterone.

Is the Way Love is Experienced Influenced by a Person’s Gender?

We can only provide conjecture because there isn’t good research on gender differences in the expression of love—all we could find was a lot of obviously biased stuff from the ’70s and ’80s tied to archaic theories like “the color wheel theory of love” that attempts to classify the pair-bonding emotion as a set of emotions based on whether it expresses itself in ways deemed socially healthy or not.

We did find one clear delineation in existing research data, but we believe it to be socialized, as we have not seen it remarked on in other cultures:

Love drives men more than women to engage in joint activities with the subjects of their love (perhaps because men are socialized to believe the way to demonstrate love is through classically romantic activities)
Love drives women more than men to admire and respect their loved ones, while also demonstrating deference by being less assertive and more accommodating toward those they love (this is likely a socialized response tied to classic gender roles)

We tried to see if we could piece together anything ourselves by looking for studies of dating patterns and gendered work in a number of cultures, with special effort to include cultures in which women have more power than men or in which there are unique dating/marriage patterns. Then, we looked for any practices that all these cultures either shared or didn’t explicitly not share. However, these studies were never as exhaustive as we needed them to be to note anything other than the occasional common ritual. Worse, there were always complicating factors. For example, we found a tendency for men to go on long journeys to show love across cultures, but even if this aspect of love wasn’t felt more by men than women, women would be put at more risk (think: Rape) on a solo pilgrimage than a male, so cultures naturally would have tended to evolve this as a male-specific expression of love.

We also were usually able to find an exception when we thought there were no counterexamples to a practice. Consider the common role females take as the primary care provider to children: We found one counterexample to this in a small African tribe called the Aka. In this tribe of about 20,000 people, men spend a disproportionate amount of time with infants—even going so far as to breastfeed infants. However, despite some wishful reporting to the contrary, it appears this is mostly only something lower-status men in Aka society do. Also, the extent of this behavior may have been overreported because in the Aka tribe, male and female partners do most activities, such as hunting, together. Given that male involvement in infant care was “proven” by how often a male was within arm’s reach of a child, the above fact would complicate this.

We would love to see a cross-cultural study that looked to see if one gender disproportionately performed certain rituals for a romantic partner, but as things stand we would feel uncomfortable claiming that the expression of love is different between genders in all areas but one. Society is awash with the idea that love leads to sexual attraction in women and sexual attraction leads to love in men. Some research even claims to back this up, but we find it to be neither abundant nor terribly well-constructed. We think this notion is wrong and more a product of societal ideas about men and women, with the stereotype being that men are more driven by sex, whereas women are more driven by love.

We theorize that the opposite is likely true: That sex triggers the love emotion in women more than it does in men, and men are much more likely to develop a love attachment to an individual who has had no intimate (or even significant interpersonal) interaction with them. This would explain the higher portion of male stalkers who attribute their stalking behavior to love. Still, the claim that these processes, if accurate, mean expressions of love are gendered is kind of cheating, as the processes have more to do with the higher levels of oxytocin females produce during sex, which increases the speed of pair bonding with a partner and thus love.

You Don’t Love a Person

No human has ever loved another human, ever. A human can only love the idea of another human—the image one has of them in one’s mind. This image may or may not accurately represent the subject of one’s affection. Problems emerge when one’s image of the subject of their affection (often rather idealized) ultimately proves to be inaccurate. Plenty of people have fallen into deep states of denial, unable to see very apparent flaws in their loved ones or recognize discrepancies in the target’s behaviors. Such delusions can lead a stalker, for example, to not realize that their target does not even know them.

The Genetics of Love

Just as genes influence our libidos, our genes influence how we experience love. Specifically, the Oxytocin Receptor gene (OXTR) has been shown to be tied to marital stability by studies at Binghamton University. Essentially, different people appear to experience oxytocin (the chemical that causes the feeling of love) in different ways, which drives some individuals to be born feeling love more strongly than others. Differences in how OXTR across individuals likely lead to inborn differences influencing how long it takes to form a “love” attachment to others and how long these attachments last. At this point, most studies done on this gene have been really small (under one hundred participants), but we would be excited to see this field expand.

Leveraging Arousal for Fun & Profit

As we approach the end of the book’s core, let’s reflect on how knowledge of involuntary arousal systems can be leveraged for personal gain. Some people are dedicated to extracting as many positive emotions from their short lives as possible, while others choose to maximize some effect they hope to have on the world. Both groups can utilize knowledge of sexual arousal to their advantage. We will address each group in turn, providing tips on maximizing the desired outcome in each scenario.

Strip Mining Positive Emotional States

Setting up a strip mining operation to extract as much positive emotion from life as possible is not straightforward because things that arouse us rarely align with our self-images. A woman may get turned on when a man forcefully exerts dominance over her while simultaneously feeling horrible about not embodying characteristics she associates with being a strong, independent female leader. A husband may enjoy having sex with lots of novel women but feel horrible when doing so because he also loves his primary partner and knows his extramarital affairs hurt her emotionally. What’s a girl to do if she extracts happiness from seeing the love of her life happy, but the love of her life extracts pleasure through being hit and verbally humiliated? Our disgusting human brains certainly don’t make this easy on us.

Something that activates pleasure through one pathway, like arousal, may simultaneously activate an aversive emotion through another pathway—or put one in an unfavorable position (e.g., arousal from flashing strangers). Those lucky few with cliché self-images who are in a traditional relationship and whose arousal systems are 100% vanilla by our present society’s standards will experience almost no conflict in the output of these systems. The far-more-common masses who are statistically normal—but not in a societally vanilla way—will have to contend with the fact that their brains suck when it comes to strip mining happiness from life.

How can people “outsmart” their own systems for outputting positive emotional states?

First: Identify the things that provide positive emotions you cannot change (like arousal patterns and amourality patterns^[61]). Next: Alter the things that provide positive emotional states you can change (such as your internal self-image) to more easily extract positive emotions from the pathways that can’t be changed.

You will quickly notice that your ideal self-identity is the most malleable thing from which you derive positive emotional states. Admittedly, rewriting your entire self-identity just to optimize something like positive emotional states will come off as draconian to most. Fortunately, there is another option.

All humans have mental models of people they meet. Humans use these models to attempt to predict others’ behavior patterns (or generate another’s side of an argument when arguing with them in one’s head long after the real argument ended).

This same mental modeling system may be used to generate most of the emotions people feel. Essentially, each person’s brain has a mental model—think of it as a character sheet—that describes them to themselves. When subconsciously deciding how to react to any given situation, our brains refer to this mental model—this character sheet—and ask: “How would this character feel about X? How would they react?” before determining how to act and establishing which emotions to produce. The resulting output will be filtered and modulated by a few other factors, such as sleepiness, hunger, coldness, pain, etc., but the model being referenced is immensely influential. These systems look for environmental cues and almost always change when a person dramatically switches between environments. This is also why some studies found that individuals lost their heroin addictions at a rate of 95% when coming home from Vietnam—the environments and daily lives of ex-soldiers upon returning from war were different enough that many rewrote their internal character sheets and as a result, even their most basic impulses were changed (for more on this theory, read: The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life).

Here is the trick: Humans do not maintain just one self-image that determines what emotional output they receive: They actually have several internal models that activate in different environments. The self-images our brains reference at school are usually different from those we reference at work, which in turn usually differ from the internal self-models we pull from when around family. This is why we often lapse into behavior patterns we have long since grown out of when home for the holidays and around family members. Heck, as humans, we can even create temporary self-images and pretty effectively adapt to them—this is, to a certain extent, the point of sexual roleplay.

People most commonly switch internal mental models when switching roles (i.e., from lawyer to mother, student to boyfriend, rockstar to daughter, etc.), clothing, activities, and environments. We are much like actors on stages, looking for cues from costumes and sets to determine who we are, what emotions we should be feeling, and how we should be acting.

You can leverage the fact that people have various internal mental models to create extra, intentionally made models that (1) can be activated by a certain setting, change of clothes, ritual, or other cue, and (2) reflect people whose emotional sets would be easy to maximize through the sexuality and amourality you happen to have.

People use this trick all the time. This is why BDSM communities often use very specific and elaborate signals for scenes. These signals make the internal model switch easier and prevent bleed over from other self-images. For example, people may perform an elaborate ritual in unusual clothing, in an unusual location, in which one partner puts a collar on another. Everything associated with the clothing, location, ritual, and interactions one has in this BDSM context is completely alien to anything one may encounter in one’s daily life, and yet they are internally consistent across BDSM contexts. One can live free of worry that they will accidentally walk into a dungeon at work or have to wear a collar to school; thus, there is no concern one will have other contexts activate/pollute one’s BDSM self-image.

The keys to executing on this strategy involve intentionally building an additional internal model as well as a ritual, environment, and outfit that facilitate activation of that model. This can be done in isolation with a partner or in a larger social context. The furry community, a subgroup of people who dress up like animals, exemplifies an excellent execution of this strategy: They create entirely new personalities called “fursonas” that can differentiate from their day-to-day persona in everything from disposition to gender, accent, and fictionalized life history.

Furries have an advantage over the BDSM community in that the identity one adopts within it differs so wildly from one’s day-to-day internal model there is no risk of bleed over. This yields less cognitive dissonance when one reflects on the actions in which one’s sexual identity indulges. For example, if one’s day-to-day internal model hates the idea of being degraded, it will not cause as much cognitive dissonance if, rather than one’s day-to-day self, a half-fox-half-dragon named Misty Sunrise gets degraded.^{^[62]}

The one catch with this approach is that, even if one can inhabit a different personality in the moment, it can be very difficult to rationalize that personality’s actions afterward, upon returning to regularly scheduled programming. It is common for people to try out the kink scene only to leave after they realize how disgusted their predominant internal model is with the fact that they enjoyed something like rape play.

Using Sexual Arousal, Sexual Aversion, & Love to Increase Efficiency

While some people seek to maximize fulfillment, love, arousal, and other pleasurable emotional states, others select a specific value or metric to maximize in their lives, based on an analysis of the human condition through whatever lens (religious or secular) they choose. The manner in which people come to these sorts of conclusions is explored in depth in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life. Let’s focus on how we can manipulate arousal-adjacent systems to better achieve such goals.

The most useful of the pathways discussed in this book, when it comes to achieving such goals, are the dominance and submission pathways. While these pathways can generate arousal, they actually represent complicated pre-programmed mental states designed to inspire specific behavior patterns that don’t necessarily instigate arousal (it all depends on context).

Consider religious submission displays, such as kneeling, hand clasping (part of a middle ages hand-binding ritual), talk of lords and masters, self-flagellation, having to obey commands to abstain from certain foods/activities, and tefillin. These patterns do not instigate arousal in religious contexts, but they are clearly borrowing from some deep-seated mental systems that lead to the co-evolution of similar displays in BDSM dungeons.

While BDSM sometimes does steal paraphernalia and rituals from religions, a look into the historical origins of BDSM accessories and practices that resemble religious ephemera conclusively reveals that—outside of maybe self-flagellation—they were not borrowed from religious displays. Rather, eerily similar BDSM displays evolved completely independently to fulfill the same, deep subconscious needs of our submission systems. In other words, behavioral sets associated with the submission system appear to have remarkable cross-cultural similarities in both arousing and non-arousing contexts, hence they likely represent some “pre-programed” behavioral set.

To be clear: We do not think that religious rituals are activating sexual arousal pathways. We highlight the similarities to make the exact opposite point. Human submission systems appear to trigger a primal feeling of satisfaction that is deeper and more basic than sexual satisfaction. Dominance and submission need not always be about sex and sexual arousal.

If amassing power or wealth is critical to a given person’s goals, they may be better off leveraging the power of submission. Historically this pathway has been used to great effect through an “all-in” submission to something a person sees as worthy of their submission. This master doesn’t need to be another human being; it can also be a more abstract concept or goal—such as the preservation of freedom.

By exploring pathways that originally evolved to help our ancestors know their place within the tribe, we can learn to manipulate them (and the mental states they create) to better achieve our goals. It is much easier to set aside all the silly distractions of life, all our vanity, all our insecurities, and all our fears when leveraging deeply rooted submissive instincts and surrendering to a master—even with that master being something so abstract as animal rights, aesthetics, learning, independent thought, or the human race. In its obsession with personal liberty, secular society belittles our ancient and deeply optimized submission systems.

There are also huge benefits to glean from our subconscious dominance systems. Asserting dominance can help humans suppress distracting emotions. It is very hard to both be in a dominant mental state and be sad, angry, or afraid, just as it is hard to see someone expressing sadness, anger, or fear as truly dominant. Alas, given how much secular society glorifies victims and indulgence in stress while vilifying the concept of presumed power over other people, most people grow up without the evoked set necessary to tap into this ancient part of our consciousness.

How does one salvage this old, rusted, heavy-lifting machinery built through evolutionary pressures and left dormant by secular education? First, learn to indulge in a pathway’s purest form by attempting to empathize (perhaps through daydreaming) with fictional characters you develop from scratch—characters who are naturally dominant and submissive. Next, ramp up the system yourself in small scenes with a partner. We explicitly recommend that these scenes not be sexual. Even if an individual is highly aroused by dominance and submission, these pathways can be activated without arousal, which is the form of dominance and/or submission you will want to learn to use in your daily life. As a side benefit, once you learn to utilize dominance and submission in a non-arousing context, you can then experiment with them in an arousing one.

Sexuality & Morality

As we reach our conclusion, it’s time to focus on takeaways. If we could get this book to nudge just one idea into the popular consciousness, it would be that a person’s sexual aversions are just as much a part of their sexuality as the things that turn them on—and that turn offs and turn ons are likely operating off the same systems.

As we are not given a framework for accepting and normalizing our sexual aversions, it is easy for ideological extremes to confuse individual sexual aversion with moral truths. This leads some to impose worldviews on others that are corrupted by their own sexual predilections.

Ideologically, a man may believe a woman should be free to sleep with as many individuals as she wants, but because he personally has a strong sexual aversion to promiscuity, as some men do, extremely promiscuous women will trigger a “disgust/ick” reaction in him (this reaction likely evolved to ensure men didn’t choose partners who increase their odds of accidentally spending resources raising children that were not their own). If he did not understand the biological and amoral origins of his instinctual aversion to promiscuous women, he might try to rationalize that feeling by concluding that promiscuous women are morally bankrupt.

This very thinking is why people used to judge the deformed and diseased so harshly. It used to be common for people to view suffering from something like leprosy as a sign of moral failings on the part of a victim. Upon seeing those with disease and deformities, people received a strong aversion response (likely evolved to encourage us to distance ourselves from people with communicable diseases) and because they felt an aversion response when looking at these people, they assumed these people must somehow be immoral.

Humans still feel this aversion response today (though we might be able to desensitize ourselves to it through overexposure). Nevertheless, our society has evolved in this respect to a point at which we can feel this biological aversion without letting it interfere with our judgments of the morality of sick and deformed people. Hopefully someday, we will manage to achieve the same level of enlightenment with humans’ sexual attractions and aversions.

On a related note: Present society’s failure to adequately accept the unchangeable sexual aversions with which we are born has compounded the obstacles in some groups’ fights against discrimination. Some advocacy groups push away potential supporters because they cannot understand how someone can have an involuntary sexual aversion to them without seeing them, personally, as gross. This is unfortunate—most people would think the idea of two elderly retirement home residents in a relationship is sweet and support their relationship, but nevertheless be grossed out by the idea of them having sex.

Even well-intentioned moral policing of what turns people on can trigger bad outcomes. To deal with the reality that many women experience sexual arousal from violent rape, some have taken to saying that it is not “real rape” that turns women on; rather, some argue that women are turned on by “fantasized rape” or “fake rape.” This is true for some people, but it is categorically not true for others. When you start making statements like this—that real rape doesn’t turn any woman on—what does it mean when a woman orgasms while actually being raped? What if she finds herself fantasizing about it later or roleplaying the experience with her partner? Does that mean she really wanted it? Does that mean it wasn’t a real case of rape because the victim orgasmed or had intrusive fantasies about it after the fact?

Trying to signal how enlightened you are by arguing against the realities of our twisted biology and world has real effects on real people.

Erasing certain realities of people’s lives that are inconvenient to a given ideological philosophy—or that feel gross—does not make one morally superior or even good.
Trying to force someone to not find something aversive is no different than trying to force an individual to change what arouses them.
Just because something elicits an “ick” reaction does not mean that thing is immoral, just as something that turns you on isn’t necessarily moral.
Pay extra attention to your moral judgments of things that illicit an aversive reaction, as you will be subconsciously biased against them and likely to look for ways to justify your disgust.

Conclusion: Relationships, Sex, & Society

By scrutinizing kinks and their implications, we journeyed through a wealth of theories, findings, and observations about human sexuality. To tie things up, let’s discuss the implications of human sexuality on relationships, sex, and modern society. Think of this chapter as an exploration of how the ghosts of early human societies, traditions, relationships, and arousal patterns haunt our modern dating world.

Why is this such an important topic?

Humans living in the 21st-century experience three sets of drives, each at odds with one another:

Behavioral impulses developed over tens of thousands of years of violent patriarchal polygyny
A culture developed over thousands of years of expansionist patriarchal monogamy
Aspirations for a peaceful, equal society in which individuals have the luxury of choosing the relationship style they “want”

Our biology, our culture, and our aspirations for our futures are in a conflict that plays out on the battlegrounds of our relationships, dating, and sex lives.

The conflict between these drives creates frustrating externalities that destabilize societies and suppress happiness. While there is no easy path around these externalities, there are nevertheless actions that might be taken to ameliorate their effects.

Let’s be blunt: Society is not handling the transitions associated with sexual freedom well. Sexual freedom is celebrated with the grave misunderstanding that humans are rational actors and that, when given freedom, humans will utilize it in a way that benefits all. In reality, humans are self-interested animals constantly chasing after an idealized self-image, only experiencing brief moments of lucidity. We do not claim to be any better.

At present, society appears to advocate for:

Letting people date anyone they want
Letting people have sex with whomever they want
Marrying the first person one falls in love with after one’s late twenties
Forming a long-term, exclusive, monogamous relationship in which both parties have equal power, decision-making abilities, and obligations
Using this relationship to produce children
Finding a new partner if things with an existing partner do not work out

We understand why this system sounds like a good idea. These standards grant us freedom and equality while not completely abandoning traditional institutions. Alas, this half measure system just isn’t working.

Explaining why this system isn’t working out requires a bit of context. Let’s pick up where we left off in our discussion of how humans likely evolved the kinks they have. In a world in which most humans lived in violent, polygynous, patriarchal cultures, how did we shift from those cultures to the largely monogamous society of a century ago? How did we shift from a large patriarchal monogamous society to the more equitable and idealistic relationship norms pervasive in Western society at present?

While polygynous, patriarchal cultures were likely the norm during early human history, every now and then tribes would pop up with different structures. Some polyandrous, some matriarchal, and some monogamous tribes emerged. Even though they appeared at much lower rates, monogamous cultures outcompeted their polygynous counterparts once humans started living in settlements above certain population levels.

A look at the data explains why this happened: When researchers control for socioeconomic conditions, polygynous societies show much higher rates of rape, murder, assault, robbery, fraud, spousal abuse, and prostitution (see the 2009 paper: The puzzle of monogamous marriage for a really interesting discussion of this). Why do we see this trend? Because unattached men act as caustic free radicals in a society. When the default relationship structure of a society in which men and women are born at about equal rates involves multiple wives pairing with a single man, you are inevitably going to end up with a lot of single men. Even today, terrorist activity in a region is highly correlated with the number of single men within it. We call the caustic nature of single males within a society the “free radical problem,” as they remind us of free radicals in physics: Unattached electrons that make chemicals highly caustic. It is little wonder that the monogamous tribes outcompeted their polygynous neighbors in almost every region of the world after human settlements reached a certain size because when you pair men and women off at a one-to-one ratio, the number of single men is dramatically lower.

If you want a good visualization, imagine a petri dish of agar (a sort of gel that acts as a solid growth medium). At first, the plate shows 98% red bacterial growths because red bacteria naturally form at higher rates than any other form of growth, but 2% of what isn’t the red bacteria happens to be penicillin. Even though penicillin appears at much lower rates, over a few weeks almost the only thing left in the agar is penicillin.

Notes from the Research:

The negative effects of intrasexual competition aren’t just seen in men within polygynous societies. For example, across sub-Saharan Africa, women are more than twice as likely to justify wife beating as men are! This makes a twisted kind of sense. If you ask a woman in a monogamous society, whether or not she is comfortable with a husband beating women, she thinks of that practice in terms of a husband beating her, but in a polygynous society, women may contextualize the concept as husband beating other irritating women with whom they have to compete. Still, it is kind of extreme that in some regions, a man’s wives are even more into his wife beating than he is on average. This exemplifies how high intersex competition makes it very difficult to form a cohesive “female agenda” in a polygynous society.
Boko Haram and ISIS exploited marriage inequality among young males by paying the bride-price (money or gifts given to a potential wife’s family) and providing wives for new recruits. Fighting for ISIS gave single men a higher chance of securing a wife. Systems like this may partially explain why conflict is more common in regions in which polygyny is common. When one man can have many wives, there will never be enough women to go around, making war the only realistic way a large portion of males can get wives.
One study we found looked at regions within monogamous societies in which men vastly outnumbered women (such as mining towns) to see if the lopsided ratio lead to the same social problems observed in polygynous societies and didn’t find any. We don’t know what to make of this, but we always believe in presenting data when it runs counter to our narrative. Perhaps these cultures have not reached the “threshold” of free radicals necessary to cause social problems, men in these societies were able to secure long-distance female partners that tided them over for the time being, or we are totally wrong and the number of single males has nothing to do with unrest in a society and something else about polygynous cultures causes unrest that just happens to highly correlate with the number of single males.

In short, while humans are “naturally” polygynous, monogamy as a social structure is significantly more stable above a certain population threshold. For this reason, societies, religions, and other groups that adopted monogamy or monogamy-ish frameworks outcompeted those that promoted unconstrained polygyny. Because humans have come to cluster in larger and larger population centers for the past few thousand years, the human race has been mostly ruled by societies in which polygyny was only normalized for the top fraction of a percent of the population—if at all (we make this exception, as most of these monogamous societies did normalize pseudo-polygynous relationships—such as married couples with mistresses on the side—among the upper echelons of society). Within these historical monogamous cultures, women were by and large still treated as second class citizens and to an extent like possessions of the men they were attached to.

Recently, something very strange happened: People started caring about the wellbeing of other humans. We began to believe that humans had rights and should be treated equally—that people should be able to do what they want and have equal opportunities available to them regardless of any conditions associated with them at birth, be they sex, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Moreover, we developed the technology—effective birth control—to make rethinking how relationships work a possibility.

Perhaps even more strangely, we began to contextualize love as a good indicator of who one should marry. We cannot stress how strange of a concept this is and how rare it is cross-culturally. It appears this concept began within Western culture through the chivalric literature concept of courtly love, typified in poems like Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart. This poem did not argue that people should marry whomever they love, but that two people who love each other should have sex regardless of their existing relationships or place in the world.

The idea of courtly love became wildly popular, but not all authors were comfortable with the adultery or interclass romance it implied, so it gradually became sanitized. “OK,” authors began to reason, “Sex with those you romantically love is OK, but you have to marry them first—and if it seems like you are from different classes, we will reveal at the end of the story that you were secretly from the same cast all along.” To put it more simply, the idea that love should be the basis of marriage is not some deep human truth, but rather the product of a trend in the medieval version of pervy romance novels—and the concept of love-based marriages was only added later in the tradition because it was the only way to depict characters who loved each-other “at first sight” to have sex without featuring adultery.

This is why early Disney stories descended from this tradition commonly depict two characters meeting and immediately getting married seemingly out of nowhere (a trope made fun of in the movie Frozen). Marriage was incidental to the story format, pasted on top of an older tradition like a fig leaf. What was “supposed” to happen in those stories is the princess gets rescued, falls in love, and subsequently bangs the guy who saved her. The idea that you should choose who you marry based on who you love is nothing but an accident derived from a panicked attempt to sensor adultery in pervy medieval novels.

This glamorization of love, combined with the free love movement, birth control, and a belief in human equality, come together to create the theory that if we just let people do what they want sexually, people will all sleep together and learn to love each other through the process, after which people will pair off with the individuals they love most.

Unfortunately, this theory has not proven to be sound.

Slut Shaming & Impossible Double Standards

Where in the process of moving from patriarchal and monogamous societies to a free, equitable society did everything fall apart? In what ways is the current model not living up to its goals?

Before the rise of gender equality and the sexual revolution, women were disadvantaged in the job market and not offered the same social protections as men. Women were therefore forced to leverage social institutions and cultural norms that encouraged them to trade sexual/romantic access for protection and resources. These systems ranged from the norm of a male breadwinner in a marriage to conventions around males paying for dates and offering gifts.

As women gained more equality within society, this exchange of sex/love for resources became less necessary. A portion of females decided it made sense to just sleep with whoever they desired. This development led to the rise of slut shaming—from both men and women—which produced a “no win” scenario for both the shamed and the shamers.

Let’s take a moment to explain what we mean by this and how it came about. We will start by exploring the economic pressures that caused slut shaming to come to exist as a cultural artifact in women and then discuss why men started slut shaming as well.

Why Women Engage in Slut Shaming Behavior

Women slut shame other women more than males do (or almost as much as males do—it depends on your chosen dataset^[63]). If presumably women disproportionately suffer from slut shaming, why is this tactic so frequently implemented by women and where did it come from?

Imagine a social group of ten men and ten women going about their lives as societal expectations transitioned away from women trading sexual access for personal investment and toward greater financial independence and “free love.” Two of those women will have sex with anyone regardless of investment given—be that investment emotional or in the form of resources. When given the choice between a woman who wants something in exchange for sexual/romantic access and one who doesn’t, these ten men will usually choose the woman who doesn’t (it’s a strict case of less investment for the same output).

These two women will therefore ruin the sex-for-something-in-exchange economy in the same manner a worker crossing a picket line destroys a union’s ability to negotiate. The only way the eight women in this group can protect their ability to trade sexual access for something would be to attach a negative externality to the act of having sex without securing at least emotional investment. This negative externality historically manifested as slut shaming.

While slut shaming is usually just social shaming, it can go much further and have massive self-image and career effects on the women targeted. Not only does slut shaming dissuade women from taking this “no-exchange” path through social punishment, but it also lowers the value of these women in the eyes of the men of the group.

While gender equality was being normalized, some women wanted to protect this old sex-in-exchange-for-something(specifically, emotional investment) system, and their only tool for protecting the old system was slut shaming.

This battle was lost generations ago. A study seeking to determine how many dates the average woman has before having sex found the most common response to be zero—that 32% of respondents slept with their current partners before their first dates. Despite the war being long over, slut shaming persists as a powerful social artifact of an earlier time. To a great extent, slut shaming represents that aspect of our cultural unconsciousness that always yearns for the past and wants to return to the old system.

Interestingly, once individual women realized they could leverage slut shaming to apply a negative externality to other women’s social status and prospects on the dating market, some began to use it as a cudgel to attack any female rival deemed to be a threat (regardless of said rival’s actual sexual behavior). This can be seen in a neat paper from 2004: ‘‘Good Girls’’: Gender, Social Class, and Slut Discourse on Campus. This study found high status women used slut shaming to prevent lower status women from gaining power within local dominance hierarchies. Even though this cultural artifact no longer serves its original purpose, it is simply too useful a weapon to leave buried anywhere but in the backs of those who threaten us.

Should the average woman wish to have genuinely good odds of securing a well-matched partner within today’s mainstream dating market, she has to undertake actions that will incite derision from her peers, coworkers, and likely even a little voice within her own head (obviously, some women get lucky and secure a partner without flipping this switch, but we doubt even a woman in such a position would claim that luck wasn’t a huge factor in her outcome).

Text Box: To be clear: Decisions to engage in slut shaming, the exchange of sex for emotional investment, and promiscuity as a relationship strategy are not consciously made for the most part. People’s hands are being forced, in subconscious ways and in aggregate, by “market forces.”

How anyone could think this system is “working” is beyond us. The only way for a woman to realistically compete on the dating market (outside of extremely conservative and religious micro markets) is to take actions that will inspire others to shame her and make her feel poorly about herself.

Notes from the Research:

If you are inclined to believe that slut shaming of women by women is merely a case of women being brainwashed by society and not a subconscious (or conscious) tactic to discredit one’s sexual rivals, we would direct you to a few studies: “Intrasexual peer aggression and dating behavior during adolescence: an evolutionary perspective” in Aggressive Behavior, “A sexual selection theory longitudinal analysis of sexual segregation and integration in early adolescence” in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, and “Indirect peer aggression in adolescence and reproductive behavior” in Evolutionary Psychology—all of which show these tactics are frequently employed, very effective at securing mates, and effective at preventing targets of them from securing mates.
A 2018 study published in Evolution and Human Behavior showed both men and women to be less trusting of a woman who looks sexually accessible. Male and female participants alike were less altruistic toward a woman who looked sexually available, but only female participants appeared to go out of their way to punish these women in a costly fashion. Specifically, in the ultimatum game, female participants on average would forgo a potential reward themselves in order to punish a woman who looked sexually available while the average male participant did not.
In the ultimatum game, an individual wins a sum of money and chooses how much to give to a third party. That third party—aware of how the sum of money was split—can choose to not accept the amount given to them, and if they proceed to reject the offer, neither individual gets anything. Female participants in this study frequently preferred that neither participant receive anything if the other player was dressed in a sexually accessible fashion, while men appeared not to care.

Why Men Engage in Slut Shaming Behavior

A world in which women expect nothing in exchange for sexual access may sound like a dream to men, but the reality of that world is as bad for men as it is for women. In a marketplace in which men bear no cost for female sexual access, all of the females sort to the same, few, high-value men. This is not conjecture—it is easily observable in the data.

A male of average attractiveness is liked by only 1 out of 115 women on Tinder. The average man should expect less than a 1% interest rate on the dating market. Keep in mind that half of men are below average. Men therefore benefit from slut shaming as well. If the average guy can convince women to play in a one-male-to-one-female system, he is much more likely to secure sexual access to a female. The fact that there is a price associated with female sexual access (whether that price manifests as fidelity, emotional investment, or financial investment) ironically works to the benefit of the majority of men.

Problems associated with a lopsided sexual market (a small number of men sleeping with the majority of women; women failing to secure commitment or emotional investment from men) is getting worse every year as society gets more comfortable with sexual freedom. According to one study, 28% of men between 18-30 report not having had sex in the last year—that’s almost 300% higher than the same figure one decade ago. Women, on the other hand, show no such effect. When the blog Overcoming Bias did a follow up on this figure to determine whether women were having sex with older men or all sorting to the most desirable younger men, they overwhelmingly concluded that women were sorting to the same, more desirable younger men.

Partially as a result of this, many “below average” men have just clocked out of the game, with 35% of men between the ages of 18 and 35 living with their parents compared to just 29% of women in the same age group. While we don’t think it is a good thing that so many guys are primarily motivated towards success through a desire to secure a partner, we think it would be imprudent to deny that it’s a huge motivating factor for many men and when it is clear to a man that he does not have a chance in the new game, his motivation will be dampened. This has obvious negative effects on society.

Again, this battle is long lost, but its cultural imprint is strong. It overlaps with that left by our monogamous forefathers and the behavioral impulses of our patriarchal polygynous ancestors. These mixed imprints create a dating environment that is complicated and, by our judgment, broken. The Gini coefficient of 0.58 for men in the dating market makes the market less equal than 95.1% of the world’s economies. Women have sorted to the highest value males while leaving low-value males angry and desperate and high-value males with no motivation to emotionally invest in relationships. In fact, the data shows this increasing as a trend, with the number of men having regular sex dropping precipitously over the past couple decades while the number of women having sex has only dropped slightly.

This failed dating market is worse than a failed economy because even the one group who seems to be on top—the “rich,” high-value men—are not benefiting in this failed state. Because high-value men are not motivated to invest in relationships, they form loving pair bonds at much lower rates than they would in a stable relationship market (the stats are really clear on this point: More attractive men invest less emotionally in relationships). In other words, while high-value men have easy access to sex when contrasted with lower value men, they are less likely to get to feel love (and this is just our opinion, but life without love strikes us as just as depressing as life without sex).

In the end, no one is really happy with this situation.

Many women feel inexorably drawn into a life of serial monogamy with men who have little emotional dedication to them. They play a game of increasingly pointless musical chairs until they realize their biological drive to have children hit them harder than they anticipated, get fed up being asked why they don’t have a spouse, or start to worry about spending life alone. As many women who hit these junctures don’t have enough time to secure the man of their dreams, they are left in a mad scramble for a pool of subpar and bitter partners (see The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships for a breakdown of the stats on this—desperate dash for subpar male partners isn’t just a stereotype, but rather a reality of the current marriage market for many players). Alternatively, some women decide to veer off the path society has set for them but must then contend with peers and family constantly asking about their current score in a game they have decided not to play.

Meanwhile, below-average men are getting no partners until the ladies’ game of musical chairs stops, leaving them feeling cheated, and high-value men are so inundated by potential partners, they don’t value any enough to form the deep emotional connections many humans require in order to glean a feeling for fulfillment. The data bears all this out: Sex rates have plummeted for millennials, especially millennial males, as have marriage rates.

These trends stand out clearly in marriage data, which shows marriage rates halving in the last few decades. The data makes it clear that this isn’t because people want marriage less or that people are more disillusioned with the concept. Interest rates in marriage are only declining slightly, not at levels big enough to explain the drop in actual marriage rates. What the data seems to show is that men who are getting regular sex easily don’t want to get married until they are much older. (On the bright side, divorce rates are also going way down, perhaps due to the later marriage ages.)

To put all this simply: The old system of gender inequality, chastity until marriage, and pseudo-arranged marriages sucked and needed to be replaced, but the new system we have adopted doesn’t “work” either. Worse, the period of transition between the two systems created cultural artifacts that make the new system uniquely unpleasant.

Text Box: Quick note: This is not a problem for people in gay dating markets, which is why we do not discuss them much in this context. Gay dating markets aren’t perfect, but not as completely pigeon diddled as heterosexual markets at the moment.

The problem isn’t that we have insufficiently embraced gender equality and sexual freedom—the problem is that sexual freedom, at least in a sex-in-exchange-for-nothing sense with no other social norms applied, doesn’t work on a societal level. Like communism, sexual freedom sounds great until one remembers to account for the fact that we are humans and humans are self-interested monsters impotently grasping at our own sentience like a middle school virgin attempting to unfasten a bra.

The Future of Sex & Relationships

Given its Gini coefficient (demonstrating profound inequality at the level of a collapsing, war-torn country), the current relationships system is transparently not stable. We can already see where things might be going, which makes this era of human sex and relationships uniquely fascinating and pivotal. We used kinks to explore where we came from as a species, then looked at how our sexualities and amouralities interacted with our evolving cultures to take us to where we are today. But where are we going? What will human dating and marriage look like 50 years from now?

We suspect society will split into a few cohesive philosophies around relationships and that these philosophies will gradually eat more and more mindshare until we reach a point at which the relationship philosophy to which a person subscribes becomes a key part of their public identity.

Let’s briefly explore a few relationship philosophies that we foresee becoming more prominent—with an understanding that we are presenting them in a generalized light (people will obviously deviate to create their own iteration of each).

Musical Chair Monogamy: This is the default societal model at present. Essentially, people go through a series of monogamous relationships that last a few months to a few years, then get engaged to the first partner with whom they spend more than three and a half years (after a certain age—between 25 and 35—with this age going up depending on socioeconomic status). After getting married, they practice a dual-income family structure (in which both partners work) and have zero to two children who are raised either by the state or a corporation.

TradCon Monogamy: There has been a recent resurgence of interest in a 1950s-inspired relationship fantasy, which involves people essentially cosplaying as the common trope of a “traditional,” nuclear family with a male breadwinner husband, stay-at-home home-keeping wife, and two or three kids. This model is often called TradCon (or traditional conservative). In a TradCon relationship, a submissive partner stays at home to raise the kids, cook, and clean while a dominant partner brings in an income and makes most of the rules.

During the dating phase, there is an expectation of significantly more chastity in this relationship model—as well as an expectation that one will find the person they marry at a younger age than in musical chair monogamy. One shift we expect to see in the TradCon model going forward is a greater emphasis on stay-at-home schooling. Given that mainstream culture paints TradCons more and more as something “other,” it only makes sense that those who ascribe to it will lean into their dedication to the model and its core differentiating feature: the exclusive dedication of one partner to the home and children.

The Poly Community: While the poly community is often thought of as being defined by individuals who have multiple sexual or romantic partners, it should really be thought of as more of a microculture dedicated to experimenting with and enforcing new cultural norms to combat the problems of the current system. This microculture includes some individuals who may define their relationship as “relationship anarchy” and others that would appear indistinct from monogamous couples—albeit with extended, close support networks—to an outsider (the poly community is often used as a model for the development of other new models for child rearing, such as the community-focused or “village” model promoted by some activists looking for alternatives to the nuclear family structure).

Essentially, the poly community should be thought of as people who agree to a new set of cultural norms about what should and should not be OK when dating and communicating within relationships. For example, poly culture alters expectations around whether monogamy must be explicitly established, what should be explicitly communicated before certain stages of the relationship, how disputes are handled, default assumptions about how finances should be distributed, and how consent is defined (how frequently it needs to be established, etc.). These cultural norms effectively ameliorate many of the larger dating market’s problems—be they slut shaming or the effects of the sex in exchange for emotional investment. The downside of these cultural norms is that they can make it difficult for those with more conservative sensibilities to participate in this community and create barriers to entry for new participants.

The Kink World: Seen cropping up around a myriad of kink communities—be they BDSM or furry-oriented—there are a number of quickly growing relationship models that explore new methods of interaction. Interestingly, most of these communities have borrowed rulesets created by the poly community (or maybe it’s the other way around). If society becomes increasingly fragmented, we expect various factions of kink lifestyles to meld with fringe iterations of other relationship styles rather than remain as independent as they are now.

For example, groups like the BDSM community are already drifting toward becoming a subgroup of the poly community due to their overlapping cultural norms, while the Taken in Hand faction has drifted toward becoming an extremist subgroup of the TradCon community (the Taken in Hand community promotes a TradCon-like relationship with more-BDSM-edgeplay-like frills, such as consensual non-consent, total power exchange, and impact play).

As a fun aside, consider the Goreans: A mostly extinct faction of the kink world that was fairly large in the early days of the internet and which proposed such a crazy solution to society’s sex and relationship market failures that we cannot help but highlight it.

Basically, Goreans said: “Oh, so now we get to do whatever we want? Well, let’s throw out all that monogamy crap and dismiss these silly aspirations for a peaceful, equal future. Let’s even throw out the myth that society used to be a better place. Let’s do things the way our early ancestors did them. Yup, let’s bring back slavery, buying and selling women, and traditional masculinity. Heck, you know what? Let’s also bring back tons of pointless rituals and traditions, but since we don’t remember the ones our distant ancestors used, let’s just lift them from a series of science fiction books (Gor).”

The Gorean approach to relationships is beautiful in its simplicity, and we love how it tackles present relationship market failures from an angle that even we wouldn’t have considered, we wouldn’t be shocked if we saw something like it resurface.

The Red Pill Model: The Red Pill started as a group of men who decided to leverage society’s unfairness to their advantage. The group got its name from The Matrix, in which the protagonist, Neo, is presented with a red pill and a blue pill—the red pill representing the true, sick reality of the world and the blue pill representing an unfulfilling, yet pleasant fantasy. Men who “take the red pill” contrast the lie they believe society tells—that the only way to secure sex and fulfilling relationships as a man is to be nice and deferential toward women—with what they perceive as reality: That such strategies only work for extremely high-value males.

Now that this movement has had time to mature and grow in size, it has had to develop new solutions for stable, long-term relationships. To this end, The Red Pill community almost presents an ideological counterpoint to the poly community in that it also explores varying relationship models and internally discusses them through “field reports” on online forums, comparing their relative efficacy—but instead of approaching their models from a perspective that presumes equality is one of the core goals of a relationship, Red Pillers do so from a perspective that presumes equality to be an impossibility and that relationship structures must be developed from a self-interested perspective.

More than any of the models discussed so far, The Red Pill does not strongly promote the idea of having children, seeing them as a tool for financial extortion or forcing functions keeping people trapped in suboptimal relationships. We expect this to change within the next decade or so and are already seeing movement in that direction.

Note: You may be tempted to ask if there is a female-centric equivalent to The Red Pill, which somewhat misses the point. Yes, there are female Red Pillers who theorize on relationship models, but since The Red Pill presumes male dominance to be the key to a healthy relationship and grew out of pick-up artist culture, you intrinsically will not see many female thought leaders.

Intentional Singlehood: Right now, there is a passive understanding that staying single is an option; however, many regard singlehood as an option of last resort and certainly not as compatible with a desire to have children. We expect this to change in the next couple of decades. Both females and males are shortchanged in their own ways by the current system, and after exposure to a certain number of firsthand, second hand, and anticipated bad experiences, many are deciding the game is not worth playing.

MGTOW, men going their own way, is the most cohesive of these ideological movements. While MTGOW claims as members anyone who recognizes the suboptimal nature of our current dating and relationship markets and decides to engage in relationships through their own set of rules, it is primarily composed of men who have chosen intentional singlehood. Historically there have been cohesive female movements with similar goals, and we expect a few to arise again in the near future.

This is a movement to watch closely, especially concerning how intentionally single people decide to handle child-rearing. The rise of co-parenting shows one model of how this might work. Check out the website CoParent.com, which acts like a sperm donor network for both intentionally single individuals and gay couples of different genders who want to share child-rearing responsibilities. That said, right now most of the movement is either childless or involves children from previous relationships.

The Family First Model: In this model, an individual doesn’t date through college—or dates very little—and subsequently has a spouse chosen for them by their parents. That said, sometimes these individuals have significant influence over their final choice, with parents lining up a number of candidates for them to meet—or heavily influencing who they date—until they “click” with a winner).

Grandparents often live with the family or in a nearby community and play a heavy role in childcare while parents earn a dual income. Individuals in this model are usually expected to have at least one kid but rarely go above four.

Despite drawing derision from those with “modern sensibilities,” this model has a lot to recommend it from a statistical perspective and is more likely to lead to a loving, stable relationship than the musical chairs model (See The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships for more info on the stats here).

The NeoCorp Model: The historic precursor to the NeoCorp model, called a “corporate family,” was the predominant family model until the last century or so that we personally see as being unfairly ignored. The corporate family model is defined as a social unit organized around a family business. The family unit itself consisted of 7.5 children (historically), unmarried relatives, and live-in staff (who are seen as family members and frequently marry into the family, contrasting them with the type of staff typically employed by TradCon families and family first families). Rather than being raised by the state (as they are in the dual-earner model), raised by one parent (as they are in the TradCon model), or raised by grandparents (as they are in the family first model), children of corporate families were integrated into adults’ daily lives. Another unique feature of the corporate family involved parents interacting with society as a single unit rather than as two separate people with “their own lives.”

Dating was unique in these family structures, as people optimized for partners who could improve them and contribute to the corporate family unit (and not so much for sexual attraction, love, or a personality match).

Steven Ruggles, a professor of history and population studies at the University of Minnesota, estimates that in 1800, 90% of American families were corporate families. Corporate families largely went extinct with the rise of male wage labor and the resulting “male breadwinner” / TradCon family structure of the 1900s, which, starting in the 1970s, was largely replaced by the “dual earner” family structure and its corresponding musical chair model (facilitated by the rise of female wage labor).

Still, we see many couples living by a revived and adapted version of this model with less structured gender roles, slightly smaller family sizes, different solutions for child rearing, and a more dynamic model of entrepreneurship—hence the term NeoCorp. This is the model we personally use and we expect it to continue to proliferate in line with the rise of remote work and the gig economy.

A Theoretical Solution

As society is now, is there anything we can do to ameliorate the dating market for individual Pragmatists?

Let’s break down the problems with the new model and the old model and see if we can find a solution:

Old model: Little personal choice (parents made or heavily influenced relationship pairings based on their value systems), little flexibility in relationship structure/rules, and strict gender roles that stifle most modern individuals’ potential.
New Model: Ease of finding new partners and low cost of breakups resulting in market failures (little personal investment in the other person and high inter-sex competition leading both men and women to feel screwed). People spend too much time looking for the perfect partner when they could have invested in a relationship in which they and their partner(s) help each other improve as a team.

Could a new model address both sets of problems?

Let’s try a little thought experiment: What if we reinstated arranged marriages, but instead of giving the choice to people’s parents whose values may not be aligned with those of their children, we gave the choice—in some respects, at least—to each individual?

We could have people complete the steps we outline in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life so they might determine their objective function (that which they want to maximize most with their lives) and work out how they want other people to see them. With these fundamentals sorted out, we would have people list their attractions and aversions as explored in this book, select their preferred levels of cognitive integration as explored in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships, and state their openness to poly/monogamous relationships. Then, while controlling for similar levels of physical attractiveness, financial wellbeing, educational attainment, and ability to relocate, match these people to long-term relationship partners with well-matched profiles. Given the way love works in humans, these people would almost certainly fall in love after a period of time.

To prevent this platform being used for casual dating and ensure that it is genuinely used as an arranged marriage tool, participants would be expected to deposit some portion of their annual income before being matched. This money would be invested in savings and released after a certain number of years of relationship survival, providing the couple with a meaningful nest egg. Should a couple decide to terminate the relationship, their deposit would not be returned. This security deposit would offer a realistic way out of the relationship that is costly, but not prohibitively so.

We aren’t sure what we would do with broken relationship deposits, as were the organization to retain them, it might incentivize the organization to make bad pairings, and organizational behavior follows incentives. Perhaps the organization would fund itself through the typical two and twenty model common among financial investments, earning two percent of the assets under management and twenty percent of profits made above a certain threshold—but only from funds associated with active relationships. This would create an incentive to create lasting relationships and provide couples with good financial return.

This strikes us as a grand idea, but recall that we are completely insane. Because we cannot trust our ideas to have any relation to what a sane, even-minded reader might think, we will leave it up to you whether you think we should put a system like this together. If it sounds interesting to you, email us at [email protected]. If we receive sufficient interest, we will put it together. If we receive a sufficient number of willing participants to make pairings, but not a sufficient number to create a full-blown organization, we will just manage some pairings ourselves and, in the place of a formal organization that engages in financial management, create some contractual mechanism that serves the same function.

Thanks for Reading

We thank you—from the bottoms of our blackened, mechanical hearts—for reading. We had immense fun putting this book together, as going through the evidence challenged many preconceptions we had. That moment of realization—that delicious: “Well, if I was wrong about X, what other aspects of my worldview were reliant on X as evidence?”—is always such a thrill.

We can only hope the book did the same for you. We hope some of the ideas we presented were new enough to offend you and make you alter some of your beliefs about how human sexuality works.

Many of the theories we shared in this book are probably wrong—radically wrong, even. That said, if people allowed the fear of being radically wrong to keep them from sharing ideas, humankind would be devoid of ideological breakthroughs, philosophical sea changes, and radical paradigm shifts.

If you ever want to chat, send us ideas about future books, provide us with feedback, or present us with challenging counterarguments, shoot us an email: [email protected]. We generally do whatever we can to help other Pragmatists.

Finally, please leave us a review on Amazon/Goodreads. They make us really, really, really happy. We give what money we do make off these books to non-profits, so those brilliant, anonymous internet reviews remind us we aren’t wasting our time.

Supplement: A Tour of Our Research Findings

After not finding a sufficiently comprehensive picture within the research available to date, we conducted our own comprehensive studies on unusual arousal patterns. The purpose of these studies was to create a quick “charcoal rub” of the human sexual condition and human arousal patterns.

These studies were created using paid participants from a study participant recruiting website called Positly.com. We collected information through simple dynamic surveys (dynamic surveys enable us to ask subjects different questions depending on the initial answers they provide) that were coded using the web application builder GuidedTrack. We recommend both Positly and GuidedTrack to anyone else out there who likes conducting studies to fill in holes in the scientific research on a topic that interests them.

There are two types of readers: One type likes looking at and interpreting data for themselves; the other type wants someone else to digest the data tables and highlight interesting implications in a colorful, entertaining manner that maintains their interest. If you belong to the former group, we enthusiastically encourage you to just skim this section and dig into the stats on your own by only reviewing the data tables.

If you consider yourself a member of the latter group, please ignore the data tables, as most of the information they summarize is covered in the text. We have packaged our exploration of this research survey data in a tongue-in-cheek tour theme, both to make the dry content somewhat more entertaining to read and in an attempt to leverage known heuristics to help people organize details in their minds that would otherwise be a jumble of sequential data points. In a memory palace, the use of shocking visualizations as well as spatial positioning within a fictional world aids recall.

So please, dear reader, step into our nerdy stats vehicle and buckle up.

Our tour starts with the requisite safety video. Before you begin digesting our research findings, we want you to be fully informed of the flaws of our study:

We were unable to collect data from people without notifying them first that our study is about sex and kinks. This means our sample population is comprised only of people who were comfortable participating in a study on that subject. Other than that, our study participants were fairly representative of the US population. In cases in which our research overlaps with studies published in peer-reviewed journals, our results do not deviate significantly from mainstream findings, suggesting that our sample population was pretty representative or at least no more biased than other studies.
Our study had around 250 participants. While this sample size is large enough to reveal some general trends in a population, it is not large enough to protect us from false positives given the huge number of factors we investigated in our survey. Even if certain data only has a 3% chance of reporting a false correlation, someone testing 100 variables for correlation is likely to find at least one false positive given the sheer number of tests they are running. Think of this study as a rushed charcoal rubbing of human sexuality, rather than an accurate, hyper realistic portrait of the subject. When our study contradicts peer-reviewed research of which we are aware, we assume the peer-reviewed research is correct and highlight the contradiction.
We failed to recruit a sufficient number of trans participants to get breakdowns on trans people as a distinct demographic, so whenever we contrast men and women, we do not include participants that identify as trans or non-binary (though as you know from our earlier discussion of this topic, we think a significant portion of the population that identifies as cis may ultimately not be as cis as they would otherwise suppose). We brainstormed methods for sourcing an adequate number of trans participants at a reasonable price that wouldn’t also create a biased pool of participants, but found no viable, economical solution. Were we to recruit trans survey participants from a single community, their answers could be quite biased.
Why did we not just include trans participants in the pool associated with their gender? Multiple studies show that around 40% of trans individuals report experiencing changes in their sexual attractions during hormonal transition, meaning we would need to test trans people in at least three different groups: No hormonal transition, post hormonal transition, and undergoing hormonal transition. Were we fortunate enough to recruit a sufficiently large group of trans participants, we could ask really detailed questions that parse out stuff like which male arousal patterns are tied to their gender and which male arousal patterns are tied to hormonal states associated with males but divorced from the male gender itself. We find this topic really interesting, as it could unlock how specific hormones affect arousal patterns, so if any of our readers have ideas as to how we might affordably source an unbiased representative pool of trans participants, please email us at [email protected].

The Hall of Arousing Art: An Exploration of Sexual Fantasies

OK everyone: All set? Away we go!

Our tour begins in the Hall of Arousing Art. This should serve as an excellent starting point for our sexual odyssey. Now is the time to get over your sexual hang-ups. Lean back and soak in the racy scenes to your left and right; this is a judgment-free zone and you may ultimately find over the course of this tour that more people are into kinky things than you had originally surmised.

We assigned a “kink” score to men and women who took our study. Much to our surprise, these scores came out more or less equal across genders (23.1 for men; 20.8 for women). This score was derived from the number of non-normative things that reportedly arouse a given study participant. We broadly define non-normative in this context as anything outside of penetrative sex between two consenting humans.

First, we would like to call to your attention the finding that most people don’t have one or two weird things that arouse them—rather, the average person is aroused by a whopping 22 weird things. Do you ever feel ashamed because a myriad of wacky things turns you on? You might be more average than you had thought.

Second, note that the idea that men and women may be roughly equally kinky flies in the face of a lot of other research out there, but in this case we feel pretty confident in our divergent data. Why? Take a look at the objects on display in our Hall of Arousing Art and you will notice not everything falls into the classic stereotypical definition of “porn.” We see some of our gentleman guests are confused by the deceptively unassuming library to the right—a library not visited in many other studies. That library is filled with forms of arousing art that women consume disproportionately: Romance novels and fanfiction. Don’t let the bookish presentation of these saucy materials deceive you. They don’t call these bad boys bodice-rippers for nothing—they are being consumed primarily for the arousal response they create in the reader, even if their consumption may not be to bring the reader to climax.

Erotic Material Exhibits

The following percentages of our male and female participants reportedly consume the following types of arousing materials:

Arousing Materials Consumed	F	M
Romance Novels	47%	4%
Young Adult Novels (Erotic)	15%	4%
Fanfiction	17%	8%
Daydreams / Personal Imagination	68%	53%
Short Erotic Stories	46%	24%
Live Action Video	53%	81%
Still Photographs	23%	59%
Heavily Edited Still Photographs	5%	10%
Hentai Video	13%	14%
Hentai Images	7%	12%
Computer Animation Video	8%	20%
Computer Animation Stills	4%	11%
Western Animation Video	2%	8%
Western Animation Images	1%	10%
Erotic Video Games	4%	15%
Virtual Reality Pornography	3%	15%
Traditional Printed Pornography	19%	27%

Just marvel at these results: The number of women who consume erotic romance novels, erotic young adult literature, and erotic fanfiction when contrasted with men is shocking. To put that another way, women consume erotic romance novels at 1175% the rate men do!

Let’s take a moment to disembark from the tram and explore this library. You will notice that it is both very sumptuous and exceedingly vast. Romance novels comprise the single largest share of the current fiction market, with 74.8 million people in the US reading an erotic novel in 2008 and 90% of them being women. In contrast, only about 100 million men within the US (and Canada) accessed online porn within the same year. This means the romance novel industry—the female-focused arousal industry—is likely more profitable than the entire male-centric, traditional “pornography” industry. This makes sense, as most traditional pornography has moved to an ad-supported model, whereas individuals still pay for most of the romance novels they consume.

So, what exactly gets women so aroused in these scintillating novels? Grab one or two off a shelf as we make our way back to the tram and continue our journey. Skim the back cover to get a picture of the leading romantic interest. Notice any themes? We do.

In his research for A Billion Wicked Thoughts, computational neuroscientist Ogi Ogas took the time to analyze 15,000 Harlequin romance novels to find the most common professions of these books’ leading male love interests. Ogas found the following professions, in order, dominated: Doctor, cowboy, boss, prince, rancher, knight, surgeon, king, bodyguard, and sheriff. These are all professions associated with status, confidence, competence, and dominance over others. You don’t see many romance novels featuring builders, programmers, marketers, and the like. This prevalence of romantic love interests with dominant professional positions is also seen in romance novels on Amazon.com, which feature 415 millionaires, 286 billionaires, and 263 sheiks as leading male love interests.

Glance over at the Japanese anime-style porn to your left. This particular section of our Hall of Arousing Art also skews more toward gender parity than you might expect given the genre’s reputation (m14% vs. f13%). However, when you consider the size and gender breakdown of subsets like the yaoi doujinshi community (a subgenre of homoerotic self-published art, primarily created by and for females), this seems less surprising. While here, let’s also marvel at the unexpectedly robust rates of erotic video game and VR pornography consumption among men: 15% of our male respondents reportedly consume VR porn and 15% also play erotic video games.

As we drive by the live action porn exhibit of our Hall of Arousing Art, you may be surprised by its relatively small size. Our survey results suggest that 47% of women and 19% of men do not consume any live action video pornography (i.e., pornographic video that includes real people and is not animated), which we think is higher than a lot of people might expect (especially when it comes to males). In our interviews with individuals who fall into this category, it became clear that many men cannot watch live action porn without becoming distracted by thoughts of the actors’ lives, the actors’ families, etc.—leading them to prefer animated pornography filled with only fictional participants.

An Ode to Fanfiction

We find fanfiction to be an amazing source of information on female sexuality. It presents unique insights into the deepest, most personal aspects of a person’s arousal pathways because it is rarely produced with any commercial motivation and instead is often primarily created with the goal of stimulating its creator. Fanfiction is furthermore unrestrained by that which is realistic or even physically possible.

Fanfiction—content written about characters from an established media property or in an established media universe—is often highly sexualized (50 Shades of Grey started as a Twilight fanfiction). Currently, about 79% of fanfiction writers are female. Even the earliest manifestations of fanfiction, such as the Star Trek fanfiction distributed in zines in the ’70s, skewed female (think: 90% female). The strong skew toward female authors and readers, the non-commercial nature of fanfiction work, and the intense sexualization pervasive in fanfiction make this genre a superb bellwether of unusual arousal pathways that cannot be explained through socialization. Should we identify 10,000 fanfiction stories about being enveloped in a cloud of tickling feathers but fail to see this odd scenario heavily represented in male focused erotic art, we might safely infer that this tickling feather cloud scenario is triggering a predominantly female arousal pathway (this is just an example, not a real phenomenon).

Fanfiction.net is a great place to find fanfiction if you are into that kind of thing (we can’t get enough of them). Fanfictions provide uniquely powerful insights into how other people see the world.

Note: While we will talk about fanfiction as an art that skews female, you shouldn’t take this as an indication that there are no communities for written erotic works by and for males (see: nifty.org).

Arousing Dioramas

We see your necks craning for something not yet revealed. We think we know what it is. “What,” you are wondering “is specifically in erotic material that arouses people?”

Great question. We created a list of everything we thought might conceivably arouse people, then asked our survey’s respondents to indicate whether or not they found each of these things to be personally arousing. We tried to be as exhaustive as we could conceivably be in our study’s list of sources of arousal, which lead us down a lot of . . . uncomfortable internet rabbit holes, but we think this is about as thorough a list as you will find—and we looked. That said, we must admit this list is only tied to consumption of erotic material. We will explore actual sex acts and specific turn ons later on in this raunchy tour.

To take a look at how our male and female survey respondents reacted to various arousing triggers in erotic material, we will now drive you through the diorama portion of our Hall of Arousing Art. Take a look at the subjects behind the glass, and please don’t blink, as we will have to drive rather quickly to get past all these scenes in a timely fashion.

Sources of Arousal in Erotic Materials	F	M
A man of high wealth	48%	8%
A woman of high wealth	10%	27%
A man of low wealth	18%	3%
A woman of low wealth	11%	23%
A man who is sophisticated	35%	6%
A woman who is sophisticated	18%	36%
A “trashy” man (someone whose portrayal is aggressively aimed at demonstrating a lack of appropriate demeanor)	21%	6%
A “trashy” woman (someone whose portrayal is aggressively aimed at demonstrating a lack of appropriate demeanor)	13%	51%
A married couple	34%	38%
A couple that is dating (i.e., They are in a relationship, but not married.)	46%	40%
A couple that is in love	51%	33%
Participants who are strangers	44%	49%
Solo masturbation	48%	58%
Mutual masturbation	31%	36%
A group of more than two people having sex	45%	48%
Two men having sex	21%	7%
Two women having sex	35%	66%
A man and a woman having sex	78%	75%
Vaginal intercourse	81%	83%
Anal intercourse	40%	56%
Fellatio	49%	67%
Cunnilingus	49%	53%
Sex with breasts (through pressing them together)	33%	51%
Sex with feet (through pressing them together)	8%	16%
Feet	6%	9%
Sounding (putting something into a urethra)	4%	3%
An overweight woman (BBW)	13%	21%
An overweight man	2%	1%
An underweight woman	5%	14%
An underweight man	2%	4%
Bukkake (lots of semen)	13%	18%
Scat (feces)	2%	2%
Urine	8%	10%
Popping (popping things)	1%	0%
Transformation (a person changing from one thing to another)	16%	5%
Vampires	21%	7%
Werewolves	14%	2%
An android	7%	8%
An alien	13%	8%
A giant (the fictional race)	8%	7%
A dwarf (the fictional race)	2%	8%
Goo people	2%	4%
People made of food	0%	0%
Furries (anthropometric animals-e.g., a girl with cat ears and a tail)	5%	5%
Half human half animals (Nagas, Centaurs, etc.)	7%	4%
Biological relative incest	11%	14%
Step relative incest	20%	27%
Rough gangbangs	24%	22%
A pregnant subject	5%	11%
Gerontophilic material (an elderly subject)	0%	3%
Interracial subjects	35%	36%
A giant penis (longer than two feet)	7%	4%
Giant breasts (larger than a quarter of total body weight)	4%	17%
Breast inflation (breasts that are getting larger)	3%	3%
An individual being forced to do something “evil”	11%	11%
Sadomasochism	18%	18%
The sexualization of a character from children-targeted pop culture (e.g., a cartoon character)	8%	9%
The sexualization of a character from adult-targeted pop culture (e.g., a character from a young adult romance novel)	11%	16%
BDSM	29%	37%
Sex toys	53%	39%
Forced male submission	9%	14%
Voluntary male submission	16%	20%
Male dominance (with a voluntary partner)	46%	40%
Male dominance (with a forced partner)	16%	19%
Forced female submission	17%	29%
Voluntary female submission	32%	40%
Female dominance (with a voluntary partner)	17%	28%
Female dominance (with a forced partner)	8%	15%
Male-on-female violence	9%	7%
Female-on-female violence	5%	5%
Female-on-male violence	6%	6%
Male-on-male violence	3%	1%
Absorption	1%	1%
Getting pregnant	10%	10%
Getting someone else pregnant	4%	13%
Giving birth	4%	1%
Menstruation	5%	2%
Switching genders	8%	3%
Feminizing someone else	7%	4%
Masculinizing someone else	2%	1%
Bimbofication (someone transforming into a bimbo)	1%	6%
A bimbo (an oversexualized female)	10%	17%
A stud (an oversexualized male)	14%	5%
A housewife	27%	46%
A traditional husband	25%	8%
A slutty person (someone whose portrayal is aggressively promiscuous)	31%	50%
A nerd (someone who is portrayed as physically weak and bookish)	23%	39%
A corporate type	26%	21%
An extremely muscular woman	1%	15%
An extremely muscular man	16%	7%
Blood	3%	4%
Cutting/piercing	4%	1%
Female crying	14%	13%
Male crying	4%	1%
Insects	1%	1%
Oviposition (eggs being put inside a female)	3%	1%
A woman being implanted with a baby that is not hers genetically	2%	0%
A man being implanted with a baby	2%	0%
Tentacles	5%	8%
Life draining	2%	3%
Causing physical pain	13%	17%
Humiliation	15%	20%
Mind control	11%	14%
A person portrayed as disposable	8%	8%
A person being dehumanized	11%	13%
A person being betrayed	11%	8%
A slave (or a person owned by another)	16%	22%
Vore (something consuming something else while it is still alive)	2%	3%
Snuff (someone dying)	3%	4%
Foot focused material	6%	5%
Drawn futa (a penis on a female body)	7%	8%
Live action futa (a penis on a female body)	5%	5%
Trans subjects	10%	9%
Uniforms	14%	17%
Latex or PVC	7%	13%
Guro (extreme images like a girl with her face peeled off)	2%	3%
Gore (extreme violence)	0%	2%
Race play (race play references intentionally racist roleplay)	2%	3%
Cuckolding	11%	17%
Infidelity of a married individual (cheating wives/husbands)	21%	19%
Being dirty	10%	11%
Voyeurism	23%	35%
Caregiver/Little	7%	6%
Father like roleplay	8%	7%
Mother like roleplay	4%	15%
Sibling like roleplay	5%	17%
Rope bondage	23%	23%
Tight full body constraints (e.g., a tight bag or mummification)	5%	7%
Bestiality	6%	2%
Human doll (a person acting like an inanimate object)	6%	5%
Necrophilia	1%	2%
Amputees	2%	1%
Petplay (someone pretending to be an animal that is a pet)	6%	3%
Pony Play (someone pretending to be an animal that is a beast of burden)	1%	2%
Thoughts of yourself as another gender	6%	3%
Thoughts of yourself	39%	23%
Thoughts of displaying your genitals in public	5%	6%
Thoughts of yourself being sexually irresistible	27%	14%
Thoughts of yourself being sexually desirable to a large number of strangers	18%	15%

Having fun? Stay buckled in and keep your hands inside the vehicle. We’re coming up to a really tasty stretch.

Wealth & Sophistication

As we whir past this dizzying array of arousing triggers, take note of the sexy dioramas that inspire the most rubbernecking from our passengers. Your fellow explorers appear to be uniquely enchanted by the scenes we pass that depict high-status men. Perhaps this comes as no surprise after we pointed out that most of the male leads in the romance novels are also high-status men, but is it not interesting that male passengers seem to be more interested in high-wealth males as well?

Our survey results suggest that a man is about as likely to fantasize about a woman of low wealth as he is to fantasize about a woman of high wealth (23% to 27%) and a woman is WAY more likely to fantasize about a man of high wealth (18% to 48%). That said, you can look at this data a bit differently and say that while both men and women fantasize about women of low and high wealth at around equal frequency (in women this is 11% to 10%), both men and women fantasize about men of high wealth at around 2.5X times more often than men of low wealth (in men, this is 3% to 8%). Erotic material for men and women alike seems to gravitate toward high-wealth males.

You would expect to see the same thing when we look at the rates of consumption for erotic material featuring “sophisticated” versus “trashy”^[64] participants, right? Well, hold onto our courtesy seat back handlebars, ladies and gentlemen, as you’re in for an unexpected bump: Men and women fantasize about sophisticated members of the opposite gender at about the same rate (m36% to f35%); however, while men certainly fantasize about sophisticated women, they fantasize about women they perceive as trashy even more (51%)!

We cannot help but notice some exasperated eyerolls emanating from a few of our female passengers as they observe their male partners’ interest in some of the less classy female dioramas in our Hall of Arousing Art. Our study suggests that women fantasize about trashy men less than sophisticated men, but not by a huge margin—21% vs. 35%—and they fantasize about trashy women less than sophisticated women (13% vs. 18%).

In general, women appear to prefer a sophisticated participant in their fantasies regardless of that individual’s gender, whereas men seem unusually turned on by participants of both extreme high and low levels of sophistication . . . but ultimately prefer trashy women.

Popular Pairings

Our findings tied to preference for couples who are dating (whether or not the couple is in love) versus strangers was wholly uninteresting to us. Each gender prefers each at about the same rates, with women being slightly more likely than men to include a couple in love within their erotic fantasies (f51% m33%), which we assume has more to do with the ease of depicting love in the mediums females consume more often (romance novels) when contrasted with those males consume more often (live action porn).

Please keep your hands away from the windows as we roll up the protective glass panes. Excellent, thank you. We’re now getting into a splash zone full of surprises. Speaking of which, you might be startled by how much both females and males include masturbation in their erotic fantasies—solo (f48% m58%) and mutual (f31% m36%).

Given the extent to which people at least pretend to get their panties into a bunch over orgies and threesomes, you may also be bemused by how often both females and males in our study included groups of more than two people having sex in their fantasies (f45% m48%). Ready for another curveball? Female respondents in our study included two women having sex in their erotic fantasies more often than two men having sex (35% to 21%). Men, on the other hand, rarely cast two men having sex in their erotic fantasies (7%) but reported fantasizing about two women having sex at almost the same rate at which they fantasized about a man and a woman having sex (66% to 75%). In fact, our stats have women featuring a man and a woman having sex in their erotic fantasies at higher rates than men do (though not at statistically significantly higher rates: 78% to 75%).

While it is unsurprising that men and women fantasize about vaginal intercourse frequently and at about the same rates (f81% m83%), it is somewhat interesting that the same can be said about anal intercourse (f40% m56%). Despite the social stigma of anal sex being something all men want and all women loathe and sometimes begrudgingly give out as a “gift” or concession, our data shows women fantasize about anal sex only 29% less than men do.

In for another surprise? While men include fellatio in their erotic fantasies more often than women do (m67% f49%), the numbers were still far closer than we expected based on common social tropes. This trend is not isolated to women: Men actually fantasize about cunnilingus at even higher rates than women (well . . . slightly higher, m53% to f49%).

Curious to know where men and women diverge on the sexual fantasy front? Men are disproportionately interested in material with breasts and feet: In our data, we found a pretty large gender difference in erotic fantasies of sex with breasts (f33% to m51%) and sex with feet (f8% to m16%). Oddly, this suggests both men and women fantasize about foot sex more than they fantasize about feet (f6% vs. m9%), though perhaps a power exchange dynamic contributes to that difference. We are not, however, concerned about overreporting foot-related arousals, as our study shows foot kinks at a slightly lower rate than other studies. This is a good sign for our data, as one of our biggest concerns was that it would overrepresent unusual kinks given that all the participants had to opt into a survey about sex. Much to our delight, the results we got consistently report unusual arousal patterns at around the same rate of other studies, suggesting our fear was not manifested.

Gird your loins, ladies and gentlemen, as we are arriving at the sounding diorama. Sounding entails putting something, usually a metal rod, into a urethra. Both men and women fantasize about sounding at far higher rates than we anticipated, f4% vs. m3%. You may not think those numbers sound high, but to put them in context 0.7% of Americans are Buddhist, which thereby implies that there are 500% more Americans who get turned on by sounding than there are Buddhist Americans. For every one American Buddhist you have met, you have probably met five people secretly into sounding.

Plump Proclivities

Those of you inclined to rotundities and sitting in our ample, double-wide seats might be wondering how weight played out in our findings.

Let’s start with a shocker: Men include overweight women in their erotic fantasies at a rate of 21% contrasted with only 2% of women who include overweight men in their fantasies.

In for another plump surprise? Men also fantasize about overweight women at much higher rates than they fantasize about underweight women (21% to 14%), as do women (13% to 5%).

Simply put, men prefer overweight women to underweight women; however, women also prefer curvy women to underweight ladies (just less than men do)—and almost nobody desires overweight men in their fantasies.

Random Kinks

Time to pull up your splash guards. Both our male and female survey respondents reported fantasizing about Bukkake (a person being covered in more male ejaculate than any one male could reasonably produce) at higher rates than we anticipated (f13% to m18%). To put that in context for you, 12.1% of Americans are non-Hispanic blacks, and multi-racial blacks make up 14% of the US population—the percent of the US population that finds Bukkake arousing is higher than the percent of the population that is black. If you talk to a random American, the probability that they watch and are aroused by bukkake is higher than the probability that they are black.

Almost none of our study participants found popping to be arousing (that is, popping things like balloons or pimples—f1% m0%) or scat (feces—f2% m2%), but despite Number Two falling out of vogue, our study participants expressed an unexpected amount of enthusiasm for urine (f8% m10%). We find this fascinating. What makes urine more than 400% more likely to cause arousal in someone than feces? We genuinely have no good theories on this one.

What our passengers might find shocking is our findings may represent a tamer population—at least vis-à-vis other studies. Researchers who have focused specifically on more rare kinks have found that men experience higher rates of arousal tied to scat and urine than women. When crafting theories on human sexual development, we give these studies—which were run by true professionals still practicing in their fields—more credence than our own survey. Again, this survey is just a broad charcoal rubbing of all human sexuality, not a microscopic analysis of it.

Non-Human Participants

We can see some of you in the back are quite excited about the spooky nature of some of these dioramas as we enter a mythical forest-themed stretch of our Hall of Arousing Art. Yes, yes, we’ve entered vampire, werewolf, and magical beast territory. Please stay in your seats and behave; your driver has a whip and knows how to use it.

In line with previous research on the subject of arousal and supernatural beings/acts, our data shows women develop an arousal tied to transformation and things that transform—as well as things that are violent or otherwise a threat to their safety—at much higher rates than men. Specifically: Transformation (f16% m5%), vampires (f21% m7%), werewolves (f14% m2%), and aliens (f13% m8%).

Gentlemen, please wipe those holier-than-thou smirks off your faces. If we look at any mythical humanoid not known for transforming and/or violently ripping apart and consuming humans, the rates or inclusion in erotic fantasies are equal across genders—or lean male. Specifically consider: androids (f7% m8%), dwarves (the fictional race—f2% m8%), giants (the fictional race—f8% m7%), half-human-half-animal beings (nagas, centaurs, etc.—f7% m4%), goo people (f2% m4%), people made out of food (f0% m0%), and furries (anthropometric animals—e.g., a girl with cat ears and a tail—f5% m5%).

Now, Simone over here thinks Malcolm is reaching too far in his categorization of aliens as violent and giants and androids as nonviolent—surely Malcolm has seen countless recent movie scenes with violent giants and androids, right? Malcolm, however, maintains his stance, insisting that the data clearly shows vampires, werewolves, and aliens have something in common that is not shared by androids, dwarfs, giants, goo people, half-humans-half-animal beings, furries, or people made out of food. He posits that this former group is seen as more inherently violent because that would make our data align with other research—but concedes that it could also be that its members are associated more with transformation (which women also find disproportionately arousing). These groupings may also just present a mere coincidence created by a few popular romance novels.

Perhaps some of you on the tram have better ideas. By all means, enlighten us (but seriously, send your theories and ideas to [email protected]; we are all ears).

The supernatural race we find surprisingly rare among our dioramas of mythological and part-human beings is furries (anthropomorphic animals). Among our respondents at least, furries were less popular than other mythical humanoids. This is bizarre, considering the massive grasp furries have on popular culture, with movies such as Zootopia even going so far as to specifically advertise to the furry community. In our data, it is less common to fantasize about furries than it is to fantasize about aliens, androids, dwarves, and giants.

On the other hand, let’s not reach too far here and keep these numbers in context: 5.5% of Americans are Asian Americans, so the number of people who consumer erotic material tied to furries in America is about as large as the entire Asian American population. If you meet a random American, our survey suggests they are just as likely to consume furry porn as they are to be an Asian American. (Just a reminder: when we compare a community like Asian Americans to a kink, we are choosing the community based on its percentage of the population for visualization purposes, NOT because the kink appeared disproportionately within said community.)

Before we depart from this mystical forest, we beseech you to marvel at the fact that that transformation, which features in 16% of the erotic materials consumed by our female survey respondents, and 5% of that consumed by our male respondents, is surprisingly common in both females and males. This is just the sort of delicious phenomenon that gets us interested enough in human sexuality—as biologically repulsive as it tragically is—to write this book.

Being aroused by transformation has no obvious social benefit specifically to women, fails to break any social taboos (or at least not as much as other less common and less gendered kinks), and does not seem obviously tied to reproduction (maybe you could argue pregnancy is seen as transformation and that would also explain why it is gendered . . . but we think that’s a bit of a reach). So why on earth is transformation arousing people and why is it arousing mostly women?

We explore this idiosyncrasy in the “Emotional States and Concepts / Dominance and Submission” subchapter on page 112. For now, let us forge onward into the strange and ephemeral territory of human cognition and explore more categories of people with whom we are not supposed to have sex.

Forbidden Sexual Partners

Both men and women taking our survey reportedly fantasize about biological relative incest (f11% m14%) and step relative incest (f20% m27%) at about the same rate, with both being slightly more popular sexual themes among males. This is higher than we anticipated, but not totally shocking. Dangerously large sexual organs are also popular, but not jarringly so. Our female survey respondents reported a higher preference for giant penises than their male counterparts did (f7% m4%), while our male survey takers reported a much higher preference for giant breasts (f4% to m17%). (We break out these stats with more nuance in the “Songbirds and Boobies” chapter on page 41 and dig into some theory on why this arousal pattern appears at the rates it does.)

We see some of you eyeing our pop culture-inspired dioramas with discomfort. We understand there have been many complaints in the media about mouth-breathing male neckbeards online sexualizing children’s cartoon characters, but our data indicates this stereotype may be misplaced. Both men and women in our study reported sexualizing characters from child-targeted pop culture at around the same rates (f8% to m9%), with males only being more likely to fantasize about fictional characters when they are targeted at adults (and even then the gender difference is slight: 11% versus 16%).

To put it simply, the pathways that cause us to become aroused by characters from fiction to whom we feel an emotional attachment seem to activate equally in both men and women. This lends evidence to the idea that the neurological pathway that causes some people to eroticize children’s cartoons is likely a malfunctioning version of the same neurological pathway that leads people to become more aroused by individuals to whom they feel emotionally close, as that pathway also lacks a gendered preference (more on this in the subchapter:“Emotional Connections to People” on page 112, in which we dig into why the things that turn people on turn them on).

BDSM Scenes

Heads up, folks—we are finally entering BDSM territory. If you would like to augment your fetching leather shoulder restraints, feel free to reach up and pull down the leather masks that have just popped down from your overhead compartment.

BDSM covers bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism, and masochism. Think: Classic, kinky sex that features power exchanges, a myriad of rituals, a broad diversity of uniforms, and oodles of toys. Note: This section only looks at BDSM as consumed in erotic materials; we’ll revisit BDSM from the perspective of acts people regularly practice further along in our tour.

Both hefty proportions of men and women consume BDSM-themed erotic material (f29% m37%). Essentially one in three Americans consumes BDSM-themed erotic material. To put it another way, it is a bit of a stretch to call someone who is into BDSM “kinky” if by “kinky” you mean: Far out of the norm. Heck, consumption of BDSM-related erotic material is about as common as interracial erotic material (f35% m36%). So BDSM is about as “kinky” as interracial porn if kinkiness is based on how out-of-the-norm a thing is.

Two themes you will see in the data that we will flag upfront is both men and women are much more likely to be aroused by dominance and submission in erotic material when it is voluntary and men are slightly more likely than women to be aroused by dominance and/or submission.

In general, our data suggests that males get turned on more by male submission in their erotic fantasies than females do (forced male submission f9% and m14% versus voluntary male submission f16% and m20%). That said, while those who do get turned on by male submission in their erotic material skew male, both males and females are vastly more likely to consume and be aroused by erotic material in which the male is dominant (forced male dominance f16% and m19% vs. voluntary male dominance f46% and m40%).

Both females and males taking our survey reported female submission to be far more arousing than male submission, be it forced (f17% m19%) or voluntary (f32% m40%). Male survey respondents reported fantasizing about dominant females more than their female peers—both voluntary (f17% m28%) and forced (f8% m15%).

Alas, we are not presently touring through virgin terrain—virgin terrain . . . get it? Everything we find here is consistent with other studies on the subject of dominance and submission. In general, both men and women prefer to fantasize about female submission and male dominance, however, the significant minority of men who fantasize about submissive males and dominant females dwarfs the number of females who find the idea of submissive males and dominant females arousing.

No need for your eyes to linger too long on that flock of kneeling submissives in the diorama at left—take a look over here at this display of sadomasochism, which 18% of both our male and female respondents find arousing and consume in erotic material. Interest in sadomasochism does not seem to be gendered, even when you consider psychological sadomasochism, which involves, for instance, an individual being forced to do something “evil” against their will (if you were wondering, psychological sadomasochism is found arousing by our survey population at a rate of 11% among both men and women).

Our data even shows this gender equality covers various “directions” of violence: Male-on-female violence (f9% m7%), female-on-female violence (f5% m5%), female-on-male violence (f6% m6%), and male-on-male violence (m3% f1%). In this case, our data does not correlate with the findings of other studies on the subject. Other research we have reviewed suggests that women get much more turned on by male-on-female violence, whereas our data suggests women are only just slightly more turned on by it. At first, we assumed this was just a data dredging issue that we were going to see whenever we attempted to parse out gender-based preference for fairly rare kinks, but in this case, the consistency of the non-gendered pattern of arousal from violence is intriguing in that it could indicate something about the underlying neurological mechanisms that lead violence to be arousing to some individuals. It is fascinating that both females and males are far more likely to be aroused by violence when a female is in some way involved (neither males nor females are turned on much by male-on-male violence) and that both females and males find male-on-female violence arousing at higher rates than any other category of violence directionality.

This is the type of stuff we love to dig into. Why would someone get turned on by violence? In most cases, violence will not aid reproduction or keep offspring alive and the most arousing violence pattern, male on female, is the most demonized in our society (think the societal cliché of spousal abuse) while the least arousing violent configuration, male on male, is glorified (think boxing). We just adore digging into these types of questions and have a lot of fun with them in our chapter on “The Impact of Gender Differences on Human Sexuality” on 186, but for now, back to the tour.

Baby Making

Speaking of fairly rare kinks and equal interest from men and women alike: Both men and women fantasize about someone getting pregnant at the same rate: 10%. You may be a little surprised at this low percentage given that that, well, REPRODUCTION IS THE ENTIRE BIOLOGICAL PURPOSE OF SEX. Oddly, more people are turned on by seeing a woman cry (f14% m13%) than impregnation. That’s friggin’ insane!

Were Simone to guess why impregnation fantasies are so relatively unpopular when contrasted against the evolutionary motivation behind them, she would posit that this lackluster interest reflects a systematic campaign waged from childhood in Western culture. A broad range of educational programs seems hell-bent on convincing people that babies equate the end of freedom, fun, and financial stability. Obviously, such campaigns were created with good intentions, to scare people out of teen pregnancy, but their wider effect is the societal consensus that fun stops when kids start. These campaigns may be inadvertently contributing to a disastrous slew of consequences, including the current demographic collapse—but that is a subject for a different book.

Malcolm disagrees with Simone on this one. He points to evidence (covered earlier in this book) suggesting that socialization of arousal patterns is fairly rare in humans. Malcolm instead posits that we may be thinking about arousal incorrectly in this instance. Arousal is just one brain reward mechanism associated with all sorts of stimuli evolution wanted to reward. We only associate arousal more closely with reproduction than happiness or fulfillment because arousal is the emotional reward mechanism most closely tied to the actual act of sex. This creates the illusion in our mental heuristics that arousal is the “baby making” reward mechanism.

Happiness, sadness, and all other emotional outputs share responsibility in guiding our reactions to stimuli in a manner that boosts our odds of having as many surviving offspring as possible. Arousal is but one of many tools in a diverse toolkit evolution leverages to achieve this task. The outputs of fulfilment and love are the two more frequently used reward mechanisms to encourage impregnation. It would make sense for evolution to more heavily leverage love and fulfillment to motivate baby making (over arousal), as they encourage longer-term behavior patterns whereas arousal appears to be better at guiding short-term behavior patterns (and specifically behavior patterns that encourage an individual to do something one would otherwise find off-putting—like putting slime-generating Dongle A into slime-generating Port B).

From Housewives to Crying

Now that your guides are done bickering, enjoy the soothing breeze while we speed up to quickly pass by a few of these remaining dioramas. Our data on the character types included in the erotic fantasies is sadly not that interesting; however, a few points do stand out: Both the men and women we polled reported consuming fantasies featuring slutty^[65] participants (“slutty” being defined in our study as someone whose portrayal is aggressively promiscuous) at higher rates than any other trope (f31% m50%). So, to our scantily clad guest suggestively rubbing her breasts in the center row: You just keep doing you. Also interesting: Neither men nor women reported many fantasies involving muscular individuals of their own gender (f1% m7%), and about half of males reported fantasizing about a housewife.

Over here we have a fun finding that strongly aligns with the research already out there: Both men and women who took our study reported consuming a non-trivial amount of erotic material that features females crying (f14% m13%), though neither males nor females reported consuming much material featuring crying men (f4% m1%). Also, while cutting and piercing is a rare kink, females find it arousing at four times the rate of men, f4% m1%. This aligns with other research, which generally shows women to be more aroused by bodily harm than men.

At this point, it should be clear to our passengers that common narratives framing chauvinistic, self-centered men as the sole drivers in markets for erotic material featuring females suffering (or otherwise being degraded) are off base. In the subchapter “Inconvenient Things that Arouse Females”on page 186, we break this stuff down in more detail, because, boy howdy, it sure is fun to see societal narratives challenged by data!

Speaking of common misconceptions, you are probably beginning to notice that narratives suggesting that mostly women drive demand for powerful female subjects in erotic material are inaccurate. There is definitely a demand for powerful women in erotic material—however it is coming predominantly from men. Finally, the narrative that most people are sexually “vanilla” and only a small handful of perverts consume all the weird porn and “out there” romance novels is complete bunk. If you are not even sometimes aroused by weird and disturbing things, you are in the vast minority.

Grab Bag of Kinks

Alright folks, enough pontificating. If you thought those mythical dioramas were a thrill, you’ll adore what’s coming up next: We’re entering some pretty trippy country. Here we are going to explore some wackier sources of arousal, but before we do, let’s pull some statistical yardsticks to help you more easily contextualize how many people we are talking about when we say something like: “3% of Americans.”

Religious populations in the US:

Jews: 2.1%
Muslims: 0.8%
Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons): 1.8%
Catholics: 23%
No Religion: 18%
Protestants: 50%

Ethnicities in the US:

Asian American: 4.8%
Native Americans: 1%
Black: 12.6%
White: 72.4%
Hispanic 16.3%

States:

Pennsylvania: 3.9%
NYC: 5.9%
Alaska: 0.2%
New Jersey: 2.75%
Connecticut: 1%
Massachusetts: 2.9%

Now that we have our mental yardsticks at the ready, let’s get moving again!

We can see some of you are looking a little alarmed at the scenes we are passing by at present, so we’ll drive through the menagerie of weirdness quickly:

Oops! Sorry for that unexpected couple of bumps, folks. Did we just run someone over? At any rate, people dying (aka snuff) reportedly arouses 4% of our gentlemen respondents and 3% of our lady respondents. That’s right: The population of Pennsylvania, the United States’ sixth most populous state, is dwarfed by the number of Americans who feel sexually aroused when they see someone die. Humans are weird—but we suppose that’s why we can’t look away until we understand their wacky arousal patterns.
Note the diorama depicting a man being implanted with a baby to your right, (exemplifying a concept known as MPreg) that reportedly arouses 2% of our female survey respondents—though none of our male respondents. This kink is unique in how heavily gendered it is, appearing almost exclusively in females. MPreg is extremely narratively driven, found predominantly in erotic fanfiction and short erotic stories and absent almost everywhere else.
See that terrifying parasitic alien pumping eggs into that woman? That’s called oviposition and 3% of our female respondents found it arousing (versus only 1% of males). More specifically, oviposition is the act of pumping eggs inside someone and this kink is common enough that you can buy an “ovipositor” and specialized fake eggs for sex play. How common is that? More American women are into oviposition than live in the state of New Jersey.
Speaking of creepy crawlers, women and men who took our study reported finding insects sexually arousing at fairly equal (albeit low) rates (f1% m1%). This is in contrast with other research, which suggests that erotic interest in creepy crawlers leans male.
You may also enjoy a gander at some tentacles up ahead, which our male and female participants found arousing at rates of 5% and 8%, respectively.
If you keep your eyes on the changing state of those folks in the display to the left, you can also witness some life draining taking place—see how they’re aging? Life draining reportedly arouses 2% and 3% of our survey’s male and female respondents, respectively.
You’ll notice a mix of magical beings and humanoids/humans eating people to your right (porn depicting such scenes is commonly referred to as vore). Such scenarios reportedly titillate 2% and 3% of our female and male respondents, respectively. Yup, there are more Americans turned on by watching a person be eaten then there are Muslim and Mormon Americans combined. That blows our minds—and we hope is just a little unexpected.
Speaking of death, 1% and 2% of our female and male respondents reported finding necrophilia arousing. You will notice this is about half the percentage of the population that finds watching someone die arousing. We suppose it’s just more fun to watch people die than it is to play with them once they’re dead—statistically speaking, of course. Oh, and this possible necrophiliac segment of the US population is still larger than the population of Connecticut.
Now, that’s not to say that somewhat immobile and compliant humans aren’t arousing. Of our female and male respondents, 6% and 5% respectively find human dolls arousing. This suggests that there are Americans who are turned on by porn involving a person acting like a doll than there are residents of New York City.
Do we have any animal lovers on board? Oh—no, not that kind; we meant people who actually get turned on by the idea of “making love” to animals. Bestiality reportedly arouses 2% and 6% of our male and female study populations, respectively. Rawr! Oh, but seriously, don’t screw animals, you reprobates. (We get into the stats on this stuff in a more serious context in the “Zoophiles” subchapter on page 109—the percent of people who see no problem in forcing animals to have sex with them is depressingly high.)
We also just passed by a diorama depicting some petplay (roleplay in which one individual acts like another’s pet). Petplay is reportedly arousing to 6% of our gal survey-takers and 3% of the guys. ‘Pony play,’ a subcategory of petplay focused on acting like a pony or a horse, also interested 1% and 2% of female and male respondents respectively.
As we drive out of the fringe zone, feel free to toss some of these complementary Mardi Gras beads at those folks exposing their genitals in public—they love it, as do 5% of our female study participants and 6% of their male counterparts.

Should I Be Scared?

Given some of your horrified expressions, we can tell that we are going to have to take a quick aside here, so you don’t walk away at this point thinking that a sizable chunk of the population is comprised of psycho killers. Despite what urban myths and film plots would have you believe, a piece by Geoffrey O’Brien persuasively argues that commercially distributed snuff is a myth that has been created intentionally by a few films that pretended to be real snuff films as a promotional tactic—specifically the 1976 film Snuff and the 1980s film Cannibal Holocaust.

We are inclined to agree with Mr. O’Brien. There is not and never has been a snuff equivalent to the commercial pedophile industry. In fact, most film clips of real human deaths that are intentionally watched by people are consumed recreationally for their shock value and not to feed some particular form of sexual arousal. This can be seen from interviews of some of the quarter million r/WatchPeopleDie subscribers (a subcommunity of Reddit.com dedicated to videos of real people actually dying). Instead of watching actual humans die, most people who glean arousal from the concept of death appear to receive arousal from three other sources: The first and the most common is from narrative-style pornography (vampire romance novels and the like), the second and also somewhat common is cartoon-drawn pornography, and the third—the most shocking and thankfully rarest—is “crush” pornography.

We like to try to stay open minded, but crush pornography is easily the most messed up thing we have encountered while writing this book. Crush porn involves sexualized women and men stepping on small living animals (like a puppy or a kitten) and slowly crushing them. These videos are clearly created specifically to elicit an arousal response, given the fact that they often use high heels and other sexualized paraphernalia. That said, we need to come back and highlight that most of the people deriving arousal from the concept of death are doing so from cartoons and fictional stories, which is no more morally questionable than deriving any other source of pleasure from watching fictionalized violence and death (e.g., laughing when Tom tortures Jerry or getting excited when an action hero “heroically” guns down a village with automatic firearms in both hands).

In fact, this is a point to dwell on as a reader: More extreme-sounding arousal pathways like snuff, gore, guro, vore, necrophilia, etc., are almost never engaged in through the actual act, but instead through things like novellas, cartoons, and innocuous roleplay. In the case of necrophilia, a common practice involves one consenting partner “playing dead,” artificially lowering their body temperature through ice or something, then lying motionless during intercourse. In the case of vore, in which arousal is gleaned from the idea of eating someone, being eaten, or seeing a person eaten, a person may climb inside an inflatable orca pool toy filled with goo and masturbate (there is a store in Japan called VoreCafe where you can pay for this unique experience).

Therefore, when you hear about someone being aroused by things like gore, vore, necrophilia, snuff, and other disturbing concepts, imagine embarrassing roleplay (no more extreme than the stuff you probably tried in your teens), cartoons (no more gory than a blockbuster movie), and cringy fanfiction (a la 50 Shades of Gray—yes, as we will keep reminding readers, 50 Shades of Gray, one of the bestselling books in history, was originally written as an erotic Twilight fanfiction.)

It is not at all unusual to feel a positive emotional sensation when thinking about someone suffering. When we read articles about people who create videos in which they step on puppies for sexual satisfaction and we see their smug faces, we imagine how good it would feel to choke the life from them. While it may not be a sexual impulse to desire such action, it is a positive emotional impulse being generated from the thought of inflicting severe suffering on another person. While we may feel this impulse, we don’t go out and act on it. Why? Because we’re not crazy.

We imagine almost everyone reading this book at some point in their life has enjoyed a pleasant fantasy involving the suffering of another person. But like us, we are also willing to bet you haven’t acted on it . . . because you aren’t crazy. You don’t just go out and act on every imagined scenario that makes you feel a positive emotion. The same is true for almost everyone who is aroused by these types of things. You don’t need to worry about a person just because the idea of hurting someone creates a positive emotional impulse in their mind. This is something almost all humans deal with successfully—just not in the form of arousal. What you do need to worry about are those who can’t say, “I am not going to inflict suffering on someone just because it will make me feel satisfied” (the crazy people).

This kind of comparison may also help you understand why individuals who are turned on by the concept of death don’t watch real snuff videos depicting people actually dying and instead focus on cartoons and fanfiction. As much as we feel an impulse to hurt puppy crushers, we would feel horrible actually doing so in the real world. We would feel horrible even watching a video of a puppy-stomping human being severely injured. The concept of people suffering for their actions is what is generating the positive emotions in us—actually watching it happen to a real person would be horrifying.

So, while we can’t empathize with what it feels like to be aroused by severe harm coming to a person, we can understand what it feels like to get a positive emotion from such a concept. Through that, we can understand how a concept can create a strong positive emotional impulse in someone’s brain without that person feeling a drive to recreate that concept in real life. Hopefully trying a similar thought experiment yourself will help you understand how an individual could be simultaneously aroused by the concept of someone dying and repulsed by the idea of watching a real person die.

Interpersonal Dynamics

You will notice a fascinating contrast between rates of the less common, “classic kink” stuff above with the rate of arousal patterns tied to social interactions between people. People appear to be far more likely to have an arousal reaction in response to social dynamics than something like tentacles.

Non-trivial proportions of our study respondents reported finding more socially driven dynamics arousing, such as:

Humiliation (f15% m20%)
Inflicting physical pain (f13% m17%)
Mind control (f11% m14%)
The idea of someone who is ‘disposable’ (f8% m8%)
Dehumanization (f11% m13%)
Betrayal (f11% m8%)
Slavery (f16% m22%).

These numbers are insanely high when put in the context of the portion of the population they represent. As we’ve discussed in the main body of this book, it seems as though the part of our brain that yields arousal tied to sex is intertwined with parts of our brains that process certain types of social interactions or the brain is using concepts as proxies for dominance rituals which in turn were motivated by a mating display system. This, in turn, causes some to feel arousal in response to certain social interactions.

We also see surprisingly high rates of consumption of erotic material focused around what people are wearing, specifically uniforms (f14% m17%) and latex or PVC (f7% m13%).

Japanese Imports

Ah—observe: Another exhibit imported from Japan. Futa, short for futanari, is a type of pornography with Japanese origins featuring individuals who have female figures and breasts—but also a penis. Our data shows drawn futa arouses 7% and 8% of our male and female study populations respectively (live action titillating each gender at a smaller rate of 5% each). Note: Here we need to be super clear that, while sometimes a transitioning individual will act in porn marketed in the futanari genre (as they may have both a penis and breasts), those who consume futanari porn do not have a high overlap with those who consume trans porn.

Futa shares much in common with tentacle porn and furry porn. All three genres boast vast treasure troves of online content, are heavily influenced by Japanese porn culture, have a lot of crossover in their consumers, appear at around the ~6% level, and are fairly gender neutral in who consumes them—despite societal stereotypes. To put them in context: The percent of Americans that enjoy tentacle porn, futa, and/or furry porn and regularly consume them each (individually) is roughly equal in size to the population of the smallest 15 US states combined (approximately 6%).

Let’s spice up this tour with a brief history lesson: Why does tentacle porn come from Japan? Erotic art involving tentacles can be seen historically in Japan in works like the 1814 famous print, The Fishman’s Wife, which depicts a scene from the legend of Tamatori in which the wife of a fisherman is having a consensual sexual interaction with octopus minions of the Dragon King. Though now seen as classically Japanese, such erotic art was not wholly unique to Japanese culture. It became disproportionately popular in Japan due to censorship of genitals starting as far back as the Meiji period. Depiction of tentacles—instead of genitals—presented a convenient loophole and enabled erotic artists to circumvent censorship rules. Finally, manga (Japanese comics) was already common in Japan when contrasted with other narrative industries due to a complex set of cultural circumstances, meaning drawn porn was already more likely to exist. Given these factors, kinks that lean on physically impossible things that can only be depicted in a drawn medium will often appear in Japan before other countries.

We hope our riders are enjoying themselves as we pull up to this diorama featuring a busty lady with a skinned head and maggots coming out of her eyes delicately holding an exquisitely folded origami swan—made, of course, from her own scalp. She is our liaison from the Guro porn community, which is reportedly enjoyed by 2% of our female study population and 3% of the gentlemen.

Guro has its roots in a 1930s artistic movement in Japan that has blossomed into what can only be described as the most “hardcore” form of wacky, extreme pornography. Imagine the “nightmare fuel” of porn, things that would turn on people if breaking social norms and taboos was actually as arousing as it is portrayed to be in pop culture (breaking social taboos does not actually arouse a large portion of the population, as we discussed in the subchapter: “Social Taboos and Rule Breaking” on page 183).

Seriously though, unless you suspect it might be your thing, don’t look up Guro porn—and especially don’t do it while considering that there are about as many Americans who consume and enjoy this type of pornography as there are residents of New York City (2.6% of the population).

This fantastical and bizarre erotic expression appears (at least in our data) to be more arousing than more traditional gore, which was of interest to none of our female survey respondents and only 2% of our male population. Gore is similar to Guro, but it takes a somewhat toned down, less fantastical approach to extreme violence. Also, unlike Guro, which is very much a Japanese cultural import, Gore developed independently as a genre and is less attributable to any single point of regional origin. To be more specific on the difference between these categories:

Gore = Arousal triggered by extreme violence and suffering
Guro = Arousal triggered by your own shocked reaction to a difficult to emotionally process image.

Arousing Practices

For those of you feeling a little gross after all the dismembered and rotting corpses in the latest two dioramas we passed, remember that feeling dirty is arousing to a fairly large part of the population (f10% m11%). If you’re ready for us to turn things down about a hundred notches, consider that rope bondage is a shockingly common wellspring of arousal, with 23% of our male and female survey populations alike reporting consumption of erotic material focused on it. Look to your left; now look to your right. If there were passengers on both sides of you, there is a 41% chance that one of them is into rope bondage.

Ma’am—ma’am—why are you exiting the vehicle? Oh my . . . well ladies and gentlemen, she appears to have taken a b-line for the very muscular and tall janitor attending to the rope bondage diorama. Look at ‘em go. Given the fact that her husband here seems to be . . . oddly OK with the situation, we figure now is a great time to discuss our study’s findings on cuckolding—and those who feel aroused by a partner having sex with someone else.

Cuckolding is a super common kink contrasted with the genetic pressures against it. A robust 11% and 17% of our female and male respondents respectively find it arousing. What is weirder is that arousal in response to cuckolding skews male instead of female, despite males having the most to lose from the act from a genetic perspective (cuckolding likely skews male because it is the product of an inverse pathway, and inverse pathways skew male—see the “Emotional Connections to People” subchapter starting on page 133 for a more detailed discussion of cuckolding). While cuckolding is a predominantly male fantasy, females actually slightly outrank males in regard to fantasies focused around the infidelity of a married individual (f21% m19%).

Before you start wondering how many of your peers actually engage in this practice, bear in mind that the number of individuals who actually take part in cuckolding (f4% and m1%) is far lower than the number reportedly aroused by it (f11% m17%). Cuckolding is one of those topics that is super interesting to us, as it belies a surface level understanding of arousal patterns (that arousal patterns are meant to maximize the number of kids you have) and thus is a concept we frequently revisit.

Seeing how many of you (and not just this lady’s husband) appear to enjoy this little scene, it might not surprise you in the least that voyeurism presented broad-based appeal among study respondents, arousing 23% and 35% of our male and female respondents respectively.

While we’re on the subject of voyeurism, note that while more of our male study participants have participated in watching someone else have sex in person (f11% to m16%), women have participated in being watched at about the same rate as men (f18% to m17%). We suppose this makes sense, as we presume the most common dynamic here is a heterosexual couple being watched by a male.

Trans Erotic Art

Now for a stop on our tour that is too culturally sensitive to quip about: Our data indicate porn in which an individual is explicitly trans enjoys fairly high consumption rates (f10% m9%). To put that in context, studies indicate that trans individuals may make up between 0.6% and 6.8% of the US population.

Like almost all expressions of an LGBT identity, the population that sexualizes trans people far outnumbers the population that identifies with that expression. You see the same thing with both gay male porn and lesbian porn: The population that likes watching gays in porn is also much larger than the gay population—but more on that shortly.

Roleplay & Fantasy Scenarios

As we roll past the roleplay-themed dioramas, a quick shout out to all the passengers roleplaying as parents on board—you’re the real stars, here. People seem to like roleplay fantasies starring opposite-gender parents. Men prefer mother roleplay (f4% m15%), women prefer father roleplay (f8% m7%), and a decent proportion of the population we polled (f7% m6%) actually carries out child-parent roleplay fantasies regularly during sex.^[66]

You might be thinking those roleplay numbers for father roleplay look pretty gender neutral, but we can modulate that by pointing out that across the board, men like family themed roleplay much more than their female counterparts. For example, 17% of men taking our survey reported being aroused by sibling roleplay, whereas the theme reportedly interests a mere 5% of our female respondents. When that is considered, females are unusually turned on by father-daughter roleplay.

Let’s enter the realm of rule 63. Rule 63 is one of the great rules of online culture that claims everyone has an opposite-gendered counterpart in the world of eroticism. In the real world, 6% and 3% of our female and male study population fantasize about themselves as another gender for the purposes of arousal. (We should clarify that an individual doing this is not necessarily trans or gender fluid, though doing this does not exclude an individual from being trans or gender fluid.)

Why, ladies and gentlemen, do you think females fantasize about opposite-gender versions of themselves more than men? From what we gathered in our data, it appears to be that females in general fantasize about things that require imagination to conjure more than males do. For example, a respectable 39% of our female study respondents reported fantasizing about themselves, whereas only 23% of our male respondents reported doing the same. Honestly, it surprises us this isn’t more common: 61% and 77% of our female and male study respondents respectively do not choose to star in their own sexual fantasies.

As we are on the incessantly charming subject of ourselves, you may also be interested to learn that 27% and 14% of our female and male subjects respectively reported indulging in thoughts of being sexually irresistible and f18% and m15% reported dabbling in thoughts of being sexually desirable to a large number of strangers. It is likely these two fantasies that lead some to post sexually explicit photos of themselves online—a practice that can appear confusing to those who lack this arousal impulse.

The Wonderland of Sex: An Exploration of Sexuality in Practice

Beep beep, perverts: Listen up. We are about to depart from our theoretically focused Hall of Erotic Material and enter into our practically focused, live-action Wonderland of Sex. During this mostly outdoors portion of our tour, you will be occasionally invited to exit the vehicle and walk around; however, be sure to only do so at our instruction, for this is a world of real people and real actions.

In addition to asking our study participants to tell us about their turn ons and the arousing material they consume, we asked them which sex acts they had actually, personally tried more than once. The idea was that someone would probably need to like something a least a little to have done it multiple times, and by getting data on such activities, we can better understand human sexuality beyond the bounds of erotic material consumption.

BDSM Land

We have a lot of ground to cover and are starting out in a splendidly colorful and popular place: BDSM Land.

	F	M
BDSM as the sub	27%	11%
BDSM as the dom	11%	19%
Caregiver and Little as Little includes Daddy Dom / Little Girl	7%	1%
Caregiver and Little as Caregiver includes Daddy Dom / Little Girl	3%	5%
BDSM as “service sub”	10%	2%
BDSM as dom to “service sub”	2%	4%
BDSM as a “brat”	9%	1%
BDSM as a dom to a “brat”	3%	2%
BDSM as a “primal” sub	3%	0%
BDSM as a “primal” dom	2%	1%
Petplay/ponyplay I have acted like an animal	3%	0%
Petplay/ponyplay I have acted like the owner/trainer/handler of my partner	2%	2%
Rope bondage as rope bottom	10%	3%
Rope bondage as rigger top	7%	15%
Impact play as the bottom being hit by a partner	15%	6%
Impact play as the top physically hitting a partner	4%	11%
Sadomasochism as the masochist	7%	7%
Sadomasochism as the sadist	2%	6%
BDSM involving no overtly sexual interaction	3%	7%
Knifeplay	5%	2%
Cutting or piercing	3%	2%
Bloodplay	3%	0%
Edgeplay	7%	4%
Sexual roleplay pretending to be something you are not during sex	25%	33%
Roleplaying as another gender during sex	5%	2%
Cross-dressing not as part of sex	1%	3%
Cross-dressing as part of sex	3%	2%
Watching someone else have sex in person	11%	16%
Being watched having sex in person	18%	17%
Cuckolding as the cuckold cuckqueen	4%	1%
Cuckolding as the hotwife hothusband	3%	0%
Cuckolding as the bull cuckcake	0%	1%
Biting	29%	22%
Being bitten	25%	29%
Scratching	26%	11%
Being scratched	19%	24%
Pegging	7%	4%
Anal receiving	42%	5%
Anal giving	10%	46%

The first thing you might notice in BDSM Land is (1) its sizable population and (2) some clear gendered preferences exist within it. Our stats suggest that women prefer to participate as the sub at more than double the rate of men (f27% m11%), and males prefer to be the dom at almost double the rate of females (f11% m19%). Keep in mind that as of this book’s creation, 5.6% of Americans are Asian Americans, so a random American is about twice as likely to participate in BDSM as they are to be an Asian American.

BDSM Land’s Vibrant and Diverse Neighborhoods

Observe the colorful and varied neighborhoods and enclaves as we drive through this populous land—there are many popular dynamics people incorporate into BDSM play. Please take a bingo sheet and pass it on: As we make a broad circuit through the heart of BDSM Land, see if you can spot any the following dynamics at play:

Caregiver and Little: This form of BDSM involves one party acting childlike and the other behaving like an adult authority figure.
Daddy Dom / Little Girl: By far the most common type of caregiver and little BDSM, this dynamic entails one participant assuming the role of the “daddy” while the other becomes his “little girl.”
Service Submission: This type of BDSM involves one participant gaining sexual gratification by being useful to another—either by providing resources or doing tasks for them (such as household chores).
Brats: A brat in BDSM contexts involves a sub who extracts sexual gratification from repeatedly challenging their dom from a submissive position, leading them to act like a “brat.”
Primal: This manifestation of BDSM involves acting “animalistic” and being focused on “the hunt,” with the dom often being called the “predator” and the sub the “prey.”
Pet Play: Petplay is a form of BDSM in which the sub roleplays as the dom’s pet. People most commonly roleplay as a cat, dog, or horse.
Rope Play: This form of BDSM revolves around the use of ropes (applied by a “rigger”) to constrain a sub.

If we look at the stats associated with subcategories of BDSM, we observe a trend in which almost all submissive participants lean female. While dominant participants lean male, there is still a fairly equal gender split among doms. This gets interesting considering that men are much more likely to be BDSM doms when practicing generic BDSM, whereas men and women are equally likely to play the dom when practicing “subgenres” of BDSM.

Why might this be happening? No spoilers!

The increase we observe in female sub participation in more obscure/specific BDSM subsets suggests that many of the couples in these “deep dive” BDSM communities are comprised of a female dom and female sub. This could make sense given that a significant factor differentiating these communities from mainstream BDSM is their additional narrative elements and the apparent female tendency to consume narrative-heavy erotic material (remember that giant library of romance novels and fanfiction we strolled through at the beginning of our tour?).

Hurtsville

Once BDSM comes to involve physical pain, these dynamics break down. In such instances, we see higher rates of men preferring to be the sub, creating gender equity in participation. With impact play, this is less pronounced, with f15% m16% reportedly practicing being hit by their partner during sex / erotic play and f4% m6% practicing hitting a partner during sexy times. The difference is more pronounced with sadomasochism in general, with 7% of both male and female respondents dabbling in masochism, whereas three times as many of our male respondents (6%) have experimented more than twice with sadism (versus 2% of female respondents).

These results challenge one of our own theories in which—at least until running this study—we had been very confident: That arousal through masochism leverages the neurological arousal pathways involved in submission. If this were the case, we would see a similar gender breakdown between the expression of masochism and submission. In other words, if submission and masochism are just two ways of igniting the same general neural pathway, it would be unlikely that one of the two interests would be disproportionately popular among women while the other wasn’t—unless there were some underlying societal drive pushing men to feel more comfortable with arousal coming from being hurt than arousal coming from being submissive. Perhaps stigma against being a submissive male is what accounts for this discrepancy and while this differentiation in arousal patterns does exist, males are embarrassed to indulge in it. Alas, ladies and gentlemen, we lack the funds at this time to properly test that theory.

By this point, you will have noticed that subs in BDSM Land outnumber doms at a rate of something like three to one. Intrepid guests, we are pleased to report that humans vastly prefer being submissive to being dominant. For those who embarked this tour in an effort to pick up some tips on securing sex more easily, you may benefit from leveraging the insatiable (and presently poorly met) market demand caused by the apparent dearth of doms: Getting sex if you become a high-quality dom is easier than securing it as a sub or neutral. Doms, on average, must have many more sexual partners than subs for these stats to be possible.

Danger Drive

As we turn down Danger Drive, you will notice an increasingly high density of female denizens. We’ve found that more violent forms of BDSM are preferred by women. In fact, the only BDSM subcategory we found to be preferred more by men involves BDSM without any sexual interaction at all (m7% f3%). Violent variations on BDSM preferred by women include knife play (f5% m2%—this is a form of BDSM that uses knives), cutting and piercing, bloodplay (f3% m0%—this is BDSM focused around drawing blood from a partner), and edgeplay (f7% m5%—this BDSM is considered risky by the mainstream BDSM community—typically because it is genuinely dangerous).

Why do we see this? We suspect for two reasons:

A BDSM scene involving extreme violence is less likely to be focused on ending in an orgasm and thus would be less alluring to men given how they relate to sex.
These findings line up with the existing research on sexuality, which indicates that females are far more likely to be sexually aroused by violence—and specifically violence against themselves or other women—when contrasted with males.

Our findings, however, deviate from the mainstream (women being more into violence) in a few areas. Specifically, they suggest that:

Men are more into sadomasochism (f2% m6%)
Women only prefer consuming erotic material depicting male-on-female violence by a narrow margin of 9% to 7%
Males preferred extreme violence, such as gore (f0% m2%), vore (f2% m3%), and guro (f2% m3%)

Why might interest in violence appear to be gender neutral in some scenarios, but much more arousing to women in others? We theorize there is a fairly simple explanation: That men and women are masochists at equal rates, but the impulse often burns “hotter” in women. The cases in which the gender breakdown is equal or leans male are “dilettante-ish” cases—like porn consumption or a participant expressing an interest in generic masochism. Sexually violent indulgences that demonstrate a more intense interest, such as activities like knife play or edgeplay (activities that may not necessarily be seen as safe, sane, and consensual), lean female. This theory would also explain other research showing the impulse to be heavily gendered (toward females), as said research is focused on things like: “Out of the total number of people who watched X video, how many were female?” and “How many Google searches for Y phrase were conducted by females?” Even if the arousal pathway manifests in equal rates among men and women, women would be more likely to go out of their way to search for violent erotic material, watch multiple videos, or conduct lots of searches on the topic if they felt the impulse more strongly.

It may also be that our survey population or study is just totally off. We do not know.

Character Court

As we pull onto Character Court, feel free to unbuckle your seatbelts, stand up, and reach for one of the many masks and costumes available in our overhead storage bins. It’s time to talk roleplay.

Roleplay (acting as someone/something you are not) turned out to be quite a common practice among our survey population. There are nearly as many US citizens who engage in roleplay as there are US citizens with pet cats (29%), as a robust f23% and m33% of our respondents have engaged in roleplay in a sexual context more than once.

Women prefer to roleplay as another gender at more than twice the rate as men (f5% m2%)—though our data also indicates that men prefer cross-dressing not as part of sex at three times the rate of females (m3% f1%). All that said, when sex is involved, the female preference remains (f3% m2%). This interesting flip of the data is actually in line with the existing research, which has consistently found gender display impulses that are not intrinsically tied to sex or arousal pathways to more commonly manifest among males.

Tooth & Nail Avenue

Please keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle as we make our way to the outer gates of BDSM Land; the denizens on this particular street bite. In terms of more generic sexual practices, biting is both very common and seems to be practiced by women at slightly higher rates than men, with biters trending female (f29% m22%) and bitten parties trending slightly male (f25% m29%). The same can be said of scratching, with females inflicting the majority of the damage. Specifically, 26% of our female respondents reported having scratched their partners during sex more than once (in contrast to 11% of male respondents) and 24% of our male population reported being scratched more than once during sex (in contrast to 19% of female respondents).

Mount Ass

You will be amused to see that we are exiting BDSM Land through Mount Ass. As we pass through its cavernous Anal Sphincter Tunnel, we find it appropriate to ask: Do we have any fans of anal on board? If so, you are in good company. A sizable 42% of women have repeatedly tried receiving anal and 46% of men have given anal more than once. Those numbers are way higher than we anticipated. We are fascinated by how well the results align with women and men who consume erotic materials in which anal is practiced (f40% m56%). As for the inverse: 10% of

women have given anal and 5% of men have received it (with 7% of female respondents and 4% of male respondents engaging in this activity through pegging, which involves a woman using a strap on to give anal).

Now let’s take a quick gander at the frequency of the supposed cornerstone emotions of romantic relationships: Love, jealousy, sex, and lust.

Crazy Country: The Land of Love, Jealousy, Sex, & Lust

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to Crazy Country, a hazy wasteland over which colorful clouds of love, lust, and jealousy gently waft. Should you not want to be overcome by these emotions as we drive through these heady thunderheads, we recommend you grab one of the various gas masks available and ensure a proper seal. Move quickly, folks—this pink cloud up ahead represents love.

Are you currently in love with someone?
	F	M
Yes	61%	49%
No	31%	43%
Unsure	7%	7%

Love: More Common Than You Would Think

What shocked us about these responses is just how common it is for an individual to report being in love. Our survey suggests that basically about half of men—and well over half of women—are in love at any given time. If this data is generalizable, love is not an unusual emotion; it is basically the norm of human existence.

Jealousy: Not Such a Big Deal

We decided to dig in on some other relationship-related emotions, so in addition to looking at arousal, we took a quick peek at jealousy patterns as well. Jealousy is not as common as vindictive country songs about jilted lovers might lead you to believe.

Do you feel intense jealousy in relation to your sexual partners?
	F	M
1 (Very Little Jealousy)	26%	39%
2 (Little Jealousy)	26%	28%
3 (Some Jealousy)	23%	19%
4 (Quite Jealous)	16%	11%
5 (Intense Jealousy)	9%	3%

While it appears that women are slightly more jealous than men, both men and women taking our survey reported relatively low levels of jealousy. This paints a rosy picture, no? Love abounds, and jealousy . . . well, it’s not that much of an issue.

At least you, dear guests, would likely see this picture as rosy. It should be clear by now that we see love as one of the most toxic of human emotions given the effects it has on one’s ability to make evidence-based decisions that benefit one’s long term goals and core values (we had quite a crisis when trying to decide whether or not to get married, fearing our decision might be being influenced by our “love” for each other). We frankly find this stretch of the tour deeply unsettling.

Sex & Lust: Overrated?

Sex and lust lie somewhere in the middle between love and jealousy—not terribly uncommon, but not as free flowing as some may believe.

How frequently do you have sex?
	F	M
Multiple times most days	1%	2%
Around one time a day	7%	4%
Around three times a week	16%	30%
Around once a week	27%	15%
Around twice a month	11%	7%
A few times a year	16%	14%
Almost never	22%	27%

A hearty 38% of our female respondents and 39% of the gentlemen either almost never have sex or have sex just a few times a year. We do not find these percentages to be particularly surprising, but an utterly absent sex life doesn’t seem so depressing when one considers that about two out of every five people are in the same boat.

What about masturbation? Don’t worry, ladies and gentlemen, we asked.

How frequently do you masturbate?
	F	M
Multiple times most days	1%	2%
Around one time a day	10%	24%
Around three times a week	16%	44%
Around once a week	22%	20%
Around twice a month	28%	5%
A few times a year	9%	2%
Almost never	14%	3%

The vast majority of men taking our survey—70%—reported masturbating more than three times a week, while the ladies’ reported masturbation frequency is all over the place, with 77% reportedly masturbating more than twice a month.

While this data is far from groundbreaking, it does dispel the myth—common among some sexually inexperienced individuals—that once someone is in love, they stop masturbating. Our data showed individuals who feel they are in love report masturbating at slightly lower rates, but they certainly don’t stop. This slowing makes sense as love decreases testosterone production in males, which lowers overall sex drive.

Rank your libido from 1 to 5, with 1 indicating no interest in sex at all.
	F	M
1 (Very Low Libido)	1%	3%
2 (Low Libido)	22%	11%
3 (Average Libido)	33%	26%
4 (High Libido)	30%	30%
5 (Very High Libido)	14%	30%

What about libido? Among our respondents, men on average self-assess themselves as having higher libidos than women (perhaps because for women, sex drive is more responsive and driven by contextual cues), but the difference in self-assessment is not as extreme as social tropes would lead you to believe.

How do you feel about your sexuality?
	F	M
1 (Very conflicted)	0%	2%
2 (Uncertain)	5%	1%
3 (Still figuring some things out)	3%	2%
4 (Certain)	32%	21%
5 (Very certain)	59%	74%

While our female respondents appear to feel slightly more conflicted in their sexuality than their male counterparts, both groups on the whole are fairly certain about their sexuality, with only 5% of men and 8% of women feeling as though there are still things for them to work out.

You will be relieved to know that we are now leaving this hazy tundra of data not explicitly tied to arousal and are returning to the Magical Forest of Turn Ons and Turn Offs.

The Magical Forest of Turn Ons and Turn Offs

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the wondrous territory of arousal spectra. Here we dig into things that cause an arousal response in some while inspiring a disgust/aversion response in others.

The following chart indicates the reaction a person most identifies with the following concepts, sex acts, smells, and images.

-2 Indicates they found a concept very aversive/disgusting
-1 Indicates they found a concept aversive/disgusting
0 Indicates they had no response to a concept
1 Indicates they found a concept arousing
2 Indicates they found a concept very arousing

Note: These questions had clarifying text and full sentences associated with them that were removed in this presentation to make the chart easier to read.

	Female					Male
	-2	-1	0	1	2	-2	-1	0	1	2%
Partner acting masculine	7%	1%	21%	15%	56%	60%	22%	9%	5%	3%
Partner acting feminine	60%	13%	16%	3%	7%	1%	3%	3%	31%	62%
Partner being muscular	7%	3%	25%	31%	34%	38%	36%	12%	13%	2%
The thought of roleplaying being raped	56%	11%	11%	8%	14%	67%	12%	8%	5%	7%
The thought of actually being raped	77%	8%	7%	3%	5%	84%	4%	5%	5%	1%
The thought of roleplaying raping someone else	81%	5%	4%	5%	3%	59%	14%	11%	8%	8%
The thought of actually raping someone else	93%	1%	2%	1%	2%	83%	4%	5%	4%	3%
The thought of being owned by someone	53%	11%	9%	19%	9%	72%	12%	6%	7%	3%
The thought of owning someone	70%	12%	5%	7%	5%	59%	11%	15%	6%	9%
Watching my partner have sex with someone else	71%	10%	4%	8%	7%	67%	12%	8%	9%	3%
The idea of losing agency (e.g., being hypnotized, mind controlled, or otherwise mentally dominated)	64%	5%	14%	10%	7%	66%	16%	9%	5%	3%
Pretending that my partner is related to me	79%	9%	4%	8%	0%	63%	17%	7%	6%	6%
The thought of sex with an actual relative	92%	2%	4%	1%	0%	81%	9%	2%	1%	6%
The smells associated with sex	20%	26%	23%	20%	11%	14%	21%	32%	19%	15%
The naked male form	5%	5%	13%	32%	45%	59%	24%	7%	4%	6%
The naked female form	15%	21%	23%	21%	21%	1%	0%	2%	7%	90%
The sight of a penis	5%	7%	12%	27%	48%	66%	16%	2%	8%	7%
The sight of a vagina	31%	21%	16%	14%	19%	1%	3%	6%	20%	70%
The sight of breasts	16%	18%	27%	17%	22%	1%	1%	3%	9%	86%
The pregnant female form	56%	23%	17%	4%	0%	46%	27%	18%	7%	2%
The idea of pleasing someone else	6%	4%	17%	32%	41%	2%	8%	13%	34%	42%
The idea of being useful to someone I admire	9%	11%	27%	33%	20%	5%	19%	32%	29%	15%
Acting sexually dominant	15%	21%	23%	31%	11%	4%	16%	20%	34%	26%
Acting sexually submissive	9%	13%	14%	26%	38%	25%	24%	13%	26%	12%
Seeing partner act submissive in a sexual context	26%	21%	26%	15%	12%	5%	3%	22%	42%	28%
Seeing partner act dominant in a sexual context	5%	10%	11%	22%	53%	12%	23%	16%	30%	19%
Being bound or otherwise physically restrained	30%	12%	13%	25%	20%	44%	22%	11%	15%	8%
Physically striking partner during sex	66%	13%	12%	5%	3%	59%	17%	10%	5%	8%
Being physically struck by partner during sex	54%	9%	11%	14%	12%	58%	15%	10%	13%	4%
Being choked during sex	53%	10%	11%	10%	16%	71%	7%	9%	8%	4%
Choking someone during sex	74%	7%	10%	7%	3%	56%	17%	6%	13%	8%
Being talked down to during sex	58%	12%	9%	11%	10%	58%	18%	8%	8%	7%
Talking down to partner during sex	69%	18%	5%	7%	1%	49%	18%	15%	12%	6%

We see the surprise on your faces that things that create an arousal response in one portion of the population caused a disgust/aversion response in another portion of the population for every single stimulus tested. Excellent reaction—this yields a perfect transition into one of our favorite takeaways from this data.

These responses provided us with evidence in favor of a theory of ours discussed in greater detail in the chapter: “Things that Cause Arousal” on page 68. Our theory is that the mental system triggering disgust/aversion is almost certainly running on the same basic “software” as the mental system triggering sexual arousal.

This theory suggests that complete explorations of human sexuality should feature sources of disgust in addition to sources of arousal—that understanding a person’s sexuality is as much about determining what disgusts them as it is about exploring what arouses them.

At any rate, let’s plunge deeper into this mysterious forest and explore the data. Don’t expect any immediate, sudden drops or jump scares as we make our way in: The first few test results are pretty predictable: Men prefer feminine women and women prefer masculine men . . . “Well, THANKS, Captain Obvious.” Right?

But look again—could the plot be thickening behind that thick clump of gnarled trees? The results might seem obvious first glance but are striking in their severity. Let’s look at a simple breakdown:

Females	Partner Acting Feminine
Partner acting Masculine	-2	-1	0	1	2
-2	2%				4%
-1			1%
0	8%	3%	10%
1	7%	3%	2%	2%	1%
2	44%	6%	3%	1%	1%

Males	Partner Acting Feminine
Partner acting Masculine	-2	-1	0	1	2
-2			1%	13%	47%
-1		1%		15%	7%
0		1%	2%	3%	1%
1	1%			1%	3%
2		1%			2%

It is remarkable just how much male and female sexuality mirror each other in their severe disgust reactions to gender displays associated with their own gender and strong arousal reactions to gender displays by the other gender. A hefty 47% of our male respondents rated femininity in a partner as arousing as possible and masculinity as aversive as possible; this is mirrored in responses from our female respondents, with 44% feeling the same way, but with gender expressions flipped.

It is also neat to see that a rare 1% of our male respondents (2% of our female respondents) report both femininity and masculinity to be turn offs. As for those who find both arousing: 6% and 5% of our male and female respondents respectively like it either way—again a near-perfect mirror between genders (this mirroring features frequently in our survey’s results, which has important implications in understanding the neurological pathways at play).

Rape

Again, we must step out of our “tour theming” to discuss a topic that is very sensitive, but which nevertheless represents an important aspect of human sexuality.

We asked about the following two concepts in a row, the second immediately after the first:

The thought of roleplaying being raped
The thought of actually being raped

These topics were presented one after another to make it clear to anyone taking the survey that yes, they had already answered the question about fantasy rape, and that is not what this second question was about. Furthermore, this juxtaposition enabled respondents to think very clearly about the relative allure of each scenario, enabling us to see if people clearly found one scenario more arousing (or aversive) than the other.

A whopping 8% of female respondents and 6% of male respondents reported the thought of actually being raped a turn on (roughly equivalent to the percentage of Americans that own a bird or reptile as a pet, 7%) while an equally breathtaking 22% and 12% of our female and male respondents respectively reported the thought of roleplaying being raped to be a turn on (around the same percentage of people in the US owns both a cat and a dog 17%).

One of the reasons we were so diligent to put these two questions right next to each other is we thought peer-reviewed research on this subject might be over-reporting the number of people who find the thought of actually being raped arousing, and we were excited to disprove those findings. Clearly, we failed on this front; our data is right in line with other studies on this unsetting phenomenon showing arousal from the thought of actually being raped is fairly common. To highlight just how prevalent this arousal pattern is, consider that the population of women in the US that gets turned on by the idea of actually being raped is roughly the size of the female population in the second most populous state, Texas.

Before we charge onward, allow us to emphasize that finding something arousing does not mean you want it to happen to you. A man can look at his friend’s wife and find her visually arousing while still thoroughly not wanting to have sex with her on account of ethics, potential consequences, likely psychological damage, and other complications. A commuter daydreaming on a subway train can look at a fellow train rider and think: “It would be arousing to rape them,” but also internalize that the subject of their fantasy is a real human with real feelings. Said daydreamer doesn’t need to act on literally everything they find arousing.

In addition, it is possible to find the idea of being raped arousing, but to also be fully aware that the arousing experience isn’t even close to the price paid in psychological damage, risk of STDs, PTSD, etc. Keep in mind 3% and 4% of our female and male respondents respectively reported the act of watching a human die to be arousing—and yet we don’t see streets strewn with bodies.

We asked a similar set of questions about raping someone else. Again, these questions were asked in a manner that minimized potential confusion. In our survey, 3% of female respondents and 7% of male respondents reported to find the thought of raping someone arousing, and 8% of the women taking our survey and 16% of their male counterparts claimed to find the thought of roleplaying raping someone arousing. To put this in perspective: There are more men who find the thought of actually raping someone arousing than there are male residents in the nation’s third most populous state, Florida.

While the proportion of male respondents aroused by raping someone else and being raped themselves is approximately equal, the proportion of female respondents aroused by the idea of being raped is well over double the number who are aroused by the idea of raping someone else.

Slave Meadow

Now that we are on to slightly less touchy ground, we will return to our tour theming. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to Slave Meadow—a surprisingly popular destination, believe it or not.

Don’t feel too bad for the men and women in chains to your right—they’re getting quite the sexual thrill here. An eyebrow-raising 21% of women and 10% of men find the thought of being owned by another human arousing, while only 12% of women and 15% of men find the thought of owning someone else arousing. For context, there are more Americans who are aroused by the idea of being owned by someone else than there are Americans who don’t have a car (15%).

One thing we found slightly odd is that the number of people who get turned on by losing their agency is slightly lower than the number who get turned on by being owned by someone else (f17% m8%). We assume this means there are a significant number of people who get turned on by the idea of involuntary slavery—slavery that they attempt to resist. Alternatively, it could just mean that “high concept” ideas like a loss of agency are less arousing than easily to visualize ones like slavery.

Cuck Creek

Let’s dig a little deeper into the actual arousal patterns associated with cuckolding behavior while we pull away from the hazardous territory of Slavery Meadow and cross over Cuck Creek, where you will observe a lineup of men on this bridge intently watching their wives bang other men by the water below.

While we found that 15% of women and 12% of men reported the prospect of watching their partner have sex with someone else to be arousing, the vast majority of both male respondents—67%—and female respondents—71%—ranked this experience as leading to the most extreme aversion reaction possible. It therefore appears to be that while cuckolding is a fairly common sexual predilection, the vast majority of people still find the idea to be highly aversive.

Incest Point

Perched over Cuck Creek, you may observe several pairs of kissing cousins and siblings necking in their cars parked on Incest Point. Our survey data suggests that men find incest more arousing than women. The 8% of women who find incest roleplay arousing is dwarfed by the 12% of men who found the concept titillating, and we see a similar mismatch with 1% of women versus 7% of men reporting actual incest to be arousing. To put this in context: 5.9% of American males live in New York State. That’s right: Our survey data implies that there are more men in the US aroused by the idea of sleeping with one of their current family members than there are men in the state of New York.

Olfactory Valley

OK, OK—we’re really leaving controversial territory now—you have all been so brave—but please put on your protective face masks. Not all of you are going to like the odors wafting in from Olfactory Valley ahead. We’re about to briefly explore the smells associated with sex. Zesty!

It seems very few people are on the same page when it comes to this subject, which is probably why we’re seeing such a rainbow of facial expressions as we drive through this new and fragrant zone of our study’s findings. Every category of arousal and aversion, from extreme to mild, had an almost exactly equal number of adherents when describing how what impulse they associate with the smells of sex and there was not a strong gendered distribution to the answer, though women were slightly more likely to find the smells aversive.

A significant 21% of our survey’s female respondents and 34% of male respondents reported the smells associated with sex to be arousing. Were you able to graph a line from arousal to disgust in males and females, it would be almost a straight line with each gender, which makes it totally unique among arousal pathways.

Were we to venture a guess as to why there is such an even and diverse distribution of reactions to sexy smells, we would suppose that this neural pathway is entirely divorced from all other arousal pathways and has been affected by modern evolutionary pressures in weird ways—either because it is very ancient or just now developing. We do not think socialization or association could explain this broad and even distribution, as arousal in response to sex-associated smells was not tied to a high level of sexual experience; however, it is heavily tied to being a dog person or a cat person, which is beyond weird. More on that later.

Our reactions to smells are just some of many surprising and all-over-the-place sexual reactions people have to various stimuli, leaving us all the more flummoxed at the cut and dry manner in which so many people view sexuality. Consider, for example, that our male survey respondents found that pregnancy makes a woman more attractive at a higher rate than our female respondents did (Men: 9%; Women: 4%).

Mammary Mountain and Phallus Peak

Please remove your masks and get a whiff of something far more groundbreaking (in our minds, at least) than our findings regarding the smells of sex, as we’re about ascend Mammary Mountain and pass by Phallus Peak, enjoying along the way a splendid view into our survey respondents’ reactions to the male and female forms and genitalia. Our survey results do a great job of illustrating how inadequate the “gay” versus “straight” spectrum is at exemplifying a person’s sexuality.

But first—let’s get the conventional interpretation of this out of the way. Typically, “gay” is a method of self-identification for individuals who are more aroused by stimuli they associate with individuals who identify as the same gender as themselves. In 2017, 4.5% of Americans identified as gay. This 4.5% was reported in a Gallup poll and we understand it is a much lower number than most people think, as the same poll showed Americans think that the gay identifying population is 10% to 23%.^{^[67]}

In our survey, 3% of the participants identified as gay and 8.75% identified as bisexual.^[68] Our number is a bit low because we removed trans and non-binary participants from the data set, which identified disproportionately as gay or bisexual. With our survey’s trans and non-binary participants added back in, we are right around the national stats for identifying as gay.

Take a look at the naked people hula hooping to your right. Which of these charming nudists do you find arousing? And what about them is arousing? You might find that there is not a perfect correlation between your supposed position on a gay-straight spectrum, but rather a mixture of things that both turn you on and turn you off about various body parts and figures—this is what our survey respondents demonstrated, at least.

Here are just a few examples of this phenomenon:

10% of males find the naked male form aversive, but find penises to be arousing
Of men who find the naked female form arousing, a whopping 30% find the sight of a vagina actively aversive
32% of women who find the female form arousing simultaneously find vaginas actively aversive
Only 1% of males who find the female form arousing simultaneously find breasts to be a turn off
That said, 15% of women who find the female form arousing find breasts to be a turn off
In general, we found that female attraction to the male form correlates strongly to attraction to penises
While only 16.5% of women who took our survey identified as gay or as the variant of bisexual attracted to at least men and women, a larger 30% of women we surveyed found both vaginas and the naked female form arousing (though, oddly, only 18% of women found both breasts and vaginas arousing)
Though only 6% of men who took our survey identified as gay or the variant of bisexual attracted to at least men and women, 11.4% of our male respondents reported finding both the male form and penises to be arousing
Male arousal in response to breasts seems to correlate with arousal in response to the female form: 87% of our male respondents reported both to be arousing
There is a similar correlation between female arousal in response: If a female survey respondent reported finding the male form to be arousing, it was very likely she would also report finding penises to be arousing, with 71% reporting both to be arousing
It seems to be the case that, in general, if a man finds the male form arousing, he will not find penises to be aversive: Not a single man we surveyed reported to find the male form arousing but the sight of penises aversive
Similarly, not a single woman in our survey group reported vaginas to be arousing and the naked female form to be aversive
7% of our female study population found the naked female form arousing while reporting to be repulsed by the sight of a vagina
6% of our female respondents found breasts arousing, but the vagina aversive
2% of female study-takers found the sight of a vagina arousing, but breasts aversive
36% of the women we polled found both the naked female form and the vagina aversive

In other words, the concept of “gayness” when talked about as a spectrum of gender preference doesn’t map well onto the data, as it requires a “male package” (penises, the naked male form, etc.) of attraction and a “female package” (breasts, vagina, the female form, etc.) of attraction. Instead the way arousal patterns group to male and female bits in the real population is quite different.

To dig a bit deeper:

Keep in mind, only 3% of our participants identified as gay and only 8.75% identified as being the variant of bisexual attracted to at least men and women.

Female	Breasts
Naked F Form	-2	-1	0	1	2
-2	9%	3.4%	2.3%
-1	4.5%	10.1%	5.6%	1.1%
0	1.1%	2.3%	13.5%	2.3%	2.3%
1	1.1%	2.3%	5.6%	6.7%	4.5%
2			1.1%	4.5%	16.9%

Female	Vagina
Naked F Form	-2	-1	0	1	2
-2	12.4%	2.3%
-1	12.4%	9%
0	5.6%	4.5%	6.7%	2.3%	2.3%
1	1.1%	4.5%	3.4%	9%	2.3%
2		1.1%	2.3%	3.4%	15.7%

Female	Penis
Naked M Form	-2	-1	0	1	2
-2	4.5%	1.1%
-1	1.1%	2.3%	1.1%	1.1%
0		3.4%	3.4%	2.3%	2.3%
1			4.5%	21.4%	7.9%
2			2.3%	3.4%	38.2%

Male	Penis
Naked M Form	-2	-1	0	1	2
-2	54.6%	1.1%		3.4%
-1	12.5%	9.1%		1.1%
0		3.4%	2.3%	1.1%
1				3.4%	1.1%
2					6.8%

Male	Breasts
Naked F Form	-2	-1	0	1	2
-2	1.1%
-1
0			1.1%	1.1%
1			1.1%	3.4%	3.4%
2		1.1%	1.1%	5.7%	80.7%

Male	Vagina
Naked F Form	-2	-1	0	1	2
-2	1.1%
-1
0			1.1%	1.1%
1		2.3%	2.3%	3.4%
2		1.1%	2.3%	14.8%	70.5%

What appears to be happening here is that humans have two, apparently independent arousal systems: One that determines whether or not secondary sex characteristics (breasts, curves, muscular arms, etc.) are arousing and the other that determines which primary sex characteristics (penis or vagina) are arousing. A person’s reaction to one of these arousal systems is only loosely associated with the other system.

We live in a world in which 4.5% of male Americans identify as gay—and yet the same amount (4.5%) find the naked male form aversive, but penises arousing. This trend is not unique to males, as 6.7% of women find the female form arousing, but vagina aversive. In such a world, the concept of the gay-straight spectrum as a tool for understanding arousal patterns can be little more than an artifact of history. Using the gay-straight spectrum to describe an individual’s sexuality is like using the gray scale to describe a color—but by this point in the book, you are probably sick of us ranting about this.

We also see you staring with great attention at the hula hoopers’ breasts and penises. Would you like to know what sizes of these undulating appendages the average guy and gal find most arousing? Of course, you would.

What breast size do you find most arousing on a woman?
	F	M
Small	5%	6%
Below Average	2%	8%
Average	36%	42%
Above Average	29%	29%
Well above average	3%	10%
Huge	1%	2%
Unnaturally Large	0%	1%
I do not find breasts arousing at all	23%	1%

Calm down, ladies, we know you all want to know if your exact cup size is in high demand, but we needed to be realistic with the options we presented in this survey. We figured men wouldn’t know cup sizes and we didn’t find this question interesting enough to find pictures of breasts for the survey.

The key takeaway with regard to arousing breast sizes, however, is this: The average man (56% of male respondents in our survey), believe it or not, prefers breasts that are of average size or below. Despite popular media stereotypes, the percent of men who like breasts that are well above average or larger is quite small (only 13% of those participating in our survey).

On to the real humdinger here: Penis size.

What penis size do you find most arousing on a man?
	F	M
Under 3 inches	0%	0%
3-5 inches	1%	2%
5-6 inches (Average)	35%	8%
6-7 inches	26%	9%
7-8 inches	14%	9%
8-9 inches	14%	2%
Over 9 inches	1%	0%
I do not find penises arousing at all	8%	69%

Our study’s female respondents were significantly less moderate than their male peers, with only 36% preferring a partner who had an average sized penis or smaller. Sorry, guys.

Now it’s time to wave goodbye to the hula hoopers and their distracting genitalia. Hopefully, they’ve changed the way you consider the manner in which we categorize our sexuality.

BDSM Tribal Lands

Let’s leave boobs and penises behind and loop back around to an area of the forest settled by BDSM tribes to enjoy some of humanity’s more colorful and upbeat turn ons.

Note: Our survey percentages will not equal 100% as they don’t include the breakdown for people who felt neutral about dominance/submission.

Key:

D = Acting Dominant
S = Acting Submissive
+ = Arousal
– = Aversion

Males

12% -D & -S
28% +D & -S
7% -D & +S
23% +D & +S

Females

10% -D & -S
9% +D & -S
24% -D & +S
29% +D & +S

To put it simply, females are more likely to be aroused by acting submissive and males are more likely to be aroused by acting dominant.

But here is where it gets interesting . . . and this is a little hard to explain, so bear with us. These male and female arousal patterns mirror each other to a remarkable extent. If instead of using the labels dominance and submission we label submission in females as P for the predominant arousal pathway and dominance in males as P for the predominant arousal pathway (while labeling the less common pathway L in both cases), you get:

-P -L m12% f10%
+P -L m28% f24%
-P +L m7% f9%
+P +L m23% f29%

For the numbers to align that tightly, there must be something going on here. It’s almost as though submission and dominance are tied to male and female sexuality in a similar fashion to people’s predominant attractions to the male or female form, but in the case of dominance and submission arousal patterns, we see more perfect mirroring. In other words, if you were to do the same exercise with something like attraction to the naked female form and the naked male form, you wouldn’t see the same kind of nice mirroring. At any rate, male and female sexuality are more closely aligned in dominance and submission than they are to attraction to the male or female form.

As a side note, we find it fascinating how common switches are among both males and females and it amuses us to no end that about 10% of the population finds both dominance and submission to be active turn offs.

The Bondage Hut

Let’s take a moment to stretch our legs and get some hands-on—or rather ropes on—experience, you brave, curiously minded adventurers. Feel free to pick up some rope and have someone help you into some form of bind or another; you may find you quite like it.

Becoming aroused by being physically restrained is, as it happens, extremely common among women, with 45% of the population finding it arousing. Yes, we see you two ladies over there—stop being so shy and let this nice local tie you up.

Only about half as many of our male respondents (23%) reported restraints to be arousing, but guys, feel free to give this a try anyway; you might be one of those one-in-four men who rather enjoys being tied up. This lower rate of male interest in being put in restraints is very much in line with our related dominance and submission findings, which consistently indicate women are more aroused by submissive roles, whereas males are more turned on by assuming dominant roles.

For example, 26% of our female respondents reported the idea of being choked during sex to be arousing, which is over double the rate at which our male respondents reportedly feel aroused by such scenarios (12%). Similar patterns are seen with choking someone else during sex, with fewer women (10%) reporting arousal at the idea of choking someone during sex than men (21%),

We see this same flip flopping of giving and receiving across gender with behaviors such as:

Being talked down to during sex (21% of women identified this as arousing, contrasted with 15% of men) versus talking down to someone during sex (which only 8% of women reported to find arousing, while 18% of their male counterparts report the prospect to be sexy)
Being hit by a partner (which 26% of women reported to be arousing—a far greater proportion than the 17% of men who are into it) versus hitting a partner (7% of women reported this to be arousing in contrast to 13% of men)

The Pain Market

Let’s take a quick stroll over to this charming, open-air market full of thatched stalls selling paddles, floggers, clamps, and all sorts of other delightful, pain-inducing toys and tools, so that we might explore pain as a physical turn on in greater depth. Feel free to keep those restraints on if you like; they make profoundly better souvenirs than t-shirts, right?

We were curious to know how people sexually identify with pain, so in our survey we asked the following question:

Does this statement describe you: “I sometimes look at pornography or read romantic literature in which one of the partners appears to be in pain.”
	F	M
Yes with a focus on physical pain	20%	15%
Yes with a focus on emotional pain	8%	1%
Yes with a focus on both physical and emotional pain	10%	11%
No	63%	73%

Here we see that specifically physical pain is far more associated with arousal than emotional pain—though emotional pain does seem to be tied to arousal patterns in a significant chunk of the population.

To those of you who picked out something nice for yourselves, tell us: What would you like to do with it? Would you like to use it on someone? Would you like someone to use it on you? Or perhaps would you like to see some other people use it? We found this general dynamic in our survey to be fascinating.

When you consume material in which it appears one of the participants is in pain, where do you place yourself in that fantasy?
	F	M
I sometimes imagine myself being the one in pain.	48%	42%
I sometimes imagine myself causing the pain.	27%	58%
I sometimes take the role of an observer.	52%	67%

(Note: This was a checkbox style question, so participants select multiple responses.)

Our survey respondents suggest that for both men and women, the preferred perspective is not the individual receiving or causing the pain, but that of a third party observer. This means the arousal is not coming from first-hand experience of dominance or submission, but rather something tied to mentally processing the concepts of dominance and submission—or the concept of pain and inflicting pain. To put it in other words, this finding suggests that the average person finds concepts on their own to be more arousing than the manner in which these concepts relate to them personally.

This, ultimately, is so much more interesting than the one-note conceptualization that so many people have of various fetishes and kinks. It would seem that in many cases, mere ideas are sexier to people than actual experiences. Isn’t that wild?

Correlates to Arousal Patterns

We will pause the tour metaphor momentarily again as this section will touch on the topic of childhood sexual trauma.

When we commissioned this survey, our goal was to find what may “cause”—or at least what heavily correlates with—certain expressions of an individual’s sexuality. For example, what makes a person get turned on by acting dominant or submissive? While dominance and submission-related arousal patterns are gendered in their expression, they aren’t so gendered as to make us think something else isn’t at play.

Before we proceed, bear in mind that some of the subgroups from which we tried to glean information were quite small, meaning our data should be taken with the hefty grain of salt that should accompany most findings associated with small sample sizes. From this point onward, our survey results should be thought of as “maybes” and as indications of places to dig further with real scientific studies—not as proclamations of what is true. Getting a large enough sample size to have a hundred of each of these subgroups, which is what we wanted to do, was ultimately not realistic.

When we first dug into this topic, we imagined that childhood conditions would appear to play a big role in the manifestation of human sexuality in adulthood. In line with this assumption, we collected all sorts of information on things like sexual versus non-sexual childhood abuse, whether a person was spanked as a child, how much money subjects’ families made when they were growing up, how their families were seen by their local communities, the strictness of their parents, the political beliefs of their parents, the religions in which they were raised, the size of the towns in which they grew up, etc. This diverse line of questioning was posed in an effort to parse out which childhood events and conditions affected adult sexuality and which did not.

We were shocked by our results. Essentially, we found that almost everything that happens to a person before puberty has very little influence on their sexuality as an adult, with the two exceptions being the size of a person’s childhood town and the strictness of their parents. Obviously, the biggest shock to us is that we found no systematic effects of childhood sexual abuse on arousal pathways—or at least that is what the stats we collected seem to show. We are aware of some studies that suggest otherwise but are not aware of any of these studies using the same methodology to contrast equivalent pre-puberty traumatic events with post-puberty traumatic events.

Childhood Sexual Assault vs. Sexual Assault in Adolescence

Individuals in our survey who were sexually assaulted before hitting puberty (the period during which adolescents reach sexual maturity), featured no deviation in kink scores from the mainstream population and bore no discernible change in arousal patterns tied to things like choking, being hit by a partner, hitting a partner, or even arousal rates tied to rape roleplay or rape itself. While this group of respondents did show a slight preference for losing agency and a slight increase in the frequency of masturbation, these two effects were small and when viewed in context, are likely false positives from data dredging rather than any indication of genuine correlation.

That childhood sexual assault would correlate with arousal pathways around rape and assault no more than childhood dog ownership or the wealth of one’s family truly shocks us. When we presented this data to a sex psychologist friend in hopes that they might sanity check our findings and expressed our dubiousness in the face of the results, she said the data didn’t surprise her at all and that it lined up perfectly with her anecdotal client experience.

In the strongest possible terms, we are not arguing that the sexual assault does not lead to long-lasting psychological effects—it categorically does. Specifically, childhood assault is associated with an increased rate of depression, anxiety, PTSD, nightmares, obesity, and distorted self-perception. Our data merely seems to suggest that these psychological effects do not seem to correlate with adult arousal pathways.

In contrast, those who were sexually assaulted after hitting puberty feature moderate, though not extreme, effects on their arousal patterns across the board.

The biggest effect post-puberty sexual assault seems to have on adults is that those who were sexually assaulted as teens were vastly more likely to be turned on by roleplaying rape scenarios: 47% of the women we polled—and 33% of the men we polled—who were sexually assaulted as adolescents found rape roleplay to be arousing, whereas only 22% and 12% of the general female and male population respectively found rape roleplay to be a turn on. This is in line with findings from other studies on the subject.

Being sexually assaulted as an adult also appears to increase the number of things that arouse people in erotic material, an effect not seen for males or females that only experienced sexual assault before puberty. In female survey respondents, sexual assault in adulthood was associated with higher arousal in response to violent or violent-adjacent submission, such as an increase in arousal from being bound, with 41% of women in this category ranking being bound as extremely arousing when contrasted to only 12% of the general population. Female victims of sexual assault in adulthood also reported higher arousal in response to being hit by a partner, with 23% of women in this category ranking being hit as extremely arousing when contrasted to only 8% of the general female survey population. Furthermore, female adult sexual assault victims reported an increase in arousal from being owned by someone, with 18% finding it extremely arousing—up from 3% in the general population.

Here we need to note that these large differences are only seen when looking at extreme levels of arousal from such activities. In other words, the occurrence of sexual assault post-adolescence doesn’t seem to correlate with whether a woman gets aroused by these activities at all, rather it appears to correlate with the volume of the arousal output associated with them.

Finally, sexual assault experiences in adulthood are correlated (in our data, at least) with both higher libido and higher rates of masturbation: 45% of women in taking our survey who reported being sexually assaulted as adults also reported masturbating more than three times a week, contrasted with 23% of the general population. Again, this is not seen in those who reported being sexually assaulted before puberty.

With all this being the case, why is there a common assumption that childhood sexual abuse causes adults to experience sexuality so differently? We think it’s important to remember that a big chunk of the population is into weird sexual stuff, and if you fall into that group and happen to also be the victim of childhood sexual assault, it gets REALLY easy to point at that relatively unusual sexual proclivity and say: “My childhood sexual assault explains why I am so into [insert non-mainstream sexual interest here].” We would go so far as to say it would be weird if people didn’t make this assumption.

Also, recall that there is a ton of evidence suggesting that childhood sexual abuse does lead to PTSD. Given that PTSD can be triggered by situations that bear a semblance to the situation that caused it, it would be common for such individuals to have PTSD reactions in sexual scenarios. It would be very easy to mistake this PTSD reaction for something to do with an arousal pathway because it was happening in a sexual context and was triggered by sexual stimuli. However, PTSD is neither an arousal nor an aversion reaction, but rather a panic reaction.

Note from the Research:

There is a famous study showing that goats can form an attraction to another species based on life experience before puberty. Studies have also shown that men who grew up with a pregnant mother (i.e., guys with a younger sibling close in age) have higher rates of attraction to porn with pregnant women in it. These two pieces of evidence suggest we are wrong in our interpretation of our data, and that life experience before puberty can have at least a limited impact on adult arousal patterns. We emphasize this because we do not want readers to come away from this book thinking: “Stuff that happens in childhood has no effect on adult sexuality.”

Now you may be wondering: Does our survey data suggest that anything in childhood has an effect on adult sexuality? We separated out both sexual and non-sexual childhood abuse and found the same results: Nothing unusual. We also looked into whether growing up in a “high power” family might make someone more dominant or sexually aggressive/violent: Nothing unusual there either. We even looked at spanking, assuming it would at least have a connection to the prevalence of spanking or impact play kinks. Again: Nothing. That said, being spanked as a child does seem to increase rates of arousal in response to submissive play during sex among men and women alike.

Bucolic Childhoods & Their Surprisingly Violent Connections

Having braved the topic of sexual abuse, let’s grab some fresh air—plus some findings related to childhood conditions that actually do appear to correlate with distinct sexual preferences in adulthood.

We did find two areas of early childhood development that may have moderate effects (at least moderate correlation) on adult sexual preferences. Both correlations surprised us. In some species of primates, the size of their troop, amount of resources in the environment, or other environmental features can alter the “behavioral template” that gets expressed through something called behavioral polymorphism, so we decided to try to determine if there may be a similar effect in humans—and by golly, it looks like there might be. This explains why we find ourselves driving through bucolic rural farmland at the moment. Feel free to roll down the windows, but keep away from the male residents (you’ll see why in a moment, darlings).

Specifically, males who took our survey and grew up in a rural environment were 240% more likely than their urban, small city, and suburban counterparts to report finding the thought of actually raping someone arousing (at around 17% instead of 7%). Interestingly, our study’s rural respondents were not significantly more likely to find the thought of merely roleplay raping someone more arousing than the general male population (18% versus 16%).

Men and women responding to our survey who grew up in rural environments were also much more likely to find the thought of owning someone to be arousing, at around 33% (versus an average of 15% among our entire male survey population) and 19% (versus an average of 12% among our entire female survey population) respectively. In general, it appears that growing up in more sparsely populated areas tracks with arousal in response to violence. Urban-raised males are much more likely to find sexual violence to be an active turn off.

Rural females who took our survey professed to be far less likely than any other female demographic to report finding rape roleplay to be arousing, at only around a 6% level, whereas women who grew up in suburbs, small cities, and large cities all reported finding the idea of roleplaying being raped to be a turn on at around the same level (20%, 23%, and 26% respectively).

Women who grew up in cities both small and large reported the idea of actually being raped much more arousing at rates of 15% (6% average) and 16% (12% average) when contrasted with those in rural and suburban environments, who reported finding the thought of actual rape to be arousing only at a 0% and 4% level. We discovered the inverse of this trend among male survey respondents, with men in rural environments being far more likely to report finding the thought of actually being raped arousing when contrasted with any other male demographic at 17% (around 17% also reported the idea of rape roleplay to be arousing).

Women who grew up in rural environments and small cities also reported the idea of being struck by a partner during sex to be arousing at almost twice the rate of those in cities (35% rural and 31% urban versus 16% in cities) with a similar pattern appearing in relation to being choked (38% rural and 31% urban versus 21% in cities). We see an inverse of this trend when it comes to female preference for choking others, with 16% of our city-dwelling respondents reporting the idea to be arousing versus 6% of our rural female respondents and 8% of those living in small cities. Female and male patterns match up very well here, with city-dwelling males getting much more turned on by being hit (22%, versus 8% rural male respondents), much less turned on by hitting their partner (17%, versus 25% of male respondents in rural environments), and much less turned on by choking a partner (6%, versus 24% of rural male respondents).

In sum, those who grow up in areas with less dense populations (or perhaps in environments where animals are more commoditized) seem to have their arousal patterns optimized for a more aggressive male reproductive strategy and a more defensive female reproductive strategy. However—and this is a big however—this is likely just a shadow of the effects that an individual’s political views have on arousal pathways. We say this because political views have a similar but more extreme effect on arousal pathways and also correlate with rural vs. urban life (we dig into this shortly). If it’s really political leanings that influence these factors (rather than rural versus urban childhoods), this pattern would also fit a larger trend we found, in which a person’s worldview affects their arousal pathways much more than their living conditions or events in their life—more on that later.

Strict Fathers

Our eagle-eyed guests may remember we did find one thing that a person’s parents could do that may affect arousal patterns after the person grew up; well, here we are. Let’s stop by this farmhouse and pose for photos with this very strict-looking dad.

Indeed, parenting style—at least when it comes to strict parents—presents another childhood domain that may affect adult arousal patterns. In our survey, female respondents who grew up with a strict father were more than twice as likely to enjoy rape roleplay (35% to 14%) and almost twice as likely to become aroused by the thought of actually being raped (12% to 7%) when contrasted with female respondents whose fathers were not strict. Daughters of strict fathers responding to our survey also preferred larger penises.

This is not to suggest, in any fashion, that strict fathers rape their daughters. Perhaps the greater interest in rape roleplay stems from having found some comfort in a figure in one’s life taking firmer control being transferred to a sense of arousal in the face of someone seizing a huge amount of sexual control via the act of rape. This may just as easily be a data-dredged false positive, as the effect is not as consistent as the rural versus urban effect, does not extend to strict mothers, and does not have a corollary effect in males. It may also just be that strict fathers are more common in rural environments, making this just another manifestation of the effect found above.

To put this another way: With the case of rural versus urban effects, we saw a similar pattern across genders that affects several arousal pathways and bears a consistent theme. This clustering of evidence gave us reason to believe the effect was real, though it could have been caused by a common influencing factor (like politics) affecting both one’s location and arousal pathways. In contrast, when we consider the case of parental strictness, we only see just a few blips, such as the increased female interest in rape roleplay.

To put a bow on this: Much to our shock, our survey suggests the events and conditions of childhood do not seem to systematically affect arousal patterns as an adult. The only two exceptions to this pattern are both dubious, with the rural-urban exception likely being the result of an external correlation (perhaps political affiliation) and the other, parental strictness of fathers to daughters, likely just being a false positive from data dredging or the same urban-rural effect being viewed from a different angle.

Diversity Land

Rejoice, brave passengers, as we enter the small Epcot knockoff zone of our survey landscape—Diversity Land—and explore the effects of ethnicity on sexuality. Grab a corndog; they’re about the only things worth trying here.

Alas, ethnicity does not seem to play all that prominent of a role in our arousal—especially when contrasted with other factors we have yet to explore. There were, however, a few curious and systematic differences worth discussing, as ethnicity did present more robust correlations than those we found in relation to childhood conditions.

The clearest example of ethnicity having a systematic effect on arousal pathways is that different ethnicities appear (at least from our data) to have different preferences for penis size. As you gnaw on your corn dog and enjoy the miniature nation-themed landscapes to your left and right, consider how various ethnic groups appear to have varying tastes for a . . . different sort of sausage.

Black female survey respondents reported a preference for significantly larger penises than any other ethnicity—with 37% preferring penises over 8 inches long and 5% preferring penises over 9 inches long. Female East Asian respondents, in contrast, professed a significant preference for smaller penis sizes, with 67% preferring penises below 6 inches in size. White, Hispanic, and South Asian study respondents reported preferences for penises at around 6-7 inches.

In general, women from ethnicities with larger penises on average appear to prefer larger penises, and women from ethnicities with smaller penises on average appear to prefer small penises. Interestingly, our data suggest ethnicity has no discernible effects on male respondent preferences for breast size. (Sorry, we forgot to check for butt preference—something a bunch of this book’s early reviewers wanted to know about.)

We know what some of you may be thinking: “It seems like almost all ethnicities of women prefer penises of above-average size.” You’ve got that right: 61% of women prefer a penis of above-average size.

As this book was heading to the printers, one of our black friends mentioned a stereotype that black women did not like giving head as much as white women. We had never heard this stereotype before and had not thought to search our data for it. We went back in to give the data a poke and—believe it or not—there is actually almost no difference in preference for fellatio by race (black women 45% vs. white women 46.4%) . . . or at least no reported difference in preference for erotic material featuring fellatio. You might therefore consider this particular racial stereotype busted.

Ultimately, ethnicity does not appear to have much of an effect on arousal. This makes sense given that most arousal patterns appear to not be socialized. If socialization played a larger role in our arousal patterns, we would expect the vastly different life experiences of Americans who grow up in different ethnic demographics to shape their arousal patterns at least to some extent.

The Colosseum of Sexual Influence & Big Four Show

Let’s pull into this replica Roman Colosseum in Diversity Land—the Colosseum of Sexual Influence—to take a gander at the myriad factors that actually do correlate with interesting sexual arousal pathways.

The big performance that takes place in this Colosseum every hour on the hour showcases The Big Four, as we like to call it—four factors that correlate very strongly with various arousal pathways:

Political affiliation
Self-reported wealth
Self-reported hotness
(No joke here) Personal preference for dogs/cats

Looks like we got here a little early, but that means we can catch the BDSM show presently taking place—it just so happens to exemplify some other fun correlations we found.

See those two ladies who appear to be having the time of their lives as they play out a wee dom-sub routine? Chances are both have excellent self-esteem. While our survey suggests that self-esteem has little effect on male sexuality, we found it is highly correlated with females becoming more turned on by acting dominant, while also not being any less likely to be turned on by acting submissive. Women reporting high self-esteem in our survey turned out to be twice as aroused by dominance when compared to their less-self-confident female compatriots. It is as though self-esteem selectively unlocks the ability to be turned on by dominance in women.

To put this another way, women with high self-esteem are not less turned on by anything that turns on a “normal” woman. Women with high self-esteem are just as turned on by acting submissive as the average woman. However, women with high self-esteem will find acting dominant in a sexual context more arousing than their less self-confident female peers. To us, this indicates that all women may actually be more “switchy” than other data pools give them credit for, being able to become aroused through both submission and dominance. This dominant-submissive ambidexterity might be hidden by a high prevalence of low self-esteem in our society.

OK, so what about happiness? Well, that intimidating female dom may be having a blast right now, but chances are she’s one of the less happy cast members of Diversity Land. Unhappy females in our survey turned out to be more than twice as likely to play the dom in a BDSM context (23% versus 7%), while happy females turned out to be far more likely to play a sub (32% versus 19%).

On the other hand, while happy men taking our survey were slightly more likely to be doms in a BDSM context (12% to 8%), they were four times more likely to play a sub (8% to 2%). In other words, happy people are much more submissive, regardless of their gender. If this effect is causational, we expect that it is simply easier for someone with submissive tendencies to be happier, as submission is inherently a relinquishment of power along with a relinquishment of responsibility, and a lack of responsibility increases one’s mood.

Interestingly, if you look at what differentially turns on unhappy people, it may not be that simple. Unhappy women are far more aroused by things like being tied up (59% to 38%), being hit by a partner (41% to 19%), and being choked (18% to 10%), which is weird, because happy men are more aroused by the same things: Being bound (21% to 11%), being hit (19% to 5%), and being choked (17% to 3%).

As you can see, while submission seems to make everyone happier—unhappiness in women and happiness in men is related to arousal in the face of what we will call “violent and violent-adjacent submission.” We genuinely do not know what is going on here—but the effect is consistent across similar arousal categories, so there is probably something actually happening. Have any theories on this front? Send them to [email protected] and share them with us.

Have a glance at the gentleman down there taking a beating from a female dom. He may be sinister, and we’re not referring to his BDSM tendencies; our survey data suggests that left-handed men are more than twice as likely to be submissive and left-handed women are more than twice as likely to be dominant, however left-handedness was not associated in our data with more dominance in males or less submission in females.

Across the board, left-handed men who took our study were more likely to be aroused by arousal pathways typically associated with women but were not less likely to be aroused by the arousal pathways typically associated with men. Likewise, our left-handed female survey respondents were more likely to be aroused by arousal pathways typically associated with males but were not less likely to be aroused by arousal pathways associated with females.

In other words, the average left-handed person appears to harbor more arousal pathways, selectively gaining more access to those which typically stick along gendered lines, with left-handed women being more likely to be turned on by male arousal pathways and left-handed men being more likely to be turned on by female arousal pathways. This is not super surprising given that studies in the past have shown left-handed individuals are far more likely to be gay (well, 34% more likely).

While we wait for the snack carts to clear out before the main event, consider sampling the following tasty tidbits suggested by our survey results:

Significantly overweight women who took our survey—more than women of any other body type—preferred much larger penises. This makes sense, as it can be difficult for significantly overweight women to comfortably achieve penetrative sex with smaller penises.
Both men and women who reported to masturbate to furries in our survey were more likely to see themselves as unattractive, but the effect is less strong in women than in men.
Female survey respondents who classified themselves as the variant of bisexual attracted to at least men and women were far more likely to become aroused by being submissive, with 80% falling into that category contrasted with 62% of straight ladies. In fact, a sizable portion of the females in our survey seemed predominantly aroused by submission—or seeing their partner act dominant in a sexual context—instead of the male or female form. Given their disinterest in gender, rather than labeling this group by its orientation toward certain genders, it might make more sense to say they have “dominance-oriented sexuality.” (Though in current parlance they would likely be described as being pansexual with a strong submission kink.)
Only 30% of women who took our survey and reported attraction to both men and women also reported feeling turned on by acting dominant, which is only a little less than the proportion of straight women who get sexually aroused by acting dominant (around 40%).
Dominant female survey respondents were way more jealous than submissive female respondents, with only 34% of all females ranking themselves as being at the high end of the jealous spectrum (with 17% putting them at the very highest end of the jealousy spectrum), but 70% of dominant females doing so (with 40% putting them at the very highest end of the jealousy spectrum). Male survey respondents did not exhibit the same pattern. Simone suspects this correlation in women is the product of higher testosterone in these individuals, as testosterone increases mate guarding behavior.
Religion did not have a strong impact on arousal patterns.
Interestingly, our male survey respondents’ body weights had no correlation with whether or not they found overweight women attractive—neither did the weights of their mothers. What did correlate with attraction to overweight women? Whether or not a male respondent had a mother around growing up. Men who grew up without a mother figure in their lives and took our survey were far more likely to look at porn with obese women. We have no idea why this would be and assume it is a false positive, but feel free to create your own theory here and write a clickbait article about it (just give us a shout out). Unfortunately, it is so rare for women to find overweight men attractive there wasn’t enough data to look at the other side of the coin.

Keep in mind that we looked at a LOT of variables. Only a few strongly correlated with a person’s arousal pathways in what looked like a systematic pattern (i.e., in a way that was unlikely to just be random false positives from data dredging). We remind you of this because we don’t want to mistakenly give the impression that everything is heavily correlated with sexual expression. Most questions we asked of our survey population did not yield any unexpected hearty connections to arousal pathways that jumped out at us enough to dig into. For a list of these other questions:

What is your birth order? (Oldest, middle, youngest, or only child, etc.)
How big was the town in which you spent the majority of your childhood?
Did you grow up in a two-parent household?
Was your father permissive or strict while you grew up?
Was your mother permissive or strict while you grew up?
What were your dad’s political leanings while you were growing up?
What were your mom’s political leanings while you were growing up?
Did you have a strong father figure growing up?
Did you have a strong mother figure growing up?
Do you feel that you grew up in a family that you would call “powerful” vis a vis the local community?
Did your family ever have trouble affording food or other basic necessities as you were growing up? (This question is intended to look for a correlation between lack of resources during early brain development and certain kinks. Please answer yes if hunger due to a lack of food was a feature of your childhood.)
How happy was your childhood?
Do you see yourself as popular within your social circles?
How often do you socialize in groups?
Is your friend group predominantly male or female?
How religious are you?
Do you have an office job?
What are your political leanings?
Do you believe you are better than other people?
Are you feeling hungry at this moment?
Are you on a calorie restriction diet, or are you currently fasting?
How often do you exercise?
Is the idea of having children appealing to you?
How attractive would you rate yourself?
What is your body type?
How frequently do you have sex?
How frequently do you masturbate?
How do you feel about your sexuality?
Rank your libido.
Do you have a partner (or partners)?
Are you currently in love with someone?
Do you prefer monogamy? Polyamory?
How would you rate the quantity of your sexual experience?
Have you been involuntarily physically abused by a romantic partner?
Were you ever physically abused as a child?
Were you ever spanked as a child?
Would you choose a partner with a dog over the same potential partner without a dog?
Would you choose a partner with a cat over the same potential partner without a cat?
Do you have a pet?
What is your current age?
What is your level of education?
What is your yearly income?
Do you have a position of authority in your work?
Is your boss mean to you?
Are you on birth control?
Are you currently pregnant?
Which of the following best describes the religious traditions with which you were raised?
What are your current religious beliefs?

We are not saying that none of these questions yielded systematic links to arousal patterns. While several answers to the above questions did show some correlation with arousal patterns, we ignored most. Why? We sought dramatic, huge, and consistent effects on arousal patterns.

Actually . . . a few of the above questions that didn’t make it into the big four did have effects that met that criteria, but when they did, they appeared to be a “shadow” of one of the big four. For example, having a position of authority at work had a very similar effect on arousal patterns as wealth did, because the two correlate with each other. Wealth made it to our big four and a position of authority at work did not, as the effect wealth had was “louder,” leading us to believe it was the primary driver of this unusual arousal pattern.

Great timing: It looks like the show is ready to start. Time to see how the big four—politics, wealth, hotness, and cat/dog preferences—correlate with arousal pathways.

The Political Promenade

As you can see, the show is starting off with a patriotic military parade. Feel free to grab the flag of your choice and a sparkler as they pass them around; it’ll help to get you in the mood.

An adult’s current political beliefs appear to correlate fairly strongly with their arousal patterns.

You might be looking down at the conservative contingent below and thinking, “Well, duh, conservatives are going to be way more sexuality inhibited than liberals”—however, you would be wrong. Our survey data suggested no difference at all between conservative and liberal “kinkiness score” in either men or women. In fact, our conservative survey participants reported dramatically higher libido than their liberal counterparts, with 66% of conservative women reporting a-higher-than-average libido versus 37.5% of liberal women and 72% of conservative men reporting a higher than average libido versus 48% of liberal men.^[69] Also, if you think male conservatives prefer generic-looking women, you would also be wrong. Actually, political beliefs—in our data at least—had no effect on preference for things like breast size.^[70]

So how do a person’s political beliefs relate to their sexual expression? Grab a pair of binoculars and take a gander at the parading masses below, specifically observing the military accessories flashed by the conservative crowd.

Males

Our data suggests males who self-identify as conservatives are more aroused by violence against others while males who self-identify as liberals are more aroused by violence against themselves. For example, when we contrast male liberals and conservatives, conservatives from our data are more than twice as turned on by hitting a partner (20% to 8%) and choking a partner (33% to 13%), while liberals are more turned on by being hit by their partner (21% to 12%), more turned on by being tied up (28% to 16%), and more turned on by being talked down to during sex (33% to 13%).

In general, self-identified male conservatives from our survey were just way more turned on by acting dominant (71% to 57%), while self-identified male liberals were way more turned on by acting submissive (45% to 29%).

Perhaps the biggest effect in males was how their politics correlated with how aroused they reported to be by rape, with conservative males becoming aroused by rape roleplay at markedly higher rates (38% to 8%) and feeling aroused by the idea of actual rape more as well (25% to only 2%). Surprisingly, given their derogatory use of the word “cuck,” but in line with other studies on the subject, male conservatives are also almost twice as likely to be turned on by watching their partner have sex with another person (21% to 11%).

You may be amused by the types of erotic art each political leaning reported consuming in our study. Conservative male participants reported consuming narrative forms of erotic art at dramatically higher levels than their liberal peers (romance novels 12% to 0%, erotic fanfiction 12% to 6%, and erotic young adult novels 8% to 2%) while liberal men were more likely to report a focus on personal imagination (54% to 48%) and live-action video (81% to 72%).

Females

What about females? In contrast to males, political ideology had no meaningful connection to our female survey population’s preference for submission or dominance. But here it gets wacky: Conservative females who took our survey were more likely to become aroused than liberal female respondents by almost any violent act, be that act committed by them personally or a partner.

Conservative female survey respondents reported getting more turned on by choking their partner (15% to 9%), more turned on by being choked (35% to 18%), more turned on by striking their partner (19% to 7%), more turned on by being talked down to (31% to 16%), more aroused by talking down to their partner (15% to 9%), more aroused by being raped in a roleplay context (38% to 16%), more turned on by being bound (62% to 38%), raping a partner in a roleplay context (19% to 7%), actually being raped (23% to 5%), and actually raping someone (15% to 0%). The only violence-related act that did not follow this trend involved arousal from being hit (27% to 27%).

On a tamer note, and perhaps unsurprisingly, conservative women are also vastly more turned on by masculinity (92% to 58%).

As to whether we see the same divide in erotic art consumption in women as well: We do, but it doesn’t follow the exact same pattern, with conservative ladies reporting higher romance novel consumption (52% to 41%), higher consumption of erotic young adult novels (16% to 11%), and more daydreaming (72% to 69%), but less fanfiction consumption (12% to 20%).

As you can see, both male and female liberals and conservatives appear to have two totally different sets of arousal patterns. Are their politics driving the arousal pattern differences, are the arousal pattern differences driving their politics, or is there some common external factor driving both we didn’t catch with our other questions? In contemplating this question, we would like to remind readers that studies of identical twins separated at birth and adopted by different families shows our political beliefs are actually highly heritable—making this finding even more engaging. What if it turns out that the patterns we see showing “heritable politics” are actually heritable arousal strategies that affect one’s politics? What if our political inclinations are just one weird manifestation of what turns us on? If we had the money and time, the first thing we would dig into was whether or not unusual arousal patterns are heritable.

One final systematic pattern we found distinguishing conservatives and liberals can be observed in their differential reactions to relationships. Conservatives responding to our survey were more likely to report being in love than liberals (f65% to f55% and m60% to m46%) and were more likely to be jealous (f35% to f25% and m24% to m9%).

Additional Political Tidbits

As if you had not already stuffed yourself with theme park corndogs and stadium snacks, some of you are looking downright starved. Thankfully, we bought along a picnic basket of homemade treats to get you through the final stretch of our tour.

What could possibly be tastier than stats which tell a meaningful story about the human condition? Water cooler stats, of course! Such stats are delicacies to all of us, especially reporters, bloggers, and armchair political theorists. Since politics is such a contentious subject, we figured doing a deeper dive into how a person’s political stance correlates with what turns them on might allow other people to see patterns we didn’t and give them something to talk about—perhaps giving us some free promotion in the process.

Bon appetit!

According to the self-reported data from our survey:

Liberal women are much more likely to fantasize about “A ‘trashy’ man” at C8% L30% but liberal men are no more likely to fantasize about “a ‘trashy’ woman” at C56% L56%.
Conservatives are way more likely to fantasize about a married couple, with females at C52% L24% and males at C52% L39%
Conservatives watch/read porn featuring two men having sex at slightly higher rates than liberals. In females, this is C24% to L22%, and in males, this is C8% to L7%. (The real surprise here is that conservative men appear to watch slightly more gay porn than liberal men. We suspect this is because the portion of the male population aroused by men is not different between conservative and liberal groups, but conservative groups are less likely to act on gay preferences outside of masturbation. Also, this is not a statically meaningful difference, so we are probably just looking at parity in porn consumption.)
Liberals watch/read porn of two women having sex at much higher rates than conservatives. In females, this is C28% to L39%, and in males, this is C52% to L76%.
Liberals watch/read porn featuring anal more than conservatives. In females, this is C36% to L43%, and in males, this is C52% to L61%.
Liberals watch/read porn featuring fellatio and cunnilingus more than conservatives. For fellatio: Females C36% to L43% and males C60% to L70%. For cunnilingus: Females C36% to L59% and males C52% to L54%.
While liberals slightly prefer sex with feet, conservatives are disinterested in erotic art focused on feet. For sex with feet: In females, this is C8% to L9%, and in males, this is C16% to L20%. For feet alone: In females, this is C0% to L9%, and in males, this is C0% to L17%.
While porn featuring sounding is disinteresting to male conservatives (0% of our conservative male survey respondents reported consuming it), it does appear to be of mild interest to liberal men (a full 7% of liberal men did—in women this was C4% and L4%). This backs a trend you will see throughout this data: Liberal men appear to get turned on by having themselves get hurt, while conservative men get turned on by having others hurt.
See if you can figure this one out: Both conservative men and women prefer scat erotic art at twice the rate of liberals (C4% to L2% in both cases), but liberals prefer erotic art with urine at about three times the rate of conservatives (females C4% L11%, males C4% L15%).
Conservative men are much more likely to consume erotic art featuring someone sleeping with a biological relative (C20% to L11%), but in females, there isn’t much difference (C12% L13%).
OK, here’s a weird one: Liberal women consume more inter-racial erotic art than conservative females (C24% L41%), but conservative males consume more inter-racial erotic art than liberal males (C44% L39%).
Ready for another weird one? Conservative women really like “giant penis” porn (C12% to L6%), while in men, consumption rates are even (C4% L4%). Both conservative men and women vastly prefer “giant breast” porn (females C12% L6% males C28% L13%).
To complete the string of bizarre findings for which we have no explanatory theory: While liberals and conservatives consume erotic art featuring characters from children-focused pop culture at around the same rate (females C8% L9% and males C12% L9%), liberals consume erotic art featuring adult-focused pop characters at dramatically higher rates (females C4% L15% and males C4% L20%).
We already went over some of the violence-related results, but here are few more:
Male-on-female violence: Female C16% L6%, Male C8% L2%
Female-on-female violence: Female C8% L2%, Male C4% L2%
Female-on-male violence: Female C12% L4%, Male C4% L4%
Male-on-male violence: Female C4% L2%, Male C0% L0%
Vore, absorption, necrophilia, and snuff—the kinks tied to people being hunted or killed—lean vastly conservative. Absorption: Female and Male C4% L0%, Vore: Female C8% L0%, Male C4% L2%, Necrophilia: Male and female C4% L0%, Snuff: Female C12% L0%, Male C4% L2%.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, conservative women fantasize about getting pregnant way more than liberal women (C20% L6%)—the same goes for giving birth (C8% L4%). What is surprising is that conservative women also fantasize about getting other people pregnant even more often than liberal women fantasize about getting pregnant themselves (C8% L2%). (In males, these numbers were C12% L11%, C0% L0%, and C16% L11%, respectively.)
To flesh out the “cuck” trend cited above: Conservatives are way more into cuckolding than liberals. Females: C20% L7% and Males: C20% L17%.
Caregiver-little porn (think daddy dom little girl stuff) is vastly preferred by conservatives. Female: C16% L6% and Male: C12% L6%.
Conservatives also appear much more involved with self-focused arousal patterns:
Thoughts of yourself: Female C44% L37%, Male C24% L19%
Thoughts of displaying your genitals in public: Female C4% L6%, Male C12% L2%
Thoughts of yourself being sexually irresistible: Female C28% L26%, Male C16% L11%

The High-Net-Worth Extravaganza

Wasn’t that a great start to the show? Well, it gets better. We love this part: No, it’s not just your imagination running amok: Luxury helicopters are indeed landing in the stadium as the patriotic promenade scuttles toward the exits amidst high levels of chopper-driven wind. Have a look at this land’s most well-heeled denizens.

We investigated the nature of our survey respondents’ jobs, education levels, positions at work, income levels, self-esteem, happiness, and self-perception of wealth (i.e., “Would you consider yourself wealthy?”). These factors correlate with each other, so effects from one bleed into the others. However, when looking at the stats, it was clear the leading factor among them was the perception of wealth—how wealthy an individual thought they were.

You won’t be crazy to think the expensively dressed high rollers stepping out of those helicopters look a bit . . . cold, cruel, and calculating. Our survey findings suggest that wealth makes males and females more dominant and more turned on by violence against their partners, but in males, wealth has a secondary effect of making them turned on much more by concepts and much less by the feminine form.

It isn’t just the six-inch Manolos those ladies are wearing that makes them seem intimidating—wealthy women who responded to our survey were far more likely to become aroused by acting sexually dominant, with 70% in our survey reporting that acting dominant arouses them, whereas only 27% of female survey respondents who saw themselves as low-income reported feeling the same way.

We didn’t find a single wealthy woman in our survey that found the thought of being sexually dominant to be a turn off, while 36% of low-income women did. Similarly, 71% of our self-reportedly wealthy male survey respondents reported feeling turned on by acting dominant, whereas only 44% of their self-reportedly low-income male counterparts felt the same way.

Don’t think those moneyed strutters down there are only into dominance. Our study suggests that wealthy men are also more likely to be turned on by acting submissive, as 75% of our self-reportedly wealthy male survey respondents reported getting turned on by acting submissive, contrasted with only 44% of our self-reportedly poor survey takers. A similar effect is not seen among the female respondents to our survey.

You may notice that the gentlemen below are not gawking with slack jaws at the ladies. Our study suggests that wealthy men are far less likely to be turned on by the sight of the female form and are far less likely to find it very arousing when their partners act feminine than low-income men (who are by far the most likely to find it very arousing when their partner acts feminine out of any wealth category). Wealthy men simply do not find femininity or the female form terribly arousing.

In addition, our data backs up a pattern that has been observed in other studies: That wealthy men prefer smaller breasts. This pattern is even more striking than we anticipated in our data—not a single man in the wealthiest category of those taking our survey reported preferring a breast size above average, with around half preferring small breasts.

Our survey respondents who reported being in the second-highest wealth category reported preferring small breasts at a rate of 17% and a robust 84% preferred breasts of average size or below. Contrast that with the lowest income category of men who took our survey, who reported preferring small breasts at around only a 5% rate and the second poorest preferring them at around the same level (only 4% in this case).

Essentially, as a person becomes wealthier, their preference for breast size scales down in lockstep with their wealth after they feel financially stable. Other studies have shown that hungrier men prefer larger breasts as well, which suggests it might be an evolutionary adaptation for men in times of famine to search for partners with more fat stores and thus larger breasts.

Now, this is a really bizarre effect: It looks like the wealthier a person is, the more they are turned on by fantasies in which they are a man, and the poorer they are, the more they are turned on by the idea of themselves as a woman. Women who took our survey were much more likely to get turned on by the idea of themselves as a man if they reported being wealthier (33% of our reportedly wealthy female survey respondents reported fantasizing about being male versus 6% of our female respondents on average). Also, wealthy women responding to our survey were more likely to fantasize about impregnating other women, with 33% having the fantasy, versus only 2% of any other class of women. At the same time, the poorest category of men responding to our survey reported fantasizing about themselves as women at a 5% rate, the second poorest at a 4% rate, and not a single man who thought of himself as of average wealth or above in our sample ever reported fantasizing about themselves as a woman.^[71]

We have no idea what is going on here. Maybe it has something to do with how our society conceptualizes wealth and social roles. Maybe it has to do with society seeing women as disempowered, and therefore a portion of people subconsciously assume they are more male when in positions of power and more female when they have less power (but frankly we hate this theory—it’s too Freudian). If you have a theory you are passionate about, we would love to hear your thoughts on this; send your theories to [email protected] or better yet, share it with the world on YouTube or in a post somewhere online and send us a link.

As for wealthy people being more aroused by violence: Wealthy men are much more likely to be aroused by the thought of actually raping someone when contrasted with other demographics. In addition, 38% of our self-reportedly wealthy male survey respondents reported to be turned on by the thought of hitting their partners, whereas only 16% of the poorer male respondents felt the same way, and 38% of these wealthy men reported finding the thought of choking someone during sex to be arousing contrasted with 10% of the poor men. In general, men who feel poor are much less likely to be aroused by the concept of any sort of violence against a partner. This is interesting, given that domestic violence is more common in poorer communities. We assume these increased rates of domestic violence reflect an impulse control issue and not an arousal pathway issue, as the emotional pressures of poverty are shown to significantly decrease impulse control, which is likely what causes the higher rates of domestic violence.

This arousal by violence against one’s partner extends to wealthy women as well, with around 50% finding this violence arousing at the highest levels of wealth. Contrast this with only 4% of the lowest wealth category of women. You see a similar pattern with choking, with women becoming more aroused by choking their partner as they become wealthier.

There is not a clear connection between wealth and arousal from being the recipient of blows from a partner in either men or women. Both wealthy and poor men and women get turned on by being struck by a partner at around equal rates.

Part of us wonders if this is a cause or effect thing. Are people who are aroused by hurting others and repulsed by femininity more likely to become wealthy, or is it that people adopt this perspective after becoming wealthy? Maybe this is all just a bleed over from a person’s politics.

Oh dear, the wealthy people are already getting back into their helicopters. We imagine they’re off to hunt people for sport.

As the show transitions to its next act, consider that:

Self-reportedly wealthy women responding to our survey reported a preference for larger penises, with a preference of 7.5 inches on average, whereas the lowest income female respondents to our survey reportedly prefer penises 6.9 inches on average
According to our survey data, the wealthier a man is, the less likely he is to consume porn with women portrayed as “slutty”
Our survey results suggest wealthy women are more likely to consume erotic material in which the man is a nerd
Self-reportedly wealthy male survey respondents were far more likely to report finding the sight of a female crying to be erotic
The self-reportedly poorer our female survey respondents get, the more likely they are to report feeling aroused by humiliation, with 18% of our poor female survey respondents reporting humiliation to be arousing
Thoughts of oneself being sexually irresistible were much more of a turn on to our self-reportedly high wealth female study participants, who reported finding it arousing at a rate 300% higher than our poor female participants
Our survey results imply that wealthy men and women are much more likely to be turned on by themselves (Specifically, they are more likely to include themselves in sexual fantasies)

The Sexy Beauty Pageant

Get ready for an audience favorite, folks: The sexy beauty pageant. Enjoy the scantily clad men and women making their way into the stadium and give us some guesses as to how you think their confidence in their appearance may affect their arousal pathways.

We see a few of you are somewhat confused by the fact that not all the cast members posing in lingerie and extremely tight briefs meet . . . average standards of beauty. Their presence in this show is a product of how they feel about themselves personally; our opinions matter not. The factor we are exploring here is self-assessed attractiveness.

Our survey findings related to self-reported attractiveness are messier than those tied to self-reported wealth and a bit harder to summarize, but in general, our findings imply that women who think they are attractive are much more dominant and unattractive men get much more turned on by being submissive. In addition, unattractive men are much more turned on by violence against women and both unattractive men and women are much more likely to report finding the idea of being raped to be a turn on.

Direct your gaze toward the gentlemen strutting around below; you may think they’re men who like to live boldly, and you’d be right. Men who see themselves as attractive appear to live along extremes, at least when it comes to jealousy. Our male survey respondents who reported to be at the extreme ends of attractiveness and unattractiveness also sorted into the extreme ends of jealousy (either being super jealous or super not jealous . . . not just moderately jealous). We at first suspected that this result came from people who like to answer all questions in an extreme fashion, but ultimately we didn’t see the same pattern among our female survey respondents’ answers or in response to other questions with sliders. Specifically, unattractive women have unusually low levels of jealousy; outside of that there was no correlation

You may also feel that the women milling about below bear a surprising resemblance to the wealthy ladies who just took off in their helicopters, and again, you would be fairly spot on. Attractive females are much more likely to be turned on by acting sexually dominant. On the flip side, unattractive women are very unlikely to find acting dominant in a sexual context arousing, with a full 0% of women in the lowest category of self-assessed attractiveness getting turned on by acting dominant in a sexual context and 55% of those in the highest self-assess attractiveness category getting turned on by it (this is one of the largest effects we saw anywhere in our study).

Don’t assume the same for these confident dudes, though: Interestingly, our survey data suggests that being attractive does not track all that strongly to whether or not a male gets turned on by acting dominant while being wealthy does tie to how much a male is turned on by dominance.

If we were to guess what was happening here, we would say that whether you are a male or a female, you will likely get more turned on by being dominant if you see yourself as a high-value potential partner, and it is common knowledge that we live in a society that judges a female partner’s value more on her attractiveness and a male partner’s value more on his wealth (and not so much his attractiveness). Though perhaps women who are wealthy invest more than their male counterparts in their appearance, so there is more likelihood that women who are wealthy are also confident about their appearance, which would blend together the correlations we’ve identified.^[72]

Reportedly unattractive men responding to our study were likely to be turned on by acting sexually submissive, with 83% of those in the lowest category of attractiveness getting turned on by being submissive and only 28% of attractive men feeling that way. Self-reported attractiveness showed no correlation to arousal tied to submission in our female study respondents, nor did wealth. This is much harder to explain than the above pattern. Intrepid sexual explorers: What do you suspect is going on?

Furthermore, self-reportedly unattractive men taking our survey are more than twice as likely than men in any other category to report feeling turned on by the idea of hitting their partner, with 33% finding the thought arousing. Attractiveness has no effect on women in this regard, and attractiveness had no effect on how much being hit was a turn on in either men or women.

Our survey data suggests that, whether you are a man or a woman, you will become aroused at the idea of being raped much more if you see yourself as unattractive. Unattractive men taking our survey were much more likely to report finding rape roleplay arousing, with 66% in the lowest level of attractiveness finding it a turn on contrasted with 10% of average men and 14% of hot men. The same is true of females, with 44% of the least attractive category of women reporting arousal at the idea of roleplaying being raped contrasted with 22% for women of average attractiveness.

We see similar results with arousal from the thought of actual rape, with 20% of women in the least attractive category finding it arousing and only 3% of women in the average category finding it arousing. The same is seen among the male respondents to our study, with 50% in the least attractive category finding actual rape arousing and 2% of men in the average category finding actual rape arousing.

Perhaps this correlation is a product of self-confidence. After all, if someone sees themselves as objectionable, sex that they had zero role in initiating might be much more arousing to them, as they wouldn’t feel they are subjecting another person to their (in their mind) objectionable self.

Interestingly, when it comes to being the rapist, our survey data suggests if you are a female and see yourself as attractive, you will find the idea of raping someone else to be much more arousing. Self-reportedly attractive women responding to our survey vastly preferred roleplaying raping someone else, with 22% of women in the most attractive category marking it as a turn on and 17% of those above average reportedly finding it arousing, but almost none of the women in the average or below average categories of attractiveness reporting the idea to be arousing at all.

In contrast, 66% of the self-reportedly least attractive males found the idea of roleplaying raping someone to be arousing, while only 10% of men of average attractiveness did, and 14% of those of high attractiveness did. As for actually raping someone: 49% of self-reportedly unattractive men taking our survey found the idea to be arousing, while not a single average man did, and only 14% of attractive men did. Contrast this with women, where again you see more attractive women getting turned on by being an actual rapist, with 22% in the most attractive category, 3% in the second most attractive, and no women of average or below average attractiveness getting turned on by the idea of actually raping someone. This effect is dramatic—a woman who sees herself as attractive is far more likely to get turned on by the idea of raping someone while a man who is unattractive is much more likely to find the idea arousing.

Ladies and gentlemen, what do you think these people below find attractive when it comes to masculinity and femininity? Before you venture a guess, consider that you might find the answer to be counterintuitive. As it happens, both females and males who took our study and reported to see themselves as attractive reported feeling more aroused by masculine-acting partners.

While this is a moderate effect in women, it is fairly extreme in men—in fact, not a single man in the below average attractiveness category of attractiveness found masculinity in their partner to be a turn on, while 6% of average attractiveness men found it a turn on and 14% of above-average-looking men found it a turn on. There was no similar or converse effect seen with regard to preferences for femininity in a partner. We assume this preference for masculinity by individuals who see themselves as attractive is a self-confidence effect in which a partner’s masculinity is not as threatening to them.

Oh shucks, the sexy beauty pageant is coming to an end. As you vote for the most actually attractive person from the bunch, enjoy some additional fun factors tied to self-assessed hotness:

Our study suggests that unattractive men get way more turned on by the smells of sex than other men, with 49% of our male survey respondents finding it a turn on, contrasted with 14% of attractive men. The opposite is true of women, with 33% of our survey’s attractive female participants finding the smell of sex a turn on compared to 20% of their self-reportedly unattractive female counterparts.
Men taking our survey who see themselves as attractive prefer larger breasts on average, with 28% preferring well above average or unnaturally large breasts. This stands in stark contrast to the arousal patterns seen among our self-reportedly wealthy male survey participants, who reported a preference for smaller breasts.
The self-reported attractiveness of our female survey respondents is not tied to penis size preference, though more attractive women are more likely to say they don’t find penises arousing at all. (Note: Some might see this as mirroring wealthy men not finding breasts attractive.)

The Dog and Cat Show

The Big Four performance concludes with the perfect mental palate cleanser: A dog and cat show. Do NOT, however, get too distracted by the majestic pupsters and kitties that come prancing out. It’s their owners who comprise the major points of fascination in this display.

The surprising correlations between pet ownership and arousal pathways present a delectable example of a random question leading to really fun data. When we put together our survey, we asked questions both about pet ownership and about preference in partner pet ownership (e.g., “Would you prefer to date a partner who owned a dog or one who did not own a dog?”). We didn’t do this because we genuinely cared about the answers, but because we thought fun stats may emerge, like: “Women who prefer a partner with cats like larger penises,” and we were keen to use this kind of vapid data to advertise the book in click bait articles. Sadly, there was no big correlation between pet ownership and breast or penis size preference outside of a small preference for larger penises among women who had dogs. There were, however, massive correlations between cat/dog preferences and many other aspects of sexuality that completely blindsided us.

Gauge the attractiveness of the men and women below. Note how the women striding next to their flouncing canines are rather attractive whereas the male dog owners are . . . less so, and that the pattern reverses with the male and female cat owners showing off their prized felines. Our survey found that more attractive women and less attractive men are drawn to dog ownership, and conversely, more attractive men and less attractive women are likely to have a cat. When it comes to animals that are neither a dog nor a cat, the results are even stronger, with very unattractive women likely to own other critters (think: birds, snakes, iguanas, fish, guinea pigs, etc.) and very attractive (but also very poor) men likely to have them. (Keep in mind our attractiveness ratings are self-reported, so you can choose to read attractive as “self-delusional” if you prefer.)

We can see a few of you drooling over those gorgeous male cat owners. Want some dirt on them before you get their digits? Our survey findings suggest that men with cats are much more likely to rate themselves as being jealous. On what might be a good note for you, they are much less likely to find the idea of physically striking their partners to be arousing (three times less likely, actually).

Take a look at that one guy getting his dog to heel like a champ, and the gentleman at the other end of the stadium failing to get his cat out of its carrier. Perhaps their comfort (or lack thereof) with controlling these animals bleeds over to the bedroom: Our dog-owning male survey respondents were slightly more likely to be sexually dominant, while their male cat-owning counterparts were much more likely to be sexually submissive. While the female dog owners responding to our survey were slightly more likely to be turned on by being sexually dominant, they were, unlike their male counterparts, also significantly more likely to be turned on by being sexually submissive.

Here is where this cat and dog show takes a delicious twist: As it happens, intrepid guests, the real star of this segment is not the pet owners below, nor is it their pets, but rather you! While our survey findings show only moderate correlation between one’s ownership of a dog or cat and various arousal patterns, our findings show a surprisingly high correlation between arousal patterns and preferences for partner pet ownership.

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen: The way you, personally, feel about those dog and cat owners below may say more about your sexual proclivities than their pet ownership does. We suspect this is because actual pet ownership is modified by a bunch of external factors, such as where a person lives or how much they move, whereas preference in partner ownership is more of a “pure” expression—unencumbered by static tied to one’s lifestyle—of whether a person is a dog or cat person.

Men Who Prefer a Partner with a Cat

If you have a cat and are targeting male partners, you are likely to attract significantly more submissive partners. This is true across almost every metric of submission, be it how much they get turned on by choking someone during sex (9% to 36%), striking their partner during sex (4% to 20%), roleplaying getting raped (12% to 5%), finding the thought of owning someone arousing (13% to 21%), getting turned on by acting submissive (35% to 21%), or getting turned on by acting dominant (58% to 73%).^[73]

So, if you want a fellow to boss around, grab a cat or two and start working them into the sexy selfies you post on your online dating profiles.

Applicability of study results is so cool!

Some other weird findings here:

Men who want a partner with a cat are way less likely to find pregnant women more attractive (0% to 10%)
They (relatively) really like the smell of sex (40% to 20%)
They are much more likely to enjoy roleplaying their partner being related to them (18% to 10%)
They are much more likely to be the jealous type (23% to 15%)
They prefer women with significantly larger breasts
They are much more likely to enjoy watching their partner have sex with someone else 14% to 6% (those who were indifferent in this case were 16% here)

Men Who Prefer a Partner with a Dog

Our survey data suggests that if you are trying to pick up a guy and you own a dog, you are much more likely to secure a dominant guy (78% to 39%), but not less likely to secure a submissive guy (34% to 22%) (remember—a person can be aroused by both dominance and submission). You are also much more likely to secure an aggressively dominant guy, as the arousal rates tied to things like roleplaying as a rapist (22% to 12%), the thought of actually raping someone (17% to 5%), and choking a partner (31% to 11%) are in most cases more than twice as high in men who prefer partners with dogs.

Some other weird findings here:

Men who want a partner with a dog are way more likely to be turned on by being restrained (31% to 11%)
In contrast to those who want a partner with a cat, they are much less likely to find pretending their partners are related to them to be arousing (4% to 11%)
They also prefer larger breasts (those with a preference for no pet ownership prefer smaller breasts)
They, same as cat preference men, find the smell of sex arousing at much higher rates (33% to 16%)

Women Who Prefer a Partner with a Cat

Inconveniently, women who prefer a partner who owns a cat have preferences similar to those of men who want a partner with a cat. Both groups in this case are looking for someone who is aggressively dominant, while tending toward being “violently submissive,” hence cat people appear to (statistically speaking) make poor matches for fellow cat people.

For example, they are much more likely to get turned on by being submissive (85% to 57%), they are way more likely to be aroused by being restrained (61% to 34%), they are less likely to get turned on by striking a partner (8% to 15%), more likely to be turned on by being struck (38% to 26%), much more likely to be turned on by being choked (41% to 23%), and much more likely to be turned on by the thought of being owned by someone ( 41% to 15%).

Some other weird findings here:

Women preferring partners who own cats are also much more into BDSM, with almost half having participated in it as a sub (48% to 19%) and a sizable number having participated in it as a dom as well (19% to 8%).
While they are generally much more aroused by submission, they are also slightly more likely to be aroused by being dominant as well (47% to 37%)
They also are more likely to aroused by the smells associated with sex (42% to 30%)
They are slightly less likely to enjoy the thought of roleplaying a partner being related to them (5% to 8%)
Like men with the cat preference they were also way more likely to be jealous (37% 10%)

Across genders, there is definitely a common profile for people who prefer a partner who owns a cat. The two things that don’t carry across genders is the cat-liking males’ predilections for incest play (5% to 8%) and watching their partner have sex with other people. The consistency across genders and distinctness of sexual preferences here is uniquely remarkable and adds credence to our perception that there is something actually going on with this pet owner preference effect.

Women Who Prefer a Partner with a Dog

Both men and women who took our survey and expressed a preference for dog owners bear striking similarities across the gender gap, but in this case, the cross-gender difference is better matched. As with males who prefer dog owners, we see an increase in arousal from dominance (53% to 33%). That said, were in males, rates of submission were simply unchanged, arousal from submission in females who prefer female dog owners’ skyrockets—especially when it comes to “violent submission” (such as roleplay getting raped 19% to 5% and arousal from loss of agency 24% to 6%).

The only thing that stands out as unique between genders is that female lovers of dog owners show a distinct preference for watching their partner have sex with someone else (19% to 11%). Remember that male cat lovers feature this preference as well, whereas male dog lovers are strongly against it, and female cat lovers were lightly against it. We are not sure what is going on here as nothing else had an effect on these numbers, and yet we see it all over the place in pet type preference and the effects of said preference inverse across genders.

Weird findings here:

We see another case of individuals in this category being more likely to be aroused by the smells associated with sex (43% of women who prefer a partner with a dog versus 18% in our overall survey population). What is going on here? Why do we see this trend across all types of pet ownership? Our guess is people who find strong odors repugnant are more likely to find a partner who owns any kind of pet to be a bad match.

What the Hell Did I Just Watch?

That was a weird show, right? Why do you think these factors stood out so boldly in our data? To us, it seems pretty apparent when you break them down into two categories: Politics and pets being the first, and wealth and attractiveness being the second.

Wealth and attractiveness factors are likely products of perceived value on the dating market and/or perceived position in a social hierarchy. We see similar, if slightly less pronounced, correlations from any factor that increases a person’s position within their social hierarchy (friend group size, position at work, etc.). However, these confidence-boosting factors also tangibly increase a person’s value on the dating market, so it is hard to break out what the exact cause is (confidence or perceived desirability).

That said, we think we have this figured out: Attractiveness increases a woman’s odds of becoming aroused by acting dominant more so than it increases a male’s odds. Wealth increases males’ arousal from dominance more than it increases females’ arousal from dominance. It appears to be a person’s self-assessed value on the dating market that drives arousal from dominance.

At first glance, it may seem as though confidence is at play, but if these correlations were being driven by confidence, wealth and attractiveness would theoretically affect men and women equally on these fronts. (This of course assumes our participants believe wealth increases a man’s value on the dating market more than a woman’s and attractiveness increases a woman’s value on the dating market more than a man’s.)

This conclusion is reinforced by our survey data indicating a person’s self-perception of their position within their social hierarchy has less of an effect on how aroused they become by dominance than wealth or attractiveness did.

Long story short, the primary driver behind arousal from dominance (versus submission) appears to be how much of a “catch” a person thinks they are. The more one sees oneself as a catch, the more one is aroused by acting dominant.

It could be argued that people who are more aroused by dominance are more likely to acquire wealth, and thus a proclivity towards dominance may drive wealth acquisition rather than the other way around. We don’t think this is the case and instead suspect the causal nexus involves wealth and attractiveness influencing arousal pathways, not arousal pathways affecting wealth and attractiveness. Attractiveness is not a choice. While someone could reasonably argue that certain arousal pathways could increase a person’s odds of accumulating wealth, it is harder to argue that certain arousal pathways increase your attractiveness (though we were, admittedly, only able to gauge self-reported attractiveness, which might be affected by a proclivity towards dominance).

As for politics and pet preference: Though our survey was extremely detailed and while it dove into almost every nuanced aspect of our subjects’ lives, we did not ask much about personal opinions and worldviews.

We developed this study thinking that arousal pathways are a product of things that happen to us in life—specifically early in our lives—so we didn’t think to ask much about the things people choose to believe. Only our questions related to politics and pet preference touched on opinions. It ultimately makes sense that our beliefs would have a larger impact on our arousal pathways than serendipitous conditions. Still, we were surprised to learn this, and if we were the types to ever write a book on the same subject twice, this is something we would dig into a lot more next time.

We remain somewhat baffled by the trends associated with politics and pet preferences. That said, lots of research shows political beliefs are, in part, genetically inherited^[74] and tied to more basic instincts like those associated with risk tolerance. We wonder if political leanings might be tied to a heritable behavior pattern in which a single common factor is influencing both politics and sexual expression, but unfortunately lack the data required to investigate such a theory. We can say with some confidence that we do not believe it is a person’s political beliefs that influence their sexual expression. Were that the case, one wouldn’t see conservative males much more likely than liberals to find the idea of their partner sleeping with someone else to be arousing, given that “cuck” is a popular conservative insult for liberal males.

Why Do People Participate in BDSM?

Beloved informational explorers, welcome to the close of our tour. Please follow us out of the replica colosseum, exiting through the BDSM-themed gift shop. While some of you have already picked up a few BDSM-themed souvenirs along the way, we would be remiss in neglecting to give you one final shopportunity.

You may be wondering why our gift shop is BDSM-themed. When parsing through the data, we made one final BDSM-themed discovery that we would like to share with you.

While we didn’t expect a perfect overlap between erotic material consumption and the actual acting out of various sexual acts, we did expect the same demographic factors to correlate with similar changes in each. For example, if being wealthy made a man more likely to get turned on by acting dominant, we hypothesized that wealth would also increase a man’s probability of being a dom in a BDSM context. This, however, is not what our survey results revealed.

Our survey results suggest that, generally speaking, factors that increase a person’s value on the sexual marketplace—be they male or female—typically cause an increase in that person’s rates of arousal from acting dominant. However, this trend does not carry over into BDSM participation.

Our data indicated, as we expected, that BDSM subs primarily participate in BDSM to masturbate the arousal pathway associated with submission. Factors increasing a person’s likelihood to be aroused by submission almost always correlate with a person’s participation in BDSM as a sub in our data.

This was not at all the case with doms. Factors that increased arousal from dominance often decreased the odds of one acting as a dom in the context of BDSM. This confused the hell out of us at first. Why would factors causing people to be more aroused by acting dominant in a sexual context not also correlate highly with people assuming the role of a dom in BDSM contexts?

After looking at the data again and again and again, we eventually noticed a pattern: When the thing that increases a person’s value on the sexual marketplace also increases the dominance they experience daily (as is the case with wealth, a job with great authority, a position at the top of one’s social hierarchy, etc.), rates of participation in BDSM as a dom either didn’t rise dramatically or dropped, while rates of arousal from acting dominant rose.

Check out these store displays for some examples. See that placard under the male mannequin with the expensive three piece suit and Rolex? While our survey results suggest that 71% of men with high-power positions at work get turned on by acting dominant in a sexual context (in contrast to only 53% of those that are in low power positions), our results also suggest that high power men assume the dominant role in BDSM contexts at a rate 17% rate, which stands in stark contrast with that of men with less power at work—a robust 29% of men in lower professional ranks assume the dominant role in BDSM play.

At this point we are sure you won’t be surprised to know that our survey data suggests that women at the top of their social hierarchies are much more likely to be aroused by acting dominant than other women. You also won’t be surprised to hear that men low in their social hierarchies are more likely to be aroused by acting submissive in a sexual context. However, we may succeed in raising a few eyebrows when we say our data indicates that a woman at the bottom of her social hierarchy is far more likely to assume a dominant role in BDSM contexts, and men at the bottom of their social hierarchies are no less likely to assume dominant roles in a BDSM context than their king-of-the-hill counterparts, despite both being much less likely to be aroused by acting dominant.

Our data also suggests that women who have larger friend groups are less likely to assume the role of a dom in BDSM play, while nevertheless receiving more arousal by acting dominant.

Finally, our data suggests that men born in families they perceived as being at the bottom of the social hierarchy prefer to play the dom at almost twice the rate in BDSM scenarios (18% vs 10%). While females born into high-power families prefer to be a dom at a significantly higher rate than females of low-power families (29% to 10%), they also prefer to assume the role of the sub at much higher rates (57% to 29%). It appears that being born into a high-status family as a woman just increases BDSM participation across the board and not specifically as a dom or a sub.

Is it not fascinating that even those who are more aroused by dominance in many cases aren’t assuming the dominant role in BDSM contexts? While on the surface this finding seems surprising, it makes sense that those who experience dominance in their daily lives would not need to resort to BDSM to masturbate dominance arousal pathways. However, in a society that tells people that indulging in subservience in public is not a laudable behavior, it makes sense that all categories of submissive people would be drawn to BDSM, as there are not many instances in which the submission pathway will be masturbated through the course of a normal day.

We could be wrong about all this. It could just be that the factors associated with being aroused by acting dominant in a sexual context—attractiveness, wealth, large friend groups, power in an office environment, etc.—also vastly increase the social and self-image “cost” of participating in a marginalized community like the BDSM community. This is something the data actually indicates might be true.

Bear with us here, because there is no concise way to explain this: Recall that our study found that men in a high position of power at work assume the role of a dom in a BDSM context at a rate of 17% versus 29% of their low-power male counterparts. Men with high-power jobs reported assuming the position of a sub at a rate of 8%, versus 18% of men with low-power jobs, suggesting that when they acted in a BDSM context, they played the dom 283% more often than when they were a sub—whereas the men of low power at work were only a dom at 161% the rate they were a sub. This indicates that when such individuals do participate in BDSM, they do so proportionally as a dom at a rate you would expect given how much more naturally aroused by dominance they are. This higher participation in dominant roles by the professionally high-power men who do participate in BDSM undermines the theory that they are more likely to have their dominance arousal pathway fulfilled by their daily life. Instead, these stats reinforce the theory that professionally high-power men are just participating in BDSM less overall.

Remembering the Journey: A Recap

Thank you for joining us on this whirlwind review of our informal research. We can tell from the dizzy and moderately nauseous looks on some of your faces that we presented a lot to digest.

As you gather your shopping bags and collect a complimentary souvenir thong on the way out, please also grab hold of this huge caveat: This is not peer-reviewed research. This is armchair research—or to put it more flatteringly, “gentleman science.” We are massive advocates of recreational research as a means of sanity checking personal theories and filling in gaps in one’s knowledge of the world. If you disagree with anything we think we found in our survey, we heartily encourage you in the strongest possible terms to do your own research. We recommend Positly.com and GuidedTrack.com as great tools for conducting your own small-scale research studies over something like Survey Monkey. Should you ultimately give this a try, we would love to help you share your findings.

If you read this far in the supplementary section of the book . . . why? We never intended you to read through all this, our sane readers stopped at the beginning of the supplementary section. Especially given that you are a deep cut kind of reader, we strongly encourage you to leave a short review on Amazon. Putting these books together is a pain in the butt and we give away all the money they make. The reviews people generously take time to post both make us feel good and lower what we have to pay in advertising to get this content out there to other people (books with more reviews and better reviews enjoy a higher conversion rate from ads). If you want to really be helpful, we are always looking for people to help edit our upcoming books—just drop us an email at [email protected].

[1] Not all of the professional sex therapists we contacted gave us detailed feedback and none reviewed content added in the final stages of editing.

[2] See “Cultural Drift and Social Change” in Current Anthropology for a discussion of cultural drift and the manner in which it accelerates within small isolated groups.

[3] One of the writers of the book is LGBTQIA, as are a number of its editors and contributors. We like to think that hasn’t impacted our objectivity and thus need not be mentioned, (it was not in the original print of the book). However, a number of this book’s negative reviews specifically called out what the reader assumed to be non-LGBTQIA individuals writing on the topic of sexuality. While we prefer that our ideas be judged on their own merit, we feel obligated to mention this, as negative reviews can severely impact the reach of this book. If it annoys you that people do this, please drop us a positive review.

[4] We are in no way comparing the daily experiences or levels of oppression that these communities historically faced and currently endure. LGBT people have been and are being killed. We only wish to highlight that cultural drift has affected each group.

[5] When you look at other research, like a study of 2,300 people in the UK showing 75% to have a kink, our number may seem high. This is because our survey does not explore kinks per se, but rather any turn on not tied to penis-in-vagina sex or oral sex.

[6] OK, that isn’t entirely true—we did find one potential pathway through which parenting might ultimately affect adult sexuality, but the effects are fairly light and are more likely to be signs of correlation rather than causation. For more info, see the chapter: “Strict Fathers” on page 451.

[7] See: “Psychological Barriers to Evolutionary Psychology: Ideological Bias and Coalitional Adaptations” in Archives of Scientific Psychology

[8] For more on the replication crisis, check out Muthukrishna, M, and J Henrich’s article “A problem in theory” in Nature Human Behavior.

[9] The words fetish, kink, and paraphilia are synonyms when used in the vernacular (and we generally try to write our books in the vernacular), but if you really want to get technical, here is how they differ:

Kink: Arousal tied to a non-traditional or otherwise socially taboo stimulus. This arousal is additive to other sources of arousal.
Fetish: A sexual fixation on a specific object or act to the extent that sexual gratification is impossible (or nearly impossible) without engaging said object or act. (An alternate, commonly used definition of fetish includes all intense arousal from non-human objects and non-genital body parts.)
Paraphilia: A fetish that has escalated to a point at which it has negative life consequences. (Think of this as the “clinical” term for a fetish.)

[10] There is a mirror phenomenon in which humans believe those they find arousing are also intrinsically more moral—this is typically referred to as the Halo Effect.

[11]Object sexuality, the romantic attraction to specific structures or architectural elements, is classified as a paraphilia when it really shouldn’t be. Accounts from those who have object sexuality almost exclusively focus on romantic or intimate feelings for structures—these individuals’ feelings are rarely erotic in nature. Meaning this is not an abnormality in an arousal pathway but rather one in a pair bonding pathway which is likely a separate neurological system as discussed above.

[12] You will notice that while the word bisexual was obviously used in the research we are citing here, we do our best to avoid it and will continue to do so throughout the book. The term “bisexual” has a few competing definitions that can be intensely personal. Some define bisexuality as attraction to more than one gender while others require this definition to include an attraction to one’s own gender—recommending the word polysexual to describe attraction to multiple genders but not necessarily one’s own. Neither of these definitions necessarily includes all people who have at least an attraction to males and females but not necessarily any other gender identity (which is what bisexual used to mean). People who would have checked the word “bi” on a survey in the past may identify as anything from bisexual to pansexual, omnisexual, or polysexual.

[13] To not beat around the bush: The most vocal of these groups are a few extremist sub-factions of the “Gender Critical Radical Feminists” also known as TERFs by their detractors (to highlight that they don’t believe trans women are women). This is also not an argument used in the more mainstream factions of the gender critical movement.

[14] Full disclosure: One of the authors of this book is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.

[15] See “Single dose testosterone administration increases men’s facial femininity preference in a Chinese population” in Psychoneuroendocrinology

[16]Well, one would call them asexual unless one knew about the term apothisexual, but we don’t think having a billion words for ultra-specific sexualities is super helpful either. Yes, it helps people feel like they are part of a wider community but it also pigeonholes people who deviate from the existing lexicon and hinders their ability to communicate their sexuality to other people.

[17] Of course, gayness might have evolved multiple times for multiple reasons. Moreover, there is some evidence from anthropological research that gay people do care for nephews and nieces at higher rates, showing there could be some selective pressure here, but that is as far as the evidence for this hypothesis goes.

[18] In current terminology omnisexuals are individuals that experience active attraction to all genders (this term is used to contrast with the term pansexual, which is often used to indicate a lack of aversion to any gender and is more common in females who fall toward the center of the Kinsey scale).

[19] Pansexual = Someone whose arousal pathways are not influenced by the gender of a target.

[20] There are still cases of women who feel no arousal toward anything at all. These cases just make up the minority of women who identify as asexual. Think of the concept of asexuality being akin to that of being colorblind: Most people who are colorblind can actually see most colors, but a minority of colorblind people with achromatopsia actually fit the etymology of the term “colorblind” and can only see in black and white but they are so rare that the term colorblind rarely applies to them even though etymologically it should apply exclusively to them.

[21] Bukkake falls under this category if you assume that arousal from sperm is a gender detection system. It could be that arousal from sperm comes entirely from the societal notion that being covered in it is shorthand for being dominated and thus arousal from bukkake is really arousal from submission. This could be teased out be seeing if it appears cross culturally.

[22] In modern parlance most of these people would now be called “omnisexual” which is used to describe active sexual attraction to all genders (as opposed to pansexual, which is seen as being more gender blind).

[23] Our primary ambassador from the looner community introduced us to this store run for looners called balloons-united.com which delights us to no end and is well worth a visit.

[24] As a cool aside, great apes have been observed laughing when people perform magic tricks for them. This would fit our schema. Magic tricks would kind of make sense within a great ape’s worldview, but would still be surprising, so they would want to see the trick performed again to fully understand it. To us, this indicates that our hominid ancestors likely laughed as well.

[25] This was a checkbox-style question, so participants were able to select multiple responses.

[26] We did find that strict fathers may have an effect, but the effect is fairly small and can be explained by other factors.

[27] For more info on this, see the literature review: “Women’s Erotic Rape Fantasies: An Evaluation of Theory and Research” in the Journal of Sex Research.

[28] This evidence could also imply that humans were in the process of transitioning in the opposite direction as well, but given that we know the end result of this period (recorded history) was largely monogamous or polygynous showing a strong expectation of female fidelity and that our closest relatives, chimps, have little expectation of fidelity, we can pretty safely assume this was not the case.

[29] Well—OK—we can think of one: Women who evolved this trait may have been living in a polyamorous society and trading sex with males for resources, securing resources from less genetically attractive (but otherwise attractive in terms of available time and/or resources) males when they could not get pregnant, but in light of the morphology evidence discussed above, we don’t think this was the case.

[30] Some ancient Greek quotes about women for context: “A woman who travels outside her house should be old enough that people ask whose mother she is, not whose wife she is,” “A man who teaches a woman to write should know that he is providing poison to an asp,” and “Zeus made wives as his worst pestilence and fettered us in bonds unbreakable.”

[31] In this particular discussion, we assume humans primarily lived in polygynous societies for the reasons discussed above. Thus, women had “primary” partners and were able to “cheat” though both concepts probably would have had vastly different meanings to these historic cultures and certainly would not have had their current moral baggage. We merely use these words as a shorthand.

[32] Part of why this surprised us is other research has indicated that doms actually report higher levels of happiness and wellbeing than subs and that participating in BDSM even lowers their cortisol levels (presumably lowering their stress levels in general).

[33] Note: This is in reference to practices like cross dressing as a cis person and not in reference to being trans.

[34] Interesting languages that evolved independently do not show much consistency in how they gender inanimate objects. This is a good demonstration of just how affected by our culture—and not inborn—our “gender packages” happen to be.

[35] This phenomenon isn’t unique to gender. Sometimes a concept or way of looking at the world is so boldly carved into our subconscious that it spills out into our perception of reality. For example, humans also have a “pre-programed” system for reading agency and emotion in other individuals. This system is so deeply ingrained that across cultures, humans will accidentally ascribe agency and emotions to inanimate objects and random patterns (like weather or clouds). Some neurodivergencies even cause alterations in how this system expresses itself (like the phenomenon of magical thinking in schizophrenia, a term for ascribing agency and intentionality to patterns), so it would be weird to not see neurodivergencies affect the gender system.

[36] We suspect this is why toddlers often become so fixated on the topic of gender and act out simplistic gendered behavior. This can be thought of as the gender version of babbling. On this topic, it would be fascinating to see if these systems could be hijacked in toddlers to identify other social roles with their gender systems.

[37] If you are interested in reading more on this front, check out “Transvestism: A Survey of 1032 Cross-Dressers” by Richard F. Docter & Virginia Prince published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

[38] Here we need to note that some organizations lump cross-dressing individuals under the “trans umbrella,” so in that sense cross-dressers would be “trans” but not “trans men” or “trans women.” Regardless of nomenclature, wanting to act out the gender display of another gender is not the same as being a gender different from the sex you were assigned at birth, so it is important to establish that both of these groups exist as distinct behavioral sets. This is another one of those cases of groups forming around the social prejudices aligned against them rather than similar drives.

[39] I, Simone, am a woman, yet I reacted similarly to the study’s male participants when looking at the study’s various pictures, so I doubt this is a strictly male phenomenon. Alas, we haven’t yet come across studies investigating female reactions to images of men exhibiting various configurations of provocative dress and posture.

[40] Do not assume that any of the above kinks are more common in the trans population. The aforementioned kinks are indeed more common among certain groups, but not trans people per se—rather, they are more common among the politically conservative and wealthy.

[41] Technically, agender people like us (people who do not have an attachment to any gender identity) are considered non-binary and sometimes non-binary people are considered trans. In some circles, our statement could therefore be read like: “As trans people, we have no idea what it feels like to be trans.” But in the same way a straight person has a better understanding than a “totally asexual” person of what a gay person is describing when they talk about being turned on by someone, a cisgender person has a better understanding of what it feels like to be a trans man or woman than we do.

This inability to even attempt to model what it feels like to care about our gender is one of the reasons we keep this section so short.

[42] For some examples see: I’m a Transgender Woman Because of Video Games or A video game showed me who I really am and read the comments from people who had similar experiences.

[43] Given this data, we cannot help but wonder if the reason the trans community has taken longer to gain acceptance than the gay community is in part because people with soft-gender expressions are far more prevalent than people with low libidos.

[44] As is the case with most of this book, we asked some community members to “sanity check” our writing, as we can’t say much about being trans from firsthand experience. We were advised to mention the role gender dysphoria plays in being trans, but ultimately chose to sidestep the subject as there is some debate within the trans community as to whether gender dysphoria is necessary to be trans. The discrepancy in consensus strikes us as a question of definition or ideology, placing it outside the scope of this book. We are more interested in the underling “brain stuff” and not linguistic stuff. All we can say is that many people who identify as trans experience gender dysphoria while others do not.

[45] Spanking became such a popular mental proxy for submission among boys who grew up at English boarding schools it become known as the “English vice” during the Victorian era.

[46] See “The pleasure is momentary…the expense damnable?: The influence of pornography on rape and sexual assault”

[47] See: “Is Pornography Really about ‘Making Hate to Women’? Pornography Users Hold More Gender Egalitarian Attitudes Than Nonusers in a Representative American Sample.”

[48] See: “Pornography reinforces sexist attitudes among a subgroup of heterosexuals.”

[49] Because porn affects opioid pathways, it will cause the parts of the brain that “light up” when exposed to potential opioids to activate when looking at porn. This has been shown in some studies.

[50] If you do believe you are addicted to masturbation and it is having a negative effect on your life, an interesting study published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings suggests through a case study that Naltrexone, an opioid antagonist, could be an effective treatment.

[51] This quote is from an interview of Andrew L. Whitehead of Clemson University in PsyPost

[52] NRE stands for new relationship energy. It’s the intense feeling one gets about a partner early in a relationship. The term is most often used in the poly community.

[53] We are open to the possibility that NRE is comprised of a few different emotional states. We broadly define these states as an involuntary fixation on another person combined with a strong emotional reward from increased closeness with them that is not based solely on sexual interest, love, or intellectual interest.

[54] It is very interesting that while our sexuality is largely unalterable through pharmacological intervention, our amoralities are highly influenceable by pharmaceuticals. Not only can drugs significantly change what incites the feeling of love in an individual in the short term but some substances, like LSD, have been shown to have long-term effects on whether or not certain concepts are likely to insight the feeling of love.

[55] Nevertheless, the NRE system—the force driving us to have crushes on people—might be influenced by gender preference, which could help to explain the origin of concepts like heteroromantic and homoromantic, as the NRE system is bundled with the amorality system in a person’s romantic orientation.

[56] If gender is a big part of “who a person is” in your conception of the world, it can impact your amorality.

[57] There is one common exception: Some individuals seem to have the thresholds required to fall in love with a target dramatically lowered by their sexual interest in a target while for others this is irrelevant. Functionally, this can make someone “gay” or “straight” in amorality even if this pattern is not caused by an amoural attraction to a specific gender.
This is another one of those circumstances in which an obsession with gender causes society to miss a blindingly obvious pattern in the data—that the systems involved with love cannot read the gender of a target but that through other systems, gender can influence love. The system is likely gender blind because it first evolved to form pair bonds with one’s children and the gender of a child would have been irrelevant.

[58] Evidence indicating the average person’s underlying romantic proclivities are panromantic does not proclaim “panromantic” to be the only “amoural identity” nor does it invalidate other romantic identities. As with sexual identities, our romantic identities are the patterns cast upon a wall when the light of our underlying romantic proclivities shines through the stained glass windows of our surrounding cultures and life experiences. The fact that the same sun shines upon most churches does not invalidate the patterns created by the unique stained glass windows they feature.

[59] We suspect that object sexuality, which leads some to form relationships with objects like cars or monuments, describes not a mix-up in someone’s sexual system, but rather a mix-up in a person’s amourality system. This is one of the few exceptions in which people are apparently only able to feel love for a narrow set of things—with the divergence in this system being that one is capable of forming intense love for inanimate objects, something the average brain appears to block (with the exception of childhood comfort items like blankets and stuffed animals).

[60] For more information on this, see: “The gendering of language: A comparison of gender equality in countries with gendered, natural gender, and genderless languages” in Sex Roles.

[61] Amorality can be pharmacologically altered with some hallucinogens, so this may be a bad example.

[62] We just made up that name to be the most generic sounding fursona we could think of; sorry if it is a real person’s fursona.

[63] See Personal Relationships or Misogyny on Twitter by Demosand Derogation of Competitors in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships

[64] ”Trashy” in our study was defined as “someone whose portrayal is aggressively aimed at demonstrating a lack of appropriate demeanor.” We would prefer not to use words colloquially intended to be derogatory, like “trashy” and “slutty,” but such words are common in arousal patterns and the naming of pornographic material sub-genres, thus a failure to use these terms would compromise our data.

[65] We assure you, ladies and gentlemen, that we would prefer not to use the word “slutty,” but this is how erotic material is labeled, and we run the risk of compromising our data when we make efforts to find a roundabout way of describing this genre of porn and erotic material in our surveys.

[66] On the back of the book, we claim that the number of people interested in parent-child roleplay is around the same as the Black population in the US. We drew this conclusion by looking at people interested in either father roleplay OR mother roleplay: 12.5%. The US Black population is 12.7%.

[67] For more information on this phenomenon, see the paper: Not Threat, But Threatening: Potential Causes and Consequences of Gay Innumeracy, which found overestimation of the size of the gay population to be common among groups that see them as a threat. A more updated breakdown indicates this phenomenon isn’t subsiding—see the Gallup article: Americans Still Greatly Overestimate U.S. Gay Population.

[68] In our survey we defined bisexual in the vernacular (arousal from at least males and females), as explaining the more complicated new variant definitions would increase the length of an already very long survey.

[69] As these are self-reported libido levels, it could be that conservatives contextualize a lower level of libido as being abnormal, but our other data does not support the theory. For example, 54% of conservative females have sex more than once a week versus 47% of liberal ladies, and 56% of conservative men had sex more than once a week versus 41% of their liberal counterparts.

Maybe sex is a bad indicator, right? If we look at masturbation more frequently than three times a week, we find 80% conservative men versus 76% liberal men fall into that category, with the hiccup being we see this case in 15% of conservative women vs 29% of liberal women.

[70] We’re referring only to the average breast size of partners. Political leaning did track with one difference in breast size preference: specifically, appetite for porn with giant breasts, which both conservative men and women reported consuming at higher frequency than their liberal peers in our study.

[71]A complication to this trend is women in the below-average category of wealth get turned on by seeing themselves as a man at a higher rate as well (7.7%). While this is only slightly higher than average, it still throws a wrench in the nice pattern we were seeing.

[72] Malcolm here: As a guy, I had trouble understanding this, so here is how Simone explained it to me: “I think many women feel unpretty because they lack the funds necessary to pay for services that they believe make them pretty (or stylists who make them feel pretty through sheer flattery).”

[73] We tried a ton of ways of showing the data in this section and couldn’t find one that was comfortably succinct—we tried laying out all the data systematically and it was immensely boring. Thus, we have decided it is best to stick with a purely narrative approach and cite stats when relevant, with the first stat being X gender who prefers partners with Y pet and the second being X gender who explicitly prefers partners without Y pet—we will not include the numbers of indifferent individuals unless they add color to the data, as they make it harder to read. We know it still sucks to read but it is the best of the various ways of laying out the data and this is where we landed.

[74] See “Genetic Influences on Political Ideologies: Twin Analyses of 19 Measures of Political Ideologies from Five Democracies and Genome-Wide Findings from Three Populations in Behavior Genetics” for one of these studies.

The Pragmatist’s Guide Book Series by Simone Collins and Malcolm Collins Full Text for LLMs and AI

The “Unknowable”

Retaining Teens Through Rebellion

Puberty:Gendered Mental Susceptibilities

Age and Power

Post-Death Family Engagement

Naming

Cultural Language

LGBT Sexuality

Cultural Approaches to Sexuality

Robosexuality

J. D. Unwin & Sexual Liberation

Levirate Marriages

Dating and Partner Finding

Gender Ratio Crises

Polyamory

A Better Solution: The Season

Dating for a Corporate Family

Marriage Contracts

Gender Roles

Interfaith Marriage

Glorification of Motherhood

Identity and Self

Hard Culture Opposition toPolygenic Risk Score Screening

Institutional Families(Post-Artificial-Womb Family Units)

Roles in Multicultural Ecosystems

The Mystery of ModernJewish Urban Specialization

The Myth of a Large, Genetic Jewish IQ Advantage

Gun Ownership andResponsibility of Protection

Urban vs Rural Approaches to Charity

Pets & Domesticated Animals

Dogs, Our Evolutionary Partners

Victimhood, Politicking, and Industry

A Case Study in Cultural Genotypes vs Phenotypes: American vs. Israeli Haredim

Locus of Control

Offense

Ideal Mental Landscape

Relation to Pleasure and the Arts

The Pleasure Pod Filter

Dealing with Anger

Dealing with Disgust

Accidental Cults: MLMs & Life Coaches

Accidental Cults: The Mental Health Industry

Accidental Cults: AA

Religious Psychology

Cultures and Conservatism

Immigration and Conservative Values

Cultural Volume

Psychedelics & Hallucinogens

Rituals and Ceremonies

Medicine and Technology

Education

Future Day

Rejection Day

Lemon Week

What AIs Like to Do for Fun

Fortress Planet AI

Deep Thought AI

Theological AI

Puberty:
Gendered Mental Susceptibilities

Hard Culture Opposition to
Polygenic Risk Score Screening

Institutional Families
(Post-Artificial-Womb Family Units)

The Mystery of Modern
Jewish Urban Specialization

Gun Ownership and
Responsibility of Protection