This is part 9 of a series of blog posts. Please start with part 1 first.
If asked, whether men are more evil than women, most people would answer something like „only few men are evil, most are all right. We should not condemn all men for the crimes of a small minority“. But unfortunately, this view is not really convincing. It might sound OK if we look at the - still rather rare - crimes committed by individual men. But what about the famous „Pelicot“ case in France (and many similar cases all over the world), where a woman was drugged and raped by dozens of men? How could all these men form such large groups? Why didn’t any of the men invited to join a group call the police? Why was it so scarily easy to convince more and more men to join the groups to torture these women too?
We have to admit that the feminists are right: we really do have a problem!
I think this behavior can only be explained using evolutionary psychology. And I must warn you again at this point: the required trains of thought must be - as discussed earlier (part 4 of this series) - necessarily moral free.
Let’s start with the most basic question: what is the purpose of men? To answer this question, I want to cite one of the previous posts of this series:
The living humans form an extremely thin layer in time, separating many millions of years of history (including our non-homo ancestors back to the first cell) from a potentially infinite future. It’s of extreme importance that we do our job of survival and procreation. If one runner in a relay race drops the baton the race is lost. Evolution did a perfect „job“ giving us all the behaviors required to succeed. Everything we do is ultimately intended (!) to serve this purpose (even if we think that „we just do it for fun“).
This is the first important building block for understanding the evil of men: even if our life is (mostly) great fun and we feel rarely badly stressed, there is always extreme urgency in all our actions. It is of extreme importance that we succeed and all of us would do everything humanly possible to prevent failure (to jump ahead a bit: yes, unfortunately this includes committing crimes!). And, as there is no higher authority which could coordinate the activities towards the achievement of this - biological - goal of procreation in a group of people, the extreme determination to succeed in this task is something all humans share. Every single human must at least try. Only this ensures that a sufficient number of humans succeed and that human life itself can be preserved for the following generations.
Note: all this might not be valid anymore for modern humans, but it describes the dynamics which has shaped the human mind over millions of years.
But where is the problem now? We are more people on earth than ever before. Is this still not enough?
To solve this conundrum we have to come back to part 5 of this series and study some aspects discussed there in more detail.
It’s our desires which are supposed to guide us through a successful life. Even if this mechanism works only very poorly in our modern society, it's very important to understand in detail how it worked in our distant past.
First, I want to illustrate how desire guides us through life using a work of art as a metaphor. In 1987, the Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss created the art film „The Way Things Go“ (watch it on youtube!) which showed a fantastic Rube Goldberg machine at work.
Human life changed only very little over millions of years. Therefore, like in the movie, the future awaiting a young boy was rather easy to predict. Our desires guided us from one - foreseeable - event to the next - foreseeable - event. And so on. In the Fischli / Weiss movie, the action sometimes proceeds without substantial changes (many „boring“ parts have actually been cut out). The same was true for our lives: sometimes the „ball“ just rolled straight but hit the next target nonetheless after some time. Like the „guiding items“ in the movie, our desires are placed rather sparsely at important „checkpoints“ of our life, whenever we needed to accomplish something important. If the action fails to proceed in the usual way, the guidance is lost completely: if a ball is supposed to roll on another object (to trigger the next action), but rolls into a wrong direction instead, the whole chain of actions is stopped at the last action.
Now we can - armed with these insights from enjoying a great art movie - look at men’s lives: how they once were and how they are today. Our desires are - as biological evolution works far too slowly to allow the human species to adapt substantially in a few thousand years - only adapted to the life of humans in pre-agricultural times.
For all men, one of the most important of such „checkpoints“ was the creation of new life. The first activity required was - of course - to have sex with a woman. We all know that actually very little sex is required to make a baby. A single intercourse can be sufficient to do the job. But in pre-agricultural times a single intercourse would - unlike in many cases today - yield for a man only a very small probability to become father. Why is this so? Life was very different from now in several aspects:
- Women had lots of sex. Strict monogamy / marriage had not been invented yet (it was invented quite late to make it possible to bequest owned things and - in particular - land to our own children). Therefore women subconsciously (!) used sex to secure care, protection and resources from several men. If you think about our modern prostitution now, you are imagining it totally wrong. Women did not have sex with men they found unattractive to get „paid“. Rather they enjoyed the huge variety of - equally penniless - attractive men and the complex rational and emotional processes required to make good decisions in their love life made the whole „game“ highly interesting and entertaining for women. In short: women had lots of sex because - in the society of the past - they loved to have lots of sex. And - at the time - no man would blame and shame women for such totally normal behavior [4].
- People lived in small tribes. Genetic variation between the members of these groups was rather small. Babies and kids looked all very similar. Therefore, only women knew for sure which kids came out of their own belly. But prehistoric men were mostly groping in the dark regarding this important question.
- Therefore for men, the only way to feel optimistic about their own chances to become a father was to have lots of sex. To outcompete other men with quantity.
- Therefore lots of sex was the trigger for the completion of this important „action checkpoint“. Once they had enjoyed lots of sex with a particular woman, they instinctively started to care for her (subconsciously assuming that she must be carrying their baby in her womb). And - another „checkpoint“ later - they cared for the children of this woman (again subconsciously assuming that some of them are likely their own). And, because men were willing to offer care, resources and protection in exchange for frequent sex, women's sexuality co-evolved in a way which allowed them to offer this with pleasure (even if their own requirements for procreation alone were much lower).
- Therefore, our prehistoric society worked perfectly well. Women and men were equally happy. Both enjoyed lots of sex (for different biological reasons - but who cares) and men cared lovingly for (several) women and their children.
And now let’s have a look at our modern sex life:
- People live in marriages and other mostly monogamous relationships. In this setup, the man is supposed to guarantee care, protection and resources in exchange for exclusive sex (i.e. guaranteed fatherhood). Unfortunately this configuration is terribly boring for women: after the single important decision, the choice of a husband or long term partner, there is actually nothing important to do anymore for the rest of their lives. Consequently, many women cut sex frequency down to the required minimum to make a few children. The required conditions to trigger the „sex action“ (i.e. stimulate her desire) are simply not met anymore.
- While women can - at least - still meet their procreation goals in this setup [1], it is an utter disaster for men. Even if they know - rationally - absolutely for sure that they have already five kids with their wife (they might even have sent some hair to a lab for DNA testing) their brains - adapted to very different living conditions - do not acknowledge this as a completion of the „getting a woman pregnant“ checkpoint. Men’s success metric for this checkpoint is only (!) the experience of frequent sex - and not an abstract information.
- This has two important consequences: First, men often don’t proceed properly to the next „care and protect“ checkpoints anymore. They hide from their families at their workplace and often show surprisingly little interest in their own children. This is because in the absence (or scarcity) of sex with the mother they - subconsciously - don’t truly believe that they are their own [2].
- But, much more importantly, they subconsciously live in a constant state of emergency. Imagine the Fischli / Weiss movie where the chain of actions breaks already at some early point in time. This threatens the completion of the whole cycle. And, translated to a man's life, this means catastrophic failure to procreate. The baton seems to have dropped and the existence of future generations seems to be at risk. This tantalizing feeling is present in men even if the biological goal of procreation has actually already been objectively reached (which is - as we know from global population growth numbers - the case for most men).
- And now, as we have seen in part 6 of this series, humans willingly compromise the wellbeing of individuals when they feel that the survival of the group (or even the species) is at risk. Accordingly, men will do everything possible to avoid the disaster of failing to procreate. Sadly, the resulting behaviors include many forms of sexual crime [3].
Now, understanding these mechanisms does not mean that we should refrain from punishing the crimes of men in our current society.
But we might want to consider planning a future society which is far better adapted to the needs of both women and men.
Please continue here with part 10 of this series.
[1] This is why women very rarely commit sexual crimes!
[2] This lets them in some cases even see their own daughters as valid sexual targets.
[3] And other harmful behaviors like prostitution and pursuing damaging instrumental goals.
[4] It's actually much more complicated. But shame must have been invented by evolution to make polyamory more effective (which kind of proves its significance in our distant past).
Image: Pixabay / FrankBeckerDE