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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28312 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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A question: why do people believe that people - especially men - who are unsuccessful with romantic relationships are unsuccessful because of a lack of moral virtue? A man who's 30 years old and has never gone on a date or kissed anyone is assumed by default to be some kind of fat, basement-dwelling loser. When he is in fact a short but fit engineer, or a corporate lawyer, or a programmer for Google, he's then roundly criticized for being misogynistic or lacking in moral virtue. Occasionally, darker - much darker - suspicions are raised: let's say that there are reasons why these men frequently avoid being around unrelated children. It seems difficult for people to comprehend that an apparently healthy, gainfully-employed individual could fail to meet with romantic success despite a decade of trying...unless there is something seriously morally wrong with them.

Someone who fails at being a salesman, or a business owner, or even at playing basketball worth a damn...doesn't get that. "I'm a nice, decent, hardworking guy...but I can't sell shoes at Nordstrom, I've been working hard to do this and have dreamt of being a salesman since I was 12" is a kind of absurd complaint. He might be a fine human being and maybe he'd make a great heavy equipment operator, but he just doesn't have the talent for sales. We don't think there's something morally wrong with our hero because he can't sell shoes, or because he's a short, clumsy guy that sucks at basketball.

I've been meaning to write a blog post which touches on this topic for months. Here's the bullet points:

  • Being morally good and being likeable on an interpersonal level are orthogonal traits. Many people are both, many people are neither, but it isn't hard to find examples of people who are likeable but unvirtuous (e.g. charming con artists), or who are morally upstanding but hard to like (e.g. socially awkward and arrogant nerds who join EA and donate vast sums of their own money to charitable causes).
  • The assumption that people who are likeable are also morally upstanding (and vice versa) is so widespread that it might as well be instinctual (for evolutionary reasons). How often do you hear people say "I like him, he's a really nice guy", as if the former by definition implies the latter? It takes immense courage to assert, without a trace of irony, that you like someone even though he's an actively nasty dickhead.
  • We assume that our friends and lovers are decent people who only occasionally behave badly under unusually stressful circumstances (i.e. the fundamental attribution error), whereas people we don't like are assumed to be actively nasty (even if we've forgiven our friends for worse crimes than our enemies have ever committed).
  • Many people are extremely poor judges of why they find someone attractive (either platonically, sexually or romantically). Asking people to enumerate the kind of friend or husband they want is a task extremely susceptible to being confounded by social desirability bias. Most people (especially those lacking in self-awareness) will list off a bunch of socially commendable traits and fail to notice that none of the people they've been involved with historically have ever met that description.
  • If you've internalised the idea that anyone you like is good and that anyone you dislike is bad, if you're approached by a person who's obviously attracted to you or wants to be your friend, but you don't feel the same way, the only way to resolve the cognitive dissonance will be to decide that that person is a bad person.
  • Sometimes the person will, by coincidence, be a genuinely bad person (because interpersonal likeability and personal virtue are orthogonal), but sometimes they'll be a morally upstanding person guilty only of being physically unattractive or somewhat lacking in social graces. For this eventuality, there's the all-encompassing cop-out that "he just gave me creepy vibes". If a woman says that a guy is "creepy" or "gave off creepy vibes" but is unable, when pressed, to provide a single specific example of a creepy thing that guy said or did (e.g. groping her, being pushy, making inappropriately sexual conversation on a first date etc.), you can reasonably assume he did nothing wrong besides not being the kind of guy to whom she's attracted. I don't care if it's been memed to death, this comic is a 100% accurate depiction of the behaviour of modern Western feminists in particular and the human species in general.
  • As I said, sometimes you might find that a person you don't like is a genuinely bad guy, but don't think the cart is before the horse - likeability comes first, then assessment of personal virtue. If a person says "I don't like him because he did XYZ", you may well later find him or her explaining away the XYZ committed by someone they like (platonically, sexually or romantically). XYZ isn't the reason you dislike so-and-so: you dislike him because he's boring or has an irritating laugh, then you tell yourself a story that the real reason you dislike him is because he did XYZ (even if you'd be perfectly happy to excuse XYZ if committed by someone interesting with a normal laugh).
  • This is most pronounced in the case of sexual/romantic relationships, but all of the above applies just as much in platonic relationships too. If someone wants to be our friend and we don't like them or enjoy their company, the human default is to insist that they are morally bad, not just boring or lacking in social graces. Many socially maladroit people end up with the erroneous belief that they are morally bankrupt on the basis of not having many (or any) friends, because they've fully internalised the "likeable = morally good" framework and all it implies.

And before anyone starts urging me to secure a mail-order bride, I'm in a happy relationship with a conventionally attractive woman. You don't have to be an incel to empathise with them.

That's a very good and insightful post, thanks!

I've recently been rewatching the mid-2000s TV show "The Good Wife," and it's one of the few creative works I've encountered that grapples with the issues you discuss. I suspect that some people on this forum might dismiss the series out of hand because it features a guest appearance from Donna Brazil and because the sequel, "The Good Fight," is a Trump Derangement fugue and woke fever dream—and would encourage you to reconsider. Especially after a romantic plot is resolved in the second season finale, the show turns almost exclusively to Julianna Margulies' titular good wife confronting exactly the good person/nice person conflict you're talking about — both in others and herself.

It really is well worth your time

I had to watch one episode of it in college and it seemed unusually intelligent and thought-provoking for a legal drama. My parents love it.

They had a great habit of casting against type. In the season four premier, one character says of another "maybe Mao isn't so bad if he works for you."

Mao is played by Nathan Lane.

you can reasonably assume he did nothing wrong besides not being the kind of guy to whom she's attracted.

Yeah, thinking about it more, you do have the issue that the disability theorists call desexualization. Very unattractive people transgress social norms by being openly interested in sex or relationships.

Many socially maladroit people end up with the erroneous belief that they are morally bankrupt on the basis of not having many (or any) friends, because they've fully internalised the "likeable = morally good" framework and all it implies.

That is an interesting one; from what I've seen, they generally come to believe that they are misunderstood and secretly valuable but fundamentally unlikable/repulsive. Sometimes there is bitterness and resentment, sometimes resignation.

from what I've seen, they generally come to believe that they are misunderstood and secretly valuable

Yeah, of the two most common failure modes, "nobody likes me because I'm scum" and "nobody likes me because they're envious of my brilliance", I'm honestly unsure which one is less psychologically healthy for the individual. I've met a few nerdy men who I suspect were bullied as children and to console them their mothers told them "don't mind them dear, they're just envious of how clever you are", and they seemed to have really internalised this. The "former gifted child" phenomenon often referred to on Tumblr and other places like that has a real ring of truth to it.

Couple the two: scum tier outside, serviceable to brilliant inside.

I've seen that - once - with a girl who'd been burned in a house fire. She was a nice enough person but thought (at least in high school) that guys would only want one thing, and then only with a paper bag over her head. Very bitter, very cynical, very blunt.

That poor woman. Hard to blame someone who's been through an experience like that for feeling bitter.

Yeah - although she was too young to remember the fire, about a third of her face looked like Freddy Kreuger. She was fit, liked mountain biking, very nerdy and wrote a lot of fanfiction. She was interested in me; at the time, when we were in high school, I found her sadness to be a turn-off. I didn't mind her face. If she'd been confident and not cared what people thought I would have found that extremely attractive. Now...I'd date her and be happy about it. Time has altered my worldview to be more like hers.

She was not a bad person. She was instead a smart, kind individual who had met an unfortunate fate that was in no way her fault. I suspect that a lot of gifted but awkward people - or just awkward people in general - think that they're OK to good on the inside but that their presentation sucks donkey balls. Hell - that's what my aspie nerd friend thinks: he's awkward as fuck, but thinks he's a decent enough guy. Not god tier by any means but he's a decent guy.

It takes immense courage to assert, without a trace of irony, that you like someone even though he's an actively nasty dickhead.

Case in point: Peter Thiel. Dude is an absolute asshole, but by god do I like him. Same with MBS.

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