Power Threads

Women deeply want men who are competent and powerful. And I don’t mean power in that they can exert tyrannical control over others. That’s not power. That’s just corruption. [Jordan Peterson on Threads]

Like many liberal herbivores I’ve moved over to Threads from Twitter (now rebranded as X). I’ve done this for the same reason as others I suppose: I’m hoping there will be fewer annoying people there. I’d like to think that doesn’t mean fewer people I disagree with – rather it means fewer people who post in a tribal way and just to annoy – people who buy into a conspiratorial ideology that they’ve swallowed whole. I’m thinking of right-wingers for the most part, but the left do it too.

Most people don’t examine their beliefs and then choose a party or side that best fits those beliefs. Rather they choose sides first with their gut and then take on board all the beliefs of the side they have chosen. Abortion. Capitalism. Climate change. China. Masks. Vaccines. Immigration. Crime and punishment. You could have a separate position on each since there’s no connection between them, but people aren’t like that. If they are climate change deniers they must also be anti-immigration. If they are pro-abortion they have to favour self-ID for trans people.

Returning to the quote at the top, I noticed a few comments to the effect of What are you doing here Mr Peterson? You’re not meant to be here. Jordan Peterson is a bête noire of the left and the sort of person they don’t want to have ruining their day on Threads. But why would they expect people like him not to have a Threads account? Threads has no way of stopping such people. People talk about the moderation on Threads compared to the free-for-all on X. But unless a person says something extreme I don’t see how that moderation will thwart them. No, all the right-wingers will migrate from X to Threads in due course. They will get no pleasure from sharing right-wingery only with like-minded people. They will want to own the libs.

Moving to the content of what Peterson wrote, what struck me first was his use of the following formula …

A is good, so this unappealing aspect of A is not really A – it is B. (In this case A = power and B = corruption.)

I discussed this at greater length here. It is a common and knee-jerk way of talking about things and it strikes me as wrong-headed every time I see it. Rather than admit that A has good and bad aspects people use this tired formula. Peterson compounds this error by his use of the word corruption for term B. Corruption generally refers to a system where public servants take bribes. That hardly fits tyrants. Is he using corruption in its other sense of general rottenness? That would fit better but it doesn’t seem like he’s doing that.

I’m interested in semantics but others may be more interested in sexual politics. A woman further down the thread clearly was. She gave an honest response, which I will paraphrase.

I don’t like you Mr Peterson. What you say sounds like stereotyping though I admit it happens to be true in my case. A stopped clock is right twice a day.

Now there are evolutionary reasons why Peterson’s post may ring true for that woman. Females need resources to nurture their young and look for mates that can provide them.

But I’m going to speculate on another reason …

When we are young we all (male and female) hope that there are competent people who will take charge if necessary. We know our own limitations but feel secure because we assume the adults know what’s what. That security breaks down a bit when we become adults ourselves and still haven’t much of a clue. Inadequate though we are, we are as good as it gets. Only in specific circumstances – with airline pilots, doctors etc – can we revert to childhood security.

Do some women feel that Mr Right will give them a more durable version of that pilot-induced security? The Mr Right option isn’t open to straight men, so they turn to philosophy, hobbies, work etc for security. Dreams and tales and hopes of perfect relationships tend not to interest them. It’s a theory anyway.

People call this kind of talk stereotyping. But stereotyping is merely a cussword for generalising with some guesswork thrown in, and this is fine as long as you acknowledge its limitations – that you may be wrong and it may not apply in every case or to everybody.

Caitlin Moran got a lot of flak recently over her book What About Men? In it she writes about what she thinks is wrong with the emotional lives of men. In brief, they ought to be more like women in the way they share their feelings. Imagine a man trying to write the same book about women! the critics said (even in the liberal press). No respectable publisher would take the book on. The man would have to vent on YouTube or somewhere like that. In any case what good has the female way of handling emotions done for women? They have worse mental health even than men, though it’s true they don’t commit suicide as much.

At least with generalisation you have something to go on. After all, some men do have mates that they banter with down the pub and so on (using the culture-specific language of the Moran’s native UK). Many don’t, but the generalisation is at least based on some observable facts. But speculation on the emotions of the opposite sex can have no such foundation. The inner life of a person is invisible and unknowable. One can only extrapolate from one’s own inner life.

So is it only okay to speculate about the emotions of people of the same sex as oneself? The variation within the sexes is likely greater than between the sexes so that doesn’t stack up. I’d say the important thing is not to be dogmatic. Speculation yes. Pontification no. I suspect this is where Moran fell down. She got careless and cocky and thought the Zeitgeist gave her a free pass to pontificate.

Twitter Quitter

I read Janan Ganesh’s Citizen of Nowhere column every week in the Financial Times, and his views resonate with me a lot of the time. This week his topic was Twitter and why he’s quit. He didn’t say, as you might expect, that he’d become an addict and wanted to detox – nor did he care much about the nasty nature of some of the discourse there. No, he had a rather snobbish reason for leaving the site. He said that Twitter had a second-rate vibe to it. Genuine high achievers – people at the top of their game – didn’t use Twitter. Or, if they did use the platform, it did them no good. Journalists and the like have Twitter accounts – people who comment on others’ achievements. Those achieving the achievements have little time for it. He also made an interesting point about irony, which is prized by Britons and Twitter users. Most high achievers lack it to some degree because their specialism demands seriousness. Twitter people, in contrast, jest about their niche hobbies and micro-obsessions. Tweeters have sports fanaticism, pop culture crushes, forgivable failings and box sets. They use words that those with a healthy distance from politics never use. He cites performative and gaslighting as examples. Ganesh quit, he said, because he’d begun to pick up this twee or beta style of expressing himself, and he wanted to nip it in the bud. Ganesh wears his Citizen of Nowhere badge with pride. (Some readers may know that PM Theresa May used this phrase to disparage her Remainer opponents.) But he takes his enthusiasm for rootless world culture further than I would. For example he’s argued that, for the economic good of the UK, London ought to be allowed to grow into a megacity with 20 million inhabitants. So he has little time for the Red Wall or the green fields of Middle England. And in this article he even seems to be condemning British irony as parochial. A step too far, you might say, until you remember Johnson and the British ironic process that made him Prime Minister.

Unsatisfactory

Be careful with that rucksack! I turn to look at the shopkeeper. It’s very near those bottles of wine. An annoying man has pointed out something that I can’t deny. The proximity of my rucksack to the fragile bottles. How do you deal with that? You don’t. He comes across as one of those people who always has too much to say about everything. Who says something when he didn’t need to say anything. But you could argue that he did need to say something when he saw my threatening rucksack. I can’t handle that. Once, years ago, I entered a down-at-heel supermarket. I’ll make you my last customer, grumped the cashier-girl, placing a notice on the conveyor behind me. I didn’t need to know that. The customer doesn’t need to know that sort of thing.

My companion pulls out her phone to pay. I know this won’t end well so I leave the tiny village shop and walk ten metres across the street. I don’t want to hear the words that they will exchange. It’s not worth my while to allow phone payments for a bottle of milk, the owner will say. He seems that sort of man – full of stuff like that – quite pleased with himself. And she won’t react well to this, I know. I can’t bear to witness any of it – any more than I can tolerate fingernails scraped down a blackboard.

I can predict the future. I’ve developed a sixth sense. What I knew would happen did indeed come to pass and I felt glad that I hadn’t heard any of it. I need to protect myself from unsatisfactory things, and I find it a constant battle. It reminds me of an ad we used to have on TV in the UK. A young piano student bashes the keys while his teacher looks on, grimacing. The teacher lights up the advertised cigar and the playing becomes sweet and melodic. He relaxes and expands as the smoke ascends to the ceiling. This kind of thing never lasts in real life. The relief, I mean. You knock one thing on the head and another crops up before you have a chance to enjoy that relief. At times like this I fancy I know why people inject heroin. The drug dulls all the pain for a while.

I find myself standing in a long slow queue in our local pharmacy. An oldish man has reached the front. I’m on day 28 of a 28-day course of statins, he says. I must have some more today. A woman says she needs something for her 95-year-old mother. Everyone who reaches the counter has complicated and urgent demands. And the pharmacists haven’t got any medicine for them, it seems. Two employees busy themselves behind a glass screen – one hovering and one serving. The serving woman stabs at a keyboard and stares too long at a sheet of paper while the statin-man protests. They didn’t send your prescription through from your GP. I can’t see anything on the system. I don’t see her screen but I imagine it blank – her mind paralysed, and her brow furrowed for show. The staff in their goldfish bowl have no escape from our gaze. No escape from the clucking, time-checking, sighing and eye-rolling. A woman turns her rolling eyes to me and I make the least response I can get away with, trying not to let the poor fish see. I sense my own impatience welling up – but I also feel sorry for the people who have to work here.

What might help them in their infernal bowl? You’d have to remove them from the water and sit them down with coffees, cakes and neck massages. All the customers sent away and told to come back the following day. Only then might they relax, think clear thoughts and deal with the situation. What a mistake to imagine that you can get your needs satisfied by harassing people. It has a counterproductive effect, raising stress levels and lowering effectiveness.

This situation takes me back to Geneva Airport in 2010.

Twenty centimetres of snow has fallen, closing the airport. They’ve cancelled all the flights. A woman stands at a desk, berating the young man behind it. She can’t board her flight. And he can’t help her because no flights will leave for two days in the whole of snowy Switzerland. That young man stabbed at his dummy keyboard too as the woman browbeat him. And he shuffled his dummy papers while the snow piled up outside, careless of the absurd lady.

I read a story on Twitter yesterday about something that happened in the USA. It concerned a mum with a car full of boisterous and hungry kids, queuing at a drive-through takeaway. By the time they got to the hatch, the children had started thumping each other and crying. The mother placed her order and realised in despair that she didn’t have her purse. Without hesitating, the youth at the till swiped his own credit card and paid for it all. You can repay me next time you pass this way, he said with a smile.

What an angel! the mother said. One in a million. And yes, I agree with the angel bit – but not the million. Because most of us long to get the opportunity to do what he did, but the opportunity rarely presents itself. We long for this kind of situation. Why? To neutralise some of the guilt we’ve accumulated throughout our lives? To convince ourselves of our own goodness, which we often doubt? And why do I say «we» when I mean «I»? I can’t speak for you. But this kind of magnanimity also feels like an existential act. It puts two fingers up to conventional ways of looking at things. It creates a transcendent cigar moment, in fact.

Toxic Twitter

I spend quite a lot of time on Twitter because I find it a good way of keeping up with news and ideas. You see the views and reactions of journalists and experts, with links to longer articles. You receive unfiltered information, before it gets simplified for a mass audience. Apples and pears I know, but compare Twitter with the output of a news organisation like the BBC. I don’t regard the BBC as biased, but they do often deliver a timid Ladybird version of events. It’s as though they don’t want to stir the public too much from their complacent slumber.

Yet Twitter users often announce that they intend to give it a rest for a week or two. They need to detox. Many people report that they feel less anxious and depressed after a spell away from Twitter. Their mental health improves, and they can’t quite put their finger on why. I’ve thought about this too, and concluded that Twitter causes you to internalise a lot of toxic voices. They become part of you, so to speak. I’ll try to explain this with a digression into some popular psychology from a few decades ago.

Eric Berne wrote his bestseller Games People Play in the sixties. In the book Berne classifies human interactions as either parent, adult or child. Child statements or interactions display unfiltered emotion. For example: I’m bored. I want some chocolate. I want a glass of wine. Adult statements come across as rational, measured and qualified. They often arise from a philosophy of long-term hedonism or deferred gratification. For example: There will probably be a rise in inflation this year. I’ll have a glass of wine when I’ve done my accounts. Parent statements have a moralising and finger-wagging quality to them. For example: That’s naughty. You should be ashamed of yourself. I’m disappointed in you. As for the games in the book title, one in particular – Ain’t It Awful – has stuck in my mind from reading the book many years ago. Woman A says to woman B at a bus stop: The buses are always late. It just gets worse and worse. The game now requires B to say: Yes, it’s terrible, the country’s going to the dogs. Or something along those lines. Social pressure compels the players to continue the game in this way. Suppose woman B responded: Actually I find that the buses are mostly on time since the new company took over. This adult response to a parent statement would create some awkwardness. Berne advocates that we function in the adult mode, though he sees a place for the other two modes. After all, the child mode provides us with motivation, pleasure and enjoyment. As a side note, I can’t help smiling at what might happen if you took the adult mode to extremes. A: It’s freezing today! B: I think you’ll find the temperature is 1.6 degrees above the seasonal average. So yeah, everything in moderation.

Let’s apply the above to Twitter. The child mode looms large, what with all the swearing, name-calling and attention-seeking. The adult mode crops up a lot less often, depending on what sorts of accounts you follow. Often if somebody says something adult, another user will reply half in jest: That’s much too sensible. You’re on the wrong platform! Also the character limit means that you can’t include all the qualifiers that make a statement adult. Adults deal in probabilities and shades of grey. Of the three, the parent mode is the most toxic one for mental health, more so than even the child mode. The parent manifests itself as self-righteousness, puritanism and political partisanship. And the Ain’t It Awful script plays out in exchanges of competitive pessimism. I suspect these moralising and doom-laden voices get under some people’s skin. As a child, I took to heart the parental messages I encountered and this served me well in some ways. It kept me out of trouble at school. But that parental nagging has long since lost its usefulness. I regard myself as socialised by now – house-trained – so I don’t need it. People like me need to take a break and read books and poetry. We need to read about life in all its complexity and moral ambiguity. We need to get away from the certainties and moral outrage of Twitter.