Seriously but not literally

This week was a pretty extreme wake-up call on the state of women online.

We learned that there are a shockingly large number of women who not only identify with a child murderer, but are ostentatiously, publicly performing that identification: posting videos of themselves sobbing while clutching infants, captioned “Same, Lindsay”.

They’re posting AI videos of Lindsay Clancy — a woman who sent her husband on an errand so that she could strangle their three children to death — receiving the warm embrace of the Sisterhood. Some are even running the “no uterus, no opinion” playbook but for actual infanticide. (I will not post examples, they’re easy to find.)

Clearly, this is not a feeling about which they are furtive or ashamed. It is baffling to imagine them setting up their camera so that they can publicly “break down”, Just Like Lindsay, to an audience of millions.

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The obvious thing to do here is to luxuriate in our outrage at this Certified Woman Moment, and try to outdo one another in our revulsion and contempt.

But first of all, women have always been women, and this kind of performance would have been unthinkable twenty years ago — and second, this thing feels a lot like demoralization propaganda, whether there is any coordinated human agency behind it or not.

Women are competing to express their solidarity and intransigence, and men competing to express their impotent despair.

(Publicly seething about what Ought to Be Done to such women is the same thing — loudly advertising the chasm between what you would like to do, and what you actually have the power to do. Women are revolted by this not because it is mean, but because it is weak.)

This is one reason we have the Joe Rogan Rule at EXIT: “If you could talk about it on the Joe Rogan Experience, you can talk about it in the chat.”

“Fedposting” — which is to say, kvetching — is mutually exclusive with productive action. A social group can tolerate one or the other, but not both.

Our commentators obligingly point and sputter because it attracts attention (and money, if you’re big enough), but it comes at the cost of emboldening our enemies and discouraging our friends.

This is not to say that we should be above taking a moral position — obviously I feel the same visceral horror and incomprehension at what the foids are getting up to — but we can’t stop there. We have to figure out what this is, and what can be done about it. Why is it happening now?

The difficulties of modern motherhood on which all of this is being blamed are either generations old by now (suburban atomization, “intensive parenting”, irresponsible disbursement of psychiatric medications), or have gotten dramatically less burdensome as this psychosocial problem has gotten worse (the physical chores of homemaking, the gendered division of household labor, the “stigma” of mental illness, etc.)

But on a superficial level, it is obvious why it’s happening: the parasocial rewards for having a public freakout have gone stratospheric.

Social media algorithms select for (and cultivate) narratives that trigger exactly the reciprocal feedback loop of outrage that we observe here — in which two opposing perspectives are so alien to one another that each side vigorously amplifies the enemy’s messaging, to show their friends how repugnant and absurd the enemy is.

The characters that generate the greatest raw emotional amplitude from friend and enemy become perceived by both enemy and friend as the spokesmen of the tribe.

Donald Trump won the 2016 election on exactly this brand of “earned media” — and it would be impossible to explain to a time traveler from 2012 how thoroughly he has conquered the Republican Party. (You, anon, are not immune to propaganda.)

Every outrage of this kind should be understood as a phenomenon of the palantir.

That’s not to say that they’re “not real”; but they are hyperstitional, a self-generating feedback loop. The viewers validate the performance, but they also absorb and are influenced by it; and some are more influenced by it than others.

You view the apparent popularity of these sentiments with horror — but the social media audience performs no moral judgment of public narratives. All they can see is that the sentiment is popular.

The thing that generates extreme emotions is viral — which means it is ubiquitous and winning, which means it is important and high-status and good.

The body of women upvoting these videos, sending money, showing up outside the courthouse, are not seriously ruminating on a desire to crush a toddler’s windpipe.

The horrific implications that you see as dead-obvious are not dead-obvious to them. They are not thinking about this the way you are thinking about it.

There will likely be a handful of copycat cases, but nowhere near what you’d expect if you took the sheer quantity of these “cries for help” at face value.

What these women are thinking is: “being a mom is Seriously Super Hard, and I am being Super Brave, look how Brave I’m being.”

That’s really all it is. The best defense you can make of this behavior is that it is sincerely, completely superficial and self-involved.

A social media hysteria has given them moral and social permission to complain in maximally dramatic terms, and to participate in a chorus of mutual validation.

There’s an echo in the “I choose the bear” discourse from a few months back.

Millions of women claimed that they would rather be alone in a room with a bear than alone with a man — and men responded with shock, in the mistaken belief that women were saying that they would actually literally rather be alone in a room with a bear.

This was not helped by the fact that many women, in the interest of making their point more vividly, said, “You’re not hearing me — I literally actually would rather be alone in a room with a literal bear and I’m not kidding”.

These women mean what they say, but not in the way that you mean things when you say them.

One of the emotional engines of this controversy is the perception that Lindsay Clancy was “crying out for help” and was “failed by the system” — that she wasn’t Heard or Taken Seriously.

But of course, her situation was being taken as seriously as such a situation could possibly be taken. There was a small army of doctors and therapists (and her husband, and a nanny) actively monitoring her.

If she had expressed a desire or plan to kill her children, they would have been immediately removed from her custody — but she didn’t.

The reason psychiatrists don’t institutionalize people or snatch their children when they report feeling depressed — or even when they report having certain categories of scary thoughts — is that they want people to speak up when they’re having trouble.

The only intervention that would have stopped this is for someone to suspend her parental rights or institutionalize her, with no judicable evidence (across a battery of clinical encounters) that she intended to harm her kids.

Obviously, these thousands of women are not actually suggesting that they are literally, actively experiencing what Lindsay Clancy experienced, or actually demanding the only intervention that would have made any sense (to have their children confiscated by the state.)

Maybe it’s waste of time to spell out that these demands have no practical content, but whatever: they have no practical content. Women are Using Language Differently. They want to Feel Heard. It’s Not About the Nail.

For most of human history, this has not been an insurmountable problem.

Every married couple experiences the same translation friction at much lower stakes; it is not that hard in a personal, human relationship to learn to take your wife “seriously but not literally”.

The problem is that it doesn't scale. Western liberal societies are procedural — they run on words as code. They cannot take women seriously-but-not-literally.

(The postmodernist insight was that words simply don’t work as code, period — but they really don’t work that way when women are political actors.)

Women cannot have their words taken seriously “just like men”, and also be Seen and Heard and Understood — because to treat them as if they talk and think like men is to misread them, to fail to understand them.

This impasse is like a divide-by-zero error, a need that can neither be fulfilled nor dismissed — which is to say, a political perpetual-motion machine. (Egalitarianism is the dominant force of our age precisely because it creates these bottomless, unanswerable political demands.)

The feminine default of “affiliative communication” is not the problem (women have been around forever), but it is intended for human relationships at human scale.

It is maladaptive to the hyper-scaled, atomized, parasocial milieu of managerial societies.

(Obviously male psychology is also painfully maladaptive to managerial society in various ways — we are trying to explain the current gendered freakout.)

The pat right-wing response to this is “well, women just aren’t cut out for this, we should exclude them from politics” — but as our societies grow more technical, legible, and impersonal, the managerial milieu expands to consume, displace, and politicize every domain of human life.

Women have never been more powerful in legible, transactional terms, but they feel more powerless and alone than ever, because the human, personal world in which their power has its natural expression no longer exists. Various political interpretations of those feelings may be incoherent, but the feelings themselves are real.

That’s the “cry for help” at the core of this hysteria.

Millions of Western women are profoundly unhappy; and it’s not because they were offered the Trad Life in earnest and rejected it out of pique. It does not exist. (Raising a couple kids alone in the suburbs on half the median household income is not the Trad Life.)

Their lives are profoundly isolated — and all normal people (but especially women) ground their sense of life’s meaning in a social context. When they are asked to do something difficult, they need social scripts that tell them they’re doing a good job, and people they care about are proud of them, and it will all be worth it.

When you are alone in the suburbs and trying to make ends meet on 1.75 incomes, a baby can make those feelings of isolation and drudgery more acute. And a man is only a man — he will struggle to provide a satisfying frame, a “world of two”, for a woman to inhabit.

The Tiktok mommies are telling you all this, of course. They are pretty good at talking about their feelings. They mean what they say!

Women need human community — and that problem is bigger than any of us.

You should not take their unhappiness personally, and you definitely should not cast yourself as the villain in their story. (You should never cast yourself as the villain in any story. We are on the side of love, and Love Wins.)

But this cry for help, which is intended to rally a community of known human beings with names and faces, is instead being answered by an intensely-selected parasocial mob of shriekers and lunatics, organized as a quasi-political bloc.

None of these women can help — or care about — the women they are ostensibly “validating” online. They can only express their own pathologies and resentments and disappointments, with the social camouflage of coming to another woman’s rescue.

This is why there is no effusion of empathy toward the husband or the murdered children. They are not saying “I am her”, they are saying “she is me” — which is to say, “this triple infanticide is about me, actually.”

But even these women are not really mad at you, or even at men as a class — they’re mad at Dad, or some boyfriend or ex-husband. And maybe that guy’s a real piece of shit, who knows.

To inhabit their frame and play the heel is to deepen the demoralization on both sides, and to vindicate an adversarial political frame. To say that men and women just have irreconcilable interests, and one “side” will have to win, is to deny the massively negative-sum character of this problem.

Nobody is “winning” here, which is the good news.

It means that you can want both men and women to be much happier — and to get much more of what they really want — than they currently do. But it can’t happen within our present technical political milieu.

I’m going to make this a two-parter — next week we’ll discuss why gendered political dysfunction is structural and terminal.

It isn’t just generating grotesque public behavior: it is fundamentally incompatible with civilization, because it disrupts family formation at scale. Managerial liberal societies can neither resolve nor survive these problems and remain managerial liberal societies.

Our task is to build the human institutions that come next.

EXIT News:

• National GOP Convention in Dallas, 9/10: I will be speaking at an event presented by Delphica Society after the convention. More details to follow on this.

• Constitutional Action completed its first beautification event in Dallas. Events scheduled in the next month in Salt Lake City and Seattle.

• Paideia will host our first Youth AI Hackathon, 10/15-10/16 in Orem, UT. Tickets on sale soon.

• Weekly Full Group Calls (Tuesday nights, 9PM ET/6PM PT)

  • This week (8/18) we heard from Kaiser Von Lohengramm, who has written extensively on the value and meaning of America’s founding myths. Full recording coming soon for paid subscribers.

  • Next week (8/25) we will welcome the Highly Respected Scott Greer to discuss his new book Whitepill.

  • The following week (9/1) we will talk to The Woolshire about building their made-in-USA wool business.

• EXIT Member Events (members can check the group chat for details):

  • 8/29, Salt Lake City, UT: Constitutional Action Beautification Event

  • 9/5, Orem, UT: EXIT member meetup

  • 9/8, New York, NY: EXIT member meetup & Michael Anton signing event

  • 9/10, Dallas, TX: Delphica/EXIT speaking event for GOP Convention

  • 9/11, Nashville, TN: EXIT member meetup

  • 9/12, Seattle, WA: Constitutional Action Beautification Event

  • 9/12, Houston, TX: EXIT member meetup

  • 9/18, Atlanta, GA: EXIT Member Meetup

  • 9/19, Columbus, OH: EXIT Member Meetup

  • 9/21, Dallas, TX: EXIT Member Meetup

  • 9/25, Salt Lake City, UT: Delphica/EXIT event