So in other news this week, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has made a controversial statement about reproductive marxism, or as he referred to it “enforced monogamy” [1]. From what I could gather from the statement, the simple premise is that which I outlined in my essay on reproductive marxism.
In nature, it appears that the natural order mating opportunities flow to men much in the same way that capital does in capitalism. It flows from those who are unsuccessful to those who are successful, and the more capital a person has, the more capital will flow to them. A man who is unsuccessful in the mating market will be left with very little, if anything at all. A man who is successful in the mating market will receive even more mating opportunities.
However, this creates instability in the system in the same way that the above average collection of wealth among a small number of highly successful businessmen creates instability in a capitalist system. The fundamental order of capitalism is competition, as constant competition ensures that resources are efficiently allocated. However, the goal of any capitalist businessman is to gain a monopoly position where the maximum amount of revenue can be generated and where above average profits will be attained. Once an oligopoly or a monopoly comes to exist, resources will no longer be efficiently allocated. Reproductive Marxism
In any system that is a zero-sum or appears to be zero-sum, a side-effect is that the outcomes are often winner takes all, rather than being normally distributed. What this means is that wealth is distributed on a curve where the top 2 – 3% of the population control a great majority of the resources, rather than the resources being distributed roughly according to population size. It’s a fancy way of saying the top 1% control 99% of the resources, the bottom 99% control 1% of the resources. This tends to create a lot of instability within the system.
If one were to use the framework of conflict theory, one could posit that within a society one has a myriad of groups that all have different interests, some of these are deeply invested in the present social order because this social order benefits them in terms of resources. Other groups are in conflict with the present social order because it does not benefit them in terms of resources. For instance, the core argument made by Occupy Wall Street protesters was that the present system benefits at the top 1% at the cost of the 99%, economically speaking.
Much of Dr. Peterson’s work, from “12 Rules for Life“, to “Maps of Meaning” deals with the balance between mechanisms that enhance and preserve stability, and those that reduce and destroy stability. I’ve themed this the conflict between the ID and the Super-ego in Freudian terms. Where the ID, cast in Peterson’s analysis as chaos represents the natural order of things, and the super-ego order, the civilizing effect of reason on nature.
The article that somewhat inspired me to do some research, and subsequently write this essay, was a very effective piece of rhetoric, very accurately aimed at the market the author sought to influence, out of which my favorite quote is:
The idea that women will only sleep with the top men if given the chance is straight out of pick-up artist garbage pseudoscience. This ideology of “beta” and “alpha” males (the latter getting all the sex) is based on a mangled and since-retracted study about wolves, and bears no relationship whatsoever to human societies. Worse, it instills the false notion that women are largely status-obsessed sluts who will have to be basically coerced into sleeping with anyone but the most attractive men. [2]
Fortunately, yours truly cares quite little for rhetoric, I much prefer data, so what does the data say? In God We Trust, everyone else has to bring the data. In the quoted paragraphs there are 2 concrete statements we can look at.
A) The existence of Alpha males and Beta males as defined by sexual success.
B) The principle that women would rather share an alpha than own a beta.
From these, we can form a couple of hypotheses. In the case of the first statement, it’s quite simple, the basic premise is that a minority of men have a majority of the sex. This is often shorthanded as the “sexual market pareto principle” that Chris Rock verbalized as “20% of the men do 80% of the fucking“. If this is not the case, one would expect male sexual success to follow a normal distribution meaning that you have extreme outliers on both sides, and most men are somewhere around the mean. This means, simply put, that one would expect 33% of men to have less than the average of sex partners, 33% would have the average number of sex partners, and 33% would have an over-average amount of sex partners.
For the second statement, that women are and I quote “largely status-obsessed sluts” this is quite an easy set of hypotheses that would follow from the former two. In effect, if one falsifies the null hypothesis, and thus is capable of concluding that sexual success among men does not follow a normal distribution, and instead that a minority of men have a majority of the sexual success (as measured by sex partners) then one can establish not that women are status-obsessed sluts, because that would be concluding on a single cause, but that there is a sexual disparity among men, and thus that factors in female sexual selection behavior likely plays a part creating this sexual disparity. Thus, the following are the hypotheses for this essay:
Null Hypothesis: Attention from women to men follows a normal distribution
Hypothesis 1: Attention from women to men does not follow a normal distribution
Null Hypothesis: Sexual success among men follows a normal distribution
Hypothesis 2: Sexual success among men does not follow a normal distribution
