Today I want to say a few painful realizations about the idea of a pendulum swinging. This connects to the very awful term called masculinism. Before I go to this term and what it represents, I think that the #MeToo movement had a lot of good reasons to come to be. Many years ago, Carter wrote a fantastic book about the fact that the largest crimes against humanity are against women. He talked about the range of awful things that happen to women around the world, mostly in undeveloped countries. It was a very shocking book for me to read, quite a few years ago, and to realize how humanity has treated women.
So when #MeToo happened, it was clear that something had to be done. And there were lots of things, the details don’t matter now, that went overboard. The justification was that the way to fix things is for the pendulum to swing the other way, and then it would swing back. I have to say that I didn’t always buy that argument because I was worried about the swinging back that would happen later.
Well, I just heard about this term, masculinism. And I have to say with a very broken heart that I think the pendulum is swinging back in a way that is much worse than I thought was possible. I don’t think any of the people who said that the pendulum would swing back at some point imagined anything like this. And it got me to think a lot about the conflict in the Middle East and how there is no question that hate begets hate. We will overreact and they will overreact. We will overreact and maybe they will be deterred, etc. And it just gets worse and worse and worse.
I think that this model of the pendulum swinging is the wrong model. Think about it, the idea that there’s gravity and the pendulum swings, but over time the swinging stops. It’s really about friction, right? If there was no friction it would continue in the same way. But the physical model we have of the pendulum swinging is that it’s too much in one direction, it will swing in the other direction, then it will swing back. And slowly, slowly, slowly it would swing into very small changes and maybe even stop at its natural point.
I don’t think human nature fits with that model. I think when the pendulum swings, it actually swings in a more extreme way. Not always, and not for everybody, but to some degree. I think that conflicts like the one in the Middle East are like that. Without real external intervention, I think things are getting out of hand. I think that the model of things getting out of hand is stronger than this. And in masculinism, I’m not justifying it, of course, but there are now people who are not just mistreating women badly but are using it as an ideology.
So first, it’s very sad. I was terribly sad to read about this phenomenon. I had no idea it happened, but once I started reading, I went into my own rabbit hole of reading about it. If you want to have a difficult day or week or a month, go into it. But if not, just make yourself aware. It’s a very sad movement. Sad for humanity, sad for people, sad for women.
In addition to that, I’m wondering whether the pendulum model is just not the right model. And what we need to understand is that overreaction creates overreaction. That the model is a model of acceleration and not a model of slowing down. And what we need is strong external forces to add some force, because naturally things tend to get more out of hand instead of evening out.
I wanted to end this with something optimistic. I don’t have one. I just think we need to understand it and then try very hard not to think that if the pendulum overswings, it will correct itself.
The sad thought of the day.
