I was talking to a woman about #MeToo and stuff a day or so ago, and it made me think.
What leads a chap like Harvey Weinstein to reduce sex with actresses to a quick dinner of champagne and caviar followed by a visit to his office and a quick jerk-off? In my sexual fantasies, sex with actresses would amount to a lot more than that.
The answer, I suppose is that Harvey's modus operandi reveals sex as a power obsession reduced to its essentials, when the beauty, the mystery of sex loses all her loveliness. In real life, sex is dressed up with love, and commitment, and a relationship, and children, God, and the whole cycle of life. But if you just want to get it on with the latest applicant for stardom, how much trouble is it worth? Do you do the dance of seduction? Do you wine and dine, and send gifts, and even write a poem or two? Do you visit the jeweler? Do you set your sex object up as your mistress? Do you abandon your wife? Your children? Well, Harvey baby has told us. It is worth champagne and caviar. It is worth an hour up in the office. But it is not worth taking the time for a seduction. So you get it off as though you were watching on-line porn.
Really, for a Harvey, all the extra stuff is not worth it; it has to be slam-bam, thank you ma'am. But you can't expect a nice middle-class girl to come up to the office and get it on in 30 minutes flat. Pretty middle-class girls just aren't trained up like that. They expect to be courted: that is why the hook-up culture requires its practitioners to load up on vodka before heading out for the evening. Middle-class girls need to blank out before hooking up.
Of course, next morning, or next month, they get angry. But that is another story.
So if Harvey is dealing with a nice middle-class girl that wants to be a star, then at least he gets to demonstrate his power by jerking off in front of her. And she probably has the sense to keep quiet. Until the day that #MeToo goes nuclear.
If power can ruin sex, what about the rest of the human experience? This is my point. If it is a bad thing for a Harvey Weinstein to wield sexual power over actresses, and everyone agrees that it is a shocking thing for employers to wield power over workers, then what about political power of politicians and activists over Americans?
The point about power and sex is that we can agree that the injection of power into sexual relationships is a bad thing that diminishes sex and diminishes people -- including both the powerful man like Harvey Weinstein and his various victims. And the point of power and employment is that it is not good for the employer to have all the power and his employee little or no power. Indeed, one of the developments of employment in the 20th century is that it is beneficial to the employer and to the bottom line not to bully his employees but to give them as much responsibility as possible.
So what about politics? Aye, there's the rub, for the woods are full of people convinced that the world waits upon the genius of their political power. But the truth is that political power, like any power, diminishes and dominates. It diminishes the potential of human cooperation; it makes people -- both the powerful and the powerless -- less than they could be, than they ought to be.
Look, this should be a slam dunk. The political regimes of the 20th century that most believed in the saving grace of political power were those of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. So, can we agree that extreme political power, that reduces the people to the status of slaves, is a bad thing?
What about the power of the administrative state and its entitlement programs? Can we not say that there must be a better way than comprehensive and mandatory programs of pensions, health care, and education, programs that dictate how people should save for retirement, how they should educate their children, must be less than optimal? And then there is the power to "deplatform" and prevent ideas from being discussed in the public square. There is the power to name and shame on social media. There is the power to brand people as racist, sexist homophobes.
Is it not true that the use of political power diminishes both the powerful that have the means to swing political power and the people without political power that are subordinated to the power of the powerful? Yet it seems that people are only opposed to political power when someone else is doing it to them.
I think that the next great step in human evolution is to reduce the power of politics and amp up the volume on cooperative relations between humans based on interpersonal trust and faith.
It may be, of course, that the development of blockchain may permit people that trust each other to interact by bypassing untrustworthy and unfaithful people. And especially the untrustworthy and unfaithful people that attempt to get their way with power. I wonder how that would turn out, for it would put additional power into the hands of the trustworthy and the faithful.
Or as Jordan B. Peterson says, the way to get on in the world is making yourself competent. Competent people are useful and beneficial, and people want to interact with them. It is a form of power, but a power that can be used to help people.
Competence, trust, faith. Surely these can overcome the poverty of power.
What leads a chap like Harvey Weinstein to reduce sex with actresses to a quick dinner of champagne and caviar followed by a visit to his office and a quick jerk-off? In my sexual fantasies, sex with actresses would amount to a lot more than that.
The answer, I suppose is that Harvey's modus operandi reveals sex as a power obsession reduced to its essentials, when the beauty, the mystery of sex loses all her loveliness. In real life, sex is dressed up with love, and commitment, and a relationship, and children, God, and the whole cycle of life. But if you just want to get it on with the latest applicant for stardom, how much trouble is it worth? Do you do the dance of seduction? Do you wine and dine, and send gifts, and even write a poem or two? Do you visit the jeweler? Do you set your sex object up as your mistress? Do you abandon your wife? Your children? Well, Harvey baby has told us. It is worth champagne and caviar. It is worth an hour up in the office. But it is not worth taking the time for a seduction. So you get it off as though you were watching on-line porn.
Really, for a Harvey, all the extra stuff is not worth it; it has to be slam-bam, thank you ma'am. But you can't expect a nice middle-class girl to come up to the office and get it on in 30 minutes flat. Pretty middle-class girls just aren't trained up like that. They expect to be courted: that is why the hook-up culture requires its practitioners to load up on vodka before heading out for the evening. Middle-class girls need to blank out before hooking up.
Of course, next morning, or next month, they get angry. But that is another story.
So if Harvey is dealing with a nice middle-class girl that wants to be a star, then at least he gets to demonstrate his power by jerking off in front of her. And she probably has the sense to keep quiet. Until the day that #MeToo goes nuclear.
If power can ruin sex, what about the rest of the human experience? This is my point. If it is a bad thing for a Harvey Weinstein to wield sexual power over actresses, and everyone agrees that it is a shocking thing for employers to wield power over workers, then what about political power of politicians and activists over Americans?
The point about power and sex is that we can agree that the injection of power into sexual relationships is a bad thing that diminishes sex and diminishes people -- including both the powerful man like Harvey Weinstein and his various victims. And the point of power and employment is that it is not good for the employer to have all the power and his employee little or no power. Indeed, one of the developments of employment in the 20th century is that it is beneficial to the employer and to the bottom line not to bully his employees but to give them as much responsibility as possible.
So what about politics? Aye, there's the rub, for the woods are full of people convinced that the world waits upon the genius of their political power. But the truth is that political power, like any power, diminishes and dominates. It diminishes the potential of human cooperation; it makes people -- both the powerful and the powerless -- less than they could be, than they ought to be.
Look, this should be a slam dunk. The political regimes of the 20th century that most believed in the saving grace of political power were those of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. So, can we agree that extreme political power, that reduces the people to the status of slaves, is a bad thing?
What about the power of the administrative state and its entitlement programs? Can we not say that there must be a better way than comprehensive and mandatory programs of pensions, health care, and education, programs that dictate how people should save for retirement, how they should educate their children, must be less than optimal? And then there is the power to "deplatform" and prevent ideas from being discussed in the public square. There is the power to name and shame on social media. There is the power to brand people as racist, sexist homophobes.
Is it not true that the use of political power diminishes both the powerful that have the means to swing political power and the people without political power that are subordinated to the power of the powerful? Yet it seems that people are only opposed to political power when someone else is doing it to them.
I think that the next great step in human evolution is to reduce the power of politics and amp up the volume on cooperative relations between humans based on interpersonal trust and faith.
It may be, of course, that the development of blockchain may permit people that trust each other to interact by bypassing untrustworthy and unfaithful people. And especially the untrustworthy and unfaithful people that attempt to get their way with power. I wonder how that would turn out, for it would put additional power into the hands of the trustworthy and the faithful.
Or as Jordan B. Peterson says, the way to get on in the world is making yourself competent. Competent people are useful and beneficial, and people want to interact with them. It is a form of power, but a power that can be used to help people.
Competence, trust, faith. Surely these can overcome the poverty of power.
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