Male Workplace Subordination Is the Behavioral Sink

Any discussion of capitalism and its intractable terminal infertility inevitably leads to the question of overpopulation, and whether we are, as a species, in such a state. We are capable of transforming our environment—but only so far, and our competence is not always as strong as we believe—so it is unclear what our world’s carrying capacity is, or whether we have exceeded it.

History suggests that, in humans, two kinds of overpopulation exist—functional and objective. Objective overpopulation is the ecological nightmare in which the means of survival become scarce and widespread death cannot be avoided—some mouths will go unfed. Nature punishes this swiftly and brutally. Functional overpopulation, which seems to occur before the true carrying capacity is reached, is a state in which the socially assigned value of life goes negative. A new person is not a welcome addition to the world, but a support burden or, worse, a thug who will compete against us by driving down wages, driving up prices, or simply stabbing someone to distract himself from his own daily misery. This tends to produce a death spiral—as the society becomes more dysfunctional, its ability to support its people declines, and the sense of congestion increases. It becomes common to detest that so many people exist—that there’s so much traffic (never mind that, most often, we are inconvenienced by it while being traffic) or that there are too few good jobs or houses—social dysfunction does limit supply of these—to go around.

Contemporary Functional Overpopulation

We exist in a state of global functional overpopulation. The young and fit are swiftly exploited and expected to show gratitude (and “passion”) for their exploitation, while those unable to work—or unable to work at the pace determined by the ruling class—are hated and discarded. There is no objective lack of the means to feed, house, and clothe people, but it is a foregone conclusion that a society like ours will never distribute them fairly—it simply has no need to do so. In every city, there are thousands of people lined up for the most degrading jobs, the worst housing, and the most intolerable living conditions, and thousands more behind them. Existence under capitalism, for those who must rely on the labor market, is a “Who can live the worst?” contest. Dishonor is the method and prize of winning.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that we’re seeing birthrates plummet everywhere. We should not oppose this; we should celebrate it as a triumph of human intelligence and empathy that the young are using the one vote they have to tell capitalism what they really think of it. As an added benefit, a declining ecological footprint (or, at least, a less rapidly increasing one) slows down capitalism’s damage until we find a way to remove our ruling class forever. I, personally, want humanity to win—I would like to see us achieve fully automated luxury communism. That said, the ruling class will not allow this unless they have no other choice—the global birth strike is probably the least violent way to overthrow capitalism. Will it cause dysfunction within our economic system? Sure. That’s the point. Let’s bring it down, and replace it with something else, in the least damaging way possible.

Functional overpopulation is, perhaps not surprisingly, not a new problem. We have, for most of our history, bred faster than we have grown the means to support dignified life—we should be glad to be freed from this tendency!

Our Culture’s Natalist Roots

The three major Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—all have strong pro-natalist leanings. Having a large family is moral; social patterns that reduce procreative tendencies are despised, with only one exception that tends to emerge when a religion becomes the majority in a geographic region: celibate monasticism. We’ll discuss how societies come around to this, but let’s first go to the ancient roots of the idea that birth is good—the ancient Hebrews.

Stateless nomads live under perpetual threat. Although they are individually healthier than settled, agrarian, enstated people, they are outnumbered. The Hebrews knew their neighbors had the means to obliterate them—this existential paranoia exists in the three major Abrahamic faiths to this day—and they despised everything about enstated life: the need of low-income women to sustain themselves through sex work, the clothing enstated people wore and the food they ate, and the open commonality of non-procreative sex—to people who saw every birth as a necessary step away from extinction, what were once called sodomy and onanism (masturbation) were considered abominable.

A mostly accurate leftist review of Sodom’s destruction—since the historicity of the place or event is doubted, it is up to us to guess what was meant—is that the crime of the cities on the plain was economic injustice. It being considered dishonorable to refuse to give alms, the people of Sodom and Gomorrah paid beggars in marked (literally, stigmatized) coins to indicate that the money had been given as alms, indicating the end user to be, in essence, indebted to society, and therefore as someone who could be put to work. The man buying grain with this currency could be expected to spend a few hours sorting out the granary—a benign arrangement, from one perspective. Of course, populations grow. New people are born who need jobs, and even those coming from prominent families will, in a state of congestion, be forced to perform a lower category of labor than their forebears did—everyone gets pushed down. Working in the granary used to be the low end of the labor market, but now it’s a position earmarked two decades in advance for a merchant’s fifth son. So, what’s to be done with those at the bottom, who must seek alms? Well, there is always something a human can be asked to pay. The powerful have no need of more work—and have filled all the jobs with their own children—so, instead of requesting labor from the destitute, they humiliate them. This means it must come to pass that those who need alms, and pay for goods in marked coins—the generational poor, the transients, the migrants—are used for degrading purposes, beaten senseless, or worse. And we know the “or worse” quite well, because that part of the story is what Sodom has become forever known for. Two angels were sent into Sodom in the guise of destitute men, and the townsfolk—rich and haughty, their minds warped into perversion by boredom and license—intended to rape them, and would have done so, had God not intervened.

In other words, the right-leaning narrative that Sodom’s destruction was about butt sex is… mostly incorrect. The story has been retold in enough different sources for us to know that economic injustice was the crime of Sodom. Still, I suspect strongly that the story is in part about butt sex. A modern scholar recognizes the shift of enstated urban people toward non-procreative sexuality as compassion—knowing how terrible life is for those who do not inherit land, wealth, or position, they limited childbearing to a number they could support using the only birth control they had—but, I suspect, an ancient desert wanderer can be forgiven for conflating this proclivity with the objectively perverted socioeconomic behaviors that are normalized in hierarchical states.

Christianity—and Buddhism, though it is not Abrahamic—both became majority religions in a large geographic region, which Judaism never has. (We’ll discuss Islam; it’s a separate case altogether.) This led them to the invention of monasticism—withdrawal from reproduction, material striving, and partiality toward one’s blood relatives. It serves a majority religion in its cultural role well—in a congested society, a parent is too preoccupied with ensuring social and economic opportunities for offspring to dedicate much time or emotion to God—but is seen as unaffordable by a minority or diaspora religion like Judaism. Jews want their best people (rabbis) to be fertile and engaged in their community—not celibate priests or cloistered monks.

Judaism has been for so long preoccupied with survival that functional overpopulation has never been a concern—the value of a new life has always been received as positive. Christianity and Buddhism have, on a different path, adapted to majority status by associating important and often powerful cultural roles with positions that mandate celibacy and poverty. Islam… I am not an expert here, but it seems that Islam’s chaotic role in today’s world is an artifact of this never having been resolved, although Islam is a majority religion in several geographic regions.

It was out of kindness that ancient enstated people chose nonprocreative sex. They understood well that having as many children as nature would allow would divide their resources and doom people to misery. Ancient nomads, however, almost certainly conflated such practices with the severe socioeconomic injustices of the cities. To them, “sodomy” (and, in principle, birth control) was not a compassionate response to a society in which human life had lost value, but a causative perversion. And that may be part of why, four thousand years later, conservative politicians are still talking about butt sex.

Population Shredders

Even in the ancient world, cities were population shredders. Abortion became a fact of daily life. Procreative sex became unusual; sex at all, when land congestion or economic dysfunction led to high stress levels, became rare except when taken by force. These city-states relied on an influx of desperate migrants—farmers displaced and dispossessed by disease and war—to keep their working classes full.

It is sometimes asked why medieval peasants did not flock, in much greater numbers, to the cities where they could join the historical bourgeoisie and become wealthy. The answer is that medieval people—and almost all ancient people—considered wage work so dishonorable that, even if one could quintuple one’s money income by entering it, no one would. A manorial peasant is poor, but has few material needs, and his children cannot be legally sold by the lord to a factory, mine, or brothel because the lord’s lord (and so on, up to the king) and the Church forbid it. Wage workers have no such protection—no one cares what happens to a wage worker, so when conditions go bad, they fall all the way to the bottom. Farmers went to the cities to do wage work only if they had no choice and, indeed, most of the people who succeeded in the cities to become the historical bourgeoisie were not brilliant or lucky peasants, but enterprising noblemen who could see that feudalism was slowly ending. The bourgeoisie never overthrew the aristocracy; they merged. The vast majority of those who entered wage labor—proving correct the medieval prejudice against it—fell to the bottom.

The literal meaning of proletariat is “those who give birth” but it is usually the case that the smarter, more empathetic proletarians stop reproducing if they can help it. They use birth control. They abort. They may stop having sex; they may, due to socioeconomic stress, lose the desire to have sex. They may avoid family formation and drink themselves to death—an ugly process, but less harmful to the world than to have five children who will rely on a labor market that is thirty years worse—because the natural tendency of labor markets is to diverge downward. This was the case in the ancient world, and it’s the case today. This is why societies needed a constant influx of farmers dispossessed by wars the urban financiers funded. This is why, in today’s world, developed countries need immigration from lands so poor that reliable birth control is unavailable.

Functional overpopulation appears to be a human issue—there is a point at which we seem to start seeing everyone as competition, and become miserable. Psychology plays a major role here. We’re not bothered by crowds at a rock concert, because such a place is supposed to be densely packed, but we grow ill at the sight of automotive congestion. Social media sickness is a case of this, too—we are in a strange competition to seem happy, because perceived happiness is assumed to lead to popularity and success, while in fact we are all both resentful of the ubiquitous fake happiness (and its costs; consider what has been done to hotel prices by people traveling to take pictures of themselves in places they otherwise would never care about) and the need to participate in this weird contest. It seems like it will only get worse. A national reputation has become a prerequisite for an ordinary job—that is how congested and dysfunctional the world under capitalism is. There are thousands of applicants for every job, and that’s bad enough, but we all know that there are thousands of applicants, which makes us borderline homicidal. We are civilized and moral enough, for the most part, not to act on this rage—but we sure aren’t going to add to the problem.

Behavioral Sink

Although functional overpopulation seems to be an artifact of human psychology, a midcentury study on Norway rats suggests that functional overpopulation can be induced in animals, at least in captivity. The rats were put in a “rat utopia” (though it became the opposite) where resources were abundant, but deviant behavior—evidence functional overpopulation—occurred long before objective overpopulation was reached; in fact, it often happened before reaching even half of the enclosure’s real carrying capacity. This led to violence, depression, and terminal infertility—the animals became individually and socially dysfunctional, and were unable to recover. This catastrophe is referred to as the “behavioral sink.”

I suspect I know what happened. Nature does not generate conditions where thousands of rats can live well in a small amount of space—that alone must have been stressful. On top of this, our brains do significant background work when conspecific individuals (a sociobiological term for “animals of the same species”) are around and, in the same way that a video game can lag if there are too many sprites to display, we simply get overloaded if there is too much human activity to which we might be expected to respond. It is possible that the chronic state of arousal—of background computation, due to the number of others of their own kind—led to a state of psychological collapse that produced antisocial behavior in a few and depressive withdrawal in the many. This happens to us, too—the perversion, in humans, is that we so often celebrate the antisocial behavior by making such people our rulers.

The human mind is typically more flexible than an animal’s. We know we are not in danger on a crowded bus. Still, the need to adjust ourselves to the presence of others—response may be required at any time—causes overload. We can program ourselves. After riding the bus a few times, we learn that it is not dangerous. Unfortunately, we are also being programmed by others—this, too, is an intractable element of capitalism. Our sense of whether we exist in a state of dangerous congestion comes from context, from what we are told, and most importantly, from how we are treated.

Consider the worsening of workspaces over the past fifty years, from private offices to cubicles to open-plan bays. There are a number of reasons these atrocious open offices are in vogue—they are cheap, they look busy—but it is an additional advantage to capitalists that they engender hostility, not at a level that would (for most people) become disruptive, but to enough of a degree that workers continue to compete against each other, from which the boss benefits. A real team player (union organizer) is the last thing a capitalist boss wants.

The social contract on a bus is pretty simple—you get on, you pay a fare, the bus goes where it is supposed to go, no one bothers you unless there’s a really good reason, and you get off—and, so long as this contract is upheld, the crowding is no source of stress at all. The social contract of our broader society is more complex and, for all intents and purposes, does not really exist, since it is constantly being rewritten without our consent by governments and employers.

Is There a “Masculine Crisis”?

It is often said by the right, and not entirely false, that leftists and liberals have been underattentive to male suffering in contemporary society. We are told that we’re in a “masculine crisis” and that this is why figures like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson thrive. I don’t like this term—we live in an all-out crisis, and it’s not a great time for most women. The fact that a small number of neurotypical, outgoing, and attractive women can sleep their way from the middle class into the upper-middle or ruling one does not mean that a 56-year-old African-American house cleaner is privileged, simply because she has the same genitals as the product management intern.

The socioeconomic meltdown we are experiencing is different for men than for women. It does seem to be hurting men more than it hurts women. That all said, I do not think men were ever explicitly made a target—greed is deliberate, but the dysfunction that follows is organic and mostly random—and this was not triggered by women. On the contrary, what has been done to formerly-middle-class young men has mostly been done by other men. Indeed, one of organizational capitalism’s purposes is, for the old rich men the system benefits, to thin out sexual competition by depriving young rivals of the resources necessary to attract partners.

Everyone has a boss, it is said, and in some sense this is true. Still, there are bosses and there are bosses. A professional athlete’s boss is the team manager, but no one sees him as a subordinate solely because, yes, he can technically be deprived of income (in the short term) by another male—if he is skilled at all, it is assumed that he can replace that income in time. Athletes, professors, and surgeons therefore technically have bosses, but remain attractive to women. This is not true of subordinate office workers—they are repulsive to women and, more cripplingly, repulsive to themselves. No woman feels safe with a man who relies on the approval of higher-status men to survive. She—and he, if he is empathetic—also recognizes the futility of reproduction in such a state—with no chance of earning or saving enough money to buy the children out of this curse, what’s the point?

Workplace subordination, of course, is not a new invention. So why wasn’t it such a problem—sufficient to cause a fertility crisis—in the 1950s? Or the 1750s? This is a tough one to analyze, because societies have invented all sorts of institutions to abstract out of existence the repulsiveness of the male subordination they have nevertheless considered necessary, and there is not necessarily a unifying principle. Still, we shall search for one. I think it is most important to observe the difference between operational or personal subordination. When you stop at a traffic light—or for a human flagger—this is operational subordination. You wait because a necessity for safe use of the intersection is to be slightly inconvenienced, but you are not being made to wait arbitrarily, or as an expression of power. People will happily take orders when there is an objective benefit to doing so.

Personal subordination, unlike the operational, is all about status. Welcome to the corporate workplace, which stands for no purpose but the enrichment of private individuals, in which low-status men—and all women—are tokens to be traded by high-status men, and means through which they can defend and expand their resources, reputations, and power. Operational subordination is following rules and orders we all can agree make sense—such as, “Don’t go through the intersection if the traffic light says it’s unsafe”—but, when it comes to personal subordination, one person making the other his bitch—making it clear that the low-status person now exists only to advance the high-status person’s goals—is entirely the point.

A surgeon or a professor does have someone who will begin the termination process if, say, the surgeon carves his initials in a patient’s uterus or the professor sleeps with a student, but personal subordination is (at least, in the popular imagination) rare in these fields. The men and women who work these jobs have independence of purpose. A surgeon can say that he works to save lives, not to increase the income or advance the career of his boss, and we will believe him. This cannot be said about ordinary office workers, and the self-deceptions about an ability to “hustle in place” and somehow defeat a system—designed by people who have already anticipated their vain moves toward independence—are defense mechanisms we recognize as pathetic.

The Feudal Mindset, the Cold War and “The Market”

Feudal societies, to make it possible for men to be subordinate to other men without making them universally repulsive, used religion. God had simply planted humans in different places, like seeds in separate rows, and designed roles for people to fulfill. Copulation across classes surely happened, but was disavowed—jus primae noctis, the so-called law of the first night, was a practice of which medieval polities accused their enemies, but seems to have been nowhere observed. A male peasant, therefore, was not a subordinate worker, but a farmer who answered mainly to God… who also happened to pay taxes to the lord. Technological limitations, in any case, made it impossible for noblemen, unless they were perverted libertines—and remember that medieval institutions frowned on this—to extract personal subordination in the way that is commonplace today. In fact, vassals were presented to the world not as subordinate males (although this is, of course, what they were) but as knights in shining armor.

We can’t go back to that, and we shouldn’t try. It is important, nevertheless, to recognize that the resurgence of ancient “mindsets” is an artifact of the general recognition that the American midcentury—the Golden Age of Capitalism—is so far gone that it can never return. The left wants to abandon capitalism and install socialism; the right wants to return to a certain nationalistic brand of market-state economy that was in vogue the last time an economic system failed in so many countries all at once.

The 1950s abstraction by which a male worker could escape sexual repulsiveness was “The Market.” The same fiction that turns a string of pointless subordinate jobs into “a career” was expanded even to men who could not argue that they even had careers. Work became a bizarre hero’s journey in which a man worked not for a boss but for “The Market”, a divine abstraction that perceives and rewards skill or merit, leaving men wholly independent on their reputations as perceived (and, in the real world, altered) by higher-status men. Subordinate working men were able to gain their dignity back by promulgating this belief. “The Market” will ensure that a diligent man’s earning potential goes up by 5 percent per year, even if he doesn’t smile when his boss walks in the room—because, trust me, no one wants anything to do with a man who must smile for other men—because it is wise enough to discern whose income deserves to go up, and how fast. “The Market” will not exactly provide, but ensure that a man of merit can provide. It is, in a weird way, the best of both worlds for one who buys into 1950s right-wing masculinity—the man gets to be a tough, heroic provider, because “The Market” gives nothing away for free, but is also independent of the whims of other men because “The Market” is not a man—it is literally God’s reification.

There are problems with this, of course. The biggest one is that it requires excluding women from workplaces—if they learn the extent to which white-collar men actually rely on their reputations, the ruse will die and women will see ordinary men as repulsive. In addition to being a moral non-starter—excluding women from economic opportunity because of their gender is an intolerable solution—this is not stable. Subordinate men still are subordinate, which means that their position will worsen every year, which means that wages will go down, which will force women back into the workplace to compensate, which will also expose women to the reality of the working world… oops. The weird 1950s social contract—excluding women from the workplace was to the mutual benefit of high-status men, who did not have to soften their demeanor, and low-status men, who at least did not have their humiliation seen by women—is not coming back, and we should not wish for it.

“The Market”—as the objective, benevolent entity that rewards skill, talent, and effort—was artificial. Don’t get me wrong—the labor market is real, but it’s not what people in our society were brought up to think it is. The Cold War was an anomalous period in which Marx Was Wrong insofar as his analysis diminished (to the point of erasure, at least from an emotional perspective for those who believe themselves to be a part of it) the middle class and its role, focusing instead on the conflict between those who must rely on the labor market to survive and those who are lucky (usually, due to generational wealth and connections) enough to be the ones operating it. Marx Was Wrong because, for fifty years, a large middle class obviously existed—what he failed to anticipate were the World Wars as well as the Cold War conditions in which extensive (and expensive) state support, a prerequisite for a middle-class’s existence, would be available. During the Cold War, our ruling class tolerated the upkeep costs of a middle one, because it was better to share the wealth than to lose research supremacy to the rapidly ascending Soviet Union. Once the Cold War was over and “communism” was “forever” dead, we as a middle class were no longer useful and, in fact, became a threat. This is why austerity policies are being pushed; it is why university budgets are being cut. In sum, our “winning” the Cold War was the worst thing that happened to us—once “communism” was defeated, the ruling class lost all need for us. The labor market is again the down elevator that it has almost always been. The old truths—such as the medieval sense of wage work as so risky as to be dishonorable—are true again, while the “Marx Was Wrong” regime of the midcentury is now, literally, history.

The fiction by which a wage earner worked for a boss but for “the market” could only hold so long as the state’s need to support a middle class guaranteed a favorable market. We are no longer living under such conditions. Instead, we see downward wage pressure everywhere, and it will not relent. Do the same thing this year that you did last year, as noble as last year’s work may have been, and you’re fucked. Wages can go down, because desperate workers are everywhere. Productivity standards can go up, because desperate workers are everywhere. Emotional labor expectations—middle managers are also exploited workers, but their bosses know it is cheaper to pay them emotionally by allowing them to be petty tyrants than to increase their salaries—can go up across the board, because desperate workers are everywhere. Bosses at all levels can demand total service to their own career goals and fire everyone who isn’t 100 percent loyal, because desperate workers are everywhere. The half-century anomaly in which it was profitable and even considered to be honorable to be a worker who makes his living “on the (labor) market” is over. Men and women are getting screwed over by this in approximately equal doses, if we look at economic losses and tolls, but it is men who suffer the addition of insult to injury, since they become sexually repulsive when they are made workplace subordinates.

The quixotic desperate man is a certain kind of stock character. In the 1980s and ‘90s, he bought magazines to win sweepstakes. He is a gambler or failed writer or inept businessman who promises he’s “due” and that the money is coming in very soon. Every society has its version of this guy—he’s appealing to nobody. Today, this applies to the office worker who must send out 1600 applications to get a single opportunity—and it’s worse, because once he gets that job, he is in a job where he must compete with 1599 other desperate losers, waiting out in the rain to take his place, or be immediately discarded.

To rely on the market value of one’s work is so reckless that almost all societies—the midcentury bourgeois “utopia” is an exception—considered it dishonorable. Going up half a step into the middle class, people rely not so much on trade skills so much as reputation, but this is even worse, because to rely on one’s reputation—on the approval of higher-status individuals—is inherently emasculating. Excluding women from the 1950s middle-class labor pool obscured the influence of reputation on a man’s career—making such men sexually palatable because their wives simply did not know that their husbands lived on their reputations—but was intolerably unjust and, in any case, this concealment would be impossible with today’s technological capabilities. It took extensive state intervention, international cooperation, and the overseas threat of “communism” to maintain and defend the infrastructure that appeared to resolve these problems—and it’s never coming back. The whole point of neoliberalism is for the bourgeoisie to cooperate internationally in ways that prevent states, even if they want to, from protecting their own people.

Darkness and Light

This all said, human cultures have invented precisely one context in which a man can be subordinate to other men and not be sociosexually repulsive. One; only one; exactly one; one times one times one—five thousand years, and only one. It’s this: give him a weapon and call him a soldier.

You now understand war. You now understand the appeal of fascism. The irony of Fight Club is that the men of Project Mayhem end up in the same mindless, humiliating subordination they had sought to escape—instead of answering to a manager, they answer to Tyler Durden, a man who does not even exist. However, since their purpose is martial—we therefore also feel, on some level, that it cannot be permanent—we can view them as heroes, and they can also view their lives as tolerable.

That all said, I don’t want war, and I don’t want fascism. I see no value in systems that throw men or women into needless subordination, and consider the “solutions” necessary to support them to be all morally intolerable, as much as I reject “fixes” to our society’s fertility problem imagined by people (mostly me) who consider The Handmaid’s Tale a how-to guide.

There is no way out of this that doesn’t involve the unquestioned overthrow of global capitalism. We are not going back to the 1950s world in which conditions, for those who rely on the labor market to survive, improve rather than deteriorate as the months pass. We’re not going back to find our way back to a system in which companies and professions reduce the power of immediate managers by offering second and third chances to people after their political nonsuccess leads to their being labeled as low performers. We are not going back to 1950s gender norms, and nobody should want to. We are going to have to burn up a whole social fabric. It is time for us to let the male provider nonsense die—it fails on its own terms, since a man who lives on his reputation is not providing for a family; his bosses, who control his reputation, are doing that—and, instead, form societies where everyone provides for everyone.