Most Men & Women Are Romantically Hopeless: The Role of Monoliths, the Issue of Complexity, and Empathy Destruction

At heart, I am a researcher. I study people’s world-views and try to engineer them back to their source so I could feel how they would genuinely feel and see how they genuinely see. I have explored the minds of all kinds of people, including those I vehemently distain and I do so from a place of curiosity. I have always been that way. And I always saw it as something constructive.

The first time that it ever crossed my mind that this could ever not be a good thing was in college. I was having a conversation with a white guy from the city and asking him questions from a project two friends were working on in class. I wanted to see how he saw the housing programs for minorities on campus. As I got him to open up and share, he talked about how he grew up and what school was like for him. I don’t recall most of what he said as it has been years ago but I recall drawing the connection for him that the way he saw the multi-cultural housing program was as something like a ‘disabled students’ housing. And he agreed that it was exactly like that. He didn’t have a problem with it existing or anything but he didn’t understand the need and was himself curious.

I could see where he was coming from. Implied in a self-imposed segregation is a need — one that the rest of the campus does not have, and yet must be supported and specialized based on race. The only piece of the puzzle he was missing was that the need was simply a basic sense of commonality, something that I imagine he would have related too. I had lived in that housing, not from a sense of being disabled but just because I figured I’d get along more with people from many different cultures than otherwise.

But I saw why he saw it the way he did because to him, particularly because he was a city kid, his race has never felt like something that brought him camaraderie with other white people. So in his mind, ‘maybe there was something particular about their racial experience as minorities on campus that he had that they didn’t, even if it didn’t feel that way’. Hence, a lot like someone disabled in a wheelchair has a very unique experience and challenges that others wouldn’t immediately recognize unless they were in their shoes. To me, it was an empathetic view.

But the two friends I was with were apparently ripping apart at the seams in silence. When he left, the two women, one black and the other white, turned to me and asked “How could you sit through that mess?!”

I was surprised, personally. I didn’t feel all that stressed. I explained to them that I just don’t really get frustrated with how people see things, I guess. I followed up saying that I feel like I have to understand the other point of view before I could be sure what to even be upset about. They kinda stared at me blankly for a moment and then ranted about the things he said and him, as a person.

I felt bad for the guy because it was my forthrightness in tone and genuinely open vibe that made him comfortable enough to speak without policing how he came off, but now these two friends were judging him really hard because they couldn’t see where he was coming from.

They were finding offense from their own point of view rather than trying to emotionally deduce his lack of offense from his point of view. And because I didn’t factor that in, I made this guy sound as though he was saying that being a minority was literally being disabled.

I was bridging the gap for people who were not ready to cross it.

Monoliths and Monads

I find myself in a similar situation when it comes to the tension between Men and Women. I have spent a lot of time breaking down the biases, assumptions, values, and needs that undergird the behaviors and perspectives of Men and Women in the world as well as my own infrastructures to see how we really see it.

Now, when I say ‘Men’ and ‘Women’, not only am I NOT talking about All men or all women, but I literally can’t be talking about all men or all women because, obviously, I haven’t see or talked to all men or all women. If you are reading this, I likely haven’t talked to you with sufficient depth, so whatever I could say about ALL Men or Women would, at the very least, be based on incomplete information.

So what am I talking about? In fact, what is anyone talking about when they say “Men are xyz” or “Women are xyz”?

Well, it is my understanding that when anyone talks about “Men” or “Women” they are referring to the Monolith in their head. One could almost always substitute “Men” and “Women” with “My net information on Men/Women.” For many people, this would include the information gathered from their own anecdotes, from studies they have clearly not personally done or checked themselves, and most importantly the story they have weaved together using all of these disparate data points.

Why Story? Well, because stories are the core human innovation that allows us to compress context and meaning. Two people can tell you the same facts but when woven together, paints an entirely different story.

For example:

Person A says, “I went to my friends house and borrowed some tools he gave me”

Person B says, “Someone came to my house and took some tools I was showing him”

The chain of events are the same. But Person A and B and filling those events with INTENTIONS and INTERPRETATIONS. And what is a story but a ‘Network of Intentions & Interpretations’?

Which gets me to Monoliths.

Monolith noun

1. : a single great stone often in the form of an obelisk or column

2. : a massive structure

3. : an organized whole that acts as a single unified powerful or influential force

- Merriam-Webster link

You have likely heard at some point the phrase that “Women are not a Monolith”, a statement meant to mean that women are not a collective hive-mind or singular body that acts in the world. That they are individuals — monads that cannot be generalized. Implied in that statement as well would be that “Men are not a Monolith,” similarly impossible to categorize in any real sense.

On principle, and in essence, I would agree with such a statement. On first glance, there is no collective entity of any man or woman for the same reason I can’t speak on All Men or All Women. For such a collective entity to exist, all men and all women would need to actually know and conspire together to enact a certain mode of being, something I am sure has not happened (unless of course I haven’t been invited). So long as there is not active cohesion to make such a group ‘whole’ and singular in action, then such a Monolith is seemingly impossible.

However, by digging down into the statement, we can see what underlying meaning of Monoliths in the Human psyche. I’ll do this is 4 points:

A. The foundation of the concept of Patriarchy is built on Men being a Monolithic entity. The foundation of the concept of Feminism is built on Women being a Monolithic entity.

Regardless of how you feel about either of these things, this is necessary because one can’t collectively hurt, disempower, help, or empower any group without the assumption that any member of that group can or should receive the intended effect. To even discuss, compare, and measure the differences in the treatment & experience between men and women requires the observation and consideration of each as a monolithic entity.

However, how could we even reasonably do this if All men and All women have never conspired together to synchronize their actions? Only a small number of men or women ever get a voice, much less a discussion, on the motion, direction, and definition of the Monolith and what ‘Men’ or ‘Women’ should do in society. Well…

B. You don’t need to communicate or be represented as an individual to be a part of Monolithic entities.

Society itself is a monolithic entity, despite the fact that we each are part of it with very different points of view. Your body is a monolithic entity, despite your cells being very different individual monads. In most monoliths, the majority of the individuals only share a few identifying traits that show they are part of that entity. However, from that collection of individuals comes a spectrum of behaviors, any one of which can be considered the ‘doing’ of the monolithic entity.

For example, John, a man, does a crime. John is part of the “Men” monolith. Hence, “Men” do crime. And this would be true. Just like if your hand picks up a pencil, “You”, too, pick up a pencil. Pushed even further, if “You” pick up the pencil, is not your foot also technically complicit in the action?

The Monolith takes ownership of the actions of ALL individuals who are a part of it, no matter how thin the association BUT so long as the monolith exists, all individuals are made responsible or associated with the actions of any and all other members.

The principle behind why this happens is the same as those described here:

This is why assessing or engaging with Monoliths are so tempestuous. This poses an issue. Both the Monoliths of Men and Women have done almost everything the other has done at least once. As a result, there is always an exception and an example of someone who contradicts whatever one could say about the Monolith of Men or Women. If that is true, then where exactly do we get the impetus to ever say anything about either Monolith?

C. Monoliths are made distinct by Comparison to other Monoliths, not by themselves.

The only legitimate way we can even define the Monolith of Men and the Monolith of Women is by COMPARISON, seeing who does more or less of any particular thing.

This is why statistics always get thrown around in contentious (and often still fruitless) discussions on the issues of Men and Women. They are just about the only way people can say anything at all about the Monoliths. Men and Women, the Monoliths, have people who do crime. But statistically, Men do more crime, which means, to an observing bystander, that Men, the Monolith, is inherently more crime ridden than Women, the monolith! The implication?

Men, all men whom fit into the monolith of Men, are now also, 30% criminal (arbitrary number), even if they themselves have never done anything like that. The Story and intent of men is 30% criminal.

But “not all Men!”, the individuals who are also roped into the monolith say. And this is true. They don’t consider themselves men because of a criminalistic urge but because they have a penis. But now, they are being lumped in with qualities that have nothing to do with them.

Worse for those guys, now that the trend has been noticed, a subset of people feel a need to know why it is exactly that Men, the monolith, has 30% more criminalistic lust within them. They look at other male traits and find testosterone which, statistically, women also have way less of. The Implication?

Men’s Testosterone makes them 80% more aggressive (arbitrary number) than Women, the monolith, resulting in 30% more criminalistic lust!

But “not all Men!”, they chant again. And on and on. Same with women.

But what prompted the question?

The Difference between the Men and Women Monoliths. Comparison. This in spite of the fact that both Men and Women have (and could) do crime. If it is true that both could do it, then there would be some common denominator cause for why it happens at all for either group. Otherwise it would be a 100% Men / 0% Women phenomenon. It is not a Rule. But we act on these things as if they are.

This, I suspect, leads to narratives and stories about Men or Women, the monolith, that are ‘true’ and yet also irrelevant to addressing the action being examined. Most of us, on a day to day, do not interact with men’s testosterone and most of us rarely ever change anyone’s mind. So these instantly place you in a powerless situation. Most of these narratives build themselves up from either Biological Pressure or Societal Pressure theories. This is because biology and sociology are fields where we can pull statistics out of to make our stories more legitimate in comparison to another monolith. The observations of the statistic is relative to another entity.

However, the compelling nature of the narrative is NOT the same as a true, first principle, CAUSE. To get to the First-Principle cause for why any behavior happens in a human being, it will never suffice to pull from JUST the external pressures.

This is because the only way to get to ‘First-principles’ for any human decision making behavior is basically just pure Empathy. The ability to viscerally experience the incentives that drive a person to act in a certain way. For many parents, having a child of the opposite sex is the first time the experiences, demands, and considerations of the other side ever actually come into view, no matter how educated or experienced they are. We don’t think of empathy as a genuinely valid and effective tool for knowledge acquisition but there are some domains of knowledge that are literally inaccessible otherwise.

Incentives, will, and intent are the infrastructure that underly decisions. Biological and Societal pressures only explain the fact that incentives could exist. But only one’s own story explains why any one individual does anything or submits themselves to said incentive. With our statistical foundation of facts, we place the first chess-move of our story, finishing the rest of the story with “because they are Evil or Stupid Devils”, a principle I explain here:

We use one of these two explanations for just about every agent’s behavior that we can’t relate to or dislike.

However, the data required to be accurate in such a thing is so much more vast and obscure that it could never be captured accurately at scale under these Monoliths. We are not all being measured and even still, we are incentivized to share or hide information that will alter the data. In fact, some studies — both officially in scientific processes, and anecdotally in the very lives of the people around us — might not happen simply because it does not cross anyone’s mind to ask the question.

This leads me to my final point:

D. The Monoliths that people refer to and the statistics they compile to reinforce them will themselves be influenced by Stories they are compelled to tell.

None of us can put ourself in the shoes of a Monolith because we are restricted to the complexity of one human being. We empathize with other People, not Groups of people. This was the purpose of such a statement as “women are not a monolith.” However, as we can see, our very capacity to Label & distinct differences is the source of all monoliths. To claim that a woman/man is not a monolith is true in reality but wrong for how all of us perceive reality as human beings. It is really saying “Women are not a category.”

But they are... Categories are one of the ways in which we process information in our minds.

What any one person’s mental monolith of Men or Women looks like will be dependent on what their own environment, circumstances, and incentives are. When someone discusses “Men” or “Women”, they are thus, fundamentally, never talking about just reality but also about their own perception. And yet at the same time, that perception bases itself in a real portion of reality.

Seriously. When a man and a woman says ‘Men’, they are both, more than not, referring to two very different entities build up by their own models, expectations, wants, and desires pertaining to that entity. Those factors are just as much mixed into what was likely real perceptions for the both of them that are accurate and valid. And same of course, vice versa.

Here we get the the crux of the issue. The projection of whole (as opposed to part or fractional) entities is critical to how we even think about anything in the world. In other words, we NEED assumptions to even think about anything. That means, strangely enough, that the Monolith does exist and does have a real effect on our actions and life. But only because that “single unified force” is enacting its will right into our brain and our decisions by extension. We have made full beings ourselves to be the monolith that acts on us. All it took was having the label exist for it to now have influence our thought, action, and perception in the world to some degree or another. Put simply, we are reacting to the Monoliths in our own minds.

This also means that any consensus that we create on the properties of these Monoliths amongst each other, represent the thin degrees of similarities of experience that we as individuals believe and agree with, not just reality. Meaning that our consensus of interpretation is far more likely to be decided by the consensus of incentives, instead of reality itself. We never just believe and agree with things. We WANT/DON’T WANT to believe and agree with things. And so long as that is true, we will naturally be drawn to the aspects of the Monolith that align with our incentives and stories, confusing them for reality and acting based on that perception.

Okay, exhausting. You can think of that entire explanation as the ultimate disclaimer and trigger warning for this topic forever into the future — an unfortunate need for our times due to the tremendous lack of trust I see these days. When someone says “Men” or “Women” anything, you should just auto-correct it to “My story of Men/Women,” including your (and other’s) own inevitable rebuttal or support in the comments. They literally can’t help it, and neither can you. And yet neither of you are right OR wrong. Each of you are both right and wrong, every time, all the time.

Makes the discussion seem kind of pointless right? Well, thats because it is pointless… UNLESS, you are bridging the gap between what either of you mean by any of the word you each are slugging around at each other.

An image that comes to mind: Two ships in the ocean need to actually dock onto each other to exchange cargo. If they are shooting cargo at each other from afar, it’s probably just a cannon ball, not cargo.

The bridge and means to dock is the Empathy.

So with all that said, I want to come back to that First Principles that undergird the mechanics of Monoliths because to me, that is the reason why we are collectively doomed, more than anything else I hear people talk about. Since they come from our own minds, the only way to understand causally what the heck Men or Women are, is to do what I already said cannot be done:

Empathize with the Monolith.

Have you ever noticed that individual people are far kinder and greater than “Humanity” tends to be? Or how often you hear people say they hate humans but they love people?

To me, this is because we are fundamentally disposed to relate to a being on our own level. However, the entity of Humanity is filled with the best and worst of our behaviors and we have a good spread.

When someone is in front of you, are you looking at the Monolith of which they are a part or are you looking at THEM? To see THEM is to keep them ‘Undefined’ and flexible.

When we interact with people, with bodies, and faces, and more so when we see them simply ‘be’ in the world without considering them as a category, we inevitably see something beautiful in them. In contrast, online it is almost necessary to think of every comment, post, essay, article, tweet (or uh… x?), as basically a part Monolithic entity. These packets of data are not people or individuals but pure ‘thought’ emanating from a philosophy or psychology. And those philosophies and psychologies become patterns that we must navigate to maintain our story of ourselves and our world. What we see online is deep digging into the make up of a Monolith. Different ‘communities’ are monoliths. Even the people who gather in a particular comment section is a little monolith of ‘types’ that converge on certain content.

And the problem, I find, is that people then slowly build a lot of hyper-detailed and thorough monoliths to apply to just about every action a person can do who very likely is NOT even living in the same universe as you, mentally. Even if they are acting ‘right’ in accordance with the monolith, there is a complete failure to see THEM and why they are acting that way.

This whole seeing THEM thing is well explained in this essay I wrote here:

So why is it so easy to lose sight of personhood today?

Because words can’t surprise you. But people do, if you look at them long enough.

These entities are basically stereotypes. And the reason we love them so much is because of one main thing:

Complexity & Overwhelm

In the essay below, I give a more thorough explanation of what I mean by complexity:

The world today is too complex. We have too many variables to consider and access to literally a global point of view has simply outclassed the amount of information we need to process to stay on top of everything going on that could effect us. What we are really doing with these Monoliths is trying to reduce the complexity of people down to something manageable & control. Uncertainty is what we are really trying to muscle out of people when we interact with them because we are so used to that uncertainty being the very think that kicks our ass in some way.

However, in the effort to bring the complexity down, we have turned people increasingly into simplified characters that are more and more elaborate and difficult to break out from (at least on their own). People are quick to throw others in monolith jail and once they are in, they aren’t really given the chance to get out. Like a spider’s web, everything they say and do only further enmeshes them into the complexity net, until they are nothing more than a ‘typical Man’ or ‘basic Woman’ — simple, explainable, and predictable to the point of not even needing to see the rest of the story — their OWN story.

Worse still, the ‘rest of the story’ more often than not is a story build into the relationship the individual has with the Monolith itself. The patterns that repeat with “Men” or “Women” are patterns that that person repeats with the Monolith, not just with any one person. They are playing chess against an adversary they have already faced multiple times and lost to. Believing they have learned from it, gotten stronger against it, or healed from it is forgetting the core issue underlying how they got into the situation in the first place.

They still have the Monolith… and they still can’t empathize with it or see it as manifestations of themselves. It has not changed.

All they ever learned was even more elaborate maneuvers to increase the stakes of the game and escalate against the entity. All they ever got stronger in was in the endurance to play the chess for longer and in harsher conditions. All they ever healed was the trauma of being stripped from a hope of victory.

But they have not rid themselves of the very entity that follows them along to the next “Man” or “Woman” they engage with. And they cannot be rid of the entity because it turns into more than a tool for reducing complexity.

It becomes a tool of Othering. Scapegoating. Sacrifice.

The Big Other

The biggest benefit of the customized Monolith that people create is that you truly can’t completely relate to it. It is not human, and as such, if you leave it alone, everything that you don’t want to claim as part of yourself, you can place into the Monolith.

Like we mentioned earlier, if an examined quality or action exists that both men and women have the capacity to do, that means that those actions and qualities do not emanate from man or woman traits. Any Exception to the Monolith (or expressions of the Monolith not coming exclusively from those within it), break the Monolith’s reality, regardless of the life experience pointing towards a trend. It is because we intuitively know that this is true that people hate being reminded that “Not all xyz are like that.” It shows the exception and hence that we are living in our own Model, not Reality.

So the real question is “what purpose does this focus on the Monolith serve?”

There are only two purposes I have seen for emotionally charged fixations on certain aspects of a Monolith:

1. To Create Distance by Othering
2. As a Vent or Receptacle of Hostility/Resentment

No matter how much an individual might wholeheartedly protest and genuinely feel hurt by your actions, distancing, or stereotyping of them, if you are looking at the Monolith talking instead of the person, your empathy will be rationalized away because you are NOT designed to empathize with a Monolith. It is too different from being ‘human’ at all.

So this makes the Monolith a perfect candidate for storing things you’d rather not see about yourself and then ‘accurately’ blaming that quality of monolith. It is always an entity that deserves all the hurt and abuse you give it.

I touched on this dynamic for the first time, here:

This explains why it is that in most ‘groupings’ we usually see the worst things. Politics is large scale Monoliths that absorb the hatred of the other side like a sponge. Culture Wars, Gender Wars, Religious Wars, and literal Nation vs Nation Wars, all are this projection. And I am certain of it because of the ‘War’ part.

In order to beat an opponent, you must actually match their complexity. You have to be able to respond and react to what they do in a way that ‘beats’ them at their own game. And the only way to do that is always to become more and more like your enemy. The women end up acting a lot like ‘narcissistic assholes’ they hate and the men act a lot like ‘perpetual victims’ they hate and it’s because that both are right and they both have been hiding those qualities in the Monolith of the big other.

Ironically, as the warring parties start to look more similar, they will find more subtle and arbitrary ways to prove they are different. This is the fate for every Monolith and every person that blindly clings to the ‘fighting’. The more one fights to show they are not part of the Monolith they are instantiating to keep the parts of themselves they don’t like, the more it seems to find a way back home, so to speak. But then again, it need not do that because the it was always home. The Monolith can only be brought about by the individual’s story itself. The fact that they can create it and its qualities in their mind is the proof that it is part of themselves and their own mind. They wrestle with themselves.

So what to do about all this? It’s a lot to take in. And what is my point anyway?

Well, my point is really captured by this:

This whole essay was one obnoxiously long way of saying “I’m throwing in the towel”, before I even started. I spend a lot of time studying specifically to try and make a bridge across the Monolithic structures in our minds. And I have actually found critical insights like the ones I have shared and so much more, including about what I think we mean by Masculine and Feminine, in essence.

But while I would love to write down and share all of the useful insights, analogies, and observations that I have found about the points of view of the Monoliths themselves, I have also realized that most people never actually wanted the bridge in the first place.

We stereotype, and other, and brutalize the monolith at the expense of the people we trap in them to cope with our miserable, confusing, and tragic existence itself. Me clearing out the illusions and obstruction will take away what essentially amounts to humanity’s pacifier and I do not have a clear and obvious replacement yet. We don’t actually want to understand each other because it will directly threaten our sense of self. And If we ever did realize that we were truly the same and that the barriers between ourselves and another is illusory, I think it might actually cause us to go more insane than we already have. And I promise you, if you feel like one of the people that truly understand the other side, you are already wrong. Because the mystery of each other is perpetually unfolding. There is no solid and final end state of ‘I completely understand’ without a box that stops understanding.

A lack of empathy is actually what keeps us ‘functional’ to whatever degree you can call our way of being on a daily basis function. And I sure as hell am not gonna be the one that all sides agree is a ‘Trojan Horse of the enemy’. True Peace will always look like that, buddy. Regardless, that lines me up as a candidate for actual sacrifice (another concept I didn’t talk about here).

This leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth. For all the deplorable behaviors I see humanity — the monolith — engaged in, the worst one to me, is the preference to sacrifice our fellow human (and really nature & reality itself) in the name of feeling good about ourselves — ego.

And I genuinely don’t know how to stop…

so I don’t know what to do about it.

But I know for sure that Men and Women are damn near hopeless. Imagine trying to love something while also never actually understanding it on its own terms. Imagine trying to connect with something while keeping it away. Imagine having expectations for something without ever knowing what it is. And then imagine trying to lie to yourself that your own ignorance justifies your spiteful hatred or even distain. Masking the same brutal barbaric bloodlust your ancestors had under the guise of ‘reason’ or stats or safety or other perpetual fascinations.

Its like pressing a name tag with the name “Devil” on someone, then kicking them for the name you gave them, and then looking at how they break down in response to your energy as evidence that they are what you called them. Its idiotic, yet completely ‘logical’. It is Sad, yet utterly unimpressive. It is the easiest & yet most hopeless mission ever — to try and help someone who chooses that over sanity. Hopeless because no amount of discussion or patience changes the mind of a sadistic asshole. But easy because they feel helped by hearing any story that justifies their hatred.

And it literally does help them. Sacrificing and abusing their fellow human being is how they cope with their own likely abuse of themselves or from others. Maybe that’s why the old english romance tragedies were written like they were. We can WANT to love as deeply and fancifully as the clouds yearn to return to the ocean. But we Love ourselves too much to ever actually do what it really takes and be truly respectful of another person’s world as well as our own, at the same time.

Once more, humanity disappoints.

When I look at society, I see a bunch of people who agree on > 90% of stuff with the <10% differences being the biases towards our strategies of achieving the exact same desired end states. Some of those differences being needed for the other party’s strategy to even work.

It just insane. And what am I but insane, to open my own mind to that insanity in the hopes that it will become sense? I refuse to sacrifice my sanity to it or humble myself beneath it anymore. I will just share what I see honestly, and I’m just gonna assume that the people who want a different point of view will already be the one’s seeking it out. If my insights bother anyone and I don’t see them ‘docking’ with me on it — offering me the same vulnerability & empathy I extend by talking about my own world and ideas — I have to assume they are just one of the people wasting my time, and their own, shooting a cannon ball for no reason.