Social Commentary

Monday Map

Marhaba fellas, I hope you are well? You are reading another edition of Monday Map from Busyminds newsletter. If you are yet to subscribe, you can just do that here. Thank you, as you join a community of curious learners: folks who learn for learning sake.

Last week’s Monday Map had a lot of views. I hope we can do it again and even better.

For today, we will have a good run through three topics namely Side effects of hookup culture, Unintended consequences, and Toys that changed the world (a lesson in serendipity). Are you ready?

SIDE EFFECTS OF HOOKUP CULTURE

So for Monday Map today, let's do a bit of social commentary. I love to sit and observe as the culture evolves (or devolves). It gets me curious and I need to find answers.

Let me start with a story.

I was an innocent kid in 2017 when I realized how easy it was for boys of my age to have sex. I know a boy who wanted to 'get the goods.' All he did was pick up his phone and make a call. A call. And it was an appointment: a 'booty call.' I was shocked. Was it that easy? Sadly, yes. These guys could get it at any time of the day. But then, this was not always the norm.

The invention or development of hookup culture is not too far back. It is just a few key searches down history. It is simply the offspring of modernity, liberalism, and feminism. And if you are asking what hookup culture is, it is the casual sex culture that doesn't demand commitment or obligation for sexual relations asides from just the actual romp. Just sex, no strings attached.

Years down the lane, hookup culture is (almost) normal. People may raise eyebrows here and there but it still takes the day. My mission in this post is to push an agenda. An agenda that you cannot be a proponent of hookup culture and cry about the consequences. Actions, or better still cultures, have their consequences and their rules.

It is cognitive dissonance to support hookup culture and lament that the world is over-sexualised and that you are a victim of sexual objectification (Oh dear, what did you expect?). And this is the first problem in modernity: that modernists always try to separate the decision and decision-maker from their consequences. This is a recipe for disaster.

A culture that allows and gives precedence to purely sexual affairs with no promises of commitment to the overall wellbeing of one's partner is a culture that sees you as only one thing: a sexual object.

The ancient cultural prescription of matrimony as the hedge around sexual relations is wise. The culture is ultimately prescribing to its adherents that "you are responsible for the wellbeing of whom you are having sex with." That's the rule. To change the culture is to change the rules. And to change the rule is to be willing to accept the consequences. And the consequence of the new rule is that under hookup culture, the person you are having sex with has no obligation to care for your wellbeing.

So, this change of guard now becomes devastating. It may start with only expectations of pleasure. But over time, the person in you, consisting of your mental, physical, and spiritual entities begin to ask for more. But this new culture has made no provision to force your partner to give you the more you seek. Now we have people who just "want to be loved for who they are" but still cheering for others to "live their best lives" which is modernity's slang for "find from a myriad of tested options, someone whose only purpose is to give you orgasms." LoL. Such dissonance.

If I have any sympathy at all, it is for the women who cheer this denigration of human worth. They are the ones who bear the primary consequences of all sexual relations in the form of their emotional investment and the case of pregnancy. It takes the right cultural hedge to protect them.

I expect men to cheer this useless culture because their losses are minimal and the price for sex is no longer commitment. But feminism made the crucial mistake of conflating the social and political equality of both sexes to mean the sameness of both sexes. Men and women come out of the casual sex arrangement differently in terms of consequences and you can trace this down to biological factors. Women still bear the brunt. It is deceitful to think otherwise.

I will close this segment of hookup culture by responding to the humanist argument. The humanist rebuttal to my claims that casual sex culture has no inbuilt rule to protect the overall wellness of its adherents, is that for the sake of humanity, "why can't we just care for the wellbeing of we are having sex with.?" I will respond thus: "not so smart Karen. Life doesn't work so neatly."

The humanist rebuttal would have been superb if it was not just some idealistic melody of words. Words that sound right but bear no reflection of reality. Soothing at best, unpragmatic on average, and disastrous at worst.

The world does not run on "just care for everyone." This would assume that we live in paradise. But because we can't always find the goodwill to care, and we don't live in El Dorado, we rely on the social mechanisms of culture, responsibility, sentiments, rewards, punishment, and shame to make society work.

In a properly hedged culture, men are responsible for the women they get pregnant. They are sometimes forced to marry them. They are shamed should they fail. But in a friend with benefits culture, men can only be forced by law courts to take care of and be responsible for the kids and not the mother. The mother is still left uncared for. Even worse, the child bears the consequences of unstable family life. So, "let's just care for one another" doesn't do the trick. Sorry.

The side effect is summarized thus: all adherents of the hookup culture are primarily sexual objects, with no obligation for anyone to care for the other's wellbeing. And even if there are traces of such, the closest metaphor to describing this relationship will be how I tended for a chick till into a big cock and I slaughtered it for Christmas. 

Vale.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

Well, if you read the entire segment before this, it shouldn't be hard to understand this concept.

Unintended consequences is simply a concept used to describe how an action may result in unforeseen and unplanned results. 

When designs are made, they are done to yield specific results as the designer has in mind. But more often than not, some of these designs yield results that the designer never foresaw or planned for. And unintended consequences can be positive or negative. Let's use the hookup culture for example.

The original agitators of hookup culture intended according to design to institute casual sex culture as a means of signalling sexual freedom (especially for women) against the oppressive rule of 'the patriarchy.' But if you read till the end, we can see that the unintended consequence is the hyperbolic rate of sexual objectification. That is, viewing the other primarily as an object of sexual satisfaction. Which is just degrading.

There are positive unintended consequences like in the case of the internet which was originally designed for military use. In the next segment, we should look at a better excerpt of positive unintended consequences.

TOYS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

A lesson in serendipity

Many useful things were discovered not by deliberate planning, but by curious accidents. The philosophy of accidental discoveries started Evolution Point. The idea is to enjoy every moment of learning as if there was no purpose to it and also be sensitive to know when you strike gold. This is the secret of effortless discoveries. It is why we “learn as leisure, innovate as by-product.”

Speaking of curious accidents, many of our useful inventions were just toys of curiosity. Now some of those toys have utterly changed the world. My most striking example is the laser.

“The laser is a prime illustration of a tool made for a given purpose (actually no real purpose) that then found applications that were not even dreamed of at the time. It was a typical “solution looking for a problem.” Among the early applications was the surgical stitching of detached retinas. Half a century later, The Economist asked Charles Townes, the alleged inventor of the laser, if he had had retinas on his mind. He had not. He was satisfying his desire to split light beams, and that was that. In fact, Townes’s colleagues teased him quite a bit about the irrelevance of his discovery. Yet just consider the effects of the laser in the world around you: compact disks, eyesight corrections, microsurgery, data storage, and retrieval—all unforeseen applications of the technology.

We build toys. Some of those toys change the world.”

(Culled from The Black Swan: The Impact of The Highly Improbable by Nicholas Nassim Taleb).

Do you know what strikes me most in this story? That Charles Townes was only satisfying his desire to split light beams; no strings attached. You do not have to walk into a lab, wearing a white lab coat, with glasses, and a deep scowl just to invent. You don’t have to die trying. You just have to flow with the serendipity. Maybe that is why I find Elon Musk fascinating.

At times the gold is not in the spot you expect it to be in. The best things come from the strangest places.

The Philosophy of Addiction: Just in case you are fascinated by how the world works, and you just want to learn more as leisure, read here on the philosophy of addictions. Very insightful; a matter of first-principles.

For the week, hold this picture:

Ciao,

Jegdy.