American Men are Superstitious Pigeons

an excerpt from "What Is Wrong with Men"

Thank you to Zach Toman for helping me make the fancam of my dreams!

The following is a short excerpt from my upcoming book, What is Wrong with Men, out in June 2025. You can pre-order. But I’ve been thinking about this part in conjunction with the discussion of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black in our Revolution and Ruin book club.

In the years before, during, and after World War II, American patriarchy’s golden age, psychologists were curious about what made people behave in the ways that they did. There are clearly social norms, but how did they arise? Are these behaviors logical or illogical? Are they conditioned responses – meaning, did they learn through social reward that certain behaviors were desirable and others undesirable – or are they instinct? If they are conditioned, can we condition humans to behave differently than the way they do now.

Simple reinforcement taught test subjects to repeat behaviors. Lab rat solves the maze, he gets some cheese. Pigeon presses on a lever, he gets a food pellet. But scientists could also induce illogical, irrational behaviors in its test subjects, simply by randomizing the distribution of reward and severing its timing from the behavior of the animal. Which is how B. F. Skinner and his assistants made some pigeons superstitious.

Skinner placed pigeons in the same boxes he used to teach test subjects to press a lever to get a food pellet reward. This time, however, the box was designed to send pellets on a random schedule, completely independent from what the trapped pigeon might be doing. They discovered that whatever the pigeon was doing when the pellet appeared, they would repeat that action in the hope of being rewarded with another pellet.

They were trying to control the behavior/reward set up. If it so happened that the bird was bobbing its head up and down when the food pellet appeared, the bird would continue to bob its head up and down, convinced this was the desired behavior that would bring food from the unseen source. If the bird happened to be flapping its wings when the food pellet appeared, the bird would continue to flap its wings.

Skinner wrote in his report, “To say that a reinforcement is contingent upon a response may mean nothing more than that it follows the response.” The bird becomes programmed, if you will, only by the coincidence of action and reward. It only understands the timing of the connection, not the other factors like the desires of the laboratory staff or the functioning of the gadgets. It can’t see beyond its own needs and desires to theorize what is happening.

This experiment has been used to explain primitive belief systems and magical thinking, from the ball player who refuses to change his underwear while the team is on a winning streak to the young woman who continues to visit and pay the psychic who correctly predicted she was about to meet a lover. When good things happen people try to control fate and make those good things happen again by creating superstitions.

This also explains the status of men in the post-patriarchy. Once, certain behaviors were granted certain rewards. The results were, for the most part, predictable. Young men who behaved in ways that made them “marriage material” to the culture in which they belonged mostly ended up married. Barring early death, war, economic crash, if a man met the standards expected of him, his reward soon followed. That role and reward would differ based on a man’s class, race, religion, place of origin and so on, but the community around the individual man taught him what to expect from his life.

But now, a young man can be handsome, college educated, have a decent job, be personable and hygienic, and yet still a romantic failure. A man can go to a good college, have the right accreditation and certifications, and yet still fail to establish himself in the career he has chosen. A man can participate in his community and still be isolated and lonely.

The patriarchal connection between behavior and reward has been severed. This has made superstitious pigeons out of men. Flapping their wings, bobbing their heads, trying to get that food pellet, certain that there must be a reason for it, the answer must be here somewhere, the right combination of steps and gestures and vocalizations that will make the pellet come. Some of the pigeons will turn against the machine, say the reason why it’s not working the way it should is because of feminists or gender confusion or cultural Marxism.

The men are told they will be rewarded with love, community, money, quality education, and meaningful work when they deserve it. But there are no visible markers, no metrics that will tell a man whether he’s getting closer to his goal. Or if he’s even moving in the right direction. The tools that he needs to become the man who deserves the things he wants – therapy or mentors or teachers – are elusive. And even if he goes into a shocking amount of debt to get the college degree he’s told he should have to get a job that isn’t in a factory that will either shut down four years later or injure him to the point he needs opioids to function, he may still find people telling him there are other, less tangible things – gumption or grit or ambition – that keep him from finding employment in his field.

Call it speculative masculinity, a vision of manhood that looks an awful lot like a desperate man in a casino, placing wild bets on impulse he confuses for rationality, hoping for a jackpot win.

Robert Jay Lifton, the professor of psychology who has for years investigated the control cults and other so-called “brain washing” organizations have over their followers, remarked that these groups become immensely attractive during times of turmoil. Lifton considered, in 1993, in The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation, that the post-patriarchal era we have been discussing has disrupted the expected stability of existence. He wrote, “We feel ourselves buffeted about by unmanageable historical forces and social uncertainties. Leaders appear suddenly, recede equally rapidly, and are difficult for us to believe in when they are around. We change ideas and partners frequently, and do the same with jobs and places of residence. Enduring moral convictions, clear principles of action and behavior: we believe these must exist, but where? Whether dealing with world problems or child rearing, our behavior tends to be ad hoc, more or less decided upon as we go along. We are beset by a contradiction: schooled in the virtues of constancy and stability – whether as individuals, groups, or nations – our world and our lives seem inconstant and utterly unpredictable.”

During these fragmented times, a cult or guru who offers easy answers – there’s a UFO coming that will take you off this planet and into a better life, or if you follow this system women will fall at your feet – will have more sway. They can step into the void created by “fatherlessness, homelessness, and the absence of clear mentorship.” The father “is identified with social and moral authority,” and those without the resources to take advantage of the freedom to create one’s own sense of social and moral authority are vulnerable to making a substitution with a false father.

Lifton has noted that the following that politicians like Donald Trump and other extremists collect tend to be more cultish than your traditional politician. Their support for the politicians of their choice tend to be more devotional and irrational than typical political affiliations, and they resist rational arguments against their leaders’ positions. And these supporters are often overwhelmingly men.

Enough men have taken up such extreme positions in the culture, politics, sexuality, and finance that it’s become difficult to retreat. There’s no steady ground to retreat to. There’s a term in crypto lingo, “diamond hands.” It’s an exhortation to stay in the risk, even as all signs are pointing to disaster. Even if the investment is crashing, even if the investor is seeing everything they own disappear, it is a sign of true integrity to stick it out. The “diamond hands” mentality says it would be cowardice to sell now and try to recover whatever might be possible in a dire situation.

But selling to contain the damages also requires the investor to admit they’ve been led astray. With so many men who feel lost glomming onto influencers and con men who profit from their confusion, these investments take on a cult-like, fantastical quality. It’s difficult for a person to admit they’ve been duped. It’s difficult for a person to admit that things are not going to improve, that years have been wasted maintaining this extreme position. Getting out of a cult-like mindset, as Lifton has documented, whether religious or political, can require years of psychological and intellectual work that is often referred to as “deprogramming.” But the longest process is often the one that leads up to the break with the collective, which requires the follower to admit they were vulnerable to persuasion in the first place.

This is how men get trapped, grinding it out. The understanding that this is a waste of time, that their failure is not only certain but also very useful to a small number of people is easy to avoid. There are a million podcasts to listen to, YouTube channels to subscribe to, ebooks to download, friends that will reinforce a person’s worst fantasies. Never stop hustling. Just keep holding, the payoff has to be right around the corner. The endless stream of content that will reinforce irrational worldviews and extreme positions keeps a person trapped in their own delusions.

There are many entry points to this cycle. Crypto is one, hustle culture is another. Physique is a big one. Weight lifting, body building, martial arts, extreme diets where the ultimate goal is to reach some impossible or painful marker of muscle mass or body fat all becomes tied into feelings of insecurity around masculinity. When the results don’t show up, there’s always something new to try, some supplement, some illegal or unregulated mix of hormones and injectables, some new guru, some new diet, some new product to buy, some new trendy workout gear or gym. If raw food doesn’t work, let’s go paleo, let’s go keto, let’s go all beef, let’s go vegan.

Even if a man does reach his goals, he is never really done. There is always one more marker, further off in the distance, that he can strive for. Five more pounds of muscle. One more millimeter of fat to lose. One more belt ranking to advance to. One more zero on that number in your account. One more gun for the collection. One more side gig, one more passive revenue stream, one more subscriber for his YouTube channel about how to hustle harder.

One way to silence self-doubt is to proselytize. Which is why men who get sucked into speculative masculinity end up perpetuating it by advising others to adopt its extremes. They are easy to find on social media, professing their loyalty to scams and con artists, picking fights with anyone who dares to disagree.