Interview with a Cobra: the bad

A couple of hours ago I posted an article about Tucker Carlson's recent interview with Andrew Tate, in which I tried to highlight some of the genuinely positive elements I found in Tate's message. But there were other points where I think he was wrong, and I want to talk about those now.

Let me start by clarifying that I know almost nothing about Tate besides what I learned from the interview. I've briefly scanned his Wikipedia article and half-heartedly googled a couple of other tidbits, but for the most part what I know is what he told Carlson during this 150-minute conversation. So while I know generically that Tate is widely famous, and that most people in the world already have strong opinions about him (for or against), I am approaching the topic as a newcomer. And I propose to restrict my criticisms narrowly to the scope of the interview itself. In particular, I am not going to start saying "Well maybe he sounded nice for Tucker, but we all know that in reality …."

Let me clarify further that even after two articles about this interview, I will not have come anywhere near covering the whole thing. This interview was wide-ranging, and touched on any number of topics which I will ignore here. In particular Carlson and Tate spent a lot of time talking about current events and contemporary politics. I found these passages absorbing in their own right (and I was tickled by Tate earnestly urging that, "We all need to thank Vladimir Putin for curing COVID-19") but they don't really fit into any of the themes of this blog.

Where, then, are my criticisms?

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First, Tate equivocates about the importance of being the best. Sometimes he says that a man* cannot be happy unless he makes himself the best man he can be. This is a clear goal, and in principle it is achievable by anyone. Apply yourself. Work hard. Get better. Anyone can do these things. And it makes sense that when you do them successfully, and begin to acquire a sense of mastery, then you will feel better in your life. (Whatever my other failures, it cheers me to reflect that I can still write these posts—consistently if not quite regularly—and that I've kept the blog going for over 15 years.)

But the equivocation comes when he slides without warning between two different goals: being the best you can be, and being the best simply. His frequent remarks about our "hypercompetitive" world (he uses that word several times) and about Alpha males are all in support of being the best simply. Among other things, Tate insists that sexual access to women requires a man to be either the best or at any rate one of the best. This notion looks superficially implausible because overall the numbers of men and women in the population are roughly equal: so you might think that there should be (more or less) someone for everyone. But Tate argues that women "don't mind sharing" a dominant man with other women (even as he makes it very clear that he would have no taste for sharing a good woman with other men); if this were true generally, then presumably the best men would get many women each; mediocre men might get one woman each; and vast numbers of losers would have no sexual access to women at all.

Tate's detailed picture of sexual access makes it clear that his praise of being the best simply is not merely an inadvertence. But it is a flaw in his message. 

Or rather, it may help him sell the message, since lots of men in his target market want to think of themselves as potentially the best. But this message sets up most of his customers for failure. 

We can't all be the best. 

On purely numerical grounds, the majority of men will be about average. 

Fully 49% of men will be below average. 

This is just math.

I fully support a message that encourages all men to be the best they can be. I think this is empowering, and I agree that it will make men happier with their lives. Power and strength always put you in a better place and a better mood. But if you insist that the goal is to be the best simply, most men will fail. There is room for a kind of wisdom that comes from failure, and I think it can enrich your life. (See for example this post and this one.) But Tate doesn't know it and can't teach it.

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Second, Tate's account of promiscuity is too simple. He holds to the popular notion, derived from a pseudoscientific "evolutionary psychology," that men are designed to be promiscuous while women are designed to be more monogamous. (He never says this in absolute terms; but he does make it clear that he considers female promiscuity to be a failure mode, while he advertises male promiscuity as one of the perks of being the Best.) But surely this is absurd. "Evolutionary psychology" has received massive criticism from the scientific community, and the picture it draws of the human sexual impulse was ridiculed as "Flintstonization" in Christopher Ryan's and Cacilda Jethá's delightful book Sex at Dawn. 

More concretely, Tate's criticism of female promiscuity is that fucking too many different men impairs a woman's ability to "pair-bond," so that if she later tries to settle down with some guy she won't be able to connect to him properly to build a proper family and household. But men pair-bond too. That's what sex does. The euphemism "making love" is well-chosen, because sex creates love where it did not exist before, and it works this way on men and women alike.

This plain fact has two important consequences:

• First, it is possible that women might not be quite so fragile as all that when it comes to having a history of multiple lovers. Yes, it bears watching (as it would with anyone). But I don't think the evidence supports the idea that they are wired that differently from men.
• Second, men who fuck a lot of women risk ruining their own ability to pair-bond. Has this happened to Tate himself? I can't think of any evidence to the contrary. 

And this leads directly into my third point.

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Where are Tate's children? 

Andrew Tate talks a lot about the responsibilities of men. He says that men are responsible to protect women and children from hazards; that they are responsible to be a rock for their women to lean on when their own chaotic emotions get the best of them;** and that they are responsible to teach and raise their children to be free of the poisoning influences of modern culture.

So—is he doing those things? 

Today, Tate is confined to his home in Romania under house arrest. The interview was conducted in his house. During that time, there was literally no mention of any wife (or other women) living there as well, nor of any children in residence. By itself, that might simply be chivalric discretion. But at one point late in the interview, Tate referred to "the mothers of my children." "Mothers" was clearly plural. So there are some plural number of women who have borne children to Andrew Tate. It does not sound plausible to suggest that all these women (and their attendant families) reside under one roof. Nor does it sound much more plausible to suggest that one woman (and her children) live there while the others live elsewhere. What sounds the most likely to me is that none of them live there.

But in that case—in fact, in every scenario except the one where all of his women and their children live together with him under one roof—how can he fulfill his fundamental responsibilities as a man?

He can't be there to steady his women when their emotions carry them away, because he's not physically there.

He can't raise up his children or spend any meaningful time in their lives because he's not physically there.

He can maintain his Alpha (read "frat-boy") lifestyle of bedding ever more beautiful women because he's got privacy at home and doesn't have to reassure new girlfriends that, "It's fine, my wife doesn't mind." But he can't actually live the fully-realized life of an adult man in a household because he's not bloody well there.

If it turns out that I'm wrong and all his women (with their children) really do live with him under one roof, then I will gladly retract this criticism.

Until then, I will insist that Andrew Tate preaches a doctrine that he does not even pretend to follow. Or rather, he follows parts of it but not the whole thing. You can't look after your children if you're not physically there.

That's the saddest part of my criticism.           

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* It's reasonably clear that he would say this about women too, mutatis mutandis, but his primary message is addressed to men on how to become better men.  

** Tate says clearly that he thinks women are more emotional than men, and in the interview he used the word "chaotic" explicitly. This is not a popular view today, and I do not propose to argue in favor of it. (Certainly not now, when it would be off-topic.) I will add that I cannot count how many times I served exactly this role for Wife, but the reader can take some comfort from remembering that Wife had and has serious mental illnesses.