The Two Faces of Feminism

A Refutation of Rollo Tomassi's 'The Human Equation'

Rollo Tomassi (real name George Miller) is one of the popularisers of the red-pill worldview. According to Rollo, this means being aware of the facts of evolutionary biology and psychology. And in a recent article called ‘The Human Equation,’ he outlines what he thinks this involves. All the main points are wrong. It reads like it was written by someone who dresses like a ’90s backup dancer, and that’s because it was.

His confusion is evident from the start. ‘Why would evolution,’ he asks, ‘prioritize the proliferation of a species at the expense of the individual organism?’ But of course evolution doesn’t have priorities. As Darwin explained, it’s totally meaningless. Using goal-directed language like ‘prioritize’ entails goals, but evolution doesn’t have any. The watchmaker, on this worldview, is blind.

Yet Rollo can’t help talking in terms of meaning. As he says, “only humans agonize over the meaning of life,” including himself. But why this should be the case doesn’t seem to bother him at all. As Aristotle said, man is the only rational animal: only man has the power of conceptual thought, and only man has free will. We make choices based on what we judge to be good.

But Rollo doesn’t even register the eight exclusively human activities that man’s rationality results in:

1. Man’s power of conceptual thought means only man uses what Mortimer Adler called ‘signs that are name-words to refer to imperceptible objects.’ So-called ‘smart’ animals like monkeys and dolphins don’t refer to concepts like justice or beauty. And only man has syntactical speech.

2. Only man makes tools for the future and makes blueprints for them. Other animals merely make instruments to use in the immediate context that led to their improvisation. They don’t give specifications for the instruments either.

3. Only man makes useless fine art. The productions of all other animals always practically aid the survival of the individual or the species. Monkeys don’t write poems or compose symphonies.

4. Only man creates freely and conceptually. Human creativity shows very wide variability: Dostoevsky doesn’t write like Defoe. But what other animals produce is uniform because it’s determined by instinct.

5. Only man makes laws to organise his societies. Where’s the constitution of the monkeys? Where are the dolphin rules for right and wrong conduct? Who’s your favourite animal political philosopher?

6. Only man *chooses* his form of social organisation. Bees don’t have debates about the best way to organise a hive. Republic? Monarchy? Marxism? No. They have species-specific uniformity determined by instinct.

7. Only man passes on his culture accumulatively from generation to generation. Monkeys or wolves don’t receive any beliefs or customs from previous generations to transmit to the next. It’s all genetic. They aren’t custodians of culture.

8. Only man practices religion and has rights.  If other animals had rights, killing them would be murder. Using them for jobs would be slavery. When we treat animals cruelly, the real moral damage we do is to ourselves, not the animals.

For Rollo, however, ‘reproduction is our meaning in life.’ Ultimately, on his worldview, all talk of rationality — everything involved in the eight exclusively human activities listed above — is irrational. And he presents himself as a tough guy here to deliver this hard truth to us. ‘Touchy-feely humanist psychology hates this combination of reductionism and determinism.’ Bro, don’t you know that Genghis Khan ‘was a raging success from the evolutionary equation’s purview”?

Yet the joke is on Rollo because evolution has no ‘purview.’ Despite his posturing, he just can’t resist personifying it or treating it as a purposeful process. Nor can reproduction have any ‘meaning’ as the outcome of a meaningless process in a meaningless universe utterly devoid of objective value. Rollo wants to claim that ‘passing one’s DNA on to the next generation is the point of life,’ yet this assumes evolution has a point. And it doesn’t.

It’s almost touching how Rollo can’t rid himself of teleological language:

‘When men kill a rival, an unfaithful lover, or kill themselves after discovering the children they raised to adulthood are not biologically their own, this is the evolutionary equation balancing itself or attempting to.’

This is nonsense. In the materialist evolutionary worldview, it’s not ‘the evolutionary equation balancing itself’ at all. It’s just matter blindly behaving according to the laws of physics. There’s no ‘balancing’ goal in mind, nor do the men themselves have minds — only their brains. Everything they do, all their thoughts and actions, is no rational than the rain falling.

Here’s another inconsistency:

‘When we lament the pitiable state of Incels today, we’re not pitying them for dropping out of society. We see them as genetic dead ends. They represent the extinction of a genetic line.’

Look who’s getting ‘touchy-feely’ now! To be consistent, Rollo would have to say that the extinction of genetic dead ends deserves to be celebrated rather than pitied. But he’s not willing to do this because he won’t think things through logically. If he had done, he’d never have opened with talk of priorities or meaning in the first place.

But he just can’t help himself:

‘The Equation mandates that fewer men than women will reproduce over time. Since plotting the human genome, we know that only one man for every 17 women passed on their DNA to successive generations.’

Evolution ‘mandates’ nothing because, being blind, it has no commands or goals, yet Rollo can’t resist capitalising it and personifying it as a Lawgiver. Even if we’d missed all the subtler instances of this so far, this one gives the game away.

Embarrassingly, Rollo also repeats the fornicator’s favourite factoid that 1 man has reproduced for every 17 women. Actually, throughout human history, 80% of women have reproduced and 40% of men have, giving a 2:1 ratio, not 17:1. Moreoever, far from monogamy being something unnatural that’s merely ‘socially enforced’, as Rollo claims, Christakis showed in Blueprint that the earliest hunter-gatherer humans were monogamous. And Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success explains that intense pair-bonds led to human flourishing.

After all, if not, what could Rollo’s problem with the Sexual Revolution possibly be? If our innate nature is to be promiscuous, then rampant promiscuity and the breakdown of monogamy would just be evolution doing its thing. Feminism itself, in fact, would be natural — just another evolutionary adaptation, no better or worse than any other way of living because all of them are equally meaningless.

As Rollo says, if ‘I’m basically a more complex form of pickup truck for my genes,' then it doesn’t matter if I live as a feminist simp. And according to him the reason is simple:

‘Nature, evolution, doesn’t care what our genes’ vehicles think is meaningful. Its only directive is solving an evolutionary equation by ensuring our genes’ immortality in this physical realm.’

By now, you recognise the familiar flaw: evolution has no ‘directive’ and doesn’t aim at ‘solving’ anything.

But at the end of his article Rollo rolls out yet another inconsistency. Although we are ‘subject to’ the ‘rules’ of ‘the equation’, we nevertheless ‘have the power to exercise our will over the equation.’ What happened to ‘reductionism and determinism’? If my mind is just my brain (matter behaving according to the laws of physics), how do I have free will? And if it’s not just my brain, meaning it’s not mere matter, how did it evolve from matter?

This is why serious materialists deny free will altogether and, with it, their own rationality. These two things stand or fall together because without free will all our thoughts are either merely random or determined by the laws of physics rather than free to follow the laws of logic. A free act is neither random nor determined by rule. It’s a third kind of thing. Thus, as physicist Stephen Barr explains, ‘since free will is fatal to scientific materialism, the materialist is forced to deny its reality.’

Either Rollo doesn’t understand this, however, or he’s happy to be inconsistent. ‘Powerful people,’ he says, ‘function within the equation and master it,’ but actually all he does is masquerade as having something profound to say while masking the implications of his own assumptions. ‘Muddy your waters,’ said Nietzsche, ‘thus you may appear deep.’ And if a man chooses to ‘master’ life by trying to get sexual pleasure while frustrating its natural purpose by having a vasectomy or using contraception, Rollo is fine with that.

Thus feminist face behind the mask becomes clear. The red pill is in fact, like Janus, the twin face or feminism. Unmarried sex and contraception were the twin pillars of the Sexual Revolution and feminism, and the red pill embraces both. This is another of the contradictions in Rollo’s worldview. Elsewhere, he was written that ‘there are no appreciable advantages (outside of raising children) that a man cannot enjoy single that he can married.’ But in the absence of contraception, having sex involves having and raising children; Rollo, however, here implies that, in agreement with feminism, he’s happy for men to either use contraception or abandon their children.

Otherwise, he’d have to say that only married men can have sex, but he doesn’t believe that because he’s a sexual radical and part of the problem rather than the solution.