The Origins Of Tom Wolfe’s Journalistic Voice

Posted on April 25, 2021 by Luke Ford

Matthew Ricketson writes:

What characterizes Wolfe’s journalistic voice, then, are: exaggeration, energy, inventiveness, playfulness, a keen sense of performance, and a wickedly satiric eye. His voice has won glowing praise and sharp detractors. William McKeen, author of the one of only two book-length studies of Wolfe’s work, calls him the Great Emancipator of Journalism for his contribution to expanding the possibilities of nonfiction writing.16 Norman Sims, author of True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism, recalls how Wolfe’s voice astonished and captured him as a student in the 1960s, not least because Wolfe appeared to have access to interior lives of the people he reported on.17 John Hartsock, author of a respected history of literary journalism in the United States, notes that what “most attracted readers to Wolfe and created a critical furor around him were his linguistic pyrotechnics that seemed to pose a taunt to advocates of standard English usage.”18 On the other hand, James Wood, the literary critic, has frequently lambasted Wolfe’s work, especially his fiction, but also mocked his “screeching italics and arrow-showers of exclamation points, and ellipses like hysterical Morse code.”19 Whatever Wolfe’s critics might say, his journalistic voice is instantly recognizable, widely copied, and has been so influential over the past four decades that it is hard to recapture its sheer freshness when Wolfe burst onto the scene back in the mid-1960s.

Despite Wolfe’s standing as a leading figure in the loose group known as the New Journalists and the attention from scholars his work has attracted, little work has been done on the origins of his journalistic voice. What attention there has been has accepted Wolfe’s own version of how he discovered his journalistic voice, partly because Wolfe is as good at telling stories about himself as he is at telling others’, partly because he has told it so often in interviews,20 and partly because to date much of the primary source material has been unavailable.

Wolfe laid down what Tom Junod called “his own origin story, his own creation myth”21 in the introduction to his first collection of journalistic pieces, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.22 By the time the book was published in 1965, Wolfe was thirty-five years old and had been in journalism for nearly a decade. He described his growing frustration with the totem newspaper’s way of reporting the lives of anyone outside officialdom, which is to say, “the totem story usually makes what is known as ‘gentle fun’ of this.”23 Wolfe was fascinated by the minutiae of people’s lives and the meaning they invested in their interests, such as hot rod and custom cars. Taking an assignment from Esquire magazine, he trekked to California and collected a welter of material. After returning to New York, he found himself blocked for a week, whereupon his editor, Byron Dobell, with a photo of an exotic car already laid out and deadline looming, told him to type up his notes and Dobell would knock them into shape. Wolfe takes up the story:

“So about 8 o’clock that night I started typing the notes out in the form of a memorandum that began, “Dear Byron.” I started typing away, starting right with the first time I saw any custom cars in California. I just started recording it all, and inside of a couple of hours, typing along like a madman, I could tell that something was beginning to happen. By midnight this memorandum to Byron was twenty pages long and I was still typing like a maniac. About 2 A.M. or something like that I turned on WABC, a radio station that plays rock and roll music all night long, and got a little more manic. I wrapped up the memorandum about 6:15 A.M, and by this time it was 49 pages long. I took it over to Esquire as soon as they opened up, about 9:30 A.M. About 4 P.M. I got a call from Byron Dobell. He told me they were striking out the “Dear Byron” at the top of the memorandum and running the rest of it in the magazine.”24

It is a story that is at once neatly shaped—the only editorial change required was deleting “Dear Byron”—and evocative of Romantic-era myths surrounding writers with a capital W. Wolfe recycles it in his introductory essay in The New Journalism.

Other than noting Wolfe’s penchant for self-promotion, most of those who have written about Wolfe’s work have repeated this story uncritically, including McKeen, Brian Ragen, author of Tom Wolfe: A Critical Companion, and Marc Weingarten, who, in From Hipsters to Gonzo: How New Journalism Rewrote the World, added little more than that Dobell had cut Wolfe’s repeated use of the phrase “for Christ sakes” and written the “throat-clearing headline.”26

New knowledge about the origins of Wolfe’s voice became available in 2014 when a rich source of primary material, Wolfe’s papers, was deposited in the New York Public Library.

…what is striking in light of Wolfe’s famous listing of narrative devices in “The New Journalism,”34 is how he deployed two of them—scenes and dialogue—decades beforehand as a teenager for a school newspaper column. His response to the world around him, even in the narrow confines of student journalism, is to construct and dramatize what he sees. At university and then at graduate school while studying for a doctorate, Wolfe tried his hand at fiction, poetry, and journalism…

…The examiners of the [Tom Wolfe PhD] thesis [at Yale] did not exactly warm to Wolfe’s approach. Michael Lewis thinks that is because they were a bunch of stuffed shirts.42 Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. A fidelity to factual accuracy is a bedrock of both long-form journalism, or literary journalism, as it is also known, and scholarly research. As Norman Sims has noted, many literary journalists research their topics as intensively as a doctoral student.43 University faculty who have both professional journalism and scholarly research experience are able to see many continuities as points of contrast between the two activities, especially in research and the practice of long-form journalism, or literary journalism as it is known in this journal. If that is the continuity, then yes, the contrast is in the prose. For anyone with literary aspirations, the form of the conventional PhD dissertation can be frustratingly rigid.

It is easy to see why Wolfe would have chafed against it. But if Wolfe had simply engaged in hijinks for his PhD dissertation, that is not what most concerned the examiners. They all actually believed that he wrote “very skilfully.”44 Further, they found his argument convincing: “The literati were indeed manipulated by the communists,” wrote the American studies graduate supervisor, David Potter, on May 19, 1956, summarizing the three examiners’ reports in a letter to Wolfe. What the examiners also found, though, and it is worth quoting at length, was that the thesis was:

“Not objective but was consistently slanted to disparage the writers under consideration and to present them in a bad light even when the evidence did not warrant this; second, that you had relied on a one-factor explanation, which, in the opinion of the readers, may be valid but has not been proved and probably cannot be proved as a single operative factor. There was a third criticism which I had not anticipated, and which seems to me more damaging than either of the other two: this was the criticism that you misused your sources, giving incorrect quotations, misstating evidence, etc. All three readers checked various sources (a routine duty of readers) and all three made this criticism.”45

They had indeed; the three examiners’ reports make scarifying reading. One examiner wrote that Wolfe’s polemical rhetoric colors every page. “His use of pejorative and biased qualifiers and terminology seems at times to be little better than what he properly critiques on the part of others.”46 Another provided two pages of notes unfavorably comparing Wolfe’s descriptions with the primary source material. For example, Wolfe wrote: “At one point ‘the Cuban delegation’ tramped in. It was led by a fierce young woman named Lola de la Torriente. With her bobbed hair, leather jacket, and flat-heeled shoes, she looked as though she had just left the barricades. Apparently she had. ‘This is where our literature is being built,’ exclaimed she, ‘on the barricades!’ ”47 There was no description of her in the sources and the quotations did not appear in the references, the examiner found.

The reports presciently lay out evidence of later criticism—and praise—of Wolfe’s work. He does, of course, write “very skilfully.” He had an uncanny ability to pluck out an essential kernel about an issue or trend: identifying the self-expressive impulse behind the creators of custom cars, or the quasi-religious nature of the Merry Pranksters’ acid experiments, or the pretentiousness of many liberals’ identification with the Black Panthers, or the special bonds forged among the early astronauts in The Right Stuff.

Wolfe does tend to try to stretch his brilliant insights into an entire argument, though. Throughout his work, status is portrayed as not only the most important, but almost as the only source of motivation in people’s lives. That is, he relies too heavily on a “one factor explanation.” James Wood has consistently criticized Wolfe’s fiction, and one of his main points applies equally to Wolfe’s journalism: “The kind of ‘realism’ called for by Wolfe, and by writers Clay, saying, “In a voice you could mulch the hollyhocks with: ‘Here you are, boy, put your name right there’.” Asked if he has a pen for the autograph, the man says he doesn’t but is sure some of Clay’s people would. Clay has been staring at the piece of paper without looking up. After about ten seconds, his face still turned down, he says: “Man, there’s one thing you gotta learn. You don’t ever come around and ask a man for an autograph if you ain’t got no pen.”54 Why would Wolfe not choose this piece for his “origin story,” especially as by 1965 when he told the story in the introduction for his first
collection of articles, Clay had become heavyweight champion, defeating the seemingly invincible Sonny Liston, and shedding his “slave name” to become known as Muhammad Ali? Perhaps that had something to do with it; Ali was an extraordinarily popular (and unpopular) figure whose fame would have overshadowed that of the just-emerging young journalist. Ali was also an extraordinary individual whose approach to everything from race to self-publicizing to boxing challenged conventions and U.S. society55 and was less susceptible to Wolfe’s sociological approach. Perhaps, too, Wolfe knew this. In a 1966 interview with Vogue on the back of his first collection of journalism, Wolfe told Elaine Dundy that he never felt he had connected with Ali and admits that “I missed the important story about him: that he was getting involved with the Black Muslims at the time I was seeing him.”56 That he was still insisting on calling Ali “Clay” in 1966, two years after the boxer had changed his name, may offer a clue as to why he missed that particular story.

To understand the second point of importance requires knowing Wolfe’s response to the examiners’ reports on his PhD thesis. And before that, requires knowing that Wolfe was brought up in a genteel, well-to-do family in Richmond, Virginia. Even well into his thirties he would address his letters home to “Dear Mother and Daddy” and sign them “Tommy.” The tone and vocabulary of the letters, indeed, vary little from adolescence right through to when he was making his name as a journalist in New York. His letters home, many of which are in the archive, are unfailingly polite, solicitous, and bland.
They carry so few traces of Wolfe’s public voice that a reader begins to wonder what on earth his parents made of his journalism. Writing to them on November 4, 1963, that Las Vegas is “a monument to all that is grossest and flashiest in modern American taste,” is just about the strongest opinion he expresses in letters to his parents.57 It is a long way from “Hernia, hernia, hernia.”

In the archive’s holdings of letters to friends, Wolfe’s language is more colloquial and forthright, as might be expected, but his letter to “Chaz,” on June 9, 1956, almost three weeks after he received the letter from Yale, fairly jumps off the page: “These stupid fucks have turned down namely my dissertation, meaning I will have to stay here about a month longer to delete all the offensive passages and retype the sumitch. They called my brilliant manuscript ‘journalistic’ and ‘reactionary’, which means that I must go through with a blue pencil and strike out all the laughs and anti-Red passages and slip in a little liberal merde, so to speak, just to sweeten it. I’ll discuss with you how stupid all these stupid fucks are when I see you.”58

Wolfe is enraged; he doesn’t see, or want to see, what, if any, were the merits of the examiners’ findings, but he did revise the thesis and it duly passed so that he was graduated in 1957. From that point on, there appears to be no time when Wolfe publicly discusses the humiliating experience of initially failing his dissertation submission. In “The New Journalism,” he compares graduate school to being imprisoned. So “morbid” and “poisonous” was the atmosphere that it defied the many student inmates who promised to satirize it in a novel, Wolfe writes.59 Similarly, in the many interviews Wolfe has given over the years, a generous selection of which have been gathered by Dorothy Scura in Conversations with Tom Wolfe, he has little positive to say about the Yale experience other than it was where he was introduced to the work of social theorist Max Weber. In one interview, with Toby Thompson for Vanity Fair in 1987, when Wolfe’s first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was published, Wolfe again recalled graduate school as “tedium of an exquisite sort,” while a friend of his, the novelist Bill Hoffman, was quoted saying, “The professors didn’t know what to make of him. . . . He was supposed to present scholarly papers, and he would write them in this fireworks style of his and just drive them crazy.”60

It is true that some find graduate school a stultifying experience, just as it is true that others find it liberating or energizing. What is curious is that Wolfe has not publicly discussed the criticism made of his PhD dissertation even though he clearly disputed it. It is one of the few episodes in his life where he has refrained from a public fight; usually he relishes them. Wolfe’s father held a PhD from Cornell University.61 In his letters home that are held in the archive, Wolfe does not mention what happened at Yale other than to say the PhD was a “horrible experience.”62 When Michael Lewis asks Wolfe in 2015 what he thinks about initially failing the thesis he submitted for the PhD, Wolfe says he harbors no ill will towards his examiners and thinks, in retrospect, that “Yale was really important for me.”63 It was 60 years later but it appears to be at least a tacit acknowledgement that the Yale professors may have had a point.

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The Dissident (2020)

Posted on April 23, 2021 by Luke Ford

I watched this silly 2020 documentary: “When Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi disappears after entering Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul, his fiancée and dissidents around the world are left to piece together the clues to a brutal murder and expose a global cover-up perpetrated by the very country he loved.”

It’s a good movie for idiots but I saw nothing in it about why Jamal matters. The guy doesn’t say anything smart or profound or unique or insightful. I’ve never heard a solid argument anywhere about why anyone who didn’t know him should care about him. He apparently adds nothing to our ability to understand the world. I heard so much commotion about his killing, and I was told by the news that he was important, but I was never given any reason to believe he mattered. He was part of Saudi Arabia’s ruling elite for 30 years and then I’m told he decided to become a real journalist at the Washington Post while simultaneously funding an insurrection in Saudi Arabia. Why would anyone outside of this conflict care? If you are not a Muslim, why would you care about these Muslim conflicts? Is there some vast well of untapped Arab or Islamic genius that will bless the world under a particular type of Arab or Islamic government? Where’s the evidence for this?

I don’t have strong opinions about what type of government any Arab or Muslim country should have. I haven’t heard any good reason for why I should care one way or another. Why is one type of Arab or Muslim government better or worse for the West? I’d prefer the type of government that is the least likely to kill me and other Westerners and least likely to suck the West into its dysfunction.

From Middle East Eye:

The Dissident looks, feels and is structured as a thriller. The first character we’re introduced to is Omar Abdulaziz, a young Saudi activist exiled in Montreal. Framed in shadowy compositions set against an ominous, overdramatic score, he is quickly established as the inside man, a whistle-blower hell-bent on exposing the ghastly secrets of the kingdom to the world.

“It’s all about revenge,” he says in the documentary’s introductory moments. “In Saudi Arabia, having an opinion is a crime. But Jamal’s death changed everything.” From the start, such a theatrical tone prioritises atmosphere, emotional engagement, and mundane cinematic flourishes over well-rounded truth.

The non-linear narrative constantly jumps from the present to the past. The formative years of Khashoggi’s career as a loyal, if somewhat critical, supporter of the royal Saudi family are largely brushed over, as Fogel hints that he may have collaborated with previous Saudi regimes out of a conviction that to change the kingdom’s system, a journalist needs to work inside it.

The history of the kingdom’s rulers is fleetingly outlined, summed up as power passed on from one prince to the next. Instead, the bulk of the narrative focuses on Khashoggi’s dissidence (spurred by both the Arab Spring and the ascendance of King Salman in 2015 to the throne), his self-exile to the US and Turkey, and his subsequent murder.

Throughout, Khashoggi is painted in hagiographic fashion as a martyr who gave his own life for freedom and democracy…

All the political issues tackled in The Dissident are dumbed down to fit a western binary of good and evil. The Arab Spring was great for the region but Saudi Arabia demolished it across the Middle East for fear it would encourage its own citizens to revolt. The Saudi monarchs were all wicked, fixated on bolstering and safeguarding their power and wealth.

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Appreciating Tom Wolfe (1930-2018)

Posted on April 23, 2021 by Luke Ford

Carol Iannone writes:

Tom Wolfe the novelist arrived as modern fiction was going bankrupt. Modernism, the revolution in the arts that took place in the early decades of the twentieth century, had delivered all it had to deliver, and was in fact sometimes leaving empty boxes on the curb. The age of iconoclastic landmarks like Ulysses, Metamorphosis, The Magic Mountain, To the Lighthouse, was long past and some of them, such as Ulysses, were looking a little shopworn. The promise of revolutionary breakthrough in consciousness, of aesthetic transformation and transcendence of life, man, society, was long past, and far from being fulfilled. The image of the writer and artist as sacred figure, the prophet or shaman who led to the depths of experience beyond the ordinary, was growing faint. Postmodernism had set in, beginning sometime after the counterculture of the late sixties and early seventies, bringing in a host of experimental forms—absurdism, fabulism, minimalism, magical realism, metafiction, as Wolfe would detail in his literary manifesto, “Stalking the Billion Footed Beast,” two years after he had made his fiction debut with the rollicking Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), about race, class, and sex-riven New York City in the 1980s. With such as Gaddis, Pynchon, Doctorow, DeLillo, Beattie, Coover, Carver, Hawkes, Barth, Barthelme, reading had become something of a chore—dry, sullen minimalist works with very little payoff, or maybe big books trying very hard but giving no particular reason to plough through them. (I can read it, a friend said to me of one 800-page number, but why? Truth to tell, though, some of these books did become cult classics, especially with younger men.)

Poetry too, had long gone from the expansive, soul shattering visions of the likes of T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and William Butler Yeats, who took on important themes and managed to make their own peculiar angle of vision large enough for others to enter. Later poets turned increasingly inward to explorations of the self and subjective experience. We went from hearing vigor in language and haunting lines to increasingly hermetic utterances that escaped any kind of recall. (A reading by John Ashbery that I attended almost finished poetry for me.) In the other arts too, we were long past the exciting forays of the early modern period–Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Brancusi. Art lovers were left trying to squeeze rapture out of such specimens as Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” Richard Serra’s gigantic, rusty “Tilted Arc,” and Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party,” consisting of large dinner plates delicately painted to represent the private parts of famous women, reverently displayed around a large dining room table. As for music, the Stravinskys and Coplands were no more, and one was always wary of having some frightful contemporary piece sprung on one, usually before the intermission at a concert, with the possibility of escape foreclosed…

Bonfire was so raw and truthful it was electrifying. It broke through the pieties of political correctness before political correctness in its contemporary sense even fully had that name. By contrast, it almost seemed that all that postmodern experimentation had been more or less an effort at obfuscation, holding back a vigorous confrontation with the realities of contemporary life. Wolfe took it on directly. As he explains in “Stalking”: “New York and practically every other large city in the United States are undergoing a profound change. The fourth great wave of immigrants—this one from Asia, North Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean—is now pouring in. Within ten years political power in most major American cities will have passed to the nonwhite majorities. Does that render these cities incomprehensible, fragmented beyond the grasp of all logic, absurd, meaningless to gaze upon in a literary sense? Not in my opinion. It merely makes the task of the writer more difficult if he wants to know what truly presses upon the heart of the individual, white or nonwhite, living in the metropolis in the last decade of the twentieth century.

Wolfe may have gotten a little ahead of reality with that prediction of power passing to nonwhite majorities in American cities by the turn of the century, although in some cases this has come to pass, and in general the thrust of his words has turned out to be all too true. The bulk of the novel shows Sherman being systematically divested of what would in our time come to be designated his “white male privilege.”

Wolfe had taken on what had become a taboo subject, more taboo, possibly, even than race itself, since it grafted onto that subject too—namely, the new wave of immigration that eventually followed the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, and that interacted with and exacerbated America’s native race problem and altogether began to change the country. Opportunists of the Left and idealists of C. Iannonethe Right were celebrating the change from entirely different motives, the one to promote disunity and division in order to gain political power, the other to cheer the expansion of America’s enduring universal values, shared by all people everywhere regardless of origin, in their view.

Long before this phenomenon eventuated in what is now termed “identity politics,” Wolfe had declared in “Stalking the Billion Footed Beast”: “Despite all the talk of ‘coming together,’ I see the fast multiplying factions of the modern cities trying to insulate themselves more diligently than ever before.” He also cites this bit from Bonfire: the mayor of New York City has a flash of insight as he’s being hustled off the stage by demonstrators at a speaking event in Harlem.

Thinking of those sitting pretty above the fray on Park Avenue and Wall Street, he wonders: “Do you really think this is your city any longer? Open your eyes! The greatest city of the twentieth century! Do you think money will keep it yours? Come down from your swell co-ops, you general partners and merger lawyers! It’s the Third World down there! Puerto Ricans, West Indians, Haitians, Dominicans, Cubans, Colombians, Hondurans, Koreans, Chinese, Thais, Vietnamese, Ecuadorians, Panamanians, Filipinos, Albanians, Senegalese, and Afro-Americans! Go visit the frontiers, you gutless wonders!” [The “frontiers” meaning the outer boroughs and neighborhoods of New York City.]

Between the pieties preached by the Left, glorifying multiculturalism and diversity, and by the Right, glorifying universalism supposedly transcending all particularities of origin, Americans of all races were not permitted even to discuss the enormous changes happening before their eyes, without being accused of bigotry. They watched the very American exceptionalism that many conservatives were claiming as being fulfilled by the new waves of immigration actually eroding into balkanization and group rights. Tom Wolfe was not afraid to take off the ideological blinders, to see reality as it unfolds, and to bring it to the page.

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Why Are Conservatives In Despair?

Posted on April 23, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 Dave Rubin vs Nick Fuentes
01:00 Tom Wolfe on American politics
02:00 Good People Must Be Dangerous People, https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/12/good-people-must-be-dangerous-people/
12:40 John Mearsheimer & Vishnu Som on “Why Leaders Lie”: Jaipur Literature Festival 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9URFBibUMPg
15:40 JM says Trump is delusional
18:00 The G.O.P. Is Getting Even Worse, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/opinion/trump-gop.html
19:00 Conservatives despair, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/why-are-conservatives-in-despair/
28:40 Cops push back back on leftist rhetoric
33:30 List of genocides by death toll, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_toll
56:00 Peak National Dysfunction, https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/peak-national-dysfunction/
1:13:00 Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=138664
1:32:00 Effective communication skills, https://www.audible.com/pd/Effective-Communication-Skills-Audiobook/B00D94332Q
1:35:00 Appreciating Tom Wolfe, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=138741
1:51:00 Tom Wolfe’s Status Update, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=138714
2:00:00 National Justice Party – America now has a Nazi party

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Tom Wolfe’s Status Update

Posted on April 23, 2021 by Luke Ford

Michael Lewis writes:

Eighteen months! That’s what it took for Wolfe, once he’d found his voice, to go from worrying about whether or not to go on the dole to a cult figure. By early 1965, literary agents are writing him, begging to let them sell a book; publishers are writing to him, begging him to write one. Hollywood people are writing to ask if they might turn his magazine pieces into movies—though really all they want is to rub up against him. Two years earlier his fan letters had come mainly from his mother. Soon they came from Cybill Shepherd. He’s booked on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. He’s now as likely to use the margins of his notebooks to tally his lecture fees as to accommodate drawings of nude skydivers. He has a stalker….

Wolfe’s response to his new status—like Hunter Thompson’s—is to create a public persona as particular and distinctive as the sounds he’s making on the page. Once he becomes famous, people start to notice and remark upon his white suit, in a way they don’t seem to have done before: they take it as one of those eccentricities that are a natural by-product of genius. He bought the thing because it was just what you wore in Richmond in the summer and kept on wearing it because it kept him warm in winter. Now it becomes this sensational affectation. He buys an entire wardrobe of white suits, and the hats and canes and shoes and gloves to accessorize them. His handwriting changes in a similar way—once a neat but workman-like script, it becomes spectacularly rococo, with great swoops and curlicues. In his reporter notebooks he tries out various new signatures and eventually settles on one with so many flourishes that the letters look as if they are under attack by a squadron of flying saucers. The tone of his correspondence becomes more courtly and mannered, and, well, like it is coming from someone who isn’t like other people. Nine years after he bursts onto the scene he receives an honorary doctorate from Washington and Lee. “While a feature writer for New York magazine he, like Lord Byron before him, awoke one morning to find himself famous,” said the college president. And, like Lord Byron before him, Wolfe had a pretty good sense of what the public wanted from its geniuses.

Yet the elaborate presentation of self never really interferes with the work or the effort he puts into it—at least not in the way it would do with Hunter Thompson. It doesn’t even seem to interfere with his ability to report on the world. Wolfe gets himself on the psychedelic school bus Ken Kesey and his acolytes are taking cross-country to proselytize for LSD. There, in his white suit, he sits and watches Kesey and his groupies more or less invent the idea of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. No one who reads Wolfe’s take on it all, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test—at least no one whose letters or reviews are preserved—asks the obvious question: How the hell did he do that? How did he get them to let him in, almost as one of them? Why do all these people keep letting this oddly dressed man into their lives, to observe them as they have never before been observed?

* The marketplace will encourage Wolfe to write nothing but novels. And a funny thing happens. The moment he abandons it, the movement he shaped will lose its head of steam. The New Journalism: Born 1963, Died 1979. R.I.P. What was that all about? It was mainly about Tom Wolfe, I think.

* Fame, to him, didn’t come naturally. The world expected him to be a character he wasn’t. “I was so used to interviewing other people,” he says. “I had never been interviewed by anyone. People were expecting me to be a ball of fire. They felt so let down!” His gaze had been relentlessly outward-looking—one reason he saw so much, so well—and he didn’t respond well when he was required to respond to the gaze of others. He wasn’t like Hunter Thompson or even Norman Mailer or George Plimpton, all of whom seemed to enjoy playing themselves, maybe even more than they enjoyed writing about it. Hunter Thompson played his character so well and so relentlessly that he eventually became his character.

* The Great White Males of that moment had decided that rather than be bus-tour guides they’d become stops on the bus tour. George Plimpton set himself up as New York City’s fireworks commissioner, Norman Mailer ran for mayor, and Truman Capote hosted masked balls at the Plaza hotel.

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Want to Hookup?: Sex Differences in Short‑term Mate Attraction Tactics (4-22-21)

Posted on April 22, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 Media rush to judgment on police shooting teen knife girl
04:00 Dennis Prager calls LeBron James a moron
06:40 Heather MacDonald talks to Dennis
12:00 USC’s Song Girls project a glamorous ideal; 10 women describe a different, toxic reality, https://www.latimes.com/sports/usc/story/2021-04-22/usc-song-girls
18:00 Want to Hookup?: Sex Differences in Short‑term Mate Attraction Tactics, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=138669
19:40 GET HIM TO COMMIT TO YOU: 3 Steps To Turn A Hookup Into A Boyfriend, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y6-zwPVqmk
40:00 Sexual Assault Allegations Against Biographer Halt Shipping of His Roth Book, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/21/books/philip-roth-blake-bailey.html
1:09:00 Men, STOP Hooking Up || A Jewish wife talks about sex!, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95wp_Qsz7vc
1:6:00 Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography by Janet Malcolm, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=138693
1:18:00 Dreams and Anna Karenina, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=138689
1:21:00 Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=138664
1:26:50 How to Dress Like a Gentleman, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDjqbP7gikI
1:40:00 Stalking the billion footed beast, https://harpers.org/archive/1989/11/stalking-the-billion-footed-beast/
1:44:00 Tom Wolfe’s gangbang scene in Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
1:49:30 Tom Wolfe: Reporting on the Times, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpYNUFL2Aes
1:56:00 Cynthia Ozick Asks Norman Mailer About Dipping His Balls in Ink, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLFQ5wQOY-g
2:25:00 Dozens hurt in Old City clash as extremist Jews march chanting ‘Death to Arabs’, https://www.timesofisrael.com/dozens-hurt-at-old-city-clash-as-extremist-jews-march-chanting-death-to-arabs/
2:34:00 Fewer Sex Partners Means a Happier Marriage, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/10/sexual-partners-and-marital-happiness/573493/
2:47:00 Andy Ngo on Antifa, BLM
2:50:00 Tucker Carlson on stabbing
3:08:30 Cop Explains Makhia Bryant Shooting, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiY3CcQ5P18
3:18:00 Land of Hope and Glory, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpEWpK_Dl7M

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Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography

Posted on April 22, 2021 by Luke Ford

Janet Malcolm writes: Another obstacle in the way of the journalist turned autobiographer is the pose of objectivity into which journalists habitually, almost mechanically, fall when they write. The “I” of journalism is a kind of ultra-reliable narrator and impossibly rational and disinterested person, whose relationship to the subject more often than not resembles the relationship of a judge pronouncing sentence on a guilty defendent. This “I” is unsuited to autobiography. Autobiography is an exercise in self-forgiveness. The observing “I” of autobiography tells the story of the observed “I” not as a journalist tells the story of his subject, but as a mother might. The older narrator looks back at his younger self with tenderness and pity, empathizing with its sorrows and allowing for its sins. I see that my journalist’s habits have inhibited my self-love. Not only have I failed to make my young self as interesting as the strangers I have written about, but I have withheld my affection. In what follows I will try to see myself less coldly, be less fearful of writing a puff piece. But it may be too late to change my spots.

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Dreams and Anna Karenina

Posted on April 22, 2021 by Luke Ford

Janet Malcolm writes:

* Tolstoy was obviously well acquainted with the guard who stops us at the border of sleep and awakening and confiscates the brilliant, dangerous spoils of our nighttime creations. The capacity to recreate these fictions in the unprotected light of day may be what we mean by literary genius.

* One of these continuities—perhaps the most significant—is Tolstoy’s keen, almost prying, interest in the sexuality of his characters and the hierarchy he has set in place that runs parallel to, though distinct from, his moral hierarchy. At the top he has set his sexually robust characters—Anna, Vronsky, Oblonsky, Levin, Kitty, and Dolly—and to the bottom he has consigned figures like the creepy Landau and Varenka, a sexless young woman Kitty meets at the spa to which she has been sent to cure her broken heart, and whose limp handshake is echoed a hundred pages later by Landau’s flaccid grip. Levin’s bloodless-intellectual half-brother Sergey Ivanovich Koznishev, a kind of double of the bloodless-intellectual Karenin (as Lydia Ivanovna is a double of another dreadful pious woman named Madame Stahl—the novel is filled with doubles and doublenesses), is another member of the league of the sexually underpowered, though his portrait is a mere sketch in comparison to the full-blown case study of impotence that Tolstoy has fashioned out of his complicated cuckold.

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Want to Hookup?: Sex Differences in Short‑term Mate Attraction Tactics

Posted on April 22, 2021 by Luke Ford

From Evolutionary Science:

* While a great deal of psychological research has been conducted on sex-specific mate choice preferences, relatively little attention has been directed toward how heterosexual men and women solicit short-term sexual partners, and which acts are perceived to be the most effective. The present research relied on an act nomination methodology with the goal of determin-ing which actions are used by men and women to solicit a short-term “hook-up” partner (study 1) and then determine which of these actions are perceived as most effective by men and women (study 2). Using sexual strategy theory, we hypothesized that actions that suggest sexual access would be nominated most often by women whereas actions that suggest a willingness to commit were expected to be nominated most often by men. Additionally, men and women were predicted to rate actions by men that suggest a willingness to commit as most effective and actions by women that suggest sexual access as most effective. The results were consistent with these hypotheses.

* One of the most noteworthy sex differences that has been documented in the evolutionary psychological literature is men’s tendency to pursue short-term, primarily sexual rela-tionships, while women are thought to preferentially pursue longer-term relationships with emotional commitment…

* Hookups are popular among young adults; one study doc-umented that 53–80% of college students in the USA engage in hookups (Garcia etal., 2012; Stinson, 2010), with simi-lar rates among university students in Canada (69% of men, 67% of women; Fisher etal., 2011). Despite this popularity, experiences within hookups are often not positive. Fisher etal. (2011) reported that in their sample of Canadian uni-versity students, 72% of men and 78% of women experienced regret, with higher-quality sex leading to less regret. In their qualitative examination, Paul and Hayes (2002) reported that the most common feelings following an uncommitted brief sexual interaction were ‘regret and disappointment’ (35%) followed distantly by ‘good or happy’ (20%). In their sample, women were significantly more likely to report feeling ‘regret and disappointment’ afterwards, whereas men were more likely to feel ‘satisfied’…

* men regret missed sexual opportunities more while women’s regrets are more frequently focused on sex that they wish they had not had.

* The most effective tactics for men in promoting a sexual encounter involved communicating love and commitment and investing time and attention in a woman.

* One may wonder why women would solicit short-term sexual encounters given that they could incur reputational damage from doing so. Greer and Buss (1994), Greiling (1994), and Greiling and Buss (2000) report that women can receive benefits from engaging in short-term mating relationships such as receiving resources in the form of jewelry, money, free dinners, or clothing, advancing one’s career, becoming friends with high status people, clarifying long-term mate preferences, having someone to spend their free time with, testing out back-up mates, and protection. Additionally, de Jong etal. (2018) report that women engage in hookups for sex and pleasure reasons and due to a desire to make an emotional connection. Therefore, while women engage in casual sex at a lesser rate than men, doing so may be an adaptive strategy.

* Men’s behaviors that were considered most effective by women are related to investment and long-term interest, in that it involves invitations to dinner and movies, or spending time with her presumably to get to know her, while women’s most effective behaviors according to men involve behaving in a manner that promotes or suggests sexual accessibility. These actions were perceived as most effective because they are consistent with female and male sexual strategies. For example, our finding comports with Schmitt and Buss’s (1996) research showing that men display immediate investment of resources as a means of strategic self-promotion to attract short-term mates, whereas women display sexual availability to attract short-term mates. They also align with the hypothesis that women often engage in short-term mating in the pursuit of long-term mate acquisition goals and as a result, are more responsive to men’s tactics associated with women’s long-term mate preferences.

* The male tactic of asking her out to dinner or a movie may be perceived as most effective due to such action conveying a willingness to immediately invest resources, and being related to altruistic actions. A man asking a woman out to dinner or a movie leads to an assumption that he is going to pay for the dinner or movie (Paynter & Leaper, 2016), i.e., he is giving her some of his resources. Schmitt and Buss (1996) report that giving a woman resources is an effective way for a man to attract a short-term mate. Also, women are attracted to, and prefer, male mates who are altruistic (Phillips etal.,2008). A man who pays for dinner or a movie may be perceived as altruistic. Additionally, a dinner date allows for courtship feeding which can enhance attraction (Alley etal., 2013; Morris, 1994). Lastly, a dinner or movie date request could suggest that, deceptively in this case, the man is willing to spend time with the woman which may suggest he is interested in more than short-term mating even though in this instance his goal is to secure a hookup. The male tactic of conversing with her may be very effective because it could indicate a willingness to get to know the woman. Such an action may indicate more than a desire to have short-term sex. This explanation is supported by Garcia and Reiber’s (2008) and Shukusky and Wade’s (2012) research on hookups which shows that both men and women who engage in hookups hope the hookup will turn into a long-term relationship.

* The male tactic “he flirts with her” is highly effective, possibly because it signals other characteristics, such as emotionality. For example, prior research shows that men who indicate a willingness to commit emotionally are most effective at flirting. The male tactic of asking her to dance or kiss may be very effective because women rate men who can dance as warmer and less dominant than men who cannot dance (Wade etal., 2015) and women find men who are overly masculine unappealing (Johnston etal., 2001). This tactic may also be very effective due to kissing playing a role in mate assessment. Hughes etal. (2007) and Wlodarski and Dunbar (2013) report that women use kissing to perform a chemosensory analysis of men’s genetic fitness. Thus, if a woman consents to give a male a kiss she may be able to make a more informed decision about the male’s genetic quality possibly removing any doubts she may have about this man’s genetic fitness. Men, being more opportunistic maters, can use kissing to stimulate a woman’s libido via the introduction of additional testosterone into her system (Hughes etal., 2007; Wlodarski & Dunbar, 2013). Additionally, both sexes use kissing to facilitate bonding with mates since oxytocin is released during kissing (Hughes etal., 2007; Wlodarski & Dunbar, 2013). It is possible that a woman may view a man who asks for a kiss as being respectful since he is asking rather than just taking the kiss, which often occurs in hookup contexts (see Flack etal., 2007), and per- ceived as warm, which women usually find appealing.

* The male tactic of asking to walk her home may be effective because it comports with research indicating that a male’s ability to protect a woman from physical harm is desirable (Buss & Schmitt, 1993; Li, 2007; Li & Kenrick, 2006). Additionally, a man may assume that going to a woman’s home increases the likelihood that sex will occur, a possibility supported by Clark and Hatfield (1989). Related to that explanation, in a systematic replication of that classic research, Hald and Høgh-Olesen (2010) found that both men and women equally acquiesced to the “come to my place” request from a stranger.

* The female tactic of going home with him may have been rated as very effective because participants assume that sex is more likely to occur if she goes home with him. This finding is similar to Hald and Høgh-Olesen (2010) who found that both men and women equally acquiesce to a request to go home with a requestor.

* The female tactic of “she gets a drink with him” may be perceived as very effective because a woman who drinks can be perceived as engaging in risky behavior, which may be used a cue of potential sexual exploitability by men (Goetz, etal., 2012) facilitating a man’s short-term sexual strategy. Additionally, this action may be perceived as effective by women because women who consume more alcohol rate themselves as more attractive (Brenman & Wade, 2020) and men favor attractive women for sex. This action may be effective because individuals who drink have a stronger intention of having sex than those who do not drink.

* college women engage in sexual activity most often with friends (47%), fol-lowed by acquaintances (23%) and then strangers (23%)…

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Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side

Posted on April 22, 2021 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2021 book:

* What exactly is spite? According to the American psychologist David Marcus, a spiteful act is one where you harm another person and harm yourself in the process. 2 This is a “strong” definition of spite. In weaker definitions, spite is harming another while only risking harm to yourself. It can also be harming another while not personally benefiting from doing so. 3 Yet, as Marcus points out, a strong definition of spite, in which harming another entails a personal cost, helps differentiate it from other hostile or sadistic behaviors.
Indeed, a helpful way to understand spite is to look at what it isn’t. When we consider the costs and benefits of our actions, there are four basic ways we can interact with another person. Two behaviors involve direct perks for us. We can act in a way that benefits both ourselves and the other (cooperation) or in a way that benefits ourselves but not the other (selfishness). A third behavior involves a cost to us but a benefit to the other. This is altruism. Researchers have dedicated lifetimes to the study of cooperation, selfishness, and altruism. But there is a fourth behavior, behavior, spite. Here we behave in a way that harms both ourselves and the other. This behavior has been left in the shadows, which is not a safe place for it to be. We need to shine a light on spite.

* Spite is challenging to explain. It seems to present an evolutionary puzzle. Why would natural selection not have weeded out a behavior in which everybody loses? Spite should never have survived. If your spite benefits you in the long run, then its continued existence becomes comprehensible. But what about spiteful acts that don’t give you long-term benefits? How can we explain those? Do such acts even exist?
Spite also poses a problem for economists. What kind of person acts against their self-interest?

* in the 1970s, the American economist Gordon Tullock claimed that the average human was about 95 percent selfish.

* Is there anything more frightening than an adversary unfettered by the bonds of self-interest? …What do you say to a spiteful person who values your suffering more than their own well-being? They are like a Terminator. They can’t be bargained with, can’t be reasoned with, and absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are, if not dead, at least inconvenienced. Unfortunately, such creatures are not limited to science fiction.

* If true, then Baader’s codename of Ahab was appropriate. In Herman Melville’s novel, Captain Ahab was so consumed with destroying the eponymous white whale that he was prepared to obliterate himself, his ship, and his crew in the process.

* An individual at the top of the hierarchy is said to be dominant. Given the reproductive benefits of holding this position, we naturally have a dominance-seeking side. In many species, physical prowess gets one to the top of the hierarchy. We can think of deer with giant antlers locked in contest. But when we consider our closer relatives, chimpanzees, achieving dominance is not solely about physical strength. Two weaker males may work together to bring down an alpha. In humans, this tendency is elaborated further. We show both “aggressive dominance” and “social dominance.”

* People with high levels of aggressive dominance demand their own way, take what they want even when it causes conflict, are aggressive, and put others in their place. They use Machiavellian tactics, including deceit and flattery. In contrast, socially dominant people tend to use reason to persuade others. They are confident, happy talking in front of a group, good conversation starters, and like responsibility; others turn to them for decisions. Socially dominant people learn by copying other successful people, whereas aggressively dominant people tend not to use social information in their decision-making.
Humans have evolved numerous adaptations that allow us to live in dominance hierarchies. We understand the rules of hierarchy from an early age. We know whom we must get permission from and whom we are obliged to. We crave a high position within a hierarchy. Indeed, status seeking is a fundamental human motive. 20 We can see differences in the status of others even before we can talk. Like monkeys, we pay great attention to the status of others. 21 Monkeys will give up a treat of sugary cherry juice just for the chance to glimpse an alpha monkey. 22 If you think we are much different, then just go into the magazine section of any shop.
Recognizing and attending to status is beneficial. It helps the lowly learn the secrets of those on high. Keeping Up with the Kardashians may be more pedagogy than pap. We pay more attention to the faces of high-status people, and we remember them better. This helps the powerless seek the protection of the powerful. Placing importance on status happens regardless of people’s culture, gender, or age. 23 It is a universal.
We are hence a creature endowed by evolution with both counterdominant and dominance-seeking sides. Erdal expresses this well. We possess, he says, “combinations of contradictory dispositions: to get more and at the same time to stop others from getting more; to dominate, and to stop others from dominating.… The conflict is deeply integrated in our psychology.” 24
Given that we have both dominant and counterdominant sides, the obvious next question is: what factors influence which side is in the ascendancy? Boehm argues that these factors include how people feel about hierarchy, the degree of centralized command and control needed in society, and the extent to which subordinates can control those above them. When most humans came to live in settled agricultural societies, around ten thousand years ago, egalitarian hunter-gatherer hunter-gatherer societies gave way to more hierarchical, domineering societies. This was because, as Erdal observes, the new environment disabled our counterdominant tendencies. 25 Humans now lived in larger groups, had private property, and recognized the legitimacy of chiefs. 26 The availability of large surpluses of storable food allowed people to buy protection and fend off counterdominant resistance.
How does all this relate to spite? My argument is that both our evolved counterdominant and dominance-seeking tendencies can create actions that fit the definition of spite. Our counterdominant side doesn’t like our being behind. It encourages us to bring down others, even at a cost to ourselves. It may know it’s safest to be quiet, but it can’t help telling the loud-mouth bully to shut the fuck up. It wants to pull down the powerful rather than elevate itself. I call this pattern of behavior “counterdominant spite.” The counterdominant part of our nature encourages us to support ideas and ideologies that attenuate hierarchies, such as universal human rights, multiculturalism, and diversity. 27 It pulls us to the political left.
Not only does our dominance-seeking side dislike our being behind; it actively prefers us being ahead. It will pay a cost to harm others if doing so leads to a relative gain. It will encourage us to drop a rung down a ladder if it means another falls further. I call this “dominant spite.” The dominance-seeking side of our nature encourages us to support ideologies that promote the existence of hierarchies, such as nationalism, the Protestant work ethic, and free-market liberalism, and to hold problematic attitudes that legitimize hierarchies, such as racism and sexism, as well as anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant sentiments. 28 It will pull us politically right.

* The importance of anger to spite is illustrated in studies showing that reducing anger reduces spite. There are a range of ways to do this. One way is chemical. Benzodiazepines, such as Valium and Xanax, reduce the activity in people’s neural anger centers: their amygdalae.

* As one would expect, the more we can control our anger, the more we can control our spiteful behavior.

* In the face of unfairness, our brains not only push us down the road of spite; they clear all traffic in the way.

* Spite can function like the colorful markings on an insect. It warns of poison. It signals “here be monsters.” …Spite is a signal you are not to be messed with, which can benefit you.

The idea that we gain a direct personal benefit from imposing costly punishment fits with an influential theory of anger. It proposes that the purpose of anger is to get other people to change their valuation of us and therefore act better toward us in the future. 86 In short, if you get pissed at people, they will be forced to care about you more.

* One way to reduce the personal cost of punishing an unfair person is to dilute the costs, which can be done by spreading them among a group of people. In small societies, groups, not individuals, kill people who have gone too far, thus minimizing individual blowback. Similarly, in the West, people are happier to punish someone if another person is also punishing that person. There is safety in numbers. 96
Another way to reduce the cost of punishment is to use methods that are cheaper than direct confrontation, including gossip, ridicule, and ostracism.

* Gossip has two major things going for it. 101 The devil’s radio, as George Harrison called it, is effective. Gossip can have a devastating effect on other people’s reputations, which makes them behave more cooperatively in the future. 102 Indeed, it seems to be better than direct punishment at promoting cooperation. 103 It is also cheap. The identity of the original gossiper is usually concealed, making it likely they will get away scot-free. Yet gossip is best described as a low-cost—rather than a no-cost—way of punishing another, as it can be costly to your reputation to be perceived as a gossiper.

* “The most imperious of all necessities,” claimed the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville, “is that of not sinking in the world.”

* THE MORE WE BELIEVE THAT the world is a competition for status, the more dominance pays. This is thanks to the outsized benefits of being number one. We are hence motivated to gain dominance. Because dominant spite can increase our relative position, it should increase as the amount of competition we face increases. Consistent with this, laboratory studies have found that the more competition you face, the more likely you are to act spitefully.

* Men with higher levels of testosterone are more likely to act spitefully…

* Jesus and Hitler wouldn’t have agreed on much. Yet there was one belief they shared: humans cannot live on bread alone. Hitler, as Orwell observed, knew that people “don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense.” Orwell credits Hitler with the insight that people, “at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.” In this way, wrote Orwell, “Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.” Orwell continued:
Whereas Socialism and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation “Greatest happiness of the greatest number” is a good slogan, but at this moment “Better an end with horror than a horror without end” is a winner.… We ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.

* The desire to burn the world to the ground may seem like spite. Indeed, it may well be harmful to both oneself and others in the short term. Yet, in the long term, it could be in some people’s self-interest, as suggested by recent work that has studied the “need for chaos.” This research, led by the Danish psychologist Michael Bang Petersen, began by examining what led people to spread political rumors online. 8 Petersen concluded that people weren’t simply doing it to boost their own party or to hurt “the other guy.” He proposed that people did it because they were pissed off with the state of society and their place within it.

* …a need for chaos reflects a wish for a clean slate or a new beginning. Individuals who feel this way are likely to be those who would benefit from the collapse of the status quo, people who seek status but lack it. The American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton captured this sentiment when he identified a potential threat from a perverted class of men who hoped to aggrandize themselves by the confusion of their country.

* chaos incitement is a strategy of last resort used by marginalized status seekers… Having a high need for chaos was associated with being young, less educated, and male. It was also associated with higher levels of loneliness and the feeling that one was positioned on a lowly rung of the social ladder.

* social marginalization would be most likely to create a need for chaos in people who had the skill set to navigate antisocial situations. This includes a lack of empathy and (in males) physical strength.

* Sacred values are nonnegotiable preferences. Examples of sacred values include the Palestinian refugees’ right of return, ownership of Jerusalem, and Shariah law.
The crucial mark of sacred values is that their defense drives people to do things that go beyond the reasonable, regardless of risks or costs. 25 Rather than weighing the costs and benefits of a course of action, people committed to sacred values will simply do what they think is right. 26 Historical examples include the Spartans at Thermopylae, the defenders of the Alamo, Japanese kamikaze, and the 9/11 attackers. Sacred values are an exceptionally powerful way for a small movement to succeed, due to the motivating effects of such values, which promote spiteful actions.

* Neuroscience provides evidence consistent with the idea that sacred values lead us to act without weighing the costs and benefits.

* ONCE VALUES, SACRED OR OTHERWISE , have been seen to be violated, what causes people to go on to undertake the most extreme form of costly punishment: suicide bombing?

Suicide bombers come to believe that all other options have failed and that violence is the only answer. 37 The terrorist organizations they are part of create this perception by framing their grievances and ideology accordingly. We saw this in the Baader-Meinhof group. They argued that talking was not possible because one couldn’t reason with the generation that gave rise to Auschwitz.
Not only must a potential bomber feel that suicide bombing is the only possible answer, but they must also believe that it is a justifiable response. For this to happen, their community needs to support such an act, or at least deem it praiseworthy under specific circumstances such as martyrdom.

* Chechens have a norm of revenge, which is normally targeted at the person who perpetrated the wrong or at their close family. Yet due to the overwhelming force used by the Russians, Chechens’ circle of revenge has widened. But why suicide bombing, which is not something most Chechens support? What has happened in Chechen society, Speckhard and Akhmedova argue, is that shattered worlds are being treated by first aid provided by a religious ideology that permits suicide bombing. 39
The theory of shattered assumptions proposes that we all have fundamental, unarticulated assumptions about how the world works. 40 It states that we assume that the universe is just, benevolent, and predictable. It claims we take it for granted that both we and others are kind, moral, and capable, and therefore deserving of good things to happen to us. Such assumptions give life meaning and make us feel secure amidst the winds of fortune.
When a traumatic event happens, these assumptions shatter. The world becomes a cold, frightening, and unpredictable place. We realize that bad things can happen to good people. Indeed, anything could happen. We can no longer trust others. Our assumptions that we were invulnerable invulnerable and in control of our lives are revealed as illusions. The resultant anxiety can be overwhelming. People need a way to cope. Some will dissociate. Others will abuse drugs. But what is really needed is a new story to make sense of the world, to cope and to live again.
In Chechen society, such a story has been provided by a religion-based terrorist ideology that resonates with a culture in which there is a duty to avenge a family member. 41 As Speckhard and Akhmedova argue, the Chechen separatist movement began as a secular one. It was then pushed by the Russian military response into accepting help from religiously oriented groups that promoted a terrorist ideology. As John Reuter puts it, Chechen suicide bombers are “desperate[,] which allows them to be deceived into being devout.”

* SO A GRIEVANCE HAS BEEN identified. The would-be bomber has been convinced that bombing is a necessary and appropriate response. But the bomber still needs to have sufficient identification with the group he is acting on behalf of to be motivated to carry out the act. Terrorists can be altruistic, and this has been argued to drive much suicide terrorism. 43 As Darwin wrote, if two groups are in conflict, the key to victory is having someone in your group who, apparently blind to alternatives, is willing to sacrifice themselves.

* what benefits your group, but it is costly to you personally. This is called “extreme parochial altruism.” Your altruism is laser focused on your team. The more tickets bearing your name that you are prepared to rip up, the more extreme parochial altruism you display.
One factor that makes you more likely to perform acts of extreme parochial altruism is if you have high levels of “social-dominance orientation,” a measure of the extent to which you want your own group to dominate and be superior to other groups. It is assessed by seeing how strongly people endorse statements such as “Some people are just more worthy than others,” “This country would be better off if we cared less about how equal all people were,” and “To get ahead in life, it is sometimes necessary to step on others.” 46
The theory behind social-dominance orientation is that societies minimize the amount of conflict within them by getting people to agree that certain groups are better than others. The superiority of a certain group then comes to be seen as a self-apparent truth. These “hierarchy-legitimizing myths” justify a society’s unequal share of resources. Examples include the appalling treatment over the centuries of African Americans in the United States. Yet hierarchy-busting myths also exist; these are ideologies that explicitly do not divide persons into categories or groups. An example is The Universal Declaration of Human Rights , which looks to reduce social inequality.
People with higher social-dominance orientation tend to exhibit lower levels of concern for others, less support for social programs, and less engagement with protest actions. They tend to have greater levels of political and economic conservatism, nationalism, patriotism, cultural elitism, racism, sexism, and rape myth endorsement. They are more likely either to justify or to be involved in violence and illegality. 47 Politicians can target such groups. People high in social-dominance orientation were more likely to have supported Donald Trump for president. 48
For extreme parochial altruism to drive people to act in the group’s interest, people need to have a fundamental bond with their group, indeed, to be fused with their group. This is called “identity fusion.”

You can also fuse your identity with a group. You become the group and the group becomes you. The resulting sense of oneness with the group creates a collective sense of invincibility and destiny. 49 Any attack on or unfairness toward the group is felt to be an attack on you. The more you feel fused with your group, the more likely you are to say that you will fight and die to defend it. 50 If your group represents a sacred value, this can produce a willingness to act spitefully to the extent of killing yourself. 51
You may fuse with another because you share genes. We feel fused with our family. Indeed, fusion may have arisen to help families cooperate and sacrifice in the face of extreme threats, like attacks from other groups. 52 Yet, sharing experiences with others also helps us fuse with them. Take identical twins. The degree to which they feel fused with each other is not only predicted by their genetic similarity. It is also predicted by the number of shared experiences they have had with each other. 53 Shared experiences can create a new family.
Suffering together is a particularly powerful way for people to fuse their identities because it increases people’s willingness to sacrifice for each other. 54 Just remembering shared suffering can boost identity fusion. 55 When fellow citizens feel like family, they are more prepared to die for their country. Part of this feeling may be because people come to share common core values with those they have suffered with. Because sharing core values with others is traditionally a signal of genetic relatedness, it may create the illusion of kinship, driving altruism. 56
People who suffer together can create bonds with each other that are stronger even than their bonds to their families.

* Threats of retaliation reduce people’s willingness to perform costly punishment. But how can this knowledge help prevent suicide bombing? How do you retaliate against the dead? You can’t, but the state can let potential bombers know that it will retaliate against what a bomber leaves behind. There is some evidence this strategy works. Punitive house demolitions, performed by the Israeli Defense Forces against Palestinian suicide terrorists and terror operatives, have been found to cause an immediate and significant reduction in suicide attacks.

* Spite is writ larger in some people’s genomes than others’. Yet all our brains are listening for their cue to spite. As our environment becomes more competitive, and resources scarcer, the world shouts at us to spite. The spiteful person can excel in competitive situations because they are not afraid of getting ahead. The world knows it can speak to our brain through our stomach. Dietary changes twist the serotonin dials of our minds, making harming others more pleasurable. When another takes our share or harms our status, anger and disgust ensue. Empathy rolls back, and we see the other as less human. We inflict a cost on them, and it feels good. But we can’t admit this to ourselves. We deceive ourselves into thinking we are acting to teach, deter, or reform the unfair. But the reality is that we just want to harm them. This is the how of spite.
The why of spite is simple. We spite because it pays. Actions that are immediately spiteful often lead to long-term benefits. Spite plus time equals selfishness. Counterdominant spite pulls down the bully, the dominator, and the tyrant. Here, spite can be a tool for justice. If we direct spite at those who harm others, our social capital grows. Others reward us with their cooperation and esteem. If we direct spite at those who harm us, we force them to place more value on our welfare. Over time, we have developed cheaper, safer forms of costly punishment, facilitated by language. We have also outsourced spite to god and the state. Now we can bite “with stolen teeth,” to use a phrase from Nietzsche.

Dominant spite aims to put clear water between us and others. It will take an absolute loss to secure a relative advantage. We are happy to lose if it means others stay below us. We are happy to lose if others lose more. Such spite keeps us out of last place. It can help us thrive in competitive environments. Historically, reproductive benefits have flowed from this cutthroat instinct, yet it also has the potential for great harm.
Existential spite, our willingness to suffer to prove reason, nature, or inevitability wrong, seems gloriously tragic. Yet there may once have been wisdom in it. Today, it can function as an antidominance tool against the sophist. It can be used to create stretch goals that can help us achieve what we never thought possible. Such spite can boost creativity.

* In his 1921 book, Crome Yellow, Aldous Huxley wrote, “To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour ‘righteous indignation’—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”

* If a Machiavellian mind set out to make spite flow, it could not have done better than create social networks. They decrease the cost of spite and multiply its benefits. Social media creates a perfect storm for spite.

Online anonymity cuts a crucial real-world brake on spite. It eliminates the threat of retaliation. Released from this fear, people freely aim counterdominant spite at those who have more status or resources. They manically snort justice, burn others, and revel in the joy of destruction. It doesn’t matter if the target earned their excess. If they got ahead on merit they will be hated all the more.
Even if you are not anonymous online, other features of the online world still encourage spite. First, it takes little effort to harm others, making spite cheap. In the online world, we are like the fabled martial artist who can destroy others with the mere tap of a finger. Second, any retaliatory costs can potentially be widely distributed. Thousands of other people may pile onto your attacks on the other person, by liking and retweeting them. As a result, any costs of retaliation may effectively be spread not just between tens of people, as in hunter-gatherer societies, but between thousands of people.
But perhaps the most important reason why having our identity known online encourages us to spite others relates to the benefits we have previously seen to be attached to acts of third-party costly punishment. In the online world, we can monitor a giant web of interactions between other people. We can weigh in on their interactions with each other and broadcast our response. Here, opportunities for costly third-party punishment open up on a scale never seen before. We can type something to harm someone who has offended or harmed someone else. This makes it third-party costly punishment (even if the cost is very small or is merely a risk of a cost). As we saw earlier, such punishment is typically esteemed by others. If we are not anonymous, then everyone knows who we are and we can publicly soak up that esteem, enhancing our reputation.

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