Heteronormative Culture

People like Elon Musk are cautioning the world that a population bust is a huge threat to human welfare, worse than our current threats of "overpopulation" and global warming. To the degree that there is some small kernel of truth to this, it's rooted in our dysfunctional heteronormative culture that not only lives in fear of a population bust, it creates the conditions that make that both likely and problematic.

In nature, a population boom and bust cycle is rooted in an abundance of resources and lack of checks on population growth, like predators, leading to overpopulation -- actual overpopulation, which is more population than the area can feed. This is followed by a population bust or die back where excess population starves to death, bringing the population back down to something the area can sustain.

Humans haven't yet reached genuine overpopulation for planet Earth and unlike most other animals, we aren't entirely at the mercy of natural events causing our population to boom or bust.

The generation of Americans known as the Baby Boomers were born not of natural forces providing unprecedented abundance but of a concerted nationwide effort to win World War II followed by a nationwide effort to use that newfound abundance to build middle class homes and let war veterans enjoy The Good Life in the form of home ownership, a full-time wife and 2.5 kids, plus the opportunity to further their education.

Historically, the nuclear family was a means to establish economic stability and security at both the individual level and societal level. This was true because there was a lack of birth control and low life expectancy, especially among children. 

In historically very wartorn areas, polygamy in the form of polygyny -- having multiple wives, but not multiple husbands -- was sometimes practiced because war tends to kill off mostly men, leaving a population imbalance where there aren't enough men to go around for a monogamous society to achieve replacement levels of population.

Women aren't the weaker sex. Instead, we are the weakest link.

One man and four wives can produce four new people in a year. One wife and four husbands cannot do the same.

Historically, most of humanity lived in subsistence cultures where people were barely scraping by. In such a scenario, the concept of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is a fairly natural concept of what happens if anything goes wrong.

The exact spectres vary, but one common concept of the four horsemen is famine, disease, war and death. 

In a subsistence culture, a crop failing -- whether yours or a neighbor's -- can lead to famine, death, disease and war. Or war can lead to famine death and disease. Or disease can lead to famine, death and war.

These things tend to go together and tend to foster each other and feed on each other.

And there is no "fighting" against them. The only real antidote for them is a healthy, functional, peaceable society with economic stability for itself and its neighbors. 

Once the process starts, it is very hard to shut down. An ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure.

So I think heteronormative culture is likely born of two things:

1. Fear.

2. Pattern matching to a single known paradigm for "individual" or small scale success without considering what that does to people for whom that one pattern fails to be a good fit.

Heteronormative culture is a bit like the "college for all" scheme. Historically, relatively few people attended college, so if you went to college, odds were high you would get a good job, have a serious career and be generally the epitome of success.

So someone was like "Everyone should do that!" and the result is hordes of young people drowning in student debt while working in retail, unable to find a job in their field.

Because simply having a degree didn't actually guarantee a successful career. It seemed to at one time when "has a college degree" was a good proxy for "likely also has a very successful career."

Making it supposedly "easy" for supposedly "everyone" means it's no longer a good proxy because the rules changed and the ability to get your act together enough to get a degree no longer is strongly predictive of career success.

A great many of our fairytales are about two people finding true love and living happily ever after. Disney Princesses are all beautiful and have it made in the shade once they find the right man.

This meme likely grows out of some general awareness that when it works, it is hugely successful. Not simply in fairytales but in actual real life.

As best I can tell, Walmart and Habitat for Humanity were both born of true love. In both cases, some man loved his wife and that led to some hugely successful thing the entire world has heard of.

Were these beautiful Disney Princesses? I don't really know what either of these women looked like but the few photos I've seen suggest they weren't "super models."

Were these men Prince Charming before their marriage? I don't think so.

Walmart was born of Sam Walton respecting his wife's edict that she didn't want to live in the big city, so he probably wasn't rolling in dough when they met. Instead, he ended up rolling in dough because they met and married.

The story behind Habitat for Humanity is that the founder, Millard Fuller, was a self-made millionaire by age 30 at which point his wife told him she was miserable and wanted a divorce. The jet set life was not in line with her Christian values and she hated it.

He gave away his money and they founded Habitat for Humanity and paid themselves a modest salary for running it. He did this to keep his wife because she mattered to him more than the money.

So when a heteronormative marriage with a male breadwinner, full-time wife plus kids works, it sometimes works spectacularly well. Division of labor so she can focus on raising the kids and keeping the house clean and quality of life for the family while he brings in the money can be a very happy formula for all members of the family for some people.

I had that for a time in my youth. It didn't make me a millionaire but I was happy to be a full-time mom for some years and I don't regret it.

But just as we apparently don't really know how to generalize the formula of "college degree leads to career success," we don't really know how to generalize the formula "good marriage leads to success." And trying to force it goes bad places.

Because I think the prerequisite there is probably that it be a good marriage and it's not easy to get that. Even the two people involved may only feel confident they made the right choices after the fact when you can see the results.

Millard Fuller's lawyer tried to talk him out of giving away his money and founding a nonprofit. He advised him to sleep on it as it was a rash decision.

Fuller told him "no." He knew it was a rash decision and he didn't want any sense talked into him. He wanted his wife to stay.

So he wanted to act on the impulse immediately. He didn't want time to come to his senses and do the "rational" thing.

He got what he wanted. She stayed and they apparently lived happily ever after.

But at that moment, it looked like a stupid idea to the rest of the world and it only looks "smart" because it worked. He had no means to know for certain that it would.

The world does not know how you replicate the seeds of success for a marriage that produces a Walmart or a Habitat for Humanity. 

The world knows Walmart exists, but it doesn't know the many private details of the marriage that made Sam Walton decide to come up with a business in a small town to please his wife. And somewhat to my befuddlement, business profiles give short shrift to the detail that his marriage to Alice gave birth to this business.

Starting an eventually big business in a small town also looks stupid on the face of it. It's the opposite of the advice everyone is given for how to get stinking rich.

The standard formula is go to the big city, get venture capital and network etc. That's how you become a rich entrepreneur.

I read once that after Sam Walton died, five or six of the ten richest Americans were all relatives of his who inherited after he died. So back in the day, Walmart's success was as big as Amazon's.

However, no one knows how to replicate that. At all. 

Business acumen aside, the world has shockingly little interest in the life of the woman that inspired Sam Walton to start Walmart or in the relationship that gave birth to this business behemoth.

What heteronormative culture tries to replicate is the pieces it can see and what it can see is unrelated to why those things were big successes. Worse, it very frequently gets it backwards.

Sam Walton and probably also Millard Fuller became rich men because of their good marriage. Money grew out of a good marriage.

In contrast, the world generally promotes the idea that men need to make good money to afford a wife and kids and women should aspire to marry well.

In other words men should have money first in order to be attractive. 

This is probably not a formula for true love. If women want you because you already have money, they are probably not that invested in you as a person.

Such women get called gold diggers for a reason. They would probably happily marry some other man, assuming he has sufficient net worth and income.

I've read countless articles that indicate far too many marriages aren't a deep commitment between two people who really click in some important way. Instead, it's about the money and she may ditch him if the money goes away.

When the only formula for success offered is "heterosexual marriage," the result is rampant homophobia, women politely whoring themselves out to well-heeled men as the best hope they have for The Good Life and in subsistence cultures too many mouths to feed.

What is one of the number one planet-wide stress point we currently have? 

Too many people.

This is a problem because we don't even know how to feed ourselves properly at the individual level if we don't have a full-time wife and mom cooking for most people and relatively few people have that anymore.

One result is that a man can be a prisoner of a marriage he doesn't want anymore because his wife knows all his health issues and the dietary restrictions dictated by them. She's a good cook and she can feed him both well and affordably, something he may have no hope of replicating without her.

He likely isn't as good a cook as she is and also isn't a walking encyclopedia of his own health issues and their concommitent dietary needs and restrictions. Nor can he readily replace her function by merely marrying another good cook.

Merely being a good cook isn't enough. His current wife is a walking encyclopedia of details about his life that took many years to learn.

Even if a new wife is willing to learn it all, which you cannot count on, it won't happen overnight.

Men become prisoners of a "servant" that mere money cannot replace. Meanwhile, women become perceived by a lot of men as interchangeable commodities that can be bought and traded in for a newer model if they become dissatisfied.

Sometimes, a first marriage between two young people really is a partnership of equals with different functions, like my marriage largely was and the Walton's marriage seems to have been.

I bet Alice Walton knew a lot about the business and was a de facto silent partner, happy to be largely overlooked by the public media. 

But a woman who merely married well -- married an already wealthy man with an established career -- is unlikely to be a real partner in most cases. She's a mere bauble on his arm and can, in fact, be traded in for a newer (younger and prettier) model if he's primarily looking for sex.

If she wasn't instrumental in his success and isn't the one doing the cooking and cleaning, if instead she is happy to order takeout and hire a maid "because he has money" and she "has it made in the shade," she may well not have actually secured her future at all. 

If it's almost entirely about the sex, she absolutely can be replaced. And probably will be when her looks fade and her entitled bitchy attitude is all that's left and he knows he can do better.

Worse, this model breaks at the societal level as well. 

The culture it creates, so driven by fear of a subsistence reality where "loss of a nail" means everything comes unraveled overnight and now people are dying and everyone is terrified the entire culture will die out, creates a world where no matter how productive we are, we all are running faster to try to stay in the same place.

A culture more tolerant of gays and career bachelors and other oddballs and square pegs not eager to get hitched in a heterosexual marriage and promptly have kids would be a culture with more time for creating answers for other scenarios.

And if we had more tolerance for people living alone by choice and thus were happy to build homes appropriate to their needs, we would be less vulnerable to the rapid spread of disease in an epidemic.

Our heteronormative culture is a culture that actively encourages humans to "breed like rats" and then is all surprised when we remain in a perpetual rat race we can't find a means to escape.

Our entire economy is geared towards perpetual growth because of our heteronormative expectation that we either all reproduce and grow exponentially or we are visited by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and are threatened with global annihilation.

Elon Musk's hand wringing only makes any sense because "perpetual growth or bust" is the only model we have. Not because it has to be that way but because we've chosen to make it so.