Joe Rogan - The Problem with Believing All Victims

There's some great good to exposing these things, but in doing so, the overzealous approach of accusing all men of being potential rapists, isn't it just an overreaction and won't it balance itself out? Or do you think that it's more complicated than that? It's going to backfire. Yeah, it looks like a power grab. But won't the backfiring balance itself out? I mean, reasonable people like you or myself, we're always going to recognize the difference. There are monsters. Yes. And we're not going to deny monsters because someone goes too far and they accuse Garrison Keeler of being a monster when we know that that's not true. It doesn't make sense. The story doesn't make sense. Because most people who I've talked to about the Garrison Keeler story, which he was consoling a woman and he touched her back and then she pulled back and he apologized and I didn't mean to do that. And then he sent her an email apologizing. She said, no big deal. Don't worry about it. They were good for a while. And then years later, when all this Me Too thing, she just decides, I remember something that was wrong and let's take this guy down. Which didn't make any sense that first of all, well, let's leave it alone. It didn't make any sense, but where's Garrison Keeler now? Right. Yeah, he hasn't been resurrected. He hasn't been resurrected. They took his shows off the air. It doesn't make any sense. Put aside whether or not you like him as an artist or you're a creator. They actually destroyed not just him, but his legacy. For a hug. For something that at the time both parties agreed was no big deal. I just don't understand it. It's completely unacceptable and it's the death of justice. Was that just getting caught up in the hysteria of just trying to find, there's one, put that fire out immediately? So we have a couple of problems. And one of the problems is that the folks who are advancing this movement and the other parallel, I wish they hadn't taken the term social justice because we need a replacement term for that that is not overzealous. But those movements have engaged in a kind of naive conclusion making that makes them inevitably hijack, they get inevitably hijacked by bad actors. So if you are essentially looking at a situation, if you say we must believe all victims, that's like putting out a neon sign for bad actors that wish to utilize this structure. And there will be bad actors in every population. Male is a population, female is a population. There are monstrous males who have been behaving predatory. There will be women who will take advantage of this and accuse people without reason. I don't know whether the numbers are robust or not, but I have heard numbers that somewhere between 1% to 4% of the population are sociopathic. If you set up a system in which we are obligated to believe every victim, then those people will come out of the woodwork and they will use this to level their enemies. And so at the very least, what that tells you is rule number one, you cannot make the rule you must believe all victims or you will have lots of people piling into the category of victim that don't deserve to be there. And who is hurt most by that? Not only the people who are going to be sabotaged by bad actors, but the people who have suffered the worst cases of, you know, rape. They are effectively having the terrible things that have happened to them diluted by stories that are either fictional or minor that are being lumped in. So... It's further victimization of them. It is. It is a transfer of well-being from the people who have been most harmed to people who have been less harmed or are cynically using these structures. So if the idea of Me Too, of the reckoning that has finally come for these really terrible guys who were getting away with all of this awful stuff, if that is close to your heart, then what you should want is a set of rules that is careful enough and robust enough that we can keep holding those kinds of people to account. What will happen if we don't do that? And I promise you this, from a game theoretic perspective, if we decide you must believe all victims and all transgressions are equally bad, we're going to turn the thing to 11 for everything from... How did that happen? I agree with you, but how did that happen? If you're cynical... It's the death of nuance, in part. Yeah, it is the death of nuance because if you're wielding this thing as a weapon, right, what you want to do is turn the tables on all men. If you want to take power and say, you listen, well, this is a frightening weapon. So in order to make that weapon maximally dangerous, you... You equate rape with catcall. Yeah, you say it's all one. There's nothing a woman could ever do that would increase her likelihood of facing any of this. And we should cover that in a second because that's another one of these booby traps where you can very easily say the wrong thing and suddenly you're on the defensive even though what you've said is very rational. But also it denies the reality of what male-female relationships look like when they're at all healthy. There's going to be risk. There is risk as you get to know people. And I don't... We're just meeting, say, instead of having met in high school so many years ago. I don't know if I like you yet. You don't know if you like me yet. We're going to take some chances and maybe you're going to say something wrong and I'm not going to be thrilled with it. Are you at fault? Do I blame you? Do I cry harassment because you said something that didn't quite fall right on my ears? Or did it sound right and I kind of like you anyway? And so I go like, ah, it's fine. You know, we're good. Well, it really depends on... How I receive that depends a lot on how I feel about you otherwise. You could say exactly the same words. You could say it and someone else could say it. And from that guy, I might feel like, I kind of wish you hadn't said that. But that has to mean that that isn't a deep problem, that he said it because we're engaged at something we're trying to discover. Do we like each other? Are we into each other? Like, what's going on here? So the process of discovery is going to involve mistake and risk and even some sort of... It's game playing. You know, you're involved in the social game in which you're trying to figure out who each other are. And after the fact saying, that guy's kind of gross. So the thing that he said was harassment. Sorry. No. Not acceptable. It's changing the rules of the game based on whether or not you like the particular individual and that's not a legit move. So we got to be super careful here. Yeah. One thing that is true is we are facing a landscape in which we are, I think, effectively rewriting the rules of male-female interaction in order to make sex with strangers perfectly safe. Now, sex with strangers can't be perfectly safe in a world in which you're dealing with, let's say it's 1% sociopath. You can't make a world in which it's safe to take a sociopath home and have sex with them. All right? That's not going to happen. But in order to try to make it safe, we're going to turn up all of these protections. So for example, we've got the issue of affirmative consent. Now, affirmative consent is a great fail safe. In a circumstance where you are dealing with a stranger, it seems like it would be absolutely essential because the danger of a miscommunication is so great that you have to be perfectly explicit and there can be, there's no room for any coyness or subtlety about it. In other words, it has to effectively be transactional. No courtship that's going to make it into history books or literature is going to involve affirmative consent at every stage. You into it? Yes. How about now? Yeah. Did you guys remember that video that they released? There was a video that, boy, I don't remember who did it, but it was essentially showing how consent could be sexy. And so it shows this millennial couple making out and like every few seconds the guy has to ask the girl if it's okay, if he kisses her, is it okay if I touch you here, is it okay if I take your shirt off and she says not yet, and then they keep going and going and going. And then the girl's asking the guy, which is hilarious, is it okay if I do this? Because it's this imagined symmetry, right? Exactly. It's not symmetrical. Which is preposterous, right. Well, that was also an issue with, they've sort of abandoned this, but a few years ago there was this thing where if you had sex with someone and alcohol was involved, you raped them because they could not consent. But I'm like, well, that means I've been raped a lot of times because that's ridiculous. But it never worked that way. If you want symmetry, you would have to say that if the man has consumed alcohol and the woman hasn't, then the woman is raping the man. Well, I don't want to freak you out, but Heather and I have been assuming each other's consent for 30 years. I mean, we have inferred it from cues that were not verbal. You guys didn't discuss. What about writing things down? Do you have a chalkboarder? No, I mean, and the thing is, the only thing that keeps us safe from being arrested for this is that since we've both done it, it's like the same. Equally culpable. Right, you're both criminals. Right, exactly. Yeah, but these changing, these shifting of the rules, it seems like it's almost like you were talking about game theory. It really does seem like a type of game. It is life, but it is a thing where people are looking to call people out. You're looking to score. You're looking to score, you're finding someone who's done something inappropriate or finding someone who's done something that used to be appropriate but is no longer, and we're looking to establish this new parameter and this new way of existing. And that there's this, it takes on this competition element, which I'm very familiar with. I understand competition. So when I see it clearly, I see team behavior. I'm like, well, I see what's going on here. This is not rational thinking. This is someone who's trying to score points. You're trying to get one on the board. Yes, it's absolutely competitive, and it's mostly competitive at the moment. It looks like sort of within women, and it's going to destroy. It's actively making male-female relationships impossible to navigate. But I understand it. As a man, I get the motivation. I think that women overwhelmingly have been victimized, as opposed to men being victimized by women in that regard in terms of being sexually harassed. It's not even close. I mean, it is one of the most unbalanced things in our culture ever. Completely. Right. And it's older than our culture. Right. And this is what we're talking about. Right. What do we want out of this? Safety. Now that it's... Right. Do you want 100% safety? Right. Do you want to maximize safety at the cost of... Well, we have to kill sociopaths if you want to do that. Yeah. The point is, if you want absolute safety... I mean, we're getting to the point where this is just robbing... Okay. If the point of this is to make sex safe because it's pleasurable, this is going to rob all of the pleasure from sex. I mean, it's getting to the point where you'd be crazy to have sex without witnesses. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. But anyway, the point is, now that the stuff is on the table, right? Now that we know that there are monsters, we know that there are economic forces that actually protect these monsters, which frankly is a big part of this story, right? Is that the economic structure of something like Hollywood causes this to continue with it being effectively an open secret that these people are abusing women and then silencing them and contractually obligating them not to do anything about it. That cancer on the social system is now open for discussion and we, all of us decent folk, know that we have to get rid of it. If you get rid of it though on false pretenses, I promise you, the very same game theory that caused it to happen in the first place will cause it to re-emerge. The only... The reason it exists... And it will be harder to address the next time. I'm going to try to get rid of it. I'm going to try to get rid of it. I'm going to try to get rid of it. I'm going to try to get rid of it. I'm going to try to get rid of it. I'm going to try to get rid of it. I'm going to try to get rid of it. I'm going to try to get rid of it. I'm going to try to get rid of it. I'm going to try to get rid of it. I'm going to try to get rid of it. I'm going to try to get rid of it. I'm going to try to get rid of it. I'm going to try to get rid of it. I'm going to try to get rid of it. I'm going to try to get rid of it. I'm going to try to get rid of it.