Why Andrew Tate is not all wrong

I am neither a fan of Andrew Tate, nor do I support his view on women. I did not even hear about him until about half a year ago, as all of a sudden, he popped up all over the Internet. The whole thing reminded me a bit of 2016 when Jordan Peterson got so famous. First, I thought this is another Dan Bilzerian, a ritch Dude with a big Ego and a lot of money, buying women and cars in order to provoke envy in other men, and paint a picture of what should men aspire to be like.

But if you take a few more moments and listen to what Andrew Tate says, you ll see a fundamental difference to Bilzerian and those kinds of Playboys. Because he positions himself as a system-critic who questions the way how a ritch class has the say, and if you are not part of this class you have to do what you are told. In one of his Youtube-Reels he also talks about racism only being a issue for poor people, and that ritch people don’t care about skin color within their class. Because it’s a tool to split up the poor class in small fragments, in order to control them.

I don’t want to glorify what Tate is saying, he is an ugly sexist and eventually a human trafficker (the courts will clarify that), and his approach towards climate-change is the one of a little boy who wants to show that he can be very naughty without having to face any consequences. He has a point when it comes to the blurry field of expectation that society has on men though. Over thousands of years men fought fights, moved around alone or in small groups, and killed to conquer and to feed their tribes and families. This led to reward-pathways in our brains, that are not being activated sufficiently anymore in our modern lifestyles. If you look into the violence-statistics and check who is sitting in the prisons because of acts of violence, it is 95% men. That this is because men are fundamentally evil and want to be violent, is clearly not the reason for that.

If you take the big 5-Personalitydimensions (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism), there are only 2 dimensions where men and women are statistically significantly different: It’s the last two ones. Men tend to be more disagreeable than women, and women are more likely to have neurotic traits than men. Attention, this does not say anything about the individual case, the only real conclusion you can pull out of this information is that the 100 most disagreeable humans are male, and the 100 most neurotic humans are female. So it only really says something about the individuum at the very extremes of the scale. Still there is a reason for this artefact of difference in our brain-wiring, and that is our adaptive evolvement as a species, and how we split our roles in our communities.

Now since the industrial revolution, but especially since WW2 a major shift happened: women got pulled out of their families, childcare was professionalized. This happened because their workforce was needed to run the economy while the men were shooting each other in war. The box of the pandora was opened, the new story told women that they have all possibilities now, that they can establish their careers and become successful and wealthy. Children got put into their peer group as soon as possible. Gabor Mate wrote in his Book “Hold on to your kids” about the problems of making toddlers orient themselves to other toddlers than to their parents, and how this inhibits maturation and already has led to a infantilization of whole generations. On top of that the absence and unavailability of the fathers due to their jobs created a vacuum of male guidance and influence – especially for boys. The economic system took our parents much too early in our lifes away from us, and now we are surprised that this leads to disorientation and identity-crisis.

People like Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate and a few other ones use this vacuum, they show understanding for the so called “Incels”, a derogatory term for men who do not manage to find a girlfriend. They put the spot on the fact that women can get attention much easier than men, and are much less likely to land homeless on the street. That as a woman you face the glass-ceiling, but also the glass-floor, because there is just more empathy towards women than towards men (“women and kids first”). As a young man you have nothing, if you don’t have rich and influential parents. As a young woman it is rather easy to get attention, just be publicly disagreeable. Or even more so: position yourself as a rightwing-person and post photos of yourself with firearms on social media, and a huge following is basically guaranteed.

This imbalance is what unconsciously justifies the pay-gap for many men. They see it just as a compensation for getting less attention and having to work much harder to stand out. That they are the ones who are the ones who give attention to those disagreeable women, they don’t put into the equation.

We have to redefine masculinity, and in order to do so we have to rethink our economic system, because it is what causes the offset. We have to give the sons their fathers back, and we need to give the toddlers their mothers back. And that starts with understanding that we are being told a lie from childhood on: that the highest aspiration in life should be to have a successful career.