How to Get [fill in the blank] Without Being a Jerk

Speaking of evolutionary theory, Emily Heist Moss writes a "big sister" letter on How to Get Laid Without Being a Jerk. It's funny and perspicacious, but also pertinent to just about everything else.

Psychologists, evolutionary theorists, and anthropologists know that material life is about survival and reproduction, although Nature has all sorts of ways of concealing Her ultimate game from unwitting participants. Most of us remain unaware of how most of what we do and pursue is either directly related to the dance of reproduction or is a sublimated form of it.

Moss make the point that there is a cool and uncool way to do this. She is talking about the reproductive dance directly, but what she says can be transposed to other areas of life, especially the economic sphere.

There are cool ways of making money and uncool ways. Much of what goes down is very uncool, sort of bordering on date rape, if not outright rape. This is an institutional problem that is deep-seated in memes and conventional ways of thinking and behaving.

Characteristic of the uncool is lack of feeling. Women know this intuitively. I remember one time when I was a grad student in philosophy, my partner at the time and I were at a party dominated by intellectual men, and in the intense debate I skewed one of the top intellectuals of the day, a prominent psychologist whose name you would recognize.

On the way home I proudly said to her, "Did you see how deftly I destroyed that guy?"

She replied, "Tom, you are a very good friend of mine. Women don't often tell men this, but we don't listen to the mouth, we feel the heart. This is was a fight among bull elephants, and it didn't smell so good. You aren't going to impress us that way."

That was a real eye-opener for me from a "big sister." I felt like a real jerk. But I learned from it and never forgot it. I think I am a better person for it.