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Relationships
What’s Good about Equality?
How to move beyond power and control
Posted January 9, 2015
I recently gave a keynote address at a conference in Australia. Although it was a family violence conference, it was attended mostly by professionals working in the field of heterosexual domestic violence, specifically violence against women, and all the questions from the audience focused on that. During a panel dicussion at the end of the conference, the moderator asked a familiar question, “How do we get men to give up their power when they benefit so much from it?”
The question reminded me of several 1990s books that cited the benefits that men reap from their abusiveness. One example describes a man who threw an abusive tantrum when his wife and daughter asked him to help with the dishes, making such a fuss that they never asked again. According to the author, the man benefited enormously from his abusiveness, because he was able to enjoy his evenings at home without having to do the dishes. You have to wonder just how much he enjoyed his evenings with a resentful, hostile wife and child, while having to cover up his own guilt and sense of inadequacy for harming the people he loved.
The problem I’ve always had with the “benefits of violence" explanation in regard to angry or abusive men is its implicit assertion that these guys are happy campers, as long as their victims go along with what they want. The thousands I’ve treated – and the one who dominated my early childhood – have suffered obvious self-loathing. However, they often hide it behind a wall of bravado or substance abuse that distracts group leaders who think as superficially as they do. I have never treated an abuser who did not admit to the self-destructiveness of his actions - and to the realization that his behavior threatens his humanity - when guided beneath the surface of simple-minded attitudes about gender-roles and entitlement.
There's only one chance of changing abusers; to paraphrase the Buddha, we must show them the fact of their suffering and the possibility of escape from suffering.
The flaw in the “benefits of violence” argument is that its evidentiary support is macro. (Men across the planet have benefitted in material ways from the terrible subjugation of women.) Whenever we apply macro analyses to individuals, we deal in stereotypes. That's why the descriptions of abusers in those books of the 1990s sound like cardboard cutouts. In reality, you will never see an abuser - or a victim - who is not a unique individual, with a distinctiveness apparent to everyone except those blinded by the confirmation bias of their theoretical perspectives.
Of course, level of analysis flaws and confirmation biases goes both ways. Applying micro theories to macro problems – as psychoanalytic authors attempted to do in the early part of the last century - obscures the enormous influence of social dynamics, institutions, cultural traditions, and historical context. We understand little about human behavior without micro and macro analyses complementing each other.
Smart people concerned with heterosexual intimate violence succumb to the level of analysis flaw because they focus on only one dimension of intimate relationships: power. Attachment bonds are not formed by power and submission; they're formed by exchange of value. No one falls in love with fantasies of power. (Love is a poor choice for those who seek power.) We fall in love with fantasies of value, of loving and being loved. Heterosexual domestic violence, like all forms of attachment abuse - of children, elder parents, and same sex partners - is a tragic and self-defeating substitution of power for value.
The only way to get people to give up exerting power over loved ones is by teaching them to behave in ways that make them feel valuable – able to value. When they learn to do that, they become more compassionate and less likely to abuse. But to do that, we must know what we value, what we are for, rather than merely what we're against.
There was lots of talk at the Australian conference about the evils of inequality. But no one could answer my counter-question: “What is good about equality?” It’s the inability to articulate what is good about equality that leads well-meaning people to wonder why anyone would want to give up power. That’s sad, because egalitarian relationships – those in which emotional investment and division of responsibility and labor are equal - are the happiest. (The decline of happiness and the rise of resentment parallels the degree of inequality.) We like ourselves better when we treat those we love with fairness, dignity, and respect, and we like ourselves less when we do not.
A neurological discovery in recent years reveals that the brain cannot do negatives – we can’t not do something. Rather, we need to do something incompatible with what we don’t want to do. We can’t teach individuals or communities not to be violent, but we can show them how to be true to their most humane values of compassion, kindness, and respect, which are incompatible with family abuse.
Our legal, social, and clinical attempts to curtail family violence are motivated by our revulsion of it. This creates an antagonistic atmosphere that tends to divide us from everyone who doesn’t agree completely with us, even though most – including most male offenders and most women with sons, brothers, and fathers - want safe, secure, families. Human behavior is more passionate and constructive when it is for something, as opposed to against something. This is the message that those of us who abhor family abuse must impart: we want safe, secure, respectful, compassionate, egalitarian, and autonomous families.
