In a strange argument, Mary Harrington, a contributing editor at UnHerd, claims that Andrew Tate is a monster created by the individualism of John Stuart Mill.
Andrew Tate is a champion kickboxer with a flashy lifestyle and a substantial social media following among what might best be described as right-wing conspiracy-minded incels. You don’t want to know him. He is a monster, and that’s no lie.
His crassly misogynistic and proudly unlettered public persona is bereft of redeeming qualities, and there is no reason to believe that his private personality is any better.
The man is a bigoted meathead with no class and no shame. If he were a caricature of toxic masculinity, you’d think it was laid on too thick. Calling him a caveman would be an insult to cavemen.
(I’m waiting with bated breath for the commenters who’ll say my ad hominem attacks only show I’m jealous of his alpha male virility and wealth.)
Tate recently got 15 minutes of fame after he made a video mocking the delightfully mockable climate activist Greta Thunberg, and sent it to her with a taunting tweet about his overpowered supercars, to which she responded with biting, albeit somewhat crude, vim.
Both his video and her response are quite funny, though unworthy of much further thought.
Coincidentally, Tate – who once said he moved to Romania because corruption is accessible to everyone and rape charges don’t stick so easily there – was arrested in Romania a day later, alongside his brother and two other suspects, over allegations of rape, organised crime and human trafficking involving multiple victims, in an investigation that dates back to March 2022.
A flood of articles followed about who this Tate character is, many of them rightfully expressing concern over his pernicious influence on millions of teenage boys and young men to whom he teaches supposed secrets of success that are more accurately described as secrets of psychopathy.
Curious piece
Among them, however, was this curious piece: Andrew Tate is JS Mill’s monster.
‘The misogynist hustler has pursued the logic of individualism’, its author, Mary Harrington, wrote, arguing: ‘Tate simply says the quiet parts out loud about the moral order – including its view of women – which the Mills [John Stuart and his feminist wife, Harriet Taylor Mill] were instrumental in shaping.’
Harrington describes herself as a ‘reactionary feminist’, and wrote a book called Feminism Against Progress. I have no intention of reading it, but its precis hints at Marxist anxieties about class differences and the view that technological progress benefits only wealthy women, while ‘poor women become little more than convenient sources of body parts to be harvested and wombs to be rented by the rich’.
Mill argued against the ‘despotism of custom’ and ‘the weight of social norms’, and in favour of a diversity of ‘experiments in living’, in his most famous essay, On Liberty, published in 1859. He was both liberal and progressive.
Harrington’s argument should be read in full, but she is clearly neither liberal nor progressive. She says that excesses such as Tate’s behaviour towards and exploitation of women could have, and should have, been constrained by the moral customs that society abandoned, especially during the sexual revolution.
She concludes: ‘For the logical end-point of the individualism Tate embraced isn’t just an inability to see women as people. It’s an inability to see anyone else as such. In other words, treating every human vulnerability as an opportunity for arbitrage, and everyone other than oneself as at best a customer, and otherwise merely a thing to buy, sell, or consume.’
It is not at all clear to me how she reaches this conclusion, let alone using logic. The dehumanising view that Tate appears to have of other people – the psychopath’s view, if you will – strikes me as both unrelated and contradictory to the ideas of individual liberty and feminism that the Mills espoused.
Individualism, after all, not only emphasises that people are themselves best positioned to choose in what manner to live their own lives, as opposed to living at the instruction of a larger social group, but also recognises the equal right of all others to their own individual liberty.
As Mill is quick to point out, it is entirely legitimate to exercise power over members of a civilised community, against their will, to prevent harm to others.
Not a new thing
The financial and sexual exploitation of other people, of which Tate stands accused, is not a new thing. It wasn’t introduced to society by the liberal philosophers who preached individualism, and later, sexual freedom.
The attitude of a feudal lord to his serfs, or a plantation owner to his slaves, or a chieftain to his tribe, or a bishop to his parishioners, or medieval men of means towards wives, daughters, concubines and prostitutes, all fit Harrington’s description, and they all predate any notions of individualism proclaimed by Mill and his post-Enlightenment peers.
Of course, with liberty comes the risk that people will choose to be assholes. It is entirely compatible with individualism to find some people choosing to be misogynists, or reactionary feminists, or racists, or owners of gold-plated iPhones, or to chew with their mouths open.
As long as their actions do not infringe on the rights of others (and sorry, there is no right not to be offended), people can do what they like. The law is there to ensure that individuals do not suffer material harm from others, or from the state, but it is limited in order to permit the vitality and progress of a society in which diverse ‘experiments in living’ are pursued as each individual chooses.
Harrington appears to consider this a drawback or flaw of individualism.
Her belief appears to be that individualism fails to restrain depravity, and that Mill was wrong to argue that ‘custom’ and the weight of social norms were oppressive. Conversely, she appears to believe that custom and social norms are beneficial to society and should be guarded, so they can protect us against people like Tate.
Barefoot and pregnant
What surprises me is how she thinks that this is compatible with feminism, at all.
Harrington appears to believe that custom and social norms once curbed the excesses of people like Andrew Tate, before JS Mill unleashed chaotic liberalism upon the world. If we returned to those customs and norms, however, then Harrington herself returns to the kitchen, illiterate, barefoot, pregnant, and obedient. Just as Tate claims to like his women, in fact.
Custom and social norms – conservatism in general – have been pretty awful about advancing women’s rights and freedoms. In fact, they are the reason the Mills believed women’s rights and freedoms needed to be promoted. Feminism exists because of conservative political views. Being a ‘reactionary feminist’ is a contradiction in terms.
Reactionary conservatism has also served to protect the interests of the wealthy and the powerful, and trample the freedoms of the poor, the marginalised, the queer and the peculiar of the world.
In most societies of the past, both Western and otherwise, people like Tate would perhaps have raised eyebrows, but he would have escaped consequences.
Nobody cared about the so-called ‘fallen women’ that became the prey of people like Tate, nor about the misogyny that he preaches, nor about the crass materialism and erzatz masculinity he acts out.
Rape? Not nice. Who’s the victim? Oh, that harlot had it coming. Who is the accused? Is he wealthy? Oh, just pay the father a fine and call it evens! No harm done.
Those are what custom and social norms used to be, not too long ago (and still are, in some parts of the world).
In our world, JS Mill’s world, Tate got arrested.
Suppression
Harrington leaves the sort of society that could police the non-criminal actions of Tate as an exercise for the reader.
Given that she opposes technological progress, once assumes it is a world without instant mass communication. You couldn’t influence incels through your YouTube channel, because there would be no internet to corrupt people.
Given that she also opposes individualism, she must conceive of some society that imposes moral rules upon its members, enforces moral behaviour, and punishes moral transgressions.
Since doing something that violates the rights of another is already outlawed in our liberal, individualist moral order, one can only conclude she also wants society to act against saying things that she finds morally offensive, or worse, thinking things that are objectionable.
Perhaps she wants misogyny itself forbidden, for example.
She makes the mistake of confusing things of which we do not approve, and things society must suppress. Conversely, she appears to think that things that are not explicitly outlawed are implicitly considered socially acceptable.
‘When your response to everything that is wrong with the world is to say, “there ought to be a law,” wrote Thomas Sowell, “you are saying that you hold freedom very cheap.”
Malcontents
The proper response to people like Andrew Tate, when they commit crimes, is to arrest and prosecute them. When they merely spew vile, toxic opinion, it is to ignore him, to mock him, to point out why he’s wrong, or to ostracise him. It is to give his followers better information, better role models, and better options. It is accepting that any society, no matter how free or how repressive, will always have its malcontents and its toxic assholes.
Blaming the poison of people like Andrew Tate on individualism, liberalism or progress is the tactic of a would-be tyrant. Great oppression – by the church, by dictators, by totalitarian states – has always been built on the promise of quelling some or other moral fear or detested group of people.
Harrington does hold freedom very cheap. It might be a good idea to warn her that her own freedom, too, will perish once she starts going after the freedoms of others.
If she really is a Marxist, however, she won’t care. The realisation will only dawn once she is sent down to the Gulag of her own devising.