Why Men Are at the Top of Society (and the bottom) - Roy Baumeister - #1075
Modern Wisdom
Chris Williamson
4.6 • 5.9K Ratings
🗓️ 23 March 2026
⏱️ 90 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | You say that cultures flourish by exploiting men. What does that mean? Well, there are multiple aspects to it, but first of all, men are more expendable than women, probably for basic biological reasons. If a small group loses half its men, |
| 0:21.0 | the next generation can still be full size, |
| 0:23.6 | loses half its women, |
| 0:24.8 | it'll be a long time to recover. |
| 0:27.4 | So it takes risks men, |
| 0:30.1 | poached men to work, |
| 0:32.9 | to produce things. |
| 0:34.7 | Most of, you know, the structures of society are really created by men. |
| 0:43.0 | I was talking to Carol Hoeven at Harvard, and she said, |
| 0:47.1 | there was a feminist who had an epiphany. |
| 0:48.9 | One point she was looking out the window and said, |
| 0:51.9 | the whole world was built by men. |
| 0:54.9 | He said, look at the buildings and the roads and the cars and all those things. |
| 1:01.4 | And that's just the physical world, the institutions too, the banks and the schools and the armies and the governments and the marketplaces. |
| 1:13.6 | I mean, women do plenty of wonderful things and they're important partners in the flourishing of our species. |
| 1:21.6 | But creating large social systems, that seems always to be the men's job. |
| 1:36.0 | And so our cultures compete against other cultures, which is mostly groups of men competing against other groups of men. |
| 1:45.0 | Now women have joined the groups in many places, but still the institutional structures are created by men. Why is it the case that men have been overrepresented as the builders in that case, both cognitively, systemically, physically? |
| 1:57.9 | Why is it? |
| 2:05.6 | That's because men do those things and women don't. What I realized fairly early on, and I have some publications of this, |
| 2:11.6 | and it was an early part of my thinking, is that the way people are being social, there are a couple ways. There's |
| 2:18.3 | interacting one-to-one, or there's doing things in large groups. I noticed this because in my field |
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