Against 'All'

I.

A group chat leaked recently. In it, FH UI students from the class of 2023 (future lawyers, future judges, future legislators) were sharing degrading conversations about their female classmates, their lecturers, and even their own girlfriends and sisters. The contents are bad enough that I’m not going to quote them. If you haven’t read it, trust me: it’s as bad as you’re imagining.

Let me be clear at the start: what they did was wrong. I don’t need feminist theory or the concept of rape culture to say so, and I’d rather not lean on either. It’s wrong because they degraded real people who never consented to being talked about that way, which is a matter of basic decency, the kind that should have been settled the moment we learned other people have feelings.

This essay isn’t about them, though.

It’s about what happened next: the wave of Instagram stories, Twitter threads, and LinkedIn posts after the news broke, from people who suddenly needed to declare their position on sexual harassment, as if anyone had been confused about it, and especially from the men who wrote long paragraphs about rape culture, toxic masculinity, and how “we as men need to introspect”.

None of those posts tells you what the poster’s own group chat looks like, and that gap is what this essay is about.

II.

There’s a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii with a strange life cycle. It lives in a cat, leaves in the cat’s faeces, gets eaten by a rat, and once it reaches the rat’s brain, rewires the rat’s behaviour so that it becomes attracted to the smell of cats. The rat gets eaten and the parasite is back in its host, a perfect cycle.

Scott Alexander used this parasite, in an essay called “The Toxoplasma of Rage”, as a model for how outrage spreads online, and it fits this case almost too well. The mechanism goes roughly like this. A case appears, say a harassment case. One side says, “look, this proves rape culture is real.” The other side asks, “wait, what’s the context, why wasn’t this handled internally?” The first side says, “you’re defending the perpetrator,” and the second says, “you’re distorting the facts.” Each side shares its outrage to its own timeline, the echo chambers fire up, followers get angry and share again, and the cycle repeats.

The interesting part, which is Scott’s central observation, is that the cases that go viral are the ambiguous ones. Clear cases leave no room for signalling. If there’s CCTV of a father beating his daughter in the street, everyone agrees it’s wrong and nobody needs to post anything. Put the case in a grey area (was that catcalling or a compliment, harassment or awkward flirting?) and suddenly everyone has something to prove.

And proving your moral position online costs nothing. You type a few sentences and hit post. There’s no risk, no friend to confront in the group chat, no toxic circle to leave; you collect the likes and feel you’ve contributed to the cause.

People call this virtue signalling. Before you write the term off as something centrists use to discredit activism, hold on: I’m not saying everyone who posts is a hypocrite. Plenty of them, maybe most, mean well. The trouble is structural. The system can’t tell sincere posts from performative ones. Instagram has no honesty sensor, and the algorithm doesn’t care whether you’ve ever confronted a friend; all it knows is that a post is generating engagement, so it pushes the post to more people.

So a man who shares content about “raising awareness of rape culture” can be the same person as one of the FH UI guys in that chat. He posts a thread about dismantling patriarchy without a trace of irony and collects five hundred likes, and he doesn’t have to be evil to do it. The system allows it, and in a way it rewards it.

These men have no skin in the game, to borrow Taleb’s phrase: they carry no risk from the moral positions they take. A man who is against harassment and willing to confront a close friend about it, at the risk of being cut out of the circle, has skin in the game. A man who posts a story and stays quiet when his friend harasses someone in front of him has a position, which is a different and much cheaper thing.

III.

Now the trickier part.

One reason discussions of harassment, feminism, and “woke culture” feel so exhausting is that the key terms have no stable definitions. More precisely, they have too many, and people switch between them depending on what the argument needs.

The philosopher Nicholas Shackel named this move the motte-and-bailey, and Scott Alexander made the name famous. Picture a medieval castle with a bailey, a wide and pleasant open area that’s comfortable to live in and hard to defend, and a motte, a small tower on a hill that’s easy to defend and cramped and unpleasant to live in. When attacked, the residents retreat to the motte. When it’s safe, they go back out to the bailey.

Social discourse does this constantly. Here’s one pair:

The motte: “There are social patterns that make it hard for victims of sexual harassment to speak up, and they need to change.”

The bailey: “All forms of heterosexual sexuality under patriarchy contain coercive elements, and every existing institution needs to be dismantled.”

Both get called feminism, and they’re very different claims. The first is hard to argue against (of course victims should be able to speak up). The second is a radical claim that needs extraordinary evidence, but attack it and you’ll look like you’re attacking the first, and nobody wants to look like they’re attacking victims.

Here’s a pair closer to home.

The motte: “Toxic masculinity refers to specific norms of masculinity that harm men themselves, like the pressure not to express emotion.”

The bailey: “Masculinity itself is toxic, and men need to fundamentally change the way they exist in the world.”

And the one most relevant to the FH UI ‘23 case.

The motte: “There is a culture in which sexual harassment is normalized and perpetrators don’t face adequate consequences.”

The bailey: “Every sexual interaction that isn’t explicitly and repeatedly consent-confirmed is a form of violence.”

Most people who use these concepts aren’t running the move on purpose. They believe the two versions are the same thing, and sometimes the two really are hard to tell apart, since reality is rarely as neat as logical categories. The effect is the same either way: discussion becomes almost impossible, because every time you criticize the radical claim you get confronted with the reasonable one, and you have to retreat, because the motte is true.

What this produces is immunity to criticism, which is dangerous. If every critique can be deflected with “oh, so you’re pro-harassment?”, the movement (any movement) loses its internal correction mechanism and becomes unfalsifiable, and an unfalsifiable belief system is what Karl Popper would have filed under dogma.

IV.

Here’s a question people rarely ask, because asking it is socially dangerous: where did the FH UI boys come from?

I don’t mean it literally; we know they’re from Jakarta, from upper-middle-class families and good high schools. I mean: how does a group of law students at one of Indonesia’s best universities, surrounded by progressive discourse and exposed every day to narratives about consent, respect, and gender equality, end up in a group chat like that?

There are three ready-made answers. The easy one is that they were already bad. The satisfying one is deeply rooted toxic masculinity. The one that lets us feel safe is that this was an individual failure with nothing systemic about it.

I suspect the real answer is more uncomfortable than any of these, though I could be wrong.

Imagine you’re an eighteen-year-old male student who has just started university. You’re not a monster, just a normal guy with the normal confusions about gender, sexuality, and relationships, and you want to be a good person and to understand.

Your campus tells you the following, sometimes explicitly and sometimes by implication. As a man, you’re part of a structurally oppressive group. Your masculinity is toxic until proven otherwise. If this narrative makes you uncomfortable, that’s your privilege talking; if you push back, that’s your fragility; if you stay quiet, that’s your complicity.

Notice that every response available to you has been labelled in advance as evidence of guilt. There’s no exit. The writer Eric Raymond called this structure a kafkatrap, after the logic of Kafka’s The Trial, in which the accusation proves itself.

I’m not saying the concept of privilege is wrong, or that men have no structural advantages; they do, and the asymmetry of experience is real. But there’s a large gap between saying “there’s a social pattern you need to understand” and saying “you’re guilty by virtue of what you are, and every reaction to this accusation only proves it”. The first is education; the second is indoctrination.

We know from every other context what indoctrination tends to produce, and it’s rarely sincere compliance. Usually it’s resentful submission or unfocused rebellion.

We have no trouble understanding why Palestinians become radical. We look at their living conditions (the constant pressure, the powerlessness, the normalized violence) and say, “I don’t agree with Hamas, but I understand how people got there.” That’s analytic empathy, the ability to separate understanding from justification.

So why do we never extend the same analytic empathy in this direction?

If you keep telling a group of people that they’re categorically guilty for who they are, whatever they do, and you close off every legitimate channel for responding, don’t be surprised when some of them retreat into closed spaces where they can vent that frustration without consequences. And don’t be surprised when the frustration, with no healthy outlet, mutates into something far darker than you imagined.

I suspect the FH UI group chat is less an anomaly than a product, and possibly, at least in part, a product of the way we’re doing the reform.

I can hear the objection from here: “So you’re blaming feminism for the harassment men commit. Classic.”

I’m blaming the perpetrators. They’re adults with agency who made choices, and no social narrative forces anyone to harass anyone. Blame is one question, though, and prevention is another. If we care about preventing the next group chat, we have to look honestly at the feedback loop that’s running. A culture that treats an entire group as guilty by default produces men who are better at hiding: men who use the right language in public and become the worst versions of themselves in the closed chat behind it.

The tragic irony is that the movement did change behaviour, on the surface, while pushing the substance further underground.

The better analogy might be Prohibition. The United States banned alcohol in 1920 and got the speakeasy instead of a sober society, an underground bar wilder than the legal one it replaced. Ban something without addressing why people do it and you remove its visibility while the behaviour carries on, and invisible behaviour is much harder to address.

V.

Consider four slogans: “Kill All Men.” “All Cops Are Bastards.” “It must be the Jews.” And the local one, “laki-laki tuh emang ya.”

I know the counterargument; I’ve heard it a hundred times, quite literally: “It’s hyperbole. Nobody literally wants to kill all men. It’s an expression of frustration from a less powerful group.”

I’m willing to accept that it’s hyperbole, that it expresses frustration, and that the frustration is rooted in real experience. Women do experience harassment on a scale men generally don’t, and women do often get dismissed when they speak up. The asymmetry is real, and I’m not trying to minimize it.

I still have a problem with it. Several, actually.

The first is consistency. If “Kill All Men” is acceptable hyperbole because it comes from a less powerful group, someone has to decide who is less powerful. Who’s less powerful here: a poor man from a village in Kupang, NTT, or a wealthy woman in South Jakarta? Is power even a single dimension you can rank linearly? Intersectionality, a theory that came out of feminism, says no. Yet when the slogan appears, the nuance disappears, and “all men” (the poor ones, the queer ones, the disabled ones, the one who just lost his mother) becomes a monolithic block you can target.

And if we accept that a less powerful group may use absolutist language against a more powerful one, then I have to point out, reluctantly, that the exact same logic justifies “All Muslims Are Stupid” from someone in France who sees Islam as a threat to secularism, or “All Jews Are Evil” from someone in Palestine looking at AIPAC and the illegal settlements, or, closer to home, every flavour of anti-Tionghoa sentiment in Indonesia, which always comes with the justification that “they control the economy”.

If you’re not comfortable with all of that (and I hope you aren’t), then the principle has to be that nobody gets to use absolutist language against any group, ever, because once the door is open you can’t control who walks through it.

The second problem is that precision is a moral obligation, and this might be the most underrated argument of the three. “All Cops Are Bastards” closes off every question that actually matters: which police, in which region, which broken policy, and whether the problem lies in recruitment, training, or accountability. It also drops the officers who are trying to reform the institution from the inside into the same bin as everyone else.

Rhetorical absolutism feels powerful. “ACAB” looks far more badass than “certain aspects of the police system in certain jurisdictions need structural reform”. But the slogan has no analytic content. It tells you what to feel and nothing about what to do, and feelings without direction are energy that just circulates inside an echo chamber.

The third problem is friendly fire, and it’s the saddest one. “Kill All Men” hurts the men who are already on your side more than the ones who aren’t. The real misogynists, who don’t care about feminism, don’t care about your slogan either; they scroll past. The men who get hurt are the ones who care enough to listen and are in the middle of learning, and who are told that they belong to a group worth killing because of their chromosomes (hyperbolically, sure, but still).

If your goal is to change behaviour and build alliances, I’m afraid this is self-sabotage.

VI.

A sympathetic reader might ask at this point: “OK, but if there are no absolutist slogans and everything has to be nuanced, how do we mobilize people? How do we get them angry about the things that are worth being angry about?”

It’s a valid question.

Look at how elastic moral labels (“racist”, “misogynist”, “bigot”) have become. They can mean almost anything, depending on what’s needed, and a word that can mean anything effectively means nothing. The labels still function, though, as weapons rather than descriptions. You don’t need to define “racist” precisely if what you’re really doing is winning a social fight.

The problem with a weapon is that it can be pointed at practically anyone. In a world where an accusation of racism or misogyny can wreck a reputation without verification, imprecision is a moral problem as well as an intellectual one.

Who, then, draws the line between legitimate criticism and hate speech, between a harsh joke and harassment, between a comment on a consented thirst trap and objectification?

Probably nobody. And anyone who claims to know with certainty, whether a feminist activist, a traditionalist conservative, or a rationalist on the internet, is selling something.

Scott Alexander has a useful distinction here between conflict theory and mistake theory. Conflict theorists think questions like these get answered by power: whoever is stronger decides what’s true. Mistake theorists think the answers can be found through honest discussion, data, and good argument, and that truth belongs to no group and is something we look for together.

I default to mistake theory, since I want to believe we can reach consensus through reason. I’m not naive about it, though. Sometimes conflict theory describes the world more accurately: some sides really do use moral narratives to defend power, and sometimes honest discussion really is impossible because one side has no interest in honesty.

Here’s the one hill I’m willing to die on. Even if conflict theory correctly describes how the world works, that’s no reason to adopt it as a description of how the world should work. Knowing that power often defines the narrative is a reason to fight harder for precision, consistency, and honesty, because without them all that’s left is endless tribal warfare in which everyone is sure they’re right.

VII.

I’ve now spent thousands of words condemning virtue signalling, taking apart motte-and-bailey, pointing out the inconsistencies of absolutist slogans, and analyzing cultural feedback loops, all while using phrases like “kafka trap”, “unfalsifiable”, and “conflict theory”.

I have to admit that all of it is also a performance.

I believe what I’m writing, so it’s a performance in a narrower sense: writing an essay this long that criticizes other people for signalling moral superiority through Instagram stories, while I signal intellectual superiority through an essay, is an irony too big to ignore.

Scott Alexander has a name for the tribe this essay belongs to, the Grey Tribe, and the whole essay, above-it-all and very rational and very un-tribal as it feels, is an expression of Grey Tribe tribalism. I’m inside the game too, wearing a different jersey.

Writing this, I’m also picking a team. It isn’t “All Men Are Trash” or “men’s rights”; it’s the people who are proud of being able to see both sides, who feel slightly superior for not being caught up in tribalism, and who are, ironically, very tribal about their non-tribalism.

You, reading this, are probably part of the same group. If you’re nodding along, it may have less to do with the argument being irrefutable than with the essay confirming something you already felt: that you’re more rational than most people, that you can see hypocrisy others miss, that you’re above all this. You aren’t, and neither am I.

The argument of Scott’s “I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup” is that tolerance only means something when it’s aimed at a group you actually find disgusting, the group whose presence makes your stomach turn, as opposed to one that’s abstract and far away and costs nothing to tolerate.

For me, that group isn’t the FH UI boys. I condemned them long ago, and condemning them is easy, since everyone agrees they were wrong. The group that tests my tolerance is the activists I think are running motte-and-bailey: the people who post “Kill All Men” and believe it’s a defensible moral position, people who are, in my view, wrong in a way they believe is right.

Can I understand why they got there, with the same analytic empathy I demand from them toward other groups? Can I apply my own principles (precision, nuance, consistency) to people who, I think, don’t apply them?

If I can’t, this essay is just a longer Instagram story, smarter maybe and with more references, but functionally identical: a public declaration of where I stand, designed more to show who I am than to change anything. That’s the uncomfortable possibility, for me and for you.

Maybe nobody is really above this game. Escaping tribalism is probably impossible for a species whose evolution depended on coalitions, so maybe the best we can do is notice that we’re playing, which doesn’t change the game but at least changes how we play it.

Or maybe not. Maybe the awareness is just another layer of signalling (“look, I’m even aware that I’m signalling, how meta of me”), and we’re stuck in an infinite regress in which each layer of self-awareness is another layer of performance.

If so, fine. At least we’ve come far enough to see the regress, and I hope (I really do) that seeing it is a little better than not seeing it at all.

VIII.

Let me come back to FH UI ‘23.

What they did was wrong; I’ve said so since the first paragraph and I’m not changing my mind. They degraded real people who never agreed to be treated that way, and you don’t need gender theory to see it. The basic empathy you should have had since you were five is enough.

I want to close with a challenge, and it’s for you and me, since they’ve already faced consequences. If you posted an Instagram story condemning them, ask yourself:

• Is your group chat clean?

• Have you ever stayed silent when your friend talked about a woman in a way you knew was wrong?

• Have you ever laughed at a joke that shouldn’t have been funny because pushing back felt too hard?

If the answer is yes (and for most men it is), then the Instagram story works as an anaesthetic: it makes you feel you’ve done something when you’ve done nothing.

The real solution is expensive. You have to confront a close friend and risk being shut out, leave the toxic circle and risk being alone, and admit to yourself when you were part of the problem, which might be the hardest part of all.

None of that requires a slogan, whether it’s “Kill All Men”, “All Men Are Trash”, or a hashtag. What it requires is simpler and harder: consistency between what you post and what you do when nobody is watching.

The word “all” is comfortable. It frees you from nuance and makes the world feel tidy: some people are good, some are bad, and you know which side you’re on. The world isn’t tidy, though. The woman who posts “All Men Are Trash” sometimes dates men who treat her badly, and she knows it; the person who shouts “ACAB” sometimes calls the police when his house is broken into; the person who says “Kill All Men” sometimes has a father, brothers, and male friends she loves deeply.

“All” is a lie, and we know it. We keep using it because a tidy lie is more comfortable than a messy truth.

The anger underneath is valid. A woman who’s angry about being harassed has every right to be angry, a person disgusted by police brutality has every right to be disgusted, and frustration with a broken system is the correct response to it. But anger wrapped in “all” stops being productive and turns into identity, and once anger is your identity you no longer want the problem solved, because solving it would cost you part of yourself.

So stop the all. Keep the anger if you want it; you deserve more than anger alone, though. You deserve precision, and solutions that work instead of slogans that only feel like they work.

And start in the smallest, hardest place: your own group chat.