In short, the emperor’s death fallacy is the belief that killing the emperor is enough to make a lasting regime change in the empire. History is full of example of states, kingdoms and nations who killed the unloved leader hoping for a lasting change, but ended up in similar or worse conditions under the new leader. Understanding this fallacy is needed in order to properly discuss the current #MeToo movement.
Sex scandals have always been highly publicized in the media. This year, however, they’ve reached a new heights. A height so high that everybody had to deeply question themselves and try to make sense of what was happening. For me, the increased number of allegations led to more confusions. It’s easy to hear about people dying in Syria, the distance makes us almost numb to their suffering. It’s extremely uncomfortable to imagine that people around you might one day be subject of sexual assault, both as victims or aggressors.
On top of it, people use different terms to describe what happened to them, which doesn’t help. In french, a sexual assault is an “aggression sexuelle”, which is essentially a rape. So seeing new sexual assault accusations every week made me wonder, why would all these powerful people use violence for sex? Are they that desperate…or for lack of better terms, sick? Something was off.
Making sense of the situation
In order to make sense of the situation, I had to go back to the basics, which was defining what is a sexual assault. It’s actually harder to define than you’d think. According to the United States Department of Justice, a sexual assault is “any type of sexual contact or behavior that occurs without the explicit consent of the recipient.” Sexual assault is basically an umbrella term that includes sexual activities such as rape, fondling, and attempted rape.To add more ambiguity to the subject, the legal definition varies depending on which state you’re in, and can even be different depending on where you were when the assault happened.
The reason why the definition matter is because we need to fully understand the problem in order to find lasting solutions for society. Else, we’ll remain busy being shocked, offended, forget and repeat.
Based on my understanding, a sexual assault falls into one of three categories:
- Penetration crimes of a body part by another body part (i.e., penal penetration of mouth, anus, vagina) or a body part by an object.
- Contact with genitalia, breast, buttocks, or other intimate body part.
- Exposure of genitalia, breast, buttocks or other intimate body parts
While sexual harassment includes creating a hostile environment, pervasive jokes/comments, looks, and body language that makes an individual feel harassed.
Based on the definition above, we can argue that a sexual assault and sexual harassment cases are two different type of crimes. Both extremely bad, but they are not equal. A sexual assault can be directly handled by law, in fact, it is already under civil laws in most part of the world. Sexually assaulting anyone should be treated the same way pedophilia is treated. It’s more than a crime, it’s a sickness. Being aroused by someone’s lack of power or rejection should be classified as a mental disorder. Pedophelia is already define as a psychiatric disorder in which an adult or older adolescent experiences a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent children. So anyone who experience a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to other’s lack of power or rejection should fall under the same umbrella, and face the same consequences.
Sexual harassment, on the other end, is a different beast. As stated above, sexual harassment includes creating a hostile environment, pervasive jokes/comments, looks, and body language that makes an individual feel harassed. I would like to argue that sexual harassment is a cultural problem rather than a “sick individual” problem. Let me explain.
Humans are social creatures. In every social settings, there are implicit rules that guide behavior. These implicit rules are extremely powerful; they let us know what is acceptable and unacceptable in specific settings. People within specific social settings usually adhere to these rules per default unless they are challenged and changed. These rules are essentially what end up becoming “the culture” and the world is full of different micro-cultures everywhere. The same behavior can look meaningless in one setting and be a sacrilege in another.
The emperor’s death fallacy is at play here when, in order to solve the problem, we force the aggressor to resign while the culture stays the same. In an empire, the emperor’s death doesn’t necessarily change the regime. It takes a full cleanup of every members of the regime to assure a new start. One of the most successful and bloodiest revolution in history is the French Revolution. In order to assure a lasting change, they had to make sure that everybody tied to the monarchy were eliminated. A difficult endeavour that lasted 10 years, 6 months and 4 days.
Killing the emperor doesn’t bring lasting change and I’m afraid this is what we are currently doing. As soon as someone is accused of sexual harassment, we use the internet to make sure the aggressor loses his/her position and fade away from the public eye. Once we’ve succeeded, we hope we sent a clear message across the globe that we will not tolerate any form of sexual misconduct. While we’re doing it with the best of intentions, we are not curing the disease rather we are simply fighting the symptoms. Here’s why:
As you can see, the incident didn’t happen in a private room with only Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira. This happened in the studio, in front of other people. The fact that nobody said anything should make you wonder. Was Matt Lauer that powerful or was such behavior somehow okay in the studio? Sadly, most sexual harassment incident happens in similar situation. Bystanders don’t say anything either because they are afraid or because it is an accepted behavior within that particular setting.
Remember, in every social settings, there are implicit rules that guide behaviors. Two teammates might slap each other’s butts as a congratulatory gesture on the field and everything will be okay. The same gesture would cause problems if you were to slap a stranger’s butts while shopping groceries. The obvious reason is that slapping butts isn’t part of the implicit rules we follow in grocery stores.
So how can we assure a lasting change?
Firing or forcing the aggressor to resign is okay, but if we truly want a better world, we should all work on the different micro-cultures we take part on a daily basis. Cultures are dynamic, what is okay today might be totally inappropriate tomorrow. Blindly adhering to implicit rules because of the “that’s how everybody behave around here” mentality is the recipe of disaster because even if you’re not committing the act yourself, you become part of the problem by remaining silence.
Leftist or rightist, we must be willing to stand our ground when facing these situations because that’s the only way to start a real dialogue about these issues and rethink our micro-cultures. The way we behave in specific settings can be seen as an expression of that micro-cultures. Until we have the courage to be consistent with our values, whether we are with friends, at work, in the locker room or at the bar; we will always fall for the emperor’s death fallacy.
It’s time for a change, we don’t need a #MeToo movement to realize how much damage our silence has caused, we need to be self-aware of our actions and be willing to take action to change…or walk away from the empire before we become part of the problem.
I write about my experiences and philosophy on medium, and tweet at @NedNadima.
