Men's Riskers

One of many quirks of male thinking (with which I am all too familiar) is our ability to ignore stuff. History is full of famous men who ignored the facts right in front of them and continued to a certain doom. There are famous explorers, like Robert Falcon Scott; famous military figures such as the Japanese hierarchy in World War II; and famous writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn survived, but might easily have not, given the time he spent detained at the Soviet state's pleasure.

In a way, the history of civilization is defined by men who ignored the obvious to the possible detriment of their own life. From the first migration of our species from Africa to Asia 50,000 years ago to the folks who fly the deathtrap Space Shuttle, I suggest that this characteristic of facing the unknown, of taking on danger and embracing risk is embedded in our Brain Operating System, of which I wrote earlier.

The men (and, increasingly, women) who do so are working towards something more than survival and reproduction. Or is it that survival and reproduction actually require us to take risks, even those that might kill us?

We need not look to figures from the past for examples of this, because there's likely not a man you know who doesn't ignore some things. The guy who is a chronic drinker and driver ignores obvious dangers. The man who has indiscriminate unprotected anal sex with many men isn't being rational. The guy who borrows tens of multiples of his net worth to speculate has a relationship with risk (possibly) counter to his long-term liquidity. And yet these activities happen every day, in every way.

I explain the male ignoring mechanism in terms of my compartmentalization theory. Imagine the male mind as a big co-op building, full of floors of apartments of varying size. What we do unconsciously is to simply avoid certain floors. When we are driven to Antarctic exploration, or deadly military action, men prevent the lift stopping at the floors with the apartments containing the facts pointing to likely failure. We block the staircase, and lock the access doors.

Once the downside is quarantined we move to the floor with the apartment containing 'optimism' and 'success despite facts' and 'triumph over adversity'. That's where we can see the light and find positivity to reinforce our blinkered thinking. It will also be the scene of our greatest success overcoming the odds, or the place where failure will make us miserable.

In relationships this is deadly, as you might imagine.