The Weaponization of Human Connection

How our deepest wiring becomes the leverage used to force our compliance

I’m not what you’d call a rabid fan of women’s sports. Outside of Olympic events like gymnastics, in fact, I don’t watch them. I don’t watch men’s sports either, save for a deep and abiding love for the Green Bay Packers that was instilled in me while growing up in the Wisconsin Northwoods. At this point, I think that is almost as genetic as my eye color.

You don’t, however, need to be a sports fan to know who Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham are. I do happen to be a fan of them both; Cunningham because she’s a honey badger and Clark because she is quite simply amazing to watch.

Speaking of honey badgers, Cunningham found herself in the middle of a mess recently for saying something true, and Kaeley Triller Harms sums the whole mess up pretty well:

Indiana Fever shooting guard Sophie Cunningham told ESPN she wants women’s sports protected from men and got booed for it days later. Seattle Storm center Stefanie Dolson showed up for a game in a “trans rights are human rights” shirt. Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve wore “Trans Kids Belong” while coaching against Cunningham. Golden State Valkyries head coach Natalie Nakase said her own version of the same thing. Reporters spent a week trying to get Caitlin Clark to referee all of it, and she wouldn’t.

Kaeley went on to draw a line between three things that were getting collapsed into one: the coaches who used their platforms to undermine women’s sports, Caitlin Clark declining to referee a controversy, and Sophie Cunningham saying one true thing and then wanting to go back to playing basketball. She is right that these are different, and that we lose something important when we can no longer tell them apart.

I pay attention to mechanisms more than controversies, and in this case, the same one is rearing its ever-present and always-ugly head. What’s more, it’s not even about women’s sports at all. Once you see the pattern, it starts showing itself for what it is: Connection Leverage.

What is Connection Leverage?

Public denigration works by attacking connection. Look at the tactics, here and everywhere.

• Calling someone’s job and “reporting” them for their political, religious, or cultural opinions.

• SWATting people (calling in a threat to their local law enforcement in the hopes that they will be killed by the responding SWAT team).

• Booing them on the basketball court.

• Going through someone’s online presence looking for anything “problematic” that can be used to shame them.

• Harassing someone online, calling them all manner of filthy names, threatening them, wishing horrifying things to happen to them, etc.

• Contacting advertisers, sponsors, or a Patreon or Substack to pull the revenue underneath someone.

• Pressuring payment processors, banks, or crowdfunding platforms to cut a person off (demonetization).

• Filing bad-faith complaints with a licensing body, bar association, or medical board to threaten someone’s license or professional credential.

• Pressuring a venue, publisher, or conference to cancel a booking, or tank a book deal.

• Review-brigading a person’s business to sink its rating.

• Loyalty tests on social media: “If you believe/follow XYZ, I will block you.”

• Morality attached to political positions: “Every decent human knows that…”

All of these things happen every day, and with a ferocity that might surprise you. It’s not tied to one political side or the other, either. While the left might seem to corner the market on trying to ruin someone’s livelihood, the number of times I’ve seen Kaeley told by conservative men, in public, that she’s a whore and they hope she gets raped is staggering, and those are not even the worst messages. I will never stop being disgusted by it, but I’ve long since stopped being surprised.

The target in all of these tactics is human connection. You’ll notice that the people who booed Cunningham didn’t somehow assemble an online rebuttal to her position on males in female sports. The people angered when someone like Kaeley speaks up about things like sexual abuse in churches and sexual deviants in women’s locker rooms aren’t interested in having a discussion. Criticism engages the argument. Exclusion pressure threatens the standing.

What you see over and over here is the threat of removal. The message underneath the filth and the rageposting and wishes for them to be assaulted is, “Agree, or be cast out.”

Humans are wired for connection, so we are built to feel that kind of threat at the level of survival. For nearly all of our history, regardless of how long you believe that history is, belonging to the group was often the difference between life and death. No one on their own survived well for long.

I was discussing this with someone this morning, and he brought up the woman named Karana (later christened Juana Maria), immortalized in the book Island of the Blue Dolphins. She spent eighteen years alone on San Nicolas Island, perfectly self-sustaining. It’s proof, my friend told me, that humans are not wired for connection, and the answer to all of this cancel culture stuff is to simply not need people. If you don’t need people, his argument was, you won’t care if they ‘cancel’ you. Karana, he said, is the example we could aspire to. After all, she was able to survive for nearly two decades on her own.

Karana’s story, however, actually proves my point; she never stopped being a social creature. She kept her rituals, she named the animals around her as stand-ins for connection, and she never stopped watching the horizon for ships. Her isolation didn’t break her, but it also never stopped her from wanting other humans. She did survive eighteen years alone, and then died less than two months after being brought back to society, among people who could not understand her language and with whom she could not communicate…with whom she could not connect.

There is something else interesting about that story. There was no negotiation happening; she wasn’t ostracized for her beliefs or opinions. There was no path back to connection for her if she would only fall in line, so there was nothing with which to coerce her compliance to anything.

That tells me that the actual leverage is the negotiation. When the crowd removes you, their power is actually found in their offer to take you back…as long as you accept that the price is your own integrity.

This is why it’s so effective. Kaeley describes the retreat that happens so often: the carefully worded apology, the promise to “educate myself” and “learn.” There’s no real change of conviction; these people probably didn’t somehow change their belief system. They simply have been made afraid of being socially alone, and they are paying the price (however willingly or begrudgingly) to be readmitted to connection.

When a public figure caves, I don’t think the question is whether they actually changed their opinions, because I doubt that they did. I would look underneath that and ask different questions:

• How much is their sense of safety resting on the approval of the crowd?

• Which crowd?

• Why is that? What is within them that makes it so emotionally mandatory to acquiesce?

And because I am always looking for ways to improve my own thinking and decision-making, I invariably turn these questions inward. What situations would cause me to acquiesce? How can I shore that up? Where am I finding my own identity and connection? Am I subject to these same weaknesses somewhere in my own life? There is always more to work on.

Compliance and Refusal

Cheryl Reeve and Natalie Nakase built careers inside a protected female category and then used their platforms to undermine it. Kaeley explains that with the condemnation it deserves:

Cheryl Reeve played four years at La Salle in the 1980s, when Title IX was technically a law but a poorly enforced one. The WNBA didn’t even exist until 1996, eight years after she graduated. She had to build a career in a sport that barely made room for women at all. Now she’s helping give that hard-won ground back.

What I see underneath that, however, is the mechanism. Reeve and Nakase (and many others like them) are preemptively paying the cost of acceptance. They know what it took to build their careers, they see the price of keeping them, and they have decided to acquiesce up front.

Meanwhile, Caitlin Clark refused to take the bait, and a mob formed to punish her silence the same way it’s punishing Sophie Cunningham for not being silent. It has to. The mechanism requires universal compliance; if Caitlin Clark can opt out of it completely, that signals to others that the threat isn’t as existential as it seems. Therefore, people who don’t pick a side must be stomped on as hard as the people who picked the “wrong” side. To the crowd, they’re both a threat to its negotiation power.

Emotional Health as the Variable

Even as people fold, some continue to stand. Kaeley is one of these. No matter how much the crowd calls for her assault, abuse, or even murder, she keeps going. J. K. Rowling is another. Years of onslaught have not changed either of them. I don’t necessarily agree with every single thing they say, but that’s not even the point.

I am more fascinated, again, by mechanism. What separates people who fold from the ones who stand? We could throw up the word “courage,” but I don’t think it’s that simple. In fact, I think courage is far downstream of the actual mechanism, and I’d argue that the mechanism is anchoring.

A person whose belonging is contingent on approval, or who is dependent on the crowd (ANY crowd) for their validation and human value, has an exposed attack surface. This includes the crowd that applauds them. The counter-mob is still a mob. People who anchor to a supportive crowd are just as susceptible to its whims. The threat of exclusion is still existential for them, and their decision cycle is owned by it.

Interestingly enough, this ties back to my work on identity-protective systems. Those who are value-linked to their labels, their groups, and their diagnoses are often just paying the price of belonging to something.

I can’t speak for whether Rowling takes her identity from her supporters, but I suspect not. I’ve met Kaeley; I can vouch for the fact that she doesn’t get her human worth from any crowd, including those who agree with her. If she did, she wouldn’t be the force of nature that she is. That’s the rub, really; the more approval you need, the less effective you are.

Someone whose connection needs are met by something other than the crowd, whether that be their faith, their strong family structure, or even their own character and self-discipline, is standing on a different kind of ground. The crowd doesn’t control that, and even if they threaten to take away their approval, it doesn’t matter because that person wasn’t relying on it anyway. Their innate need is met elsewhere.

This means that emotional health lowers your susceptibility to the screaming of the fickle crowd, and anchored belonging is a direct defense against their threats.

Anchored belonging means having your need for connection genuinely met by people and commitments that aren’t constantly negotiating their own price. Having stable connections in your life means you don’t have to be subject to connection leverage because you’re not attached to the crowd’s version of it.

It also doesn’t mean that you are on your own San Nicolas Island, singing Simon and Garfunkel’s isolation anthem to yourself about how you don’t need anyone. We do need others; that is baked into our psyche. But we also get to decide what kind of people we choose to need around us. We can choose to forge the real relationships and connections that will sustain us. We can decide to foster real, face-to-face authenticity that protects us against the ever-changing tides of the mob.

Change who you belong to, and you change what you can afford to say.