The Real Sword of Damocles Hanging Over Western Civilization

This is what I call an omnibus post. That is, it will contain many links to what I have published here and elsewhere previously. Not going to apologize for that. I don’t mind asking you to read a variety of approaches to the same gigantic topic. It’s a tooic so big we’ve all become accustomed (or trained ourselves) to deal with it only in pieces. But the pieces are all part of a larger whole that has grave consequences for the cukture as a whole. A great many people aren’t going to like what I have to say here, but it’s time it was said. I won’t be mincing words. If you feel like contending with specific points I am making, you’re well advised to read what’s at the links before you cut yourself the easy break of dismissing this post as irrational or wrongheaded or over-generalized. It isn’t. It just won’t be popular.

A word about the word ‘general’ as it used in vernacular expressions like ”in general” or “generally speaking.” We all do generalize, mostly without acknowledging that when we use a noun with the verb to be as in “women are”) we are not saying “all women are.” We are generalizing in terms usually constrained by an axiom called the Pareto Principle or the 80-20 Rule. It would be incredibly tedious to keep saying ‘generally speaking’ on a topic as volatile as this one, since we are all offenders. Women are more than fond of pronouncements that begin with “Men are (or aren’t) so-and-so…”

Why am I getting legalistic so early? Because my main point is not a generalization but a statement of fact: feminism as a mass movement to rewrite a 5.000 year old social contract on the fly has been a disastrous failure. For close to a century the evidence pro and con has been mostly anecdotal, but enough time has passed, enough significant events have occurred, to confirm that the movement has caused far more harm, including deaths and disasters, than it has produced benefits. This matters a lot because we have reached a tipping point that should be a wake-up call for both sexes and so far has been confined to a narrow political issue generating far more heat than light in the public square. But the light in the public square should be blinding. And daunting. We are so far along a misbegotten path that the means of identifying corrective steps is not at all clear.

If you’ve taken the link to the Pareto definition, you may be wondering how it applies to feminism. It seems altogether too businesslike and quant-heavy to be appropriate for an emotional subject like the establishment of equality for women in the nation and the culture as a whole. Vilfredo Pareto’s 1906 observation is summarized at the link, as follows: “ The exact numbers are not a strict mathematical law, but rather a universal observation that causes and effects are rarely distributed equally.” Even more simply, 20 percent of causes are responsible for 80 percent of effects. Focusing on the critical 20 percent of causes is far more efficient than working on all 100 percent of effects collectively. The easily understood technological example is, “ Microsoft famously found that fixing the top 20% of the most reported bugs eliminated 80% of the errors and crashes in their systems.”

Successful applications of the Pareto Principle tend to be pragmatic in nature, which reduces the epidemic confusion between agents of actions and the results of those actions. As it happens, the 80-20 breakdown does apply to both agents and results; it’s just that without an appropriate frame of reference, the use of these numbers can lead rapidly to mumbo jumbo, counter-productive generalizations, and bad outcomes.

The attempt to make men and women more equal in the culture has for the century in which it’s become a political football has employed a frame of reference called “Social Justice.” The bad outcomes it has been addressed have been too narrowly defined with respect to both actions and outcomes. The unit of measurement has been institutional accounting of results like taxable income and numbers of participation by profession or discipline. These turn out to be misleading in the extreme because Social Justice is not wholly measurable in terms of dollar and cents. It seeks to achieve a vaguely defined ideal strictly in terms of the data processed by the IRS and the Bureau of Census. How can that be right? 

It can’t. The correct frame of reference for this foundational element of social organization is not ‘justice’ defined as equal dollar outcomes but ‘utility’ in terms of societal health, safety, and prosperity. 

The brute fact of the matter is that male-female equality can never be achieved in the Social Justice frame of reference without totalitarian suppression of human nature, male and female, which will reduce not only the economic prosperity of both sexes but also the quality of life for the society as a whole. Forcing economic outcomes and official title holders to be equal in number of outcomes will make everyone poorer, less safe, less healthy, and less economically productive.

Why? We’ve been watching the Social Justice frame of reference fail repeatedly and continuously for at least a hundred years now. It is failing because we have been pretending that men and women have the same capabilities except for the minor matter of their biologically different roles in producing offspring, which we have fantasized are rendered finally irrelevant by physically erasing gender as an aspect of physical identity and lying away the very great differences that do, and will always, distinguish the sexes from one another in terms of their utility to society. 

The Social Utility frame of reference highlights the clear, historical, genetic equality of the sexes as components of a sustainable civilization because it does not regard prosperity in particular as a fit measurement of economic productivity. It has its own intuitively logical manifestation of the 80-20 breakdown. It posits, as all successful religions have for 5-10,000 years we know of, that the two most important components of a healthy culture are family and, um, everything that happens in the big wide world outside the home . These two components are absolutely equal in their contribution to the survivability of a civilization. Now for the numbers breakdown. 80 percent of men have greater social utility in the ‘everything else’ component. 80 percent of women have greater social utility in their role as creators of strong  families and homelife. Why what is called the patriarchy developed as it did. 

In strictly physical terms, men are stronger, more aggressive, more drawn to competition and risk than safety, and endowed with more endurance and tolerance for pain (excepting the hormonal anomaly of childbirth), and because of their sexual orientation genetically wired to protect the female even at the cost of their own lives. In mental terms they are more likely to be focused outside the home on accomplishments that perpetuate their names/legacies and increase their sexual attractiveness in ways women don’t need to depend on. 

In strictly physical terms women are the only creatures on earth who can bear human children, nurture and protect them throughout uniquely long infancies and childhoods, accept untold hardships and sacrifice their own lives for those of their children, and create all the appurtenances of comfort and support in a long conjugal relationship with one (or only a few) sexual mates, serve as moderators during instances of conflict in order to prevent unsafe violence and reckless competition; and achieve their objects of desire by means of sensual and sexually seductive attractiveness. Mentally, they are more inclined to measure their own experience of life in terms of feelings rather than trophies, titles, and conquests, and they are far more inclined than men to choose physical safety over risk and compromise over possibly injurious conflict, regardless of the principles involved. No one but a woman can be a mother in the fullest, most idealized sense of that magical word. 

That said, 20 percent of women are very much like men, just not as big or tall. And 20 percent of men are very much like women, except that they can never be mothers.

What does social equality between the sexes look like in this frame of reference? We can return to that discussion after we provide some additional context. A year that stands out for many reasons 1913. One the great pivot points in American history. In 1912, the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank within a couple hours. More women than men were rescued from the lifeboats. Call it the last gasp of patriarchal chivalry. Under the new President, Woodrow Wilson, the real modern liberal tradition began. The first federal income tax was enacted, giving birth to IRS, that perpetual instrument for sharing the wealth under the more enlightened hand of the first “Progressive” movement, which began the stream of Social Justice reforms we’ve experienced as a nation since. Universal Women’s Suffrage became law that year as well. Under Wilson, who cast both Jews and blacks out of Princeton when he was there, the Democrat Party acquired its first platform that empowered not working men but intellectual visionaries who could correct all the sins and social injustices flesh was heir to. The giant World War that began in 1914 also was as important to the birth of feminism as the right to vote, because the labor scarcity caused by having so many men in combat overseas drew women into the manufacturing workforce, earning money for hard physical labor alongside men in the industrial economy. Some of them liked it. They wanted more, as a matter of principle, even if the new advocates for women’s rights didn’t necessarily want to stand on an assembly line for 8-10 hours a day themselves. Thus was the so-called feminist movement born.

The movement was initiated primarily by well educated women who felt imprisoned by traditional female roles in the home. They were indicative of the 20 percent who desired to compete equally with men in traditional male avocations like scholarship, the law, all the arts and sciences, government, and even the military. (Not, significantly, basketball, hockey, or tennis.) The founders of the modern feminist movement were (80 percent of them?) graduates of pretigious universities and already competing successfully against men in all manner of professions and workplaces. The reform efforts they pioneered would have been more effective if they had been more focused on identifying, encouraging, and facilitating the 20 percent who, like them, were the disenchanted ones in traditional American adult life. That siege ment of the female population was not being well served by the reality that brilliant women from Vassar and Wellesley were only able to gain employment as secretaries in Corporate America. Mostly. Except for the exceptions, of course, who clawed their way up the ladder like, well, men.

What we got instead was a numbers game. The equality of outcomes they chose as their measurement tool was universally applied to all outcomes. The proof of success, of  “liberation,” was equal numbers in terms of college and professional school enrollments, corporate boards and CEOs, financial institutions, elected officials, per-capita incomes, law enforcement from street cops to Supreme Court Justices, property ownership, and, yes, the vices too, including open sexual promiscuity as practiced by (all?) men in the infamous Old Boy Network.

What do we have to show for it in the 100+ years since the establishment of universal suffrage? In terms of outcomes, it’s been a total bust if your measurement criteria include the population of all men and all women. Here’s a link. I refuse to quote it selectively. The scope of the assessment is wide ranging and definitive in its patterns. There’s more on the same subject in other areas here. And here. A link within a link in several of the posts above is this (wait for it to load; it’s in the Wayback Machine and like many of us old things it takes longer to pull itself together of a morning…).

For a single outstanding example of just how tilted the world has become because of the emphasis on global (macro as opposed to micro) outcomes, see the very long post linked below that illustrates the intertwined network of complications involved in all the initiatives to force equity on an apparently resistant system. At this point we’re no longer talking about feminism per sē but an “intersectional” web whose originating spider can be traced all the way back to Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and Germaine Greer: Seismic Cracks in the Icy Coalition of Democrats. 

The theme that has emerged in later posts linked here is the bête-noir DEI, which is the tipping point referenced above. Why the graphic up top is, or should be, a catalyst for very serious debate. All of the female members of the Supreme Court are DEI hires. As were Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg before them. In every case the chief criterion for their nomination and approval was that they were female, and SCOTUS should be as near half and half as nine chairs will allow.

Even the national electorate knows implicitly that the Presidency of the United States is far too important to be a set-aside for anyone, let alone this particular woman. The Supreme Court of the United States is, because of its lifetime appointments, the second most vital seat of power in our government and no less obligated to be filled by the most able among us, regardless of chromosome anatomy. It should not be the basis for decisions based on the logic that “it’s about time” to ignore half the population in favor of the other half.

“No younger version of him.” A line for our times.

Available evidence from their résumés would indicate that Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson were DEI admissions to the intensely competitive law schools they attended, and they are also DEI admissions to the Court. Much the same logic (common sense, anyone?) applies to Amy Barrett. It’s just a pretense to suggest that she was affirmative action for the second-tier law schools in the land. Notre Dame was a figleaf credential used by the GOP to cover for their Kamala-like selection logic in desiring a replacement for the vacant O’Connor seat. 

Barrett was just a 4th down field goal through the upright arms of the Touchdown Jesus.

The recent SCOTUS rulings on mail-in voting and birthright citizenship are all the evidence required to perceive the second-rate intellect of judges who cannot distinguish between principles of national moment and narrow preferences about what generally constitutes a generous thing to do for the appeasement of sectarian grievances. Mail-in votes accepted after Election Day legalize the theft of elections by finding and counting votes in the dark until your side wins. Leaving birthright citizenship intact now that the American slaves of foreign-born parents are long dead and buried with no categorical heirs, is an invitation to hostile nations for all kinds of insurrectionist (i.e., terrorist) mischief. Both decisions fall into the bin labeled ”Obviously Stupid Rulings.” DEI and the enemies of the Constitution and the nation win. American-born citizens lose.

As important as the wrong decisions are, the mindset of the female justices who wrought them is (Guess what!) an acute reminder that women are more prone to make decisions based on feelings rather than logic. It’s the same kind of logic that gives more weight to the angst experienced by a teenager who missed her period than to an accumulating abortion death toll in the tens of millions. Can’t see the unborn ones, so the girl feelings matter more. But the unborn ones really are all around us, a population of lives not lived that would have substantially altered the history of our times. 

The graphic buried in the dark center of Feelmalez Station in Shuteye Town.

No, this is not sentimental hand wringing. It is an archetype of an economic principle called Opportunity Cost. That is, the absence of outcomes that might have occurred if some other course had been chosen for an investment in cultural energy and resource development. Decisions made to placate feminists have opportunity costs of many different kinds.

Leaving this here as a reminder that blanket statements 

in this realm are always bounded this way.

Feminists tend to proclaim their allegiance to the part of the civil rights movement related to race. Something that sounds good to say, but feminism has done more damage to black economic development than any other factor. (The other, almost equally damaging factor was Government.) There was a long, failed experiment called Affirmative Action, intended on its face to propel black youth into more competitive participation in the pursuit of material prosperity. This didn’t work for two reasons. First, because the well-intentioned universities involved threw black students who hadn’t been taught how to swim into the deep end of the pool and gave them water wings in the form of easy grading and pandering course curricula to make them look successful to graduate schools and corporate employers. Where Black Studies Departments came from and de facto black segregation on college campuses came from, a higher-ed ghetto meant to salve fragile egos but only compounded the personal insecurities and resentments of the students they’d singled out. Secondly but far more importantly, Affirmative Action failed because feminism hijacked it by pretending, absurdly, that women were also an underprivileged minority (i.e.a very well connected majority) in need of institutional shortcuts to lucrative careers. 

What happened? Colleges and universities and large employers played along with the minority designation for women. While the politicians were distracting women with the joke called the Equal Rights Amendment, doomed because it couldn’t preserve the many exceptions for women built sensibly into the laws of the nation, the worlds of education and commerce were playing a shell game with blacks and women, offering both groups phonied up credentials the larger of the two groups did not and had never really been needed. If there had to be Black Studies to acknowledge past sins, there now also had to be Women’s Studies and an accompanying takeover of various humanities and social science disciplines/faculties to highlight a phantom conspiracy of neglect for the great past achievements of women in literature, the arts, and in science, business, and politics. 

The conspiracy of neglect and oppression did not exist before the feminists invented the sinister “patriarchy.” The history of the United States in particular was rewritten as a cartoon in which American women were put-upons like Sally Field in Norma Rae and the patriarchy was played by Lionel Barrymore in It’s a Wonderful Life.

[As an interesting side note, here’s a clip from a movie made about mid-way between the two stereotyped depictions shown above. A member of the “Patriarchy” sans morning coat and batwing collar…

Where does Marty fit in the oppression fable?

Somewhere in the, uh, middle, I guess.]

Neither sex has a monopoly on the experience of pain, disappointment, disease, opportunities denied, exploitation, and socioeconomic unfairnesses inherited at birth. Both before feminism and since, women enjoy longer life spans than men. In economic terms, women simply cannot make the claim that the ante-feminism standard of living before feminism differed from that of the men in their lives. Income was reported by household, not by “median income male vs. female,” as it is today. Household was not an accidental designation. Most marriages did not end in divorce and single motherhood for a poorly educated, abandoned woman in her twenties or thirties. People stayed married because the patriarchal Ten Commandments did not discriminate by sex in the one that may be the most energetically broken of them all in the 21st Century, the “shalt not” covering adultery. If it occurred, it had to be forgiven, if at all possible, “for the sake of the children,” to which both husband and wife had unbreakable responsibilities of different kinds. Where the term nuclear family family came from before it became the punchline of a joke about toxic two-income households where no one sits down at the same table for dinner and children live behind locked doors in their rooms with video games and smartphones for contact with their ubiquitous electronic peers.

We are asked to see the housewife as portrayed (propagandized) by Donna Reed, Barbara Billingsley, Jane Wyatt, Jayne Meadows, and Lucy as a prisoner of male prejudice and manipulation while all the fun stuff happened in the outside world where he lived. Poor thing. But where was hubby really? In a nice office selling insurance like the stereotypical TV dads we now regard as tyrants? No. 

Q: Who do we think was working in the coal mines, the sewers, the fields, the ear-splitting glass factories, the power and phone lines, the highrise and bridge construction crews, the long haul trucks and railroads, the police and fire departments, the highway maintenance crews with the snowplows and jackhammers, the fishing boats, the 24/7 plumbing and electrical repairmen, the gas stations and auto repair garages, and all the other places where the work could be backbreaking, dangerous, and far from uniformly well paid? 

A: The very same people who are still doing almost all of it now. Men. 

Actually, there are a lot of questions one could ask to assemble a report card on the Social Justice Approach to Female Emancipation AND the Social Utility Approach to Cultural Contribution by Sex.

The one most useful product of AI technology is that high speed, highly specified searches for specific information are no possible. Answers are immediate and as useful as the existing data collection systems allow. You can ask questions about any activity, personal or institutional, by sex and by generation and receive some kind of answer. In other words, you can take the temperature of Feminism and of the whole man vs woman debate and compile its results all by yourself. 

I’ll give you a hint in one particular question area. Not even AI can tell you what percentage of total U.S. personal income was earned by women in any given year or years. Every number they give you is per capita, usually in terms of median hourly wages. Who’s getting paid what for the same job. Which is very far from telling us who’s making all the money. Musk ain’t on their per capita list. They don’t want you to know that women are still underperforming men across the board and in every profession, even though they now outnumber men in college and professional school enrollment. There’s one big exception to this though.

The Brits used to have a talent for pithy slang until they threw away their humor and tact and decided it was appropriate to pepper every conversation with ‘cunt’ and ‘twat’ and all the derivatives therefrom that describe the remains of the British make sex. One of their best terms was “on the dole.” An apolitical designation for all the people whose financial subsistence comes from the government rather than actual productive labor. Including, naturally, all the people who work for the government in jobs from which they can never be fired.

If you ask Google’s AI enough questions, you’ll find that the sector of American life where women really have caught up with men is in government jobs of every kind but the lifesaving ones (police, fire, rescue, and military). They still lag in elected officials at the federal and state level, but in all the bureaucratic support functions for those they are close, even or leading. When it comes to prosecutors, judges, school boards, government unions, childcare social services, regulatory administrators of every kind, women are a very high percentage of the total dole workforce. 

You can ask these questions of AI Assistants for yourself. You can, and should, also ask for breakdowns BY SEX about these questions:

Q: Who is making creative and economically profitable breakthroughs in technology and the arts? 

Q: What is the number and economic status of single parent families?

Q. What is the trend in divorce rates in this century?

Q: What is the mental health status, clinically and self-diagnosed, of single parents?

Q: What is the trend in childhood legal and crime involvement in the century regarding:

- Traffic arrests

- Drug arrests

- Drug overdose deaths

- Drug-related murders

- Runaways and otherwise missing

- Sex crimes

- Underage abortions

Q: What is the trend in how many books children are reading a year this century!

Q: What is the trend in how many hours/week children spend in the company of parents ?

Q: What activities are most commonly shared by families together, how often, for how long?

Q: what forms of childhood discipline are most common, how reportedly effective?

Q: What are the trends in family health, parents and children, regarding: 

- Weight

- Outdoor activity

- Alcohol use

- Marijuana use

- ADHD 

- Depression

-Anger Management

 

You can roll your own questions if you’ve a mind to. What questions might give you, personally, a sense of how well we are doing in sex equality in the Social Utility Frame of Reference? 

I’m going to leave you with that to think about for now. There’s a lot more to be said about the ‘Social Utility Metric’ (SUM) and how to improve it, but not before you’ve had time to digest the above and do some of your own homework. SUM can show us the size of the opportunity cost we’ve already experienced above and beyond dollars and titles, and possibly point at some means of recovering our losses…

P.S. I know who may not like this, but here’s the song that’s been playing in my head all morning as I finished this post…