Q&A: DEFINE ‘AGENCY’ —“CURT: Could you point me to any of your existing writin

Q&A: DEFINE ‘AGENCY’

—“CURT: Could you point me to any of your existing writing that develops your use of the term ‘agency’? I’m thinking more in legal terms (agent/agency), and wondering if that understanding is sufficient or if you have something different in mind.”— Andrew

It’s not complicated. It’s:

**agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices**

Think of it as a soft version of ‘free will’.

When I use the term, and when most of us use it in the context of different abilities, we refer largely to the delta between fully deliberate, fully rational, fully informed, unbiased, decision making.

Conversely, a lack of agency occurs as various impulses, cognitive biases, disinformation, and error accumulate until the person in question is no longer what we consider reasonable or sentient.

So when we say ‘women lack agency’ we are referring to the impulses that affect them because of their reproductive roles, which bias them against the tribe (males), and limit their decision making in matters of the tribe (politics).

(it is very hard for women to think clearly compared to men unless it is about a subject that is reproductively important for a woman and her offspring survival. In this sense most women are political equivalent of color-blind, in the same way that most men are nesting-blind, or empathically blind. The analogy that a woman’s mind is like a version of Windows that keeps popping up modal dialogs sporadically and constantly. For men. We open a window and we don’t see another one until we open another one and close this one. We also think about a very small subset of (high risk) problems and women do exactly the opposite: think about a host of low risk problems. Why? we hunt.They take care of children. I can hunt next week. Children must be taken care of right now and today. it’s not complicated.)