Theme: Responsibility

“WE ARE IN FACT HUMAN AND CAN BE ENCOURAGED TO BE OUR BETTER OR WORSE SELVES JUST LIKE MEN.”

—“You need to be careful in how you lumpsum a group. Not all women have fallen victim to third wave infantalization. A growing number of women, particularly of the millennial generation and after are coming into the world with at least partially opened eyes. Accounting for some variation of concern-clusters that are biologically hard wired, we are in fact human and can be encouraged to be our better or worse selves just like men.”—- Anne Tripp

Agreed. And we can see it in the numbers. Even if the numbers are small. Before I respond in full I want to say a few things.

first, i want to state that you are one of the best women who has ever followed me. And that I look forward to your thoughts because they contain honest insights – and honestly they warm me because they show what CAN be a norm in gender discussions.

Second, it is easier to use a small misunderstanding to illustrate a very big idea, than it is to correct a concert of errors, and lose the big idea in the obscurity of answering all the errors.

So what follows is more of a matter of using the excellent opportunity that you have given me to make a bigger point.

And I hope that you will understand this – that when a soldier asks a question, a general answers the question for the entire army, lest the opportunity for the lesson be wasted. This is sometimes uncomfortable for the soldier. But once this ritual is habituated, asking such questions even if at first it seems a matter of personal expense, is merely and opportunity to teach the rest of the army a lesson via the general.

So, let’s start with:

—“You need to be careful in how you lumpsum a group”—

The statement is a very obviously female expression. One that men do not make. And it’s so predictable coming from a woman – even from someone as objective as yourself, that it’s almost a deterministic certainty.

Men talk in terms of packs, tribes, armies distributions, nations, and civilizations. We do not talk in individuals because unlike women who must train individual children, we train packs, armies, tribes, distributions, and nations.

We just assume it’s obvious that when talking about the pack, tribe, army, distribution, nation, and civilization, that it’s logically obvious that we are talking about distributions, and that when we speak of distributions we refer to changing the distribution.

***When you talk to set of warriors if you individualize them you break the very thing that you are seeking to change from a mere instinct into a sacred commitment: we are all responsible for one another. if the man next to you is weak or injured you must save him and he you. Your group save theirs. Your groups save the people. your people save the civilization.***

This is the scale upon which men operate. Not the child, not the woman, not the adult, not even the family, but the distribution: ALL OF US.

Women are not taught that men think like this – always and everywhere. We give precedence only to our mates. To men it is obvious that women do not. But we have never been successful at putting it into words.

So we are well aware that there are amazing women. We area aware that there are wise women, rational women, women of agency, and yes, women who sense they may possess it if they work at it, and yes, women who only grasp that something is not right.

But men live in a world of PROBLEMS. And we talk about PROBLEMS. And the women who are NOT problems are simply NOT the subject of our discussions, our thoughts, our intuitions. The women who ARE problems are a threat to the pack, tribe, army, nation, and civilization.

Conversely, when we hear even the wisest of women say “remember the exceptions”, or as we ridicule women “not all x are like that” – we abbreviate as “NAXALT” this makes us intuit that the problem is universal, since the inability to grasp the difference between an individual and a distribution is the first problem that limits a woman’s agency outside of the interpersonal and familial, and the central reason that we do not believe women can ever be any more competent at politics in large numbers, than men can be competent at infant-rearing in large numbers. It’s exasperating.

Why, if we are equal, and we can understand women in this capacity, and women cannot understand us in this capacity, can we claim that we are equal in political capacity?

That said, I see the problem of women’s agency one of mental discipline. And while women may prefer buddhism, yoga, and meditation because women evolved extensive preening to prevent all possible cellular damage, and while men may prefer stoicism, competitive sports, and fire-gazing, because we absorb cellular damage on behalf of the tribe, both men and women when living outside of small tribal life require some form of mental discipline – or what we today still call by the romantic term ‘mindfulness’. It is women who are more the victim of it than men. For men, the problem is not our minds, it is our violence. And for that reason the institutions by which we have constrained the danger of the world’s greatest super-predator man, into a domesticated cooperative animal, regulated by norm, tradition, religion, law, credit and informational reputation is far higher than that of women whose chief threat to civilization has always been her damnable gossip, rallying and shaming. And her impulsive willingness to burn all civilization to advance her offspring. A more insidious and indirect violence, but a coercive violence none the less.

I have argued for decades now that the central problem is that men and women should be educated separately, and taught the disciplines necessary for our genders, and that as such we are not identical, but entirely compatible. And if this were accomplished and natural law sufficiently imposed, we would, in fact, be functionally equal in the market for the production of commons despite our differences in gender, class, and age.

And that is my ambition. universal compatibility. for all. gender, class, tribe, nation.

Hugs. 😉