We can see from the historical record that men are physically, intellectually, and morally critical to effective resistance to totalitarianism. I believe that I have missed the significance of this for years.
I have been studying the mechanisms by which men and boys are subjected to injustice and neglect. I have been concerned on human grounds, and moral grounds, concerned about our collective health and prosperity in societies where we are damaging these precious resources of energy and innovation – and I have been concerned about the possibility of general enfeeblement leaving us vulnerable to predation by more virile cultures (whose values are troubling).
But I failed to acknowledge that the deliberate destruction of our men could be being perpetrated by our own elites, not just out of foolishness and political expediency but, as method of disarming and dislocating our populations by design, to make us easier to reengineer to serve their ends. It’s not clear to me the degree to which the War on Men has been consciously informed by this goal, but I’m not sure how much that matters anyway.
Perhaps our elites have been quite unaware of subconscious devils driving them – but we can divine from their actions what the intended outcome has been.
I believe that men are innately more morally certain than women. From the differences in results broken down by sex in the bell curves in Simon Baron-Cohen’s Empathy Quotient and Systemising Quotient test results, we can make some theses on evolved sex roles. I believe that women have evolved the greater ability to empathise (defined by Baron-Cohen as: “the ability to put yourself into someone else’s shoes and to imagine their thoughts and feelings” and “the drive to respond with an appropriate emotion to someone else’s thoughts and feelings”), not only in order to be best able to respond to infants, but also to support group cohesion by providing soft power backing to dominant cultural narratives – in particular by making their own families conform to them (so they are socially acceptable, so they can prosper).
Empathy and agreeableness are strongly correlated, and both can be functional adaptations that prove useful to individuals and groups – but can also be highly vulnerable to manipulation.
Men have evolved a little differently. Men are more rational than women, enabling them to provide stability and to realise progression, for their families and the collective. This gives men an advantage in being able to assess moral questions based on defined values, less influenced by social pressure.
Anecdotally, I think we see that difference in support for trans ideology. I am yet to see any research, so this is literally speculation based on personal observations, but – while there are of course very vocal women using their vaginaphones to object to dangerous nonsense that’s being pushed at the moment in that arena – I feel like I see more women overall who are actually ok with it, and more men who sense the danger.
All of the above is presented in a binary fashion – clearly I am generalising – but in reality it’s not binary and doesn’t need to be. The 2016 Presidential election in the U.S. and the U.K.s’ Brexit referendum were both very close. Had only women had the vote, they would have been just as close – but both of those votes would have gone the way our wannabe totalitarian overlords wanted. We’d have little success on the street predicting which way people voted based on their sex, but at a population level, small sex differences can lead to huge effects on outcomes.
Furthermore, Jung’s theory regarding contra-sexual aspects to our personalities suggests to me that The War on Masculinity (as a front in the War on Men) threatens men’s abilities to be the morally certain and confident and courageous individuals that we need; and the associated feminist conceptual rejection of feminine social power (which is necessary in order to convince society that women need enhanced political and economic power) also threatens women’s abilities to integrate the femininity and masculinity in us, in healthy ways that would enable us to participate usefully in the struggle for our freedoms too.
Jung saw men and women as typically presenting personality features recognisable as of own biological sex. But he also saw us as having distinctly opposite sex aspects within us (he called them the anima in men, the animus in women). At the time he was writing, sex roles were significantly more rigid, so the danger he saw was of individuals suppressing contra-sex aspects of themselves which would not disappear as a result… But, rather, live in our depths, out of sight, growing twisted and malevolent and explode out when they got the chance, possessing us and causing dysfunctionality and neurosis.
Men possessed by the anima could be a hysterical, whiny little bitches. Animus possessed women could be hostile, domineering hags. He advocated that individuals should acknowledge and seek to integrate our contra-sexual aspects so that we may avoid these dangers – and so that we can actually draw to some degree on strengths of the opposite sex, appropriately, when it’s useful. I feel like presently we have been nurturing the same problem for a long time, with a lack of sex balance within individuals, with anima possessed men and animus possessed women – but the cause is precisely inverse.
We’re not victims of social pressure to conform to the expectations associated with our biological sex. Today: masculinity is dialled down in men by subjecting masculinity to constant criticism and the threat of punishment, so more and more are anima possessed because expressing their masculinity is too dangerous. Women’s femininity on the other hand is dialled down by the conceptual rejection of feminine power, so we see many women possessed by their animus because they’re convinced erroneously that femininity is weak.
The attacks on men that have astounded me in their diversity, injustice, cruelty (and also in what I imagined was an absurd level of misjudgement if the aim was to empower women), and they have crippled many men. There is fear, there is uncertainty, there is hopelessness in too many men: there are men held back in their educational and career trajectories, there are good men broken in courts – often family courts where it is ruled that their children don’t need meaningful relationships with them (or after family courts decide they do need those relationships – but there are no mechanisms to defend their rights when rulings are ignored by resident parents).
If the aim was to empower women, it’s a sick and twisted empowerment that we have, one that can only, ultimately hurt us vicariously and deprive us of opportunities for our own personal growth. If the aim was to neutralise the threat that functional individuals, men in particular, may pose to the establishment of totalitarianism… That could work.
Since the global pandemic response (but not limited to that event), it has become abundantly clear that the vast majority of national governments either do not have authority to represent their citizens – or choose not to. They will force us not to leave our homes. They will force us to close our businesses. They will coerce us into accepting risky medical interventions. They will lie, and the big social media companies have been colluding with them to manipulate open discussion (including censoring the truth when that’s inconvenient) – and with a contempt so brazen that it feels like they want us to know that they no longer feel compelled to even pretend to respect us. They will have our ability to share our resources revoked on online platforms, they’ll even have our ability to access our own money suspended by banks, and when they deprive us of national physical currencies, our economic vulnerability will be so much more acute.
The quantity of data they have on so many of us, and the sophistication of their abilities to use it to know us intimately is terrifying. Social credit scoring is coming, and we will have to make decisions about whether to prioritise our physical needs or our rights, and what we know is right.
They abuse legal mechanisms, sending police to harass law abiding citizens who say things they don’t appreciate, using emergency powers to crush protest, passing legislation to give police powers to apprehend people they think might be considering protesting, militarising police forces (and failing to even clarify in what situations these weapons are and are not supposed to be used in).
The global economy is in pieces, and they knew lockdowns would damage it, and they are comfortable with big pharma, big energy and big tech all celebrating record profits while the standards of living of citizens are deteriorating. Landgrabs have been going on for years – sometimes by nation state apparatus, sometimes by foreign state actors, sometimes by big corporations and sometimes by hugely wealthy and influential individuals who present themselves to the world as benevolent philanthropists – and the net result is that we the people actually own an alarmingly diminishing area of the lands that we call home, and we the people may soon find that we have an alarmingly diminishing say in how it’s used.
Left/right is more irrelevant now than ever – their actions are indistinguishable. National politics are looking like soap operas (as pointed out by Neil Oliver) – fine, if you’re into depressing televised fiction, but ultimately insignificant. They refuse to prove that we enjoy election integrity. And just in case any uppity populations might somehow swing it to get a government in power who wants to represent them… The ones we currently have are busy signing up to mechanisms whereby at the drop of a hat executive power can be officially lifted from the hands of the people we (may or may not) vote for (like the treaty on pandemic prevention and preparedness and Agenda 2030).
I am nostalgic for 2016. In the face of extreme psychological pressure, citizens in the U.K. and in the U.S. felt the fear and did the right thing anyway. I think we really rocked the establishment, and I think that what we’ve seen in response since is a reinvigorated effort from them to cripple our moral capacities – as well as a dizzying array of systems established or reinforced in order to keep us in line going forwards.
I think they were expecting to be able to offer us some pretty real choices back then, so that they could defend the impression that they have tried to cultivate (that we’re living democratically), but I don’t think they thought we’d dare take the chances offered. They thought they could bolster the appearance of legitimate governance for free. Showing them that’s just not so was thrilling – but it’s also made it clear to them that (if they don’t want us asserting our values) they need to tighten their grip.
The intellectual courage rejuvenated, and the networks formed and strengthened over that period will support resistance to the closing down of our “free” societies. But I tend to doubt that we will be able to arrest the trajectory, never-mind claw back freedoms already lost, in the near-term.
It could be that all we can really save is our souls, but that’s not nothing. It is masculinity that will take the mountain view to see that we’re wasting our energies on concerns that won’t mean shit when none of us have any freedoms, we are unable to reliably attend to our fundamental needs, when we’re not even afforded the luxury of protesting our fate.
It is masculinity that will lead, and mentor, and give courage. We need to nurture virtue in our men with urgency. It may well be that today our collective reserves of masculinity have been subverted to the point where we’re not strong enough to resist totalitarian creep. It may well be that we need the hard times coming, to build strong men. A time will come for our people to reclaim their rights, and virtuous souls who’ve walked before will be guiding them. That’s a legacy to live for.
