One of my regular correspondents has written to me about women. He is worried that women are more inclined to big government than men, and this is due to the fact that women are more limited, defined more by who they are than what they can do. At any rate, women showed themselves inclined towards big government the moment they got the vote. They seem to be "less accommodating to a liberty-minded, laissez-faire society."
Agreed. My feeling is that this issues from the fundamental role of women, which is not to achieve diversity and inclusion in tech, but to raise children to adulthood. On this view a woman needs a ton of things settled and assured the moment the first kid hits the ground. She needs food; she needs shelter; she needs protection from males other than her husband. And she needs health care: boy does she need health care. These things need to be available right now and continue to be available for years. Women expect things like child care and schools and stuff to be available, as a matter of right, and they become mortally offended if these things are not available. One thinks also of the good old song: "Why Don't You Do Right," with memorable lines like "Get out of here and get me some money too." Women want a settled, reliable community around them when they get in the family way.
In the old days the only way that a woman could get an establishment to bear and raise children was to marry a man with a farm to whom her father would be willing to pay a dowry. In other words, both families had to provide in order to provide enough resources for a marriage to go through. We moderns are, of course, shocked by this mercenary approach to marriage but it made sense. You didn't get married unless you had the establishment to raise a family. Of course, plenty of people broke these rules, and many of them ended up like Fanny Robin in Far from the Madding Crowd. If we accept the notion of the "downward mobility" that obtained in Britain prior to 1800 in A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark, then the reproductive fortunes of the poor were miserable prior to the Industrial Revolution.
The novelty of our age is that we can afford to throw all these rules away and pay poor women to have children without husbands. We do it because we can afford it and because it efficiently wins the votes of poor women. Also we have applied the organizational technology of the factory system to child-raising and assembled the children of the world in government child-custodial facilities where they are taught regime propaganda by government functionaries. In other words, a ton of things that women used to have supplied to them by the marriage system is now provided by government program. And many women think this is a pretty good idea.
The question is whether women are wise to vote to have government assume so many functions related to the care and raising of children. We may say that women are like others that have recently obtained political influence, from the working class that voted for government programs to the minority groups like blacks and Latinos that have voted for big government. It seems really cool to be able to band together and get the political system to shower you with benefits.
My answer would be: probably not. If the government -- or the patriarchy -- showers you with benefits and takes over a lot of the decision-making in your life then you are probably becoming like an animal in a zoo. Like the animal in the zoo you are losing the culture and the instincts of survival that got you where you were up until yesterday. And you are not acquiring the skills you need to wive and thrive in the city.
Now, my line is that we are in the transition period after thousands of years of agriculture where humans are moving off the land in their billions and learning to live and work in the city. It defeats the purpose if you arrive in the city and become the ward of the government, taking a dole and teaching your children not how to rise into the middle class but how the manipulate the benefit system of The Man.
But heck, what do I know. What about Christopher DeGroot on women:
What did women do in Berlin in May 1945? In A Woman in Berlin the women became the concubines of the Soviet invaders. But they hid their teenaged daughters in the attic.
I think that the deployment of women into politics and the corporate bureaucracy and "the workforce" is a civilizational folly: women are not designed for political and corporate systems. What they are designed for is the community of women in the neighborhood that creates the culture in which children are born and raised to adulthood. Among their most important contribution is to set community standards and to name and shame anyone that violates them. I am reminded of the joke of the man that asserts that in his household he makes all the important decisions, like whether we recognize Red China, and his wife does all the rest.
In due course, I predict, women will decide that big government is not the answer to their needs. And then, imperceptibly, quietly, the world will change, and we will look back and wonder how it happened.
Agreed. My feeling is that this issues from the fundamental role of women, which is not to achieve diversity and inclusion in tech, but to raise children to adulthood. On this view a woman needs a ton of things settled and assured the moment the first kid hits the ground. She needs food; she needs shelter; she needs protection from males other than her husband. And she needs health care: boy does she need health care. These things need to be available right now and continue to be available for years. Women expect things like child care and schools and stuff to be available, as a matter of right, and they become mortally offended if these things are not available. One thinks also of the good old song: "Why Don't You Do Right," with memorable lines like "Get out of here and get me some money too." Women want a settled, reliable community around them when they get in the family way.
In the old days the only way that a woman could get an establishment to bear and raise children was to marry a man with a farm to whom her father would be willing to pay a dowry. In other words, both families had to provide in order to provide enough resources for a marriage to go through. We moderns are, of course, shocked by this mercenary approach to marriage but it made sense. You didn't get married unless you had the establishment to raise a family. Of course, plenty of people broke these rules, and many of them ended up like Fanny Robin in Far from the Madding Crowd. If we accept the notion of the "downward mobility" that obtained in Britain prior to 1800 in A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark, then the reproductive fortunes of the poor were miserable prior to the Industrial Revolution.
The novelty of our age is that we can afford to throw all these rules away and pay poor women to have children without husbands. We do it because we can afford it and because it efficiently wins the votes of poor women. Also we have applied the organizational technology of the factory system to child-raising and assembled the children of the world in government child-custodial facilities where they are taught regime propaganda by government functionaries. In other words, a ton of things that women used to have supplied to them by the marriage system is now provided by government program. And many women think this is a pretty good idea.
The question is whether women are wise to vote to have government assume so many functions related to the care and raising of children. We may say that women are like others that have recently obtained political influence, from the working class that voted for government programs to the minority groups like blacks and Latinos that have voted for big government. It seems really cool to be able to band together and get the political system to shower you with benefits.
My answer would be: probably not. If the government -- or the patriarchy -- showers you with benefits and takes over a lot of the decision-making in your life then you are probably becoming like an animal in a zoo. Like the animal in the zoo you are losing the culture and the instincts of survival that got you where you were up until yesterday. And you are not acquiring the skills you need to wive and thrive in the city.
Now, my line is that we are in the transition period after thousands of years of agriculture where humans are moving off the land in their billions and learning to live and work in the city. It defeats the purpose if you arrive in the city and become the ward of the government, taking a dole and teaching your children not how to rise into the middle class but how the manipulate the benefit system of The Man.
But heck, what do I know. What about Christopher DeGroot on women:
Women, deep down, feel they deserve a chivalrous outcome, since per their psychology, men are essentially branches on the feminine tree of hypergamy, women’s will to power. Women, moreover, largely lack a sense of justice, where the word denotes conscious, abstract duty; they are mostly feeling and caprice, irrational and maternal. Hence, although they are more sympathetic than men, they are frequently effortless vampires, without scruple or conscience.My interpretation of this is not that women are deficient, but that they cannot afford the time to worry about justice and duty, not when the woman's basic need is to keep herself alive so she can keep her children alive. It really does not matter how she gets food on the table and health care down the street. The only thing that matters is that she gets it and her children get to grow up and, in due time, leave the nest.
What did women do in Berlin in May 1945? In A Woman in Berlin the women became the concubines of the Soviet invaders. But they hid their teenaged daughters in the attic.
I think that the deployment of women into politics and the corporate bureaucracy and "the workforce" is a civilizational folly: women are not designed for political and corporate systems. What they are designed for is the community of women in the neighborhood that creates the culture in which children are born and raised to adulthood. Among their most important contribution is to set community standards and to name and shame anyone that violates them. I am reminded of the joke of the man that asserts that in his household he makes all the important decisions, like whether we recognize Red China, and his wife does all the rest.
In due course, I predict, women will decide that big government is not the answer to their needs. And then, imperceptibly, quietly, the world will change, and we will look back and wonder how it happened.
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