Women, Kevin, Can Be As Mean As Pepper

Right now I am struggling with the assertion in Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning that the Great Mother represents both creation and destruction. We seem to be getting all Hegelian here, where a thing is the same as its opposite, or very nearly.

But really? Women are destructive?

You see, I am really your average squish and I have been taught to be a gentleman, where women are concerned. So I find it really difficult to deal with the idea of women as destructive.

So you can imagine that I am really interested in the travails of Kevin D. Williamson and the women of The Atlantic. Here is a good set of links from PowerLine. Is the defenestration of Kevin the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything where women are concerned?

Could it be that women are not the innocent virgins and suffering mothers of legend?

You think?

Don't forget the fact that the main actors in all those religious witch-hunts of which we've heard tell were women.

And there is the fact reported by James M. Ault Jr. in Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church. Men hold all the offices in these racist, sexist, homophobic churches, but women control the church through manipulation of their office-holding husbands. How? Well in part it is because the women's gossip network creates "a common grid of 'what everybody sees' and 'what everybody knows.'" In other words, women get to define social reality through their daily conversations and interactions with each other.

Hey, here is something more, that I just read yesterday. It's the lament of a "really beautiful woman" about how hard life has been for her. It's not the men that make it rough. Oh no. It's the women that all hate her.

One of the worst things about being beautiful is that other women absolutely despise you. Women have made me cry my whole life. When I try to make friends with a woman, I feel like I’m a guy trying to woo her. Women don’t trust me. They don’t want me around their husbands. I’m often excluded from parties, with no explanation.

Well, bust my buttons! Who knew?

So really, why be surprised that the women at The Atlantic all ganged up on poor Kevin Williamson. It could not be, it must not be that a man who was adopted as a baby -- and therefore might easily have been aborted, but wasn't -- would have strong feelings in a pro-life direction with respect to abortion.

No! Not to be endured! Nobody is allowed to to tell well-born women the facts of life. After all, what is the point of being a well-born woman working at a prestige media title unless you can define the common grid of what everybody sees and everybody knows, and make it stick.

Oh, and in the same week we have the kerfuffle at YouTube, run by Susan Wojcicki, who is connected with the founders of Google. The problem at YouTube seems to be that while conservatives and alt-right whackos kinds expect to be demonetized and censored, immigrant Iranian women vegans get really angry! How dare anyone censor them or demonetize them? What about their rights!

So here's the basic facts of life from Jordan B. Peterson, as I understand them right now, to help it all make sense.

First of all, our modern scientific world view, of facts, facts, facts, has nothing to do with the case. We do not go through life making rational decisions based on data input and strategic processing of data. Not at all. We -- and all living things -- live moment to moment on auto-pilot, flying along as unconcerned as a seagull. But then something unexpected happens. Enter fear. It means that you have to suspend auto-pilot, stop your life right there until you can figure out what happened and why, and figure out how to deal with it. Until then, you are paralyzed with fear. Reason has nothing to do with the case. It is emotion that rules the world.

In a societal context, where a whole society has been rocked on its heels by an unexpected event, the problem can only be solved by a "sacrificial hero," who does the work of figuring out what happened and how to change society so that it can deal with the new and the unexpected. As we know, these figures are only venerated when they have departed the scene, often tragically. Think Lincoln, JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr. Or, if you are a lefty, Rosa Luxemburg, Sacco and Vanzetti, Trotsky, the Rosenbergs, Che.

Really, if you want to make a difference, you probably have to die upon the Cross.

But this is not the way of women, as The Atlantic has just demonstrated. And this is not surprising. Women are the agents of creation and destruction; it is men that are the agents of order and tyranny, and specifically restoring order after the lingering death of tyranny, which is the world of the dying king, holding on to his throne with white knuckles while the world crumbles around him.

You can see this in the way that political scientists frame presidential elections. Elections are either Four More Years -- a continuation of order -- or Time for a Change. Time for a Change tells us that the voters think that the order of the previous regime has tended towards tyranny and the political order must be refreshed. That is a man's job. It cannot be the job of people that insist on their safe space and the exclusion of all discouraging words that might upset them.

Meanwhile, our liberal women friends like Jennifer Palmieri are still emoting about the idea of a woman president.

Only thing is that the great women political leaders of our time, Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher, pretty well reinvented themselves as men. Theresa May and Mutti Merkel, not so much.

Because the job of a political leader is not to cuddle in a safe space but to boldly outdare the dangers of the time, the eternal black cloud of the Dragon of Chaos. And that is what men were put on this Earth to do. Women? Not so much.