The Question of Men, Women, Stress, Hierarchy, Complaint and Conformity

Responding to my piece on "Yes, Young Liberal Women Have Mental Health Issues, But..." regular reader Sara reminds my that my notion of the women's Culture of Complaint was corrected a while back by a woman red.hibiscus who wrote:

I don’t agree that woman have a Culture of Complaint. That is what men perceive, not what women experience... The actual culture is a Culture of Conformity. Negative tools are shame, guilt, threat of expulsion. The civilized version is rule of community ties and on-the-ground social ties, eg family.

Perfectly correct. Actually I would say that, in a perfect world, men have a Culture of Courage. After a couple of drinks it descends into a Culture of Insult. In a perfect world, women have a Culture of Conformity. After a couple of disagreements, it descends into a Culture of Complaint. Ying and Yang, and all that.

The piece on Liberal Women got into the question of "stress" which I think is a Girl Thing. I also think that "mental health issues" has a lot to do with women experiencing conflict in the man-designed public square. Conflict is part of the game for men, but intolerable for women.

In view of all this, Sara writes, we need to remember

1) The idea that open confrontation (instead of gossip) is anti-female culture 

2) The idea that stress AKA conflict is intolerable to women and they won't stand for it. 

Men live in a dominance hierarchy, Sara writes, and "see their survival in the world around them as a fight to be on top of the pyramid." But

Women however, because of the nature of their female bodies, necessarily see their own survival in the world around them as a fight to be left alone and survive in an EXISTING CONTEXT set by men.

Actually, I would refine this to say that most men most of the time know their place in the dominance hierarchy, and only occasionally attempt to change it in a fight, a point made by Jordan B. Peterson in his lobster hierarchy argument.

I suppose the same applies to women, wanting to be left alone to run their households and raise children in the context created by marriage, and only occasionally being challenged by the gossip of the women's Culture of Complaint -- which is, no doubt, concerned about the woman in question appearing to violate the Culture of Conformity.

To get all Hegelian we would say that the male Culture of Courage has its negation in the Culture of Insult, while the female Culture of Conformity has its negation in the Culture of Complaint.

I would say that, despite the male hierarchy, there is among men a curious counter-current of equality. When men greet each other with an insult they are expressing that notion: "hey, pal, you are no better than I am." And, for instance, when I had my interview with billionaire Steve Ballmer I was careful to treat him as an equal, and behave as though I expected to be treated as an equal.

And I think that in the women's Culture of Conformity that asserts an equality among women there is a hidden hierarchy that every woman knows but nobody talks about. The Culture of Complaint is all about adjusting that hidden hierarchy.

Also, another woman corrected me on the Culture of Complaint saying that the ideal among women is Kindness. (This explains the last line on the virtue-signaling #WeBelieve yard sign that insists "Kindness is Everything").

I suspect that the Culture of Conformity and the Culture of Kindness are different aspects of the same thing.

Don't ask me how all this aligns with the left's insistence that everything is a social construction, except when it isn't.

"I Will Make You Safe"

Here's how to get elected president in 2024. Tell the women of America: "I will make you safe."

Because by 2024, what with the gathering chaos of Biden-world, women won't be so worried about Trump's rudeness. No indeedy. They will be wanting a Strong Man that will stop the madness and Make Them Safe.

Normally, as I say, Women Expect to be Protected. In normal times, when it really seems that they are being protected, it is natural for women to look askance upon aggressive men that like to duke it out in the public square. It seems like the rude men are making them unsafe.

I disagree with that, but I get it. What Women Want is to get on with their womanly tasks of keeping the kids alive and protecting their reputation as chaste women in the community of women. Aggressive men don't fit into that world.

They are wrong of course. What they should be doing, in normal times, is encouraging men in their manly sports, to keep them up to the mark. Most manly pursuits, from hunting to sports to politics, are relatively harmless. Indeed, they are genius, by deflecting men's natural propensity to quarrel into safe channels.

But when chaos looms, then women stop expecting men to cool their jets; then they start expecting men to sacrifice themselves and protect them, the women.

Now, my guess is that the current Democrat policy circus, from chaos at the border to chaos in the cities, to loot and plunder for the educated Snobs and the helpless victim Scum, is going to make women really afraid, perhaps even including the virtue-signalling women of the #WeBelieve brigade and the "Hate Has No Home Hare" huffers. 

Because what our Democratic friends are forgetting, as they go pedal-to-the-metal on every lefty activist notion imaginable, is that all their activism makes ordinary middle-class Schmucks less safe and less secure and less prosperous.

As I read the Strauss and Howe Fourth Turning I realize that the Big Thing that sparks their "Crisis" is the accumulated injustice of the current ruling-class regime. This is not to damn our liberal ruling-class friends in particular. It is just in the nature of the beast that every ruling class favors and feeds its own supporters and neglects the rest of the community.

Let me just boil it down to one chart from usgovernmentspending.com:

Do you see how, over the last century, government spending steadily increased as a percent of GDP up until about 1980. When, shall we say, it had gone about as far as it could go? And by the way, when ordinary American workers stopped participating in the increase in wealth and income?

Think of all that government spending as loot and plunder that the ruling class takes out of the hide of ordinary people and puts in the hands of its supporters. And I mean everyone from Social Security recipients like me to unionized teachers in the public schools to college professors to grant-wielding scientists to all kinds of people getting government contracts and subsidies, etc.

The more money that government takes out of the hide of ordinary people making their ordinary living, the more that it creates victims of injustice, people who cannot make a decent life for themselves because of the rip tides in the economy created by the government playing favorites.

Now Strauss and Howe gin up a cutesy Jungian theory of the circulation of archetypes, Prophets, Nomads, Heroes, Artists to explain the political cycle. I think it is a cutesy way of covering the nakedness of the truth with a decent drapery, to drag in Edmund Burke. Because, after all, Strauss and Howe are educated class Snobs, and they know that the educated class can only take a little twinch of truth at a time. We get to their "Crisis" when the current ruling class is running out of ways to hide the naked injustice of their rule -- and pretty well all ruling classes are unjust, because "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice."

Hey, we are all human, and we all like a bit of free stuff. But it leads in the end to a situation where a ruling class is trying to cut corners -- like ours right now -- because the sums don't add up. So the ruling class launches its BLMs and Antifas into the streets, and demonizes the opposition as an "armed insurrection" and pretty soon women start looking for a Savior to Make Them Safe.

To Be Continued. As they say.

A New Three Layer Theory: Snobs, Schmucks, and Scum

I was reading The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy by William Strauss and Neil Howe, after my daughter recommended it five years ago.

I agree with its notion of historical cycles, and that they tend to be about the length of one full human life, eighty to one hundred years. And that it is convenient to break up the cycles into 20-year generations.

But I'm not sure I agree with grafting Jungian archetypes onto the generations: Prophet, Nomad, Hero, Artist.

And I don't agree with the idea of distilling hundreds of topical best-sellers as a real view of social and cultural reality. The picture that Strauss and Howe paint is really the ebb and flow of educated-class fashions. It does not really deal with politics as the ebb and flow of who-whom, to coin a phrase.

I'd say that a better way to understand history is to think about how the ruling class, living in its bubble, is often clueless about the miseries it is committing on the rest of the society. Let us rather say that a cycle begins with a new elite dishing out loot and plunder to its supporters, and then dealing with the unanticipated consequences of its actions. For instance, it might have seemed like a good idea to offer loot to senior citizens with Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, but what happens when these programs end up eating the budget? And the well-to-do seniors make sure the politicians know that they'd better not mess with their entitlements.

The basic fact is that the ruling class, any ruling class, is nothing but a bunch of Snobs. The ruling class thinks it is the fount of all wisdom, and no wonder when nobody dares to challenge it, because consequences. In our case we have a ruling class that is endlessly coming up with cool ways to buy votes and launch impressive projects of self-admiration. But what happens to the ordinary middle-class Schmucks on the receiving end of the ruling-class brilliance?

For instance, take California, please. In the 1970s, my first decade in the US, California was already in the lead in controlling suburban development and saving the coastline from development. But the result was to make housing brutally expensive for the young'uns just starting out. It was clear to me that I could never afford to live and work in California. But the existing residents of California that I met seemed to be copacetic with the new order: they accepted the importance of saving the environment for future generations.

No wonder. Because the new California worked well for the establishment Snobs, and for minor Snobs, people already enjoying modest positions of honor from the ruling class. Ordinary middle-class Schmucks, not so much.

And then there are the lower orders, people just trying to get by, somehow. The Snobs have spent the last century telling the helpless victims how much they care for them and how much welfare and housing and benefits they are going to get. But in truth the Snobs do not care about the Scum; they only care about their votes.

I wrote 20 years ago that a truly enlightened elite would set up the culture and the economy -- a Road to the Middle Class -- to encourage the lower orders to acquire the skills and the culture of the middle class and rise up from indigence and the lower-class culture of subordinate serfdom or rebellious gang-dom into the responsible culture of middle-class work, home, family, and order. That is not the policy of our ruling-class Snobs.

The result, as Charles Murray described in his Coming Apart: the State of White America 1960-2010, is an America where the Snob class of educated professionals has great careers and merger marriages, a Schmuck middle class is doing so-so, and a Scum at the bottom where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

The beauty of the current system is that the ruling class Snobs get to tell the Scum how much they care, and then blame the Schmuck cops and other notorious white supremacists for the travails of the Scum.

No doubt at some point this false ruling-class narrative will fall apart. And then the only question will be the size of the butcher's bill.

"Gammon:" The Latest Leftist Hate Pejorative

We all know that the worst thing in the world today is the racist-sexist-homophobe white supremacist next door. But maybe there is something worse.

See, in Britland today the educated-gentry lefties have invented a new pejorative: "Gammon."

What in the world is "gammon," you ask? I will tell you. Here is Brendan O'Neill at Spiked!

Mainly aimed at angry men of a certain age who are pro-Brexit and possibly a bit iffy about mass immigration, this fleshiest of epithets reduces people to lumps of meat. Pig meat, at that. It is the closest any side in our maddening culture war has got to likening human beings to animals.

Get it? Gammon is pig meat. Or, as the OED says "The ham or haunch of a swine." But it also means "the lashing of a bowsprit." And the game of backgammon. And in thieves' slang, to gain someone's attention while another is robbing him. And it also means "to talk (plausibly or persuasively)." Or, "to feign, pretend." Or "to stuff with ridiculous nonsense, to humbug, deceive, hoax."

When referring to working-class middle-aged white males that the educated graduate might encounter in a pub, the pejorative dramatizes the likelihood that the said "gammon" may get red in the face, like the actual pig-meat product available at your local butcher's. The pejorative was created back during the "Brexit Wars" about whether Britain should leave the European Union.

According to Brendan O'Neill, the pejorative is really a reflection of the confusion and disorientation that the graduate left experienced in Britain during and after the Brexit vote -- and indeed in the demolition of the "red wall" of working class Labour constituencies in the North of England in the 2019 British General Election.

It can't be that the policies of the educated gentry of the last century has created divisions and winners and losers, and indeed has victimized the very people that the left claims to represent.

I think that the current wokism, the cancel culture, the left-wing street thugs, the new pejoratives invented every day by our educated betters: all these things issue from the fact that the glorious certainties of the last century are crumbling.

And when the glorious certainties are crumbling the chaps who rode the wave -- we thought it would never end -- cannot believe what is happening.

It's not a problem for me, oh no. As a naive Kantian I believe that we cannot know things-in-themselves, that everything is a crude theory that papers over the cracks, and that one day there will be a minor earthquake and the cracks will reappear.

So I go through life wondering about what cherished assumption will get demolished tomorrow.

And I laugh at my lefty friends that think they have it all figured out. Not to their faces, of course.

And I hope that we can get to the next regime without too much of a butcher's bill.

But that's how politics and religion and science work. Part of it is an attempt to understand reality. Part of it is an attempt to convince ourselves that we have everything figured out and there is no need to change the benevolent and compassionate arrangements that so benefit us, the shimmering, glowing stars in the political firmament. And part of it is an attempt to imagine how much better left, the universe, and everything could be. If Only.

And part of it is a cowardly and base attempt to blame everything on some pathetic scapegoat. Like the "gammon" in the local pub.

What Do the Bidens Think They Are Doing on Ukraine, Taiwan?

I asked a military acquaintance about the Obama Iran Deal: did he have any information about what the Obamis thought they were doing, back in the days Before Trump. He came up with some notions, but nothing that really stepped inside their thinking.

So what do the Bidens and the Europeans think they are achieving by normalizing relations with Iran? Especially when it seems like the whole of the Sunni world is making peace with Israel.

Now Victor Davis Hanson is worrying about mixed signals and confusion from the Biden administration on the Russians massing on the border of Ukraine and China invading the airspace over Taiwan. Are they going to get us into a war?

Do they even know what they are doing?

And, by the way, do we really want to Do Anything about Ukraine and Taiwan?

Put it this way. The Global Threat if communism is over. But Russia certainly wants to secure it's non-Arctic access to the sea. And just generally remind everyone that they are the big dogs in the region.

I'm sure that China has a similar agenda, to end the 200 years of humiliation and restore the Han people to their rightful place as the boss of East Asia.

Ok, but then what?

I'd say that it wouldn't hurt to have Russia embroiled with their neighbors, and it wouldn't hurt to have China riling up its non-Han neighbors from South Korea to Japan to the Philippines to Vietnam.

That's because I think that the world is now in a post-imperial age. It doesn't make any sense to have an empire. The Brits figured that out over half a century ago, after more than a century of knowing that "these chaps don't like us" in India; we Yanks are in the middle of figuring it out, as in: why are we paying to defend Europe? From what?

Problem is, of course, that everyone in the political arena believes in the importance of political power. It must be important, right? Because if it weren't then why are you politicians politely listening to the dumb voters just so they'll reelect you, or think you are a great leader saving them from some existential peril. Why are you wasting your lives being "some damn politician?"

Yes, politicians, why are you wasting your lives trying to pretend that there is some existential peril out there, from climate change to systemic racism to anti-Asian hate to the Russia threat to the China threat? The world would like to know.

See, the way I look at it, all these emergencies and existential perils and hates and oppressions come down to one thing: you guys get to spend more of my money on your power trips.

And I don't see any percentage in any of that for me. And that's how politics works, right? The politician gotta pay off the rubes for their support.

Yes, Young Liberal Women Have Mental Health Issues. But...

All of us racist sexist homophobes are having a grand old time with the latest news -- reported by Instapundit -- that "Over 50% Of Liberal, White Women Under 30 Have A Mental Health Issue." Akshully the article's text puts it slightly differently, and in the interests of truth, justice, and the American Way, the result comes from people answering a poll, whose question was:

"Has a doctor or other health care provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?"

So, 56.3% of liberal white women aged 18-29 answered "yes" and 33.6% of liberal white men answered "yes." For white conservatives the numbers are 27.3% and 16.3%. The numbers go down as whites get older.

But do you see a rather important point? It is not "woman have mental health issues" but women reporting that a doctor told them they had a problem.

I think that we should take all this with a grain of salt. First of all, mental health treatment is what we might call a "cure of the soul," a job that was performed in the old days by priests and ministers. You would expect that secular people like liberals would seek "cure of the soul" from a mental health professional rather than a minister. Second is that no doctor or other heath professional would tell someone that they have a mental health problem unless their patient "signaled" to them that they would accept such a recommendation. I find, on the rare cases that I interact with the health care system, that the medical practitioner in question is keenly interested in knowing what you want to hear.

The other thing is the "women in the public square" issue that I keep an eye on. It comes from German sociologist Georg Simmel who wrote, over a century ago, that women were coming into the public square, due to various trends, and that we could expect that they would change the public square "to suit a more feminine sensibility."

I say that women do not like the male-created public square, which is a domesticated version of male fisticuffs. Women don't confront each other; they just don't.

Women also, you may have noticed, find "stress" to be a problem. For men, the whole point of "stress" is whether you are man enough to deal with it.

So I would say that educated women today have embarked on a life that is not well adapted to "a feminine sensibility." And I mean everything from consecutive "sexual relationships" to living together before marriage to abortion to combining career and family to divorce to managing finances. In my view, all of these aspects of a modern woman's life are experienced as "stressful" and an unjust imposition.

As I say, "women expect to be protected." What does that mean? It means that no woman can successfully run a household and raise kids and keep everyone healthy -- in other words create the next generation -- unless she is protected from the physical vicissitudes of life. And I say this not in a patronizing way, but as a definition of reality.

And when Simmel talks about adapting the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility" I interpret that as everything that women are trying to do in the public square from "safetyism" to "microaggressions" to sanctioning students in college that raise controversial questions.

This, in my view, goes right back to hunter-gatherers. If a male hunter-gatherer gets into a row with his band-mates, do you know what he does? He quits the band and joins another.

What! And you thought that tribes were tribes and ne'er the twain shall meet! Wrong! Tribes were invented later.

But here is what I read into that. If you are a woman in a hunter-gatherer band and you don't get on with the other women, then you will literally descend into hell. The other women will shun you and name and shame you and your life will be a perfect hell. And leaving the band for another was not an option, I suspect.

The whole culture of women not confronting each other, but complaining about each other behind their backs in conversations about "I can't believe she said that" is  all about the situation of women since time immemorial: that they have to make their life within the community that they were born into or were married into. It means that women have to get along with the other women.

To expect women to suddenly adapt to a more male culture of open outcry and verbal fisticuffs is essentially demanding that they drop the culture that human females have practiced since time immemorial.

And most women will find the "stress" of that to be intolerable. And blame the patriarchy. And encourage their doctor to recommend that they seek care from a mental health professional.

Some Things I Don't Get

I don't get why we -- and the Europeans -- are holding the hands of the Iran regime. To do what? To put off its acquisition of nuclear weapons by a couple of years? To help it get more money for its military adventures in southern Arabia and in Syria and Lebanon? What's the point of that?

Is there something I am missing? I've had my antennae out for a while, hoping to catch a careless word from one of the actors that will tell me what is going on.

Otherwise, I suspect that we will eventually discover that the whole thing was a cluster you-know-what. That it goes back to some action made back in the 1970s. Maybe it even goes back to the left's opposition to the Shah and his notorious SAVAK secret police? Or something the Carter administration thought it was doing in the months before the mullah regime attacked the US embassy in 1979?

I don't get why the Democrats are still advocating big-time immigration. I understand the notion of "replacement" of the ordinary white American people with Democrat-voting immigrants. I understand the lordly notion of being above nationalism and racism. But surely, our Democratic friends must care a little about the lower wages that must inevitably paid to native-born Americans, particularly black Americans, if immigration numbers continue. And there is the question of what happens, a decade or two down the road. I recall reading a few years ago that the Tony Blair government of 1997 opted for increased immigration to teach the Tories a lesson, to stick 'em in the ribs. Really?

I don't understand why we are getting involved in Ukraine vs. Russia. I can see the idea of helping the little guy against the big bully Russia. But really, what do we know about the whole mixture of eastern Europe, from the Baltics to Belarus to Ukraine? Not to mention Romania, Bulgaria, the various fragments of Yugoslavia. I just think that the potential for doing something really stupid is really high. And I don't have much confidence that our noble and worthy foreign policy experts have a clue.

And then there are BLM and Antifa. I wonder if our worthy rulers really know what they are doing by turning a blind eye to the rioting and looting of their street thugs. The whole point of city policing and due process is that, in the famous icon, justice is blind. I understand the position of the activists: their religion requires that they find and advocate for helpless victims. But I have this idea that the adults in the room, the Democratic Party leaders, understand that street action should be kept down to a dull roar.

But that's not the message we are getting from the Democratic Party leaders. What does that mean? Does it mean that the activists run the show, and that the wise heads in the corridors of power know that they must accommodate the activists?

I don't understand why the Democrats, with a 51-49 Congress, are pushing the pedal to the metal and imposing their agenda on the nation as though they had 70-30 support -- and then lying about what they are about, saying that their Green New Deal policies and loot-and-plunder for every liberal activist group is "public health" and "infrastructure." And then pushing gigantic multi-trillion spending bills.

I just don't get what the bigger picture is supposed to be. And I don't know what the strategy is for the inevitable inflation and economic cock-up. Of course, it is easy to say "modern monetary theory" and say that deficits don't matter for "governments that control their own currency." That's what Keynesianism was all about. Keynesianism, as I recall, came a cropper in the "stagflation" of the 1970s. And so did a lot of Americans.

Of course, this could all be explained by the notion that our rulers are idiots and can't think beyond the current crisis, and do whatever it takes to win the next election, and spend whatever they can get away with. This week.

But I'd rather not think that. So I'm still confused. I just don't get it.