A Marxist Misinterprets History

I first read Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Origin of Capitalism: a longer view back at the end of 2015 and wrote my review here. But then a month or two I picked it up again. Because.

It's an odd thing, to read a book by a Marxist, because Marxists live in a different universe, and they use the language of Newtonian mechanics -- moments, laws of motion -- that Marx used when he wasn't being all materialist with Feuerbach. Oh and "self-reproduction," presumably as in Darwin.

Oddly, when I reread the book I seemed to have no recollection of reading it previously!

Wood's narrative is basically this. Back in the old days, humans lived through "non-market access to the means of self-reproduction, and specifically land." Thus, "traditional ruling classes... passively appropriat[ed] rents from dependent peasants." But then, with the "improvement" movement, in which landowners started to want to make money on their land, people became proletarianized, they became "market-dependent;" they became wage slaves. Today people live under a "market imperative."

But, Wood notices, the English aristocracy was "demilitarized" before the lords in the rest of Europe.

I can see why I reread The Origin of Capitalism with new eyes. Because, you see, in the intervening years I have read about what this demilitarizing of the aristocracy was all about, and why it led to "improvement."

See, back in the day the feudal lords were basically mini kings and ruled their estates as royalty. And the peasants that tilled the land on their estates were not just there for the convenience of "passively appropriating" rents. The peasants, or at least the male ones, were there to constitute the army of the lord, what the notables in Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays call "our powers."

But when Henry VIII disarmed the nobles he effectively dissolved their mini-kingdoms and their mini-armies. See what that means? Back in the day, the idle peasants were useful as cannon- or at least arrow-fodder. Not any more. So that's when the lords started kicking their peasants off the land and enclosing the common land, and trying to make money with "improvement." As Marx put it:

A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart well says, “everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.” ...

Well, they were useless now, but not back in the day when they were part of the feudal host, available to march to the battlefield. Then they were useful as soldiers, as part of the lord's power projection.

Wood talks about how the proletarians live today under the "market imperative." So they do. So we all do. They must prostitute themselves in the labor market and work for wages -- and the wages are determined by the market, the ebb and flow of supply and demand for human labor, and not justice. 

Yes, but back in the day, "traditional ruling classes... passively appropriat[ed] rents from dependent peasants." So they did. And they allowed to peasants to scratch around and utilize "common lands" and the peasants worked out a communal approach to share the use of the common lands. And everything worked out for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Until the day that the lord needed the peasant and his billhook in the lord's army. Jolly good fun, unless the lord lost the battle and some other lord came to lord it over the peasant, and maybe loot the lord's land and kill the peasants and sell the peasants' wives into slavery.

Of course, in our day the peasant is not completely living under the "market imperative." He or she can subordinate himself or herself to the ruling class and get passively appropriated benefits from his or her loving lord. Call if living under a "political imperative."

The last word in Wood's book is telling.

The hope of achieving a humane, truly democratic, and ecologically sustainable capitalism is becoming transparently unrealistic. But although the alternative is unavailable, there remains the real alternative of socialism.

 Do you see the utter head-in-the-sand determination not to see what is right in front of you?

For I would say this:

Two steps forward and one step back, the economy of the free market has performed the miracle of increasing the real income of humans by 30 times in 200 years. Meanwhile all experiments in socialism have been criminal, murderous failures. What is wrong with people that can still conjure up a vision of "the real alternative of socialism" despite the evidence of 100 million dead in 100 years?

 Socialism is not a "real alternative." It is not sitting there, waiting to be tried. Instead it is a proven failure. Because every time it has been tried it has been a failure. No, not just a failure, but a bloody failure, a starving failure. And it's about time that lefties admit it.

Narratives: 1776 Commission, McClanahan, Gottfried, and Anton

There's been a little spat in intellectual conservative circles lately. I caught up with it by reading Michael Anton, who was criticizing Paul Gottfried who was criticizing Brion McClanahan who was criticizing Trump's 1776 Commission report. Or the other way around.

McClanahan didn't like the 1776 Commission report because it advanced the "proposition nation" notion that "all men are created equal" that was advanced by President Lincoln. The Founders, he writes, were not particularly interested in phrases from the Declaration of Independence. 

In McClanahan's view the Americans involved in the Founding of the Constitution were interested in state sovereignty and that "the people had a right to “alter or abolish” either a state government or a central government." Nor was anyone that interested in the "proposition" that "all men are created equal" in the 1850s.

The question is whether this is an original sin or not, whether the Founders should have known that slavery was the great sin of the ages etc., and whether the Founders are to be eternally banished for not endorsing the modern agenda of rights including votes for blacks and for women.

I think all this misses the point. First of all, back at the Founding, the various actors were politicians, playing both ends against the middle as politicians did then and do now. A lot of people wanted a Constitution, and so they looked to what would get a Constitution written and ratified.

By the 1850s there were different issues moving men's minds, and so the argument was different. And in the Civil War and afterwards the various participants were creating narratives to justify the war and the regime that came after it. 

The ruling class of the Founders was pretty well a ruling class of landowners, and in the South those landowners were slave-owners.

By the time of the Civil War a new ruling class was arising in the North, around the new economy of industry and steam transportation.

Our present ruling class is an educated upper class of credentialed bureaucratic careerists, and they naturally think that the old landowners and the industrialists that replaced them were moral cretins compared to themselves. So any pejoratives or insults that diminish the guys of the old era are just part of the narrative that extols the present rulers as moral and political giants.

In our time we are faced with easing our present corrupt ruling class out of its sinecures and power positions and encouraging them to get a real job. One of the things we need to do is create a new narrative that damns the present rulers into the moral basement as people who have created "human rubble" with their failed government programs and created a new lower class where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. That's how you play politics; you try to put your adversaries on the back foot.

In other words, one of the things we need to do is to create moral fairy tales that teach the young'uns to hate the moral turpitude of the present rulers just as the present rulers regale the kiddies with their moral fairy tales about racism and white supremacy as Literally Hitler.

I have a fantasy that helps me get up in the morning. It is that we are transitioning to a new era in which the ordinary Commoners that obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules, are reaching critical mass and are beginning to demand that the rulers take account of their needs and their right to live their lives according to their beliefs.

My fantasy is that if you want to understand Brexit in Britain, and Trump in America, and the movement of the white working class in Britain from the Labour Party to the Conservative Party and the movement of the white working class in the US from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, then you need to understand the phenomenon of the rise of the middle-class Commoner.

There's a good piece by Melanie Phillips on Substack about the recent by-election in Britain where a solid Labour constituency just elected a Conservative woman to Parliament. She points out that in Britain the "working class people are deeply attached to their country as the place where they know they share basic values, traditions and assumptions[.]" But the Labour Party

had become instead the party  of the educated metropolitan upper middle-class, which was committed to liberal universalism and trans-national “human rights” law and up-ending basic values such as the traditional family or even what is to be a man or a woman — and which denounced people like themselves as racist and privileged, simply on the basis that they had a white skin. It was no longer the Labour party; it had become the North London Dinner Party.

Sound familiar? That's exactly what we have here in the US. We are ruled by an urbanist educated elite that doesn't get that the world is full of people that are not like them, and have a right to live their lives just as much as educated liberal activists.

My view is that all the talk about the Founders and racism and equality misses the point; they are old narratives heading for the scrap-heap of history.

What we need is a narrative that glorifies ordinary middle-class Commoners living ordinary lives. And I believe that the narrative has to start with the proposition that you can take your pejoratives, your accusations of racism and white supremacy and patriarchy and put them where the sun don't shine.

Are We Heading to Civil War II?

I just finished up two books prophesying bad times ahead. The first was The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe. It advances a cyclical theory of history using Jungian archetypes; there are "saeculum" cycles -- lasting about 80-100 years -- and then there are generational cycles with Prophets, Nomads, Heroes, Artists. Here's La Wik.

The second was Ages of Discord by Peter Turchin, which proposes a secular cycle based on demographic data like GDP and immigration and intra-elite competition. Peter Turchin was born a Russian; he came to the US in 1977 when his father was exiled from the Soviet Union. Here's La Wik.

Both of the books propose that we are heading for a crisis that may well involve a civil war in America.

I'd say that The Fourth Turning reduces to the notion that we all tend to turn to squabbling in times of peace, leading to a crisis. And then in the crisis we all have to unite and pull together. In the aftermath of the crisis successfully concluded we all sit around for a while telling each other how nice we are. Until people start to squabble again. Right now we are headed for a crisis, because it is 75 years since we were united by the experience of World War II.

Ages of Discord proposes that people get angry in tough times. Thus, for the ordinary commoner, things get tough when real incomes are flat or going down; so people get angry. For the average elitist things get tough when there are too many people competing for elite jobs like politician and doctor and lawyer; that's what makes elitists angry with each other. Right now everyone is angry. Commoners are angry because incomes have been flat ever since 1970; Elitists are angry because the explosion in college education means an explosion in people that think the world should listen to them.

I am reminded of radical Randolph Bourne's maxim that "war is the health of the state." People come together in a crisis. In other words, a war. Another way of saying this is that politicians are always looking to fight some frightful foreign foe. They instinctively know that their dream of leading their people depends on there being a threat to overcome. Alternatively, if there isn't a foreign foe, then you lead your partisan faction to battle against the other partisan faction who, as everyone knows, are monsters.

Incidentally, this is the meaning of the two front war proposed by the Biden Administration. The first is fighting climate change, a very cunning way of mobilizing the whole country as if to war. The second is fighting "systemic racism," fighting for "oppressed peoples" against the "white oppressors."

And again, this reflects the truth about government, that its only warrant is to protect us against enemies, foreign and domestic. Real or imaginary.

Let us analyze things using Turchin's "Well-Being Index" and "Political Stress Index." Back in 1820, the "Era of Good Feelings," ordinary Americans felt pretty good. The Well-Being Index was high, and American had united during the Indian Wars. And there was no real conflict in the elites.

But then began the great wave of 19th century immigration, and wages suffered. Then began the rise of the North with manufacturing and railways challenging the dominance of the South's cotton economy. So, by the 1850s the commoners were pissed off by the Irish and German immigrants pulling wages down and the Northern industrialists were pissed off by the lordly South that had dominated politics and government since the Founding. It was time to teach the other guys a lesson.

And everyone stayed pissed off until after World War I. But then Congress wrote a bill to sharply curb immigration and real wages started to rise. The crisis of the Great Depression and World War II inspired everyone to pull together under the brilliant leadership of FDR and Jobs for progressive intellectuals. By the end of WWII we were all united, and in the 1950s and 1960s commoners benefited from a surge in real incomes.

But all good things must come to an end. In 1965 Congress passed a new immigration bill that sharply increased immigration. And real wages stopped climbing in the 1970s. The sharp increase in college education meant that more would-be elite people were competing for doctor jobs and lawyer jobs and political jobs.

So now you come to today, where the commoners are rebelling against half a century of no real increase in income, and the cognitive elite is pushing back against the nerve -- the noive -- of the commoners critiquing their wisdom.

I have two ideas. First, let's limit immigration (hey, I'm an immigrant, but I got mine). Then maybe the incomes of ordinary Americans will start to rise. Second, let's replace college with technical schools and apprenticeships and internships for most Americans. Then there won't be so many people educated for political leadership competing for the same glorious prizes. And then everyone will live happily ever after.

Could it work? Maybe.

But first, I suspect, our glorious elite will have to screw up big time -- like they did in the 1970s. Politics does not proceed on the well-tended garden of good ideas, but on the bonfire of bad ideas.

I just hope we don't have a civil war.

Implementing a National Liberation from Lefty Colonialism

Over at American Greatness Stephen Balch comes up with a good idea. He says that we the people are presently suffering under a colonialist regime, and we need a national liberation project.

To be sure, the colonial analogy is far from perfect. Western colonies often gained from being colonized; for us, it’s a dead loss. But there are enough similarities to help us understand the strategies our elites are following, how they could be better resisted, and why, as with most colonialists of the past, they’re likely to fail.

If we are to neutralize our colonialist ruling class we need not just "mass activism" but also "mass education and inspirational ceremony," Balch writes. Yes. Ceremony.

We should also organize mass observances of traditional and newly created holidays, commemorating events like the Yorktown surrender and D–Day, or solemnly memorializing the victims of totalitarianism... so let’s consider the creation of a counter-calendar to our elite’s parade of apologetic commemorations, filled with holidays reinforcing national consciousness and pride.

Brilliant idea. Actually, when you are talking ceremony, you are talking religion, the celebration of the sacred. And we need to re-sacralize our national myth, to make holy again the sacred history of the American Founding. I say, for instance, that we should counter the lie of the 1619 Project with my "1584 Project." In case you didn't know, 1584 was the year that the first shipload of White Trash arrived in North America.

Yes, let's celebrate the "waste population" of Europe that was cast upon these shores by the hoity-toity ruling classes of Old Europe. Instead of sneering at white trash and rednecks.

This is all part of the downstream notion: politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

When we are not celebrating America in religious ceremonies, like President Trump at Mount Rushmore, I think we should push back on all the lefty pejoratives.

Racism? There's nothing more racist in today's America than Black Lives Matter. Period.

Sexism? There's nothing more sexist in America than the old tired movement of feminism. Which has done what, exactly, for women lately?

Violence? There's nothing more violent in America today than a lefty Antifa "mostly peaceful protest."

Homophobia? What could be more oppressive than the brutal cancel culture promoted by Big Gay? Imagine what would happen to you if you got up at a Critical Race Theory session at work and said: "you know, I think we should teach children that, while gay is all very well, you will probably live a better life if you act hetero, and marry and have children.

Slavery? Apart from the fact that the biggest slave states in all history were founded in the 20th century in Russia and in China there are other questions to consider. What do you call a regime that forces its people to go about wearing masks? What do you call a regime that taxes over a third of its peoples' income? What do you call a ruling class that metaphorically flogs any impertinence from the plebs with cancel culture? What do you call a regime that drafts the whole nation into a Green New Deal to "save the planet?"

Hate? I'll tell you what. Every politician, at every level of government, is in the hate business. That's because, stripped of all its fol-der-ol, politics is about two things: foreign war and civil war. In the foreign war the politicians teach the people to hate the horrible Frogs, or Krauts, or Nazis, or Commies. In civil war the politicians teach the people to hate the N-word, the white trash, the white oppressors, the white supremacists, the robber barons, malefactors of great wealth, the conspiracy theorists, the armed insurrectionists. Etcetera.

Colonization? There is nothing more colonizing that the rulers and the swells telling ordinary American commoners that they are subhuman white oppressors or deplorables or bitter clingers or white racists. There is nothing more colonizing that the top-down administrative state. There is nothing more colonizing than forcing workers and students to attend diversity training or critical race theory sessions. Colonization of the Curriculum? Yeah. Starting with the uber-colonizing 1619 Project.

We all of us need to be ready with the comeback. Racist? I'll tell you what's racist: BLM. Hate? If you are in politics, you are in the hate business. White Oppressor? Yeah, and I could be fired tomorrow for saying the wrong word -- in private. There's always the Mary McCarthy line. Everything the left says is a lie: including "and" and "the."

Yup. First we celebrate America in every way possible. Second, we push back whenever the left uses a pejorative. Onwards and Upwards

Transportation and the Lower Classes

For years I've been quoting the Duke of Wellington and his opposition to railways. My quote has been that "railways would encourage the poor to travel around needlessly."

Because there is nothing worse than ordinary people traveling around needlessly and distracting from the vital importance of important people traveling around importantly on important affairs of state.

But I could never find the original quote, and I worried that maybe I was imagining things. Now I understand why. Because in a piece by Will Lloyd at UnHerd.com about the decline and fall of the English eccentric there was mentioned a Col. Sibthorp who, as soon as railways were invented,

began a fruitless war against the railway, complaining that they “encourage the working class to move about.”

Only, when I Googled the quote, I found Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know by Karl Shaw, and he writes something a bit different.

[Sibthorp] particularly hated railways -- 'the Steam Humbug' -- which he predicted would bring an array of disasters ranging from moral ruin to wholesale slaughter. Sibthorp enjoyed the support of at least one important supporter, the old Duke of Wellington, who was also suspicious of railways because "they encourage lower classes to move about."

Hmm. It just shows how things can get all bollixed up. Bit of a cock-up on the quoting front.

The funny thing is that, today, the Col. Sibthorps and Dukes of Wellington worrying about "moral ruin to wholesale slaughter" are our liberal friends that want to keep the deplorables in high-speed trains and light rail and TGVs and not in their evil SUVs on the nation's highways where they are emitting CO2 and pitching the Earth into runaway global warming and the end of the world as we know it.

Never mind that the cities with mass transit -- along with women and minorities -- were hardest hit by the COVID epidemic.

Here's an interesting factoid. In the book North and South by Mrs. Gaskell, about the textile industry in the north of England in the 19th century, the climactic scene between hero Mr. Thornton and heroine Margaret Hale takes place in a house in London. But in the 2004 BBC TV serial they meet at a train station somewhere between London and Milton where their trains, going in opposite directions, have stopped. So, back in the day, Mrs. Gaskell never thought of a climactic train rendezvous. But in the modern BBC adaption brought to you by North London luvvies, what could be more romantic!

What appeared to be a horror back in the nineteenth century to the high and mighty seems like a walk in the park to today's haughty ruling class. And don't get me started on the eevils of unrestricted airplane travel! Why, I was to Denver last weekend and, let me tell you, the hoi-polloi are back to traveling around needlessly. The concourses are full, the planes are full, and the carbon emissions are outtasight.

Just wait till the cruise industry starts up again. The Horror!

Earth to liberals. Humans are a nomadic species. We like to go walkabout. You liberal swells "fly private" from one vitally important global conclave to another to plan your next "Reset." We lesser mortals fly the commercial airlines, because that's all we can afford. And the average deplorable drives his F-350 crew-cab truck.

Now go back to your regularly scheduled activism and don't let me hear from you again until next time.

Meanwhile, I'll tell you what I think. I think that planes, trains, and automobiles are the best thing since sliced bread. There is nothing I like better than driving north on I-5 and looking at all the folk driving who-knows-where in their personal transportation, unless it is walking down an airport concourse looking at all the average folks waiting for their flight. As far as I am concerned there is a clear penumbra and emanation in the US Constitution that makes personal transportation a basic human right, and I like to see American citizens exercising that right.

And, frankly, I can't wait for the chance to fly to Mars. On vacation.

The Evil Spirits Will Always Be With Us

Even though David Hume disentangled factual truth and moral truth, says Zman, people still conflate them. And then a day later he notes how important simple belief is to humans.

Mysterious forces like privilege and institutional racism drive the public debate. These are not things that can be seen or even described. They just exist. Lives are being changed and public policy is being written on the assumption that these things exist. 

You mean the #WeBelieve signs?

I think it is important to understand that we humans are everything we ever were. We are the interactions at the molecular level, at the DNA level, at the distributed body level where cells are built and destroyed, nutrients are transported across the body, babies grow into adults, adults reproduce, and then grow old and die. We are an unknown complication of instincts, of semi-conscious emotions, of unconscious drives, of rational thought and of creative innovations.

Zman tells us about the importance of writing things down.

People who think the natural phenomena of the world are controlled by spirits are going to live different lives than people who work from a fixed set of religious doctrines. The spirit gods are fickle and unpredictable, while the book of rules is less so. The unpredictability of the holy book is due to the people holding it, not the book itself. It creates a standard of truth that everyone can understand and, more important, uphold collectively.

But, I would say, a wise book religion keeps a continuity with the spirit gods. That is why Catholicism had saints and miracles. And that is why the Reformation and Puritanism, with their iconoclasm and focus on the book to the exclusion of everything else, are a problem. Because here we are, 500 years later, and nice liberal ladies say: We Believe in Black Lives Matter and Love is Love -- not because of a book, but because.

I say that leftism is a Great Reaction, a lurch back to the primitive, where socialism is slavery, and the welfare state is feudalism, and reparations is revenge. In part, I think this is a reaction against too much book religion and book ideology.

But I claim to understand why this is so. People cannot live by bourgeois rationalism and a dichotomy between factual truth and moral truth alone. In fact, tons of people just don't get the religion of the book and fixed rational rules. Because the only thing they know is the fickle world of the evil spirit that doesn't like them.

Our glorious elite, that lives on its faith in creativity -- not just in making better scientific theories but that humans can "fundamentally transform" society -- likes to regard the simple bourgeois culture of responsibility as backward and shameful. It regards the middle class that lives by the truth of people following the rules, getting a job, and obeying the laws as cramped and oppressive. Whatabout the people that can't get a job? Because disability or racism? Whatabout them, deplorables?

That is why my theory of the Good Life recognizes all three levels of human experience, and is the wisest and the deepest and the truest thing out there. It recognizes that there are millions of people that still live in a world beset by evil spirits. And by the way, what do you call Hitler/Stalin/Mao? If those guys weren't animated by Evil Spirits my name isn't Chris Chantrill.

My theory of the Good Life believes that the great broad middle class lives by rules and responsibility. But that the middle class often can't understand the folks that believe the world is driven by the Evil Corporations, or whatever evil spirits best fit their sufferings and setbacks.

My theory of the Good Life believes that educated people live in the faith of creativity, that we have the power to discover new knowledge and that the highest and best life is to discover something new, whether a scientific theory, a new technology, a new social program, a way to transform the world towards heaven on earth.

What is missing in this world is perfect people that recognize that there are people in the world that don't think like them, people that believe that other people have a right to live in their own way, and a right not to be bullied and harassed and canceled into the right ways -- which mysteriously happen to be just what the perfect people believe.

I say that the German Turn that begins with Kant's dictum that we cannot know things-in-themselves but only appearances, is the way out of the box, because it says that we humans cannot know the minds of the evil spirits, cannot know for sure that our science really describes the world as it is, cannot know for sure that our creative achievements are real rather than imaginary.

In other words, all of us, whether a certified genius, an ordinary schmuck, or a delta-minus moron, are stumbling in the dark. We live our lives in the faith that what we believe, what we are doing, what we dream of doing, is the right thing.

But what if we are wrong?

I would say that to ask that question is the beginning of wisdom. And never mind about the answer.

The Gender Gap in Free Speech

A piece in Psychology Today has recently reported that men are more pro-free-speech than women (from Steve Sailer).

In a 2019 study, 59% of women said protecting free speech was less important than promoting an inclusive society, while 71% of men felt opposite.

But young men have the same attitude as adult women. And a study of online speech found that "women are more censorious than men."

Which all fits in with my "women in the public square" notion that women do not like the open-outcry culture of the public square, because open outcry is a guy thing. The culture of the community of women is one that creates an organic, subconscious pressure towards outward conformity and being outwardly "nice." It is appropriate for domestic society and neighborhoods, where the needs are for people to get on with each other, help each other, and keep the kids alive.

There is, in my view, a need in domestic society to avoid innovation and conflict, because the whole point is to have babies and keep the kids alive.

Or, to argue from the opposite position, in the marketplace the majority of innovations and creative endeavors end in failure. Which is fine in the marketplace as we have seen over the past 200 years of the Great Enrichment.

But, of course, innovation in making babies and raising children is personal. It is no good for me to make innovative changes in raising my children or growing my food, knowing that in the aggregate the innovations will result in a better, more prosperous society. Because if innovation hurts my kid, then that is final.

So that explains why women are more risk-averse than men, why women are more likely to be censorious cancelers in corporate world, why women are less likely to be involved in corporate startups.

It explains why women are more pro-mask in the current COVID dispensation, and more likely to follow the advice of experts. Women are coded for these things.

Whereas men are coded to take stupid risks, because "men are expendable."

My prediction is still that women are going to retreat from the public square and occupy positions and occupations with less risk and that reward conformity. That probably means that they will occupy most of the positions in government and corporate bureaucracy, because those positions are coded for following the established procedure and not deviating from approved norms.

But young men have a problem. If, as the "experts agree," young men are low on free speech approval, it means that they are ill-equipped for male adult life. For one thing, women are better coded for "go along to get along" lives and occupations, so if men choose low-risk occupations they are likely to find themselves outperformed and out-judged by the women around them.

It is interesting to note from another piece, that East Germany was perhaps the most censorious society in history.

If someone looked like he might challenge the Communist Party’s legitimacy or control, the Stasi systematically destroyed his life. They used blackmail, social shame, threats, and torture. Careers, reputations, relationships, and lives were exploded to destabilize and delegitimize a critic. 

The trouble is that this sort of top-down ideological control, while benefiting the ruling class in the short term, does enormous damage to the body politic -- including the ruling class -- in the long term. 

If there is one thing we should have learned from the history of the West in the last several hundred years it is that today's rebel is tomorrow's CEO, and that a healthy society permits a vigorous circulation among the elite -- the political elite, the cultural elite, the economic elite.

But that is exactly what women have seldom done, and the current political and cultural elite are trying to prevent. Because they are the good guys, the virtuous guys, and people that don't agree with them are evil and ought to be suppressed.

There is no doubt it will all end in tears, because life, the universe, and everything is a constant renewal that is achieved by the death of the old. The truth of the women's culture of conformity is that you need to keep things on hold to get the kids out of the nest. The truth of the men's culture of competition is that you need to innovate so the next generation will have a world to live in.

How do you balance the two? I have no idea, except to honor women's need for a quiet place and men's need to shake things up.