Sunday, October 14, 2018

Politics Made Simple

Are you confused by politics and the incessant squabbles between the left and the right? Mystified why politicians bother to speak at all in public when everyone expects them to be constantly lying? And why all the political deception in the first place? Now you can end your confusion with this handy primer.

Liberals and Conservatives, Victims and Bullies

Virtually every political disagreement boils down to a difference in how people answer the following question: Whom do you side with in a conflict, the underdog or the bully? Do you care about the happiness of strangers? Feel bad when they’re mistreated and wish there was some way to help them? In that case, congratulations: you’re a sentimental leftist!

Or do you think those who suffer deserve it because they’re too weak or lazy or stupid to avoid the abuse? Do you find yourself cheering for the aggressor and wondering why the bully got all soft and stopped pummeling the nerd just because the nerd started crying? Well, then, welcome to the club and hail Satan: you’re a right-winger!

The political continuum is divided along these main lines, between those on the left and those on the right or roughly between liberals and conservatives. However, politically-active people have a vested interest in obfuscating what politics is all about, as I’ll soon explain, so the conventional labels are fraught with misleading connotations. Thus, to clarify the situation, we should understand that “liberal” refers to a sissy, a groveling or resentful loser, while “conservative” means someone who surrenders the burdens of humanity to revert to a state of animal selfishness.

If you’re relatively weak, either physically or mentally, you feel bad when other weak people suffer, because you can easily imagine what it would be like to be in their shoes. And weak people suffer because the world is impersonal and unfair, and so weaklings are ground up and spit out of nature’s maw. If you were strong rather than weak, you’d be tempted to abuse your advantage and become the bully, in which case you’d stop identifying with victims.

If instead you are a bully, you feel sickened by weakness, because you’re secretly afraid to admit that even if you’re strong and callous enough to dominate other people, you’re an ant in the larger scheme of things. So you refuse to identify with losers. But you can’t afford to bond with fellow bullies, because they could turn on you at any moment. You’re in competition with your fellow aggressors, so you find yourself all alone with your capacity for empathy atrophied.

Weaklings team up to fight brutality and injustice by forming sanctified organizations called “governments.” The purpose of a government is to help those who can’t help themselves because they’re busy being clowned and dominated by an unfair world. Properly speaking, then, all governments are left-leaning or socialistic.

The conservative form of “government” is more properly called a tyranny. In political and economic jargon, a tyranny is a monarchy, a dictatorship, or a monopoly. Conservative government licenses not the responsible managing of affairs of respected citizens, but the prerogatives of a tyrannical few who dominate the many. The purpose of tyranny is to let nature take its course, to make people behave like animals by imposing animal law on those who could do better. The animal behaviour in question is the tendency to form power hierarchies dominated by the strongest, most psychopathic members of the group, that being nature’s most stable way of organizing social populations throughout what is aptly called the animal kingdom. In a conservative society, the weak majority is ruled over by a strong, mentally deranged (hubristic) minority as in Saudi Arabia, Nazi Germany, plutocratic America or any ancient kingdom or empire, and instead of being allowed to form unions or representative governments to alleviate its misfortune, the majority is trained to accept its lowly station and to defer to the mad pursuit of power. Whether it’s the divine right of kings or social Darwinism or the neoliberal fusion of corporate salesmanship and government, the tyrants spread myths to make excuses for the inhumanity of nature for which they stand.

The “traditions” the conservative wishes to preserve aren’t testaments to human wisdom or reactions to natural injustice, since those would be progressive and thus the opposite of conservative. Instead, the traditions that matter to conservative practice (leaving aside the conservative’s empty propaganda) are one and all pretexts for acting like animals. Recall that in nature there are frequent struggles to survive and only rare opportunities for benevolent cooperation, because the world is godless. If you cooperate you risk being betrayed, whereas if you think selfishly, the genes will benefit from the resulting competition between would-be dominators, even if you should be bested in the ensuing conflict. The strongest, most ruthless creatures—called “predators”—rise to the top of the food chain, and the “conservative” is the fellow who’s just fine with that happening in “human” societies.

Femininity, Masculinity, and the History of Political Lies

Another way to understand the main political difference is to notice that liberalism is feminine whereas conservatism is masculine. These opposing sets of values are based on a divergence in the brain’s ways of thinking, which in turn evolved in our formative hunting-and-gathering period, called the Paleolithic or Stone Age. As explained in Iain McGilchrist’s book, The Master and his Emissary, and in Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet versus the Goddess, hunting and gathering require different skills. Prehistoric humans survived by dividing the labour between the sexes, which therefore acquired different hardwired specializations and predilections.

Women gathered berries, fruits, and herbs, thus acquiring the talent for holistic thinking, for surveying the context and passively waiting for the earth to yield its bounty. Women also looked after the infants and the home camp, because they’re biologically equipped to carry the infant to term, to give birth and to nurse the young, during which time they bond chemically with the offspring. Men made themselves useful by undertaking the adventure of hunting wild game and bringing back meat to camp. Men thus needed to specialize in planning step by step how to outsmart their prey.

Two ways of thinking thus developed which are present in every human brain, although men tend to be more masculine than women, and women more feminine than men. What’s called “femininity” is roughly equal to the left-wing attitude (although to right-brained thinking): both are about cooperating to solve problems in a fair, sustainable, inoffensive manner. Masculinity is the way of the hunter which requires hard-heartedness, cunning, and the flagrant imposition of one creature’s will to live at the expense of another’s. In short, masculinity is the celebration of predatorial and thus animal values, whereas femininity is progressive to the point of being posthuman in orientation.

What happened in the Neolithic Revolution some twelve thousand years ago was that humans settled down to farm, and so men found themselves out of a job. The hunting part of hunting-and-gathering wasn’t needed anymore, since people discovered ways of maintaining docile livestock to be slaughtered at will, and farming optimized women’s gathering process. For over three million years, men had evolved masculine traits and they couldn’t just lie down and receive the peace and progress of the Neolithic Revolution. To do so would have been emasculating. Men therefore turned their masculine energy inward. Men hunted each other, becoming proficient at war and political domination through tyrannies, otherwise known as conservative cultures or God-given kingdoms. Thus began the recorded human story which, to the consternation of women, is almost entirely the story of the male abuse of power and so is properly called history.”

Prehistoric masculinity encompassed the values and strategies of hunting, including the courage and honour of venturing into the unknown wilderness to track and struggle with the beast and to enrich the tribe with its carcass. That masculinity was fundamentally amoral—however men and women accommodated themselves to their specializations. The division of labour was driven by the evolutionary imperative to survive as animals thrown into the indifferent wilderness.

Modern—in the sense of Neolithic—masculinity is a further corruption of the original male function, the latter being part of nature’s genetic exploitation of our species for its inhuman pseudopurposeThe politics of behavioural modernity began with the masculine/conservative squandering of the victory of femininity that had occurred with the triumph of agriculture. Men ran wild in the civilizations that grew from the fruit of feminine labour. Farming supported population growth and the leisure to develop advanced technologies and flourishing cultures (arts and ideologies), and men adapted to their obsolescence by preserving a vestige of their prehistoric lifestyle. Instead of preying on wild animals, they devised and codified social hierarchies that dehumanized large segments of society, providing the most masculine minority of alpha males the chance to demonstrate their manliness by dominating the helpless masses (especially the slaves and women).

So whether you’re a man or a woman, if you’re a leftist, you think in a feminine, lily-livered manner, and if you’re conservative you’re masculine and thus an asshole.

More specifically, if you’re a feminine or liberal male, you have to lie to excuse your failure as a masculine man and so you embrace the myths of beta-male culture. You call for a large, functioning government to secure the welfare of the majority, while you implicitly understand that a large, democratic or technocratic government becomes dysfunctional, and you look forward to that dysfunction as an opportunity to empower yourself in an underhanded fashion. For example, you may look for loopholes in the unwieldy tax code or you’ll expect every democratic administration to corrupt itself by the end of its term, and you feel manly as you vote the bums out (even though as a mere beta male you’re the victim of this absurd, broken political system).

If you’re a feminine female, you have to lie to avoid going to war with masculine men and to justify your sexual attraction to predators. This lie is called “mainstream feminism,” which is part of the culture of political correctness. Unless they’re radical transhumanists, these women have to pretend that masculinity isn’t bankrupt, that human progress doesn’t consist in the complete domestication and eventual elimination of our species at the hands of the machines that are the ultimate inheritors of the world order created by feminine labour (by Neolithic, historical “progress”). Moreover, these women want to turn men into babies to give free rein to their mothering instincts, and so in recent decades in Canada, the United States, and parts of Europe, they’ve taken the lead in creating a liberal culture of overprotectiveness.

While beta males are ambivalent about their animal nature and so can seek power only dishonestly through underhanded, civilized schemes, in their professions and their function as law-abiding citizens, feminine women likewise are driven to lie to avoid reckoning with the absurdity and horror of human social relations. These women would empower themselves as mothers of the masses and tamers of human predators, using big governments to reinstitute the egalitarian sort of society that had prevailed out of necessity in the Paleolithic period. These schemes of feminine women are doomed to fail for two reasons. First, because liberal governments are inevitably infected with what Nietzsche called the natural will to power; specifically, governments are corrupted by the machinations of pseudo-civilized, psychopathic males, otherwise known as leaders in the private and public sectors. Second, because the heterosexual woman’s brain has evolved to prefer the psychopathic, predatory man, since that’s the man who succeeded in the hunt and in equipping the tribe with fur and iron-rich meat.

If you’re a masculine male, you have to lie, in turn, to avoid admitting that you’re behaving as the very sort of narrow-minded animal you long to hunt and kill for sport or nourishment. Thus, you dress up the evil and madness of your values and political policies and practices with all manner of dishonest theology and pseudoscience. God allegedly blesses the king’s right to rule over his subjects. The Church’s medieval empire is likewise blessed by God even though as far as can be discerned from the earliest Christian documents, Jesus, the founder of Christianity, was a feminine omega male who wanted out of all earthly endeavours. And American empire is blessed by a preposterous marriage between bastardized Christianity and economic Darwinism or “libertarianism.”

These macho males demand the shrinking of government to enable the bestialization of private life, as unrestrained capitalism or the “free market” exacerbates social inequalities, creating the dominance hierarchies that testify to nature’s victory over the human potential for godlike transcendence, and that gratify the corrupted ego of these predatory males as they’re nevertheless worshipped as idols of greed and ruthlessness. In short, these males have to pretend that oligarchy isn’t a betrayal of humanity on behalf of the animal kingdom we’ve supposedly left behind.

And if you’re a masculine (that is, a conservative) woman, you too are prone to lie about what you really want and how you actually behave. By voting for psychopathic males, for example, you provide cover for the bestial culture which men dominate. You thus betray womankind and your feminine instincts. To mitigate the cognitive dissonance, you subscribe to some lame theology that provides zero spiritual sustenance. You demonize foreigners and other races, but by playing that masculine game of dividing and conquering the masses, you ignore the overwhelming reality of patriarchy, which is that since the corruption of the Neolithic Revolution men have dominated women above all. These women are thus obviously traitors to their kind, as feminine (liberal) women are quick to point out. 

Political discourse, therefore, is the sad art of pretending that the managing of large human populations isn’t a humiliating clusterfuck. The disputes about privatization and taxes, government inefficiency and propaganda, democracy and the encroachment of hypercapitalism stem from that original division between those who are weak and who side with victims, and those who seek to abuse their power, between those who dream of progress as an escape from animal habits, and those who condemn that dream in the name of a flight to self-destructive savagery. So that we can avoid addressing the underlying issues, political discourse consists almost entirely of self-serving lies. Both liberal democracies and tyrannies resort to lying to skirt the ghastly truths that conservatism is flat-out evil while liberalism is a pipe dream for insipid weaklings.

Having learned these truths, you’re now burdened with the choice between cynical disengagement from political affairs and the search for some ennobling, creative alternative. Good luck with that.

13 comments:

  1. I read an article last week about a study that indicated men with upper body strength were less concerned about the well-being of others than other men. There have been a lot of these studies over the years, and a few seem to indicate Big Strong Men are conservatives, ready for the apocalypse so we can cut the sheep loose, just like Ayn Rand would have wanted.

    Back in 2012, there was even talk in conservative circles about how Romney's relative manliness compared to Obama was proved by the fact he'd fathered 5 sons as compared to Obama's two daughters.

    I cheer on the underdog even if he probably doesn't deserve cheering on.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I also instinctively cheer for the underdog, because I feel pity more strongly than disgust under those circumstances, unless the underdog does something to earn my disgust. The underdog needs cheering more than the dominator, since the dominator doesn't need to work on mind over matter.

      I suspect most of the upper class's psychopathy is bred into them, as shown in an episode of Billions and as reported in the case of Donald Trump, for example.

      American politics is largely consistent with the above analysis, as far as I can tell. South Park got there first with its dick-pussy-asshole model from Team America. "Dicks fuck pussies [i.e. conservatives troll liberals], but dicks _also_ fuck assholes [i.e. dictators like the head of North Korea]."

      Delete
  2. This seems to leave out that the real alternative to politics (regardless of the more insignificant issue of whether government is conservative or liberal) is simple war or isolation (usually the former). Part of the art of being a predatorial animal is to only choose fights that you can win without suffering major injuries. Likewise, bullies tend to gang up on their victims, use cheap shots, or pick unfair fights, because they don't want to get seriously hurt in the process of beating up a slightly weaker victim, they want to emerge unscathed after beating up a much weaker victim and taking their lunch money. Territorial disputes between similarly powerful rivals occur, but typically because one of them underestimates the other's capacity to resist, not because bullies knowingly pick a fight that has a good chance of crippling or humiliating them.

    Government isn't, per se, a tool used by weaklings to fight injustice, which later gets subverted and used to reassert the power of predatorial tyrants (the weaklings might equally well team up to fight injustice as a violent mob as a discursive government, and injustice itself can manifest through simple violence just as well as through the relatively soft violence of oppressive laws, so what is distinctive and defining of government is not that it can be used in either of these ways).

    Government is, per se, the space in which various predators and (sometimes) masses of organized weaklings use discourse and cunning to negotiate their privileges and shares of a common spoils, with the implicit threat of violent contest if they are not minimally appeased, knowing that domestic tranquility ensures space for economic power to be gained far in excess of that which is possible during an endless civil war, and knowing also that the order provided by the monopoly on violence and property guarantees of the State give a better assurance that elite can keep their current privileged positions and holdings than the chaos and uncertainty of an open contest between similarly powerful forces. No matter how strong you are, or in what position in society you are, a situation like the Syrian Civil War is unlikely to sound like a great idea to anyone who has a will to live. That is, a resentful and despondent weakling who hates their current prospects might become sympathetic to ISIS-type "revolutionary conservatism", seeing such a shakeup as a good opportunity to use chaos to move up the foodchain and become powerful at the expense of current alphas, but anyone who is already powerful will want to avert a civil war at all costs, at least if they foresee a widespread outbreak of sustained fighting in which the outcome is uncertain (in contrast, a strongman like Erdogan might welcome a failed coup attempt as an opportunity to purge political opponents- but only if he thinks the coup attempt can be swiftly put down without much danger to himself).

    The contest between liberalism and conservatism is secondary to the contrast between the order of the State and the chaos and uncertainty of open war between similarly powerful factions. The goal of politics proper isn't the outcome of the dispute between liberals and conservatives (whether progress or tyranny), but the fact that it is resolved through discourse and cunning rather than simple and universally devastating violence. What is distinctive and defining of government is that order, progressive or tyrannical as it may be, does not break down.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for your comments. I agree there's little honour in the conduct of psychopathic aggressors. I suppose war (the state of nature) and isolation (e.g. ascetic withdrawal) are alternatives to politics, but my question (at the end) is whether there's "some ennobling, creative alternative." Both war and isolation might be creative in that they're not commonplace in nature, as least not to the degrees we practice them--although some species are antisocial and self-isolation is their norm. But are these alternatives worthy of our potential?

    I was trying to clarify the purpose of government rather than define it with necessary and sufficient conditions. I agree that weaklings can form mobs to fight injustice, so that purpose isn't unique to government. I've added the word "sanctified" to that part of the article, to make the Hobbesian point that governmental violence is special not even because it's based on a monopoly, but because of the civil religion that props up the organization. We effectively worship the government, awed by the realization that heads of state represent millions of people through the social contract. Our worship of celebrities is similar to the deference we display towards government officials. Still, government as opposed to tyranny is about maintaining a welfare state, about looking out for the majority, most of whom are relatively poor.

    I agree that stability is better for business than is a state of war. Even arms dealers require that war be carried out beyond their base of operations. So you're right that government is largely about maintaining the peace, and thus politics is a substitute for solving conflicts by war. But political disagreements are split along the lines I spoke of, depending on whether the disputants are weak or strong. Once we're out of the state of nature, due largely to Neolithic progress, as I said, the question is _how_ we peacefully solve our conflicts. You suggest it still comes down to "discourse and cunning," but those are almost synonyms for the weakling's victimhood and the bully's cold-blooded Machiavellianism. So while the shift from chaos to order is historically prior to the liberal-conservative dichotomy, I think the latter becomes paramount once we stipulate that we're working in the context of civilization.

    What's interesting, then, to me is that the psycho leaders (corrupted by their power in the wholly expected manner) become predators and free-riders who make exceptions of themselves (as Hobbes said) and who thus represent a limited return to the state of nature. There's a state of nature that persists in the space of civilized peace. This is similar to how rich people like O.J. Simpson or Brett Kavanaugh can get away with crimes or how "capitalists" seek to form monopolies or oligopolies to escape the travails of competition. They make exceptions of themselves, although in the latter case the free market for the hapless majority looks more like the state of nature, and the wealthy live in what I call elsewhere the real Heaven, Paradise or Kingdom of God (link below, if you're interested).

    http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2018/04/the-social-reality-of-heaven-and-hell.html

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you for your article and reply. I should say that I would not write these comments if I was not interested in how you might undermine my points, and I'm interested in that because I have a lot of respect for your thought and interest in the positions you've taken. My apologies for the length of this, you’ve given your readers a challenge here to try to describe an ennobling and creative alternative, so I intend to elaborate an attempt I have been working on (you may notice the influence of your work). I’d be curious to know what you make of it.

      In response to your first paragraph, other than ascetic withdrawal the only means I can see to end or escape the conflict between various strong and weak factions in society is the dissolution of society, or the temporary prioritization of cooperation which can occur when most of the weak and the strong put aside rivalry to fight against an external power, oppose the plans of an interest group from a different region of a country (for example in the geopolitical conflicts between Madrid and Barcelona surrounding the Catalan independence movement) or against a faction of the strong or the weak that most of the weak particularly detest or fear. Of course, in these cases all that is happening is that the conflict between weak and strong as such is no longer the primary line of conflict in society, it is not as if that line of conflict goes away.

      Machiavelli argued in The Prince that it is generally in the interests of a prudent predator to get the support of a large number of betas, rather than the support of a small number of jealous and well-positioned alphas (the support of the people, not the support of the aristocracy). The betas will be happy if they are merely not abused too harshly by their ruler, that is, (as Hobbes argued) if various basic "rights" such as life and liberty from arbitrary mutilation or imprisonment are not violated against them in particular. In contrast, the aristocracy wants to share in the ruling and the bullying, and perhaps even to replace the current ruler. They are therefore a liability to the ruler which must be kept in check.

      The strong compete with one another to decide who will wield power more than they compete to decide who will tyrannize the weak in particular, and to the extent the weak can prove useful in tipping the balance towards one tyrant or governor rather than another, the competition between strong would-be rulers in those cases becomes primary rather than the competition between the weak and strong, as the strong compete to appear to be the lesser evil to the weak.

      It seems to me that the major task of political philosophy is to figure out how all of this squabbling can go as it must (given the interests and power dynamics in society) as smoothly as possible, avoiding the bloody excesses involved in revolts, coups, revolutions, civil wars, insurgencies, and phenomena like the mafia activity that begins to protect large black market transactions.

      So it seems to me that one possibility for a noble political alternative to both progressivism and conservatism is to take a step back and try to ensure that as much of this unavoidable squabbling as possible goes on in the most civil, orderly, discursive and well-informed way as possible. That is, everyone’s expectations about what they can get out of the others without undermining their own safety and privileges should be as close to reality as possible, minimizing vices such as short-sighted overplaying of hands, underestimation of formidable opponents, and acts with destabilizing unintended consequences.

      Delete
    2. According to this way of thinking, the main problem with excessive conservatism (as you are using the term) is that a population which is left to its own devices to such an extent that people become in immediate danger of dying or losing all will to live, precisely because of that, can no longer be considered part of civil society, because they no longer have any reason to respect the results of political dialogue, obey the law, or engage in formal or permitted channels of political expression. Instead, they are likely to rebel and do whatever it takes to either regain minimal life prospects, or at least take some consolation in revenge and go down in a blaze of glory. This obviously isn’t desirable for the weak who end up in such a desperate position, but its also very undesirable for the powerful, because rebels, criminals and terrorists tend to make life dangerous for the strong, hurt the economy, hurt, steal from or kill productive people, and in extreme cases do things like seizing power for themselves.

      Likewise, the main problem with excessive progressivism would be that it naively aims to take privileges from the strong which it is in no position to take, such that the attempt backfires as the privileged call their bluff and successfully protect their privileges or at least hurt or kill a lot of people in the process of trying, people who might otherwise have lived if the weak had demanded only those gains they were ready and able to defend.

      The ideal result of this sort of politics would be that everyone gets as much as they actually can get without undermining order and sustainability. One reason this could be considered a noble goal is because order and stability, in addition to their contributions to material wealth and to happiness, tend to make possible things like scientific research, literacy, technical training, the arts (at least in private), and contemplation for those who choose to seek them, and allow larger populations, better technology and greater power to displace more of the wilderness and replace it with artificial worlds which were at least intended by someone. Chaos and internal instability, on the other hand, tend to make such things more difficult to pursue, and lead to a return of the wilderness; history becomes decided by chance, error and simple violence, and a greater role in history is reasserted for non-human forces such as disease-causing agents whose spread can no longer be checked, and natural disasters that no longer have their effects mitigated.

      Delete
    3. It is true wars and arms races can promote scientific advances, and revolutions can spur cultural and existential watershed events as well as Terror, censorship and purges, and this might be seen as a major argument against my last point (the Italian Futurists and Fascists, and the Bolsheviks, thought a certain kind of war and even internal violence would invigorate science and culture rather than destroy it, and they were not entirely wrong) but as Arendt argues in On Revolution, even revolutions undermine themselves when they eat their own children (if what they seek is radically greater progressivism or conservatism than what currently exists, rather than an orgy of violence for its own sake, as sometimes is the case):

      If revolution must occur because power has shifted so radically and quickly that the old order can no longer contain or appease newly dominant forces, then both rich and powerful psychopaths and weak betas, if they value their own skins, should try to minimize the chaos which is unleashed and try to accumulate or keep what power they can without taking too great a risk of losing everything. I think a good way to do that, as Arendt implies, is for the powerful to volunteer as friends of the revolution and try to organize a convention where the relevantly powerful players in the new order can negotiate their shares of control over local, regional and national government (or tyranny, as the case may be, provided it is the sort of tyranny that can continue long-term). Since the people can always cause a great deal of trouble for tyrants, it seems to me they must always have at least some minimum of meaningful representation in such a convention if the revolution is to go smoothly, however conservative it may be. In any convention, some players will dictate terms, and others will have to either accept them or try their chances in war, but it is in everyone’s interest to accept what clearly must be, understand what that is in advance, and seek as favorable terms as possible without bloodshed when the outcome of conflict appears uncertain or at least severely damaging to all parties.

      Hobbes himself claimed that anything like a division between tyranny and government is counterproductive (since this sort of language tended to lead to civil wars that were not worth the trouble they were started over, and more importantly for him, because the oppression seen as characteristic of a tyranny was in his view not an alternative to government, but merely a different policy which an identical form (structure) of government might choose according to circumstance; an accident attending government, rather than the substance or property of a distinct form or kind of government. He makes the latter point on the first page of Ch. XIX of the Leviathan, and makes the former point regarding civil war beginning with the section titled “And that all Government but Popular, is Tyranny:” in chapter XLVI of the Leviathan. Since I mostly agree with his arguments on these points (influenced by Arendt and Federalist 10, I disagree with Hobbes that there are only three forms of government, which he argues for at the same time in that section of Ch. XIX), I am conceding to your perspective (which seems more in line with the view of Aristotle which Hobbes was rejecting) because I’m more interested in whether you think my Hobbesian defense of the primacy of civil peace maximization over conservativism and progressivism rises to the difficult challenge you’ve laid out, or whether you think mine is a failed attempt to suggest Hobbesian advocacy of civil peace as an ennobling, creative alternative to cynical disengagement from political affairs.

      Delete
    4. I think you are right that conservativism and progressivism, using your definitions, are as you describe them; major and inextinguishable forces in political affairs and respectively “flat-out evil” and “a pipe dream for insipid weaklings.” In my attempt to suggest a third alternative in the language of natural rights, natural laws and civil peace, I end up merely recommending moderation, prudence and foresight to both parties, and then I seek ways to enforce or at least apply pressure for moderation and prudence to indeed reign, regardless of whether they reign in a very conservative or very progressive country, however the case must be to minimize violation of the most basic and inalienable natural rights. By "inalienable" I mean "preconditions to any and all rational purposes consistent with life and the minimal means to continue to desire to live." which for that reason really are inalienable to all but those who lack will to live, since there is no conceivable end those with will to live could intentionally alienate these rights of nature as a means to.

      I disagree with you that the primacy of order is superseded by the conservative/liberal contest once we specify we’re working in the context of civilization. Civilization is a precarious and imperfect artifice which is frequently wrecked unexpectedly. The priority of the preservation of civilization cannot be superseded by tendencies toward certain varieties of civilization, since they presuppose its existence, which cannot be reliably enough counted upon to securely presuppose it, especially in the absence of strong and general will to prioritize its preservation.

      Respectfully yours

      Delete
    5. Thanks for your thought-provoking comments. I've written up my response in the form of an article on centrism, called "Centrism and the Search for a Worthy Social Order" (link below).

      I'll just note here that what I say about artificial worlds replacing nature is meant to be taken mostly as a description of what's happening. I say it's the meaning of life to deal with the horror of natural reality, but I haven't made up my mind whether this trajectory we're on as an enlightened species is for the best. That's why I speak of existential heroism as tragic. For example, there's the ecological criticism to contend with. The optimistic scenario is something like transhumanism or some other cool sci-fi world in which we're all empowered by scientific knowledge. But it could go the other way too. There's honour in facing up to harsh truths, but there's absurdity and ultimately fruitless suffering in that "enlightenment" as well. So whether civil peace is truly progressive is a complex issue.

      http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.com/2018/11/centrism-and-search-for-worthy-social.html

      Delete
  4. I think feminine women are more prone to be conservative than liberal and otherwise for masculine women, more prone to behave like a male, and we know that a lot of feminists are lesbians or a lot of lesbians are feminists. Feminist women want equality because they tend to see themselves more as a tomboys than a ''traditional'' woman while feminine women want be protected and even disputed by masculine men. This also explain why liberals tend to be more prone to cooperation [big state, copying pre-hunter gatherers little comunities] over competition. Many conservative political writers had associated leftism with atavisms, but i don't know if this is totally the true. I think liberals, on avg, and specially those who are biologically ''on the left'', are the products of urban environments where no longer enphasised-physical features are absolutely required, but intellectual ones.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I agree that in conservative places like the Middle East, Russia, or the southern US, women are often feminine (submissive) rather than combative and manly like feminists, but that's because those places are patriarchal (male-dominated) and so conservative women are trained to submit. Either way, the feminine woman has to rationalize her (instinctive or indoctrinated) attraction to masculine men (to bullies or psychos).

      Feminists emerge in liberal cultures which are pluralistic rather than patriarchal. Liberal women can be masculine because they learn that masculine traits help them take advantage of business opportunities that don't exist in patriarchies. I'm not sure there's much more to the intrinsic characteristics of gender than the left and right-brained ways of thinking. What's crucial is that power corrupts both sexes, as power from success filters down in patriarchies, for example, from the male leaders to the women who serve them. These conservative women thrive by kowtowing to warped men or even by manipulating them behind the scenes.

      Delete
    2. Agree partly, i believe masculine women in ''traditional'' societies are taught to be closeted about their behavioral trends, or, cultural environment have a role about human social behavioral, but even in very feminist societies, conservative women, on avg, tend to be more submissive to men, because biologically speaking, sexual dimorphism is higher among conserfs than among urbanite illibs, because long term patriarchy select for submissive women and emotionally dominant men.

      Delete
    3. I think it's powerful men who select for submissive women. We can see this with the older male celebrities who lose their mature wife and start dating young submissive girls. George Clooney's an exception. Whether liberal or conservative on some issues, powerful men are equally corrupted by their temptations. It's the luxury and decadence of a prospering society that allow for this inequality, since I doubt there are many submissive women in hunter-gatherer tribes where mere survival is paramount. Nor are there many effeminate males in such tribes.

      Delete