The Hatred That Binds Us

The Root of the Gender Wars

This is a long post with a number of images, and some email clients may choke on it. Read the whole thing in full at http://jdanielsawyer.substack.com

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There are around twelve thousand thermonuclear warheads in the world, each with a potential destructive force far greater than Fat Man and Little Boy (the bombs which the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). In the wrong hands, they can literally blow a large swath of humanity back to the stone age and solve the already-self-correcting problem of overpopulation.

I must admit to a fatalistic streak where this issue is concerned. So long as those weapons exist, the odds are good that somewhere, somehow, some nut bar is gonna get ahold of one and set it off.

Alternately, a visionary attitude might grip the political class and we may find ourselves in a flurry of bomb-dismantling and reactor-building.

My fatalism stems not so much from jaded cynicism (though there is some of that), but from thermodynamics:

Concentrated energy doesn’t stay that way. Eventually, someone notices, and, for good or ill, the energy gets used.

Culture works that way too. Sigmund Freud, in his book Civilization and its Discontents famously once posited that civilization is built upon the repression of the human desire for pleasure. Neuroticism, he concluded, was the result of the mismatch between the demands of civilized life and the demands of the body.

For my money, this leans in the direction of the right sort of reasoning, but the specific formulation is the kind of stupid dogma that could only be propounded by someone who is so completely Austrian¹ that he would never dream of letting the facts-on-the-ground get in the way of a good theory.

The facts?

Every culture, even legendarily laconic hunter-gatherer cultures, are built upon (or at least around) irreconcilable tensions. In immediate-return hunter-gatherer arrangements, fierce egalitarianism seems to be the order of the day.² If you glory-hound in that kind of society, or fail to observe rules around food sharing, or try to hoard mates or wealth, you’re going to meet with a sudden and unfortunate hunting accident. Those cultures which appeared, at first glance to Western eyes, as idyllic and peaceful were idyllic and peaceful exactly insofar as they were willing to quickly kill troublemakers in order to keep life quiet inside the tribe. In these cultures, the foundational tension is between the need for valor among men (to hunt and to defend the tribe) and the need for peace within the tribe. That tension was (and sometimes still is, where such cultures persist) resolved at the tip of a spear.

As I have learned in new and exciting ways as I’ve begun working with construction and blacksmithing, when you’re making things—whether blades or buildings—you can greatly increase your creation’s staying power by pre-stressing the material from which it’s made. Put your creation under dynamic load, and you increase its ability to resist shock and deformation…up to a point. The price you pay for this strength is brittleness; when hit with a shock or load beyond its limits, your creation doesn’t bend or sway or deform, it shatters.

Our civilization is currently facing loads on its dynamic stress points that are pushing it to crumble. This article will be the first of a series of three essays where I explore these stresses, and what they are doing to create derangement through the erosion of these fundamental tensions. I will ponder what solutions might emerge from the raw materials we’re working with. I don’t really care what political tribe my analysis supports or discourages—my approach to culture and politics is, first and foremost, ecological: I believe that one should understand, as best one can, the system one is in before forming unshakable opinions about the way things oughta be.

Of Love and Hate

At the age of twelve, I sat in the living room of one of the regional coordinators for Operation Rescue³ and listened to him regale people with new tactical discoveries he’d made about how to effectively block access to abortion clinics without technically breaking the law. I was staunchly pro-life at the time and living on the coast—a “conservative” in a hostile environment. Pro-lifers in my world were pretty benign folks who tended to put their money where there mouth was. Over the course of my late childhood and early adolescent years I volunteered, from time to time, at a Crisis Pregnancy Center that served as a rooming house for unwed pregnant women who were either getting on their financial feet so they could raise their child themselves, or who had committed to putting the baby up for adoption. They got free or cheap room and board in exchange for submitting to counselling, church activities, and carrying their baby to term.

The organization, I have since learned, has got its problems. But still, even twelve year-old me could easily spot the rather startling difference between the heartland Operation Rescue folks and the coastal Crisis Pregnancy Center folks:

The folks at Crisis Pregnancy Center loved babies and went out of their way to see that babies not only got born, but got a chance at a good start in life.

The folks at Operation Rescue hated abortion. They hated it with a vengeance. I agreed with them, at the time, that abortion was murder, so I understood the hatred. However, I’d never seen any conservative Christian get nearly as exercised about babies that died in bombings in the drug war, or the inner city kids (of any ethnicity) that were suffering in the then-burgeoning crack-epidemic gang wars in Oakland.

Another wrinkle I noticed: The Operation Rescue folks didn’t like their children. Adults are likely to shrug off this kind of intuition as “their love language is just different,” but children know whose parents actually like them and whose parents merely go through the motions because they feel duty-bound to do so (and whose parents actually hate them). The CPC folks, by contrast, really enjoyed children, from babies on up.

I later realized that the two days I spent in the home of that activist was my first identifiable encounter with one of the fundamental driving forces of American culture:

Hatred.

And not just any hatred.

The hatred of women…by women as well as by men.

The Fires of Hatred

When I talk about hatred, I’m not talking about the way you might detest a food. I, for example, have a visceral disgust response to eggs due to having been cruelly molested by a hard boiled egg factory when I was a young boy.⁴⁵ Extreme? Sure. But while I say “I hate eggs,” what I’m really describing with that expression is a deep desire not to have eggs intrude upon my consciousness.

Excuse me for a moment, I need to go wash my brain out.

Lacy wants to know why, if I hate eggs so much, I keep stealing them from her.

My dislike of those crunchy-shelled ovoid ova is properly called “antipathy.” On the other hand, if someone were to ask me whether I like the music of Metallica, I’d say “I hate it,” but the truth is it just doesn’t connect with me. I don’t give a damn (apathy), so why go to the trouble of listening to more of it?

Nor is hatred really present in most racial prejudice I’ve encountered. Ethnic or religious tribalism takes something extra to rise to the level of genuine hatred—if it didn’t, the Amish wouldn’t be able to do business with us “English” without feeling defiled by the interaction, nor would the bustling ethnic ghettos of New York City be able to exist side-by-side without erupting into a race war.

Nor am I talking about contempt, which is a response of exhaustion and exhaspiration, accompanied by disrespect and dismissal. Contempt is most commonly provoked by people being self-destructive, weak, spineless, blinkered, and/or persistent in worthless or useless activities.

All these things rhyme with hatred, but they’re not hatred proper.

Real hatred is a special emotion. It isn’t apathy, nor it it mere antipathy or contempt or the flip-side of a love-of-one’s-own. Hatred requires something extra.

It requires focus.

An object of hatred holds a similar claim on one’s attention as an object of adoration (if not a greater claim). Without focus, hatred is just a rhetorical exaggeration.

But with focus, hatred is one of the most potent forces in the universe. It fuels revenge cycles and feuds, and it wipes out entire civilizations. It lit the spark and stoked the fires of the Wahhabism that toppled the World Trade Center, an action which accelerated the ruin of Wahhabism which, was, even then already in motion.⁶

Hatred arises like a dragon from a bed of gold when the hobbit of humiliation comes calling at the door.

This is not an accidental allusion. In The Hobbit, the humble Bilbo creeps into the dragon’s lair intent on stealing from the beast in advance of driving it from its lair entirely. But Bilbo, caught up in the exhilaration of the moment and protected by magic invisibility, gets carried away and taunts the dragon. Humiliated by a mere thief, and believing that the thief springs from the neighboring Lake Town, the dragon’s malice is roused. In a fit of focused hatred, he storms from his lair to take revenge upon those he believes have wronged him.

Hatred motivates.

And, worryingly, it can provide purpose in a life otherwise devoid of it.

Hatred, as Stephen Kronish wrote, is “a nutritious emotion. You can live on it for years.”⁷ It can sustain your emotional life when all else is gone, just as it sustains Wahabbist culture over a century after its mother culture was finally, brutally ground into the dust by the decadent Western powers. It can sustain what is arguably the Western world’s most successful religion (Communism) in a way that moves history this-way-and-that as if history were a cork tossed about on a hurricane storm surge.

To fall in love is to devote a piece of your consciousness explicitly to the object of obsession. Hatred is the same. In both cases, one’s own identity becomes, in some important sense (and for whatever stretch of time) dependent upon this other, outside thing.

Love comes to us when we recognize in someone or something a part of ourselves—either one that we value, or one that we have felt we are missing. Your children, your spouse, your lover, your dog—you love all of them because they fit with you, you’ve invested your life into them, and they feel as if they are a part of you (and, in the case of your children, they literally are).

Hatred kindles within us when we feel as if something precious—some part of ourselves—has been stolen, or murdered, or attacked. It comes to us when we are humiliated, brought low, embarrassed, and we imagine that we can only fill the pit of inadequacy that opens within us by taking revenge.

Need—the need for position, status, esteem, affection, and validation—fuels both love and hate. When need is frustrated, we begin to feel resentful, and hatred blooms. It directs itself at those things we need most, and especially at the people (or entities) who control those things. Urban folks hate rural folks because rural folks make food and extract the resources that urban folks depend on. Politicians hate constituents because without constituents, politicians have no position or identity. Need creates dependence, and dependent people are prisoners, and so we hate our needs and seek to free ourselves from them and/or confine them in special frames (hence the popularity of asceticism, from no-fap to “cleanse” diets to religious food restrictions).

Is it any wonder, then, that the sexes—both needing each other in some capacity at nearly every juncture of life—so easily fall into hating one another?

Or that both sexes so easily and repeatedly fall into hating women?

Hating for the Sake of Love

Some hatreds, of course, are necessary. They prick the teenager to differentiate himself from his parents. They provide ample fuel for the tasks of stretching out one’s hand and making a life for oneself, winning respect in the world, or defending one’s own against threat. And they provide the energy to sustain a wounded soul through the worst seasons of recovery.

But necessary hatreds are transitory. As the person so possessed matures, the hatreds fall away. The woman who was raped eventually builds the strength to again meet men as individuals. The man who was abused by his mother or his wife rebuilds the damaged parts of himself enough to be a man in full, freed from his need to hate women as a species. And sometimes the warriors who faced each other across the battlefield find that they have more in common with one another than they do with those who did not go through the hell that had been built from the hatred of their countries’ leaders for one another.

A Quiet, Quasi-sexual Cancer

The following story is true. The names and some other minor details have been changed to protect myself from lawsuits.

Wilma was a manager. She had a really shaky start as a manager, and a couple of the people who worked for her really resented that she got promoted over them, but once she got her feet under her she did well enough that her division didn’t lose money. She wasn’t spectacular, but she was mostly competent. An embodiment of the Peter Principle,⁸ she wasn’t going to get promoted any time soon, but she certainly wasn’t in danger of losing her job (no matter how much the better-qualified underlings griped about being passed over).

And, being smart career-men themselves, they eventually left the department for greener pastures. There was only one problem: Leif absolutely hated her.

This wasn’t a problem for Wilma. It was a problem for Leif.

Leif worked in the engineering department—Wilma was in customer relations. Leif didn’t work for Wilma, but he had to communicate with her fairly regularly, and he hated Wilma.

He hated that she’d been promoted to the level of her incompetence, he hated that she was persnickety about things that didn’t matter to engineers, but most of all he hated that she had more power than him.

Leif was a fairly competent, if unimaginative, engineer who always acquitted himself admirably at annual reviews, but he had the personal charisma of a sack of flour. His autistic tendencies and his inability and/or unwillingness to play office politics had kept him out of the career track he’d really wanted, so he’d had to settle for a job he was good at, for quite good pay, but which didn’t challenge him, leaving him quietly miserable. He was undeniably brilliant, but not in a way that gets rewarded in a corporate environment. Wilma was less intelligent than he was, and he found it humiliating to have to deal with her. She was obviously beneath him.

The situation continued to be a low-level irritation to Leif for a couple of years, until one afternoon when he saw Wilma speaking to Bob in a quiet corner of a coffee shop. Bob was Wilma’s boss and corporate mentor, the man who’d championed her for the job.

As he watched, Leif saw Wilma brush some fluff out of the hair on the side of Bob’s head. It’s the kind of gesture that people think nothing of when they do it, but that communicates a high level of intimacy and trust between the parties who engage in it.

Suddenly, Leif realized: Wilma was having an affair with Bob. She’d slept her way to the top. Bob was married, but he was having an affair with this dumpy, irritating, thirty-something woman anyway. The only reason Leif had to deal with Wilma’s annoying presence at all was because she was giving good head to someone in power (who, tragically, wasn’t named “Leif”).

Why on earth did I give AI an image prompt for “holding hands”???

Over the next few months, Leif obsessively watched for clues that his hunch was correct, and in the process he developed his interpersonal skills to a level he’d never dreamed (not that he noticed). Eventually he wheedled the truth out of one of Wilma’s girlfriends:

Yes, Wilma was sleeping with Bob. They’d been an item since before Bob got Wilma her first job at the company. Bob had recommended Wilma for her promotion, but didn’t get a vote in her being hired due to their acquaintanceship pre-existing their co-worker relationship.

That was all Leif needed to hear. From that point forward he went out of his way to make Wilma’s life miserable, both by being difficult when dealing with her directly, and by taking every opportunity he could to talk about what a slut-bag whore she was to anyone who would listen.

Coincident with his discovery, Leif learned he was in line for a big promotion if the company got acquired in an upcoming deal. It was music to his ears until he learned that Wilma would also be among those who were retained in the acquisition.

When the company was acquired and Leif was offered the new job, he quit in disgust. He would never, he vowed, work for such an immoral company ever again.

And, for the next several years, he was out of work as his family skated on the edge of the financial abyss. Leif didn’t care, though—he’d found a new hobby where he was surrounded by younger women who thought he was the bee’s knees. Although, to my knowledge, he didn’t actually bed any of them, he was very happy to brag to anyone who would listen (including his wife and his children, in front of company, and to the embarrassment of all) about the way they fawned over him.

The High School Double Standard

Back in the before time (i.e. before feminist manners tamed both men and women to the point where they felt embarrassed about policing the sexuality of others while face-to-face with them), there was a pretty risible double-standard where sex was concerned, and everyone knew about it. By the time I was in High School it had been mostly contained within the high school bubble, and growing beyond it once you hit college was one of the ways you showed you were “grown up” (not that it ever really went away, it just went underground).

It went something like this:

Girls who “slept around” (meaning, had a fully consummated sexual relationship of any kind at any point, or, alternately, were willing to do more than kiss boys) were “sluts,” “whores,” and generally beneath contempt (except if you were a dude trying to score with one).

Boys who “slept around” (i.e. the entire spectrum from “being popular with girls” to actually having sex with anyone) were the coolest dudes you could find.

This double-standard brings some dark benefits to both sexes. It allows socially powerful girls to control the sexual marketplace to some degree, and it gives boys (both the successful and the unsuccessful) a way to vent their terror of women.

We’ll get into that terror in a moment. It’s not to be underestimated.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see this dynamic repeated across cultures and time:

Socially powerful women aren’t socially powerful because they’re attractive, they’re socially powerful because they’ve figured out how to control the mating behavior of other women.⁹

Similarly, socially powerful men aren’t socially powerful because they have women falling all over them—instead, women flock around them because they are socially powerful.¹⁰

This rather elementary observation gets perverted by those in the manosphere and what I shall, for the lack of a prepackaged term, call the “conquering feminist” worlds, leading to a plethora about ridiculous dogmas about how “only the top 10% of guys can get laid” and how “women only want dudes with good looks and lots of money.”

Nonetheless, it has some interesting implications—including the answer to why men like Leif loathe women like Wilma…and why so many other women do, too.

The Real Battle of the Sexes

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I realize everything I’m about to say is grossly oversimplified. More nuance is coming later in the piece.

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Biology is a harsh mistress, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the ways that the sexes are set up to envy and fear one another.

Men tend to control governments and administer violence.

Women tend to control social networks and the moral order of the universe.

Men tend to control access to wealth and/or prestige.

Women tend to control access to children and social respectability.

Men usually defend the tribe.

Women usually rule the home.

Men and women need each other—and in almost every culture with any longevity, both have spheres of lofty esteem that are tailored to their social roles and biology.

Men are bigger, stronger, uglier, more physically dangerous, and more disposable.

Women are smaller, more beautiful, more valuable, and more socially powerful.

Wait, what?

Despite—or rather, because of—their physical prowess and facility with hard power, men are less powerful on average than women in almost all cultures throughout history, and they are considered less valuable as well. That’s why they get sent down the mines, and off to war.

Civilizations memorialize war heroes, entrepreneurs, and inventors because 99+% of those who march off to war, or start a new business, or spend their lives inventing new things either die from their endeavors, or don’t achieve anything of note.

Unfortunately, entire civilizations and ethnicities are wiped from history if their men don’t happily march into high-risk certain doom in these three areas. The promise of immortality in memory (whether with one’s tribe, or one’s family) is the inducement that humans offer to men for the privilege of using them as the cannon fodder of evolution.

This, in other words, is why sacrifice is considered honorable.

Women also sacrifice, of course. They risk death with each pregnancy, carrying the actual literal future of the human race inside their bodies at great personal cost.

Thus we find that women fear men because of the damage men can do to them, while men fear women because men who do not win the approval of women are worthless (hence the terror).

Oddly, in both cases, this has a lot less to do with sex (as in “sexual intercourse”) than it at first appears. Instead, instincts surrounding survival and reproduction (including the sex drive) are diverted in humans onto the proxy of “social esteem.”

And, in this aspect, we all come to the party holding the short end of the stick, because what we seek is not what it feels like we should be seeking.

Twists in the Chase for Tail

At all times, in all places (as near as we can tell), women are the cultural keystones:

Women raise children.

Women continue culture.

• When a culture is prudish and patriarchal, women enforce both by controlling the sexuality of other women through social pressure, and thus also throw hard walls around the allowable behaviors for men (including erecting and enforcing behavioral norms that incentivize and/or perpetuate the abuse of women and children). They continue both by inculcating these values into the next generation.

• When a culture is chivalric, women enforce the norms of chivalry through choosing champions who conform to the ideal, and elevate the social esteem of those champions over their fellows. They continue these norms by inculcating them into the next generation.

• When a culture is egalitarian, women enforce norms through shame, dishonor, and social emasculation. They continue…well, you know.

In all cultures, women enforce sexist attitudes, whether those attitudes are so designed as to disadvantage women or men. In African cultures, for example, women—not men—most commonly perform genital mutilation on young girls and evangelize the importance of this ritual.

In all cultures, women maintain the norms around slut-shaming (which is more commonly engaged in by women than by men, and usually with a much higher degree of nastiness and subtlety).¹¹

This attribution of unrivaled social power to women may sound strange, especially if you’re intimately familiar with the ways that men can abuse and defame women, but the dynamic is well attested in the world’s art and history—consider the social mavens in Victorian novels, Livia from I, Claudius, the women who fostered the witch hunts at Salem, the crusade to outlaw prostitution in the early 20th century, the cancel culture mobs of our own day, the machinations of the villianesses in the plays of Shakespeare and the women in the Canturbury Tales, the Baby Splitting incident in the court of Solomon [biblical ref], the social manipulation on display in soap operas and famous Mean Girl dramas like Heathers, and the rivalries between the goddesses that prompted the bewitching of Paris which led to the Trojan War.

All this stems from the basic power dynamic between men and women:

Because they are bigger and stronger and more aggressive, men control access to safety and to key resources that can only be got through muscle and teamwork.

And because they bear and rear children, women control access to sex and family life. This means that women control access to all those things for which men are willing to sacrifice in the securing of resources.

This is the reason for that terror I mentioned earlier that men experience around women. You can find it attested in poetry and myth going back to the beginning of time—the femme fatale of noir, the coldly demanding princess of the chivalric tradition, Medusa (who, having been cast out of female society, is made unbearably beautiful and ugly at the same time, cursed to turn men to stone with her gaze), the chaos dragon Tiamat who controls the stuff of life, and so on. In societies where the sexes have separate spaces as well as integrated spaces, men can win honor in the eyes of other men through accomplishment even if they aren’t good at winning the approval of women. In a fully integrated society, though, the only easy access most men have to social esteem is through winning the approval of women.¹²

Because of all of this, women also control other women’s legitimate social and sexual access to the men themselves. This kind of social power in the face of physically more-powerful and temperamentally more-violent men puts women in a dangerous situation unless they band together to regulate the culture—which they invariably do, in all cultures.

Women who break the rules or who don’t fit the mold, therefore, get the shaft from other women as much as from men—and since women are individuals, most women don’t fit the mold in one way or another. This creates a situation analogous to that described in Chris Rock’s famous 1990s routine about class divisions within black America:

“Who’s more racist: white people or black people? Black people! Because black people hate black people too!”

Biology’s cruelest joke on both women and men is that all humans—and especially all post-pubescent adult humans—are psychologically and socially dependent upon the attention and esteem of women.

More Than One Thing

The above story about Leif and Wilma is one of three fairly similar incidents that I have thus far been privy to. So what the hell is actually going on here? What does it have to do with the way our civilization is deranging itself? And why does it keep happening, time after time, generation after generation, regardless of how norms change?

Keep happening?

If you can’t think of at least one story—fictional or non-fictional—that resembles something like their tale, you haven’t been paying attention. Such incidents recur in art and history from the ancient world through Shakespeare and into the present in almost every soap opera and long-form relational drama ever made (especially since women entered the traditionally male-dominated parts of the workforce in the 20th century).

They keep happening because women have an “unfair advantage” over men, as they can deploy their “feminine wiles” to win esteem and attention. Contra-feminist philosophers, “misogyny” isn’t a single thing. It is, instead, at least two things, and I think it might actually be three things:

• Men are prone to hating women because of their need for women’s esteem

• Women are prone to hating women because of their need for women’s esteem

• Women are prone to hating their own femininity because of its physical vulnerability, difficult anatomy,¹³ and the propensity of both men and women to hate women

And, again contra the most popular strains of feminist philosophy, these three types of misogyny aren’t about politics, sex, or power, at least not directly.

All three are, instead, about humiliation.

The Chauvanist’s Bluster

When talking about hatred—especially politicized hatred—it’s easy, fashionable, and acceptable to blame its existence/prevalence on demagogues. Propagandists, ideologues, televangelists, and cult leaders make their bones, we fancy, by creating hatred in society—hatred that would, presumably, not otherwise exist.

Those from Utopian apocalyptic religious and philosophical traditions, be they political (like the various disciples of Rand, Marx, Hitler, and other spiritual descendants of Hegel) or religious (the so-called “fundamentalists” of various sorts, be they Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Hindu, etc.) pine for a future in which the bad actors will be eliminated—whether through repression, extermination, or conversion—and people will come to love one another and unite in Peace under the banner of Truth.

Such traditions talk a good game about goodness, beauty, love, and charity. Christian fundamentalists, for example, fancy themselves great-hearted in their desire to save the world for Christ and to save their neighbors from hell. Despite their vitriolic rhetoric about of those they consider “secularists” and “hedonists,” they neither fancy themselves hateful (“We love the sinners! We just hate their sin!”) nor do they have any trouble recognizing the hatred animating, for example, the actions of Wahhabist jihadis.

Yet, for those of us outside such a tradition, it seems obvious that all of their prophets (and most of their adherents) are animated not by love, or by an aspiration to love, but by naked burning hatred, itself fueled by the fact that they do not truly believe their own propaganda.

As Slavoj Žižek once observed:

Are the so-called fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the US: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers’ way of life. If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers? Why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated, by the sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation. This is why the so-called Christian or Muslim fundamentalists are a disgrace to true fundamentalism.

Perhaps it’s true that “hatred of injustice is no vice,” but if it’s not, than no hatred ever is—because hatred always grows in the soil of injury and injustice (or perceived injustice). Hate is a cry of anguish, a rage at wounding, and an act of vengeance whereby the empty self attempts to regain its bearings by killing those parts of the world that shine light into the empty pit gnawing at its core.

It is the cry of the loser who wishes he could take his toys and go home.

Demagogues do not create hatred, they capitalize on it. They are a parasite class that harvest the energy of the wounded and feed them on the sugar-syrup drip of justified outrage, seeking always to keep it at fever pitch. Every time an election comes around, the doses get a little higher, because politics, religion, and self-help do not—and can not—fix the hatred that rages at the core of our civilization.

Roots and Branches

Beneath all the cruft and political positioning, our civilization is animated by a mutual hatred: the hatred of women for the strength and agency of men (which women often do not feel they possess), and the hatred of men for the beauty and aloofness of women (because men often feel that, without these virtues and the advantages they bring, they will never be “good enough”). This hatred, an implicit danger in male-female relations, was historically reconciled—with varying degrees of success—through mutual honor given by each sex to the other.

When technology gave us the ability to control our world without the immediate and obvious need for physical strength, to control our reproduction without recourse to secret lore¹⁴ or tradition, and delivered to us material prosperity beyond imagining, it also liberated us from the constraints which, in previous ages, told our ancestors who they were, and what value they brought to the world.

That the world’s great religions started their death spiral precisely when the march of technology began to destroy the constraints that compelled mutual honor between the sexes is no coincidence. And, short of an asteroid strike, that technology isn’t going away.

As can be readily seen in every modern culture from China to Japan to Saudi Arabia to England to the United States, and in every great program of elimination, democide, and expulsion over the past couple centuries, no amount of religion, politicking, or ideological compulsion can—or will—solve the riddle of our misogyny and misandry, because these problems are not political at all. National cultures, ethnic identities, and shared narratives cannot return (or re-develop) unless and until this change to the most basic conflict of human life is once again reconciled:

Men and women are alien to one another, and, despite the advances of technology, we still need each other—and this mutual need is legitimate, baked into the very fabric of who we are. But, because of the advanced state of our technology, we can no longer hold one another prisoner in the ways we once did.

It would seem to me a wise thing to begin considering how we can stop approaching one another as if we were consumers shopping for products, or hungry animals seeking to fill a gnawing need, and instead approach each other in ways that restore the dignity and honor appropriate to our gendered consciousness. In so doing, we may renew the dynamic sexual tension upon which our civilization—like all civilizations—depends.

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In the next installment in in this series (which should come sometime in the next three weeks), I will discuss how our reaction to technological developments and the social erosion it occasions has helped stripped the eroticism from life—and with it, any sense of spirituality or depth that gives meaning to struggles for power or the furtherance of culture.

1. Austrian thinkers, politicians, and painters are notorious for this particular flavor of dogmatism.

2. This is the actual universally-informative conclusion supported by the research collected by Christopher Ryan [link to his substack] and first publicly collated in Sex at Dawn. This research also informs his other books. Other secondary conclusions drawn by the author or imputed by his supporters and detractors—whether about sex, politics, or economics—are far less reliable an/or universal in nature than any of the parties involved generally wish to admit.

3. This was way back in the days before the group split into Operation Rescue West and Operation Save America.

4. I’m told the same thing happened to Marty McFly, which explains why he’d fly into a rage anytime someone called him a “chicken.”

5. Yes, this is a joke. The real story is already on record elsewhere, and recounting it is boring.

6. This is an issue which is still playing out today. “There is a lot of ruin in a nation,” the old saying goes—Wahhabism is, itself, the latest stage of the ruin of the Ottoman Empire…but I’m getting ahead of myself.

7. Letters from Morocco, Wiseguy, Season 2 Episode 10.

8. An emergent rule that governs hierarchies which was originally observed by Laurence J. Peter, the “Peter Principle” says that, in meritocratic hierarchies, people will tend to be promoted until they reach a position where they are not competent to do the job at a level of excellence sufficient to attract attention. People are thus “promoted to the level of their incompetence.”

9. The technical name for this phenomenon is “Female Intrasexual Competition.” Paula Wright writes extensively and beautifully on the mechanics of this phenomenon. Find her substack at https://substack.com/@paulawright.

10. Men’s social power derives from one or more of the following operating in a given social context: competence, social aptitude, admirability, strength, wiliness, temperance, wealth, and the capacity for violence.

11. This sounds a bit weird in our current cultural moment, as men are often pretty nasty about “slutty” women, especially since the Post-War Freudian revolution. This is an historical anomaly, a wrinkle in masculine behavior that previous generations would have found so distinctly un-masculine that, in order to get away with slut-shaming in non-cuckoldy circumstances without outing oneself as terminally unfuckable and unworthy of esteem, one would have to invent a moral panic to get away with it, as did Heinrich Kramer, author of the Malleus Mallificarum and the dude who invented the witch hunting craze. The sheer weirdness and weakness of men engaging in feminine-coded slut-shaming is still occasionally noticed in today’s world (as it recently was by Substacker

PhiloSophie

. Notwithstading all of this, it is essentially a tactic in female intrasexual competition, and so common among women that I’ve heard it regularly from sex-positive activists in contexts where they feel either threatened by, or smug about, the competition in a given room.

12. This is also why contemporary men’s-only spaces tend to be so potently misogynistic—they are filled mostly with men who have failed to win the esteem of women and are thus seeking a place to vent their resentment. Such sentiments are contagious, and this kind of contagion can be also seen in women’s-only spaces and other social spheres separated by identity groups whose primary kinship comes from their sense of exclusion.

13. See, for example, the startling and amazingly well-done French post-feminist film The Anatomy of Hell, directed by Catherine Breillat

14. Birth control, abortion, and infanticide have nearly always been available to women who were in good standing with the elder women in their tribe, and generally unavailable to women who were not so well-positioned.