Fans of my YouTube channel How to Sail Oceans have suggested that I write a book. I’m reasonably sure that they mean a sailing book, an adventure log.

The truth is that I am really not interested in the project, perhaps because I secretly regard the project as beneath me. Does that make me a literary snob?

It’s just that I cannot think of anything I might add to this well traversed literary genre. Nowhere have I sailed that has not already been visited by a yacht. I’ve read the classics, from Joshua Slocum to Bernard Moitessier to the Pardey’s. All of these individuals have navigated without electronic aids--by sextant, compass, sounding lead and taffrail log. All of them have made their way across oceans, in and out of bays, negotiated yachting centers and commercial ports without auxiliary power. While I am quite the rarity these days as a purist (engineless) sailor, nonetheless, it has all been done before, and it has all been written up.

Well while I am at it, at making confessions that is, I may as well say that I haven’t even grazed let alone immersed myself in yachting literature for a good two decades now. Truth be told, I don’t watch many YouTube sailing videos either. I find most of it dull. There, I said it. “We have quit our jobs and bought a boat and now we are living our dream of sailing around the world ... “ While such a thing may be of epic proportions to you personally (as it should be), the fact is that, to repeat, so many people have done and are doing exactly the same thing that it’s no big deal anymore.

Are you still with me? Please don’t leave just yet, because there’s more to this story.

So there I was working on my sturdy little craft, minding my own business, when this fellow on the boat next to me in the boatyard hands me a book he thinks I should read. He seems like an intelligent young man based on the short conversations I’d had with him up to this point, so perhaps that was enough to persuade me to politely accept the gift. But then a week later he says that he wants the book back as he will launching soon to set out on his own sailing odyssey. Amazingly I had actually found the motivation to flip through the first few pages and some things caught my eye. This book was something out of the ordinary. Now curious I ordered my own copy off of Amazon.com. I crammed the newly delivered book into my onboard bookshelf where it lay uncracked for the next two years.

Another question I frequently get is whether I’m thinking of buying another boat, meaning, of course, a bigger one. The answer is no and for two reasons. One is that I have spent so much time modifying and tuning my own craft to suit my needs that I don’t particularly relish starting the process all over again. The second reason is that I like my boat. That said, I am not immune to temptation. One temptation I’ve entertained is finding an old William Atkin designed Ingrid, or her sororal twin the Alajuela 38, remove the engine and re-fit her with a gaff rig. So basically just a bigger version of my own boat, Ruth Avery. I’ve sailed on an Alajuela 38, and they are amazingly swift. Which is not surprising as the lines of this craft are near perfection.

I said that a few things caught my attention when I first flipped through Sea-Steading, the book by Jerome FitzGerald, the loaner book from my boatyard neighbor. Mr. FitzGerald purchased his boat Macha as a partially completed Ingrid “complete with pilot house, rotten decks, and bat colony”, and then proceeded to rebuild her, giving her a traditional gaff rig and removing the engine. With every passing year I become more convinced that there is a supreme intelligence at work who likes to tease.

Which Mr. FitzGerald does not believe in. He establishes himself at the outset as a hardcore, militant atheist of the Richard Dawkins variety. I don’t like Richard Dawkins. I think he is egregiously mistaken about the most important things. Yet Mr. FitzGerald is at the same time an eerily kindred spirit to me. In the dedication he writes: “This book is dedicated to those who sail and appreciate the beauty inherent in sailing. This book is dedicated as well to promoting the skill, character, and seamanship displayed by those who sail in its traditional fashion--without the aid of engines. This book affirms the rigors of true sailing--the attentiveness they demand and the strength they contest--as rewards. This is what makes the experience meaningful. We cannot imagine demeaning our experience by making it trivial or common.” [1]

Preach, brother.

Another little bit of irony is that the name of the boat belonging to the fellow who lent me this book is Cloud Messenger. Mr. FitzGerald would probably call it coincidence, or Dawkins would probably say that I am reading in design where only chance exists. I’m not so sure of that.

The New Smart-Aleck’s

Let us address our disagreements straight away. Mr. FitzGerald writes: “We only have meaning in our life insofar as we create meaning. Meaning is nothing more than what can be termed ‘emotive import’, or a fancy way of saying the ‘event at hand makes me feel’ ... We only notice, are conscious of, the emotion of the moment [1](p. 11) ... [The problem of human suffering] has been a problem for mankind forever, of course, and the religions of the world have tried to confuse the basic issue of the fact ... [and offer] all sorts of mental tricks that are taught to blunt the edge of reality ... [like] otherworldly justice at some fictitious point in the future ... Imagine that if mankind had faced squarely the issues of the difficulty of life for ten centuries rather than trying to evade them, where we might be today? ... I have come to the conclusion that more than what one believes or the ethical system one holds, the environment in which one lives in has more of a bearing on how one views the world ... A bad environment, and desperation in general, make one tend to grasp at any hope, and one is likely to find god.” [1] (p. 31)

I hope that I have fairly encapsulated Mr. FitzGerald’s worldview in the above medley of quotes. He explicitly identifies as a humanistic atheist, and so I shall invoke a well-known proponent of this view, Richard Dawkins, for further examination.

Mr. FitzGerald regards religion as a cope. Richard Dawkins, who would agree with that assessment, sees religion as a by-product of evolved traits which benefit, or have benefitted, humans in some way. He puts forth the theory that unquestioning obedience to authority is frequently necessary for humans, as our instincts are sometimes woefully insufficient, which is obvious in the case of curious youngsters. When dad says don’t play by the riverbank because there are crocodiles around, the child is well served to obey without question. Should the father, on the other hand, insist that as a child of the Enlightenment he should seek out truth on his own, unfettered by convention and prejudice, that he should eschew any rote learning and dogma, that could well end the boy’s life before it even began.

Dawkins goes on to put forth his theory of memes, which essentially are useful or appealing cultural beliefs or expressions. Religious stories and aphorisms have proved especially meme-worthy because they speak to uniquely human psychological needs: the need to believe that our suffering matters, that there is a greater power underwriting a moral order to the universe, that those who have wronged us will pay for their crimes even if they escape justice here on earth, etc.

Thus according to Dawkins we are primed for religious indoctrination by our evolved trait of respecting authority and accepting conventional wisdom, and that successful religions have developed memes (parables, stories, etc.) which speak to basic human psychological needs and as such are used by religious authorities get us hooked on their “copium”. And to Mr. Fitzgerald’s point about the environment, surely religious memes spread better in some environments than others: people in distress are more likely to find God--there are no atheists in foxholes as the saying goes.

Dawkin’s says that religion is a “mis-firing” of evolved brain mechanisms which served us in the past, and may still serve us particularly when we are young and inexperienced, but that make us vulnerable to indoctrination, to fanatical adherence to irrational beliefs.

If this is in fact the case, obviously mankind needs to grow out of it. In the words of physicist Stephen Weinberg: “The world needs to wake up from the long nightmare of religion. Anything we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilisation.” [2]

Speaking specifically to the Judeo-Christian worldview, Dawkins writes: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic,homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can become desensitized to their horror.” [3]

So not a fan. Given this perspective on the matter we can understand why Dawkins and his ilk are so militant in their atheistic proselytizing. They are trying to save humans from some really, really nasty and destructive lies.

But, we must ask, what of their arguments? Is Judaism and Christianity nothing but a lot of fanciful stories to help us cope? Are people of faith simple fools?

What Does ‘2’ Weigh?

Thinkers like Dawkins believe that for anything to count as knowledge we must be able to set up a science experiment to verify the claim. If Dodo birds still exist, then at some point we should able to find one, catch him on camera. So why not apply the same standard to God? Dawkins writes: “Either [God] exists or he doesn’t. It is a scientific question; one day we may know the answer, and meanwhile we can say something pretty strong about the probability.” [3](p. 70)

Really?

Dawkins and company are scientific materialists. They believe that reality is what the physical sciences describe: elementary particles and energy, chemical reactions, biological evolution of life forms through natural selection. Which is probably what most people believe these days. So let us pose a philosophical question: what is the mass of ‘2’? What is its chemical formula? What space does it occupy?

Suddenly we are confused because numbers are mind-stuff, not physical entities. Since the scientific materialist insists that everything is reducible to matter and energy, “mind-stuff” must therefore be an epiphenomena of underlying material processes. As Dawkins famously argues regarding living creatures, they only appear designed. Design is just a figment of our own imaginations, and our imaginings are in fact just physical processes taking place in our brains, and our brains are the result of undirected material processes over long periods of time. With regards to a number like ‘2’, the scientific materialist might contend that we have to think about ‘2’, which means that our mechanical brains are doing something. So ‘2’ is thus always reducible to brain activity, and therefore to the physical and observable.

OK then, what about ‘12,334,556,129,343,445,443,392,007,444,233,556’? (I just made that up) or some such random gigantic number? Since there are an infinite number of integers there must be an infinite number of them at any given time which no one is thinking of--i.e. there’s no brain activity corresponding to it--and which exist on no computer hard drive or written on paper or anything anywhere in the universe. So they have nothing physical to be reduced to. I repeat the question: do these numbers exist?

Or consider the physicist claiming that elementary particles are the fundamental building blocks of the universe. Well he could not mean that all observed reality is reducible to the physical reality physics describes, otherwise, what is the description itself? What of differential equations, numbers, mathematical operators, etc.? Certainly they are not made of elementary particles, have mass or energy, occupy space. Quantum Field Theory is something you understand (or at least a few people do, or claim to ... ) not something you observe in nature, touch, feel, or taste.

The indisputable fact is that we cannot know anything at all without thinking, and thinking is not anything material in the scientific sense. CS Lewis famously wrote: “The Naturalists have been engaged in thinking about Nature. They have not attended to the fact that they were thinking. The moment one attends to this it is obvious that one’s own thinking cannot be merely a natural event, and therefore something other than Nature exists.” [2](p. 49)

Mind, consciousness, soul--whatever you want to call it--is the most basic substrate of any kind of reality that we can be made aware of (that is not to say that there is nothing beyond thought, only that we cannot know it). It is a peculiar claim indeed that what the products of mind reveal, e.g., the elementary particles of quantum physics, are actually real while the mind itself is some sort of epiphenomenon or illusion.

The Problem of Self-Serving Barbers

So we agree that a soul, let’s call it, is necessary for knowing anything, and in particular it is the human soul’s capacity for reason which produces anything we can call knowledge. The central article of faith of science is that all truths--or at least all the important ones--can be known through reason. It is therefore of paramount importance to scientists to know that they are in fact reasoning correctly. To this end philosophers throughout the ages have developed formal systems of logic, beginning most notably with Aristotle. Perhaps the most ambitious of such systems is Betrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead’s prodigious Principia Mathematica, which they published in three volumes between 1910 - 1913.

All formal systems of logic start with a set of axioms and have specified rules of inference. Any statement derived from the axioms using the rules of inference will be a theorem of the system. So long as the axioms are true, all derived theorems are guaranteed to be true. The hope of Russell and Whitehead was that all mathematical and scientific statements could be cast as statements within Principia Mathematica. In which case one needs merely to crank the machine and out comes guaranteed truth. Science will no longer be marred by error. The pure light of truth will eventually shine upon all of nature’s mysteries.

This was a grand vision but as you might guess not so simple to implement. Additionally, one very pesky problem emerged in that Principia Mathematica could produce theorems that talked about themselves. Russell offered a folksy example of this problem in asking us to imagine a village barber who shaves all men in the village who don’t shave themselves. The statement seems perfectly innocent until we think about it. Our village barber, let’s call him Burt, shaves all the men of the village who don’t shave themselves. All fine and good until we realize that Burt is a man living in the village and we must determine whether or not Burt shaves himself. If Burt does not shave himself, then there is one man in the village who Burt doesn’t shave and who doesn’t shave himself, which makes our statement false, since Burt is the village barber who shaves ALL men who don’t shave themselves. So the obvious fix is for Burt to shave himself. But then we realize that Burt is now shaving a man who does shave himself, making the statement false once again. Bugger.

Nonetheless Whitehead and Russell believed that they could inoculate their magisterial truth machine against such subversive self-referencing. That was until a young Austrian mathematician named Kurt Godel came along. Godel noticed a parallel between recursive arithmetic systems and formal logical systems. A simple example of a recursive arithmetic system is the Fibonacci numbers: 1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,... which is a series of numbers produced by the recursive formula Fn = F(n-1) + F (n-2), n > 2, or the nth Fibonacci number in the series is the sum of the previous two F numbers. Notice that we need the first two numbers, 1 and 2, to get us started. Those are the “axioms”, from which all “theorems” (successive) Fibonacci numbers are derived. In fact Godel would come to realize that the entire system of symbolic logic put forth in Principia Mathematica could be encoded as an arithmetic system like Fibonacci numbers, only more complex. This would become the famous Godel numbering system.

Perhaps a concrete example of a formal logical system and Godel numbering would help here. To this end, Douglas Hofstader has provided us with his simple MIU system [4], which is constructed from three typographical characters, M, I, and U. The system has one axiom: MI, and four rules for constructing theorems:

1. Any string ending in I can be replaced with IU.

2. Any string of the form Mx (x is any string of characters) can be made into Mxx

3. III can be replaced with U

4. UU can be removed

Now, for example, we can ask: Is MUI a theorem?

Proof:

• Start with our axiom: MI

• MII (rule 2)

• MIIII (rule 2)

• MUI (rule 3)

QED

Now consider a parallel system made of three whole numbers, 3, 1, and 0. This system has one axiom: 31, and four rules for construction:

1. Any number ending in 1 can be multiplied by 10

2. Etc.

Unfortunately, the remaining rules get quite complicated, but it is only important to note one thing here: 3,1,0 directly corresponds to M, I, and U, respectively. Notice that the first rule of MIU says that any string ending in I can be replaced with IU. So our axiom MI can be turned into MIU by the first rule. Correspondingly, our axiom 31 can be turned into 310 multiplying by 10, which is the first rule of the corresponding arithmetic system. To repeat the point: to our formal symbolic system we can construct a corresponding arithmetic system, where all the rules of our symbolic system are mirrored as arithmetic operations.

The other important takeaway is that formal logical systems don’t have to mean anything. They just start with a vocabulary of symbols, some axioms, and rules for producing theorems from those axioms. That’s it.

But of course the whole point of Principia Mathematica was to produce meaningful truths, to purge science of messy, sloppy, ordinary language and cast its propositions in terms of unassailable formal logic. It was Kurt Godel who realized that this alignment with truth-- with meaningful statements in ordinary human language-- would be Principia Mathematica‘s undoing.

So the hand-waving explanation of Godel’s famous incompleteness theorem is this: Godel, using Principia Mathematica, constructed a statement which says (in ordinary language): “when fed its own Godel number, this statement cannot be proved using the rules of Principia Mathematica“. Or: k = G(x), where k is the Godel number of the statement in quotes, G(x), and x is an independent variable. So when we feed G(x) its own Godel number, we have: g = G(k), where g is the Godel number of G(x) when x is assigned the Godel number of that statement. Now in practice g will be some whopping gigantic number, but we can ask: can g be reached using Principia Mathematica, using the axioms and rules, but cast in arithmetic form? Just as we can ask: is 334564 a Fibonacci number? Either it is or it is not.

The devilish detail is that if g can be found, then G(k) is a theorem of Principia Mathematica. Except that G(k) says that it is not a theorem! So finding g means that we have found a proof of a theorem which says that it is not a theorem.

Well we can’t have our great truth machine proving contradictions, so the only way out is to posit incompleteness, that there will be at least one theorem which can be stated using the system--and which we understand is true-- but which cannot be proved. By extension every formal logical system will have this property: to avoid contradictions, they must remain incomplete. The big takeaway: we humans, in understanding Godel’s statement in ordinary language, what it means, understand that whatever formal logical truth system we can construct will have at least one TRUE statement that WE UNDERSTAND as true but which cannot be proved by the system-- it cannot be computed, it cannot be “known” by system. Or that human understanding transcends any system of formal logic.

Again the problem is with self-referencing. For example, in Principia Mathematica we could have a statement k = PRIME(x), where k is the Godel number of the statement asking: is x a prime number? Well nothing prevents us from writing: g = PRIME(k), which asks: is the Godel number of the statement PRIME(x) itself a prime number? As before, our machine will search to find if g is a theorem, or if g is true, which, if so, means that k is a prime number. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. In either case an interesting tidbit of information to add to the Principia Mathematica knowledge library.

But what got our knickers all in a bunch was the statement g = G(k), which says that there is no proof of this statement (i.e. g is not a theorem) when x is set to the Godel number of G(x).

Actually, just for kicks, let’s consider g = NO_PROOF(PRIME(x)), which states that there is no proof of PRIME(x) when x is set to the Godel number of the argument (what’s in parenthesis). Now PRIME(x) will have a Godel number p, so let’s sub p for x to get NO_PROOF(PRIME(p))= g. If the Godel number of PRIME(x) is in fact prime, then g will be false, there will be a proof that p is prime because it is. Otherwise g will be true--we will find this Godel number can be generated by the arithmetic analogue of Principia Mathematica. So all fine and good. No problems, no contradictions.

Now comes the Godel trick: instead of subbing in PRIME(x), let’s sub in NO_PROOF(x). Now the statement NO_PROOF(x) will have a Godel number k, so NO_PROOF(NO_PROOF(k))= g. NO_PROOF(k) will have a Godel number g‘. So we have g = NO_PROOF(g’). What is g’? The Godel number of NO_PROOF(x) when x is set to the Godel number of the statement NO_PROOF(x). Recall Godel numbering: to our system of formal logic, we have a parallel arithmetic system, so that every line of a proof in Principia Mathematica can be expressed as a number. So g’ is the numerical way of saying: “there exists no proof of NO_PROOF(x) when x is set to the Godel number of that very statement”. Therefore what the statement g = NO_PROOF(g’) is evaluating as its argument (what’s inside the parentheses) is the very statement itself when expressed numerically (as its Godel number).

Again, in order to avoid contradiction, g cannot be a theorem of Principia Mathematica, or the Godel number g cannot be found, otherwise we would have a contradiction since the statement says it is not a theorem.

I know this is quite the brain teaser. I here supply references to a video series which I think explains Godel’s incompleteness theorem quite nicely. [4][5][6][7][8]

Anyway, the big takeaway from all of this is that Godel’s theorem implies that human understanding is not reducible to a computation. We understand that if the Godel statement is proved, then the system is proving a contradiction--and that that understanding cannot come from within the system. For any formal logical system we can create, there will be at least one truth which we understand as true but the system does not. Understanding has the property of always standing outside of its objects. What the Godel theorem shows is that should we try to turn our understanding into an object—to create an artificial intelligence—our understanding of it will yet place us outside of what our created intelligence understands (or can prove).

Or as Roger Penrose -- philosopher, mathematician, and, ahem, Nobel prize winning physicist -- puts it: “What the Godel theorem does [is that] it tells you how to use your understanding of why the rules are true to transcend the rules ... the point is that [the formal logical] system doesn’t know what it’s doing, that’s still true with AI, you talk to AI and it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.” [9]

Understanding requires a soul, or consciousness, which has the property of being indefinite and outside anything it stands in relation to. As Reinhold Niehbur put it: “The human spirit has the special capacity of standing continually outside itself in terms of indefinite regression ... The self knows the world, insofar as it knows the world, because it stands outside both itself and the world, which means that it cannot understand itself except as it is understood from beyond itself and the world.” [10]

The difference between consciousness and what a computer knows is that the former lives in an ocean of potential--potential objects to be brought forth into conscious awareness. Our reality is in this respect created, or reasoned out from this vast, unfathomable potential. Notice how this parallels the creation story of the world in Genesis: “Now the Earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters”. God then creates our world, creating day and night, land and sea, and so on. He creates a habitable order by speaking, thus creating a world that can be rationally understood. The human soul is an attenuated version of its Creator, as we similarly can create our own worlds (e.g. through technology) through our understanding of God’s creation and our own creative capacity.

We Can Only See Valuable Facts

So we’ve established that there is this indefinite ocean of possible things in what we call consciousness. From which it follows that objects of knowledge must come into our awareness by some sort of filtering process. The philosopher Imanuel Kant posited that all propositional knowledge is made possible through the Categories of the Understanding. One category, for example, is Quantity. Take an apple. Every apple is different, but there’s an intersection of common characteristics which allows me to determine it as a unit of “apple-ness”, and once I have resolved how to determine an apple, I can then count: one, two, three, four, five! I have five apples in my bag. This is important to me because I can sell these apples for $0.25 each. All prospective buyers also know how to resolve apple-ness and how to count them, hence the number of apples for sale is “objective knowledge”, something that can be placed in the public domain of things we all see or understand in the same way--things that are not merely subjective opinion. The important thing to note here is the abstracting of “apple-ness”, that we filter and resolve experience, not merely observe given facts. Which is to say: objects in the world of which we can have any knowledge of cannot exist without the organizing agency of the soul (or mind, if you prefer).

Let’s explore this a little further. As I was walking to the marketplace with my bag of apples, summing up in my mind how much money I would make, I notice a fellow in front of me suddenly get agitated, pull out a pair of binoculars and then dash into the bush. I am momentarily distracted by him, puzzled by his behavior. We later meet up at the market and talking to him I find out that he is an avid bird watcher, and that he veered off the road because he heard the song of a very rare bird. I know nothing of birds. I cannot even recall hearing bird noises. My mind was occupied with the potential profit from my apple haul. For me the bird didn’t exist at all because my conscious perception was never attuned to it. And that is because bird calls are not something I value.

Thus we are beginning to see how our values determine the reality which reveals itself to us. This undermines the empiricist view of “ready made” objects in the world which our senses merely detect.

If we adopt the empiricist view, then it follows that at some point everything will be revealed, we will have shined the light in all possible places and know what reality is in its totality. Theoretically science has an endpoint, at time when all of the facts are accumulated, the heavens are mapped, laws of motion for all things great and small are known.

But the history of empirically based modern science itself betrays this view. Newton and Einstein, for example, were both looking at the same planets, moons, and stars when Newton very accurately described gravity as an innate pulling force between two masses whose strength is proportional to the inverse square of the distance between them. Einstein then reimagined the workings of the entire data set, claiming that masses are actually traveling in straight lines but in a space that is curved by mass. The elliptical orbits of planets are just like ships following great circle routes across the seas – they are always pursuing the shortest distance between two points. Revolutions in science involve and are sometimes exclusively revolutions in thought which re-imagine and reorganize human experiences of the world, a point famously made by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in what he called paradigm shifts.

The point here is that scientific theories and scientific facts involve the agency of the mind, or soul, and that whenever we speak of the agency of the soul this necessarily means moving toward some state of affairs it sees as better than the present. Kuhn said that scientific paradigms have two defining characteristics: 1.) They are “sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents” away from what has been going on. And 2.) they are open-ended, with plenty of problems for the “redefined group of practitioners to resolve.” [11]

In other words, new scientific paradigms come to be because they are novel and interesting. Scientists don’t wander out into nature and haphazardly measure things just for the hell of it. Facts are gathered as part of an investigation, piecing together the clues of a mystery.

So the facts revealed to us by science are brought forth by human interest in novelty, the lure of a good mystery, the challenge of solving a puzzle. But how are we to understand this interest, what we sometimes refer to as “a calling”? Jordan Peterson, often citing Carl Jung’s work, argues that it is archetypal stories which reveal the most basic human values. He writes: “What could possibly be more real than the facts? First, which facts? And there indeed is the rub. This is why we find the archetypal stories at the base of every well-integrated psyche and every unified community. These stories provide the structure through which we apprehend the facts and communicate the hierarchy of value that lends weight to one fact over another. The great stories reflect the aim that motivates us and provides security to the individual, and which when shared constitutes the basis for community. That aim is a prerequisite to the act of perception that allows us even to encounter what most truly exists. The stories that are depictions of our aim and our character have a primary reality, not least because even our understanding of the real—even our “direct” perception of the facts—depends on the a priori existence of these depictions. Are the facts more real than the instrument that allows for the determination of facts? We cannot help but see the world through a story. More precisely, we see the world through a structure that, when portrayed in drama or verbalized, is a story.” [12]

To be clear, this does not mean that we can create facts and scientific truths by fiat. As we saw in the foregoing example, by training our minds on how to resolve apple-ness and learning to count, we can create a public space of objective knowledge, of agreed upon facts, such as how many apples are in a basket. That is not open to interpretation. But the landscape of facts we deal with and use to guide ourselves and orient ourselves only come to our conscious awareness by some underlying value structure. As Peterson explains, our aim is prerequisite to the very act of perception itself, how we come to know anything at all.

God is Real

At this point I’m just going to cut to the chase and explain why I believe God is real and that we must believe in God if we want civilization.

I believe that I have sufficiently refuted scientific materialism, which atheists like Dawkins accept as axiomatic. To review, I considered what mathematical entities like integers, which are objects of mind and thus immaterial, would have in the scientific materialists’ worldview. Scientists use mathematics to understand the universe as reducible to elementary particles and energy of which mathematics itself is not reducible. Numbers are ontologically different things. By what logic, other than an act of faith, can you carve out a separate reality to elementary particles, photons, etc. which cannot in any way have their being in the world independently of thought?

To belabor the point just a little more, the assertions of scientific materialism become especially problematic with microscopic phenomena. Physicists used to use bubble chambers to observe and identify charged particles. The magnetic field would cause the charged particles to move in circles, leaving condensation trails in the bubble chamber. You could identify the particles by the radius of the circle. Electrons would veer into a tight circle, having little mass, compared to, say, protons. All of which is understood through electrodynamics and atomic physics. But as for electrons, protons, pions, etc., we never–nor could we ever–observe them directly with our senses. They are imaginative projections. We might perhaps think of them as tiny billiard balls zipping about, but that is purely projected out of our minds. Yet scientific materialism says that elementary particles are what the entire cosmos ultimately reduces to, while our minds and senses are epiphenomenal. How can this be? Scientists attribute reality to such imagined things in so far as the machinery of experimental physics confirms what theory claims, confirms with something we can actually see like tracks in a bubble chamber, but that is the extent of the reality of elementary particles. They are not objects of our sense experience. We can only imagine them as if they were.

And of course our imaginative projection of charged particles as tiny billiard balls would be challenged by the famous double slit experiment, where electrons were shown to behave like waves in creating diffraction patterns. The only contradiction is between our imaginative projections of electrons as either billiard balls, or waves on the water. Again, we cannot see electrons at all, we can only see what our experimental apparatus shows us.

Next I delved into the Godel theorem. Once we realize that nothing can be known at all without mind, without thought, without consciousness, Godel’s theorem then goes on to show us that mind transcends any system of propositional knowledge which it can create. To any science, once cast into a system of formal logic, there will be a Godel statement which tries to evaluate itself–ask if it is true. Because we have understanding which transcends and stands outside any such system we can create, we understand that in order to avoid contradiction our science system cannot prove or know the Godel statement, yet we can know that the Godel statement is true.

Moreover, a computer, which is a material instantiation of a formal logical system, can only know what exists within the scope of its computations. A computer does not understand anything the way we do. Which is to say that a computer does not possess a soul, is not is tapped into the indefinite reservoir of possible things, the ocean of awareness we call consciousness.

If we accept that understanding, as opposed to computation or logical proofs, involves this indefinite, vast ocean of consciousness, the next question is how we come by facts. How do the facts reveal themselves to us? Evidently facts must be somehow sifted out of this ocean of possibilities.

If we look at science, we will see that facts emerge by virtue of an investigation, a case, a problem we are trying to solve. There is an aim or purpose around which facts are selected and organized, a purpose which brings the very facts into our awareness. Jordan Peterson explains that our aim is prerequisite to the very act of perception itself.

This is a crucial point. To better understand it, consider that nearly every specialty field, from law to welding to piloting, has a specialized language, beyond ordinary language, for the specific facts that must be learned in order to practice the profession. These facts serve the specific aims of the profession, whether it be prosecuting crimes, or making a proper TIG weld, or safely flying a commercial airliner, or etc..

Moreover, truthfulness in any knowledge space cannot be assessed independently of its purpose. Take maps as an example. Think of how many different kinds of maps there are: road maps, nautical maps (charts), weather maps, seismic maps, etc. The scientific materialist who insists that objects have an existence separate from mind, that they just are and have no relation to human valuing and purpose, would have a tough time explaining the wide variety of maps. He would have to say that there’s one map of reality–of the objective world–and the rest are derivative or epiphenomenal. But a moment’s thought reveals this to be nonsense. Which map is more true, a road map or a nautical chart? Assuming both are accurate, they are both true. What does this mean? They are both reliable tools in relation to their purpose, be it driving in the first instance, navigating a vessel in the second.

Now, every civilization will have a variety of professions serving their aims, but naturally we ask ourselves: what is the ultimate aim of civilization? We might reply that it is peace and prosperity, that it is security and wealth, that it is a sense of community and belonging, etc.

And as we’ve said, our reality, the facts we all accept, our communal knowledge space, will result from an underlying value structure. But where does the value structure come from? How do we know that it is right and good?

For Christians, as well as many other faiths, it comes from God. Let us consider this.

The book of Genesis describes the beginning as an ocean, formless, pure potential: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters”. It is no coincidence that the story of God creating the universe is exactly analogous to how we, as rational beings, come to know things and order our world in a beneficial way. God as the supreme intelligence sees that His created order is good. He has granted us humans freedom through reason (mind, abstraction which stands outside of nature, as we’ve said, cannot be understood in terms of physics or biology) to choose our paths with the potential of creating good for ourselves. This is what is meant by humans “made in the image of God”.

So we humans can create in the same manner as God, though in a very attenuated way. Having this freedom to chose makes us moral agents. Like God we seek to create beneficial modes and orders, societies where humans flourish. It is said that Western Civ is the marriage of Greek philosophy with Judaism and Christianity. There is no question that Western Civ has allowed human flourishing as no other civilization in history, whether we’re talking standard of living, human rights, medicine and health and yes, even spiritually. It’s the winning formula.

We can never know God directly, only take our best guess at what He wills for us. I think that the Bible and the great philosophers of antiquity, e.g. Aristotle, have proven to be humanity’s best guess thus far. My claim that God is real is simply this: we can in principle create social mores and societies by fiat, because we have the freedom to do so by our gift of rationality. But the moral laws of the universe will determine their ultimate success. They will be judged by God, not by opinion polls or ballot boxes or elites. That there is an absolute standard for what is good and true in politics reveals what I understand to be God.

Just to restate one more time: the reality that we bring forth into our conscious awareness, our recognized knowledge space, depends on an underlying value structure which holds and ranks the relevant facts. This reality will only be good insofar as the value structure is in accordance with God’s will. An oppressive tyranny can be just as fact based as American democracy, the former dealing in the very real realities of pain, fear, and humiliation in determining human behavior. Christianity, on the other hand, grants every human unique moral agency, that humans are not meant to be slaves, not meant to exist as farm animals. American democracy, which is steeped (or at least was…) in Christian ethics builds personal liberty into its form of government and the result has been unprecedented peace and prosperity for Americans and much of the world as well. Hence I conclude that the West is more closely aligned with God’s will than any other.

If we look at Islam, conversely, which is another major world religion, we are rather hard pressed to find any such glowing recommendations. Dr. Gad Saad writes: “Since the September 11, 2001, Islamist terrorist attacks on the United States, Islamic terrorists have perpetrated more than 35,000 attacks across the globe. The attacks have occurred in nations that vary on every conceivable metric, including race, ethnicity, culture, religion, language, economic vitality, and political system. No other religion has come even remotely close to Islam in inspiring, justifying, or supporting terrorism.” [13]

I only bring this up to elucidate my empirical approach to understanding God. If we are to assume that God means well for us, that He wants us to prosper and live in peace and harmony, then, at least in its latest iteration, Islam appears misguided.

Life is Not by Chance

I cannot leave this section without taking a short digression into Stephen Meyer’s work on the origin of life.

In 1828 the German scientist Friedrich Wohler accidentally synthesized urea, a chemical compound normally produced by an animal kidney. Up until that point it was believed that such a compound required life, “vital force”, to be brought into existence, but Wohler had just artificially synthesized it in a laboratory. Suddenly the possibility emerged in the minds of scientists that perhaps life on earth began in such a way--chance combinations of chemicals in some sort of primordial soup that created primitive, self-replicating organisms. Once you have that, Darwinian natural selection takes over and we have all creatures, great and small.

The ensuing scientific scrutiny of simple living cells, however, revealed astonishing levels of complexity. Well no matter say the evolutionists, life has had over four billion years to arrange itself, that’s plenty of time for randomness to produce functioning organisms.

In 1952 Harold Urey and Stanley Miller managed to synthesize, in a similar manner as Wohler, amino acids, the basic building blocks of proteins, which are the basic building blocks of life. At this point many scientists became convinced that chance combinations of chemicals combined with Darwinian selection is the true story of how life emerged on earth.

Now an indispensable part of Darwinian evolution is the selection of genetic traits in the reproductive process. Mendel famously showed how traits get passed on from parent to offspring in peas. Then came the pathbreaking discovery of James Watson and Francis Crick about the structure of DNA. This went well beyond describing the mechanism of genetic inheritance, as it also revealed an entirely new dimension to the problem. Stephen Meyer writes:

“Watson and Crick’s discovery would forever change our understanding of the nature of life. At the close of the nineteenth century, most biologists thought life consisted solely of matter and energy. But after Watson and Crick, biologists came to recognize the importance of a third fundamental entity in living things: information.” [14]

DNA, it turns out, stores genetic information as sequences of its four bases A, C, G, and T in much the same way as digital information is stored in sequences of 1’s and 0’s on a computer hard drive.

We can thus ask: how much such genetic information is required to build a rat or a human? Answer: A lot--and I mean, a lot. Getting functioning genetic code by randomly throwing out sequences of the four bases would likely require a mighty high number of throws. Nevertheless, let us recall Dawkins’ argument for Mount Impossible. Evolution starts simple. Given enough time--a few billion years ought to do it, no?--it can produce amazingly complex life forms.

But it does have to start somewhere, with something simple. Says Stephen Meyer: “The simplest extant cell, Mycoplasma genitalium a tiny bacterium that inhabits the human urinary tract requires only 482 proteins to perform its necessary functions and 562,000 bases of DNA (just under 1,200 base pairs per gene) to assemble those proteins [13](p. 201) ... Of course building a functioning cell at least one that in some way resembles the cells we actually observe today would have required more than just the genetic information that directs protein synthesis. It would have also required, at the very least, a suite of preexisting proteins and RNA molecules polymerases, transfer RNAs, ribosomal RNAs, synthetases, and ribosomal proteins, for example to process and express the information stored in DNA.” [14](p. 202)

It’s not just the DNA information of the requisite proteins that are required, but all the machinery necessary to read that information and direct the physical construction process. In order for me to view this essay on my computer screen, for example, I need more than just the digital sequences stored on the hard drive which encode the essay. I also need an operating system to direct the CPU to execute a word processing software program which reads the information on the hard drive and turns on or off each computer screen pixel to form English characters on the screen so that I can read it.

Anyway, the number of genes required for mycoplasma genitalium, a very simple bacteria, is at a minimum 562,000/1,200 = 468 genes. Yet scientists have postulated primitive one celled organisms might be coded with as few as 250 genes. Because proteins are “expressed” genes, the information encoded in DNA can be approximately equated to the information contained in the amino acid sequences which comprise the protein. Which is to say, if we are trying to calculate the chances of a correct DNA sequence arising to supply our bare minimum required 250 genes, we could alternatively calculate the probability of the specific amino acid sequences emerging by chance for the necessary proteins of our simple, one celled organism.

For a two-amino acid protein, the number of possible combinations is 20²= 400. For three, 20³=8,000. In real life, short proteins consist of about 150 amino acid chains, or 20¹⁵⁰ which works out to about 10¹⁹⁵ possible sequences. Bottom line: researchers have found “the probability of achieving a functional sequence of amino acids in several known (roughly 100 amino acid) proteins at random is still exceedingly small, about 1 chance in 10⁶³ (to put this in perspective, there are 10⁶⁵ atoms in our galaxy). [14](p. 208)

In 2007, researcher Douglas Axe presented a more realistic estimate of a functional protein of 150 amino acids randomly assembled by chance in a pre-biotic soup, such as might have existed during early Earth. He also took into account two other independent requirements, the probability that the protein incorporates only peptide bonds (1/10⁴⁵) and incorporating only left-handed amino acids (1/10⁴⁵). Multiplying these three probabilities together we get 1/10¹⁶⁴.

Now William Dembski calculated that the universe’s “CPU” runs at a maximum of 10⁴³ events per second. Since there are approximately 10⁸⁰ elementary particles in the universe, and the universe is estimated to be about 10¹⁸ seconds old (NOTE: Meyer uses 10¹⁶ seconds), you get an UPPER BOUND on the number of possible physical events that could have taken place in the universe up until now to be 10¹⁴¹.

Hence the universe has had a maximum of 10¹⁴¹ rolls of the dice, so to speak, to try and hit a combination that has 10¹⁶⁴ possibilities.

This means that in order to expect a 50-50 shot at a simple protein emerging in a pre-biotic soup, the universe would have to be nearly a trillion-trillion times as old as the 10 or so billion years as it is currently estimated to be. Or alternatively, the chance of getting a functional protein given the “probabilistic resources” (number of dice rolls, you might say) is one in 10²³ (164-141 = 23). Climbing mount impossible is therefore ... practically impossible.

Richard Dawkins has in fact acknowledged that no one knows how life emerged on earth. He stated as much in an interview with Ben Stein [15]. Dawkins proposed that perhaps the DNA for a self-replicating cell or simple organism came from another civilization somewhere else in the universe. Perhaps they in fact designed a seed they sent to earth in order to flourish. Of course this begs the question as to how such an advanced civilization itself came into being. Dawkins insists on some sort of Darwinian process, though we’ve shown that this is highly unlikely, not just for life on earth, but for the entire known universe.

The overall point I wanted to make with this digression is that, at least at this point, no one has been able to propose a credible naturalistic explanation for the origin of life. The favorite fecund pond of early earth where chance combinations of chemicals formed an initial self-replicating organism appears to be just another myth of man’s origins--the one that suits the sensibilities of the naturalists.

Moreover, where the chance hypothesis for the origin of life falls short is in its failure to account for the vast amount of genetic information needed to code even the most primitive life forms. What the life sciences are now revealing is that the universe is suffused with information. As the only known source of information is what we call mind or intelligence, it stands to reason that the cosmos is the creation of a supreme intelligence.

Oar Power

Alright, so now back to what I originally came here to talk to you about: oar power. Which actually means sailing a boat that is large enough to live aboard and stout enough to safely cross oceans but does not possess any form of mechanical power. Except for an oar, or two, which gives us some means to maintain forward progress when the wind dies away.

Nowadays this represents a vanishingly small group of seafarers. Hoping to inspire a few more devotees, Mr. FitzGerald founded the Oar Club, which he describes as follows: “Eriks, my crew and a very fine fellow, I believe is responsible for the name, ‘The Oar Club–A Sailor’s Club’. The point was an inside joke, admittedly, and has really nothing to do with rowing but that sailing a pure sailing craft was a times a lot of hard work, and you for certain knew when you were in the Oar Club. It wasn’t necessarily a good thing to be in the Oar Club, but when you were, you certainly were about to learn something.” [1](p. 70)

Now there are arguments to be made against over-reliance on technology. When you no longer have to sail all of the time but only when it’s pleasant, your skills atrophy and that could spell disaster should the systems you rely on suddenly quit. Which will happen at the worst possible moment, naturally. But this mostly misses the point. The two most transformational technologies in the sailing world–diesel engines and GPS–are nowadays quite reliable. In 2025 it is not unreasonable to regard celestial navigation, for example, as an outdated and unnecessary skill.

Old-time sailor and writer Tom Cunliffe offers I think something more plausible to the traditionalist: “Until recently, even landsmen were governed by the turning seasons. The globe was of unimaginable immensity, and distance was walked out at 3 knots, or covered at 5 or 6 on horseback. A bad decision produced immediate repercussions which could give rise to physical discomfort, perhaps even death. Sailing brings us back to these values, but as yachts become ever more shiny, efficient, and packed full of machines to insulate our bodies from having to work the foredeck, or our minds from the fear of navigational catastrophe, frustration has set in for many of us. The world we seek is the mysterious place in which men who could neither read nor write made their peace with wind and tide in order to feed their families. The lost asset which divides them from us was an understanding of their place in creation.” [16]

That last sentence might sound like an empty platitude, but I think it gets right to the heart of the matter, which is that we no longer have a sense of our place in creation. Or even believe in the Creator. And a good many of us now have enough material goods to know that money cannot buy you a place in creation. Material things can make life safer, more pleasant, more fun, but not meaningful. And unless you can somehow devolve yourself back into a beast, a meaningless life will kill you. I mean that literally. A life of simple hedonism such as habitually using drugs to activate the pleasure centers has, I hold, never made anyone happy and fulfilled, but it has certainly led to many pre-mature deaths. Being made in the image of God means that we can only be happy when we strive to become uniquely godlike.

So we– being myself, Mr. FitzGerald, and fellow Oar Club members–claim that the sea-steading life we build for ourselves supplies meaning by adventure, by placing us back, at least to some extent, into pre-industrial times, back to the age of sail when all movement at sea was done by sail and oar instead of technologies which do most of the work for us and therewith dramatically reduce the requisite skills. We still adopt some modern technologies of course, but not to the extent that they insulate or remove us from that “mysterious place in which men who could neither read nor write made their peace with wind and tide”.

Actually we adopt a lot of modern technologies, if the truth be told. We only insist that the boat must be a sailing craft–not a motorsailer, not auxiliary sail. Once you slip the mooring cable and venture out to sea on a sailing craft, even with today’s sophisticated weather models, even with accurate charts, you can never be quite sure how it will all turn out.

My high school Latin teacher was a purist sailor, and he used to say that sailing up to his mooring was something he could never quite learn. That applies to sailing generally. Wind, wave, and current is never exactly the same twice. Progress at sea by the wind alone defies mathematical certainty. I will bet a decent sum than anyone who has sailed an engineless boat of any considerable tonnage over a number of years has had at least one near disaster which skill alone could not have averted. The sudden wind shift that throws you aback while trying tack through a narrow cut or in a crowded mooring field. The freak squall that has you suddenly dragging anchor and scrambling to raise sail as you get blown toward a rocky lee shore. The reliable trade wind deciding to go on vacation while the ocean swell is pushing you toward an impossible-to-anchor-steep-to Pacific atoll. No matter how skilled you are you cannot anticipate every vagary of nature that might foil you. Sometimes it just comes down to luck.

Now how exactly volunteering for such unnecessary difficulties and the occasional terror can supply meaning and purpose in life is an interesting question.

Tom Cunliffe suggests that the more difficult pre-industrial world of sail was enchanted in some way, an assertion I would agree with. Earlier I cited Jordan Peterson’s work on archetypal stories, which are the Biblical stories if we are talking about Western Civilization-- the stories which center the culture, which drive the created knowledge spaces, the political orders, even our perceptions themselves. Peterson frequently draws on the work of Carl Jung, who identified psychological archetypes, which are basic patterns by which we resolve the indefinite manifold of experience and which determine what we become conscious of. Archetypes involve more than rational resolutions, as in Kant’s Categories of Understanding (e.g. Quantity), but organize experience in ways that involve the emotions as well. When archetypes are invoked, we may experience terror or exaltation, sadness or pleasure, any number of emotional states.

One such archetype is the Great Father. The Great Father is the protector of a habitable order, the good and just society where children are provided for, women cherished, men turned into gentlemen. It is a high trust society, one of trade and prosperity, one in which people not only have a place in the social order, but in the order of creation as well. The negative is the Terrible Father, the tyrant. This is the military dictatorship, a society which will impulsively persecute or even execute anyone who deviates a hair from rigid rules and customs. There is no tolerance for individual autonomy, creativity, or art. It is a society that simply marches forward in time, in well-organized ranks, endlessly repeating propaganda, repeating the state approved lies which cover over the tragic stupidity of it all.

Following the Second World War, Americans revered their war veterans and the hyper-masculine expressions they represented, and which produced great wealth but also a lot of industrial ugliness: “There was a ‘male’-ness to these failures. The country worked, all right—but in a way that was transactional, aggressive, and indelicate. Uniformity marked the post-war built landscape, from billboards to housing projects to corporate headquarters. When the dyspeptic University of Michigan literature professor John Aldridge looked out on America’s post-war suburban neighborhoods, then still under construction, he saw army attitudes brought home and a war zone along with them. ‘It resembled nothing so much as the military world we had just escaped,’ he recalled in the late 1960s. ‘From coast to coast we bulldozed the land into rubble, tore out the grass, uprooted the trees, and laid out thousands and thousands of miles of company streets all lined with family-sized barracks.’ ” [17]

In the West, however, there came a reaction to this hyper-masculine excess of order which was becoming Terrible Father-like in a new reverence for the feminine. We might reflexively cite feminism as an example. However, feminism is ironically masculine, essentially a movement to propel human females into the traditional realm of male achievement: business, law, politics, etc. I think the real resurgence of the feminine came in the environmental movement, which is a resurgence of nature worship driven by a sense of impending loss of what is untouched and unspoiled. Wealthy Westerners who were no longer chained to their jobs by necessity were now looking to escape the modern regimen – to get away from all the ugly machines, to be free of the 9-to-5 rat race, to liberate themselves from the endless micro-management by societal norms and politeness. Thus a new generation of Rousseaueans was born, a generation waking up to the realization that they may have been born free but are everywhere in chains.

As far as the archetypes go, nature is Feminine. It is fecund, the source of all life, which is the Great Mother, as well as the taker of life, which is the Terrible Mother. She is beautiful and the fount of inspiration and creativity, while also being the place of darkness, danger, chaos, the deep ocean, the whale that swallows Jonah.

Against the Terrible Mother (still following Peterson and Jung here) stands the archetype of the Male Hero, who is drawn to adventure into nature, into chaos and danger, who confronts it head on. If he survives, he brings back home to his family and tribe a fresh new order. He inspires in his people a renaissance, a new prosperous and peaceful political order. The Great Father is thus reborn from the ashes of the Terrible Father, which was the old, corrupt, decadent political order. Think of Aeneas journeying into the Underworld, where he must go before finally founding a city for his people, before founding Rome. Or Luke Skywalker in the Empire Strikes Back who must journey into the darkest recesses of the jungle alone to face his fears. He puts on his weapons belt, but the wise man Yoda informs him that his weapons will be no use for where he’s going. He will not be fighting any enemies he knows with light sabers. Skywalker must complete his training—which involves this descent into chaos and terror—in order to save the Rebel Alliance from the Empire, which is of course the Terrible Father.

Now I’m going to guess that at this point some of you are rolling your eyes and thinking that all this Jungian archetype stuff is a lot of hot air. You might also be wondering what in the world any of this has to do with Oar Club membership. I’m getting there. Please be patient.

Allow me to relate some of my own experiences which, I submit, stand as evidence that these Jungian archetypes are real and have driven my life decisions in significant ways.

Back in 2004 I attempted to write a book about my world sailing voyage (by attempted I mean attempted to publish it) which I titled Sailing Through the Night. I explain that I chose a low tech (almost zero tech back then–didn’t even have a 12-volt system) and engineless boat because I wanted to see the world as sailors had once known it. I would be no tourist. I would pit my wits and skill against the vagaries of the wide ocean, just like my seafaring heroes of yesteryear.

In the course of writing the manuscript I was developing a theory about the parallels between ocean sailing and sleep, which led me to a passing interest in why we need to sleep at all. To which I never found even a remotely satisfactory answer. The point is that I was thinking this long before I had any awareness of Jung’s work. Looking back I was pretty evidently being propelled by the archetypes which he had identified. The sea, water, darkness and sleep are the Feminine (archetypally), the source of creativity and renewal. Genuine adventure leads out of the well ordered, known, safe world into chaos and all of its attendant dangers. I was certainly thirsting for an adventure that was a “natural challenge” (i.e. out in nature). I do recall wanting to escape from effete academia and then the mind-numbing banalities of office life in the working world. Growing up on a prep school campus I recall quite clearly the persistent feeling that I was living a pre-fab, cheap imitation of life, not the real thing. I was surrounded by sophisticated people who talked with authority and gravity (though I sometimes doubted their sincerity) about great people and deeds of the past but never actually did any such things themselves.

I wanted real adventure, not Disney world, not the movies. I wanted to be like those men I met in the books of Alan Villiers, Sterling Hayden, Melville and Conrad. I wanted to be battling canvas one-hundred feet aloft in a screeching Cape Horn gale (or at least I imagined I did). I wanted to stand at the wheel of a great square rigger logging 18 knots while mountainous seas crashed and tumbled over her decks.

Of course my dreams could never come true so long as I insisted on living in a world that has since passed out of existence. So I looked to literary things to supply what I could not find in the real world. I tuned in to high-browed news outlets like NPR or PBS, read the NY Times, read some of the books they recommended. But it always left me cold, like some important ingredient was missing. I wanted to shout like the old lady in the Wendy’s hamburger commercial: “Where’s the beef?”

I also became aware that publishing and legacy media is run by feminists who do not like men, and who would only try to prove that my sailing heroes were frauds, or that the fastest clippers owe their record speeds to the captain’s wives, or that my interest in such things only perpetuates harmful sexist stereotypes, and etc. Eventually I tuned out.

Of course there was still classic literature, but for the most part I could not bring it to life. My teachers were not of much help. The first time I encountered a contemporary work that made me sit up was Allan Bloom’s book The Closing of the American Mind. It was never assigned to me; I read it on my own. That was the rare shaft of sunlight peeking through a crack in the top of the cave. Bloom talked about great books, not to deconstruct them so as to spare us puny moderns unpleasant comparisons, but to present them to us in all their majesty, like a great old cathedral that when first entered can stop you cold, render you momentarily transfixed by its beauty. Your gaze is drawn upward. You think that perhaps, one day, you may do great things too.

I also remember when I returned to the Virgin Islands in 2004, having just closed my global loop, I had found a Christian station on FM radio (didn’t have a cell phone back then; radio was my sole connection to the world when afloat). I remember one preacher I really liked. His multipart series on the Book of Job had me enthralled. But growing up in and around academia, and growing up in America post 1960’s, with the atheism of people like Richard Dawkins, it was taken as a virtual truism that religion is for morons. Once I left the Virgin Islands, I stopped listening to Christian radio.

Anyway, I wrote the manuscript, tried to publish it but had no takers so I needed to go back to work to earn money. I finally landed a very good paying job with Merrill Lynch Commodities in Houston, Texas. The money was good–no, it was great-- but my mental state was bad and getting worse. When I was finally laid off during the crash of 2008, it came as a relief. I knew that I was done with the corporate world and that, for a variety of reasons, I really had no choice in the matter.

The Lure of the Pure

Naturally I would move back aboard, not only for financial reasons (no longer having that six-figure income), but because I was not done adventuring. After a rather extensive refit I re-launched Ruth Avery in December of 2008 and sailed away for Bermuda and on to St. Thomas, USVI. It was a most unpleasant trip, I do recall. But I was back afloat, free to roam once again, and that was good enough for me.

I have had many adventures since then. I still live aboard the same boat and continue to wander the watery parts of the world. Which has slaked my thirst for adventure, having done it for so many years now. I have also mellowed somewhat with age. My YouTube channel How to Sail Oceans was never destined to rule social media, but it has brought me a much-needed connection to the world. I am particularly grateful to the comment section. One needs to be appreciated for whatever one is offering up to the world. Being thought of as useless or irrelevant can be crushing. It can turn you into Cain.

Over the years I have continually added new equipment and upgrades to the boat, which in many cases meant introducing more technology. I finally crossed the Rubicon with the purchase of an outboard motor for the dinghy. Some years later I constructed a bracket so that the motor could be used to push the mother ship as well. This of course was hardly the equivalent of installing an inboard diesel, but I was now motorized.

For a few years. Last year my 3.5 hp Tohatsu gave up the ghost (gear shift lever froze) and I decided not to replace it. I would return to sail and oar, the way I had started. Despite all the added difficulties, somehow the purity of it overruled all other considerations. Which is saying something. I am not naive here.

In places like the Florida Keys, for example, not having an outboard motor for the dinghy can mean some long rows to get ashore. During some of those long rows ashore, often followed by a walk or bike ride to the grocery store, I tried working out in my mind why I would row when I could afford a motor.

My first thought was the fact that after having spent over two hours on self-powered transport just to pick up some items at the grocery store, I no longer felt the need to go jogging or swimming to get some exercise. I know that if I am sedentary for too long I will get anxious, lethargic, and that it will eventually lead to insomnia. Exercise cures it for me. When I had the outboard my runs ashore were considerably shorter and easier, but then they did not cure the sedentary blues. I would often have to go ashore again just take a jog. Which made me contemplate why we always seek more labor saving conveniences and then purchase health club memberships to make up for all the lost physical activity. Why not just live a more integrated life?

I have come up with three reasons for this. The first is control, or as psychologists might further specify it, the desire to make ourselves the locus of control. The philosopher Martin Heidegger said that the essence of modern machine technology is a revealing of nature as “standing reserve”, as a fuel supply for our needs, at hand and ready for use. Technology thus places the locus of control with man. No need to wait up on wind or tide as with the sailing ship, with a reliable diesel you are master of the sea.

The second is that we hate chores. My dentist tells me to slow down with the scrubbing on my teeth because it’s causing the gums to recede. I wonder why spending an additional moment to attend to this small matter is so difficult for me. I think it’s because it’s a chore and I just want to get it done with the least amount of effort. Same with going ashore to go grocery shopping. It’s a chore, so I want the quickest, most convenient method of transport, which is a motorized dinghy. I can then get in my physical exercise at another time of my choosing, and I can choose the types of exercises I wish to do. Again this adds that desired locus of control to my day in the form of options.

I promised three reasons, and so, OK, with sneering contempt I present the third reason: social status signaling. A life of ease signals wealth. Hey loser, I’ve got it made, I live on easy street! Yeah it’s stupid but it also matters. Unless you are living in a remote wilderness without any communications, not even a radio, don’t tell me that you don’t care what other people think.

Still I don’t think that I have adequately accounted for our fixation on convenience, even in cases when it’s clearly counterproductive when considered more broadly. I propose that it’s a hangover from our much leaner evolutionary past. We wish to avoid physical exertion in the same way that we crave high carbohydrate and sugar laden junk food even if we are already overfed. Throughout most of human history, high caloric foods like meat from big game or sweet fruits and honey were generally hard to come by, so when presented with such foods we are programmed to gorge ourselves. But now with Burger King, or McDonalds, or Pizza Hut, or Dairy Queen, or etc. just down the road, such food is readily available and at an affordable price. Obesity is now a major health problem in America. In 2024 the CDC reported that nearly 40% of Americans are obese and that obesity accounts for $173 billion dollars in medical expenditures.

But back in the pre-industrial, pre-Burger King era, calories were scarce and thus humans evolved to be caloric misers. When you have little caloric income, you have to cut spending everywhere possible. So we naturally embraced every labor saving device to save calories. As with junk food, we now have so many labor saving devices that our bodies are often not exercised at all, which only further exacerbates the obesity epidemic along with other widespread health problems.

Oar Club Philosophy

Cue the scoffing chorus: no one is ever going to sail when they have a motor, walk three miles to the grocery when they have a car, endure the heat when there’s air conditioning, and so on. Seeking comfort and convenience is natural and you’re not going to fight it.

Agree on the first part. However it should be noted that civilization is not natural. It is to be distinguished from the so called “state of nature”, or savagery, the life of primitive peoples which for most part was a life of grinding poverty and perpetual warfare.

This is why all civilizations educate their young. Education forms youngsters into adults capable of behaving in and contributing to civilized society. Of course nature is not to be erased--though that has been tried many times, from ancient Sparta to the Soviet Union to present day Queer Theory. No. Civilization cultivates nature like one cultivates a garden. Or civilization aims to perfect nature, which is how Nietzsche saw it.

Now every civilization that I am aware of engages in an arena of activities which we might call “culture”, activities which are useless insofar as they don’t produce food, or build shelters, or transport goods, which is to say, they don’t take care of worldly business. Take sports for example. Following our calorie conservation principle which inclines us toward labor saving machines, sports make no sense. Why expend vast amounts of energy trying to run a 26-mile-marathon when the distance could be quickly, reliably, and comfortably traversed in an automobile?

The highlight reels of sporting events I think point us to the answer. Great sports stories are the stories of heroes, the archetype being the scrappy underdog or hapless team of amateurs who go from being the butt of every joke to champions. Think of Miracle on Ice, when the amateur team USA pulls off a most unlikely victory against the virtually invincible Soviet team in 1980. During the final ten seconds ABC announcer Al Michaels loses his professional composure to the intensity of the moment and famously shouts into the microphone: “Do you believe in miracles? … Yes!” just when the clock ticks down to zero and the Americans triumph.

Sports are mere play, yet they imitate real world struggles. American football resembles two armies meeting on a battlefield. Sports from the ancient world, such as javelin throwing, are non-lethal versions of military combat, back when soldiers used spears.

And though they may be mere forms of play, excelling at a sport invariably pushes human skill, strength or endurance to its utmost limit, be it running a marathon in record time, defeating another man in a boxing ring, or winning at billiards.

So let us say that sports are forms of play which imitate real life struggles, and that struggles are part of life, even for the so called privileged. Virtually no one just has it all and is happy. Life is also precarious. Chance plays a role. One must often endure prolonged periods of intense uncertainty while crises loom. In the sporting highlight reels we see such moments of life played out in a game. In this way a mere game can have much broader significance and engage us on a deep emotional level. Sports heroes maintain the correct attitude and coolness of head under intense duress, as when all their efforts, training, hopes, come down to a few seconds of game time. They engage us with an archetypal value structure, remind us why we should aspire to be like these heroes in our own lives with our own challenges. They also show us why we turn away from those who like to complain, are resentful, or try to manipulate us into granting them unearned accolades.

In addition to sports, nearly all cultures have art, which is similarly “useless”. While popular music and movies are billion-dollar industries, they do not produce any necessities (i.e. food, clothing, shelter). Art is also a form of play: playing at dress-ups, telling ghost stories, imagining another world or re-imagining our present world in a way that focuses our attention on invisible things, like a person’s character. Art exercises our supernatural capacity for abstraction, our unique rational soul. Creations, whether it be painting, literature, music, sculpture, etc. that draw our attention and summon powerful emotions (invoke archetypes, by Jung’s formulation) will often become memes. A meme is psychological shorthand for a complex structure of ideas. Take for example the popular meme of the “Red Pill”, derived from the movie The Matrix, and broadly refers to cultural acuity, the ability to see the truth beneath all the convenient lies. The Red Pill is set against the “Blue Pill”, which is intellectual laziness and a willingness to believe what the culture says to believe, of going along to get along. Good works of art thus bring forth into our collective consciousness patterns and realities by which we orient ourselves, understand ourselves, and motivate ourselves.

Great art might be distinguished from popular art in that the memes it creates are more enduring and widely adopted. Cain from the Old Testament is a character type which is everywhere today as it was in ancient times. As a meme it draws up to our perceptions a human type characterized by bitterness and resentment.

Finally there is religion and philosophy, which attempt to understand art propositionally, explicitly, and additionally to know the unity of all art, the highest purpose it is attempting to reveal. Religion is, however, not reducible to philosophy as most faiths recognize that not everything can be understood propositionally but rather can only become known through ritual and practice.

And while culture may be useless, it is not unnecessary. Without culture humans live as animals, from moment to moment, seeking food and sometimes a mate. Which is fine for a bear or a blue bird, but not for a human. Humans are made in the image of God, which means that they partly exist in a world of ideas, and this world must be integrated with their animal nature if they are to flourish. This is the purpose of culture.

Anyway, let us say then that Oar Club is in part a sports club. Yet I think the Oar Club transcends a sports club in that it throws us back into the pre-industrial world when the forces of nature ruled the lives of men. The operation of powered vessels are distinctly different from those sailing craft, as Joseph Conrad once so perfectly explained: “The taking of a modern steamship about the world (though one would not minimize its responsibilities) has not the same quality of intimacy with nature, which, after all, is an indispensable condition to the building up of an art … such sea-going has not the artistic quality of a single-handed struggle with something much greater than yourself; it is not the laborious absorbing practice of an art whose ultimate result remains on the knees of the gods. It is not an individual, temperamental achievement, but simply the skilled use of a captured force, merely another step forward upon the way of universal conquest.” [18]

As we’ve said, modern technology aims to conquer nature to make our lives easier, but also that modern technology can be stifling. An environment that is entirely human artifice can be oppressive in the sense that all choice, all ways of conceiving things, are already givens in the technologies which surround us. Our entire world, especially if you spend most of your time on a smart phone, is something already conceived of by other people. All of your desires and dreams are but existing products and services. You forget that there’s such thing as (figuratively speaking) a Godel statement–truth you can know outside of all the systems in which you consciously understand your life.

Intuitively at least some of us sense that what all the science and art of the day is telling us about the world is yet a tiny dwelling place of human artifice, a pale and inadequate reflection of reality. Plato famously described the culture of his own time with his metaphor of the Cave.

So back to nature! The call is loud and clear to us Oar Club members and all such kindred spirits. I can remember when I first set off blue water voyaging and wondered what mysteries might unfold from spending weeks at sea with no outside communications. Just the lonely sea and the sky. We Oar Club members know of something much greater than ourselves by the many faces of the sea, one day a source of incomparable joy and delight, the next frustration and discomfort to the point of total exasperation, which, if we have any semblance of sensitivity and intelligence, instills a religious dimension to the whole affair, nudges us closer to God.

And that’s the crux of it, as I see it. The reductionism of atheism, secular humanism, scientific materialism all lead us toward ourselves as nothing but agents with appetites. There can be nothing else because it’s the only thing we can objectively measure through economics and opinion polls. You can dress it up in scientific jargon like “emotive import” etc., but that won’t change the fact that there can be no accounting for any unity of purpose, beauty and greatness once that we adopt these premises. Without God everything is meaningless, just a chasing after the wind.

References

[1] FitzGerald, Jerome William, Sea-Steading: A Life of Hope and Freedom on the Last Viable Frontier (iUniverse; Lincoln, NE, 2006), p. ix.

[2] Lennox, John. Can Science Explain Everything? (Questioning Faith) (p. 9). The Good Book Company. Kindle Edition.

[3] Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion (p. 51). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]

[10] Peterson, Jordan B.. Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (p. 371). Taylor & Francis. Kindle Edition.

[11] Kuhn, Thomas S.. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition . The University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition

[12] Peterson, Jordan B.. We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine (p. 11). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[13] Saad, Gad. The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense (p. 129). Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition.

[14] Meyer, Stephen C.. Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (p. 84). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

[15]

[16] Cunliffe, Tom. Hand, Reef and Steer: Traditional Sailing Skills for Classic Boats (Sheridan House: New York, 1996), p. 13

[17] Caldwell, Christopher. The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (p. 41). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

[18] Conrad, Joseph. The Mirror of the Sea (pp. 30-31). Kindle Edition.

The Higher Learning

When I was in graduate school back in the 1990's one of my professors, a brilliant but irascible man, opened his lecture with a remark which, paraphrasing from memory, went as follows: "Back in the early 20th century we had all of these groundbreaking discoveries in physics with only a few people holding PhD's. With all of the PhD's nowadays we should expect a major breakthrough in physics almost every week. But that is not happening. I wonder why that is?"

It is no exaggeration to say that the scientists of the early twentieth century fundamentally altered our understanding of the physical world. Einstein's theory of relativity drew a curious, to put it mildly, relationship between space, time, and mass. The pioneers of quantum mechanics, on the other hand, drew even more curious connections between subject and object, where the observer figures into the mathematics as a mathematical operator on a vector. Even more astonishing is the fact that all of these bizarre theories are backed up by empirical evidence.

Now with regard to university degree holders, higher education has exploded during the past century. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 1910 the total number of PhD's awarded in the United States was 443. A century later, in 2010, that number is 158,590, a three-hundred-and-fifty-eight-fold increase. Moreover, in 1910, the ratio of males to females earning PhD's was 9:1. In 2010 it became 0.93:1. [1]

So higher education is exploding and female "empowerment" is happening on a massive scale. Around the mid-1990's women began earning more undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees than men, and the upward trend of women continues. [2] As for university faculty, Professor Sarah Hill puts it as follows: "Most of the really competent academics I know, who are just kicking ass, and who doing a really good job in terms of discovery, are women. I think the university has fallen apart because there are a lot of people who are mediocre, who are generally old men, and who are trying to maintain the system that rewards mediocrity. " [3]

So the evidence seems to say that the feminists are right, women really are the superior gender. Yet how to square this with the historical fact that all of the greatest scientists--not to mention artists, inventors, and explorers-- are men? How to square this with the history of academic physics as observed by my old prof? Feminists blame the patriarchy, which they claim oppressed women, robbed them of opportunities, and turned a blind eye to their achievements. Some of which may be true, but as we are now a half-century deep into affirmative action for women, with female only business training ([4], for example), female only faculty positions [5], female only spaces while male only spaces are forced to admit women [6], etc., feminist philippics over patriarchal oppression grow ever more implausible.

Consider the recent spectacle of three university presidents, Liz Magill of University of Pennsylvania, Sally Kornbluth of MIT, and Claudine Gay of Harvard, speaking before Congress in words and tone that would scarcely distinguish them from any middle manager in corporate America. [7] This is not meant as a dig at middle managers, as erudition and eloquence is neither expected nor needed from them, but as for university presidents, well, that's their bailiwick. Hence the question arises: by what metric are these and the majority female contingent of academia, in the words of Prof Sarah Hill, "kicking ass"?

Certainly being president of an elite university would qualify as "kicking ass" from a careerist standpoint, but the issue is whether these women are upholding the standards of elite universities in any traditional sense. These three women hardly effused learnedness and profundity. One could be forgiven for suspecting that they were affirmative action beneficiaries or even frauds. Which in the case of Harvard president Claudine Gay is what Christopher Rufo has in fact alleged, pointing to numerous instances of what appears to be plagiarism in her published works. [8]

Further, to quote the podcaster and provocateur Matt Walsh: "The real problem with Claudine Gay's plagiarized papers isn't that they were plagiarized. It's the fact that even if they were original thoughts, they were still vapid and dumb and pointless thoughts. It used to be that Harvard professors conducted original research on important topics like biochemistry. But now they write useless garbage for a non-existent audience solely to advance themselves." [9]

To Walsh's point, it does appear that the hallowed halls of academia are succumbing to rampant careerism. In the past two years, for example, the famous publishing house John Wiley & Sons, Inc. has closed four academic journals and has had to retract over eleven thousand papers determined to be fraudulent. [10] The main culprit appears to be academic "paper mills", where aspiring academics can pay to have their papers published, or to be listed as authors on fabricated scientific papers in order to pad their CV in the "publish or perish" world of academia.

And it's not just academia where the ranks of females are surging while standards are slipping. Consider a case from the business world, the performance of female CEO's. Feminists never stop carping over the "glass ceiling", in impenetrable barrier of sexism which they say keeps women from the highest offices. Well the Obama years were undeniably quite good to feminists and women, and by 2012 there were twenty female CEO's of Fortune 500 companies. Author August Løvenskiolds analyzed the five year performance of these twenty women compared with the male CEO's of comparably ranked companies on the Fortune 500 list (e.g. if a woman was CEO of the 50th ranked company, author chose a male from the next highest ranked company with a male CEO, mostly likely the 49th ranked company). Result: only ten of the twenty women still had their position after five years, compared to fifteen of the twenty men. In addition, eight of these male CEO's increased the ranking of their companies from 2012 to 2017. None of the female CEO's improved the ranking of their companies. [11]

Or consider the US military. Despite what feminists and the media claim, the jury is still out on whether women can capably serve as combat soldiers--or can capably serve as soldiers at all. From "deployment pregnancies" to lowering physical fitness standards to issues with group cohesion which inevitably come about with co-ed companies, there is much evidence that women simply don't belong in the military. Which the public rarely hears about as military discipline is often used to keep soldiers silent on the issue, a frighteningly problematic development for something so vital as national defense. One Marine captain described his experience when he "… had attended the basic-training graduation of a friend at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and saw little in the way of “military bearing” and “no pride in what should have been a life-changing event for these young adults.” He suggested that if the Army is training as it fights, it “is training soldiers for a pillow fight, not a war.” [12]

While not conclusive proof, these examples do suggest that feminism is succeeding for feminists but failing virtually everyone else. Obviously there are other forces at work in the culture, but feminism stands out as particularly corrosive. Why is this? Because, I submit, feminism undermines the patriarchal social order which is the basis of Western Civ--or any advanced, prosperous civilization. I now endeavor to explain this.

Better Homes and Gardens, Courtesy of the Patriarchy

A garden is nature beautified and defanged. Only select vegetation and cute (or at least docile) animals are allowed in. It soothes the senses of the adults and invites children to play. Since a garden is not natural it requires work to construct and maintain. In the civilized world the plot of land on which it rests, the estate, must be paid for.

In the most typical modern context "the garden" is the family home with a backyard-- the archetypal American household of the 1950's, of Leave it to Beaver. The father is head of household. He is the principle bread winner and the last word on all major decisions. The wife is his subordinate ("OK, but I'll have to check with my husband first .." she will say to the salesman at the door or the electrician on the phone before proceeding with a purchase) and chiefly in charge of maintaining the home and raising the kids. The feminists hate this arrangement because the woman is sacrificing her sexual freedom and a high flying career for a man. Feminists argue that the world will improve immeasurably once that women are freed from such domestic bondage, once that their great talents are unleashed and their unique leadership styles allowed to shine. Be that as it may, it should not escape our notice that the Leave it to Beaver type household of the 1950's and 1960's which the feminists excoriate also coincided with an extraordinary economic boom.

For Daniel Amneus, author of The Case for Father Custody, this is not a coincidence. I here quote him at length:

[The] economic boom of the 1950s and the 250% growth in the GNP were the result of the stable families of the time and the high male motivation they produced. The hated feminine mystique was women’s principal contribution to that prosperity. It meant wearing a mask and playing a role, but it kept men playing their role as husbands, fathers and providers. It was artificial, but so is everything about civilization. It worked. It kept women behaving—kept them from being as “natural” as they are in the ghettos. It gave children fathers. The “problem that has no name” of which Ms. Friedan complained was the result of women having had most of their other problems solved by the patriarchal system and being confronted with the problem at the apex of the “hierarchy of needs,” the spiritual problem of finding enlarged meaning in life. Betty Friedan, an unspiritual lady, imagined the vacuum might be filled by an elitist career, an economic solution. It hasn’t worked out. Most liberated women are more miserable than ever. They have a below-replacement birthrate and a sixty percent divorce rate. Men are roleless, children confused. [13]

In the US, the Democrat Party explicitly caters to feminists. A woman's right to sexual freedom, particularly in the case of aborting unwanted pregnancies, is a non-negotiable. It was also the Democrat Party under President Lyndon Johnson which initiated a massive welfare state which not only supports single mothers, but encourages mothers to evict fathers in order to secure benefits. [14]

The feminist revolution convinced women that family values are not central to all aspects of life for women, but that women can establish their sexual autonomy by male-style achievement in the world of work. The result has been swarms of females taking over male jobs—and expecting Affirmative Action benefits and special favors for their sex, lest they be discriminated against, lest they be supposed to need husbands. Result: income redistribution on a massive scale, male rolelessness and demoralization on a massive scale—and female unchastity on a massive scale, entrenched and now presumed to be a right … Prisons are filled with single men unable to create partnerships with women. Subsidized housing tracts are filled with single women (and their fatherless children) unable to create stable partnerships with men. While the single males are committing their crimes and serving their prison sentences, the single women with whom they fail to form partnerships, are breeding the next generation of troublemakers." [13, pp. 307-308]

The reason the patriarchal system leads to advanced civilizations while matriarchies lead to impoverished ghetto life is because patriarchy channels powerful biological and psychological forces in a way that benefits society at large. Let us take a moment to understand this.

Mate selection drives a good deal of human behavior. Human males prize youth and beauty in females, and females prize the qualities that typically lead to high social status in males, i.e, intelligence, ambition, emotional toughness, and above average stature. [15] Females bloom like mayflowers in their middle to late teens, and they only have to care for their hygiene and health and have a nice personality to attract most males. Men, on the other hand, have to work. They have to make something of themselves. Their characters must be formed, mental toughness inculcated, useful skills learned.

Men do this through an array of hierarchies which characterize nearly all groups of males. This begins when they are mere boys: "The reason that a male instinctively starts vying with his same-sex peers from when he is a toddler is for the very purpose of calibrating to what extent he will be able to reproduce. That women may be interested in him if he is the winner in a male–male contest is no mere by-product: it’s the very thing he is competing for." [16]

Mating opportunities are a potent source of male motivation. While you could say, as does Daniel Amneus, that the patriarchal system is socially constructed as opposed to just occurring in nature, it nonetheless harnesses and leverages the natural power of the male sex drive. Chaste and nubile women are far more valuable to men than used up whores. The patriarchal system thus demands chastity of maidens and sexual exclusivity of wives. The latter stricture is of particular importance as the husband needs assurance that he is raising his own biological children if he is to be required to share the fruits of his labor with them. This maximizes a woman's value to men, which in turn inspires fierce competition among men, which begets the virtuous cycle of high performing males trying to top each other-- all while building, maintaining, and defending civilization. While some of these men will still hire prostitutes or have flings as an overflow valve for their lust, and women will perhaps rightly complain about the double standard, nonetheless the women who submit themselves to patriarchal rule will in general enjoy greater security and a higher standard of living compared to their liberated sisters.

It might not be an over generalization to say that this is how the West was built. In fact what many have argued was the birth place of Western Civilization, Ancient Athens, in relation to her nemesis Sparta, is instructive in this regard. I am speaking of the so called classical era, approximately from 500 to 300 BCE, when there was an unprecedented flowering of intellectual and artistic talent among the Athenians and their allies. From Archimedes to Sophocles, Thucydides to Plato, the depth and breadth of intellectual and artistic invention during this era is astonishing. Alfred North Whitehead would famously state that the philosophy of the European Enlightenment is but a series of footnotes to Plato.

Anyway, one of the great statesmen of the classical era, Pericles, would deliver a funeral oration to his fellow Athenians to commemorate the fallen soldiers in what had become a Greek civil war, the Peleponnesian War of 431-404 BCE. Breaking with tradition, instead of merely praising the dead, which he also does, he would remind his fellow citizens of what they were fighting for, why Athens is the shining city on a hill, a beacon of light to the rest of the known world. At the very end of the speech he would address the women of Athens as follows: "[If] I must say anything on the subject of female excellence to those of you who will now be in widowhood, it will be all comprised in this brief exhortation. Great will be your glory in not falling short of your natural character; and greatest will be hers who is least talked of among the men, whether for good or for bad." [17] Female excellence is thus first and foremost good behavior, in never overstepping her natural sphere of influence as a female.

Compare with her rival nation Sparta, where the women were famously powerful. A Spartan mother would address her son leaving for war: "come home with your shield or on it", which meant come home victorious or honorably dead. Outside of those two possibilities the mother made it clear that she would disown him. She had no ear whatsoever for what the young man might have felt. Apart from being soldiers, the Spartan men were expected to marry and father children, or else: "Persistent avoiders of marriage might be set upon at any time in the streets by groups of women, and be severely handled." [18] Bachelors would be physically attacked and publicly humiliated by the Spartan women.

Writes Will Durant: "All in all, the position of woman was better in Sparta than in any other Greek community. There more than elsewhere she preserved her high Homeric status, and the privileges that survived from an early matrilinear society. Spartan women, says Plutarch, 'were bold and masculine, overbearing to their husbands . . . and speaking openly even on the most important subjects.' They could inherit and bequeath property; and in the course of time—so great was their influence over men—nearly half the real wealth of Sparta was in their hands. They lived a life of luxury and liberty at home while the men bore the brunt of frequent war, or dined on simple fare in the public mess." [18](p. 162)

Though nominally ruled by men, Sparta was a matriarchy. And for many decades she was invincible, at least militarily, finally bringing Athens to her knees in 404 BCE. But what of Sparta's legacy? "The Spartan code produced good soldiers and nothing more; that it made vigor of body a graceless brutality because it killed nearly all capacity for the things of the mind … In the end Sparta’s narrowness of spirit betrayed even her strength of soul. She descended to the sanctioning of any means to gain a Spartan aim; at last she stooped so far to conquer as to sell to Persia the liberties that Athens had won for Greece at Marathon. Militarism absorbed her, and made her, once so honored, the hated terror of her neighbors. When she fell, all the nations marveled, but none mourned. Today, among the scanty ruins of that ancient capital, hardly a torso or a fallen pillar survives to declare that here there once lived Greeks."[18] (p. 166-167)

So the same dynamic played out then as now. The patriarchal social order produced much hurly-burly on the one hand but also a profusion of human creativity and technological innovation. While the matriarchal orientation, conversely, produced a socialist state which only progresses toward ever more strict state control of its citizens, particularly of the men. This progress continues until human creativity is extinguished and finally whatever spirit animated the nation in the first place dies away and the nation becomes nothing but rote customs maintained by the threat of severe punishment for disobedience.

Our own progression toward matriarchy, which began in the 1960's, is showing up the economic data. In a recent book Nicholas Ebertstadt states that while the US economy may appear healthy and strong, the fact is that there is a lot of artificiality to it, in particular, that soaring asset valuations are being inflated by the Fed holding interest rates near zero. The apparent vast wealth creation of the US economic engine is thus partly a chimaera as it does not entirely derive from the creation of value by a dedicated workforce. This also coincides with a great male flight from work, the subject of Ebertstadt's book: "America's great male flight from work began in earnest around 1965 and has continued virtually without pause since then [19] … this mass voluntary flight from work by men—this hitherto nameless problem—lies at the center of so much of America’s new dysfunction and despair [19](p. 149) … Economically, declining LFPRs [Labor Force Participlation Rate] and falling work rates have made for slower economic growth, widening gaps in income and wealth, greater budgetary pressures, and higher deficits and national debt. They have likewise increased the risk of poverty in the United States, not least for the children whose fathers are found in our huge army of men without work [19](p. 150) …". Additionaly he notes: "Of the American economy’s current ailments, the declining dynamism of U.S. businesses is among the most worrisome." [19](p. 152)

Putting naturally dependent creatures like women in charge of economic wealth production while marginalizing men who at least are amenable by nature to being acculturated as self-sacrificing providers of course leads to less production and more consumption of the services which women used to look for in a husband. At the risk of beating the proverbial dead horse, we cannot overlook the extent to which the feminists have marginalized and demoralized men--recall that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" was a favorite catchphrase--particularly in their role as fathers, as Daniel Amneus explains in great detail. They have bullied men in academia, the military, and many professional fields. They have wormed their way into publishing, entertainment, and the media. Think of how many commercials, TV shows, and movies that ridicule men, particularly fathers, who are routinely portrayed as incompetent oafs. Even nature shows have gotten into the act with feminist productions like "Queens" by National Geographic [20]. Eberstadt observes: "To a distressing degree, these men appear to have relinquished what we think of ordinarily as adult responsibilities not only as breadwinners but as parents, family members, community members, and citizens." [19] (pp. 102-103) To a large extent the feminists have indeed succeeded in smashing the patriarchy resulting in sluggish economic growth, ballooning deficits, broken families, frustrated women, and legions of unemployed, unproductive, unmarriageable men.

Heart of Darkness

Was there ever a more picturesque and romantic (from a distance) episode in the history of commerce than the clipper ship era of the 19th century? The extreme tea clippers were essentially big racing yachts which could set a cloud of canvas and were a revolution in hull design with their famously shaped bows. In the tea trade a faster ship meant that you could wait longer than your competitor to buy tea from China--the longer you waited the lower the buying price as the market became saturated--and then race back to England to be among the first arrivals the season who commanded the highest sale prices. In this way you would "clip" the competition.

But it was not merely the beautiful ships, but the life and the men which has fired the imaginations of many young adventurers, as well as writers.

Joseph Conrad was a master mariner who served during the twilight years of the great sailing ships. He observed working men in a rather unique crucible, in times of extreme danger and hardship while also being hermetically isolated from the rest of humanity.

In his novel The Nigger of the Narcissus, Conrad introduces us to a typically hyper-masculine, well disciplined clipper ship crew, but which subsequently falls into a group psychosis triggered by a terminally ill--or possibly malingering--black man, James Wait ("the nigger"). Their newfound and maudlin empathy for an ailing shipmate takes on an absurd dimension. The ensuing soul-searching becomes transparently narcissistic and fraudulent and disrupts the operation of the ship. At one point the ship nearly capsizes and drowns them all.

(Author's Note: I feel compelled to state my opinion on the racial aspect of this story. The only black man on the ship, James Wait, is sick and using his sickness to manipulate others. The fact that Conrad depicts the one black man as a locus of sickness and dysfunction might, in some people's eyes, suggest that Conrad is an odious racist. What I believe is that Conrad invoked negative stereotypes of black people which were common in his time for the larger purposes of his literary creation, in the same way Shakespeare invoked negative stereotypes of Jews in his play The Merchant of Venice. In any case, I think that speculating on whether or not Conrad was a racist or Shakespeare an anti-Semite is a waste of time.)

The story opens with the Mate, Mr. Baker, calling out the crew list, as the Narcissus will soon sail. Notable among the new hands is the massive Singleton, the elder seaman among the foremast hands. He quickly settles in, and we find him absorbed in a popular novel which he is laboring to read. He is not particularly clever or literate, which explains why he has never advanced beyond the station of foremast hand. He is the unsophisticated but loyal working man, a simpleton who seldom thinks of himself and obediently offers his prodigious, muscled body and long acquired skills to the job at hand, all for some meager pay. "With his spectacles and a venerable white beard, he resembled a learned and savage patriarch, the incarnation of barbarian wisdom serene in the blasphemous turmoil of the world … The wisdom of half a century spent listening to the thunder of the waves had spoken unconsciously through his old lips." [21]

Then we are introduced to Donkin, "a man with shifty eyes and a yellow hatchet face", who is filthy dirty when he boards ship and immediately establishes himself as both quarrelsome and useless. "They all knew him! He was the man that cannot steer, that cannot splice, that dodges the work on dark nights; that, aloft, holds on frantically with both arms and legs, and swears at the wind, the sleet, the darkness; the man who curses the sea while others work. The man who is the last out and the first in when all hands are called. The man who can’t do most things and won’t do the rest. The pet of philanthropists and self-seeking landlubbers. The sympathetic and deserving creature that knows all about his rights, but knows nothing of courage, of endurance, and of the unexpressed faith, of the unspoken loyalty that knits together a ship’s company."

Mr. Baker has now called all hands but comes up one short. The remaining name he cannot read from the list, so he dismisses the crew on the bosun's suggestion that perhaps the last man will yet show up before daybreak. Mr. Baker is about to retire for the night when a deep, loud voice is heard somewhere in the darkness: "Wait!" it says. Then the man comes into view: "The nigger was calm, cool, towering, superb. The men had approached and stood behind him in a body. He overtopped the tallest by a half a head. He said: ‘I belong to the ship.’ He enunciated distinctly, with soft precision. The deep, rolling tones of his voice filled the deck without effort. He was naturally scornful, unaffectedly condescending, as if from his height of six foot three he had surveyed all the vastness of human folly and had made up his mind not to be too hard on it." Mr. Baker looks to his list and affirms that Wait is the remaining crew member, and instructs him to take his gear forward.

The following morning the Narcissus puts to sea. The men are set to work by the mates. Shipboard routine is established. Out of sight of the officers the men taunt each other, prank each other, argue nonsense: "They disputed endlessly, obstinate and childish; they repeated in shouts and with inflamed faces their amazing arguments; while the soft breeze, eddying down the enormous cavity of the foresail, that stood out distended above their bare heads, stirred the tumbled hair with a touch passing and light like an indulgent caress."

The Narcissus is a happy ship. But Donkin, meanwhile, "solitary and brooding over his wrongs on the forecastle-head, moved closer to catch the drift of the discussion below him; he turned his sallow face to the sea, and his thin nostrils moved, sniffing the breeze, as he lounged negligently by the rail." Then: "Suddenly the face of Donkin leaning high-shouldered over the after-rail became grave … The washerman plunged both his arms into the tub abruptly; the cook became more crestfallen than an exposed backslider; the boatswain moved his shoulders uneasily; the carpenter got up with a spring and walked away". James Wait appears on deck. Though just another foremast hand, he yet commands them with some subtle power. He came up on deck to scold them for making too much noise. How could you all do such a thing to a dying man? "Donkin above blinked his red eyelids with invisible eyelashes, and smiled bitterly over the nigger’s head."

Soon Jimmy has the crew under his spell. He has their consciences hooked. Archie, the concertina player, has stopped playing. "Our singers became mute because Jimmy was a dying man. For the same reason no chap — as Knowles remarked — could ‘drive in a nail to hang his few poor rags upon,’ without being made aware of the enormity he committed in disturbing Jimmy’s interminable last moments … The cook was over-whelmed with grief; he did not know the culprit but he knew that wickedness flourished; he knew that Satan was abroad amongst those men, whom he looked upon as in some way under his spiritual care ... The Narcissus was still a peaceful ship, but mutual confidence was shaken. Donkin did not conceal his delight."

Donkin's insolence brings him into a confrontation with Mr. Baker, who proceeds to knock out one of Donkin's front teeth. "Donkin grinned venomously. From that day he became pitiless; told Jimmy that he was a ‘black fraud’; hinted to us that we were an imbecile lot, daily taken in by a vulgar nigger. And Jimmy seemed to like the fellow! ... Jimmy’s hateful accomplice seemed to have blown with his impure breath undreamt-of subtleties into our hearts. We were disturbed and cowardly. That we knew. Singleton seemed to know nothing, understand nothing."

One day Singleton punctures the spell by way of his simple, bold, straightforward nature. He confronts Jimmy directly, asks him if he is actually dying. Jimmy is momentarily startled by the forwardness, "why, can't you see I am?" he replies somewhat tentatively. " ‘Well, get on with your dying,’ [Singleton] said with venerable mildness: ‘don’t raise a blamed fuss with us over that job. We can’t help you.’ Jimmy fell back in his bunk, and for a long time lay very still wiping the perspiration off his chin." The statement of plain fact is crushing to Jimmy but liberating to the rest of the crew. Donkin hastily counters the momentary reprieve with another injection of psychological poison. He convinces them that Singleton is just a fool. "We perceived that after all Singleton’s answer meant nothing. We began to hate him for making fun of us. All our certitudes were going; we were on doubtful terms with our officers; the cook had given us up for lost; we had overheard the boatswain’s opinion that ‘we were a crowd of softies’. We suspected Jimmy, one another, and even our very selves. We did not know what to do."

Approaching the Cape of Good Hope the Narcissus is beset by terrible storms. Just when it seems that the severe weather has passed, the sea strikes its blow. Singleton, at the wheel, spots a massive rogue wave tumbling toward them. "Look out for yourselves!" he shouts. The wave knocks the Narcissus down on her side--and she does not come back up.

The men struggle to re-group, to account for each other, to move about the ship which is now laying on her side. Against their salt-dried mouths the cook manages to extract some fresh water from a cask and hand it out in mugs to the crew, for which they are all exuberantly grateful. The crew are in amazingly good cheer for such dismal circumstances, but: "Suddenly some one cried: — ‘Where’s Jimmy?’ and we were appalled once more." The sick and morose man by now had his own cabin, which was likely submerged. But the crew nonetheless execute a heroic rescue operation, smashing through the hefty timbers to get at James Wait, and they succeed in extracting him alive. "We could not get rid of the monstrous suspicion that this astounding black-man was shamming sick, had been malingering heartlessly in the face of our toil, of our scorn, of our patience — and now was malingering in the face of our devotion — in the face of death. Our vague and imperfect morality rose with disgust at his unmanly lie. But he stuck to it manfully — amazingly."

Conditions are moderating but the Narcissus remains pinned on her side. Captain Allistoun barks: "Wear ship!" (put the ship through a jybe). Reflexively the exhausted men set to work, setting some canvas. The powerful and expert Singleton is at the wheel. Slowly the Narcissus gathers way and steers off the wind. Then she obediently puts her stern through the wind, with the pressure on the sails now working to right the ship. And the Narcissus rights herself, free from the ocean's deathly grip.

The danger has passed and fair weather returns, and Donkin is back to his old tricks. "We remembered our danger, our toil — and conveniently forgot our horrible scare. We decried our officer — who had done nothing — and listened to the fascinating Donkin, his care for our rights, his disinterested concern for our dignity, were not discouraged by the invariable contumely of our words, by the disdain of our looks … and inspired by Donkin’s hopeful doctrines they dreamed enthusiastically of the time when every lonely ship would travel over a serene sea, manned by a wealthy and well-fed crew of satisfied skippers."

Captain Allistoun is now going to have it out with James Wait. This time Jimmy loses his nerve, gets to his feet, but stumbles about. The Captain eyes him intently. "‘No. You don’t,’ said the master curtly. Bare feet shuffled, disapproving voices murmured all round; he went on as if he had not heard: — ‘You have been skulking nearly all the passage and now you want to come out. You think you are near enough to the pay-table now. Smell the shore, hey?’ ‘I’ve been sick… now — better,’ mumbled Wait glaring in the light. — ‘You have been shamming sick,’ retorted Captain Allistoun with severity: ‘Why… ‘ he hesitated for less than half a second. ‘Why, anybody can see that. There’s nothing the matter with you, but you choose to lie-up to please yourself — and now you shall lie-up to please me. Mr. baker, my orders are that this man is not to be allowed on deck to the end of the passage.’ "

The crew is in uproar, threatening to strike in protest as a gesture of solidarity with Jimmy, with Donkin devilishly egging them on. Suddenly heavy iron belaying pins land on deck, passing very close to the two mates, Mr. Baker and Mr. Creighton. The row becomes so intense that the helmsman leaves the wheel in curiosity and the Narcissus begins slowly rounding up into the wind. The sails begin to luff. "The ship trembled from trucks to keel; the sails kept on rattling like a discharge of musketry; the chain sheets and loose shackles jingled aloft in a thin peal; the gin blocks groaned. It was as if an invisible hand had given the ship an angry shake to recall the men that peopled her decks to the sense of reality, vigilance and duty."

The men reflexively return to their duties, the Narcissus is brought back on course, and the men resume their protest but heads are cooling. Captain Allistoun says to Mr Baker: " 'Did you see the eyes of that sick nigger, Mr. Baker? I fancied he begged me for something. What? Past all help. One lone black beggar amongst the lot of us, and he seemed to look through me into the very hell ' … He disappeared below, leaving his mates facing one another, and more impressed than if they had seen a stone image shed a miraculous tear of compassion over the incertitudes of life and death…"

Shortly after sighting Flores (the Azores), Jimmy dies. All hands attend the sea burial of Jimmy. The corpse does not slide easily over the side, but only after ever increased tilting does it suddenly break loose and splash down into the deep blue sea, and "The ship rolled as if relieved of an unfair burden; the sails flapped." Shortly thereafter Captain Allistoun commands them to square the yards. A fair wind is working in, at long last. "A week afterwards the Narcissus entered the chops of the Channel. Under white wings she skimmed low over the blue sea like a great tired bird speeding to its nest."

Conrad evidently had little regard for "sea lawyers" and scorned those who sought to improve the lives of working men because they pitied them. When the men of the Narcissus justifiably complain that they have been pushed to their limits from working on a nearly capsized ship which has been beset by storms for days now, Mr. Baker only rebukes them: "— ‘Care for you!’ exclaimed Mr. Baker, angrily. ‘Why should [Captain Allistoun] care for you? Are you a lot of women passengers to be taken care of? We are here to take care of the ship — and some of you ain’t up to that."

In case your thinking that such men only exist in novels, here's a letter from a former foremast hand who served on several of the great clippers, including the famous Thermoplyae:

In my experience I have found that deep-water sailors treated like men [his italics] are the most loyal, active, dare-devil bunch in the wide world. They will put up an awful fight to save a ship they love, in which they get decent food and fair treatment. By this I do not mean that they must be coddled, because sea discipline must be maintained at all times. Treated as dogs, like we were [the author is referring to his time on an American "hell ship"], they can be sullen and unresponsive, caring less than nothing for their own lives or for that of the ship. We had a good crew on the ship above mentioned, amongst which we had five Liverpool Irishmen that, to use a sailor's expression, 'were hard men to shave'. I really believe that after the Liverpool gang declared themselves that the remainder of the crew were more afraid of them than they were of the Skipper and the two mates." [22]

Men have to be men if they are going to afforded any respect at all. This is why, like it or not, the men's rights movement will not likely ever achieve widespread acceptance, and why reformed feminists like Louise Perry will acknowledge that while men have legitimate complaints which are routinely dismissed, especially by feminists, men's rights advocates give her "the ick". [23]

Correspondingly, the organizations and institutions that men build are hierarchical and often pitiless to those who don't make the cut. A man's value is performance based. Men come up through the ranks, if they have the talent, if they have the drive. As noted earlier, boys will begin forming success hierarchies at a very early age and it serves the important purpose of calibrating their mating success later on. Boys want to win because winners get the girls. The proclivity for competition and ranking is hardwired into nearly every human male.

I think we can read a degree of callousness into the traditionally masculine shipmaster Joseph Conrad, which might be labeled "toxic masculinity" today. Even though James Wait was in fact terminally ill, Conrad still saw him as a malingerer. Donkin the socialist he regards with unalloyed contempt. At the very end of the story, when the ship reaches port, reaches the city, the crew is receiving their pay and dispersing: "‘Can’t write?’ said the clerk, shocked. ‘Make a mark, then.’ Singleton painfully sketched in a heavy cross, blotted the page. ‘What a disgusting old brute,’ muttered the clerk. Somebody opened the door for him, and the patriarchal seaman passed through unsteadily, without as much as a glance at any of us." Then comes Donkin: "Donkin entered. He seemed out of breath, was grave, full of business. He went straight to the desk, talked with animation to the clerk, who thought him an intelligent man." Typical of sailors of the time, Conrad looks disparagingly at city dwellers who live soft and decadent lives, the reason why they naively and perversely praise fraudsters like Donkin while deriding superb seaman like Singleton.

I chose Conrad's story, apart from the fact that I like sea stories, because I think it presents an accurate and persuasive allegory to the so called culture war in America, and in the West in general. Donkin, "Jimmy’s hateful accomplice [who] seemed to have blown with his impure breath undreamt-of subtleties into our hearts ... " would be the postmodernist, the Critical Race Theorist, the cultural Marxist of today who puts "undreamt-of subtleties" into our minds and sows endless nesting doubts into our hearts.

As an example, consider the matter of “unconscious bias”. If you are overtly racist, well that is not OK we all can agree. But if you protest that you a not a racist, that could be even worse. You really do harbor prejudices against black people, or women, or LGBT people, only you are refusing to acknowledge it. This requires intervention and therapy to exorcise. All of which causes crippling self doubt and moral castration. The recent grooming gang scandal in the UK furnishes us with a recent example of such moral castration. The fact that the perpetrators are mostly Pakistani Muslim men and the victims young, white, British girls has the media, the police, and the UK government mute on the alleged injustices lest they be in any way seen as bigoted against dark skinned people. [24] Utter cowardice, that. "All our certitudes were going; we were on doubtful terms with our officers; the cook had given us up for lost; we had overheard the boatswain’s opinion that ‘we were a crowd of softies’. We suspected Jimmy, one another, and even our very selves. We did not know what to do."

The universities were and are the incubators of all of this (in our time, not Conrad’s). Castration through feminization, you might say. UPenn professor Amy Wax describes the current culture of the university as follows: "the elevation of the values of the nursery and the kindergarten over the traditional, established, customary values of the academy … of truth seeking, of rigor, of empiricism … of sportsman like vigorous disagreement, and women [and minorities] have questioned those values and I think actively sought to undermine them in their kind of safetyist, anti-free expression, anti-First Amendment ethos." [25]

The denigration of the masculine (e.g. "toxic masculinity") and the exaltation of the feminine, which I've sometimes heard referred to as the "women are wonderful effect", has resulted in generations of effeminate men. Though it may be deeply subversive to their most basic instincts as men, many men nonetheless embraced feminism because they saw it as a socially acceptable way of shirking their responsibilities, first and foremost as protectors and providers. They also thought that it would please the women, or at least keep them out of trouble with them.

There are no women around in Conrad's story. Yet the men are similarly beguiled by an over indulgence of compassion and self-reflection, which suggests that the temptation exists for all men. Some of the sailors, especially the younger ones, are veritably bewitched: "[Belfast] spent every moment of his spare time in Jimmy ‘s cabin. He tended him, talked to him; was as gentle as a woman, as tenderly gay as an old philanthropist, as sentimentally careful of his nigger as a model slave-owner."

I think Conrad correctly identifies the temptation as an instrumental "higher" moral calling which justifies mendacity, laziness, and cowardice. "Falsehood triumphed. It triumphed through doubt, through stupidity through pity, through sentimentalism. We set ourselves to bolster it up, from compassion, from recklessness, from a sense of fun. Jimmy’s steadfastness to his untruthful attitude in the face of the inevitable truth had the proportions of a colossal enigma".

Like the mythical god Narcissus, the collective psyche of the crew is captured by its own self, its own politics, and this nearly results in the ship sinking and her company drowning. Too much self-focus, or "self-care" as we might say in our present day therapy culture, rots the souls of individuals and puts the larger society at risk of fragmentation and crippling dysfunction. Among the crew of the Narcissus, Singleton alone remains true and immune to the narcissistic self-absorption which has taken over, as a result of his many years spent at sea and perhaps due to his lack of intellectual vigor.

Games Without Frontiers

To once again invoke my previous metaphor of "the garden", modern technology has effectively expanded the garden into public spaces, into men's spaces, into the plains, the wilderness. Vast swaths of earth are now crisscrossed by highways along which towns large and small offer all kinds of goods, eateries, and entertainment. A family can drive a car three thousand miles, coast to coast across the United States, and not fear starvation, dehydration, or getting mauled by a bear. Rolling hills and miles of cornfields lay supine, nonthreatening and unchallenging, when viewed from the car windows. Mere passing scenes for the passengers inside a small, petroleum powered machine. Perhaps their nature viewing is set to a sound track as well, a popular song rendered on a hard drive as binary code which yet captures the music with better fidelity than a human ear could ever discern.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of the "last man", a " man, motivated only by the desire for comfortable self-preservation … the most despicable man because he is no longer able to despise himself. He neither wants to rule nor be ruled, to become rich or poor; he wants everyone to do and be the same. ‘We have invented happiness’ say the last men, and they blink.” [26]

Our current conception of progress certainly has the "last man" in mind, only we see it as a good thing. No human wishes to spend his life merely eking out an existence. Even the nature freaks, the "off-the-grid" folks you see on YouTube, will take a myriad of modern devices with them so that they can be "one with nature" but not hungry and miserable at the same time. As a matter of course, modern technology and the ethos of technological progress has been universally adopted throughout the world.

It is also recognized that our technology resulted from modern science, which began in the 1600's with men like Issac Newton. Modern science is mechanistic. The book of nature is written in mathematics so far as the physical sciences are concerned. Science thus values truth understood as the correctness of ideas, as how precisely the mathematical model reflects observed reality. Being merely descriptive of nature the language of science cannot speak to values, including the value of science itself. Values thus get farmed out to consumers in a free market. Science produces technology, and technology makes our lives easier, more comfortable, and free.

Except without a credible science of higher purpose and without the proximate correctives imposed by nature (hunger, dangerous animals, etc.), man is perhaps too free for his own good and comes to believe that he can style his own nature. Which on the one hand affords more freedom than ever to pursue life, liberty and happiness, but dissolves the shared bedrock of moral principles. It is now becoming questionable as to whether free nations like the United States can continue to flourish as such, or will descend into anarchy and madness. Lacking a bedrock of moral principles means having no defense against subversive philosophies which can take root within a nation.

Such as postmodernism which came to America in the 1960's. This new radical skepticism from Europe took hold in the universities, which held that the greatest works in the Western Canon are regarded as such only because their creators, mostly white Europeans, have managed cultural dominance, in part through military force. They argue that what is considered true, what is considered artistically beautiful and superlative, only reflects the value system of the dominant culture, the ones calling the shots politically. There is no actual order of rank in artistic and scientific works, only the one imposed on the people by the powerful. Whether it be Rachmaninoff or rap music, it's all really just a matter of personal preference. If we regard the former as "high art" that is only because the people running the institutions tell us that it is so. The shared consensus on what is highest implies a shared value system, but for the postmoderns the so-called shared value system is just the value system of whichever political faction has the upper hand at the time.

The postmodernists did, however, recognize the problem they would exacerbate: "Technology also began to advance rapidly, which, together with the mass production of consumer goods, enabled this “middle culture” to fuel a new postrationing desire for art, music, and entertainment. This, in turn, sparked fears that society was degenerating into an artificial, hedonistic, capitalist, consumerist world of fantasy and play." [27] That is, they recognized that rapid advances in technology combined with wealth production through free trade is producing the world of our dreams while at the same time producing an environment for which we are maladapted.

I will grant that Hanna Rosin is correct in pointing out that between the genders, women are better adapted to this new world than men--but only because of the natural proclivities of females which feminists despise. Females prize safety and security because they are the natural caretakers of infants. In so far as technology makes the world safer and softer, that's to her liking. Plus a wealthy economy affords a lot of service oriented jobs which require more of social adroitness than technical skill and muscle. An incompetent in charge of a three thousand ton windjammer running in heavy wind and sea could cause her to broach to. A careless navigator could run her up on the rocks resulting in the loss of life and property. But a CEO of a consulting business like McKinsey & Company succeeds more by swaying perceptions than steering anything tangible.

So the economy of the garden, so to speak, trades and monetizes a good deal of vanity, of will o' the wisp, the latest fashions. As the economy grows a larger percentage of the population can and will pay for fantasy, flattery, even outright lies (e.g. diet books, life coaching, stock trading, etc.). When the known world is a garden, playing at dress-ups can become a profitable industry with all the reputational seriousness as construction or petroleum engineering.

Of course the garden itself still needs to be maintained. It requires raw materials mined from the earth, petroleum extraction and refining, a functioning power grid, food production, shipping, etc. These jobs are well defined, they engage with nature and they require specific skills which cannot be finessed. A farmer has to produce actual food, not a vaunted program for higher self esteem, which may or may not affect anything. Unsurprisingly these jobs are overwhelmingly performed by men.

Yet, apart from the fact that females generally excel at the "soft skills" compared to men, who by their very nature tend to be more logical, direct, and disagreeable, I submit that the real problem for men goes much deeper. As a preliminary sketch, I refer to the work of psychologist Erich Neumann, who argued that our souls resolve experience by an array of archetypes. Archetypes are much broader than logical categories, e.g. resolving things in terms of quantity (as Kant would have it), as they engage our emotions as well. They are pattern recognition firmware which gets installed in all humans and through which our most basic instincts and predilections find expression or manifest in some way. In the ancient world these archetypes were often projected outward as gods and goddesses, of jealousy, of love, etc. There is, for example, the archetype of the Great Mother: "When analytical psychology speaks of the primordial image or archetype of the Great Mother, it is referring, not to any concrete image existing in space and time, but to an inward image at work in the human psyche. The symbolic expression of this psychic phenomenon is to be found in the figures of the Great Goddess represented in the myths and artistic creations of mankind … the dynamic action of the archetype extends beyond unconscious instinct and continues to operate as an unconscious will that determines the personality, exerting a decisive influence on the mood, inclinations, and tendencies of the personality, and ultimately on its conceptions, intentions, interests, on consciousness and the specific direction of the mind." [28]

One's personality is determined by the relative strength of these archetypes within him. As there are sex specific archetypes, sex differences are revealed by the relative preponderance of archetypes in a male vs. a female. One such archetype is the Great Mother. Another the male hero. "Consciousness is identified with the figure of the male hero, while the devouring unconscious is identified with the figure of the female monster. As we have elsewhere shown at length, this co-ordination is general; that is, in both sexes the active ego consciousness is characterized by a male symbolism, the unconscious as a whole by a female symbolism." [28](p. 105)

The hero's journey evokes the masculine element of one's soul, a disposition resulting from a male-oriented admixture of archetypes at play which are more common to human males. Dr. Leonard Sax recently stated that boys almost universally want to be heroes. [29] What this means is that facing risk, plunging oneself into uncertainty, into the unknown, in order to bring forth order, whether it be a piece of music, a political principle, a scientific theory, etc., is the basic orientation of healthy male development. It is well known that men are more willing to take big risks for a possible big payout than women. Of course some women have also excelled at such things, those being atypically masculine females.

Thus a "global garden" threatens to smother masculine energy by closing his perceptions toward wildness, danger, actual possibilities. After all, the boy might say, there are no mountains left to scale, every peak has already been reached, so what's the point? Seeing no useful employment for his basic masculine promptings in an increasingly feminized society, as discussed above, men may choose to lose themselves in masculine fantasy, e.g. video games, where they imagine themselves as the real adventurers of yesteryear while living off of mom or some baloney disability check from the state. Apart from the fact that the player is not actually venturing out into the world, this is faux adventure because the man remains hermetically secluded inside the walls of what is already known, predictable, and safe. Every possibility is already mapped out by the game creator, for it is a deterministic computer program. There's a countable number of possible moves, though they may be many. He's no more, in principle, than a piece on a chessboard. Now matter how life-like they may appear, human built machines are ipso facto dead because they cannot bring forth anything beyond what has already been revealed up to this point in human history. Only a human soul can do that.

Wildness--sometimes literally the wilderness, places yet untouched by humans--has always been a place of human renewal, of intellectual or spiritual renaissance. From Jesus in the desert to Darwin at the Galapagos to HD Thoreau at Walden, a very many seminal thinkers have left the civilized world and ventured into the wilds to free their minds, to coax something, perhaps just a vague sense, to eventually reveal itself in their souls. Recall Melville's famous opening chapter in Moby Dick:

But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues,— north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?

So many men are drawn to the open sea, which even today remains much a wild frontier, even though most prefer to only observe from a comfortable distance, remain in the city. He concludes the chapter:

With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in. By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open.

Melville likens comfort seeking city dwellers as inmates of an asylum, their perceptions and daily routines neatly contained within safe, man-made walls. Given the advances in technology and overall wealth of Western Civ, this is progressing beyond the temptation of a safe, soft option to seem more like a destiny as the entire globe becomes ever more crafted by human doing. I'm only making the point here that as actual wildernesses disappear, so may the call to adventure, the endless possibilities for human creativity when one dares to venture into the unknown.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger meditated deeply on the dangerously dehumanizing possibilities posed by modern technology. In his tract The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger argues that modern machine technology marks a significant departure from previous technologies, like bridges and windmills and sailing ships, because it transcends mere instrumentality as it becomes a way of revealing truth. Which is a revealing as a calculable nexus of forces. Everything comes to pass by efficient causes, like giant domino chains.

As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of it precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion : It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself. [30]

Modern machine technology reduces nature to a mere supplier of raw materials, or "standing reserve". Nature becomes "objectless" in the sense that it no longer presents us with a myriad of challenges and mysteries, forces we have had to contend with and which have formed us as humans over many millennia. Nowadays we can live inside a technological cocoon where nature supplies the means to human ends, which are increasingly what pleases the senses once basic needs are secured. The dangerous delusion is that the garden is all there is-- that all there is is human contrivance, or that that is all that matters. Following what we've said earlier, this extinguishes the upward pointing beacon of the soul by blinding it to the wildness and chaos outside the garden walls. The soul no longer even knows there are walls. Moreover, if our environment is entirely human engineered, then changing it to suit one's needs means fighting against other humans. Without strongly perceived natural conditions much of this fight lies in persuasion, winning over enough powerful people to your fashion choices. The world we live in in thus determined by who has the political power -- enter the postmoderns.

Moreover, man himself can the become the raw materials for the machines, become "standing reserve", for the longer he lives within a technological cocoon the more his responses to inputs will become predictable and amenable to mathematical modeling. Our cell phones or what comes next will become the remote control receivers the powerful will use to call up the desired behaviors from the populace. This is a dreadful possibility for all humans, but especially men.

A Call to Arms

I began this essay with a remark made by an old physics prof of mine which has long stayed with me, as to why there are so few groundbreaking scientific discoveries nowadays compared to a century ago. This seems especially puzzling considering the explosion of higher education, the nearly two-orders-of-magnitude increase in advanced science degrees awarded each year since the turn of the 20th century. One would think that more accredited scientists would mean more science getting done, which should only improve the chances for groundbreaking discoveries.

Additionally there is the fact that the explosion of higher education owes in a large part to the women's movement of the 1960's which propelled legions of females into professional fields, including and especially academia. The universities are now majority female, which has the feminists trumpeting victory. Hanna Rosin, for instance, gleefully reported that men are getting trounced, while Prof. Sarah Hill notes that it is the women who are "kicking ass" in the academy compared to all the mediocre, old men.

Insofar as earning the accolades goes, women are beating the men, in fact. But then one has to consider the overall present value of such accolades compared to the past. The trend line is most certainly downward. Back in the 1950's a man with a high school diploma could get a job that paid well enough to support a family. Nowadays he'd be lucky to do that with a masters degree. [31] Might this have something to do with the massive influx of women? The universities have not only become female dominated by the numbers, but hyper-feminized culturally, as Prof. Amy Wax among others have testified to. But the world outside academia is vigorously competitive and one typically needs to be both skilled at persuasion and tough enough to stay in the fight to succeed. Hence it is little wonder that the university in so far as its role in forming the minds and characters of the youth has less value today compared to fifty years ago.

We considered the modern "garden" as the family home with the backyard, a tended and manicured version of nature that is safe for children yet still suggests adventure. We then considered that modern technology and wealth production has effectively expanded the garden into the cities and even the countryside. All of which was made possible by a science which has nothing to say of value--even its own--as it reveals nature entirely in terms of efficient causation through mathematical modeling. The result is that the environmental pressures our ancestors evolved to survive in have largely disappeared while at the same time there is no longer a Queen Science, one that deals in valuations and points to the peaks, to the highest values. Hence there is neither the force of nature nor reason underwriting values, just the marketplace and those who are able to manipulate it. The end result is that the traditional male role of protector and provider has been diminished while modern society, when all is running smoothly, incurs the age old vices of wealthy families and the aristocracies of yesteryear: decadence, effeminacy, destructive hedonism taking the place of duty and purpose.

Yet perhaps this world yet will be able to do away with masculinity. We have to consider the matter. Writing in the 19th century, Joseph Conrad yet imagines (though perhaps it is based on his own experience as a shipmaster) a windjammer crew seduced by sentimentalism, by a sudden inward consideration, a overweening self-regard. They are egged on by a self-styled socialist and rabble-rouser onboard, Donkin, and his show victim, James Wait, who serves to as the focus of all the injustices thrust upon them by evil oppressors like ship captains, ship owners, and shipping company CEO's. And there is some truth to it. Working men were and are sometimes exploited by industrialists, in some cases scandalously so. But the safe operation of the ship, like the larger civilized world, simply cannot afford perfect justice for all. Some will be sacrificed, men will be sacrificed, which is the reason why initiations of boys into manhood have existed for centuries. Otherwise men will become too self-focused--narcissistic--a state of affairs which almost drowns the ship in Conrad's story, and may well drown our ship of state if left uncorrected.

Allegorically I posit that Conrad's story is still true, even in our hyper-technological, artificial world. In the first place, technology only mediates nature. At some point it must interface with reality: the reality of extracting petroleum, of building safe airplanes, of managing human waste, etc. Most of these jobs are still performed by men, and yet this does not appear to cause the feminists any concern, so confident they seem that men will just go on doing all the necessary jobs for them no matter how badly they get treated. But the truth is that the world is nowhere close to being fully automated.

Secondly, boys have to become men so that the patriarchal social order can properly function. Daniel Amneus has I believe made a convincing case that civilization is a patriarchy--no other social order as of yet has produced any similar level of peace and prosperity, not to mention the advances in science and art. The basic building block of a patriarchal order is the father-headed household. This is not to say that other arrangements should be proscribed. Allowances to our classical liberal principles of individuality, that everyone should be able to pursue their own hopes and dreams, are essential to any healthy society. The patriarchs should not be in the business of micromanaging people's lives, only offering thoughtful guidance based on decades of life experience. However, a subversion of the natural order, which is what the feminists are attempting, will likely lead to societal collapse and it is the job of patriarchs to stop it.

Third, healthy masculinity is what brings new modes and orders to the world--keeps society growing and flourishing. There's no standing still in life, not for individuals, not for civilizations. This is my reply to my old prof, as to why physics is stagnating, why groundbreaking scientific discoveries are rare despite the swelling ranks of scientists. Genius is more than mere mental computing power, than IQ. Its product is original, not something that can be figured out from known premises. Typically it issues from adventure, a journey sometimes literally though the wilderness, confronting darkness and danger, treading where one is constantly unsure of one's footing. Wealth and comfort, university safe spaces, generally do not create genius, though they may host spectacular technicians.

Finally, demoralizing boys and men by disparaging and discouraging their natural development, teaching them to be more like the well behaved girls, is not going to make anyone's lives better--not the boys, not the men, and not the women who need their love and devotion. The feminists might get to spike a football over it, but that's about it.

In most cultures boys were turned into men through military service. Cleaved from the inclusive and compassionate world of home--of mother-- this would be his first adventure. Challenge after challenge is thrown at him, and crying for help will only increase the severity of the next challenge. No one cares about the boy's feelings, for he must become a man, and a man does not place himself above his company, his family, or God. Luckily most human males are wired to thrive from this sort of adventure, and will in time develop a deep, abiding sense of pride in their willingness to sacrifice everything if necessary. That is, after all, what heroes do. And that taps into very deep rivers of the male psyche which throughout history has show itself to be an inexhaustible fuel supply for building, protecting, and maintaining civilization, from the family unit up to all its institutions.

I think that the challenge at hand is to convince younger generations of men that there are plenty of adventures to be had--and plenty of opportunities to be a hero. I think that we need to reconstitute all-male institutions which turn boys into men, in particular, all-male military academies, but also all-male trade schools and institutions like the (former) Boy Scouts of America. The feminists will cry foul, call you sexist, threaten lawsuits for this. Well if you're up for an adventure, up to measure your mettle, there you go.

Another is to restore father custody as the default in divorce cases, as in the patriarchal order the children are his property, so long as he does not neglect or abuse them. This will have feminist heads exploding. It should be great fun.

Or you can work at the local level. I spend a lot of time around yachtsmen and just this past summer, for example, I noted that a local yacht club was sponsoring an all-female sailing program. I have written about the unfair advantaging of women in the Ocean Race. [32] If you have any sway in these circles, gently inquire as to how specifically advantaging women is fair. If they claim that it is necessary to compensate for the supposed historical advantages that men have had over women, calmly point out that it was men who developed ocean going sailing ships; it was men who sailed them to uncharted lands; and it was men who invented the sport of yacht racing. So what exactly are you girls laying claim to? If they argue that women are proving themselves to be capable ocean sailors these days, point out that this is not an apples to apples comparison. Technology such as electronic navigation, satellite weather feeds, all kinds of labor saving devices such as roller furling mechanisms, was all developed by your forefathers who have made it possible for lesser talents to succeed at what only the most daring of men would attempt in the past.

I only use this example because it's what I am familiar with. But I'm sure that you see the same dynamic playing out in many spaces as our culture is pervaded by feminist politics. The world of online gaming is another example of vigorous feminist colonization, as Joker of the YouTube channel "Better Bachelor" has discussed at some length. [33] Men need to set boundaries on their spaces. If women want to build out their own games, more power to them, but don't expect the men to change what they like in order to accommodate the girls who never did the work.

Which reminds me of what I see coming out of Hollywood. I see a lot of classic movies getting feminist treatment, which typically means that the females are now the heroes and the males largely useless or incompetent, unless they are evil. But again these feminists seem only interested in what is already established and successful. I don't see them creating any new franchises. I see Kathleeen Kennedy making feminist friendly Star Wars movies. Or Disney re-writing timeless classics like Snow White, where lead actress Rachel Zegler haughtily explains that in this version she will not need no prince to save her. Feminists consider this as much needed progressive updates to outdated stories, but it looks a lot more like parasitical pillaging to me.

Anyway, if face-to-face activism is too tall an order, you can write or podcast to a general audience on men's issues, as I am doing here.

The future of our civilization, of Western civilization, of continued peace and prosperity, rests squarely on the shoulders of men, as it always has. While you younger men may complain that older generations of men, particularly the hippie generation of the 1960's and 70's, have betrayed you, it still does not absolve you of the responsibility. Don't shirk, don't fall for the sentimental lie, the soul-destroying narcissism of therapy culture, a life of ignoble ease. You deserve much better than what the culture of today has planned for you.

References

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_301.20.asp

[2] Reeves, Richard V.. Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It (p. 25). Brookings Institution Press. Kindle Edition.

[3] [

around the 48 min mark

[4] [https://developer.apple.com/entrepreneur-camp/how-to-apply/

[5] https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-30973376.html

[6]

[7]

[8]

Christopher F. Rufo

Is Claudine Gay a Plagiarist?

Harvard president Claudine Gay has problems. Touted as the first black woman to run the nation’s most prestigious university, she assumed leadership with high expectations, but her tenure, which began this summer, has been mired in scandal. As dean and then president, Gay has been accused of…

Read more

3 years ago · 456 likes · 240 comments · Christopher F. Rufo and Christopher Brunet

[9]

[10] https://theweek.com/science/rise-of-fake-science-fraudulent-papers

[11] https://avoiceformen.com/featured/do-men-make-better-ceos-than-women/

[12] Browne, Kingsley. Co-ed Combat (p. 277). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[13] Daniel Amneus, The Case for Father Custody (Primrose Press, Alhambra, CA, 1999), p. 305

[14] Schlafly, Phyllis. Who Killed the American Family? (p. 122). WND Books. Kindle Edition.

[15] Buss, David M.. The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating. Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

[16] Moxon, Steve. The Woman Racket: The new science explaining how the sexes relate at work, at play and in society (p. 29). Andrews UK - Academic. Kindle Edition.

[17] Thucydides. The History Of The Peloponnesian War: By Thucydides - Illustrated (p. 42). Kindle Edition.

[18] Durant, Will. The Life of Greece: The Story of Civilization, Volume II (p. 161). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

[19] Eberstadt, Nick . Men without Work: Post-Pandemic Edition (2022) (New Threats to Freedom Series) (p. 132). Templeton Press. Kindle Edition.

[20]

[21] Conrad, Joseph; Book House. Joseph Conrad: The Complete Novels (The Greatest Writers of All Time Book 36) (p. 539, 555). Kindle Edition.

[22] Letter to Alan Villiers, author wished to remain anonymous. Alan Villiers, The Way of a Ship (Charles Scribner's Sons; New York, 1970), pp. 176-177

[23]

17:00

[24]

[25]

starting at 3:50

[26] Strauss, Leo; Cropsey, Joseph. History of Political Philosophy (p. 1193). The University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.

[27] Pluckrose, Helen; Lindsay, James A.. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody (p. 25). Pitchstone Publishing. Kindle Edition.

[28] Neumann, Erich. The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (Princeton Classics Book 14) (pp. 73-75). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[29]

[30] Martin Heidegger, William Lovitt (translator), The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (Garland Publishing Inc., New York, 1977), pp. 26-27

[31]

[32] https://kevinboothbysailing.com/2023/07/29/the-quota-women-of-the-ocean-race/

[33]

Sunshine State Politics

January, 2024

Thus far my sailing sojourn to Florida and the Keys has been spectacular. I'm not merely talking about the weather, which of course comes as a welcome change from November in New England. The passage south was not exactly gentle summertime sailing, either. It rarely is. When I finally entered the Old Florida Channel (which leads by the south of Key Biscayne) on Jan. 3, 2024, it was the middle of the night and the wind had gone calm. I cursed, but then, conveniently, the flooding current carried me straight into the anchorage. Nice.

Now Key Biscayne has always been an upscale place, but at least they provide a dinghy landing for us down-scale boaties. There once was a public water tap too, but they removed it, which meant that I would have to sail over to Dinner Key Marina to fill up. At Dinner Key they have a tap conveniently located by the dinghy dock. Just arriving from Bermuda I needed fresh water, so I sailed over and anchored just outside the mooring field and proceeded ashore by dinghy.

Shock! This water tap has been removed. I ask around, but no one seems willing to volunteer any information. I finally find a hose on one of the docks and fill up my two 5-gallon jerry cans.

So all is well for now, and I enjoy my stay.

A few weeks later I set off for Marathon, Florida. Arriving in the Keys the first thing I notice is that the place is looking spiffier. The City Marina has been spruced up, and there's a brand new gas station just across the street. Billboard signs are new, sidewalks clean, vegetation tended to. Fantastic. Nice to see Marathon shedding the trashy trailer park look.

I also notice fewer derelict vessels inside Boot Key. Sometimes such vessels are abandoned, and sometimes they have sketchy people living on them. Not to sound callous, but I am happy to see them gone.

Then I see a US Coast Guard RIB going around to all the anchored vessels, some of which are clearly not derelicts but cruising yachts. This gives me a start, but I never find out what the Coast Guard wanted with these vessels.

Upon arriving in Key West, the picture continues to come into focus. The live-aboard community around Key West is rather notorious, especially out by Wisteria Island. Approaching Key West I notice straight away that the ranks have been thinned, that there are fewer anchored vessels, and very few derelicts.

I proceed to anchor in my favorite spot inside Garrison Bight. While the showers and laundry machines are only accessible to mooring holders, the city marina still provides a water tap on their dinghy dock, accessible to all.

No more. The water tap can only be activated with a marina key card. And even if I chose to take a mooring, I didn't see any available, which is often the case both in Key West and Marathon, particularly during peak season.

So now finding fresh water is becoming an issue. Also needing to purchase groceries, I make my way to the Winn Dixie. There's a neat little spot in the mangroves where you can tie up just behind the Denny's, in the shopping center where the Winn Dixie is.

Shock again.

The parking lot is now surrounded by a tall metal fence. There's still a landing just by the overpass, and you can climb up onto the bridge and around the fence like a sewer rat. Which is of course what I did, having little shame about such things these days.

I did find a water tap but I'm not going to reveal where it is. Clearly the authorities are trying to drive out not only the boat bums, but the budget cruising crowd who prefer to anchor off and save their money. Which includes your humble author here.

Such is life. If you're not paying rent, expect to be pushed away, at least from the major ports.

But then a news report pops up into my YouTube feed, a report on the situation with live-aboards in Miami. The city commissioner, David Suarez, wants all anchored boats gone. He attempts several lines of argumentation which are refreshingly refuted by the local authorities and scientists. I say refreshing because I've come to expect that television news will side with The Empire.

Anyway, first Suarez claims that the boats are illegally dumping black water (sewage) into the bay. But the local police only find a few vessels to be in violation. Then he claims that their anchors are destroying the sea grass on the seabed. But Prof. Jim Fourqurean of Florida International University explains that the sea grass was obliterated years ago when the Army Corps of Engineers dredged the whole place out to build artificial islands.

Well damn the facts, David Suarez remains undeterred and unconvinced. Toward the end of the report he says: "I think it's time for you [the boaters] to move on, you know, stop destroying our bay."[1][2]

"Our bay."

Apparently Suarez and his constituency think they own the place.

And part of me agrees with Suarez in so far as keeping things tidy, even though I don't own anything there, and I'm pretty sure he would look down his nose at me as well.

Speaking for myself, though I think I also speak for the vast majority of blue water sailors, it is the crowds and the noise and the detritus of the city that we are trying to get away from. We seek remote islands, wild coasts, and pristine bays. We want to see dolphins playing by the bow, great whales, pelagic birds in perpetual glide flight, the beauty of nature. We want the freedom to roam great expanses of ocean. We want to live in real nature, not a manicured nature park that has fences and officials charging admission. The fact that the open ocean remains untamed and unaffected by man's technological advances is part of it's increasingly unique and rare appeal to us modern day adventurers.

Beyond the yachting world, the lure of "life off the grid" appears quite pervasive judging by the immense popularity of back-to-nature themed channels on YouTube (just a random search yields channels such as https://www.youtube.com/@OffGridLife). Though much of it may be fantasy, the view counts reveal a real curiosity, if not a widespread, unmet psychological need.

Then there's the present day environmental movement which, particularly on the issue of anthropogenic climate change, is a quasi-religion. Critics of climate change are declared "climate deniers"--heretics--though they may be impeccably credentialed scientists such as Richard Lindzen or Steven E. Koonin. [3] Sacrificing your standard of living is something like an act of repentance. Its mission is described in apocalyptic terms: the end of the world is nigh, or twelve years (as was once claimed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). We have to act now to save the planet.

In any case, the yachties and the off-the-grid'ers and the environmental activists all share a conviction that human influence on nature is destroying something precious, and that the unrelenting expansion of industry may soon take it all unless something is done. Their passion is undeniable, but are they correct?

Living Off the Grid: Fact vs. Fiction

Science Values Facts

I shall now attempt a hypothesis which says that humans, particularly in the West, have been so blessed with technological powers which have freed them from the harsh natural conditions of their ancestors that they have both forgotten about said harshness, and yet are also aware that humans need some such natural conditions to in order to be human. It may be partly a conflation, but I think that people see the taming, manipulating, and spoiling of the natural world through technology as similarly acting upon the human soul. Just as a man can no longer roam free on the wide open prairie, so his mind cannot escape the incessant imposition of others who wish to corral his thoughts, encompass his mental horizons by their institutions. Human structures, billboard signs, city lights, a morass of regulations and licenses, and now social media are making it all but inescapable. True, humans are social animals who need other humans, but they also need to freely associate--or not--with those whom they choose. Totalitarian social orders make the latter impossible. The ineluctable march of technology appears to be facilitating a kind of totalitarian conformism which is only exacerbated by the lack of an authentic, deep rooting of our selves. This deep rooting appears to require a more primitive relationship with nature.

But not only is modern technology removing us from the natural conditions which formed the bodies, minds, and mores of our ancestors, much of modern philosophy prostrates itself before modern science, accepting its purely naturalistic model of reality as true by virtue of its rigor (and success). So a modern philosopher such as Yuval Noah Harari says that values, countries, governments, God, are "fictional realities".[4] They may be useful, only they are not real.

Well indeed, we don't see any national borders on the satellite images. We cannot find any human virtues in the night sky or under a microscope. So the question needs to be addressed: might it be the case that values can only be regarded as fictions?

To the contrary it's not difficult to convince oneself that while scientific truths are objective--free of personal preference or politics--the pursuit of truth cannot be. Scientists don't just go wandering about the world measuring things. What to measure, and with what? By what units? Counting grains of sand in a desert is pointless. But understanding, for example, how certain types of plants can still thrive in a desert might be important for increasing crop yields.

Science must therefore be directed by human valuing. Objects of science are discovered, or brought out of unconcealment, by subjective forces, by a passion, a calling, a psychological need. "The evidence is overwhelming that we see the world through a structure of value", says Dr. Jordan Peterson, "raw empiricism doesn't work. This is partly why the Enlightenment has to come to an end. You cannot orient yourself with knowledge of the facts, and the reason for that is that there is an infinite number of facts. You have to organize the facts, and as soon as you organize them, you're in a value hierarchy." [5] Peterson suggests that the most basic contextual structure by which we understand a value hierarchy is the story, particularly through archetypal stories such as those in the Bible. Stories are character sketches. I shall now provisionally draw a correlation between the profundity and durability of truth claims and the character of truth seekers. To state it succinctly: profound truths must come from profound people (the corollary being the famous latin: ex nihilo, nihil fit).

As far as the circumstantial evidence goes, I haven't heard of many groundbreaking scientific discoveries originating in faculty lounges. I am not aware of any great writers who perfectly aligned themselves with prevailing ideas of genius in their own times, or who lived on a guaranteed income. Darwin had to endure a long voyage to the Pacific on the HMS Beagle. Einstein was a lonely misfit who did most of his groundbreaking work during his free time while employed as a clerk in a patent office. What worth knowing has ever come from the ensconced?

Conventions provide paths of least resistance, of energy conservation, and as such are immensely useful. But life is not static, nor is art nor science. Both man and his creations require constant nourishment. Slogans such as "hell no, we won't go", which rallied a nationwide counter-cultural movement in 1960's, is now passe, its vital force spent. The Spirit of the Age dies away until the next emerges. No one has the last word, not even in science, not even Sir Isaac Newton. P. B. Shelley wrote of the transitory nature of everything human in his famous poem "Ozymandias":

And on the pedestal, these words appear My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my works ye mighty and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away

The most enduring literary works, such as the Bible, concern themselves with guiding human creation, beginning with the creation of new humans. These stories chiefly deal with human character types and dispositions, how they typically play out when instantiated in the real world. Great stories, those which we consider to be archetypal stories, can be abstracted into general valuation schemas or templates so as to be, to put it crudely, reusable. We might therefore say that guiding principles abstracted from archetypal stories are a necessary condition for producing and maintaining a civilization, its science, art and politics.

But nowadays we live in a world that is being radically transformed by modern science and technology, and this science and technology describes a world that is value free and thus is incapable of evaluating its own underlying value hierarchy, its guiding principles. It has to defer to the free market for its reasons to pursue this and not that. Which has produced no shortage of technological wonders, that must be acknowledged, except that lacking any credible, coherent philosophical architecture it does nothing to maintain it and in fact appears to corrode the very culture which produced the scientists and tech wizards in the first place. And so we are back to needing good stories to cultivate humans capable of producing and maintaining our peaceful and prosperous civilization. We still need guiding principles for human development. I argue that in order for this to come about, humans will need a re-balancing of their relationship with nature.

At this point, however, I pause to take a slight detour into the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, particularly with respect to his views on modern technology. His arguments (as usual) are rather complicated, but they are profound and helpful to our present inquiry.

Summary Notes

• The constant transformation of the natural world into human structures appears to be causing psychological distress for many who fear that soon no one will be able to escape the artifacts and impositions of others.

• Modern philosophy generally accepts the naturalistic worldview of modern science and technology. This naturalistic view is mechanistic and value free and thus provides us with no coherent philosophical architecture with which to evaluate good and bad (including the value of science and technology).

• However, as all of science is a human creation, there must be an underlying set of values driving science forward.

• Character formation is the focus of all wisdom texts such as the Bible. Modern philosophy appears inadequate for this task. It is questionable whether the vibrant, innovative, and free society which has been Western Civ is capable of maintaining itself.

The Question of Technology

According to Heidegger, unlike pre-modern technology, modern technology does not merely furnish us with tools, it is also a way of revealing truth. Heidegger writes (and I shall try to unpack this for you in a minute, so hang on):

"... when destining reigns in the mode of Enframing, it is the
supreme danger. This danger attests itself to us in two ways. As
soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as
object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and
man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of
the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a
precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself
will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth." [6]

Let's start by understanding what Heidegger means by "standing reserve".

Modern machine technology is unique in its rendering of nature as stored energy for human purposes. For example, in the past when men traveled oceans by sail, they used only God's wind, of which they had no control. With the advent of powered vessels, with all of the interlocking systems of petroleum extraction and delivery, of fuel lines and combustion cylinders, etc., man's relation to nature is as to one of mere raw materials, or "standing reserve", to be called up whenever seagoing transport is required. No need to wait upon wind or tide when you are diesel powered. Though the sailing ship is also a technological thing, it is distinctly different from the powered vessel in it's direct relation to nature--to the wind and the tide--which it cannot order up as needed.

The way modern technology traps and stores nature lies in its method of setting up nature to report itself according to mathematical models. As an example, recall perhaps a physics experiment you did with a pendulum made of a metal ball suspended by a string. When you held the ball at an angle from the vertical and released it (the initial conditions of the system), you could calculate from Newton's laws the exact amplitude and frequency of the pendulum swings. Of course the pendulum will not behave precisely as the model predicts. For example, if you neglected to add the effect of air friction on the swinging ball (as well as the string), the mathematical model would have the pendulum swinging forever while in reality it slowly comes to a halt. The mathematical model is not the physical reality. However, things in the universe can be set up to report themselves in a way that is sufficiently close to abstract mathematics--that is, as isomorphic to the machinery of a formal logical system of symbols and rules--as to allow for the construction of actual machines, material instantiations of our abstractions.

Now we might have been tempted to say here that the mathematical model forecasting the future of the apparatus is the underlying reality of which our actual pendulum approximated. In this way the mathematics is seen as a Platonic Form, an eternal, unchanging essence of the natural world. But mathematics is an abstract language, a collection of symbols with rules for their manipulation, whose essence is exclusively, it would appear, that of the human soul. Nobody has ever tripped over a "27" while hiking in the woods as they would a rock or tree branch. Put this way we immediately recognize the logical category mistake. Math and logic are realities of the mind. To think that the universe, including all that we perceive, is ultimately reducible to formal symbolic systems of logic, to mathematics, will necessarily lead to such category mistakes. I hold that this is the way in which modern science and philosophy bounds our horizons for what can be regarded as real. If mathematical physics underpins all observable reality, then free will must be an illusion, our value system but a human fiction (think Harari) since everything is predetermined according to mathematics. Yet we nonetheless observe that somehow these human fictions appear to the turn control knobs to the giant machine which is nature (how exactly that could happen was Descartes' mind-body problem) to call up what is wanted, e.g.,travel, indoor heating, electric lights, etc. We are left confused. So far as I can tell this view (i.e. scientific materialism) is simply untenable, but nonetheless has wide acceptance because of its support role in the miracle of modern technology.

Anyway, let us agree that the march of modern machine technology is the ever extending of the setting up nature within mathematical models. This is what Heidegger calls Enframing, which he describes as, and I'm paraphrasing here: a challenging forth by which man sets up nature to report itself in a mathematical way, a way that makes it calculable in advance. Heidegger regards Enframing as a supreme danger not because of the technology it produces, there is nothing inherently evil (or good) in technology, but because it monopolizes all ways of revealing, of man and his relation to nature. Man sets upon nature in order to control and master it, and eventually he will similarly set upon himself. Recall at the outset I hypothesized that while the present day environmental movement abjures the manipulating and spoiling of nature by machines and industry, many similarly fear a manipulating and spoiling of humans, of their innermost sanctum. Consider the case of social media whose profitability depends on transforming large numbers of humans into a resource that can be relied upon to behave a certain way based on the content that is fed to them--to buy things, to vote a certain way, etc. That is, the financial success of social media requires transforming humans into standing reserve.

So in light of all of this I humbly propose the following. Firstly that we consider mathematics a dialect of the Logos, or The Word if you prefer, which affords us humans partial perspectives on Being (by which I mean the indefinite manifold of experience, what's coming from your senses, your mind, your emotions, etc.). The fact that nature can be set up to report itself according to mathematics does not prove that we are essentially machines, but rather that because we can understand Logos (or The Word), we have the essential freedom to roam about in a world of ideas. The fact that we can construct great edifices of mere ideas, like mathematics, and then use them to manipulate the natural world in a way that bends it to our will, is the extent to which we have been gifted, though in a limited way, the powers of our Creator. Possessing The Word is possessing a degree of freedom from instinct, disposition, genetic programming, etc. so that we can construct great edifices of nothing but ethereal ideas, and yet use these ideas to understand and transform ourselves and our world.

Let me just note that what I propose does not preclude the existence of universal truths. What Newton's laws say about pendulums, for example, are absolute truths within the bounds of their original scope of applications. "If you set the experiment up this way, you will observe the following"-- such are the universal truths of science. The mistake comes when we see the mathematical model as the underlying reality, as a Platonic Form, as Being itself, rather than as a tool by which we can organize and understand predictable patterns within Being. The scientific materialist has only a hammer --modern science-- and wants to reduce the entire universe to a set of nails. This is when we end up with nonsensical questions like: where in space-time does Einstein's theory of gravity exist? What is the mass or energy equivalent of "3"?

Summary Notes

• Martin Heidegger holds that modern technology is converting nature to "standing reserve", essentially raw materials ready for use.

• Not only is modern technology a means to an end (e.g. reliable transportation), but is also way of revealing truth, i.e., nature as standing reserve.

• Modern science and technology reveals nature in terms of mathematical models which render it calculable in advance. The mistake of scientific materialism is regarding the mathematical model as a Platonic Form, the underlying reality of Being, of everything we sense, intuit, feel, etc. This leads us to believe that nature is a machine devoid of purpose, and from which we can derive no human values.

• Contrarily I propose that we view mathematics as a dialect of the Logos, or The Word, with which we humans have the essential freedom to roam about the world of ideas in order to create such things as mathematical models, literature, art, etc. Through such creations we can transcend instinct, genetic programming, and environmental determinism. In this way we have been gifted, though in a limited way, the power of our Creator.

The Love of Wisdom

To my thinking the most serious fault with modern philosophy, specifically with scientific materialism, and with atheism, apart from its sycophantic aping of modern science, is the smuggled in premise that we can understand things independently of a perspective. If we believe that we can actually know Being itself, then we believe that there is an endpoint to science, that there can be a Theory of Everything. I hold that, philosophically, this can never be, and history, at least so far, confirms it. Every new discovery in science or work of art only opens up a new vista, and in so doing reveals itself as partial. Newtonian mechanics was eventually found wanting when it came to microscopic phenomenon. What Newtonian physics brought into our collective knowledge allowed for new lines of exploration, new truths of the universe to be uncovered. Recall earlier we said that guiding principles for human development are most fundamental as they underlie all art, science and technology of any given civilization. Guiding principles are what channel the chaotic currents of a group of human souls, beginning with the education of its youth, into a shared public knowledge space broadly referred to as culture.

This is a somewhat tricky but important point to understand. While a culture will (one hopes) have a collection of bedrock, universal truths in its knowledge space--which could potentially be recognized by and serve any such knowledge space--as we've said there is an indefinite number of facts and possible truth claims. It is the underlying value structure contained in a culture's guiding principles (as I have called it) which determine which facts and truth claims will be bought into the public square, how they will be arranged and organized. So for example a seafaring and trading peoples such as the ancient Phoenicians would have a rich knowledge base centered on ship design and navigation when compared to the Mongols, who had no need of such things. Such is the inescapable role perspective plays in all knowledge production.

Now, we might say that all of knowledge is relating concepts, and in this way knowledge is the unifying of mental pieces into new, synthesized pieces. All knowledge that can be cast in a spoken or written language is a unity, the unity of subject with predicate. "All men are mortal", "not all whales have teeth", etc. It seems evident enough that much of the value structure underlying knowledge is simply utilitarian (the desire for food, shelter, comforts, etc.). Nonetheless we have to wonder if there is something beyond all of that which we are aiming at, evidenced by the universal human proclivity to believe in gods or God? Perhaps some ultimate unity of all concepts?

Well we've already conceded, in refuting scientific materialism, that a Theory of Everything is not possible because concepts are always partial and can produce only more partial understandings. We humans are only afforded a perspective, not omniscience. In light of the foregoing a better question would be: is there a universal value structure which should guide our knowledge production so that we may get closer to finding an ultimate unity? The Eastern philosophers spoke of The Way. Perhaps this is how we should think of it. A way is a path forward in the world of becoming. The Way, if there is such a thing, would be the specific path for every human which brings him to full fruition.

In a famous Socratic dialogue, The Symposium, Socrates presents us with a non-sexual Eros: "Love [Eros] is the son of Plenty and Poverty … far from being tender and beautiful as most people think he is hard and rough and unshod and homeless … always dwelling with want. But from his father again he has designs upon beautiful and good things, being brave and go-ahead and high-strung, a mighty hunter, always weaving devices, and a successful coveter of wisdom." [7] Love involves privation, a part seeking to make itself whole. The philosopher--literally the lover of wisdom--lives between ignorance and wisdom, aware of his ignorance, which is ugly, but with his sights set on wisdom, which is beautiful. This is the philosopher's perspective. The dialogue continues: "The right way to approach things of love, or to be led there by another, is this: beginning from beautiful things, to mount for that beauty's sake ever upward, as by a flight of steps, from one to two, and from two to all beautiful bodies, and from beautiful bodies to beautiful pursuits and practices, and practices to beautiful learnings, so that from learnings he may come at last to that perfect learning which is the learning solely of beauty itself may know at last that which is the perfection of beauty." [7]

I interpret beauty as a approximating an ultimate unity (the more lasting and beautiful, the closer the approximation), a sense of completion--perfection which says "don't change a thing". This is as close as us mortals, driven by our partiality, our lacking, can come to finally finding a blissful resting place, finding heaven. Even non-linguistic works such as painting and music strive toward a unity, otherwise they don't make sense, they don't move us. No great work of music is just a concatenation of harmonic sequences that just suddenly starts somewhere and ends somewhere else. Think of a great symphony like Beethoven's Ninth, starting off with the low, agitated strings, portending something momentous when suddenly it's all bombast with the horns. Then there's usually a slower, more introspective movement, and a final climax at the end. It "tells a story", has a structural unity.

As with works of art, so it is with science. Think of Newton subsuming a falling apple (allegedly) and the orbit of the moon under three simple, magisterial laws of motion. To take things we can all observe in the universe and describe them, unify them, in a handful of mathematical expressions is a creation of beauty.

For Socrates, Eros is the driving force toward these ultimate unities, toward beauty. The way in which individuals grow themselves toward creating things of beauty, which give us glimpses of the divine, will rest on a value structure. Geniuses may in fact create a new kind of human story which can modify the accepted value structure of a culture, but nevertheless everyone's value structure begins with what is given. Obviously, though it is politically incorrect to say so, advanced (read: superior) cultures are the ones whose value structures produce humans who create beautiful things. Though beauty is impossible to measure, two relevant metrics would be the durability of the creation and the breadth of its influence.

Summary Notes

• Nothing can be known independently of a perspective. We can never know Being itself.

• All knowledge that can be written or spoken seeks to unify subject with predicate. Is there an ultimate unity to which all knowledge aims?

• Socrates claims that Eros is what points us toward ultimate unity by begetting in beautiful things.

The End of History

Well be that as it may, modern technology combined with decentralized free markets has created so much abundance for so many that a great number of humans no longer feel any need for beauty and all the work it entails. The West appears to be succumbing to a spiritual entropy resulting from over reliance on sense stimulation to maintain well being.

The post-modern philosophers addressed this uniquely modern problem. "The rapidly accelerating technology was also producing a mass consumerist culture dominance … Technology also began to advance rapidly, which, together with the mass production of consumer goods, enabled this 'middle culture' to fuel a new postrationing desire for art, music, and entertainment. This, in turn, sparked fears that society was degenerating into an artificial, hedonistic, capitalist, consumerist world of fantasy and play..." to the point where "all realities had become mere simulations (imitations of real-world phenomena and systems) and simulacra ('copies' of things without an original)." [8]

The endlessly taxing labors of mere survival, once the norm for most any common man, gives way to recreation, to fantasy and play, to "lifestyles". Recall Heidegger's concept of 'standing reserve', which is nature as raw materials on hand for use. The ever increasing the abundance of standing reserve means that human lives will center less on bare necessities and more on luxuries and vanities. As modern humans no longer face the common enemy of mean old Mother Nature, a sense of common cause is lost.

So it is perhaps a matter of course that the post-moderns became obsessed with social power struggles to the point of claiming that language itself--even mathematics--could be used to subtly maintain a socioeconomic caste system. As technology lowers the threshold for the requisite skill and fortitude to succeed in productive industry, the natural hierarchy of competence becomes harder to discern. Present day social media makes it easier than ever to profit by counterfeit. Corporate policies such as ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) would have been laughable in the much leaner, not-so-distant past. Necessity rules an ever smaller portion of the economy, buried under layers of a luxury economy that caters to vanity. Participants in the latter must excel at marketing. This economy caters to man living almost exclusively within artificiality. The victors in this economy can indeed appear to be nothing more than skilled manipulators in human power games.

Which perhaps would not be a problem if it weren't for the evident fact that humans need a higher authority, a supreme judge, someone or something that squares all accounts. Friedrich Nietzsche famously anticipated the modern problem in declaring "God is dead", not on a note of triumph but as a warning of impending social catastrophe. Nietszche thought that the philosophers could effectively reconstruct God through a re-valuation of all values, but as we've said in the foregoing, not only are men mortal, but so are their creations. They cannot replace God. To think otherwise is to be as delusional as Ozymandias. The Enlightenment vision of a society founded on science, on pure rationality, is a chimaera.

Recently there has been renewed interest in ancient texts, particularly the Bible. Dr. Jordan Peterson has now published two series of lectures on the Bible on YouTube which have garnered tens of millions of views. It seems that many people are coming to question modern philosophy's dismissal of traditional religion. Perhaps those old books are smarter than the smartest of the moderns. Peterson seems to think so.

I have outlined above what I think is the problem with modern philosophy, with scientific materialism, with atheism. Just to recap, I argue that we are not purposeless machines locked in chains of cause and effect, though aspects of our bodies can be abstractly represented as such. But rather we have been gifted The Word by our Creator, which enables us to wander in a world of abstraction, to imagine and then create in the material world, as did our Creator. In this way humans are made in the image of God. We kill God by not following The Way, or His Way, a human developmental path guided by proven wisdom.

However, even if I am correct about the philosophic problem, that modern philosophy is simply mistaken about God and religion, it's still all too cerebral. We need to "touch some grass" as the saying goes. This is where our long and difficult relationship with nature needs to be understood in a first hand way. That is, we must have some relationship to the natural world similar to the environment in which our ancestors evolved.

How? I can only offer my own experience as a suggestion.

I was the son of a schoolteacher who took our family sailing during his summer vacations. I knew very early on that I was going to become a sailor of some kind. I also developed a neurotic conviction that turning on the engine when conditions no longer favored sailing was cheating. A sailboat with an engine is not a sailboat. Those who go knocking about in auxiliary-sailing vessels are not sailors.

I've since eased up on the purist evangelism because I tried out exactly what I was preaching and learned. When I first began sailing Ruth Avery she didn't even have a battery for any electronics. When the wind failed my only option was a 14-foot sculling oar, which is really only of use in calm or near calm conditions. But that didn't stop me from circling the globe, half of which I did by sextant only navigation. I do recall thinking to myself, beyond the purist appeal, that I wanted to sail this way "because of what I would become" as a result. I wanted to see the world through the eyes of sailor, not a tourist. One of my sailing heroes, Sterling Hayden (who was also a movie actor), put it this way: "Why go to sea under sail at all if you're so concerned with security? Why not go as a kind of frozen vegetable buying your way across the world surrounded by hot running water, epicurean cuisine, swimming pools and tiny-tot programs, teen-age programs, mommy and daddy programs--designed for your delectation, and designed too to quarantine you from the contagion of elemental wonder and awe known only to simple living?"[9]

I still sail Ruth Avery and live aboard full time. I have added a small outboard motor for maneuvering in close quarters, but she remains without inboard power, her underwater profile bears no disfiguring aperture or propeller. I use electronic navigation (chart plotter) and offshore I use Iridium satellite weather forecasting. My three year circumnavigation odyssey, sailing much like the great Joshua Slocum did back in the late 19th century, had served its purpose. Though I'm not sure that I've yet unpacked all of the lessons from that episode of my life, I have learned that living in the past, "living with nature", is hard. When I was younger and thirsting for high seas adventure it was just what I needed, but now it's too hard to be fun. So I've gradually allowed modern technology in to make my life a bit easier and rather more enjoyable.

So the sea cured me of the back-to-nature hankering when I actually encountered it's primal moods as transmitted by wind on sails, by waves and currents on a small craft that has ventured far from help. Offshore I had no communication with the outside world except for whatever I could pick up on my shortwave radio. I navigated by the sun, moon, and stars. Back then I had almost a Luddite disdain for modern technology. I wanted nothing to disrupt my communion with the universe.

Nowadays I love my smartphone and computer, fast and reliable mail order services like Amazon, super-markets full of fresh food (which I can store since I added refrigeration some years ago … ). I love the conveniences of modern life. I love videos on demand thanks to YouTube. I don't feel like I am living an artificial and empty life. I feel grateful that I don't have to suffer like my ancestors.

But I would never have reached this point had I not gone to sea under sail--actually under sail, mind you. Which brings me back to my original claim that mankind needs wildernesses and wild oceans to roam, needs the myriad of creatures with whom he shares much of the animal part of his soul. Otherwise he will likely lack first hand knowledge of the natural sentiments and impulses of his own soul, he will only know what he is supposed to think and feel according to culture. Wisdom requires awareness of one’s natural self.

At least that's my experience. Conservatives often facilely dismiss the environmental movement as a glorified please don't litter campaign. I contend that without the wild--what has not been distorted by human industry, human ideas--we cannot find the basic psychological grounding we need for our journey through life. Wisdom texts alone are not enough.

Environmental Opportunists

I began this essay talking about Florida politics and the conflict between the city commissioner, David Suarez, and the live-aboard boaties in Miami. Suarez, in my estimate, is an environmental opportunist. The passion of the present day environmental movement is palpable, and wherever there are strong passions, particularly if they are seen as virtuous, there will be opportunists. I've met a few Suarez types in my travels. I've seen a few harbor masters obviously ingratiating themselves to the local rich while trying to pass themselves off as noble stewards of the planet. Another reason why I avoid the big ports.

And just as the great religions of the world have sometimes naively enabled sociopaths (e.g. pedophile priests), so to does this new green religion. As a boatie who not long ago sailed the coast of Spain, I have been following this strange situation with the orca whales, which appear to be attacking the rudders of sailing yachts. In some cases they have sunk the yachts. But as this video explains, harming any orca whale is against the law, even if it is attacking you, if it is damaging your property or causing injury. [10]

This is crazy. Every human has a right to defend himself and his property when attacked, whether it be by another human or an animal. But the environmental loonies don't care. If you harm their whales, you are a criminal.

Most concerning of all, in my estimate, is what appears to be an emergent Global Green Elite. Organizations like the World Economic Forum come to mind. They seem to be pining for a new Garden of Eden, a new green Earth only sparsely populated by humans. Billionaires preferred. Their slogan "you will own nothing and be happy" is an obvious lie. People want their stuff, they want their own place and the Global Green Elite wants to take it all away to save the planet. There are of course many theories, but certainly one plausible theory is that they are working toward a new feudalist system. They actually want to reduce the masses to poverty (to owning nothing) in order to turn them into dependents, dependent on their lords for survival. At which point the new feudal lords will have the yoke snugly fitted around the necks of the commoners.

A few years back I wrote a short story about a cabal of global leaders rolling out a mass vaccination program to treat a pandemic that was not nearly as deadly as the news media kept claiming. The vaccine didn't really cure the disease either, except it did have one side effect of sterilizing a certain percentage of the population. A small enough percentage as to allow for plausible deniability. The elites dreamed of the day when they could visit purified nature—forests with all sorts of animals, oceans with whales and dolphins, mountains and big skies—while not having to put up with overfed dumb-asses driving around in pickup trucks. They would only see purple mountains and majesty, not a landscape littered with fast food restaurants and strip malls. They envision a beautiful earth all to themselves once that the lower order humans are removed.

I fear that this may in fact be their vision. Let us remain ever wary of false prophets as we go forward in trying to sort out our evolving relationship with the natural world and all of its creatures.

References

[1]

[2]

[3] Koonin, Steven E.. Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters. BenBella Books. Kindle Edition.

[4]

[5]

at 1:18:00

[6] Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (Garland Publishing Inc., New York, 1977), pp. 26-27

[7] W. H. D. Rouse (translator), The Great Dialogues of Plato (Mentor, New York, 1984), pp. 99-105

[8] Pluckrose, Helen; Lindsay, James A.. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody. Pitchstone Publishing. Kindle Edition, p. 26

[9] Sterling Hayden, Wanderer (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.,New York, 1977), p. 14

[10]

First my story (sorry to bore you)

The solitary reader supplies his own assessment of his relationship to those he meets in print. This can result in some unpleasant reckonings with reality, yet by the same token, the lover of literature may become confident enough about everything he has worked out in his mind as to embark on some great social adventure, like Don Quixote, emboldened by his romantic naivete. He resolves to put it all to the test. Some of which is guaranteed to turn out horribly. Which is likely to turn out just as it should. It's really hard to go wrong with adventure so long as you are willing to risk it all.

OK, so here's my story.

I went off to college and suddenly became a science geek (I did not go to college to study physics, simply stumbled on a passion), and this set me on a path of some success. By my 40th birthday I had earned a PhD in physics, worked for five years as a risk management consultant at Arthur Andersen, and then for two years as a quantitative analyst at Merrill Lynch Commodities in Texas. Between those two jobs I had circled the world alone in my 31-foot sailboat Ruth Avery, the boat I still own and sail to this day.

It was around this time, now entering my forties, that I had become obsessively vexed by the fact that I could never find a girlfriend. I began learning to play guitar and then going to open mic nights. It seemed to me like a good strategy, since it would give me a plausible excuse to be at social places like bars (yikes!), and an occasion to show off. But this did not go as planned.

Certainly I had set myself up for some rough sledding. But I had to somehow elevate and distinguish myself, stand above the masses. Not an uncommon motive for a man looking to attract a women, and not ignoble by any stretch. Such is the fuel of ambition. Only that the percent of ambition spent on trying to distort reality is wasted energy. Women are naturally very keen at piercing a man's subterfuges, especially if you are a potential romantic interest. I stubbornly insisted on my version of things, and so the women stayed away.

To return to my formal education for a moment, I had graduated from Connecticut College in 1991 Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with major in physics and a triple minor in math, music, and philosophy. I thought I was good enough for Caltech, but the best graduate school I could gain acceptance to was the University of Chicago. And even that may have been a bit of a fluke, as I was in somewhat over my head there, although I did write a successful dissertation, earning my doctorate in physics in 1996. After which I got lured away by money into the financial world, first at Arthur Andersen and then at Merrill Lynch Commodities. My credentials happened to align with what was in demand at the time. There I actually received more respect (and money) than I thought I deserved.

I thought that living as a part-time musician would be easier, not to mention more satisfying, than all of the high-powered corporate stuff. I would be disabused of this. The world of professional music, even at the lowest level of bar gigs, is just as competitive and nasty as the corporate office, only it pays less. My first public performances at the open mic nights were unmitigated disasters. Initially I was so nervous that I forgot almost everything I had learned and, as what generally happens in those situations, the crowd just turns away and starts conversing amongst themselves, often noisily, as a way of distancing themselves from the dying elephant in the room. My response was to go home and practice harder. I was never lazy.

I also had more time to practice because I had lost my job with Merrill, now in the spring of 2008. I had a good deal of money saved up--one clear advantage of bachelorhood, that must be acknowledged--so the idea was that I would sail to the islands and get music gigs to earn spending money. This was precisely the kind of insane romantic plan that appealed to me back then.

I actually did manage to get some music gigs in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, over the course of the next seven years. I also recall getting fired from every one of them. But I practiced like crazy, went out and hustled for gigs, so I'm giving myself an 'A' for effort.

Now recall that I had begun this madcap venture as part of a two step growth plan: first to develop social skills, then, with said skills, land an attractive girlfriend. Both of these skill sets came very slowly to me, and only with herculean effort at that. Moreover, my quest to find a girlfriend had all but stalled. I did find some helpful books on the subject, in particular From Shy to Social by Christopher Gray and Without Embarrassment by Michael Pilinski. Yet it was clear that I was running out of time. I needed to go for broke. So I signed up for a bootcamp with Julien Blanc, the pick-up artist, who was working for Real Social Dynamics at the time.

I had my friend Rob boat-sit Ruth Avery for me, as I left her at anchor in Charlotte Amalie for the three days I would be gone, gone to Las Vegas. Naturally I came down with a cold the day of my flight, and I did my best to stay hydrated while traveling. Bootcamps consisted of an instructor and three students. We were supposed to meet at one of the hotel bars (can't remember which) at 9 pm if I recall. My stomach was in knots, and just before I left the hotel I felt I needed to empty my bladder one last time and out came urine the color of red wine. The first and only time I had ever seen blood in my urine.

I find my way to the dimly lit, cavernous lounge area near the bar. I look about and see two men seated. One of them looks at me a bit searchingly. Holding eye contact I take a few steps closer and he leans in and says, in a conspiratorial whisper, "are you here for the bootcamp?". "Yes!" I reply, echoing the conspiratorial tone. We begin with brief summaries of our bios, how we found out about the pick-up community, etc.. So we talked, waiting for the arrival of Julien.

A little more of my backstory.

I wrote a manuscript to a book about my world voyage which I had hoped to publish. Thankfully it never was. I had grown up the son of a schoolteacher at a New England prep school, and I certainly had the professorial attitude down. Here's a quote from the manuscript:

The manifold moods of open sea and sky, sometimes serenely divided, sometimes rising up in frothing peaks till the sea is carried away in snowy streaks of vapor by a storming sky, are protean but constant taken as a whole, the timeless natural medium from which the art of building ships and sailing them arose. That the most ignorant and profane would boast that some clipper in which he served was the finest sight ever beheld says something. They instill the artistic sense, the sense for the beautiful and sublime, which in my estimate is far more genuine than anything I have known coming from the big-city art crowd.

Actually that's not too bad in my present estimate, but it gets worse. Here we go:

I eagerly joined in with fellow cruisers whenever the opportunity arose. I recall a “sundowners” cocktail party while I was anchored behind the Saints, part of Guadaloupe. They were all pleasant peoples, all Americans if I recall and all typical cruisers. Being a solo-sailor always evokes curiosity, and being queried about why I sail the way I do, I would instinctively draw from writers like Joseph Conrad for eloquence and seriousness. I wanted to make it clear that I was more than a mere vacationer. Moreover, I used to think well of myself for interjecting quotes and ideas of great writers and thinkers, not as a vulgar showing off of ivy-league learnedness, but a certain conceit that I should carry on the Socratic mission.

Calling out my own conceit here was just false modesty. I really did consider myself a philosopher of note, only not yet noted. At this point I had made it from the US East Coast to the Caribbean, which is no mean feat, but still only about ten percent of a world voyage. It was certainly not my place to speak as if I were Sinbad. Reading this passage, which I had happily forgotten about, had my face turning scarlet.

Here's one last passage which I think important for what follows:

The weather forecast called for strong Trades in two days time, but I had decided to leave; I had to get going lest I lose my courage, I thought. I expressed some anxiety, searching as a man always does, I think, for the tender sympathy of a woman. But Karen let drop a giggle, and I was struck to the marrow. In a moment I regained my composure, the mask of unconcerned heroism. We talked of other things.

Such was my understanding of women then. I wanted sympathy from them, as a child wants from his mother when things get tough.

Which I think explains a good deal as to how I ended up hiring a pick-up artist to teach me about women, things I should have learned twenty years ago.

Julien shows up and, following introductions, has us take a pledge to do whatever the instructor says. Well none of us are about to back out, not after having traveled thousands of miles to get here, not after having paid the two-thousand dollar tuition fee. After the pledge Julien looks at me: "OK, you are going to go up to the bar and ask for a knife. Then you will cut your hand with it, just enough to draw blood". I stare back for a minute. "Well?". So I get to my feet, but before I take a forward step he pulls me back down with his hand on my shoulder. "Sit down, I'm just messing with you."

We always had our meetings in noisy places, places where we all had to shout to be heard. This was to help with projecting our voices, as bars and clubs are always noisy. None of us had strong voices and we were all struggling, already. Julien then reviews the hand signals to signal which girl to approach. Approaching girls and striking up conversation is the PUA's great claim to fame, and at least some of them are effective teachers in this area. Julien, I can say, is an attractive man who projects the confidence that women find attractive. I saw that much with my own eyes. I only mention this because PUA's are frequently dismissed as charlatans, and while many (read: the majority) of them are, some of them do have actual skills to teach.

I remember my first approach had Julien, his assistant, and my two classmates roaring with laughter. Well I guess it was kind of funny, in retrospect. I was making rookie mistakes, such as approaching a woman from behind, or touching first to get her attention. The bootcamp would go on until around 0200, when Julien and his assistant would disappear and we were left to our own devices. I was always exhausted at this point and very much looked forward to getting back to my hotel room, much too tired to care about my girlfriend situation anymore.

Julien had a three day lesson plan for us, the notes from which I managed to recover. On the first night the plan was to simply stay active in the intense club atmosphere. One major reason a man will fail at seduction is that he is too socially timid. This is the sort of man who will freeze up in the night club jungle, stand with his back to wall, drink in hand, staring at all the glammed up women covorting about. Stay stationary for too long and you become jungle vegetation.

Over the next two days Julien taught us how to "set up the pull", where "pull" is PUA-speak for removing the woman from her social milleiu to a place private enough for sex. I think the youngest student may have pulled on the third night, but I don't know. We parted ways then and I never followed up. For the other student and myself, who were evidently going to remain bachelors for the foreseeable future, Julien told us that our journey had only begun. Now it was up to us to continue going out and approaching girls, applying what we had learned. He told us to keep a journal and report to him on our progress. Which I did. He never wrote back.

Over the next two years I settled into a regimen of going out at least three nights a week and making at least three approaches each night, if at all possible. Of course I was frequently rebuffed, had other men threaten me, was eighty-sixed several times, on two occasions told I was not allowed on the property again, and so on. In the bigger towns like Miami I sought out other men in the "community" as wing men. Most of them were useless. A few were OK.

As far as lessons learned, I was certainly playing out of my league with the women I was going for. This is one of the false promises of PUA technique. Recall the subtitle of Mystery's famous book on his method: "How to get beautiful women into bed". Naturally as one begins to re-train one's sights toward more attainable mates, success should increase, but that wasn't happening for me. Also I was getting tired of it all. In fact I was getting to hate it. Intensely. So I quit.

So all for nothing? Hardly. My PUA experience did not follow the cliched script foist upon it largely by its critics, the swingin' bachelor who hops from woman to woman while degenerating into sloth, substance abuse, and venereal disease. On the contrary, my experience more closely approximated the storied hero's journey. Though I had certainly harbored some bitterness toward women and the world in general for the battering I received, it was tempered by a pride of maturation, of having made it through basic training.

I never found a girlfriend, so, yes, I have failed in this area. I have here detailed to the best of my knowledge my own foibles and misconceptions with regards to this problem. I have made an honest attempt to take all due ownership of my failure. However, I don't think that all of it was my fault.

Here's one observation I've made. Many nights I went out not because I had any desire to, but simply as practice for developing a skill. Yet none of the women I approached ever seemed to catch on to this. Most women are extremely keen on ferreting out men's hidden motives, yet they never seemed to discover this one in me, of if they did, they never let it on. Another observation, and I know I'm not the only one on this one, is that women have a near sociopathic lack of empathy toward men, especially when men show them romantic interest. There seems to be a reflexive interpretive bias in women which causes them to interpret almost any advance made by a man as an affirmation that she's simply irresistible, and that it is also her prerogative to reject his advances by any means necessary, or more commonly, unnecessary. With many of the women I'd approached, I would say that this affirmation was all that they ever needed or wanted. They had no compunctions about playing along just to get their attention hit and then moving on without a second thought. In other words, they were narcissists.

I've wondered whether this is hardwired or cultural. The answer is obviously both. I think we can in fact identity some culture currents which are turning modern females into narcissists and making them unappealing to men for any other purpose than sex. This is subject to which I now turn.

Modern Woman

There's a popular saying in the so-called "manosphere" (which largely exists online): you can love women, or you can understand them. Female nature has heretofore been cleverly hidden from most men, so the theory goes, and that men have been fed a lot of bogus ideas about romantic love and the goodness of women. Taking the "red pill" is coming to understand that Ms. Sugar & Spice is driven by a ruthless mating strategy, by hypergamy, where she will try to maximize the genetic health of her mate along with his ability to garner resources and his willingness to share them with her. This is why she prefers tall, athletic men who gladly pay for expensive dates. It should be noted that the female mating strategy, according to the manosphere, is backed up by science. For those who are interested, David Buss' The Evolution of Desire is a good place to start.

I dispute the overall claim. I doubt that the women of the artists and romantic poets ("She walks in beauty like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies/And all that's best of dark and bright/Meet in her aspect and her eyes"[Byron]) were but mere fantasies, though they certainly were idealizations. All humans can be cultivated to some extent, their nature is malleable to a degree. There's an entire body of scientific literature on an effect known as behavioral epigenetics, which measures the extent to which our genes respond to our environment. The fact that so many women today are closer to what Mark McDonald observes as a psychologist as opposed to the poet Lord Byron does not prove that we have discovered true female nature. Rather, I contend, we are observing the results of a social engineering project which has mangled and exploited female nature.

This bad bit of social engineering to which I refer is of course feminism. Hanna Rosin, one its more obnoxious proponents (the competition here is fierce), ironically argues essentially the same point as the high priests of the manosphere. Female nature is now free to flourish, to show itself unfettered by the oppressive patriarchy, thanks of course to all of her brave feminist fore-mothers. The natural result of which is the end of men--the end of a male dominated society. This is because the new industrial and information age (although almost exclusively invented, built, and maintained by men, a fact which Rosin glosses over) is far better suited to women than men, and so women will soon be the dominant gender. There is evidence for this. Boys are failing in school, dropping out of the workforce, living at home with mom, losing themselves in the world of porn and video games, and remaining single and undesirable to women. [3][4][5]

Yet are women winning because they are the "superior" gender? Are the great masses of women finally rising up and sticking it to men? Let's go back in history some and have a look at the celebrated Women's Movement.

In 1895, the state of Massachusetts polled voting aged women as to whether they wanted suffrage. Of the 575,000 eligible women voters, only 22,204 voted yes.[6] So the vast majority of women did not want suffrage, which naturally begs the question as to how it came about. The answer appears to be: from the top down. Author Rachel Wilson cites the case of Alva Vanderbilt Belmont. Alva was twice married to very wealthy and influential men (William Kissan Vanderbilt and then Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont). Through her access to vast wealth and influence, Alva "dedicated her life to feminist causes, including suffrage. She donated vast sums of money to women's suffrage organizations in both the UK and the US. She frequently paid the bail of picketers and demonstrators in the suffrage movement, and she funded and organized large rallies and marches. She founded the Political Equality League in 1909 to help gain votes for suffrage-supporting candidates in New York. She purchased office space for the National American of Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and funded its national press bureau. She convened a 'Conference of Great Women' in 1914 at Marble House, one of her sprawling estates. She organized huge fund raisers attended by her wealthy elite New York friends and is regarded by historians to be likely the largest single contributor to the financial success of the suffrage movement." [6](p. 85)

In more recent history, consider the case of Meghan Markle, Dutchess of Sussex. Born in Los Angeles in 1981, she was the daughter of Thomas Markle Sr., an award winning lighting and photography director for many television shows, including General Hospital. She was an attractive girl with connections to the entertainment business and she managed to land some minor acting gigs. Though she graduated from Northwestern University, she does not appear to have had any significant academic abilities. So more or less a nobody until she landed an absolute plumb of a husband with Prince Harry. With marriage came a significant place in the twelve-hundred-year-old British monarchy, immediate socio-political power, media attention, and great wealth.

Markle may have become a real life Disney princess, but she is also a feminist, so no, that wasn't going to happen. Soon she found the customs of the ancient family burdensome. She felt she needed to carve out her own path in life as a strong and independent woman … "it is precisely through her connection to the monarchy, one of the oldest hierarchies known to man, that she has the capacity to tear down the hierarchy she married into. She married into power and privilege only to undermine power and privilege."[7] As a feminist she exhorted other women to do the same, to sabotage the very institutions which have allowed them thrive and succeed as never before. "Markle, perhaps one of the most privileged and entitled women in all of history, is now producing a podcast, Archetypes, that features her and her friends talking about women’s oppression."[7] Talk about chutzpah.

There are many other examples which Rachel Wilson cites to illustrate the point that feminists largely worked from the top down through wealthy and influential men--through The Patriarchy--rather than up from the grass roots, as feminists would have you believe. Similarly, feminists have been very effective in infiltrating many critical, literally man-made institutions, frequently finding the patriarchs guarding the doors all too happy to step aside and usher them in. Several authors (e.g. Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys, Warren Farrell The Boy Crisis, William Collins The Empathy Gap) have documented the feminist infiltration of the education system. Feminists have skillfully worked to disadvantage boys and men all the while claiming that girls and women are the real victims of institutional discrimination.

Feminists have also burrowed their way into the courts, law enforcement, and above all, social services. Professor Stephen Baskerville writes: "These feminists created and control the vast and impenetrable social services industries that most journalists and scholars find too dreary to scrutinize. In the US they dominate the $53 billion federal Administration for Children and Families, itself part of the gargantuan trillion dollar Department of Health and Human Services. They are both dispensers and recipients of its $350 billion grant program (“larger than all other federal agencies combined,” according to HHS) funding local “human services” or “social services” bureaucracies—by far the largest patronage machine ever created, reaching into almost every household in the land and making the Soviet nomenklatura look ramshackle."[8]

So the prevailing narrative of the Women's Movement, of the brave suffragettes, of the iconic marches of the 1960's, of ordinary women taking to the streets just to have their voices heard, is more feminist folklore than fact. Not that it didn't happen, only it was a sideshow which conveniently confers the appearance of a grassroots movement. As usual, the women didn't overpower the men through direct force, but through manipulation. They cleverly and effectively lobbied powerful men--the patriarchs-- to hamstring their fellow men so that the women could elbow their way past.

But why, you might ask, did all of these powerful men just hand over their power to feminist women? How have feminists invaded so many Western institutions with such little resistance? Answer: by appealing to men's innate sense of chivalry, his desire to please and protect women. As men's rights advocate Paul Elam explains, men will never object to any measure purportedly done to benefit women, will attack any man who does, and will never complain if said measure hurts men as a group. Think of the men who stood by on the decks of the sinking Titanic ready to shoot any man who refused to yield his lifeboat seat to a woman. Conversely, women will never oppose any measure which purports to help women, will attack any woman who does, and will always complain of anything that hurts women as a group.[9] Let that sink in. With these natural, gender specific proclivities at work, the disenfranchising of most men (but not the powerful ones at the top, feminists still need them for their continuing march toward an absolute matriarchy) virtually falls out as a matter of course.

Yet how has it been that this dynamic never played out to any significant degree in the past? Answer: because of the unprecedented technologies and wealth resulting from political liberalism, from a meritocratic free enterprise system which has unshackled us in countless ways from our mutual oppressor: mother nature. Most early societies struggled to even maintain their populations against war, starvation, and disease. Industrialization has vastly reduced the latter two, freeing women from the undeniable duty of baby production. Then another invention, birth control, freed them from unwanted pregnancy. The patriarchy, or the male dominated public sphere of politics, industry, science and technology, which feminists tirelessly revile as the great oppressor (yet want all for themselves …) is in fact the great liberator of women.

By the 1960's feminism had firmly aligned itself with communism, partly to adopt its social pressure tactics to get women out of the home. Betty Freidan made this her mission in life, and she was a brilliant propagandist, famously comparing traditional home life to a "comfortable concentration camp". Absurd, but it worked on women. In 1975 Simone de Beauvoir, in an interview with Betty Friedan, famously said: "No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”[7](p. 75) Where persuasion fails, the state needs to step in.

Feminists believe that, nonetheless, given a state sponsored push in the right direction, women will naturally prove themselves better than men at being men. This does not appear to be the case. In her recent book The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us, Carrie Gress writes: "Feminism offered us women’s studies and women’s health and women’s rights, but they didn’t tell anyone, even once solid data was in, that their goals leave women miserable, unhealthy, and wondering what we did wrong. They didn’t tell us that the life they want us to live serves those in power, not us. Their goal via the sexual revolution was to reject motherhood, monogamy, and marriage in favor of hookups, money, glamour, and it has left so many unfulfilled, and deeply unhappy." [7] (p. 94) Or as Paul Elam puts it: "Feminism took women out of secure, supportive homes, where they generally tended to be happy and put them on the fast track to the professional middle. It has created a wide gulf between men and women which has ironically also gutted a lot of men's chivalrous tendencies … women went from being mothers to just another customer at the day care center, they went from cherished wives to untrusted potential threats in the lives of men. The promised rewards for all of these unintended consequences utterly failed to materialize." [10]

One final point. Nearly all of the most celebrated feminist leaders were character disordered women. Valerie Solonas, for example, was physically abused as a child, an incest victim, who was homeless by the age of fifteen, when she lived on the streets as a panhandler and prostitute. Andy Warhol once declined to produce a play she had written and she attempted to kill him with a pistol. Kate Millet, another feminist icon of the latter 20th century, was in and out of mental institutions her entire life. Shulamith Firestone also struggled with mental illness. She died alone in her apartment. It is believed that she died of starvation. And the list goes on. "Nearly every one of these women was affected by one or several major struggles in her life, including mental health issues, mother wounds, father wounds, sexual abuse, abortions, suicides, drug overdoses, bipolar disorders, depression, and run-ins with the law." [7] (p. 88) From such a poisoned spring it is hard to fathom how anything salutary can flow. Yet to this day these feminists are celebrated as heroines, their writings are taught in universities, and they are hailed as important thought leaders.

So to conclude this section, I do not contradict what the manosphere nor Mark McDonald say about modern women. Indeed my own experiences with women align with much of what they say. While nature and genetics certainly determine to a significant degree who we are, how we behave, it is also true that environment and culture play a role as well, even to the point of modifying how our genes are expressed. I reject the "red pill" premise that women are naturally and simply Machiavellian maters. Rather, modern woman is the peculiar result of a social engineering project which did not grow up organically from the grass roots, which is to say, did not issue naturally from female nature (or from natural female superiority, as the supremacists would have it), but rather came down from on high by disgruntled elites. It turns out that these elites, most of them women, hate femininity, as femininity makes women better suited as helpers and followers than leaders and adventurers. Above all they hate the most uniquely important female role, which is producing the next generation of humans. This takes too much time away from the front where they should be battling men for supremacy. The feminist program requires the constant application of social pressure for it goes against nature, and it is uncertain as to whether they will achieve anything beyond making us all miserable.

The Child-Man

Me on Palmerston Atoll, 2002

"Sambo" refers to a psychological type who emerged among the black slaves of the antebellum American South. That's according to historian Stanley M. Elkins, who writes: "Sambo, the typical plantation slave, was docile but irresponsible, loyal but lazy, humble but chronically given to lying and stealing; his behavior was full of infantile silliness and his talk inflated with childish exaggeration. His relationship with his master was one of utter dependence and childlike attachment: it was indeed this childlike quality that was the very key to his being. Although the merest hint of Sambo’s 'manhood' might fill the Southern breast with scorn, the child, 'in his place,' could be both exasperating and lovable." [11]

Elkins argues that a Sambo type results from a "closed system", meaning a life situation which offers no reasonable hope for future freedom or self-agency. He notes that such a type emerged not only on the plantations of the antebellum South, but also in Nazi concentration camps. Many prisoners, convinced of the utter hopelessness of their situations, reverted to a child-like state, playing at pranks, giggling at bodily functions like farting. He also notes that their mature sexuality had all but disappeared; they were effectively prepubescent again. Conversely, Elkins notes that the slaves in South America, where it was possible for a slave to earn money from his own labor and therewith purchase his freedom, rarely displayed the Sambo type.

I stole half of the title for this section from a chapter in Kay Hymowitz's book Manning Up, a chapter she titled "Child-Man in the Promised Land". Hymowitz observes that with the rise of girl-boss feminism in the 1990's, in what many thought would be the final battle for gender equality, the men, curiously, turned into Child-Men. "The child-man is the fun house mirror image of the alpha girl. If she is ambitious, he is a slacker. If she is hyper-organized and self-directed, he tends toward passivity and vagueness. If she is preternaturally mature, he is happily not. Their opposition is stylistic as well: she drinks sophisticated cocktails in mirrored bars, he burps up beer on ratty sofas. She spends her hard-earned money on mani-pedi outings, his goes toward World of Warcraft and gadgets … The child-man prides himself on his lack of pretense, his slovenly guyness, not to mention his fascination with bodily fluids and noises. The child-man is the reason, for instance, for the success of iFart, an iPhone app—in fact, ‘The Premier iPhone Fart Application’—that imitates the noise suggested by its name." [12]

In other words, he's a Sambo. Naturally feminist authors and academics are all too happy to explain the child-man. He's the entitled brat who suddenly had his privileges revoked and now he's throwing a tantrum. This is the view of well known gender-studies sociologist Michael Kimmel, who speaks of the masculinity crisis as "aggrieved entitlement", that men always thought their historical winning streak would continue, that the world was theirs for the taking, and they are now going through the grieving process of finding out that this is no longer the case, that it's now the girls' turn.

In my estimation, Kimmel and the feminists are more interested in promoting--and funding--their activism than understanding problems, especially those of men. These Sambo's are not grieving, they are fighting. Men know well that direct confrontations with women, which they are loathe to do in the first place, are likely to get them shouted down as misogynists or chauvinists. So they foil them instead. Hymowitz notes that "it's important to recognize that the child-man knows very well he is playing to a clownish sociological type. In Maxim and other child-man outlets, sentences seem crowded with ironic quotation marks as if to announce, 'We seem like just a bunch of horny, stupid, insensitive guys, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. You shouldn’t either.' " [12] (Kindle Location 1714) The more the new generation of boss girls demand that men level up, man up, grow up into suitable partners, the more men gleefully frustrate them with puerile antics. Victory for the Sambo's in this ascendant feminist matriarchy is the utter exasperation of the boss girls.

I anticipate that some will object to comparing present day Western men to concentration camp inmates or plantation slaves, but nonetheless I think all of the above find themselves in a closed system, and thus, following Elkin's analysis, we see the emergence of the Sambo in each of these social systems. As Dr. Helen Smith once put it: "… this new world order is a place where men are discriminated against, forced into a hostile environment in school and later in college, and held in contempt by society—and for the honor, are expected to conform to a society for women only." [13] I think many men have come to realize that the society for women only is the only society they know and are ever likely to know.

Though I was never anything like the Child-Man which Hymowitz describes, as I was much too self-conscious and sexually inhibited for any of that, I would say that I was a kind of Sambo as well. Some people said that I was a Peter Pan type, which I resented because I thought that they were wrong, but in retrospect I see their point. Growing up on a prep school campus in New England I got pretty heavily marinated in feminism, and naturally wanted to behave as the sort of man the feminists deemed a "good man". I joined in the chorus when it came to ridiculing men, especially macho men. When I went to college I found similarly minded classmates who hated the frat types, the jocks. "Keg Warriors" we called them. In graduate school the Simpsons was a favorite. The idiot dad seemed all good fun back then.

Yet I also had a sense of incongruence. I was fighting with something basic to my own nature, that I could sense. In graduate school, as a break from my studies, I read literature, especially of seafaring adventures. I found the books of Alan Villiers nestled deep in the recesses of Crerar Library, and I devoured them. Falmouth for Orders, By Way of Cape Horn, Sons of Sinbad, Cruise of the Conrad--I could feel the mighty ocean winds on my cheek, smell the sea salt just from titles. The Great Age of Sail, the windjammers with towers of square sails, the rugged men--yes men! No women except the occasional captain's wife who went as a passenger-- who were muscular, tanned, and tough. My soul lifted with the sails of those old ships. My life was there, or at least part of it was.

Problem is that the sailing ships are long gone. The merchant marine is all powered vessels now, and of those I have no interest. As far as social respectability, having a PhD in physics and now working at Arthur Andersen in Chicago certainly had me on a track to considerable wealth and respect. All those years of trying to be a feminist-approved man was paying off and certainly would pay even more in the future. But the plain truth is that it had also injured my masculine identity to the point where I developed a neurotic fixation on escape.

Before the world voyage in my own boat, I had applied for a crew/trainee position on barque Picton Castle, as she was about to set off on her second world voyage. If I recall the tuition for the voyage was $36K, and I had some money now, now having worked for four years at Arthur Andersen. I plunked down my deposit and scheduled a visit, to where the ship lay in Lunenberg, Nova Scotia.

They wanted me to stay several nights, but I could only stay for one as I had to return to work. My reception was decidedly chilly. At first it was hard to get anyone to talk to me. I was under the impression that I was to interview with Captain Daniel Moreland, and I was informed that he was not there. Nonetheless, they let me spend the night on the ship, and a few of the crew and one of the mates started to warm up to me a little. Anyway, I was then informed that the captain would interview me by phone at some such time. He never called. Finally I called the booking agent for the Picton Castle and complained. Finally the captain called me. It did not go well. Afterwards the agent returned my deposit.

Earlier I shared some of my writing and my attitudes. I do not deny that I had a lot of growing up to do. So I am not going to blame Captain Daniel Moreland and his organization for what happened, at least not entirely.

Later I found a rather lengthy article on the Picton Castle and her captain. Of interest I found the following passages: " … when at last there came the opportunity to get to know the Picton Castle's master socially, the interview questions were postponed in favor of topics of equal interest to him, including the literary merit of Melville, the philosophy of Lao-Tzu, the comparative qualities of various marine painters, local and world politics, global environmental problems, the nature of enlightenment, and the advantages with sailing with a predominantly female crew. 'That's according to my theory of the natural ascendancy of women aboard ship', he observed … 'it's different when they get aboard ship. They get to explore in a way they can't at home, and they're more compliant. Especially the girls … Guys are OK for about a week, then they're all experts. Girls keep right on learning without that hang up". [14]

So the captain is a male feminist. I have no way of knowing whether his apparent feminism was the reason for my rejection, only that it certainly fits into the anti-male trends in education we see almost everywhere nowadays. I also cite this episode from my own experience as evidence for the aforementioned "closed system". While the romance and beauty of great sailing ships certainly fired my imagination and was a motivation in and of itself, looking back I also see how desperate I was for a traditionally male vocation where men not only developed skills but a foundational identity, an identity which could stand independently of whatever the women might think. Unfortunately, like so many of such spaces, they've since been invaded by feminists and their devotees. As Janice Fiamengo, a former feminist, succinctly describes it: "Beginning in the 1970s, men’s spaces were usurped, their maleness was denigrated, and policies and laws forced changes in male behavior that turned many workplaces into feminized fiefdoms in which men held their jobs only so long as women allowed them to."[15] While there still are powerful men at the top, many of them are but marshals of the feminist matriarchy.

Hence there appears to be just two viable routes for men of the 21st century West. One, which I followed for some time, is to become the compliant, docile, feminized worker male who serves the matriarchy and stays out of trouble. And work you will, as feminists will never stop moving the yardsticks, updating their demands as to what you have to do to stay in their good graces. The few alpha men who refuse to play ball, like Donald Trump, Andrew Tate, or Laurence Fox, can expect endless, expensive lawsuits and arrests. As most men could never endure nor afford this, there's the second option, which is the Sambo, the man not at work, the man playing video games all day, the buffoon. While it condemns him to a lowly life, it also affords him a way to stay out of the crosshairs of the matriarchs while slyly giving them the finger at the same time.

More recently, however, men seem to be adopting a third way, a path which I now find myself on as well.

From Sambo to Separatist

Author Aaron Clarey (left) believes that marriage and family is no longer a realistic option for the majority of today's men.

Along comes the internet. Suddenly a new Wild West opens up in cyberspace, and naturally the men became pioneers, prospectors, rogues and sheriffs again. While feminists could threaten to withhold federal funds from organizations like the Boy Scouts of America unless they complied with their demands, any man with enough money to buy a computer and an internet service plan could enter an online men’s club. Many men disguised their identities behind a cryptic user names. As one of the early "manosphere" content creators Sandman points out, one of the reasons that feminists were so keen to get women into traditional male spaces like the Boyscouts was monitor them, to police their speech and behaviors. [16] But the online world is protean and a massive jumble, making it hard to even comprehend much less control.

So the feminists used the megaphones that they already had, legacy media outlets like television news and print media, to maintain their heretofore firm grip on culture and gender politics. When Cassie Jaye began her documentary The Red Pill Movie her initial topic was rape culture, particularly how the online sub-culture of women haters--who call themselves Men's Rights Activists (MRA's)--were contributing to the problem. She believed this to be the case because she had never heard otherwise. Such was the extent of media saturation which the feminists enjoyed. In the course of the documentary she discovers, much to her own consternation and bewilderment, that the men's rights advocates had well reasoned arguments and facts to back them up. Though she would never become an MRA, in the course of the film Cassie Jaye comes to realize that the feminists had put blinders on her, that she had based her opinions on incomplete information.

One central figure in The Red Pill Movie is Paul Elam, founder of A Voice for Men, and is one of the worst men on earth if you listen to feminists, as he and his website posed a very real public threat to the feminists' carefully curated narratives.

Now long before the online men's movement, a former male feminist and soft-spoken academic, Dr. Warren Farrell, published a book called The Myth of Male Power. The modest and unassuming tone of the book only amplifies its impact. Anyone raised in the feminized West likely regards male power and privilege over females as axiomatic. Farrell argues that women are in fact the privileged sex while men, he famously points out, are the disposable sex. Though certainly women have to look after themselves, and they have to bear children, still they can more or less just be who they are and society will love and support them. Men, on the other hand, have to earn a place in society through hard work, talent, and sacrifice. Moreover, the value of men's productivity is typically valued in so far as it benefits women, particularly so far as it benefits mothers. Again think of the sinking Titanic. Men would be forever shamed--or shot--should they fail to yield their seat on a lifeboat to the women and children.

Paul Elam describes his reaction to Farrell's book as follows: "After binge reading the whole book, everything in my life changed … [it] gave me the satisfying realization that I had been right all along, that I wasn't crazy, that there was in fact something wrong in the world … men are raised with a slew of coercive messages. Do this, don't do that, get your do's and don't's down to a fine compliant art form or face the shaming consequences. Don't think of yourself. Ever. Ignore your pain, produce like a fucking machine, and lay it at the feet of women. Man up and take that shit. Deal with whatever comes in silence or be relegated to society's reserved, default trash heap for non-men … throughout history shame has been used to silence men with the malfunction of thinking they are as important as the causes and people they serve. In a world that operates like this, anger is unavoidable." [17]

I believe, contrary to Elam, that men do have to man up and take that shit. It's what they are programmed to do, and it is what brings them a sense of purpose and meaning. Paul Elam even admits that it was traditionally masculine men--the fearless warriors, the tireless workers, the lonely but brilliant iconoclasts--who built civilizations like our own.

In my estimation the real problem today is not the life of hardship and sacrifice men are expected to lead, but the pernicious lie told by feminists that the civilized world and all of its institutions are merely instruments of power and domination intended to serve supremacist males--the so-called Patriarchy. Believing this, feminists demand that men be put on probation. Male sacrifice will still be required, of course, only no longer honored. Why would anyone honor oppressors? Feminists see it as their mission and prerogative to take control of the governing institutions which have guided the West in order to use them to finally institute "equality", which means turning them into institutions of power and domination for supremacist females. Even if they were to acknowledge this fact, feminists don't care. Men need to be controlled and routinely punished. It's the only way to turn them into "good men".

It must be said that feminists are correct in pointing out that most human societies looked to older men as advisors and leaders. In this respect they were patriarchal. In Ancient Rome, for example, there was the senate, a word which derives from the Latin senex, which means old man. The senate was thus an assembly of elders. Prior to that, like so many primitive societies, the ancestors to the Romans were structured in clans, or a group of families led by a tribal chief, or a pater, a father. So as Rome grew up, the senate thus became the meeting place of fathers representing the clans.[18] This was indeed a patriarchy.

Why were so many societies organized this way? Because, as Farrell points out, men had to earn their way by serving the rest of society, the women, the children, the sick and the elderly. They had to go to war and they had to hunt for food. Those who survived the ordeal, who endured years of hardship and privation, who dealt with savage enemies, who faced evil and their own immanent deaths, were the most likely to become wise individuals late in life. They'd seen it all. They are not easily swayed by the latest fads. They don't listen to fools as they've nearly gotten themselves killed doing just that too many times already. They are stern, judgemental, but respected men.

While the ruling pater's are only a select few in society, all men who are fathers nonetheless rule their own family in a similar way. Hence by the lights of the feminists, not only the ruling pater's, but all fathers are participants in an oppressive patriarchy. Hence the feminist crusade to disable fathers in America and throughout the West. Says Stephen Baskerville, feminists implemented policies "the express purpose of which is nothing less than to enfeeble and degrade America’s men on an enormous scale. This is done especially by destroying men’s home life and authority over their children, but elsewhere too: by patently false accusations of domestic violence and rape; by family courts that confiscate children from legally innocent fathers, whose authority has been undermined and terminated before their property is plundered and their persons incarcerated without trial … " [19] Ultimately nearly every feminist campaign in some way or another aims at destroying fathers and fatherhood, destroying male authority and the culture-wide respect for that authority.

All of which leaves young men of today will little to aspire to. The "good man" of the now feminized West is a servant, a slave to his female superiors. The proliferation of man-children, of Sambo's, should not come as any big surprise given these cultural forces and what we've already discussed. The natural apogee of masculine maturity is a pater, but this is longer allowed in the feminized West, hence men who wish to become men are left with really only one option: to leave.

"Leave" needs to be placed in scare quotes. Very few men, or anyone for that matter, wishes to leave the modern world entirely and go live in the wilderness. Anyone who has any experience with such an existence--or anything even approximating it--has probably learned that it is rarely any fun. No, most men intend to utilize global supply chains and modern conveniences, which of course means that they will need some way of earning money, which in turn means that they must live in polite society at least in so far as it is a requirement for gainful employment.

So we are not talking about separating from society completely. Perhaps the most radical male separatist movement is MGTOW, which stands for Men Going Their Own Way. The movement exists mostly online, with dozens of content creators, thousands of videos and millions of views. For the MGTOW's, separation primarily means refusing to participate in the dating and marriage markets, as that is where the modern matriarchy exerts most of its control, with sexual harassment policies, divorce and family courts, and women's monopoly on reproductive rights.

The fact that sexual separation produces no children to transmit one's teachings means that MGTOW can only be a temporary, stop-gap solution. As we've said, a pater is nearly universally esteemed in all human cultures because he is a human male who has come to complete fruition, and no man can become a father without knowing a woman. "Women are the foil against which a gentleman defines himself … It is no accident that all the classical advice books emphasize the central importance of how a man should relate to women." [20] Going all the way back to Genesis, Adam only becomes a mortal man because of Eve, who is his curious, devious, and beautiful helpmate. Men and women are neither without each other.

So the bulk of modern male separatists--at least the ones who are actually serious--are neither separating from modern economies nor from women. Rather they are searching for a path through modern society which leads to prosperity, personal freedom, and perhaps romantic relationships but without ever coming within shelling range of the feminist matriarchy. Several authors in the so-called "red pill" space have offered life plans for such a male separatist. One is Richard Cooper. His book The Unplugged Alpha is relationship advice for male separatists. Cooper spends a good deal of the book laying out his guiding principles for screening out women who will likely turn out to be apparatchiks of the matriarchy. In his chapter titled "Red Flags", he reviews the most obvious signals emitted by women who pose the greatest risks to men. Not surprisingly, any woman who overtly identifies as a feminist is to be avoided. More indirect clues of the feminist character type is a general disdain for traditional femininity, body piercings, unnatural hair colors, and being overweight. Disregarding traditional femininity also includes excessive promiscuity. Good women aspire to be chaste.

Perhaps the most glaring red flag for Cooper is if she is a single mother (naturally the "not all" caveat applies here as everywhere ). He devotes an entire chapter to these women. And on another point there is nearly unanimous agreement among male separatists: avoid marriage. Not because it isn't a good thing for men, women, children, and all of society, but because in the West the institution of marriage has been utterly corrupted by feminists. Cooper himself went through what is now a familiar tale of divorce, when he discovered that contrary to being a privileged male in a patriarchy, he had few rights but a slew of responsibilities, especially when it came to writing checks.

Cooper also discusses men's health, both physical and mental, on fitness and developing a Stoic mindset. Besides going to the gym, men should have a few masculine hobbies and interests. Cooper recommends owning a motorcycle.

For Stephen Baskerville, however, much of this, while all good, could still produce but a caddish player. A man needs to become a Gentleman. I have to agree. “Alpha" is crude. For all the talk about self-improvement you hear from the red pill crowd--"money, muscles, and game" is a constant refrain in these circles--their advice boils down to little more than developing lowest denominator mating signals in order to attract the kinds of females who respond to such things.

The making of a gentleman begins with a proper education. A gentlemen should have a working knowledge of classic literature. This would include Homer and the plays of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus. He should know at least the big four plays of Shakespeare, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. He should also be familiar with the Bible. Throw in some of the great novels, such as Oliver Twist by Dickens and The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, and he's got enough to work with.

A gentleman should also have a knowledge of world history, beginning with Ancient Greece and Rome to the Middle Ages to Renaissance Europe, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, the Napoleonic wars and the American Civil War, and the two world wars of the 20th century. In addition he should have some familiarity with the great philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Rousseau, as well as great scientists like Newton and Einstein.

Finally there's the arts. A gentleman knows some of the great classical composers, e.g. Mozart and Beethoven, as well as some of the great painters and the various genres of art, such as Baroque vs. Romantic (admittedly I am woefully ignorant on visual art and architecture, unless we're talking yacht design …)

Are you beginning to sense how adolescent "money, muscles, and game" sounds by comparison?

When it comes to women, however, Baskerville agrees with much of what Cooper says, particularly that a man should start running at the first whiff of feminism. "In general, a good woman is one who accepts the virtues of modesty and chastity and who wants to be courted. A woman who expresses her determination to demand her 'rights' and 'equality' and who wants to take the initiative is trouble."[p. 88] That is, a gentleman seeks a Lady. But where to find her? "To find good women, white men are looking to Eastern Europe, and black men to Brazil and Africa, and all men to the Far East."[20](p.89) says Baskerville. Enough Western men are in fact doing this that they now have a group identifier: The Passport Bros. [21]

Good luck with that says Aaron Clarey. He opens his book The Menu: Life Without the Opposite Sex with the story of Fred, a man who seemingly had it all. He certainly had what women wanted, and there was no shortage of young attractive women in his life. Yet Fred was troubled and finally took his own life. Clarey's analysis is that he was seeking a wife--a Lady--and after sifting through dozens of women none of them even came close to the mark. "But what [no one recognizes] is we are now entering a post-marriage, a post-partner world where the opposite sex is no longer the primary objective of the other." [22] Men and women are still seeking traditional marriage and family, but most will end up heartbroken upon discovering that this is no longer a realistic possibility.

Clarey is not opposed to casual dating or hooking up or even hiring a professional, but no man should ever make love and marriage the focus of his life lest he end up like Fred. What should a man focus on? First off, no matter what his circumstances, a man must be leading an active life, must be doing and striving not sulking in mom's basement. Naturally this should include daily exercise and a good diet. Most importantly, not only should a man earn enough to financially support himself, but he should seek a profession not merely a job. While you can get by as a low skilled laborer, generally it doesn't pay well and you have no specific skill which the larger society values, as they are already capable of doing such things themselves. But if you are a plumber, computer programmer, a pilot, etc., nearly everyone at some time or another will find themselves in need of your services. Professional titles don't just command higher wages, they indicate how you contribute to society. As feminists now have trained us all to eschew any sort of dependence of a women on a man, it is of vital importance that a man find some sort of work which not only earns him money but earns him a respected place in society as well.

As for myself, having learned to sail early in life, and having my imagination set ablaze by authors like Alan Villiers, Sterling Hayden, Bernard Moitessier, Joshua Slocum, and on a more literary level, Joseph Conrad, I knew that somehow I had to somehow forge a sailor's life for myself. After my experience with the Picton Castle I was determined that I was going to do it my way, even if I was the only one doing it. That really left me with only one option, which was to save up enough money from working in order to buy my own boat and live for some time without needing to work again.

It was by only a few grainy photos posted on YachtWorld (a brokerage site) did I spot her in the vast jumble of "pre-loved" boats. A Gilmer 31, owner finished, gaff rigged, no engine nor electrical. She was named Ruth Avery after the owner's mother. Ruth Avery is engraved on her ship's bell, so that's her name, I was never going to change that. When I first visited the boat in Rock Hall, Maryland, on a cold, raw February day, I knew she was to be my ship. So much the better that I could have her for a song, not being the sort of boat anyone else really wanted, especially without an inboard diesel engine. I gladly cut the check for $22K USD.

And oh has it been quite the ride! Beginning with a refit in Maryland, in the suffocating August heat and ferocious mosquitoes. Then freezing in Hampton, Virginia, early November, waiting for Herb (an SSB amatuer meterologist and passage router) to give the green light on weather for a run to Bermuda. That was my first major offshore passage with Ruth Avery, and she barely blinked. Then on to the Caribbean and dreaming of the South Pacific. Without an inboard engine the Panama Canal is out of the question, so I sailed to the rather depressing port of Galveston, Texas and put the boat on a truck. I ride in the cab with the trucker and his girlfriend all the way to Dana Point, California. After having my wallet considerably lightened by the boatyard there, I'm off on a nearly month long passage to Nuku Hiva, the Marquesas. Then comes the fabled South Pacific run, the Society Islands, the Tuamotos, and Tonga. October is the spring there and the beginning of the cyclone season, so it's a long and rough ocean trip south to New Zealand.

The stay in New Zealand must be as long as the cyclone season, which is nearly five months. I remember watching the 2002-2003 America's Cup series at the sailing club in Opua with a traveling tribe of other cruising sailors. Following the cyclone season it's back to the tropics, to Fiji, to Savusavu. Then to the Torres Strait, Home Island, westward to Darwin, a modern city in the middle of Australian desert. Across the Indian Ocean to South Africa. I now count my lucky stars that I made it around southern Africa in an engineless boat without getting caught out by severe weather. It happens in those parts. Frequently. Could have easily lost the boat if not my life, but the sea gods, Moitessier insists, love fearless and determined souls. He may be right.

Rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 2004

Up through both Atlantics and I finally end my odyssey in Maine, where I put the boat on the hard at Great Island and move in with my parents. I spend a year and a half attempting to become a great author. Oh well. It became clear that my only hope to return to life aboard was to get back into the financial world and earn more money. I was still relatively young--in my 30's--but with such an unusual career thus far getting back into the ultra conformist corporate world was not going to be easy. Indeed it wasn't.

What I did not count on was how hard it would be staying there. Though I had landed a great job with good pay at Merrill Lynch Commodites in Houston, Texas, this was one of the most painful episodes of my life. This is actually a recommendation for living a life of adventure. It brings problems, many of them dating back to your earliest years, up to the surface so that you can deal with them before it's too late. Otherwise you may have become just another member of the anesthetized masses. OK, I'm sure some of them are genuinely happy. I sure was not. I was constantly tense. Driving to work in my little Corolla I sometimes found myself yelling until I was hoarse in uncontrollable fits of rage. This couldn't last.

I recall the pressure interview with Human Resources when I was laid off from Merrill in early 2008. In the end I'm not sure which of us was more surprised. I did not anticipate actually getting fired nor escorted out by armed security. I doubt that they anticipated that I would so willingly, almost gleefully sign my severance, such as it was, and walk out. I remember looking at the window at the pale winter sky knowing that this was another turning point in my life. I was done with the corporate life. I would likely never again find employment that used my education or career skills. I would not have a stable income. I didn't even have a coherent plan.

Except for fitting Ruth Avery out for more seagoing adventures, that was a given. I threw myself at the refit, which included significant modifications to both the interior cabin as well as the rig, building a new self-steering windvane, re-barrier coating the bottom, etc. I worked all spring and summer and fall of 2008, launching by chilly November. I set off for Bermuda in early December in what would be one of the coldest, most miserable passages of my life. But I made it.

Then on to the Caribbean. I would spend the next eight winters in the Caribbean, trying to become a professional musician, of which I've already spoken. I wanted to write, but saw no way of getting published nor earning any money at it. At least the stock market was recovering so my investments I had made from earned wages were accruing value. In fact they were doing well enough that in 2015 I attempted to seriously get into the dating market, with the RSD Bootcamp I have spoken of.

Still nothing was panning out, though. Always refusing to just wallow in despair, I clicked on yet another pick-up video on YouTube, looking for yet another angle, another way to attack not only my dating problem, but the larger life problem. And then it hit me. Why don't I make YouTube videos on sailing? That's something I know a thing or two about. I can write scripts, so that will scratch my writing itch some. Plus I can compose and record my own music for the videos. Thus How to Sail Oceans was born. And the rest is history …

Well no, not really. Although what followed was certainly a huge improvement.

A video on engineless sailing got me through the noise, after which I very quickly had enough subscribers to monetize my videos. That's income, baby! After all those years of foolishly dreaming of becoming a professional sailing ship man it had now become a reality. All of those seemingly pointless dead ends, in which I had invested so much time, like music, was now part of a profitable venture. Most important of all I was building a base of followers who respected me.

Not that any of this is making me rich or world famous. I still have to rely on my investments I made back when I had a "real job" for the bigger purchases, like new sails or electronic equipment, or haulout fees. At present I make enough to pay for my day-to-day expenses. And I constantly feel the pressure to keep turning out content and to improve lest my channel recede into obscurity in a sea of other creators all elbowing their way toward the spotlight.

Then there's the question of what I shall do when I'm too old to sail oceans. I don't have that worked out yet. But I am certain that had I stayed in the corporate world, with health insurance, nice things, a fat retirement fund, and so on, it may have all been for naught. I may well have ended up like Fred. Instead I found a way forward that is not always pleasant but provides me with a sense of directed growth, directed not by fad or fallacy, but by the design specs coded into my DNA. Or by God's Will. Still not sure which.

References

[1]

Dissident MD

Why American Women Are Undatable

“I don’t even want to go on any dates anymore. They just feel like a chore.” I heard this from my twenty-four-year-old male patient this week. I hear it frequently from men everywhere. I hear it in bars, at professional conferences, over coffee at lunch. I hear it because American women have become undatable…

Read more

4 years ago · 182 likes · 54 comments · Mark McDonald, M.D.

[2]

[3] Farrell, Warren . The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It. BenBella Books. Kindle Edition.

[4] Eberstadt, Nick . Men without Work: Post-Pandemic Edition (2022) (New Threats to Freedom Series) (pp. 102-103). Templeton Press. Kindle Edition.

[5] https://www.newsnationnow.com/health/young-men-single-young-women/

[6] Wilson, Rachel. Occult Feminism: The Secret History of Women's Liberation (p. 82). Kindle Edition.

[7] Gress, Carrie. The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us (p. 4). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.

[8] Baskerville, Stephen. The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Governmental Power (p. 47). Angelico Press. Kindle Edition.

[9] Elam, Paul. Men. Women. Relationships: Surviving the Plague of Modern Masculinity (p. 105). LPS publishing. Kindle Edition

[10]

[11] Elkins, Stanley M.. Slavery (p. 82). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.

[12] Hymowitz, Kay S. Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys . Basic Books. Kindle Edition (Kindle Location 1710, 1770).

[13] Smith, Helen. Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream - and Why It Matters (p. 8). Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.

[14] Gilkerson, William, "Captain Daniel Moreland and Picton Castle", Maritime Life and Traditions, No. 11 (Brooklin, Maine, USA), p. 12

[15] https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/single-sex-spaces-for-me-but-not

[16]

starting at 1:16:00

[17]

[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Senate

[19] https://menaregood.com/4272-2/

[20] Baskerville, S. K.. A Gentleman's Guide to Manners, Sex, and Ruling the World: How to Survive as a Man in the Age of Misandry– and Do So with Grace (p. 83). Sophia Institue Press. Kindle Edition

[21] https://www.zerohedge.com/political/passport-bros-feminists-are-outraged-men-going-overseas-find-traditional-wives

[22] Clarey, Aaron. The Menu: Life Without the Opposite Sex (p. 6). Kindle Edition.

“I wasn’t a quota”

Margaret Thatcher famously bristled at the suggestion that her rise to power and ability to rule had anything to do with her sex. In a 1993 interview with NPR she is quoted as saying: "Well, I would like (the assessment of) whatever I did to be that I got there because I was the right person for the job. It didn't matter as a man or a woman. I had the right qualities for the job, the right beliefs, the right principles. I wasn't a quota." [1]

Feminists never warmed up to Thatcher, and the feeling was mutual. Thatcher was a classical liberal, a strict meritocrat who eschewed any sort of affirmative action other than your own blood, toil, sweat, and tears. Conversely the feminists, who pervade the global political Left, embrace what is called "equity", which means entrusting an elite few to judge who deserves what in our wealthy industrial society. Deservedness is typically based on "historical disadvantage", and it is assigned to groups of peoples with a recognized history. White heterosexual men are conspicuously absent from consideration. Apparently they have never known anything approaching unfair suffering, even those who worked hardscrabble jobs like mining or fishing, jobs which oftentimes injure and occasionally kill, jobs they took in order to feed their families. Of this the feminists don't care. It is women, they insist, who are constantly facing prejudice and disadvantage. And so for nearly half a century the feminists have been burrowing their way into governments, corporations, academia, and the sporting arena to change policies and rules in order to advantage women at the expense of men. [2]

Anyway, I recently picked up an article describing boat technicals and new crew rules for the Ocean Race. For those who do not follow yacht racing, the Ocean Race, originally the Whitbread Round the World Race, is an ocean race which follows the old sailing ship route around the world from Northern Europe, eastbound in the high latitudes of the Southern Ocean. Generally speaking yacht racing has never endeared itself, nor drawn the interest of, the general public, as it is typically viewed as elitist because yachts, especially racing yachts, are expensive. I guess in this day and age that it is only a matter of course that those holding the purse strings to the major yachting competitions would belong to the new globalist elite, and that they would bring their politics along with them. DEI (Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion) has found its way to the Ocean Race. [3]

Let's begin with the new crew rules for the Ocean Race (as of 2021): "Both the 60 and 65ft fleets have a quota for women on board. There are five crew (one of whom must be a female) on an IMOCA60, plus the OBR [On Board Reporter]. There are no age restrictions (i.e. youth sailor requirements) in the IMOCA class. On the 65's there have to be 10 sailors plus the OBR. The 65's must have a minimum of three women on boats - with two Youth age categories - under 26yrs and under 30yrs." [4]

So there you have it. The quota women of the Ocean Race.

In addition to gender politics they also join in the environmental crusade. Of course everyone wants a clean environment, responsible resource management (e.g. preventing over fishing), etc., but just a scroll through the Ocean Race Learning Centre and you will read lots of platitudes without scientific support. "We're seeing first-hand the devastating impact of pollution, climate change and industrial over fishing on our ocean". Well I've done my share of offshore sailing I cannot say that I have seen any of those things first-hand. How does anyone know climate change first-hand? Elsewhere they write: "Together we can turn the tide and turn up the volume: to demand systemic change, to pressure policymakers worldwide, and to radically increase ambition and urgency to help the ocean thrive again." [5] I'm not saying that we should disregard marine ecosystems and toss our trash wherever we like, but if we are going to lobby lawmakers to change the ways we are allowed to do things, it would be nice to know just precisely what the problem is and how their policies are going to help. But I digress.

The Ocean Race follows the old sailing ship route around the world from Northern Europe, eastbound in the high latitudes of the Southern Ocean.

Ensuring Progress

I have written of Tracy Edwards' astonishing debut in the 1989-90 Whitbread Round the World Race, when she and her all-female crew of the 58-foot yacht Maiden finished second in her division. [6] Like so many instances of girls beating the boys in athletics, in time it showed itself to be more of a one-off than a trend.

After Maiden, in the following Whitbread Race of 1993-94, the US Women's Challenge would take 9th place overall out of the ten finishers. In the 1997-98 race, all-female EF Education, skippered by Christine Guillou, would finish in last place overall. In 2001, the Whitbread Round the World Race would be re-branded as the Volvo Ocean Race, and there would be one all-female entry, Amer Sports Too, who would finish in last place overall despite being allowed additional crew.

In successive races, entrants with female crew members would be allowed additional crew. Yet despite these advantages (or the disadvantaging of all-male crews) there would not be another women's challenge until the 2015-2015 race with Team SCA, skippered by Samantha Davies. Again the women would finish in last place.

So more rule changes were put in place to favor women. In the 2017-18 Volvo Ocean race, all-male crews could only have seven men total, one fewer than the 2014 race. They could, however, have eight or nine total with one or two females onboard, respectively. Or there can be crews of five men and five women, or an all-female crew can race with eleven total. So if it's going to be girls against the boys, it's going to be eleven against seven. CEO Mark Turner stated: "We’re using the crew rules to incentivize skippers to bring one or more female sailors onboard. I really hope that it’s not necessary to have any rule at all in the future – but it seems it’s the only way today to ensure we can maintain progress.” [7]

In the 2017-18 race, Turn the Tide Against Plastic sailed with five women and five men and tied with Scallywag for last place. There were no all-female entrants. The winner, Donfeng, chose to sail with two women. Now in 2023 every boat must have it's quota of women onboard.

The unquestioned assumption here is that the natural dominance of males in this competitive sport--like so many others--is a problem. Mark Turner pitches his affirmative action program for women as "progress". He doesn't say precisely what he means by that, but I will here venture a guess: unequal representation of women (i.e. less than 50%) in a given endeavor is the result of sexism. Women are getting shut down and shut out by paleolithic sexists attitudes, by "The Patriarchy", by the systematic slighting and disadvantaging of women. But is this true?

Tracy Edwards (left) and her all-female crew of Maiden would take second place in Division D of the 1989-90 Whitbread Round the World Race. Overall victory would go to Steinlager II, skippered by the late Peter Blake (right)

Western Civ in 2023

Let's review the state of Western Civ in 2023 from the standpoint of gender.

Our first stop will be the UK, where we will examine how boys and girls are doing in the education system. The National Curriculum assessments carried out for Year Six students (between 10 and 11 years old) supplies student performance data for both tests and teacher graded assignments. For teacher graded assignments, girls outperformed boys on all measured subjects: reading, writing, science, and math. However, on standardized tests, the gender gap is consistently narrower, with boys predictably doing better at math. It is also worth noting that only one in eight primary school teachers are male. [8] This suggests that the female dominated primary schools are biased against boys, as boys generally do better on standardized tests than when they are graded by (most likely) a female teacher. It is also a fact that there is no measurable difference between the average IQ of males and females. The research indicates that boys are viewed less favorably than girls on account of their naturally more rambunctious behavior and this is reflected in the grades they receive from their teachers. [8] (pp. 63-64)

It is well known that boys are generally more interested in things and girls more interested in people. Thus technical schools naturally play to boys' strengths, and given the fact that boys are not faring much better in US schools than their English counterparts, it would seem that supporting good technical schools might be a great way to get our boys back in the game.

Here is what happened with Aviation High School in New York some years ago. At this school students immerse themselves in the mechanics of jet engines, electrical wiring, etc. but yet have to maintain passing grades in English and history in order to participate in all the fun hands-on stuff. Philosophy professor Christina Hoff Sommers writes: "The school’s two thousand pupils—mostly Hispanic, African American, and Asian from homes below the poverty line—have a 95 percent attendance rate and an 88 percent graduation rate, with 80 percent attending college. The New York City Department of Education routinely awards the school an “A” on its annual Progress Report. And it has been recognized by U.S. News & World Report as one of the best high schools in the nation." [9]

So a smashing success except for one glaring problem in the eyes of educators: the student body is 85% male. Feminist groups like the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and the National Women's Law Center began waging legal warfare against technical schools like Aviation High School on the grounds that girls’ rights were being violated. Aviation's claim that both genders are welcome and that technical schools are naturally more appealing to boys than girls was roundly dismissed by the feminists. In 2010, Marcia Greenberger of the National Women's Law Center lobbied the Obama Administration to apply Title IX anti-sex discrimination outside of athletics, and against Aviation High School in particular. [9] (p. 11)

Even as the data was piling up about male underperfomance in school, the feminists refused even for a moment to desist from their war against boys. Boys succeeding where girls are not means sexist discrimination, there can be no other reason. As a result of these pressures "vocation and technical schools won’t get rid of their 'male teams' in welding, engineering, or automotive repair, but they are likely to cut them back and practice reverse discrimination in favor of girls. More resources will be deployed to change the preferences of young women to suit the ideology of groups like the AAUW and the National Women’s Law Center. School leaders have no matching incentive to develop programs that could attract great numbers of disengaged young men. On the contrary, they are well advised to avoid them. Such programs will put them at risk of a federal investigation and loss of funds." [9] (p. 166)

Both in the UK and the United States, female university students began outnumbering the males by the mid-1990's. This was the period when feminist writer and professor Daphne Patai began noticing that women's desire for a hassle-free learning environment, free in particular from the male sexual appetite (purportedly …), began taking a strange and dangerous turn. What this would become she would call the Sexual Harassment Industry (SHI): "No longer a well-intentioned effort to gain justice for women, it has been turned into a tool (powered by a legal apparatus and manipulated by a professional cadre of trainers and enforcers) for implementing, and indeed normalizing, what was once merely a marginal and bizarre feminist worldview … [SHI became] a means of controlling male expression of sexuality, a way to put men on notice, while dressing up the attack on them as the pursuit of equality and social justice for women." [10]

SHI is an outrage machine fueled by feminist hatred of men and heterosexuality, and, to quote Andrea Dworkin, they're gonna prosecute the pigs to prove it. According to feminist orthodoxy, heterosexual sex is never innocent, it always involves the man asserting his power and dominance over a woman. All heterosexual men are thus, to a greater or lesser degree, the sexual harassers and rapists of women.

Their claims on male sexuality, however, are based not on any sort of measurable social science but on the opinions of leading feminists. In her 2018 book The Diversity Delusion, Heather MacDonald wryly begins her assessment of the alleged campus rape epidemic as follows: "It’s a lonely job, working the phones at a college rape crisis center. Day after day, you wait for the casualties to show up from the campus rape epidemic—but few victims call." [11] To which the feminists are unwavering. They didn't build out this Sexual Harassment Industry for nothing. MacDonald continues: "Could this mean that the crisis is overblown? No: It means, according to the campus sexual-assault industry, that the abuse of coeds is worse than anyone had ever imagined. It means that consultants and counselors need more funding to persuade student rape victims to break the silence of their suffering." Yes, of course.

In 2011, SHI received federal backing from the Obama Administration with the infamous "Dear Colleague" letter which essentially told the universities: get your rape numbers up or face federal investigation. In response the universities adopted a preponderance of evidence standard for deciding rape accusations, rather than the beyond reasonable doubt standard used in the real world. They encouraged accusers to come forward, denied the accused the right for cross examination, and: "reverse[d] the presumption of innocence and treat[ed] the male as guilty unless overwhelming evidence unavoidably demands the opposite conclusion." [11] (p. 124). That is, men are guilty until proven innocent. Unsurprisingly many men have been expelled on flimsy evidence--evidence that would never stand in an actual criminal court.

I think it is fair to say that the universities don't much like men anymore. Not only male students, but male faculty as well. Especially if they are white and heterosexual. Affirmative action hiring is standard in America's elite universities. For example, in the UC San Diego physics department: "[The department] advertised an assistant-professor position several years ago with a 'specific emphasis on contributions to diversity,' such as a candidate’s 'awareness of inequities faced by underrepresented underrepresented groups.' Social-justice concerns now apparently trump the quest to solve the mystery of dark energy. All five candidates on UC San Diego’s short list were females, leading one male candidate with a specialty in extragalactic physics to wonder why the school had even solicited applications from Asian and white men." [11] (p.177)

But surely outside of the university hot houses the feminists are rather more circumspect, more measured with their views when it comes to hard working American families, the backbone of the US economy? Not a chance. Feminists hate the traditional nuclear family, as they see it as the basic patriarchal unit from which the rest of society issues. Feminists have thus led the political Left in America in an unrelenting war on fathers while the conservatives on the Right have done little to stop it. Stephen Baskerville, who has published numerous articles and books on the plight of American fathers, writes: "For years, so-called conservatives have accepted and even supported feminist policies, the express purpose of which is nothing less than to enfeeble and degrade America’s men on an enormous scale. This is done especially by destroying men’s home life and authority over their children, but elsewhere too: by patently false accusations of domestic violence and rape; by family courts that confiscate children from legally innocent fathers, whose authority has been undermined and terminated before their property is plundered and their persons incarcerated without trial; by politicians and celebrities who, even after being falsely accused themselves, mouth obsequious mea culpas and shrink from denouncing the entire charade in principle, and from defending other men." [12]

Thus far I have only discussed the US and the UK, but the disadvantaging of men has long since gone global. "It's there for all to see" says Janice Fiamengo, "at the heart of the United Nations and all of its affiliated international organizations is the determination to export radical feminism to all corners of the globe … the agenda is, as always, to disenfranchise men and boys, to weaken families and to produce increased dependence on global organizations and thus more power centralized in the hands of those who run the UN."[13] White papers from the UN outline initiatives to empower women according to boilerplate feminist doctrine, exhorting women to resist traditional gender roles. If the man refuses to do his share of housework women are made to understand that this counts as abuse. Women must extract themselves from financial dependence on men--from patriarchal oppression-- which naturally results in a lot of women turning to government handouts. UNICEF, which purports to care for the welfare of underprivileged children around the world, caters almost exclusively to the needs of women and girls.

I could go on, as I haven't even touched on the misandry which now permeates popular culture, but I hope that this much will suffice. Quotas for women, as in the case of the Ocean Race, assume that women and girls are disadvantaged, that they suffer injustices in need of correction. I have here made my case to the contrary.

A Woman’s Place is in the Home

I have never heard this stated unironically. It comes from our bygone patriarchal past--allegedly. But that's over now. Women are on the move, making their own way, proving themselves as good as men, building a whole new world where women finally have a seat the the table. Women's empowerment is all upside, right?

Certainly the Bible does not advocate female empowerment. Ever since our original mother and father were evicted from Paradise men have had to work for a living, women to bear the pains of childbearing, and God commands of Eve that "Your urge shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you". A woman's place in the world is a subordinate one.

While many moderns (and postmoderns) dismiss the Bible, it must be admitted that it has been around a heck of a lot longer than feminism, Post Modernism, Social Constructionism, Critical Theory, and etc. There is something to be said for a long track record.

But OK, fair enough, we live in a scientific age which demands scientific evidence. I shall here endeavor to present my case that women's empowerment, particularly in contradistinction to the gender roles prescribed by the Bible, is ultimately wrong-headed and destructive.

I am obliged to begin with the "not all" disclaimer. I started off this essay quoting Margaret Thatcher, who did step into conventionally male shoes and showed the world that she had what it took. As I am talking about the world of ocean yacht racing, I should point out that there have been women who have made their mark here as well. In 1977 Naomi James completed a circumnavigation of the world via the Southern Ocean, the same route as the Whitbread Round the World Race, and was the first woman to do so. I have written of Tracy Edwards and Maiden. And just recently Kirsten Neuschafer won the Golden Globe Race. [14] As with nearly all traditionally male arenas, there have been females, albeit a small minority of them, who have competed with males on a even field and have occasionally beat them.

I will also state for the record that my own politics aligns with the classical liberal tradition. I believe that all adult humans, as it says in the American Declaration of Independence, have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. With few exceptions such as conscription during war time, incarceration of dangerous criminals, or committing the insane to mental health facilities, I oppose any government policies which are coercive. In general I oppose forcing anyone into a life that is not of their choosing.

Alright, with that out of the way, let's get to it. In a previous essay I put forth the hypothesis that the feminist push to turn women into breadwinners like men, though apparently enjoying a great deal of success in Western countries, is nevertheless a fight against female nature which is costing both businesses and central governments more that they can afford. [15] Women naturally try to turn their workplaces into something closer to an intimate living space, into a home, desiring comforts and safety and security. We've seen how this led to an insidious Sexual Harassment Industry in the universities. In the working world, working women will frequently require lengthy paid leave while they are pregnant and caring for newborns, and then require child care once that they return to work. The overall gender dynamic has not really changed: men raise the money while women raise the children. Except in the feminist version, men, particularly high earning men, pay high taxes to subsidize "empowered" women. In this new arrangement the government becomes their husband while individual men are optional.

Feminists prefer it this way, that women can always fall back on the government and use the government to control male behavior. And feminists like the government, for they have had tremendous success as lobbyists. Earlier we saw what they did to technical schools like Aviation High School. When their step and fetch President Obama came into power, the feminists went hog wild. "When President Obama presented his multi-trillion-dollar budget, he declared he was calling for a freeze in discretionary spending. Feminists immediately had a tantrum and won exemption from the freeze for all feminist programs and organizations … A White House document titled 'Opportunity and Progress for Women and Girls' describes fifteen federal programs that will receive increased funding to appease the female left. The Violence Against Women project, for example, was targeted for a 22 percent increase. The budget would also appropriate $50 million to give grants to incentivize the states to adopt paid family leave and increase funding for day care, with Head Start scheduled for additional funding of nearly $1 billion. Obama's budget also increases funding for a new program to recruit under-graduate students from underrepresented groups in science and technology careers and increases funding for a special program to give women more jobs in academic science and engineering careers." [16] Make it rain, Barry, make it rain.

Now recall that while all of this girl power was going on, the feminists were simultaneously working to enfeeble and degrade men and boys, beginning with the education system. This has resulted in generations of weak men.

In his book The United States of Fear, psychiatrist Mark McDonald chronicles the horror of the Covid-19 pandemic. Though the virus could be deadly to minority of the population (mostly the elderly), it unleashed a social contagion from which few could escape and which produced debilitating psychological effects in many. In July of 2020, McDonald, along with several other physicians, stood on the steps of the US Supreme Court to publicly air their criticisms of the US government's response to the pandemic. McDonald focused on the school closures and the harm it was causing the young based on what he was seeing as a psychiatrist. Breitbart news live streamed the event and it was viewed by millions. But then something very shocking happened: YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter removed the video and all shares of it from their platforms. President Trump's son, Don Jr., tweeted a link to the video and then his Twitter account was suspended. McDonald writes: "Everything we had said was factual, medically sound, and backed up by empirical evidence, but we had challenged the pandemic narrative, and that was not allowed … For the first time in my life, I saw the removal of civil liberties occurring under the guise of safety. And fear was fueling it." [17] It was by now clear that something had gone seriously wrong with democracy in America.

McDonald had seen the storm clouds gathering for some time. Schools began handing out participation trophies so that there would be no losers. Mothers would no longer let their kids walk to school unattended (I can remember walking to and from school alone or with my schoolmates on a regular basis). Universities starting providing safe spaces, issuing trigger warnings against controversial ideas. It is likely that this new prioritization of safety and comfort is directly related to the massive influx of women into public spaces. For it is a well documented psychological fact that women on average have higher levels of anxiety than men, experience more negative emotions, and are more prone to hysteria. "In one study of nearly 27,000 women across cultures, women displayed nearly double the prevalence of generalized anxiety and panic disorder compared with men. Greater susceptibility to fear, then—both rational and otherwise—appears to be a natural consequence of being a woman." [17] (p. 32) The most obvious reason for this difference is that women are the primary care givers of infants, and thus are naturally hyper-vigilant.

To make things worse, popular culture nowadays enables female hysteria, or perhaps put more accurately, disables male hardheadedness and skeptical rationalism. When Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, challenged Greta Thunberg's prophesies of environmental apocalypse, he was labeled a misogynist. As hysterical women are supported uncritically by world leaders and the media their anxiety gets legitimized and thereby amplified and spread. Hence much of the Westernized, feminized world was already primed for a mass psychosis. Then came covid.

"There is a reason the term 'Karen,' rather than 'Peter' or 'James,' came into popular use in 2020" writes McDonald, "Women in large numbers—mainly middle-class, liberal white women—took to the streets to accost, shame, and even physically assault anyone out of compliance … In effect, Karens became the psychotic enforcers of the arbitrary rules imposed on the population by unelected bureaucrats and unaccountable politicians." [17](pp. 76-77)

McDonald could see clearly that the majority of such women had one thing missing in their lives: strong, dependable men. "Traditionally, as everyone knows, it has been the role of men to calm and ground women’s fears, not the role of doctors but of fathers, uncles, brothers, and, of course, husbands. As science amply shows, men are evolved for the good of the species to adopt a protective attitude toward females, and this innate proclivity is powerfully reinforced by millennia of social and religious conditioning in every known society on earth. No society exists where women are left to fend for themselves. Men are evolved and socialized to love, provide for, and protect their women." [17](pp. 39-40)

Except our own. Women's empowerment insists that women can fend for themselves, "a woman needs a man like a fish need a bicycle", etc. People with persistent anxiety will often try to control their environment as a way of alleviating their discomfort. This was precisely the psychological mechanism of the "Karens": as the media and government officials (particularly the former) stoked fear and panic over a new virus, these women, overcome with anxiety, began trying to control everyone around them, and the result was often more than just annoying, it was destructive and sometimes tragic. The lockdowns and mask mandates may have made a lot of women feel as if they were protecting their children, but the effects of these measures may have in fact done a lot of harm. "The Brown University Department of Pediatrics has found that babies born after January 1, 2020 show an IQ point loss of twenty points, presumably caused by the deprivation of home confinement and universal mask-wearing that impeded normal brain development." [17] (p. 24) The desire for control of course also meant curtailing free speech, as McDonald experienced first hand, which also produced the very dangerous situation of people submitting to policies and medical procedures (e.g. vaccine mandates) without enough information to give informed consent. This lurch toward totalitarian control of the populace is the direct result of weak men standing aside while the women lead.

Finally, in what may become an "existential crisis" (as our politicians are like to say), human fertility and birth rates have been dropping almost everywhere for several decades now. For those of us who grew up believing that overpopulation was a future certainty in almost any scenario other than nuclear holocaust, and that there would be mass starvation, wars, and environmental destruction as result, this may come as rather strange news. Yet, while world population will continue to grow for some time, it appears that it will thereafter begin to decline, possibly at an alarming and, economically speaking, catastrophic rate.

"Birth rates are falling much faster than many dominant societal narratives imply. The global fertility rate for all of Latin America and the Caribbean fell below replacement rate (2.1 babies per woman) in 2021. India will achieve that status in 2022. China is expected to be at half its current population by 2066. First-generation immigrants in the U.S. fell below re-population rate in 2019. Already 115 countries, representing about half the world's population, are below replacement rate. By the end of the century, nearly every African country is projected to have a rapidly declining population." [18]

Presently no one knows why this is happening. Those writing and podcasting about it, however, seem to agree on three possible causes: 1.) environmental toxins, which may, for example, be responsible for the drop in male testosterone and sperm production 2.) the decreased utility of children due to industrialization, i.e., children are expensive in modern societies 3.) the feminist movement.

Number 3 gets my vote (not to say that 1 and 2 inconsequential). "Elite feminists push all women to plan their lives around careers. The result is that young women give little thought to marriage and motherhood and instead spend upwards of a decade becoming highly qualified for the workforce. Women believe this is the better life plan, since their mothers' lives, they are told, were empty and meaningless" [16] (p. 51) Yet many women find their lives to be empty and meaningless precisely because they did not do as their mothers had done but listened to the feminists, and now they have no children and are already infertile.

We have already discussed the plight of many modern males in education system. At present universities control much of the career accreditation business, and the traditional male dominated blue collar trade schools have lost their social cache. Hence large numbers of men are losing social status. To make matters worse, an alarming number of men are not participating in the labor force at all, as carefully detailed by Nicholas Eberstadt in his recent book Men Without Work. That is, many men are dropping out of society. "More than 60 percent of young men are single, nearly twice the rate of unattached young women, signaling a larger breakdown in the social, romantic and sexual life of the American male. Men in their 20s are more likely than women in their 20s to be romantically uninvolved, sexually dormant, friendless and lonely. They stand at the vanguard of an epidemic of declining marriage, sexuality and relationships that afflicts all of young America." [19]

Now it is an established fact that females naturally seek high status males for partnering, a phenomenon known as hypergamy. Moreover, the higher the woman's own status the stronger her hypergamous impulse. Thus: "Successful women face a shortage of demographically superior men to marry. Indeed, the nascent decline in marriage has been attributed to a putative shortage of economically attractive partners for unmarried women. Applying data imputation methods to national survey data, researchers found that unmarried women face an overall shortage of partners with either a bachelor’s degree or yearly income exceeding $40,000." [20]

While some women will end up childless, others, following feminist promptings, will marry the government, use men as sperm donors, and become single mothers. Research shows that single mother homes have many detrimental effects on children, not the least of which is to perpetuate single motherhood. Compared to traditional two-parent homes, single mother homes are especially bad for boys. Boys raised in father-absent homes likely have lower IQ's and get lower grades in school, are more likely to drop out of school or get expelled, are more likely to be unemployed, are more likely to be incarcerated, and … the list goes on. [21] Naturally these boys will seldom grow into the men women would like to marry and start a family with.

Unsurprisingly there is also an increase in celibacy. I think it was David Deida who introduced the idea of sexual polarity, that male and female are like the north and south ends of the magnet, and the more pronounced the gender distinction (i.e. the more masculine the male and the more feminine the female), the stronger they attract each other. The feminists want to erase all of this, insisting that gender is largely a social construct.

Before DEI descended on the Ocean Race, one can find clips from previous runs of the Ocean Race where the skippers were accompanied by walk-on girls as they greeted their shore-side fans [22]. These are always young, attractive females who are there for spectacle and glamour. They also represent the natural socio-sexual dynamic that has existed forever and which still exists no matter how much DEI they try to ram down our throats. The top males--in this case, the boat captains--parade in the company of beautiful women.

It is no small matter that the feminists want to shut down this kind of pageantry. Not long ago they drove away the Grid Girls from Formula One auto racing [23]. Janet Street-Porter, speaking for the feminists, lays down the law: "Goodbye grid girls – there is no place in sport for sexual objectification anymore". Men working and striving and competing for the attention of beautiful women, who they desire sexually, is over. We're all on the same team now, sweating, grunting, wearing the same grey overalls. She can take the helm and bark orders like any man; she can drive a race car and chew tobacco and spit like any man. The famous scientist James D. Watson is quoted as having said “Almost everything I ever did, even as a scientist, was in the hope of meeting a pretty girl.” Sorry buddy, pretty is just a pretty way of saying you desire her sexually, and that's not allowed. We could probably do without your double helix anyway. Certainly not if it comes at the cost of aiding and abetting the sexual objectification of women.

Champions win the attention of beautiful women.

For most men the seduction of a woman is a difficult and perplexing task only learned after many rejections. A man must therefore be motivated. Bits of pageantry like Grid Girls will fire a lot of young men's imaginations, drive them to succeed, perhaps even to the heights of a great scientist like James Watson. But as women are drafted by feminists to fight men as if they were men, and men are feminized and demoralized, it should be no wonder that there's not a whole lot of marriage and baby making going on.

Earlier I quoted Mark Turner and used him as a spokesman for the organizers of the Ocean Race, who views quotas for women as "ensuring progress". Progress is understood as moving toward a better state of affairs, and overall improvement in the human condition. The race organizers have adopted the politics of the Left, of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion, of feminism, of United Nations style globalism. They believe that this is the way to go.

I argue to the contrary. Women's empowerment is based on the false premise that women are an oppressed class. It denies the natural psychological and physiological differences between men and women in order to make the premise appear plausible. While some women will flourish in traditional male environments, too many will insist that public life resemble the cozy home that they left behind. This generally results in high costs and onerous rules of conduct coming from an ever expanding state. Women's empowerment is also causing a breakdown in gender relations. The feminist solution to male lust and aggression is to neuter men while teaching women to behave like men, thereby reducing sexual attraction. This may be a contributing factor to a future collapse in human population.

References

[1] https://www.times-gazette.com/story/opinion/2013/04/15/page-margaret-thatcher-not-quota/19021756007/

[2]

[3] https://www.theoceanrace.com/en/rwp/news/13556_The-drive-for-diversity

[4] https://www.sail-world.com/news/228303/The-Ocean-Race-Part-4-Shore-Crew-and-Media]

[5] https://www.onebluevoice.net/

[6] https://kevinboothbysailing.com/2022/10/03/women-in-sail

[7] https://www.yachtingworld.com/news/volvo-ocean-race-rule-set-to-force-change-for-women-sailors-97932.

[8] Collins, William. The Empathy Gap: Male Disadvantages and the Mechanisms of Their Neglect (p. 87). LPS publishing. Kindle Edition.

[9] Sommers, Christina Hoff. The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men (p. 8). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

[10] Daphne Patai. Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism (American Intellectual Culture) (Kindle Locations 223-224, 1616-1617). Kindle Edition.

[11] Mac Donald, Heather. The Diversity Delusion (p. 117). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[12] https://menaregood.com/4272-2/

[13]

[14] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/14/travel/kirsten-neuschafer-golden-globe.html

[15] https://kevinboothbysailing.com/2023/04/07/the-future-is-female-has-us-all-going-broke/

[16] Phyllis Schlafly and Suzanne Venker, The Flipside of Feminism, (WND Books, Washington, DC, 2011), pp. 135.

[17] McDonald M.D., Mark. United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis (p. 13). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

[18] Collins, Simone; Collins, Malcolm. The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion: A playbook for sculpting cultures that overcome demographic collapse & facilitate long-term human flourishing (The Pragmatist's Guide 5) (p. 6). Omniscion Press. Kindle Edition.

[19] https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-young-men-are-single-most-young-women-are-not/

[20] https://quillette.com/2021/06/28/mate-selection-for-modernity/

[21] Farrell, Warren . The Boy Crisis (p. 402). BenBella Books. Kindle Edition.] )

[22]

(starting at 39:20) and

(starting at 5:00)

[23] https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/formula-1-one-grid-girls-boxing-sexism-sport-me-too-tennis-a8190686.html

I regard it as a matter of course that Aristophanes, the preeminent comedic genius of antiquity, imagined a government run by women as both a socialist state and something hilarious. Though never considered as one of his best plays, The Assemblywomen is nonetheless a very funny play, at least the first half of it is. It is also wonderfully refreshing, as gendered humor nowadays so predictably resolves itself into male-bashing. Not that Aristophanes delighted in bashing women, far from it, for even the philosopher Socrates was not spared his acidic (and bawdy) wit, only that the guys do get their innings here.

Briefly, the play opens with our protagonist Praxagora waiting in the predawn darkness for her female compatriots to show, and they are late. She is close to the point of exasperation when two of them finally arrive, with excuses of course, but Praxagora is eager to get straight to the plan. The two women affirm that they have stopped shaving their armpits, spent time out in the sun to bronze their skin, and have sewed beards for themselves as instructed. Satisfied, the three of them proceed to the assembly, where they intend to pitch their plan to save Athens. Which is to hand over control of the state to the women.

Immediately there are problems. One of the women resumes her wool-combing, explaining that she may as well get some chores done while waiting for the Assembly to fill. Praxagora is livid and berates her compatriot for acting in a way that would give away her gender. The success of their plan depends on them passing themselves off as men, as only men are allowed to participate in the assembly.

Praxagora's argument for a matriarchy begins with noting that women are the ones responsible for the efficient management of the home. And that they are reliably conservative in their methods, unlike men who are always tinkering. For example, she notes that women always use hot water when dyeing wool, and would never start experimenting with cold water or some such nonsense. They're not always trying to come up with a cockamamie invention. She continues: "Women still sit down to do the roasting, as they’ve always done. They carry things on their heads, as they’ve always done. They hold the Thesmophoria Festival, as they’ve always done. They bake cakes, as they’ve always done. They infuriate their husbands, as they’ve always done. They conceal lovers in the house, as they’ve always done …" After Praxagora finishes the two women agree that it is a brilliant speech, and so they are off to deliver it at the assembly [1].

Scene Two opens with a gentleman named Chremes and his two slaves hauling all of his possessions off to the Agora, where he will hand it over to the state. The newly elected female rulers have abolished private property. Everything will be shared from now on. Chremes is then accosted by a citizen who wants him to know he's a damned fool for listening to these women. "Grabbing, not giving is what comes natural to us" explains the citizen, but Chremes is undeterred. They are both interrupted by a female crier with a message from the state: "Calling all citizens, yes, all citizens, for that is how we do things now …" The crier announces that dinner is served for everyone, no one will go hungry in this new regime because everything is shared. After which the citizen tells Chremes that he's off to go get some free food, to which Chremes recoils and tries in vain to chastise the freeloader, explaining that he must turn in his possessions first. "Oh, I'll hand it in, some time" the citizen replies. [1](pp. 248-9, 251)

The play ends with a festival, and thus without any conclusion. In the age of Classical Greece, the age in which Aristophanes lived, Athens' rival Sparta was perhaps the most perfect socialist state that has ever existed, and the Spartan women were famously powerful. According to Plutarch they “were bold and masculine, overbearing to their husbands . . . and speaking openly even on the most important subjects.” The Spartan women "could inherit and bequeath property; and in the course of time—so great was their influence over men—nearly half the real wealth of Sparta was in their hands. They lived a life of luxury and liberty at home while the men bore the brunt of frequent war, or dined on simple fare in the public mess." [2]

Historian Bettany Hughes says of the Spartan women: "At at time when Greek women were expected to be invisible, [Spartan women] had power and responsibility in their own right. In fact they were so cocksure, they dared to take on the men in politics, on the streets, and even in that most sacred bastion, the sporting arena … it wasn't just Spartan women's physicality that shocked the outside world. Their freedom was equally notorious. Aristotle described the place as a gynocracy--a state run by women, and he didn't mean it as a compliment." [3]

Spartan mothers made sure from the get-go that their boys understood the Spartan warrior code. Hughes cites an anecdote of a Spartan mother shaming her wayward son, in which she hikes up her skirt and asks him if he would like to crawl back in. A man's life is either total devotion to the state, or no life at all. "With your shield or on it" the Spartan mother would say to her son when his time came to march off to battle. You either return victorious, or as a dead body for burial.

This strong matriarchal element, which demanded the slavish obedience of all males, also produced a stifling conservatism which ultimately spelled Sparta's demise. The Spartan code became inviolable. Or perhaps reflected what Praxagora considered women's superior wisdom in the efficient management of the home. "The Spartan code produced good soldiers and nothing more; [the code] made vigor of body a graceless brutality because it killed nearly all capacity for the things of the mind. With the triumph of the code the arts that had flourished before its establishment died a sudden death; we hear of no more poets, sculptors, or builders in Sparta after 550. …In the end Sparta’s narrowness of spirit betrayed even her strength of soul." [2] (p. 167)

Yet despite it all, men proudly obeyed the laws of Sparta. Famously so at the Battle of Thermopolyae, where Leonidas and his 300 Spartans refused to the retreat from the overwhelming Persian force after it was handed a great tactical advantage by a traitor to the Greeks. They were all killed, and for that, immortalized. A stone memorial was placed on the road leading through Thermopolyae which, variously translated, reads: "Passer by, go tell the Spartans that here we lay dead, but that we lived true to the Spartan code."

Sparta provides an extreme example of the extent to which men are willing to sacrifice, suffer, and to face death so long as are respected for it, especially by women.

Part II: I’m Being Oppressed!

Fast forward two and half millennia and we have feminists arguing that men are at an evolutionary end. "The End of Men" triumphantly wrote Hannah Rosin in a lengthy article for the Atlantic. At long last women are stepping up to their rightful place at the table--at the head of the table, that is, insists Maria Shriver. And that's just the beginning. Women not only need to take their proper place as leaders, but need to avenge all the historical injustices perpetrated on them so that the guilty gender finally learns.

What has changed? Men (as in human males), those incorrigible tinkerers as Praxagora chided them, over the centuries eventually accumulated the knowledge necessary, particularly in mathematics and physical sciences, to invent machines and cities and supply chains which free humans from the privations, dangers, disease, and suffering routinely imposed on them by mean old Mother Nature. Yes, I'm sure there were a few female pioneers in there too. Anyway, the relationship between men and women throughout history appears to have been largely a cooperative one, as allies facing a common enemy. To our ancestors, the squabbles between the sexes we nowadays make so much hay over would probably count as little more than humorous diversions.

Regardless, the feminists insist that women are and have been systematically disadvantaged by men for ages. They point to the overwhelming dominance of males in our history books, and as well as the continuing dominance of males at the highest echelons of society, as leading statesmen, as captains of industry. The Invisible Hand is really the Patriarchy, a pervasive and persistent favoring of men over women. Interviewing Jordan Peterson for GQ Magazine, feminist author Helen Lewis sums up what is generally called "Patriarchy Theory": "My conception of the patriarchy is … that there is a structure in which women participate that overall privileges and benefits men in order to control female reproduction." [4]

There are certainly historical examples of women denied jobs, political representation, or property rights because of their sex. Or of chauvinistic men who waved them away saying "this is a man's job, cupcake", and so on. But anecdotes alone do not maketh a social history. Patriarchy theory sounds plausible on the first pass, but when zoomed in to higher resolutions, it becomes clear that even the feminists themselves have trouble describing exactly what it is.

In a 2018 article titled "The age of patriarchy: how an unfashionable idea became a rallying cry for feminism today", Charlotte Higgins writes: "Patriarchy is nimble and lithe. Its margins of operation always seem to be expanding. Feminists have naturally tended to arrange their battle lines in front of the aspect of oppression that they have regarded as the most pressing." [5]

Which sounds to me like they make it up as they go. If patriarchy theory seems a bit flimsy coming from the feminists, it terms of biology and evolutionary psychology, on the other hand, it makes no sense at all. Again quoting Ms. Higgins "For much of human history, the persistence of male domination was so much part of the oxygen of life that patriarchy was not even identified as a concept". On the contrary, the evolutionary biologists supply ample evidence that gynocentric societies are the default, not patriarchies. While men may hold the top positions of power in the social structure, ultimately said structure serves to provision for and protect women.

Why should females be served and protected? The answer begins with basic biology. First, males produce viable sperm at an average rate of 12 million per hour, whereas the average woman will produce only 400 viable eggs in her entire life [6]. Secondly, a human female takes around nine months to gestate a single child (typically), during which time she is taken offline from any further baby production. Clearly males could produce almost unlimited numbers of babies but not so with the females. So for a given population of humans in which there are roughly equal numbers of males and females, in order to attain some hurdle rate of baby production necessary for survival, only a small percentage of the males will be actually necessary. Moreover, given that most human civilizations struggled merely to survive, few women could be spared and so they were typically sheltered from danger. The excess males, on the other hand, could make themselves valued and necessary to their fellows by taking on the dangerous jobs, as soldiers, hunters, explorers, and so on.

Hence we have the traditional division of labor between the sexes, of blue jobs and pink jobs, of males as protectors and providers and females raising the kids. From which comes a natural sexual dimorphism, with men developing stronger, more athletic bodies and more stoic temperaments, while females become more empathic and particularly attentive to the needs of infants. This dimorphism is maintained and re-enforced by the dynamics of human mate selection, to which I now turn.

Observed human mating behaviors can be understood all the way down to the level of genetics. An essential function of sexual reproduction is purging harmful traits while retaining beneficial ones. Now because females have the paired XX sex chromosomes, while males have an X paired with a Y, many male recessive genes will be unpaired with a dominant and thus expressed. While the actual mechanics of gene expression is, sorry to say, beyond the comprehension of your humble author here, the upshot is that observed genetic traits will show more variability in human males than females. An example of this is the IQ curve. While males and females have approximately the same average IQ (100), there are more males the the extremes--i.e., there are more male dummies and geniuses than females [7]. There are approximately twice as many men as women with an IQ above 125. There are approximately six times as many men as women with an IQ above 155. [8]

How does this make sense in terms of human mating? Think about what we've said. Genes are not static. There are copying errors, random mutations, which usually produce defects that will hinder an organism's ability to survive, but sometimes produce improvements. Obviously we therefore want some mechanism that will filter out bad variations and hang on to beneficial ones. Now in the case of humans, as we've said, the females are the scarce resource--they cap the rate of baby production for any population of humans. Therefore it makes sense to express genes more in males so that the poorly coded ones can be more easily sifted out by the females. Put another way, in producing equal numbers of males and females, there is an excess number of males needed for the species to survive, so bad genes are best purged by purging the males from reproduction. It therefore makes sense that the males would express their genes more, while the females would be the more discerning mate selectors.

But how does this happen? Now we move up to the level of human social behaviors, of human mating. Research shows what every man and boy knows: human males are competitive. They instinctively form hierarchies based on primarily on talent and ability. Boys will race each other, wrestle each other, dare each other to do crazy things like jumping their bicycles as I once did (I grew up in the age of Evel Knievel). This may appear to be all fun and games--boys will be boys--but it is hardly so. "The reason that a male instinctively starts vying with his same-sex peers from when he is a toddler is for the very purpose of calibrating to what extent he will be able to reproduce. That women may be interested in him if he is the winner in a male–male contest is no mere by-product: it’s the very thing he is competing for." [8] (p. 29)

Genetics of course will play a key role in determining who comes out victorious. If basketball were the only success hierarchy by which human males were judged, as a man who stands a five and a half feet my sorry fate would be sealed. Fortunately there are many arenas in which a man can compete for status and which may get him noticed by a winsome lass. It is well established that the social status of a male is a key factor for being selected by a female.

So men naturally compete for status and women naturally encourage them to do so. Young men must be subjected to harsh conditions in order to be assessed for mating. And if said harsh conditions come in the form of military training, as an example, society at large reaps the great benefit of having devoted protectors. To disadvantage men and let them struggle in life thus benefits women and society. This is what we might call a gynocentric social order. Gynocentric societies will allow no soft option for its boys and men. Recall the extreme example of ancient Sparta.

Not only ancient Sparta, but Western cultures are gynocentric as well. In his book The Empathy Gap, William Collins documents how boys and men are regularly disadvantaged in the UK, from education to health care to marriage--and all the while feminists keep pushing politicians to pass more laws helping women to succeed against supposed patriarchal oppression.

Take health care for example. Men die prematurely from nearly all causes at a higher rate than women, leading with cancer and cardiovascular disease. Yet in an analysis of the UK health system, William Collins shows that females are favored when it comes to services. In some cases the sex discrimination is overt, as in the case of the HPV vaccine: "Despite the number of premature deaths due to HPV cancers being virtually the same for the two sexes, over ten years ago the NHS introduced a free vaccination programme against HPV for girls, but with no such programme for boys." [9]

Nor is it true that men simply do not take advantage of the available services because they don't want to be seen as sissies: "There is a willingness to attribute men's indisputable health disadvantages to men's lesser use of healthcare services, and to attribute this to men's destructive masculine characteristics. However, this hypothesis does not survive inspection … There are signs here that male health disadvantage is more due to society-wide acceptance of such disadvantage than it is to destructive masculine traits. Adopting a stance that traditional male gender norms are responsible (" it's men's own fault") may be a subconscious means of avoiding acknowledging the implied empathy gap." [9](pp. 153-154).

While I applaud William Collins for exploding feminist myths about male privilege, I don't expect the empathy gap to close any time soon. Males must prove themselves, compete, endure more, suffer more, because the health and survival of our species depends on it (or at least it did in pre-industrial times). So far as I know no amount of social conditioning, in any society, has ever overwritten this most basic programming (although you might argue that monogamous marriage has curbed natural human polygyny, where the females would rather share a high status male than mate with a low ranking one). It is not society's job to care for men, it is men's job to take care of society's business. Ask any Men's Rights Advocate how their pleas for compassion on behalf of men are typically received.

Part III: Richard Reeves

“The feminists are at war with Mother Nature, and Mother Nature is still winning" wrote the late conservative firebrand, Phyllis Schlafly, and she is right. But don't expect that to impress any feminists, not so long as our phenomenally wealthy Western societies continue as such, not so long as they have intellectual heavy hitters, such as Brookings Institution senior fellow Richard V. Reeves, going to bat for them.

In his recent book, Of Boys and Men, Reeves recognizes the myriad of challenges facing males in present day Western Civ, and that, it must be admitted, is a major step forward coming from "the establishment" (academia, think tanks, legacy publishing). Not only does Reeves correctly diagnose many of problems specific to boys and men, he also endeavors to offer solutions. And while I am willing to assume that his intentions are good, Reeves is a feminist, and that is a problem. Feminists proclaim to be advocates of gender equality. Evidence suggests otherwise. Baldly stated, feminism is a war on men. Feminists have no interest in helping men and in fact will vigorously oppose anyone who does.

Let's begin with education, as that is where Richard Reeves begins. Boys are failing in school, at almost every level, while girls are succeeding. In the United States, by eighth grade, 41 percent of girls are at least “proficient” in writing, while only 20 percent of boys are [10]. Boys are expelled from school three times as often as girls. Since 1993, in the United States, more females have received associate's, bachelor's, and post-graduate degrees than males [11]. The trend is downward for men in virtually all areas of education, and has been so ever since the feminist revolution of the 1960's.

Now for Reeves and company, the male recession in education is puzzling. Says Reeves, "the underperformance of males in college is shrouded in a good deal of mystery. World-class scholars have pored over the low rates of male college enrollment and completion, piling up data and running regressions. I have read these studies and spoken to many of the scholars. The short summary of their conclusions is: 'We don’t know.' Economic incentives do not provide an answer. The value of a college education is at least as high for men as for women. Even a scholar like MIT’s David Autor, who has dug deeply into the data, ends up describing male education trends as 'puzzling'. Mary Curnock Cook, the former head of the UK’s university and college admissions service, says she is 'baffled.' [11] (p. 31).

Well they might of asked Jordan Peterson, who stated in the previously cited interview with Helen Lewis: "[People] are sick and tired … of this doctrine which says that throughout history the relationship between men and women was one of power, essentially slavery … [that men's] ambition and forthrightness is a manifestation of something fundamentally tyrannical. They're not happy with that, it's not doing anyone any good, and it's also not true. It's really a terrible thing to do to young men, and it's happening all the time. That's why they're bailing out of the universities like mad. There won't be a man left in the social sciences in ten years in the universities, and it's no bloody wonder, it's an inhospitable place." [4] (starting at 12:27)

And should you find an outpost of male success in education, you can be sure that a small detachment of huffy feminists will soon be on the scene to cry foul. Consider the case of Aviation High School in Queens, New York. Philosophy professor Christina Hoff Sommers writes: " … to walk through the front doors of Aviation High is to enter one of the quietest, most inspiring places in all of New York City. This is an institution that is working miracles with students. Schools everywhere struggle to keep teenagers engaged. At Aviation, they are enthralled … The school’s two thousand pupils—mostly Hispanic, African American, and Asian from homes below the poverty line—have a 95 percent attendance rate and an 88 percent graduation rate, with 80 percent attending college. The New York City Department of Education routinely awards the school an “A” on its annual Progress Report. And it has been recognized by U.S. News & World Report as one of the best high schools in the nation. Aviation High lives up to its motto: 'Where Dreams Take Flight.' "[12]

When asked about the school's smashing success, the school principal cites the strict code of discipline, their culture of respect. But for Sommers the secret sauce is not the "culture of respect", rather the immediate application of classroom knowledge to practical--and employable--skills. And when it comes to traditional academic disciplines such as English and history, students must pass a performance threshold before they get to tinker with the Cessna 411 engine sitting out on the playground.

Except there's problem, and I'm sure that you have already guessed what it is: Aviation High School is predominantly (85%) male. It was the National Women's Law Center who deployed the first regiment. "In 2001, its copresident, Marcia Greenberger, along with two activist lawyers, wrote a letter to the then–Chancellor of the New York City Board of Education, claiming that girls’ rights were being violated in the city’s vocational public schools and demanding that the 'problem be remedied without delay.' "[12] (pp. 9-10) Thus began the long siege against Aviation High School and similar boy-friendly vocational schools. "Despite their success and promise, vocational academies like Aviation High School and Blackstone Valley Tech face harsh opposition from the women’s lobby. In a 2007 report, the National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education (NCWGE) condemned high school vocational training schools as hotbeds of 'sex-segregation'"[12] (p. 162)

Lest you think the feminists just make noise, they are adroit lobbyists too. For example, in 2012 US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan re-jiggered the Perkins Act, under which federal grant money gets allocated to technical and vocational schools, in order to ensure not only equality in admission to such schools, but equality in outcome. So basically proportional representation of girls and boys. Hence "The new Perkins Act will further empower the women’s lobby to threaten schools like Aviation and Blackstone Valley with lawsuits."[12] (p. 164)

The feminist Obama administration directed Title IX at technical and vocational schools. Title IX has been used against college sports programs, as sports like football tend to be heavily male dominated, so athletic programs were forced to recruit more women athletes to avoid losing federal funding or possibly facing discrimination lawsuits. In response some universities, like Boston University, simply did away with their football team. As a result "vocation and technical schools won’t get rid of their 'male teams' in welding, engineering, or automotive repair, but they are likely to cut them back and practice reverse discrimination in favor of girls. More resources will be deployed to change the preferences of young women to suit the ideology of groups like the AAUW [American Association of University Women] and the National Women’s Law Center. School leaders have no matching incentive to develop programs that could attract great numbers of disengaged young men. On the contrary, they are well advised to avoid them. Such programs will put them at risk of a federal investigation and loss of funds."[12] (p. 166)

Sommers also notes that by the 2010's there is already ample evidence showing that boys are failing in school. The feminists, of course, dismiss it. As I've said, the feminists are waging a war on men, and the best way to defeat men is to knock them out while they are still boys.

Next Reeves moves on to the labor market where men, blue collar men in particular, are losing ground. The outsourcing of muscular labor abroad and automation are certainly two factors. But it goes much deeper than that. I shall return to this subject in the next section.

Moving on to family life, the next crisis is the decline of dad. Reeves I think sums up the traditional male role very well: "Men are expected to put others before themselves in a variety of ways, including by giving up resources to the group, as well as risking injury or even death in its defense. One of the central ideas here is that of a surplus. Mature men generate more resources than they need for their own survival, and these are shared with the clan, tribe, or family."[11] (p. 52) Men produce more than they consume, which is how they make up the inherent value difference between them and women, the latter having intrinsic value by virtue of their role in reproduction, as we discussed in the previous section. Traditional marriage then ties the biological male parent to the female such that his surplus resources are transferred to her exclusively. Per the contract he is also placed in charge of her and the children as a father. As such marriage has worked since we have recorded history of it because it is congenial to the natural gender dynamic of humans.

It's only the spectacular technological and economic advances of the last century that has cleared the way for a feminist critique, that marriage stifles women's autonomy by making them the property of men. In any case, in our present day: "Women are now the main breadwinner in 41% of U.S. households. Some of those are single mothers, but by no means all; three in ten wives now out-earn their husbands, twice as many as in 1981. Most mothers now work full time, and in almost half of families where both parents work full time, mothers earn as much or more than fathers. Mothers have also received growing support from the welfare system, allowing even those with low or no earnings to be freer of the need for a breadwinning husband."[11] (p. 55)

Of this Reeves says: "The success of the women’s movement has not caused the precariousness of male social identity, but it has exposed it … Economically independent women can now flourish whether they are wives or not. Wifeless men, by contrast, are often a mess."[11] (p. 60) And you thought men were tough and rugged, but alas, they're just emotionally vulnerable big-mouths. Once you take away their patriarchal powers, they just go to pieces. Feminists like Reeves see it as their noblesse oblige to figure out how to help males adapt to an increasingly female primary world.

Professor Stephen Baskerville sees it differently: "The only benefit [pushing women into the workforce] can give to women is to increase not their affluence (though this may have been part of the short-term temptation), and certainly not their leisure, but their power—the power against their husbands that accrues from a separate paycheck and with it the ability and willingness to divorce … But the real beneficiary is the state. For this trend has transformed child-rearing from a private family matter into a public communal and taxable activity, expanding the tax base and with it the size and power of the state, while the elite sisters in traditional male occupations drive down male wages, lower productivity, and fuel inflation." [13]

In other words, pushing women out of the homes and their traditional role as mothers and homemakers means that they must hire professionals to raise their kids. This means that these women are now engaged in taxable economic activity, as are the mercenary moms who are caring for their kids. In addition, the sudden expansion of the labor force beginning in the 1960's in the US drove down wages, making it very difficult for many men to support a family without his wife working as well, so many are forced into this new arrangement. Moreover, the dissolution of the traditional family, as Reeves himself notes, has created many single moms who depend on the welfare state. Instead of relying on men, who naturally see it as their charge to protect and provide for their women, these modern feminized women are taught that men are either tyrants or incompetent boobs, so it's better to rely on the government, as the government has the power to coerce men to hand over their money and to punish them for unacceptable behavior.

By 1977 no-fault divorce became the law of the land in the United States. Theoretically no-fault divorce is gender neutral, but in practice women initiate around 70% of divorces in the US, and among college educated women that number jumps to 90% [14]. Since women generally marry men who make more money than them, typically the father ends up paying the bills--child support, alimony, lawyer fees. In other words, the typical woman can file divorce, regardless of what her husband thinks, take the kids, the house, and at least half of his personal wealth with her. A massive bureaucratic industry has since grown up around family demolition, whose centerpiece is the family courts, comprised of a shadowy army of judges, lawyers, psychologists, child protective services, child support enforcement agents, mediators, counselors, feminist groups of course, and the list goes on.

In reality, the divorce industry that feminists have helped to create is far worse than this. Dads who have already been financially zeroed out by the divorce and who cannot afford to pay child support are castigated in the media as "deadbeat dads", while the women are frequently propped up as heroines, as single moms bravely navigating this tough world on their own and raising their kids at the same time. And if the insults weren't bad enough, many dads find themselves in jail: "To the abandonment hoax was added the nonpayment of 'child support,' whereby fathers whose children had been confiscated by the divorce courts were required to pay for it through instant 'obligations' they had done nothing to incur and that could well constitute 60–100% of their income and even more. Any arrears are quickly collected by predawn raids at gunpoint. Wild and patently fabricated accusations of wife-beating, child abuse, and pedophilia turned the father into a monster and a pariah with whom no one dared associate. This government-propagated hysteria rationalized its own funding and expansion."[13] (p. 77)

For Baskerville, and for many who have paid close attention to the matter, the divorce industry has worked to disempower fathers while looting them and the taxpayers all at the same time: "The power of this bureaucratic underworld is derived almost entirely from children. It is the world of social work, child psychology, child and family counseling, child care, child protection, foster care, child support enforcement, and juvenile and family courts. Overwhelmingly, it is feminist-dominated … These feminists created and control the vast and impenetrable social services industries that most journalists and scholars find too dreary to scrutinize. In the US they dominate the $53 billion federal Administration for Children and Families, itself part of the gargantuan trillion dollar Department of Health and Human Services. They are both dispensers and recipients of its $350 billion grant program (“larger than all other federal agencies combined,” according to HHS) funding local “human services” or “social services” bureaucracies—by far the largest patronage machine ever created, reaching into almost every household in the land and making the Soviet nomenklatura look ramshackle … that great experiment in open-ended social engineering and government expansion that continues to evolve and wheedle its way into ever more intimate corners of private life, increasingly by bankrupting the most prosperous societies in human history."[13] (pp. 46-47)

No matter. Reeves insists that there is not any sort of discrimination, unfairness, or disadvantaging of men and boys. There is no need to roll back any feminism. The problems are structural, which up until recently had been holding back the girls, they have "had the brakes on". [15] For Reeves the challenge is to figure out how to help males adapt to this new world. To this end, Reeves proposes several solutions.

He suggests "red shirting" boys in early education (which is to hold them back a year) to account for the fact that boy's brains develop more slowly than girls. Another is freeing students and male students in particular from the college railroad, the persistent cultural norm that a four-year college degree is the only path to success. He suggests we work to revive CTE (Career and Technical Education) which certainly has shown to benefit boys and young men. But already I have to raise my hand. We have seen with Aviation High School what happens when boys begin flourishing in a space where girls are not: the feminists marshal their forces to shut it down. I think it's fair to say at this point that feminists now control the education system.

Another solution Reeves offers is encouraging men to get into HEAL professions (Health, Education, Administration and Literacy). I agree with him that more male teachers, particularly at the elementary school level, would give the boys an early and much needed boost. Teaching young kids is generally seen as a pink profession, and nowadays males in this line of work are often suspected of being pedophiles.

As the health care industry is booming, Reeves sees a lot of opportunities for male nurses, but once again, despite numerous campaigns to recruit male nurses, men remain largely recalcitrant: "… the ad featured nine nurses who, as the Center’s Deborah Burton, explained, 'embody male characteristics in our society.' Among them were a former Navy SEAL, a biker, a karate champion, a rugby player, a snowboarder, and an ex-firefighter. The campaign generated media attention. It was certainly a bold effort with precisely the right intent. But it didn’t seem to move the dial in terms of the rate of recruitment of men in the state." [11] (p. 201)

I remember back in grade school, circa 1980, when school counselors brought in football players to pitch Home Economics to boys over traditional Industrial Arts. Even the principal assured us that Home Ec is not for sissies, as these strapping older boys took Home Ec instead of IA and were patently not sissies. As I recall, that didn't move the needle much either. Home Economics is for girls, everyone knew that.

The popular YouTuber Rollo Tomassi I think put his finger on the problem with trying to recruit men into pink professions. Young men who have yet had any experience in the dating market know that working as a nurse or school teacher for a slim paycheck is not going to get them anywhere near desirable women. When they think of a male elementary school teacher, they envision some effeminate man struggling to control screaming kids all day, and then going home to an overweight wife who yells at him for failing at his share of the domestic chores. Most men would rather take their chances with Andrew Tate's Hustler University, gamble on this or that crazy pyramid selling scheme, than face such a dreary future.

Part IV: Men Going Galt

In 1970, 80 percent of 25-to 29-year-old men were married; in 2007, only about 40 percent percent of them were. In 1970, 85 percent of 30- to 34-year-old men were married; in 2007, only 60 percent of them were.

Kay Hymowitz, from Manning Up

According the 1940 census, the work rate for civilian noninstitutional men twenty–to–sixty-four years old was 81.3 percent. In 2015, that rate was 78.4 percent. The work rate for prime-age males in 1940 was reported to be 86.5 percent, two points higher than in 2015 and about a point and a half higher than readings thus far for 2016. In other words, work rates for men appear to be lower today than they were late in the Great Depression when the civilian unemployment rate ran above 14 percent.

Nicholas Eberstadt, from Men Without Work

The Pentagon likewise disputes details of recruitment shortfalls. But the military brass concedes that many branches of the military are still between a third to a quarter short of their recruitment goals—despite the military steadily lowering standards for enlistment

Victor Davis Hanson, from an article in American Greatness, Feb. 16, 2023

Who is John Galt?

The oft repeated question in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged is a verbalized shrug, a colloquialism for "I don't know". They don't know why their society is collapsing. Everything they've been taught on how to think of it only leaves them more confused. Rand was writing about the Soviet Union, but in the novel she imagines the United States of America succumbing to communism.

When we finally meet John Galt more than halfway through the novel we find him living amongst fellow industrialists, entrepreneurs, engineers, medical doctors, artists and scientists in a kind of anarcho-capitalist Paradiso. Galt is in fact leading a strike against an ascendant managerial class who busy themselves with passing sweeping moral laws designed correct human inequality. In practice this amounts to looting the wealth creators in order to support the idle and quarrelsome.

A crisis point has been reached when even the wealthiest industrialists can no longer afford to stay in businesses. So John Galt cleverly grants the new moralists just precisely what they ask for: "Ability is a selfish evil that leaves no chance to those who are less able? We have withdrawn from the competition and left all chances open to incompetents … It is evil to succeed, since success is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? We have ceased burdening the weak with our ambition and have left them free to prosper without us. It is evil to be an employer? We have no employment to offer … We are giving men everything they’ve professed to want and to seek as virtue for centuries. Now let them see whether they want it.” [16]

In a recent Twitter thread venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan notes the increasing number of industrial accidents and construction related mishaps including: the Ohio chemical explosion; airline runway incidents; failed high speed rail; fires from mismanaged forests; million dollar toilets; $300M bus lanes; and $3.5B subways. Why is this happening? He responds: "One answer is that the only type of maintenance that’s even semi-prestigious in American society is software maintenance. That is, it's not prestigious to be plumber, mechanic, or electrician. You can make money, but it doesn't have cultural cachet. And so maintenance suffers." [17]

In her Atlantic magazine piece "The End of Men", Hannah Rosin cites the work of french sociologist Pierre Bourdieu: " … Although the land no longer produced the impressive income it once had, the men felt obligated to tend it. Meanwhile, modern women shunned farm life, lured away by jobs and adventure in the city. They occasionally returned for the traditional balls, but the men who awaited them had lost their prestige and become unmarriageable. This is the image that keeps recurring to me, one that Bourdieu describes in his book: at the bachelors’ ball, the men, self-conscious about their diminished status, stand stiffly, their hands by their sides, as the women twirl away." [18]

While Rosin is correct that technology has reduced the demand for blue collar muscular jobs, jobs in which the larger, broad-shouldered male body possesses an obvious advantage, we still need people in America to do these jobs. But the women are indeed just twirling away from these men, particularly in the dating markets. It is a well established fact that women will seldom date or marry a man who stands below them on the socioeconomic ladder. This is the result of the female prioritization of provision and protection in choosing a mate. As discussed in the preceding section, women are attending universities at higher rates than men, which is still the standard path to a well paying and prestigious professional career. As a result, many women are out-earning men. Recent data shows that women aged 22-29 out-earn their male counterparts [19].

Moreover, data indicates that the higher a woman's socioeconomic status, the stronger her preference for a higher status male mate. The result is an ever growing shortage of men meeting the standards of these modern women: "Cleverly titled the Rise of the SHEconomy, Morgan Stanley forecasts that 45 percent of working women between the ages of 25 and 44 will be single and childless by 2030, the largest share in history." [20]

The problem is further exacerbated by the fact that men are dropping out of the labor force. In his recent book Men Without Work, Nicholas Eberstadt combs through the latest data on the American labor market, focusing on the male flight from paid employment. "To a distressing degree, these men appear to have relinquished what we think of ordinarily as adult responsibilities not only as breadwinners but as parents, family members, community members, and citizens. Having largely freed themselves of such obligations, they fill their days in the pursuit of more immediate sources of gratification. While a minority (those in training or further education) can be seen as pursuing or already possessing a vocation in life, the vast majority cannot be so described. On the contrary, the data here suggest that something like infantilization besets some un-working men." [21] One interesting observation he makes, in addition: "Between 1972 and 2014, formal worship was on the decline among all American adults, but the proportion of un-working men who never went to worship was distinctly higher than for men with work." [21] (p.101)

The feminists can only offer shame with books like Manning Up (Kay Hymowitz), Save the Males (Kathleen Parker), Why Boys Fail (Richard Whitmire), etc.. The traditional conservatives are seldom much better. Boys need to grow up, man up, and do their damn jobs. Which, admittedly, is a fair point. What they miss, and what their dripping condescension reveals, is that they cannot see men as rational beings who respond to incentives. Sure, many men are louts, many are lazy ne'er-do-wells, the despair of society, but there appears to be many more men who are simply assessing the conditions on the ground and deciding that it just ain't worth it. In other words, men are going on strike, an observation made by psychologist Helen Smith now over a decade ago: "What [Hannah Rosin] doesn’t mention is that this new world order is a place where men are discriminated against, forced into a hostile environment in school and later in college, and held in contempt by society—and for the honor, are expected to conform to a society for women only. What she calls inflexibility is men rejecting her and other feminists’ suggestions that they become more like women. She has no clue how men really feel or why they behave the way they do, nor does she seem to care." [22]

History documents the achievements of men. It is a fact that, relative to men, comparatively few women have built anything of lasting value: in technology, in the arts, in philosophy, in politics. The motivations of men have roots that extend all the way down to basic biology--the more they achieve, the better their chances of finding an attractive mate and producing offspring like them. A lot of what we read in the history books are the endeavors of men going to unbelievable extremes to distinguish themselves, to be first, to be famous, to cover themselves with glory. From guitarists performing feats of unbelievable complexity, to explorers like Captain Cook, to entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, to the ordinary Spartan soldier staring down death to prove his worth--we write their histories because such men changed our lives and deserve our reverence.

Yet should you deny men and boys their history, deny them their unique form of human energy, dismiss it as toxic, then perhaps you will bring about the end of men. Attack technical schools were boys thrive and implement affirmative action programs for girls, and you dash the boy's sense of a unique and respectable path forward in life. Get rid of recess and competitive sports through Title IX and you undermine the young man's desire to win, to earn trophies, get his name in the local paper. Promote women in the professional world, demand said world become more female friendly (maternity leave, child care, speech codes, etc.), blast the message that men must step aside to atone for historical oppression of women, and you undermine the man's motivation to get ahead. Make it known that the average blue collar man is a lowly and undatable servant in the eyes of modern woman, that his advances on such women are likely to be regarded as sexual harassment, and many men will retreat into the safer world of virtual reality and pornography. And for the eligible bachelors who do succeed and marry, put them on perpetual probation with unilateral, no-fault divorce laws and a massive Soviet style bureaucracy whereby a woman can order her husband out of the house at any time, take his money and children, and if he resists have him arrested on domestic violence charges. Beat this drum 24/7, in the news, movies, literature, pop psychology: men are toxic!, the future is female!, stand aside!, check your privilege! and on, and on. This is what is happening in the West. Is it any wonder that men are resisting by refusing to engage? Is is any wonder that, like John Galt, many men have decided to give the feminists just precisely what they ask for by withholding themselves and seeing just how much the other half likes it?

The feminists will rejoin that they can get along fine without men. Recall we quoted Richard Reeves as saying "economically independent women can now flourish whether they are wives or not." But are women, en masse, really capable of economic independence? Let's look at some numbers: More than 50% of welfare recipients are single mothers [23]. In the United States, welfare accounts for about 15% of the total federal budget (a little over $1 trillion in 2020). Women are the primary recipients of welfare, being 85% of food stamp beneficiaries (SNAP). [24] And there are benefit programs which are exclusive to women such as WIC.

While more and more women are now working and paying taxes, still the burden falls mostly on men. Approximately 20% of Americans earn more than $100K/year [25], and about 2/3 of them are men. The top 20% of earners in America pay approximately 80% of all federal income tax [26]. Which means that the top 20% of men pay more than half of all income taxes (53%). So most federal income tax comes out of the pockets of men and goes into the pockets of women, at least those receiving welfare. An exhaustive analysis of who pays to whom in America is well beyond the scope of this essay. I only wish to make the point that the basic gender dynamic, which is the result of long evolved sex differences, has not gone away, rather it has been displaced from the most natural and direct arrangement of husbands providing for wives and kids to Big Daddy Government floating a raft of single moms.

William Collins makes a similar observation for the UK: "Men pay 73% of the income tax into the Exchequer. This funds the public sector, two-thirds of whose employees are women. The public sector enjoys far more lucrative pension provisions than the private sector, similar provisions having almost disappeared from the private sector due to unsustainable costs…In short, the economy is 'gendered' in the sense that money flows from men to women." [9] (pp. 291-292)

Now let us have a look at the following chart of US dept to GDP over the past 200 years:

Prior to the 1960's, in the bad old days of the oppressive patriarchy, debt/GDP was generally under 20%. The only exceptions being the three major wars: the Civil War, First and Second World Wars. Following WWII, when debt/GDP crested over 100%, it began recovering and appeared to be headed for its normal level of around 20% when it begins climbing again, starting in the 1970's. And then it's up, up, and away, with debt/GDP now over 100% -- and that's prior to the covid pandemic. I understand that correlation is not causation, and thus far I have not succeeded in unearthing the data which would prove causation, so I offer the following as a hypothesis.

Wealthy, industrialized societies like the United States can offer plenty of gainful employment in safe environments which require good people skills. Such jobs are well suited to women, and many women appear happy to take them. Many such jobs are white collar jobs, require a university degree, pay well and have a good deal of social prestige. In the US, women are now the majority of university graduates, and as of 2019 they comprised 52% of lawyers [27] and over 75% of all health care workers [28].

Well that all sounds great. But feminists are not happy with women merely having a satisfying career, they want women at the top, beating the boys, with the emphasis on the latter. They are female supremacists. To this end they continually push for more female-friendly working environments, more affirmative action in hiring and promotion, most of which come at the expense of men and of corporations. "[Men's] well-being and job security have been under attack through a decades-long feminist campaign to protect and promote women at men’s expense: this has occurred through affirmative action hiring and the insistence on transforming workplace culture to make it welcoming of women (and hostile to men)" writes Janice Fiamengo. Feminist activism in the workplace has thus resulted in "decades-long unfairness—often legally enforced—to shoe-horn women into elite jobs they didn’t earn and to support their oft-unreasonable demands for accommodation, up to and including the firing of men deemed to have caused female discomfort." [29]

Another issue is that, short of biologically modifying human females, there is no way of getting around the fact that a woman's peak fertility happens between 18 and 28 years of age, which also coincides with the apprenticeship period of any highly skilled profession. Jordan Peterson recounts the time he had spent as a clinician with female lawyers, brilliant hard working women who made partner in prestigious law firms only to find out that they really wanted to be moms above anything else. This is obviously a sub-optimal situation, both for the women who invested so heavily in a career they would discover was not for them, and for the corporation who now has to find a replacement for a highly skilled worker. [30]

The plain fact is that women are not designed to be providers, or perhaps we should say, primary providers. I think many women enjoy careers so long as they are not under the gun to make all financial ends meet--they'd rather hand that off to a man. Many women want careers so long as that career does not deprive them of a certain amount of family time. This is certainly one reason why there are so few female CEO's. To make the job of CEO accommodating to a woman's priorities would necessary handicap the corporation against its not so female friendly competitors.

Moreover, while few women actually meet the demands of the top paying professions, they also do not seem to care much, nor really have ability for, all the necessary blue collar jobs–plumbers, roofers, farmers, miners, auto mechanics, computer techs, truck drivers, etc. –without which Ms. Career Woman would never be able to do her job, nay, would probably not even be able to survive. The maintenance of a prosperous modern society still falls largely on the shoulders of men whom feminists like Hannah Rosin sneer at and deride from their ivory towers, publishing houses, and posh media suites. Our modern civilization still very much depends on men. Its critical infrastructure cannot continue to function without them.

Thus I hold that, though admittedly as yet a hypothesis, even the wealthiest, most advanced societies like the United States cannot afford to sideline their men, who have evolved as primary wealth producers and technicians, while the women go on to run the world. The accommodating of work environments to female preferences does not scale. Firstly because it costs too much. The social experiment which began in the 1960’s in the US, of making women and men interchangeable, while simultaneously pushing women en masse into the traditionally male arena productive labor, is leading us to bankruptcy.

Now I would like to argue that the problem goes far deeper than the financial challenges. Richard Reeves states: “the male malaise is not the result of a mass psychological breakdown, but of deep structural challenges.” I disagree. Our current malaise is the result of trying to turn women into men so that men are no longer needed. While structural problems do indeed exist–outsourcing manufacturing jobs overseas, etc. –the root of the problem is psychological, energetic and spiritual. Reeves even notes that ” …not only are many boys and men struggling, they are less likely to be helped by policy interventions.” Nicholas Eberstadt notes that permanent unemployment is statistically lower among men who are religious than those who are secular. Evidently religion provides these men with a buffer against the cultural onslaught, provides them with a place not only in society but in all of Creation, in God’s plan, and that, among other things, significantly increases their productivity.

All successful cultures are able to harmonize often dissonant natural impulses. Monogamous marriage, for example, reigns in a man’s proclivity to pursue as many sexual partners as he can get his hands on by harmonizing his desire for sex with his pride in being an owner and a chief, the king of his castle. A woman’s natural hypergamy (to constantly seek higher status males), on the other hand, is reigned in by her desire for financial security and stable environment in which to bear a child, which she seeks in the form of a good husband. From all the research I have seen, this traditional arrangement is also best for children.

While monogamous marriage as understood in the Judeo-Christian tradition many not be the only way of effectively organizing human society, it appears better than anything else that has yet been tried. Phyllis Schlafly: “It should be clear that most social problems and many financial problems are caused by the absence of the nuclear family. The majority of suicides, runaways, school dropouts, kids using illegal drugs, teen pregnancies, and other social ills come from mother-headed homes. Likewise for those who end up in jail … Do you want Congress to cut taxpayer spending and balance the federal budget? Do you want Congress to stop raising the debt limit and to start paying down the national debt? Do you want to reduce or even eliminate the handouts of cash and benefits for living expenses that are paid monthly to nearly half of all Americans, creating widespread dependency on government? … No way can any of that happen unless we restore the nuclear family as the lifestyle of the majority of Americans, so families can support themselves without welfare handouts and government infringement.” [31]

Nowadays the entertainment industry routinely pushes the feminist social prescription. In a series of videos titled “Why Modern Movies Suck”, the film critic who goes by the name of Critical Drinker says: “The traditional heroic male lead which was pretty much the bedrock foundation of cinema for almost 100 years is apparently no longer a viable commodity … they’ve been replaced with more acceptable alternatives. Don’t believe me? Fuck it. Go turn on your TV and watch basically any commercial break that comes up in the next hour or so. Tell me how many dumb, hapless, incompetent husbands, fathers and boyfriends do you see constantly screwing up even the most simple household tasks and needing someone more diverse to bail them out? Go ahead, I’ll wait.” [32]

Life follows art only when art is able to harness genuine passion, when art is in some way beautiful. Feminized cinema appears to do no such thing, but is rather an attempt to re-engineer humans so that women rise to feminist approved positions of power. For reasons discussed above, this runs against many natural human currents and does not appear to achieve any sort of harmony. Hence it is ugly and nihilistic, and most people turn away. So called “woke” movies have thus far enjoyed little commercial success.

Contra Reeves, I think the extent to which the feminists have infected our culture is causing, if not a mass psychological breakdown, a lot of psychological duress, especially for men, though for women as well [33]. The feminist vision of society requires too much artifice and nature balks. One consequence is a distressing and increasing number of “men on strike”. I doubt the male recession will end until some conditions are met. My top three are as follows:

The feminists need to stop crying and lying about male dominance in technical fields like computer science, or in leadership positions like corporate CEO’s, as if it stands as evidence of an unfair and oppressive patriarchy. The natural competitiveness of males and their propensity to form strict hierarchies lends itself to the public sphere, to industry, to politics, to science, and is why Western Civ, from which nearly everyone has benefited, was almost entirely built by men. Feminists need to recognize the unique role of masculine energy in the world, and–this is critical–defer to it. They cannot sufficiently replicate it to take over the world. They must learn some humility and accept their place in the natural order.

Secondly, the feminists need to recognize the unique roles that fathers play in raising children. The weaponized divorce and family court system of which Stephen Baskerville writes needs a major overhaul (or perhaps even better, a funeral), and no-fault divorce needs to be abolished.

Third, all affirmative action needs to be ended. As for the United States, its own Declaration of Independence states: “[all humans] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The Declaration does not endorse affirmative action, only the underwriting of individual autonomy. Let men and women freely choose their paths in life, let them have their adventures, and let the chips fall where they will.

The men I respect do not want favors nor pity, they only want a fair deal. They want to work at something that is important and useful. They want to display their talents in competition, and may the best man win. They want the love and respect of women, and they want a good wife. If there is anything like hope to be found in our current predicament, it is perhaps that men will once again have a mission that is great, clear, and urgent: to restore Western Civilization. Even perhaps–with men being the inveterate tinkerers that they are–to improve upon it.

References

[1] Aristophanes. The Birds and Other Plays (Penguin Classics) (pp. 229-230). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

[2] Durant, Will. The Life of Greece: The Story of Civilization, Volume II (p. 163). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

[3]

(starting at 24:54)

[4]

(starting at 52:35).

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jun/22/the-age-of-patriarchy-how-an-unfashionable-idea-became-a-rallying-cry-for-feminism-today

[6] Buss, David M.. The Evolution of Desire (p. 32). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

[7] https://www.nature.com/articles/npre.2009.3238.1

[8] Moxon, Steve. The Woman Racket (p. 70). Andrews UK - Academic. Kindle Edition.

[9] Collins, William. The Empathy Gap: Male Disadvantages and the Mechanisms of Their Neglect (p. 135). LPS publishing. Kindle Edition.

[10] Farrell, Warren . The Boy Crisis (p. 28). BenBella Books. Kindle Edition.

[11] Reeves, Richard V.. Of Boys and Men (p. 26). Brookings Institution Press. Kindle Edition.

[12] Sommers, Christina Hoff. The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men (pp. 7-8). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

[13] Baskerville, Stephen. The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Governmental Power (p. 44). Angelico Press. Kindle Edition.

[14] https://sasforwomen.com/7-reasons-why-women-initiate-divorce-more-often-than-men/

[15]

(starting at 19:00)

[16] Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged (p. 741). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[17] https://www.revolver.news/2023/02/america-lost-hardworking-men-who-held-her-together-and-now-she-is-crumbling/

[18] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/308135/

[19] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-in-20s-earn-more-men-same-age-study-finds?ref=quillette], and are now the primary breadwinners of 40% of American households.

[20] https://quillette.com/2021/06/28/mate-selection-for-modernity/

[21] Eberstadt, Nicholas. Men Without Work (New Threats to Freedom Series) (p. 102). Templeton Press. Kindle Edition.

[22] Smith, Helen. Men on Strike . Encounter Books. Kindle Edition (p. 8)

[23] https://www.creditdonkey.com/welfare-statistics.html

[24] https://prosperitynow.org/blog/welfare-policies-impede-gender-equity

[25] [https://www.zippia.com/advice/how-many-people-make-over-100k

[26] https://taxfoundation.org/rich-pay-their-fair-share-of-taxes/

[27] https://www.zippia.com/advice/what-percentage-of-lawyers-are-female/%5D

[28] https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2022/over-16-million-women-worked-in-health-care-and-social-assistance-in-2021.htm

[29]

[30]

[31] Schlafly, Phyllis. Who Killed the American Family? (p. 224). WND Books. Kindle Edition

[32]

[33] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.1.2.190

The cameras are rolling.

Jacinda bears her arm to the nurse, though not without stealing one last glance at the vial to be sure that she's getting the placebo. She knows her company as the best of friends. They share the most noble vision for the Earth and all creatures great and small. But she also knows the power brokerages of the world, inhabiting one of them herself. One can never be too careful.

All good. The innocuous solution is injected and Jacinda makes a brief statement to the bank of cameras before her. "Be a good citizen of the world. Do it for your loved ones, do it for your neighbors, let's get through this pandemic together. Get vaccinated!" The applause follows, and the cameras depart.

When we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong

Jacinda is bemused by the subtle pulsing in Klaus's body which her feminine perceptions read like a palimpsest on the prodigiously serious gait of the aging visionary. She has to stifle a giggle imagining the young Klaus, with long hair and raging hormones. All of that sexual lust which has since flowed as from a fuel line to power his long, arcing intellectual career. The music of Crosby, Stills, Nash--the music of his youth, had suddenly, irresistibly summoned a decades old version of this man as if by hypnotic charm.

They shake hands. "You are one of the few who can make a real difference," he says with that disarming warmth. "We are but a small band of friends, but our influence is immense. I think you already know this. But sometimes we all need a reminder of what we are trying to accomplish, how important it is."

Klaus saw, or perhaps thought he saw, a cloud of doubt pass over her face.

Just beyond the hotel is one of the most spectacular views imaginable. IPhones are great, but not worth losing these priceless--and irreplaceable--treasures. Jacinda had learned her lessons, taught to her by the master. You give wealth to a fool he will only squander it. Nearly every lottery winner has done just that. There's a reason why most poor people remain poor. Yet a super-intelligent and industrious minority of humans have bestowed an unbelievable bounty upon humanity. Nowadays people can travel almost anywhere in the world in less than 24 hours; drive automobiles, dine on nearly any menu they like. They live in great sprawling suburbs with homes full of appliances, all of which gobble up scads of energy. The Everyman has won the lottery on the backs of the brights, and the result is senseless and destructive hedonism. Thousands of species of animals who have lived for millions of years will go as the dodo so that some overfed dumbass can drive a pickup truck. And Klaus' band of world leaders are not even counted among the brights, they are merely their custodians, those who must see to it that the idiocy of the world does not drive them extinct as well.

I'm goin' down to Yasgur's farm, gonna join in a rock n' roll band

The smartly dressed, brown skinned steward emerges into the plushly decorated conference room holding a massive silver platter which he is eager to set down on account of his already aching arms. Sliced melons, strawberries, pineapple and golden apple cuts draw in one's attention against his white, double-breasted coat.

Moments later his similarly skinned compatriot sets down a platter of cheeses and crackers, and finally a short, young lady sets down two silver urns of coffee and tea. The attendees are filing in. Klaus always has a small entourage, for he is, despite his overt modesty, a prophet of Biblical proportion. Handsome Justin is not far behind, immaculately dressed in the finest silks. Head always cocked slight upward, he commands deference. Jacinda could not help notice how good looking he is, although his obsequiousness to women like her makes him suspect as well.

Two hours later the refreshments tray is picked over. Empty coffee cups sit on crumpled thick cloth napkins, stained with brown semi-circles. Some yawns for lack of sunlight and physical activity has afflicted the attendees. But just now everyone sits erect and at attention. Klaus has taken the stage to address his flock.

"The vaccine has reached nearly seventy percent of the world population, and unquestioned success …" Everyone here knows the score. Releasing an engineered virus into the general public was always risky, as it could mutate into something deadly enough to kill everyone, including themselves. But their in-house scientists assured them the chances were remote. China's one-child policy was the last of the overt top-down measures to control population. Governments cannot operate in the open like they used to. America put an end to that. Other countries have followed suit. Their peoples will resist as hard as their leaders try to push. A manufactured pandemic, on the other hand, though risky from a health standpoint, provides ample cover for a trial mass sterilization program. Of course not everyone who took the vaccine would suffer this side effect, by design, only about 10-20% of them.

And maybe it's the time of year, and maybe it's the time of Man

On the east corner of the lobby, through the long, vertical windows, one looks down upon an ugly concrete loading bay. The raw ingredients of tonight's buffet supper, of grass-fed beef, free-range turkey, shrimp and lobster, organic vegetables, coffee, teas and pastries are packed in plastic crates, handled by broad shouldered men. Jacinda's eye falls as if by gravity on one of those men, wearing a muscle shirt, his splendid male physique polished with his own sweat. " My bended hook shall pierce their slimy jaws, and as I draw them up I'll think them everyone an Antony, and say 'Ah ha, you're caught!'" She allowed herself to get lost in a whimsical moment, expressed in a line of Shakespeare. She needed a break from business. "A girl needs pets" she muses, shaking her long, black hair coquettishly.

Suddenly she realizes that Justin is standing behind her. He had crept up silently as a snake. Jacinda froze, wondering if he had learned her thoughts, if she had accidentally voiced them within his earshot. "Whale watching tomorrow should be great fun" he opens. Innocuous enough, and she is satisfied that he had not discerned anything, that he only seen her titillations at the sight of the muscular man and a stab of sexual jealousy had brought him over.

Justin represented the new man. Tall and handsome, clean and splendidly attired, straight teeth, skin clear and soft, and eyes that pierced. He was perfectly adapted to polite society, as good as any woman, and capable of social calculation which made him a most deft politician. Tomorrow Klaus and the band of future leaders--for they were all undeniably in ascendancy--would board a private charter jet to Vigo, Spain, where they would board the Sueno del Mar, a 100-foot luxury yacht, to go watch the orca whales in their southern migration. "Mark says that the migrations are getting stronger for the orcas. And they may have their babies with them" Justin continues.

Jacinda smiled at the image of the baby whales. Babies, even from another species, will make most any woman smile.

"Oh yes", she replies, quickly finishing up her internal calculations, "It shall be wonderful. The Spanish coast is so lovely, lovely of Klaus to arrange the excursion, a perfect way to conclude the conference."

From just a few paces away Mark comes into their conversation. "My ears are burning" he says, with a laugh. But he almost immediately turns back around, realizing that he is about to be introduced to some initiates to the global leadership group.

Introductions are exchanged. The new members fix their attention onto Mark, admiringly. "So happy to have you. Our ranks are swelling. People are learning the future of a sustainable earth. In fact Klaus believes in as little as one hundred years from now humans will live in perfect ecological balance with the earth. Industrial wastelands will become forests of life. Our food will be nutritious and safe, once again, done with chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Oceans will be teeming with fish. Oh I hope you will be joining us on the whale watch tomorrow? It shall be magical, I assure you!".

By his peripheral vision Mark can see Klaus summoning him. Mark motions Jacinda to take his place. Jacinda is a star. The initiates knew of her recent stirring speech on the new lines of war, the information wars, and the need to insure that information online is properly sourced and vetted. And more to the point, those who spread disinformation are properly dealt with by the authorities. The combination of intellect and female intuition and empathy made her a paragon of global leadership. Amongst her devotees it bordered on worship.

We are stardust, we are golden
We are caught in the devil's bargain

Klaus clicks the latch and double checks with Mark to be sure that all electronics are switched off.

"You know you can't just put them all to the sword like in ancient times" Klaus began, picking up where they had last left off in the argument. Klaus' face became slightly flushed with irritation, as his physiology had just picked up where it left off as well.

Men are the problem. The problem is always with men, especially the young adult ones.

"That's what women are for" Mark counters reflexively.

"Indeed" says Klaus, "why men in the First World War would rather be ground up meat than receive a white feather from a female, but … " and then he turns to look at Mark, "men are being pushed. There's always the crazy misogynists, the men's rights crowd, no problem there, they have no credibility, but you have an increasing number of mainstream conservatives all upset over the dissolution of the nuclear family. They show studies, stats, broadcast on the internet, we cannot ignore them."

"Yes but even conservative men have accepted female empowerment." Mark parries, "And those empowered women are having fewer kids, and a female head of the household is far more likely to comply with demands of the state. Girls thrive in school, they love the institution and soon become greatly interested in preserving it. And the boys are doing so badly, and are so unappealing, that many of the girls will grow into independent, single women not interested in marrying. The men are psychologically so deflated by rejection that they are largely harmless. All of this works toward a sustainable population goal, you know."

"Agree. But you forget that the male population also provides with the bulk of the innovators. We are always racing our foes with technology. The problem is separating the wheat from the chaff. Plus no one has ever managed the entire globe. A military is not yet obsolete, the special forces need men. Females and pansies can do a lot with technology, but you still need the fighters with boots on, no way around that yet."

Mark stops to think for a moment.

"You see my point, Mark" continues Klaus, taking the opportunity to fill the silence with more of himself, "only about ten percent of human males are worth anything in a post industrial, post agricultural economy. And of those ten percent there's just a handful who are indispensable to our success. The problem is that it is very difficult to identify that indispensable few until most of the cohort has matured."

Mark emerges from this thoughts and resumes: "The feminists are highly effective, I think you still underestimate them. We now have quite a few boys who want to be girls, convinced that it is their only route to social acceptance. Naturally a few exceptional males will break away, it's statistics. They may be our enemies or may become the few indispensable ones. The women are good at spotting these men. For those who remain stubborn enemies of the state, they are yet no match for the state."

"Don't be so sure. We are still trying to square a circle, you understand. Social pressures work on most men, they quickly understand that they are powerless and have no choice but to work for us. But the exceptional ones who have what it takes to break through may also break us, the Genghis Kahn's of the world."

"Injectible nano-technologies are showing promise" says Mark as a tentative rebuttal, "though it's not anything to scale yet, and it poses its own problems" adding his tentative retraction. "Honey traps still work like a charm, though. Tempt married men with beautiful young women, single men with under-aged ones, gay men with boys. Get it on tape and you own their reputation. It rarely fails."

"So long as we control global information flow" Klaus counters, having now adopted the role of the skeptic in the conversation.

"It's solid, Klaus. Tech and media is onboard, I have few doubts of that" says Mark, squaring himself back up before Klaus.

"That's good. That's good." replies Klaus, trailing off and disengaging. He moves toward the door and rotates the handle. The latch clinks and the door is opened.

The muted din of merrymakers challenges the thickly carpeted hallway. As they open the door to the dining hall it roars with a great deal more treble. Everyone has been waiting for Klaus to show so that they can be seated. The several tables are piled with feast. The wine flows. Klaus steps to the head of the longest table, picks up a champagne flute and raps on it three times with a fork. It rings like a church bell. The room suddenly falls quiet.

"To our beautiful Earth, and to our friends in this movement. And to our children and the splendid inheritance we shall bestow upon them. Ours is a noble cause, it is a great cause, so let us now celebrate so many wonderful things which are on the way."

Cheers erupt. The guests are seated. Now they can eat.

We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we have to get ourselves
Back to the Garden

Author's note: All people, places, and conversations in this piece are fictional.

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