Complaints of “toxic” workplaces. Mass hiring of diversity-equity-inclusion commissars. Open-borders immigration sold to the public with tear-jerking images of refugee children. Trans mania spreading everywhere from kindergarten classrooms to corporate C-suites. Personal pronouns in work email signatures. White women kneeling in prayerful mass protests after yet another African-heritage male with a mile-long rap sheet resists a cop and is shot. Removal of traditional due-process rules to favor women’s sex claims. Talk of “reparations” on a trillion-dollar scale, to remedy racial inequalities. Ever-stricter limits on acceptable speech, debate and scientific inquiry. Declining support for truth itself, if the truth might cause hurt feelings. A heavy emphasis on trauma and victimhood in news media, literature, law, and psychiatry. Open governmental discrimination against white males.

All these are manifestations of a societal climate change that has been underway since the 1950s, with a sharply increased pace in recent years. The causes are many, but one is more important than all the rest put together. I am referring to the entry of women into public life, which—particularly in recent decades as women have ascended to the upper ranks of all important institutions—has given them unprecedented cultural and political power.

I’ve been writing about this for more than a decade. During most of that time, my hypothesis was rejected or ignored, presumably because it was considered too heretical. In the past year and a half, other more prominent figures have started to write about some of the particular institutional effects of women’s new power (e.g., on academia), presumably in part because it has become just too obvious to ignore. What I think is still being missed—or suppressed—is the true extent of this process of cultural feminization, and, more importantly, the disastrous future towards which it is driving.

The ubiquity of cultural feminization

Women’s new power is being wielded, and felt, not just in the universities, not just in H.R. offices, not just among mainstream media corporations and big publishing houses, not just among millennials, but everywhere, affecting everyone. It is what I have called a general “pink shift” in the culture. The fact that even traditionally macho institutions such as the military and sports leagues have been affected is a good indication of its power and breadth.

Women’s ascension to power in institutions, and in public life generally, has altered the culture for the simple reason that women, on average, do not think and act as men do. They are more emotionally sensitive and compassionate, more tuned into people and direct relationships rather than abstract rules and systems and hierarchies. They are quicker to form and join social networks, and to spread social contagions. They are more risk-averse, less interested in conquest and exploration, and more sensitive to environmental threats. They have less tolerance for the stressful combat of free debate, less respect for scientific inquiry for its own sake, less patience with the idea of judicial due process. Probably as a result of being more emotionally sensitive, they seem more easily influenced by narratives that emphasize short-term, emotion-evoking consequences, and seem less interested in dry analyses of long-term outcomes. Perhaps especially when they are childless (or their children have “left the nest”), they are more likely to embrace the “disadvantaged” of the world as their virtual children, feeling emotional pain at persistent inequalities among them, and seeking to alleviate that pain by almost any means necessary.

Of course, women differ among themselves in the strengths of their psychological traits, as do men. But the basic idea here is that the two sexes’ overlapping “bell curves” of trait distributions have significantly different averages or means, which I think is evident even on small, organizational scales, but is seismically obvious on a civilization level.

In short, women collectively have their own distinct perspective on the world, and, now that their power exceeds men’s, they are showing their disdain for the world men made, declaring: “We can do better.”

But can they do better? And why is this important question missing from Western public discourse?

Hiding their power

I had trouble getting my earlier essays on cultural feminization published even in smaller, decidedly conservative media. I can’t be absolutely certain of the reasons, but, as everywhere else in media, there were always female editors in the decision chain—often at the top—and of course thousands of female subscribers who might be angered by anything frame-able as “anti-women.”

The idea that women have unprecedented cultural power, and with it have been dramatically reshaping most of the world’s societies, is, of course, not inherently anti-women. Why can’t women just accept their triumph and take a victory lap? Why does there appear to be not just an overlooking of this historic social phenomenon but even (apart from a few opinion pieces) a sort of conspiracy of silence about it, especially among women?

One explanation is obvious. Women as the physically weaker, more risk-averse sex have traditionally wielded power less openly and directly. As such, they tend not to want to reveal their power, let alone crow over it; they prefer to emphasize their weakness and chronic victimization—which, among other effects, triggers a protective reflex among many men.

I don’t think that’s a complete explanation, though. I think that women like to hide their power not only because it’s more effective when hidden, but also because they realize, deep down, that female supremacy is hard to defend as an optimal way of steering civilization.

Even the feminist who openly seeks absolute female power—the kind of woman who asks “why do we need men?”—is well aware of (has “internalized”) the traditional, disparaging view of the female mindset. This is the view (one might call it the Aristotelian view, though it has been expressed by modern women as different as Ann Coulter and Camille Paglia) that women, relative to men, are irrational, flighty, suggestible, overly emotional, unstable, given to herd thinking, and prone to hysterias and other social contagions. And although this traditional view may seem crude and unfair, most women at least understand that there really is such a thing as the “female mindset,” that it does involve greater emotional sensitivity and people-centeredness in most situations, and that it makes women better mothers than they would be if they were more male-brained.

But is this female mindset somehow superior to the traditional male mindset when it comes to shaping culture and policy? I have never seen or heard a woman make this claim explicitly, probably because the weakness of the claim is obvious. Why would a female, maternal mindset be superior in the public sphere, when it is an adaptation for a very different environment, i.e., actual maternity, which in fact has occurred traditionally within the protective bounds of male-managed society? By the same token, why would the male mindset be inferior when it must be, at least in part, an adaptation for the public sphere—where men have reigned from the dawn of hominids?

It seems to me that women, having no solid argument to justify their cultural and political ascendancy (“it’s our turn” “men are toxic”), and knowing that debates in general play to male strengths, have decided simply to avoid the issue by pretending their ascendancy hasn’t occurred.

Female empowerment leads to social collapse

Not every social change driven by this “Great Feminization” process has been adverse, but it does seem that most have—and that the net effect is increasingly dystopian.

These bad consequences also seem very predictable, at least from a male perspective.

Some examples:

New, lenient policing and sentencing laws.

Short-term goal: Stop police oppression of African-Americans.

Long-term effects: Incentivization of law-breaking, rampant crime, business flight.

Municipal laws that prevent removal of homeless and other street people, offer food etc.

Short-term goal: Treat homeless people with compassion.

Long-term effects: Incentivization of homelessness, filthy encampments that spoil large areas of the city, more crime, business flight.

Generous welfare policies

Short-term goal: Treat the disadvantaged with compassion, reduce hunger, etc.

Long-term effects: Incentivization of indigency, spread of welfare dependency, impairment of family-formation (mothers lose incentive to marry), plus all the social pathologies that follow from these.

Promotion of anti-traditional behaviors/lifestyles (homosexuality, transsexualism)

Short-term goal: Empower the marginalized.

Long-term effects: Weakening of social norms, spread of what is effectively antisocial (anti-family) behavior, spread of associated mental illness in the most impressionable, i.e., children and young adults.

Opposition to restrictions on immigration

Short-term goal: Help the “huddled masses” (i.e., the same maternal sentiments expressed in Emma Lazarus’s famous sonnet.)

Long-term effects: Incentivization of mass/illegal immigration. Destruction of national identity, lowering of trust, increase in despair, price inflation, brain-drain in origin countries, etc.

Restriction of speech, debate, legal due-process, scientific inquiry

Short-term goal: Prevent the emotional turmoil caused by “hateful” arguments, concepts, or simple observations, e.g., of racial differences in cognitive and behavioral traits.

Long-term effects: Destruction of liberal norms, a maternal “because I said so!” illiberalism, corruption of scientific culture, reversal of scientific progress.

Promotion of equal outcomes vs. equality of opportunity

Short-term goal: Reduce conflict and promote fairness by directly reducing financial inequality (resembling a classic maternal strategy for promoting harmony among children—also probably the norm in family-based paleolithic groupings)

Long-term effects: Destruction of normal, healthy incentives to succeed. Promotion of lazy, redistributive attitude (“I’m a victim of racism—give me money”). A centerpiece of communism/socialism and a key reason for its failure.

Promotion of “harm reduction” strategies (e.g., free needles) against illicit drug use

Short-term goal: Reduce mortality and hospitalizations due to drug overdoses.

Long-term effects: Incentivization of drug use.

The overall pattern should be clear: The feminine mindset, with its focus on short-term, feelgood outcomes in the culture and policy realm, tends to set up perverse incentives, thereby basically guaranteeing bad long-term outcomes.

Incidentally, the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has famously argued, with experimental evidence, that the “female brain,” compared to the “male brain,” is less good at understanding and building systems. It is easy to see why this would be so, if the feminine mindset is relatively blind to the mechanisms that determine a system’s long-run performance—the system in question here being the system of humans called society.

Women’s greater focus on the emotional and the short-term has other adverse impacts on culture and policy. One is the “witch-hunt,” social-contagion-prone atmosphere that now suffuses Western (esp. Anglo-American) culture—and I think derives from the heightened feminine sensitivity to the stress of debate (including greater pain from the cognitive dissonance generated by opposing arguments), and the broader feminine need for emotional harmony in groups. The speed with which women, led by their woke high priestesses, have been dismantling Western traditions in favor of fads and frenzies such as “gender-affirming care for children,” is stunning and ominous.

Even more ominous, though, is the weakness of public opposition, which, of course, is due largely to women’s reluctance even to acknowledge their power, let alone restrain its excesses.

Will the West continue to collapse by a slow process of social dissolution? It’s easy to picture that happening simply as a continuation of trends our cultural matriarchy promotes: Third-World-ization via immigration, white self-hatred, discrimination against men, low Western fertility, diversity over merit, sanctioned lawlessness for protected racial groups, etc. It’s also plausible that the collapse will be more sudden and catastrophic, via, say, lost wars, surrenders to invader-immigrants who are not so feminized (or so civilized), or even, one day, the sentimental granting of civil rights to “sentient” machines. Anyway, as far as I can see, all paths in our feminized civilization lead to the failure of that civilization. It’s almost beside the point to note that that failure will bring this brief, strange period of female cultural hegemony to a close.

* * *

United Airlines flight 93 was the one that crashed into a field in Pennsylvania on 9/11/01, instead of being flown into the US Capitol. The reason it crashed into a field in Pennsylvania was that a group of passengers, ordinary peace-loving Americans, put aside their fears of immediate harm from the edged weapons held by the hijackers and united with one goal: to storm the cockpit, kill the hijackers, and regain control of the plane. Although they didn’t succeed in regaining control of the plane, they did at least induce the hijackers to crash it prematurely.

These passengers had the advantage of knowing, from communications with people on the ground, what was up that morning—and thus, what their hijackers probably intended to do with the plane. So really they knew they had nothing to lose. Among the many sounds the cockpit voice-recorder picked up in the final minutes of the flight, was that of a food cart being rammed against the cockpit door, and a cry from one of the passengers, “In the cockpit! If we don’t, we’ll die!”

According to Wikipedia, “Vice President Dick Cheney, in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center deep under the White House, authorized Flight 93 to be shot down, but upon learning of the crash, is reported to have said, ‘I think an act of heroism just took place on that plane.’”

He was right. But the heroism of the flight 93 passengers was a different kind of heroism than the lone-actor heroism we’re more used to reading about. It was a heroism involving a coming-together, a coalescence, of people who could accomplish a heroic task only when in a “united state.”

The rarity of that kind of coalescence nowadays points to a basic conundrum of human affairs, especially governance. In other words, even when a large mass of people has ample justification for rebelling against the relatively small group of individuals who control their lives, and ample means to do so—if united—they almost never unite effectively.

*

Consider the recent unprecedented popular protests across China, which ultimately involved more than a dozen cities. The background was a general unhappiness concerning national and local “COVID zero” policies, plus an even more general dissatisfaction with one-party rule. The triggers for protests were World Cup broadcasts from Qatar showing fans not wearing masks, and a deadly fire in a residential building in Urumqi that took firefighters hours to extinguish due to extreme local anti-COVID measures—Urumqi had been locked down for months. As for the leadership of the protest movement . . . the movement seems to have been relatively leaderless and spontaneous, driven chiefly by the circulation of Internet messages and images. That leaderlessness is unsurprising in China, where any dissident leader visible and vocal enough to shape and direct protests is likely to be swiftly bundled away by police. It also may have been the decisive factor, for these relatively leaderless protests were limited to public gatherings, and did not have clear goals other than the mass voicing of complaints. Ultimately, the Chinese government was able to climb down from their COVID policies without their tight control of the country being threatened significantly.

A popular uprising against the government of Sri Lanka earlier this year was arguably more successful. The government, headed by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and including some of his family members, was widely viewed as incompetent and corrupt, as Sri Lankans faced out-of-control inflation, power shortages, and other problems. When these stresses worsened and protests began, the government responded with repressive measures such as arrests and social media blackouts, exacerbating the situation. The protest movement eventually developed a leadership structure, including some firebrand student leaders. In July, a very large crowd of protesters stormed the Presidential palace in Colombo and Rajapaksa was forced to flee the country. However, the new government soon cracked down on the protest movement leaders, who apparently didn’t have much support among the country’s elites.

There are also ongoing protest movements in Iran and Russia. The one in Iran is very prominent and broad-based, and has forced the Tehran regime to backpedal somewhat, but so far has failed to result in an overthrow of the theocratic regime—which recently has started publicly executing protesters. The protest movement in Russia, against the Putin government and its Ukraine invasion, is hardly visible and seems to have achieved little if anything—clearly many dissidents have opted to leave the country rather than stay and protest, while some higher-profile dissidents have been disposed of via the now-classic Russian method of defenestration.

Just looking at these examples, one can postulate that a popular political uprising, to have a decent chance of success, requires:

• • Sufficient popularity, i.e., support from a large, preferably dominant proportion of the population, among whom there is a strong commonality of interest;
  • Strong stressors/triggers that convince ordinary people that regime change is needed and compel them to take action (starting with protest marches and other gatherings);
  • A vision of how things should be different, e.g., more liberal, less corrupt, more aligned with some alternative ideology, etc.
  • Effective leaders who can inspire and direct the movement in ways that achieve regime change;
  • Elite support, boosting the movement’s power by enabling it to control or influence key institutions (e.g., media, academia, police, military).

*

Ticking most or all these boxes is going to be challenging anywhere, particularly so in Western countries. I would say it’s virtually impossible in the United States at present.

Popularity: Considering how the current US regime favors nonwhites, and considering how many contemporary white women are content with this anti-in-group discrimination, it seems likely that American dissidents are mostly white males—the principal heirs, as it were, of the country’s founders and builders. I would guess that this putative dissident group, all in all, comprises less than a third of the US population. That is still a very large number of individuals, somewhere between 50 and 100 million. Certainly they would be unbeatable if united as one against disunited foes. But even white American males remain highly disunited. Moreover, the fact that dissident Americans, as I have defined them, are very much a minority puts them in a weak position culturally. It also would be used (and to some extent is already being used) to justify harsh regime measures against them, since they do not “represent the average American.”

Stressors/triggers: The level of stress and urgency that would normally compel dissidents to go out onto the streets and protest is so far not very evident among dissident Americans. To be sure, the regime (an entity that is cultural as well as political and extends far beyond formal government) has done great damage to the country, via the wokeification/corruption of education, media, academia, immigration policy, the judiciary, and most other policies and institutions. Their misrule seems much more deserving of a punitive popular reaction than the misrule that prompted the American Revolution. Yet the US, for now, retains relatively high living standards, certainly for white males—and those living standards are supported by a huge structure of financialization/debt. In short, American dissidents still have much to lose by revolting openly. And so, like the proverbial slow-boiled frog, they still mostly prefer waiting (and complaining ineffectually, often indirectly via conspiracy theories) to real, in-the-streets action. I doubt that they will prefer action until there is much more radical and extensive regime provocation and/or a prolonged economic depression that leaves them with “nothing to lose.”

Envisioned change: American dissidents are remarkably fragmented in their views of what has gone wrong and what is to be done about it. Many of them, as I just noted, believe in bizarre conspiracies involving things like elite pedophile rings, or “chemtrails.” It’s often hard to tell where the conspiracy-theory fringe ends and the mainstream begins.

The only halfway-cogent explanations for USA’s predicament that I’ve ever heard/read are from right wing intellectuals with small followings. The average “angry white male” appears to have little or no understanding of, say, the recent cultural and political impact of women, or the history of blacks in the USA and their manipulation by the major political parties. The most popular view now among right-wing American dissidents seems to be that “wokeism is the problem,” and that things would get better if it could just be toned down a bit. In other words, they have neither a solid grasp of the problems facing the country, nor a positive alternative vision—let alone one that captures the energy and idealism of young people in the way that progressivism/wokeism does.

Inadequate leadership. The American woke regime seems almost as effective at suppressing the leaders of dissident groups (e.g., Proud Boys, Oath Keepers) as the Chinese Communist party’s secret police are at suppressing pro-democracy leaders. In the wake of the regime’s 1/6/21 prosecutions and hearings, I can’t think of a single person, inside or outside of American politics, who currently has the visibility, stature, energy, intellect, and vision to reverse the adverse trends and put the country on secure footings. A big part of the problem, of course, is that at this late stage of the national disease, saving the country almost certainly would require a revolution-like abandonment, at least temporarily, of its current political framework—and the regime, understanding this, has begun to treat any opposition as sedition. Given these stakes, many of the right’s most prominent “leaders” have switched to less risky goals, such as enriching themselves—which to me is a clear indicator of organizational defeat/degeneracy, seen also among Democratic Party-controlled African American leaders.

Lack of elite support. Perhaps the most obvious of all its defects is that the American conservative/dissident movement lacks elite and institutional support. This is not a trend that seems likely to be reversed any time soon. The takeovers/makeovers of elites and institutions by anticonservative activists and their ideas (often these begin as conquests by women, who are inherently more left-wing and susceptible to wokeism) reflect a process that has been at work for decades, and is now accelerating through its final stages to a state of more or less complete control.

Thus, while the Flight 93 story presents a striking case of group heroism in the face of disaster, it’s more an example of what US isn’t (yet) than what it is. The legacy population of the United States, though well advanced in their cultural and political emasculation, and in the related, sad handover of their inheritance to foreigners, are still surprisingly comfortable, still quite far from an “if we don’t, we’ll die” moment.

***

When labor becomes scarce, expensive, and/or unreliable, business owners start looking for alternatives. For most of the past 30 years, a very attractive alternative was offshoring—to countries like China, where labor was cheap, plentiful, and reliable. In the past three years, the COVID pandemic and the maturing of once-cheap labor markets, plus the increasing obviousness of China’s IP theft and overall hegemonic ambitions, have begun to reverse that trend. Economists are now forecasting “the end of globalization,” with labor scarcity continuing for decades as the workforce shrinks. Big companies, desperate for workers, are even indicating a willingness to hire people without college degrees for positions that traditionally required them.

To me, though, the idea that labor will continue to be scarce seems wrong. As I see it, mechanization and AI are now moving onto the steepest part of the innovation slope, and will soon start “disemploying” people all the way up the labor value chain, from manual trades to those overpaid millennial marketing girls sipping lattes on TikTok. Even I, with my fairly challenging profession and decades of experience, am likely to be left jobless at least a few years before I’d like to retire.

AI has taken longer than expected to arrive in useful forms, but is now definitely arriving and ready to start disrupting. It can, technically if not yet legally, drive cars, tractors, trains, and boats; fly planes and drones; and guard warehouses. The mechanization technology underlying humanoid robots has been making big advances too—such robots now can open doors, climb stairs, recover from falls, hold and manipulate heavy objects, etc. Once such robots are mass-produced and made available for leasing, their use as replacements for factory workers, waiters, construction workers, checkout clerks, etc. will become a viable proposition. Will we have to wait as long as five years before that starts?

AI language-processing software that can be taught, or can teach itself via the Internet, should start displacing office worker bees well before then—and by worker bees I mean basically anyone whose job consists largely of emailing, writing reports, filling out spreadsheets, and doing other routine kinds of paperwork. And we’ve all seen the AI text-to-image and text-to-movie packages that were unleashed recently and have been improving at a rapid pace. How long will it be before a single writer, working with one of those algos, generates a feature-length film on his own? A year from now? Two?

Essentially, we’re facing the prospect of the abrupt end of the labor market, an institution that has been at the center of human civilization for millennia.

I’m aware that critics of earlier forms of labor-saving technology, such as the Luddites and their ilk, were somewhat shortsighted in their predictions of mass labor displacement. These early industrial workers were themselves displaced in large numbers, and in that sense had every reason to complain. What they failed to see was that the labor-saving innovations that displaced them would, on the whole, lead to greater productivity and economic growth, and ultimately a net rise in demand for labor.

But that was then, and this is now. The tech that’s going to be released into the world in this decade will be capable of displacing humans from their jobs much faster than the latter will be able to keep up. In other words, if you are laid off because your employer or clients can just buy an AI package to do the same job more cheaply, and you then decide to retrain for some “AI-proof” job, it’s quite likely that that “AI-proof” job will be overtaken by AI long before you can get into it. Even if that job stays available, you’d be competing for it with an exponentially rising number of other displaced human workers.

It’s impossible to predict in detail how this will all play out. But I can easily imagine an early phase in which language-processing AI, vehicle AI, warehouse robots, and a few other related innovations are hailed as game-changers for businesses and other organizations, allowing them to do much more with fewer workers and at less cost—and alleviating inflationary labor shortages along the way. Close on the heels of that “denial” phase, though, will come the bargaining, depression, and acceptance phases, as the pace of disemployment accelerates. I see this as an ouroboros—snake-eating-its-tail—process, because it involves the economy effectively consuming itself, i.e., destroying, with every increment of growth and investment in innovation, the employment earnings that are the principal fuel for a modern economy.

There may be no stable equilibrium in this process for a long while. Governments probably will try to tax businesses, especially AI-using businesses, to fund welfare payments to the unemployed masses, but will that work? Even if governments could manage it fiscally, what would be the psychological effect on tens of millions of people who can no longer earn a living for themselves? (We already know that men become easily depressed when unemployed.)

It also seems unlikely that Western governments would ever simply disallow the use of AI and robotics. One of the great lessons of the mass immigration era is that Western governments, ostensibly “democratic,” like having electorates made up of financially stressed people whose votes can be bought with government largesse.

It stands to reason that the disemployment situation will be easier in countries that currently have relatively small workforces—or rely on guest workers who can be sent quickly back to their home countries if needed. By the same logic, countries with open borders and huge, low-skill, permanent immigrant populations, like the US, could be in serious trouble. Those countries will suddenly have many millions of excess mouths to feed, and to do so might easily require taxation levels that trigger capital flight.

I’m not totally averse to the idea that at the end of this transition lies a society in which robots do everything for near-zero cost and humans can stay busy however they like without worrying much about money. But it’s hard to believe this transition will occur without historic levels of pain. I’ve written often in this space about various drivers of Western decline, collapse, and general upheaval; the now-imminent “ouroboros economy” of AI and robotics is surely another one.

***

The new Western culture, especially the American variety, offers the old-fashioned conservative male dissident many trends to bewail. Discrimination against white males! Promotion of LGBTQ lifestyles! The trans mania with its mutilation of children and destruction of women’s sports! Suppression of meritocracy, free speech, free scientific inquiry, and due process of law! Runaway entitlement spending! Open borders! Critical race theory! The ESG investing fad! No-prosecute policies in violent cities! Proliferation of social contagions and hysterical illnesses, from ROGD and PTSD to Tik-Tok Tourette’s! Cascades of cancellations of perfectly competent white males, e.g., for “grading too hard in organic chemistry,” or for cracking an off-color joke! Widespread exclusion (in effect) of males from important professions, including public relations, publishing, and clinical psychology/psychotherapy. “Math is White Supremacy!” “Showing up for work is White Supremacy!!” “Not being a pea-brained slob is White Supremacy!!!”

My argument here is that everybody should stop bewailing these trends as separate phenomena—should stop fighting “wokeness” or “ESG” or the trans mania. They should, instead, focus on the one factor that underlies and causes all of these social developments.

Of course, I mean women—or more precisely, women’s newfound power in organizations and institutions, and in the culture generally.

An assumption everyone seems to have made during the decades of female emancipation is that women see things more or less as men do, and are just as devoted as men to the principles underlying Western civilization. Not so! As some feminist writers, including Virginia Woolf, warned long ago, women when they enter public life in business and government tend to look around and see lots of things they want to change. They’re just not fans, to the extent that men are, of things like free speech, open debate, due process of law, meritocracy, free scientific inquiry, maximizing shareholder value, equality of opportunity, and so on.

It’s not that women have worked things out logically and carefully and comprehensively, and now want to formally enact a scheme they think is better. It’s more that things in Western civ, which was made by men, often go against the emotional grain with women, causing them real discomfort, and compelling them to react. Women’s instincts were shaped by evolution for a maternal and domestic context, and seem to bias them towards short-term, feelgood, nurturing, and protective outcomes—on average compared to men. These instincts seem to be especially aroused by things like persistent racial inequality, discussions of race-based IQ differences, ruthless meritocratic competition unleavened by sympathy for the losers, stern cross-examinations of women making rape claims, medical skepticism over women’s unverifiable symptoms, and the kind of frat-boy humor that has gotten so many men cancelled. Now that women are largely in charge, they question why we need such things—or peremptorily try to stamp them out.

There are some nuances to this general theory. First, a lot of women are not woke. But the argument here is really about women on average as compared to men on average, and I don’t think it could be reasonably disputed that women, on average and compared to men, are significantly biased in the direction of wokeness. It’s also obviously true that modest average psychological differences between the sexes could translate to big social changes when one sex takes power from the other. I would suggest too that the women who seek power in institutions are less likely to be “average” women and more likely to be childless activist types. There is, moreover, a hell of a lot of depression and anxiety among modern women, especially younger ones, and that as well may push many women to embrace the woke activism mindset as a therapeutic source of meaning and purpose.

Another nuance has to do with women’s apparently superior ability, compared to men, to align themselves emotionally within a group. This means, in effect, that women in an organization will tend to be less independent-minded, with the tradeoff that they can collectively punch above their weight. Among the examples that come to mind is the recent cancellation of Woody Allen from his publisher due to activism among the publishing company’s junior staff. (The publishing industry, like public relations and psychology/psychiatry/psychotherapy, is utterly dominated by women—“junior staff” in publishing generally means millennial women.)

Women, as I’ve suggested in a recent essay, may also have, collectively, a stronger drive to dominate organizations, to eliminate the greater discomfort they experience when exposed to male organizational culture. Certainly the female-to-male ratio in many organizations now is one that would be condemned as discriminatory (by women) were the proportions reversed.

A further nuance, which I think will become increasingly obvious and important as our societal “pink shift” advances, is that women, as they align emotionally within groups, and ultimately purge dissenting voices, tend to cause the institutions they control to become unstable. In other words, like hysteria-prone convents of half a millenium ago, female-dominated institutions become relatively susceptible to groupthink contagions that swing them irrationally this way and that. Today these contagions introduce relatively mild new absurdities like pronoun declarations and land acknowledgments. But I expect it’s all going to get loopier, and more harshly enforced, as time goes on and female control solidifies.

Lastly, somewhat hair-splittingly, I don’t think that women when left to themselves running male-built institutions necessarily become woke in the way that we see now. I see wokeness as a contemporary, contagious mindset (not quite an ideology) that corresponds very well to, and thus easily infects, the average female mind, still moreso the younger, more neurotic, more activist female mind. But in principle, under different circumstances, one could gin up something substantially different that would also spread well among women, provided that it pressed their main buttons. Certainly in the centuries before women took such a large part in public life, thought contagions among them were common and varied, though usually localized and rarely very consequential (rarely but not never—see, for example, the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria).

But back to my main argument: If wokeness and its variants are all epiphenomena of the new, historically unprecedented power of women in public life, measures taken against wokeness etc. could be ineffective if there is no acknowledgment of the true source of the problem. Indeed all means short of reducing women’s presence in public life might be futile.

I’m not advocating a specific strategy, but I think it’s important at least to highlight this dilemma, which Western countries obviously have no easy way of resolving. It may be that over time, the current, Cultural Revolution-like surge of wokeness subsides and becomes less radical, as the women pushing wokeness are increasingly forced to acknowledge some of its adverse consequences, such as rising crime from weak law enforcement, social dissolution from uncontrolled immigration, the institutional incompetence that flows inevitably from the abandonment of meritocracy, and the aforementioned institutional instability.

Then again, by the time things get bad enough for women to acknowledge that they aren’t necessarily better than men at managing our civilization, the process of degeneration might be very, very advanced. Indeed, it’s plausible that, by then, other, even stronger, less reversible adverse processes—ethnic conflict, for example—will be underway, effectively sealing the West’s fate.

***

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

*

One of the traits that women seem generally willing to acknowledge as their own is a greater affinity for “inclusivity” and the related “equity.” In other words, compared to the average man, the average woman seems to have a stronger preference for a society in which meritocratic competition and rewards, and the resulting inequalities, are minimized. To the extent that this is so, women (compared to men) would therefore tend to prefer flatter, more egalitarian and less hierarchical social groupings—as has often been observed.

Meritocratic competition and hierarchical ordering are among the pillars of Western civilization, so it should be concerning if these are now being weakened by the cultural and political ascendancy of women. However, this brief essay is not (mainly) a judgment of the fitness of this feminine trait-set—it’s a speculation about its origins.

Has anyone done a conclusive study of why women are relatively inclined towards inclusivity/equity and against competition, meritocracy and hierarchy? If so, I’m unaware of it. Since human traits typically are rooted in the prehistoric past, I’m not sure a conclusive study of such a thing is even possible.

In any case, let us assume that these female biases do have primordial roots. What could those roots be?

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, and I guess is the obvious, default explanation, wanting to promote inclusivity/equity could have originated and persisted as a maternal instinct. This instinct would have worked to inhibit the otherwise inevitable rivalries and battles among a mother’s children, thus perhaps increasing their summed chances of surviving to adulthood and reproducing.

Is this “maternal-origin hypothesis” the end of the story? Or can other aspects of prehistoric life also account for the egalitarianism of the modern female mindset?

The primitive social structure in which H. sapiens is thought to have lived the longest—by far—was the extended family-based band that dominated the Paleolithic (“hunter-gatherer”) period. This basic mode of existence was practiced by humans, and perhaps also by their hominin ancestors, for millions of years, whereas more advanced social forms have been shaping us for only the last 10,000 years or so, i.e., the period following the Neolithic revolution.

From a modern perspective, one of the more striking features of the typical Paleolithic social grouping—which still can be observed in various remote parts of the world—is its lack of what we would call private property, a strong share-and-share-alike ethic, and a simple, non-hierarchical, “flat” organization. The 1980 South African film, The Gods Must be Crazy, did a decent job of depicting one such group (of Kalahari Bushmen) and the possessiveness and envy that threatened their harmony when they discovered an unusual and valuable object (a Coca-Cola bottle, dropped from a passing airplane).

The implication of the story, and indeed of standard anthropological descriptions of such bands, is that egalitarianism is and was necessary to keep these groups together—and keeping these groups together presumably conferred some evolutionary advantage by improving the survival chances and overall Darwinian fitness of their constituent individuals.

As Francis Fukuyama has put it in The Origins of Political Order:

Within a band-level local group, there is nothing resembling modern economic exchange and, indeed, nothing resembling modern individualism . . . Both hunting and gathering are done on a group basis by families or groups of families. Hunting in particular leads to sharing, since there is no technology for storing meat, and hunted animals must be consumed immediately . . . Many of the moral rules in this type of society are not directed at individuals who steal other people’s property but rather against those who refuse to share food and other necessities. Under conditions of perpetual scarcity, the failure to share can often affect the group’s prospects for survival. Band-level societies are highly egalitarian . . . within the band, there is relatively little differentiation between families, no permanent leadership, and no hierarchy. [my italics]

That this “paleo mindset” corresponds to key aspects of the modern female mindset points to the possibility that the one helped seed the other—in other words, that the relative female preference for inclusivity and equity in modern times originated not only in maternity but also in the social organization that dominated during the Paleolithic.

As for men, it seems likely that with the Neolithic revolution and the rise of towns, cities, private property, hierarchical government, stratified societies, meritocratic competition for wealth and status, and so on, their mindset was reshaped for this more structured and competitive environment. (This, incidentally, would have given Neolithic men a huge edge over their more peaceful, less competition-minded hunter-gatherer counterparts—an edge that is still painfully evident wherever modern and paleo-type peoples are in contact.)

The female mindset would not have been reshaped to the same extent by the Neolithic revolution if, as I suspect, this revolution brought much less change to women’s lives and roles. Women were still principally concerned with raising children, and in that context their relative preferences for inclusivity and equity, and aversions to competition and hierarchy, would have remained adaptive. Women’s roles in farming also might not have represented a big departure from their gathering lifestyle of paleo days. And although female sexual competition would have made more and more sense in a world where men’s status began to vary greatly, it’s unclear that women—often treated as patriarchal property before marriage in premodern times—had much freedom to engage in such competition until relatively recently. Certainly the competitions for wealth, status, and power that the Neolithic revolution and town/city life introduced would have been almost entirely male pursuits.

Of course, the trait differences resulting from these distinct roles and selection pressures would not have been absolute. Men and women differ genetically by only a single chromosome among 23 pairs of them, and the outcome of that tiny genetic difference is mediated by the environment as well as by factors such as sex hormones, whose doses during development can vary considerably. Just as some women are on the mannish side of the distribution of looks, some would have been on the mannish side of the distributions of psychological traits.

In the same way, or through other mechanisms of atavism, some men even in modern societies would continue to be very “paleo” and egalitarian in their thinking. It’s tempting to speculate further that this reversion, with its associated conviction that simpler times were better times, underlies some relatively old religions and political movements, including Christianity and socialism*—which, though they were invented by men, tend now to be favored more by women.

In any case, to sum up the main idea here: Key feminine psychological traits favoring inclusivity and equity and opposing hierarchy—traits that seem especially influential now as drivers of social change in the era of female empowerment—may have had their origins in the band-level social organization that dominated the Paleolithic period, not just in maternity per se.

I’ll grant that I’m not a professional anthropologist, and my idea here is not particularly complicated or sophisticated. I’m sure there’s a lot more to be said about the origins of sex-specific psychological traits. But my idea seems worth considering—indeed I think anthropologists would have suggested and explored it already, if their feminized, wokeified profession hadn’t effectively suppressed this and many other areas of inquiry.

Incidentally, my hypothesis itself suggests why this suppression is occurring. If women’s instincts on issues relating to inclusivity, equity, and hierarchy are instincts adapted for maternity and a primordial, long-outmoded social structure, then in modern societies these instincts are probably maladaptive when expressed in the public policy realm, however suited they may still be for family life and the raising of children. Even as a hypothesis, this is not a view that feminists can ever tolerate.

*Marx considered paleolithic bands the original communist societies.

* * *

A quick summary for those coming to this for the first time.

I’ve been in the habit of citing one of my 2019 essays, “The Great Feminization” or “The Day the Logic Died,” as an introduction to the idea of cultural feminization. Since those pieces were written, though, I’ve posted other essays on this topic, expanding this “idea space” a bit more with each one. So it might be useful now, to those coming to this for the first time, to have an updated short summary of the whole picture as I see it.

In a Nutshell

Women, because of their different ways of thinking and behaving on average, and their new, strong influence over culture and politics, are the principal drivers of modern social change, including all aspects of wokeness.

From Home to Office

American women—whose sociocultural circumstances are very similar to those of other Western women—obtained full equality in voting rights by constitutional amendment more than a century ago. That had significant cultural and political consequences, but it was only a small part of the story of women’s modern empowerment. The big change occurred in the period 1950-2000, when women shifted, en masse and on a durable, peacetime basis, from being dedicated homemakers to participating more or less equally alongside men in the working world and public life. The labor force participation rate charts below (the first for American men, the second for women) clearly show this shift.

As I wrote in “The Great Feminization”:

The historic significance of this migration on its own appears to have been underappreciated. Women never made such a move, to such a degree, in any large human society in the past. It significantly altered the structure of ordinary life.

But women in the late 20th century didn’t just move into the workforce. They moved into its upper ranks, to professions that strongly influence societal culture and policy. They became journalists, public relations specialists, lawyers, academics, novelists, publishers, filmmakers, TV producers, and politicians, all to an unprecedented extent. In some of these culture-making professions, by the 1990s and early 2000s, they had achieved parity or even dominance (e.g., writers, authors, and public relations specialists) with respect to men. Even where they fell short of full parity, they appeared to acquire considerable “veto” power over content. A 2017 report by the Women’s Media Center noted evidence that at the vast majority of media companies, at least one woman is among the top three editors.

Women Think Differently About Cultural and Political Matters

Women’s ascension to power in culture- and policy-making professions has been followed by extensive cultural and political changes. Why? Because women, on average, think differently than men do about cultural and political issues. This should not be surprising: The bodies and minds of women and men were shaped long ago by biological and cultural evolution for their distinct traditional roles in life. Women’s distinct roles obviously have required certain psychological traits or tendencies that are different from male traits. I think most of us would agree that these innately feminine traits include:

1. • A greater emotional sensitivity and capacity for empathy/compassion/nurturing.

• • A greater fearfulness and aversion to risks (concerning dangers to themselves and others), including an extra sensitivity to the risks of toxic and other environmental threats (reflected in hormone-driven pregnancy behaviors such as food/odor aversions and compulsive “nesting”).

• • A greater affinity for people and relationships, and lesser affinity for constructed, systemized, and abstract things.

• • A greater tendency to align emotionally when in a group, especially a group of other women—a tendency that implies a superior ability (individually and collectively) to transmit emotions and other social contagions.

• • A reduced affinity for competition and capacity for resistance to aggressors.

• • Greater affinity for themes of suffering and victimhood, with correspondingly less interest in triumphant “male” themes of exploration and conquest.

Probably most of these traits are interrelated. In any case, when one considers these broad aspects of “innate femininity,” it isn’t hard to see that the very sudden extension of their dominance—from women’s traditional domestic domain to all areas of public life—would help account for the dramatic social changes of the past half-century or so.

It also isn’t hard to see that women tend to support these social changes more than men do—although it’s important to understand that by altering the culture, women have influenced not only their own but also men’s thinking and behavior.

Social changes likely to have been driven by the ascendancy of female traits

• • Much more generous welfare programs.

• • Extensions of the concept of welfare to include more types of intervention (e.g., affirmative action) and more groups needing intervention (“traditionally marginalized groups”).

• • Excessively honoring (e.g., with pronoun declaration rituals) anyone with a claim to victimhood or some other “special identity” status.

• • Very strong social reactions to media portrayals of racial injustice/inequity, e.g., the near-hysterias following the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO and George Floyd in Minneapolis, MN.

• • Inflations of the traditional definitions of “harm,” “offense,” “trauma,” “violence,” “aggression,” etc., as reflected in new terms such as “microaggressions” and “triggers.”

• • An astounding belief (from men’s perspective) in slight or even imaginary emotional upsets as sources of real harm in the world. This belief is reflected in everyday female-produced media content but also in the new hyper-focus on psychological trauma in law and medicine, and of course in the vast inflation of trauma-related syndromes such as PTSD (and the recovered-trauma-memory syndromes of the 1980s/90s, before they were discredited).

• • A shift away from the traditional deterrence of criminal behavior with punishment and stigmatization, in preference for compassion-based, non-stigmatizing solutions (e.g., non-prosecute policies for most crimes, free needles for addicts).

• • Reduced tolerance of deaths in war, despite (ironically) a greater inclination to enter foreign conflicts in response to emotion-evoking atrocities portrayed on television.

• • Less tolerance for capital punishment and other harsh sentences, especially where the “traditionally disadvantaged” are concerned.

• • Less restrictive immigration policy, again driven by stories and imagery (pitiable refugee children, huddled masses, etc.) that evoke maternal protective/nurturing instincts.

• • In general, much more emphasis in media and policy contexts on compassion-evoking stories of individuals, with correspondingly less emphasis on (even condemnation of!) coldly logical risk/benefit analyses focused on the long term.

• • Suppression of potentially upsetting ideas or expressions (“hate speech,” “mansplaining”), words, facts (e.g., on racial differences in criminality), free debate and free speech, due process of law (especially when women are plaintiffs), and even some fields of scientific inquiry.

• • Helicopter parenting.

• • Obsession with safety, e.g., as seen in new terms such as “safe space.”

• • Rise of “green” movement and related cultural themes involving opposition to nuclear power, GMO, “toxins,” “chemicals,” even vaccines (a movement that was increasing in popularity, with female leadership, pre-COVID-19). Related shift towards “natural” foods and medicines, including those produced by the relatively unregulated supplements industry. Rise of hysteria variants involving claims of chemical hypersensitivity, toxic metals, etc.

• • Decline in interest in engineering, as shown by greater reliance on foreign-born students at e-schools, loss of Western pre-eminence (to China) in advanced engineering projects.

• • Predominance of “social media” in Western life.

• • Shift away from technical themes and toward social (woke) themes in female-dominated STEM media and professions, e.g., “math is white supremacist.”

• • Shift away from traditional, hierarchical, rule-based religions toward more loosely structured and therapeutic forms of worship and spirituality.

• • Frequent and rapid social contagions of new cultural themes (e.g., wokeness and its various associated behaviors and terminology, from BLM worship to the trans mania), affecting virtually all organizations and institutions—because women, the chief transmitters of these contagions, are highly influential in organizations and institutions.

• • Increase in the frequency and prevalence of overtly pathological social contagions (hysterias) such as Tik-Tok-induced Tourette’s-like behavior.

• • Tendency of professions and institutions to become female-dominated by systematically excluding (especially white) males—who are “problematic” for grouped women, simply because of their innate male resistance to institutional feminization.

• • General increase in intolerant, “hive-mind” behavior in institutions and professions as a consequence of increasing female dominance.

• • Marked preference for inclusivity and equity over traditional meritocratic discrimination, everywhere from schools to companies to political appointees and candidates. “Participation trophies.”

• • Virtually uniform emphasis on victimhood themes in Western literary fiction, coincident with female takeover of publishing industry.

• • Reduced public interest in adventurous endeavors such as manned space exploration (“we should fix poverty and inequality here on Earth first”).

• • Demotion of traditional heroes such as Christopher Columbus and Thomas Jefferson and promotion of their alleged victims, e.g., Native Americans, Sally Hemings.

Obviously, not every woman out there likes or is driving these changes. The differences between men’s and women’s mindsets are differences on average.

Moreover, the mindset underlying these shifts—a mindset that, in some of these cases, seems sensitive to the point of neuroticism—might not even be that of the average woman. I suspect it more closely represents the attitudes of the single, childless activists who have been most energetic in pushing these social changes. For them, perhaps, society and its “disadvantaged,” from African-Americans to Rio Grande-crossing illegal immigrants, are substitutes for the children they don’t have.

Cultural Feminization is Problematic

One sufficient and conservative reason for doubting that cultural feminization is a good thing is simply that it entails the abrupt replacement of a large set of civilizational traits that were embedded in Western people, culturally and probably biologically, over thousands of years. Not every Western trait is essential to the West’s survival or is even still adaptive in the modern world. But discarding these traits at the whim of female activists seems a bit like deleting genes willy-nilly from the human genome. Could you do that without bad consequences? Yes, conceivably—but it’s far more likely to end in disaster.

Another good reason to oppose or limit cultural feminization is that, while men traditionally led societies and thus would have been expected to evolve attitudes and behaviors appropriate for that role, women traditionally were confined to other, more private roles, centering on maternity. In other words, why should we suppose that being a mother, or being shaped by evolution for motherhood, is a better preparation for public life than . . . serving in public life, as men have done for ages?

There are further reasons that have to do with specific effects of feminization. For example, feminization appears to have brought a new cultural and political emphasis on short-term, feelgood consequences, with less emphasis on—I would say a blindness to—long-term consequences. It should be obvious that this is unsustainable and must end badly.

Moreover, females’ lesser affinity, even hostility, for due process of law, free debate, unfettered scientific inquiry, and related aspects of Western, small-l liberalism, seems likely to render the West relatively static, sclerotic, and poor if allowed to run to its logical conclusion.

Then, of course, there is the apparent female (relative to male) embrace of mass immigration to the West from the Third World, which I think has the potential to dissolve Western societies faster than any other factor.

I think it’s worth mentioning too, though it’s more speculative, that the apparent decades-long slide in testosterone levels in men might be an effect of cultural feminization. Testosterone levels in men (and women) are known to be regulated by social cues, such as winning or losing competitions, and so it would make sense that cultural messaging condemning and suppressing traditional masculinity would have a T-lowering effect. Lower T means lower fertility, which below a certain threshold—one that Legacy Americans sank beneath long ago—leads ultimately to the extinction of the population.

Lastly, there is the sense of taboo that enshrouds the idea of cultural feminization, in general but especially when it is framed negatively. The high-profile MSM types (Cowen, Edsall) who have touched the subject (only in the last year or so, as far as I know) have been approving or very mild in their concerns. Also, for more than a decade now, most of the short essays I’ve tried to get published on this subject, including in some pretty right wing publications, have been rejected. In every case, a female editor had veto power, and I think her male colleagues also feared the hostile ululations that would ensue if they published my unvarnished take. Anyhow, an old quote (often attributed to Voltaire) seems apt here: “If you want to know who rules over you, look at whom you’re not allowed to criticize.”

Further reading

“The Great Feminization” (2019)

“The Day the Logic Died” (2019)

“Cultural Feminization: a Bibliography” (2021)

The Great Feminization: Women as Drivers of Modern Social Change (2022)

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Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

From conception through adolescence, male and female humans—mammals in general—are driven along distinct neural and anatomical developmental pathways by androgen and estrogen hormones, men having more of the former, women having more of the latter. The divergences in those developmental pathways lead to the innate differences in attitudes and behaviors between men and women.

One of the most striking of these behavioral/attitude differences has to do with risk: Women are, on average compared to men, markedly less willing to undertake risks—more “risk-averse”—and this gender difference has been shown (here and here, for example) to be broadly testosterone (T)-linked. In general, research in the past few decades suggests that either the bloodstream T level, or a marker (based on relative finger lengths) of prenatal T exposure, or both, predicts a person’s propensity for risky behaviors, as well as for competition and aggression.

Social psychology experiments on risk aversion typically examine risk behaviors, such as gambling choices, that can be studied relatively tidily in a laboratory setting. At the same time, in the modern West, low risk-aversion is often framed as a negative, maladaptive trait that tends to lead people astray. In fact, in the real world, the ability to cope with fear and take big risks is probably an essential step in the process of civilization. As Camille Paglia famously quipped, “If civilization had been left in female hands, we’d still be living in grass huts.”

Indeed, a greater willingness to take risks, even in comparison to other male-run civilizations, is plausibly one of the reasons the West got so far out in front of the rest: exploring and conquering most of the non-European world, developing the most technologically and culturally advanced societies ever known, exploring outer space, etc. But now that the West’s culture and policy have been heavily feminized, the lesser female enthusiasm for risky adventures like space exploration—a difference that seems even more pronounced anecdotally than it is in surveys—helps explain why spending on such endeavors has become just a tiny fraction of spending on welfare and other matters dear to women’s hearts.

[link]

That testosterone reduces fear, enhances the willingness to compete, and enhances the desire to dominate probably is a major reason men, on average compared to women, are more competitive, more willing to engage in violence, less subject to anxiety and fear, and less emotionally sensitive in general. Again, this is entirely what one would expect from men’s traditional roles not only as explorers but also as hunters and warriors. And, of course, we know that the vast majority of violent criminals are male. Thus, “willingness to fight” and related traits are obviously gender-determined to a great extent.

Should we care if the West’s feminization makes its people and their leaders less inclined towards fighting as well as exploration? Yes, we should care, especially if not all countries have been feminized. In the latter context, a country’s feminine aversion to fighting could result in its becoming enslaved, or even extinguished in genocide, by a less-feminized rival. But even a more subtle weakness could make a country highly susceptible to a bully’s manipulative threats.

For example, many already view the current New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, as a personification of that weakness.

In general, human civilization seems to requires a willingness—at least in a critical mass of the population—to undertake fearful hardships, stresses, even violence and death, for good ends. Without men and their fear-lowering testosterone, who would supply that crucial willingness?

Testosterone and a feminized culture

Speaking of testosterone, if you haven’t been living in a cave for the past two decades, you know that T levels in men have been declining—in other words, men at a given age today tend to have lower T levels than men of the same age a few decades ago. Studies [link, link, link, link] have found this alarming trend in multiple developed countries including the US. Some of these studies have specifically controlled for potentially confounding factors such as increases in obesity, which lowers T, and still have found evidence of a decline.

No one really knows what is causing this drop in T levels among men. Apart from rising obesity, which almost certainly accounts for some of the problem, suspected culprits include estrogen-mimicking compounds that leach out of common plastics, and the big decline in cigarette smoking among men (smoking inhibits estrogen synthesis, and a few studies have linked smoking to higher T).

One hypothesis that never gets mentioned—well, except by me—is that cultural feminization is itself a significant driver of declines in T. In other words, the recent feminine shift in cultural themes and norms, which effectively suppresses and stigmatizes many traditional aspects of traditional masculinity, and the related loss of male power in society, has had an essentially feminizing effect on the male brain, resulting among other things in lower T levels.

This hypothesis could be tested, to some degree, with simple experiments. For example, I would guess that exposure to images or videos of women shouting—a pretty common motif in modern media—could be enough, depending on the dose, to measurably lower T levels in ordinary males.

To some of you, it may seem totally implausible that sociocultural factors, working via cognition and emotion, could influence something as deeply biological as the secretion of a sex hormone. However, it is a well-established phenomenon—in fact, it’s quite clear that the androgen system in mammals was specifically designed by Evolution to be regulated by social and other external cues.

It is known, for example, that sexual activity raises T levels in men (and women). Also, sports players and even their fans show increases in T levels after winning games, whereas losers show decreases. In general, it seems that T levels in men tend to rise before fights and other challenges, and either stay high or keep rising after wins, and drop after losses—one of Nature’s “winner take all” effects. (There is even evidence that becoming a father—which requires a less aggressive, more nurturing character—downregulates T production.) In other words, T levels definitely do rise or fall based on external sociocultural cues, with negative experiences being more likely to drive T levels lower. And thus, in a feminized society that hands men Ls every day, we really should expect them to show significant drops in T.

T and Civilization

In principle, the consequences of lower T levels aren’t all bad. For example, there appears to have been a striking drop in the rate of violent crime in the US since the 1980s and early 90s.

Of course, there are many other factors, including declining lead exposures, the passing of the 80s/90s crack-cocaine epidemic, and changes in urban policing policies, that could help explain this trend. But the hypothesis that falling T levels, over the same period, have contributed, is at least plausible. Wouldn’t that be a good thing?

Maybe in that narrow sense, it would. But, again, there would be tradeoffs. Some would involve men’s health: Low-T, for example, is known to promote depression, osteoporosis, obesity, erectile dysfunction and heart disease, among other adverse health consequences. Other tradeoffs might affect society even more profoundly. In particular, low-T would be expected to reduce men’s sperm counts—which, by the way, is a trend that researchers have specifically detected. Lower T and lower sperm counts would be expected, in turn, to make men less likely to marry and/or have children. One well-known study did find that lower-T men in their mid-20s were less likely to be married several years later—and of course many studies have noted the wider trends of falling marriage and cohabitation rates, and associated birth rates, in recent decades.

[link]

Endemic low-T in a society, or a wider civilization as in the case of the West, might thus be considered a clear warning sign that the bottom is dropping out. One would expect this warning sign to emerge in a society that has been subject to a major defeat in war. In the West, in a historically unprecedented turn of events, it may be happening despite Western war victories and geopolitical supremacy. In other words, Western social liberalism, with its handover of most cultural power to women, may have delivered to its men, and to Western civilization, the equivalent of a crippling defeat.

* * *

In prior essays on this site and elsewhere, I’ve argued that the spread of wokeness and its recent marked intensification (the “Great Awokening”) is best seen as a social contagion—of feelings and sociocultural ideas that broadly reflect women’s maternal instincts, and are much more transmissible among women than among men.

I’ve also suggested that wokeness is apt to be ultra-transmissible among females whose feminine, maternal energies aren’t absorbed by husbands and children and may seek another outlet. The terms “cat lady” and “wine aunt” refer to a subset of these individuals, but many unmarried girls and young women, as well as successful career women, also fit this description.

I’ve proposed, moreover, that wokeness is driven into institutions not just by the conversion of (especially female) workers already in place but also by the takeover of those institutions by women and tamed males, via biased hiring.

I’m more certain now than ever that all these hypotheses are correct, as far as they go. But I think there is one more aspect of wokeness that requires an explanation. I’m referring to what could be called wokeness’s spiraling frenzy—its tendency to move away from norms of belief and behavior and towards extremes, wherever it takes hold.

To put it another way: The woke women and their enablers who in the past decade or two have effectively taken control of virtually all major American institutions and professions have not been content to implement a modest set of reforms and leave it at that. As their power has grown, they have increasingly attacked the core values of Western civilization: everything from due process of law to meritocracy to the shielding of children from sexual deviants and predators. As their policies have become extreme, so have their methods. They have made it clear that they don’t want sober deliberations—they want emotional shock and awe!

One could argue that there is a counter-cultural logic to this movement—that it wants to collapse the existing order as completely as those hijacked planes collapsed the Twin Towers on 9/11.

But is the Great Awokening replacing the old culture with a new one that can bind society sustainably—a “successor ideology”?

Wokeness and the Great Awokening are driven chiefly by women, who have their own ways of thinking and persuading—ways that typically seem more emotional and less rational than men’s. So one might suppose that there is a genuine ideology being built here, albeit a feminine one that seems alien to the average male, and that the Great Awokening is just the final, dramatic dash in this “pink shift” takeover of Western culture.

However, to me, that’s not the full story. To me, the Great Awokening’s spiraling frenzy, and its attraction for people who are evidently mentally ill, suggest that it is for the most part only a temporary and reactive social phenomenon: a social “mania.”

Logic and Madness

As many have noted, the Great Awokening bears a strong resemblance to the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.

The CCR’s spearpoints were cadres of “Red Guard” fanatics, young people (even teens) whose instability and restlessness, suggestibility, and high susceptibility to fanaticism were probably comparable to what one finds in today’s millennial Antifa brigades. These howling Maoist minions sought the erasure of whatever competed with Maoism, which in practice meant just about anything predating Maoist China—history books, art, architecture, temples, even genealogical records. Red Guards and their camp followers toppled statues of Confucius, pasted huge banners with their slogans everywhere, and went around attacking intellectuals or anyone even lightly connected to the teaching of pre-Maoist history or philosophy.

That was the counter-cultural logic part of it. But there was also the crazypants part—shocking, obscene, savage stuff, ultimately including murder and even cannibalism.

At some high schools, students killed their principals in the school courtyard and then cooked and ate the bodies to celebrate a triumph over “counterrevolutionaries” …  Government-run cafeterias are said to have displayed bodies dangling on meat hooks and to have served human flesh to employees. [NYT]

Not content with attacking living reminders of the old China, Red Guards also broke into cemeteries and dug up the skeletal remains of ancient Chinese emperors and nobles, desecrating them and denouncing the persons these remains had once been.

Other examples of these social frenzies come to mind. In some of the pre-Christian feasts of Rome and northern Europe, open drunkenness and debauchery, and various other intentionally shocking inversions of everyday social norms, were encouraged, at least in part as cathartic but controlled ventings of accumulated stress. (Modern parties, especially the ones teens and young adults have, seem like echoes of these displays.) As Samuel Johnson famously said, “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

Or a woman. The infamous convent hysterias of 1500s-1700s Europe supply many illustrations of spiraling frenzies among women, especially sexually frustrated younger ones. In the 1632-34 Loudoun case, for example, at a public exorcism of supposedly demon-possessed Ursuline nuns, a Sister Claire “fell on the ground, blaspheming, in convulsions, lifting up her petticoats and chemise, displaying her privy parts without any shame, and uttering filthy words. Her gestures became so indecent that the audience averted its eyes.” [link]

Sexual themes dominated the antics of “possessed” nuns, although there were maternal—or inverted maternal—themes too, for example claims of mystical pregnancy, and stories of secret witch conclaves (“witches’ sabbaths”) at which children were eaten.

Themes of sexual violation and impregnation, theft or killing of unborn babies, and witchcraft, along with the same spiraling of fantastic claims and odd behavior, were also typical in the medicalized versions of possession—”multiple personality disorder” and “UFO abduction”—that were popular among young women in the 1970-90s, and ended up discrediting many therapists and psychiatrists, as well as the whole idea of “hypnotically recovered memories.”

To me, these are examples of social manias—not just contagions (for even healthy, sustainable behaviors can be contagious) but contagions that spread intense and increasingly bizarre, often counter-cultural activities, and are essentially reactions to excessive stress.

A holiday from stress and inhibition

As the comment by Dr. Johnson implies, human beings in modern civilizations are inhibited and stressed by the social rules they are supposed to obey and the complex social environments they are supposed to navigate—the “pain of being a man.”

It makes sense that women nowadays would be relatively hard-hit by such stresses. Women’s basic lifestyle has shifted dramatically—much more than men’s has—over the past few generations. Women during this interval generally have had to face new stresses from:

• • higher education and the pressures at higher levels of the working world;
  • the postponement or abandonment of marriage and child-bearing;
  • a new (or newly de-civilized) courtship environment in which their natural desire for love and motherhood is taken advantage of again and again without being fulfilled.

All the while, women have been told (by the most authoritative sources, including Hollywood and feminist activists) that these changes represent “progress” and must not be resisted.

Women also, compared to men, appear to have an innately greater desire for “equality” and social harmony. Yet these lofty, sentimental social goals, during the same critical period, have slipped—frustratingly—further and further out of reach, as the West has intensified its effort to remake itself as a highly multi-racial/ethnic civilization.

In addition to having to face these new stresses, women are (on average) more emotionally sensitive than men, and thus are apt to be more affected by the same stressors.

Small wonder, then, that a very large proportion of women and girls in Western societies can now expect to be diagnosed with a mood or anxiety disorder. It probably also should be unsurprising that the essentially feminine notion of “trauma”—a highly stressing psychological injury—has now taken on an outsized role not only in Western medicine but also in the wider culture.

On the whole, then, the recent changes in the standard female lifeway, and the demographic makeovers of Western societies, have created a large and chronic background level of stress for women. But the severe emotional contagion of the Great Awokening was triggered only after additional, more acute stressors appeared in the first half of 2020: the pandemic with its lockdowns, social isolation, and widespread fears of illness/death; and then the inflammatory treatment—by left-leaning media, activists, and politicians—of various police killings of miscreant African Americans.

Thus I think one can fairly easily fit the Great Awokening into the broader category of stress-induced, stress-relieving social manias. Amid the furious revels of such manias, inhibitions are necessarily going to be relaxed (for some more than others, of course) and people who were relatively labile, even frankly nuts, to begin with will also be drawn in, given the camouflage these frenzies provide for their behavioral issues.

The function of boundary-pushing

A social mania—one that is true to the concept of mania—cannot run forever. It must end by depleting its energy source or by inducing resistance, just as an individual with psychiatric mania will become exhausted after many days without adequate sleep, and/or will cause herself to be hospitalized and treated by exhibiting increasingly abnormal behavior. If a social mania’s deep purpose is to relieve accumulated social pressures, then its tendency to be ever more immoderate might even be seen as functional—in the sense that the spiraling further and further away from social norms serves to reduce support and induce opposition, thus limiting the damage while allowing the requisite venting of steam. To put it crudely, a social mania with its spiraling frenzy is a societal “cry for help.”

This is all speculative. It’s also a group-level, forest-not-the-trees view that people with an ordinary individualistic bias might find hard to wrap their heads around. But it’s a novel take that I (obviously) think should be considered. On the whole, it suggests that the Great Awokening should interest us less as a new cultural movement, and more as a signal indicating deep problems with the existing culture and society. In other words, it’s a social version of a seismic tremor, or even earthquake, and its intensity and direction of slip are interesting mainly for what they tell us about the underlying stresses at work—stresses that are unbearable and thus have be relieved, in one way or another.

***

The sanctions against Russia—both the official economic sanctions and the unofficial, often petty-seeming sanctions such as banning Russian owners from cat shows—arguably represent the first great “geopolitical cancellation” of this new feminized era in the West.

This cancellation obviously goes far beyond the usual diplomatic noises that are made when the blame for conflicts is murkier and the victims more remote from us. It is a public reaction to an outrage that rises explosively above the usual outrages, involves fellow Westerners, and is available to tug at the heartstrings 24/7 on a variety of electronic media.

Moreover, it really does look like a broad translation of the usual domestic cancellation strategies to the geopolitical scene, including economic punishment, censorship, general ostracism, threats of judicial action, and indirect assistance for those who fight the Cancelled One, but of course no direct, overt involvement in that fighting.

Given the scale of this response, the scale of the atrocity that triggered it, and the scale of Russia’s ongoing losses in Ukraine, Putin’s downfall seems inevitable. After killing many thousands of innocent Ukrainians, destroying probably trillions of dollars’ worth of Ukrainian buildings and other infrastructure, utterly breaking Russia’s army and air force, and of course lying through his teeth about his actions and motives, he does not appear to have any way out—any peaceful “off ramp.” He is our generation’s Hitler, and I suspect he already knows that his days, in office at least, are numbered.

There are many potential pluses to a Putin downfall. One is that Russia again will have a chance to achieve what it could not achieve in the 1990s, namely a more mature form of government and economy, oriented towards and not against the West. Such a transformation of Russia, which I think is somewhat more likely than the alternative, would mean a final unification of all the West’s major powers, and at least a temporary “emboldening” of them. That in turn could usher in one of those periods of history, like 1990-2010, in which the West reigns supreme over all earthly comers. In this scenario, bad actors such as Iran, China, and North Korea would have to watch their step, at the very least, and the world in that sense would be a safer place.

But here’s the bad news. Even if the “best case” scenario happens—including a glorious Russian uprising and overthrow of the dictator, maybe even on Easter Sunday (April 24 in the Russian Orthodox calendar)—the West has suffered a blow in its own ranks that I think is of dire significance.

If you’ve read any of my previous essays on this site, you know that I have taken a generally dim view of the West’s future. Cultural/political feminization; mass immigration, multiculturalism and wokeism; and the lack of political tools for solving these problems, have doomed the West in the most basic ways, as I have seen it. On the other hand, conservatives in the West have been gaining strength and coherence in recent years in reaction to the excesses of Letfism/wokeism. As recently as a month ago, it had seemed plausible to me that a Zemmour-ization of the Western Right (Eric Zemmour is explicitly against both cultural feminization and mass-immigration/heavy-multiculturalism) could, eventually and with a lot of luck, restore the situation.

But what Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine revealed all too clearly is that much of the Right in the West is, well, wrong, and about fundamental things. Sadly, these Wrong Rightists include Zemmour as well as prominent commentators in the US, Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance among them.

The Wrong Rightists hate, first and foremost, what they call the Globalist American Empire (GAE). Fair enough—I hate it too. The problem is that they view Putin not as a murderous kleptocrat and global troublemaker (as I view him), but rather as a valuable counterweight to the hegemony of the GAE—a counterweight they want to strengthen, not weaken. These pro-Putin rightists have seemed quite willing to nullify the sovereignty of Ukraine (and, since the invasion started, have been willing to let Putin’s murders of tens of thousands of Ukrainians go unpunished), in order to preserve this counterweight—this bastion of old-fashioned Christian values according to the peculiar delusion afflicting some of them.

Of course, quite a few of the Wrong Rightists are backpedaling now, saying they deplore what Putin did, etc. They understand, at least at some level, the parallels between their sentiments and the discredited sentiments of say, Laval in France and Lindbergh in the USA during 1939-41. They therefore tend to exhibit their distress over the impending collapse of Russia as a Great Power, and the impending destruction of Putin and Putinism, in ways that are more or less indirect. They are peevish about Ukrainian “propaganda.” They lament the “lost opportunity” to have prevented the horrors of this war by barring Ukraine from NATO, thereby calming the nerves of their sensitive hero in the Kremlin. They speak darkly of Ukrainian “Nazis.” They yearn for a swift settlement that preserves Putin in power (and, not incidentally, conceals the fatuity of everything they have claimed or predicted about all this). They emit copious cope about how Russia is still destined to “win.” Above all, they say the West should care less about Ukraine and more about problems at home.

Here are just a few examples of this output (to which I may add soon as time permits):

What I think all this means is that the Western Right in general now is left with much less credibility in the eyes of the average normie citizen, just as occurred in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. In particular, the pro-Putin, “America First” sector of the Right, the sector that happens also to be most deeply concerned with the most serious issues, such as mass immigration, has grandly shot itself through the foot—or maybe through the heart. This has left the Left/center-Right “GAE” coalition in a much better position, so that there won’t be a Zemmour-type president in the USA any time soon—and I’m guessing now there won’t be one even in France. Thus the West’s demise will have been hastened at the very moment of its own apparent triumph over its longtime mortal enemy.

***

World War II ended less than two decades before I was born, yet I’ve always felt that it belonged to much more distant age—set off from modern existence by its different ways of thinking and doing, different patterns of speech and dress, grander scale of horrors and heroism, even the monochrome of its newsreels. The bad things, especially, seemed mostly unrepeatable in the world where I grew up.

American isolationism is a good example. Conservative Americans, for the longest time, didn’t want to help Britain, or Western Europe, with their struggles against Hitler and Mussolini. The USA had helped out Britain and France in 1917-18, and felt that they shouldn’t have to do anything like that again. Let Europeans sort out their own problems, they said.

That was part of their public reasoning, anyway. Another part of it seemed much more instinctive and tribal, much more driven by the false logic of “the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend”—their enemy being FDR, of course, their new friends being the Axis dictators.

It might seem facile to criticize the American isolationists of 1939-41 from our postwar perspective, but really they should have known better just from the information available at the time. In any case, it’s always striking now to read and hear the things they said. Here, for example, is aviator Charles Lindbergh, on September 11, 1941 (Europe conquered, Britain under siege, Wehrmacht nearing Moscow etc.), blaming the British, Roosevelt, and “the Jewish,” for pushing America towards war:

The Pearl Harbor attack, less than three months later, embarrassed the America First movement into silence. Lindbergh himself spent much of the war trying to get into combat to redeem himself, and eventually succeeded—in getting into combat, not at redeeming himself.

But anyway, here we are again, with the same kind of geopolitical setup (armed dictator on the prowl abroad, liberal Democrats in control at home), resulting in the same strange mindset on the part of American conservatives.

By the way, in case this is the first essay of mine you’ve read, I’m pretty conservative too (notwithstanding David Goldman’s swipe at me, below, as a “neocon/GlobLib”). Yet the fellow conservatives who, in defiance of recent history, have started talking up Putin and talking down Ukraine, the US and the Western alliance, are now as alien to me as DEI consultants.

I’ve already set down my own anti-isolationist, fight-the-bad-guy thoughts on Putin and Ukraine, a month ago on this site. Here I just want to record, mainly out of sheer amazement and chagrin, some of the sentiments I’ve been reading in recent days from elsewhere on the American right.

To keep things manageable, I’ve focused mainly on two prolific and very widely followed commentators, Goldman and Richard Hanania, and I’ve organized their comments by their major themes.

“Ukraine is a corrupt and backwards place that isn’t worth defending—or invading”

“Ukrainians are So Dumb”

“It’s All NATO’s/Neocons’ Fault for Expanding NATO and Threatening Russia”

“Putin is Smart and Will Win”

“The Woke are the Real Enemy—not Putin”

(See also “No Viet Cong Ever . . .“)

“You Neocons are So Dumb”

“Love Ukraine = Hate America”

“We Should Cut a Deal With Putin”

“Our NATO Allies Won’t Help Us—In Fact, NATO will collapse”

“We’ll Be Better Off When Russia and China Have More Power”

“Enough with the World War II Analogies!”

“And Now For Some Other Clever Ideas”

I’m aware that, as readers go through all these posts, they might find themselves agreeing with the sentiments expressed. But, as I post this, the long-awaited Russian offensive to conquer (presumably) Ukraine is just starting. It’s unlikely to be as dramatic for Americans as Pearl Harbor was, especially since it’s an attack on Ukraine, but modern electronic media, and weaponry, are going to be amplifying factors. I hope it will shock many of the Putin apologists and associated naysayers into rethinking their attitudes.

***

“What is it, then, that this craving and this helplessness proclaim to us, but that there was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present? But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself. He only is our true good, and since we have forsaken him, it is a strange thing that there is nothing in nature which has not been serviceable in taking His place; the stars, the heavens, earth, the elements, plants, cabbages, leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, pestilence, war, famine, vices, adultery, incest. And since man has lost the true good, everything can appear equally good to him, even his own destruction…”     —Blaise Pascal, Pensées VII (425)

For as long as I can remember, people have been asking: what comes next after Christianity? The assumption has been that Christianity is dying, and, as Christianity once replaced the polytheisms of the classical era, so should something new and improved come along and take its place.

In the 1980s and 90s, there was a relatively relaxed discussion about the possibility of a kind of globalistic spiritualism (or spiritual globalism) as a successor to Christianity: a blend of New Age-y, Earth Mother paganism and save-the-whales activism. But for all the allure that body of belief and practice had for some, women especially, it seems to have failed so far to cohere into anything institutionally serious. Certainly there have been potent religion-substitutes, most recently political-correctness/wokeism and the high fever of the Great Awokening, but these have been just substitutes, more about policy preferences and coping with socioeconomic inequalities—what we render unto Caesar, as Christ might have said—than any reach for the infinite.

I suppose many Christians would say that their religion isn’t going to be replaced anytime soon, because it has been renewing itself with more popular views and practices, for example prioritizing personal religious experience over traditional ritual and hierarchy—and moreover has been spreading, or at least holding steady, in Africa and Latin America. The problem with this view is that overall measures of belief and religious participation have continued to decline in Western countries, especially in the European home of Christianity but even in the relatively Christian United States.

This clear downtrend among Christianity’s original adherents suggests pretty strongly that this religion in its various forms cannot long survive prosperity, education, and the march of science, and in another few generations will be as defunct, globally, as Zoroastrianism—Islam, Judaism and Buddhism soon following it into the graveyard of theisms.

So again, what comes next? What can fill the proverbial God-shaped hole?

There should be some urgency to the question these days, for it is at least plausible that the decline of Christianity represents the loss of a critical source of vitality for Western societies—and is thus a key factor in their ongoing dissolution. This dissolution is seen in the West’s high rates of mental illness, suicide, drug overdoses, and changing demographics due to immigration; and in falling rates of marriage, household formation, and fertility among those of Western heritage. Indeed, the West now appears to face the usual fate of defeated, devitalized and demoralized peoples throughout history, namely population collapse.

Science as Spiritual Antagonist

Having lived since childhood with the cultural expectation that a religious successor to Christianity is coming, and now in middle age failing to see any sign of such a successor on the cultural horizon, I have to suspect that there won’t be one. Science appears to have been eroding not just one or two particular ideas of God but really any idea of a transcendent being worthy of being worshipped.

From personal experience I expect that this process almost always works only in one direction. A person is baptized and raised in the traditions of one of the big religions, but then in the course of modern education and maturation acquires an alternative, agnostic or even atheistic view of the universe—and when that happens, the person finds it very hard to go back again to embrace religiosity and transcendence. How does one put the toothpaste back in the tube?

Science, in other words, seems to be a potent and broad-acting antagonist with respect to whatever part of the human psyche craves religious transcendence. It embraces the infinite, the cosmos, enough to fill the God-shaped hole, blocking all competitors, but it cannot provide the nourishment, the meaning, the seeds of morality, that one gets from a traditional religion.

Part of the appeal of religion is that it flatters believers with the idea that there is a transcendent Being who considers them important enough to care about. “For God so loved the world” etc. Science obliterates this conceit along with all the other traditional assumptions humans have made about their elevated rank in the universe. “Since Copernicus,” Nietzsche famously wrote, “man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane—now he is slipping faster and faster away from the center into—what? into nothingness? into a ‘penetrating sense of his nothingness?’”

The point here, or the suggested hypothesis, is that science, despite being beneficial to humanity in many ways, is also harmful in a critical psychological way. This is not a new idea, but it and its implications seem to have been underexplored, to say the least. Do science’s malign effects outweigh its benign effects? What if science inevitably sets up a “despair trap” through which any sentient species can pass only with difficulty? Does this putative barrier explain the so-called Fermi Paradox, named for the Nobel-winning physicist Enrico Fermi—who wondered why, if life evolves so easily in the universe, ET civilizations aren’t abundantly evident to us?

Increasingly Toxic Knowledge

Most people are protected from the toxic effects of science by their lack of awareness of, and interest in, the parts of science that deal with the nature of reality and the universe—the parts that blot out the warm sun of the old religions. But, as science takes an ever-larger role in education, in politics, in popular media content and so on, people increasingly will have to confront these toxic parts. Those who absorb such knowledge would not even have to be consciously aware of its toxic effect on them. The pathways and processes connecting learned information to depression and demoralization could work slowly, and entirely “below the limen,” in the unconscious parts of the mind.

In any case, one can easily get the gist of this demoralizing knowledge by skimming through any contemporary popular treatment of cosmology. There one will find laid out, in the weirdly upbeat prose preferred by publishers, cosmologists’ conviction that Earth and its humans make up an infinitesimal speck within a reality comprised of vast, multiple and multiply-dimensioned universes. The acceptance of such a reality raises an obvious and discomfiting question: Would a God that reigns supreme over such a vastness really take notice of an insignificant and presumably backward species such as ours?

The more one reads about the modern scientific understanding of reality, the worse it gets. Arguably the most important scientific advance of the past century is quantum mechanics (QM). The fundamental mathematical equations of this discipline, derived in the 1920s from experimental observations, have been proved accurate again and again, and are the basis for many modern technologies. Yet the physical reality suggested by QM’s equations is severely at odds with the ways in which humans tend to think about themselves and their world. Indeed, the prevailing theory about QM reality is about as cold and nihilistic as any theory could be.

This prevailing theory was originally called the Relative State Formulation by its inventor (a lapsed Catholic named Hugh Everett, who died in relative obscurity in 1982), but is now famously known as the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI). It suggests that the particles constituting the fabric of “reality” exist naturally not as discrete, individual objects but as what might be called an interconnected multiplicity of states—a ghostly multiplicity that indicates the presence of separate worlds or universes.

In other words, while our reality appears to be constructed of discrete particles, and we generally experience only one world or universe that appears to proceed probabilistically along one timeline, there is in fact a wider reality—a “multiverse”—consisting of an infinitude of other universes.

MWI may be hard to understand if one hasn’t had much physics. But its central idea is that, across the multiverse, everything happens that can happen. In other words, at any moment, the particles that make up any object, including a human, have, collectively, a vast number of immediate futures. These are not possible futures—they all happen/exist, just in different universes. Over short intervals, on the order of seconds or fractions of a second, the differences between these alternate outcomes will be relatively subtle, a matter of slight, seemingly random variations in the positions and other attributes of the subatomic particles making up the object of interest. However, as time goes on—as seconds run to days and years—the differences in outcomes increase dramatically, and of course every branch on this tree of possibility keeps branching again and again, with every femtosecond tick of the cosmic clock. Thus, any person, or any other object, faces at any moment a near-infinitude of futures, and, again, each of these—according to MWI—actually happens in a separate universe within the multiverse.

I’ve never seen any emphasis of this point in popular treatments of MWI, but the theory suggests that the multiverse—all Creation—has a perfect completeness. Its history could be imagined as a closed book on which each page has been inked solid black with the superimposed imprints of innumerable typed and re-typed characters. From the perspective of its godlike author, the book would contain every possible story. From the perspective of an individual human, incapable of perceiving more than one (very brief) timeline, it would contain only the story through which he has lived—though, again, this individual human would really have been only one manifestation of a rather hazily defined collective entity that, from the moment of birth and at every moment thereafter, proliferated into every possible variation of identity and experience.

Whether the ever-branching universes that make up the multiverse are created ex nihil, or already exist—beyond time as it were—in a meta-realm of every possibility (that closed book of over-inked pages) is something that MWI theorists still debate. But the implications for the human self-image are just as dire either way.

In essence, “you” will have been a hero in some of the worlds you have lived through, a villain in others, a nonentity in most. From the perspective of a god who sees all these timelines, do you deserve punishment for your villainy, praise for your heroism, scorn or pity for your nonentity-ness? Wouldn’t such a god understand, instead, that you—far from having any agency in the way that humans instinctively assume—have been fundamentally obliged to be all things, across all your timelines, simply to fill out the full space of possibilities comprising multiversal reality?

And from the perspective of such a god—or of any entity that can apprehend the reality of the multiverse—what are the histories, written or experienced, of myopic humans who think the one universe they perceive is all there is? Do these single-timeline accounts have any more significance than, say, the precise arrangements of handfuls of sand tossed by random children on a beach? These arrangements, these histories, may be influenced by “laws” that relate precedents to outcomes. But the fundamental variability that drives them, collectively, to satisfy every possibility, suggests that their individual significances to an MWI-perceiving god would be nothing—zero.

Does MWI’s final reduction of the “meaning of life” to absolute zero really have dire implications for humanity? Must we believe, with Pascal, that the human psyche has within it an “infinite abyss” that “can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object”? Humans like other animals have evolved, first and foremost, to live and to procreate. Moreover, through medical advances that enable longer and longer lifespans, humans may soon start to see themselves as very godlike.

Yet humans are a contemplative species, and if they can be inspired by contemplating some things, so can they be depressed—even to suicide—by contemplating others. What could be more depressing for them than to become aware of their imprisonment within one tiny solar system, in one vast universe of implicitly zero meaning and significance, inside an infinitely wider multiverse. Hugh Everett himself appears to have felt this conflict and its implications, in the sense that he became an atheist who smoke, drank, and ate to excess—essentially killing himself with a heart attack at the age of only 51—and before he died specified that his remains should be thrown away like garbage.

Beware ETs Bearing Gifts

Humans appear to be bound to confront QM and MWI not only through popular science literature and routine technical education, but also as quantum technology (especially quantum computing) starts to replace conventional technology in many applications—causing users of the new tech to wonder, how does this really work?

Conceivably, modern societies, through some radical cultural shift—perhaps driven by the new and unprecedented cultural power of women—will avoid this confrontation by turning away from science. The elevation of science that we see in the modern West is, after all, a relatively recent cultural choice, one that not every civilization has made. By rejecting that choice, for example as the Amish have, humans could protect themselves from MWI and similar toxic knowledge indefinitely. For now, though, it seems unlikely they will choose such a radical change of direction.

Another possibility we tend to overlook is that humans, whatever their choices, might nevertheless be abruptly forced to confront toxic scientific knowledge, if an extraterrestrial civilization were ever to visit Earth and attempt communication. What is the nature of reality? How is the fabric of existence constructed? Those are among the first questions we would ask visitors from a more advanced, star-faring civilization.

Martin Amis once touched upon this theme in a short story titled “The Janitor on Mars,” which, suffice it to say, was pretty dark in its view of human morale and morality in the context of an encounter with a superior ET civilization bearing nihilistic cosmological revelations. The least dark element of the story was the impending sudden destruction of the Earth and extinction of humans. In real life, humans probably wouldn’t be granted such a mercy, and would have to die off slowly, one by one in “deaths of despair,” and multitude by multitude in suicide cults and wars.

The fact that craft from ET civilizations are, at least, scarce in Earth’s skies, could thus reflect not only a “despair trap” that strangles most technical civilizations in their cradles, but also the awareness—among those fortunate civilizations that have survived the trap—of the potent effect of the knowledge they carry, on such naïve and primitive species as ours.

***

This short essay was prompted by the debate surrounding the ongoing Russian threat to invade Ukraine. But it is really a more general argument about state-vs.-state conflicts—even human-vs.-human conflicts.

My train of thought here was first tugged into motion when I read some of the remarks by Twitter nomenklatura, to the effect that the US shouldn’t lift a finger to help Ukraine and countries like it, should focus on its own problems, should stop “warmonger” talk, etc.

To me, such arguments reveal not just that a lot of Americans have failed to learn the lessons of history, but also that they’ve lost touch with some of their most basic and useful moral instincts.

(I should note here that I have no “axe to grind” where Ukraine is concerned: I don’t know any Ukrainians; I’ve never been to the place; I probably never will go there.)

Some quick background

In the 1980s, severe economic divergence between the Eastern Bloc and the democracies of the West, and the related weakening of the Soviet state, led to the emergence of durable pro-democracy movements in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and other captive nations. These movements came to successful conclusions in 1989, when they brought down the Warsaw Pact, the Berlin Wall, and the entire Iron Curtain. Two years later, the USSR itself disintegrated, its constituent “republics,” including the core Ukrainian, Byelorussian, and Russian Republics, seceding from their union in late 1991. Most of the government offices and instruments of power in Moscow reverted to the control of the newly named Russian Federation, which became, initially, more of an ally than an adversary to the West.

This was, for the West, a victory almost on the scale of the Second World War’s. Indeed, it seemed to bring to a close not just the Cold War but also the broader process of European upheaval that had begun with the start of the First World War in 1914.

But the waters did not stay calm. The first post-Soviet leader of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, was an alcoholic and a clumsy and corrupt administrator, and was forced to resign in 1999. He was replaced by his appointee Vladimir Putin, an ambitious former mid-level KGB officer who had entered politics after the fall of the USSR. Putin had a mess on his hands at first, and had to contend, among other things, with a much more democratic political system than had existed in the old USSR. But he eventually got things under control, in the traditional Russian way one might say—he smothered Russian democracy in its cradle, enriched himself and his cronies, and made Russia yet again an adversary of the West.

Putin never achieved a Stalin level of power, but he had enough control to bully and imprison political dissidents at home, and assassinate them abroad. He also was increasingly able and confident enough to impose Russia’s imperial will on some former captive states that had become too independent-minded, namely, in the oughties, Chechnya and Georgia, and, starting in 2014, Ukraine—following a popular Ukrainian uprising against that country’s pro-Russian leader, Viktor Yanukovych. Russian troops, not very convincingly described as volunteers and separatist freedom fighters, invaded Ukraine in that year, ultimately occupying the Crimean peninsula as well as a resource-rich eastern region called the Donbas.

Now Putin has positioned Russian troops and equipment seemingly for a new invasion, and has issued the West (principally the USA) a set of extreme demands that essentially convey the message: Ukraine is part of Russia, or at least should be forever under Russia’s thumb.

While Putin has acted boldly (by timorous Western standards) against Ukraine, Georgia, and Chechnya, he has not dared to attack other former Soviet satellites, such as Poland, Romania, and the Baltics. There is a simple reason for this: In the wake of the USSR’s collapse, the latter all eagerly joined NATO to protect themselves against their ancestral Russian enemy. Being a NATO member carries the solid-gold guarantee of full military assistance—troops and weaponry—from other alliance members in the event of Russian invasion. This has, to all appearances, been a sufficient deterrent against Russia since NATO’s inception. Ukraine, Georgia, and Chechnya are not members of NATO.

Reasons to Leave Ukraine to its Fate

There are true, mostly unspoken reasons why Americans, and Westerners generally, don’t want to help Ukraine in a decisive way, and there are essentially false, justification-type reasons that are provided for public consumption.

The true reasons are 1) having troops killed and precious military hardware destroyed on behalf of a country that is out on the margins of Europe would be costly—above all politically; and 2) opposing Russia too strongly would interrupt its supplies of natural gas to certain European countries (e.g., Germany) that badly need this resource, which, again, would be politically and otherwise costly.

These reasons strike me as quite similar to the reasons schoolchildren use, or feel, when they observe a bully threatening someone else: Although they at least vaguely recognize the value of stopping the bully, they fear the cost of “sticking their neck out” to fight, and feel that it would simply be cheaper to look the other way. The bullies, of course, understand this reasoning and exploit it.

The public reasons for not supporting Ukraine, a relatively democratic European state facing invasion by an authoritarian semi-Asiatic aggressor, largely have to do with Ukraine’s not being part of NATO, with Russia’s alleged right to control states on its periphery—sometimes referenced with the phrase “sphere of influence”—and with a general feeling that leading Western countries, especially the US, are overextended already and shouldn’t always try to be the world’s policeman. There is even the notion, apparently popular among many right-wing Americans, that Ukraine in recent years has become an American colony, the creation of warmonger “neocons,” and should now be liberated from the American empire so that it can return to the natural, bosomy embrace of its Russian mother.

Reasons to Stand Up for Ukraine

Firstly, the people of Ukraine, despite their ancestral brutalization and periodic annexation by Russia, consider themselves—and are—a distinct Western, Christian people, with their own culture and language. If there is one broad political-philosophical priority that Western societies should stand up for, it is the political independence of their distinct peoples—the same “inalienable right” of self-determination on which the USA was founded.

Secondly, NATO intervened decisively in Bosnia in 1995, to defend the independence of that country from what was essentially an attack by neighboring Serbia as well as by Bosnian-resident ethnic Serbs. What did the beleaguered Muslim Bosnians possess, to justify NATO’s protection, that Christian Ukrainians now lack?

Thirdly, and just obviously, the only broadly applicable and effective way in which small states can protect themselves from much larger aggressors is by joining alliances or other collective security arrangements. Ukraine naturally would like to do this, but for various reasons, including the terminal pusillanimity of Germany (which still flinches when anyone mentions the Red Army), has not been allowed membership in NATO. Thus, the fact that Ukraine is “not part of NATO” is more a cause of Russia’s bullying than a valid justification for acquiescing in it.

Fourthly, the US and Russia in 1994 inveigled Ukraine (along with Kazakhstan and Belarus) to give up the Russian nuclear weapons stationed on their soil, in exchange for various security guarantees, under the so-called Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. Twenty-eight years on, Russia has blatantly and repeatedly violated this agreement. The US, though it promised at the time to come to Ukraine’s aid if Russia turned against it, has instead sought to weasel out of any real commitment. However, the agreement was explicitly meant to provide a security assurance—it’s there in the title, folks.

Fifthly, failing to stand up to Putin will embolden him. I notice the mockery some on the right have leveled, not only at this obvious argument, but also at the obvious Munich 1938 comparison. If there’s anything about this debate that really sparks my ire, it’s that smug “you can’t compare now to 1938” stuff. This is not an argument requiring fine, scholarly distinctions between historical events! This is about basic human nature. And, while it’s true that Putin’s aims now might be limited to Ukraine (or mere threats to Ukraine), it’s also true that Hitler’s aims were limited, vis a vis Western Europe, in 1938—but of course his aims got bigger as the threat from those who opposed him got (as he assessed it) smaller. Another way of putting this is that the manly instinct to fight the bully, even at considerable cost, even when the bully doesn’t directly threaten oneself, is not a useless atavism, as some commentators seem to think. It is still an adaptive reflex and, along with antibully systems such as NATO (imperfect as they are) underlies the relative peace of the developed world.

Sixthly, failing to stand up to Putin, allowing him to carry out his rape of Ukraine, will have demoralizing effects on the people of the West. The revealed weakness of the leading Western countries also could nudge any country that had hoped to get the West’s protection to instead become a minion of Russia.

Finally, failing to stand up to hegemonic bullies is a bad long-run strategy, just in simple logical terms. With no credible alliance to oppose him, the bully can subjugate his victims one by one, conceivably until he is too powerful even for an alliance to oppose.

What should have been done?

In general, those in a position to do so should have provided Ukraine with a worthy alliance to join as soon as the country started moving away from Russia. Although Germany and France (which are partly to blame for the current situation) have long opposed Ukrainian membership in NATO, the US and UK should have helped organize an alternative alliance, perhaps including other, highly motivated ex-Soviet Republics. Even now the US could tell Germany: agree to admit Ukraine to NATO immediately or the US will quit NATO and form a new alliance. In any case, the moment Ukraine enjoyed the formal protection of NATO or some other strong alliance, the Russian threat—if so far uncommitted—would recede.

It’s important to emphasize that last point. The purpose of having alliances is to not to be a “warmonger.” It is to deter war by showing the would-be hegemon that he will get a bloody nose if he takes a step further.

In future, it would also be a smart move for the US and other Western countries to encourage their former regular military men to serve as paid volunteers, equipped with gray market hardware, in conflicts like these. The presence or even the possible presence of such experienced mercenaries would be a significant additional deterrent to an aggressor.

Every day, on Twitter and a thousand other media and social-media forums, Americans of a “conservative” or “right-wing” persuasion bemoan and lament the civilizational destruction caused by the crazed, bureaucrat-and-brownshirt armies of wokeness.

I bemoan and lament with them. But what distresses me even more is the destruction—serious destruction—caused by trends that ordinary people on the right approve or at least choose to keep silent about.

One of these trends concerns some of the criminal and civil cases inspired by the #MeToo movement—cases that represent the anti-male, pro-histrionic-female theme in the broad wokeist takeover of the American judicial system. (Another prominent theme in that takeover, the anti-white-law-abiding-citizen, pro-black-felon theme, I wrote about just over a month ago.)

A particularly striking #MeToo case, still in its early stages but already with prominent media coverage, lies before us now.

This is the case brought by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the most media-noisy of the sex kittens paid and kept by the late Jeffrey Epstein. She claims that—more than two decades ago, when she was just 17—she slept with the British royal Prince Andrew, and suffered so much harm thereby that she is now entitled to significant monetary damages. According to the complaint filed by her lawyers:

Prince Andrew committed sexual assault and battery upon Plaintiff when she was 17 years old. As such, Prince Andrew is responsible for battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress pursuant to New York common law. The damage to Plaintiff has been severe and lasting . . . .

The below photograph depicts Prince Andrew, Plaintiff, and Maxwell at Maxwell’s home prior to Prince Andrew sexually abusing Plaintiff.

The reader is free to peruse the full complaint [pdf], to follow the case as it progresses, and to make judgments accordingly. I offer here, as a mere bystander who knows none of the parties, only my own humble, hushed opinions.

Which is to say, I think it’s a shameless fraud that demonstrates the shambles of the American legal system under the pressures of wokeist feminization.

Worse, I think it puts on full display America’s cultural corruption—for no media commentator of prominence, as far as I know, has offered even mild skepticism about this outrageous case or others like it.

In other words, while I believe that the stink of this business is more or less universally apparent, the average media person pretends otherwise because the stories generate clicks, and also for fear of cancellation—cancellation by the same hysteria-prone demographic that got people hanged at Salem and other innocents burned at the stake throughout Europe.

Let me clarify that Giuffre’s case against Andrew doesn’t—I mean, logically shouldn’t—have a close connection to the legal cases against Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. I happen to think the latter were both obviously guilty of sex trafficking and related offenses, even if the sentence Epstein would have received in New York and the one Maxwell is now set to receive will be excessive (on the Great White Defendant principle) compared to typical trafficking cases, i.e., involving some Nigerian or Honduran who really does enslave and brutalize his victims. But no one has ever presented evidence that Andrew was a party to Epstein’s trafficking scheme, or that he was anything other than a gentle fool who, like other fools (Bill Gates and Bill Clinton among them) hung out with his friend Epstein from time to time. (How Epstein generated the charisma to gather such people in his orbit is to me a significant mystery, albeit not relevant here.)

Giuffre’s case rests on the simple allegation that Andrew, in cahoots with Epstein and Maxwell, somehow “forced” Giuffre to sleep with him—which seems not just an unsupported allegation but a preposterous one. Assuming Giuffre and Andrew even did have sex, we have been given no reason to picture it as any less volitional on her part than her demeanor in the photograph would suggest. And I think it’s safe to say that Andrew, whatever his other failings, has never shown a propensity for treating women in the manner alleged.

At the same time, it appears that Giuffre, having partied and traveled widely and gotten to know various men, all on Epstein’s nickel, has been, since E’s legal troubles began, squeezing him or his estate (also Ghislaine Maxwell and Alan Dershowitz) for further money; and the suit against Andrew represents one of the continuations of that broader effort; all of which speaks clearly to the issue of her motive.

In short, the case has the prima facie appearance of being no more than a shakedown: an attempt essentially to extort money with the threat of an embarrassing civil trial if the money is not paid.

Despite this, there is a good chance Giuffre will prevail—her blue-chip lawyers, who probably stand to get around a third of any award or settlement, would not have taken the case otherwise. Most likely she will prevail because Andrew and his family will decide to settle rather than endure the pain of a trial. Even if they are willing to endure that pain, the corruption the #MeToo strain of wokeness has caused in the American legal system, including juries, makes any such case a roll of the dice, at least. The judge in the case also may not be an even-handed Myron Kovitsky type (Bonfire of the Vanities); he is Lewis Kaplan, a Clinton appointee and a paid-up member of the New York liberal elite, whose demeanor in an early hearing does not bode well for the prince.

Shakedowns occur all the time, among highlifes and lowlifes, but this one is so prominent, so front-and-center, and yet apparently so untouchable by simple reason and skepticism. No disinterested observer can question it! Everybody loves Empress Virginia’s new clothes! Little wonder that Dershowitz, target of another one of Giuffre’s suits, has come across as almost apoplectic when talking about her to reporters.

certified, complete, total liar [link]

I’m not neutral on this, because [Giuffre] also accused me of having sex with her, and I proved conclusively — through her own diaries, through her own lawyer, through our own emails — that it would be impossible for me to have ever met her. [link]

Anyway, I hope my writing this emboldens some of you out there to speak up—quixotically, I know, but so be it—and state what is obvious about cases like this, namely that they need to be strongly discouraged somehow, and the men targeted by them need to be better protected. The US and other Western legal systems already make many concessions to women, including protection from incidental reputational harm in rape cases. Why can’t men receive a similar level of protection from the deliberate reputational harm of shakedown cases?

Well, of course, you know why—because women essentially are now in charge, and are remodeling the institutions of Western life to suit themselves. With essentially zero pushback from men. I begin to tire of pointing this out.

***

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

I’ve written about women and their cultural/political ascendancy so much in recent years, especially the last three, that I worry about sounding like the proverbial broken record if I write any more. But it seems to me that as this idea is accepted more widely—including by commentators who see it as their own idea . . .

. . . there is a tendency to narrow the focus (e.g., “female graduates,” “HR ladies,” or “women explain wokeness”) so that the true extent of the West’s feminization is obscured.

Moreover, the case can be made that feminization is having not only an enormous but also a potentially fatal impact on Western civilization as we have known it. Thus, thumping the tub about this subject may be a good and necessary thing to do now.

To that end, I think at least several key points within this overall hypothesis bear repeating:

Women’s broad cultural/political ascendancy has been reshaping the West for decades

The big idea here is that women have been the principal drivers not only of the creeping wokeism post 2015 or so, and of the ongoing semi-spiritual movement known as the Great Awokening, but also of the general “leftward” (in fact, “feminine”) trends in Western culture and politics over the last six-plus decades. This is the period in which women moved en masse into, and achieved parity or dominance within, culturally and politically influential professions such as journalism, publishing, entertainment, law, academia, politics, even blogging.

It is not just from one or two of those professions but from all of them, and in every circumstance along the way (e.g., university life, engagement with social media, office politics, voting, protest marches), that women have been causing cultural and political change, effectively feminizing the West to a degree never seen before in any large civilization.

Activist women—mostly single, university-educated, and/or young—may be the “shock troops” of feminization, and the most dedicated and effective practitioners of wokeism and cancel culture. But women in general have been driving this social transformation.

Women’s ascension to cultural and political power has had cultural and political consequences because women on average are different than men across a wide range of attitudes and behaviors

Gender differences in attitudes and behaviors were presumably shaped—at a biological level with changes that cannot easily be undone—by men’s and women’s distinct roles during the long period of hominid evolution, roles that for women centered on maternity. Women even now in modern times appear to be markedly more emotionally sensitive than men on average, quicker to form social networks, less interested in abstract and inanimate things, less interested in systems, more personal (including ad hominem) in their thinking, and more fearful—not just of ideas and people they dislike but also of toxins and other putative environmental threats. All these differences have had cultural and policy consequences as women’s power has increased in societies designed and traditionally run by men. One could say that women effectively have been using their new cultural and political power to renovate and redecorate their civilization according to their distinctive tastes. As Virginia Woolf put it in her 1938 essay, “Three Guineas”:

Let us never cease from thinking—what is this “civilization” in which we find ourselves?

Cultural/political feminization therefore involves a multitude of changes

Cultural and political changes that have plausibly been driven by the ascendancy of women in Western societies are not limited to the extreme changes associated with “wokeism.” They include also relatively mild and gradual, long-term trends:

• • more extensive and generous welfare programs;
  • more rights, often including reverse-discrimination-type rights, for “traditionally disadvantaged” or otherwise marginalized groups (blacks, Hispanics, nonwhite immigrants, women, gays, transsexuals, etc.);
  • more emphasis generally in culture and policy on “equality of outcomes” over “equal opportunity,” and on guilt and compassion (vs. dispassionate, long-term calculation) as drivers of policy and social change;

• • more emphasis on “trauma”—emotional upset—everywhere from journalism to law and medicine, with a related emergence of trauma-memory (PTSD) or otherwise trauma-related syndromes that are strongly contagious and now highly prevalent;
  • less affinity for traditional, often Constitutionally protected forms of (emotionally painful) confrontation such as free speech and free debate, free scientific inquiry, and due process of law (e.g., the right to face one’s accuser, and the right to cross-examine)—and increasing affinity for systems that suppress and punish “unacceptable” speech;
  • the acceptance of what amount to special rules for women when they are complainants against men in sex-related court cases, e.g., they can bring cases decades after the alleged crime, and when they claim to have been abused by men they later dated or exchanged love-notes with, their claims are still taken seriously—are simply chalked up to their presumed trauma;

• • the intrusion of distinctively feminine values into the traditionally male-dominated world of sports, such that, for example, athletes putting their “self-care” instincts over their competitive instincts are not derided but celebrated;

• • the alteration of language, including the elimination of upsetting terms and invention of new ones (“safe space”), to reflect the reigning new feminine mindset;
  • the routine, rapid formation of social networks to exert pressure on corporations or other institutions to “cancel” someone who has fallen afoul of feminist/woke orthodoxies;
  • strong environmentalism and related advocacies and preferences (anti-vaccine, anti-GMO, anti-nuclear, climate-change alarmism, veganism, “organic” foods and medicines, etc.), stemming plausibly from women’s relatively strong sensitivity to the idea of environmental harms including toxins;
  • Shifts towards less systematized/hierarchical and rule-based religious forms, from paganism to evangelical/charismatic Christianity.

Cultural/political feminization, far from being “progress,” is probably destroying Western liberalism—the liberalism that emancipated women in the first place

Yes, men on average have their own ways of thinking and acting—their own stubborn, long-evolved biases. And yes, the traditional male mindset is not necessarily optimized for running human societies in the 21^st century. But there is an obvious reason why the male mindset, compared to the female mindset, is probably better adapted for managing culture and politics: Men have been managing culture and politics, and getting punished in the harshest ways for failure, for hundreds of millennia. Women, by contrast, have been working on a large scale in public life for not even two generations—and still seem inclined to blame men when things go wrong.

On the flip side of that argument is another obvious point: Women’s mindset is not simply unadapted or insufficiently adapted by evolution for managing public affairs; it is adapted specifically for other tasks, mainly domestic tasks revolving around the bearing and raising of children. In other words, women’s higher emotional sensitivity (compassion, guilt, fear, anxiety/turmoil); their relative indifference to machines and systems and cold, abstract thought; their stronger fear of toxins; their greater tendency to think un-independently and transmit social contagions, etc. are in a fundamental sense out of place in the culture- and policy-making spheres.

I’m not suggesting that women’s traits are totally separate from men’s in this regard—for virtually any trait there would be two highly overlapping distributions, so that there would be lots and lots of women further towards the “male” end of the distribution compared to the average male.

But there clearly are differences between the means of those distributions, between the average male and the average female in other words; and the central idea here is that those differences, on a population level, are not only meaningful but potentially cataclysmic in their civilizational impact.

That impact is evident not only in the broad cultural and policy shifts since the early 1960s—the “pink shift” as I have called it—but in the more recent and extreme policy changes in places where cultural and political feminization is most advanced: “defund the police,” “let violent criminals out on bail,” “open the borders / diversity is our strength,” “let homeless people camp and crap wherever they like,” “give addicts needles,” “math is racist,” “logic is sexist,” etc. Not all of these policies are wildly popular, and obviously specific groups of hardcore activists are to blame for some of them, but I don’t see how these changes, collectively, could have taken root to the extent they have except against a heavily feminized cultural background—they are essentially ad absurdum expressions of the feminine mindset applied to policy.

I don’t think that every manifestation of feminization will be harmful in the long run. But some will. The move away from free speech towards speech- and thought-policing seems pretty ominous. Even worse, I suspect, is the encouragement of mass non-Western immigration to Western countries. One does not have to “hate” non-Western immigrants to understand that they and the culture they bring with them are . . . non-Western . . . so that the more there are of them, the less Western their host countries become. The women who encourage mass non-Western immigration seem surprisingly indifferent to the fact that non-Western cultures generally are less liberal, and a lot less friendly to the idea of female power, compared to Western cultures even from a few decades ago.

Can liberal Western societies nevertheless avert their impending self-destruction, by—among other measures—reining in cultural/political feminization? We’ll soon see, but I doubt it. I think it could help some to talk more about this cultural feminization hypothesis—“cult-fem theory”—at least as a way of dispelling the holy aura of “progress” that feminization-related social changes have acquired. But could one attack cultural feminization more directly and conclusively? Could one expel women, or even just the “bad apples,” or even persuade them to think and act differently, in all significant Western institutions—legislatures, government offices, universities, corporations, media organizations, philanthropies—where they are now embedded and substantially run things? I don’t see how. I don’t think liberal Western societies have any strong defense against this threat, other than by reverting to overt illiberalism.

***

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

An unpopular cause I feel compelled to stick up for today is the cause of Travis McMichael, his father Gregory McMichael, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan, all of Brunswick, Georgia, USA, who were recently found guilty of murdering Ahmaud Arbery. Rightly or wrongly, I am convinced that this verdict is blatantly unjust. I also believe that many Americans, not just the jury and the prosecutor, are complicit in this injustice—an injustice that is much closer to murder (these men are likely to die in prison) than was the actual killing of Arbery.

Grievous miscarriages of justice occur frequently now in the United States, and often arise due to race-related issues that bias prosecutors and jurors. So why am I writing about this particular injustice, and not, say, the travesty of the Derek Chauvin verdict? I think it’s mainly because in the Chauvin case I read a healthy amount of commentary defending Chauvin, whereas in the case of the McMichaels and Bryan I read no defenses, only smug expressions of satisfaction or at least placid acceptance of this verdict, even among people who should know better.

The guilt of the McMichaels and Bryan is, in other words, part of the contemporary American “conventional wisdom” that I have come to distrust almost reflexively.

Why the McMichaels and Bryan were abandoned to their harsh fate so easily, even willfully and joyously, by their countrymen is something I’ll speculate about later in this essay, but first I want to go over some of the basic facts of the case.

The killing of Ahmaud Arbery

Ahmaud Arbery was a 25-year old African-American man who lived in Brunswick, Georgia. Like many African-American men, he had a police record for at least moderately serious crimes, including bringing a handgun to a high school football game in 2013, and an attempted shoplifting of a TV from a WalMart in 2017. He was still on probation when he died.

In late 2018, apparently based on his own observations as well as those of family members, Arbery’s probation officer recommended that Arbery get a mental health evaluation. At this evaluation—the defense lawyers brought this up at the trial, but the judged ruled it inadmissible—Arbery described to the evaluator (apparently a psychiatric nurse) “auditory delusions sometimes commanding him ‘to rob and steal’ and sometimes telling him ‘to hurt people,’” as well as general difficulties controlling his anger. Arbery was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and prescribed olanzapine (Zyprexa), a second-generation antipsychotic that is also used treat schizophrenia and the manic episodes of type 1 bipolar disorder; however, he apparently didn’t take the drug for long, and there was no evidence of it in his system when he died, although there were trace amounts of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

The MSM stories after Arbery’s death were heavily biased in the young man’s favor, and tended to omit or downplay anything negative, preferring to show a picture of him looking spiffy in his prom suit . . .

. . . and preferring to emphasize that at the time of his death Arbery was “planning” to attend a local technical college to become an electrician, and often went jogging for exercise.

In general, because of this overwhelming bias, it is hard to trust the information about Arbery that was provided by his family and their lawyer and cannot be verified, e.g., with documents. We can’t say with confidence much more about his background than what judicial records show, namely that he had a history of being armed illegally, and of attempting theft, and of showing signs of mental illness including serious impulse-control problems. This shouldn’t necessarily have had any bearing on the jury’s findings, but it does speak to the broader moral picture, and definitely belies the many MSM portraits of Arbery that were designed, in part, to whip up hatred against the men who killed him.

Late in 2019 Arbery had begun taking occasional jogs into a mostly white neighborhood called Satilla Shores, where the McMichaels and Bryan lived. A video camera also had recorded him, in his jogging clothes, walking into a house in the neighborhood that was under construction—this had happened several times, mostly at night.

In the months immediately preceding his fateful encounter with the McMichaels, there also had been several break-ins or thefts in the neighborhood, including the theft of a gun from an unlocked truck—reported by Travis McMichael on January 1.

On the night of February 11, according to Wikipedia:

Travis called 9-1-1 to report a slender 6-foot-tall Black man with short hair, wearing red shorts and a white shirt, who was trespassing on the site of a house under construction. Travis said, “I’ve never seen this guy before in the neighborhood.” The dispatcher asked whether Travis was OK, and he said, “Yeah, it just startled me. When I turned around and saw him and backed up, he reached into his pocket and ran into the house. So I don’t know if he’s armed or not. But he looked like he was acting like he was.” “We’ve been having a lot of burglaries and break-ins around here lately”, Travis said on the call. He told the dispatcher that he was out in his truck, and that as many as four neighbors were out looking for the man. His father Gregory was one of the people out searching that night, and Gregory and at least one other neighbor were armed. Police responded and searched the house along with a neighbor, but found no one. However, surveillance video from that evening showed a man who reportedly looked like Arbery, briefly walking in and out of the house under construction. He did not take anything. The under-construction house did not have doors or windows.

While Arbery died before the mystery of the local thefts could be solved, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that exonerates him in all those thefts, despite the MSM’s implications otherwise. Given his background and the correspondence of his jogging and the local burglaries, it seems at least plausible—and evidently many Satilla Shores residents suspected—that he used his jogging at night as a cover for burglaries, and jogging in daytime to select his night-time targets. (I would be interested to know whether the burglaries continued after Arbery’s death, but haven’t seen any reference to such data.)

On the 23^rd of February, shortly after one o’clock in the afternoon, Arbery once again ran into Satilla Shores, and into the house under construction, and once again was recorded on video camera.

A neighbor, Matthew Albenze, also spotted Arbery and called 911 to report the trespass on the building under construction. Wikipedia again:

The 9-1-1 dispatcher asked if the man was “breaking into it right now?” The caller replied: “No … it’s all open.” After the caller said the man was now “running down the street”, the dispatcher said police would respond. The dispatcher asked at 1:08 p.m., “I just need to know what he was doing wrong. Was he just on the premises and not supposed to be?” The caller responded, with some parts garbled, saying: “And he’s been caught on camera a bunch at night. It’s kind of an ongoing thing.”

Why Arbery ran away isn’t clear, but the perception among those who saw him was that he was trying to escape after stealing something from the construction site. Apparently he hadn’t stolen anything, but if he had known that the cops had been called, then, being on probation, he might have wanted to avoid another brush with the law. Then again, if Arbery was mentally ill, it is probably pointless to try to rationalize his actions.

Soon Arbery ran past the McMichaels’ house, where Gregory McMichael, working in the yard, saw him and recognized him as the repeat trespasser the neighborhood was worried about. He and Travis armed themselves and got into their white pickup truck, and gave chase.

The MSM accounts, and the account of the prosecutor, are worded to suggest that the McMichaels were racist good-old-boys who pursued Arbery that day simply because they wanted to hunt down, and snuff out the life of, an innocent black man whose only “crime” was “jogging while black.” To say that this is false, and as such represents both journalistic and prosecutorial misconduct, would be putting it very mildly. Both McMichaels had law enforcement experience, and obviously (all the evidence leans this way) were attempting a citizen’s arrest, a procedure that has a long history in the United States and at the time was specifically sanctioned in Georgia law. In other words, they wanted only to detain Arbery so that he could be questioned by police.

Whether they had sufficient reason to attempt a citizen’s arrest is debatable. However, to say that in the heat of the moment someone slightly exceeding his rights under a citizen’s arrest law automatically will be charged with false imprisonment, and then murder for defending his life when the mentally ill arrestee attacks him, is completely absurd. Citizen’s arrest laws are not meant to sanction vigilantism, but they also are not meant to be life-destroying traps for honest citizens who are trying to protect their neighborhoods—in what was here a demonstrable absence of effective policing.

The McMichaels tried unsuccessfully to cut off Arbery as he ran, and, they said later, even asked him to stop and let them talk to him, but he didn’t respond and continued running in an attempt to evade them. They could easily have shot him, if killing him had been their intent, but they did not; they simply kept trying to get him to stop.

At some point Bryan, who had seen the chase go by his own house, joined in with his black pickup truck and tried—again, unsuccessfully—to cut off the running man. Note that Bryan was not a close friend of the McMichaels; he was merely another resident in this neighborhood that was now literally up in arms over the rash of thefts and trespassings, and hoped to put the perp behind bars.

Ultimately the McMichaels gave up pursuing Arbery—apparently the neighborhood had many open yards through which he could always evade them—and simply parked their pickup at a crossing where they thought he was likely to appear in his attempt to get away.

At this point, just several minutes after Albenze’s 911 call, Travis McMichael, standing on the road by the driver’s side door, made his own 911 call—but then saw Arbery coming and handed the phone to his father, who stood in the truck bed:

a male caller said: “I’m out here at Satilla Shores …There’s a Black male running down the street.” The 9-1-1 dispatcher asked, “Where at Satilla Shores?” The caller replied: “I don’t know what street we’re on.”

Arbery now as he approached apparently saw Travis standing with his shotgun by the open driver’s door on the left side of the pickup truck. Arbery might have turned around or veered onto either of the lawns beside the narrow road. Instead he kept running towards the truck, though he altered course to the right side of the road, and then ran along the right side of the truck, just a few feet from Gregory McMichael who stood in the truck bed talking to 911. When he reached the front of the truck, Arbery suddenly cut left and charged Travis.

This was the impulse that killed Arbery. You and I, and pretty much every sane person aware of the story, know this, and know that we would never have done what he did. We know that we would have stopped, and we know that if Arbery had stopped, as he’d been asked, he would still be alive, the McMichaels and Bryan would be free, and none of us would have heard of any of them.

But Arbery charged Travis. Bryan, who had been in pursuit of Arbery, parked his pickup in time to catch most of this tragic encounter on his cellphone camera.

Arbery in his fatal lunge had almost reached Travis when the latter fired his shotgun, catching Arbery in the chest. Arbery kept coming and tried to wrest the gun away from Travis. Meanwhile Gregory McMichael, with the phone still to his ear and the line to the 911 dispatcher still open, screamed at Arbery to stop.

The caller shouted, “Stop! … Watch that. Stop, damn it! Stop!”

Why did Gregory McMichael shout at Arbery to stop? Well, obviously because he and his son had never intended to kill Arbery and were astonished that he was making it necessary.

Arbery did not stop. He kept struggling for the shotgun until Travis had shot him with it a total of three times. After the third shot, which went through the left side of his chest, Arbery quickly weakened, staggered, and collapsed to the pavement.

Aftermath

Alerted by the first 911 call, the police soon arrived. Arbery by then was dead. Travis McMichael was splashed in blood and evidently in shock (“No, I’m not all right,” he told the cop. “I just fucking killed someone.”)

But, along with his father, he cooperated. Bryan cooperated too. They freely discussed the events of the preceding minutes, evidently without any sense of having committed a crime. The police did not arrest them, and the local district attorney’s office did not charge them. The Brunswick Circuit DA, Jackie Johnson, saw the case as an unfortunate but not really criminal one involving a mentally ill young man who essentially had brought about his own death through his own impulsive and violent actions.

Johnson had connections to the McMichaels, though, so she recused herself and turned the thing over to a neighboring district, Waycross Judicial Circuit District. The DA there, George Barnhill, felt the same way about the case. According to Wikipedia:

On April 2, Barnhill wrote a memorandum to Glynn County police, recommending that no arrests be made. Barnhill wrote that the McMichaels were within their rights to chase “a burglary suspect, with solid firsthand probable cause”; that “Arbery initiated the fight”; and that Travis McMichael “was allowed to use deadly force to protect himself” when “Arbery grabbed the shotgun”.

By this time, of course, Arbery’s family had got a lawyer, “leaders of the black community” were getting involved, and there were demands for a prosecution. So the whiff of racial protest, with all that entails for a prosecutor’s career, was already in the air. Soon Barnhill washed his hands of the case, with a rather tenuous excuse:

Arbery had previously been prosecuted by his son, a prosecutor for the Brunswick Circuit District Attorney’s Office, in an earlier case [and] one of the defendants [Gregory McMichael] had served as an investigator on the same prosecution.

And so, on April 13, the Georgia Attorney General’s Office handed the case to another nearby venue, the Atlantic Judicial Circuit.

It’s unclear what would have happened if the case had simply been left at the Atlantic Judicial Circuit, with no new event to inflame the situation, but presumably its DA, one Tom Durden, would have been under the same political pressures as the two DAs that had passed on the case.

What did happen is this: On May 5 a local defense lawyer who had consulted informally with Gregory and Travis McMichael uploaded Bryan’s cellphone video to the website of a local radio station. Stories were circulating to the effect that Arbery had simply been gunned down while jogging, and the lawyer apparently thought that the video would convince the public of the McMichaels’ innocence. He thought wrong—not because the video shows the McMichaels to be murderers, but simply because it somewhat shockingly depicts a young African-American man’s death at the hands of two fairly stereotypical-looking southern white fellows. This publication of the video was, remember, in one of the hardest, most hysterogenic periods of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just a few weeks later, America would erupt in the Great Awokening after George Floyd’s death—but even now it was clear that this society was becoming very restive under pressure, and its politicians and politically sensitive prosecutors were doing what they could to placate the more restive elements.

From Wikipedia again:

Within hours of the video becoming public, Tom Durden, the district attorney for Georgia’s Atlantic Judicial Circuit, said that he would present the case to “the next available grand jury in Glynn County” to decide if charges should be filed. The convening of grand juries had been postponed until after June 12 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Durden accepted Georgia Governor Brian Kemp’s offer to bring in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) to investigate. [italics mine]

At this point, with the most senior state politician getting involved in what should have been an obscure case, and more or less signaling—virtue-signaling—which way it should go, the McMichaels’ fate was sealed.

The GBI found probable cause to charge Gregory and Travis McMichael within 36 hours of taking over jurisdiction of the case, and, on May 7, arrested and charged them with felony murder. The McMichaels were booked into the Glynn County Jail. At an appearance before a judge the following day, the McMichaels were both denied bond.

A few days later, Bryan too was arrested and charged.

Ladies of the Jury

When the case came before a jury, it was widely reported that eleven of the twelve jurors were white. It was much less widely reported that nine of those eleven were women.

Women, as I have been writing for the past decade, “wear the pants” now in most Western societies, i.e., have unprecedented and often dominant influence in many realms of culture. This is important because on average women think about and react to the world differently than men. Compared to men, for example, women seem much more emotionally aroused by stories of white-on-black racial conflict. Women, white women, also appear to have been the dominant participants in the bizarre BLM frenzy of the summer 2020 Great Awokening.

If the McMichael/Bryan defense lawyers had read my essays, they would have known this (I write this only half-jokingly—my essays are not that obscure) and accordingly might have tried a different jury-selection strategy—though really, as this and many other examples show, the jury system in the United States is generally unlikely to deliver justice in cases where the forces of Wokeness favor one side.

In any case, the jury members were mostly women, the DA that ultimately charged the three defendants was a black woman (she claimed at the trial, among other things, that the defendants “chased, hunted down and ultimately executed” Arbery), and the lead prosecutor in the trial was a woman. And of course, Al Sharpton sat in the courtroom with Arbery’s family, and a mob of demonstrators camped outside the court building, to remind those sensitive women of the jury what they would face if they delivered the wrong verdict.

The jury, without much deliberation, duly returned a verdict of guilty on most of the charges. These charges included felony murder for all three defendants—even Bryan who had not been armed and had done nothing more than pursue Arbery in his truck. Travis McMichael, who presumably would have been killed by Arbery had he not defended himself, was additionally found guilty of “malice murder,” which means murder with “express or implied malice.”

These charges bring a minimum 30-year sentence before the possibility of parole, and for Travis McMichael, with the additional malice murder rap, there may be no parole—that will be up to the judge.

The Biden Administration, of course, watched this show trial approvingly.

However, it isn’t going to let it go at that. No, the Biden Administration via its “Justice” Department will try to earn further brownie points in the eyes of its voter base, and at the same time try to crush the spirit of conservative Legacy Americans, by pursuing a federal hate-crime trial of the McMichaels and Bryan—scheduled to convene next year.

Meanwhile the state of Georgia, led by “Republican” Gov. Brian Kemp, will also send a message by prosecuting former Brunswick Circuit DA Jackie Johnson—the first one to recuse herself, remember—for “obstruction of justice.” This will ensure that, the next time a black person in Georgia is killed by whites for any reason whatsoever, local DAs will show the proper Stakhanovite zeal in prosecuting.

Flaws in the Law

Note that Georgia law defines the kind of murder alleged in the case as follows:

(a) A person commits the offense of murder when he unlawfully and with malice aforethought, either express or implied, causes the death of another human being.

(b) Express malice is that deliberate intention unlawfully to take the life of another human being which is manifested by external circumstances capable of proof. Malice shall be implied where no considerable provocation appears and where all the circumstances of the killing show an abandoned and malignant heart.

(c) A person commits the offense of murder when, in the commission of a felony, he or she causes the death of another human being irrespective of malice.

Did “all the circumstances of the killing show an abandoned and malignant heart” on the part of Travis McMichael? The answer is obviously no. He did not shoot Arbery from the window of his truck (or at any time until charged) as he would have done had his intent been murderous; he phoned 911 prior to the fatal encounter; he did not flee the scene of the killing; he showed every sign of having been shaken by that killing because he had not expected it; and he cooperated with the police who came to the scene. If he had an “abandoned and malignant heart” (why are these vague and archaic descriptors even allowed in the legal code?) he would have acted like a typical premeditated killer, shooting Arbery in a way that would not implicate himself, and denying involvement if questioned. I can imagine that a lot of American men who are forced to live with the problem of Black crime will now prefer that option, at least those men who are not totally demoralized by show trials like these.

The bigger problem here is the implied notion, noted above, that even mildly overinterpreting a citizen’s arrest law, as any concerned citizen might easily do without bad intent, can abruptly (by the whim of a biased jury) turn the citizen into a felon, and then a murderer if he has to defend himself against the arrestee’s violence. If such a notion were valid, a citizen’s arrest law would be worse than worthless. It would be as if the government invited motorists to drive across a very long and narrow, guardrail-less bridge over a mile-deep gorge, having positioned the bridge in such a way that it constantly swayed and shimmied in the wind. It effectively would be no bridge at all—only a deathtrap for the unwary.

The Malignant Heart of the Matter

Is there even any point in arguing over the legal questions at the heart of such cases? I can remember many racially tinged travesties of justice in my adult life, going back at least to the O.J. Simpson trial of 1995. These cases always feel like inversions of the To Kill a Mockingbird setup—either an apparently guilty black man goes free or gets off lightly, or a wrongfully prosecuted white man has his life ruined. More importantly, the process by which these injustices occur is always (as in Harper Lee’s model of 1930s small-town Alabama) a social process involving race-politics pressures as well as a lot of venality, cowardice, and hysteria. Tom Wolfe somehow got away with writing a big novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, about the modern versions of these circuses, a novel that even in 1987 conveyed strongly the message that American society and its judicial system had been irretrievably broken by decades of racial factionalism.

Similarly, what really drew my attention to this case was the evidence of race-politics pressure on DAs and politicians, the jury’s disregard for the basic evidence that should have exonerated the defendants, the MSM’s wanton mischaracterizations of the case (go back and read their accounts!), and then, above all, the overwhelmingly positive, smug reaction to the verdict by so many Americans.

Of course, Twitter and social media generally are full of people who can cheaply virtue-signal while never having to deal with the unhappy realities afflicting ordinary Americans. Stephen King, for example, lives in a humongous complex on a barrier-island beach south of Sarasota—I know because I once lived nearby—at the least-accessible extremity of a wealthy neighborhood that was designed by its residents to keep out the riffraff, including anyone who looks remotely like Ahmaud Arbery. From that fortress King is unlikely ever to have to face the problem of burglary or thievery, and anyway any losses from such property crime would be infinitesimal in their impact on him.

But I think virtue-signaling is only a small and secondary part of this. Over the past few years, and especially since the COVID pandemic started, the more or less diffuse growth of wokeness in American life seems to have cohered into a Salem-like episode of socially sanctioned savagery—arguably almost as deadly as Salem, and much more broad and durable. I’ve even had the vague imaginative sense (from a distance, as an expatriate) that this mass hysteria has been developing into a kind of cult, presided over by a collectively summoned black perp-god, or purple-haired Gender Studies goddess, who in strident tones demands a constant flow of human sacrifices. (Another writer elaborated this human-sacrifice concept before me, so I will mostly leave that imagery to him.)

The centrality of pictures and videos should give us a clue to how these weird social phenomena arise. If, let us say, a young black man, a man like Ahmaud Arbery, is found dead in the street by gunshot one day, but there is no video evidence of how he was killed, what will be the public reaction? The reader knows the answer already, because such cases occur many times per day across the US, especially in heavily black cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit and Baltimore. There is generally no reaction, no wider resonance. The man’s family may weep. They may call on the police to solve the crime. But usually only if the cops identify a white suspect (a relatively rare event) will the case make out of the back pages of the papers, and only if the white-on-black killing is caught on video (much rarer) is the case sure to be lifted from the muck of the ordinary criminal court docket into the glare of a Woke Cult show trial.

People in general, and I guess women moreso than men on average, are apt to be distressed when they witness—for example on a video—a violent death. The distress in turn creates a sense of urgency to do something. (Consider how heavily US foreign and immigration policies in recent years have been driven by distressing images in the media, e.g., of wounded children in Syria or refugee children crossing the Rio Grande.) Distress also tends to suppress rational thought, making the mind more susceptible to the beating tom-toms (to paraphrase McLuhan) of mass delusion and madness. And when a killing depicted on a distressing video can be made to seem even remotely consistent with the central wokelore motif of evil whites harming innocent blacks—that very live snarl of wires in the American psyche—the mass delusion and madness will come together and start to lurch in a predictable direction. It will start to be controlled and guided, to do meaningful political work, by a political faction that I would say definitely has “an abandoned and malignant heart.”

It seems to me that there are usually two main group of actors that ignite these episodes: blacks who from basic instinct or family ties support fellow blacks in conflicts with whites, and a certain large stratum of white women who have, in regard to blacks, a powerful guilt and appeasement reflex. Once those two groups start up and gather steam, craven politicians and their judicial minions join in with the rapidity of scurrying rodents, and then the superorganism swells to its maximum size with the additions of journalists and millions of ordinary and celebrity virtue-signalers. This frenzied entity of many voices and noises somehow achieves a certain harmony as it demands “justice,” which is code for: give us a white victim.

One cannot overemphasize how uninterested in truth is this entity. In the case of Derek Chauvin, the entity assured us that the smirk on Chauvin’s face as he held down George Floyd was simply his sadist-cop’s delight at the approaching demise of his poor African American victim. Chauvin was a police officer with long experience of having to deal with unruly and bullshitting black perps, and of course did not have the clairvoyance to know that this particular perp, this one unlucky time, was telling the truth—but try explaining that to some vapor-brained leftist millennial or wine-aunt who is caught up in the full guilt-hate-love ecstasy of the Awokening.

In the case of Kyle Rittenhouse, the entity (speaking even through the man who is the current US president) assured us that the defendant was a white supremacist who had gone hunting for innocent protesters. The entity let it be known among the softer minded that Rittenhouse’s victims were black—this became a very widespread perception. Rittenhouse avoided becoming the next sacrificial victim mainly because the people he had shot in self defense were actually white. It must have helped too that he, Rittenhouse, was a cherubic-looking lad liable to trigger the protective maternal instincts of many American women—instincts that are normally directed entirely toward the shooting victim in such cases, at least when the victim is black.

In Georgia, of course, the victim was indeed black and the accused were southern whites who drove pickup trucks, carried guns, probably had a few Confederate flags around, and probably held African Americans in low esteem. On the great totem pole of wokeism, these men were the lowest of the low. Thus, the story the entity told of their vile misdeeds, in the MSM, in social media, in the courtroom through the mouths of sworn officers of the court, was a festival of lies and obfuscations, and essentially the defendants had no defenders other than their paid lawyers.

The victims of human sacrifice in ancient times often were drawn from the lowest, most marginalized castes. Is it not plausible that tens of thousands of years of primitive religion have worn certain paths into our minds such that even now we subconsciously act out those rituals—and perhaps can even experience, every so often, the vivid illusion that an angry god is present and wants to be appeased?

This particular deity will never stay appeased for long, though, will it? And as evidence accumulates that America’s grand racial experiment has failed, will Americans ever face up to that failure and respond rationally? Or will that failure just drive them crazier and crazier, as they deliver more and more sacrificial victims to a god who will not relent?

***

There have been slow social changes over the past century, but there have been fast ones too. A recent one, the year-old outbreak of extreme wokeness called the Great Awokening, has spread with wildfire velocity through US and even foreign institutions, raising the basic question: why did this happen?

Part of the answer is in the term itself. The Great Awakenings were several distinct episodes of intense religious fervor, chiefly in North America, in the 1700s and 1800s, and arguably in the 1960s-80s. They were social contagions, and spread, like viruses, within populations that had for various social and economic reasons been made peculiarly vulnerable to them. They included mass gatherings to hear highly charismatic—one might say hypnotic—preachers, and mass conversions, amid fainting and weeping, to less hierarchical, more personal and emotional forms of Christianity. Contagions of guilt over sinfulness were followed by outbreaks of ecstasy over salvation. But while the Awakenings were, most vividly, mass psychosocial disturbances, they also led to durable changes, in affected Christian churches, in theology and ordinary practice.

The Great Awokening has shown at least a superficial resemblance to its Christian forbears, in its weepy mass gatherings, its heavy inculcations of guilt, its pressure to embrace radically new ways of thinking—whiteness as a sin—and in its swift march through the media and other important institutions. Above all it looks like a social contagion.

Some factors that made America susceptible to this contagion are plain enough. At the time the Great Awokening started there was a deadly pandemic of a real virus, and, for many, an associated, highly stressful interruption of normal life. There were also unnerving riots, lootings, and other social disturbances in US cities, due to some unhappy police/perp encounters that were amplified by activists and politicians in the run-up to a fateful presidential election. As for the themes of the Great Awokening, they were not really new—most had been around since the 1960s, usually on the radical fringes. In general, white American guilt and perplexity over the chronic low status of the average black American has been an unassuageable stressor on the country from the time of slavery.

But I think there is another big piece in this puzzle of why the wokeist gospel, with its hatred of white American heroes and hagiologies of black ne’er-do-wells, ripped so easily and swiftly through the country and its key institutions, including corporations, and even now mostly retains all these conquests.

As readers of previous essays of mine (especially this, this, this, and this) may have guessed already, this missing piece is the involvement of women—women as ordinary citizens, and as members of affected institutions. And although I’ve touched on this theme in these previous essays, I’m coming at it here from a slightly different, cultural dynamics angle.

A Feminine Susceptibility

If history has taught us anything about social contagions, it is that women, on average, are more susceptible to them than men. Women have been the key instigators and transmitters of all the most famous mass-hysterias, including the many medieval and early modern convent hysterias and witch-hunts, but also all the modern, medicalized mass-hysterias–among them Charcot’s neuroses (which kicked off modern psychiatry), multiple personality disorder and other “recovered memory” syndromes, the ongoing child gender dysphoria hysteria, and ordinary schoolyard hysterias of the “children overcome by mysterious gas leak” type. This relative susceptibility to emotional contagion is one of those feminine traits that is sort of obvious anecdotally, and occasionally is given weight by an experimental psychology study, though the idea of it runs against the prevailing pro-feminine orthodoxy in media and academia, so it isn’t mentioned much.

Why are women this way? To me the likeliest, if necessarily tentative, explanation is that the two sexes, with their distinct traditional roles, have evolved distinct sets of psychological leanings and behaviors, and the typical feminine set of behaviors includes a superior emotional sensitivity and sociability as a broad adaptation that facilitates, e.g., child-rearing. The fact that this “enhanced connectedness” makes women more susceptible to harmful social contagions may have been an acceptable side-effect in times when women were mostly restricted to home and hearth. Women’s greater ability to align among themselves may even have ended up as part of an adaptive female defense mechanism against the physically stronger sex.

If we consider just this trait, or trait-set, and ask what its social impact should have been as women entered public life en masse over the past half-century or so, I think we end up making sense of a lot of otherwise puzzling social phenomena. In regard to the Great Awokening, we can hypothesize at least that this has been primarily a contagion among women, especially young women with high feminine energies that are not absorbed by husbands and children and need some outlet.

I would suggest too that the Great Awokening’s transformation of big institutions reflects not only the general fear of personal cancellation within these institutions but also the “critical mass” of susceptible women who work in them. In other words, for example, a male executive at a big corporation might only pay lip service to wokeism to preserve his status, while a female executive would be more likely to enforce it from conviction.

As Orwell once said through his 1984 character Winston Smith:

It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.

I don’t think that women are equally susceptible to any orthodoxy—I don’t expect them to spawn variants of Nazism, or, say, jihadist Islamic ideology. But I think there is a broad range of stuff they go for that comports with the feminine, weaker-sex, caregiving mindset and includes themes of trauma, the loss of agency, the need for inclusivity, and protection from environmental threats. Wokeism ticks most of those boxes, but may also be appealing to women, at least subconsciously, because it is very much an anti-male ideology–so that women have inherently less to fear from it, and may even find it a useful tool for dislodging men, especially white men, who somehow stand in their way.

Silent but Deadly

Like all the other aspects of women’s cultural ascendancy in the West, this one seems to lie there in plain sight while remaining officially unmentionable. How often do we hear of petitions against insufficiently woke persons, usually white males, by students at a university, or reporters at a newspaper, or employees at some publishing house, in which the feminine sentiment of the complaint (“we feel unsafe”) is unmistakable, and yet no one—in a media increasingly controlled by women—mentions the striking preponderance of females among the petitioners? How often do we see images in the media of Great Awokening mass gatherings whose participants are mostly female though there is nothing in the caption or the story text to explain or even acknowledge that interesting fact? It would seem that a big part of female power, even of the modern, feminist, you-go-girl variety, still comes from feigning powerlessness.

In any case, if the entry of women into public life over the past few decades has now reached a “critical mass” that makes Western institutions and culture highly susceptible to runaway ideological fevers and contagions, then the West obviously has a much bigger problem than wokeness itself.

As noted, I’m assuming that these contagions will be broadly limited to those whose themes are consonant with female sensibilities. But, as the experience so far with wokeism suggests—and the quote from Orwell suggests too—female sensibilities may be no less likely than male sensibilities to support the establishment of totalitarian or otherwise inhumane regimes.

Arguably an even worse outcome is to have no regime at all—to have the chaos of anarchy. Is it far-fetched to suggest that anarchy is where the ascendancy of women is taking the West? The feminized elites of Western, especially Anglosphere, countries now promote influxes of ethnically distant foreigners, and official favoritism towards these newcomers, while preaching hatred and suppression of white legacy populations. Propaganda along these lines has become deafening over the past two decades, and it’s now hard to imagine that it could ever be reversed fully. But the long-term outcome of demeaning and replacing a dominant legacy population with a mix of very different, often half-civilized foreigners is almost by definition going to be a civilizational collapse. Another, perhaps mostly Asian-flavored civilization may arise from those ruins, but there is no guarantee that it will be better—in any sense—than the Western civilization that is now swiftly fading.

I want to emphasize that I don’t wish to demean women in putting forward this set of suggestions. Many women are more resistant to the wokeism nonsense than the average male—and, as females, have better insight into the quirks of the female mindset.

But the key idea here is that there is a difference between the average female and average male. In other words, for traits relating to social contagion susceptibility, men and women can be scored along two bell curves which mostly overlap, though they have different means. That difference in the means makes a big difference on its own. In addition, those women out on the more “extreme feminine” tail of the female curve—who I expect are mostly young, single, fertile, with passion and compassion to burn—may have an outsized impact through their particularly strong ability to align emotionally and transmit contagions.

I think this sex difference is also a good example of a relatively subtle average difference measured at the individual level adding up to a striking difference in collective behavior and culture.

All that said, I am not dogmatic about any of this. I’m broadly aware that we as modern humans, with our fixation on the individual, know too little about how our individual traits relate to the shapes and dynamics of our societies. Essentially, we don’t know the recipe for making civilizations that are good but also sustainable. Again and again, across history, we are born to civilizational riches and then ignorantly squander them.

***

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

America’s leftist elites regard white American nationalism as their principal ideological adversary. But they have another adversary that is often overlooked: black American nationalism.

Black American nationalism is very easy to overlook, here in the third decade of the new millennium. Although it has had its day in the sun—even Lincoln was in favor of it, once upon a time—its best-known proponent since the Civil Rights Era, Malcolm X, died 56 years ago, at the hands of rival black nationalists, and the movement seems to have gone only downhill since. Already by the mid 1970s Richard Pryor was mocking the “Back to Africa Movement” in his stand-up routines. Black American nationalism also has been tainted (or so one is supposed to think) by the moral support it has occasionally received from overtly white supremacist organizations. In any case, although there must still be millions of black Americans of the nationalist persuasion out there, their movement has by now been relegated to the fringes—the black nationalists who make the news these days seem mostly violent, deranged and disorganized.

By contrast, black American activism that is not nationalist seems to have been doing pretty well lately, judging by the recent wildfire contagions of enthusiasm for BLM, the 1619 Project, the George Floyd hagiology, and Critical Race Theory. Last year, leading Democrats actually donned kente cloth stoles and bent a knee on the US Capitol’s marble floor during the announcement of police reform legislation, as if genuflecting to a Justifiably Angry Black God.

Non-nationalist black activists also seem to have been doing pretty well for themselves personally. Consider Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a co-founder of BLM, whose income as an activist has enabled her recently to purchase several homes collectively worth several millions of dollars. Or Nikole Hannah-Jones, of the 1619 Project, with her consulting, if that’s what one should call it, for Shell and other large corporations, and her remarkable habit of promoting products in interviews and speeches. Or the so-called family of George Floyd, with their $27 million payout from the city of Minneapolis. Or Stacey Abrams with her novel and its lucrative adaptation for TV. Or Ta-Nehisi Coates with his comic books and film scripts. Or reparations-demander Ibram X. Kendi with the miraculous largesse he attracts from wealthy whites.

Now, granted, some of this flow of wealth to activists could be framed as prudent purchases of insurance by white-run organizations—inoculations against the cooties of “racism” and “white supremacy” that can afflict, and cancel, any prominent organization if it’s not careful.

But even moreso I think this wealth transfer reflects elites’ desire to reward and incentivize those who tamely do their bidding.

Malcolm X viewed elite-approved “black leaders” in his day with similar skepticism. He famously called Martin Luther King Jr. a chump and a stooge of white liberals for promoting the idea of peaceful integration within white America—an idea that to him was an empty promise, aimed as always at perpetuating white control of blacks.

I think he was basically right about that. And if contemporary America’s leftist elites have banished black nationalists to the fringes, and have instead anointed a bunch of racial-equity grifters as the approved “leaders” of black America, then surely black nationalism is something that Legacy Americans should support as energetically as they can.

I’m not just being enemy-of-my-enemy tribalistic here. I’m trying to be coldly logical. The leftist elites of the US, which is to say the leaders of the Democratic Party and their allies and henchwomen in academia, media, entertainment, big business, etc., need to keep American blacks in the country and on their side for the most basic electoral reasons. They cannot abide a black separatism that would lead to a new, black nationalist political party or—the elites’ ultimate nightmare—a substantial black exodus from the US to a new homeland, even an internal one. Obviously, such an exodus would, among its many consequences, fatally weaken those leftist elites, in part by removing most of the radioactive core that powers their racial-factionalist ideology.

There is also a strong moral argument here. African-Americans of today are descendants of West Africans who were brought to the New World against their will. Theirs is a population that was literally enslaved for a long time, and then was oppressed for a long time after that. Even as their oppression has eased it has become clear that they are, for the most part, trapped in a world not of their making. In other words, for all this time they have been denied the basic rights of ethnic nationhood and self-determination that most peoples around the world have traditionally enjoyed. The fact that European-derived whites, with their hyperverbal brains and their sentimental, empire-adapted ideology, have overwritten ancient wisdom about the primacy of ethnic nationhood and self-determination, and no longer consider it important, is—American blacks might say, with some heat—not their problem.

It shouldn’t be their problem, anyway. And yet it is. And it’s not just their problem, is it? This idea that nations should be substantially multi-racial/ethnic (“multicultural”), bound merely by civic nationalism, economic opportunism, and kumbayah songs, is really the ur-problem, the most deeply planted seed of destruction, in the United States and most other Western countries. This idea seems essentially Christian in origin, but was also elaborated in response to the circumstances of the modern West, including colonialism and the globalization of trade and labor. In the US, it was shaped inter alia by the issues surrounding the Civil War, and was used, e.g., to justify turning African slaves into Union soldiers and then Republican voters in the Reconstruction South.

Despite multiculturalism’s clash with traditional ways of organizing societies, and its century and a half of failure in the US, it persists—persists even as racial/ethnic factionalism ravages the country, burns its cities, corrupts its democracy, and ruins its quality of life.

Even worse, multiculturalism’s elite proponents have become ever more suppressive of traditional ethnonationalism—declaring it “white supremacy” if favored by whites—even as they openly stoke nonwhites’ racial/ethnic grievances to build their political factions.

So black American nationalism is really only one of a thousand notions rendered unacceptable by America’s multiculturalist cult—whose mindset has managed to colonize both of the major political factions, and has successfully compensated for its evidentiary shortcomings with an hysterical, Inquisitionist crushing of dissent.

Nevertheless, black American nationalism does have advantages that make it a more practical aim amid this woke, antinationalist Inquisition. For one thing, it’s about what American blacks want, and if they declare they want to live apart and self-governing, the elites have no good alternative to the granting of that wish. Again and again those elites have declared American blacks holy and inviolable. Even if the elites’ motive in saying so has been only political and expedient, many blacks, and liberal whites, have taken the assertion at face value.

Another practical advantage that should make black nationalism more viable as a white cause is that American whites, I guess for reasons relating to their Christian backgrounds, prefer to think of themselves as helping others, not as acting selfishly for their own benefit. What could be more unselfish than to carve out thousands of square miles from their fair land, and donate it to their black brothers and sisters, to give them a new and truer freedom?

Would the blacks who lived in such a country experience a decline in living standards? I expect that they would, at least initially and in material terms. But as naïve as it may seem for me to say so, the issue here really goes deeper than material considerations: It’s about self-determination and human dignity. There are about fifty million black descendants of slaves living in the United States, enough to form one of the world’s most populous countries, and in many ways they have made clear that they are a distinctive people who prefer their own kind to others. The claim that they must nevertheless be the permanent captives and pawns of one political faction or another, in a society of European origin that is majority nonblack—a society that also jails them at sky-high rates—is actually ludicrous. It is one of the many toxic lies Americans foolishly think they can continue to live with.

***

Almost exactly twenty years ago, on the other side of the world from the USA, the elites and middle classes of the Philippines, with low-key but ample international support, overthrew their country’s elected president, Joseph Estrada, in what was later called a “constitutional coup.”

Estrada was in many ways like Donald Trump. He was an older guy with a womanizing past and rough-edged, frat-boy attitude who was widely known through past media exposure (he’d been an action star in Filipino movies, back in the day), and had plenty of mass appeal, but was somewhat repulsive to the more educated classes.

A big difference was that Estrada had been credibly accused of corruption. When, in January 2001, his Senate supporters effectively suppressed key evidence in his impeachment trial, the prosecutors walked out, liberals in the Philippines threw up a hue and cry, foreign diplomats and creditors became nervous, and the idea of simply ousting Estrada spread quickly.

Just a decade and a half before, in 1986, a mass movement that had come to be known as the EDSA Revolution (after an avenue in Manila where the main gathering took place) had resulted in the overthrow of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The anti-Estrada opposition followed this obvious model, and when the impeachment trial collapsed, EDSA II took place immediately. The media were for it, the US, a key ally, gave the nod (G.W. Bush, fresh from his own Bush v. Gore court victory, was about to take office), important Philippine cabinet officials including the heads of the police and military abandoned Estrada, and even the Philippine Supreme Court blessed the coup with the airy declaration that “the welfare of the people is the supreme law” (i.e., salus populi suprema lex). Estrada saw that he had lost virtually all support, and resigned, allowing his successor, vice president Gloria Arroyo, to take office.

(Arroyo, who later pardoned Estrada after his corruption trial and conviction, eventually faced corruption allegations herself, concerning a bribe allegedly demanded by her government from a Chinese government-linked telecom company that wanted a contract to install a “national broadband network” linking Philippine government offices. But she was viewed much more favorably by the elites than Estrada had been, and ended up serving out her terms of office.)

Why is any of this of interest now? Well, for one thing, it’s a reminder that presidential transitions in “democracies” are not necessarily constitutional or legal just because the media proclaim them to be. EDSA II also illustrates how Trump’s presidency, if it were restored by court action, could come to an untimely end.

Perhaps more importantly, this two-decade-old “people power” story highlights some of the things that Trump and his supporters, or a post-Trump Red State America, would not have if they were ever to try to achieve political power through a revolt or rebellion:

• They would not have significant foreign support.
• They would not have the support of their country’s elites.
• They probably would not have the support of any major media organization, domestic or foreign.
• They almost certainly would lack support from the USA’s top military brass.

Could they still prevail? Sure. But they would have to overcome all these disadvantages. And since they would not have MSM support they could not simply gather dramatically in one place and hope for a media-induced buildup of pressure on the federal government.

Red States Army

Essentially, Red State America would need to form an army, à la 1776. Although the needed size and firepower of that army would depend on the movement’s ultimate goals, I think that force would have to be at least several hundred thousand strong to contend with Blue States National Guard units and possibly regular army and USAF units. Much of the “Red States Army” total could come from Red State National Guard units, defecting regular military troops, and retired/reserve veterans, though it would probably be able to pad out that core with a larger group of hunters and others who own and know how to use guns.

This rebel movement, to the extent it could control its own territory, would have a grip on most of the former-USA’s food production, so food shouldn’t be a problem. But the movement would need to set up its own banking system, central bank, and currency, much as the Confederate States did in Civil War I. It would need to establish control over the parts of the internet and telecom networks, rail and road networks, and other infrastructure elements within its domain. It would need its own social security system. And so on, and so on.

Moreover, prior to rebellion at state level, this movement would need a network of benefactors who would fund the cause covertly, for example by adding soldiers and support workers to existing businesses’ payrolls, or simply in a low-visibility, cash-based system outside the federally regulated banking system. As many on the right have learned already, US banks ultimately will not (knowingly) do business with those whom the left elites designate as “enemies of the people.”

The goals of a Red State confederacy could be, for example simply to break away and form a sovereign country, taking existing Red States along with any adjacent Blue State rural counties whose inhabitants vote to join. At county level the USA is mostly Republican, so in principle such a Red America would include most of the land area of the lower-48 states and of course all of Alaska. This would leave Blue America with most of the GDP-producing industry of the former USA, but also with most of the long-term social and demographic problems—“vibrancy” I think they call it.

All that vibrancy would be reflected in whatever army the Blue States could muster following the tens or hundreds of thousands of defections by Red State-loyal troops and officers, plus the loss of the many military bases within Red States. And if the Red States’ goal were purely defensive, the Blue States would have the added burden of having to subdue Red State cities, presumably through high-cost urban warfare.

What of the Antifa and BLM brigades we saw in action last summer? Well, their antics don’t strike me as particularly relevant to actual combat—although I can imagine many of them being unwilling to learn that lesson except in the hardest possible way.

In short, when it comes to actual fighting, a Red State army could have substantial advantages. (I’m assuming that neither side would go nuclear in this conflict.)

My guess is that the hardest task for an independence-seeking Red America would be the political task of convincing Red State governors and legislators to secede in the first place, so that the rebellion could begin to organize at scale. They don’t make US politicians like they used to—certainly not like they did in 1861.

In fact, neither Trump nor any prominent Red State politician, as far as I know, has had the mental clarity and courage even to raise the issue of resolving the USA’s current schism through political separation. That’s despite the Woke Left’s increasingly obvious willingness to tyrannize its domestic enemies, i.e., half of the country, by demonizing, canceling, and disemploying them, silencing their political speech, and, if necessary, imprisoning them in re-education camps.

The USA was founded on the principle of self-determination as the ultimate escape from tyranny, and the tyranny of the contemporary, woke Left already threatens to be worse in some ways than what Colonial Americans faced in the run-up to their declaration of independence. So it does seem appropriate at least to start thinking about how contemporary Americans might successfully act on that hallowed principle.

**

Is the United States in the process of remaking itself with a new ideology called Wokeism?

A lot of people seem to think so, but I don’t. The idea I sketch out briefly here is that the recent pandemic spread of Wokeism, a.k.a. The Great Awokening, is really only a transitory cultural phenomenon, more than a mass hysteria but less than the development of a full-fledged successor culture. Wokeism does draw upon trends in Western culture that have been underway for decades. However, as an ideology or culture it is basically incoherent and destructive, and does not offer a viable guide to a sustainable new way of life. Wokeism is chiefly marking a period of cultural upheaval—and is telling us nothing of how that period of upheaval will end.

The mess of Wokeism

Wokeism lacks a coherent list of do’s and don’ts, of the kind that normally make up a working culture. It shows no sign of having been thought through.

To give one example, the people who run BLM recently published a “manifesto” on their website which included a vaguely Maoist insistence on collective parenting:

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

Apparently this was embarrassing enough, even for the dedicated banner-carriers and fellow-travelers of BLM, that this provision along with the rest of the manifesto was removed from the website soon after it was posted. When I went to the site address (https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/) as I was composing this essay, I got a simple 404 error—suggesting that BLM lacks not only sense but also basic IT skills.

Other features of Wokeism include demands for radical police reforms—radically weakening police powers—or even the defunding/abolition of police departments. Some municipal governments in the United States have been so well captured by leftists that they really seem willing to adopt such measures. But—to state the obvious—these measures, and the criminality and anarchy they are bound to unleash, are things that a developed society with a large, wealthy, and center-right business-owning class will not tolerate for long.

Further down the Wokeists’ unrealizable/unsustainable wishlist we find radical reforms to education, which have the ultimate goal of bringing about equality of outcomes for different racial and ethnic groups, especially in public schools where the Wokeists’ policy grip is strongest. Standardized tests will be de-emphasized, admissions exclusivity weakened, and discipline more or less abandoned, in order to accommodate more disadvantaged groups. Recitations of Woke ideology presumably will start to crowd out traditional subjects such as math and English. To again state the obvious: this cuckoo radicalism will mean only that any family having the means to do so will take their children out of public schools, leaving the unfortunate kids whose parents can’t place them elsewhere to suffer a long nightmare of Woke education.

Then there is the absurd idea of reparations, to be paid somehow to American blacks who, after 155 years of post-slavery systemic racism, have managed to become the world’s richest black population by far. I wonder how serious the Wokeists are about reparations anyway, since actual payment might be construed as an end to the matter, obliging both blacks and Wokeists to move on from all their racial grievance-mongering. (We all know the grievance-mongering will never be put to rest, as it serves an essential partisan-political function.) Actual payment might also do embarrassingly little to alter the essential situation of American blacks, who in many cases would end up worse following their rapid spending of their windfalls.

Open-door immigration appears to be a core policy of Wokeism, though it shouldn’t be, as it obviously harms the interests of American blacks. Even among immigrant groups, the open-door policy is apt to become unpopular to the extent that these groups see further newcomers as a source of unwanted competition for jobs. Of course liberal immigration policies have prevailed anyway in the US over the past few decades, and thus they are sustainable in that retrospective sense. But open-door immigration isn’t a culture or a pillar of a culture—it is effectively an anti-cultural policy, which almost by definition will destroy the host country’s traditional way of life and create a situation in which newcomer cultures will have to duke it out for eventual supremacy. Who seriously thinks that if Chinese-Americans or Indian-Americans take over large parts of the USA, they will continue to permit mass immigration from Africa or Latin America?

Similarly, if the wokeists succeed in making whites second-class citizens in their own country by mandating POC-preferences in jobs and university admissions—which they clearly hope to do—the end-result is unlikely to be a harmonious multiracial/multiethnic USA living under Wokeism. Much more likely will be the outcome seen in multi-ethnic situations elsewhere in the world, namely inter-ethnic strife, followed by the triumph of one or more, presumably nonwhite ethnicities—who may just divide the old USA among themselves and, in their new American country or countries, adopt nationalistic policies favoring their own. To them, the romantic multiracialism of early 21^st century whites may end up being seen as a tragically maladaptive cultural trait—vaguely reminiscent of the predilection for firewater that helped doom 19^th century Native Americans.

Wokeists embody the chaos of wokeism

Apart from Wokeism’s specific policy notions, look at the Wokeists themselves—especially the ones at the business end of Wokeism, where ideas are turned into action. Are these activists bustling Bolsheviks, busily setting up farmers’ or manufacturers’ or soldiers’ collectives? Not exactly. They seem like supremely messed-up people, a very high proportion of whom have histories of mental illness and/or severe sexual identity issues. They seem not only fundamentally unhappy but fundamentally set against the world as it is. That is why they burn and break and topple indiscriminately, destroying even statues of Lincoln. They seem to want the outside world to bear a closer resemblance to the disorder they have within. In other words, they don’t seem to be for anything meaningful. Does an Antifa Autonomous Zone look constructive? Is it something Western people could build upon? How about a burning, rubble-strewn downtown Minneapolis?

OK, but what about rich Woke-capitalist billionaires like Zuckerberg and Bezos? Aren’t they formidable enough to sustain Wokeism as a new culture?

Well, certainly, the Zuckerbergs and the Bezoses and their ilk are powerful. But I think they have zero intention of sustaining Wokeism in a form that could be called a new culture. They are primarily businessmen who have got to where they are by adapting rapidly in a dynamic business (and political) environment. They are now adapting to Wokeism, because it is a clear and present danger to anyone with commercial interests. Their adaptation is to feign support—they fear Wokeism and don’t want to be harmed by it, and think they can escape the firebombs and boycotts if they get out in front of the whole thing with various empty gestures.

Needless to add, corporations are not about to start hiring obese black trans performers, let alone 75-IQ kids from the ‘hood, to do anything substantive. Woke capitalists’ actions will mainly be limited to the patronage of a few, influential, black “public intellectuals,” who are essentially running legal protection rackets.

Woke capitalism may also encompass a more urgent hiring preference for well educated Asians and Latinos over whites—anyone but whites! But for the most part the corporate version of Wokeism will be symbolic. After all, competitive organizations need competent people, and Wokeism—because of its insistence on equality of outcomes—does almost everything possible to discourage the development of practical competence.

In short, Wokeism on its own can never be a constructive, society-driving ideology or culture. It may seriously damage or even topple the old culture of legacy Americans, and that process may take years and result in terrible destruction, perhaps on the scale of the French Revolution or even the Fall of Rome. But Wokeism is not itself a successor culture that will be around a couple of generations from now.

The importance of demographics and technology

I don’t claim to fully understand wokeism or its origins, but I don’t think anyone can understand it without first understanding how the cultural ground, so to speak, was prepared for it.

To switch to a viral analogy, wokeism was a pathogen that was always around. There is nothing really new about it. It is a mix, a pastiche, of a lot of old, discredited ideas most of which were first put forward by 1960s radicals. Why did it suddenly break out into a pandemic spread? I think the answer is that the big changes that made the outbreak possible were in the susceptibilities of host populations.

One big change was the cultural feminization that followed the mass entry of women into culturally influential professions such as journalism, publishing, law, politics, and science over the past half-century. I’ve written about this in earlier essays. Among other things, this feminization process appears to have made the culture profoundly more vulnerable to empathy-inducing themes of oppressed minorities, downtrodden refugees, and buzz-phrases like “systemic racism.”

American women have not been doing particularly well under their emancipation—their estimated lifetime prevalence of major depression is now more than 20 percent, to note one adverse mental health trend among many. Marriage and birth rates are falling. More and more women, having followed the dictates of feminism and sexual liberation, are living alone and childless. Amid the anxiety and bleak isolation of the COVID-19 crisis, many of them seem to have embraced Wokeness as a belief system that is almost spiritually sublime in its ambitions, and at the same time satisfyingly engages their maternal instincts to protect the weak. Other basic instincts may be involved as well. In any case it can’t be denied that women, particularly white women, have been enormously overrepresented at woke and BLM marches and protests.

Women’s cultural influence in America isn’t going away any time soon. Any new culture that takes hold, or any form of cultural reversion, presumably will have to suit them. But a glance around the world tells us that women on the whole are very flexible when it comes to culture, provided that certain basic needs are met—needs that center largely around motherhood. I can’t believe that Wokeism, in the long run, meets enough of those needs. It seems more like a yearning, a dance, a pose, a fling, than real life.

Apart from cultural feminization and the COVID-19 crisis, two other big factors have obviously been relevant. One is the Internet, and social media in particular, which has boosted in an unprecedented way the potential speed and scale of social contagions. (I think it’s also generally accepted, if not as well studied as it should be, that women tend to transmit social contagions among themselves much more efficiently than men do.)

The other factor is the 2020 presidential election, which has spurred various get-out-the-vote operations and generally has encouraged partisan activists to whip up emotions to energize potential voters. I think various left-wing/Democrat activists did just that in the wake of George Floyd’s death, and that was the spark on dry tinder that flamed into the Great Awokening.

That flame has dimmed considerably in the months since June. It may flare up again if the Democrats sweep on election day. But I think it won’t burn for 70-odd years as Marxism-Leninism did. It doesn’t have the coherence or the minimal connection to human nature that it would need to have. What stable ideology will form on the other side of Wokeism is unclear. But given the ongoing cultural decay of whites and the relative robustness of nationalism among nonwhites, it seems likely that Wokeness will only mark the transition to a new, probably nonwhite-centered culture—or cultures. Those cultures could, ironically, end up being much more conservative and traditional than the decadent mishmash from which Wokeness emerged.

Western societies almost without exception in recent decades have been transformed by the large-scale additions of essentially all foreign ethnicities to their legacy European-stock populations.

How this came about is less important than the fact that it happened and now festers as the central problem of Western civilization. But I think it’s fair to say that this transformation began, several decades ago, principally because Western elites wanted it, at least partly for reasons they could not openly defend. A simplified and somewhat cynical version is that Left-leaning politicians in the US, emboldened by their success in capturing “the black vote,” calculated that they could import other ethnic minorities from abroad en masse and ultimately assemble a permanent electoral majority that way. Businessmen and the rich, seeking a wider range of cheap-labor options, were eager to go along. This basic idea then spread to the elites of other Western countries.

The pan-ethnic flow has continued for those mostly-unacknowledged reasons, and also because recently arrived foreigners and their offspring have by now acquired substantial political power of their own. But the reasons that have been used to publicly justify this change, at least in recent decades, are different. The elites, who now include the mouthpieces of these new ethnic voting blocs, have been assuring the increasingly feminized, compassion-oriented legacy populations of the West that this historic transformation has been necessary as an act of compassion, and a recognition of universal civil rights—huddled masses and all that. For the special case of the USA, they have argued or implied that the country has always been a construct of immigrants, a “civic” rather than an ethnic nation, a “promised land” in the words of RFK.

This has always been more than a dry, reasoned argument. The elites have applied to the legacy lower orders a strong emotional and moral pressure to accept that multi-ethnicity, “diversity,” is good, that it sits on the correct side of history, that opposing it is bad and racist. Some European governments have been so successful in their browbeating that they now enforce this new moral code in actual law. But even Western elites that haven’t achieved that level of thought-control have been pretty effective in enforcing diversity dogma through threats of disemployment and social ostracism for dissidents—cancellation.

Diversity dogma as we know it today would not have had as receptive an audience in the 1960s. The cultural ground had not yet been prepared. The average Democrat then would be considered “far right” today. So when the floodgates to pan-ethnic immigration began to be opened around the middle of that decade, people were simply misled. The elites, instead of presenting the coming demographic transformation as a good thing, assured ordinary citizens that it wouldn’t happen. The influx of foreigners would constitute a social ripple rather than a sea change—nothing to worry about! “This bill we sign today”—claimed Lyndon Johnson of the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Bill—“is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not restructure the shape of our daily lives.”

It did, though. And in the context of those original false assurances, the mass migration of ethnically and culturally distant peoples to the West has been an ongoing fraud, perpetrated by Western elites against their own legacy populations. By the same token, the compassion-based, right-side-of-history argument used to justify mass immigration is mainly window dressing. Still, it has been remarkably effective, and it deserves an effective response. As I organize my own thoughts about this, I don’t suppose that I have anything truly novel to say, but still I think my presentation is a better one than mass immigration opponents in the popular media usually provide.

It’s not about “hate”

I have never been comfortable with arguments against mass immigration that rest heavily on the idea of immigrants as lawless primitives.

That’s not to say that immigrants never are lawless primitives. It’s probably always been the case that a significant proportion of them belong in that category. But an argument that focuses just on the lowlifes implies that all the lawful, hard-working immigrants are totally OK. And they’re not totally OK, any more than lawful, hard-working white Americans would be, in the eyes of their hosts, if they tried to form a huge expatriate colony within some ethnically and culturally distant society.

I know this because I’ve spent most of my adult life as an expatriate in ethnically and culturally distant societies, and despite being lawful and hard-working I’ve run again and again into the limits of host country tolerance for foreigners. Those limits have been manifest in laws, such as laws limiting the kinds of jobs resident foreigners can do, and the property rights they can enjoy. Those limits have also been apparent in attitudes, such as the presumption that a foreigner opposing a native in court should normally lose, and the widespread belief that foreigners should pay more for things than natives do, or the simple, murmured resentment among locals to the effect that “there are too many foreigners here.”

Locals’ limited tolerance for foreigners like myself has sometimes struck me as too limited, but the fact that it is limited has never seemed fundamentally wrong. Placing bounds on foreign influx and influence in a society has always seemed like obvious common sense—a common sense forged by biological and cultural evolution as a basic human instinct.

Calling this innate in-group preference “hate” is one of the contemporary Left’s most specious and dishonest ploys. Don’t be a hater! My own experience is that countries placing heavy restrictions on foreigners’ residency and influence typically have citizens that are very warmly disposed towards visitors from abroad—probably in part because those restricting laws give locals a measure of security, from which they feel more free to be hospitable.

Nor is my opposition to mass immigration in my own country rooted in hatred of foreigners: I have spent most of my adult life living in far-flung places among ethnically and culturally dissimilar folk, and even married one of them, so that my children are now ethnically and culturally half-American and half-foreign. In other words, it has long been the case that the people dearest to me are foreigners in whole or in part.

From what do the limits of our tolerance spring, if not from hate?

Well, from something more fundamental than a human emotion. An organism is not an organism if it does not have boundaries that separate it from its environment and from other organisms. If it is too permeable, it will not survive. Human societies are not as well defined in this sense, compared to flora and fauna, but clearly they have been shaped by a similar evolutionary logic.

If one needs to invoke an emotion as the force underlying the universally limited human tolerance of foreigners, why not invoke love? As in, love for one’s kin and country—love for one’s national and cultural identity. One can’t have those good things, those fulfilments of basic human needs, and open one’s borders to all the peoples of the world. It would be like opening the doors of one’s house to random strangers. Speaking of which: remember that scene in the film Doctor Zhivago when the doctor returns from the war to find his comfortable Moscow residence filled with several other families—his own wife and children now confined to a single room? It was a wrenchingly effective depiction of the Bolshevik disregard for basic human nature. And for the viewer, as for Zhivago, the proper objects of hatred were not the new tenants but the Bolshevik overlords that had sent them.

Naturally, when a flood of immigrants makes a citizen feel that he has been displaced, his country effectively overrun, a certain amount of hatred toward the foreign displacer is an understandable reaction, and historically has been pretty effective at motivating a reversal of the flood. But hatred in that context is merely a means, and a temporary one, not the end in itself.

Globally, and ideally, the end is a good and positive end: a system of distinct nations—homelands populated by what are, more or less, extended families, each with a dominant ethnicity and culture—in which good fences, fair trade, and moderate amounts of tourism, intermarriage, and urban cosmopolitanism make good neighbors. In principle, at least, a sane and farsighted world can realize that humane goal calmly through policy, rather than through conflict.

Diversity destroys democracy

There are other reasons to oppose the flood of multi-ethnic immigration that has hit the West in recent decades. One set of reasons, largely amounting to a negative version of the argument above, invokes the weakening of social bonds, the dilution of the usual sense of shared culture, neighborliness and trust in an ethnically bound society, the erosion of the usual feeling of belonging (“this no longer feels like my country”), with an attendant demoralization that has already been blamed, e.g., for the downturn in white life expectancy in the US.

Another set of reasons involves the economic distortions caused by mass immigration, which include downward pressure on wages, disemployment of the legacy population, and—no less important—a draining away of skilled labor from the countries supplying the immigrants.

Then there is the higher-crime/lower-quality-of-life angle, which is especially relevant when the majority of immigrants come from less wealthy and orderly places.

Lastly, there is an argument that has long seemed to me especially important and yet mostly neglected. This is the argument that heavy multi-ethnicity in a society is incompatible in the long run with democracy—at least, traditional, stable, Western-style democracy—and must in the end produce political dissolution and anarchy or anyway some other-than-democratic outcome.

In part, this is an argument from simple observation: Multi-ethnic states almost never form naturally, and when they have been set up artificially—e.g., by Western colonial powers over the past few centuries—the result usually has been fragmentation or the emergence of a strongman (e.g., Saddam Hussein) with a police state.

This is also an argument from simple logic: Shared ethnicity is a very strong social and political binder, perhaps stronger than any other, particularly when the ethnic group is a political minority and feels, or is told that they should feel, a sense of adversity and oppression. In principle, as left-leaning parties in the USA and elsewhere have recognized, a sizeable political coalition can be built from such aggrieved, bloc-voting minority groups, provided that the faction-building party can manage to keep the flames of grievance alive in them. I think it’s fair to say, and it is maybe self-evident from events ongoing as I write, that those flames must ultimately burn away the mutual respect and trust that a society needs to sustain a democratic style of government. Many of the founders of the U.S. Republic knew that factionalism, in general, would be a constant temptation and a major threat to its survival. Race-based factionalism, which the founders largely failed to anticipate, is arguably on historical grounds—not to mention, evolutionary-biological grounds—the most toxic.

In the US the Democratic Party, previously the party of southern whites, has been shifting towards this mode of racial-minority factionalism (which also encompasses non-ethnically defined marginalized groups such as women and LGBTs) at least since the civil rights era of the 1950s and 60s. Over the decades, powered especially by immigration, this strategy has strengthened the party electorally, and on a superficial analysis would seem to have positioned it now for long-term electoral dominance. But really this strategy has been self-defeating, in the sense that it effectively has destroyed the social fabric of the USA, making democracy itself now untenable as a means of stable governance.

If I’m right that my country—presaging developments elsewhere in the West—is about to see the full collapse of its political system, then the Left’s current pandering claim that slavery was America’s “original sin” may have a grain of truth to it. I would call it not only America’s original sin but also the original seed of America’s destruction: Through slavery, Americans brought a large, racially and developmentally distant minority into the country. That ultimately prompted a massive conflagration before the Republic was even 90 years old. But what came afterwards was arguably worse. The decision not to give ex-slaves their own separate homeland (as Lincoln among others had wanted) but to keep them in the US as citizens led ultimately, perhaps inevitably, to the emergence of civil rights ideology, diversity dogma, pan-ethnic immigration, and the current caustic factionalism that I expect will prove terminal.

The same fatal seed may deserve blame for the fall of the West more generally, since American-style civil rights ideology long ago infected the elites of other Western democracies and at least partly accounts for their post-colonial embraces of pan-ethnic immigration.

Am I too pessimistic? We’ll soon see. In the meantime, I’ll be busy preparing myself and my family for life and work outside the countries of the self-immolating West.