“But are you strong enough now for a truly big fish?”

—The Old Man and the Sea

Have you ever had a Big Idea—an idea with the potential to transform the way people think about their society and culture?

Imagine that you had such a Big Idea, but you weren’t a professional opinionator and didn’t have an easy way of getting your Big Idea “out there” in front of a lot of readers.

Imagine too that your Big Idea was going to be controversial enough, in mainstream circles, that publication under your own name would almost certainly cost you your livelihood.

What would you do?

Here is what I did—and, as they say, don’t try this at home.

THE BIG IDEA

Before getting into the timeline of events, I want to emphasize that I have written this in part for the benefit of other, younger writers, who may read it someday and find it useful—as an account of a process that is relevant to their ambitions but seldom set forth in detail. More than that, though, I see this as a “case history” supporting an argument for changes in how we deal with new ideas (of the non-copyrightable, non-patentable variety) and incentivize their originators.

Now to the what and when: It all started early in the new millennium, after I returned to the US following a decades-long sojourn abroad. As I settled in, certain differences in American culture, compared to what I’d known as a young adult, started becoming apparent. Themes of “trauma” and suffering seemed much more prominent in the culture, from media to medicine. Public policy debates were often competitive exercises in projecting compassion, or “empathy,” in regard to supposed victims. Political correctness, a hypersensitive projection of concern for the disadvantaged, seemed out of control. Even in my own somewhat technical line of work, I noticed similar changes in tone and emphasis.

Eventually the proverbial lightbulb winked on. As I put it in an essay (“The Demise of Guythink”) in late 2011:

… these empathy-related changes in public discourse are due in large part to the recent, unprecedented entry of women into public life in Western countries. Women have not only the right to vote but also a presence in key areas of society—science, law, business, politics—as never before, and it would be hard to believe that their influence has not changed the culture, bending it towards their own cognitive style. People now use the jokey phrase “endangered white male” . . . but what may be truly endangered here is the male cognitive style.

That may not be a good thing, if the male cognitive style evolved to be optimal for managing societies, while the female cognitive style is tuned for the rearing of children. There is a tendency in our culture now to treat empathy as a trait to be simply maximized. But “understanding and building systems,” as [Simon] Baron-Cohen puts it, is useful, too—and perhaps most if not all of our culture’s greatest failings now come not from a lack of empathy but from a failure to see how complex systems fit together, and how they may fly apart.

What also worries me is that too much empathy, or other related aspects of the female cognitive style, may be—we don’t know; probably no scientist would go near this question—less compatible with the reasoned debate and calm analytical thinking that are presumably needed in a healthy democracy, or in any mature society. Several years ago, then-Harvard President Lawrence Summers (who was later a White House adviser) referred rather delicately to the possibility that male/female cognitive differences partly explain the relative lack of female professors in math and science; he was, in effect, shouted down and forced from his post….

An inflexible, authoritarian, shout-them-down tendency is often said to be a feature of PC-think generally. PC-driven marches and protests (on campuses for example) typically are meant not to broaden a discourse but, rather, to repel or suppress an unwanted speaker—much as a mother, without any pretense of democracy or debate, would try to protect her children from an unwanted influence or their own innate waywardness. (“Because I said so!”)

There it was: the Big Idea! And it was big! What other theory had the same power to explain the dramatic waves of change that have been sweeping through modern societies in the past few decades? What other theory combined such a simple and compelling framework of understanding with such dark implications for Western civilization?

I posted “The Demise of Guythink” on a website I had set up—of very modest readership—where for several years I had published various short essays on cultural and science-related topics (anonymously, though some readers knew who I was).

As time went on, though, and the novelty and importance of this idea grew in my estimation, I increasingly thought of getting it published more prominently.

The problem was that I had no clear path for achieving that. I wasn’t a complete nobody—as a journalist, I had written a few books, and more than a few newspaper and magazine pieces, including op-eds. But that had been in the relatively distant past. Moreover, as the world had grown richer and the Internet had become a supremely powerful tool, the barriers to entry for becoming a “writer” had collapsed to virtually nothing, creating more competition than ever and making the process of big-media publication, from a cold start, harder than it had ever been. I pitched a roughly 600-word version of my thesis to the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed people around that time . . . and, if memory serves, got the same result one would get from dropping a small stone into the darkness of a mile-deep well.

I might have persevered with other newspapers or webzines, but I soon concluded that that could be an uphill, potentially very costly struggle. The standard line set down by feminist activists—de facto thought leaders for Western women—was that the fairer sex was still hindered, harassed and victimized by all the things men did, and thus needed ever more power to achieve full emancipation and equality. Indeed, it seemed to me that women’s ability to influence men had always depended heavily on their claims to be relatively weak, needing special protection, etc. In other words, in the age-old power contest with males, females’ claims of powerlessness and victimization were basically reflexive and relentless. Thus, my observation that women were already moving past parity and achieving real dominance in many key areas of public life, from teaching and publishing to psychiatry . . . was likely to be dismissed as a fantasy, or, worse, suppressed as a heresy.

My further suggestion that women’s new dominance in Western civilization was hazardous to that civilization, because maternal thinking was not suited to the public sphere, would make this a heresy to be suppressed with extreme prejudice. I imagined screams, shouts and ululations until I was well and truly cancelled and silenced—to the extent that feminists and the Left had to take notice of me. So, publishing my Big Idea prominently under my own name didn’t seem wise, at least not before my retirement, which was still a long way off.

I can’t remember whether I received any direct feedback on the piece I posted on my website—I didn’t have the time or energy to maintain a comments section. But the site analytics suggested that it was read by at least thousands of people over the next year or so. A “manosphere” writer named Matt Forney linked to it in one of his own blog posts. That’s pretty much all I remember about its impact.

SCRATCHING THE ITCH

Years passed. Other events and interests held my attention. It was not until June of 2014 that the urge to write about cultural feminization rose up in me again.

This time I pitched a piece on the subject to Takimag, a small webzine that, although I didn’t normally read it, struck me as suitably uninhibited. The editor, the daughter of Takimag’s proprietor, said she was potentially interested, but wanted it shortened in a few ways. I complied and re-sent it. She then replied simply that she couldn’t use it after all. I was left with no clear idea of her reason, though naturally it occurred to me that pitching this idea to female editors was not an optimal strategy.

Where else could I send it? I figured that if even Takimag—somewhat fringy, and typically framed by the mainstream media as “far right”—wouldn’t touch this hot potato of an idea, and if female editors were problematic, then I’d have to venture still further out onto the fringe. The obvious place was the manosphere.

As a middle-aged family man, I didn’t have much use for “game,” complaints about the contemporary dating scene, or other themes central to that subculture. But the urge to get my idea out there, somehow, anyhow, was strong now. Without much effort (though I again had to shorten my submission by quite a bit), and using a pseudonym as most of their contributors did, I got a new version of my thesis published on Roosh Valizadeh’s Return of Kings site. If you use the Wayback Machine and check the site as of late 2014, you’ll see that the piece was posted in August of that year. (It has also been archived here.) My title was “No Country for Men,” but Roosh or one of his editors, probably for SEO reasons, changed it to “Thanks to Progressivism, America is No Country for Men.”

It was much read and commented upon, within that circle of readers, and for some years it was easily googleable. However, as the mainstream media became more feminized and “because-I-said-so” inflexible, outlets like Roosh’s became less permissible. Ultimately—suppressed by search engines, and with most or all of his monetization routes blocked off—he was forced to shut down. So, although I didn’t see it right away, this was yet another dead-end in my quest.

Posting on Return of Kings did, however, scratch the “get it out there” itch, and another year or so passed before the itch recurred. Using my real name, I pitched a very softened version of my cultural feminization idea to the Washington Post, and surprisingly, the response was not a blank refusal but an invitation to submit my piece for posting in their “PostEverything” section. Looking back, I think I probably should have done that. However, at the time I saw PostEverything as a glorified Letters to the Editor forum, and reasoned that publication there would bring little reward, while leaving me with the usual risk to my livelihood. I guess I also feared that the Post’s editors would alter my thesis in ways I wouldn’t like. So I declined the offer.

I pitched a similar piece to one or two other places around then, and though my records and memories of those efforts have faded, the result was the same. Thus, early in 2017, I reverted once again to self-publication. Using the anti-Trump, pro-feminism Women’s March as a peg, I posted a short presentation of my idea to a blog page on my personal, non-pseudonymous, website where I had posted a few other short essays over the years.

I didn’t keep it up on that site for long. A few months after it was posted, a prospective client of my consulting business, a woman with a moderately high position at a prestigious institution, read it (as indicated by my site analytics info) and immediately ghosted me. I assumed that my thesis, even as softened as it was, was the causative factor in this loss of what could have been a lucrative relationship, and immediately took it down.

We’re nearing the fateful Twitter years, but not there yet. In the Spring of 2018, I submitted yet another softened version of my cultural feminization thesis to Quillette, which was then just emerging as a new and interesting venue for non-woke thought. One of the editors, a fellow named Jamie (Palmer, I think), turned it down politely with the comment that: “Your thesis is interesting but, in the end, unpersuasive and feels like a possible correlation/causation confusion.”

A bit less than a year later, in March of 2019, I sent yet another version of the idea to an editor at the conservative public-policy magazine City Journal, but received no reply.

(As the reader may know already, both City Journal and Quillette have since published pieces offering versions of the cultural feminization hypothesis—pieces that make no mention of me or my essays.)

TWITTER AND “J. STONE”

Once again, failure to get published in other journals led me back to a more D.I.Y. mode of punditry. Later in that month of March 2019, I set up a new pseudonymous website as a home for my essays, and joined Twitter with the idea of using Twitter posts to publicize those essays.

I think my general idea was to be a proponent of “cold logic” over the “hot emotion” of a feminized world, so I used the domain absltzero.com. For my Twitter presence I invented the pseudonym “J. Stone,” which had the merit that it didn’t seem like a pseudonym.

Having posted a quick version of my thesis, titled “The Great Feminization,” on the new site, I joined Twitter and started using my tweets to advertise the essay.

What happened next? Crickets.

At the time, I didn’t know much about the process of drawing attention and followers on Twitter, and anyway was unable to spend much time on it, given my day-to-day work and family responsibilities. But I did try, at least several times per week, to reply to tweets from prominent Tweeters with relevant quips followed by a link to “The Great Feminization”—in the hope that one, eventually, would read it and recommend it to his or her flock of followers.

“The Great Feminization,” by the way—though it was broadly similar to others I’d written, going all the way back to “The Demise of Guythink” in 2011—did contain a fairly pithy summary of the situation:

Feminists these days spend a lot of time worrying about male-dominated culture—“patriarchal culture,” “sexual harassment culture,” “rape culture,” “the culture of silence,” and so on. But shouldn’t they be acknowledging the influence that women now have on culture: on workplace culture, on media culture, on campus culture, on American culture, and on Western culture generally? That feminizing influence may be the greatest single driver of the rapid social changes seen in recent decades.

Consider the following U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics chart of women’s civilian labor force participation rate.

It shows that in 1950 only about 30 percent of working-age women were in the workforce, but by 2000 that figure had jumped to 60 percent and rivaled the participation rate for men, which had been in decline since the early 1950s.

In other words, by 2000 the U.S. workforce had been mostly gender-integrated. On average, workplaces by then had almost as many women as men.

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.

Why is the greater presence of women in culture-making professions important? Because women, on average, think differently than men on a wide range of subjects….

How would culture and policy have changed as a result of women’s new influence? Presumably in ways that reflect feminine psychological traits.

For example, women appear on average to be more empathetic and compassionate, more emotionally sensitive. Some of the most striking social changes of the last few decades appear to have been driven by a cultural shift in that direction:

• • • • More generous welfare programs
      • Expansion of the concept of welfare to include more types of intervention (affirmative action, etc.) and more groups needing intervention
      • Expansion of the definitions of “harm,” “offense,” and “trauma” (“microaggressions,” “triggers”)
      • Increased attention to psychological trauma in law and medicine, leading to a greater acceptance, and thus a higher prevalence, of trauma-related syndromes such as PTSD (and the recovered-trauma-memory syndromes of the 1990s)
      • Less tolerance of deaths in war; but, ironically, a greater inclination to enter foreign conflicts in response to emotion-evoking atrocities portrayed on television.
• 
  • • • Less tolerance for capital punishment
      • Less restrictive immigration policy
      • More emphasis in media and policy contexts on emotion-evoking stories of individuals (e.g., pitiable refugee children) rather than dry analyses of long-term outcomes.
• 
  • • • Suppression of any kind of emotionally disturbing speech (“hate speech,” “mansplaining,” etc.) and even fields of scientific inquiry that are likely to evoke negative emotions;
      • Less affinity for traditional, constitutionally protected forms of confrontation in the legal and political spheres, i.e., less support for open debate, free-speech rights, and “due process of law.”
      • Suppression/replacement of words that evoke emotional discomfort (e.g., “abortion clinic” becomes “women’s health center”)

That’s just from one set of closely related traits. Certainly there are others. For example, women for obvious evolutionary reasons appear to have an instinctive fear of dietary and environmental toxins, which can become pronounced during pregnancy (“morning sickness,” nesting reflex, food aversions). Is it just coincidence that women’s cultural ascendancy in Western countries corresponds to a huge rise in diet-, drug-, and environment-related concerns encompassing the Green movement, anti-GMO attitudes, “detox” fads, the “herbal medicine” racket, “organic foods” preferences, and even the anti-vaccine movement?

Et cetera. It was a quick, accessible outline of my Big Idea, and I gathered from my website analytics that people who started reading it tended to read it through, and often sent their friends links to it.

Still, the daily reader count seldom got into three digits, and sometimes flatlined in the single digits for days at a time, especially if I was too distracted by work to do my reply-guy thing on Twitter. For weeks, and then months, my interest in the whole thing waned, as it just seemed unrewarding.

But the compulsion to get some recognition for my Big Idea was one of those relapsing/remitting conditions that can never be fully cured. Within six months of posting “The Great Feminization,” I began work on a new cultural feminization essay, centered on a more in-depth account of the aforementioned Larry Summers brouhaha.

I initially conceived of this essay, which came to be titled, “The Day the Logic Died,” as something that would be publishable in a respectable conservative venue. But by the time I’d finished it, and weighed its largeish word-count, I knew better, and just posted it to the absltzero.com site.

“The Day the Logic Died” was an exploration of the Larry Summers case as a classic early example of a cancellation hysteria created by activist, anti-rational women in academia and media—a classic demonstration, in other words, of cultural feminization and its unpleasant consequences. I also put in a hypothesis at the end about the deep reasons why men fail, again and again, to hold their own in this new female-controlled cancellation culture. Though it was a long essay, it was probably the most “writerly” one I’ve produced on this topic.

Once again, not much happened in the weeks after I posted it. But a few months later, lightning finally struck, and—using my reply-guy strategy—I succeeded in getting “The Day the Logic Died” noticed by a popular Twitter figure. This was the celebrated “Spotted Toad” (@toad_spotted), who read the essay, liked it, and recommended it to his tens of thousands of followers:

Boom. The essay went “viral,” as they say—Statcounter began registering thousands of hits per day. And as people checked my posts and my bio and saw that Spotted Toad followed me, I began accumulating many more followers. To my surprise, many of these were Twitter-famous or even real-life-famous people with high follower counts of their own. They included Wesley Yang, Walter Kirn, Nick Denton, Marc Andreesen, Helen Andrews, Micah Meadowcroft, and Steve Sailer. One of the best known of these even DM’d me, wanting to know—apropos of the Larry Summers essay—if I was on the faculty at Harvard.

Naturally, this positive reaction encouraged me to spend more time on Twitter, and to keep posting essays on absltzero.com, including essay #3, “Girl Power” (Jan 2020), in which I tried to trace the roots of modern cancel culture back to convent hysterias, Salem, and other female social contagions of yore.

Writing more, both in short-form and long, was probably unwise at this point, given how little time I had to spare for it. But anyway I pressed on, publishing additional essays whenever I felt I had something reasonably new to say.

STONE’S PEAK

Early 2020 brought the COVID crisis. Fear of what the pandemic would do, anxiety over the sudden economic shut-down, and stress over lockdown and mask-wearing rules combined to exacerbate the national frazzlement. Then in the approach to the presidential election, Democratic Party operatives’ stoking of black grievance and white guilt—achieved by pumping several police run-ins with recalcitrant African-Americans into national prominence, and organizing marches and riots—was added to this toxic mix. As I pointed out often that year, mostly in tweets and once or twice in essays, stressed American women had reached a sort of breaking point, causing them—in a social mania akin to the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966-76—to shift their society-disrupting activities into a higher gear.

This contagious frenzy, which Sailer aptly called the “Great Awokening,” was essentially female in a way that, I thought, made the concept of cultural feminization increasingly obvious.

Throughout 2020 and early 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic kept me busy professionally. I did find time to change the domain name of my essay website from absltzero.com to thoughtsofstone.com. I also probably made at least one or two further—now-forgotten—efforts to get published more widely. But those too failed, and by April of 2021, I was getting restless again.

At this point, I had enough big-name Twitter mutuals (who were routinely liking and retweeting my stuff, and reading my essays) that I felt I could ask for their help in reaching a wider audience. In April 2021, I contacted Helen Andrews, a young author and editor/writer for The American Conservative magazine, to see if TAC would be interested in running a short piece on my cultural feminization idea. Based on her tweets, Helen had struck me as very sharp-minded and conservative—and she was clearly enthusiastic about my Big Idea.

She was gracious in her response, reiterating her support for my thesis and heaping particular praise  on “The Day the Logic Died.” After making inquiries, she informed me that The American Conservative as a rule would not publish something by a pseudonymous author. As an alternative, though, she suggested The American Mind, a webzine produced by the Claremont Institute, and she helpfully put me in touch with its editors James Poulos and Spencer Klavan. My short piece on cultural feminization, “Pink Shift,” appeared in TAM’s pages in early May.

Naturally, I felt that this was progress, in the sense that I was reaching a wider readership, and was also basically putting down a public marker of my role in advancing the cultural feminization hypothesis. But though I gained a modest number of new Twitter followers and daily readers of my essays, I was still far from my goal.

Months passed, and the familiar, unpleasant sense of futility grew in me. I had made a reasonable effort—especially given my work and time constraints—to get my Big Idea “out there” and noticed. Certainly a lot of people, in a strong position to help, were well aware of it and its provenance. But how could I propel this idea into the public mind strongly enough that it had to be confronted and considered, and never again ignored or suppressed? And what more could I do to get the recognition I felt I deserved? Whatever the true answers to those questions may have been, I did little other than what I had been doing, namely writing to small-ish media organizations and asking them to publish my Big Idea.

That strategy continued to not work, although for a while, things kept happening to prop up my hopes. One day in mid-October 2021, I did a routine check of the analytics for the thoughtsofstone.com website, and saw thousands—soon tens of thousands—of visitors to the “Great Feminization” essay page. It was clear that all these visitors were arriving via a link on a blog called Marginal Revolution.

Marginal Revolution is the blog of Tyler Cowen, the economist, Bloomberg columnist, and all-round social media star. I wasn’t entirely surprised that “The Great Feminization” had caught his attention, as I had observed in the past that his ideas and mine sometimes ran in similar (at least marginally heretical) directions. We had even had a brief, cordial email exchange during the 2008-09 financial crisis—when he was already very popular, but far more approachable—in relation to one of my ideas (on my anonymous blog) about the future economy.

In any case, Cowen’s link to “The Great Feminization” widened the essay’s circulation not just for one or two days, but for weeks and months—in which many other bloggers and posters cited it approvingly, and visitor counts at the thoughtsofstone.com site stayed high.

Toward the end of that month of October, energized by the Cowen link, I pitched another piece on cultural feminization to Twitter mutual Park MacDougald, a young editor/writer at the Washington Examiner. He told me he was just then bound for a new job at UK’s UnHerd, but would try to get the piece in before he left, if I could get it to him quickly. I did, we did some rapid edits, and on Oct 27 he told me the piece would be online two days later.

The piece—my working title was “Wokeism is a Woman”—didn’t really include anything new compared to what I’d already written on the subject. It started as follows . . .

Consider the hypothesis that most of the dramatic social changes sweeping over Western societies in recent decades, including the rise of social justice ideology or “wokeness,” are driven not so much by a specific ideology as they are by a simple demographic shift, namely, the large-scale addition of women to the ranks of the elites.

It is curious that this possibility has been overlooked for so long. Since the middle of the last century, women in the West have almost completely departed from their traditional stay-at-home roles. They have moved into the workforce alongside men, and have acquired power, often dominance, within all the culturally and politically influential professions. Women are now managing editors, film producers, CEOs, university presidents, cabinet secretaries, senators and congresswomen. They now help direct the culture and the policies that move all of us—the first time this has happened in a large society.

. . . and it ended (in the last draft I have in my files) this way:

In any case, the most important issue about this “great feminization” is where it appears to be taking us. Do we really want to jettison things like due process and free scientific inquiry? Do we really want laws discriminating against America’s legacy population, especially white males, in the name of “equity?”

I suspect that a lot of people, men in particular, already sense at least subconsciously that wokeism and related social changes reflect the new power of women—and hope that the worst of these changes are a sort of emotional storm that will blow over eventually if they just ignore it. I think that view overlooks, to put it mildly, wokeism’s sensational recent successes in transforming Western societies, and its strong roots among the women who help run those societies. Wokeism is too incoherent, too contrary to common sense and human nature, to last anywhere near as long as Western liberalism has. But rolling back its excesses is going to require real effort. Step one should be the recognition—as harsh as it may seem—that wokeism, far from being an enlightened vision of human progress, may be only the projection of a maternal mindset that is dangerously out of its depth.

THE SHARKS

The day before the Washington Examiner piece was scheduled to appear, MacDougald DM’d me to let me know it had been put on hold. I knew that I hadn’t pulled my punches in the piece; moreover, I had experienced one or two last-minute cancellations of pieces in my earlier career as a journalist. So I was not especially surprised when, a week later, MacDougal informed me that they weren’t going to run the piece at all—and that he, about to exit, had little say in the matter. (He offered a kill fee, which I declined.)

It soon became clear that that had been my last chance to get my Big Idea out there and get credit for it. The “Great Awokening” had made women’s central role in wokeness and modern progressivism hard to ignore—and with that (and to some extent the influence of my own essays) other writers with easier paths to high-profile publication were starting to see an opportunity. Other than Cowen with his comment-free linking to “The Great Feminization,” none of them would acknowledge my prior contributions.

Less than a month after my piece on women and wokeness was killed at the Washington Examiner, the writer Noah Carl published a short Substack post (“Did Women in Academia Cause Wokeness?”) arguing that the roots of wokeness lay in the feminization of academia—essentially a much narrower (and I would say incomplete) version of my own argument.

A very similar piece by Mary Harrington appeared on the same day, Nov. 24, in the UK webzine the Critic, about “The New Female Ascendancy” in academia—in the administrative ranks, at least.

Less remarked on is the sex breakdown of the growing proportion of administrators. A recent diversity and inclusion report by the University of California indicates that women make up more than 70 per cent of non-academic staff across (among others) nursing, therapeutic services, health, health technicians, communications services roles, and a majority or near majority across all non-manual staff roles. In other words, if men are still over represented in top academic roles, the non-academic supporting ecosystem is overwhelmingly female.

And that support system has an increasingly symbiotic relationship with student activism, which over my lifetime has (on both sides of the Atlantic) shifted noticeably away from a focus on material conditions toward something more like the bureaucratic regulation of personal identity and interpersonal interactions.

A 2015 look at student protesters across 51 campuses showed the most common demands — alongside greater diversity among faculty — were diversity training and cultural centres. In turn, this focus requires a ballooning staff tasked with managing identities, or variously supporting or disciplining types of relationship, for example via “consent” education: the roles where women predominate.

Overseas at the time, I was alerted to the appearance of Harrington’s piece by a nice Twitter DM from Helen Andrews:

Certainly I agreed that I deserved credit! However, as I replied a bit morosely to Helen (after thanking her again for her help and encouragement), I knew that I probably wasn’t going to be given a lot of credit, given that I was a pseudonymous, non-professional essayist with no high-profile publication of my thesis. Again, it would turn out that even a little credit was more than I should have hoped for.

Surprisingly, one of the writers who advanced cultural feminization as his own big idea was Thomas Edsall, a writer for the New York Times, who managed to get a stealthily subversive essay on all this (“The Gender Gap is Taking Us to Unexpected Places,” 12 Jan 2022) into the Gray Lady’s pages. He quoted Tyler Cowen enough to suggest that he read Cowen’s “Marginal Revolution” blog—which to me also suggested that he had read “The Great Feminization” and that his essay might even have been prompted by it. But if one is writing a column for a woke media organ like the New York Times, where young, female and nonwhite activists are always looking for ways to advance by displacing white males, it would be deeply imprudent to cite a pseudonymous essayist who evidently hated wokeism and other leftist  dogmas. Of course, from my perspective it would nevertheless have been the correct, honorable thing to do; but I think it’s fair to say that in American journalism now those old-fashioned ethics count for very little. Anyway, Edsall mostly stuck to the quoting of relatively dry academic and survey stuff on gender differences in attitudes, which itself was not new.

. . . a Knight Foundation survey in 2017 of 3,014 college students asked: “If you had to choose, which do you think is more important, a diverse and inclusive society or protecting free speech rights.”

Male students preferred protecting free speech over an inclusive and diverse society by a decisive 61 to 39. Female students took the opposite position, favoring an inclusive, diverse society over free speech by 64 to 35.

I’ll just list briefly a few of the other relatively prominent writers who started posting on cultural feminization, generally with the conceit that they were making an original contribution:

Richard Hanania. Having discussed cultural feminization as a podcast guest in August 2021, he posted one or two Substack pieces on the same topic early in 2022, with arguments very similar to my own. He was already vastly better known than I, but there was a significant overlap in our Twitter mutuals and general interests, so our stuff would have appeared on each other’s timelines quite a lot during 2019-2021.

Some of the commenters on Hanania’s Substack posts also linked to my older cultural feminization essays, which directed at least hundreds of his readers, and I would guess Hanania himself at some point, to my work. I couldn’t help noticing that someone in Southern California (where Hanania lived then), often using an IP address at UCLA (where he had recently been a grad student), was a frequent reader of the essays on my website. Yet as far as I know, Hanania has never acknowledged my prior contributions. (I have previously criticized Hanania for his promotions of eugenics, Vladimir Putin, the Chinese Communist Party, abortions to prevent Down Syndrome births, etc.)

“L0m3z.” This pseudonymous right-wing writer, prominent on Twitter, managed in early 2023 to get a few-hundred-word piece published in First Things (one of the many media orgs on whose deaf ears my pitches had fallen) framing the cultural feminization hypothesis as the “longhouse” theory—a reference to longhouse-dwelling primitive societies.

The idea apparently derives from the book Bronze Age Mindset (2018) whose pseudonymous author’s references to it are pretty cursory.

 . . .

None of that is really important anyway, since the invocation of putative longhouse-based societies clearly fails—or is just unnecessary—as an explanation for cultural feminization. Western culture has been feminized mainly because women, abandoning their traditional homemaker roles at the behest of feminists and for financial reasons, have moved into public life and have achieved critical masses in all important, culturally and politically influential Western institutions. L0m3z basically admitted this in his short piece, though he referred to other, later writers like Hanania and Edsall as having pointed this out, not to me. Like Hanania, L0m3z had had a lot of Twitter-mutual overlap with me, and, I seem to recall, followed me for a few months after Spotted Toad gave me some publicity in 2019. L0m3z also didn’t start writing on Twitter about his “longhouse” idea (judging by Twitter searches) until late 2021.

Heather MacDonald. I had always admired MacDonald’s writing, so I was disappointed to see her piece in Urban Journal in March 2023 about the feminization of academia. It seemed unoriginal from my perspective—and, I guess, also would have seemed that way from the perspective of Harrington or Carl. Worse, the initial title appears to have been “The Great Feminization of the American University,” so that, following the publication of her piece (which of course did not cite me) the Google search ranking for my “Great Feminization” essay of 2019 was obliterated, and readers searching for those keywords were directed to MacDonald’s piece instead. (The fact that Urban Journal changed the title hints that someone tipped them off to the existence of my essay.)

There were a number of other pieces discussing this topic, including one in Quillette, and even The American Conservative. None of these pieces mentioned me. No one mentioned me, apart from a few tweeters in replies and blog commenters.

As time went on, and tardier but better-known writers’ thoughts on this circulated more widely, even people who definitely knew of my work started referring to me only alongside, sometimes even after, those other writers.

Of course I know that to the ones making these references, this “inclusivity” would have seemed perfectly natural, perhaps even generous towards the nobody J. Stone. Nevertheless, I felt at least a twinge of annoyance every time. “Nothing these other writers are telling you about cultural feminization is original in the slightest!” I wanted to shout. “That would become instantly obvious if any of them had the decency to cite my work!” But I knew that no one cared–I knew I was dealing with social forces just as inexorable and irrational as the ones I’d been writing about in my cultural feminization essays.

I continued to post occasional cultural feminization-related thoughts on Twitter . . .

. . . but over time I was, as they say, airbrushed from the picture.

It did not help that I was pseudonymous and intent upon remaining so. It also emphatically did not help that, early in 2022, I tweeted/posted in support of Ukraine’s struggle to withstand Russia’s invasion. A large number of my Twitter mutuals, flying flags I had not known they possessed, revealed themselves to be supporters of Putin or at least derisive skeptics about Ukraine’s ambitions to be a free country. I expressed my own derision in regard to this bizarre, anti-liberty, anti-self-determination attitude, and this resulted in my being unfollowed or muted by many. That the facts on the ground in Ukraine increasingly supported my view probably only hurt me worse in this respect.

In 2022, it was increasingly clear from the dwindling engagement of my tweets that I had essentially lost my audience. In April of that year, less than 12 months after my “Pink Shift” piece had appeared in American Mind, I organized my thoughts on cultural feminization into a self-published ebook, as a sort of tombstone for my eleven years of promoting this idea, and then mostly ceased writing about it. I had come to the conclusion that trying to introduce and get credit for an important new idea, from a standing start, on Twitter or a personal website—or on any venue with a small audience—was a mug’s game, little better than shouting to passers-by from a proverbial soap-box.

A BETTER WAY?

Is this just my own personal gripe—my own self-driven, bad-luck story—without relevance to the wider problems of society? I can easily believe that members of the “opinionator elite,” as I call them, would say so if pressed.

I also think that the vast majority of people, even highly educated people, don’t consider the process I have described significantly problematic. They encounter new ideas all the time, and they generally don’t care about recognizing these ideas’ exact provenance—they don’t see that as affecting their interests. Sure, they’ll pile on the opprobrium if a plagiarist is caught red-handed. But if some pseudonymous nobody complains about his prior work being copied and/or not cited by some mass-followed elite opinionator, the latter and his followers will scoff together at Mr. Nobody’s presumption.

That doesn’t mean they’re right! Consider the distribution of forces here: Firstly, there are the opinionator elites, the gatekeepers of media content and popular intellectual discourse. Obviously, they have no interest in finding fault with a situation that empowers them, and to some extent enriches them. Just as obviously, the great mass of ordinary, non-idea-originator people are not going to see a problem if the elites won’t highlight it for them.

Against this weight of opposition and inertia, we amateur, non-elite idea originators—surprisingly numerous but still constituting only a tiny minority in the grand scheme of things—have little chance.

There is also a general misconception that new ideas of the type I’m referencing here—ideas that appear in media outlets like the ones I’ve mentioned in this story—do not deserve protection because they are of a different nature than the ideas or intellectual works we do normally protect, e.g., with copyright and patent laws.

But while it may be true that the idea “cultural feminization is happening and is caused by women’s entry en masse into culturally influential institutions” is not a patentable invention and is not a book or film that can be copyrighted and sold commercially, nevertheless:

• • This idea has social value in the sense that it potentially explains many otherwise inexplicable sociocultural changes. It may not (yet) have the same perceived importance, but it belongs to the same broad category as Darwin’s theory of biological evolution, and Dawkins’s theory of cultural memetics;
  • This idea certainly can have commercial value for writers who successfully negotiate book and/or magazine deals—perhaps even lucrative sinecures at think-tanks—by claiming to have originated it.

Although I think the mechanism by which non-elite idea originators are disadvantaged is essentially non-rational—a blunt-force social suppression—I can imagine a semi-compelling reasoned case for the status quo, which would go something like this:

People won’t believe that a new ‘Big Idea’ is valid unless the author of that idea has plenty of social support, e.g., from a substantial number of authoritative figures (i.e., elite opinionators) and/or a large mass of social media followers. Thus, the introduction of a new idea must be, to some extent, a popularity contest—which means that one must develop a sturdy network of social support before one can expect the idea to spread widely and proper credit to be given. In most cases, gathering such support requires one to write under one’s own name, instead of hiding behind a pseudonym—this is why so many media organizations refuse to publish pseudonymous authors. In short, you can choose to play the game, with a chance of winning, or you can choose to quit and be a loser.

I believe that this would seem reasonable to many people. But really it is not a very good argument.

Firstly, this “social network argument” enmires itself in, or at least fails to take account of, a logical fallacy called the genetic fallacy. This fallacy is the belief that the genesis of an idea has anything to do with the idea’s validity. In other words, if Adolf Hitler had once claimed that two plus two equals four, it would be illogical for us all to disbelieve it merely because Adolf Hitler stated it.

The Hitler example makes the fallaciousness obvious, but in everyday cases it’s not so obvious. In fact (as I would say my own case illustrates) it’s common in public discourse for a good idea to be rejected or ignored, without any consideration of its merits, because the idea-originator is either unknown or—as is true for a lot of conservative thinkers nowadays—somehow intolerably heretical, from the perspective of media gatekeepers.

My guess is that, despite our gatekeepers’ now having more formal education than ever, they are more prone than ever to stray into this fallacy, because there are more women than ever among these gatekeepers, and (for that reason) the culture itself is more feminized than ever. Women, on average compared to men, are drawn more to the personal, less to the abstract, and so they are more likely to consider the character or politics of a person who is voicing an argument before they consider the argument on its merits. In my experience, a shocking number of educated women do not see the genetic fallacy as a real fallacy. Indeed, the modern wokeist/feminist contention that gender and ethnic identity determine the validity of one’s ideas and contributions is a bold assertion of this view.

Now, of course I recognize that we can’t all be abstract logicians. We are social animals, only a few million years removed from our tree-dwelling ape ancestors, and we tend to make decisions in crude ways, often involving associations that are practically useful but not necessarily linked by causal mechanisms. We are disinclined to listen or read when some unknown or fringe-y person starts pontificating—yet the same idea, restated by a mainstream thinker, will be much more likely to get our attention. This does seem natural to us.

Natural doesn’t mean optimal, though. Keeping slaves and burning heretics are among the many practices that once seemed natural to us humans. In more traditional, “natural” times, we also had no protection for—or even concept of—intellectual property. The fact is that current social structures and dynamics governing the treatment of new ideas end up suppressing many true idea originators and rewarding fake ones. Who really believes that we can’t come up with a better, fairer, more modern approach?

It seems worth emphasizing here that one of the great revelations of modern electronic social media platforms, especially Twitter, is that there are surprisingly many amateur but bona fide originators of useful ideas. Obviously it would be good if these people—whether one wants to include me in their ranks or not—had an easier time making their new ideas visible or at least getting credit when their ideas do eventually begin to circulate. This would encourage more new ideas, whereas the present system (as my case is meant to illustrate) discourages them.

Amateur idea originators are, in my opinion, mostly people whose quirks of genetics and life experience cause them to perceive the world a bit differently than the average person does. This doesn’t necessarily make them smarter than average, but it does allow them to see patterns that others don’t. This cognitive differentness (not the same as autism, though very mild autism sometimes produces a similar phenomenon) often puts them “out of step” with their fellow humans not just intellectually but also socially. Thus, in my estimation, amateur idea originators are often among the least equipped and inclined to climb the greasy pole to win social support.

How to amplify their voices? How to give them credit and thereby encourage their contributions?

The Internet already gives us the basic medium for the essentially costless publication of new ideas. Some of us set up our own websites; others have Substack accounts. It should also be possible to craft search algorithms specifically to find and date instances of a given idea on the searchable web—this would seem an excellent application of current AI technology.

It should be possible, as well, to make an “idea registry,” maybe something like a cross between rXiv.org and Wikpedia, to which anyone can contribute, and where ideas are automatically categorized and time-stamped.

I have two basic models in mind. The most obvious one is the patent system, a modern, logical, merit-based system that does not require inventors to garner social support. And, again, while the commercial potential of technical inventions drove the establishment of the patent system, and political/cultural ideas tend to have less money-making potential, the reality nowadays is that new ideas are more monetizable than ever through books, magazine articles, Substack subscriptions, and so on. I also think most experienced professional journalists and opinionators would admit that it is absolutely routine for better-known writers to “borrow” the reporting and/or ideas of lesser-known writers and monetize them with large publishing contracts. Although, again, the average person doesn’t care, quite a few big-name writers would not have their fame and fat incomes but for opportune appropriations of others’ work.

We may not want to treat new cultural/political ideas as protectable intellectual property in the strict sense, by fining violators, requiring licensing, etc. But having an easily searchable record of the originations of these new ideas would, at least, tend to discourage the rampant theft that now takes place.

The other model I have in mind is the “motif index” made by folklorists. Such an index—somewhat akin to patent examiners’ taxonomies of technologies, and zoologists’ taxonomies of plants and animals—is a hyper-branchiate ordering of folkloric tales according to the functional elements they contain. If such a vast and useful information structure could be built by a few folklorists using pre-Internet, pre-computer technologies, it should be doable much more easily now for new ideas in the Internet age.

I see no downside for this general proposal to “level the playing field” for idea-originators. It seems like a no-brainer, really, and my guess is that, as it becomes easy to implement in the AI age, it will happen, overcoming the predictable opposition/suppression by the elite opinionator class. Perhaps I will even get some credit for the idea!

* * *

____________________________

“If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?” —Stephen Hawking

In 1959, at an Anglican mission in the village of Boianai, on the north coast of the mountainous southeastern prong of New Guinea, there occurred one of the best-known examples of what the UFO researcher J. Allen Hynek would later call a “Close Encounter of the Third Kind.”

The case involved a series of UFO sightings—by mission staff and other locals—of odd lights in the sky and saucer-shaped crafts, over a period of several weeks, culminating in a close encounter in late June. The mission head, William Gill, a 31-year-old Australian named William Gill, had more or less dismissed some of the earlier sightings in a letter written June 26 to a senior colleague based elsewhere in PNG:

I am inclined to believe that probably many UFOs are more likely some form of electric phenomena—or perhaps something brought about by the atom bomb explosions etc.

Having signed himself “Doubting William,” Gill later that day became a UFO believer, as he explained in a follow-up letter to the same colleague on June 27:

Life is strange, isn’t it? Yesterday I wrote you a letter, expressing opinions re the UFOs. Now, less than 24 hours later I have changed my views somewhat.

Last night we at Boianai experienced about 4 hours of UFO activity, and there is no doubt whatsoever that they are handled by beings of some kind. At times it was absolutely breathtaking.

What Gill and his staff and parishioners saw (and more than three dozen later signed a statement affirming the truth of Gill’s account) was a saucer-shaped craft that approached the village closely, and came as low as 100 meters from the ground. It had a deck on top, from which four different beings, human in appearance, observed the people on the ground.

One figure seemed to be standing looking down at us (a group of about a dozen). I stretched my arm above my head and waved. To our surprise the figure did the same. Ananias waved both arms over his head then the two outside figures did the same.

Ananias and myself began waving our arms and all four now seemed to wave back. There seemed to be no doubt that our movements were answered. All mission boys made audible gasps (of either joy or surprise, perhaps both).

As dark was beginning to close in, I sent Eric Kodawara for a torch and directed a series of long dashes towards the UFO. After a minute or two of this, the UFO apparently acknowledged by making several wavering motions back and forth.

Waving by us was repeated and this followed by more flashes of torch, then the UFO began slowly to become bigger, apparently coming in our direction. It ceased after perhaps half a minute and came no further.

After a further two or three minutes the figures apparently lost interest in us for they disappeared ‘below deck.’ At 6.25 pm two figures re-appeared to carry on with whatever they were doing [seemingly setting up equipment on the deck] before the interruption. The blue spotlight [emitted upward at a 45-degree angle from the top of the craft] came on for a few seconds twice in succession.

The craft was accompanied by others in the sky nearby, but none landed, and eventually the sightings—often obscured by cloud cover—petered out, more or less coincident with a series of mysterious, loud explosions in the sky.

Gill later commented that the saucer-like object he had seen at close range “looked a perfectly normal sort of object, an earth-made object. I realised, of course, that some people might think of this as a flying saucer, but I took it to be some kind of hovercraft the Americans or even the Australians had built. The figures inside looked perfectly human.” [italics mine]

*

The Boianai encounter has long been seen as a classic, high-quality UFO case. How could one convincingly dismiss such a close and well witnessed encounter involving a university-educated priest who was on record as being skeptical about UFOs?

To me, though, the Boianai case is important mainly because it illustrates the weakness of the standard hypothesis about UFOs, which is that they (i.e., the ones with no ordinary explanation) are visitors from other star systems. This “ET hypothesis” is weak for cases like Boianai because visitors from other star systems wouldn’t look human, as the Boianai visitors did, and probably wouldn’t use tech that so closely resembled ours. Like many other UFO cases, the Boianai case seems more consistent with the moderately less woo idea that these visitors are visitors from our own future, or at any rate from “parallel-universe” versions of Earth that resemble our world much more than distant planets would.

In this view, the UFOs coming from our own near future, or from parallel universe Earths close to our own timeline, would have occupants that look very much like us, and tech that resembles ours—whereas UFOs from our distant future or “distant” parallel Earths would seem much more “alien,” while remaining humanoid.

*

But let me back up. I have never been a UFO researcher or “enthusiast.” I was once a journalist, and as such, in bygone days, I did spend a small slice of my life thinking and researching and writing about UFOs, and becoming acquainted with the lore.

I met, among others, senior current/former government/contractor types who told me they thought it was all real—UFOs, crash retrievals, the whole nine yards—though they couldn’t get access to verify anything. One or two of them wanted me to dig into it.

I did that eventually, in a small way, with the backing of a prominent media organization (as in “yes, feel free to tell them you’re working on a story for us—and let us know if you find anything interesting.”) I spoke to former government officials and contractors (e.g., metals experts) who should have known something, if there was something to know. Whether I approached them directly or obliquely, they all genially professed ignorance about anything that would indicate the existence of a crashed-UFO exploitation program. Eventually I ran out of leads to pursue, and went back to writing about more ordinary stuff.

I felt some relief at that. The idea of a supersecret government UFO program was unsettling. I also felt to some extent that if it existed, it probably should be kept a secret. Moreover, the whole UFO field by then had become, to me, a hall of mirrors in which fact and rumor, fact-finding and UFO evangelism, were almost impossible to tell apart. I was never comfortable there.

I still found the UFO literature compelling, not in its entirety, of course, but in key cases involving multiple independent witnesses, some with radar backup and so on. I retained a sort of middle-of-the-road view of UFOs, reasoning that we’re in a big universe, we’re unlikely to be alone, and so probably some UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin.

I also came to the conclusion, not then but eventually, that the ability of contemporary humans to learn about visitors from advanced ET civilizations is probably very, very limited, so that ufology (in the usual sense, aimed at ET-UFOs) is likely a mug’s game, whether conducted privately or with taxpayer funds.

Had I not walked away from UFOs, I might even have ended up being the journalist the government-connected enthusiasts used to break that big story in the New York Times in 2017. In any case, thanks to those enthusiasts, and to the journalist they chose, Leslie Kean—above all, thanks to the late Senator Harry Reid who got a small UFO program funded from 2008-2016 or so—UFOs in the last few years have become almost a mainstream thing again. New government programs have been set up, and the “expert” panels for these include government-employed individuals who are very enthusiastic about the subject.

Maybe in some cases they are too enthusiastic. One or two of them heard a story like the one I heard, about a UFO recovery/exploitation program, and in recent months have been trying to use their positions on these panels to act as “whistleblowers” and rip the lid off the whole thing.

Good reasons to keep it a secret, if it exists:

• • Harmful psychosocial effects could follow the exposure of such a program—which would disrupt most of the “realities” and moral orders humans have constructed for themselves. Just being forced to acknowledge the existence of beings with superior technology could, on its own, have a seriously demoralizing effect.

• • If any of the material can be exploited technologically, then it is better for the US to do that, and to keep it secret, than to “share it with the world,” including the world’s bad actors such as China and Russia.

• • The knowledge that the US has such material, and the possibility that the US and its allies can exploit it, might be enough to dissuade some of those bad actors from doing seriously bad things, such as using nuclear weapons. (More than two decades ago, I started but never finished writing a novel, loosely based on my journalistic experiences, in which the whole “UFO crash retrieval” story turned out to be a psy-op against the Chinese in the run-up to their planned Taiwan invasion.)

For the same reasons, I find it hard to take at face value the claims by the so-called whistleblowers (who may have been making large sums off their fame/notoriety even before their claims are verified) that they are selflessly doing humanity a favor by forcing disclosure of this alleged secret program.

But to return to my main point: If these claims about recovered vehicles or fragments are true (and there are quite a few such cases in the UFO literature, even if none is very convincing), then they suggest, once again, that “alien” visitations involve a surprisingly low and error-prone level of tech. Why would star-faring ET civilizations that are millions or billions of years ahead of us in development send such failure-prone craft into our skies? It just doesn’t make sense.

One of the self-described whistleblowers, David Grusch, has indicated that pilot bodies were recovered in one or more of these cases. Why flesh-and-blood pilots, for a journey across light-years? And why are the “aliens” in UFO cases always described as humanoid bipeds?

It also doesn’t make sense that the technology left behind by these supposedly super-advanced visitors would invite the prospect of reverse-engineering by ourselves. For us to reverse-engineer a crashed saucer from a millions-of-years-ahead civilization would be like Australopithecus ape-men reverse-engineering a crashed F-35.

Again, these crash/recovery stories, along with Boianai and many other cases in the lore, would make much more sense (to the extent we need to take them seriously) if the visitors in question were not from other star systems, but from somewhere much “closer.”

*

Tourists from the future is a catchy phrase, but isn’t precisely what I am hypothesizing here.

Classical physics, and even early (“Copenhagen Interpretation”) quantum physics, did not offer much hope for those wishing to develop time-travel technology. A paradox always stood in the way. For example, if you were to depart in your time machine, in Hollywood time-travel fashion, and land in your own backyard the day before, greeting yourself and your wide-eyed wife and children, then you would be changing your own past—you would stop being you—and that just seemed impossible. To put it another way: the traditional conception of time implied a single timeline on which the entire universe exists and unfolds, with no apparent allowance for jumps backward and forward.

The now-dominant Relative State Formulation (a.k.a. the Many Worlds Interpretation, or MWI) of quantum theory is, in principle, more accommodating. It implies—to simplify—that reality comprises an infinitude of ever-branching universes or timelines. Thus, apart from other physical considerations, you could travel “backwards in time,” though the timeline on which you alighted would be distinct (possibly differentiating at the moment you arrive) from your timeline of origin. This means that if you traveled a day backward in time, the people you met in that “destination timeline,” including your “self,” would be merely different versions of those populating your departure timeline. You’d be in a “parallel universe” version of the universe you’d left, and nothing you did there would alter your original timeline—your personal “past.”

In principle, if you could jump from one timeline to another, you also could jump to more distant, parallel timelines to visit more different versions of Earth, whether in the present, past, or future. In this sense, you would be traveling not just along the dimension of time, but across it—across timelines, or “across the multiverse.” I’m not sure what this kind of travel should be called. Perhaps “trans-timeline travel” or “frame shifting” or something like that.

How you would jump between timelines—or travel back along your own and alight somewhere, forcing the branching-off of a new timeline—is of course the hard problem here. Possibly there would be a conservation-of-energy issue, so that major amounts of energy would have to be released or subtracted with each jump. The explosions reported at Boianai, and in other cases, call that issue to mind (although a straight conservation-of-energy calculation implies at least gigaton yields). Though it seems that most reported UFOs depart by moving rapidly upward into the sky, it is conceivable—this is all extremely speculative anyway—that any necessary energy exchanges take place high in the atmosphere where they are less noticeable, and might even be taken for bolide explosions when they involve energy release.

Why would “trans-timeline-travelers” use flying machines, instead of just materializing on the ground, as in time-travel movies? Perhaps because “arriving” at coordinates corresponding to solid matter, inside a mountain for example, would spell instant death for the travelers—and thus a high-atmosphere or outer-space entry, in suitably equipped craft, would be a standard safety measure.

The general idea that some UFOs may be time-travel vehicles, not ET vehicles, has been suggested in various forms over the years. There is also a somewhat more vague idea, put forward by Jacques Vallee many decades ago, that UFOs may represent non-human visitors from other dimensions but not other star systems. Replace dimensions with “timelines” (or “universes,” per MWI) and you arrive at something similar to what I am suggesting. Anyhow, again, this is all highly speculative—and it is very possible that the UFO-crash-retrieval/exploitation story will soon be debunked and discredited. But even if that happens, the wider UFO phenomenon, with solid cases like Boianai, retains its potential to blow our minds.

***

The US government shut down its official UFO investigations in 1969, and thereafter, for more than four decades, the UFO phenomenon wallowed in a low-culture morass of tabloid stories, books by “abductees” claiming to have been impregnated by ETs, TV documentaries about ancient aliens, etc. Over the past decade or so, thanks to the efforts of influential enthusiasts in the U.S. Senate and the military/intelligence community, UFOs have begun moving back towards mainstream acceptance. Since 2021, the Pentagon has had an office—currently called the “All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO)—tasked with collecting and analyzing UFO reports. The recent media flap over a Chinese spy balloon prompted the setup of an additional Pentagon-FAA-DHS-CIA “airborne objects” study team. Even NASA now has its own blue-chip panel for studying UFOs “from a scientific perspective.”

It would be tough to argue that these developments are entirely bad. We’re now in the Drone Age of warfare, so it absolutely makes sense to “watch the skies” and identify what’s up there. It also seems sensible not to dismiss UFOs as purely terrestrial phenomena—a small proportion of cases, including some sensational recent ones involving military aircraft, really do invite an ET interpretation.

That said, I suspect this will be a case of shifting from low-culture nonsense straight to elite hubris and foolishness—premised on the conceit that we can undertake a detailed study of ET-UFOs as if they were ordinary scientific phenomena.

It should be obvious that we cannot—not if these phenomena represent advanced intelligent ETs that are studying us, reading our beliefs and intentions and shaping our perceptions, perhaps to obscure their true nature. This is just common sense, although the UFO lore also supplies many instances of mysterious aerial objects’ seeming to anticipate, and sometimes even thwart, the actions of human observers such as pilots.

And what if, despite our very limited ability to learn about UFOs, we gathered enough evidence to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that some really are advanced, starfaring ET species? Would we take pride in this “scientific” discovery? Or would we enter into a state of smoldering despair, as we faced the painful fact that we are an also-ran species? Anyone who seriously ponders the ET-discovery possibility is reminded eventually of the many inter-civilizational encounters in our own ages of conquest and discovery. Those encounters generally went badly for the inferior party—in part because the “knowledge” they gained was basically toxic to their prideful worldview.

The good news is that the average starfaring alien in our galaxy is unlikely to be apprehensible enough to have this toxic effect. The popular notion of a Captain-Cook-like ET visitor who is eager to tell us about his own world, eager to share his advanced scientific and technical knowledge, seems particularly far-fetched. The thing that we humans find hardest to understand about putative ETs—and this is evident from our relentlessly anthropomorphic depictions of them in fiction, folklore, and even academic papers—is just how alien most would be.

Consider that our galaxy, along with the rest of our observable universe, was around for roughly 10 billion years before our solar system existed. That’s a lot of time in which other life forms might have arisen, and it suggests that the average age gap between our starbound species and true starfarers in our galactic vicinity is on the order of billions of years. The resulting difference in civilizational development would thus be enormously greater than that between, say, 18^th century Englishmen and Pacific Islanders. It would be more like humans vs. ants, or humans vs. bacteria.

Conceivably an alien species even with that degree of superiority could communicate in some way that our comparatively rudimentary brains could understand. But why would it even bother? We humans don’t feel compelled to introduce ourselves to ants or bacteria, let alone try to teach them things about ourselves or other aspects of the reality we know. These lower species cannot contain the kind of information we would consider worth imparting.

By the same logic, any specific assumption we humans make about the activities of advanced alien civilizations based on what we would do (broadcasting radio signals, building megastructures, and sending probes from motherships are favorite themes among our so-called experts) is just fatuous anthropomorphizing. We simply lack the capacity to imagine what it would be like to be such creatures. “Where there are no men, there are no motives accessible to men,” as Stanislaw Lem famously put it in Solaris.

Out on the long tail of the age-gap distribution, there might be some ET visitors that are only hundreds to thousands of years more advanced than we. But even they would be very difficult for us to grasp, given the vast differences in our environments and evolutionary histories, and the technologies they would have that we don’t. How would a modern fighter jet roaring overhead look to someone living in America just 300 or 400 years ago? Probably no less strange than the “dark gray cube inside of a clear sphere” that Navy F/A 18 pilots observed in a 2014 midair encounter off the Virginia coast.

Whatever we can grasp about aliens is likely going to be found in the common threads of UFO reports—for example, the apparently benign nature of putative ETs and their craft. They don’t go around killing people, and despite official fears about midair collisions, they have never verifiably knocked a manned aircraft out of the sky. That is at least consistent with what our own history as a species suggests: that as we’ve become more civilized, we’ve tended to become more “humane” and caring, towards outgroups within our species and even toward other species. If ETs are at least as humane as we are, and smarter as well, then even the ones closest to us in age and development might not want to disturb us too directly, lest they trigger our despair-driven demise.

It seems at least plausible, then, that virtually all ETs capable of visiting us are either too advanced and alien to bother, or, if they do visit, are wise and benign enough not to make their presence too obvious. This is one possible resolution of the “paradox,” famously stated by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, that aliens seem scarce and elusive though our universe should be teeming with them.

If this way of thinking about ETs is correct, then our “scientific studies” of UFOs should yield little, at least while we remain in the pre-starfaring state. Though the skeptics might consider themselves vindicated in this case, it would otherwise seem the happiest possible outcome for us as a proud, ambitious species.

On the other hand, it is at least conceivable that among the 100+ billion star systems in our galaxy, there are some starfaring civs that have zero empathy for primitives like us, and would upend our world with no more thought than you or I would have for bugs we happened to crush underfoot while strolling outdoors. These aliens are the kind that would park on the White House lawn, making their presence impossible to ignore. These are the ones we should fear. That our experts frequently evince a yearning for such open contact really underscores how primitive and vulnerable we are.

Incidentally, the gulf between our prideful view of ourselves as a species and our (likely) actual backwardness and insignificance—which direct ET contact presumably would force us to acknowledge—points to yet another reason UFOs seem so scarce: that intelligent creatures tend to die of despair as soon as they discover their true place in the universe.

***

I didn’t get into video games until I was in my 40s. Oddly enough, it was a historian who triggered my interest. Niall Ferguson, the bestselling author, columnist, TV personality and Stanford professor, penned a 2006 New York Magazine piece, “How to Win a War,” that persuasively extolled the virtues of video games as tools for learning about history. He was particularly impressed by a certain turn-based PC strategy game that purported to model World War II—playing it, he said, had seriously challenged some of his own beliefs about the war.

I was not as impressed when I played that particular game, and later a more sophisticated competitor. The limitations of consumer-level computers and developer teams meant that these games simply couldn’t model the dynamics of the WW2-era world very well. However, even at that very modest level of simulation, the experience of replaying a historical period again and again, for dozens to hundreds of playthroughs, did prompt some thoughts about history in general.

One was simply that replaying a given stretch of history, which is to say, generating one variant history after another, has the effect of diminishing the significance of any of those variants. Naturally, in the highly abstracted milieu of a video game, one expects to be far less sensitive to details than one would be in real life. But I noticed that I became progressively desensitized to the details of the real-life WW2 as well: they seemed less interesting and meaningful.

To put it another way, my picture of this period of history was no longer formed from one clear image-capture, but from many—and in that multiple exposure, so to speak, most details were nonrecurring; they therefore tended to fade away as the number of exposures grew.

Would real-life history look different each time if we could re-run it from the same initial starting point? It absolutely would. Even one modern country is an enormously complex and nonlinear system—it will always vary significantly in how it runs from the same starting conditions, and the details of its course will be hard to predict very far in advance. (Think of how hard it is for us to foresee the course of a much simpler nonlinear system, the weather.)

Even so, we almost never think of history in this way. Experience encourages us instead to think of any historical episode as a singular phenomenon—one unique block of spacetime, never to be repeated—and that in turn leads us to frame any history as a sets of events linked by cause-effect relationships. Typically, we also try to draw big lessons from it all: the “lessons of history.” By contrast, when we have the ability to simulate replays of that block of spacetime again and again, seeing how things play out differently each time, it makes the inherently probabilistic nature of history stand out much more sharply. We are, in effect, forced to face a reality we normally wouldn’t acknowledge.

To illustrate again with an extreme example: Suppose one had a large bucket filled with a million marbles, each with its own identifying number, and suddenly dumped them onto some perfectly flat, expansive surface—and recorded precisely how they all bounced and rolled and reached some final arrangement. To the average person, that “history” of the marbles wouldn’t be particularly interesting, would it? The average person would understand intuitively that this marble-history was basically random, would look different in every re-run, and had nothing to teach, other than that marbles reliably obey known laws of mechanics. For that reason, writing a detailed History of the Marbles—or worse, having a dozen marble historians write their own competing tomes—would be absurd. Possibly such histories would be of interest to marbles, who might be curious about all the individual collisions that had brought them to their present positions. But to beings capable of a wider perspective, a history of the marbles would seem pointless—a measuring of statistical noise, as mathematicians would say.

*

Apropos of all that, at some point in my WW2-gaming sojourns I came up with a weird thought-experiment:

Suppose the virtual soldiers and citizens populating any given playthrough had human-like feelings, and regarded that playthrough—their playthrough—as the only one that had ever happened? What would these virtual people do if I, as the Player-God above them, suddenly revealed to them the true nature of their existence—in other words, revealed their “history” as but one chance-ridden playthrough among many?

They would despair, wouldn’t they? Not only at the revelation that their existence was a mere simulation, but also in the recognition that it was merely one of many variant, stochastically determined existences—one semi-random timeline among thousands, or really billions considering the wider universe of players with their separate copies of the game. They would see that, even as a simulation, their existence was effectively meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

Someday, computer games may be invented that not only simulate human events with a high degree of complexity, but also, via the right hardware, imbue their human-like characters with some degree of consciousness. Given the situation of these simulated humans, aware that they are trapped in worlds of no meaning or consequence, we as godlike players will feel sorry for them. However, the sufferings of our virtual creatures should be the least of our worries at that point—for by then we should have recognized that, as creatures of no consequence ourselves, we are in the same damned boat.

*

Can that be true? Is what you or I experience as “real life” merely one probabilistically determined playthrough among an infinitude of them?

The short answer is: very likely yes. And this is arguably the most important revelation—or, if you like, compelling theory—produced by science to date. Moreover, the idea I propose here is that any human civilization capable of grasping this true nature of our reality will eventually enter a state of deep and chronic despair, which perhaps can end only in human extinction.

This putative process of discovery and despair has an interesting, foreshadowing parallel in the most famous Western account of human origin, that of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. For we are, with our science, compulsively eating a forbidden, toxic fruit (of the Tree of Knowledge) and are thereby, in effect, exiling ourselves from the lush, blissfully ignorant existence we briefly had.

And this may not be just a human affliction. It may be one that always strikes species once they reach a certain level of technical and scientific advancement. If so, then plausibly it has already extinguished most of the smart species across the universe, and has made the rest avoidant lest they transmit to us truths we cannot handle. This would explain the paradox—“Fermi’s Paradox”—that the universe probably has incubated trillions upon trillions of alien civilizations, yet the latter’s visits to us appear to have been relatively few and furtive.

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Science, as we know it, is a very recent development. Broadly speaking, it is one of the fruits of the Neolithic Revolution, which began in the Eastern Mediterranean about 15,000 years ago, and by about 1000 A.D. had spread to almost every human society. This major shift in the human lifeway, from nomadism to farming and settlement-building, triggered a rapid, self-catalyzing increase in the scale and complexity of our societies, and the development of many new institutions. Science, however, was one of the slowest to emerge—and as an ongoing, global institution, dominant over magic and religion, has existed for only about a century and a half.

The progress of science has been bittersweet. On the one hand, it has led to better living standards through better knowledge and technology—e.g., better crop yields, better sanitation, better medicines, and a vastly better understanding and command of our environment. On the other hand, it has relentlessly belied man’s instinctive, high opinion of himself as a special creature of God, “made in His image.”

One of the earliest and most famous examples of this type of psychologically problematic scientific knowledge was the idea (introduced by Copernicus in 1543, and later refined and popularized by Kepler and Galileo), that our planet is not at the center of the universe. It took hundreds of years and considerable technical developments in astronomy for this painful truth that the universe does not revolve around us to be accepted. But in a sense, we are still struggling to cope with the implications. If we are not situated centrally in the universe, how could it have been made specifically for us, as our religions have led us to believe? A cosmology that placed us in one wispy spiral arm of one nondescript galaxy among trillions of galaxies might have been an important step forward for our science—but it was a giant leap downward for our self-image.

Then, of course, there was Darwin. Humans as mere animals, evolutionary cousins of apes? Impossible! The Church resisted that theory as it had resisted Galileo and Copernicus. But by Darwin’s time, science was much stronger, the Church much weaker, and within only a few decades, serious opposition to the theory of evolution by natural selection started to fade away.

It was also becoming clear, by then, that Earth couldn’t have been around for only a few thousand years, as accounts such as Genesis implied. Empowered by the discovery of radioactivity and radioactive decay, geologists by the mid-1920s understood that Earth was formed billions of years ago. This implied that we, H. sapiens, are merely an incidental and very recently developed addition to our planet’s fauna. In fact, many paleontologists now suspect that, had that asteroid not hit our planet about 65 million years ago, largely wiping out the then-dominant dinosaurs, tool-making primates like us might never have evolved.

Since the end of the 1900s, cosmologists generally have been in agreement that our observable universe has existed for roughly ten billion years before our solar system was even formed. That means that humans are almost certainly latecomers to the higher intelligence club—and may be as primitive and uncomprehending, in relation to truly advanced species, as ants or amoebas are to us.

All this points to the conclusion that a God of the Universe, if anything like Him exists, has no special interest in humans; and, moreover, that all human “meaning” and “significance” is strictly local—strictly confined to our tiny speck of reality.

*

Probably like most people who grew up in the latter half of the 20^th century, I’ve tended to react to these scientific revelations by ignoring them. To the extent that I did think about them, in my younger years, I assumed with vague optimism that humans someday, through better technology, could spread from one star system to another, and so on until they establish their universality, perhaps ultimately melding with whatever force or entity made the universe. I think it’s fair to say that a lot of other people, including prominent advocates of space exploration, still think the same way.

I now see such optimism as a form of denial—a denial that is going to be harder and harder to maintain, as time goes on and we humans are increasingly confronted with the nature of our reality.

How we understand that reality is something that I expect will undergo various elaborations in the coming decades. But it should already be apparent that the idea we could ever “conquer the universe,” or in any way escape the utter insignificance of our existence, is naïve.

The most obvious (though not even the worst) part of the problem is that the universe is just unmanageably vast: larger than we can ever observe, expanding faster than light, and very likely infinite—which would mean that the human realm or contribution, in relation to the whole, could never be more than infinitesimal. This idea that space is effectively infinite the physicist and cosmology popularizer Brian Greene has described as “consistent with all observations and . . . part of the cosmological model favored by many physicists and astronomers.”

The human mind is not really adapted for contemplating infinities, but as Greene has pointed out, a truly infinite universe would contain, at any moment, infinite numbers of worlds identical to ours, some moving through time precisely as ours does, others with variations—in fact, all possible variations.

Again, compared to the whole of this Infinite Universe, and, we might also say, in the eyes of its Creator, the histories of individual worlds within it, along with their systems of morality and meaning, should be of infinitesimal significance. If we could take a God’s-eye view, zooming out from our planet to encompass our whole galaxy, and then galaxy clusters, and clusters of clusters, we would see the histories of individual worlds much as the video game player sees our world: less as sets of interlinked events, and more as manifestations of a broader, stochastic process, whose function is essentially only to ink over the space of possibility.

Contemporary physics, specifically quantum mechanics, delivers us to an even colder, darker destination. Quantum mechanics has at its core an equation, the Schrödinger wave equation, that implies a weird multiplicity of states for any given quantum-scale particle (an electron, for example) traveling through time. Physicists in the early years of quantum theory clung to the belief that these multiple states somehow probabilistically “collapse” to one state whenever one tries to observe the particle with a measuring device. However, in the past few decades the field basically has abandoned that rather hand-waving interpretation, mostly in favor of a simpler, more parsimonious one: that the multiple possible states a particle can be observed to have are all, in a sense, real.

In other words, these alternate states represent multiple actual particles existing in different “worlds” or “universes.” Thus, a physicist recording the impact of one particular state of an electron has, at that moment, otherwise identical counterparts in otherwise identical alternate universes who record the impacts of all the other states.

The reality implied by this interpretation—now called the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI)—encompasses not just one very big universe but, rather, an infinite number of them, a “multiverse,” across which everything that can happen does happen. There is a perfection here that, at least in a technical sense, should impress those who always believed Creation would be flawless and complete.

Of course, from the usual sentimental human perspective, MWI looks bizarre and horrifying. Even so, its superior simplicity and parsimony, as a way of thinking about quantum phenomena, has enabled it to survive and spread despite its implications—which physicists don’t “like” any more than you or I do.

As Greene has noted:

I find it both curious and compelling that numerous developments in physics, if followed sufficiently far, bump into some variation on the parallel-universe theme.

*

“The multiverse will drive you crazy if you really think about how it affects your life, and I can’t live like that,” the philosopher of physics and MWI theorist Simon Saunders once told a reporter. “I’ll just accept [it] and then think about something else, to save my sanity.”

Is thinking about something else a viable strategy to escape the psychological consequences of modern cosmology?

Conceivably it is, up to a point. Humans evolved with basic, powerful drives towards survival and procreation, and even religiosity; they thus probably have, on average, a significant innate resistance to nihilist worldviews. Even now, well into the third millennium A.D., most of the human population professes belief in one religion or another. Also, obviously, the average person has no deep understanding of, or interest in, MWI or other modern cosmological theories.

Yet the things we do learn and think about ultimately affect our behavior, if only subconsciously. One doesn’t have to be a philosopher or a psychologist to understand—to take another extreme example—that if we all knew our solar system would be obliterated within a year, making it obvious that our existence was and always had been inconsequential, enough of us would fall into despair that our societies would start to disintegrate immediately.

I think the reason we’ve largely been able, so far, to resist the toxic implications of modern cosmology is simply that we haven’t been forced to confront them. But that situation is changing.

When I was growing up in the 1970s and early 80s, cosmology was expansive but still quite tame compared to what was coming. Carl Sagan’s 1980 Cosmos TV series on PBS, for example, was hardly despair-inducing. One could contemplate the large universe depicted by Sagan and other pop cosmologists of the time, and, as I noted above, could still fantasize about humans’ someday traversing and conquering it. MWI and other infinite-universe theories had not yet caught on, certainly not at the popular level.

These days, by contrast, MWI and similar “parallel universe” themes are essential elements of pop cosmology, and, perhaps more importantly, are also common in pop culture generally.

Moreover, although technologies based on quantum mechanics (such as lasers) have been around for decades, newer quantum tech such as quantum computing and quantum encryption emphasizes, for the first time, the spookier, multiplicity-of-states aspect of quantum mechanics—the aspect that MWI essentially was devised to explain. Thus, from popular science to tech to popular media culture generally, people are being exposed to the infinite-universe/multiverse idea as never before, and in ever-stronger doses.

The impact of that rising exposure won’t be immediately obvious. There are, and in the coming decades will continue to be, many other drivers of despair, disruption, suicide, and social disintegration in the modern world—drivers such as cultural feminization, mass immigration, and human-displacing AI systems. Trying to disentangle the effect of one of these from the others is going to be challenging, to put it mildly. But, if my hypothesis is correct, “cosmological despair” will weigh more and more heavily and evidently on developed societies—especially among younger people, who will encounter MWI and similarly harsh cosmologies in their formative years, never having had the comforts of older, friendlier worldviews. In other words, if the world is now entering an Age of Despair principally for other reasons, cosmology will keep it there terminally.

*

There probably aren’t very many clear examples, yet, of people taking their own lives as a result of belief in MWI or other toxic cosmologies. However, something like this seems to have happened in the case of Hugh Everett III—the physicist who developed the original version of MWI (“’Relative State’ Formulation of Quantum Mechanics”) as his Princeton PhD thesis in 1956.

Everett eventually became a financially successful tech entrepreneur and, in most ways seemed normal, being married with children, having friends, and pursuing ordinary hobbies and pleasures that included wine-making and ocean liner cruises. However . . .

Everett firmly believed that his many-worlds theory guaranteed him immortality: His consciousness, he argued, is bound at each branching to follow whatever path does not lead to death—and so on ad infinitum. [link]

Probably at least partly due to this belief, he smoked, drank, and ate with abandon, which ultimately gave him a fatal heart attack in 1982, when he was only 51 years old. In accordance with his wishes, his body was cremated and his ashes were thrown out with other household garbage.

A decade and a half later, Everett’s troubled 39-year-old daughter Liz took her own life even more directly. She left a note to the effect that she wanted her own ashes thrown out with the garbage, so that she might “end up in the correct parallel universe to meet up w[ith] Daddy.”

***

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.

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Late in 2011, I first put pen to paper, or fingertips to keyboard, to describe an idea that had been bouncing around in my mind for several years—at least since Larry Summers’s public defenestration from Harvard in 2005. The idea was that women’s unprecedented mass entry into public life, in the US and other Western societies, had been “feminizing” public discourse and policy—leading among other things to the rise of political correctness culture, the increasing suppression of free speech, and the decline of capital punishment—due to women’s different way of thinking about the world.

I wasn’t a professional opinionator—just an amateur with a background in journalism. But I did have a website where I published occasional essays, which were read by a few hundreds to thousands of people every month, and there I first set down my thoughts in a short piece about the demise of the male cognitive style. In the ensuing decade, I developed the basic idea in further essays, including in two web magazines with significant readership. I joined Twitter to promote these essays. Eventually I had some recognition as an introducer of this idea.

The idea of cultural feminization became more and more obvious in the wake of the Great Awokening, which appeared to be a heavily female-dominated social phenomenon. One writer after another began to notice and embrace the cultural feminization idea as their own—either not knowing of my (and others’) prior contributions, or knowing of them but not considering them “big” enough, in terms of readership and public awareness, to acknowledge them.

I may be ultra-sensitive on this topic, because some of my past journalistic work has been used by others with inadequate attribution (or none). I am also aware that this is a very personal kind of pain, one that tends to attract little sympathy from those who have not had a similar experience.

Still, I think there is an objective case to be made, wholly apart from my own gripes, that “inadequate credit to originators of ideas” (ICOI?) is a legitimate social problem whose solution would materially benefit society. Why? Simply because denying people credit for developing original ideas effectively disincentivizes them from making the effort to develop those ideas, and in that straightforward sense is likely to retard human progress. Obscuring past expressions of an idea also limits new discussions of that idea when they do occur—people are constantly “reinventing the wheel.”

We acknowledge this logic in other domains of knowledge production. The new ideas of scientists, doctors, English Lit experts, etc. are protected and made accessible by the searchability of their formal papers (via the PubMed system, for example) and the citation custom. New technical ideas also are protected and made accessible by the patent system and its strong judicial backing. Books, musical compositions, movies, TV shows, are protected—albeit weakly—by the copyright system.

Unfortunately, when it comes to ordinary, non-patentable, non-copyrightable ideas that are published in informal, non-academic fora—ideas such as “women’s mass entry into public life has feminized institutions, culture and policy”—there is no legal protection, and no good and searchable repository. Moreover, the principal search engines for web-based material aren’t really designed to uncover the origins and subsequent iterations of ideas. Mainly because of this, there is only a very weak cultural enforcement of priority claims by idea-originators. I observe anecdotally, for example, that Twitter is full of DIY experts who (from lack of knowledge and/or lack of scruples) recycle others’ ideas, framing their contributions as new, though they are unoriginal and are often incomplete/undeveloped compared to the true original. Thus, the true originators are discouraged by not getting credit, and the false ones lead everyone in circles instead of moving the discussion productively forward.

Solutions?

In a broad-brush way, I imagine two complementary solutions to this problem. One is to develop a “registry of ideas.” The other is to develop an “idea history” search engine/bot.

The registry of ideas could have a broad structure like the “motif index” developed by the anthropologist Stith Thompson in the 1930s to record and categorize folkloric tales according to their different elements or “motifs.”

The Dewey Decimal System, by which librarians decide where to shelve books, and the aborted Google “Knol” project, offer other potentially helpful models of topic-categorization.

I imagine that some organization like the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia’s parent) could provide some initial structure and guidelines for such a database, after which it would be assembled and curated by volunteers in a highly distributed manner—like Wikipedia. Idea-originators could directly submit their work for recording in the registry, as they can now for appropriate intellectual property with the patent and copyright systems, or they could just let the curators detect their work (assuming it had been published) with their specially designed web bots and other search tools.

Those tools would be powered by “idea history” search algos, which would parse natural language text to identify ideas being expressed, and categorize them—at least as a “first pass” effort to be checked by human curators of different idea domains, though AI tech may soon be able to handle such tasks on its own.

I suppose one objection to this whole idea—this idea about ideas—would be that ordinary writers, especially casual self-published essayists and social-media posters, won’t submit to a citation system the way academics do. I think, though, that to a great extent, ordinary writers already do follow the custom of citation. These days (unlike, say, 50 years ago) a large majority of young adults in the US have had some college experience, with the exposure to citation rules that entails. More importantly, the internet with its “hypertext” ability that can easily link text to other documents anywhere on the web has made citation of others’ work routine even for the most casual writers. The only things missing, really, are the search engines and repositories that would help to fully routinize the assignment of priority, rewarding creativity appropriately, and plausibly making even our humdrum, everyday dialogue a bit more rigorous and serious.

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