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

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

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

The ubiquity of cultural feminization

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

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

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

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

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

Hiding their power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Female empowerment leads to social collapse

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

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

Some examples:

New, lenient policing and sentencing laws.

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

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

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

Short-term goal: Treat homeless people with compassion.

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

Generous welfare policies

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

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

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

Short-term goal: Empower the marginalized.

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

Opposition to restrictions on immigration

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

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

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

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

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

Promotion of equal outcomes vs. equality of opportunity

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

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

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

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

Long-term effects: Incentivization of drug use.

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

This is a just a brief, minor note about an aspect of human populations that seems to be overlooked much of the time in popular discourse, namely the existence within countries of distinct strata of individuals. In discussions about the United States, this stratification is less overlooked, given the country’s huge African-derived population, its more recent Latino and Asian influxes, and its intense political and cultural focus on racial identity (for nonwhites anyway). But most other countries, and occasionally even the US, are treated as if their populations could be summed up in simple averages. My point here is merely that for stratified societies, this averaging will often be misleading, making it hard to understand phenomena such as the relative performances of emigres, or national achievements in particular fields.

The example that triggered this short train of thought is the “national IQ” comparison favored by HBD aficionados. Here is part of a typical national IQ chart:

Source: worldpopulationreview.com

Now consider the following chart from Wikipedia, showing the median household incomes of Asian-Americans. Note that the two top groups, numbering in the millions each, are Indian-Americans and Filipino-Americans, and that their median household incomes are quite a bit higher than that of Chinese-Americans.

This is not an ordering one would have predicted based on the national IQ chart. According to that chart, Filipinos and Indians have two of the world’s very lowest average IQs (~82 and ~76)—in fact, India’s score puts it below several sub-Saharan African countries. In contrast, the “Chinese IQ” is near the top at ~104.

Now of course there are at least several factors that could help explain this seemingly unexpected outcome. One, obviously—argued by many, though it’s beyond the scope here—is that “IQ” is not everything it’s cracked up to be. Another is that “national IQ” scores are inaccurate, or, at least, vary wildly in accuracy from one country to another. A third possibility is that some ethnic groups have had more time than others to build social capital and wealth in the Land of Opportunity. A fourth, a very well known phenomenon, is that the immigration process effectively tends to select for people of above-average drive and intelligence.

What I would like to add to this list of (non-mutually exclusive) factors is the simple observation that many societies around the world are highly stratified. This is due to the natural tendency of individuals to marry others of like educational background and socioeconomic status, such that the rich beget the rich, the poor beget the poor, the smart beget the smart and the dumb . . . well, you get the idea. India is one of the world’s most strongly and overtly stratified societies, with formal names for its social castes. The Philippines for its part is still notoriously feudal, with a thin but powerful politician/tycoon class (heavy with Spanish and Chinese blood), a small middle class, and a fertile majority of mostly ethnic Malay folk who exist more or less at rural African levels of development. China may be getting more stratified (a trend that worries its current leader Xi), but it still seems much less stratified than India or the Philippines—as a lingering effect of the Maoist decades, and probably also due to its greater racial homogeneity. (Published “Gini coefficient” estimates suggest that China has a lumpier wealth distribution than the other two, but long story short, I don’t have much faith in such estimates.)

The point, in any case, is that when it comes to comparisons of “nations” defined as immigrant populations of different national origin, one is comparing mainly the performance of the upper castes from those nations, not average citizens—and, roughly speaking, the upper castes of more stratified nations will tend to be further above their national averages, compared to the upper castes of less stratified nations.

This is true also in considering achievements in specialist fields, or feats where relatively small numbers of excellent individuals are needed. India, whose “average IQ” is about what one would expect of a high-performing person with Down Syndrome, has nevertheless produced a significant number of research Nobel Prize winners, certainly more than any other tropical nonwhite country.

By the same token, considering the performance of a country based on a metric, such as GDP, that covers* the entire population, is going to be misleading, in the sense that it obscures the differences—vast gulfs in many cases—between the benighted, down-in-the-mud lower castes and their wealthy, entitled, sharp-elbowed overlords.

That’s it. That’s the only point I wanted to make here.

***

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.

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Logic and Madness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A holiday from stress and inhibition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The function of boundary-pushing

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cultural/political feminization therefore involves a multitude of changes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Author’s note:

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

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

Why are Americans on the political Right so drawn to conspiracy theories, from the chemtrails lore and QAnon to the conviction that COVID-19 vaccines are harmful?

It’s hard to say anything with certainty about the causes of social trends, societies not being very amenable to the types of experiments that can settle such issues in other realms of science. But to me a plausible hypothesis is that all this conspiracy-theorizing is a conversion of complex, partly unconscious, and above all inadmissible knowledge concerning existential threats, into a form that the average person can openly express.

In other words, even if this conspiracy stuff seems ridiculous to most educated people, it is stuff that ordinary folks can understand and discuss, and even if the threats are in fact imaginary, they are in principle as salient and alarming as the real threats that are suppressed: Dire threats from the culture and media are converted into dire threats from the water and the air, even from medicines. Similarly, the implicit knowledge that America’s elite-driven culture corrupts young people is transformed, in the QAnon belief system, into a simpler narrative about a ring of elite pedophiles.

To put it yet another way: on the Right the collective unconscious knows that something has gone terribly wrong and is causing great harm, but it tends not to acknowledge this directly—it tends to acknowledge only imaginary wounds. Psychiatrists call such phenomena, when they occur in individuals, hysterical or somatoform or conversion disorders: For example, a woman’s husband has been cheating on her, but instead of acknowledging this, she develops an ailment with nonspecific and unverifiable symptoms.

Why can’t Americans openly acknowledge what has harmed them? Most obviously because the principal causes of harm over the past half-century are the very things that American cultural and political elites have held up as holy and beyond criticism—indeed, anyone criticizing them is, in the lexicon of America’s new, feminized, despiritualized Puritanism, a hater.

Consider the general reaction if one were to make, on social media or in person in polite company, any of the following assertions (which I regard as essentially true):

• The permitting of mass immigration to the United States from 3^rd World countries over the past several decades has been—in effect, from the perspective of legacy Americans—a fraudulent and treasonous ploy by the Democratic Party to pack the electorate in their favor.
• To further this scheme, Democrats have depicted it as a compassionate, Christian policy that only “racists” would oppose—notwithstanding the fact that ethnically based nationhood is and always has been the norm worldwide.

• Democratic Party coalition-building over the last half-century has also relied heavily on the stoking of anti-white feelings among American blacks, anti-male feelings among American women (especially single women who are inherently more susceptible to this message), and anti-heterosexual feelings among homosexuals.
• To reward the members of its coalition and further divide them from legacy Americans, the Democratic Party has succeeded in establishing policies that significantly discriminate against legacy Americans and in favor of women and non-whites. Incredibly, these policies, including the euphemistically named “affirmative action,” favor even affluent non-white immigrants over legacy Americans. Again, to quash opposition or even debate, Democrats have depicted these discriminatory policies as compassionate and necessary measures that only evil people could oppose.

• Major news media organizations, the advertising and entertainment industries, academia, Big Business, large segments of the legal profession, and of course most of the pseudo-opposition Republican Party, have for their own selfish reasons enabled and abetted these schemes.

• While these schemes have as their inevitable result the destruction of traditional American society and its replacement with a grouping that necessarily will be degraded, unstable, partly atomized, and riven with ethnic conflict, the “new America” in principle will be much easier for these cultural and political elites to control.
• Although the Democrats’ latest power-seeking move—large-scale rigging of the presidential election, mostly through ballot-harvesting in key Democrat-controlled areas—has outraged many on the right, the Democrats’ much more harmful method of electorate-packing has been ongoing for decades.
• Effectively the USA’s cultural and political elites have ruined a great country in their pursuit of greater power over it. Many of these elites may actually believe that their motives have been pure. Yet the gravity of their crime far exceeds anything that any traitor or indeed any foreign adversary has ever done to the United States.

Obviously, for the average American, stating any of these things openly and identifiably, beyond one’s circle of family and close friends, would risk immediate practical consequences such as social ostracism and job loss.

Less obviously, such a declaration would also have an important psychological consequence: To acknowledge awareness of this real and colossal crime while doing nothing about it—continuing one’s normal routines—would be embarrassing; it would amount to a confession of pathetic weakness and cowardice.

For most Americans, such a declaration could invite as well the recognition that for years, even decades, they have effectively collaborated in this crime, by voting for Democrats and Republicans who have furthered it, and perhaps even by participating in ritual denunciations of fellow Americans who have opposed it.

For all these reasons, I suspect, many Americans avert their eyes from the harshest truths about their situation, preferring to embrace fantasies that signal their distress without inviting the labels “racist” or “white supremacist” or being otherwise unmentionable. They call these fantasies “red pills,” but they are really only blue pills.

And perhaps the remarkable mass rallies for a president who was always evidently an inept narcissist, the MAGA-themed protests and other gatherings, and even the recent, brief mob occupation of the U.S. Capitol, should be seen in a similar light: as make-believe manifestations of a rage that dare not speak its name—manifestations that in the end are ways of losing, not ways of winning.

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

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

The mess of Wokeism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wokeists embody the chaos of wokeism

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

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

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

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

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

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

The importance of demographics and technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not about “hate”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diversity destroys democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 20^th 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. That psychological differentness is well established from experiments, and is reflected in the well-known “gender gap” in voting and policy choices—a gap that is even larger when considering women who are maritally independent of men, i.e., single women, one of the fastest-growing demographics in the country.

If one accepts that culture is a strong determinant of behavior, which it is really by definition, it follows that putting a high proportion of women into senior roles in culture-making professions, basically for the first time ever, will have changed the culture and therefore changed how people on average tend to think and act. It won’t have changed everyone absolutely; we are not blank slates. But it will have moved the collective needle—shifted the so-called Overton Window of publicly acceptable opinion, and shifted average behavior as well, even average male behavior. That is, in fact, the underlying logic of organizations like the Women’s Media Center, which have explicitly sought to alter, to feminize, the content of mass media and the resulting attitudes of the public by putting more women into newsrooms.

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?

Then there is the issue of systematizing. Experiments by psychologists and everyday observations by parents, etc. suggest that whereas the average “male” brain is adapted for understanding and building systems, the average “female” brain is . . . not so much adapted for that. A cultural shift away from traditional “male,” systematizing thinking across society could again explain many specific social changes. One is the great, still-ongoing migration from traditional religions with their managerial hierarchies and highly systematized theologies to new, more loosely structured and personalized spiritual groups, such as Evangelical Christian groups, New Age movements, and neo-pagan groups (e.g., Wicca) which give prominent roles to women. Another plausible reflection of this de-systematizing tendency is the long-term decline of interest in engineering among U.S.-born students, who are now outnumbered by foreign students at U.S. engineering grad schools.

One of the most obvious sex-related differences in human behavior concerns aggression and violence. Women on average are far less violent than men, and consequently make up only about 7 percent of the U.S. prison population. If women have had an unprecedented feminizing effect on the “public mind” in recent decades, in principle that would have reduced the propensity for aggression and violence even among men. Indeed there has been a striking downward trend in violent crime rates in the U.S. in recent decades—a trend that would be even stronger if all the violent crimes committed by people born and raised in traditional, patriarchal societies, e.g., Mexico, were excluded.

How could men have been feminized to this extent? By having less testosterone, for example. The ways in which sex hormones rise and fall in response to social cues is an under-studied area, but two trends stand out alarmingly: Age-adjusted testosterone levels in men have been falling in Western countries in recent decades, and—as one would expect from that—sperm counts have been falling too. Interestingly, those sperm-count studies suggest that whatever is causing the trend in Western societies has been having less effect, or no effect at all, in traditional, i.e., patriarchal societies.

Why is it “alarming” that male testosterone levels and sperm counts have been dropping in Western countries, if one result is less violent crime? Because that’s not the only result. Declining testosterone also means declining fertility and probably also a declining motivation to marry and raise a family. Here again the statistics are consistent with the idea of a Great Feminization. The U.S. in recent decades has seen not only a decline in the marriage rate, but also a collapse of the birth rate for U.S.-born women, to levels below what demographers consider necessary to maintain the population. The “U.S. population” now grows chiefly because of open-door immigration and births to immigrant mothers.

Am I crazy to link female emancipation and near-equality in the workforce to all these bad results, including population collapse? Well, no—I’m only putting forward a hypothesis, and one that seems well grounded in the data. Obviously many factors contributed to the social changes that have swept across the West in the past half century or so. But that women were one of those factors seems undeniable. And the possibility that they were, and continue to be, the dominant factor seems worth discussing, not least because of the potential implications for the future. Yet . . . there has been no discussion. I’ve been circulating this idea for years now, in one forum and another, and it gets no traction at all. It isn’t shot down by some fact or logical disproof; it’s just ignored or dismissed without reason. No “respectable” publication will touch it. I can’t help wondering if that response is yet another reflection of women’s new cultural power.

published 6 Mar 2019

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Postscript (3/25/19): Apparently a similar theory, blaming the West’s fertility decline on feminism, has been kicking around in “far-right” circles. That probably helps explain why doors have tended to shut in my face whenever I’ve tried (over the past 7+ years) to get a version of this essay published–and I’ve been reduced to publishing pseudonymously in fringe publications or on d-i-y websites. In case it’s not already clear, my “great feminization” idea is mainly about cultural feminization, doesn’t have anything directly to do with the formal “feminist” movement, and doesn’t require any dire prediction about population decline/replacement. Also, though it should be irrelevant, I’m not some woman-hating incel; I’m happily married, etc. My interest in the topic of sex differences in culture and policy attitudes developed from the fact that I, a male, work in a profession that is increasingly female-dominated.

 

Author’s note (Oct 2022):

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.