{"id":566,"date":"2022-04-16T16:52:30","date_gmt":"2022-04-16T21:52:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thoughtsofstone.com\/?p=566"},"modified":"2022-04-17T17:16:57","modified_gmt":"2022-04-17T22:16:57","slug":"the-tree-of-knowledge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thoughtsofstone.com\/the-tree-of-knowledge\/","title":{"rendered":"THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE"},"content":{"rendered":"
Encourage new ideas and more productive dialogue by giving idea-originators the credit they\u2019re due<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Late in 2011, I first put pen to paper, or fingertips to keyboard, to describe an idea that had been bouncing around in my mind for several years\u2014at least since Larry Summers\u2019s public defenestration<\/a> from Harvard in 2005. The idea was that women\u2019s unprecedented mass entry into public life, in the US and other Western societies, had been \u201cfeminizing\u201d public discourse and policy\u2014leading among other things to the rise of political correctness culture, the increasing suppression of free speech, and the decline of capital punishment\u2014due to women\u2019s different way of thinking about the world.<\/p>\n I wasn\u2019t a professional opinionator\u2014just an amateur with a background in journalism. But I did have a website where I published occasional essays, which were read by a few hundreds to thousands of people every month, and there I first set down my thoughts in a short piece<\/a> about the demise of the male cognitive style. In the ensuing decade, I developed the basic idea in further essays, including in two web magazines with significant readership. I joined Twitter to promote these essays. Eventually I had some recognition as an introducer of this idea.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The idea of cultural feminization became more and more obvious in the wake of the Great Awokening, which appeared to be a heavily female-dominated social phenomenon. One writer<\/a> after another<\/a> began to notice and embrace the cultural feminization idea as their own\u2014either not knowing of my (and others\u2019) prior contributions<\/a>, or knowing of them but not considering them \u201cbig\u201d enough, in terms of readership and public awareness, to acknowledge them.<\/p>\n I may be ultra-sensitive on this topic, because some of my past journalistic work has been used by others with inadequate attribution (or none). I am also aware that this is a very personal kind of pain, one that tends to attract little sympathy from those who have not had a similar experience.<\/p>\n