Don't know about you - but I cordially dislike the online (and print) manosphere genre of "advice about women" - the stuff that emanates from chaps who claim to have a lot of experience of a lot of women (because, obviously, they know the most and are wisest on the subject - yes?)
Not, I notice, the opposite kind of chap who has known one woman and stuck with her... Apparently such men don't seem to have quite the same keen-ness to expound at such length on "women" - and what could such a man know about "women", anyway?
(Or maybe it is best for the expert on women to be something in-between? Perhaps there is an ideal number for experience - a sweet spot, somewhere between one and loads?)
The women-experts talk about "women" in the form of sweeping generalizations, almost invariably rounded-out by checklists and bullet points.
My problem is that - when it is Christian, as well as manosphere - the mode of such discourse destroys that which it purports to promote: i.e. the possibility of good relations between a man and a woman - one man and one woman.
Why? Because it is an Ahrimanic, bureaucratic way of talking about people and inculcates and entrains such a mindset. But instead we ought, as Christians seeking good, to be concerned about individuals. And not, therefore, to reason inductively about particular people.
Now, of course, everybody - including myself - talks and writes about 'people' and subsets of people such as The Establishment and The Masses, and Westerners. We talk about specific nations, classes, professions, religions, ideologies etc. etc. We do so for various reasons - sometimes genuinely scientific, more often to do with how 'best' to 'organize' society.
Or sometimes it is a form of humour (albeit this may be destructive in tendency and in large doses, even as it is indeed genuinely funny).
But that 'categorical' way of talking about aggregates and averages is innately and intrinsically hostile to good individual human relationships.
It is even hostile to our capacity to respond to specific situations, to the me-here-now of actual living in particular places.
The one is descriptions of crystalline structured, timeless-generality; the only is our personal experience of something fluid, interactive, unique. If the first impinges on the second, it will tend to degrade and destroy it.
And 'the general' does indeed tend to impinge on 'the personal' - because the general is the subject of public discussion and debate; the subject of expertize, training, evidence, reasoning and argument.
Whereas the personal is - and should be - essentially private.
If you want to weaken or destroy an established good personal relationship (e.g. a marriage) - then it just needs one of the two to start analyzing it using general concepts that (supposedly) apply to most/ average/ subsets of people; to start discussing its details with 'friends' or with professional experts whose knowledge derives from samples of data from several or many persons - and who claim the ability to apply this 'evidence' to the specific situation.
If you want to prevent somebody finding a good relationship - go ahead and do the same! Get him to frame all potential and incipient relationships within a categorical scheme derived from what most/ average/ this-subtype of person supposedly does.
Yet, there is a vast gulf between, on the one hand, trying to prevent what are usually bad outcomes for most/ average people of certain types (utilitarian social policy...); and, on the other hand, trying to promote good outcomes between specific and unique individuals. They aim in opposite directions.
Trying to conflate two incommensurable approaches has predictably adverse outcomes.
My point is general: How we discuss something affects - and may destroy - what it is that we intend (or tell-ourselves we intend*) to say.
For instance; as a doctor, scientist, literary scholar or teacher; I came to realize that anyone who advised or instructed me about my subject in a 'managerial' mode Would Do Harm to that role, if I took any notice of him; regardless of the content.
The mode of thinking that was signaled by managerial discourse, is one that is innately hostile to good outcomes of a kind that required either personal or creative engagement.
The same applies to advice or instructions purportedly aimed-at personal (or creative) goods.
Think about it.
*Our awareness of our own good intentions may be (often is) self-deception; may be yielding to a temptation to sin. Do we really want to help 'people'; or is it instead that we personally enjoy talking and writing about 'this kind of stuff', and posing as an expert; and rationalize it with an altruistic veneer?
