*
There is a mis-match between human psychology - which mostly evolved in a context of hunter-gatherer societies - and life in modern society: but the mis-match seems to be much more extreme in women than men.
*
Essentially, the mis-match is evident in terms of human choice and especially in relation to 'reproductive success'.
(Happiness is irrelevant to this - natural selection operates on reproduction, and happiness is merely a means to that end.)
*
Reproductive success of a person is, roughly, the relative proportion of viable offspring it contributes to the population - this is, roughly, measured by the number of children born to a person (minus those children who die before completing their reproductive lifespan).
In the modern world where death rates are very low, reproductive success can pretty much be measured as the fertility rate: the number of children.
*
If you look at figures 1 and 2 in this paper -
http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/daniel.nettle/amnat.pdf
you can see that the situation is very different for men and women.
Men are biologically reasonably well adapted to modern society - but not women: the graphs go in opposite directions in this particular sample.
*
Overall, as men become wealthier and higher in status it either increases the number of children (which is what would be expected, biologically - and is the reason why men strive for status) - or at least does not damage reproductive success too much.
(Of course, in a sample worldwide, this would not hold, since less wealthy men would have a lot more children. This argument only applies to modern, developed societies with control of reproduction.)
But as women become more wealthy, more educated (and even more so with respect to increasing IQ) the number of children declines sharply and the proportion of women who are childless increases.
*
Why should women be so much more adversely affected - from a biological perspective, purely in terms of reproductive success, by modernity?
Because, almost certainly, in the past (in the pre-contraceptive era) increasing wealth among women almost certainly strongly increased reproductive success.
It is contraception which is the main factor.
Women seem predisposed to avoid or minimize childbearing, in proportion that they are more intelligent, educated, wealthy and high status.
*
This is surprising, and remarkable, and - currently - pretty much unexplained.
Here are some ideas.
*
In biology in general, females are (almost always) the investing sex: they invest a lot more resources into offspring (before and sometimes after birth) than males.
In order to allocate investment most female mammals will temporarily suppress reproduction under conditions of stress - fear of violence, starvation, disease etc.
This can be conceptualized in terms of saving resources for better times which may be ahead.
Reproductive suppression may be achieved by not ovulating, by reabsorbing the fetus, by abandoning or even killing newborn offspring etc.
*
Maybe women in modern society are engaged in reproductive suppression (mostly by means of contraception and abortion): maybe there is (at some level) a perception of 'stress'; maybe (in some way) the modern situation is perceived as alien and hostile to such an extent that reproduction is deferred (in hope of better times ahead) - but since this situation does not change, better times never arrive and reproduction gets (in practice) deferred permanently - until the reproductive lifespan is over.
*
Or could it simply be distraction? Any focus on reproduction is overwhelmed by the multiple attractions and distractions of modern evolutionary novelties.
*
In historical societies reproduction just happened as a by product of instinct: people sought 'happiness' and the children just came along (and there was no way of stopping them).
Now, with the presence of so many evolutionary novelties, people in general are confused and distracted, such that if they 'do what comes naturally' it does not lead to having children - but merely to (mostly short lived) pleasure/ avoidance of suffering.
In modern societies this means that women behave much more bizarrely (from a biological perspective) than men - from a biological perspective, women (by choice) make themselves ugly and unattractive (with fashion, by their behaviour), and (biologically) waste their time and resources.
*
But why should women be more 'confused' by evolutionary novelties than men?
Perhaps because women are more peer oriented than men.
Each man is, in a biological sense, a loner who seeks status, seeks to become the dominant male and get the lion's share of reproduction. Each man is against other men - except that self-interest dictates that one way to pursue self interest is via alliances.
But in historic societies, alliances were very difficult to sustain unless underpinned by genetic relatedness: most gangs and tribes were of male relatives.
Otherwise male v male competition would tend to break them up.
*
But women seem more able and motivated to form alliances with unrelated women (perhaps because a women would usually move to the husband's tribe, and needed to establish herself among female strangers?). Therefore, whatever the reason for greater peer orientation, women are strongly influenced by the opinions of other women (or, more exactly, by what they perceive to be the opinions of other women.
*
So women will do almost anything which they perceive to be necessary to fit with what they perceive to be the peer group of other women - from the mild level of sending innumerable greetings cards, through adopting fashions which (nearly always) usually make them less attractive; up through drunkenness and promiscuity, to tattooing, foot-binding and other self-mutilations.
(By less attractive I mean objectively so, from a biological perspective such as the massive amount of data on male sexual preferences cross-culturally and the correlations between attractiveness and signals of reproductive potential and what makes a potentially good long term partner and parent.)
All of these originated and enforced by that biggest and most influential of evolutionary novelties: the mass media, which in this instance functions as a super-stimulus interpreted as representing the female peer group.
*
So, a couple of ideas ...
1. that the very high level of maternal investment in humans makes women relatively highly likely to engage in reproductive suppression under situations of stress: and modern society is perceived as extremely stressful - so reproduction is deferred, indefinitely...;
or,
2. that because women are more peer orientated, they are more vulnerable to influence by the mass media - which is an evolutionary novelty functioning as a superstimulus that is perceived to represent the female peer group...
but the phenomenon seems undeniable and calls out for explanation.
*
To restate the question:
Why are women so much more adversely affected (in a biological sense: reproductive success) by modernity than are men?
Or, why do modern women choose - on average - to damage their reproductive success?
Or, why does the pursuit of happiness – under modern conditions – cause de facto reproductive suppression in women so much more strongly than in men?
*
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query women peer. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query women peer. Sort by date Show all posts
Wednesday, 4 May 2011
Thursday, 23 September 2010
Dyed brown hair in young women: evolutionary psychology notes
For about 15 years I have been teaching the conventional wisdom of evolutionary psychology that hair is a primary signal of youth and health in women (cues of youth and health being equated with female beauty).
So that thick and lustrous hair was, under human ancestral conditions, an un-fake-able signal of youth and health - such that only healthy young women could possess it.
In other words, significant systemic disease or age would make hair less thick and/ or duller.
The result was that human men evolved to find thick lustrous hair attractive in women.
*
Of course, modern technology has made it possible for older and unhealthy women to mimic - more or less accurately - the thick lustrous hair of youth by using hair dye, hair conditioners, and even hair extensions and wigs. Nonetheless, although these may be convincing from a distance, from close range the special qualities of youthful and healthy hair are unmistakable.
*
So, from this evolutionary psychology perspective, and assuming that women are wanting to make themselves more attractive to men, it would make sense for older and less healthy women to dye their hair as carefully as possible such that it simulates the appearance of the hair of healthy young women.
But it would not make any sense for young, healthy women to dye their hair, since this would make it less attractive.
And indeed, twenty years ago sensible young women virtually never dyed their hair - except when they wanted to signal their membership of some 'tribe' (such as punks or goths, or being 'arty' ) and this was 1. the less sensible women, and 2. a distinct minority. A proportion of young women also signalled their sexual availability by bleaching their hair blond - although this made their hair very obviously artificial and less attractive.
This habit was first broken by the improvements in the technology for making hair blond. A very high proportion of young women with brown (aka. brunette, 'mousy') hair then 'went blond - around here it was about a quarter to one third of all young women who became artificially blond. Nonetheless, even about ten years ago many young women had natural, uncoloured hair.
But now essentially all young women have dyed hair.
*
The most striking aspect of universally dyed hair is the naturally brown-haired young woman who has her hair dyed brown.
Essentially, the hair is re-dyed almost exactly the same colour it was to begin-with.
So that her hair ends up the same as it was before, only less attractive - because it has been dyed.
Now, an 18 year old with naturally lustrous hair ends up with hair which looks the same as a thirty five year old with dyed hair.
What is going on?
*
From a perspective of evolutionary psychology I believe that this implies that modern women are clearly not primarily aiming to be attractive to men (or why else would they go to such effort and expense to make their hair - a major cue of their youth and health - less attractive?).
In a nutshell the reason is fashion. But what a strange thing this thing 'fashion' turns-out to be!
Women are dying their hair the same colour it was before because dying your hair is currently fashionable, and women do not want to go against fashion because... well, nothing really, except that it is apparently a fundamental drive among women (much more than it is among men) to conform to the perceived peer group behaviour of other women.
*
It is the 'perceived' peer group which is crucial, not necessarily the actual current behaviour of women in the real world: fashion is a product of the mass media which provides a powerful, pervasive, high status and seemingly-authoritative signal that 'fools' evolved human psychology into believing that what is depicted in the mass media is reality (in fact more real than actual reality) - and therefore what the peer group want.
(This point concerning the 'reality' of the mass media - especially to women - is so important, and so neglected, that it can scarcely be over-stated.)
A relatively very small number of women - and the (mostly homosexual) men, who substantially dominate the fashion industry - actually 'decide' what nearly all women do, by means of their large influence over the content of the mass media.
If the mass media depicts and endorses - explicitly or (even more effectively) implicitly that it is first 'OK' then 'in' to do something: then that thing will be done, by almost all women eventually; almost without regard for the real-world consequences, because the actual real world is perceived as less real than the mass media world.
*
And there are no obvious limits to what the peer group of other women can make individual women do to themselves: historical examples include genital mutilation and foot-binding; modern examples include tattooing and piercing - dying hair the same colour being a relatively mild example.
What differs about the modern situation is that fashions change so quickly and frequently that their absurdity is blatant. (One can imagine that in the past, when 'fashions' changed so slowly and infrequently that they became characteristic of cultures, that it would not be obvious what was an arbitrary fashion and what was simply intrinsic to human behaviour. Indeed, fashion actually is an aspect of culture: i.e. culture which changes rapidly, within a lifetime.)
hence the blatantly arbitrary and ugliness-producing effects of fashion make no difference to the willingness of women to inflict damage on their attractiveness - the prime evolutionary directive is apparently to observe and learn fashion/ culture - and do it ASAP.
*
So brown hair dyed an almost identical brown in young women is a small but prime exhibit in the case for the fundamental psychosis of modernity - that modern humans inhabit a society where strong, basic, evolved behaviours are subverted and over-turned, even where this behaviour causes immediate and obvious damage to an individual's probable reproductive success.
So that thick and lustrous hair was, under human ancestral conditions, an un-fake-able signal of youth and health - such that only healthy young women could possess it.
In other words, significant systemic disease or age would make hair less thick and/ or duller.
The result was that human men evolved to find thick lustrous hair attractive in women.
*
Of course, modern technology has made it possible for older and unhealthy women to mimic - more or less accurately - the thick lustrous hair of youth by using hair dye, hair conditioners, and even hair extensions and wigs. Nonetheless, although these may be convincing from a distance, from close range the special qualities of youthful and healthy hair are unmistakable.
*
So, from this evolutionary psychology perspective, and assuming that women are wanting to make themselves more attractive to men, it would make sense for older and less healthy women to dye their hair as carefully as possible such that it simulates the appearance of the hair of healthy young women.
But it would not make any sense for young, healthy women to dye their hair, since this would make it less attractive.
And indeed, twenty years ago sensible young women virtually never dyed their hair - except when they wanted to signal their membership of some 'tribe' (such as punks or goths, or being 'arty' ) and this was 1. the less sensible women, and 2. a distinct minority. A proportion of young women also signalled their sexual availability by bleaching their hair blond - although this made their hair very obviously artificial and less attractive.
This habit was first broken by the improvements in the technology for making hair blond. A very high proportion of young women with brown (aka. brunette, 'mousy') hair then 'went blond - around here it was about a quarter to one third of all young women who became artificially blond. Nonetheless, even about ten years ago many young women had natural, uncoloured hair.
But now essentially all young women have dyed hair.
*
The most striking aspect of universally dyed hair is the naturally brown-haired young woman who has her hair dyed brown.
Essentially, the hair is re-dyed almost exactly the same colour it was to begin-with.
So that her hair ends up the same as it was before, only less attractive - because it has been dyed.
Now, an 18 year old with naturally lustrous hair ends up with hair which looks the same as a thirty five year old with dyed hair.
What is going on?
*
From a perspective of evolutionary psychology I believe that this implies that modern women are clearly not primarily aiming to be attractive to men (or why else would they go to such effort and expense to make their hair - a major cue of their youth and health - less attractive?).
In a nutshell the reason is fashion. But what a strange thing this thing 'fashion' turns-out to be!
Women are dying their hair the same colour it was before because dying your hair is currently fashionable, and women do not want to go against fashion because... well, nothing really, except that it is apparently a fundamental drive among women (much more than it is among men) to conform to the perceived peer group behaviour of other women.
*
It is the 'perceived' peer group which is crucial, not necessarily the actual current behaviour of women in the real world: fashion is a product of the mass media which provides a powerful, pervasive, high status and seemingly-authoritative signal that 'fools' evolved human psychology into believing that what is depicted in the mass media is reality (in fact more real than actual reality) - and therefore what the peer group want.
(This point concerning the 'reality' of the mass media - especially to women - is so important, and so neglected, that it can scarcely be over-stated.)
A relatively very small number of women - and the (mostly homosexual) men, who substantially dominate the fashion industry - actually 'decide' what nearly all women do, by means of their large influence over the content of the mass media.
If the mass media depicts and endorses - explicitly or (even more effectively) implicitly that it is first 'OK' then 'in' to do something: then that thing will be done, by almost all women eventually; almost without regard for the real-world consequences, because the actual real world is perceived as less real than the mass media world.
*
And there are no obvious limits to what the peer group of other women can make individual women do to themselves: historical examples include genital mutilation and foot-binding; modern examples include tattooing and piercing - dying hair the same colour being a relatively mild example.
What differs about the modern situation is that fashions change so quickly and frequently that their absurdity is blatant. (One can imagine that in the past, when 'fashions' changed so slowly and infrequently that they became characteristic of cultures, that it would not be obvious what was an arbitrary fashion and what was simply intrinsic to human behaviour. Indeed, fashion actually is an aspect of culture: i.e. culture which changes rapidly, within a lifetime.)
hence the blatantly arbitrary and ugliness-producing effects of fashion make no difference to the willingness of women to inflict damage on their attractiveness - the prime evolutionary directive is apparently to observe and learn fashion/ culture - and do it ASAP.
*
So brown hair dyed an almost identical brown in young women is a small but prime exhibit in the case for the fundamental psychosis of modernity - that modern humans inhabit a society where strong, basic, evolved behaviours are subverted and over-turned, even where this behaviour causes immediate and obvious damage to an individual's probable reproductive success.
Sunday, 20 July 2014
Women as victims of modernity
*
In a superficial sense, women are pandered and pampered by modernity - in a deeper sense they are the primary victims.
I know that women are privileged above men in almost all human societies (there are more than half a billion women living in the culture that is the exception); and that this preference is biologically-based upon each specific woman being on average reproductively more valuable than each man (see The Woman Racket by Steve Moxon before disagreeing with this) - BUT when it comes to the fundamentals of life, women are in the situation of having been duped by modernity so profoundly that they do not even recognize but profess to enjoy the situation!
*
I will not weaken my case by stating too many pieces of evidence: two will suffice:
1. Among the wealthiest, healthiest, most able and (on average) most attractive women - those women who are free-est in our society, and perhaps in the history of the world - the fertility rate is about half a child per woman, and about half of these women choose not to have any child.
Somehow, women en masse have been duped into forgoing, indeed rejecting, the greatest of all earthly mortal gratifications: motherhood; for which nothing can remotely compensate - and what is worst of all they embrace their victimhood (at least they do in public).
2. Healthy young women are intrinsically the most valued, desired, and attractive entities on this earth - and yet, about half of these beautiful creatures strategically, deliberately and (what is worst) proudly mutilate, deface and uglify their bodies with tattoos - they pay to do this, they go through inconvenience and pain to do this, the damage cannot be undone - and yet they advertise and boast about and display their foolish choices and wicked actions (wicked - because gratuitously to mar beauty is indeed wicked - and to advertise it is to encourage wickedness in others).
The trend is recent, the scope and inclusiveness of the trend is increasing and spreading, the extent of self-inflicted defacement and mutilation are expanding year on year.
*
How has this happened? I think the answer is fairly simple. Women calibrate their behaviour mostly by reference to the peer group of other women - in modernity this peer group has been hijacked by the mass media.
The only force powerful enough to overcome the peer group for women is religion; and in modernity religion has been rejected (or subverted into being merely a mouthpiece of the mass media).
And the mass media is evil - indeed in modernity it is the very source and focus of evil
http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.co.uk/
The mass media has duped women into becoming willing mass victims - and the mass media has done so deliberately, from its intrinsic wickedness and its strategic onslaught upon good.
The reason for the greater success among women than men is simply that the mass media can successfully mimic (at the psychological level) the peer group of women and can shape their active, chosen behaviour.
*
(The mass media can and does destroy men - but as a rule men know their lives are miserable and wicked and futile; and do not embrace and celebrate and make political movements out of their desperate condition, in the way that women do.)
*
To do all this to women, the mass media first had to clear away religion by portraying Christianity as intrinsically anti-woman and a misery-inducing fraud, and imposing a secular world view - and this was accomplished very fully about fifty years ago - in the mid 1960s.
*
Modern secular women are helpless before the mass media: psychologically, nothing stands between each modern woman and the pervasive, crushing, gleefully destructive power of the mass media.
*
Since the mass media is the source of evil in modernity, it can be equated with Sauron's One Ring - which puts modern women into the situation of Frodo when he had become 'addicted' to the Ring.
So here - from The Lord of the Rings - is the situation of modern, secular, media-addicted woman:
No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me. I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades.
*
In a superficial sense, women are pandered and pampered by modernity - in a deeper sense they are the primary victims.
I know that women are privileged above men in almost all human societies (there are more than half a billion women living in the culture that is the exception); and that this preference is biologically-based upon each specific woman being on average reproductively more valuable than each man (see The Woman Racket by Steve Moxon before disagreeing with this) - BUT when it comes to the fundamentals of life, women are in the situation of having been duped by modernity so profoundly that they do not even recognize but profess to enjoy the situation!
*
I will not weaken my case by stating too many pieces of evidence: two will suffice:
1. Among the wealthiest, healthiest, most able and (on average) most attractive women - those women who are free-est in our society, and perhaps in the history of the world - the fertility rate is about half a child per woman, and about half of these women choose not to have any child.
Somehow, women en masse have been duped into forgoing, indeed rejecting, the greatest of all earthly mortal gratifications: motherhood; for which nothing can remotely compensate - and what is worst of all they embrace their victimhood (at least they do in public).
2. Healthy young women are intrinsically the most valued, desired, and attractive entities on this earth - and yet, about half of these beautiful creatures strategically, deliberately and (what is worst) proudly mutilate, deface and uglify their bodies with tattoos - they pay to do this, they go through inconvenience and pain to do this, the damage cannot be undone - and yet they advertise and boast about and display their foolish choices and wicked actions (wicked - because gratuitously to mar beauty is indeed wicked - and to advertise it is to encourage wickedness in others).
The trend is recent, the scope and inclusiveness of the trend is increasing and spreading, the extent of self-inflicted defacement and mutilation are expanding year on year.
*
How has this happened? I think the answer is fairly simple. Women calibrate their behaviour mostly by reference to the peer group of other women - in modernity this peer group has been hijacked by the mass media.
The only force powerful enough to overcome the peer group for women is religion; and in modernity religion has been rejected (or subverted into being merely a mouthpiece of the mass media).
And the mass media is evil - indeed in modernity it is the very source and focus of evil
http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.co.uk/
The mass media has duped women into becoming willing mass victims - and the mass media has done so deliberately, from its intrinsic wickedness and its strategic onslaught upon good.
The reason for the greater success among women than men is simply that the mass media can successfully mimic (at the psychological level) the peer group of women and can shape their active, chosen behaviour.
*
(The mass media can and does destroy men - but as a rule men know their lives are miserable and wicked and futile; and do not embrace and celebrate and make political movements out of their desperate condition, in the way that women do.)
*
To do all this to women, the mass media first had to clear away religion by portraying Christianity as intrinsically anti-woman and a misery-inducing fraud, and imposing a secular world view - and this was accomplished very fully about fifty years ago - in the mid 1960s.
*
Modern secular women are helpless before the mass media: psychologically, nothing stands between each modern woman and the pervasive, crushing, gleefully destructive power of the mass media.
*
Since the mass media is the source of evil in modernity, it can be equated with Sauron's One Ring - which puts modern women into the situation of Frodo when he had become 'addicted' to the Ring.
So here - from The Lord of the Rings - is the situation of modern, secular, media-addicted woman:
No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me. I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades.
*
Wednesday, 4 August 2021
Christian women used to be more religious than men - now they are less
Probably a majority of real Christians in the past, for many centuries, were women. Of course, we cannot look into the souls of Men - but in so far as there were objective correlates - such as the number of nuns compared with monks, the sex ratio of regular church attenders and practitioners etc. - women mostly outnumbered men both as a proportion and in terms of average devoutness.
This was also revealed by the immense and indomitable long-term courage of the 'Babushka'-type old women, who stuck to their publicly declared Christianity even under conditions of harsh oppression; and did their best to transmit this to younger generations.
It seems as if - up until the middle 20th century - most nice and virtuous women in the UK would not just self-identify as 'a Christian', and would also want to follow Jesus to Heaven; there to be reunited with loved ancestors, and to await their families.
But now, women of the same personality type - who are better than average in terms of niceness and virtue (although much less nice and virtuous than good women of a few generations ago) have very obvious taken the side of Satan in the spiritual war.
Consequently, I think that there are probably - and perhaps for the first time in many centuries - a higher proportion of men than women among real Christians.
In other words; the same pro-social, conscientious and obedient personality traits that led women to be good Christians when the churches were strong, coherent and genuinely Christian - and led by men; have caused women to abandon Christianity - including even the pseudo-Christian churches led, whether officially or tacitly, by women.
Women have become on average more leftist and materialist-atheist than men; because society is now dominated by materialist-atheistic leftism - and women's innate conformity and desire of peer group acceptance leads them to track these changes in society.
Women's greater usage of (and addiction to) mass- and social-media has exacerbated what was already a strongly established pattern - since the peer group of women is now more powerfully virtual than real - and this peer group is monitored and controlled by the global powers of purposive evil.
In place of the indomitable Babushkas, modern middle-aged and elderly women display extremely little courage in support of Christian ideals and living; because these are now disapproved by their peer group. They merely drift - expediently - towards whatever they feel will be most accepted by the dominant public discourse.
What were women's strengths are now women's weaknesses - their Achilles heel.
They may aspire to the side of good - but under unrelenting, increasing, daily pressure from Authority to conform to evil: they drift.
So, what Christian revival we are seeing (modest as it is) is now not just led-by, but participated-in, mostly by men.
Which is something else new, and perhaps unprecedented, about these End Times.
Wednesday, 5 May 2021
How serious is this threat? Well, if people are freaking-out it must be Really serious - right? (How the System is manipulating women.)
I suppose this can be chalked-down to another phenomenon of feminization.
There is a strongly differential tendency for women to evaluate the seriousness of a threat by monitoring people's emotional reactions to it.
This is probably an aspect of women's greater alliance-building, peer group orientation (whereas men must compete as well as cooperate - so peer groups tend to be task-orientated and hierarchical).
I can see why this way of evaluating seriousness might be evolutionarily adaptive for women in hunter-gatherer tribal conditions; where many women would find themselves as wives living in a relatively strange tribe among her husband's relatives - and would need to 'learn the ropes' quickly, and make alliances with a new group of women.
Thus, if somebody is offended by what you have said - it is wise to assume that you have said something offensive. When people are avoiding something or somebody - it would be wise to do likewise - to adopt the same attitudes.
"There is no smoke without fire" is a proverb that was probably invented by a woman; and certainly has been embraced by womankind.
Yet - of course - under modern conditions where the most powerful female 'peer group' is a virtual construct of the mass media that acts as a maladaptive, hyper-amplified super-stimulus*; and where 'offence' is mass constructed on an assembly line; The System can generate blinding smoke without even a spark of fire.
So; The System can generate real objective threats (terrorist atrocities, forest fires, outbreaks of arson and violence) in order to justify to men taking some kind of action which The System wants to take.
The threat is real, but it was deliberately contrived.
The fact that the threat was deliberately contrived by the authorities can (more-or-less plausibly) be denied, or simply muddled - especially when there are a few steps in the causal chain leading to implementation.
Then men can be made to believe that the threat comes from some external or internal enemy (against whom they have resentment), or is a kind of 'natural' disaster; and men can be made to focus on short-term, 'practical' measure to address the immediate threat.
And for the women? The System can even-more-easily generate hysterical, terrified responses - reporting, quoting, and (spontaneously or simulated) depicting women (or children) sobbing and weeping, exhibiting apparent fear and trembling and other similar responses.
These depictions and 'verbatim' reports operate strongly to activate women's empathy - even with strangers - when these are subjectively-experienced as within the woman's (virtual) peer group.
So; when events are cancelled, products withdrawn, activities forbidden - this response means the supposedly-causal threat is perceived as dangerous: hence it is 'is' dangerous. If a person or group is shunned, avoided, or excluded by the (virtual) peer group with which a woman empathically-identifies - then likewise. In effect: "They must be dangerous, or people would not react like that!"
Such responses 'prove' to women - at a subjective, subliminal, physiological level (that requires no further 'evidence' and indeed which cannot really be refuted by objective evidence) that the threat is real, serious and must be acted-upon immediately.
This, even when in reality there is no objective threat, or a microscopic and merely theoretical objective threat.
David Icke usefully described the sequence of "Problem - Reaction - Solution" - and this can be observed as a standard trope of modern governance. I am suggesting that there is, within this, a sexual differentiation such that men typically focus on the Problem, and women on the Reaction.
And that for women the Reaction is of such overwhelming importance that there need be no underlying Problem.
Even it is proved objectively that there is no underlying Problem at all - this may make no difference for women; because they are focused on the Reaction.
It can be seen that in this respect as in many others, women are more easily and effectively manipulated than men, in the context of the modern, media-dominated society.
And this is one major reason why the Global Establishment favours women in 'middle-management' type positions - which nowadays includes even national and corporate leadership.
(i.e. All those whose job, especially from 2020, is to represent and implement the policies of the covert world government.)
Wednesday, 30 January 2019
Women, men and task-functionality
(Note: What follows are generalisations based-upon biological differences - there are exceptions; but exceptions are exceptional, and should be regarded as such. Social arrangements may reshape or distort the generalisations; but such arrangements need to be purposive, powerful and permanent - since they are trying to re-mould what happens spontaneously. If you dispute what it said below; bear in mind that this is almost-certainly not because of evidence, but because you have different assumptions by-which you are interpreting the evidence.)
Women react very badly to being told they can't (or even shouldn't) do any particular thing; even when they don't actually want to do it.
So (evil) feminism seems to work by telling women that they are being excluded from this or that - by a conspiracy of men.
This is termed the 'patriarchy' - and is supposedly an omnipresent-yet-occult peer-group conspiracy of a kind that does not spontaneously exist among men (who mostly compete with each other - or cooperate in hierarchies); but is normal among women (who spontaneously conspire for social goals, and punish other women by social exclusion).
So women can get very angry about being excluded from horrendous situations, like frontline combat situations in wars; despite that it is only very rare and unusual women who actually want to take part in such activities (and indeed, the majority of men would certainly prefer Not to be in such situations!).
This is why women (in general) feel, or can easily be made to feel, that being excluded from things they would actually hate to do is equivalent to being shunned.
Another example is professional mathematics, physics and engineering. Only a small minority of men, but a much smaller minority of women, actually want to do these things as a first choice in life (even when they are good at them). But even women who would loathe to do this work can get very angry if they are brought to believe they are being kept-out of it... which, of course, they aren't; quite the opposite for the past several decades.
Women project female motivations onto men; just as men project male motivations onto women; and this is quite natural and spontaneous because it is how we understand other people: we use our own emotions to model those of others. And this is why it is so easy to fool so many women into assuming that men operate in the ways that women do.
And it goes further than this; because men and women perceive Life in different ways - I mean the whole business of the human condition is seen differently: Women see life more socially, men see life more functionally.
Therefore, by a kind-of paradox... From a task-functional perspective, the fact that only few and exceptional women want to be in a situation (or are able to do it, due to sex differentials in ability) is sometimes exactly why women actually ought to be 'kept-out'! (...as a generalisation, with exceptional exceptions...)
As the adverse (and increasingly-adverse) experience of recent generations suggests; the mixed sex situation has intrinsically so many dys-functional aspects, that it is generally to be avoided when functionality is the priority. There are, of course, exceptions - usually time-limited - such as when functionality is so strong or urgent a priority that it psychologically overwhelms the problems of mixed-sex groups. For example in acute emergencies, or during war.
Task-functionality is a mainly masculine ideal - and in a pure form is pretty rare even among men, and easily corrupted by short-termism and selfishness. Nonetheless, most men see an 'ideal' world in terms of functions, and how best to accomplish them. The difference is not in the ideal, but in whether it can be lived-up-to.
(Perhaps this is why talking-about sports is so popular among men, since sports are about 'how to' accomplish tasks: how to win. Men often enjoy spending hours talking about how their team might play better, might win more... task-functionality in action.)
But even if at lower levels men are mainly motivated by selfish-short-termism; task-functionality must dominate the leadership group; if performing a function is genuinely intended.
Men who are genuinely interested in functionality, and who have gathered in self-selected groups of other such men, nearly always experience the presence of women as disruptive to functionality.
This is not-at-all surprising; since adult mixed-sex functional groups are an extreme evolutionary novelty - just a handful of generations even in The West. We are not evolutionarily-equipped to task-function in mixed sex groups - we not being assisted, but rather thwarted, by our 'instincts'.
From the male perspective of task-functionality, 'women' (in general, and as a group especially) tend to hijack task-functionality into 'social dynamics'; since men see the world in functional terms, and women in social terms.
A single exceptional women, in exceptional circumstances, may share task-functional goals with self-selected men (history provides several examples). But because task functionality is so extremely rare among women (especially in some particular areas such as maths, physics, engineering and the like); any group of women will not be composed of such rare exceptional types; and therefore any group of women will almost-certainly tend to (try to) hijack task-functionality into social dynamics; because that is simply how groups of women experience reality.
Thus women reshape the externally-orientated functional male environment into a social female environment of networks - with its focus on dynamics... bonding rituals, a kind of peer-group-norm 'egalitarianism'; and psychodramas of favouritism, exclusion, shunning.
And this is precisely the nature of modern bureaucracy, and therefore of all modern social systems.
Modern organisations have no real external task-function (what they have is a mere badge, a fake rationale, an excuse) - and have mostly given-up on task-functionality. All large organisations are bureaucracies, and all bureaucracies have become mostly, qualitatively the same: their main activity is inwardly-directed 'office politics'.
The female ideal of work-life as social dynamics has displaced the male ideal of task-functionality: the workplace has been remodelled around group dynamics, instead of accomplishing some role.
Of course - none of these 'public space', organisational activities really satisfy women - because what is really most-wanted by most women (spontaneously, naturally, deeply) is a family.
Being a unit of human resources in a bureaucracy can hardly be expected to substitute for being a mother to children. Yet this is indeed what is expected - and the superiority of the workplace to the family is massively-pervasive propaganda, explicit and implicit, in the mass media and officialdom directed at women.
Women increasingly build failed lives on the false motivation of resentment-at-exclusion.
Thus we wreck the effectiveness of the entire public realm in The West, in trying and failing to provide a idealised female-friendly environment; in a misguided and destructive (and ultimately evil-motivated) attempt to substitute work for family for the majority of women - when this is only valid for rare and exceptional women.
And the motivation that drives this is resentment, based on false projection of female-onto-male psychology.
Women react very badly to being told they can't (or even shouldn't) do any particular thing; even when they don't actually want to do it.
So (evil) feminism seems to work by telling women that they are being excluded from this or that - by a conspiracy of men.
This is termed the 'patriarchy' - and is supposedly an omnipresent-yet-occult peer-group conspiracy of a kind that does not spontaneously exist among men (who mostly compete with each other - or cooperate in hierarchies); but is normal among women (who spontaneously conspire for social goals, and punish other women by social exclusion).
So women can get very angry about being excluded from horrendous situations, like frontline combat situations in wars; despite that it is only very rare and unusual women who actually want to take part in such activities (and indeed, the majority of men would certainly prefer Not to be in such situations!).
This is why women (in general) feel, or can easily be made to feel, that being excluded from things they would actually hate to do is equivalent to being shunned.
Another example is professional mathematics, physics and engineering. Only a small minority of men, but a much smaller minority of women, actually want to do these things as a first choice in life (even when they are good at them). But even women who would loathe to do this work can get very angry if they are brought to believe they are being kept-out of it... which, of course, they aren't; quite the opposite for the past several decades.
Women project female motivations onto men; just as men project male motivations onto women; and this is quite natural and spontaneous because it is how we understand other people: we use our own emotions to model those of others. And this is why it is so easy to fool so many women into assuming that men operate in the ways that women do.
And it goes further than this; because men and women perceive Life in different ways - I mean the whole business of the human condition is seen differently: Women see life more socially, men see life more functionally.
Therefore, by a kind-of paradox... From a task-functional perspective, the fact that only few and exceptional women want to be in a situation (or are able to do it, due to sex differentials in ability) is sometimes exactly why women actually ought to be 'kept-out'! (...as a generalisation, with exceptional exceptions...)
As the adverse (and increasingly-adverse) experience of recent generations suggests; the mixed sex situation has intrinsically so many dys-functional aspects, that it is generally to be avoided when functionality is the priority. There are, of course, exceptions - usually time-limited - such as when functionality is so strong or urgent a priority that it psychologically overwhelms the problems of mixed-sex groups. For example in acute emergencies, or during war.
Task-functionality is a mainly masculine ideal - and in a pure form is pretty rare even among men, and easily corrupted by short-termism and selfishness. Nonetheless, most men see an 'ideal' world in terms of functions, and how best to accomplish them. The difference is not in the ideal, but in whether it can be lived-up-to.
(Perhaps this is why talking-about sports is so popular among men, since sports are about 'how to' accomplish tasks: how to win. Men often enjoy spending hours talking about how their team might play better, might win more... task-functionality in action.)
But even if at lower levels men are mainly motivated by selfish-short-termism; task-functionality must dominate the leadership group; if performing a function is genuinely intended.
Men who are genuinely interested in functionality, and who have gathered in self-selected groups of other such men, nearly always experience the presence of women as disruptive to functionality.
This is not-at-all surprising; since adult mixed-sex functional groups are an extreme evolutionary novelty - just a handful of generations even in The West. We are not evolutionarily-equipped to task-function in mixed sex groups - we not being assisted, but rather thwarted, by our 'instincts'.
From the male perspective of task-functionality, 'women' (in general, and as a group especially) tend to hijack task-functionality into 'social dynamics'; since men see the world in functional terms, and women in social terms.
A single exceptional women, in exceptional circumstances, may share task-functional goals with self-selected men (history provides several examples). But because task functionality is so extremely rare among women (especially in some particular areas such as maths, physics, engineering and the like); any group of women will not be composed of such rare exceptional types; and therefore any group of women will almost-certainly tend to (try to) hijack task-functionality into social dynamics; because that is simply how groups of women experience reality.
Thus women reshape the externally-orientated functional male environment into a social female environment of networks - with its focus on dynamics... bonding rituals, a kind of peer-group-norm 'egalitarianism'; and psychodramas of favouritism, exclusion, shunning.
And this is precisely the nature of modern bureaucracy, and therefore of all modern social systems.
Modern organisations have no real external task-function (what they have is a mere badge, a fake rationale, an excuse) - and have mostly given-up on task-functionality. All large organisations are bureaucracies, and all bureaucracies have become mostly, qualitatively the same: their main activity is inwardly-directed 'office politics'.
The female ideal of work-life as social dynamics has displaced the male ideal of task-functionality: the workplace has been remodelled around group dynamics, instead of accomplishing some role.
Of course - none of these 'public space', organisational activities really satisfy women - because what is really most-wanted by most women (spontaneously, naturally, deeply) is a family.
Being a unit of human resources in a bureaucracy can hardly be expected to substitute for being a mother to children. Yet this is indeed what is expected - and the superiority of the workplace to the family is massively-pervasive propaganda, explicit and implicit, in the mass media and officialdom directed at women.
Women increasingly build failed lives on the false motivation of resentment-at-exclusion.
Thus we wreck the effectiveness of the entire public realm in The West, in trying and failing to provide a idealised female-friendly environment; in a misguided and destructive (and ultimately evil-motivated) attempt to substitute work for family for the majority of women - when this is only valid for rare and exceptional women.
And the motivation that drives this is resentment, based on false projection of female-onto-male psychology.
Monday, 26 October 2015
Why is it that so many modern women have become attention junkies?
Because they can - is the short answer.
That modern Western women are often attention junkies seems clear by their chosen behaviour - their clothes, hair, self-mutilations - the whole way they 'present themselves'... which shows that they strive to get attention; especially from men.
And this attention is sexual.
The 'attention' sought is mostly short-term, causal, superficial... the admiring glance, the second glance, the mild flirtation. Harmless, just fun, one might suppose? This is the affirmation of individuality in the mass context of the anonymous city. Attention is tangible evidence that you 'stand out' from the crowd, are an individual, are desirable to 'men'.
And when women seek more attention, they usually succeed - which is why the process is addictive.
Modern Western women mostly succeed in getting sexual attention because - so long as they are healthy - it is easy when they are young. This for straightforward biological and reproductive reasons: young and healthy-looking women are all desirable, all attention-grabbing. Some more than others, of course - but all young healthy women will attract attention.
So most women start with a baseline of un-earned attention simply by virtue of what they are when young: to men they are potential mates to be evaluated, to other women they are potential rivals. Thus the appraising glance, the second look, the atmosphere of flirtation.
And if young women want it they can get more, simply by sending out cues of 'sexual availability' which men are hard-wired to respond to - hence the use of revealing clothing, or signals such as tattoos and piercings, and the bold glance and confident self-presentation - which are interpreted by men as signals indicating a higher probability of low cost, no strings sex.
(Sluts always get attention; and a lot of modern women have noticed and taken this lesson to heart; and apply it to varying degrees.)
Of course, women may not be doing this consciously, they may deny that this is their intention, and they may be honest in this denial; but this is the reason for the extra attention.
And when more and more women are doing this, it creates an escalation of signalling, an 'arms race' among young women - to be 'the one' who grabs and holds most attention in a crowd. Anyone who opts out of the arms race becomes almost invisible in the crowds of modern life.
(In early human life, in small groups, every young healthy women was like a goddess due to sheer rarity value - she did not need to do anything at all: but simply be. Indeed it was her transcendent role to 'be'. As the poet Robert Graves put it: Man does, Woman is.)
So even young and beautiful women compete for attention nowadays, and because sexual advertisment is very effective at getting attention (attention from men, and also from other women who intuitively perceive a rival) then unless it is prevented by some internal restraint or external prohibition there is an innate tendency for women increasingly to sexualize their self-presentation - because if attention is the goal, then more sexualization works.
As women age into middle age - through their thirties - they progressively lose this unearned attention which is bestowed by evolution, and such women may start to complain they are 'being ignored'.
In reality, this 'being ignored' is merely a loss of biological privilege. (Welcome to the real world!) But in a secular and nihilistic world where community is broken down, and stable familes are increasingly rare; the loss of the daily thousand self-affirmations of casual attention is experienced as an existential crisis.
So middle aged women dye their hair to make it look younger - or maybe 'go blond', escalate the use of makeup, and start to dress more carefully to maximize their sexual assets.
And it works! They do indeed get more attention.
Perhaps for a while they get more attention because they accurately simulate the appearance of a younger women; but after a while they get more attention because they are giving-off signals of sexual availability - because the way men are 'wired' by evolution is that a middle aged (or elderly) women who is presented herself to enhance or simulate her sexuality, may be offering the chance of low cost, no strings sex.
Such signals are hard, perhaps impossible, to ignore - even when they are ignored or deplored. Hence the extra attention. For women; if you don't want to be ignored - and if that is your main objective, then the easiest and most effective actions is to make yourself look (more or less) like a slut - a woman of 'easy virtue' as they used to say.
(The woman need not deliver on what her appearance seems to promise - the advertisement of sexual availability may not be honest - but meanwhile she will get the attention she craves.)
In the end, women find themselves in an addictive cycle. In order to retain the unearned attention of their youth - or, as they may put it to themselves, in order not to 'be ignored'; from their thirties and continuing for longer and longer into the fifties, sixties, maybe even beyond - many modern women engage in escalating and un-discriminating levels of sexual signalling.
This is most obvious among single women and the divorced and those married women looking for affairs or new husband - but the addiction has infected even happily married women; who hate to 'be ignored' (as they perceive it) in the prevailing highly-sexualized social environment - and feel compelled to present themselves in a sexualized way.
This is experienced as 'empowering', revitalizing. It is socially admired. Instead of accepting their mature role as a 'mousy', ignored, middle aged housewife - faithfully devoted to family and community; middle aged women may suddenly dye their hair, or 'get a tattoo' - and experience a sudden increase in attention - especially from men - and all too often they misinterpret the real, underlying nature of and motivation for this attention. And other women will praise them (at least to their faces).
In the past, this arm race of sexual signalling was prevented by strong social norms - mostly enforced by the peer group of women - against even young women's behaviour. But especially middle aged women were sanctioned for presenting themselves in a sexualized way, or trying to simulate youth (the English expression for such behaviour was 'mutton dressed as lamb).
But typical modern women, and the mass media culture, do not enforce modesty and restraint. Instead our corrupt and morally-inverted society celebrates showing-off, attention-seeking: mere celebrity is celebrated.
To be unnoticed is to be despicable and despised
(I have heard middle aged women express real anger and resentment against those who do not join-in the attention arms race - who 'let themselves go' and accept the withdrawal of unearned privilege.)
This attention addiction is, I believe, the main basis of the ever-increasing sexualization of Western society over the past 50 years; and it was a natural and inevitable consequence of secularization and the removal of social norms that limited public sexual displays among women.
The process of societal sexualization has little or nothing to do with actual sex - the environment is highly sexualized, women are displaying, men are responding to these displays; marriages are delayed and broken, families are not had or abandoned under the pervasive pressure of 24/7 bombardment with sexual signals, of social life experienced as swimming through a sea of sexualization...
Meanwhile there is not much actual sex for most people most of the time - and never enough of it to build a life around (that being intrinsically impossible, a chimera) - and fewer and fewer children are born.
Western society spirals towards self-chosen extinction.
The sexuality of women is indeed a powerful social force - and any society which does not recognize that as a fact, and control this force, is doomed; as we are doomed.
At present each women is 'liberated' - i.e. allowed, encouraged, to manage this nuclear force of female sexuality entirely for herself. It is like giving a machine gun to a kid!
The problem is that the weapon of female sexuality will be used if it can be used without cost. Even with majority restraint, a minority can cause immense problems, and set-off an arms race.
Liberation is socially toxic: obviously so.
Female modesty just is a matter of general societal concern - and must in some way be externally regulated for the good of everyone.
There is no arguing with 'must' - but there are a wide range of possible means, some far preferable to others (some ways of controlling female sexuality are relatively benign, others are loathsome - the current Western secular attempts are both loathsome and ineffectual); and how best to regulate female sexuality is the proper topic.
Note added: It is my conviction, presented many times elsewhere on this blog; that problems such as the one described above can only constructively be solved on the other side of a mass Christian revival. Any attempt to solve such problems in a secular context, starting from where we are now, will almost certainly do more harm than good overall - because (here, now) our motivations are corrupted, and this corruption will out in attempts to address structural social problems.
The thing to bear in mind is that when there is a problem (such as modern sexuality in general) which is obvious, and which contravenes basic common sense and traditional wisdom - there must be very powerful forces maintaining that problem.
This means that attempts at reform must overcome strong resistance, which means that reform must be powerfully motivated - ie. reform must tap-into strong, widespread and fundamental human emotions.
In the modern and secular context, such strong, widespread and powerful emotions are almost entirely negative and selfish - for example: pride, envy, resentment, hatred, Schadenfreude. This seems obvious among the secular right wingers who advocate 'reform' in the sexual arena - either their motivations are too weak for them to succeed, or else their motivations are bad.
Only religion is capable of being both a sufficiently powerful and also good motivation as the basis for the tough work of reform. And of religions, only some few.
So, as in most things here and now, the first choice is to choose your religion. (And the choice of adequate religions, known to be sufficiently powerful, is in fact very limited indeed - indeed for the West the choice is practically limited to two broad and obvious categories.)
And if you cannot choose a religion, then (no matter how severe the problem - and indeed the more severe, obvious and simple-to-solve is the problem) it is probably best to do nothing: because no matter how bad things are - they can always get worse.
That modern Western women are often attention junkies seems clear by their chosen behaviour - their clothes, hair, self-mutilations - the whole way they 'present themselves'... which shows that they strive to get attention; especially from men.
And this attention is sexual.
The 'attention' sought is mostly short-term, causal, superficial... the admiring glance, the second glance, the mild flirtation. Harmless, just fun, one might suppose? This is the affirmation of individuality in the mass context of the anonymous city. Attention is tangible evidence that you 'stand out' from the crowd, are an individual, are desirable to 'men'.
And when women seek more attention, they usually succeed - which is why the process is addictive.
Modern Western women mostly succeed in getting sexual attention because - so long as they are healthy - it is easy when they are young. This for straightforward biological and reproductive reasons: young and healthy-looking women are all desirable, all attention-grabbing. Some more than others, of course - but all young healthy women will attract attention.
So most women start with a baseline of un-earned attention simply by virtue of what they are when young: to men they are potential mates to be evaluated, to other women they are potential rivals. Thus the appraising glance, the second look, the atmosphere of flirtation.
And if young women want it they can get more, simply by sending out cues of 'sexual availability' which men are hard-wired to respond to - hence the use of revealing clothing, or signals such as tattoos and piercings, and the bold glance and confident self-presentation - which are interpreted by men as signals indicating a higher probability of low cost, no strings sex.
(Sluts always get attention; and a lot of modern women have noticed and taken this lesson to heart; and apply it to varying degrees.)
Of course, women may not be doing this consciously, they may deny that this is their intention, and they may be honest in this denial; but this is the reason for the extra attention.
And when more and more women are doing this, it creates an escalation of signalling, an 'arms race' among young women - to be 'the one' who grabs and holds most attention in a crowd. Anyone who opts out of the arms race becomes almost invisible in the crowds of modern life.
(In early human life, in small groups, every young healthy women was like a goddess due to sheer rarity value - she did not need to do anything at all: but simply be. Indeed it was her transcendent role to 'be'. As the poet Robert Graves put it: Man does, Woman is.)
So even young and beautiful women compete for attention nowadays, and because sexual advertisment is very effective at getting attention (attention from men, and also from other women who intuitively perceive a rival) then unless it is prevented by some internal restraint or external prohibition there is an innate tendency for women increasingly to sexualize their self-presentation - because if attention is the goal, then more sexualization works.
As women age into middle age - through their thirties - they progressively lose this unearned attention which is bestowed by evolution, and such women may start to complain they are 'being ignored'.
In reality, this 'being ignored' is merely a loss of biological privilege. (Welcome to the real world!) But in a secular and nihilistic world where community is broken down, and stable familes are increasingly rare; the loss of the daily thousand self-affirmations of casual attention is experienced as an existential crisis.
So middle aged women dye their hair to make it look younger - or maybe 'go blond', escalate the use of makeup, and start to dress more carefully to maximize their sexual assets.
And it works! They do indeed get more attention.
Perhaps for a while they get more attention because they accurately simulate the appearance of a younger women; but after a while they get more attention because they are giving-off signals of sexual availability - because the way men are 'wired' by evolution is that a middle aged (or elderly) women who is presented herself to enhance or simulate her sexuality, may be offering the chance of low cost, no strings sex.
Such signals are hard, perhaps impossible, to ignore - even when they are ignored or deplored. Hence the extra attention. For women; if you don't want to be ignored - and if that is your main objective, then the easiest and most effective actions is to make yourself look (more or less) like a slut - a woman of 'easy virtue' as they used to say.
(The woman need not deliver on what her appearance seems to promise - the advertisement of sexual availability may not be honest - but meanwhile she will get the attention she craves.)
In the end, women find themselves in an addictive cycle. In order to retain the unearned attention of their youth - or, as they may put it to themselves, in order not to 'be ignored'; from their thirties and continuing for longer and longer into the fifties, sixties, maybe even beyond - many modern women engage in escalating and un-discriminating levels of sexual signalling.
This is most obvious among single women and the divorced and those married women looking for affairs or new husband - but the addiction has infected even happily married women; who hate to 'be ignored' (as they perceive it) in the prevailing highly-sexualized social environment - and feel compelled to present themselves in a sexualized way.
This is experienced as 'empowering', revitalizing. It is socially admired. Instead of accepting their mature role as a 'mousy', ignored, middle aged housewife - faithfully devoted to family and community; middle aged women may suddenly dye their hair, or 'get a tattoo' - and experience a sudden increase in attention - especially from men - and all too often they misinterpret the real, underlying nature of and motivation for this attention. And other women will praise them (at least to their faces).
In the past, this arm race of sexual signalling was prevented by strong social norms - mostly enforced by the peer group of women - against even young women's behaviour. But especially middle aged women were sanctioned for presenting themselves in a sexualized way, or trying to simulate youth (the English expression for such behaviour was 'mutton dressed as lamb).
But typical modern women, and the mass media culture, do not enforce modesty and restraint. Instead our corrupt and morally-inverted society celebrates showing-off, attention-seeking: mere celebrity is celebrated.
To be unnoticed is to be despicable and despised
(I have heard middle aged women express real anger and resentment against those who do not join-in the attention arms race - who 'let themselves go' and accept the withdrawal of unearned privilege.)
This attention addiction is, I believe, the main basis of the ever-increasing sexualization of Western society over the past 50 years; and it was a natural and inevitable consequence of secularization and the removal of social norms that limited public sexual displays among women.
The process of societal sexualization has little or nothing to do with actual sex - the environment is highly sexualized, women are displaying, men are responding to these displays; marriages are delayed and broken, families are not had or abandoned under the pervasive pressure of 24/7 bombardment with sexual signals, of social life experienced as swimming through a sea of sexualization...
Meanwhile there is not much actual sex for most people most of the time - and never enough of it to build a life around (that being intrinsically impossible, a chimera) - and fewer and fewer children are born.
Western society spirals towards self-chosen extinction.
The sexuality of women is indeed a powerful social force - and any society which does not recognize that as a fact, and control this force, is doomed; as we are doomed.
At present each women is 'liberated' - i.e. allowed, encouraged, to manage this nuclear force of female sexuality entirely for herself. It is like giving a machine gun to a kid!
The problem is that the weapon of female sexuality will be used if it can be used without cost. Even with majority restraint, a minority can cause immense problems, and set-off an arms race.
Liberation is socially toxic: obviously so.
Female modesty just is a matter of general societal concern - and must in some way be externally regulated for the good of everyone.
There is no arguing with 'must' - but there are a wide range of possible means, some far preferable to others (some ways of controlling female sexuality are relatively benign, others are loathsome - the current Western secular attempts are both loathsome and ineffectual); and how best to regulate female sexuality is the proper topic.
Note added: It is my conviction, presented many times elsewhere on this blog; that problems such as the one described above can only constructively be solved on the other side of a mass Christian revival. Any attempt to solve such problems in a secular context, starting from where we are now, will almost certainly do more harm than good overall - because (here, now) our motivations are corrupted, and this corruption will out in attempts to address structural social problems.
The thing to bear in mind is that when there is a problem (such as modern sexuality in general) which is obvious, and which contravenes basic common sense and traditional wisdom - there must be very powerful forces maintaining that problem.
This means that attempts at reform must overcome strong resistance, which means that reform must be powerfully motivated - ie. reform must tap-into strong, widespread and fundamental human emotions.
In the modern and secular context, such strong, widespread and powerful emotions are almost entirely negative and selfish - for example: pride, envy, resentment, hatred, Schadenfreude. This seems obvious among the secular right wingers who advocate 'reform' in the sexual arena - either their motivations are too weak for them to succeed, or else their motivations are bad.
Only religion is capable of being both a sufficiently powerful and also good motivation as the basis for the tough work of reform. And of religions, only some few.
So, as in most things here and now, the first choice is to choose your religion. (And the choice of adequate religions, known to be sufficiently powerful, is in fact very limited indeed - indeed for the West the choice is practically limited to two broad and obvious categories.)
And if you cannot choose a religion, then (no matter how severe the problem - and indeed the more severe, obvious and simple-to-solve is the problem) it is probably best to do nothing: because no matter how bad things are - they can always get worse.
Sunday, 3 December 2017
Which sex is more vulnerable to being harmed by abstractions? Women - obviously!
Men and women are different - as a strong true generalisation - so it should not be a surprise when they are seen to be different.
One difference relates to abstractions: men are more at home in the perilous world of abstractions, and when women live-by abstractions they may become seriously disorientated. Women are the preferred bureaucrats in modern, totalitarian institutions - because women are easier to corrupt into servility to the rules.
When it comes to abstractions; women are more prone than men to a kind of institutional Stockholm Syndrome - when captives identify-with their captors; when the miserable slaves of regulations become emotionally committed to the regulations that enslave them.
Women intrinsically hate regulations and prefer personal relations - but once persuaded that regulations are their defence and guarantor; they lose all sense of perspective. The only response to the problem of regulation is seen to be more regulation - and thus they are trapped.
At worst (and that worst is not uncommon) women become helpless/ help-resistant pawns when manipulated by abstraction-wielders - which is why women are the prime, self-made, self-trapped victims of modernity and Leftism.
This is a simple fact - in the sense that so many women choose not to marry, to delay marriage until too late, choose not to have children, choose not to care for the children they have - and become blinded by anger and vengefulness when this insanity is pointed-out, or when any effective action is proposed to remedy it.
(For most women, not all but a very large majority...) In comparison with such self-inflicted - and remedy-resisting - life-destroying life-choices - nothing that modern culture can provide will come close to compensating.
And given that modern women (like modern men) have become materialist religion-deniers; this life is everything, and when they self-wreck this life there is no compensation and no repentance. And narcissism, plastic surgery, drugs or becoming an attention/sex-junkie are no more than momentary compensations - massively worsening the underlying problem.
Yet (unless women are coercively-enslaved - in which case these domains are destroyed and life emptied), women innately rule the love-and-sexual arena, women determine the existence of families, women provide the peer networks that bridge between families... If women will not or cannot do these things, then they will not be done - and life is impoverished.
The modern world depends on a spiritual-Christian awakening - both men and women are necessary; but it cannot happen without women. At present women are solidly driving the Left-Liberal-bureaucratic-totalitarian agenda (including within the fake-Christian churches); and if they do not stop, then the agenda will not stop (although it may be replaced by something different but equally bad).
The first step is for individual women to escape the toils of abstraction that enmesh them from early life; and take control of their own lives with reference to their true selves, their hearts - rather than being (as at present) dupes and tools for the implementation of the evil global Establishment strategy.
Friday, 22 October 2010
Inverted boasting and the profound psychosis of modernity
*
Boasting is bad - although nearly everyone is prone to it.
But the content of a boast can be revealing.
There is rational boasting, which is boasting about something that is spontaneously desired, that you have and others have not; and there is that psychotic phenomenon of inverted boasting about that which is spontaneously despised, and which anyone could have easily - if only they could degrade themselves enough.
(I am using 'psychotic' to mean pathological, irrational, without reality-testing, going-against adaptiveness, and un-understandable at the individual level).
*
I first came across inverted boasting in my teens among young men who bragged about getting drunk, and of what happened when they did. I found this puzzling, and hardly knew what to say. Anyone could get drunk, it simply involved drinking too much. What was there to boast about? except that most people preferred to refrain from it for most of the time.
In the past people got drunk, but either kept quiet about it, or were ashamed. What was there to boast about, after all? Anyone can put fluid inside their body.
Presumably, the willingness to boast about something so facile was related to displaying a disdain for 'social pressures' - and a product of moral inversion.
In modernity, moral inversion is taken as a sign of moral superiority, of being able to 'see through' the shams and pretenses of society.
So that public figures whose major accomplishment is getting drunk are famous for the fact, and serve as fantasy figures of liberation.
*
In terms of sex it is a standard element of evolutionary psychology that (because they get pregnant and invest far more into the offspring - both before and after birth) women are the shortage sex - men court and women choose.
At a crude biological level, men (like many other primates) trade and invest resources for sex. Women trade sex for resources. That is - to some extent - the way that human minds have evolved, and accounts for the spontaneous morality differing between men and women.
So it is rational (although despicable) for men to boast about promiscuity - having sex without investing resources (sex without strings); and for women to boast about getting resources without giving sex.
Traditionally (as it were) nasty men boast about their string of conquests and how they did not even buy the woman a meal and left her straight afterwards; nasty women boast about how they have a string of men buying them expensive gifts, meals, treats, holidays - and how they give them nothing in return - not even a kiss.
*
In nothing is the psychosis of modernity more apparent that the inverted boasting by which women, the shortage sex - and indeed young and healthy women - boast about giving-away sex, about offering sex without strings.
For young women to give away sex without strings is about as difficult as it would be for a man to give away diamonds. In brutal cash terms, the young women are giving away something worth many hundreds of dollars - and then boasting about it, as if it were some kind of achievement!
Of course, there have always been women of this general sort. Women who liked sex so much, or had such weak self-control, that they were prepared to risk their reputation, risk their health and survival, to get the kind of sex that they wanted.
But in the past promiscuous women kept this behavior quiet, because they knew how other people would regard this; and how this kind of behaviour becoming widely known would ensure that the woman would never get a good husband.
*
But of course it is not just about dollars - because a woman known to offer sex without strings is a prostitute, and among prostitutes the pecking order comes from the fee charged. To be an unpaid prostitute is to be the lowest form of an already-degraded occupation.
Yet in modernity women boast about this.
In nothing is the psychosis of modernity more apparent that - somehow - women are induced to boast about something which anybody could do (I mean any young healthy woman) simply by choosing. It does not even require effort - just saying yes. It is pushing at an open door, the only barrier being that few could (or would want to ) degrade themselves to do it.
Perhaps the only skill is in reassuring the recipient of the gift that it really is a gift, that the woman really is offering sex-without-strings. This is hard for men to believe, they naturally suspect some kind of trick or scam; but the whole thing is made easier by intoxication - and intoxication is a near-universal in modern social interactions.
*
What are they actually boasting about is that - by giving away sex - they can have sex with attractive men, they get to choose (within a reasonably large range) to whom they will give free sex.
They get to choose upon whom they bestow this (biologically) immensely valuable thing, something in extremely short supply. Well, yes... if a man was giving away 500 dollar bills, he could no doubt choose some attractive women who would help him spend them. That is not the point.
Of course you get more choice in bestowing a gift than in selling the same product.
*
What seems to be the point is to advertise ones liberation from blah blah blah.
To demonstrate one's moral sophistication.
To demonstrate girl power, the power of women over men.
(What irony! - the 'power' to bestow casually and for free what men will pay a lot to get, pay even with their lives to get!).
After all, if sex is fun - who has the right to stop me doing it? What more is there to say?
*
Drink and sex are surely related in modernity. Evolved instinct makes it extremely difficult for normal women to give away sex-without-strings - and to get into a state where this can be accomplished usually requires intoxication.
So intelligent, healthy young women are getting used-to getting helplessly drunk, and encouraging each other in this; and this helps them achieve the degradation of offering free sex - which they then boast about.
Having done it, then whether the act is repented, concealed or boasted-of depends substantially on social attitudes - especially attitudes of the female peer group (since that is what matters most to women, even more than to men).
Whatever; it seems that women are now in situation of the most extreme moral inversion, the most extreme going-against evolved spontaneous instinct (to say nothing whatsoever of Christian morality) that is conceivable.
A social situation where intelligent, young, health women find that they can get what superficially appears to be prestige for being boldly-degraded, for publicly and self-destructively seeking short term pleasure regardless of cost or context.
*
A visiting Martian biologist would immediately recognize that there must now be, at some level, a profound psychosis at work in modernity - in generating such widespread female behavior that is such a gross violation of such a powerful evolved instinct.
*
Boasting is bad - although nearly everyone is prone to it.
But the content of a boast can be revealing.
There is rational boasting, which is boasting about something that is spontaneously desired, that you have and others have not; and there is that psychotic phenomenon of inverted boasting about that which is spontaneously despised, and which anyone could have easily - if only they could degrade themselves enough.
(I am using 'psychotic' to mean pathological, irrational, without reality-testing, going-against adaptiveness, and un-understandable at the individual level).
*
I first came across inverted boasting in my teens among young men who bragged about getting drunk, and of what happened when they did. I found this puzzling, and hardly knew what to say. Anyone could get drunk, it simply involved drinking too much. What was there to boast about? except that most people preferred to refrain from it for most of the time.
In the past people got drunk, but either kept quiet about it, or were ashamed. What was there to boast about, after all? Anyone can put fluid inside their body.
Presumably, the willingness to boast about something so facile was related to displaying a disdain for 'social pressures' - and a product of moral inversion.
In modernity, moral inversion is taken as a sign of moral superiority, of being able to 'see through' the shams and pretenses of society.
So that public figures whose major accomplishment is getting drunk are famous for the fact, and serve as fantasy figures of liberation.
*
In terms of sex it is a standard element of evolutionary psychology that (because they get pregnant and invest far more into the offspring - both before and after birth) women are the shortage sex - men court and women choose.
At a crude biological level, men (like many other primates) trade and invest resources for sex. Women trade sex for resources. That is - to some extent - the way that human minds have evolved, and accounts for the spontaneous morality differing between men and women.
So it is rational (although despicable) for men to boast about promiscuity - having sex without investing resources (sex without strings); and for women to boast about getting resources without giving sex.
Traditionally (as it were) nasty men boast about their string of conquests and how they did not even buy the woman a meal and left her straight afterwards; nasty women boast about how they have a string of men buying them expensive gifts, meals, treats, holidays - and how they give them nothing in return - not even a kiss.
*
In nothing is the psychosis of modernity more apparent that the inverted boasting by which women, the shortage sex - and indeed young and healthy women - boast about giving-away sex, about offering sex without strings.
For young women to give away sex without strings is about as difficult as it would be for a man to give away diamonds. In brutal cash terms, the young women are giving away something worth many hundreds of dollars - and then boasting about it, as if it were some kind of achievement!
Of course, there have always been women of this general sort. Women who liked sex so much, or had such weak self-control, that they were prepared to risk their reputation, risk their health and survival, to get the kind of sex that they wanted.
But in the past promiscuous women kept this behavior quiet, because they knew how other people would regard this; and how this kind of behaviour becoming widely known would ensure that the woman would never get a good husband.
*
But of course it is not just about dollars - because a woman known to offer sex without strings is a prostitute, and among prostitutes the pecking order comes from the fee charged. To be an unpaid prostitute is to be the lowest form of an already-degraded occupation.
Yet in modernity women boast about this.
In nothing is the psychosis of modernity more apparent that - somehow - women are induced to boast about something which anybody could do (I mean any young healthy woman) simply by choosing. It does not even require effort - just saying yes. It is pushing at an open door, the only barrier being that few could (or would want to ) degrade themselves to do it.
Perhaps the only skill is in reassuring the recipient of the gift that it really is a gift, that the woman really is offering sex-without-strings. This is hard for men to believe, they naturally suspect some kind of trick or scam; but the whole thing is made easier by intoxication - and intoxication is a near-universal in modern social interactions.
*
What are they actually boasting about is that - by giving away sex - they can have sex with attractive men, they get to choose (within a reasonably large range) to whom they will give free sex.
They get to choose upon whom they bestow this (biologically) immensely valuable thing, something in extremely short supply. Well, yes... if a man was giving away 500 dollar bills, he could no doubt choose some attractive women who would help him spend them. That is not the point.
Of course you get more choice in bestowing a gift than in selling the same product.
*
What seems to be the point is to advertise ones liberation from blah blah blah.
To demonstrate one's moral sophistication.
To demonstrate girl power, the power of women over men.
(What irony! - the 'power' to bestow casually and for free what men will pay a lot to get, pay even with their lives to get!).
After all, if sex is fun - who has the right to stop me doing it? What more is there to say?
*
Drink and sex are surely related in modernity. Evolved instinct makes it extremely difficult for normal women to give away sex-without-strings - and to get into a state where this can be accomplished usually requires intoxication.
So intelligent, healthy young women are getting used-to getting helplessly drunk, and encouraging each other in this; and this helps them achieve the degradation of offering free sex - which they then boast about.
Having done it, then whether the act is repented, concealed or boasted-of depends substantially on social attitudes - especially attitudes of the female peer group (since that is what matters most to women, even more than to men).
Whatever; it seems that women are now in situation of the most extreme moral inversion, the most extreme going-against evolved spontaneous instinct (to say nothing whatsoever of Christian morality) that is conceivable.
A social situation where intelligent, young, health women find that they can get what superficially appears to be prestige for being boldly-degraded, for publicly and self-destructively seeking short term pleasure regardless of cost or context.
*
A visiting Martian biologist would immediately recognize that there must now be, at some level, a profound psychosis at work in modernity - in generating such widespread female behavior that is such a gross violation of such a powerful evolved instinct.
*
Friday, 5 August 2016
The roots of official feminism - Why does The Establishment favour women as leaders?
Why has The Establishment*, for half a century full-on, favoured replacing men with women leaders?
Obviously, we can be sure that the real reason has nothing whatsoever to do with benefiting women! While the occasional woman (a tiny minority) may be happier and more fulfilled as a 'leader', the mass of women are systematically immiserated by becoming manipulated pawns, and their lives wasted.
You doubt this assertion? Look At Their Eyes! (...The windows of the soul - the entrenched misery, desperation.)
But why? The answer is simple. The Global Conspiracy of Purposive Evil are behind official feminism - as they are behind all mainstream ideas of recent decades - and what they want is control of the world population - and therefore they want the most controllable personnel: and women are more controllable than men.
Think about it: Men and women are psychologically different, so one or the other is going to be more controllable than the other, on average - and that would be women.
More exactly, women are more inclined to want to control themselves and each other.
The Establishment want control, but ideally they do not want to impose control - they want people to choose to be controlled to the extent that they deny being controlled, so much have they internalised their situation. To know one is being controlled is to invite resistance and reaction. But if the person regards the state of being controlled as their own choice and necessary and for their own well-being - well, that person is self-damned and actively resistant to repentance and liberation.
The modern, preferred, kind of control is via invisible and impersonal media and mechanisms - via the likes of perceived peer pressure, fashion and social approval/ sanctions. Women are much more manipulate-able by these indirect mechanisms than are men; because they are more sensitive to them and voluntarily collude in imposing them.
Women constitute the great majority of mass media and social media addicts (see who are glued to their 'smart'-phones as they walk along busy streets); and can be induced to do almost anything to themselves and each other! - Up to and including gross and permanent uglifying mutilations such as genital surgery, foot binding, plastic surgery and tattooing - as well as the more normal and obvious rotating absurdities of hair, makeup and clothing fashions.
(Women will not only do these things to themselves and each other, but will believe and argue that it is both necessary and good to do them.)
The relative manipulability of women is also seen in terms of the fact that in all developed countries women have chosen sub-fertility and the extinction of their tribes in order to pursue 'leadership' goals - such that the representative modern woman chooses (and fights!) to become a middle manager drone embedded n a bureaucracy, instead of a wife and mother running a home - and this is the other side of the coin of mainstream 'official feminism' focused upon women as favoured leaders.
In sum, from the perspective of a global ultra-elite with an evil agenda for the destruction of values, and the strategy of seeking this via control; it is easy to understand why they should want women as leaders rather than men - and why this agenda should have been consistently, and increasingly, pushed for so many decades, across the full spectrum of mass media, government and official propaganda, via the arts and charities, and through the systems of law, education, mainstream so-called-Christianity, and all other powerful social influences.
*Note: For those new to this blog, I should make clear that I regard the ultimate core-controllers of The Establishment to be demons - literally those supernatural personages of purposive evil as described in the New Testament and familiar to modern people via CS Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. These immortal spirits provide the long-term strategy and direction which can be perceived in history - but the great mass of their servants, serfs and slaves are men and women.
Obviously, we can be sure that the real reason has nothing whatsoever to do with benefiting women! While the occasional woman (a tiny minority) may be happier and more fulfilled as a 'leader', the mass of women are systematically immiserated by becoming manipulated pawns, and their lives wasted.
You doubt this assertion? Look At Their Eyes! (...The windows of the soul - the entrenched misery, desperation.)
But why? The answer is simple. The Global Conspiracy of Purposive Evil are behind official feminism - as they are behind all mainstream ideas of recent decades - and what they want is control of the world population - and therefore they want the most controllable personnel: and women are more controllable than men.
Think about it: Men and women are psychologically different, so one or the other is going to be more controllable than the other, on average - and that would be women.
More exactly, women are more inclined to want to control themselves and each other.
The Establishment want control, but ideally they do not want to impose control - they want people to choose to be controlled to the extent that they deny being controlled, so much have they internalised their situation. To know one is being controlled is to invite resistance and reaction. But if the person regards the state of being controlled as their own choice and necessary and for their own well-being - well, that person is self-damned and actively resistant to repentance and liberation.
The modern, preferred, kind of control is via invisible and impersonal media and mechanisms - via the likes of perceived peer pressure, fashion and social approval/ sanctions. Women are much more manipulate-able by these indirect mechanisms than are men; because they are more sensitive to them and voluntarily collude in imposing them.
Women constitute the great majority of mass media and social media addicts (see who are glued to their 'smart'-phones as they walk along busy streets); and can be induced to do almost anything to themselves and each other! - Up to and including gross and permanent uglifying mutilations such as genital surgery, foot binding, plastic surgery and tattooing - as well as the more normal and obvious rotating absurdities of hair, makeup and clothing fashions.
(Women will not only do these things to themselves and each other, but will believe and argue that it is both necessary and good to do them.)
The relative manipulability of women is also seen in terms of the fact that in all developed countries women have chosen sub-fertility and the extinction of their tribes in order to pursue 'leadership' goals - such that the representative modern woman chooses (and fights!) to become a middle manager drone embedded n a bureaucracy, instead of a wife and mother running a home - and this is the other side of the coin of mainstream 'official feminism' focused upon women as favoured leaders.
In sum, from the perspective of a global ultra-elite with an evil agenda for the destruction of values, and the strategy of seeking this via control; it is easy to understand why they should want women as leaders rather than men - and why this agenda should have been consistently, and increasingly, pushed for so many decades, across the full spectrum of mass media, government and official propaganda, via the arts and charities, and through the systems of law, education, mainstream so-called-Christianity, and all other powerful social influences.
*Note: For those new to this blog, I should make clear that I regard the ultimate core-controllers of The Establishment to be demons - literally those supernatural personages of purposive evil as described in the New Testament and familiar to modern people via CS Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. These immortal spirits provide the long-term strategy and direction which can be perceived in history - but the great mass of their servants, serfs and slaves are men and women.
Friday, 28 May 2010
Motivation - the key to science?
While wanting to know the truth does not mean that you will find it; on the other hand, if scientists are not even *trying* to discover the truth - then the truth will not be discovered.
That is the current situation.
'Truth' can be defined as 'underlying reality’. Science is not the only way of discovering truth (for example, philosophy is also about discovering truth - science being in its origin a sub-class of philosophy) - but unless an activity is trying to discover underlying reality, then it certainly cannot be science.
But what motivates someone to want to discover the truth about something?
The great scientists are all very strongly motivated to ‘want to know’ – and this drives them to put in great efforts, and keeps them at their task for decades, in many instances. Why they should be interested in one thing rather than another remains a mystery – but what is clear is that this interest cannot be dictated but arises from within.
Crick commented that you should research that which you gossip about, Watson commented that you should avoid subjects which bore you - http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2007/12/gossip-test-boredom-principle.html - their point being that science is so difficult, that when motivation is deficient then problems will not get solved. Motivation needs all the help it can get.
Seth Roberts, in his superb new article (which happened to be the last paper I accepted for publication in Medical Hypotheses before I was sacked) makes the important point that one motivation to discover something useful in medicine is when you yourself suffer from a problem -
http://sethroberts.net/articles/2010%20The%20unreasonable%20effectiveness%20of%20my%20self-experimentation.pdf
Seth does self-experimentation on problems which he suffers - such as early morning awakening, or putting on too much weight (he is most famous for the Shangri-La diet). He has made several probable breakthroughs working alone and over a relatively short period; and one of the reasons is probably that he really wanted answers, and was not satisfied with answers unless they really made a significant difference.
By contrast, 95 percent (at least!) of professional scientists are not interested in the truth but are doing science for quite other reasons to do with 'career' - things like money, status, security, sociability, lifestyle, fame, to attract women or whatever.
The assumption in modern science is that professional researchers should properly be motivated by career incentives such as appointments, pay and promotion – and not by their intrinsic interest in a problem – certainly not by having a personal stake in finding an answer – such a being a sufferer. Indeed, such factors are portrayed as introducing bias/ damaging impartiality. The modern scientist is supposed to be a docile and obedient bureaucrat – switching ‘interests’ and tasks as required by the changing (or unchanging) imperatives of funding, the fashions of research and the orders of his master.
What determines a modern scientist’s choice of topic, of problem? Essentially it is peer review – the modern scientist is supposed to do whatever work that the cartel of peer-review-dominating scientists decide he should do.
This will almost certainly involve working as a team member for one or more of the peer review cartel scientists; doing some kind of allocated micro-specialized task of no meaning or intrinsic interest – but one which contributes to the overall project being managed by the peer review cartel member. Of course the funders and grant awarders have the major role in what science gets done, but nowadays the allocation of funding has long since been captured by the peer review cartel.
Most importantly, the peer review cartel has captured the ability to define success in solving scientific problems: they simply agree that the problem has been solved! Since peer review is now regarded as the gold standard of science, if the peer review cartel announces that a problem has been solved, then that problem has been solved.
(This is euphemistically termed hype or spin.)
To what does the modern scientist aspire? He aspires to become a member of the peer review cartel. In other words, he aspires to become a bureaucrat, a manager, a ‘politician’.
Is the peer review cartel member a scientist as well? Sometimes (not always) he used-to be – but the answer is essentially: no. Because being a modern high level bureaucrat, manager or politician is incompatible with truthfulness, and dishonesty is incompatible with science.
The good news is that when real science is restored (lets be optimistic!) then its practitioners will again be motivated to discover true and useful things – because science will no longer be a career it will be colonized almost-exclusively by those with a genuine interest in finding real world answers.
That is the current situation.
'Truth' can be defined as 'underlying reality’. Science is not the only way of discovering truth (for example, philosophy is also about discovering truth - science being in its origin a sub-class of philosophy) - but unless an activity is trying to discover underlying reality, then it certainly cannot be science.
But what motivates someone to want to discover the truth about something?
The great scientists are all very strongly motivated to ‘want to know’ – and this drives them to put in great efforts, and keeps them at their task for decades, in many instances. Why they should be interested in one thing rather than another remains a mystery – but what is clear is that this interest cannot be dictated but arises from within.
Crick commented that you should research that which you gossip about, Watson commented that you should avoid subjects which bore you - http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2007/12/gossip-test-boredom-principle.html - their point being that science is so difficult, that when motivation is deficient then problems will not get solved. Motivation needs all the help it can get.
Seth Roberts, in his superb new article (which happened to be the last paper I accepted for publication in Medical Hypotheses before I was sacked) makes the important point that one motivation to discover something useful in medicine is when you yourself suffer from a problem -
http://sethroberts.net/articles/2010%20The%20unreasonable%20effectiveness%20of%20my%20self-experimentation.pdf
Seth does self-experimentation on problems which he suffers - such as early morning awakening, or putting on too much weight (he is most famous for the Shangri-La diet). He has made several probable breakthroughs working alone and over a relatively short period; and one of the reasons is probably that he really wanted answers, and was not satisfied with answers unless they really made a significant difference.
By contrast, 95 percent (at least!) of professional scientists are not interested in the truth but are doing science for quite other reasons to do with 'career' - things like money, status, security, sociability, lifestyle, fame, to attract women or whatever.
The assumption in modern science is that professional researchers should properly be motivated by career incentives such as appointments, pay and promotion – and not by their intrinsic interest in a problem – certainly not by having a personal stake in finding an answer – such a being a sufferer. Indeed, such factors are portrayed as introducing bias/ damaging impartiality. The modern scientist is supposed to be a docile and obedient bureaucrat – switching ‘interests’ and tasks as required by the changing (or unchanging) imperatives of funding, the fashions of research and the orders of his master.
What determines a modern scientist’s choice of topic, of problem? Essentially it is peer review – the modern scientist is supposed to do whatever work that the cartel of peer-review-dominating scientists decide he should do.
This will almost certainly involve working as a team member for one or more of the peer review cartel scientists; doing some kind of allocated micro-specialized task of no meaning or intrinsic interest – but one which contributes to the overall project being managed by the peer review cartel member. Of course the funders and grant awarders have the major role in what science gets done, but nowadays the allocation of funding has long since been captured by the peer review cartel.
Most importantly, the peer review cartel has captured the ability to define success in solving scientific problems: they simply agree that the problem has been solved! Since peer review is now regarded as the gold standard of science, if the peer review cartel announces that a problem has been solved, then that problem has been solved.
(This is euphemistically termed hype or spin.)
To what does the modern scientist aspire? He aspires to become a member of the peer review cartel. In other words, he aspires to become a bureaucrat, a manager, a ‘politician’.
Is the peer review cartel member a scientist as well? Sometimes (not always) he used-to be – but the answer is essentially: no. Because being a modern high level bureaucrat, manager or politician is incompatible with truthfulness, and dishonesty is incompatible with science.
The good news is that when real science is restored (lets be optimistic!) then its practitioners will again be motivated to discover true and useful things – because science will no longer be a career it will be colonized almost-exclusively by those with a genuine interest in finding real world answers.
Monday, 4 November 2013
It's Not About the Nail - Men and women are different: very different
*
If you haven't watched the (brilliant, acute, witty) short video "It's Not About the Nail" - then watch it:
http://www.jasonheadley.com/INATN.html
*
The above video captures a truth about women, from the perspective of men; and beyond this is the idea that men and women may be a lot more different, psychologically, than is currently assumed.
*
In fact, the null hypothesis is currently assumed - that men and women are the same unless proven different.
In practice this means that there is never-enough-evidence to prove, for sure, and without any possibility of alternative explanations - that men and women are different.
But they are: we know this! It is inbuilt, spontaneous, common sense knowledge.
*
What would be interesting to know is more about these differences.
In other words we should assume (because it is true) that men and women really are psychologically different, and then explore the nature of these differences.
*
For instance, why could it make sense for women to have that attitude caricatured in 'It's not about the nail'?
The way I would summarize this attitude is accepting that things-are-the-way-they-are (not trying to 'fix' them) and therefore focusing upon how people feel about things. Indeed, just summarizing it like that makes clear that this is a rational attitude in many circumstances - because often/ usually things cannot be 'fixed' but we must just make the best of them.
Also, in the social world we humans inhabit, many of our most pressing problems are indeed social; therefore one of the best ways of 'fixing' a problem is to harmonize the peer group: to decide what we think about it.
*
Thus women will (I think) generally talk together to reach a consensus of the proper attitude to a situation; whether somebody (especially another woman) behaved well or badly - or perhaps whether they are a nice or nasty person; and will then create considerable social pressure to impose this collective view on other members of the group (especially other women).
If so, then this is an extremely important approach to social life, and a vital mechanism of behavioural regulation.
*
On the other hand; if things can be fixed, and need to be fixed...
When it is acknowledged that there are real differences, then a strength in one circumstance becomes a weakness in another - hence the (on average) functionality of complementarity.
*
If you haven't watched the (brilliant, acute, witty) short video "It's Not About the Nail" - then watch it:
http://www.jasonheadley.com/INATN.html
*
The above video captures a truth about women, from the perspective of men; and beyond this is the idea that men and women may be a lot more different, psychologically, than is currently assumed.
*
In fact, the null hypothesis is currently assumed - that men and women are the same unless proven different.
In practice this means that there is never-enough-evidence to prove, for sure, and without any possibility of alternative explanations - that men and women are different.
But they are: we know this! It is inbuilt, spontaneous, common sense knowledge.
*
What would be interesting to know is more about these differences.
In other words we should assume (because it is true) that men and women really are psychologically different, and then explore the nature of these differences.
*
For instance, why could it make sense for women to have that attitude caricatured in 'It's not about the nail'?
The way I would summarize this attitude is accepting that things-are-the-way-they-are (not trying to 'fix' them) and therefore focusing upon how people feel about things. Indeed, just summarizing it like that makes clear that this is a rational attitude in many circumstances - because often/ usually things cannot be 'fixed' but we must just make the best of them.
Also, in the social world we humans inhabit, many of our most pressing problems are indeed social; therefore one of the best ways of 'fixing' a problem is to harmonize the peer group: to decide what we think about it.
*
Thus women will (I think) generally talk together to reach a consensus of the proper attitude to a situation; whether somebody (especially another woman) behaved well or badly - or perhaps whether they are a nice or nasty person; and will then create considerable social pressure to impose this collective view on other members of the group (especially other women).
If so, then this is an extremely important approach to social life, and a vital mechanism of behavioural regulation.
*
On the other hand; if things can be fixed, and need to be fixed...
When it is acknowledged that there are real differences, then a strength in one circumstance becomes a weakness in another - hence the (on average) functionality of complementarity.
*
Friday, 2 September 2011
What does women's hair look like?
*
I have quite forgotten.
*
When I was a kid, dyed hair was rare: something done by young women trying to attract attention (the bleached 'platinum' blond) and the 'woman of a certain age' unconvincingly pretending to be younger than she was.
Hair dying was primitive, and dyed hair looked unnatural.
But hair is a naturally primary signal of attractiveness, an advertisement of health and youth. A healthy young woman's hair was her glory; a glory that lasted - like her youth - only a few years.
*
By my late teens there were also people (women and men, by then) who dyed their hair as a statement of tribal loyalty - punks and the like. The hair was deliberately non-natural, strange colours, striped etc.
But dying technology improved and it became possible to dye hair almost realistically (at a price). Soon every woman had dyed hair - old, middle aged and young.
Sometimes it was a realistic mimic of natural hair, sometimes a statement of loyalty, sometimes it was merely dyed...
*
To see natural hair has become a rare event - there is no more glory.
*
So, what were the original motivations for dying hair? Oh yes, to attract attention and to pretend to be younger.
What used to be rare motivations are now the norm.
We have shifted from asking: why do you dye your hair? (what are to trying to prove?), to why don't you dye your hair? (what are you trying to prove?).
*
But since young women conceal their glory by hair dye, and since many dyes look merely mousy and do not attract attention, the explanations do not cover the facts.
Universal hair dying is just another example of the susceptibility of women to peer pressure, and the ability of the mass media to simulate peer pressure.
Hence we get the phenomenon of fashion which is intrinsically meaningless in terms of its specific content, but deeply meaningful in terms of revealing of the emptiness - indeed self-loathing - of mainstream modern humans.
Fashion makes people uglify themselves (permanently and grossly in the case of tattoos and piercings), impair function, risk disease, repel those whom they would like to know, and work harder at jobs they hate (in order to pay for the fashions).
What cannot fashion make people do? - especially women.
*
So long as a person, a people, are enslaved by fashion - by a thing intrinsically meaningless, intrinsically harmful - then they are indeed slaves and little good can be expected from them.
If you are looking for hope - look to the unfashionable.
*
I have quite forgotten.
*
When I was a kid, dyed hair was rare: something done by young women trying to attract attention (the bleached 'platinum' blond) and the 'woman of a certain age' unconvincingly pretending to be younger than she was.
Hair dying was primitive, and dyed hair looked unnatural.
But hair is a naturally primary signal of attractiveness, an advertisement of health and youth. A healthy young woman's hair was her glory; a glory that lasted - like her youth - only a few years.
*
By my late teens there were also people (women and men, by then) who dyed their hair as a statement of tribal loyalty - punks and the like. The hair was deliberately non-natural, strange colours, striped etc.
But dying technology improved and it became possible to dye hair almost realistically (at a price). Soon every woman had dyed hair - old, middle aged and young.
Sometimes it was a realistic mimic of natural hair, sometimes a statement of loyalty, sometimes it was merely dyed...
*
To see natural hair has become a rare event - there is no more glory.
*
So, what were the original motivations for dying hair? Oh yes, to attract attention and to pretend to be younger.
What used to be rare motivations are now the norm.
We have shifted from asking: why do you dye your hair? (what are to trying to prove?), to why don't you dye your hair? (what are you trying to prove?).
*
But since young women conceal their glory by hair dye, and since many dyes look merely mousy and do not attract attention, the explanations do not cover the facts.
Universal hair dying is just another example of the susceptibility of women to peer pressure, and the ability of the mass media to simulate peer pressure.
Hence we get the phenomenon of fashion which is intrinsically meaningless in terms of its specific content, but deeply meaningful in terms of revealing of the emptiness - indeed self-loathing - of mainstream modern humans.
Fashion makes people uglify themselves (permanently and grossly in the case of tattoos and piercings), impair function, risk disease, repel those whom they would like to know, and work harder at jobs they hate (in order to pay for the fashions).
What cannot fashion make people do? - especially women.
*
So long as a person, a people, are enslaved by fashion - by a thing intrinsically meaningless, intrinsically harmful - then they are indeed slaves and little good can be expected from them.
If you are looking for hope - look to the unfashionable.
*
Saturday, 24 March 2012
The autistic extravert - reflections on extraversion and stimulants
*
Hans J Eysenck's personality trait of extraversion is typically measured by asking about sociability, but extraversion is not primarily about sociability: rather, it is an index of reliance upon external stimulus to maintain arousal.
(Introverts are internally aroused, hence do not 'need' other people so much, and so tend to be solitary.)
*
Effective external stimulus is usually social, because humans are social animals, but nowadays it can also be provided by reading, computer work, absorption in crafts etc.
Therefore, many autistic/ Asperger's type personalities should properly be classified as extraverted, because they require high levels of external stimulus.
However, because of their autistic tendency, social stimulus is not effective (because it is not interesting enough to them) and instead stimulus may be sought from TV, computer games, factual hobbies etc.
*
As David Healy has noted, many people with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) or ADD (attention deficit disorder) can be seen as extraverted, in the sense of needing environmental stimulation - and indeed there is much 'comorbidity' or overlap between autistic traits and ADHD/ ADD.
Yet people with ADHD may be relatively uninterested in social interaction or social exchange - and their extraversion may therefore be non-obvious.
*
Also, by this concept of extraversion, more women than men - indeed most women - are extraverted; because women orientate towards other women (real or a virtual peer group provided by the mass media) more than men (on average), and seek constant social inputs.
This applies even if women are shy and dislike crowds, parties etc.
Yet women and men usually come out as being of equal average extraversion when the extraversion personality rating scales focus on social activity - I think this happens because extraversion scales focus on sociability, and these questions about sociability are missing the essence of extraversion, which is not social.
*
I regard introversion as a rare trait - much rarer than extraversion. The distribution of extraversion-introversion in the population would not be normally distributed if it were properly measured.
Introversion is neither useful nor adaptive for ancestral hunter-gatherer societies (except perhaps of the occasional shaman) but is probably useful for many types of modern (industrial and post-industrial) society, where solitary and autonomous endeavour is necessary; for science, arts and crafts.
Introversion is also a necessity for effectively creative people - creative geniuses - and modern/ industrial society absolutely depends on the work of such people.
But introversion does not fit into an organizational context, because it is solitary, uninterested by other people, awkward, autonomous etc. Hence modern/ industrial society is killing itself by failing to use the unique and absolutely vital (for modern/ industrial society) contribution of introverts.
*
But introversion may also be pathological, due to low 'drive' or motivation.
A person may be solitary and self-contained not because they are internally stimulated, but because they 'can't be bothered', because they are un-rewarded by action, anhedonic.
And this may be a consequence of a range of diseases and disorders.
This could be either an innate deficit - perhaps hereditary, perhaps a gene mutation; due to infection or a post-infective state; come from mild/ early Parkinson's disease; or due to malaise from immune activation, catabolism (post operative, with cancer), or from chemotherapy; or be caused by anti-dopaminergic drugs, such as the neuroleptics/ antipsychotics, or SSRI 'antidepressants' (indirectly anti-dopaminergic).
Some cases of dependence on dopamine-boosting agents (such as nicotine, or stimulants) are therefore likely to be primarily examples of self-medication, rather than addiction.
*
But in general, I think it is extraverts that benefit functionally from stimulants (amphetmine, ritalin, caffeine, nicotine), since this provides them with an internal stimulus, making them more independent of their surroundings and better able to concentrate and focus on 'work'.
(This is the explanation of the apparent paradox - noticed back in the 1930s - that 'hyperactive' people - children and adults - are seemingly 'calmed' by stimulants such as amphetamines. They are not really 'calmed' but are made less distractible.)
*
And, as described before, pathological introverts may also benefit from stimulants because they need more drive and motivation: the stimulants treat their state of insufficient dopaminergic stimulation.
*
But natural introverts would probably find that stimulants were dysfunctional, making them somewhat manic, so internally-over-stimulated as to be out-of-touch with their surroundings.
*
I think it was Eysenck (again) that first noticed the almost opposite effects of stimulants on extraverts and introverts: 'calming' extraverts but making introverts jittery and 'hyper'...
Hans J Eysenck's personality trait of extraversion is typically measured by asking about sociability, but extraversion is not primarily about sociability: rather, it is an index of reliance upon external stimulus to maintain arousal.
(Introverts are internally aroused, hence do not 'need' other people so much, and so tend to be solitary.)
*
Effective external stimulus is usually social, because humans are social animals, but nowadays it can also be provided by reading, computer work, absorption in crafts etc.
Therefore, many autistic/ Asperger's type personalities should properly be classified as extraverted, because they require high levels of external stimulus.
However, because of their autistic tendency, social stimulus is not effective (because it is not interesting enough to them) and instead stimulus may be sought from TV, computer games, factual hobbies etc.
*
As David Healy has noted, many people with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) or ADD (attention deficit disorder) can be seen as extraverted, in the sense of needing environmental stimulation - and indeed there is much 'comorbidity' or overlap between autistic traits and ADHD/ ADD.
Yet people with ADHD may be relatively uninterested in social interaction or social exchange - and their extraversion may therefore be non-obvious.
*
Also, by this concept of extraversion, more women than men - indeed most women - are extraverted; because women orientate towards other women (real or a virtual peer group provided by the mass media) more than men (on average), and seek constant social inputs.
This applies even if women are shy and dislike crowds, parties etc.
Yet women and men usually come out as being of equal average extraversion when the extraversion personality rating scales focus on social activity - I think this happens because extraversion scales focus on sociability, and these questions about sociability are missing the essence of extraversion, which is not social.
*
I regard introversion as a rare trait - much rarer than extraversion. The distribution of extraversion-introversion in the population would not be normally distributed if it were properly measured.
Introversion is neither useful nor adaptive for ancestral hunter-gatherer societies (except perhaps of the occasional shaman) but is probably useful for many types of modern (industrial and post-industrial) society, where solitary and autonomous endeavour is necessary; for science, arts and crafts.
Introversion is also a necessity for effectively creative people - creative geniuses - and modern/ industrial society absolutely depends on the work of such people.
But introversion does not fit into an organizational context, because it is solitary, uninterested by other people, awkward, autonomous etc. Hence modern/ industrial society is killing itself by failing to use the unique and absolutely vital (for modern/ industrial society) contribution of introverts.
*
But introversion may also be pathological, due to low 'drive' or motivation.
A person may be solitary and self-contained not because they are internally stimulated, but because they 'can't be bothered', because they are un-rewarded by action, anhedonic.
And this may be a consequence of a range of diseases and disorders.
This could be either an innate deficit - perhaps hereditary, perhaps a gene mutation; due to infection or a post-infective state; come from mild/ early Parkinson's disease; or due to malaise from immune activation, catabolism (post operative, with cancer), or from chemotherapy; or be caused by anti-dopaminergic drugs, such as the neuroleptics/ antipsychotics, or SSRI 'antidepressants' (indirectly anti-dopaminergic).
Some cases of dependence on dopamine-boosting agents (such as nicotine, or stimulants) are therefore likely to be primarily examples of self-medication, rather than addiction.
*
But in general, I think it is extraverts that benefit functionally from stimulants (amphetmine, ritalin, caffeine, nicotine), since this provides them with an internal stimulus, making them more independent of their surroundings and better able to concentrate and focus on 'work'.
(This is the explanation of the apparent paradox - noticed back in the 1930s - that 'hyperactive' people - children and adults - are seemingly 'calmed' by stimulants such as amphetamines. They are not really 'calmed' but are made less distractible.)
*
And, as described before, pathological introverts may also benefit from stimulants because they need more drive and motivation: the stimulants treat their state of insufficient dopaminergic stimulation.
*
But natural introverts would probably find that stimulants were dysfunctional, making them somewhat manic, so internally-over-stimulated as to be out-of-touch with their surroundings.
*
I think it was Eysenck (again) that first noticed the almost opposite effects of stimulants on extraverts and introverts: 'calming' extraverts but making introverts jittery and 'hyper'...
Saturday, 30 January 2021
Self-mistrust is a root of modern Man's evil-subservient gullibility - Christianity the indispensable way-out from it
We are at a profoundly maladaptive stage in the degenerative pathology of modern consciousness; that is to say the Consciousness Soul - in which we experience our-selves as cut-off from the world and other people.
The subjective experience of the self now regards itself as a meaningless epiphenomenon, a free-spinning cog; with no access to reality, and no validity to its thoughts.
Therefore, people do not trust their own thinking, do not even trust their own powers of observation and reasoning. They doubt (to the point of paralysis) any conclusions that they may themselves reach - even about the simplest and most obvious of matters.
Yet people need to live - so lacking anything from-within (anything that they will believe, or can motivate them); they must by default respond to external guidance.
Consequently, modern people (especially women) have become almost wholly passive and dependent-upon external inputs of facts and values; which mostly come via mass and social media, and from 'official' institutional sources.
Women are most prone to this passivity and gullibility, since their evolved disposition is to rely on the peer group for life-guidance; and for motivating their behaviour.
(Or in practice they rely upon whatever modern simulacrum psychologically most-approximates the ancestral peer group: i.e. mass/ social media and the official consensus of those with power)
The desire to fit-in to the norms of this perceived peer group is very powerful - and when people are lacking any more powerful inner motivation it is overwhelming, irresistible; and people become incapable of learning from experience.
And as men have become much more behaviourally-feminized (apparently from many contributing reasons); men too have become increasingly helpless against their own perceived (but actually Establishment-manufactured) peer group motivations.
Consider the birdemic, or any other of the Big Lies such as climate change, antiracism or the sexual revolution. There is, in the first place, no reason At All to believe the mass Media, the official bureaucracy, the corporate PR, the international or national politicians - since they are known to be incompetent and have bad incentives.
On top of that; they are known habitual and extreme, grossly inconsistent and incoherent in their statements, and show zero capacity to evaluate the consequences of their policies or learn from experience.
Further; they have now all-but prevented (made impossible, punishable, illegal) all public dissent from the dishonest, manipulative gibberish they spout...
Yet the mass of the public cannot see this, cannot comprehend it, will not think about it, will not question it - and have shown an open-ended and apparently infinite capacity for zealous credulity. The masses regard whatever happen-to-be today's facts and theories as 100% good, true, vital and necessary.
What this means is that the typical, majority, modern Man ignores that which he knows from his own experience and by his own reasoning (which he believes to be worthless); and therefore, necessarily, thinks and does whatever the dominant external sources tell him to think and do - without limit and regardless of changes and contradictions in this external input.
This is exactly what we see everywhere around us in the world today.
It is therefore completely ineffective, therefore futile, to explain and show modern Man the arbitrary, dishonest, and inconsistent behaviour of the Global Establishment/ officialdom and the mass media - because that is an appeal to his own motivation to think, discern, reason and act upon the outcome. So, modern Man will believe powerful external authority regardless...
There is an answer; but it is religious and metaphysical. Modern Man must consciously choose (because that is what the Consciousness Soul requires) to believe in God; and specifically believe-in the Good creator God of Christianity, who is our divine Father - we his children...
And from this modern Man must come to understand and believe that his own thinking is potentially valid: and that his own best discernment of truth is the best possible motivation for life.
The best motivation - because he is a child of God, who shares in the divine; and the best because his loving God will provide specific and individual guidance for his life.
Only then can modern Man come to see-for-himself, think-for-himself, and learn from his experiences; and become sufficiently motivated to over-ride the external, pervasive, evil-seeking programming from the Global Establishment.
Sunday, 14 April 2019
The testosterone and Human Growth Hormone supplementation culture: "It will have to be paid for... and trouble will come of it"
It has become very popular for middle aged (and older) men to take male hormone supplements - testosterone or, by preference, human growth hormone (HGH).
Especially HGH (taken by injection) has a powerful effect of slimming, increasing mucle definition, and causing a 'rejuvination' in terms of drive and energy. Hence it has become all-but universal among mass media 'leading men' actors, stunt men - and more generally (I heard a local tradesman discussing his growth hormone usage in a cafe).
And for most people, the only 'problem' with HGH supplementation is the cost - about 40 dollars per day.
But as the Shire Hobbits said about Bilbo's apparently perpetual youth (after he obtained The Ring), when it comes to hormone supplementation the rule would seem to be: "It will have to be paid for... It isn't natural and trouble will come of it!"
I state this firstly on general evolutionary principles. Firstly, all masculinising ('androgenic') hormones tend to shorten life and increase the risk of many diseases, especially cancers. This is mostly why men are shorter lived than women.
In general, only those men who have the 'best' genes (least deleterious mutations) and are healthiest, can survive and thrive despite high levels of androgenic hormones. This is probably why the masculinised man is more physically attractive to women - under natural conditions, signs of masculinisation (and of higher male hormone levels) are a Honest Advertisement of genetic fitness.
This is a version of Zahavi's Handicap Principle - by successfully overcoming the health handicap of high testosterone, the male with good genes is able (honestly) to advertise his high quality.
Aside: In the natural world - indeed until the last few generations; the physical attractiveness of men to women was of only modest importance in terms of sex. Partly because sex was largely confined to marriage, marriages were mostly arranged and was a matter of survival; so economics was life and death.
So, absent modern corruption by the fake-peer-group of the mass media, most women are not that interested in men's looks.
The current cult of masculine attractiveness - body-building, hormone enhancement, shirtless selfie poses etc; and the attempted youthful appearance from fashion, hair dye and plastic surgery; seemingly comes from established practices in homosexual culture, spreading to affect men more generally.
Conversely, if a man with poor genetic fitness had high androgenic hormones, the average deleterious effect on his health and longevity would suffice to reduce his overall fitness. So genetically unfit men with excessive testosterone, for example, would leave behind fewer offspring, on average and under ancestral conditions.
So, a modern man who artificially enhances his masculine traits by taking androgenic supplements would be expected - on average - to reduce his reproductive success - due to health problems or early death.
(Unless modern conditions are sufficiently different from ancestral to negate this - and such may be the case. It is commonplace for modern people to survive for long periods with disorders and disabilities that used to be rapidly fatal. So androgenic supplements may make modern men less healthy, but this may not cause an increased mortality rate.)
We should, of course, note that mainstream modern men do not care about leaving behind viable offspring, and indeed generally try to avoid doing so. They (apparently) care only about having sex and not at all about reproduction. So a predicted reduction in average reproductive fitness does not matter to them; it would not affect their decision.
Another consideration is that you can't get something for nothing, and every advantage will have to be paid-for. Especially, you cannot boost a hormone and expect it to be overall beneficial.
After all, the human body is easily capable of secreting a lot more more testosterone or growth hormone than the average level. That would not be a problem.
If more testosterone, or GH was a clear benefit to a man, then why does not the body just secrete more of the hormone? The fact that it does not, implies that to do so would, overall, be a disadvantage. And this implies that androgenic hormone supplementation will produce a net disadvantage - one way or another.
But, again, modern secular men do not really care about the long term; and will typically do anything that benefits them here and now, and for the next few months. Their lives have no transcendental meaning, they believe their the soul does not exist, and that consciousness is extinguished at death.
The natural conclusion is that the sureness of a short and pleasurable life here-and-now outweighs any long term probabilities of harm.
It is also relatively a male feature to take opportunities of sex 'now', to be short-termist and promiscious about sex - because a man who has a lot of sex with a lot of women as a young man might (under ancestral conditions) be expected to out-reproduce the average man.
In principle, a short and sexually promiscous life could be reproductively beneficial to men - while being a disadvantage to women (who benefit more from having fewer genetically high quality offspring and rearing each optimally).
(Although the extremely high death rates of infants and children of 'single mothers' in tribal societies might negate this substantially or wholly - so promiscuous men might sire many children, but have no surviving offspring.)
In conclusion, on the whole, I would fully expect the use of masculinising sex hormone supplementation to be associated with significant long term harm to health and functionality, and a reduced lifespan.
But I recognise that - in a world of hedonic materialism - this fact cuts little or no ice.
In a world where there is no God and no consciousness beyond biological death; in a world where maximising pleasure and minimising suffering is the entire, bottom line, morality; then sex often becomes - by default - the most powerful motivator.
And any-thing that plausibly increases the probability of more sex with more - and more attractive - women; is likely to be popular among the mass of mainstream hedonic materialists; no matter what other problems it may cause.
Especially HGH (taken by injection) has a powerful effect of slimming, increasing mucle definition, and causing a 'rejuvination' in terms of drive and energy. Hence it has become all-but universal among mass media 'leading men' actors, stunt men - and more generally (I heard a local tradesman discussing his growth hormone usage in a cafe).
And for most people, the only 'problem' with HGH supplementation is the cost - about 40 dollars per day.
But as the Shire Hobbits said about Bilbo's apparently perpetual youth (after he obtained The Ring), when it comes to hormone supplementation the rule would seem to be: "It will have to be paid for... It isn't natural and trouble will come of it!"
I state this firstly on general evolutionary principles. Firstly, all masculinising ('androgenic') hormones tend to shorten life and increase the risk of many diseases, especially cancers. This is mostly why men are shorter lived than women.
In general, only those men who have the 'best' genes (least deleterious mutations) and are healthiest, can survive and thrive despite high levels of androgenic hormones. This is probably why the masculinised man is more physically attractive to women - under natural conditions, signs of masculinisation (and of higher male hormone levels) are a Honest Advertisement of genetic fitness.
This is a version of Zahavi's Handicap Principle - by successfully overcoming the health handicap of high testosterone, the male with good genes is able (honestly) to advertise his high quality.
Aside: In the natural world - indeed until the last few generations; the physical attractiveness of men to women was of only modest importance in terms of sex. Partly because sex was largely confined to marriage, marriages were mostly arranged and was a matter of survival; so economics was life and death.
So, absent modern corruption by the fake-peer-group of the mass media, most women are not that interested in men's looks.
The current cult of masculine attractiveness - body-building, hormone enhancement, shirtless selfie poses etc; and the attempted youthful appearance from fashion, hair dye and plastic surgery; seemingly comes from established practices in homosexual culture, spreading to affect men more generally.
Conversely, if a man with poor genetic fitness had high androgenic hormones, the average deleterious effect on his health and longevity would suffice to reduce his overall fitness. So genetically unfit men with excessive testosterone, for example, would leave behind fewer offspring, on average and under ancestral conditions.
So, a modern man who artificially enhances his masculine traits by taking androgenic supplements would be expected - on average - to reduce his reproductive success - due to health problems or early death.
(Unless modern conditions are sufficiently different from ancestral to negate this - and such may be the case. It is commonplace for modern people to survive for long periods with disorders and disabilities that used to be rapidly fatal. So androgenic supplements may make modern men less healthy, but this may not cause an increased mortality rate.)
We should, of course, note that mainstream modern men do not care about leaving behind viable offspring, and indeed generally try to avoid doing so. They (apparently) care only about having sex and not at all about reproduction. So a predicted reduction in average reproductive fitness does not matter to them; it would not affect their decision.
Another consideration is that you can't get something for nothing, and every advantage will have to be paid-for. Especially, you cannot boost a hormone and expect it to be overall beneficial.
After all, the human body is easily capable of secreting a lot more more testosterone or growth hormone than the average level. That would not be a problem.
If more testosterone, or GH was a clear benefit to a man, then why does not the body just secrete more of the hormone? The fact that it does not, implies that to do so would, overall, be a disadvantage. And this implies that androgenic hormone supplementation will produce a net disadvantage - one way or another.
But, again, modern secular men do not really care about the long term; and will typically do anything that benefits them here and now, and for the next few months. Their lives have no transcendental meaning, they believe their the soul does not exist, and that consciousness is extinguished at death.
The natural conclusion is that the sureness of a short and pleasurable life here-and-now outweighs any long term probabilities of harm.
It is also relatively a male feature to take opportunities of sex 'now', to be short-termist and promiscious about sex - because a man who has a lot of sex with a lot of women as a young man might (under ancestral conditions) be expected to out-reproduce the average man.
In principle, a short and sexually promiscous life could be reproductively beneficial to men - while being a disadvantage to women (who benefit more from having fewer genetically high quality offspring and rearing each optimally).
(Although the extremely high death rates of infants and children of 'single mothers' in tribal societies might negate this substantially or wholly - so promiscuous men might sire many children, but have no surviving offspring.)
In conclusion, on the whole, I would fully expect the use of masculinising sex hormone supplementation to be associated with significant long term harm to health and functionality, and a reduced lifespan.
But I recognise that - in a world of hedonic materialism - this fact cuts little or no ice.
In a world where there is no God and no consciousness beyond biological death; in a world where maximising pleasure and minimising suffering is the entire, bottom line, morality; then sex often becomes - by default - the most powerful motivator.
And any-thing that plausibly increases the probability of more sex with more - and more attractive - women; is likely to be popular among the mass of mainstream hedonic materialists; no matter what other problems it may cause.
Monday, 17 June 2019
How truth is both objective and subjective
Yesterday I described how men and women characteristically - but in different ways - tend to regard Truth in a passive and materialist sense, as being That Which Overwhelms. Men by the overwhelming of imposing force, women by the overwhelming of social (especially peer group) consensus.
But that is, of course, potentially to leave out the spiritual aspect of life - the divine aspect; since the overwhelming is mostly (women especially, but nearly always men too) done by 'other people'.
And so we have these 'operational definitions' of truth that are, in practice, very 'relativistic' - in the sense that if lots of people, or just a few powerful/ high status people, decide something - then we are naturally - at a materialist level - inclined passively to accept it as true.
As I say, this is truth as 'that which overwhelms'; such a truth 'comes from outside' each us us - we are 'victims' of truth. If that was all-there-is top truth (in practice) then there could be no truth - because consensus isn't truth, power isn't truth...
If there is to be truth at all - and if that truth is to be something we personally endorse, rather than being compelled to submit-to; then there must be a higher truth that is not psychological but objective; and active, not passive. Because if truth is merely the external coercing, and our-selves submitting - then it would not be something that we personally would want. We would be merely slaves to truth.
(Obviously!) on the other hand, truth can't be something we make-up for ourselves - as a kind of wishful thinking.
Yet for most people these are the only choices - truth is either seen as that which is imposed (which in practice is usually 'other people'), or whatever-I-say (which is truth-as-delusion, since truth is private and unique).
In sum - these are demonic views of truth - with the choice being submission or pride, a hierarchy of coercion - we submit to the truths of those more powerful, and impose our own truth upon those whom we can dominate: i.e. the hierarchy of Hell.
This is another argument for the Goodness of Final Participation. That the truth that is Good, the truth which Saves, the truth which brings us towards being ourselves gods in harmony with the purposes of God - all these are the truth of Participation. They are voluntary truths in the sense that the truth is God's creation, we choose to endorse the purpose and nature of that creation, and because of love we joining our-selves to that ongoing work of creation.
So truth is not compelled but chosen - hence subjective; and truth is also objective and not just a figment of my mind, but has universality. And truth is mine, because I contribute to it; and truth is for anybody else who also chooses the heavenly life of collaborating in the work of creation.
But that is, of course, potentially to leave out the spiritual aspect of life - the divine aspect; since the overwhelming is mostly (women especially, but nearly always men too) done by 'other people'.
And so we have these 'operational definitions' of truth that are, in practice, very 'relativistic' - in the sense that if lots of people, or just a few powerful/ high status people, decide something - then we are naturally - at a materialist level - inclined passively to accept it as true.
As I say, this is truth as 'that which overwhelms'; such a truth 'comes from outside' each us us - we are 'victims' of truth. If that was all-there-is top truth (in practice) then there could be no truth - because consensus isn't truth, power isn't truth...
If there is to be truth at all - and if that truth is to be something we personally endorse, rather than being compelled to submit-to; then there must be a higher truth that is not psychological but objective; and active, not passive. Because if truth is merely the external coercing, and our-selves submitting - then it would not be something that we personally would want. We would be merely slaves to truth.
(Obviously!) on the other hand, truth can't be something we make-up for ourselves - as a kind of wishful thinking.
Yet for most people these are the only choices - truth is either seen as that which is imposed (which in practice is usually 'other people'), or whatever-I-say (which is truth-as-delusion, since truth is private and unique).
In sum - these are demonic views of truth - with the choice being submission or pride, a hierarchy of coercion - we submit to the truths of those more powerful, and impose our own truth upon those whom we can dominate: i.e. the hierarchy of Hell.
This is another argument for the Goodness of Final Participation. That the truth that is Good, the truth which Saves, the truth which brings us towards being ourselves gods in harmony with the purposes of God - all these are the truth of Participation. They are voluntary truths in the sense that the truth is God's creation, we choose to endorse the purpose and nature of that creation, and because of love we joining our-selves to that ongoing work of creation.
So truth is not compelled but chosen - hence subjective; and truth is also objective and not just a figment of my mind, but has universality. And truth is mine, because I contribute to it; and truth is for anybody else who also chooses the heavenly life of collaborating in the work of creation.
Thursday, 20 June 2019
Why was 1960s style hedonic sexual individualism abandoned?
It is easy to get distracted and misled by the fact that the sexual revolution began (mid 1960s) with an explicit assertion of the 'rights' of individuals to 'do whatever they wanted with whoever/ whatever they wanted' - the principle of open-ended and impulsive hedonism. Free love etc. - with an emphasis on extreme heterosexual promiscuity (because that is what most men 'want' at the purely-hedonic level).
The 'problem' was to persuade most women that they wanted it too. And in practice this required social indoctrination (by the fake female peer group of the mass media) and liberal usage of alcohol and drugs, and engineered pro-promiscuous social situations.
Most people fail to recognise that this ultra-libertarian and individualist 'let it all hang out', 'follow your dreams and impulses' spirit has long since been replaced by something very different in spirit: something collective, bureaucratic, totalitarian.
Perhaps the feminists began it with the slogan and idea: The personal is political.
This, unnoticed at the time, was a repudiation and reversal of carefree, individualist hedonism - and the assertion that all thought and actions (including sexual) were primarily political, hence collective, statements. At exactly this point - and, significantly, under the explicit guidance of women - began the assertion that The System had the authority, right and power to take-over sexuality.
Nowadays, the realm of sex and sexuality has been drained of hedonic significance and become a realm of earnest and hectoring political monitoring, propaganda and control - in an inverted morality by which sexual acts, including their discussion, are the primary theme used to enforce a top-down, collective ethos.
To be included in the totalitarian system, sex must be made explicit and universally discussed. But - as everyone feels and knows - the realm of sex is thereby enslaved to that system. When everything is shared socially and officially, and when that social and official realm has been absorbed into the social control system (with rewards, threats, sanctions) - we have what we recognise as modern reality of the sexual revolution.
60's sexuality was always a 'stalking horse' - a fake policy, a temporary battering ram for use against the 'repressive' Christian churches, behind which the real (global establishment) agenda was advanced.
Nowadays, the pro-impulsive sixties ethos is merely exploited as a lure (e.g. in pop videos, adverts and similar), to get people interested, to get them pro-sexual revolution with the promise of pleasure; before the transition into top-down, bureaucratic totalitarianism; where sex and sexuality becomes a controlled, symbolic demonstration of everybody's subordination to The System.
Note: For the sex n drugs n rock-and-roll generation, the sexual revolution has been a classic example of 'bait and switch'. They began as selfish, hedonic rebels; and ended as titled and awarded chairmen of bureaucracies encouraging/ celebrating/ imposing ever more laws, procedures and codes-of-practice and crushing all freedom and pleasure in the name of 'diversity' and 'inclusion'. Their always-evil-motivations are clearly revealed by the fact that so very few of them have chosen to refuse this trajectory, or even to acknowledge the U-turn in the sexual revolution. The few that have done so tend to be notorious and vilified - Camille Paglia is an example, who apparently remained an unreconstrcted 60s radical, and denied/ was refused the Establishment plaudits of her contemporaries. The System has attempted to crush her more than once, and currently.
Further Note: I refrained from the use of the (handy) Steiner nomenclature; but I am obviously describing the way that a brief Luciferic hedonic anti-System sexual revolution in the 1960s; fed-into a prolonged Ahrimanic phase (still ongoing) in which the sexual revolution is primarily a series of excuses for more bureaucracy, hence further extension and tightening of the totalitarian System. The trajectory from anti-System to Pro-System - and many individuals undergo this exact same trajectory in their own personal development - because without God The System is inevitable and supreme as the only societal source of meaning and purpose - so being anti-System is ultimately futile, and Lucifer always leads to Ahriman.
The 'problem' was to persuade most women that they wanted it too. And in practice this required social indoctrination (by the fake female peer group of the mass media) and liberal usage of alcohol and drugs, and engineered pro-promiscuous social situations.
Most people fail to recognise that this ultra-libertarian and individualist 'let it all hang out', 'follow your dreams and impulses' spirit has long since been replaced by something very different in spirit: something collective, bureaucratic, totalitarian.
Perhaps the feminists began it with the slogan and idea: The personal is political.
This, unnoticed at the time, was a repudiation and reversal of carefree, individualist hedonism - and the assertion that all thought and actions (including sexual) were primarily political, hence collective, statements. At exactly this point - and, significantly, under the explicit guidance of women - began the assertion that The System had the authority, right and power to take-over sexuality.
Nowadays, the realm of sex and sexuality has been drained of hedonic significance and become a realm of earnest and hectoring political monitoring, propaganda and control - in an inverted morality by which sexual acts, including their discussion, are the primary theme used to enforce a top-down, collective ethos.
To be included in the totalitarian system, sex must be made explicit and universally discussed. But - as everyone feels and knows - the realm of sex is thereby enslaved to that system. When everything is shared socially and officially, and when that social and official realm has been absorbed into the social control system (with rewards, threats, sanctions) - we have what we recognise as modern reality of the sexual revolution.
60's sexuality was always a 'stalking horse' - a fake policy, a temporary battering ram for use against the 'repressive' Christian churches, behind which the real (global establishment) agenda was advanced.
Nowadays, the pro-impulsive sixties ethos is merely exploited as a lure (e.g. in pop videos, adverts and similar), to get people interested, to get them pro-sexual revolution with the promise of pleasure; before the transition into top-down, bureaucratic totalitarianism; where sex and sexuality becomes a controlled, symbolic demonstration of everybody's subordination to The System.
Note: For the sex n drugs n rock-and-roll generation, the sexual revolution has been a classic example of 'bait and switch'. They began as selfish, hedonic rebels; and ended as titled and awarded chairmen of bureaucracies encouraging/ celebrating/ imposing ever more laws, procedures and codes-of-practice and crushing all freedom and pleasure in the name of 'diversity' and 'inclusion'. Their always-evil-motivations are clearly revealed by the fact that so very few of them have chosen to refuse this trajectory, or even to acknowledge the U-turn in the sexual revolution. The few that have done so tend to be notorious and vilified - Camille Paglia is an example, who apparently remained an unreconstrcted 60s radical, and denied/ was refused the Establishment plaudits of her contemporaries. The System has attempted to crush her more than once, and currently.
Further Note: I refrained from the use of the (handy) Steiner nomenclature; but I am obviously describing the way that a brief Luciferic hedonic anti-System sexual revolution in the 1960s; fed-into a prolonged Ahrimanic phase (still ongoing) in which the sexual revolution is primarily a series of excuses for more bureaucracy, hence further extension and tightening of the totalitarian System. The trajectory from anti-System to Pro-System - and many individuals undergo this exact same trajectory in their own personal development - because without God The System is inevitable and supreme as the only societal source of meaning and purpose - so being anti-System is ultimately futile, and Lucifer always leads to Ahriman.
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