Progressivism is quite literally a fake ideology - it can only thrive in a fake environment. As soon as something real happens, progressivism evaporates. If progressivism is present, it means it is fake and you are living a lie.
That being said, what can we infer about the moral character of people who chose to live in a natural way ahead of time as opposed to people who live in delusion until something bad happens?
I am reminded of a wonderful quote I saved years ago from First Things’ book review of “The Children of Men”:
“This question leads us to one of James’ most intriguing and subtly developed themes: the uselessness of liberal theology in a time of profound crisis. Christian theological liberalism has typically discarded orthodox eschatology in favor of a mild and essentially secular meliorism. But when people are faced with the apparent extinction of the human species, the belief in moral and material progress that undergirds such meliorism becomes, to say the least, untenable.”
Progressivism is a death-cult. They attempt to destroy all that is in human nature for the sake of engineered dogma and hedonism. It's a self-destructive extremism that exalts the whim of the individual as gospel and human civilization as, at best, a throwaway project.
Sounds similar to season two of The Island. In season one a bunch of carefully selected men were dropped on a desert island and put through an extremely tough survival experience. They got to swim ashore with just a jerry can and a few other misc objects. The only food on the island was plants and some crocodiles. At the end of the season they were starved and had to be re-introduced to food carefully. Nonetheless, they survived.
After this proved popular, feminists complained that it wasn't fair women were excluded. So in season 2 the organizer (Bear Grylls) decided to troll them by creating a second team on a different island that consisted exclusively of women. Needless to say, hilarity ensued.
The men rapidly formed a cohesive team with a leader, set up a water purification mechanism with their jerry cans, and hunted down crocodiles that they then used for meat. One of them found a net and was able to untangle it, eventually setting up what amounted to a fish farm - much to the amazement of the other men, who had very much doubted what he was doing and had been getting annoyed that he was apparently shirking his duties.
The women immediately split up, got lost, and one of them nearly died of dehydration. They failed to organize any leader meaning every decision was constantly debated. They failed to hunt any food, although suddenly two fat tame piglets turned up on their beach (i.e. the producers bailed them out). So naturally they refused to kill the cute piggies and adopted them as pets instead, then left them behind when moving to a different beach. By this point they were starving and on the road to death so a random "local fisherman" turns up on a boat and offers a couple of the girls a free fish, they go back to camp and say "we caught a fish". And so on. They were so dumb they often failed to pick up on the help they were being given by the producers (in contravention of the show's own rules).
The entire thing was horrifically embarrassing for the feminist worldview. The women weren't random, the show was a serious survival show and had been selected for their likelihood to do well, as well as given special survival training.
Several characteristics shone through:
1. The women were much lazier than the men e.g. some of them just go sleep on the beach for a while, whilst the men worked dawn till deep in the night in order to find food, water, build their camp etc.
2. They were disorganized. Time was valuable but they spent a lot of it just talking or arguing instead of making decisions. They were also remarkably unintelligent, regularly doing things guaranteed to result in swift death.
3. The women didn't take it seriously. They clearly knew the male producers wouldn't let them fail too badly and came to rely on that. At several points the (male) doctor monitoring them via the radio had to spell out to them what they had to do to survive (e.g. go find the jerry can they'd thrown away).
4. They were dishonest. Despite knowing they were ON CAMERA and thus everyone would eventually find out, the ladies didn't hesitate to lie to each other (and as a group).
Anyone who watches that show obtains a visceral understanding of how classical gender roles appeared; quite simply, if the men didn't take control and tell the women what to do, the women would all immediately have died.
To be fair, I do think that modern progressivism is partially responsible for the women being so incompetent and so arrogant about their own abilities. You take a woman from the year 1100 and say "let's put you in a place where you need to survive with 10 other women and no men" and she'd tell you to shove it up your ass.
Any woman who says she doesn’t need a man, has clearly never attempted to field dress, let alone butcher, a deer by themselves or even with another female. And our hill country deer are small compared to those in the rest of the country. So, to these raging feminists, I say, bitch please. Get out in nature where your meat isn’t in plastic wrap and then get back to me on that one. This goes for the man-bun wearing yahoos too.
Now, let’s not let the guys off the hook totally- most likely to die in the backcountry are young males that hike solo. So your girl might keep you from doing something stupid.
As an aside- I typically hate working with other women. I would much rather work with men. Men are on task, while most women (and soyboys) are busy gossiping and plotting how to backstab you. Usually it’s because they lack intelligence, which I attribute to eating disorders being common in females in high school. They starve themselves while their brains are still developing and the lack of nutrients really impacts their intelligence level.
Reading this like: Yes. Yes. Thank you. When all is stripped away, and humans are contending with surviving or not surviving, it automatically goes back to what works best: women, home, preparing the food, taking care of the children (really, really important jobs, even if you have an evolutionary mindset--no survival of the children, no survival of the species), while the man goes out to earn/hunt/collect food.
In a society run completely by women, I argue nothing would ever be done or built. Women would spend time in endless committees and town halls, trying to make sure everyone voiced their perspective, and that every angle was considered.
While these things are important, in disaster, famine, or war, quick decisions are necessary. Men have the kind of brain that allows them to focus on a single item and make it happen. What is top priority here? What do we do to fix it?
A lot of women--including me--actually thrive on multitasking. We can watch children, cook dinner, and clean the house (and read political news or societal commentaries) almost simultaneously. My husband would have a conniption.
If you come at this from a Biblical perspective, it makes sense. Men and women were designed to complete and complement each other, not to be interchangeable. No matter how much the feminists sound off, I will never believe that women and men are the same, or that either of them are unnecessary. You can see this in a good relationship or marriage where the couple has a healthy respect for each other, absolute differences, and they have learned how to work as a team (sometimes over many turbulent decades) to accomplish amazing things.
While good men with good wives will listen to their wives, at the end of the day they have to step up and make a call. Remember when we used to mock men who were "hen-pecked"? or laugh at some poor fellow because "she wears the pants"? We all recognize that this is dysfunctional, a man who has no conviction or decisiveness is not to be commended. Unless you live in feminist la-la land, I guess.
Here, in ranch country where I live, we are not so disconnected from nature and the land to fall into this trap. We can see the biological differences ourselves, and most people hold traditional roles. I think we are blessed to understand what it takes to survive, and if disaster hit us, we would fare better because we wouldn't have to first wrestle with true gender roles that suddenly shattered our entire worldview.
It's almost as if women and men evolved complementary characteristics that helped them mutually survive in harsh ancestral environments. It's almost as if gender ideology is a luxury of an advanced industrial civilization whose members are sheltered from elemental realities by modern comforts, conveniences, and social structures.
With three young kids it’s hard to deny. If we lost our home and needed to rebuild it would be my husband and the other men fending off the beasts and putting roofs over our heads, whereas the women would be trying to figure out how to feed each other’s children. How could it be any other way? What’s the alternative, I’m laying down pipes and working on sewage while wearing a baby and my toddlers scream for me? Would I nurse my baby while putting up a roof?
I also love the observation about extended family. I have no siblings and one reason I have so many kids is that I want my *grandkids* to have first cousins (my children don’t have any cousins on my husband’s side either. Small family size problem. His sister is single and childfree). And my great grandchildren to have second cousins and great aunts and uncles. Without such relationships there is no clan.
This shows that even seemingly weak family ties can prove crucial in hard times, whereas friends you see everyday can be unreliable.
This is a good example of why I don’t think you can change the true believers. They see evidence daily of reality and still continue on an obviously idiotic ideology. The thing I don’t get is how are these progressive women really benefiting from this nonsense? Now they get to work and clean the house and pay the bills and raise the kids? Did they really want an email job this badly?!
The baseline reality of human sexual dimorphism is somehow controversial these days. Overwhelming evidence of its existence notwithstanding.
Most of us get that there are legit exceptions. But for all of the envelope pushing and ceiling breaking in regard to traditional sex roles, the Annie Oakleys of the world are a rare thing.
There are also plenty of so-called "gendered roles" that really had no business being assigned as gendered roles in the first place, like the tasks of cooking and cleaning.
But when the neighborhood is on fire, the natural baseline of traditional dimorphic sex rules has a way of showing up in obvious and bold relief to sort things out, for the mutual benefit of all concerned in the community. As is fitting and proper.
Female anthropologist devalues traditional women’s roles. Instead she could have noted how providing basic daily needs was the glue that held the family together. Both male and female roles were crucial.
The utopia they desire is worthy enough, but they have lost the knowledge that utopia is out of our reach because we cannot and are not meant to acheive it by ourselves.
A branch of anthropology with highly dubious merits that one might say is likely useless at best and subversive and destructive at worst finally found a practitioner who produced a work of tremendous value. It is an incredible confession of both the value of high agency men and the spite their agency is greeted with by this sub-discipline's insufferable practitioners.
I think one could write a good treatise using this paper as a foundation along with some good research. "How Robbing Men of Agency Through Female Disparagement Of High Agency Action Leads To Spikes in Deaths of Despair."
Community solidarity was inspiring too, in Lake Charles in 2020, after our hurricanes and flash flood. The conclusion I drew from the experience was that people instinctively knew what they had to do to survive a trauma. Let people talk, as a way of processing the trauma. I experienced first-hand something I had read about with respect to kids trying to recover from childhood abuse and trauma.
"People who haven’t been through a comparable trauma, don’t really understand what you’re going through. They may try. But honestly, they don’t get it. “You only had three inches of water in your house.” But when you’re watching the water rise, and it’s still raining, you don’t know that it is going to be “only” three inches. During that waiting period, people perceive their lives to be at risk, because they are.
Likewise, well-meaning people will sometimes say to childhood sex abuse survivors: “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” “Do we really have to keep talking about this?” “Can’t you just forgive and forget and move on with your life?” Well, no, actually, they can’t exactly move on, until they truly deal with it.
Where I live, chatting about natural disasters has become a standard topic of conversation. People ask, “How did your house do?” And then they listen respectfully to the answer, pretty much as long as the other person wants to talk. People don’t get uncomfortable and try to end the conversation, the way they might when someone can’t stop talking about their latest surgery.
I had very similar conversations with the produce manager at the supermarket, with my friends after church, and with nurses in New Orleans who survived Hurricane Katrina 15 years ago. Everyone instinctively gives their fellow survivors a whole lot of space, and time, and attention. I guess we intuit that these conversations are necessary and constructive, not self-absorbed and destructive."
The current hot house arrangement of de-feminized women and de-masculinized men cannot withstand hard shocks from external reality. Such shocks will inevitably occur. Good post. The article looks like it is worth reading for the details. Thanks for posting.
UPDATE: Humorously, a moment of research discloses this bibliographic information: “Hoffman, S. M. (1999). The regenesis of traditional gender patterns in the wake of disaster. In A. Oliver-Smith, & S. M. Hoffman (Eds.), The angry earth: Disaster in anthropological perspective (pp. 174-191). New York: Routledge.” A further moment of research through my own email traffic discloses that I bought this book in July of 2022 as part of the research for my own book. So, I have this article at home. Looking forward to looking at it tonight!
This may have already been said in a prior comment but I wonder how much Berkeley and Oakland being highly secular enclaves had to do with the lack of communal solidarity. I live in a relatively highly religious region of the US and it’d be almost shameful for the larger community to not come out in droves in support of one another during a disaster. Obviously kin would be primary, but I’ve witnessed firsthand an outpouring of concern for the wellbeing of others in this region. This could perhaps be less true in the city centers though.
In 2020 in Lake Charles, we had two hurricanes and a flash flood. Gender roles asserted themselves, for sure. The difference between us in Louisiana and the feminists in Berkeley is that we had no problem embracing them. I'm grateful to the men. I even made a little video about it, to record how I felt at the time. The part about gender roles is around the 7:40 minute mark. https://www.facebook.com/TheRuthInstitute/videos/316496949564276
Progressivism is quite literally a fake ideology - it can only thrive in a fake environment. As soon as something real happens, progressivism evaporates. If progressivism is present, it means it is fake and you are living a lie.
That being said, what can we infer about the moral character of people who chose to live in a natural way ahead of time as opposed to people who live in delusion until something bad happens?
I am reminded of a wonderful quote I saved years ago from First Things’ book review of “The Children of Men”:
“This question leads us to one of James’ most intriguing and subtly developed themes: the uselessness of liberal theology in a time of profound crisis. Christian theological liberalism has typically discarded orthodox eschatology in favor of a mild and essentially secular meliorism. But when people are faced with the apparent extinction of the human species, the belief in moral and material progress that undergirds such meliorism becomes, to say the least, untenable.”
I expect this is not too far off so will be interesting to see what happens.
A lot of people stay stuck in their delusions even after something bad happens!
A sign of truly atrocious moral character.
Progressivism is a death-cult. They attempt to destroy all that is in human nature for the sake of engineered dogma and hedonism. It's a self-destructive extremism that exalts the whim of the individual as gospel and human civilization as, at best, a throwaway project.
Sounds similar to season two of The Island. In season one a bunch of carefully selected men were dropped on a desert island and put through an extremely tough survival experience. They got to swim ashore with just a jerry can and a few other misc objects. The only food on the island was plants and some crocodiles. At the end of the season they were starved and had to be re-introduced to food carefully. Nonetheless, they survived.
After this proved popular, feminists complained that it wasn't fair women were excluded. So in season 2 the organizer (Bear Grylls) decided to troll them by creating a second team on a different island that consisted exclusively of women. Needless to say, hilarity ensued.
The men rapidly formed a cohesive team with a leader, set up a water purification mechanism with their jerry cans, and hunted down crocodiles that they then used for meat. One of them found a net and was able to untangle it, eventually setting up what amounted to a fish farm - much to the amazement of the other men, who had very much doubted what he was doing and had been getting annoyed that he was apparently shirking his duties.
The women immediately split up, got lost, and one of them nearly died of dehydration. They failed to organize any leader meaning every decision was constantly debated. They failed to hunt any food, although suddenly two fat tame piglets turned up on their beach (i.e. the producers bailed them out). So naturally they refused to kill the cute piggies and adopted them as pets instead, then left them behind when moving to a different beach. By this point they were starving and on the road to death so a random "local fisherman" turns up on a boat and offers a couple of the girls a free fish, they go back to camp and say "we caught a fish". And so on. They were so dumb they often failed to pick up on the help they were being given by the producers (in contravention of the show's own rules).
The entire thing was horrifically embarrassing for the feminist worldview. The women weren't random, the show was a serious survival show and had been selected for their likelihood to do well, as well as given special survival training.
Several characteristics shone through:
1. The women were much lazier than the men e.g. some of them just go sleep on the beach for a while, whilst the men worked dawn till deep in the night in order to find food, water, build their camp etc.
2. They were disorganized. Time was valuable but they spent a lot of it just talking or arguing instead of making decisions. They were also remarkably unintelligent, regularly doing things guaranteed to result in swift death.
3. The women didn't take it seriously. They clearly knew the male producers wouldn't let them fail too badly and came to rely on that. At several points the (male) doctor monitoring them via the radio had to spell out to them what they had to do to survive (e.g. go find the jerry can they'd thrown away).
4. They were dishonest. Despite knowing they were ON CAMERA and thus everyone would eventually find out, the ladies didn't hesitate to lie to each other (and as a group).
Anyone who watches that show obtains a visceral understanding of how classical gender roles appeared; quite simply, if the men didn't take control and tell the women what to do, the women would all immediately have died.
To be fair, I do think that modern progressivism is partially responsible for the women being so incompetent and so arrogant about their own abilities. You take a woman from the year 1100 and say "let's put you in a place where you need to survive with 10 other women and no men" and she'd tell you to shove it up your ass.
Any woman who says she doesn’t need a man, has clearly never attempted to field dress, let alone butcher, a deer by themselves or even with another female. And our hill country deer are small compared to those in the rest of the country. So, to these raging feminists, I say, bitch please. Get out in nature where your meat isn’t in plastic wrap and then get back to me on that one. This goes for the man-bun wearing yahoos too.
Now, let’s not let the guys off the hook totally- most likely to die in the backcountry are young males that hike solo. So your girl might keep you from doing something stupid.
As an aside- I typically hate working with other women. I would much rather work with men. Men are on task, while most women (and soyboys) are busy gossiping and plotting how to backstab you. Usually it’s because they lack intelligence, which I attribute to eating disorders being common in females in high school. They starve themselves while their brains are still developing and the lack of nutrients really impacts their intelligence level.
Borderline psychotic the amount of cognitive dissonance these people have. This was a good read.
Reading this like: Yes. Yes. Thank you. When all is stripped away, and humans are contending with surviving or not surviving, it automatically goes back to what works best: women, home, preparing the food, taking care of the children (really, really important jobs, even if you have an evolutionary mindset--no survival of the children, no survival of the species), while the man goes out to earn/hunt/collect food.
In a society run completely by women, I argue nothing would ever be done or built. Women would spend time in endless committees and town halls, trying to make sure everyone voiced their perspective, and that every angle was considered.
While these things are important, in disaster, famine, or war, quick decisions are necessary. Men have the kind of brain that allows them to focus on a single item and make it happen. What is top priority here? What do we do to fix it?
A lot of women--including me--actually thrive on multitasking. We can watch children, cook dinner, and clean the house (and read political news or societal commentaries) almost simultaneously. My husband would have a conniption.
If you come at this from a Biblical perspective, it makes sense. Men and women were designed to complete and complement each other, not to be interchangeable. No matter how much the feminists sound off, I will never believe that women and men are the same, or that either of them are unnecessary. You can see this in a good relationship or marriage where the couple has a healthy respect for each other, absolute differences, and they have learned how to work as a team (sometimes over many turbulent decades) to accomplish amazing things.
While good men with good wives will listen to their wives, at the end of the day they have to step up and make a call. Remember when we used to mock men who were "hen-pecked"? or laugh at some poor fellow because "she wears the pants"? We all recognize that this is dysfunctional, a man who has no conviction or decisiveness is not to be commended. Unless you live in feminist la-la land, I guess.
Here, in ranch country where I live, we are not so disconnected from nature and the land to fall into this trap. We can see the biological differences ourselves, and most people hold traditional roles. I think we are blessed to understand what it takes to survive, and if disaster hit us, we would fare better because we wouldn't have to first wrestle with true gender roles that suddenly shattered our entire worldview.
It's almost as if women and men evolved complementary characteristics that helped them mutually survive in harsh ancestral environments. It's almost as if gender ideology is a luxury of an advanced industrial civilization whose members are sheltered from elemental realities by modern comforts, conveniences, and social structures.
That's some pretty good blurt and blather.
Thank you kindly.
With three young kids it’s hard to deny. If we lost our home and needed to rebuild it would be my husband and the other men fending off the beasts and putting roofs over our heads, whereas the women would be trying to figure out how to feed each other’s children. How could it be any other way? What’s the alternative, I’m laying down pipes and working on sewage while wearing a baby and my toddlers scream for me? Would I nurse my baby while putting up a roof?
I also love the observation about extended family. I have no siblings and one reason I have so many kids is that I want my *grandkids* to have first cousins (my children don’t have any cousins on my husband’s side either. Small family size problem. His sister is single and childfree). And my great grandchildren to have second cousins and great aunts and uncles. Without such relationships there is no clan.
This shows that even seemingly weak family ties can prove crucial in hard times, whereas friends you see everyday can be unreliable.
This is a good example of why I don’t think you can change the true believers. They see evidence daily of reality and still continue on an obviously idiotic ideology. The thing I don’t get is how are these progressive women really benefiting from this nonsense? Now they get to work and clean the house and pay the bills and raise the kids? Did they really want an email job this badly?!
The baseline reality of human sexual dimorphism is somehow controversial these days. Overwhelming evidence of its existence notwithstanding.
Most of us get that there are legit exceptions. But for all of the envelope pushing and ceiling breaking in regard to traditional sex roles, the Annie Oakleys of the world are a rare thing.
There are also plenty of so-called "gendered roles" that really had no business being assigned as gendered roles in the first place, like the tasks of cooking and cleaning.
But when the neighborhood is on fire, the natural baseline of traditional dimorphic sex rules has a way of showing up in obvious and bold relief to sort things out, for the mutual benefit of all concerned in the community. As is fitting and proper.
Excellent. An evisceration, but done skillfully, like a caring surgeon.
Welcome to leftism, where resilience is brutality and basic division of labor is oppression.
Female anthropologist devalues traditional women’s roles. Instead she could have noted how providing basic daily needs was the glue that held the family together. Both male and female roles were crucial.
The utopia they desire is worthy enough, but they have lost the knowledge that utopia is out of our reach because we cannot and are not meant to acheive it by ourselves.
A branch of anthropology with highly dubious merits that one might say is likely useless at best and subversive and destructive at worst finally found a practitioner who produced a work of tremendous value. It is an incredible confession of both the value of high agency men and the spite their agency is greeted with by this sub-discipline's insufferable practitioners.
I think one could write a good treatise using this paper as a foundation along with some good research. "How Robbing Men of Agency Through Female Disparagement Of High Agency Action Leads To Spikes in Deaths of Despair."
Community solidarity was inspiring too, in Lake Charles in 2020, after our hurricanes and flash flood. The conclusion I drew from the experience was that people instinctively knew what they had to do to survive a trauma. Let people talk, as a way of processing the trauma. I experienced first-hand something I had read about with respect to kids trying to recover from childhood abuse and trauma.
"People who haven’t been through a comparable trauma, don’t really understand what you’re going through. They may try. But honestly, they don’t get it. “You only had three inches of water in your house.” But when you’re watching the water rise, and it’s still raining, you don’t know that it is going to be “only” three inches. During that waiting period, people perceive their lives to be at risk, because they are.
Likewise, well-meaning people will sometimes say to childhood sex abuse survivors: “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” “Do we really have to keep talking about this?” “Can’t you just forgive and forget and move on with your life?” Well, no, actually, they can’t exactly move on, until they truly deal with it.
Where I live, chatting about natural disasters has become a standard topic of conversation. People ask, “How did your house do?” And then they listen respectfully to the answer, pretty much as long as the other person wants to talk. People don’t get uncomfortable and try to end the conversation, the way they might when someone can’t stop talking about their latest surgery.
I had very similar conversations with the produce manager at the supermarket, with my friends after church, and with nurses in New Orleans who survived Hurricane Katrina 15 years ago. Everyone instinctively gives their fellow survivors a whole lot of space, and time, and attention. I guess we intuit that these conversations are necessary and constructive, not self-absorbed and destructive."
https://www.ncregister.com/commentaries/survival-mode-flash-floods-trauma-and-childhood-sexual-abuse
Sounds like a good article.
The current hot house arrangement of de-feminized women and de-masculinized men cannot withstand hard shocks from external reality. Such shocks will inevitably occur. Good post. The article looks like it is worth reading for the details. Thanks for posting.
UPDATE: Humorously, a moment of research discloses this bibliographic information: “Hoffman, S. M. (1999). The regenesis of traditional gender patterns in the wake of disaster. In A. Oliver-Smith, & S. M. Hoffman (Eds.), The angry earth: Disaster in anthropological perspective (pp. 174-191). New York: Routledge.” A further moment of research through my own email traffic discloses that I bought this book in July of 2022 as part of the research for my own book. So, I have this article at home. Looking forward to looking at it tonight!
This may have already been said in a prior comment but I wonder how much Berkeley and Oakland being highly secular enclaves had to do with the lack of communal solidarity. I live in a relatively highly religious region of the US and it’d be almost shameful for the larger community to not come out in droves in support of one another during a disaster. Obviously kin would be primary, but I’ve witnessed firsthand an outpouring of concern for the wellbeing of others in this region. This could perhaps be less true in the city centers though.
In 2020 in Lake Charles, we had two hurricanes and a flash flood. Gender roles asserted themselves, for sure. The difference between us in Louisiana and the feminists in Berkeley is that we had no problem embracing them. I'm grateful to the men. I even made a little video about it, to record how I felt at the time. The part about gender roles is around the 7:40 minute mark. https://www.facebook.com/TheRuthInstitute/videos/316496949564276