As I said above, this essay raises some important points, but unfortunately is not very well thought out or presented. I believe I understand what the writer is trying to say, but I also understand that this is because I’ve been pursuing a course of study for some two decades that’s taken me far away from the conventional collective consensus of present-day culture — a consensus that’s been carefully nurtured by the forces Graham Strachan wrote about (in his response to Devvy Kidd), who “want to destroy the institutions of civilisation so they can rule over the wreckage.”
As Will Rogers remarked, it’s not what folks don’t know that hurts them, so much as what they think they know that ain’t so.
In order to understand the subjects under discussion, we must first understand that there are two kinds of “law” being referred to.
Two thousand years ago there lived in Cairo a famous rabbi named Hillel, who was widely celebrated for his knowledge of the Law. One day, the story goes, a Roman military officer, having heard of the rabbi’s fame, challenged him to expound the Law while standing on one foot. The rabbi raised one foot and said, “Do not do to others what is hateful to yourself. That is the whole of the Law; the rest is merely commentary.”
This is the “Law of Nature and of Nature’s God” to which Thomas Jefferson referred in the Declaration of Independence. And it was on this Law, more or less, that our Republic was founded. This is not the “law” that is studied and elaborated in modern university law schools, or practiced by modern lawyers, or enforced in modern courts. All these are concerned with human law, otherwise known as statutory or case law. At best, human law is, as the rabbi said, a commentary and clarification on God’s Law; at worst — and most often — it is an attempt, by the endless obfuscation at which our immature minds (smart is not the same as wise, though smart thinks it is) are so skilled, to get around God’s Law.
The hundreds of yards of “law” books in the State Law Library a few blocks from my house (I’ve been there to do research) are almost entirely concerned with this kind of “law.” As the Roman historian Tacitus famously remarked, “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
Those who are most skillful at this obfuscation are called “lawyers.” It is not an accident, I believe, that the United States, the world capital of feminism, also hosts, by orders of magnitude, a larger population of lawyers per capita than any other country. Or that, for instance, last I heard, out of 100 members of the federal Senate, 98 are lawyers. The original 13th Amendment to the Constitution would have prevented members of the Bar from holding government office. I really don’t believe it was an accident that this amendment was somehow conveniently forgotten during the “Civil War.”
Those who have studied Law from the perspective I am outlining commonly make a distinction between what is Lawful and what is merely “legal” — i.e. sanctioned by human “law” though it may violate the “Law of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Most of what goes on “under colour of law” nowadays is in the latter category.
A single example should suffice: Any workable human system of laws must begin with a statute outlawing murder. This is clearly an application of the Law cited by Rabbi Hillel: since I would hate to be killed against my wish, I must not impose the same fate on another. No society which allows its members to kill each other without restraint can possibly survive. This is why the first of the Judaeo-Christian Commandments addressing social relations (after those defining the relationship of man to God) says “Thou shalt not kill.” And why the first Buddhist Precept is “Do not kill.”
It is not an accident that the number one feminist “law” was the Supreme Court decision that “legalized” abortion. Abortion is clearly murder in the sight of the Law expounded by Rabbi Hillel, but under our modern system of “law” it is allowed. Thus it must be clear that the “law” which presently rules is not the same as the Law. The difference is absolute, and crucial.
As Will Rogers remarked, it’s not what folks don’t know that hurts them, so much as what they think they know that ain’t so.
In order to understand the subjects under discussion, we must first understand that there are two kinds of “law” being referred to.
Two thousand years ago there lived in Cairo a famous rabbi named Hillel, who was widely celebrated for his knowledge of the Law. One day, the story goes, a Roman military officer, having heard of the rabbi’s fame, challenged him to expound the Law while standing on one foot. The rabbi raised one foot and said, “Do not do to others what is hateful to yourself. That is the whole of the Law; the rest is merely commentary.”
This is the “Law of Nature and of Nature’s God” to which Thomas Jefferson referred in the Declaration of Independence. And it was on this Law, more or less, that our Republic was founded. This is not the “law” that is studied and elaborated in modern university law schools, or practiced by modern lawyers, or enforced in modern courts. All these are concerned with human law, otherwise known as statutory or case law. At best, human law is, as the rabbi said, a commentary and clarification on God’s Law; at worst — and most often — it is an attempt, by the endless obfuscation at which our immature minds (smart is not the same as wise, though smart thinks it is) are so skilled, to get around God’s Law.
The hundreds of yards of “law” books in the State Law Library a few blocks from my house (I’ve been there to do research) are almost entirely concerned with this kind of “law.” As the Roman historian Tacitus famously remarked, “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
Those who are most skillful at this obfuscation are called “lawyers.” It is not an accident, I believe, that the United States, the world capital of feminism, also hosts, by orders of magnitude, a larger population of lawyers per capita than any other country. Or that, for instance, last I heard, out of 100 members of the federal Senate, 98 are lawyers. The original 13th Amendment to the Constitution would have prevented members of the Bar from holding government office. I really don’t believe it was an accident that this amendment was somehow conveniently forgotten during the “Civil War.”
Those who have studied Law from the perspective I am outlining commonly make a distinction between what is Lawful and what is merely “legal” — i.e. sanctioned by human “law” though it may violate the “Law of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Most of what goes on “under colour of law” nowadays is in the latter category.
A single example should suffice: Any workable human system of laws must begin with a statute outlawing murder. This is clearly an application of the Law cited by Rabbi Hillel: since I would hate to be killed against my wish, I must not impose the same fate on another. No society which allows its members to kill each other without restraint can possibly survive. This is why the first of the Judaeo-Christian Commandments addressing social relations (after those defining the relationship of man to God) says “Thou shalt not kill.” And why the first Buddhist Precept is “Do not kill.”
It is not an accident that the number one feminist “law” was the Supreme Court decision that “legalized” abortion. Abortion is clearly murder in the sight of the Law expounded by Rabbi Hillel, but under our modern system of “law” it is allowed. Thus it must be clear that the “law” which presently rules is not the same as the Law. The difference is absolute, and crucial.
It’s important to understand that we in the present-day United States live under the original Constitution of the Republic only in regard to Article I Section 8 Clause 17, which grants Congress the power “To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever” over any territory which is the property of the federal government, or has been ceded thereto by any of the States. Through a process of “legal” sleight-of-hand that has been going on since the 1860s, all the territory of the formerly sovereign States has been gradually transferred into this jurisdiction, while the Citizens of the same States have been induced to trade in their natural sovereignty, as claimed in the Declaration and guaranteed in the Constitution, for a federal “citizenship” under the so-called 14th Amendment, which makes them “subject to” the jurisdiction of the United States, i.e. chattel with which the latter authority may do whatever it will.
This is, according to many researchers who’ve spent many years investigating recent history, the reason for all the excesses of our current governmental/legal system — from the “income tax” through the “family courts” to a president declaring war on his own — which, though it still wears the trappings of the original Republic, has actually been converted into an empire in the classic mold, with all power vested in the State, which rules its citizens according to its own whims.
The author does indeed cite some precedents in law for his argument, including several Supreme Court cases and a key provision of the federal Constitution (“No State shall…pass any…Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts.”). I don’t have the resources at hand to look up the case cites, but the name Hale vs. Henkle (or maybe it was Henkel) I know I’ve seen in some of what I’ve read in my studies. So I wouldn’t dismiss the “legal” basis of his argument out of hand. Unfortunately, though the principles involved are really quite simple, getting back to them requires a lot of work clearing away the all the underbrush of obfuscation that’s been piled into all our heads by the system of education, indoctrination and control run by the government and the corporations that control the government, all of them in turn controlled by lawyers and their ilk.
And of course, I would agree that it won’t succeed in court, not only because it hasn’t been sufficiently worked out, but because the court system is specifically designed and operated to avoid the truth behind this argument. There are effectively no Article III courts left in America today; what we now call “courts” are merely administrative tribunals whose function is not to determine the truth but simply to decide how much the guilty (anyone who’s summoned into such a court is assumed to be guilty) must pay. I’ve heard of a few who’ve been able to confront the court system directly and force it to acknowledge and obey the “Law of Nature and of Nature’s God,” and the original Constitution, but this is very rare and requires really advanced skills.
Quote: "An argument requires an offer, acceptance and consideration, and this situation requires all but three of these elements, since bearing a child can hardly be considered an “offer,” while being born can hardly be considered 'acceptance.'"
I assume you’re referring to a “contract” requiring offer and acceptance. How else then would you characterize the process by which a new human life appears in the world? The “offer” is made when the individual decides to engage in sexual congress; the offer is “accepted” when it results in the creation of a new human life — a life which is fully equal in fundamental character and rights (if the concept of rights is to have any meaning at all) to those of the parents. The “consideration” is (1) whatever it is we think we get out of sex — which must be something, considering how much most of us are willing to spend for it, and (2) what we get out of having progeny (satisfying the “urge to reproduce,” etc.), in exchange for (3) the energy spent in the support and rearing of the child. That both of these “rewards” are mostly sought out of instinct rather than reason (which is why there are nearly seven billion humans on a planet that cannot possibly support than number “in the style to which we’ve become accustomed”) does not mean they are not real, or that the consequences of our seeking them are not real.
Of course, most of us have probably insisted at one time or another in our childhood that “I didn’t ask to be born!” To which I recall my mother responding that according to her memory of the process of childbirth, I certainly did! It’s basically a question of responsibility. Am I responsible for my existence or not? To be human, in my view, I must accept that responsibility, with all its implications. If I am unwilling to do so, I have no basis to claim the rights of a human being. Nor, I believe, will I have any hope of getting out of the prison wherein I find myself.
I understand your unease with the “insulting” implications of this line of reasoning. However, I think we have to start with what’s real, and what’s real is that in this world, the male of any species is, to begin with, no more than a means to serve the female’s ends, which are the ends of Nature Herself: the endless production of more life. Nature doesn’t “insult” anyone, any more than does an earthquake. Reality just is; attempting to ignore it will only make everything worse.
Yes, “when we assess and define the ‘needs’ of civilization, we are actually referring primarily to the needs of women and children.” Don’t forget that “men” also were once children. There never has been a man who was not a child first. That men may develop and concern themselves with issues beyond the simple “needs” of women and children does not excuse us from first seeing to those needs as well as we are able. You can’t build the roof before the foundation and walls, and they must be built well if the roof is to last.
And the point — again, not very well made, but it’s there — of the article under discussion is that the traditional “patriarchal” cultural system did better at that than the matriarchy that’s recently been made to replace it. Or, more exactly, that the matriarchal system actually has not replaced it, since men are still being held responsible under “patriarchal” principles as if they were still the heads of the families from which they’ve been ejected. And that a system thus based on a lie cannot possibly succeed. So the author demands that women really shoulder the responsibilities that men have carried in the past, now that they have demanded the power/freedom that men have had based on that responsibility. Or admit that their whole ideology is a lie, so we can get to work on solutions that might actually work. In other words, put up or shut up.
My response to the idea that “women and children are civilization and humanity” is to say that it is precisely because men are somewhat “outside” the world of women and children that humanity has any chance at all of becoming more than just another kind of chimpanzee, eternally trapped in the endless round of birth-and-death. It is not an accident that all the great moral/religious teachers of human history have been men. Either the purpose of life is just to keep the wheel turning, grinding out suffering for all eternity, or it is to find a way out of this trap. Each of us can choose between these two; if there’s any meaning at all to human life, it must begin with how we respond to this choice.
You see, I don’t believe there really is a war between the sexes. I don’t believe the real interests of men and women differ in the least. The lesser may be at war with the greater, but the greater is never at war with the lesser. A child may dispute its parent’s authority, but the parent, if the authority is genuine, is never in conflict with the child. Man may think he is at war with God, but God is not at war with man; and a man who understands this is not at war with women, though women may be at war with him.
The traditional authority of the male in the “patriarchal” family can be properly understood and exercised only in the understanding that “to rule is to serve.” This is why Jesus washed his disciples’ feet. And the male can play his role successfully only when he understands that he too is subject to a Higher Authority. Most of the problem with the “patriarchal” family has resulted from men forgetting this fact. Encouraged, I will add, by women. “Women rule the world; no man ever did anything unless allowed or encouraged by a woman.” (Bob Dylan said that.)
Quote: "There’s nothing about a woman’s gender which will make one single bit of difference to a baby, since it doesn’t know a breast from a baby-bottle as long as it provides equal nourishment."
Well, you may think there’s no difference between a woman’s breast and a baby bottle, but I do. It’s a religious question, really; you’re a materialist, and I’m not. You believe that everything can be reduced to chemicals, no more; I do not. Apparently you also believe the feminist dogma that there is no real difference between the sexes beyond an “accidental” variation in plumbing arrangements; I do not. Even in the “men’s movement,” I find most men these days thinking like women. Which is why I wouldn’t call myself a “masculist” or whatever; I’m not at war with women over who gets what goodies. I suppose it’s unavoidable, since the “men” of our time are the sons of the women who created feminism; but this will have to be addressed if there’s to be any response to feminism besides a mirror of its own fallacies.
Quote: "And let me remind you that in a few years men will create their sons by themselves through the use of artificial wombs. We don’t need women to obtaining eggs anymore, so ectogenesis will be a by-word for the end of matriarchy."
Well, maybe so, but that’s not a world I would want to live in. That’s really responding to feminism on its own level, and will certainly not get us out of the pit. I’m not the least bit “submissive” to women, as I think my writing should make clear. Respect is not the same thing as submission. I try to be polite because I believe that’s my job as a man, as Kipling wrote in his famous poem: “If you can keep your head while all around you are losing theirs….”
I try to recognize and acknowledge reality, the better to respond to it effectively. I try to see women as they are, precisely so they won’t rule me. It’s certainly not easy, because of the “hormone-induced fog” Warren Farrell so aptly identified, which rules all men’s view of women. But neither capitulating to their unconscious, arbitrary power, nor responding with unreasoning anger (at which they’ll always be better than we are anyway), nor running away in fear (where shall we go? Mother is everywhere) is a productive response. “Artificial wombs” do not address the issue, any more than do any of the artificial rearrangements of reality promoted by feminism.
“Independence” is an interesting concept; though I believe Jefferson was mostly correct, and advanced human progress greatly, it must be understood that true “independence” exists only against a background understanding of our absolute interdependence with the entire universe, including our fellow beings, and most especially the “opposite sex.” It is precisely the feminists’ childish idea that they can be “independent” in some absolute sense that has led to all their mischief.
Regardless of how well or poorly this essay presents its case, the point it raises is crucial: either you believe that the “Law of Nature and of Nature’s God” is absolute, or you believe that it can be abrogated, modified, juggled, finessed, jawboned, whatever, by human cleverness. If you believe the latter, then eventually all you will be left with is the “Law of the Jungle.” Which is where feminism, and all its sister ideologies, are taking us.