In 1992 Canadian journalist Wendy Dennis came out with a book entitled "Hot and Bothered, Sex and Love in the 90s". In her introduction she became the first woman I'd ever heard actually admit that men had a side of the story too. She promised to try to tell it fairly, and certainly did a better job of that than any woman I've heard before or since. She still showed some distinct feminist and feminine biases, particularly in some of her choices to illustrate male anger about the treatment they had been receiving from women, but, as I have included certain male biases in my writing with more forethought and intent than I'm sure she showed, I can hardly fault her too severely for that. The mere fact that she admitted that men have a right to have their point of view considered put her into not just a different category, but an entirely different species, than other women authors who have written on this subject. Please read her book. Please give copies of it to all your friends. For, in the 5 years since its publication, things only seem to have gotten worse. There is no other single topic that I hear discussed even half as frequently as how miserable both men and women are as a result of the lack of any sort of satisfying sexually intimate relationship in their lives.
She begins with the questions "How are women doing?" and "How are men doing?". In both cases the answer is not well. With only rare exceptions, men and women everywhere are confused, angry, alone, suspicious, often downright hostile, and, underneath it all, terribly terribly hurt. In some states the divorce rate has reached 75%. More and more single people have simply quit dating. For quite some time it has been very chic for women to proudly announce that they are quite happy without a relationship. Now men are beginning to take the same position. As I have talked to members of both genders, the story that I get is that this is mostly true but not quite with the spin of satisfaction that it is usually presented. A little probing will reveal that, instead of "quite happy", "less miserable" sitting on the sidelines watching the emotional brawl instead of participating is closer to the truth.
What is most surprising to me is the number of young men, in their early 20s, who have dropped out of the mating game. For a 30 year veteran in the army-of-occupation left behind by the sexual revolution with the scars to prove it, like myself, this is easy to understand. But for someone at an age when I still considered that dreaded Hawaiian disease, Lakanooki, certainly fatal if left untreated for a year and would tolerate almost any level of abasement to convince some woman to share my bed, it is amazing that a young man would make the choice to sit out. Their reasons for doing so are quite informative.
Feminism has transformed the social climate in this country as thoroughly as the Bolsheviks transformed the former Russia. Which is of course what it set out to do: thus is a rousing success as a social movement. But, like the collectivist thinking on the economic level, the collectivist thinking on the social level which drives feminism did not have quite the results promised. After 75 years, the grand socio-economic experiment of the Bolsheviks was abandoned because it was too contrary to the nature of human beings. For those 75 years, however, citizens had to contend with economic deprivation and hardship as they struggled to change that nature to conform to a grand ideal. Not just human nature, but the natural world as well. Crops were planted according to 5 year plans, not according to weather, harvests, and needs of the population. In the same way, feminists have demanded that the factors and forces which drive attraction conform to a plan, a FEMinine plan.
Males have simply been dropped out of the picture as serious elements of consideration, except to regard them as agricultural crops which fruit love, support, and sperm. Author Dennis herself says it - "For one of the implicit, if unadmitted, tenets of feminism has been a fundamental disrespect for men." When the Bolsheviks fundamentally disrespected the fact that a crop ripens dependent on rainfall, sunshine, and a host of other factors, demanding instead that it be planted on a certain date and harvested on a certain date according to a grand idealistic plan laid down 5 years earlier, they could invest all the hours, fuel, and seed in planting and still have nothing to eat when it was all done. Not just no result, but an incredible waste of resources which were already in short supply. And people end up hungrier as a result of wasting the seed which could have more productively been eaten than thrown away in an attempt to force nature to conform to a human ideal. Fortunately for them, in the States farmers still understood that a crop ripens according to natural laws and did not attempt to play GOD, so had surpluses which allowed the Bolshevik plan followers to purchase grain to keep from starving to death. Unfortunately, no one is growing a surplus of male attraction to women these days, particularly not one which meets the complex, contradictory, and completely impossible requirements of the feminist agenda, so women are emotionally starving to death.
The most repugnant statement in the entire book, repugnant both because it illustrates the fallacy which caused the whole house of cards to fall and because it highlights the fact that women are still blind to the fact that men are human beings at all and illustrates that a fundamental disrespect for men is basic not just to feminism, but to all women, is this (quoted in lengthy entirety):
"In the end, the hard lesson women take from the apparent man shortage is this: by trying to live up to the lofty ideals of feminism, by elevating their expectations of themselves and of men, they set themselves with a collision course with loneliness. Men will punish them for their ambitions, and they will punish them in the cruelest way imaginable: by not wanting them any more." (emphasis added)
Let me express the message in this statement another way:
"In the end, the hard lesson the Bolsheviks take from the apparent food shortage is this: by trying to live up to the lofty ideals of Bolshevism, by elevating their expectations of themselves and the crops which provide them food, they set themselves with a collsion course with starvation." (True so far, the penalty for that level of denial in the natural world has always been death.) "The crops will punish them for their ambitions, and they will punish them in the cruelest way possible: by dying."
I still cannot fathom the incredible self-absorbtion, self-centeredness, self-OBSESSION, that can allow anyone to overlook how intensely and determinedly women have pursued making themselves unwantable and destroying and stamping out every last bit of desire for them a man could possibly have. And the determination to be the victim to the very end. The fact that men have quit wanting women couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that women have been viciously attacking men for being attracted to them and every instance of its expression for years. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that expressing it has been thoroughly criminalized and wanting a woman and making it known can land a man in prison these days. It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that everything a man might find attractive that doesn't fit the feminst ideal is slammed with a sledgehammer of shame. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that men have believed women who have told men how little they or their attention could possibly mean to women, and in fact they find them both highly offensive and completely irrelevant. No, it couldn't possibly have anything to do with women or their actions, it is entirely due to the universal quality of men to spend their lives thinking up nasty things to do to women. To "PUNISH" them.
It makes me sick.
In what I call the "Holocaust of Desire", men's desire for women has been being systematically murdered for the past 30 years. By women. Now men are "punishing" women by being dead to them. The murder weapons have been maleness-bashing and the criminalization of male sexual expression through the expanded definitions of sexual harassment and rape and the constructivist fallacy of making all men equally guilty for the acts of any individual man.
The sad truth is that I'd rather eat Drano than try to love a woman, only to find that my every act and intent was viciously and maliciously twisted into a victim's melodrama which I might spend the next several years in prison paying for. The entire purpose of the criminal justice system is to control and attempt to eradicate deviance. Now that men desiring women has been declared deviant, the eradication efforts are having their effects.
In the end, the hard lesson that women really need to take from the real man shortage is this: by denying and negating our needs, by making wanting you into a criminal act, by being so self-centered that you cannot see any act in the world as being motivated by anything other than intent to frustrate your needs and desires, you have proven to us that what feminists began saying 30 years ago is equally true in reverse. Not only is a woman without a man like a fish without a bicycle, a man without a woman is like a bicycle without a fish.
Male Bashing
The Criminalization of Male Sexuality - Harrasment and Rape
Sunday, March 13, 2005
Saturday, March 12, 2005
EOTM: Confronting Matriarchy
All of western culture is ruled by a vast and invisible matriarchy operating from the shadows so its actions are nearly invisible. The foundations of this Matriarchy are maternal authority and women’s Superiority Complex. From the moment of birth, men are taught to defer to maternal authority. As soon as they enter public school, they confront almost exclusively female teachers whose absolute authority over the classroom is enforced by what few men are part of the public education system. In high school, young males are usually exposed to a few male teachers whose own exercise of authority is quite different from their female counterparts. Male teachers often handle discipline problems in the classroom at a much lower level than female teachers, who tend to escalate matters to male administrators if their hegemony is challenged.
Men who marry usually find their wives expecting the mantle of maternal authority to be simply handed over to them by and from the man’s mother without missing a beat. It sometimes takes many battles for a man to make the point to a new wife that she is his spouse and equal, not his mother. Women who stubbornly insist on being slow learners on this issue set up oppositional and adversarial positions which often will poison the marriage over time. Women expect to be able to make the rules and simply expect men to obey them. Men who assert themselves and demand some degree of regard and consideration for their point of view will often have to fight the battle for recognition over, and over, and over.
When feminists realized that they were about to overthrow women’s own matriarchal power base with their initial anti-marriage and anti-motherhood stances, they did an abrupt about-face and embraced motherhood even more fervently than they had rejected it just a few years before.
Matriarchy has now taken over the court system as feminist "jurisprudence" has replaced objective facts with female feelings as the relevant criteria for determining guilt or innocence. A woman’s emotional state has even become adequate defense against charges of murder, and women have a multitude of emotional defenses, ranging from the abuse excuse to PMS, which literally allow them to get away with murdering men, children, and other women.
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Shadow Power
Matriarchy depends on shadow power. It must deny its power and function from the shadows. All matriarchal power stems from the maternal role and maternal authority, and the power to grant or deny sex.
Foundations of Female Power
1 - The Mating Dance - Sexual Power
2 - Maternal Authority - Moral Power
3 - Control of the Education/Socialization system - Indoctrination Power
4 - The Male Protector Role - The Power of Weakness
5 - The Rescue Reflex - Victim Power
6 - Unfair Fighting - Confusion Power Tantrum Power,
7 - Emotional Terrorism and Violence - Intimidation Power
8 - Betrayal - Shock and disappointment Power
Foundations of Male Powerlessness -
1 - Denial of Fear
2 - Fear of Isolation
3 - The need to convince, have credibility, be acceptable, receive validation.
As boys, men are separated from other males, fathers particularly, terrorized and isolated, and told that the only source of emotional sustenance and intimacy for was with women and in sexual union. This places a great deal of power in the hands of women, which is difficult to resist the temptation to abuse.
As men confront the totally changed male and female roles that are the legacy of feminism, women are going to lose a lot of their historic moral power. Confronting the Matriarchy involves shedding light on its workings - naming the vague purpose behind the behavior intended to confuse and obfuscate.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Men who marry usually find their wives expecting the mantle of maternal authority to be simply handed over to them by and from the man’s mother without missing a beat. It sometimes takes many battles for a man to make the point to a new wife that she is his spouse and equal, not his mother. Women who stubbornly insist on being slow learners on this issue set up oppositional and adversarial positions which often will poison the marriage over time. Women expect to be able to make the rules and simply expect men to obey them. Men who assert themselves and demand some degree of regard and consideration for their point of view will often have to fight the battle for recognition over, and over, and over.
When feminists realized that they were about to overthrow women’s own matriarchal power base with their initial anti-marriage and anti-motherhood stances, they did an abrupt about-face and embraced motherhood even more fervently than they had rejected it just a few years before.
Matriarchy has now taken over the court system as feminist "jurisprudence" has replaced objective facts with female feelings as the relevant criteria for determining guilt or innocence. A woman’s emotional state has even become adequate defense against charges of murder, and women have a multitude of emotional defenses, ranging from the abuse excuse to PMS, which literally allow them to get away with murdering men, children, and other women.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Shadow Power
Matriarchy depends on shadow power. It must deny its power and function from the shadows. All matriarchal power stems from the maternal role and maternal authority, and the power to grant or deny sex.
Foundations of Female Power
1 - The Mating Dance - Sexual Power
2 - Maternal Authority - Moral Power
3 - Control of the Education/Socialization system - Indoctrination Power
4 - The Male Protector Role - The Power of Weakness
5 - The Rescue Reflex - Victim Power
6 - Unfair Fighting - Confusion Power Tantrum Power,
7 - Emotional Terrorism and Violence - Intimidation Power
8 - Betrayal - Shock and disappointment Power
Foundations of Male Powerlessness -
1 - Denial of Fear
2 - Fear of Isolation
3 - The need to convince, have credibility, be acceptable, receive validation.
As boys, men are separated from other males, fathers particularly, terrorized and isolated, and told that the only source of emotional sustenance and intimacy for was with women and in sexual union. This places a great deal of power in the hands of women, which is difficult to resist the temptation to abuse.
As men confront the totally changed male and female roles that are the legacy of feminism, women are going to lose a lot of their historic moral power. Confronting the Matriarchy involves shedding light on its workings - naming the vague purpose behind the behavior intended to confuse and obfuscate.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Friday, March 11, 2005
EOTM: Surviving a Culture of Singleness: Choosing Unmated Lifestyles
"In the beginning, there was the "Battle of the sexes", and it was bad enough. Then, on the end of the 2nd millenium, man and woman made "Gender War", and they looked at it, and it was worse. "
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Surviving a culture of singleness: choosing unmated lifestyles.
You would have to have been living under a rock for the past 30 years to have been unaware of the major social shifts occuring in the structure and function of marriage, the family, and child rearing.
Ethical, caring, progressive men have few palatable choices in the mating game today. Culturally, fathers have been reduced to walking wallets. Men who want a real role in raising their children are confronted with the growing acceptance of single motherhood, with its inescapable implication of single fatherhood. As the battle for "wage parity" continues, gains in women's income are often offset by the reduced numbers of men who outearn them and are thus considered "eligible."
Resource competition is reaching levels never even dreamed before. The entire notion of "necessity" has been redefined in two generations and very little which is regarded as essential today was even dreamed of by the generation that spanned the great depression and WW II. The notion of entitlements introduced during the 1930s to pull the nation out of the depression has fossilized into making the government the parent of all. Fathers are disposable as long as the mother has income from somewhere. Mothers are disposable because now we have "day care" and "quality" time.
I believe that Charlie Chaplin's vision in "Modern Times" has become reality. Human beings have been mechanized just like industry and standardization has become the rule of success. Individuality, individual variation, and uniqueness have all succumbed to mass culture.
Since the 1960s, the focus in the realignment has been women's roles and women's issues. The movement which has spearheaded this effort has even had a feminine name. In fact, feminism literally is the ideology of the feminine.
Despite all the changes in women's roles, the expectations within the culture were that men would continue to fulfill all their old duties. And, since the generation of men entering into the gauntlet that the mating years were to become were brought up expecting to do just that, the boomer generation for the most part tried to comply. However, the change in women's roles has had such profound and lasting changes that men's roles are in transition whether anyone likes it or not.
As the provider role falls by the wayside on the pilgrimmage to wage parity, and the disciplinarian role falls to the relentless efforts to uncover victims of abuse, men are faced with being criticized for what they were brought up to do. There has been deep and long standing bitter resentment of that by men. And the net effect on men raised after this vast social change will take decades to fully assess.
However, one effect is already beginning to become apparent and that is an awareness of just how expensive fertility has become. Particularly in the US, people accustomed to the highest living standard in the world are ripping and tearing at each other over the belief that the share of the wealth which they are receiving is not large enough. Having children and taking on the providing role means you have to take on the responsibility for providing them with ENOUGH. Remember, everyone wants to "HAVE IT ALL" these days. It's not just "men against women", children are turning on their parents these days. Remember the Menendez brothers?
With so many obstacles and burdens to raising children, as opposed to simply becoming pregnant, it is something that men will begin to avoid with the same fervor that women have pursued birth control and such radical tactics as abortion. C4m, choice for men, is the legal equivalent to abortion. Male birth control pills are being tested. Men are challenging in court the rights of women to conceive and stick them with the bill.
We have reached the stage in polarization between the genders where the user of birth control now has to warrant its effectiveness.
The disruption in fertility patterns will soon shift from the generalized right to NOT reproduce, to certain more fundamental questions about the right TO reproduce. Based on cost alone, many will have to make the decision to not have children because they can't afford them.
The primary question will end up being whether the sex drive can be successfully defined completely away from its history-long biological purpose - continuation of the species - into a new "social" mold. Can everything about us, from our bodies to our most basic drives, be simply redefined in semantic terms and become, like feminism, whatever we say it is?
I contend not.
The legal and cultural situation is forcing a reversal in some of the responsibilties of relationship initiation and maintenance. Men are being forced to take on the role of gatekeeper and deal with women who are very aggressive in pursuing sex. The crushing burdens of the current idealized father role and the legal risks posed by Sexual Harassment and Rape laws take a great deal of the attractiveness out of women in general.
Maleness, liking women, wanting to have sex with them, and fatherhood have all been criminalized. It is easy to tell what a culture is trying to stamp out by what it criminalizes. How boys and young men will respond is hard to predict. But they will doubtless react very differently from their fathers whose actions were criminalized after they commited them.
For the near future, at least, it seems that both men and women will need to adjust to unmated and childless lives. It is highly doubtful that government subsidies will be extended to children conceived through a sperm bank, at least not for very long if women continue to take on increased tax burdens as their income increases. As hard as the conservatives have fought to preserve it, the nuclear family looks like it is going into mothballs like nuclear arms.
What will replace it is anybody's guess. And everybody is guessing. And the stakes for a wrong guess just keep getting higher.
The boomers were the straddle generation. They were born and socialized under the old ideas of family, even though they were already breaking down, then tried to make the transition to living under the new ones. The results were wildly mixed.
Now, the boomers are increasingly adopting singleness as a lifestyle and retiring from the gender armies to let the younger ones fight it out. The question is whether the young will keep on fighting it, or reject the gender war just like the boomers rejected the Vietnam war. Interestingly, I saw a boomer post on an NG titled "They're turning on us." Well, that's what we taught them.
I hope this turns out to be the case. Young men and women have inherited a legacy of hatred and distrust that will be hard to overcome. They have all been fed a lot of propaganda. I'm glad I grew up before all this started to happen. I don't envy them the task.
One thing seems certain - that both genders will need to approach fertility in more cautious and planned ways. But certainly for men, exploration of alternatives to fatherhood will definitely need to be considered.
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The Water Gets Deeper
In the wake of radical feminism, it seems like it has taken a very long time for an equally radical and forceful masculism to develop. Both sides are now dealing from positions of defensiveness and anger.
Below are some essays on what such a radical masculism might look like. In effect, it is nothing more than actual implementation of the fish and bicyles concept which has been the slogan of womanism since the early 70s. And the sad truth is that, once out of the gauntlet of the child-bearing years, men and women DON'T really need each other for much of anything. The interdependency which has characterized the human race since its beginnings, whatever creation myth you subscribe to, between men and women has been severed. Young men are talking about their need to have "reproductive independence" from women.
I believe that the mere fact that the sexes are talking about "reproductive independence" from each other is clear indication that the human race is either getting ready to completely unravel, or follow Huxley's model of the "Brave New World" and grow kids in test tubes and indoctrinate them in government run centers. Will humans make the next leap toward becoming machines? And over time will the distinction between human being and machine break down?
Some Radical Notions on biological and social processes and the future of culture
The Feralization of Culture – Building better predators
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Surviving a culture of singleness: choosing unmated lifestyles.
You would have to have been living under a rock for the past 30 years to have been unaware of the major social shifts occuring in the structure and function of marriage, the family, and child rearing.
Ethical, caring, progressive men have few palatable choices in the mating game today. Culturally, fathers have been reduced to walking wallets. Men who want a real role in raising their children are confronted with the growing acceptance of single motherhood, with its inescapable implication of single fatherhood. As the battle for "wage parity" continues, gains in women's income are often offset by the reduced numbers of men who outearn them and are thus considered "eligible."
Resource competition is reaching levels never even dreamed before. The entire notion of "necessity" has been redefined in two generations and very little which is regarded as essential today was even dreamed of by the generation that spanned the great depression and WW II. The notion of entitlements introduced during the 1930s to pull the nation out of the depression has fossilized into making the government the parent of all. Fathers are disposable as long as the mother has income from somewhere. Mothers are disposable because now we have "day care" and "quality" time.
I believe that Charlie Chaplin's vision in "Modern Times" has become reality. Human beings have been mechanized just like industry and standardization has become the rule of success. Individuality, individual variation, and uniqueness have all succumbed to mass culture.
Since the 1960s, the focus in the realignment has been women's roles and women's issues. The movement which has spearheaded this effort has even had a feminine name. In fact, feminism literally is the ideology of the feminine.
Despite all the changes in women's roles, the expectations within the culture were that men would continue to fulfill all their old duties. And, since the generation of men entering into the gauntlet that the mating years were to become were brought up expecting to do just that, the boomer generation for the most part tried to comply. However, the change in women's roles has had such profound and lasting changes that men's roles are in transition whether anyone likes it or not.
As the provider role falls by the wayside on the pilgrimmage to wage parity, and the disciplinarian role falls to the relentless efforts to uncover victims of abuse, men are faced with being criticized for what they were brought up to do. There has been deep and long standing bitter resentment of that by men. And the net effect on men raised after this vast social change will take decades to fully assess.
However, one effect is already beginning to become apparent and that is an awareness of just how expensive fertility has become. Particularly in the US, people accustomed to the highest living standard in the world are ripping and tearing at each other over the belief that the share of the wealth which they are receiving is not large enough. Having children and taking on the providing role means you have to take on the responsibility for providing them with ENOUGH. Remember, everyone wants to "HAVE IT ALL" these days. It's not just "men against women", children are turning on their parents these days. Remember the Menendez brothers?
With so many obstacles and burdens to raising children, as opposed to simply becoming pregnant, it is something that men will begin to avoid with the same fervor that women have pursued birth control and such radical tactics as abortion. C4m, choice for men, is the legal equivalent to abortion. Male birth control pills are being tested. Men are challenging in court the rights of women to conceive and stick them with the bill.
We have reached the stage in polarization between the genders where the user of birth control now has to warrant its effectiveness.
The disruption in fertility patterns will soon shift from the generalized right to NOT reproduce, to certain more fundamental questions about the right TO reproduce. Based on cost alone, many will have to make the decision to not have children because they can't afford them.
The primary question will end up being whether the sex drive can be successfully defined completely away from its history-long biological purpose - continuation of the species - into a new "social" mold. Can everything about us, from our bodies to our most basic drives, be simply redefined in semantic terms and become, like feminism, whatever we say it is?
I contend not.
The legal and cultural situation is forcing a reversal in some of the responsibilties of relationship initiation and maintenance. Men are being forced to take on the role of gatekeeper and deal with women who are very aggressive in pursuing sex. The crushing burdens of the current idealized father role and the legal risks posed by Sexual Harassment and Rape laws take a great deal of the attractiveness out of women in general.
Maleness, liking women, wanting to have sex with them, and fatherhood have all been criminalized. It is easy to tell what a culture is trying to stamp out by what it criminalizes. How boys and young men will respond is hard to predict. But they will doubtless react very differently from their fathers whose actions were criminalized after they commited them.
For the near future, at least, it seems that both men and women will need to adjust to unmated and childless lives. It is highly doubtful that government subsidies will be extended to children conceived through a sperm bank, at least not for very long if women continue to take on increased tax burdens as their income increases. As hard as the conservatives have fought to preserve it, the nuclear family looks like it is going into mothballs like nuclear arms.
What will replace it is anybody's guess. And everybody is guessing. And the stakes for a wrong guess just keep getting higher.
The boomers were the straddle generation. They were born and socialized under the old ideas of family, even though they were already breaking down, then tried to make the transition to living under the new ones. The results were wildly mixed.
Now, the boomers are increasingly adopting singleness as a lifestyle and retiring from the gender armies to let the younger ones fight it out. The question is whether the young will keep on fighting it, or reject the gender war just like the boomers rejected the Vietnam war. Interestingly, I saw a boomer post on an NG titled "They're turning on us." Well, that's what we taught them.
I hope this turns out to be the case. Young men and women have inherited a legacy of hatred and distrust that will be hard to overcome. They have all been fed a lot of propaganda. I'm glad I grew up before all this started to happen. I don't envy them the task.
One thing seems certain - that both genders will need to approach fertility in more cautious and planned ways. But certainly for men, exploration of alternatives to fatherhood will definitely need to be considered.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Water Gets Deeper
In the wake of radical feminism, it seems like it has taken a very long time for an equally radical and forceful masculism to develop. Both sides are now dealing from positions of defensiveness and anger.
Below are some essays on what such a radical masculism might look like. In effect, it is nothing more than actual implementation of the fish and bicyles concept which has been the slogan of womanism since the early 70s. And the sad truth is that, once out of the gauntlet of the child-bearing years, men and women DON'T really need each other for much of anything. The interdependency which has characterized the human race since its beginnings, whatever creation myth you subscribe to, between men and women has been severed. Young men are talking about their need to have "reproductive independence" from women.
I believe that the mere fact that the sexes are talking about "reproductive independence" from each other is clear indication that the human race is either getting ready to completely unravel, or follow Huxley's model of the "Brave New World" and grow kids in test tubes and indoctrinate them in government run centers. Will humans make the next leap toward becoming machines? And over time will the distinction between human being and machine break down?
Some Radical Notions on biological and social processes and the future of culture
The Feralization of Culture – Building better predators
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Thursday, March 10, 2005
EOTM: Hard Analysis
Hard Analysis Sites:
All around the net, and to some small degree of print media, current social conditions are being subjected to some very hard analysis.
While I do not necessarily agree with every little thing said on these sites, I do agree with a lot of it, and particularly with the principle of gathering information and coming to one's own conclusion rather than just accepting what the media and the government force feed us.
Andy Turnbull – “The Cassandra Papers”
Backlash.com - The name says it
Kack Kammer: rulymob.com If Men Have All the Power, How Come Women Make the Rules?
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Exceptional Hard Analysis Articles:
Here is a collection of articles which clearly and unambiguously describe one aspect or another of current social conditions.
David Shackleton:
The War Against Men
Feminism Exposed: Our blindness to feminine evil
Erin Pizzey:
How the Women’s Movement Taught Women to Hate Men
Jean Sonmor:
Feminism Led to Masculine Rage
All around the net, and to some small degree of print media, current social conditions are being subjected to some very hard analysis.
While I do not necessarily agree with every little thing said on these sites, I do agree with a lot of it, and particularly with the principle of gathering information and coming to one's own conclusion rather than just accepting what the media and the government force feed us.
Andy Turnbull – “The Cassandra Papers”
Backlash.com - The name says it
Kack Kammer: rulymob.com If Men Have All the Power, How Come Women Make the Rules?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Exceptional Hard Analysis Articles:
Here is a collection of articles which clearly and unambiguously describe one aspect or another of current social conditions.
David Shackleton:
The War Against Men
Feminism Exposed: Our blindness to feminine evil
Erin Pizzey:
How the Women’s Movement Taught Women to Hate Men
Jean Sonmor:
Feminism Led to Masculine Rage
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Feminism Deconstructed: Nothing but a Hate Movement
."I feel that 'man-hating' is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them." -- Robin Morgan - former president of the National Ourganization for Women (NOW) and editor of MS magazine
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Feminism is nothing but a hate movement pure and simple. From the opening shot of the S.C.U.M. Manifesto, to today's endless man-bashing, feminism has been first and foremost, predominantly and overwhelmingly, about hating men and all things male.
The remarkable peristence of the credibility of feminism as movement of so-called "equality" does not speak well of the intelligence of the public at large. A growing body of dissenting voice to the anti-reality dogma of feminism is finally beginning to make itself heard.
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.Tuesday, March 08, 2005
EOTM: In a Male Voice
These articles are written in a male voice. This means a male focus on the issues, male experience and values reflected, and sometimes "strong" language. If any of it offends you, go away - you don't have to read it.
Men have had 30 years of having women's versions and descriptions of their experience shoved down their throats. Even a major writer on men's issues, Warren Farrell, takes men to task for it. What no one seems to acknowledge is that men have been speaking out for a long time, and often when men do - they are shouted down. Time and again, I have seen men try to say what what their experience was like, only to have it denied and they be told what it was or "should" be instead.
The concerns of women have become so numerous, dramatic, and filled with suffering that it seems the only way men can possibly avoid victimizing them is to avoid them as completely as possible.
Models of Man
Men have had 30 years of having women's versions and descriptions of their experience shoved down their throats. Even a major writer on men's issues, Warren Farrell, takes men to task for it. What no one seems to acknowledge is that men have been speaking out for a long time, and often when men do - they are shouted down. Time and again, I have seen men try to say what what their experience was like, only to have it denied and they be told what it was or "should" be instead.
The concerns of women have become so numerous, dramatic, and filled with suffering that it seems the only way men can possibly avoid victimizing them is to avoid them as completely as possible.
Models of Man
Monday, March 07, 2005
EOTM: The Nature of Things
Foremost among the foundations of femimism is the need to deny nature. The separation of the sex act from the bearing of the children that it produces has produced a culture which devalues all human life: male, female, and child.
The old "mating dance" between men and women has taken an ugly turn. Our bodies are natural creations and our desires do not much listen to "shoulds".
Whether human beings can totally be redefined socially, as the grand socialist experiment has been trying since the late 1800s, or whether their natural origins will continue to assert themselves is still up for questioning.
Biological Basics
It’s About Reproduction and Status: Why Men Go For “The Look” (or seem to think with our genitals at times)
Some Radical Notions on Biological and Social Selection Processes and the Future of Culture
The Feralization of Culture: Building Better Predators
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
The old "mating dance" between men and women has taken an ugly turn. Our bodies are natural creations and our desires do not much listen to "shoulds".
Whether human beings can totally be redefined socially, as the grand socialist experiment has been trying since the late 1800s, or whether their natural origins will continue to assert themselves is still up for questioning.
Biological Basics
It’s About Reproduction and Status: Why Men Go For “The Look” (or seem to think with our genitals at times)
Some Radical Notions on Biological and Social Selection Processes and the Future of Culture
The Feralization of Culture: Building Better Predators
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Sunday, March 06, 2005
EOTM: A Simple, Brief, Rationalist Alternative to Feminist Theory
"Once upon a time..." as so many stories begin -
Most people did NOT live in the suburbs. They did not have running water, gas furnaces, electric lights, dishwashers, televisions, garbage pickup, laundry facilities in the basement or utility room, fast-food joints on every corner, access to amazing medical techology, germ-free water, or a zillion other things which modern women and men simply take for granted. Life in general was a lot of work and, well, that is or was "life." It was pretty much the only game there was unless you chose death, which the world stood ready to deal you in thousands of different ways.
Rather than being made in "god's" garage with his power tools, humans have spent at least a couple of million years developing tool using capacity, so-called "intelligence", and that form of social organization we euphemistically call "civilization" despite the fact that it becomes less "civil" with each passing year.
Fairly early on, our clever ancestors learned that some ways of going about things worked better than others in assuring the surival of the tribe by maximizing the survival potential of the individual members - things like organization, cooperation, and division of labor. Being a species pretty poorly physically adapted to most environments, a fairly large percentage of our time and energy went into adapting the environment to our needs. Like everything alive, individuals valued their own lives pretty highly, but also recognized a certain value in survival of the tribe as a whole over any individual. The central survival factor of the tribe was fertility, and archeological evidence suggests that fertility was worshiped by every pre-technical people.
Like any good resource manager, our ancestors based their resource management strategy on the scarcest resource, not the most abundant. Therefore, the female contribution to fertility was considered far more valuable than the male contribution. As long as starvation was not emminent, the female ability to bring forth life was the most mystical and valuable thing possible. People worshipped it, and protected it at almost any cost. It made so much sense to leave any dangerous activity to men and protect the women from danger that these peoples would have likely regarded as insane or very evil the suggestion that anyone would do otherwise.
The best description of the development of culture that I have ever seen is by Anne McCaffrey in what has developed into the standard boilerplate introduction to her hugely successful "Dragonriders of Pern" series of novels.
"... people went about their separate tasks, and each developed habits that became custom, which solidified into tradition as incontrovertible as law."
Over time these traditions did, indeed, become codified into law as population density increased and the fact that human beings are not always perfect and sometimes act in selfish and destructive manners forced groups into adopting formal codes of conduct and punishing those who strayed too far outside of them. The conservationist oriented approach to protecting the groups future by protecting its fertility led to a natural and informal division of labor with women extending and continuing the natural role of bringing forth and nourishing children to caring for them until they gained a reasonable measure of self-sufficiency, and men generally undertaking the more strenuous and risky activities required to provide for survival of the group.
Given the immense body of knowledge that must be transmitted to the young of the human species, and the limited ability of the young to understand the full reasoning behind it ( which is why the young are called "immature") it was a lot more practical and efficient to simply tell the junior members of the culture what to do than it was to argue with them over why it was a good idea to do it that way. Frequently, the reasons would never be explained and the practical considerations underlying the choice of behavior were lost as cultural knowledge. Then, if the environment changed such that the dictated behavior was no longer really necessary, it was still continued because people had forgotten the reason why they did it in the first place.
In human history, there are 2 great revolutions which created a distinct and abrupt discontinuity in the environment. The first revolution was the agricultural revolution which occurred perhaps 10,000 years ago. Agriculture stabilized the food supply and made both possible and necessary permanent encampments and domiciles. ( For more on this aspect, click here.)
The second revolution can be viewed many different ways, but I call it the "Scientific and Technological" revolution which began with the smelting of metal and continues to this day in the form of industrialization and technology based mass culture. This revolution gave homo sapiens a degree of control over their environment that the race had dreamed about for all time. A degree of control over, and certainty about, the future which had been the secret wish of all peoples became reality. With the advent of Pasteur's germ theory, the last great restraining force on human population levels, disease, was removed and the population of humanity exploded. About 1850, the human population of the world was about 1.5 billion. Now, 150 years later it is 4X that: about 6 billion.
Despite all the changes in the environment which made the survival of the species no longer so dependant on fertility, ten thousand years of social history, custom, and law do not go away overnight. Codified into almost every aspect of law, and deeply embedded in all social customs and values, is the notion that women (meaning their fertility) MUST be protected and that men are highly expendable. The primary value of male life has always been measured by how much he produced to contribute to the group as a whole. Before the vast consolidation of durable wealth in the hands of a small percentage of the population, and before men were forced off the land which was the source of their sustenance by enclosure and the need to drive them into the cities to provide the workforce for the Industrial transformation, this productivity was measured directly in terms of production of food. Post-enclosure, this value was transferred directly to the ability to provide food by buying it, i.e. wages.
Fast forward to the end of the 20th century, and you find men's value still being determined by their earning capacity, and women still choosing their mates based to a large degree on this.
Far from there being ANY sort of world-wide and history-long conspiracy by men to do awful and nasty things to women, to "OPPRESS" them, the male attitude has been driven by a deep and inherent appreciation of women's value and a desire to protect and take care of them.
However, our culture has never come to terms with the impact which death control must inevitably have on our social customs and value structure. The desire of women to free themselves of their biological role as producers of babies is understandable given the many burdens that role creates for them. But, in order for women to be free of that role, men must also be free of the role of providing care and maintenance for those babies as the only means to social identity.
The monstrous lie and hoax perpetrated by feminism, i.e. that it is MEN who have fought any gains or progress toward the re-balancing of the power relationships between men and women should be immediately obvious in the fact that so many men were early supporters of feminism and that the lament heard from women from the mid-1970s on was NOT that men were seeking to "OPPRESS" women into traditional marriage but rather EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE. Men weren't badgering women to marry them, they were REFUSING to "commit" to marriage themselves.
Were it not for the elements of man-hating and victimism which were integrated into feminist thought from very the beginning by early feminist theorists and writers like Betty Friedan, Kate Millet, Susan Brownmiller, Valerie Solanas, and Robin Morgan; then carried on in fine style by Susan Faludi, Naomi Wolfe, Sally Miller-Gearhart, and a host of others; the radical shift from woman-as-strong to woman-as-total-victim as the core message of feminism would have been obvious.
It is still fascinating to read the works of such new-wave feminists as Rene Denfield and Robin Blumner who point out the Victorian attitudes of female fragility, sensitivity, and moral superiority pushed by contemporary feminism, but do not take the next logical step. If WOMEN are the ones most aggressively pushing these notions today, end of the 20th century, has any woman raised the question whether women might (now just consider the possibility) just have been the driving force in promoting those notions the last time around. Just maybe, the paternalistic attitude of culture toward women has been promoted and nurtured by women all along, in order to gain the special protections and treatment that women get from a culture which has those attitudes. Special treatment like first grabs on the lifeboat seats when the Titanic goes down, or special "Violence Against Women Act" laws.
Hmmmm? Do you think that perhaps women could have been an active and major driving force all along in promoting the notion of how weak, capricious, and in need of special treatment women are?
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Most people did NOT live in the suburbs. They did not have running water, gas furnaces, electric lights, dishwashers, televisions, garbage pickup, laundry facilities in the basement or utility room, fast-food joints on every corner, access to amazing medical techology, germ-free water, or a zillion other things which modern women and men simply take for granted. Life in general was a lot of work and, well, that is or was "life." It was pretty much the only game there was unless you chose death, which the world stood ready to deal you in thousands of different ways.
Rather than being made in "god's" garage with his power tools, humans have spent at least a couple of million years developing tool using capacity, so-called "intelligence", and that form of social organization we euphemistically call "civilization" despite the fact that it becomes less "civil" with each passing year.
Fairly early on, our clever ancestors learned that some ways of going about things worked better than others in assuring the surival of the tribe by maximizing the survival potential of the individual members - things like organization, cooperation, and division of labor. Being a species pretty poorly physically adapted to most environments, a fairly large percentage of our time and energy went into adapting the environment to our needs. Like everything alive, individuals valued their own lives pretty highly, but also recognized a certain value in survival of the tribe as a whole over any individual. The central survival factor of the tribe was fertility, and archeological evidence suggests that fertility was worshiped by every pre-technical people.
Like any good resource manager, our ancestors based their resource management strategy on the scarcest resource, not the most abundant. Therefore, the female contribution to fertility was considered far more valuable than the male contribution. As long as starvation was not emminent, the female ability to bring forth life was the most mystical and valuable thing possible. People worshipped it, and protected it at almost any cost. It made so much sense to leave any dangerous activity to men and protect the women from danger that these peoples would have likely regarded as insane or very evil the suggestion that anyone would do otherwise.
The best description of the development of culture that I have ever seen is by Anne McCaffrey in what has developed into the standard boilerplate introduction to her hugely successful "Dragonriders of Pern" series of novels.
"... people went about their separate tasks, and each developed habits that became custom, which solidified into tradition as incontrovertible as law."
Over time these traditions did, indeed, become codified into law as population density increased and the fact that human beings are not always perfect and sometimes act in selfish and destructive manners forced groups into adopting formal codes of conduct and punishing those who strayed too far outside of them. The conservationist oriented approach to protecting the groups future by protecting its fertility led to a natural and informal division of labor with women extending and continuing the natural role of bringing forth and nourishing children to caring for them until they gained a reasonable measure of self-sufficiency, and men generally undertaking the more strenuous and risky activities required to provide for survival of the group.
Given the immense body of knowledge that must be transmitted to the young of the human species, and the limited ability of the young to understand the full reasoning behind it ( which is why the young are called "immature") it was a lot more practical and efficient to simply tell the junior members of the culture what to do than it was to argue with them over why it was a good idea to do it that way. Frequently, the reasons would never be explained and the practical considerations underlying the choice of behavior were lost as cultural knowledge. Then, if the environment changed such that the dictated behavior was no longer really necessary, it was still continued because people had forgotten the reason why they did it in the first place.
In human history, there are 2 great revolutions which created a distinct and abrupt discontinuity in the environment. The first revolution was the agricultural revolution which occurred perhaps 10,000 years ago. Agriculture stabilized the food supply and made both possible and necessary permanent encampments and domiciles. ( For more on this aspect, click here.)
The second revolution can be viewed many different ways, but I call it the "Scientific and Technological" revolution which began with the smelting of metal and continues to this day in the form of industrialization and technology based mass culture. This revolution gave homo sapiens a degree of control over their environment that the race had dreamed about for all time. A degree of control over, and certainty about, the future which had been the secret wish of all peoples became reality. With the advent of Pasteur's germ theory, the last great restraining force on human population levels, disease, was removed and the population of humanity exploded. About 1850, the human population of the world was about 1.5 billion. Now, 150 years later it is 4X that: about 6 billion.
Despite all the changes in the environment which made the survival of the species no longer so dependant on fertility, ten thousand years of social history, custom, and law do not go away overnight. Codified into almost every aspect of law, and deeply embedded in all social customs and values, is the notion that women (meaning their fertility) MUST be protected and that men are highly expendable. The primary value of male life has always been measured by how much he produced to contribute to the group as a whole. Before the vast consolidation of durable wealth in the hands of a small percentage of the population, and before men were forced off the land which was the source of their sustenance by enclosure and the need to drive them into the cities to provide the workforce for the Industrial transformation, this productivity was measured directly in terms of production of food. Post-enclosure, this value was transferred directly to the ability to provide food by buying it, i.e. wages.
Fast forward to the end of the 20th century, and you find men's value still being determined by their earning capacity, and women still choosing their mates based to a large degree on this.
Far from there being ANY sort of world-wide and history-long conspiracy by men to do awful and nasty things to women, to "OPPRESS" them, the male attitude has been driven by a deep and inherent appreciation of women's value and a desire to protect and take care of them.
However, our culture has never come to terms with the impact which death control must inevitably have on our social customs and value structure. The desire of women to free themselves of their biological role as producers of babies is understandable given the many burdens that role creates for them. But, in order for women to be free of that role, men must also be free of the role of providing care and maintenance for those babies as the only means to social identity.
The monstrous lie and hoax perpetrated by feminism, i.e. that it is MEN who have fought any gains or progress toward the re-balancing of the power relationships between men and women should be immediately obvious in the fact that so many men were early supporters of feminism and that the lament heard from women from the mid-1970s on was NOT that men were seeking to "OPPRESS" women into traditional marriage but rather EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE. Men weren't badgering women to marry them, they were REFUSING to "commit" to marriage themselves.
Were it not for the elements of man-hating and victimism which were integrated into feminist thought from very the beginning by early feminist theorists and writers like Betty Friedan, Kate Millet, Susan Brownmiller, Valerie Solanas, and Robin Morgan; then carried on in fine style by Susan Faludi, Naomi Wolfe, Sally Miller-Gearhart, and a host of others; the radical shift from woman-as-strong to woman-as-total-victim as the core message of feminism would have been obvious.
It is still fascinating to read the works of such new-wave feminists as Rene Denfield and Robin Blumner who point out the Victorian attitudes of female fragility, sensitivity, and moral superiority pushed by contemporary feminism, but do not take the next logical step. If WOMEN are the ones most aggressively pushing these notions today, end of the 20th century, has any woman raised the question whether women might (now just consider the possibility) just have been the driving force in promoting those notions the last time around. Just maybe, the paternalistic attitude of culture toward women has been promoted and nurtured by women all along, in order to gain the special protections and treatment that women get from a culture which has those attitudes. Special treatment like first grabs on the lifeboat seats when the Titanic goes down, or special "Violence Against Women Act" laws.
Hmmmm? Do you think that perhaps women could have been an active and major driving force all along in promoting the notion of how weak, capricious, and in need of special treatment women are?
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Saturday, March 05, 2005
EOTM: The Secret of Life: Shut Up and Shovel the Fuckin' Gravel.
.The entire secret of life, of power, of everything, was taught to me when I was a teenager, by a man, a farmer. And he taught it to me in the way that is so typical of men: three sentences, no more. I contend that the real conflict today is not male versus female, but urban versus agrarian values. When people forget where their food and fiber comes from, when they forget the natural processes and timetables that produce them, when they start looking for someone else to "hand over" what they want and stop taking the responsibility for producing it themselves, when they replace hard work with belligerence and aggression, they lock themselves into downward spirals of helplessness, powerlessness, and anger.
I taught this same lesson to a woman "friend" of mine. It took me two years. During the entire time she was doing her best to manipulate and harass me into a "romantic" relationship that I had absolutely no interest whatsoever in allowing to happen. It took many screaming matches and finally the threat to throw her out of my life for her to "get it", but she finally "got it" and today she credits me with saving her life, her soul, and her sanity, and has become a friend.
The farmer's name was Griff. I was a "townie" (population 300) and made good money for a teenager as a "hired hand". One day when I showed up for work he said "We're going to pick up a new truck." We got in his car and the entire 40 minute ride to the dealer passed without either of us saying a word: One of those easy comfortable silences that men often use to communicate more than words ever can. We picked up a new 4-wheel drive ¾ ton pickup and headed back to the farm. When we got back, he pointed to a large gravel pile by the barn and told me to fill the truck bed with gravel and go fill in a hole in the entrance to one of his fields.
I said "But that gravel will ruin the paint on the bed of this brand new truck." He looked at me silently for about a minute, his expression eloquently saying that I was the worst idiot he'd ever been burdened with having to tolerate in his life. Without saying another word he picked up the shovel and, with a swing that would be the envy of every major league baseball hitter, he swung it around and smacked the side of the truck sending paint chips flying in every direction and leaving a huge dent. He looked at me again with that same "I can't believe you are such an idiot" look and said: "City boy this is a FARM truck. I didn't buy it to look pretty, I bought it to DO WORK, same reason I'm payin' you. Now it ain't new no more, so shut up and shovel the fuckin' gravel." Then he turned around and walked off, leaving me to feel foolish and gain wisdom.
Of course it took the entire context and circumstances for me to understand the full significance of the lesson: not with my head but with my spirit. In the same way, cultures world wide and throughout history have used ritual space to teach the great lessons to the young. Complexity and too many words destroy the lesson, because the very heart and soul of the lesson is that words accomplish nothing. Words do not put in crops. Words do not harvest them or get them to market or prepare them or put them on our plates. No one eats unless someone shuts up and shovels the fuckin' gravel.
The entire secret of male power is that men do, men have, shut up and shoveled the fuckin' gravel. Men shoveled the gravel that built all the hydroelectric dams which provide the electric power which everyone today takes for granted; some of that "Patriarchal technology" that some women are so fond of sneering at. Men put their sweat and, about 50 of them, their very bodies into Hoover dam. Then they "handed over" the result to women to make their lives more comfortable. The millions of tons of gravel which went in to building the transcontinental railway were shoveled by men. And hundreds of their bodies went into it as well. Women and men living today would have none of the conveniences which make their lives so comfortable if millions of men had not shut up and shoveled the fuckin' gravel. All the lawsuits and affirmative action programs in the world could not have built them. Those men did not wait for someone to "hand over" those dams or that railroad to them, they shut up and shoveled the fuckin' gravel and built them. Hoover dam is "male dominated", the transcontinental railroad is "male dominated" because men put their time, their work, their sweat, and their very bodies into building them. Everything that we see in the world today, from business to the military, that is "male dominated" is so because men died to build it.
That is both men's power and their powerlessness.
They shut up and shoveled the fuckin' gravel.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Friday, March 04, 2005
EOTM: Life
Human beings are part of the natural world. They are part of a group of a great many things that have a characteristic in common which we call life.
Life is a chain - an endless cycle of birth, growth, and death. Every individual living thing is part of a long genetic heritage and the purpose if it's life is to carry on that heritage, lest the species vanish from the earth. The purpose of an individual's life is create more life.
Life is not a static "thing" to be acquired in quantity, but an experience to be lived. That means living through all the cycles - birth, growth, and death. Each living thing has a cycle unique to its species.
Because the individual survival takes a back seat to species survival, the drive to reproduce supercedes all other drives. A great many species only mate once at the end of their lifecycle: salmon, moths and butterflies, and a great many insect species. All crops and fruits have a one year life cycle.
Those who see humans as apart from the natural world, cannot see the how the manifestations of the daily business of carrying on life fit into broad patterns. For those who do see these broad patterns, all of life makes perfect sense. It may not always be exactly the way we like it, but it makes sense.
I don't know whether humans can learn to adapt to a totally un-natural world. Sense gets surrendered to force of will or of argument. Without sense, the world turns into a very hostile place.
I don't know whether an understanding of the natural basis of life will be useful or adaptive in the future. Perhaps science will erase the distinction between humanity and machines. Perhaps people will get to design their own children.
I don't like the idea, but tides have a way of overcoming all resistance. Humanity more than ever before has the ability to choose its own future. I hope that wise choices get made. I am not optimistic.
Personally, I am glad that I lived in a time when neither air nor water could kill you. I am glad to have walked in a forest and seen different forms of life everywhere I looked and know that every one of them was a close cousin. We all had the same needs - food, shelter, the company of others of our kind. I am glad to have been able to tune in to a forest and understand it as a form of life that lives in very slooooowwwww time. A forest may take 200 years to twitch its finger, but it is every bit as much a living entity as a human being or a butterfly.
I hope that humanity does not lose track of what it is to be alive.
He who dies with the most toys - still dies.
There is far more to life than how many sport-utility vehicles you can buy - how much stuff you have. Humans are consuming the earth with how much stuff they have. We are stamping out other species at the rate of 17,000/yr in our relentless pursuit of stuff. As a culture, we are obese, addicted to television and the stuff it sells us, and glued to the couch. Life in a box.
The fracture between men and women is a war over stuff, over competition for the financial power to buy stuff. The fundamental cooperation between men and women to accomplish the tasks of staying alive and raising more of their kind, has been severed. I believe this is because humans have forgotten that they are alive and their role in the continuation of life.
As humans move into ever more un-natural and artificially constructed worlds, they may indeed diverge from other forms of life and cease to have anything in common with them. I see humanity becoming more like the borg every year.
What used to be thought of as family and community has been replaced by the marketplace. Both families and communities have been destroyed and the functions they formerly served have been "outsourced" at less cost. The family has succumbed to the market pressures of competition.
It will be some time before we really know whether modern technological civilization is a viable adaptation or not. I don't think it's going to be. There are simply too many people consuming too much. At some point we have to run out of things to consume. When that happens, life will change drastically.
But the fascinating thing about life is that it always does go on. Young people today are trying to sort out new roles for men and women from the rubble of the old roles which the boomers left as their legacy. Roles which were appropriate in a pre-technical agrarian environment are no longer appropriate in a marketplace dominated urban environment. Children, who used to be considered assets, are now an expense item. The duties to the children for the first 25 years or so have become so onerous that men and women are at each other's throats over who is going to carry the load. In a pre-techical society, kids began to contribute directly to the household before age 7. Now they tend to be a drain on their parents for at least 3X that long, often longer. The entire meaning of kids has changed. Now everything in the world is "for the children." Only, we now have a whole lot of children that nobody wants.
In her wonderful series about pre-technical culture, Jean Auel in "The Mammoth Hunters", has an old shaman saying that you can learn everything you need to know about life by observing for one year. Anyone with an agricultural background will understand that completely. The basic life cycle of nature is one year. Everything blooms about the same time every year, and everything gets harvested at the same time, year after year. There are some great patterns and timetables which dictate people's actions and choices. It takes a woman nine months to have a baby. You cannot get nine women together and get it done in one month.
I am not at all sure that humanity can long survive the generalized loss of this knowledge, because subjective fundamentalism always substitutes ego and the will to power for understanding and getting in line with natural processes and timetables.
I agree with the shaman that one can learn everything one NEEDS to know about life by watching a field of corn, for example, for one year and understanding the analogues of each part of the corn's life cycle in the human experience.
In the spring, the farmer tills and prepares the ground, the substrate from which the nourishment for the crop comes. This is analogous to the community, the values and skills of the parents, their choice of where to live and what it provides, and their social networks. A child will only grow well when planted in fertile ground.
Next the farmer plants the seed. You know what the analogue of that is.
The young plant sprouts, and sends its roots into the ground to draw nourishment. The plant becomes an analogue of the marriage, which has a male part, the tassel, and a female part, the ear and silks. But notice that the marriage is also an entity of itself. IT is what sinks the roots, not the male or female parts by themselves. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, in "The Divorce Culture", speaks of the loss of "social capital" as social networks are torn apart by divorce. If the plant stays rooted in its initial spot, the roots grow deep and strong. If it is ripped out, chances are it will never grow enough of a root system to produce healthy fruit. Prior to a high level of geographic mobility, a child would have social networks built over many generations to draw upon as it started life. In many communities, the folk would help the marriage get a quick start on its root system by building the newlyweds a house and barn. More young men starting their "careers" have gotten a boost from old established friends of their parents and grandparents than have not.
Except in the cases of the very wealthy, geographic mobility severs the connection to long standing social networks. Divorce virtually always destroys access to half of the potential social capital of one of the social networks, almost always the father's.
Once the plant has a strong root system, it begins to bear fruit. The ripening of the female part, the ear and silks, brings out the male part, the tassel, with a fervor to fertilize that defines its very existence. For a few days it sheds massive amounts of pollen ( sperm ), on the order of millions of pollen grains per potential kernel of corn ( ova ), in an attempt to achieve its ONLY purpose - fertilization.
Once the sexual phase of the plant ( marriage ) has passed, all nutrition coming from the root system ( community ) is shunted to the offspring ( ear of corn kernels ) to make them as strong and vital as possible for their job next year of producing the next generation. The plant itself ( the marriage ) outlives the male and female parts, but not by much. All those parts are programmed to die once their job of carrying on the chain of life unbroken is done.
Next year, the cycle begins anew.
The modern world has nothing of the natural world in it. An understanding of life is only necessary to people for the purpose of understanding themselves. They no longer need to understand where their food and fiber comes from - there are people who specialize in bringing it to them and that is all they really need to know. More and more of what they need is being produced in factories anyway. Everything is highly processed these days. That is the only way the economy has been able to expand the numbers of jobs while the numbers it takes to produce most things have been falling for years.
As young people try to figure out new gender roles, economics takes precedence over life in the decision making. This has the makings of a very hard new world.
It makes me want to admonish people - remember, you are alive.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Life is a chain - an endless cycle of birth, growth, and death. Every individual living thing is part of a long genetic heritage and the purpose if it's life is to carry on that heritage, lest the species vanish from the earth. The purpose of an individual's life is create more life.
Life is not a static "thing" to be acquired in quantity, but an experience to be lived. That means living through all the cycles - birth, growth, and death. Each living thing has a cycle unique to its species.
Because the individual survival takes a back seat to species survival, the drive to reproduce supercedes all other drives. A great many species only mate once at the end of their lifecycle: salmon, moths and butterflies, and a great many insect species. All crops and fruits have a one year life cycle.
Those who see humans as apart from the natural world, cannot see the how the manifestations of the daily business of carrying on life fit into broad patterns. For those who do see these broad patterns, all of life makes perfect sense. It may not always be exactly the way we like it, but it makes sense.
I don't know whether humans can learn to adapt to a totally un-natural world. Sense gets surrendered to force of will or of argument. Without sense, the world turns into a very hostile place.
I don't know whether an understanding of the natural basis of life will be useful or adaptive in the future. Perhaps science will erase the distinction between humanity and machines. Perhaps people will get to design their own children.
I don't like the idea, but tides have a way of overcoming all resistance. Humanity more than ever before has the ability to choose its own future. I hope that wise choices get made. I am not optimistic.
Personally, I am glad that I lived in a time when neither air nor water could kill you. I am glad to have walked in a forest and seen different forms of life everywhere I looked and know that every one of them was a close cousin. We all had the same needs - food, shelter, the company of others of our kind. I am glad to have been able to tune in to a forest and understand it as a form of life that lives in very slooooowwwww time. A forest may take 200 years to twitch its finger, but it is every bit as much a living entity as a human being or a butterfly.
I hope that humanity does not lose track of what it is to be alive.
He who dies with the most toys - still dies.
There is far more to life than how many sport-utility vehicles you can buy - how much stuff you have. Humans are consuming the earth with how much stuff they have. We are stamping out other species at the rate of 17,000/yr in our relentless pursuit of stuff. As a culture, we are obese, addicted to television and the stuff it sells us, and glued to the couch. Life in a box.
The fracture between men and women is a war over stuff, over competition for the financial power to buy stuff. The fundamental cooperation between men and women to accomplish the tasks of staying alive and raising more of their kind, has been severed. I believe this is because humans have forgotten that they are alive and their role in the continuation of life.
As humans move into ever more un-natural and artificially constructed worlds, they may indeed diverge from other forms of life and cease to have anything in common with them. I see humanity becoming more like the borg every year.
What used to be thought of as family and community has been replaced by the marketplace. Both families and communities have been destroyed and the functions they formerly served have been "outsourced" at less cost. The family has succumbed to the market pressures of competition.
It will be some time before we really know whether modern technological civilization is a viable adaptation or not. I don't think it's going to be. There are simply too many people consuming too much. At some point we have to run out of things to consume. When that happens, life will change drastically.
But the fascinating thing about life is that it always does go on. Young people today are trying to sort out new roles for men and women from the rubble of the old roles which the boomers left as their legacy. Roles which were appropriate in a pre-technical agrarian environment are no longer appropriate in a marketplace dominated urban environment. Children, who used to be considered assets, are now an expense item. The duties to the children for the first 25 years or so have become so onerous that men and women are at each other's throats over who is going to carry the load. In a pre-techical society, kids began to contribute directly to the household before age 7. Now they tend to be a drain on their parents for at least 3X that long, often longer. The entire meaning of kids has changed. Now everything in the world is "for the children." Only, we now have a whole lot of children that nobody wants.
In her wonderful series about pre-technical culture, Jean Auel in "The Mammoth Hunters", has an old shaman saying that you can learn everything you need to know about life by observing for one year. Anyone with an agricultural background will understand that completely. The basic life cycle of nature is one year. Everything blooms about the same time every year, and everything gets harvested at the same time, year after year. There are some great patterns and timetables which dictate people's actions and choices. It takes a woman nine months to have a baby. You cannot get nine women together and get it done in one month.
I am not at all sure that humanity can long survive the generalized loss of this knowledge, because subjective fundamentalism always substitutes ego and the will to power for understanding and getting in line with natural processes and timetables.
I agree with the shaman that one can learn everything one NEEDS to know about life by watching a field of corn, for example, for one year and understanding the analogues of each part of the corn's life cycle in the human experience.
In the spring, the farmer tills and prepares the ground, the substrate from which the nourishment for the crop comes. This is analogous to the community, the values and skills of the parents, their choice of where to live and what it provides, and their social networks. A child will only grow well when planted in fertile ground.
Next the farmer plants the seed. You know what the analogue of that is.
The young plant sprouts, and sends its roots into the ground to draw nourishment. The plant becomes an analogue of the marriage, which has a male part, the tassel, and a female part, the ear and silks. But notice that the marriage is also an entity of itself. IT is what sinks the roots, not the male or female parts by themselves. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, in "The Divorce Culture", speaks of the loss of "social capital" as social networks are torn apart by divorce. If the plant stays rooted in its initial spot, the roots grow deep and strong. If it is ripped out, chances are it will never grow enough of a root system to produce healthy fruit. Prior to a high level of geographic mobility, a child would have social networks built over many generations to draw upon as it started life. In many communities, the folk would help the marriage get a quick start on its root system by building the newlyweds a house and barn. More young men starting their "careers" have gotten a boost from old established friends of their parents and grandparents than have not.
Except in the cases of the very wealthy, geographic mobility severs the connection to long standing social networks. Divorce virtually always destroys access to half of the potential social capital of one of the social networks, almost always the father's.
Once the plant has a strong root system, it begins to bear fruit. The ripening of the female part, the ear and silks, brings out the male part, the tassel, with a fervor to fertilize that defines its very existence. For a few days it sheds massive amounts of pollen ( sperm ), on the order of millions of pollen grains per potential kernel of corn ( ova ), in an attempt to achieve its ONLY purpose - fertilization.
Once the sexual phase of the plant ( marriage ) has passed, all nutrition coming from the root system ( community ) is shunted to the offspring ( ear of corn kernels ) to make them as strong and vital as possible for their job next year of producing the next generation. The plant itself ( the marriage ) outlives the male and female parts, but not by much. All those parts are programmed to die once their job of carrying on the chain of life unbroken is done.
Next year, the cycle begins anew.
The modern world has nothing of the natural world in it. An understanding of life is only necessary to people for the purpose of understanding themselves. They no longer need to understand where their food and fiber comes from - there are people who specialize in bringing it to them and that is all they really need to know. More and more of what they need is being produced in factories anyway. Everything is highly processed these days. That is the only way the economy has been able to expand the numbers of jobs while the numbers it takes to produce most things have been falling for years.
As young people try to figure out new gender roles, economics takes precedence over life in the decision making. This has the makings of a very hard new world.
It makes me want to admonish people - remember, you are alive.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Thursday, March 03, 2005
EOTM: The Warning Label: 90 degrees from everywhere and the language ain't pretty.
The gender dialogue has been entirely unbalanced since the 1960s. Men have been demonized, hated, and told to eradicate themselves. Opportunists of both sexes have jumped on the bandwagon of anti-male sentiment and misandry and have been incessant and extreme in their demands that men remodel themselves according to a new social ideal which amounts to nothing more than personal biases and self-centered ideology. Culturally, we have suffered greatly from a glut of worthless opinions and a severe shortage of worthwhile efforts.
Elsewhere on the web, you can find a site entitled "All Men Must Die". There is no link to it from here because I refuse to gratify this immature little harridan's ego any further by boosting the traffic to her site which promotes arrogant hatred and sexism. Nor will you find links to sites talking about the inevitability of "patriarchy", celebrating misogyny, or calling for the repeal of women's right to vote.
What you will find here is intense criticisms of a wide variety of ideologies which underlie the conflicts which have now been elevated to the status of war. You will find contrarian opinions which do my level best to make hamburger out of the sacred cows of both the Right and the Left. If I don't manage to seriously piss off at least one conservative and one liberal each day, I consider the day a total waste. On a good day I also manage to chap the asses of a moderate or two.
My language is plain spoken, blunt, and often profane. If that offends you, don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out. A site called "All Men Must Die" is clearly a hate-motivated site, but is allowed to continue to promote its message of hate. I claim the same right to publicize my hatred of stupidity.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Elsewhere on the web, you can find a site entitled "All Men Must Die". There is no link to it from here because I refuse to gratify this immature little harridan's ego any further by boosting the traffic to her site which promotes arrogant hatred and sexism. Nor will you find links to sites talking about the inevitability of "patriarchy", celebrating misogyny, or calling for the repeal of women's right to vote.
What you will find here is intense criticisms of a wide variety of ideologies which underlie the conflicts which have now been elevated to the status of war. You will find contrarian opinions which do my level best to make hamburger out of the sacred cows of both the Right and the Left. If I don't manage to seriously piss off at least one conservative and one liberal each day, I consider the day a total waste. On a good day I also manage to chap the asses of a moderate or two.
My language is plain spoken, blunt, and often profane. If that offends you, don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out. A site called "All Men Must Die" is clearly a hate-motivated site, but is allowed to continue to promote its message of hate. I claim the same right to publicize my hatred of stupidity.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
EOTM: Gender War, Sexuality, and Love - Overview
With all the thousands of books published on the topic of relationships, trying to say something meaningful, and hopefully new, about the topic in the context of the gender war seems nearly impossible. And trying to say it briefly or concisely or succinctly seems even more impossible. However, it is even still more impossible to sit idly by and say or do nothing.
As the 20th century draws to a close, it is hard to imagine a time when relationships between men and women have ever been worse. Sandy Close, writing for the Pacific News Service, quotes a veteran teacher in her article, "Gender War Among Youth -- At the Heart of America's Calamity", that among young people today - "Male-female relations these days aren't love-hate. They're pure hate."
Like World War I, which the naively optimistic called "The War to End ALL Wars", the gender war has become a trench war with the various sides dug in and surrounded by barbed wire. And, like that war, the frontier has moved very little in the past few years. (During the entire first World War, the frontier never advanced or retreated more than 7 miles.) But, unlike that war, this one has dragged on for 35 years. Two generations have been born, grown up, gone to college, and entered the cold hard world of adulthood while the war has dragged on. One almost has to wonder whether this gender war is going to become the "Hundred Years Gender War."
Like the American Civil War, and I suppose really like ALL civil wars, this one is tearing apart families, turning former friends and allies (like spouses) into bitter enemies, consuming a huge portion of the available resources, time, and energy of the citizens, and leaving nothing but bitter destruction and scorched earth in its wake. Marriages are more likely to fail than to succeed. Both sexes are talking about "reproductive independence" from the other. Young people of both sexes hate the other sex.
This isn't about equality. Equality has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Equality never has had anything to do with it.
It is about the intrusion of marketplace values into personal relationships, the purchase of love, and the devastating effects of inflation as the "price of love" has spiraled upward out of control. It is about how sex, love, and people have been turned into commodities and objects. And it is about the clash between socialism and capitalism in the realm of personal relationships.
And it is about hate.
It is about a small group of mentally and emotionally ill women who have been able to sell their personal hate-filled pathology as a universal cultural condition. It is about making women fear and distrust men and men fear and distrust women, more than they already had reason to.
It is about denial of real biological differences which do exist, at the same time it is about denial of the real nature of those differences.
It is about turning would-be allies into enemies, and majoring in minors to turn petty differences into war.
It is about a bunch of disgruntled would-be princesses throwing a fit because life isn't carrying them around on a satin pillow. And it is about men getting sick of dying and being sacrificed for trying to satisfy the aspiring princesses that these men are trying to love.
It is about distorting the entirety of human history which was not particularly kind to anyone, and was full of challenges to survival, and painting the strategies used to insure the survival of the greatest number of people in the revisionist light of victimism.
It is about insanity being sold as sanity.
It IS insanity.
eye of the mind [EOTM] is a male friendly, feminidiocy unfriendly, site dedicated to a real and constructive approaches to bringing an end to the gender war.
In the end, the future will boil down to the answers to two questions:
1) Just how much hate do women expect to be able to dump on men without men beginning to hate back - bitterly?
2) Are there enough women willing to stop hating, and start cooperating with men and taking a realistic look at the actions of women and how they directly contribute to the creation and perpetuation of the complaints of feminism, to turn back the tide of hate and make a difference?
You tell me.
As the 20th century draws to a close, it is hard to imagine a time when relationships between men and women have ever been worse. Sandy Close, writing for the Pacific News Service, quotes a veteran teacher in her article, "Gender War Among Youth -- At the Heart of America's Calamity", that among young people today - "Male-female relations these days aren't love-hate. They're pure hate."
Like World War I, which the naively optimistic called "The War to End ALL Wars", the gender war has become a trench war with the various sides dug in and surrounded by barbed wire. And, like that war, the frontier has moved very little in the past few years. (During the entire first World War, the frontier never advanced or retreated more than 7 miles.) But, unlike that war, this one has dragged on for 35 years. Two generations have been born, grown up, gone to college, and entered the cold hard world of adulthood while the war has dragged on. One almost has to wonder whether this gender war is going to become the "Hundred Years Gender War."
Like the American Civil War, and I suppose really like ALL civil wars, this one is tearing apart families, turning former friends and allies (like spouses) into bitter enemies, consuming a huge portion of the available resources, time, and energy of the citizens, and leaving nothing but bitter destruction and scorched earth in its wake. Marriages are more likely to fail than to succeed. Both sexes are talking about "reproductive independence" from the other. Young people of both sexes hate the other sex.
This isn't about equality. Equality has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Equality never has had anything to do with it.
It is about the intrusion of marketplace values into personal relationships, the purchase of love, and the devastating effects of inflation as the "price of love" has spiraled upward out of control. It is about how sex, love, and people have been turned into commodities and objects. And it is about the clash between socialism and capitalism in the realm of personal relationships.
And it is about hate.
It is about a small group of mentally and emotionally ill women who have been able to sell their personal hate-filled pathology as a universal cultural condition. It is about making women fear and distrust men and men fear and distrust women, more than they already had reason to.
It is about denial of real biological differences which do exist, at the same time it is about denial of the real nature of those differences.
It is about turning would-be allies into enemies, and majoring in minors to turn petty differences into war.
It is about a bunch of disgruntled would-be princesses throwing a fit because life isn't carrying them around on a satin pillow. And it is about men getting sick of dying and being sacrificed for trying to satisfy the aspiring princesses that these men are trying to love.
It is about distorting the entirety of human history which was not particularly kind to anyone, and was full of challenges to survival, and painting the strategies used to insure the survival of the greatest number of people in the revisionist light of victimism.
It is about insanity being sold as sanity.
It IS insanity.
eye of the mind [EOTM] is a male friendly, feminidiocy unfriendly, site dedicated to a real and constructive approaches to bringing an end to the gender war.
In the end, the future will boil down to the answers to two questions:
1) Just how much hate do women expect to be able to dump on men without men beginning to hate back - bitterly?
2) Are there enough women willing to stop hating, and start cooperating with men and taking a realistic look at the actions of women and how they directly contribute to the creation and perpetuation of the complaints of feminism, to turn back the tide of hate and make a difference?
You tell me.
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
EOTM: Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Gender War
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Say the words "gender war"to someone these days and likely you will get one of two reactions. Either they will look at you like you have just said something totally incomprehensible, as most people would have before the 1990s, or they will launch into a personal perspective on the battle lines, battlegrounds, and battle tactics which they have observed from personal experience. With each passing day, more people move from the first category into the second as they somehow become a casualty of this incomprehensible war.
And war it certainly has become.The older term for the essential conflicts between the interests and needs of men and women - the more benign "Battle of the Sexes" - has taken a mean and ugly turn. A wedge has been driven right down the middle of the human race which deprives the combatants of the only solace available to them in all other wars: respite from hostilities in the presence, or the arms, of someone they love.
As with any war, propaganda is being used to demonize the enemy. Men and women, who should be the most natural of allies because they have so much to offer each other that they both need, are instead seeing their interests as being mutually exclusive, not interdependent and complementary. The tragedy of this is beyond words.The tragedy is human loneliness, and the scope is almost universal.
Men, in general, have been slow to respond to all the terrible charges leveled against them. There have been many reasons for this. Foremost among these has been the difficulty which men have had in believing that so much of womankind would turn so thoroughly and viciously against them. Twenty-five years ago, no one could have predicted that the entirety of human history would be completely re-written by the time that the newborns of the day graduated from college. Or that the actions and lives of so many men, great and obscure, would be stripped of every shred of human decency and generosity and distorted into a world-wide and history long conspiracy of and by men to do nasty things to women - called "Patriarchy."
Like observers of the events leading up to each of the world wars, there were many of us who expected sanity to re-enter the dialogue at any time and the hostility and hatred to cease rather than continue to grow. In the end, we turned out to be just as foolish and naïve as those who put off joining the world wars until forced to do so. By the time we realized that THEY had declared war on US, it was too late to avoid it and we were left with no choice but to fight for the basic rights and freedoms in which we believed.
This "barely civil" civil-war has fragmented our culture and balkanized interest groups in a way that will take years for us to recover - if we can recover at all. As soldiers who fought the Japanese in the early 1940s had a very difficult time later adjusting to the idea of Asians as friends and neighbors, those of us who have lived out our entire adult lives in the midst of this war will likely not be able to heal from the wounds it has caused and be able to see our former enemies as anything other than enemies.
Overview
The Warning Label: 90 degrees from everywhere and the language ain’t pretty.
Life
The Secret of Life: Shut Up and Shovel the Fuckin’ Gravel.
A Simple, Brief, Rationalist Alternative to Feminist Theory
The Nature of Things
In a Male Voice
Feminism Deconstructed – Nothing But a Hate Movement
Toward a Culture of Singleness
Equal Time: Tales of Offensive and Obnoxious Women
The Lies: Propaganda Used to Demonize a Non-Existent “Enemy”
The Rocky Road to True Equality
Double-THINK, Double, Triple and Quadruple Messages
”Can’t We All Just Get Along?” “Can’t We Just Go On A Date?”
Rape and Sexual Harassment: The Pearl Harbor of the Gender War
The Sexual Harassment Battlefield
The Opening Shot: The S.C.U.M. Manifesto
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Presenting Feminism! A Coming Out
The Feralization of Culture – Building Better Predators
Turning Away from Women: Fish without Bicycles
Feminism Deconstructed - A Vast Social Deconstruction (Demolition) Project
False Premises, False Promises
The Ultimate Hypocrisy: An Alleged Movement for “Gender Equality” with a Gendered Name
Feminism in the Context of U.S. Social History, 1890-1999
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Sexuality and Relationships
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We live under many illusions about the nature of the world and relationships. There are a great many "shoulds" that many feel compelled to live up to. There is much made of the NEED for dishonesty and lies. All this is sadly untrue.
There are very few forums for a sane and healthy approach to sexuality. This wonderful net is filled with the commercial exploitation of unfilled sexual need. Anyone who stood back,without value judgements, and looked at the sheer volume of activity and $$$ spent would see the vast volume of it. Yet all that is "sold" here is the objectification of human beings. It is this objectification which is the disease of the industrial consuming society. Everything works best when everyone is an identical producing consuming consumed unit. Yet without individuality there is no passion.
Sexual Psychology – Part One – Working Class Heroes - Puberty
Sexual Psychology – Part Two – Puberty to 40
Sexual Psychology – Part Three – 40 to Closing Time
The Socio-Cultural Context of Sexuality and Marriage
The Biological Foundations of Sexuality
The Biological Context of Sexuality and Mating
The Nitty Gritty of Male Sexuality
The Destruction of Little Girls’ Sexuality
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Love
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The question of love has been much discussed throughout history. Several of the viewpoints I express will, no doubt, offend some people. Yet, no matter how much one hears or reads about love, it is only in the actual loving that one gets love's rewards.Many think that they want to be loved, but being loved is something that happens from the outside. It can't be felt, so the lovee still feels empty.Love is really a verb, not a noun. The lover is filled with love. All major religions have this somewhere in their teachings. Sexuality is NOT love. Sexuality is sexuality. It is mother nature's little trick for making surethere are more little species running around. Sexuality is a need, a drive,a hunger, and as such is not under conscious control. Loving well is the achievement of a mature spirit, and while it may have its elements of lust (from luster - to shine), passion, it is always creative, never destructive. Being destructive in the name of love is sacriledge which merits burning at the stake.
Sunday, February 06, 2005
EOTM: The Goddess
The Goddess represents all that women are, might be, and hope to become: as the God represents the same things for men. When there were many gods and goddesses, each of them represented a separate face of what we have now come to call "the human condition". There was one for each of the best and worst, and the sometimes simply mundane, characteristics of women and men.
The many faces and incarnations of these beings, as well as the ease with which they could change shape or name, testified to a deep intuitive understanding of human nature which was passed from generation to generation by the oral tradition of myth and legend. Within each person lies the potential to be creative or destructive, as well as the potential to understand which of their acts contribute to creation and which to destruction. The process of social maturation is the gradual development of these abilities and the increasingly conscious choice applied to selecting one's own actions based on the probable consquences of that act.
For the past several hundred years the Goddess has been under siege. The empire that the Romans began and eventually spread to span the entire globe under the reign of their students, the British, set out to destroy her because she interfered with empire building. Now the the god, too, is under siege: for the same reasons and in the same manner.
In every woman dwells some of the goddess, as in every man dwells some of the god. As each child makes the torturous journey from helplessness and dependency to the responsibilities and freedoms of adulthood, the god and the goddess represent the collected wisdom gained by thousands of generations of observation of how people can and do act. In the stories called myth and legend are the lessons learned regarding how each action we choose affects the lives of others, what its consequences will likely be. Using these lessons we can apply the force of consciousness to creating the world we desire by selecting our acts based on what we wish to create.
Most religions of the common era have lost sight of this. As humanity has become more densely packed and often cannot tolerate the slow process of maturation, guidelines for action have become externalized in the form of rules or commandments. Over time, people stopped teaching the understanding of why one "should" or "should not" do a particular thing and substituted compliance for understanding. The goddess and the god were moved outside of each person. Without internalizing the divine, both the sacred and the profane aspects of it, humans remain eternal children: forever dependant on the understanding of others to inform their actions. Yet, when those they look to have not internalized it either, they place themselves in slavery to the power of other unmatured children who will pass along their own helplessness and dependency, but call it wisdom.
In the dark ages before the Renaissance, compliance was enforced by a reign of terror called "The Inquisition". Dark and angry children in grown-up bodies tortured and killed all who did not bow to their so-called "wisdom". Learning itself was considered dangerous and vigorous attempts were made to stamp it out. Heirs of an empire begun hundreds of years before sought to consolidate their power, all power, by destroying all who opposed it. Because their one and only god was male, they attempted to destroy and discredit the idea of the divine feminine. Millions died for refusing to accept the moral authority of these self-appointed masters.
Much of the world today still lives in the shadow of those murderous times. Colonialism spread across the globe, confiscating ancestral lands, destroying entire cultures, and wiping out entire peoples. By first separating themselves from the divine then claiming to understand and represent it exclusively, these empire builders have set themselves against life and become a cult which worships death. In their view there is no meaning in life except to prepare for death and what happens afterward. They worship death, not life.
The Goddess was gravely injured, but she did not die. Deep within millions of women she waited out the dark times until her wisdom was again needed to heal the world. The God, as well, came close to death because the divine was confiscated from all human beings to be placed in the hands of a parental figure. No human was allowed to look inside for answers. All answers were to come from outside ourselves: from the empire builders, the enslavers. Now those answers are failing completely, and women and men are turning back to the Goddess and God within themselves.
Marianne Williamson speaks of "glorious Queens" as opposed to "slave girls" in "A Woman's Worth" and Robert Bly speaks of the need to find and reclaim the "inner King" in "Iron John". The King and The Queen are the earthly manifestations of God and Goddess. They represent the highest level of spiritual achievement available to us mere mortals. Most people tend to think of kings and queens in terms of the power that they have over the "common folk". Those who think of it in those terms have it backwards. The only power a true king or queen has is the power of self-mastery and the realization that we all serve a power greater than ourselves. Whether this power be called by the name of some particular god or goddess, or simply by the name "life", only those who dedicate their lives to its service will be able to find meaning, and unity, and purpose in their lives. Those who master this find people compellingly drawn to them. Which is why those people make them into kings and queens.
Many current worshipers of the goddess have fallen into the same pattern as the old Inquisitors. Dark, angry, and twisted children; they hate the god and seek to elevate the goddess above him. Under the lie of "equality", they seek superiority, power, and mastery of everything except themselves. They have come to worship only one face of the goddess: the dark and destructive face of Kali: the destroying face of ”The Bitch”. Men, having lost the god within themselves, no longer understand how Shiva uses his own power to balance the power of Kali. Instead, they cave in and supplicate to her. As a result, all that is good in them gets burned away and they become empty of all goodness, all godness, within. Some come to worship the dark power as well, and resort to violence to save themselves.
These men, as well as the men who hate the god and seek to elevate the goddess above him, are fools: dangerous fools. As the goddess must remain strong to balance the destructive power of the dark faces of the god, so must the god remain strong to balance the dark and destructive faces of the goddess. When either grows too powerful, many die and are lost.
George Lucas gave us a modern day version of the myth about this eternal struggle. Luke-who-walks-the-sky battles Darth Vader: literally "Dark Father". Rage and hatred are very powerful forces. Women's claim that "women+rage = power" is the cry of wounded and angry children lost in the dark. Anything + rage = power: rage = power. But it is a destructive power, not a creative one. The hate-intoxicated zealots who worship the dark and destructive face of the goddess are as much to blame for her loss of respect as those who hate all her faces. Men and women alike need to reclaim the light faces of the goddess and the god as well as the dark: if we, their children are ever to be freed from the darkness to walk again in the light of love for each other.
The best all round site I know for the many aspects of the goddess is:
http://www.yoni.com/
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Further Reading:
The God
Male Sexuality
The many faces and incarnations of these beings, as well as the ease with which they could change shape or name, testified to a deep intuitive understanding of human nature which was passed from generation to generation by the oral tradition of myth and legend. Within each person lies the potential to be creative or destructive, as well as the potential to understand which of their acts contribute to creation and which to destruction. The process of social maturation is the gradual development of these abilities and the increasingly conscious choice applied to selecting one's own actions based on the probable consquences of that act.
For the past several hundred years the Goddess has been under siege. The empire that the Romans began and eventually spread to span the entire globe under the reign of their students, the British, set out to destroy her because she interfered with empire building. Now the the god, too, is under siege: for the same reasons and in the same manner.
In every woman dwells some of the goddess, as in every man dwells some of the god. As each child makes the torturous journey from helplessness and dependency to the responsibilities and freedoms of adulthood, the god and the goddess represent the collected wisdom gained by thousands of generations of observation of how people can and do act. In the stories called myth and legend are the lessons learned regarding how each action we choose affects the lives of others, what its consequences will likely be. Using these lessons we can apply the force of consciousness to creating the world we desire by selecting our acts based on what we wish to create.
Most religions of the common era have lost sight of this. As humanity has become more densely packed and often cannot tolerate the slow process of maturation, guidelines for action have become externalized in the form of rules or commandments. Over time, people stopped teaching the understanding of why one "should" or "should not" do a particular thing and substituted compliance for understanding. The goddess and the god were moved outside of each person. Without internalizing the divine, both the sacred and the profane aspects of it, humans remain eternal children: forever dependant on the understanding of others to inform their actions. Yet, when those they look to have not internalized it either, they place themselves in slavery to the power of other unmatured children who will pass along their own helplessness and dependency, but call it wisdom.
In the dark ages before the Renaissance, compliance was enforced by a reign of terror called "The Inquisition". Dark and angry children in grown-up bodies tortured and killed all who did not bow to their so-called "wisdom". Learning itself was considered dangerous and vigorous attempts were made to stamp it out. Heirs of an empire begun hundreds of years before sought to consolidate their power, all power, by destroying all who opposed it. Because their one and only god was male, they attempted to destroy and discredit the idea of the divine feminine. Millions died for refusing to accept the moral authority of these self-appointed masters.
Much of the world today still lives in the shadow of those murderous times. Colonialism spread across the globe, confiscating ancestral lands, destroying entire cultures, and wiping out entire peoples. By first separating themselves from the divine then claiming to understand and represent it exclusively, these empire builders have set themselves against life and become a cult which worships death. In their view there is no meaning in life except to prepare for death and what happens afterward. They worship death, not life.
The Goddess was gravely injured, but she did not die. Deep within millions of women she waited out the dark times until her wisdom was again needed to heal the world. The God, as well, came close to death because the divine was confiscated from all human beings to be placed in the hands of a parental figure. No human was allowed to look inside for answers. All answers were to come from outside ourselves: from the empire builders, the enslavers. Now those answers are failing completely, and women and men are turning back to the Goddess and God within themselves.
Marianne Williamson speaks of "glorious Queens" as opposed to "slave girls" in "A Woman's Worth" and Robert Bly speaks of the need to find and reclaim the "inner King" in "Iron John". The King and The Queen are the earthly manifestations of God and Goddess. They represent the highest level of spiritual achievement available to us mere mortals. Most people tend to think of kings and queens in terms of the power that they have over the "common folk". Those who think of it in those terms have it backwards. The only power a true king or queen has is the power of self-mastery and the realization that we all serve a power greater than ourselves. Whether this power be called by the name of some particular god or goddess, or simply by the name "life", only those who dedicate their lives to its service will be able to find meaning, and unity, and purpose in their lives. Those who master this find people compellingly drawn to them. Which is why those people make them into kings and queens.
Many current worshipers of the goddess have fallen into the same pattern as the old Inquisitors. Dark, angry, and twisted children; they hate the god and seek to elevate the goddess above him. Under the lie of "equality", they seek superiority, power, and mastery of everything except themselves. They have come to worship only one face of the goddess: the dark and destructive face of Kali: the destroying face of ”The Bitch”. Men, having lost the god within themselves, no longer understand how Shiva uses his own power to balance the power of Kali. Instead, they cave in and supplicate to her. As a result, all that is good in them gets burned away and they become empty of all goodness, all godness, within. Some come to worship the dark power as well, and resort to violence to save themselves.
These men, as well as the men who hate the god and seek to elevate the goddess above him, are fools: dangerous fools. As the goddess must remain strong to balance the destructive power of the dark faces of the god, so must the god remain strong to balance the dark and destructive faces of the goddess. When either grows too powerful, many die and are lost.
George Lucas gave us a modern day version of the myth about this eternal struggle. Luke-who-walks-the-sky battles Darth Vader: literally "Dark Father". Rage and hatred are very powerful forces. Women's claim that "women+rage = power" is the cry of wounded and angry children lost in the dark. Anything + rage = power: rage = power. But it is a destructive power, not a creative one. The hate-intoxicated zealots who worship the dark and destructive face of the goddess are as much to blame for her loss of respect as those who hate all her faces. Men and women alike need to reclaim the light faces of the goddess and the god as well as the dark: if we, their children are ever to be freed from the darkness to walk again in the light of love for each other.
The best all round site I know for the many aspects of the goddess is:
http://www.yoni.com/
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Further Reading:
The God
Male Sexuality
Saturday, February 05, 2005
EOTM: The God
The god is under siege in most cultures around the world, particularly western culture. Fundamentalism, mistaking the finger for the stars that the finger is pointing to, mistaking the messenger for the message, has impoverished most religions. Now they function more as social controls than as a way of providing spiritual meaning to the day to day lives of human beings.
Humanity has been divided against sacredness, and against itself. People see themselves as separate from any sort of divinity, anything sacred. They are also totally estranged from nature. They see themselves as un-natural beings and, to a large extent, have become unnatural.
The penalty for this is that the ecosystem is being depleted and destroyed. We have been playing like spoiled children on this paradise planet that the creator has provided for us. We have been so ego-centric in our view of the creator that we regarded ourselves as the ultimate creation and aspired to be as gods ourselves. We believed that we were destined to have dominion over this earth and eventually control the very forces that create matter from energy. We have done all this, yet the cockroach will certainly outlive us as a species.
Every religion believes that it understands and worships a power that is above all other powers. This "above" includes the petty distinctions of the name to use and the method of worship. Yet they so humble their gods that they believe such a powerful being could care about such a small thing.
The sad truth is that "worship" or "faith" are used like "love" to cover up and justify unspeakable acts. One tribe who slaughters another to fulfill the will of their god apparently thinks their god is so puny that an earthquake or storm or plague or simple starvation is beyond their god's power.
No, unfortunately the truth is that often religion is simply one more power group competing for market share of the faithful and their tithes. All the dire consequences of not following the vocal messiah's preferred path are to intimidate people into compliance.
Modern Wicca has done much to salvage the concept of the sacred feminine. We all owe a major debt of gratitude to all the witches who burned and died, as well as those who survived to keep the traditions from being exterminated.
Yet we are still lacking in a deep understanding of the sacred masculine.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Further Reading:
The Goddess
Male Sexuality
Humanity has been divided against sacredness, and against itself. People see themselves as separate from any sort of divinity, anything sacred. They are also totally estranged from nature. They see themselves as un-natural beings and, to a large extent, have become unnatural.
The penalty for this is that the ecosystem is being depleted and destroyed. We have been playing like spoiled children on this paradise planet that the creator has provided for us. We have been so ego-centric in our view of the creator that we regarded ourselves as the ultimate creation and aspired to be as gods ourselves. We believed that we were destined to have dominion over this earth and eventually control the very forces that create matter from energy. We have done all this, yet the cockroach will certainly outlive us as a species.
Every religion believes that it understands and worships a power that is above all other powers. This "above" includes the petty distinctions of the name to use and the method of worship. Yet they so humble their gods that they believe such a powerful being could care about such a small thing.
The sad truth is that "worship" or "faith" are used like "love" to cover up and justify unspeakable acts. One tribe who slaughters another to fulfill the will of their god apparently thinks their god is so puny that an earthquake or storm or plague or simple starvation is beyond their god's power.
No, unfortunately the truth is that often religion is simply one more power group competing for market share of the faithful and their tithes. All the dire consequences of not following the vocal messiah's preferred path are to intimidate people into compliance.
Modern Wicca has done much to salvage the concept of the sacred feminine. We all owe a major debt of gratitude to all the witches who burned and died, as well as those who survived to keep the traditions from being exterminated.
Yet we are still lacking in a deep understanding of the sacred masculine.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Further Reading:
The Goddess
Male Sexuality
Friday, February 04, 2005
EOTM: The Goddess and The God of the Wicca
Each of the major religions of the world recognizes a duality in the divine. Dividing the darkness from the light of the judeo/christian bible, the yin & yang of eastern philosophies, many other examples. Because there is an inherent duality in humanity based on gender, it is easy and tempting to think of that divine duality as being male or female. Even more so, people tend to want to divide another duality, good vs evil, along gender lines. Thus we have seen created theologies in which the SACRED is either male or female, and the PROFANE is the other.
Wiccan theology recognizes that the sacred and the profane exist in everyone. There are dark and light sides to both male and female, just as there is to duct tape. How those dark and light sides get expressed is the work of the individual soul to decide. If you believe in Kharma, then you see that each soul gets to keep doing it wrong until it gets it right.
Unlike the arid theologies of the single male god at the top of a hierarchy, generated in the deserts of the middle east and carried worldwide by the european empire builders, pantheistic earth-based religions have always cast their deities in both genders. Mark Twain said it: "God created man in his own image and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor." Since we cannot really imagine the infinite, we turn to what we know for an understanding. We turn to humans. All myths, all legends, have their roots in fact. The personalities these gods and near-gods (heros) exhibit are based on real people who at some point in history exhibited this personality. Humans still do today.
What Wicca offers is sacredness for both genders. There is a sacred masculine and a sacred feminine. Because they are both sacred, sexuality between them cannot be anything but sacred. It is the joining of these two energies which creates life. That's what we all worship: the creative force.
Of course, both genders also have a profane side, a destructive side. In myth and legend we have the stories of how this side has been expressed. When one gender demonizes the other they provide the perfect smokescreen for evil. Since they are good and the other bad, all their acts are "good" or justified. Thus real evil comes to be called by the name of good. A perfect example is the incredibly destructive things done by parents to children and lovers to each other in the name of love. As Luke Skywalker had to struggle with the dark side of the force, so must we all.
Inherent in the spiritual foundation of wicca is an equality between the genders. This is what has made it so attractive to feminists and those influenced by them. Unfortunately, there has been a tendency to follow the trends set by worshippers of dead jews and elevate the sacred feminine above the sacred masculine or forget about the sacred masculine altogether.
Wicca is also known as the way of the wise. It is in this sense that I use it here. In that light there is no difference from the way of zen, which you will find elsewhere on these pages.
There is an old zen koan about the teacher who points to the stars and the student fixes on the finger. The teacher slaps him.
Often ritual, which is designed as grand theatre for the subconscious and intended to facilitate a spiritual experience, becomes bogged down in details and loses its meaning in the trappings. The colors of the altar candles become more important than the acts of the particpants before or after.
Let us focus back on the stars. Let us change our sense of time so that we begin thinking in terms of "deadlines" of a year and a day. Let us see the year as we now see 2 weeks and see that it certainly looks like "magic".
Let us all reclaim the sacredness of ourselves and all others.
Blessed be.
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Further Reading:
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Thursday, February 03, 2005
EOTM: Science & Technology: The New Gods
In their quest for power, humans have come to love technology and worship the god science. Science has given us the microwave, the micro-chip, and the micro-computer, courtesy of which you are now reading this.
However there are those of us who must ask whether all this worship of science and technology has enriched the lives of humanity or done anything to move us in the direction that the old gods created us to follow. We have stolen much power from the gods, and they are much the poorer and weaker for it. As humanity sought to become as gods through the application of technology, it forgot the most important power of the god: the power to create.
The major question for people to face themselves with today is whether they are willing to invest technology completely with godlike powers and let it dictate to them what they must do and be like. At its greatest extent of power technology cannot create life, the best it can do is copy it. And copy is what "society" seems determined to do. Change everyone into copies of everyone else.
Technology makes as bad a master as it does good a servant. The challenge of the 3rd millenium ce will be whether humanity surrenders and submits to the dominion of technology, thus creating the dead end for humanity and the thing we all cherish so much, our "intelligence", which is used to mean our consciousness and self-awareness.
We claim to be "intelligent" life, yet we let machines and their rigid inflexible needs dictate the leading of our lives. We have even "split" the nucleus of the nuclear family by destroying the male/female pair bond and the mechanics of attraction which bring them together.
Bad idea.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Further Reading:
Philosophy & Theology: The Old Gods
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to “The Eye of the Mind” Main Page
However there are those of us who must ask whether all this worship of science and technology has enriched the lives of humanity or done anything to move us in the direction that the old gods created us to follow. We have stolen much power from the gods, and they are much the poorer and weaker for it. As humanity sought to become as gods through the application of technology, it forgot the most important power of the god: the power to create.
The major question for people to face themselves with today is whether they are willing to invest technology completely with godlike powers and let it dictate to them what they must do and be like. At its greatest extent of power technology cannot create life, the best it can do is copy it. And copy is what "society" seems determined to do. Change everyone into copies of everyone else.
Technology makes as bad a master as it does good a servant. The challenge of the 3rd millenium ce will be whether humanity surrenders and submits to the dominion of technology, thus creating the dead end for humanity and the thing we all cherish so much, our "intelligence", which is used to mean our consciousness and self-awareness.
We claim to be "intelligent" life, yet we let machines and their rigid inflexible needs dictate the leading of our lives. We have even "split" the nucleus of the nuclear family by destroying the male/female pair bond and the mechanics of attraction which bring them together.
Bad idea.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Further Reading:
Philosophy & Theology: The Old Gods
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to “The Eye of the Mind” Main Page
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
EOTM: Philosophy & Theology: The Old Gods
Philosophy was the original science, art, and theology. The word comes from the ancient greek and means "love of wisdom". There is good reason that the highest level of academic accomplishment is called "Ph.D.". Doctor originally meant "teacher", thus a doctor of philosophy is someone who teaches the love of the wisdom of a discipline. Love is the force which also drives the healer, the minister, the scientist and the Artist. Love of life.
This amazing gift and ability of consciousness and self-awareness which man has been so proud of because it distinguishes humanity from the "lower" animals also put on us a terrible burden: the ability to ask and the need to know "Why?". Humanity needs a "because". The history of humanity is the story of searching for "becauses", and the ultimate "because". The ultimate "because" has always been called god.
As humanity's curiousity and need to know yielded results of understanding some of the "why"s, the sciences were born. Astronomy allowed the learned to watch and predict the succession of the seasons, which was essential to the survival of early man. Botany allowed people to predict which foods would taste good and nourish them, and which would kill them. The more that thought took over from instinct in controlling human behavior, the more important science became. And, because the average person was too preoccupied with survival, and had neither the time nor the inclination to delve into the nature of things, those who did understand were recognized for the importance of their knowledge.
Yet as every parent knows, even when the "becauses" are understood (which they often are not, since each "why?" is really at the end of a chain of "why?"s and knowing the answers to all the "why?"s which came before is essential to understanding the answer to the current one), each "because" simply leads to another "why?". Beyond the limits of human knowledge has always existed the unknown and perhaps unknowable, and all the unanswered "why?"s have belonged to god. Theology is therefore the Philosophy of the unknowable.
Everything which has been within man's ability to understand "why", has been developed into a scientific discipline of study. Every 4 years we double the number of "becauses" that we have. The average college prep student knows more science than all the scientists in the world did as recently as 100 years ago. As we have learned to understand what previously only god understood, science and its bastard stepchild, technology have become our new gods. Gradually the question changed. People began to ask "why?" when what they really meant was "How?".
When people began to learn "how" to harness the understanding of "because" to bring about what they wanted, the will to power was born. Thus did humanity attempt to steal the power of god, by saying "MY will be done". Down to the very heart of the atom did we find ways to exert that power. Yet it is always the power of destruction. We "split" the atom, and unleash that awesome power, yet no scientist has ever taken a bunch of parts and "put together" an atom.
And then there are those groups of people whose questions are only "when?" and "why not?". The first aspire to godlike powers over others, the second group is so isolated from reality and the outside world that the only thing they can dwell on is how they want reality to be and how disappointed, angry, and hurt they are that it isn't that way. Their lives are consumed with bitter disappointment over finding out that they are NOT god.
But the "why?" we started out to find has been lost. And it was the second question to be asked anyway. "What?" is the beginning. Without an understanding of what it is, why does not matter. We have turned around begun looking the wrong direction, studying "how" things have been put together, rather than studying the purpose of putting them together. We know how to tear them apart and often when we will be done.
What and Why are still dealt with by philosophy and theology. What is the nature of god, and for what purpose were we created? Just to destroy and consume? Strange notion of god.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Further Reading:
Science & Technology - The New Gods
The Goddess and The God of the Wicca
The God Under Siege
This amazing gift and ability of consciousness and self-awareness which man has been so proud of because it distinguishes humanity from the "lower" animals also put on us a terrible burden: the ability to ask and the need to know "Why?". Humanity needs a "because". The history of humanity is the story of searching for "becauses", and the ultimate "because". The ultimate "because" has always been called god.
As humanity's curiousity and need to know yielded results of understanding some of the "why"s, the sciences were born. Astronomy allowed the learned to watch and predict the succession of the seasons, which was essential to the survival of early man. Botany allowed people to predict which foods would taste good and nourish them, and which would kill them. The more that thought took over from instinct in controlling human behavior, the more important science became. And, because the average person was too preoccupied with survival, and had neither the time nor the inclination to delve into the nature of things, those who did understand were recognized for the importance of their knowledge.
Yet as every parent knows, even when the "becauses" are understood (which they often are not, since each "why?" is really at the end of a chain of "why?"s and knowing the answers to all the "why?"s which came before is essential to understanding the answer to the current one), each "because" simply leads to another "why?". Beyond the limits of human knowledge has always existed the unknown and perhaps unknowable, and all the unanswered "why?"s have belonged to god. Theology is therefore the Philosophy of the unknowable.
Everything which has been within man's ability to understand "why", has been developed into a scientific discipline of study. Every 4 years we double the number of "becauses" that we have. The average college prep student knows more science than all the scientists in the world did as recently as 100 years ago. As we have learned to understand what previously only god understood, science and its bastard stepchild, technology have become our new gods. Gradually the question changed. People began to ask "why?" when what they really meant was "How?".
When people began to learn "how" to harness the understanding of "because" to bring about what they wanted, the will to power was born. Thus did humanity attempt to steal the power of god, by saying "MY will be done". Down to the very heart of the atom did we find ways to exert that power. Yet it is always the power of destruction. We "split" the atom, and unleash that awesome power, yet no scientist has ever taken a bunch of parts and "put together" an atom.
And then there are those groups of people whose questions are only "when?" and "why not?". The first aspire to godlike powers over others, the second group is so isolated from reality and the outside world that the only thing they can dwell on is how they want reality to be and how disappointed, angry, and hurt they are that it isn't that way. Their lives are consumed with bitter disappointment over finding out that they are NOT god.
But the "why?" we started out to find has been lost. And it was the second question to be asked anyway. "What?" is the beginning. Without an understanding of what it is, why does not matter. We have turned around begun looking the wrong direction, studying "how" things have been put together, rather than studying the purpose of putting them together. We know how to tear them apart and often when we will be done.
What and Why are still dealt with by philosophy and theology. What is the nature of god, and for what purpose were we created? Just to destroy and consume? Strange notion of god.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Further Reading:
Science & Technology - The New Gods
The Goddess and The God of the Wicca
The God Under Siege
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
EOTM: This is Zen
This is zen.
.
Like listening for the sound of one hand clapping, looking at this picture for a while will tell you all the essence of zen. It cannot be described, tho much good writing about it exists. Each of us leaves footprints in the sand as we travel through this adventure called life. If we pause for a moment and look back at those footprints, we are struck with their smallness and temporary nature when set against the backdrop of the immense elemental forces of the seashore. The yin & yang of the waves within the larger yin/yang of the tides will wash them away within hours, if the wind does not blow them away within minutes.
I call myself a zen priest, yet that is purely self-appointed. When I was young and full of myself, I wanted to be a zen master and teacher. One day it occurred to me that the road to mastery was to live it every moment. There are far more rewards from living it than from the public recognition of my "mastery". It is a remarkably fulfilling and serene way to view life. I promote it as an answer to the increasingly chaotic world in which we live.
In the best (perhaps only true) zen movie ever made, "Circle of Iron," the protagonist, Cord (that which binds), finds that all answers are found in the mirror. Today, in western culture particularly, all answers seem to lie outside ourselves. We are a culture of reacters, blamers, and victims. There are always buts, whys, and becauses which explain our destructive behavior. None of them make it non-destructive. The destruction and violence will continue until each person begins to stay one's own hand and take complete responsibility for one's own acts.
There are other cosmologies which include this, one in particular called Wicca, and I hope to be able to provide the means to explore them as well on these pages.
.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
.
Philosophy and Theology: The Old Gods
Science and Technology: The New Gods
The Goddess and The God of the Wicca
The God
The Goddess
.
Like listening for the sound of one hand clapping, looking at this picture for a while will tell you all the essence of zen. It cannot be described, tho much good writing about it exists. Each of us leaves footprints in the sand as we travel through this adventure called life. If we pause for a moment and look back at those footprints, we are struck with their smallness and temporary nature when set against the backdrop of the immense elemental forces of the seashore. The yin & yang of the waves within the larger yin/yang of the tides will wash them away within hours, if the wind does not blow them away within minutes.
I call myself a zen priest, yet that is purely self-appointed. When I was young and full of myself, I wanted to be a zen master and teacher. One day it occurred to me that the road to mastery was to live it every moment. There are far more rewards from living it than from the public recognition of my "mastery". It is a remarkably fulfilling and serene way to view life. I promote it as an answer to the increasingly chaotic world in which we live.
In the best (perhaps only true) zen movie ever made, "Circle of Iron," the protagonist, Cord (that which binds), finds that all answers are found in the mirror. Today, in western culture particularly, all answers seem to lie outside ourselves. We are a culture of reacters, blamers, and victims. There are always buts, whys, and becauses which explain our destructive behavior. None of them make it non-destructive. The destruction and violence will continue until each person begins to stay one's own hand and take complete responsibility for one's own acts.
There are other cosmologies which include this, one in particular called Wicca, and I hope to be able to provide the means to explore them as well on these pages.
.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
.
Philosophy and Theology: The Old Gods
Science and Technology: The New Gods
The Goddess and The God of the Wicca
The God
The Goddess
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
EOTM: Creating the Future
Every moment of every day we are moving from a past into a future. We carry the learning with us, but we need not carry the mistakes that were the source of the learning. We need not carry with us the resentments or shames of the past if we look forward and realize that we can create a world in which they don't exist, but we have to stop carrying them forward.
We are constantly moving into a future which we are continously creating. Actions in this moment create effects in the next. As we shape those actions with intent, so do we shape the future.
There is a reason that grand intent is called "vision". We must "see" the future in the eye of the mind before we can create it. If all we can "see" is the ills of the past and recreate the future in the image of the past by reacting to it, that is as good a definition of hell as is needed.
See a future which emphasizes the best of humanity, not its worst.
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Back to “The Eye of the Mind” Main Page
We are constantly moving into a future which we are continously creating. Actions in this moment create effects in the next. As we shape those actions with intent, so do we shape the future.
There is a reason that grand intent is called "vision". We must "see" the future in the eye of the mind before we can create it. If all we can "see" is the ills of the past and recreate the future in the image of the past by reacting to it, that is as good a definition of hell as is needed.
See a future which emphasizes the best of humanity, not its worst.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to “The Eye of the Mind” Main Page
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
EOTM: The Environment
It's where we all live folks. We're treating it like a convenience store combined with a toilet bowl. We are digging holes and ripping it up to make stuff to sell to people who will eventually throw it away and have to dig another hole to bury it in. All the time we are producing toxic byproducts which poison us and every other form of life on the planet.
We'd better get a clue. Malthus* was right. Humanity is expanding its numbers not only to the limit of the food supply, but also to the limit of the sewage treatment capacity. The earth can no longer absorb and cleanse the toxic wastes produced by so many human beings. We need to take immediate steps to slow population growth and reduce the amount of pointless purposeless consumption that we all do. Science is not going to save us. We are not going to all get into space ships and find new worlds once we have used this one up. We have finally discovered that we can't throw our garbage over the neighbor's fence and forget it. That garbage will eventually come back to us in our water, or our air, or our food.
I'm tired of drowning in your shit.
* Malthus stated that any population will grow exponentially up to the limits of its food supply, which grows arithmetically.
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Back to “The Eye of the Mind” Main Page
We'd better get a clue. Malthus* was right. Humanity is expanding its numbers not only to the limit of the food supply, but also to the limit of the sewage treatment capacity. The earth can no longer absorb and cleanse the toxic wastes produced by so many human beings. We need to take immediate steps to slow population growth and reduce the amount of pointless purposeless consumption that we all do. Science is not going to save us. We are not going to all get into space ships and find new worlds once we have used this one up. We have finally discovered that we can't throw our garbage over the neighbor's fence and forget it. That garbage will eventually come back to us in our water, or our air, or our food.
I'm tired of drowning in your shit.
* Malthus stated that any population will grow exponentially up to the limits of its food supply, which grows arithmetically.
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Back to “The Eye of the Mind” Main Page
Monday, January 10, 2005
EOTM: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Motorcycles do put one into a zen state. There is something about their marvelous simplicity. So much that we thought was essential turns out to be excess baggage. Our lives depend on being totally aware in the moment and clearing our minds of things which are not significant at the present time.
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