feminism – root cause or consequence?

Feminism is without a doubt the worst plague ever to afflict the human race but was feminism a root cause of the evils that followed or merely a consequence of other social changes?

By the time second wave feminism made its appearance in the 1960s a number of crucial social changes had already occurred. The first and the most disastrous (possibly the single most disastrous event in human history) was the introduction of the contraceptive pill in 1961. That irrevocably turned sex into a recreational activity rather than a part of the sacrament of marriage. It made sex all about short-term pleasure. From that point on traditional marriage was doomed.

While in theory divorce was still difficult in many places it was clear that there was a trend towards making it easier in practice. And from about the 1920s onwards divorce had gradually become more socially acceptable. Divorce means marriage being transformed from a sacred unbreakable bond into a short-term arrangement to be terminated when it becomes inconvenient.

Women moved into the workforce in increasing numbers in the first half of the 20th century. That was not necessarily a problem. Women had always worked. But work was something women did until they got married. By the 50s it was becoming more socially acceptable for married women to work. This was a very unfortunate trend.

Even more disastrous was the expansion of higher education for women after the Second World War. In fact the expansion of higher education in general was a calamity. A university education is something that only a small proportion of the population (maybe 5%) will benefit from. For most people it is actually a bad thing. For all but a very tiny handful of women it is a disaster.

And of course the 20th century saw a continuation of the decline of Christianity. Without religion there is no basis for morality. Without morality there is only power (for the elites) and pleasure (for the masses).

These changes did not come about as a result of second wave feminism. These changes preceded second wave feminism, and in fact were largely responsible for making that horror possible. By the time the feminists got going western society had already started to lose its way.

There was also the Sexual Revolution, which was mostly a result of the contraceptive pill. The Sexual Revolution was of course very bad for women. Sexual liberation does not work fir women. They’re not wired that way. It simply makes women self-hating and miserable and chronically emotionally dissatisfied.

Men made the mistake of thinking the Sexual Revolution was going to be great for them. It would mean lots more sex. In fact it meant lots more sex for a very small number of men.

This is a large part of the explanation for the failure of men to stop feminism in its tracks at a time when that was still possible. Men were inclined to think that feminism was like the Sexual Revolution – they would end up getting more sex. Mostly they didn’t get the extra sex and what they did get was an ongoing nightmare. By the time the realities became apparent it was too late.

Feminism was largely a symptom of a society entering the terminal stages of decadence. It appeared at the same time as other symptoms like the drug culture and the worship of homosexuality. Maybe feminism could have been stopped but it would have required a willingness to confront other much more basic societal failings.

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Culture War 2.0 and demographics

The Culture War has been lost. There’s no question about that. One thing however needs to be borne in mind – winning or losing a war is not always the end of the story. Quite often a war simply sets the stage for a second war. This is true of purely military or political conflicts and it may well be true of culture wars as well. Culture War 1.0 is over and perhaps Culture War 2.0 is yet to be fought.

One thing that stands out about Culture War 1.0 is how easy the victory was. Social and cultural attitudes changed dramatically in a very short space of time. In 1960 marriage was the cornerstone of western society. Most people got married and most people had children and almost everybody agreed that this was the formula for happiness. Within twenty-five years the institution of marriage had crumbled. Marriage was no longer regarded as something permanent and sacred. It was now an option, and was widely regarded as being not exactly a permanent or even a very significant arrangement. What mattered was love and everybody knew that love meant sex. The secret of happiness was lots of sex. Children were seen as an encumbrance. Fertility rates plummeted. Women who considered having children to be the most important thing in life were thought of as being a bit odd and vaguely disapproved of. To feminists women who wanted children were traitors.

Twenty years ago homosexual marriage was a bizarre and laughable fringe idea. Now it’s the very bedrock of our civilisation and anybody who disapproves of it is regarded as being  an evil nazi.

What happened? The answer is very simple. People conformed. In the West we had long since abandoned the ideas that religion mattered and that there were eternal moral values. What mattered was being popular. You didn’t need to worry if your opinions were correct, you simply made sure that your opinions conformed to what was popular. Or at least to what you were told was popular.

The key point here is that if social and cultural attitudes can be changed almost overnight in one direction then logically and obviously they can be just as easily and just as quickly changed in the opposite direction. Most people will conform to what they see as the dominant ideology. The dissenting minority is then forced to conform. If the dominant ideology changes then, like magic, social and cultural attitudes change.

The objection to this is that the dominant ideology of the present day is so dominant that it is unlikely to change. To believe that is to ignore the lessons of history. The most important lesson of history is that the future is always unpredictable. If you had a time machine and you transported someone from the year 1914 to the year 1939 they would find themselves in a world that would have been entirely unimaginable in 1914. Entire empires had vanished. Entirely new countries had appeared. Strange and incomprehensible political doctrines were now considered to be perfectly normal.

This was largely a result of the First World War but wars are not the only ways in which everything can be changed in ways that could not have been predicted. Demographic change is another. Whether demographic change is a good thing or a bad thing is not relevant here (I think it’s a bad thing) but it’s likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Thirty years from now the United States will be a different society. It will be a very hispanic society. There is no way of predicting exactly how that will play out but it will cause major political changes and could lead to significant social and cultural changes. Will the social attitudes of an hispanic United States be the same as the social attitudes of the U.S. today? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on the extent to which those numbers can be turned into cultural power. It also depends on the extent to which the hispanic segment of society conforms to the ruling ideology of liberal atheism. Could hispanic immigration fuel a religious revival? Even a Catholic revival? Who knows.

Then there’s western Europe. Islam is going to be a much bigger presence thirty years from now. Again the question is the extent to which this will translate into political and cultural power. There’s also likely to be a race between, on the one hand, a growing secularisation and on the other hand the likely emergence of powerful strains of political Islamism. Will a Britain with a much larger Muslim population continue to conform to its current ideology of rainbow unicorn feelgood soft totalitarianism? Again the answer is maybe, or maybe not.

In my next post I’m intending to address the question of soft cultural power in more detail.

culture war, to the death

It’s now obvious that the objective of the globalist/liberal/SJW elites is not to achieve complete political dominance. Their objectives go way beyond that. They are aiming at nothing less than the total destruction of all opposition. They are aiming at zero tolerance for dissent.

We can forget the idea of live and let live. We can forget the idea that once we have been stripped of every vestige of power and influence and completely humiliated and subjugated that we might at least be allowed to live our lives in peace in our own way. That is not going to happen. If you dissent in any way from the new orthodoxy, if you are a social conservative or a Christian or even an old-fashioned leftist who is critical of capitalism, if you a liberal who thinks things have gotten out of hand, if you question orthodoxy in any way you are marked for destruction. For our new masters it is not enough to defeat their political and ideological enemies. Those enemies must be entirely eliminated.

If you have some fantasy that as long as you keep your head down you will be able to live your life your own way or raise your children in your own way think again. It is not just open dissent that is forbidden. It is forbidden to have doubts. It is forbidden to have any reservations about political orthodoxy.

The culture war was lost because most people on the Right didn’t think it was worth fighting because they didn’t think it really mattered. They failed to recognise that as far as the globalist/liberal/SJWs were concerned the culture war was going to be a fight to the death.

It is simply not possible for Christians or for social conservatives to share a society with liberals. Maybe there was a time when some kind of compromise might have been possible. Personally I doubt it, but I admit the possibility. In any case there is no question that at this point in time there can be no compromise, no peace. Either we destroy them or they destroy us.

SJWs and globalists – who actually pulls the strings?

The culture war is a war that was launched by powerful vested interests but they are not the ones who actually fought the war. The bankers and billionaires and senior deep state functionaries (the globalists who could be described as the Inner Party) left the conduct of the war largely to journalists, academics, politicians and so-called activists. These were the Social Justice foot soldiers. They could be described as the Outer Party.

It was an arrangement that worked very well. The globalists wanted to ensure that populations were demoralised and easily controlled, with no loyalties and no stable beliefs. They wanted willing consumers, and compliant cheap labour. They therefore wanted traditional institutions such as the family and the churches destroyed. Their SJW foot soldiers were eager to oblige.

So far so good. The one minor problem is the quality of the human material from which the SJW foot soldiers are drawn. Feminists, homosexuals, transgenders, environmentalists – these people are fundamentally unstable. Many are in fact mentally ill. This phenomenon is one that Spandrell has addressed in his recent extremely stimulating posts on bio-leninism here and here and here.

The mental instability of these people makes them useful in many ways since it predisposes them towards fanaticism but it also makes them difficult to control. When you’re using feminists as a weapon for example then you have to be aware that you’re dealing with an unguided missile. The globalists are happy to use feminists to attack Christians and white men (preferably working-class white men) but the recent #metoo fiascos where feminists have targeted black men and even elite Jews are a good illustration of the dangers. In fact the dangers in this case are even greater since you’re not just dealing with feminists but also with actresses who are even more unstable and narcissistic than everyday feminists. Your chances of trying to reason with Hollywood feminists are very very poor. These Hollywood feminists can smell blood in the water and they are in no mood to pick and choose their victims carefully.

This is likely to be more and more of a problem. The globalists have given seriously crazy people a great deal of power to destroy and they’re hoping they can direct that destruction against their enemies, but those crazy people get crazier as they get more power and as they get the taste for blood. They’re likely to be increasingly difficult to control. The results will be interesting to watch.

education and orthodoxy

There are many sad delusions that are held by conservatives. One of the saddest and most persistent is that education used to be about broadening the mind and encouraging independent and critical thinking, before the cultural marxists took over.

In fact the purpose of education as an organised activity, whether carried out by government or by churches, has always been to teach people what to think. It has never been the purpose of any educational institution to encourage independence of thought, except within very narrow limits. In fact the function of education is to teach children to remain within those limits.

Education has always been about propaganda. In the past it was mostly about propaganda serving the interests of the current political establishment. There was a period in the West when education was used by the Left to undermine the current political establishment. Now the Left as it was once understood no longer exists. We have a new political establishment, a globalist neoliberal establishment, and education is once again employed to impose limits on thinking.

Conservatives also cling to the touching belief that universities used to be about defending freedom of thought. Nothing could be further from the truth. Universities were established for the purpose of defining and enforcing religious orthodoxy. That is the purpose they still serve to this day. The nature of religious orthodoxy has changed, but the function of the university remains the same. Identifying and punishing heretics has always been the business of the university.

Defining orthodoxy and punishing deviations from that orthodoxy – this is what all education systems, from kindergarten to university, are all about. An education system exists in order to prevent freedom of thought. This is why churches, back in the days when they still believed in their own teachings, were so obsessed with founding schools and universities. This is why governments are so very interested in education.

As Stalin pointed out, “Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”

There’s nothing very mysterious or even sinister in all this. Any society that wishes to survive will naturally try to avoid the dangers of social chaos by preventing the propagation of destructive ideas. The problem we have at the moment is that we have a political establishment that wants to encourage socially destructive ideas. And conservatives, as usual, have no idea what is happening. If conservatives had understood any of this they would fought to retain control of the schools. We are in a situation very much like the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the late 60s. The political establishment intends to retain control even if they have to destroy society in order to do so. They are determined to enforce orthodoxy even though the orthodoxy they are enforcing can only lead to social disintegration.

 It’s all about power, and power is another subject about which conservatives understand nothing.

the Culture of Mockery

One of the things that has fatally weakened western civilisation has been the Culture of Mockery. This has been particularly the case in Britain.

Take a look at British popular culture over the past half century. It’s nothing but a sustained campaign of mockery of traditional Britain. Back in the 60s we thought this was being done by the counter-culture – by bold avant-garde nonconformists attacking the Establishment. But it wasn’t. It was the Establishment doing the mocking. Tearing down everything that ordinary Britons cared about.

The British people still haven’t figured out that it’s their own Establishment that hates them. The political, cultural, financial, bureaucratic Establishment. The hilariously misnamed Conservative Party. Even the Church of England, which has nothing but contempt for actual Christianity. Even the Monarchy, which has stood by and cheerfully watched while the country was trashed, occasionally rewarding the worst traitors with a knighthood or a peerage.

It’s not the global left that has destroyed Britain – it’s the British Establishment.

Never underestimate the absolute loathing that people like Theresa May have for everything Britain once stood for.

Of course the Culture of Mockery has undermined all western societies, but it has assumed a particularly virulent form in Britain. The British elite has waged a continuous and all too successful war on Britishness.

how the culture war could have been won

You can divide people into two categories, the civilisation-preservers and the civilisation-wreckers. The civilisation-wreckers have taken various forms but the most dangerous of all are the Social Justice Warriors with which we are too familiar today. The real question is – why have the civilisation-wreckers been so much more successful than the civilisation-preservers?

A major reason is that the civilisation-preservers are generally speaking fairly ordinary people. They have jobs. They’re married. They’re raising kids. They have only a limited amount of time to devote to politics.

The civilisation-wreckers on the other hand are usually unemployed. Or they work in academia, which is the same thing really (at least in most of the humanities departments). Even if they’re married they usually have one or even more commonly no kids. They have lots and lots of leisure time to devote to political activism. In practice ten civilisation-wreckers can achieve more than a hundred civilisation-preservers simply because they can devote their whole lives to the task.

The sad thing is that this situation, this massive over-supply of activists with time on their hands, is not natural. It has been manufactured. And it could have been stopped.

Anyone who has had to deal with an infestation of household pests such as ants knows that the only way to eradicate the problem is to find the nests. It’s the same with SJWs. Fortunately in the case of SJWs we know where the nests are. They’re in academia mostly, in the bureaucracy and in NGOs and the media (especially the government-owned media like the BBC and the ABC). And they’ve been breeding there for decades.

Over the past decades supposedly conservative governments in Britain, Australia and the U.S. have had ample opportunities to solve this problem. All they had to do was to cut off the supply of oxygen, in other words cut off the funding. Would-be SJWS would them have been forced to find real jobs in the real world. They would then not have had all that leisure time for political activism (some of them might even have abandoned their SJW beliefs after encountering the real world).

This would not have been a complete solution of course. Some of the nests in the media would certainly have survived and some of the useless university departments handing out Mickey Mouse degrees would have found alternative sources of funding. But it would still have achieved quite a lot. The supply of SJWs funded by the taxpayer with unlimited amounts of free time could have been reduced radically. The SJW menace might have been contained.

And those supposedly conservative governments in Britain, Australia and the U.S. have done nothing. They have allowed SJWs to continue to proliferate. The worthless NGOs still thrive, the Women’s Studies and Gender Studies and sociology departments continue to get funded to churn out unemployable misfits intent on destroying our society, the bureaucracy has not been reined in and the BBC and ABC still spend billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money on civilisation-wrecking.

There is an obvious conclusion to be drawn from this. Those so-called conservative governments never did intend to win the culture war. They never even intended to fight it. Worse than that, they have been not merely passive spectators but in many cases have worked actively for the forces of darkness. Those conservative political parties need to die.