decline of the family

Culture Wars: Co-Existence Through Limited Government
Marxist-Feminist Poster

Marxist-Feminist Poster

[Note: this is an edited and improved version of a post released last year, this time intended for the audience at Sarah Hoyt’s blog, According to Hoyt. This post has relevance for reducing the contention between social conservatives (and some religious communities) and social liberals and feminists.]

I’m writing about the history of government thought control and the means of restraining it by constitutional limitations on its powers. Western governments are more and more intrusive on private decisions, and modern feminists strongly influence their actions and propaganda from their positions in academia, government, and nonprofits. Restricting government’s powers to interfere in private decisions and control the media message would give private personal decisions more room, and everyone (except the nomenklatura) would benefit.

Feminism started out with a quest for equity in job opportunities, voting, and freedom to choose. This initial agenda (“equity feminism”) won a lot of support from fair-minded men and women, though even then there was a strong element of special pleading in the movement.

By choosing to notice only the bad things that happen to women in our own time as well as other cultures and times, modern feminists have failed to work for truly equal treatment of men and women. Instead of seeing individuals and their rights as important, modern feminists and other Social Justice Warriors believe that only a relentless focus on oppression of some categories of individuals by others is the key to righteousness, and their collectivist view of group rights leaves little space for sympathy for anyone who cannot claim membership in an oppressed class. They believe as a religious cult would believe that if only they explain their beliefs hard enough to the unenlightened, the scales will fall from their eyes and goodness will triumph. No amount of victory in achieving their goals would ever be enough for them to end their battles, since new groups of the wicked can always be identified to battle against; the battle itself nourishes their egos and so it must continue. If all their enemies have been vanquished, villainy is defined down to catch a new class of micro-villains whose microagressions and incorrect thoughts must be corrected.

Note that it is no longer enough that “victim” classes be treated equally by government and in employment and public accommodations — theirs is now a push for equal outcomes to overcome private rights of association and contract, so women (or men!) who desire to work less or take out more time for family would not be allowed to bargain for those conditions of employment by asking for less pay for less work. Implicitly all employees with the same job title and duties must be paid the same regardless of their individual contributions or their own desires for a lesser degree of commitment to the business.

Equal opportunity does not imply there should be equal outcomes, because diversity of interests and abilities between individuals and the sexes means there will be unequal interest in career options that require 60 hours a week of work, intense focus on mechanical problems, manual labor, or hazardous conditions. Similarly, you will not get or expect equal interest in the highly social, helping professions that, on average, women appear to prefer. Efforts to force equal employment in every company by race, sex, age, or other class are simply doomed — any company which balanced its workforce to match these desiderata would find themselves forced to hire less productive employees, crippling them against their competition not so constrained. Jesse Jackson has called for Federal pressure on high tech firms to require equal employment outcomes in tech jobs. When you talk to a Social Justice Warrior about this, you get an answer remarkably similar to what socialists said in the 1970s when you asked how any country could level outcomes (“to each according to his need”) without the productive escaping to another country to achieve what they could without the shackles: “Well, that’s why they had to build the Berlin Wall.” To stop the defection of those who want to be free to follow their own preferences, this preferred system must be extended everywhere or somehow escape must be controlled and punished by, say, walls, machine guns, and Gulags.

So what we have is a small but highly influential ideological group, educated, generally well-off, and embedded in academia, media, government, and non-profit work throughout the United States. They continually agitate for larger and more intrusive government which would employ more of their kind, the better to regulate away all imperfect thought and behavior. Business and profit-making enterprise is viewed as suspect because it is partly beyond their political control, so efforts to take control of decisions inside businesses continue, and the expanding HR departments, lobbyist payments, and political contributions of businesses reflect the need to pay for protection against this bureaucratic tendency. Similarly, hospitals and schools have responded to the increasing regulation and government funding of their activities by hiring many more high-paid administrators while shorting the low-level staff that actually do the work, because they must do so to get along in an increasingly bureaucratized, legalized, and centrally-controlled environment. This employment of large numbers of high-paid staff that don’t directly produce anything of value for customers has greatly increased the cost of domestic services like healthcare and education, and the drag on Western economies has brought economic growth to a halt in many places.

We have seen such bureaucracies before — the churches which for centuries held both political and moral authority over weak governments in Europe attempted to regulate thought and action to increase their own power. Wrangling over state religion and power led to incessant warfare. The solution to the problem of state interference in private thought and belief was finally found in the Enlightenment idea of separation of church and state. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in his letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

The early history of the colonies which later became the United States is instructive. Many of the colonies had an established church (the Massachusetts Bay colony notoriously drove out religious dissidents and hanged the Quaker Mary Dyer on Boston Common in 1660) and wished to maintain their government support for a specific religion even as the Enlightenment took hold, but it became clear that any government uniting the colonies would have to take a neutral stance toward religion, and enforce a set of human rights (constraints on government action to control individual thought and choice) to allow them all to co-exist peacefully. The great flaw of this compact, its political tolerance of slavery and second-class citizenship for slaves, was only corrected by the upheaval of the Civil War, which cemented the primacy of the federal government and its enforcement of the ideal of individual rights within the states.

Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer is an eye-opening look at the four founding British cultures of colonial America, and how each of them continues to influence present-day political preferences and power struggles. Other immigrant cultures (German, Irish, Scandinavian…) were also influential, but tended to join with one of the four founding cultures that closely represented their views, resulting in the welter of memes of political belief now contending for influence.

In New England, the Puritans from East Anglia settled between 1629 and 1640, the years immediately preceding the English Civil War in which Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan army defeated and beheaded King Charles I. Their colony started with a rigid established church which was intolerant of free thought.

In Virginia, settlers consisted of vanquished supporters of King Charles and the established (Anglican) Church of England, primarily from the south and west of England. They tended to be more relaxed about religion and more business and trade-oriented.

Quakers then arrived in the Delaware Valley (Philadelphia area) from the English midlands (and their religious kin from various German sects) between 1675 and 1715. Their way was strongly religious and pacifist, but recognized the importance of freedom of conscience.

The good coastal lands having been occupied, the Scotch-Irish (referring collectively to immigrants from the north of England, lowland Scotland, and Ulster) settled the Appalachian hill country from 1717 to 1775. Scrappy and suspicious of any effort to tax and control by hated distant governments, their attitude of automatic resistance is still visible in today’s politics, with Sarah Palin an example of the type.

Only a government which respected and mediated the difference between these founding cultures could work for a larger United States.

As time has gone on, these Enlightenment understandings have been eroded, and “Americanism” (the practice of tolerance and “minding your own business,” belief in progress, self-sufficiency, and freedom of thought for all citizens regardless of sex, race, wealth, or heritage) is less practiced. Our Social Justice Warriors say they value freedom of speech and thought but only for approved speech and thought; heretical ideas are to be stamped out by denying speech and punishing the heretics. It is no longer surprising to hear a college activist suggest that certain kinds of speech be forbidden by law.

There are signs that popular culture has taken note of the tendency toward totalitarianism and government propaganda from the Social Justice Warriors. Dystopian YA novels like The Hunger Games show a population repressed and manipulated by a media-controlling central government. The movie version of the novel The Giver takes some shots at this mindset; a thoughtful review of the movie version in The Atlantic “What Is the Price of Perfect Equality?” gets at its politics:

Engels saw the institutions of family and private property as deeply entwined. Part of Engels’ objection to the institution of the family was that it involved a “progressive narrowing of the circle, originally embracing the whole tribe, within which the two sexes have a common conjugal relation.” Marxism’s benevolent tendencies are swallowed up by concern and preference for one’s immediate family, which becomes the unit of basic inequality…. Commerce and trade, it turns out, are just as dependent on the passions as the passions are dependent on commerce and trade in The Giver. The true nightmare of a dystopian world is that all of these things are interconnected, and that by losing one or the other, by engineering it away socially or medically, nightmarish unintended consequences will ensue.

The solution to this contention over social preferences and culture is analogous to the separation of church and state. To accommodate all religious and social beliefs in a framework of law and justice that respects all such beliefs that can be consistent with universal human rights, a government has to be prohibited from interfering when those beliefs are practiced without harming an individual’s rights. We might call this generalized idea “Separation of Culture and Government.”

While the modern feminists would wish to eliminate such current cultural communities as Mormonism, ultra-orthodox Judaism, socially conservative evangelical Christians, conservative Catholicism, and unreformed Islam from the scene, a bargain must be struck to prevent further strife: the law will not take a position on any social belief — it will not take sides for or against social conservatives or Social Justice Warriors. Any individual is free to practice their beliefs with other like-minded individuals in voluntary association. Attempts to bring the force of the law to bear on changing social mores and behaviors that are not in violation of individual rights would be prevented. The law of marriage would revert to the law of contract, with social conservatives free to enter into perpetual marriage contracts with features like dowry, alimony, and discriminatory child custody and support arrangements, while others would be free to bind themselves to marriages which maintain individual property and call for equal arrangements for child custody, with no alimony implied unless provided for by contract. No group could punish an individual member for behavior contrary to its beliefs except by private action: social sanctions, excommunication, and shunning. Lobbying the central government to adopt your preferred social arrangements by law would, ideally, occupy far less time and attention in national politics as such efforts were struck down by the courts.

Currently modern feminists have won considerable power to use government support and propaganda to free women of some of the obligations of the patriarchal culture they wanted to replace. Not only to correct injustices in law and employment, but to increase government spending and regulation to provide support that women formerly might have had to negotiate and serve a partner or employer to obtain. Both ever-expanding social welfare states and the failed Communist states reduced individual accountability and replaced allegiance to family and employer with allegiance to the state’s goals, and that is the model modern feminists prefer and are now working toward in the US.

Under such a controlling regime there is far less reward for striving. Hard work is replaced by contentious committee meetings and political struggles for pieces of a shrinking pie. The increasing numbers of academics, government workers, and nonprofit workers operate detached from practical considerations of serving customers. It becomes easier to slack off, and so more people slack off. The endpoint occurs when the productive have fled or chosen more leisure over work, and the economy collapses after years of stagnation. In the family sphere, we already see the endpoint in entire communities where single mothers struggle to raise children without benefit of a father to help and guide, young men are either in prison or involved in gangs, and intact families with bourgeois values are forced to move away. Women are taught that they are victims of oppressive males, and the enlarged State will take their side in any disputes and support them directly if they have children. What had been a safety net for people in tragic circumstances became a way of life for millions.

Men and women who don’t want to take the role offered them in the culture they grew up in have the choice of not doing so, or bucking their culture to find a partner who more closely reflects their chosen values — this is America, where you can be who you want to be! But under a government that micromanages social arrangements and decides family custody and support decisions based on “victim feminism,” men are never safe from rape accusations, your children can be taken away from you easily, and the population of women one might productively partner with has been programmed to see themselves as victims entitled to use government to win any disputes that might come up. If you are hardworking and successful on your own, you are taxed heavily to support other men’s children and fund the politically correct bureaucrats who harass your business. This thumb on the scale of justice makes marriage a negative-sum game for many men (especially the poor and disadvantaged), and the elevation of bureaucrats and academics above workers in the private sphere damages men’s career prospects, unless of course they adopt the conformist ideology.

The limited government crowd doesn’t want no government. It is generally recognized that externalities and free-rider problems can only be handled by a government; defense, civil justice and policing, pollution regulations, and public health regulation (quarantines, vaccination requirements, etc.) are areas that can only be handled by a monopoly state. But political decision making is a blunt and inefficient mechanism, and those matters which can be handled by private business and voluntary social organizations should be, both for efficiency and freedom of choice. The libertarian and smaller government crowd wants a government that concentrates on effectively and efficiently handling matters only it can handle well. The expansion of the government sphere at the expense of the private sphere is analogous to Microsoft’s destruction of most competitive software applications companies in the 1980s: using its near-monopoly in operating systems and the enormous profits to enter the applications market, marketing its mediocre applications and funding them when any normal company would have given up. Eventually competitors were worn out and stopped funding new development; Office products took over, ending most of the progress in the field for a decade. Using the power to tax and the lack of any mechanism to disband failed government programs, mediocre government-funded services (like monopoly elementary and secondary education) crowded out the privately-funded community schools, and after a century of increasingly centralized control, local parental control of schools and their curricula has almost vanished. Education is now heavily influenced by modern feminists, and children are indoctrinated in feminist and anti-masculine ideas.

It took generations for feminists and Progressives to capture the commanding heights of government, media, education, and non-profit foundations. From their perches they have directed a campaign to change the culture and enlarge the State, and they have won. Federal government authority has expanded to directing university handling of rape allegations and defunding men’s sports teams under Title IX. Meanwhile, antiquated family law (as in, for example, Massachusetts) remains unreformed, designed for an era where the woman was assumed to be a fragile flower needing protection, and forever a ward of her husband even after no-fault divorce.

Some of these problems of feminist excess are now getting more mainstream attention, but the best solution is the libertarian one of limited government. Both major US parties are flirting with libertarian ideas like an end to the War on Drugs and government surveillance excesses, but the bureaucratic underbrush that limits freedom the most has been a part of our lives for a long time, and few see how damaging it is becoming. State-by-state reform of divorce and alimony laws is happening, but slowly.

Few candidates for office believe voters will support a pledge to do less. Efforts to reduce bureaucratic and centralized control of people’s lives have been politically difficult, until perhaps now when the incompetence and waste of large government projects has become more obvious. While there is a temptation for men to join feminists in playing the victim card (“Men are victims, too! Help us!”), men don’t need special programs to regain fairness; they need a government that stops interfering and lets organic social relations between men and women resume a more natural course.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples OrganizationsDeath by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations,  available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

 

For more on SJWs, modern feminism, Red Pill men, and family law:

Divorced Men 8 Times as Likely to Commit Suicide as Divorced Women
Life Is Unfair! The Militant Red Pill Movement
Leftover Women: The Chinese Scene
“Divorce in America: Who Really Wants Out and Why”
View Marriage as a Private Contract?
Madmen, Red Pill, and Social Justice Wars
Unrealistic Expectations: Liberal Arts Woman and Amazon Men
Stable is Boring? “Psychology Today” Article on Bad Boyfriends
Ross Douthat on Unstable Families and Culture
Ev Psych: Parental Preferences in Partners
Purge: the Feminist Grievance Bubble
The Social Decay of Black Neighborhoods (And Yours!)
Modern Feminism: Victim-Based Special Pleading
Stereotype Inaccuracy: False Dichotomies
Real-Life “Hunger Games”: Soft Oppression Destroys the Poor
Red Pill Women — Female MRAs
Why Did Black Crime Syndicates Fail to Go Legit?
The “Fairy Tale” Myth: Both False and Destructive
Feminism’s Heritage: Freedom vs. Special Protections
Evolve or Die: Survival Value of the Feminine Imperative
“Why Are Great Husbands Being Abandoned?”
Divorce and Alimony: State-By-State Reform, Massachusetts Edition
Reading “50 Shades of Grey” Gives You Anorexia and an Abusive Partner!
Why We Are Attracted to Bad Partners (Who Resemble a Parent)
Gaming and Science Fiction: Social Justice Warriors Strike Again
Social Justice Warriors: #GamerGate Explained
Emma Watson’s Message: Intelligence Trumps Sex

Culture Wars: Peace Through Limited Government
Marxist-Feminist Poster

Marxist-Feminist Poster

[Note: this is an edited and improved version of a post released August 18th, 2014, published on “A Voice For Men” — this has relevance for reducing the contention between social conservatives (and some religious communities) and social liberals and feminists.]

In response to several articles here about libertarians and men’s rights, I’m prompted to write about the history of government thought control and the means of restraining it by constitutional limitations on its powers. Western governments are more and more intrusive on private decisions, and modern feminists strongly influence their actions and propaganda from their positions in academia, government, and nonprofits. Restricting government’s powers to interfere in private decisions and control the media message would give private personal decisions more room, and men would benefit.

Feminism started out with a quest for equity in job opportunities, voting, and freedom to choose. This initial agenda (“equity feminism”) won a lot of support from fair-minded men and women, though even then there was a strong element of gynocentrism in the movement.

By choosing to notice only the bad things that happen to women in our own time as well as other cultures and times, modern feminists have failed to work for truly equal treatment of men and women. Instead of seeing individuals and their rights as important, modern feminists and other Social Justice Warriors believe that only a relentless focus on oppression of some categories of individuals by others is the key to righteousness, and their collectivist view of group rights leaves little space for sympathy for anyone who cannot claim membership in an oppressed class. They believe as a religious cult would believe that if only they explain their beliefs hard enough to the unenlightened, the scales will fall from their eyes and goodness will triumph. No amount of victory in achieving their goals would ever be enough for them to end their battles, since new groups of the wicked can always be identified to battle against; the battle itself nourishes their egos and so it must continue. If all their enemies have been vanquished, villainy is defined down to catch a new class of micro-villains whose microagressions and incorrect thoughts must be corrected.

Note that it is no longer enough that “victim” classes be treated equally by government and in employment and public accommodations — theirs is now a push for equal outcomes to overcome private rights of association and contract, so women (or men!) who desire to work less or take out more time for family would not be allowed to bargain for those conditions of employment by asking for less pay for less work. Implicitly all employees with the same job title and duties must be paid the same regardless of their individual contributions or their own desires for a lesser degree of commitment to the business.

Equal opportunity does not imply their should be equal outcomes, because diversity of interests and abilities between individuals and the sexes means there will be unequal interest in career options that require 60 hours a week of work, intense focus on mechanical problems, manual labor, or hazardous conditions. Similarly, you will not get or expect equal interest in the highly social, helping professions that on average women appear to prefer. Efforts to force equal employment in every company by race, sex, age, or other class are simply doomed — any company which balanced its workforce to match these desiderata would find themselves forced to hire less productive employees, crippling them against their competition not so constrained. Jesse Jackson has called for Federal pressure on high tech firms to require equal employment outcomes in tech jobs. When you talk to a Social Justice Warrior about this, you get an answer remarkably similar to what socialists said in the 1980s when you asked how any country could level outcomes (“to each according to his need”) without the productive escaping to another country to achieve what they could without the shackles: “Well, that’s why they had to build the Berlin Wall.” To stop the defection of those who want to be free to follow their own preferences, this preferred system must be extended everywhere or somehow escape must be controlled and punished by, say, walls, machine guns, and Gulags.

So what we have is a small but highly influential ideological group, educated, generally well-off, and embedded in academia, media, government, and non-profit work throughout the United States. They continually agitate for larger and more intrusive government which would employ more of their kind, the better to regulate away all imperfect thought and behavior. Business and profit-making enterprise is viewed as suspect because it is partly beyond their political control, so efforts to take control of decisions inside businesses continue, and the expanding HR departments, lobbyist payments, and political contributions of businesses reflect the need to pay for protection against this bureaucratic tendency. Similarly, hospitals and schools have responded to the increasing regulation and government funding of their activities by hiring many more high-paid administrators while shorting the low-level staff that actually do the work, because they must do so to get along in an increasingly bureaucratized, legalized, and centrally-controlled environment. This employment of large numbers of high-paid staff that don’t directly produce anything of value for customers has greatly increased the cost of domestic services like healthcare and education, and the drag on Western economies has brought economic growth to a halt in many places.

We have seen such bureaucracies before — the churches which for centuries held both political and moral authority over weak governments in Europe attempted to regulate thought and action to increase their own power. Wrangling over state religion and power led to incessant warfare. The solution to the problem of state interference in private thought and belief was finally found in the Enlightenment idea of separation of church and state. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in his letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

The early history of the colonies which later became the United States is instructive. Many of the colonies had an established church (the Massachusetts Bay colony notoriously drove out religious dissidents and hanged the Quaker Mary Dyer on Boston Common in 1660) and wished to maintain their government support for a specific religion even as the Enlightenment took hold, but it became clear that any government uniting the colonies would have to take a neutral stance toward religion, and enforce a set of human rights (constraints on government action on individual thought and choice) to allow them all to co-exist peacefully. The great flaw of this compact, its political tolerance of slavery and second-class citizenship for slaves, was only corrected by the upheaval of the Civil War, which cemented the primacy of the federal government and its enforcement of the ideal of individual rights within the states.

Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer is an eye-opening look at the four founding British cultures of colonial America, and how each of them continues to influence present-day political preferences and power struggles. Other immigrant cultures (German, Irish, Scandinavian…) were also influential, but tended to join with one of the four founding cultures that closely represented their views, resulting in the welter of memes of political belief now contending for influence.

In New England, the Puritans from East Anglia settled between 1629 and 1640, the years immediately preceding the English Civil War in which Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan army defeated and beheaded King Charles I. Their colony started with a rigid established church which was intolerant of free thought.

In Virginia, settlers consisted of vanquished supporters of King Charles and the established (Anglican) Church of England, primarily from the south and west of England. They tended to be more relaxed about religion and more business and trade-oriented.

Quakers then arrived in the Delaware Valley (Philadelphia area) from the English midlands (and their religious kin from various German sects) between 1675 and 1715. Their way was strongly religious and pacifist, but recognized the importance of freedom of conscience.

The good coastal lands having been occupied, the Scotch-Irish, referring collectively to immigrants from the north of England, lowland Scotland, and Ulster, settled the Appalachian hill country from 1717 to 1775. Scrappy and suspicious of any effort to tax and control by hated distant governments, their attitude of automatic resistance is still visible in today’s politics, with Sarah Palin an example of the type.

Only a government which respected and mediated the difference between these founding cultures could work for a larger United States.

As time has gone on, these Enlightenment understandings have been eroded, and “Americanism” (the practice of tolerance and “minding your own business,” belief in progress, self-sufficiency, and freedom of thought for all citizens regardless of sex, race, wealth, or heritage) is less practiced. Our Social Justice Warriors say they value freedom of speech and thought but only for approved speech and thought; heretical ideas are to be stamped out by denying speech and punishing the heretics. It is no longer surprising to hear a college activist suggest that certain kinds of speech be forbidden by law.

There are signs that popular culture has taken note of the tendency toward totalitarianism and government propaganda from the Social Justice Warriors. Dystopian YA novels like The Hunger Games show a population repressed and manipulated by a media-controlling central government. The movie version of the novel The Giver takes some shots at this mindset; a thoughtful review of the movie version in The Atlantic “What Is the Price of Perfect Equality?” gets at its politics:

Engels saw the institutions of family and private property as deeply entwined. Part of Engels’ objection to the institution of the family was that it involved a “progressive narrowing of the circle, originally embracing the whole tribe, within which the two sexes have a common conjugal relation.” Marxism’s benevolent tendencies are swallowed up by concern and preference for one’s immediate family, which becomes the unit of basic inequality…. Commerce and trade, it turns out, are just as dependent on the passions as the passions are dependent on commerce and trade in The Giver. The true nightmare of a dystopian world is that all of these things are interconnected, and that by losing one or the other, by engineering it away socially or medically, nightmarish unintended consequences will ensue.

The solution to this contention over social preferences and culture is analogous to the separation of church and state. To accommodate all religious and social beliefs in a framework of law and justice that respects all such beliefs that can be consistent with universal human rights, a government has to be prohibited from interfering when those beliefs are practiced without harming an individual’s rights. We might call this generalized idea “Separation of Culture and Government.”

While the modern feminists would wish to eliminate such current cultural communities as Mormonism, ultra-orthodox Judaism, socially conservative evangelical Christians, conservative Catholicism, and unreformed Islam from the scene, a bargain must be struck to prevent further strife: the law will not take a position on any social belief — it will not take sides for or against social conservatives or Social Justice Warriors. Any individual is free to practice their beliefs with other like-minded individuals in voluntary association. Attempts to bring the force of the law to bear on changing social mores and behaviors that are not in violation of individual rights would be prevented. The law of marriage would revert to the law of contract, with social conservatives free to enter into perpetual marriage contracts with features like dowry, alimony, and discriminatory child custody and support arrangements, while others would be free to bind themselves to marriages which maintain individual property and call for equal arrangements for child custody, with no alimony implied unless provided for by contract. No group could punish an individual member for behavior contrary to its beliefs except by private action: social sanctions, excommunication, and shunning. Lobbying the central government to adopt your preferred social arrangements by law would, ideally, occupy far less time and attention in national politics as such efforts were struck down by the courts.

Currently modern feminists have won considerable power to use government support and propaganda to free women of some of the obligations of the patriarchal culture they wanted to replace. Not only to correct injustices in law and employment, but to increase government spending and regulation to provide support that women formerly might have had to negotiate and serve a partner or employer to obtain. Both ever-expanding social welfare states and the failed Communist states reduced individual accountability and replaced allegiance to family and employer with allegiance to the state’s goals, and that is the model modern feminists prefer and are now working toward in the US.

Under such a controlling regime there is far less reward for striving. Hard work is replaced by contentious committee meetings and political struggles for pieces of a shrinking pie. The increasing numbers of academics, government workers, and nonprofit workers operate detached from practical considerations of serving customers. It becomes easier to slack off, and so more people slack off. The endpoint occurs when the productive have fled or chosen more leisure over work, and the economy collapses after years of stagnation. In the family sphere, we already see the endpoint in entire communities where single mothers struggle to raise children without benefit of a father to help and guide, young men are either in prison or involved in gangs, and intact families with bourgeois values are forced to move away. Women are taught that they are victims of oppressive males, and the enlarged State will take their side in any disputes and support them directly if they have children. What had been a safety net for people in tragic circumstances became a way of life for millions.

Men and women who don’t want to take the role offered them in the culture they grew up in have the choice of not doing so, or bucking their culture to find a partner who more closely reflects their chosen values — this is America, where you can be who you want to be! But under a government that micromanages social arrangements and decides family custody and support decisions based on “victim feminism,” men are never safe from rape accusations, your children can be taken away from you easily, and the population of women one might productively partner with has been programmed to see themselves as victims entitled to use government to win any disputes that might come up. If you are hardworking and successful on your own, you are taxed heavily to support other men’s children and fund the politically correct bureaucrats who harass your business. This thumb on the scale of justice makes marriage a negative-sum game for many men (especially the poor and disadvantaged), and the elevation of bureaucrats and academics above workers in the private sphere damages men’s career prospects, unless of course they adopt the conformist ideology.

The limited government crowd doesn’t want no government. It is generally recognized that externalities and free-rider problems can only be handled by a government; defense, civil justice and policing, pollution regulations, and public health regulation (quarantines, vaccination requirements, etc.) are areas that can only be handled by a monopoly state. But political decision making is a blunt and inefficient mechanism, and those matters which can be handled by private business and voluntary social organizations should be, both for efficiency and freedom of choice. The libertarian and smaller government crowd wants a government that concentrates on effectively and efficiently handling matters only it can handle well. The expansion of the government sphere at the expense of the private sphere is analogous to Microsoft’s destruction of most competitive software applications companies in the 1980s: using its near-monopoly in operating systems and the enormous profits to enter the applications market, marketing its mediocre applications and funding them when any normal company would have given up. Eventually competitors were worn out and stopped funding new development; Office products took over, ending most of the progress in the field for a decade. Using the power to tax and the lack of any mechanism to disband failed government programs, mediocre government-funded services (like monopoly elementary and secondary education) crowded out the privately-funded community schools, and after a century of increasingly centralized control, local parental control of schools and their curricula has almost vanished. Education is now heavily influenced by modern feminists, and children are indoctrinated in feminist and anti-masculine ideas.

It took generations for feminists and Progressives to capture the commanding heights of government, media, education, and non-profit foundations. From their perches they have directed a campaign to change the culture and enlarge the State, and they have won. Federal government authority has expanded to directing university handling of rape allegations and defunding men’s sports teams under Title IX. Meanwhile, antiquated family law (as in, for example, Massachusetts) remains unreformed, designed for an era where the woman was assumed to be a fragile flower needing protection, and forever a ward of her husband even after no-fault divorce.

Some of these problems of feminist excess are now getting more mainstream attention, but the best solution is the libertarian one of limited government. Both major US parties are flirting with libertarian ideas like an end to the War on Drugs and government surveillance excesses, but the bureaucratic underbrush that limits freedom the most has been a part of our lives for a long time, and few see how damaging it is becoming. State-by-state reform of divorce and alimony laws is happening, but slowly.

Few candidates for office believe voters will support a pledge to do less. Efforts to reduce bureaucratic and centralized control of people’s lives have been politically difficult, until perhaps now when the incompetence and waste of large government projects has become more obvious. While there is a temptation for M(H)RAs to join feminists in playing the victim card (“Men are victims, too! Help us!”), men don’t need special programs to regain fairness; they need a government that stops interfering and lets organic social relations between men and women resume a more natural course.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples OrganizationsDeath by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations,  available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

 

For more on SJWs, modern feminism, Red Pill men, and family law:

Divorced Men 8 Times as Likely to Commit Suicide as Divorced Women
Life Is Unfair! The Militant Red Pill Movement
Leftover Women: The Chinese Scene
“Divorce in America: Who Really Wants Out and Why”
View Marriage as a Private Contract?
Madmen, Red Pill, and Social Justice Wars
Unrealistic Expectations: Liberal Arts Woman and Amazon Men
Stable is Boring? “Psychology Today” Article on Bad Boyfriends
Ross Douthat on Unstable Families and Culture
Ev Psych: Parental Preferences in Partners
Purge: the Feminist Grievance Bubble
The Social Decay of Black Neighborhoods (And Yours!)
Modern Feminism: Victim-Based Special Pleading
Stereotype Inaccuracy: False Dichotomies
Real-Life “Hunger Games”: Soft Oppression Destroys the Poor
Red Pill Women — Female MRAs
Why Did Black Crime Syndicates Fail to Go Legit?
The “Fairy Tale” Myth: Both False and Destructive
Feminism’s Heritage: Freedom vs. Special Protections
Evolve or Die: Survival Value of the Feminine Imperative
“Why Are Great Husbands Being Abandoned?”
Divorce and Alimony: State-By-State Reform, Massachusetts Edition
Reading “50 Shades of Grey” Gives You Anorexia and an Abusive Partner!
Why We Are Attracted to Bad Partners (Who Resemble a Parent)
Gaming and Science Fiction: Social Justice Warriors Strike Again
Social Justice Warriors: #GamerGate Explained
Emma Watson’s Message: Intelligence Trumps Sex

Real-Life “Hunger Games”: Soft Oppression Destroys the Poor

Social capital, what’s that? The built-up support networks of families and individuals that help maintain and order their lives. Family ties, community ties — with organizations like churches, schools, and voluntary associations that once were more common parts of everyone’s lives. The mutual assistance of friends and neighbors. Reputation, status, and the regard of others which motivated good behavior, honesty in dealing, and charitable assistance, which maintained and strengthened those ties, and helped those in need with both assistance and the strings of obligation to repay that assistance by being useful members of the community.

In a small town, the impulse to assist the poor and disorganized was direct, and the people being helped were known to everyone. Big cities with their concentrated slums of poor immigrants led to social service agencies, funded at first by churches and cities, and then by state and federal governments. As the source of the assistance became impersonal, so did the aid — and the direct contact between those assisting and those assisted declined. Instead of the local church matrons with their bourgeois ideas of proper behavior and work, harassed social workers with enormous caseloads processed cases quickly, and the ideology of government assistance changed so that any behavioral expectation of the client population was viewed as an affront to their dignity.

In time, the government assistance ethos spread to every corner of the country and crowded out the local community services. Meanwhile, locally-controlled schools were gradually taken over by higher levels of government and distant union bureaucracies so that the influence of local parents was minimized. This was viewed as “progressive,” since distant elites thought local school boards and parents were too parochial and backward to be entrusted with decisions, and would get in the way of teaching the correct materials.

The incorrect application of emotions of sympathy and support to faceless categories of people like “the poor” and “the undocumented” removes any possibility of understanding the real situations of each of the category’s members. A hazy idealized poor family is envisioned, then a response that would be appropriate if that family lived next door (help them!) leads to voting for politicians that offer new programs to help “people like that.” By misapplying family and community feelings to higher levels of government, voters put into place a bureaucracy that misses most of the social signalling features of local groups and takes tax money to grow itself, crowding out local groups (and the valuable social signals that maintained bourgeois standards.)

Progressives generally are sentimentally supportive of direct local politics — they especially favor the ideals of the New England town meeting, where everyone who showed up had a say. The reason why this form of local government was generally abandoned is that it is simply too time-consuming for larger communities, and allows the motivated minority to capture control. Election of representatives was an advance which allowed voters to go about their own lives most of the time while exerting control through their representative, who had time to understand the issues thoroughly and vote in council in the best interests of the voters. Being in the 1% of local voters who cares deeply enough about an item to show up at a public meeting about it does not mean your feelings about it are more important than the views of those who didn’t show up; the once-every-few-years election is more likely to reflect what most voters want.

What have been the effects of progressive, centralized control of education, healthcare, and social services? It is true that the backwards practices of a few local school boards have been reformed, but the loss of a rich layer of church and private charity social services has impoverished local social capital. While today’s mass communication and the Internet removed one of the impulses to community (“I’m bored. Let’s go into town and hang out!”), a lot of the loss is due to the crowding out by a monopoly government, which had deep pockets and would use them to continue failed policies, as Microsoft in the 80s used the profits from its near-monopoly OS business to keep creating mediocre applications software until the innovators in applications were destroyed.

Very wealthy people have always been freer than others from the stifling social controls and judgments of bourgeois community standards. The elite of Paris and London in the 1800s often kept mistresses and dabbled in drug use without having their lives destroyed. The lower classes did not have the wealth to recover from errors, and those who did not hew to bourgeois social norms were isolated and damaged.

As the upper middle classes in the US grew as wealthy as the elite had been in the previous century after WWII, the sexual revolution and War on Poverty bestowed more social freedom on everyone — the middle and upper classes got birth control, sexual freedom, and women in the workplace, while the poor got programs to “uplift” them from poverty (a term which exposes the condescension involved). Social workers in vast numbers were hired to distribute assistance, free of any obligation — except for unmarried mothers, who were told their assistance would be cut if they married a working man.

Over the course of several generations, the well-off used their freedoms and came out relatively unscathed — families were still largely intact, children were still trained in the arts of civilization and followed the path of university and marriage into professional careers. But the artificial assistance to the poor, with its lack of community obligations and support and its immediate withdrawal in the event of marriage and better work, removed the social incentives that keep healthy communities healthy. Intact families grew less common. Crime and social pathologies became the norm in poor inner-city communities. As conditions worsened, the motivated and organized left for more civilized neighborhoods with better schools. The segregation of cities and even whole regions by income increased. Whole generations of children were poorly raised, poorly schooled, and left to drift without purpose or guidance from now-absent fathers, who were in prison or adrift themselves.

See this post and its links for more discussion of the black community specifically.

Meaning well is no defense.

We have a large number of people trained in academia who think their impulses to control other people’s lives indirectly through election of technocrats are just as virtuous, and a replacement for, the individual impulse to assist someone near you. They are horribly, hopelessly wrong, but convinced they are right and that only troglodytes and racists would oppose their “help.” They live in a bubble with other Virtuous People and feel superior to people who work in trades or live away from the elite coastal cities. Their lives are rich with experiences and status goods, and they can handle sexual and social freedoms well (mostly) because of their deep reserves of cash and connections — “rehab” is an option, and being late to work because of a bender or hookup won’t get them fired.

But for the poor, the “assistance” of government bureaucracies has gradually destroyed their families, their jobs, their communities, and their social capital.

The Hunger Games is an entertainment, but part of its attraction is the funhouse-mirror view of the societal and geographic divisions we see today in the US. The country is divided between the rich and frivolous Capital District, distracted by the spectacles of the Games and government-provided entertainments, and the poorer Districts where laborers (generally of the grubby, lower-class kind) toil generation after generation to support the imperial Capitol.

The heroine, Katniss Everdeen, grows up impoverished in the coal mining district, but with a strong and resourceful spirit takes on the system as a focal point for rebellion. The economics of the government are far from clear (why does an empire with high technology still have manual labor as its foundation?), but its oppressive nature and manipulation of the educated and refined white collar workers of the Capitol are clear.

Charles Murray fearlessly dares to be politically incorrect in his Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010:

In Coming Apart, Charles Murray explores the formation of American classes that are different in kind from anything we have ever known, focusing on whites as a way of driving home the fact that the trends he describes do not break along lines of race or ethnicity.

Drawing on five decades of statistics and research, Coming Apart demonstrates that a new upper class and a new lower class have diverged so far in core behaviors and values that they barely recognize their underlying American kinship—divergence that has nothing to do with income inequality and that has grown during good economic times and bad.

The top and bottom of white America increasingly live in different cultures, Murray argues, with the powerful upper class living in enclaves surrounded by their own kind, ignorant about life in mainstream America, and the lower class suffering from erosions of family and community life that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness. That divergence puts the success of the American project at risk.

His point in focusing on the white class structure is that black communities have been the canaries in the coal mine — more fragile and more urban, and therefore the first to be effected by the social welfare bureaucracies. Now the social pathologies that destroyed inner-city black communities are spreading to the rural and suburban lower classes — marriage rates dropping, children brought up poorly, gangs and the drug war creating social chaos. Progressive whites could pretend the black community was in trouble because not enough was being done, and racism — but when the rot spreads to every city and town, it’s impossible to explain it as the result of racism.

The more progressives elect politicians purporting to care about income inequality, the worse the life of the poor. The phenomenal damage caused by the Drug War to inner city communities and families, the prison-industrial complex that has helped destroy the black family and the lives of millions of young men, the hair-trigger police SWAT teams raiding the innocent by mistake and killing dogs and people in the hundreds — these are all the effects of a government elected by “caring” people who want to control the lives of others from a distance. And now the damage is going mainstream.

The Economist this week has a great story about the Hunger Games-like divide in the US:

SHANA, a bright and chirpy 12-year-old, goes to ballet classes four nights a week, plus Hebrew school on Wednesday night and Sunday morning. Her mother Susan, a high-flying civil servant, played her Baby Einstein videos as an infant, read to her constantly, sent her to excellent schools and was scrupulous about handwashing.

Susan is, in short, a very conscientious mother. But she worries that she is not. She says she thinks about parenting “all the time”. But, asked how many hours she spends with Shana, she says: “Probably not enough”. Then she looks tearful, and describes the guilt she feels whenever she is not nurturing her daughter.

Susan lives in Bethesda, an azalea-garlanded suburb of Washington, DC packed with lawyers, diplomats and other brainy types. The median household income, at $142,000, is nearly three times the American average. Some 84% of residents over the age of 25 are college graduates, compared with a national norm of 32%. Couples who both have advanced degrees are like well-tended lawns—ubiquitous.

Bethesda moms and dads take parenting seriously. Angie Zeidenberg, the director of a local nursery, estimates that 95% of the parents she deals with read parenting books. Nearly all visit parenting websites or attend parenting classes, she says.

Bethesda children are constantly stimulated. Natalia, a local four-year-old, watches her three older siblings study and wants to join in. “She pretends to have homework,” says her mother, Veronica; she sits next to them and practises her letters.

Veronica is an accountant; her husband is an engineer. Their children “all know that school doesn’t end at 18,” says Veronica. “They assume they’ll go to college and do a master’s.” Asked how often she checks her various children’s progress on Edline, the local schools’ website that shows grades in real time, she admits: “More than I should, probably.”

In “Coming Apart”, Charles Murray, a social scientist, ranked American zip codes by income and educational attainment. Bethesda is in the top 1%. Kids raised in such “superzips” tend to learn a lot while young and earn a lot as adults. Those raised in not-so-super zips are not so lucky.

Consider the children of Cabin Creek, West Virginia. The scenery they see from their front porches is more spectacular than anything Bethesda has to offer: the Appalachian Mountains rather than the tree-lined back streets of suburbia. But the local economy is in poor shape, as the coal industry declines. The median household income is $26,000, half the national average. Only 6% of adults have college degrees. On Mr Murray’s scale, Cabin Creek is in the bottom 10%.

Melissa, a local parent, says that her son often comes home from school and announces that he has no homework. She does not believe him, but she cannot stop him from heading straight out across the creek to play with his friends in the woods.

She has other things to worry about. The father of her first three children died. The father of her baby is not around. Her baby suffers from a rare nutritional disorder. And Melissa has to get by on $420 a month in government benefits. Small wonder that she struggles to enforce homework. And small wonder the gap between haves and have-nots in America is so hard to close.

…

In a study in 1995, Betty Hart and Todd Risley of the University of Kansas found that children in professional families heard on average 2,100 words an hour. Working-class kids heard 1,200; those whose families lived on welfare heard only 600. By the age of three, a doctor’s or lawyer’s child has probably heard 30m more words than a poor child has.

Well-off parents talk to their school-age children for three more hours each week than low-income parents, according to Meredith Phillips of the University of California, Los Angeles. They put their toddlers and babies in stimulating places such as parks and churches for four-and-a-half more hours. And highly educated mothers are better at giving their children the right kind of stimulation for their age, according to Ariel Kalil of the University of Chicago. To simplify, they play with their toddlers more and organise their teenagers.

The Adventures of Supermom

“I talk to him constantly,” says Lacey, another Bethesda mother, of her two-year-old son. “As we go through the day, I talk about what we’re doing. I try to make the regular tasks interesting and fun, like going to the grocery store.” Her older son, who is five, devours maths apps and asks his mother questions about arithmetic. At the weekend the family might go to the American History Museum or the Washington Zoo or a park.

Cabin Creek parents love their children just as much as Bethesda parents do, but they read to them less. It doesn’t help that they are much more likely to be raising their children alone, like Melissa. Only 9% of American women with college degrees who gave birth in the past year are unmarried; for those who failed to finish high school the figure is 61%. Two parents have more time between them than one.

And even two-parent families in Cabin Creek tend to be more stretched than those in Bethesda. Sarah, another Cabin Creek mom, has a sick mother and a husband who was injured in a coal mine. Her three boys, two of whom make it a point of pride to be on the naughty kids list at school, exhaust her. She helps them with their homework and reads to them fairly regularly, but often just lets them watch television. “Dora the Explorer” is somewhat educational, she says: “It’s got Spanish in it.”

Children with at least one parent with a graduate degree score roughly 400 points higher (out of 2,400) on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (a test used for college entrance) than children whose parents did not finish high school. This is a huge gap. It is hard to say how much it owes to nurture and how much to nature. Both usually push in the same direction. Brainy parents pass on their genes, including the ones that predispose their children to be intelligent. They also create an environment at home that helps that intelligence to blossom, and they buy houses near good schools.

…

The two aspects of parenting that seem to matter most are intellectual stimulation (eg, talking, reading, answering “why?” questions) and emotional support (eg, bonding with infants so that they grow up confident and secure). Mr Reeves and his Brookings colleague Kimberly Howard take a composite measure of these things called the HOME scale (Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment) and relate it to how well children do in later life, using data from a big federal survey of those born in the 1980s and 1990s.

The results are striking. Some 43% of mothers who dropped out of high school were ranked among the bottom 25% of parents, as were 44% of single mothers. The gap between high- and middle-income parents was small, but the gap between the middle and the bottom was large: 48% of parents in the lowest income quintile were also among the weakest parents, compared with 16% of the parents in the middle and 5% in the richest (see chart 2).

Likewise, the difference between high-school dropouts and the rest was far greater than the gap between high-school and college graduates. Mr Reeves and Ms Howard estimate that if moms in the bottom fifth were averagely effective parents, 9% more of their kids would graduate from high school, 6% fewer would become teen parents and 3% fewer would be convicted of a crime by the age of 19.

Read the whole thing here. The story goes on at length about suggestions for improving the lives of children brought up in social and financial poverty. Some of these are just more of the same failed top-down ideas (universal pre-school, more social workers.) But the most useful strategy of all is to allow the laws of natural community organization to work again by ending the Drug War, the police war on poor citizens, the overregulation that makes it hard to start and keep a small business, and the paternalistic “assistance” that prevents natural formation of strong families.

More on prison-industrial destruction of young black men.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples OrganizationsDeath by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations,  available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

 

Propaganda posters from Hunger Games.
Divorced Men 8 Times as Likely to Commit Suicide as Divorced Women
Life Is Unfair! The Militant Red Pill Movement
Leftover Women: The Chinese Scene
“Divorce in America: Who Really Wants Out and Why”
View Marriage as a Private Contract?
Madmen, Red Pill, and Social Justice Wars
Unrealistic Expectations: Liberal Arts Woman and Amazon Men
Stable is Boring? “Psychology Today” Article on Bad Boyfriends
Ross Douthat on Unstable Families and Culture
Ev Psych: Parental Preferences in Partners
Purge: the Feminist Grievance Bubble
The Social Decay of Black Neighborhoods (And Yours!)
Modern Feminism: Victim-Based Special Pleading
Stereotype Inaccuracy: False Dichotomies
Real-Life “Hunger Games”: Soft Oppression Destroys the Poor
Red Pill Women — Female MRAs
Why Did Black Crime Syndicates Fail to Go Legit?
The “Fairy Tale” Myth: Both False and Destructive
Feminism’s Heritage: Freedom vs. Special Protections
Evolve or Die: Survival Value of the Feminine Imperative
“Why Are Great Husbands Being Abandoned?”
Divorce and Alimony: State-By-State Reform, Massachusetts Edition
Reading “50 Shades of Grey” Gives You Anorexia and an Abusive Partner!
Why We Are Attracted to Bad Partners (Who Resemble a Parent)
Gaming and Science Fiction: Social Justice Warriors Strike Again
Culture Wars: Peace Through Limited Government

Proposed: How a Smaller, Less Intrusive Government Would Forward the Interests of Men
Marxist-Feminist Poster

Marxist-Feminist Poster

[Note: this is an edited version of a post released Augost 18th, 2014]

In response to several articles here about libertarians and men’s rights, I’m prompted to write about the history of government thought control and the means of restraining it by constitutional limitations on its powers. Western governments are more and more intrusive on private decisions, and modern feminists strongly influence their actions and propaganda from their positions in academia, government, and nonprofits. Restricting government’s powers to interfere in private decisions and control the media message would give private personal decisions more room, and men would benefit.

Feminism started out with a quest for equity in job opportunities, voting, and freedom to choose. This initial agenda (“equity feminism”) won a lot of support from fair-minded men and women, though even then there was a strong element of gynocentrism in the movement.

By choosing to notice only the bad things that happen to women in our own time as well as other cultures and times, modern feminists have failed to work for truly equal treatment of men and women. Instead of seeing individuals and their rights as important, modern feminists and other Social Justice Warriors believe that only a relentless focus on oppression of some categories of individuals by others is the key to righteousness, and their collectivist view of group rights leaves little space for sympathy for anyone who cannot claim membership in an oppressed class. They believe as a religious cult would believe that if only they explain their beliefs hard enough to the unenlightened, the scales will fall from their eyes and goodness will triumph. No amount of victory in achieving their goals would ever be enough for them to end their battles, since new groups of the wicked can always be identified to battle against; the battle itself nourishes their egos and so it must continue. If all their enemies have been vanquished, villainy is defined down to catch a new class of micro-villains whose microagressions and incorrect thoughts must be corrected.

Note that it is no longer enough that “victim” classes be treated equally by government and in employment and public accommodations — theirs is now a push for equal outcomes to overcome private rights of association and contract, so women (or men!) who desire to work less or take out more time for family would not be allowed to bargain for those conditions of employment by asking for less pay for less work. Implicitly all employees with the same job title and duties must be paid the same regardless of their individual contributions or their own desires for a lesser degree of commitment to the business.

Equal opportunity does not imply their should be equal outcomes, because diversity of interests and abilities between individuals and the sexes means there will be unequal interest in career options that require 60 hours a week of work, intense focus on mechanical problems, manual labor, or hazardous conditions. Similarly, you will not get or expect equal interest in the highly social, helping professions that on average women appear to prefer. Efforts to force equal employment in every company by race, sex, age, or other class are simply doomed — any company which balanced its workforce to match these desiderata would find themselves forced to hire less productive employees, crippling them against their competition not so constrained. Jesse Jackson has called for Federal pressure on high tech firms to require equal employment outcomes in tech jobs. When you talk to a Social Justice Warrior about this, you get an answer remarkably similar to what socialists said in the 1980s when you asked how any country could level outcomes (“to each according to his needs”) without the productive escaping to another country to achieve what they could without the shackles: “Well, that’s why they had to build the Berlin wall.” To stop the defection of those who want to be free to follow their own preferences, this preferred system must be extended everywhere or somehow escape must be controlled and punished by, say, walls, machine guns, and Gulags.

So what we have is a small but highly influential ideological group, educated, generally well-off, and embedded in academia, media, government, and non-profit work throughout the United States. They continually agitate for larger and more intrusive government which would employ more of their kind, the better to regulate away all imperfect thought and behavior. Business and profit-making enterprise is viewed as suspect because it is partly beyond their political control, so efforts to take control of decisions inside businesses continue, and the expanding HR departments, lobbyist payments, and political contributions of businesses reflect the need to pay for protection against this bureaucratic tendency. Similarly, hospitals and schools have responded to the increasing regulation and government funding of their activities by hiring many more high-paid administrators while shorting the low-level staff that actually do the work, because they must do so to get along in an increasingly bureaucratized, legalized, and centrally-controlled environment. This employment of large numbers of high-paid staff that don’t directly produce anything of value for customers has greatly increased the cost of domestic services like healthcare and education, and the drag on Western economies has brought economic growth to a halt in many places.

We have seen such bureaucracies before — the churches which for centuries held both political and moral authority over weak governments in Europe attempted to regulate thought and action to increase their own power. Wrangling over state religion and power led to incessant warfare. The solution to the problem of state interference in private thought and belief was finally found in the Enlightenment idea of separation of church and state. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in his letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

The early history of the colonies which later became the United States is instructive. Many of the colonies had an established church (the Massachusetts Bay colony notoriously drove out religious dissidents and hanged the Quaker Mary Dyer on Boston Common in 1660) and wished to maintain their government support for a specific religion even as the Enlightenment took hold, but it became clear that any government uniting the colonies would have to take a neutral stance toward religion which enforced a set of human rights (constraints on government action on individual thought and choice) to allow them all to co-exist peacefully. The great flaw of this compact, its political tolerance of slavery and second-class citizenship for slaves, was only corrected by the upheaval of the Civil War, which cemented the primacy of the federal government and its enforcement of the ideal of individual rights within the states.

Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer is an eye-opening look at the four founding British cultures of colonial America, and how each of them continues to influence present-day political preferences and power struggles. Other immigrant cultures (German, Irish, Scandinavian…) were also influential, but tended to join with one of the four founding cultures that closely represented their views, resulting in the welter of memes of political belief now contending for influence.

In New England, the Puritans from East Anglia settled between 1629 and 1640, the years immediately preceding the English Civil War in which Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan army defeated and beheaded King Charles I. Their colony started with a rigid established church which was intolerant of free thought.

In Virginia, settlers consisted of vanquished supporters of King Charles and the established (Anglican) Church of England, primarily from the south and west of England. They tended to be more relaxed about religion and more business and trade-oriented.

Quakers then arrived in the Delaware Valley (Philadelphia area) from the English midlands (and their religious kin from various German sects) between 1675 and 1715. Their way was strongly religious and pacifist, but recognized the importance of freedom of conscience.

The good coastal lands having been occupied, the Scotch-Irish, referring collectively to immigrants from the north of England, lowland Scotland, and Ulster, settled the Appalachian hill country from 1717 to 1775. Scrappy and suspicious of any effort to tax and control by hated distant governments, their attitude of automatic resistance is still visible in today’s politics, with Sarah Palin an example of the type.

Only a government which respected and mediated the difference between these founding cultures could work for a larger United States.

As time has gone on, these Enlightenment understandings have been eroded, and “Americanism” (the practice of tolerance and “minding your own business,” belief in progress, self-sufficiency, and freedom of thought for all citizens regardless of sex, race, wealth, or heritage) is less practiced. Our Social Justice Warriors value freedom of speech and thought but only for approved speech and thought; heretical ideas are to be stamped out by denying speech and punishing the heretics. It is no longer surprising to hear a college activist suggest that certain kinds of speech be forbidden by law.

There are signs that popular culture has taken note of the tendency toward totalitarianism and government propaganda from the Social Justice Warriors. Dystopian YA novels like The Hunger Games show a population repressed and manipulated by a media-controlling central government. The movie version of the novel The Giver takes some shots at this mindset; a thoughtful review of the movie version in The Atlantic “What Is the Price of Perfect Equality?” gets at its politics:

Engels saw the institutions of family and private property as deeply entwined. Part of Engels’ objection to the institution of the family was that it involved a “progressive narrowing of the circle, originally embracing the whole tribe, within which the two sexes have a common conjugal relation.” Marxism’s benevolent tendencies are swallowed up by concern and preference for one’s immediate family, which becomes the unit of basic inequality…. Commerce and trade, it turns out, are just as dependent on the passions as the passions are dependent on commerce and trade in The Giver. The true nightmare of a dystopian world is that all of these things are interconnected, and that by losing one or the other, by engineering it away socially or medically, nightmarish unintended consequences will ensue.

The solution to this contention over social preferences and culture is analogous to the separation of church and state. To accommodate all religious and social beliefs in a framework of law and justice that respects all such beliefs that can be consistent with universal human rights, a government has to be prohibited from interfering when those beliefs are practiced without harming an individual’s rights. We might call this generalized idea “Separation of Culture and Government.”

While the modern feminists would wish to eliminate such current cultural communities as Mormonism, ultra-orthodox Judaism, socially conservative evangelical Christians, conservative Catholicism, and unreformed Islam from the scene, a bargain must be struck to prevent further strife: the law will not take a position on any social belief — it will not take sides for or against social conservatives or Social Justice Warriors. Any individual is free to practice their beliefs with other like-minded individuals in voluntary association. Attempts to bring the force of the law to bear on changing social mores and behaviors that are not in violation of individual rights would be prevented. The law of marriage would revert to the law of contract, with social conservatives free to enter into perpetual marriage contracts with features like dowry, alimony, and discriminatory child custody and support arrangements, while others would be free to bind themselves to marriages which maintain individual property and call for equal arrangements for child custody, with no alimony implied unless provided for by contract. No group could punish an individual member for behavior contrary to its beliefs except by private action: social sanctions, excommunication, and shunning. Lobbying the central government to adopt your preferred social arrangements by law would, ideally, occupy far less time and attention in national politics as such efforts were struck down by the courts.

Currently modern feminists have won considerable power to use government support and propaganda to free women of some of the obligations of the patriarchal culture they wanted to replace. Not only to correct injustices in law and employment, but to increase government spending and regulation to provide support that women formerly might have had to negotiate and serve a partner or employer to obtain. Both ever-expanding social welfare states and the failed Communist states reduced individual accountability and replaced allegiance to family and employer with allegiance to the state’s goals, and that is the model modern feminists prefer and are now working toward in the US.

Under such a controlling regime there is far less reward for striving. Hard work is replaced by contentious committee meetings and political struggles for pieces of a shrinking pie. The increasing numbers of academics, government workers, and nonprofit workers operate detached from practical considerations of serving customers. It becomes easier to slack off, and so more people slack off. The endpoint occurs when the productive have fled or chosen more leisure over work, and the economy collapses after years of stagnation. In the family sphere, we already see the endpoint in entire communities where single mothers struggle to raise children without benefit of a father to help and guide, young men are either in prison or involved in gangs, and intact families with bourgeois values are forced to move away. Women are taught that they are victims of oppressive males, and the enlarged State will take their side in any disputes and support them directly if they have children. What had been a safety net for people in tragic circumstances became a way of life for millions.

Men and women who don’t want to take the role offered them in the culture they grew up in have the choice of not doing so, or bucking their culture to find a partner who more closely reflects their chosen values — this is America, where you can be who you want to be! But under a government that micromanages social arrangements and decides family custody and support decisions based on “victim feminism,” men are never safe from rape accusations, your children can be taken away from you easily, and the population of women one might productively partner with has been programmed to see themselves as victims entitled to use government to win any disputes that might come up. If you are hardworking and successful on your own, you are taxed heavily to support other men’s children and fund the politically correct bureaucrats who harass your business. This thumb on the scale of justice makes marriage a negative-sum game for many men (especially the poor and disadvantaged), and the elevation of bureaucrats and academics above workers in the private sphere damages men’s career prospects, unless of course they adopt the conformist ideology.

The limited government crowd doesn’t want no government. It is generally recognized that externalities and free-rider problems can only be handled by a government; defense, civil justice and policing, pollution regulations, and public health regulation (quarantines, vaccination requirements, etc.) are areas that can only be handled by a monopoly state. But political decision making is a blunt and inefficient mechanism, and those matters which can be handled by private business and voluntary social organizations should be, both for efficiency and freedom of choice. The libertarian and smaller government crowd wants a government that concentrates on effectively and efficiently handling matters only it can handle well. The expansion of the government sphere at the expense of the private sphere is analogous to Microsoft’s destruction of most competitive software applications companies in the 1980s: using its near-monopoly in operating systems and the enormous profits to enter the applications market, marketing its mediocre applications and funding them when any normal company would have given up. Eventually competitors were worn out and stopped funding new development; Office products took over, ending most of the progress in the field for a decade. Using the power to tax and the lack of any mechanism to disband failed government programs, mediocre government-funded services (like monopoly elementary and secondary education) crowded out the privately-funded community schools, and after a century of increasingly centralized control, local parental control of schools and their curricula has almost vanished. Education is now heavily influenced by modern feminists, and children are indoctrinated in feminist and anti-masculine ideas.

It took generations for feminists and Progressives to capture the commanding heights of government, media, education, and non-profit foundations. From their perches they have directed a campaign to change the culture and enlarge the State, and they have won. Federal government authority has expanded to directing university handling of rape allegations and defunding men’s sports teams under Title IX. Meanwhile, antiquated family law (as in, for example, Massachusetts) remains unreformed, designed for an era where the woman was assumed to be a fragile flower needing protection, and forever a ward of her husband even after no-fault divorce.

Some of these problems of feminist excess are now getting more mainstream attention, but the best solution is the libertarian one of limited government. Both major US parties are flirting with libertarian ideas like an end to the War on Drugs and government surveillance excesses, but the bureaucratic underbrush that limits freedom the most has been a part of our lives for a long time, and few see how damaging it is becoming. State-by-state reform of divorce and alimony laws is happening, but slowly.

Few candidates for office believe voters will support a pledge to do less. Efforts to reduce bureaucratic and centralized control of people’s lives have been politically difficult, until perhaps now when the incompetence and waste of large government projects has become more obvious. While there is a temptation for M(H)RAs to join feminists in playing the victim card (“Men are victims, too! Help us!”), men don’t need special programs to regain fairness; they need a government that stops interfering and lets organic social relations between men and women resume a more natural course.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples OrganizationsDeath by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations,  available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.