Through the pondering of a series of questions, I came to a certain eureka-moment on the topic of the male and female forces. I won't lie: these paragraphs are a bit of a masturbatory romp in the defense of misogyny (but not really, read on!), the topic of the biological imperative, politics, and the inspiration for the title of this website. It is also the product of 5+ days without speaking to anyone (I am one of the lucky few positioned in society such that I can accomplish this rare feat), and so it is probably a bit more wordy than it might need to be. Read on at your own risk (but please do risk it).
First question: whether people truly believe the strong are meant to dominate the weak, or more importantly if it is true. I think that it is not necessarily widely believed. Nature doesn't seem to want to promote that thought, as it could be destructive if carried to the extreme.
Nonetheless, it is entirely true.
And exactly as it should be. But what is terribly important is that we change what "strong" means.
Concrete example: the 2004 elections. The strong were the people who most closely aligned themselves with the traditional biological imperative. What were the main issues? Right to terminate pregnancy? Homosexual rights? Safety of our homeland? These are not things that have anything to do with our higher natures, except in that the first two issues could only arise as humanity wakes up and starts to ask questions. But we didn't wake up, we hit the snooze button. So, the weak allowed the strong four more years of sleep.
I've always thought of humans as being in a very awkward stage in our evolution. We've become smart enough to see the cage, but not smart enough to liberate ourselves.
But back to the example: look at how close things were in the election. Look just how much closer they've been getting generation after generation! The very fact that the weak are able to have such high hopes at all suggests that the balance of power is shifting. And of course this isn't limited to our own local era, obviously the pendulum has swung back and forth quite a bit since prehistory (it's pet peeve of mine that people seem to superimpose the linear path of social and liberal progress of, say, England, on the rest of humanity), but it is, nonetheless, getting better all the time.
Now - even in the better days of this awkward stage of human evolution - we are a long way from making decisions independent of the savannah mind, yet we are ever more influenced by our higher natures. Now this may well be some quantum fluke, and indeed it is possible that there is no biological component to this stage in evolution at all. If all history and knowledge and human endeavor whatsoever was to be removed from us, we could well end up no different from our furry forebears. Whether this is true or not, it contributes greatly to my sense of wonder and appreciation of said human endeavor, and makes me all the more nervous in the presence of certain memes. We have to be very careful that we don't model by memetics what we exhibit in genes.
This is where I would get a little bit mystical-sounding and talk about information theory and quantum mechanics and memetics and all that, but won't, as it is a pain to type and I am relatively sober.
Next issue: women and alpha males; I actually have rather misogynist views in this department. It should be noted that I, like House, am a misanthrope and not a misogynist, but damn it all if misogyny doesn't seem to come up fairly often anyway.
Female animals, of virtually any species, generally have to cope with every aspect of their lives personally. The lioness rears cubs, hunts, fights with females occasionally, and plays an important role in mating. The lion, on the other hand, merely plays an important role in mating. Otherwise, he uses his sheer overdeveloped strength to steal food and subjugate other males. If lionesses reproduced via parthenogenesis, lions would not be missed one little bit. They'd likely be better off.
If we choose to load animal behavior with values, then the lioness is quite virtuous, and the lion is a fuckwit.
Now take humans: early hunter-gatherer populations would have been much the same way, save for that human males are much more mannerly than lions (except at the bar). The men used their greater strength to create more free time: first through reducing the threat of beasts into a huge asset, and, eventually, through agriculture. While women have been, at various times and locations, "taken care of" in terms of food and money by their male mates, they have still had to do most of the leg-work in making sure human history keeps going while the men get dressed up to fight.
I have the great curse of being able to see virtually no difference between these two species, aside from a slight phenotypical one.
Try loading these behaviors with values. Really they already are, and in fact they are pretty much the basis for the values I assigned to the lions. But where did we get those values? What kind of bio-cognitive bias produced the value called "virtue through ensuring the smooth function of evolution?" If you read back a bit, that's exactly the kind of virtue I believe to be more mammalian than human.
I don't want to imply that women are, by consequence of their intended biological function, doomed to be breeding tanks instead of the fully-actualized beings that men can become - by no means. Men are equally subject to the "lion fuckwit" behavior, and often survive by theft and subjugation of the bodies and minds of their fellow man. One need only look at the state of current transnational economic system to see that this is the case.
But this is men at their worst, just as the matrons who are the guardian-protectors of tradition and the status quo are women at their worst.
I'm sorry if I'm belaboring the point, it's just that I am so often lauded for seeking to abandon my alpha-male (hah!) behavior, while being twice as harshly condemned for hoping women will abandon their alpha-female behaviors.
A combination of the best of both genders behaviors is clearly becoming a healthful necessity if we hope to progress while not killing each other. We must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath-water.
The thing is, while these male behaviors are generally starting to become more widely viewed as stunted and puerile, the same is not true with the cult of the hearth. Perhaps I should not say that I have misogynist views, but misanthropic views that are comparatively misogynistic.
That's enough of that, anyway.
Final question: is this all just biased comparison so that we see in nature what we see in ourselves? I think that is a very important question that we must never stop asking. I also think that if there is some kind of inherent blind-spot, that it is probably nature-based, and thus the question can become somewhat paradoxical. I believe that, in all probability, if the bias exists, it exists for the very reason it is indeed true. That sounds a bit like a faulty sudoku strategy that wraps back in upon itself, explaining the bias with the bias, but I truly believe that if the bias is natural, it cannot bias a careful understanding of nature. It's a bit like the old Angel/Devil riddle where you're trying to figure out the door into heaven. Are you familiar with it? The bias will reveal the same information as the truth will, but you have to ask the right question to know if you are tricking the bias into revealing the truth, or forcing the truth to exhibit the bias.
Wow, I thought I'd get through these questions without mentioning anything more esoteric and silly than quantum mechanics, but I actually got around to game theory.
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