Post No. 3,211 - How did we get here? A speculation (aka a rant) ...

 

 Photo by Chris Leggat on Unsplash (I will be adding the occasional photo in future) 

Recently I heard Robert Reich  say the backsliding that led us to here started under Reagan. I would put it a little earlier, with the start of the evil ideology of neoliberalism in the 70s, but Reagan destroyed a lot of good things and radically shifted the balance of power in society towards the ultra-elite and their slightly lower in status ultra-rich - thereby enabling all the conservative destroyers who followed after him, including John Howard, Tony Abbott, and Scott Morrison here in Australia. 

And now we have the epitome of what that backsliding has led to: the current Autocrat-in-Chief of the USA. 

And NOW those who supported and willingly were part of that whole gash through human existence are FINALLY starting to realise just how wrong they were ... and their ultra-elite overlords are probably wetting themselves with laughter at easy they were to dupe - and dupe so completely. 

So ... how did we get here? 

Well, I consider the problem started when a small group of insecure, narcissistic, either exclusively or mostly cismale psychopaths created patriarchy around 10,000 years ago - at, or just after, the time of widespread adoption of agriculture (which had been used by some gatherer-hunter societies, but less destructively). 

Before then, societies were either equally or predominantly matrilineal, but, more importantly, in a gatherer-hunter style of society, (my understanding is that) people were assessed on the basis of their ability to contribute to survival and thriving of the group - it didn't matter what gender/sex/other arbitrary point of division they had, what could they give, and what did they need? Whatever stereotypical labels we might wish to apply now, it was a more humane, humanistic, CARING way of living - as is shown by one Neanderthal skeleton which showed evidence of prolonged care, including others pre-chewing the person's food for years. (I couldn't find a link for that case, but see this, this, and this.) 

Could that person have met the requirements of a patriarchal society? No. 

Could that person have been able to contribute in other ways? Maybe - for instance, entertaining the young with whatever the Neanderthal version of story telling was. 

Was that person’s existence worth treasuring anyway? Yes - a clearly demonstrated, wholehearted yes. 

In that sort of society, the massively destructive personality of those who created patriarchy would be more likely to get them actively excluded from society than anything else - and exclusion, over our five and a bit million years of hominini, two and a half million years of homo, and 260-350,000 years of homo sapiens (“modern human”) existence, has been a major challenge to personal survival - the groups were relatively small, by modern standards, but they allowed a combination of skills, ways of thinking, backups, etc that contributed significantly towards a better chance of surviving than being alone. 

And disruptors like the creators of patriarchy could shatter and thus destroy such a society - including the disruptor, so, if their damage could not be stopped, the disruptor may find themselves banished. (Incidentally, chimpanzees have been known to kill bad leaders - which is a mistake as that individual’s existence should, if not treasured, be at least respected.) 

Disruptors needed a tool of distraction that could give them a way of staying despite their manifest unfitness - something unrelated to useful survival and thriving skills, but that they could use to start creating a difference of no useful value other than the social status, and later the social privilege, of themselves. 

With patriarchy, a point of useless difference - not something related to meeting needs such as physical protection (e.g., silverbacks), remembering where waterholes were that were good in drought (e.g., elephant matriarchs), or tool development/problem solving/creativity including invention (many species, but particularly homo species) - was brought into existence: being assigned male. 

Agriculture may have enabled this to some extent, as it created the need for multiple people with particular skills. In a small group, one or two tool makers may have sufficed, but in a larger agricultural society, there would have been a need for many such people, and specialisation would have started us down the path of further separation by those people with particular skills starting to live together in the same neighbourhood, for instance. Into that commencement of separations came the small number of patriarchs, claiming another basis for separation existed ... and no-one noticed or objected effectively to the pointless basis of differentiation - maybe they even amathiacly celebrated it as something new, which they wanted to do to show they were fully up-to-date with everything new in what no doubt seemed to them a rapidly changing world. 

That personality flaw/character fault of wanting to be hip or with it (in my generation's parlance) is still with us. I was watching the episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer which introduced the character Dawn at a someone’s house, and that person was so afraid of being different in any way (especially anything that indicated she was not completely aware of the latest minute’s fad) that she claimed to have seen the character in a previous episode - which is an utter impossibility, but she clung to it out of fear of exclusion (and thus a genetic memory of death?) which had come though hundreds of millennia of evolution and ten thousand years of patriarchal perversion. 

That ten thousand years has seen quite a bit of opportunistic perversion by patriarchs and incompetent enabling by people who were reducing themselves to tools of the patriarchy, including:   the perversion of Christianity into neochristianity (which I am aware has been massively damaging to western societies - especially as a tool of social engineering [what neochristianity did to formerly strong, confident women is unforgivable] ),   the industrial revolution (which saw a near ultimate splintering of our circle of caring down to a small nuclear family),   and everything that has been done over the last half century or so. 

But none of this was done by the patriarchs themselves:   they had willing human tools without which NONE of this would have happened (which is why I wonder at those who smugly point out that counter-reaction starts with elites, but amathiacly fail to recognise that it is those who have been left disaffected by changes that were of greater overall benefit, people who are possibly not considered nice, who will be the foot soldiers of evil), and if some of those human tools are starting to wake up to what was done to them, then there are additional signs of hope in the world - and a need for a massive amount of hope, but at least we might be able to start clawing back some humans, which gives weight to the other thing that Robert Reich said: after this second gilded age of the USA, there will be a second Progressive Age - and hopefully we will have learned enough to prevent any future backsliding (treasuring the humane over money will be a big start, as will be returning to a focus on beneficial [inclusive] community and healthy [servant or at least stewardship based] leadership). 

 

PS This analysis by the writer and activist Van  Badham is the most accurate and most succinct explanation of how Australia wound up in its current troubled socio-economic-political situation that I have ever come across:   “Why the Left Fails”   https://youtu.be/ZI9u73E7n_c   This covers the arrogance of Keating, and “the [party] have colonised the image of what it means to be left without a class analysis   ...   We have lost a generation of sophisticated articulators of socialism”   The farcical pretence that Australia does not have class problems is a major flaw in our national psyche       

 

Possible flaws 

Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider: 

• there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan  Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”;  
• I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
  

 

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Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our Mӕgan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering” (just as binary gendered [men’s and women’s] sporting teams are either both given the gender descriptor, or neither).

#PsychicABetterWorld   and  

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