Real and Fake Privilege

Forgive me if this post is all over the place. It has no preconceived plan. Rather, I'm just going to free associate in the hope that it will discover its point along the way. If it doesn't, well, that's mindjazz: sometimes your musical reach exceeds your improvisational grasp.   

Everyone can see that our culture has become feminized -- and emasculated -- over the past sixty years or so. Others can debate the surface causes and effects, but in this series of posts, we're attempting to elucidate the cosmic significance of this drastic change.   

Think of how differently fathers were depicted in popular culture prior to the ascent of the vaginocracy. Off the top of my head I can think of at least half a dozen TV shows with a father but no mother: Andy Griffith, Bonanza, The Rifleman, My Three Sons, Courtship of Eddie's Father, Make Room for Daddy, Bachelor Father... 

Andy Griffith and The Beverly Hillbillies featured Aunt Bea and Granny as mother figures, but it's difficult to imagine either one wearing a pussy hat. Nor would either one accept the notion that they were "oppressed," except perhaps by carpetbagging Yankee pussies.

But since the latter half of the 1960s, "Fatherhood, and the role of men," has been "under assault by feminist groups."

By the 1970s, fathers had become a central target for the media, especially entertainment. Fathers were increasingly portrayed as buffoons, even as evil, on prime-time television. Comedies, according to one study of thirty years of network television, presented blue-collar or middle-class fathers as foolish, although less so than portrayals of upper-class fathers (Schweikart & Allen).

One of the reasons for this is that men -- unlike feminists -- have a sense of humor about ourselves. We don't mind being caricatured, nor are we triggered by being teased. Comedy begins at home.

Back then (the '70s) the left was still capable of humor, so they were able to advance their agenda under cover of laughter. By the time conservatives figured out what was going on, it was too late:

Although it took about twenty years for sociologists to study the phenomena, scholars almost universally agreed by the 1990s that children of one-parent families suffered from more pathologies, more criminal behavior, worse grades, and lower self-esteem than kids from traditional families (ibid).

The left, of course, has a solution to each of these pathologies: normalize abnormality, decriminalize crime, eliminate academic standards, and instill pride based upon one's race (so long as it isn't Caucasian) and gender (so long as it isn't male).

It's all about privilege: the privilege -- actually, entitlement -- of growing up with a father married to your mother. There are "libraries... filled with books and studies about correlations between fatherlessness" and "various behavioral outcomes," proving beyond doubt that the privilege of having a father in the home is "more important to positive outcomes than race, income, or one's station at birth" (Eberstadt).

"Racial justice" is waaaaaay downstream from paternal justice. Not only are we not racists, but more importantly, we didn't abandon you and your mother, so don't blame white people.  

In fact, Eberstadt attributes the cancer of identity politics to the loss of real identity rooted in traditional family structure. As a former clinical psychologist, I rate this sentiment True-to-Self-Evident, bordering on Captain Obvious territory: I am a victim, therefore I am. But not really. It's a fake identity that evolved in order to patch up a brittle foundation of Being.

But progressive victims are always vindictims, i.e., bullies, for to say bully is to say counterfeit masculinity. Bullies such as Joe Biden or Barack Obama or Garlic Merman or Lil' Binger are the weak man's impersonation of a strong man.

Which raises an interesting question: why does the left always project? (https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/09/citizenship-and-courage/) What is it about leftism that results in the pervasive projection of primitive sexual and violent material? Let's bear in mind that correlation is not causation, so we need to determine whether projection is a cause or consequence of leftism, or perhaps both. 

Spoiler alert: yeah, it's both. But let's read what Hanson has to say anyway:

The Left is addicted to projection -- the psycho-political syndrome of attributing all of one’s own sins to one’s opponents. The woke apparently do this out of some Freudian effort to square the circle of their own guilt or sense of privilege, by fobbing off their own fearful realities onto others. 

True, true, and true. How do we know? For the simple reason that we are precisely the ones into whom the left projects, and we know on a first hand basis that we are none of the things the left attributes to us, whether it is racism, sexism, insurrectionism, anti-science-ism, etc. 

They could just ask, but then I might not give the answer that you want me to. Oh well. 

I don't want to be a psychological reductionist, but psychology is nevertheless part of the answer. Everyone projects sometimes, but some people project all the time, e.g., psychotic patients. Is the left psychotic? I don't know. Does the left distort reality in a systematic way? 

Take for example, the worn-out charge of “privilege”.... This trope originates exclusively from the Left. Purportedly, it signifies a rigged system in which white males have gained, unfairly and undeservedly, “privilege” to exercise cultural, economic, political, and social control over the “other”....

How odd, given that by any indicator the political Left is the party of wealth and privilege. The wealthiest ZIP codes are found in blue states such as California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York. Twenty-six of the 27 wealthiest congressional districts, gauged by per capita incomes, are represented by liberal Democrats (Hanson). 

Psycho. 

Is that all? No, there's more: the party of wealth and privilege pretends it isn't, by projecting the wealth and privilege into us:

Registered Democrats on average have higher incomes than their Republican counterparts. Democratic presidential candidates have vastly outspent Republicans over the last 20 years. Note that the old liberal saw about “dark money” has steadily disappeared from the left-wing lexicon (nothing is darker than Mark Zuckerberg’s infusions of cash to warp particular voting precincts)....

The most elite and wealthy institutions in America are predominantly liberal bastions: Silicon Valley, entertainment, universities, professional sports, Wall Street, the mainstream media, and foundations (ibid.).  

As they say, if institutional racism is a problem, it's got nothing to do with us, since we have no control or even influence over these institutions.  

Okay, but does this have anything to do with fathers, especially the missing kind? 

I have to admit that I'm a little envious of people with privilege -- for example, my son, who gets to grow up with me as a father. How awesome must that be? I think I'll ask him when he wakes up. Then again, he might not give the answer that I want him to.