How Do You Solve a Problem Like Alexandria?

According to Dutton (in the book about witches & feminists), 

atheism can be understood, in evolutionary terms, as a "spiteful mutation," which is associated with being maladaptive. 

And according to Dávila,  

Militant irreligion gradually transforms the one possessed into a simple imbecile convulsed by hatred.

Once again, modern science confirms ancient wisdom. 

Whether we call them spiteful mutants or hateful imbeciles, it's the underlying reality that counts. 

Supposing, say, AOC, is a modern-day witch, we're still left with the question: just how do you solve a problem like Alexandria? In the majority of cases the problem used to solve itself via marriage and motherhood, but the left has successfully demonized these healthy adaptations, especially among the most indoctrinated (i.e., adultolescent female college [g]rads).

The etiology of the word "hysteria" goes back to the ancient Greeks, who couldn't help noticing that women and their moods can be a bit much. They posited the theory that hysterics suffer from a "wandering womb," and that pregnancy caused the womb to settle the f*ck down in one place.

I'm looking at an article that makes fun of this quaint notion, even though it was rooted in empirical observation unhampered by wacky wokery. These ancient healers weren't trying to hurt women, but to help them overcome the hysteria -- i.e., anxiety, panic, mood disorders, somatization, invisible handcuffs, etc.

Just because the explanation is wrong, it doesn't mean the treatment doesn't help. For example, just yesterday I read of a study "proving" that depression is not caused by a "chemical imbalance" in the brain, in particular, of serotonin. 

Which doesn't mean serotonin-enhancing medications don't work. Rather, if true, it just means we don't know why they work (when they work). I don't know how computers work, but it doesn't stop me from blogging.

Anyway, back to the problem. I wonder if the song provides any clues?

I hate to have to say it
But I very firmly feel
Alexandria’s not an asset to the congress
I’d like to say a word in her behalf
Alexandria makes me laugh

A flibbertijibbet! A will-o’-the wisp! A clown!
Many a thing you know you’d like to tell her
Many a thing she ought to understand
But how on earth do you debate her

Without her thinking you want to date her? 

At any rate, the ancients thought hysteria could be cured by having a baby, whereas modern primitives think women can be made happy by killing their babies. But apparently this isn't true:

Modern research has found that women who undergo abortion have a markedly different personality compared to those who do not. Females who have had abortions score higher than controls in histrionic characteristics, Narcissism, and anti-social personality.... So, females who have abortions are likely to be unpleasant, anti-social people....

If extreme feminists can be understood as modern day witches, then we would expect them not only to be in favor of abortion to be perversely proud of it. 

Ironically, if witch crazes unwittingly removed such spiteful mutants from the gene pool, so too does abortion, at least on average -- a sort of genetic self-immolation.

In any event,

as modern feminism is strongly linked to leftism or liberalism, "Second Wave Feminists" are more likely to suffer from mental illnesses, such as depression. Ideological feminists, like witches, are unhappy malcontents who are rejected by more content members of society. There is a degree to which they should be pitied (Dutton).

Problem is, they only seethe at your pity and concern. For example, consider Elizabeth Warren's unhinged emotional reaction to the pregnancy centers that exist precisely to help women:

With Roe gone, it’s more important than ever to crack down on so-called "crisis pregnancy centers" that mislead and deceive patients seeking abortion care.... We need to crack down on the deceptive practices these centers use to prevent people from getting abortion care, and I’ve got a bill to do just that. 

In other words, I'll get you, my pretty, and your little kid too! 

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Alexandria?

According to Dutton (in the book about witches & feminists), 

atheism can be understood, in evolutionary terms, as a "spiteful mutation," which is associated with being maladaptive. 

And according to Dávila,  

Militant irreligion gradually transforms the one possessed into a simple imbecile convulsed by hatred.

Once again, modern science confirms ancient wisdom. 

Whether we call them spiteful mutants or hateful imbeciles, it's the underlying reality that counts. 

Supposing, say, AOC, is a modern-day witch, we're still left with the question: just how do you solve a problem like Alexandria? In the majority of cases the problem used to solve itself via marriage and motherhood, but the left has successfully demonized these healthy adaptations, especially among the most indoctrinated (i.e., adultolescent female college [g]rads).

The etiology of the word "hysteria" goes back to the ancient Greeks, who couldn't help noticing that women and their moods can be a bit much. They posited the theory that hysterics suffer from a "wandering womb," and that pregnancy caused the womb to settle the f*ck down in one place.

I'm looking at an article that makes fun of this quaint notion, even though it was rooted in empirical observation unhampered by wacky wokery. These ancient healers weren't trying to hurt women, but to help them overcome the hysteria -- i.e., anxiety, panic, mood disorders, somatization, invisible handcuffs, etc.

Just because the explanation is wrong, it doesn't mean the treatment doesn't help. For example, just yesterday I read of a study "proving" that depression is not caused by a "chemical imbalance" in the brain, in particular, of serotonin. 

Which doesn't mean serotonin-enhancing medications don't work. Rather, if true, it just means we don't know why they work (when they work). I don't know how computers work, but it doesn't stop me from blogging.

Anyway, back to the problem. I wonder if the song provides any clues?

I hate to have to say it
But I very firmly feel
Alexandria’s not an asset to the congress
I’d like to say a word in her behalf
Alexandria makes me laugh

A flibbertijibbet! A will-o’-the wisp! A clown!
Many a thing you know you’d like to tell her
Many a thing she ought to understand
But how on earth do you debate her

Without her thinking you want to date her? 

At any rate, the ancients thought hysteria could be cured by having a baby, whereas modern primitives think women can be made happy by killing their babies. But apparently this isn't true:

Modern research has found that women who undergo abortion have a markedly different personality compared to those who do not. Females who have had abortions score higher than controls in histrionic characteristics, Narcissism, and anti-social personality.... So, females who have abortions are likely to be unpleasant, anti-social people....

If extreme feminists can be understood as modern day witches, then we would expect them not only to be in favor of abortion to be perversely proud of it. 

Ironically, if witch crazes unwittingly removed such spiteful mutants from the gene pool, so too does abortion, at least on average -- a sort of genetic self-immolation.

In any event,

as modern feminism is strongly linked to leftism or liberalism, "Second Wave Feminists" are more likely to suffer from mental illnesses, such as depression. Ideological feminists, like witches, are unhappy malcontents who are rejected by more content members of society. There is a degree to which they should be pitied (Dutton).

Problem is, they only seethe at your pity and concern. For example, consider Elizabeth Warren's unhinged emotional reaction to the pregnancy centers that exist precisely to help women:

With Roe gone, it’s more important than ever to crack down on so-called "crisis pregnancy centers" that mislead and deceive patients seeking abortion care.... We need to crack down on the deceptive practices these centers use to prevent people from getting abortion care, and I’ve got a bill to do just that. 

In other words, I'll get you, my pretty, and your little kid too! 

Reality is Just Like a Woman

Or something. The usual Friday ramble, which may be more entertaining than substantive.

Some things that don't possess material reality nevertheless have an enduring psychic reality. One might dismiss the latter realm by saying it is "only" psychic, but then you're going to exclude most of the content of reality, which is either in the mind or nowhere at all.

Which is not an argument for subjectivism or relativism. Rather, what we call reality has a kind of bipolarity such that it exists one way exteriorly and in another manner interiorly. What we call knowledge is the mode in which reality exists in the intellect; there is a humanoid trinity of knower, known, and the knowledge that links them.

It reminds me of the concept of maya, i.e., the idea that the world consists of appearances. This is true, except that the appearances are of reality, precisely. They are at once a veiling of reality and reality as veil. Irony is built into the nature of things: on the one hand, No man sees my face and lives, on the other, Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.

Now, let's put forth the proposition that Whoever has seen a feminist has seen a witch. It may sound surprising, but this is why you experience that unpleasant feeling upon exposure to hideous women such as Joy Behar, Whoopie Goldberg, Nancy Pelosi, Kathy Hochul, Kamala Harris, Joy Reid, Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, etc. Each of them triggers that creepy feeling that people in olden times identified with witches.

My argument is that modern-day feminists perform the same functions witches once did and accordingly are psychologically and even physically extremely similar. This is akin to the way in which... modern-day cultural institutions perform the same essential functions as tribal ones and are likewise comparable in salient respects (Dutton).

Going back to the persistence of psychic reality, the words we use are less important than the reality they signify. But if we eliminate the word and don't replace it with something equivalent, then the reality it signifies will obviously persist but be "unthinkable." It will just lay there in the psyche like an indigestible lump of concrete.

I'm not a Jungian, but Jung wasn't wrong about the concept of archetypes. For there is an enduring deep structure to the psyche that includes various preconceptual categories for the metabolism and storage of experience, one of which is the witch. Apparently, we have a witch archetype because there is a factory preset in the head to identify common forms of toxic femininity. 

It's been a long time since I read any Jung. Let's see if we can dig out anything useful. 

First of all, there is the anima archetype, which is "a personification of all feminine psychological tendencies in a man's psyche" (complementary to the animus, or male archetype in the female psyche).

However, in more enlightened times people understood that this archetype doesn't just consist of sugar and spice and everything nice. Rather, it could take on a quality of shrewish and spiteful and everything noxious, which is where the witch enters the picture, for it is hardly as if premodern man never encountered toxic femininity, or had no knowledge of ex-wives from hell. Indeed, some of the earliest art depicts them.

In fact, the anima "is often personified as a witch or a priestess -- women who have links with 'forces of darkness' and 'the spirit world.'" Jung points out that "the belief is still widespread that women are more receptive than men to the irrational," and cites the example of male shamans who would

even wear women's clothes, or have breasts depicted on their garments, in order to manifest their inner feminine side -- the side that enables them to connect with the "ghost land" (i.e., what we call the unconscious).

You don't say. I wonder which restroom they used.

Seems to me that this duality can be traced all the way down to the bottom of the psyche, where we find Eve on the one hand, and Mary on the other (and all they symbolize). Not to suggest that Eve was the first witch; however, it seems clear enough every witch enacts and valorizes Eve's poor choice, without the redemptive compensation of the Mary archetype. 

Does this make any sense, or am I out here alone on this limb? Well, I'm reading a totally unrelated book called The Way Forward for Perennialism, by Charles Upton, and it has a section discussing the primordial feminine, which again, cuts both ways. It's a little convoluted, but I think I get it: the "Divine Feminine" has the power "to melt the hardness of the human ego"; however,

the dark side of the archetypal Feminine Principle... is necessarily also present -- the transpersonal petrifying-power -- the Head of the Medusa.

Again, this duality goes all the way down and up in the cosmos, and is "more primordial than Good and Evil, or even Truth and Error" -- which is to say, "Transcendence and Immanence." And it seems that the former is associated with male, the latter with female, which is why we have been known to call it the mamafestation (or sometimes mayaplicity), which in turn goes back to what we said above about the manifestation of reality via the veil:

The wavelike quality of manifestation, and consequently its nature as Maya or "truly-existing-illusion"... results from the fact that it exists in one sense and does not exist in another, which is why we see it as always coming into and departing from existence (Upton).

Apparently the cosmos is just like a flighty woman. 

Now, an emotionally mature man does not burn witches, but nor does he allow them to take over the military, or the educational establishment, or congress, or anything else except for The View. 

Ultimately, it seems that the male archetype serves as a kind of complementary axis for the cosmically enchanting and wandering ways of the primordial feminine (and vice versa -- she for his coldly rigid, analytic, and systematizing ways). Geometry + Music. 

So, where does this leave us? I suppose with the idea that patriarchy is adaptive because it promotes values that enable the survival of the group. But wherever there is explicit patriarchy there is always implicit matriarchy, and we need to recognize the light and shadow in each archetype. 

For just as there exists a toxic masculinity in the form of weak men impersonating strong men, there is a toxic femininity consisting of weak women imitating weaker men and calling it "empowerment."

Reality is Just Like a Woman

Or something. The usual Friday ramble, which may be more entertaining than substantive.

Some things that don't possess material reality nevertheless have an enduring psychic reality. One might dismiss the latter realm by saying it is "only" psychic, but then you're going to exclude most of the content of reality, which is either in the mind or nowhere at all.

Which is not an argument for subjectivism or relativism. Rather, what we call reality has a kind of bipolarity such that it exists one way exteriorly and in another manner interiorly. What we call knowledge is the mode in which reality exists in the intellect; there is a humanoid trinity of knower, known, and the knowledge that links them.

It reminds me of the concept of maya, i.e., the idea that the world consists of appearances. This is true, except that the appearances are of reality, precisely. They are at once a veiling of reality and reality as veil. Irony is built into the nature of things: on the one hand, No man sees my face and lives, on the other, Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.

Now, let's put forth the proposition that Whoever has seen a feminist has seen a witch. It may sound surprising, but this is why you experience that unpleasant feeling upon exposure to hideous women such as Joy Behar, Whoopie Goldberg, Nancy Pelosi, Kathy Hochul, Kamala Harris, Joy Reid, Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, etc. Each of them triggers that creepy feeling that people in olden times identified with witches.

My argument is that modern-day feminists perform the same functions witches once did and accordingly are psychologically and even physically extremely similar. This is akin to the way in which... modern-day cultural institutions perform the same essential functions as tribal ones and are likewise comparable in salient respects (Dutton).

Going back to the persistence of psychic reality, the words we use are less important than the reality they signify. But if we eliminate the word and don't replace it with something equivalent, then the reality it signifies will obviously persist but be "unthinkable." It will just lay there in the psyche like an indigestible lump of concrete.

I'm not a Jungian, but Jung wasn't wrong about the concept of archetypes. For there is an enduring deep structure to the psyche that includes various preconceptual categories for the metabolism and storage of experience, one of which is the witch. Apparently, we have a witch archetype because there is a factory preset in the head to identify common forms of toxic femininity. 

It's been a long time since I read any Jung. Let's see if we can dig out anything useful. 

First of all, there is the anima archetype, which is "a personification of all feminine psychological tendencies in a man's psyche" (complementary to the animus, or male archetype in the female psyche).

However, in more enlightened times people understood that this archetype doesn't just consist of sugar and spice and everything nice. Rather, it could take on a quality of shrewish and spiteful and everything noxious, which is where the witch enters the picture, for it is hardly as if premodern man never encountered toxic femininity, or had no knowledge of ex-wives from hell. Indeed, some of the earliest art depicts them.

In fact, the anima "is often personified as a witch or a priestess -- women who have links with 'forces of darkness' and 'the spirit world.'" Jung points out that "the belief is still widespread that women are more receptive than men to the irrational," and cites the example of male shamans who would

even wear women's clothes, or have breasts depicted on their garments, in order to manifest their inner feminine side -- the side that enables them to connect with the "ghost land" (i.e., what we call the unconscious).

You don't say. I wonder which restroom they used.

Seems to me that this duality can be traced all the way down to the bottom of the psyche, where we find Eve on the one hand, and Mary on the other (and all they symbolize). Not to suggest that Eve was the first witch; however, it seems clear enough every witch enacts and valorizes Eve's poor choice, without the redemptive compensation of the Mary archetype. 

Does this make any sense, or am I out here alone on this limb? Well, I'm reading a totally unrelated book called The Way Forward for Perennialism, by Charles Upton, and it has a section discussing the primordial feminine, which again, cuts both ways. It's a little convoluted, but I think I get it: the "Divine Feminine" has the power "to melt the hardness of the human ego"; however,

the dark side of the archetypal Feminine Principle... is necessarily also present -- the transpersonal petrifying-power -- the Head of the Medusa.

Again, this duality goes all the way down and up in the cosmos, and is "more primordial than Good and Evil, or even Truth and Error" -- which is to say, "Transcendence and Immanence." And it seems that the former is associated with male, the latter with female, which is why we have been known to call it the mamafestation (or sometimes mayaplicity), which in turn goes back to what we said above about the manifestation of reality via the veil:

The wavelike quality of manifestation, and consequently its nature as Maya or "truly-existing-illusion"... results from the fact that it exists in one sense and does not exist in another, which is why we see it as always coming into and departing from existence (Upton).

Apparently the cosmos is just like a flighty woman. 

Now, an emotionally mature man does not burn witches, but nor does he allow them to take over the military, or the educational establishment, or congress, or anything else except for The View. 

Ultimately, it seems that the male archetype serves as a kind of complementary axis for the cosmically enchanting and wandering ways of the primordial feminine (and vice versa -- she for his coldly rigid, analytic, and systematizing ways). Geometry + Music. 

So, where does this leave us? I suppose with the idea that patriarchy is adaptive because it promotes values that enable the survival of the group. But wherever there is explicit patriarchy there is always implicit matriarchy, and we need to recognize the light and shadow in each archetype. 

For just as there exists a toxic masculinity in the form of weak men impersonating strong men, there is a toxic femininity consisting of weak women imitating weaker men and calling it "empowerment."

Readin', Writin', & Wreckin' Civilization

In less enlightened times they used to call a group of witches a "coven." Nowadays the preferred nomenclature is "teachers' union." In Los Angeles, the witches have 

adopted a radical gender-theory curriculum encouraging teachers to work toward the “breakdown of the gender binary,” to experiment with gender pronouns such as “they,” “ze,” and “tree,” and to adopt “trans-affirming” programming to make their classrooms “queer all school year” (Rufo).

Teachers are given workshops and presentations on a range of key subjects such as 

“breaking the [gender] binary,” providing children with “free gender affirming clothing,” understanding “what your queer middle schooler wants you to know,” and producing “counter narratives against the master narrative of mainstream white cis-heteropatriarchy society.” 

If a boy or girl is unsure of zir gender, any choice is acceptable except for the actual one:

[S]chools can facilitate a child’s transition from one gender to another without notifying parents. And the district is far from neutral: it actively celebrates sexual identities such as “pansexual,” “sexually fluid,” “queer,” “same-gender-loving,” and “asexual,” and gender identities such as “transgender,” “genderqueer,” “agender,” “bigender,” “gender nonconforming,” “gender expansive,” “gender fluid,” and “two-spirit.”

With witches it always comes back to religion. We'll come back to it as well in a moment, since they started the fight.

The narrative follows the standard academic slop: white, cisgender, heterosexual men have built a repressive social structure, divided the world into the false binary of man and woman, and used this myth to oppress racial and sexual minorities. Religion, too, is a mechanism of repression....

Proof once again that man cannot not be religious; or, if one rejects normative religion, an abnormal one will rush in to fill the void. This is certainly one of the underlying appeals of leftism, which is so strongly associated with irreligiously. 

Big Education is pretty big. The biggest non-governmental educational structure in the world is funded by the Catholic church, which still has an antiquated view on the question of gender -- the one that prevailed from the emergence of mankind until about five minutes ago. In fact, the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel was the founder of modern genetics, so he certainly shares blame for the widespread belief in biology. 

In the book Witches, Feminism, and the Fall of the West, Dutton adopts a purely sociobiological view of religion, such that he considers it a functional adaptation irrespective of whether or not God exists. He claims that it is about 0.4 heritable, and that "higher religiousness is associated with higher fertility and with better physical and mental health."

Apparently, knowing which sex you are somehow facilitates reproduction. Who would have guessed? "Be fruitful and multiply" is a prime directive of both biology and religion, not Be ye fruitcakes and multiple genders. 

Dutton further notes that religiousness has a 0.3 correlation with "overall health," but this modest figure is somewhat reduced because of a positive correlation between extreme religiosity and severe mental illnesses such as bipolar and schizophrenia. Control for these nutcases and the health correlation is significantly higher. 

Fr. Spitzer cites psychiatric evidence that irreligious people have

significantly higher rates of suicide, depression, impulsivity, aggression, familial tensions, and substance abuse by comparison with the religiously affiliated.... Religiously unaffiliated subjects had significantly more lifetime suicide attempts and more first-degree relatives who committed suicide than subjects who endorsed a religious affiliation.

Moreover, 

Unaffiliated subjects were younger, less often married, less often had children, and had less contact with family members. Furthermore, subjects with no religious affiliation perceived fewer reasons for living, particularly fewer moral objections to suicide. In terms of clinical characteristics, religiously unaffiliated subjects had more lifetime impulsivity, aggression, and past substance use disorder.

Back to Dutton, he proposes that "Those who have mutations of the body are very likely to have mutations of the mind, leading to ways of thinking that are fitness-damaging." And beginning with Second Wave Feminism in particular, we have seen the rise of a cohort of crazy and dysfunctional women: "These people and their followers are modern-day witches" who act against, and convince other to act against, their genetic interests:

such feminists, like witches, are in comparison to non-feminist women, more likely to be single, childless, low in pro-social personality traits, irreligious, and physically unattractive, which is consistent with the relationship between physical and mental mutation. 

On the positive side, "like witches, they also tend to be shunned by males," so, while it may take a few generations, it seems they will eventually breed themselves out of existence, so thank God and Darwin for that. Meanwhile we will have to put up with them, but what if we as a civilization can't survive their infiltration and increasing dominance of our institutions? 

A strong military is one of the few necessary functions of government, and at the moment ours is suffering a crisis of recruitment. Is there any wonder why? No man wants to be bossed around by a bunch of trannies, perverts, sissies, and witches, nor did any man ever risk his life to make the world safe for non-conforming two-spirt genderqueers. And if he did, he would apologize immediately.

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for the breakdown of binary gender.

What a sick joke. The poor in genetic, psychological, and spiritual fitness will always be with us, but if we put them in charge of our children and our military, then not only do we have no one but ourselves to blame for the decline and extinction of our civilization, but we probably deserve it.

Readin', Writin', & Wreckin' Civilization

In less enlightened times they used to call a group of witches a "coven." Nowadays the preferred nomenclature is "teachers' union." In Los Angeles, the witches have 

adopted a radical gender-theory curriculum encouraging teachers to work toward the “breakdown of the gender binary,” to experiment with gender pronouns such as “they,” “ze,” and “tree,” and to adopt “trans-affirming” programming to make their classrooms “queer all school year” (Rufo).

Teachers are given workshops and presentations on a range of key subjects such as 

“breaking the [gender] binary,” providing children with “free gender affirming clothing,” understanding “what your queer middle schooler wants you to know,” and producing “counter narratives against the master narrative of mainstream white cis-heteropatriarchy society.” 

If a boy or girl is unsure of zir gender, any choice is acceptable except for the actual one:

[S]chools can facilitate a child’s transition from one gender to another without notifying parents. And the district is far from neutral: it actively celebrates sexual identities such as “pansexual,” “sexually fluid,” “queer,” “same-gender-loving,” and “asexual,” and gender identities such as “transgender,” “genderqueer,” “agender,” “bigender,” “gender nonconforming,” “gender expansive,” “gender fluid,” and “two-spirit.”

With witches it always comes back to religion. We'll come back to it as well in a moment, since they started the fight.

The narrative follows the standard academic slop: white, cisgender, heterosexual men have built a repressive social structure, divided the world into the false binary of man and woman, and used this myth to oppress racial and sexual minorities. Religion, too, is a mechanism of repression....

Proof once again that man cannot not be religious; or, if one rejects normative religion, an abnormal one will rush in to fill the void. This is certainly one of the underlying appeals of leftism, which is so strongly associated with irreligiously. 

Big Education is pretty big. The biggest non-governmental educational structure in the world is funded by the Catholic church, which still has an antiquated view on the question of gender -- the one that prevailed from the emergence of mankind until about five minutes ago. In fact, the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel was the founder of modern genetics, so he certainly shares blame for the widespread belief in biology. 

In the book Witches, Feminism, and the Fall of the West, Dutton adopts a purely sociobiological view of religion, such that he considers it a functional adaptation irrespective of whether or not God exists. He claims that it is about 0.4 heritable, and that "higher religiousness is associated with higher fertility and with better physical and mental health."

Apparently, knowing which sex you are somehow facilitates reproduction. Who would have guessed? "Be fruitful and multiply" is a prime directive of both biology and religion, not Be ye fruitcakes and multiple genders. 

Dutton further notes that religiousness has a 0.3 correlation with "overall health," but this modest figure is somewhat reduced because of a positive correlation between extreme religiosity and severe mental illnesses such as bipolar and schizophrenia. Control for these nutcases and the health correlation is significantly higher. 

Fr. Spitzer cites psychiatric evidence that irreligious people have

significantly higher rates of suicide, depression, impulsivity, aggression, familial tensions, and substance abuse by comparison with the religiously affiliated.... Religiously unaffiliated subjects had significantly more lifetime suicide attempts and more first-degree relatives who committed suicide than subjects who endorsed a religious affiliation.

Moreover, 

Unaffiliated subjects were younger, less often married, less often had children, and had less contact with family members. Furthermore, subjects with no religious affiliation perceived fewer reasons for living, particularly fewer moral objections to suicide. In terms of clinical characteristics, religiously unaffiliated subjects had more lifetime impulsivity, aggression, and past substance use disorder.

Back to Dutton, he proposes that "Those who have mutations of the body are very likely to have mutations of the mind, leading to ways of thinking that are fitness-damaging." And beginning with Second Wave Feminism in particular, we have seen the rise of a cohort of crazy and dysfunctional women: "These people and their followers are modern-day witches" who act against, and convince other to act against, their genetic interests:

such feminists, like witches, are in comparison to non-feminist women, more likely to be single, childless, low in pro-social personality traits, irreligious, and physically unattractive, which is consistent with the relationship between physical and mental mutation. 

On the positive side, "like witches, they also tend to be shunned by males," so, while it may take a few generations, it seems they will eventually breed themselves out of existence, so thank God and Darwin for that. Meanwhile we will have to put up with them, but what if we as a civilization can't survive their infiltration and increasing dominance of our institutions? 

A strong military is one of the few necessary functions of government, and at the moment ours is suffering a crisis of recruitment. Is there any wonder why? No man wants to be bossed around by a bunch of trannies, perverts, sissies, and witches, nor did any man ever risk his life to make the world safe for non-conforming two-spirt genderqueers. And if he did, he would apologize immediately.

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for the breakdown of binary gender.

What a sick joke. The poor in genetic, psychological, and spiritual fitness will always be with us, but if we put them in charge of our children and our military, then not only do we have no one but ourselves to blame for the decline and extinction of our civilization, but we probably deserve it.

How to Dodge the Secular Millennium

I was scanning the library for any insights into witches & their craft, and pulled down an old favorite called Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of Millennial Experience, by Richard Landes. 

I think I'll reread it, since it's full of insights on how to interpret crazy times. Things were crazy enough when I first read it in 2011, but in hindsight we see that the craziness was just getting warmed up. 

Of course, things are always crazy, since humans are always crazy, and the more history one reads, the more one is astonished that anything ever goes right. 

Come to think of it, this is one of the sensibilities that distinguishes left from right: the progressive looks at the world and is resentful that things aren't better, while the conservative looks at it and is amazed and grateful that anything at all works out. 

According to a note to myself in the back of the book, there's a deep logic to the illogic of politics, and it goes like this:

1) Take power.

2) Eliminate the forces of evil.

3) New humanity emerges, i.e., utopia, heaven on earth, arrival of the eschaton, etc.

4) Turn to demonizing narrative upon inevitable failure of #3.

The Brandon administration is well into #4. The list of people and things he has blamed for his narrative collapse include Putin's Price Hike, Big Oil, Big Meat, Corporate Greed, Ultra-MAGA, gas station owners, etc. Every day there's a new malefactor, since the public isn't buying any of the administration's narratives.

Speaking of which, another note says that the narrative describes "what is supposed to happen," not what actually happens. It is a model, and like any model, it is not the reality. Politics in particular is susceptible to dysfunctional models, and you could say that history is the wreckage of bad models. 

For example, Marx's narrative predicted how history will go under conditions of communism. How history went is another story, and one reason why it went so badly was the titanic effort to force it to go where it would not and could not go. But for the left, impossibilty is always beside the point.

It's the same with the global warming crowd, which is literally trying to force the world to go where it will not and cannot go, with entirely predictable consequences. 

Another note says "The only good thing about the left is that its millennial movements always fail." However, the failure is usually a drawn-out process, as the left heroically resists the feedback of reality and tries to prop up its failed narrative. Says here that "apocalyptic time is inherently unstable and doesn't last long." We shall see.

I'm not optimistic, because another note says "all political movements must partake of millennial impulses." If this is true, it means that if conservatism is to achieve #1 above (gain power), it must somehow tap into the millennial impulses of the mob. 

And one doesn't have to read much mediocre conservative writing to see the process at work. We have to somehow sell the idea that Everything's Gonna Get Better, knowing full well that it will be an accomplishment to truly change anything. 

This doesn't make us pessimistic, much less cynical. We just know human nature, that's all. We actually enjoy resting under the shade of timeless truths while watching with bemused horror as our little glimpse of history passes by. 

Here are some aphoristic branches to insulate you from the heat of the moment:

I am not trying to poison the wells. But to show that they are poisoned.

No paradise will arise within the framework of time. Because good and evil are not threads twisted together by history, but fibers of the single thread that sin has spun for us.

History shows that man’s good ideas are accidental and his mistakes methodical.

Intelligence does not consist in finding solutions, but in not losing sight of the problems.

To be a conservative is to understand that man is a problem without a human solution.

Christianity does not solve “problems”; it merely obliges us to live them at a higher level.

For the Christian, history does not have a direction, but rather a center.

Bottom line: there's an occasional victory but no end to the war, so

Let us live the militancy of Christianity with the good humor of the guerrilla fighter, not with the glumness of the entrenched garrison (Dávila).

How to Dodge the Secular Millennium

I was scanning the library for any insights into witches & their craft, and pulled down an old favorite called Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of Millennial Experience, by Richard Landes. 

I think I'll reread it, since it's full of insights on how to interpret crazy times. Things were crazy enough when I first read it in 2011, but in hindsight we see that the craziness was just getting warmed up. 

Of course, things are always crazy, since humans are always crazy, and the more history one reads, the more one is astonished that anything ever goes right. 

Come to think of it, this is one of the sensibilities that distinguishes left from right: the progressive looks at the world and is resentful that things aren't better, while the conservative looks at it and is amazed and grateful that anything at all works out. 

According to a note to myself in the back of the book, there's a deep logic to the illogic of politics, and it goes like this:

1) Take power.

2) Eliminate the forces of evil.

3) New humanity emerges, i.e., utopia, heaven on earth, arrival of the eschaton, etc.

4) Turn to demonizing narrative upon inevitable failure of #3.

The Brandon administration is well into #4. The list of people and things he has blamed for his narrative collapse include Putin's Price Hike, Big Oil, Big Meat, Corporate Greed, Ultra-MAGA, gas station owners, etc. Every day there's a new malefactor, since the public isn't buying any of the administration's narratives.

Speaking of which, another note says that the narrative describes "what is supposed to happen," not what actually happens. It is a model, and like any model, it is not the reality. Politics in particular is susceptible to dysfunctional models, and you could say that history is the wreckage of bad models. 

For example, Marx's narrative predicted how history will go under conditions of communism. How history went is another story, and one reason why it went so badly was the titanic effort to force it to go where it would not and could not go. But for the left, impossibilty is always beside the point.

It's the same with the global warming crowd, which is literally trying to force the world to go where it will not and cannot go, with entirely predictable consequences. 

Another note says "The only good thing about the left is that its millennial movements always fail." However, the failure is usually a drawn-out process, as the left heroically resists the feedback of reality and tries to prop up its failed narrative. Says here that "apocalyptic time is inherently unstable and doesn't last long." We shall see.

I'm not optimistic, because another note says "all political movements must partake of millennial impulses." If this is true, it means that if conservatism is to achieve #1 above (gain power), it must somehow tap into the millennial impulses of the mob. 

And one doesn't have to read much mediocre conservative writing to see the process at work. We have to somehow sell the idea that Everything's Gonna Get Better, knowing full well that it will be an accomplishment to truly change anything. 

This doesn't make us pessimistic, much less cynical. We just know human nature, that's all. We actually enjoy resting under the shade of timeless truths while watching with bemused horror as our little glimpse of history passes by. 

Here are some aphoristic branches to insulate you from the heat of the moment:

I am not trying to poison the wells. But to show that they are poisoned.

No paradise will arise within the framework of time. Because good and evil are not threads twisted together by history, but fibers of the single thread that sin has spun for us.

History shows that man’s good ideas are accidental and his mistakes methodical.

Intelligence does not consist in finding solutions, but in not losing sight of the problems.

To be a conservative is to understand that man is a problem without a human solution.

Christianity does not solve “problems”; it merely obliges us to live them at a higher level.

For the Christian, history does not have a direction, but rather a center.

Bottom line: there's an occasional victory but no end to the war, so

Let us live the militancy of Christianity with the good humor of the guerrilla fighter, not with the glumness of the entrenched garrison (Dávila).

Ding Dong the Witch is a Dude

Why this alliance between unhappy women and unstable men who think that pretending to be a woman will somehow make them happy? Since the former are unhappy being women, what makes the latter think they'll be any happier? Are there trannies who imitate happy, stable, religious, and conservative women? Maybe, but I don't know of any.

It reminds me of people who are unhappy under a free market system, and imagine they'd be happy under socialism. Never mind the untold misery created by socialism. This time it will be different!

This goes to the whole attraction of "activism," and the sort of person attracted to it. In general, people who lose themselves in activist movements do precisely that: they hate themselves but are able to "lose" and "transcend" this self-loathing by identification with the transcendent ideals of the group. This always requires projection into an out-group, so all the self-hatred is now experienced as emanating from the outside-in. 

I read an amusing example of this process this morning, via the NY Times. In it, the author ponders the question of why conservatives are so darned "anti-democracy." Being that this is the NY Times, there is a total absence of self-awareness, nor any examination of the premise, which is regarded as axiomatic. It is very much like a delusional person who begins with the principle that martians are in control of the government, and undertakes a sober investigation to understand how and why.

He cites five reasons why those of us who don't accept his delusions are delusional. For example, 

many conservatives -- especially white conservatives -- feel more threatened than in past decades. They worry they are part of a fading minority. 

Naturally, no examples are given, reminiscent of the medieval peasant who has never met a Jew but only knows they have horns. The author is quick to point out that the concerns about "diversity" actually have a basis in fact, being that the country is indeed becoming 

more racially diverse and [is] destined to become even more so. It [conservative anti-democratic mania] also happened as the country was questioning traditional ideas of gender and sexuality and becoming more secular, with religious observance declining. 

Obviously racial diversity is just a red herring, since it is Democrats who are freaking out precisely because Latinos are abandoning them by the millions and thereby making the GOP more "diverse." Where are all the conservatives who aren't laughing themselves silly over this tectonic political realignment, as Democrats become the homogeneous party of affluent, credentialed white Karins of both sexes? 

It also turns out that the great majority of Americans are not on board with the groomer agenda, which obviously makes us "pro-democracy." But even if the majority of Americans thought it was a good idea for the state to be involved in the forced sexualization (not to mention sterilization and genital mutilation) of children, it's more than a bit tendentious to call this "anti-democracy" instead of just pro-child. 

Another reason we hate democracy 

is modern media. On the internet, falsehoods can spread more quickly and be repeated more frequently than, say, the Birchers’ claim that Dwight Eisenhower was a secret communist.

For example, did you hear the one about Russia hacking the 2016 election and Trump being an agent of Putin? Or Trump calling Nazis "fine people?" How about the crazy story about Hunter's laptop being real? Or the J6 scuffle being an "insurrection"? The internet is just a buzzing hive of crazy conspiracy theories!

Without all the Pulitzer Prizes.

Let's get back to this question of "witches." The modern mentality is simply to reject both their existence and the very possibility of their existence. But this doesn't make them go away, it only makes them go unnoticed.

Back when people did believe in witches, what were they seeing? Was it just a hallucination? That's unlikely, since hallucinations are rare even in individuals, let alone whole cultures. Genuine delusions are also rare. 

On the other hand, projection is not only common but ubiquitous, so the perception of witches was likely some combination of real unattractive and/or threatening traits in the so-called witches, mingled with a fair amount of projection from the people preoccupied with these genuinely unattractive scapegoats.

But there is some kind of enduring psychic reality underneath the projection, hence the persistence and universality of witches:

The archetype of the "witch" is burnt deep into the European psyche, recurring again and again in folklore, fairytale, and fantasy. The old hag who lives alone in a spooky cottage on the edge of the village with a black cat: she is wicked, uses magic spells to achieve her diabolical ends, and she is to be avoided at all costs (Dutton).

Why do such images haunt the collective psyche? What is their source?

Let's pull a dusty volume from the shelf called The Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, and see if it offers any guidance on the subject.

Says here that "belief in witches exists in all lands, from earliest times to the present day" -- which means that the belief is truly timeless and universal, apparently part of our inborn, archetypal psychic structure with which we interpret experience. These may be thought of as pre-conceptions, or empty categories, that await fulfillment by experience.  

It seems that although the category is universal, it accumulates a lot of particular meaning depending upon this or that culture -- similar to how marriage is universal but acquires particular forms in different cultures. 

Interestingly, witches are associated with the "most horrid crimes when they either kill children or offer them to devils in most accursed wise," and also "impede and prevent [the] power of procreation." It seems that witches were the first "pro-choice" activists.

They are indeed spiteful mutants, in that they

practice witchcraft for purposes of revenge, or out of envy or jealousy, or to impose their will or wishes on someone else.

The deeper point, I think, is that, just as there exists a complex "biosphere" that is the larger context for life itself, there is also a "psychosphere" that serves as the larger context for thought, or for Mind Itself. 

We all participate in this nonlocal web, nor can we help doing so, and it always features some sort of structure for the management of unwanted and unacknowledged psychic material -- in other words, for the projection of things like envy, jealousy, greed, violence, whatever. It serves as a kind of psychic purification system, without which the individual would be forced to live in his own private psychic septic tank.

One of my favorite Democrats is Keith Olbermann, since his use of conservatives to manage his own psychic demons is so transparent. Let's check in on his twitter feed and see how he's been doing lately. For him, witches and devils are everywhere:

Newspapers -- stop calling [conservatives] "pro-life." Until they're anti-gun and pro-health care, they're just Theocrats imposing their bullshit religion on others.

Dear Congresswoman "Right to White Life," If there's anything worse than a Nazi, it's being a dumb Nazi. Don't be a dumb Nazi.

Maria Bartiromo used to be a business reporter but now sells fascism for a living and sounds like she's 125 years old and drunk, talking about somebody ELSE showing signs of decline. [That would be the perfectly healthy Biden, whom anyone can see is as sharp as Olbermann himself.]

This creature Kari Lake is inciting political violence and needs to be prevented from continuing to do so.

Texas is a failed state. Its GOP are THE Worst Persons In The World.

Again, what would he do -- how could he live with himself -- if not for the psychic safety valve of projection?

What strikes the former psychologist in me is the "over the top" characterization of witches in the past, and Olbermann's equally over the top characterization of conservatives in the present. 

Psychic continuity amidst historical change. But we're out of time, so to be continued...  

Ding Dong the Witch is a Dude

Why this alliance between unhappy women and unstable men who think that pretending to be a woman will somehow make them happy? Since the former are unhappy being women, what makes the latter think they'll be any happier? Are there trannies who imitate happy, stable, religious, and conservative women? Maybe, but I don't know of any.

It reminds me of people who are unhappy under a free market system, and imagine they'd be happy under socialism. Never mind the untold misery created by socialism. This time it will be different!

This goes to the whole attraction of "activism," and the sort of person attracted to it. In general, people who lose themselves in activist movements do precisely that: they hate themselves but are able to "lose" and "transcend" this self-loathing by identification with the transcendent ideals of the group. This always requires projection into an out-group, so all the self-hatred is now experienced as emanating from the outside-in. 

I read an amusing example of this process this morning, via the NY Times. In it, the author ponders the question of why conservatives are so darned "anti-democracy." Being that this is the NY Times, there is a total absence of self-awareness, nor any examination of the premise, which is regarded as axiomatic. It is very much like a delusional person who begins with the principle that martians are in control of the government, and undertakes a sober investigation to understand how and why.

He cites five reasons why those of us who don't accept his delusions are delusional. For example, 

many conservatives -- especially white conservatives -- feel more threatened than in past decades. They worry they are part of a fading minority. 

Naturally, no examples are given, reminiscent of the medieval peasant who has never met a Jew but only knows they have horns. The author is quick to point out that the concerns about "diversity" actually have a basis in fact, being that the country is indeed becoming 

more racially diverse and [is] destined to become even more so. It [conservative anti-democratic mania] also happened as the country was questioning traditional ideas of gender and sexuality and becoming more secular, with religious observance declining. 

Obviously racial diversity is just a red herring, since it is Democrats who are freaking out precisely because Latinos are abandoning them by the millions and thereby making the GOP more "diverse." Where are all the conservatives who aren't laughing themselves silly over this tectonic political realignment, as Democrats become the homogeneous party of affluent, credentialed white Karins of both sexes? 

It also turns out that the great majority of Americans are not on board with the groomer agenda, which obviously makes us "pro-democracy." But even if the majority of Americans thought it was a good idea for the state to be involved in the forced sexualization (not to mention sterilization and genital mutilation) of children, it's more than a bit tendentious to call this "anti-democracy" instead of just pro-child. 

Another reason we hate democracy 

is modern media. On the internet, falsehoods can spread more quickly and be repeated more frequently than, say, the Birchers’ claim that Dwight Eisenhower was a secret communist.

For example, did you hear the one about Russia hacking the 2016 election and Trump being an agent of Putin? Or Trump calling Nazis "fine people?" How about the crazy story about Hunter's laptop being real? Or the J6 scuffle being an "insurrection"? The internet is just a buzzing hive of crazy conspiracy theories!

Without all the Pulitzer Prizes.

Let's get back to this question of "witches." The modern mentality is simply to reject both their existence and the very possibility of their existence. But this doesn't make them go away, it only makes them go unnoticed.

Back when people did believe in witches, what were they seeing? Was it just a hallucination? That's unlikely, since hallucinations are rare even in individuals, let alone whole cultures. Genuine delusions are also rare. 

On the other hand, projection is not only common but ubiquitous, so the perception of witches was likely some combination of real unattractive and/or threatening traits in the so-called witches, mingled with a fair amount of projection from the people preoccupied with these genuinely unattractive scapegoats.

But there is some kind of enduring psychic reality underneath the projection, hence the persistence and universality of witches:

The archetype of the "witch" is burnt deep into the European psyche, recurring again and again in folklore, fairytale, and fantasy. The old hag who lives alone in a spooky cottage on the edge of the village with a black cat: she is wicked, uses magic spells to achieve her diabolical ends, and she is to be avoided at all costs (Dutton).

Why do such images haunt the collective psyche? What is their source?

Let's pull a dusty volume from the shelf called The Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, and see if it offers any guidance on the subject.

Says here that "belief in witches exists in all lands, from earliest times to the present day" -- which means that the belief is truly timeless and universal, apparently part of our inborn, archetypal psychic structure with which we interpret experience. These may be thought of as pre-conceptions, or empty categories, that await fulfillment by experience.  

It seems that although the category is universal, it accumulates a lot of particular meaning depending upon this or that culture -- similar to how marriage is universal but acquires particular forms in different cultures. 

Interestingly, witches are associated with the "most horrid crimes when they either kill children or offer them to devils in most accursed wise," and also "impede and prevent [the] power of procreation." It seems that witches were the first "pro-choice" activists.

They are indeed spiteful mutants, in that they

practice witchcraft for purposes of revenge, or out of envy or jealousy, or to impose their will or wishes on someone else.

The deeper point, I think, is that, just as there exists a complex "biosphere" that is the larger context for life itself, there is also a "psychosphere" that serves as the larger context for thought, or for Mind Itself. 

We all participate in this nonlocal web, nor can we help doing so, and it always features some sort of structure for the management of unwanted and unacknowledged psychic material -- in other words, for the projection of things like envy, jealousy, greed, violence, whatever. It serves as a kind of psychic purification system, without which the individual would be forced to live in his own private psychic septic tank.

One of my favorite Democrats is Keith Olbermann, since his use of conservatives to manage his own psychic demons is so transparent. Let's check in on his twitter feed and see how he's been doing lately. For him, witches and devils are everywhere:

Newspapers -- stop calling [conservatives] "pro-life." Until they're anti-gun and pro-health care, they're just Theocrats imposing their bullshit religion on others.

Dear Congresswoman "Right to White Life," If there's anything worse than a Nazi, it's being a dumb Nazi. Don't be a dumb Nazi.

Maria Bartiromo used to be a business reporter but now sells fascism for a living and sounds like she's 125 years old and drunk, talking about somebody ELSE showing signs of decline. [That would be the perfectly healthy Biden, whom anyone can see is as sharp as Olbermann himself.]

This creature Kari Lake is inciting political violence and needs to be prevented from continuing to do so.

Texas is a failed state. Its GOP are THE Worst Persons In The World.

Again, what would he do -- how could he live with himself -- if not for the psychic safety valve of projection?

What strikes the former psychologist in me is the "over the top" characterization of witches in the past, and Olbermann's equally over the top characterization of conservatives in the present. 

Psychic continuity amidst historical change. But we're out of time, so to be continued...  

Witches, Feminists, and the Men who Enable Them

I finished an informative, provocative, and entertaining book over the weekend called Witches, Feminism, and the Fall of the West. While I agree with the author (Edward Dutton) that feminists are witches, I guess I mean it literally whereas he only means it genetically. 

In other words, he maintains that witches and feminists are a result of maladaptive genetic mutations, and that the mutations have been accumulating under the far less harsh environmental conditions since the industrial revolution. Now any idiot with crazy and maladaptive ideas can survive into adulthood and even tenure. 

I could be wrong, but I don't see how the process of natural selection could result in such rapid and revolutionary changes. Besides, look at me: I would have called myself a feminist as recently as the 1990s, whereas now I think the 19th amendment was a civilizational catastrophe, and my DNA hasn't changed. 

Was I a warlock back then? No, but I was certainly under the influence of witchcraft. This, however, begs the question, because it puts the scene of the crime back into the foolish men who accept feminism to begin with. To paraphrase Lincoln, the patriarchy will never be destroyed from the outside. If we lose our testicles it will be because we castrated ourselves. 

Regarding patriarchy, one of the points of the book is that it is both adaptive and normative, certainly under the harsh conditions of the evolutionary environment. There are a host of evolutionary reasons why patriarchy developed, nor is it difficult to understand why. At bottom, patriarchal societies are more likely to survive the battle of group selection for the same reason Lia Thomas is likely to curbstomp his swimming competition. 

Here's a summary of the story so far: Early Modern witches

tended to be physically unattractive females who acted in such a way as to undermine patriarchy, and by extension group selection. They also tended to be childless and unmarried. Being physically unattractive, they had poor genetic health, and this was reflected in their being mentally maladapted, as we would expect most females to be evolved to accept patriarchy.   

Hold on a minute: evolved to accept patriarchy? That's not funny!

Well, call it what you will, but Rob Henderson's most recent newsletter contains some fascinating data showing how the same underlying evolutionary strategies are hard at work in today's "dating market" -- which is just a modern way of saying "evolutionary environment," for it's a matter of whose genes will move on to the next round.

For example, on dating apps,

Men swipe right (“liked”) on 62 percent of the women’s profiles they see; women swipe right (“liked”) on only 4.5 percent of the men’s profiles they see.

Oof! One result is that

In terms of attractiveness, the bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.

Oof!2 Thus, for women natural selection is a buffet, while for men it's a fight to the genetic death for the leftovers. In other words, same as it ever was. 

Except it is apparently going to speed up our genetic deterioration, because research suggests that use of Tinder, for example, is associated with "Dark Triad" personality traits (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism), which are in turn heavily genetically loaded. Bottom line:

The researchers conclude that "Tinder can be a venue for people high on the Dark Triad to pursue short-term mating strategies."

All of this goes back to the very different mating strategies of men and women. Since women must bear the burden of pregnancy, they are on the genetic lookout for three main things: status, resources, and loyalty. Conversely, men are primarily interested in three different things: looks, looks, and looks.

But looks aren't what they appear to be, since an abundance of research shows a strong correlation between things like facial symmetry and overall genetic fitness. And to this day, liberals tend to have less facial symmetry, more mental illness, and other markers of genetic unfitness.

A big reason why the genetic rules have changed -- why we have so many spiteful mutants running around -- is that 

In 1800, half of all those born died as children; two centuries later, almost none did. More and more people who would not have survived in old times walked among us.

Which isn't a bad thing unless we allow the mutants to take over with their dysfunctional ideologies. "Unwell in body and mind," these mutants tended to be

selfish and impulsive; at worst, they promoted depression and despair.... 

The really spiteful ones advocated for ideas that were catastrophic. Worse still, people listened to them, since most are born to obey.... 

We all went mad, you could say -- everyone, except those who were naturally resistant or too slow to conform. Deviancy became the norm; patriarchy was overturned. Those who were brightest were the first to accept the new religion, as they could talk themselves into anything.

And here we are:

 

Having said all that, an aphorism comes to mind:

The historian who speaks of cause and not of causes should be fired immediately.

So, there are genetic causes to be sure, but there's a lot more going on. Yesterday I awoke suddenly at 5:00 AM with this question rattling around in my head of when things went wrong. 

If we consider Genesis 3, it seems that it all started with the first guy who listened to his wife. But then I wondered about the Serpent: is his gender mentioned in the story? Yes: "he said to the woman..."

Therefore, it's no longer a question of Eve pulling Adam away from his theocentric orientation, rather, it's a matter of Eve being caught between two competing male voices, so the bottom line is it's the fault of males either way.

To be continued.... 

Witches, Feminists, and the Men who Enable Them

I finished an informative, provocative, and entertaining book over the weekend called Witches, Feminism, and the Fall of the West. While I agree with the author (Edward Dutton) that feminists are witches, I guess I mean it literally whereas he only means it genetically. 

In other words, he maintains that witches and feminists are a result of maladaptive genetic mutations, and that the mutations have been accumulating under the far less harsh environmental conditions since the industrial revolution. Now any idiot with crazy and maladaptive ideas can survive into adulthood and even tenure. 

I could be wrong, but I don't see how the process of natural selection could result in such rapid and revolutionary changes. Besides, look at me: I would have called myself a feminist as recently as the 1990s, whereas now I think the 19th amendment was a civilizational catastrophe, and my DNA hasn't changed. 

Was I a warlock back then? No, but I was certainly under the influence of witchcraft. This, however, begs the question, because it puts the scene of the crime back into the foolish men who accept feminism to begin with. To paraphrase Lincoln, the patriarchy will never be destroyed from the outside. If we lose our testicles it will be because we castrated ourselves. 

Regarding patriarchy, one of the points of the book is that it is both adaptive and normative, certainly under the harsh conditions of the evolutionary environment. There are a host of evolutionary reasons why patriarchy developed, nor is it difficult to understand why. At bottom, patriarchal societies are more likely to survive the battle of group selection for the same reason Lia Thomas is likely to curbstomp his swimming competition. 

Here's a summary of the story so far: Early Modern witches

tended to be physically unattractive females who acted in such a way as to undermine patriarchy, and by extension group selection. They also tended to be childless and unmarried. Being physically unattractive, they had poor genetic health, and this was reflected in their being mentally maladapted, as we would expect most females to be evolved to accept patriarchy.   

Hold on a minute: evolved to accept patriarchy? That's not funny!

Well, call it what you will, but Rob Henderson's most recent newsletter contains some fascinating data showing how the same underlying evolutionary strategies are hard at work in today's "dating market" -- which is just a modern way of saying "evolutionary environment," for it's a matter of whose genes will move on to the next round.

For example, on dating apps,

Men swipe right (“liked”) on 62 percent of the women’s profiles they see; women swipe right (“liked”) on only 4.5 percent of the men’s profiles they see.

Oof! One result is that

In terms of attractiveness, the bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.

Oof!2 Thus, for women natural selection is a buffet, while for men it's a fight to the genetic death for the leftovers. In other words, same as it ever was. 

Except it is apparently going to speed up our genetic deterioration, because research suggests that use of Tinder, for example, is associated with "Dark Triad" personality traits (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism), which are in turn heavily genetically loaded. Bottom line:

The researchers conclude that "Tinder can be a venue for people high on the Dark Triad to pursue short-term mating strategies."

All of this goes back to the very different mating strategies of men and women. Since women must bear the burden of pregnancy, they are on the genetic lookout for three main things: status, resources, and loyalty. Conversely, men are primarily interested in three different things: looks, looks, and looks.

But looks aren't what they appear to be, since an abundance of research shows a strong correlation between things like facial symmetry and overall genetic fitness. And to this day, liberals tend to have less facial symmetry, more mental illness, and other markers of genetic unfitness.

A big reason why the genetic rules have changed -- why we have so many spiteful mutants running around -- is that 

In 1800, half of all those born died as children; two centuries later, almost none did. More and more people who would not have survived in old times walked among us.

Which isn't a bad thing unless we allow the mutants to take over with their dysfunctional ideologies. "Unwell in body and mind," these mutants tended to be

selfish and impulsive; at worst, they promoted depression and despair.... 

The really spiteful ones advocated for ideas that were catastrophic. Worse still, people listened to them, since most are born to obey.... 

We all went mad, you could say -- everyone, except those who were naturally resistant or too slow to conform. Deviancy became the norm; patriarchy was overturned. Those who were brightest were the first to accept the new religion, as they could talk themselves into anything.

And here we are:

 

Having said all that, an aphorism comes to mind:

The historian who speaks of cause and not of causes should be fired immediately.

So, there are genetic causes to be sure, but there's a lot more going on. Yesterday I awoke suddenly at 5:00 AM with this question rattling around in my head of when things went wrong. 

If we consider Genesis 3, it seems that it all started with the first guy who listened to his wife. But then I wondered about the Serpent: is his gender mentioned in the story? Yes: "he said to the woman..."

Therefore, it's no longer a question of Eve pulling Adam away from his theocentric orientation, rather, it's a matter of Eve being caught between two competing male voices, so the bottom line is it's the fault of males either way.

To be continued....