The perils of diversity

While group affiliations by clan, tribe and nation have always created ingroups and outgroups, the bigotries we experience today can be traced through history by the demands of the trade economy. Women have been kept subservient to control ownership of their offspring in patriarchal structures for the last several millennia. The role of caregiving (but not necessarily womanhood) is vilified when less population growth is needed. The taboo against homosexuality is largely invoked only when population growth is being encouraged.

Religious affiliation was used to prevent Muslims from enslaving other Muslims, a humanitarian law which made the rest of the world an outgroup and vastly expanded the Islamic slave trade. The same ingroup restrictions on slavery were made by the Christian church when the Ottoman Empire was too powerful against Europe. In the melting pot regions near the Silk Road, ethnicities and nationalities were too mixed to establish clear divisions, so religions were used to establish ingroups and outgroups. The idea of genetic race, as opposed to national appearance, was invented only in very recent history and encouraged primarily in America, as a visual representation of class and to divide the lower classes, including women. The methods of outgroup vilification used began with the very literal demonization of women along the major Indo-European trade routes several millennia ago.

But regardless of the dangers magic posed, the bourgeoisie had to combat its power also because it undermined the principle of individual responsibility, as magic placed the determinants of social action in the realm of the stars, out of their reach and control. – Silvia Federici[cite]

For, as for witches, I think not that their witchcraft is any real power, but yet that they are justly punished for the false belief they have that they can do such mischief, joined with their purpose to do it if they can, their trade being nearer to a new religion than to a craft or science. – Thomas Hobbes, Leviathon[cite]

The religious obsession with removing witchcraft, particularly from the hands of women and indigenous people, was a fear of anything that interfered with control and free will for powerful men. The overwhelming fear of chaos was a fear of both women and nature. Both have been popularly associated for millennia with chaos, a word which originally was used to describe the primordial state. Pythagoras wrote, “There is a good principle that created order, light and man and a bad principle that created chaos, darkness and woman.”[cite]

The Babylonian goddess of primordial creation, Tiamat, described in the Enûma Eliš (sometimes depicted in a serpent form or as the mother of serpents) is one example of this ancient association. In this myth, her son Marduk murders her, the divided parts of her body become the heavens and earth and Marduk becomes the most powerful patriarch-god over his siblings. A related story specifies, “the deity above-mentioned took off his own head: upon which the other gods mixed the blood, as it gushed out, with the earth; and from thence were formed men. On this account it is that they are rational, and partake of divine knowledge.”[cite] Men were not only associated with the god, not the goddess or the earth, but chaos, women and nature were depicted as their mortal enemies which needed to be violently overcome.

This is an early (possibly 18-16th century BCE) version of many religious myths describing primordial chaos and darkness conquered and divided into binary good/evil, light/dark, male/female by a man-like god or a god-like man. Subsequent stories are reduced to the man-god fighting a serpent or dragon and are sometimes referred to as the chaoskampf theme in myths, legends and religious stories. This story is common to almost all Indo-European and neighbouring regions in stories ranging from Beowulf vs the dragon to Apollo vs Python to Christ vs Satan and Krishna vs. Kāliyā.[cite]

The more modern forms of this myth are the knights who battle dragons for the hand of characterless virgins, a too-perfect allegory for the subjection of female power. This transformation is echoed wherever trade spread Christianity and replaced the mother goddesses such as Pachamama with the virgin Mary. While Latin America still prays to the Mary-goddess and her figure is far more prominent than that of Jesus, she is now depicted as a characterless and castrated vessel for God-man instead of a direct source of life and power. This revision in women’s acceptable role is seen throughout history as powerful women from Trota to Elizabeth I have been accused of being male or, like Joan of Arc and Hildegard of Bingen, treated as solely empty vessels for God’s will. The men of their eras also claimed divine inspiration but were credited personally for their achievements.

In later years, many theologians decided to replace the idea of primordial chaos with nothingness or creatio ex nihilo, an early example of photoshopping anything considered female from history. The snake-like creature persisted however, and retained its qualities of being conquered by Marduk-God for the use of man. Psalms 74 of the Book of Psalms addresses God, “Thou didst break the sea in pieces by Thy strength; Thou didst shatter the heads of the sea-monsters in the waters. Thou didst crush the heads of leviathan, Thou gavest him to be food to the folk inhabiting the wilderness.” It is this chaotic force of nature in the form of the leviathan which Thomas Hobbes invokes in his 1651 treatise arguing the need for a strong absolute ruler (or man-god) to control our impulses under a state of nature.[cite]

The other aspect of the myth which persists is the division of a chaotic whole into an ordered binary, and the development of a Manichean worldview. With the addition of the Madonna-virgin figure to the chaoskampf myths, women themselves became a binary. As long as they were obedient to men (order) and not in control of their own power through sexuality and lifegiving, they could be on the side of light and good and order. In the last couple of centuries the ancient division between chaos and order, light and dark, and male and female was expanded in some regions by the creation of race. Now people are labeled as black and white and some are cast out with chaos and darkness and women while some are elevated with light, order and men. The virgin woman became the untouchable ‘white’ woman and the dark women were left to be cast as the whores, though both were still subjected to men. The preference of Circassian slaves as wives and concubines to the sultans of the Ottoman empire and the shahs of Persia while the cheaper Syrians and still cheaper Nubians[cite] filled the harems of the lower classes is an example of this new status.

A Jewish story describes Adam’s first wife Lilith as created before or at the same time as him and from the same earth. She refused to lie beneath Adam and flew away to become the baby eating, man raping, snake loving demon she appears as in many writings (under various names). Her appearance in the Alphabet of ben Sirach in the 8th – 10th century[cite] as a foil to characterless Eve entrenched the moral that women who were not completely subjected to men were pure evil. She, like primordial chaos, has been photoshopped from most current accounts of Adam and Eve. We are again left with only one acceptable form for women in the shape of Eve and the Lilith side is again now represented by a snake, also associated with Satan and evil. Still, Lilith’s role as the temptress of Eve is an early example of the moral to keep women isolated and not able to conspire together and to keep the good women away from the bad.

All of these ancient beliefs were used during the Inquisition to stir up hatred and increase the subjection of women. In order to create a class war against a population which was not an abstract thought but the family members and social structure men lived with daily, differences between men and women had to be exaggerated and presented as the result of evil. In 1486, the printing press began its illustrious career as a disseminator of mass hate propaganda for centralized power with the publication of the Malleus Malleficarum[cite] which saw 29 printings before 1669, second only to the Bible. Among the many edifying chapters in this extraordinary work are the following:

Concerning Witches who copulate with Devils. Why is it that Women are chiefly addicted to Evil superstitions?
Whether Witches may work some Prestidigatory Illusion so that the Male Organ appears to be entirely removed and separate from the Body.
That Witches who are Midwives in Various Ways Kill the Child Conceived in the Womb, and Procure an Abortion; or if they do not this Offer New-born Children to Devils.
How Witches Impede and Prevent the Power of Procreation.
How, as it were, they Deprive Man of his Virile Member.
Of the Manner whereby they Change Men into the Shapes of Beasts.
Of the Method by which Devils through the Operations of Witches sometimes actually possess men.
Of the Method by which they can Inflict Every Sort of Infirmity, generally Ills of the Graver Kind.
Of the Way how in Particular they Afflict Men with Other Like Infirmities.
How Witch Midwives commit most Horrid Crimes when they either Kill Children or Offer them to Devils in most Accursed Wise.

The Malleus Malleficarum summarizes the historical views on women as follows:

“Ecclesiasticus xxv: There is no head above the head of a serpent: and there is no wrath above the wrath of a woman. I had rather dwell with a lion and a dragon than to keep house with a wicked woman. … All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman. Wherefore S. John Chrysostom says on the text, It is not good to marry (S. Matthew xix): What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colours! Therefore if it be a sin to divorce her when she ought to be kept, it is indeed a necessary torture; for either we commit adultery by divorcing her, or we must endure daily strife. Cicero in his second book of The Rhetorics says: The many lusts of men lead them into one sin, but the lust of women leads them into all sins; for the root of all woman’s vices is avarice. And Seneca says in his Tragedies: A woman either loves or hates; there is no third grade. And the tears of woman are a deception, for they may spring from true grief, or they may be a snare. When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.”

So the witch hunts decreed that a woman was neither permitted to think in the company of other women or in solitary, all of her thoughts must be guided by men. Network censorship in the name of terrorism is not a new thing.

Malleus Malleficarum then offers remedies for witchcraft including some of the most disturbed sexually deviant practices ever written, dressed up as law and order. It is however made clear that the power of witches was not their own, but rather came from a sexual act with the devil, women being far too weak of mind to have ideas of their own. “For as regards intellect, or the understanding of spiritual things, they seem to be of a different nature from men; … Women are intellectually like children…. No woman understood philosophy except Temeste.” As a model of professional sabotage, the Inquisitions and Malleus Malleficarum remain unequaled and the control they established over medical knowledge remained complete until the Internet allowed women and others to once more begin their gossip. Interestingly, one of the first and most panicked cries for Internet censorship was to prevent dissemination of medical knowledge by any except professionals.

The isolation of women was furthered by the dehumanization and the discrediting of all visible female emotion as trickery designed to use men for evil purposes. Men were made to fear any sympathetic attraction to women as being under her spell and resistance to association with women became a celebrated measure of piety. Female seduction was feared as a method of removing men’s free will, a premise still used today in rape justifications. Isolated from other women, feared and despised by men, their work reduced to slavery, their history erased, and their hereditary knowledge unattainable, women became outcasts of the very societies they still created and nurtured.

Both Lilith-type legends and Malleus Malleficarum warn of the dangers of women’s carnal natures:

“But the natural reason is that she is more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations.”

And of their natures in general:

“And as to her other mental quality, that is, her natural will; when she hates someone whom she formerly loved, then she seethes with anger and impatience in her whole soul, just as the tides of the sea are always heaving and boiling. Many authorities allude to this cause. Ecclesiasticus xxv: There is no wrath above the wrath of a woman. And Seneca (Tragedies, VIII): No might of the flames or the swollen winds, no deadly weapon, is so much to be feared as the lust and hatred of a woman who has been divorced from the marriage bed.”

All of the above opinions are reinforced by philosophy, in which Aristotle calls women “a misbegotten male”,[cite] and by science, in which Darwin wrote “males are more evolutionarily advanced than females”.[cite] Darwin also warned that “unchecked female militancy threatened to produce a perturbance of the races” and to “divert the orderly process of evolution”.[cite]  It is little wonder that feminism spends all of its energy trying to convince both men and women that they are alike in every respect and denying any differences no matter how physically apparent.

In actual biological fact, women are obviously not equal to men though they certainly are equivalent. Whether or not men deviate more from the normative range (in both directions) due to their more vulnerable Y chromosome[cite], women deviate from their own norms through both a monthly cyclic cocktail of hormones and a lifetime of changing, personality altering hormones.[cite] This is not a weakness, it is a gift. Women are capable of far more diversity of thought within their own minds and lifetimes. We are not even beginning to understand the full effect of hormones on women (or men) because difference is not a topic of popular study in a world where safety and societal acceptance are found only in equality. One thing is certain; there are cognitive differences in women on the hormone altering pharmaceuticals sold to women worldwide as Feminism, their keys to acceptance into a male world.[cite]

No one can seriously think in this day and age that the best method of birth control we can come up with will necessitate women the world over being subjected to extremely dangerous pharmaceuticals[cite] that do everything from destroying the aforementioned carnal lust to eliminating the aforementioned natural will which these men found so frightening. The birth control pill is not just about birth control, it is Dolby sound for women’s hormones, a way to control that legendary fury which hell hath no greater than and a sacrifice of women’s own genius to make them a little closer to the masculine ideal. The fear of women’s hormonal changes is ancient and pervasive. It is predictable that it was women suffering post-natal depression that were a favourite target for brainwashing by Canadian intelligence services. What would be poetic justice if it were not an environmental catastrophe is those same hormones that are being used to declaw women globally are of course returning to the earth and combining with the simulated estrogen in plastics to create an excess of women’s hormones the world over.

Centralized medicine brought the industrialization of childbirth and removal of breastfeeding. The pharmaceutical industry has managed to conflate the pill with birth control almost completely and further conflate the pill with feminism. Feminists who feel their role consists of convincing the world that women are identical to men and preaching complete assimilation would rather deny that natural hormones exist and embrace any pharmacology that minimizes them. It is interesting that the exact same pills when provided to an ethnic group are a scandal[cite] but not when provided to an entire sex.

The desire to remove any variation in character from women goes back to earliest writings. In Indo-European mythology, women are frequently powerful wild cards with a passion for vengeance such as Nemesis, Nyx, Lilith, Eris, Calypso and many others. In science fiction, women are most often robots (frequently literally), predictable and characterless, with child bearing function removed or industrialized. The hoped for transition in character is hard to miss. In societal norms women must be heavily moderated, use endearments instead of (witch’s) cursing and any negativity or assertiveness is instantly condemned as hysteria or unacceptable anger. The need to constantly train women to be passive and subservient partly results still from a very real terror instilled by the relentless propaganda of the last millennium.

In matrilineal societies women controlled the home and were responsible for all of the child rearing as well as most agriculture. As descent could only be proven from women, they were the heads of families and men could be banished from the home and even shunned from the village if they offended. This shunning could equal a death sentence if the man had nowhere else to go. The terror of women’s anger may have had something to do with this traditional fear in some cultures. Centuries later, the same concerns about women’s property ownership and maternal rights and the same complaints about women’s natural character are being repeated by the masculinist MRA (men’s rights activists) group. Conversely, MRA also complain if property ownership is not available to women as they then are considered gold diggers, seeking possession of men’s property. The resentment of men who were made to purchase admittance into their own families by the creation of waged labour continues.

Religions were not such an obvious point of division as gender. All of the great Silk Road religions adhered to the same patriarchal ideology of autonomous and omnipotent men who were granted the right to use women, children, nature and weaker or more unfortunate men in any way they wished. Although they followed different prophets: Mani, Zarathustra, Buddha, Christ, Mohammed, and more, there was no serious point of conflict between theologies along the Silk Road. They all fit comfortably into the same patriarchal social structures, unsurprisingly as they shared both common myths and common economic structures. The religious conflicts of the region are and have always been based on trade. As in all group affiliation, religion was used to divide very similar populations and justify atrocities towards each other.

Islam taught that Muslims could never enslave other Muslims and non-Muslims could only be enslaved if they were prisoners of war or the children of slaves.[cite] For its time, this was an extremely humanitarian law. Unfortunately, the in-group differentiation of this law and the contemporary demand for slaves led to the Islamic region becoming a vortex for warlike raids on other regions and enslavement of their populations. Since any prisoners of war qualified as slaves, slave raids to fill the Islamic markets were conducted by varied groups of people throughout Africa, west Asia and Europe.

Judaism dictated that Hebrews had considerably more rights than non-Hebrew and originally they were to be treated only as servants and freed after six years as written in Exodus 21:2 “If you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve for six years; but on the seventh he shall go out as a free man without payment.” and in Leviticus 42 “For they are my servants, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold as slaves.” The same strictures did not apply to outgroups: Leviticus 44 “As for your male and female slaves whom you may have: you may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are around you. 45 You may also buy from among the strangers who sojourn with you and their clans that are with you, who have been born in your land, and they may be your property. 46 You may bequeath them to your sons after you to inherit as a possession forever. You may make slaves of them, but over your brothers the people of Israel you shall not rule, one over another ruthlessly.”

Although the above strictures were modified in other sources and certainly not always followed, there were consistently different statuses accorded to Hebrew and non-Hebrew slaves. If a Jewish man must sell himself into slavery he was instructed not to sell himself to a woman or a person from another faith and if he was sold to another faith it was the responsibility of all other Jews to redeem him.[cite] From the middle ages to the 19th century there were Jewish societies organized to free Jewish people from slavery.[cite]

Christianity reflected the Roman and Byzantine empires where it spread, and treated slavery as a well established fact of life, with not much said for or against it. As the slave raids spread from the Islamic markets and as those slaves began returning to Europe in the form of well trained armies, the Catholic Church started to issue edicts discouraging the enslavement of Christians and especially the sale of Christians to non-Christians. Besides prohibitions on selling to Muslims, from the 4th century forward there were repeated Christian prohibitions on Jews owning Christian slaves. Several sources state that Jewish involvement in the medieval slave trade was significant at certain times and places and several other sources say their involvement is grossly overstated. Most historians can agree however that the Christian perception of Jewish involvement was high enough to contribute a great deal to anti-Semitism in Christian communities. According to David Brion Davis in Slavery and Human Progress, “Medieval Christians … became obsessed with alleged Jewish plots to enslave, convert, or sell non-Jews.”[cite]

At various points in history, the religions of the book offered mutual protection from slavery to each other or mutual aid as go-betweens in the slave trade. Non-Muslim slave traders from Ethiopia, Spain and elsewhere carried out the horrific practice of slave castration for sale of eunuchs to Muslims who were forbidden to castrate them.[cite] Other religions were punished for interference such as the Manicheans who were condemned by the Synod of Gangra in 340 for encouraging slaves to revolt.[cite] Manichaeism  between the third and seventh centuries became the most widespread religion in the world but it was driven out of the west first and then out of China by the 14th century, after supporting peasant rebellions.

While Judaism did not necessarily encourage conversion of slaves, both Islam and Christianity spread rapidly through the protection they each offered their ingroups from slavery and from conversion of slaves. Both Muslim and Christian communities also became wealthy by trading each other as slaves. While some Christian groups during abolition used Christianity as a reason to abolish slavery, others such as Jefferson Davis used it to justify slavery, saying the practice “was established by decree of Almighty God…it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation…it has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts.” Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America.[cite]

None of the major religions encouraged slavery and all in fact tried to reduce its horrific nature, both by reaffirming the humanity of the slaves and by forbidding or restricting its use on their own ingroups. Indeed, the exhortations against cruelty to slaves may have been what partly attracted lower classes to these religions in a region dominated by the slave trade. The changing attitudes towards slavery now puts these religious texts far behind in a humanitarian role they once led. If the religious texts of two millennia ago were to occupy the same position in today’s society which they did when they were written, the groups they would be advocating for would include all of humanity and the passages on slavery would be for abolition. Sadly, the texts have been preserved instead of the spirit.

Despite their intent, the group affiliation nature of all religions only led to increased slavery and brutality towards each other, culminating in outgroup hatred. While it may be hard to believe that people would war with each other for centuries over scarcely differing religions, it is perfectly understandable in the context of the slave trade. Not only were there vast profits to be made by merchants in these wars, there would also be deep hatred to outgroups who regularly enslaved each other’s families and used horrific practices such as castration and forced marches which cost the lives of so many.

Those religions not of the book, whether from parts of Africa, America, India, or other regions, suffered from being the outgroups that all of the great trade religions were free to use as slaves. As trade exploration went overseas, indigenous people were also depicted as heathens to justify their enslavement, but this division did not work as well when they became converted to Christianity. A large population of labour slaves has also been a repeated danger for rebellion throughout history and the increasing amount of slaves being imported to America created a great risk of rebellion. When these slaves joined forces with indentured servants and others from the lowest classes, they were a constant danger to the ruling classes. It is in this context that race divisions were created.

By the time of widespread European overseas exploration, religious differences were causing extreme division throughout Europe. People were no longer divided simply by prophet or Eastern Orthodox vs Roman Catholic or Catholic vs Protestant, they had splintered into innumerable little sects which were being used to justify persecution of each other. Many people moved from Europe to the colonies in search of religious freedom. Religious divide was even more of an anathema in English colonies because it was feared that indentured servants would lead uprisings against their colonial masters in favour of other Catholics, as the Irish Saint Patrick’s Battalion (San Patricios) deserted the United States military to fight alongside Mexico in 1846 and Irish indentured servants on St. Kitt’s rebelled when France attacked the island in 1666. The United States particularly was founded on a principle of separation of church and state by a group of men highly suspicious of the church and their efforts to divide, so the United States particularly became the incubator of racism to justify slavery.

The same experts and rewriting of historical experts which were used to dissociate men from women were used to help establish racism in America. The concept of race doesn’t mesh well with myths depicting all of humanity as coming from one man and one woman but Christians have a story in Genesis 9:20-27 wherein Noah condemns Canaan to be a servant of servants to his brothers. The convenience of this myth had been recognized centuries earlier, around 1100 by Honorius Augustodunensis, who depicted serfs as the descendants of Canaan to justify their perpetual servitude.[cite] In the last couple of centuries this story was used again by both Christians and Muslims who decided, against all other information, that the descendants of Canaan were African and condemned to perpetual enslavement.[cite]

Around the late 17th century, the first attempts to divide people by race appeared. In 16th century Spain, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda claimed that the indigenous in America were “natural slaves”.[cite] John Stuart Mill wrote in 1869 that “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians”[cite] applying racism which Aristotle never intended to Aristotle’s view that “those who are as different [from other men] as the soul from the body or man from beast—and they are in this state if their work is the use of the body, and if this is the best that can come from them—are slaves by nature. For them it is better to be ruled in accordance with this sort of rule, if such is the case for the other things mentioned.” Even Mill spoke of barbarians as a transitory state which could be changed however. Racism started as nothing more than intellectual posturing to justify the theft of land in the Americas and the resurgence of slave trading by Europeans. Later, both racism and sexism were used to defend class barriers in general.

Like sexism and religion, racism was extremely helpful in dividing labourers and emphasizing non-existent divisions over the class reality they all lived. Slave traders used existing myths to create bigotries which could be used to entrench their use of other people. People were divided by gender, religion, and race to facilitate the slave trade initially and the resulting stratified society in later years. Long after the short-lived concept of race has been completely debunked, racism lives on. As long as there is a large bottom class and a tiny ruling class there will be the same motivations for keeping the bottom class divided and fighting each other. Groups like the United States Rainbow Coalition of the 1960s, who simply followed ideas instead of aligning by bigotries, are the biggest threat to the class system and will be disrupted by any means possible. (Video below.)

Bigotries allow different rules for different people, convince people to welcome the segregated cages they are put into, allow them to pay less for the labour of some, and give them a powerful tool to coerce people’s behaviour. Bigotries encourage people to lobby for benefits only for their own sect and ignore all others, ensuring that the most powerless remain isolated. Bigotry does not restrict itself to one sect or region. The evictions of Dominicans of Haitian descent from the Dominican Republic or the mass slaughter and expulsion of Rohingya people in Burma are just two examples where people will find almost imperceptible differences and use them to create division and mask economic motives.

All bigotries are expressions of class bigotries. Hatred of women is hatred of lifegivers and caregivers and it lessens when women refuse those roles. Hatred of indigenous people is hatred of ecosystem caregivers and it lessens when indigenous people refuse those roles. Hatred of those who are valued less or more is a protection of class. Hate is not based on appearance. It is based on the class associated with appearance. Hate will not end by achieving equality for all different sects in each class as long as the classes themselves remain. The classes will never be removed as long as the trade economy is profiting from them and the  bigotries will never be removed as long as the top class is protected by them.

Excerpted from Autonomy, Diversity, Society. Citations will be transferred when I get a minute.

People are commodity

In every single part of the world, chattel slavery has been a part of human history. No region of any significant size has not had large populations of people sold as slaves and no region has not purchased slaves. There is no era in which slavery was not a significant part of societal relations. Even hunter-gatherer people abducted or claimed slaves as war or crime reparations or as spoils of war. Throughout history and continuing today, these human products were used as adopted family members, labour, sex slaves, human sacrifice and even more gruesome fates. Even when they weren’t traded, they were chattel in that they were considered the property of an owner, to dispose of as they wished.

Slavery increased wherever the trade economy flourished, as did the production of all products for sale. The trade empires of the middle east and Africa were in very large part built by the labour of slaves and the wealth brought by the slave trade. During the last two millennia and earlier, the Arab and African states made slavery for both labour and sex an integral part of their social structure. Although slavery is technically illegal in every part of the world now (in Saudi Arabia and Yemen not until 1965, In Oman not until 1970 and in Mauritania not until 2007) neither region has ever really eradicated it and both have recently seen greatly increased human trafficking of all kinds[cite]. In addition to the regular trade, disasters such as the wars in Syria, the Central African Republic, South Sudan and elsewhere bring the international vultures of human trafficking as well as politicians not averse to ridding themselves of annoying populations at a profit.

Europe’s use of slaves dropped after the fall of the Western Roman Empire with the increase in serfs and indentured servants and the decrease in trade. Europe was still frequently raided for slaves for all reasons, particularly the Slavs who were so often raided that the condition of slavery became synonymous with their name. Possibly three million[cite] Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Moldovans, Circassians and Lithuanians were enslaved by Central Asian khanates between 1500-1774 or six and a half million between 1200 to 1760,[cite] in a trade several authors have dubbed the “harvesting of the steppe”. According to Mike Dash, “the great Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky … observed that “if you consider how much time and spiritual and material strength was wasted in the monotonous, brutal, toilsome and painful pursuit of [the Tatar] steppe predators, one need not ask what people in Eastern Europe were doing while those of Western Europe advanced in industry and commerce, in civil life and in the arts and sciences.”

The vast majority of this trade was destined for the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. The Slavs had been the site of frequent slave raids earlier by Vikings, Italy, and others for sale to the Byzantine Empire, but by the time of the Ottoman Empire the trade was huge, there and elsewhere. Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Britain, Ireland and Iceland were also raided by pirates from the Barbary coast and some estimates claim between 1 million and 1.25 million[cite] Europeans were captured by pirates and sold as slaves in Tunis, Algiers and Tripoli between the 16th and the 19th centuries. Slaves made up three quarters of the population of the Crimean Khanate and one fifth of the population of Constantinople. As huge and devastating as this trade was, it was matched or dwarfed by numbers enslaved in parts of Africa and does not include the smaller or more exotic branches of the trade like slaves from Karelia (Finland).[cite] Like Africa and the Middle East, eastern Europe has never eradicated this trade. The still primarily female slave exodus is still ongoing[cite], still with the complicity of some source and destination governments.

China at many times preferred peasant, serf and bonded labour to slavery, but large populations of criminals and foreigners were still enslaved throughout Chinese history and as now,[cite] any laws against slavery frequently did not reflect the reality. Like Africa and Europe, India’s preexisting slavery was greatly expanded by the Islamic slave markets. Later Indians were also sold to the European overseas empires. The Dutch had the largest slave trade in the world in the late 1600s and, besides enslaving the indigenous populations, they imported around 6000 African slaves and an unknown quantity of Indian slaves a year into the Dutch West Indies.[cite] South East Asian slave populations were huge, particularly in Thailand and Burma where some estimate a quarter or third of the populations in some regions were enslaved between the 17th and 20th centuries. All the above regions still have large populations in labour slavery today[cite], as well as sex slavery and purchased brides, increasingly as the female shortage in both India and China has become more acute[cite]. Nepal and other areas are frequently raided by traffickers for the sex trade[cite] and Nepal also has traditional slavery still in existence among the kamlari[cite]. Displaced populations like Burma’s Rohingya people are either pushed off into boats to die or they fall victim to the human traffickers, frequently associated with officials like those in the Thai navy[cite]. China also has indentured labour that is difficult to distinguish from slavery and they have mass trials and execute prisoners and political dissidents horrifically and on demand for the organ trade in what can only be called a human farming industry[cite].

Slavery was widespread in America, as it was on the other continents, and Europeans who landed in America both enslaved indigenous people and were occasionally themselves enslaved. As soon as overseas trade expansion began in the 15th century, so did renewed trafficking in slaves by Europe. The trans-Atlantic slave trade from Africa to America was a massive industry from the mid 1500’s to the mid 1800s, enslaving around 85,000 people a year at its peak[cite]. While slave raids have always resulted in very low survival rates for the victims, from causes such as long marches, foreign diseases, castration and abuse, the trans-Atlantic voyages were particularly long and horrific with inestimable death and suffering. In addition to slaves from Africa, political dissidents and victims of attempted genocide in Ireland and other unwanted or poor throughout Europe were sent as indentured servants in conditions sometimes close to slavery. With the progressive abolition of slavery in the colonies, their numbers were replaced by more indentured servants from India and China, also sometimes kept in conditions difficult to distinguish from slavery. As well as traditional slavery, the United States in particular has continued to keep servants in a state near indentured servitude through legal threats based on their visa status.

In the era of abolition, slavery was depicted in American colonies as a problem of racial equality. This approach disregards the entire history of global slavery which took place before racism was invented and which hasn’t been slowed at all by attempts to eliminate racism. The international focus on one part of the historical trade, labour slaves from Africa to European colonies, in particular the United States, has allowed all other slavery to operate with varying levels of impunity. When slavery becomes so visible it can’t escape notice, it is now called human trafficking. While the new term focuses on the sale of people rather than the use of them, they are both incomplete terms and the only reason to swap one for the other is to pretend that there was a point in history where slavery was abolished and now it is a historical topic. While there may no longer be African slaves picking cotton in the United States, there is unprecedented slave labour in the United States from the rest of America and even more slaves from around the world in the United States sex industry[cite]. Despite the fact that there are far more books and papers discussing the end of slavery than the continuation of it, slavery has increased in almost every part of the world[cite].

Slavery has also been depicted as a problem integral to production and capitalism. Both today and throughout history, there were huge populations of slaves purchased for consumption instead of production, slaves for sex and other service to the wealthy. Slaves as product instead of means of production have been widely ignored in movements focused on workers defined as those involved in manufacturing product. This has led many historians to depict the Arab slave trade as not related to labour and to talk about slaves being freed by marriage and adoption because the service of women and children continues to be unvalued. Exodus 21:2 instructed “If you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve for six years; but on the seventh he shall go out as a free man without payment.” but Exodus 21:7 qualifies “If a man sells his daughter as a female slave, she is not to go free as the male slaves do.” If marriage is involved there is no need to qualify. Then as now, we accept female slavery as a domestic cultural norm. If a boy is sold for labour, human rights groups call it slavery, but for a girl they use the term marriage in cases which are slavery by all definitions. Women and children’s bodies are also now a resource for the massive non-consensual porn industry, as product. Defining domestic and product slavery would require discussion of the roles of women and children in the wider society. The lack of autonomy of women and children in deeply patriarchal societies also makes it much more difficult to define the conditions which constitute slavery. If adult male standards were used, all women and children may be considered slaves in some communities.

Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written in 1948 to abolish slavery. In 1966 it was modified to ensure it still allows slavery of the lowest class, in prisons. In the private prisons of the U.K., U.S. and Australia, people in prisons are chattel, actually owned by the corporate prisons, and their labour and their bodies can be sold through corporate contracts. With the scandals involving police and judiciary funneling people into these prisons for payment,[cite] it is evident the prisons are the new cotton fields in the United States and the judiciary and police in these cases are acting as slave traders.

Slavery, like genocide, is a problem that has been with us in every region and every era. To our credit, both are now almost universally recognized as something we need to overcome, but we are nowhere close to doing so. Both are largely ignored by both media and public, perhaps because those whose job it is to see that these crimes do not go on are helpless to stop them. Despite the attempts at creating peacekeeping forces by the United Nations and others, we have not developed a way for larger society to protect one group of people who another are intent on massacring. Neither do we have any way to stop a lucrative trade economy in any product, particularly when many of those profiting occupy powerful positions. It is easier to pretend these things no longer happen.

A 2014 study on population growth projections finds an 80% probability that the world population, now 7.2 billion, will increase to between 9.6 and 12.3 billion by 2100.[cite] Growth will occur primarily from nations which have suffered from trade pillaging, including indigenous populations in the Americas. In the wealthy states, as well as the rapidly growing economies such as China, Brazil and India, an epidemic of aging is projected instead.[cite] At the same time, income disparity has reached a point where “eight men own the same wealth as the poorest half of the world.”[cite] More than ever in history, there are far too many vulnerable people to meet the needs of the few who can afford to buy them. There is also a global gender imbalance[cite] which has been caused by the gynocidal[cite] actions of populations in China[cite] and India,[cite] the current and projected largest populations in the world, as well as other places. Since China and India are also two of the wealthiest economies, they can afford to spread their severe imbalance to other nations.[cite] More than ever in history, women are a global commodity.[cite]

The fact that population growth is stabilized or dropping in industrialized countries and increasing in developing countries and poor populations is used to justify both active and passive genocide by the people controlling the technology to wage war and stop disease. The number of displaced people reached 65.3 million in 2016 and is steadily climbing.[cite] It is no longer necessary to conduct raids into peaceful territories for the slave trade. Wars and famine are driving large populations of desperate and untraceable people into the arms of slave traders.

With the Australian government’s recent sale of refugees to Cambodia,[cite] human trafficking has become openly a government activity again, as it always has been secretly. The U.S. military and Canadian resource corporations have for years disdained justice systems in favour of monetary payouts for the lives of people they murder.[cite] The trade economy has normalized the valuation of people in monetary terms to the point that it is customary to reply with a dollar value when asked for a person’s worth. The underclass in earlier empires were valuable labour. In modern times the vast majority are expendable product. Replacing labour slavery with waged labour and automation has only expanded the uses people buy slaves for. People are bought and sold as products for militias, prostitution, marriage, organ trafficking and even ritual killings. People are tortured for ransom and charged for their passage as refugees.

There is no need for wise rulers to create community in a supranational empire. Trade can make problem populations disappear and bring profit too. Inconvenient populations were, and still are, packed on cargo ships and traded as slaves or indentured servants or settled in penal colonies far away from home. Bounties for neighbours helped fill Guantanamo as well as slave markets throughout history and today. One of the primary sources of income for stateless militias is still the ancient standby, kidnap and ransom. With the growth of criminal industry, human trafficking is far more versatile now than it has ever been. Stateless militias traffic people to sell for every criminal use, but use them as well as drug mules, for weapons running, as sexual bribes to militia members and as ‘suicide’ bombers. Both stateless and state militias use child soldiers. Boko Haram fighting against the Civilian Joint Task Force youth vigilantes endorsed and supported by the Nigerian military was a war of children against children, something none of Nigeria’s ally states objected to and something media seldom reported in their periodic hysteria about Boko Haram.

The trade economy creates a market for whatever product it has to sell. No one needs to buy trafficked humans. The demand is created by the seller who convinces the buyer. The vast increase in the paedosadism market, where children are raped, tortured or murdered for adult entertainment is a horrifying example of created demand.[cite] There is a new and growing market in West Africa created by those who have convinced politicians that amulets from ritual killings are necessary for their electoral success.[cite] China is farming prisoners and political dissidents and harvesting their organs on demand to market them to a self-indulgent and wealthy population who have been convinced they deserve immortality.[cite]

One of the most interesting economic loops of the last century is in the paedosadism market. A very large number of powerful officials in governments and international organizations have been implicated in paedosadism,[cite] leading to much debate in the press as to the causal link between paedosadism and high office. There is an obvious feedback loop between a criminal underground which is in charge of human trafficking and those in positions of power who are either lured to participate or were selected for high office because of their blackmail potential. The frequency with which spy agencies are involved in these cases also indicates that they may be encouraging the election of politicians and others who they can easily control with blackmail. Besides the incredibly high number of politicians implicated in the UK,[cite] thers are accusations that children from Kincora boys home were used by MI6 for blackmail of IRA and Sinn Fein members[cite] and accusations that Joris Demmink, the Dutch Minister of Security and Justice, was being blackmailed by Turkey[cite] and others. There have also been multiple cases of organizations such as United Nations peacekeepers involved in paedosadism, in Bosnia, in Somalia, in the Central African Republic and more. It is obvious that a criminal industry as huge as human trafficking cannot exist without borders and bank accounts being accessible to the trade and that access is ensured by a blackmail and bribery loop fed by the industry itself.

States also have multiple ways to profit from large populations now that large scale industrial labour is no longer needed. They are used for weapons advertising, as seen in the huge increase in arms dealer profits from the weapons trade shows being held over the slaughter of people in Syria, Gaza and elsewhere.[cite] They are used to fill prison corporations, a circular trade that has taxes pay corporations to imprison the citizens and then prisons sell the labour of prisoners to other corporations at a vast discount.[cite] People are made ill and their illness is used to profit the pharmaceutical and medical industries.[cite] Their food security is destroyed and the resulting famines are used to profit NGOs, a cycle well planned years in advance.[cite] Cartels in America sell drugs to the poor in the United States in exchange for the guns flowing down the Iron River from the United States to Central America.[cite] Weapons manufacturers in the United States profit on the lives of the poor in both Central America and the U.S. and then convince governments they need even more guns to stop the violence. Water everywhere is stolen and polluted by Coca Cola so that people are forced to buy Coca Cola.[cite]

Since the years during which IBM profited from cataloguing people for Hitler’s concentration camps,[cite] the tech industry has catalogued and spied on and murdered people for the powerful. Intelligence and military agencies have been accused of or admitted to conducting mass and individual experiments on foreign and local populations for decades and the findings are frequently used to profit industry.[cite] Food, environmental, worker and infrastructure safety are reduced by corruption, incompetence, and corporate greed, but even more so when the ruling strata would rather the population was reduced.

As people become more expendable, the popular uses for them are ever more genocidal. Drugs are as useful for immobilizing a large public and funding their tyrants as they were in the U.K. – China opium wars or Japan’s occupation of Manchuria. Today, China is more likely to be the supplier, as they are in providing fentanyl to the United States[cite] or heroin to Burma’s Kachin people.[cite] The three biggest criminal industries are all genocidal, a great help in removing populations standing in the way of resource corporations or threatening the wealthy. The weapons for populations to destroy each other with greater ease and the drugs to increase the violence and incapacitate effective resistance have been supplemented with the rapid growth of the human trafficking industry.

The trade economy and borders have made both genocide and slavery much more difficult to control. Both slavery and human trafficking are now illegal in every state in the world, but the states do not control the trade economy. Human trafficking is now the world’s largest criminal trade, ahead of weapons and drugs. Like the rest of the supranational merchant class, this economy operates above state jurisdiction. The United Nations has estimated there are now about thirty million slaves worldwide[cite] but it is impossible to know the real number. Traffickers are often supplied by organizations working with the most vulnerable people, from NGOs to military to child protection services. They haunt places where people may have gone missing for any number of reasons such as natural disasters and refugee migrations.

We have always had sectarianism. The difference now is we also have hierarchy. Those who treat the rest of us as an outgroup they have no empathy for are at the very top strata of society and have control over every aspect of our lives. We have always committed atrocities on people in our outgroups. The difference now is we can profit from those atrocities. Whether our actions have social approval or not, they can produce currency which will bring social approval. As long as we can buy social approval with currency we are no longer as susceptible to societal coercion. As long as our societies are non-existent, shunning and inclusion have no effect on us.

 

Excerpted from Autonomy, Diversity, Society. Citations will be transferred when I get a minute.

Witches and how they are silenced

A weed is a strong plant thriving where those in power do not want it. A witch is a strong person thriving where those in power do not want them.

The Inquisition was a centuries long movement to discredit and destroy the caregivers of communities and land and put all knowledge and power in the hands of industry. Wherever women or indigenous people possessed knowledge and influence they were labeled as witches, discredited and silenced. This still happens to both women and indigenous people today, especially those in caregiving roles, but today instead of fires, they are mostly kept in place by class. As the possessors of knowledge and social influence, witches were at the top of their societies. To keep these societies in a lower class, the top had to be decapitated.

Women in the last millennium were vilified, sexually terrified, driven from science and knowledge based fields and left with no purpose after menopause. The most powerful traditional careers for old women in Europe were forcibly stolen, taken over and commodified. For centuries, women and indigenous cultures were afraid and ashamed to share their knowledge, now ridiculed as old wives’ tales and superstitions. Photoshopped history and the centralized press entrenched the dominance of wealthy western men and laws regarding official certification, patents and copyrights kept stolen community knowledge from community use. Women and indigenous people who want to enter science now must enter a field controlled by western men and act according to their rules. They must study and accept that caucasian men have been responsible for every innovation in history. They must attend a university full of subjects whose histories teach they are inferior, imbecilic and inherently evil alongside the heroic Great Men who reputedly solved all of the world’s problems with one Nobel Prize after another.

Women are now accepted as token Great Men if they come from an approved demographic and are fully accepting of the teachings of the other Great Men. Acceptable roles are as representatives of all womankind under the label Feminism, that affiliation which is used as a club to push corporate strategy under the guise of helping women, or as promotional tools for Great Men, citing, interviewing, speaking about and generally acting as a reflective moon to their suns. Unless a woman sees a great need to distribute their own point of view, they probably will not as there is no benefit, it will not be heard and it usually leads to ostracization. They have generally learned to fear mobs, economic survival and social acceptance depends on acceptance by the Great Men and communication is too difficult without group support. They will rarely, if ever, see their vision come to fruition in the way they wished anyway and they will nearly always see their ideas co-opted for the glorification and empowerment of a Great Man.

In the debate over how much of Albert Einstein’s work was collaboration with his wife Mileva Marić, a lot of men decided she did not actually have anything to do with his work, pointing largely to the fact that she did no work after they separated. After they separated, she was a single parent of one schizophrenic son and another angry fatherless son, was responsible for a sister suffering pyschotic episodes and two parents and had no professional encouragement. Einstein had all of the adulation, time, resources and expert colleagues at his disposal and he also produced nothing comparable to their work in 1905. Even during their marriage, the relationship was obviously unbalanced enough that he felt the list of demands[cite] he presented to her were reasonable. Great Men are usually given a huge amount of time and resources to sit and think and study. Someone offering to take over Mileva Marić’s unpaid work while she thought is laughable even today.

Even when a Great Man such as John Stuart Mill states that his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, co-wrote his essay and it includes the same arguments she published years earlier, male scholars decide that he was lying and he wrote it all himself. Women must excel in their belief of this history. Their acceptance is contingent on their proof that they are in all respects, identical to men. Women who are disinterested in studying an endless and unbroken stream of caucasian men are chastised as being disinterested in politics, science, or other serious topics, despite the fact that they still make up the vast majority of voluntary action based labour in all of those fields. The ridicule of every woman who speaks in public as a big mouthed woman, the endless complaining about the sound of women’s voices, and the instant sexualization of any woman who speaks in public is still used to prevent women from escaping the role they were assigned by capitalism.

Media and corporations attempt to ensure that all women seen in public are under 30 in a continuance of the demonization of women past childbearing age. Women must do everything men do, with all of the above obstacles, before they are 30 and then be compared with men at the end of their careers. Men are shown billionaires in the media, women are shown plastic surgery. The token women in Hollywood films, half the age and exponentially more attractive than the men, are echoed in technology conferences and elsewhere in the business world.

Booth babes and women as display appear to serve no purpose other than a warning to women much as hanged cadavers once warned travelers away from city walls. The picture here illustrates, as does nearly every tech conference, that while fat bald old men are welcomed everywhere in IT, women over 25 do not exist and women do not exist except as an attractive display of body parts in any case. Since women were once equal in technology, writing the first algorithm, the first programming language, the first compiler and leading many important projects such as the software development for the first Apollo moon landing, the current demographics are not the result of ability or interest but the result of the drastic increase in power associated with the field.

Photo from Consumer Electronics Show 2013 via Mashable.[cite] 

It would not be acceptable in IT to have constant headlines like How to explain the new data-leaking ‘Heartbleed bug’ to your mom[cite] directed at an ethnic group instead of a gender. Neither would it be acceptable to have a conference full of caucasian men decorated with naked bodies of men from another ethnic group. From funding caucasian men for being caucasian men[cite] to ensuring networking strongholds are as female friendly as frat houses,[cite] IT has aggressively driven women from its clubs just as medicine, the formerly most powerful profession, did.

It is common to point out that men score more highly in math and abstract areas than women to account for their prevalence in STEM fields. By that logic we would also expect almost all public speakers to be women since they score significantly higher in verbal areas. There should also be far more older women in all professions than older men since mental faculties in men deteriorate more quickly.[cite] Since both fields are completely dominated by men, especially as they become older, we can concede that there are plenty of both that are qualified for both areas but something is still sending far more men to the top in every high status field.

In 1996 Ellen Winner wrote: “… gifted girls have much more trouble socially than do gifted boys. For example, in one study, academically gifted boys were shown to be more popular than average ones, while gifted girls were less popular than average girls. In fact, the most popular of all four groups were the gifted boys, and the least popular of all were the gifted girls. The gifted boys were perceived as funny, smart, and creative, while the gifted girls were classified as moody, melancholy, self-absorbed, aloof, and bossy. What is seen as leadership in a boy is seen as bossiness in a girl.”[cite]

“Girls with high grade-point averages report more depression, lower self-esteem, and more psychosomatic symptoms than do boys with such grades. The conflict between intimacy and excellence is also felt acutely by children from minority groups in which it is not “cool” to excel at school.”[cite]

“… the striking decrease in the number of girls in gifted school programs in later grades. Girls make up about half the population in these programs in kindergarten through third grade, but by junior high school they make up less than 30 percent. Girls show lower self-confidence and lower career aspirations than do boys of equal ability. The ambitions of bright girls decline in high school, even though they tend to get higher grades than boys. And girls are more likely to hide their abilities in order to be socially accepted.“[cite]

If you ascribe to the theory that the extra X chromosome brings women an extra resilience from neurotypical deviation we can speculate that the very rarity of women who stray very far from the mean is grounds for their persecution. There are many factors yet to be eliminated before we can accept any such theory, such as the effect of poverty[cite] and chronic stress[cite] on iq testing, but whatever the cause, less deviation in women could lead to less tolerance of diversity. You may also consider that persecution of witches, whether women or other lower classes, may create a greater need for solidarity against a common enemy elite. It could be a cumulative rage against the idea of survival of the fittest in a trade economy which was designed specifically to exclude them that causes hostility towards elitism. Equality may evoke memories of the Commons, an idea which for women represents the last time they were recognized as contributing members of society entitled to their share, not just parasites dependent on charity or pale reflections of men. Or perhaps societies in which women were beaten and killed for incompetence and burned at the stake for attaining skill or knowledge have created a culture where pulling attention is taboo.

Whatever you choose as the cause, it is impossible at this point to deny the hostility the majority of women feel for women who excel too far beyond them or lag too far behind them. If girls are now in some cultures more accepting of higher achievement among girls it is only as a class movement. There is still no support for relative excellence or originality or the independent thought that would lead to radical creativity. Feminism, like all group affiliation, preaches solidarity not individualism. There is also still the ancient divide between the good women who obey society’s strictures and the bad women who disobey. It is women as much as men who now police this binary divide.

“For it seems very evident that another person’s narcissism has a great attraction for those who have renounced part of their own narcissism … It is as if we envied them for maintaining a blissful state of mind.” – Sigmund Freud[cite]

Both women and indigenous people very frequently offer work anonymously to parasites to get their ideas heard through group work, NGOs or media, or as assistants to Great Men, partners or children. As Nietzche instructed,[cite] the greatest achievement women should strive for was to produce an Übermensch, not be one. Centuries of women’s and indigenous work unacknowledged and used freely by the commons has made it habitual for Great Men to pick it up and market it as their own. Any group that produces great content will also attract people who will attempt to use the content to become Great Men. In either case, control of the power created by the ideas will not be wielded by the originator and it is very unlikely it will be wielded in the manner they intended, one reason so many Great Men act in ways completely opposite to their original promises.

In medicine, women were allowed back much later as subservient nurses, providing care and forbidden to act without permission from a male doctor in a continuation of the fear that women with no male supervision would conspire to kill babies. This is typical of the class structure created where caucasian men are assigned the roles with titles, authority, credit and media attention while others have been permitted action based paths. A horizontal system of action based governance would remove the misplaced authority. As it is, the labour is dissociated from the authority. Part of the reason for this dissociation is that recognition and credit follow social approval which is overwhelmingly accorded to the top class of caucasian men, by all classes.

Women promote husbands, sons, friends and sometimes strangers as a matter of habit. Women sometimes promote other family members as a way to improve their own situations, but often they simply use their energy and skills to promote others since they aren’t going anywhere themselves. They sometimes marry or give birth to people they want to deliver their message or attain their goals, a frustrating experience all around. Women will work tirelessly to elect a man to a position where he may enable the social change they desire. They will do all the background for male journalists, NGO’s or others in a position to achieve their goals while knowing the camera will be on the man and they will never be acknowledged. They will provide ideas and assistance to men in power because they have the skills and will never have the position themselves.

Women very often promote men involuntarily by having credit for their work stolen. There are endless job descriptions filled primarily by women which essentially mean all of the credit for all of their work will be applied to the man who hired them. Women tend to fill these jobs due to lack of higher employment opportunities. Often credit is stolen and women lack the voice and credibility to stop the theft. While this theft may certainly happen to men as well, it happens far more often to women as there is less risk involved. It is much less likely she will ever attain a position of power so her ability to retaliate is limited. Women who want recognition for their own work are most typically dismissed as hysterical, having giant egos, and caring more for themselves than the cause, a throwback to the slave morality expected of women in caregiving roles.

Both men and women tolerate the idea that some people are going to be at the top and that those people will be men. They may individually resent the advancement of specific people, but there is no widespread feeling that no men ought to be advancing, especially among people with the power to promote. The strata ceilings which keep people from rising above their class are also strata floors to keep them from dropping, voluntarily or not. There is always instant social justification for a caucasian man who fails and hatred for a man who voluntarily lowers his status by being openly homosexual or a caregiver. Men who seek to protect those outside their class instead of exploiting them are ridiculed as white knights by the class protectors. Group narcissism and strata protection also ensures hatred from men when a celebrated man subsequently identifies as a woman like Chelsea Manning or glee when a celebrated woman is discovered to have previously identified as a man like Dr. V.[cite]

There is also a practical benefit to both men and women of promoting men as they may rise to the top of any ponzi scheme and elevate their supporters. There is no personal gain in promoting women and almost no one does it. If a woman achieves a position where a man would typically receive non-reciprocal promotion, they are resented instead of promoted. Women who expect other women (or men) to work for them with no recognition are commonly regarded as bitches and sabotaged instead.

Disinterested men will tolerate women advancing. Many of these men feel they work to help women advance, but at very best, they do not stand in their way. A man devoting his life to furthering a woman’s career with no ulterior motive is extremely rare. Even those men that treat women equally generally expect far more ego-stroking and recognition in return for their magnanimity than they give. Women who promote men typically receive nothing in return and this is commonplace throughout the world. The reverse simply doesn’t happen outside rare isolated occurrences.

Many men actively work against the advancement of women. One reason is real or perceived gain for themselves. Either they do not wish to lose the unreciprocated support which is propping up their own success or they fear the advancement of women will create more competition for themselves. Another reason is group narcissism that sees women as a competitive outgroup.

Many women loudly proclaim that they promote other women. Usually, they do not, and they do not even tolerate it happening. Women very rarely promote the advancement of women past their class. They guard their strata ceilings as much as men guard their strata floors. Women certainly do promote and support each other but it is very much a reciprocal exchange. Where distribution deviates it must be based on their perception of fair. They will offer up those within two standard deviations below the normative mean as candidates for promotion while undermining and bringing back those above the mean. If men say another man was born with more ability, it is acknowledgment of superiority. If women say another woman was born with more ability, it is a demand for compensation. Hollywood depicts men and boys in terms of unchanging social strata. The hero usually remains a hero and even when the nerd gets the popular girl, he remains a nerd. Girls are depicted in conflicts over their social stratas: the unpopular girl is transformed into a pretty and popular one or the popular girl is humiliated and brought down. Successful men tend to tell people of the positive things in their life, successful women tell of their challenges. This is not humility, it is justifiable fear.

This does not mean most women are haters of elitism. They are equally vicious to those below them. When homely becomes ugly, fat becomes obese or stupid becomes learning disabled, these women are again more vindictive and vicious than their male counterparts. Women with poor social skills or incompetence are treated with derision, while for men these weaknesses just reaffirm their masculinity. Women will also happily promote elite men all day. It is just other women that need to stay within the acceptable range for their class.

Class war really occurs between stratas, not arbitrary assignments of gender or race. Women and others trapped in lower classes attack those who attempt to rise and try to knock them back into their place much as gangs and cults will murder people who try to leave and some men despise other men who lower themselves to the level of women. In stratified society, the stratas are the real societies and those attempting to leave are shunning their society. Retaliatory shunning is the reaction. Even with no further attack, shunning is one of the most effective punishments humans have devised for each other. It is possible that the effects of shunning are felt more by both women and those in indigenous cultures because of vulnerability to outside threats, a greater biological or cultural workload to share and more poverty. Shunning and lack of approval from the vast majority of class peers and a lack of class peers in higher stratas is enough in itself to strongly discourage women and other lower stratas from offending their class with any attempt at excellence or achievement. Women with superior ability either accept inferior roles or learn that other women are their mortal enemies.

Witches, whether women or other lower classes, usually never realize they are intelligent, as they are more likely to be told they are arrogant. While potential Great Men will be hailed as leaders and class examples, witches will be destroyed by their peers as class traitors. If witches excel they must downplay, apologize, minimize and hide it. Beautiful women must stress their stupidity, brilliant women must hide their sexuality. All women must be shown as having sacrificed their family life or career, and the word sacrifice is usually explicitly and accurately used to describe an offering made to appease their class. Women and other lower classes are consistently criticized for not promoting themselves but the risks in doing so are too great.

Women at the top are the ones chosen to be there by men and not eliminated by women, a dual filter that excludes most witches: those with brilliance and originality and those capable of disturbing the class structure.

 

Excerpted from Autonomy, Diversity, Society. Citations will be transferred when I get a minute.

 

People are means of destruction

If we compare the natural duties of a Father with those of a King, we find them to be all one, with no difference at all except in their latitude or extent. As the Father over one family, so the King, as Father over many families, extends his care to preserve, feed, clothe, instruct and defend the whole commonwealth. – Robert Filmer, Patriarcha[cite]

For any society to exist, there must be creators and protectors working for the society. All adults were usually needed in both roles, providing shelter and food and creating the physical assets of a home such as tools, clothing, blankets and art and building the social structure of the society. In most times and places, there have also been highly gendered roles. The women gave birth and did the majority of the early child care and men assumed more of the protector roles, both in defending the tribe and their assets in conflicts and in representing the tribe in outside negotiations with possibly unfriendly neighbours. In these societies, strength, bravery and generosity to the tribe were the most admired attributes of any man. The power of social approval was strong enough in most tribes that people, especially men, would face certain death for a favourable place in their tribe’s history.

As societies grew, many turned into patriarchal clans. In these societies, men were not just members of the tribe, sharing duties and receiving benefits as equals. The common protective role assumed by men became the role of a disciplinarian parent. The father-ruler in these clans was the embodiment of law and order. They made all the decisions for the clan and were to be obeyed without question. They meted out punishments to any who disobeyed and resolved conflicts with more punishments. The love and gratitude a tribe felt for their warriors became awe and fear for these patriarchs.

A structured class difference was created with patriarchs above the clan and men above their own families. As with all class barriers, people became isolated from each other by power and fear. Men in these societies felt the love they once earned replaced by respect at best, fear at worst. Communal sharing of responsibility was replaced by complete authority where the patriarchs were expected to have all answers for everything that occurred in their domain. The subjection of women infantilized women but it also made parents of men and placed formerly shared responsibility on the shoulders of only men. The shame men once felt for personal failure was now shame for the failure of anyone in their clan. With greater responsibility came greater tyranny and deeper class divide between men and the source of their approval.

Lately it has become common to equate patriarchy with oppression of women by men. Patriarchy is simply oppression, of women and men, by a class structure that infantilizes those at the bottom and burdens those at the top. It was not women who overthrew the patriarchy in Europe, it was men. While women fought alongside men, it was men who designed the future structure of society, summed up in the cry for Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité! The cry for liberty was a cry for freedom of men, both freedom from subjection by a patriarchal ruler and freedom from responsibility for all of society. The responsibility and isolation of men in a patriarchal society was frequently empty and unrewarding. The call for fraternity was a call for brotherhood, for a society of equals who would meet without demanding anything of each other. Since that call, libertarian men have fought for their independence from responsibility to society and insisted that the principle of equality means all are equally able to care for themselves. Most industrialized communities are no longer patriarchal. They are nearly all fraternal. The fraternity denies responsibility to society and in return receives no approval from society. Approval from others is the life force for humanity, our single greatest motivator. Life without approval is an empty shell.

For those men that remained committed to service to their communities and maintained their old roles as caregivers and protectors, they found their communities deeply changed. While the trade economy was teaching women that they were parasites and lucky to be enslaved, it was teaching men that they could only buy acceptance, love and society. As societies became more dissociated, generosity to the entire village or clan was replaced by a man building the personal wealth of his own immediate family. Jobs went from being of service to your village in exchange for approval from your village to being of service to corporate industrialists or militias in exchange for currency. The former great men who protected and served the villages became industrialists who exploited and attacked the other villagers.

The social motivation was the exact same. The men still craved the approval of their societies but approval which had been gratitude for service became approval of wealth. Currency became a dissociated form of approval that you could keep in the bank and spend at will. A rich man could walk down the streets of a village and receive attention and gifts just as a hero could earlier. These men still crave the same things their earlier forebears did: celebrity, political leadership, high social ranking, a place in history, and most of all, approval.

The difference is not in the men but in the social structure they are now acting in. Instead of being in service to society, these men are in service to industry which is usually in direct opposition to the best interests of their society. The role of a great man has been perverted to mean its opposite. Those once celebrated as being society’s great protectors and creators are now given a monetary simulation of approval for being society’s great destroyers. Their labour which would once have brought them approval from all members of their society and attention from their love interests, now brings them media celebrity and flattery from the hurricane of vampires and sycophants orbiting the ponzi schemes of wealth and celebrity. The men who gain wealth to marry a beautiful, young woman and then complain that she married them for their wealth know what they are missing but not how to attain it.

The dissociation of modern families means that not only does a man no longer include his extended family or village in the society he seeks to benefit, he frequently does not include his wife either or sometimes even his children. Many billionaires still crave approval and a spot in history as great men but work all of their lives with only one goal, to amass as much wealth as possible. It is hard to imagine what makes these men so obsessed with collecting more and more of this dissociated approval with no real approval behind it except a very deep confusion as to what they are craving and where to find it.

It is possible that the too-little-too-late groups of philanthropist billionaires are a glimmer of recognition in these men, particularly the ones who realize they don’t even like their own wives and children enough to create an empire for them. The patronizing, ineffective and frequently outright sociopathic projects they undertake in the name of philanthropy show either a complete lack of understanding of society and social needs or reinforces the fact that they are irreclaimably sociopathic and still associate control and power with approval. Even where their projects may be of some actual benefit to society, when presented on top of their years of internationally destructive activity, it is little more than very insufficient war reparations.

This is the role men have been forced into since the beginnings of the trade economy. Men were shunned out of their families and into industry or military far more often than women and were not welcomed back into their families without currency. In many cases they had to give up their entire family life and just send back the currency while they lived far from home. The social approval a woman once received for being a good mother was given to men if they were a good provider. After the trade economy took control of all social relationships, a good provider was the one who spent the least time with his family or village and was most successful in exploiting his society. Industry pretended that industrialists provided jobs and money, neither of which are needed by any community, and successfully perverted the word providers to be applied to the community destroyers. Social acceptance was granted to those who would formerly have been attacked.

Because men were much more successful as wage earners and because men migrate with far greater ease than women and have far less social obligations keeping them at home, women became the backbone of resistance to industrialists or military repression. From environmentalists to mothers of the disappeared, women have been filling the streets of peasant revolt for millennia.[cite] From industrialists to militias, men have made up the overwhelming majority of those they are fighting. The old social kernel, with the weak and the caregivers at the center and able adults, mostly men, as a protective shell, has changed to a society at war with itself.

Once children would be taught to be of service not just to their parents but to all elders and smaller children to gain the approval of their society. Now children are taught to be of service only to themselves and to exploit all others. Communities which once shared skills and knowledge with each other have now commodified teaching and restricted it to only their own children or those who can pay. Once children were taught that their tribe was the best and there was no other tribe as wonderful as theirs to strengthen group affiliation and an ingroup narcissism that shunned those outside. Now children are taught individual narcissism that shuns everyone outside themselves. A class war was created within families. Now caregivers serve children and those in the trade economy, those in trade purchase caregivers and children, and children are created as product to serve corporations. Even this most basic social network of dependencies has been turned into a siphon for the benefit of corporations.

The group narcissism that has throughout history allowed societies to ruthlessly exploit each other has become distilled into individual narcissism on a massive scale as each person looks out for their own society of one. In countries as dissociated as the United States, where people have been taught since birth that the potential loss of one American life is worth unlimited destruction of the rest of the world, the extreme group narcissism sets the scale for the extreme individual narcissism. This individual narcissism combined with the sectarianism of the United States looks like every person is a society at war with every other. It is hard to imagine such a country coming together enough to even conduct a civil war.

In the middle of this sits a disaffected group of men who are currently populating the part of the Internet called The Manosphere. This is the group of men who would previously have been receiving the greatest success under the trade economy and the greatest empty approval from their purchased caregivers and children. They have been taught to do nothing without personal benefit which they can exchange for specific approval. The specific approval from women and children is no longer forthcoming as both are much harder to purchase in industrialized societies than in the past, both because of their own independence and their own growing narcissism. The explosion of the PUA (pick up artist) industry is a movement where these men are trying to forcibly take the empty approval they feel entitled to, with or without an exchange. The fact that they spend most of their energy debating how to receive the most while giving the least, and the reliance on market deception, reflects their view of female approval as a commodity they ought to be able to purchase.

It is no surprise that these men have created such a powerfully bonded community any more than it is any surprise when they join violent cults and gangs. The new communities are providing them with the approval they crave. It is no surprise that they are so angry, or that opposing factions of women are equally angry. Narcissistic rage towards the designated source of approval is an invariable reaction to a withdrawal of approval. This is a principle recognized by MGTOW (the name of a group who call themselves Men Going Their Own Way but in fact spend all of their time online discussing women). The goal of MGTOW is to make women feel the narcissistic pain of rejection that they are feeling by withholding themselves from women.

The dissociation of industrialized societies has changed national narcissism into an explosion of individual narcissism. The amount of approval now demanded by individual members of industrialized societies is unlimited and of course, unsustainable. The monetization of this approval still requires a social aspect. As it takes more and more money to buy the envy and obsequiousness of others, the ruthlessness in obtaining wealth and the dissatisfaction it brings will continue.

The solutions to this narcissistic emptiness will not be found in gender parity in a trade economy. The answer is not that women should benefit from trade, it’s that men should not. All money in a trade economy comes from the powerful and we need to build a society that benefits the powerless. If service to society becomes the measure of worth, women will have parity overnight and all people will receive direct approval for their contributions. If we reject the economy based on trade to the powerful, neither men nor women will have to, or be able to, buy their acceptance into their own families or the approval of their communities.

The social acceptance we once received for being of service to our communities we now receive for competing with and exploiting them. This acceptance is not the social approval we all crave as humans. It is envy and fear and it leaves us empty.

 

Excerpted from Autonomy, Diversity, Society. Citations will be transferred when I get a minute.

People are means of production

Patriarchal control of women’s bodies is frequently explained as an issue of property ownership. Not just the women themselves but also any offspring were considered assets to be disposed of and therefore a source of power. Any attempt by women to limit reproduction was seen as a threat to the potential wealth of the family and society.

Today, there are far easier ways to control people than by reproducing them. Waged labour combined with institutional work slavery such as prison labour, university interns or forced volunteer work for those on social assistance gives the ability to demand labour from others with no social relation to the masters. Very little of the world’s population is now employed in direct service to the very rich in any case. Most are looking for a share of resources themselves and increasingly, posing a threat to the lifestyles of the very rich, particularly now that mass communication and organization enable great crowds in the streets worldwide pointing out their superior numbers. Increasing automation and overpopulation mean industry no longer needs the population growth we are experiencing so both motherhood and children have experienced a sharp devaluation in society. Industry has gone from punishing contraception, abortion and infanticide by death to trying to forcibly sterilize women. Women are caught in a war between those still dictating that women must have children and those dictating that they must not. China forces abortions[cite] while Ireland refuses them[cite]. Choice is lost and children are economic pawns instead of part of a society. At neither side is the support of motherhood or childhood considered at all, only the power to reproduce or not.

Women’s reproduction can be regulated by limiting access to birth control and forbidding its use, as well as making it impossible for women to survive without a family structure which includes heterosexual sex, but this only serves to increase reproduction. A society that wishes to decrease reproduction typically needs to make it disastrous to reproduce, historically by making it impossible to protect yourself while pregnant or to protect small children once they are born. Today, children are killed by states constantly and very publicly and dismissed as simply ‘collateral damage’. A very short time ago, the death of a child was considered by western society to be a non-debatable tragedy, an evil so pure and complete its evil was never questioned. This mindset was first altered by a persistent campaign during the US war against Iraq to depict Iraqi children as bomb carrying subhumans created by their parents only for the purpose of death. ‘They do not value life’, ‘They would rather die than live’, and ‘Iraqi children are not like ours’, became the new truths that western society was convinced to accept.

As always, the minority persecution then spread much more easily to a societal truth. Israeli soldiers are taught to kill anything that moves[cite]. The US military boasts of new guidelines that “opened the aperture” to considering children of any age legitimate targets[cite]. The children lost their humanity in the eyes of society and become objects. This change is probably illustrated nowhere better than on the U.S. police targets depicting “non-traditional threats” including pregnant women and children. Societal dissociation is complete with the police officer who stated he enlarged images of his own children for target practice “so that he would not be caught off guard with such a drastically new experience while on duty.”[cite] If not his own children, what society is it his duty to defend? The message is clear. People are paid to kill people. People are not paid to give birth. It is more socially acceptable to kill people than to give birth to people. Genocides are being fueled the world over on the premise that populations are growing too quickly and women are under particular attack as the source of population growth.

The increasing amount of slave labour involved in producing the labour force is also an effective deterrent to lifegivers and caregivers. Most workers are required for knowledge industries so caregivers are directed by the state to train their children to a far higher level, still with no compensation for their labour and at much greater expense to themselves. Giving birth no longer entitles the parents to any assistance from the people they raise, as those obligations are theoretically taken care of by systems of dissociation such as retirement funds and insurance. The work, risk and financial burden of producing the work force is all on the parents and the benefit is all for corporations.

While a capitalist who invests in anything that produces income is entitled to a return on investment, women who produced the entire work force have received none. In a world where society has been commodified, the return on investment is highly discouraging. Economic freedom is more available now (although unequal) for women but not for children and dependents who are still left unaccounted for by the economic systems imposed on society. In Japan the declining birth rate has reached a crisis point in a state that refuses to ease immigration restrictions. It has been suggested that women should be forced to contribute to society in another way if they refuse to give birth. Since Japanese women already work in the trade economy exactly like men, it would be interesting to see what social contribution would be considered comparable to lifegiving and caregiving, and whether it would receive pay[cite].

Not only is the trade economy structured to make lifegiving and caregiving very costly choices, mothers are depicted as parasites on society and a despised class. The term single mom today is as derogatory as unwed mother was in the past, the morality offended being not in the lack of marriage but in the possible dependency on social support. In the west, women supposedly have lifestyle choices but only if they make the choice to have extremely few or no children and a career or a wealthy partner. A single mother on welfare is treated as the most contemptible creature within the law. Parasites are hated as they weaken the host. The trade economy does not recognize that all men and women parasited off of their mothers in a very physical reality in order to exist. Underlying every patriarchal society and the trade economy is the idea that lifegivers should be grateful to the society for letting them and their offspring live. This is a complete reversal of biological fact.

Who gets to decide when dependency is to be despised? The excuse that infants did not consent to being born so are exempt from judgment is disingenuous as no one chooses to be dependent on society. Dependency is a natural part of the human experience and mothers are not creating dependency, they are relieving society of the vast majority of responsibility for it. Unlike every other dependency, society would not exist without infants. The propaganda depicting mothers as parasites is coming from the true economic parasites, deflecting blame onto their victims. The statement that people did not ask to be born is an attempt to diminish the mother’s contribution, or make it something to condemn in order to deny any reciprocal obligation from society.

The continual humiliation of living in a society which views them as parasites leaves women vulnerable to even more capitalist scams to force more free labour from them[cite]. For women conditioned through generations and written history to believe they are parasites and expect slavery, it is harder to recognize and fight off these predators. Most women with dependents pride themselves in their ability to survive in the system while obeying all the ridiculous rules, and condemn other women who refuse. They have accepted the trade economy’s zero valuation of their labour.

No human achievement would have been possible without the lifegivers and caregivers that raised and enabled those achieving. Mothers receive instant blame for failures of their adult offspring, as seen in the media coverage of tragedies like the Sandy Hook massacre[cite] or the Boston bombing[cite], both in the United States. Even a case that could seemingly not possibly be blamed on a woman, such as the Sandy Hook massacre, apparently can. The U.S. media and president aligned to exclude the killer’s mother from the recognized victims[cite] and media instantly began to question her parenting as a cause of his actions[cite]. Victim blaming is a phenomenon that occurs in all violence directed at a lower class, but only in violence against women can the victim be held to blame for the character of the killers. As soon as a woman is found to blame, this search for root causes stops; the discussion is never continued to find a man causing the supposed misbehaviour of the woman and hold him accountable for her actions. Teachers are also punished for student failure and disrespected like mothers are, more where students are younger and there are more female teachers. Lifegiving and caregiving both carry only the risk of loss of societal approval and no possibility to gain approval, at least for women.

This blame is not a recognition of the greater influence of mothers in caregiving as any credit is far more likely to be assigned to fathers. Gillian Triggs, the Australian justice given the position of president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, was depicted in Australian media as the daughter of a tank commander[cite] as though her father’s experience driving a tank was somehow more relevant to her legal post than her own five decades of legal achievement. Even a completely absent father like former U.S. president Barack Obama’s gets an autobiography entitled Dreams From My Father in which the mother who raised Obama is reduced to “a white woman from Kansas”.[cite]

Women as mothers are also derided as coercion to stop reproduction. The act of giving birth instantly triggers a demotion in status to a level of no sexual attractiveness, intelligence or interest to society except as a consumer of household products. Mothers, like prostitutes before them, are expected to not participate in society. Mothers have their children threatened if they disobey power as Pussy Riot members and many others have discovered[cite]. “You have a four-year-old daughter, and you must have known going into your performance in the church that arrest was a real possibility. Wasn’t that irresponsible toward your child?” Der Speigel scolded[cite] Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, in glaring contrast to their fawning coverage of Julian Assange, also a parent of young children. In today’s society, any reminder of female physical attributes comes with a perception of lesser intelligence. Women are described as a mom as a demeaning dismissive. In the technology fields currently hailed as our future in every aspect of society, mom is a euphemism for imbecile and some self-proclaimed feminists still sneer at other women as breeders. Respect and perception of intelligence decreases for women with the number of children born, while for men more children still adds to the perception of leadership.[cite]

Western media have gone from a frenzy of approbation for the Dionne quintuplets in the 1930’s to death threats for a U.S. mother of octoplets. In 1934, a poor farmer with five children gave birth to quintuplets and then three more children, for a total of thirteen. People all over the world sent assistance to them, to the point that Canada passed the Dionne Quintuplets’ Guardianship Act in 1935 making them state wards and a significant tourist attraction and government income source[cite]. In the United States in 2009, a single mother of six gave birth to octoplets. She received death threats, protests outside her home, and a baby seat thrown through the back window of her minivan[cite]. In an interestingly medieval turn, she also appeared in a strip show labeled “The Final Humiliation” to pay the bills for her children[cite].

Mothers are subjected both to suspicion that they are in some way dependent on society and suspicion that they are in some way not doing all the caregiving work expected of them. Even the Sandy Hook killer’s murdered single mom was subject to instant speculation over whether she earned her own money and how while also being vilified for her adult son’s actions[cite]. People seem terrified that any money or support for lifegiving or caregiving would encourage people to give birth for the wrong reasons. Oddly, this reasoning is not applied to journalism, politics, medicine, killing people or even dissociated caregiving by teachers, social workers or foster parents.

The old patriarchal idea that women were property has combined with the new idea that lifegiving and caregiving are anti-social acts. Industrialized states support rights applied by gender instead of role. Societies that profess to protect women’s rights still treat lifegivers as slaves to society and regulate their behaviour as such. The aggressive master morality considered appropriate for workers in the trade economy is replaced by slave morality demanded of anyone working as lifegivers, caregivers or in service to society. Humility, no expectation of reward, and unrequited respect and devotion to those they serve are demanded with the roles.

Society has never been shy about dictating what type of person should become a mother or the behaviour expected once someone becomes a mother, but these pressures are not shared by the rest of society. While the mother is expected to be an impossible paragon, modern society feels no obligation to provide a safe and welcoming, educational and nurturing environment. A mother that does not love her child is considered an abomination. A society that does not love its children is considered natural and justified. An entirely child free environment is not just possible, it is considered normative and a right, encouraged by segregated public spaces and endless articles asking if children ought to be allowed in social gathering and other public places. A popular theme in parenting blogs for the past several years suggests that caregivers should provide the surrounding society with goodie bags as a preemptive apology for intruding into society. Public spaces regularly ban infants and children. No one can demand a life free of those employed by military or refuse admittance to the elderly. Children and their caregivers are the lowest social class above criminals and they have been outcast, not just from the trade economy but also from the rest of society.

If a caregiver in industrialized states fails to care for a child, if they are addicted, abusive, unwilling or unable, the child is not entitled to just go to a neighbour or family member and expect care. There are dissociated government institutions that will punish caregivers for neglect or abuse and provide food and lodging for children, but there is no society that the child has a right to expect love and caregiving from. If a society refuses to nurture or even accept its young, it is no surprise if the youth grow up to disrespect and even attack the society. From earliest childhood, they are made aware that their ingroup consists of only their family or even only themselves. The group narcissism usually associated with nationalism becomes individual narcissism in a dissociated community.

Caregivers must now attempt to raise contributing members of society while competing with far stronger coercion from media, video games, addiction, mental health issues and a surrounding sociopathic community. Middle aged single mothers or elderly grandmothers are not strong enough to stand up to fully grown adolescents, but they are held solely responsible for the behaviour of their teenage sons and daughters. Not only do they receive no societal support, they are degraded in the eyes of the child. Because lifegiving and caregiving work has no value attached, the old inherent debt of honour to lifegivers, caregivers and community elders has been erased. Children are given allowances instead of chores. Mothers are judged by their capacity to give, love and respect but children and the surrounding community are not. Society has ensured that the job of caregiving is impossible. Caregivers are in service to those they are compelled by society, biology and humanity to love and care for, so going on strike is not an option. When life gets better for others, caregivers are the first to be put off with promises of trickle down human rights. When help is offered, it always serves to diminish the societal support role in caregiving and increase the corporate and state roles.

The world is critically overpopulated and populations are still increasing. The answer to that is to increase education and availability of safe[cite] birth control methods and alternative lifestyles for women, as well as incorporating children more into the societies they are part of. The answer is not to vilify lifegiving and caregiving and those who assume those roles. When children are taught to disrespect their own caregivers for their gifts and for their acceptance of a slave role, they are taught to despise caregiving itself and anyone who acts outside of the trade economy. The approval economy and dependencies that built our societies from our earliest history are being shown as the most contemptible and difficult path from earliest childhood. Caregivers and children are the last unit of social structure to be dismantled and the most physically and socially difficult to separate. The war against this relationship and its isolation from the rest of society is a war against society.

In the capitalist society we live in, corporations are people and people are means of production. The rapidly escalating international industry of human trafficking is a picture of a society which has reduced people to dissociated bodies. Men object to a society which gives them responsibility for childbirth without authority or choice and women object to a society which gives them responsibility without choice, support or acknowledgment. Men and women, old and young, able and infirm have been forcibly ripped apart in an attempt to destroy and commodify society and halt the creation of a horizontal network of inter-dependencies. Caregivers are overwhelmed and unrecognized. Grandparents are receiving back the unemployed, the addicted, the wounded and the sick so that society does not have to deal with revolution. Caregivers are absorbing all of the anger caused by the trade economy injustices from their position at the second to bottom tier of society.

State education takes responsibility for indoctrination of selected history and worldview and preparation for the work force, frequently a compulsory education that parents will go to jail for resisting. Propaganda dictates that the same parents who were capable of teaching nutrition, health, hygiene, speech, safety and so much more to their children are incapable of teaching reading. Capitalism insists every child has a right to daily indoctrination paid for by the state but not a right to food and shelter. To appoint only mothers and caregivers as fully responsible for producing and caring for the entire society and not recognize or support that work is institutionalized slavery. State propaganda is not a social right. Food, safety, shelter and all the benefits of the society are. If the child is to love their society, they must be welcomed by it. If a society is to benefit from caregivers, their labour must be recognized and included in the economic structure.

The root of society, the first dependence, is created when a woman gives birth to a child. The nature of society depends on how it is built out from that core, whether all share in responsibility for the first and all other dependencies or whether the strongest are pulled away to isolate caregivers and commodify dependency.

Excerpted from Autonomy, Diversity, Society. Citations will be transferred when I get a minute.

Autonomy, Diversity, Society

The history of humanity is a history of our struggle to maintain a balance between autonomy, diversity and society. As we have moved from isolated but networked tribes to today’s fully integrated global communities, we have developed rigid hierarchical systems of control favouring either autonomy or society, a perpetual pendulum between the politics of the left and the right. Instead of achieving the balance we need, we now live in a state of no society and oppressive sameness under the all-encompassing control of a global empire. This book will discuss how shunning and inclusion have been used to create today’s global empire and how the people of the world can reclaim these methods to regain the societies and autonomy we have lost.

Autonomy, Diversity, Society

The fourth age of nations
The supranational empire
The profiteers of division
The lazy man’s empire
There are no nation states
Thought terrorism

The destruction of society
People are means of production
People are means of destruction
Witches and how they are silenced
People are commodity
The perils of diversity

Science, isolation and control
Objective cruelty
Radical science
The Intelligentsia
A societal singularity
People weighed and measured
The Revolutionaries

Architecture of dissociation

Rethinking the moats and mountains

Glossary (Kind people have stigmergically translated this article into French, and Spanish.).

Dearest reader,

The history of human society is a large topic. Attempting to write a book about such a topic is like taking a close up-picture of an elephant through a tiny lens. You may reveal valuable insight into one part of a foot, but you can never include the entire foot and the ears are left out entirely. This book, like everything in life, provides no absolute truths or any idea that is not up for debate or could not benefit from more nuance. It is simply a particular perspective, one which I use to develop ideas written in books past and future.

We invented words to help us understand each other but sometimes they trigger very different thoughts in different people. To ensure my words do not trigger the wrong thoughts, I have included a glossary at the end to explain what I mean by some of them. Please let me know what is missing.

H.

….

Earlier

Autonomy, Diversity, Society
The average tyrant
Free will and seductive coercion
Commoners and how they are coerced
Great Men and how they are upheld
Witches and how they are silenced
This is what my revolution looked like
New Orwellian Dictionary (NOD)
Equality and the fraternity

The destruction of society

The root of society is a woman giving birth to a child. No one looking at that root could fail to see the ability of one life to affect another or the changes wrought in one individual by interaction with another. A mother’s autonomy, free will and physiology are thoroughly disrupted by the experience. Hormonal changes in the mother can create an overwhelming urge to nurture and protect a strange and separate human or an overwhelming urge to kill the helpless infant. With lactation, mood altering hormones can stay with the mother for years and the act of giving birth leaves lifelong effects. There is evidence that cells from the fetus cross over and remain in the mother’s body, possibly influencing her physiology for years and transferring cells to younger siblings.[cite] There are also indications that the fetus may receive DNA from not just their father but also previous men their mother received sperm from[cite]. The physical reality of an autonomous individual created by parasiting off another person and receiving input from many more, not just before birth but for years after, is a microcosm of society. Life is not an individual achievement but a continuum passed from one generation to the next through a vast number of life forms. Society is a network of dependencies.

Once communities are destroyed, families are the only society preventing children from growing up completely dissociated or as sociopaths. In stratified societies, particularly those heavily dependent on trade economy, women had their roles more restricted and were treated less as community members and more as possessions. Trade inherently favours those not performing the lifegiving and caregiving roles in society so power concentrated in men everywhere trade flourished. As women and their labour became more and more a possession that men could buy, women’s lives were more restricted and they were more guarded as the possessions of one man. With that isolation came a loss of community in almost every case unless a man could afford more than one wife. The treatment of women varied greatly under the trade economy, but because Europe spread the third age of supranational empires around the world, the pattern for industrial destruction of families still followed everywhere today follows the one set in Europe.

Where all had previously worked together in a society, waged labour created class warfare and a new master-servant relationship between men and women. Men had autonomy through land replaced by autonomy through wages and women were now unpaid slaves. With the destruction of peasant society, women lost their communal support network. A woman had to either manage a job in the trade economy while also being solely responsible for societal support or accept work as a slave to her own husband and family, with even her wages from the trade economy often being paid to her husband. Frequently, there was no choice of independence from marriage for women. Men were reduced to working all day away from their family to purchase their admittance into it. Family relationships which had, once established, been purely social were now monetized and deeply humiliating and divisive to all.

The division of men and women was the most important class division, the one which enabled the commodification of all the most basic dependencies and destroyed the possibility of horizontal society.

European history is usually written as a history of the inexorable progress of the trade economy, depicted as civilization. The peasant rebellions and resistance between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the resurgence of trade following the raids on Constantinople is largely depicted as a blank spot called Europe’s Dark Ages. Endless battles and insurrections and powerful networks of horizontal collaboration are buried in a history which reads as Thomas Carlyle’s “Biography of Great Men”.[cite]

The communalist movement that existed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries … was the complete negation of the unitarian, centralizing Roman outlook with which history is explained in our university curricula. Nor is it linked to any historic personality, or to any central institution. – Kropotkiniv[cite]

The decline of the Western Roman Empire brought increasing resistance from peasants to those who sought to enclose and control their land use and acquire their labour. Slavery had evolved into serfdom in most places in Europe and many people had far greater autonomy, their own land plus the commons, solidarity and community. The Magna Carta[cite] was first signed in 1215 and the Charter of the Forest[cite] in 1217. Centralized power under the Catholic church was being challenged by Martin Luther and the Protestants preaching spiritual freedom. The peasants had diversity and society and were fighting to maintain autonomy. Silvia Federici calls the heretic movements of the 11-13th centuries the first “proletarian international” and she describes the heretics “liberation theology” which “denounced social hierarchies, private property and the accumulation of wealth” and disseminated “a new revolutionary conception of society that … redefined every aspect of daily life (work, property, sexual reproduction and the position of women) posing the question of emancipation in truly universal terms.”[cite] The Cathars saw the spirit as being sexless and gendered roles as illogical.viii

The Beguines of the 12th century also created a society of horizontal collaboration among womenix, devoted to prayer and good works but free of subjection by the church or any other hierarchy, as did the smaller male Beghard communities. The Mirror of Simple Souls[cite], by Beguine Marguerite Porete in the early 14th-century, was written in French and intended to make religious teachings accessible, unlike the church’s Latin. During a time when the Catholic church acted as the sole NGO, collecting money for the poor and keeping it for themselves, these women were threatening the church coffers. Women were also, according to Federici, a major force behind the later peasant revolts during food shortages and other troubles as they seldom had the option of leaving and were responsible for the caretaking of children and others. Women who were part of the families and communities they were healers in were also less likely to act in the interests of the powerful over the health of their families. Isabel Pérez Molina writes[cite] “… witches-healers … advised people to control their consumption of sugar, since they had detected illnesses related to such consumption. However, for the Church, which had interests in the sugar industry, it was in its interest for consumption to increase, not the other way round.”

In the mid 13th century, the old silk road reopened under the Pax Mongolica. European traders demanded increased production and more control over both the workers and the production of workers, but at the same time, the Black Death killed a third of Europe’s population. There were two outcomes of the increased desire for labour. First, women were blamed for their failure to produce a work force. Second, Europe became a major player in the slave trade. In response to the first, the church and capitalists sought to establish corporate control over childbirth and respond to the rising egalitarian threat by dividing the previously united peasants.

The power of life and death was largely the domain of women in medieval Europe as they were the keepers of medicinal knowledge and the medical practitioners. They were also the midwives and the people who performed abortions and taught contraception so they controlled the production of the labour force. With industry demanding more workers, women’s bodies, no less than foreign continents, became the site of a capitalist war for resources. By 1484, when Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal bull approving the Inquisition, women were clearly defined as capitalism’s first terrorist threat, accused of having “slain infants yet in the mother’s womb … hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving”.[cite] A heretic who recanted was made to embroider a bundle of sticks (a faggot) to their sleeve in reminder of the fire they had escaped and may yet suffer. The term once used against argumentative women is now used as a pejorative against homosexuals, the other targeted practitioners of non-reproductive sex. The women healers had used sedatives and other drugs to assist in childbirth, but the church also decided that was against God’s will that women give birth in pain and die frequently in childbirth.[cite] As of 2012, almost 800 women die in pregnancy or childbirth every day.[cite] The Catholic church today still spends far more time objecting to abortion than to murder.

Between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries, the witch hunt which raged over Europe and the Americas killed untold numbers of women and indigenous healers who practiced medicine or had medical knowledge at the same time that the institution of all male professional medicine was being established. The medical knowledge taught in the universities established in the twelfth century was primarily a study of the works of Galen and Hippocratesxv and included little to no practical experience. The professional practice consisted of little more than blood letting and incantations by the church with confession required before treatment. The universities commodified care for society members into a product to make the Catholic church more wealthy, much as the medical industry has continued to put corporate wealth over medical care today. The execution of all female and indigenous practitioners and forbidding of all old knowledge was to establish a monopoly over the most important societal knowledge, the power over life and death. What is billed as The Birth of Modern Medicine was really the death of all women’s knowledge and most importantly, the death of women’s control over their own reproductive destinies.

As medical education in Europe became regulated and restricted to men, the women previously known as wise women who traveled and taught others were condemned as gossips. The word gossip, which once meant friend, was turned into a vice and churches warned of women’s idle tongues. In the words of the Malleus Malleficarum , “they have slippery tongues, and are unable to conceal from the fellow-women those things which by evil arts they know”.[cite] Entire networks of learning were dismantled as these women were named witches and tortured to reveal their networks of trade and knowledge sharing in an apparent attempt to genetically cull daring or intelligent women. Daughters were made to watch their mothers burn and sometimes received lashes in front of their mother’s fires in warning.[cite] The women’s networks had also been used to spread information between villages. In centralizing control over medicine and education and isolating women, the church also controlled horizontal communication. Traveling healers were replaced by traveling priests and professional doctors. Peasant rebellions would find neither a sympathetic conduit for information.

In an interesting parallel to today’s terrorism laws, witchcraft was also deemed a crimen exceptum[cite] with far less rights for prisoners, interrogation under torture, death sentences for suspicion of offence and inquisitions which sought new names to prosecute. Then as now, the new medical professionals played a significant part as ‘expert witnesses’ for the prosecution. The demonization of women was also greatly helped by the teachings of their professional rivals who brought back such Hippocratic favourites as female hysteria (still a very popular diagnosis for any woman who speaks in public) and the wandering womb, described by Aretaeus: “In the middle of the flanks of women lies the womb, a female viscus, closely resembling an animal; for it is moved of itself hither and thither in the flanks, also upwards in a direct line to below the cartilage of the thorax, and also obliquely to the right or to the left, either to the liver or the spleen, and it likewise is subject to prolapsus downwards, and in a word, it is altogether erratic. It delights also in fragrant smells, and advances towards them; and it has an aversion to fetid smells, and flees from them; and, on the whole, the womb is like an animal within an animal.”[cite] It is hard not to be reminded of politicians in the United States today who claim that women’s bodies are full of hundreds of tiny dead babies.[cite]

Current history describes the Inquisition as primarily religious persecution despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of victims were women of all faiths. The popularly known victims who were persecuted for their beliefs, the ones taught in schools today, are scientists such as Galileo and Copernicus who both lived to very old age and continued to work. The hundreds of thousands or millions of women and indigenous and enslaved South Americans killed are unmentioned. All of the texts at the time of the Inquisition made clear, the primary target was women (and in South America, indigenous and slave cultures) and their professional knowledge. The Inquisition was not, as it is depicted today, an attack against men of science, it was an attack for and by men of science.

It is still not acceptable to today’s corporations to mention the gynocide that put them in control or the dissociated structure that exists more than ever today as medical knowledge is not just centrally controlled but also copyrighted and patented. A search for the history of western medicine will jump straight from Hippocrates to the twelfth century with all of the intervening knowledge photoshopped out, dismissed as old wives’ tales with no recognition of the fact that it provided health care for all of Europe for centuries.

At the same time that women saw their own bodies turned into workhouses to enslave them and lost autonomy over their own bodies, the trade economy made all work not traded to the powerful for a wage unrecognized. The World Bank today still speaks of women entering the workforce and contributing labour when they enter the trade economy. Worker’s movements centre around waged workers and men’s rights activists insist more men die on the job because the occupational hazards of childbirth and marriage aren’t considered jobs. Laws protecting against forced labour and slavery do not include motherhood. According to the World Health Organization, 287 000 women die in childbirth every year.[cite] All United States combat casualties in all wars ever come to 848,163.[cite]

The erasure of value from women’s work was necessary for the enslavement of women. The enslavement of women was necessary for outside ownership of their bodies, the factories producing the labour force.

 

Excerpted from Autonomy, Diversity, Society. Citations will be transferred when I get a minute.