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.