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.