The progressive wave of feminism, liberal values, and social justice embodies a correct identification of many of the oppressive qualities of present and historical norms, rules, and controls. A steady march toward greater standards of toleration really does improve the lives of many people, such as homosexuals. A loosening of the shackles of rigid social norms and crushing oppression allows a greater range of people to pursue their own view of a happy, fulfilling human existence.
Well, at least in the short term…
The fundamental problem with these movements is that almost nobody involved in constructing or propagating the theories has even a minimal level of appreciation for the fact that one cannot simply organize society by whim, and that the laws of economics, group psychology, and cultural evolution must be respected.
When we’re simply trying to push freedom of choice to its utmost, and usher in an age of tolerance, love, and honesty, the ideals of polyamory sound wonderful.
But then reality strikes.
In 1949, Ludwig von Mises published Human Action, a brilliant and comprehensive treatise on economics that stands until the present day as required reading for anyone aiming to understand how civilization works, and how it breaks down.
In the introduction, he described the genesis of economics as the realization that there are laws of human behavior and societal coordination, and that it’s not possible to simply draw up a beautiful story of humans working together toward a common goal, convince the majority of people that this system would be marvelous and fair, and then expect the society-wide agreement alone to produce the system as intended. If you ignore the hard work of figuring out how to put into place an incentive structure that would actually lead to the intended results, even unanimous approval for your laudable vision could devolve into depravity.
See here for the first four paragraphs of that introduction:
Economics is the youngest of all sciences. In the last two hundred years, it is true, many new sciences have emerged from the disciplines familiar to the ancient Greeks. However, what happened here was merely that parts of knowledge which had already found their place in the complex of the old system of learning now became autonomous. The field of study was more nicely subdivided and treated with new methods; hitherto unnoticed provinces were discovered in it, and people began to see things from aspects different from those of their precursors. The field itself was not expanded. But economics opened to human science a domain previously inaccessible and never thought of. The discovery of a regularity in the sequence and interdependence of market phenomena went beyond the limits of the traditional system of learning. It conveyed knowledge which could be regarded neither as logic, mathematics, psychology, physics, nor biology.
Philosophers had long since been eager to ascertain the ends which God or Nature was trying to realize in the course of human history. They searched for the law of mankind’s destiny and evolution. But even those thinkers whose inquiry was free from any theological tendency failed utterly in these endeavors because they were committed to a faulty method. They dealt with humanity as a whole or with other holistic concepts like nation, race, or church. They set up quite arbitrarily the ends to which the behavior of such wholes is bound to lead. But they could not satisfactorily answer the question regarding what factors compelled the various acting individuals to behave in such a way that the goal aimed at by the whole’s inexorable evolution was attained. They had recourse to desperate shifts: miraculous interference of the Deity either by revelation or by the delegation of God-sent prophets and consecrated leaders, preestablished harmony, predestination, or the operation of a mystic and fabulous “world soul” or “national soul.” Others spoke of a “cunning of nature” which implanted in man impulses driving him unwittingly along precisely the path Nature wanted him to take.
Other philosophers were more realistic. They did not try to guess the designs of Nature or God. They looked at human things from the viewpoint of government. They were intent upon establishing rules of political action, a technique, as it were, of government and statesmanship. Speculative minds drew ambitious plans for a thorough reform and reconstruction of society. The more modest were satisfied with a collection and systematization of the data of historical experience. But all were fully convinced that there was in the course of social events no such regularity and invariance of phenomena as had already been found in the operation of human reasoning and in the sequence of natural phenomena. They did not search for the laws of social cooperation because they thought that man could organize society as he pleased. If social conditions did not fulfill the wishes of the reformers, if their utopias proved unrealizable, the fault was seen in the moral failure of man. Social problems were considered ethical problems. What was needed in order to construct the ideal society, they thought, were good princes and virtuous citizens. With righteous men any utopia might be realized.
The discovery of the inescapable interdependence of market phenomena overthrew this opinion. Bewildered, people had to face a new view of society. They learned with stupefaction that there is another aspect from which human action might be viewed than that of good and bad, of fair and unfair, of just and unjust. In the course of social events there prevails a regularity of phenomena to which man must adjust his actions if he wishes to succeed. It is futile to approach social facts with the attitude of a censor who approves or disapproves from the point of view of quite arbitrary standards and subjective judgments of value. One must study the laws of human action and social cooperation as the physicist studies the laws of nature. Human action and social cooperation seen as the object of a science of given relations, no longer as a normative discipline of things that ought to be–this was a revolution of tremendous consequences for knowledge and philosophy as well as for social action.
While economics was the youngest science at that time, we may only hope that soon the youngest science will be an epistemologically equivalent analysis of other social institutions, such as the sexual marketplace or natural language.
Faced with the problems in human society, the progressives are those who choose to Blindly Move Forward. They see suffering, and in response they weave a utopia of tolerance and beauty, completely ignorant to the fact that there are inexorable laws of human coordination, and simply ripping out the parts of civilization that they don’t like could lead to a disaster of unintended consequences. Even the most ugly social norm could, upon close inspection, be discovered as a crucial mechanism for societal cohesion and order.
Denying women the same standard of education as men, for example, sounds like an intentional attack against female welfare. “If we give them education, they will see the light, and realize how oppressed they truly are, while at the same time gaining the knowledge that will allow them to revolt against the patriarchy. Keep their minds lost in the darkness, so we may continue to subjugate their bodies with no limitations.”
But when you look more closely, you’ll discover that even this norm, as horrible as it may sound to the modern Western ear, likely had a crucial function in the genesis and maintenance of Western Civilization, and its departure is likely leading to systemic problems.
In natural conditions, humans do not arrange themselves into the one-man-to-one-woman system of monogamy, the family structure, and the marriage institution. Instead, the top men share many of the women, while the low-status men get little if anything. As women are designed to feel attraction only for men who feel high status to them, denying education to women and supplying it to men can effectively lower the status of all women and raise that of all men, making the one-man-to-one-woman system much more workable from the standpoint of female sexual psychology. Give the female population an equivalent standard of self-improvement and education, and we find ourselves back in a circumstance where a greater number of men seem low status (and therefore unappealing) to women, than the number of women who seem unattractive to men. The natural lopsidedness of the sexual system returns to some degree. We find monogamy run into an obstacle, and the sexual landscape moves closer to the primitive order of 40% of the male population taking 80% of the females. Civilization takes a hit to the gut.
But who are those who Give Up and Step Back?
Many people who recognize that the ideals of feminism and liberalism lead to societal disharmony and social breakdown use this information to conclude that we must go back to the systems which worked in the past. Against the progressives, they are the conservatives. They understand that the marriage institution, limitations on female promiscuity, and so on are what created the order that we call Western Civilization, and they realize that with the unraveling of this order their home countries and native cultures are in danger.
But recognizing that many of the social norms that progressives think are intolerant and prejudiced actually lie at the heart of social coordination doesn’t detract from their claim that they do in fact make many people suffer. Returning to those painful social systems, as effective as they may be for certain purposes, is a case of giving up the fight for fundamental improvement and progress. While marching blindly toward a utopian vision, and having no understanding of the realities of societal organization, is a disastrous mistake; at the same time it’s a replacement of starry-eyed visionary thinking with battle-hardened cynicism to simply desire a return to the old order of rigid oppression.
A few months ago, I started writing a post I titled “The Volatility of Sexual Freedom”.
See the following excerpt for the beginning of the draft:
From the point of view of the evolutionary forces, it doesn’t matter whether our action is impelled by the pursuit of greater heights of happiness and pleasure, or driven by the retreat into lower planes of misery and pain. For the units of natural and cultural selection, there exists no test less callous than, “Do the psychological conditions of these humans induce them to behave in a way advantageous for the perpetuation of the genes behind their physical constitution and the memes underlying the institutional framework of society?” Whether we show up at a social gathering and take on a certain personality role because it gives us a sense of satisfaction and belonging, or whether we do so in order to escape the lowest rungs of loneliness and isolation; such things bear no necessary relevance to the gears of biological and societal evolution. Insensitive to the plight of the conscious mind occupying the human body, the evolutionary process need only herd us in the right direction.
Maxim #1: Conservative values are the bedrock of industrial imperialism, with modern first-world society being a result of the natural selection of nation states.
Opposed to the natural order of the sexual climate, the traditional marriage system and family structure acted as a dam which diverted the unruly and volatile sexual urges of men into economic productivity and industrial development. Girls were put on a tight leash by their parents, and then as women they were passed off to the authority of a husband; the female population’s own impulsive and hedonistic sexual appetite was repressed by the social machine. With men searching for a sexual partner or a romantic companion lacking direct access to women free to make their own life decisions, the social game for men consisted not in gaining a bit of privacy with a woman and pressing her attraction buttons, but rather winning the respect of her friends and family. Passionate and spontaneous lust and emotional connection was replaced by socio-economic status and a considerate demeanor.
As per the insights in the first paragraph, I must emphasize that these norms developed because they worked for the perpetuation for certain cultural arrangements, not necessarily because they were enjoyable for the individuals involved.
I wrote a note to myself on the same topic a little less than a year ago:
In terms of the evolutionary forces, there’s no reason why we must be driven by pleasure rather than simply less pain. If a more useful outcome from the point of view of evolution simply meant switching from terrible pain to more tolerable pain, then humankind would still march consistently in the direction of the gene’s desires.
However, we now live in one of the first times in history, perhaps, where the goal can be happiness for all individuals.
The old order may have worked in many powerful ways in terms of optimization processes, but there were plenty of casualties of society: people who suffered their entire lives with minimal reprieve. The Liberation of the Individual is beginning in earnest, but there are many unintended consequences brewing on the macro scale. The participants in the Order of Conservative Values surely didn’t know any better than the participants in the Progressive Order of Individual Liberation about the macro effects of various individual behaviors, but while for the former the forces of group selection mediated by imperialism gave them intuitive wisdom the latter has nothing to grasp onto. The rush to usher in a world of happiness, acceptance, and toleration has brought with it an undermining not only of the Dark Side of Societal Coordination, but also the Light Side. We shall experience a deluge of unintended consequences for years to come as people begin to wake up to the mess their utopian vision has caused.
The Order of Conservative Values worked like this: Opposed to the natural order of the sexual climate, the marriage institution and the family structure acted as a dam which diverted the unruly sexual urges of men into the sort of economic activity required to build up a military capable of imperialism. Alpha-style courtship was systematically stamped out by norms concerning age of consent, difference in age between sexual partners, and so on, along with the women being put on lock down first by their parents and then by their husbands. A certain kind of beta-style courtship instead was incentivized, where the man had to slave away as a cog in the machine to develop the status and monetary situation to get a wife. While alpha-style courtship presses the buttons of the woman’s attraction mechanism, this peculiar form of beta-style courtship forced the man to go through the parents to have access to their daughter, leading to the development of courtship norms such as respect, chivalry, and so forth, which worked on the parents but are irrelevant when trying to seduce a liberated woman.
These norms, however, are being systematically dismantled. As conditions move more and more into a futuristic society, the religious ideologies of times past begin to fail their hosts in myriad ways. People turn to science for the answers to their worries and life problems, but science has developed in a lopsided manner: while physicalist reasoning is done well (e.g., physics, biology), praxeological reasoning is left behind. Partial rationality is the result, as the gears of hedonism grow stronger under the guise of liberation from oppression. With religion falling to the wayside, and science yet unable to fill in certain vital gaps, we see part of the foundation of conservative values collapsing with nothing to fill its place.
Other conditions have changed as well. With abortion, the pill, contraception, women’s economic independence, no-fault divorce, densely packed cities, anonymous Internet-based communication channels, and so forth, the model of one-man-to-one-woman is beginning to break down, and MGTOWs (beta quitters) and PUAs (alpha monopolizers) are developing in their wake. Neither side has the incentive to work as a cog in the machine any longer, and with that change we shall see a slow breakdown of the old order of civilization. With sex androids and virtual reality sexual experiences on the horizon, along with increasing acceptance for the myriad ways to have sex without having children, the number of childless MGTOWs and PUAs will rise further and further and we’ll have to wonder what the future holds for the propagation of humankind.
There’s strong reason to believe that materialism, heavy industry, long hours working in unnatural settings, stimulants that help people do what would otherwise be soul-crushingly boring cubicle work, and emotionally charged political rallies aren’t very helpful for the general happiness and well-being of a population.
But what would have generally happened to such a population? Of course they would have been invaded, conquered, and assimilated into the Western way of life, for better or for worse. The structure of human civilization that we see in the present age wasn’t the outcome of a wise and steady trial-and-error march toward social institutions increasingly in line with our fundamental values and needs. Rather, we can explain an astonishing proportion of the structure of modern society by pointing to an evolutionary process which didn’t have too overwhelming of a care for individual happiness and welfare: the natural selection of nation states, especially through imperialism but also via other factors.
Is this the way of life we should want to preserve?
To conclude: Rather than Blindly Moving Forward like the feminists, liberals, and social-justice warriors, or Giving Up and Stepping Back like the people involved in the Red Pill community, the manosphere, and particular areas of the general conservative movement; instead we may recognize (as the former group does) that the social norms which characterize the history of much of civilization have led to a lot of suffering, realize (as the latter people do) that throwing them away without a moment’s thought could put Western Civilization at risk, but then (as neither group does) put these two ideas together, and work toward figuring out a new order for civilization, which takes into account the Red Pill facts of human nature, but pursues the Blue Pill ideal of an enjoyable and happy life for all people willing to work as a team.