House of Eratosthenes

So this squish does a surprisingly fair job of looking at the whole not-controversy controversy of “men looking at women.” I call him that because he comes out and says “I admit that I find a beauty pageant to be derogatory toward women,” which is something I find to be just silly. I envision a line here; “Women should be treated with respect” doesn’t cross it, “Women are deserving of the same opportunities as men” doesn’t cross it, but usually anything having to do with “Men shouldn’t look at women” does. I take offense against their offense.

Beautiful women? I’m not supposed to look? Or if I can’t get away from the sight, I’m not supposed to like what I see? That’s just dumb. Any and all variations of this are preordained to be daffy, dumb and unworkable. How are you going to enforce? And beauty pageants? They are what they’re called, nothing more or less. They’re celebrations of female beauty. Who’s against that? Point them out to me. I don’t want those people deciding anything that affects me or anyone else.

But then he says some very well-thought-out, rational things.

Male humans tend to be visual in their sexual interests, not unlike female birds. Yes, I get it that this has led to a host of problems for women trying to live up to photo-shopped ideals, but the vibrancy of the pornography industry suggests that this is not about to change any time soon. Instead of looking for pro-social ways for men to gratify their visual interests, however, the Left seems to say that men should not have these interests at all. The Left seems to say that since all rape starts with sexual interest, all sexual interest must lead to rape. The Left seems to say that if a man enjoys a woman’s looks, that must be all he enjoys about her…

No system of values — psychological, political, or moral — can work by ignoring reality. Human aggression and men’s visual sexual interests are often treated, especially by the Left, as dispensable inconveniences rather than as core elements of the human condition.

You know, the thought occurs to me. This doesn’t have anything to do with sex, or men & women, at all. Not really. It’s about power. Haven’t we been learning that the hard way for years and years now?

“He looked at me/her and made me feel uncomfortable.” The Human Resources and legal wheels grind away, fast or slow, and when it’s over the offending ogler is dutifully punished, and removed. But the insecure-feeling person is still feeling insecure. The work environment is NOT made any more inviting or comfortable for anyone, compared to how it was before. In fact it is considerably less so. Men still appreciate the sight of a good looking woman, and why shouldn’t they? So no human vices were cured. And was it ever a vice?

We’re all here, I’ve said before, because some man did so appreciate.

No, to understand this, we have to understand power. Power is allocated according to two different systems, which we might think of as a “hard” way vs. a “soft” way. The hard way has definitions. Og the Caveman gets most of the meat, because he’s the one who killed the beast. The boss says you gotta go, he owns the company. For every milligram of power or privilege somewhere, there’s a commensurate milligram of responsibility or achievement to go with it.

The “soft” way is the province and invention of the undefiners, those pitiful wretches who live among us who bristle at the formation of new definitions we’ve figured out we need, and busy themselves mostly with efforts to eradicate the definitions we have already. It works on the wavelength of wink-wink nudge-nudge we-all-know. What s/he wants s/he gets, everybody knows!! It’s [insert name here]’s world, the rest of us just live in it. So it’s cult-of-personality power, “magical-person” power. We could call it “Oprah” power?

With this understanding of the schism within the concept of power, we see this is no longer a man-woman issue. Both men and women work with and perceive power according to the “hard” rules explained above, and both men and women work with and perceive power according to the “soft” ones. Our passions are here, not in some battle between the sexes. “Up with men/women, down with women/men” is something for the third-grade playground. Nearly all of us left it behind way back there.

The undefiners, both men & women alike, are laboring to build a world they can never have. “I don’t want you looking at pretty women because I want YOU TO SEE women this way, and I want YOU NOT TO SEE them that way.” This means the object of derision is inextricably intertwined with the goal, and can never be vanquished, can never go away. If the ogling male were ever to go away, there’d be nothing to reform, no righteous struggle to engage. It might feel good to defrock some powerful man of his status, occupation or social position, but it’s only like a cocaine addict and his latest snort. What’s the dog do after catching the car?

So they need us. We don’t need them.

Of course, since they’re constantly making new rules for us to follow and not too much else of anything we could use…we aren’t allowed to discuss this. It’s not really necessary for us to do so. It’s simply true. They have goals that depend on our continued existence…our goals are to get something done, which we could do quite handily without them around.

The single most memorable line in The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, addresses this directly. The villain Ellsworth Toohey confronts the hero Howard Roark, with the confirmation that Toohey has been destroying Roark’s prospects and livelihood. He then demands to know, “What do you think of me?”

Roark replies, “I don’t think of you.”

That’s the situation. Those who seek power this way are never going to have it. Those on the other side, we who rely on power being connected link-for-link and dram-for-dram with associated responsibilities…don’t think of them. We don’t think about the wink-wink nudge-nudge ethos of power-sharing. We can’t afford to, we don’t have time. We have work to do.

It’s a problem of productivity. Specifically, the productive are too productive.

Now, that’s true in any society more advanced than a cave: There will be surplus. Societies organize, in large part, to figure out how to distribute the surplus. And thus, any society larger than a cave will have its freeloaders, its parasites, its un-definers, its Human Resources Department. Successful societies figure out a way to deal with them.

Some work better than others. You can go the Sparta route, and force un-definers to act like definers — hard to soft-power your way to the top in a hoplite phalanx in a fully militarized society. But though that gets rid of freeloaders (insofar as any society can), it’s too fragile to last. Or you can shuffle them off into a priesthood — that’s the Medieval option, and it worked ok (seriously, though parish priests didn’t live very high on the hog, most peasants would’ve taken it in a heartbeat). The Chinese scholar-bureaucrat-court eunuch tactic works pretty well, too, for a while — how much real damage can the Undersecretary of the Corn Harvest Festival (8th class, junior grade) actually do?

Here in the West, we had a decent way until recently: Academia. Shuffle these types into the ivory tower, where they make boneheaded pronouncements like “gender is a social construction.” They pat themselves on the back for being so clever, and we pretend to believe them, and so long as the tech majors outnumber the liberal artists 10:1 like back in the Fifties, who cares if they have a Wymyn’s Studies department or three?

But now there’s too much surplus to be effectively distributed. A huge number of people, perhaps the actual majority, have negative value — we could fire everyone under the age of 40 with a BA from every job in America right now, and productivity would probably go UP. We’re so prosperous we don’t know what to do with ourselves, so we let these clowns out of the ivory tower and into the real world.

What is to be done, as the man once asked? I dunno. Soma? The soft-power types really just get off on bossing people around. Soma, combined with something like a holodeck — let them boss SimCity people around all day.
- Severian | 04/14/2018 @ 17:13
It would have to be “something like a holodeck.” Filling in the illustration as broadly as we possibly can, it would have to be something that appeals to malcontents, since that’s what these people are going to be.

If the day arrives they have nothing to complain about, they forfeit their influence — ALL of their influence is derivative of something they’ve identified that requires fixing — and they crave influence. Case in point: Sexual harassment is wrong. Okay, so force that serial harasser into early retirement, and “educate” the workforce that still remains. Hostile work environment is wrong. Okay, so term that guy who was caught wolf-whistling the secretary, and educate the workforce that still remains. Equal pay is a must-have. Okay, require equal pay. Uh…what’s left? Embiggen the definition of hostile work environment. Make up some phony statistics about pay disparities. Assume institutional discrimination when you find out the number of female garbage collectors, electrical linemen and software engineers are not women…

Ultimately, what I’m talking about, is establish loftier and loftier compliance goals until things are required that cannot be met, so that the complaints are never-ending. Curing disparities and grievances is not the point; the complaining is the point.

So to answer your question, what do we have for these people to do? Our error is in thinking “They are malcontents who seem to want to be taken seriously, so we should put them someplace where they’ll be taken seriously (then we may see the day when they stop complaining)..” I like your holodeck idea better. The place we put them, should be some kind of a cloister, someplace where people can complain endlessly inside, while the people outside can labor onward in peace, getting things done. Like I pointed out. We have work to do.
- mkfreeberg | 04/14/2018 @ 19:08
That’s exactly what I’m getting at, and what academia used to be. Most people ignored the priests, the court eunuchs, the professors — by design. These people can argue over the numbers of angels dancing on pinheads to their hearts’ content — they can ruin each others’ lives (and oh God will they!), but it doesn’t affect us out here in the real world at all (remember, I’m the guy who says that had the Tsar wised up and made Vladimir Ulyanov the chair of some third-rate philosophy department somewhere, there would’ve been no Lenin).

The Internet was good for this, too, back in the days. But now everyone can have an opinion on whether Kirk or Picard was superior, so there’s no cachet in it…. they have to go have their nerd-rage flame wars in the real world.

My only half-serious idea is: Universal conscription. Seriously. You may have aced the verbal part of the watered-down, klown-kollege SAT they have now, but the ASVAB doesn’t lie — your one militarily-useful aptitude, Snowflake, is swabbing the decks of a submarine. Here’s a mop, and as a bonus, you’ll finally get to meet some of The Workers! That’s a reality check if ever there was one. The snowflakes are probably irredeemable, of course, but it’s worth a try (and, as a bonus deficit reduction measure, you could transmit boot camp pay-per-view. What would you pay to see, say, Matthew Yglesias getting reamed by R. Lee Ermey? I think I’d go broke in 32 hours).
- Severian | 04/14/2018 @ 19:56
[…] last, but not least, House Of Eratosthenes notes the hard and soft […]
- Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup » Pirate's Cove | 04/15/2018 @ 06:09

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The Hard and Soft PowerSaturday, April 14th, 2018

The Hard and Soft Power
Saturday, April 14th, 2018