Gents, the link has been updated. Thanks for letting us know - Maya must have been banned from Medium in between Lorenzo writing the piece & me editing and publishing it on here - so, literally in the last week (probably while I was in Tenerife). So, very annoying.
Great essay. The systemicist/conspiracist divide is one of the most significant epistemological debates of our time. On the one hand, as you say ably demonstrate, a great deal can be explained as the straightforward consequences of human social instinct interacting with the nature of whichever social system those humans find themselves in. When that system becomes strongly misaligned with desires or expectations, there's a natural tendency for conspiratorial thinking to project a malign intent - as for example the magical thinking engaged in by BlueAnon regarding Russia, systemic racism, the patriarchy, and so on.
But on the other, there is the real historical existence of conspiratorial organizations acting to great effect on society. The American revolution may not have been a Freemasonic conspiracy in the sense that it was carried out to advance some long term Masonic goal, but the lodges certainly played their part in enabling clandestine coordination. The existence of the Italian Mafia was officially denied for years even as it established itself as the most significant criminal organization in the world. In the modern context, there's the role played by intelligence agencies, which are compartmentalized and secretive by their very nature; what would one call COINTELPRO, Mockingbird, Gladio, or the various color revolutions if not conspiracies? To say nothing of revelations concerning the backchannel coordination of spooks and social media companies in order to reduce the impact of political dissidents.
This is why I tend to adopt a both/and approach to the question of conspiracy vs system:
Another factor worth mentioning on this topic is the tendency for the regime to label any noticing it dislikes - for example of the long term impacts of mass immigration, or the designs of the World Economic Forum - as 'right wing conspiracy theories', even as they openly promote and celebrate such things. Anton's celebration parallax in other words. But of course the WEF etc. are not "conspiracies" in the sense of being secretive about thei aims, and their use of the term 'conspiracy theory' is really just a mixture of status attack and gaslighting, so not actually relevant to the question of whether organized clandestine activity plays a significant role in world politics.
Often the answer is "this and that", as you note. Humans crave certainty (it's biological) and are thus prone to binary thinking. It can also be "this, that, and another thing we aren't aware of yet because someone doesn't want you to know about it".
Humans are terrifyingly susceptible to mind control. This is achieved by 1) Degradation of their brain's ability to function properly by poor diet and toxins and 2) Repeating the desired mode of thinking often, and 3) Using rewards and punishment for desired/undesired thoughts & actions.
If a conspiracy has been debunked, and yet the conspiracy still explains the world in front of you more or less accurately, has it been debunked? Refer to the previous paragraph if necessary.
The term "conspiracy theory" was literally created by people who conspire for a living to discredit people who investigate conspiracies.
Apart from the "diet and toxins" I would agree that the reflex response to any new revelation about rich and powerful groups is to link it to a (nutty) conspiracy theory and dismiss it as more of the same.
Endocrine disruptors are everywhere because of packaging and food processing. Glyphosate and other toxins are are in widespread use. Low fat, especially low-saturated fat/cholesterol diets have been propagandized for generations. Cholesterol lowering drugs have been pushed and administered for just as long. Processed food removes or destroys key nutrients for health, and sugar (especially high fructose corn syrup) leads to metabolic syndrome which suppresses important hormones. Vitamin D in particular is critical to human health. Sunlight, which causes humans to produce it, has been demonized as cancer-causing, and application of arguably dangerous sun-screen propagandized for generations.
Knowing that, you are probably still skeptical of "diet and toxins" ability to degrade your ability to think clearly, but hopefully a tiny bit less so.
Lorenzo & and I have a joint piece on the "diet & toxins" issue in the works, mainly because he lost 43kgs while getting fit & healthy and I lost 21kgs getting similarly fit and healthy. We both used intermittent fasting and one of the keto diet variations to achieve that, too.
Over the last few years I've experimented with intermittent fasting and simple calorie counting, got good results with both - was down to 15% body fat at one point.
The diet and toxins route to assuring mass compliance is at second remove compared with the other 2 factors which directly control compliance.
That said I am also concerned about toxins. Especially environmental toxins. When I was a kid we used to sit in the garden on deckchairs in early summer and it was like insect soup in the air around. Any long journey in a car resulted in pocket money for cleaning off dead flies. None of this now happens (especially not the pocket money).
I would describe the toxins as part of the no platforming of resource depletion, over population and pollution and the historical no platforming of climate change rather than as direct efforts at creating compliance. These are existential issues but tackling any of them affects the rich and powerful.
Networks of coordination are major factors in human affairs. And dismissing folk pointing out such coordination as “conspiracy theorists” is, indeed, a regularly used rhetorical ploy.
Notice something about the examples you cite. (1) They use identifiable organisations. (2) They come to light.
The colour revolutions I would not use as good examples, as they only worked by tapping into broad social aspirations. Calling them conspiracies is usually a ploy to deny that reality.
Indeed, it's necessary to define what one means by conspiracy, as there are multiple distinct phenomena aggregated within the word. The conventional use of 'conspiracy theory' is meant to evoke the Illuminati (which was also an organization that came to light) drinking virgin blood in secret antechambers as they orchestrate the fate of the planet together with their lizard people allies. This image then gets attached to any notion that powerful people collude. It's a rhetorical sleight of hand that is so effective that organizations such as the WEF can act quite openly and still have their critics dismissed as conspiracy theorists.
In any case, I would argue that clandestine intelligence activities, including eg color revolutions, qualify as conspiracies insofar as they are strongly influenced by hidden agents acting to direct or influence political outcomes in order to advance interests that are not openly admitting their involvement. I don't think 1) or 2) are sufficient to exclude a certain incident or organization from the conspiracy classification.
One of the great insights of evolutionary theory is that things not capable of forming intent can nevertheless act, or at least be selected for as if they act, strategically. All you need is feedback and response.
Worse still, most people knew it was a conspiracy as it was happening (COVID breaks out next to the main research centre on coronaviruses in the world - what are the chances? - about 10,000 to 1 or higher that it was the lab). Now we know chapter and verse but still the conspiracy continues.
The existence of obvious conspiracies means that global politics is, as it has always been, about wealth and power. As wealth and power shifts to women they promote themselves. But the women did not start the power shift, it was the wealthy wanting originally, cheap, highly qualified labour that did it. The platforms owned by the powerful invite them in and, as you point out above, create a fake narrative to increase their influence. As the wealth and power of China grows it can do no wrong.
PS: The COVID conspiracy was global. The academics lost any attachment to accurate accounts.
PPS: I know no-one who believes Qanon. It is in the same category as reptiloid aliens running the world. These are largely fake conspiracies that inflict collateral damage on people who support part of the agenda - for example, Bilderberg is dangerous to democracy but anyone saying so is asked to take the tin foil off their heads. How many of the archetypal "conspiracy theories" (the nutty ones) are actually supported by a lot of people and how many are platformed to create the impression of mass insanity? - The "sane" being the wealthy and powerful and their apparatchiks.
"It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It" -Upton Sinclair
Conspiracies succeed by those in in positions of power create and tell the lie, and then all those dependent on them proceed to spread the lie because their paychecks depend on it.
Something that keeps emerging with modern feminism is an oddly anti female and pro male cornerstone. It's the unspoken but clear concept that to be a successful woman you must be indistinguishable from a successful man.
It holds what men do as the ultimate and what women did as worthless. We don't celebrate woman teachers or nurses, but watch what happens if you become a scientist or an astronaut! Women who raise children are certainly failing compared to the woman who forgoes children to be a CEO.
It goes further where feminists view their physical femininity as a burden to delete with pharmaceuticals so as to be able to participate better with (or as) men.
It's no wonder why so many girls are becoming transmen these past 5 years. Because that milliu has bizarrely accepted that men are the ultimate.
I don't think it's possible these days to define a set of things which "feminists" believe, since there are too many conflicting groups claiming the name feminism (at very least, radical feminists and liberal feminists, but you could probably add "former second-wave feminists who stopped being active when they got the vote and equal pay" and subdivide the groups further)
Which one will be highlighted in the media as what "the feminists" believe will of course reflect the interests of the people who own these platforms, and the amount of overlap with the opinions of ordinary women who describe ourselves as feminist is unknown.
There is one thing all feminists believe: that you need a special ideology/philosophy to liberate women. Which is false.
Yes, feminists vary in how they conceive that liberation, what the barriers to such are, what path is required to achieve same. But that foundational belief is common to all forms of feminism.
Interesting take. I think I'd need you to justify that further in order for me to believe it. For instance, women in general have shared characteristics of being able to bear children (and very frequently actually doing to) with all the attendant effects on our life trajectories, of being generally less physically imposing and thus more easy for community leaders to not take seriously, and of being physically weaker and thus possible to physically dominant.
Those shared characteristics aren't very similar in scope to any other large significant social group that I can think of, and have the obvious implications of a) women in general having specific collective interests and b) being more likely to need to pursue our interests, specifically, by collective action.
So why *don't* we need a special ideology/philosophy to ground that collective action and prevent ourselves being dominated by the male half of the community?
Did we need a special ideology to abolish slavery? Did we need a special ideology for abolish laws against Jews and Catholics? Did we need a special ideology for adult male suffrage? Did we need a special ideology for civil rights? No
Nor do we need a special ideology for equal rights for women.
As for the differences between men and women, as statistical patterns they are real. But feminism gets in the way of dealing with them precisely because it tries to turn everything to do with women into both a special case and yet a basis for equality.
A 2015 poll of the UK populace conducted by Survation for the Fawcett society found that 81% of women and 84% of men supported equal rights for women. (Yes, the rate among men was higher.) Only 9% of British women identified as feminist. Feminism does not speak for British women. Indeed, it gets in the way of doing so.
Well, I'll be interested in your long form essay about this, and we may have further conversations at that point.
Partly because at that point it will probably be clearer whether your critique is "this specific ideological framework of this iteration of feminism is wrong" (which I may well agree with) or "it is wrong to believe that women as a class need a specific philosophy of liberation, which other groups don't need" (which currently I don't agree with)
I didn’t, not because I don’t like his work (I do) but because it wasn’t a focus and I come to the above conclusions about Western dynamics from folk such as Mitteraur and Nicholls. But the big issue is that, while I have read other works by Henrich, I haven’t got around to that book, just the original paper. Which, now you refresh my memory, has that very useful kinship index map. I will ask Helen to add that reference, ta.
Gents, I've added the following paper reference for you in the bibliography:
Jonathan F. Schulz, Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan P. Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich. "The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation." Science 366, no. 6466 (2019): eaau5141.
You unravel the conspiracist mindset very well. My tendency to presume that things are not a conspiracy comes from this: governments and bureaucracies are just not that competent. In fact, notoriously the opposite.
Wonderful piece! It seems to me that conspiracies are slotted into two main categories: elite/academy/left approved (eg. feminism, decolonisation efforts) and tin-foil, right, low class (which ends up containing e.g. qanon but also covid lab leak). Conspiracies are so easy to believe even for the highly intelligent perhaps in part because they are so used to deciphering and explaining patterns, it's easy to conjure them up where there are none. Too many of those same intelligent people then can't see that they could be wrong, or could be in the same mindset as those lower class/less educated/right wingers with their unapproved conspiracies.
The behaviour around the covid lab leak was very bad. It was always perfectly plausible even without Matt Ridley & Alina Chan's scientific evidence, simply because we are dealing with a totalitarian state. Totalitarian states lie - we should be familiar with this from the USSR/Nazi Germany during WWII/the Cold War. And while China is an unusually competent totalitarian state, it still lies (look at Xinjiang, for goodness' sake).
Yes, I remember being shocked that some leftwing colleagues were praising China's low death/covid figures. They were quick to assume our own Government would lie (and I don't dispute that Governments of any stripe can lie), but they didn't think China's would.
I appreciate the explanations provided here, and understand the lesson to be taken away is different from the complaint I am about to make.
This article is one of many which effectively says "Conspiracy thinking is flawed". Here I read the ends of a conspiracy can be achieved without an actual conspiracy of actors coordinating and hiding that coordination. However I am used to reading "it is just people with aligned interests, therefore not a conspiracy, therefore the proposition there are people acting together to achieve a goal is untrue". The difference between these two formulations is the absence of hidden coordination in the case of this article doesn't dismiss the fact that people are moving in concert to achieve ends.
When in modern times someone says something like "there is a media conspiracy against certain narratives" the thing that is concerning is the resulting suppression, not the mechanism by which the people have come into alignment to perform that suppression.
There is little solace to be had in knowing that the people who have come together to gaslight and make you an outcast didn't have a group meeting about it first.
One thing about "people with aligned interests", though, is that you can have two groups with imperfectly aligned interests coordinating to some degree, but not in complete agreement. At that point, the narrative being promoted will start to become inconsistent and flawed, as both groups fight for control of it.
"The quintessential Gnostic cosmology is that all material Creation is a conspiracy of the Demiurge."
Or Rousseau in his Second Discourse - that man was initially a peaceful, solitary cattle-like creature, and all socialization, even family, was at odds with this nature. I believe all modern revolutionary theory is built on the assumption that our social system(s) oppress our nature - and thus are rooted in Rousseau's absurdity.
I'm a little confused on your perspective on feminism, on a couple of points. 1) Are you saying that there's no connection between the feminist movement and women's rights? (ie, that women would have gained as many rights as quickly if feminism had never existed?) And 2) I'm wondering how you define oppression? What does it take to be oppressed? Is a slave oppressed? Is a serf oppressed? (I'm just a regular person who's never read much feminist theory, but I had never heard that male oppression of women was supposed to be a conspiracy until I read this essay, and I don't think men would have any need to be secretive about wielding power over women when they are physically so much stronger. Yet I have to say I think that somewhat recent laws disallowing women from holding bank accounts without the say-so of a responsible man, and ancient laws treating rape as a property crime against a man, etc., were oppressive.)
Serfs and slaves were oppressed. African-Americans under Jim Crow were oppressed. There is massive oppression in North Korea. I define oppression as active destruction of the well-being of others. Typically involves serious restriction, usually for exploitive purposes, of the choices available to some group or individuals.
A women’s movement was required to argue and agitate for getting rid of legal restrictions on women. A special ideology (feminism) was not required.
Ah, I see, you are drawing a distinction between the women's movement and feminism, which I guess I never had done, but since I haven't read much feminist theory this is very possibly just ignorance on my part. When I have described myself as a feminist, all I have meant by that is that I think women should be equal to men in society and in law (apart from necessary biological distinctions).
Regarding oppression, surely you would have to agree that women have had their choices seriously restricted in a way that has degraded their quality of life, in most societies? Wouldn't this make women broadly oppressed? (Although, this is not the case in Western civilization in the present day.) I suppose a very literal reading of the phrase "men oppress women" would not be accurate, since not every man has oppressed every woman - but most societies have oppressed women, and have been structured such that individual men, if they are husbands or fathers, have been given authority to oppress the women in their household if they so chose. Am I missing something?
Yep. There was oppression of women. In some societies, a lot. It is perfectly reasonable to note that societies vary hugely in their gender egalitarianism. Indeed, the general tendency over time in complex societies in the core areas of Eurasia was for the status of women to fall. The women’s movement arose in the Eurasian civilisation where women were least restricted and had the highest status.
So your objection to the phrase is that it is too sweeping and doesn't admit to the existence of societies where women had more rights? (And, possibly, that the women who started saying "men oppress women" were upsettingly ignorant about their position in a society that was already comparatively egalitarian - if I'm not reading too much into your comment?)
I understand the desire for precision, and to avoid over-generalizing, which results in inaccurate understandings. I will bear that in mind as I read further in your essays, which I have been finding fascinating and very enlightening. (I have to admit it was hard for me to suppress a certain knee-jerk emotional response to reading that male oppression of females is a fantasy, haha - although here I find myself at the egalitarian pinnacle, so far as I know it.) Thank you for entertaining my questions!
A dedicated piece on feminism is forthcoming, don't worry!
Ta. Pity, it was a good piece by Maya Forstater.
The article has been moved to here:
https://hiyamaya.net/2023/02/09/on-gender-critical-disputes/
The link will get changed tomorrow, when Helen is awake.
Gents, the link has been updated. Thanks for letting us know - Maya must have been banned from Medium in between Lorenzo writing the piece & me editing and publishing it on here - so, literally in the last week (probably while I was in Tenerife). So, very annoying.
On the upside, Substack’s business model is based on not being opinion restrictive.
Great essay. The systemicist/conspiracist divide is one of the most significant epistemological debates of our time. On the one hand, as you say ably demonstrate, a great deal can be explained as the straightforward consequences of human social instinct interacting with the nature of whichever social system those humans find themselves in. When that system becomes strongly misaligned with desires or expectations, there's a natural tendency for conspiratorial thinking to project a malign intent - as for example the magical thinking engaged in by BlueAnon regarding Russia, systemic racism, the patriarchy, and so on.
But on the other, there is the real historical existence of conspiratorial organizations acting to great effect on society. The American revolution may not have been a Freemasonic conspiracy in the sense that it was carried out to advance some long term Masonic goal, but the lodges certainly played their part in enabling clandestine coordination. The existence of the Italian Mafia was officially denied for years even as it established itself as the most significant criminal organization in the world. In the modern context, there's the role played by intelligence agencies, which are compartmentalized and secretive by their very nature; what would one call COINTELPRO, Mockingbird, Gladio, or the various color revolutions if not conspiracies? To say nothing of revelations concerning the backchannel coordination of spooks and social media companies in order to reduce the impact of political dissidents.
This is why I tend to adopt a both/and approach to the question of conspiracy vs system:
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/a-conspiracy-of-systems-a-system
Another factor worth mentioning on this topic is the tendency for the regime to label any noticing it dislikes - for example of the long term impacts of mass immigration, or the designs of the World Economic Forum - as 'right wing conspiracy theories', even as they openly promote and celebrate such things. Anton's celebration parallax in other words. But of course the WEF etc. are not "conspiracies" in the sense of being secretive about thei aims, and their use of the term 'conspiracy theory' is really just a mixture of status attack and gaslighting, so not actually relevant to the question of whether organized clandestine activity plays a significant role in world politics.
Important to remember:
Often the answer is "this and that", as you note. Humans crave certainty (it's biological) and are thus prone to binary thinking. It can also be "this, that, and another thing we aren't aware of yet because someone doesn't want you to know about it".
Humans are terrifyingly susceptible to mind control. This is achieved by 1) Degradation of their brain's ability to function properly by poor diet and toxins and 2) Repeating the desired mode of thinking often, and 3) Using rewards and punishment for desired/undesired thoughts & actions.
If a conspiracy has been debunked, and yet the conspiracy still explains the world in front of you more or less accurately, has it been debunked? Refer to the previous paragraph if necessary.
The term "conspiracy theory" was literally created by people who conspire for a living to discredit people who investigate conspiracies.
Apart from the "diet and toxins" I would agree that the reflex response to any new revelation about rich and powerful groups is to link it to a (nutty) conspiracy theory and dismiss it as more of the same.
Endocrine disruptors are everywhere because of packaging and food processing. Glyphosate and other toxins are are in widespread use. Low fat, especially low-saturated fat/cholesterol diets have been propagandized for generations. Cholesterol lowering drugs have been pushed and administered for just as long. Processed food removes or destroys key nutrients for health, and sugar (especially high fructose corn syrup) leads to metabolic syndrome which suppresses important hormones. Vitamin D in particular is critical to human health. Sunlight, which causes humans to produce it, has been demonized as cancer-causing, and application of arguably dangerous sun-screen propagandized for generations.
Knowing that, you are probably still skeptical of "diet and toxins" ability to degrade your ability to think clearly, but hopefully a tiny bit less so.
Lorenzo & and I have a joint piece on the "diet & toxins" issue in the works, mainly because he lost 43kgs while getting fit & healthy and I lost 21kgs getting similarly fit and healthy. We both used intermittent fasting and one of the keto diet variations to achieve that, too.
That's tremendous, very happy to hear that. We're gonna make it.
Most excellent. 43 kg is amazing.
Over the last few years I've experimented with intermittent fasting and simple calorie counting, got good results with both - was down to 15% body fat at one point.
Slonk eggs bro
The diet and toxins route to assuring mass compliance is at second remove compared with the other 2 factors which directly control compliance.
That said I am also concerned about toxins. Especially environmental toxins. When I was a kid we used to sit in the garden on deckchairs in early summer and it was like insect soup in the air around. Any long journey in a car resulted in pocket money for cleaning off dead flies. None of this now happens (especially not the pocket money).
I would describe the toxins as part of the no platforming of resource depletion, over population and pollution and the historical no platforming of climate change rather than as direct efforts at creating compliance. These are existential issues but tackling any of them affects the rich and powerful.
Just look at the control of academe and the media. Billions of words on wokery outweighing all of our present reality. It is an obvious conspiracy - see https://therenwhere.substack.com/p/the-globalist-threat
Follow the money even though it may be a circuitous path.
Networks of coordination are major factors in human affairs. And dismissing folk pointing out such coordination as “conspiracy theorists” is, indeed, a regularly used rhetorical ploy.
Notice something about the examples you cite. (1) They use identifiable organisations. (2) They come to light.
The colour revolutions I would not use as good examples, as they only worked by tapping into broad social aspirations. Calling them conspiracies is usually a ploy to deny that reality.
Indeed, it's necessary to define what one means by conspiracy, as there are multiple distinct phenomena aggregated within the word. The conventional use of 'conspiracy theory' is meant to evoke the Illuminati (which was also an organization that came to light) drinking virgin blood in secret antechambers as they orchestrate the fate of the planet together with their lizard people allies. This image then gets attached to any notion that powerful people collude. It's a rhetorical sleight of hand that is so effective that organizations such as the WEF can act quite openly and still have their critics dismissed as conspiracy theorists.
In any case, I would argue that clandestine intelligence activities, including eg color revolutions, qualify as conspiracies insofar as they are strongly influenced by hidden agents acting to direct or influence political outcomes in order to advance interests that are not openly admitting their involvement. I don't think 1) or 2) are sufficient to exclude a certain incident or organization from the conspiracy classification.
And then there is the concept of egregores.
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/memespace-egregores-and-google-maps
One of the great insights of evolutionary theory is that things not capable of forming intent can nevertheless act, or at least be selected for as if they act, strategically. All you need is feedback and response.
This post expresses the point about plotting and systems of coordination re: the pandemic nicely.
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/why-we-must-mock-the-virus-pests?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
The big problem here is that conspiracies do indeed happen. The suppression that COVID was a lab leak was a global conspiracy
- see https://therenwhere.substack.com/p/covid-was-a-lab-leak-the-evidence .
Worse still, most people knew it was a conspiracy as it was happening (COVID breaks out next to the main research centre on coronaviruses in the world - what are the chances? - about 10,000 to 1 or higher that it was the lab). Now we know chapter and verse but still the conspiracy continues.
The existence of obvious conspiracies means that global politics is, as it has always been, about wealth and power. As wealth and power shifts to women they promote themselves. But the women did not start the power shift, it was the wealthy wanting originally, cheap, highly qualified labour that did it. The platforms owned by the powerful invite them in and, as you point out above, create a fake narrative to increase their influence. As the wealth and power of China grows it can do no wrong.
PS: The COVID conspiracy was global. The academics lost any attachment to accurate accounts.
PPS: I know no-one who believes Qanon. It is in the same category as reptiloid aliens running the world. These are largely fake conspiracies that inflict collateral damage on people who support part of the agenda - for example, Bilderberg is dangerous to democracy but anyone saying so is asked to take the tin foil off their heads. How many of the archetypal "conspiracy theories" (the nutty ones) are actually supported by a lot of people and how many are platformed to create the impression of mass insanity? - The "sane" being the wealthy and powerful and their apparatchiks.
"It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It" -Upton Sinclair
Conspiracies succeed by those in in positions of power create and tell the lie, and then all those dependent on them proceed to spread the lie because their paychecks depend on it.
Something that keeps emerging with modern feminism is an oddly anti female and pro male cornerstone. It's the unspoken but clear concept that to be a successful woman you must be indistinguishable from a successful man.
It holds what men do as the ultimate and what women did as worthless. We don't celebrate woman teachers or nurses, but watch what happens if you become a scientist or an astronaut! Women who raise children are certainly failing compared to the woman who forgoes children to be a CEO.
It goes further where feminists view their physical femininity as a burden to delete with pharmaceuticals so as to be able to participate better with (or as) men.
It's no wonder why so many girls are becoming transmen these past 5 years. Because that milliu has bizarrely accepted that men are the ultimate.
Absolutely. This bizarre feature of feminism will be discussed in a later essay.
I don't think it's possible these days to define a set of things which "feminists" believe, since there are too many conflicting groups claiming the name feminism (at very least, radical feminists and liberal feminists, but you could probably add "former second-wave feminists who stopped being active when they got the vote and equal pay" and subdivide the groups further)
Which one will be highlighted in the media as what "the feminists" believe will of course reflect the interests of the people who own these platforms, and the amount of overlap with the opinions of ordinary women who describe ourselves as feminist is unknown.
There is one thing all feminists believe: that you need a special ideology/philosophy to liberate women. Which is false.
Yes, feminists vary in how they conceive that liberation, what the barriers to such are, what path is required to achieve same. But that foundational belief is common to all forms of feminism.
Interesting take. I think I'd need you to justify that further in order for me to believe it. For instance, women in general have shared characteristics of being able to bear children (and very frequently actually doing to) with all the attendant effects on our life trajectories, of being generally less physically imposing and thus more easy for community leaders to not take seriously, and of being physically weaker and thus possible to physically dominant.
Those shared characteristics aren't very similar in scope to any other large significant social group that I can think of, and have the obvious implications of a) women in general having specific collective interests and b) being more likely to need to pursue our interests, specifically, by collective action.
So why *don't* we need a special ideology/philosophy to ground that collective action and prevent ourselves being dominated by the male half of the community?
Did we need a special ideology to abolish slavery? Did we need a special ideology for abolish laws against Jews and Catholics? Did we need a special ideology for adult male suffrage? Did we need a special ideology for civil rights? No
Nor do we need a special ideology for equal rights for women.
As for the differences between men and women, as statistical patterns they are real. But feminism gets in the way of dealing with them precisely because it tries to turn everything to do with women into both a special case and yet a basis for equality.
A 2015 poll of the UK populace conducted by Survation for the Fawcett society found that 81% of women and 84% of men supported equal rights for women. (Yes, the rate among men was higher.) Only 9% of British women identified as feminist. Feminism does not speak for British women. Indeed, it gets in the way of doing so.
Well, I'll be interested in your long form essay about this, and we may have further conversations at that point.
Partly because at that point it will probably be clearer whether your critique is "this specific ideological framework of this iteration of feminism is wrong" (which I may well agree with) or "it is wrong to believe that women as a class need a specific philosophy of liberation, which other groups don't need" (which currently I don't agree with)
I assume you meant to cite Henrich on the WEIRDest people in the world
I didn’t, not because I don’t like his work (I do) but because it wasn’t a focus and I come to the above conclusions about Western dynamics from folk such as Mitteraur and Nicholls. But the big issue is that, while I have read other works by Henrich, I haven’t got around to that book, just the original paper. Which, now you refresh my memory, has that very useful kinship index map. I will ask Helen to add that reference, ta.
Gents, I've added the following paper reference for you in the bibliography:
Jonathan F. Schulz, Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan P. Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich. "The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation." Science 366, no. 6466 (2019): eaau5141.
The article was too long .It should have used everyday language to make its points.Interesting as it was I stopped reading 1/4 in.
You unravel the conspiracist mindset very well. My tendency to presume that things are not a conspiracy comes from this: governments and bureaucracies are just not that competent. In fact, notoriously the opposite.
Wonderful piece! It seems to me that conspiracies are slotted into two main categories: elite/academy/left approved (eg. feminism, decolonisation efforts) and tin-foil, right, low class (which ends up containing e.g. qanon but also covid lab leak). Conspiracies are so easy to believe even for the highly intelligent perhaps in part because they are so used to deciphering and explaining patterns, it's easy to conjure them up where there are none. Too many of those same intelligent people then can't see that they could be wrong, or could be in the same mindset as those lower class/less educated/right wingers with their unapproved conspiracies.
The behaviour around the covid lab leak was very bad. It was always perfectly plausible even without Matt Ridley & Alina Chan's scientific evidence, simply because we are dealing with a totalitarian state. Totalitarian states lie - we should be familiar with this from the USSR/Nazi Germany during WWII/the Cold War. And while China is an unusually competent totalitarian state, it still lies (look at Xinjiang, for goodness' sake).
Yes, I remember being shocked that some leftwing colleagues were praising China's low death/covid figures. They were quick to assume our own Government would lie (and I don't dispute that Governments of any stripe can lie), but they didn't think China's would.
I appreciate the explanations provided here, and understand the lesson to be taken away is different from the complaint I am about to make.
This article is one of many which effectively says "Conspiracy thinking is flawed". Here I read the ends of a conspiracy can be achieved without an actual conspiracy of actors coordinating and hiding that coordination. However I am used to reading "it is just people with aligned interests, therefore not a conspiracy, therefore the proposition there are people acting together to achieve a goal is untrue". The difference between these two formulations is the absence of hidden coordination in the case of this article doesn't dismiss the fact that people are moving in concert to achieve ends.
When in modern times someone says something like "there is a media conspiracy against certain narratives" the thing that is concerning is the resulting suppression, not the mechanism by which the people have come into alignment to perform that suppression.
There is little solace to be had in knowing that the people who have come together to gaslight and make you an outcast didn't have a group meeting about it first.
No consolation at all. But accurate understanding of mechanisms makes their successful disruption more likely.
One thing about "people with aligned interests", though, is that you can have two groups with imperfectly aligned interests coordinating to some degree, but not in complete agreement. At that point, the narrative being promoted will start to become inconsistent and flawed, as both groups fight for control of it.
"The quintessential Gnostic cosmology is that all material Creation is a conspiracy of the Demiurge."
Or Rousseau in his Second Discourse - that man was initially a peaceful, solitary cattle-like creature, and all socialization, even family, was at odds with this nature. I believe all modern revolutionary theory is built on the assumption that our social system(s) oppress our nature - and thus are rooted in Rousseau's absurdity.
I'm a little confused on your perspective on feminism, on a couple of points. 1) Are you saying that there's no connection between the feminist movement and women's rights? (ie, that women would have gained as many rights as quickly if feminism had never existed?) And 2) I'm wondering how you define oppression? What does it take to be oppressed? Is a slave oppressed? Is a serf oppressed? (I'm just a regular person who's never read much feminist theory, but I had never heard that male oppression of women was supposed to be a conspiracy until I read this essay, and I don't think men would have any need to be secretive about wielding power over women when they are physically so much stronger. Yet I have to say I think that somewhat recent laws disallowing women from holding bank accounts without the say-so of a responsible man, and ancient laws treating rape as a property crime against a man, etc., were oppressive.)
Serfs and slaves were oppressed. African-Americans under Jim Crow were oppressed. There is massive oppression in North Korea. I define oppression as active destruction of the well-being of others. Typically involves serious restriction, usually for exploitive purposes, of the choices available to some group or individuals.
A women’s movement was required to argue and agitate for getting rid of legal restrictions on women. A special ideology (feminism) was not required.
Ah, I see, you are drawing a distinction between the women's movement and feminism, which I guess I never had done, but since I haven't read much feminist theory this is very possibly just ignorance on my part. When I have described myself as a feminist, all I have meant by that is that I think women should be equal to men in society and in law (apart from necessary biological distinctions).
Regarding oppression, surely you would have to agree that women have had their choices seriously restricted in a way that has degraded their quality of life, in most societies? Wouldn't this make women broadly oppressed? (Although, this is not the case in Western civilization in the present day.) I suppose a very literal reading of the phrase "men oppress women" would not be accurate, since not every man has oppressed every woman - but most societies have oppressed women, and have been structured such that individual men, if they are husbands or fathers, have been given authority to oppress the women in their household if they so chose. Am I missing something?
Yep. There was oppression of women. In some societies, a lot. It is perfectly reasonable to note that societies vary hugely in their gender egalitarianism. Indeed, the general tendency over time in complex societies in the core areas of Eurasia was for the status of women to fall. The women’s movement arose in the Eurasian civilisation where women were least restricted and had the highest status.
So your objection to the phrase is that it is too sweeping and doesn't admit to the existence of societies where women had more rights? (And, possibly, that the women who started saying "men oppress women" were upsettingly ignorant about their position in a society that was already comparatively egalitarian - if I'm not reading too much into your comment?)
I understand the desire for precision, and to avoid over-generalizing, which results in inaccurate understandings. I will bear that in mind as I read further in your essays, which I have been finding fascinating and very enlightening. (I have to admit it was hard for me to suppress a certain knee-jerk emotional response to reading that male oppression of females is a fantasy, haha - although here I find myself at the egalitarian pinnacle, so far as I know it.) Thank you for entertaining my questions!
Yes, I have no objection to living in a gender egalitarian society. Indeed, I strongly prefer it for lots of reasons, including moral ones.