The Patriarchy Scam
All three legs of the white male “respect” stool are threatened - career, family, and patriarchy and the right is freaking out in a way that will hurt everyone but mostly them.
By some estimates patriarchy has been around since agriculture started over 10,000 years ago. However older patriarchy usually had women spending more time raising children and male careers like fighting, farming, or factories.
Since changing career and family outcomes is hard, the right is doubling down on patriarchy but it’s a scam.
Career
Wealth inequality and poor job prospects are the obvious candidate for new events to cause a right uprising, but the gilded age and progressive era also had equivalent economic issues.
Average life expectancy at birth, average life expectancy at 10 years old and adult height measures all trended downward during the Gilded Age, even in studies which control for factors such as demographic changes brought on by immigration.
Both periods also had rising union membership which softened the wealth inequality. However a services economy is difficult to unionize — lower skilled, smaller workplaces, and more part time. Reducing immigration and tariffs can’t change decades long manufacturing trends anytime soon.
Women in the workforce combined with inability to unionize means “respect” from career is harder for most men; unless like Putin you draft young men into a war you started.
Family
The world’s lowering birth rate means praise for raising a family is harder to achieve. Fewer children are born and acceptance of the importance of raising a family is also lower.
Autocracy does not solve anything. China and Russia have even worse issues with wealth inequality and low birth rates.
Above is already not fair to women, but if you include single mothers and limit the data to families with children then you get an even worse picture.
Could the white male respect problem be solved by returning to mostly husband income households? No because with tremendous wealth inequality the only way to restore respect is to tax the rich more — a luxury goods tax for instance. Otherwise those white males would just be single income in households with much lower status than others.
Traditional Patriarchy
At the height of patriarchy Thomas Jefferson had a shadow family with a teenage “black” girl 14 to 16 years old. White men in America considered themselves scientifically superior to other races and women.
In 1790 a census showed one third of southern households owned slaves. However 25 to 70 thousand American men died in the revolutionary war out of roughly 1.25 million men, around 4%. Plus there was no casual dating and in the 1780's men didn’t marry till mid to late twenties.
By 1780 the percentage of adult colonists who formally held membership in a church was between 10 and 30%. Less than half of Americans, 45%, now belong to a formal house of worship.
In 1890, 85% of Americans were born in the United States and currently it’s about the same. So peak patriarchy only requires economic subjugation of women and other races — not strong religious participation or low immigration.
However that leaves patriarchy as a divide with no compromise. States that allow women control of their bodies cannot easily coexist next to states that don’t.
A form of soft succession is already under way — you can force people to end slavery but you can’t force a transition from red to blue. Some humans may have been forced to adopt agriculture but there is evidence that for many it was a long process of choice.
Christian Nationalists and “Respect”
Modeling seeking respect as is shown in the bible is problematic.
On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
Jesus at this point is supposed to be human so honoring him like a god is odd. However even if we consider him a god respect should not mean lessers traveling long distances with gifts.
Jesus said to Simon, “You are right.” Then Jesus turned toward the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? When I came into your house, you gave me no water for my feet, but she washed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You gave me no kiss of greeting, but she has been kissing my feet since I came in. You did not put oil on my head, but she poured perfume on my feet. I tell you that her many sins are forgiven, so she showed great love.
Again is Jesus a man or a god and even if he is a god why does this poor woman have to wash his feet in her tears etc to be forgiven. Incredibly toxic and more than a touch of misogyny.
And the twelve were with him, and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s household manager, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them[a] out of their means.
Where Magdalene stood in early Christianity is unclear but in the version of the bible used modernly she is excluded from being a disciple and overly mentioned for having evil spirits.
4 But one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected, 5 “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.[b]” 6 He did not say this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; as keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it.
7 “Leave her alone,” Jesus replied. “It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial. 8 You will always have the poor among you,[c] but you will not always have me.”
Here again the concept of “respect” is toxic. There is even an ad hominem attack on Judas as if that invalidates the point that Jesus is basically warming himself by a fire of burning cash.
Nor are Jesus’s disciples shy about the proper way to show respect
11 A woman[a] should learn in quietness and full submission. 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man;[b] she must be quiet. 13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve. 14 And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.
Not just quitness but “full submission”. Here again is this strange attitude towards lessers. Even assuming men were gods compared to women, it doesn’t follow that women should be submissive.
Of what use is the lesser beings acts of submission to a god? Does an ant bringing me a bread crumb somehow boost my standing? Does claiming I have nothing to learn from an ant, which is definitely untrue, make me a more impressive person?
Respect can really only be displayed by one equal to another. Forcefully collecting respect from lessers is hollow and meaningless.
It is impossible for Jesus to model receiving respect so long as the bible presents him as more than human. A Christian man seeking respect has only cringe asymmetric relationships to guide him.
For instance Lazarus is sometimes described as Jesus’s friend but then
Jesus tells his followers: “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby.”
Imagine I block an ant, watch it suffer trying to get around the obstacle, and then remove the obstacle and proclaim, “Praise me.”
So when Christian nationalists pursue respect it is in the form of asymmetric relationships with their own promotion above lessers. Stephen Miller’s tribute speech embodies this:
You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness, you are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity.
Again suppose even Christian nationalists are some sort of god like creators and everyone else is nothing — still what do they get out of putting woke people, immigrants, black people, and LGBTQ in their place?
Instead of respect Martin Luther King focused on love:
And this is what Jesus means when he said: “How is it that you can see the mote in your brother’s eye and not see the beam in your own eye?” Or to put it in Moffatt’s translation: “How is it that you see the splinter in your brother’s eye and fail to see the plank in your own eye?”3 And this is one of the tragedies of human nature. So we begin to love our enemies and love those persons that hate us whether in collective life or individual life by looking at ourselves.
Modern Patriarchy
Steve Bannon on not supporting #TimesUp
What I do know is that it’s against what I call the patriarchy — it’s against the way things have been run for the previous 4,000, 5,000, 10,000 years. It’s just opposed to that.
If conservatives were opposed to new things they would be against tech billionaires, climate change, and even capitalism. Mostly modern patriarchy is about dominating women into doing extra work, work that men don’t want to do, or investing in patriarchy approved types of work.
Where previously patriarchy involved controlling inheritance, marriage alliances, ensuring women continued to bear children even though it was dangerous, and the same for men and war, all of that is mostly gone.
Modernly a Margaret Thatcher type isn’t anti patriarchy. Only women who would help other women not be dominated are an issue.
Where previously “witch” hunts cost around 35,000 women their lives, modernly the stakes are usually lower. The incident of rape is still deplorably high, but getting away with sexual abuse isn’t the main driver of modern patriarchy.
Even the slowly crumbling average man bonus is no longer a main patriarchy driver. The main driver for patriarchy is now just keeping an American male economic casino open.
Even the grandiose term “AI” reflects a patriarchal need for exaggeration and domination.
Women are adopting generative AI technology at a significantly lower rate than men, in many cases because women question whether it’s ethical to use the tools, according to research by Rembrand Koning and colleagues.
In tech domination has been working this way:
- Focus on a new and unregulated industry
- Use the proceeds to dominate government and prevent attempts to clean up the resulting mess
- Find a newer unregulated industry
However this whole playbook can be run without patriarchy except for one problem — it requires vast amounts of investment and bonding together on domination makes that investment easier.
Steve Bannon understands the result of patriarchy for oligarchs
These oligarchs in Silicon Valley, they have a very different view of how people should govern themselves. I call it techno-feudalism. They don’t believe in the underlying tenets of self-governance.
It’s just that Bannon is more about achieving those results for a MAGA base instead of stopping patriarchy altogether.
The Patriarchy Scam
Very few men have anything to gain from modern patriarchy. Under normal conditions most men know this and so patriarchy has been bloodlessly crumbling for a long time.
That changed with gilded age inequality intersecting with baby bust intersecting with internet groups commenting on DEI. Now the body count will begin in America though weirdly the majority of the deaths will come from segments of the population that supported Trump.
Meanwhile those who think modern patriarchy will shore up religious participation seem blind to the fact that modern patriarchy is destroying religious participation. America’s precipitous drop in religious attendance started with the crisis of sexual abuse cover up in Catholic churches.
This cover up was pure patriarchy — men solely in charge allowing other men to get away with rape. Nor is church support for suppressing women’s control of their bodies likely to end well for religious participation.
That’s the problem with aligning yourself with a 10,000 year old system; it’s unsuited to accomplish anything modern. AI is not modern — it’s empire.
So for most men patriarchy is a pure shit show that enables a fascist workplace that has now spilled over into a fascist federal government. What then makes patriarchy so popular? How does the patriarchy scam work? According to one theory it’s a Ponzi scheme:
Men do not just happily bond together to oppress women. In addition to hierarchy over women, men create hierarchies and rankings among themselves according to criteria of “masculinity.” Men at each rank of masculinity compete with each other, with whatever resources they have, for the differential payoffs that patriarchy allows men.
And specifically in America:
Any kind of powerlessness or refusal to compete becomes imbued with imagery of homosexuality.
However some women are making this toxicity a negative for dating. So as usual with modern shit show patriarchy the scam ends up denying whatever you were after. Instead of winning you a 14ish Sally Hemings, teenage girls are repulsed as in Netflix’s Adolescence.
The modern patriarchy scam works as long as women let it work:
What bothered me more was the sheer number of young girls and women who surrounded me throughout the summit, cheering and rejoicing as Kirk and like-minded female acolytes delivered sermon-like remarks onstage that all zeroed in on one main idea: True femininity resides in servitude and motherhood.
However blaming “Stacys” for choosing patriarchy games winners “Chads” is exactly what the misogynist incel communities do.
Still there are powerful women involved in weaponizing trans and that effort looks to be the latest patriarchy scam innovation. (Likely patriarchy suppressing gender fluidity will make transgender more popular.)
Perhaps the original patriarchy of 10,000 years ago was more just a division of labor where men tried to protect newly created stores of grain from hungry people without enough grain.
At some point the patriarchy trying to prevent theft and scarcity was replaced by a patriarchy that causes theft and scarcity.