“Patriarchy is the bitter enemy of everything progressive and good. Patriarchy must be erradicated and deracinated, not only from its sources of power, but from living memory itself.” — Random Progressive
We hear this blaring from loud speakers, megaphones — then whispering from our earpods and from the deep, creaky, breathy, vocal frys of the speakers at the mandatory diversity, inclusion seminars, all in a dreamy eternal loop of random progressive voices, snaking out of the social control centres and mouthpieces of our society: the managerial elites, including governments, the academics, the professionals, the health officers, the police, the school teachers, the neighbour putting up her Ukraine flag and from inside the open doors of the United Church, its steps painted in the bright rainbow of love.
What irony that patriarchy is the solution the progressives crave — if they only knew — a force that will bring an end to their inner turmoil, bring them peace, end the gnawing of that worm inside their brains of anxiety, shew that black dog of depression sitting at their feet implacable, inside the cubicle, show them the light of happiness, at the end of that dark tunnel; in an imperfect world, where they find only despair, it is patriarchy that will bring them the occasional justice they seek, where instead, everywhere, people are trampled and surveilled, under the high heals and knowing smiles, of our caring dictators.
The facts speak for themselves. Women have triumphed and are ascendant. They are entrenched and dominant in academia, the professions (especially law and other human sciences), the civil service; women have their equity commisars implanted in most businesses, and have been elevated beyond their wildest abilities into the position of head of state in most western countries, or if not currently holding office as prime minister or president, are dominant or well represented in cabinet where they can whistfully threaten with public shaming any recitivist male leader and keep divergence in check.
The pandemic itself saw male leaders patently itching to unleash the masses and avoid the lockdowns or pull back from the brink of overreach, overreaction and dystopia, only to be dragged back again, like Michael Corleone, at the female threat that their retrograde male instincts would, left unchecked, put people at risk. They were re-educated to understand that one Covid death was too many, that they must above all keep people “safe”. And then, on a dime, the female dominant cabinets have demanded unconditional love, or rather, support for Ukraine or climate change, even if such unconditional love/support means nuclear war or the cull of humanity, reduced to pods and bug eating. These incoherent swings were known to our ancestors as distinctly female, and rightly feared.
Even where we have male leaders, their methods and affectations are distinctly female. Justin Trudeau in Canada, despite a pretence of male virility, as the Tofino surfer, in his wet suit, or as street tough, as illustrated by his famous boxing match with a political gadfly, has in real life used all his dramatic skills to embody the female. His complete disregard of personal space is infamous. Sitting across the table from him, he leans in, never lets his gaze break from yours as you speak, tears well up in his redening eyes when you talk of diversity, equity, inclusion, at the mention of that same sex boy who broke your heart in high school and, when you feign to rise to leave, he rushes towards you, grabs you like his Bogart to your Elsa, and embrasses you with a passion or deep physical attention that we only usually experience from grandmothers, lovers and muggers.
When the male ethos of the Truckers appeared in Ottawa, he feigned sickness, Covid of all things, and left town so he could be safe. Like the Southern female matriarch, or Aunt Pittypat in Gone with the Wind, he refused to so much as be seen with, let alone talk to, the lesser, unseemly and uncouth white trash or Belle Watlings that had camped on his estate, a caravan of gypsies and unwashed — with their unacceptable views. “It just aint fitting,” as Mamie would say. A short time ago, such blatant cowardice, dishonour and effeminacy would have ended his political career. Today, he is a made “man”.
Which brings us to an article I just read in Chronicles Magazine, the “Revolt of the Fatherless,” by author Stephen Baskerville, in which he examines, the crash of Western civilization and how it can be traced to the state’s surgical removal of the father’s authority and to the feminized blind rebellion that has followed. He writes:
Our conservative elites clearly have no clue why our civilization is collapsing before our eyes. They can provide no explanation for the triumph of the woke left. Nor can they explain why the virus hoax fools huge numbers into further acquiescence. It is not surprising, then, that they offer no way out of our predicament either—other than more of what got us into it. They react negatively to the left while accepting a steady stream of defeats. But the very notion of mounting a counter-offensive seems beyond their comprehension.
Various explanations for this phenomenon are unsatisfactory, says the author, as they pull the punch when near the target. Baskerville asks:
So why did the left win? Why, for example, is virus hysteria driving people like lemmings to the sea, and what can be done about it? A plausible explanation is available in plain English. It also suggests straightforward remedies through cost-free changes in identifiably pernicious policies. The right kind of leadership could well rally the majority to achieve these changes.
I recently posted on Twitter that, “The #feminist mind resembles that of the toddler, in which adult qualities such as personal responsibility and virtues like humility and modesty are suppressed or denied and the central rhetorical devices are gloating or the tantrum.” When you try to reason with a feminist, you are wrestling with a porcupine. Baskerville explains this as a broader phenomenon:
First we must understand that this crash of civilization is a revolt of adolescents—some superannuated, but adolescents all the same. It represents the culmination of a power shift, from the mature to the immature, that accelerated during the 1960s: “The times they are a-changin’,” as Bob Dylan sang. Both Cancel Culture, with its contempt for civil liberties, and Black Lives Matter, with the violence and destruction it rationalizes, are perpetrated by those with a smattering of university education, young militants under the sway of their predecessors from the 1960s.
The media collusion is largely explicable in like manner. The manipulable, twenty-something journalism and political science graduates head out into the media world and make it like themselves. I have taught many such students (including conservative ones), and I know how intoxicated they become with their own righteousness and unaccountable power.
Baskerville inquires, why has this generation been so easily radicalized?
… Something subtle but sinister has been at work in the intervening decades since the 1960s. The young have not simply been “empowered” to revolt against their elders; most of today’s youth have never known effective parental authority to begin with.
The answer is to be found in the absence of the father and, society-wide, the suppresion of patriarchy and its key function as an inseparable counter weight to the female.
This suggests the origins of our malaise to be in something conservatives should understand but do not: government’s systematic destruction of families. More precisely … the elimination of fathers from the lives of tens of millions of children, the effects of which long ago transformed poor communities into war zones and now wreak havoc in middle-class society as well. Adolescents rage out of control because they never had any paternal authority to keep them under control and teach them how to channel their emerging discontent with the world’s imperfections into constructive dissent and productive habits of life.
Fatherlessness (not poverty or race) already accounts for every social pathology among the young: the violent criminality, substance abuse, and truancy that draw police to ungovernable minority and poor neighborhoods, where they themselves face criminalization for trying to fight crime. Fatherless youth suffer disproportionate emotional disturbance and self-destructive disorders—precisely those that psychologists now associate with COVID lockdowns: depression and suicide. These youth also indulge more in smoking, overeating, and other unhealthy practices .…. these “broken boys” perpetuate their problems into succeeding generations by siring more out-of-wedlock children.
In short, while some rise above their origins, fatherless youth are much more likely to be dysfunctional, self-destructive, and—in ways that lack purpose or direction—rebellious. The effect is compounded when entire communities have hardly a father among them for generations.
Like Kirk in the original Star Trek, when his emotional side is separated from his rational side in a transporter malfunction, he must learn through battling the evil one, that he and his other must be reunited, or they will both die separated. Likewise, men and women — not good and evil — but different none the less, cannot live apart, or be in perpetually warfare; they need each other to be their best and avoid their worse tendencies.
Why is fatherlessness so debilitating, both individually and socially? Because where motherhood is biologically inevitable, fatherhood constructs the social order. Philosopher Thomas Hobbes credited patriarchal authority with a central role in leaving the state of nature and entering civilized society. In nature, Hobbes argued,
…the dominion is in the mother. For in the condition of mere nature, where there are no matrimonial laws, it cannot be known who is the father, unless it be declared by the mother; and therefore the right of dominion over the child dependeth on her will and is consequently hers.
Only with the advent of civilized society—where “patrimonial laws” operate—did sovereign authority over children migrate to the father. Yet today we are reversing this stage of civilizational development and reverting to matriarchy. Our revolt targets both fathers and civilization itself.
The natural social order is the primary target of progressives who are waging a scorched earth policy to create a world that has never existed, or if it did here or there many millenia ago, has always failed and has itself been erased from memory — except in occasional brief outbursts in the decadent courts of Caligula, Nero or the Ancient Regime.
This natural paradigm is attacked by radical sexual ideology and its institutionalization in government welfare and existing divorce laws. These structures empower officials to “divide and rule” parents by turning fathers and their authority into objects of invective or ridicule and by turning children into narcissistic and nihilistic rebels. As a result of feminist ideology, “the most striking characteristic of our time is that the mother resents the father,” writes Schwartz, and resentment (as Nietzsche and others understood) is the most poisonous emotion in politics. …
The target is not only individual fathers, but the “the entire regimen of paternal authority, as established in civilizational norms”. All are targeted for destruction.
Getting rid of him … we will be free of the demands and expectations placed upon us … We will not be subordinate to any roles, rules, or obligations, but will be able to do what we want, act on our whim, in perfect safety, to the accompaniment of mother’s love.
Today’s COVID regimen operates by way of this underworld in its single-minded determination to enforce measures that increase the harm they claim to be alleviating. The latest of these is the indefensible, even sadistic, demand to inject children needlessly, which many are calling child abuse. But then it is well established that, by eliminating fathers and multiplying single mothers, the matriarchy’s apparatchiks have been proliferating child abuse for decades. The case of James Younger in Texas, whose father fought his ex-wife and the courts to save his son from gender transition, illustrates how close we are to court-ordered castration.
Baskerville asks, “What can be done?” How do we get the adolescents under control? One thing he points to is a return to the very male notion of fault, which now slips through our civilizational fingers like sand. Fault is a profoundly male concept, bare and unforgiving, which once led to harakiri and duels. This withdrawal of our support applies not only to no-fault divorce but, in my view to many other aspects of our civic life, such as the multiplicity of tribunals set up, not to judge, but to allocate resources. The effect is to denude society of moral standards, rights and just rewards, and submerge us in a world of judgment free administration, where we are loved to death and given a number for the trouble. No-fault car insurance and workers compensation tribunals have these characteristics. Although they may do some good, and may have arisen to correct some abuses, we cannot let the matriarchs destroy our courts, because they are too male and too judgmental. We must let the jury, from time to time, tell the lying bastard, or the Amber Heard, “case dismissed”. The theatre of the law and its drama, for all its imperfections, is the blood of western civilization.
Baskerville concludes:
First, we must expunge from the law the indefensible oxymoron of no-fault justice as applied to marriage and everything else. At a stroke, this devious legal subterfuge fatally undermined two bedrock institutions of western civilization: marriage and common law. As Maggie Gallagher, author of The Abolition of Marriage, points out, no-fault divorce law prohibits any legally binding agreement to raise children. It also authorizes judicial proceedings (including criminal punishments) against legally innocent people. No free society, no civilization can possibly survive this innovation. A half century after the enactment of this measure, its baneful effects seem to have caught up with us in the form of the new radicals.
Rectifying this law will facilitate the larger challenge of dismantling the socialist-feminist welfare behemoth, which institutionalizes this source of abuse. State-mandated feminization was inflicted first upon the poor and then upon others. Devouring one-fourth of our GDP, this underworld criminalizes breadwinning men, embitters single mothers, empowers radical apparatchiks, and disfigures (morally and physically) innocent children. It also impoverishes all of us and entrenches leftists in public office.
These effects can be undone by prioritizing focused counterstrikes against the bureaucratic factories. Mobilizing the grownups—mostly men—is a necessary first step.
Baskerville’s analysis is probing and insightful. Indeed, we need to start naming female power where we see it and calling it to account for its mischief. We need to open the curtains, let the light in and open the window for some fresh air as well. What we have learned, that we couldn’t have known otherwise, is the close association between female implicit and inferential forms of power and their corresponding and uniquely female forms of tyranny, stickie like molasses. Unlike the Leviathan, whose source of power is formal and explicit, central and sovereign, female power does not easily give up its source, like Victoria Falls in a dark continent. Expressions like cutting the umbilical cord and getting out from under your mother’s apron used to be cliches. Now, they are apt to produce more ambivalent responses. They also no longer just apply to young men living in their mom’s basements playing video games. They have deep social implications and the wounds may already be too deep to heal.