| If men won't vote their interests...
The "Alpha Males" in Congress and so on do not represent "men." They represent themselves first, and their harem second. They do what alpha male monkeys do: they use state power to extract resources from the other males, and shovel those resources into their own pockets and to the females. This is a good deal for the females, so they vote for more of it. Every time you hear about another government program for assisting with "child care" or "subsidizing motherhood," you are watching alpha male monkeys making their females more dependent on them. The women cheering this on see the state as a more reliable (He's immortal, swoon) provider than those ordinary male monkeys. You can't knock this system for effectiveness... it worked for a very long time. It still works in the jungle, and among monkeys. It never really went away. What makes it possible to bring it back now is that we are a long way from the Magna Carta and the days when a few hundred armed men could persuade the King that maybe we oughta make things more equal around here. The King-with-overwhelming-force is back, and so are his nobles, and soon so will be the serfs. The problem the King is going to have is that we don't live in the trees anymore. Kings today need airplane mechanics and truck drivers and sewage-treatment engineers. You can't really put a gun to someone's head and make them do a good job at that. They have to care, or you end up like the Soviet Union did where the planes crash, the ships sink, and the buildings fall over. Monkey rules won't work in a technological society. Forty years after Helen Reddy roared, men are still doing 95% of the work that keeps the technological trains running. If the space aliens were to beam up all the male diesel mechanics, the food distribution system in the U.S. would crash within weeks. The space aliens probably won't be by, but what will happen is that diesel mechanics whose children have been taken away from them, who are under restraining orders for some bogus spitefest by the ex-, and whose paycheck is being garnished to the point where they have $400 a month to live on, develop yer basic 'fuggit attitude.' Do that to enough of your diesel mechanics and garbage-scow tenders and refinery workers, and one day the whole thing just sorta falls over. And the guys who could've prevented it look at the mess and say, "You fix it." Every time I read another one of those articles about the Irresponsible Young Men who behave as though they have lost interest in whether tomorrow is any better than today (for anyone but themselves), I wonder what's going on at their jobs. "Valve needs replacing? Aww, fuggit." Close the hood and go get lunch. |
They can't, because no one will represent their interests. Part of what happens when a society becomes "feminized" is that it moves back toward what I call Monkey Rules. Under monkey rules, there is a small cadre of alpha males, but all the rest of the males are so much baggage to the troop except for their ability to hoot and holler at rival troops or to forage for food. Monkey rules were in effect for a very long time. The idea of "nations of free men, all created equal" really arrived only with firearms and the Magna Carta. It's a relatively recent development.