Alternatives to Patriarchy
Somewhere in the midst of the plague year of 2020, Marion felt a need to vent some of the angst he felt towards the moral and political degeneracy of the West. The issue that pricked him the most was what he perceived as the society’s full-press attack on traditional white males such as himself. Meanwhile, the reality on the ground, he thought, was that of widespread whoredom: dating apps re-creating the sexual dynamics of baboons, short-term relationships based on superficial attraction or money, and therefore on exploitation, and all of the newfangled sexual identities - all expect heterosexual males - invited to flaunt their lechery and employ it for political gain.
To deal with his frustration, Marion wrote the following essay on a deep-web forum where he cyber-socialized with similar-minded men, and some women:
”
“A family, group, or government controlled by a man or a group of men,” says the Merriam-Webster dictionary about patriarchy. But they don’t have space for essays there. Patriarchy, let me tell you, is most essentially about creating boundaries. The boundaries are created between males to avoid conflict and chaos.
It first draws boundaries on progeny, so that each male may lay full claim on his sons and daughters and accept full responsibility for raising them. The father receives honour or shame based on the behaviour of his progeny. It is unclear how and if the honour-shame dichotomy, an indispensable societal regulator, would even work without fatherhood.
Other boundaries, such as those of private property and opinion, spring from the concept of fatherhood, and lead to the formation of the individual. Such boundaries had to be applied to men rather than women. Which child belongs to which woman is obvious and requires no laws. A woman has the biological instinct to take care of the children she bears and needs no system of values to impel her to do so. She also does not need to be restrained in procreation, as she can produce only one child, or rarely two or three, every nine months. What a woman does need is assistance from males. But acknowledgment of fatherhood required abstract thinking so to speak, a contract and a commitment of sorts that may have been the blueprint for all others.
Contracts, commitments and boundaries lead to separation of inheritance and a unique space for every man in a society. In that space, the family unit can practice sovereignty, making their own decisions based on their own private judgment.
Another reason why patriarchal boundaries had been applied to men rather than women is that the biological role of women is nurture, and not competition. Strife among males can easily degenerate into chaos, which negotiation of boundaries and prohibitions help keep at bay. One may argue that competition, the masculine element, is not “necessary” and that a society ruled by the nurture principle - that is, ruled by women - would eliminate struggle. Putting aside the oxymoron of the idea of “ruling by nurture”, the idea ignores that prior to nurture, a woman practices selection. Just as spontaneously as she nurtures her offspring, she spontaneously selects whom she sees as the most competent male mating partner. Competence can only be seen through competition, so a female-dominated society would not in the least eliminate competition among males. Without males making deals among themselves, the competition would merely degenerate into a laissez-faire alpha-male dynamic seen in most species of mammals and in dysfunctional cultures.
Patriarchy is a fragile truce among competing males. It draw limits on what each may lay claim on. This act of balancing and curbing of desire is the mother of all morals. Its most equitable and most advanced forms are monogamy and democracy.
I can think of three alternatives to patriarchy. The first one can be observed on BBC’s Our Planet series. There, one can see mountain rams, for example, butt heads for ownership of the female harem. The winner gets to copulate with all the females, while the losers are outcast to roam alone in the wilderness and wait for another opportunity, or die.
The females meanwhile peacefully graze and accept whoever is the winner. They barely turn around to see what their winning beau looks like before he humps them. Significantly, there is not a single species in which the females are physically restrained or submitted into a relationship with the alpha-male; without exception, they choose to remain in the harem of their own will.
Perhaps the harem after all is a better option for females. An alpha male is awe-inspiring and non-violent towards them. He is only violent towards rival males. On the other hand, in the monogamous societal arrangement, the majority of females have to put up with non-alpha, loser males. The sex won’t be great, the progeny will not be great either, and worst of all, the loser male is likely to vent his aggressive instincts not on head-butting the alpha male, but on beating his wife.
Many of the non-alpha males know the ruthlessness with which women practice sexual selection when unrestrained by the artificial laws of patriarchy, and this knowledge flares their misogyny. Males can negotiate a hunting strategy or distribution of loot with each other, but women’s sexual preferences they find perfectly unwieldy. Women to them are like Aristotle’s mineral objects, which have only one simple tendency - to fall towards the centre of the world, the alpha-male.
In fact, from the Darwinian perspective, the only clear beneficiaries of patriarchy are unfit males. The alpha males win in natural competition, and the females don’t mind it. This explains why patriarchy is so intrinsically linked to monotheistic religion, the idea that entails an all-powerful God who created all men (and women) as his loving children. A perfect God does not create unfit males. Bad males are not ones unfit for Darwinian victory; rather, they are ones who choose to become morally unfit through their own sovereign free will. The concept of equality of all men and their filiality with the creator of the universe is ridiculous to a Darwinist.
We have seen and still see various degrees of the “harem alternative” in human societies. Historically, in states in which men submitted too much of their independence to a central government, the man or men of that government held harems. Social inequality was extreme. Feminists were unheard of; on the contrary, women were treated as property and their individuality curbed through regulations on dress, speech, and movement.
Significantly again, there has never been a rebellion of women against an alpha-male ordering. There has never been an insurrection of housemaids. There have been, on the other hand, insurrections of male slaves. If women ever supported them, it was probably because of the slave’s potential to become alpha-males. The grazing ewe lifts up her head to see Spartacus and wonders: Has there been a mistake? Is this the actual alpha-male? Meh, let’s wait and see.
But what about the feminist insurrection? you will say, is that not a rebellion of “housemaids”. It’s not. The feminists of every wave were not housemaids. They were aristocratic daughters and wives. Their rebellion could crystallise only in the advanced-stage patriarchy, when the balancing act of male competition reached such a state of serenity that even women dared to be considered actors in the grand negotiation. It could happen only in a society where all humans were children of God, a society that venerated a woman as the God Bearer and the chief enemy of the Evil One. And even in this rebellion, we can say that behind every rebellious woman there is an insecure man - a non-alpha father, perhaps.
Besides the harem, many will argue that some form of communism, by whichever name it goes, as another alternative to patriarchy. Here, the prerogatives and responsibilities of the father are removed in a misguided attempt to eliminate even the negotiated patriarchal struggle. Of course, there is also an absolute aversion to inequality, alpha males, and harems. So, men are not allowed to negotiate boundaries among themselves, but are not allowed to fight mercilessly for them either. How can this be?
There has to be a superior power enforcing this state of affairs from above. Indeed, there is the totalitarian central party, and the party itself cannot but become one massive and malignant alpha-male. Communism, in its struggle to eliminate big and small harems, inevitably ends up creating one enormous harem. Now it is true that communists are peevish about sexuality; they think of it as atavistic. However, communism is fundamentally about dominance and control: the winners don’t have dozens of wives, but the losers are eliminated in gulags.
The third alternative often cited is the Amazon tribe frolicking in the woods and not caring who bangs who. They all share their food and resources. One may imagine that such an arrangement is possible when the resources are abundant relative to the population, and that this would occur only where the human needs and wants are far below the human potential. The moment that tribe reaches beyond picking fruits and spearing fish, the moment it desires for more than mere sustenance, it creates scarcity and engenders struggle and competition. The happy bunch of hunters and gathers turns into chest-thumping cannibals.
And guess what - human desires are always above human resources. There are no happy frolicking tribes, and there have never been any. The anthropological research will reveal to you that archaic and tribal societies are marked by complex cultural systems that maintain a precarious balance of power, and are often enforced through bloody ritual. Hear it from James George Frazer, from his famous book The Golden Bough:
“No human being is so hide-bound by custom and tradition as your democratic savage; in no state of society consequently is progress so slow and difficult. The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of iron.”
Patriarchy is not what it’s maligned to be. It is a curbing of male dominance and not an enabling of it. It is a sacrifice of men in order to share the burdens and responsibilities of child-rearing with women. It is the only way to maintain civilisation.
“