Cascade of Choices

Posted on April 4, 2012 by ehurst

How far do you go chasing truth? One thing leads to another, as the old rock song says.
The title of my blog indicates I want to do what’s right for myself, and I write to give others a chance to consider what it might mean for themselves. Sometimes I can be downright practical, but most of the time it’s not even exactly theoretical, but calling you to reach above your own intellect.
In the land of Linux and Open Source software, one of my primary complaints is too few developers understand users. Part of that disconnect leads to problems when someone feels a need to upgrade one item, which is probably broken, only to discover doing that requires upgrading almost everything else, or adding lots of new stuff which demands more upgrades, on and on into infinite loops of destructive replacement. This happens when the developers so narrowly interpret what is required for this or that package, according to their own whims and damn everyone else with the differing Linux setups. And God forbid they should ever go back and simply fix the previous version. But it seems generic coding is a lost art, an art based on consciously trying to address human need.
If you don’t write code yourself, you are stuck, and they just can’t be made to care about that. The vast majority of people can’t write code because the learning curve is huge, and precious few are willing to teach. The barriers are massive. The saints are those who take a moment to share a bit of code to fix particular mismatches, or who actually rewrite something to be more accommodating to the wide differences in various Linux systems. I rather hope I’m not throwing out spiritual code too difficult to reach from where you are. Writing the code to your daily life is something I honestly believe is already hard-wired into your soul, even as I consciously consider the vast array of human individuality.
When I suggest Western Civilization as a whole is a failure, I’m presuming you are smart enough to realize you can’t just pretend you will walk out of it today. What I’m hoping you’ll do is think about it enough to find ways to get a little closer to something better than the West, even as you are stuck in it. Part of that “something better” should include living a message which confronts the West, at least in some small ways. The underlying issue with truth is not keeping it all to yourself, but a commitment to removing obfuscations. Sometimes I can offer some examples of how that plays out.
For example, I was recently confronted with some really aging and ragged discussions of race relations and sexism. Most of such discussions are handed to us in obfuscated code, set afloat in the world on a giant raft of false assumptions. You aren’t permitted to enter their conversation without climbing on that raft. All I can say is, don’t do it. Your little rowboat of truth is far safer. Don’t engage them until you can draw attention to the junk raft itself. You can go a lot farther toward solutions when you choose a boat designed according to the waters you intend to sail.
Sexism? Yes, by definition I’m a sexist. That is, I assert you cannot sanely create uniform outcomes under any useful measure. The system is already broken, and pushing through something with badly damaged assumptions about what it should look like coming out the other end only breaks more things. So I use Game, clinical observations about human behavior in relation to sexual identity, and the resulting theoretical explanations, to prove sexism is frankly necessary to understand humans and get along in this world. I reject equal outcomes because I reject the whole stinking system in the first place. Use Game and you’ll find far more peace, and ignore the screamers (which tactic is part of Game anyway).
Racism? When someone offers a consistent definition of “race” on which everyone else agrees, we can talk. Is it about certain physical differences? Sure, I can ignore that. I do it all the time. Is it about complex cultural baggage correlated with those physical differences? It is almost with violence I reject the notion I can’t pass judgment on cultural expressions, because I do it with my own native culture. You have a problem with that? Argue with God; I’m using His standards and His chosen culture as the baseline. I refuse to debate whether it’s right. My rejection is not based on pure matters of taste, which is yet another thing I won’t surrender, but for an entirely different reason. That’s not to say I’m going out of my way to make everyone conform to my tastes nor my cultural judgments, but it’s damned (literally) nonsense to suggest I have to swallow and “enjoy” something I find unbearable. So while I won’t destroy your car if your stereo plays rap music loud enough to rattle the windows on my Jeep, I will probably laugh when someone else does, or when random events do it. Meanwhile, I’ll keep my radio tuned to Classical music, thank you.
It’s the same reason I don’t take my own life, though I am longing to leave this world. Not everything we wish for is properly addressed by active pursuit. I assert there is a God in Heaven who steers certain events He claims for Himself as His prerogatives. I didn’t make all these messes, and all I can do with them is what I understand He requires of me.
This world is not what it was designed to be. It’s broken, and from that follows a certain amount of breakage in every human life. Some of our human discomforts are simply par for the course, the random results of bigger things no one here can control. That would be issues such as which sex you are and other physical characteristics. DNA is like that; it doesn’t ask your permission. So is an awful lot of what we experience as human choices. Malice is too easily imputed where it doesn’t exist. Worse, it’s often imputed to individuals who were handed a lot assumptions about life by the same people who gave them their DNA. I believe one of the worst forms of malice is assuming someone close to you in time and space should be blamed for not having chosen some other DNA and heritage. That sort of thinking is itself a matter of heritage, and becomes a sorry excuse for attacking someone in easy reach.
You want justice? I rather think you can’t afford to pay the price for real justice. Too many people have chosen one narrowly defined bit of justice over all others, and that is injustice in itself. Given what we are all up against, perhaps the only hope we have is first discovering what justice means, then work out what it looks like, and try to make it happen in what little you actually can choose. No justice will come from leveraging the current system, because it is inherently unjust from the very roots.
I reject the whole system in the first place, and I’ll do everything I can to escape it’s clutches.

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On Accountability

Posted on April 3, 2012 by ehurst

Dear Readers, I hold myself accountable to you. My life is an open book; my mission requires I leave myself open to inspection far greater than required by civility. Ask what you dare, what you believe is of significance in helping you evaluate whether it’s worth your time to read anything on this blog.
A while back, I wrote a review of Life Church based on my experience plus a bit of background research from what is available on the Net. I read comments made by others who had been involved in Life Church, plus some news articles. I took the time to read pros and cons.
If you click the link to my post, you’ll see a rather long comment was posted. I replied. The reason I raise the issue is because my readers need to see how I operate on this blog. I rather hope the commenter comes back and finishes the job. I am eager to stand behind what I write, and retract where I am shown wrong.
Let me state again for the record: You should make up your own mind. I’m not appealing for defense and won’t shrink from you taking me to task.

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Blundering Oppression

Posted on April 3, 2012 by ehurst

The most competent people in government service have a tendency to leave that service. What’s left is a vast army of idiots.
You realize, of course, I am attacking the popular social orthodoxy which reveres the military in particular, and government service in general. Oh, those sacred souls bearing the sacrifice of poor pay in order to serve “we the people”! This sentiment is assumed so you aren’t permitted to question it without risking physical abuse from some grouchy old Marine, or other true believers with a similar disposition. How do you dare; what right have you?
Okay, I’m a disabled veteran, and have sacrificed normal functioning of my body parts while wearing that uniform. I paid my dues. And I still say the military is loaded with psychopaths who lead a bunch of nincompoops. Yes, there are good people in uniform, some intelligent ones, but not many wise ones. When they figure out what’s going on, they leave. Were it not this vast army of idiots representing the way government operates as a whole, we would be glad we found a place to keep them all out of our way. The problem is, we have a terribly active and intrusive government, and it’s run by those idiots.
And then you realize the very safety of our national security lies in the hands of these people. Sadly for Lynnae Williams, what few competent people there are in the CIA are those assigned to keeping her quiet. Since it’s too late to prevent her ranting, I’m waiting to see how long she lives. Without knowing where her heart is — Twitter doesn’t lend itself to broad self-disclosure — I’m guessing she is more rattled at the CIA than the government in general. The CIA is loaded with self-important jerks, and her tolerance was just about pushed to the limit during training. What I hope to point out, in case you didn’t already know it, is this is the sort of people who run CIA field operations.

I attribute any #CIA successes to accidents, not #competence. CIA recruited too many incompetent misfits, it can’t be an accident

I suppose those in the upper ranks aren’t quite stupid, but I have to wonder what their real goals are. Protecting US citizens is hardly of any importance to them. If anything, the CIA is probably one of the greatest threats to the average American. But since my college days, CIA recruiters always went after the most incredible jerks who felt they should be ruling the world. And my limited experience with CIA agents is they didn’t get any wiser during their training.
Most of us who see this sort of thing don’t bother to write books about it. Sure, I’ve mentioned this problem in previous posts, but it was only a small part of my mission. It’s just one minor truth which looms large only in certain contexts. The broad general truth of psychopaths running the US government applies all the way down the chain in all directions. Thus, our military is hardly that competent. You never hear of the vast number of debilitating incidents which plague all military operations. You seldom hear about the huge waste that arises from sheer incompetence. If they were honest, the largest single cost in the military budget is loss from bungling. It’s institutionalized at every level; I know because I helped compose budget requests for military operations, and it would never be tolerated in a profit-making business.
How do you describe extravagance which still results in an artificially stressful environment such that stupid mistakes are the norm? It’s madness.
As with virtually every military operation today, by far the majority of what the CIA does is not in pursuit of a sane agenda. I’m pretty sure there is some intelligent sinister purpose in it, but the government continues to absorb some of the worst of humanity. At the same time, the net result of government behavior maintains a high ratio of idiots to choose from. We get just a peek at this through the Twitter activity of people like Lynnae Williams. There is no reason to doubt what she says, and she’s not telling the half of it.
Here’s what I hope you take away from it all: Include this in your calculations and general awareness. Cynicism is a gift from God, but don’t let this slow you down. You still have to pursue your mission. When you remember it’s not about accomplishments, but faithfulness, you don’t feel so overwhelmed by a very concerted effort to overwhelm you with fear and general panic. The real battle is not on the ground, but in your soul.

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Having a Mission

Posted on April 2, 2012 by ehurst

David asked me how I manage to keep making a significant post or more virtually every day of the year. The starting place is mission — having a sense of something you really must do lest you lose your very sense of who you are.
Whether it be upping your Game, keeping a blog alive, or simply being a real human, the essential element in living is commitment to something bigger than yourself. For this reason, even if there were no other readers, I’d still be blogging. I do it because I must. Blogging is part of paying attention to all the other “must do” things in my life.
The first step in working out what you must do in your own life is taking at least a day or so on a regular basis and ripping aside all the “must do” things other people throw at you. Nobody has any business answering this question for you. Too many people in this world are buying into someone else’s mission. It’s not as if your sense of what’s important can’t change with events which tend to uncover things previously hidden from your awareness. We count on that very thing, but if you buy anyone else’s packaged set, you have compromised to the point you have no point of your own.
The best way I know to do this is to break off your routine; go somewhere off your normal life’s route and do something else entirely, or nothing much. Be alone with your thoughts for awhile. Don’t go off to some packaged retreat; those are fine in themselves, but they steer you in a specific direction. You need to find your own by getting lost and discovering your own sense of direction.
The second step is simply applying what you discover about yourself. No one can do this for you, either. If you can’t find the power to break out, you mission won’t matter. But if you find something you can do, even just that one small step in the direction you found is all it takes. Then another, and another. You probably won’t even know where to point your toes, as it were, until after you completed the previous step and passed through the contextual changes. Take your time and let it sink in. Do what’s in front of you first.
Third, learn the only constant is change. Embrace it, because it’s what separates us from everything else in the universe — conscious and constant change. Surely you’ve encountered that old Prayer of Serenity: Lord, grant me the patience to accept things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference (paraphrased; write your own). Learn serenity and it’s outward manifestation of aplomb.
The final thing is learning to chase down what makes you hesitate. Were I to use the term “what you fear” it would be too narrow. Chase down what makes you uncomfortable, bored, what brings dread and fear, and anything else that doesn’t make you smile. Frankly, this is critical to mission itself. Learn how every negative emotion in any degree signifies an enemy to be conquered. Build up the callouses you need on your soul, because that stuff isn’t going to go away. Each thing rubbing you raw holds a clue to what you can and should change.
Naturally, you could pay lip service to any of these things. And sure, you could steal this little list of four steps and repackage it for sale, if you were into marketing. Go ahead; I really don’t care. I’m not the first guy to dream up something like this. Given a different audience, one which interacted with me more, I’d probably write it quite differently. Give me a week or two and that would be enough to see me change some parts of it, or offer a different structure entirely. The whole point, which I hope is obvious, is it has to come from inside or it won’t mean a thing.
I write because I can’t shut up; it’s central to my mission. Don’t compare yourself to that, because it could be viewed as a miserable burden in some contexts. Explore your own soul and decide how much writing is enough for you, along with just about anything else we humans do.
Got mission?

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Ritual of Foot Dust: Vox Popoli

Posted on April 1, 2012 by ehurst

This is a virtual ritual, because it references events entirely confined to cyberspace.
I am a prophet of the God of the Bible. It wasn’t my idea. It’s a claim to divine authority, and the exercise of that authority rests entirely upon the power of God’s Holy Spirit. The end of my authority in that sense is simply delivering the message. Were it left to me and my own resources, I’d say nothing at all. It really doesn’t bother me subjectively, but my spirit is provoked and I cannot remain silent. I’ll do my best to explain with my feeble understanding of what shakes my spirit.
Over the years I’ve relied on Vox Day and the Dread Ilk (the nickname for his online associates) for incisive commentary on events of the day. Their opinions were borne out by subsequent events, showing a fairly accurate analysis and useful predictions. There is a dearth of this among men today, so we treasure all such offerings.
Sadly, Vox and some of the Ilk rely entirely too much on their human powers of reasoning to assess things far beyond mortal ken. Instead of trusting in divine revelation, they take it upon themselves to pronounce judgment over Scripture. Sometimes it’s pretty subtle, such as attempting to confine Scripture under Aristotelian logic, a logic which rejects the very concept of divine revelation. This is the same sin of the Pharisees who worked so hard to crucify the Lord Jesus Christ. Vox claims to follow Jesus, but rejects the entire intellectual background of His teachings. Thus, Vox rejects sound doctrine and chases the false god of his own human reasoning, and too many of the Ilk follow that path. He does so in a very provocative matter, seeking to lead astray those who read his teachings.
I have performed due diligence trying to warn the Ilk. I have seen many others doing at least as good a job pointing out in detail why Vox’s doctrines are heretical. We are ignored or mocked. In case you are wondering, I’m not defending systematic theology, nor traditional church theology itself by any means, but rather the doctrines taught in Scripture. For example Vox sets limits on what the Heavenly Father can know, repudiating a concept commonly labeled “omniscience.” It’s not a debate about the meaning of the term, but a blasphemous rejection of God’s majesty in declaring He cannot know all things.
I’m shaking the dust off my feet. I’m not returning to Vox Popoli, and I suggest to my fellow Christians Vox and these Ilk cannot be regarded as Christians. Nothing more can we do to correct their sin; we turn them over to Satan for correction. We have to step away for the sake of our own missions.
The final warning is not something I would dream up at all, but is straight from Bible teaching: The wrath of God falls upon all sin. The very thing Vox and the Ilk make their god is the very thing which will fail them. My experience with God’s ways leads me to believe sometime in the near future their human wisdom will turn to folly, perhaps on some issue, perhaps with some repetition. I honestly don’t know any specifics, only that I am bound to obey this move of the Spirit.
As always, taking this seriously is entirely a matter of voluntary consideration in your own spirit. I don’t take myself that seriously, and suggest you do the same, but if this message touches you in any way, that’s the moving of the Spirit.

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Trailblazing

Posted on April 1, 2012 by ehurst

While I no longer have access to the trails I cut through the local woodland, it was merely a symbol of something I’ve done for most of my life.
My woodland trails didn’t really go anywhere. One big loop through somewhat varying terrain, but it wasn’t about getting anywhere. The point was to have a place to walk, ride, but mostly to be alone and away from the normal distractions of our busy world. Everyone should already understand the importance of exercising the body, because what you don’t use, you lose. In theory, most people understand exercising the mind. Sadly, most of my world has no clue how.
It’s one thing to work the brain at puzzles, higher math, word games, etc. All good stuff critical to intellectual development. You can take it too far, but most people never come near far enough. However, that is actually less important than the one thing our world desperately seeks to avoid: introspection. Even when we do engage this, we do it poorly. The truth of that becomes all too obvious when you see so much the world engaged in destructive and self-destructive behavior.
I would willingly discuss and debate what constitutes destruction in that sense, but most of the world is too eager to let someone else decide it for them. When someone else reaches out to you with a packaged definition of important things, it’s virtually a guarantee it won’t be in your best interest. The whole point is the utter lack of debate, because of the utter lack of exploration. This is your soul we are talking about; why would you let someone else tell you what should be there?
I might try to teach you some basic structure of the soul, such as I know it, but the whole point is to get you poking around for yourself. I’m blazing a trail, not so you can follow. You can’t follow me very far into my soul, but I want to inspire you to blaze your own trail in your own soul. I could teach you all about the hand tools I use and for what sort of vegetation and mineral barriers they work with, and even how to wield those tools in uncommon ways. We could talk about muscular development and eye-hand coordination. Did you know you could swing a heavy ax at almost any angle and actually cut that way? I do it all the time.
I’d much rather you handle your own soul with some skill. The most important thing I can do is show you something about escaping your own personal barriers.

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Parable of the Sandbox

Posted on March 31, 2012 by ehurst

He was master of his domain. None dared oppose him long; many had been sent away in derision. Not a few left flying through the air. He didn’t expect any to take his word for it, and openly derided their ability to even understand.
It didn’t do any good to tell him he should get outside the sandbox, though. He built up all sorts of dreamy sand castles, then beat them down with his stick. Sometimes a few would compete from neighboring sand boxes, and he had no trouble jumping the box sides to smash their castles, too. Most of those who paid him any attention would often join him in the sandbox, celebrating his victories over the sand castles. But if it wasn’t in one sandbox or another, he disdained to get involved.
Of course, there were lots of sandboxes like it all over the world. Those who claimed their own sandbox would challenge someone else to come and build a better sandcastle. But it was always by their own individual rules, and with their own unique blend of sand, their own special stick. Only rarely did it seem any of it bore any relevance to any other sandbox.
Meanwhile, high above in space, someone was playing Makrugh and the world on whose surface his sandbox and the others stood was scheduled for dissolution under his very feet.
All he had to throw at the energy weapons in space ships was sand and a stick.

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Manhood and Intimidation

Posted on March 31, 2012 by ehurst

We are all on the path, and I would hope I’m not the same man I was even a week ago.
To be human is to be variable. It does no good to envision truth and reality as somehow objective, an entity to which we aspire. Our ability to perceive it waxes and wanes with experiences and internal mechanisms we will never completely nail down. There is no magic formula to all things, no final answer, simply because no one alive on this plane is capable of handling it. We are more variable and dependent on outside forces than is popular to admit.
Manhood should not be seen as aspiring to be some unmovable rock against the storms of life. Sticking to the metaphor, it’s more like having the good sense to identify a good rock and hanging on to it.
But I prefer the image of walking a path. Sometimes you have to cut your own path, blaze a fresh trail, only to find it’s some ancient path long forgotten and overgrown. That’s how I see my own manhood. Intellectually, I suppose I may well miss something essential from the ancient truths, revealed by God and buried under vast human falsehood, but I have better trust in God by a long shot than in myself.
Nor any other man. In times past there were moments I was intimidated by other men, and maybe even a few women. That wasn’t meant to shoot down any claim to manhood, but the sense of intimidation means you haven’t answered their challenge inside yourself. When you feel intimidated, the right answer is to hang around until you find out what that unanswered challenge is.
For example, I have some online acquaintances intimidated by certain bright minds in the blogosphere. They won’t dare comment on these blogs for fear of being overwhelmed verbally and logically, or in some way embarrassed. For some, the experience of being verbally humiliated equates to a physical beating. Having received a few physical beatings in my life, I’ll let you in on a secret: the results of combat of any sort, verbal or physical, has no bearing on your manhood. That you showed up and stood for what carried you thus far is sufficient.
Further, the fundamental issue of intimidation itself rests entirely upon not seeing the flaws and weaknesses of every man. You need not face anyone in combat to realize they have a serious opening in their armor. All you need to know is that there is one, and once you see what it is, suddenly you are facing just another combatant, no greater than you. More skillful and experienced, perhaps, but missing something you have and therefore, vulnerable.
So while you may get kicked off their blog or forum for whatever reason, they are no greater than you in the final sense. You can walk away knowing you need not compete in their league, because it’s just a closed and limited forum, not the whole world. Especially so with the virtual world of the Internet. They don’t own the whole thing, and certainly not the wider reality of your existence. You have your own league, where they would not compete so well against you. In other words, they really can’t do anything to you, and there’s no cause for that creeping sense of dread, or intimidation.
Yeah, you might be crazy and have people say so. It’s their loss, not yours.
Once you know your mission and are pursuing it, the active pursuit itself defines your manhood, and it works in Game and all of life.

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She Needs You

Posted on March 30, 2012 by ehurst

There is no short course in having a shepherd’s heart.
The quintessential man is a shepherd. He doesn’t need the sheep; they need him. There are blessings and rewards for getting involved, for tying yourself to their needs, but you could live without them. In fact, it’s easier to be a predator. But in the grand moral sense of how the universe operates, if you really want the best of what’s available, you’ll take up the often thankless task of shepherding.
Fundamental to the whole thing is your own sense of need. If you are needy, you are a sheep yourself. You’re a little boy who still needs his mommy, still nursing at the breast. You aren’t fulfilling her needs, because you drag on her inner resources too long and the sabbatical rest is denied. These are all symbols conveying a very deep truth beyond clinical discussion. If you haven’t taken responsibility for the things demanded of you, if you haven’t first demanded satisfaction of what you need from yourself, you can’t let go and stand alone.
If you can’t stand alone, you can’t do anything for anyone else which matters. It means you don’t matter. You’re a problem, not the solution. Being a man means having some answers which come from inside you, answers which outweigh and justify your demands. It means doing what only a man can do. Don’t mistake that for simply doing your job, honoring your contracts, etc. Those are fundamental human moral obligations, not manhood itself. Pulling your own weight is just the starting point. There is something unique in taking the responsibility for the welfare of others, but even more rare is feeling the pain of failure. It’s ownership, not of all the outcomes, but of all the losses you can’t possibly prevent. It’s the power to face the weaknesses, failures, sorrows and still willing to try again.
More, it’s the dire need to keep trying because you can not let yourself quit. You’ll always be capable of miscalculating and quitting too soon or not soon enough, but those are incidental to the inner necessity of commitment to a sense of mission you simply can’t abandon. You are saying, “Screw the cost; I have to do this.” If you can really get hold of that, let it get hold of you, then you have whatever it is manhood is supposed to mean.
This is that very something women need. This is what calls to them. It really has precious little to do with measurable accomplishments, though some are silly and shallow enough to think that’s what matters. If so, they don’t matter. Because a real woman is looking for a real man. If you can scrape off the silly Victorian and Germanic-feudal notions of “real man,” just as she must reject the same mythology about herself, you might get somewhere with this. A man does not need a woman, but everything which calls to him is exponentially better with her support. The survival imperative of passing on your genes is a poor shadow of what really matters eternally. Rising above mere instinct means you’ll draw on all of hers.
Your fire of commitment is her warmth in a cold and abusive world.
I can’t justify any of this with pure logic. If there is nothing in a man or woman to find this vision compelling, we have to let them wallow in the lies. Manhood itself includes an ineffable awareness that certain things depend entirely upon him or it all goes to Hell. He has to accept that burden as part of his redemption from the Fall. She has to get behind him, or she has no hope, but he has to be there first. Her taking the lead in deep spiritual matters is why we are fallen in the first place. It’s not her mission, not her place, not her wiring. The pinnacle of her hope is her man’s commitment, and damn the failures. Indeed, for both of them, the only thrill worth having, the only joy possible, comes from embracing this vision.
It is not just doing, because performance scores are deceptive; nor is it fitting some definition (AKA, “being”). It’s living it, something worth dying for. Live it, man.

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Post-Victorian Feminist Mythology

Posted on March 29, 2012 by ehurst

Misty asked me to expand on the idea of Post-Victorian Feminist mythology.
Victorian Literature and the underlying cultural assumptions are the core mythology behind current Western Feminist orthodoxy.
Most people who’ve read much in English Literature are familiar with the Victorian Era, 1837-1901. Queen Victoria did more to shape our American culture today than is easily imagined. Whole books have been written drawing out the ways in which her reign covered a period when all sorts of things came together which changed the world in so many different ways. If you are aware of scholarly movements behind things like Protestant Theology, you realize some of the worst heresies we still suffer came from this period: modern religious liberalism, the denial Scripture is the unique record of God’s revelation, the social work religious movement, Marxist and related theologies, Progressivism (interpreting theology), Zionist Dispensationalism, Protestant fundamentalism, etc. You may be aware of pernicious influences in other fields of study, not least being political theories.
It wasn’t all bad, but the point here is how it collated and solidified a massive layer of social mythology regarding human sexuality. I won’t get bogged down here in details, but it’s the logical culmination of feudalism, the Reformation and basic Germanic pagan mythology. The business of the white knight and Mariolatry gave us the two primary sex types, both so completely false, it’s hard to know where to start.
Thus, while we know Queen Victoria’s isolation in childhood and her mother’s strict legalistic morality are strong influences on her reign, it’s hard to blame her for anything more than keeping the ball rolling in the same direction it was already going, when it would have been the perfect time to stop it and get real.
Some of the things which came to a head during her reign:
1. The extravagant protection and smothering control of childhood: It’s not that prior generations didn’t love their children, but this was extreme, unique in human history. As Western materialism came to a head, the natural human capacity for being otherworldly and hoping for a better future in Paradise (however imagined) was sublimated into vicariously living your paradise through your children. Instead of afterlife above, it was afterlife in the kids. There was no longer any moral investment in the divine, but all one’s energy was in creating a better world for one’s progeny. The primary mark of holiness was embracing prissy middle class virtues, making it the whole point of religion and religious zeal.
2. The moral dominance of women: Men had to strive mightily to become a white knight and maintain it. Women were presumed born virtuous as the Mother of God. Sacred virginity became the symbol of all things good, great and powerful. Women weren’t supposed to like sex, only tolerate it. Their mission in life was to tame their bad boys, including the ones they married. Whatever was a feminine concern was the Word of God, because women were the soul of civilization.
3. Extension of the nest: The model of a woman’s home became the blueprint for all the world at large. Domestic order and prosperity of the sort found in middle class proper homes became the blueprint for national politics and international relations. Meanwhile, the extended family home was broken up, and the nuclear family became the only model for home life. It’s almost shocking how utterly destroyed was the instinct to cling to your roots. To move far away from parents and other kin became a dire necessity of human existence. Thus, instead of your local paternal village council of elder kinsman, your entire nation became your “village” and the national government got directly involved in your personal affairs. Government took the place of family elders.
It’s already obvious how this destroyed human political behavior, but what applies to society at large surely sets the stage for all human interactions, including personal romance. Game is the obvious recovery of sanity in peeling away the layers this Victorian mythology, and we can only hope it lays bare the obvious mistakes in politics, as well. Even in theology it helps, because it exposes the hideous excuses for questioning the old order, not of the feudal structure, but of the more ancient assumptions about reality.
Consider this: Setting aside for the moment the contents of revelation, if your fundamental assumptions about reality make room for divine revelation, it’s hard to describe what a difference it makes compared to a reality organized purely on human perception and logic. The Victorian Era crystallized a resolve to discount and ignore received wisdom from any divine source, not simply the God of the Bible. Whether you agree with that epistemology or not, what we have now is the inevitable result of that tectonic shift in how we approach the task of conceptualizing reality. Could we visit a parallel universe where the various cultural inputs were changed, I seriously doubt the fundamental assumptions of feminist mythology would be so very different.
Take away the fear of divinity, and you will have a feminist political and social system of some sort. The basic wiring of men and women are that different.
Addenda: Vox offers a short list of what all this has gotten us today. I paraphrase:

  • Women reject accountability for their words and actions.
  • Women are more demanding and difficult to family and freinds than with complete strangers.
  • Women whine about men, then chase the most available alphas, who are jerks.
  • Women demand more of others than themselves.
  • Women demand laws giving them advantages and call it “sexual equality.”

In response to an offline question, perhaps I should make it more obvious about one thing. When young fellows are coming of age, most are self-neutered by adopting the feminist social propaganda. They become deltas and gammas, etc. In order to maintain any manhood, if they don’t actually understand the truth on some level, they end up having to rebel against society. Typically that means taking the only path open — being a jerk, a predator, etc. Thus, the majority of fellows who arrive at adulthood with their manhood intact are very likely bad boys of one stripe or another.
Women demand white knights, honestly believe they want them, yet hate them. Women chase alphas because that’s what their wiring responds to, and most of the alphas they encounter are jerks. Most women have no idea why they do this, even deny doing it. This is the Post-Victorian Feminist woman.

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