Men Of Progress Painting by Christian Schussele

Generosity, in this egotistical world, is perceived as weakness, and therefore rewarded with disdain. This is the problem of the welfare state—largely funded by white men—in regard to blacks and women, both full of envy, and neither ever to be satisfied. Consider the video about “white privilege” that has been circulating widely on social media. Representative of the authoritarian sentimentalism of our time, it features a number of young people—whites and blacks—about to run a race, with the winner to get a hundred-dollar bill. The implication, of course, is that life itself is a race, and one’s value as a person determined by status: a kind of vulgar idolatry that, I have argued, is modernity’s stand-in for its dead God. With trite, would-be touching music playing, and close-ups of happy young white people juxtaposed to those of sad young blacks, this video is a cynical and disingenuous vehicle of resentment. It is just the sort of thing that leftists employ to effect the revenge that they call “social justice.” The runners are asked several questions to determine their “privilege.” After giving their answers, they are told to take several steps forward, their “privilege” signifying a heartrending “injustice” to blacks. At least this experiment did not occur in an inner city, where the evil whites might have been shot.

Ancient thinkers took it for granted that life is harsh, fated, and tragic. No ancient writer says that we should punish others or level them down just because they have what we do not, or that we should abase ourselves to history, forever “guilty” because “our people” enslaved another. Coveting in the name of “social justice” is a distinctly modern “virtue.” It is, more deeply, a symptom of the weakness and decadence that always attend exceedingly wealthy cultures, when adults come to resemble children, prone to needless guilt and pity, while others lack the spine to admonish them. Asians and Jews are doing better than whites in this country, and far better than Hispanics and blacks. The main reason, of course, is their superior work ethic, which corresponds to their more traditional way of life. It is certainly unthinkable that Asians or Jews should ever have a 74% illegitimacy rate, as there is among blacks. Nor is it “unfair” for children to receive the benefit of their parents’ good conduct. If anything in life is sacred or justifiable, it is the transmission from parent to child. Should this child be made to suffer because that child’s parents were irresponsible? Are we collectively accountable to chance? The end point of such reasoning is life in test tubes, for only absolute sameness can eliminate the value judgments about mere difference that cause such anguish for the weak. What the diversity fundamentalists cannot accept is diversity itself. Actual diversity requires leaving people alone, letting them be…diverse.

Besides excessive wealth, the main source of our time’s resentful leveling is women. For it is in the nature of women to level things down, using manipulation to get the status they cannot attain through merit alone. Equal opportunity is only for men, for women value equality about as much as they wish to appear unattractive. Women, deep down, feel they deserve a chivalrous outcome, since per their psychology, men are essentially branches on the feminine tree of hypergamy, women’s will to power. Women, moreover, largely lack a sense of justice, where the word denotes conscious, abstract duty; they are mostly feeling and caprice, irrational and maternal. Hence, although they are more sympathetic than men, they are frequently effortless vampires, without scruple or conscience. And so, in the hypocritical Nathaniel Hawthorne fiction that is America, we constantly have women “coming forward,” decades after the fact to opportunistically allege “harassment” about what in most cases were de facto bartering arrangements with powerful men. Such shameless lying is far less common among men. For women, it is just another weapon in the general arsenal of deceit, along with the fake cry, the shit test, “the talk” that doesn’t reveal the actual issue, and so on.

It is often remarked that men are more assertive and straightforward than women. The reason we are is obvious: We are bigger and stronger, and so can afford to be. Hence the old male practice of quickly clearing the air—confronting one another, often with violence—and then moving on. Two men slug it out, and afterwards have a beer. That is real respect, something earned. This is an advantage—and burden—that women, with their smaller and weaker bodies, do not have. Hence their characteristic passive-aggressiveness, pettiness, disingenuousness, dissimulation, resentment, vindictiveness, backstabbing, group shaming, and willingness to ruin people’s lives—especially men’s—in order to exercise the deep spirit of revenge that is so central to them. It is indeed the way of women, when things do not go as they wish, to exploit the public’s instinctive paternalism. In such situations, our natural and noble desire to protect women from bad men passes unperceived into the strongest element of human nature: sheer evil and the desire to make others suffer, which, being conveyed under the guise of righteousness, is of such subtlety that few people can perceive the error and hypocrisy. So it happens that men all across the country have had their lives ruined by female manipulation and paternal herd virtue, a phenomenon that has been well documented by Laura Kipnis, KC Johnson, Stuart Taylor Jr., and others.

Reviewing Joanna Williams’ important new book, Women vs Feminism: Why We All Need Liberating From the Gender Wars, Ed Dutton relates “how feminists abuse statistics” concerning the representation of women in academia and the workforce. Feminists also take care to propagate the myth of the wage gap. For feminism is defined by victimhood, and as such, it will not concede progress or acknowledge real justice. The problem, for feminists, is that equal opportunity leads inexorably to the massive demonstration of women’s inferiority to men. IQ tests continually show that, compared with men, women do not think very well (i.e., with supreme intelligence), and therefore most are incapable of understanding complex contexts and keeping up with the ablest men. Accordingly, even in 2017, men dominate science, technology, Congress, and indeed everything wherein exceptional ability is required. There are still no great women philosophers, scientists, or artists on the level of Aristotle, Newton, and Bach. It is not even close and never will be.

Whether they incoherently demand “equality” or not, women shall remain fundamentally manipulative. Scholars have documented what we all notice as teenagers: that women establish value and so obtain power by shaming men and women alike. Such wicked strategy is inherent in female psychology. Most people, of course, believe women are less aggressive than men. That appearance is deceiving, however, because women’s aggression is usually carefully concealed, a crafty affair. Unfortunately for them, most men do not have the discernment to notice their pretty puppet master’s strings. Women, to be sure, want to be valued no less than men do. Beauty is to women as ambition is to men. The two goals, indeed, are complementary, both aiming indirectly at coupling and the propagation of children. And what women—who, in their own way, are as driven as men are by the will to be valued, whether as regards beauty or their role in the workplace—lack in physical strength and mental ability, they more than compensate for with subterranean guile. Because she is weaker than man, woman obtains her ends as a dissimulator—a fox to his lion. Thus feminists, like so many catty schoolgirls, will continue griping about “gender inequality,” appealing to men’s natural but usually myopic paternalism and to the deep resentment of their own sex as they endeavor to actualize their gender dystopia.