Making Sense Of The Political Mess

We have feminists howling about “patriarchy” and “misogyny,” and we have Father's Lobby types howling about “cultural Marxists.”

We have the Left howling about a global corporate plutocracy, and we have the Right howling about a Satanic New World Order Conspiracy.

I seek to make sense of this whole mess, and I will do so by applying the teachings of the wisest influence I have ever encountered: Jesus Christ.

Now Jesus Christ teaches us Christian love, which means making the effort to understand and sympathize with the person and have their best interests at heart while correcting whatever it is they are doing that is wrong. And in all cases there is in fact an understandable position. The feminists come from the position of experiencing bad behavior by men, and the other side comes from the position of experiencing bad behavior by feminists. The Left had negative experiences dealing with business, and the Right had negative experiences dealing with government. However what they have done with it was completely wrong.

Attacking people like Gwynneth Paltrow accomplishes absolutely nothing. Attacking the Western literary and cultural legacy, or seeing the Western civilization as the root of oppression of women, accomplishes less than nothing. On the other side, claiming that women are all bad and should be ground down by violence and court abuse is completely wrong as well. Both sides are totally in the wrong. The influence of both has been completely ruinous, and neither side deserves support. A person who is so uninformed as to see me as a misogynist needs to be met with real ones. A person who sees me as a feminist needs to be met with real ones as well. I refuse to be the whipping boy for either side. They see one another in me; they need to see one another in one another. Then they can beat each other to pulp to their heart's content. In a debate dominated by vicious radicals on both sides, the most uncomfortable place is the middle. However it is the middle ground, as we will see later, that has the promise for us all.

With business and government, there is a valid reason for both. Both are there to serve demand. Business is there to serve the demand at the marketplace, and government is there to serve the demand at the poll booth. Both are certainly capable of doing wrong things. However neither one is Satan.

In conflicts of interest, I advocate what I call the positive middle path. I do not mean just any middle path, as the middle can be found in all sorts of undesirable places. I mean the positive middle path that supports each side's capacities for rightful action and confronts each side's capacities for wrongful action. Neither business nor labor is good or bad. Both are capable of both. Business should be supported when it actually creates prosperity, confronted when it burns down the Amazon or treats its workers like dirt. Labor should be supported when it provides the brains and the brawns to make possible business prosperity, confronted when it demands ridiculous things from its bosses or advocates for slaughters of propertied class.

Now we see some people say that any knowledge that is not part of the canon is “bigotry” or “bias.” We see other people attacking the more educated out of the claim that they lack integrity – which they define as “acting as a single unit.” In a climate where everyone is influencing everyone else, very few people would have what these people call integrity. Once again, such a thing would be referred to as bigotry or bias. What one would have to do instead is make sense of all the conflicting influences and see who is right and about what. At which point one would be able to create a more informed integrity.

In this and in other things, I chose to make good out of a bad situation. When I was vacationing at a festival, the organizers invited the media covering the event to participate in the event, and a friend of mine said that this ruined their objectivity. What it did instead was give them a fuller understanding of what they were covering. They understood the experience of the participants, even as they were able to see it from the outside. And that gave them a full picture: That of understanding both the experience of the participants and the external effects of that experience.

I am a moderate by conviction and a radical by temperament. I am also very easily influenced by nature. So, once again, I decided to make good of a bad situation. What I would do is submerge myself in a mentality, then pull back and see how it affects other people. This creates what I call an integrative understanding of things, where one knows both the experience of the participants and its effects on others. And that corrects the errors involved in both forms of perception – in case of the first, that of ignorance of how one affects the world; and in case of the second, that of coldness and uninformed judgmentalism. The result is a fuller picture of things, and I believe that this has application in journalism, sociology and market research.

With gender war, I have found horrible behavior on both sides. It is not surprising that people who get their inspiration from Marx would be conducting themselves like Stalinists. They created a vicious party line and have been passing it off as education or as enlightenment. Like Stalin claimed to speak for the people and named his enemies the enemies of the people, these people have been claiming anyone speaking against their party line to be enemies of women as such. Meanwhile they have been exerting a vicious conformity pressure upon other women to be as vicious as they are, while maliciously attacking any woman or man who would not agree. The other side is not better; and when Hitler and Stalin are fighting each other one sides with neither one.

Whom does one side with? The men and the women who are willing to behave rightfully to one another. The men and the women who are willing to practice compassion and generosity. The men and the women who care about one another and want the best for one another. The men and the women who come from the position of goodwill toward one another and act according to that goodwill.

Now in a social climate poisoned by gender war, such people would be at a disadvantage. The man who has goodwill toward women will be appropriated or scapegoated by women who are vicious toward men, and the woman who has goodwill toward men will be appropriated by men who are vicious toward women. Meanwhile the nasty people on both sides will be in the lead. What we will see therefore is people of goodwill finding their way into all sorts of nastiness, and people of ill will rising to leadership of their gender. And this will result – and did result – in an incentivization of hideous conduct and attitude and abuse against people who would not take this path.

This needs to change. Indeed this needs to be inverted. People need to have correct incentives, and that means especially incentivizing willingness to treat one's partner right. Doing this will provide a solid refutation of both sides in the gender war, and that will make the world better for everyone. Now both sides in the gender war have been demonizing me, and they should. I am against the horrible mess that they have made of society. I want to see reduced the influence of both sides in the gender war, and men and women having the courage and inspiration to be good to one another.

With business and government, once again, neither is God and neither is Satan. Business is capable of doing both right and wrong, and so is the government. Both consist of people, and I see no reason why people in either would be better or worse than the other. I have heard many entrepreneurs complaining, in many cases rightfully, about government over-regulation and over-taxation and red tape, and I have heard any number of people in the government having a low view of business. However there is a legitimate place for both business and government; and any effort to do away with either is an effort to do away with what created either – which is, once again, public demand, either at the marketplace or at the poll booth.

Is it true, as a guru once told me, that “againstness never works”? It certainly worked for both Marx and Reagan. I am against neither women nor men, and I am against neither business nor government. I am against the gender war. I am instead in favor of men and women having and practicing goodwill toward one another. I am against the horrible mess that the gender war has made of society. I am in favor of better social practices in which willingness to be good to the other gender gets rightfully rewarded.

So now you people know exactly where I stand. It is not where I started out, and it took a long journey for me to get to this point. I am neither a feminist nor a misogynist. I am someone who is in favor of goodwill by men and women toward one another. If you are a man or a woman of goodwill, do not let the usurpers on either side claim to speak for you. Speak instead in favor of love. And then become a positive force in society to confront the horrible abomination known as the gender war and create a better world for your children.