A Light Diversion into the Darkness.

I am a man. A few years ago, I wrote a Diary for Daily Kos in which I, somewhat satirically, suggested a solution to the grim predictions contained in my Armageddon series (The-Solution-for-Everything).

I subsequently received a number of comments that prompted me to write another diary on the subject (The-Solution-for-Everything Response-to-Comments). The following are the two Diaries revised for the purposes of this blog.

A solution for everything:

Given the seeming insurmountable problems and crises, such as, wars and more wars, environmental calamities and climate change, gross and growing income and wealth disparities, creeping secular and sectarian authoritarianism, nuclear and biological weapons proliferation and the host of other problems that accompanies humanity’s seeming death march to Armageddon, there appears to me to be a root cause and a simple solution to the conundrum we find ourselves in.

The root cause of our current predicament is that we have too many men in the world today and the simple solution is to arrange to have far fewer of them.

(While this is meant to be a bit snarky, we must remember, many times in recorded history, including in our own not so distant past, men, in many societies, have periodically reduced the numbers of women by among other things killing female infants in favor of males.)

Think about it for a moment. Is there any evolutionary purpose served today, outside of transporting and contributing half of the DNA strand to new individuals, for having hanging around a great number of individuals whose sole evolutionary function is to protect the cave from predators (mostly other men) and obtain a few unreliable scraps of high calorie proteins from large animals while the female of the species was birthing and raising the next generation (and in all probability also gathering the major portion of the tribes caloric needs)?

Given that recent human evolution appears to be rapidly moving more along social and technological lines than the biologic, except for the DNA transport function (and even that is presently technologically questionable) the other functions of the male are mostly well taken care of today (with the possible exception of protection from men themselves).

There are about six or seven billion humans abroad in the world today, about half are men. That is far too many just to provide for the survival of the species and actually may be inimical to that survival. I would guess that we need at most only about one percent of that number, if that much, for species success and genetic diversity.

In a science fiction series of novels, the writer c.j. cherryh posited a community run entirely by females, with the few males there, like male lions in a pride, were kept in splendid isolation for breeding purposes because they were too dangerous and insane to be let loose. This fictional culture worked quite well, and there was a lot of co-operation among all concerned.

Other writers, mostly men, imagining similar female-dominated societies, unfortunately too often pictured them as being ripped apart over conflicts for the few remaining men. (Why do male writers so often picture women as men in dresses with deficient upper body strength? Women are not simply lesser men.)

Does anyone really believe that women as a whole would take up arms against one another over a man. Imagine if the “face that launched a thousand ships” were that of Brad Pitt instead of Helen of Troy would the women of Greece have taken to their boats? I for one find no reason to believe they would, after all, each of the poor evolutionary irrelevant male creatures provides enough genetic material for hundreds, if not thousands, of progeny.

In such a world the hydrocarbon emission problem would virtually disappear. The sexual sublimation of adolescent boys and young men by the automobile would be replaced with transportation only needs. Would a woman really need to drill a hole in the ocean a mile below the surface? It is not even a successful metaphor.

Population pressure will recede. No one can rationally maintain that it is solely women’s thirst for more and more children that lies at the root cause of the population explosion.

And what about meat? The consumption of Big Macs, BBQ ribs and steak would plummet, freeing the world environment from the ravages of the inefficient production of meat protein. The reduction of methane production alone from fewer cows as well as men can only be interpreted as environmentally and aesthetically beneficial.

Yes, some will suffer, like beer distillers and owners of sports teams and perhaps the porn and sex industries and the like, but I am sure that is a small price to pay for the enormity of the benefits.

Does anyone believe that women, in general, have wet dreams at night about the glories of social and economic inequality? Would they really have interpreted Darwin’s theories as survival of the fittest? (I suspect Kropotkin rather than Spengler would have been more appealing.) Would modern economic theory be more or less Keynesian if it were written by women for women? (We cannot lose sight of the fact that traditional economic theory was for the most part written by men, about men, for men)

Think about wars, invented by men to keep down the competition for sexual access and to acquire resources from those who actually produced them (usually women). Would women really find a need to dress up in uncomfortable military costumes only to mess them up killing one another to prove their sexual attractiveness? I do not think they are so simple-minded. Don’t you think that even the crazies among the female sex, would resist sending out other women to fight and kill or be killed for a few more acres of land or another barrel of oil or for that matter because we do not like their opponents’ skin color or the face of their god?

What about the creeping theocratic lunacy afflicting the world today? Imagine the meeting at a street crossing in old Jerusalem among a group of burka covered Muslim women, a few babushkas clad Israeli immigrant woman from the Pale and a covey of Irish nuns. Does anyone really see them grabbing knives and guns and killing one another? Insults shouted, maybe a little pushing and shoving, but killing no. It would soon be over because they all have more important things to do than shout at each other on a street corner.

What about gay men? Would not this society be unfair to them? Given the fact that gay men are still men and historically not above the testicular induced madness to kill one another for no good reason (e.g. Alexander the Great), I have come to the conclusion that we should consider adopting the system practiced by the American Indian. Gay men wishing to do so, could go off and live as women in every way practical. That would also have the practical advantage of immediately reducing the number of the male hormonal addled by ten or fifteen percent. Then the rest of us males, straight and gay alike, can go off and live in splendid isolation and save the rest of the world from the plague of our unbridled testosterone.

Can anyone out there in the blog-o-sphere think of one crisis afflicting the world today that cannot be better handled by women in a world with far fewer men?

Response to Comments:

The Diary above posited there were too many men in the world and that excess may be a major cause of the problems facing us today. It further suggested that women could probably do a better job of running things, at least in so far as the survivability of our species is concerned.

The response (mostly male) from those few that read the Diary and choose to comment on it, generally expressed high dudgeon that I would even hint at the possibility that women on a whole could do a better job at species survival than men who had after all rigged the game in their own favor for at least about 10,000 years.

Now I am the last person women either need or should want to defend them in any way. I can, however, try to make the case for the assertion that men have outlived their evolutionary purpose and that there are just too damned many of us.

For at least 10,000 years or so virtually every political system, economic system and religion have been designed by men for men. There is no natural or divine law that requires any of these structures to be designed in the way that they have been. During those same 10,000 years, every justification of those structures has been developed by men to benefit men.

That rigging of the game in favor of men and their particular needs and worldview has disadvantaged women throughout time and still does so today.

Women are not lesser men. There is no reason to believe that they are physically and emotionally hard-wired to be simply smaller men without penises whose bad luck it is to be designated that half of the population to be able to bear the future generations of the species and thus assure its survival. The fact of the matter is that because their critical role in species survival required them to spend so much time throughout their generally short lives in the all too often deadly activity of childbearing, the game has always been rigged against them. After all, the women were too busy doing the hard work of procreation, giving birth and raising their offspring to engage in such activities as beating up their neighbor or constructing governments and institutions to do the same thing, or for that matter writing about how good that may be. Men, on the other hand, often had a lot of time on their hands, needing only to spend a few minutes to deposit their seed and otherwise hang around the entrance to the cave to intercept the occasional predator.
 By the way, how many men did it really take to guard the cave entrance, anyway? I suspect that since they were so underemployed, the men spent a lot of the time thinking about how to kill one another and keep all the women for themselves. Eventually, they wrote books about it.

Almost all institutions of significance in society have been designed by men to benefit men in order to glorify their designated evolutionary function. Governmental, financial and religious systems were developed to enhance the male role in species procreation. Had those systems been designed differently because that function was not needed, as it is not required today, would we have seen different results? Actually, we may get a glimpse of what could happen from the effects of some of the recent changes in our school systems

Not too long ago our elementary and secondary schools moved away from separate education by sex that was the traditional norm because it was viewed as disadvantaging women. At the same time, at least in the US, we adopted a more co-operative less authoritarian pedagogy. Soon, surprisingly, we began to see boys falling behind girls in almost every aspect of their educational performance. This was most likely due in part to the fact that the intellectual development of boys and girls occurs at a different rate and to some extent boys and girls traditionally responded differently to different teaching techniques. In any event, this exacerbated the difficulties that the boys were having keeping up. Sure some boys still did well, but for most the system had unwittingly been rigged against them. If this could happen so quickly to boys as a result of some minor changes to a single system, what must have happened to women over the ages?

Therefore, it is not enough that we allow women to compete (that word in itself being a male rigged concept) but it is perhaps time that we men should simply step aside and let them design their own institutions and rationalizations.

OK, you may say we agree that we men may have rigged the game in favor of our sex, so what makes you think that they will be any better at running things than we men have been?

I found the following quote in a Huffington Post article a few weeks ago but alas, I did not record the author and could not locate the article again. So to the unknown author, I apologize for using your words here unattributed but if you or anyone reading this recognizes them please let me know and I will immediately correct the problem.

“Sociobiology: males in their profound hunting pack instinct are unable to think of social issues except in social-third person terms — short-circuiting our best economic brains to totally ignoring the easy (never discussed therefore never discovered) sector-wide solution.  We really need more (half?) females in the legislature and the social studies who are able to think of issues based on merits only, first person terms”.

Some of the comments to my Diary alleged that women can be as bad as men and pointed to Sarah Palin and Ann Coulter among others as examples of the evil that women can aspire to. Now in the case of Ann, there have been many comments to the effect that she may be an infiltrator from the other team so to speak, as a result, for all we know, she may just be one of us in disguise. With Sarah however, as much as she does not rank as one of my favorite persons, to compare her to such paragons of maleness as Vlad the Impaler, Hitler, Attila the Hun and so many other shining examples of our sex, really now….

The question should not be can they do better but under any conceivable scenario could they possibly do worse than we have?

After all, what is so wrong, from a male standpoint, with the social model of the lions of the savannah. The female lions run everything while a few males spend their days building up their muscles and beating off a few rivals. Men can, in this society, then spend their time preening in front of a mirror to make sure they look good in a swim suit.

As for whether we men have outlived our evolutionary purpose and are unnecessary to exist in such great numbers as we do today, let me add to the question with which I ended my prior Diary regarding what it is that men do today that woman cannot do as well or better, with the additional query, what is it that our sex actually does do other than clutter the place up?*

*  One possibility, for white males at least, is suggested in this recent article in the “Atlantic Monthly” magazine. http://www.theatlantic.com…

Some additional observations not contained in previous publications:

Originally nature’s way of dealing with the problem of excess underemployed males was to place them at the edges of their migrating bands. Since they neither bore nor nursed the children, the more foolhardy or slow of mind or foot provided easily obtained food for the predators of the era thereby protecting the far more genetically valuable women and children from predation.

As the large predators began to die out about 100,000 years ago, the problem of what to do with the now underemployed males was solved by the discovery by them of the joys of war.

Beginning in the twentieth century however that solution began to become inadequate as the burden of war shifted from the wholesale decimation of un-bred males onto women and children. Humanity began to ignore the mandate of God to his armies of the righteous :

‘… kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves.’ Numbers 31.17,18.–

(This shows that even a male god recognized which human units were most valuable for species survival).

Since the Second World War, it has been estimated that up to 90% of the casualties of most armed conflicts have been born by civilians. The obvious conclusion is that war is no longer an adequate control of the excess and underemployed human male populations on earth. If left to their own proclivities, the human male will remain blind to the effects of his technologically enhanced means of eliminating his sexual competitors until every last creature on earth dies along with him.

So, if war is no longer adequate to keep the beast occupied and its numbers under control, what is?