Eckhart Tolle and romantic relationships

Eckart Tolle writes about how to become at peace and find joy. I think he has helped many people but I quibble with him on his views on relationships, which are also popular among other New Age thinkers.  Here is a quote from The Power of Now:

"As the egoic mode of consciousness and all the social, political, and economic structures that it created enter the final stage of collapse, the relationships between men and women reflect the deep state of crisis in which humanity now finds itself. As humans have become increasingly identified with their mind, most relationships are not rooted in Being and so turn into a source of pain and become dominated by problems and conflict.

Millions are now living alone or as single parents, unable to establish an intimate relationship or unwilling to repeat the insane drama of past relationships. Others go from one relationship to another, from one pleasure-and-pain cycle to another, in search of the elusive goal of fulfillment through union with the opposite energy polarity. Still others compromise and continue to be together in a dysfunctional relationship in which negativity prevails, for the sake of the children or security, through force of habit, fear of being alone, or some other mutually "beneficial" arrangement, or even through the unconscious addiction to the excitement of emotional drama and pain." 

The irony here is that ET blames this dismal state of relationships on the "egoic mode of consciousness", whereas what is new here is the belief in individualism and the New Age philosophy that extols individualism. It's become a sin to look out and comfort/soothe one's partner. It's lumped under caretaking, loose boundaries and codependence. People used to be able to take care of each other AND themselves. Now it's all about "staying in one's lane", which not surprisingly leads to bad relationships.

On the one hand, mystics throughout the ages have had a goal to get beyond the ego/self/personality/individual (which is seen as an illusion, or sometimes as the devil, the source of all suffering), and find a larger Self/Presence/internal God with which to merge. On the other hand humans have a need which starts at infancy and develops further into adulthood, to be authentic to one's self and establish boundaries, i.e. to know one's particular needs and wants and assert them with other people. The human potential movement that started in the sixties extolled the virtues of the self and authenticity, but it  was more nuanced, it recognized other needs besides authenticity and transcendence, as exemplified by Maslow's pyramid. 

The global economy has capitalized on this need for authenticity in order to create more individual consumers and to eliminate competition from other ways that people can satisfy their needs, like families, tribes, and villages. These human organizations satisfy intermediate needs between these two opposing goals/needs of authenticity and communion with the divine. They satisfy the need for intimacy, for collaboration, for belonging to something larger than oneself.

The New Age movement has seemingly tossed out the intermediate needs and just focused on the two extremes of self and Self (what some have called Spiritual Bypass). It's ironic because mystics abhor the self, and capitalists think the Self is fictional (unless it can make them money). 

A new perspective is emerging in biological and social science (see DS Wilson's Atlas Hugged), and in relationship psychology and neuroscience (see Stan Tatkin's Wired fo Love, and Richard Schwartz's Internal Family Systems). For each level of emergent human organization, different qualities are necessary. An individual human has to integrate all her psychological parts to function well. For romantic relationships, individuals have to care about the relationship, not just about themselves and the other, or themselves and some Presence. Sure it's important for each individual to know themselves well and not to project blame onto their partner or use their partner's trauma as a coverup for dealing with their own trauma, but that's not enough. They also have to study and know their partner. They have to put a boundary around the relationship. There has to be a way to resolve differences through rational conversation and a team attitude, not just each person for themselves and accepting WHAT IS, or being taken over by limbic parts of the brain when things get strained. Accepting WHAT IS (or being in the Now, to use Eckhart Tolle's words) works for hermits, or in a romantic relationship as long as both partners' needs are met with what the other person is saying or doing, but as soon as it's not working for one of them, the other needs to be willing to talk about ways of changing course, even if it's still working for them. Otherwise "accepting WHAT IS" is a double standard: You have to accept WHAT IS even if it is not meeting your needs, but I will get upset or dump you if WHAT IS that you are saying or doing doesn't work for me.

Eckart Tolle and a few others say that one should not need intimate relationships when one is enlightened, because then one is whole. In this view, intimate relationships are only a tool for enlightenment for people who are not yet enlightened. And yet all these same people are not able to exist without some intimate relationship, whether it is to their children, mates or pets. If that's the case, then it's not merely a tool but a necessity. The underlying psychological truth that they are getting at is that neediness is not as attractive as confidence and inner peace. There are ways to achieve more of these without a romantic relationship, yet it would be hypocritical to pretend that the needs for intimacy, sex, and collaboration are cancelled by yoga and meditation.

Eckart Tolle and a few others have made intimate relationships instrumental. A tool for the individual ego to obtain enlightenment (the Self does not need tools). Gone is love of another individual for its own sake--I only love you because you are useful to me. In the romantic view, there is a recognition that what we love about each other is unique, something that has to do with the soul of the other and we love them regardless of what they can do for us. The soul is capable of other lovable qualities besides transcendence and authenticity, such as courage, wisdom, kindness, critical thinking; but ET reduces everything to transcendence, and other simplistic New Agers reduce it all to transcendence and authenticity.There is no concept of soul in Eckhart Tolle's philosophy (in The Power of Now, the word "soul" appears only once in a quote attributed to Jesus). There is only ego/self/personality/individual and Source/Self/Presence/God. The mystical view has been that Source is like an ocean and egos are like waves, or Source is like the Sun, and egos are like windows for the sun's light to shine through, both metaphors are one way causation from Source to ego, with no room for emergence, where the causality goes both ways. A soul is like a window which also has its own source of light, not just a passive instrument for the sun's light. Or like a wave which can influence the state of the lake it is happening in, interacting with the air, the ground, and other waves. With a soul, there is the possibility that I love your soul for its own unique sake, regardless of its usefulness to filling my needs. Neither ego nor Presence offer that possibility. Ego is by definition unlovable, whereas Source is lovable independent of someone's ego/personality. A soul can be nuanced, it can have qualities that are lovable (courage, compassion, humility, humor, curiosity, freedom, etc), as well as qualities that are not lovable (greed, cowardice, hypocrisy, fear, etc), as opposed to ego which is all bad in the mystical view, and all good in the capitalist view. There is also a possibility that two souls recognize a connection to each other even without being aware of the qualities in each other that they love, perhaps from having met previous to this life.

Eckhart Tolle might be OK with instrumentality (aka transactional relationship), but not with a responsibility to fill needs for one's romantic partner. In order to fill a partner's needs one must not only be open to requests from ones's partner, but one must study them so one can even anticipate their needs. For all this we need to use all of our faculties including our minds. He feels like partners should fill their own needs by communing with Presence directly, and have no needs except to commune with Presence. The repulsion that some in the New Age movement feel about meeting a partner's needs might be a flash back to patriarchal wifely duty to satisfy the husbands sexual needs. There is a difference between being able to have sex on demand, regardless of one's state of arousal, vs being able to have intimate conversations and make eye contact, or hug one's partner. The former is largely out of conscious control (it is happening in the limbic part of the brain), whereas the latter involves conscious parts of the brain.

"If you stop investing it with "selfness," the mind loses its compulsive quality, which basically is the compulsion to judge, and so to resist what is, which creates conflict, drama, and new pain. In fact, the moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace. First you stop judging yourself; then you stop judging your partner. The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way. That immediately takes you beyond ego. All mind games and all addictive clinging are then over. There are no victims and no perpetrators anymore, no accuser and accused. This is also the end of all codependency, of being drawn into somebody else's unconscious pattern and thereby enabling it to continue. You will then either separate - in love - or move ever more deeply into the Now together - into Being. Can it be that simple? Yes, it is that simple."

No it isn't. While this expresses a beautiful idea when taken with moderation, it is not a useful thing never to judge. One can judge with love and thereby help one's partner meet their needs better or improve their soul. One needs to be able to disagree with one's partner at times in order to figure things out together better than could be figured out alone. Rejecting judgment is rejecting the mind. Better to combine the mind with the heart, judgement with love. ET is correct that judgement without love or self knowledge is harmful to a relationship.

"As you may have noticed, they (relationships) are not here to make you happy or fulfilled. If you continue to pursue the goal of salvation through a relationship, you will be disillusioned again and again. But if you accept that the relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world"

Yes, a relationship is not just about happiness, but if we are wired for love after evolving in couple relationships and families and tribes for millions of years, then happiness is surely a part of it if it is done with love AND consciousness. It is not just about our happiness, but our partner's as well. 

"You cannot love your partner one moment and attack him or her the next." Actually you can as Stan Tatkin shows in Wired for Love. There are parts of the brain that have to do with survival and others that have to do with generosity, nurturing, respect, etc. Sexual love is however in the same part of the brain mostly as the survival parts (the amygdala). Other kinds of love can be expressed in other parts of the brain or even in the heart or vagus nerve.

"Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain." Partially, but not only. Addiction can also result from an inability to fill a basic need and a substitution of something that mimics the way to satisfy the need, with the same production of dopamine and other pleasure hormones, but only works for a short time and has a negative long term effect. It is also good to face pain and not try to distract oneself from it because it can help us improve our souls, to be more compassionate, more patient, more insightful. 

"Love is not selective, just as the light of the sun is not selective. It does not make one person special. It is not exclusive. Exclusivity is not the love of God but the "love" of ego."

Not if we can love souls instead of egos or vessels for Presence. Romantic love is selective, though for some people it does not have to be exclusive.

In the New Agey philosophy the causation goes: I love you because you can help me be in touch with Presence.

In the older spiritual philosophies, the causation goes like: I love your soul because of its qualities or because I knew it before this life. I want to meet your intimacy and collaboration needs as a result, and you might want to meet mine. Together we can create a relationship which will be a source of joy and safety for others, such as our children, our tribe and our village. The life  of an organism is about lack seeking wholeness outside of itself (see Incomplete Nature, by Simon Deacon). The New Agers have inverted this for seeking wholeness within. And yet they are only able to exist due to other people and nature supporting them from without both materially and emotionally.

"True salvation is a state of freedom - from fear, from suffering, from a perceived state of lack and insufficiency and therefore from all wanting, needing, grasping, and clinging."

In other words, death, or dementia. Because life can sometimes be free from fear and suffering, but not always. And life is based on lack and insufficiency as well as fullness and abundance. Our basic needs can be filled by the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, but eventually we need a refill and sometimes it takes doing stuff we don't like in order to obtain food and water (so not total freedom). With air it is pretty quick. With water we can last longer before a refill, and with food even longer. Yet none of these things are cause for shame or condemnation, and neither are our basic need for intimate relationships, and of belonging to a tribe and land.

Love, courage and wisdom, not just peace and bliss. Ramana Maharshi's "who are you?" meditation is great as an exercise, not as a lifestyle. Neither RM, nor ET are qualified to teach us about how to be human. They have not birthed or raised children, had lifelong romantic relationships, been traumatized in war, famine, or child abuse and overcome these, composed inspiring music, poetry or literature, discovered mathematical structures or scientific mysteries, planted and harvested food.

spirituality and global capitalism

For hundreds of thousands of years, our species has been based on tribes, then also families within villages. It has also been based on a deep interdependence with the natural world. Individuals didn't even exist as such for most tribal people, as each person could not be defined without a reference to the bonds that bind them to tribe, land, sky and water. Tribes, families, villages and the relationship with nature not only helped people survive, but met deep needs within individual humans so that they thrived. Hunter gatherer individuals do not need a God to fill a deep vacuum within them. Their needs are met from each other, from nature and from a sense of belonging to the tribe and the land. They might have stories about various spirits, who are rooted in the land or the sky or the oceans. But they would never dream of giving up the relationships with each other or the natural world for one of these spirits, or even all of them. The piraha are one example. And these spirits were external to them, though there might be resonance of certain spirits with certain  individuals.

Families within villages also provided deep belonging and interdependence with people and nature. If there was a God involved, there was usually not the idea or the possibility that this God would replace the relationships between people or between people and the land.

The idea of focusing one's life on a relationship with God arose in village culture within Judaism. I'm not sure how it arose, probably innocently from mystics like Jesus who were misfits and did not get their basic needs met from a family within a village. Maybe because sometimes their family and village were destroyed by an invading nation.

The idea also arose in India with similar environments among misfits. And in the middle ages in Europe and Persia with a few mystics who needed an outlet for their strong sexuality in a sexually repressive society. Listen to songs and read poems about mystical experiences, or take entheogens, and the presence of sexuality or a similar force that feels ecstatic and connective is hard to miss. You don't get pagans or native people or most villagers who are sex positive, advocating dropping everything and focusing on God. Perhaps this is not quite what "seek ye first the kingdom of God" means, maybe it means prioritizing this God, external in tribal and village cultures, internal for moderns. It seems to me that prioritizing is innocent for the external God, but with the internal God, in combination with seeing the global market as a source of economic goods and services, it leads to an extreme individualism and lack of genuine care for others. On the other hand, perhaps the external God is more prone to disagreements with other external Gods than the internal God, which is not about dogma but about inspiration and creativity.

Still, this idea of prioritizing God didn't take off and go viral till late stage global capitalism which encourages individuals to interact with (prioritize) a global market instead of with each other for their basic needs. The greatest profit comes from individuals; also villages and families get in the way of people's dependence on the market. If people can produce what they need for each other they don't need the global market. Conversely if they can get their basic needs from the global market, they at least superficially don't need each other. Sex becomes a commodity which they can get from porn or human trafficking instead of a sacrament that binds them to each other and makes them deeply care about each other. An ideology which tells them they don't need each other reinforces this dependence on the market and is selected for by capitalism. The end result is the destruction of tribes, villages and families.

Enter Ayn Rand and her poisonous ideology of objectivism (see here a satirical description of the irony of conservative christians adopting objectivism as an ideology). Now not only do people not need each other, but greed and selfishness become virtues. Ayn Rand was reacting to the brutality of the soviet regime, which took collectivism to an unhealthy extreme, allowing free riding in the form of Stalin and party apparachniks to take over. In the Marxist ideology, everything is a cause of social environment and large economic forces, and so there is no room for personal responsibility. The opposite of this is that personal responsibility is the sole cause of everything in human matters. Both ideas are terrible and lead to different forms of hell. People need each other on a personal and small collective level, and can't have much deep connection beyond the family level, with still some emotional connection possible at the village or tribe level (about 200 people max). 

The solution that evolved out of the medieval mystics that gets selected by global capitalism is a parallel story about how people can get their deepest emotional and spiritual needs met only from a God (similar to the global market), either an external God for conservatives or an internal source God for liberals (especially in the american yoga community). And that the relationships with each other and the land are either not necessary, or that they are only instrumental to a relationship with a God. 

There is no conspiracy of capitalists trying to get people to not need each other or the nature around them, or to destroy villages, tribes and families and the relationship between people and land. There is just a resonance between belief systems that encourage these sort of things, and an evolutionary selection pressure for these sort of belief systems within global capitalism.

Just like cells in a multicellular organism, people can survive alone for a while, but to thrive for a long time they need each other (and nature). There is nothing wrong with interdependence as long as the parts/cells/humans are healthy, and as long as the needs of the cells are resonant and not to far from the needs of the whole organism. But in global capitalism it is fashionable to believe that dependence on other people or the natural world is unhealthy and only a dependence on the global market is healthy. The spiritual equivalent is to believe that only a dependence on an internal source/God is healthy, and a dependence on other people or nature is unhealthy. 

How do I know that there is no internal God that can fill the deep vacuum left by global capitalism by destroying villages, tribes, families and our connection to nature? Because nobody has ever seen this God. Most believers feel creativity, intense belonging, peace, joy, intense energy, and euphoria induced by entheogens, by meditation, sex, ritual, music, prayer, dance or being in nature. Also, if there were such a God, it would have revealed itself to our tribal and village ancestors, not waited till now when it is suspiciously conducive to global capitalism.

What I am concerned with is a sort of psychopathic egotism that is unable to feel compassion, care and curiosity for other beings because it declares itself to be happy and godlike and only sees others as instruments for one's own needs and goals.

Still this does not rule out the possibility of a deep ontological interconnection between people (and other living organisms) that transcends face to face communication, perhaps through some sort of field, either a known long-range field such as gravity or electromagnetism, or a yet unknown one to science. It is also possible that this field is involved in creativity and mystical experiences and that most of what people consider their selves are representations of this field, not the field itself. This sort of interpretation of the inner source is then compatible with having real care, compassion and curiosity for another part of the field. A more mundane psychological interpretation of the internal source/God is that it is simply an individual's knowing of their own needs, a deep understanding of themselves that is essential for not only their health, but the health of their family, tribe or village. Without such an understanding, it is possible for an individual to become unhappy and become prey to people who use them for their own needs without contributing to the needs of the whole family or tribe or village (i.e. freeloaders). It is also possible for such an individual to become a free loader, using other people to compensate for their lack of understanding of themselves. This disease of the part(s) (e.g. individual) can lead to a disease of the whole (e.g. tribe). We might call it co-dependence, but health does not consist in pretending to not be dependent on the family, village or tribe, or pretending to be dependent on only the global market, internal or external God. Health comes from both an inner understanding of one's needs and the needs of others in the tribe, and of the needs of the tribe as a higher order entity. Health also comes in situations when those 3 needs can be made congruent and resonant with each other.

Perhaps tribal and village people did not individuate as much as modern people and did not have very complex individual needs that differed much from other members of their tribe or village. I wonder if a modern person could be happy living under such circumstances once they've tasted individuation. Perhaps out of tribal deep interdependence and modern extreme individuation we can synthesize a middle sweet spot...

Pros and cons of Libertarianism

I have much sympathy for libertarianism and libertarians because of course healthy humans love freedom and dislike stupid rules, incompetent or mean bosses (or slave owners) who wield power over us, senseless laws, exploitive rents and taxes, stupid burocrats who waste our time and wield petty power.  And we have seen the horrors of mobs and cults (but are often ignorant of their ecstasies). I agree that there is something sacred and important about human individuals, that freedom and happiness are the domain of the individual human, not of the cells inside a human body, nor of any higher level of organization of humans, such as a family, tribe, village, nation, the EU or United Nations. But individual happiness can sometimes be maximized by trading some individual freedom for the benefits that come from belonging to a family, a tribe or a village. 

Libertarians respond to this challenge in two ways, either ontologically or based on a different calculus of ethics (I'm not going to categorize them in economic or political ways). The ontological libertarians deny that there is any reality to organizations beyond individual humans, that they are not more than the sum of the individual humans, that the only real thing is individual humans interacting (and possibly a separate God).. The opposite view is embraced by deep ecologists, who think that individuals are an invention of late stage capitalism and have no ontological reality, that individuals are always inextricably embedded in a  family, tribe and ecosystem and can't exist without those. I disagree with both these views based on my understanding of emergence and evolutionary game theory (which I won't go into here),  and think they are complementary not exclusive of each other.  I understand how the both arise. The deep ecological view was the default before western civilization. The individualist view arises when people are so little dependent on others around them for goods and services, villages and tribes can't survive. Instead there is a dependence on abstract entities with a dubious independent (of us) ontological reality, like global markets and the military, money, an Abrahamic God, and large governments, all of whom supposedly bring goods and services from all corners of the globe to our local stores, giving an illusion of island individuals. Moreover these entities are more of a nuisance, convenience, protection, authority or a danger to us, than a source of joy and communion. The family, village and tribe provided a means for people to commune with each other (and the natural world), not just annoying transaction costs. They provided a set of traditions, values, boundaries (around the family, tribe or village, not around the individuals) where communion could be refined and concentrated. In such an environment libertarianism never arose. Instead there was the distributism of the Catholic church and village, the primitive communism of tribes and families, the mysticism and pantheism of individuals who know what it is to deeply belong to something bigger than their own individual selves.

Then there are the other kind of anarchist libertarians who love freedom and individualism above all else and won't trade it off for any amount of happiness, or maybe they just have never tasted the kind of happiness that can be had from deep communion with other people or nature in a supportive institutional environment. No social contract for them, except between individuals, no laws, but also no ecstasy or ego-transcendence. These folks acknowledge the reality of higher order entities/institutions than individuals, but see individual freedom as the highest value, never to be traded off with happiness, theirs or someone else's, and so these higher order institution seem evil to them, because they invariably impinge on individual freedom. Not only do they see the higher order institutions as evil (except the religious ones who don't see God as an entity to know and be part of but as an independent entity to fear, worship, obey), but the people who promote these institutions are sometimes seen as evil. They mistrust generosity or altruism or sacrifice of one's own (immediate) best interest for someone else's well being (except when Jesus does it). They are more interested in establishing boundaries than transcending them or allowing others through. They are more interested in taking personal responsibility than letting go of control. And they are correct in a limited, paradoxical way, and so are the collectivists, the cultists, the addicts (who long for ego-transcendence but can't achieve it within western individualist culture without their addiction), the artists, the great scientists, tribalists, deep ecologists, the co-dependents, the mystics, the distributists, the neo-primitivists, in that what they are all reaching for is part of the human experience, which is both individual and collective. They might even agree to a government that would be given (only) a policing and protecting power, as these would presumably maximize individual freedom. Happiness to them is an individual choice, despite much data that contradicts this claim, showing that happiness depends on community, family, stability, flow (aka grace), nature and other things not under direct control of individuals (see The Happiness Hypothesis by J. Haidt)

The problem with usury

Usury has two legs, an individual intentions leg and a systemic/societal leg. It can stand (shakily) without one or the other, but not without both.

Individual intentions

Usury comes from the same root as the verb "to use". A world in which individuals see each others as a means to their own ends, or more bluntly as Hobbes said "a war of all against all" leads to hell, and many traditional religions recognized this and forbade usury, at least within the tribe (aka intra-tribal).  We're talking mostly rent and lending at interest, but it generalizes beyond that. This has an easy "fix": if we see each other instead as manifestations of the sacred and try to make our relationships with each other based on that perception, we may have a taste of heaven on earth. From an evolutionary game theory perspective, forbidding usury and instilling the sacred intra-tribal relationships perspective is a way to reduce intra-tribal conflict and impose a cost (when the rule is broken) on "defectors" (aka free riders, landlords, money lenders, some politicians, etc), which gives a selective (inter-tribal) advantage at the group/tribe level compared to groups/tribes that don't use this strategy.

However, even the best of intentions, where we want to create a relationship based on the sacred within the people involved in an economic transaction, can lead to hell, in a system whose foundation is short term individual benefits with only long term individual costs, or externalized costs to others. Such a system (e.g. our current global economy, whether in capitalist or socialist form) inevitably goes towards massive inequality, which destroys communities and families, which ironically individuals need for optimal functioning. This is a systemic problem, not an individual one, and it's solution is also systemic (as in we need a different economic system).

Systemic dynamics

Here's how it plays out: some get wealthy just by having land or money, which they can leverage to make a much greater (money) / (labor spent) ratio than most people with less money. If we start with everyone having an equal amount of resources and add a tiny amount of random inequality of resources, or even random inequality in self-interest, it's an unstable equilibrium where the initially slightly richer (or slightly more self-interested, or even just slightly more entrepreneurial) get even richer and the initially slightly poorer (or less self-interested, etc), who have to pay the bulk of the interest and the rent to the rich, get poorer. Sometimes it's even indirect, where the rich rent to other rich people, who are using other poor people through rent or interest. The short term stable equilibrium is massive economic inequality, but that is also unstable in the long term as the poor revolt against the rich. And this can happen at any scale, even a small village, or a family. That is why stable families are mostly based on a gift economy, and long-lived villages do not have money lenders or landlords within the village. And that is why villages and families which adopt and mimic the current global economic system within themselves are not stable, also leading to individual unhappiness.

Possible solutions

One possible solution is to forbid usury (as some mainstream religions have done), but people are very clever about circumventing prohibitions and attempts to legislate morality. Things are not always black and white: I'm not really renting the house to these folks, it's a mutual gift....

Another possible solution (favored by conservatives, though they won't necessarily admit what is being done) is propaganda (this word does not necessarily entail deceit) campaigns by the government and the wealthy to make the poor either aspire to be rich or at least middle class (and sometimes succeed to various degrees) by playing the game, to look forward to a reward in an afterlife, or to identify with the rich or middle class through other shared "identity" traits (even though they are wealthier and have all these perks that we don't, we can identify with some of them who are white, black, women, men, american, pakistani, christian, jewish, muslim, gay, straight, entrepreneurial, hard-working, talented, coke-drinking, etc), and by identifying with them, resist the temptation to be murderous towards them (in sociological terms, they are no longer considered an out-group, they become part of our in-group). This is a containment solution that might succeed in preventing revolt for a while, but does not prevent the massive unhappiness of a large part of the population that is either not able to be of use to family and community (aka unemployment), is toiling under alienating conditions, and is often causing harm to nature or other people far away and in the future.

A third possible solution (favored by many liberals) to this systemic problem is the redistribution of wealth by a big government through taxation, or subsidies to the poor. It has the problems of creeping burocracy (with its own version of inequality and dampening of initiative) and disempowerment of poor people, which I don't want to get into here, suffice it to say that it is not a good long-term solution.

I don't know what a good solution is (can you help me figure it out?), but I can speculate based on my best understanding of the problem that it involves localizing the economy so that it is easier to see the effects of our actions on other people and even on ourselves, in a short enough time. This is the solution that was favored by tribal societies, families, rural villages before the industrial revolution, Gandhists, and catholic distributists.

old problems, old and new solutions

P=problem

S=proposed solution

Based on my study of how nature evolves higher levels of organization, (all the way from organic molecules (not just DNA) to networks of organic molecules, cells,  organs, organisms, families, villages, cities, companies, economies, nation/states, ecosystems, all the way to a whole planet earth), and my experience assisting, visiting and starting intentional communities, I propose that we have the following problems and the following possible solutions. I have in several previous posts discussed problems of intentional communities from the perspective of what we can learn from conservative intentional communities I , and II, systems theory, mundane issues that arise in communities, and tragedies. This is yet another attempt to tackle problems from a practical yet radical perspective.

Do you agree that these problems are fundamental (for example some people think systemic racism is fundamental, but I think that is false) ? Do you have other proposed solutions? I'd love to hear from you.

1. P: We are yearning for an intermediate between family and nation/state

    S: community composed of pods/families, where the pods are economically and culturally inter-dependent, because of the structure and agreements about what we are and are not doing, what we call Community Supported Community (CSC)* in analogy and extension of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). In contradistinction to capitalist and communist economics (where there is no intermediate of value between individuals and the global market or the state), or distributist economics (where there is no intermediate between the family and the global market or state), we value the nesting of individuals within families (or pods), and families within villages (or tribes).

2. P: Feedback loops are too big for learning to occur (e.g. global warming, peak oil, government and corporate corruption, (global) market failure to provide for needs, usury (usually exploitation of strangers through rent).

    S: Localization. All basic needs are produced locally, and most local production is for local use. For this we need hundreds of people to take advantage of diversity of talents, and efficiency of specialization. Also, externalization to nature (as in atmosphere and rivers or oceans), future generations and people far away is impossible with a local economy. If we screw up we get immediate feedback and have to make corrections. Both communism and capitalism could benefit from smaller scales (the family is already communistic, and the village can benefit from a small market economy)

3. P: a. Too much communalism on a scale larger than about 10 people leads to freeloading (it's a good breeding ground for that kind of behavior) and competition (diverse needs, finite resources), with resulting conflict, drama, and only the most assertive or strong people getting their needs met. Conflict resolution is an oft-touted solution, but how much time do people want to spend on conflict resolution vs just enjoying life? Of course conflict resolution is part of the solution once conflict arises, but we propose there are ways of reducing the potential for conflict (see below), similar to germline segregation in biology.

        b. Too much family in the context of a global economy (e.g. homesteads that barely interact with each other) leads to cultural anomie. Also, we have serious ecological and economic problems that can't be addressed in the context of families in a global economy.

    S: Separate pods of people who resonate with and deeply love each other and can share a domestic space. In such an environment (usually a sexually and genetically related family, but it doesn't have to be), competition is reduced, there is less diversity of needs, and it can be more simply negotiated than if there were more people. But unlike homesteads that are barely interacting with each other because they can interact with the global economy for their cultural and economic needs, we agree to a radical economic and cultural interdependence (CSC), where people need and can rely on each other for their diverse economic and cultural needs. There is less energy needed to devote to conflict resolution and meetings, and more energy for enjoying nature, work, contemplation, personal passions and relationships. For a functioning economy hundreds of people are necessary, whereas for a functioning family no more than about 10 people are needed or possible. We propose to encourage both levels of organization and nest the family within the community in a synergistic way. In disagreement with Confucius, who thought that the success of the nation depends on the success of the village, which depends on the success of the family all the way down to the health of the individual, I think that the success of each level of organization depends on the levels both above and below it, not just below it. Also, I disagree that everything depends on only individuals being healthy (the libertarian view), or individuals having a good relationship with a God or Spirit or some other foundational (lowest) or ultimate (highest) entity (the mystical view). If we can at least get the 3 lowest levels (starting with individuals, of course there are lower levels) healthy, and make the dependence on levels beyond the village mostly superfluous, we can create something good. 

5. P: We don't need each other, given our dependence on the impersonal global economy

    S: We agree to produce for each other and use each others goods and services (CSC, which includes cultural services). We also unite around sacred values**, have respect for competent authority in specific areas, and have good boundaries around community and agreemets, since these are the "secrets" of conservative communities that make them last longer and have smaller turnover than liberal communities.

6. P: We are destroying nature because we are not connected to her and our dependency is not apparent

    S: By getting our economic, cultural and spiritual needs met from the land around us, we are forced to deeply care for nature. It becomes concrete as opposed to the abstract way most people experience nature. At best most people are currently tourists/hikers/backpackers in nature. We propose to trade the comfort, convenience and removal from nature of the global economy for more immediate connection between us and nature

7. P: 85% of people hate their work, many are unemployed

    S: We trade off mechanization for craft production and practices (such as permaculture) that encourage individual autonomy and creativity and an appreciation by pod and community members for the fruits of one's labor.

8. P: overpopulation--meaning too much competition for resources (not necessarily overcrowding)

    S: we agree to no more than 1 kid per individual, though people can trade for the privilege of having more kids (like I'll give up my potential offspring so you can have an extra, maybe you can give me something in exchange). We can be lenient if accidents happen and people get pregnant unintentionally, but if it happens too often there has to be consequences. Humans should be able to control their population, unlike most other animals, because of the gift of foresight and choice.

9. P: Unhealthy or un-environmental food (even when it's organic)

    S: We produce our own food, each pod has their own food production, though pods also specialize in food production (and other production).

10.  P: Injustice (the haves exploiting the have nots)

       S: There will be less injustice because pods will have joint ownership of the land and just like families they will have love as an ointment to help reduce conflict due to diverse talents and needs. There could be differences between pods, but these will be based on pod focus and preference, not on one pod exploiting another. The community will have monitors (one of the Ostrom principles) to make sure this does not happen, and a coalition of people who can prevent any one pod from imposing its will on other pods. Also, we will try to encourage a spirituality based on communion rather than resource acquisition and control**.

11. P: No say in decisions regarding health, housing, and our immediate environment

      S: Pod governance, nested within community governance, nested within local county/town governance, ... Most really important decisions happen within community and pod, not higher levels, as it is now. Also, pods can send representatives if they want to community decision-making meetings.

12.  P: Loneliness

       S: Pods that are more stable than families in the mainstream, because the community and nature encourage their stability through a mutual interdependence.

13. P: Xenophobia 

      S: We need to inculcate a deep ecology or deep humanism view where people care about others and the earth outside of the village. We at some point might need to help create higher level entities to prevent any one community from getting too aggressive. This is an exception to localization. We need globalization of communication and information to continue to some extent, not to dominate our economic and cultural life.

14. P: Woundedness. Our culture has left many people not getting basic emotional needs met (due to industrial revolution destroying villages, good work and reducing effectiveness of family) resulting in scapegoating (shadow projection onto others), addictions, and cognitive deterioration.

      S: As a short-term transition, encouraging people to do inner work (meditation, contemplation, exercise, nature therapy, and therapist-assisted therapies of various modalities) and inter-personal work (NVC, Nakaima, Zegg Forum). Long-term, restoring the family and keeping it sustainable in the context of a village, and restoring good work.

15.  P: Insufficient attention by liberal intentional communities to the 6 values that help conservative communities last longer and have smaller turnover (but not so far go viral or provide a radical and resonant alternative to the mainstream). Also insufficient attention to the problems listed above, especially the distinction between family/pod and community, and the dependence on the global economy, instead of the among community families/pods. Eco-villages have the most potential to remedy these problems.

       S: First, like in addiction-recovery programs, admitting that there is a problem, and then implementing the 6 values and the solutions above.

16. P: Insufficient attention by the mainstream (even the fringes of the mainstream) to the problems of western civilization (some are listed above) since the industrial revolution.

      S: As the inevitable decline of western civilization continues, more and more people will be looking for alternatives. It would be nice for these to be created earlier than later, when resources are less available and cognitive decline increases.

17. P: People are afraid of the negative aspects of cults (such as loss of individuality, suicides, psychological boundary violations by leaders) to consider that the reason cults are successful so often is because they meet real human needs that are not met in the mainstream civilization, such as a sense of belonging and safety, communion with other people in the cult, and a shared reality around which to create meaning.

     S: Provide a sense of belonging to the family/pod and the community by encouraging some individuals to pursue a talent in designing activities which encourage communion (singing, dancing, ritual, plays, storytelling, deep discussions, group therapy, games, hot tubs, saunas, sweat lodges, etc), as well as encouraging economic interdependence through CSC. Also provide training on the negative aspects of cults in order to avoid those. Also Issac Bonnewits' ABCDEF.

*CSC Agreements (between pods, or between individuals? TBD):

1) Providing a good or service that at least 90% of the people in the community agree is needed.  Individuals can thus focus on developing skill, responsibility and expertise in an area that resonates with their soul, akin to majoring in a field of study at a university. For more resiliency of the CSC, individuals can also have “minors” in areas that are not their primary focus, but hopefully someone else’s focus; Individuals can thus focus on developing skill, responsibility and expertise in an area that resonates with their soul. 

2) Providing a 'market' for someone who's providing a good or service in the community, even if it's of lower quality or higher 'price' in some way, with mechanisms for improvement available, as discussed below;

3) The strategic closing of production loops, so that inputs and outputs of each producer are provided by and to other producers (including non human ones) in the village, or eventually in other similar villages; and

4) Communal practices and rituals that allow us to express grief and joy and encourage belonging and interdependence. Some people could even major in organizing or facilitating these.   

5) Ostrom Principles for monitoring people (within a pod) and pods (within the community) who get too aggressive against other people or pods, and the power to give proportional punishment or withholding of benefits from such people or pods, as well as clearly defined boundaries for pods and the community and any communally owned land.

A longer rationale for CSC:

We think the fundamental flaw in all mainstream economic and political systems is their large size/scale (the benefits of large scale are outweighed by the costs), whereas the fundamental flaw in all intentional communities is their over-dependence on the mainstream systems, and their neglect of the problems of too much sharing or equality (tragedy of the commons, freeloading, brain/talent drain). Intentional communities either have too much sharing/communalism or too much “homesteadization” whereby families have their own homesteads and jobs in the mainstreasm economy, with very little economic and cultural interaction with other homesteads. We proactively address these flaws in both the mainstream and intentional communities, from a holistic approach, integrating economics, psychology, governance and environmentalism. We propose a much smaller economic and cultural scale of a few hundred people, and an even smaller domestic scale of highly interdependent homesteads of between 2-10 people (aka "pods"). This has the advantage of much individual freedom at work, more love in the domestic sphere because it only involves highly resonant people, primary accountability to the group, personal care for and from other members of the domestic sphere, a radical dependence on the local nature and the local community for basic needs, and care about the outside world. The benefits and costs of these will all be discussed below. In presenting these, it's sometimes hard to not mix the economic, psychological, government, and environmental parts. Either  the benefits or costs can be more neatly subdivided, but not both (or maybe this can be done by someone?) :

Economic rationale

1. Individual freedom with work encourages initiative and innovation, which are good for individual productivity and group adaptability/fitness. However, we need to discourage big egos that can create jealousy and resentment. Also, especially in pioneering stages, work parties may be more efficient.

2. Accountability to the group (by CSC and Ostrom agreements and enforcement mechanisms) discourages free loading, one of the main problems of groups where there is much sharing. However, we need to discourage totalitarianism and give people domains of time and space where they can explore their creativity or relationship with other beings without being stifled by the group.

3. Personal care for and from others creates a safety net, an insurance against accidents to individuals. Contrast this with large impersonal institutions which usually fail to provide good personal care. I am not sure yet whether we also need to implement "high cost signaling" mechanisms which are common in both mainstream and many ICs (for example, you can't take more than a small amount of assets out if you leave) to create more loyalty and discourage people from leaving too easily.

4. A radical dependence on local nature (enforced through stories, rituals, and striving for almost no imports or exports), combined with foresight and group monitoring, reduces the occurrence of the tragedy(overexploitation) of the commons. It is easier to care about local nature than nature far away, the dependencies are more obvious. Also it is easier to monitor people locally, harder to hide nasty practices. Last, it encourages people to see themselves as part of nature, which besides the psychological benefits (to be discussed below) keeps most of their contributions inside the community. The costs are further discussed in #5 of the psychological rationale section.

5. Care about the outside world is insurance against accidents or threats to the whole community. Neighbors or other communities can help if bad luck befalls the community. The costs are dilution of the energy that goes into the community.

Psychological Rationale

1,2. Individual freedom and a craft-mentality (as opposed to a machine-operator mentality) with work encourages states of flow (especially when combined with group accountability), which contributes to happiness.

2. Economic accountability to to the group (based on CSC agreements) encourages a sense of belonging, which contributes to happiness (though it could also contribute to stress if one falls short of one's commitments). The accountability to the group can also be encouraged though giving credit for designing and participating in ritual, storytelling, art, teaching/learning workshops, group dance, music making (and listening to others in the group as opposed to electronic music), well-being meetings (probably at the pod/family level), as well as encouraging adults to take care of other people's children. All these activities provide "community glue", which contributes to trust and a sense of belonging and reduces the need of people to leave (brain/talent drain)

3. Personal care to and from others is one of the essential ingredients of good relationships, which also contribute to happiness. Also, it encourages trust and generosity, which discourage hoarding and excessive inequality, which contribute to social unrest, jealousy and violence. Personal care also makes it easier to give feedback, so people can improve their skills, both at work, psychologically and socially.

4. A radical dependence on local resources encourages a radical dependence on one's community members since one can't do everything, and one knows who provided ones goods and services, as well as whom one is producing these for. Beyond resources, a radical dependence on nature gives one a sense of belonging as part of nature (a factor in happiness).

5. Care about the outside world through encouraging of a humanist and deep ecological worldview, prevents the negative side of tribalism from creating the conditions for war with the outside world and encourages active peace with the outside world. It can be encouraged by a limited flow of information and even more of goods and services, since CSC intentionally limits flow of goods and services to and from the outside world, with the exception of similar communities (a tradeoff since this can also help care for the outside world). The limiting of resource exchange with the outside world needs to happen gradually as to avoid burnout. In addition, careful screening of prospective members based on both well-designed surveys and long trial periods will be implemented so as to avoid "negative selection" for freeloaders who are attracted to the benefits offered by the village, but may not be willing to pay costs, such as loyalty and accountability to the group, less availability of consumer goods than can be gotten in the global market, less convenience at times with less labor-saving devices, respect for agreements and enforcers of them (such as peacemakers and productivity monitors, this is not hard for more conservative people, but might be hard for more liberal ones).

Governance rationale

1,2,3,4. The first 4 practices provide community glue, and reduce the interpersonal conflict that arises when people do not like, trust or need each other (yet are forced by an economic system or proximity to interact with each other) thus reducing the need for large scale group governance (in particular, hierarchies and burocracies). Smaller governance groups such as families and pods are encouraged and make governance less complex and more manageable. Ostrom principles will be implemented to avoid the over-exploitation of common resources (by making public goods also have proportional private costs), monitor both productivity (of individuals and pods) and well-being of individuals (which in a community can also be partially looked at as common resources), as well as encourage both participatory governance(give people a real voice in things that affect them and others they care about) and nested governance (leave them alone or allow them to choose a pod-representative/peacemaker with things that they or others do that don't much affect others outside the family/pod, which has its own governance). It is possible that some people (e.g. peacemakers and productivity monitors) will have managerial roles, but not of everything, just specific areas, thus reducing the dangers of concentrated power. It is hoped that all the activities (besides purely economic) that encourage community glue, will also reduce the need for complex legal agreements, of which compliance is mostly based on fear of punishment.

5. Bigger governing bodies will need to be built (and initially existing ones tolerated or reformed from the outside world). This has already been covered in #5 for psychological rationale section.

Environmental rationale

4. A radical dependence on local nature encourages a deep ecological worldview, which sees one's community members, both human and other species as being intricately interdependent. With such a worldview, it is more difficult to want to hurt other people or beings (though sometimes it may be necessary). This radical dependence on local nature will be encouraged by relearning hunter-gatherer skills and pre-industrial skills (from known experts and experimentation), as well as encouraging innovation with permaculture ideas and appropriate technology.

5. A more global environmental consciousness, will also be encouraged though being more abstract, is harder to encourage. It can be done through travel and education (though we may not have much resources for long-distance travel, the young especially might need to do it). Also, as has been mentioned when the humanist worldview is not present, people can just move on and keep degrading nature, or steal from more peaceful tribes if they don't take care of the nature around them.

**Example of sacred values: individuals have a sacred core merely by existing, and they are valued for this core primarily, before their value as useful to anyone else. The purpose of life is to commune more than to control and in order to commune, we value these 4 relationships between individuals and :

1) their community; 2) their sacred creative source; 3) their ecosystem; and 4) their surrounding society

To commune or to control?

That is the question, more than "to be or not to be". And unlike the Hamletian question, the answer is not binary.

We have both these impulses within us, in common with all living things. So many of our motivations and actions can be at least partially reduced to control or communion, sometimes a mixture of both. Many originators of religious movements have urged us to let go of control in order to achieve communion with each other, with nature, or with a deity. Buddha wanted us to commune with the source of being, by letting go the controlling nature of our egos and minds. Jesus wanted us to let go of the instruments of control (monetary savings, material possessions, religious rules) in order to commune with each other and with God. And yet, control has proven hard to eradicate. 

Control is needed to avoid being predated by opportunistic freeloaders from within our family, village, company or nation. The early Christians had to learn that "he who does not work does not eat". A loving church that focuses only on communion is a good breeding ground for freeloading behavior. 

Control is also needed to avoid being over-run by competing groups or individuals from outside. The early Christians had to learn to convince the Romans to join them and then to mount a military response (not always defensive) to the muslims. 

And control is needed for scientific and technical mastery of nature.  Here we see that absolute control of nature is not possible or desirable, because we are part of nature. We must also commune with it in order to survive and thrive.

From hunter-gatherers who learned how to control wood, bone and rock in order to fashion simple tools that increased their efficiency in hunting, gathering, staying warm and safe, to scientists and engineers who learned to control genomes and nuclei to accomplish amazing feats that go beyond survival and comfort, we have an increase in control, but not so much in communion. Hunter gatherers had to learn to commune with animals in order to not drive them to extinction, and also because there were benefits to communing with them. Some of the benefits were spiritual, for example learning to embody strength, loyalty, freedom, determination and courage that we can learn from some species of animals. Other benefits were more mundane, such as having dogs for protection, cats for rodent control an so on with all domesticated animals. Note the difference between hunter gatherers spiritual relationship to animals (and plants) and modern farmers, who see the animals (and plants) as tools to be controlled. Things have evolved towards less communion, more control. And this has metastasized into the human realm, where now most people treat each other as tools to be controlled rather than holy beings to be communed with. This we can call the instrumental mentality. Fear and social anxiety are the result.

Of course there are exceptions: Einstein valued imagination over knowledge, and awe over logic. Schrodinger thought there was only one mind that could be accessed by all individuals.  But in general, people today see each other as tools for career advancement, money and safety acquisition, sex, social status, and as potential rapists, suers, zombies, terrorists, or other various enemies and incarnations of evil that can be used to project unto one's anger, hatred and unprocessed traumas.

Men yearn to commune with a feminine archetype of pleasure, inspiration, abundance, mirth, justice, nurturing and ecstasy. Women yearn to commune with a masculine archetype of strength, confidence, big picture vision, courage and persistence. But the instrumental mentality ruins it. The desire for sex, especially, because of its overwhelming nature, especially in young men, can ruin the potential for communion, when the desire or its intensity is not reciprocated. And conversely, when women see men as mostly instruments for money, status, comfort and security, and also see them as disposable when they are not good enough instruments, there can be no hope of communion between the sexes, or even in gay relationships where people see each other in these ways.  On the other hand, when the masculine and feminine want to commune with each other, sex can be a great instrument for such a communion.

Not only are couple relationships trampled by the instrumental mentality, but higher levels of human organization are destroyed or made extremely unpleasant, such as villages, workplace communities, intentional communities, nations.

Even if we are able to restore a mentality of communion, it may be equally important to create activities that encourage communion because humans do not live by stories alone. Can we start valuing the kinds of games, dances and rituals that encourage communion? We already have group sing-alongs, music jams, bands and choirs. We need more of them and have them be more common instead of being relegated to specialists. We can add discussion groups (of books, movies and suggested topics), storytelling and dancing and music around campfires, hot tubs, sweat lodges, and ecstatic, ego-transcending, entheogen-assisted bacchanalian rituals. Ah, my heart hurts when I think of the gap between how we could commune with each other vs how we are. At least we have dogs and gods, rivers, oceans, prairies, deserts and lakes to commune with. But nothing beats our own species for communion.

 

the 5th wave of feminism

The original promise of feminism was to transcend genetic, epigenetic and cultural evolution and to provide more opportunity and happiness for everyone, maybe with some birthing pains. It was supposed to be a liberatory ideology. What has happened instead is to continue further along the tracks set after patriarchy started, of gynocentrism, pedo-centrism (i.e. "women and children first"), alpha-male-centrism, and most (beta) men's perceived disposability unless they devote all their energy to providing for women's and children's needs and keeping their place in the hierarchy (yes, I know that this seems blasphemous and absurd to most people who have been indoctrinated in mainstream feminist ideology), as well as some ugly views of women that lead to nastiness towards them (such as rape and general disrespect of their boundaries).

Part of the problem was that most feminists did not learn about cultural and genetic evolution (or else thought that culture was much easier to tweak than genes, and that Darwinian mechanisms of variation, competition and selection did not apply to it) and thought that patriarchy was some kind of a conspiracy by men to oppress women (e.g. EO Wilson, the founder of socio-biology, had ice water poured over his head by feminists, during a speech), instead of a system that gave certain alpha males an advantage in wealth and sexual opportunity, most women an advantage as far as safety and peace, and certain groups that adopted patriarchy an advantage in warfare, productivity and genetic diversity. To change a cultural system can be just as difficult as to change a genetic system. The source of variation is not just random mutation but conscious ideas about how the system works and how it would respond to change. Even if we were extremely skilled at such modeling (which we're not), living systems are an intricate web of interdependencies, and most single (or even double or triple) changes are not going to lead to an improvement. An evolutionary stable equilibrium is hard to change, whether genetically or culturally. Another issue was that many feminists thought that the oppression of women that happened in most agrarian societies (there are still a few existing) was going to carry forth into industrial and post-industrial societies, despite the fact that patriarchy gave no evolutionary fitness advantage (but was vestigial) to most individuals in, and to these societies in competition with other societies. This made their claims of being oppressed by men or patriarchy in post-industrial cultures seem non-sequitur at best, and like vicious, self-serving lies at worse.

At some point in our pre-history, when resources were plentiful, population low and competition scarce, our ancestors were non-patriarchal and non-monogamous. Most of them were hunter-gatherers, though perhaps Minoan civilization is an exception. The divine feminine was able to express itself in art and loving one's tribe. But at some point as population increased, groups that invented patriarchy were able to outcompete groups that didn't in both war and agricultural productivity. Alpha males found it helpful to repress female sexuality in the masses with the help of the church, burkas, female genital mutilation, witch burning, and general violence-induced stress, and to confine any remnant left to monogamous marriages for the masses. That way most non-alpha men would be docile, pacified, kept from too much competition with each other which would weaken the state or the fiefdom. A bit of sex with the wife would keep them from outright rebellion during their youth, when they are most likely to rebel. And a bit of respect for their natural tendencies to serve and protect women and children was a win-win for the village and for the beta men. The situation wasn't so bad for most women, as they were protected from warring nations, unsolicited sexual advances, dangerous or back-breaking work, and had much opportunity for creativity in the domestic sphere. The divine feminine was hiding, but not totally banished.

On the transition from an agrarian patriarchy/monogamy to the present, with the help of feminism: With the industrial revolution, new opportunities arose for work that did not require much upper body strength, so now women were initially prevented by tradition from partaking in this work that men had no particular advantage doing (unlike agrarian work). Most men who are not alpha got even more competitive with each other and also now with women, and also garnered less respect from everyone, because masculinity was not as valuable, and some feminists made it appear toxic. They were even more marginalized than before (in the military, dangerous or stressful jobs, family court, #metoo type witch hunts), even more disposable. They were made into debt slaves, killed, genitally mutilated, had to endure the shame of being unemployed, separated from their children, had to endure living without much empathy or love from anyone unless they fell in line with the program of dedicating all their life energy to a wife and children no matter what the cost to themselves. They had to repress their feelings and just be useful and productive, or at least pretend to be productive doing shit work, when there were jobs to be had. Men's feelings and life just do not matter unless they are alpha or fall in line. My personal situation has not been so bad as for most men, but I was till able to see through the deception of it.

Most women became more unhappy because they have more responsibilities and are put in competitive stressful careers which they thought they might like, but didn't. Also, they became more unhappy because they are not usually as turned on by men who are not confident and decisive and able to be aggressive at times. The divine feminine went into hiding and women became more masculine.

There were feminists who tried to make the point that the problem is patriarchy, not men, but that was too abstract for most people. Especially since Patriarchy etymologically means rule by fathers. Not just the 0.01% alpha fathers. And also because patriarchy in the west seemed to be declining, yet men seemed to be worse off than in countries where patriarchy was still strong.

There are a few asymmetries in the relationship between men and women under non-tribal conditions that are not usually talked about in feminist circles. First, most young men are much more needy of sex than most young women, for proximal biological reasons having to do with testosterone, and for evolutionary reasons as well having to do with the fact that men can impregnate many women at a time, whereas women can only be impregnated by one man and then there is a long waiting period before they can be impregnated again. As anyone who has studied negotiation knows, if one side needs something more from the other side, the more needy side is at a disadvantage and the less needy side has power over the more needy side. It's also something that is seen on the population level, not just individual negotiation level, as an example of supply and demand. There is not as much demand for sex (from men) by the population of (heterosexual) women, as there is demand for sex (from women) by the population of (heterosexual) men (women want provisions and protection more than sex). Since the supply of sex by men to women exceeds the demand, the "price" or value of male sex will be low as far as the population of women is concerned. Whereas since the supply of sex by women to men is far below demand, the value of female sex will be high as far as the population of men is concerned. 

The second asymmetry is that though women can get most of their emotional needs met from other women, pets, and children, the same is not true for men in non-tribal conditions. In non-tribal cultures most men are not very good in being nurturing and kind, especially towards other men or pets. As I've mentioned in another post, monogamy thus forces them into an emotional prison with one sole emotional connection to their partner.

The third asymmetry is that on the average, and also for evolutionary reasons, women value safety more than men and are less willing to take risks than men, and especially during childbearing years are less interested in taking on themselves the risks and competition for resources that it takes to obtain food and possibly shelter, and defending against marauders (all these things now represented by ability to make money). Combine this with lower upper body strength and spatio-temporal reasoning (which were more needed in defense and farming in agrarian cultures) and its not hard to see  how the ugly trade of sex/emotional intimacy for material resources evolved. The same supply and demand reasoning that leads women to have more power in sexual negotiations gave men more power in money negotiations. And of course men and women have tried to compensate for these imbalances by making prostitution or more subtle modern equivalents such as some forms of marriage possible and lucrative for both sexes. But in industrial and post-industrial cultures, men no longer have this bargaining power, except where it is vestigial. Safety is not much of an issue (except when a feminized culture over-reacts to various threats, from pandemics to terrorists to white supremacists, to communists, welfare mothers, child molesters, etc), upper body strength mostly isn't in high demand, and spatio-temporal reasoning might only be needed in a few STEM fields and trades (where men outcompete women, despite the fact that everyone in these fields wants more women to join them, and misguided beliefs about discrimination). Thus this asymmetry is already addressed in post-industrial culture.

In tribal cultures, the first asymmetry is mitigated by sex being more available for men from many women. Women do not pin all their economic hopes on one man, but on the tribe as a whole, and feel much safer (when there is no inter-tribal warfare at least) and do not need to guard their sexuality as an economic bargaining chip in exchange for safety and provisions. Sex can even become a way to ease tensions and increase group cohesion, as in bonobos. Also in tribal conditions, there is more connection to the sensual natural world and to other ego-transcending rituals besides sex, which mitigates the need for sex as the only mechanism of ego-transcendence. Last, in non-patriarchal tribal cultures there is much emotional bonding among all tribe members, also mitigating the need for sex, which is partially an emotional need, not just a physical need. This addresses the second asymmetry above. The asymmetries are still there (and are even celebrated), but they don't lead to the same prostitutional ugliness in tribal cultures (at least before they come into competition with other more violent tribes, or modernity) as they do in agrarian, industrial or post-industrial cultures.

The fact that we live in a post-industrial culture, not a tribal one is the first obstacle to transcending our evolution. The second obstacle is that trauma from the past is still determining to a large extent our present behavior, feelings and outlook. There is the past trauma of genocides, broken treaties, mass die-offs during epidemics, wars, forced relocations, kidnappings, slavery, witch burnings, normalized rape, beta male disposability in everyday life. Until that is addressed and integrated there is little hope for transcendence. We already mentioned the third obstacle to transcending evolution: the immense interdependence of parts of a culture.

The problem for MRAs is that they acknowledge the evolutionary pressures for women to get certain privileges and for most men to be disposable but they still think it's unfair and they won't admit that they are traumatized by the past. Most of them have no trouble with women having equal opportunities as men. I doubt most of them would want to live in a Handmaid's Tale kind of world. I think most MRAs share the original feminist desire to be treated as if they matter, not as being disposable or only valued for their use to women and alpha males. Their hatred of feminism is of the injustice that has only increased as a result of certain kinds of feminism, the hijacking of the original liberatory ideology by power hungry women and alpha men. But also that they don't want to recognize the female trauma of the past, during real patriarchal times, or of the present in cultures that still are patriarchal.

We need another wave. A wave of love for all people, letting them find what their gifts are, and helping them match them to the needs of their community, regardless of their biology, but not in spite of it. We need to rebuild communities, relocalize economies, and revalue the positive aspects of masculinity and femininity, instead of being immersed in the toxic aspects of both. But it won't happen without grief and trauma work and the recognition of the other genders' or culture's trauma, which might be different than our own.  And it won't happen without recognizing something sacred in life, that goes beyond evolutionary motives and economic transactions. It also won't happen without an understanding of social, psychological and biological evolution and the deeply ingrained cognitive habits of our culture which has proximally served the evolutionary trajectory it has taken. It may not be necessary for most people to have this understanding, but it would help if at least the leaders and pioneers of the 5th wave developed such an understanding.

Pioneers can be women like Cassie Jaye, Karen Straughan, Christina Sommers-Hoff and Janice Fiamengo, if they can team up with the more spiritual feminists like Starhawk, Lynx Vilden, Sue Monk Kidd and Pema Chodron.