Patriarchy makes society undeveloped

Patriarchy tends to perpetuate itself by undermining the logic of those who are oppressed — women. It says, “Surely you are imagining it that men are actually oppressing you? You must be insane! We care for you, deeply.”

The result of this kind of brainwashing is that women underestimate the accuracy of their own perceptions and start to believe that they are incapable of logic.

It is easy to see why patriarchal societies are less developed, because the ideology of patriarchy is based on infantile projection. That is, if I am male and I do not like anything about myself, I can feel justified and encouraged by the system as it is to project these nefarious aspects onto women close by. Patriarchal societies keep their members in a state of infancy by encouraging this sort of behaviour as a way to excuse oneself. Rather than embracing patriarchy, people should be taught to observe their actions and introspect and analyse why they do the things they do. That would allow them to behave in a more mature fashion.

I perceive that infantile projection is absolutely essential for giving the impression that there are “natural” hierarchies, whereby men dominate women because men are intrinsically more noble than women happen to be. Louis Althusser recognises a difference between forms of repressive state apparatus and ideological state apparatus. So, in terms of sheer power, we could recognise that men dominate in various institutions of power. Why they dominate and how they manage to get into a position of domination are other questions.

It is my view that infantile projection is the means encouraged by various forms of ideological state apparatus in order to keep women in their place. So, we have the media, the church and to some degree various educational institutions perpetuating the idea that there is something noble, logical and transcendent of emotional states in the quality of being male. Men learn through social conditioning that they can easily project their unwanted emotional states onto women, so as to conform to this masculine ideal.

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identity categories

People expect you to play a role that is defined how they see your identity to be. So, for instance, when I migrated from Zimbabwe to Australia, I was expected to self-consciously “distance” myself from white, colonial racism. I didn’t do that, because I didn’t know that this was how “the game” had to be played. I genuinely had no idea about the necessity to play any game.

Similarly, one is expected to maintain an internal consistency of behaviour in relation to how others happen to judge you (i.e. what category they have subconsciously put you into). If you appear to be a particular category of person, but then do not act according to the principles that would define that category of existence, many people become upset. They believe you have “deceived” them — when really they have simply made a mistake about who you are, and then changed their minds, and then blamed you for the discrepancy between their two perceptions.

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MINUS THE MORNING: my specifically African feminism

There is actually nothing particularly “Western” about my feminism. It came about through my roots in Zimbabwe. (This is all in my memoir.)

I was brought up as a right-wing, Christian conservative, and then I had to cope with the traumas of migration and a father who all but went mad trying to justify his Rhodesian, male point of view in response to the total collapse of his society and its world view. My feminism is in direct reaction to this, and as such quite personal. It is not the result of (much) tutelage within Western institutions.

I think my book represents some challenges in that it doesn’t come from the point of view of Western identity politics. I have taken an approach which is naive; phenomenological — and I have tried to maintain that sense of how I really experienced my coming to a point of greater knowledge by maintaining the childlike tone that was part of much of my early adulthood. Women born into this Rhodesian, right-wing culture, were “brought up” to remain “child-women”, in the Victorian sense. So, I remain true to this character of how I was, and speak with the tone of this naive wonder at the world. I suppose this can open me up to all sorts of charges of feminine silliness and/or white entitlement, but that is to take too literal an interpretation of my writing. I had to deliberately regress my consciousness in order to be able to portray how I actually experienced the reality of the times.

***
Way back when I was still writing the book, I had a lot of people asserting that whatever I had to say, so long as it was critical of patriarchy, must necessarily be incoherent. This was back in the days of Howard and George Bush. Nowadays, the previously extreme levels of patriarchal assault have dropped off, but I would be surprised if people’s real attitudes had changed all that much.

In any case, I am too certain that I have behaved correctly and said what had to be said (albeit with too much moderation) to really care.

***
My main problem, in the past, was not being allowed to speak. I had no idea how strong this sensation of being denied speech was, until recently when I put a lot of facts together. I mention it in my book (although I do not link up the reasons there, at least not explicitly). The fact that I was a “white” from Africa seems to have been the reason why nobody wanted to hear my perspective on my past.

At the same time as recognising this as one of the causes of my feeling pent-up and feeling “strangled”, however, I also see that the need to repress my aggression was in fact based on the imposition of conventional gender roles.

So I was in a place where I had legitimate reasons for feeling angry, but was censured for expressing this rage, for conventional reasons.

And then again, if I were not already physiologically predisposed to feeling somewhat combative and aggressive, I might have experienced the psychosomatic sensation of the obstructive lump in my throat, but still not the sense of being pent up  to the point of being about to explode.

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Obama, identity politics and why that didn’t work out

Identity politics goes well with a consumerist approach to life, since one can rather passively “choose” one’s product (often in a way that is seen to enhance one’s self-image or ‘lifestyle choices). Then one sits back and expects the ‘product’ to perform. It’s all quite superficial. The idea that Obama must necessarily perform acts in solidarity with oppressed people because his skin colour is identified with oppression has proven to be false. People need to get over the idea that ‘identity’ is a transparent and obvious signal of motivation. It isn’t.

This discomfort one experiences must be real, otherwise humans have a tendency to be conservative and to try to “adapt” to the circumstances they are in, and not try to change them. This approach seems to be ingrained in us at something like a biological level. Part of the problem seems to be in the way our biological hardware enables us to adapt to our cultural and environmental circumstances at an early age. So, if we grow up in a system of capitalism, we will find that capitalism also comes to define our emotional determinants. We learn a capitalist subjectivity, which can be so hard to change that it seems to us like “human nature”.

It may have something to do with this neurological mechanism:

I will suggest that in addition to
being a neural repository for innate forms of behavior, the striatal complex constitutes part of a storage mechanism for parroting learned forms of emotional and intellective behavior acquired through the participation of limbic and neocortical systems.

CEREBRAL EVOLUTION AND EMOTIONAL PROCESSES:
NEW FINDINGS ON THE STRIATAL COMPLEX
Paul D. MacLean
Laboratory of Brain Evolution and Behavior

Clearly people have been on the wrong path with their forms of moral leftisms and identity politics.  Identity politics dominates the left when what is needed is a more considered and humanistic approach.

The need for a more substantial basis for action other than identity is made palpable by the fact that identity has become a repository for ideas of moral goodness and evil. Because of this, we do not see the human being and his or her capacity for thought and for action. Instead, we see an “identity” with a powerful code attached suggesting either “good” or “evil”.

Although there is a historical basis for seeing certain groups of people as oppressed or as oppressors, contemporary ways of treating identity go way beyond this recognition to the point that psychological forces within society as a whole are directed towards assuring that identities remain fixed on the basis of our inner needs to have a sense of moral certainty about our worlds. We learn to project our sense of “good” into certain types of identity, and the parts of ourselves that we would disown as “evil” into other identities. This seems to be the case with both the left and the right.

Thus, “identities”, although originally historically created and developed, become psychological fictions to amuse ourselves by. These have next to nothing to do with serious politics but, much of the time, are rather an obscuring veil, disguising real political processes.

"Projecting" — and how this applies to gender

It strikes me that many people do not know what “projection” is, or how that psychological dynamic is used to engender gender. Generally, “projection” is viewed as something anomalous, eccentric, and the product of rare people who express themselves in pathological ways.

In actual fact, projection is the means by which societies maintain inequalities between people. It is indispensable for creating hierarchies of class and gender. Without projection, we would not be persuaded to the belief that people have certain unchanging and essential qualities that mark them, independently from the social context, as being either “inferior” or “superior”.

Projection, however, facilitates this sense we often have that society is structured by people expressing their “essential natures” as it were. If more women than men find themselves at the bottom of their societies, with few economic resources, this is because of their essential natures. Likewise, a male has power because he is essentially powerful. A change of social context, therefore, ought not to change the degree of power he has over others. He retains that power, independent of his context, just because he is “a man”.

Clearly, this way of reasoning is fallacious — a fact that men’s rights groups expose when they point out that “men, too, are discriminated against.” Suddenly, a social basis for organisation comes to light when men feel that they are being made into victims. Otherwise, such organisation remains deliberately obscured and unnoticed. Such is the ubiquitous and self-serving view that society is generally just made up of people (except when women are behaving nefariously and in a “socialistic” fashion, by making males feel that “social forces” actually exist).

Projection, however, continues to reinforce social hierarchies, whilst rendering them invisible. The way in which projection “works” is through the culturally engendered trope of “reading between the lines”. This way of handling others from a different class or different gender from one’s own places an impermeable membrane between you to prevent communication.

How much do you “read between the lines”? (The answer to this question may answer : ‘How much do you “project”?’)

If I tell you that society has been harmful to me because of patriarchal practices, do you read me as saying something completely different; something I hadn’t thought to say, at all?

Perhaps, (you think), what I am really saying is that I feel I am one of the weaker members of society. Perhaps you think I out to conquer the world by “making excuses” for all sorts of things. (With what motivation? To what end? Why now?)

It has never ceased to astonish me how mentally secure most patriarchal men become, as they set to work to undermine my speech with all sorts of bizarre interpretations of their own. They become busy securing their positions in society as superior to me, but their projections are outlandish; their ears tone-deaf. They have absolutely no idea what I am  saying.

MINUS THE MORNING: on emotions and feelings

Patriarchal culture continues to promote many misconceptions about what feelings and emotions are and, indeed, what purposes they serve.

To be able to access one’s feelings through one’s writing doesn’t necessitate any judgment that one’s writing is particularly ‘emotional’ in the sense of mind-body dualists, by which women take on a role as the conductors of emotional meaning within a particular culture. This traditional idea of the ‘feminine’ role is fundamentally alien from the way I was brought up, which was to express myself in an extremely reserved and stoical mode.

I do not consider the possession of feelings as some kind of manifestation of the universal feminine. I know I have been misunderstood on this basis before, and there does seem to be an ubiquitous cultural tendency to misunderstand in this way. Rather, to my mind,’feelings’ point us back to history. They help us to decode the meaning of events that have transpired from one generation to the next.

For many years I was enraged with life, but I did not realise it. Like white Africans in general, I was brought up to be very indifferent to feelings — my own, as well those of anyone around me. I was therefore quite capable of ignoring the deep seated sense of betrayal I had at having to leave my country at a tender age. I didn’t realize I felt this way or that I had been ignoring my emotions. Persisting doggedly and without much awareness of my deeper views didn’t make my gnawing sense of uneasiness go away. Instead, it became buried underneath layers of bravado and an ever more rigid stoicism. Until finally somebody pushed me too far. I had been harboring an extreme number of distressing feelings all those years.

After much reflection, I finally understood how I’d been turning the anger inwards for a long time, producing chronic fatigue syndrome and depression. I began to overcome these things when I realised how angry I actually was. I was infested with a time bomb. Slowly, at first, but then with intensity I was exploding inwards.

Had I become a victim of my own emotion, without realizing it? I began to address the question directly through writing, as an attempt at self-understanding. It did not dawn upon me until much more recently that much of my cultural training was to repress emotion. I also discovered that at a deeper level of consciousness than logic and rationality are capable of delving into, I was aware that others were passing off their feelings of guilt onto me, turning me into a scapegoat for the wrongs of the world. I also realised that I had lost my home, my country, and everything that had previously had any meaning to me as a child and that I hadn’t mourned these losses.

I’ve learned from my mistake. I no longer repress emotion because now I understand that looking inward can turn us back to history so that it no longer haunts us. Such an investigation of the psychological material that lies hidden under rubble ought not to be considered pejoratively feminine, nor should it be mistaken for a particularly gender-specific means of communicating.

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I see this, don’t you?

What I see is that any form of contemporary capitalism can appear to be largely justified by means of deflection of guilt away from present day capitalists to the ‘colonials’ of yore. It is THEY who are deemed to be truly evil, with values and motivations that are 300 percent reprehensible. By contrast, capitalism markets itself as belonging to a ‘West’ whose values have been completely regenerated, though condemning and distancing itself from ‘colonialism’. Capitalist raping and plundering is now morally pure, according to this understanding. That is because all of the evil belongs to the past, when people didn’t know any better and were ‘colonials’.

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The patriarchal double-bind

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individualism

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WHAT WOMEN WANT

It has become clear to me,through my philosophical research, that the reason why males simply cannot know what women want is because “masculinity” involves transcendence of what it generally understood to be “femininity”. That is, a male become a man by negating the aspects within him that relate to empathy, reflectiveness, and intellectual flexibility. These aspects become relegated to the realm of the “feminine” in the man who has successfully transcended them, in order to become “masculine”.

Henceforth, when a woman speaks, a “masculine” man is unable to process what she is saying. He has, to all effects and purposes, “transcended” her language and its associated meanings, and now what a woman says has no meaning for him.

Despite the fact that women are fully capable of communicating what “they want”, the man is no longer in a position to hear them, insofar as he is “a man”. So, “what women want” is necessarily mysterious to him.

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I think that there are certain sociocultural pressures (by which, I generally mean, broadly “economic pressures”) that prevent people from taking what ought to be a simple step, and affirming the humanity of others. Industrialism, for instance, gives us categorically different identities, which allows us to be readily utilised in different ways as part of the division of labour. It sets us against each other, since we come to see ourselves as beings with ontological distinct characteristics, such as gender or “race”. The sense that we are actually all human beings become de-emphasised by means of these economic processes.

In my view, postmodernisms are often struggling with the way in which we have accepted identification with these historically bestowed economic roles. We end up thinking within these terms, on the basis of the categories that have been bestowed on us. We feel stuck, because we cannot resist history and the work that it has done on our minds.

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Objectivity and subjectivity, perception and politics

When I speak about “objectivity” and “subjectivity”, I am really speaking about human attitudes. “Objectivity” is the state of mind that removes emotion as far as possible from the equation. So, the lens of “objectivity” is fairly unemotional, but still not METAPHYSICALLY (that is, in terms of last truths) objective. A surgeon or airline pilot needs to be “objective” in this sense.

By contrast:  ”subjectivity” allows emotions to become part of the lens by which reality is observed. This is, I think, the natural human tendency, and really is the default condition of human perception. What is artificial is repressing subjectivity to get objectivity. Repression of emotions does not lead to a viewpoint that is devoid of emotion, but rather to a state where emotions are no longer integrated with the search for meaning. This lack of integration of the emotions with the rest of the psyche leads to emotional distortions of reality, and not to a state of rational equilibrium. Paradoxically, one must have a certain amount of emotional integration to be able to stand apart from the emotions, at times. Thus a strong ego can help objective detachment better than a weak ego.

We can also critique our own subjectitivies with the aid of other subjectivities. That is when the fun begins, and things get political.  Politics is the self-conscious commitment to develop lenses through which others come to see the world. Postmodernism is one particular lens, but there are many others.

Entertainment between cultures

I don’t find African culture to be less intelligent than Western culture. Comparing both, at the level of popular culture, we find that they are just on about something different.

In the case of Western culture, tragedy in soap operas serves the purpose of getting the viewer to respond by feeling anything at all. In the popular Australian soapie, Neighbours, one tragedy strikes after another, all in the effort to get the viewers to feel something.

In the case of the Nigerian soap operas I’ve watched, the tragic events that happen are obviously staged. Their purpose is to get the audience to laugh about the trials and tribulations of life.

I think that the differences in philosophies behind these two approaches reveals something significant. Human nature is not the same everywhere you go.

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Rationality as ideology: the gender bind

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