Gender — more than race, class, or creed — is the invisible engine that’s driving our cultural decline. By Alexander Grace.
A long one but a very powerful explanation for the changes we are seeing.
Society is falling apart. I’m sure you’ve noticed how every single institution feels weaker, every conversation feels more fragile, and people today are more anxious, more tribal, and more easily offended. The moral compass of the West, once built on individualism, truthtelling, and merit, has been replaced with something softer, more irrational, and far more chaotic.
People offer lots of different explanations for why this is. … All of these lenses capture the story to some extent, but none of them get at the root. That’s because there is a lens that nobody uses. It is a lens that people actively avoid because they are scared to talk about it. The implications are just too big. Yet, this lens explains the pattern more clearly than any other. I’m talking about gender.
Women favor conformity and social harmony over truth and competition. After the vote for women came feminism and the wholesale upending of the modern world. Identity politics and woke replaced individualism and merit. Contest of ideas were replaced by character assassination and exclusion. Stagnation and stupidity is making a comeback.
When women gain influence over cultural norms, values, institutions, education, media, public discourse, that’s when everything changes. Not because women are bad, but because feminine psychology, feminine morality, and feminine styles of conflict resolution are at their core in conflict with what used to provide the structural basis of all of our institutions. …
It is gender more than race, class, or creed that is the invisible engine that’s driving our cultural decline. …
Tribalism has replaced individualism and it is group affiliation that now defines your moral status and your credibility and role in public life. This of course completely erodes the foundations of liberal thought that held that individual sovereignty reigns supreme guaranteeing the rights of everybody under the law to be treated as equals. ..
Once feminism demonstrated that you could use your group identity to advance yourself personally, it then opened the door for everybody to identify with their group and then use that as a tool to get ahead. Merit was no longer the determining factor to see how far you could rise. Grievance was. This undermines the liberal notion that it is individual merit that should determine your level of success.
Once merit was abandoned, identity group politics followed:
But very quickly, feminism made the claim that women were not succeeding because of a lack of individual merit, but because of systemic oppression. Perhaps they were right. But instead of giving time for the culture to catch up, they relied on legal action, enforcing affirmative action, gender quotas, special recruitment programs, and of course, scholarships based on gender. The key change was that feminism framed under-representation not as a challenge to be overcome, but as proof of oppression and injustice.
It didn’t take long for people to notice that being part of an oppressed group gave you moral leverage. When you were applying for a position, you are no longer just a candidate. You are now a potential solution to an injustice. Employers could no longer afford to look at candidates simply based on merit because not hiring you was suddenly a political decision. Once the politics of representation took root, it didn’t take long for other groups to notice. The strategy was mimicked by racial minorities, the LGBT community, even obesity activists and those who were pushing for body positivity felt they needed representation. The message was clear. You don’t need to outperform, you just need to out-identify.
Suddenly men began to feel a pressure that they had some kind of moral duty to step aside to allow women to take opportunities that they based on merit would have been given because to not do so would be an act of political oppression. …
Before we even knew what had happened, we discovered that our compassion had been hijacked and used as a competitive tool against us. Those who favored a merit-based system were pushed aside as increasingly individuals looked towards their collective identity as their personal tool for advancement. The cultural precedent is set and now every minority identifies with their group identity. …
For many, home life became political and unstable:
When feminism politicized the home, that was no longer a safe space. … It is almost impossible to understate how much damage has been done by the erosion of a stable family life. It used to be that men could suffer setbacks out in the world but still be respected at home. It used to be that women found tremendous meaning and identity in their role as mothers and wives. Children had a clear model for how reality worked, a sense of structure, and the roles that were expected of them. With that psychologically stable base, it gave individuals the freedom to experiment and to innovate in the public sphere, knowing that they could always return to their families and their home for stability.
Undermining that foundation has created a collective trauma that is very deep. People questioned their identities. They did not know what their role was. Suddenly you found fathers uncomfortable embodying the authoritative leader role at home. Mothers were inattentive to their children, seeing them as a form of oppression and soft imprisonment and often left the home in search of a new identity, a quest to find themselves.
The results were entirely predictable. Divorce rates soared. Children grew up in confused and fragmented homes. They internalized the message that nothing is permanent. There is no safety. There’s nothing that you can count on.
Without a stable non-political identity, mother, son, daughter, father, people began to define themselves by their group affiliations. Your group identity became your new emotional home. …
Female psychology:
The evolutionary roots of female psychology [are] that women are inherently more tribal and group oriented. Due to evolutionary pressures, women naturally evolved survival strategies that were anchored in group bonding and social cohesion. So long as this was tempered by male authority and other matters, it was fine. Things were in the balance.
But as women’s tribal instincts began to take hold in our public institutions, it eroded the healthy sense of competition and individualism that used to define our public life and replaced it in favor of emotional consensus and group thinking.
There is no denying that the ideology of individualism maps far more neatly onto male psychology. The notion of healthy competition, a fair fight, or even just going it alone and being a lone wolf are all instincts that fit naturally into male psychology.
But for a woman to be seen as an individual alone from the group was akin to a death sentence. She needed the sisterhood to survive. And so over generations, evolution favored women who prioritized group coherence and social harmony. When given the choice, many women would choose to be wrong but remain inside the group, than to be right and kicked out. This is why differences of opinion and conflict inside all female groups can either become explosive or be quashed. This is because the stakes for women are incredibly high.
Conflict, disagreements, and arguments, these are not opportunities to learn from new perspectives. Instead, these are dangerous developments that threaten the harmony of the group. At a cultural level, this has reshaped everything that we experience. As we move away from a competition of ideas into a public discourse that focuses more on consensus building and emotional validation, social media has become an ideal environment for studying these ancient feminine tribal instincts as they’re playing out today.
You see the ancient instinct of reputation policing with the modern phenomenon of cancel culture. You see virtue signaling with the constant anxiety to be seen as one of the good ones, one who gets on with the group. Political correctness itself emerged from the tribal instinct to promote harmony, to make sure that nobody felt excluded or offended.
The goal is not let’s have a debate and discover what’s true. The new goal is to make sure that everybody feels good. Over time, a society that internalizes these values becomes risk averse, emotionally sensitive, and conformity driven.
The values that gave mankind the huge leap forward of the last few centuries are now seen by a feminized society as bad:
The traditional hallmarks of liberalism like creative dissent, free speech, intellectual disagreement, these are viewed as threats to social cohesion. Now the group is more important than the individual, a direct inversion of liberal values. …
It is important to understand that this is not just ideological. This is biological. What you’re seeing is the feminine instinct to nurture scaled up to the position of law. What we now see is the erosion of any natural accountability structures. The system has now been designed to insulate people from the feedback loops of reality and an increasing number of people for whom their need is a permanent state of affairs. They will be dependent upon the government for life.
One of the biggest drivers of this change is the demographic of single mothers who receive more support from the government than any other group. But of course, when you subsidize the choice of single motherhood, you disincentivize any instinct that they had for preserving a long-term relationship or encouraging their own independence. It is not a coincidence that we have seen a decline in marriage rates. It is not a coincidence that women vote more left-leaning on economic issues than men do. And it is this voting block that has shaped national policy away from temporary relief structures to permanent dependency systems.
Over generations, this kind of dependency becomes culturally embedded and children grow up seeing the government as the natural provider of their needs rather than a man, a father, a husband. Men are increasingly being displaced as the economic providers, replaced by the state. Gratitude shifts away from your personal relationships towards the government. After all, they’re the ones taking care of your needs.
And so the cycle continues until people feel like the idea of a government that is not involved in every area of their lives as an unthinkable course of action never to be contemplated. This will be difficult to break because men and women define compassion in fundamentally different ways. When men think of compassion, they think of fairness and justice, holding people to a consistent set of standards and giving them a chance. But for women, their expression of compassion is very different. It’s often expressed with rule bending and leniency and a desire to remove all suffering. …
Attitudes to risk are very different between the sexes:
It is also true to say that women naturally are more risk averse than men. At the core of classical liberalism is the belief that you are free to rise and you are free to fall. You are free to win and you are also free to fail. Failure itself is not injustice. It is feedback.
To men, this freedom is important and men are naturally predisposed to taking risks, facing consequences, owning their outcomes, and creating new plans based on that feedback. This mindset is extremely important for any society because it creates innovation and entrepreneurship. An individual who practices personal responsibility in this way is going to be a leader, somebody that other people feel trust in and who they can count on in an emergency.
Unlike men, women are not built for risk. While in caveman times, men were out waging war on the neighboring tribes or hunting big game or doing other dangerous activities, women stayed at camp, protecting themselves and protecting their offspring, often relying on the community around them for their sense of safety. Risk was inherently more biologically costly for women. Pregnancy and child rearing demand caution, and your status as a woman in the tribe depended upon you being well-liked. And given that women were almost guaranteed to be able to reproduce, it really made no sense for women to take huge risks.
It is no surprise then that women overwhelmingly support public policy that eliminates risk. There has been an exponential increase in government regulations, consumer protections, health and safety mandates, and various other forms of government overreach all in the name of the public good.
Goodbye freedom, hello censorship:
Gradually what you have seen is freedom being reframed away from something that is heroic and noble into a source of danger. Freedom is seen as being reckless or selfish or harmful. Even free speech, the cornerstone of all liberal democracies is under attack.
And there is a growing sentiment in society driven primarily by women that if free speech can be used to say things that are hateful, then that speech needs to be regulated. …
Stagnation is re-occurring, as safetyism reigns:
The consequences of this kind of thinking are devastating. A society that wants to protect its citizens from failure is going to kill ambition. Risk takers, those that would use their creative energies to innovate and push society forward, are now going to be seen as dangerous troublemakers and villains that are making the rest of us unsafe by their choices. …
In higher education, grade curves have been flattened in order to protect students from feeling like failures. Safe spaces and trigger warnings have replaced areas that should be reserved for intellectual challenge and debate. …
For today’s media, truth is not as important as conforming to the narrative:
And perhaps the strongest institution that we’ve seen shift under feminine influence is that of journalism and media. There has been an undeniable shift away from hard journalism, our accounting of the black and white facts, towards narrative journalism, which focuses on the lived experiences of the people going through the event. Newspaper headlines are written more for emotional validation rather than informing the audience. Opinion pieces are seen as more important than those pieces with true investigative depth. When the focus shifts away from the discovery of the truth towards emotional validation, then it naturally creates a culture of intellectual stagnation. …
Why bother, men?
Why risk innovating or suggesting new ideas when all it does is put a target on your back?
In all of these institutions, the natural male instincts are being wasted because they are not welcome or valued. Men’s ambition, their quest for the truth, their innate competitiveness, these are all now viewed as problematic. …
If a man did have an issue with the institution and the way it was being run, what are his options? He would like to have a structured debate, a competitive testing of the ideas, an objective examination of the facts. But this is because it suits the masculine style of conflict resolution. But women feel and experience things differently. When things get difficult for women, they often resort to indirect emotional tactics, social exclusion, passive aggression, and reputation destruction. These instincts fundamentally undermine the integrity of any debate where we’re having a healthy disagreement, and any quest for the truth. …
Men find truth:
Men do not inherently view disagreement as problematic. In ancient times, when discussing battle tactics or hunting strategies, there was likely fierce disagreement amongst the warriors as they debated the merits of a particular course of action. But this was encouraged and even promoted because this exchange of ideas would lead to the best outcome. It was possible to fiercely disagree with the person next to you, but still respect them, knowing that at an inherent level, the two of you were on the same team working towards the same goal. These masculine instincts formed the basis of our cultural institutions that we have today and the principles that underly them. Courtrooms where justice is delivered, scientific inquiry where new discoveries are made, sport and athletic competition, and even in the realm of politics where healthy debate used to be a hallmark of our liberal democracies.
However, the concept of a healthy disagreement and respect for an opponent who is telling you that you are wrong is a difficult concept for female biology. This is not to say that women are not competitive or that they don’t enter into conflict with each other. But women have strong instincts telling them to repress this conflict and to express it in indirect ways.
Today we run on women’s rules. Men and debate are increasingly excluded:
This is why you see in groups of women tactics used like gossip, social exclusion, emotional manipulation, reputation damage. The goal is often not to win the argument, but to undermine your opponent’s social standing. As more women entered into the institutions of media, education, and politics, their style of conflict resolution began to take over.
It has shifted from a case of you are wrong to you are a bad person. Debate is no longer about ideas. It is about signaling which tribe you belong to. The collapse of respectful and rational discourse in our society is corroding us from the inside.
In order for a healthy society to function, there needs to be space for a healthy disagreement and an exchange of ideas that is robust and competitive. A shared commitment to truth, a willingness to hear ideas that make you uncomfortable or that you don’t agree with. There needs to be a fundamental understanding that the facts of a situation are often separate from the feelings we have about it. When we lose our commitment to these principles, everything collapses….
Again, we have a situation where the masculine values are not able to thrive or even contribute in this system because men’s directness is seen as relational aggression. The logic that so defines the masculine mind is seen as cold and harmful. And any disagreement that they express, even in a healthy way, as seen as them trying to usurp power and dominate a situation.
The effect, of course, is that many men have just checked out of public discourse altogether, no longer willing to participate in a system that does not value their contribution.
It’s communism versus individualism. For nearly all of human history, communism was the norm, as was poverty and the Malthusian limit. But for a few centuries a small portion of the world’s population practiced individualism and capitalism.
Here’s the author reading the entire essay:
