Gender: the turf on which the pointy-headed overlords gain the most ground

As you know, yesterday was International Women's Day, and all the lefties milked it for all it was worth.

I was heartened to see a couple of expressions of concern for what, in post-America anyway, is a more immediate problem: the villainization of masculinity.

On his FNC program, Tucker Carlson used a segment to cite some of the effects of this: Girls get better grades on balance. They smoke less marijuana. They are more likely to show up on time for their jobs. Men on average die five years before women, due to addiction. There was a 43 percent rise in suicide deaths among men between 1997 and 2014. Women outnumber men in graduate-school enrollment and the attainment of doctoral degrees.  (H/T: Caffeinated Thoughts.)

He then had as his guest the great Jordan Peterson, and their exchange was must-see viewing. He asked Peterson why he thought men were afflicted with these pathologies. Peterson replied that it was the result of policy, the outlawing of masculinity itself. The demonization of "competition as a valid form of human interaction." Tucker winds up their conversation by asking Peterson how we might counter this trend: "If you have your children in a school and they talk about equity, diversity, inclusivity, white privilege, systemic racism, any of that, you take your children out of the class." Carlson says, "We might run out of schools pretty quickly," to which Peterson responds, "That would be just fine."

Heather Wilhelm at National Review cites a few recent salvos in the war on masculinity:

“It’s tempting to believe that boys are not ‘hardwired’ to care about feelings or friendship,” notes a recent New York magazine piece, part of a larger and questionable chin-stroking series called “How to Raise a Boy.” Really? Who finds this belief tempting, and has that person ever interacted with a real live boy? Further in the piece, we are told that boys need forced female friendship to curb their aggressive instincts, and that “by the end of elementary school,” boys are “starting to sexually objectify girls.” In other words, by going through puberty, they’re automatically oppressing women. Ah. Okay.

“The power white American boys have been taught to seize for generations comes from the already powerless, women, people of color, everyone who isn’t us,” notes another piece in the “How to Raise a Boy” series, written by a man. “Which is why, in a macro sense, the lessening power of men (straight and white particularly) is an unquestioned societal good. When others rise, we must fall.” I could point out that this is an almost flawless example of Milton Friedman’s fixed-pie fallacy — the mistaken assumption that “one party can gain only at the expense of another.” Ideally, we should work together to grow the proverbial pie and lift all proverbial pie-stocked ships, but hey, why bother? That’s apparently no fun at all.

“Teenage boys and men are almost entirely the bad actors in certain crises the nation is facing, like mass shootings and sexual harassment,” noted a recent New York Times piece, detailing a growing American parental “bias against boys.” Michael Thompson, a “psychologist who studies the development of boys,” told the Times that “there is now a subtle fear of boys and the trouble they might bring.”

Yesterday, I covered an event at a downtown Indianapolis hotel for a central Indiana newspaper. Cummins, a Fortune 200 company that bills itself as being in the power-generation business and is best known for its diesel engines, was sponsoring a two-day women's conference, the centerpiece of which was a luncheon at which the company announced the launch of an initiative called Cummins Powers Women. It involves partnerships with a number of nonprofits in the design and implementation of female-empowerment programs in countries around the world.

The opening remarks of the announcement proceedings were given by the Vice President of corporate responsibility.  After comparing the magnitude of the initiative to South Africa getting rid of apartheid and the August 1963 march on Washington in the US, she introduced the featured speaker, the founder and executive director of an organization that is going to be one of the partners in the initiative. It's called Rise Up. The speaker recounted some of Rise Up's undeniably laudable achievements, such as getting child marriages banned in Guatemala and Malawi. The touting of Rise Up's kindred spirits, however, couldn't escape notice. Boasting of working closely with the UN on its "sustainability goals," and name-dropping the Clinton Global Initiative. An overhead projection of the logos of media outlets that have given Rise Up coverage: The Guardian, The Huffington Post, NPR, the New York Times. The odor wafting off the whole presentation was unmistakable.

Pro that I am, I wrote my story with impeccable objectivity. I haven't stopped thinking about the layers of implication, though.

There's something - dare I say it? - paternalistic about the whole undertaking. For an Indiana-based engine maker and a San Francisco-based nonprofit to presume to be able to radically alter entrenched cultures in far-flung lands there is a palpable measure of hubris involved.

One of the categories with which I'm going to tag this post is "corporate acquiescence to the Left." It's one of the first categories I established when I started LITD, and one that gets frequent entries.

You see, contrary to the leftists' illusions that big corporations are hotbeds of greed and obsession with quarterly-report-bottom lines, they are actually their allies. Witness the displays of cowardice on the part of various major retail chains in the face of gun-control outcries post-Parkland. Or, speaking of Indiana, the position taken by Lilly, the Ball Corporation, Angie's List and the aforementioned Cummins during the 2013 religious-freedom dustup.

Once again James Burnham's prescience in the penning of his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution is in our faces.

For the unacquainted, I think an Amazon reviewer sums up Burnham's thrust effectively:

Burnham's central argument will repulse both leftists--who think that the modern world is suffering an excess of free market capitalism--and conservatives/libertarians, who think that America is one more Obamaphone away from communism. It certainly ticked off his old Marxist buddies, drunk as they were in the 1930′s on their unbelievably arrogant belief in the "historical inevitability of socialism." Burnham's view was that the dictatorship of the proletariat would never happen because the pincer of technological advances and increasingly complex societies meant that ruling a nation required a skill set that the proles simply did not possess.

Burnham observed that Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and the U.S. under Franklin Roosevelt were developing along parallel paths, creating an economic system in which power rested not with capitalists or workers, but managers; administrators, HR ditzes, engineers, bureaucrats, civil servants, CEOs and other figures who exist outside of the capitalist class yet are not of the proletariat. Stalin's nomenklatura, Hitler's vast patronage network, and the myriad agencies created by the New Deal represented this shift in power, as they were controlled neither by capitalists or by workers. The trigger for this transition was the mass unemployment sparked by the Great Depression and capitalism's complete inability to solve it, but the foundations had been laid beforehand in the increasing scale of society and scientific advances that made large-scale organization easier.

Of course, a phenomenon that came along some 25 years after Burnham wrote that book was the counterculture. I doubt that Burnham could have foreseen that drastic upheaval, even given his exceptional foresight.

But maybe his foresight prevails anyway. A great number of the hippies, radicals and peripheral admirers thereof have gravitated to the corporate world in the 50 years since the counterculture heyday. They are now spearheading the great project of attempting to give human nature a makeover.

That begins with rendering the question "Why have pretty much all societies been patriarchally structured?" so impolite to raise as to merit ostracizing he or she who raises it.

This is unprecedented terrain onto which we're stepping, and we're being led not by dreadlocked-and-tie-dyed drum-circle types, but fashionably dressed pointy-heads who deign to know what is best for the world's six-billion plus heirs of hard-won human advancement.