Men are the Problem.

Nuclear Weapons, A.I. and other Existential Threats Emanating from the Male Brain

(For this topic I expect you to run many lines of thought at the same time; collectively they form a matrix with many points of connection. I know you can do this; the big problem is in trying to convey the full message in this linear stream of words. There are many links for reference material; the ones marked with ** are must-reads - you are really missing something good if you don’t take time to read them. Yes I get it - people want to read shorter posts, less than 1200 words. But they read books, don’t they? This is shorter than a book and it’s too important and it doesn’t make sense divided up into many little posts.)

Title: Men are the Problem.

Sub-title: Nuclear Weapons, A.I. and other Existential Threats Emanating from the Male Brain
by Kathleen McCroskey (1946-    )
 
Summary
There is historical context to the too-numerous mass shootings and gun violence. The evolutionary path of society is in retrograde rather than toward improvement of life for all. While complex factors such as culture, family, education and social structure play a role, there is a central link to the entire problem. Bear in mind I am talking about descendants of the warring tribes of Europe including their descendants which emigrated elsewhere; many other cultures on this planet seem to enjoy a better life experience. Although, with the ongoing globalization, more and more people, especially the young, are “condemned to the anti-rooms of the modern world.” (Pankaj Mishra in Age of Anger, cited below). Various authors demonstrate psychological and cultural roots of problems with presently constituted masculinity, but perhaps the problems can be traced to deeper roots in the workings of the male brain, which has resulted in such social benefits(?) as nuclear weapons, toxic forever-chemicals and now A.I. Can we get all this stopped? Is it possible to avoid an all-out world-wide civil war of all against all, in every country? What can be done about gun control? Are we now living in a bad zoo?
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Social structure
There is no proper social structure; kids exit high school leaving behind a supervised environment and are basically dumped out to see if they can swim in the “deep end.” Developing a social structure requires building a sense of belonging. But belonging involves group activity while much of modern identity is structured around “the individual.” By default, a social structure is hierarchical, someone leads each group, as humans are a small-group animal. Hundreds of millions of people lined up facing one leader is not a social structure. There should be layers of small groups. There have been various proposals for better social structures such as **Steiner’s Threefold Social Order** in which the education system plays the prominent role in ensuring that every person is achieving their potential, including funding, throughout their life. Presently, nobody is carrying that ball. That is a major social defect, like a crater that swallows a city. Or, imagine a giant cookie-cutter that cuts the heart out of society - it’s a brutal deficit with no workaround. In Steiner’s system, government does not meddle with the education system and that system distributes the social capital which funds the student’s endeavors. But likely implementation must be species-wide since accommodating immigration isn’t practical. But the main point is that turning kids loose after their education is an unmitigated failure. A bigger issue involves governance: if a proper social structure were to be implemented, would there any longer be a need for that self-serving anachronistic social construct known as “government”? Do you need to have a vote every four years on how your electricity is supplied? No, you set it up as a utility and let it run.

“In the Middle Ages the rights and responsibilities of individuals were determined by their place in a hierarchical social system that placed great stress upon acquiescence and conformity.” From Max Lerner’s article in 14th edition of Britannica.
See also: https://www.britannica.com/topic/liberalism and https://www.britannica.com/topic/individualism
 
An offshoot of this hierarchical system is military organization. Emphasis is on chain-of-command. This was a large part of male social structure for how many thousands of years? Was that long enough to have an evolutionary effect?

For how long has the numbers of the male population been modulated by battle, and rules of military behaviour? Excess young males were good for farm help or were called “cannon fodder” to supply the armies. The last king to lead his troops in battle was King James IV of Scotland. But throughout history, the trend has always been finding ways to cause a more deadly result instead of using simple hand-to-hand combat. Every possible method was employed - horses, chariots, slinging burning material, arrows, entrapment, and the eventual invention of gun powder and its accessories - cannon, guns, machine guns, then explosives and eventual, the greatest triumph of the male mind- nuclear weapons.
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Family
The present “System,” whatever you wish to call it, such as “capitalism,” the socio-economic structure that allows the functioning of cities, has destroyed the original notion of Family. The first act was enticing them off the land to move into a city and take on factory work. This began hundreds of years ago with the enclosure of the commons - open spaces available for use by all (the “commoners”) began to be claimed as private land. Even now, in your cities, is their really any “public” space? No, it is all private land, owned by individuals, corporations or the “corporation of the city of ___” The beginnings of the notion of private property and capitalism spring from this enclosure time. According to Marx, in the dialectic of capitalism, the people were both the victims and beneficiaries. Part of the victimization was in the connecting of the people to the supply chain - they could no longer produce their own food since they have lost their land. Thus a previously unseen form of poverty was created, people could only have an existence if they were connected to the system of production - doing something of value to the management class. Being forced to live in the city, their schooling or work is supposedly so valuable that they can (and must) pay someone else to grow their food, they now buy it at a grocery store. This kills Culture, which is the production, preparation and enjoyment of food.
 
Another destroyer of Family is the education system - the children are taken away to be “educated,” trained to take their place in the systems of production. Yes, there is the benefit of making education available to all by making it free, but any sense of whatever was the family business is broken. Mind you, wealthy families have their workarounds for this issue, so that their children can take their place in the family business structure. But for proletariat families in cities, the children often do not even understand what their father does at work and that required skill set can only be obtained through the keyhole of education (I’m not mentioning “or other working parent” since this section is about society’s total loss of “fatherness”). Thus, except for the wealthy, work processes and education are in a separate world from Family. Loss of land also damaged family structure and culture. City dwelling meant confined spaces with restricted territorial domain. Where once you could see the sky and landscape, now you see the wall of the next building.
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Fatherlessness
**What’s the Problem with Men?** by Mark Manson in The Observer.
Read this story about Roberto Escobar, brother of infamous Pablo Escobar. Read it through and get to the last line, it is so important. Sorry, no spoilers, you just have to read it. Along the way, Mark Manson catalogs the problems with men and masculinity, a quick history of male violence. And how this all might relate to the absence of real “fatherness” in the family. Mark Manson’s insightful writing speaks directly to the issues - Why are the worst people in human history always men? He writes that due to social changes in recent centuries, traditional masculinity is no longer a necessity and its costs on men and society are no longer worth the benefits and much of the work in today’s economy is just as easily done by women.

A quote from “The Trouble with Men…”

               “As the world has changed, levelling the playing field for women, millions of Western men have failed to come to terms with a remodelled society. Men face an existential crisis: confused over their place in the world, lost at home and work, and suffering from an epidemic of loneliness and plummeting self-esteem. If we care about boys, how do we respond? Can Western societies both continue the fight to improve women’s rights – a battle that’s far from over – and start addressing the “masculinity crisis”?”
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APA article on masculinity:

 “The concept of gender roles is not cast as a biological phenomenon, but rather a psychological and socially constructed set of ideas that are malleable to change.” (Levant & Wilmer, 2011) [1]
        These authors seem to dismiss behaviour as a biological phenomenon (heritability) although some admit that alexithymia can be inherited. Of course, with humans being the “smart” ones (sapiens), behaviour can be changed by paying attention to it. But has the extent of malleability been reduced by the thousands of years of irrational selection by wars?

“Examples of prevention strategies may include: 
Educate parents on the negative consequences of physical punishment and humiliation techniques on children (e.g., Violence-Free Childhood).
Educate parents to create safe, nurturing, healthy environments and relationships that prevent modeling violence to children, and teach them to express and regulate their emotions (e.g., ACT Raising Safe Kids).
Identify and treat psychological distress precipitated by gender role socialization (Reidy et al., 2016)[2].
Promote healthy relationship skills that decrease adolescent’s acceptance of traditional gender role norms and dating violence (Berke & Zeichner, 2016)[3].
Create marketing campaigns designed to modify social and cultural norms that endorse the unhealthy male code and consequent violence (Abramsky et al., 2011[4]; Hossain et al. 2014)[5].
Have multi-level programs that positively integrate boys/men into society in healthy, positive ways.”
 

      This article starts out with:
” Western culture defines specific characteristics to fit the patriarchal ideal masculine construct. The socialization of masculine ideals starts at a young age and defines ideal masculinity as related to toughness, stoicism, heterosexism, self-sufficient attitudes and lack of emotional sensitivity (Wall & Kristjanson, 2005), and of connectedness.”

        However, think about all these behavioral corrections from the child’s viewpoint - “What is wrong with me; it seems that everything I do is wrong!”
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Connectedness
Now consider the above point “connectedness.”
Here’s a **great article** by Benjamin Sledge, published in Human Parts:
Title: “Today’s Problem With Masculinity Isn’t What You Think - A former soldier explains the emotional vacancy of the fatherless generation.”

The author indicates that for most boys growing up these days the situation isn’t much different than the barbarity in Lord of the Flies. No one is teaching them virtue, character or responsibility, so that an alpha male can arise and lead them into poor behaviour. In this lonely world there is no camaraderie, no deep conversations. Men express anger and hurt through violence, in this generation without the skills to cope with hardship or adversity. A deep connective in all these matters is a lack of intimacy with their father while growing up. Benjamin Sledge offers this excerpt from Dr. Joshua Straub’s book Safe House:
“A team of researchers at the John Hopkins School of Medicine set out on a 30-year study to find if a single related cause existed for five major issues: mental illness, hypertension, malignant tumors, coronary heart disease, and suicide. After studying 1,377 students over thirty years, the most prevalent single cause wasn’t what everyone thought. They found that the most significant predictor of these tragedies was a lack of closeness to the parents, especially the father.”

        The only place Benjamin Sledge found real emotional bonding was among fellow soldiers while stationed in Iraq. He suggests another reason than PTSD for why former soldiers are killing themselves at a high rate - they are lonely and lack the emotional intimacy they once had with comrades. He offers a quote from Cicero: “Every man can tell how many goats or sheep he possesses, but not how many friends.”
        But consider that Cicero lived from 106 BC to 43 BC. Yet this quote remains relevant today. How can that be, over two millennia, evolution of languages, cultures and the long “progress” in thought in Western philosophy, unless there is a biological, genetic root to that behaviour?
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Gun control
In another Benjamin Sledge article, “Honest Thoughts from a Veteran about Gun Control and Mental Health”, he brings into sharp focus exactly what has to happen with gun control.

      He details how and why people no longer have the aptitude to face adversity and have basically skipped learning how to become resilient adults. Depression and other mental health issues are on the rise, people don’t have coping strategies and are snapping. More people are more lonely and isolated than ever before, even with all the Internet connectivity. People with these issues absolutely must not have guns. He suggests guns be available only to law enforcement and veterans, of course seconding that to good mental health. Military training includes the best gun control measures which includes extensive weapons training along with ongoing mental health assessments. Where is this in civilian life? The gun lobby would be dead against this - they claim a right to own (ever more sophisticated) weaponry, as well as in USA, their so-called Second Amendment rights, to form militias. But militias are quasi-military not a bunch of hunting buddies decked out in military garb to look cool and impress each other. He insists that in case of tyrannical government, it would be law enforcement and veterans who would take charge, not these play-soldiers. And for “hunters” who think they need an AR-15s for hunting - that is crazy and an unfair advantage in the hunt. REAL hunters would use a knife and run down the animal until it is out of breath and slit its throat. Humans have better lung capacity than any four-legged animal. Sure, maybe you want an AR-15 for hunting wild boar, but do you want to eat that?
 
An article by **Brené Brown ** “Gun Reform - Speaking Truth to Bullshit, Practicing Civility, and Effecting Change” recounts the family hunting experiences in her youth. One of the family hunting rules was that you absolutely don’t shoot an animal that you don’t plan on eating. I would amend that by saying don’t eat any animal that you can’t track down and kill. This article has a good section on “Bullshit” and commentary on gun reform.
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On anger and violence - Men are the problem!
On Noember 22, 2022, there was a blog by the **President of South Africa** on the President’s letterhead, titled “Men are the problem, but they should be part of the solution.”

“While we should be encouraged that many of the perpetrators are not being allowed to get away with their crimes, our foremost task is to prevent men and boys from becoming abusers in the first place.
Men are the perpetrators of gender-based violence and it is therefore men that need to change. It is men – as husbands and partners, as fathers, colleagues, peers and classmates – who need to consider their own attitudes towards women and girls.”
“We must change beliefs that men are strong and women are weak, that men have to be in charge, or that men can do as they please with women. Men need to understand that they can and should express their pain and frustrations without inflicting harm on others.”

        Read a report by the **Violence Policy Center**:

   “The presence of a firearm can turn domestic violence into domestic homicide. When men murder women, the most common weapon used is a gun. Nearly 90 percent of women murdered by men are killed by someone they know. To reduce lethal violence against women, it is essential to keep guns away from domestic abusers.
When Men Murder Women is an annual study released by the VPC for Domestic Violence Awareness Month in October. State by state, the study details the circumstances of all reported homicides of women by men in single-victim/single-offender incidents. The study also ranks the states based on their rate of females killed by males. This research is used by state and local advocates to educate the public and policymakers on the realities of domestic violence and promote effective solutions to protect women and children from abusers.”
 
Here’s a great article by **Charlie Hoehn in Be Yourself**, titled “Mass Shootings in America, and Why Men (and Boys) Keep Doing This - thoughts on the Vegas shooting” - (You can get his books for free at https://charliehoehn.com/ )

Charlie explains why we have “a generation of the most anxious, depressed, and suicidal American children on record.” He reports on Dr. Peter Gray’s research: “Over the past half century, in the United States and other developed nations, children’s free play with other children has declined sharply. Over the same period, anxiety, depression, suicide, feelings of helplessness, and narcissism have increased sharply in children, adolescents, and young adults… The decline in play has contributed to the rise in the psychopathology of young people.”

Other related links:
https://www.apa.org/about/policy/boys-men-practice-guidelines.pdf
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/american-psychological-association-links-masculinity-ideology-homophobia-misogyny-n956416
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/toxic-masculinity-terrible-shorthand-real-problem-plaguing-men-ncna957941

Literary review of Canada - Massey College, **A book review** written by Walter DeKeseredy, this book being Human Evolution and Male Aggression: Debunking the Myth of Man and Ape, by Ann Innis Dagg and Lee Harding. One important point mentioned is that countries with the most economic inequality and least social safety net are the most violent.
Another interesting point in this review, Dr. DeKeseredy mentions that in their animal behaviour studies, “the bulk of their data is derived from studies of animals living in their natural habitat. They also occasionally cite empirical work done on species confined to zoos or laboratories and provide up-to-date information about the fossil remains of human ancestors. Dagg and Harding do emphasize, though, that animals’ behaviour in captivity cannot be generalized to those of animals living in the wild. Furthermore, they remind us that humans sometimes alter conditions in the wild to the point that ‘habitats become more like bad zoos than natural environments.’”
      Have humans altered their own environments so much that they are essentially in zoos, living in captivity, thus altering human behaviour?
“Many theories attempt to lay out offender characteristics that best predict interpersonal violence, but the most robust determinant of who commits beatings, homicide, rapes and so on is whether the offender is male. Why are most violent offenders men? Dagg and Harding contribute to the large body of criminological knowledge showing that it has little to do with their biological makeup or with factors identified by evolutionary psychologists. Again, they view aggression as mainly a product of modern culture… Dagg and Harding are not the first to point out that there is no aggression gene.”
        However, although there may not be a gene for aggression, there has been an ongoing culling/selection process in that species called Human Male over thousands of years and perhaps this has led to an evolutionary end-stage result? Like a cat is so “catty” by being in an evolutionary end-point. There are, apparently, genuine evolutionary traits, for example:

Restricted access    Research article
First published January 2007
Gender Differences in Cooperation and Competition: The Male-Warrior Hypothesis
Mark Van Vugt <mvv@kent.ac.uk>, David De Cremer, and Dirk P. Janssen
Volume 18, Issue 1
       Abstract
Evolutionary scientists argue that human cooperation is the product of a long history of competition among rival groups. There are various reasons to believe that this logic applies particularly to men. In three experiments, using a step-level public-goods task, we found that men contributed more to their group if their group was competing with other groups than if there was no intergroup competition. Female cooperation was relatively unaffected by intergroup competition. These findings suggest that men respond more strongly than women to intergroup threats. We speculate about the evolutionary origins of this gender difference and note some implications.
        Referenced in:

The Male-Warrior Hypothesis

        Again, referencing the sentence above, “…they view aggression as mainly a product of modern culture,” like the false dichotomy of capitalism versus communism, this is a false dichotomy which frames the debate so that you must choose between genes and environment; nature versus nurture - the important issue is that brain cells being fed testosterone are not in their optimal working environment. No, you can’t devise a double-blind randomized study to prove this, you have to open your eyes and look at the world-wide body of evidence. The male brain is a problem.

Further reading if you wish:
https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2018/05/whats-wrong-with-modern-men/
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/7/14/the-problem-with-male-feminists
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Age of Anger
Prerequisite to this section: read the article in The Globe and Mail, July 7, by Doug Sanders:
“France, again in flames, refuses to look at the spark.” Here again, as in DeKeseredy’s review, income disparity, lack of opportunity (a form of oppression) foment this deep anger. But according to the book **Age of Anger**,by Pankaj Mishra, we are likely to see a lot more of this world-wide. Yes, I just assigned another entire book to your reading list for this course! Just suck it up and read it, it’s very important. First read Doug Sanders, then this book, and you will get the connection.

A synopsis of the book from the MacMillan web page:
     How can we explain the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world—from American shooters and ISIS to Donald Trump, from a rise in vengeful nationalism across the world to racism and misogyny on social media? In Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishra answers our bewilderment by casting his gaze back to the eighteenth century before leading us to the present.
     He shows that as the world became modern, those who were unable to enjoy its promises—of freedom, stability, and prosperity—were increasingly susceptible to demagogues. The many who came late to this new world—or were left, or pushed, behind—reacted in horrifyingly similar ways: with intense hatred of invented enemies, attempts to re-create an imaginary golden age, and self-empowerment through spectacular violence. It was from among the ranks of the disaffected that the militants of the nineteenth century arose—angry young men who became cultural nationalists in Germany, messianic revolutionaries in Russia, bellicose chauvinists in Italy, and anarchist terrorists internationally.
      Today, just as then, the wide embrace of mass politics and technology and the pursuit of wealth and individualism have cast many more billions adrift in a demoralized world, uprooted from tradition but still far from modernity—with the same terrible results.
     Making startling connections and comparisons, Age of Anger is a book of immense urgency and profound argument. It is a history of our present predicament unlike any other.

        The subtitle of Mishra’s book is A History of the Present. This book is perhaps equivalent of a graduate-level overview of Western Philosophy in which he summarizes and analyses the thought of every important philosopher -  in the context of their times, including pre- and post-wars and other turning points in social progress. It is rare indeed to have these philosophers grounded in their social and political context.
One sentence in his prologue really sums up our times (you can follow along on page 14):

     “An existential resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness, resentiment, as it lingers and deepens, poisons civil society and undermines political liberty, and is presently making for a global turn to authoritarianism and toxic forms of chauvinism.”

In Age of Anger, page 68: In the book What is to be Done? (1863) the Russian writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky mentions the Crystal Palace, a glass and iron structure built by Joseph Paxton for London’s 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, to be ‘a miracle of art, beauty and splendor,” and that it “embodies a utopian future, built on rational principles, of joyful work, communal existence, gender equality and free love.”
But Dostoyevsky, visiting London a few years later for the International Exhibition in 1862, on seeing the Crystal Palace, railed against this portent of utopia (quoting Mishra on page 70):
      “…the cost of such splendor and magnificence as displayed at the Crystal Palace was a society dominated by the war of all against all, in which most people were condemned to be losers.” Afterward visiting Paris, “noted that Liberté existed only for the millionaire;…Égalité… was a ‘personal insult’ to the poor exposed to French justice; … Franternité  was another hoax in a society driven by the ‘individualist, isolationist instinct’ and lust for private property.”
     “Even the socialist played the same game of materialism with his mean calculus of order, and his bitter notion of class struggle. ‘True socialism’… could not be established in the West, for the ‘Occidental Nature’ had a fundamental design flaw: it lacked Fraternity. Dostoyevsky wrote:

‘You find there instead, a principle of individualism, a principle of isolation, of intense self-preservation, of personal gain, of self-determination, of the I, of opposing this I to all nature and the rest of mankind as an independent autonomous principle entirely equal and equivalent to all that exists outside itself.’”

Sound familiar? This was a critique of the nature of the West (the Atlantic West) that Dostoyevsky saw in 1862. How have we improved since? Yet this false utopia of the Crystal Palace has travelled to the far corners of the world, enticing all peoples to drool for consumerism. And we in the rich North rub it in their faces by sailing such monstrosities of consumption as the Icon of the Seas into their ports to show them exactly what they will never be able to attain. All these matters deeply affect the spread of resentiment around the world, and with it, as mentioned above, growing instances of authoritarianism (Trump was NOT an aberration!), chauvinism and violence. The growing threat of world-wide civil war, of all against all, gradually increases. But if people are smart (Homo sapiens, remember), they can choose to not instantly take to the streets in rebellion. However, with recent past as a guide, being “reasonable” is not viable, to wit, the Black Lives Matter protests in USA, the above mentioned protests in France, as well as in many other countries. What ever happened to “Come now, and let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18)? Reason can reveal truth, while emotion leads to strife and division. But the multitude of chasms between class levels in society results in no possible common language of communication between the proletariat and the elite ruling class, along with an apparent lack of moral agency among those who sit in judgement.

Here’s what you probably did not realize back in Philosophy class - as far as I can tell, all these great thinkers and writers, Aristotle, Plato and beyond, were (you guessed it) all men. But was there really an underlying misogyny in these lines of thought? Quoting Mishra on page 299: “Men everywhere in the nineteenth century longed, out of a deep fear of emasculation, for a new Napoleon, who would show, as Nietzsche wished, the business man, the philistine and women their place.” And one of the deep influencers in the lines of hedonic self-fulfillment, Mikhail Bakunin in Russia, added that such lethal individualism is part of modernity as well as of nationalism and fascism. These trends, starting in the nineteenth century, are now world-wide in scope. Bakunin was in Siberia for ten years but spent the rest of his life organizing and indoctrinating groups who took his ideas far afield, to USA and India. There were other routes to India as well, leading up to the creation of the “Stephen Harper” of India, Prime Minister Modi. This path also runs through (among others) the writers Herbert Spencer, de Lamennais, Saint­-Simon, Mickiewicz, Mazzini, to Savarkar, the chief theorizer of Hindutva, a political Hinduism for organizing and militarizing Hindus, who became head of the Hindu Mahasabha party in 1937. A member of Savarkar’s party broke away to form the RSS (Rashtriya Sawyamsevak Sangh), a paramilitary organization. A British intelligence report in 1953 said the RSS could be in India what the “Fascisti” are to Italy or the “Nazis” to Germany. PM Narendra Modi follows this RSS tradition into the present.

Is there some other means of verifying these conditions in India other than through Mishra’s book? Yes, there is a good article that explains how Hindu-supremacist violence in India is a national collective effort while white-supremacist violence in USA is still an individual effort. This article by Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox appeared on **TomDispatch, May 23, 2023** and reads like an extra chapter to Mishra’s book. This, as the authors say shows the potential for both societies (USA and India) to break down completely. World-wide civil war, anyone?

One last quote from Age of Anger, page 274:

” …nationalism is, more than ever before, a mystification, if not a dangerous fraud with its promise of making a country “great again” and its demonization of the ‘other’; it conceals the real conditions of existence, and the true origins of suffering, even as it seeks to replicate the comforting balm of transcendental ideals within a bleak earthly horizon. Its political resurgence shows that resentiment - in this case, of people who feel left behind by the globalized economy or contemptuously ignore by its slick overlords and cheerleaders in politics, business and the media - remains the default metaphysics of the modern world since Rousseau first defined it. And its most menacing expression in the age of individualism may well be the violent anarchism of the **disinherited and the superfluous.**”” ( these last two words also relate to a post by Chris Hedges).

As mentioned above, Trump is not an aberration but is an embodiment of the fullness of the “progress” in thought in the Atlantic West which now envelopes the world, as well as the manifest hedonism which enables unbridled consumption. Besides the other indoctrination pathways mentioned above, there was another pathway to America via Opus Dei, founded in 1928 by Catholic priest Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer y Albá which has played a major role in rebalancing the judiciary and enabling enhanced powers of the executive branch. Escrivá was a major enabler of the Franco regime in Spain. These ideas found fertile ground in America, beginning with elites at Harvard. (See American Kompromat by Craig Unger, pages 102-110)

For another verification of the bad effects of globalization and attendant neo-liberalism, see “Last call for neoliberalism: What I saw at the party at the end of the world order” by Omer Aziz[in The Globe and Mail.
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The male brain
What do all these tragic events have in common: The 1862 Dakota War in USA, the genocide in Armenia, the Holodomor, The Holocaust, The Great Leap Forward, The Great Chinese Famine, the most heavily-bombed country in history (Laos), Kissinger’s bombing of Cambodia, the Cambodian Civil War, the genocide in Rwanda - (you can guess where I’m going with this) - they all seem to be the product of the male brain. Also, Japanese Military Unit 731 in occupied China, run by Lieutenant-General Shiro Ishii (Globe and Mail, Aug 8, 22023, page B16). Reported in this obituary from an article in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: Ishii and other members of Unit 731 were granted immunity from prosecution for war crimes by the United States in exchange for Americans’ getting “exclusive possession of Japan’s expertise in using germs in lethal weapons.” Apparently, all governments are atrocious.

And of course along with all those, the development of nuclear weapons and their use. Weapons testing, beginning with the first one, the Trinity test in New Mexico, was a deliberate covert crime against their own people, whose health was simply sacrificed for the sake of developmental secrecy. Along with that issue, there is the book Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America (Hanford, WA) by Joshua Frank. Then as if the crime against humanity of the Tokyo fire-bombings wasn’t bad enough, the atomic bombs were deployed against two Japanese cities. This was one of the worst crimes in history and totally evil. I could have used the word “unnecessary’ but that plays into the propaganda framing of the topic, because any question of such an event being necessary or unnecessary reveals a total moral failure. A demonstration of the power of these doomsday devices could have been done with an announced public detonation rather than the cowardly stealth development and deployment, so typical of male brain function.

Now, similar to the after-the-fact warnings from the nuclear scientists, Artificial Intelligence experts are apologizing for what they have let loose in the world. In a pithy statement published in May by the non-profit Center for AI Safety: a single-sentence warning: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Sorry, that is backwards - that’s another male-brain screw-up - if you are going to need to apologize, whether for some evil new technology or intimate-partner violence, then don’t do it in the first place. This male brain issue might be either a deliberate or functional disregarding of consequences.

Now, it seems, through AI, the faulty workings of the male brain will be embedded deeply into even the most basic processes which underlie everything. Nuclear weapons and now AI are endpoints of male-brain logic and the results of that “thought process” exhibit existential threats to humanity, yet again.

Am I making all this up? Read an independent confirmation of the dominance of men in world affairs, written by **Graça Machel, co-founder of The Elders.** Read that, and sign up for their very important bulletins.

An important component of some computer protection systems is that they set aside a part of the computer system to be a computer-within-a-computer; which they call a "sandbox". Then a new program intended to run on the main computer can first be run in the sandbox, so that it is contained and can be studied for bad behaviour, before being tried on the main system. For the rest of history, the male brain problem needs to run in a sandbox, where it can play but not further damage society and the world.

Society has come to accept as "that's just the way things are" the misery caused around the world by the workings of the male brain. Take a big item first- nuclear weapons, their development and eventual (yes) deployment. Society did not keep an eye on "what are the guys building out in the garage" and the result has not been good. So many other things in the world can be traced back to this same problem.

Consider climate change- the net result is that the human species is screwed, since collectively they are incapable of understanding their predicament. Not “problem,” predicament. A problem you can solve - a predicament is like watching out the window as your bus goes over the cliff. Or perhaps that is wrong, perhaps just half the human species is screwed, that being the male half, meaning that for this species to survive, all the hard work must be done by women to avoid "going down with the ship". Why does that sound familiar? Why must the women and children keep being the victims?

The big problem with women needing to do the hard work, is that women world-wide have endured the largest gas-lighting job in history, as the male part of the species becomes more defective, they increase the global effort to subjugate and devalue women in a pathetic attempt to maintain patriarchal power. But the patriarch has clay feet and should be toppled. Can women be liberated from this oppression and get hold of the reins of power? That is humanity's only hope. No, I don't accept a concept that women are genetically incapable of being tyrants or ideologues, and for those who believe otherwise, I have a two-word answer and a three-word answer - Margaret Thatcher and Kelly Anne Conway.

Could we please have a paradigm shift in the way News is reported? First the real News, followed by a (labelled) section of male-problem News, and that would include all items that can be linked directly and indirectly to male sources. This would include (among other things) everything about Trump, Netanyahu, Putin, Xi (and all other silver-backs), government secrecy, nuclear arms and power generation, tar sands, plastics, forever chemicals, pipelines, money markets, finance, military, murders, gang warfare, and most other violence and crime. It is difficult for society to act on the problem until the problem is identified and labelled, after that can follow containment. It has been a difficult problem to identify for a couple reasons - women have at best only a second-hand knowledge of the workings of the male brain, and people in general have been conditioned (as mentioned above) to accept all the badness in the world as just the way things are. Part of the social conditioning is witnessed in the case of Trump - you learn to recognize that hormone-etched façade of today’s Trump to mean a figure of authority. But see through that and you will see the little insecure boy, the little Donny, who never really grew up, but acquired that imposing face later in life. And the feedback he receives from that undeserved fealty merely encourages his bloated ego and continuing poor behaviour.

But "things" don't have to be this way, it all has to stop. Imagine, if we found life on another planet and the creatures were acting as our humans are doing - fighting, warring, killing, destroying their very means of life support - that would be the last place you would ever want to visit. But we have seen those creatures, and they are us (thank you, Pogo). Can we ever get over this?
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In Age of Anger, Mishra quoting Nietzsche:

“What will not be built any more henceforth, and cannot be built any more, is - a society in the old sense of the word, to build that, everything is lacking, above all the material. All of us are no longer material for a society; this is a truth for which the time has come.”
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“What evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!”
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end notes

[1] Levant, R. & Wilmer, D. (2011). Masculinity constructs as protective buffers and risk factors for men’s health. American Journal of men’s Health, 8, 110-120. doi:dx.doi.org.exproxy.rit.edu/10.1177/1557988313494408.

[2] Reidy, D.E., Berke, D.S., Gentile, B., & Zeichner, A. (2016). Masculine discrepancy stress, substance use, assault and injury in a survey of U.S. men. Injury Prevention: Journal of the International Society for Child and Adolescent Injury Prevention, 22(5), 370-374.

[3] Berke, D.S., & Zeichner, A. (2016). Man's heaviest burden: A review of contemporary paradigms and new directions for understanding and preventing masculine aggression. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 10(2), 83-91.

[4] Abramsky, T., Watts, C.H., Garcia-Moreno, C., Devries, K., Kiss, L., Ellsberg, M., . . . Heise, L. (2011). What factors are associated with recent intimate partner violence? Findings from the WHO multi-country study on women's health and domestic violence. BMC Public Health, 11(1), 109-109.

[5] Hossain, M., Zimmerman, C., Kiss, L., Abramsky, T., Kone, D., Bakayoko-Topolska, M., Watts, C. (2014). Working with men to prevent intimate partner violence in a conflict-affected setting: A pilot cluster randomized controlled trial in rural Côte d'Ivoire. BMC Public Health, 14(1), 339-339.