@LukeWeinhagen - Luke Weinhagen

INSURERS & DECIDERS (the "women in politics" issue) In a healthy society/civilization, these are the same entities. As they separate, and to the degree they separate, societal/civilizational dysfunction manifests until eventually no insurance is left and the society/civilization collapses. Some framing - In World War 2 the Royal Air Force was losing lots of planes to enemy fire over mainland Europe. They turned to the Statistical Research Group at Columbia University to assess what could be done. The SRS recorded bullet holes in planes that made it back creating a hit map. The obvious impulse based on these hit maps was to armor those areas receiving the most damage. One of the group's members, mathematician Abraham Wald, advised to instead reinforce those areas clear of hits on the hit maps. His reasoning, the planes used to determine where hits occurred were the ones that survived and made it back. Those hits were survivable. It is the areas where their maps showed no data that represents the planes that did not make it back. The impulse to armor the obvious hit zones represents survivorship bias. When we focus on the obvious problem we often miss underlying causal contributors. I view the collapse of societies/civilizations much the same way. (generalizations required to articulate the broad dynamic) Depending on how we measure, there have been anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred distinct societies/civilizations in recorded history. Nearly all of them have collapsed. Ended. Transformed into something completely wiped from existence or transformed into something different enough from what they emerged as to no longer be the same society/civilization. And across those societies/civilizations, only a small fraction have granted women political to any real degree. So when I look at this problem I have to think - maybe it is not women (or the feminine) having political franchises that represent what causes the collapse of societies/civilizations. It certainly looks like women in politics must be the problem as we examine our own society/civilization. The primary vectors of undermining can largely be traced back to changes in politics and policy emerging after women's suffrage, both in the US and across the West. The political engagement of the feminine lights up the hit map of societal/civilizational "hits". "Women in Politics" represents the obvious problem that must be reinforced. Right? Yes. And No. You see, I don't use our society/civilization as the representative sample for the problem. I add our hit map to the data from as many other societies/civilizations as know well enough to use as samples. As I mentioned earlier, most of these did not have women engaged in politics. So while women in politics may be OUR problem, it seems unlikely it is THE problem. Instead, what I see is any time those making directional decisions for a society/civilization are different from those insuring a society/civilization, that civilization begins to fall apart. If your insurers, those responsible for paying the costs of decisions, and the decision makers separate the decisions themselves lose their incentives to support the well-being of the society/civilization. Our founders recognized this dynamic. It was voiced in their primary complaint; "Taxation without representation!" They were held accountable as insurers of the decisions affecting their society/civilization but were not afforded a corresponding role as decision-makers. We recognize this when we point to the ideal of the "Ruler of Last Resort" being embodied in the same entity as the "Insurer of Last Resort". It's why monarchies, at least those that maintain these dynamics, worked throughout history. And why our founders in the US set our government up specifically to create a governing body serving this role. Success has led us to the opposite conditions today, where the decision-making is in the hands of people who pay no costs for the decisions they make. Detached from any investment into the society/civilization. Extractive and parasitic. Consumptive. Adding even more weight to the feminine expressions, the consumptive expressions, are the source of the problem. My argument is that dependence, not women, produces the problem. That the separation of decision from insurance is the underlying cause. Free riding. Cost evasion. Responsibility evasion. Accountability evasion. All just separation of decision from insurance. "It's the women" accounts for our societal/civilizational collapse. "It's the evasion" accounts for all societal/civilizational collapse. We see evasion so strongly associated with women in the West because agrarianism began the separation of women from natural pressures early and effectively. Removed from them the adaptive pressure to express the abstract responsibility required to insure society/civilization. Guaranteeing we get exactly to where we are not once women are fully engaged in politics. The West is a society/civilization built from the ground up to separate children first, and women as the caretakers of children second, from the costs of direct exposure to nature. A social structure that ensures they are unlikely to become insurers while simultaneously our high-trust bias compels us to extend them the responsibility as decision-makers. But again in this, the problem is not women inherently (as it looks obvious to be), but the separation between insurer and decision maker. The blank spots in our societal/civilizational hit map. When my peers frequently observe that many societal/civilizational problems can find their origin in women's suffrage they are not incorrect. When they argue that removing women from politics will solve the problem, the survivorship bias occurs. Because of the way the West has developed and evolved, women in our society/civilization have become the primary vector of the underlying cause but they are not inherently the underlying cause. If we "solve the feminine influence in politics issue" we may delay collapse (making us even more blind to the true threat in the process). But as history overwhelmingly shows us, masculinity itself is no safeguard of society/civilization. If our society/civilization permits the separation of cost accruing from cost paying, decision-making from insuring, we lose our society/civilization - no matter who. (The upside is that the fix is the same no matter the who, no separation of cost making and cost paying - no political power for the dependent, any dependent.)