In Chinese philosophy, yin and yang describe how seemingly opposite or contrary forces may actually be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they may give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another.
Fortunately, I spent most of the weekend blissfully unaware of the latest topics dominating the news cycle. As such, when I awoke this morning to get caught up, it became obvious that a “manifesto” written by a male Google employee had become a huge topic of conversation. Given the outrage associated with the document, I expected to read some downright awful and unconscionable things in it. That never happened.
Personally, I’m really glad this person wrote the manifesto. Not because I agree with everything he wrote and the way he delivered it, but because it hopefully will allow us to have a conversation on a topic that has spilt people into binary factions that resemble dogmatic religious sects. Before I get started, I want to make it clear that I understand how some people — particularly women in tech — many of whom unquestionably experience harassment and sexism, could feel isolated and offended by this document. I don’t work at Google, and have never worked at Google, so I have no basis on which to agree or disagree with what he wrote as it pertains to the company. Likewise, I have no informed opinion whether it’s true or false that coding at a high-level for a company at the scale of Google requires a higher concentration of masculine traits or not. For a contrary opinion to the Google document on that front, see the following: So, About This Googler’s Manifesto (for the record, I found most of that piece to be painful and preachy, but his point #2 is worth considering).
In contrast, the purpose of this post is to have a conversation about the belief that there are no observable biological differences between men and women at the population level, and that all observable differences are social constructs. I completely reject this assertion based on logic, history and life experience. That being said, the most productive way to talk about these differences is in the context of masculine and feminine energies. The acknowledgement and acceptance of these different energies has been discussed since the beginning of time, and really shouldn’t be controversial. It has always been acknowledged that feminine energies tend to be found in greater concentrations within the female population, while masculine energies tend to be more concentrated in males. These things aren’t just invented social constructs, they’ve always been a present and observable aspect of the human condition, which is why they’ve been discussed ad nauseam for thousands of years.
Things get complicated and dangerous when you take the fact that feminine qualities tend to be concentrated in females (and masculine within males), and then apply it at the individual level in a stereotypical manner. We certainly should not do this. Every single male and every single female will have their own unique blend of masculine and feminine energies, and there will be plenty of women who exhibit greater concentrations of masculine energy than many male peers. These are also probably the sorts of women who tend to rise up to the position of CEO or political leader. This doesn’t make masculine energy better than feminine energy, but it does mean that our unbalanced and twisted world offers more financial and material rewards to those who demonstrate a greater concentration of masculine energy.
Personally, I think this is a huge flaw and the root cause of a lot of our suffering. For example, American culture worships the Wall Street trader who makes $5 million a year while adding very little to no value to society, while looking down upon a mother or father who chooses to stay home and raise their children. Rather than reflecting upon the world we’ve created and admitting how perverse this is, the mantra seems to be “hire more women traders.” That’s a one-way ticket to nowhere.
The one aspect of the Google manifesto that really struck me on a personal level was the following:
Men’s higher drive for status
We always ask why we don’t see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life.
Status is the primary metric that men are judged on, pushing many men into these higher paying, less satisfying jobs for the status that they entail. Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths.
I’m one of these people who worked a job that required “long, stressful hours” during my 10 years on Wall Street. I personally decided that it wasn’t worth it for a variety of reasons. Was this me finding more of an appeal in what can be characterized as feminine energy and wanting to embrace that side of me? I think that certainly was a part of it, and I’m very proud of that decision. In fact, I think much of my evolution as a human over the past decade has to do with me fundamentally understanding the importance of feminine energy and trying to connect to it more. I get to take my son out of his crib every single morning, and I simply can’t put a dollar value on how much that means to me. Claiming that these two types of energies don’t exists, or that they don’t tend to aggregate in higher densities in one gender versus the other, is just putting our heads in the sand and causes us to ignore the root of the problem.
The real problem as I see it, isn’t that feminine energy tends to aggregate more in females than in males, but that we undervalue feminine energy to the detriment of our societal health. I’ve written a lot about incentives over the years, and how we are creating more bad behavior because our culture incentivizes bad behavior. If Wall Street or other corporate crooks never have to fear prison and simply have to pay a fraction of ill-gotten gains for committing fraud, of course you’re going to have a fraud epidemic. Likewise, if we have an economic system that funnels the vast majority of material rewards to those with higher concentrations of masculine energy (which across an entire population will tend to be males), of course masculine energy will dominate and create a very unbalanced, unhealthy world.
This puts females in general in a very difficult and unfair position. There must be countless women who are extraordinarily talented and downright brilliant, yet feel trapped because they must cater their spirits toward a masculine-energy dominated world just to be financially independent and successful. Does this make any sense? Should we be denying the existence of masculine and feminine energies and their distribution within genders, or should we be questioning why our culture places masculine attributes on a pedestal and funnels most financial rewards to such traits? Is a systematic denial of the importance of feminine energy healthy for the human race?
These are the really important questions we should be asking, because the more we incentivize and reward masculine traits in favor of the feminine in a very unhealthy way, the more unbalanced and prone to collapse our civilization becomes. The yin and the yang, the masculine and the feminine, these things are equally important to nature and must be equally represented and appreciated in any society. Any culture that does not do this is out of balance and will suffer the consequences.
Finally, here’s a link to the entire “manifesto” should you want to read it. In tomorrow’s post, I’ll analyze the document, and the extremely heated reaction to it, from a Spiral Dynamics framework.
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Michael Krieger
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I have not read the Manifesto but have had the opportunity to see both males and females in a professional venue. I think it a mistake to not pay equally for equal work. However, there is a difference between males and females and this spills over into the different and distinct roles each plays in society. My biased view is that males plan to the end of the year and females to the end of the week. Males take part in one of the few things REQUIRED for Homo sapiens to survive (those being 1-find food, 2-find shelter, 3-procreation). Females take on a totally different role in the procreation part putting all else in second place once the family system is created. As a “work-a-day issue the job will near always be second to the maternal duties. There is NOTHING wrong with this but the emphasis is significant and in some cases (if not most) will effect the participation in a Professional Career after the maternal obligations. In addition, there SEEMS to be no driving need to participate to the extent that I see males doing professionally. For this I have no explanation.
I hope that anyone reading this buys into the basic concept of evolution. It is that biology or rather genetics matter. Over the millennia, homo sapiens and other primates evolved into a dimorphic species. This is not good, it is not bad. It is.
There are a bunch of things it is not. It is not a social construct. It probably has survival value for the species, not the individual. It can be seen thousands of years later in skeletons. It has physical reality. The morphology of the human body impacts the physical and mental skills that each individual brings to the party. To whine about or try to wish away this heritage of genetics is not scientific and is probably a most egregious example of denialism, which the SJW’s are always whining about.
The next part of this is the role of statistics, namely the bell shaped curve. There are going to be genetic anomalies and individuals in each percentile. The point is that most individuals tend to cluster around the mean. That is why it is a bell shaped curve. The brain is an electro-chemical physical object that is build by genetics. It too is subject to the bell shaped curve.
It was my observation when I worked in IT that outstanding individuals ( outliers at the top of the curve) figured out how to contribute in a way the got them rewarded, because they contributed to the success of their managers. It could also be observed that certain individuals for what every reason were utterly convinced of their excellence no matter what reality told them and they were always complaining about being overlooked.
This is the problem with participation trophies. Reality is ignored. The reward is for contributing, not being.
Nicely put Dennis.
The entire celebrate diversity schtick is really nothing more than a participation trophy for having a certain prescribed identity.
It does nothing to promote excellence, and instead, stifles it.
Feminism became a caricature of itself as soon as it got started and rapidly devolved into participation trophy territory.
None of this was what MLK and his fellow brethren had in mind. It’s the exact opposite.
Oh dear. Some people who have clearly yet to see the new “Red Pill” documentary of a feminist who set out to expose the men’s rights movement and ended up more or less becoming an MHRA, more or less debunking the outdated feminist narrative patriarchy theory and rape culture nonsense.
You really believe that there’s a culture of women being harassed at work? I must have got it all wrong then, thinking that women more or less have cart blanch and men more or less get fired at the drop of a hat at the slightest offence to a woman.
It must have been on another planet that men used to duel to the death at the slightest offence to a woman at court. Chivalry must have never happened. So next I guess you’ll be telling us that women have always been oppressed.
Here’s an antidote for you: http://stgeorgewest.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/quiz-suffragists-ku-klux-klan-or.html
The fact is that we survive as a species due to the mathematics of the survival of the tribe. There have been countless social experiments around the world with the identical outcome. Invariably 100% will stop to aid a woman being attacked and 100% wont help a man in the same position. The fact is that our caveman ancestors had to protect the women for their tribe to survive, because women are simply the reproductive bottleneck. One guy can inseminate thousands per year, but a woman can only have around one pregnancy per year.
Next you need to acquaint yourself with the recent studies that show how much more work centric men are than women. [seeing as you seem to be aware that women are more domestically inclined] After that, as we’re all intelligent people visiting this site let us not pretend to be morons that buy the idea that the aggregate of all of men’s wages and the aggregate of all of women’s wages equates to a gender pay gap and look instead at the research into like for like comparisons that show 0 benefit to men and in fact benefits for women certainly under age 45.
Women in an unfair position? I guess we’ve found your blind spot. Let me help you. Quite apart from the fact that women are the gatekeepers of reproduction, the most important thing in life full stop…
Let’s turn our thoughts away from the 5 guys and one woman who own the planet and the few thousands of captains of industry and look at the population as a whole.
Men are over 90% of the homeless.
Relief agencies actively wont give men food aid and only give it to women.
Men are virtually everyone who dies in a war.
Men [most] die younger, but not the wealthy who live just as long as women.
Men are 4 times more likely to suicide. Up from 2:1 40 years ago.
Men pay more taxes and receive least benefits.
Down to nearly 35% at university and still falling. Down from 60% 40 years ago.
Men have the responsibility of conscription in time of war for their right to vote.
Women are more likely to murder their children
Women are more likely to start a domestic incident
Women have the pussy pass. Oh, you haven’t heard of the pussy pass?
If the boat is sinking in the modern era, women still get off first. …and the rest.
Women in Muslim countries are treated far better than men and have many protections.
Women got the vote with no conscription responsibility.
Though they make less money thanks to their less dangerous jobs and less hours worked, [oppressed in your mind] women miraculously spend most of the combined income or men and women.
…and those lists are endless. I dare anyone to show me 1 way in which government benefits men over women. I’ll save you the time, you can’t. I can show you 20 ways that the governments of English speaking nations benefit women over men.
Let’s just be clear, we live in a gynocentric society. Women rule everything. People who say otherwise have only poor rhetoric and never data to back their claims.
Some believe that this is a Willie Lynch style dividing of the people by a scientific dictatorship. It has certainly been a full on lame-stream media Fake Feminist News agenda for the last 40 years and more, so I understand your confusion.
Did you know that FEMEN was recently linked to JSIL [the state of Israel] and George Soros?
> Women rule everything
Getting more material benefits on average and ruling are two rather different ideas,
technicality
….that has >>spilt<< people into binary factions…
You knew this was coming:
Google fires the engineer who wrote that viral memo criticizing its diversity efforts
https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/07/google-fires-memo-author/
By immediately firing him, all Google has done is prove his point.
It is NOT just a hormone issue. We are genetically coded differently. The role of the female and male in the process is specific and to attempt to make us the same is foolishness. Both roles are very important and each has its function. To think otherwise diminishes each. We are NOT the collective though there is a desire by the uber controllers to try to make us think so.
I don’t know about this “masculine energy” and “feminine energy” idea, but here’s my take:
I find it difficult to believe that masculinity and femininity are only hormone deep. When you boil all the modernist rhetoric down, this is what they’re saying. They’re saying that a man or woman aren’t REALLY masculine or feminine, they’re just male or female–that there isn’t any underlying masculine or feminine reality.
This is the sort of two-dimensional mechanistic view I would expect from materialists. But I believe there really is a Masculine and a Feminine. And the reproductive function is the least aspect of them, simply that masculinity and femininity carried over into the physical realm. The underlying reality in the spiritual realm is much, much greater and more comprehensive.
Ultimately, to deny that we are spiritual beings doesn’t make us into highly-evolved animals, it makes us into machines. But this has been the intention all along.
It’s interesting to note how all the initiatives of the materialist left arrive at the same place eventually.
OK , when i look at MY personal archetypes, i can ask them who they are. They do not call themselves male or female. There is no warrior or mother. One who nurtures. One who fights. One who perceives and so on…… They are like programs to be used when needed. Each individual has their own way of doing these things. Male nurturing has a different approach to be sure. All qualities are needed to be a whole human being. One strategy that solves a dilemma today, will NOT work on every problem. So, humans being different is good. Groupthink to judge others is incorrect and not helpful. People get lazy, and don’t want to asses individual persons. This mental trap is a sickness. A cop out for people with weak critical thinking skills. People who cannot debate an argument decently. The mentally feeble. It is also an element of oppression.
“This culture incentivizes bad behavior” — truer words were never said. Great article.
As a former IT guy who has been a stay at home Dad the last 13 years I totally get the message. I have spent years perfecting my own health and fitness systems, teaching myself nutrition, organic gardening/permaculture. My isolation in this was extreme. However I did have time to surf the web and write. A former Sun (now Oracle) employee told me that when we both look back I’d be the one to have had the greater reward. It is true. I dodged a bullet when I fell off the corporate ladder.
“I want to make it clear that I understand how some people — particularly women in tech — many of whom unquestionably experience harassment and sexism, could feel isolated and offended by this document.”
What utter garbage. You don’t have the courage of your convictions. The harassment is more often to the contrary these days, with men afraid to even speak with female coworkers in the same room.
Isolated and offended? please. Yeah, apologize ahead of time for free speech. Are you a wimp or what? Pathetic.
Interesting, but Google has ventured into territory that is a sovereign right, not a corporate right.
1. Any contractor that receives a federal contract, must obey the laws and rules that Congress and the President, subjugate their employees with. This includes all laws, that is in all areas, including sedition and treason. Once one becomes an employee of the USA, it is the USA first and foremost.
2. No entity that has not registered as a non-for-profit may act as a no-profit and under the ‘equal protection’ clause (the Fourteenth Amendment) dividends must be paid.
Google has a huge federal ‘cross-hair’ on it and apparently doesn’t know it.