Cape Kiwanda, Oregon — photo by Charles Conor Pezeshki (my son)

If there’s anything that characterizes intellectual life nowadays, it’s the tragedy of metacognition — the things not talked about in intellectual circles that might actually better or lives, or provide increased understanding into the conflicts and complexes of modern society. When you’re bogged down in spending most of one’s discussing whether men playing dress-up at various stages of their developmental arc, and policy to be written along those lines, you’re losing a lot. It’s a lot like biodiversity loss — most of the animals, or thoughts going extinct are invisible to modern society. We lose ground, and complexity in information in more ways than most people realize.

One of the big ones I’ve reflected back on are the actual differences between men and women (putting aside the noise above — standard definitions here, folks.) I see this because it affects our young people more than anything. By positing there are either a.) no differences between the two, or b.) only perverse differences that can only be defined and discussed by select individuals in the contemporary academy, we are creating the playing field for our own extinction. I look at the level of social intercourse (forget the real kind for a moment) happening between young people nowadays and I honestly wonder how we’re going to survive as a species. It’s more monastic than a Franciscan nunnery.

Human brains are fascinating things, but they produce information based on a knowledge stack. I’ve written extensively about this elsewhere on the blog in terms of my work on knowledge structures. But here’s the thing, folks. Just like computers, human brains work on a modified, vastly hyperconnected stack of hardware, firmware and software. Our current intellectual caste has decided that we’re only allowed to (maybe) talk about the last one, while we’re using that selfsame software. And any discussion of the lower levels will get one branded with some “‘ist” term, which then will lead to shunning.

But anyone with experience with higher forms of life knows that this is ridiculous. I’m a dog fanatic, and if there’s any one sentient individual that has convinced me that specific knowledge can permeate all three levels, especially over time and within the context of some version of selective breeding, it’s my friend.

Boo Boo, the borzoi.

Boo Boo the borzoi, as a puppy.

Boo Boo’s quite a bit bigger now (he is a wolfhound) but he was born with instincts. And one of those is to be able to identify, stalk, and predate wolves. I have never trained him to recognize a wolf, nor has he associated with other borzoi that might have placed that knowing in his software. He was born with it. And he demonstrates this very “software-ish” behavior whenever a wolf-hybrid comes to the dog park. Boo Boo will become agitated and alert, and go into a stalk. Which has me reaching for my leash, because I’ve had enough experience with Boo Boo and aggressive dogs to recognize him as a dog of means.

You can read about borzoi on the web if you so desire. But the breed is only 500-600 years old — a cross between some Pyrenees-type dog and greyhounds. Somehow, Boo Boo’s preternatural sense of what a wolf is (my border collie does not have it) is in there. And it’s not just hunting something that moves. Boo Boo loves puppies and all small dogs. Somehow, at some point in time, Boo Boo’s ancestors’ software got turned into hardware. And hence we have a Russian wolfhound.

Boo Boo in a comfortable environment.

There is a constant drumbeat from the scientific community that “somehow” our brains are fundamentally different from other animals. I’ve also discussed this on the blog regarding sentience, and I think it’s B.S. Additionally, as time has gone on, various researchers have also documented that dogs are so emotionally available to us because they think like us — just without the difference in clock speed for certain, more abstract items.

It doesn’t mean that animals don’t think different thoughts. I would, for one, love to talk to a sperm whale, which has a brain like ours, except theirs weighs 20 lbs. They manage to coordinate actions literally across oceans. But the demands of inter-agent coordination are largely the same — to the point that even animals with very different starting hardware (like birds) end up with similar behaviors to humans, because of how their brains adapt, in both hardware and software, to the exigencies of existence.

With that background, I’d like to reintroduce a discussion around the notion that, once one recognizes the knowledge stack, men and women actually do think differently. And that difference might not show up in higher levels of thought — though lower level knowledge structures are omnipresent and nested in higher level knowledge structures. But down at the baseline, men and women have core hardware/firmware differences that really drive inter-agent coordination knowledge at the level (Survival and Tribal) that a shit-ton of culture is generated at.

Why does this matter? Certainly, women and men are both capable of high level abstract thought. Arguing about that is boring to me, though it makes the psychopaths ecstatic. The big ‘Why’, though, is because when one cannot recognize that at least there are some differences, spread across population demographics (of course — no one sex is monolithic here) then you have opened up the door for psychopaths to sow confusion among the masses. You’re handing those people that seek to destroy societal coherence a big fat club. When you can create internal, self-reinforced confusion inside independent agents, you’ve really managed to score a big enchilada in terms of driving societal collapse.

What are the two dyads that exist in men and women that drive core behavior? With all the usual caveats (statistical distribution, etc.) they are:

1. Men are driven by: Protect and Provide.
2. Women are driven by: Nurture and Social Control

These two sex-differentiated mandates dominate the lower level of thought (and hence culture) in humans. They are innate, and used by humans as core operating principles as key sorting principles in human societies, almost ubiquitously.

The male part is easy. Modern day feminism (whichever wave you want) has endorsed dissecting the male persona as legitimate discourse, as long as it is portrayed negatively (and usually bound up with race as well.) There is a lot of this out on the web. But I’ll tell you this, folks. If you’re at a party, and some dude grabs your lady’s ass, and you don’t do anything, I guarantee you’re headed for the checkout line. Chris Rock has the best routine on the ‘provide’ part, and I’ve posted it below. He is a true genius of the age.

But if you notice, we don’t discuss women’s core functionality. There are all sorts of DeepOS reasons for that — especially if you believe that men are a giant breeding experiment run by women. This may be true, but is better left for another day.

Considering ‘Protect and Provide’ before we move on, one can see when there is a distortion in either, it leads to antisocial behavior that ripples across societies. ‘Protect’ can turn into physical abuse. ‘Provide’, on either side, leads to excess, or starvation. Easy. And since these are a coupled dyad, lacking in one can lead to overcompensation in the other. That’s a key point, and if you want a fun mental game, you might graph up a teeter-totter with the various outcomes.

Now on to women. Nurture and social control.

In any debate over the superiority of one of the sexes over the other, the first word — Nurture — is either explicitly or implicitly front and center. Humans as a rule like the idea of nurture, and put forward this as the reason women should be the exclusive in governments, and all other sorts of organizations. Women nurture, and collaborate, and remind us of “mommy”. It’s a core function, and it’s the primary psychological weapon brandished in any kind of argument that’s really about power and control. Maggie Thatcher didn’t get her handle as the Iron Lady by baking cookies.

But the problem is that most Western cultures routinely denigrate the role of nurturing as having any importance at all. We put our infant children in revolving caregiver daycare, and trust our entire future on the lowest external status women in our society. We call women who want to stay home with their babies “lazy”. And everyone’s fine with nurture and talking it up until it’s time to make 20 sandwiches for the picnic.

The same posited and projected “women are more empathetic than men” behaviors also must come into play into how young women then view how they want to pursue their own futures. In the last 20 years, I have met only a handful of young women who even want to have a family. The numbers show this, of course, with declining birthrates across the Western world. I read once that teen pregnancy and women’s infertility are two sides of the same coin, and I think it’s true. In our current political milieu, people are ready to fight over the morality of in-vitro fertilization, as well as talking about artificial incubation of the entire pregnancy cycle. These are linked phenomena — by the time a woman becomes self aware enough to resist the toxic behavior, and mirroring it herself in her youth, she becomes infertile. Biologically, the best time to have a baby is 16-25. But even stating this obvious fact is considered full of sexist bias. It’s nuts.

The problem with this truly schizophrenic cultural perspective on nurture is that it is intrinsically coupled to its dyadic partner, Social Control. Women provide social control in societies through establishment of norms, as well as hierarchies inside women’s culture. Social control is important. I think the core of it is that it likely prevents sexual abuse of children. And it manifests in numerous ways — older women are constantly at war with both men and women over the status of what I call ‘uterine real estate’ — who gets access to younger fertile females. Only the highest status elder males are given anything resembling an endorsement to reproduce with young females (look at Robert de Niro, or Leo DiCaprio, for example.) And of course, the abortion wars wage on and on. Feminists are quick to indict men for existing as primary actors in all these fights, a la The Handmaid’s Tale. But by and large, I think this is bullshit. If you look at hyper conservative tribal societies, it is women that run the social norms. Who enforces the Taliban’s edicts? It’s the grandmothers. That doesn’t mean that men play no role. But the day-to-day is almost completely run by elder women in that society.

The problem with all this is that without recognition of the base programming in young women, they are the ones that suffer the most. They are the ones that bear the conflict, and seek retrograde solutions for their own biological exigencies. Modern society not coming up to the bar leads to Christian and progressive fundamentalism and oppressive excesses. And these are all hooked together inexorably in cause-and-effect.

When basement-level scaffolding is denied or suppressed, pathologies a plenty are generated. This post could be a whole book on how all this works. But at least let’s start the discussion. What does our core programming consist of? What are its key demographics? How can we create a truly inclusive culture that allows our young people to thrive?

It’s crickets and shame out there, folks.

P.S. I had read the book I inherently mentioned at the top of the post some 20+ years ago. I didn’t go back and re-read it before writing this post. But I did read the Wikipedia article on it. Nothing like what I am proposing was really in there.

There’s also a humorous and transactionally based web-based author that will give you both a chuckle and insight I found recently — Hoe_Math. It’s dating down in the lower v-Memes. But most dating is in the lower v-Memes. Enjoy!