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Foreign policy in Western Europe and later the whole EU was coined by cooperation and building of support for joint policies after 1951. This stood in stark contrast to the events of the Second World War and much of the 1930's as well as the First World War. The ultimately unsuccessful efforts to come to peaceful cooperation from the late 1920's had been picked up and brought to success.
We entered an age in which -at least within Western Europe and within our societies- confrontation had a bad reputation while cooperation, consensus-seeking and talking to adversaries had a good reputation to the point of being considered the only acceptable behaviour.
This macro level behaviour reminds me of the stereotypical advice that women give regarding conflicts; talk, talk, talk. Never in my life have I heard a woman advise to confront a source of trouble. This seems borne from evolution to me; the women of the world would have spent most of the past 900,000 years or so with broken jaws and worse if they had immediately confronted aggressive men rather than tried to keep the conflict at the level of talking (and shouting). It sure seems to have been a successful evolutionary strategy, but I suspect this success was misleading.
It's usually not the talking that reduces or solves the problem with some aggressor; it's that one man or multiple men step in to defend the woman. So the evolutionarily successful strategy wasn't really to limit yourself to talking; it was for women to buy time till men address (often solve) their problem with an aggressive man. This appears to have been lost somehow, and the belief in the power of the spoken (or written) word took over within Western societies.*
Today's women appear to suffer from the twin delusions that their hardcoded approach is universally superior and that they typically solve conflicts with aggressive parties themselves. I have never seen the latter happen in my life. All that I ever saw was that aggressive people shied away from further escalation when men stood up and faced them, deterring further aggressive moves.
Sadly, this twin delusion has infected the political 'class'. Germany has many politicians who are highly proficient in hiding failures and shortcomings until given intense scrutiny, and highly proficient in building networks of political support within their own party. Nowhere to see is a talent or suitable character for standing up and facing an aggressor to force him to cease with his aggressions.
Instead, they fall back to the only thing they know, the only thing the women ideology recommends; talk, talk, talk. Well, this and spending public money, especially when others chose to do more than talking.
Sorry for the blunt and unsophisticated messaging, but this repertoire is terribly incomplete. Cooperation, consensus, network-building all have their place, time and subject where they are the best path of action, but the challenge posed by aggressors isn't among them. Maybe they could eventually succeed, but this would be way too slow, and lead to too much suffering and damage. What's needed is a good-old-fashioned, stone age-hardcoded behaviour of a group of men standing up and facing the aggressor selflessly.
I do not believe that the public (media, politicians, pundits) are ready to accept this publicly. Their careers depend on not acknowledging it, for none of them are competent enough for their jobs and this could become completely obvious. Our society (societies) allowed a delusional ideology to take over, and it led us to a path of giving extraordinary power to systematically flawed personalities.
S O
*: This clearly excludes their dealing with foreigners on distant continents.
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Hmm,if you removed your comment linking this political behaviour to 'the behaviour of women', I doubt there would be an controversy at all about it. Our western democracies have long since evolved (devolved?) into reality TV shows - like Love Island, but for the over 40s set. I don't have any grand solutions.
ReplyDeleteWell, the influence of a 51% demographic on policymaking through elections is kinda the point.
DeleteI'm of course fine with every citizen having the same vote, but we should ward against letting delusions influence policy.
"What's needed is a good-old-fashioned, stone age-hardcoded behaviour of a group of men standing up and facing the aggressor selflessly."
ReplyDeleteNo dispute. However the tricky part is that men usually create more often than women shitty strategic situations. More "manly" men may create more situation in which we are the aggressors
So how to implement a short-term switch from female peace modus to male war modus? :-)
We need to have that tool in the shed.
DeleteI was asked which German politician would has a suitable personality to face off Putin, and couldn't name a single one.
That needs to change.
Last Dingo:
ReplyDeleteYou are suprising me again and again ! >>women ideology>> thats the perfect summary of our social misery. The character and characteristics of women have permeated society to such an extent that any non-female behavior is already sanctioned in kindergarten and school. From an ethical and moral point of view, this is certainly all very praiseworthy, but it just doesn't work in a world in which the majority of people do not share these views in any way.
So it is a question of culture, a question of the socio-cultural mainstream in a society, which defines the fighting power of a society in the event of war. That has always been my thesis. Exactly what i have written here and in many other places again and again.
The influence of social culture on warfare is just too immense to ignore.
I didn't write that our men wouldn't fight. I wrote that our culture created politicians who avoid to confront someone like Putin as long as they can.
DeleteI did understand you. But i think you underestimate the cultural influcence here. You see it as an thing that influences mainly the politics, but i has also begun to influcende the population as an whole.
DeleteI have no doubt that many men would fight, but the percentage is lower than in other countries. There are studies about that. For example in germany the number according to one study is around 18 %. That means simply, that only an minority of the men would fight. Especially the young men would not, and they were raised, educated and manipulated to be so from their parents, from kindergarden and from school (violence is always bad, lets talk etc)
Our culture does therefore not only produce politicans who avoid to confront someone like putin, it creates also to much men who will avoid to confront other men with violence. And that is even the bigger problem here.
And the politicans?! What was first: the egg or the chicken? IMO the politicans are the result of an widening and growing change in culture to a more feminine / female culture with the result, that politicans which would confront someone like Putin are not voted for and do not get political power.
The politicans you see are the result of the change of our culture.
What you call "study" was a primitive, worthless poll.
DeleteStop spreading disinformation here!
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DeleteMargaret Thatcher, indira Gandhi, golda meir.
ReplyDeleteThat's a meaningless reply. Nobody here claimed that all women of world history were the same.
DeleteThe fundamental contradiction in you picking up this unoriginal position Sven is that you've spent most of your blog arguing that all the manly men that demand big powerful systems, large armies, ballistic missile defence and other high tech gadgetry are idiots.
ReplyDeleteHow much do you not go on about the importance of sophisticated coordination for generating combat power, but then when it comes to responding to aggression the best you can do it tear off your shirt and yell: massed infantry charge is the only response.
This blog post was almost entirely about political decisionmaking necessities (the need to confront aggressors, not to comfort or integrate them) and why our current crop of politicians in high office are unsuitable for the moment.
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