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Opposing the Patriarchy
I’ve read a lot of history in my lifetime and I’ve interacted with thousands of fellow humans in a wide variety of circumstances. It’s pretty clear to me that while there are occasional conspiracies, most of the time things happen because the human brain isn’t evolved to do much reasoning and has zero capacity for consistency-checking. Thus people believe in nonsense and don’t realize when two of their beliefs are mutually incompatible and we reliably do foolish things over and over and over again.
So I have a simple axiom: Any question of the form “Why do people…?” can generally be answered with “Because people are basically stupid.”
History is little more than an endless series of blunders caused by our intellectual incompetence. Today our amazing technologies amplify our native stupidity, so we get Trump and Brexit and Bolsonaro and Salvini and Babic and AfD and PiS and all the rest of the mindless populist horde that is sweeping away the thin veneer of civilization we thought would magically persist despite our failure to provide the necessary care and attention.
What this means is that whenever people start blaming some abstraction for the ills they resent, I become worried.
I become worried for three main reasons.
The first reason is because pointing at an abstraction is useless. You can wage a…
