With my self-assured knowledge of my wisdom, I told a friend when I get out of the swimming pool, my husband and I both need to use the bathroom, each of us for different reasons.
My friend said ‘fascinating’ in an Oscar winning voice performance.
I was lately looking at Steven Pinker book, ‘a sense of style’, and I think Pinker needs such a friend as mine. Or perhaps Pinker is so utterly brilliant he no longer has friends who are of equal intellect to his own and thus he knows he knows better. I started reading the beginning of the ‘sense of style’ where he belabors the need for brevity. Advice I definitely wish he thought to heed when he wrote ‘the better angels’. While I agree with the thesis of ‘the better angels..’, it was long like 7000 x7000page PhD theses.
I hope I am hyperbolizing but I am not sure I am. I get he thought we’d all disagree with him so he wrote it thus to beat us all into submission. And the point of such a thesis is to bore readers to death so they start to skim. Indeed to me he was preaching to the converted: we indeed are a much less violent society.
For me it was the realization that public executions are no longer happen in most of the world. Also we don’t do witch burning anymore. In my opinion our society has gotten less violent because women have been gaining more power, and as women get more power the safer and better society will be. I did not see this in Pinker’s book, what I saw is that he expressed was that it was correlated rather than causative. I believe women’s power is causative.
The proof of this I think is in Afghanistan, before the US invaded they had public executions and it is possible that there was no other country where women had less power, except perhaps some African nations according to wikipedia and amnesty international countries performing public executions in 2012 were Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Iran and Kuwait. And it seems the taliban are back at it.
While men might think it’s wonderful having so much power, I think that all that power probably hurts men too.
While this is about how the accumulation of wealth and how this even hurts the rich, it’s not a big leap
to assume that the same is true for power. In some ways i think this is even more obvious because the power men exert is very conformist, so men must conform otherwise be ousted.
As I am sure I’ve said before and I know I am not the first, that society is no better than how the weakest member of society is treated. Gandhi and Maya Angelou have both said similar. And the best possible society will be when each member of society is treated with equal respect and everyone’s time is treated as equally valuable.
Our society is heading in that direction because sooner or later republican men will realize that they are living fossils and women do have value.