World Peace Is Possible - Part 6
Why aren't the experts talking about a world without men?
Table Of Contents For This Article Series
So far in this article series about world peace we’ve wondered about a world without men, explored emotional engagement with violence, said the marriage between violent men and the knowledge explosion is unsustainable, claimed that violent men can’t be fixed, and talked about human reproduction without men.
In this article let’s address what may be the most influential objection to the world without men theory.
Why aren’t the experts talking about this?
Our Relationship With Authority
In a complex society like ours none of us have the time, talent or ability to think every issue through from scratch by ourselves. Given that no one can be an authority on everything, most of the time we’re going to look to experts for answers.
And our relationship with authority is deeper than just how we look to experts, we look to the authority of the group consensus for answers to all kinds of things. Even when it comes to the petty decisions of everyday life most of the time we find it more efficient to rely on the larger group mind to chart our course. If nobody else wears a clown costume to the office, and if everybody else seems to wear blue jeans to a barbecue, we’re not going to bother to analyze this too closely, we’re mostly likely going to just go with the flow and do what everybody else is doing.
And so when an unusual idea like a world without men comes up it’s natural that we’d look to experts and our social environment for input. And if experts, the media, and our friends aren’t talking about a world without men, we may understandably take that as evidence that such an idea is not worth considering.
Of course one reason intellectual elites are not discussing a world without men could be because such a proposal is obviously a bad idea. This will likely be a popular theory among experts. But there are others reasons we don’t see experts talking about a world without men too, and it’s the purpose of this post to widen our scope by exploring some of those other reasons.
The Business Of Being An Expert
It seems helpful to reflect upon the fact that for most intellectual elites being an expert is a job, a career, a business, a method of earning income.
There's certainly nothing wrong with working for a living of course, but we should be aware that once money is involved this may introduce business agendas which can in some instances compete with a purely objective analysis.
The problem is money. Intellectual elites have spouses, mortgages, children in college, parents to care for etc. And like any of us, these family responsibilities will be prioritized over their expert topic and “the world”, as they should be.
Thus, business agendas will triumph over intellectual agendas whenever there is a conflict between the two.
Reputation Is Everything
Experts provide an intellectual service, information and analysis. Their business takes place in the world of abstraction, and they don’t provide tangible real world provable services like that of your plumber and car mechanic. And so, for intellectual elites, their business is built upon not just what they know, but upon what people think they know. In the blue collar world all that matters is if you can do the job. In the white collar world, image matters more than performance.
And so to the expert, their reputation is everything.
What this means is that any intellectual elite who is dependent upon a paycheck can only explore so far beyond the limits of conventional group consensus thinking. If the expert publicly travels too far beyond those boundaries their employers, customers, readers etc may stop thinking of them as experts, and rebrand them as crackpots. And to intellectual elites such a rebranding of the expert’s reputation in their customer’s minds represents an existential threat to the expert’s career, and must be avoided at all costs.
Is The Group Consensus Working?
In those cases when the conventional thinking of the group consensus works in solving a problem then none of the above is an issue. The expert will have more detailed knowledge of a conventional solution than the rest of us, and so they clearly have value in that case.
But what we often see is that if the collection of ideas which the group consensus accepts as being normal and reasonable could solve a longstanding problem, those ideas probably would have already worked.
And so, the most promising territory for solutions often lies in that collection of ideas generally considered to be unrealistic, unreasonable, unworkable, crackpot etc.
And this is what we see in the case of world peace. Thousands of years of conventional thinking has not liberated us from male violence.
And so, if we’re serious about world peace, we’re left with no choice but to explore ideas outside the limits of the group consensus, ideas that are likely to be quickly dismissed as crackpot notions. And because experts typically have a very limited ability to travel in this territory they will usually confine their engagement, if any, to doing the dismissing.
Does this guy have the answer to world peace?
Ok, maybe not. Alright then, so probably not.
But given that there is exactly no evidence that the experts will ever lead us to world peace, and that this failure is likely to eventually lead to the end of everything…
What do we have to lose?
Why not hear what the crackpots have to offer?
“Why not hear what the crackpots have to offer?”
I think we have, haven’t we? History is filled with crackpots. You might even say that history is the story of crackpot ideas that eventually get discarded. Then we move to the next nutty notion. Or to use a biblical image: “When you leave the Garden, you’ll be mostly on your own. You’ll try all sorts of crazy ideas you think might satisfy you, but they won’t work. (I’m looking at you, Babel!) But don’t worry: When you’re tired of searching, tired of thinking that you have the wisdom & power to run this show, you’ll come back to Me. Which is great! I’ll be delighted to see you again!”