Like any good dilemma, the one I’m in is one of my own doing. I have over ten drafts of posts (or just mere ideas of posts) sitting in my queue, and never really sure which one I should try to complete. I stand in the middle of my own blog like would-be roadkill standing in the light that conveniently goes to them instead of them to it. But on the thought of the cute creatures of God’s paved earth I was recently thinking of one of their dilemmas, the hedgehog’s dilemma, which leads me to the fable’s author, Arthur Schopenhauer.

European thinkers after the Enlightenment were perplexed with question after question that they attempted–and frequently failed–to solve, but two stand out the most in the way they’ve shaped the last two hundred years. The first is the more well-known Jewish Question, the second is the lesser known Woman Question. Some of you, I imagine, are surprised that this is a real thing and not just a meme. If you look at the Wikipedia page, you’ll discover that the WQ is actually older than the JQ and the idea of woman’s liberation and patriarchal oppression has a longer pedigree than most people realize. There’s a rich history of scholarship I would love to get into here, but the history of the WQ is a post for a different time. There are two thinkers who stand out in their own thoughts on the WQ, and that’s Otto Weininger and the aforementioned Arthur Schopenhauer. Otto Weininger’s book, Sex and Character, and the man himself, are all worthy of their own post but before him was Arthur Schopenhauer and his essay “On Women”.

There is very little you won’t find in the Manosphere that wasn’t first found in Schopenhauer’s essays. Anything the Manosphere developed in its ideas that weren’t first found in Schopenhauer’s essay can be sorted largely into commentary on technological developments, commentary on the dominance hierarchy among men, and seduction techniques, all of which inevitably spiraling out into a supremely nerdy wilderness of jargon and categorization. It’s an interesting essay, but its role as the ur-manifesto for internet misogyny before the first man who screamed the C-word into the electronic aether was a twinkle in his bitch of a mother’s eye means there’s not much in it you probably haven’t heard if you’ve been marinating in the crimson juices of the redpilled cyberspace for the last ten years. Still, it is worth it just to quote him once since all masters are owed their due. On women and their sense of time, Schopenhauer writes:

“Then again we find that young girls in their hearts regard their domestic or other affairs as secondary things, if not as a mere jest. Love, conquests, and all that these include, such as dressing, dancing, and so on, they give their serious attention…This is why women remain children all their lives, for they always see only what is near at hand, cling to the present, take the appearance of a thing for reality, and prefer trifling matters to the most important…The advantages, as well as the disadvantages, that this entails, make woman, in consequence of her weaker reasoning powers, less of a partaker in them. Moreover, she is intellectually short-sighted, for although her intuitive understanding quickly perceives what is near to her, on the other hand her circle of vision is limited and does not embrace anything that is remote; hence everything that is absent or past, or in the future, affects women in a less degree than men.”

We see aspects of what Artie’s talking about in women’s short-sightedness play out time and time again in the realm of the career woman. Every year there’s at least one article that comes out that really highlights the trouble career women are in and the Rube Goldberg contraption that society is going to need to set up to make sure all of these women would be able to get the happy ending they hope is waiting for them at the end of it all. The latest one is from Hannah Frishberg, one of the innumerable Millennial dumpster fires of Jewish descent that consistently watched Lena Dunham’s fat girl fantasy, Girls. And true to form, Frishberg delivered us the latest round of Deep Concern for women in the patriarchy.

Broke men are hurting American women’s marriage prospects

There’s nothing revolutionary in the article. Women prefer men who make more money than them despite the religion of Progress and Equality that we’ve all been inculcated with as children. It’s a mark of this age that fundamentally lies about everything that what everyone knows has to be learned.

Women won’t settle for less and they won’t marry down. A man has to make more than them–significantly more–and it certainly matters a great deal what it is they though. It’s not the deliberate way the labor market has been constructed, the numerous incentives to get more women into these high status careers (necessitating that there will be fewer of these high-performing men), or economic disparities so stark that gig-hopping is all people have; it’s these men not doing their due diligence as men. And now these broke men who haven’t manned up have gone and ruined the marriage prospects for these thirty-something women who are finally ready to settle down!

This story has been going on for decades. It’s just getting faster and dumber now. That’s just how capitalism works ladies, I don’t know what to tell you. If, in those sleepless 4am moments, you ever find yourself wondering why things are the way they are just understand that in capitalism if you can’t see who the sucker is it then it’s probably you.

It’s also interesting seeing articles like this and seeing how much they’ve entrenched the two flavor of ideologies they’ll allow you to have. You can have Neoliberalism With Tactical Libertarian Elements or you can have Neoconservatism With TradCath Paypigs.

The latter is pretty self-explanatory, Neoconservatism does as Neoconservatism does and with the American public’s general Protestantism so degraded and degenerated that it’s a controlled, albeit chaotic, state all that remains is to catch anyone hungrier for something more serious and transcendent and real and shepherd them into an ineffectual camp of intellectual thought games while the Neocons use them as front puppets. It has an added bonus of keeping people serious about their faith docile by convincing them they have no actual role to play except to shut up and accept the subversion that’s going on within the church (something LeftCaths, who are more adept at playing the power game, have been laying the ground work to make sure traditionalists are hoisted by their own petard). That’s not germane to this post though and, for the third time here, should be a post all its own.

Neoliberalism With Tactical Libertarian elements has been the more recent creation and is intriguing in the way they’re appealing to modern women. Women, being how they are, love the power and status process and to be able to have higher stakes than their little circle of friends is something they’re deeply inculcating into the modern woman. We mock it by pointing out they’re trading spreadsheets for families and babies, but like how internet pornography is engineered to overclock men’s brains and short circuit their dopamine receptors and mess with their natural instincts (especially the sexual one) by building a constant need and dependence for escalation, getting women into the workplace is meant to work in the same stimulating way by overclocking women’s sublimated need for power and status. Women leaders are often atrociously horrific in their disposition and policies for this reason.

Neoliberalism is thus designed to appeal to the white woman more than anyone else. It has all the right elements for them:

Neoliberalism prefers a complex level of capitalism that requires a high level of bureaucratic tricks for institutional stability and requires a lot of internal compliance to function. Women are well suited for this.

Neoliberalism encourages a high level of diversity in order to break up worker solidarity and get footholds into new markets. White women will thus be the biggest beneficiaries of this due to their comparatively higher level of competence than other groups.

Neoliberalism establishes complex hierarchies to maintain system ideology and promote continued compliance. Through this the ultimate goodies of power and status manifest, which women want.

Neoliberalism, being capitalistic, comes with a lot of trickery and subterfuge in the realms of competition. Something women are prone to do to their friends.

Neoliberalism, in order to function in this level of complexity and requirements to always expand, needs to embrace surveillance capitalism. Woman is the natural snoop.

Where Tactical Libertarianism comes in is to patch the cracks that inevitably form in such a system. With the modern white woman winning, it meant the modern white man had to lose. The material world is ultimately a zero sum game. Tactical Libertarianism, to suddenly become libertarian when proposals that would limit the power and reach of private companies and institutions, takes care of both the free speech issue and ‘giving aid to white men’ problem. The power that business has to control conversation and discourse can’t be limited because “muh private company” (just ignore all of the subsidies and welfare they get or how they almost never built the infrastructure that all of this is working off–Obama wasn’t wrong, they didn’t build that!). You can’t help white men in this system who are very clearly falling behind and have no future prospects because you don’t give handouts to losers (unless of course they’re the helpless and oppressed brown clients of the system). Plus many of those white men had libertarian ideas themselves once, so it’s just desserts, nevermind the fact that libertarianism was always meant to be a trap for white men to be lured to and fall into. That the trap was sprung and that it’s now being used against them reveals its true insidious purpose. If you don’t understand what I mean by trap, here’s a rule of thumb for you: if you’re encouraged to believe something out of “principles” to the detriment of your own security, it’s a trap.

Modern women largely cannot see this for what it is. They want and need a partner higher status than them because biology fitted them with different necessities. They’ve been left holding the bag by their masters who are well-aware of the implications of having depressed and degraded men at the bottom of the social hierarchy. The high-status male is now an even rarer commodity, one worthy of going to war over and keeping the fighting internal instead of external. And these women cannot see the end that is waiting for them. There will be no men for a significant percentage of my generation, the Millennials, as many Millennial men who realize the raw deal they were given are going to follow their own natural inclinations and compete with Zoomer men for their women instead (if they aren’t just checked out entirely, another depressingly common tendency).

I know some who became somewhat cognizant that there was no light at the end of the tunnel for them and have adjusted their expectations in the most depressing ways possible. The rest will not fare too well in the coming alcoholism and pill epidemic that is going to rack up a body count of 40-59 year old women on a level not seen at any other point in human history, except for perhaps the phenomenon of the WWI spinster who lost her sweetheart in the war. The trauma of the First World War has usually been viewed in the lens of the European men who were senselessly grounded into fertilizer for poppies in the great tragedy of the 20th century, or in a Spenglerian view as the downturning of the West, but there was a woman’s component to this as well. Two million women were singled out in Britain alone, leaving women in a status of being “nothing but a piece of wartime wreckage living on ingloriously in a world that doesn’t want [them]” as the writer Vera Brittain put it.

The beginning of the career woman is often erroneously attributed to the results of WWII but it actually had its roots in the trenches of the Western front. You can follow the path of the millions of ghosts that lead these women with no prospects now to have no choice but to take up positions outside of hearth and home. Financial security? Gone. Love? Gone. Children? Gone. From that many women would begin to trailblaze paths for career women and for many firsts, leading to where we are today. It’s been a hundred years since that deposition began and the results are calcifying.

Meanwhile for the men, while they will always have more options than women at attracting younger girlfriends (and if they’re smart marrying them), the picture on the ground for the youngest boys isn’t looking too rosy. Even that advantage of age is not something they may find they’ll know how to use.

It really just brings up right back to Arthur Schopenhauer and the hedgehog’s dilemma. I’ll end this post with a meditation on that. The text of it from Parerga & Paralipomena (using porcupine in place of hedgehog) goes like so:

“One cold winter’s day, a number of porcupines huddled together quite closely in order through their mutual warmth to prevent themselves from being frozen. But they soon felt the effect of their quills on one another, which made them again move apart. Now when the need for warmth once more brought them together, the drawback of the quills was repeated so that they were tossed between two evils, until they had discovered the proper distance from which they could best tolerate one another. Thus the need for society which springs from the emptiness and monotony of men’s lives, drives them together; but their many unpleasant and repulsive qualities and insufferable drawbacks once more drive them apart. The mean distance which they finally discover, and which enables them to endure being together, is politeness and good manners. Whoever does not keep to this, is told in England to ‘keep his distance’. By virtue thereof, it is true that the need for mutual warmth will be only imperfectly satisfied, but, on the other hand, the prick of the quills will not be felt. Yet whoever has a great deal of internal warmth of his own will prefer to keep away from society in order to avoid giving or receiving trouble and annoyance.”

Modern society as it is creates a warped tyranny of distance with millions of hedgehogs left out in the cold. There are those who are very fortunate, they had the wits about them to not fritter away all their time with stupid expectations or they were blessed and lucky from the start, finding someone to love and share every prick of the quill together, producing litters of children to cherish. A toast to them.

For the sake of this sick society I hope the ones out in the cold can find that internal warmth, because between the men and women it now produces without any prospect of the future, no society can handle the weight and danger of a million cold hands with their own sharpened knives.