sj_zero on Nostr: Certain political philosophies claim that the West is a patriarchy, and when you ...

Certain political philosophies claim that the West is a patriarchy, and when you compare the way that the West works to true patriarchies historically and in the present day, you can see that that's just not the case.

So let's start off with what a patriarchy would look like. Under a true patriarchy, the father, the head of the family, at the head of the entire family, would have immense political power over the entire family and would essentially be the dictator of their family. Ancient Rome was a patriarchy. The head of the household could straight up murder his wife, and it really wasn't a big deal. The head of the household controlled all the slaves, and was the one who made all the decisions about how resources were to be divvied out amongst family members.

This concept of a nuclear family relatively speaking derives from the UK and the US as well as commonwealth nations, but tends to exist in some form throughout Europe. In addition to pure structure, there's a question of inheritance. In the nuclear family, whoever gets the inheritance is essentially arbitrary. It might be the firstborn son, the favorite daughter, it might be everyone, it might be nobody. By contrast, in other societies the firstborn son inherits everything, the secondborn son might be allowed to stay and help, maybe the third, but generally there's nothing left for sons past that, and there was never anything for the daughters. Such rules of inheritance also cast long shadows on history and a country's economic distribution, as power can accumulate in firstborn sons, or it can disperse amongst many descendants.

It's something that seems alien when you look at media from other cultures, the level of power the father or the grandfather has over the family. In the west, if your father disagrees with your marriage it's unfortunate but largely meaningless. In much of the east, if your father disagrees with your marriage you may have your whole life stripped from you. As a westerner you look at that media and it just looks odd, like nothing similar to your own life.

By contrast, Western Civilization is not a patriarchy at all, it is a nuclear family. Instead of the head of the family having overwhelming power over the entire bloodline, each individual goes out into the world on their own to make their own fortune and find their own power. As a result, rather than the patriarch being the head of the family, the family as a unit is a thing unto itself. In some families the man may be dominant, but another family is the female might be dominant, and another family still there might be a very reasonable balance of power.

Now I'm not talking at all about whether men have many positions of power in society, because in the grand scheme of things I don't think that that's really patriarchy per se. Patriarchy is rule by patriarchs, rule by the male heads of families. Under such a system, there is no place for matriarchs in positions of power, and there's also no place for men who are not patriarchs.

Indeed, it is I think no mistake, no accident that feminism only came from Western civilization and to an extent doesn't exist in many other civilizations today. That family structure which is so different from patriarchy ends up being the impetus for women to gain equal political power and equal treatment under the law because governments often end up taking the form of the family.

There can be imbalances and imperfections in a system without that system being those imbalances and imperfections. I think that's one of the places where academia ends up really broken -- they see that problems exist and then attribute those problems to the entire foundation of the society when they don't realize they're a part of that society and that society they hate so much is the foundation that has them asking the questions. In western societies, the imbalances and imperfections (at least the ones that can be solved)

A society with universal suffrage is one that by definition isn't a patriarchy in government, either. It would be easy to give voting rights only to the heads of families -- imagine the mafia, where the male heads of each family get together to make decisions. Now *there's* a patriarchy.

I think it presents a major strategic blunder among feminists to constantly attack western society when it is the one society on earth that consistently sees women as equals. Once western culture collapses (and arguably it is in the process right now), if virtually any other region's culture takes over it's a near total certainty that feminism will be destroyed.

Some people advocate for the destruction of the family as a unit altogether, insisting that such a structure is oppressive towards women. There are places that exists today, but they're not good. Fact is, the data shows definitively that our lives are better with at least 2 parents who are with you throughout your entire childhood. If you consider the outcomes for women, women should practically speaking want men raised with fathers, because men who grow up without fathers make up a disproportionate number of violent criminals at an overwhelming rate, and also make up a disproportionate number of sexual offenders. Far from making life better for women, such a society would be markedly worse.

I think in part it's from living in a society that's so good that women don't realize how bad things could be. They don't realize in other societies how unsafe women are, how much like chattel they're treated, how little agency they have, and that it's not because they don't have feminism, it's baked right into those cultures in the same way that feminism is baked into the concept of a nuclear family where a man and a woman court each other and get married largely independently of their families.

This goes back to a core point: The right won't like it, the left won't like it, but western civilization is unique in how it is structured, and so if one wants to conserve western civlization then progressivism and social justice are in a sense baked in and you can't fully remove it without having something new that isn't western civilization anymore, and also western civilization is unique in how it is structured, and the only reason anything resembling "progress" is possible is because the fundamental ideas of the west are compatible with and in fact became the garden from which these ideas sprouted and grew, and any other civilization would not have (and did not) come up with these ideas and without western influence would not continue to accept them.

Something the left won't like, but the right will is that there's no guarantee that progress is social justice and what today is called progressivism. It's entirely possible that having gone further than anyone else, progress ends up being a more explicit acceptance of objective reality and a push to achieve balance between many different ideas that are all valid but don't exist in a vacuum, rather than a continued push towards only one or two ideas.