American Creativity

Masculinism or the Judeo/Christian tradition is a creative approach to life. It values, above all other things, creativity. It therefore devises an economy that encourages it. It talks about the wonders of entrepreneurship. It values individualism, since creativity occurs in an individual mind. Feminism, on the other hand is passive and uncreative. So, using this scale, we can identify the most masculine countries and the most feminine. Obviously, since most human creativity is occurring in America, that is the best choice for the most masculine nation on earth. Followed by England and Western Europe.

The most feminine country would be someplace like Bolivia or Mongolia or Borneo. There are lots of choices since chaos is a feature of feminism and therefore a tendency to decentralization. For middling countries, we would do well to choose Russia, China, and India. They have enough masculinism to produce centralized governments and some art to document themselves, but no inventions have occurred there for a very long time. No atom bombs or computers or transistors or rockets. No home of creativity like Hollywood. No communications satellites. No CNN. In my view, it doesn't count if you are second to produce a new technology. That is copying.

Of course, in the last century, the home of creativity was Central Europe. They invented navigation, colonialism, the novel, the symphony. But, when America was established, the very creative were attracted to it, and came.

America has now created the strongest creative engine ever devised. The American Economy. And is exporting its principles around the world, though the more feminist countries have difficulty putting these principles into practice. The way the American economy works is to punish those who don't participate and reward those that do, with the greatest rewards going to the most creative. Hollywood stars, business leaders, sports figures, especially those that win the most. Of course, one could say this is a feature of any economy, but it is a question of degree. To what extent are the non contributors made to suffer. This occurs in two forms. First do the successful support the non successful and second, how loudly are they criticized for their lack of participation. America wins on both counts.

At the top of the pyramid is Bill Gates, providing the tools to exploit the computer, expected to spur creativity itself, to all the world. At the other end, a drunken Indian or a black coke head. Masculinism, of course, views the drunk as an aberration, to whom he hurls the words, "Sober up, get to work". Of course the drunk does neither. He is doing his best to overcome the pain he feels in knowing that he has been excluded from the culture in which he lives because he lacks the tools to contribute to the creative effort and therefore feels worthless.

So, high creativity, as a value, involves imposing suffering on that segment of the culture not contributing. This is not surprising, but maybe it would be well to analyze the dimensions of the imposed suffering and compare that with the creative product, to judge whether it is still a good trade.

The most obvious group of sufferers are the Indians. They, being strong feminists and believing in living in harmony with nature, are least able to contribute to the creative effort and therefore suffer the most. They are unproductive and therefore have to be maintained by the more productive and therefore are resented by them. They transmit their resentment and the Indian gets drunk to escape the condemnation, being powerless to adapt in anything less than several generations. Of course those several generations of purgatory are finally coming to an end and sure enough, the buffalo returns in the form of the gambling casino.

After the Indians the blacks suffer most, for the same reasons. But it is easier for them, perhaps having been less spiritual in their relationship to the earth in their native Africa. None the less, the experience has been very similar though in addition to being marginalized by the masculinists, they had to endure the indignity of slavery. This suggests that their form of feminism was more passive than that adopted by Indians, who presumably wouldn’t have made good slaves, since they weren’t used in that way.

The masculinists are nothing if not opinionated. What else should one expect from the most creative among us. Their creativity permeates every aspect of their lives and they discriminate between what they consider creative quality and poor efforts. They like fine cigars and wine. They wax poetic about Kentucky Whiskey. They like neat homes and clothing that is new, clean, and wrinkle free. They like order. Especially in inherently chaotic aspects of human life, like sexual relationships. As a result, they discriminate unmercifully against those that violate the rules of order regarding sex. They say it is family values that concerns them, but what they are most offended by is chaos. And indiscriminate sex, with its propensity to lead to violence is the most offensive.

Thus, prostitutes and homosexuals come in for some of the most intense criticism they are capable of. They cannot produce the reasoning behind their criticism, so they rely on rules of behavior as handed down in their holy books.

After that, we can identify those that are borne with some deficiency in normal capability. Those with unusual mental states or abnormal physical traits. These things make them less capable of contributing to cultural creativity, so they get as little as possible from the culture. The culture has to maintain them because of the rules of morality as set forth in their holy books, but they do it as cheaply as possible, in order to conserve as much as possible for the creative effort.

So, who's left? Middle and upper class whites, mainly. They contribute and therefore have no suffering imposed on them by the culture. Of course they do suffer in the areas in which creativity has been unsuccessful, up until now. They mainly suffer the price of creativity. Guilt and other psychological disturbance arising from hubris which readily attaches itself to the creative.

Next, what do we get for the emphasis on creativity. We get entertainment, and crucial it is too since one of the effects of creativity is to deprive us of the activities that used to provide us with a sense of self worth and fulfillment. Activities like hunting, farming, and home making. Instead we use robots to perform these activities, which we purchase from the creating companies, thereby providing them with the resources to develop more robots. Robots like dishwashers, cars, TV's, lawn mowers, boats, heaters, air conditioners, computers, satellites, bombs, guns, lasers, etc., to name some of the most important. (A robot is defined here as any machine devised to perform a function for a human).

And this line of reasoning gets to another group upon which we must heap suffering. The animals. One doesn't know to what extent a wild turkey enjoys his existence, but we can be pretty sure he wouldn't choose the existence Mr. Tyson offers. Or, now factory farms are taking over for fish and pigs too. And those we can't domesticate we wall into as small areas as possible, which we can assume is a form of suffering too.

So, what else do we get from creativity, besides entertainment and robots? Well, we get leisure, the time to pursue abstract entertainments. Since the robots have deprived us of the exercise necessary to maintain a smoothly functioning body, we produce abstract equivalents in facilities devoted to the function. Unfortunately it is sterile and there seems no way to eliminate that. We can learn to play chess well, as a substitute for war, but that is also sterile. And, any number of hobbies exist, all pretty similar in that, since they don't directly, but only indirectly solve survival problems, they have a sterile quality to them.

Probably the final gift of masculine creativity is understanding. This is a great gift, no doubt, and the one thing that can arguably make up for the amount of suffering imposed. Understanding could make survival possible when otherwise that wouldn't be the case. It could provide us with the tools to escape dramatic environmental upheaval, an inevitability in the long term. And since the last environmental upheaval was The Great Flood, probably at the end of the last ice age, one might conclude that some form of environmental upheaval is overdue. Unfortunately, up until now, understanding hasn't come up with any realistic way to escape, but it could. For instance, one way would be off planet. Not realistic yet, but a possibility.

Males are particularly well suited to the pursuit of understanding. Aggression is built into the male of any species with a need to plant its sperm inside a female. And aggression is just what is needed to pursue understanding. One could say they are essentially the same task. In the one case one must project one’s body into that of a female, while in the other one must project one’s mind into the workings of an external object in order to create an accurate model of it.

So, is the tradeoff worth it? There is really no way to know before the full drama has played itself out. If we do succeed in surviving an event we would not have otherwise survived, then we must conclude that it was worth it, since the final morality is survival. On the other hand, at present the prospects for survival off planet don’t look good, and the chances of survival of all but the most disastrous environmental event do look good. Probably we shouldn’t expect to retain our civilization, but actual survival would appear to be reasonable of expectation. As for quality of life, this is a subjective judgment and the best opinions will be from the old, who have had a long time to ponder the question. I would say that quality of life has declined in many ways, though individual survival has improved. This is as much as to say that materially we have benefited while spiritually we have lost. But even on the benefit side, large segments of our species don’t participate and the final cost is still not fully understood.