I've talked before about my personal philosophy of loving and
hating everything simultaneously. I can choose either, but it is
the one, or at least the point between the two, that I feel most
comfortable with, which decides my overall opinion. This also tends
to sway around, leaning at times towards more weird or extreme
conclusions. At the moment on the topic of humanity I am falling on
the side of hate. But not for the popular reasons, the destruction
of the environment, lack of morale ethics, etc., it's actually
those ideas that I hate. The concept of humans as a whole being
above their own selfish, animal, motivations. Clearly, they are not.
Until the last few days when there's been a new outbreak of the
virus up north, the Australian TV news has been saturated with
endless babble about sexual assults between MPs and their staff.
What annoys me about all this is all the shock and fury about
something that seems to be inevitable. The future is set to have
men and women working not just at the same level, but together in
every job, so much as they can be persuaded. From the abolition of
all forms of gender segregation this is an obvious outcome. There
will be sexual desires between them, and with all the physical
barriers previously separating them removed, a percentage of
individuals will always be reduced to indulging in them.
It's actually exactly the same as the problem of corruption in
government. You put people in positions that they can exploit for
their own benefit, and some will do so. The greater someone's
individual power in a trusted position, the greater the likelihood
that they will abuse it. This is why communist dictatorships always
end up rife with corruption, because some individuals are
inevitabley able to manoeuvre so that they have much more power
than the rest. There are fewer barriers to that than in a
democracy, though hardly enough. People generally accept the risk
of government corruption, it annoys them but is expected at the
same time. The anger is funnelled towards putting up new barriers,
and there the public get lost in the complexity of their
implementation.
But with gender equality, much of the public wants barriers between
the sexes taken down, so that they mix in identical roles in both
work and social life. Yet with politicians and beauracrats these
are the same people who the public don't really trust to put their
country ahead of themselves, what logic is there in assuming their
sexual desires will be held back with any greater restraint?
My point isn't against the movement of gender equality (though I'm
guessing I'd be better off not getting a position on the FSF
board), but against the mislaid perception of people that lies
behind the infantile assumption that we are more than just
self-serving animals. We all run endlessly through interwoven
tunnels of social acceptability, bending our path into the shapes
of morality and responsibility while really our intended direction
is always set for nobody but ourselves. We are lost in this maze.
It is a maze that we as a society have built to be lost within,
bumbling through all sorts of arcane rituals and obligations just
so that we can serve our own universal animal pleasures.
But we don't believe we are animals, we believe we are the maze.
