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My first post here, let me know if am doing something wrong.
Motte, bailey and patriarchy
I have noticed that when feminists talk about the patriarchy they often commit the motte-and-bailey fallacy. Before I continue it is important to note that as far as I know there is no generally accepted definition of patriarchy and how the word is used differs widely even among academics and "experts".
The motte part is a patriarchy theory as used in anthropology and sociology. This part is usually solid and you can use it as evidence that patriarchy is a real thing. Arguments for patriarchy from anthropology and sociology are:
The bailey part is a patriarchy theory as used in feminism. This part is much more speculative and authors rarely try to prove it. Arguments for patriarchy from feminism are:
How feminists typically use the motte and bailey fallacy: They make a claim of the bailey type, for instance "men are the majority of homeless because patriarchy hurts men too". When the opponent attacks the bailey and argues that no such patriarchy exists, the feminist will retreat to the motte and reply with "of course patriarchy is real, do you deny that wives take husbands names, do you deny that we still call ourselves 'mankind'?"
The important part of course is that arguments in the bailey part have no direct causal connection to arguments in the motte part.
This is generalized conspiracy theory prevalent on the left and that for various reasons endorsed and spread without closer examination. You have two groups: one is oppressor and the other one is oppressed. Oppressors have control over some special property and they use their power to deny oppressed people access to this property. They then create a system that perpetuates and entrenches this dynamic into the future keeping the oppressed people where they are.
So for feminists you obviously have men as oppressors and women as oppressed. Men use their male privilege to oppress women. They also perpetuate the whole system called patriarchy for the future. The same goes for workers/bourgeoisie/capitalism or "normal people"/queer people/cisheteronormativity and so on.
As with all conspiracies, there is grain of truth to it. Even the most stupid ones - like chemtrails - have some useful nugget somewhere down there, like for instance Operation LAC where US governments literally secretly sprayed dangerous chemicals over US soil in order to study if this is viable military technology. That is your Motte, and then Bailey is whatever you want it to be.
It's not a "generalized conspiracy" it's just plain old marxism with the bourgeois and proletariat scribbled out and replaced with fill in the blanks.
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This is perverse logic. I am not a group just because I happened to be born with a penis. Is this what they call identity politics?
If you want to understand Identity Politics, then it is best to go to the source of Black feminist group named The Combahee River Collective and how they defined it in their 1977 manifesto
This is the true birthplace of the concept of intersectionality, The Combahee River Collective was a group of black women many of them were lesbians. They connected their identity to oppression, and posited that until the least privileged are free (black, queer women), nobody is free. Of course the identity politics in this sense is abhorrent as it automatically assigns value judgement to immutable characteristics such as sex, race etc. The way to get around this is to introduce systemic thinking. You are a man and even if you do not directly and consciously engage in oppression, you nevertheless have access to male privilege and you implicitly and unwittingly perpetuate the system of power - The Patriarchy (or White Supremacy or Capitalism etc.) - that oppresses people. You will never be able to tap into the lived experience of oppressed people, you will always lack this way of knowing, but you can be an ally and center these marginalized identities whenever possible. To center here it means literally, they imagine identities being on the margin of the circle while privileged people are in the center. Marginalized people have better view of the situation having the outside view, you have to shrink the circle and introduce margins into the conversation. You will see these concept in DEI training explaining it all to you. As Di Angelo says:
It is lifelong work until patriarchy/capitalism/white supremacy/whatever is dismantled completely. But before then you have to give power to the marginalized so that the society can reorient itself in right direction under their expert guidance to dismantle oppression. Once that goal is achieved, the marginalized will abolish themselves as they will no longer need the power and we all end up in utopia.
That is the one minute summary of generalized dialectical conspiracy theory, their weltanschaung and ideas behind that worldview. It really is quite simple if you look at it. For sure at least in the way to identify who is the victim and who is to blame for everything as with many other conspiracy theories. Similarly to those there is also a huge rabbit hole to lose yourself for a lifetime, but the general gist stays the same despite complicated sounding jargon and the rest of it.
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One minor alteration- feminism is a class interest movement for college educated urban women, particularly single ones. In the current environment getting them declared victims is advantageous to them, hence feminism endorses conspiracy theories for why objectively privileged people are victims. Patriarchy is just an unfalsifiable declaration of privileged women fitting in the ‘oppressed’ category of the general leftist conspiracy theory.
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That's because it's not a specific empirical claim, it's a narrative lens.
Like evolutionary psychology. Like capitalism. Like Gamergate. Like politics. Like a lot of things.
I don't know if this board is comfortable calling it autism or STEM-mindset or whatever, but I have it, a lot of you have it, it has a lot of benefits, and it makes us bad at understanding what people are doing when they use narrative lenses to try to express theories and observations that are too vast and complex to be 'proven' with a single empirical observation.
Saying 'male loneliness is caused by patriarchy' is not the same type of claim as 'gravity causes things to fall towards the ground.'
But it is the same type of claim as 'low consumer confidence causes recessions'.
If you say 'don't be ridiculous, recessions aren't caused by low consumer confidence, they're caused by supply shocks,' then you're kind of missing the point. Recessions are caused by lots of different things all interacting in complex and chaotic ways, and those things are all way more amorphous and varied and random than the terms 'consumer confidence' or 'supply shock' or even 'recession' make them sound like. You can't point your finger at a simple empirical causal relationship for any of this, nor can you measure it in a definitive way that makes one of those theories right and the other wrong forever.
And yet, it's still meaningful to talk about how low consumer confidence causes recessions, how supply shocks cause recessions, etc. Because what you are doing in when you talk about a claim like that is taking the ineffable chaos that is a human economy and using a narrative lens to point out a specific trend or pattern or commonality in that economic process. And in the same way it is useful to talk about a fire as an object even though it's really a process, focusing our attention through that lens lets us explore and notice things, real actual things with real actual causal significance, that we wouldn't have noticed if we were just treating it as undifferentiated chaos.
And of course, we have to look at it through lots of different lenses to illuminate different parts of the chaos, and try to pick out individual empirical pieces we can hold onto and measure, and integrate across different perspectives to try to make a coherent model of the overall process. But that doesn't make any one of those lenses wrong, that type of claim is a category error.
(many lenses may be useless, of course)
So, anyway.
Patriarchy causes male loneliness and suicide?
That lens is to make you notice that boys and men police each other against too much emotional or physical intimacy towards each other, and that causes loneliness and alienation.
It's to make you notice that society pushes men to view all relationships they have with women as potentially sexual and looks skeptically at those who don't, in ways that put strain on those potential friendships and creates loneliness and alienation.
It's to make you notice how society denigrates 'sensitive' men who talk about their emotions or express sadness or seek help, making it harder for them to turn around bad situations they are in.
It's to make you notice that suicide attempts are more common for women but more successful for men, and that's mostly because of gun culture encouraging men to have deadlier tools at their disposal.
Etc.
You can say 'calling that patriarchy when there are more proximate causes is dishonest' or 'that's not what causes it because there's also this other things that causes it' or w/e, but again that's kind of a category error, those claims are not incompatible with what the narrative lens is trying to tell you. If the narrative lens caused you to pay attention and think about the issue in more detail and notice all those specific thigns you're pointing out, it's kind of done it's job already.
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I don't disagree with what you wrote at all. In fact, I wholeheartedly champion basically everything you said. My first exposure to that kind of feminist sophistry first got me totally tongue-tied and I didn't know how to fight back against it, but I knew that they were doing something wrong. Then when I saw people like Scott calling out this sort of thing as a motte and bailey in posts like Social Justice and Words Words Words, Another Brick in the Motte, and Untitled, I was able to recognize exactly where the sophistry was, and I grew to hate feminists for their abuse of logic, and getting large swaths of society to fall in line, because they make fallacious arguments that aren't super easy to spot and refute as such. After all, the way to win a debate with a 2 minute speaker limit is to make arguments that take 2 minutes and 10 seconds to refute.
But all of this was pointed out by tons of MGTOWs, MRAs, and other anti-feminists, along with the more scrupled people in the rationalist movement like Scott back in 2015. I'm sure that 99.99% of people posting on the Motte already know that patriarchy theory is one of the biggest divisive arguments of the past decade, and I'm sure that 95% of Mottezians would agree with you that it is pure sophistry, and one of the more infamous and abused motte and bailey arguments. This is all to say that I think that everything you said is old news, so I'm wondering, why did you bring it up? Is there some greater context surrounding your post that would be relevant to it, that would cast it in a new light, to spark debate amongst the Motte?
Sorry, I don't want to be too hard on you as a first time poster. I'm far from the arbiter of what's insightful and what's old on the Motte, and it's not like I've never said anything that was obvious to others before. It's just that people on the Motte are always (rightfully) wary of us becoming an echo chamber, and I worry about that, too. So I'd rather focus on new things that we have lots to say about as opposed to retread ground.
I am happy to see that what I discovered for myself is correct and was discovered before. I am kind of flattered.
I brought it up because it is something I didn't know about.I am going to read those articles by Scott that you mentioned. Thanks!
Definitely check them out, they're incredible and transformative. I think Untitled is the one most focused on patriarchy, but I like Social Justice and Words Words Words the most, it has a really great ending.
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I'll echo @CertainlyWorse here. Your generation (mine too it sounds like) is not the only one to exist. One of the most important things we do on the Motte is not, in my opinion, delving further and further into the frontiers of 'Truth' and 'Knowledge,' free from the censors of the mainstream internet.
In reality, the main benefit of the Motte is far more mundane. We are here to keep a record, and keep track of the sophistry that is increasingly peddled in all corners of the modern Western world. We provide a guidepost or a haven for those who believe in heterodox ideas, but don't want to go fully into the toxic, hate-driven, and ultimately non-intellectual parts of the online discourse that make up the vast majority of the 'heterodox' sphere.
While we are quite small with regards to the rest of those rejecting mainstream motte and bailey tactics, I like to think we are some of the most reasonable and even positive groups out there that attempt to have logical arguments.
Thanks @Londondare for doing your part to keep this effort alive.
I am flattered, thank you. I feel like I just discovered the fire while you in here already cooked the diner :)
No worries. I was where you are just a few years ago.
Also, I gotta start spellchecking my comments good lord.
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The Motte isn't unique in this, but it's one of the forums where people either first come across heterodox concepts or a place where people can grapple with those ideas in plain sight of people that can correct their faulty reasoning. I expect The Motte will continue to rehash discussion around identity politics, social justice, the jewish question and the like for as long as the forum lasts.
After participating in the early Manosphere, I hear some of its most refined arguments still being spouted in a repackaged format by slick influencers such as Chris Williamson and Andrew Tate. But for a 20 year old without that background who is feeling his way past The Narrative and looking for alternatives I can see that those concepts are evergreen in their appeal. I continue to come across young men socially who are desperately looking for someone they can discuss red pill and anti-feminist theory with, without committing social seppuku. So it goes.
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I think the hidden logic for these types of claims look like this:
This is why patriarchy is hard to define. It can't just be the traditionalist trappings that have managed to remain, because it is something that needs to be in power right now manipulating society.
So I'd argue that rather agreeing with that the patriarchy exists, instead argue that it is a tool used to avoid the reality that traditionalist values can't possibly be the engine causing the problems of the western world today because it is just too weak.
It doesn't necessarily have to be manipulating society right now, historical structures have a lot of momentum and persist for many generations. The standard example factoid is about how railroad gauges today were determined by the width of Roman chariots, but you can see it everywhere.
Like, you don't have to believe that God is real and Lust is a Mortal Sin in order to be culturally inclined towards slut shaming. As long as everyone in your neighborhood believed that 100 years ago, and then modeled the type of puritanical behavior that calls for to their children, the children will go on emulating it in a self-reinforcing cycle for quite a lot of generations after they've stopped believing in the original reason for it. It just becomes 'how things work'.
That doesn't account for things getting worse. If gender issues are getting worse while traditional values are receding then there must be some other variable.
Aside from Roe being overturned (which pretty transparently was just traditional cultural elements bargaining with their leaders for the judges they wanted), things are getting better. So I'm not sure what you're referring to here.
That things are getting better is not a view internalized by feminists or the left, Pinker is not popular in those circles, and to believe that is basically to be naive. The whole point of "woke" was to wake people up to the idea that that kind of belief is for the privileged and not based in reality.
As someone actually in those circles I don't believe that to be the case at all.
I mean just for starters 'woke' was explicitly about black oppression, the spread to mean 'anything to the left of Desantis' is mostly a creation of the right.
But more generally, yeah, being woke is about noticing systems of power and privilege and how they affect people's lives, just pretty basic critical/material analysis stuff. That does mean that you are noticing problems and ways the world is bad. But there's nothing inconsistent between that and also noticing ways it is improving or better than the past.
Fair enough, I may have to update my model, but I still believe that in some sense there is a conspiratorial mindset towards to modern use of patriarchy, and I believe in some sense there is some feeling of things getting "worse" in a way that is behind it, see the negative reactions to the Stephen Pinker view of the world coming from the far left. And I do think there is an inconsistency between the loudness/anger/direness of the attitudes on the social justice left and any understanding that things are getting better. And I think that reflects the reality that things are more mixed than you portray, where you have the rising depression rates, higher loneliness rates, and how those are pressured by various gender-defined experiences (instagram for girls, school for boys, etc.)
(FWIW I know woke is largely defined by the right, it really doesn't matter, what matters is is it a clear/useful way of looking at what I'd call the loud social-issues-focused progressive wing of the left)
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In Derrida's Deconstructionist school of literary criticism that these kinds of Post-Modernist philosophies are based on, any categorizing or distinction between things is, itself, oppression. The very fact we think men and women are beings worthy of distinction is the root of oppression and we can never have true equality as long as we can think them distinct. So it is the deconstructionist critics job to instead try to paint the supposed inferior party as really superior, using the oppressors own words against them, so as to deconstruct the oppressive structures that have been created. The existence of these structures is again self evident from the fact we are even drawing different categories (people well versed in literary criticism and philosophy would find this obvious and you should as well if you know anything at all /s).
Well I think I mean categorization in a different way than what you describe. I'm aware of what you're talking about but I am thinking of the way progressives tend to isolate problems into categories and define immoral antagonists for each. Gender issues are cause by patriarchy, race issues by whiteness, economy issues by capitalists, etc.
They don't consider that (1) good intentions or moral behavior (defined by them) can have negative consequences and that (2) bad things can happen because of things outside the category that they have defined them in. That is, the idea that men were hurt because we sold jobs overseas doesn't make sense to them, because it's a gender issue with an economic cause. It must really have been the patriarchy at the root of the issue, because that's the only thing that can cause gender issues, since the patriarchy is the antagonist of the gender category.
They will then just claim patriarchy is caused by capitalism and capitalism is caused by patriarchy. It's all word games to them. The real world doesn't exist and this has been proven philosophically, so they have no need to deal with empirics, except when it suits them. You can't force them to believe anything, so you can't win if they don't let you.
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