A question about history

TheInkerman · 2017-05-03T16:27:53+00:00

It's important to understand that the image that TRP has of 'the good 'ol days' of stoic, strong men and feminine, submissive women with perfect nuclear families is basically fantasy.

Social rules, behaviors, and mores largely follow two things; firstly, the basic underlying human physiology and psychology; which is basically unchanged in the last 50,000 years, and secondly the way in which that underlying psychology adapts itself to the circumstances of the day.

For most of human history our circumstances matched our underlying psychology (we were hunter/gatherers living in small clan groups), so there was no 'adjusting' needed. That changed when we began to form civilizations. If you haven't read The Misandry Bubble, it covers the basics pretty well (although IMO goes a bit too far at the end). Because our underlying sexual psychology was incompatible with the optimal productivity needed for human civilization to survive, religion and other moral rulesets were created to 'police' both male and female behaviours. In such times the margins between life and death are slim; you and your family could die of disease or accident at any time, a drought could wipe out whole villages, and there was the ever persistent threat of the psycho barbarians across the river/in the next valley. This meant that you couldn't fuck around with sub-optimal organisational structures. Men are better at organising ourselves; we form hierarchies quickly, and they're generally fairly stable. That's not to say women are bad at organising themselves, they're just not as good as men. By the same token men are much more useful working in a field or killing stuff, rather than chasing kids around the house, so that became women's domain (in many societies a similar logic led to women having strong roles in religion). In an ancient or medieval civilization, perfect social optimization could be the difference between life and death. Sexual competition meant intra-communal violence which again could mean death and extinction, so you also clamped down on that shit.

These social rulesets persisted as long as the difference between life and death for societies was relatively slim, but that changed (relatively) recently (for the sake of argument I'm going to start with the Industrial Revolution, but in practice these changes probably started much earlier). The Industrial Revolution completely changed human society. Humanity went from widespread subsistence agriculture to high density urban industrial societies basically overnight (historically speaking), and so your rules had to change again. The Victorian sexual repression is a classic example of society trying to re-affirm the social rules it's used to, while updating them; religion and communal shame no longer worked as an enforcement mechanism because science had killed God and there are no 'communities' in cities of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, so instead the Victorians promoted the idea of individual morality. In practice of course this didn't work for very long, and over this same time period you have the rise of the first feminists and the start of the modern study into sexuality. Post-Victorian Era led to increased sexual liberation, especially after WWI, hence the 'Roaring 20s'. The Depression and widespread social collapse it brought brings society back down to the 'life or death shit' level again, so we see a slight regression to conservative social morals (a similar mechanism is at play with how the length of the average dress/skirt relates to the economic climate of the time; when things are good women can afford to be more promiscuous/less selective with their partners; when things are bad they need to put a high price on their pussy).

Post-WWII is where things really take off from our perspective. Consumer appliances, women in the workforce, and of course the Pill were again massive changes which forced society to adjust again. The interesting thing is that starting with the Industrial Revolution and progressing through the 1950s, civilization (in the West at least) moved away from it's 'life or death' struggle. It could afford to be lax about certain behaviours. In practice this was often good; being gay is now ok and accepted, at least relative to where it was, while both genders are no longer sexually repressed into depression and alcoholism, and women are free to work. But bizarrely we've now moved into a situation where our 'natural' psychology (the hunter/gatherer) comes to the fore in sexual relations. Women want their beasty mammoth killers and nothing is stopping them pursuing it, while men are now free to fuck around as much as we want. But social rulesets have a lag time, and we're currently going through that 'updating'.

That's where TRP (and the increasingly common re-evaluation of men and our roles in society generally) comes in. It might be explained simply by this; the game has changed but the rules are still being updated, TRP is offering an updated ruleset. The 'traditional' roles of men and women have been made obsolete by passage of history, and we have yet to craft an effective new set. Feminists in some respects are trying to do this; the issue is that they're trying to do this only for women and not for men. Men need an updated ruleset as well, hence TRP.

A minor addendum would be that there doesn't necessarily need to be new 'rules'. Rulesets were created to prevent behaviour that could damage society, but we increasingly live in an age that has very resilient societies, so arguably the solution is 'fewer' rules, rather than merely 'different' ones.

legitshitonly · 2017-05-03T16:18:11+00:00

The exponential growth of information technology giving a voice, a strong voice for that matter, to stupid people and stupid ideas (stupid for lack of a better word right now). Hasty generalizations are quick to become law or fact in public opinion. Deep, open thought is hard to come by sadly.

Dave Chappelle put it great in his new special- Today, if you like dressing up like a baby, you can go online, find 200 other people who like dressing up like a baby, and y'all can meet up at the Mariot downtown one Sunday morning. 50 years ago, if you liked dressing up like a baby, no one found that shit out. You stayed home.

We want to be too open and accepting. We pander to such minorities that are extremely minute and for some reason feel the need to empower them instead of relying on good 'ol fashioned consensus or majority rule, allowing survival of the fittest to handle the forward propulsion of ideas as well as the beings themselves.

Our current use of technology is affecting us in ways that may very well may be incomprehensible to us at this time. We shall see.

ppzhao · 2017-05-03T19:29:11+00:00

Not really sure - I think somewhere in the 80's, there was a war against men in USA. They demonized all things "manly" in schools and the media. I'm not really sure why that is, but it probably had to do with rise of feminism and those ideas taking over our government education and media. 90's kids were led to believe "women like sensitive men" and "real men cry" and all other things. Those kids grow up to be adults and those ideas got further reinforced by the media and higher education, and that's where we are now. This trend became more and more exaggerated after the 90's.

Title	A question about history
Author	MisterHuckFinn
Upvotes	1
Comments	4
Date	May 3, 2017 3:46 PM UTC (9 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/askTRP
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/asktrp/comments/69155t/a_question_about_history/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/askTRP/a-question-about-history.90547 https://theredarchive.com/post/90547

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