I'd press X to doubt like they say on this one. It sounds good on the face of it but history and human nature especially do not bear out that wholly 'emancipating women' is in anyway going to make a society more robust and prosperous. Infact the argument can be made that the opposite is true and you need not consider the past few decades but even go back in history to observe this.It may do nothing to boost or negate your pet argument of women's education & participation in the workforce to the technological progress of that particular society but the impact this has on a women's emancipation namely her financial independence & consequently independence in thought & action can't be underestimated .
The very first manifestation of this was the women's suffrage movement beginning in the mid 19th century in the US & UK . We ought to take a more holistic view of both developments viz the education & the participation of women in the workforce has on the social fabric of a society . This does have a direct impact on the technological progress any given society makes in the time space dynamic.
The Spartan Dilemma – Devayasna
A discussion for a different thread though.The Spartan Dilemma
In the 8th century BC, Sparta conquered [PDF] a neighbouring territory Messenia, rich with agricultural land. It was also rich with a labour force, that later came to be known as the helots. Now the helots outnumbered the Spartans 10:1 but were unarmed [1]. Spartans were known for their military prowess and it is not an urban legend that their newborn male children were subject to physical scrutiny for its continued life. Spartans killed malformed male babies, most likely because of their male privilege I’m sure.
The combination of this captive labour force and the agricultural land led to an interesting dilemma, the Spartan Dilemma if you will. If the Spartans did not expand their military prowess and become even stronger and more ruthless, the helots could revolt and that would be the end of that. However, if they did not delegate labour to manage the helots and the acquired estates the territory would be useless. This was an incurred opportunity cost and would result in redirection of the labour of men. The Spartans thought they’d found a way out – allow women to manage the estates.
What followed was revolutionary for the time – nowhere else in Greece did such a society exist – where women were given property rights at par with men. The reason for this was because men were engaged full-time in training for war. Men would live in barracks till they were 30 and were full time soldiers till they were 60. They were not needed to till the land, for that there were the helots. They were needed to manage them, but for that no man could be spared.
So what did the Spartans do? They educated their women, such that the women were almost equally as educated as their men if not more [2]. Women were allowed to own property just as men did. The inheritance laws for property were revised and women were allowed to directly inherit property, thus increasing their incentive to manage the estates. Women owned 40% of the land in Sparta, a truly astounding figure. To reinforce the incentive for women, adultery was not even considered sufficient grounds for divorce, so that men could not falsely accuse women of adultery and acquire the lands bequeathed to these women. Spartan women also began to marry later than the other Greek women of their time. Women were trained in horse-riding so that they could manage the estates. Sparta had granted its women equality with men.
The discerning immediately understands the opportunity cost of allowing something of this sort. In 480 BC Sparta had some 8000 citizen males, but 100 years later, that value was down to a fifth. Women were simply not incentivized to have and raise children. The result? Around 370 BC when Sparta lost to Thebes, Messenia successfully revolted and never returned to Spartan control. Women lost their equal status and were treated the same as they were in the rest of Greece.
The lesson to take away here is not that equal rights for women is inherently bad, but that loss of demography is. It is quite obvious that there is no such thing as a work life balance. Treating women as equal to men, and making them aspire to masculine roles such as employment has the effect of lowering their TFR. Demography is destiny, and without it civilization falls.
This push for equality is an unstable equilibrium as illustrated by the Spartans. Stability lies in treating women like women, as nurturers and caregivers. They are naturally more empathetic than men, and evidence suggests they are better at health related topics such as medicine.
Equality has brought nothing but ruin on women. For instance, women’s suffrage is responsible for the ever burgeoning United States government. Taxes have increased, so has expenditure both of which are highly undesirable. Sexual ‘liberation’ has caused disaster in the lives of the women who embraced it wholly. They are depressed, more likely to be divorced, more likely to be single mothers [3]. It should be of no surprise to anyone that women are unhappier under equality than they were under patriarchy, both absolutely and relatively to men.
The Spartan Dilemma really boils down to how to handle inevitable destruction. Does one allow destruction to progress unfettered immediately or does one simply delay it for future generations to deal with. In the same way the impending doom of global warming is a Spartan Dilemma. One should be quite skeptical of the models used to predict the effects of global warming [4]. Increased CO2 levels will not kill us all off, especially since plants do better in droughts due to increased levels of carbon dioxide. The founder of Green Peace Patrick Moore himself states that there are benefits to increased levels of CO2 [5].
Really global warming is a moral dilemma – without industrialization the poor in India will suffer since they do not have access to the facilities the average upper middle class liberal in Urban India has. But the industrialization comes at the cost of damage to the environment, which is impossible to estimate and will only affect future generations. Does one trade the rights of the present for the rights of the future? There will be inevitable wars over access to potable water, as well as resources like coal and oil. But does the UMC liberal in all his ignorance, really believe that he should dictate how the lives of the villager should be?
And what of other nations, how will they respond to this dilemma in the future? Should the Hindu lose the industrialization race, succumb to civilizational decay before it has even reached its new peak in the history of the human race? Suffice to say, the only move is to play defect.
In summary, it is clear that Hindus must learn from history as to the pit-falls of so-called equality [6] foisted on them by the mleccha and guard against the Lysenkoisms popularized by their main stream media. The Occident is keen on maintaining it’s hegemony and does so through deception [7] in various forms. It is imperative that Hindus break their mental conditioning and begin to see power structures as they really are.
[1] Compare with Ibn Battuta who mentions that the “Lower classes” were heavily armed, so much so that they could resist Mohammedan tyrannies. No recorded history of a revolution of the well-armed V4s exist in history, but the unarmed helots most certainly did revolt against Spartan tyranny. It makes one wonder as to the nature of “Brahmanism”, and if it is rooted in anything but a Marxist conjuration.
[2] Women in America have more degrees than men.
[3] Single motherhood is detrimental to children in a number of ways. A stable married couple’s children are better off.
[4] Moldbug: “To estimate climate sensitivity, all you need is an accurate model of Earth’s atmosphere. Likewise, to get to Alpha Centauri, all you have to do is jump very high.”
[5] Patrick Moore left green peace because it was taken over by liberals and SJWs with no formal science education. Instead of focusing on the science, they pushed for their political agenda. It is a warning to Hindus to be careful of supposedly humanitarian organizations – PETA, Green Peace, the Red Cross, the Ford Foundation etc.
[6] Equality is incoherent, and it’s application would involve tyranny.
[7] No state is secular. In addition the author of this paper forces secularism onto Athens instead of onto Christianity, to mislead us into thinking that secularism has a tradition older than it really does. Webs within webs.
Note: Some phrases are lifted entirely from Fleck and Hanssen’s marvellous paper.
