American law in particular was designed to favor a bottom up approach. The majority of law and action takes place at the local level, then you get to less specific, broader government at the state level, then even less specific and broader government at the national level. But the majority of the laws and their enforcement, the overall largest majority of government participants, is at the lowest and nearest level. So it only take a few people to represent a whole state at a national level, but hundreds at a state and local level.

But the world doesn’t stand still. Our government and our outlook, which has much greater powers for the viewing of accumulated rather than foundational power, has shifted to a top heavy approach. We believe more in the top than we do in the bottom levels of the structure. And we invest in and believe in the power, less and less, of the lowest level of government, the family. The individual is the fundamental component of all human social and governmental structures, but the first actual level of society and government in action is the family.

But, increasingly, family is a less important and less invested in part of our political life. We’re living in our minds at the top of the pyramid, because we don’t really have an much going on at the bottom level any more. Our relationships, marriage in particular, the most basic form of social contract and government, is in massive decline. Interactions between the sexes continue, but under much less formal or organized or unified terms. They consist more of short term alliances for temporary mutual benefit, rather than a unified grand project.

So conditions in the world have changed, but underlying instincts and energies in humans haven’t. So what new expressions have they found? Women are, as a class, far more agreeable and pro-social than men. They’re more concerned with safety, reduction of harm, standards of behavior, cultivation, and validation. So there are kind of two warring desires at play there. One is the desire to create a safe, protected, bountiful, provisional space, a home. But that requires a certain internal order be maintained. You can’t wreck up the house, you can’t bring chaotic or destructive or corrupting influences into it. It has to be kept clean and pure.

Measures of disgust and neuroticism also average higher in women than in men. They’re more bothered by elements that compromise the integrity of the protected space. So the desire to create a protected space, which is a benevolent desire, also carries with it a necessary sensitivity toward maintaining that space, that rejects anything that might disturb the peace. Roughhousing, dirty shoes, all those things that can upset the integrity and peace and security of the home are a problem. And women have, throughout history and across all cultures, been bothered by them. There are vulnerable people who we have great sympathy toward and investment in inside the house, and they need that secure, safe space to explore and grow.

So, the way you get women on your side is to make a case to them that you’re a vulnerable, growing, sympathetic organism who deserves to be inside their mental house. And they will take you in and start to build walls around you and protect your interests. On the downside, because their fundamental assumption is charitable, and their broad personality prejudices predispose them that way, they aren’t in the best position to challenge the assertions of legitimate need and expression and need for protection and good faith on the part of those they care for. You don’t question a baby whether it is right in demanding you care for it, however it rages. The assumption is that they are always right. Victimhood, vulnerability, need, and suffering are sufficient arguments in themselves to provide the desired care and protection, because the assumption is that the customer knows best. You assume that the child, by instinct, knows what they need, and their job is simply to convey those needs and vulnerabilities, and your job is to provide for them and protect them.

Since women, on a massive scale, no longer are nearly as invested in government of this kind at a familial level, there is a much much larger remainder of that built in energy that can be collected and expended at the cumulative societal level. Women won’t stop building protected spaces and playing house. That’s what they do. They will just do it at whatever level of expression is available to them. And currently the most technologically easy and obvious level, the level at which needs and dangers are most constantly shoved in your face at a daily level, is not the family but political society. So female political activitism absorbs the excess energies that changes in technology (from personal innovations that meet basic daily physical needs much more easily to things like the pill that greatly reduce the need for women to bear the burdens of reproduction) have freed up. So, in a way, the elevation of certain political concerns and approaches is a necessary consequences of decreased familiar investment by women requiring other avenues for dispersal and investment of excess human capital.

One of the things that most confuses cultural and historical perspectives is the failure to recognize the fundamental humanity of humans. Conditions change, technologies change, strategies change, religions change, relationships change. But men keep being men wherever they are. Women keep being women. Humans keep being religious. You can’t end any individual religion, it won’t prevent human beings from behaving in a religious manner. You can take away hunting and war from men, they’re still going to be men. You can take away the home and children from women, they will still be women. How men and women approached those respective challenges was shaped by their underlying character. Those conditions can change, and whatever it is they do in that situation will also be influenced by their underlying character. There was an error in assuming that one particular way of responding to particular set of conditions by men or women was itself the fact of men and women, that it was the underlying reality itself. That was mistaking the token for the type. And when we had a chance to look around the world and see that the type varied quite a bit (although it varied far, far less than one would ever predict if there were no udberlying reality), and when we had a chance to see conditions change rapidly as result of technology and history, we realized our mistake. But instead of learning the underlying lessons about what was driving those particular expressions, instead of exploring the deeper realities, we contented ourselves that the fall of the facade meant there was no building underneath.

As a result, we are continually shocked to find that women keep acting like women, despite conditions having changed, and men keep acting like men. They respond in their own unique ways, no matter how you attempt to transplant them. To be sure, they share much in common, and are much varied, but in collection if you present each with the same conditions you will not see identical responses. They have a character that is not so easily changed but rather adapts its expression to whatever situation it is confronted with.

Men, of course, have their own distinct character. They’re more disagreeable, tend more to extremes of outcome, experience less negative emotion, are more aggressive, less sociable, more competitive, less risk-averse, less conscientious (and also therefore have higher tolerances for disgust). So if you put men, alone, in charge of building a house, without any input or incentives from women, you’re going to get a very different kind of house. All-male societies do occur, and tend to look pretty different from how things look when the women show up. The military has been, throughout history, generally an all male society. The mining towns of the American frontier are a good example of men, and not only men but men isolated as such (adventurers and, on their own building a society. Eventually the women showed up, mostly in the form of prostitutes, but whatever their situation they were still women and started demanding things like schools and charity efforts and law and order and proper care given to material needs. And later, when the farmers and their families showed up things were quite different. The world of the mining town before those interventions was dangerous, competitive, raucous, risky, messy, extractive, opportunistic, individualistic, minted fortunes as well as ruined them, and had quite a focus on short term gains and pleasure. Of course, these were mostly single men looking to make their fortune in a dangerous and uncertain venture, not an average cross section of men, much less humanity. But they were still men, if somewhat extreme, untempered examples. A wilder companion to the more cooperative and regimented venturesome hierarchy of the military. (Our modern military is, in fact, quite a different beast from militaries of the past, being the product of long refinement and social feedback. If you want to picture a proper all-male military you’re better off picturing the Mongol Horde or the armies of Alexander than the American military.)

However different both might be, they reflect the male approach: willing to confront risk and danger for the chance of exceptional outcomes, highly competitive, willing to enter the wilderness to either bring something back or make something out of it (and themselves), pursue much fewer comforts and provisions for secondary needs, and are far more goal focused than socially focused.

So how might one describe such an approach?