I think there’s a mistake being made in many corners of our culture. And it explains a lot. How conservatives failed to pass on their values, why the educational system is more essential to the character of a culture than its government, the decentralized and social nature of the current revolution in thought, all the things so many people are concerned about. And it is a failure to appreciate the nature or extent of the power of the left, or what might be more accurately conceived of as the feminine aspect of the social-political dyad of humanity. 
    It is the masculine, generally, that changes the course of a culture, because it itself is the least secure and most changeable. The masculine can be eliminated and selected in massively disproportionate numbers (and puts itself willingly in that position), causing great changes to the population. And it is more variable by nature. And it is more singular, disagreeable, extreme, risky, and unidimensional. And all this, together, makes it the most likely engine for advancement into new spaces as well as the frontier of adaptation. And it shoulders much of the cost of that adaptation, which is often very high as a proportion of that population. Adaptation is a positive process that achieves its results at the cost of a massive glut of death and failure. And people tend to notice those sorts of things, so the masculine gets a certain amount of attention, positive and negative. In part because the costs are ao great, in part because it’s very important to acknowledge and take advantage of the benefits when something or someone does rise out of that maelstrom to succeed. 
    But. The feminine is the vessel of stability for the species, and of the civilization. It does the actual work of maintaining the culture through fundamental networks of connectivity and administration, which includes evaluation of members and distribution of goods. It is the engine where much of the real daily work of maintaining the species and the society goes on. And it is extremely easy to underestimate just how powerful those forces are, without them needing to ever raise their heads above the crowd. They operate with the power of a tide from within the flow of the culture. And so they are less visible, less singular and easy to pin down or even understand how they operate. 
    Masculine efforts may open up new channels by their brute efforts, or create rocks and obstacles, even dams that obstruct or redirect possible pathways, but the power of the flow of history is in the feminine. Broadly speaking, this hashes out in the relationship between actual men and actual women, but it’s more archetypal than it is specifically sex-based. 
    Because the sexes are so closely tied to those super-personalities, though, changes in the relationship between the sexes on a broad scale can have systemic social and political effects. When they change positions, when they alter the ways in which they engage with one another, when there is a major shift in the balance of their respective powers or in the available arenas for those powers to be expressed, when they become come more or less connected or dependent on one another, all of these sorts of changes restructure society from the ground up. How could they not? This relationship is what the species is.
    I think it is possible for both masculine and feminine to err by catastrophic failure and by catastrophic success. Disaster results from both because, for the species as a whole, it is the dialogue and the relationship that is the actual source of the strength and health of society, and this relationship is compromised by any action that disables it. 
    The form that this disaster may take can vary quite a bit depending on whether it is the masculine or feminine that rises or falls, or some combination of both. In fact it doesn’t really matter what trajectory either takes, or what positions, so long as the relationship is compromised. So long as the dialogue is broken. When that happens, society is headed for a disaster. 
    And I believe that, even apart from the sins and misunderstandings in the social and political arenas that have arisen to estrange masculine and feminine from one another, there is such a deep division emerging at a systemic level in our society in this most basic of all human relationships, the relation of the species to itself across its primary division, that disaster of some sort of almost unavoidable. We have such distrust, such dysfunction, such lack of community, such lack of understanding, such disappointment, such resentment, that it is becoming hard to justify the partnership at all, or even comprehend it or its value. 
    And that is a literal will to destruction for a society. That is a self-imposed death sentence. If that most basic knowledge has not been passed on, nothing can take its place or save us from the long-term consequences. That is a house divided.
     And we do not have the slightest idea how to fix this divide. Or at least we don’t have many useful ideas that wouldn’t make the breakdown in dialogue worse. This dialogue is the lifeblood of a civilization. It begins at the level of individuals and scales up to the level of the social super-personalities, the archetypes, the Anima and Animus.
    We’re all in the position today of watching a marriage fall apart, and it is the marriage that is our society. And we don’t have any clue how to fix it. Blame is insufficient, as there is plenty to go around. The causal chains could be chased back into antiquity, trying to figure out who should apologize first and for what misunderstanding or misstep or indignity.
   For all that wise men can throw their stones into the tide, it won’t mean anything if women (or other representatives of the feminine) don’t take up their ideas and guide the flow of the current of life around them. Men, even smart men, simply don’t have the tools to accomplish that, and it is a power so diverse and distributed as be almost incomprehensible in its complexity and subtlety. It is a networked intercoherence of shared values, shared resources, shared concerns, shared stories, and more. It is both everywhere and nowhere. And the masculine is curiously maladapted to engage it on its own terms. 
    Being a rock thrower means you disrupt the flow, even when it’s for the purposes of good. You are an imposition, an offense, a destructive disturbance with collateral impact. The feminine isn’t just strong, it is strong beyond belief, because it operates in the principle of a compound pulley. By this means a single hand can move a great ship, without any excessive display of strength or excess, because the whole load is pulled in a thousand parts from a thousand different joints. Everywhere the system hangs together and takes a turn, a loop of cord is run round, so one tiny tug is multiplied across a thousand tiny fulcrums and pulls the weight of the whole society along. That is feminine power. 
     Our new communication technology is the new cord of our society, one far longer and more extensive than any conceived before. Where in times past the extent of any system of such pulleys was limited by the local community and its means of connection and transmission, social media forms a silken cord that may be wrapped round the shoulders of every person in every corner of the nation, raising a web round every corner and every institution in the whole of the society. But it’s very hard to tell from where it is being pulled, and where it is being pulled to. 
     Archimedes claimed he could move the whole world if he only had a lever long enough, and he also knew that you could pull any weight with the smallest of motions if you only had a cord long enough and enough corners to wrap it round. Mechanical advantage and force multiplication are much less easy to understand and trace than mere strength of arms or display of force, but they are as real in the physics of social and psychological interaction as they are in the physical world, and you underestimate them at your peril. Not only do we lack the tools to resist such a tug, we can often scarecly even comprehend from whence it derives or toward what it truly aims. 
    I cannot fault either left or right in the current battle. Because I cannot see any possible solution that does not involve healing the rift between them, and declaring blame or victory for one side or the other has never been a good tactic for restoring conjugal bliss. Victory for either side is only another kind of condemnation to a further extreme and devolution. And who knows where that would end? The left might do everything to us. And the right might do nothing. And we err if we think either is sustainable for such a civilization. Either could destroy us, benevolent as both would imagine their unhindered action to be.
    Having said that, the diagnosis is at least clearer than we think. We do understand this sickness. It’s well-known. What is it that is wrong, what is it that’s happening? It’s fundamentally a dying marriage. And we can approach it as such. It’s in really, really bad shape. It’s a career-breaker. But it’s intelligible, it’s not a new and incomprehensible kind of problem. It’s a bad relationship. And we can approach it through that lens. And perhaps begin to find the cures.