Mike Lorrey has written another terrific essay, this time
on the causes of the statistical difference between men's
and women's attitudes. What he's written is entirely
consistent with recent sociological findings, e.g., see
Francis Fukiyama's book "Trust", or Joel Kotkin's book
"Tribes", which analyze many different societies.
Mike wrote
> I think though, that it would behoove us to look at why exactly women
> tend to have a greater preference for security over freedom. I don't
> accept blindly the assertion that it is genetic. If it is not, then
> protocols can be fashioned to help mitigate such phenomena.
>
> High freedom societies that are stable and relatively immune or
> resistant to fascist takeover seems to be exclusively the realm of those
> which are constructed on a basis of high trust between individuals
> outside the family unit. The US government was constructed in such a
> society (NOTE: High trust between individuals has nothing to do with
> trust in government. The founding fathers trusted each other with the
> reins of government, but not the instruments of government per se) of
> white males who knew each other, and trusted those they didn't know
> because they were also educated white males (i.e. recognized members of
> the leadership class). Many of these white males were of the same
> religious denomination, were Masons, and had attended the same colleges
> and been members of the same state legislatures.
>
> In this society, women and blacks were not trusted with the
> responsibilities of citizenship, they were seen as less than capable of
> bearing the 'white man's burden', and female blacks were considered
> least capable of all.
>
> When later on first blacks, then women, were enfranchised as full
> citizens, there were significant movements who continued to oppose this,
> either officially, unofficially, or systemically, which demonstrated to
> the newly enfranchised groups that they were still not fully trusted for
> reasons they had absolutely no control over, they had no hope of ever
> earning through merit the trust of a full citizen with a large amount of
> the white male populace, and that through that lack of trust, they
> learned that the words that white men spoke in the open were not to be
> trusted, because they could not be depended upon to follow through on
> their lofty pronouncements of equal rights.
>
> At the same time, the country was in desperate need of labor to build
> the expansionist dreams of its leaders, westward into the frontier, and
> forward with technology and infrastructure, such that immigration from
> non-Anglo countries vastly increased, and the lack of trust inherent in
> these non-Anglo cultures resisted the forces of assimilation, thus
> diluting further the sum of trust between all individuals.
>
> As a result, it is not surprising that women, being the last
> enfranchised group, is the least trusting toward others, even between
> themselves, to the point that studies show that all groups: black males,
> black females, and white females all demonstrate greater trust for white
> males than for members of their own group, and that these groups all
> tend toward reliance on legal measures that prefer security to freedom.
<end>
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