Idea: Modern liberal democracies allow society’s natural managers to pursue their niche interests, which has created a structural problem with political representation. Until this is resolved, state managed rights and responsibilities will stagnant and regress.
Gender ideology wants to re-establish gender stereotypes that harm women and girls, put males into women’s prisons, and make women’s sport redundant. I’m sure given enough time wider society will understand the harm this ideology is doing, but why should women have to wait for this? This is where the importance of political representation by people directly affected by an issue becomes relevant. Simply, political representation shortens the time to resolve political disputes.
The question is who are the women best suited to represent the political interests of women as a whole? I’ve highlighted the small number of women who are successfully challenging gender ideology, but they represent a tiny minority of the women who could challenge it. I’ve also suggested that political activism has been taken over by a ‘B team’ of average people now that the smartest people from previously disadvantaged groups are free to pursue their niche interests. It’s this latter group of ‘smartest people’ that I think represent the majority of women that are required to become more politically involved. But who are they?
Firstly, this perception is just a means to illustrate some ideas; it’s not the only place where you can find smart women! I’ve worked in both the academic and commercial world, and for me the smartest women are more often found in the business world. You can succeed in academia if you achieve certain endpoints (generally your publication record) and this is heavily dependent on factors such as memory, being comfortable with abstract complexity, your work ethic, etc. In contrast, the business world requires a much broader skill set, especially in the social and emotional sphere. In my experience excellent managers, for example, are as good at productively resolving the petty melodramas that often plague workplaces as they are at the technical aspects the workplace is meant to be focused on.
The business world is full of these smart women, and I think these are the women that are required to be more politically engaged. But how? I think a new movement is required. We’ve had first- and second-wave feminism followed by the incoherent and harmful mess of third wave feminism created by B team activists. Maybe now if women from the business world and beyond are to have some influence we might call it fourth quarter feminism.
What would be the characteristics of this movement? It will be led by smart people so I think it’ll be naturally orientated towards liberation feminism over equality feminism, although I doubt the members of this movement will be interested in labels. I’ve mentioned liberation feminism before and its relationship to intelligence. As I'll discuss in other posts, I think liberation feminism, and in reality the deeper and broader truth it’s derived from, is more cognitively demanding than the simple, conservative position of believing the status quo should be equally divided, so smart people are more likely to prefer it.
It's obvious to ask, “so what will this involve then?”. Well, to quote Germaine Greer in the link above, “I don’t know”. This reveals that people have to accept this movement will involve a process of discovery, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some features that will be common along this path.
For example, there will be an open recognition amongst non-activist, ordinary women there’s a structural problem with their political representation in modern societies. And despite wanting to just live their lives, they will have to have some degree of political involvement. I imagine that engagement will need some unifying identifier like ‘The Conversation’ or similar. And this conversation will be just an everyday activity that has the essential feature of recognising that action will be regularly required to deal with the structural problem mentioned above.
To illustrate what this might involve I think it’s useful to think of how these smart women deal with problems in their daily working lives. As I said above, these women often have to manage melodramas created by people less intelligent than themselves. Observing how they do this, I’ve noticed various features.
Smart people are quick to decide whether people can be reasoned with or not, and over what realistic time-scale. If time and the intelligence of the person allows, a smart person will see the benefit of being patient with someone. However, it’s frequently the case that people simply aren’t intelligent enough to be reasoned with within some acceptable time-scale so appropriate strategies are required.
Often, leveraging authority has to come into play. This will involve demanding they behave in a way that isn’t disruptive if they wish to remain within the team or group. Another way I've seen effective managers work is to avoid problems such as those described above by building a team in a way that creates balance in various personalities and how they react to the ebb and flow of a work environment, while avoiding people that might cause problems via effective recruitment.
How would the approach above work on a larger scale? Being smart, it’s likely women who’re involved in The Conversation will have some social and economic power. This could be via their jobs, for example. Political parties are dependent on donations to fund their activity, and smart women could be involved in generating those funds and influence who donates and why based on political candidates and their policies. At the extreme, these women could be involved in organising their own candidates for elections to put pressure on more established parties to adopt policies that aren’t against women’s interests.
Other than influencing political recruitment and party policies, I suspect another strategy would be to find ways to communicate directly with ordinary people rather than waste time with the fools, charlatans, and ideologues that plague political discussions, particularly on social media. This could be by setting up websites so ordinary people could be involved in The Conversation. It’s difficult for me to imagine the smartest women I know thinking Twitter, for example, is an effective medium to genuinely influence public policy.
For clarity, I’ve focussed this post on women and feminism. But as I suggested in the Political B Team, this structural problem with political representation is much wider. I suspect The Conversation will become recognised as a broad, unavoidable, and everyday activity that’s required to manage this chronic problem with poor political representation, especially as this has made it easier for people with authoritarian traits to have influence. We have a situation where society’s natural managers are making sure the highly complex world we live in is functioning efficiently but this has left unresolved social issues in the hands of people who simply aren’t intelligent enough to resolve them. We need these managers to become involved again or social progress will stagnate or regress.