Playing The Long Game

There is a group known as The Dreaming Tree of Life Sisterhood that I tend to both agree and disagree with in various ways.  And given the crossroads that humanity is currently at right now, hashing out these differences could not be any more timely.

On their website, which the reader is free to peruse in detail, they note that patriarchy is the root of all evil, that system is destroyed our planet, and must be stopped.  And that the forces of evil (however defined) will do anything to maintain that system.  No argument from me there.  However, I do have a few points of contention with what they believe, which are important so we do not throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. 

First of all, the broader New Age Movement does not have to be evil.  Regardless of its partial Theosophical origins, it is currently a decentralized, leaderless movement.  Or more accurately, it is more than one movement.  Discernment, not discarding it completely, is what is really in order.

Second, not all spiritual beings are necessarily evil either.  Some are, of course, and often pose as good (the oldest trick in the book), but again, that calls for discernment, not wholesale rejection.  And the idea that humanity was created and genetically engineered by evil spiritual entities for the purpose of destroying all Earth-Life is questionable at best.

Third, as Buckminster Fuller (and Nikola Tesla) would be spinning in his grave about now, technology, however advanced, does not have to be evil either.  It all depends on how it is used, how it is designed, and who controls it.  Technology merely for technology's sake is stupid and wasteful--granted.   Appropriate technology, however advanced, in the right hands has the power to solve so many problems.  Going full Neo-Luddite, on the other hand, will not solve anything, and will simply lock us into the current feedback loop from the failed and destructive technologies of the past.  Nor will it solve the problem of patriarchy either--keep in mind the Amish are about as patriarchal as one could get, for example, as a quick Google search will show.

Fourth, neither patriarchy nor capitalism can be defeated by austerity (ecological or otherwise) or retreatism, as that strategy will backfire mightily and get us permanently stuck in a bad place and still end up destroying the planet.  The only way to defeat them both is to give them the one thing they cannot survive for very long--ABUNDANCE.  Capitalism requires scarcity to function, that's why they manufacture so much artificial scarcity.  And capitalism must die since it is also unsustainably based of growth for the sake of growth, the ideology of the cancer cell which evenutally kills its host.  And patriarchy is the primary protection racket used to prop up the Ponzi scheme of capitalism.

Fifth, while Women do need to take over in order to save the planet and all of its inhabitants, the "power over" paradigm needs to be jettisoned and replaced with the "power within", "power to", and "power with and through" paradigms.  Thus, revoking individual civil rights from either men or Women needs to be out of the question, as is punishing anyone for thoughtcrimes or victimless crimes of any kind.  How can it even be enforced without the "power over" paradigm to prop up such "carceral feminism"?  It simply does not compute. 

Yes, individuals do have natural and inalienable rights.  There, I said it.  That is not a patriarchal concept, simply fact.  And thus what Riane Eisler calls the "dominator" model of society needs to be replaced with the "partnership" model.

And finally, integration of Women into the current system (or at least the appearance of such) at first is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, and I believe it is in fact a prerequisite for Women taking it over and destroying it from within and ultimately replacing it with Matriarchy.  Fighting patriarchal capitalism from the inside is infinitely more effective than fighting from the outside, especially since we have already established that starving the beast via austerity will backfire.  As for such integration and taking over being what the forces of evil really want, keep in mind that their supposed plan is failing in terms of their most crucial plank of all: nuclear power.  The nuclear renaissance that the evil spiritual hierarchy that the Dreaming Tree of Life Sisterhood speaks of simply has not materialized, and is now in terminal decline due to increasing cost, fear of another Chernobyl or Fukushima, cheap natural gas, and especially due to the rapidly falling cost and rising cost-effectiveness of renewables like solar, wind, hydro, wave/tidal, and geothermal, and even algae fuels.  Thus, the biggest litmus test--support of nuclear power--fails miserably in recent years, which only further proves that patriarchy is indeed in its final death throes, Goddess willing.

As for nuclear power being necessary to thwart climate change, it is of course too little too late for that to work. To replace all fossil fuels with nuclear power, we would need to build and additional 14,000 such power plants worldwide, each taking 10-15 years to build and requiring a LOT of money, resources, and yes, fossil fuel energy to build and operate.  The time to do that was decades ago, and that window has since closed forever.  It is bascially a zero-sum game between renewables and nuclear nuclear in terms of resources and opportunity costs, and at this juncture we need to focus it all on renewables, efficiency, and conservation if we want to have a chance to save the planet.  Nuclear has basically gone from once being "too cheap to meter" to now being too slow and expensive to matter.

In other words, in order to defeat patriarchy for good, we really need to play the long game, one that Women are currently winning.  And Goddess willing, they will prevail--if they don't end up unwittingly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory due to ideological purism, of course.