Women are made to stand for the entropy driving the universe toward more and more disorder until God (reified Reason) fades away to nothing. Just another irrational power game justifying  of one group of humans dominating another.

Even many secularists get suckered into playing this game --  Richard Dawkins  as, for instance, when he implied that women trying to draw some demarcation lines of their own (which is always a patriarchal no-no, since women are intrinsically without structure) is just so much whining and silliness.

The lines he is inclined to draw between rationality and irrationality are consistent with a notion of Western culture being quintessentially rational and cultures where women allegedly or actually suffer more than in Western culture being considered wholly irrational.  But the real differences are hardly as stark as our metaphysical/religious conceptions make out.

1. You’re just expressing emotions. Emotions don’t mean anything to me, so I am free to ignore them.

2. You may have said something, but it has no meaning. Can you say it again, in a way that has meaning?

3. Perhaps there is something wrong with your sexuality if you think that way?

4. You seem to be nuts!

5. No, I still can’t quite grasp what you are getting at or why.

6. Are you trying to say this to fulfill your biological urges or reproductive whims? It seems rather narrow, and I cannot grasp it from my heights.

Dear Friend

There is no "human nature" apart from a certain desire to expand creatively and a certain desire to accommodate those close to us and belong.   Creative expansion need not be considered negatively, in a winner takes it all sense.   One can give to others through one's creativity.   Perhaps the problem is with having any fixed idea of human nature in relation to it being either good or evil. It is neither.

The trend to want more and more does not occur in a vacuum but is part of the capitalist cultural matrix.  The market can only expand if there are enough consumers to drive it forward.   We are encouraged, therefore, to want things we do not need, in order to expand the market.  

Communism, on the other hand, may not allow for the need to take risks and to experiment, which are features of life that make us feel alive.   That may be down to trying to fix a concept of  "human nature" as being socially, rather than individually, defined.

My writing draws from Nietzsche, through Bataille and Marechera.   They represent different human generations, each attempting to come to terms with social reality as it unfolds.   What attracted me to these writers is that they do all, generally, have a theory of what it means to be human, but in a way that doesn't posit or necessitate a particular social or political agenda.   They each have an axe to grind, but they are all thoroughly honest about their own mentalities -- what cultural theorists call "self-reflexive".  So, you can say, well Nietzsche wanted to rid the world of monotheistic religion, whilst he tended to be a bit misogynist.  Bataille wanted to rid the world of wage-slavery.   Marechera hated colonialism and Zimbabwean "socialism".   But they all transcend their respective hostilities and agendas, because you can take much more from them than that, by way of their keen observation of life.   You can also learn much about how the individual's psyche is structured.   You learn there is a death instinct and a creative drive.  All these writers have pushed themselves to their limits in pursuit of knowledge, so you also learn what it looks like when somebody does this.   This is "intellectual shamanism" -- the free exploration of one's subjectivity.  Most people would rather do anything else, but it is the only way to make an ongoing and fresh cost-benefit analysis in order to effectively run one's life.

If everybody did this, certainly the system would be fixed.  People would no longer crave what they didn't really need, like petty addicts.   People would no longer moralize about what others are doing with their "human nature" because they would be so busy investigating their own.  The fact that most people don't even know what they want, but are inclined to go along with another person's program means they are easily manipulated and their individual nature is distorted.   They are pulled out of shape and turned into something they don't necessarily want to be, and they don't seem to care.

Probably, though, not enough people want to take up the challenge of radical individualism, in order to find out what they want.   I think global warming will take its course and reduce the global population, whereupon there will be a different social order to the present one, with a different sort of elitism.   Perhaps there will be no pretence at democracy, since the idea of democracy seems to have run its course, with an increasingly cynical leadership (such as in the US) that does not care what the populace thinks of it.  I imagine different sorts of societies will spring up, based on formulas not yet tried.

Anyway, not my problem.  My program is to mock those who decline to act for themselves whilst they use the rhetoric that humans are just animals and we cannot help ourselves.  I concur with them that they are apes.

Jennifer

Apelike levels of consciousness predominate when people are under stress. This is most extreme in the case of war, but also true with the simple fact of an excess population in relation to natural resources and space. In Marechera's drama, the black veteran and the white one have survived the WAR but lost much of their sanity, since they have attempted to seal off their wartime atrocities behind a wall of unconsciousness. The illusion that people maintain is that this can be successfully achieved. It cannot. Uncontrolled regression (for there is a controlled sort), even temporary uncontrolled regression, is costly. Both men were lawyers but have now become tramps. They may have thought the damage they were inflicting was far from home, but it was on women close to them. The pretext for war is that males must protect the women and children close to them, but it is precisely the women and children who are killed by war. At the same, time while the war lasts it seems to free the libido.

I used to suffer from world weariness, but the wall says that too was nothing. I cannot get away from you, though that’s the only thing I want from life, from the whole last ounce of the universe. You also want to get away, but like me, you can’t, and for the same reason. I am your wall, and you are my wall. And the game we tried during the war of mounting each other like dogs in severe heat has not yet been settled. ( p 46)