The Serpent's Egg

["Jurriaan Bendien" <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Les,

I have no disagreement with your remarks, in fact, I haven't come across
anything that I disagree with you about yet ! Of course the article is
rather ridiculous, even although it it true that poor white boys are
failing. This is an important fact with regard to the future evolution of
European neo-fascist trends.

What is interesting is that the Minister, while admitting the existence of
social classes, as a fact of life which the education system can do nothing
about, is now focusing on feminism as a possible bogey to explain poor
performance by poor white boys. It is quite a "sophisticated" or subtle
theme, because it could be taken to imply that somehow boys are being
"weakened" by middleclass feminist morality, or even that boys are being
turned into little girls due to feminist policies, resulting in poor
performance; the tacit implication being that boys must be boys in order to
score well. Or, more positively, that girls ought to help poor white boys
more, but it isn't happening, despite feminist rhetoric, or something like
that.

Another way of looking at it, is that the feeling being conveyed is that
boys are being mothered too much by the education system. It is a sort of
gobbledygook, which could suggest all sorts of things to the public, for
example, a connection between models of sexuality and gender which influence
educational outcomes, said to be more decisive than poverty (in some social
model, poverty and mental illness is simply the product of sexual failure,
or social failure in the sexual area). But an important question to ask is
why the Minister resorts to this tactic, what social or cultural conjuncture
gives rise to this (he is the son of Ralph Milliband). In other words, who
is he really trying to attack, and with what aim.

The most general tactic of politics in any class-divided society is that of
"divide and rule", in other words, you divide the dominated classes and at
the same time seek to unite the ruling classes, through buying-off
strategies, co-optation, blaming, victimisation, demonstrations of power and
superiority, manufacturing consensus and so forth. Which is one reason why
many people hate politics and regard it as unhealthy, they would engage in
it, only if the situation forces them to assert themselves politically
(associated problems are the refusal to take personal responsibility for
anything beyond oneself, the avoidance of excess or unwanted attention, the
lack of belief in the ability of political processes to change anything for
the better, the lack of trust and general cynicism about other people).
Nobody really wants to be caught up in the irreducible moral duplicity of
class hierarchies (the ultimate inability to reconcile sectional interest
with general interest involved), they would rather ignore it as much as they
can, never mind probing it to its roots, and live the most happy compromise
they can find.

Of course, the dominated classes can operate the "divide and rule" tactic in
same way, seeking to split the elites while unifying their own class.

Point is, the themes within which this tactic is contained and repeated
shift and change all the time, it is a sort of "art". Feminism is not a
class-based ideology, it refers to generalisations about 3 billion women
from all sorts of social classes and ethnic backgrounds, from extreme
poverty to maximal wealth. These generalisations are so general, that they
are pretty useless mostly, and in order to give them some meat, feminist
ideology has to be linked to the interests, conditions and morality of some
specific group of women in a specific society.

But this is often done via all sorts of malabstractions, because feminism
lacks the characteristics of a universalist ideology of human emancipation,
it must "marry" with at least one other ideology. It seeks the emancipation
of women on the basis of the "women first" principle, claiming that other
ideologies cannot contain the special interests of women (exclusivity
principle), which is often false in many cases, and just a ploy for women to
advance their own interests at the expense of other women and/or men.  It is
sometimes a bit like the ideology of "true socialism" Marx sometimes talks
about. Whether feminism is reactionary or progressive, can be evaluated only
by looking at who advocates it, and what their real constituency is. Within
the elites, as among the working classes, fashions change. So paradoxically,
the real feminist might not even be the person who calls herself a feminist.

As regards myself, bit of blog: I am happy to admit I sometimes have
specific misogynist moods these days. Never had them before, wasn't raised
that way. This is more a product of the treatment I experienced here, and my
continued relative hostility to the emotional world, sexuality and
conceptions of gender by most Dutch people, their propensity for
exploitation and theft with a smile, their intrusiveness and disrespect for
personal privacy, their prurient, psychoanalysing interest in the sex lives
of other citizens, their roughness, coldness, blase behaviour and
banalities, their propensity for projecting their own pathology onto you,
their fake arrogant confidence, their propensity for wishing to act as
though they are somebody's parent, without consent, their propensity for
mindless aggression and characterless teasing, on the basis of attacking and
manipulating the vulnerabilities of others.

All these factors tend to demotivate me and disorganise me (sometimes chaos
becomes deliberate, since I do not wish to be trapped into the patterns of
others who invade my personal sphere), and I feel alienated, more so than in
the previous country I lived in, where you just had a lot more personal
space and civil respect, you can get trapped in nihilistic depression. I
would be very hesitant to have any affective intimacies with Dutch women
ever again, even if they seem attractive. Generally I have liked Dutch
people older than 55 or 60 the best, because by that time, the puberal,
competitive, mindlessly aggressive, racist or status thing is generally no
longer so important. Hedonist ideology can become oppressive too: it
prohibits any excuse for not enjoying life, and indeed it incurs wrath,
because by denying attention, people feel that their deepest beliefs about
love and life are being attacked. So you can have this damned-if-you-do and
damned-if-you-don't thing.

But of course the task is not to grumble or indict, but to turn these
negative feelings around into something constructive - not to dwell on the
psychopathology of others, or that of yourself. Sigh. That isn't easy to do,
even if you intellectually have the answers already (and I usually have, at
the abstract level I have learnt little really new since 1987). It is more a
question of personal discipline and will, motivators, demeanour and
lifestyle, and shutting out what happens around you. I am inclined to be
expressive when I shouldn't be, and should probably just do my own thing,
not publish anything, and so on. Frustrations and hasty impulses just make
me scatterbrained.

The problem is that as soon as you start to show real performance, real
creativity, real behavioural improvement again, you can attract all sorts of
attention that you aren't looking for, often on the immoral, corrupt basis
to which I referred at the beginning of this paragraph. So then you have to
have a thick skin, whereas I have in reality some thin, sensitive patches of
skin. And the sensitive patches are what people like to zoom in on,
obviously not always with good intentions, but in order to affirm
themselves. So anyway, to find an appropriate context in which I can express
what I wish to express, can be extraordinarily difficult. I have to think
about that often.

Some retro lyrics about my themes:

'cause we're living in a world of fools
Breaking us down
When they all should let us be
We belong to you and me

- Bee Gees

She (what did we do that was wrong)
Is Having (we didn't know it was wrong)
Fun (fun is the one thing that money can't buy)

- The Beatles

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

- Bob Dylan



Regards,

Jurriaan