D: The Great Tribal Forgetting: Salvation from the Law of Limited Competition “Mankind has […] been suffering from a psychological and spiritual imbalance. Imbalance causes frustration, and frustration causes fear. And fear makes for a bad trip. Man has been on a bad trip for a long time now. The human race will begin solving its problems on the day that it ceases taking itself so seriously” -- Curse of Greyface, Dischordianism ***** But here is one of the most amazing occurrences in all of human history. When the thinkers of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries were finally compelled to admit that the entire structure of thought in our culture had been built on a profoundly important error, absolutely nothing happened. Obviously they didn't care to do anything. They didn't care to go back to all the foundation thinkers of our culture and ask how their work would have changed if they'd known the truth about our origins. I fear the truth is that they wanted to leave things as they were. They wanted to go on forgetting , , , and that's exactly what they did. The foundation thinkers of our culture didn't hesitate to assume that the whole of the human story was all leading up to "Us" -- the people of our culture -- and this is the way it's been taught in our schools every since. Unfortunately, like so much of the thinking that was done at this point, this was so grotesquely false to facts as to make flat-earth cranks look like intellectual giants. -- Daniel Quinn, The Story of B ***** “History cannot be understood apart from perceptions of sexual difference. One of the primary objectives of Eve’s Seed is to explain how people’s views of sexual difference have shaped history. …. Karl Marx had it wrong. Class has, to be sure, been a major factor in history; but class itself is a derivative concept that is based on the ultimate causative power in history: sex. Marx’s famous formulation must be revised: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of struggles based on the division of our species into two sexes, jealousies emanating from this division, exaggerations of the differences between the sexes, misunderstandings about sexual reproductive power, and metaphors derived from sex. Together, these closely related matters constitute the most important, but largely neglected, set of motive forces in human history. Control -- or the claim of control -- over the means of reproduction has been even more fundamental to history than has control of the means of production. The real importance of insecure masculinity, again, is that those men who suffer from it are most apt to seek power in order to compensate for their self doubts. Sexually linked motivations have been evident in men engaging in war since the earliest times. -- Robert McElvaine, Eve’s Seed: Masculine Insecurity, Metaphor, and the Shaping of History; and Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes and the Course of History *****
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