Escaping the Longhouse

In the paranoiac fantasies of modern progressivism, the most widespread and deeply-seated is that of the egalitarian conceit, the blank slate notion of equivalence between sexes, races and cultures. There being no basis to differentiate, there can be no basis to discriminate or compartmentalise. However, as natural differences diverge from each other, specialities and deviations emerge that don’t fit this paradigm. The conceit becomes an enforceable norm, and from it come discursive and coercive instruments of multiculturalism, anti-racism and feminism.

“Where comparison between groups is concerned, equality of outcome is far more pertinent as a measure of equality than is currently allowed. It makes sense to start from the expectation that all groups would normally be distributed in roughly equal proportions along all measures of social activity: to expect, therefore, an equality of outcome, and to take any divergence from this as a reasonably safe indication that opportunities are not yet equal”[1]. This is an arbitrary definition, as it does not consider the geographical, cultural and social differentiation that constructed these inequalities/differentiations in the first place. But such arbitrariness is common in this line of thinking. Definable reality is easily ignored when the overwhelming concern is for the provision of equal resources for diverse groups. The mechanisms to actually achieve this, by levelling down and homogenising cultures along a unitary definition, are acceptable as inequality is an aberration as Phillips defines it. To deviate from the norm, particularly along lines of race or gender, can only be seen as a departure from the supposedly natural position of Rousseauian egalitarianism.

Power relations are inverted. The weak dominate the strong as bioleninist IQ shredders enforce a dogma of equal outcomes and institutionalised flattening (with a subsequent expansion of managerialism and administrative compliance). The weak don’t inherit the earth so much as they inherit the bureaucracies, the upper and mid-tier agencies that interfere so as to make sure no one is excluded or discriminated against. Welcome to the longhouse.

The longhouse “refers at once to our increasingly degraded mode of technocratic governance; but also to wokeness, to the ‘progressive,’ ‘liberal,’ and ‘secular’ values that pervade all major institutions”. Its “most important feature, and why it makes such a resonant (and controversial) symbol of our current circumstances, is the ubiquitous rule of the Den Mother. More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior” [2].

Feminisation is symbiotic with the egalitarian conceit. The overseeing function of the den mother finds its real world equivalents in the HR manager and the therapist, and subsequently in the expansion of female-centric occupations of modern administration and social care. “Think of feminization not as the promulgation of characteristics belonging to women—whatever those would be—but as the promulgation of those characteristics traditionally associated with women. Think of values like nurturing and caring, emotion and sentimentality, connection and community, passivity and submission, vanity and appearance, cooperation and equality, openness and access, manipulation and influence. These are the values on the ascendancy in our public and private lives”[3]. These characteristics are ubiquitous in corporate and governmental worlds, from equity initiatives and anti-racist hiring policies (which target the lowest common denominator) to the apathy and permissiveness toward crime and social disorder increasingly prevalent in Western countries, as in the response to BLM rioting or the disproportionate focus on right-wing violence relative to the wider problems of drug and gang-based violence or immigrant violence which effect many cities, from London to Washington to Stockholm. Nurturant and emotive responses in governance are bywords for tolerance of disorder. The response can never be a crackdown on crime or a reduction in the provision of services by the state to reduce dependency. A competitive or martial ethos in the endowment of public goods or hiring in large bureaucracies (private and public) is anathema because of the potential for exclusion on the criteria of efficiency or competence. Inclusion becomes the primary purpose of governance, no matter the variegated matrix of identities, minorities and tribes that are out there.

This inversion of power relations creates a diminution of responsibility and consequently a vast network of buck-passing. Bureaucracy has always been a nightmare of unnecessary officialdom and self-aggrandising spin that suggests their department/centre/institution is vital to the running of a particular service or the providing of a particular good. But the spread of HR culture[4] and the therapeutic state[5] have created dominant narratives throughout these institutions that remove blame altogether, instead emplacing an ethos of care that aims to reduce conflict and prevent argument. Consensus is key, as it means that anybody outside that consensus can be browbeaten into conformity, otherwise accused of various modern crimes of racism, misogyny or an imagined phobia because they don’t think that the giving of care and concern to every minoritarian interest is the most pressing matter.

“In a 2019 report by the Knight Foundation, 59% of women said that promoting an inclusive society is more important than protecting free speech, whereas 71% of men said that protecting free speech is the more important value. Moreover, 58% of college men said it is never acceptable to shout down a speaker, whereas only 41% of women agreed that it is never acceptable to do so”[6]. Competition, argumentation and exclusivity (i.e. the capability to maintain a distinctive cultural position against homogenising tendencies) is swept aside by the moral revulsion of women who demand an unquestioned conformity.

Foucault’s analysis of the prison, the hospital and the school as the prisms of societal power[7] (their creation of facticity, their scientism of analysis) has transformed as the arc of the longhouse has besieged them. A system of feminised dispositions has replaced these sites of biopolitical power. It sits in a dual instantiation with Deleuze’s societies of control[8]. The obvious growth of surveillance technologies has not produced a corresponding network of policing or order. The prison, school and hospital are now sites of disorder, largely uncontrollable (just look at the growing chaos in prisons or the turnover rate for teachers due to pupil’s behaviour). These are not contradictory. The therapeutic state replaces biopolitics and instantiates an anarchic, schizophrenic set of rules. Following the feminised forms of sympathy required, power accrues to victim narratives and their progenitors. The overbearing mother (the black mammy) becomes the archetype, both ineffective and selective in its judgments. The only ones punished are those who question this system.

The longhouse is an archetypal abstraction of female traits and attitudes. Feminisation in society does not mean rule by women, but rule through traits common to them and their subsequent systematisation through bureaucratic rules and cultures. “Social psychological factors such as intolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty which translate to intolerance for political and social nonconformity; and greater susceptibility to feelings of threats posed by unconventional ideas and groups”[9]. These are common to myriad cultural debates, particularly that around transgenderism and LGBT rights. Pretending to be a woman has the same effect in that it propounds a direction toward conformity and the prizing of inclusivity over efficiency. Perspectival decisions are more important than results. The longhouse is the arc of femininity through bureaucratic procedure and political decision-making. The display of aggressive intentions, even in ersatz form in Western populism, is alien to the current body politic. To aggressively advocate one’s own collective interests is to sit outside acceptable opinion, unless it fits part of a victim narrative. In that case, violence is excusable so long as it isn’t institutional. Walking into the Capitol Building and stealing some artifacts is beyond the pale. Looting Target stores and burning down neighbourhoods is allowable. The former is male angst and destructive anti-establishment activity. The latter is the outcry of the downtrodden rather than an example of opportunism and simian idiocy.

Feminisation is also expansionary and technologically-reliant (to the point of paradox). It can be thought as an evolution of status competition in the stagflationary phase of a secular cycle, characterised by an elite growing beyond the means to accommodate their needs and desires[10]. A growth in elite numbers (those with college education within middle and upper managerial positions which women dominate) presents the need for new strategies to compete. Enter female forms of competition which complement or replace their pre-existing counterparts. Female competition is characterised by “(i) avoid interference competition, (ii) disguise competition, (iii) compete overtly only if high-ranked in the community, (iv) enforce equality among female peers and (v) use social exclusion”[11]. In other words, overt cooperation, flattened organisational structures (managerial growth out of proportion to staff levels or productivity), growth in networks and the development of consensus policies to overtake competition/argumentation.

“According to the data, there are only a handful of occupations in which the gender split comes close to being equal. Most of these are desk-bound jobs, with legal, social and cultural professionals, along with business and administration associate professionals and sales workers, all hovering around the 50% split between men and women”[12]. “The trend in numbers can be seen into the 2010’s as well. The number of HR management positions increased from 30.5 percent in 1980 to 44 percent in 2010 and white women are by far the largest group represented in HR management. This could be due to the idea that when women are put into management positions, they look for other women to fill roles and create more gender diversity within the field”[13]. These organisational strategies are inherently expansionary.

“Mobilised femininities”[14] of empathic support emerge that create an organisational culture that is sprawling. In female-dominated managerial and administrative functions, we can see a growth out of proportion with the productivity of work or redistribution of tasks. Take higher education, where increased administrative overhead has not reduced the workload of academic staff, but simply increased work generally to fill niches or create processes. Self-serving bureaucratism combines with feminised competitive tactics to produce an inflationary dividend of decreasing returns while increasing the size of the network and its points of contact. Central nodes are eliminated in favour of a flat structure based on unanimity.

Feminisation is a socio-economic evolution. The development of political forms and organisational loci (networks, conferences, committees) beyond the power of a national sovereign or central authority dictate new logics of power. In these, female competitive strategies predominate (ostracism, grouping, limitations on debate) as these forms do not directly strategise or use power, instead indirectly fashioning it discursively and ideologically. Sovereign power is replaced by network power, the martial leader toppled by the peacekeeper and the dais. Individual decision-making overtaken by the need for consensus.

Hakim noted this in relation to women’s expansion into the public spheres being down to the contraceptive revolution (technological reliance), the growth of administrative, desk-based roles and “the increasing importance of attitudes, values and personal preferences in lifestyle choices”[15]. Phillips and Taylor note something similar in the ubiquity of feminisation as an effect of post-industrial organisational patterns: “the segregation of women’s work from men’s conceals from many men workers the ways in which we are all becoming ‘women workers’ now; all subject to (in Harry Braverman’s phrase) a ‘degradation of labour’ which gives to all jobs the classic features of women’s employment”[16].

This is the ethos of post-industrial societies, where martial values have been lost in a globalised melange of internationalised homogenisation (i.e. diversity as the elimination of distinctive cultures). The loss of religious observance and growth of a cultural hodgepodge has been intertwined with this. There is no societal structure. Feminisation can then fill in the cracks as a mechanism for status-seeking and cultural orthodoxy. A cult of the feminine emerges which encourages abstract egalitarianism alongside an overbearing, mothering persona (that puts restrictions on the extent of competition, violence or aggression). There is no “men’s work” now as the industrial relations and technological complexes that created it have shifted via outsourcing and the growth of the service sector. The longhouse is an outgrowth of that sector and the administrative complexities and vagaries it entails.

But this dynamic is also incredibly fragile, reliant as it is on technologies (particularly birth control and computerisation of work) and post-industrial processes (the growth of the service and care sectors) to create parity with men. When crises hit, as with the coronavirus crisis, traditional gender norms takeover as subsidised childcare and long school hours can no longer be relied on to allow women to work 9-5 (or longer)[17]. Equally, the effect of these changes on demographic replacement spells longer-term issues as native displacement is excused by reduced fertility rates in the West. “Case studies of women who have achieved high status professional and managerial jobs tell us a lot more about the social processes involved. They show, for example, that such women have greatly reduced, or even eliminated, their work-life balance problems by remaining childless, in about half of all cases, or by lower fertility, as illustrated by one-child families”[18].

Interlocking phenomena develop as feminised bureaucracies encourage and inculcate immigration through the narrative of minoritarian concern and global humanitarianism. Don’t worry, there’s no great replacement, just a slow demographic ebb as native populations are pushed to the suburban peripheries all while being told how bigoted they are for moving in the first place or complaining about higher crime rates, lower social trust and higher rents/property prices.

Other long term consequences are emerging from this experimental blend of post-industrial politico-economic organisation and feminised value structures. The change in skillsets for occupational growth[19] has coincided with stagnant productivity across post-industrial economies. They are both unproductive and expansionary as these career paths grow beyond the upper bound of their need. That mechanical skills are correlated with lower pay and by extension lower prestige shows what modern economies have become, corporate bureaucracies with middle-heavy administrative structures that are innately multiplicative while providing little value added. Economies that don’t build and are infrastructure-deficient. Where substantive productivity exists, it is concentrated in niche sectors that provide the majority of capital while having limited interconnection with the wider national economy (i.e. finance, advanced engineering, materials production, etc.).

Regarding historical matrilocal and matrilineal social structures, they have been noted to thrive in primitive contexts, where agricultural specialisation and animal domestication was lacking. “There is an intuition from previous literature that matriliny is a potentially unstable form of kinship system organization; interestingly, our results appear to support this hypothesis in the sense that most of our observed associations were negative (with the exceptions of the female-based inheritance patterns mentioned above), with matriliny and matrilocality occurring less often with other cultural traits than would be expected by chance. In particular, a number of hypotheses have linked the loss of matriliny to subsistence and economic factors, particularly shifts from horticulture and relative economic equality to intensifying agriculture, animal domestication and increasing economic inequality”[20].

That feminisation is so reliant on technology now is an irony. However, the fragility previously noted shows the limitations of this structural shift. The potential for post-industrial societies to grow is premised on the continued ability to outsource productive capacity to pools of cheap labour, while maintaining administrative oversight. But with the cost of resource inputs increasing and their scarcity also growing, geopolitical realities are starting to bite at post-industrial heels. The 30-40 year experiment of administrative sprawl and the concomitant feminisation of practices and values is meeting the limit of productive stagnation and demographic freefall. Such technologisation of feminine competition and power strategies is an attempt to escape the biological trap, the sexual dimorphism that present femininity and the woman as synonymous with the role of caregiver and child bearer. But in doing this, fertility rates have collapsed. Even countries where childcare is subsidised and work patterns are flexible see declining fertility rates, most below replacement level.

Despite these weaknesses, feminisation still equals power today. Substantial female predominance or equality in managerial and bureaucratic sectors (HR, administrative services, educational directors, judiciary, etc.[21]) means diffuse but important organisational power. Even though women don’t have equality in the top occupations, they do have authority in the cogs of bureaucracy, thus allowing feminisation through office rules, organisational policies and the structural implantation of ideology (i.e. concepts of sustainability or EDI festering through all organisational forms, no matter the relevance or necessity).

The question of escaping the longhouse becomes one of determining what organisational structures or forms of political power are impervious to these diffuse, tendrilous forms. One obvious answer would be to move away from post-industrial economies, either toward reindustrialisation or greater automation of administrative tasks, thereby cutting the legs from mid-tier bureaucracies. Yet in the stagnant slump most Western economies find themselves in, these answers grow ever more distant. Despite predictions of doom, the actual pace of automation is very slow relative to the demands of labour power. The necessity of low-wage social care, agricultural, catering and logistics roles to the UK economy has been evident in persistent labour shortages. That companies might invest in automative technologies seems fanciful while we indulge their demands through mass immigration and subsidisation (as in the case of agriculture and higher education particularly).

In the socio-cultural realm, the reassertion of a private realm removed from public scrutiny would be a move against feminisation. The longhouse is the opposite of privacy. The carving of a private realm outside the gaze of an overbearing community is anathema to the feminised polity, which demands control over sexual relations, household chores and online communications. The Wages for Housework[22] campaign demonstrated this in its demands for the destruction of a definable household as separate from the workplace. By bringing the wage relation into the home, the demands for the collectivisation of production meant the removal of any sphere separate from it. The raising of children or the cultivation of marriage would be a collective enterprise under the auspice of a community (den mother). The reproduction of values can never escape the cloying consensus of the longhouse. By reasserting a private realm, the man’s home as his castle, a wedge can be driven into the feminist paradigm. Modern surveillance technologies caution against this though, as communications systems are mapped out by intelligence agencies and the criminalisation of speech is done through an online medium.

Escaping the longhouse may mean societal regression, back toward a culture of honour and a more direct violence in lieu of progressive civility[23] which has served to undergird the move toward feminisation. Something more militaristic, more martial in its disposition. Can such a thing meaningfully exist or grow in the 21^st century? Or would it be too easily stifled as a troglodytic reaction, to be ignored or banned outright? The bureaucratisation of the Taliban[24] is indicative here, as it demonstrates that martial values only extend so long as the fight lasts. Beyond that, civility takes over and the complexities of modern governance delineate existence.

Modern technologies also bite into this, as the necessity of manpower in military logistics and warfare is overtaken by computerisation and intermediation. The very technologies of administrative function are taking over military affairs and restructuring the value system thereby. While feminisation sits in a paradox with technology in that feminised societies have tended to be economically and technologically regressive (with today’s dynamics following this) while being reliant on these technologies to instantiate their paradigm in the first place, a post-feminist power structure also faces a similar paradox, between technological necessity (increased automation of cognitive tasks and bureaucratic functions) to undergird a value system that isn’t reliant upon inverted power relations and covert competitive strategies, and technological scepticism to prevent a human inaptitude to the modern world and maintain control over the space-time dynamics of politico-economic systems.

What could a culture beyond civility look like? And who would its agents be? It would be one based on tribalistic values and a naked version of power e.g. direct conflict over scarce resources, borderland violence, territorial disputes, a focus on higher levels of autonomy/autarky. In BAP’s words, this is about the control of owned space[25]. Ironically, feminised societies may augur these forces inadvertently. By taking the side of minoritarian interests, tribal patterns have re-emerged in the West through voting blocs, political influence and territorial control. In particular, for ethnic minorities this takes the form of institutional takeovers and establishing footholds as a community that demands common resources.

When discussing the stagflationary stage of a secular cycle earlier, one of its main features is elite overproduction. Historically, this has led to wider conflict and warfare as elites scramble for resources (land, money, manpower) and demand increasing tribute from an overtaxed populace. Either through popular revolt or civil war, these elites are cut down to size as the secular cycle reaches its apex. While the nature of feminisation has been to introduce competitive-cooperative strategies that sideline or eliminate conflict, the nature of overproduction combined with scarcity means that the inevitable is being delayed. “Female intrasexual competition may be… less prone to physical violence”[26], but its encouragement of tribalist undercurrents and its naked hatred of the white working and middle classes produces a dynamic between the first and third worlds, between civility and honour. It is in that gap where the currents of martial violence and political games will be played as Western countries hybridise into increasingly violent, corrupt entities. The direction of that corruption, either into minority-majority societies or into a newly muscular ethno-nationalism, will define the direction of decay in this secular cycle.

This is the limit of the longhouse. It relies on the rules and functions of civility, while allowing a cultural plurality that increasingly undermines it. In that may exist the germ through which the longhouse is escaped.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9760.2004.00188.x

[2] https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/02/what-is-the-longhouse

[3] https://www.seattleweekly.com/news/when-did-we-all-become-women/

[4] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2329496517704871

[5] https://thecritic.co.uk/the-mate-mate-mate-state/

[6] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-antisocial-psychologist/202104/the-gender-gap-in-censorship-support

[7] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

[8] https://www.jstor.org/stable/778828

[9] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/12/opinion/gender-gap-politics.html

[10] Peter Turchin & Sergey A. Nefedov, Secular Cycles

[11] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2013.0079

[12] https://ilostat.ilo.org/these-occupations-are-dominated-by-women/