Originally a comment by Artymorty on Use them or else.
I have to wonder if at some level, some of this madness is a symptom of the executives and those in power not caring enough about “the gender thing”, rather than them being utterly preoccupied with it.
The heads of these institutions don’t believe in gender nonsense. Rather, they consider their actions: they do an ad-hoc cost/benefit analysis in their heads, comparing the cost of taking one side over the other. If they side with the gender critics, the actions required to put a stop to gender lunacy signal immediate cost to themselves — unrest and pushback from within the institution; headaches from activists. The appearance of being “anti-LGBTQ”, etc. It would all just be so terribly unpleasant for the brass to stop it.
On the other hand, the costs involved in playing along with it are paid downstream: they’re paid by women, they’re paid by vulnerable people, they’re paid by those who don’t have power.
This is the same shape of so many catastrophes playing out right now: there are collective action problems that cannot be solved because of the power imbalance in society, and because whatever checks and balances were once in place to at least try to correct against these kinds of imbalances have eroded. There were supposed to be watchdogs and regulators to put a stop to these kinds of collective-action runaway trains.
I compare it to the real estate crisis in Canada:
Everyone sees that the country’s caught up in an absurd system that doesn’t make any sense. We’ve built literally hundreds of thousands of “investment vehicles” — more-or-less fake apartments, units so small and uninhabitable that virtually no one will occupy them. But stopping the system — admitting that we were just slapping up towers of fake housing for immediate profit — would have required those in power (the banks and the real estate developers) to pay a cost, whereas keeping the scheme going offloaded the cost downstream to those less in-the-know, mom-and-pop investors and such. It didn’t take long before most people at the top figured out it was bullshit, but by then a kind of pyramid scheme had emerged, so the system kept going anyways, because as long as other people still hadn’t caught on ot the scam, the safer, more lucrative bet was to go along with it — for now. Well, “for now” was then. Now now, the whole thing’s gotten so out of hand that the entire country’s economy is on the brink. The game’s over and the pyramid’s collapsing.
I think that structure maps almost perfectly onto gender nonsense: they’re building up fake “genders” — even fake genitals — that nobody’s really buying. But stopping it at this point would incur too much cost at the top. Each individual executive sees it as a problem better dumped on those below. It may be bullshit, and it may be doing catastrophic harm to those below you, but if you’re an executive, your short-term cost/benefit says it pays to play along, for now. The cost to women’s rights, to gay and autistic people’s bodies, to freedom of speech… those costs are beginning to add up, and the pyramid of gender is beginning to wobble.
I fear that only after everything’s collapsed will they admit they were cowards.
Leave a Reply