So, Roald Dahl’s work was canceled, so to speak. Actually, it was censored. I can’t say I’m surprised in any genuine sense of the term. However, I do think this just goes to show that our overly feminized society cannot handle the slightest bit of offense. Oh, but how dare I even say that! How dare I suggest our society is overly feminized. Well, it is.

On average, Men and Women differ in three major facets of personality: Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. This means that women are better rule followers, more willing to please, and more emotionally unstable than men. When interacting with each other, the latter two have a fascinating effect: what emotionally disturbs the feminine must be excluded to please either herself or those who surround her. For example, it has been noted that women have more odd beliefs than men, and these odd beliefs are quite significantly related to belief in the paranormal and supernatural. In other words, Women are far more likely to perceive forces in the world of a preternatural or paranormal quality; i.e., a mind behind the world. Thus, when they are upset, or others are upset, they may feel a need to appease the mind behind the world that is also ‘upset,’ and, as a result, feel they have to alleviate and remove whatever is causing them, others, or the mind behind the world to be upset. For now, I will call this type of behavior ‘ostracization.’  This may also explain why women are more likely to be religious than men.  

Still, what happens in a society whose religious foundations have crumbled around it, whose young people either identify as atheists or non-religious? Surely that religious impulse must be directed into some medium. For some women, this medium is ideology.

I have made it quite clear that while ideologies appear to be religions, they lack that essential quality which makes them a religion: a god. However, I do think they have an object of worship: the scapegoat. Several years ago, I read Rene Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World and I was thoroughly moved by it. So much of what I saw around me seemed to be explained by the observations Girard had made through his work. Neither Eliade nor Campbell were ever able to capture the idea of the scapegoat, the victimage mechanism, as Girard did. He magically isolates and reidentifies the victimage mechanism as a perennial and cross-cultural phenomenon. It is this mechanism, the object of this mechanism, that is the ultimate object of worship for those who lack a god.

A feminized society, specifically one which lacks a god, will still have the tendency to engage in ostracization or sacrifice. The members of that feminized society will identify what they feel is the cause of their distress, gather their resources, direct their will and energy at the identified object, and then ostracize that object. In time, the scapegoat becomes a totem that the entire society is geared towards venerating through the process of sacrifice. This is a form of worship and might be analogized to Frazer’s notion of sacrifice. Their life literally goes into the object of their hate so as to relieve themselves of their angst. Yet, as Girard so keenly notes, this never really alleviates the angst causing the mimesis of the victimage mechanism.

The situation ultimately spirals out of control, and the societies overcome by this mimetic pathology descend into self-destruction. This is tantamount to a positive-feedback mechanism. The feminized societies that engage in the victimage mechanism are affected by a pathology exemplified by an indifference towards, or denial of, the idea that their own distress, angst, and discomfort come from within. In part, this emanates from their excessively ego-centric perspective of the world. Remember, feminized societies are more agreeable, conscientious, and neurotic. In other words, they are emotionally unstable rule followers that want to please people around them; they want to be inclusive and kind; they want the world to be peaceful and filled with love. Any internal distress has the potential to be projected outward as distress in the world.  When they are not at peace, the world is not at peace. So, how do they achieve this kind of peace, love, kindness, and inclusivity? By sacrificing people who are disagreeable, who buck the status quo; essentially, vital men.

The feminine society ultimately worships the Vitally Masculine as it seeks to destroy it. It gives its resources, time, and energy to the vitally masculine in the hope that, by sacrificing all of the above to oust the Vitally Masculine, they can achieve peace by appeasing the offended. Yet, again, their lack of peace does not come from without or by appeasing the offended. Their peace cannot come from destroying the vitally masculine man, nor by acquiring power from his sacrifice either. It can only be achieved by overcoming themselves.

The feminine society absolutely fears this. To make this claim is to also implicitly state that they need to improve themselves; that there’s something wrong with them. But to state this, even if you imply it, is to upset them; and to upset them is to mark yourself as a cause of their distress; and if you cause them distress, or others distress, in the fashion discussed, you must be removed; sacrificed to appease the upset. They project their psychological turmoil onto the identified object of their, or another’s, distress and move to annihilate it. In this sense, it is the perpetually upset who serve as the objects of the overly feminized society’s worship, but this doesn’t make them their gods. Their gods, those they sacrifice and sacrifice for, limit them or magnify their limitations.

Throughout history, humans sacrificed to appease the gods, to appease God (see Leviticus). However, the gods were not gods because they could be appeased through sacrifice. They were gods because they were powerful and because they shined a light on the weaknesses of men, the sins of Man, and those sins could only be relieved by following the will of the gods and appeasing them; by obeying God and His law.

In a society without these gods, or God, that still has the religious instinct (so to speak), those who limit them remind them of God, remind them of He who limited them, who does limit them, and this upsets them. Thus, to relieve this stress, to appease themselves and those upset by this limiting variable, they scapegoat, sacrifice, or ‘ostracize’ the symbol of their former God, recapitulating the reality of their limited being and God. Of course, no single man totally embodies the vitally masculine; this would be absurd. But the vitally masculine is represented in each of these sacrificed men. By them, the feminine society appeases itself, but it also denies the reality of its being, tacitly acknowledging its limitations: they are not vitally masculine; they cannot handle what he can; and because they cannot handle what he can, they must remove him because he has the capacity to go beyond them.

Over time, they structure their institutions around the sacrifice of these kinds of beings. Again, all their time, resources, and energy go into sacrificing this force because it disrupts the peace that they lack, for they cannot find it in themselves. In the end, when their society can no longer bear how stultifying it has become – when the feminine force finally dies out because it keeps destroying that which gives it life – the core of the society ultimately returns to its beginning. It is this force, these men, who reestablish, reconstitute, and reform the society. This force is, founds, and transfigures the law; it is the culture, the father of the culture, son of the culture, and spirit that moves throughout the culture. It is this force that demands obedience implicitly and explicitly, not just to care for others or to promote the peace, but because it enables its adherents to be creative, to fully live their lives, and to overcome themselves.

This is why a feminine society suffers from the excesses of the masculine. Its entire conception of discipline revolves around the desire to appease the displeased, to ensure people are protected from harm, are kind and nice, and that everything is peaceful and everyone loving. The feminine society, then, cannot properly direct masculine energy; it can only seek to suppress it or regard it as some sort of pathology; it cannot integrate the vitally masculine into itself without limiting itself.

To acknowledge that the masculine has a proper place in society is to give space to the same force that has the capacity to limit its feminine nature. To do this is to revert back to that state of obedience to God and Nature; the masculine force will ultimately reconstitute itself as the coordinating and organizing force it is if given space. For the members of a feminine society, this is unbearable. Thus, they cast it out, they pathologize it, demonizing it as patriarchal, sexist, or fascist.

They can only respond to this force with callous discipline; the feminine society cannot direct it competently; they push it to the margins where it becomes bestial and untamed. They cannot bear to burn the fat either; or if they do burn the fat, they do so ineffectively. If this masculine force were properly coordinated, it could become the creative and conquering capacity that it is in essence. Yet, that would upset the fragile mores of the feminized society, so it will not, or cannot, properly direct the masculine energy of the society. The feminized society can only really emphasize how harmful it is because that’s what it perceives the masculine force as; it cannot see the masculine force as anything else as long as it seeks to preserve itself. However, ostracizing the masculine force will ultimately kill the self-obsessed and overly feminized society.  

The masculine force seems to be a creative force. It plows and sows the fields of the feminine, sacrificing with sweat, blood, and time to create new life of itself; a motif very clearly discussed by Campbell. When the overly feminine society captures this process for itself, not wanting to disrupt itself, unwilling to disturb the soil to sow its own field, it fails to reproduce effectively. It cannot create anything new; it can only repeat what already was. To create anew would require the feminine society to broach the peace that it so dearly holds on to. To do this might cause harm, it might upset someone, it’s risky for a feminine society to create something new, and so it stays the same. Over time, this is the reason for its death. It cannot create new life, it cannot generate the variation that’s necessary to overcome the tragic bottlenecks of life, and so it eventually dies off. The masculine core or germ, being capable of overcoming these kinds of bottlenecks, is what survives. Only it is capable of sowing the fields of the feminine to generate creative variation. This is why it is the father, why it is the son, and why it (the vital masculine) is the force that weaves itself throughout the society, holds it together, and energizes it.

Censoring Roald Dahl to be more inclusive signifies the desire of the feminized society to suppress the creative force that challenges its being. We cannot call Augustus Gloop “Fat” because the term is upsetting, and the term is upsetting because it reminds the fats that they are less than they can be. Anything that reminds someone that they are less than they could be reminds them of the forces and principles limiting their being. That which has the power to limit their being, for example, nature, the laws of nature, and He who wrote the laws of nature, is God or signifies God. The word “Fat” reminds them of their limitations, causes them distress, and thus it must be removed; it is a reminder of the impositions placed on them by the Good, or God. The vitally masculine force reminds them of their limitations, this distresses them, and so they seek to silence it, suppress it, or abolish it. The censoring of Roald Dahl’s work is just one more example of the victimage mechanism at play. Yet, more than that, it is the denial and suppression of that will which has animated civilizations since time immemorial.