Tom Golden and David Shackleton explore the key themes of David’s book The Hand That Rocks the World. The conversation begins with a look at how both sexes use power, with a particular focus on women's power—how it operates, and why it so often goes unseen or unacknowledged. David outlines three distinct forms of female power, each with both positive and negative expressions. The discussion then shifts to human maturity, examining how personal growth can be stalled by ideological identification. And there's much more—insights that challenge conventional narratives and invite deeper reflection.
Contemporary neuroscience says that our perceptions evolved in order to maximize Fitness at the expense of Truth. The theory is called Fitness Beats Truth (FBT), and it goes a long way to explain the success of feminism.
Feminism is an easily exposed pack of lies, and yet it is one of the most successful ideologies ever created by a group of human beings. Believing it results in men virtually being enslaved and serving women at every turn. Thus it is very successful at promoting the fitness of women, and thus to some degree survival and reproduction. Fitness overwhelms the incoherent mishmash of lies presented by feminists.
Okay, Steve, thanks for your reply. But if more than 2 billion people (mainly women) are feminists, then my question remains cogent. The birth rate has already fallen below the level of reproduction in every Western (feminist) country. Of course, reproduction requires both women and men. But I doubt that most men, even in the West, support the hostility toward marriage (or heterosexuality itself) that women have promoted on ideological grounds. To me, this adds up to women explicitly rejecting the fitness of our species for demographic continuity (although some men do so implicitly for hedonistic or other non-ideological reasons).
Evolutionary fitness requires that offspring reach reproductive age and are themselves able to reproduce. Birth rate, although not insignificant, is not critical.
In order for offspring to reach reproductive age, the mother must have a secure source of resources and support. Ideological feminism, if adopted, orients the mind and the culture towards serving the female. Women flock to it and then reject men who balk at its ludicrous claims. Truth is utterly irrelevant. The power and survival value of male subservience accounts for the propagation of feminism. That is of course unless or until a critical mass of men refuse to submit. Then the ideology will die, and smoother will take its place.
Steve, I find this an incoherent theory. The evidence would seem to be that feminism has little survival fitness, in Darwinian terms, since it has greatly reduced the number of children per woman in our lifetimes. One needs only to look at the dating scene to see how dysfunctional sexual relations between the sexes have become under feminist ideology.
Further, your statements "Truth is inaccessible" and "Feminism is an easily exposed pack of lies" would seem to be in conflict, mutually contradictory. The fact that resolves the contradiction is that truth is inaccessible only in an idealistic, absolute sense. In practical terms, it can be approached to any degree of accuracy that you wish, provided that you make the effort.
You should read the book "The Case Against Reality" by neuroscientist Donald Hoffman before passing judgement.
Fitness applies to feminism here, not women. Feminism has over 2 billion subscribers despite it being easily exposed lies about history. Furthermore "Truth" is used in the sense that objective truth is inaccessible. This doesn't mean that we cannot identify claims that contradict evidence about the past (feminist lies).
Feminism benefits women by trapping men in subservience, thus giving them secure source of protection and provision, something that they sought from time immemorial. From the female perspective this is fitness. Billions of when have adopted this ideology, and the men who want to mate with those women submit.
The wealthy first world has the added complication that women can turn to the govt and high paid easy jobs and cut men out of the loop. That some do this doesn't change change feminism, it just gives women yet another powerful tool. In the messy business of natural selection, we may see that too much power in the hands of women is disastrous, and men will have to respond.
A possible corollary is that if you want to sense, or live, in "truth," you have to abandon everything that you think you know and live fully in the moment. This is an old religious/spiritual idea - the importance of letting go - and can lead to the state of gnosis.
This presentation would have been better had it continued to stage 4 (wisdom). If MLK is still in stage 3 (recovery), after all, then who could possibly be in stage 4?
I suggest another interview on stage 4. We’ve already heard about recovery (though mainly on the personal level). What we need ultimately and most desperately is wisdom—especially on the collective level.
I didn't say (or if I said it I misspoke) that MLK was in stage 3, only that his movement was. This is clear since it was still founded in dualistic justice, right and wrong, whereas stage four transcends dualism. I wrote about stage 4 extensively in my book "The Hand That Rocks the World," but I find it difficult to talk about in a brief interview since it is so foreign a concept for most people, the idea of not seeing the world through a dualistic lens is such a stretch that it usually gets me misunderstood.
Your general point about racial and sexual ideologies is correct, David, and worth emphasizing. But MLK's Civil Rights movement was definitely not "founded in dualistic justice." Other racial movements were, it's true, especially the ones that came after him--shamefully rejecting him even as they celebrate his annual commemoration. Instead, they're allied with both feminism and other woke movements. This would have outraged MLK, whose movement was founded on the Bible's prophetic tradition--which rejected revenge in favor of reconciliation. This is precisely the wisdom that we need so desperately now.
Paul, I think that you are missing the distinction between stage 2 of the model, which is about projecting blame and creating innocent victims and guilty perpetrators, and stage three, which is about owning responsibility and not projecting anything, and is in fact psychologically healthy. I said that modern identity movements are in stage 2, all about guilt projection and are very unhealthy, while MLK's movement was stage 3, healthy but still grounded in what is right and what is wrong. This is a key distinction. You talk of dualism as if it is always unhealthy, but having a calibrated sense of right and wrong is part of healthy development, which is why I call that stage recovery.
We're still using the word "dualism" in different ways, David. Here's what I think is a useful distinction: between (a) good (right) and evil (wrong), urges within ourselves and (b) between good people (us) and evil people (them), ontologically opposed groups. In my opinion, at any rate, those two mentalities are neither identical nor even related.
You're right, Paul, that we're using the word "dualism" in different ways. I use it simply to identify a conceptual framing system that is dualistic, i.e., that is based in quantities that have two opposite poles, such as day and night, good and evil. I use it in the abstract, not connected to psychology or morality - but of course, it has obvious application there.
I don't find your distinction useful, Paul. One is subjective and individual, the other is external and collective. These distinctions are independent of and irrelevant to the concept of dualism itself. Furthermore, they are just one application of dualism, in the moral realm, which is more limited than my framing.
We are, after all, discussing my model - I ask you to try to extend yourself to consider it on its own terms.
You're referring to "duality," David, not "dualism." These two words sound alike, but they're not. The "ism" (as in, say, "fundamentalism") is a clue. You're free, of course, to use words as you please or even to invent new words (as I sometimes do for want of adequate alternatives). But I hope that you'll provide readers with your own working definition of dualism and why it's different from what they might expect of a word that has a very long history in Western thought. Philosophers, for example, would never apply "dualism" to the Chinese notion of yin and yang, a duality that rests firmly on what we would call "complementarity" and is therefore precisely the opposite of what you're talking about.
One more suggestion, David. No interview can do more than introduce a complex theory such as yours, of course, but this one focused too quickly on personal psychology and psychotherapy. I get that, because every social problem has a personal dimension. But I think that identity politics is also a collective problem, not only a personal one--and a moral problem, not only a psychological one.
At least some of the people who join ideological movements, by far the most influential ones, are not only psychologically ill. For whatever personal reasons, they've become true believers in a secular form of fundamentalism. Worse, they belong to powerful fundamentalist communities.
I don't know how to reach them. On a personal level, underage members of cults can be "deprogrammed." But I don't advise that solution to this problem. For one thing, it would present legal problems even for parents trying to rescue their own children. Moreover, not all members are minors. I can say only that, If there is a solution at all, it would rely ultimately on a yet another cultural, communal and moral renaissance.
I use the word "moral" here, because these identity-based ideologies rely less on anger than they do on hatred. Though not a psychologist, I suggest that hatred is not an emotion at all (even though it can look like one). Rather, it is the underlying premise of a communal worldview, one that generates and fosters the urge among insiders to persecute outsiders. This makes it a specifically moral problem both personally and collectively. Rescuing the moral vocabulary in public discourse, in short, is as important as rescuing troubled individuals.
We're all neurotic in one way or another, but this doesn't (usually) mean that we're all psychotic and therefore utterly incapable of telling the difference between justice and revenge. No society that fails to produce moral agents, who by definition retain the ability to choose between good and evil, can endure for long. At the very least, therefore, we must find some way as a society of preventing the ideological indoctrination of young children. And the only way to do that in the long run, I suggest, is by introducing them--not necessarily in the churches but surely at home and in the schools--to the moral traditions that (even in secular form) have produced movements such as MLK's.
also the assertion that men want to enslave and only enslave women is first found in the 1846 declaration of sentiments, at seneca falls. take that for what you think it's worth. what I think is worth more is what was left out of that statement, which was the mere mention or allusion to children in any form — nada. at Seneca, women resign from being mothers, blame men for their own biology and then throw men into the sewer as oppressor and slave driver. this is more than a century before "women's lib" was ever a thing...and liberate from WHAT?
Also I love these discussions BUT always omitted is the influence of the electrical environment on sex, gender and relations between men and women. it eliminates sex by projecting thought through space and time without bodies, meaning without any form of biological sex...electricity has also destroyed the privacy that is essential to relationships.
electricity transmits the human mind at light speed. electric light illuminates the darkness. together these turn the mind inside out, reversing individuality and erasing privacy and invading the inner sanctum.
this increased with the telephone — the party line, and the gossiping operators who could and did listen to everything, ensuring that all seemingly private communication was broadcast to the community...this has come to full fruition in the digital age, where there are no secure or private spaces and where people voluntarily record and/or broadcast the details of their life, including their most intimate thoughts and sentiments. the presence of the electrical environment and all of its telepathic communication technology erases the very concept of privacy, as well as its practical reality. nobody feels like their mind is private and we have forgotten the feeling that we experienced when it was...like so much from distant, receding childhood...
women's lib is the product of the psychic environment of television, the scale of the drama, its episodic nature, its presentation AS A SHOW....as a total fabrication. It's as if someone dusted off the fictional script written in 1846 and recreated it as fictional drama, vastly amplifying the reality of how most people really felt.
the ultimate victory of feminism was to drive women apart from one another (despite the fake tribal drama), to separate mothers from kids, and fathers from kids. the pretended enemy is man. the real enemy is children.
'Also I love these discussions BUT always omitted is the influence of the electrical environment on sex, gender and relations between men and women. it eliminates sex by projecting thought through space and time without bodies, meaning without any form of biological sex...electricity has also destroyed the privacy that is essential to relationships'
Yes, agreed. Very astute. Electricity separates and enraptures, fascinates. In manmade applications, it also imposes an artificial wavelength upon the natural and biological environment.
Based on a combination of experience and Scripture (Christ witnessing satan 'falling like lightning'), I believe electricity has an elemental type of sentience or intelligence. Also, I think that electricity fundamentally is demonic.
Truth is inaccessible.
Contemporary neuroscience says that our perceptions evolved in order to maximize Fitness at the expense of Truth. The theory is called Fitness Beats Truth (FBT), and it goes a long way to explain the success of feminism.
Feminism is an easily exposed pack of lies, and yet it is one of the most successful ideologies ever created by a group of human beings. Believing it results in men virtually being enslaved and serving women at every turn. Thus it is very successful at promoting the fitness of women, and thus to some degree survival and reproduction. Fitness overwhelms the incoherent mishmash of lies presented by feminists.
Every ideological system fits this pattern.
If women are so fit, in evolutionary terms, whey are they not reproducing the species?
In this example it is feminism that is fit, not women. More than 2 billion people globally subscribe to feminism.
Okay, Steve, thanks for your reply. But if more than 2 billion people (mainly women) are feminists, then my question remains cogent. The birth rate has already fallen below the level of reproduction in every Western (feminist) country. Of course, reproduction requires both women and men. But I doubt that most men, even in the West, support the hostility toward marriage (or heterosexuality itself) that women have promoted on ideological grounds. To me, this adds up to women explicitly rejecting the fitness of our species for demographic continuity (although some men do so implicitly for hedonistic or other non-ideological reasons).
Hi Paul, it's great to converse with you!
Evolutionary fitness requires that offspring reach reproductive age and are themselves able to reproduce. Birth rate, although not insignificant, is not critical.
In order for offspring to reach reproductive age, the mother must have a secure source of resources and support. Ideological feminism, if adopted, orients the mind and the culture towards serving the female. Women flock to it and then reject men who balk at its ludicrous claims. Truth is utterly irrelevant. The power and survival value of male subservience accounts for the propagation of feminism. That is of course unless or until a critical mass of men refuse to submit. Then the ideology will die, and smoother will take its place.
Steve, I find this an incoherent theory. The evidence would seem to be that feminism has little survival fitness, in Darwinian terms, since it has greatly reduced the number of children per woman in our lifetimes. One needs only to look at the dating scene to see how dysfunctional sexual relations between the sexes have become under feminist ideology.
Further, your statements "Truth is inaccessible" and "Feminism is an easily exposed pack of lies" would seem to be in conflict, mutually contradictory. The fact that resolves the contradiction is that truth is inaccessible only in an idealistic, absolute sense. In practical terms, it can be approached to any degree of accuracy that you wish, provided that you make the effort.
You should read the book "The Case Against Reality" by neuroscientist Donald Hoffman before passing judgement.
Fitness applies to feminism here, not women. Feminism has over 2 billion subscribers despite it being easily exposed lies about history. Furthermore "Truth" is used in the sense that objective truth is inaccessible. This doesn't mean that we cannot identify claims that contradict evidence about the past (feminist lies).
Feminism benefits women by trapping men in subservience, thus giving them secure source of protection and provision, something that they sought from time immemorial. From the female perspective this is fitness. Billions of when have adopted this ideology, and the men who want to mate with those women submit.
The wealthy first world has the added complication that women can turn to the govt and high paid easy jobs and cut men out of the loop. That some do this doesn't change change feminism, it just gives women yet another powerful tool. In the messy business of natural selection, we may see that too much power in the hands of women is disastrous, and men will have to respond.
A possible corollary is that if you want to sense, or live, in "truth," you have to abandon everything that you think you know and live fully in the moment. This is an old religious/spiritual idea - the importance of letting go - and can lead to the state of gnosis.
This presentation would have been better had it continued to stage 4 (wisdom). If MLK is still in stage 3 (recovery), after all, then who could possibly be in stage 4?
Maybe we should do one on stage 3 and 4?
I suggest another interview on stage 4. We’ve already heard about recovery (though mainly on the personal level). What we need ultimately and most desperately is wisdom—especially on the collective level.
I didn't say (or if I said it I misspoke) that MLK was in stage 3, only that his movement was. This is clear since it was still founded in dualistic justice, right and wrong, whereas stage four transcends dualism. I wrote about stage 4 extensively in my book "The Hand That Rocks the World," but I find it difficult to talk about in a brief interview since it is so foreign a concept for most people, the idea of not seeing the world through a dualistic lens is such a stretch that it usually gets me misunderstood.
Your general point about racial and sexual ideologies is correct, David, and worth emphasizing. But MLK's Civil Rights movement was definitely not "founded in dualistic justice." Other racial movements were, it's true, especially the ones that came after him--shamefully rejecting him even as they celebrate his annual commemoration. Instead, they're allied with both feminism and other woke movements. This would have outraged MLK, whose movement was founded on the Bible's prophetic tradition--which rejected revenge in favor of reconciliation. This is precisely the wisdom that we need so desperately now.
Paul, I think that you are missing the distinction between stage 2 of the model, which is about projecting blame and creating innocent victims and guilty perpetrators, and stage three, which is about owning responsibility and not projecting anything, and is in fact psychologically healthy. I said that modern identity movements are in stage 2, all about guilt projection and are very unhealthy, while MLK's movement was stage 3, healthy but still grounded in what is right and what is wrong. This is a key distinction. You talk of dualism as if it is always unhealthy, but having a calibrated sense of right and wrong is part of healthy development, which is why I call that stage recovery.
We're still using the word "dualism" in different ways, David. Here's what I think is a useful distinction: between (a) good (right) and evil (wrong), urges within ourselves and (b) between good people (us) and evil people (them), ontologically opposed groups. In my opinion, at any rate, those two mentalities are neither identical nor even related.
You're right, Paul, that we're using the word "dualism" in different ways. I use it simply to identify a conceptual framing system that is dualistic, i.e., that is based in quantities that have two opposite poles, such as day and night, good and evil. I use it in the abstract, not connected to psychology or morality - but of course, it has obvious application there.
I don't find your distinction useful, Paul. One is subjective and individual, the other is external and collective. These distinctions are independent of and irrelevant to the concept of dualism itself. Furthermore, they are just one application of dualism, in the moral realm, which is more limited than my framing.
We are, after all, discussing my model - I ask you to try to extend yourself to consider it on its own terms.
You're referring to "duality," David, not "dualism." These two words sound alike, but they're not. The "ism" (as in, say, "fundamentalism") is a clue. You're free, of course, to use words as you please or even to invent new words (as I sometimes do for want of adequate alternatives). But I hope that you'll provide readers with your own working definition of dualism and why it's different from what they might expect of a word that has a very long history in Western thought. Philosophers, for example, would never apply "dualism" to the Chinese notion of yin and yang, a duality that rests firmly on what we would call "complementarity" and is therefore precisely the opposite of what you're talking about.
One more suggestion, David. No interview can do more than introduce a complex theory such as yours, of course, but this one focused too quickly on personal psychology and psychotherapy. I get that, because every social problem has a personal dimension. But I think that identity politics is also a collective problem, not only a personal one--and a moral problem, not only a psychological one.
At least some of the people who join ideological movements, by far the most influential ones, are not only psychologically ill. For whatever personal reasons, they've become true believers in a secular form of fundamentalism. Worse, they belong to powerful fundamentalist communities.
I don't know how to reach them. On a personal level, underage members of cults can be "deprogrammed." But I don't advise that solution to this problem. For one thing, it would present legal problems even for parents trying to rescue their own children. Moreover, not all members are minors. I can say only that, If there is a solution at all, it would rely ultimately on a yet another cultural, communal and moral renaissance.
I use the word "moral" here, because these identity-based ideologies rely less on anger than they do on hatred. Though not a psychologist, I suggest that hatred is not an emotion at all (even though it can look like one). Rather, it is the underlying premise of a communal worldview, one that generates and fosters the urge among insiders to persecute outsiders. This makes it a specifically moral problem both personally and collectively. Rescuing the moral vocabulary in public discourse, in short, is as important as rescuing troubled individuals.
We're all neurotic in one way or another, but this doesn't (usually) mean that we're all psychotic and therefore utterly incapable of telling the difference between justice and revenge. No society that fails to produce moral agents, who by definition retain the ability to choose between good and evil, can endure for long. At the very least, therefore, we must find some way as a society of preventing the ideological indoctrination of young children. And the only way to do that in the long run, I suggest, is by introducing them--not necessarily in the churches but surely at home and in the schools--to the moral traditions that (even in secular form) have produced movements such as MLK's.
actually they do notice men's positive attributes and actively reject them, either as a tenet of "we can do it all" or for PR purposes.
also the assertion that men want to enslave and only enslave women is first found in the 1846 declaration of sentiments, at seneca falls. take that for what you think it's worth. what I think is worth more is what was left out of that statement, which was the mere mention or allusion to children in any form — nada. at Seneca, women resign from being mothers, blame men for their own biology and then throw men into the sewer as oppressor and slave driver. this is more than a century before "women's lib" was ever a thing...and liberate from WHAT?
Also I love these discussions BUT always omitted is the influence of the electrical environment on sex, gender and relations between men and women. it eliminates sex by projecting thought through space and time without bodies, meaning without any form of biological sex...electricity has also destroyed the privacy that is essential to relationships.
electricity transmits the human mind at light speed. electric light illuminates the darkness. together these turn the mind inside out, reversing individuality and erasing privacy and invading the inner sanctum.
this increased with the telephone — the party line, and the gossiping operators who could and did listen to everything, ensuring that all seemingly private communication was broadcast to the community...this has come to full fruition in the digital age, where there are no secure or private spaces and where people voluntarily record and/or broadcast the details of their life, including their most intimate thoughts and sentiments. the presence of the electrical environment and all of its telepathic communication technology erases the very concept of privacy, as well as its practical reality. nobody feels like their mind is private and we have forgotten the feeling that we experienced when it was...like so much from distant, receding childhood...
women's lib is the product of the psychic environment of television, the scale of the drama, its episodic nature, its presentation AS A SHOW....as a total fabrication. It's as if someone dusted off the fictional script written in 1846 and recreated it as fictional drama, vastly amplifying the reality of how most people really felt.
the ultimate victory of feminism was to drive women apart from one another (despite the fake tribal drama), to separate mothers from kids, and fathers from kids. the pretended enemy is man. the real enemy is children.
'Also I love these discussions BUT always omitted is the influence of the electrical environment on sex, gender and relations between men and women. it eliminates sex by projecting thought through space and time without bodies, meaning without any form of biological sex...electricity has also destroyed the privacy that is essential to relationships'
Yes, agreed. Very astute. Electricity separates and enraptures, fascinates. In manmade applications, it also imposes an artificial wavelength upon the natural and biological environment.
Based on a combination of experience and Scripture (Christ witnessing satan 'falling like lightning'), I believe electricity has an elemental type of sentience or intelligence. Also, I think that electricity fundamentally is demonic.
corrected
Women want to have their cake and eat it too. What results is any power that women have is immediately abused without consequence.