Help Me.

Master Qui-Gon, sir,

Wait, I’m Tired…!

I’m trying to keep 

Something Alive, 

and I don’t think 

I can do it…..

Anakin..!!

DROP!!

Why Do We 

Fall, Bruce…?

“And so, this is one of the reasons I think 

Men are bailing-out of 

so much of academia, 

and maybe 

The Academic World in general. 

And maybe,

The World in general…..

"So, part of The Problem is,

Men actually don’t have 

any idea 

How to Compete 

with Women. 

Because The Problem is that 

if you unleash yourself completely, 

then you’re an 

Absolute Bully. 

And there’s no 

doubt about that, 

because even if 

Men unleash themselves 

on other Men, 

that can be pretty goddamn 

brutal, especially for 

The Men that’re 

really tough. 

And so that just 

Doesn’t Happen 

with Women, ever. 

So you can’t 

unleash yourself completely -- 

Because, 

If You Win, 

You’re a Bully;

and If You Lose, 

well, You’re just 

bloody pathetic. 

So, How The Hell are 

You supposed to play 

A Game like that…?” 

The Father, Senex,

Lord of The Dance :

You Know — I’ve learned 

a few things over The Years :

Ye can’t…. 

Ye can’t  make An Omelette, 

without crackin’ some eggs…

What Doesn’t Kill Ye, 

makes Ye Stronger;

We ARE — What We Eat.

You Buy Cheap, 

You Buy Twice.

The Open HAND, 

has The Strongest Grip.

•NEVER• parachute 

into an area, 

Y’ve just BOMBED….

PAGLIA : 

I can remember, still, 

the life of the agrarian era - 

which was for most of Human History - 

The Agrarian Era, where 

there was The World of Men, 

and The World of Women. 

And the sexes had very little 

to do with each other. 

Each had Power and Status 

in its own realm. 

And they laughed 

at each other, 

in essence. 

The Women had enormous power. 

In fact, The Older Women ruled, not 

The Young Beautiful Women like today. 

But the older you were the more 

you had control over everyone, 

including the mating and marriage.

 

There were no Doctors, 

so The Old Women were like midwives 

and knew all the ins and outs 

and [had] inherited knowledge 

about pregnancy and 

all these other things. 

I can remember this. 

And the joy that women had 

with each other all day long. 

Cooking with each other, 

being companions to each other, 

talking, conversing. 

My Mother remembered, 

as a small child in Italy, 

when it was time to 

Do The Laundry 

they would take The Laundry 

up The Hill to The Fountain 

and do it by hand. 

They would sing, they would picnic, and so on. 

We get a glimpse of that in the Odyssey when Odysseus is thrown up naked on the shores of Phaeacia and he hears the sound of women, young women, laughing and singing. And it’s Nausicaa, the princess, bringing the women to do the laundry. It’s exactly the same thing. So there was. . . 

Each gender had its OWN hierarchy, its OWN values, its OWN way of talking. And the sexes RARELY intersected. 

I can remember in my childhood in a holiday - it could be a Christmas, it could be a Thanksgiving, whatever - women would be cooking all day long, everyone would sit down to eat, and then after that the women would retire en masse to the kitchen. And the men would go. . . I would look at them through the window and see all the men. The men would be all outside, usually gathered around the car - at a time when cars didn’t work as well as they do today - with the hood up. And the men would be standing with their hands on their hips like that. Everyone’s staring at the engine. That’s how I learned men were refreshing themselves by studying something technical and mechanical after being with the women during the dinner.

So all of these problems of today are the direct consequence of women’s emancipation and freedom from housework thanks to capitalism, which made it possible for women to have jobs outside the home for the very first time in the nineteenth century. No longer to be dependent on husband or father or brother. 

So this great thing that’s happened to us, allowing us to be totally self-supporting, independent agents has produced all this animosity between men and women, because women feel unhappy. Women today - wherever I go, whether it’s Italy or Brazil or England or America or Toronto - the upper-middle class professional women are unhappy, miserable. And they don’t know why they’re unhappy. They want to blame it on men. The men must change. Men must become more like women. No. That is the wrong way to go. It’s when men are men, and understand themselves as men, are secure as men - then you’re going to be happier. 

Peterson: There’s nothing more dangerous than a weak man. 

Paglia: Absolutely. Especially all these quislings spouting feminist rhetoric. When I hear that it makes me sick. But here’s the point. Men and women have never worked side by side, ever. Maybe on the farms when you were like. . . Maybe one person is in the potato field and the other one is over here doing tomatoes, or whatever. You had families working side by side, exhausted with each other. No time to have any clash of this. It was a collaborative effort on farms and so on. Never in all of human history have men and women been working side by side. And women are now. . . The pressure about Silicon Valley - they’re all so sexist, they don’t allow women in, and so on. Men are being men in Silicon Valley. 

Peterson: Especially the engineers. 

Paglia: And the women are demanding that. . . ‘Oh, this is terrible, you’re being sexist.’ Maybe the sexes have their own particular form of rhetoric, their own particular form of identity. Maybe we need to reexamine this business about. . . Maybe we have to perhaps accept some degree of tension and conflict between the sexes in a work environment. 

I don’t mean harassment. I’m talking about women feeling disrespected. Somehow their opinions, when they express them, are not taken seriously. Even Hillary Clinton is complaining. When a woman writes something online she’s attacked immediately. Everyone is attacked online. What are you talking about? The world is tough. The world is competitive. Identity is honed by conflict. The idea that there should be no conflict, that we have to be in this bath of approbation. . . It’s infantile. 

Peterson: That’s right. It’s absolutely infantile. Okay, so, a couple of things there. Well the first thing is that the agreeableness trait that divides men and women 16

most. . . There’s three things that divide women and men most particularly from the psychometric perspective. One is that women are more agreeable than men, and so that seems to be the primary maternal dimension as far as I can tell. It’s associated with a desire to avoid conflict. But it’s associated with interpersonal closeness, compassion, politeness. Women are reliably higher than men, especially in the Scandinavian countries and in the countries where egalitarianism has progressed the farthest. So that’s where the difference is maximized, which is one of the things James Damore pointed out quite correctly in his infamous Google Memo. Women are higher in negative emotion. So that’s anxiety and emotional pain. That difference is approximately the same size. And again that maximizes in egalitarian societies, which is extremely interesting. And then the biggest difference is the difference in interest between people and things. And so women are more interested in people, and men are more interested in things, which goes along quite nicely with your car anecdote. But the thing about men interacting with men again is that it isn’t that they respect each other’s viewpoints. That’s not exactly right. What happens with a man. . . I know a lot of men that I would regard as remarkably tough people for one reason or another. And everything you do with them is a form of combat. Like if you want your viewpoint taken seriously, often you have to yell them down. They’re not going to stop talking unless you start talking over them. It’s not like men are automatically giving respect to other men, because that just doesn’t happen. It’s that the combat is there, and it’s expected. And one of the problems. . . And so, this is one of the reasons I think men are bailing out of so much of academia and maybe the academic world in general. And maybe the world in general. Men actually don’t have any idea how to compete with women. Because the problem is that if you unleash yourself completely, then you’re an absolute bully. And there’s no doubt about that, because if men unleash themselves on other men, that can be pretty goddamn brutal, especially for the men that really tough. And so that just doesn’t happen with women ever. So you can’t unleash yourself completely. If you win, you’re a bully. If you lose, well you’re just bloody pathetic. So how the hell are you supposed to play a game like that? I’ve worked with lots of women in law firms in Canada, for example. And high achieving women, like really remarkable people I would say. And they’re often nonplussed, I would say, by the attitude of the men in the law firm, because they would like to see everyone pulling together because they’re all part of the same team. Whereas the men are like at each other’s throats in a cooperative way because they want the law firm to succeed, but they want to be the person who is at the top of the success hierarchy. And that doesn’t jive well with the more cooperative ethos that’s part and parcel of agreeableness. So we don’t really have any idea how to integrate male and female dominance hierarchies.

BALDER

“As Isaac aged, He became blind and was uncertain when He would die, so He decided to bestow Esau’s birthright upon him. 

He requested that Esau go out to the fields with his weapons (quiver and bow) to kill some venison. 

Isaac then requested that Esau make “savory meat” for Him out of the venison, according to the way He enjoyed it the most, so that He could eat it and bless Esau.

Rebecca overheard this conversation. 

It is suggested that She realised prophetically that Isaac’s blessings would go to Jacob, since She was told before the twins’ birth that The Older Son would serve The Younger. 

Rebecca blessed Jacob and she quickly ordered Jacob to bring her two kid goats from their flock so that he could take Esau’s place in serving Isaac and receiving his blessing. 

Jacob protested that His Father would recognise their deception since Esau was HAIRY and he himself was SMOOTH-SKINNED. 

He feared His Father would curse him as soon as he felt him, but Rebecca offered to take the curse Herself, then insisted that Jacob obey ONLY Her.

Jacob did as His Mother instructed and, when he returned with the kids, Rebekah made the savory meat that Isaac loved. Before she sent Jacob to His Father, she dressed him in Esau’s garments and laid goatskins on his arms and neck to simulate hairy skin.”

“I heard a voice that cried,

Balder the beautiful

Is dead, is dead 

- I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) and then, as in the other examples, found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it. 

The reader who finds these three episodes of no interest need read this book no further, for in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else. 

For those who are still disposed to proceed I will only underline the quality common to the three experiences; it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. 

I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. 

Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. 

Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. 

But then it is a kind we want. 

I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. 

But then Joy is never in Our Power and Pleasure often is. 

I cannot be absolutely sure whether the things I have just been speaking of happened before or after the great loss which befell our family and to which I must now turn. 

There came a night when I was ill and crying both with headache and toothache and distressed because my mother did not come to me. 

That was because she was ill too; and what was odd was that there were several doctors in her room, and voices, and comings and goings all over the house and doors shutting and opening. It seemed to last for hours. 

And then My Father, in tears, came into my room and began to try to convey to my terrified mind things it had never conceived before. 

It was in fact cancer and followed the usual course; an operation (they operated in the patient’s house in those days), an apparent convalescence, a return of the disease, increasing pain, and death. 

My Father never fully recovered from this loss. 

Children suffer not (I think) less than their elders, but differently. 

For us boys the real bereavement had happened before our mother died. 

We lost her gradually as she was gradually withdrawn from our life into the hands of nurses and delirium and morphia, and as our whole existence changed into something alien and menacing, as the house became full of strange smells and midnight noises and sinister whispered conversations. 

This had two further results, one very evil and one very good. 

It divided us from our father as well as our mother. They say that a shared sorrow draws people closer together; I can hardly believe that it often has that effect when those who share it are of widely different ages. 

If I may trust to my own experience, the sight of adult misery and adult terror has an effect on children which is merely paralysing and alienating. Perhaps it was our fault. Perhaps if we had been better children we might have lightened our father’s sufferings at this time. 

We certainly did not. 

His nerves had never been of the steadiest and his emotions had always been uncontrolled. 

Under the pressure of anxiety his temper became incalculable; he spoke wildly and acted unjustly. 

Thus by a peculiar cruelty of fate, during those months the unfortunate man, had he but known it, was really losing his sons as well as his wife. 

We were coming, my brother and I, to rely more and more exclusively on each other for all that made life bearable; to have confidence only in each other. 

I expect that we (or at any rate I) were already learning to lie to him. 

Everything that had made the house a home had failed us; everything except one another. 

We drew daily closer together (that was the good result) - two frightened urchins huddled for warmth in a bleak world. 

Grief in childhood is complicated with many other miseries. 

I was taken into the bedroom where my mother lay dead; as they said, ‘to see her’, in reality, as I at once knew, ‘to see it’. 

There was nothing that a grown-up would call disfigurement - except for that total disfigurement which is death itself. 

Grief was overwhelmed in terror. 

To this day I do not know what they mean when they call dead bodies beautiful. 

The ugliest man alive is an angel of beauty compared with the loveliest of the dead. 

Against all the subsequent paraphernalia of coffin, flowers, hearse, and funeral I reacted with horror. 

I even lectured one of my aunts on the absurdity of mourning clothes in a style which would have seemed to most adults both heartless and precocious; but this was our dear Aunt Annie, my maternal uncle’s Canadian wife, a woman almost as sensible and sunny as my mother herself. 

To my hatred for what I already felt to be all the fuss and flummery of the funeral I may perhaps trace something in me which I now recognise as a defect but which I have never fully overcome - a distaste for all that is public, all that belongs to The Collective; a boorish inaptitude for formality. 

My mother’s death was the occasion of what some (but not I) might regard as my first religious experience. 

When her case was pronounced hopeless I remembered what I had been taught; that prayers offered in faith would be granted. I accordingly set myself to produce by willpower a firm belief that my prayers for her recovery would be successful; and, as I thought, I achieved it. 

When nevertheless she died I shifted my ground and worked myself into a belief that there was to be a miracle. 

The interesting thing is that my disappointment produced no results beyond itself. 

The thing hadn’t worked, but I was used to things not working, and I thought no more about it. 

I think the truth is that the belief into which I had hypnotised myself was itself too irreligious for its failure to cause any religious revolution. 

I had approached God, or my idea of God, without love, without awe, even without fear. 

He was, in my mental picture of this miracle, to appear neither as Saviour nor as Judge, but merely as a magician; and when He had done what was required of Him I supposed He would simply - well, go away. 

It never crossed my mind that the tremendous contact which I solicited should have any consequences beyond restoring the status quo. I imagine that a ‘faith’ of this kind is often generated in children and that its disappointment is of no religious importance; just as the things believed in, if they could happen and be only as the child pictures them, would be of no religious importance either. With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.