Chapter 16: Modern Feudalism and Women

Any governmental or socio-economic paradigm that aims to be mutually-empowering among all individuals and groups, and to foster the thriving of each and all, must value each and every person.

This chapter was written when the Transition was imagined as a single, rapid, coordinated event. Passages from that original plan are kept for transparency in marked boxes; the current approach is gradual, voluntary and democratic (how the approach has evolved).

Unfortunately, many cultures and paradigms, including the dominant modern feudalism, devalue, marginalize and disempower women. That’s fifty percent of the population who are treated as less-than. Women in the United States earn about 82 cents for every dollar men earn (Pew Research Center, 2023), and even comparing the same jobs and qualifications, an unexplained gap remains (Blau and Kahn, 2017). High-level opportunities disproportionately go to men. There is no conceivable justification for this behavior. In a culture where money defines one’s options, ability to survive, degree of freedom and respect granted one, this disparity directly and unjustifiably harms women.

Some argue that women’s menstruation hurts performance and that they will likely get pregnant and end up leaving the workplace, and use that as justification. Women are thus penalized for keeping the species going. Men, however, aren’t paid less if they are in the armed Reserves, which will lead to time away from work and could lead to being killed or injured. No double standard is in any way acceptable.

Businesses are primarily concerned with profits, stock prices and market share. Anything perceived as diminishing those even a little bit, is seen as needing to be culled. In the employers’ ideal world, employees would work long hours for little to nothing with no benefits. If they can get a good deal on a machine that can replace the employee and work for no pay at all, they will jump on it, wholesale.

Over and above that, the preferential cultural attitudes elevating men and devaluing women comes from long before the current socio-economic paradigm dominated the world. That paradigm, however, like any hierarchical social structure, amplifies those attitudes, socially sets them in stone and perpetuates them, largely unchallenged.

In such cultures, some women, faced with the prospect of trying to survive on sub-living wages, opt to marry for money as a survival strategy. The result is dysfunctional, loveless relationships in which wife and husband are using each other. This leads to even greater alienation. The result is normalization of inauthentic and unfulfilling relationships.

In these cultures, prostitution arises when women are struggling and perceive that the only way they can pay the rent and put food on the table is to sell their bodies.

To expunge disparaging attitudes towards women (along with people perceived as “other”) will not happen automatically when the paradigm change happens. It will take a lot of effort over a long time to achieve that goal. But ending the current paradigm will end money as a means of inducement and enforcement over women. Nobody will be able to threaten anybody with loss of livelihood. The goal of cultural healing will become much more attainable, once hierarchical social structures are mothballed.

The new paradigm will strongly reinforce collaboration, cooperation, mutual empowerment and respect. It will not reinforce bullying, intimidation, obstruction, exclusion or abuse. What is reinforced predominates. What isn’t reinforced tends towards extinction. There will be no power positions for anybody to abuse. There may still be prejudiced, ignorant people; but they won’t be in a position to use economics to inflict their ideas on non-consenting people. Nobody will be in a position to block access of anybody else to any resource, except with respect to their own person and living space.

With currency obsolete and all resources from homes, to food, to education, to transportation, to healthcare to virtually everything accessible to all, there will be no motivation for anybody to create shortages or withhold access to goods and services. Attempting to do so will be a prosecutable crime. None will be able to stand in the way of another’s life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness and everything that goes with them.

Yet we do best to be vigilant and proactive in working to eliminate sexism, racism, religious and ethnic intolerance. Its means of enforcement will be mostly gone, but the mentality itself will require a long process to undo. There are a number of examples of such attitudes that persisted and festered. The Soviet Union sought to end gender bias and made major gains in women’s education and employment, though women still carried most of the domestic work and rarely reached the top (Lapidus, 1978); after the dissolution of the Union, pre-Soviet sexist attitudes resurfaced openly. In the United States, freeing the enslaved did not end racism: it mutated into Jim Crow laws, lynching and segregation, and racist acts and attitudes persist to this day. The Nazis were defeated in WWII; yet since the mid-2010s, in the United States and in Europe and elsewhere, we’ve seen a proliferation of white supremacist and neo-Nazi terrorist groups and attitudes (CSIS, 2020), who have made inroads into infiltrating government itself. If not addressed explicitly, destructive generational attitudes tend to fester and re-emerge later. In other words, the transition to the new paradigm will be just the beginning of an ongoing process of rebuilding, redefining, and healing our societies and ourselves.

Our goals will include the empowerment, fulfillment, synergistic, symbiotic engagement, freedom and quality of life for ourselves and each other. Replacing the mutually-predatory current modern feudal paradigm with one that fosters mutual support, symbiosis, synergy, will reduce racism, sexism, religious intolerance and inter-ethnic hatreds from Himalayas to foothills. We will still absolutely need to conquer those foothills. We dare not become complacent, think that our work is done, or rest on our laurels.

Yet attempting to simply suppress hateful attitudes and ideation won’t undo them. It will drive them underground and cause them to fester. People holding those attitudes will see themselves as victims or even martyrs, which will lock them more strongly than ever into their attitudes. We will need to address these attitudes directly, possibly with an approach similar to the one that helps people get free of any addiction. They are caught in a compulsion to be entitled to be and act as though they’re above others, as some CEOs are, even more so. Deprived of their “drug” of choice, which will no longer exist, at least some of those people will react badly and possibly violently.

The full range of attitudes, beliefs and behaviors will have to be out in the open. We will need to strike a delicate balance. We will not thrive if bullying, hatred, intolerance, exclusion and abuse are common and reinforced. Yet directly suppressing those attitudes would only drive them underground and out of sight, making them all the more dangerous.

From the beginning, the people bringing in the new paradigm will clearly state that one of its principles and goals is to set up a society, at local, national and international levels, that empowers and sustains every one of us, guaranteeing each person access to all their needs and supporting them to make their best contributions.

The new paradigm will be peer-based, not hierarchical. There will be no positions of power that would enable one or some to impose their prejudices or personality disorders upon others. With all resources directly accessible to all, no party will own or control the access of others to goods, services and resources. This will greatly reduce the ways discrimination or exclusion could be imposed. Economics will no longer be a means of preferential control.

There will still be the problem of groups of people sharing exclusionary, bullying, abusive, slanderous or demeaning behavior towards others. That won’t magically disappear. Yet such behaviors are already illegal in most countries. Such laws will have to be strengthened and rigorously enforced across the board.

The current dominant paradigm germinates, feeds, and amplifies inter-group resentments and hatreds. The paradigm routinely creates shortages of all resources, including jobs and other sources of income. There isn’t enough to go around. In this win-lose-lose-lose game, one person or group always gains at the expense of others. Existing ethnic, racial, religious and other conflicts are amplified and new ones spawned. The normal functioning of the paradigm guarantees it. We are thus kept divided against each other and kept playing the game by rules set by the modern feudal lords, in full accordance with the principles of the paradigm. Concerted unified societal action for fundamental change is thus inhibited and often extinguished. The one group that always gains at the expense of all others is the modern feudal lords. The paradigm reliably generates such a feudal aristocracy. It matters not who occupies that position.

The intense hierarchical structure of the paradigm creates an intensely stratified society. Women often occupy a lower position in this hierarchy than their male peers to varying degrees. The economics of the power structure become ever more set in stone over time. The ones at the top of the economic pyramid are reliably those most driven to accumulate, and most devoted to, wealth, power, opulence and privilege. Like most people caught in a compulsion, they act to protect and preserve its objects at all costs. The paradigm strongly reinforces this, and by playing the part assigned to us in the “game,” we reinforce this behavior.

The new paradigm will erase this modern feudal power structure. With the need for currency obsolete, nobody will be in a position to lord it over another or block another’s access. All persons will have direct access to what they need and want (subject to reasonable limitations – how many cars does a person need?). There will be no ruling class and no subjugated class.

Pre-existing resentments and attitudes acquired under the current dominant paradigm will persist for a while. It will be important to encourage and reinforce open public dialog and mobilize psychotherapeutic resources to support the Transition. Mutually beneficial collaboration and symbiotic modes of action will be reinforced. Predatory, coercive, bullying behavior will not be reinforced. Those who find it hard to adjust will have support and assistance to find their place to thrive in the new paradigm. The old attitudes, behaviors and patterns will increasingly fade over time. The first generations to grow up in the new paradigm will never learn the destructive, dysfunctional behaviors of the current paradigm.

Some may still seek to intimidate, exclude, or harass certain people or groups, and may refuse to interact or work with them. For that reason, we will need to strengthen and vigorously, impartially enforce laws prohibiting such behaviors. Judges, prosecutors, administrators, and police officers who are unable or unwilling to behaving in accordance to these principles will need to be replaced with ones who do, not in a punitive spirit but in the same mindset with which a person with failing eyesight may need to be prevented from driving. To minimize the opportunities for abuse, all functioning of public functionaries will have to be fully transparent to the public in real time.

One would not put an alcoholic in charge of the night shift at a liquor store. We will not put a person who has shown, by their conduct, that they cannot act impartially toward all persons because of an intractable prejudice or hatred, in a position of authority over the public or of serving it. Such a person will not be put in a position of being able to harm, exclude, bully or demean others due to their dysfunction. The full range of support will be available, at no cost, to anyone who wants help letting go of hatred.

In the public discourse, we’ll need to support each other in avoiding blame of persons. There will be no place in the new paradigm for “payback.” Those who were once exploiters and oppressors will have no power to oppress. Those who were once oppressed and exploited will no longer be. What is now the current paradigm will be in the past. We will do best if we learn from the past but emphasize the present and the future and how to steer our society in the new paradigm on a course towards universal human thriving, harmony, symbiosis, actualization and fulfillment.

Generational, ingrained ethnic, religious and other hatreds with lives of their own will be a bigger challenge. Hatred is not a medical diagnosis, but it is a different thing from anger. Anger is aimed at what someone did, and seeks to change it; it can drive people to right a wrong. Hatred is aimed at who someone is, sees them as unable to change, and seeks to harm or exclude them (Fischer, Halperin, Canetti and Jasini, 2018). It has no constructive side. It is a dysfunctional state of mind, harmful both to its targets and to the people who hold it, and it calls for patient work to undo it, through contact, education and support, while the law protects its targets from harmful acts. We will meet it with firmness and compassion, using every reasonable means, from contact and education to counselling, to help people free themselves of it. Individuals who act on it, by harming or credibly threatening others, may need to be kept separate from the rest of the population, but only through a lawful, transparent process with due process and independent review, possibly in a manner emulating the Norwegian prison system (Sterbenz, Business Insider, 2014). Holding a hateful belief will never by itself be grounds for this; conduct is what counts. The purpose of this will not be punitive. These individuals will be treated with respect and compassion, with every opportunity to change, but prevented from being a threat to the well-being of others.

In short, the Transition to the new paradigm will not end all prejudice, bullying, violence, abuse, or other harmful behavior. It will, however, reduce the scope, prevalence and severity of such behaviors from Himalayas to low foothills. Mutually beneficial behaviors will be reinforced. Destructive, predatory behaviors will not. What is reinforced, predominates. What is not reinforced, tends towards extinction. The new paradigm will give rise to a self-reinforcing cycle of expanding benefit to individuals, groups and the larger community.