The bitchings of an old white woman...

...who is sick of privileged, middle aged, middle class, mostly white males

I watch a lot of Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying videos. I enjoy their cool intellectual approach and the way their conversations mentally stimulate me. They can give me a lot to think about. But, sometimes they are just sooooo dumb!

I usually mix with psychics and intuitives and mystics and artists and witchy herbalists, people who feel and sense the world around them in preference to intellectualising everything. So the level of intellectualism from Brett and Heather makes a nice change…sometimes.

Yesterday I watched this video. It is very powerful and very much worth watching. There are some great insights here. But on one matter this conversation left me cold. The assumed privilege was mind blowing. Below is what I wrote to Brett Weinstein and then cut, pasted and edited here. One thing I can be certain of is that he will never read it, for the reasons I explain below. I don’t know the other dude - he has not made it onto my list of worthwhile privileged, middle aged, middle class, mostly white males.

And to any man who is reading one of my articles, please take it on trust that you are NOT one of the privileged, middle aged, middle class, mostly white males I am referring to here. Don’t get the hump with me please.

The boys are not playing well together but are still casting themselves as our thought leaders and saviours

Brett is correct in identifying that the current thought leaders don't play well together. He is right that they are loners and that this is a serious weakness of the supposed "freedom movement", which is now falling into a pit of testosterone fueled infighting, to the detriment of us all.

Are our thought leaders really the self-identified, successful, middle aged, middle class, mostly white men? These are the “thinkers” who came into what I will loosely call the Covid era with a reputation and with a level of success in the mainstream world. They are the ones who have successfully obeyed all the rules of mainstream society, until recently, in order to get the financial and ego reward this society offers the right type of middle aged, middle class, mostly white man. They are used to being at the top looking over the rest of us. And they have now forged ahead as the dominant voices in the alternative media space.

The Substack hierarchy

And as they always have, they ignore those who have not earned a level of status and success in the mainstream world. Substack is a great example of how this works. Substack has its own form of hierarchy. Mostly successful white males get paid subscriptions by other successful white males, with the occasional darker skinned male and the occasional female getting in on the game, just as long as they can show they have been able to succeed in the white male world; as long as they obey the white male rules. They identify one another with their "bro bonding", which can get close to nauseating at times and is designed to make we outsiders know we ARE outsiders.

The rebels on Substack

But there is another world on Substack hidden behind this world. It is the world of those who did not succeed in getting significantly rewarded by mainstream, and who are still not getting rewarded to a decent level on Substack. It is the world of those who have been radicals all their lives, who have been outsiders all their lives, who have been so far ahead of the game for so much of their lives that they are almost entirely rejected from mainstream society - and now from “mainstream Substack”.

So who are we? We are a legitimate and valid personality type but successful white males don't think so. They do not value the way we look at life and they do not value our perspective on life. They look at our substacks and rarely read them because they are too personal or too emotional or too honest or too "creative" and they cannot imagine how our meagre life experiences could matter to them. We have to have white male authority behind what we write to reassure them that they should "waste their time" reading us. If some white male structure has given us the title of Dr, they will pay us some attention, just for as long as we behave like a doctor and talk like a doctor and assume authority like a doctor, as defined by the privileged white male world. But if we wander off into talking about stuff that is a step too far from their mainstream world, no way.

And they think it is their job to save the world and that they are the only ones who can do it. They get together at their self-congratulatory conferences to prove how much they matter. But do they really matter much at all?

I say yes, they do matter, but as a part of the team. They are not the entire team. And they might just have to accept leadership from somewhere else, even from those they have scorned, who posses knowledge and skills they do not have.

Who really spins the future?

This gulf between the privileged and the radicals is huge. The privileged are not able to read and value the ponderings of sick old women or irascible old men, who think they, the privileged, are talking very clever bullshit that we, the true radicals, can sum up in a paragraph. No, they will pay one another for their very clever bullshit, and slap one another on the back for being so very very clever. Meanwhile we, the radicals, get on with applying knowledge to life. We drag it down from the stratosphere and integrate it into daily life - if it is worth it. I wonder how many of the millions of words written on Substack have been brought to life by being applied in material reality?

What we do know is that the privileged, middle class, middle aged, mostly white men will never take the time to value our sharp wits and our insight and our realism. Do they have any inkling of the value to human society of insight, intuition, inspiration - those capacities that come from the unknown, via the miraculous human form, to lead us into the as yet unknown and undreamed of future? But this is what we need now, visionaries; not their stratospheric intellectualism, but our real life insight to know what needs to be done, and our pure hard grit and determination to get it done.

So what space are the privileged giving those of us who will actually envision and spin the future? None. They think it is all up to them and that without them, nothing will happen.

Wake up boys. We are taking anything useful we can from your ponderings, putting it together with our own, and using what results to spin the future, here and now, with or without you.

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