Irreni World Scale Versus Cultural Norms of Power

Systemic Solutions

The social problems today like racism and sexism are in part systemic problems and those systems must change. Irreni World Scale erases and replaces those systems because you can't get ahead by staying even.

The #MeToo movement happened thirty years ago with Anita Hill. I remember when the Anita Hill event took place and I greatly celebrated the outcome. Today conservatives lament the character assassination of Clarence Thomas all the while overlooking the greater good that came from it. Sexual harassment policies and laws quickly became policy for large corporations. Because of Anita Hill women are treated far better today in the work place than they were before the Anita Hill came forward. Progress.


And yet, #MeToo is still a thing. Those corporate policies didn't seem to stop Harvey Weinstein?


The rule of law is only as good as its enforcement. George Bush gave Congress the finger after Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley act. He did so by reducing the SEC staff by half, he gutted enforcement. Laws without enforcement are useless. Another example, the CEO of a company such as with Harvey Weinstein is the chief enforcement officer. Why would he prosecute himself? Another example, the police are never prosecuted for crimes because why would they arrest themselves?

These deficiencies in the rule of law system are called systemic failures.

The people who benefit from these systemic failures will tell you these failures cannot be fixed.

Fuck them.

You can't get ahead by staying even.

Life has greatly improved due to sexual harassment policies and laws passed in the 1990s. Similarly, life has greatly improved for minorities in the US after the civil rights act was passed.

And yet.

And yet while the degree of oppression may have been reduced against women and minorities the same types of oppression that existed before the laws were passed are still common. Women are still sexually harassed in the workplace and blacks are killed by the police for reaching their hands near their waist.

The "fear-of-life" standard passed down by the Supreme Court in 1989 is pure racism at its worst. It had nothing to do with protecting the lives of police. The police in Japan do not carry guns and are just fine.

In the 1800s the question of slavery was put to George Washington. Should slavery be abolished? As a slave owner Washington said that in his opinion that abolishing slavery would lead to more death and misery than otherwise just letting slavery fade away as economic nonsense. Five-hundred-thousand people died in the civil war. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink was Washington's guiding principle. Was Washington's position right? Should we have just waited until slavery faded away?

Well, it turns out you can lead a horse to water to a certain extent. This extent is what we have experienced with the passing of the Civil Rights Act and the sexual harassment. I remember reading something insightful after Anita Hill and subsequent burgeoning of sexual harassment policies. One op/ed write opined that women will fare far better in their striving for equality because white men live with women but white men don't know any blacks. Women now represent over half of lawyers graduating and something similar for doctors.

And yet.

The fundamental problem preventing us moving forward are systems by men designed for men. Predominantly I'm talking about the power pyramid of bureaucracy. The power pyramid has two patriarchal features:

1. Single leader at the top of a people pyramid that primarily governs subordinates that themselves sit roost upon a sub-pyramid of power.
2. Single leader power has final authority for all domains of decisions.

This is patriarchy defined. It favors men.

Patriarchy has been under attack since the rise of feminism. Today the volume of anti-patriarchy is I would say about the same as what I observed during the 1970s. And the response  is the same, patriarchy denial and patriarchy doesn't exist.

Jordan Peterson and others claim that there is no such thing as patriarchy today and even claim that it never existed at all. However, these are the same folks who will claim  differences between men and women are why men choose some career paths and women choose others. Which is it?  System differences exist due to gender choices or not? How can patriarchy not exist if women are making career choices based upon gender?

So what the patriarchy deniers would have you believe is that there are some domains of human nature where gender doesn't play a role, patriarchy, and some domains where it does like career paths. The other bullshit that is promoted by the patriarchy deniers is to rename it "dominance hierarchy" and that this form of hierarchy is as unavoidable as breathing oxygen and so therefore women must submit to our human nature of dominance hierarchy.

Fuck off.

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink.

Why were we able to lead a horse to water and make them drink? By that I mean why did we experience a demonstrable success with the Civil Rights Act and sexual harassment laws to lead people to drinking water not of their beliefs...and yet?

Let's put this in a different context, smoking.

When I grew up everyone was smoking. Both my parents smoked. Smoking was the norm. And yet, even in the 1970s there were anti-smokers who were publicly out because of the Surgeon General's Warning on cigarettes. All of us are susceptible to pressure of cultural norms overriding otherwise personal choices. If everyone does something it becomes a norm and we may participate even if we aren't personally interested or truly believe. Religion operates under this guise and if religion were ever exposed for only its true adherents we'd quickly discover that the United States is not 70% Christian, but far less than 1%. When the anti-smoking campaign started many of us who hated smoking felt empowered to break free of the cultural pressure. Nowadays smoking has resolved to just those who are truly committed, albeit mostly addicted.

I believe this is what happened with the Civil Rights Act and sexual harassment laws. Many of us white men were not down with the overt racism and sexism we saw around us. When these laws were passed it then empowered us who were in the dominant culture to disengage from sexism and racism practiced by those who are. I personally have reported sexual harassment I have observed of women in the work place many times to human resources. I feel it is my duty.

But it is still not that easy. In 1984 I moved from Indiana to California. I was an overtly homophobic person. I made fun of men who wore pink or yellow, I made fun of men who drove VW bugs. I laughed at homophobic jokes. I was homophobic because in part I didn't think I knew any gay people and I was trained to be homophobic and didn't recognize it. When I came to California that changed. I got called out on my homophobia and quickly reversed my attitude. I have worked with many out gay people since coming to California and have shed my social disease.

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink except of those horses were not really being themselves by not drinking water. And sometimes people need to be re-aligned with who they truly are after a childhood indoctrination.

Shaming people and then again raising awareness through the likes of protesting and normalization in entertainment media works great with aligning people who would otherwise not practice shameful behaviors.

However, shaming people and raising awareness has its limits. Shaming and raising awareness can and have run their course due to limits.

One of those limits is systemic failures of the rule of law. Those doing the policing won't police themselves and then subsequently build a "good old boy" network outward from there.

This is what we are seeing with the Brett Kavanaugh case and then again with Trump. These people have socially abhorrent behavior and become exempt because they police themselves. Trump was exempt first as a CEO and now has declared he has the power to pardon himself.

It is time to blow up the patriarchy. It is time to blow up the system by males and for males: the power pyramid.

As a reminder, this blog is about solutions and not punditry.

Irreni World Scale blows up the patriarchy into 300 million pieces. Irreni World Scale calls for a minority-centric power structure in the MGO, the micro-modular governing organization. These minority governments of size thirty have the ultimate, final authority in the rule of law. Larger governing bodies built form these modules are subordinate in power. To whit, the MGO Constitution eventually replaces the US constitution as the supreme law for those governed by it. MGOs have a fixed size of thirty people and with seven-billion people on the planet then that means there will be 300 million minority governments. Power this diffuse undermines patriarchy. Irreni World Scale does not explicitly disallow any MGO to organize its thirty people as a power pyramid. However, it does not need to disallow a power pyramid once they must survive in the face of competition. Irreni experiments will demonstrate that MGOs designed on meritocracy decision leadership perform far better than those designed with existing patriarchy, man-at-the-top leadership. In a meritocracy leadership those who are most qualified to make a decision make the decision. Various decision support structures will be needed for meritocracy leadership, up to and including formulating a new structure on demand as novel situations occur. Patriarchy lacks any leadership dynamism in design.

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink.

Patriarchy, sexism and racism deniers today are juvenile in their tantrums claiming such things as racism no longer exist. Specifically their tantrum goes simply a word like "bureaucracy" doesn't have the word "patriarchy" in the title and  therefore it cannot be patriarchy. People who voted for a person that claimed Mexico was sending us rapists and murderers are racists no matter how loud their tantrums denying they are racists are. Racists today hide behind claiming they are not racists. That is a juvenile defense a six-year-old uses. And those who exercise racism all the while denying it are not getting away with it. Republican voters had sixteen candidates to chose from in 2015 and they chose the most racist one by far. Because he was a racist.

Just self-identifying is not a free pass, except religion. This is one domain of culture that still gets a free pass. This has to change. If Trump says he's a Christian, still to this day, for some reason,  we're suppose to take him at face value? No. Trump is not a Christian. He doesn't act like one, he's not one.

When we start flushing the systems designed by men for men down the cultural toilet then religion has to be first and foremost of them to be flushed. A system with no standards of qualification except self-identification is the worst of the worst systems. All religious texts were written exclusively by men and then subsequently power given only to men. It is just that obvious and simple. Religion has to go. Just refuse to join a religion and they will disappear.

We have to have the courage of our convictions. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink except if cultural pressure was forcing those who would otherwise drink to not drink. We have reaped the benefit of leading those type of horses to water and getting them to drink with the Civil Rights act and sexual harassment laws. From here out though we still have to deal with the horses who refuse to drink.

To manage those horses we need new systems that replace the old systems designed today that are in place to favor those in power. We don't need stamped labels of "patriarchy" on bureaucracies to notice that bureaucracies are patriarchies. We don't need stamps of "racists" on police forces to recognize they are racist.

We must be willing to erase and replace these systems.

Irreni World Scale is designed to erase and replace these systems, starting with an initial call for 300 million MGOs. MGOs are not the only systems of new design to replace current designs but thinking about MGOs is a good place to start your journey. If you want to learn more you can read the various introduction to Irreni blog posts using the side bar menu. Just look for "Irreni Introduction" in the title.

If 300 million minority governments sounds too radical then it is because the power pyramid culture has hoodwinked you into believing there can be nothing else can do. I came to believe growing up that I didn't have to smoke even though smoking was still a cultural norm. I came to accept homosexuality in the 1980s when homophobia was still a the cultural norm. You can come to believe  in minority government even though power pyramids are the cultural norm today.


Freethinkers unite!

Freedom!

Party On!

Let's get cracking!

Voluntarily Reject Demagoguery!

Politics as Science!

Demand Irreni World Scale!

Anti-theism is feminism!  

Think disruption!

Empathy for all!

Moral relativity: think it, breath it!

Prove it or lose it!

Conversations equal consensus! 

Welcome to the 21st century!

Scale your empathy, scale the world! 

Find your tribe!

Be sexy people!

The future is coming! 

Innovate at a rapid pace!

Slow speed ahead!

Well come! and well met!