Recently I ran into a very interesting phenomenon on youtube: the “men going their own way” (MGTOW) “movement” and a very widespread pattern of rants against feminism and the feminists, usually written by very smart people. When I say “rants”, I actually mean very well researched, analytical and informed commentaries.

MGTOW is essentially a recognition that women are so overprotected by the state that they are dangerous to men – if you marry them, they can decide they are simply bored and take your children away, take a huge portion of everything you own, have you support them for the rest of their lives and find another victim to repeat the process ad nauseam. Furthermore, if they feel like it they can invent some false accusation against you and put you in jail, because the courts are biased to simply take their word for it. So basically some men decided that the risks outweigh the reward and abandoned the entire concept of relationships and marriage, thinking that women have to be treated merely as sex object, because treating them as potential partners can irredeemably screw your life. Of course, some men answer that “not all women are like that” (which is so typical it’s been made into an acronym, NAWALT), to which MGTOW men reply that, considering the rate of divorce of about 50%, and the way the divorce procedure works, they simply aren’t willing to risk it.

OK, some would argue, so the problem really isn’t the women, it’s the legal framework that puts them in a position to make excessive demands. If women couldn’t rely on the state to be their big bully to call upon when they want to take advantage of their men, they would have to rely on traditional interpersonal ways of resolving problems. We then ask why are women in such an unreasonably advantageous position over men and end up with feminists as an answer: they created a theory of patriarchy which supposedly oppresses women throughout history and needs to be reversed by introducing a legal system that negates male privilege, and, since men are pigs and cannot be trusted, in fact establishes female rule over them in order for them not to get any funny ideas.

Putting the rants about the feminists aside for a moment, there is a serious issue of intrusive state, and the argument is basically about the concept of rights.

The concept of rights might sound prevalent and universal today, but it’s actually a very newly introduced legal invention. You see, when the entire United Nations thing was created, there arose the issue of its charter and the concept of an universal legal framework, an international law if you will, and it had to have some rational foundation for making laws other than religious dicta. You can’t say that the foundation for the prohibition of murder is “thou shalt not kill” or however that was translated to ancient English. All ancient books of law were based on a religious dictum of some kind – the laws of Hamurabi, Manu and Moses are in essence religious laws, given to humans by deities, and a modernist materialistic state construct saw no place for those and had to pull something from its ass to fit the bill, and they came up with the concept of “human rights”, such as a right to life and property and what not.

You can’t even begin to understand what a radical reversal of things that was, because the concept of rights is essentially unknown in traditional legal systems. Instead, you had a concept of “duty”. Essentially, the gods had a duty to maintain order in the world. With that purpose, they explained to the kings and priests what their duty and role in the order of things was, and they, in turn, explained to their subjects what their respective duties and roles were. If each performed his or her duty well, the world and society worked well and everybody was happy.

This means that, in the ancient systems, men and women had no rights. They had their respective duties. They had a duty to respect each other, to assist each other and to solve problems amicably and constructively. A man had to build and defend the home and provide sustenance, while a woman had a duty to care for the well-being of her husband and children. They both had a duty to help children develop into adults with best possible starting points and then either send them on their way or train them to take over the inheritance. This concept of duty has a serious advantage over the concept of rights, in that it is intrinsic and not extrinsic. Your duty is your own, and you are expected to do certain, usually very specific things to fulfill it, which puts you in the position of control over your own life. The rights, however, are defined and maintained by the state, which puts you in a position of whining victimhood; if your “rights” are violated, you are expected to be a whining victim and expect someone else to take care of you, which puts people in a child-like position relative to the state. There’s no such thing with duty, but the problem with duty is, it’s difficult to mandate it legally. You can define it negatively, as refraining from violation of rights, but you can’t really legislate duty in a materialistic, non-theocratic legal system, which is why the entire concept was abandoned when the modernistic legal framework was created, and the irony is, those who designed the system probably thought that the concept of rights puts humans in the driving seat, in a position of power and control, unlike the concept of duty, which implies oppression and victimhood, but when you actually pay attention to what those rights actually are and who guarantees for them, the perception reverses.

Let’s see some examples. There are robbers in some forest who attack people of some village. The people complain to the nobleman that they are being attacked, with the argument that it is his duty to protect them. He acknowledges that and assembles a militia which goes into the forest and kills the robbers. Problem solved.

A peasant’s wife complains to the nobleman that her husband beats her; it is the duty of a husband to protect his wife, not abuse her. The nobleman acknowledges that and punishes the offender, but in such a way that he can proceed to take care of his wife and children: he is not killed or imprisoned, because that would be harmful to the wife, but is whipped and publicly shamed.

None of that requires the concept of rights; they can be implicitly assumed, in a sense that a wife has a right to her husband’s protection, but this would be a foolish assumption, because if her husband dies, off goes her right. The concept of defining protection as a duty serves an additional purpose of invoking gratitude in the ones who are protected and cared for. In the concept of rights, there really is no place for gratitude: you only whine and make demands, because you really have no duty, you have rights and you whine if you don’t have it your way. This has two obvious consequences: creating a population of whiners who don’t take any responsibility or ownership of their situation, and a huge nanny-state which is forced to take care of all those rights it invented, and this is financed by taxing everyone to death. This is why all current democracies which acknowledge the concept of rights are drowning in taxes and state bureaucracy, which is the logical consequence of displacing the intrinsic concept of duty with an extrinsic concept of rights.

There is just no way for such a social experiment not to fail, and when it does, it will fail into its opposite, which will be some bloody mess, because people aren’t really good at analyzing things, and even the good thinkers who put their minds to this problem seldom seem to grasp the fundamentals. You can only imagine what an angry mob with pitchforks will do, especially since it has been indoctrinated into believing that they have all sorts of rights which have been violated, and they don’t really have a duty to do anything, other than pay taxes, which is impossible to do since they are around 75% in some cases, when you take both income tax, VAT and all the other crap into account.

Since this is essentially my opening argument, I will refrain from going into great lengths at this point and will instead proceed to elaborate in further articles.