At the dawn of the 20th century, Britain had the greatest empire the world had ever seen. It stretched from the boreal vastness of Canada to the ice floes of the South Pole, from the scorching deserts of Egypt to the steamy jungles of New Guinea.
In 1900, British king Edward VII ruled over a quarter of the world’s population. His navy was the largest, most modern, and most ruthlessly efficient fighting force on the planet. His was the empire on which the sun never set, the undisputed global leader in science, technology, and commerce.
And then, in 1918, the British Parliament made a historic mistake. It gave women the vote. In 1920 the United States followed. Women’s suffrage rapidly spread around the world. Nearly 100 years later, how’s that working out for us?
Men were free in 1900
A man in Britain or the United States was free to say what he liked, subject only to the ancient laws on slander, treason, and incitement to crime. Men were the heads of their households, and they commanded respect as fathers and husbands. The majority paid no income tax. You were free to start a business without having to fend off legions of government busybodies. There was no welfare state, the only people who expected to live off their fellow men were beggars and drunks.
Western civilisation was unashamedly patriarchal and capitalist. Masculine virtues had propelled Europe out of the dark ages and colonised the New World, creating mighty new nations from scratch. Freed from feudalism and serfdom, the fertile mind of Western man produced an incredible series of discoveries and inventions. These allowed our forefathers to tame the forces of nature which had dominated and immiserated human beings since the first primitive hominids gazed in wonder and fear at a sunset on the African savannah.
Electricity let us push back the night. The steam engine brought us factories, mass production, and railways, which made mass prosperity and mass transit possible for the first time. Modern agriculture eliminated the ancient evil of famine in every country that bathed in the light of Western science. The world began to knit together as the primordial forerunner of the internet—the telegraph—brought regions and then nations and then continents together in almost instantaneous communication.
The intellectual crowning jewels of the West lay in its universities, from the medieval institutions of Europe to the Ivy League. These were places where serious and ferociously bright young men studied law, philosophy, and science. Where the secrets of the atom were probed, life-saving medical advances were made, astronomers mapped the cosmos, and engineers dreamed of ways to take us there, one day, into space.
The Western world in 1900 was not Utopia. There was poverty, bigotry, and injustice, but opportunity was real and a man with grit and ability could make something of himself. Many of the richest and most famous men of that era had been born poor and were self-taught.
Where stands Western civilisation today?
Men are not free in 2014
Most Western countries have a labyrinthine code of laws designed to jail you for saying the wrong things. Even in the United States, which stubbornly clings to its First Amendment, a man’s career can now be ruined and his reputation traduced if he offends against the latest dictates of political correctness.
Half or more of your income ends up in the pockets of the government, thanks to its bewildering array of taxes. Fathers and husbands—when they’re not being ridiculed as the butt of every joke on television—are second class citizens. If your wife decides she wants to take your house and your children away from you, she easily can with the full force of the law behind her.
If you try to start a business, you will find that not only are you not free to hire whoever you want, but you must also satisfy every whim of town planners, environmental bureaucrats, and health and safety commissars—all of them paid for by you, the taxpayer, to tell you what to do.
Another thing that you, the taxpayer, are funding is the welfare state. The welfare state exists to allow lazy people who don’t feel like working to live off you without going to the trouble of begging you for your money. The welfare state pays single mothers to squat out feral kids by multiple men without having to hold down a husband to pay for it all. The welfare state means the government is substitute Daddy for these women and their bastard offspring.
One fifth of US households now claim food stamps. That’s 47 million Americans, living in the richest and most successful society that has ever existed, where food is cheap and plentiful beyond the wildest dreams of people living 100 years ago, who are supposedly so pathetic and helpless that they need the government to feed them, as if they were children.
Our universities have become a bizarre combination of daycare facility, pick-up joint, and grotesque circus of left-wing drama. Universities are no longer places for serious thinkers to hone their minds. They’re places where braying young idiots go to learn to parrot feminist and Marxist slogans before reality punches them in the face with the realisation that their joke degrees are worthless.
The days have gone down in the West. Behind the hills, into shadow.
How did it come to this?
The state of modern society is a disaster for many fathers. But of all the self-inflicted wounds perpetrated on Western civilisation, votes for women was the most easily avoidable. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time, in 1918 and 1920, when Britain stood at her peak and the United States looked to the century ahead with supreme confidence. But women are not like men. They don’t think in the same way. They don’t understand or value freedom the way men do. Women have a herd mentality. Rugged individualism, healthy masculine debate, and raucous male laughter offend their sensibilities.
As soon as American women were allowed to vote, alcohol was banned in the United States. The temperance movement had been a female dominated nuisance for decades, but now hopelessly misguided female busybodies had electoral power. It was a farce that turned a nation into lawbreakers and birthed organised crime on a massive scale.
Slowly but inexorably, the United Kingdom and the United States, and other societies that allowed women to vote, began to tilt leftward. Welfare states were created, largely because women feel that it’s not “fair” to allow people to succeed or fail on their own merits. And it’s not “fair” that a woman should have to rely on the father of her children to support her, when she can make men in general pay for her upkeep through the tax and welfare systems.
Government, which had once been small and limited, began to spread its tentacles like a rape-beast from the sickest Japanese anime porn until it penetrated the lives of every citizen. Taxes started to rise in order to pay for all these new entitlements and programmes, and an entire caste of useless bureaucrats emerged to run them. Family and divorce law gradually warped into the anti-male Kafkaesque nightmare it is today because of politicians chasing female votes.
As with most female demands, capitulating to women’s suffragists didn’t satisfy them. Not content with invading the traditionally male space of political affairs, women started insinuating themselves into every other masculine sphere. The universities admitted them, which is why male students today find themselves harangued about imaginary “rape culture”. They swarmed into the workplace, which is why working men today find themselves terrified of sexual harassment or discrimination accusations from spiteful female co-workers. Even the military became feminised and sensitised, with deleterious consequences for the fighting man.
The modern religion of the West—political correctness—is every feminine vice writ large: bossy, deceitful, petty, and false. Almost everything that is wrong with modern life can be traced to the decline of masculine virtues and their replacement with feminine vices. For civilisation itself is the triumph of masculine energy, vision, and courage.
For the sake of our civilisation, for the sake of all men and women, we must undo this historic wrong turn. Women have no business voting in elections for public office, let them stick to voting for things they understand, like the X-Factor. This may seem like a quixotic idea. But remember—so was women’s suffrage, once.
Read More: Liberals Are Not The Enemy…But Liberalism Is