The Imposition of Wants

Distorting Want Into Need pt. 1

I don’t know how many are aware  of Rebbe Manis Friedman.  He is an Hasidic Jewish thinker, but unusual I believe in his concept of God and creation even for Hasidism.  Friedman says that man has no need for God but that the creation was about God having a need for man.  Now bear with me for one  moment because this will not be a religious post.  If man has no need for god rather than the converse, then man has no need to “obey” God in order to be rewarded because man, lacking any need in God can tell God.  “No.”  I am man, I am singular and not you, and so I do not need you to impose upon me the manner in which I am to be.  

Similarly, Friedman goes on to suggest, children don’t need the parent, it is the parent who needs the child and attempts to impose upon the child a personality of obedience and duty to the parent that the child has no need to obey.  Well the first objection you are going to say is that of course the child does need the parent to take care of them, at least initially.  But just for a moment let’s go back to the first statement, and then we will reframe the argument without Mr. God.  God, says Friedman is imperfect because alone he is unfilled and so he needs to create man.  If God were perfect and had no need to create man he simply would not create man.  Since he does create man, then the option is to create immortality and therefore godliness in man.  But if God creates other Gods, there would be no need to do so because if God exists without being created, then other Gods could exist without him needing to create those other Gods and God would not be lonely, or have a lack, and therefore a need to create.  But since he is lonely he does create man and therefore he creates a world where man himself has no need for God because the mortal man’s needs are totally filled by the creation itself.  Food and shelter and a community (Friedman says “woman”) in which all of his needs are met so that God himself is unneeded by what he creates, but what he creates is to fulfill only God’s needs.  

Now seen from this angle, the parent has the need and the child is born with the parent having created (“given birth”) to the child has to create that child with the   ability to provide the child’s food, shelter and community but the child itself does not need the parent because the parent must provide the child that the parent needs with the same wants necessary for the child to successfully fulfill the child’s needs.

Now I have intentionally reframed Friedman to be parent for two reasons.  One the singular parent equates to the singular God, and secondly the parent that creates is singular—the female that is able to give birth. But she gives birth, as God did to fulfill his needs to be not lonely.  The woman does need male sperm in any bi-sexual species, but how or from whom the male sperm is collected is irrelevant, she has no need for the male other than the injection into the ova.

Man however has great need for the woman so that he does not suffer the fate of God or woman.  But before we go on let’s now remove God and speak of what we can ascertain to be the basic framework of creation from a more discernible scientific framework since we cannot discern the existence of God beyond a man’s “belief”, but beliefs are not a priori to man but consequential to his existence. So the best scientifically discernment to replace God is with elements.  I don’t want to get into subatomic particles, etc, but essentially we have a slew of molecules floating around, bumping into each other, combining with other molecules to create larger complex molecules, or fusing apart to create smaller molecules that may or not recombine.  Here we have a sort of loneliness, or at least a “need” in the sense that that is how all known objects come into exist  (it may not be the case with dark matter, we haven’t quite grasped what dark matter is, but one recent (like within recent weeks when the theory was published) suggesting dark matter may consist of molecules that may not act the same way because the molecules might be too proximally distant to do so).  Be that as it may, the discernible understanding of molecules is that they are dancing around on a pinhead and they create whatever they create due to their propensity to combine or not combine and create other combinatory molecules.  Now probably this is not out of molecules being lonely, but there is certainly a need.  If there was no need then of course all would be dark matter or some other type of universe where this was not true.

But speculations such as these, are science fiction.  By science fiction I do not mean fairy tales, or falsehoods.  All fiction is truth, though it is often presented in genres that seem false.  Murder exists, and for some reason titillates, and so some read murder novels. Romance is an often longed-for need, titillates our desire for what we think of as the ideal relationship.  Violence is real, and a consequence of either our desire to subdue or strike back.  Toni Morrison created fantastical extremes but expresses the reality of experience to such a great degree that she transfers the experience of suppression and longing for dignity into something totally unreal that relates to all real experience. Science fiction can take a multitude of routes to express all of the above realities in ways that are already felt realities (i.e. Soylent Green, The Terminator, the Hunger Games) or attempts at defining supposed technological and scientific discoveries that may not yet be creatable or discernible.  And all speculations about as of yet indiscernible possibilities (space travel, life or invaders from other planets, time travel, alternate universes) are at present basically science-fiction until and if they become discernible,

So what is discernible, but not completely discernible at present, although more and more is becoming discernible is the evolutionary processes that have occurred on earth.  So if we look at what Friedman points out;transferred to a completely secular perspective, before a species can survive there is a need that its ability to survive is enabled.  That is why in eras of catastrophic alteration there is a sudden rash of species transformation and new species development until the needs that the species that survive can be met.  But once this occurs evolution reaches a stage of what Gould calls punctuated equilibrium.  Similarly, as our solar system developed, there was a period where elements were coalescing into what would come to be, and it eventually reached an equilibrium that became what we discern as our solar system.  But none of these equilibrium stages ever mean stasis and permanency.  In other words, change never stops because the foundation at its most elemental stages does not stop and all eras of rapid change (new solar systems, mass extinctions on earth, etc) are abundant until a stage of relative equilibrium occurs.

Now back to our parent who needs a child.  And let’s for a moment disregard abnormal impositions on the parent (woman), but we will get to that because that is what I am trying to get to.  Humanity is in no way unique in bringing forth offspring via male and female, nor is this limited to animal species (and not all animal species necessarily do so), some can create offspring always  through replication, and some through parthenogenesis that produce offspring in times through the presence of sperm, but can at other times produce it without the presence of sperm.  The claim that Jesus was born without the presence of sperm is not a unique claim in human history (don’t tell the Christians, this is our secret), both before the claim of early Christans and since.  But as far as what has been claimed there has never been a discerned incidence of parthenogenesis in human history.  Doesn’t mean it is impossible, that it cannot happen, or that it hasn’t happened, but that it has never been discerned to have happened, but it has been claimed to have happened.

What is discerned is that we are always a species that needs the presence of sperm. But in humanity the female, the parent does not need the male, she only needs the sperm.  Now what I am going to say can be discerned in the majority of animal species that become parent with the aid of male sperm,, and that is that because the parent of the species has no need of the male, only the sperm, she has great leeway in determining, or choosing the sperm donor. And certain males are more frequent donors but the majority are never selected to become donors.  Now this has been shown to be the case in human evolutionary studies as well.

An ancestral population of 60 women and 30 men were breeding in Africa before humans left the continent. The numbers fell to around 25 women and 15 men breeding at the time of the first migration of Homo sapiens, around 70,000 years ago. The whole population would have been larger, but the extras were not contributing to the gene pool. As modern humans moved into Europe more than 45,000 years ago, the number of mothers may have outnumbered fathers by around 100 to 30. And new studies are also showing that the supposed murderous Yamnaya did, in a certain area contribute to a large extent a strong male and female balance in the genetic inheritance in north-central Europe but as they spread across Europe and into Britain there is much fewer incidences of Yamnaya genetic inheritance, and that increases (in my thinking, but not necessarily indicated in the studies) a strong likelihood that the Yamnaya males who moved away from the region of present-day  Ukraine and southern Poland were unselected and moved westward  to mate, but primarily mated with the native women to such an extent that there is much less Yamanaya genetic heritage in those other lands. Or perhaps they were not as bloodthirsty as some claimed,

But if they did not dominate the donations of sperm, we are confronted with abnormal imposition of male sperm.  The women obviously were not selecting mates but being forced to mate.  But of course we have now also (by the time of the Yamnaya) into the beginning era of kings and the era of male dominance and I am sincerely interested in seeing studies that I haven’t encountered yet, on what the ratio of men to women in this era would be. Now I would presume, that, once again fewer males donated sperm to the female population; but it would now be for a much different reason with the same result.

So now we can enter into the modern era and what some are suggesting is the “lonely male” who is ripe for maga induction.  I’m not quite convinced.  I think there are a variety of reasons, but one reason could possibly be that unselected males are also those more left out.  But evolution (beyond the sperm donation) gives the parent no need for the male.  But ah! The male has need of the female.  The man can do nothing but donate sperm, but the female remains the parent who has the need for a child. And if sperm is not donated by abnormal imposition, the parent is the one who determines if she indeed has such a need.  But the male wants to donate sperm.  Males who do not donate sperm are superfluous evolutionary discards.  They live and die unselected, so they need the parent to seek them to contribute and when they don’t, then we encounter the need for the male to donate his sperm through abnormal imposition.

Now we encounter another abnormal imposition, by throwing into the mix the ingredient of want that is increased by the power necessary to want more than is obtainable.  If someone wants and can exert power to fulfill his wants, then he can impose that want over the needs of others.  If he wants, but lacks the power to impose his wants, then he attempts to impose them abnormally and so he begins to define a culture where man has power over the parent and subdue her to meet his need though he may not be wanted.  

He subdues her by giving her less power.  The parent needs a child, or does not.  But the sperm-donating male needs to donate his sperm to the parent.  But the power that the man takes towards the imposition of his need to develop a structure that imposes his needs over the wants of the parent.  In order to do this he takes away the parent’s selective right by confining her need to his unfilled need by forcing her into an abnormal imposition of power that makes his need into a want.  But if the unselected male, or the less favored male, or the male has taken for himself more power over other males successfully creates a structure (marriage, historically, being the most common form) to make the parent need the male by taking control not only of her ability to select the sperm of her choice but her means of doing so by defining her into a belief in fidelity that she must adhere to through a system of patrilineal inheritance  of the parent’s child.

But under such a system all males also become arranged into a hierarchy of power.  One can not be powerful over no one, so to be powerful he must be powerful over as many as he is capable of being powerful over. To be powerful over only one (the parent, now a wife) is not much power.  But is the elemental exercise of the abnormal imposition of power.

The parent needed only the power to select, but each parent equally had the same power and frequently accepted the same sperm donor for the very simple reason that the qualities being sought were often overlapping.  In humanity it was not necessarily only the biggest and strongest,  because the human community requires other qualities than just strength and so other qualities were selected to create  the more diverse community  necessitated by the human needs that permitted it to survive communally.  Unlike elephants, dolphins and whales that form separate communities of adult males and females, or say male lions who form prides of males until a male is strong enough to oust a weakened older male from his pride; the human community survived in common with each other because the female was sometimes the most innovative, sometimes the more capable hunter (though rarer simply due to overall, but not necessarily individualistic, dimorphism in humans).

Of course the power that overfluxed needs and transformed them into wants created an abnormal imposition of power over sexual selection and the more powerful the male perceived himself the more he abnormally imposed that power on mate selection.  The boss over the secretary; or more notoriously the white male over the black woman which did alter the imported African into Afro-Americans.  But the power structure of males over other males would not allow the black male any power over the white woman, for doing so would grant the black male an equity in power that could upset the established male hierarchy.  

Now some may dispute this theory and suggest the early genetic differences in male breeders was because there had always been a”natural” male hierarchy.  My dispute with this is twofold.  First off, we have very strong indications that communities that did survive into the future of history but had little need to record their  history other than orally, present us with many examples of both matrilineal inheritance and matriarchal leadership and various combinations of patriarchies and matriarchies and matrilineal and patrilineal communities.  So that might indicate both evolved separately.  But the second reason most communities that were more basic, i.e. structured more ritualistic,  rather than by religiously-supported structures of layered hierarchies almost had some female component of either matrili

neal or matriarchal, while almost none of the structurally inherited hierarchies, even if there was the occasional queen, those queens could succeed to power only through the patriarchal line when no male heir existed that could maintain that patrilineal inheritance.  And furthermore we see evidence in a vast proportion of those communities from Melanesia to the Iroquois where the parent selected the mate and the “fathers” were the parent’s brothers and uncles rather than the sperm donors.