2 responses

1. I’d like you to please clarify how you think about the relation of the particular to the general for women and affections, since you suggested that from the very name of Eve onward the purpose of women is to bring life and good. If that is the purpose of women, how does a woman whose weakest power is affections fit into that purpose? I’ve thought of a few options:

   1) A woman who has weak affectional powers is not fulfilling the purpose of women in the earth. This could be a bad thing, or it could just be that she has some other, more individual, purpose.

   2) The purpose of bringing life is most often found with women because the mean distribution of affectional powers is far greater in women than men. It’s the purpose of affection to bring life, not the purpose of women to bring life. So, a highly affectionate man can have a purpose to bring life, too. And a low-affection woman can serve her own purpose.

   3). Life-giving and affection are intrinsically tied to being a woman, so that if you had a hypothetical man and a hypothetical woman with exactly equal spiritual powers in each of the three categories, the use of those powers by the man would still be more oriented to subduing the earth and the use those equal powers by the woman would still be more oriented towards filling the earth (with life and good). I’m thinking, as I write this option, about your Fruits of the Spirit chart where each fruit had one more triplet of options oriented towards each power.

   Do any of the above align with how you relate female purpose, general trends, and exceptions to the trends? Or is there another way you are looking at it that I don’t see?

   Secondly, you said last episode that internal standard intellect is very rare. But this episode you said that western culture has a priority on intellect and internal standards of guilt and innocence. Again, I had some ideas about how those things might fit together. Do any of them align with your thinking?

   1) Will and Affection are most common because you are judging common in a global sense and the East and the global south are much more populous than the West. Internal standard intellect, or at least intellect led is the most common alignment in the West.

   2) What a culture has as its power alignment is or can be different from what the individuals making up that culture have as their alignments, so it can be simultaneously true that intellect first is individually rare, and that the culture as a whole has intellect as the primary power

   3) When you were talking about the powers and cultures, you were talking about what the cultures value and not what they actually display or consist of. So even though Western culture like internal intellect, most of us don’t actually have it.

   Reply

   • Thank you for asking for clarity on these. All three could be true on the first question. There are exceptions to general distributions, and a woman with affections last (or, for instance, one who cannot bear or raise children) can still be a good woman. She is not fulfilling the purpose of women in general, but she has value nonetheless, and though all women could not be like her, she must find what God has called her to in her particular community. It will be exceptional.

     It could also be true that a man, still a good man, is not called to dominion specifically, but to nurturing and the maintenance of life, and though all men could not be like him, he still has purpose and value on the earth. He will likely find it difficult to be valued in his community and may be cruelly treated. Further, in local contexts, because of the pervasive reality of hypergamy, even high-affection men and low-affection women tend to be paired in such a way that women tend to be either equal to or superior to their men in affections, and men tend to be either equal or superior to their women in at least will if not intellect. It seems that since intellect tends to function as an arbiter between people, there is far more overlap in that power between the sexes and in communities. Men tend on average to be far superior in will, women tend to be far superior in affections, but there seems to be more equity in intellect on average. This makes sense, as the intellect achieves, with greater ease, a greater level of objectivity than either will or affections (which are intrinsically more body-oriented). So in disputes between the will and the affections, the intellect would be the natural mediator.

     On the second question, I think option two is more what I’m thinking. The West tends to value internal intellect even though, clearly, most people in the West do not actually display this primary power or orientation. Most people really do not function according to internal standards, whatever their power distribution, but Western people are more likely to think they do—or at least wish or pretend that they did—even when they don’t. And this lack of self-awareness creates many problems in Western communities. At the same time, since the West does tend to value internal standards, it follows that mavericks, rebels, and free thinkers would have a greater chance of success in Western communities. So we tend to produce and sustain a higher number of internal standard individuals in our communities, though still not anywhere close to a majority. One evidence of this is the worldwide dominance the United States has in original research and development. We tend to invent and discover new systems, even if the refinement and perfection of those systems must be left to external standard communities (especially Eastern communities).

     You have thought through this well. I wish all people would be as circumspect. Like I said, talking in generalities is dangerous, and I’m really thankful you were willing to think through the options rather than assume things. I hope my responses helped to clarify what I was thinking.

     Reply