Patriarchy and Its Pretenders

When Authority Is a LARP

When we were young parents, we met a Canadian couple at church who recommended the Canadian television series Road to Avonlea as one of their favorite family-friendly shows. It fits nicely into a genre I call “blood pressure-lowering entertainment,” similar to older series like Andy Griffith or the beautifully shot All Creatures Great and Small, now airing on PBS. All of these series hearken back to simpler times before modernity drove everyone crazy.

Road to Avonlea is a spinoff of the Anne of Green Gables series by Lucy Maude Montgomery, based on additional characters she developed surrounding the original Anne series¹. Its generative narrative concerns Sarah Stanley, a city girl from substantial wealth, who is sent to live with her late mother’s siblings, the Kings, on Prince Edward Island after her father’s business faces financial ruin and allegations of fraud. It is set shortly after Anne leaves the island, circa 1907.

The Kings are moderately prosperous by PEI standards, owning their land, upon which sit several houses, and possibly other investments such that their homes are respectably furnished. They notably lack domestic servants, other than the occasional farm hand. The major social divide is between Presbyterians and Methodists, and the Kings, as rock-ribbed, stoic Presbyterians, believe they are more respectable in a society that is otherwise entirely homogenous. Like I said, it’s a blood-pressure-lowering show.

The King family on the island consists of three siblings: the headstrong eldest, Hetty, who is Sarah’s guardian; the youngest sibling, Olivia, and a brother, Alec. Hetty is a confirmed old maid, a schoolteacher, and published author; she is stern, judgmental, and controlling over the rest of the family, whereas Olivia is a kinder, freer spirit who eventually marries. Alec is married with children and operates the family farm. Much of the drama of the show consists of conflict between Hetty and the other females of the family, especially Alec’s wife, Janet.

In both Anne and Road to Avonlea, what's especially apparent is that the women run the place. Alec mostly stays out of the way, too busy with farm work and supervising his boys and hired hands to be involved in much of the social goings-on. He carefully picks his battles, only intervening as the head of the family when things reach a threshold of craziness that requires his action. Among the cousins, the primary characters of consequence are Sarah and Alec’s strong-willed oldest daughter, Felicity, whereas the simpler boys largely serve as pawns in their various schemes and dramas.

Lucy Maude Montgomery was an early feminist, yet as a great artist produced literature that was mostly non-political, as her works about PEI are considered semi-autobiographical. Her work serves as an admission against interest, in that despite laws of the time limiting the formal rights of women that Montgomery no doubt opposed, women retained a substantial majority of the power of day-to-day life in PEI society through their natural gifts of influence.

The PEI “Soft Patriarchy”

Avonlea arguably portrays this “soft patriarchy” at its societal peak before the devastation and demoralization of World War I. The revivals of the 19th century had made sincere Christianity more salient than ever and it seemed many people sought, as much as they could, to live a life pleasing to God as they understood Him.

In such a society, despite fewer formal rights, women nevertheless enjoyed substantial influence over the men in their lives. Some yearn for a return to this arrangement, but their circumstances were so different that I’m not sure Humpty-Dumpty can be reassembled. As I described in my column on Andrew Tate, there were balancing aspects of the old ways that are inapplicable in today’s world, and a return may not be workable if any one component is missing.

First, they had marriage patterns that were very different. With limited effective contraception available and extreme social taboos, sex outside of marriage was extremely risky. With no social safety net, women had to be extremely careful who they married, with the result that settled Western societies featured something like 20-30% of women (and thus men too), like Hetty, remaining unmarried, while those who married had large families that compensated for those who did not. Given the risks of an ill-chosen marriage, many women decided their best option was to remain unmarried, such that unstable, irresponsible, or lazy men were continually pruned from the gene pool.

People knew each other’s families, and men who were harsh and abusive or from families with such reputations would find themselves locked out of social intercourse with the more respectable families². Men who wanted to marry well strived to cultivate an image of a gentleman who worshipped his lady as proof that his authority would only be exercised with utmost care. The opportunity for psychos who can hide in modern anonymity was much reduced³.

Likewise, few men were truly independent but nested within hierarchies. A young couple would not typically move away to a new city where an abusive man could pull off his mask, but rather live on the family farm under the authority of a father or father-in-law. Those husbands who were abusive or harsh could be physically disciplined by other men, usually a woman’s male relatives, while the law turned a blind eye to these private matters if the actions only caused minor injuries.

Generally, people were saner, getting fresh air, sunshine, eating exclusively organic, predominantly whole foods, and engaging in significant manual labor, which improved moods and agreeableness. The “war between the sexes” was non-existent, as few people worked in an office where men and women could both equally do a job, and thus it was obvious that men and women were better suited for different kinds of farm work. Janet King certainly didn’t feel oppressed by Alec’s digging post holes, cleaning out stables, or heaving 60 lb. bushels of wheat onto a horse-drawn trailer while she made supper.

One myth about this period is that women could not own property. Single, widowed, and unmarried women certainly could, whereas married women’s property rights were subordinated to their husbands under the ancient Norman legal doctrine of coverture.

However, this is not how things normally worked when it mattered. Few people had any property to speak of beyond land, which required male labor to be productive, and many of those who did have more liquid property would set up inheritance under a trust, which is still in common use today among families with significant estates. Wealthy families often created such trusts for a wife’s “sole and separate use,” which under English common law protected any property under the trust from the husband’s use or control⁴.

Pre-nuptial agreements, then called marriage settlements, modifying the husband’s rights were also extremely common among the propertied. No one was forced into giving up property rights as a condition of marriage, and people of this time were generally freer than we are to set up enforceable contracts and covenants as they saw fit, even when foolish, as we see in the various entailments that caused problems in Jane Austen’s novels⁵.

Thus, any family who wanted their daughter to have independent property could easily do so, and any woman with her own money could set up a trust and/or settlement agreement before she consented to marriage. While the details of the Kings’ finances aren’t discussed extensively, in these supposedly benighted times, Hetty had independent wealth and investments that allowed her to make her own financial decisions. On top of this, she had considerable influence, one might say dominant influence, over her brother.

Thus, Alec King had real authority he rarely used, and then only gently, because of cultural norms and expectations of the time. If this is the natural model resulting from centuries of organic civilizational development, how does this work when all supposed fatherly authority is essentially fake in a world of no-fault divorce, alimony, and child support? There are no easy answers.

The Ideal Exercise of Authority

The leadership literature is unanimous on two rather obvious points. First, all responsibility must come with requisite authority. Second, authority is best exercised implicitly.

Whether one is running a business or a military unit, “pulling rank,” except in rare circumstances, is a marker of poor leadership. The ideal leader, most of the time, aims for voluntary compliance and persuasion, not coercion. Given this, a common mistake is to assume that real authority doesn’t matter and that all authority can safely rest on persuasion alone.

This is also wrong, as it is the actual authority, exercised gently and implicitly, that is quietly persuasive to followers. No sane business or military unit requires responsibility for outcomes while depriving its leaders of actual authority, even if the overuse of coercive authority is a marker of poor leadership. Both principles only work in tension, like a guitar string.

The Patriarchy Pretenders

And this takes us to the modern “patriarchy” movement. Whether of the softer complementarian variety or more hardline interpretations, all of it is effectively a LARP. For better or worse, men have no actual authority over their families and thus traditional roles, however interpreted, require voluntary participation by all parties. The implicit authority is none at all, subject to continual renegotiation. I’ve learned in business and life that success first requires a hard look at ground-level reality and constraints, not wishful thinking about cultural supports that are long gone.

The solution to this is not to assert authority that isn’t real as if it were, but rather to adapt to circumstances. If real authority rarely explicitly utilized is ideal, then fake authority constantly harped on to compensate for its lack of realness is the worst combination. The only solution is to be extremely careful to marry someone with compatible values whose principles and character cause voluntary behavior as reliable as if it were legally required and enforceable.

It seems like by the time someone is citing Bible passages on headship and authority to mitigate a relationship conflict, the situation in today’s world is probably irrecoverable. Everyone knows what Scripture says, and if someone’s not cooperating with the LARP it’s probably over or someone’s acting crazy. This is not to say that the public preaching of these passages is not helpful as a general matter as reminders for the reasonable and sincere⁶, but rather that in acute situations they are of limited practical utility.

Even disproportionate interest in these topics can be an indicator of adverse selection. Alec King, after all, wasn’t listening to podcasts about pretend patriarchy but rather was embedded in a system of his implicit and real authority. Even though I might agree with some of the arguments, it strikes me as a potential red flag if this is a disproportionate interest of someone.

As an example, I am a huge believer in avoiding burnout and limiting workweeks in cognitively demanding roles to around 40 hours. However, if I interview a potential employee, and they bring up the personal importance of work-life balance to them, that socially inappropriate emphasis in an interview causes me to question their work ethic, even if I agree generally.

Similarly, just as a young woman who strongly identifies as a feminist might be revealing a fundamental insecurity or hostility concerning men, a young man who can’t shut up about patriarchy might be revealing something about a lack of personal gravitas or insecurity in exercising persuasive authority that indicates a potential problem in a real relationship in today’s context. In extreme cases, if an all-or-nothing categorical thinker unable to comprehend distributions, he might propagandize himself into a core dislike of women, for which one commentator recently coined a clever term:

“Spiritual homosexuality.” Oosh, Andrew Tate, call your office.

Sanity Trumps All

With few real external controls on anyone’s behavior, temperament matters at least as much as correct opinions when it comes to close relationships like employment or marriage, particularly the social intelligence to know the proper contexts and relative emphasis for correct opinions.

The most important thing, then, for both sexes is to marry someone sane. Sanity and reasonableness can make any authority structure somewhat superfluous. Unfortunately, this is more difficult than ever. A chart showing mental illness by political orientation among college students has been floating around Twitter:

The default interpretation of this chart is to point at how crazy liberals are, which is true. But what bothers me is that even among my in-group, those describing themselves as “very conservative,” fully 35% have “feelings of poor mental health at least half the time.”

I have ideas as to what’s causing this to be more fully covered in a future post, and I think social media has a lot to do with it. It’s very hard for a large portion of the population to behave themselves when supernormal stimuli are flooding our brains constantly.

Many women whose husbands make top 5% incomes complain about money, presumably from viewing vacation and house porn from Insta influencers. Similarly, some very online young guys, many of whom can’t bench their own body weight, but are exposed to outlier thirst traps online, seem severely miscalibrated about who is a “mid” in attractiveness and thus their realistic options in the dating market.

The modern theologian Rushdoony⁷ saw sexual pornography as a desire to escape the curse and return to the Garden of Eden, and that applies more generally to compulsively consumed aspirational content of all kinds. It is exacerbated by what some theologians have called the “double curse.”

That is, it’s not just our fallen nature that causes us problems. It’s also the natural consequences of the curse attending it. Our work is frustrating, causing economic scarcity and inequality. Our genetics are imperfect, and this imperfection is unequally distributed, resulting in some people having many more good things than others, whether in appearance or mental capacities. Yet we retain those natural desires for perfection that were innate before the Fall.

All of the various pornographies provide a temporary escape from the reality of scarcity⁸, allowing the viewer to ever-so-briefly imagine a different reality where everyone is beautiful and rich, their homes perpetually tidy, their vacations amazing, their sourdough always rising perfectly, and their children always well-behaved. The curation effect compounds the problem, in that even the most beautiful, wealthy people have bad moods or bad days which never make the social media highlight reel.

The classic supernormal stimulus is the brightly colored plastic egg which causes a bird to ignore her natural brood. The bird, however, is clueless, and blissfully ignorant as she nurtures the sterile fake. People, however, know better, and the moment the illusion fades there follows an inevitable self-loathing.

Ironically, this revolution in envy enabled by modern communications technology occurs in a world of material post-scarcity⁹ our ancestors could hardly believe if they saw it. We have more than ever, yet are more dissatisfied than ever, because as social animals it’s always been relative status that matters most. And thanks to online dopamine drip feeds, nearly everyone is voluntarily, compulsively rubbing their own noses in their perpetual shortcomings compared to the 99.9th percentile.

Some people can more easily contextualize this appropriately in their minds, but it hits hardest for those with a more tenuous grasp of reality. And while modern life undoubtedly makes more people crazy, the unreasonable have always been among us. The consequence of the removal of all real familial authority, the destruction of “all bonds not continually chosen,” as Charles Haywood puts it, is to make the lives of those who lack rationality especially hellish in a modern environment where they need regulation of their base impulses more than ever.

The authorities in the past that would have curtailed self-destructive behavior can do little. Spouses can blow up their families in a huff with a simple courthouse filing, and parents of drug addicts can’t force them into treatment. The sane are mostly doing just fine, but the decline of real authority disproportionately hurts those who badly need external control.

Stopgaps and Solutions

One of the strangest artifacts of modern law is that marriages are easier to dissolve than business partnerships. The latter are generally respected as demanding deference from the courts as ongoing, enforceable agreements that people consented to at their formation and justly requiring their continued compliance despite any newfound preferences. Business partners have a “duty of loyalty” to each other and expectations of “fair dealing” that can result in significant sanctions from the courts if violated.

Cheating on one’s business partners is very expensive, whereas cheating on one’s spouse sometimes results in court-ordered cash and prizes. As a participant in both business partnerships and a marriage, I am very thankful for sane partners all around.

It is an odd development of the law that even as economic freedoms are seen as less absolute, sexual freedom is demanded as a basic human right, despite previous voluntary vows. Thus, marriage is now dissolvable at-will, and no contract can make it otherwise.

Libertarians demand that the government “get out of the marriage business,” perhaps not comprehending that marriage is, among other things, a contract involving property and thus requires government intrusion to be properly regulated. Someone with guns ultimately enforces a division of property. For marriage to mean anything, one policy or the other will be necessary from governmental authorities. With no-fault divorce, marriage today is essentially as “fake” legally as the pretend patriarchy.

One possibility for those who desire real marriages is to restore the ability for willing parties to opt out of no-fault divorce, or set enforceable terms. Most critically, parties should be able to have a court find fault for various specified reasons and for fault to have financial and familial consequences concerning marital property, custody, alimony, and child support¹⁰.

Churches could promulgate model contracts, perhaps submitting the finding of fault to the church itself, much like arbitration agreements remove contract lawsuits from the public courts. More generally, for those who pursue no-fault divorce, a presumption of 50/50 custody coupled with zero alimony and zero compulsory child support¹¹ would remove financial incentives for breaking up families.

Such measures would at least allow people to smoke out individuals of bad faith before a marriage — someone’s refusal to enter into a for-fault marriage contract would be telling — and hedge their bets against crazy spouses whose insanity only emerges after marriage and, ideally, provide incentives to keep crazy behavior under control. Admittedly, all of this is unlikely to happen, and thus, a cold realism is necessary when considering modern marriage.

If you are blessed with a sane spouse, be thankful. And for those seeking marriage, the imperative of marrying someone sane and reasonable has never been more important. Be suspicious of people with questionable past behavior who claim to have changed, whatever religious gloss they try to put on it. Even with a sincere religious conversion, for individuals with low baseline levels of self-control, sanctification to a threshold of behavior that meets reasonable expectations could take decades longer than your willingness to tolerate it. In marriage and business, it’s best to bet on people not changing much; what you see is mostly what you get.

As I covered in my column on the Duggars, cheap grace and revivalist enthusiasm have suckered many a decent person, like Anna Duggar, into a marriage with a spouse who is “damaged goods.” The societal guardrails of nested authority that might mitigate such a situation were removed a long time ago, so as the finance guys said about moving up the risk curve when money was at zero rates, TINA. There Is No Alternative to finding a person who will be sane and reasonable by nature rather than compulsion.

1. The entire library of films from Kevin Sullivan is excellent, and available to purchase for streaming here.

2. My grandfather, hardly a feminist, in the 1960s cautioned his daughters against dating local third-generation Hungarian immigrants because they had a cultural reputation for hitting their women. What we regard as the universal moral standard for how women are to be treated was more-or-less limited to Northern Europeans until very recently, and cultures that did not live up to this standard were considered retrograde by the same. Anglo-American folk music, likewise, puts women on a very high pedestal. Compare George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today” to gangsta rap, for example.

3. The stats showing most people meet online these days are very scary for parents of young adults.

4. Anyone with significant wealth who didn’t or doesn’t use a trust is foolish, as trusts are magical legal vehicles. They allow the beneficial use of property without the dangers of direct ownership, and most importantly, for the second and subsequent generations, protect property from creditors, including lawsuit judgments.

5. Entailed estates were voluntary modifications to common law inheritance usually made by some foolish distant ancestor, not a default arrangement that excluded women from inheriting property. I call this foolish because banking on the ability to produce a male heir in perpetuity is biologically improbable, and it seems obvious one would rather have a full-blooded daughter inherit than a distant male relative with whom one shares a mere Y chromosome. Daughters, further, are more related to their fathers than sons because the X chromosome is larger than the Y. Many distinctive male traits, from male-pattern baldness to intelligence, are disproportionately influenced by the X chromosome, whose effects for good or ill are phenotypically exaggerated in men due to their having a single copy. The only way a man can see his single X chromosome expressed in a male descendant is through a daughter, as it will occur statistically in half of any sons of a daughter but zero sons of a son.

6. This is increasingly rare. I remember our very conservative church sponsoring a young couple’s marriage class taught on DVD by Paul Tripp. Tripp, who has a reputation as a conservative, spends the entire series hand-waving about “the gospel” as preachers are prone to do when wanting to avoid Scripture’s more offensive passages to modern sensibilities. His practical advice, when not talking in circles about “the gospel,” is “don’t be an angry jerk to your spouse,” i.e., obvious, banal, and nothing that would offend the editorial board of the New York Times. I resolved to never pay the opportunity cost of reading a Paul Tripp book after that. I have the same attitude about John Piper, whose opinions on familial self-defense tell me he’s a pietistic lunatic unworthy of my consideration on any other topic. That both men are, I am told, talented writers is even more reason to avoid them, as that makes them more likely to infect readers with plausible rationalizations for absurd conclusions.

7. Citation, not endorsement, as I reject Rushdoony’s hard theonomy, however useful it was in countering the dispensationalist antinomianism of his contemporaries. I find it a good practice to read authors more conservative than myself, as given the natural bias of our times, I will tend to err on being less conservative than I ought. Rushdoony, ironically, is at his best when not discussing theonomy. One of his more profound ideas is that sexual paraphilias are usually manifestations of masochism, which he identifies as a way of bargaining with God by confessing to (or making a humiliating public exhibition of) a lesser sin to create a license for the greater sin. Even among males, masochists outnumber sadists, including the bizarre phenomenon of men like Jerry Falwell, Jr., who like to “watch,” which is the polar opposite of what evolutionary theory based on pitiless natural selection would predict. Rushdoony, more generally, in The Politics of Guilt and Pity, identified both de-growth environmentalism and DEI/woke as societal manifestations of masochism, as the common grace prosperity of modern life creates an unbearable sense of guilt in the unregenerate man, for which he substitutes an alternative system of penance which carefully allows for his sins of choice. The confluence of sexual deviance and Leftist politics is no spiritual accident.

8. I am reminded of Norm MacDonald’s quote on gambling: “I remember a psychiatrist once telling me that I gamble in order to escape the reality of life, and I told him that's why everyone does everything.” Virtue, IMO, requires the curation of a portfolio of lawful pleasures, all kept in balance under the threshold of addiction, to counter the pain of a fallen world. My good friend calls this Tom’s Law of the “Conservation of Intoxication.”

9. Perhaps the only “good” more scarce today is beauty, an externality of the post-scarcity surplus of food driving the obesity epidemic. Beyond social media’s effects, the increasingly abnormal bimodal distribution of health and wealth also makes it more difficult for people to be content with their lots. While more people are obese than ever, the explosion in practical knowledge surrounding health and wellness (not to mention solutions available to the wealthy such as cosmetic surgery and Ozempic-class drugs) means that the most beautiful people are more beautiful than ever, and there are more of them at the top of the distribution. Likewise, much of what drives middle-class anxiety about money is that there are more rich people than ever, as wealth and income distributions feature an increasing proportion of the rich and a declining proportion of the poor and middle class:

Companies that used to cater to the now-narrowing middle class, like Disney, find it optimal to cater to the broadening wealthy demographic, making middle-class people feel like losers as they can no longer afford the small luxuries of previous generations. Social media, of course, exacerbates the perception of these real and emerging gulfs.

10. Notably, there is a deficiency in current law that does not allow parties to have enforceable pre-nuptial agreements concerning custody and child support, usually the most financially and emotionally material part of divorce settlements, as courts take it upon themselves to determine the “best interest” of children.

11. The child support system is unbelievably coercive, the only type of debt where one can still be sent to prison for not paying and subsidized in its collection by taxpayers through most states’ attorneys general. As an employer, in such situations, the courts coerce my payroll department to waste administrative time making a separate payment to the receiving parent, a “pre-garnishment” of wages unavailable to any other creditor, and if I refuse, I am liable for the payment even though I was not a party to the marriage or divorce! It would seem salutary to the social ecosystem if people bore their own risk when extending sexual credit.