Gee’s Reviews > Witches, Feminism, and the Fall of the West > Status Update

half of all those born died as children; two centuries later, almost none did. More and more people who would not have survived in the old times walked among us. They were mistakes made flesh. They no longer uplifted the established rules; they endlessly criticized and undermined them, like the witches of yore. Unwell in body and mind, they were, at best, selfish and impulsive; at worst, they promoted depression

Autism, which is also associated with anorexia and Borderline Personality Disorder is itself characterized by a weak sense of self. Autistics lack the feeling that they are the same person across time and that they are in control of their thoughts and actions, possibly because, lacking empathy, they find that they cannot predict the consequences of their actions and, hypersensitive to stimuli, they are overwhelmed

If there is no objective truth, then why do postmodernists use Western medicine when they become ill instead of going to see a witch doctor? Why do wealthy Africans come to Europe for heart operations? The answer, as Australian anthropologist Roger Sandall notes, is that Western science gets results, because it is grounded in reality—in the objective truth

with greater female influence, society will become less efficient at nurturing genius, less inventive, and so less likely to win the battle of group selection

Life History Strategists are more environmentally plastic than fast Life History Strategists, meaning that they are more sensitive to their environment. This environmental sensitivity allows the organism to be optimally adapted to its environment at any given time, giving it a competitive edge in the highly competitive ecology that produces a slow Life History Strategy

Liberals have been found to value the moral foundations of equality and harm avoidance (which are also more typically female concerns), whereas conservatives value hierarchy and structure (an element of which is “truth”), group-loyalty, and sanctity. In this sense, objective truth—which could be regarded as a component of hierarchy and order—is less important than the feelings of the individual

in terms of female-influence damaging group selection, is that females are, on average, less focused on systematizing than are men. Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has shown that the “extreme male brain” is intensely focused on systematizing, but deficient when it comes to empathizing. In the “extreme female brain,” this is reversed: it is strongly focused on empathizing but it is “system blind.”

push for the individualizing values: harm avoidance and attaining personal power, including through pushing for “equality.” You do this because you perceive yourself as not having power. People who are neurotic are likely to have aspects of low self-esteem and thus see themselves as lacking power, no matter how much they have in reality, and identify with others who lack power, feeling resentment and fear towards tho

stereotypical Early Modern witches, tend to be physically unattractive and masculinized, as well as single and childless. Like witches, they damage group selection by feminizing politics (reducing ethnocentrism) and academia; they push out geniuses (who benefit the group), who are obsessed with truth, in favor of “Head Girls,”

Ardent feminists would appear to be precisely the kind of women that would have been accused of witchcraft in Early Modern England