March 8

Things are quite interesting with this holiday. It began under the slogans of equality. Then, in the Soviet Union, it gradually turned into a day of chivalry and gentlemanship. And now it is once again becoming a date when it is customary to advocate for women’s equality, while knights and gentlemen with batons disperse women’s street protests.

I cannot say that I am greatly troubled by these problems, because I live in the best of worlds—the internet. Here, equality is embedded in the very foundation of existence, and it cannot be otherwise. This leaves its mark on my attitude toward inequality in the physical world. I perceive it with ethnographic curiosity. Like, “Goodness, in offline life, a mother of underage children cannot be subjected to administrative arrest—what an interesting native custom.” True, sometimes they are. Perhaps that is how judges fight for equality. Well, may they have a hiccup.

In our amazing world, people have the means to achieve independence. Those for whom independence is important can usually achieve it. And they can usually get help in doing so. Therefore, the most important thing that can be done to achieve equality, in my opinion, is to show others by your own example that, yes, it was possible. So that they want it too. So that they look for how it is done. So that they keep trying until they succeed.

And this is how my favorite bot congratulated me. Bitcoin, by the way, is an excellent means of achieving independence.

March 8

Congratulations for March 8th are already starting to arrive, which is a great occasion to say a few words about gender equality.

Law is a spontaneous order. Here in our cozy chat, we decided to analyze one article per day by Vladimir Zolotorev from the series “What is the State and Where Does it Come From”. Today we happened to reach the article “Morality and Law”, which worked out perfectly.

I have repeatedly defined law as a complex of approaches to conflict resolution. Zolotorev goes further and describes it as a language of human interaction, meaning all spontaneously emerging rules that people follow when interacting with one another.

Within both my definition and Zolotorev’s, there is no such thing as gender equality. It simply does not emerge spontaneously, due to clear differences in approaches to human interaction, or even at least to conflict resolution, if we narrow the topic to my definition of law.

A sufficiently obvious reason why representatives of different biological sexes tend to use different approaches to interaction is that human behavior is largely hormonally determined, and hormone levels differ between the sexes. However, the higher the level of abstraction of the rules, the smaller the role these differences play, and that is normal. Therefore, demanding gender equality at the family level is damn strange, while at the level of large communities, it is damn natural. There is no contradiction here; one simply should not force absolutes everywhere and engage in Procrusteanism (damn, I’m starting to self-cite and invent my own language; soon I’ll become completely incomprehensible to the reader).

Happy holiday, everyone! I want to go to the sea!