TOWARDS A TRUE EQUALITY

Are introverts morally superior to extroverts? This is an interesting question and one which I believe can be answered in the affirmative. Yes, introverts generally are morally superior to extroverts, and for the simple reason that whereas the former are aligned with essence, or the internal, the latter remain aligned with appearance, or the external. Essence and appearance are forever antithetical and can never be considered equal. Of course, no-one is completely an introvert or an extrovert, but the fact that, when not striving for a balance, most people are predominantly one or the other permits us to distinguish between them as, in effect, 'the good' and 'the bad'.

To be an introvert is to value the internal world above the external one, to prefer being 'in one's head', through reflection or contemplation, than outside it ... in curiosity at the world around one. An introvert is thus biased in favour of the spirit rather than of the flesh, and may be defined as of masculine character, in whom the profound predominates over the superficial. Conversely, an extrovert spends more time in the external environment and may accordingly be described as of feminine character, with a corresponding predilection for the superficial over the profound. The extrovert is usually a man of action and may well be highly observant. He notices what goes on around him with a comprehensiveness and penetration which the introvert will rarely if ever possess. To him external events are important, whereas the internal world, to the extent that he has one, seems relatively trivial.

Generally speaking, this extrovert/introvert antithesis appertains to the division of the sexes. Women are fundamentally extrovert and men, by contrast, introvert. A woman notices appearances with more consistency and penetration, as a rule, than does a man, and this is because, for her, appearance is what really matters, what really counts in life, so that, as Schopenhauer well-remarked, she usually takes appearances for reality (and even, in a certain sense, too seriously). On the other hand, a man, if truly masculine, will treat essence with more respect than appearance, and thus adopt an introverted attitude to life. He will be predominantly immersed in the spirit, whereas a woman will remain aligned with the flesh. Indeed, it could be argued that whereas women are rooted in the eyes, men are centred, by contrast, in the brain.

These distinctions between the sexes are gradually being eroded and all because the influence of modern industrial civilization, in slowly masculinizing women, is driving society towards a post-dualistic status in which the ultimate objective can only be the complete transcendence of the feminine element in life. Needless to say, we have a long way to go before we attain to a supermasculine and highly introverted society, which, so I contend, will only come about with a post-Human Millennium, and the correlative elevation of humanity to the superhuman level ... of human brains artificially supported and no-less artificially sustained in communal contexts. In the meantime, women will doubtless continue to exist, but not as traditionally!

Nevertheless, one would be a hypocrite to assert that all modern women were already radically masculinized, since the evidence of the senses would seem to indicate that a majority of them are still sufficiently feminine to be able to continue behaving in a traditionally seductive, sensual manner, and to perform the usual female duties in life. Some women may be more advanced and liberated than others, but they remain a comparatively small minority of, for the most part, university-educated intellectual types. Most women, it seems to me, have not yet betrayed their sex or been obliged to do so to any radical extent, which is why they continue to treat appearances as being of more importance than essence.

I shall give you a typical example of an average woman's concept of the world, as appertaining to sex. Such a woman will regard the solitary man as 'bent' by assuming that he masturbates. Whether or not he does so ... isn't particularly important. What is important, however, is the light thrown on the woman's psychology by the word 'bent'. It reveals, I mean, that she cannot conceive of sex in transcendent terms, but must refer it back to nature, so that anything which may be regarded as a deviation from the natural norm is deemed perverse, and duly castigated with the crude epithet in question. Lacking a more evolved spiritual dimension, this average type of woman is unable to relate to a lifestyle or attitude to life which refutes conventional sexual behaviour. Rather than interpreting the man's celibacy in terms of spiritual aspirations, she regards it as a failure, a perversion of the natural sex instinct, and does so because of an inherent bias, in her psyche, for appearance over essence, the flesh over the spirit. Such women are incapable of appreciating the virtue of sublimated sexuality. They remain chained to the concrete, the apparent, the phenomenal, and are thus more traditionally feminine.

Of course, even the most advanced women have spiritual limitations, and I do not for one moment believe that they would be capable of attaining to the same level of spiritual freedom as a man of outstanding genius - say, a Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Schopenhauer, Dali, de Chardin, or Prokofiev. The tendency of publishers to employ an ever-growing army of women readers, these days, can only be a source of lasting regret to those men - more spiritually advanced than the majority of their fellows - whose works are bound to prove unattractive to such readers by dint of being either too complex or too artificial, too transcendental or too progressive, too moral or too elitist, as the case may be. With a high percentage of women employed in editorial roles there are always going to be significant drawbacks from a serious writer's standpoint, not the least of which will entail the female reader reacting against the content of too radical a typescript for her liking under the impression that it is erroneous or dangerous when, in point of fact, it is simply the product of a more spiritually-evolved psyche, one that would probably find a greater degree of sympathy and understanding from an intelligent male reader - provided, however, that he was habituated to appreciating men of genius and could therefore boast of intimate scholarly connections with the likes of Huysmans, Roussel, Spengler, Sartre, and Koestler. Alas, not many female readers could do that!

Despite the progress which has been made, during the past century, in drawing women up higher towards more masculine criteria, the fact nonetheless remains that a division between the sexes still exists and will doubtless continue to exist until the post-Human Millennium, when only Supermen will prevail. Yes, the traditional feminine/masculine division still exists, but so, too, does a new dimension, as applying in particular to so-called liberated women in their relation to the most intelligent males, in which a kind of spiritual disparity exists along a post-dualistic spectrum in response to male superiority in things of the spirit. The more advanced women are doing their best to close the gap, but even they have to admit, sooner or later, that they are still fundamentally women and cannot therefore hope to compete with the contemporary world's outstanding male geniuses. If these geniuses are to be described as 'greater men', then the leading female intellects effectively become 'lesser men' in relation to them, and so they must remain. This is not male chauvinism, but fidelity to truth as I endeavour to push free thought to greater heights, in revolt against natural determinism. No woman, barring a sex change, will ever become a man, though she can certainly become more man-like in the course of evolutionary time, and thus sacrifice a number of traditional feminine norms or be obliged to modify them in response to masculine pressures.

As for sex, however, women are on the whole extrovert and, hence, superficial. They are likely to be more impressed by a neat, clean appearance than by what a man may know about the Universe or God or the Millennium, and, consequently, they are inclined to regard a well-dressed man as superior to a poorly-dressed one, even though the former may be a money-grubbing scoundrel and the latter a poverty-stricken genius! This is the inevitable consequence of taking appearances for reality and evaluating people according to superficial criteria. One cannot be surprised that some men, predominantly given to essence, choose to dress poorly or informally as a means of expressing their contempt for appearances. For one can't please the world and genuinely aspire towards the transcendental Beyond at the same time. A truly introverted man will know in which direction salvation lies.

The fact that evolution is tending in the direction of greater spirituality ... inevitably means that women must be treated increasingly like men, since the post-dualistic age requires that they effectively become 'lesser men' rather than remain just women, as before. The move towards sexual equality in certain contexts is therefore both morally desirable and inevitable, but one must understand the exact terms on which the world is moving towards it, else the chances of one's interpreting equality in a ridiculous way can only be pretty high!

Let me give you an example. A husband and wife decide that, since the sexes are equal and women should be liberated from traditional domestic slavery, they will share whatever domestic duties they may have, including care of their offspring. Consequently the husband takes turns with the cooking, washing-up, sewing, hoovering, bed-making, nappy-changing, bottle-feeding, etc., while his wife dedicates a correspondingly greater amount of time to reading, watching television, listening to the radio, practising yoga, or whatever. Here, in this absurd situation, evolution has only gone forwards for the wife, whereas for her husband it has effectively gone backwards, since he now has to take a share in traditional female duties. But this is precisely what shouldn't happen, since evolution is primarily furthered by men, and the modern age signifies not the triumph of women over men but the coercion of women away from their traditional roles, in response to a male-oriented technological world. For a modern husband to take turns with his wife in tackling domestic responsibilities is really quite ridiculous, since evolutionary progress should be serving his interests by making him even more masculine, and hence spiritually-biased, than were his male ancestors, thereby leading him towards a greater degree of spirituality, whether through culture or religion, than would previously have been possible. With the comparatively recent invention of so many electrical appliances for domestic use, such as dishwashers, washing-machines, spin-dryers, hoovers, fridges, cookers, electric fires, and so on, the woman is spared much of the time-consuming manual work which her sexual ancestors formerly had to do, and should thereby have more free time in which to cultivate masculine, i.e. spiritual, interests, like watching television, reading books, playing chess, or painting pictures. This is what liberation should really mean for the wife - not the absurd imposition onto her husband of traditional female duties!

So although we speak of equality, we should be careful not to misspeak of it, and thereupon run the risk of reversing or impeding evolutionary progress. What we must understand is that the sexes are only equal, these days, to the extent that women are now effectively becoming 'lesser men' through the influence of environmental and technological progress, rather than remaining firmly entrenched on the female side of history. But that same coercive influence which has slowly dragged them across the borderline, so to speak, which separates the feminine from the masculine, has driven men even further ahead on the masculine side of it, so that an evolutionary gap still exists between women and men, but this time on the post-dualistic level ... as a distinction between 'lesser men' and 'greater men' or, as one could alternatively phrase it, quasi-men and genuine men, according to the logic of a male-biased society.

We can exploit a useful analogy here with a tug-of-war, in which a male team is striving to pull a female team over a white line which divides the feminine from the masculine side. Let us imagine that the women are three feet away from being pulled over the line and that the men are also three feet away from it on their side. Thus a gap of six feet exists between the sexes, since the two teams are balanced either side of the line. With their greater strength, however, the men gradually pull the women closer to the line and eventually right over it, so that everyone is on the male side. But the distance the women have been pulled is also the distance the men have moved deeper into their masculine territory, which means that a gap of six feet still exists between the two teams, since the women are now some three feet over the white line and the men at least (barring a large team) nine feet away from it. This analogy suffices to explain the spiritual gap which exists between 'lesser men' and 'greater men' on the post-dualistic side of evolution. The men have dragged women into a masculine-biased lifestyle, but they have evolved apace at the same time, and thus exist on a higher level of post-dualistic evolution. Because women are now effectively 'lesser men', it is expedient to treat them as men rather than to discriminate against them as women. What it is not proper to do, however, is to treat the men, who are now effectively 'greater men', as if they were women, and so oblige them to share in a variety of traditional female responsibilities! In truth, an inequality between the sexes still exists, the only difference being that it is not now the old gender-based inequality, in which women were women and men were men, but a completely new, post-dualistic inequality reserving to 'greater men' the right to take upon themselves tasks and responsibilities which, owing to their comparative physical or mental weakness, 'lesser men' would be insufficiently advanced or qualified to do. The 'lesser man' who now plays a competent acoustic guitar in the manner of, say, Judi Collins or Joni Mitchell is dwarfed by the 'greater man' who plays a brilliant electric guitar like, say, John McLaughlin or Carlos Santana. No equality of guitar-playing could ever exist between these two dissimilar masculine creatures, though masculine they both arguably are!

There is, however, a reverse case to the downgrading of the husband in a domestic egalitarianism which results in his sharing feminine duties with his wife and, fundamentally, it is no less absurd, insofar as it entails the downgrading of women. I refer to that aspect of sexual equality which results in women becoming freak athletes, whether as cricketers, footballers, long-distance runners, or whatever. Now whilst I'm not altogether opposed to the concept of women in sport, there are certain sports which seem less to reflect evolutionary progress, where the emancipation of women is concerned, than simply to degrade women into types of 'lesser men' who are far below the 'lesser men' whose lifestyles reflect a spiritual bias. Better for women to become the latter than the former, since evolution is tending towards the spiritual and thus away from the physical, as reflected, amongst other things, in contemporary sport.

We are on difficult ground here, so I beg the reader's patience whilst I redefine my position, this time solely with regard to men. We can omit the inverted comas here, for we are now dealing with the literal - namely the distinction between lesser and greater men, defining the former as physical and the latter as spiritual. The fact is that, just as an introvert is morally superior to an extrovert, so a brain worker is morally superior to a muscle man or a manual labourer, since evolution tends towards a spiritual culmination. A literary genius is thus a superior type of man to a sportsman, say, a cricketer or a footballer, no matter how accomplished the latter may happen to be. The one uses brain power, the other muscle power. The one is introverted, the other extroverted. The one aspires towards the divine consummation of evolution, the other stems, in a manner of speaking, from the diabolic roots of life in the cosmos. But the preponderance of sport over war in modern life does at least indicate that the lesser men are now generally behaving in a less evil, because more sublimated, competitive fashion than was formerly the case. It is better that this lesser type of man should be a cricketer or a footballer than a swordsman or a spear thrower in a much more lethal form of competition - namely, gladiatorial contests or even war.

Thus for men, competitive sport represents a degree of evolutionary progress which has to some extent sublimated evil along less violent and dangerous lines. For women, on the other hand, competitive sport does not reflect such sublimation, but is simply something imposed upon them in response to the post-dualistic nature of the age. Where, formerly, men were opposed to one another more violently, whether as soldiers or gladiators, they are now increasingly brought into opposition on terms which don't, as a rule, lead to bloodshed or loss of life, though injuries of one sort or another do of course frequently occur. But women were never - or rarely - opposed to one another in war or gladiatorial combat, so one cannot regard their adoption of competitive sport as a form of moral progress. Rather, it signifies a regression for them which is a consequence of their masculinization and the correlative tendency of men to treat or regard women as 'lesser men'. Where, formerly, women were confined to maternal, domestic, and sexual roles, they are now free to play football or cricket or hockey in a competitive context. Thus they become 'lesser men', but only in relation to men who were already lesser when compared with brain workers. As 'lesser men' in this context they are decidedly inferior to those women whom we earlier discussed in terms of intellectual or spiritual predilections, since their masculinization is physical and therefore not strictly compatible with evolutionary progress. Indeed, it could well be that women whose lifestyles are now spiritualized to the extent that they become 'lesser men' are superior to the actual lesser men whose lifestyles, in contrast, are predominantly physical and competitive. For if the actual lesser men become 'greater men' in relation to the sports-playing 'lesser men' on the physical level, why shouldn't 'lesser men' on the spiritual level become 'greater men' when compared with the actual lesser men of sport? The distinction between the physical and the spiritual should still hold true, regardless of gender. For if a philosopher of genius is superior to a female novelist, how can the latter not be superior to a sportsman, whose emphasis is physical rather than spiritual?

One is therefore unable to contend that all men, just because of their maleness, are, ipso facto, superior to all women. There are men who are superior to other men, as spiritual to physical; there are women who are superior to other women, as spiritual to physical. But there are certain types of women who are superior to lesser types of men, as spiritual to physical, and certain types of men who are superior to all women, regardless of how intelligent or intellectually accomplished some of the latter may happen to be! The fact is that, much as a female intellectual can outshine lesser types of men, she can never outshine the greatest, who are always in the vanguard of evolutionary progress. A Simone de Beauvoir is obliged to take second place to a Sartre, a Woolf to a Huxley, a Plaith to a Pound, a Weil to a de Chardin, a Gregory to a Yeats, and so on. Here we come back to the inevitable gap along the post-dualistic spectrum which cannot be closed while women remain at least partly female. Only with the post-Human Millennium will there be an absolute equality, and then only because all bodies will have been transcended in the artificially-supported and no-less artificially-sustained brains of the Supermen and nothing approximating to the feminine will accordingly remain. And because the artificial contexts will necessarily impose a uniform psychology on the brains being supported, there will be no distinction whatsoever between male and female - everything having by then become supermasculine, in advanced spirituality.

Hence the equality of the sexes that we superficially speak of, these days, is but a prelude to the complete overcoming of the feminine element in life, as essential to evolutionary progress. To treat women as women would be an unfortunate anachronism in a world with post-dualistic aspirations. We do not wish to be reminded of dualistic criteria, since our bias is towards the post-Human Millennium. We are all the time becoming more introverted, and we desire that women should become more introverted or, at the very least, less extrovert as well. They will always lag behind us on the human plane, but on the superhuman one there will be no distinctions. Men will become Supermen and so, too, will women. Sex will be transcended, for sex is specific to the body and the psychology which that body, be it male or female, imposes upon the mind. An artificially-supported brain could only be masculine, never feminine! It is precisely by overcoming the feminine that a true equality will exist - an equality of supermasculine Supermen. We may have a long way to evolve before such equality comes to pass, but at least it is my belief that we are slowly tending towards it.