From Eve to Dawn by Marilyn French

Author:Marilyn French [French, Marilyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781558615656
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2018-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

AN ANALYSIS OF THE STATE

WHEN LOUIS XIV OF FRANCE DECLARED “L’état, c’est moi,” he said what many heads of state assume—that they personally incarnate the state. Because people revere the countries where they live, they are often willing to sacrifice their lives for it. They may also revere their head of state; certainly, they are encouraged to do so by state propaganda. But heads of state are almost never primarily concerned with the well-being of the people; their main interest is maintaining or extending their power, and that of their family, clique, party, or class.

The state is the physical embodiment of an idea, patriarchy, an ideology based on the lie that some people are superior to others according to divine will. They are not superior in a given attribute, but altogether better, humanly superior, and therefore entitled to more status, resources, and power than others. Only inherent superiority can give one person or group the right to dictate to others, execute people, make war, and suppress dissent.

Democracy developed in an attempt to curb the worst characteristics of states. It is vaunted to hold that all people are equal (and thus to be nonpatriarchal), but no democracy ever existed that in fact did so. The first democracy (Athens) held a handful of citizen men to be superior to women, slaves, and men who did not own property. The United States, founded explicitly on the ground that all men were created equal, not only omitted women from the human race but operated as a slave-owning state.

Democracies claim that they do not subscribe to the lie of patriarchy but hold everyone equal. A society of equals votes for one man to be held a limited superior for a limited time, in order to govern not as a divine appointee, but as the people’s choice. But patriarchal thinking, with its idolization of power and belief in transcendence, permeates all societies and cannot simply be ignored. Power cliques develop in patriarchies, and soon enough become supreme, even over the elected governor. In our time, these cliques are multinational corporations. Politics cannot change unless patriarchy ceases to be the primary structure of our thought.

Patriarchy insists that some people are better than others because its primary reason for existing is to assert that men are superior to women. But because this claim is a falsehood, it is regularly challenged. States built on lies are insecure and are easily threatened; leaders must endlessly propagandize, insisting their lies are truths.

Early rulers based their claim to superiority in relation with a god. In every early state we examined, a high god was placed above other gods before a man or a family or a clique asserted its supremacy. At that time, the matricentric tradition still existed, and most people believed that the divine was located in women. Men co-opted the female by asserting a relationship with a goddess (Sargon) or a divine female (Egyptian rulers even married a woman or their own daughters to gain legitimacy). After patrilineality was well established, men could claim direct descent from a god, as the early Chinese rulers did.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.