The Most Important Job In The World

I recently had repeated to me a line by a demagogue I dislike which went something like this:

Motherhood is the most important job in the world.

I am sure you've seen or heard some variation of this at some point in your life. What's infuriating about it can be broken down into two rather obvious parts: where it is right and where it is wrong.

Stay with me.

Where it is right is that motherhood is the most important job in the world, for women. The reason this caveat is required before the sentence can be correct is that, simply put, women cannot be a mother by themselves, and this is true at both the physical and mental aspects of being a parent.

At the physical level, a pregnant woman is significantly debilitated by the process of pregnancy. I've seen this firsthand often enough now to know that a pregnant woman is largely incapable of providing for herself during this time, and colloquially we recognize this in the diminutive expectation on fathers to retrieve whatever a pregnant mother is craving, at any time of day, because the implicit assumption is that if she could do it herself then she would.

At the mental level, a woman is not wired to sever the dependency her children have on her, but instead to be there to meet every need and desire. To properly cultivate and instill discipline in a child, you cannot be primarily concerned with how they feel and how they're immediately reacting to the process. A young mother is instinctively wired to react to emotional distress of their young and alleviate it, to comfort and nurture, so it's quite literally the opposite of their instincts to ignore distress or to try and break that connection. A crying baby is most stressful to the mother of that baby, because especially at early stages of development, crying is the only means for a baby to communicate "I need something".

These "problems" are really only so if the mother being dependent on anyone else is itself a problem. In our current culture, this does become a problem because of who the mother is dependent on, not that she necessarily requires assistance at all, at least at our current stage of degradation. If she is dependent on "a man", then that is somehow a denigration of her womanhood, but if she is dependent on a corporation or tax dollars funding a program that she then relies on instead of a man, then that's socially acceptable. If that doesn't seem logically coherent, it's not, don't waste time trying to make logical sense of it, and I'll explain why later.

This leads us to what is wrong with the original statement, in that if applied universally without caveats, it quickly becomes a joke, because if the "most important job" is dependent on some other job, then that other job is probably more important, because if it's not being done, then nobody can do the "most important job" in the first place. This is akin to saying that the internet access is the most important thing in the world, ignoring the importance of electricity. If you can't have one without the other, then trying to separate the two becomes absurd.

This is made even more amusing by the fact that, being a sexually reproducing species, women cannot get pregnant on their own. Humans do not reproduce asexually, like a virus or bacteria, but instead requires a man with viable sperm to fertilize a woman's eggs. This means that, even discounting the material and physical requirements once a woman has become a mother, a woman can't even become a mother without a man either. At no point in the process can the dependency of a woman on some external factor be severed, though you can be certain that once they've finished gossiping about each other, feminist scientists will get around to finding a way for women to reproduce without men.

Now, as absurd as all that may be, the supposedly more rational men can make a similar mistake, in that while they are no less important, nothing that they provision or protect matters if they do it only unto themselves. Selfishness does not ever actually result in mutual benefit, and so just as absurd as women trying to cut men out of the picture is, so are men who try to cut out women.

While the most important job for a woman is to be a mother, the most important job in the world for a man is to be a father. The responsibilities are different, certainly, in that while mom is debilitated and wired for nurturing and care, fathers are wired for protection and provision. Men are better at remaining focused on a goal, regardless of how they or others feel, to ensure that a task is accomplished. At the biological level, this is explained by the effects of testosterone on the brain, in that connections which are strong for women are broken for men, and so the connections that male brains make to compensate are the foundation for the increased capacity for logic and reason.

Logic and reason provide the means by which men can detach themselves from how they feel to address needs for themselves and their families. It's why a father won't be moved in the same way by the sound of a baby crying as a mother, not because the father does not care for the future of their offspring, but because their focus is on ensuring their children are prepared for when the parents are no longer around to help out. The nature of a child is to be dependent on the parents, and to keep that alive forever, but that would end the species in a generation, and so fathers must work to sever the dependency on the parents, and that is a painful process for the child no matter how you try to approach it.

Nevertheless, if there is no mother to carry and care for children, then it won't matter how good a man is at provision and protection, because he'll provision more than he can ever consume, and his protection of said resources will prevent them from being invested as a legacy that will continue on after he has died. Material accomplishments cannot fight back against entropy anywhere near as effective as your posterity can.

In this, there is a dependency on men with respect to women, and women with respect to men, for either of their most important jobs in the world to be available to work in the first place, let alone for each of them to do the best job they can at their most important job in the world.

This is about the closest that men and women will ever get to equality, not in any tangible behavior or appearance, but in that they are both wired and required to achieve disparate tasks and responsibilities, and when they work together in unison with respect to those roles is when either will ever truly find success.

Where this system fell apart is with men.

Yup, men, the problem originated with us, and because we caved, we have thus continued to be the source of problems, even when we didn't make the choices that have led to the specific circumstances. We took on blame when we shouldn't have, and much like how apologizing in public only increases the thirst of those who demanded an apology in the first place, when men groveled to women, they invited women to continue to blame them for even the poor choices of women.

The reason this hasn't been solved is because men simply won't admit that they were wrong in the first place. The same arrogance and pride that conquered foreign armies also deluded men into thinking that their power was sufficient that they could absorb any bad consequences that came about because of the folly of women. That the lofty idealism that they boasted of possessing was, or ever could, have been turned against them and perverted.

Time and again, even in the Bible, how often do we see men who are puffed up in arrogance, sure that nothing a woman could do would bring them any harm, turn to a woman and offer to give her "anything she desires", only to then hear an absurd request that he is then regretfully bound to oblige, lest he lose face and admit that his power is not so great as to have supported making such a boast.

Male arrogance, not grounded in any sort of truth, is how we got here. Men, thinking that their power would not ever be dampened or eliminated because of their voluntary humiliation, gladly stepped up to the plate, deluded into thinking that they were paradoxically demonstrating great power.

Like Samson with Delilah, the arrogance of man believing himself to be infinitely strong leads to his inevitable downfall. Instead of refusing to play, men thought they could play along with the silly games women suggested and that nothing bad would come of it. The reality is that the worst behaviors of women were then put on display, and men had to force themselves to not just hold their tongues, but to even go so far as to praise women in their degenerate behavior, hoping that if they played this new game better than other men, then the true measure of their power would be seen and they would be justly rewarded for it as well!

So not only did men start the game out by taking blame and groveling when they shouldn't have, many doubled down on this and thought that in taking on even more blame and groveling even more would somehow "end the game", and they'd be the "winner". All of this only created a negative feedback loop where more and more absurd, more and more selfish, more and more dysgenic behavior was entertained by women, and men went right along with it. That's why it doesn't make sense, because manifesting irrationality is the name of the game.

The less rational, the more fantastical, and especially the more pleasurable, the "better" it must be, and damn the consequences because our power is sufficient to take on whatever fate can throw at us.

That's how we got to where we are today, with men declaring some variation of "motherhood is the most important job in the world", because they're still too arrogant to admit that they've been played. They're still convinced that they're "going to win", and that the women who have behaved irrationally will magically come to the rational conclusion that there are any winners to declare, or that it's time to play a new game.

The reality is that they'll keep playing the game till it stops being fun, and that'll happen either when men stop playing along, or when consequences finally force everyone to stop playing altogether.

For the same reason fathers need to detach themselves from appearance and emotion to make the hard decisions in support of their family, so do men need to do so at the societal level as well, not worrying about the labels and the emotional outbursts, because the choices they're making are for the better of everyone involved. The discipline that needs to be instilled, the dependencies that need to be severed, are necessary for our mutual survival, for mothers to be mothers and fathers to be fathers, and like a child throwing a tantrum, the process is not going to be easy or rational or civil or polite.
 Mothers plant, fathers prune. Without one we have chaos, and without the other we have no future.

We need both, and men need the confidence to not just say and believe that, but to stop playing games and act on it as well. Sooner the better.