It seems like a fairly consistent attribute of masculine, left-brain perception that it works in terms of “known-ness”.  It deals primarily with either what is directly known from sensory input, or what can be indirectly “known” via abstract thinking.  It is fundamentally a strategy-maker, so only that which can be sensed or predicted with a high degree of accuracy is really relevant.  Simply put, you can’t plan for the truly unknown, so the unknown becomes of little importance.  So hunting/killing becomes a series of large, succeed-or-fail sort of undertakings.  They are the specialists of the human species.

On the other hand, feminine, right-brain perception works quite routinely with the unknown.  Whether gathering food or nurturing children, instead of knowns one works with probabilities.  A rich understanding of the factors involved will give them reliable guidelines to follow, but ultimately they can’t strictly plan for a good plant to be found where it often is, or a child’s needs to be what they usually are.  They operate by leaving a lot of room for unknown variables, so their process becomes highly dynamic and more in-the-moment.  So gathering/nurturing becomes a constant, ongoing process of moment-by-moment perceptions, decisions, and adaptations.  They are the generalists of the human species.

Now, this arrangement worked very well for a very long time.  Between the men specializing and the women generalizing, they really had all their bases covered.  They could flourish just about anywhere.  But eventually they out-populated this setup, and they needed something new.  As usual, the generalist women were the first to adapt, expanding their knowledge of the life cycles of plants and of nurturing creatures to produce agriculture.  This was wildly successful, and for a while women gained a new prominence in the importance-for-survival arrangement.  Conversely, between decreasing need for hunting and increasing demand for labor on the farm, men had lost their previous role.  They were now secondary to human survival and the skills they had honed over millions of years were becoming irrelevant.

But things didn’t stay that way.  While the specialist men are much slower to adapt, when they do it is with characteristic potency and precision.  Eventually they tuned their strategy-making minds to agriculture, where they found that abstract thinking was enormously useful.  Indeed, once they had sorted out all of the central “knowns” of growing plants and animals, they turned out to be more successful at it than women.  In the short term, men’s narrow focus and disregard of the unknown turned agriculture into a boom-or-bust affair (much like their old hunts), but in the longer term their keen strategies produced food to a level of surplus that humanity had never before known.

But now, something critical had shifted for the very first time in humanity.  While women had gained prominence in the early days of agriculture, men had still been very important.  Their hunting skills readily adapted to the early needs of capturing game for domestication, and their strong bodies were of great use for labor on the farm.  But once an agriculture based on men’s strategies was fully established and providing for almost the entire spectrum of survival needs, women lost their prominence to men.  But in the hunter/killer nature of the masculine mind, prominence becomes dominance.  The only central survival role that remained for women was the bearing and raising of children, which to the analytical eye of men reduced them to mere baby machines.  Patriarchy had been born.

Now that men were dominant in humanity, it rapidly began to take on left-brained characteristics throughout its culture.  And, crucially, men still fundamentally thought in terms of hunter/killer, so violence became a basic tool to be applied to most any problem.  So the products of abstract thinking and might-makes-right rolled across humanity, and across the planet.  Technology and war became the primary axis of survival, and with their vicious efficiency, humans very quickly became the dominant power of the entire world.

Or so we thought.  Remember that men’s strategy-making had a central, profound limitation the whole while.  It does not make room for the unknown.  Indeed, the masculine-dominated perspective that we have developed does not even permit the unknown to exist.  Science has become the religion of the day, and absurdly declares that we already know almost all of the whole of reality, and that the relatively small amount left is without a doubt knowable and will soon be brought into the light of reason.  To the masculine mind, “the world” can only possibly be the sum of its senses and abstractions.  The world becomes the “universe”, the mechanical, mathematical realm of dead matter and cold calculation.  But this is the highest order of hubris.  The World is indefinitely larger and stranger than our perceptions can contain, and indeed infinitely larger and stranger than we can even imagine.

And so now we have come to the truly long-term effects of the masculine, left-brain perspective dominating human life.  Hierarchical, patriarchal, homophobic, xenophobic, technology-obsessed states make constant war against one another and against the World, each trying to finally win the hunt that eternally slips just out of grasp.  Humanity has reached staggering levels of population “success”, but individually our mental and/or physical suffering is ever-growing.  All the while, we have ravaged the body of the World and the lives of so many of our fellow species.  Our ignorance of our ignorance has brought us to the very brink of our destruction, and if unabated, will soon send us irrecoverably plummeting over the edge.

We desperately need to recover our relationship with the unknown.  We dearly need to recall our profound and permanent ignorance of that which lays beyond our senses and abstractions.  We absolutely must exchange our hubris for humility if we are to continue to survive.  We, men and women alike, must root out the masculine-dominated world-view and resurrect the feminine understanding of self and World.  Only when the two perspectives are allowed dynamic interplay with one another can we be fully human, and only then will we survive.

Wow, that is what the right was having a collective paroxysm over?  In case you were like me and were caught unawares, all the bill does is put a stop to some of the more heinous ways that insurance companies fuck us over within the existing system.  Which is good!  That was desperately needed.  But I’d hardly call it a reform of the American healthcare system.  Reform is when the system itself is actually changed, most pointedly being when everyone has access to healthcare as a basic human right.  Certainly there are more people with access now, particularly those with pre-existing conditions (which, again, is a good thing!).  But for myself, and I imagine most of the other millions who don’t have coverage simply because it’s hideously expensive, it seems like for the real heart of the entire debate, we completely lost.  The Democrats rolled over, just like they always do.  And that unholy alliance of fundamentalism, (ironically) nationalism, and corporate greed that calls itself the Republican party continues its steamrolling of the citizenry, still largely unimpeded.

Call me back when I can actually get insurance.  Then I might care more about how it’s run.

Things that will go away:

Money - Money is the abstraction of value.  It removes value from the things which actually have it (goods, labor, etc) and places it into an idea which has no intrinsic value of its own.  This is catastrophic on numerous levels.  Perhaps a rough parallel could be established with some kind of standardized item of barter that actually had value in itself (the old Roman method of paying their soldiers in salt comes to mind), but money as we know it will be no more.

Large Settlements - The age of towns and cities will be over.  I anticipate we’ll wind up settling in villages of around 100-150 people, as observed by Dunbar’s Number.

Centralized Governments - Government will be at the village level, and relatively informal because everyone knows everyone else.  Styles will vary widely based on regional conditions and cultures, but will tend towards more egalitarian structures featuring more “coordinators” than “officials”.

Agriculture - Farming and livestock as we know it utterly destroys the land.  I imagine some manner of parallel will emerge that involves encouraging the growth of particular plants and animals in their natural environment, but the idea of taking over a plot of land and attempting to utterly control it will be history.

Unchecked Procreation - The “right” to pop out as many kids as you want will be recognized as insanity.  Some manner of taboo will develop around male-female intercourse that dramatically reigns in population growth (not that people will stop having sex, but perhaps something involving the withdrawal and/or rhythm methods of birth reduction).

Non-renewable Materials - Anything that we can’t in some way put back the way we found it will be out.  Metals, oils, gases, minerals, and even stone will become taboo to use in most ways (probably excepting what can be scavenged from the old constructions).  I imagine that cleverly processed plant fibers will become the dominant material for everything from tools to buildings.

Electricity - I suspect that in the end we’re going to find that there’s just no way to convert, store, transport, and use electrical energy that doesn’t wind up costing more than it’s worth in the big picture.  Not to mention that the loss of metal and other non-renewables will render it pretty much unusable anyway.

Mental Illness - What we have come to call “mental illness” is nothing more or less than the psycho/spiritual backlash from convincing ourselves that civilization is “the world”.

Most Humans - Barring some manner of miracle (which I do hold as not entirely impossible), once the infrastructure goes, it seems very probable that most of us are going to die.  The world just can’t support seven billion humans.  To give you a sense of scale, they estimate that we out-populated the hunter-gatherer strategy at around one million humans.  In a dark way, I kind of hope that enough of us go fast enough so that those left have plenty of resources to work with.

War - Believe it or not, war is entirely a product of civilization and overpopulation.  Humans went their first two million years without even the concept of a warrior.  Once the population is sufficiently reduced that we have adequate survival resources and we aren’t subjected to the myriad insanities of civilization, we’ll suddenly find ourselves in the recently novel position of not having anything to fight about.

Things that will hang around:

Specialization - It will probably be dramatically reduced in scale (I doubt we’ll see any more psychoneuroimmunologists), but specialization is one of the single most powerful tactics we’ve ever developed.  Look for it to remain a big player.

Writing - Writing is just way too handy for far too many things to go anywhere.  I suspect there will be a great deal of renewal in oral tradition, so writing may not be quite as dominant, but it’ll keep on going strong.

Art - Pre-civilization cultures had some basic forms of art, but civilization took it to much greater heights.  I think we’ll see a lot less absurd “modern” art that doesn’t make sense to anyone but other “modern artists”, but on the flip side I imagine a deeper appreciation for more down-to-earth art in the general population will emerge.

Complex Technology - It’s going to see a major reduction in scale (by several orders of magnitude!), and develop some very serious taboos about responsible usage, but we can’t put the worms back in the can.  Complex technology in its basic concept is here to stay.

Distributed Enterprise - We can do so much with a lot of people working in concert that I suspect we’ll find a way to keep doing it.  I can imagine regional networks among villages coordinating the exchange of goods and labor to produce products of much greater sophistication than any single village could manage.

Gone with the Wind still holds a record that is hard to imagine being broken.  At almost twice the popularity of its nearest competitor, every single citizen in the entire nation saw this movie an astonishing one and a half times!

Even with this more realistic picture of popularity, Avatar is still doing incredibly well at 68th place.  And it’s still steadily cranking out the sales, so I don’t doubt that its rank will climb much higher than that before it finishes its run.

It’s interesting to note that there hasn’t been a new top-10 movie in 28 years.  That means that most people currently alive in the country have never personally experienced a genuine cinematic phenomenon (especially not also being old enough to really appreciate it).  And in the last decade, Avatar aside, the best we’ve managed to do is 72nd.  Let’s hope that Avatar is a sign of better things to come!

Note that ticket sales were taken from a list ultimately based on money made, so an unusual ratio of tickets to money could have resulted in some movies being excluded from this list, especially near the bottom. Also, any movie re-released in a year with a substantially different population will have a skewed result (I’m looking at you, Star Wars).