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Feminism and Male and Female Balance Q: What do you see as the role being for
people who are not married or for whatever reasons do not find a partner or choose
to have children or whatever? RK: Nobody has to get married here [Stelle]. Q: I am not saying they do. I am just
saying, what do you see that role being, because I think society is made up
of people who have paired off and people who are not, and is there some
feeling you have about what’s happening now with them? RK: In the world at
large? Q: I guess what has been
seen as the feminist movement outside of Stelle. I am not sure how it is seen here, but is this history happening for a reason?
Is there in your philosophy, a way to see things, and some good things? RK: There is a great deal of confusion going on
now in the minds of men and women in society at large.
All Western societies seem to be kind of “up in the air” at
the moment. I think that there will be a finer appreciation of the
mutual humanness of men and women as a result of
this. I think in the past a lot of women have seen
men as kind of strong-arm types who are forcing a lot of things down a
woman’s throat, and have done that. I know my mother and my grandmother both
felt they were really suppressed; that they were not
looked upon as being fully human; not entirely franchised. Maybe they might
have gotten the vote in the nineteen-twenties but they never really felt that
they were fully accepted; had the same rights. That gives rise to a lot of resentments on the part of women. I think
men are going to have to look at women for what they really are: human Egos
with mind powers identical to theirs and with rights which
are identical; just inherent in the fact that they are human beings. And, not creating stylistic roles that they have to fit into:
that women are necessarily the ones to do the cooking and the washing, and
they better stay home, and are very docile, and men go out and do the things
that they want to do, and the “old lady” better stay at home if she knows
what’s good for her, and so forth. I think men really want a woman who
is an equal. They did not know that, because society kept telling them they
were supposed to be the strong ones, the superior ones, and they always had
to work together with all their brothers to keep the sisterhood of women down; to keep them from getting too feisty or too much in
control. I think that was based on fear. Q: I guess I have a tendency and I am sorry
to lay things out without—is this a repeat of
something that happened? RK: I think it is fairly
cyclic, but it can be many years, many centuries between these cycles.
As a woman, I would not want to have a relationship with somebody who is my
inferior. I would not want to think of him as my inferior. I do not want to
keep him in a position where somehow or another people recognize that he is
lesser than me. I would not like that. I like to
deal straight up like a friend. If I choose a friend among men, and most men
can identify with this pretty easily, we like to deal with things straight
from the shoulder: right out on the surface, no pussy-footing
around, and no games. Here is who I am, and I know who you are. I like who
you are. I want you to like who I am, and we don’t
have to play games between one another. Our
society was set up for a long time where it was almost impossible for
anything other than games to be played between men
and women. He had to be allowed to be the strong decision maker
and the protector and the wage earner, and she was supposed to be the meek
and docile, the rearer of children, and the one who comforted him when he
came home, and definitely backing him in whatever he had to do in life: the
little woman behind the man who was able to go out and conquer the world.
Under those circumstances, she had to be very manipulative
to get what she needed. She had to play all the little coy games and what
have you, and it really kept him from regarding her as a person who he could
level with; who he could just be who he was. He had to play his strong man
role, and she had to diminish her strengths into this little docile lady at home role. It was a fake. Everyone was playing
games with one another, but they expected that that is what they were
supposed to be doing, because that is what society seemed to imply. It kept
people from being good friends except unusual couples who, maybe their
intellectual composition or the way they were put
together emotionally, dealt with one another, as equals right from the
beginning. Well,
according to the Brotherhoods, They have been aware
for a long time that human Egos are human Egos. It is the bodies that
primarily that are sexual. There is no doubt about that there are female Egos
and there are male Egos, but what seemed to impose the roles was their physical bodies. As Egos
they were always mental. You do not have sex on the Astral plane. You do not
have anything to have sex with. You have to engage
one another on a purely mental level as equals. But, then when we
come into physical incarnation, we are scrunched down into these crazy roles
that everybody is afraid about. Men are afraid of their roles, women are
afraid of their roles, and I think we are breaking out of those stereotypes.
Women are allowed to examine, for the first time in a long time, what all of
the capabilities and the potentials are of being a woman
are. And it certainly is not as the bourgeois
intellectuals of the last two centuries have tried to impose, and that is
that society was trying to give women the right to be free to be men. They
need to have a different consciousness. They need to understand that they are
trying to develop what it is to be a woman, and the feminist movement is not
pushing that. That movement is just saying, “You have got to have equal
rights with the men,” as if somehow or another the things that men are doing
are glamorous, glorious things that women should aspire to, and that they
aren’t really living up to their potential unless they are beating men at
their game. Most men that I know would just as soon get out of the
commercial aspects of living altogether, because they hate it. A lot of them
are kind of stumped to figure out why, when I hate
the business world as it is, that women want to get into it? It astonishes
men quite a bit that that is the trend that women are trying to get into. We have got to have a whole new system, of course. I think
the economic philosophy—the Lemurian Philosophy—is going to allow people to
put more emphasis on their humanness instead of their productiveness, or
their part in being a cog in the whole economic
structure; the political structure. (11-1981) Womens’ Roles in the Nation of God Q: I find it very hard to reconcile what
you say in some of the things in The Ultimate Frontier. For example,
the limitation of occupations for women, and so on, and perhaps if women are
to find out what they are as women maybe we have to be
allowed to make what you might consider some mistakes. You have to
find out what you are not sometimes, in order to find out what you are. But, it seems to me that the limitations to what you think
women should do in the community. I cannot reconcile that with how you talk
now. RK: I did not say that. That is what Dr. White
told me, and this refers to the Nation of God. One of the
reasons for some of those limitations, of women getting into the commercial
aspects of the community, is that there will be so little work to do because
things are supposed to be so put together that items, that you buy at the
store in the way of furniture and automobiles and homes and what have, just
go on and on and on for generations. They do not have to be replaced constantly, as they are designed now. The
system is not to be designed where everybody is running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to keep up
with the basic necessities. Under those circumstances, it is stated that we
should get back to the way the Lemurian economy was where the average work week is twelve hours. There is barely enough for the
wage earners in the families to do that (enough work to go around), and so
the women are essentially to be eliminated from the commercial aspects of
“bringing home the bacon.” Now, that does not mean that women cannot be experienced in practically anything they want to
do, as long as they do not do it for gain. Going to
college is going to be a big item for most people’s lives. The optimum age
for getting married for a woman will be twenty-eight, as if was back in those
days. For a man, about thirty-two or thirty-three.
Under those circumstances, so much time is given to
learning that much of it will be spent in the university where people can
learn how to really understand about biology, nuclear physics, the healing
arts, history, and philosophy, and to become truly acquainted with these
ideas so they understand them. Under the Lemurian system, as I understand it, we will have to
work towards in the new nation a system where if a person develops himself to
be in a public function— governor, a mayor, eventually work himself up to the
possibility of being a candidate to be a governor of his province and maybe
even the head of the nation—that his wife has to go through the same special
training that he does; which means up to about age thirty-five a continual
going to school.
That is so that she is part of that team. It is not just the man who does
those administrative positions all by himself. His wife is also a part of
that, and she has to understand about all of the aspects of how that nation
is to be run. How she is going to fit this in with
rearing children is another question, but that will be one of the
requirements. So, it
is not to diminish the possibility of women doing the things they want to do,
but to keep them out of factories and the stresses of the commercial
situations so that they are in a better framework for rearing children, which
is by far the more important task than having a trade to earn a living. In
the first place, a woman, in all the kinds of things that she does, generally
develops proficiency in many areas of living, where a man concentrates on
some specific trade. He may know everything there is to know about machining,
but she has to know how to properly rear a child,
things about nutrition so that she, her children, and her husband are kept
healthy. All the little chores that go along with running a household give
far more scope and broader opportunities to learn many kinds of things and
bring it into balance, as opposed to the guy who
just does his one thing. Women tend
to have been the arbiters of civilization. Seems like historically the
idealists of how civilization should be put together
have been the men, but the ones who actually make it happen have been the
women. I am not saying those are the roles that they should
have. It just seems that that is the way it has
turned out. Whatever characteristics seem to be developed by males as
opposed to females, that seems how it has worked
out. I do not know that anybody has ever imposed that or tried to grab those
roles for themselves, it just seems inherent in the
masculine and feminine characteristics. So,
what Dr. White, in the best estimate that I have of what he was trying to say
was do not try and promote women in commerce. That is not where they are
going to have their greatest strength. That is not the things that they are
going to be doing, which is going to give them a better chance at fulfilling
themselves as human Egos and serving mankind in the
best way. Q: How do you avoid the unfortunate thing that
goes along with that situation? Generally speaking, the things that men do
tend to be held up as the things that are the most important, and the things
that women end up doing are not the commercial aspect, seems to be— RK: I think that results from men blowing their
horn. They keep convincing themselves that this is really
great stuff. But women, say, two hundred years ago when most people
were either farmers or involved in some cottage trade—cottage industry—they
were home, they were with their children, with their wives, all the time.
Regardless of what they were doing, at least, they had other ones around
them. Now, they have to somehow bolster themselves up and
say: this is really great, I go off early in the morning, I go off before my
kids get up, I spend an hour getting to where I am going to go, doing the
ridiculous things all day long that nobody could care about ten years from
now, come back home fighting possible death on the freeways until you get
back home again. By that time the kids are
cranky, ready to go to sleep, you have some kind of hurried dinner and have
little fights with them and you sit exhausted in front of the television.
Somehow, they have got to tell themselves that; convince themselves that this
is really what they like to do and it is really a great thing and I am really
excited to do this, in order to kick themselves out of bed every morning. I do not
think they really want to do that. I think they would
really prefer to be home and have some way by which to earn a living in the
presence of their family where instead of being divided from their wife for
such a long period of time, she is always there: a friendly voice to talk to,
because you know you marry a friend and someone who you can count on, rather
than having to be wary about what you say to every single person around you
because they are possible competitors for the better-paying job somewhere
down the line. I think we are in a sick situation. (11-1981) Humanness Is Most Important in the
Nation of God RK: If we look at the ideas of the Lemurian
philosophy and the Nation of God in the future, and take with us our present
views of modern life, it is going to look wrong to us. It is going to require
an entirely different viewpoint on the parts of men and women. You have to start developing that here in Stelle so that we can
go into the new Nation of God with a better appreciation of how men and women
should be relating, and it sure as heck is not supposed to be a commercial
relationship: “Now, I am bringing in more money, you are bringing in more
money, or the one person who is working is not bringing in enough.”
The whole works has gotten distorted as a result of
that. My generation, your generation, the younger generations around today,
have all been brought up in the context of regarding the proper way of doing
things and the modern, most advanced way of doing things in a highly
industrialized society. I do not think industrialization is entirely
compatible with humanness. I think we have to put commercial activities and industrial activities and technological
activities in their proper place, and it is not at the top. They are
important; we cannot do without them, we would be greatly diminished if we
did not have them, but right now their importance
looms too large in our considerations. It is going to take really quite an
important turnaround in our appreciation of what really matters. And, what matters first is humanness. The kids should not be coming in somewhere fourth or fifth down
the line. They are supposed to be number two in a person’s life and their
spouse is number one as far as persons are concerned and material
considerations are concerned. So far as spiritual
considerations are concerned, I think one’s relationship to the Higher Beings
such as Christ or God really takes top priority. Few people have time to give
the depth of consideration and awareness to that in our present society that
they should have. So, we are looking forward to a different kind of thing,
and then what Dr. White says, which sounds like harsh proscriptions, just
says, “Well, yeah, naturally.” But, when you first
read it in The Ultimate Frontier, it sounds pretty hot. (11-1981) |
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