The biggest problem with the men’s rights movement is its failure to see the big picture. For some reason, people think they can separate feminism and gender issues from a larger philosophical problem. This is wishful thinking. It can’t be done.

There’s a reason the feminists latched onto Marxist philosophy like a child to his mother’s teat. It provided them with a philosophical framework – a faith, really – that allowed them to deny the realities of human nature by assigning inequalities to political struggles. There are some truths in Marxism. Political and economic inequalities are real, and often stand in stark contrast to natural inequalities, hence the use of the concept of natural law to strike down privileges of birth and other “accidental” advantages enjoyed by some over others.

Today, however, people fail to see the original intent of these movements. In fact, they have an often inverted notion of them. For example, the idea that a woman should be privileged over a man in hiring preference is more akin to the old notion of nobility by birth than it is to the Founding Fathers’ concept of equality.

In fact, the notion that men and women are equal would have been very strange to even the most radical of Enlightenment thinkers. Yet by mysterious twists of fate (and possibly liberal English resistance to French Republicanism), the feminists have coopted the ideology.

So what we are left with today is a twisted interpretation of what was a flawed philosophy to begin with. Now that Enlightenment and Marxist notions of inequality as a more or less purely political, cultural construct, have been discredited, we are left with an increasingly dysfunctional guiding faith in a fallen god.

Is the key to cling to the old idols, hanging on with eyes tightly shut against the mounting body of evidence that we were wrong, or to accept that we made some mistakes along the way and move on? To me, the latter seems far more reasonable.

But in order to move on, we have to reject all that follows from the errors — not just those things that we personally dislike. So if it turns out that, say, men and women are not by nature equal, then we can’t say we want equality on our terms. Instead, we have to make an effort to learn the truth, and then we can go about accommodating it.

So the real problem is not merely feminism, but the original error, which includes a great deal more than that.

Therefore, if you oppose feminism and its associated evils, the most effective way to fight it is to debunk the false philosophy that supports it. And this means we cannot indulge men who adhere to the same principles, whether they are on “our side” or not.

What it really comes down to is truth vs. error, but because “equality” is such a powerful concept today, it must be attacked head on and by name before people can begin to perceive the error. Hence my recent articles on the subject.