Quotas, quotas, quotas. Can we please have a quota on quotas, so at least some of the time we don’t have to hear about them? Much in vogue again with the depressing news that in future executive bonuses should be based on how many women are appointed to senior positions. Of course, this is yet another triumph for the feminist’s juggernaut. and at one level one has to admire, if not agree with, their sheer ruthlessness and single-minded determination – and immense success – at transforming society in a very short period of time.
Feminists hardly make a secret of their ambitions, but I wonder whether the drive for gender quotas is actually also part of a far more subtle and perhaps even greater transformation of society, towards the dynastic power politics of a new medieval age.
It has been fashionable for a considerable time to say that the nation state is dead or dying, and for some reason this is seen as ‘progress’. It would be more accurate to say that the direction of travel is deeply reactionary: moving back into something akin to the medieval model of society, when sealed, aloof, internationalist-minded elites oversaw the parochial peasant classes, and had vastly more in common with each other than they did the people they governed.
In medieval times, of course, rank and prestige were defined by ownership of land and title; politics and power were essentially dynastic. Astonishingly, we see the same process happening today: closed elites, this time not defined by ownership of land but, far more disconcertingly, by both environmental and genetically inherited advantages, are marrying each other in both politics and business. The wives and husbands of senior politicians commonly sit on the boards of major corporations, and politics is increasingly a family business, with politicians even starting to marry their counterparts in other countries. Even in America, a country with well over 300 million people, the primaries included not one but two candidates whose family members had previously been Presidents themselves.
Quotas, formal or otherwise, are good way of accelerating these existing trends of the concentration of wealth into the hands of a few extremely powerful and highly connected global families, related increasingly by blood and marriage. Perhaps it is pure prejudice on my part, but it would be very interesting indeed for an investigative journalist to examine the network of contacts and family relationships of the women now being appointed under the quota system to corporate boards for example – what’s the betting a great many of them will be married to very powerful men, themselves sitting at the top of business and politics?
To suggest that this is all worked out as part of some grand international plan by the Bilderbergers/New World Order/Davos, no doubt within a darkened room complete with a man stroking a white cat, would be to deservedly invite derision: such formal conspiracies are rare. Far more common is that subconsciously shared mutual interests direct policy towards an outcome desirable to those in power. It is easy to see why promoting gender quotas, especially at international level, would play very much to the advantages of the powerful elites and are in fact not a means to expanding opportunity, but to ultimately restricting it.
Running the world is increasingly a family concern. Welcome to the New Medieval Age.
