R. A. Bahlieda M.A., Ed. D.

Educational expert, political theorist and freelance writer

I have decided to post a blog. There are a number of reasons for this decision.

Blogs are generally filled with the nonsense and detritus of humanity. Along with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. the digital world is essentially a meaningless mass of daily chatter. It has intentionally drawn our attention away from substantive discussions about real issues. Our universe is patriarchal and commercial. It disguises the level of exploitation, unfairness and control that is built in to the system. The digital world is for the most part a massive patriarchal pacification system designed to lull people to sleep within the inanities of daily life. It is intended to keep our attention fully occupied so that we do not think about or discuss our dismal situation and what to do about it. It is is the gin houses of the 1880s reincarnated. This blog will attempt to see and think outside the box for solutions to our problems. In the daily events of life, it will attempt to demonstrate in a very real way how patriarchy works and how damaging it is while offering real solutions to those issues. The blog is an extension of my books.

This blog is posted with medium text for the visually impaired.

This blog is a critical, personal act liberating myself and my views from the claustrophobic filters that have limited my expression (and others) and governed my life to this point. These major filters (religion, capitalism, education etc.) must be critically interrogated in order to view alternatives.  Every revolution starts with an idea. In a blog you must trust your own ideas.  No different than commercial media.

Unfortunately, the digital universe is here to stay and as they also say – if you can’t beat ‘em – join ‘em. This is a rebuttal blog that will attempt to explore meaningful issues and potential solutions through shorter unpublished essays, op-eds. Letters to the editor, essays etc. This blog is an attempt to reinterpret the masses of information (legitimate and non-legitimate) and  to begin to explore ideas that global media tend to block in our now infinitely expanding digital world. I will not bore you with the mindlessness of my daily life.

The pin-hole camera worldview of the traditional western, democratic, commercial press is  naturally biased towards big business, Christianity and patriarchy and is thus selectively restrictive as to what it will publish. All media are large corporate businesses and as such have a decidedly strong bias in this regard. This means that views that discuss real change to our social situation will be blocked even when these make sense. This blog is a small answer to that. Traditional media does not want to rock the boat too far and so it remains within a narrow field of discussion and views.  Also the volume of responses mediates against being published. I want to remove these various blinders from society’s vision and make “free speech” truly free.

This blog is a critical personal act liberating myself and my views from the claustrophobic filters that have limited my expression (and others) and governed my life to this point. These major filters (religion, capitalism, education etc.) must be critically interrogated in order to view alternatives.  Every revolution starts with an idea. In a blog you must trust your own ideas.  No different than commercial media.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. The problem comes when people attempt to impose their ideas on others by force, belligerence or intrigue or hold ideas that are in opposition to the betterment of humanity. Honesty is a rare commodity. Our democracy is framed within a patriarchal worldview. We live in not a pure democracy but a patriarchal, capitalist democracy that structures our society in certain ways that are amenable to it. When we talk about a “free press” we are talking about a patriarchal, free “capitalist” press. Our traditional leadership models are patriarchal, religions, politics, education etc. as Goettner-Abendroth and von Werlhof have suggested. Everything we think or write about must make reference to this over-arching and obviously dominant philosophy. It is a major shortfall of academic study that they have not taken up this approach, leaving the majority of academic literature barren. Most academic writing studiously ignores the issue of patriarchy whether it is written by male or more surprisingly female academics. It doesn’t matter about topic or reason, patriarchy is “verboten” It is the enormous elephant in the room.

This blog will not be light reading or right reading, but it will focus on critically evaluating society and revealing changes that no other western media seems capable of doing at this time. It will also critique a wide range of issues and topics in addition. It will step out of these perspectives and critique them. While there are innumerable voices populating the commercial media and the blogosphere or the word (correct term used) universe – there are few sensible alternatives with real time solutions. I want to illuminate some of the darkness surrounding what the restrictive pin-hole of light reveals. Media is in many ways a placebo where the public gets to read about and interact with the commercial press without any real change often occurring. Free speech is a deception. Talk without action is cheap. It is time governments, business and the public started to walk the talk. In essence; this blog will try to avoid the traditional bias and pitfalls of journalism and explore practical ideas that will benefit people – real people. I do have my own biases but at least they are unfiltered and honest and oriented in making life better for people everywhere. That is quite different from governments and businesses that are invested in making the lives of a few people better at the expense of everyone else. In a century of conservative, liberal and quasi-socialist governments nothing has changed and much has gotten worse – a lot worse.  The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  This must change.

This blog is a digital newspaper of one. You the readers will determine how wide the circulation base is and how relevant the ideas are. I am not writing to convince anyone of the veracity of my ideas – they will speak for themselves and if they ring a bell with readers that will be their test of truth but they will also be provocative as they need to be to express and expropriate the truth and to begin the process of change.

This blog also responds to changing times. The age of traditional academia and lengthy peer-reviewed publishing is coming to an end as it is being buried by a massive layer of digital output. The only response I believe is to join the wave and add my voice to the blizzard of issues out there.Like most people I suppose, I decided to start this blog after a lifetime of submitting letters (65 published in the Toronto Star) and other newspapers. Hundreds more were rejected. I also submitted dozens of op-eds to newspapers of which sparse few were published. – only to find that they were a closed shop. Op-ed writers were often selected based on what appeared to be cronyism with the same writers being published again and again. This is not a free press. Hundreds of quality issues-focused ideas never saw the light of day despite the fact that I am an experienced educational expert and skilled writer with a Doctorate in Education who has reflected widely and thought deeply about the issues confronting society and myself for my entire life. I am sure the writing of many others were also rejected. As my life went on, I began to discern a political bias in the editing process. If you favoured the status quo then your ideas would be published. If you favoured anything else they weren’t. Also if you criticized media you were not published. I also noted there was no viable socialist press

I am also starting this blog due to a constant stream of consciousness in my head that has churned out thoughts throughout my adult life and which I believe may be of some value to others.  Like Jack Kerouac I will now let these ideas spill out onto a page and let the readers decide their merit. The key is that the thoughts must be intelligent and shared and thus the blog. An unshared thought is a waste of time because it is never tested against another human thought in reasoned debate that is social and interactive. People need to talk about issues and not only traditional leaders and politicians but everyone. In many ways the leaders and politicians are the last people who should be talking about the issues. My own time is becoming short and I must write and publish.  In these dark days of a planet under huge stress due to plastics and pollution, war, the negative effects of industrialization and capitalism, poverty and labour strife and the rapid expansion of authoritarian populism in the likes of Donald Trump in the U.S.A., Marine Le Pen in France and Doug Ford in Ontario as well as the hundreds of alt-right dictators and authoritarian “leaders” everywhere who arrogantly control their countries for their own benefit every person on earth must speak out to save our once beautiful planet and humanity from their destructive, self-serving ideas. We must all speak truth to power – we owe that to our children. To a large extent although not exclusively men and capitalism have destroyed our world in the modern era. Capitalism is a predatory, vicious and amoral economic system that makes millions of victims to create its wealth. Industrialization is a double-edged sword. It creates wealth and industrial comforts while polluting the earth. This does not have to be. If capitalism was controlled the scenario would be much different. Wealth and poverty are relative.  It is no longer acceptable to be passive or silent and defer to leaders – every single person must rise up and make their voices heard in peaceful, non-violent ways. A blog is one way I have decided to add to the fray. The #MeToo movement is only a tiny beginning. We must aggressively change the system before it is too late.

Patriarchy is a system of power in which men dominate. And finally, we come to the core of the problem – patriarchy. Patriarchy is the male meta-ideology of society that has dictated and governed our lives for 4-6 thousand years and it has reached its peak (or its depths) in our modern world. It is the most pervasive, invasive and virulent force in society now, in the past, or in the future. We live in a constructed democratic gulag of ideologies and practices that are dictated by patriarchy. In short – it’s a man’s world.  It has become so complex and disguised that it exists invisibly in our leadership, economics, politics, education, religion and gender relationships and seems quite “natural.”  Both men and women are trapped in the ideology of patriarchy. However, this is a forced natural. Patriarchy is extraordinarily destructive and damaging to society at the mega geopolitical level down to the personal level and virtually everything negative in the world can be traced back to it yet everyone assumes that it is a “natural” way of being that needs no change or no challenge. Rather than putting out fires one at a time we can put out the forest fire by attacking patriarchy at its source. For this reason I believe we must go back to the beginning and start over – dismantling patriarchy in all its forms everywhere. This may take centuries but if we don’t start we may not survive.

This blog, in one form or another will attempt do this by posting rejected letters (ideas) and op-eds plus a series of essays on topics of daily interest. Patriarchy is the most serious problem that society faces today and in the future. The first step in addressing it is awareness. What is most important to understand is that patriarchy is an extremely complex, massive and integrated invisible problem that everyone faces and that we must address on all fronts simultaneously. Like the seven-headed Hydra if we cut off one head it is likely to grow back because the other six heads still exist. The seven heads are: patriarchy, leadership, politics, capitalism, education, religion and gender relationships. In short, all of society as we know it. A concerted world-wide effort towards change is needed –  one person at a time.

I have been forced to blog to get some new ideas directly into the hands of people around the world – to break through the corporate and private sector filters that blind us and prevent us from seeing a different world. At the risk of being just another grain of sand on the beach I must try to speak truth to power and restore reason and intelligence to our global debates. I hope to add my voice to the billions of others out there to create an unstoppable tsunami of change. These discussions do not belong to traditional leaders but to the mass of humanity, the 99.01% of the world that live on the planet earth and that simply want to go about their lives with a few good friends, food and family but who are constantly being interrupted, harassed and oppressed in this simple pursuit by patriarchal leaders, geopolitics, religion, education and a host of other issues that dominate our world as it is currently structured. This blog will attempt to de-construct the world in layman’s terms.

-RB