LITTLE ROCK — Ladies, please don’t misunderstand me here. I am blessed to have good women in my life who I love thoroughly. The intended target of conviction for this piece is not women, its men who want to think like you - and by that disallow you the freedom to be who you really are in balance with the masculine mind.

Throughout human history men have had the role of risk-takers.

Women have had more of an emphasis on safety and security. This is a generalization of course, but an accurate one.

The interplay between the two, with women advocating the safe choice and men deciding that certain risks are worth taking, has been an essential part of keeping humanity on the road to progress.

Because of those balancing forces, we have moved along the path of progress, falling off neither to the side of foolish risk-taking that leads to destruction, or excessive emphasis on safety which leads to stagnation.

Ironically, the unwillingness to take a calculated risk is itself risky in the long run. By refusing to attempt to capitalize on opportunities whose likely rewards are greaterthan the risks of incurring costs, one can wind up in a situation where you have no choice at all. When disaster strikes, inadequate resources are at hand to cushion the blow, due to an over-emphasis on avoiding even a small risk.

Because of this, the divide between the “feminine” side and the “masculine” side, is really a preference for avoidance of immediate risk that is presently visible - not total risk.

There is an ongoing effort in Western civilization to feminize men. I have observed that part of the outcome of this diabolical effort is that many men are no longer able to rationally analyze risk, or at least seem uninterested in developing their latent capacity to do so.

I am in a business (natural gas) where landowners I deal with have the possibility of extremely high rewards. There are some risks, too, but nothing like the over-blown scare stories we sometimes hear. I was amazed to find a number of men where even themost baseless thought of risk paralyzed their minds so that they were unable to even process the potential rewards. If there was any rumor of risk, they were going to do nothing.

Men in this class were not interested in looking at the evidence to see if the risk was a credible one or not - the rumor of risk alone committed them to inaction. Nor, if the rumor of risk was present, were they interested in attempting to investigate the potential size of the reward so that even if the risk was true they could perform a viable risk-rewards calculus.

I am sorry, I do not like grown men acting this way. I don’t say we need to be like teenage boys, dealing with testosterone for the first time and so engaging in excessive risk without an appropriatereward, but we do need to fill our role. Men are the ones who are supposed to be the advocates for risktaking. That is, risk taking in the short run in order to provide more security in the long run. Too many of us are shunning that role.

We used to be a society where men understood that you had to take rational risks in order to obtain valuable rewards. Now, we want “guarantees,” especially of the government variety. Well, no politician can truthfully promise you reward without risk of loss. That doesn’t stop them from promising it untruthfully, because they sense that not only most women but now even many men are willing to make the following irrational trade: They will trade the right to keep more of their own earnings and even their personal liberty and freedom in exchange for a promise from a politician (which cannot possibly be kept) that they will be taken care of for life no matter what happens. In other words, risk is eliminated.

It’s no wonder we can’t say no to things like endless debt just to make things “OK now.” There are consequences to these things that affect our politics, our home, everything. I support the re-masculization of America.

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Editor’s note: Mark Moore is the lead writer for an Internet blog on matters pertaining to Arkansas culture and government, Arkansas Watch, and on Tuesday nights is the host of an Internet-based radio program, Patriots on Watch. He can be reached through The Times at [email protected].

Opinion, Pages 4 on 08/03/2011