The Patriarchal Project Has Failed

A Return to Egalitarianism

Breugel’s Tower of Babel, 1565

It’s time to stop and tell the truth.

The patriarchal system delivers the same result over and over: war, oppression, abuse, exploitation, suffering. It turns out that if you hire patriarchal warlords and their jealous, angry god to run your culture, you’re going to be in endless wars, cultural and worldwide, public and private, no matter how much you insist you don’t want that. MAGA thought they were buying America first. No more foreign wars; no more regime change. It didn’t work out.

Newsflash: Being led by warmongers leads to war.

It’s all noise.

Human beings merge with stories to our detriment, in agreement or opposition, and the patriarchal project exploits that. Stories don’t affect reality at all, just our experience of it. They have created so much noise, so many stories, so much chaos, that both sides find themselves in a new war before they can even say no. Because their patriarchal dominion project is overseen by a war god.

Lately, I’ve become increasingly aware of these belts around the circumference of the globe, made of noise, the oppressive business of everyone’s thoughts and opinions. The president who is a traitor… and war… Iran, Venezuela, Gaza, Ukraine… And more. There’s been a new genocide every 1.4 years since 1956. The depth of our rape culture that still allows the Epstein trafficking and blackmail ring to remain unresolved, though all we have to do is follow the money. Plans for how we are going to overcome them, and the abdication of responsibility that claims we are already defeated. The climate is already past the point…

And we know the stories aren’t true, sometimes even as we repeat them. Her fault; his fault; fucking billionaires. All the mythologies of the one god, the true prophet, the rightness of male domination, and even the hope for a return to an earlier female-centered egalitarian culture are all just stories.

Our Earth, surrounded by satellites

Since my personal noise is mostly quiet, I sit with the cacophony, which never escapes Earth’s atmosphere because of an ozone layer of suffering. Every species that isn’t already extinct, the flora and fauna on land and in fish and plants in the oceans, are releasing depth charges of suffering, which we ignore, refuse, and push away with more noise. Pass the ketchup.

There are two other options.

Gampo Abbey, Nova Scotia

Option 1: Withdrawal

Refuse to participate. Join a monastery. Become a hermit. This is a very attractive archetype for people like me. It’s my Plan B. “If things get too bad,” my fantasy says, “I’ll go up to Nova Scotia and join Pema Chödrön at Gampo Abbey.” I’m no Buddhist, mind you. But as a patriarchal mythology, they are one of the least offensive and most beautiful. Patriarchies exist on a spectrum. They aren’t all as horrible as our own.

A less drastic version of Plan B is the fantasy of the isolated hermit house in the woods with a productive garden, some animals, and complete self-sufficiency. That’s the ideal. For a while, it was a tiny house. Or I could create self-sufficiency here in the middle of busy Los Angeles, grow my vegetables and flowers, trade with neighbors in the gift economy, sing in a Threshold Choir, and participate in the noise as little as possible. You can see from my busy Substack that I’m not yet the hermit I aspire to be. Age will catch up with me, though, and complete the process. By the time most of us die, everything that still belongs to us fits into one brown paper bag.

Option 2: Attachment

When my spiritual chips fell, I realized that Buddhist mythology was wrong about attachment, or they weren’t giving the full picture. The lack of secure attachment is a patriarchal approach - diagnosable. Sidhartha Gautama was a noble son.

But you can attach firmly if you are willing to grieve when that attachment is inevitably broken. That’s all that’s required. Willingness to feel grief. So, I attached to my family, my kids in my high school classroom, my community, and my commitment to truth. The prayer was simple: Show me who I am in Truth. That prayer marshals the universe, the invisible and the visible. Once the process begins, the prayer becomes: I’m willing to feel this. There’s no need to untie the Gordian knot; love melts the illusion of rope.

Here’s another truth: We never needed patriarchy to create art, science, literature, architecture, medicine, or any of the beautiful disciplines. In fact, all those beauties were held back by the exclusion of women and racial minorities - held back by a lack of perspective so stunning it thought the Birka warrior was a man for over 130 years. And, refused to see until 2013, that 75% of ancient cave paintings were done by women. In fact, some scholars still insist that the woman’s prints must have been made by adolescent boys, because women just couldn’t have…

Bla, bla, bla. It’s pathological in its underlying terror of women. That terror projected is mysogyny.

But ancient egalitarian cultures weren’t gender obsessed like we are. They didn’t use gender as a marker. Modern mythologists have a really hard time imagining a world that isn’t structured by gender hierarchies. They simply can’t. But that doesn’t mean our ancestors didn’t. Proof exists in our eldest indigenous cultures, which are alive and thriving today, but racism won’t let us see it. Because primitive…

The ancient city of Catalhoyuk, where they weren’t gender obsessed like we are.

All patriarchy gave us that we couldn’t have accomplished better and sooner as an egalitarian culture was an insistence that women start moving in with their husband’s family, take their husbands’ names, and pass their property to his sons. See, women, by now, no longer control their bodies or their children. Though it was completely unnatural, power over those things transferred to men. That’s why they needed violence. Then, thousands of years later, they plan to use that seismic shift from how everything always was to take away our vote. Because your name will now have to match your birth certificate. Sneaky bastardos.

Way back when I was seeking enlightenment, I used to think the world was lost - too violent, too complicated. Saving it was an impossible project. Better to transcend it. But it was always myself I was seeing, not the world. Now that I’m past the cult of my own personality, I see that all those arguments about things being too complicated are the excuses I’d used so I could put off the inevitable death of my own false self and all the ways, subtle and gross, I kept it alive. Cultures do that, too.

Most of the true spiritual teachers I’ve sat with avoid politics as the messy entrapment it is. Most people can’t talk about it without losing themselves to a story, a trance as vivid and true to life as the best movie. We just have this tendency to merge with stories, which is why I call us homo mythologica, for clearly we don’t live up to the name sapiens. So, while I was waking up from my personal victim story, if I became entranced, my teacher would call me back to reality. “Not that,” she would say. “Not that.” I haven’t seen my teacher in over 20 years, but I can still hear her voice sometimes. “Not that.”

I wanted to be at war with my parents over my childhood, especially that dead parent, my father, who didn’t make it out of our story alive. And I was right about them, and wrong about what mattered because I was at war. Winning was what mattered to me then. If patriarchy has taught us anything of value, it’s that you can prevail, you can win the war, and lose something more important. That’s why I’m not at war with men or patriarchy. Instead, I tell the truth.

And speaking of spiritual traditions, so many patriarchal mythologies, even the more benign ones, have painted this world as bad, as something to overcome - as fallen - because of a woman in most but not all cases. But that woman-blaming creation myth was only a projection of the mind. The beautiful world, the garden, is still reality. What descended was a projection of our collective mind - the fall from grace was mental. Grace hasn’t moved. It’s time to withdraw that projection and see the world without it.

We do that by stopping.

It’s simple. Center into your heart. Listen. It says yes to this, and no to that. Listen as an individual who is waking up from layers and layers of ancient trauma, stored in the DNA. Be brave when your heart says yes or no. The heart is right in the long run, even though it seems that you will lose everything. That’s why you must be brave, because the mind does not stop telling stories of doom simply because you have stopped acting them out. Let them play. Like a movie, it’s a light show. You can’t stop them anyway, and who is the person trying to stop them? The problem, that’s who. Just stop.

Can we do this as a culture? Can we collectively wake up and usher the world into a golden age of egalitarianism, where the answer to our problems is diffused through every part of our culture, readily available if we are only willing to listen to and share power with everyone?

Of course, we can.

It only seems complicated because we are afraid and don’t want to. But this is what the world is asking of us in the collapse of all our systems, our bottom, speaking in recovery terms. And I do speak in recovery terms, because patriarchy is addicted to the power accumulated through the compulsion to dominate. Money is just the mind’s system of keeping score. Our culture has all the money we need to take care of everybody. And that’s what money is for. Taking care.

What’s the answer to every addiction? First, you must stop the self-indulgence that perpetuates harm. Just stop.

Then the heart will urge you to do what you have been refusing to do. You must admit what you have been refusing to admit. Take care of what you have been refusing to tend to. Tell the truth where you have been lying. For example, we must tell the truth about the Epstein ring of abuse and international blackmail. Tell the truth about our rape culture that sees living, breathing girls and women as consumables - disposable. The culture that sees black and indigenous people as consumable - disposable. That sees workers as consumable - disposable.

That’s women and men. Lots of us. We must tell the truth about male suffering under patriarchy and about the many women who perpetuate this system, too. Listen, we’ve all done terrible things. That’s the nature of it.

Let the chips fall where they may. Don’t touch. Don’t fix. Don’t move. Stop. In the clarity after stopping, do what is simply obvious. Do that. The antidote to war is love. The answer to patriarchy is community. Loving, caring community. An egalitarian community that supports everyone.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Or just say hello. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

Usually, I respond pretty quickly to almost every comment, but next week I’m taking option A: Withdrawal, because the options aren’t binary. We can do both! I’m immersing myself in a darkness retreat, turning to face my Self. Three days and four nights of total darkness inside our Mother Earth, so I might be a little slow in responding to comments. Please comment anyway. I’ll be back, perhaps with a little more clarity to share, at least that’s the plan…