The Invention of Gender Roles – Division by Design

The first in a series of six essays entitled The Abyss of Civilization, published in Resilience Magazine in 2025–26.

“What is civilization? What is culture? Is it possible for a healthy race to be fathered by violence—in war or in the slaughter-house—and mothered by slaves, ignorant or parasitic?”

—Agnes Ryan, 1952, quoted in What Is Civilization?, ed. Zerzan.

Origins: The Civilizational Code

Understanding any subject should, in principle, be simple: start at the beginning, locate the roots, and trace how the thing arose. Yet this essential discipline is seldom practiced. Just look at these few examples:

• Engineering and technology. Curricula preach “learning from failure,” but genuine root-cause analysis is routinely sacrificed to looming deadlines. Investigations skim symptoms, not the cultural assumptions or design flaws beneath them, and faith in self-correcting “progress” blunts deeper reflection.

• Psychology. Once attuned to formative experience, the field now centers cognition, productivity, and symptom management—steered by insurance codes and workplace metrics rather than a hunger for origin stories.

• Quality assurance. Systems claim to mine historical data, yet hierarchies, profit motives, and siloed thinking stifle genuine systemic learning.

• Science. Even the flagship of methodical inquiry bends under corporate funding, institutional politics, and journal incentives. The reproducibility crisis and resistance to paradigm shifts reveal how structure itself can block foundational investigation.

• Education. Ostensibly the guardian of context, schooling now delivers fragmented facts in siloed curricula—rarely weaving them into coherent, origin-aware narratives.

But most striking is this: history itself often sidesteps its own roots. It catalogues events, maps power, and tallies outcomes — but shrinks from a deeper ontological excavation of its foundations. That evasion has a cost. Consider gender roles: these were not inevitable or natural. They were invented — deliberately, selectively — amid a larger civilizational shift whose consequences still structure the present.

To trace the emergence of gender roles, we must return not just to a distant past but to a specific place: the Ancient Near East (ANE). Within this region, our focus will be on events of the fourth millennium BCE in Sumer, in what is now southern Iraq. This was not only the first place where civilization developed—it was the crucible from which civilization began to spread across the world. Here, sedentism, surplus, hierarchy, and symbolic abstraction fused into an entirely new social reality. Beginning around 12,500 BCE, the long Transition Period—from foraging lifeways in the Levant to urban settlements in Sumer—unfolded in this zone with unusual intensity. By 4000 BCE, the synthesis of agriculture, administration, and conceptual systems had given rise to the earliest forms of the state.

The region’s geography was pivotal: centered in the heart of the Eurasian landmass and crisscrossed by rivers and trade corridors, it became a vector for cultural diffusion. But it was not connectivity alone that mattered. What defined the ANE was more its internal convergence—environmental constraints, irrigation regimes, surplus logistics, and spiritual centralization—out of which emerged law, property, priesthood, and gender as formal categories of social control.

Gender roles, as we will see, were not passive byproducts of evolution. They were encoded responses to new civilizational pressures: surplus management, inheritance tracking, labor segmentation, and spiritual justification. They served as tools for stabilizing emerging systems—and tools can be designed, imposed, revised, or discarded.

This essay confronts the modern neglect of origins head-on. It asks when, how, and why civilization codified gender roles—socially enforced traits, duties, and behaviors assigned to “men” and “women.” Only by tracing their roots can we uncover truths no surface treatment will ever reveal.

The Strangeness of Strangers

When recognition faded and the Other was born

From the moment law and priestcraft formalized the categories of “man” and “woman” in Sumer around 4000 BCE, something new emerged: the figure of the Other—those no longer included in the original, undifferentiated human field. It is a telling sign of our cultural amnesia that so little attention has been paid to when and why gender roles were invented. The argument here is straightforward: gender roles crystallized in Sumer as tools of civilizational stability.

Before the rise of states, humans lived as participants in a shared, chthonic field—alive to difference, but never divided into strict hierarchies. Among hunter-gatherer societies, gender was acknowledged as a difference but rarely enforced as a rigid social role or status marker. For the vast majority of human history—roughly 95%—during the long arc of nomadic life, there is little evidence of fixed roles, social stratification, or symbolic codification based on biological sex.

But as settlement deepened and symbolic authority coalesced around temple and palace, these fluid distinctions gave way to a far more durable and institutionalized gender code. During the subsequent 9,500 years of increasingly sedentary life—especially in the Ancient Near East—practical and symbolic differences began to emerge. However, these differences were inconsistent, localized, and far from fully institutionalized until the pivotal rupture around 4,000 BCE.

The clearest, most enduring markers of imposed gender roles appear around 3600 BCE—and intensify sharply after that date. Yet structural and archaeological clues hint that this process began as early as 4000 BCE. No cultural rupture is ever instantaneous: like temples or tax systems, gender categories coalesced over centuries of administrative innovation, symbolic reclassification, and ritual enforcement.

But dates alone only sketch the outline. Civilization introduced a way of life unlike anything in the nearly 300,000 years that preceded it. I liken it to black-and-white Kansas—not for its dullness, but to highlight the sheer intensity of what came next. The world of cities was Oz in full color: interactions sped up, strangers multiplied, and mistrust grew. Wariness became a survival skill. Strategy, caution, and calculation replaced the older rhythms of trust and recognition. This wasn’t just about numbers—it was about density and proximity. The urban crucible reached critical mass: too many lives colliding, too much surplus and symbolism compressed into shared space. Under that pressure, new social orders took shape, new divisions of being solidified, and new gender codes burned into place.

One might compare the shift to moving from a familiar village into a sprawling metropolis—but even that analogy underestimates the rupture. Today, our cultural field—a mesh of inherited customs, beliefs, values, and institutions—already shapes us wherever we go, from wilderness trails to city streets. Four millennia ago, no such field fully existed. It was not a backdrop people inhabited; it was an emergent force pulling them in, its logic still forming, its meanings still unsettled.

And then, for the first time in human history, people found themselves surrounded by strangers—not just unfamiliar faces, but unknown minds and unreadable intentions. In tight-knit bands, behavior could be interpreted through shared memory and mutual recognition. In the early cities, that familiarity vanished. You no longer knew who someone was, what they wanted, what they believed—or how they judged you.

Confusion took hold. Old interpretive tools faltered. Every encounter grew heavy with uncertainty and suspicion. Was that gesture friendly or probing? Did silence signal respect—or threat? In this charged atmosphere, the concept of the Other emerged—not as a philosophical abstraction, but as a visceral presence on every crowded street and in every public square.

Strangers are no longer like the unfamiliar members of another hunter-gatherer band—encountered with the possibility of trade, kinship, or communication. They are now potentially dangerous, deceptive, unknowable. Dualistic thinking takes root: safe or unsafe, good or bad. Negative judgments begin to dominate every encounter. Caution becomes the default. The psyche recoils, seeking security in separation.

Into this charged atmosphere, a new distinction emerges—one utterly foreign to hunter-gatherer life. Women may grow more cautious in the city’s swirl, but in men, something subtler—something faintly ominous—begins to stir. A shift is underway—one that will soon reshape history.

The Invention of Gender Roles

As the earliest cities swelled with new populations, inherited customs and practices clashed—melding into novel combinations of meaning and value. During the long Transition Period, some communities had already drifted toward hierarchy while others remained largely egalitarian. Even so, a unifying spiritual thread endured: the elemental forces that once shaped hunter-gatherer life still anchored human experience, if in a frayed and partial form. It was into this unsettled landscape—where the old world lingered at the edges of a rising urban order—that civilization began to forge its most durable distinction: the division of humanity into “men” and “women,” each bound by prescribed roles, rights, and duties. But as I’ll argue below, it was men who first stepped into these newly defined roles.

The world remained suffused with a chthonic presence—a fertile, embodied power of nature and a spiritual landscape alive with feminine force. These were not abstract ideals but visceral realities: spirits of fertility, place, rhythm, and limit, woven into the fabric of daily life. Even as early settlements rose, these forces held sway, rooting human meaning in earth and body.

This was no single event but a mythical threshold—likely crossed within the first century of civilization—when a new force emerged: a pervasive heaviness, like a toxic fog, seeping into the land and the rhythms of daily life.

Until that moment, violence had been episodic—situational hunts, tribal disputes, occasional raids. Our ancestors knew killing, but it was seldom organized or enduring. Then, something shifted. Violence became embedded in the fabric of existence: structural, ideological, and inescapable. It marked the instant when coercion moved from the margins to the heart of human psychology and social order.

What emerged around 4000 BCE was not merely an escalation of violence but a fundamental mutation: destruction became normalized—honored, even—and fully institutionalized. It reshaped human identity from the inside out, especially in men.

To grasp the magnitude of this shift, we must distinguish between natural destruction and the kind humans began to engineer after this turning point. In nature, destruction is cyclical. It belongs to the rhythm of growth, decay, and renewal. Even catastrophe—storms, predators, wildfire—serves life’s long arc. A fire, for instance, clears deadwood, fertilizes the soil, and makes room for fresh growth. This is not destruction as negation, but destruction as renewal.

But the destruction that emerged with early civilization was of a different order altogether. It no longer followed nature’s rhythms or yielded anything regenerative. Instead, it became methodical, abstracted, and untethered from genuine need—serving hierarchy, expansion, and domination. In doing so, it began to hollow out the human psyche.

I call this form non-regenerative destruction. When a forest burns, nutrients return to the soil. When a city is razed, the rubble feeds no one. The lives lost are not part of any natural cycle; they are ruptures—tears in the fabric of a psyche once grounded in reciprocity, vitality, and life-affirming values.

To understand this deeper shift, I introduce my Naturalistic Theory (NT), the framework that underpins this entire series. In NT, each of us is understood as a psyche—a unified being composed of body, instincts, emotions, brain, mind, and gender (or gender blend). This stands in stark contrast to the modern reduction of the self to cognition and identity labels.

But Psyche, with a capital P, names something far deeper: our ontological ground. It is the pre-cultural, pre-personal field of existence we enter at birth—the shared human essence that precedes identity, language, or role. Psyche is not purely psychological but the living fabric of being before it was fragmented, classified, or domesticated by civilization.

Naturalistic Theory holds that once destruction crossed from nature into Psyche, it became non-regenerative destruction (NRD). In that moment, it tore the very fabric of existence—wounding not just human beings, but being itself. That initial rupture might have healed had people revived the grounding values of the hunter-gatherer ethos. Instead, the wound deepened—and the split became structural*.*

NRD embedded itself most deeply—and irrevocably—into the male psyche, which proved especially vulnerable to its imprint. This underscores why the ontological dimension matters: civilization’s violence did more than reshape behavior—it altered the very conditions of being human in the new world.

Women were perhaps less vulnerable to this inner rupture if only because their capacity to create and nurture life tethered them to the creative force that echoed nature’s rhythms. This grounding was not merely biological but reflected their deeper belonging to the field of being. I call this the ontological feminine—a life-affirming principle rooted in relation, receptivity, and renewal, still alive in our ancestors’ experience of nature. Ironically, while this offered women a form of protection, men—less tethered to this principle—were affected by NRD earlier and began to assert a perverse form of control over the emerging sociocultural sphere.

NT thus provides a clear foundation for understanding how the male gender role was constructed around an amplified capacity for destruction. Over time, this pattern not only persisted but intensified—evidence of the powerful role cultural conditioning played in shaping and reinforcing it.

It is essential to recognize that violence is not an innate human trait, despite common assumptions to the contrary. The biological evidence on this point is strong and consistent—yet it remains conspicuously absent from most public discourse.

We can therefore conclude that the distorted values introduced by early civilization allowed NRD to take root in men, amplifying both physical and structural violence. From this soil, the earliest historical form of patriarchy emerged—not as a natural outcome, but as the result of deliberate material, architectural, and symbolic shifts.

1. Rising Violence in Early Sumer

·        During the Ubaid period (ca. 6500–4000 BCE), settlements show little evidence of conflict. Fortifications are absent, weapons are rare in burials, and material culture points to cooperation over coercion.

·        After 4000 BCE, this pattern changes abruptly: fortified walls appear, weaponry becomes common in graves, and mass burials suggest organized violence.

·        At least two battle sites from this era have been archaeologically confirmed. Given the fragmentary preservation of ancient remains, these likely represent only a small sample of actual conflicts.

·        Architecture reflects this shift: walls thicken, entry points narrow, and defensive structures multiply—material signs of a growing obsession with control, threat, and domination.

2. Grain Storage and the Rise of Male Authority

·        After 4000 BCE, men increasingly assumed control of grain storage—an early nexus of surplus, value, and symbolic meaning.

·        Storage facilities were often aligned with celestial or cardinal axes and wrapped in fertility metaphors, linking food to cosmic order.

·        Over time, these centers expanded in function—combining storage with coordination, ritual, and record-keeping—becoming early nodes of centralized authority.

·        Those who administered them gained not just logistical control but spiritual and symbolic prestige, consolidating male dominance over both material and metaphysical life.

3. Architecture as Codified Patriarchy

·        Elevated, rectilinear buildings replaced earlier horizontal, communal forms—reorganizing space around visibility, surveillance, and command.

·        Functional zoning emerged: administration, storage, and ceremony became spatially and symbolically distinct from domestic life.

·        Public space grew increasingly male-dominated, centered around vertical structures that mirrored sky gods and reflected hierarchical power.

·        Activities once communal—ritual, storage, governance—became specialized and enclosed, systematically excluding women from spiritual, symbolic, and political centers.

·        Enclosure intensified this transformation. Spaces that had once been relatively open and communally accessible were increasingly bounded by walls, restricted entrances, courtyards, and controlled pathways. Enclosure did more than reorganize physical space: it determined who could enter, who could participate, and who exercised authority within increasingly specialized centers of storage, administration, and ritual.

4. Mass Labor Projects

·        Large-scale construction increasingly required the coordination of labor far beyond the household or small community. Walls, monumental buildings, irrigation works, storage complexes, and other collective projects concentrated the capacity to organize human effort in emerging centers of authority.

·        These projects transformed labor itself into an instrument of social organization. Increasing numbers of people could be assembled, directed, and put to work toward purposes determined by others.

·        The result was not merely larger buildings or more elaborate infrastructure. Mass labor projects materially rehearsed hierarchy: some people planned, commanded, recorded, and allocated, while many others supplied the physical labor.

·        Together with violence, control of surplus, and enclosure, the organization of mass labor helped convert emerging hierarchy into an enduring material structure.

Together, these developments reveal a coordinated transformation: violence became institutionalized, surplus became centralized, and space itself began to encode a gendered order. The male gender role—as both enforcer and beneficiary of this new arrangement—was constructed not by nature but by design.

Civilization and Its Vulnerabilities

Violence, in the civilizational context, is not just a tactic—it is a worldview, a multipronged method of eliminating resistance, especially from nature.

Within just 400 to 500 years—a blink of an eye in human history—a new social order took hold. While the archaeological and textual record from the Ancient Near East (ANE) remains uneven, the core evidence is unmistakable: by this time, the male gender role had become codified. Non-regenerative destruction (NRD) and hierarchical domination were normalized. The foundational structures of patriarchy emerged in visible, enforceable forms. In the span of just 25 generations, human life was set on a radically different course—soon to be codified, ritualized, and internalized.

What followed is very intriguing from a ontohistorical perspective (i.e., the history of how human being changes over the years especially major changes. Despite frequent references to proto-priests or proto -temples from the archeological literature, even before civilization, religion did not truly form before 2350 BCE simultaneously with the rise of empire

Instead, what occurred was primarily a process of direct materialistic reduction (DMR) within early Civilization. This marked the beginning of sustained efforts to invert material reality, block the movement of relational being where possible, and otherwise reduce the bodily basis of the psyche. Early forms of transcendence were also emerging, anticipating the symbolically mediated reduction (SMR) that would later become increasingly important, but the picture was messy and the predominant mechanisms remained material. Similar to the processes described above, four primary forms of DMR operated together:

1.      Violence. Violence increased, practiced predominantly by men within and between growing settlements and through raids or forced transfers of resources from surrounding hinterlands. Violence did more than injure and kill: it reorganized relationships through fear, coercion, submission, and physical domination.

2.      Enclosure. Enclosures became increasingly common, restricting movement and access while dividing spaces that had previously been more open and communal. Walls, bounded compounds, controlled entrances, storage areas, and increasingly differentiated spaces materially reorganized relationships among people and between people and their surroundings.

3.      Monumentality. Gradually taller, larger, and more imposing buildings were constructed, exercising a strange new influence over people accustomed to a more direct experience of primary reality. Their sheer material presence made emerging hierarchy concrete and visible. At the same time, these structures increasingly served as material metaphors for more abstract and transcendent conceptions of power, providing one of the places where DMR began to shade into SMR.

4.      Mass labor projects. Large labor units demonstrated the growing ability of emerging elites to assemble, coordinate, and direct human bodies on an unprecedented scale. The projects themselves materially enacted hierarchy: a few increasingly commanded while many performed the labor. The resulting monumental works then magnified the apparent power of those who directed them, eventually helping create the impression that such authority extended beyond ordinary human capacities.

To understand the dramatic transformations of the fourth millennium BCE, we need to apply Naturalistic Theory (NT) more closely. NT holds that changes in material conditions, technologies, social organization, and human behavior do not remain external to us. Over time, they alter the psyche itself. In this period, however, the principal forces acting upon the psyche were not yet religious or primarily symbolic. They were overwhelmingly material.

Civilizational religion was still not underway. Older forms of predominantly feminine, chthonic spirituality lingered, while new forms of transcendence were beginning to appear. These developments would eventually become important to symbolically mediated reduction (SMR), but they should not be projected backward onto a period in which the principal reduction of relational being was occurring through direct materialistic reduction (DMR).

DMR worked upon people through their bodies, their physical surroundings, and their relationships with one another. Increasing violence subjected bodies directly to coercion and fear. Enclosures restricted movement, access, and participation. Monumental architecture transformed the scale and organization of experienced space. Mass labor projects assembled and directed large numbers of human beings toward purposes increasingly determined by others. These were not representations of hierarchy. They were hierarchy experienced materially.

The importance of this distinction is considerable. Civilization did not initially need an elaborate religious system to reduce relational being. It could alter human experience by reorganizing material reality itself. Walls could separate. Violence could compel. Buildings could overwhelm. Labor could be commanded. The body learned the emerging civilizational order through repeated participation in it.

This is where the psyche becomes central to Naturalistic Theory. Civilization is not merely a collection of cities, institutions, technologies, or political arrangements existing outside us. Its practices enter human beings. Repeated exposure to coercion, enclosure, hierarchy, specialized labor, and increasingly controlled space began fragmenting relationships that had previously joined body, community, environment, and psyche more directly.

Nor was this a single rupture in which one human world suddenly disappeared and another replaced it. The fourth millennium BCE presents a much messier transformation. Older practices persisted beside new ones. Chthonic spirituality lingered while early transcendent conceptions appeared. DMR predominated while the first mechanisms that would later support SMR were beginning to develop. Different forms of social organization overlapped for centuries.

Monumentality illustrates this overlap particularly well. A large building is emphatically material: it occupies space, redirects movement, organizes bodies, and makes unequal power physically present. Yet its very size and permanence can also point beyond itself. The structure becomes capable of embodying authority, distance, permanence, and powers greater than those of ordinary human beings. Here DMR begins to provide material conditions from which later forms of SMR could grow.

What emerged, then, was not yet the mature religious and symbolic order of later Civilization. It was something more fundamental: the progressive restructuring of material life in ways that reduced relational being and altered the psyche. Civilization was learning to control space, bodies, labor, resources, and relationships before it developed the symbolic systems capable of explaining, legitimating, and eventually transcending them.

The Material Reduction of Relational Being

The transformations of the fourth millennium BCE remain enormously important, but I originally misunderstood their character. I described the period between approximately 3600 and 3400 BCE as a series of “foundational ruptures” driven substantially by transcendence, priesthood, and emerging religion. The archaeological terminology itself contributed to this interpretation: references to “proto-priests,” “proto-temples,” and related categories made later religious institutions appear to extend much further backward than the evidence warrants.

The more important transformation was material.

Civilizational religion was still not underway, although older forms of predominantly feminine, chthonic spirituality lingered and early forms of transcendence were beginning to appear. The dominant process reducing relational being was direct materialistic reduction (DMR): changes imposed upon bodies, space, labor, resources, and relationships themselves.

Four developments were especially important: increasing violence, enclosure, monumentality, and mass labor projects. Together they reorganized lived reality. Violence imposed domination directly upon the body. Enclosures divided and restricted space and access. Monumental structures made emerging hierarchy physically overwhelming. Large labor projects demonstrated that increasingly powerful authorities could assemble and direct substantial numbers of human beings toward purposes determined by others.

Gender-role construction developed within this material transformation. For elite men, increasingly destructive, controlling, and domineering practices became associated with emerging forms of authority. Lower-status men were increasingly incorporated into systems of labor, violence, production, and compliance. Women experienced another dimension of the same transformation as activities, spaces, and forms of authority that had previously been more accessible became increasingly restricted or reorganized.

The consequences extended beyond social organization because DMR acted upon the psyche through repeated material experience. To live within walls, submit to organized authority, participate in increasingly specialized labor, encounter monumental structures, and experience or witness coercive violence was also to inhabit a different human world. Civilization was beginning to fragment relationships among body, community, nature, and the wider material field upon which relational being depended.

This did not happen as a sudden rupture, nor did one coherent system replace another between 3600 and 3400 BCE. Older and newer forms existed together. Chthonic and relational practices persisted. Early transcendent tendencies appeared. Material hierarchy expanded unevenly. What makes the period decisive is therefore not the sudden invention of civilizational religion, but the increasing capacity of Civilization to reconstruct material reality itself.

This distinction also changes how transcendence should be understood. Transcendence did not initially drive the transformation. Rather, DMR helped create the material conditions from which increasingly transcendent and symbolically mediated forms could later develop. Monumentality provides an early bridge: an enormous structure remained entirely material, yet its scale could embody powers and abstractions exceeding ordinary human experience. Material power was beginning to acquire symbolic possibilities.

The fully developed transformation of spirituality—the consolidation of priesthood, named deities, divine authority, increasingly formalized religion, and the much more powerful operation of symbolically mediated reduction (SMR)—belongs to a later stage of this history. What the fourth millennium reveals first is something more basic: Civilization learned to reduce relational being materially before it learned to do so systematically through religion.

The Long Shadow – The Weight We Carry

The destruction unleashed by civilization extends far beyond physical violence. It gives rise to entire systems built to suppress whatever threatens its structure—or the elites who benefit from it. Some of the most insidious forms of dehumanization leave no visible wounds: the erasure of cultural memory, the belittling of a child’s sense of self, the quiet violence of online humiliation, or the denial of a person’s equal worth—or even their right to exist.

The broader harms—racism, sexism, transphobia, poverty, ethnic cleansing, systemic injustice, colonization (including of the psyche), and imperialism—are not accidental. They are sustained by institutions and ideologies that must be confronted not only externally, but internally as well.

Few ideas have wrought more harm than the entrenched us/them dualism—a mindset that demonizes the unfamiliar and reduces others to existential threats. How many beatings, pogroms, riots, wars, and genocides have been justified on this single, brutal premise?

The gender transformations described in this essay were part of a much larger material reorganization of human existence. Increasing violence, enclosure, monumentality, and mass labor projects altered relationships among people and between people and their physical world. Within this emerging order, male authority expanded while women were increasingly excluded from spaces, activities, and forms of power that had previously been more accessible to them.

These developments did not yet constitute the mature patriarchal religious system that would emerge later. Civilizational religion was still not underway, and older forms of predominantly feminine, chthonic spirituality lingered. What was already occurring, however, was the direct materialistic reduction (DMR) of relational being. Bodies were controlled, spaces enclosed, labor directed, resources concentrated, and relationships increasingly organized through hierarchy.

Even architecture participated in this transformation. Larger and increasingly monumental structures did more than provide new functional spaces. They made hierarchy physically present. Human beings encountered authority through walls, restricted spaces, elevated structures, and buildings whose scale dwarfed the individual. Monumentality remained a material mechanism of DMR, even as it began creating possibilities for the transcendent meanings that would later become increasingly important.

The consequences for gender would accumulate over millennia. Patriarchy eventually embedded male privilege within law, religion, morality, property, political authority, and institutional power. Yet this dominance also imposed profound costs upon men themselves. Men were disproportionately mobilized for organized violence, compelled to fight for rulers and states, and increasingly taught to suppress relational and emotional capacities incompatible with their assigned roles.

Over time, these material inequalities acquired elaborate symbolic justification. Men came to be represented as logical, rational, decisive, and objective, while women were increasingly associated with emotion, irrationality, bodily existence, and inferiority. What had developed materially could now be reinforced symbolically. DMR was increasingly joined by SMR.

Patriarchy has conferred enormous advantages, particularly upon elite men, while helping deform relationships among men, women, children, other living beings, and the natural world. Its history cannot therefore be understood simply as men gaining power over women. It became part of a much larger civilizational restructuring of relational being itself.

Far from exonerating my gender for its role in sustaining patriarchy, I believe men have a particular responsibility for dismantling it. But patriarchy is not the only destructive force we face. Racism, class hierarchy, colonialism, transphobia, imperialism, and other systems of domination have subsequently become entangled with it. Their histories differ, but all can participate in reducing human beings and the relationships through which we exist.

And yet, there is hope. Understanding how these structures were constructed also means recognizing that they are not inevitable features of human existence. For most of our species’ history, human beings lived otherwise. Confronting Civilization’s long reduction of relational being therefore opens another possibility: restoring our connection to nature, to one another, and to the wider field of relationships from which human life emerged.

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In the next essay, we turn to a later and increasingly symbolic stage of this transformation: how the feminine—and eventually women themselves—was reconstructed within emerging patriarchal systems and made to serve the developing needs of Civilization.