The World Today: Part Three

In the last thousand years or so, we have all been impacted individually and collectively by the toxic influence of “hierarchy-thinking”, which has been the hallmark of the Patriarchal Epoch.

‘Hierarchy thinking’ is the mindset that believes that “might makes right”, that people can be ‘more-than’ and ‘less-than’ worthy compared to each other, and that the higher up the hierarchy that you happen to reside, the more power and influence you have over society. This also impacts how much responsibility and culpability you must take for your actions; the more power you have, the less responsibility you have to take for the harm that you create. So, hierarchy thinking says, “I have more power than you, so I can invade your country, take your house and kill your family, and get away with it.”

At national levels, this kind of thinking has made for incredibly unjust societies, filled with ‘divide and conquer’, separation and isolation between individuals, systemic injustice against those considered by this mindset as “less than” and, crucially, a divide between the genders.

There has always been a spectrum of genders, from ‘none’ to ‘many’. Patriarchy, in particular, has always had a warped view of any gender that did not abide with its’ conformist, limiting views, from Queen Victoria denying that lesbians existed, to the legislature condemning and outlawing homosexuality in England up to as recently as 1967.(For European balance, France legalised homosexuality in 1791.) Patriarchy has had a lot to say about people’s orientations and about sexuality generally.

Aside from the gay rights movement sadly having to activate to effect change and achieve equal rights in many social areas, patriarchy has peddled sexism with huge affect in society generally. Under patriarchy, women and children were considered ‘less than’ and, through sexism, were compartmentalised, and denigrated, as members of society. As a social construct, patriarchy also weaponised the meaning of ‘family’. The word ‘family’, from the Latin ‘familia’, under patriarchy meant that everything under this roof is owned as an object, or chattel, by the man of the house. These objects or chattels included the man’s wife, his children, his slaves and his animals.

From this mindset sprang women having to fight to have the vote, having to marry for social standing, women having to endure legal rape in marriage, being denied the right to divorce, children being exposed to child sexual abuse, rape generally, sex trafficking, sexual harassment, sexual discrimination, the list goes on.

Many, many facets of modern life were impacted by the ‘hierarchy’ mindset. Wars, the world over, are all premised upon this thinking. Instigators of the wars active in the world today are premised exactly upon this thinking.

The Beginnings of Patriarchy, Power-Over and Hierarchies

Ancients civilisations all conducted themselves with a ruling elite and under-classes. The Greeks are credited with the philosophical discussions that formulated these ideas into speeches that later became essays studied in schools and universities across Europe. The Romans did not devise the strategies that go with hierarchies, but Julius Ceasar is credited with having also used the phrase ‘divide and rule’ (in the Latin, ‘divide et impera’) and implementing it with such panache, that he became a key figure in the wide expansion of the Roman Empire in lands stretching over much of Mediterranean Europe and beyond. Hence, being ‘driven apart from one another’ has been an intentional war-themed strategy from Roman times. Divide and conquer, in the mind of the oppressor, means ‘we turn them against each other, so that our job to control them is easier’. This was the mindset of imperialists and colonialists the world over and was highly effective.

Leaders who only saw an ‘us and them’ dynamic in war and then clashed with their opponent with that mindset, only won if their resources allowed. In contrast, conquerors and dictators who created two or more camps among their adversaries and then augmented war between those camps, had a strategy that didn’t require extensive funds to succeed. The warring factions targeted by the overlord would obviously lose trust between themselves and so they would not combine forces in a common insurgency; a powerful revolt of combined resources against the overlord could not occur.

Adolf Hitler said: “It is our strategy to destroy the enemy from within, to conquer him through himself.”

This form of control uses a psychological impediment against the opponent. ‘Divide and rule’ has, at its core, a negative intention against the individuality of the target, which results in a process called “de-individuation”. This psychological outcome of ‘divide and conquer’ makes an individual’s consciousness shut down. Instead of one’s own evolution and knowing being a strategic tool used by the oppressed camp, those people shut down their knowing and their consciousness becomes subsumed into, and takes on, the will of the collective.

People who become de-individuated have become ‘individually unconscious’ and are instead influenced heavily by, and merged with, group consciousness.

De-individuation is a group behaviour that results, among other instances, when people are controlled by a ‘divide and rule’ leader, where the sway of the collective becomes more powerful than individual judgement. In essence, the individual loses awareness and self-control, and becomes aligned with the collective mass hysteria, a kind of mass insanity.

Collective imitation of others occurs and that group consciousness is ultimately controlled by the overlord. Vandalism and persecution in Nazi Germany happened because individuality became lost in the group identity.

‘Divide and Conquer’ is Not Who We Are

It was no coincidence that Dark Side, the hidden force in the minds of humans intent on driving destruction into human life, chose to use exactly this intentional method of ‘Divide and Conquer’ to drive humans apart from each other, to divide and to dominate them.

The good news is that while we can conclude that we have, most certainly, been ‘driven apart from each other’, we can equally be clear that this is not our nature. We are community-oriented, and we need each other.

David Attenborough, the biologist, natural historian, broadcaster and English legendary icon, was once asked if, over the course of his career, having learned what he knows about animals, he now preferred animals over humans? He said no. He said, and I paraphrase; ‘we are social animals, we need each other’.

We do need each other and we, perhaps unwittingly, are acting in service to Dark Side if we stay separate from each other.

The opposite of ‘divide and conquer’ is ‘unite and build’. The main difference between a conqueror and a builder is that a conqueror wants adulation and people to follow him; the builder does not want personal adulation, they want their people to follow a mission.

The ultimate objective of ‘unite and build’ leadership is not gaining power, but empowering people to achieve something bigger through collaboration, not competition. Edward de Bono once said that cooperation was more valuable than competition and that you can win without having to kill your enemy. He said, organisations “that solely focus on competition will ultimately die. Those that focus on value creation will thrive.”

If we unite and build together, we can overcome the impact of the Patriarchal Epoch and find solutions through mutual gain, benefitting not just us but those around us.

The modern ‘cult of personality’ will fail, along with all of the other idolised norms brought about by that epoch.

As these shifts move quickly, we get to choose which side of history we want to be on.

So, if we can acknowledge that we have been forcibly driven apart from one another as individuals and collectively, how has that harm impacted us as individuals and collectively? And what can we do about it? How do we heal from individual and collective harm?

In the next blog in this series, we will look deeper at how to address the work needed to clear out the impact and influence of the Patriarchal Epoch from our bodies, our systems and our lives.

Blessings on you all and blessings on the work.