The first in a series of five essays

“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 metaphysical rather than merely psychological: 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, by contrast, were less vulnerable to this inner rupture. 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.

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.

Yet what followed was even more extraordinary. Over the next two centuries, transformations occurred with such speed, scale, and permanence that they are best understood as foundational. And yet, historians and scholars have largely failed to grasp their full significance—recording the facts, but not the rupture. These changes did not unfold in isolation, nor were they the result of gradual evolution. They appeared together, suddenly, and for the first time in the 290,000-year history of Homo sapiens.

To name what they missed, I call this the Great Ruptures Period.

As I began researching this period more deeply, I was dumbfounded by what has been missed. Many of its most extraordinary developments remain inadequately theorized, disconnected from one another, or rarely evaluated in relation to what came after. For example, the sudden rise of transcendent symbolism and radically new modes of thought in the mid-fourth millennium BCE has been treated as marginal or incidental in most historical accounts. These oversights are not accidental. They reflect deep-seated assumptions within the academic tradition—chief among them an unexamined bias toward transcendence and hierarchy. I will return to these biases in the fourth essay of this series, where I explore how the discipline of religious studies has failed to grapple with the deeper meaning of this period.

To understand the dramatic transformations of the fourth millennium BCE—especially the two pivotal centuries at its core—we must now apply the framework of Naturalistic Theory (NT) more closely. As outlined earlier, NT holds that human existence unfolds in distinct stages, each shaped by material conditions, survival strategies, and emergent technologies. These stages are punctuated by transitional periods—ruptures in which old patterns collapse and entirely new ways of being arise. Just as the hunter-gatherer era gave way to the cognitive revolution between 80,000 and 50,000 BCE, so too did the rise of civilization mark a profound break. What makes NT distinct is its insistence that these outer changes reshape the inner world as well: the psyche itself adapts to the logic of each stage. Environment, innovation, symbolic systems, and human consciousness are not separate domains—they co-evolve, and in the fourth millennium BCE, they collided with unprecedented force.

In the NT framework, what occurred in the fourth millennium BCE was not a continuation of previous trends but a categorical shift: a rupture that reorganized both outer structures and inner life. The human psyche, once grounded in ecological reciprocity and communal relation, began adapting to surplus logic, symbolic stratification, and institutional control. Civilizational patterns that later spread globally—law, class, gender hierarchy, priesthood, centralized violence—first consolidated in Sumer. This wasn’t simply the birth of cities, but the emergence of a new kind of being: shaped by abstraction, compelled by order, and increasingly detached from the regenerative rhythms that once oriented human life.

This brings us to civilization—the singular stage of existence that has prevailed since roughly 4000 BCE. It is essential to distinguish this formative era from later variants—such as the Mesoamerican civilizations or imperial expansions—which, though significant, reflect divergent expressions of a civilizational logic already in motion. In this early phase, the psyche begins to take visible form in Sumer.

The psyche is the central contribution of Naturalistic Theory. More than any other concept, it reveals the profound impact that emerging practices, behaviors, technologies, beliefs, and values have had on the totality of our being. Civilization is not something external to us—it is the collective expression of the human psyche in a particular state.

I emphasize “psyche” and “mind” here for two reasons. First, the complex systems that define civilization—what I call third-stage processes—can only function when the psyche is fragmenting or already fragmented. A healthy, integrated psyche would naturally resist the very dynamics that drive civilization forward.

The insertion of NRD into the fabric of early civilization enabled men to consolidate unprecedented levels of power—enough, at last, for the group mind to begin operating on a mass scale. This emergent collective consciousness first took shape among the rising elites. By around 3600 BCE, male priests, now entrenched within newly established temples, had accumulated outsized influence—not only over ritual life, but over economic and political systems as well.

Army ants offer a revealing analogy. Like early civilizations, they expand through coordinated swarms, overrunning ecosystems without centralized control. But ant behavior is biologically programmed. Human coordination, by contrast, is cultural—transmitted mind to mind, shaped by values and intention. Here lies the crucial difference. Army ants destroy to renew: aerating soil, redistributing nutrients, triggering ecological balance. Human destruction, shaped by NRD, serves domination, expansion, and control—often at the cost of life itself.

Even as civilization succeeded by its own measures in its early stages—and, as we painfully recognize today, continued its relentless expansion—it carries two profound vulnerabilities.

The first is clear: humanity has exceeded Earth’s ecological carrying capacity. This overshoot is not merely a crisis of policy or morals—it is the universe’s ultimate stop sign, enforced by entropy itself: the law that drives all systems toward disorder, collapse, and eventual death.

The second vulnerability cuts even deeper: civilization’s ingrained hostility toward nature. This may come as a surprise—or even a shock—the first time one truly sees it; it certainly was for me. But once the curtain is pulled back, the truth becomes undeniable. Civilization depends on the conquest and subjugation of nature—not only for her resources, but for what she represents: vitality, balance, and regenerative power. Yet nature is resilient, self-correcting, and far more powerful than anything the human mind can fabricate. No act of will or invention can change that. And for this reason, values rooted in ancestral life—wholeness, reciprocity, restraint—pose an existential threat to civilization’s ongoing project of domination, extraction, and unchecked growth.

These forces became increasingly incompatible with the emerging civilizational order—so incompatible, in fact, that their suppression became essential to the system’s consolidation. The “benefits” civilization had already secured—by constructing the male gender role and anchoring it to non-regenerative destruction—were no longer sufficient to maintain control. Something deeper was required. Once again, the target was the Psyche—but this time, the assault was intensified and more direct, aimed squarely at dismantling the vital creative force of the feminine: in nature, in women, and in the shared ontological field that had once grounded human life.

Naming the Foundational Ruptures

As I outline the major transformations that occurred between 3600 and 3400 BCE, I invite you to consider not only what changed, but why it changed—and how those changes continue to shape our lives, our institutions, and our inner worlds.

These were not gradual or organic developments. They were ruptures—sudden, violent breaks in the fabric of human existence. They severed our connection to nature, to one another, and to the deeper layers of the psyche. Their shockwaves still reverberate through everything we take for granted today.

Unprecedented in our species’ history, these cataclysmic transformations reshaped human consciousness itself. They tore through the symbolic, spiritual, ecological, and gendered dimensions of life—often with stunning force and finality.

I begin with the second phase of gender role construction. For elite men, this meant the rigidification of destructive and domineering traits. For lower-status men, it meant deeper entrenchment within the emerging order and growing compliance with its demands. We’ll return to this dynamic in greater depth in the next section.

In contrast, I posit that male priests were centrally involved in both constructing the female gender role and rigidifying the male one. This was not necessarily a fully conscious or coordinated plan—few actors at the time would have grasped the ontological stakes especially as they have affected us until today. But they did seek to organize society along patriarchal lines, so they had to suppress or even destroy the wild, relational, and chthonic energies still prevalent at that time.

Because this construction lies at the very heart of civilization’s formation—and because its consequences have been both catastrophic and enduring—it demands focused attention. The next essay will be devoted entirely to the cataclysmic transformations that unfolded during those two pivotal centuries.

To be assigned a new role is difficult enough. But to be assigned one so unnatural, so damaging, and so relentlessly imposed—then forced to adapt to it across generations—inflicted a profound fracture of the psyche and accelerated its disintegration.

The second foundational rupture serves as the driving mechanism behind all others. It is embodied in the act of transcendence, which emerged as both the engine and the emblem of the fracture itself. Transcendence became civilization’s operating logic—a principle so pervasive, so deeply embedded in how we think, organize, and assign value, that we rarely even see it. It saturates nearly every dimension of modern life, yet remains largely invisible—unexamined, unchallenged, except when romanticized or mystified by scholars and later spiritual thinkers.

But transcendence demands far greater scrutiny. It must be carefully conceptualized and rigorously interrogated—in both its religious and secular forms—for its reach is vast and its consequences profound. A full examination will follow in the third essay, but here we need to see how that occurred from very beginning since this shift marked a decisive break from earthbound reality and the chthonic forces of nature. It was, unmistakably, a vertical move—upward toward the heavens and into increasingly abstract, masculinized visions of a new, disembodied presence, later to be called “divinity.”

This shift displaced most nature-bound spirits, severing ancient ties to land, body, and immanence. In their place, authority was redefined and concentrated in those deemed closest to the divine—or those who claimed privileged access to its will. Power quickly coalesced in the hands of elite priests within emerging temple complexes, working in concert with warrior-kings whose rule was now sanctified from above.

From the outset, transcendence fused spiritual and political authority, and this deserves emphasis. In the fourth millennium BCE, the fusion is glaringly obvious, though the era remains largely unfamiliar to us. Yet when we examine the role of Christianity in imperialism, it should be just as plain. We must not allow what is intricately woven into the modern paradigm to bias our perception. A sacralized hierarchy arose in the ANE—a vertical order mirrored in both symbol and social structure—that exists to this very day. And as this verticality took hold, the horizontal plane of mutuality and balance began to wither.

The third and fourth foundational ruptures—the rise of institutionalized spirituality and the invention of named deities—first emerged as a single current before branching into distinct trajectories. Though their deeper implications will be explored in later essays, even a brief overview reveals the staggering scale of spiritual upheaval between 3600 and 3400 BCE. These were not surface-level shifts; they redefined the sacred, the human, and the structure of the cosmos itself.

These ruptures, though vast and multifaceted, can already be traced through a series of developments that reshaped spiritual experience at every level. What follows is not a complete account, but a glimpse into the radical reconfiguration of the sacred between 3600 and 3400 BCE:

Spiritual Transformation, 3600–3400 BCE: Key Developments

• Emergence of a priestly caste claiming exclusive authority to interpret the will of the gods—eventually becoming fully masculinized and aligned with elite power.
• Priests specialized in celestial observation, reading heavenly movements as divine messages.
• Temples, once storage and communal sites, were redefined as dwellings of the divine—centers of surplus, labor, and power cloaked in sacral legitimacy.
• Rituals became formalized and synchronized with agricultural and celestial cycles, tying cosmic order to social control.
• A rigid sacred/profane binary emerged, fragmenting earlier holistic ontologies and centralizing interpretive authority.
• Hierarchical cosmologies displaced older, earth-rooted understandings—elevating sky gods above chthonic and animistic forces.
• Spiritual authority began extending into behavioral control, internalizing discipline through new moral structures of guilt, debt, duty, and submission.
• Kingship was mythologized and spiritually authorized, with rulers cast as god-chosen or semi-divine.
• Writing and accounting were sacralized; priests became scribes who linked divine knowledge with emerging bureaucratic systems.
• Theological abstraction deepened, moving from immanent spirits to distant, masculinized, universalized deities.
• Sacrificial systems institutionalized offerings—grain, oil, animals—transforming practices of reciprocity into rituals of appeasement and fear.
• Access to divinity became mediated and monopolized, a shift that would solidify in later epochs
• City-specific gods were canonized, aligning political identity with spiritual loyalty.
• Relational natural forces—rain, wind, fertility—were named, personified, and redefined as abstract, controllable divine agents.
• Myths emerged around these deities, stabilizing the new order and embedding social hierarchy into sacred narrative.

This list of developments is dizzying—and you’ve only begun to glimpse how deeply they connect, how profoundly they reshaped governance, society, and inner life. But as you reflect on the scale and speed of these changes, return for a moment to the questions we began with: not only what changed, but why—and how those changes continue to shape your world, your institutions, and your psyche. These were not ordinary shifts. They were ruptures: sudden, deliberate breaks that fractured meaning, severed bonds with nature, and disoriented the human being. Their legacy lives on in everything around you. To understand who you are—and where you are—this is where you must begin.

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 role constructed by men during the Great Ruptures Period unleashed a cascade of destruction—one that continues to this day. Men were indoctrinated to see themselves as superior to women, children, and animals, ranked above them in a rigid hierarchy of worth. Even the lowest-status man could act as the “little king” of his hut or hovel, wielding near-total authority within his narrow domain. Among the most tragic outcomes was the manufactured rivalry between men and women—a false, corrosive competition that became one of the earliest tools of divide and conquer. The myth of male superiority also served to cement the dominance of male priests and rulers—those who benefited most from its invention.

These gendered assumptions even shaped the built environment. Structures rose ever higher—not only as symbols of divine aspiration, but as concrete expressions of male dominance. By placing men atop towers that pierced the sky, verticality itself became a visual grammar of control and supremacy.

Patriarchy—a profoundly destructive ideology—embedded these false hierarchies deep within an already fractured psyche. As new models of life and order took hold, its momentum only grew. By the time the first empires emerged a thousand years later, men’s rights had expanded dramatically—formally codified into law, morality, and institutional power. But this dominance came at a steep price: men were far more likely to be conscripted into standing armies, waging endless wars to uphold the very empires that granted them status—while being trained to suppress any natural revulsion toward cruelty.

From the earliest days of civilization, men were taught they possessed superior capacities for abstraction—managing money, levying taxes, or even inventing goddesses designed to reinforce male authority. Over time, this hardened into a rigid binary: men were labeled logical, rational, decisive, and objective, while women were dismissed as emotional, irrational, or even hysterical.

While patriarchy has conferred countless privileges—especially to elite men—it has also deformed the male psyche. Many men were shaped into beings who are distant, emotionally stunted, arrogant, and severed from relational, life-affirming ways of being. Conditioned to prioritize church, king, and country above all else, they were trained—generation after generation—to kill and die for causes that had nothing to do with their own well-being.

Far from exonerating my gender for its role in sustaining patriarchy, I insist that men must now take the lead in dismantling it—decisively and without delay. But patriarchy is not the only destructive force we face. Interlocking ideologies—racism, classism, colonialism, transphobia—continue to shape our world, and most people, in some way, still participate in sustaining them. This work demands collective responsibility from people of all gender identities, because these systems harm us all.

And yet, there is hope. As we confront these structures, we can begin the deeper work: restoring our connection to nature and her wisdom, and nurturing new life beyond the ruins of what has been.

In the next essay, we examine how the essence of the ontological feminine—and of women themselves—was manipulated and corrupted, seized in the most horrendous way, to serve the needs of patriarchy and civilization.

Teaser image credit: The variety of mythological scenes increased dramatically during the Akkadian period. In this seal, a seated vegetation goddess is greeted by three other deities. Stalks of grain sprout from the females, while tree branches grow from the two males, perhaps referring to a specific myth. By Anonymous (Mesopotamia) – Walters Art Museum: Home page  Info about artwork, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18804095