It may not be a surprise to you that we’re increasingly at the will of technofeudal lords who seek to own our attention to maximize their profits. Even this app with its promise of well-thought, long form essays can become a time sink if not used consciously. Many of us have rightly decided to work at freeing our minds, reading more, creating more, and connecting more with nature and the people we care about.

I don’t mean “more” in the sense of “go be productive! Optimize!” I mean more perhaps in the sense of “deeper”. We want deeper relationships with others and with our own creativity for their own sake. Yet, if you just discovered this Solarpunk Guide to Meaning in Life, how many of you have read this far in one sitting?

Yeah that’s right, I know some of you are trying to read this right after you finished the last one. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that going through the information faster will somehow get you to solarpunk faster. It takes time to transform ourselves. It is a marathon, not a sprint. Go do something else if it’s the same day. Phone your parents, talk to a friend, write some poetry, sing a song back to the birds.

I didn’t write these essays to be read one after the other, but for each of them to be applied in your life slowly. This is profoundly important for our topic, which is the problem of giving up on our commitment to change, otherwise known as backsliding.

No matter where you are in your development, taking long-term, roughly consistent action is far more important than taking immediate, massive action. All you need to do right now is to read this essay, do the assignment, and meditate. That’s it. Your goal isn’t to finish this essay and then change your life, and you definitely won’t do this simply by reading all the essays that may have been released since it’s been published.

What we’re after here is a transformation of consciousness such that you are living by your own definition of virtue and following your own inner compass. This doesn’t mean hyper-individualism because virtue aims at flourishing cultivating through helping others flourish as well. These essays are meant to help you create your personal role in the equitable distribution of flourishing, which is why you have to take your time to go through it. Finishing it fast is not using the book properly, and thus, it will not be able to facilitate the transformation of consciousness.

Given the way these essays are structured, I assume that you read it at least once a week and at most every couple days, doing each essays assignment and aspiring to meditate every day.

What happens if you don’t? That’s okay!

You want to find a balance between continual self-development and compassionate self-acceptance. We’ll be going deeper into that in the fourth essay, but the primary point is that change takes time. This should make you wonder though…why the hell does it seem so difficult to stick to changes every fibre of your being seems to want?

I’m almost 100% positive that you’ve experienced this. When you try to change your life you inevitably slide backward and end up doing the same shit you’ve always done. This is called backsliding and one reason it happens is that you try changing too much too fast. You add exercise, reading, and meditation, all the while trying to stop smoking weed, playing video games, slapping your genitals around so often, listening to music, watching tv, etc., etc., etc., and all that happens is that you fall off in a matter of days. You simply cannot change this much of your life all at once. You just can’t.

As such, there is nothing wrong with you for taking time to change. We are human. We have limitations. The error is thinking we don’t have limitations and beating ourselves up when we can’t completely change our life all at once. Change something small. Integrate that change so that it becomes a new standard part of your lifestyle like showering or brushing your teeth. Change something else. Integrate that change. With a few months of patience, humility, and self-forgiveness, you’ll be the very person you were trying so hard to be all at once.

A key point to always remember is that self-development is a marathon. It’s not a sprint. If you sprint you will run out of energy way sooner than if you pace yourself. It’s easy to get trapped in this instant gratification mindset, but realize that your desire to get it now is the same desire that is driving your addiction to your current lifestyle. If you treat your self-development journey the same way, then you will just get more of the same. You’ll waste more and more time with braindead scrolling, you’ll feel more and more like your life is completely meaningless, you’ll feel more and more powerless to create positive change in the world.

Instead, we’re going to start small and slowly build up until you have everything you need to carry on your self-development for the rest of your life through engaging with the world. By the end of this guide, you’ll have all the skills you need to develop a more personal relationship with yourself.

That is such an important distinction to make. The “grindset” of self-improvement often frames progress in black-and-white terms. They make the goal doing a ruthless audit of your entire life to remove all the bad habits you want to get rid of and add all the positive habits that you want to add. Nothing about that may seem wrong necessarily. Don’t we want to completely remove bad habits and only live according to good habits?

Some people are capable of doing something close to this. I myself have gone through periods where I was incredibly disciplined. I was also lonely and strung-out. This will make more sense the deeper we get into this guide, but the solution to addictive thinking is not the puritanical sinlessness of the hyper-disciplined Spartan. Patrick Carnes has written well on the bulimic cycle that too many addicts get stuck in as they try to recover. They oscillate between periods of indulgence and complete abstinence that keep them stuck in the same spot. The issue isn’t their inability to remain completely abstinent, it’s the black-and-white thinking that prevents them from learning the middle way to true development.

The key then is to start slowly. This can be very difficult to do.

Before we get to that, if you like this essay so far, then please give it a like and subscribe to the channel. It also really helps if you share this essay with people you know. While all my content is free, I do have paid subscriptions so if you’d like to support the channel I’d appreciate that a lot. Thank you so much.

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It’s so easy to get swept away by the dopaminergic rush of big changes. Today is the day everything changes, today is the day that my life took a turn for the better. It very rarely works like this and the fantasy becomes its own addiction. We get hooked on that motivational rush of huge change and the desire to live the heroic vision of “the day everything changed”. You’ve simply swapped one addiction for another.

Instead, add or remove one habit. Take a week or two to integrate it, and then add or remove one more. The longer you do this the better at it you’ll get. If the habit you removed happens at the same time or in the same context, then try to do one positive thing first. For example, if you scroll the moment you walk through the door after work, try meditating for just 5 or 10 minutes instead.

Have the humility and self-love to give yourself space to change. If you go from never reading or meditating to reading 10 minutes and meditating for 10 minutes, that’s a fantastic change. If for the rest of the day you scrolled or did something “unproductive”, then that day was still a victory, because you made the decision to start a journey of sustainable change.

This seems so counterintuitive, but that’s simply how change actually happens. By taking those 20 minutes of your day and working on yourself, you’re slowly building up the muscle of discipline without overworking it and crashing the next day, week, or month of white-knuckled living. Let go of the fantasy of the big change. You were already going to spend the entire day on the internet, but now you spent 20 minutes doing something that was changing your mind in a positive direction.

If you do catch a wind of motivation? Then go do that thing. Meditate for a bit longer, read one of the books from the recommended reading, go do something else. You don’t have to force yourself to not do something beneficial. The point is that on the days you do feel like doing nothing at all, do the 20 minutes, and then do nothing at all guilt-free. You did what you set out to do. Honestly celebrate that victory. With time, you’ll eventually get to where you wanted to all along.

For now, all you should focus on is reading an essay, meditating, and doing the assignment. I know it’s getting annoying hearing this, but take things slowly.

Either way, that’s enough for today. Please do the assignment and then meditate for at least 5 minutes. Thank you so much for your time and attention, and I look forward to speaking with you again in the next essay.

If you don’t already keep a journal you complete every time you give in to your vice (scrolling, junk food, etc.), then this could be a game-changer for you. It only takes 5-10 minutes after every relapse and yet it could 10x the speed of your development. I don’t like using “speed” as a motivator because that’s the wrong approach to self-development. That said, I think here it really is quite simple. If you put in the effort to reflect on the reasons you relapsed with your maladaptive pattern, you’ll simply learn faster.

The reason this works is because each relapse is not a failure, but an opportunity to learn. This is where you learn what dysregulation feels like it, how it works, what your seeking behaviours are (below), what your triggers are, and what you can do to prevent that from happening in the future.

Seeking behaviours are essentially any behaviour where you’re intentionally seeking out your substance, behaviour, or some substitute. You’ve been triggered and now you’re seeking it out. That could mean literally picking up your phone to scroll, it could mean texting friends to go out drinking rather than going for coffee and actually connecting, it can mean looking at an online store to “browse” but definitely NOT to buy anything (unless you find a deal that was just too good to pass up…). It can even look like pacing restlessly, unable to do anything other than resist the urge to relapse by pretending you’re not desperately waiting for the time to pass and the day to end.

So…what does a relapse journal actually look like? It’s pretty simple, just answer the following:

1. How do you currently feel? Be honest, but kind.

2. What seeking behaviours did you engage in over the last day/few days?

3. Was there something that triggered the seeking behaviours?

4. What can you do in the future to prevent the trigger?

   1. Be careful about avoiding necessary triggers. Unnecessary triggers can be removed from your life because they’re unnecessary. Necessary triggers are those things you need in your life. Separating yourself from your friends, family, or adaptive activities to hide away from any trigger is not the same as healing and development.

5. What can you do in the future to deal with the triggering once it happens?

6. What other lessons did you learn?

7. Choose one clear action step you can implement moving forward

   1. What is some problem you’ve discovered about yourself, your triggers, your seeking behaviour, your relapse, etc., that can be acted upon and improved? Put it in bullet point form if you have multiple. Be very clear and start taking action on it if you can. Write it below to get help or search online for answers.

Firstly, this is clearly framed for more “addiction” maladaptive patterns, but it can definitely be changed to fit your pattern. For example, if you’re dealing with angry outbursts, seeking behaviours may mean asking your partner why they didn’t do what you’d asked rather than communicating how you’re feeling (“why didn’t you do it” vs. “I noticed I felt agitated when I saw that this wasn’t done”).

This shouldn’t take much more than 5 – 10 minutes. If you want to go longer, then by all means keep going and dig deeper. However, the smallest step rule applies. Just do the smallest little bit you can do at first. At this point it doesn’t really matter much if you spend an hour journaling about why you relapsed. You want to only do what little you can to learn and strategize. Doing it for 5 – 10 minutes is better than not doing it at all, and setting out for an hour is a good way to say, “Fuck it, I’m not doing it”.

Also, even if you happen to put the same preventions or the same strategies in the journal each time, you are still getting something out of this process. You will often come up with new strategies, but by journaling, you’re exercising your ability to stop, connect with yourself, reflect, and then strategize. Perhaps more importantly, you’re teaching yourself to value being more self-reflective, which will help you before relapse itself.

If you’d like non-clinical help on this journey, I offer IFS-informed existential guidance. As a guide, not a therapist, I am informed by Internal Family Systems, existential therapy, acceptance and commitment, authentic relating, and adult developmental psychological.

Until the next installment in this guide, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.

Recommended Reading:

1. Ryel Kestano - Authentic Relating

   1. Great book on how to communicate better with ourselves and others.

The world is on fire and I have no idea what to do. I look to the world for answers and I’m met with a seemingly endless number of things that I can do, each of which I’m told is actually making the problem worse. It can make climate nihilism seem so much more understandable. Why do anything when anything you can do is gasoline?

What we need is a new map to make sense of it all.

In previous essays, which you don’t need to read, we’ve been trying to create a new ontology or map of reality in order to make better sense of our place as humans. This has led us to post-humanism and its claim that human beings do not sit atop a throne of domination that entitles us to destroy the environment for our own selfish desires.¹ We can at the very least aim for a map of the post-human that positions us better than that.

This led us to Wilber’s differentiation between dominator and growth hierarchies, and anti-hierarchy and heterarchy. Dominator hierarchies are those that oppress those beneath them, whereas growth hierarchies are those that promote the growth in capabilities of those lower in the hierarchy. We should defer to the expertise of a good doctor, giving them temporary power over our bodies, but we should also rise up to prevent the corrupt doctor from ever practicing again. This heterarchical approach is the egalitarian drive for cooperation for equitable distribution of the access to growth necessary to overcome dominator hierarchies.²

It might raise your alarm bells for me to conceptualize a doctor’s expertise as a hierarchy, with my slipping in “growth” before the word acting as a cryptofascism to let me get away with hierarchy. As we discussed in the last essay though, we have to understand a doctor’s expertise as a hierarchy precisely because their capabilities make the possibility of abuse more likely. You trust your doctor with your life because of her expertise, but she could just as easily betray that trust and do you great harm.

The reason we’re covering all of this ground is, again, to create a map of reality that can help us navigate reality better. The fact that increased capabilities make possible horrifying abuses is precisely because of the trust we ought to have for those proven to have higher capabilities than us. Again, we ought to trust them, but that’s exactly what gives them power over us because, likely, neither of us can perform the lifesaving surgery that a doctor can.

These facts about higher capabilities, expertise, and trust must be seen as hierarchical because of that risk and because we must stay conscious of these hierarchies precisely to disrupt corrupt dominator hierarchies. The ambivalent nature of expertise is that it always comes with the risk for domination, yet we require those with different degrees of expertise in a near endless number of domains. We ourselves must remain self-aware enough of the power dynamics of our own expertise so that we avoid becoming the very monster we sought to resist.

Now we understand the difference between dominator and growth hierarchies, and the importance of egalitarian heterarchy to ensure equitable access to growth and the power to overcome dominator hierarchies. The next step is to re-integrate growth hierarchy with egalitarian heterarchy.

Wilber does exactly that by introducing the concept of a holarchy, which is a growth hierarchy in which the parts are nested within each successive stage.² For example, a water molecule contains hydrogen and oxygen. You cannot have water without hydrogen and oxygen, but to say that water is merely a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen also doesn’t cut it. Pumping both gases into a room doesn’t make water. The elements have to bond and interact in the proper way, which requires the flow of energy through the system.

Think then about a cell and all the different molecules and reactions going on that allow it to survive. Then consider a multicellular organism. Each step is a new stage of a holarchy, a hierarchy of growth with each stage nested within the next higher stage that emerged over the course of evolutionary history. The multicellular organism is not “superior” to the single cell, but it is higher up a holarchy because the multicellular organism contains many single cells that are organized in a way very different from a mere mixture of cells and that gives it new kinds of capabilities.

Eventually those multicellular organisms become so complex that they develop organ systems that are regulated by nervous systems that have a centralized brain. The brain itself contains many areas that are differentiated from each other, but are also highly integrated. Each brain area is a node in a system that has been re-integrated into a very complex whole. The human brain is, arguably, one of the most differentiated and integrated systems we know of.

“But what about whale brains! They could be even more complex!”

Yes, maybe they are, and that would be amazing to find out, but there’s a reason you said whale brain and not dog brain. However intelligent dogs may be, we know that they aren’t as intelligent as humans. Even if they have capabilities that humans don’t, the difference in capabilities between dogs and humans is so clear that very few people would try to argue that we’re on the same footing.

Now you might say that that the dog’s smelling capabilities means that it has a more differentiated and integrated olfactory cortex, the region of the brain for smell. In terms of the holarchy of smell the dog is above us. You’d likely be right, but that’s missing the point of holarchy. Even though the dog may have more advanced smelling, we have other parts of our brain that are so much more advanced in specific domains that we can train dogs to smell for complex strategies that dogs can’t even fathom, let alone train themselves for. We’re even in the process of building machines that may one day smell better than either of us.³

That raises a very important distinction we need to make. There are two holarchies of nested complexity here in which dogs are higher up the one of smell whereas humans are higher up that of rationality.

Yet the more important point I’m making here is that it’s not enough to simply have high capability in one skill, but how the integration of many capabilities allows for something entirely new to emerge. The difference between dogs and humans is not a difference in our skill with a few capabilities, but about a radical difference in the kind of capabilities either of us could possibly have.

This is where heterarchy comes back in to make a holarchy different from a hierarchy. Remember that a holarchy is a kind of hierarchy that unites with heterarchy. A heterarchy is concerned about egalitarian coherence, with the parts collaborating together in unison. I can throw a bunch of hydrogen and oxygen together, but that doesn’t make water. I can throw a bunch of cells together, but that doesn’t make a multicellular organism. It’s instead the way in which these parts interact with one another that produces the higher stage of the holarchy.

To again be as clear as possible, a holarchy isn’t automatically a good thing that never has domination. What makes a holarchy is not its automatic well-being, but in how the lower parts are capable of collaborating in such a way that they integrate, affording or making possible new behaviour that wasn’t found in any of the lower parts. This could still lead to domination, so to integrate heterachy into hierarchy is to always remain vigilant for that potential for domination, including when that vigilance becomes its own form of domination.

As an example of the integration of capabilities, let’s take an infant who is incapable of walking on their own. If you hold that infant above a moving treadmill (don’t drop them), they will start moving their legs as if they were walking.⁴ It’s not as if the infant suddenly learned how to walk on their own. They have the capability to move their legs as if they were walking, but the moment they try on their own they fall over and fly off.

That said, they can likely stand up straight, so it’s not as if they can’t hold themselves up. Their abdominal muscles have the capability to do that. They can also crawl across the ground so they’re capable of coordinating their limbs in a way that allows them to move around an environment. The issue is that these differentiated capabilities, the movement of their legs for walking, the postural support of the abdominals, and the capability of coordinated movement of limbs, have not been properly integrated into a new stage of the holarchy. Once they are, then suddenly that infant becomes a toddler with an entirely new level of freedom of movement that the crawling infant did not have.

Despite the fact that the dog has a highly developed capability for smelling, that capability is not matched with highly developed abstract reasoning, language, or forethought. Human beings have incredibly advanced and integrated capabilities that afford them new levels of freedom that are to the dog what the walking toddler is to the crawling infant. That’s why the retaliating human is a whole different beast to the chimpanzee.

Even though the chimpanzee ought to have a right to life that far exceeds what too many humans believe, it’s the highly differentiated capability of grief and empathy integrated with abstract reasoning that allows some human beings to care about that chimpanzee’s right to life more than other human beings are capable of. That doesn’t mean that this less caring human has less of a right to life than the more compassionate human being, but we can begin to see how worldviews can be the consequence of greater holarchical integration in a way similar to the difference between crawling infant and walking toddler.

This is why I’ve taken us through each painstaking step to explain how holarchical integration works. We started with a simple understanding of hierarchy and anti-hierarchy, separated hierarchy into two kinds and then re-integrated it, which allowed us to separate anti-hierarchy into anti-hierarchy and egalitarianism to produce heterarchy. We then integrated the hierarchy with heterarchy into a holarchy, which then allowed us to better understand the difference between a chimpanzee and a human, and between two humans with different levels of compassion for that chimpanzee.

The person who understands all of that has a much more differentiated and integrated, or rather complex understanding of hierarchy than the person who believes “all hierarchies are oppressive”. Again, while it may seem like we’ve just stretched the definition of hierarchy for a cryptofascist justification of hierarchy, we are instead keeping our anti-hierarchical eyes wide open to the inevitability of hierarchy precisely so that we can remain as egalitarian as possible.

For as long as there are those that are more capable than us, they can use those greater powers for domination just as we as humans can over the more-than-human world. To be egalitarian, we must remain vigilant to the inevitability of hierarchy. Our anarchoprimitivist egalitarian ancestors did exactly this through a moral community structured by complex layers of mechanisms that actively levelled any unjust hierarchy. Even with such practices, they sometimes failed at this, which the historical record can attest to.⁵

As I said at the beginning of this essay, our more complexified map of hierarchy is meant to help us better navigate reality to prevent the formation of unjust, unnecessary hierarchy. With this toolkit of the heterarchical growth hierarchy that is the holarchy, we can also get a better view of reality itself. In the same way that our tongue evolved to be used for chewing and swallowing food, but was then “exapted” or used for the new purpose of spoken language, we can exapt or make use of a more complexified model of hierarchy created to better grok political philosophy in order to better understand reality itself.

Remember from previous essays that the distinction between humans and non-human animals such as dogs is that we lie further along a scale of complexification, with a greater variety of parts integrated to function in a coordinated fashion.

Henriques offers us the following visualization of the holarchy of reality’s complexification from simple matter to complex cultural life of human beings. He further maps how the different sciences relate to one another, with each constituting the attempt to understand behaviour within the different layers of that holarchy:⁶

At the bottom we start with Matter, this is where oxygen and hydrogen becomes water, and where many other complex molecules interact and integrate to form other even more complex molecules. Eventually, those molecules integrate to form the earliest forms of Life. In that layer we have further complexification from single-celled organisms to multicellular organisms toward the Mind layer once we get nervous systems. That then complexifies toward Culture where we have Matter, Life, and Mind integrated in nested layers to produce organisms capable of the linguistic gymnastics I’ve been conducting throughout these past few essays on ontology.⁶

Just as you cannot have water without oxygen and hydrogen, you also cannot have Mind without the embodied dynamics of Life from which it emerges, nor Culture without the minded dynamics of such embodied organisms. Perhaps you could, but then it would be a very different Mind and Culture than anything else we have ever seen on this planet so far. That said, regardless of which specific path it took, such a being would require a comparable depth of nested complexity.

While Ferrando is right to say that there’s incredible diversity in the universe because of evolution, they miss how that diversity has also led to an increase in complexity.^1,7,8 The complexity of the animal life we see around us emerged because animals evolved in response to adaptive challenges in their environment. As new, more complex animal life evolved, they presented new challenges that pressured other species to complexify in order to meet those challenges.^7,8

Ferrando claims that evolution is about diversification rather than that complexification. And yet, evolution’s march toward diversification provides the means by which it complexifies, which also provides the means by which it diversifies as new layers of reality emerge.

There is a great diversity of things that a crawling infant can do, but that pales in comparison to the diversity of things that a walking toddler can do. With each new stage of complexification there is a new world of possible actions and experiences. It’s that new world of actions and experiences, and the new capabilities that become possible within it that makes human beings so powerful relative to other animals. That power requires a higher degree of responsibility from humans relative to other animals. A chimpanzee cannot annihilate all life on Earth, but humans can. Bacteria could eradicate all life on earth, but they cannot reflect on their capability to do so in order to improve it for the purpose of annihilating a rival group of the same species.

Everything I’ve said within this series on a post-human ontology may make sense, but it may be difficult to see how it all hangs together. In other words, I have a lot of explanations for the differentiated parts of my argument, but it may be difficult to see how they integrate together into a complete understanding.

Before we get to that, if you like this essay so far, then please give it a like and subscribe to the channel. It also really helps if you share this essay with people you know. While all my content is free, I do have paid subscriptions so if you’d like to support the channel I’d appreciate that a lot. Thank you so much.

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We started this series, if you remember, with a voyage into ontology by exploring Ferrando’s post-human deconstruction of the category of “human” because of how it has led to much violence against those not given the label. This led us into a notion of the post-human with post-dualism. This means that we don’t reify simplistic binaries like “friend/foe” or “human/non-human”, and instead challenge them and allow ourselves to be challenged by them.¹

However, I also cautioned against the performative contradiction of the dualism between anti-dualism and dualism. I answered this with Ferrando’s post-exclusivist post-dualism, which I used to claim that we shouldn’t exclude binaries that moved us toward a greater complexity of understanding, but also one that didn’t exclude exclusion.¹ I made the claim that this was because there’s something different between humans and chimpanzees. Even though we should both be given rights, to say that chimpanzees are persons in the same way as human beings doesn’t take into account an important difference between them.

This led me to challenge the performative contradiction of anti-hierarchy. The reason I explored this was to both introduce the hierarchical idea of holarchies and to show you conceptual complexification in action.

Understanding holarchies is important because we need to understand that even though humans are higher up a holarchy of complexification relative to chimpanzees, that doesn’t mean they have any right to dominate chimpanzees as they see fit. In fact, their higher position in the holarchy grants them far greater responsibility than a chimpanzee. A human is capable of so much more harm, though that’s also why they’re capable of so much good to ensure that harm doesn’t take place.

Then, understanding conceptual complexification in action was necessary, firstly, because I wanted to show you how we can be hurt and benefitted by our conceptual maps. A simplistic map like “hierarchies are bad” hides a performative contradiction that can lead to the very moral superiority that the map-maker would seek to avoid. Your commitment to destroy all hierarchies comes with the denial of the inevitability of hierarchies, which blinds you to the hierarchy you enact to destroy all hierarchies you deem beneath you.

By denying that the doctor’s expertise inevitably creates a hierarchy of power in the domain of medicine, we blind ourselves to the dynamics of that power and thus to its solution. We do not ensure egalitarianism by blinding ourselves to hierarchies, playing in a fantasy world where hierarchies of power don’t exist just because we all agreed not to abuse them. Abuses can happen even when we actively attempt to avoid them. Such is the lot of imperfect humans with our imperfect maps.

Secondly though, I wanted to show you the process of making that map more complex. It’s not just that we have a more complex map with more parts, but that we were able to explain so much more with that more complex map. Again, more complexity is not synonymous with more good. You can get lost far more easily in a more complex map, but a more complex map also has far greater potential for good when it’s used well relative to a simplistic map used as well as it possibly could be.

This is particularly true when those who wish to effectively use complex maps for their own selfish ends. Again, just as complex environments full of complex organisms create selection pressures for greater complexity in order to survive, more complexified malevolence creates selection pressures for more complexified benevolence. This is not always the case because sometimes benevolence requires simplicity, but simple benevolent tribespeople cannot protect themselves against a nuclear malevolence.

Returning to our new map, we went from “hierarchies are bad” to understanding how growth hierarchies are a necessary and beautiful part of education, and how they come with greater responsibility and the desire to see those lower in the hierarchy grow. This is very different from a dominator hierarchy where there is the desire to wield power for one’s own self-interested goals and to keep others down, which often leads to horrifying abuses.

Seeing the difference between growth and dominator hierarchies also helped us understand how someone can operate in both at the exact same time. It is precisely our greater capabilities within a growth hierarchy that makes us so much more at risk of turning that growth hierarchy into a dominator hierarchy. All social systems, whether more hierarchical or much less, are ambiarchies, meaning they are ambivalent in how they make possible opportunities for both good and evil.

We’ve thus seen how our map itself complexifies over time. This is a very important point.

In trying to solve the dilemma of humanization we were led to take our simplistic map of hierarchy and turn it into a more complex map. The more complex map was higher up a holarchy of understanding than the less complex map, and so it allowed us not only to explain more, but also to justify why we have greater responsibility than the chimpanzee. The fact that we have such powerful capabilities is why we’re so at risk of turning our position in the complexification holarchy of evolution into a dominator hierarchy that is destroying the planet.

We can take the anti-hierarchical stance all we want and say that we’re no better nor worse than any other form of life, and that saying so is dualistic arrogance the creates a binary between superior humans and inferior non-humans. There’s a lot to be learned from that perspective, of course there is. But it would also completely ignore the very real hierarchy of power that exists between human capabilities and non-human capabilities that will always threaten non-human life even when we’re careful to prevent it.

We also can’t just say we’re higher up a hierarchy. We have to understand what exactly we mean by hierarchy, what that hierarchy is actually mapping, and what that says about the differences along that map.

By this specific hierarchy, I mean a measurement of behavioural complexification. This hierarchy is mapping the increasingly nested, differentiated and integrated capabilities that afford greater causal power in the world. The differences in causal power can become so extreme that human beings can annihilate all life on Earth. They can hunt down and retaliate against each other and other animals, sell each other and other animals into slavery, the food industry, and all sorts of other heinous atrocities. They can then reflect on their capability to do so in order to improve upon it, whether in ethical or unethical directions.

And that’s just it. Those greater capabilities also allow human beings to do immense good. We have to remember that where complexification isn’t a growth to goodness, it also isn’t a growth to badness. Many people will look at all the evil that humans seem uniquely capable of doing and use that as reason to say that humans are intrinsically evil, a parasitic cancer that must be annihilated.

It isn’t that our immense capability for evil is evidence of our evilness, but that for the same reasons we are so much more capable than other animals, we’re also capable both of greater evil and goodness. Rather than condemning humanity only to its capabilities for evil, enacting the very simplistic dualism that leads to the annihilation of the more-than-human world, we ought to do what we can to foster our capabilities for good.

One way in which we can do this is to have more complex maps that allow us to understand and explain more of reality, which would allow us to better justify why we ought to take certain actions.

If we can see the complex map that tracks how the soil is necessary for the growth of our food and our evolution in the first place and how the biodiversity on this planet is necessary for the entire system functioning in a way that allows that soil to grow food, and how our greater human capabilities gives us an immense degree of responsibility to not allow our actions to fuck it all up, then we can better justify why we ought to treat the soil in a way that isn’t just useless dirt, to treat the biodiversity of life in a way that isn’t just resource for extractive, hedonic use, and to treat each other as student/teachers who are capable of interacting in more or less post-humanizing ways.

That more complex map is what we’ll continue to discuss in the next essay on ontology.

Assignment:

1. In previous essays you’ve selected some domain you’re interested in, be it sexual relations and masculinity as I did, your own gender, a previous or current religious affiliation, a political party, or something else. Remember that you’re answering these in the context of creating solarpunk within that domain of interest.

2. Think about the skills you need in your own domain in order to be better along the terms of the domain itself.

3. How do the capabilities these skills give you power and how could that be abused?

4. What can you do to wield these skills in more ethical ways, enacting a growth hierarchy that supports the development of those less skilled than you?

5. How might you use those skills to support those who don’t wish to develop those skills?

6. Write your reply in the comments so we can discuss these ideas!

Until the next one, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.

References:

1 – Ferrando, F. (2020). Philosophical Posthumanism. Bloomsbury Academic.

2 – Wilber, K. (2000). Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution. Shambhala.

3 – Toward a disease-sniffing device that rivals a dog’s nose. (2021, February 17). MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://news.mit.edu/2021/disease-detection-device-dogs-0217

4 – Juarrero, A. (2002). Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System. Bradford Books.

5 – Kemp, L. (2025). Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. Random House, Inc.

6 – Henriques, G. (2022). A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap. Palgrave Macmillan.

7 – Azarian, B. (2022). The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. BenBella Books.

8 – Deacon, T. W. (2013). Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter. WW Norton.

Take back your mind from our techlord billionaires and the social media they use to cook our brains.

Yeah…easier said than done…

How many of us know that this technology is increasingly bad for us yet continue to use it far too frequently? I include myself in that. As of this publication I’ve only just deleted Instagram a week ago. I had already set up my phone so I could only use it for 10 minutes for several years, but even then I saw in real time as it fed me content specifically designed to piss me off. No matter how hard I tried, my feed kept delivering me the most outrageous content, even in titration.

Creating solarpunk requires so much of us in how much it requires we remove from our lives. This can be both easy and difficult. Easy because in the decades, perhaps even years to come much of this removal will be forced upon us. The economist Nate Hagens calls this The Great Simplification. You can experience it today by walking through the mall and asking yourself which of your favourite stores, products, and services will survive a climate-caused collapse of the global supply chain.

Seriously, go and do that. Walk through the mall and honestly ask yourself, “can this possibly still exist 10 years from now?”

You may be pausing at this point and asking yourself how that’s the easy part. What’s the difficult part?

The difficult part is choosing now to change your lifestyle so that we’ll, as Hagens calls it, bend our society rather than break it. It reality, we’re stuck with the difficult choice of taking it easy now so that it will be difficult later, or doing the difficult thing today so that the future will be easier though still incredibly difficult.

This guide is meant to be only a first step toward that. I certainly don’t pretend to have all the answers as what I write here is only a tiny sliver of what has to be done. What it will provide you as a first step is a guide to help you live a life of meaning, purpose, authenticity, and autonomy in a way that is aligned with climate action. That first step involves removing ourselves from the brain rot so that our creative acts in this world can bring about something called solarpunk, a vision for an egalitarian, nature-oriented, while still technological culture.

While each essay in the guide can be read on its own, you can check out all the essays here.

I’ll obviously dive deeper into what I mean by a “solarpunk life” throughout this guide, but put simply, it means being able to live your own life according to your own values rather than being tossed this way and that by all the influences we have in our contemporary world.

All that said, I’m incredibly excited to share with you the esoteric secrets of authentic autonomy, of a true inner compass that can cut through the bullshit of our age and guide us to the shining light of solarpunk. I hope my sarcasm is obvious enough to see my cynicism. I don’t think anything in here is some forbidden, ancient knowledge channeled into my soul-crystal by the Annunaki. It’s none of that, but…given how little real education we’re given in our lives, it may as well be.

It’s an absolute tragedy that so many of us weren’t taught “authenticity” or given even basic psychological training. Many of you may simply be looking for direction in life, whereas others of you may be struggling with psychological issues. Lord knows that I’ve struggled with my own, including addiction, bedridden anxiety and depression, profoundly isolating social ineptitude. I’ve been through it and I know many of you continue to face far worse.

Unfortunately, we only ever know that we need this information once we we’re so locked within a rut that taking any sort of action is next to impossible. In our addictive world we’re quite literally educated to be locked down inside maladaptive patterns.

For some of you the idea that you’re addicted may immediately hit, but for others it may take some explaining. The primary narrative within the psychological community is that addiction is some sort of “brain disease”. It’s obviously more complex than this, but the brain disease model basically just says that because there are brain changes in an addict’s brain that are extraordinarily difficult to change, addiction is a disease of the brain.

Psychologist Marc Lewis wrote an excellent book challenging the brain disease model of addiction. He instead offers a learning model of addiction, which basically just means that addiction is a very intense form of learning. Lewis’s approach basically unites the brain disease model and the self-medication model of Dr. Gabor Maté in a way that balances out the limitations of either perspective.

In this and the next two chapters, we’ll take a deeper dive into this because I know that may seem a bit abstract. Don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense yet. The major point I want you to take away is that if addiction is learning on overdrive, then as you go about your normal life you are engaging in certain behaviours and becoming “addicted” to those things.

Again, I get that it sounds extreme to compare your normal life with addiction, but that’s precisely why I’m using the word “addiction”. Don’t take my use of the term as a diagnosis. I’m instead trying to open your mind to the reality that you are locked within patterns that you have difficulty changing. I’m not saying you’re “addicted” necessarily, but I am saying that you can find a lot of practical wisdom in addiction psychology.

This is why I’ve titled this essay, “Cultivating Authentic Solarpunk in an Addictive World.” I’m not just saying that our current technology and culture is full of addiction, although I am definitely saying that. I’m also saying that the world itself can become addictive because we have to learn to be in this world.

In this new way of looking at addiction, we’re saying that it carves very deep “grooves” in our brains. These grooves cause us to fall into the same behavioural patterns over and over. I mean what should we call that other than learning? When you learn how to ride a bike, you’re carving out grooves in your brain so that every time you get on a bike you know what to do. You fall into the same behavioural pattern of peddling a bike and not falling over.

You may know what you stand for yet continue to act against it, or perhaps, you don’t really know what you stand for, you don’t know who you want to be, and you don’t know what you want to do with your life. What all that means is that you have fallen into a pattern of living, or lifestyle that prevents you from having a clear, well-articulated inner compass that can actually guide you toward meaning, purpose, authenticity, and autonomy. You want so badly to begin making changes that could help create solarpunk, but you just don’t do any of it.

To put it as bluntly as possible, your lifestyle has carved deep grooves into your brain, and you have become “addicted” to that way of living. If you disagree, then change your life. Right now. Start doing everything you know you should be doing. Start waking up at the right time, meditating, exercising, eating well, committing yourself to your relationships, be a good listener, be a good speaker, be brave enough to go out and meet new people, spend your money on the right things, etc., etc., etc., I hope you get the point.

You have to learn how to do these things rather than what you’re currently doing.

Changing yourself is never as easy as we hope it is and that’s because we are “addicted” to being who we currently are. Who we currently are is how we currently behave and we find it incredibly difficult to stop behaving that way. If “addiction” is learning on overdrive, then is it so strange to think that this is true for you? You’re right, being you is nothing like being “addicted” to heroin or sex or anything like that…unless of course that is what you’re struggling with…but again, I hope you get my point.

Even if we didn’t include the pervasiveness of the smartphone, junk food, or anything else we waste our lives on, there are still so many things that are stopping us from being the kind of person we want to be. And then, we obviously do have to take into account the fact that we have a literal addictive technology in our pocket. The fact is that we are, in many ways, stuck within our current self and in some cases, it is quite literally destroying our lives and planet.

Fortunately, by reading this guide, you’ve already made a decision toward not letting yourself continue being a victim of the smartphone, of capitalism, and of your own mind. As you’ll discover throughout this guide, investing in who you actually want to become is important because every time you’ve acted in the ways you currently act, you’ve invested in becoming the person you currently are. You are constantly learning and re-learning to be you.

So, in writing a guide that focuses on creating a real inner compass that can guide you toward something like solarpunk, I had to figure out what exactly you needed to know, and in what order, so as to make the maximum impact on your current self in order to move you toward your ideal self. Some of this introductory information may be stuff you’ve heard before, but there are a few things you need to understand to make the most of this guide.

Firstly, implementation matters far more than information. I could give you the greatest book in the world that would get you healthy, wealthy, happy, and able to think and perform at levels most humans aren’t even aware exist (I write tongue-in-cheek). At the end of the day though, if you aren’t implementing that information then you simply aren’t doing it.

As such, you need to take the mindset of a complete beginner. The information in these first few essays may not be new to you, but the implementation of that information will help you implement the information in the rest of the guide. The way this guide is organized is to deliver to you the information you need in a specific order so that as you take more and more action. No one is the same and some won’t need this order as I did, yet it’s hopefully organized in a way that can help make small, sustainable changes.

For example, in the next essay, we’ll talk about backsliding, which is one of the most common problems that people encounter in any journey of self-development. We all inevitably find ourselves missing days or falling back into patterns we want to change. This is backsliding. If you want to get through this guide you have to understand what this is, why it happens, and what you can do about it.

I have the entire guide written already, but I’m releasing it on a weekly basis to give you time to read each essay and integrate the advice it advocates in your life. If you come across this when there are already many essays released, then it can be helpful to read it a bit faster, but it’s less necessary than you think. I’ll say this until you’re annoyed with me. Small changes are more sustainable than big changes.

If you feel you don’t have the time to do that, then take a moment to look at how much time you spend on your phone. I’m pretty sure every phone has a time tracking feature to tell you how much time you’re spending. You can also download apps on your laptop. Get a sense of how much time you’d have if it wasn’t for the social media.

Now that you’ve done that, answer me honestly, did you check the time and come back immediately? Or, did you spend more time than you planned on something else? It’s okay. Really. You are where you are and the point of this guide is to help with that, but this is a good opportunity to really reflect on how you’ve been living your life.

The simple fact is that if you don’t value your time, then you don’t really value your life.

I’m not talking about value as price, like time is money. I’m talking about these rich experiences of life’s depth in relation with the people and activities that truly give our lives meaning. Every hour you spend on social media is an hour away from that value.

Point being, 30 – 60 minutes per day on your mental health is nothing compared to the hours you’ve wasted with social media. A single hour of practice per day is nothing compared to the world of flourishing that awaits you on the other side of dedicated, consistent self-development. NOT BY YOURSELF, but with compassionate, loving others. You won’t find them staring into your phone.

With that word compassion being written, if you really are that busy, you don’t have to do something every single day or else you’re a failure. You can read this essay today, maybe do a brief meditation, and then do the exercise tomorrow or whatever fits. I highly recommend to read a little and do a meditation each day if you can. The key point is that you want to be doing some internal work every day. Taking small bites when you first start out is what gets you to the point where you’re able to do way more.

You must learn to push yourself, but not so hard that you end up giving up. I would much prefer you read 5 minutes and meditate for 5 minutes, rather than doing nothing at all. If nothing else though, do a little work and then meditate every single day. No matter what else happens, if you do that every single day, then you are not only making progress, you’re getting better at making progress.

If you do end up skipping a day, that’s fine. Life happens and as we all know full well, change can be hard. You want to develop an internal drive for flourishing that will get you doing this every single day regardless of whatever excuse your mind comes up with. You also want to develop the forgiveness and self-compassion to know that this is an ideal that you’ll get closer to over time, but one that will never look perfect. Don’t accept less than your best, but understand that your best starts lower than you hope, develops over time, and never looks like perfection.

The point of all the work we do here is to show you how to go deep into your mind and body so that we can create a transformation in consciousness. This doesn’t mean anything magical or woo-woo or anything like that. It just means that we’re trying to make a huge change in the way our mind works. This is kind of what I mean by “developing an inner compass”. However, we first must heal the parts of you that prevent you from building an inner compass that points toward what you find meaningful and virtuous.

Part of our issue is that we’re currently using a compass that only points away from pain. The issue with such a compass is that it inevitably leads you back to who you currently are. It’s not actually pointing anywhere you want to go because it’s quite literally pointing in all directions except one:

Pain.

Not only does this not lead us anywhere we would truly want to go, but some of the most meaningful and fulfilling experiences in life lie on the other side of pain that we chose to grow with instead of against.

We want to create a new compass, one that is pointed not away from anything in particular, but toward your own personal definition of flourishing. If that all sounds a little abstract right now that’s totally fine. It’s going to make more and more sense as we continue.

With those points out of the way, we can touch in with one of the highest impact phrases you may ever hear. It’s a quote from Dr. Gabor Maté, “it’s not why the addiction, it’s why the pain.”

As I said above, you have a compass that points away from pain and this inevitably leads you back into the lifestyle patterns you’re currently addicted to. We numb ourselves with social media, food, TV, or porn because we aren’t effectively dealing with pain in our lives. As you’ll see more and more, this pain is also what’s preventing us from living according to our values. In either case, the question, as Dr. Maté says, is one of pain.

To begin dealing with pain more effectively and acting virtuously (whatever that means for you), we must first learn how to stop being ineffective. You’ll be pleased to know that changing your life only requires three very simple steps. Firstly, identify when you are “dysregulated” or “triggered” to do something you know is bad for you. Secondly, feel through that dysregulation. Thirdly, choose to act in accordance with your values and goals.

Simple, right? Yeah…right…do you even know what I mean when I say dysregulated? What does it mean to feel your way through it? Often we hear, “feel your emotions, don’t suppress them,” but what does that actually mean? When you feel negative emotions every fibre of your being tells you to escape…so should you avoid feeling dysregulated? And what about, “act in accordance with your values and goals”? Do you even know what your values or goals are?

If I asked you right now what you stand for, would you respond with a well-thought out statement with clear strategies and methods for living it, or would you simply recite whatever you’ve been told you should stand for without any real knowledge of what it looks like when it’s lived? Maybe you’d find that you couldn’t answer at all.

If these three steps are so simple…why exactly is this so difficult for us?

Before we get to that, if you like this essay so far, then please give it a like and subscribe to the channel. It also really helps if you share this essay with people you know. While all my content is free, I do have paid subscriptions so if you’d like to support the channel I’d appreciate that a lot. Thank you so much.

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The answer is not that we need some tip or trick to get us to do these seemingly simple things. Instead, it’s that who we currently are cannot do these things. If you keep doing the same things, you will get the same outcome. Expecting the same approach to produce a different outcome is said to be the definition of insanity. It isn’t, but the simple fact is that if you continue being the same person that you are, you will continue to do the same things that define this person. If who you currently are could do the things you know you should be doing, you’d be doing them. You simply can’t argue with that.

More importantly than anything else, the path of development is about becoming the person who is already virtuous, rather than simply not engaging in low quality behaviour. This doesn’t mean letting go of your authentic self, or losing who you are. It means actually becoming your authentic self.

Just think about it. Is being addicted to social media, news, food, porn, or anything else, your authentic self? Is being unable to have the relationships you want? And what about the hobbies or skills you want? The answer is no on all accounts. You have greater freedom of choice when you choose to become the person who is their own definition of virtuous.

I certainly don’t mean your own definition in a hyper-individualist, dog-eat-dog, get what you want and fuck everyone else kind of way. I mean the expression of virtue that is meaningful to you. There are many ways to be virtuous in the spirit of environmentalism and social justice while still being based on your own interests, skills, talents, etc.

As such, this guide will help you express that virtue in way that is authentically you, not me, not your parents, not your society, no one else, but you.

Realize however, that there may be things here you disagree with.

I don’t want you to be a sheep, but please remember, if the way you currently viewed yourself and reality contributed to your own idea of virtue and the good life, you would already have that. What I’m teaching here will help you become your own guide. The fact is that social media, society, and trauma have turned you into a sheep and unmanageable emotional pain, your shepherd.

The reason for this is that the mind acts as a lens through which the self and reality are perceived and interpreted. This means that when something happens, the way your mind is structured dictates what you think about that event, what you feel about that event, and how you act to deal with that event. If your mind is structured in a maladaptive way, then you will interpret reality in a way that feeds maladaptive patterns and a greater lack of well-being. No matter how much you try to change your life, your mind will continue to interpret events in a way that perpetuates your maladaptive patterns. If you change your mind to interpret reality in better ways, then you will naturally move toward better lifestyles and habits.

In my work as a guide, I’ve had clients who don’t fully grasp why we cover the ground we do, so let’s look at a real-world example to help drive the point home.

Let’s say you want to start exercising. You find a good program for beginners, you start lifting some weights and you get your diet in order. You finally get past the beginner hump and you make it a consistent habit. You build some muscle, you lose some fat, things seem to be going well. Then, you see a guy bench more than you and realize how much smaller you are than him, how little strength progress you’re making, and the pounds just don’t seem to be coming off as fast as you want them to. You feel like a loser. You feel like all these months were for nothing, so you eventually just give up again, buy some fast food, and make a capitalist wealthier.

Getting to the gym is important, but so is learning how we create unnecessary pain in our lives. If we act in ways that create more pain and stress, such as always demanding more and never being able to celebrate and feel satisfied by our victories, then what do you think we do? If we’re addicted to numbing ourselves to pain…then yes, exactly, we use whatever it is we’re addicted to. We fall back into old patterns because we’re numbing ourselves to pain we aren’t dealing with effectively.

Or, perhaps we go in the opposite direction and become obsessive about the gym. Why do you think so many people use steroids even when they don’t compete at anything? They never feel big enough even as they turn heads because of how big they are. They’re no longer moving toward physical well-being, but away from the fear of being too small. You deal with these situations because you aren’t the person who is truly virtuous…at least not yet, because you can absolutely become that person.

This entire book is about doing just that. Take the role of student throughout this book, apply what I say, and learn from it. After completing each of these chapters you’ll likely have questions, comments, or concerns. Feel free write a comment, and I’ll respond, or someone else in the community may respond. Let’s discuss these ideas and help each other grow.

That is the solarpunk ethos.

Remember that I said in the last essay that we are relational. We’re created out of our relationships with others and the world. Even though this guide is based around the idea of developing authentic autonomy, autonomy is always relational. My essay series The Solarpunk Self goes deeper into that using the case study of sexual ethics, but the point is that we want to interact with wise others in mutual education. Even though the nature of a guide frames me as a teacher, I am always a student, both yours and other teachers.

Point being, don’t be afraid to disagree with something I’ve said. Let’s talk about that disagreement so that we can help each other come to a better mutual understanding. I’m not asking you to be a sheep who follows everything I say, but a collaborator on this journey of self-development toward your definition of virtue. We create solarpunk together and solarpunk is egalitarian. Egalitarianism means we are all equal contributors, even though what we can contribute differs. Being equal is not about being the same, but about tempting each other with the good we see in each other’s hearts.

With that being said though, also cultivate humility. Listen to what I’ve said and have the open-mindedness to run the experiment. Even if the experiment fails, there are always lessons to be learned in the trying. You are a scientist and your life is the experiment.

When you complete the guide, you’ll have an amazingly powerful foundation from which to act. When you read books, watch videos, try new experiments, and continue living your life, you’ll have a system to compare and contrast. Maybe you’ll change some things, maybe you’ll reinforce some things, but what’s true is that you will have some sort of compass to guide you toward your own personal creative expression of solarpunk while being in collaboration with others who desire to create solarpunk as well.

What you learn in this guide is exactly what we should have learned in school to prevent any of these issues from happening in the first place.

So, let’s start now. After this essay, I’d like you to complete the first assignment. Then, I want you to meditate for 5 minutes.

The key to understanding meditation is that you aren’t looking for a clear mind. The biggest mistake that mindfulness gurus have made is to market meditation as having a clear mind. That is NOT the point of meditation when you first start. The point of meditation when you’re a beginner is to realize that you don’t have control over your mind.

That means that “doing meditation right” looks like setting your timer for 5 minutes, sitting down, and focusing on your breathing. Inevitably, without fail, you’ll realize that your mind has wandered off. THAT IS A VICTORY! Realizing that you can’t control your mind is the first major victory in meditation. The more often you catch yourself lost in thought, the more you’re winning. Simply return your attention back to your breath and wait for the next time you catch your mind wandering. If you do that for 5 minutes, then you have won at meditation.

If you already have a consistent meditation practice, then do the assignment and then follow your regular meditation practice. We’re going introduce other techniques later in the guide, so for right now just focus on creating or maintaining the habit of meditation.

Either way, that’s a lot for today already. The assignment is quite short, so please go do that. Then, meditate for 5 minutes. Thank you so much for reading this guide. I look forward to speaking with you again in the next one.

Right now the major goal is to learn a little bit each essay, do an assignment, and then do the meditation practice each day. In the process, you may discover something that requires a lot of work to overcome.

If at any point you experience something that is incredibly intense in some way, then please reach out to someone you trust for support. If you can, I highly recommend seeking professional help as well. I know access to mental health services can be difficult for many of you reading this. If you’re in that situation, then please search for free services on google with “crisis line” or “mental health support line”. They exist and they can help you through very difficult emotions. You can also look for online support communities in which people going through similar experiences offer support when they can.

If you’d like non-clinical help on this journey, I offer IFS-informed existential guidance. As a guide, not a therapist, I am informed by Internal Family Systems, existential therapy, acceptance and commitment, authentic relating, and adult developmental psychological.

1. All of us have some sort of vice we know we’d do better without, whether that’s scrolling, video games, binge watching TV shows, porn, etc. Choose one.

2. Brainstorm for 5 – 10 minutes or until you have at least 10 reasons for why you want to quit.

3. Choose the top 3 – 5. Then, think of the ways in which these reasons are suffering-based. In other words, how are these reasons based around the avoidance of pain? How do they create more pain? Do you value these reasons because of previous pain?

   1. The purpose of this question is to begin developing awareness of how even your positive goals are often shrouded by pain or your resistance to pain. Sometimes, awareness itself can be curative.

4. Between now and the next essay, try to quit this vice completely. Your goal isn’t to quit it, but to watch and learn how you fail at quitting. If you manage to cut it out, awesome, but again, notice how you respond emotionally to cutting it out of your life and then failing to keep it out. The failure is not a failure, but the beginning of a new learning process.

Until the next installment in this guide, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.

Recommend Reading:

1. Marc Lewis – The Biology of Desire

2. Gabor Maté – The Realm of Hungry Ghosts

3. Robert Kegan – In Over Our Heads

4. Brendan Graham Dempsey – The Evolution of Meaning

   1. The most profound book on the science and meaning of “meaning”. In chapter two, he covers the most sophisticated science we have on psychological development.

It may be easy to look at the history of Western women and see an entire gender forced into the myth of domesticated, submissive housewife. Yet, the myths a culture tells itself are often far more complex, with myths conjured up to help justify and explain other, older myths that are soon forgotten as yet another layer of myth is laid over top.

Women are seen as real witches that are then seen as evil women that good men and women refuse to associate with. Such good women are seen as demure, quiet, obedient mothers who leave the games of the public sphere to men. Such mothers then seek liberation from this myth, some honouring mothers as just as important as men, others looking to join the public sphere to prove they’re just as good at the games of men. Their sexuality is eventually liberated until the witch returns as a feminist icon before becoming a spooky season slutty costume.

Layer upon layer of myth that has some, though certainly not a complete connection with the complex reality of history. The paragraph above is not meant to be 100% historically accurate, but to show a mythic understanding of the development of a myth. Though that’s also not to say that empirical data is useless.

The issue is that we are, in part, a mythic species. We construct stories to understand ourselves and the world, filling our worlds with characters, heroes, villains, lovers, and friends. So much so that by the time we get to the empirical data we already have ready-made slots to force the data within.

Even academic history can become little more than a collection of myths that are taken up by a people with eyes at a future they hope is better than the present. Goodison and Morris, and separately Hutton, have criticized the notion that our prehistoric ancestors worshipped a singular “Mother Goddess”.^1,2 Hutton specifically shows how the idea originally emerged from highly conservative thinkers who wanted to justify the reduction of women to being merely mothers.² We’ll return to that later when we challenge Jordan Peterson’s views on the matter.

That, of course, isn’t to disparage academic history by any means, as Goodison, Morris, and Hutton are all academics who place a high value on the empirical historical data. Yet, if we want to aim ourselves at a better future, I think we have to acknowledge how we are often organized around myths that tie our present into the future by taking up a specific understanding of the past.

My task here is not to analyze the empirical data on the real history of women, men, and the social institutions that shaped them, but to understand more deeply the real history of the myths we currently live by. By doing that, we can better understand how we can transform ourselves beyond those often very limiting myths.

By myth then, I mean both a falsehood and an instructive story. Not even historians have complete access to history and so they’re trained specifically to see their understanding as limited fragments of the past that can sometimes obscure just as much as they reveal. There is reality and then there are the sort-of-true-sort-of-false myths we use to instruct ourselves about that reality. I’m focused on these myths and how they can be real enough to define people’s lives, their culture, and their institutions, and how that can act to change reality over the long term.

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The Castrating and Castrated Woman

In the last essay, which you don’t need to read, we introduced the myth of the Succubus. This is not merely the demonic, seductive female from folklore, but is a more plural notion that includes that folkloric succubus (notice the lower case “s” for the folklore). Ayers writes that the Succubus is the operative framework for understanding women in the West and so includes a variety of different ways of understanding women and men.³

The Succubus as a demon represents the abject or rejected nature of women. Within the patriarchal symbolic order, women are the other of the ideal, which is “man”. Femininity itself comes to be abject, including much of what ideal men are not allowed to be. To be feminine is to be at the bottom of the hierarchy. This would seem to explain why women are seen as submissive, their natural place being beneath men.^3,4 Yet this contradicts the idea of the Succubus being the operative framework, since a demonic, seductive female is not exactly “submissive”.

Obviously, submission can be a way to gain power in a state of oppression. Being sexually submissive is a really great way to delude a powerful man into divulging all his secrets and making himself susceptible to your whispering in his ear, letting him convince himself that he was the source of your plotting.

However, the true explanatory power of the Succubus is that her conniving, corruptive nature makes her deserving of subjugation. Whether or not women are submissive is irrelevant if they are deserving of being forced into submission. From this perspective, the witch-hunts become a centuries-long campaign of forced domestication. Not because they were intended to be necessarily, though sometimes they likely were, but because that is one of the unintended consequences of the witch-hunt.^5,6

While the Succubus that came into being because of the witch-hunts has been layered over with myth after myth, old myths have been taken up to define to this day our conception of both women and men.

The purpose of all my writing then, is to become conscious of the myths we live within, including the one I’m writing here. This is a myth, a simplified story to help us understand the overflowing complex infinity of reality and ourselves. Our goal is not to get rid of myth, but to create myths that are emancipatory and aware enough of themselves as myths that we can iterate them as academic history reveals more about the truths of our past. We thus want myths that can help us cultivate the fluid open-mindedness to transform our myths, ourselves, and the reality we live in.

Returning to the Succubus then, we can understand how it is the operative framework by understanding how it isn’t a singular definition. Again the reality is more complex than any framework. The map is not the territory, but I find that a tripartite map can help us better navigate the reality we find ourselves in today.

I spoke of this in the last essay when I mentioned the castrating and castrated woman. I’ll save the third part for later, but to understand these terms we have to put them in the context of the “patriarchal” symbolic order.⁴

This is an order built around the masculine experience as the ideal for deserving power. If we say that men belong in positions of power whereas women are better suited to be mothers, then we say that to have political, scientific, or any kind of public power requires being a man. That’s not to say that every man is entitled to such a position nor that women can never find themselves in such a position, but that being a man is a fundamental requirement given how the ideal is shaped around being a man.

Again, these are myths about a reality that can differ from the myth. Women can be in a position of power even as these positions are built around and tailored to the realities and myths related to being a specific kind of man.

From that perspective, we can understand the patriarchal order as constructing power and desire around men’s experiences. Such theories construct power itself as that which we desire because of how we are influenced by patriarchy itself. They thus call “power” and the “ideal” the phallus. To have the phallus is to have the power of the desired ideal.³ There is a distinction between having and being the phallus, but we’ll leave that for now.

If men are conceptualized as having the right to power within patriarchy whereas women are not, then we can say that men have the phallus or power, whereas women can only ever desire the phallus or power.

A castrating woman then, is one who threatens men’s power. She threatens to castrate them, steal the phallus from them, and to take up the “unnatural” position of a woman in power.

We can see how this ties in with the still-to-this-day common notion that witches steal men’s penises.^5,7 We can obviously argue about whether or not these myths have anything to do with the association between power and phalluses. Yet, I think we can all agree that it’s a very interesting coincidence that power is constructed around men’s experiences and those that threaten men just so happen to be accused of stealing their literal dicks.

Either way, the castrated woman, is the one who has accepted her “natural” position as being without power. Remember, the Succubus is the operative framework, and so even though the castrated woman is the opposite of the castrating, she is defined by her opposition to the reasons for her abjection. Said another way, the castrating woman justifies why women are abjectified, and so even as they aim for the virtuous position of the castrated woman, they merely reconfirm their abjectification.

The most a virtuous woman can hope for is a trusted place as the loyal submissive to her man. Think about the double bind this creates for a woman. She must conform to the submissive role in order to earn intimacy and safety, but in doing so she reconfirms to herself and the culture that this is the natural place of women. If she rebels against this role, causing a legitimate disruption in the relatively smooth operations of the social order, then she proves to the culture that women who don’t conform deserve abjectification.

To be free, the castrated woman must disrupt the social order enough for it to transform into a shape that can actually hold a new role for women. Yet, by doing so, she may make things more difficult for specific domains and with specific people during the time of transition, even as legitimate improvements are also made. The liberation of women can thus be both a moral necessity with real benefit and the cause of social disruption that can be cherrypicked to justify re-enforcing her subjugation.

This is why the Succubus is the operative framework that includes both the castrating and the castrated woman. Even though it may appear that the Succubus is only the castrating woman, it’s the defining role that organizes the other social roles in such a way that perpetuates the patriarchal symbolic order.

Remember from the last essay that we introduced the idea of an attractor, a higher order, stable yet dynamic pattern that emerges out of all the sub-dynamics that constitute it. As the operative framework, the Succubus acts as the attractor, pulling the complex system back toward the Succubus despite perturbations to the system itself.⁸ As we’ll see in a future essay, this is why the feminist movement has given rise to the faux-liberation of post-feminism.⁹

Before that, we need to explore deeper how the polarity between the castrating and castrated woman recreates the Succubine social position of woman, the definition of the ideal man as the one who conquers her, and the patriarchal order itself.

We can understand this through the idea of the Madonna-whore complex in which a man has difficulty viewing his romantic partner as a complete sexual being. She’s either the pure, respectable woman his parents will one day meet or she’s the degraded slut that isn’t worthy of a serious relationship.¹⁰ In other words, the sexually liberated whore is the castrating woman who deserves subjugation and the Madonna is the castrated woman who doesn’t have any sexual desire whatsoever.

Beyond being a misogynistic denial of woman’s whole humanity, this Succubine complex also becomes a justification for rape. Spinelli writes of a fundamentalist lay-preacher who believed he’d conquered the sins of the flesh and no longer felt sexual arousal. Obviously he still did, but would interpret his sexual desire as being the temptations of Satan. It wasn’t that he himself was experiencing sexual desire, it was that this feeling within him was coming from an external, malevolent force.¹¹

The succubus is a demonic, seductive female who sneaks into the houses of men in the dark of the night in order to steal their life essence (cum) by tempting them with sinful sexual desire.

Spinelli wrote about his client in 1996.¹¹

The Succubus framework describes the means by which men, raised to view their sexuality as the sinful corruption of the flesh, deny responsibility for their sexuality by projecting it onto external entities. Even once the obvious mythic language has been removed, this very same myth is operating in the minds of both men and women.

When a person asks, “but did you see what she was wearing,” that is Succubus thinking. That’s a person projecting responsibility for their own sexuality onto someone else because they can’t bear the weight of being the source of such sinful desires. If we understand ourselves in a simplistic friend/foe binary, then we need to project those unacceptable aspects of ourselves onto an external foe that we can blame. When it comes to women and femininity, that foe is the castrating feminine, the Succubus, and thus, every time a man gets a boner, it becomes justification for the subjugation of women.

A curious thing to note about “castrated woman” is that a woman cannot be castrated. Creed, quoting Lurie, makes the point that:⁴

Even if the patriarchal order privileges masculine power, it doesn’t really make sense to conceptualize women, the powerless gender, as being castrated. That would imply that they ever had power and it was taken from them, yet by their nature they are born without that power.

What this conceptual structure provides is the positioning of women relative to men. A woman is the negative ideal for men rather than an ideal or abject on feminine terms. Even the castrating woman is powerful only insofar as she is a threat to patriarchal power. The very danger of the castrating woman to the patriarchal hierarchy is interpreted along terms that simply recreate the hierarchy. A woman can’t even be dangerous to the social order on her own terms.

From this perspective, “woman” is always the empty hole waiting to be filled with meaning relative to the masculine.

For example, Creed writes of the many ways that women are portrayed as monstrous in horror movies, stating that it’s often in retaliation to what she’s been denied, like family, husband, lover, or child. In such stories, it’s the castrated woman becoming a killer to demonstrate how she ought to be punished for having failed at achieving the ideal for women, which is of course, castration as submission to patriarchy.

By tying the image of the Succubus, the demonic, seductive murderous to that of the castrated woman, the submissive mother, the patriarchal symbolic order folds the fear of castration back on itself. The only expression of feminine power is in pained desperation to attain the acceptable feminine position of the castrated woman. She kills for her failure to conform rather than for her own autonomy.

All that said, we return to the notion that the operative framework of woman under patriarchy is the Succubus, the castrating woman, the seductive demon capable of usurping power from men given her sinful sexuality, body, and emotions. It makes sense that she gives reason for why women deserve subjugation, but such a demonic framework doesn’t jive well with the good, submissive woman who knows her place.

To explain this, we first have to understand what Jordan Peterson gets wrong about the feminine.¹²

Before we get to that, if you like this essay so far, then please give it a like and subscribe to the channel. It also really helps if you share this essay with people you know. While all my content is free, I do have paid subscriptions so if you’d like to support the channel I’d appreciate that a lot. Thank you so much.

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Jordan Peterson’s Error

Let’s begin with the original psychoanalytic view that tended to deny the importance of the mother, focusing on the father’s role. The general idea is that Freud and early psychoanalysis as a whole tended to view the father as the decisive psychological organizer given his being the representative of the patriarchal symbolic order. To become a self is to separate from the mother and enter the world of the father and the social order.^3,12,13

From this perspective, Peterson’s claims that the myth of Tiamat and Marduk represents the rejuvenation of civilization makes sense. If you’ve watched enough of Peterson you’ve probably heard him mention the Mesopotamian god, Marduk and his battle with the draconic goddess Tiamat.¹²

Already you can see a common pattern in myth that we discussed in my essay on the goddesses. Feminine deities have often been recast as demons, even being seen as threats to childbirth and children.¹² This is the Succubus, this is the demonization of the feminine as fundamentally corrupt and dangerous.

In this myth, Apsu, the old god and lover of Tiamat, has grown corrupt and is then murdered. This enrages Tiamat and so she goes to war with the gods. Marduk, the heroic god, slays her and is crowned the King of All the Gods.¹²

Peterson interprets this in the common ways that such myths are interpreted. Tiamat, as a feminine character, often represents the unknown chaos of nature. Apsu, the old god, represents tyrannical order, the old King who has become corrupt and oppressive. The fact that Apsu and Tiamat are lovers represents the way that masculine order keeps the feminine unknown under control.¹²

You can see very clearly here how patriarchal this myth is.

The feminine is controlled, conquered, and kept at bay by the masculine. When that masculine order is destroyed by the other gods, representing the rebellion against tyranny, Marduk must slay the feminine unknown and bring about a new, revitalized, and benevolent masculine order to protect us all from the chaos of a feminine world without masculine order.

To Peterson’s credit, he does acknowledge that all masculine order eventually becomes corrupt and must be transformed by the “revolutionary hero”.¹² The issue is that he comes from the psychoanalytic tradition that sees the patriarchal order of the father as the fundamental psychological transition of individuality. Patriarchal hierarchy, however corruptible, is still preferable to the feminine chaos of the unknown.

Peterson goes from mythological interpretation to psychological explanation by claiming that “explored territory” is orderly protective father who, “keeps one foot on the Terrible Mother”. A child, exploring the unknown, depends on the structures of the father to build something new, to be safe as they transform the unknown into the known.¹²

Again, this is based on the old psychoanalytic tradition that centers the father. As I mentioned before, Goodison, Morris, and Hutton criticize how this very tradition was used to interpret history in ways that justified the tradition’s view of gender, psychology, and civilization. They took their very cultural understanding of masculinity and femininity, and then applied that universally to all cultures as if gender roles and even language have always functioned the same.^1,2 Yet even things such as associating “sexuality” with “fertility” have not always been as strong as they are in cultures with Christian heritage.¹

That said then, we can’t say that “femininity” has always meant “chaos”, “unknown”, “nature”, or “emotion” in ways that certain elements of our culture have taken for granted. Certainly these associations have been made, as I’ve argued in previous essays, but that’s cultural baggage rather than reality or psychology being fundamentally gendered in alignment with Western norms.

Goodison and Morris further criticize the Jungian glamorization Marduk’s matricidal slaughter of Tiamat as the struggle for freedom.¹ This is echoed by Ayers, Creed, and Benjamin, who separately write that the mother is just as much, if not more than the father, the entry into the symbolic order.^3,4,13 The psychoanalyst Lacan writes that the father represents the prohibition of the symbolic order on the infant’s desires.¹⁴ Yet, through attachment theory, we can better understand the mother as the “yes” of exploration, nodding reassuringly “I’ll still be here” when the infant is done playing in its discovery of the unknown and desires to return to the known of mother.¹⁵

These errors make Peterson’s Maps of Meaning an incredibly ambivalent book. For all the genius that is there, it’s so drenched with the patriarchal nonsense we’ve spent this series discussing. Peterson operates from the warrior ethos of the patriarchal order and so conceptually associates the feminine, the body, the unknown, and nature, thereby justifying viewing each of them as something to be conquered, extracted from, and used for the benefit of the patriarchal hierarchy. As he himself writes:¹²

Yet how can this happen? How does Peterson go so wrong?

We can understand this with the following quote from his book:¹²

Hold the fuck up.

The Great Mother is…planned rape? Painful slaughter during war? Dominance without compassion?

Call me a crazy feminist I guess, but how the fuck is the feminine planned rape? What is this if not a man projecting the sexuality he refuses to take responsibility for and then demonizing femininity for it?

It’s one thing to say that women are capable of violence on their own terms and for their own purposes, and an altogether different thing to say that the universal representative of battlefield and rape is a woman. This is Succubus thinking. A woman raped as the spoils of war is blamed for the same reason Spinelli’s pastor could not take responsibility for his own sexual desire.

Peterson’s error can be further captured in the following quote about the hero’s purposes with the feminine:¹²

Here, Peterson discusses the common trope of the hero winning the girl, claiming that she represents the benevolent aspects of the feminine unknown. In other words, Peterson is perpetuating the patriarchal splitting of the feminine into the castrating and castrated woman. Splitting is a defense mechanism where we take something and split it between the positive parts and the negative parts.¹⁶

In Peterson’s patriarchal analysis, the feminine is the dangerous unknown meant to be conquered so as to extract whatever positives can be found there. What’s more, he then projects a lot of negative aspects of masculinity onto the negative feminine, claiming the feminine is planned rape and slaughter. Marriage thus establishes the benevolent feminine as the property of the patriarchal order that keeps his boot on the feminine’s throat for everyone’s protection.¹²

It becomes less surprising that the unknown is conceptualized as a female chaos monster that the masculine hero literally tears apart. The unknown is a woman that must be split apart, conquered, and used to benefit patriarchal culture. This is unilateral power in sexual relation to the unknown, thus to the feminine, thus to women, and thus, is a perpetuation of a Succubus myth that does violence to women and to men.

If you remember from my essay on technofeudal gender, I discussed the distinction between oppressive, unilateral power and emancipatory, relational power.^17,18 The patriarchal warrior ethos can only see the feminine unknown as a thing to be conquered because it is constructed along lines of unilateral power.

Even as Peterson discusses the necessity of a relationship with the unknown for emancipating ourselves from corrupt tyranny, he cannot conceptualize it as anything other than a thing to be conquered. As with the castrated woman, our only path beyond oppression is reduced to submitting to a new order of unilateral power.

The finality of this fact can be captured by Peterson’s claim that:¹²

I don’t mean to descend to ad hominem, but this is telling coming from a man addicted to benzos. Again, I don’t mean that as an insult. I mean that a man with an anxiety disorder cannot help but conceptualize death and the unknown as an insurmountable anxiety. For all the positives Peterson has to say about the feminine and the unknown, his inability to truly face his existential anxiety has him emphasize the danger of the unknown and the totalitarian safety of patriarchal order.

In existential therapy, existential anxiety arises from the four givens of existence, which includes death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness.⁹ Given Peterson’s work, it is quite clear that death, freedom, and meaninglessness are incredibly important to him. Yet, he makes the mistake that Fromm warns us about. His inability to integrate his existential anxiety leads him to escape from freedom.¹⁹ His cultural background fills these existential anxieties with patriarchal narratives that justify associating the feminine with the unknown and then splitting it into parts to be conquered for the benefit of a new patriarchy that forever recreates the totalitarianism of the old.

Then what, you might ask, would the Succubus become once reconstructed along lines of emancipatory, relational power? Relational power is the creative collaboration in which we become more powerful together.

Where Peterson would advocate for the revivification of the Great Father of patriarchy, I instead advocate for releasing the Great Feminine from her cage of patriarchal motherhood. I don’t mean to denigrate motherhood, but simply to emphasize the more-than-motherhood of the feminine.

Ironically, it’s Peterson himself who can guide us toward that:¹²

Yet, again, within that quote we can see the patriarchal poison that drips from Peterson’s work. A truly revolutionary hero is one that can remove the poison from the gaping wound left by the warrior ethos. To become such a hero is to overcome the limits of the heroic itself, to move into the post-heroic healing of the traumas of war, transcending unilateral power toward a relational power in which we grow powerful through creative acts together.

In other words, we must make peace with the Succubus.

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Making Peace with the Succubus

It’s important at this point to remind you that our understanding of the Succubus is as a myth defining the roles, rules, norms, personality traits, and more that we associate with the binary genders. Green makes a very important point about the complexity of mythic representation:¹

Even though hunting may be a masculine role in some cultures, they may represent it mythologically as a woman because hunting has far more to do with abstract concepts such as nourishment, renewal, and reciprocity. This would mean that even though material and economic conditions create a masculine position for hunting, the culture imbues that masculine activity with feminine associations because their abstract conceptualizations of the activity are also operative in the positioning of the activity within their symbolic order.

This may lend evidence to the idea that the Great Mother could be the representative of battlefields, rape, and slaughter. However, my major point about the Succubus as an organizing framework is that it’s the wrong organizing framework for understanding women and men. I think that’s clear at this point, but I’m presenting the Succubus to say that however “real” it is as a myth that organizes the genders under patriarchy, it is for that very reason that it’s a horrifying violence to women and men.

As we discussed here and in the essay on the Denigration of Goddesses, the notion that the feminine is related to all that Peterson, Neumann, and traditional psychoanalysis claim is because of a specific cultural history that is projected onto the feminine as a universal. This completely erases the plural associations and definitions that the feminine has had and thus could possibly have. If you take nothing else from this essay, it’s that our future is far more open than Western projections on our past might have us believe.

Thus, to better understand the complexities of how such myths operate, we’ve been using post-Jungian archetypal theory that sees the archetypes through materialist-constructivism, or how social categories emerge in feedback loops with material conditions, and psychosocial perspectives, or how social categories emerge in feedback loops with each individual’s life history.²⁰ That is to say, that we can understand these myths by seeing how they emerge from the impact that material conditions, cultural scripts, and social institutions have on individual people, and how those people in turn live their lives within and sometimes against such myths in ways that can transform all of it. We can understand this as the integrative perspective of post-Jungian archetypal theory.

As such, when I say that an institution or belief is Succubine, what I’m really saying is that they can be understood with the representation or map of that archetype, of that pattern of interactions.

By seeing an institution through the lens of the Succubus, we’re able to see how that institution functions in ways that may contradict the more explicit intent or purpose of the institution or belief itself. The reason for this is because no environment, institution, culture, or person consists of only a single pattern. We’ll be focused on the Succubus archetype for a few more essays, but there are others we’re going to be considering as well.

Returning to the individual though, we can also see how this Succubine pattern that exists from the dynamics of material conditions, culture, and institution imprint the Succubus into the minds of individuals.

At the level of the individual, the archetype is the pattern of feelings, thoughts, and behaviours given how all those influences affect you. I don’t mean to say that there is a Succubus living within you, but instead that your social conditioning can be described as “Succubine” and this has real explanatory power for understanding how you exist as a person born within this patriarchal system.

The Succubus, as a mythic image taking the shape of a woman, is as much about “women” as the hunting goddess, which is to say, that it represents far more than what it might superficially seem to say about only women.

In other words, just because the female Succubus myth represents the feminine position within the patriarchal order, that doesn’t mean it only has to do with womanhood. In fact, it may say far more about masculinity. This is actually the point of the Succubus. It is not best understood as a statement about the dark feminine, but what the dark feminine is given what men raised under patriarchy believe and fear about themselves, women, and the relations between the genders. In that sense, looking to the Succubus and expecting to know about only woman is foolish.

We can thus see how the Succubus differs between men and women. Much of what I write is limited to the masculine standpoint because I am a man. In large part then, I understand the Succubus as a masculine archetype in how it defines in the negative the masculine roles, rules, norms, and all else. By “in the negative” I mean to say that what the Succubus tells men about women also tells men about themselves. I’ll get to what she represents for women in a moment, though I can obviously say far less about that.

As a negative ideal for masculinity, the Succubus represents the masculine role of the patriarchal warrior who conquers women, nature, and world with the dog-eat-dog logic of unilateral power. If men understand women through the Succubus, then this would be the most logical pattern of living. Women are either the castrating woman that must be conquered or the castrated woman who wants to submit to them.

That said, transforming the Succubus archetype would be to transform traditional masculinity.

How do we transform an archetype?

Each archetype can have multiple functions, including Shadow, Heroic, and Anima. As a Shadow archetype, the Succubus represents all the parts of you that you’ve labeled as a threat to repress or attack. As a Heroic archetype, she represents who men must aspire to become in order to vanquish those threats. As an Anima, she represents the kind of women men must fear and must desire, which also contributes to who they ought to aspire to be in order to reject or attain those women.²¹

To summarize what we’ve said, we require the post-heroic approach of making peace with this Succubus archetype and all that she represents as a Shadow, Heroic, and Anima archetype for men.

The first step in making peace is the slow process of facing what we’ve repressed. The castrating woman was repressed, hidden behind the castrated woman because patriarchal power couldn’t conceptualize femininity as powerful if its proper place was submission.

For individual men, we have to reconnect ourselves with what patriarchy has taught us to repress. We must learn to honour ourselves as emotional, embodied beings who need and desire real intimacy and connection with other human beings, including other men. We cannot transform and integrate the Succubus through the unilateral conquering that defines the Succubus herself, and so we cannot integrate all that we’ve been taught is too feminine for us by trying to conquer our emotions, bodies, and relationships with others.

Valkenbourgh criticizes the Red Pill for exactly this approach to self-improvement:²²

What could be more Succubine than that?

As a woman however, transforming and integrating the Succubus will mean something altogether different because of the different roles you’ve been socialized into.

We deny the feminine true power on their own terms. Women are relegated to aspiring to castration or to castrate. As I said at the beginning of this essay, to challenge the patriarchal order is to risk creating real problems in people’s lives. Violence becomes the only path to liberation, not just violence as in hurting people, but even non-violence creates harms. Regardless of what you do as a woman seeking liberation, it either becomes a reason to demonize you as deserving of subjugation through the castrating woman or it’s co-opted for the purposes of perpetuating patriarchy itself.

We’ll be considering the latter situation in the next essay when we discuss the phallic woman, the final part of the tripartite feminine.

The issue with the former option may seem obvious. If the myth of the castrating woman is used to denigrate feminine power, then women are attacked for trying to be powerful.

The real issue with the castrating woman however, is that she is only dangerous. There is no peace, love, and forgiveness, only hatred, vengeance, and violence. This is a perpetuation of the patriarchal splitting of the feminine. Yet it would be just as naïve to say that anger must be set aside in the name of love and forgiveness. Integration also cannot merely be an oscillation between violent anger and loving forgiveness.

I don’t yet know what this will look like. These essays are my own exploration into these archetypes so that I may discover it in the writing, the reading, and the inner work I do in the meantime.

What I can say so far is that there are real negative human impulses in people of all genders. Boehm called us the ambivalent ape for that reason, writing that we have the capacity for domination, submission, resentment of domination, and altruism.²³ If the problem is that we split the feminine into castrating unknown and castrated known, then the solution seems to be honouring the feminine in her wholeness.

The difficulty however is with how our myths help us understand ourselves, our virtues, and our flaws. If we understand our flaws through the Succubus, then we have not truly understood our flaws because of the violence done to them by the Succubus itself as a totalizing framework. The point of honouring the Succubus is to enact a co-transformation of self and Succubus beyond the limited framework we bind each other within.

If all of this seems too vague it’s because we have to wait to get more deeply into this. There is still so much to cover, but I wanted to give a brief sketch of where we’re going.

To do that, we must first see how the feminine wasn’t merely torn in two, but in three. We’ll discuss that in the next essay with the phallic woman. If you’d like to catch up on this Solarpunk History series, then check out the other essays here.

Assignment:

1. In previous essays you’ve selected some domain you’re interested in, be it sexual relations and masculinity as I did, your own gender, a previous or current religious affiliation, a political party, or something else. Remember that you’re answering these in the context of creating solarpunk within that domain of interest.

2. If you read the last essay, then you hopefully have a list of ways it shows up in your domain. Contemplate what it might mean to transform the Succubus, to move from where you currently are to where you want to go in a healthy, sustainable fashion.

3. If you want to explore more what “a healthy, sustainable fashion” looks like, then check out my series A Guide to Meaning. New essays will be posted each week.

4. Write your reply in the comments so we can discuss these ideas!

Until the next one, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.

References:

1 – Goodison, L., & Morris, C. (1998). Ancient Goddesses: The Myths and the Evidence. BRITISH MUSEUM.

2 – Gresham College. (2025, January 15). The Modern Goddess—Ronald Hutton [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv_HdgT9q0s

3 – Ayers, M. Y. (2011). Masculine Shame: From Succubus to the Eternal Feminine. Routledge.

4 – Creed, B. (2023). The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge.

5 – Federici, S. (2014). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia.

6 – Federici, S. (2018). Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women. PM Press.

7 – Ngige, M., & Lasteck, A. (2026, September 3). “Genital theft” accusations: How social media fuelled rumours that turned deadly. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg8lw7n2ddo

8 – Juarrero, A. (2023). Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence. The MIT Press.

9 – O’Neill, R. (2018). Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy. Polity.

10 – Sigmund Freud and His Impact on Our Understanding of Male Sexual Dysfunction | The Journal of Sexual Medicine | Oxford Academic. (n.d.). Retrieved April 18, 2025, from https://academic.oup.com/jsm/article-abstract/6/8/2332/6834571?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false

11 – Cooper, M. (n.d.). Existential Therapies. SAGE Publications Ltd.

12 – Peterson, J. B. (1999). Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. Routledge.

13 – Benjamin, J. (1988). The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. Pantheon.

14 – Fink, B. (2025). The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton University Press.

15 – Pierrehumbert Blaise Guedeney Nicole, G. A. (2021). L’Attachement: Approche Clinique ET Thérapeutique. Elsevier-Masson.

16 – Cramer, P. (1991). The Development of Defense Mechanisms: Theory, Research, and Assessment. Springer/Sci-Tech/Trade.

17 – Loomer, B. (1976). Two Conceptions of Power. Process Studies, 6(1), 5–32. https://doi.org/10.5840/process19766126

18 – Hedlund, N. (2025, April 23). Visionary Realism and the Emergence of a Eudaimonistic Society. Nicholas Hedlund. https://www.nicholashedlund.com/post/visionary-realism-and-the-emergence-of-a-eudaimonistic-society

19 – Fromm, E. (1994). Escape from Freedom. Holt Paperbacks.

20 – Dempsey, B. G. (n.d.). The Evolution of Meaning, Volume 1: Cosmos to Culture. IAM Press.

21 – Ellis, R. M. (2022). Archetypes in Religion and Beyond: A Practical Theory of Human Integration and Inspiration. Equinox Publishing.

22 – Van Valkenburgh, S. P. (2021). Digesting the Red Pill: Masculinity and Neoliberalism in the Manosphere. Men and Masculinities, 24(1), 84–103. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X18816118

23 – Boehm, C. (2001). Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Harvard University Press.

“Is there even such a thing as solarpunk self-development?”

It may seem like a bit of an odd question. Of course there is! You as a person can improve your psychological well-being, your skills, and do more to engage better with the people you care about, the world, and that can help you make the world a better place.

That said, I also think there is a very important and understandable skepticism. When we think of “self-development” we often have images of the hustle, the grindset, the hours spent in front of a computer, the maximization and optimization of every facet of our lives all to make more money. God knows I’ve been there myself.

For this reason, I make a distinction between self-development and self-improvement. The latter is what I just described. In short, this is conforming oneself to the kind of character and lifestyle necessary to find success as defined by neoliberal capitalism. It’s about getting rich rather than becoming the person who can make the world a better place.

Self-development, on the other hand, could be described in many ways. For our purposes here, I want to define self-development as healing and developing your mind in such a way that you’re better able to engage in the world in a way that creates solarpunk. We’ll define what “solarpunk” means in a moment, but this isn’t about getting rich the quick and easy way with these 21 steps! What you’re reading here is a simple guide for beginning to get a grip on your mind, life, and relationships given the incredibly addictive world we live in.

We’ll get into that more in the next chapter, but first, let’s talk about solarpunk. Put simply, it’s an aesthetic of a future culture, one that is egalitarian, nature-oriented, and often, though not always technological.

In such a culture, we no longer have such enormous differences in wealth. It’s a culture that ensures that people have the resources, relationships, and time to live lives of true flourishing. The “punk” of solarpunk is to stand against capitalism and oppression, but is also a rebellion against pessimism. We stand against oppression so that we can move toward a beautiful future.

A beautiful future means of course that our lives are intimately entangled with nature. We don’t view nature as a resource to be extracted, used, and forgotten. We view it as something sacred, something we have a deep relationship with.

This nature-orientation is perhaps the most obvious element of solarpunk. Images like the one just below show a beautiful building covered in lush green foliage. Now image an entire city like this, with as much green space as possible, or entire cities designed specifically to accommodate and enhance nature’s thriving. We don’t just take care of nature, but live within biophilic architectures that are made as living as possible.

The technological component however, is perhaps the least highlighted element. Some people view solarpunk more in terms of cottagecore pastoralism, with huge cities a thing of the past. Others view solarpunk as a means of making the highly technologically advanced city more sustainable.

Whichever you prefer is kind of beside the point. Technology, at least in my mind, is not the enemy. The problem is allowing our pursuit of technological advancement to be defined by materialist accumulation rather than an egalitarian ethos that serves nature and true human flourishing. This is a debate worthy of having, but again, at least in my view, technology is an essential component in that.

Interestingly enough, I think these debates are one of the reasons I refer to this guide as a “first step” toward post-capitalist solarpunk futures.

The simple fact is that we cannot know what solarpunk will actually look like. The philosopher Agnes Callard has written that this is a feature of aspiration rather than a bug. When we aspire to something we can only understand that thing from our current perspective. This means that we can only truly understand what it’s like to be what we aspire to when we get close enough to it. You couldn’t possibly know what it’s like because you’re simply not there yet.

There are two consequences to this.

Firstly, as you move toward your aspirations you have to remain open-minded to course correct. As you get closer, as your old perspective slowly begins to fall away, you’ll likely realize the errors you were blind to. At that point, you’ll realize that you might need a new strategy, a new relationship, or even an entirely new value system. This should be expected though. We all currently live in a highly capitalist environment, perhaps even a technofeudalist environment. We’ve been shaped and organized our entire lives by a system that wants us to keep recreating it even as we fight it.

The entire point of this guide is to help you begin to shed that conditioning, to throw it off, and become at least one step closer to the kind of person who can create solarpunk. This idea of one step closer brings me to the second consequence of Callardian aspiration.

Before we get to that, if you like this essay so far, then please give it a like and subscribe to the channel. It also really helps if you share this essay with people you know. While all my content is free, I do have paid subscriptions so if you’d like to support the channel I’d appreciate that a lot. Thank you so much.

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Each step we take is toward the adjacent possible. The most possible move we can make toward solarpunk is not the collapse of capitalism and the reconstruction of society in the name of egalitarianism, deep ecology, and human flourishing. The most possible move is the one just adjacent to where we are now.

If you have difficulty dealing with anxiety, depression, and an addiction to the internet, that’s where you need to start because that may be all you can do. I can’t tell you how many people I see wasting their lives on the internet, scrolling from reel to reel to reel, hoping for positive change, to be a part of positive change, and yet they cannot put the phone down. However hopeful our future vision of a rebellion against the pessimism of capitalist realism may be, it will never come to fruition if we can’t make this first step away from these addictive technologies.

For all the years of my life taken from me by neoliberal self-improvement, one of the things that I’ve held on to is the capability to get shit done. I’m certainly not saying I always get the right shit done, but I’ve been told by many people that my ability to focus, read, and write is incredible. Again, I don’t want to sound arrogant when I say that. I love reading and writing, so that’s what I spend most of my time doing. That’s kind of my point though.

There was once a time when I could say I loved reading and writing, yet I spent hours playing video games, watching porn, scrolling through Reddit, or binge watching TV shows. I’m not blindly against any of these things necessarily. What I am against is the fact that I wanted to read and write more than anything else, but I couldn’t because of my issues with the internet. Mindless consumption had such a firm grip on my mind that I could do nothing else except consume. My life was spent in front of a screen watching other people live their lives.

How are any of us going to do anything that could create solarpunk when we’re stuck in that kind of lifestyle? How much human potential is wasted, day after day, year after year, because they cannot, you cannot do anything other than scroll to the next reel? We find ourselves stuck, time after time in maladaptive patterns that pull us further and further away from ourselves.

We’ll be picking this up in the next chapter, but the last thing I’d like to discuss is the distinction I make between “toxic” and “maladaptive”, and “healthy” and “adaptive”. Firstly, “toxic” and “healthy” often situate the problem and solution in the individual. While I talk about “character” and “identity” throughout this book, I want to center not the state of the person, but how the state of the person influences the quality of their participation in the world. Certainly our world influences the quality of our participation, but let’s first look at why I prefer “adaptive”.

Let’s take “adaptive anger” as an example. If you’re sitting with your partner and you calmly say, “I’m holding a lot anger because of our conversation yesterday. I feel like my pain wasn’t being seen.” You’re acting with adaptive anger because you’re honestly saying that you’re angry, but you’re communicating in a way that makes connection far more likely.

If you happen to cross paths with a cougar and you calmly say the same thing, then you’re not acting with adaptive anger. In fact, you may be killed. In that moment, you may need to act more aggressively, yelling loudly and making yourself big and intimidating. In that case, the most adaptive response is completely contrary to dealing with a conflict with a partner.

In either case, the most adaptive response to a situation is the one that supports your own flourishing without unnecessarily violating anyone else. Yelling at your partner isn’t going to contribute to intimacy, trust, and love. Yelling at the cougar with all the intimidating dominance you can muster does.

That said, how do we understand “adaptive” in light of capitalism and post-capitalist solarpunk? By “adaptive” do we mean “functionally fit to the ecosystem of capitalism”? In other words, do we mean to say that we’ve achieved psychological well-being when we’ve found success within a capitalist economy?

If that’s your definition then all your efforts are constrained by the kind of character and value system necessary to find success within capitalism, which actually means you become the person who recreates and values the recreation of capitalism itself. The difficulty is that you may feel amazing and find legitimate success, feeling as if you’ve actually found the secret to the good life.

In reality, you’ve only fallen for survivorship bias. You happened to be one of the lucky survivors, but the system itself leaves more damned than allows to truly thrive. In that sense, all your healing, development, and success have simply recreated the oppression of others who were not so lucky so as to have been born in situations where they could become survivors or, for the very lucky few, a thriver.

Yet the difficultly here is how our new found well-being becomes defined by capitalism itself. That is to say, even though you feel amazing, you only believe you feel amazing given how your life has conformed to the standards of success of capitalism. You got the big house, the nice car, all the gadgets and toys and products and signifiers of success you’ve ever wanted, and you feel great about that, but only because you’ve been taught that’s all you needed for meaning in life. To clarify, it makes perfect sense for you to want these things, so I don’t judge you. The issue is that you’ve been convinced that this was what you should have been aiming for in the first place.

Of course, there are also many who don’t feel better despite their success, there success even being the very thing that causes them distress. Yet, there are others who find a good enough life, learning to find meaning in life through the things that actually matter. In this case, this is the person who makes enough money to feel financially secure, but has found meaning in their relationships, their children, their hobbies, etc. For such a person, it isn’t the capitalist definition of success as more, more, more, but, perhaps luckily, a realization that true happiness comes from those people and activities rather than the capitalist success.

Unfortunately, because they found it within the current system, they might believe that the way things are is how they ought to be, “Look at all the happiness I’ve found through putting in enough hard work to earn a good job. If others can’t, then that’s on them!”

The difficulty here is that they’ve been given this narrative to understand their own experience by capitalism itself. They don’t realize that even in their simple life of honest meaning, they too suffer from survivorship bias. They’re right when they say they’ve worked hard and have really earned what they have in life. And yet, the simple narrative that those who didn’t make it are themselves to blame is just that, a simple narrative.

Just because you didn’t make it doesn’t mean you didn’t work just as, if not even harder. There is no 1:1 association between hard work and making it, and for those of us who don’t make it and are unfairly blamed, we’ve tasted a sliver of the unnecessary oppression that capitalism creates. Not to mention the people who don’t work hard and still made it by stroke of luck of the people they or even their parents happened to know. Meritocracy indeed.

Point being, if we’re trying to learn to feel, think, and act adaptively, then this ought to mean something very different from:

1. Conforming to capitalist definitions of success

2. Feeling okay despite unjust conditions

3. Not being angry enough to want to fight for a better world

As I said above, adaptive anger sometimes means responding calmly despite our anger. That’s what it means to have psychological well-being. We need to be able to communicate our needs and boundaries in ways that respect other people and the differences that exist between us, particularly given the difficulties of transforming society.

Coming back to the idea that “healthy” and “toxic” situated the problem in the self, we have to recognize that there is no perfect system, there is no perfect communication between self and system, and there is no perfect communication within the self. As such, problems will always emerge in each domain, which means solutions and strategies within each domain are necessary. While solutions cannot be situated only in the self, they also cannot be situated only in the system.

That is to say, the idea that “self-development” is an inherently individualistic solution that recreates capitalism is a valid criticism, but ultimately an incomplete one. As I said at the beginning of this essay, there is a distinction between self-improvement and self-development. The former is about conforming ourselves to capitalism, the latter asks whether or not we can act within ourselves and with others in a way that actually leads us toward solarpunk.

If we’re at the will of our emotions, thoughts, and behaviours to such an extent that we shut down, then we’re by definition incapable of putting in the work to create a post-capitalist solarpunk world. Even though in a just world we’d have the social support, we don’t live in a just world and that’s the fucking point. You can’t expect to transform capitalism if you lack enough emotional well-being, which, importantly, is not the same as feeling good all the time. In fact, emotional well-being requires the capability to hold anger well enough to act against injustice in a way that creates justice. In other words, that is what it means to have adaptive anger within a capitalist system.

Being angry about capitalism is not enough. We must be angry enough that we can actualize the optimism of solarpunk’s vision. There is a way beyond the mindless consumption of late stage capitalism, but to heal and develop toward solarpunk, we have to be honest where we currently are so that we can take a step toward the adjacent possible.

Once that step is taken, we can take the second step, and then the third, and then the fourth, until one day we find ourselves surrounded by people we love, the life of lush nature all around us, creating, playing, and laughing in a culture that cares for us and gives us the resources and opportunities to care about others and ourselves.

The rest of this guide will show you how to take step one.

Before we continue however, the most important distinction I want you to make is between self-development as developing yourself and developing by yourself. We want the former, not the latter. By reading these essays written by someone else, you’ve already proved that you don’t develop by yourself. Hopefully, you weren’t of such a naively hyper-individualistic mind anyway. We need each other because we’re a relational species. We’re created out of relationships with others and the world.

Even in writing this guide I’m immensely grateful for all the people who’ve influenced me and have created the frameworks that I use throughout. This includes Emotion-Focused Therapy, Somatic Experiencing, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Existential Therapy, and Internal Family Systems. While I am not a therapist, I have been immensely inspired by these therapeutic modalities and have used them in my practice as an IFS-informed Existential Guide.

That said though, please, consider reaching out for therapeutic help (which I do not provide) if you’re severely struggling with your psychological well-being. There are many resources available to you and can be found with a simple google search. If you’re struggling with addictions to substances, with explosive anger in which you hurt people or damage property, or get so overwhelmed that you shut-down for extended periods of time or think about suicide, then please seek therapeutic support.

Importantly, if you struggle with an eating disorder, then please don’t read this guide. I use diet and body image as examples throughout given my own experience, and so it may be very triggering and may give advice that might be damaging for you given where you are in your own journey.

At the end of the day, if you want to create solarpunk, one of the best things you can do is what a solarpunk culture would do. Value your mental well-being enough to get help.

Until the next installment in this guide, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.

Recommended Reading:

A quick note on references. With this guide I’m less interested in the careful citation of claims that I do in my other series. Here, I’m more about delivering you the information you need. All of what I write here is in accordance with the therapeutic modalities I’ve already mentioned and I list those books in relevant essays. Point being, this isn’t information I’m making up. It’s based on real psychological theory that has been used in therapy around the world.

We can quibble over which psychological theory is the best, but what matters here is getting started on a journey of healing and development. As such, while I may reference certain psychological theories, the recommended reading is just that, the reading I recommend. While there are many great books, we only have limited time. Instead, I’m going to be recommending books that will better help you take your education into our own hands and guide you beyond the limitations in my own perspective.

At the end of the day, if these details matter so much to your own healing, then please consider working with a therapist, coach, or guide. At that point, the issue isn’t the right information. It’s the right relationship with someone who can help you apply the information in a way that only a caring, trustworthy, and educated professional can provide. If you’re interested in working with me, then I invite you to schedule a free consultation at this link.

Here are the books. The first is a solarpunk fictional story, and the second is another of my Substack series.

1. Chambers, B. (2025). Monk and Robot: A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy. Tordotcom.

2. My Solarpunk Self series – https://solarpunkmythos.substack.com/t/self

There is no better way to define the ideal man than to say that he is not a woman, define good women as those who submit to him, and then enact a multi-century extermination in which any woman who doesn’t fit that definition is called a “witch”.¹

You of course may be wondering at that point what exactly it is that this ideal man has been defined as, perhaps other than “conquers women”. Once we realize the one doing the defining is patriarchy, it makes a lot of sense that this would be an important piece of the ideal. Though not merely the ideal man, since patriarchy defines the ideal itself as “man”.² From that point, anything that isn’t the ideal must include that which man cannot be, which is feminine, and so women are abjectified, demonized, and slaughtered in untold thousands.¹

You can read more about that in my essay on Technofeudal Witch-Hunts where I use Federici’s work to discuss how the radical disruption of society caused by the emergence of capitalism in feudal Europe led to the witch-hunts.

In this essay, I’m going to be discussing how that same transformation led to a redefinition of the social categories of “woman” and “man”. This was not the origin of misogynistic definitions of “woman” by any means. Much of this had already existed for many years. It was instead the intensification of this old definition in order to justify the excruciating and humiliating torture of the witch-hunts. These same definitions inform how we understand the two genders today.

Obviously trans and non-binary identities exist, but for this essay I’ll be focusing on how the patriarchal West has conceptualized “gender” as being along the reproductive binary.

Importantly, as Connell has stressed, there also isn’t femininity and masculinity, but femininities and masculinities.² More important however, are the myths that a culture tells itself about the genders. The plurality of gender even along the binary certainly matters, but the myths a culture tells itself can operate as both falsehoods and instructive stories.⁴ The myth of binary gender is a falsehood, but it is also an instructive story that defines the lives, aspirations, and fears of all the pluralities that exist.

Given the title, the lens we’ll be using to understand “woman” is the succubus, the demonic, seductive female that drains life from men in the dark of the night. Ayers writes that the succubus is the operative framework defining what it means to be a woman under patriarchy, and thus, what it means to be a patriarchal man.³ The reason for this, as I’ve already stated, is that how we define “woman” is, in part, as a sort of negative ideal for “man”.

If you as a man want a relationship with a woman, then you ought to know what women are like and what they desire. If what women are like is different from men and what they desire is a man who is different from them, then that means that you ought to be that which is not like them in order to pursue intimacy with them, which is itself defined as a “pursuit” given the terms of the definition. A similar, though often not completely equal narrative is told the other way, the differences often leading to intra-class conflict in the form of gender antagonism.

Our desire for love, children, and meaning in life as a sexually reproducing species in a culture that reduces us to being fundamentally defined by the reproductive binary, is structured around aspiring to be different from one another and thus afraid, even ashamed of being too similar.

This “structuring” is known in Lacanian thought as the “symbolic order”, which can be understood as the social order, the rules, norms, and morals about appropriate behaviour, personality traits, and desires of either gender.⁵ The symbolic order specifically as patriarchal order defines who and what you are as either a man or a woman. If you don’t conform to this order, then you’re not “real”, and this is normative. You are a bad, deficient, and defective person for not being a “real” man or woman. To be in such a state is to be the “abject”.⁶

Given that “woman” stands as the abject of the ideal person, her patriarchal structure is centered on her abjectification. She is, primarily, an object of alterity or otherness. To be a woman is to be other. This alterity means that she stands at the margins of the bottom of the patriarchal order.⁶ We can thus see that the ideal man is above her and is himself made abject by his association with womanhood and femininity.²

Thus we see that the succubus defines women as other and deserving of subjugation. If women are meant to be submissive to men it may seem odd that she’s primarily defined as a succubus, a demonic, seductive female that doesn’t really seem “powerless”. Yet when we see that she is “deserving of subjugation”, we can understand why. It’s precisely women’s power as the succubus that makes them worthy of subjugation. She is a danger and she must be subdued in order to protect us all from that danger.

Now we also see the justification for the witch-hunts. Throughout the centuries women were increasingly seen as an essentially corrupting force that betrayed their natural reproductive role. Women were simultaneously reduced to being mothers while being seen as the primary threat to children, birth, and even conception itself. This can be seen in the myriad laws that sprang up around contraception and abortion, as well as in the ousting of women from the medical establishment that now oversaw the process of birth.¹

This would also complete the demonization that had begun with the denigration of the goddesses. Far from the Mother Goddess myth that says our ancestors worshipped a single goddess, our ancestors are more likely to have had many deities representing a diversity of things. It’s in fact a patriarchal monotheistic projection onto our past to say otherwise.⁷

Once patriarchy denigrates women into mothers, the primary path of revalorization is as mothers, yet this simply recreates the reduction of women to their reproductive role. We can’t imagine a polytheistic conception of the divine feminine because we also can’t imagine a polycentric conception of either gender.⁸ We thus do not see a fracturing of an ancient, divine feminine singularity. That didn’t happen, but what does seem to have happened is the plural denigration of the many divinities of femininity into demons.⁷

Yet, again, we have this contradiction between women being reduced to motherhood and also being the sexually autonomous and powerful demonic succubus. As a negative ideal, to be a woman is to be the abject of masculinity, but also the abject of herself. The essence of woman is fundamentally different from what women ought to be. That’s exactly why she has to be subjugated by the masculine. She can’t be trusted because her “unreasonable, vain, wild, wasteful” essence is itself corrupting.¹

The reasons this happened were complex, obviously, but put more simply, it was because material conditions demanded a certain kind of person. With the emergence of capitalism, men were forced into waged labour in order to feed their families whereas women were forced into reproduction in order to create more workers. The division of labour was never complete, but this was the organizing myth governing the capitalist workforce because of the capitalists’ interests.¹

Notice the material demands being placed on the genders and how this would have shaped what they desire in one another. If men were forced to be workers and women mothers, then men would be looking for mothers looking for workers to support them and vice versa. In capitalist hierarchies, where age is associated with increased finances, this would manifest as young men not having the finances to afford and thus attract a woman.

Not only would this create the economic conditions in which myths about what women innately desire could be spun up, but it would also create a legion of resentful young men. In one period in France this often manifested in the “sport” of dragging poor women out of houses to gang-rape them in the streets. Such a reality may beggar belief if it weren’t for the witch-hunts that would occur in the centuries following, where entire families accused their members of witchcraft knowing of the public torture and execution they would likely have to endure.¹

It is thus important to remember that social categories don’t emerge without reason. They are dependent on material conditions that enforce specific definitions for specific categories given what those conditions require to be perpetuated. Clearly, the ruling elite created the laws and conditions they do in order to keep themselves in power, but the consequences of these conditions can often be unforeseen or even contrary to the desires of the powerful. This can include the social categories that arise from these material conditions and how people use these categories to structure their lives.

For example, how does a population of men raised to view sex as sinful react to their desire for women? Part of capitalist domination was the outlawing of collective activities such as festivals, sports, and dancing. The social joys of bodily pleasures were ways to create class solidarity while wasting potentially productive hours. Clearly, capitalists wanted to avoid both, but a consequence of this is how it was refracted through the culture itself in the form of philosophy, medicine, and science.¹

This is obviously another example in which cultural myths about the genders and people generally did not spring into existence with the birth of capitalism. It was instead how these pre-existing myths were parasitized by the material conditions created for and by capitalism and how this in turn led to new myths that couldn’t have existed outside these material conditions.

As an example, the connection between women, femininity, the body, and emotions had already existed at least as far back as the ancient Greeks. Yet, reinterpreted by a philosopher such as Descartes, these associations were reified in the notion of mind/body dualism. The body, only now understood specifically as a machine, was a fallen “thing” in need of being disciplined, controlled, and used by the worker to produce surplus value for the benefit of the capitalist class.^1,9

Given the association between body and femininity, it can be easy to see the analogy between disciplining the body and the wife. Yet think also of how this in turn defines the ideal man. A man, as worker, is the one who disciplines his corrupting body and emotions in order to fulfill his duty as a worker. All of this is interpreted as the nature of man. To be an embodied, emotional man is to be unnatural. Even though there has often been resistance to this myth, those who resist today still do so against this same myth.⁹

As Federici writes, even as far back as the 4^th Century, the clergy recognized this association between women, the body, and their sexual power over men, and so desired to regulate it. The stories of Eve and Pandora frame women as the origin of sin itself, the natural corrupting force of femininity, body, and sex that must be controlled by men to protect society itself. Handbooks were eventually made in the 7^th century to guide priests in regulating the sexual lives of their flock.¹

Returning to the birth of Modern philosophy, we can see this same narrative in the birth of anatomical science and how it was used to exclude the traditionally female healers and midwives from the practice of medicine and childbirth. Even more complex sexual discourses emerged to more precisely shame, control, and punish sexual behaviour that didn’t directly contribute to the reproduction of the workforce. This workforce would come to value being “the workforce”, despite having been created as such through the extermination of their female and sometimes male forebears.¹

Point being though, a woman’s sexual power over men is also a way to corrupt his role as worker and in what he provides for the increase of the capitalist’s human tools. Myth emerged as both the social categories to understand the world and to understand these social categories themselves. The witch was just such a category, and her antagonism against children, whom she routinely sacrificed to the devil, was used as justification to remove women from medicine.¹

Furthermore, a loss of crops and cattle, and the consequent starvations, were also blamed on witches, and thus on women as a group, who were seen to roam the night looking to spread disease and mayhem throughout the land.¹

Women, the body, deals with the devil, nighttime mayhem, and the need to repress one’s sexuality outside reproduction all congealed into the plural notion of the succubus. This demonic, seductive female represented all that was abjectified by patriarchal capitalism in order to create the ideal man as worker and woman as mother. This was then reinforced and reified by philosophy, theology, medicine, science, and the many men, women, and children born to understand themselves with these categories.¹

The final stroke was the public torture that burned the notion of the witch into everyone’s mind. If every woman could be a witch, then no woman could be trusted, and so for the benefit of all, women must be controlled and subjugated by men, who alone possessed the reason necessary to guide their own bodies, women, and society toward flourishing, whether defined in the name of God or capital.^1,9

Yet, all that said, we still have a contradiction in which women are essentially this succubus figure while being naturally mothers. A simple resolution would be to say that women are essentially succubi, whereas as natural mothers they’re reduced to biological reproductive function. Nature intends for them to be mothers, but their conniving essence would have them threaten the safety of children and pull men from productive labour and reproduction.

This makes sense and is definitely a part of it.

Ayers adds to this that feminine power had to be repressed in order to cement the ideal of masculine power. If women could ever be powerful enough to threaten men, then this would contradict the essential power and authority of masculinity. This can be seen in the myths surrounding females as being chaste, unsexual, and desiring to submit.³

The ideal man is not a slave to his body, sexuality, and emotions, which of course includes the need for intimacy. As such, he must repress these weaknesses, thereby repressing the castrating feminine succubus who threatens his power. Thus, we see that the feminine as succubus is in fact split into the feminine as castrating force threatening male power and as castrated. The castrated feminine is the chaste, submissive feminine that not only doesn’t desire power, but desires to be under the guidance of male power.⁶

I’ve obviously just introduced some terms that need to be defined, namely castrating and castrated, but they point us to something I need to cover to truly understand them. Remember that the succubus is the symbolic structure that defines who women are within the patriarchal order. It can be easy to forget that this means that the succubus lives in the minds of individual men and women.

Before we get deeper into that, if you like this essay so far, then please give it a like and subscribe to the channel. It also really helps if you share this essay with people you know. While all my content is free, I do have paid subscriptions so if you’d like to support the channel I’d appreciate that a lot. Thank you so much.

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Previously, I’ve defined my position as a materialist-constructivism whereby material conditions create categories and narratives that people use in order to navigate, perpetuate, and in some cases, transform those material conditions. I’ve primarily framed these categories as being created by the ruling elite to recreate their power, forcing them upon people through policy and propaganda. Yet, this fails to see how these categories operate and evolve within people’s minds, creating unforeseen conditions that then influence the ruling elite.

A simple example of this is hip-hop being created by poor Black people and then being coopted by the ruling capitalist elite to profit. This led to the valorization of Black culture in a way few could have dreamed possible, let alone as a consequence of hip-hop. That’s not to say that this solved racism, but it shows clearly how myths are not merely top-down narratives of control, but arise out of the people who resist that control by expressing their stories in art.

Returning to the mind of the individual, we have to understand that the entirety of the patriarchal order doesn’t exist within any single mind. The patriarchal order consists of the cultural, political, economic, juridical, and other aspects of an entire society, those aspects that exist at the collective level beyond any individual or even merely an aggregate of individuals. All of these factors together operate toward an “attractor”, a concept we covered in my essay on egalitarianism.

In short, an attractor is the stable state a system tends to move toward despite disturbances to the system. As the various parts act together, they tend toward or move around some sort of higher order pattern.¹⁰

For example, a murmuration is a pattern that flocks of birds can fall into. The entire flock seems to move in unison, creating complex flight patterns that seems like it had to have been choreographed. Yet, these birds aren’t choosing to fly as they do. The complex pattern self-organizes from all the birds flying together, with each bird likely responding only to the movement of the other birds in close proximity. With enough birds responding in this way, that shifting, moving pattern of the murmuration is the attractor, a dynamic pattern that appears to take on a life of its own.

The patriarchal order functions in a similar fashion. None of the individuals of the Western goliath need to know all the facets of the patriarchal order in the exact same way in order for it to exist and operate as it does.

Remember, an attractor exists as a stable, dynamic pattern despite disturbances and despite internal variation and diversity. No one bird is like any other and the murmuration can appear even if all the birds were replaced with other birds. Patriarchy may manifest very differently in your life than in the life of another, and yet the pattern of patriarchy can still exist because it is irreducible to any one aspect, domain, or function that constitutes it.

The reason I’m making this point is for you to understand why I can make the claim that the patriarchal order defines women as the succubus, without you necessarily consciously knowing women as the succubus or believing some of the specific things I’ve said the succubus consists of. The succubus is an attractor, a pattern that emerges out of all of the interactions that occur within our culture and because of our material conditions, and how that influences each of us individually and how each of us individually influences that pattern.

This perspective adds to the materialist-constructivist perspective with the psychosocial perspective, meaning that we need both.¹¹ We can understand the patriarchal order as the attractor of all the individual people interacting with one another within a specific culture that shapes and organizes those people, while simultaneously codetermining material conditions. The patriarchal order and the succubus as a specific facet of that order are attractors, patterns that arise out of individuals, cultures, institutions, and material conditions.

When we return again to the individual, the succubus operates within them not in its totality, but in how it shapes and organizes their psychology in response to the culture, the individual people they interact with, and the various institutions that affect them.

If you have a succubine psychology interacting in a succubine culture with other succubine people, even though none of these things can be defined as totally succubine or even succubine in the exact same way, the trajectory of your behaviour and interactions will be constrained in the same way as any bird’s flight in the murmuration is constrained by each individual bird in close proximity and by the total pattern of the murmuration itself. An individual bird may have a lot of freedom to move within that pattern while remaining within and constrained by what the pattern limits that bird to do.

All that said, the succubus also exists as a representation of that attractor, which means that it exists within the minds of the people who are conditioned by that pattern and seek to understand that pattern. Even though I am referring to all the complex dynamics that constitute “the succubus”, by making claims about “the succubus”, I am in fact pointing to a representation of those complex dynamics rather than the dynamics themselves. You cannot point to all that the succubus represents in the same way you can’t point to “climate change”, yet when you use either term, we know what you’re talking about.

As an important limitation to our analogy of the murmuration, the individual birds cannot represent the murmuration in the way we can the patriarchal order, the succubus, and climate change. If you can understand all these complex dynamics with the representation of “the succubus”, then that representation is going to shape how you act, which will in turn change the overall pattern of the succubus itself. That is how we can make such representations emancipatory or, if not careful, accelerate its oppressive power.

Throughout this essay we’ve gathered together the basic structure of the succubus and the basics of the mechanisms by which it operates as an overarching pattern of the co-determining dynamics of material conditions, cultures, institutions, and individuals.

In the next essay, we’ll further discuss the complex structure of the Succubus and how it can show us where Jordan Peterson goes wrong. If you’d like to catch up on this Solarpunk History series, then check out the other essays here.

Assignment:

1. In previous essays you’ve selected some domain you’re interested in, be it sexual relations and masculinity as I did, your own gender, a previous or current religious affiliation, a political party, or something else. Remember that you’re answering these in the context of creating solarpunk within that domain of interest.

2. How does the succubus manifest in your own understanding of women?

3. How does the succubus manifest in your own understanding of men?

4. Can you identify a “succubine” institution? In what way is it so?

5. Write your reply in the comments so we can discuss these ideas!

Until the next one, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.

References:

1 – Federici, S. (2014). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia.

2 – Connell, R. W. (2005). Masculinities. University of California Press.

3 – Ayers, M. Y. (2011). Masculine Shame: From Succubus to the Eternal Feminine. Routledge.

4 – Vervaeke, J., & Mastropietro, C. (n.d.). Awakening From the Meaning Crisis: Part One: Origins (S. Coyne, Ed.). Story Grid Publishing LLC.

5 – Fink, B. (2025). The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton University Press.

6 – Creed, B. (2023). The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge.

7 – Goodison, L., & Morris, C. (1998). Ancient Goddesses: The Myths and the Evidence. BRITISH MUSEUM.

8 – Lugones, M. (2016). The Coloniality of Gender. In W. Harcourt (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development: Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice (pp. 13–33). Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-38273-3_2

9 – Lakoff, G. (20). Philosophy In The Flesh. Basic Books.

10 – Juarrero, A. (2023). Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence. The MIT Press.

11 – Dempsey, B. G. (2026). The Evolution of Meaning, Volume 1: Cosmos to Culture. IAM Press.

Beginning in medieval Europe, untold thousands of people, almost exclusively women, have been murdered for having been involved in witchcraft. It could be easy to think that this was merely the result of a bunch of superstitious middle aged peasants too uneducated to realize their local herbalist wasn’t stealing men’s penises.^1,2 Yet, such witchcraft violence continues to this day with an estimated 20,000 murdered, tortured, or banished in the decade preceding 2019.³

In the past few essays, which you don’t need to read, we’ve discussed our egalitarian origins, the emergence of patriarchal systems, and the representation of the denigration of women in mythologies that have forgotten they once had goddesses. Despite that, one could argue that the final nail in women’s coffin was the horrifying femicide that created the modern definition of woman, and thus man. While we’ll be discussing those definitions in greater depth in the next essay, in this one we’ll begin exploring why exactly this femicide happened in the first place.

According to Federici, the short answer is the emergence of capitalism.^1,2 The transformation of the feudal system into capitalism was a radical rupture that led to the redefinition of human society and psychology. In this essay we’ll also get to how that exact same process is happening today as capitalism gives way beneath technofeudalism. In very brief, technofeudalism is the new economic system created by tech billionaires who shape our behaviour using algorithms and personalized online marketplaces.⁴

That said, one of the most important processes that contributed to the rise of capitalism was the process of enclosure. Kemp and Federici separately write of enclosure as a key element in hierarchy, as it prevented people from fleeing unjust abuses and finding land they could legally use to create their own livelihood.^1,2,5

Interestingly though, Kemp writes that the basic components of capitalism have been present since the Bronze Age, including private property, enforceable contracts, wage labour, markets with responsive prices, and supportive governments.⁵

The enclosures of 15^th century Europe catalyzed these primordial components with increasing swaths of once public land in the hands of the emerging capitalist ruling class.⁵ This led to an incredible number of people being prevented from using the very land that had supported them and their ancestors for generations. By merely closing off land, the medieval social order was radically transformed and this allowed the true emergence of capitalism.

The number of poor people increased dramatically. Families disintegrated as the elderly were left behind and the youths became vagabonds traversing the countryside in search of a better life. One of the worst disadvantaged were older women, perhaps contributing to the still common trope of the elderly lone woman being the hideous, evil witch.¹

The point is that the economic hierarchy changed and suddenly society had an enormous number of newly marginalized people. Federici writes specifically of poverty’s connection with the witch-hunt here:¹

This led to once cooperative collectives atomizing into distrustful individuals who sometimes violently protected what was theirs. There was even a “desocialization and decollectivization” of the population, with collective social events like sports, games, dancing, and festivals all being attacked and regulated by the state. People were disconnected from the social joys of their sinful bodies, forced into filling their leisure time with far more economically productive activities.¹

The point of this was, as Stein writes, because measurement is one of the basic structures of a society, creating a world in service of the one controlling the measurement and the policies created from that measurement.⁶ Federici writes that measurement as a basic structure of capitalist society came in the form of demographic recording so that the state could supervise and intervene in sexuality, procreation, and family life. This was all done in an attempt to atomize collectives into “workers and breeders” in service of a state that sought to create the world needed by its own increasingly capitalist interests.¹

For women, this is particularly important. Federici writes again:¹

The social structure that the still young capitalism inherited was already quite misogynistic, but after enclosure increased the number of poor, undesirable people, this misogyny was further amplified. As more and more land and industry was placed into the hands of the elite, many more than ever had to turn to waged labour.¹

This was very different from the division of labour that was more common place before enclosure. With most families being serfs on farms, the idea of “woman’s work” wasn’t as demeaning. Whether as mothers or in other jobs around the farm, women were essential components in the productive and reproductive capacities of their collective. Despite sexual divisions of labour, the entire family and village worked together to ensure all had enough to eat. Each member was of value.¹

Once waged labour came on the scene of an already fractured population that had been forced to abandon the farm to go to cities, the sexual division of labour became far more the site of misogynistic oppression. Women’s labour was no longer considered work because work was a thing one was paid to do. Much of what women had already done couldn’t be waged in the same way and, with new technologies, much that could was taken by machines.¹

Women were thus forced into a particularly denigrating process. They were a majority of the poor population and of the population forced to move to cities. If you can’t be paid for your labour, then you’re also far more likely to be poor and dependent on men who became the primary waged earners. This all led to “woman’s work” becoming the pejorative it is today.¹

Even though many women have always done waged labour, the waged labour women did was itself devalued, whether socially or economically. If a job didn’t produce as much capital for the ruling class, it simply wasn’t socially valued, and also paid less, making women dependent on both their employers and their husband or father. Additionally, if a job was simply associated with femininity, it was often considered less worthy of celebration or at the very least, beneath men to do, and thus inferior on those grounds.¹

“Thankfully” this was also coupled with the elite’s desires for larger populations and so policy was created to make sure more women were having more children. Not only was women’s work now no longer the valued labour that led to wages, but women were increasingly relegated to their reproductive role.¹

These associations between femininity, and social and economic devaluation are so important because they laid the groundwork for women being an appropriate scapegoat for the social ills surrounding the tumultuous emergence of capitalism. Not only were women and their labour devalued, but this devaluation barred them from revalorization. Federici writes of single women being chased from villages even if they earned their own wage because they were assumed to be unable to support themselves and their true career was that of wife.¹

This causal loop between material conditions and social categories is profoundly important in understanding how capitalism’s emergence led to the witch-hunt. Changing material conditions led to women being less likely to earn as much as men given the sexual divisions of labour that were already in place. Yet, even when changing material conditions could have provided women with greater economic autonomy, the social categories already in place reinforced the barriers that kept women from improving their conditions.

Yet not all women’s labour was domestic. Some of it was medical. The transformation of medicine from “woman’s work” to “man’s work” was another contributor to the denigration of women and to the witch-hunt. Federici writes of this here:¹

Women were seen merely as reproductive machines, but simultaneously, the primary threat to their own reproduction. Federici thus adds:¹

Federici states that the reasons for women being murdered as witches were especially linked with their roles as healers and as having magical powers that threatened the emerging social order that required workers. Where once women were celebrated for these roles, they were demonized and slaughtered in their thousands with the highest number of persecutions coinciding with the highest increase in prices. Economic disruption needed a scapegoat to blame and women, now devalued and demonized, were ripe for punishment.¹

This also coincided with the birth of modern philosophy and the denigration of the body and emotion, both of which had already long been associated with women and femininity.^1,7 Through Cartesian dualism that saw mind and body as fundamentally separate, we had the body understood through the metaphor of a machine. It was a fallen thing of parts and disgusting refuse that had to be disciplined for the sole purpose of production and reproduction.¹

This complex interplay between philosophy, economy, and misogyny birthed a new worldview that amplified the warrior ethos that had already seen the world as a resource for extraction, study, and conquest. The relations between capitalist power hierarchies and the emerging science is exemplified in surgeons snatching the bodies of the recently hanged for study. The undesirables marginalized by capitalist enclosure of once public land were used by the scientific-medical establishment to create theories that were in turn used to justify the demonization as witches of women village healers.¹

Why was all of this done?

The new economic conditions afforded by enclosure demanded a new type of person. Specifically, the “worker”, the human capital that allowed capitalist elite to accrue more and more wealth and power. With philosophy and science, this led to a new conception of the person and a new ethical framework based around being the best worker one could be, being the best tool for a capitalist’s pursuit of wealth.¹

Any ethical framework is meant to create an aspirational ideal for a person to aim for. Any ideal however requires that which doesn’t fit the ideal. The demands of the capitalist economy forced people to change into the new person they were required to be, and all those who didn’t fit that definition, couldn’t, or worse, were simply accused of not fitting were deemed “abject”. The social order defines that which is marginalized, disgusting, and sinful as abject. It then scapegoats the abject for all the ills that are internal to the social order itself and punishes them.⁸

In the case of the witch-hunts, this was primarily the poor, often elderly women who wouldn’t or couldn’t fit into the new social position forced on women given the sexual division of labour, the unequal distribution of wages, and all else we’ve already discussed. Federici links all this to the philosophical-scientific paradigm just emerging:¹

The brutal, horrifying public torture of women was used not only to subdue women, but to subdue men by igniting the fear and hatred of the women closest to them in their hearts. To define an ideal person is to make the pursuit of one’s aspiration defined by the abjection of all of oneself and others that doesn’t conform to that ideal. Public executions of witches became the vehicle through which the abjection of women’s autonomy, sexuality, and personhood defined the ideal person and the ideal woman as sub-person.¹

As the feudal system broke under the weight of capitalisms emergence, the social order that defined the entirety of a person’s life and relationships also gave way. An entirely new way of life, definition of a person, and purpose and place of one’s relationships came into being. As capitalism now buckles under its own weight given climate change and the emergence of technofeudalism, do we see many of the same processes that we saw in the rise of capitalism? The short answer is yes.

As we discussed in the essay on patriarchy’s emergence, no single factor “caused” the witch-hunts. It might seem that enclosure was the primary driver of capitalism’s emergence and thus the witch-hunts, but we have to understand this as the complex coevolution of many different factors that made worsening forms of each possible. Enclosure made much possible that wasn’t before, but those things in turn made worse forms of enclosure possible.

To sum up these various factors then, capitalist witch-hunts emerged because of, though not exclusively, enclosure, competitive individualism, desocialization and decollectivization, the removal of valued contribution given changes in wages, technology, and industry, as well as new forms of measurement in collaboration with emerging philosophical, scientific, and medical establishments. This all afforded the identification and extermination of a scapegoat that defined in the negative a new ideal for the human.

All of this worked together to shatter the social order that had given people’s lives meaning. As you can probably already guess, these exact same processes are all happening today. We’ll begin with enclosure.

Before we get to that, if you like this essay so far, then please give it a like and subscribe to the channel. It also really helps if you share this essay with people you know. While all my content is free, I do have paid subscriptions, so if you’d like to support the channel I’d appreciate that a lot. Thank you so much.

Subscribe now

Even centuries ago, enclosure was not merely about physical enclosure, but also about psychological and social enclosure. Today, enclosures are occurring digitally through the internet, and this is leading to new forms of psychological, social, and physical enclosures.

As we already discussed, technofeudalism is emerging because tech billionaires control online marketplaces through algorithms. When you go onto amazon, you see a completely different marketplace than I do because each of us have different consumer profiles. These marketplaces are made specifically to ensure that we spend the most amount of money the most often, all based on big data that tracks our behaviour across the internet.⁹

Yet this extends far beyond marketplaces, including the social media landscape. What you see on YouTube, Tiktok, and Instagram is also shaped by algorithms to ensure you spend the most amount of your time on their platform. These algorithms select for what is most likely to hold your attention, which means the most stimulating content that fuels and blends outrage, sexuality, and stimulation in a frantic scurry from one emotion to the other.

These platforms are defining your entire worldview based on emotions that appeal to your basest instincts and values, even shaping those base instincts into forms they could never have taken in a non-digital environment. You imagine yourself to be choosing what you watch, but you can only choose between those things the algorithm learns appeals to your base desires. Even though you start by choosing what appeals to you, over time the algorithm and “for-you-page” begins shaping you through content that wins in the algorithmic lottery by conforming to the emotional demands of sex, outrage, and stimulation.

This creates an intense psychological enclosure in which people are closed off from their higher desires, and social enclosure separating them from one another. It’s also an enclosure in which hyper-individualism is celebrated. Capitalism itself already rewards hyper-individualist competition, but with the psychological fracturing caused by digital enclosure, we’re given hyper-narrow categories with which to establish our individuality.

The neoliberal “branded identity” views your individuality in terms of a company that you promote and market through social media itself. The fact that “influencer” has become one of the top five most desired job by our youth speaks clearly to this.¹⁰ We’re celebrating the entrepreneurialization of the self as the ideal human and so accelerating the achievement-subject. As Han writes:¹¹

Again, we assume our choices on the internet are expressions of our own freely defined individuality, but it’s being shaped and defined by social media itself in the context of a culture that idolizes achievement in capitalist status games as the primary measure of the good life.

Han writes that, where dictatorships attempt to control bodies, the neoliberal regime controls minds through motivation, projects, initiative, and optimization. The dictum to “think positively and pursue your dreams” becomes an oppressive requirement, as if you’re living a half-life unless you’re constantly working toward more success, more vacations, more experiences.¹¹

This “regime” is so counterintuitive because we’ve been taught to view this as a freedom and good. Yet again, it becomes a whip of its own. The claim that we “can” do something becomes a commandment that we must try with everything we have or else we’ll never be happy, and only losers refuse to try.¹¹ We fail to see how all our hopes and dreams are merely reflections of the images we’re fed through media. While Han focuses on neoliberalism in his critique, technofeudalism has only accelerated and amplified this same phenomenon.

This is also in the context of desocialization and decollectivization that’s caused by the technofeudal internet. Where puritanical capitalism outlawed the social joys of bodily pleasures, technofeudalism pornifies this dynamic. I’ve previously defined porn as the idolization of the abject in a way that amplifies the disconnection with ourselves and each other that abjectification initially created.

In other words, the puritanical outlawing of bodily pleasures abjectified those pleasures, making them sinful and wrong for us to engage in, especially as a social affair. The parasite that capitalism is saw the profound profits hiding in those sinful pleasures and so incentivized their reintroduction into the mainstream. Yet, because we lack the same social structures that allowed us to metabolize those pleasures, the way we reintroduce these abjectified elements of ourselves only serves to separate us even further from ourselves and each other. This is what I mean by “porn”.

Ironically, we see this most especially with porn, OnlyFans, and the already horrifyingly isolating power of AI romantic partners. The more deeply we pursue these once completely abjectified pleasures specifically in these ways, the further away we’re pulled from real intimacy with other human beings, even with the physical world itself.

It gets so bad that such people, robbed of the education and first-hand experience they need to create enjoyable intimacy, are deluded into believing porn is better than the real thing. They can’t grasp that their fear and pain surrounding intimacy is due to a lack of skill. They satisfice their needs for intimacy with porn, which means that they pursue things that make them feel as if they are being satisfied but in reality are hurting them. We all confuse satisfaction with satis-fiction. Even worse though, they believe themselves to be edifying their needs toward their own algorithm-chosen, individual definition of true human flourishing.

The pornification of other domains functions in a similar way, yet the fracturing caused by enclosure means that abjectification happens as it is pornified. What I mean to say is that no matter what we find ourselves inspired by, no matter how we express our algorithm-chosen individuality, we’re simultaneously exposed to messages governed by outrage. There is always going to be someone who sees what we do as cringe or even unjust and so we’re being abjectified in myriad ways by myriad communities. We’re given endless opportunities to stand for our algorithmic individuality, be abjectified for it, and then use that to re-idolize our abjectification in a way that separates us further from other human beings.

Through this more general idea of pornification and the idea that we confuse satisfiction with edification, outrage foments gender antagonism. We don’t see the romantic landscape in terms of complex heterosexual relations in which honest mistakes are made by most of us, with all of us being shocked by the depravity of the few monsters of either gender. We instead see the catastrophe of heteropessimism where every member of the opposite gender are themselves the worst of the monsters.

Throughout all of this is the algorithms themselves, the new methods and forms of measurement that define what is True, Good, and Beautiful. Each algorithm is made to precisely measure every length of your eyeball’s glance at content in order to shape the perfect life-sucking for-you-page possible. Big data shared across the industry is used to run experiments on us in order to extract profit and mold us into a new technofeudal ideal of the human.⁹ We have already become the perfect, mindless consumer thirsty for the nihilistic hedonism only the algorithm can provide.

The philosophical, scientific, medical, and technological establishments collude with technofeudal lords and Big Data to accomplish these digital enclosures and the hyper-extractive satis-fiction they force upon. A new ideal human being is being defined for us without our knowledge, let alone our consent. We thus find ourselves at a fork in the road between a transhumanist, technofeudal dystopia and a posthumanist, participatory emancipation.¹²

Ferrando distinguishes transhumanism and posthumanism in several ways, but for now we can understand transhumanism as an acceleration of the abjectification of the body.¹² The transhumanist idea of the “good life” is one that has excised the corruption of our enfleshed bodies for cybernetic upgrades or complete upload of our consciousness into the digital world. This is myth in both senses of the word as guiding narrative and falsehood. Transhumanists guide us with chains into a future they don’t even know is physically possible.

Posthumanism, on the other hand, operates as a transcendence and inclusion of the body.¹² Rather than seeing the body as a fallen corruption, posthumanism sees the body as fundamental to what it means to be sentient. This is further justified by 4E cognitive science which views our embodiment as fundamental to cognition. We feel, think, and act through and with our bodies.¹³ As such, we see our bodies as beautiful aspects of what it means to co-create flourishing between humans and the more-than-human world.

Yet, posthumanism also doesn’t exclude technological upgrades. The distinction is that we aren’t doing so to escape our bodies or each other, but to attempt to deepen our connection with ourselves, each other, and the more-than-human world. No matter what we might be able to change about ourselves with technology, it must always transcend the oppressive binary that sees our bodies as sinful foes to be purified.

This is why posthumanism has become a key dialogue partner in my own attempt to articulate a map of reality that doesn’t fall for transhumanist technofeudalism. We instead want a posthumanism that is truly participatory, which means it’s one we all agree to, which of course assumes that we are all capable of understanding what’s at stake when we decide. Participatory posthumanism is thus an emancipatory process that includes the voices of all.

Yet, with the technofeudal digital marketplace of ideas, we are instead fractured into hyper-tribal fractals ripe for intertribal conflict. Just as the hyper-individualism of the internet creates endless opportunities for abjectification between tribes, it also provides endless opportunities to define a scapegoat to blame it all on. The gender antagonism I mentioned above moves the witch-hunt from “the human as man vs. the abject as woman” to “the human as hyper-tribal digital persona vs. the abject as anyone who disagrees with narcissistic me”.

The obvious question however, is who will be the ones tortured in public executions to enforce that new definition of the human?

I think it’s important to understand that technofeudal witch-hunts happen in (at least) two domains that are determined by class. The witch-hunt I’ve been alluding to so far is the one that exists primarily within the lower classes. We fight each other online and in-person through destroying reputation, careers, or simply roasting each other with online pileups that are quickly forgotten when the next exciting controversy comes around. Too often however, these witch-hunts lead to real political violence, such as when an incel drives his van through a crowd of people.

Yet there is also the witch-hunts between the ruling elite and the lower classes of people. We can see this in the United States with the gestapo ICE disappearing undesirables from the street. We can also see this with the AI surveillance war machine that is Palantir’s collusion with the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. It’s particularly telling that Peter Thiel, one of the founders of Palantir, is an avowed transhumanist who hesitates when asked if humans belong in his future and believes that he’s stopping the Anti-Christ by creating an AI surveillance state.

At this point, you might be wondering what any of this has to do with solarpunk. If you don’t know, solarpunk is a vision for a future society that is egalitarian, nature-oriented, and technological. One of its primary slogans is that its punk is a rebellion against pessimistic futures. All that I’ve written seems incredibly pessimistic, perhaps excluding the piece on posthumanism.

This leads us to discuss the final piece I mentioned above, the changes of waged labour and technological industry. Obviously this is happening today with the creation of AI that is intended by its creators to steal all of our creative, scientific, and philosophical jobs, among many others. This radical rupture and transformation in human society is producing a new kind of human that cannot pursue those things that have given us the most meaning, purpose, and value in our lives, such as the art, music, narrative, and poetry made to make sense and meaning of ourselves and the world.

Before LLMs became such a threat to us, I was one of the people who viewed AI with excitement. I was so hopeful that I’d live to see AI robots that could do all the jobs we didn’t want to do, making possible an economy where humans were once again no longer forced to do waged labour in order to survive. In such a world, if you wanted to open a restaurant and serve clients, you could because you wanted to, rather than because you had to in order to survive. If you wanted to spend you days being creative, studious, or social, you could if you wanted to.

Such an AI utopia is almost by definition solarpunk, yet it seems further and further away as the AI we do have takes more and more of these activities we need to flourish as humans. Again, even our social connection is being parasitized by AI chatbots masquerading as romantic partners, even as parents and siblings. If what it means to be human is being redefined, then the humans we and our descendants will be while under technofeudalism seem to be little more than mindless consumers of AI content.

Again however, we are not condemned to this transhumanist technofeudal dystopia, but instead inhabit a clear fork in the road between it and something far more like solarpunk. Material conditions clearly matter since this rupture in our reality is happening because of incredible transformations in technology. Yet, just as with the capitalist witch-hunts, our witch-hunts are creating new categories of what it means to be human, even what is real. While material action is required, we also require adequate frameworks, categories, and maps to chart a course through this chaotic mess toward solarpunk.¹⁴

In the next essay of this solarpunk history, we’ll be discussing how the capitalist witch-hunts created the social category of “woman” in the form of the succubus and how this in turn formed the social category of the human as the man who conquers her.

Assignment:

1. In previous essays you’ve selected some domain you’re interested in, be it sexual relations and masculinity as I did, your own gender, a previous or current religious affiliation, a political party, or something else. Remember that you’re answering these in the context of creating solarpunk within that domain of interest.

2. How have the digital enclosures of technofeudal social media shaped your “individuality”?

3. How might you begin to separate yourself from these influences?

4. How are you contributing to the technofeudal witch-hunts?

5. How might you disengage or act against them?

Until the next one, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.

References:

1 – Federici, S. (2014). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia.

2 – Federici, S. (2018). Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women. PM Press.

3 – Forsythe, M. Danagogo, B., & Baker, C. (2025) Legislative approaches to addressing harmful practices related to witchcraft accusations and ritual attacks: A global review. International Network Against Witchcraft Accusations and Ritual Attacks. https://endwitchhunts.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Globalreview-EffectiveLegislativeApproachesReport.pdf

4 – Varoufakis, Y. (2023). Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Melville House.

5 – Kemp, L. (2025). Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. Random House, Inc.

6 – Stein, Z. (2016). Social Justice and Educational Measurement: John Rawls, the history of testing, and the future of education. Routledge.

7 – Lakoff, G. (20). Philosophy In The Flesh. Basic Books.

8 – Creed, B. (2023). The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge.

9 – Zuboff, S. (2020). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.

10 – Zandt, F. (2023, October 11). Infographic: What Do U.S. Teens Want To Be When They Grow Up? Statista Daily Data. https://www.statista.com/chart/31014/most-popular-future-jobs-with-united-states-teenagers

11 – Han, B.-C. (2015). The Burnout Society. Stanford Briefs.

12 – Ferrando, F. (2020). Philosophical Posthumanism. Bloomsbury Academic.

13 – Newen, A., Bruin, L. D., & Gallagher, S. (Eds.). (2020). The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. Oxford University Press.

14 – Hedlund, N. (2025, April 23). Visionary Realism and the Emergence of a Eudaimonistic Society. Nicholas Hedlund. https://www.nicholashedlund.com/post/visionary-realism-and-the-emergence-of-a-eudaimonistic-society

There’s nothing like the feeling of being dominated, to have a person with more power than you, standing over you, deciding your own fate for you for no other reason than that they can. Maybe it’s because they’re better than you and this has given them greater privileges in some organization. Maybe it’s because they’re nothing more than a power-hungry tyrant psychopathic enough to view other people as tools to be used and discarded.

Solarpunk, an egalitarian, nature-oriented, and technological culture, is one that by definition doesn’t create systems that specifically reward such traits. No system is perfect, obviously, but there’s a clear difference between solarpunk and our current technofeudal predicament, with a few tech billionaires playing as gods deciding our collective fate.

In my hope to create a solarpunk culture, I’ve been led to post-humanism and the ethical update to humanism that it provides. Post-humanism is a philosophical movement that doesn’t reject the body in the way that transhumanism does, but instead seeks to dethrone humans, challenging those of our species who believe we’re entitled to dominate non-human life or the environment.¹

My goal with this series of stand-alone essays is to begin updating our ontology, our map of reality with post-humanism, using it to help us better understand our place as human beings in the universe. In the previous essay, which you do not need to read, we challenged the notion that evolution doesn’t lead to greater complexity.

The reason that’s important for us is because the post-humanist Francesca Ferrando greatly emphasizes that evolution is a process of diversification and not complexification. They have such strong advocacy for that position because they fear the fascistic and speciesist implications of complexification.¹ If evolution is a process of increasing complexity, even in part, then that means that we can talk about evolution as a normative process. More complexity means better, which means humans as a more complex organism rightfully reign supreme in a hierarchy of dominance.

Applying the insights of complexity science to evolution however, we can see that more complex organisms emerge, partly, because of the pressures of increasingly complex environments. Although it’s important to say that evolution is not exclusively a move toward complexity, only that there are processes of evolution that cause it to emerge.² This, eventually, leads to the emergence of human beings who are, undoubtedly, incredibly complex organisms with immense causal power in the world.

Whatever the truth of evolution’s complexification, there does appear to be a hierarchy of power here and it’s threatening our planet. Obviously for those of us who don’t like world-ending techno-fascism, this is a very real problem. However, for post-humanism, it’s a problem because the entire point is to be post-anthropocentric, to do away with the notion that human beings are entitled to dominate nature, non-human animals, and each other.¹

As I argued last time though, complexification must not be thought of as a growth to goodness nor entitlement, but is in fact a growth toward new capabilities for both good and evil.³ Understanding this is important precisely because we want to be good. This means that understanding what it means to complexify is also important, which brings us to the tension between hierarchy and ethics. As the title of this essay asks, is hierarchy always evil?

Firstly, the anti-hierarchical position is a performative contradiction.^4,5 A performative contradiction occurs when you make a claim that presupposes the claims contradiction. For example, claiming that there are no universal truths presupposes the universal truth that there is not one single universal truth…⁴

Freinacht deconstructs the notion of anti-hierarchy as a performative contradiction as follows. By claiming that anti-hierarchy is better than hierarchy, you’ve just created an ethical hierarchy where anti-hierarchy is above hierarchy. You want people to be anti-hierarchical and so you’re motivated to convince people to agree with you, assuming that you know better than them, and so are justified in exercising power in order to flatten the hierarchy. To be able to flatten a hierarchy presupposes greater power than the hierarchy has to preserve itself. Thus, your goal is quite literally to gain more power and thus domination over the current hierarchy. What is that if not the creation of a new hierarchy?⁵

Even worse, you’ve capped that hierarchy, saying that there is no position that could possibly be more ethical than your anti-hierarchy hierarchy.⁵ No matter what, you’ll always have the most morally righteous position for all time and so deserve to hold on to your morally righteous definitely-not-domination. That…sounds a lot like the superiority that Ferrando seeks to avoid.

Even worse than that however, is that the nature of your hierarchy requires you to blind yourself to the hierarchy you’ve just created. Remember, you’re anti-hierarchy. You by definition can’t allow yourself to be hierarchical, and so to be anti-hierarchy you must avoid the fact that you’ve just created a hierarchy with yourself in the superior position.⁵

Now you’re not only covertly enforcing a hierarchy, you’re also motivated to actively blind yourself to that fact. You’ve plucked out the eyes of self-awareness in a desperate attempt to be more ethical. You’ve placed yourself in the even worse position of being unable to ensure that your hierarchy doesn’t fall for all the very real ills of hierarchy that caused your anti-hierarchical stance to emerge in the first place.⁵

If you’ve been following this series, then you likely already have a sense for how we can solve this dilemma.

Post-humanism is meant to be a post-dualism that rejects binaries. Yet, not only does anti-hierarchy create a binary between itself and hierarchy, it’s also a flattening binary. In brief, the dualist, flattening binary is one in which the relations between the terms of the binary narrow in on a static, rigid, and too simplistic conception of one and the other. The post-dualist, complexifying binary is one that through their relating, co-determine and co-create something beyond the binary itself.

By taking hierarchy to be the automatically bad position, and anti-hierarchy the automatically good position, you’ve reified this flattening binary as the only binary that could exist, completely avoiding the possibility that there could be a hidden complexifying binary waiting to be discovered.

Before we continue though, what exactly is complexity? Complexity is a measure of the number and variety of parts and the number of connections of those parts. A system is considered very complex if it has many parts performing a great diversity of functions in an integrated fashion, with many functions acting in concert. As a system complexifies, it differentiates into new parts, and then re-integrates, then differentiates and re-integrates.^2,6

This has all been very abstract, so let’s make that a tad more concrete by using our hierarchy problem as an example of flattening binaries, complexifying binaries, and complexification.

Ken Wilber has written on the difference between dominator and growth hierarchies.⁴ Notice the beginnings of a complexification there. We started with hierarchy vs. anti-hierarchy. We then differentiate hierarchy between growth hierarchies and dominator hierarchies. What are we going to do with this new diversity?

Firstly, a dominator hierarchy is what we typically think of when we say hierarchy. It’s one predicated on power, where the higher in the hierarchy you are the more powerful you become, but also the more justified you feel in wielding that power. You’re seen to be more worthy of that power.⁴ Trump is the personification of a dominator hierarchy. He believes he’s better than everyone else, that he deserves to be better than anyone else, and that if he pleases he can grab you by the pussy and his superiority is precisely the reason you wanted him to all along.

A growth hierarchy, on the other hand, is one that is focused on degrees of capability.⁴ For example, there is a hierarchy between students and teachers because the teacher has grown greater capabilities in the domain of education in question. This is far from saying that the teacher is intrinsically superior to the student simply because they know more. It’s instead to acknowledge that in this domain the teacher does know more and so is more capable than the student. People with more skill in some domain get greater access to realities relevant to that domain. That’s why the student is learning from them in the first place and why we don’t have unskilled people engineering buildings.

As such, growth hierarchies tend to be far more contextual, whereas dominator hierarchies, unsurprisingly, tend to aim for more cross-contextual authority. By definition they seek to dominate in all situations. Growth hierarchies focus on one or a few domains. Where in this domain the teacher is more capable than the student, in another domain that student may be far more capable. In no situation does that mean that the teacher is afforded greater moral worth than the student.

While growth hierarchies come with greater power, this actually creates more responsibilities on the part of the teacher.⁴ The fact that the teacher is more capable requires they be that much more aware of the power dynamics that exist given the differences between them and the student. Often enough, the higher up you are in the growth hierarchy the more responsibilities you have precisely because the difference in capability can put you in a radically more agentic position than your student.

A key difference between a dominator hierarchy and a growth hierarchy is that the dominator seeks greater power and less responsibility. Growth hierarchies take their greater power as a greater responsibility and value helping those lower in the hierarchy to grow.⁴ The teacher’s exact purpose is to help the student learn everything they need to know to take their capabilities and education into their own hands.⁷

Sometimes however, hierarchies are both growth and dominator hierarchies.

Plácido Domingo was placed in a position of power because those around him trusted that his capabilities as a conductor would motivate audiences to spend money, thereby creating employment for many. He even went above and beyond to help the careers of the people he worked with, using his capabilities and power to help them grow. However, he also abused this power to sexually harass many of the women he worked with. While he helped the careers of even those who rejected his advances, those advances were so frequent that women had to look outside the change rooms to make sure the coast was clear.⁸

He was also surrounded by people who, because they profited off of his success, enabled his abuse and, likely, his ignorance of how abusive his behaviour actually was. It could be said that the hierarchy wasn’t even maintained most by the man highest in the growth hierarchy of musical capability, but by those who profited off of him being there.⁸

This is an important point to make about hierarchy in general. There is never only one hierarchy. Luke Kemp has re-named “civilization” as goliath, which he defines as:⁹

While there was a hierarchy of capability that afforded Domingo greater power, there was also a hierarchy that afforded the profiteers the power to sweep his abuses under the rug at the expense of those he harassed. Again, that miniature goliath may have allowed them to have power over Domingo’s perception of his own behaviour.⁸

This is such a beautiful example of the tragedy of hierarchy, and yet we’re still stuck with the inevitability of hierarchy. You cannot change the fact that a difference in capability creates a hierarchy rife with the potential for growth in capability and domination with power. As the educational philosopher Zak Stein writes:¹⁰

Notice what’s happened so far. We’ve differentiated hierarchy into growth and dominator hierarchies. In fact, there are important enough differences that growth hierarchies can even be seen as essential forces for beneficial growth, the maintenance of society, and the safety and well-being of those within it. We then re-integrated these hierarchies, showing how they often come hand-in-hand. That’s a difficulty with hierarchy that we should never forget. All systems cast a fascist shadow and so we must continually shine a light.

That may lead us back to the anti-hierarchy stance, but notice something else here. We started with a simplistic, flattened binary of hierarchy bad and anti-hierarchy good, which forced us into the blindness of the anti-hierarchy hierarchy.

We thus now have a more complex understanding of hierarchy where we see that hierarchies can be very good but also very bad precisely because the good increases the possibility of the bad. Christopher Boehm has written that humans are the ambivalent ape because we are often defined by domination, submission, the resentment of domination, and of course, altruism.¹¹ This same ambivalence exists in all hierarchies, often depending only on where you lie relative to the hierarchy itself.

Again, Domingo’s prestigious capabilities as a conductor were precisely the things that put him a position to abuse his power and to be enabled by those who wanted to use his power rather than make him a better person.

This re-integrated notion of hierarchy has given us a more complex, nuanced understanding of hierarchy, which allows us to better figure out how to use hierarchies well. The binary between dominator and growth hierarchies led us to articulate their differences and complexify our understanding. We thereby revealed the binary not as a flattening binary toward violent over-simplicity, but as a complexifying binary toward strategic liberation from the worst elements of dominator hierarchies.

It may seem like we’re stuck with the same binary between hierarchy and anti-hierarchy, but that would be to unfairly flatten the complexity of this new binary that’s hiding behind the word “hierarchy”. Yet, given the undeniable interconnectedness of growth and dominator hierarchies, we also can’t say they can ever be mutually exclusive terms. A term like “ambiarchy” or ambivalent hierarchy may work to highlight this more integrated understanding of hierarchy, but I’m not convinced it’s necessary yet. More importantly, where is this new complexifying binary leading us?

This new notion of hierarchy is aware of itself as having positive and negative elements, and it seeks to grow itself in a way to better foreground the positives. In the spirit of growth, it might begin to dialogue with the anti-hierarchy position, taking the role of student in the face of the anti-hierarchy position.

“Tell me anti-hierarchy, why do You hate me so? Help me understand why I’ve gone wrong.”

Anti-hierarchy might reply:

“I see You hierarchy, in all your desire to do better, I know You come in good faith. You too often believe that your capabilities entitle you to greater authority over those with less capability. Those with less capability become not only motivated by the desire to grow in their capabilities, but to grow in the power that those capabilities afford them over those with less. This creates unhealthy, perhaps even downright violent competition between people who are blinded by their mutual subjugation to those in authority. Where Tom and Jane should rise up against the unjust authority of Donald, they’re too busy fighting each other to get enough drops of empowering capability trickling from him.”

In a moment of insight, hierarchy breaks out of the simplicity of his previous understanding, saying, “So You’d have me focus more on Tom and Jane collaborating than on Donald’s ‘teachings’? Get them working together so that they even can grow? I realize that I’ve been unfair to you anti-hierarchy, I’ve totalized you as my enemy, but I see now that You were fighting precisely for what I can now understand about myself as the difference between growth and domination. I see now that I have flattened You into anti-hierarchy when You are in fact also egalitarianism.”

From this complexified vantage point, our new notion of hierarchy can see that anti-hierarchy can also be egalitarianism.

Before we get to that, if you like this essay so far, then please give it a like and subscribe to the channel. It also really helps if you share this essay with people you know. While all my content is free, I do have paid subscriptions so if you’d like to support the channel I’d appreciate that a lot. Thank you so much.

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Wilber writes about egalitarianism here:⁴

A similar view is offered by Boehm in his analysis of egalitarian hunter-gatherers who frequently employed levelling mechanisms in order to prevent hierarchy from emerging. Interestingly, Boehm called such social arrangements a reverse dominance hierarchy because the collective enacts dominance of any one individual to prevent them from becoming singularly dominant.¹¹ This ensures true egalitarianism with each member of the band having roughly equal decision-making power, bargaining power, and thus, personal autonomy.¹²

I originally made the following argument in my essay on egalitarianism, where I claimed that I think Boehm misses something important when he calls egalitarianism a reverse dominance hierarchy. There’s something truly insightful there in how the collective emerges as more powerful than any one individual, but the limit is in viewing that as mere dominance.

The specific social role that can help us understand this limitation is what I call the “student/teacher”. Where I am your teacher in one domain, I might be your student in another, and even where I am your teacher, you teach me how to teach you better. Honouring this fact allows for relationships based on educational reciprocity in which neither of us are superior to the other. We’re called into a relation of true friendship where our love for one another is defined by mutual growth.¹³

The teacher is not only motivated by the prestige that comes with whatever domain they’ve excelled in. They almost certainly still are, but they’re also motivated by the joy of sharing their expertise with the rest of the tribe because of the egalitarian ethos. Does this mean that every tribe member is always motivated to teach in only this way? Of course not.

Yet, if the egalitarian ethos is truly alive within a population, then the social harmony that comes from altruistic education is far more likely to be there.

Elsewhere, Stein has made the distinction between the educator in a growth hierarchy and the propagandist in a dominance hierarchy.^7,10 The educator knows more and has greater expertise than the student in some domain, and so in and only in that domain they ought to have greater decision-making power. Even egalitarian tribes honour and respect expertise, as, of course, they should.^11,14

Yet, the educator seeks to give the student the tools they need to take their education into their own hands. The propagandist seeks to give the student the tools they need to further the propagandist’s agenda. It’s the difference between “I teach so that we may grow together in response to the challenges we face” vs. “I teach to recreate the worldview that gives me power over you”.

In other words, egalitarianism is the cooperation between equals that allows them to grow together, with their different distribution of capabilities balancing each other out as a collective. Even if either remains the master in their own domain, the fact that they work together means they’re far better off than they are alone.

I hope you noticed that something really profound just happened there. Notice that it was their differences in capabilities in two different hierarchies of skill that made the collective that much more powerful. Rephrasing Kemp’s definition of goliath we can see that we now have a collection of interconnected growth hierarchies in which individuals create something more together than either of them could have alone.

Additionally, just as we integrated dominator and growth hierarchies, we can also integrate egalitarianism with anti-hierarchy to produce what Wilber calls heterarchy.⁴ To be clear then, anti-hierarchy is the impulse Boehm calls domination resentment, it’s the impulse that drives us to be skeptical and challenge those who seem to be higher up some hierarchy.¹¹ To be egalitarian, as we’ve said, is to have equal decision-making power, bargaining power, and personal autonomy.¹²

Heterarchy, as the integration of anti-hierarchy and egalitarianism, is the structure that ensures egalitarianism through an anti-hierarchy that doesn’t place itself above personal autonomy. It’s about centering cooperation between equals. Yet, beyond mere cooperation for mutual growth, heterarchy is what gives those lower in a dominator hierarchy the power to overcome the dominator hierarchy because they value their mutual personal autonomy.

So yes, please do not take anything I say as an argument against the anti-hierarchy impulse.

In fact, even if you disagree with everything I say here and believe that I’m deluded about the value of growth hierarchies, GOOD! Please, argue, stand by your position, come up with more refined, sophisticated, and complex arguments. Your type of thinking is necessary to keep dominator hierarchies from existing. I would only hope your position would become this more complexified notion of heterarchy rather than anti-hierarchy. As Boehm himself writes of heterarchy within hunter-gatherers:¹¹

Point being, “egalitarian” hunter-gatherers haven’t necessarily ever had the anti-hierarchy that exists in a flattened binary with hierarchy. Yet, this more complexified notion of heterarchy, being a system with a greater variety of parts integrated to act in concert, does have an anti-hierarchy element to it. Heterarchy’s cooperative anti-hierarchy is necessary because dominator hierarchies pit those beneath them against each other. Insofar as those beneath them grow, they do so in a hostile competition that often leads them to justify and perpetuate the dominator hierarchy. This is partly what gives them their enduring power.

By contrast, those in growth hierarchies may compete, but they do so as the vehicle for each other’s growth. Boehm himself discusses the competition that exists even in the most egalitarian foragers, yet this is again not competition against one another.¹¹ It’s the friendly competition between equals who see that competition as generative of mutual growth in capability. Competition within growth hierarchies is in service of educating better competitors for the joy of playing and living together, rather than competition in the name of domination. Those above them would seek to keep that competition healthy and collaborative, ensuring that there is equitably distributed access to resources and relationships for growth despite differences in capability.

I hope you now see why Boehm’s claim that heterarchy constitutes a reverse dominance hierarchy isn’t exactly accurate. While he accurately identified heterarchy, he falsely called it and thus misunderstood it as a reverse dominance hierarchy. He says himself in his book that anthropologists tend to focus on the negatives of egalitarian collective authority.¹¹

When it comes to collective authority then, the collective is not necessarily only dominating individuals, but creating the conditions in which individuals can educate, grow, and care together. The same prestige that benefitted Domingo is still operative here, but it’s not prestige that affords greater decision-making power in a dominance hierarchy. It’s greater decision-making power within a growth hierarchy that benefits the heterarchical collective. The overarching context of the collective changes how expertise, prestige, and domain-specific increases in decision-making power operate. To reduce that to a reverse dominance hierarchy misses that point.

Again, you want to always remain conscious of the possibility that prestige and expertise create a dominance hierarchy. Yet, when contained within the bounds of a growth hierarchy, the collective acts in service of the individuals because of how they act in service of the collective. To call this a reverse dominance hierarchy would be to miss the social harmony afforded by the circular relations between the individual and the collective that gives each individual the education they need in order to enact their autonomy in the world. Heterarchy is thus afforded not by a reverse dominance hierarchy, but by a collection of interconnected growth hierarchies in service of individual growth in the face of challenges that threaten the heterarchical structure of the collective.

The theologian Bernard Loomer refers to this dynamic as the distinction between unilateral and relational power. Unilateral power is about relations of dominance over others, whereas relational power emerges where increases in your power lead to increases in my power lead to increases in our power together.¹⁵ Aligned with this, research on meaning in life has shown that beyond simply having a purpose, you find incredible meaning through giving yourself to something beyond yourself, when what you do matters to people who matter to you.^16,17

Notice what we’ve done. Through complexifying our understanding of hierarchy, we complexified our understanding of the opponent position. Where anti-hierarchy is a covert hierarchy blinding itself to its own dominating moral superiority, we can see heterarchy as the more complexified vehicle of egalitarianism and anti-hierarchy that ensures the growth hierarchy doesn’t become a dominator hierarchy.

So, we’ve differentiated hierarchy into dominator and growth hierarchy, and differentiated anti-hierarchy and egalitarianism, and then re-integrated all of them for a more complexified understanding. We now have a heterarchical growth hierarchy in which distributed education in service of the collective ensures that each of us is granted the equal decision-making power that allows for true personal autonomy.

As history can attest however, it never works this smoothly even in the best of times. Reverse dominance hierarchy is still a thing. We want to distinguish that from heterarchical growth hierarchy. Reverse dominance hierarchy is what happens when the collective dominates the individuals who, because of their expertise, could be capable of leading the collective through a crisis. If the prestige distribution that ensures no one individual comes to dominate any other works too well, then those individuals may be ignored when they ought to be listened to. In a medical crisis, I don’t want your anti-hierarchy to silence the doctor.

Furthermore, there’s no guarantee that the intelligence of the collective will always lead to the right answer. Despite all the heterarchy of these hunter-gatherers, they could still engage in conflict internally and with other groups.^9,11,18 The key themes here are that there’s always the possibility of dominance and unethical action because complexification leads to greater capabilities for both good and evil. And, of course, our heterarchical hunter-gatherer ancestors eventually gave way to patriarchal empires with incredibly unequal dominance hierarchies.

An increasingly common criticism that the Left makes of the Left is that the last 10 years have been far too defined by infighting over purity and this contributed to the rise of MAGA fascism.^19,20 We allowed our heterarchical growth hierarchy in service of the collective to become a true reverse dominance hierarchy, one that sought to dominate the individual to protect the purity of the collective at the expense of the collective. Again, we can’t be surprised when we ended up with another dominance hierarchy.

The least that we need instead are the relations of loving mutual growth that the student/teacher social role provides. Having a high standard for the people we organize with is important, but the power that heterarchy has to liberate is precisely the power that puts us at risk of becoming yet another dominator hierarchy. Again, growth in capabilities necessitates a growth in power, and that power can be used for co-creative relational growth or unilateral domination.

Yet, for a series that aims to express a post-human ontology we’ve stayed well within the bounds of human relations. While this essay has been about demonstrating that hierarchy is not always evil, we also have to wonder how this can be applied in a post-human fashion. Thankfully, Wilber already has a concept for our heterarchical growth hierarchy and he’s applied these “holarchies” far beyond the merely human. We explore that in the next essay.

Principles for Application:

1. In previous essays you’ve selected some domain you’re interested in, be it sexual relations and masculinity as I did, your own gender, a previous or current religious affiliation, a political party, or something else. Remember that you’re answering these in the context of creating solarpunk within that domain of interest.

2. What rights and responsibilities ought to be given to those with greater capabilities in your domain?

3. What rights and responsibilities are often unjustly given?

4. How might your domain structure itself differently so as to equitably distribute resources and relationships for growth?

Until the next one, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.

References:

1 – Ferrando, F. (2020). Philosophical Posthumanism. Bloomsbury Academic.

2 – Azarian, B. (2022). The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. BenBella Books.

3 – Walsh, R., & Wilber, K. (2010). Integral Theory in Action: Applied, Theoretical, and Constructive Perspectives on the AQAL Model (S. Esbjörn-Hargens, Ed.). SUNY Press.

4 – Wilber, K. (2000). Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution. Shambhala.

5 – Freinacht, H. (2017). The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One. Metamoderna ApS.

6 – Dempsey, B. G. (n.d.). Psyche and Symbolic Learning. Sky Meadow Press.

7 – The Consilience Project (2021, August 23). WE DON’T MAKE PROPAGANDA! THEY DO! The Consilience Project. https://consilienceproject.org/we-dont-make-propaganda-they-do/

8 – Nussbaum, M. C. (2021). Citadels of Pride: Sexual Abuse, Accountability, and Reconciliation. WW Norton.

9 – Kemp, L. (2025). Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. Random House, Inc.

10 – Stein, Z. (2019). Education in a Time Between Worlds: Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology, and Society. Bright Alliance.

11 – Boehm, C. (2001). Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Harvard University Press.

12 – WHAT IS POLITICS? (2021, October 26). 10.1 Do “Egalitarian Societies” Exist? David Graeber & David Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything” [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vNADAH-Rxk

13 – John Vervaeke’s Lectern. (2023, March 3). After Socrates: Episode 11 - Proper Proportions & The Right Mode | Dr. John Vervaeke [Video recording]. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=7-d69SP7EvU

14 – Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F. J. (2001). The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(3), 165–196. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1090-5138(00)00071-4

15 – Loomer, B. (1976). Two Conceptions of Power. Process Studies, 6(1), 5–32. https://doi.org/10.5840/process19766126

16 – Wallace, J. B. (2026). Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose. Penguin USA Incorporated.

17 – Wolf, S., Koethe, J., Adams, R. M., Arpaly, N., Haidt, J., & Macedo, S. (2012). Meaning in Life and Why It Matters. Princeton University Press.

18 – Saini, A. (2023). The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality. Beacon Press.

19 – Etelson, E. (2023, October 24). Why I’m no longer woke [Substack newsletter]. Erica’s Substack. https://ericaetelson.substack.com/p/why-im-no-longer-woke

20 – Chamas, T. (2026, April 6). The Genealogy of Wokeism (Part 1) [Substack newsletter]. 1Dime Review. https://1dimereview.substack.com/p/the-genealogy-of-wokeism-part-1

Also available on YouTube and Spotify.

Working in a fancy restaurant, I’m infuriated by the opulence I often see in the clients I serve. As they brag about how expensive their preferred status icons are I find myself arguing with them in my mind, “don’t you know the world is on fire?”

Yet for all my fury, I ought to look in the mirror and ask myself the same question, particularly around whether or not what I’m doing is water or fuel. I can demand a person walk through the mall and ask themselves which of their favourite stores will no longer exist in 20 years, whether because of global economic collapse or transformation toward a more sustainable form. Do I demand of myself the same willingness to let go of ineffective strategies?

Recently I was called out for being a dreamer wasting his time writing what I do. It’s fair pushback. Jungian psychology faces a perfectly understandable controversy in its own domain of therapy, let alone in the domain of climate action.

Despite that, I think Jungian archetypes and my essays still have merit. First and foremost, not all forms of psychology will appeal to everyone. If this doesn’t land for you, then that’s totally fine. Yet, there is still merit to it even for those of you it doesn’t land for directly, as I’ll get to.

To explain why, I’d like you to imagine you’re a 14 year old boy having father-son bonding time by going to see “300” in theaters. You face an onslaught of for-profit images of masculinity, warriors, and war. The hero is the Spartan king who fucks the hot queen and kills the evil invading people who look differently and have different culture. You’re inspired to start working out and playing sports so you can get a hot girlfriend. Then, as a 21 year old in college, let’s say by stroke of luck, you’re inspired not by the Red Pill manosphere, but instead to become a “climate warrior fighting for Mother Earth”.

To explain how Jungian archetypes apply here, I want to cover three points. There’s the function of human cognition, specific frameworks and practices that make use of that cognition, and the need to create culture that moves us from neoliberal capitalism toward something like a solarpunk society.

Human cognition seems to be relational. Not only do we find meaning and education in life through connecting with other people, and not only do we need to connect with one another to get things done in a highly social world, but our internal worlds are also highly relational.

Just think about how you might respond to this post here. If you disagree with me and are annoyed by something I’ve said, you might think of a reply through arguing with me in your mind. Or perhaps you’re already lost in an argument with your partner, sibling, boss, etc. You’re engaging in a relation in your mind with an imaginary representation of the people you know or imagine exist, such as general stand-ins for political groups or ideologies that anger you. You’re learning about these people, yourself, and the world through the conversations you have in your mind.

The kind of “archetypal” work I write about provides frameworks and practices that turn our relational human cognition into a method to understand things beyond our simple quotidian relationships. By conceptualizing abstract concepts as personified archetypes and connecting with them as if they were people, for example the entirety of the planet as Mother Earth, we can understand them in new kinds of ways.

For example, I’ve been in a communal living situation where we did practices in the morning to connect with one another and prepare ourselves for the day. One practice was to look at the forest around us and to “feel love for your mother”. That was literally the extent of the instruction, but I felt a very powerful feeling of love for nature emerge within me and a deep desire to connect with the people around me. A simple phrase to view a forest as my mother was enough to create that feeling. That’s it.

If we want people to be willing to do the immensely difficult work necessary to save our planet and transform capitalism, we need them to actually care about the Earth in collectives that are connected enough to be able to work together toward that common end.

I don’t believe that Mother Earth is a real entity that exists with its own mind. In fact, it’s completely unnecessary that any of us do. It’s about understanding how human cognition works, what frameworks and practices make use of that, and then doing that in a collective to produce culture that can be tangibly effective. In that sense then, working with an archetype is about cultivating a specific kind of relation with ourselves, each other, and the world given how the archetype helps us connect with and understand all of that.

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Returning to my essays, I’m trying to connect this perspective with a more complex view of history because of how our history has been used to create unjust realities.

For example, the cult of MAGA uses an idyllic American past. Red Pill discusses human prehistory to justify patriarchal gender relations as “evolutionary truths”. Why is it that MAGA and Red Pill can use the histories and narratives they use with such effectiveness?

I’m challenging such historical narratives, and then analyzing that history in the context of educating about how we already think of ourselves in limiting ways.

Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch is a marxist-feminist analysis of how the emergence of capitalism created the conditions that produced the witch-hunt and how that was used to create a definition of “woman” that is eerily similar to those Red Pill uses. If we want to be able to overcome the negative effects of real history, we must firstly understand that “real” history and then begin developing practices that can help us heal ourselves and each other of its negative effects.

That said, let’s return to our example of the 21 year old raised on action movies and inspired to become a climate warrior.

When you’re inspired in that way, how is your understanding of “warrior” defined not by climate activism and the ways of being necessary to save the environment, but by the archetype of “masculine warrior” taught to you by 300 and all the other action movies you watched to connect with your father?

To what extent does that influence you? How do you conceptualize the people who disagree with you and how does that influence how you treat them? Is that more or less effective? What about the gender relations you were taught from such movies? How do you understand the feminine “Mother” Earth given that? Has male entitlement ever contributed to sexual abuse in environmentalist communities?

I’m definitely not saying that “action movies = sexual assault”. I’m definitely saying that the kind of culture we engage in determines how we understand ourselves, each other, the world, and that informs what we actually do when the rubber meets the road.

However wrong Jung may have been on the specifics, the fact of the matter is that when you watch TV, read books, and engage in society, you’re being force-fed myths and archetypes. Simply being born in a specific place comes with a national identity that requires specific stories and symbolism to define how a person of your nationality sees the world. You have very little informed consent for any of this.

This is happening to all of us whether we consciously do it or not. The point of my writing is to teach you how to do so consciously. If you still don’t see the point, that’s totally fine. I do.

As such, I want to be sure that when I talk about a specific archetype such as “Mother Earth” or any other, I’m also trying to figure out what I actually mean, why I mean what I do, and how that might be recreating capitalist patriarchy rather than transforming it.

At the end of the day, the entire point of solarpunk is to get dreamers to imagine futures beyond capitalism so that we have something to collect around as we do the tangible work. I can give you frameworks and practices that help you connect more deeply with those frameworks personified as real people. Yet, what exactly does it mean to personify “misogyny” as a living entity?

The therapy Internal Family Systems (IFS) would advise that we talk with these mental representations with compassionate curiosity. Rather than trying to beat back the influence of toxic masculinity or hustle culture, we instead talk to the warrior within and say, “I’m curious what you’re afraid would happen if we weren’t a warrior?”

As ridiculous as that may sound, IFS has been used to successfully treat explosive rage in combat veterans and a whole host of other mental health issues. By doing such practices on your own, by sincerely communicating with these imagined entities even if you don’t believe they exist, you can discover and create something you didn’t expect. I can give you the framework, but through your own practice you can do more than I ever could have alone.

For example, through archetypal work and IFS, I’ve begun engaging in community for the first time since I was a kid forced to go to Church. That’s led to my co-organizing men’s mental health circles and facilitator education workshops. New culture begins in the minds of people who are capable of coming together enough to discover and actualize that new culture. Through this work, I became such a person.

I hope that communicates the tangible effectiveness of what I’m writing here. If you’d still like to pushback, I’m happy to discuss it. That’s also how we convert all of this into a culture capable of putting in the tangible work. It’s about making these cultures truly emergent co-education rather than top-down propaganda. While you may disagree with me and choose not to do these practices or read my essays, as long as we’re all doing what we can, solarpunk will be more and more likely to be a reality.

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Before Egypt was ever a civilization, there were people who had already begun worshipping a great cow goddess. In these desert communities, it’s easy to see how her life-giving milk could become so sacred. It’s also easy to see how deeply associated she could become with women, not least of all for the obvious association of milk and the creation of life, but also in how material conditions created specific social relationships that strengthened this further. As men ventured into the desert to hunt, women were more likely to remain with the cattle.¹

The point of worshipping such a goddess was to remind these people, across generations, what ought to matter to them. As the world changed around them, as disease swept through them and their livestock, and as new people came through peacefully or violently, they must remain true to the cow goddess because they must remain true to the livelihood that kept them alive, no matter how bad things became.

Ask any Marxist and they’ll tell you that material conditions matter. For a Post-Jungian materialist-constructivism, the relation with a deity is, at least in part, about the survival of a certain people with a certain way of life despite fluctuations in the material conditions that way of life depends on.

To understand the purpose of a deity then, it can be helpful to ask yourself which aspects of reality are being disclosed through your relationship with that deity. Each deity represents certain aspects and so in communing with it, you’re highlighting those aspects. The deeper your relationship with the deity, the more deeply you can see into those specific aspects of the world. As a consequence however, the more deeply blinded you are to that which the deity cannot disclose.

In that sense then, a deity is both an epistemology, defining what we can know about the world, and an axiology, defining what we ought to value in the world. It thus becomes the filter through which the ontic is made ontological, the means by which the world as it actually is becomes that which we understand the world to be. We can thus see deity worship as the means by which a society maintains a worldview that allows it to remain functionally fit to the world, to actually navigate it well.

The function of a deity is as the personified representation of a facet or perhaps even the entirety of our worldview. By engaging in dialogue, worship, or relation of some kind with the archetypal deity, we are engaging with a sliver of our total worldview. Our worldviews and their deities often emerge from our social and environmental conditions because they develop as the means by which we navigate our social and environmental conditions.

By looking at the history of the denigration of goddesses, we can get a better look at how the religious and administrative elite were shaped by the emerging patriarchal hierarchy. As we’ll see, the complexities of the relation between deities and the lived experience of the genders preclude a definitive statement about deity and social structure. Yet, we’ll also see the psychological and thus social function of the archetypes in co-creating a mythos capable of moving us away from technofeudal patriarchy and toward solarpunk, a nature-oriented, egalitarian, and technological future.

For example, as the feminist revolution took off in the West, there was the emergence of the notion of an ancient “Mother Goddess” that was worshipped by our matriarchal ancestors in a far more peaceful and equal Europe. With the rise of patriarchy, this Goddess was slowly transformed and denigrated into a demon, before being forgotten altogether as the “one true” male God took his rightful place on Heaven’s throne. It makes perfect sense that this image would come to be so lovingly worshipped by women reclaiming power in their own time, as well as so hostile to the subsequent arguments showing that such a Goddess and such a society likely never existed in the way they hoped.¹

I understand that hostility, but these Goddess narratives weren’t as feminist as many of their proponents believed. I think this is best summed up by Paula Gunn Allen when she writes:²

The complex diversity of ancient deity worship is not the loss of what could have been an amazing feminist discovery about our past. We must instead see the Goddess narrative as the understandable response to patriarchy, but constrained by the denigration of the feminine to the role of mother. Motherhood should be celebrated. The issue is that when you reduce women to being merely mothers and then denigrate mothers, revalorization can become only about motherhood rather than all that women can be outside motherhood.³

When we look to our past, we have to be aware of how our current cultural context shapes what we can say about that past. If you look at fertility and assume sexuality, and likely femininity, that’s a consequence of a specifically Christian cultural heritage. The peoples of ancient Mesopotamia didn’t associate those terms as much as we do, and so it makes sense that they had both male and female fertility deities. It also makes sense how Western people looking back at such fertility deities would be more likely to wrongly assume they were all sexual and, given imperfect artefacts, were all female.¹

Contrary to this, we see in earlier Mesopotamia, a whole host of gods and goddesses that likely didn’t even start as human let alone as a single divine woman. As their animal forms became more human, they took on genders and swapped them as the culture that worshipped them changed. Female deities could represent things like writing, account, arts, the textile industry, and much more.¹

Interestingly, this didn’t always reflect the gendered division of labour, with men sometimes inhabiting industries with many goddesses and very few gods. It’s likely that this reflected how deities lag behind social transformations, with women being more likely to inhabit these industries in a past where they were more likely to take place within the household. As time goes further on, eventually we do see these goddesses swap genders to reflect the new gendered distribution of labour.¹

It’s also very important to know that sometimes this happened in the reverse. There is a male and female pair of Akkadian deities that slowly transformed to have the female take over the male’s role before the male was denigrated into a demon. This clearly shows the complex relation between deity, culture, and material conditions.¹

Yet, regardless of the limitations of the Great Mother Goddess myth, what is true is that in a specific place in the world that became highly patriarchal, goddesses were denigrated and replaced with single male deities to form the Abrahamic religions.¹ These religions would then go on to shape empires that to this day have enormous, yet certainly not complete control over global culture, particularly in the West.

In my essay on patriarchy’s emergence, we discussed how the egalitarian bands of our ancestors were often taken over by bloodthirsty tyrants, whether from inside or outside.⁴ While Gerda Lerner was a proponent of the myth of Mother Goddess prehistory, she also writes of the historical development of increasingly patriarchal social systems and religious belief in Mesopotamia. Here, as bloodthirsty warmongers came to dominate, so too did their religion.⁵

To be clear, many of Lerner’s claims may be overstated as she assumes a linear development of the religious narrative. I must also emphasize that my own narrative here is far more simplistic than the reality, but my goal here is to attempt to demonstrate the complex relationship between deity and social structure. In that spirit, I think she shows how political transformation could have led to the very real denigration of the goddesses that we saw.

For example, when Sargon of Akkad came to rule over Mesopotamia, he appointed his daughter as the high priestess. This would give her immense religious authority, but it also shows how the King ruled over any religion. When he died, the next ruler removed her from her office. When Sargon’s grandson took the throne, he made his own daughter high priestess, and this tradition lasted for 500 years.⁵ The point is that the human representative of feminine spirituality was subject to the human king, and so it doesn’t seem so ridiculous to see that very same dynamic represented in their religious myths.

This complex political play between royalty, administration, and religious elite in the evolution of their myths is similar to what we saw with gender, industry, and deity. As the society became more patriarchal we saw that:¹

Ishtar is a Mesopotamian Goddess that at one time had an incredibly important place. Regardless of the myths surrounding the denigration of the Mother Goddess, what is true is that there were once goddesses that were on equal footing or higher than gods, depending on the specific culture and the deity’s domain. Over time, the functions of the goddesses were taken over by male deities, sometimes becoming a mere consort and other times becoming a demon, sometimes one and then the other, but often all before being forgotten altogether.

For example, Hassan writes of this transformation from far ancient Egypt into the Egyptian civilization. Local deities were subsumed into pan-Egyptian goddesses which were then seen, along with gods, as the ancestors of the patriarchal, conquering King. While this evolution was far from a complete denigration of the goddesses, it does show how they shifted to take a more supporting role, especially in how their divine authority was enacted by the actual king.¹

This is more obviously seen in the evolution of the religion in the Jewish culture that would create the Bible and then Christianity. Firstly, God himself is likely the war god of the polytheistic culture that would become the monotheistic Judaism. The most bloodthirsty warlord becomes the leader and so the myth reflects that in the dominion of the war god as the one true God. Secondly, unknown to too many is that the God of the Bible once had a wife.¹

I think this is a truly fascinating way we can recontextualize the myth of the Mother Goddess. Karel van der Toorn writes about the likeliest identity of God’s wife, named Asherah, and how she fits the bill of a Mother Goddess. Not only was she the personification of woman’s reduction to motherhood, but at least for Israel, she was never more than God’s consort and thus his property. The Bible also condemns her.¹

What’s even more telling is that Asherah likely had a greater role among the common people, likely playing the role of intermediary between them and the more distant God.¹ I don’t know if there is any academic opinion on this, but I think it’s very interesting to see how her function was replaced by Jesus. You have a woman playing the intermediary, giving women some kind of importance among the common people, but then she’s kicked out and replaced with the Son of God, and then condemned by the religious-administrative elite.

This of course isn’t even to mention how Eve, the Biblical mother of all human beings, is condemned to the status of property because of her hand in the Original Sin. St. Augustine himself, one of the earliest philosophers of Christianity as we understand it today, equated women directly with sin, sexuality, and the fallen natural world.^1,6

We can also see a similar process in the Ancient Greek mythology with the evolution of goddesses given how local traditions were replaced by increasingly powerful city-states. While female deities here could represent varieties of activities, they were often seen as being nurturing to some extent.¹

This shows us how, again, deities disclose worlds. If you worship a female deity of war, the fact that the deity is female is going to shape how you understand war. Additionally, if you view women as being more nurturing, you’ll likely view war from a more nurturing perspective because you’re seeing it through a female deity.

This is reflected in Athens that, slowly, over time transformed Athena to be increasingly “masculine” to make her more palatable to the deeply misogynistic society that had inherited her as the primary deity of their city. The juxtaposition between the female Athena and the disgusting abuses of women produced cognitive dissonance. The religious-administrative elite relieved this tension by removing the signifiers and attributes of femininity that surrounded the image and character of Athena.¹

That said, the diversity and fluidity of Greek deities was different than the Panhellenic image that might suggest “Athena” meant the same thing for all Greeks at all times. The same is true with the evolution of Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Christian mythologies.¹

The point of worship was to adequately identify and value the local aspects of the world that need to be understood. The specific features of any local deity was constrained by their very real way of living, which includes culturally-specific gender expectations, more so than what the religious elite decided about them. Worship set the stage of life. It helped them make meaning and bind them to their lived environment and experiences. We can thus see that deity is intimately bound with the material conditions of the world. You couldn’t convince the cow worshipping pre-Egyptian cattle herders that the cow goddess was a demon.

As time goes on however, the mythology itself becomes a world in need of a functionally fit worldview that is sometimes opposed or contradictory to lived reality. When the ruling elite punish non-believers with horrifying torture and fearmonger with narratives of eternal damnation far greater than what they’re forced to watch their loved ones suffer, the cow goddess becoming a demon becomes far more likely. The myth itself becomes more real than the material when the myth guides the swing of the sword, the flight of the nuclear weapon, or the investments of tech billionaires.

With more time, the myth loops around and around, disclosing nothing more than its own convoluted mess of tangled knots. A people, equipped with the tools of science that help them cut through that tangled mess like nothing any religion has ever provided, is captured by one myth at least. The myth of the view-from-nowhere, the view that we can see the world without a filter at all, exactly as it is.⁷

This is the myth that, in part, led to the emergence of the myth of the prehistoric Mother Goddess. Ronald Hutton has an amazing lecture showing how the modern Mother Goddess is just that, an incredibly modern invention.⁸ This deity acted as a filter, an epistemology and axiology, that converted the world of European archaeological findings into a very inspiring falsehood.¹

Far from being a view-from-nowhere finding objective facts about our past, many academic researchers and writers were recreating the patriarchal denigration of woman to mother in their very attempt to fight the denigration of mothers through revalorizing women in the narrative of the Mother Goddess.

Jungian notions of the “feminine principle” saw themselves as revealing universal truths about femininity, but were betraying a specific cultural heritage that had already associated for them sexuality, fertility, femininity, moon, nature, and mystery.¹ The rational, scientific patriarchal gaze looked to the past through the eyes of both men and women, and constructed narratives that confirmed what they already took for granted as “biologically, essentially” true.^1,6

Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris write how this patriarchal gaze shows up differently between the sexes:¹

Yet there is more to the world and to women than the all-encompassing bliss of mother’s loving safety. A post-Jungian understanding of the divine feminine is necessary, one that doesn’t fall for the bullshit of our patriarchal past, but opens us to the aspirational horizon of a meta-gender future. This is not one that denies our embodied existence as sexed organisms, but one that sees us through polycentric eyes as being more than the single center of the reproductive binary.

Miranda J. Green writing on Gallo-British goddesses shows that the interpretation of deities is not as simple as “spear means hunter goddess”. It may in fact be a more abstract concept such as reciprocity given a wider pantheon of gods and their ownership of specific animals. Many cultures have specific ritual practices that teach a people to honour the natural world as something outside their own anthropocentric ownership.¹ Given specific associations between gender, hunting, animals, and nature, this manifests as specific deities which may or may not have anything to do exactly with all that they seem to represent for us today.

Furthermore, just because a woman represents something masculine, that doesn’t mean it has anything to do with womanhood, but may in fact be far more about masculinity. In that sense, looking to a feminine deity and expecting to know about only women is foolish. You can’t understand the place of women in Athenian culture by looking at Athena plucked from her context. You have to understand the place of men and women in that culture, its relation to other cultures, and the masculinizing evolution of Athena. Look to Athena for female empowerment and find a deity, a sliver of a worldview made specifically by the men, and more specifically by men of the ruling elite.

Yet, what are we, those of us seeking to transform technofeudal patriarchy into solarpunk, to make of this history of the goddess?

Before we get to that, if you like this essay so far, then please give it a like and subscribe to the channel. It also really helps if you share this essay with people you know. While all my content is free, I do have paid subscriptions so if you’d like to support the channel I’d appreciate that a lot. Thank you so much.

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The value of developing relationships with deities, including goddesses, is because they can represent an aspirational relationship with a reality we seek to create or even what we fear to create. While the Greek goddesses sometimes contradicted the social position of real women, the fact that Athena was slowly masculinized shows that however far behind culture deity may lag, eventually deity catches up. This is of course shown by the eventual domination of patriarchal monotheism.

That said, the cow goddesses of the most ancient Egyptians emerged specifically because of the material associations between women and the importance of cows. The question we have to ask ourselves is whether or not the relationship we seek to create with reality through relating to archetypes is truly enough to change material conditions.

For that, I’d invite you to go watch your favourite TV shows and become conscious of the onslaught of images, signs, and associations vying for power over your pocketbook, lifestyle, and worldview, and the material conditions you in turn create due to their influence.

Look also to the national anthems, holidays, statues of celebrated people, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of it all. These are all part of the mythos we currently live, and they are creating us as people with certain goals, hopes, and fears that recreate the society that sets them up.

The fact of the matter is that we always have a mythos whether we want to or not. We can pretend we are no longer religious while religiously spending money, attention, and life on for-profit movies that define for us how we see each other. Giving us mass-produced archetypes for the heroes, villains, lovers, teachers, and friends we then feel motivated to become, to meet, and to kill in our own lives.

We can also consciously choose which myths we choose to live by as we move toward solarpunk.

I’ve argued previously that working with the archetypes is analogous to the evidence-based therapy called Internal Family Systems or (IFS).⁹ In IFS therapy, you treat the different parts of yourself as if they are real people. Let’s say you’re experiencing inner conflict about some decision. If you spoke to each side of yourself that wanted different things as if it were a person, you can find a way through that inner conflict. This therapy has been used to treat anxiety, depression, eating disorders, OCD, and a whole host of other struggles.¹⁰

Point being, in communicating with an archetype directly, we’re not engaging in some hocus pocus interaction with a real life “deity”, spiritual being, or however the specific archetype manifests within you. You’re instead engaging in a conversation with your mental representation of all that the archetype represents.

For example, in your mind you have an idea of what women or men are like. Most of us approach these ideas as abstract notions that we pick apart or agree with because we view them as “ideas” that we primarily “understand”. This is, ironically enough, a very rationalistic view of the way ideas work in our mind.⁶

What if you instead spoke to that idea as if it were an actually entity?

The fact of the matter is that you already are when you find yourself lost in fights with people you know in your mind. Maybe it’s an ex-partner, maybe it’s a political leader, maybe it’s some general stand in for “man” or “woman” fighting about some controversy you saw while scrolling through social media. In those moments, you’re actively engaged in “IFS parts work”, it’s just that you’re not thinking of it in those terms and so you’re trapped by the context of an argument. You can only understand it based on what arguments can disclose about that person and the world.

By engaging in archetypal dialogue, worship, or any other practice you choose to use for archetypal work, you’re setting the stage, specifying the roles you wish to inhabit, and then communicating with what that part of you represents about the world. A key point to recognize is that this is not about understanding the archetype. It’s about truly connecting with the archetype as one does a friend, teacher, or in a way more fitting for the divinity of the being, if that’s what the specific conversation calls for.

What that conversation calls for is dependent on your intention, which must become conscious if you want it to move in the right direction rather than being confined by whatever technofeudal patriarchy has socialized you into believing. If we seek to create solarpunk, then learning our history is necessary to begin separating ourselves from that technofeudal influence.

Importantly for solarpunk as a nature-oriented future, the complexity of the goddess history doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be inspired by and dialogue with the creations of the feminist Goddess movement. Mother Earth has caught on so fiercely because she represents something truly profound about what we need today in order to direct us toward and bind us to a future we desire. We don’t need an ancient history of any kind to decide to love Mother Earth today.

Yet, in honouring our Mother Earth, I find myself moving more toward a collaborative polytheism. As I said, archetypal work is not about understanding any deity, but about connecting with that deity. To truly move beyond that technofeudal influence, we must be willing to be challenged by and challenge archetypes with compassionate curiosity. Just as with our parts in IFS, connecting with an archetype is meant to be a collaborative process in which we discover the selves and worlds we never knew we wanted to create.

Assignment:

1. In previous essays you’ve selected some domain you’re interested in, be it romantic relations and masculinity as I often do, your own gender, a previous or current religious affiliation, a political party, or anything you find intrinsically interesting. Remember that you’re answering these in the context of creating solarpunk within that domain of interest.

2. If you could understand specific aspects of your domain as deities or archetypes, what would they be? What gods, goddesses, heroes, and villains give life to your domain?

3. Are they benevolent, malevolent, or ambivalent forces?

4. Try connecting with them through compassionate curiosity, discovering what they desire and how they see the world. Let yourself be surprised by them. The specific form of connection could be mental dialogue, written dialogue, art, music, theater, or any other medium that speaks to you.

Until the next one, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.

References:

1 – Goodison, L., & Morris, C. (1998). Ancient Goddesses: The Myths and the Evidence. BRITISH MUSEUM.

2 – Lugones, M. (2016). The Coloniality of Gender. In W. Harcourt (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development: Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice (pp. 13–33). Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-38273-3_2

3 – Federici, S. (2014). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia.

4 – Kemp, L. (2025). Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. Random House, Inc.

5 – Lerner, G. (1987). The Creation of Patriarchy. Oxford University Press.

6 – Lakoff, G. (20). Philosophy In The Flesh. Basic Books.

7 – Wilber, K. (2000). Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution. Shambhala.

8 – Gresham College. (2025, January 15). The Modern Goddess—Ronald Hutton [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv_HdgT9q0s

9 – Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy. (n.d.). Retrieved July 24, 2026, from https://samhsa-nrepp.foundationifs.org/

10 – Schwartz, R.C. (2021). No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model. St. Martin’s Essentials / Sounds True.

Also available on YouTube and Spotify.

Was the birth of patriarchy the birth of gender itself? This is obviously a very important question to ask. Many of us want an egalitarian society in which people of all genders or no gender can flourish, living truly meaningful lives. This is the solarpunk vision of the future, a society that is egalitarian, nature-oriented, and technological. If our goal is to transform our current technofeudal predicament into solarpunk, then we ought to transform how we understand gender even if you’re cis gendered as I am. This of course leads us to how it emerged in the first place.

To state clearly then, when I say “gender”, I’m specifically referring to how a specific culture understands biologically sexed bodies. Biology is sex, gender is culture. We’ll get into that, but in two past essays, which you don’t need to read to understand this one, we’ve discussed a solarpunk version of our history, looking at our egalitarian origins and the emergence of patriarchal hierarchy. Yet, we didn’t really focus on how gender itself emerged.

A key point I made in that essay on patriarchy, was that no one factor was responsible for the emergence of hierarchy. It was instead many factors evolving together that made hierarchy more and more likely over the long term. This means that hierarchy is multiply realizable, which basically just means that there are many ways to make a hierarchy.³ When it comes to the emergence of it, we can say that hierarchy becomes a group’s most adaptive solution when it fits it well enough to its environment to be a functioning social system. It is functionally fit to some environment.⁴

For the vast majority of our existence as human beings, egalitarianism was the most adaptive, functionally fit solution to our environment.^2,5 Once we got patrilineality with patrilocality, material accumulation through agriculture and animal husbandry, advanced weapons that no one else had, psychopathic Big Men leading us against hostile neighbouring tribes that wanted what we had, and all that working together to cage us in land that we couldn’t easily flee, now hierarchy and the warrior ethos became the most adaptive solution.

This warrior ethos objectifies the world, viewing it as a pool of resources to be extracted for the purpose of creating hierarchies of power. The warrior ethos thus comes to be primarily defined as a masculine relation to the world. Such an ethos lives in the moral community of the oppressed, who live it even as it oppresses them because they believe it to be the natural and even good way of things. Gender is thus born as the sexed division of labour that patriarchal systems create in order to perpetuate themselves.

Today, such gendered differences between men and women live on in the moral community with the modern instantiation of the warrior ethos. Obviously this has changed quite a lot because of the feminist revolution, but the base of our gender relations assumes that man the warrior protects woman the mother. As we’ll see, your interactions within these gender roles recreate the hierarchy that demands the warrior ethos that genders you in a specific way in the first place.

As we discussed in the last essay though, the complexity of history includes the complexity of gender, both within and before patriarchy. Take this essay as an educative simplification, giving you a waypoint through that complexity. This is obviously only a starting point that we’ll continue in the future.

If we want to understand how to evolve beyond the deeply hierarchical technofeudal patriarchy we currently live in, we first need to understand that egalitarianism is also multiply realizable. It can be composed of many different factors within many different kinds of environments and that’s a message of hope. It means becoming egalitarian again is a possibility. And yet, what we’re also left with is the complexity inherent to creating a post-hierarchal egalitarianism.

Firstly though, to be egalitarian means that each individual has roughly the same decision-making power, which means there aren’t important differences in bargaining power, and this means that people have roughly equal personal autonomy.⁶ Bargaining power just means that there is a roughly equal distribution of meaningful wins and losses. If you have a million dollars and I have ten, then you’re willing to bargain with more than I am because wins and losses matter way more to me. That leads, when push comes to shove, to your having greater decision-making power.

When it then comes to creating a post-hierarchal egalitarianism, we have to remember that we can’t have an egalitarianism that looks the same as the anarchoprimitivism of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The entire point of anarchoprimitivism is that we can’t have true egalitarianism without completely removing Goliath. A Goliath is a system of interconnected hierarchies masquerading as “civilization”. In killing Goliath, anarchoprimitivism would also do away with the real beauty of some of the technology that it’s provided us.²

Solarpunk, an egalitarian, nature-oriented, technological culture is decidedly not anarchoprimitivist. Fortunately, the very fact of egalitarianism’s multiple realizability is precisely that it doesn’t need to be.

That said, in regards to hierarchy’s multiple realizability, Saini writes the following:⁷

Another such binary that ought to be broken down is that between hierarchy and an exclusively anarchoprimitivist egalitarianism. These are not the only two options. Just as there are patriarchies, there are also egalitarianisms. Interestingly then, Kemp writes the following:²

That said, he doesn’t subscribe to anarchoprimitivism. Instead, what we can make of this lack of a guarantee of the good life offered by Goliath is to understand it in terms of functional fittedness and developmental niche construction.⁸

The basic idea is that if the hierarchy defines the terms of success along lines of the warrior ethos, then to be functionally fit to that society is to adopt the warrior ethos. In other words, to pursue success is to recreate the very system that oppresses you.

The wealthier a bourgeois woman becomes the more she is oppressed as a woman because capitalism intersects with patriarchy.⁹ The more violent you become to protect your loved ones the more violent men there are to protect your loved ones against. The more you pursue careers that promise large salaries the more you contribute to a capitalist economy that destroys the environment. We construct a niche and we must develop the warrior ethos in order to succeed within that niche, and this constructs and perpetuates that very niche.

This is why we need a truly post-hierarchical egalitarianism. This is an egalitarianism that has emerged out of Goliath, and so is in response to how Goliath has already shaped us as individuals and as peoples, our social and political systems, and our environment. These changes are realities that we can’t simply do away with. Any move toward egalitarianism must be in response to what has come before us and to what exists today.

This is where we can understand the importance of having a materialist-constructivist analysis that Saini also provides, rather than merely a materialist one.⁷ A materialist analysis is the one I primarily offered in my patriarchy essay, looking at social organization as a consequence of material and economic conditions like agriculture, animal husbandry, and inter-group conflict. A materialist-constructivist analysis looks at how concepts and categories have causal power along with material conditions. This is profoundly important for understanding the origin and transformation of gender.

For example, Saini discusses how censuses taken by various governments create binary gender categories that include specific features defining each gender.⁷ A purely materialist analysis would look at the reproductive functions of males and females and the consequent divisions of labour that this creates. The constructivist analysis looks at how such census data is used to create specific policies. The genders are thus co-constructed by how census data is used to shape policy that in turn shapes material conditions that increasingly reflect how the census defined reality. Measurement is thus seen as a world-creating act.

Here’s a more specific example. If the census data on the number of children women are having is used to create policy for increasing the number of women giving birth, then that policy will motivate more women to have more children. The census itself framed women primarily in terms of their reproduction specifically for the economic agenda of the administration that wanted more women having more children. Now that more women are conforming to that reproductive role, they will see themselves and be seen by the rest of the culture primarily in terms of that role.

The administration created a census for a specific purpose, created policy to achieve that purpose, and then the consequences of that achieved purpose ripple throughout the culture with women being reduced to their reproductive function. This in turn constrains the terms of any possible revalorization to that very role of “mother”. Even as we celebrate women for the importance of mothers, we simply recreate their reduction to reproduction.

The same is true for men. If a state wants to go to war, they take census data about able-bodied men, create policy that makes men more able-bodied, or even cultural propaganda that idolizes masculine, muscular men that protect their women. This of course creates the cultural belief that to be a man is to already be created by nature the embodiment of the warrior ethos. All so that the hierarchical administration that seeks to go to war to expand their territory and wealth has a large enough population of able-bodied disposable men to throw at their enemy, with our troops being rewarded with their enslavement and rape of foreign women.

It’s important for you to understand this process of how a society creates the conditions of functionally fitted success that pressures a population to conform to some economically necessary ideal which in turn continually recreates the society in order to keep everything going. Whether or not any person ever achieves that ideal is unnecessary because all that matters is that enough of us pursue that ideal. It’s not the achievement of the ideal that keeps a society going, but the continued pursuit of it by enough people.

To transform the gendered moral community of technofeudal patriarchy into one for post-hierarchical solarpunk egalitarianism, we must create systems in which the pursuit of ideals recreates these more preferred systems. Such systems must be capable of out-cooperating capitalism, while keeping in mind that we need enough parts working together in order to tip the scales away from patriarchy toward egalitarianism.

This is why I often end my essays with a statement about creating solarpunk in a domain of your interest. You’re likely already interested in making solarpunk a reality. You read essays like this, look for art, fiction, movies, etc., that embody the solarpunk spirit. You’re likely also interested in other things that don’t yet have a clear connection to solarpunk. In fact, that domain is almost definitely incredibly defined by capitalism and thus playing a part in the recreation of capitalism. By asking yourself how you can bring solarpunk into that domain, you’re creating another part, another factor that’ll pull us toward solarpunk instead.

In a similar spirit, if you like this essay so far, then please give it a like and subscribe to the channel. It also really helps if you share this essay with people you know. I do have paid subscriptions, but all my content is available for free so it’d be more about supporting the channel. Thank you so much.

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Now, in the same way that patrilocality, agriculture, inter-group conflict, etc., etc., all pulled us toward hierarchy and eventually capitalism, we can create enough pieces of the egalitarian puzzle together in order to move us toward solarpunk.

In order to better do that though, you have to understand the past ways that egalitarianism emerged post-hierarchy.

To remind you, the egalitarian ethos gave way because increased inter-group conflict in agricultural patrilocal tribes transformed the hunter ethos into the warrior ethos. This warrior ethos became the foundation of the imperial ethos, with the emperor or leader of some kind being a warrior, often the most bloodthirsty.² This was even reflected in myth with the monotheistic deities that came to dominate the world religions often having been the war god of some prior polytheistic pantheon.^7,10 We thus had a warrior ethos defined by an objectifying, extractive logic that saw the world as a pool of resources waiting to be conquered.

We then come to the kind-of-sort-of-egalitarianism of Ancient Greece. Remember that egalitarianism is about equal decision-making power. Democracy is a post-hierarchical attempt at egalitarianism. Yet, consider how deeply imbued Greek democratic egalitarianism was with the warrior ethos. Lerner quotes William H. McNeil writing of the phalanx, a formation that soldiers used, as key in the Greek polis and the concept of the citizen-soldier.¹⁰

There was of course a clear difference between the Athenians and the Spartans. Where the Athenians had a democracy for certain men and strict regulation of women, the Spartans were ruled by an oligarchy yet had relatively freer women.¹⁰ Spartan women would manage their husband’s property while they were away at war and at one point they owned two-fifths of the land. These women could become so wealthy that they could provide financial assistance to poorer male relatives, potentially giving them greater influence of them.⁷

It’s important to recognize though that part of the Spartan’s better views of women were inspired by the belief that childbearing was just as important for society as military service.¹⁰ We again see how a woman’s valorization is constrained along lines of motherhood. Yet this is exactly my point. While Athenian democratic egalitarianism and Spartan gender egalitarianism were far from perfect, less than what we have today on both fronts, they were both emergent from the warrior ethos.

It was the hyper-disposability of the Spartan man that led to the conditions in which women were granted more power than the democratic Athenians. The long term consequences of the extractive, hierarchical warrior ethos can sometimes produce democracy or gender equality. In our case, there’s been both, with the warrior ethos producing the liberal individual, modern democracy, and the conditions for the feminist revolution’s being possible at all.^11,12

That said, just as with the Athenian and Spartan egalitarianisms, ours too is being limited by the remnants of the warrior ethos. The view that nature is a thing to be conquered and broken up for resources in capitalist games of success is the modern instantiation of such an ethos.

The ethicist Virginia Held criticizes the liberal individual for using the White, European, highly educated man as its exemplar, completely ignoring all the very real social roles, histories, and conditions that would prevent a person from reaching that ideal even to this day.¹¹

Elsewhere, Wendy Brown criticizes neoliberal capitalism and its reduction of every form of value to price in a market, which consequently causes the collapse of that very liberal individual. The tragic irony of liberal egalitarianism, is that the warrior ethos expressed through the logic of neoliberalism has privatized all benefits of capitalism to increasingly wealthy individuals and externalized all costs to the common people and to the environment at large.¹²

This is the same logic of every other Goliath that has ever existed and as with every other, our Global Goliath is in the process of collapsing precisely because the ruling elite destroy the foundations that produced their wealth in the first place.²

Yet, if census data and the administration in general create the ideal of the liberal individual, the modern warrior ethos, then no matter what we do as a people, we will continue to recreate it. Unfortunately, our criticism can also recreate the ideal we seek to deconstruct.

Maria Lugones offers another example of the administrative and intellectual classes constructing oppressive categories. She discusses the intersectional and decolonial perspectives that allowed us to see that “woman” as a category of liberation recreated racial oppression. Feminist’s understanding of “woman” often meant “white, bourgeois woman”, and so studies and censuses missed how being “black” intersected with “woman” to produce different dynamics of oppression.¹³

For as astoundingly emancipatory as the liberal individual has been, it has recreated oppression by defining the liberal individual in terms achievable by a small fraction of even White men, let alone all men or other genders. And, as astoundingly emancipatory as feminism has been, it has recreated oppression by defining woman in terms that only a small fraction of even White women meet. Sometimes these errors were intentional, I’m sure, but many times they were also unintentional.

This difficulty has led Hanzi Freinacht to theorize a metamodern politics and he explicitly ties his project with solarpunk.^14,15 He writes of emancipation and democratizing politics, two separate streams that seek to create systems and processes that focus on emancipating people and making our societies more democratic. His point is that there is no utopian end-point, but instead increasing degrees of a relative utopia in which we’re iteratively disclosing hidden power dynamics, making our society more and more egalitarian.¹⁴

One way we can do this is by reconceptualising gender and its moral community of the warrior ethos along lines of transformative, relational power rather than only oppressive, unilateral power. This distinction comes from the critical realist philosophy of Roy Bhaskar, though I came to it through Nick Hedlund. For Bhaskar, unilateral power fuels the extractive, instrumental rationality of the hierarchical warrior ethos. Transformative power on the other hand, is conceptualized as our capacity to transform ourselves and the world, to have any agency at all.¹⁶

Bhaskar’s transformative power can be further specified using Bernard Loomer’s concept of relational power. We have relational power, when increases in your power lead to increases in my power lead to increases in our power together.¹⁷ We can thus see that the most transformative, emancipatory agency is not the hyper-individualist unilateral power over others, but relational power in which we act together to co-create ourselves and the world toward continued mutual development and flourishing.

Gender is often constructed along lines of unilateral power, meaning that when we take male or female bodies we construct narratives, roles, and values that hierarchize between them. Men with male bodies are considered the ideal human, but particularly if they conform to what Connell calls hegemonic masculinity. This is an ideal defined by the warrior ethos, the masculine, muscular, virile male who conquers the world and earns his place at the top of the hierarchy.¹⁸

The issue that both Lugones and Connell point out is that very few people actually conform to this ideal. Yet, it becomes a justification for the hierarchy because social mobility itself is defined by the ideal as a thing that can be achieved by anyone who only works hard enough.

With boss girl feminism, we see the ideal expand to include other visions of the ideal, even as the system remains structured around specific kinds of people who could possibly achieve success. You can achieve success whether you fully conform to the ideal or not because there is a difference between the imagined ideal and the actual standard necessary for success. Not to mention the importance of luck. And, as we’ve seen, to even try and fail to achieve success is to recreate the hierarchy itself.

That all said, if we can draw on several different philosophical toolkits we can begin to see a new, solarpunk vision for gender beyond technofeudal patriarchy. This would afford gender relations that transcend the warrior ethos.

To begin, why look for emancipatory gender relations at all? Especially given Lugones’ decolonial feminism, it seems that gender itself is a hierarchizing way to conceptualize different bodies.

First and foremost, I’m talking about my own experiences and so I can’t speak to LGBTQ+ experiences. Try to apply these general concepts to your own specific situation. I hope it’ll be obvious how to do that as we continue because, ironically, to transcend technofeudal gender we have to learn from decolonial and queer perspectives. And, last caveat I promise, this is essay is more a preliminary look at a lot of what I’ll be discussing in the future. Take this as a jumping off point rather than a final say.

Secondly then, we have to grapple with the adjacent possible. This is a concept from complexity science that shows how even very complex systems can be transformed by focusing on the most adjacent step from where you are now to where you want to go.³

The future won’t be gendered in the way we currently gender male, female, and intersex bodies. We don’t even do that in the exact same way we did 100 years ago. Men and women today are thought of differently than they were in the past and in different cultures, even if we were still talking about the same male and female bodies.

Yet, for the vast majority of people today, we still primarily talk in terms of a binary. The fact that a majority of men and women are heterosexual and cis gender means that for the most part, most specific instantiations of gender relations will manifest in that context.¹⁹ In any inter-gender interaction, it will be most likely to be between a man and a woman who are heterosexual. Each of these interactions will recreate the gender category itself because that gender is constructed along lines of unilateral power rather than transformative relational power because of these very real material conditions.

Even if we grant Connell’s point that there is no one masculinity or femininity, but masculinities and femininities, we still have to grant that this is structured as a binary. As such, if we want to transform gender toward the adjacent possible, we have to start where we are with gender as it currently stands.

The philosopher Agnes Callard’s conceptualization of aspiration can make it clearer why this is the case. If I aspire to be something, then that presupposes that I’m not currently that thing and so cannot truly understand that thing even as I aspire to it.²⁰

For example, let’s say I aspire to be a yogi. Not only do I not know how to do yoga, but I have no idea what people who do yoga are like. I may have ideas from movies or beginner youtube videos, but until I talk to anyone or do the yoga, it’s all just a fantasy in my head. In that sense then, I can only guess at what being a yogi is like from the perspective of a non-yogi who may aspire for very wrong reasons. Things like a not-subtle arrogance at being more spiritual than other people. It’ll take me months or even years of practice and meeting the various people within that culture to realize how little I knew.

That said, it was my aspiring to be a yogi that got me moving in some general direction. Even if I changed direction several times as I learned more deeply what it meant to be a yogi, I eventually understood what it was like because I became a yogi. What I needed in that process of aspiration were the right-enough wrong reasons for becoming a yogi.

The difference between gender constructed along lines of unilateral power vs. transformative relational power works in a similar way. I can only start from the gendered realities that exist today, having been socialized as our current culture’s understanding of “man” and who is interested in dating those who’ve been socialized into “woman”. We can thus understand transformative gender as being a way of relating with other genders through one’s gender, but specifically in a way that emancipates, aiming ourselves at a horizon we cannot yet see beyond.

That said then, we can return to the wisdom of Lugones by understanding how the European Goliath has tended to construct gender. We talk about male and female bodies and then construct gendered norms for men and women. This becomes an organizing principle for sex, labour, the self, our relations with others, etc., etc.¹³

Women are constructed as a category by specific men seeking their reproductive bodies as a resource of unilateral power in games of economic exchange. The very real binary in reproductive function acts as the primary divider creating gender hierarchy in patrilocal systems with all the other factors we discussed. To be clear, I’m not making the reductionist mistake of saying that the reproductive binary is the fundamental, direct cause of hierarchy, but that when it’s in a specific context such as patrilocality, then it can become the primary line in the sand.

By contrast, matrilocality affords a gender division not rooted in the female body as a token of exchange because it allows female coalitions to form, balancing out heightened risk-taking and power-seeking among specific subcategories of men. Such men only become capable of taking power over other males when enough hierarchizing factors are at play, which allows them to create systems that other men also benefit from even as they’re oppressed by them. The key point is that the reproductive binary itself is not automatically generative of gender as a hierarchy.

The problem is when the reproductive binary becomes the locus around which unilateral power specifically constructs the two genders. What it means to be a woman is reduced to reproductive function. From that point forward, any valorization of femininity is constrained along reproductive lines. The divine feminine can only ever be “mother nature”, “the great cosmic mother”, etc. This leads to the notion of gender liberation to mean only the removal of gendered difference because gender itself is seen as the category that reduces women to their reproductive function.

I think this is a red herring because no body ought to be reduced to its reproductive function. The very real binary that only bodies with wombs can be impregnated by bodies with penises doesn’t need to be attacked or deconstructed with language games because that binary is not the locus of oppression. The locus of oppression is the process by which we reduce our conceptualization of any body to the reproductive binary and then organize our life, culture, politics, and economy based on those narrow conceptualizations.

Another part of the problem then is that our construction of gender as a construction has been reduced to unilateral power. When you think of gender, you can only think of it as a thing that is used to hierarchize between different bodies, valorizing one and oppressing the others. When we ask the question whether patriarchy itself was the birth of gender, we answer yes only because we’ve conceptualized gender itself as a hierarchal concept. To be gendered is to be placed into a hierarchy. From that perspective, egalitarianism, however multiply realizable, cannot include any gender.

What if that’s not the only way to construct gender? Can we instead construct an understanding of gender as a construction specifically for the purposes of transformative, emancipatory relational power?

Obviously then, we can’t reduce what it means to have any body to the reproductive functions of that body. You’re more than the fact that you can have kids. Yet if that’s true, then why the gendered difference?

If your identity is no longer centered on the reproductive binary, then who you are as a person can’t be understood in a gendered fashion. I don’t do what I do because I am a man, believing all that I do must conform to what men do. I instead have a meta-gender identity, an identity that goes beyond or is after gender, with many passions that I do for their own sake without there needing to be any sort of central gender identity that all conform to.²¹

If everyone has a meta-gender identity that includes a variety of things they’re interested in and do, then it doesn’t make sense to conceptualize ourselves in a binary category like man or woman.

That sounds nice, but the issue is, again, that most people are currently cis gendered heterosexuals. Maybe one day that won’t be the case. I’ll be honest, my bias is that the majority of people will always be heterosexual in which those with female bodies are attracted to male bodies for both sexuality and romance, and vice versa. I’m open to the possibility that this is simply a consequence of my own conditioning in patriarchy. Again, maybe one day that won’t be the case.

Yet, the wisdom of the adjacent possible is that it is the case and you can’t convince people en masse to be attracted to people they aren’t attracted to. You can’t radically change sexual relations overnight or even across a single generation and hope things go well. I’d argue that porn, dating apps, and social media have done this, but precisely in a very negative, regressive way. People are as they currently are, not as we hope they’ll be, and how they are is profoundly socialized and influenced by technofeudal gender hierarchy.

A post-hierarchal gender must be in response to that reality today. In that sense then, the meta of gender is not only beyond or after, but also includes meta as “with” gender.²¹

Even if a woman decides not to have children, she will still have to deal with the fact that she has a body, identity, and attraction that centers on the reproductive binary. Even as she creates a meta-gender identity that is polycentric, she must grapple with the relations she has that are influenced by this fact, just as any man does. All of us must also grapple with the complexity of narratives told to us and about us in regards to our gender.

You can identify as whatever kind of person or gender you desire, but the moment you step into relation with someone who genders you as a man in a specific way, you must respond in ways that answer to that gendering. The fact is that women have their stories about men, good and bad, and often they come with good reason based on their own life history or on the stories they’ve heard. You may know you’re a good man, but she doesn’t.

In that sense then, however meta-gender your own identity may be, you are still gendered a specific kind of man in the eyes of others, and so conceiving of a positive masculinity includes navigating that complexity. What I mean to say is that even though being a good man likely just means being a good person, the fact that you’re seen as a man by others means that your being a good person is going to look different than what it does for a woman, and so you must learn to be a good person in a different way than a woman, facing different challenges and thus requiring different skills.

Again, this is simply because the stories believed in by any woman or man you interact with are going to cause them to interpret what you do differently than a woman because you are a man. Your actions must take that into account in ways that respect the other and, of course, yourself. Sometimes those stories they tell themselves are radically unjust. This is also not even getting into the fact that we are embodied, biological organisms with sexualities that discriminate along lines of sexed bodies and gendered identities, however fluid such discriminations may sometimes be over the lifespan.²²

To have a gender role then, is not simply to have specific features, whether physical or psychological, but to have a specific map for navigating unique circumstances given how the environment you navigate constructs you as a certain gender. To be clear, this is true even when people respect your gender identity, because they are still telling gendered stories that may conflict with how any of you understand your selves and desires in life.

Part of that gender role also includes navigating away from one’s gendered map, which is itself constrained by having been socialized into a specific gender role in the first place. To deconstruct and reconstruct one’s gender is determined by which gender you’re talking about and moving toward. A man becoming a better kind of man is thus different than the same intention for a woman.

Point being, even if it could one day be different, you can’t get everyone on the same page and trying to do so will cause a backlash that will make the problem worse, as I’ll get to in a moment.

As I said before though, there isn’t any real reason to. The issue with unilateral constructions of gender construction is that by centering the origins of gender hierarchy on the divisions of labour due to the reproductive binary, they’ve reified the very hierarchy they seek to upend. They’re recreating the very logic of women being reduced to their reproductive function, which is itself reduced to its economic value in patriarchal systems that treat women as tokens of exchange in negotiations over unilateral power.

How can we valorize motherhood if reproduction is only framed in such a way? How can we valorize women if what it means to be a woman is only framed in such a way? The solution isn’t giving up on the revalorization of motherhood or women, but to remove ourselves from the way technofeudal patriarchy demands how we frame what it means to be a woman, mother, man, father, or to be divided along lines of a reproductive binary.

Fortunately, we can’t assume that in the egalitarian bands of our ancestors, motherhood was seen being inferior to the roles of men, nor that women were seen as being merely mothers. There were a plurality of goddesses that honoured femininity beyond the reproductive function. As Lugones quotes Paula Gunn Allen, to reduce femininity to divine fertility would be to trivialize woman. Our critiques of the category of gender must not become the means by which we reify it as exclusively being a category of oppression.⁷ We must instead aim for a meta-gender, transformative category of emancipation.

To clarify a little more what I mean by meta-gender then, I’m using a tool from post-human philosophy that I discussed in my essay Are Chimps Less Worthy of Moral Concern. The difference between gender and meta-gender is not the same as saying gender and anti-gender or even simply no gender. It is instead the difference between a complexifying binary and a flattening binary.

To state the difference clearly then, a meta-gender binary is a complexifying binary, one in which the terms of the binary co-determine and co-create something beyond the binary itself. The gender, flattening binary, by contrast, is one that through their relating, narrows in on a static, rigid, and too simplistic conception of one and the other.

When we’re able to see gender relations as co-creative relations of transformative relational power, that’s when we’ll actually be able to transcend the unilateral, flattening gender of technofeudal patriarchy. The heteropessimism of gender antagonism simply recreates the very unilateral gender it seeks to up-end because it acts as intra-class division that distracts from the class conflict that has to happen for true emancipation.

This obviously isn’t to say that non-binary individuals or LGBTQ+ folks of any kind have to conform themselves to what I’m saying. In many ways they’re already outside the heterosexual binary by definition, even though it often isn’t as simple as that in practice. Yet, for those of us who are heterosexually cis gendered, we instead need to focus on how we can navigate the gendering of male and female bodies in a way that is transformative rather than oppressive.

How can we actually do this though?

One way we can do this is to educate ourselves and those close to us in the processes of renegotiating gender roles. I think the rise of masculine and feminine energy is operating as an escape from freedom because it is a flattening binary. The psychologist Erich Fromm wrote about how people who are given more freedom than they can manage tend to escape from that freedom back into the perceived safe simplicity of totalitarianism.²³

With the feminist revolution, gender roles have shifted and become far more fluid. This creates tremendous pressure on people who may simply lack the education or social support to deal with one’s own emotional difficulties, one’s partner’s, and then communicate all of that well enough to solve problems. Effectively, genders roles act as a way to simplify the complexity of life and romance, giving each partner clear rules to follow whenever problems arise. When that allows them to solve problems better, it’s confused as evidence that the gender roles are completely innate and then that’s used to flatten the very real complex diversity of the people involved.

To make that more concrete, if you’ve been raised your entire life to be a strong warrior who never talks about his emotions, then what are you going to choose? Put in the effort to learn the entirely new skill of emotional intelligence and be called a pussy for it by the very patriarchally conditioned women you’re trying to date? Or, go into a martial arts gym and learn how to fight with a bunch of guys who create welcoming community around fantasies of being unilaterally powerful enough to protect the ones they love? Perhaps you’ll simply choose to walk away from women altogether.

Or, if you’ve been raised your entire life to expect to be taken care of by a man who makes more money than you, then what‘re you going to choose? The really good guy you feel safe around and feel emotionally connected to, but isn’t motivated by capitalist ambition in an ever more precarious economic situation? Or, the wealthy guy who became dominant enough to succeed in games of capitalist success?

Not to mention the fact that, as you become more successful yourself given the freedoms feminism has created, you’re far less willing to settle for a guy who hasn’t put in the emotional work because he’s too busy learning to fight to protect you against…what exactly? Men who lack the emotional intelligence to deal with their angry, insecure need for power or who act criminally due to the financial survival situations created by technofeudalism? Maybe it’s better that you too walk away from men altogether.

As Saini has written, the narratives we see in the media or create from biased census data are often far from the lived realities of the diversity of people who exist.⁷ These simplistic narratives created by Red and Pink Pill to sow intra-class division are far from the real experiences people have, yet their perceived ubiquity is having a detrimental effect on people’s desire for romance and community.

For those of us with the privilege to read, focus on, and understand an essay such as this, we likely have more opportunities to enact the transformative relational power necessary to renegotiate gender roles.

This past summer I’ve entered into a community of incredible people who are doing exactly that in whatever small ways they can. I’ve had conversations with people who are confronted every day with the complexities of that renegotiation but continue to do it as best they can. I’ve met men who gather together to confront their grief and share tears. I’ve met women who respond with open hearts as men express their pain and regret at being raised to be a danger to them.

This is the emergence of a new moral community based around meta-gender relations that aren’t rooted in the warrior ethos. It’s now no longer man the warrior protecting woman the mother, but males socialized as men grieving what the warrior ethos took from them and made of them. They can step outside their role of warrior to become more, just as women have already done themselves by stepping out of the role of mother that had been forced upon them.

Gender as meta-gender can thus become the site of a truly transformative, relational power. The great irony is that we live through the genders we were socialized into in the relations, romantic or not, that are only made possible because of the reproductive binary. Rather than reducing and flattening ourselves to the reproductive binary, it becomes the structure within which and through which we transform ourselves. Post-hierarchical meta-gender becomes another aspirational avenue for the multiply realizable egalitarianism of solarpunk

Yet, many of us don’t have that privilege. For many of us, the most we can hope for is the safe simplicity of masculine and feminine energy in our desperate hope to find love, and compared to far too many, even that is a privilege.

While there is no long arc of history that guarantees that things get better, there are hopeful signs. One of the most important quotes in my life comes from Ilya Prigogine:²⁴

If you express solarpunk in a domain of your interest, you are creating such a small island.

For all the difficulties of the fight for equality, the feminist revolution continues even in the highly patriarchal China. Ironically, it’s precisely because of patriarchy that it’s happened. Saini writes of how the one-child policy that privileged sons made women far scarcer. Today, some women have realized they could renegotiate the terms of their marriage, even enforcing matrilocality instead of the traditional patrilocality.⁸ It’ll be very interesting to see what new meta-gendered relations come into being because of this.

While I’m certainly not saying that matrilocality is a social system we must return to, I think what this shows is that the logic of patriarchy has begun collapsing on itself. The Global Goliath that has created the greatest income inequality our species has ever seen has also allowed the ideas necessary for solarpunk to spread like wildfire across the planet.

Kemp writes that the logic of extraction eventually leads to rigid hierarchies ruled by ineffective oligarchs too stupid to adapt themselves to changing reality.² What is that if not a perfect description of the farce of Trump’s technofascist regime?

There is no easy way forward. The collapse of the Global Goliath could take all of us with it. Until then, I’ll personally continue loving with everything I have. When I look into the eyes of the people I love, I’m inspired to become the man who can lift them up well enough for them to lift others up. To create small islands of coherence, we have to begin with where we currently are and that means turning to the people around you, asking them for support and giving it where you can. That is the egalitarian ethos that will lead us to solarpunk.

Assignment:

1. In previous essays you’ve selected some domain you’re interested in, be it romantic relations and masculinity as I often do, your own gender, a previous or current religious affiliation, a political party, or something else. Remember that you’re answering these in the context of creating solarpunk within that domain of interest.

2. How has your domain been structured in terms of unilateral power? How are expertise, authority, or roles understood in terms of having greater decision-making power? Are these differences just?

3. How can they be reconceptualised in terms of transformative relational power? Sometimes expertise earns greater decision-making power. Where should the line be drawn and why?

4. What is the adjacent possible, the next possible step, from unilateral power to transformative relational power?

Until the next one, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.

References:

2 – Kemp, L. (2025). Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. Random House, Inc.

3 – Juarrero, A. (2023). Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence. The MIT Press.

4 – Cesare, S. D. (2026). Organic Progress and Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge University Press.

5 – Gender egalitarianism made us human: A response to David Graeber & David Wengrow’s “How to change the course of human history” - by Camilla Power | libcom.org. (n.d.). Retrieved September 8, 2026, from https://libcom.org/article/gender-egalitarianism-made-us-human-response-david-graeber-david-wengrows-how-change-course

6 – WHAT IS POLITICS? (2021, October 26). 10.1 Do “Egalitarian Societies” Exist? David Graeber & David Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything” [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vNADAH-Rxk

7 – Saini, A. (2023). The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality. Beacon Press.

8 – Stotz, K. (2014). Extended evolutionary psychology: The importance of transgenerational developmental plasticity. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00908

9 – Ferguson, A. (1989). Blood at the Root: Motherhood, Sexuality and Male Dominance. Pandora Pr.

10 – Lerner, G. (1987). The Creation of Patriarchy. Oxford University Press.

11 – Held, V. (2006). The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, Global. Oxford University Press.

12 – Brown, W. (2017). Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Zone Books.

13 – Lugones, M. (2016). The Coloniality of Gender. In W. Harcourt (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development: Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice (pp. 13–33). Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-38273-3_2

14 – Freinacht, H. (2019). Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two. Metamoderna ApS.

15 – Freinacht, H. (2023, July 14). We must reclaim solarpunk from authoritarian regimes. UX Collective. https://uxdesign.cc/we-must-reclaim-solarpunk-from-authoritarian-regimes-bf368e4984b2

16 – Hedlund, N. (2025, April 23). Visionary Realism and the Emergence of a Eudaimonistic Society. Nicholas Hedlund. https://www.nicholashedlund.com/post/visionary-realism-and-the-emergence-of-a-eudaimonistic-society

17 – Loomer, B. (1976). Two Conceptions of Power. Process Studies, 6(1), 5–32. https://doi.org/10.5840/process19766126

18 – Connell, R. W. (2008). Masculinities. University of California Press.

19 – Pride month 2023: 9% of adults identify as LGBT+ | Ipsos. (2023, June 1). https://www.ipsos.com/en/pride-month-2023-9-percent-of-adults-identify-as-lgbt

20 – Callard, A. (2018). Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming. Oxford University Press.

21 – Rowson, J., & Pascal, L. (n.d.). Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds: Crisis and emergence in metamodernity. Perspectiva.

22 – Zhang, W. (2024, December 4). Sexual identity is more fluid than previously thought, says twelve-year study. The Conversation. https://doi.org/10.64628/AB.mtmwghhqw

23 – Fromm, E. (1994). Escape from Freedom. Holt Paperbacks.

24 – Arnoud. (2023, July 14). Islands of Coherence. The Garrison Institute. https://www.garrisoninstitute.org/pathways-to-planetary-health/islands-of-coherence/

Also available on YouTube and Spotify.

Look into the eyes of a woman you love and ask yourself whether she should feel like she’s in danger. Look into the eyes of a man you love and ask yourself whether he should feel like he must become a danger in order to protect her.

Too many men today believe that they ought to learn how to fight so that they can protect their loved ones. The typical critique is “protect them from who? Yeah that’s right, other men!”

This isn’t wrong by any means. Yet, for as right as it is, it often shuts dialogue down. Such men feel responsibilized for the crimes of the violent, when they wanted nothing more than to protect the people they love. What’s too rarely explained to them is that one part of the problem of “learning to fight” is that it contributes to a subculture that glorifies violence, creating an attractor for men who revel in the power they have over the people they abuse.

This same logic extends far beyond the world of mixed martial arts, with researchers such as Greg Elliott coming up with the psychopath selection hypothesis. This is the idea that our society has structured itself to select for psychopathic behaviour. Regular people are incentivized to adopt a cutthroat Machiavellianism in order to succeed in life.¹ Even success itself is defined on terms so hyper-individualistic that only a psychopath would be happy having met those terms.

As with fighting, each loving, empathetic person who pursues this version of success, feeling as if they must in order to live a good life, is in fact creating the very conditions that create the problems they seek to solve. This is our technofeudal patriarchal predicament, a hyper-technological society ruled by a small oligarchy of billionaires who seek to extract every last coin of profit from each of us.

The question we should be led to is whether or not we’d all be better off by focusing our time and energies on creating culture and systems that glorify peace, love, and creativity. Such culture could be described as solarpunk, which is the vision of an egalitarian, nature-oriented, yet still technological future.

Unfortunately, creating such a future may seem impossible. The very idea that a species such as ours could ever be egalitarian sounds like the wishful thinking of some granola loving hippies. It’s important to recognize however that for the majority of our time on this planet as humans, we have not only lived in egalitarian bands, but many that were gender egalitarian as well.^2,3,4,5,6,7 In other words, patriarchy is not something that has always been the case, but something that emerged historically.

As such, if we want to understand how we can get to a solarpunk world, we need to understand more deeply how we got to our current deeply hierarchical, technofeudal civilization. On that point, Luke Kemp challenges the idea that “civilization” is deserving of the name, re-terming it “goliath” and defining it as:²

A goliath then, is a complex system that pumps wealth and power to a small elite, often to the radical detriment of everyone else. The fact that it is such a complex system means that we have to have a historical narrative true to that complexity. This leads us to the complexity sciences, particularly their concept of “multiple realizability”. This is a property of complex systems that basically just means that there’s more than one way to do things, there are multiple ways to realize some social system whether egalitarian or hierarchical.³

Such an obvious statement may seem useless, but it’s actually answering a very common problem. In many of my readings about the rise of patriarchy there’s a near-unanimous desire to either find the one primary cause, such as material accumulation creating wealth inequality, or to remind us that there can be no one primary cause. Even material accumulation doesn’t always lead to inequality as there are examples of sedentary farmers who had accumulation while remaining relatively egalitarian, even distributing that wealth collectively.²

What multiple realizability offers us then, is an understanding that of all the parts we could consider, what really matters is that there is no single direct cause of hierarchy. Where in this culture this one factor matters a lot, in this other it matters much less. Yet, very importantly, any factor may still facilitate patriarchy when other facilitating parts are introduced. While this group of peaceful sedentary farmers had no issue with material accumulation, they may quickly become radically hierarchical when a more violent neighbour decides that they want what they have.

We thus need to understand the parts that make hierarchy more likely. Not to prevent them from existing, but to understand how they work in various contexts. Sometimes a part is necessary at certain periods of a culture’s existence or during certain environmental conditions. How many cultures have gone extinct because they didn’t have accumulated stores of food and other resources when hard times came?

In some cases we ought to have that specific factor, but we also need to understand trade-off relationships. What are we sacrificing or putting ourselves at risk for by having that specific factor? This can only be known when we understand how that factor operates within different cultural and material contexts. While material accumulation may make hierarchy more likely, we may also be able to create social systems and cultural practices that allow accumulation while remaining egalitarian. For a technological solarpunk future, this is a problem we ought to solve.

Finally, an important point to remember is that there is never linear progress like “first women are subjugated, then farming is invented, then psychopaths take over, and then hierarchy happens”.

As an example, the author Angela Saini questions an account of marriage as being so inherently hierarchical that it informed slavery. She instead offers the possibility that it was slavery that came to define how we think of once-egalitarian marriages.⁸ In my view, it’s better to remember that there’s always a reciprocal relationship, with each part influencing the others as a culture evolves. They inform and shape each other.

I think Saini exemplifies the approach we ought to take with this. Throughout her book she repeatedly offers an aside, to herself more so than the reader, to caution against being swept away with a certain flashy, interesting narrative.⁸ History is simply complex and most, if not all systems are multiply realizable. Even this essay is a violent simplification of the true complexity, but it still can be useful to help you understand that history a little better.

That said then, the single most important causal factor that always, no matter what leads to patriarchy’s development was the move from matrilocal to patrilocal societies. Obviously that’s a joke, but this specific factor is about whether a man or a woman leaves their own tribe to go to that of their new partner. In matrilocal systems, women stay put, whereas in patrilocal, they move to their husband.

We’ll get to why societies may have made this transition later, but I first want to talk about why exactly this specific factor makes patriarchy more likely by discussing the idea of female coalitions. A female coalition is exactly as it sounds. Women get together to stand for their own interests. Even though patrilocal cultures can be gender egalitarian within the wider community, it becomes more difficult to maintain that in the context of marriage because they lack real coalitions with other women.⁸

Saini writes of the very deep oppression caused by a woman’s mother-in-law. Working in the interest of her own son and family, her cruelty ensures that her daughter-in-law remains under her son’s authority. Point being, there can be no real coalition when you have a bunch of strangers who don’t know each other, surrounded by men who are family, and women who are committed to the protection of their own children.⁸

Yet, think about how patrilocality and a lack of female coalitions would operate in ways that differ from matrilocality and the alternative lack of male coalitions.

A common reason given for patriarchy’s emergence was the reduction of women to a token of exchange.^7,9 One reason the same doesn’t happen to men when they move matrilocally is because men are not as valuable when it comes to reproduction.^7,9

It can be easy to think that matrilocal bands are simply more ethical, and maybe they are, but it may also be that they’re simply more indifferent to men than patrilocal bands are to women when it comes specifically to parental certainty. A mother knows she is the mother of her own children whereas a father doesn’t. Consequently, there are simply more pressures on a patrilocal tribe to control a woman to ensure paternity certainty, that the children are truly those of the father.¹³

That said, in matrilocal bands there’s sometimes control of the possible father through institutions such as bride-service in which a woman’s in-laws ensure the potential father provides economically for her.¹³ And yet, a matrilocal band doesn’t gain anything by controlling a man’s reproductive capabilities because he’s not the bottleneck to reproduction that women are. If a man can impregnate more women in the time it takes for a woman to give birth and raise a child, to even know that she’s pregnant, then it makes more sense to control a woman’s reproduction.¹⁰

Again, there’s real complexity there, but we’ll return to that later in the essay. What I want to focus on is that this shows us how evolutionary psychology, far from the upholder of patriarchy that Red Pill bastardizations make it seem, has actually been used more and more to justify feminist critiques of patriarchy.^4,6 That is to say, we can understand why matrilocality harms men less than patrilocality harms women partly with evolutionary psychology, showing how differences in reproductive function contribute to differences in cultural and economic evolution.

Importantly, this also demonstrates that we cannot reduce culture and economy to biology. This doesn’t require a “gene” or “innate psychological module” for patrilocality, only a more adaptive social organization given differences in reproductive function and, of course, material conditions.

Then again, why does reproduction matter so much? Because a matrilocal or patrilocal band is also matrilineal or patrilineal. This means that any property or resources that exist will be passed down from mother to daughter or from father to son. Each family has a vested interest in their member’s reproduction beyond simple affection. This is one of the reasons why “material accumulation” has become such a source of disdain. Affection gets tossed aside as the more important factor in a family’s life once private property and personal wealth come on the scene.

Taking a note from Saini, we have to remember not to let any single narrative run away from us. While private property matters as a factor that contributes to the likelihood of hierarchy emerging, another very important part is the denigration of women to their reproductive function. A simple linear narrative would say that this denigration happens because of how controlling a woman’s reproduction contributes to personal wealth through patrilineality, but each of these parts co-evolve in a complex system that includes other parts rather than one after the other.

The simple linear narrative that material accumulation always leads to hierarchy assumes a merely material view of value. It’s the idea that economic value could supersede other forms of value. There are likely many mothers-in-law who feel great affection for their daughters-in-law, not to mention the many husbands in egalitarian bands who refused to oppress their wives. The idea that husbands and their mothers only value wives as tokens of economic value comes, ironically, from the very same worldview that would eventually reduce the environment to its economic value in a capitalist marketplace.

Economic value becomes more important than other forms of value when pressures become high enough such as in wartime or drought, then enough parts contributing to patriarchy begin to work together. The reduction of wives to their reproductive value becomes a survival necessity, even if not necessarily preferred. In such situations, wives may readily agree to their own reduction because that is necessary for their own and their loved ones survival. It could very well be their mutual affection that leads to a deal with the patriarchal devil that doesn’t become obvious until a generation or more later.⁹

Just because such women chose to do it, doesn’t mean they’d have preferred to do it if given a real choice in better conditions.

Yet, the fact is that even in good conditions women can be more easily reduced to their reproductive function once their ability to produce children becomes something more easily controlled. That’s why patrilocality matters just as much as patrilineality. In a patrilocal band, surrounded by strangers and guarded by a mother-in-law, a woman can’t create a coalition with other women to collectively protect her right to her own body. It might make sense to say that patrilocality gives power to husbands to own their wives as property, but what it really does is give his family power to work together to treat each individual foreign woman as property.

You may still wonder why any women would ever agree to such a state of affairs.

Firstly, because if women are in a disadvantaged position, then when they find themselves in a position of power defined by their care for another, they may take advantage of it. Ann Ferguson discusses this in terms of capitalism and patriarchy being two different systems that confer power to women in different, yet intersecting ways. Where in capitalism a bourgeois woman has power over a working class woman, in patriarchy she has less than men. Because these systems intersect, by engaging in capitalist domination of the working class for the benefit of a family she cares about, a bourgeois woman recreates the patriarchal system that dominates her.⁹

The same dynamic likely takes place in patrilocal bands. A mother-in-law has power over her daughters-in-law, who, being strangers with vested interests in and care for their own children and their own relative freedom within an oppressive system, are less likely to form a coalition.

While this may seem strange, Saini writes of a similar dynamic among the women captured and enslaved by Boko Haram. Some of these women were taken as wives and then given power over slaves. Women in such a position recreate the system of their own domination, yet in doing so, they are also afforded power and privileges they may not have even had in their original family. They may also now have children of their own whose well-being is dependent on their conforming themselves to a situation that also affords them power even as it oppresses them.⁸

Rollo Tomassi, the Godfather of the Red Pill, has tried to use such circumstances as evidence that women crave to be dominated.¹⁴ That doesn’t make sense. He’s saying that the fact that there are many men who go into a tribe, murder all the men, enslave the women, rape them into pregnancy, and then those women willingly accept their captivity to raise those children, all means that those women are perfectly okay with this because the act of being dominated in such a fashion is how they select the more dominant alpha with superior genes.

The lack of rebelliousness in such women doesn’t mean they craved the dominance, desiring or preferring to submit. The inability to win in a fight against a captive army of strangers who already murdered your entire people, and so choosing submission, is not the same as preferring submission. If you’re given the choice between life in captivity and death, you can deal with a lot of suffering, especially if meaning can still be found through children and whatever community you can create, even when forced upon you. What this speaks to is not women’s preference for submission, but for the strength of the human spirit in creating meaning even within horrifying suffering.⁸

Yet none of this necessarily says why women get reduced to their reproductive function, only why it might be perpetuated by the women themselves despite the disadvantages. Maria Lugones offers a powerful quote from Paula Gunn Allen about the idea of a pre-patriarchal mother goddess:¹¹

The Goddess movement has been an enormous part of the development of feminist thinking, yet explicit in the notion of a “Mother Goddess” is the very patriarchal denigration of women to their reproductive function.^8,11 While I’m certainly not against a revalorization of femininity or motherhood, I’m also wary of narratives around the reclamation and revalorization of the “divine feminine” when it centers the mother as being exclusively or even primarily exemplary of feminine divinity.

Gerda Lerner, the influential feminist author of The Creation of Patriarchy, focuses on the denigration of mothers but also on the denigration of women to being merely mothers.^7,8 We’ll discuss the denigration of women as mothers in a later essay, but an important reason women were reduced to their reproductive function is related to the second reason women would have agreed to their own subjugation in patrilocal bands.

Lerner writes that in early Jewish communities a loss of population due to wars and epidemics may have led to women agreeing to a heavy division of labour that prioritized their maternal role in creating more sons.⁷ This is a key, key point that connects the prioritization of sons over daughters with the exchangeability of daughters between patrilocal bands and the replacement of the egalitarian ethos with the warrior ethos.

To begin to unpack that, Boehm writes of the egalitarian ethos and a moral community as essential for the maintenance of egalitarianism despite changes in material conditions. Essentially, the moral community acts through levelling mechanisms that counteract the influence of factors that make hierarchy more likely. Despite changes in materials conditions, the presence of material accumulation, agriculture, and sedentary villages, some tribes remain relatively egalitarian because of the power of the moral community, the people of the tribe itself, who continue to value egalitarianism enough to keep hierarchy from emerging.¹²

We can thus understand the second reason why matrilocal cultures became patrilocal despite the clear disadvantages it produced for women. It was the emergence of a new moral community with hierarchizing mechanisms centered on a warrior ethos rather than an egalitarian ethos. In other words, this was the birth of the worldview in which women viewed themselves as being so in need of male protection that they co-created with men the very warrior ethos that made their protection necessary.

Again, I want to be clear that I’m not putting forward the warrior ethos as the new primary driver of hierarchy. I’m instead offering it as another factor that co-evolved with and because of all the other factors we’ve already discussed and continue to discuss.

So, what other factors?

Material accumulation! Yes, we finally get at that all-important, always direct cause of hierarchy’s emergence!

With the birth of agriculture and animal husbandry there was now selection pressures on bands to become patrilocal rather than matrilocal. The fact that a band could accumulate material surplus meant that they had resources that another band could steal, resources that often included women themselves. Which band is likely to survive such an onslaught? A matrilocal band in which the men are strangers? Or, a patrilocal band in which many brothers, fathers, uncles, and cousins are all in close proximity and ready to die for one another in a coalition? ^2,7,8,13,15

This also explains why patrilocal tribes became far more controlling of women than matrilocal tribes were of men. If more patrilocal tribes came on the scene after agriculture increased inter-tribal conflict, then there were external pressures on the tribe to become more restrictive of their women in order to protect them. It wasn’t necessarily that patrilocality exclusively, always led to patriarchy, but that with material accumulation, patrilocality became more likely as a consequence of inter-tribal conflict, and so patriarchy then became more likely.

We can again see how these different factors co-evolve rather than there being a linear, direct causation from one to the other. Patrilocality and inter-tribal conflict without agriculture may not have produced patriarchy. Matrilocality with agriculture and inter-tribal conflict may not have produced patriarchy. Get the right combination of any of them and all the other factors we haven’t mentioned, and now patriarchy and hierarchy generally become far more likely than egalitarianism of any sort.

A very important addition however, is that these transitions were far from instantaneous. It was a slow process over sometimes many generations, requiring many different factors to come together.^2,16

The main point though, is that the transition to patrilocality and the subjugation of women wasn’t something women or even men consciously chose knowing what it would lead to. It was a survival necessity that ended up lasting longer than necessary because of how these changes transformed the egalitarian ethos into a warrior ethos, coopting the very moral community and levelling mechanisms that had perpetuated the egalitarian ethos.

With the emergence of resources that could be stolen, inter-tribal conflict became far more common and this placed selection pressures not only on patrilocality, but also on the emergence of a warrior ethos. This wouldn’t have immediately replaced the egalitarian ethos. Remember that the parts of any system co-evolve together. The warrior ethos would have emerged amidst the egalitarian ethos, perhaps even been afforded by certain aspects of it, perhaps particularly in how the egalitarian ethos had already co-evolved with a hunter ethos.¹²

It might seem obvious that the hunter ethos transformed into the warrior ethos. Things like competition over prowess with certain weapons and the number of kills one gets. Even though bands such as the !Kung san have levelling mechanisms that ensure very skilled hunters don’t develop an overly inflated ego, there’s still friendly perhaps even sometimes hostile competition among hunters. As Boehm has written, the urge to domination is endemic to human nature. The fact that all egalitarian social systems have levelling mechanisms is precisely to deal with such impulses when they arise.¹²

Boehm’s writings can help us understand how the warrior ethos emerges from the egalitarian ethos. He writes that we are the ambivalent ape in that we’re defined by domination, submission, and domination resentment.¹² Both bonobos and chimpanzees demonstrate very clearly that our evolutionary heritage is defined by all three.^12,8,17

People often like to look at the bonobo to show how peaceful our “real” ancestors are. Firstly, evolution is about common ancestors. Bonobos aren’t our ancestors, but we share a common ancestor that many want to believe was just as peaceful as modern day bonobos are. Yet, the evidence we have shows that bonobos aren’t as peaceful as the popular myths. Females will chase and attack males, sometimes removing limbs, and no bonobo troop has ever been found led by a male rather than a female.^8,17

We also have to remember that even if men seem to be more likely to be power-hungry, which is very different from saying all men are, this doesn’t mean that women aren’t motivated by power and competition.² Women play sports and have throughout history. Women have been rulers, sometimes horrifyingly, violently power-hungry ones.⁸

My point in bringing this up isn’t to highlight how we really are dominant after-all. It’s instead to complexify our narratives about our history and ourselves. We don’t need to have been descended from some idyllic, peace-loving common ancestor in order for us to be capable of egalitarian peace today.

Lerner herself writes that we ought to abandon the search for an empowering past.⁷ While I think that’s a bit overstated, what we ought to do is understand ourselves as Boehm does, as the ambivalent ape capable of domination, submission, and resentment of being dominated.¹² We’re capable of both domination and egalitarianism depending on environmental conditions, and so that’s exactly what we’ve found throughout our history.

That said, Boehm and Saini also write of a fourth piece that defines human beings in ways that none of our primate ancestors seem to be capable of. Despite all that we can say about human violence, we are also capable of incredibly awe-inspiring acts of altruism.^8,12

Boehm criticizes much of evolutionary psychology for what he calls “methodological individualism”, or the assumption that humans by nature are selfish, capable only of a strategic altruism for the benefit of their own reproductive success. As you can imagine, he criticizes that position.¹²

Elsewhere Kemp writes of the same mistake leading to the inadequacies of game theory outside the math and unnatural lab environments. He concludes from the numerous experiments that when human beings interact, they’re often defined by highly altruistic behaviour. What changes things is when humans are taught game theory. Unsurprisingly, learning to expect others to be selfish makes us more selfish, and also when we’re caught up in competition at the level of the state and the company. Such environments bring out the darker angels of our nature rather than define our nature as such.²

Despite this altruism and despite our potentially peaceful common ancestor with the bonobo, violent hierarchy emerges. Boehm theorizes that this may have been precisely because of our altruism. As our capabilities for altruism increased with our advancing social cognition, enabling us to understand and care about increasingly complex webs of social connection, this also increased both our willingness to die for an in-group and engage in increasingly complex warfare in order to do so.¹² The biologist Robert Sapolsky writes of the neurotransmitter oxytocin, the famous “love” chemical, which increases both in-group affiliation and out-group hostility.¹⁸

The point is that with more lootable resources through the material accumulation made possible by agriculture and animal husbandry, groups were more likely to be attacked by raiders.^2,15 Additionally, with more resources, a patrilocal family could actually have something, such as cattle, to exchange for a woman, convincing a family to let her go.¹³ Even though human altruism might make such exchanges and even combat less likely, in the right conditions our desire for dominance and our altruism might work together.

This is the tragic beauty of the multiple realizability of patriarchy. Altruism alone would seem to make it less likely, but when combined with dominance, with agriculture, with patrilocality, and with inter-group conflict, suddenly our altruism for our in-group becomes the means by which we become so violent toward the out-group. The degree of human social cognition also makes the lines of in/out-group that much more violently complex. Where I would die to save my brother’s wife, I’d also support his violence to keep her in line because she is simultaneously the in-group of my tribe and the out-group of my gender.

To summarize everything so far, I’ve shown how the various aspects of our ambivalent nature act together to produce complex conditions of in-group altruism and out-group hostility. When placed in a system with the material conditions created by agriculture and animal husbandry, this creates the evolutionary advantageous social system of patrilocality. This disadvantages women specifically because of how it robs them of coalitional strength against the interests of not simply “men as such”, but specifically men raised in a social system that affords and requires their control of women to ensure the certainty of their patrilineal inheritance going to the right son. This all acts together to slowly, over time, make a warrior ethos more important than an egalitarian ethos.

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With all that said then, what exactly is the warrior ethos, what moral community emerges to value it, and what hierarchizing mechanisms emerge to maintain it?

To understand what the warrior ethos is, we first need to understand how it sees the world. This is an extraordinarily important point that ties together much of what we’ve been discussing. The very first step (remembering that there are no real “first” steps) is in seeing this change in worldview as the transformation of the hunter ethos by the emergence of agriculture and animal husbandry.

Even though hunter-gatherer bands killed animals, they often viewed them as being imbued with spirits that put them on a similar footing as humans. There wasn’t as clear a distinction in worth as there is in our society. The fact that humans killed animals for food wasn’t because we were entitled to do so, but because we were just like any other animal that hunted for its own food. Such a worldview was called animism and animistic egalitarians, perhaps unsurprisingly, were also far less likely to have slaves.²

With agriculture and cattle however, this began to shift. The philosopher Ken Wilber has written that the animistic respect and care for non-human animals couldn’t last the moment you had to whip livestock in order to make it do what you wanted.¹⁹ The shift to animal husbandry marked the shift to viewing living beings as merely a resource. As Saini writes:⁸

Her statement about this claim applying only to people, meaning humans, is part of the problem. Saini is at odds with Lerner in that she views slavery as predating the subjugation of women, whereas Lerner says that the slavery was informed by the already hierarchical marriage.^7,8 Saini writes about slavery:⁸

This is obviously true and so it’s likely the case that slavery co-evolved with egalitarian marriage to produce more vicious slavery and more patriarchal marriages. Yet, we can also apply that paragraph to non-human animals. Slavery and patriarchal marriage didn’t just appear out of nowhere. They appeared out of cultures that had for many thousands of years been animistic, had a more egalitarian relation with non-human animals. To have such worldview collapse into one that saw animals as a resource to be broken clearly contributes to the problem.

I can’t accuse Saini of direct anthropocentrism for having not mentioned it one way or the other, but she does address the way that women have been animalized. She quotes James Scott who writes on medieval texts about:⁸

There seems to be a connection between the collapse of animism, patrilocality, patriarchy, and hierarchy in the form of the slavery of both human and non-human animals. The hunter ethos gave way underneath the anthropocentric and androcentric logic of extraction. As Kemp writes:²

Extraction justifies the violent exploitation of anything labelled the out-group, often for the altruistic sake of our in-group. Kemp very clearly writes of the metals used in weapons.² The warrior ethos is intimately bound with the logic of extraction in a way that cannot be supported by only a hunter’s ethos, and certainly not an egalitarian ethos. The raiders of a young patrilocal tribe who now had material surplus were seeing with the eyes of extraction and that’s why they became warriors rather than hunters.

Remember though that Kemp defines a Goliath to be collection of interconnected hierarchies. He terms Goliath fuel to be lootable resources, caged land that prevents people from voting against hierarchy by simply walking away, and finally, monopolizable weapons. Once a society has powerful weapons that no one else has, it quickly comes to dominate an area, pushing its borders further as the logic of extraction has it view its neighbours as resources of food, slaves, and women, that token of exchange prized for its reproductive capabilities.² The warrior ethos thus comes to be primarily defined as a masculine relation to the world.

We thus have increasingly violent tribes in which men socialize other men to be warrior-protectors of their women, property they own for the purposes of producing more sons. They devalue and reduce women to their reproductive function even as many of them may honestly love them enough to be willing to die for them. This is the complexity of the warrior ethos. It’s also a protector ethos, but the two go hand-in-hand, recreating each other. Kemp writes explicitly of hierarchy as a protection racket and this includes even loving relationships while under the warrior ethos.²

A fascinating addition to this is how all of this contributed to the valuing of sons and the devaluing of daughters. It makes sense that sons were valued because patriarchal patrilineality meant they’d be given greater decision-making power through their inheritance. Yet, sons were also more valued precisely because they became more disposable than women.

I want to be very careful as I write this because the idea of the disposable male is often used by Red Pill and other men’s rights activists to counter the idea that we aren’t living in a patriarchy. The sociologist R.W. Connell has written that the oppression men face in patriarchy contributes to the very system that supports them.²⁰ I think a more nuanced understanding of patriarchy as a Goliath can help us understand how this seemingly paradoxical idea can be true.

If a Goliath is a collection of interconnected hierarchies, then even though in one hierarchy a man is incredibly oppressed, in another he may benefit. It’s the same logic as Ferguson’s idea that a bourgeois woman’s success in capitalism feeds the very system of her gendered oppression.⁹ Two distinct systems can intersect, providing privileges even as they deny others.

In the case of the disposable male we see the same kind of dynamic and an important case of how the moral community of the warrior ethos coopts a levelling mechanism of the egalitarian moral community, turning it into a hierarchizing mechanism. Saini writes the following:⁸

This is the egalitarian levelling mechanism of ridicule, once used to keep the hunter from becoming too bigheaded, now used to shame men into going into battle for the benefit of the hierarchy that robs all of them of power even as it affords some of them privileges. While the women are privileged in that they can remain safely at home, they send their men to do battle where they’ll likely, if they survive, rape the women of the out-group.

Saini writes further of the co-evolution between slavery and patriarchal marriage, writing that:⁸

Sons were prioritized because of patrilocal patrilineality. This social system was selected for because of the inter-tribal conflict over lootable resources which led to the warrior ethos that prioritized sons for combat. Sons were prioritized over daughters because of patrilineality and because they were disposable for the perpetuation of the very collection of hierarchies that privileged and oppressed all of them. As Ferguson writes of bourgeois women, where in one hierarchy they have power, in another they are oppressed.⁹

Men’s disposability as warriors recreated the necessity of the extractive logic of the warrior ethos which led to the rape and enslavement of women, and the misogynistic power that the mighty warrior had over women as mere tokens of exchange based on their reproductive value. The exchange of women also became a way to ensure alliances between tribes, reducing violence between them.⁷

Ironically, the same women who shamed their men into battle were then exchanged to prevent further battle. I don’t say that in a vindictive way, like they got what they deserved or something. I only mean to highlight how Goliath’s are collections of hierarchies that give and take privileges depending on whatever is necessary to maintain the hierarchy of power. Men and women have been pitted against each other by these hierarchies since they began. The idea of the disposable male could be a way to awaken men to the way the patriarchal warrior ethos oppresses them, but it’s often used as yet another means for the common people to attack one another while the hierarchy prospers.

Yet so far I’ve talked about “hierarchy” almost exclusively in abstract terms. It wasn’t just the hierarchies themselves that received the powers, the individuals within those hierarchies did. How did leaders emerge out of the egalitarian ethos that ridiculed and shamed successful hunters who brought home good meat just to ensure that they didn’t become too arrogant?¹²

During times of crisis, whether environmental or in wartime, even egalitarian bands would elect a leader who was granted greater, yet temporary power. Additionally, with the introduction of material surplus, certain “Big Men” were granted greater bargaining power because they had more to lose and thus more reason to take risks that led to greater rewards. Importantly though, Boehm writes that a near unanimous trait that all temporary leaders must have had is generosity.¹²

Kemp writes of a way the very egalitarian levelling mechanism of leadership generosity can become a hierarchizing mechanism. Many Big Men would throw feasts for their group members. Once such Big Men had the resources to be incredibly generous repeatedly, that generosity may get linked to the right to have large surplus and remain Big Men. Each time they threw an enormous feast, demonstrating how generous they were, their social status for being generous became justification for their right to their surplus, thereby perpetuating their greater bargaining power, and thus, decision-making power.²

With increasing surplus, there would be an increasing population of women to produce more disposable sons to be sent off into battle to loot even more resources and slaves, allowing the hierarchies to climb higher and higher. As Kemp writes:²

The warrior ethos is that of the extractive hierarchy that creates the conditions in which violent psychopaths are most likely to rise to power. Kemp writes of the countless rulers who were launched into power atop geysers of blood.² The egalitarian ethos of the generous leader is replaced by the warrior ethos of the violent dictator, with the most dominant, most strategic, most bloodthirsty individuals often being the aspirational exemplar.

Such dictators are almost exclusively male, but again, there is a very real difference between saying that most psychopathic rulers were male and most males are violent psychopaths. Kemp states explicitly that it wasn’t a Hobbesian war of all against all, but a war of a few trained male warriors against the many peoples who wanted to live in peace. Power-hungry men created the system in which the average, far less violent man could benefit even as he was also oppressed.²

In these hierarchies, captured men are often slaughtered whereas women, captured or otherwise, are used a token of status and political conniving among men. Remember that, according to Red Pill misinterpretations of evolutionary psychology, the fact that a single child takes a woman out of reproduction for an extended time means that she has higher intrinsic value than men. While the male is disposable, to say that a woman’s being kept alive means she has intrinsic value is foolish. Her value is as the price of an object, a tool used for reproduction, itself reduced to mere economic utility.

To reduce human value to price and then say a man’s is less than a woman’s is not to say that women are of more value. The problem is the value structure that reduces and instrumentalizes human value, rather than that the system gives women a certain kind of utility and price that keeps her alive and “protected”.

Certainly being slaughtered is a horrifying crime and a woman is alive to find some sort of life of meaning amidst the suffering she endures, but what value is her protection against slaughter when that life is often the use of her holes for pleasure and/or reproduction against her will? What a joyous boon for the intrinsically valuable woman. At the end of the day, the discourse of the disposable male is worthy of more than this intra-class division that it’s become.

Here though, we can connect Boehm’s idea that in-group altruism breeds out-group hostility, with the moral community that uses hierarchizing mechanisms to justify and perpetuate their own oppression by violent dictators.

Kemp writes that groups of people under threat from the outside cooperate far better and are far more willing to commit violence to survive against that threat. Unfortunately, this also makes us far more prone to conformity. Again, our in-group altruism breeds out-group hostility. The more we come together the more sensitive we become to even very small differences that might signal that threatening out-group. Even worse, this also makes us more prone to authoritarianism. We turn to strong men psychopathic enough to enforce conformity for enhanced cooperative violence against the out-group.²

Even though inter-group violence sometimes happened before agriculture, and temporary Big Men were elected to lead, levelling mechanisms around the egalitarian moral community quickly disintegrated any sort of power structure that might have begun emerging.^2,12 Kemp writes of the many cases where hierarchy failed to form because there weren’t enough parts for it to emerge.²

This is why material accumulation and even patrilocality together aren’t always enough. Yet, when they come with a time of environmental crisis where inter-group hostility over scarce resources increases, now those parts can work their magic all together to tip the scales toward hierarchy. A warrior ethos emerges as a matter of survival against a threatening outsider that drives us into tight conformity and out-group hostility, and to look for a Big Man whose psychopathy is channeled against the threat. Once the threat is over, he’s now in control enough to maintain that control. The patrilineality of patrilocal tribes means whatever power he accrues throughout his life is passed to his sons.²

To reduce the emergence of patriarchal hierarchy to any one factor would be to miss how they are all important for its emergence. Certainly there are specific factors, such as material accumulation, that contribute greatly to its likelihood. That said, it’s not simply a culture having specific factors or forms of social organization that make it become a hierarchy or patriarchy. It’s how these various factors operate together in response to specific environmental conditions, whether drought, famine, or a violent neighbouring tribe.

When it comes to the emergence of hierarchy, we can say that hierarchy becomes a group’s most adaptive solution when it fits it functionally to its environment.²¹ For the vast majority of our existence as human beings, egalitarianism was the most adaptive solution to our environment. Once we got patrilineality with patrilocality, material accumulation through agriculture and animal husbandry, advanced weapons that no one else had, psychopathic Big Men leading against hostile neighbouring tribes that wanted what we had, and all that working together to cage us in land that we couldn’t easily flee, now hierarchy and the warrior ethos became the most adaptive solution.

The fact that a given patriarchy can be composed of many different factors within many different environments, yet still be a “patriarchy” is precisely because of the multiple realizability of the social system. There may be many paths to patriarchy but that simply means that specific patriarchies can be different while still being “A” patriarchy. Even though we can say that cattle husbandry was a huge aspect of the emergence of some or even many patriarchies, doesn’t mean that it is always causal because it isn’t the only causal factor.

The reason I’ve returned to the point that started this essay is because if we want to understand how to evolve beyond the deeply hierarchical technofeudal patriarchy we currently live in, we want to understand that egalitarianism is also multiply realizable. It can be composed of many factors within many different kinds of environments. This is a message of hope. It means becoming egalitarian again is a possibility. That’s what we’ll cover in a future essay.

Assignment:

1. In previous essays you’ve selected some domain you’re interested in, be it romantic relations and masculinity as I often do, your own gender, a previous or current religious affiliation, a political party, or something else. Remember that you’re answering these in the context of creating solarpunk within that domain of interest.

2. A hierarchizing mechanism is one that maintains a hierarchy. For example, generosity being used to justify power or the pursuit of success contributing to capitalism. What hierarchizing mechanisms exist within your own domain?

3. How can you begin transforming that mechanism so that it contributes to solarpunk?

Until the next one, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.

References:

1 – Nate Hagens. (2026, August 26). The Rules of the Game Keep Us Trapped with Greg Elliott | TGS 231 [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVlfwKUssPg

2 – Kemp, L. (2025). Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. Random House, Inc.

3 – Juarrero, A. (2023). Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence. The MIT Press.

4 – Gender egalitarianism made us human: A response to David Graeber & David Wengrow’s “How to change the course of human history” - by Camilla Power | libcom.org. (n.d.). Retrieved September 8, 2026, from https://libcom.org/article/gender-egalitarianism-made-us-human-response-david-graeber-david-wengrows-how-change-course

5 – WHAT IS POLITICS? (2020, December 11). 7. The Origins of Patriarchy and Dominance Hierarchy; what David Graeber and Jordan Peterson miss [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgOo-bS7OJI

6 – Clark, G. (2025). Carl Jung and the Evolutionary Sciences: A New Vision for Analytical Psychology. Routledge.

7 – Lerner, G. (1987). The Creation of Patriarchy. Oxford University Press.

8 – Saini, A. (2023). The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality. Beacon Press.

9 – Ferguson, A. (1989). Blood at the Root: Motherhood, Sexuality and Male Dominance. Pandora Pr.

10 – Pinker, S. (2003). The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Penguin Books.

11 – Lugones, M. (2016). The Coloniality of Gender. In W. Harcourt (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development: Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice (pp. 13–33). Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-38273-3_2

12 – Boehm, C. (2001). Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Harvard University Press.

13 – Engels was Right: Early Human Kinship was Matrilineal | libcom.org. (n.d.). Retrieved September 8, 2026, from https://libcom.org/article/engels-was-right-early-human-kinship-was-matrilineal

14 – Tomassi, R. (n.d.). The Rational Male. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

15 – Evans, A. (2023, December 25). The Patrilocal Trap. https://www.ggd.world/p/the-patrilocal-trap

16 – Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. (n.d.). The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Signal.

17 – Martin, W. (2019). Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free. Little, Brown Spark.

18 – Sapolsky, R. M. (2018). Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. Penguin Books.

19 – Wilber, K. (2000). Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution. Shambhala.

20 – Connell, R. W. (2008). Masculinities. University of California Press.

21 – Cesare, S. D. (2026). Organic Progress and Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge University Press.

Also available on YouTube and Spotify.

Humans sit atop a hierarchy of domination, rightfully ruling over the lesser species so that we can extract the greatest profit we possibly can from a world we’ll leave behind as we slowly conquer and exploit the rest of the universe.

If that opening made you gag a little, then good! I think that very perspective is what’s destroying our environment, creating immense income inequality, and preventing the fruition of anything like the solarpunk vision of a nature-oriented, egalitarian, technological culture.

I don’t think human beings have greater moral worth than any other species. Here, I define moral worth to mean a right to a life without unnecessary suffering, a right to agency in the world, and to enact the same moral concern for others.

It’s at that moment that we have to pause. This might make for a good orienting definition that can guide us through deeper considerations, but we have to wonder what exactly “necessary suffering” means and who gets to decide. What about “agency” and “world”? We also have to wonder, when it comes to non-human animals, to what extent are they able to enact a similar moral concern about the worth of other beings, whether their own species or others.

This last one is an important question because that can very quickly lead us to the same hierarchical view of humans in which our greater capabilities with a very particular kind of intelligence grants us greater moral worth and justifies our dominion. In fact, I think any definition of moral worth should not include that last one precisely because it sets the bar way too high.

Instead, moral worth might be better conceptualized as a right to a life without unnecessary suffering, especially human-caused, and a right to agency in the world to create flourishing. Very loaded and I hope to get to something more precise, but certainly a better guide that what I offered before.

What we really need is a post-human solarpunk ontology, a map of reality that can more effectively guide us in these ethical considerations.

In a previous essay, I introduced Francesca Ferrando’s philosophical post-humanism, which challenges the anthropocentrism that places humanity at the center of the universe.³ A post-human perspective has some similarities to deep ecology, conceptualizing the value of the non-human life and world in a post-anthropocentric fashion, having intrinsic value outside what human’s desire.^3,4 As such, Ferrando advocates for a post-dualism that deconstructs binaries such as human/non-human, friend/foe, and us/them.³

We complexified our understanding of post-dualism as a post-exclusivist post-dualism that doesn’t create an oppressive binary between dualism and anti-dualism, but also doesn’t exclude exclusion.

For example, we ought to seriously reconsider the categorization of only humans as being persons deserving of rights, reconsidering the exclusion of chimpanzees or dolphins. However, we ought to exclude soil from the rights of personhood. The point of post-exclusivist post-anthropocentrism is not the idiot compassion that would have us foolishly grant personhood to everything, but to challenge the way tradition has taken nature’s name in vain to justify violent exclusion.

At the end of the last essay, I also stated that chimpanzees couldn’t be persons in the same way that humans were because of our vast difference in capabilities. Unfortunately, that leads us straight back to an anthropocentrism that sees the human as being in some way special relative to other life. Yet, human life is intimately bounded to and dependent on other life and even the inanimate such as soil. Our knee-jerk exclusion of other life from intrinsic value is quite literally destroying our planet. This is quite the dilemma to solve.

We can get a legitimate post-anthropocentrism by understanding something that I believe Ferrando misses.

Firstly, implicit in Ferrando’s notion of post-anthropocentrism is, obviously, that humans are not at the top of some hierarchy of value. We are not gods entitled to own, manipulate, and destroy life.

I agree with them, but there are important tensions between them and I when it comes to evolution, complexity, progress, normativity, and entitlement. To be upfront, I am not going to be arguing for evolution’s march toward morally superior super-men. That’s not where this is going. In fact, I think resolving these tensions is so important because of the real risk of falling for such a fascistic narrative.

To begin then, we need to understand how evolution and complexity are related. According to the complexity sciences, complexity is a measure of the number and variety of parts and the number of connections of those parts. A system is considered very complex if it has many parts performing a great diversity of functions in an integrated fashion, with many functions acting in concert.⁵ It might be easy to think that biological evolution is marked by an increase in complexity with bacteria being eclipsed by highly complex mammals including humans.

Contrary to this, Ferrando quotes the biologist Stephen Gould saying that evolution doesn’t move toward complexity, but toward diversification.³ And yet, if evolution doesn’t move toward complexity…then why the complexity? Evolution didn’t stop at mere bacteria, but exploded into a whirlwind of new kinds of organisms with varying degrees of complexity.

Elsewhere, Silvia De Cesare discusses Gould’s position as the “left wall” of complexity. If there is a minimum of complexity that a living organism can have, such as bacteria, then evolution can only ever move away from that wall. Like a drunken sailor randomly guided only by his avoidance of the wall, evolution eventually stumbles its way toward greater complexity.⁶

Interestingly, De Cesare agrees with Gould’s claim that the evolution toward complexity is not progress, yet she does so in an argument for evolutionary progress as normative. She argues that if a specific trait evolved to perform a certain function, such as a wing for flying, then we can say that there is a normative range from good wings to bad wings, from function to dysfunction.⁶

Over evolutionary time, natural selection can move a species toward far better wings, but specifically within the same environment. All else being equal, the wings of the new species work better for flying than those of the species from which the new one evolved.⁶

Through De Cesare, we have a notion of evolutionary progress in terms of functional fittedness, or how well a specific trait can function or how well it can fit within a specific environment. This provides a normative thrust to evolution at the most local scale with the comparison between single traits in specific environments. De Cesare cautions against moving from that local normative progress to more global notions of progress such as an entire species being better than all others in its evolutionary line or, even worse, being better than all other species for all time.

It’s important to recognize that throughout these discussions there’s a careful attempt to separate out evolution from progress, progress from normativity, normativity from entitlement. Again, this is unsurprising given Gould’s claim that he fears how evolutionary progress can be and has been used by fascists, at the loss of millions of human lives.⁵ Even further for our purposes in discussing post-humanism is how this domination also extends to non-human lives.

I think the primary difference between De Cesare and myself when it comes to evolutionary progress is that I am not talking about evolutionary progress in normative terms. The Neo-Piagetian educational philosopher Zak Stein criticizes what he sees as the growth to goodness fallacy. We can discuss growth or progress without making normative claims because what we’re really talking about with complexification is the emergence of new capabilities through repeated processes of differentiation into a greater number and variety of parts that are then re-integrated to act in concert.^7,8

For example, humans can clearly do things that animals can’t because those specific capabilities, such as rational, reflective thought, are more complex. That isn’t a normative statement in the sense that rationality gives humans entitlement to dominion.

Oddly enough, this actually fits well with De Cesare’s definition of evolutionary progress.

Firstly, complexity is often measured in a domain-independent fashion, meaning that it doesn’t matter what domain, environment, or specific trait we’re talking about. It’s merely the measure of the number and variety of parts, and the number of connections between those parts, of any sort of system.

By contrast, the psychological complexity that Stein discusses is often considered in a domain-dependent fashion. As such, often what people mean when they say “human’s more advanced rationality” is more about the complexity of specific traits of instrumental rationality being most functionally fitted to the local environment of neoliberal capitalism.⁸

Importantly then, De Cesare also makes it clear that our increased rationality may actually make us less functionally fit to an environment, and thus, dysfunctional relative to a less rational animal. No other animal is currently at risk of destroying all life on the planet.⁶

In other words, we can have greater complexity in terms of rationality, but that may actually make us more dysfunctional, and thus, normatively worse off than another animal, specifically with how that trait contributes to our survival within a specific environment. Really grasp that, our fittedness to our environment is hurt by how rational we are, and a less though still relatively rational animal might be more fitted to their own environment. Which of us is truly the more rational then?

Point being, normativity and complexification are not the same thing. Humans being higher up a specific scale’s complexification does not mean we’re entitled to anything, only that we’re capable of doing both greater good and harm than other animals.

Yet, again, we wind up back into a discussion of post-anthropocentrism and the immense capabilities that humans have. There seems to be a march toward greater complexity, yet Gould, Ferrando, and De Cesare say it’s random. At this point, you might be asking, why exactly does it even matter?

As we’ll see over the course of the next few essays, it matters because understanding how the process of evolution works is important for understanding how to be a more ethical person. If we as relational beings are created out of our relations with others, then we need to be aware of how evolution and the capability to be ethical are related to the process of complexification.

Okay, please bear with me for the next little bit. I need to get this out of the way even if sounds a bit convoluted. I’m going to make this all make sense by the end of this essay.

If I want to be a more ethical person who treats people better, this means that, created out of others as I am, I have to understand how I can come to treat others more ethically so that the relations that contribute to my own complexification also enact that greater complexification in ways that are ethical. The recursive nature of this process is at the heart of evolution’s complexifying march.

Christ isn’t that just infuriating? Isn’t it so frustrating to see how, despite complexification not being a normative process toward goodness, the precise fact that it is a process toward both goodness and evil makes it all the more normative to understand? In other words, the fact that complexification leads us to both good and evil, and we want to be good, means that we ought to understand how evolution is in part a move toward complexification.

If psychological complexification itself is the differentiation and re-integration from a simple understanding to a more complex understanding, then we can understand the differentiation of our conceptualizations of evolution, complexity, and normativity as itself the complexification that will lead to a re-integration that allows us to be both more good and more evil. Which means, we ought to fucking understand what’s going on here if we want to be more ethical.

Okay, now that we’ve got that all out of the way, we can finally turn to whether or not evolution is in fact a drive toward complexification. If you want a deeper dive on this, then I highly recommend the book, The Romance of Reality, by Bobby Azarian, or, The Evolution of Meaning, Vol. 1, by Brendan Graham Dempsey. They challenge the reductionist science that Ferrando ironically criticizes to lead them to claim that evolution is not complexification, but Azarian and Dempsey instead use the paradigm of complexity science and its far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics.^3,5,9

Before we get to that though, if you like this essay so far, then please give it a like and subscribe to the channel. It really helps with visibility in the algorithm. It also really helps if you share this essay with people you know. Thank you so much.

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Returning to complexity science, this differs from traditional thermodynamics, which views life as a surprise given how all physical systems seem to move toward thermodynamic equilibrium. In other words, if you put a cup of hot coffee on a table it eventually becomes cold because the heat energy is distributed throughout the room. This process is defined by the holy 2^nd law of thermodynamics, which says that all systems become more disordered as their energy dissipates into the environment.⁵

How can life emerge if all ordered systems disintegrate? Even the cup that holds the coffee will one day disintegrate. Yet, not only did the very ordered life emerge, but it’s persisted for billions of years and become increasingly ordered over time with the emergence of multicellular, multi-organed, rational humans, beings composed of a high number of greatly varied parts integrated well enough to act in concert as a single organism.

What traditional thermodynamics failed to take into consideration was that closed systems eventually grow disordered. Earth, orbiting as it does around an enormous nuclear furnace, is decidedly not a closed system. It is open to the energy of the sun.⁵

The answer to why life emerged is thus captured in the phrase, “energy that flows through a system acts to organize that system”. Even inanimate molecules such as silver will organize themselves into a structure that allows for the more efficient flow of energy through the system. As more energy flows through increasingly complex systems, that very flow of energy causes the system to become even more complex. Obviously, adding more energy doesn’t necessarily always lead to greater complexity, but if the system is capable of evolving to meet the increase in energy flow, then that evolution may be toward greater complexity.⁵

From inanimate silver that organizes to allow better energy flow, molecules eventually organize with sufficient complexity for life to emerge and that life survives if it is functionally fit enough to the environment. Thankfully, Azarian shines a light on the fascist shadow that “fitness” casts with the statement “survival of the fittest”. He writes:⁵

Remember, that complexity emerges as energy flows through a system. As long as the sun shines, pumping energy into the open Earth system, there is energy available to flow through the open systems of life itself. Azarian thus defines life as follows:⁵

How does life acquire information? Azarian explains:⁵

Azarian calls this process “learning” and claims that each individual organism constitutes a hypothesis made by the species as a whole about the likelihood of survival and reproduction. That is to say that an organism is a model of its environment. Its embodied form is prior “knowledge” about the set of strategies necessary to extract energy from a predicted environment. If the organism dies, it was a failed prediction. If the organism survives, then the species as a whole has learned something about its environment. ⁵

For example, a giraffe’s neck is a hypothesis about what strategy is needed given where food can most likely be found, which is, obviously, up high. Whether or not the giraffe survives is dependent on how well all the hypotheses that its body and brain make fit the giraffe well enough into an environment that it hopes will take a specific form.

This fits us well with De Cesare’s definition of evolutionary progress, showing how the giraffe’s neck is more functionally fit to a specific environment’s structured distribution of energy in the form of food. If trees begin to grow higher, then those individual giraffes with longer necks would constitute better hypotheses made by the entire species than those individual giraffes with shorter necks.

That’s where we get back into our argument that evolution is not a drunken sailor’s march away from a minimum degree of complexity. The giraffe is not a hypothesis about a static, inanimate environment, but a hypothesis about an environment that changes in response to the effectiveness of the giraffe’s prediction.

Importantly for us, this means that a more complex environment often though not always requires a more complex organism in order to survive. The very process of complexification that leads to silver organizing itself to allow energy to flow more efficiently is the one that allows more complex life forms to evolve and for those life forms to learn more about their environment in order to survive better. Even if complexification is not always the result of these processes, to say that these processes do not drive toward complexification seems to be false. As organisms of greater complexity interact with organisms and environments of greater complexity, there is selection pressure on those species to have, over time, more complex hypotheses or organisms in order to survive.⁵

Additionally, one of the key insights of human evolution has been that it was the complex social environment that created that selection pressure on early hominid ancestors. The more socially complex we became, the more socially complex we had to become in order to navigate that complexity well enough to extract enough energy in order to survive and reproduce.¹⁰

We can see here then that the process of complexification is evolution’s way of meeting new challenges that emerge precisely because of that complexification. When we get to human beings who have moral concerns, then we can say that if complexification creates new capabilities for evil, then those of us who wish to be good must complexify in order to combat that evil. This places pressure on evil to complexify in order to combat our good. This evolutionary arms race is known as the Red Queen hypothesis. The faster the world moves, the faster we must become just to keep up.^5,11

Far from being progress only toward “better”, evolution as complexification is normative precisely because it leads to new capabilities for both good and evil. When evolution gets to humans who are capable of both horrifying evil and awe-inspiring altruism, and of being aware of the difference, we can see how important it is to understand that they’re inseparable. The fact that we’re so capable of good is because we are so capable of evil, and insofar as we are capable of becoming more ethical, we are also capable of becoming more unethical. Surviving new challenges means coming up with better strategies, which means pressures on those who wish to be unethical to come up with better strategies in order to survive. That is evolution.

We can make that more concrete by considering a woman who is more capable of assessing how well a potential romantic partner can support her in raising their young. She’s placing evolutionary pressure on the men of her species to either meet those demands or to manipulate her into believing they can.

Her consideration requires a high degree of complex capabilities, accurately assessing her own capabilities, her partner’s capabilities and honesty, and taking all of that in the context of the physical and social environment that defines the terms of “success”. At the level of the human, it’s now no longer merely about getting resources, but her cultural background becomes its own domain to be navigated with her assessment of how well the man fits with rules, customs, and other cultural practices. Again, whether or not he tells the truth or lies to her, he will require highly complex capabilities in order to do so.

With the high levels of complexity that the human species operates at, we get increasing degrees of moral concern and thus concern about moral worth. The greater one’s capability for concern the greater one can confer moral worth not only to other living beings capable of experiencing but also the entire field of reality that creates the conditions of possibility for any concern and worth at all. The fact that we can consider other beings and the environment itself as being worthy of moral concern is dependent on the same capabilities that allow us to commit genocide at an industrial level.

Our “specialness” as human beings is not because we have some “special essence” by nature of our being human, but because of the immense causal power we have given how far along we are on a very specific scale of complexification. To understand that specific scale of complexification in a post-human fashion, one that is truly post-anthropocentric, we also need to understand more deeply the structure of the “field of reality” I mentioned just above.

We’ll get to that in the next essay, but to end this one, I must reiterate my commitment to a post-anthropocentric post-humanism that removes the mantle of domination wrongly taken by certain of our species.

Our immense causal powers do not entitle us to domination. Instead, they put the radical responsibility of a post-anthropocentric custodian of the diversity of the complexifying depth of the many perspectives through which reality can come to know itself. The depth of our perspective is dependent on the diversity of perspectives and beings that constitute the biosphere that creates the conditions of possibility for any perspective at all.

The human perspective isn’t the ultimate perspective. Firstly, because some organisms have richer eye sight, hearing, or other senses than human do, giving them far richer experiences on certain scales. Secondly, because complexification will march on far beyond us. The complexity of our reflectively rational moral concern puts a responsibility on us for the sake of the emergence of a more complex perspective within and beyond us. One that can truly honour how a greater moral concern is dependent on the health and well-being of all that makes that moral concern possible.

I am the soil because without it I could not be a human capable of a complexifying moral concern.

As Azarian himself writes of human intelligence:⁵

Given our immense causal power to both tend to and destroy a environment to which we are inseparably connected as a part of that web, we must cultivate a deep love and value for the whole web of reality. Not to extract or control, but to tend to with minimal interference. The drive toward greater complexity emerges because of the arms race and because we hope for a perspective better able to maintain the process of diversifying AND complexifying perspectives.

Yet doesn’t this perspective simply valorize a multipolar trap?

A multipolar trap is one in which even the non-violent competition between self-interested actors destroys the ground on which their competition plays.

For example, a bunch of social media companies competing to keep eyeballs on their products. They aren’t trying to create a legion of addicted, chronically outraged people. Yet, because they are competing for those eyeballs, they’re incentivized to create social media that becomes addictive through rapid fire reactions that use outrage and other forms of stimulation as fuel. Eventually, you have a hyper-polarized population of people too mentally ill for a social contract for collective flourishing.

Fortunately, as the process of complexification produced beings capable of moral concern, it can also produce perspectives that overcome the multipolar trap of arms races. We can see an example of this in one of the better therapeutic approaches for helping people overcome their own internal hyper-polarization.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is therapeutic methodology that, put very simply, views the self as being composed of several different parts that compete with one another to solve the problem of emotional pain. Unlike many other therapies, IFS doesn’t view these parts as pathological problems to be solved, but as long lost friends separated by deep wounds that have never been adequately addressed. The process of healing becomes a process of befriending these parts, building intimacy through deep relations of mutual support, trust, and understanding.¹²

Applying that to this discussion, I was watching a recording of the founder of IFS, Richard Schwartz, working with a veteran who was struggling with deep, unresolved pain that led to anger issues. During the session, the man talked about a room within him that was full of dark spirits.¹³

It got me thinking about the process of complexification of the practice of therapy itself. We might say that it began with exorcism and has, so far, resulted in IFS. What’s striking is how well it can be understood with Ferrando’s post-human toolkit.³

Ferrando discusses the post-dualism that sets aside the simplistic narratives of friend/foe that flatten conflict into unnecessary perpetuation of hostility.³ In the last essay, we drew a distinction between post-dualist, complexifying binaries which, through their relating, co-determine and co-create something beyond the binary itself. The dualist, flattening binary is one that, through their relating, narrows in on a static, rigid, and too simplistic conception of one and the other within that binary.

Exorcism views the self in terms of a harsh binary between acceptable parts that are in alignment with Christian doctrine and unacceptable parts that are deemed so sinful as to be conceived as external, evil entities.

IFS is the result of a post-dualist, complexifying binary beyond the friend/foe, in which the hostility between parts of us is overcome by seeing each part as misunderstood, wounded former comrades that must be supported in relations of loving friendship. The reason this is a true complexifying binary is because it differs in process from the consumptive flattening of totalitarian love.

Totalitarian love is conceptualized in IFS as being similar to the befriending strategy, but different in the presence of an agenda. Totalitarian love demands friendship, demands love, and demands collaboration. Love me and accept me now just as I am whether you want to or not.

While the way I’m discussing it makes the distinction clear, it’s difficult in practice because the hand of love is extended far enough ahead to obscure the totalitarian agenda hiding in the background.

As a true complexifying binary, the befriending strategy of IFS is far more about leading with curiosity and compassion in order to build an honest connection. Each step is purely consensual with each part. If a part doesn’t want to speak, connect, or work together, then there’s no pressure until it feels safe enough for that to happen. We stay true to the hostility, there is a friend/foe binary here, but the way we’re approaching it honours why the part views things in such hostile terms, understanding its history, its trauma, its fears.

The agenda is not to force the part into a friendship, but to learn why the part framed other parts of the self as foes in the first place. We work through the friend/foe binary by honouring it and that’s what allows us to co-create something beyond the binary. We come to see the self as being composed of a great number and variety of parts, each performing their functions, working with them to help those functions act in concert. This concert is not one that doesn’t have inner conflict, but through the diversity of its functions, the conflict between them is capable of performing in a more integrated, causally powerful fashion.

IFS’ befriending strategy is a clear complexification of exorcism. It’s also a strategy that can move us beyond seeing our relation with the wider environment as one of extraction and control. We don’t see nature as a foe to be conquered, but as a wounded comrade we seek to befriend by showing that each of us can again be worthy of trust. There are real reasons for why the friend/foe binary emerged, hostilities that need to be honoured on the way to renewed friendship.

Again though, this is a perspective that can only emerge with the complex moral concern that, at least as far as we know, only human beings seem to be capable of. What possibility is there for “befriending” between the lion and the gazelle? From the perspective of the gazelle “extraction” is an understatement. And what of the Palestinian? Would the child reaching out in friendship to the Israeli soldier stop the other from shooting them in the back of the head?¹⁴

These failures of the “befriending” strategy showcase something important. Different battlefields require different strategies, and so we need a complex enough map of the various battlefields that exist, what strategies are necessary, and to recognize when the battlefield has changed enough to recognize that framing it as a battlefield is one of the reasons the battle doesn’t end. Our strategies must then be functionally fit to the battlefield given the specifics of the battlefield, but with the express intention of transforming the battlefield toward collective flourishing.

To be clear though, the point of my essays isn’t to solve Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. I’m woefully undereducated to even attempt it. Notice however, that this is a highly complex problem that requires highly complex solutions to solve. Thus, evolutionary complexification marches on. That is the point I’m trying to make, but toward what we’ll continue to discuss as we consider the following questions.

Assignment:

1. What is the structure of the field of reality that complexification has produced up to this point?

2. Why must complexification continue? Why not escape into the simplicity of anarchoprimitivism?

Until the next one, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.

References:

3 – Ferrando, F. (2020). Philosophical Posthumanism. Bloomsbury Academic.

4 – Sessions, G. (1995). Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century: Readings on the Philosophy and Practice of the New Environmentalism. Shambhala.

5 – Azarian, B. (2022). The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. BenBella Books.

6 – Cesare, S. D. (2026). Organic Progress and Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge University Press.

7 – Walsh, R., & Wilber, K. (2010). Integral Theory in Action: Applied, Theoretical, and Constructive Perspectives on the AQAL Model (S. Esbjörn-Hargens, Ed.). SUNY Press.

8 – Dempsey, B. G. (n.d.). Psyche and Symbolic Learning. Sky Meadow Press.

9 – Dempsey, B. G. (n.d.). A Universal Learning Process. Sky Meadow Press.

10 – Clark, G. (2025). Carl Jung and the Evolutionary Sciences: A New Vision for Analytical Psychology. Routledge.

11 – Ridley, M. (2003). The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. Harper Perennial.

12 – Schwartz, R.C. (2021). No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model. St. Martin’s Essentials / Sounds True.

13 – Fall 2026 | Online Circle. (n.d.). Retrieved August 26, 2026, from https://info.ifs-institute.com/fall-2026-online-circle

14 – McGreal, C. (2024, April 2). ‘Not a normal war’: Doctors say children have been targeted by Israeli snipers in Gaza. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/gaza-palestinian-children-killed-idf-israel-war

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Being raised by robots was difficult. How could someone become a person when the only thing that lived in metal eyes was the reflection of yourself that you couldn’t yet understand? You were an infant, a wailing mass of hunger, fear, anger, discomfort, and a desire to be held in the safe arms of a being who was capable of co-creating affection. However soft they’d made those mechanical arms, it was only enough to teach you rules, not show you how to be cared for and to care in return.

In a technofeudalist society, in which the raising of our young has been handed to AI controlled by corporations seeking a profit, what exactly is lost? How would that differ in a solarpunk society? This is one that’s egalitarian, and full of lush, green nature, while still providing the beauty and benefit that advanced technology can provide.

In this essay we’ll be discussing how socialization gives us maps that shape our understanding of ourselves, each other, and the world. If we want to create a solarpunk mythos, a story that can guide us beyond the dehumanizing, silicon dystopia in which we’ve found ourselves, then it’s necessary that we understand how our culture has filled us with profit-driven stories, mass-produced archetypes, and narcissistic desires.

We’ll first begin with what I mean by socialization. This is the process by which your society, your parents, teachers, and media teach you how to navigate that society. What is right, wrong, normal, natural, what does it mean to live a good life, and how do you actually live that good life given all of that? They, in effect, teach you what it means to be a person, and, importantly, why their vision of personhood and a good life is justified as true, good, and beautiful.

Henriques defines a system of justifications as a system of propositions that map the world to, “coordinate and legitimize action,” and as such, “humans are transformed into persons as a function of being socialized into systems of justification.”¹

Through socialization, you learn what it means to be a legitimate person, a legitimate man, woman, and definitely not any other gender… You also learn what counts as a legitimate justification for believing what counts as a legitimate person or legitimate belief. Why do you believe the reasons given to you for why you ought to believe something? Almost certainly because of the decade long training program we’re all forced to attend 5 days a week throughout our childhood. I’m not against the concept of school by any stretch of the imagination, but is it any wonder it’s so easy to assume that all these beliefs are the natural, “real”, and best way of things?

Lacan conceptualized socialization as your introduction into a specific Symbolic Order. This includes a language, knowledge, law, morality, and more. In very short, a culture milieu and social order. He thought that your entire understanding of yourself was defined by your culture, and thus, by something other than yourself.² I think this is a bit overstated, but I do think that our culture has an enormous influence on how we can understand ourselves. This is despite our very real biology and despite self-initiated, non-cultural learning such as the process of learning to walk.³

Yet even before you walk you’re already being socialized. The psychoanalyst Fink can help us understand why this is the case. Think about a baby who feels some discomfort and so begins to cry. The parents, not knowing what the problem is, might respond to that discomfort as if it were coldness, hunger, or pain. Without knowing why their baby is crying, the parent can only guess until the baby stops crying. If they only ever respond to cries with food, the baby will slowly learn that these discomforts “mean” hunger, and so learn, even before it can speak, that discomfort equals hunger equals, “I must go find food”.²

The key point here is that we learn that an experience must be responded to as if it meant something altogether different. We learn to associate specific problems with specific solutions. That means we’ll be biased toward pursuing that learned solution for hunger, fear, discomfort, even if it doesn’t actually fit with the problem.

For better or worse, things never work quite that simply. Robots shape infants according to their corporation’s programming, responsive parents can get better at identifying their infant’s needs because they can care. Yet the point is that your experience of yourself is never truly personal, even if your parents were always responsive enough. Sloterdijk writes that intersubjectivity precedes subjectivity and this seems to have been borne out by 4E cognitive science.^4,5 In other words, “I” am an “I”, only insofar as I have been taught to relate to myself through other people. Fink adds that:²

That is to say, when we’re given a specific language by a specific culture to understand ourselves and the world, we’re ultimately constrained by what our culture teaches us certain words are supposed to mean and what is associated with those words. Yet, again, that language is often the only way we can communicate with others what we want and need. However biological our needs as humans may be, we cannot escape the influence language and culture has as our guide to understand ourselves and to help others understand us.

Think about the difference between the language of humours or demons vs. the language of medical science. Clearly, our language matters in understanding ourselves and solving real problems in the world.

I think this is an important point to keep in mind. However violent the process of socialization may be, it is 100% necessary. In the process of creating solarpunk, we want to socialize people in the norms, rules, and regulations that allow solarpunk to continue to be possible. We want people who care deeply for each other, to know the difference between mindless stimulation and those experiences that are truly meaningful to us as human beings. It’s not as simple as assuming that people just know that.

Yet, given that the process of socialization can constitute a violence, we must always be aware of how socialization works so that we can overcome it when it stops working for human flourishing.

Lacan can again help us with the following table, which shows how our biological needs are interpreted by the language our culture gives us to produce our desires for specific things, experiences, and people:²

This means that you’re born with certain needs. You experience cold and need warmth. You experience hunger and need food. You also need love, you need laughter, you need all sorts of things. The problem is that you can only understand your needs through a Symbolic Order that defines with language and specific moral codes what those needs are, how they can be satisfied, and thus, what you desire to get in order to satisfy them. Through socialization into a culture, you’re given a conceptual map for understanding your bodies and how you must respond to the experiences of this body you, at least in part, are.

To understand that body, we first need to begin with what your needs are. Some have criticized Lacan and his lineage of thinkers for having reduced humans to language rather than honouring our embodied existence as biological organisms.^6,7,8 The fact is that your needs are, in part, biologically determined in the sense that your biology creates the conditions of possibility for you to need anything at all.

This brings us to the very important distinction between a need and a desire. A need is something biologically determined, whether that means it’s something you need for your survival such as food or it’s something you want because your biology allows you to want it. You don’t “need” to have a romantic partner in order to survive, or even to have an incredibly fulfilling life, because there are examples of people who have done both.

Yet, your biology is structured in such a way so as to make romance have the potential to be fulfilling and meaningful, and a lack to be so incredibly painful that fighting for romance can be a fight for survival and even a justification for violence. There is a need, an experience within you that can be satisfied by pursuing a romantic or sexual relationship, and that experience could possibly be meaningful, fulfilling, and good for you.

The fact that there are spectrums of asexuality and aromanticity means that it’s possible you could have the experience in which you’d never want to have sex or romance.

Let’s then say that you, as an aromantic, were forced by your culture to pursue romance and all the responsibility to another human being who demands romance from you. That could lead you to a life that made you feel nihilistic and resentful, potentially even to the point of seeing it as a fight for survival and justification for violence.

Even if such experiences are statistically unlikely, the exception demonstrates how biology creates the conditions for romance being possible. Regardless of how much the environment may influence the extent to which you experience a need for romance or not, human biology is variable enough that you can experience that need or not.

That said, how you actually go about responding to any need is defined by your culture and the language you use to understand your needs. Desire then, is an experience you have for something that your culture has taught you will satisfy the need you experience within your body because of how your biology affords or makes possible that need and the methods of its satisfaction.

This of course doesn’t mean that anyone can desire anything, but that everything you desire to get in order to satisfy a need has been socially constructed. You’ve been taught by other people that a certain biological need can only be satisfied by a certain thing. Again, you can teach yourself things that no culture has taught you, but the point is that culture is powerful enough to supersede this in some cases.

Again, our biology constrains what could possibly satisfy your needs. In fact, my precise point is that however much you may desire something, it may not actually satisfy your needs. This is called satisficing, and it is, at least one force, that is destroying our planet. Satisficing is when you’ve been taught that a certain thing can satisfy your needs, but it either satisfies it well enough while also causing you problems or doesn’t actually satisfy your needs despite your continued desire, your continued pursuit.

As an example of the first, junk food satisfices your hunger because you can eat and survive with junk food. The issue is that junk food can make you so unhealthy that it eventually kills you because it lacks essential nutrients. It never truly “satisfies” your hunger in the way whole foods do, it merely satisfices because it attracts you more while providing you with less. When not kept in moderation, it actively prevents true human flourishing despite it contributing to your survival.

Here then, I want to define edification as responding to a need in a way that contributes to flourishing. In that sense then, we can build a spectrum in which satisficing is on one end and edification is on the other, with satisfaction lying somewhere in between.

For example, a banana might satisfy your hunger, chocolate might satisfice your hunger, but a well-balanced meal of whole foods with a little bit of chocolate every once in a while would edify your hunger. If it’s still unclear, an example of the second sense of satisficing can help us understand the difference better.

Before we continue, if you like this essay so far, then please give it a like and subscribe to the channel. It really helps with visibility in the algorithm. It also really helps if you share this essay with people you know. Thank you so much.

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Drugs satisfice by soothing the pain of dissatisfaction, whether that pain is anxiety, loneliness, or something else. Video games can also satisfice, filling in for the pain of a lack of accomplishment, meaning, and purpose. Even accomplishment itself can become a stand-in for the need for belonging, satisficing belonging.

The point is that we become addicted to these things when we learn that any pain we feel can be solved with our addiction. Yet, despite our desire for them, they never truly “satisfy” the underlying need. This shows us clearly that our needs can be bound to desires that have nothing to do with actually satisfying those needs. Drugs can only ever temporarily soothe our pain. They can never satisfy our loneliness, which means that our loneliness is never properly associated with the functions meant to contribute to our social survival, let alone flourishing.

The key takeaway so far is to see how we are a complex web of biological needs and socialized desire. When they’re adaptive, when they function well, our socialized desires direct us toward those things that will satisfy or edify those needs in a way that contributes to our general well-being or even flourishing.

Sometimes understanding the difference between a biological need and a socialized desire is difficult because some needs are conflated and then we’re taught that desiring a certain method for satisfaction or edification works for several needs, when it really doesn’t. Remember that our need for accomplishment can be conflated with a need for belonging, and then we pursue accomplishment hoping that it’ll finally, one day, bring us intimacy and love. That’s of course not even getting into what our society teaches us “accomplishment” or “intimacy” are supposed to look like or how we’re supposed to pursue them.

Another example is that we have a biological need, a condition of possibility, for a loving-sexual partnership. This is certainly a nuanced point, but unless you’re asexual or aromantic, this is true enough. In either case, our culture can give us very different narratives that turn our pursuit of romance into satisficing.

A man who’s been taught by Incels that he can have a fulfilling enough relationship with pornography or OnlyFans because feminism has destroyed Western women has a satisficing relation with his need for intimacy. Such men can get to a place where they desire porn more than women, but porn and OnlyFans can only ever be a facsimile that satisfices but never edifies a need to contribute to true human flourishing.

Related to this is being convinced that pursuing social status is the path to romantic fulfillment. This could be a woman who chases a wealthy man in the hopes that this is what will truly edify her, allowing her to live the best, most fulfilling romance. This is another nuanced point.

Her biology creates the conditions of possibility for social status being attractive at all. Yet, it’s the culture that constructs what is believed to be high or low social status, and how important she believes social status will be relative to other features of an attractive partner. The more she chases social status to the exclusion of other attractive factors, the more she satisfices her need for romance rather than edifying it, despite the fact that she continues to believe it will one day edify her.

Researchers suggest that it’s likely that social status is attractive because we need a certain level of resource safety, social belonging, and learning from skilled teachers. Yet, there is no guarantee that what you view as being high social status is actually tied in any way to what will satisfy your biological need. It could very well be something that merely satisfices.^9,10

This manifests as a socialized desire for social status as a promissory note for these biological needs, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only thing that matters or that it even has to matter when you have access to other things that can be attractive. This is particularly true since women are no longer so dependent on a partner for social belonging and resource safety.

Yet, if you believe that wealth and social status are the primary path to edifying a need for intimacy within you, then you’ll desire education for a certain career that promises a certain amount of wealth. You’ll be spun up in systems of justification that give you beliefs about how the economic system ought to work, which then feeds back around into the perpetuation of culture that teaches children that wealth and specific capitalist definitions of social status are the primary or even only paths to success, happiness, and the good life.

What all of this shows us, is how your needs and desires get wrapped up within a justification system. This justification system emerges from and depends on, and then further justifies certain material conditions. That justification system must include how to socialize your children into the kind of people who can navigate those material conditions well enough to survive and achieve some vision of a good life.

In addition to this, Lacan says that your desire for intimacy with others functions in the following way. You desire both a thing that you believe will satisfy or edify your needs for intimacy while also desiring to become that which what you desire desires.¹¹

To put that in more concrete terms, you desire a specific kind of woman who your culture has taught you will edify your need for intimacy. Your culture has also taught you that this woman desires a certain kind of man. In order to get that woman, you feel pressured to become that kind of man. If your culture teaches you that women desire wealthy, powerful men, then you’ll desire to become wealthy and to have a certain kind of social status. You’ll thus desire to become a specific kind of man that could possibly become wealthy and powerful within the bounds set by a very specific culture and socio-economic system.

You don’t believe this merely to satisfy a need so you can survive, but to edify a need so that you can contribute to human flourishing, to what you’ve been taught by your culture is truly good, true, and beautiful, whether that’s true or not. This same process obviously works with all genders and sexualities, sometimes creating competing narratives that put us at odds with each other for no real reason.

Importantly then, these narratives are not the territory. Your desires for things act as maps guiding you toward the satisfaction of your needs, but the things they point you to are not themselves your needs. In other words, your desires emerge from the archetypes your culture has given you about the heroes, villains, lovers, teachers, and other characters that inhabit your culture and world. You desire to aspire to be a certain kind of person. You desire to be with a certain kind of person. You desire to fight or flee from certain threats. You desire to transform this technofeudalist mythology so that you can make a better world.

Technofeudalism gives us myths and maps that mold our needs into desires that direct us toward content and toys that satisfice, yet rarely satisfy let alone truly edify. Corporations, our technofeudal lords, seek to extract from us whatever makes them the most profit, not what gives us the most meaning in life.

Solarpunk would give us myths and maps that mold our needs into desires that direct us toward experiences and people that truly edify us. We seek to relate with another in ways that honour ourselves, honour the other, and honour the natural world that create the conditions for any of this to be have been possible in the first place.

That’s what we’ll continue to discuss in the next essay.

Assignment:

1. We often conflate “need” with “intensity of feeling”. Next time you feel a desire for something, ask yourself if it’s a “need”. How do you know? Is the intensity of the feeling enough? Become conscious of how you say something is “needed” and how that shapes your behaviour.

2. What have you been taught will satisfy or edify a need? How do you know it’s true or false?

3. What are those things that truly satisfice, satisfy, and edify your needs?

4. What are the needs that are most important for you to satisfy or edify? In other words, what are those things that require mere satisfaction and what are those things that require edification?

Until the next one, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.

References:

1 – Henriques, G. (2022). A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap. Palgrave MacMillan.

2 – Fink, B. (n.d.). The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton University Press.

3 – Mills, J., & Goodwyn, E. (2023). Archetypal Ontology: New Directions in Analytical Psychology. Routledge.

4 – Sloterdijk, P. (2011). Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology (W. Hoban, Trans.). Semiotext.

5 – Newen, A., Bruin, L. D., & Gallagher, S. (Eds.). (2020). The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. Oxford University Press.

6 – Lakoff, G. (20). Philosophy In The Flesh. Basic Books.

7 – Storm, J. A. J. (2021). Metamodernism: The Future of Theory. University of Chicago Press.

8 – Lewis, M. D., & Granic, I. (Eds.). (2002). Emotion, Development, and Self-Organization: Dynamic Systems Approaches to Emotional Development. Cambridge University Press.

9 – Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F. J. (2001). The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(3), 165–196. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1090-5138(00)00071-4

10 – Cheng, J. T., Tracy, J. L., Foulsham, T., Kingstone, A., & Henrich, J. (2013). Two ways to the top: Evidence that dominance and prestige are distinct yet viable avenues to social rank and influence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(1), 103–125. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030398

11 – Creed, B. (2024). The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge.

Also available on YouTube and Spotify.

A key necessity for a solarpunk society is having a population that actually cares about the natural world. It isn’t enough to be surrounded by the lush green of biophilic designs that keep us connected to the natural world despite the artificial cities and towns in which we humans have confined ourselves. We must also be able to look into the eyes of our animal siblings and recognize the right to life that they demand from us. Yet how can any of us recognize such a demand in non-human animals if our ethical framework for the right to life is defined along an axis of humanization and dehumanization?

In my last essay on Solarpunk Ontology, we explored the performative contradiction implicit in “humanizing” relations. Quickly, a performative contradiction occurs when we make a claim with a hidden presupposition that contradicts the claim.¹

For example, by claiming that solarpunk selves are more ethical because they’re created out of humanizing relations, I presuppose selves that are less-than-human for having not been created out of humanizing relations. Here, “humanize” means to give someone moral worth, which is to have moral concern about another’s right to a life without unnecessary suffering, and for their capability for agency in the world, and their capability to enact the same moral concern for others.

The “created” does a lot of work here. It’s not only that my rights to humanity are recognized by some person or a state, but that I’m created as something more than I was. I am made more human. This could be interpreted as justification for my being more worthy of human rights than one who was not created in this way. This creates an ethically dubious hierarchy of humanity in which some people are more subhuman than others, particularly if they’ve had traumatic, abusive relationships that cause them to act unethically or even criminally. We blame the criminal for being intrinsically evil rather than seeing the society and personal history that produced them.

We solved this dilemma, at least in part, by exploring how the relationality of solarpunk selves acts as a failsafe. We’re created out of our relations with others and so if I humanize others, even those that dehumanize me or others, I humanize myself, and vice versa. The more there are who humanize, the more there are who humanize. We’re thus called to deconstruct the hidden assumptions and practices that might stop us from humanizing others, deconstructing the boundaries that separate those who are considered worthy of being human and those who aren’t.

This call to deconstruct boundaries should eventually lead us to begin questioning the boundaries implicit in the word “human” itself. This leads us to the philosophical post-humanism of Francesca Ferrando, in which they criticize the anthropocentrism of the human. Firstly, post-humanism is not transhumanism, which often denigrates the human body and nature while idolizing technology. Post-humanism doesn’t denigrate the body or technology, but seeks to deconstruct oppressive hierarchy.²

From the post-human perspective, you’d criticize the anthropocentrist that takes the human to be the pinnacle of evolution’s march, granting “humans” special rights and privileges at the expense of the world and non-human animals.

That said, Ferrando first calls attention to the history of racism that has violently dehumanized people for their colour of skin, showing how the boundary of the “human” once excluded those we now consider to be undeniably human. While many anthropocentrists likely claim they’re anti-racist, they ignore how that same labelling of “human” and “non-human” justifies the ongoing slaughter of the animals they eat.²

You might pause things at that point and say, “It’s a bit much to relate the slaughter of animals to the systematic enslavement of human beings. Whether that enslavement was based on the colour of their skin or on any other justification, it’s simply in a moral ballpark far beyond the slaughter of non-human animals.”

Yet, Hanzi Freinacht has compared the number of deaths in the food industry to the number of deaths during the holocaust. If you were to concede that 1 human life is worth 1000 land animals and 10 000 sea animals, then per year you’re slaughtering the worth of 133 holocausts.³

Every year, we are slaughtering animals at a rate of 133 holocausts.

That’s assuming that at least 1000 animals are worth a human life, and so that 133 is hiding the deaths of over a trillion per year.³ Numbering in the trillions, the human slaughter of animals may arguably be greater than any megalomaniacal dictator could hope to achieve with humans ever.

Obviously, I think that’s a little unjust, but the larger point I’m trying to make is how profoundly powerful the category of “human” is. Whether the absence of the label “human” has been used to justify racist violence and enslavement, or the megacide of trillions of animals, it cannot be denied how powerful that label is in creating very real consequences in the world. If our goal is more ethical relations, then of any boundary we want to challenge, it is very clearly the boundary around the category of human.

Before we continue, I want to simplify things a bit by distinguishing between human and person. From here on out, when I say human, I mean a Homo sapiens, and when I say person, I mean something that should be afforded human rights. All humans regardless of race are Homo sapiens, but some political ideologies would deny certain Homo sapiens personhood because of their race.

When it comes to what deserves what we typically think of as human rights, we’re focused on how something, human or not, is given personhood.

The goal for the rest of this essay is to begin teaching you some of the tools in the post-human toolkit so that you can begin deconstructing that boundary. At the end, we’ll apply a few of them to our solarpunk humanization performative contradiction, but it’ll take us a few essays to learn the full toolkit.

The first tool Ferrando uses is post-dualism, which is to move beyond dualistic categorizations such as “us/them”, “friend/foe”, and “human/non-human”. They believe dualism to be at the heart of the categorization that leads to genocidal violence.²

Before we continue, if you like this essay so far, then please give it a like. It really helps with visibility in the algorithm. It also really helps if you share this essay with people you know. Thank you so much.

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Returning to the idea of performative contradictions, we have to be careful of the dualism between dualism and post-dualism. I don’t necessarily think Ferrando advocates for an anti-dualism when they say post-dualism. To help explain what they do mean by post-dualism, they discuss post-centrism and post-exclusivism.² I know we’re already getting into the terminological weeds, so please don’t worry. This is (hopefully, please God hopefully) going to be very clear by the end. Let’s begin with post-exclusivist post-dualism.

To be exclusivist is to label based on describing what a thing is based on what it is not. To be a man is to be not a woman. To be the most definitively human is to be not a woman, Black, or an animal. We’re primarily concerned with defining ourselves in opposition to other things that are denied whatever rights we exclusively reserve for what qualifies for the label of “human”. This creates a binary between “human” and “everything else”.

It would be easy to say that you should be aimed at an anti-binary stance, where you claim that all binaries are evil and have to be deconstructed. However, this would not only create a binary between binaries and non-binaries, but one that is violent, aiming at eradicating, whether through forced re-education or legitimate physical violence, any unacceptable category in that oh so ironic binary. Do you see how easily it is for your aim at a more ethical way of understanding to create a performative contradiction that leads us to violence?

You must thus understand the difference between a complexifying binary and a flattening binary. A complexifying binary is using a simple binary that makes it easier to move to a more complex understanding, one that is more fluid and open to update. Such a binary helps you simplify a complex topic in a way that helps you develop toward a more complex understanding beyond the binary itself.

One example is the binary between Martin Buber’s You relations, or treating someone as a person, and It relations, or treating someone as a mere tool to be used. The point of this binary isn’t to say that You relations are always better, but that by making that distinction we can more easily see how exclusively using It relations can rob someone of personhood. We can also see how exclusively using You relations can render us incapable of doing anything but relating with the world as a person. You can’t take action in the world unless you objectify it to some extent. You eventually have to drink the water or eat the food rather than honouring the divine sovereignty.⁴

By drawing that distinction well, we’re better able to use It relations and You relations in their proper place. When we require results, we have to use It relations. However, we also have to pause and relate to the other, even an object or abstract problem, as a You. This may seem strange. I’m literally telling you that talking to a problem as if it were a person can help you understand that problem better. That’s kind of the whole point of something like Internal Family Systems therapy.⁵

In either case, this strategy can help us break up our preconceptions and update our understanding of that person or the problem. Remember that we never truly understand the full complexity of some situation. We’re only limited human beings. So, ironically, You relations in their proper place can make us more effective because we now have a more complex understanding of a person or problem.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t guarantee non-violence because there is no single panacea strategy that leads us to goodness. However much we can develop a more complex understanding, complexification is not an intrinsic good. A more complex understanding can be used for good and evil, but it does balance the potential for violence that a flattened understanding can sometimes cause.⁶

So if that’s a complexifying binary, a flattening binary would be one that oversimplifies a complex topic. That can make it easier to understand. So, at least sometimes, It relations can be effective because they simplify another’s complexity to make them easier to deal with. We’re better able to quickly get results because we’re not lost in unnecessary complexity. Yet that also runs the risk of oversimplifying the other person. We flatten their complexity into something that is horrifyingly different from what they really are, which makes it all too easy to deny their personhood in the pursuit of our own self-interest.

Flattening binaries don’t just flatten complexity, but run away into oversimplification because each element of the binary becomes increasingly simplified in opposition to the other element. This is often why people advocate for a non-binary approach that becomes anti-binary. They’re reacting against the way in which they’ve been violently flattened by some oppressive binary, such as a man-woman binary that robs women of rights because they’re born to be submissive to superior alpha males.

That’s an incredibly good reason to be anti-binary.

The trap however, is to conflate flattening binaries with complexifying binaries. If someone lacks the education or development to understand how to use a complexifying binary, they can turn it into a flattening binary. People come along and see that flattening binary, rightly criticize it for being violently oppressive, and then confirm to themselves that all binaries are oppressive. What they’ve actually done is reify a new binary in which there are good non-binaries and evil binaries that are all oppressive, totalizing, flattening binaries.

In other words, your critique of flattening binaries could become parasitized by flattening binaries. Your desire to make the world a better place has made the world a worse off place because now we’re all stuck with only flattening binaries. You’re unable to use complexifying binaries that, through the pedagogical utility of their simplicity, move you toward greater complexity. You’re cast into a world of hyper-polarized particularities without a map to guide you toward a more complex understanding. Surprise, surprise when such an asperspectival madness leads the most uneducated to escape from freedom into the totalitarian simplicity of fascism.^7,8

Our post-exclusivist post-dualism cannot exclude dualisms that have the potential to be beneficial. Friend and foe can be a flattening binary, but when a man comes at me with a knife and another steps in to stop him, I better know the difference.

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All that said, you may have caught two potential traps here.

Firstly, if a post-whatever cannot exclude itself, how is it a post-? If we have a post-dualism that doesn’t reject dualism, isn’t that just dualism?

Dualism gets lost in a flattening binary that is reified as a fundamental feature of reality. Post-dualism accepts dualisms, but doesn’t reify them and close them down as the natural, unchanging, and morally Good way of things. A post-dualist dualism leaves these dualisms open to be renegotiated by nature of their relations with one another.

To state the difference clearly then, the post-dualist, complexifying binary is one that through their relating, co-determine and co-create something beyond the binary itself. The dualist, flattening binary is one that through their relating, narrows in on a static, rigid, and too simplistic conception of one and the other.

Secondly, post-exclusivism cannot be exclusive of exclusion because sometimes we ought to exclude. Again, exclusivism excludes in a way that closes down around what it includes and rejects in perpetuity all that it excludes. A post-exclusivism would exclude, but remain open to update and redefine the nature of that exclusion. It’s not a violent, hegemonizing exclusion.

As an example, excluding exclusion would lead to categorizing rocks as persons, giving them what we typically think of as human rights. Some things shouldn’t be categorized as persons if we want personhood to have any meaningful power in the protection of those beings capable of suffering.

We instead need an open-ended process that is capable of updating and complexifying toward more ethical relations. Those rocks aren’t persons and acting as if we ought to view them as persons is foolish, but we should certainly understand how those rocks are relationally bound to all that allows anyone to be persons. If all rocks suddenly disappeared, we’d be in a very shitty situation.

We must have environmentally informed definitions that allow us to see the value of soil not merely for human beings, but for all life. Some of that life might be benefitted by being labelled as persons, whereas in other situations there may be limitations to labelling them as persons.

For example, a chimpanzee cannot be a person in the same way that a human is. Remember that “personhood” is to be afforded what we currently view as human rights. A chimpanzee ought to be afforded the right to life without human-caused suffering, but a chimpanzee shouldn’t have the human right to pursue sex with a consenting human adult. We’ll get into why this is the case in a moment, but this has nothing to do with being a different species. We can imagine a romantically compatible alien with human-level intellect, and fight for the right to interspecies romance just as we fight for homosexual’s right to have the sexual and romantic relations they desire.

Clearly, there is an important difference between chimpanzees and humans, but that difference cannot be used to justify the torture of that chimpanzee so that the human can look cuter with skin-safe makeup for their hot, blue, tentacle-headed alien paramour. Nor can such a difference justify the torture of a cow because steak is just so damn juicy.

But then, how many animal lives would be worth sacrificing to test a vaccine against a new virus that was dangerous enough to threaten all life on a global level? Can we say we truly value the suffering of sentient species if we’d condemn all species to extinction, whether by the hand of nature or a few highly educated morons in a lab?

That said, a chimpanzee must be more of a person than the soil, despite the soil being necessary for all chimpanzees, cows, and humans to experience sentience at all. We need a more complex understanding of what we mean by “persons”.

At this point we’ve filled the post-human toolkit with the tool of post-exclusivist post-dualism, so it’s likely unsurprising that I think it can help us solve this dilemma. Let’s apply that to our problem of solarpunk humanization.

To remind you, I’ve argued that to “humanize” someone means to give them moral worth, which is to have moral concern about their right to a life without unnecessary suffering, and for their capability for agency in the world, and their capability to enact the same moral concern for others. By stating that “humanize” enacts a performative contradiction, I’m saying that I’m making an equivocation between “human” as being deserving of moral worth and “human” as having a certain moral character that we consider to be more aligned with the Good, and that equivocation leads to unethical action, as I’ll demonstrate it a moment.

To then say that solarpunk relations are more ethical because they humanize relative to neoliberalism’s relations of instrumentalization, is to enact a performative contradiction through the use of the label “human”.

By saying that humanizing relations are more ethically creative of a self, I’m unethically equivocating greater moral character with a hierarchy of greater moral worth in which solarpunk selves are above non-solarpunk selves. The solution is not a more careful use of the word “humanize” because as post-humanism shows, the label itself is the site of the equivocation that leads to the performative contradiction.

With our new post-human toolkit of the post-exclusivist post-dualism, we can deconstruct the boundaries of the human enough to see how there is a meaningful distinction to be made between “human” and “some non-humans” when it comes to much of what it means to have personhood or being deserving of certain human rights, yet not moral worth. A chimpanzee, despite being non-human, ought to be met with moral concern about their right to a life without unnecessary suffering, their capability for agency in the world, and their capability to enact the same moral concern for others.

Here’s how we can actually use this post-human toolkit to begin to justify the label “personhood” instead of “human”.

Post-dualism shows us that dualisms often hide reified categories that can lead to unnecessary suffering. In labelling chimpanzees as “non-human”, the anthropocentrist will often offer the justification that they aren’t as intelligent as humans and so shouldn’t be afforded the same rights, such as those surrounding sexual autonomy. We can understand “less moral character” to be a consequent of “less intelligent”, which means being less intelligent is the same as being less capable of agency and moral concern for others.

The anthropocentrist’s argument of intelligence goes as follows. Less intelligence means less moral character means no sexual autonomy to choose to have sex with humans given power dynamics that arise from the radical difference in intelligence. Without getting into what we mean by “intelligence”, that’s a good argument and one that I agree with. Yet, because “moral character” is equivocated with “moral worth” through the label of the “human”, less intelligence also becomes less deservedness for moral worth.

In other words, they’ve used the label “non-human” in a manner that equivocates between “greater moral character”, humans being capable of greater moral concern than chimpanzees, and “greater moral worth”, humans being worthy of more moral concern than chimpanzees.

This leads to the justification that chimpanzees have less right to life than humans do because the equivocation links “less intelligence means less capability for moral concern and thus less moral character” with “less deserving of moral concern”.

Post-exclusivist post-dualism helps us see that “human” hid an oppressive, flattening binary, one that oversimplified the difference between chimpanzees and humans. Chimpanzees are seen to be less intelligent, which means they have inner experiences that are less rich, we means their suffering is worthy of less moral concern than humans.

This flattening binary has undeniably led to real world consequences where chimpanzees are violently excluded from the category of “human”, robbed of moral worth, being used in hideous experiments for the sake of humans and their greater moral worth given their greater capabilities for moral concern of, at the very least, other humans.

The claim “humanizing relations are more ethical” is thus a performative contradiction because it contradicts itself by reifying the category of the human despite that category being the site of the equivocation that renders it a dualistic, flattening binary that runs away into a static ontology about what humans fundamentally are and what non-human animals fundamentally are, which is then used to justify unethical treatment of non-human animals.

And yet, how does “person” and “non-person” fair any better as a post-dualist, complexifying binary?

The answer is hidden in my use of the very controversial example of sexual autonomy and chimpanzees. There is a difference between chimpanzees and humans such that chimpanzees cannot have the sexual autonomy to choose to have sex with humans. To even discuss that is considered a category error whereby I’m discussing autonomy about a being that cannot be seen as having sexual autonomy. This is an ontological claim about what humans and chimpanzees are such that they ought to be afforded sexual autonomy in drastically different ways. One in which the chimpanzee cannot autonomously choose to have sex with a human and so a human is acting wrongly to attempt to have sex with a chimpanzee.

We thus need an ontology informed by the ethical strengths of the toolkit of post-humanism, while also making sense of the differences between humans and chimpanzees.

There’s a bit of a long road that we have to take to get there. I hope this essay has convinced you to walk that road with me. I think it ought to be stated explicitly however that in no way does “person” and “non-person” mean a difference in right to a life free from unnecessary suffering, especially human-caused. While the particulars of that right to life may differ, I grieve for the torture and murder of a chimpanzee by a human. Yet, the differences between “person” and “non-person” will help us see how a human and alien of comparable capabilities ought to be afforded a different quality of rights and responsibilities than the chimpanzee.

In the spirit of post-humanism’s ethical promise, we ought to keep these new categories fluid and open to update. What they’re driving at though, is that there’s something about being a human that separates us from chimpanzees enough to matter. I don’t mean that by nature of being human we are intrinsically special by some essence, but that there are real causal forces related to our being human rather than chimpanzee that must be taken into account.

I’m going to go deeper into this, but let’s put it plainly for now. A human being is capable of horrifying retaliation in a way that a chimpanzee could never dream of, but also of the awe-inspiring goodwill that would lead to a life dedicated to protecting another species incapable of doing the same. What exactly is the basis of that greater capability and is it related to the fact that binaries are not merely what make themselves flattening or complexifying?

Assignment:

1. In previous essays you’ve selected some domain you’re interested in, be it sexual relations and masculinity as I did, your own gender, a previous or current religious affiliation, a political party, or something else. Remember that you’re answering these in the context of creating solarpunk within that domain of interest.

2. What binaries exist within your domain?

3. How are they typically used as flattening binaries?

4. How might they be used as complexifying binaries? We’ll be discussing another example in the next essay if this one is difficult to think about. Start looking for binary oppositions. How are things separated into two camps and then pitted against each other?

Until the next one, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.

References:

1 – Wilber, K. (2000). Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution. Shambhala.

2 – Ferrando, F. (2020). Philosophical Posthumanism. Bloomsbury Academic.

3 – Freinacht, H. (2022, June 13). The Four Pillars of Metamodern Animal Rights aka. How to Prevent 133 Holocausts. Metamoderna. https://metamoderna.org/the-four-pillars-of-metamodern-animal-rights-aka-how-to-prevent-133-holocausts/

4 – Buber, M. (2010). I and Thou. Martino Publishing.

5 – Schwartz, R.C. (2021). No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model. St. Martin’s Essentials / Sounds True.

6 – Stein, Z. (2010). Now you get it, now you don’t: Developmental differences in the understanding of integral theory and practice. In S. Esbjorn-Hargens (Ed.), Integral theory in action: Applied, theoretical, and practical applications of the AQAL model (pp. 175–203). SUNY University Press.

7 – Wilber, K. (2001). A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and Spirituality. Shambhala.

8 – Fromm, E. (1994). Escape from Freedom. Holt Paperbacks.

Also available on YouTube and Spotify.

A solarpunk society is in one that is egalitarian, nature-oriented, and technological. While all three can be very attractive features, the first one is perhaps the one that seems the most farfetched. As Mark Fisher famously said, it’s far easier for us today to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.² Even feminism, the call for gender egalitarianism, has been coopted by boss girl neoliberalism to make sure 50% of our technofeudal lords are women.

There’s a meme in popular culture that evolutionary psychology has revealed the human being as innately competitive, self-interested, even patriarchal.³ Fortunately, the feminist revolution of actual evolutionary psychology happened over 20 years ago, with those such as Christopher Boehm and even more so Sarah Hrdy. They’re among the many who’ve demonstrated clearly that our ancestors were anything but. In fact, for the vast majority of our time on this planet as human beings, we’ve been egalitarian.^1,4,5,6

Before we continue however, we ought to define what we mean by egalitarianism. Far from meaning “everything is free” or “everyone is the same”, it instead means that everyone has equal decision-making power, which also means that everyone has comparable bargaining power and personal autonomy.^1,7 This is far from being a complete definition, but I think this is a good simplification to help guide us through this essay.

In either case, when we are egalitarian, your gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. don’t over-determine how much sway you have in making decisions. Further, when you bargain, your standing is entangled enough with the collective that wins and losses are roughly distributed. Such an arrangement, when done well, also maximizes each person’s autonomy because the dominance hierarchy is organized in such a way as to prevent anyone from having too much power over anyone else.

Wait a minute! Dominance hierarchy? Isn’t that what we’re trying to get rid of?

This is the really important nuance that Boehm makes between a dominance hierarchy and a reverse dominance hierarchy. A dominance hierarchy is where a single individual or small group rules over everyone else. A reverse dominance hierarchy is where the collective itself organizes to ensure that each person has equal decision-making power. Even where there are leaders, they’re often temporary, they vary between people according to expertise within a situation, and generosity is a near unanimous requirement for any leader.¹

That said, Boehm also makes the very important point that the desire to dominate is an unavoidable feature of human nature.¹ Obviously, it varies. Please don’t come in and say, “but I don’t feel the need to dominate”. I believe you, but the point with any claim about human nature is not that all humans have the exact same features to the exact same degree. It’s instead that the variability of human nature means that there will inevitably be someone who desires to dominate enough to try to go against the group.

This fact was known by the egalitarian societies in which humans have spent most of their time on this planet. This is why they all have practices and social norms that deal with this desire to dominate.

For example, Boehm writes of the !Kung san’s prestige distribution through arrow sharing. The idea is that whoever made the arrow is the one who takes credit for the kill. If you make an arrow and give it to me, and I make a kill, you get the credit even if you weren’t on the hunt. The high degree of arrow sharing means that prestige is distributed randomly throughout the tribe.¹

Obviously, everyone knows who the best hunter is. It’s not as if they see one person making all the kills, but literally believe that the arrow makers are the ones making all their kills. It’s instead that the culture of the !Kung san reminds everyone not to take the best hunter too seriously just because they’re the best hunter. In Western society, people fail at this all time when an expert in one thing suddenly becomes seen as an expert in anything.

We can see why this is important from the research on the difference between prestige and dominance as means of increasing decision-making power. In other words, you can have high social status, and thus more decision-making power in one of two ways. You have high expertise in something or through aggression, manipulation, and coercion. These constitute two different strategies for creating hierarchies that justify why people should listen to you. If you’re the best hunter, then I listen to you about hunting. If I threaten you with violence, then you listen to me to stay safe.^8,9

The difficulty with prestige and dominance is that even though prestigious people are more likeable, people can backwards rationalize “liking” the dominant in order to live with current, though unsavoury conditions. That is to say, if you find yourself dominated by some aggressive individual, then it’s easy to think of them as being more likeable simply because rebellion isn’t currently possible or if they even promise you some benefit from their dominance.⁹

What’s true for all high status individuals however, is that they both get the same amount of attention from people. That may be one of the key reasons they’re both effective strategies for creating hierarchies of decision-making power.^8,9 Again, if there’s an issue with hunting, then you’re going to listen to the best hunter, giving them your attention over the worst hunter because you have good reason for doing so. If someone is very dominant, then for your safety, you better give that person your attention. Even though you know they’re not the best hunter, you’ll still listen more to what they have to say.

When the collective attempts to reach a consensus on some decision, then by virtue of attention, some individuals will have had more say, and thus, more decision-making power. The egalitarian practices that Boehm outlines are thus essential to ensure that decision-making power remains distributed despite the attention-grabbing effects of prestige and dominance.

Yet, one thing that the researches on prestige and dominance miss is that they see prestige merely in terms of competition. Competition is the explicit lens through which they see and understand the prestigious and those who give them their attention. They do this to discuss how humans evolved the ability to learn from the prestige. It’s not just that you’ll listen to the best hunter, but that you’ll want to learn from them in order to become the best hunter you can be. You’re thus always competing with other students, but also with the teacher for their time and energy.⁸

Boehm’s insights about the reverse dominance hierarchy of the collective that allows egalitarianism to occur both sees and misses this same point. He discusses how ethnographic research has focused on the negative side of egalitarian practices, looking at how people enforce the egalitarian ethos through punishment and ridicule.

For example, if a hunter brings home a really good kill, they’ll make jokes about it being small, or spoiled, or too thin to make a good meal. They’ll literally do this as they’re preparing the enormous amount of meat for distribution throughout the tribe.¹

This may seem like a negative thing, like poor hunter for being ridiculed for providing and being generous. What you have to understand is that the hunter has learned to celebrate not they’re prestige for making the kill, but the experience of sharing, providing, and being generous. They may enjoy hunting, they may still enjoy competing with other hunters to be the best. It’s not like those feelings aren’t also there, but they’re contained within the goodwill of tribal communion. Their meaning and purpose in life are centered on the solidarity of the egalitarian ethos, where social harmony and communion are themselves rewards.

This is what we often miss when we try to understand this from our own hyper-individualistic perspective. You think, “what do I gain from the egalitarianism” without realizing that this is one of the reasons it’s so hard to make egalitarianism work. Your reward is the experience of caring for others.

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Yet, I think Boehm also misses this when he calls egalitarianism a reverse dominance hierarchy. There’s something truly insightful there in how the collective emerges as more powerful than any one individual, but the limit is in viewing that as mere dominance.

I have a series of 3 essays (1, 2, 3) that go deeper into what I mean, but the specific social role that can help us understand this limitation is what I call the “student/teacher”. Where I am your teacher in one domain, I might be your student in another, and even where I am your teacher, you teach me how to teach you better. Honouring this fact allows for relationships based on educational reciprocity in which neither of us are superior to the other. We’re called into a relation of true friendship where our love for one another is defined by mutual growth.¹⁰

The teacher is not only motivated by the prestige that comes with whatever domain they’ve excelled in. They almost certainly still are, but they’re also motivated by the joy of sharing their expertise with the rest of the tribe because of the egalitarian ethos. Does this mean that every tribe member is motivated to teach in this way? Of course not. As I’ve been arguing, the desire to dominate is endemic to human nature.

Yet, if the egalitarian ethos is truly alive within a population, then the social harmony that comes from altruistic education is far more likely to be there.

Zak Stein, an educational philosopher, has made the distinction between the educator in a growth hierarchy and the propagandist in a dominance hierarchy.^11,12

The educator knows more and has greater expertise than the student in some domain, and so in and only in that domain they ought to have greater decision-making power. Even egalitarian tribes honour and respect expertise, as, of course, they should.^1,8

Yet, the educator seeks to give the student the tools they need to take their education into their own hands. The propagandist seeks to give the student the tools they need to further the propagandist’s agenda. It’s the difference between “I teach so that we may grow together in response to the challenges we face” vs. “I teach to recreate the worldview that gives me power over you”.

When it comes to collective dominance then, the collective is not necessarily only dominating individuals, but creating the conditions in which individuals can educate, grow, and care together. Prestige is still operative here, but it’s not prestige that affords greater decision-making power in a dominance hierarchy. It’s greater decision-making power within a growth hierarchy. The overarching context of the egalitarian collective changes how expertise, prestige, and domain-specific increases in decision-making power operate. To reduce that to a reverse dominance hierarchy misses that point.

Again, you want to always remain conscious of the possibility that prestige and expertise create a dominance hierarchy, but when contained within the bounds of a growth hierarchy the collective acts in service of the individuals because of how they act in service of the collective. To call this a reverse dominance hierarchy would be to miss the social harmony afforded by the circular relations between the individual and the collective that gives each individual the education they need in order to enact their autonomy in the world. Egalitarianism is thus afforded not by a reverse dominance hierarchy, but by a growth hierarchy in service of individual growth in the face of challenges that threaten the egalitarian structure of the collective.

The theologian Bernard Loomer refers to this dynamic as the distinction between unilateral and relational power. Unilateral power is about relations of dominance over others, whereas relational power emerges where increases in your power lead to increases in my power lead to increases in our power together.¹³ Aligned with this, research on meaning in life has shown that beyond simply having a purpose, you find incredible meaning through giving yourself to something beyond yourself, when what you do matters to people who matter to you.^14,15,16

As history can attest however, it never works this smoothly even in the best of times. Reverse dominance hierarchy is still a thing. We want to distinguish that from egalitarian growth hierarchy. Reverse dominance hierarchy is what happens when the collective dominates the individuals who, because of their expertise, could be capable of leading the collective through a crisis. If prestige distribution works too well, then those individuals may be ignored when they ought to be listened to.

Furthermore, there’s no guarantee that the intelligence of the collective will always lead to the right answer. Despite all the egalitarianism of these hunter-gatherers, they could still engage in conflict internally and with other groups, sometimes leading to the enslavement of the captives.¹⁷ The key themes here are that there’s always the possibility of dominance and unethical action. And, of course, egalitarianism eventually gave way to patriarchal empires with incredibly unequal dominance hierarchies.

We obviously want to return to egalitarianism. So, as this essay’s title asks, why can’t any of this work in the West?

Before we get to that question, if you like this essay so far, then please give it a like. It really helps with visibility in the algorithm. It also really helps if you share this essay with people you know. Thank you so much.

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So, why can’t any of this work in the West?

Where is the student/teacher when to become a student requires a lifetime of debt for the false promise of a safe career? We aren’t learning for the sake of the collective, but learning for our own individual sake, and then act surprised when the collective fails to provide us the autonomy and meaning we sought. We’ve been taught to idolize prestige, even to idolize dominance. Meaning in life has been reduced to the price of what we do for our own benefit rather than the value of what we do for a collective we care about beyond our own egotistical desires.

When any one individual is granted the opportunity to have power over everyone else, it’s downright foolish to act surprised when everyone is thrust into competition that prevents anyone from helping anyone else.

Certainly the emergence of hierarchy is a little more complex than that, but for the distributed education in service of the collective that gives us the equal decision-making power that allows for true personal autonomy, the least that we need are relations of loving mutual growth that the student/teacher social role provides. Boehm himself discusses the competition that exists even in the most egalitarian foragers, yet this is again not competition against one another.¹ Competition within growth hierarchies is in service of educating better competitors for the joy of playing and living together, rather than competition in the name of domination.

Given all of that, where did we, the innately egalitarian humans that we are, go so wrong and how can we start to make things go right?

While the emergence of dominance hierarchy is obviously a complex topic that I’ll be covering in the future, I think the first part I’d like to address is the emergence of gender hierarchy. One of the limits of Boehm’s book is that he seems to assume that gender hierarchy within the nuclear family is something that was incredibly pervasive even within egalitarian hunter-gatherers.¹ Yet, as Power, Hrdy, and Clark have separately written, gender egalitarianism is also something that extends far into our history as human beings.^4,5,18

Male competition over females is one dynamic that leads to dominance hierarchy, and so, it was coalitions among women that was responsible for gender egalitarianism despite that fact.^1,4,6,18

Unfortunately, female coalitions become less and less likely when tribes move from matrilocality to patrilocality. A matrilocal tribe is one where women stay with their families, and men from other tribes marry into that tribe. This prevents things like domestic violence creating hierarchy within a family because any woman is protected by her family. Yet, once a tribe becomes patrilocal, all the men in a tribe are family and all the women are strangers. This prevents the women from creating a coalition more powerful than the men’s coalition. Even though women may have equal extra-familial decision-making power, within the bond of marriage they remain unequal.^1,6,15,17,18

It might be difficult to say that inequality within a marriage is always the first step toward dominance hierarchy, but it certainly is a very important step, especially if you’re a woman. Once this happens, women are far more at the will of men because their lack of coalitional support means they have less bargaining power than men, and thus, less decision-making power.

If such a dynamic disadvantages women so severely though, why exactly do matrilocal tribes become patrilocal? The issue is that patrilocal tribes are better able to deal with intertribal conflict. Men who are family are better able and willing to fight together on a moment’s notice when a raid or conflict of some kind happens. The more intertribal conflict in an area, the more likely a population will become patrilocal.¹⁵

In other words, human tribes didn’t become patrilocal because they wanted to necessarily, but because in certain conditions they were forced to. It’s important to recognize that there’s a whirlwind of factors involved in the emergence of patrilocality and of hierarchy of any kind. Yet, when it comes to gender hierarchy, women are forced into patrilocal marriage. This then leads to marriages in which they’re more likely to be dominated by men because they lack the coalitional strength that would secure their autonomy.

That said, there’s a meme in contemporary culture that women prefer dominant men because of our evolutionary heritage. Once again, our evolutionary heritage as human beings has been dominated by egalitarianism. That’s our evolutionary heritage for the last few hundred thousand years.^4,6

Additionally, Boehm can help us see that even when we look to our primate ancestors, it’s a gross oversimplification to say that women prefer submission to dominant men. As an aside, the reason I’m using chimpanzees in the following example rather than bonobos, is to make the point that even if we were more closely related to the more hierarchical chimpanzee, that wouldn’t necessarily make a substantial difference.

That said, Boehm writes of three underlying factors that define primate nature. We dominate, we submit, and we resent domination. This makes sense. If primates such as chimpanzees organize themselves in dominance hierarchies based on competition, then by definition, even when they submit, they would prefer to dominate. Even when submission comes with advantages, we and chimpanzees would prefer to be the one in charge.¹

This is most obviously seen with chimpanzees who’ll perform submission behaviours when in close proximity to the dominant male, but then give defiance calls when at a safe distance. They submit, but they are more than ready to show their dissatisfaction once they’re out of harm’s way. Only the most foolish dominant forgets that because they will quickly lose out to the next chimp in line for the throne.¹

Boehm also writes of female chimps in captivity who later accepted a dominant male. Firstly, this coalition of female chimps severely wounded several adult males before finally accepting one as the dominant. Secondly, you have to understand “dominant” as the male who was allowed mating rights over the females relative to these other males that were later introduced. The dominant was not so much in power over the females, but over the other males.¹

The fact that the females allowed him these rights was seen when one of the females decided she preferred another male over the dominant. After rejecting the dominant several times, she was caught in the act with another male. When the dominant chased this male around, all the females gathered to force the dominant to submit. While the dominant had power over any one female due to the differences in physical strength, it was when they stood as a collective that this one dominant was shown to be powerless.¹

This is our evolutionary heritage even as compared to the potentially highly hierarchical common ancestor we share with the chimpanzee.

It may of course be easy to say, “but Will these are chimps in captivity, not in their natural habitat”.

This would miss the very obvious point that females are more likely to develop coalitional powers when outside the bounds of patriarchal power. It would simply be foolish to make the mistake that women’s authentic desire is determined by the behaviour they have when raised in environments of pervasive gender hierarchy. Women submit when they must, but even then, only so far. As Boehm says, we are defined by domination, submission, and domination resentment.¹

A wrench in this idea though is that women prefer men of high status. It seems to be the case. Yet, we must make a distinction between status as prestige vs. dominance, and then, as prestige vs. wealth. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the two seem to be associated. Researchers have found that women’s preferences for hyper-masculinity is associated with the prevalence of homicide, but even more so with income inequality.¹⁹ This is in line with the bodyguard hypothesis that women prefer dominant men because they’ll protect them.²⁰

In other words, women pursue dominance when their survival and culturally-defined “quality” of life depend on it.

This is further bolstered by challenges to the idea of hypergamy, or the idea that women will only marry men who are higher status or income than them. What we find is that both men and women pursue people of the same class. They’re both choosing the lifestyle and values they were raised in. Given a gender pay gap, a woman pursuing a man of the same class means they’re choosing men who earn more than them. Yet, the more that women are given the same economic opportunities as men, this difference in income disappears and the similarity in class remains.²¹

Point being, women submit to men of higher income, dominance, or decision-making power because they are forced to in order to maintain a familiar standard of living. It’s foolish to look at an environment of pervasive gender hierarchy and then say that this is what women innately, inevitably prefer. You can’t rob women of power and then wonder why they only choose men who have more power. That’s all they have to choose from. And of course, as that female chimp above, sometimes they choose the more preferred “beta” male while the alpha’s back is turned.

Yet, again, most women do seem to prefer the higher status man. For example, in ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel, men become religious scholars whereas women become the primary breadwinners. In such communities, women do not have a preference for wealth, but for religious scholarship. They’re still interested in prestigious, high status men, it’s just that what they consider prestigious is dependent on what the culture views as prestigious.²²

We’ve discussed in a previous essay however that this may have more to do with who they believe deserves their attention long enough for attraction to emerge. And, as we covered early in this essay, both men and women equally give their attention to people of higher status.⁹

This simply makes sense. In tribal cultures, prestige was associated with the expertise necessary to be a contributing member of the tribe, which means that it was associated with health, belonging, and meaning in life.⁸

Yet, in our contemporary society, even status as prestige can be associated with factors that are contrary to human flourishing. This is where you get rampant materialism of women desiring to keep up with the Kardashians and men trying to be the hyper-competitive, dominant, wealthy men such women desire, but at least they have high status, at least they support your hedonistic pleasures and your short-term survival.

The point I’m trying to make is that regardless of whether or not a culture primarily rewards status, it does so as a by-product of what the culture itself requires of people in order to make them fit functionally into that culture.

Functional fittedness is a concept from evolutionary biology in which an animal is considered to be functionally fit when it can survive long enough to reproduce in a specific environment. As such, for human beings capable of cultural beliefs, expertise can become prestigious even if it’s only believed to be important by the culture. Most women don’t give a shit if you’re well-versed in obscure Judaic scripture, but once a woman does, you suddenly become a far more attractive man.

So yeah, status can certainly matter, but what exactly you define as high status changes depending on your culture and subculture. Yes, some women would love a 250 lb muscular behemoth, but some other women would rather a guy they can play DND with. Some women prefer both.

What we can’t forget is that both Boehm and Saini write of a fourth feature that humans develop on top of domination, submission, and domination resentment. The vast majority of us have an honest desire to be altruistic, to care for others.^1,17 In other words, if you make generosity, care, and emotional intelligence functionally fit enough within a culture that such expertise becomes prestigious, then that’s what women will be more likely to prefer in men.

Importantly, as we’ve already discussed, the egalitarian ethos also ensures that status doesn’t become too important. What conversations about status and attractiveness tend to miss out on is that status is not the only thing that matters. If a specific society has social sanctions against abuses of status, then that opens the door even more for different reasons for wanting to choose a partner.

At the end of the day, if a chimpanzee female can choose the non-dominant male over the dominant male and all the other females can support her decision in defiance of the dominant, then, call me a crazy feminist, maybe human women can too.

Unless of course, they’re raised in violent environments that force the development of patrilocality that robs them of that coalition power.^4,18 Unless they move from mobile nomadic bands to sedentary farmers. Unless temporary leaders become socially acceptable “big men” who accumulate more and more resources under their own control, eventually creating chiefdoms with highly hierarchical decision-making power in which the egalitarian ethos is replaced by a warrior ethos that fails to distribute prestige and sanction dominance.^1,6,17 As Boehm writes:¹

That said, while the West has evolved to a point where egalitarianism seems as unlikely a development as ever, a few concepts from complexity science can act as beacons of hope in these dark times.

The first is the almost clichéd idea that a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Both egalitarianism and dominance hierarchy emerge out of the various parts we’ve covered throughout this essay, yet they cannot be reduced to these parts. This is what makes research on these social systems difficult. People often look for some small set of factors that make up all egalitarian or domination societies. It can be discouraging when we find differences because it feels like we’ll never find a good enough map. How can we make egalitarianism work when nothing seems to be the special sauce?

Alicia Juarrero writes that this is a feature of these systems rather than a bug. This specific property of complex systems is called multiple realizability. While many egalitarian societies have common features, no one feature is the feature that allows it to be egalitarian. It’s instead that egalitarianism is what’s called an attractor. When you have enough of the right parts working together, the system gets attracted toward a certain state, such as egalitarianism or domination. There are thus multiple ways to realize egalitarianism.²³

Egalitarianism thus acts as an attractor to a system composed of enough of the right parts, even if it doesn’t have all the parts. The more features a society has that allow it to be egalitarian, the more likely egalitarianism will emerge. This is true even if it doesn’t have several features that seemed so important for a bunch of other egalitarian societies. Those missing features could be incredibly important, especially in the specific environments of those other cultures. Yet, in this other society, egalitarianism became a powerful enough attractor because they had enough of the parts they needed to make egalitarianism possible, in their specific environment.²³

Boehm calls the cultural practices we’ve discussed, such as arrow sharing or ridiculing a hunter’s kill, levelling mechanisms. These mechanisms level the playing field to ensure roughly equal decision-making power within a culture.¹

An example he offers is the Wape, an egalitarian culture in which men started gaining more individual wealth after contact with modern Australian culture. They maintained their egalitarianism through a specific form of gambling in which no one could leave a table a winner. You had to keep playing until you lost. This distributed the wealth enough to keep material accumulation from turning domination into a more powerful attractor than egalitarianism.¹

My point is that even when our environment radically changes, such as with contact between the Wape and modern Australia, we can create new levelling mechanisms that reinforce egalitarianism as an attractor. Complexity science has another name for this property of systems, metastability. A system is metastable when its attractor is capable of persisting despite changes in environment or changes in parts.²³ If no one part is necessary, then a new part can be introduced to ensure the attractor of egalitarianism remains constant.

An example I’ll leave us on is why a specific levelling mechanism no longer works in our culture and what we can do instead to help make solarpunk egalitarianism a powerful enough attractor in the West.

Boehm writes that one of the most important levelling mechanisms is a moral community acting around an egalitarian ethos. A culture has to value the lifestyle and way of thinking that makes egalitarianism possible and defend against upstarts seeking more power for themselves. For example, many cultures used ridicule in various ways to make sure no one’s head got too big.¹

In our culture, we often see this same dynamic in online shaming and callout culture. I want to be nuanced here. If someone has said or done something that is unacceptable, then we as a culture want to be able to call them out and hold them accountable. We need a moral community ready and willing to defend the egalitarian ethos. The issue arises when we consider the very different social organization that we have because of the internet.

In tribal society, if a would-be dominant was ridiculed he could leave to go find another tribe, sure, but he would likely find another egalitarian tribe who would ridicule him for the same behaviour. With the internet, the ridiculed upstart can go online and quickly find a community that welcomes him, empathizes with him, and, often enough, gives him an even more extreme ideology that makes him an even worse person than he was when he said the thing that earned him ridicule.

For example, Andrew Callaghan, a YouTuber and creator of Channel 5, was “cancelled” for sexual misconduct. Within 3 days he’d received an invitation to come work with Alex Jones and InfoWars.²⁴ How many “cancelled” have been offered the exact same reward and taken it? It was only Callaghan’s commitment to his political beliefs that kept him from making a deal with that devil. Elsewhere, David McRaney and Laura Bates have separately written about how important a welcoming community is for people trying to get out of extremist political ideology.^25,26

I’m not arguing that ridicule is never effective, but if we don’t offer a path to redemption or any education on how to metabolize or make use of the pain of ridicule, then we can’t be surprised when people increasingly leave our political movements for right wing extremism. We’ve allowed our egalitarian growth hierarchy in service of the collective to become a true reverse dominance hierarchy, one that seeks to dominate the individual to protect the purity of the collective at the expense of the collective and its individuals. Again, we can’t be surprised when we end up with another dominance hierarchy, reverse or not, that drives people into the domination resentment that overthrows the dominant, whether individual or collective.

If we want a metastable Solarpunk culture, one that remains egalitarian despite changes in technology, culture, or economy, then we have to be willing to be honest about how those changes require changes in the levelling mechanisms we use. For as long as we refuse to update ourselves in response to an ever-changing reality, refuse to be student/teachers committed to love as mutual growth, we will never be able to survive the climate crisis let alone create solarpunk.

Assignment:

1. What levelling mechanisms might be used in your communities to ensure prestige is distributed?

2. How might you better show up as a student/teacher, offering the caring education necessary to help others in your community develop in beneficial ways?

3. What are some better levelling mechanisms for ensuring dominant upstarts don’t gain power, while also ensuring they aren’t chased away into toxic communities?

Until the next one, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.

References:

1 – Boehm, C. (2001). Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Harvard University Press.

2 – Fisher, M. (2022). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zer0 Books.

3 – Destiny. (2022, September 4). Destiny Gets HEATED w/ Girls And Guests On Fresh N Fit ft. SNEAKO [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO5AB1gCnRw

4 – Gender egalitarianism made us human: A response to David Graeber & David Wengrow’s “How to change the course of human history” - by Camilla Power | libcom.org. (n.d.). Retrieved August 8, 2026, from https://libcom.org/article/gender-egalitarianism-made-us-human-response-david-graeber-david-wengrows-how-change-course

5 – Clark, G. (2025). Carl Jung and the Evolutionary Sciences: A New Vision for Analytical Psychology. Routledge.

6 – Kemp, L. (2025). Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. Random House, Inc.

7 – WHAT IS POLITICS? (2021, October 26). 10.1 Do “Egalitarian Societies” Exist? David Graeber & David Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything” [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vNADAH-Rxk

8 – Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F. J. (2001). The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(3), 165–196. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1090-5138(00)00071-4

9 – Cheng, J. T., Tracy, J. L., Foulsham, T., Kingstone, A., & Henrich, J. (2013). Two ways to the top: Evidence that dominance and prestige are distinct yet viable avenues to social rank and influence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(1), 103–125. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030398

10 – John Vervaeke’s Lectern. (2023, March 3). After Socrates: Episode 11 - Proper Proportions & The Right Mode | Dr. John Vervaeke [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-d69SP7EvU

11 – The Consilience Project (2021, August 23). WE DON’T MAKE PROPAGANDA! THEY DO! The Consilience Project. https://consilienceproject.org/we-dont-make-propaganda-they-do/

12 – Stein, Z. (2019). Education in a Time Between Worlds: Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology, and Society. Bright Alliance.

13 – Loomer, B. (1976). Two Conceptions of Power. Process Studies, 6(1), 5–32. https://doi.org/10.5840/process19766126

14 – Stein, Z. (2019). Education in a Time Between Worlds: Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology, and Society. Bright Alliance.

15 – Wallace, J. B. (2026). Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose. Penguin USA Incorporated.

16 – Wolf, S., Koethe, J., Adams, R. M., Arpaly, N., Haidt, J., & Macedo, S. (2012). Meaning in Life and Why It Matters. Princeton University Press.

17 – Saini, A. (n.d.). The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality. Beacon Press.

18 – WHAT IS POLITICS? (2020, December 11). 7. The Origins of Patriarchy and Dominance Hierarchy; what David Graeber and Jordan Peterson miss [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgOo-bS7OJI

19 – Brooks, R., Scott, I. M., Maklakov, A. A., Kasumovic, M. M., Clark, A. P., & Penton-Voak, I. S. (2010). National income inequality predicts women’s preferences for masculinized faces better than health does. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 278(1707), 810–812. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2010.0964

20 – Hahnel-Peeters, R. K. (2023). Bodyguard Hypothesis, Rape, and Coercion. In Encyclopedia of Sexual Psychology and Behavior (pp. 1–5). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08956-5_295-1

21 – Alexander, S. (2023, May 24). Hypergamy: Much More Than You Wanted To Know. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/hypergamy-much-more-than-you-wanted

22 – Malovicki-Yaffe, N., Tratner, A. E., & McDonald, M. M. (2024). Culture shapes sex differences in mate preferences. Evolution and Human Behavior, 45(3), 281–291. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2024.04.002

23 – Juarrero, A. (2023). Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence. The MIT Press.

24 – Joshua Citarella. (2025, April 2). Andrew Callaghan: Andrew’s Theory of Radicalization | Doomscroll [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf-x7T-fFc0

25 – McRaney, D. (2022). How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion. Portfolio.

26 – Bates, L. (2023). Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists: The Truth about Extreme Misogyny and How it Affects Us All. Sourcebooks.

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It almost goes without saying that objectifying people in a way that dehumanizes them is a bad thing. I’ve made the claim many times that ethical relations are those that humanize people and that such relations can make us more human. If our goal is to create a better society like solarpunk, then we obviously want people to be engaged in humanizing relations. Firstly, solarpunk basically means an egalitarian, nature-oriented, technological culture.

The obvious dilemma here is that this implies that some people are more human than others. There’s a performative contradiction that by claiming that solarpunk selves are more ethical because they are the product of humanizing, I have reified those who are not solarpunk selves as less-than-human. I’ve created categories of the human and the not-human-enough to be able to create solarpunk. For a movement that claims to be more ethical than neoliberal capitalism and to have a conception of the self more ethical than the liberal individual, this is an error we have to correct.

Another quick definition, a performative contradiction is one that contradicts itself because making the claim presupposes truths that contradict the claim. For example, saying that there is no universal truth presupposes the universal truth that there are no universal truths.³ Or, saying that solarpunk selves are more ethical because they’re humanizing presupposes selves that are less-than-human, creating an ethically dubious hierarchy of humanity in which some people are less human than others.

To begin solving this performative contradiction, I want to begin by discussing how the idea for this essay came about. I had posted an essay on the solarpunk subreddit. The fact that I talk about masculinity led to many calling for gender abolition. One of the commenters quoted Ursula K. Le Guin for having said that whatever is left over after gender has been removed is simply human. I don’t mean to put words into the commenter’s mouth or that of Le Guin. I really don’t think they mean what I’m about to say.

I think we need to be careful about how we deny humanity to those who desire to be gendered for the same reason that we need to be careful how we deny humanity to those who aren’t solarpunk. We both claim to stand for a more ethical future while simultaneously making a deeply unethical performative contradiction. I am going to swing back around to gender, but there’s a road we have to take to get there.

All that said, if the solarpunk self is relational, meaning that it’s created out of its relations with others and the world, then we can very easily see how this begins to solve this dilemma. By saying that solarpunk selves are those that humanize, we say that if there is any person that is dehumanizing another then that person is not a solarpunk self.

This creates a sort of virtuous failsafe in which we aim to catch ourselves in the act of dehumanization. I make myself a solarpunk self by humanizing even those who don’t have solarpunk selves. In other words, it is not the solarpunk self who dehumanizes, but others who dehumanize themselves through their dehumanization of others who don’t fit their standardizing definition of the human. Even when another dehumanizes me, I humanize myself by humanizing them, which at the very least closes the door to a reciprocal dehumanization that leads us to atrocity.

This reciprocal co-creation of the self is a profoundly important point. Those who dehumanize inevitably end up dehumanizing themselves. We have to understand how this happens because, as might be obvious, this kind of dynamic is very much alive in our culture.

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Firstly, I wrote the following before reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. He gives a similar argument as mine in his challenge to emotivism and its consequences.⁴

Either way, by objectifying another as a tool, as a means to my end, I create a competition of nihilistic hedonism. It’s nihilistic because there is no meaning outside of our own end, there is nothing bigger than myself. Meaning in life becomes constrained to my own self-interested needs. It becomes merely hedonic because it’s only about my own little self and what is most pleasurable or satisfactory for my own end. If all that matters is me and myself, then all that can be taken into account is how something benefits or hurts me.

This is why the Conformist stage, which is 2.5 in Dr. O’Fallon’s model of psychological development, is a necessary and beautiful part of everyone’s lives. This is a stage of development we all require because despite the negative consequences of blind conformity, we also must learn the social norms and codes of conduct that allow us to engage with other people in, hopefully, healthy ways.⁵ In solarpunk societies, we want some sort of social norm that teenagers can conform to so that they’re prepared for the solarpunk world as adults.

Most children find themselves at one of the stages before Conformist, which is called Egocentric. Adults stuck at this stage often lack the ability to truly care about another’s perspective as their own. This leads them to treat other people in a way that seems narcissistic, objectifying, and instrumentalizing, but it’s literally because they can’t see outside their own perspective. ⁵

As a Conformist, I honestly care about my group outside of what they can give me. I can experienced the mutuality of shared experience that allows me to see beyond that Egocentric narcissism.⁶ There are many issues with Conformists, yes, but it is an important step to greater capabilities for ethical action than the Egocentric. Unfortunately, also for unethical action, as a growth of capabilities is not necessarily a growth to good use of those capabilities.⁷ A Conformist’s capability to care so deeply for their group can be matched by a violent animosity toward an out-group.

However, if the culture we conform to is one that valorizes a hyper-individualistic conception of the self, as ours does, then we are stuck with a mutuality that can only exist within the bounds of a narcissistic, objectifying view.⁸ If everyone sees each other as a tool for their own nihilistic hedonism, then there is a competition to dictate to what extent you need to consider others in order to get your end fulfilled. If everyone acts like this, then no one’s whole, sovereign being is ever respected outside of how they can be used in someone else’s narcissistic end.

Yet, this may seem like a contradiction. I’ve said that the Egocentric can only care about others insofar as they are capable of benefitting them. Conformists can truly care about members of their group, being capable of the mutuality of shared experience. If our culture is confined to hyper-individualism where we don’t care about another’s perspective unless it benefits us, doesn’t that mean that our culture keeps us trapped at Egocentric?

I think that’s true to a certain extent, but I also think it’s a little more complex than that.

Someone who can experience only their own perspective or another person’s perspective is Egocentric. The fact that Egocentrists can’t hold both perspectives at the same time means that they can only ever see their own perspective OR another person’s perspective. Conformists can hold both perspectives at the exact same time and that allows them to honestly view another’s perspective as their own perspective.⁷

For the Egocentric it’s this or that perspective, whereas for the Conformist it’s this and that perspective. This allows the Conformist to really grasp the idea of a “we” because it’s what you and I believe and care about together.⁷

Remember though, Conformists can have a lot of hostility for the out-group. While a Conformist can hold their own perspective and another’s perspective, they often tend to conflate the two perspectives. The two perspectives being held at the same time means that they often get fused together. They assume that they think the same, feel the same, and this is what makes them Conformists who want to be the same as each other. If someone reveals that they aren’t the same, then that person gets forced out of the group and is seen as too other to be one of us.

As such, if you are a Conformist to a hyper-individualistic culture, then that means that the standard of being a part of the in-group is being capable of hyper-individualism. In other words, if you’re capable of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, which really means you were born with certain privileges, then you’re worthy of being a part of the in-group, and then I can honestly care about you as a part of my group.

If you fail to meet those standards, then it’s not systemic racial or gender issues, it’s not mental health issues, or some other perfectly legitimate reason. It’s that you haven’t taken enough personal responsibility. Your failure is your own fault, you’re part of the out-group. I don’t give a fuck about your self-imposed poverty. You want to be successful? You want to be part of our in-group? Then work harder.

This perspective, unsurprisingly, leads our culture to become a narcissistic, atomizing, and dehumanizing culture, in which there’s a reciprocal narrowing into our own hedonic narcissism.⁹ Reciprocal narrowing means that the more I do this to you the more you do this to me the more I do this to myself the more I do this to you.

Even as we interact and transact, we’re forced to measure the extent of our transactional interaction based only on how it satisfies our own narcissistic hedonic end. There is thus a competition over the extent to which we consent to allow ourselves to be used and the extent to which we manipulate another to only see those elements of the transaction that would lead to their consent. In such a competitive view of relationships, consent barely qualifies as “informed”.

There is a thus, again, a runaway narrowing to only consider the elements most important to getting the transaction completed here in this moment. It’s a narrow boundary win/win that externalizes any losses to the other in the transaction or to others who were never considered in the transaction. We are biased and incentivized to bullshit each other and ourselves about the relevance of what we want relative to what anyone else wants. Everyone is doing this to each other. If this is how we think of ourselves as selves, then what kind of culture are we condemned to recreate?

To reverse this process, we have to learn to ask ourselves, honestly, “what do You want outside of anything that I want out of you or simply believe you’d want because you’re obviously just like me?”

This, of course, runs the risk of leading us to the opposite extreme, and one that Anderson criticizes Levinas for making. Where the transactional leads to this unilateral dominance over the other for the sake of yourself, the prioritizing of the other in lieu of yourself risks the losing of yourself in the other. Flipping the dominance of self into a submission of self recreates the very hierarchy it seeks to upend.¹

We instead aim to find the optimal grip between the pursuit of my end and the legitimate caring of another.⁹ When both are brought into alignment that is what makes a more humanizing relation. It isn’t as consensual as it needs to be for me to get what I want for my narcissistic hedonic end, but about what we can create together toward a more complexifying understanding of each other and the world.

We instead ask, “How can we democratically contribute to the flourishing of an increasing number of people such that more people can even consider what it might be to contribute in a way that leads to the flourishing of more people capable of such considerations?”

I realize that was a bit of a mouthful, but really consider that as a possible definition for what it means to create solarpunk selves capable of creating an increasingly solarpunk society capable of creating increasingly solarpunk selves.

Connect all of that to the idea of the sexual citizen, the person who is able to pursue their own self-interested sexual goals while also pursuing the other-interested care to respect the same right in the other.² Not in the pursuit of one’s narcissistically hedonic need to ejaculate, but for the creation of selves capable of more deeply experiencing each other as sovereign beings outside our desires for the other.

Obviously this works best when we are both consciously co-creating each other in this way, but the reality of the world is that not everyone thinks this way. While finding others who think like this is necessary, remember that we’re student/teachers, both each other’s student and teacher. As my student, I give compassionate hospitality for your mistakes, but as my teacher, I aim to learn from you so that I might attain a higher perspective in which I can learn, teach, and act in better ways. There is no panacea strategy that will make everything work out fine, but some strategies are better than others depending on the context and we can help each other learn what that means.

Additionally, we have to consider how we can create a culture in which an increasing number think this way. That leads us to ask what exactly does “consent” mean when we’re born as infants into a society we didn’t consent to. We’re given rules, regulations, and norms about gender and otherwise, that we didn’t consent to.

In the case of gender then, we’re given specific rules and roles, and are then cast into that world to survive and function. Not merely in games of capitalist survival, but in just trying to deal with other human beings who are, again, their whole sovereign being beyond whatever we could want from them or how we would define them.

Where in that is informed consent?

Vervaeke has defined love as being in a certain mode of relating in which we’re participating in each other’s mutual growth.¹⁰ We see the other as a sovereign being not contained by our conceptions of them, but as a sovereign horizon of possible becoming wholly unto themselves, thus honouring the co-creative emergence of that becoming in our interactions with them. It’s a way of relating to somebody else that helps them develop in ways that are authentic to them, which in turn allows you to develop in ways that are authentic to you.

By contrast, Pinkard discusses the Hegelian master/slave dialectic in which the master’s individuality is affirmed by the slave who sacrifices their own individuality in affirming the master. The master is thus, ironically, dependent on the slave. If the slave realizes this, then they now gain the power to take away the master’s individuality by refusing to affirm the master. There is thus a paradoxical competition between the master and the slave for affirmation as an individual.¹¹

The liberal individual takes itself to be the master without need for affirmation from anyone else. While this is a nice enough idea, we’ve already gone over why this is wrongheaded here and elsewhere. We are not separated, atomized individuals. We’re deeply interdependent and co-creational.

What we seek then is that optimal grip where our authenticity is born out of our mutual affirmation of the other’s authenticity in a way that’s not inauthentic to me, and vice versa. We’re brought into a reciprocal dance where we’re trying to find an optimal grip on the development toward a relational-autonomy.

The paradox is not a bug, but a feature. It’s the very foundation from which autonomy can emerge. The right kind of autonomy is the product of loving, humanizing, consensual relations. There can thus be no utopian endpoint at which we have attained autonomy, but a complexifying move toward greater capabilities for autonomous action given the deep interdependence of the student/teacher affirmation of and from the other.

This is why, as Levinas says, ethics may have to be first philosophy.¹² Any philosophical question ultimately arises out of relationality, which means that it feeds back into reality. Not only is your ability to philosophize dependent on how you have been produced by relations, ethical or otherwise, but the way in which you philosophize will influence a world that will ultimately feed back around to influence the quality of your philosophizing. You’re called to make your relations with others more ethical so that you can even continue to do philosophy beyond the ethical.

Anti-life philosophy is an example of the failure mode of the atomized subject that would seek to eradicate all life to end suffering. It’s ultimately one of the most narcissistic philosophical positions you could take. You’re choosing it from your own limited perspective and enforcing that on all life everywhere for all time. Such a philosophy is arguably the inevitable endpoint to the utilitarian atomization of the self, where the only possible avenue of meaning in life becomes a nihilistic hedonism. How can suffering have any meaning to flourishing if all that matters is pleasure?

This is also why romantic relationships are exemplary of ethics. They are the relation in which equals meet each other in a transaction that must be more than a transaction. We’re repeatedly called to overcome our own selfishness so that we may love our partner while simultaneously standing for our own values. The friction can cause us immense suffering, but that friction is what opens us to see beyond our limited, narcissistic egoism so that we can see the beauty of mutual growth that romantic love can afford.

In our culture, love is reduced to pleasure that I get from another who exchanges it for pleasure in return. An anti-life philosophy is by definition not a relation between equals who are each capable of autonomous choice in the preservation of their own life or the lives of other equals. It fails to see how it is the very suffering of coming up against the infinity of the other’s sovereignty that allows mutual growth to higher and higher orders of flourishing.

However, this brings us up against the limits of what exactly we mean by equals. What exactly do we even mean by human? If we say that reciprocally humanizing relations are a failsafe against dehumanization, what are we to make of the hidden cultural boundary around human and the excluded animals that so many of us torture to eat every single day merely because it is the standard, “natural” way of things?

This is where we’ll turn in a future essay.

Assignment:

1. Is there a meaningful difference between humanizing someone as recognizing their humanity, and humanizing someone as in creating them as more human given those recognizing relations? See if you can find your way to the hidden assumptions embedded in this question.

Until the next one, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.

References:

1 – Anderson, E. (2019). From Existential Alterity to Ethical Reciprocity: Beauvoir?s Alternative to Levinas. Continental Philosophy Review, 52(2), 171–189. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-018-9459-3

2 – Hirsch, J. S., & Khan, S. (2020). Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus. WW Norton.

3 – Wilber, K. (2000). Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution. Shambhala.

4 – MacIntyre, A. C. (2011). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Bloomsbury USA Academic.

5 – O’Fallon, T. (n.d.). The Three Questions, Stages International. Retrieved March 14, 2026, from https://www.stagesinternational.com/thethreequestions

6 – Lewis, P. M. (2018). The Discerning Heart: The Developmental Psychology of Robert Kegan.

7 – Stein, Z. (2010). Now you get it, now you don’t: Developmental differences in the understanding of integral theory and practice. In S. Esbjorn-Hargens (Ed.), Integral theory in action: Applied, theoretical, and practical applications of the AQAL model (pp. 175–203). SUNY University Press.

8 – Brown, W. (2017). Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Zone Books.

9 – Vervaeke, J., & Mastropietro, C. (2024). Awakening From the Meaning Crisis: Part One: Origins (S. Coyne, Ed.). Story Grid Publishing LLC.

10 – John Vervaeke’s Lectern (Director). (2023, March 3). After Socrates: Episode 11 - Proper Proportions & The Right Mode | Dr. John Vervaeke [Video recording]. https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=7-d69SP7EvU

11 – Pinkard, T. (2010). Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason. Cambridge University Press.

12 – Levinas, E. (2011). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Duquesne.

Also available on YouTube and Spotify.

In this essay, we’re going to be discussing the difference between IFS Parts and Jungian archetypes. I’ll end things with how you can actually start doing archetypal work in order to create solarpunk, an egalitarian, nature-oriented technological culture.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a psychotherapeutic method that is considered an evidence-based practice.^1,2 Interestingly, it understands the human mind as composed of parts and if you imagine yourself talking to those parts, you can collaborate with them on the project of your mental health. If you talk to yourself as if you’re talking to another person, you not only heal yourself, but develop new capabilities you didn’t have before.

It can be difficult for me to imagine that this is a radical idea because given my experience with it, it seems obvious at this point. That said, most people are likely shocked by the idea that they have many little people living within them. Every day we find ourselves lost in conversations with ourselves, and yet it doesn’t really dawn on us that the people we’re talking to have a mind of their own. We then act surprised when these parts make decisions that we later regret. The fact that you can happily make a decision while simultaneously resisting it and then regretting it is because you have different parts of you with different personalities.

With all of that being said, if you know about Jungian archetypes, you might be wondering what the difference is. This is the idea that within us there are subpersonalities that represent certain characters from myth and stories. We feel inspired by heroic characters because such characters are archetypal. The Hero is an archetype that speaks to us so profoundly because all heroic stories ever told by human beings are gesturing at the human need to aspire to be someone better. The same is true for archetypes like the Wise Old Man who teaches the Hero, connecting our aspiration to intergenerational guidance, or the Shadow, the villainous character who actually represents the evil we fear exists within us.

I offer an advanced theory of the archetypes in my essay, Jungian Archetypes for a Solarpunk Culture, but the major point here is that both IFS and Jungian Archetypes theorize that we have parts of ourselves that function as if they have a mind of their own. There are obviously many ways we could conceptualize the difference, but I think the three primary ways I want to distinguish between them is that an archetype is often, though not always, more autonomous and more mythological as a consequence of being more complex.

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Let’s begin with the idea that archetypes tend to be more complex. Our internal families of parts can be very complex. When I speak of complexity then, what I’m saying is that a single archetype can represent so much more than the specific functions that IFS gives our parts. Our parts can be managers, firefighters, or exiles and complexity often comes in the way they relate with one another to influence our behaviour. We feel a painful emotion and a firefighter swoops in to drive us into addictive behaviour to soothe that pain.

Yet, a single archetype can be the representative of an entire worldview and multiple archetypes can be the manifestation of the clash between worldviews. We can understand these conflicts with the language of IFS, but the simple fact is that the archetypes often inhabit a far more complex world than the simpler, quotidian relations between parts. This also means that IFS can be more immediately therapeutically powerful than archetypal work. This is a gross oversimplification, but it’s kind of the difference between wanting to feel better and wanting to reconstruct an entire worldview.

Archetypes also tend to be more autonomous. This is a nuanced point because a part can be responsible for explosive rage, addictive acting out, and a whole range of very difficult experiences in which we feel like we’ve completely lost our autonomy to them. They are autonomous and powerful. Yet, archetypes can often do that too and can be experienced as being far more autonomous when we consciously dialogue with them. It can literally feel like being invaded by a legitimate, autonomous, externally originating entity.³

The “feel like” is important though. I don’t believe archetypes are truly autonomous entities that invade our consciousness from the outside like demons or deities. I personally don’t believe such things exist, but I have experienced archetypes as being very autonomous yet internal to me. I haven’t had this experience of being invaded, but I have heard such stories from people who also believe archetypes aren’t “real” external existing entities.

Thirdly, archetypes also tend to be far more mythological than parts. Parts can be embedded in the story of our lives, they can have their beliefs and personalities, but this is very different from being mythological.

By mythology then, I mean that they are embedded in a narrative that seems to entangle our own personal life history with our wider cultural context in ways that manifest as deeply symbolic and imaginative. There’s a very real difference from having a simple dialogue with a manager part and being involuntarily confronted with the mental image of a 3-headed chimera speaking for the women wounded by patriarchy’s grip on our own hearts as men.

Clearly…we can have many experiences that exist between these two extremes. My point is that one is very different from the other and that difference can be understood as mythological. This is precisely why archetypes can be so useful for worldview-level changes in ways that parts often aren’t.

For example, Vervaeke and colleagues have a really amazing book on the zombie archetype, which represents the herd mentality of mindless consumerism. The zombie isn’t just a movie monster, but is a worldview that emerges when an entire culture’s values and vision of the good life are shaped and corrupted by the material conditions of late-stage capitalism.⁴

Through the zombie, you’re better able to understand the whirlwind of cultural, systemic, and psychological complexity that makes the zombie so narratively powerful in our culture. There’s a reason The Walking Dead became such a popular series. It spoke to so many people because it was representing something even the uneducated could understand, the lived experience of our cultural moment. By contemplating what the zombie means for us and society, we can see more deeply into ourselves and society.

That said, the trap with any mythology is that the narrative complexity, the types of characters, the struggles and triumphs are all speaking to a very specific worldview. The Walking Dead may speak to our beliefs about our cultural moment but precisely because they are born of our cultural moment. You could watch that series and walk away with a very nihilistic view of human cooperation in the face of civilizational collapse. Unless you’re able to see how a mythology speaks to you because it is dependent on a specific culture that is shaping your psychology, you’ll never be able to rewrite that mythology or create a new culture.

Grant Maxwell writes that Nietzsche’s great error was similar. He over-identified with a single archetype. Maxwell instead advocates for a sort of archetypal polytheism.⁵ A mythology must be a complex narrative that sees many worldviews being pitted against each other, allowing for battles and alliances in which new worldviews can emerge. Getting stuck within the mythology of a single archetype like the nihilistic zombie is getting stuck in a single worldview and then wondering why you continue to recreate the very problems you sought to solve.

It might be easy to say that the issue is mythology itself. Is this not why we left mythology behind in the dustbin of irrational history?

Maxwell reminds us that mythology always returns.⁵ The fact that the secularization of our society has only achieved the replacement of religion with superheroes and other fandoms, extremist political cults, and technofeudalist transhumanism should tell you that very clearly. We are living a mythology whether we want to admit it or not because we are limited human beings with a limited understanding of a vastly complex world.

No matter how well I know you, I am only ever understanding a fraction of what you truly are. I only ever know a fraction of myself. When it then comes to complex social forces, we can easily become lost in that whirlwind and find ourselves spat out with a deluded mythology that drives us to protect the planet from the antichrist by creating a totalitarian AI-surveillance state while destroying the environment. How the fuck did that happen?

Archetypal work can help us create generative simplifications that allow us to relate with the world in ways that create new mythologies that are better at helping us understand and navigate the world. We’re moved to live, create, and commune in ways that make the world a better place because we can tell ourselves better stories about where we want to go and what we need to do to get there.

At this point though, it may seem like the difference between parts and archetypes can be described horizontally, with archetypes simply being further to the “more” side of some spectrum. I don’t think that’s quite accurate, but what I’m about to say is speculative. Rather than being horizontally more, an archetype’s greater complexity is actually a measure of it being vertically above parts in the sense that it has the potential to represent an entire system or even systems of parts.

I’m going to give a concrete example in a moment, but I want to set the stage with a few ideas. We first have to get a better sense of what I mean when I say “complex”. In developmental psychology, they define complexity as the number of differentiated and integrated parts in a nested system.⁶ When we talk about vertical complexity, we mean to say that the system of parts is coordinated by a higher order parameter in which the parts are nested.⁷

Think about having 5 light switches that each control the light in a specific room. Then, you have one higher switch that can act top-down to turn all those lights on or off. Obviously, archetypes and internal family systems are far more vertically complex than this simple example. You can’t necessarily talk to a predetermined archetype and expect all internal family systems to suddenly fall into their proper place. When we get to that level of complexity, it’s not as simple as having a master light switch. The parts can also influence the function of the archetype.

Adding to that is an idea that comes from an anthology edited by Dr.’s Marc Lewis and Isabela Granic on emotional developmental complexity. They didn’t talk about parts or archetypes, but they did talk about how simple emotions and beliefs can co-emerge as complex structures that act top-down on the emotions and beliefs that make them up.⁸

Let’s finally make that all concrete. Let’s say during my childhood I learned that the emotion of shame was associated with public speaking. They get bound together. As an adult, I find myself on a stage in front of a group of friends I trust and even then, that shame re-emerges as deep anxiety I don’t fully understand. The idea is that shame and public-speaking now act together in order to shape and organize my behaviour, potentially causing me to avoid entire careers or experiences that would require public-speaking. A single experience in childhood might have become a maladaptive structure that defines the rest of my life.

In the language of IFS, that complex structure is likely a small system between an exile of maladaptive shame and a manager that causes me to avoid any situation that involves public-speaking. When I talk to either of those parts, I’m differentiating between the two parts of that maladaptive structure, the intensely painful emotion and the attempt to protect me from that pain.

In the process of communicating with these parts I may learn that either of them are far more complex than simple pain and protection, with each part having its own personality. What’s going on here is that the shame becomes an organizing principle that shapes certain thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. In other words, that differentiated part called “the exile” becomes integrated as a complex subpersonality based on how the dynamics of shame itself influence how I feel, think, and act.

If I find myself being blended with, controlled by the exile, then all the complexity that comes with the exile is in fact the result of the simple combination of shame and public-speaking defining any other emotion, belief, or action that emerges at that time. I’m seeing all the world from the perspective of the exiled shame, colouring the world and interpreting the world as the exile sees it. The same is also true for protection, seeing what the world looks like from the perspective of protection against public-speaking shame.

Notice how through dialoguing with the parts, I’ve differentiated a simple structure of shame and protection into two more integrated, complex subpersonalities with their own opinions about each other. With enough dialogue, time, and trust, I can eventually teach the exile of shame to let go of its burden and heal, and I can teach the manager to take on a new, more adaptive function. In other words, dialogue with the exile shows how it was operating as a “master-switch” for several feelings, emotions, and behaviours. With time, such dialogue can help me become more comfortable with public-speaking itself.

You can see how just with the IFS language, I can go through a process of complexification. A simple structure of public-speaking shame and protection against that shame through avoidance was differentiated into two complex subpersonalities. I then re-integrated those healed parts into a higher order structure that was far more adaptive in terms of my relation to shame and public-speaking. Yet, where does the archetype come in?

Remember that archetypes have the potential to be more complex, more autonomous, and more mythological than any individual part, even having the potential to represent an entire worldview. Where a single part might be the manifestation of the dynamics of a context-dependent emotion, such as shame in the context of public-speaking, an archetype represents the entire family dynamic of this context-dependent shame and protection against it.

Here’s a specific example from my own work with archetypes. I’ll be getting into this in a later essay, but the symbol of a warrior’s shield has come to represent my need to perform emotional labour while hiding my own emotional experience from view or even avoiding any intimacy whatsoever. To be clear, I didn’t choose this symbol. I was meditating and the symbol appeared to me. Through dialoguing with the shield, I could understand more and more of the emotional, cognitive, and behavioural dynamics that it represented and how those dynamics emerged from the experiences I’ve had in my life.

A few months later, while doing parts work related to a specific difficulty, I dialogued with two manager parts that were acting in opposition to each other. One wanted me to be a caretaker whereas the other wanted me to avoid things. Again, I didn’t choose to do this, I was just doing some parts work on a specific issue I’ve been facing in my life and these were the two parts I happened to meet. It was during the parts work that it became obvious, “oh my god this is the shield!”

That’s when I first got the insight that archetypes can sometimes be higher order structures containing entire family systems. The shield is a symbol representing the entire dynamic between the caretaker, the avoider, and the other parts of the family system, and was revealed to me through meditation literally months before I met those individual parts. While working with the parts has been helpful, working with the archetype has also been helpful for understanding the overarching dynamic.

The shield re-integrates the parts into a higher order structure, giving it the potential to act as a master-switch above the family system. Yet, again, the relation between archetypes and IFS parts are not as simple as a master light switch. Remember that I met the shield before I met the parts. While I do think the archetype may be a nested whole containing the parts, I think dialoguing with the parts can facilitate a complexification of the shield.

If you remember from my archetypes essay, I said that archetypes can facilitate a recursively differentiating integration. In other words, I have a symbol like the shield. I unintentionally differentiate the shield into a caretaking and avoider part. I dialogue with those parts, understanding them well enough to realize that they’re parts of the shield. By re-integrating them as the shield I can better understand both the parts and the archetype of the overarching system. Through doing this recursively, repeatedly, I can potentially come to a more complex understanding of my parts and the archetype.

Importantly, both parts work and archetypal work have had profound real world benefits in my life. This isn’t just funny little games you can play with your consciousness. This has led to a new community, a new romantic relationship, new friends, and multiple new projects. My life has changed in a radical way since beginning this work. I really can’t express that to you enough.

If you’re convinced at this point to begin doing your own archetypal work, then I highly recommend you read Robert Johnson’s book, “Inner Work”.⁹ There’s a lot I disagree with him on, but his approach to dreams and active imagination can be very informative. The point of my essays on mythos are to update the theory in ways I find important and to offer you examples by applying these tools to my own attempts to create a personal mythology around the creation of solarpunk.

Johnson writes that we can do archetypal work by dialoguing with the archetypes and getting them to dialogue with one another. By dialogue he means literal dialogue with ourselves as in parts work. However, this can also mean writing conversations as if you’re writing a script, writing poetry, non-fiction, enacting archetypal dialogue through dance, painting, photography, or music. The point is to bring the archetypes to life in a way that is authentic and potent for yourself.⁹

Yet, that said, Fink can leave us with something very profound that he said about the notoriously difficult to understand psychoanalyst Lacan:¹⁰

The point of archetypal work is to facilitate just this relationship with our own understanding. The archetypal dialogue of a personal mythos is meant to bring us into a relationship with the complexity that always exceeds our understanding. The goal isn’t to end the relationship with the infinite, but cultivate it throughout our lives.

Principles for Application:

1. Read Inner Work by Robert Johnson. It really is an amazing book that is incredibly actionable. The stuff on dreams can cut through the bullshit that often comes in New Age dream journals, and the stuff on active imagination can help turn your creative work into transformational work. As an example, this is what separates quotidian fantasy authors from the greats like Tolkien.

2. Choose an archetypal artistic medium, whether imagined dialogue, writing, poetry, dance, contact improv, circling, music, etc.

3. In my previous series on the Solarpunk Self, you chose some domain of interest, scan the field of your domain and begin to consider what archetypes are operative. You don’t have to choose the same domain if you don’t want to, but what heroes, villains, lovers, teachers, and other characters exist? Take stock of the relationships you’re already living and how your mind is defining those characters, which in turn determines how you believe you should relate to them.

4. Think about how you can bring those archetypes to life through your artistic medium in order to understand them more deeply.

That is the essay, so thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.

References:

1 – Schwartz, R. C. (2021). No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model. St. Martin’s Essentials / Sounds True.

2 – Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy. (n.d.). Retrieved July 24, 2026, from https://samhsa-nrepp.foundationifs.org/

3 – Mills, J., & Goodwyn, E. (2023). Archetypal Ontology: New Directions in Analytical Psychology. Routledge.

4 – Vervaeke, J., Mastropietro, C., & Miscevic, F. (2017). Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis. Open Book Publishers.

5 – Maxwell, G. (2022). Integration and Difference: Constructing a Mythical Dialectic. Routledge.

6 – Dempsey, B. G. (2025). Psyche and Symbolic Learning. Sky Meadow Press.

7 – Juarrero, A. (2023). Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence. The MIT Press.

8 – Lewis, M. D., & Granic, I. (Eds.). (2002). Emotion, Development, and Self-Organization: Dynamic Systems Approaches to Emotional Development. Cambridge University Press.

9 – Johnson, R. A. (2009). Inner Work: A Four-Step Journey to Self-Transformation, Unearthing Subconscious Strengths, and Interpreting Dreams with Jungian Psychology. HarperOne.

10 – Fink, B. (n.d.). The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton University Press.

Also available on YouTube and Spotify.

In this essay, we’ll discuss Jungian archetypes and how they offer a character, practice, and map that can make or break an emerging solarpunk mythos.

Since Jordan Peterson rose to popularity, it seems like Jungian archetypes are talked about more and more, or perhaps, that’s just the algorithmic tunnel I’ve happened to find myself down. In either case, the thing that frustrates me to no end is how archetypes have been co-opted by people with ideological commitments that justify patriarchy as the natural way of things.

King, warrior, magician, propagandist for a worldview so deeply embedded in the notion of “universal principles” that they prevent themselves from ever evolving to a new form of self and society.

It’s probably clear that this isn’t what I aim to do when I discuss Jungian archetypes. Instead, I see the archetypes as pointing to processes that, whether universal or not, are profoundly developmental. I see them as tools and approaches for our development beyond who we currently are. In other words, I think the creation of a solarpunk society can be aided by the right kinds of uses of the right kinds of definitions for what archetypes are.

The philosopher Robert M. Ellis is perhaps one of the best at cutting through the bullshit with his functional account of the archetypes.¹ By getting to their basic functions, we can better understand what the point of the archetypes really is. From there, we can then build up a theory of the archetypes that allows us to use them in beneficial ways.

That said then, Ellis writes that an archetype mobilizes our energies so that we can perform certain functions in our lives over the long term. He then defines the four archetypal functions:¹

1. The Heroic or Aspiration Function

   1. To live and develop as human beings in the long term we need the ability to make plans and see them through to fulfill goals. An archetype performs the Heroic function when it mobilizes our energies toward those goals over the long term.

   2. I’d problematize the idea of “hero” as the only form of aspiration. We aim at a certain character that emerges from the pursuit and overcoming of goals. While “Heroic” plays the part well enough, I’d suggest looking for other ways of conceptualizing what it means to aspire other than the “Hero”, but also, to disrupt and redefine what it means to be a “Hero”.

2. The Shadow Function

   1. We need to be able to identify, and then avoid or eliminate long-term threats. An archetype performs the Shadow function when it, accurately or inaccurately, identifies threats.

3. The Anima/Animus Function

   1. We need to be able to develop relationships with those who are different from us, but who may have complementary qualities. When we’re constrained by some narrow perspective, we want to look for complementary qualities to break us out of that over-specialization. An archetype performs the Anima/Animus function when it attracts us to something we lack and this need not be limited to romantic or sexual attraction.

4. The Infinity Function

   1. Ellis refers to this as the God Function, but I prefer Infinity function because I personally don’t believe in God and I think the word is often far too loaded. This is probably the hardest to wrap your mind around, but the general idea is that we need to be able to maintain a vision of the possibilities for our own individual long-term development and that of our communities, keeping ideals in mind for how things could be as well as how they are. When this function works well it is about opening ourselves to real potentials that exist beyond us. It’s about self-transcendence, breaking out of and evolving beyond the box we’ve placed ourselves in and is thus about having a relationship with the infinite, with that which we can never really grasp.

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To give an example of an archetypal function, when I am inspired by someone to pursue some goal, then they’re a Heroic archetype for me because of what function they motivate me to perform. That can be a more conventional hero like Superman or Arnold Schwarzenegger, or it can be a smaller-world hero like Margaret who volunteers every Saturday. Hearing about them and learning about them inspires us to be like them by pursuing the same goals in the same ways. All are heroes that inspire us to pursue certain ends, yet Arnie and Margaret both speak to very different worldviews.

This is one of the most important points to understand about the archetypes. An archetype is not simply a singular figure or character from myth, movie, or culture at large. An archetype is the representative of an entire worldview and so in that, they are in fact often enough combinations of each of the functions.

Arnold Schwarzenegger as a Hero is a representative of the entire worldview that made the 80s action movie possible. He doesn’t only set the goals and the methods for pursuing them, but also the enemies, the obstacles, and the methods for overcoming them. He defines what it means to be the ideal man and so defines also what the ideal woman is, which is the kind of woman such a man would pursue and that would want to be pursued by such a man. Even the language of “romantic pursuer/pursued” is shaped by Arnie himself. By merely inspiring you to take action and hit the gym he is standing for all of that and far more.

This is why the Infinity function is so important. Being able to see beyond Arnie to honour the heroism of Margaret may require an entirely different worldview. If your commitment to Arnold is shaped by your belief in a specific form of love, family, and career, then that’s a pretty radical commitment to break.

Yet, by nature of being heroes that inspire us to pursue goals, we’re often forced into a tradeoff between pursuing goals well enough to accomplish them and completely redefining what our goals should be, how we should pursue them, and all else that is required in the development of a new worldview.

In other words, we can’t possibly accomplish anything if we’re constantly updating our worldview. As such, sometimes a Heroic, Shadow, or any other archetype’s simplicity is a necessity. Ironically, this truth can help us understand more deeply the complexity that the archetypes can hold.

But firstly, let’s summarize what we’ve said so far. We’ve challenged the idea that archetypes are universal principles that we must conform to. They are instead better defined as archetypal functions, meaning that they mobilize our energies so that we can perform certain functions within our lives. However, the archetypes themselves are not simply the functions that we perform given how they influence us. They are instead the entire shape that they come in, which, beyond the simple function, define how that function fits us within the territory we find ourselves.

Okay, let’s put that a bit more simply by beginning again with a definition of the archetypes rather than archetypal functions.

At the most basic level, an archetype itself is a symbol that acts as a representation or map of several internal and external factors. Internally, they can include beliefs, perspectives, feelings within your body, the emotional categories you use to understand those feelings, potentially the whole gamut of things, categories, and processes that exist within you. Externally, the same is true. They include sociological, economic, political, and all other factors that we could think about in regards to the external world.²

An archetype isn’t necessarily ALL of those things, but could include any combination of them. Again, if I view Arnold Schwarzenegger as a hero, then I am going to pursue certain economic goals that are very different from viewing Margaret as a hero. That means that Arnie is a representative and map of an entire economic system, which means he is also a map of an entire political party given how those economic goals influence my politics. People who idolize Arnie are likely going to be capitalist Republicans (although that may not be true since the rise of MAGA), but people who idolize Margaret are more likely to be Leftists who begrudgingly vote Democrat.

What all of that also means is that an archetype is always overflowing with what it intends to represent. In fact, the overwhelming complexity of all that an archetype could represent is kind of the point of the archetype. Think of it like a generative simplification. By simplifying all that complexity into the form of a symbol, image, or person of some kind such as Arnie or Margaret, the archetype becomes more generative or productive. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

But generative of what exactly? And how?

Through the archetype, we are able to integrate the factors they represent in order to see more deeply into them. Integration means that rather than there being all these disparate, seemingly disconnected factors, I am able to see them as one interconnected whole through the symbol.^3,4 Again, my idolization of Arnie that drove me into the gym to get muscular also contributed to my economics and politics. By understanding Arnie as an archetype, I am better able to see how fitness, economics, and politics were connected through my pursuit of the goals he represented.

What’s more, think about what happens when I consciously hold all of these factors together through contemplation of the symbol and its relations to all that I now believe that it represents. All of the cognitive machinery that typically acts in a less coordinated fashion is now brought to bear in the attempt to integrate the factors into a unified understanding.^5,6

By seeing how Arnie is shaping my physical health, my economics, and politics, by considering the influences between those factors, I can get a better understanding of those factors and how they influence each other.

In other words, the archetype acts as a sort of focusing lens for the dynamic coupling of the cognitive machinery used in my understanding of myself, the world, and how they relate with one another. I can see not only that all these factors are connected, but how they are connected, which allows me to understand the complex causal web more deeply. This in turn allows me to see into myself as both an effect of that web of factors, but also as the knower who is modeling that complex web of factors.

Remember that however much I am trying to track real features of myself and the world, that tracking is itself a map that I am creating within myself. The archetype can thus be thought of as a type of map of a territory. That territory consists of the various factors. By collecting them all in the form of the archetypal map, I am, hopefully, given a more differentiated and integrated model in which I can see the complex causal web connecting the factors.

Then, when I differentiate the various factors again, I do so in a way that has been influenced by what happened to them during the previous integration. Now that I see how much Arnie was affecting my fitness, economics, and politics, I can begin to differentiate myself from Arnie’s unspoken worldview without necessarily losing all that I’ve learned from him.

Another example. Once I understand my emotions as not just random feelings, but as feelings that emerged out of their relation to the other factors of the map, I am able to understand those as emotions in a far more conceptually rich way. I see that my feelings of shame for not living up to Arnie’s ideal were not because I am intrinsically shameful, but because I was raised in a culture that valorized certain modes of being because of certain economic pressures. Failing to live up to that ideal makes me feel ashamed because my understanding of that archetype has taught me that shame is meant to drive me to try harder to conform to that ideal.

Once I know this, I am now better able to deal with that shame when it arises. I can instead choose to aspire to better ideals that are more in alignment with the kind of person I want to be. I’m no longer pulled so strongly by what my culture expects of me simply because of economic pressures I’ve realized I don’t personally care about.

The focusing power of the archetypal map helped me understand the reasons for my feelings better, which helped me deal with the specific feeling better the next time it arose. I’m now able to see more deeply into myself in regards to how that feeling manifests within me, how it influences me, and so make better decisions. The integration of the different factors helped me differentiate them in a beneficial manner.

Once I can understand each differentiated factor better, think about what that means when I re-integrate them into another archetypal map.

This new map may be very similar, but also different given how the previous cycle of differentiation and integration affected it. I may still look up to Arnie, but my understanding of him is far more complex than it was before, not least in my idolization evolving into a more tame respect.

This can continue as repeated cycles where a recursively differentiating integration opens me reciprocally with the world through the archetype.⁴ Put simply, the deeper I see into the world through the archetypal map, the more deeply I am able to see into myself. This reciprocal oscillation allows me to see deeper into and through the archetype into the territory it maps, which allows me to see more deeply into myself.

On top of that, as a map of the territory, an archetype is also a map through the territory, and even further, it can be a map to a newer, better map. Given that these better and better maps are about understanding myself and the world so as to better mobilize my energies to perform certain functions over the long term, that means they are also maps for creating better (or worse) territories.

In other words, as a Heroic map of the world, Arnie is motivating me to pursue goals that help me develop into a certain kind of person that can create real, lasting changes in my life and in the lives of others. What world is being created when ten thousand people try to become Arnie vs. try to become Margaret?

To try to put that together, an archetype is a recursively differentiating integration where creating a map opens me up to see more of myself and the world so that I can create a better map, which can open me up to a self and world beyond the territory that the archetype was initially mapping.

An archetypal map is thus not just a beautiful picture, but a map for becoming more causally powerful in the world. The symbol itself helped me see what I was currently living by and aspiring to, even though I wasn’t necessarily aware of it. Who knew that by trying to be like Arnie I was creating a world in which being like Arnie could even bring success? Now however, I can more consciously aspire to something different that can bring about a different, and hopefully better world.

However, understand that an archetypal map is not just created willy-nilly by bringing disparate factors together, but was already functioning without me realizing it. As the Jungian psychologist Robert Johnson discusses, we’re often working with real archetypes and inner mythologies whether we know it and want it, or not.⁷ If I was already inspired by Arnie, Margaret, or any other archetype, I was already using that map. If I bring attention to the influences in my life and try to create an archetypal map, I am identifying the influences that are already in my life.

The point I’m trying to make then, is that when I consider an archetype and its functions, putting it together in the form of an archetypal map, such a map sometimes helps me better see real relations between all the factors influencing my worldview.

Let’s think of another example. To remind you, if the archetype is a Heroic archetype, I am called to aspire toward it in order to achieve certain goals. We already understand that well enough.

However, let’s say it’s a Shadow archetype. That means that it defines those aspects of myself or the world that I ought to reject or attack. By identifying a Shadow archetype, I can better understand what is being rejected, how it is being rejected, and, importantly, why it is being rejected. Now I can see if I was labelling something a threat when it wasn’t really a threat, or was a real threat that I was dealing with in a way that made the threat even more threatening. I can now find a better way of relating to that aspect than I was because I took the time to articulate the map that was already guiding me.

Yet, what happens if an archetypal map has both Heroic and Shadow aspects?

This is the promise and danger of the archetypes. Remember that our first conception of an archetype helps us learn that this was the map we were already using to navigate the complex of factors it represents. If we bring together that archetypal map we are better able to understand how the factors are connected, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we really see the real relations nor does it mean that we’re automatically able to use that map wisely. We could be wrong on both accounts.

For example, we may bring together a map that contains both Heroic and Shadow aspects, but believe it is primarily Heroic. This means as we reciprocally open through the recursively differentiating integrations of the map, we are doing so in a way that augments the unresolved Shadow aspects of the Hero we aspire to be. The more we aspire the more we reject those facets of our self and the world that we are perhaps most called to relate to better.

The overarching structure of the archetypal map also influences the way in which I can integrate the related factors. A Chinese globe will be very different from the globes made in a country that recognizes Tibet. The American globe was likely very different from the British globe during the American revolution. A Hero in the shape of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robin Hood, and King Richard I will make for a very different kind of aspiration, as will an altogether different archetypal map for aspiration than the Heroic.¹

That’s precisely why the factors that an archetype integrates matter for the shape of the archetype itself and vice versa. My emotions mapping into cultural and economic factors that produced shame for not becoming the Heroic Muscular Entrepreneur are all real relations. I aspired to be that definition of a Hero because of that shame, because of those cultural expectations, and because of those economic pressures. Even though I wasn’t fully conscious that my engagement with the world was defined by the archetypal map of the Heroic Muscular Entrepreneur, it acted almost like an autonomous agent, pushing me and pulling me toward ends that were intimately bound to and made up by these relevant factors.²

In fact, we can better understand the archetypes by dialoguing with them as if they were fully autonomous agents. This is one of the practices we can use to get all of that cognitive machinery working together.

Let’s say I’ve fully articulated an archetypal mapping, connecting the image and ideals of Arnie with the economic and political games he inspires me to play, and the emotions that are associated with all of that and how they all drive me to do certain things and create a certain lifestyle.

When I sit down to talk to a visualization of that archetype, imagining what it would say and how it would react, I am modelling all the factors I am trying to keep in mind. In some cases this can be felt like a real conversation with another person. Such experiences are also found in Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy and I can speak from personal experience how powerful both archetypal dialogue and IFS can be.⁸

Sometimes they are so powerful that they quite literally force themselves upon us.² When we’re living from an archetype that is maladaptive and dysfunctional, we experience it as a rage, depression, addictive acting out, or a whole range of other behaviours that can cause horrible damage to ourselves and others. Whether or not we seek to change those behaviours depends on the archetype that lives within us and all the various factors that make it up. That can lead us to seek help…or lead us to justify our rage as righteous fury on the unbelievers.

Again, think about how all of that is going to look if my Heroic archetype is Arnold Schwarzenegger, Volunteering Margaret, or President Trump. Think about what conversations I could have with each of those archetypes when I more deeply understand all that they represent. Think about what might happen to me if I spoke to each of those archetypes. What might I realize about myself, about my ideals, and about actual and possible worlds when I speak to them or get them to speak to each other?

The purpose of identifying and working with the archetypes is to integrate all these different factors so that we can understand them better and to transcend the limitations of the archetype itself toward a new higher, wider, and more inclusive archetypal map. This archetype will always be overflown by the complexity it seeks to represent, but this can help us grow to be overflown even just a little less. This can of course never be a definite growth to goodness nor to the supreme accuracy of any map we create.⁹ However, we can develop more accurate maps that can guide us toward better ethical choices that create more ethical worlds.

Of course, no map is ever complete, and so there cannot be any single map or archetype. Archetypal maps are most powerful when we converse with several and when we include other people in those conversations with their own archetypal maps. And, as the cognitive scientist Vervaeke has said, there is no single panacea practice, which is why we need an ecology of practices.¹⁰

However, now you understand what archetypes are, what functions they perform, and how they can be used for your own development.

Key Orienting Ideas:

1. An archetype can perform a Heroic, Shadow, Anima/Animus, or Infinity function

2. An archetype is an image, symbol, or fictional or non-fictional person or entity

3. An archetype is a representation of a complex of internal and external factors

4. An archetype is always overflowing with what it intends to represent

5. An archetype acts as a focusing lens, bringing together disparate cognitive machinery in a coordinated attempt to understand what the archetype represents

6. A map is only ever a map, it is never the territory of factors it seeks to map

7. The symbol of the archetype itself influences how we can understand the different factors it represents and vice versa

8. We can dialogue with the archetypal image in order to understand it better

9. Archetypes can often be transformed as we find new ways to represent the complex terrain as we understand it better

10. There is no guarantee that we will successfully understand what it represents or that this process will lead us toward goodness

That is the essay, so thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.

References:

1 – Ellis, R. M. (2022). Archetypes in Religion and Beyond: A Practical Theory of Human Integration and Inspiration. Equinox Publishing.

2 – Mills, J., & Goodwyn, E. (2023). Archetypal Ontology: New Directions in Analytical Psychology. Routledge.

3 – Dempsey, B. G. (2025). Psyche and Symbolic Learning. Sky Meadow Press.

4 – Maxwell, G. (2022). Integration and Difference: Constructing a Mythical Dialectic. Routledge.

5 – John Vervaeke’s Lectern. (2019a, September 6). Ep. 34 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Sacredness: Horror, Music, and the Symbol [Video recording].

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoqibFwvQJ4

6 – John Vervaeke’s Lectern. (2019b, September 13). Ep. 35—Awakening from the Meaning Crisis—The Symbol, Sacredness, and the Sacred [Video recording].

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpivf1SoEdc

7 – Johnson, R. A. (2009). Inner Work: A Four-Step Journey to Self-Transformation, Unearthing Subconscious Strengths, and Interpreting Dreams with Jungian Psychology. HarperOne.

8 – Schwartz, R. C. (2021). No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model. St. Martin’s Essentials / Sounds True.

9 – Walsh, R., & Wilber, K. (2010). Integral Theory in Action: Applied, Theoretical, and Constructive Perspectives on the AQAL Model (S. Esbjörn-Hargens, Ed.). SUNY Press.

10 – After Socrates. (n.d.). YouTube. Retrieved February 3, 2026, from http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuj6q5NP_fXjBzUT1p_qYSCC

Also available on YouTube and Spotify.

In creating a solarpunk society, it may seem obvious that we require a solarpunk worldview. Yet, what exactly do we mean by worldview?

Koltko-Rivera defines worldview as, “sets of beliefs and assumptions,” but he advises us to “think of a worldview not as a […] description of reality, but as a lens through which one reads reality.”¹

In other words, a worldview shapes and organizes our perception, interpretations, and predictions about what we experience.

If something happens to us, our worldview determines how we understand that event. Before we even begin to consider how to respond, our worldview has already cut-off entire worlds of possible response given the understanding we come to. When we actually begin to respond, our worldview again determines which responses we can even begin to consider as legitimate. By the time we finally respond, we’re left with a tiny fraction of the responses that could have been possible. When that response then has real consequences in the world that we must interpret and understand, we are again caught behind the lens of our worldview.

It seems then that we ought to understand very deeply what our worldview actually entails. Unfortunately, as you can likely imagine, our understanding of our worldview is itself defined by our worldview. It might be easy to be thrust into a terrified nihilism because of that realization, feeling ourselves trapped within a worldview that closes any possibility of ever transcending it. When we look to those who have such horrifying worldviews that are destroying the planet, it would be all the easier to become all the more horrified that they have no hope of ever changing.

Fortunately, it’s not so hopeless. The simple fact is that our worldviews are not static, crystallized prisms imprisoning us in our current identity. They are after-all, not actually “lenses” like the glasses you may now feel on your face. They are instead fluid processes constantly updating and shifting as they’re confronted with the real world.^2,3 They’re lenses that change as they filter the world they offer to us.

Given the hope for updating our worldviews, we are again called to actually reflect on what our worldview is and what it ought to be. Where do we actually begin?

Taves, Asprem, and Ihm have created a worldview model consisting of several “big philosophical questions” which can help us begin offering our own answers.⁴ Together, those answers constitute our worldview. Once we have those answers, we can also begin asking new questions in order to come up with new answers that actually align with the kind of worldview we seek to have. Here are the 5 big philosophical questions:⁴

1. Ontology – or map of reality, what exists and how does it behave?

2. Epistemology – how do we know what we know?

3. Axiology – what do we value?

4. Praxeology – what should we do? What actions should we take?

5. Cosmology – where do we come from and where are we going?

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If we have an ontology in which angels, demons, and hell are “real”, then that is going to inform all other aspects of our worldview. If someone confronts us with knowledge about how the world “really” works, then our epistemology is going to be incredibly constrained. No matter what evidence they might offer us about some other “reality”, we cannot believe them because we know angels and demons exist, even though we may not have any evidence whatsoever.

When it comes to creating a solarpunk society then, what happens if we believe that human beings exist as homo entrepreneurialus? This is my name for Wendy Brown’s entrepreneurial self, the idea that evolution has created human beings as innately capitalist.⁵ This is a very specific ontological statement about what humans are and it constrains quite severely what we could value, what we can do in the world, and thus, what we can envision for our future. From that perspective, if solarpunk is fundamentally post-capitalist, then it amounts to a complete waste of time.

As someone who’s dedicated himself to the co-creation of solarpunk, you can see how this creates a pretty significant problem for me. To solve that problem then, I am beginning a new era for this Substack. My reading and writing will now be organized around the articulation of a solarpunk worldview. This isn’t something I aim to do myself, but is instead an invitation for you to be a fellow creator of this emerging worldview.

As Grant Maxwell writes, this is because:⁶

In other words, given that our world is now a truly global world, one that includes numerous cultures that consist of an immense array of interpenetrating subcultures, a solarpunk worldview has a significant challenge. Again, rather than being a static framework or description of the reality we seek to create, a solarpunk worldview is a process that allows us to interact with ourselves, our world, and with each other in ways that allow us to collaborate toward solarpunk rather than compete into the fragmented and polarized chaos we seem to be headed toward.

Collaboration must also not mean erasure of diversity because, importantly, diversity is the lifeblood of progress. Here I define progress as post-capitalist, meaning that a world that becomes more capitalist, or even worse, more technofeudal, is regression.⁷ This is for the simple reason that any economic system that depends on infinite growth in a finite world is doomed to self-termination.1 Put more simply, the economy can’t grow indefinitely forever.

Solarpunk as a vision of progress is thus not a colonialist enterprise that seeks to erase all diversity, but is a truly global project that emerges from the collaborative dialogue between the diverse cultures that share this planet.

Maxwell writes further about integrating visions:⁶

A solarpunk worldview exists on the horizon of possibility, a promise of a future integration that can only exist when we see a final integration as an unreachable and undesirable goal. This means that the fruit of any collaborative dialogue is the opportunity for further dialogue, for further challenge, disagreement, and co-creation. Such a process is important because no worldview can ever be the final say. The worldview questions above are, quite clearly, not answers. Even though a question invites an answer, the fact of the matter is that we must hold onto the question.

Complexity theorist Alicia Juarrero explains clearly why this is the case in her discussion of hermeneutics, or our theory and method of interpretation:⁸

That is to say, any worldview worth its salt must be able to offer a theory of the one who has that worldview. This is obvious when we consider the worldviews held by an adult, a child, or a dog. A dog’s worldview may seem a bit ridiculous, but Taves and colleagues state explicitly that the first 4 questions can be answered, however implicitly, by non-human animals.⁴ As such, we must take into account theories of psychological development that articulate just precisely how cognition differs between an adult, a child, and a dog. Such theories of development can show us how we can get better at making better worldviews.

Yet, there’s also an important distinction that I think Taves and colleagues gloss over. This essay is already longer than I had originally planned and so I want to be clear that this is, ironically, a glossing over of a more complex topic we’ll discuss in the future.

When we look at “cosmology” we see that it is in fact two questions, “where have we come from and where are we going?”

Where we come from is quite clearly our history. A solarpunk future requires a solarpunk understanding of its past. For example, are we truly a hierarchical species that is innately patriarchal, as the Red Pill manosphere seems to believe? Quite clearly, not exactly.^9,10 Yet, we have to articulate clearly what our history actually entails.

When it comes to our future, I want to state that this is better conceived as a mythos. This may seem odd. Firstly because myths are supposed to be falsehoods. Secondly because myths include an understanding of our past.

On that first point, a myth is not merely a falsehood. It can also be an orienting story. A mythos includes a narrative and praxis that orients us to ourselves and our world in ways that adapt us to the challenges we face. We can see then that a mythos acts as a way to connect our history to our praxeology into our future. In other words, given where we come from, what must we do in order to make our story about the future a reality?

Our praxis consists of specific practices, yes, but also rituals and festivals that bring our narrative to life and that bring us as characters within that narrative to life. When world, narrative, character, and praxis are aligned, we recreate that alignment through our engagement in that mythos.

Whether we’re aware of it or not, we are already characters bound within a narrative with practices, rituals, and festivals that come with it. National anthems, holidays, statues of celebrated people, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of it all, are all part of the mythos we currently live, and they are creating us as people with certain goals, hopes, and fears.

If we unconsciously practice certain rituals that align us to a mythos that actualizes a horrifying future, then we cannot be surprised when that’s the kind of future that becomes a reality. Peter Thiel imagines a future that makes him hesitate when asked if humans are a part of that future. Such a future is likely to amplify income inequality before creating a climate catastrophe that destroys us all.

We can thus see that our survival, let alone our thriving, depends on us having a mythos that is not only inspiring, optimistic, and beautiful, but one that can actually come into reality.

With all of that being said, we have to understand a mythos as a story that can be understood. That is to say, a mythos isn’t the entire articulation of a worldview, but is the worldview filtered into a narrative. As such, a worldview contains a mythos that articulates the worldview in a form that can be understood and learned from by those that wish to have that worldview.

To be more clear then, when I say mythos is a narrative I don’t mean that it’s a work of fiction, but rather that it is a story about our future in the same way that saying we want an AI to liberate us from wage labour is a story about our future.

Moving forward then, I will categorize all of my essays into the 6 worldview questions. Below you can find 6 headings with all of my essays categorized into the 6 worldview questions. Additionally, each category will also have subcategories.

I’m doing this because while writing my Solarpunk Self series I ran into the problem that the longer the series became, the more investment you the reader were forced to make. While my essays can be categorized, I also want each one to be as standalone as possible. Rather than write long series, I want you to be able to jump in at any point. However, because many essays will follow a similar theme, I want to create a space where you can go to see how they connect. This will make the most sense when you see the categories themselves, so I won’t say more.

Suffice it say that I want my essays to be digestible for you the reader, but I also want to offer you clear connections so that you can understand the whole picture if you desire.

That is the essay, so thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.

Ontology

• Who Counts As Human? - Preliminaries to a Post-Human Solarpunk Ontology

• Are Chimps Less Worthy of Moral Concern? - Complexifying Our Way to a Post-Human Solarpunk Ontology

• The Ethical Weight of Complexification - A Post-Human Solarpunk Light on Evolution’s Fascist Shadow

Epistemology

Axiology

Praxeology

• Jungian Archetypes for a Solarpunk Culture

• Jungian Archetypes vs. Internal Family Systems

• How Technofeudalist Capitalism Shapes Your Desire

History

• Why Can’t the West Be Egalitarian? - A Solarpunk History of Humanity’s Origins

• The Origin of Technofeudal Patriarch - A Solarpunk History of Hierarchy’s Birth

Mythos

References:

1 – Koltko-Rivera, M. E. (2004). The Psychology of Worldviews. Review of General Psychology, 8(1), 3–58. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.8.1.3

2 – Dempsey, B. G. (n.d.). Psyche and Symbolic Learning. Sky Meadow Press.

3 – Storm, J. A. J. (2021). Metamodernism: The Future of Theory. University of Chicago Press.

4 – Taves, A. (2020). From religious studies to worldview studies. Religion, 50(1), 137–147. https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2019.1681124

5 – Brown, W. (2017). Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Zone Books.

6 – Maxwell, G. (2022). Integration and Difference: Constructing a Mythical Dialectic. Routledge.

7 – Varoufakis, Y. (2024). Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Melville House.

8 – Juarrero, A. (2002). Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System. Bradford Books.

9 – Boehm, C. (2001). Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Harvard University Press.

10 – Power, C. (n.d.). Gender egalitarianism made us human: A response to David Graeber & David Wengrow’s “How to change the course of human history.” LibCom. Retrieved June 30, 2026, from https://libcom.org/article/gender-egalitarianism-made-us-human-response-david-graeber-david-wengrows-how-change-course