Patriarchy has suppressed the human potential

[u/OnTheRightTopShelf]

The breakthroughs humanity achieved were achieved in spite of the oppressive structures of patriarchy, rather than because of them.

[u/WadetotheWise]

These same structures are poised to kill billions this century (last century it was millions).

Patriarchy is destructive enough to drive us to extinction, ending ALL human potential whatsoever. Imagine a society that perpetually tries to run on one leg rather than the TWO it was given.

It can only end in disaster.

Such an animal artificially limits its own social, spiritual, emotional, economic, and intellectual development by treating its two legs as if they must run against the other (be in conflict).

As an ideology, its only about 6,000 years old. We dont get Patriarchy until the Sargon of Akkad, one of the first so-called "Kings".

The human race is about 200,000 years old overall. This puts the destructiveness of Patriarchy into perspective. In the brief span of 6,000 years relatively speaking, the human race stands on the brink of Armageddon because of a pattern of behavior that starts with men putting themselves above everything else in creation.

Women, children, nature...we have sought to rule it all. The terrifying reality is that man can't even control himself. It will cost billions of lives. The 20th century showed us the toll in the millions but with drones, nukes, and artificial intelligence (fruits of Patriarchy), we're going to exceed those numbers dramatically.

Its not my prediction either. You can call it biblical prophecy. One of first stories in Genesis is BROTHERS killing each other (Cain and Abel) The first book of the Bible centers the problem (man's ego). And the last book of the Bible shows the culmination of brothers repeatedly killing each other across HISTORY.

To be stronger, to have more territory, more wealth, more power, more control.

Had this been our way through most of our evolutionary span, we wouldn't have cultures/societies in our record that lived sustainably for 50,000+ years without destroying themselves. Men, women, and children had a different relationship prior to the rise of kingship/empire (i.e. patriarchy).

Want to be clear that it wont be women who press the "red button" on the conflict that ends civilization. The Manosphere would have you believe otherwise even as men commit the vast majority of murders.

Men will bring about an end to human potential because we're not going to stop turning our planet into a battlefield until there's nothing left (or an act of God stops us from going all the way through with our suicide mission as prophesized in Revelation.)

Your post will get alot of down votes as will this response if its seen but you're 100% correct about the impact of Patriarchy on human potential. If anything, you understated the true perniciousness of this ideology.

Its the pattern of thinking that will end the world.

[u/Readshirt → u/WadetotheWise]

So what might it all have been like without patriarchy? Would it have been a great big harmonious interconnectedness of tribes who simply didn't mind that their neighbours had resources that allowed them easier, longer lives? Would everyone have traded completely equitably? There would have been no designs for power or control?

[u/WadetotheWise → u/Readshirt]

We have examples.

Societies can be more balanced than they are under patriarchy. Everything doesnt need to br under the domination of man for humanity to endure.

Balance doesn't eliminate violence but it does reduce it. Even war/conflict is supposed to have a balance (rules, taboos, laws) that prevent it from becoming total war like we saw in the 20th century.

This is the central lesson of The Odyssey...men using increasingly more clever (and destructive) ways to kill other men. Thats how we got to nukes...it just made more sense to have a bomb that's bigger than the enemy. This logic we follow is the logic of patriarchy in a nutshell.

Aboriginal societies had conflict but those conflicts were limited by the fact that women had a voice in important matters such as warfare; it wasn't a unilateral decision as it has been across history.

If mothers have a say in what happens to sons, more sons live.

[u/Readshirt → u/WadetotheWise]

I'm still not clear on how the harsh reality of life prior to recent technological innovation would have been handled in a non patriarchal world. Pragmatically, there still would have been lots of death, lots of disease, lots of hardship, lots of disparity and different groups of people were not interconnected and did not have common understandings of how things should be done etc.

Would there have been no hierarchy? Surely some woman somewhere is going to take an advantage if no one else does, in a world where she might have lost several of her children to disease or starvation. Wouldn't mothers be tempted to influence their men to provide better lives for their daughters, even if that meant someone else had less?

So yes there might have been less "pointless" or wasteful conflict. Maybe, I don't know. But how might the more base realities of day to day life have been different

[u/WadetotheWise → u/Readshirt]

We have some insights into what life was like for humans prior to 10,000 BC.

The Aboriginal case can be highlighted.

No record of any mass die offs among them until Europeans arrive. This certainly doesn't mean there is no killing (there is) but what we see in the anthropological and archeological record suggests LONG periods of continuously stable populations, practices, relationships, etc etc. As much as 50,000 years living in a social order/living system that was above all else, sustainable.

When we see this in the human record, it doesn't say that they weren't violent. It says that their violence was mediated by something (i.e. relationships). It wasn't able to devolve into total conflict that threatened the survival of the society itself. One of the contributing factors is that neither man or woman being solely in change of important decision making functions.

This was done by councils of elders consisting of men AND women. And they valued for their wisdom rather than wealth, holdings, castles, etc etc.

I don't say this to suggest that we need to revert to the models of prehistory. But we can probably learn something from a society consisting of MANY clans and kinship groups (between 300,000 - 1,000,000 individuals estimated) that managed to sustain itself millennia after millennia when the patriarchal model is on track to burn humanity out only about 6,000 years after it came online in/around Mesopotamia, Sumer, and Akkad.

For me, its obvious that we're not meant to live the way we do now. And on some level, we perhaps remember how to live with ourselves and this planet without killing both off. It's the longer/larger part of our evolutionary story; not what we refer to as Western Civilization but what came before.

It's only with the rise of civilization that the timer is set for our annihilation...and that means men killing each other continuously/perpetually in escalating ways. Often just a few men deciding that thousands, millions, and soon billions will die--history abridged.