Gazing out of the Abyss #2: The culture war
This talk is ostensibly about the culture war that is, to a greater or lesser extent, occupying all our minds right now. But I don’t want to get lost in the political trenches. Instead, I’d like to shift the horizontal axis to a vertical one and see what lies underneath.
We can’t talk about the culture war without talking about feminism, and we can’t talk about feminism without Carl Jung. Perhaps, in talking about the latter, we can shed some light on the former—or at least bring in a parallax view. That may sound like a daring endeavor, but let’s go for it and try to weave politics, psychology, and what we might call deep sociology together.
C.G. Jung had an idea about the development of the self that centered around the integration of shadow, persona, and the opposites of animus and anima. I presume readers of this piece are more or less familiar with what Jung called individuation. I’ll just point out that any development can only happen by way of crisis—moments when the self is broken open and we move toward a more unified being, automatically showing more gratitude, love, patience, and humility. Or, as I would call it: a more unified appearance of will—but that is another topic.
In any case, here is our human conundrum: we can’t stay the same. Nature, culture, and the autopoietic momentum of psyche itself force us to change, adapt, rethink, and transform. Countless books have been written about this.
One of the more prominent ones was Joseph Campbell’s book about the hero’s journey and the monomyth. In literature and theory, it centered on the archetypal hero who had to go through different stages and tribulations, descend into the underworld (which might appear as the whale’s belly in Pinocchio), and come back to society to offer something he had found within himself. It is a story of becoming whole, of integration. The Neo we encounter at the beginning of The Matrix—the aimless hacker-slacker—went through a full 360 to arrive at his full self at the end.
(In the second and third parts of the Matrix—which were cinematically underwhelming but thematically more interesting—Neo underwent a second transition: from the full self to the no-self, which belongs to the domain of the world’s true religions.)
This journey has been ingrained in the story of becoming a man at least since Homer’s Iliad. It is the story of man’s becoming. Traditionally, or archetypically, men were always about becoming, while, conversely, women were about being. He is culture; she is nature. The death on the cross, the fight with the dragon, the enlightenment under the Bodhi tree—these were archetypically the struggles of men.
As any man can confirm, this struggle is thrust upon us from childhood. It is a struggle that few women have a firm grasp on, or even the slightest understanding of. It is the struggle of facing the world without a safety net, a struggle that becomes ever more complex the more we learn to tame the dragon in order to confront the next bigger one. Because that is what becoming means: by overcoming the challenges the world poses to us, we must shed that which is untrue, unauthentic, or childish. The story of man’s becoming is a story of becoming self-reliant, self-responsible, self-disciplined, self-accountable. And women cannot fathom men’s struggle in the same way that men cannot truly fathom what it means for a women to create life.
Women, being nature, were traditionally not exposed to these kinds of cultural challenges to the hierarchical structured glass ceiling that men have always operated it. Every man knows from the get-go who is over im, and under him in the pyramidal structures world. This is the worksplace, and this is why men frown upon safe-spaces: Because they deny the ecology and crisis of growth that only happen outside of the safe spaces.
Womens challenges centered for the longest time in humanity on being nature itself—motherhood and family. The implicit treaty between men and women up until modernity was that men protected women not only for the sake of motherhood, but also by shielding them from the world, from the transformations men are forced to endure by encountering it without a safety net.
That very archetypal equation—that man existence means becoming and woman existence means being—changed with modernity: with industrialism, capitalism, and most importantly, feminism. And it is no secret that these things appeared historically more or less at the same time.
The tobacco industry tapped into women’s liberation by riding on the “skirttails” of the suffrage movement. In 1929, the American Tobacco Company organized a group of women to march—reminiscent of suffrage marches—down Fifth Avenue in New York City for the Easter Parade, holding cigarettes. The cigarettes were referred to as “torches of freedom,” transforming the public’s perception of smoking as a social taboo for women.
Nothing was the same afterward. As many observed, feminism was a way for capitalism to extend the workforce. But from another perspective, feminism was about the craving of the woman’s self to undergo transformations similar to those men had, enforced not by nature and childbirth, but by culture.
Let me explain.
Feminism, at least in its inception, was never primarily about women liberating themselves from the shackles and oppression of men and patriarchy. It was always an expression of the more implicit desire to grow whole—not to be unburdened by society’s expectations of how this growth should look. It was about creating societal structures through which the woman’s self could transform through crisis. It was the urge of the woman’s self toward crisis, to learn to be self-reliant and to face the cultural world – which is the world of work, art, technology, and religion (or, in her words: spirituality) without a safety net. A woman must go through these changes to become a fully embodied human being and leave her childish nature behind. That means moving from being self-centered, narcissistic, moody, egotistical, and scheming to becoming a person of considerable wisdom and grace. That means confront the cultural world without being shielded by the man.
Ironically, “tradwife” movements—or even cynical commentators like #homemath—try to restore structures that run contrary to the urge to be exposed to cultures harshness. It’s no wonder that an increasing number of women on TikTok and Instagram complain about these realities. Yet this is exactly what the female self needs in order to grow and transform. To become her own shield-maiden – a topic not surprisingly used increasingly in modern storytelling (that intends to break with old archetypal stories)
In the same way her spirituality is not a real transformative religion yet. Her spirituality, which men were trained for for millienia in caves and deserts, is still in its infancy, as a look into the broad supply for spiritual seminars and festivals for women reveal that center around safety, sharing, and empathy and sensitivity. Real spirituality is something else entirely.
So, at its most fundamental core, feminism is the social movement that exposes the woman’s self to the harshness of culture and the world. The emphasis here lies on culture. Feminism enabled women to enter the struggle of culture.
Viewed from that lens, it becomes clear why its natural twin became transgenderism—which the ostensible male drive to understand what being female actually means. (There are roughly three trans women for every trans man. Even trans-man is about understanding the male becoming) Feminism and transgenderism are therefore not truly at odds with one another as it might seem, but rather provide a complementary service: enabling women to endure men’s crises, and men to endure women’s crises.
It important to note here that we cannot judge transgenderism from the current state of technology. In its full form, it will likely enable male-born females to have children of their own. Which might explain why it´s is enforced on young cofused people: Because it is a social experiment with a larger goal in mind.
And so we can see that a good part of the culture war is actually about the growth of the self through integrating its opposite—in Jung’s words, animus and anima. Much of the hot topics of the culture war circle around gender-polarities: It´s right there, in the words. Hence progressive means nothing else than to promote and openness and crisis, while conservative means nothing else than boundaries and stilted growth.
What that means is that instead of working on themselves—which men have done for millennia—the goal should be to help women face the cultural crisis. Exhibit a strong hand and force them to confront the dragon themselves. Incidentally, this is what women find masculine.
So if you need one piece of dating or lifestyle advice, it is this: hold women accountable, not to their game, but to yours. Incidentally, they will find it attractive.