Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today’s topic investigates the nuance between the Patriarchy and the Matriarchy and how our common misunderstandings of what they really are deny us an understanding of what it truly means to be human. Let’s strip back the false binaries and fictions to find out how nature optimized us for both.
The term Patriarchy is almost exclusively used as a pejorative in the modern lexicon to capture everything wrong with humanity. Conversely, the term Matriarchy is used as a shortcut for victim or a juxtaposition against the patriarchy for everything that’s good and healthy in humanity. A recent LinkedIn post by Carolyn Wonders highlights a quandary while proffering the following definitions:
“Patriarchy organizes society around: → Hierarchy — who is above, who is below → Control — who has it, who doesn't → Ownership — of land, of labor, of women, of children → Competition — for resources, status, dominance → Domination — the idea that power over others is the highest good
Matriarchy organizes society around: → Stewardship — care for what sustains us → Relationship — the web we live inside, not a ladder we climb → Cooperation — the understanding that survival is collective → Care — as a serious value, not a soft one → Continuity — the long view, not the quarterly report”1
At first blush, those definitions seem to fit, and for very obvious reasons. Given what we explored recently in The Two Rules of Life, evolutionary biology has optimized males and females differently:
The female is optimized for creating, growing, and raising new life.
The male is optimized for creating, growing, and providing resources and protecting the tribe.
Underlying that definition is an issue I need to address out of the gate, and that’s the perception that the patriarchy protects men while oppressing and abusing women. This is where it starts to get complicated because we have to face the shadow behaviors on all sides, tease apart the healthy vs. the unhealthy patriarchy, and strip down the structures to their fundamental elements to really understand them.
Yes, there are negative masculine behaviors, but it is my argument today that those are not a feature of the patriarchy, but rather why the patriarchy exists. Further, due to human nature, that negative shadow never goes away because those behaviors can be useful, and it’s a constant battle to keep it at bay (or turn it into a weapon against your enemies). Further yet, the matriarchy and the patriarchy have never existed in an either/or binary. It’s always been an AND function. This is something we explored in Chaos and Order, where the Yin and Yang are two halves, one of chaos and the other of order, one feminine and the other masculine, coming together to create an antifragile whole that restrains the shadow in themselves and in each other.
While the original definition in that post teased at the nuance of the answer, the conclusion, and further posts from Carolyn highlighted a simplified definition that seems to drive the major perceptions of patriarchy and matriarchy:
Patriarchy = everything wrong with everything in the world
Matriarchy = everything right with everything in the world
This isn’t hyperbolic on my side because she went on to post:
We did not invent patriarchy because it was the best system. We inherited it because it was the system that won wars, r.a.p.i.n.g. and destroying ancient Matriarchal societies. A society built for conquest will conquer societies built for living. That’s not a moral victory. That’s just how conquest works.
What Carolyn describes is the shadow behavior, and the shadow has a seductive attraction. (Don’t give in to the Dark Side!) She is right that we need to keep the shadow in check, but the shadow is not the patriarchy. Further, the statement positions the matriarchy and patriarchy as adversaries, which, as we just described in yin and yang, is wrong and shows her own adverse shadow. The shadow is why the patriarchy exists.
The Shadow
It helps to understand that both the masculine and the feminine have positive and negative manifestations. Again, back to Chaos and Order, these are represented as:
The Good Mother, Gaia, Mother Earth | The Devouring Mother
The Good King | The Absent or Tyrannical Father
What’s typically being described as “patriarchy” in this debate is narrowed to the negative manifestation of the masculine. A definitional error is that this masculine shadow is only compared to the positive manifestation of the feminine, the Tyrant vs. Gaia. But that’s not how it works, and that’s not how it is, and those negative behaviors aren’t the status quo. The shadow exists, absolutely, and the patriarchy and the matriarchy fight to keep the shadows in check. (Stay tuned for a forthcoming investigation into the feminine shadow)
The other catch with Carolyn’s original definition is that what she describes as the matriarchy is actually part of a healthy patriarchy. I wager she’s blinded by the adversarial relationship she’s created, but it’s pretty clear she’s abandoned the actual femininity of the matriarchy. As an improvement, I’d proffer that her original definition encompasses most of the patriarchy, while the matriarchy differs thusly:
Matriarchy organizes society around: → Nurture — dependency is protected and developed into competence → Enculturation — transmitting values, identity, behavior, and tradition → Socialization — teaching language, manners, values, identity, and the norms required to live with others → Integration — weaving individuals into families and communities through relationship, mediation, inclusion, and care.2
This distinction is important because feminism seems to ignore the uniqueness of the matriarchy and, like Carolyn, is fighting over who does the patriarchy better.3 It also misses that her prescriptions are the shadow feminine under the guise of care, and what we see is Toxic Empathy and a ‘Mother knows best” attitude. It’s very successful in painting the entire patriarchy with the shadow while absolving the matriarchy of any role, agency, or, heaven forbid, negative impact itself.
Yes, there’s a shadow. It exists on both sides and expresses itself slightly differently. However, the patriarchy isn’t defined only by its shadow, and claiming the positive patriarchy as part of the matriarchy actually exhibits the feminine shadow and doesn’t help us understand the patriarchy at all!
The Patriarchy in Context
Here’s the reality: The healthy sides of both the patriarchy and matriarchy constrain the negative inclinations of both men and women while directing their energies toward the two things that are optimized for.
Matriarchy = creating, growing, and raising new life.
Patriarchy = creating, growing, and providing resources and protection to the matriarchy.
To put this in context, the worst inclinations of men are terrible until you really need them. Sociopaths create chaos in society, but they’re useful as weapons of war to protect the very society they can’t quite fit into. This is why elite military units have an above-average number of sociopaths. Note, though, that it’s the patriarchy encapsulating these shadow behaviors and directing them toward something useful. Left alone, these behaviors would dominate; held in check, they eliminate threats.
The patriarchy is also a dragnet that doesn’t discriminate whether these negative behaviors come from men or women. When you hear complaints about ‘boss bitches’ being ‘held back’ by the patriarchy, just recognize that the patriarchy doesn’t appreciate that behavior from men or women. Too often, when women enter patriarchal systems, they emulate the shadow behaviors the patriarchy is designed to suppress. They feel the suppression without realizing that men, behaving the same way, do too.4
There’s another twist here in that both the patriarchy and matriarchy correct the excesses of the other. Carolyn demonstrates the valuable role the matriarchy can play in correcting the excess of the patriarchy, but the complication is that she’s railing against any attempt the patriarchy might make (this essay likely included) in correcting her own excess, manifesting the shadow of the feminine.
I’d also like to point out that her definition of patriarchy includes domination, which is wrong.5 A healthy patriarchal hierarchy shouldn’t be confused with unchecked rule by the strongest individual. Research on humans and chimpanzees shows that while alphas can gain influence through dominance, intimidation, and coercion, this influence is fragile because adversaries, working together, can bring the tyrant down. Domination is the shadow, and we can see its shade cast in many places because it can work, but only in the short term, and often provokes resistance over time.
Instead, the best leaders cultivate allies, care for potential supporters, mediate conflicts, and maintain coalitions. Simply put, domination doesn’t work because hierarchy depends on social intelligence, alliances, reciprocal support, and some degree of acceptance by the group. Put another way, it’s stewardship, relationship, cooperation, care, and continuity. This is what the healthy patriarchy and society writ large celebrate, nurture, and promote.6
That’s why humans have repeatedly developed what researchers call leveling mechanisms: criticism, ridicule, ostracism, sanctions, and coordinated resistance against individuals who try to convert rank into unrestricted personal power. This is why, as Sam Alaimo adeptly points out, you have chivalry because these are the mechanisms that create healthy, balanced men.
Similarly, this is also why the healthy patriarchy holds men accountable to the Hero’s Journey, where men have to literally die to their shadow to be reborn and add value to society. The matriarchy also values this sacrifice, as evidenced by its persistent use in books, plays, and movies throughout history. This is true patriarchy.
Burn it Down?
At this point, I hope you appreciate how the simplified definitions of the evil patriarchy and magnanimous matriarchy fall apart under simple scrutiny. The problem is we rarely allow the conversation to get into this gritty reality, and today, it feels like feminism is improperly comparing only the positive feminine with the negative masculine. But clearly, this is stupid.
But what happens when you damn the patriarchy and seek to burn it all down? This is a topic we poked at in Tradition, where the author Donald Kingsbury wrote:
“Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back.”
Simply put, when you work to destroy the system that holds back the worst inclinations of men, you aren’t freeing yourself from domination, as that’s a shadow behavior. What you’ve done is tear down the fence that keeps that behavior in check and let it roam unfettered.
I also don’t know any men who appreciate the masculine shadow. But, in attacking all things bad as patriarchy, we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater, and, as Chesterton’s Fence warns, when you remove a social structure, you unlock everything that it was designed to hold back. Let’s look at two examples that shatter the simplistic understanding of patriarchy that we’ve been analyzing.
The first is my Alma Mater, Michigan Technological University, an engineering school where there were three men to every one woman. To hear tell, that should have been the most dangerous place for women. In fact, it was the opposite. Michigan Tech is, and has been, one of the safest places for women at any University. All that raping, domination, and ownership of women? It was rare because the worst inclinations of men were checked by men.7
The statistics are damning because universities that have equal to or greater numbers of women actually have greater percentages of sexual assaults.8 The women are competing more, and the patriarchy is not as strong. These also tend to be more liberal universities, which makes the numbers more contradictory than we’d assume.
For the second example, let’s look at the collision of the shadows of both the patriarchy and the matriarchy happening right now in the United Kingdom regarding the Pakistani Rape Gangs. Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently wrote Britain’s Rape Gangs and the Failure of Feminism, where she identifies: “One of the report’s most unsettling implications for feminists is that the loudest voices forcing this scandal into the open were not the major women’s organizations or state-backed feminist commissions but insurgent figures: male, and outside the consensus classes.”
What you’re seeing is the patriarchy trying to stand up against accusations of racism to protect the women of their culture against sexual threats.
Think on that one again: the loudest voices demanding accountability, even protesting this violence on women, are largely Men.
When you tear down the healthy patriarchy, you unleash the very things you want to avoid. This is exactly the situation that’s manifesting in universities and with the Pakinstani Rape gangs as the shadow ‘patriarchy’9 meets Western feminism, which has hobbled chivalry with accusations of racism via misapplied, toxic empathy.
Summary
To formulate a better definition, I propose that the Healthy Patriarchy = creating, growing, and providing resources and protection to the matriarchy through structures that constrain the shadow and direct the energies toward order, competence, hierarchy, and sacrifice.
Human civilization depends on two social orders, where the matriarchal order creates, nurtures, and integrates human life, while the patriarchal order organizes resources, protection, external cooperation, and long-term provision around that life. Each order channels characteristic human drives toward socially productive ends, and each restrains the ways those same drives can become destructive within its own order, while also correcting the excesses of the other.10
The counterintuitive insight is that the alternative to patriarchy is not matriarchy. Likewise, the alternative to male domination is not female domination. The right answer is a complementary system in which both the matriarchy and patriarchy constrain, correct, and strengthen one another while preventing the negative tendencies, the shadow behaviors that threaten stability.
Divided, masculine order becomes sterile, and feminine care becomes suffocating. Integrated, they produce a social order capable of protecting, generating, developing, and renewing human life; in short, an antifragile relationship. So, let’s damn this unhealthy understanding of the patriarchy and ensure we elevate the healthy version, allow it to restrain the shadow, and pair it with a healthy matriarchy that’s doing the same. Long live the Patriarchy!
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I need to note that, in her full post, she refers to the Iroquois as a matriarchal society that she considers an exemplar. However, history shows it wasn’t much different than the things she critiques. It’s a great example of not understanding matriarchy, patriarchy, or history!
The reality is captured by Edward Campbell in his essay: Conquest Everywhere: The New World Was No Eden. Clearly, the false binary of men vs. women is wrong and needs more analysis.
I copied her style; if it looks like AI, I don’t disagree, as I think her stuff was AI-generated.
Without bogging down the main essay, let’s do a quick analysis of her original definition of patriarchy and how women actually embrace it:
Hierarchy: Boss Bitch
Control: My body, my choice
Ownership: female control of land, of labor, of children
Competition: Women can do everything men can. Title 9 sports, etc.
Domination: Lived experience trumps anything. Women hold the social trump card.
To the point on misplaced definitions, modern feminism calls this unhealthy, yet fights over it, while claiming the healthy masculine, while ignoring the feminine altogether, a topic we explored in Rediscovering the Goddess.
There’s a sensitivity element here. It takes a LOT more patriarchal pressure to encapsulate and push down the negative male. Therefore, women, unused to that pressure, are likely to feel it at much lower levels, leaving the perception that they’re uniquely constrained vs. uniquely sensitive to constraint. Put another way, one of the shadow tendencies of men is a big ‘fuck you’ attitude, which requires more pressure.
I’d also love to go deeper into her idea of ownership, including women and children, but in the target-rich environment, I have to remain focused.
Supporting Sources:
Boehm, C. (1993). Egalitarian behavior and reverse dominance hierarchy. Current Anthropology, 34(3), 227–254. https://doi.org/10.1086/204166
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
Fehr, E., & Gächter, S. (2002). Altruistic punishment in humans. Nature, 415, 137–140. https://doi.org/10.1038/415137a
Feldblum, J. T., Krupenye, C., Bray, J., Pusey, A. E., & Gilby, I. C. (2021). Social bonds provide multiple pathways to reproductive success in wild male chimpanzees. iScience, 24(8), 102864. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2021.102864
Foster, M. W., Gilby, I. C., Murray, C. M., Johnson, A., Wroblewski, E. E., & Pusey, A. E. (2009). Alpha male chimpanzee grooming patterns: Implications for dominance “style.” American Journal of Primatology, 71(2), 136–144. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajp.20632
McClanahan, K. J., Maner, J. K., & Cheng, J. T. (2022). Two ways to stay at the top: Prestige and dominance are both viable strategies for gaining and maintaining social rank over time. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 48(10), 1516–1528. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672211042319
Ronay, R., Greenaway, K., Anicich, E. M., & Galinsky, A. D. (2012). The path to glory is paved with hierarchy: When hierarchical differentiation increases group effectiveness. Psychological Science, 23(6), 669–677. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611433876
Wrangham, R. W. (2019). Hypotheses for the evolution of reduced reactive aggression in the context of human self-domestication. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1914. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01914
Two examples to not bog down the essay:
A guy I knew, who was an ass to women, was blackballed by the men so badly that he left after one year. He went to another university with fewer men and was charged with sexual assault. The men from Tech never gave him a chance.
I went to walk a friend home from a Frat party and was stopped at the door. They wouldn’t let her leave, drunk and only with me. Other friends convinced them to let me get her home, but those Frat boys told me I’d better be back there in no more than 20 minutes. And I checked in because they’d hold me accountable.
Supporting Sources:
Bradshaw, C., & Blei, D. M. (2024). A Bayesian model of underreporting for sexual assault on college campuses. The Annals of Applied Statistics, 18(4), 3146–3164. https://doi.org/10.1214/24-AOAS1928
National Center for Education Statistics. (2024). Criminal incidents at postsecondary institutions. Condition of Education, U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/a21
U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2020). Higher education: Approaches and strategies used in college campus surveys on sexual violence (GAO-20-351). https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-20-351
Though this is MUCH messier than you’d think, as you can explore here in: Islamic Feminism & Muslim Matriarchy.
Similarly, The Handmaid’s Tale is a matriarchy, enforced by the patriarchy, but I need to point out that the men don’t like it. Consider that the Commander breaks the law to take Offred to a club so he can treat her like a human while having sex. A crime he hides from his wife, as she’d turn him in. The driver, another man, and his friends are the ones who save Offred and her child.
I should clarify that neither order belongs exclusively to one sex, but neither is independent of sex. Evolutionary biology creates different constraints, incentives, vulnerabilities, and average tendencies, and healthy societies recognize those differences without reducing individuals to them.
I have frequently said that one of the biggest problems we have these days is too many boys running around in men's bodies. In your terms, I'd say that's too many men exemplifying the shadow patriarchy.
As a result, I'd said my most important job is to raise my son to be a healthy, positively masculine man, and my daughter to expect that from the men in her life.
As for the loss of chivalry, I feel we've lost honor. A man (compared to a boy in a man's body) keeps his word, admits when he has been wrong, and makes amends for his failings. This has become too rare in our public world.
Brilliant.