Obsidiana

What makes you a good gender dweller? Knowing what to do (how to behave) “being” somebody of that cohort. Being able to manage the situation. And because men are gender-deprived, they are also clueless about their expected behavior. As I said, they are controllers, not managers. So, in the division of labor that is our modern urban world, besides having to deal with the remains of their zombie symbolic patriarchal role, men design reality in ways that are amenable to control. That’s how they get busy, that’s how they keep relatively focused, and that’s what they are paid to produce. The fact that women are increasingly taking these jobs (which is inevitable: good jobs are there to be taken) is a problem for the stability of the system, and a pressure for the conversion of “male” into a new (proper) gender. Is it possible that the gender ecosystem evolves so that it starts functioning without any neutral reference? Hard to tell, the way out of the gender system will also take us away from the land of simple explanations.

Anyway, genders are action schemes. Action schemes evolve, but are essentially conservative structures. Reality is what we call the entanglement of these action schemes in the artificial environment of the modern city, mediated by design structures (places, devices, sounds, colors, geometries) that make possible gendered people coexisting in large numbers, by allowing them to believe that their repetitive, schematic behavior is indeed individual, voluntary and purposeful.

So all gendered minorities are claiming their territories, and being relatively successful in that effort, at least so far. There is a conservative fundamentalist response, but it shows signs of fatigue. You have to go outside of the western sphere of influence to find true patriarchal regimes that are still functional, to see how hard their struggle is. In the West (in the “Northwest”, to be precise, but I digress), any woman has, in front of her, at least a menu of alternatives plans for its liberation from whatever symbolic male structure that may still keep them captive. Liberation is not the real agenda, power is. The fact that many smart women still hold on to their traditional role is because it may be, in some cases, a strategic shortcut to power.

But what is “power”, anyway? Ha.

Power is appealing to us, because it can capture, and it can kill, so we falsely believe that it is as real as death. That leads us to the false corollary that love is the antidote of power. You don’t need an antidote for an illusion, you need to get rid of it. To take away its authority.

In modern societies, power is the name of “getting what you want without having to create anything”. As I said earlier, this is a game you can’t win. You can make it last a long time, though. How does that work? As I said, in the process of trying to get what they want and failing miserably, people create stuff. They can’t help it, and yet, they also can’t own the stuff they create. I believe that creativity, in this sense, is something that happens to you. Anyway, there is a problem here, and the problem is called “social division of labor”. In “complex” societies (those that created cities), labor has to be structured. And that structure is the foundation of the gender system, but there is something crucially important to understand about these things: just because they are, like, 8000 years old, it doesn’t make them natural (heck, it doesn’t even make them really that “old”). It was in these very artificial environments that all the prejudices about men and women, about sexuality, about race and about the faculties of the human individual were bred. As with all prejudices, they take a grain of truth and turn it into a pearl, sometimes a very ugly pearl, which we then learn to find pretty anyway. All the things that were created in these few millennia of civilization may seem amazing to us. By the way, let’s say they really are, in a way. I’m not actually suggesting we throw all these things away, and “start over” (as if we could actually do that…) But no, just the contrary. My point is: they do not serve as a good sample of our potential. It is still too early to know anything conclusive about what we are collectively capable of.

Large societies are hierarchical. That means, literally, that they depend on the notion that there is a principle of discrimination, or separation. Our modern world is integrated, horizontal, networked, but still struggles with hierarchies. Science is still accepted as a narrative of the “fundamental principles” of nature. Nature, of course, couldn’t care less about our necessity of making sense of it, and science is whatever scientists do. Anyway, in that effort, the pseudo-notion of “system” has been our last resort. When we fail terribly in our attempts at domesticating a natural phenomenon, we call it a system. We put it in a box, label it, put it on a shelf, and go back to sleep.

The brain, for instance. We first assumed (and still largely believe) that ethics is based on the brain being divided in different layers, and that they form a hierarchy, meaning that we have some sort of “King” inside our minds (and when things get too hard, we come up with an imaginary Super-King, that would rule over all our smaller individual Kings). We do that, because we must reconcile, say, Plato with modern individualism, and modern biology.  Plato himself had to reconcile Egypt and Babylon with the (then modern) Greek culture, but that’s another story. As with all the things that do not exist, this inside King has to be artificially sustained, and this costs a lot of energy. How do we cope with that expenditure? We, once again, streamline the process: division of labor will have to save the day. That’s where our modern gender structure comes to rescue: all gendered creatures are allowed to be human, networked, horizontal, collective. Non-gendered creatures (the white-western-adult-heterosexual-masculine-man kind) are immobilized as hosts-of-the-King-inside. As ghosts.

Simple and complex are the same thing, if you look carefully. Let’s call it simplex. Our society is too big to be simplex. It is sophisticated and complicated instead of complex; poor and dull, instead of simple. We live in times of degeneration, of decay.

When a new empire emerges, its territorial limits are not set by lack of ambition or means. They are determined by a sense of wholesomeness, by the perception that they already have the land that is worth having, that they already are everything there is to be. When this moment arrives, that’s when they start falling apart. We live in one of these moments. We believe the earth is limited, so there is no more room to grow. When we look back at the Roman Empire, we may ask why didn’t they cross the Atlantic, or at least follow the African coastline to the south. They didn’t do that because there was no sign of a nation living in those places: they weren’t announced to them as a foreign territory, domains of other organized societies already living there. By the way, Columbus was not really going to “America”, remember? And the other guys that went after him were imitators; there was no real, pure “discoverer”, because that’s not how empires work. An empire doesn’t create new land, doesn’t discover new potential; that’s what kingdoms do.

Contemporary empires are empires of capital. Capital is not to be found everywhere, it lives on crossroads. The network of global cities serves as the backbone of this all-encompassing “system” of trade and exchange, but it is still an empire that neglects what it sees at its outside as “non-territory”. A new empire will emerge when the vast territory now considered “off limits” is invaded by conquerors that may then explore the new raw material our new economy – possibly still capitalist – is to be built upon: complex nervous systems, natural and artificial. Brains.

What is the produce of brains? Hard to answer, if you don’t know what to look for: how would you explain to a roman citizen what a modern factory does? Of course, you could show him a picture of a factory, and even have him understand that it is a more efficient way of producing things, with new machines, new sources of energy and a new division of labor. The problem is, the factory doesn’t make sense without the concept of a mass market, the integration of a supply chain, the modern financial institutions, and so on. The same thing happens with brains. The fact is, we only very recently have begun studying and understanding what a brain really is (other than merely treating it as an “organ”, or reducing it to a “system”), and for this knowledge to become the seed of a new revolution it must inspire a new common sense, and – literally – a new way of thinking.

To understand what it means to capitalize on brains, a useful metaphor would be the urgency we see, now, of doing something different on agriculture: if we can manage to profit from a forest, without destroying it (without turning it into a plantation), we may become open to the idea that we can “profit” from society without force-fitting it into a grid of fixed individual characters, divided in genders. In a way, a crop field is an artificial desert, and the same can be said of a modern city. Its beneficiaries have moved to suburbs, penthouses, mansions, places that are located at a strategic distance from genuine – depersonalizing – urban life. Meanwhile, we know that people can live in the same forest where they earn their living, and a city that is connection-friendly can, and must, be truly inhabited by humans, living humanely. And a brain can think things without being invaded by devastating ideas.

(To be continued)