Silencing women was the prerequisite for corruption
To build a world of relentless extraction, you first had to remove the people attuned to its cycles. Silencing women was not a side effect of the industrial project; it was the prerequisite.
The mess we are in is not a political problem, or a technological one. It is a problem of system design. And it began with a failure to listen.
This is not a wellness point. It is a systems one. For millennia, human societies understood their dependency on the earth because that dependency was visceral. The planet was not an inert resource to be mined, but a living system with its own rhythms. The earth is female, the moon governs the tides, the seasons dictate the harvest. These were not quaint metaphors; they were observable truths that shaped law, culture, and survival.
Women are, by default, more connected to these cycles. This is not mysticism, but biology and sociology. When your own body is a cyclical system, you develop an innate understanding of processes that are not linear. You see the whole, not just the quarterly earnings report. You understand that fallow periods are necessary for future growth, that there are limits, that extraction without replenishment leads to collapse. It is a worldview of custodianship, not domination.
An economic model based on infinite growth and relentless extraction cannot tolerate a worldview of custodianship. It is a hostile operating system. To install it, you first have to remove the guardians of the old one. The centuries-long project of stripping women of their power – from the burning of the witches, who were often healers and knowledge-keepers, to the barring of women from finance, government, and science – was not an unfortunate byproduct of history. It was a strategic necessity.
By severing the connection between power and cyclical knowledge, the architects of the new world created a void. In that void, corruption grew. Not just the petty corruption of backhanders and bribes, but the profound, systemic corruption of a paradigm that views a forest as timber, a river as hydro-power, and a mountain as ore. A system that cannot value what it cannot immediately convert to capital.
This system is simple, brutish, and effective in the short term. It is a game of ludo: roll the dice, move your piece, knock others off the board. The power that was suppressed to enable it is, by contrast, three-dimensional chess. It is complex, multi-layered, and concerned with the state of the board ten moves from now, not just the next capture.
The men who run the show today are still playing ludo, baffled by the strange, interlocking crises that beset them. They call for more data, more technology, more growth – more of the same linear thinking that engineered the disaster. They cannot see the game for what it is because the piece of the system they amputated was the very one that understood the whole.
We have built a world that is deaf to its own rhythms, and it is screaming.
TL;DR
To build a world of relentless extraction, you first had to remove the people attuned to its cycles. Silencing women was not a side effect of the industrial project; it was the prerequisite.