Chaos and Order
Reclaiming the Feminine
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and investigate them from different perspectives and disciplines to come up with unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic is a second exploration into the strength of the feminine and forces us to address something many find problematic in that the ancient archetypes depict the feminine as chaos and the masculine as order. This seems to offend our sensibilities but only because we have a deeply encoded bias that the masculine order is somehow preferred. We’ll dive into the history of the feminine, of our consciousness, and what we’ve lost over the millennia.
Introduction
These essays on the feminine aren’t mine alone. My partner in crime, Lisa joins me in writing as we’ve wrangled with the concept of the feminine for a few years now. Our focus for this topic is raising two daughters in the current political climate we feel devalues the feminine.
Our fascination with the feminine is rooted in a troubling tendency we’ve encountered in how society views it. As we explored previously in Rediscovering the Goddess we assert that today’s premise for women is roughly captured as follows:
To be a successful woman you must be indistinguishable from a successful man.
The challenge revolves around lumping men and women together as interchangeable elements where the only differences are social constructions. As we explored in Goddesses, evolutionary differences lent themselves to historic social structures that not only recognized but revered the feminine. Alas, we seem to have lost that nuance.
Society has attempted to not just mash the feminine into masculine power structures but to pretend there is zero difference between the two. Yet this is not how history positively viewed the difference. Our ancient mythologies clearly identify a balance where the feminine is depicted as chaos and the masculine as order. Already this ruffles feathers so here’s a great video that highlights this difference:
The lady in the video describes women like water and men like a glass. The feminine water is described as:
“Very free-flowing and beautiful. It can be calm and peaceful, and it can be chaotic!”
I’ll build on this and say that water is always the life-bearer in ancient mythology which also rings true in nature writ large today. Without water, there is no life. But life is chaos, it’s challenging, it’s messy and risky.
The lady contrasts this against the masculine depicted as the glass representing:
“The structure, the safety. It’s the certainty and it holds the water.”
We saw this in Rediscovering the Goddess when ancients depicted women deities as naked, representing how they operate in their own character, simply in their nature. This nature, and Nature in general is wild and quite chaotic. We struggle to accurately predict the weather and there are many things both tiny and large that seem to be trying to kill us every day. Nature is metal.
Contrast this to the ancient archetypes of the man who is always clothed. Man does not function from the nature of their bodies but from their roles in society. It’s all about structure, stability, hierarchy. In a word, order.
Women represent the future of the species, our chance to maintain a genetic legacy, nature, the divine, and chaos. Men represent order, structure, and protection that help increase their success in creating a genetic legacy.
Deeper into Psychology
Our first step as we get deeper into psychology is to address the concept of archetypes and their rendering in our culture. Gender traits fall into a general bimodal distribution aligned to the sexual binary. Each of us has a balance of masculine and feminine archetypes that we manifest. It’s part of the duality that exists in the individual psyche and the world writ large. Yet I’ll underline here that, while there is a distribution of traits, the bimodality of the distribution repeatedly demonstrates a bifurcation, not a smooth or consistent spectrum. This means there is something different between feminine and masculine.
In Jungian psychology, the feminine is associated with chaos, and the masculine is associated with order. These are not just gendered concepts but also represent different psychological dynamics. The feminine, or 'anima', in Jungian terms, is often linked to the unconscious, intuitive, and creative aspects, which can be seen as chaotic due to their unpredictable and non-linear nature.
Conversely, the masculine, or 'animus', is associated with rationality, logic, and structure, which can be seen as ordering principles. Psychiatrist Carl Jung captured a combination of two archetypes each of the masculine and feminine.
The Good Mother, Gaia, Mother Earth | The Devouring Mother
The Good King | The Absent or Tyrannical Father
The classic story of the hero’s journey or the fight with the dragon of ancient lore is thick with deeper meaning regarding the battle for our individual consciousness as both men and women and the separation from the aegis of our parent’s ego of identity. This is where the adolescent male transitions from the nurturing arms of his mother into the masculine power structures.
This quote from The Origins and History of Consciousness by Erich Neumann, a protege of Jung captures the masculine and feminine requirement to separate from the parental archetypes and the consequence of failure:
“The fact that they have failed to rescue and redeem the feminine side of themselves is often expressed psychologically in an intensive preoccupation with the universals to the exclusion of the personal, human element. Their heroic and idealistic concern with humanity at large lacks the self-limitation of the lover, who is ready to cleave to the individual, and not to mankind and the universe alone.”
This failure sounds like a lot of Generation Z right now, doesn’t it? It represents where the chaos and order are out of balance. A devouring mother, what we might call a helicopter mom today, is not an archetype of feminine love but devouring the soul of her children. It’s often paired with either an absent or a tyrannical father who helicopters right along. Neither expose the child to the world so that they can grow. This shows up as many young adults being lost in their “heroic and idealistic concern with humanity at large” and yet unable to manage their own lives.
In Application
As Lisa likes to say, ask a group of women to describe themselves and you’ll end up with a far-reaching and varied response, often concluding with an invitation to hang out and observe as much of their identity is relationship-bound.
Contrast this to having a group of guys describe themselves and you’ll get a structured and, typically, role-oriented answer. Men define themselves by actions and status, less by relationships.
So what is the practical point in all of this? In one word, it’s Antifragility.
Back to the description of water; uncontained water is fog. You can’t drink it. It visually obscures the risks in nature that are out there. It’s cold and dark. Yet this same water, structured in a glass, a lake, or a river, is no less chaotic, but it is much more useful.
The masculine provides the structure, a glass of sorts, that can encapsulate the feminine energy. Yet without something to hold, the glass is just as useless as fog. Since the water represents the life-giving element, filling the glass with rocks isn’t very useful either. Lastly, glass is not resilient and those masculine hierarchies, power structures, and societal edifices that it represents are shockingly fragile.
It’s not an underestimation to say that men need the chaos of the feminine. When the chaos is paired with order we create antifragile systems. This requires enough order to provide structure, safety, and certainty coupled with enough chaos to be very free-flowing and beautiful. Just like the Yin and Yang of Chinese philosophy captures two complementary principles where Yin is negative, dark, and feminine (read chaos) and Yang is positive, bright, and masculine. (read order)
Back to the application of those archetypes and the premise introduced earlier that a successful woman is indistinguishable from a successful man. What we’ve found interesting is that the devouring mother today is typically over-indexing on the masculine order. The helicopter mom has to control everything and cannot just let go and allow nature to take its course.
Likewise, the tyrannical father also over-indexes toward order. Neither the negative archetype of feminine nor masculine is balanced. When they aren’t balanced individually, they also are rarely balanced together and aren’t able to achieve the Yin and Yang.
Back to the quote from Neumann above, we need a similar integration individually to achieve the Yin and Yang. The individual feminine needs to integrate an element of the masculine. She must order herself to a degree to not rely exclusively on the masculine to support her. If she doesn’t she risks relying on tyrannical men.
Likewise the individual masculine needs to integrate an element of the feminine. This softens the order, prevents tyranny, and embraces empathy and compassion within himself.
The lack of that integration often leads to what I’d call compassionate tyranny. This certainly seems to be reflected in society today which is being stretched between caring about everything while also trying to control everything. It is manifest in the push for compassion and acceptance coupled with restrictions on speech and ideas. The result is fragility not the superpower of antifragility.
Conclusion
Our goal here is to show that both sides are equal halves of a complete whole. They are also not in opposition. The masculine contains elements of the feminine and the feminine contains elements of the masculine.
Apropos of the Keys to Innovation topics explored here before, innovation, creation, and change is chaos. You can’t have the benefits without that chaos. Yet it’s about balance. I don’t like the phrase, “Move fast and break stuff,” and I think that’s because it’s not balanced. It’s trying to be innovative but it misses the nuance of the feminine.
We (Lisa and I) don’t feel our society is balancing the two well. There’s certainly a lot of evidence in politics and the work environment of compassionate tyranny. It’s not the fault of either side but of both sides not stepping back far enough to properly define the problem. If we don’t do that we’ll never balance the superpower available to us. It also has us chasing a value proposition that devalues the feminine.
This conversation is still likely to leave us wrangling with feelings that we don’t care for. Value judgments likely lead us to want to defend or critique. Lisa and I have been struggling with these concepts for years because of societal impressions that bias us toward certain value propositions and a political climate that pushes sameness.
We’d like to know what you’re feeling and why. What would be disagreeable about the ancient archetypes of order and chaos and what could we put in its place that’s as antifragile, flexible, dynamic, and balanced as those two things?
More on investigating the feminine here:
Let’s keep the conversation going in realtime on Substack Chats!
This essay became a foundational element in Integration: Book Two of The Singularity Chronicles as the AI try to reconcile what it means to have human emotions, expereinces, and thoughts divorced from a human body.
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It is a complex thing to write a piece with another person. The blending of two voices and two points of views. Incredible work on this post. The narrative itself embodies the themes you are writing about, or is that too meta?
We need balanced chaos, freedom of choice and kindness