Patriarchy is the greatest threat facing humanity today

Leye - Every other Wednesday

By Soman

The greatest threat facing humanity today is not the depletion of the ozone layer, micro plastics in the oceans, drug resistant bacteria, extreme poverty, rampant pollution, pervasive inequality, bees dying out, modern slavery, or the very real possibility of nuclear war.

Not even the inevitable rise of A.I. and the possibility of robots doing to us what Europeans did to native populations all over the globe.  Not even North Korea’s missile tests. Not even Donald Trump in the White House.

The greatest threat facing humanity today is patriarchy. Everything else is a symptom.

The continued, sustained, and systematic exclusion of half of humanity from all of humanity is an order of things that is unnatural, grossly inefficient, and ultimately destructive. Evidence alone has proven and continues to prove this.

For most of recorded history, men have ruled the world, and for most of recorded history, men have made the decisions to go to war, men have gone to war, destroyed nations, destroyed civilisations, depleted natural resources, raped and pilfered, destroyed the natural balance that sustains all life on earth, including mankind. Men.

Today, the man led world is fast approaching the point of no return in terms of the destruction man has caused to earth. Man is killing earth.

Women have ruled. Yes, women have gone to war. Women have made great discoveries, gifted great inventions to humanity, breastfed nations, done great things.

But if the statement above seems even in the slightest patronizing, it’s further evidence of an unequal world and the great violence of this inequality. The great and foolish exclusion of half of humanity from all of humanity.

(Of course, no one can totally exclude anyone from humanity, but it hasn’t stopped men from trying, and as a result, effectively excluding women in many ways from many things.)

If with men in charge, the world as we know it today is as messed up as it is, the only guarantee of change is to try a different order of things; to have women in charge - or at least to have as many women as men in charge, and on a fiercely and unyielding equal footing.

I think that that every decision and action of man being in charge has led us to a situation in which human beings are being sold in open slave markets in Libya and the leaders of the world are united in their silence, safe for a few words of ineffectual condemnations.

(I refuse to refer to any human as a slave, even if they are sold in slave markets. They are not slaves; they are victims of crimes against humanity.)

In Libya, men are harvesting organs from migrants who are sold in slave markets. Right now. This is happening now.

I sometimes dream of what the world would have been like if some or all of the great religions had female saviours and prophets. If the world had been ruled equally by women and men. If girls and boys grew up equal in all ways: the toys they play with, the aspirations assumed for them, their dressing, their permissions. A world in which men do not in isolation make the decisions that affect women. A world in which men do not drag us all into war, impose obsolete and self-serving laws and customs upon the rest of us and take us the brink of extinction.

The greatest threat facing humanity today is patriarchy. But beware, patriarchy cannot, and will not, correct itself.