There's a strange and awesome thing happening in the world today. The most radical and transformative leaders are all…women. Or at least mostly women. The men, meanwhile are busy…being men. Grinning, foolish, violent, crude, and selfish. Trumps bellowing like toddlers, Farages winking like idiot 007s, Salvinis raging like Mussolinis.
I think there's a great truth hidden in there. The future is feminine. It isn't that it belongs to women. But it does belong to values and attitudes and ways that we often call "feminine." That is precisely why so many of the world's rising leaders are women. The systems of male violence that have run the world for ages now have also run their course. They have destroyed everything they came in contact with, ultimately, from the planet to life on it to democracy. Who else was going to rebuild from the rubble of male violence but…women? Male violence made the world a dystopia. Women are changing it. But I'll come to all that.
Now, before you accuse me of the millennial war crime of "gendering" a thing, let me point out that…I'm not. Or maybe I am — and I just don't care. In my little household, I'm the mommy. I stay at home and write and take care of the little one, while my partner goes out in the big bad world and doctors the ill. So I'm going to speak about masculine and feminine values or ways. But these aren't neatly "gendered" in the way we're told to think of it now. The masculine and feminine exist, as Freud and Jung pointed out, long ago, in all of us. Not all women are gentle and sweet, and not all men are vicious and cruel. What should we — as people — be? Simmer down there, my friendly "men's rights activist." It's not about men vs women, in other words.
Here's what I see happening. Leadership as an exercise in patriarchal macho values of domination, greed, exploitation, possession, abusiveness, rank — that age is over, even as the Trumps and Farages embody it. True leadership today, and for the next century, is about nurturing and elevating and expanding the possibilities of things — from a reef to a child to a river — with care, gentleness, defiance, courage, truth, rebellion, grace. Sure, men can do that, too. But patriarchy and capitalism and supremacy — the great systems of male violence that have run our world for millennia now — can't.
Let me therefore outline three principles for leadership in this century — and three women who are changing the world by embodying them.
The first principle — and the foundation — is what I'll call nurturance. By that I mean a very simple idea. The job of a leader right about now is to undo all the damage that's been done by centuries of capitalism, empire, patriarchy, supremacy. All that slavery, servitude, violence, aggression, rage, tribalism, hate. All the ways it wounded us, life, the planet.
Human beings have lived this way for centuries: the most violent men — and it's usually men — among them rise to the top. Why? Because the point of a society is to do violence to those weaker, and take their possessions. To enslave and exploit them. In previous eras, we called it slavery, today we call it capitalism. Not much has changed.
But obeying the way of the predator has come at a steep price. What are some of the costs? Severe climate change. Life on the planet dying off — mass extinction. Democracy breaking down into fascism. 90% of humanity still left poor, precisely those who were enslaved and exploited and abused hardest — while even in rich countries, middle classes are now collapsing. The way of the predator, it turns out, only really rewards the most vicious predators. It rewards them everything. All the money, power, status, and worth in a society.
If you doubt that, take a look at America — where vicious fools like Trumps rule, while the average American dies in debt, broke, abandoned, without anything to his or her name. That is an object lesson: America was the world's most predatory society, by a very long way, the original slave state, then the world's greatest polluter, then the one who bombed and invaded more than half the world. What was the result of following the way of the predator? Collapse.
Figures like Elizabeth Warren hope to change all that. Bernie Sanders, of course, has for decades now. They are trying to teach Americans that the way of the predator is obsolete. Following that path has only led to a dead end — one at the bottom of any abyss. Once, the world might have wanted to follow America's example. Now, it laughs — when it's not shuddering.
The way of the predator must be replaced with the way of the nurturer — that's what a figure like Elizabeth Warren is really saying. She is calling on Americans to genuinely care for one another again. To nourish each other. Not just in abstract ways, but concrete ones — with healthcare, retirement, education, and so on. She is asking Americans to invest in one another again. And to do that, they must stop preying on one another — battling one another for the very things they could simply give each other, like healthcare. That's a titanic challenge — because Americans have been taught forever, essentially, that nobody has any intrinsic or inherent worth, and the only purpose of all life is for the strong to dominate the weak.
(Now, an astute reader might say to themselves: "those are patriarchal values of violence and greed and possession and domination, being replaced with more classically 'feminine' values of nourishment and care and gentleness." I don't think life is so gendered. But I do think there's a reason today's truest leaders are all women — and that reason is that patriarchy is one of the reasons humanity has found itself at a dead end. If you read the above closely, I'm saying that male violence has run the world. Patriarchy creates pecking orders of violence, and the tribe respects the most violent one the most, submitting to him. That is the way we have organized our world, whether we call it "empire" or capitalism." The moral logic — the strong rape and exploit the weak — remains precisely the same. Women are challenging that ilogic, that way, perhaps because they know firsthand, better, just how foolish and stupid and dangerous it really is.)
So Warren is one example of the way of the predator being replaced with the way of the nurturer. But the truth is that that transformation — from a predatory way of life, to a nurturing one — must happen at a global scale, not just a national one. That is what I mean in one way by "the future is feminine." )And of course, wiser minds before me have said just such a thing.)
That brings me to my second leader, and my second principle — inviolability. What is Greta Thunberg really saying? That we don't have the right to go on treating the world…as a body to own, trade, possess, exploit, abuse, rape….the way that patriarchy has treated the female body for millennia. She is saying: no more. Life deserves more than that. The world cannot survive if we go on doing patriarchal violence to it, treating it the way an abusive tribe treats a woman — as a thing to own, trade, control, dominate, possess, use, and abuse.
My second principle you might also call sanctity. Greta travels across the ocean in a little sailboat, to scold the UN General Assembly for having let down the world, and allowed us to reach the brink of catastrophic climate change. She is really saying: these things must be inviolable. The rivers, reefs, oceans, forests. The insects, bees, elephants, fish. We cannot go on violating the sanctity of life on the planet. We must be better than that. We must be wiser than that.
That path has resulted in the world we see today. Life on the planet has been violated, plundered, raped, abused, and discarded — for what? So that the world's 0.1% could grow unimaginably rich, effectively. For profit. So the "stock markets" could soar, and those offshore bank accounts could bulge. But see the point. The world is run like a patriarchal empire of little tribe — the most violent men, the Trumps and Putins and Sacklers and so forth, are given billions, for tearing life on the planet apart. That is exactly what we might expect a patriarchy to do — to abuse all bodies for profit, to treat the planet itself like the ultimate female body, and own it, possess it, abuse it, exploit, throw it away.
What are we to do instead of violate the sanctity of life? That brings me to back to the first principle, Elizabeth's principle. We are to nourish it. In hard terms, that means we are going to have to invent things like global green public investment banks. That's mouthful — because we don't have a word for such a thing. We're going to have to create safe zones for the reefs and forests, agencies to manage them, corporations that replenish them, not exploit them, jobs to tend to them, industries to grow them, post-GDP measures of "growth" that reflect them.
See how much work that is? And yet there most of us are, doing our — as David Graeber says — bullshit jobs. Helping capital…make more money. No wonder our work feels so pointless. It is. We're not doing the work of this century. We're doing macho, abusive, exploitative work — literally, the work of a global patriarchy — and more and more, many of us hate it, because we intuitively sense we are then ruled by violent men, and values of greed, domination, and abuse, too. The work of this century is feminine, my friends. It is about nurturing and nourishing life, protecting its sanctity, making it inviolable.
Do you see how big the gap is between the macho, exploitative, abusive work we do — patriarchal — and the feminine work that we need to start doing? Let me make it clearer. Calculating profit, yelling at your underlings, reporting those earnings, attending those meetings, fighting your corner, having that battle in the boardroom. It's literally like patriarchal tribal warfare for status and respect and power — seeing who can dish out the most greed and violence, and who can take it, and the pecking order forms based on it. That's literally most of our "work." That's also why most work feels like…bullshit. It is.
The real work we have to do is feminine. Protecting the Amazon, investing in it, holding those trees close, making sure each little one is nourished and fed and watered, counting all that, valuing it, respecting it — not in soft, abstract ways, but hard ones, in real organizations and institutions, with real money and measures and jobs and tasks and people.
How are we to do all that? That brings me to my third leader, and my third principle: dignity. Malala is the schoolgirl who famously survived being shot in the head by the Taliban — twice — just for daring to get an education. Today, she's at Oxford. And her message is simple: every child on planet earth must have an education. Dignity. Let's extend it. Every child on planet earth should have an education. Let's add medicine, food, water, healthcare, retirement, shelter, and savings to that list.
If we were serious about doing that, here's what we'd do. We'd create a global charter of rights, and make all those things basic rights, for every single child on planet earth. We'd get every nation to sign it. Many poor ones would refuse — how would they afford it? We rich Westerners would help fund it — thus giving back much of what we stole from them in centuries of slavery and exploitation.
And then we'd get our hands dirty. After we created the New Declaration of Global Human Rights, aybe we'd create the Global Education Investment Bank. And the Global Education Agency. And the Global Alliance of Universities. And the World Education Fund. We'd build schools and hire teachers and author curricula. We'd create something like a global Marshall Plan to educate the world's children — not just to first grade, but to a university degree and beyond. We'd pay for it, we'd organize it, we'd institutionalize it, and we'd culturally normalize it.
That's the breadth of Malala's dream. A genuinely different world — not just in the sense of some abstract daydream. But in the hard, concrete sense of new institutions, agreements, arrangements, rules, opportunities, possibilities. All of that, focused on one idea: dignity. Every life should be free to realize its highest possibilities.
But that idea doesn't stop at Malala. Why shouldn't the tree and the river and the reef have dignity, too? What it means for them is something like this. The river has the right to flow to the sea. The tree has the right to touch the sky. The reef has the right to nourish the fish. And so on.
All of those things would require another radical transformation. Maybe we'll have to write the Global Declaration of Euidamonic Rights — not just "human rights", but meaning "rights for all life." Maybe we'll have to create a Global Eudaimonic Investment Bank. A global Agency of Well-Being. A Global Eudaimonia Fund. We'd have to hire people to staff and run all those. We'd have to create whole new jobs and titles — "Chief Well Being Officer", "Eudaimonia Architect", "Life Engineer", "Well-Being Designer", "Ecosystem Managers", "Outcomes Accountant" — to even begin trying. We'd have to create new kinds of rewards and incentives, new kinds of
The future, my friends, is feminine. It is made of values like inviolability, nurturance, and dignity. It is made of care, gentleness, truth, possibility. It is about giving and affirming and cultivating life — not taking it and owning it exploiting it. No, not all women are these things. Nor are all men little patriarchs, bullies, abusers, tyrants, thugs.
Yet the fact is that systems of male violence — capitalism, patriarchy, supremacy — have run our world for millennia now. They have left it a smoking wreck. And right now, right here, this — this is the moment of truth where we begin to leave them behind. And create systems that aren't based on male violence. But on truer and wiser things. The human beings of the future must tread the way of the nurturer than the predator.
The world's most transformative leaders are almost all women today, and that is for a reason. Who else is going to bring systems of male violence to an end? Men? So the reason isn't that all women embody femininity, nor should they. But women, having been on the receiving end of patriarchy's violence, greed, and domination, are the ones fighting it hardest now, too. They are the ones who are saying a system that treats the world, life on it, democracy, civilization, possibility, like a passive, pliant body for a violent tribe of men to possess, own, abuse, rape, and discard — that system, that way of thinking, its stupidity and greed, and vicious destructiveness is something we must leave behind. All of us.
And all of us, I think, should cheer for that.
Umair
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