--- The late 20th to early 21st century West, while ostensibly advancing toward “freedom,” has restructured around systemic desire inhibition. Foucault's sovereign “right to kill” has been replaced by a managerial “obligation to optimize,” marking the transition to a _biopolitical regime_ (see _Discipline and Punish_, *The Birth of Biopolitics*). Every institution—school, workplace, medical authority, digital platform—functions now as an apparatus of _conformity reproduction_, a self perpetuation of the status quo, rather than the manifestation of a higher vision. In evolutionary terms, the modern state has become a fitness landscape optimized for the reproductive _suspension_ of its citizens: a digital simulacrum of relationality, pornography as satiety-without-contact, gamified consumer culture as libido deferral. The mimetic substrate of sexual competition—honour, risk, courtship, scarcity—is overwritten by _frictionless surplus_. Desire ceases to move because there is no external referent that is _not_ already consumed by the algorithmic mirror. Tinder replaces the village square; OnlyFans replaces the temple of Aphrodite. A significant, under-discussed variable is **“prestige compression.”** As noted in Henrich’s _The Secret of Our Success_ and Turchin’s _Ages of Discord_, prestige must be _relative_, _earned_, and _differentiated_ to serve its socio-reproductive function. But in the post-teleological information age, prestige metrics are simultaneously inflated (Instagram followers) and deflated (everyone is “special”), leading to a deadlock: mimetic rivalry without resolution, status hunger without shared ritual. The Enlightenment abolished divine right but did not replace it with a metaphysically sufficient anthropology. Liberal democracy, founded on procedural equality, eventually lost its telos beyond inclusion. In absence of sacred difference, all distinctions—between male and female, child and adult, sacred and profane—become subject to bureaucratic flattening. The result is not balance but **disintegration of archetype**. ![[画画的肠肠-xintong-chen-eros-female-2023-6-14.jpg]] > *Note: In [[Symposium - Son of Love & War|Plato's Symposium,]] Aristophanes presents a myth where primordial humans were three sexes: male, female, and androgynous (a combination of both.) These androgynous beings were too powerful, as punishment, Zeus split them in two. Eros is born from this act, becoming the embodiment of the desire to return to that complete state.* In prior epochs, male and female were not equal because they were _complementary_: two poles orbiting a metaphysical center *[(hieros gamos)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieros_gamos)*. When modernity declared war on “essentialism,” it made myth _unspeakable_ without stigma. The **secular Western moral order**, influenced by therapeutic culture and trauma-centric epistemology (see _The Righteous Mind_, Haidt), now enshrines **harm avoidance** as its supreme ethic. But this ethic cannot sustain eros. Eros _requires_ risk, asymmetry, and initiation. A society that pathologizes masculine assertiveness, and commodifies feminine intimacy, generates not equity—but **ontological sterility**. Falling birthrates are not caused by “careerism” or “housing costs.” These are rationalizations for a much deeper collapse: **the withdrawal of shared myth**. Across East Asia, Europe, and North America, the fertility collapse is nearly perfectly correlated with the loss of communal telos: no mythos of destiny, no multigenerational lineage, no eschatological horizon. Children require belief in tomorrow. In a culture where tomorrow is a threat (climate panic), or meaningless (consumer accelerationism), natality appears absurd. The existential tone of [[11HE – Gun, Globe & Cross – (1,000–2,000 CE)|11HE]] is thus _quiet_: not the cataclysm of nuclear fire, but the slow entropy of unchosen barrenness. In Hannah Arendt’s _The Human Condition_, natality is the root of political action—a faith that the world is worth entering. Its disappearance is a political crisis disguised as a personal choice. ![[衤今禾口 - 帝釈天 - 2022.jpg]] --- ## Mimetic Collapse and Gender as Prestige Arena Let us now move from demographics to anthropology. [[René Noël Théophile Girard - The Sisyphus of Desire|Girard’s]] central insight—[[The Nature of Desire, Rivalry and Myth|that human desire is triangular, mediated, imitative]]—is the Rosetta stone of our crisis. In every society, models of admiration structure sexual competition and social cohesion. Where previously models were rooted in proximity and archetype (the brave warrior, the wise father, the beautiful maiden), today they are decoupled and algorithmically amplified. Mass media creates **mimetic saturation**. A teenage boy no longer competes with his local village or school peers; he competes with curated avatars of status—celebrities, influencers, pornographic idols—while being socially atomized and existentially irrelevant. This mimetic inflation yields two opposite reactions: _withdrawal_ (NEETs, hikikomori, incels), or _overconformity_ (hyper-neurotic careerism, ideological virtue signaling). Women, in turn, face an equally brutal landscape of expectations. On one hand, feminism promises power, agency, and freedom. On the other, the evolutionary substrate of sexual selection—hypergamy—remains intact: most women still desire men of equal or greater status. But as women rise economically, the number of such men shrinks, creating what demographers call the “**mating gradient problem**.” Feminism unshackled the feminine from economic dependence—but failed to offer a _new telos_ of womanhood beyond career mirroring. This is not to lament the rise of female agency—indeed, in tribal and pre-industrial contexts, matrilineal authority often balanced male hierarchy. Rather, the problem is **telos drift**: the absence of a clearly communicable model of what a flourishing woman or man _is_, _for_, or _toward_. --- ## Toward Resolution: Archetype Reconstitution, Not Regression What is needed is not regression to patriarchal structures, but a **civilizational restoration of archetypal function**. - Masculinity is not “toxicity” nor merely an outdated social construct—it is a necessary vector of civilization: a convergence of _direction, containment, sacrifice, and transcendence_. Cultures that suppress this vector collapse into bureaucratic ennui. - Femininity is not passive nor purely domestic—it is a force of _selection, regeneration, interiority, and relational sacredness_. Cultures that commodify or masculinize it dissolve into relational confusion. The postmodern West has not abolished hierarchy; it has merely obscured it under layers of procedural bureaucracy and ideological denial. Men and women continue to compete and desire—but with no coherent telos. This is unsustainable. ![[衤今禾口 - 不见岳 - 2022.png]] A viable future requires: 1. **New prestige economies** that reward generativity, not virality. 2. **Ritual re-entry points** for sexual differentiation that do not pathologize it. 3. **Post-liberal mythologies** that sacralize both lineage and transcendence, without reverting to authoritarianism. 4. **Institutional structures** (guilds, orders, rites, schools) that channel male aggression and female selectivity into **communal flourishing**, not zero-sum rivalry. If we continue to treat humans as economic units and gender as negotiable software, the end is not oppression—but **silence**. A world without mothers and fathers, without sons and daughters, is not liberated—it is post-human. With a mirror held up to a civilization that forgot why it began, perhaps the path will reappear.