If a 5,000 year plus social construct keeps us bound to hierarchy and domination, are we really as “brave and free” as we like to think? It seems like humanity may be stuck with an ancient trope: the domination game. That game has many names, and we now see it in so many guises: conquest (“taking” Greenland or Cuba, invading Ukraine, China dominating the South China Sea) as well as “power politics,” “survival of the fittest,” exploitation, subjugation, annexation, and occupation. Steven Miller, the Trump acolyte leading much of Trump’s domestic policy, may have put it best when talking about U.S. control of Venezuela and Greenland, saying that “power” is what determines who gets what in this world.
In the ancient game of domination, it’s all about trying to control others (and sometimes succeeding in subduing their will to yours). And it’s especially important to men and young boys, who long to be “masters” rather than servants. We men always want to be “the boss.”
Trump, for example, acts like a mob boss, and this somehow appealed to young men in the 2024 election. Jonathan Rauch of The Atlantic has written that Trump’s style of leadership can be summed up in one word that captures all of this: patrimonialism. Scholars Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein, in their book The Assault on the State, argue that we are witnessing a worldwide return to patrimonial authority — where leaders treat the state as a personal possession and governance is essentially corrupted by replacing the rule of law with the rule of one man.
Across the world, in countries as diverse as Hungary, Israel and the U.S., attacks on the modern state and its workforce are intensifying. These attacks are led by self-aggrandizing politicians who attempt to seize control of the state for themselves and their cronies. What replaces the modern state—professional government agencies organized under the rule of law—once it is fatally undermined is an earlier, more destructive form of politics: the rule of men.
Patrimonialism is closely associated with corruption, opportunism, machine politics, underdevelopment, and weak state capacity. Think of Putin, Kim Jung Un, Victor Orban, or anyone who is so dominant in their nation-states that, like King Louis XIV, they could say, “I am the state.” (“L’etat c’est moi.”)
It is hardly coincidence that the voting citizens of many countries have supported “strongmen” who demonstrate a will to power, promising order and prosperity. Young men supported Trump in 2024 by a significant margin, and it appears that many of them saw Trump as the kind of man they wanted to be. NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway coined the phrase “aspirational masculinity” to describe the dynamic — young men didn’t just agree with Trump politically, they saw him as the kind of man they wanted to be.
Trump’s campaign leaned into this heavily, featuring hypermasculine cultural figures like Hulk Hogan, Dana White, and Kid Rock, and placing Trump on podcasts popular with young men like Joe Rogan. In the U.S., the manosphere” phenomenon includes online communities that promote misogyny, anti-feminism, and a narrow view of masculinity, often framing men as victims of societal changes driven by feminism. It includes various groups such as men’s rights activists, incels, and pick-up artists, and has been linked to radicalization and real-world violence against women.
An analysis by Scientific American pointed to hegemonic masculinity — the belief that men must be powerful, bread-winning protectors — as the single strongest predictor of Trump support, even stronger than party affiliation, race, or education. Young white working-class Gen Z men without college degrees voted for Trump at 67%, driven by economic anxiety, feelings of being “unseen,” and social pressures around male identity.
But the “manosphere” phenomenon –– which seeks to beef up male dominance economically and socially –– is not confined to the U.S. 139 million boys remain out of school globally, and suicide claims over 720,000 young lives annually — the third leading cause of death for ages 15–29 worldwide. Across all OECD countries (with only 5 exceptions), women now outpace men in tertiary education — 46% of women vs. 39% of men hold degrees. A King’s College London/Ipsos poll found that 56–57% of Millennial and Gen Z men across surveyed countries said promoting women’s equality “has gone so far that we are discriminating against men.”
But discrimination against women has a long history. A consensus of scholars places the emergence of widespread patriarchal control over money, resources, and women at roughly 5,000 to 10,000 years ago — a relatively recent development in the full arc of human history.
For the overwhelming majority of human existence, societies were not organized around male control of resources. Hunter-gatherer communities were largely egalitarian, focused on fair division of labor and resources, with female leaders and even matrilineal societies existing alongside male-led ones. Since modern Homo sapiens have existed for roughly 200,000–300,000 years, this means patriarchal hierarchy as a dominant global norm occupies is relatively recent.
The shift began with the Neolithic agricultural revolution, starting as early as 12,000 years ago in some regions and around 10,000 BCE. As communities settled, cultivated land, and accumulated surplus food and livestock, those who controlled these resources gained power and influence — and in most cases, those people were men performing physically demanding tasks like plowing and herding. Settlement also increased conflict between groups, reinforcing the value of physical strength and military prowess, further tilting power toward men.
The clearest, best-documented evidence of institutionalized patriarchy — men legally controlling property, women, and inheritance — dates to roughly 5,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, particularly the Sumerian city of Uruk. By around 4000 BCE, men in Sumer had claimed legal ownership and naming rights over children and were gaining legal control over women’s bodies and economic activity.
In her landmark book The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), Gerda Lerner notes that after 3000 B.C.E., “we encounter evidence of warfare on a grand scale. Social systems became rigidly hierarchical, authoritarian, and patriarchal. Women were deprived of the right both to speak their minds and control their bodies. Urukagina’s edict (c. 2300 B.C.E. in Mesopotamia) declared, “If a woman speaks…disrespectfully to a man, that woman’s mouth is crushed with a fired brick.”
A key mechanism that cemented and perpetuated male economic dominance was patrilineal inheritance — passing land, wealth, and livestock through the male line. This created a feedback loop: men needed to control women’s reproduction to ensure heirs were biologically theirs, which in turn required restricting women’s autonomy, mobility, and economic independence. As Lerner’s work suggests, women’s subordination was instrumental in the development of early class hierarchies, not merely a byproduct of them.
To put it in perspective: if modern humans have existed for ~200,000 years, and patriarchy solidified over roughly the last 5,000–10,000 years, then male-dominated hierarchies have characterized only about 3–5% of total human existence. Crucially, research consistently shows this is a social construct, not a biological inevitability — hunter-gatherer evidence, surviving matrilineal societies, and the recent rapid changes in gender relations all underscore that patriarchy emerged under specific material conditions and is not the “natural order” of human social life.
People living in the U.S. like to believe they live in the “land of the free, and the home of the brave.” But no one –– man or young boy, woman or young girl –– is truly free if they have to somehow “fit” into the social construct of patriarchy and its attendant hierarchies; no nation is truly free if it is held in captivity by patrimonialism. All of it is “perfectly legal,” and in fact the laws in the U.S. and many other nations have enshrined patriarchy rather than gender equality. It was all summed up brilliantly by Gerda Lerner in The Creation of Patriarchy.
“No matter how high in the patriarchal social order a woman might rise, she was always controlled by men sexually and reproductively. Every class had two tiers, one for men, and a lower one in the same class for women Power losses by men through submission to a ruling elite was compensated for by power gained over women, children, hired workers, slaves and the land. In this order, it was in the interest of women to seek out a male protector and economic supporter. But the price they paid was sexual servitude undervalued domestic labor, and subordination to their husband in all matters even those once regarded as the domain of women. As a fringe benefit, women were permitted to exploit men and women in races or classes lower than their own.”
Trump, Vance, and Miller et al. want the U.S. to return to “the golden age of America,” but what they mean is a return to those rigid hierarchies. But that kind of rigidity does not make us stronger, freer, or more socially innovative. Equal rights means that both boys and girls must be nurtured in ways that allow their own inner excellence to emerge, and for young men or young women who do not fit “the mold” to be free to explore their own unique talents. If we keep defining male success as the ability to exercise power over others, we will not be living in the land of the free and the home of the brave. We will be re-living an old and tiresome trope of patriarchy and domination. We want to be big and powerful, but on this pale blue dot, in this miraculous, unimaginably large universe, we are only free as servants of God’s will, not to play domination games over others.