201: The Father Figure Is a Lie
A Dispatch from the Post-Patriarchy
There was a time when authority looked like a man in a suit. When leadership meant speaking without listening. When care was outsourced, and control was inherited. That time has ended. We don’t celebrate Father’s Day anymore—not because we don’t love our fathers, but because we finally buried the father figure.
It wasn’t one moment that killed it, but a long, slow reckoning. A reckoning with history. With myth. With the stories we told about strength, discipline, and power.
We once built entire societies around the figure of the patriarch—firm, distant, decisive. He ran companies. He led countries. He disciplined families. And we thanked him for it. Or feared him. Or both.
Now, we live differently.
A World Without the Father Figure
In our classrooms, children learn to co-govern. Not just through mock parliaments, but through real, consequential decisions about shared resources, rules, and repair. In our homes, parenting is no longer tethered to gender roles or fixed hierarchies. Caregiving is a shared responsibility. Emotional literacy is not a luxury—it is a right.
No one rules alone anymore. Authority is always situated within a network of consent, context, and care.
“Every child grows up knowing how to listen, how to co-govern a classroom, and how to resolve conflict without punishment. Authority is no longer concentrated in singular bodies—but is distributed, fluid, and reciprocal.”
We still have leaders, but we don’t elect them for their bravado. We choose them for their capacity to hold space, to facilitate dialogue, to resolve crises without creating new ones. We still have parents, but we no longer assume that the father knows best. Sometimes he does. More often, he learns.
“Authority, like parenting, is not a right—it’s a relationship.”
The father figure was always a performance. A mythology. A placeholder for a deeper hunger—for safety, stability, and love.
He appeared on currency. In war posters. At the head of the table. In pulpits and press conferences. He demanded respect, often confusing it with fear. He preached order while waging violence. He called it strength, but it was detachment. He called it love, but it was possession.
Silvia Federici reminds us that patriarchy did not evolve—it was imposed. A system of control designed to regulate reproduction, labour, and land. The witch hunts were not a cultural panic. They were a strategy: destroy female autonomy, displace communal knowledge, and install the father as sovereign.
“Federici taught us that control over care was the foundation of power. Freire taught us how to dismantle it—with dialogue, not decree.”
The father figure was a lie because it promised security while enforcing obedience. It offered guidance, but only through submission. It allowed men to rule while alienating them from intimacy, vulnerability, and shared responsibility.
“The father figure was invented to justify domination—not nurture. It told men they were in control while alienating them from their own emotions and responsibilities.”
The Collapse of Patriarchal Authority
It began to break down as the crises multiplied. Climate volatility, social fragmentation, mental health epidemics—each revealed the brittle incompetence of the patriarchal order.
Strongmen stumbled. Technocrats flailed. Corporations built on conquest could not navigate the collapse of the very systems they depended on. Authoritarian fathers—whether in homes or in parliaments—had no answers for floods, grief, or isolation. They could punish, but not heal. They could command, but not care.
Paulo Freire’s critique of the “banking model” of education—where knowledge is deposited, not developed—proved prophetic. It was not just pedagogy that failed, but governance. Top-down control creates dependency, not resilience. Without dialogue, without participation, there can be no true authority. Only force.
“We didn’t just reform the family—we reimagined it. We stopped raising sons for power and daughters for compliance. We raised humans for interdependence.”
Now we govern through listening, not lectures. Emotional intelligence and conflict resolution are core civic competencies. Political institutions are measured not by how decisively they act, but by how deeply they reflect the needs and will of their communities.
Fathers still exist, but fatherhood has changed. It is no longer a title of command, but a practice of presence. The best fathers are those who show up with humility, who know when to speak and when to listen, who understand that care is not a gift they give—but a right they support.
And on what used to be Father’s Day, we gather in community to reflect on the legacy of those who broke the mold. The caregivers who challenged domination. The teachers who refused to command. The men who learned to be vulnerable, and in doing so, became powerful.
“Patriarchy didn’t fail because men are weak. It failed because no one should rule alone.”
We buried the father figure not to dishonour fathers, but to liberate them. To free all of us—from the roles we were forced to play, and the myths we mistook for truth.
This is the future of authority: shared, felt, reciprocal. The lie is dead. We live.
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So well said, Jesse. Thank you.
This piece of thinking is huge. It’s the elephant in the room. So thank you.
Patriarchy is what is stopping The World from solving so many issues. At its heart is non-accountability of the male. And it is also what spawns slavery in all its forms, as well as the twin-scourge of Libertarianism / Fascism.
I know many fathers who are part of the new ethic of co-parenting with humility, and I’m heartened by it. But much of the world is still in the grip of patriarchy and its reactive / domineering characteristics.
Let’s keep taking about this, dear men. There are alliances everywhere. It is the ultimate movement.