Why AOC Short-Circuits the Conservative Mind (Why) The Universal Mother is the Antidote to the Authoritarian Father
Here’s a funny and strange thing. Have you noticed how conservatives are helplessly attracted to AOC — utterly beguiled by her, unable to resist her magnetic pull, tumbling into her orbit like flaming meteors — but are also, at the very same time, hopelessly perplexed as to how to deal with her? A little bit like sixth grade boys? Should they insult her, mock her, taunt her, push her down into the sand — or learn from her, admire her, understand her? Why can’t they seem to stop thinking about her, anyways? ARRRGGH! What to do?! Zzzzzt. Bang! That sound you hear is the conservative mind short circuiting. And I think it has a very great deal to teach us about the future.
AOC short circuits the conservative mind because conservatives only see women as virgins and whores — but she is the universal mother. The universal mother is the antidote to the authoritarian father. Conservatives know they need, desperately, the authoritarian father — but they can’t admit they need the universal mother, or else their whole identities, worldviews, ways of thinking would collapse. Zzzzt! Short circuit.
Let me explain what I mean by all that — and you can judge for yourself whether I make sense or not — with a brief caveat, which you can skip if you like. Now, I’m sure that many of you are deeply uncomfortable at the mere mention of some of the above. You might either think it’s fatuous nonsense, or it might even make you angry. One of the ways our culture is deficient right now is that talking seriously about psychology is not allowed — only “data” and “facts”, please, we’re all hyper-masculine rationalists seeking control now. And another is that the post-modern take on gender politics has produced a deeply contradictory stance which many of us believe in, but don’t examine — gender is false, yours doesn’t matter, but mine is also the most important thing in the world. Both these things can’t be true, can they? Aren’t they just another way of expressing the need for authoritarianism, essentially? So let’s talk about the above — if you can put aside your discomfort, which is really just internalized, veiled misogyny (but I’ll come back to that.)
What do I mean by the “universal mother is the antidote to the authoritarian father”? Let’s start with what I don’t mean. All women are mothers, only women can be mothers, women can only be mothers, men are fathers, and so forth. The universal mother is the one who gives birth to all things. I understand it’s voguish these days to say things like “but men can give birth, too!” — but let’s try to ignore how obviously absurd that sounds for a moment, because nobody’s saying they can’t.
The universal mother is the source of renewal, of birth, of creativity, of transformation. She is the Nile river and the first of May. She is the rainforest and the sea. She is the cloud and the rain — but not the air or the mountain. The universal mother is oceanic and endless. The springtime roars through her, and conquers the winter. She nurtures and nourishes the slumbering seed in the dark soil, with the waters of life. She is the source from which all things flow. Go ahead and roll your eyes if you must. People since the beginning of time have needed a universal mother — whether Astarte or Mary. To imagine you are above them is what it always is: hubris. So why have people needed a universal mother in the first place?
We can no more escape our archetypal attachment to the universal mother, as Jung pointed out, than a chick can escape being imprinting motherhood on the first nurturing thing to hold it. We — fragile, little things, lost in a world in which we are helpless — will always have this abiding need to have our three greatest fears soothed away, fears of death, of loneliness and abandonment, of powerlessness and helplessness. Think about — really think about — how great these fears are. They return to haunt us every single night, no matter what we do, don’t they? Why else do we cling desperately to the ones we love, in our little beds? So universal mothers and authoritarian fathers help allay and soothe our deepest, most terrible fears — our primal, existential ones. But they do it in different ways.
The authoritarian father says: if you can go out and be supreme, you will be immortal — at least symbolically, maybe even literally. Make America Great! Build a Reich that lasts a thousand years!! But of course to be supreme, to rise above all the other tribes, you must obey your own most violent man, too — he becomes a king. So the authoritarian father produces patriarchy, heirarchy, tribalism, precisely because he is a system, a form, of domination, control, power. All these things — domination, control, power, or their embodiments, money, possessions, sex, wealth — are just ways to deal with those deep, primal fears. But they don’t work very well, do they? No king has died a happy man. Wearing golden masks in temples haven’t saved anyone from turning into dust, have they?
Universal mothers, in contrast, teach us that if we nourish and transform and nurture, we give birth, and in that act of creativity, those terrible primal fears are transformed, too. Our grief becomes love. Our loneliness becomes intimacy. Our sense of being lost becomes laughter and joy at simply witnessing the miracle of life. Our powerlessness becomes our truest power — to see, to hold, to know.
It’s true that all these things come with a terrible price. If universal motherhood turns grief into love, it also turns that love into more grief — when the child grows up, when the day is done, when death comes. And yet that bargain is still a good one. Because in those moments we are engaging in this profound and delicate act of creation, when we are giving birth, when we are nourishing and nurturing, we are overwhelmed with joy, with beauty, with truth, with grace. Death will come, it’s true — and take everything away from us. In the end, it will do it as gently as a brother — not the way we fear, like a reaper. But at least we can now say we have lived.
(Incidentally, all this is why Jordan Peterson’s reading of women is so skewed. For him, the universal mother is a dangerous thing — a force of chaos. Sure, it can be. The spring melts the frozen ice — who can say which way it will thunder down the mountain. Birth, rebirth, creativity — these things are chaos, it’s true. But chaos is not some dark and terrible force — unless all you really want to begin with is an authoritarian father.)
And yet there are many societies in history which have been so patriarchal that the role of the universal mother was played by men — women were excluded even from this form of primal power, which is their own. Shamans and seers and oracles and priests, doctors and healers and psychologists — in many societies, these were always, and only, men. What happened to women who had any form of primal power — who could, for example, through the power of nurturing and nourishment, seem to attract whole societies, like AOC? They were castigated as witches, and burned at stakes, or condemned as heretics, and stoned, or nobody was allowed to marry them, and so on. All ways to limit the primal power of women, really.
In the paragraph above, I used the words “primal power.” To devalue the idea of the universal mother is a subtle, deeply internalized form of misogny. It’s not true that one must be a woman to have the power to nourish and transform and create and renew — nor that women must do any of that, or even should, or should want to, and especially not that they should ever need to. Please don’t make the unsubtle mistake of thinking that I am calling for an authoritarian father — which is what that is. It is simply that this act of being a woman place you in deep and I’d guess fairly profound communion with mysterious and beautiful and subtle and dangerous aspects of being. The pain, the agony, the heartache, of creating something — which is going to die, just like you are. Men will never really have that — not deep down, as a lived trial, in their very souls, the actual feeling of it, the raw undeniable experience of it, which is probably impossible to put into words. But who needs words when you can create life itself? We can pretend men can live all this — but we are just pretending.
Don’t you think it’s funny that we lionize Botticelli and Picasso as great painters — when it’s the women whom they were painting that still give birth every day? What’s worth more, a person — or a painting of one? So why do we say at this juncture in human history that women should deny the primal power of universal motherhood — if, at least, that’s what they want? Do you see what I mean by “subtly internalized misogyny?” Don’t you think it’s a little convenient even bros these days think women should be sexually liberated — but we are not allowed to celebrate or really respect motherhood? Virgins and whores — but no mothers, please. Feminism these days is too often still a bad bargain with patriarchy — women are only liberated in the precise ways which give it pleasure and strengthen it, and that’s hardly a coincidence.
(There are things only men will really experience, too, which are just as hard to put into words. The universal mother birthes — the authoritarian father must tend to her while she does. He must go out and make sure that no one is attacking her, wounding her, he must provide and protect and so on, all the usual masculine things. The man must compete with other men, not to mention time, dust, mortality, and the weather, to do all that — yet he will never know the agony and grace of life-creation. Again, that’s not to say that women don’t do those things, too, that they shouldn’t, or that they can’t. But it is to say that a female is obviously not a male, and we are a little more foolish these days for denying it — because unless we build societies which can take care of both psychologically, emotionally, relationally, we will build unhealthy ones, which are so single-mindedly devoted to turning everyone, male or female, into authoritarian fathers, they even lack, for example, maternity leave.)
You’d be very wrong to think I’m saying one has to therefore be all man or all woman. In fact, I’m saying the very opposite — mature adults are formed from syntheses of these primal powers. Creativity tempered with courage. Empathy infused with perseverance. Wisdom, which is the fusion of knowledge and one’s own ignorance. Strength, which is the gentleness to lift a broken, wounded thing up — not trample it down. Do you see what I mean? For us, personally, the route to growth is discovering the universal mother and the father within us each. It’s difficult enough — but it’s made all the more difficult when we’re told fathers and mothers are not things worth being at all. They are, my friends. They have always existed and always will.
Now. All that brings me back to AOC, you, and me. Why do our societies feel so out of control? So imbalanced? Like they’re collapsing and crumbling before our very eyes? The reason is very simple, in one way. Too many authoritarian fathers — not enough universal mothers. Societies like American and Britain have long histories of empire building, which reflect cultures of authoritarian fatherhood. It’s no surprise that as the world became a little more powerful, and they became a little less powerful — they retreated into a desperate search for authoritarian fathers. Reagan…Bush…Trump. But Theresa May is Britain’s authoritarian father — not it’s mother — sternly commanding it, threatening it with terrible punishment, cracking the whip over it.
The US and UK are collapsing in no small part because the authoritarian father killed the universal mother. The universal mother died. No one was allowed to mourn her, which was bad. No one was allowed to want to be her, which was worse. And everyone was told she didn’t matter, or never existed, and all we should be are authoritarian fathers, cruel, domineering, status-obsessed, controlling — even if we’re women (which is the criticism many minorities make of white feminism, essentially.) These were grave and fatal mistakes of social psychology. Anytime that you see a society’s allowing it’s authoritarian father to kill off its universal mother — look out to sea, my friends. There is a tsunami coming. Things will collapse, because authoritarian fathers cannot nourish a society — only discipline it. It will and must turn on itself.
America killed off all its universal mothers — whether JFK or MLK or Rosa Parks — and ended up left only with an authoritarian father. That last part happened literally, in Trumpism. Now we are turning on ourselves, aren’t we? Who is there to nourish us? The authoritarian father is literally starving the government as punishment. Do you see what I mean now? As predictable as the tides, my friends. Too many authoritarian fathers — and not enough universal mothers: figures who are focused on renewal, on creation, on nurturing, on nourishment. Hence, these societies have grown profoundly malnourished — emotionally, intellectually, psychologically, relationally. Contrast that with, say, Scandinavia, where universal mothers more or less rule the roost — or even Canada, where Justin Trudeau is basically the soothing, gentle universal mother, only in a suit.
But just because your culture only allows you to respect or want or admire authoritarian fathers doesn’t mean your primal need for a universal mother goes away. In fact, like all repressed needs, it only multiplies, grows, careens out of control. Now you’ll do anything to be nourished. You’ll sell your soul to the lowest bidder. lYou’ll lash out at all women, like incels, when you feel deprived. You’ll keep asking daddy to do something he can’t really do very well: you’re malnourished, remember? You need the most nourishing milk of all. But only the universal mother can really give that to you. Daddy can only punish you. That’s what America and Britain keep doing — and it is a big reason they are failing.
Hence, this strange, bizarre dynamic — conservatives being utterly seduced by AOC, unable to resist her, not quite able to understand why, or what to with her. We can all see how magnetically pulled they are to her — and yet it’s hardly sexual, like it is with the many peroxide blondes they keep on subordinate on Faux News, is it? It’s something entirely, weirdly off-kilter, genuinely different. So what is it? It’s that latent, buried need for a universal mother, which no one can escape — ever. Not matter how deeply they try to hide or bury it with macho fantasies of domination and control (which, incidentally, are all cries for the universal mother. What else do you think all these tough guys are really competing for? Nourishment, duh.)
AOC has turned the tables, seduced conservatives with their own most primal, buried desires — not with sex, not by being a pretty trophy, but by offering genuine nourishment, nurturing, dignity, respect, belonging, meaning, purpose. They can’t resist that — nobody can, in fact. And so they are just drawn to her as anyone else. She is the universal mother, beckoning all into her arms. And yet I’d bet even AOC is probably a little shocked at and overwhelmed by the sheer explosive might of her sudden, newfound powers. She’s being born, right now, too.
The lesson? The universal mother is the antidote to the authoritarian father. Think about it. Reflect on it. Remember it. Treat the bizarre and weird contradictions of post-modern gender theory with the skepticism they deserve — my gender is the most important thing in the world, but yours doesn’t matter at all!! Understand it’s just conservatism and patriarchy in disguise, all too often, all over again — a kind of weak liberation to be sexually desired, to be virgins and whores, but not really existentially valued, as mother-creators, spring-bringers, winter-melters.
Patriarchy can tell us that women don’t matter in many ways. Denying their intelligence, their sociality, their sexuality. Are we liberated because we reclaim just one? Of all these ways, to deny motherhood, I think, is the truest form of misogyny of all. And yet it’s still the one we’re the most comfortable with — isn’t it? Being a sexually liberated millennial: cool. Being a mom: uncool, LOL, mom jeans, mom pants, mom hair, mom car, mom, don’t you even know how to Instagram? God!
But God isn’t dead, mom is. That was the real problem of the 20th century, and it’s becoming an even bigger one in the 21st. The devaluation of motherhood — and all that comes with it, which is the murder of the universal mother — is so deeply ingrained into us we still can’t see it, and its catastrophic effects on our societies. Maybe it’s patriarchy’s final frontier.
https://eand.co/why-aoc-short-circuits-the-conservative-mind-2bd6baa3d7a2
