Patriarchy: The Original Sin

Patriarchy and Fascism: The Old Hierarchy in the New Code

We often treat fascism as a 20th-century aberration. But its logic—division, domination, and moralized hierarchy—is far older. Its blueprint is deeply embedded in one of the most ancient and persistent social structures: patriarchy.

Patriarchy is not simply about male dominance—it is a worldview that sorts existence into strict dualisms: male and female, right and wrong, pure and impure, worthy and unworthy. Power isn’t shared—it’s ranked. Authority becomes sacred, obedience becomes virtue, and deviation becomes disease. In doing so, patriarchy reproduces and normalizes the very mindset fascism later amplifies.

And nowhere is this logic more effectively rehearsed than in what Deleuze and Guattari call the Holy Family: father, mother, child—a triangle of control, submission and guilt.

This structure places transgression at the heart of identity. The child, like Adam, is marked by forbidden desire. The father becomes the arbiter of law. And the family becomes sacred—not because it frees us, but because it teaches us to obey.

The Binary Machine: Father, Law, and Division

Patriarchy is more than a social order—it is a metaphysical operating system. It divides the world into polarized categories: order versus chaos, reason versus emotion, strength versus weakness. These binaries are not neutral—they are ranked. One term is elevated; the other devalued.

Within this logic, the father becomes the embodiment of law, clarity, and command. The mother becomes a symbol of unruly nature, flux, and danger.

From the household to the state, this logic migrates—colonizing our sciences, our laws, our religions, our stories.
It shapes how civilizations define truth, enforce norms, distribute power—
and how we construct gender, culture, identity, even the self.

The Family Factory: Oedipus and Internalized Control

Freud’s Oedipus complex, as critiqued by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, reveals how the family operates as the first factory of repression—the original micro-unit of fascism. It is within the Holy Family that desire is first de-coded, regulated, and moralized. Here, the child learns that love is conditional, authority is sacred, and transgression invites punishment.

To be loved, they must obey.
To be seen, they must suppress.
To belong, they must conform.

In this structure, the father is not just a parent—he is the first tyrant. The child is not simply learning to live—they are learning to submit.

The family is the delegated agent of psychic repression… it offers a displaced image of desiring-production that represents the repressed as incestuous familial drives… a diversion where the whole of psychoanalysis goes astray.

Deleuze & Guattari

From Repression to Rule: Fascism as the Scaling of Submission

Fascism is not merely a political ideology—it is the metastasis of the Oedipal trap. It takes the psychic wound of the obedient child and turns it into a national narrative.

The Leader replaces the Father. The Nation replaces the Family. The Other becomes the corruption that must be purged for purity to be restored.

Fascism doesn’t descend suddenly—it grows slowly, seeded in the psyche and watered by obedience. It does not need crisis to begin. It needs a population already trained to suppress desire, defer to authority, and fear difference.

There is fascism in all of us… the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.

Michel Foucault

Fascism doesn’t invent repression—it organizes it. It redirects wounded desire into obedience, turns fear into law, and rebrands submission as virtue.

Desire does not threaten a society because it is a desire to sleep with the mother, but because it is revolutionary… Desire is explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors.

Deleuze & Guattari

Fascism glorifies masculinity, discipline, and domination. It fetishizes uniforms, rituals, and hierarchies. It is patriarchy’s dream at scale—a world where the father’s law is total, where ambiguity is purged, and where everyone knows their place.

Original Sin: Patriarchy as Power’s Prototype

Before fascism raises flags and builds states, it rehearses its logic in the family home. Patriarchy is a system built on binaries, on the naturalization of hierarchy, and on the moralization of obedience.

It teaches that some are born to lead, others to follow. That masculinity is authority, and femininity is submission. That “the other” is danger, and purity is salvation.

Fascism emerges from patriarchy. The family was the prototype. The father’s word, the template for the state. Patriarchy instills a worldview where power is virtue, domination is love, and emotional suppression is rendered sacred.

This is why fascism always returns to the family. Why it clings to gender roles, obsesses over “traditional values,” and fears softness, queerness, and care. Because patriarchy isn’t just compatible with fascism.

It is its origin story.

If patriarchy is the structure, mythology is its voice. The stories we inherit shape what we build—and what we destroy.

In the next piece, we trace how an ancient myth of collapse—Atlantis—was twisted into a blueprint for domination. From Bacon’s New Atlantis to Silicon Valley’s digital empires, the dream of control, separation, and superiority lives on.

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Literature Index

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.