Narrative Self Café V2: The Paradox of Patriarchy

Sequel to Narrative Self Café: Men Explaining Mansplaining

Characters

• Iain McGilchrist
• Mary Douglas
• Donna Haraway
• Simone Weil

Key Concepts:

• Narrative self
• Patriarchy
• Embodied cognition
• Attention
• Hemispheric lateralization

Scene: “The Café That Thinks”

A quiet room lined with books. The same café as before—Paris and
Oxford folded into one. A chalkboard reads:

“The Paradox of Patriarchy: A conversation about identity, survival, and the stories we become.”

Scene 1 — Opening the Question

McGilchrist:
Thank you for coming. Our topic is the idea that what we call patriarchy
may be less a conspiracy than a self-protective architecture—a
collective version of the narrative self defending coherence under
duress. Let me start with the survival question: Why do societies become rigid?

Douglas:
Because every society must draw boundaries. My work on purity and
danger shows that taboo systems act as the immune system of the social
body. Patriarchy is one such boundary structure, forged under the
pressures of threat. It organizes roles, risks, and responsibilities.

Haraway:
And boundaries become prisons when they forget they are stories.
Patriarchy fossilizes not because it begins badly, but because it
refuses multi-species, multi-perspective relationality. It insists on a
single narrative of order—one sex, one epistemology, one script.

Weil:
In times of fear, societies cling to force. And force, I have argued, behaves like gravity: it pulls everything downward into necessity.
Patriarchy is the triumph of necessity without compassion—a defense of
the social self that threatens the personal soul.