Societies Are Strange,

And It Might Be Okay

A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Societies are characterized by patterns of relationships (social relations) between individuals who share a distinctive culture and institutions; a given society may be described as the sum total of such relationships among its constituent of members. In the social sciences, a larger society often exhibits stratification or dominance patterns in subgroups.

Queen Nefertiti, the wife of Pharoah Amenhotep IV, was a relatively meek young woman with a slender face, long neck, and smooth skin. She must have been about four feet, six inches tall, the height of an average Egyptian woman of the time. Growing up in the royal palace at Thebes, probably Amenhotep III’s vizier’s daughter, Nefertiti, was engaged to Amenhotep IV at eleven years old. With her femininity and striking charm, I imagine she looked and spoke like the deified revolutionary, which she in fact, was.

From her depictions, she barely wore clothes, which was normal. Egypt was hot. She also appeared in traditional garb. Sometimes, a clinging gown tied by a girdle with ends falling in front. She sometimes wore a short wig because her head was shaven, so her unusual, tall blue crown fit.

Nefertiti was the right girl at the right time, never trained to lead but eventually possessed tremendous influence in the direction of a great nation. There is evidence to suggest that she was an adherent of the cult of Aten, a sun deity, at an early age. She may have influenced Amenhotep IV’s later decision to abandon polytheism in Egypt in favor of a monotheism centered on Aten. After Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten and assumed the throne of Egypt, Nefertiti ruled with him until she disappeared.

I spent time imagining Nefertiti’s life. I tried to discover how she lived, and if perhaps unconsciously, she ever wanted to hang onto her innocence after being engaged at a young age. Her role in history, as a woman who had her palace, a place where the sun eternally shines, probably led to a fair amount of sorrow and madness.

The bust of Nefertiti from the Ägyptisches Museum Berlin collection, presently in the Neues Museum. During the early years in Thebes, Akhenaten (still known as Amenhotep IV) had several temples erected at Karnak. One of the structures, the Mansion of the Benben (hwt-ben-ben), was dedicated to Nefertiti. In scenes found on the talatat, Nefertiti appears almost twice as often as her husband. She is shown appearing behind her husband the Pharaoh in offering scenes in the role of the queen supporting her husband, but she is also depicted in scenes that would have normally been the prerogative of the king. She is shown smiting the enemy, and captive enemies decorate her throne.

She was probably a character before she was a person. As the modern celebrity may feel, perhaps she was, in a sense, an unfortunate victim of what others have seen about her, wanted her to be and not to be. Her roles vary but are revisions on a singular tune. She was the queen who couldn’t bear her husband a son, the divine wife who helped usher in a new way of worship, the girl framed on tomb walls. Nefertiti identified with her husband’s religious revolution and that, according to Akhenaten’s poetry, he loved her dearly. That must matter.

I was interested in the balance between Nefertiti and Akhenaten, so over the years, I dug. In a way, it’s impossible to discuss Nefertiti without discussing Akhenaten, and vice-versa, which is the proper place between a husband and a wife. Maybe, a man’s job is to preserve his wealth, power, and legacy, and the right woman can help him extend it. Their joint history seems to address something gone wrong, a problem relevant across time and tradition, the call to fix society.

In the small town I live in, college is starting. Driving through downtown, I see things that make me anxious. Fresh-faced college students are moving into various apartment complexes. I see them rummaging through stores around the city. I feel for their hearts. Youth is the season for Romance, their idealism beaming from their faces, how much they don’t know, their bullshit detectors not yet fully formed.

A tunnel built so toads can cross a street safely demonstrates the importance residents of Davis place on the environment and wildlife. Since the 1960s, all subdivisions in Davis have been built with bike lanes, something that helped the city get a “platinum” designation from the League of American Bicyclists. Strong schools, a stable economy and excellent health care attract newcomers. Most Davis residents are politically active.

College is an effort of extremes and allegories, simple and demanding in its devotion to delayed gratification, a place where dead academics and Leftist ideology set the condition. Nevertheless, I can’t help but fantasize about my time in college. I entered bright-eyed, thinking I could change the world just by my youthful vigor alone.

At times, I still feel that way, like Akhenaten, aware of no time, living entirely in the present. Youth is the season to see something wrong with society, bravely and ignorantly declaring yourself competent enough to modify it.

With liberal optimism and Wordsworthian Romanticism, much of college is spent subconsciously knowing that your borrowed time is flowing. Time passes the student, eventually transforming the student into the teacher in an active alchemic process. If you live in any system without an identity, the system will give you one. College is no different; the role of the academic is alluring. These wild secluded scenes…

It’s become common to hear horror stories of powerful men, familiar, swapped like pokemon cards until the specifics fade and general sentiments regarding their behavior become mythological. I remember reading a story about Harvey Weinstein, who bullied Selma Hayek into having a lesbian sex scene in Frida. “I will kill you, don’t think I can’t,” Weinstein once said to Hayek after she rejected his advances. Hollywood and Weinstein, a once happy marriage. Why do powerful men’s abuses of power captivate our attention?

Our heroes and villains illustrate something deep in the subconscious, something repressed. We admire successful and powerful men yet desire for all men to wield power without a strand of psychopathy, the same psychopathy that made them desire power in the first place.

Harvey Weinstein is an American former film producer and convicted sex offender. In October 2017, following sexual abuse allegations dating back to the late 1970s, Weinstein was dismissed from his company and expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. More than 80 women had made allegations against Weinstein by October 31. The allegations sparked the #MeToo social media campaign and many sexual abuse allegations against powerful men around the world; this phenomenon is referred to as the “Weinstein effect”.

W e don’t want to admit it, but we say one thing but believe another about the nature of men and women. Our educated liberal class mastered a lethal separation between men and women, and it has trickled down to becoming a dominant cultural perspective, affecting the uneducated harsher than it does the educated. When you’re a rich woman, you can afford to distance yourself from men. However, when you’re poor, you need a harmonious existence between men and women in your life. So tradition is necessary on the lower rungs of society.

It’s impossible for me to think of Akhenaten and Nefertiti and not consider modernity’s obsession with power jockeying. The passionate personalities in modern dating also tend to believe the opposite sex exists just for happiness’s pursuit or as an interplay between power and submission. Modern relationships embody the endless gorge between what we say we want, what we secretly desire and publicly admire, the distance between the people we marry and love.

I believe power and purpose stem from men and women playing their roles, the fact that joy, love, and fanciful feelings are not on the list of relationship requirements that lead to long-term marital success. My perspective of modern dating is, in short, a traditional and possibly lonely one, unpopular or even cold.

In the United States and the West at large, we are in a subconscious misalignment resulting from feminism and the abuse of masculine power. We’re all responsible. As it happens, I am at peace with the current moment of subconscious misalignment, those who relish the hookup culture. Those whose lust for love itself possess a fear of commitment so acute they drown in the pursuit of a feeling. I know something about a fear of commitment myself, appreciating the elaborate systems some people contrive to fill the voids in their hearts, empathic with all the medicines of the masses, whether they come in the form of alcohol and drugs or as hard to comprehend as astrology, history, and religion.

A “house altars” depicting Akhenaten, Nefertiti and three of their daughters; limestone; New Kingdom, Amarna period, 18th dynasty; c. 1350 BC. Collection: Ägyptisches Museum Berlin, Inv. 14145

For Akenhaten, taking society from polytheism to the world’s first monotheistic religion nearly ruined his kingdom. All societies fluctuate and decay. Akhenaten’s movement lacked followers who shared his convictions so that, when he died, his family and the priests and officials who had served him jettisoned Atenism and restored the pantheon of deities, reopening closed temples. Aten’s temples were demolished, the great city Akhetaten was deserted, and the various hymns to Aten that expressed the theology of his religion remained sad memories on the walls of tombs. Not one of these has been found in later writing to indicate that a scriptural tradition emerged. Institutions rot.

If I forced myself, I could blame Nefertiti for the doom of Akhenaten’s rule. She, after all, was an adherent to the sun cult first. As I mentioned earlier, it’s very believable that she got her husband to convert. Together, Akhenaten and Nefertiti demolished old traditions in the hopes of establishing a new one. The people of Egypt built resentment for their Pharoah while he was alive, eventually reestablishing the old way once he died.

The futurity of his vision, liberalizing the traditional structure of worship, from a pantheon of multiple deities to one, was his attempt to turn chaos into order, mirroring the role of a husband to a wife, or a wife to his home, even if the house is an entire society.

Akhenaten’s transformation of religion brought with it radical changes in artistic conventions. Departing from the idealized images of earlier pharaohs, Akhenaten is sometimes depicted with feminine hips and exaggerated features. Early images of Nefertiti show a stereotypical young woman, but in later ones she is a near mirror image of Akhenaten. Her final depictions reveal a regal but realistic figure. On the walls of tombs and temples built during Akhenaten’s reign Nefertiti is depicted alongside her husband with a frequency seen for no other Egyptian queen

What if society taught us the principles of dating? Providing a template for courtship might not be completely compatible with establishing a “free society”; instead, it would be considered, in the West, fascistic. Imagine your teacher giving instruction on how to choose a suitable mate, divvying gendered roles and responsibilities.

“Lucy, you can’t date Connor because he’ll never build you a palace, and he doesn’t know the words to Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey.”

People are entitled to deny what might be good for them, though. Society today is anti-tradition, seeking to question all institutions which benefitted our ancestors. I’m taking pains today to say that society is missing meaning, sections of it failing to perceive the practical utility of tradition. Tradition can be thought of as an insurance plan, a way of making sure we don’t stray too far into confusion and chaos.

An outgrowth of tradition is the family — the family is the atom of society. Although we may have only a superficial understanding of what it means to be married, marriage comes pretty naturally to some people. Our children are suffering for those to whom wedding doesn’t come naturally, the suffering coming in the form of hardly articulating what they’re seeking from their gendered opposite.

The conscious mind only gently grazes these concepts because the unknown binds our actual needs in our mind’s dark recesses. We have long-buried our existing drives, continuing to seek in the outside world the stability we seek internally. Life’s cosmic component supersedes religion and science yet naturally involves both. All of its cosmic potentials are psychic. Not psychic like fortune tellers and witches, but a reality where history possesses an intuitive, rhythmic, poetic charm. History implies a narrative, but it’s more like a song we sing: a divine rhythm humming humankind’s story, positioning figures in front of the choir to sing individual verses throughout time immemorial.

I didn’t learn about Nefertiti and Akhenaten. I remembered them. Historical figures intrigue me because their lives say something about our nature. As Freud said,

“The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it.”

Our societal differences fizz forth in astrology and religion as society moves further away from organized religion, more and more each day falling in love with the freedom of astrology, breaking down the rigidity of tradition that religious organizations have as a central characteristic.

On January 6, 2021, a mob of supporters of President Donald Trump attacked the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. They sought to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election by disrupting the joint session of Congress assembled to count electoral votes that would formalize President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. The Capitol Complex was locked down and lawmakers and staff were evacuated, while rioters assaulted law enforcement officers and vandalized the building for several hours. Five people died either shortly before, during, or following the event: one was shot by Capitol Police, another died of a drug overdose, and three succumbed to natural causes

W e see the same dichotomy in politics. Conservative or Liberal represent the past and the future, respectively. Yet, both are essential aspects of the same coin, necessary to materialize progress, to keep societies handsome. Fundamentally speaking, conservatives will always approach reality with facts, using history to protect the future from potential threats. Liberals, however, use feelings to imagine the future, using the past to determine what not to bring into the future. Thus, two fundamentally separate passageways define reality.

Being alive has three chaotic qualities that often converge: randomness, uncertainty, and suffering. To navigate this trifecta of terror, most people encase themselves in an ideology, creating a sense of right and wrong from that place. However, society has to teach us how to fit meaningfully within it. So maybe, the answer is, participate in no traditions until you can recognize how you intentionally work within its infrastructure.

The Bible is a collection of religious texts, writings, or scriptures sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, Islam, Rastafari, and many other faiths. It appears in the form of an anthology, a compilation of texts of a variety of forms that are all linked by the belief that they are collectively revelations of God. These texts include theologically-focused historical accounts, hymns, prayers, proverbs, parables, didactic letters, admonitions, essays, poetry, and prophecies. Believers also generally consider the Bible to be a product of divine inspiration.

The Bible has a couple of exciting ideas. But, kind of how I’m asking whether society will ever remember the importance of tradition, I also have to raise whether we remember love, or is it a primal instinct derived from archetypes and cosmic, gendered reactions.

In the Bible, our ancestors used the love of God to articulate the nature of love itself, giving love a divine, transcendent principle in the hopes of having its complexities absorbed into a societal ethos. 1 John 4:7–8 says,

“7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

By attributing love’s source to God, they learned to love something without expecting anything in return, removing attachment from an exchange of hopes.

Allowing for the possibility of love’s boon, yet not to despair the boon’s absence. Loving God operates on the presupposition that you must know that the object of your passion cherishes you, whether or not you see the return manifested in every given moment.

Love encompasses a range of strong and positive emotional and mental states, from the most sublime virtue or good habit, the deepest interpersonal affection, to the simplest pleasure. An example of this range of meanings is that the love of a mother differs from the love of a spouse, which differs from the love of food. Most commonly, love refers to a feeling of a strong attraction and emotional attachment.

Love and romance’s hunt have nearly coopted religion’s position in society, turning dating into the new church, where there are less meaningful unions and more wastes of time. There’s an aspirational quality to love because, if love is a transcendent principle like the Bible decries — the societal inundation of true love, through cinema and media in general, plays its part in bringing courtship and love down to the domain of man, of course.

Whether or not we’re alive to attain true love is questionable, but reality’s most dominant characteristic, beyond pain and suffering, terror and confusion, is the capacity to experience a meaningful bond.

The universe manifests love in the masculine expressions of rules, logic, rigidity, tradition, culture, and feminine expressions of openness, intuition, nature, change, and fluidity. When embarking upon love’s journey, these two expressions jostle for supremacy, making finding an adequate representation of love an inherently divine enterprise. Nothing is easy about love because it’s intertwining opposites.

I hear quite a bit of this man named Jesus Christ. What doesn’t get spoken about much is his last breath on the cross, where he cries out to God, his Father, asking, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” which translates to “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” The divine Son utters a statement of doubt toward his Father, presenting a rather a human response to suffering. Doubt. Even Jesus Christ doubted whether or not his Father truly loved him, so we have no chance. But maybe a universal truism about the nature of love is that though the potential for happiness exists within it, we can define love by its potential for pain and suffering, as well.

Feeling forsaken by someone who loves us is expected, abandonment chronicling the story of love. Perishing before your partner is an unspoken covenant you’ve entered once you decide to marry someone. So naturally, entering into love comes with the potential for abandonment. That’s the bargain.

A human being can’t construct reality entirely alone, values coming from the soup of shared experience. So, first, we need to figure out what the individual within us values, and ironically, the idea of the individual starts with a division. Journeying into someone else means traveling into yourself, but often when we think about love, it’s discussed as a portal to receive sex and cuddles, but there’s more to it beneath the surface.

When a man is prepared to love, he relies upon his partner, telling them secrets about himself and the people he holds dear. I believe the stigma of “men don’t talk” is an evolutionary holdover from our prehistoric, tribal ancestors. If our male ancestors trusted the wrong partner, divulging vulnerabilities meant death. If you’re a man, no, a woman won’t kill you, but she could destroy your reputation, your legacy. Likewise, loving the wrong man for a woman shares deadly consequences.

Romantic love has something like three components: a love of self, the other person, and a love of the connection between you and your partner. Ironically, in a society that increasingly loves to praise love, we grow in anti-social behavior, narcissism, and sociopathy, traits that I think are anti-love. We do not like sharing in this new society; the fantasy we are afraid to say is over, is over. As a result, love’s romantic center cannot hold. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. Our true feminine, the balance, disappears — the inner Nefertiti abandoned.