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4:46

(In »Living religion versus deadly alienation«)

According to Plato, the soul is allied with the higher world of ideas, while the body must be content with being connected to the lower-tier, corruptible material world. The soul never changes; it is the constant which stands firm at the centre of the body’s capricious emotional turbulence. From this dualism, all of human existence is then divided up into the categories eternal ideas and corruptible matter. This dualist escapism is a perfect fit as the ideology of patriarchy: the man is calm, balanced and constant, just like the soul, while the woman is reduced to an irrational and volatile emotional tempest, just like the body. Power must therefore fall to the man who, by definition, is of course of a higher standing, and the woman must be subordinated to him in order for society not to collapse under the pressure of internal instability, all in accordance with dualism’s self-perpetuating, circular reasoning.