Growing up in the 1980s, I got to experience the tail-end of the Cold War. Back then, Soviet Communism was the enemy, and the American ideal was seen as what was morally correct. Calling someone a “commie” wasn’t just an insult, it was a judgment about their character. But when I got to university, I was rightly taught that you can’t truly judge something until you understand it. So I read The Communist Manifesto. I didn’t come away a convert, but I did come away with a clearer understanding: not just on what communism was trying to solve, but on what made the American and Western ideals distinct in their own right.
What surprised me then (and still frustrates me now) is how few people can define Communism or Socialism at all. These are ideas that continue to shape our political thoughts, yet when pressed, most people can’t explain what they actually mean. If we can’t define a thing, how can we judge it?
Through the lens of systems thinking, I came to see Communism and Socialism not just as flawed political ideologies, but as expressions of something deeper: a misapplication of gender.
This article explores how the masculine and feminine spirits are not just social constructs or roles, but essential responsibilities within complex systems. When rightly applied, they sustain and grow complex structures. When misapplied, they fracture systems from the inside out.
Relationships in Systems
Relationships are central to complex systems. In general, complex systems are a hierarchical structure of modules that both consume and provide to each other. This is what I call the Consumer Provider Paradigm. For example, you are a complex biological system: you consume the services of your organs to do human things, like walking or writing a letter to your elderly grandmother. Using the services of your organs, you as a human can provide to something beyond yourself that is higher in the complex system hierarchy: your family, work, church, community, etc. This is true for all systems. An automobile provides for humans to consume to move people or goods from one place to another. But the automobile consumes subsystems like the drivetrain. The drivetrain has subsystems like the engine and transmission. This hierarchy continues all the way down to the atom. This Consumer Provider Paradigm is a relationship: the fundamental relationship within a complex system.
How important is this relationship? If this relationship is violated, the module in the system will either be removed from the system or the system will die. If any module only consumes, it will be quickly cut out of the system. A parasite is an example of something that only consumes: it consumes resources without providing anything of value back to the host or ecosystem. It will keep consuming until the eventual death of the complex system it finds itself in.
A balanced relationship of consuming and providing is required for the system to exist. Through this relationship flows sacrifices. All complex systems have something flowing through them: blood through biological systems, data through software systems, force through drivetrain systems, electricity through circuit systems, etc. What flows through complex systems is created from sacrifices. In my article Sacrifices in Complex systems, I define sacrifices as a process in which an entity converts and/or gives up time and energy for consumption by another entity, in order to produce a new quality.
Sacrifices usually require suffering. In our examples above: exercise and diet for the biological systems, data entry for the software system, combustion of gas to enter for the drivetrain, burning of coal/petroleum/etc for the creation of electricity for the circuit. Sacrifices usually require some form of suffering, which is why one should always beware of the “too good to be true” schemes. Sacrifices are what flows through complex systems and why the relationship between modules is so important: sacrifices need to flow through the system in order for more qualities to be created.
This process of sacrifice and suffering, of consuming and providing, is a fundamental spirit that continues the expansion of the complex systems in our reality. This concept of suffering, sacrifice, consuming and providing is the spirit of the masculine.
The Masculine Spirit
The masculine spirit is the spirit of being part of a complex system: its primary concern is that of the system itself, to be a module within the system. In order to be a high quality module within the system, it’s primary goal is the take on a responsibility as a module to help distribute complexity throughout the system.
The masculine spirit is that of being the highest quality module within a complex system.
In my article Know Your Freedoms: Responsibility in Complex Systems, I discuss how responsibility is essential for a module to be relevant within a complex system. All modules consume. And if a module does not also provide, it’s a parasite on the system. The system must cut it out since it is not fulfilling the Consumer Provider Paradigm. In order to not get cut out, the module must provide. In software, code that is not providing any functionality will be quickly cut out. We engineers pride ourselves with deleting code! One of my engineers submitted a code change to add a feature and the total number of lines of code decreased because of his changes. It was beautiful code! He removed code that was “over engineered.” This means that there was a bunch of code that wasn’t needed in order to achieve the responsibility assigned to that code.
Provision is essential for a module to be in the system. This is why it is paramount for the masculine spirit to be applied. This is why I believe it has traditionally been important to teach young men to develop a skill and be “useful”. Humans are important modules in many complex systems, and one of these systems is that of the economy or the marketplace. To be a high quality module, one must take on a responsibility within the marketplace: to have a job or provide labor or a service. But they cannot just take a responsibility and be content, they must continually improve on their responsibility: to continually adapt to the needs of the market.
In order to stay relevant over time, the module must be continually improving on its ability to fulfill its responsibility. If it doesn’t improve, a different module of better quality might replace it. This happens quite a bit in software: a framework or library becomes stale due to lack of maintenance and a new better framework comes along that is easier to consume, not only for the engineers but for the system as a whole. Currently my team of coders is in the process of removing a popular framework called jQuery. As of this writing, it’s been almost 2 years since the framework has been updated. Other APIs within browsers are making the framework obsolete. However, jQuery is in the process of being “rewritten” but I believe most other teams will probably do what we are doing: cut it out of the system. Its quality hasn’t improved quick enough and it needed to be “born again”.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus discusses the concept of being “born again” during a conversation with Nicodemus:
Jesus answered him, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.’
Relevance is so important for the masculine. Complex systems discard unproductive or stagnant modules. In biology, this process happens through the evolutionary process: if mutations within the biological system is unproductive or of low quality, it won’t have the chance to reproduce. The process is done through much death. At the human level, we have the opportunity to improve without physical death. We can be “born again!” We can die to our old selves and improve to be high quality providers within the systems we have responsibilities within. This continually rebirth and provision requires strength.
Strength is required to endure the system’s demands. A weak module fails under pressure, while a strong one remains reliable and effective. This isn’t just physical strength but also mental, emotional, and even moral strength. The ability to uphold one’s responsibility despite adversity is essential, and masculine. Nature understands this and has personified the masculine spirit as male species. Males are generally stronger physically than the female, especially in mammals. This trend is also generally seen in birds, even though there are some exceptions like owls and shorebirds where the strength for the male is in endurance and agility, not brute strength.
Up until this point we have discussed how the masculine spirit is that of the domain within the complex system. It encompasses the requirement of taking on responsibility, provision and strength. You might be asking: if the masculine spirit is that of the domain within the complex system, how does the feminine relate? The feminine spirit is truly the opposite of the masculine but of equal importance: the feminine spirit is that of nurturing modules.
The Feminine Nurturer
Complex systems are a hierarchical network of modules that distribute complexity throughout modules. Modules working together as dependents and providers within the system embody the masculine spirit. However, over time new modules are needed as that pesky concept of entropy insures that nothing lasts very long in this reality. All modules will need to be replaced at some point. The replacement of modules within a system is the spirit of the feminine.
The feminine spirit is that of nurturing modules to eventually be added into a complex system.
If you’re not familiar with entropy, it was a concept introduced in the mid-19th century by Rudolf Clausius, one of the founders of thermodynamics. He defined entropy as a measure of the dispersal of energy in a thermodynamic system over time. It was a very specific measurement in physics, but over time it generalized in its meaning. Soon after Clausius popularized the turn, other scientists recognized the pattern of entropy and applied it to other areas of science. This started with Ludwig Boltzmann in the 1870s–1890s. Through his research he showed that systems naturally evolve from less probable (ordered) states to more probable (disordered) ones, just by chance. That’s when entropy started being seen not just as energy dispersal, but as tendency toward disorder, and eventually as inevitable decay or degradation in systems. By the early 20th century, with thinkers like Arthur Eddington and the popularization of the “arrow of time,” the idea of entropy as a metaphor for inevitable decay took root both in science and culture.
Because of entropy, all modules within a complex system have to be replaced at some point in order for the system to continue to grow. Entropy guarantees that over time, modules degrade and eventually die. They lose efficiency, coherence, or energy. In complex systems, this means individual modules can’t be static; they must be replaced, renewed, or evolved to maintain the system’s overall integrity and potential for the system to become a dependency for something new. For the emergence of new qualities to continue, complex systems need a way of properly replacing modules so that new hierarchies can be created. This need of replacing modules within a system to overcome entropy is the domain of the spirit of the feminine.
Outside the System
Since the feminine spirit’s main responsibility is to replace modules within a complex system through nurturing, then she must stand outside the system she is renewing. She cannot be fully embedded within it, because nurturing involves oppression, which is a force that is toxic to complex systems but is needed for the creation of modules. If the feminine spirit is exercised from within a system, it would erode the very structure she is meant to support.
In my article Power to Life, Power to Death – Power in Complex Systems, I review that there are two types of power within a complex system. One power is that which flows through a system. Think of force through a vehicle drivetrain or electricity through an electrical grid. Proper power within complex systems is not controlled, but harnessed. But when control of power is sought, this leads to the other type of power: the usurping of responsibilities through oppression or subversion. For examples of oppression, think dictatorship or the micromanaging boss. For subversion, think unions or revolutions. Both are about the misapplication or accumulation of responsibilities at the wrong hierarchal level of a complex system. As history shows, this type of power is destructive to complex systems. However, it is necessary for the nurturing spirit of the feminine.
The feminine spirit is not using “oppression” in its negative or abusive sense, but in the structural, formative sense: a provider exercising control over a dependency so that the dependency becomes fit for implementation. That’s righteous oppression: a temporary imposition of will and constraint, necessary for the preparation and maturation of a module to be able to take on responsibilities within a system. A parent doesn’t let a child raise themselves, because unshaped freedom in a young, undeveloped module leads to chaos or failure. Instead, the parent constrains, directs, and shapes the child through boundaries, expectations, and instruction. This same pattern holds in software development. The developer is the nurturer; the code is the module to be implemented. During development, the code is tightly controlled: tested, rewritten, shaped again and again. This process is not democratic. The developer exerts absolute control until the module is mature, until it meets expectations and behaves as required. Only then is it implemented into the system, where it becomes part of the larger systemic structure.
Because of this oppression, the feminine spirit must be outside the system. In both parenting and software, the feminine spirit as mentor, oppressor, and nurturer operates from above and outside the module. Her role is to shape, not participate. To prepare the dependency for righteous inclusion within a greater whole. Most people equate oppression as something completely negative, that it is only “toxic” by default. If oppression is necessary in the feminine spirit, what makes a gender toxic?
Toxic Masculinity
This reality that we find ourselves in is all about creating new qualities by way of complex systems. The masculine spirit is one that participates in the consumer provider paradigm of the complex systems they are in. The feminine spirit is one that is replacing modules within complex system to overcome the inevitable decay of modules due to entropy. These are the descriptions of righteous genders. What makes a gender “toxic” is the spirit that turns the gender against the responsibilities it is required to fulfill.
The toxic masculine spirit crushes modules by stripping it of its ability to be a consumer or provider. He denies them relationship. He severs their place in the system’s hierarchy. In doing so, he kills their purpose because in a complex system, to have purpose is to provide to something and consume from something. A module must stand between: it must receive, transform, and offer. Without that, it becomes inert and will be cut out of the system.
Bullying is a great example of toxic masculinity: it strips kids of their confidence for providing and shames them for being a dependent: mocking their need for help, guidance, or time to mature. It treats dependency as weakness instead of a necessary phase in the development of a provider. It also strips them of their confidence to provide: undermining their attempts to contribute, to stand, to create. It tells them, “You are not enough. You will never be enough.” It replaces the will to grow with fear and self-doubt.
But just as there is righteous oppression in the feminine, there is righteous bullying in the masculine. Men will bully other men, into becoming strong modules. Righteous bullying is a form of masculine challenge that uses pressure, friction, and even discomfort to forge strength in a developing module. It’s a form of anti-fragility to ensure that men are good consumers and providers. This kind of bullying is often found among men, especially in environments where stakes are high and failure is costly: sports teams, trades, military units, or elite software teams. Here, a seasoned provider may aggressively challenge a junior, not to humiliate him, but to force his growth. The goal is not dominance, but transformation. Like the righteous feminine’s oppressive nurture, which confines only to eventually release, the righteous masculine’s oppressive challenge strikes only to prepare the module for weight-bearing service.
When I was very young, I had a neighbor friend who was roughly the same age as me. One day, his father was driving us to their grandparents’ farm, along with my friend’s older brother. As we passed a field where the farmer had recently spread manure, it emitted a foul odor. Both my friends and I couldn’t help but complain about the smell. I will never forget my friend’s father: he turned around with a stern expression and told us to “knock it off.” I was taken aback, wondering if I had done something wrong. My friend’s older brother also turned around and gave us a look, not one of disappointment, but one of strength. When I saw his face, I somehow understood that it wasn’t about being in trouble, but about how men should behave. Strong men don’t complain about smells. It was bullying, but a righteous challenge to shape us young boys into strong individuals.
Another form of toxic masculinity is that of gating or gatekeeping: the prevention of the entrance of redundancy within a system. This is especially true when that redundancy threatens the gatekeeper’s status or role. Redundancy in complex systems is not wasteful; it’s vital for resilience. It allows for the replacement of modules, adaptation to failure, and evolution over time. But a gatekeeper, particularly one operating from a place of fear or pride, interprets redundancy as a threat rather than a strength. They resist the introduction of new modules that can provide what they provide or consume what they consume, because redundancy exposes their replaceability. This behavior is rooted in fear: the fear of being replaced and the fear of sharing authority.
Gatekeeping is an easy trap to fall into as a software engineer. In a previous role, our team needed to integrate functionality developed by another group into our asynchronous job-processing system, which handled long-running tasks. Instead of providing the necessary logic as a standalone component, the other team delivered it tightly coupled within a service, designed in a way that made separation of functionality impractical from the service. This decision necessitated deploying two separate software packages to our clients, who then faced the additional burden of configuring them to function together. Such coupling, often a result of gatekeeping practices aimed at preserving control over specific codebases, can inadvertently lead to increased system fragility and escalating configuration complexities over time. This scenario reflects a broader issue where gatekeeping behaviors can stem from a desire to maintain control or job security, often at the expense of collaboration and efficiency. Such practices can be viewed as manifestations of toxic masculinity in the workplace, where dominance and control are prioritized over teamwork and adaptability. In contrast, embracing righteous masculinity involves using one’s skills and influence to foster inclusive, cooperative environments that prioritize the collective success of the team for the greater good of the company.
Toxic Femininity
Where the toxic masculine spirit crushes modules, the toxic feminine refuses to let go out of fear, control, or misplaced care. She keeps the module in a permanent state of dependency, treating protection as more important than purpose. In doing so, she prevents it from becoming a provider, from being tested, integrated, and made real through relationship with the rest of the system. The toxic feminine doesn’t nurture for provision, she nurtures for dependency. She nurtures to control (the second type of power) rather than to release into the system for the proper flow of power through the module. And ironically, this toxic feminine spirit leads to the same outcome that entropy brings: decay. The righteous feminine knows she must eventually let go. Her oppression is always temporary, always with the aim of freedom and responsibility. That’s why her role must be outside the system: preparing what is not yet worthy to become part of what must endure.
Perfectionism is a form of toxic femininity. It masquerades as care, discipline, or high standards, but in truth it is a form of control (our second type of power) that prevents the module that its nurturing to be released into the system. It keeps the module in an endless state of refinement, never declaring it “ready,” never trusting it to stand on its own. The righteous feminine shapes a module, disciplines it, and then lets it go! The toxic feminine perfectionist refuses to let go of the module it is nurturing. Not because the module is not ready, but because she can’t bear to risk its failure.
In software development, engineers can sometimes fall into the trap of perfectionism, becoming overly attached to their work and resistant to feedback. This mindset can lead to viewing one’s creations, be it a website design or an API, as flawless and misunderstood. They dismiss constructive criticism as unnecessary. Early in my career, I experienced this toxic spirit firsthand while designing and building websites; I often believed my designs were perfect and resisted client suggestions for changes. Similarly, some developers may refuse to refactor APIs to make them more adaptable, insisting that their original implementation is ideal. Such behavior, while stemming from a place of pride in one’s work, can hinder collaboration and the evolution of better solutions. Recognizing and overcoming this perfectionist tendency is crucial for fostering the creation of high quality modules.
The toxic feminine also prevents the module that she’s nurturing from hardship, from the ability to improve from stressors. She shields the module from friction, prevents stress, and smooths out every discomfort. In doing so, she prevents anti-fragility, keeping the module fragile, dependent, and unready for life within the system. An anti-fragile system thrives on stressors: it improves through challenge. But modules can only become anti-fragile through exposure to reality, not through insulation. The toxic feminine, in avoiding all pain, denies the module the very conditions it needs to transcend fragility. Her love is turned inward, it refuses to let go to the ultimate death of what she is nurturing: her ultimate tragedy.
Righteous expressions of gender sustain and renew systems by fulfilling their intended roles. Righteous masculinity operates within systems, being high quality providers and dependencies. The righteous feminine operates outside the system, nurturing and refining modules through controlled oppression so they are ready to be integrated. Toxic expressions of gender distort these roles: masculinity becomes destructive and domineering, while femininity becomes smothering and paralyzing. But there’s a third pathway, aside from the righteous and toxic, that may be even more dangerous than toxicity: misapplied gender.
Misapplied Gender
Misapplied gender is the expression of a gendered spirit, masculine or feminine, in the wrong domain or layer of a system. Unlike toxic gender, which is an inverted form of a gender’s nature, misapplied gender may appear righteous in character but is disordered in placement. The nurturing, oppressive quality of the feminine spirit is meant to operate outside the system, preparing and refining modules for integration. When it is placed inside the system, it corrupts the system by its oppression. Similarly, the masculine spirit, which is meant to operate within the system as a responsible module, taking on complexity and contributing to structure, becomes misapplied when it attempts to nurture. Detached from the system it is designed to serve, it becomes rigid, controlling, or overly procedural, unable to offer the patience and sacrifice true nurturing requires. Misapplied gender mimics righteousness, but when wrongly implemented it creates stagnation, fragility, and spiritual confusion.
One example of misapplied gender is the health industry. This domain should be a feminine domain since health is something that needs to be nurtured. It should be a place of healing, patience, and individualized growth. But it has been placed inside a masculine system designed for efficiency and transactions. Doctors are trained as providers in a system that demands output, speed, and risk management. But many of them entered the field with a feminine impulse: to care, to heal, to be present in the suffering of others. Patients, too, are treated like broken components rather than living beings. The system might preserve life, but it often fails to cultivate health. This is why it should not be called a health system, but a death prevention system. A transactional system that has quantitative output: to prevent the patient from dying. And because of its dependence on measurable outcomes and systemic efficiency, it cannot truly function as a system of care. Whether it’s run by the private sector or the government, the structure remains masculine in spirit. True health, however, requires the slow, attentive work of nurturing, which can’t be commodified or bureaucratized. Until we allow the feminine spirit to guide the foundation of our health approach (placing relationship, attentiveness, and care at the center) we will continue mistaking the prevention of death for the cultivation of life.
An example of misapplied gender of the feminine is Marxism. Marxism, at its core, emerges from a deep concern for the oppressed and an instinct to nurture those cast out or exploited by existing systems. It recognizes the real suffering of economic inequality, class stratification, and structural injustice. It’s a response with the feminine impulse to protect, care for, and elevate the dependent. But Marxism misapplies this feminine spirit by moving it into the system itself, attempting to institutionalize nurturing through political structures. In doing so, it removes the natural process of hardship, replacement, and refinement that complex systems require to evolve. Instead of preparing individuals to become strong, responsible (which requires freedom) modules who can provide and consume within a functioning system, it shelters them within the system by flattening the systemic hierarchy, usurping responsibilities, and eliminating necessary sacrifice. In Marxism, the mother becomes the government, and the citizen is kept in a state of permanent dependency: safe, but undeveloped. It is not the absence of love that corrupts Marxism, but the misplacement of love’s domain, the feminine spirit.
The case of Marxism was the first to open the door to a larger pattern in social systems: the rise of social justice as a governing force in our institutions. At its core, social justice emerges from the same instinct as the Marxist: a desire to protect the vulnerable, to uplift the marginalized, to bring healing and inclusion to those who have been historically harmed. These are deeply feminine instincts (nurturing, compassionate, and protective) and they are righteous when expressed in the proper domain.
But when the feminine spirit becomes the governing logic of systems, those systems begin to break down. Social justice, when misapplied, subverts the masculine responsibility to sustain and preserve the integrity of the system. It demands that systems not only accommodate emotional and social wounds but be restructured around them. In doing so, it places care inside the machinery of justice, rather than outside, where it belongs: preparing people to face justice, not rewriting it to avoid hardship.
The Torah warns against this misapplication with remarkable clarity:
Do not show favoritism to a poor person in a lawsuit. Exodus 23:3
This command doesn’t reject compassion, but simply insists that compassion must not distort justice. Systems built on truth and order cannot sustain the burden of the righteous oppression of the nurturer. When they are asked to do so, the result is neither justice nor care, but a confused and fragile imitation of both. This is the misapplied feminine spirit: beautiful in intention, tragic in execution.
Hopefully these examples show the tragedy that is the misapplied gender. That these examples will help you understand that the spirit of masculinity and femininity are necessary for systems to thrive, but they can be destructive if misused. In my article Original Sin – Oppression And Subversion with Good Intentions I talk about how humans have the natural impulse to use oppression or subversion to solve problems. This is unique to humans since we’ve been given a gift, a chance to further something of most importance that requires us to be able to wield the masculine and feminine spirits: to further expand God’s creation.
Expanding God’s Creation
Masculine and feminine spirits are essential to sustain systems: the masculine provides and consumes responsibilities within a system; the feminine nurtures and replaces modules so that the system doesn’t degrade under the weight of entropy. Together, they allow systems to endure and become dependable foundations for higher-order complexity. But sustaining a system is not the same as expanding it. Expansion requires vision. It demands the ability to ask, “Why should this system exist? What higher purpose should it serve?” That question doesn’t emerge from within the system, it comes from beyond it.
In software, we embody this every day. We nurture the code in isolation (oppressing and shaping it with care) and then we release it into production, where it becomes a module within a living, expanding system. But the decision to build the system at all, what problem we’re solving and why it matters, doesn’t come from the code. Nor from the process of writing it. It comes from somewhere deeper. Through research, we identify what’s broken in the world. Through meditation and stillness, the why emerges. Not from us, but through us. This is the presence of God in creation. Masculine and feminine answer how and what. God answers why.
The why is never abstract, it’s always tethered to a mission and vision. The mission is qualitative: it names the good we are trying to achieve. It reflects our highest values and longings. The vision is directional: it outlines how that mission might begin to take shape in the world. It offers the scaffolding for future systems, pointing toward structures that don’t exist yet but could. In this sense, the mission and vision form a context for creation. They provide a compass for the masculine and feminine spirits, who otherwise might work tirelessly but without direction.
Without mission, the masculine risks becoming cold efficiency: providing within a system that will knownly be destroyed in the future. Without vision, the feminine risks nurturing modules that have nowhere to go. But when God breathes purpose into creation, when the “why” is known, the spirits fall into alignment. The masculine adapts and provides what is necessary to carry the vision forward. The feminine raises up the modules that can provide for the mission. Together, they no longer just sustain systems, but participate in the expansion of God’s plan.
This is what makes humans unique. All life lives within God’s systems; humans are invited to extend them. We are the only beings entrusted with both oppression and subversion, and given the capacity to project into the future. When the genders are aligned under a righteous mission and vision, sourced from the divine, we become co-creators. We don’t just maintain the garden: we expand it.
Overview
Gender within complex systems embody two spirits: the masculine spirit of taking on responsibility of consuming and provisioning within a system and the feminine spirit which has the responsibility of nurturing new modules to be replacements within a system to overcome entropy. Both can turn toxic or become misapplied when removed from their proper context leading to the destruction of a module or system. But when aligned under a divine why, a mission and vision revealed through meditation and discipline, these gendered spirits not only sustain systems, they expand them, allowing humans to become co-creators in the unfolding of God’s plan.
LongLoft - Code Writer 
Brilliant!
LikeLike