A short reflection on the dissertation I couldn’t finish.

Before I went a little mad and had to leave my PhD program, the dissertation I was writing was called “The Inheritance of Gilgamesh.” It was about the patriarchal systems of thought, perception, and control that originated in ancient Mesopotamia around 3100 BCE and have been serving as scaffolding for Western consciousness ever since.

In looking deeply into systems and our own passing-through of them, I got the sense that we’re running cultural software we didn’t install and mostly can’t see. This is more than “ideas” or “beliefs.” This is the infrastructure supporting all of that, beneath our emotions, our relationships, our sense of what’s possible. It determines what we notice and what remains invisible. What feels natural and what feels transgressive. What counts as a problem and what counts as a solution.

I started studying this because I needed to understand what had happened to me growing up. By my late twenties, I had become what I can only describe as an unwitting implement of some of the worst aspects of these systems. I was making decisions that seemed to come from someone other than me, that I wasn’t present for, that were harmful, and I couldn’t understand why. The cognitive dissonance was crushing. I was trying to reconcile the person I thought I was with the harm I was actually causing, and nothing made sense.

The answer, I eventually discovered, wasn’t just about my individual psychology — though boy-howdy did that factor in — but also about the blending of my own cognition with the systems of thought I’d inherited and internalized without ever questioning them. The tacit agreements to the world around me, if you will.

Somewhere around 3100 BCE in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Uruk, something fundamental shifted in how humans organized themselves and understood the world. We look at it from our own time as “the birthplace of civilization,” but what is that foundation and whose giant shoulders do we claim to stand on?

Through their reinterpretations and reconstructions, the priest caste ritualistically murdered the goddess Ishtar. This was deeper than just mythology and led to an utter transformation to the fabric of society itself. After having been understood as an active force, a partner in creation, the sacred feminine was violently redefined as something to be controlled, possessed, objectified. Nature underwent the same transformation. Instead of sympoietic integration with natural cycles (following the rhythms of the Tigris and Euphrates), society shifted toward interrupting and controlling those cycles for efficient production (irrigation, accounting, expansion).

What emerged was a way of thinking rooted in hierarchy, domination, separation, and control. Machine-like thinking that prioritized economics over relationships. A worldview that saw the world as resource rather than kin.

This is the inheritance we’re still living with. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Code of Hammurabi, the foundations of Western religion and law — all of it emerged from this shift. And we still teach it without examining what that actually means in terms of our relationships with each other, with ourselves, and with nature.

When I use the word “patriarchy,” I’m not just talking about gender dynamics, though that’s part of it. I’m talking about a comprehensive system of hierarchical control that shapes everything:

• How we understand power (as domination rather than cultivation)
• How we relate to nature (as resource to be extracted rather than system to participate in)
• How we solve problems (by breaking them into parts and controlling variables rather than understanding interconnection)
• How we organize society (in rigid hierarchies rather than networks of relationship)
• What we value (conquest, expansion, permanence over process, adaptation, and change)
  

These patterns show up everywhere — in our myths and stories, our architecture, our economic systems, our educational methods, our approaches to everything from agriculture to organizational management. They’re so pervasive that they’re nearly invisible. They feel like “just how things are” rather than “one way things could be.”

The problem is that this way of thinking is unsustainable. It creates the same kinds of harm now that it created then. And trying to solve problems from within this framework keeps reproducing the same patterns.

To be honest, I didn’t originally set out to write this particular dissertation because my egoic self couldn’t let go of where I started, but then my life fell apart in ways that forced me to see the systems I’d been operating within, and I couldn’t with any honesty focus on my previous topic. Through a period of time that felt like having my sense of self completely dismantled and rebuilt, I began to understand that I’d been living according to scripts I’d never chosen. Scripts about ambition, success, masculinity, control, what it meant to be valuable or worthy, including those that led me to my first dissertation topic.

So instead, my dissertation became an attempt to understand these pervasive and overriding socio-personal systems philosophically — to trace them back to their origins, to see how they work, to map the maze I’d been lost in. I used phenomenological analysis of my lived experience, hermeneutic reading of cultural texts from the Epic of Gilgamesh to contemporary mythology, and a feminist/posthumanist lens to see the patterns.

The core question was: How do patriarchal systems of thought, perception, and belief imperceptibly scaffold emotion, action, and behavior in personal and public spheres?

Or more simply: How do these ancient systems shape us without our knowing? How do they determine what we feel, what we do, what we think is possible? And how can we recognize and disengage from them?

I wanted to show that the same worldview that gave rise to unsustainable policies and social structures at the macro level also creates unsustainable conditions at the personal level. The harm isn’t just “out there” in society — it’s in how we relate to ourselves, to each other, to the possibility of living differently.

In the state I was in at the time, I couldn’t wrap my head around it all and manage my life, and I fell away from the program as All But Dissertation (ABD). The same mental health crisis that got me fired from Bio-Rad in March, 2023 made it impossible to continue the program, and I left in April of the same year.

There’s something almost cosmically appropriate about that. I was studying systems that harm people, systems I’d been harmed by, and the process of studying them while still untangling myself from them was too much at the time. The cognitive and emotional load of simultaneously living through trauma, processing it, and analyzing it philosophically proved unsustainable.

The Inheritance of Gilgamesh isn’t just ancient history. It’s the operating system most of us are still running. It’s why organizations struggle with the same dysfunctions. It’s why relationships follow familiar painful patterns. It’s why we keep trying to solve problems with the same thinking that created them.

Understanding this inheritance doesn’t mean we can simply step outside it — we’re soaked in it, it’s in the language we speak and the stories we tell. But we can start to see it. We can recognize when we’re defaulting to hierarchical control instead of sympoietic relationship. When we’re treating something as a resource to extract rather than a system to participate in.

We can choose different stories. Different ways of organizing. Different modes of being.