Do you think you have glory? it’s a strange question but hear me out.

You see, there are people who arrive into the world, carrying a strange light around them. Before they have earned a thing, before they have fought a battle or won a prize, life already seems inclined in their direction. Doors open. Fortune lingers. Their names travel farther than they do. We watch them from a distance and tell ourselves stories about destiny. We say they are gifted. We say they are blessed. Sometimes, if we are being honest, we say something harder: they were chosen. As Prince Zuko from Avatar, the last Airbender observed, some people are born lucky, while others are lucky to be born. Some people have to find the light, discover themselves, go through a journey, battle their fears, while some are born at the finished line. Let’s start out from the only Inheritance everyone receives from their parent, both rich and poor: the a spell casted after birth: the name given to child. Maybe that could explain why some people stand out.

Permit me a small experiment. Let me rename you, Michael. Congratulations, you are Michael now. That single name carries centuries of triumph, power, celebrity, and myth. As a member of this distinguished fraternity, you stand among the likes of the Archangel Michael, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, Michael ‘Mike’ Tyson, Michael Phelps, Michael B. Jordan, and countless other Michaels, living and dead, real and fiction. Yet, not every Michael is remarkable. In fact, I know many who are not. One worked as a janitor at a company where I was employed. To call him extraordinary would be dishonest. Then again, who am I to determine the measure of another man? What I do know is that he did not occupy the same place in my imagination as Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, or Michael, the Archangel, the divine warrior who casted Satan and his demons from heaven.

Perhaps the name Michael is too weighty an example. But whether we admit it or not, the way we see the world is more than who bears the name, it’s about the person beneath. A skyscraper does not look the same from the eyes of a janitor named Michael as it does from those of a CEO named Michael working in the very same building. We do not look at every Michael the same way, the name itself guarantees nothing. We reserve a different gaze for those rare individuals whose lives seem touched by an invisible hand. The sort of people after whom children are named.

My grandfather named me Clinton after the forty-second President of the United States. In doing so, he inadvertently placed me among millions of other Clintons orbiting the gravity of one man. And perhaps that is why I have always been fascinated by the question of favour. Why do some people seem born with an extra measure of it? Why does life appear to lean toward them? The story of Esau and Jacob survives because it speaks to a feeling many of us know too well—the suspicion that someone else received the blessing first. That someone else began the journey already ahead. Like it or not, some Jacobs are just loved by God even before birth.

Contemporary Yoruba has a word for this phenomenon: Ògo. It is usually translated as glory, but glory is too small a translation. Ògo is not the applause that follows labour, nor the reward at the end of endurance. It is the unsettling possibility that grace arrived before effort. That God smiled before you had done anything to deserve it. Christians call it grace, Muslims call it Baraka (Alùbáríkà), Others call it luck. Everyone is in agreement that Life does not distributes its gifts equally.

To describe Ògo in scientific terms is to venture into the science of probability. While there is no universally accepted way to calculate the odds of any one person existing, scientists agree that the chain of events leading to your birth is astronomically unlikely. One often-cited illustration puts the odds at around 1 in 400 trillion, not as a scientific measurement, but as a way of conveying just how extraordinary your existence is. In that sense, all of us are fortunate simply to be alive.

But being alive is only the beginning. What are the odds of becoming a millionaire? Globally, fewer than 1% of people have a net worth of at least one million dollars. The odds of becoming a billionaire are even more staggering. With only about 3,000 billionaires in a world of more than eight billion people, the probability is roughly 1 in 2.7 million. Then there is longevity. Reaching your 100th birthday will be a remarkable feat, only achieved by about 1 in every 10,000 people worldwide. Put together, these numbers reveal the truth: life is already an improbable gift, and many of the achievements we celebrate are statistical outliers. Every millionaire, billionaire, and centenarian is living proof of odds that most people will never beat.

I wish I had a happier ending to this. I don’t. Sometimes the odds fall in your favour. Sometimes they don’t. It is what it is. Perhaps that is the uncomfortable truth about Ògo.

My first encounter with death was in the year 2000. You could say I was blissfully ignorant. Let me explain. I remember that day precisely. It rained water and ice, literally, and I played beneath it with my siblings and cousins, arms stretched wide. My maternal grandfather had been buried that morning. I was sad, briefly, I think. Be that as it may, by evening, I was the happiest boy in the world, playing in the rain. I was three years old. Of course, I did not know any better. As a child, all I wanted was to play and be happy. Grief was something I could not even fathom.

Three years later, my paternal grandmother passed away. I was older now, and I knew Mama, as we fondly called her, and so this time, for the first time, I began to ask where she had gone. During the burial ceremony, I remember doing a bit of reflecting. I was genuinely saddened by her passing. Nevertheless, later that day at the reception, having received that legendary three-peat combination of party jollof rice, fried rice, and salad, I was once again the happiest boy in the world. Not because I had forgotten her. I simply happened to have other matters to attend to. Food, music, dance. I was six, and life was insisting on itself.

Fast forward nine years, and my father passed away. This was different. You could have brought me the finest meal from the finest kitchen in the world and I would not have touched it. Sleep became a place I was afraid to go. I cried for days. I grieved for years. I am still grieving. Rain, music, dance; none of it came this time. Nothing came. Only a crushing weight of silence and despair.

You see, death is different when it hits home. But before it arrives, it warns you. You hear its distant hum long before you see it, but somehow you get distracted and ignore it. It is like a gaping pit that appears far away but keeps widening every day, edging ever closer, coming to swallow us all. And as we continue to cling to life, time swings us back and forth above that widening void. It waits patiently for that one decisive push, and then we fall. I would argue that the haunting, uneasy feeling of waiting to die is more torturous than death itself. But why do we ignore it? Why do we bury our heads in the sand and pretend it is not there? Perhaps, somewhere at the back of our minds, we believe we are immune, or special. We are not.

Three years after my father was buried, I saw the infamous Abubakar Shekau of Boko Haram on television for the first time. The sight of him stirred a dread in me that I still cannot properly name. But hidden within that cloudy dread was a sliver of something else: relief. Relief for my father, my grandmother and my grandfather. At least they do not have to watch this, I thought. At least they have been spared the waiting. For the first time in my life, I became envious of the dead. Twelve years later, the gap that opened in Maiduguri has widened beyond its borders and crept ever closer to the rest of us.

There are three sides to this story. The side that brings the death, the side that receives it, and the side that watches from beneath a blanket, bargaining quietly with God and hoping the distance holds. We all belong to one of these three. The gap does not care which. It is coming. It has always been coming.

What will you do when it comes for you?

I’ll be painfully honest; I am writing this half-asleep. Not the kind that comes before rest, but the other kind, where you are awake and technically functioning yet somehow dimmer than you should be. Like a phone stuck at thirty percent. I have deleted Instagram maybe four times before. I am writing this on the evening of a potential fifth, and I am beginning to suspect the two facts are connected in ways I have not yet fully mapped.

The brain is the only real estate that has ever truly mattered. More than land, more than money, more than lineage. And like all valuable real estate, it does not stay empty. When we arrive into the world it is open, fertile land, and then, the construction begins; family pours the foundation, religion raises the first walls, school installs the windows and decides what view they will face. Culture, media, the internet; they all move in and begin to renovate, constantly, according to their own blueprints. What we believe is real, what we consider possible, what we tolerate, all of it is architecture. Somebody designed it. The question is who, and whose interest they were serving when they picked up the pen.

On the other side of the screen are rooms full of the sharpest minds this generation has produced, whose singular professional purpose is to understand the precise neurological cocktail that will keep me scrolling for twelve more minutes. Seventeen. Forty. They are not evil. That is the part that burns. There is no malice in it, only optimization. I am not being targeted. I am being harvested. And if doom-scrolling truly diminishes something in the quality of my attention, in the clarity of my thought, then the question I cannot stop returning to is: how am I supposed to build anything? How are any of us supposed to? How are we going to compete on a global stage, let alone fix our corner of it?

I believe that those responsible for developing the minds of the younger generation have not taken it seriously, and I do not believe it is an accident. A population that cannot think critically is a population that can be governed easily. A man who has benefited from an unjust system long enough begins to need that system to continue. And so nothing is planted. There is a saying that a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never sit under. I look at what has been planted here, and I know something went wrong at the root.

You could ask: why not just drop the phone, leave social media for a while? But the honest answer is that I needed the distraction, at least at the beginning. There was something I did not want to sit with, and the scroll of doom was always there, always willing. The problem is that the distraction has now gone on so long that I can no longer clearly name what I was running from. And in its place I now have a restlessness I cannot settle, an attention span I cannot reset and a nagging sense that I have been a willing participant in my own diminishment.

My verdict, with whatever brain cells I have left to form one is this: the battle for the mind is the only battle that has ever mattered. Every other fight, economic, spiritual, political, flows from it. I have handed over square footage I cannot fully account for. But I will fight back for it, even though the algorithm knows me better than I know myself, even when the system was designed to keep me distracted, even when it feels like a losing battle. Ehn…Maybe I’ll just delete Instagram again.

/ˌmɛtəkɒɡˈnɪʃn/

And here you go again. This will be your first time putting text to paper this year. I hope it is worth it, because you might as well drop that pen at once. What in the sweet hell has gotten into you, thinking you are a writer now? That dream died a long time ago, remember? Your many procrastinations made sure of that. You stalled long enough for the birth of Artificial Intelligence, and now you may never again find joy in the honest work of your own pen.

Did I strike a nerve?

Alright then, let us examine the evidence. You are twenty-nine years old. Your apartment is embarrassing. You are single, lonely, and dead broke. No fortune. No inheritance. No savings to your name. You have become a man of no consequence, neither in the grand scheme of reality nor in the comforting illusions of fantasy. And once again you believe that pouring your heart out into the public domain will somehow become the therapy you so desperately need.

Wait a minute. You told the lady at work that you do not believe in therapy.

You lied again, did you not?

Yes, I lied. But that was not me speaking. That was my ego. That was you speaking. Truthfully, sometimes I am unsure of my own beliefs. Perhaps I will never be as bright as you. Perhaps I will never amount to anything in this world.

Nevertheless, I do know this. All my life you have given me no recourse. You have dragged me relentlessly through the mud and refused to give me even the smallest measure of credit. I was a grade F student. I failed woefully. I was restless, playful, distracted, and unconcerned with the expectations of others.

Still, I tried. Time and time again, I tried.

You reek of self-pity. Dear boy, your lack of ambition irritates me. Your complacency infuriates me. I loathe your indolence. When will you leverage your youth? When will you carpe diem? When will you make peace with our demons, seek forgiveness from love, release the past that grips your throat, reconcile with our ancestors, and find some measure of solace in this bewildering world?

Then tell me why you make me tussle for control. Are you not supposed to be my partner? The one who stands firmly in my corner?

Listen. Many years ago, I took up this mask and regalia. I perfected the masquerade dance until it became second nature, until the performance itself became indistinguishable from the man beneath it. I tore apart what remained of my fragile heart and swore never again to forgive the past. I took a quiet trip into dreamland, searching for rest, hoping never to be awakened from that comfortable illusion.

All that colourful language will not hide the truth.

You are your own worst enemy.

You wait for perfection before action. You mistake understanding for doing. You are far too impatient to experience the quiet grace that only consistency can produce. Efe, your time is running out. Greatness lingers somewhere on the horizon.

Will you get a grasp of it?

Humility is the gateway to wisdom. You can’t pour new knowledge into a mind that is already convinced it holds all the answers. My journey, especially my search for God, has been a continuous cycle of learning, unlearning, and relearning. A profound sense of peace, a kind of heaven, emerges when you truly grasp how little you know about the universe. I’ve accepted that I don’t have all the answers. As my path grew more complex, I was humbled by the realization that I might never fully grasp the world’s intricacies. All I have is my intuition, some knowledge, and the patience to wait for a deeper understanding that can transform me. I know that in the presence of profound ideas and grand visions, all superficial pursuits quickly lose their appeal. I needed to listen and absorb all the knowledge I could get, filtering it with discretion while staying connected to God. So, I continued to attend Christian meetings and pray to whoever was listening, always keenly aware of both the curse of knowledge and the cost of ignorance.

Nevertheless, in the midst of my struggle, a deeper puzzle emerged: the persistence of evil. I never grappled with its existence; evil, in a way, felt natural. Pain is a fundamental truth of reality, and it’s our primary reaction to evil. What truly kept me awake at night was its encroachment and staying power. To break it down, a common saying is that “proper preparation prevents poor performance.” It’s a testament to how order requires active control, preparation and discipline. Yet, an insidious, opposing force seems to drive the hearts of people toward chaos and their baser instincts. I realized the devil isn’t in the details; evil is clearly visible. It manifests daily through the modern scourge of sexually gratifying content, where a force of pleasure appears in millions of bedrooms at once. Evil is what consumerism and the lure of money do, pulling you into an insatiable pursuit. Evil is the false, ungodly sense of pride and supremacy that gives the “haves” a sense of superiority over the “have-nots.” Evil is violence and bloodshed. I could continue indefinitely listing the different forms of evil that seek to destroy us all. And so I thought, if evil, or rather the Devil, exists, then God must as well, for it requires a truly godly amount of self-control to counter this force.

With a clear concept of the devil as an imaginary force that drives me toward my weaknesses and chaos, it was easy to begin viewing God as the opposite: the very concept of good. I began to see God not as a man in the sky, an arbiter of right and wrong, but as a fundamental force of good in the world that brings order and guides me away from the chaos that seeks to ruin my life. God is the spirit that brings order, that wants me to clean my room and guides me to do the most important things in my life. I therefore decided on something powerful: to align myself with the Highest Good. To me, this means making my thoughts, actions, and decisions consistent with the most ethical, compassionate, and beneficial outcome, not just for myself, but for others and the broader world. This means resisting evil, keeping clean, and clinging to good.

In my effort to fight my demons, I realized I needed more than just willpower; I needed a framework, a story bigger than myself, something that could explain why the battle between order and chaos felt so ancient, so universal. Nothing explains the struggle between the forces of good and evil like the Bible, revealing a higher power that wants to help me create heaven out of this hell we call Earth. Its history, its archetypes, and its timeless characters mirrored my own struggles—my temptations, my victories, and my failures. I began to read the Bible again; this time with a new outlook. It wasn’t just a book of rules; it was a mirror of the human condition, a map of the soul, and a living guide that turned the concept of God into something I could understand, interpret, and relate to.

Then I had a surreal experience that confirmed my new perspective. After a terrible day at work that brought me to tears (a painful moment of helplessness for any man), my sister read me a Bible verse. It was Psalm 73, and it felt as though God knew exactly what I needed to hear. Every word spoke directly to my experience, answering the questions that had haunted me. It was greater than any poetry I had ever heard. However, my sister left me with much more than a Bible chapter.

She brought me to a profound realization: I am not alone in this journey. My struggles are not mine alone to carry, but part of a long fight passed down through generations. My grandfather and father battled the same forces I battle, and the Bible, God, and the order that comes with faith helped them stand firm. What they gave me was not a burden, but a legacy. I realized that I am standing on the shoulders of giants, continuing a struggle that has been fought before me, moving the needle a little further toward enlightenment.

The distinction between good and bad becomes powerfully clear when seen through the lens of the Samurai-inspired concepts of the Warrior and the Gardener. True goodness isn’t impressive when one lacks the capacity for harm; it becomes a compliment only when you possess the skill, strength, and means to inflict damage but consciously choose peace. To put it simply, it is far better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.  A Warrior in a Garden is one who is trained, disciplined, and capable of handling conflict, yet who deliberately chooses to live a quiet, peaceful life. Conversely, a Gardener is a gentle, peace-loving soul lacking the skills or mindset for conflict, and is tragically vulnerable when unexpectedly thrust into danger. Life is inherently unpredictable; peace is never guaranteed, and the most serene garden can transform into a battlefield without warning. This is precisely why it is wiser to prepare for hardship during times of calm than to be caught unprepared when trouble arrives. It is essential to fortify your core and your will to live, for in the war of life, it is always better to be prepared, embodying both the discipline of the warrior and the compassion of the gardener. This is how I arrived at this conclusion.

I am a third-generation Jehovah’s Witness, so you could say my faith is multigenerational. My grandfather made a choice decades ago that would ripple through my life: he embraced this faith as a way to bring order to the chaos of his life. For him, it worked, and he achieved tremendous success during his lifetime. My father inherited the religion, despite many of his eleven siblings choosing other paths. He was a deeply intelligent and practical man, and for his own reasons, he stayed and passed it on to me. However, this article isn’t truly about religion or its ancestral journey, not in the traditional sense. It’s about something far more fundamental: God. For many years, I wrestled with the idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing being who watches over humanity, the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong. My hope is that this piece will bring both me and you, the reader, to a clearer understanding of who God is and the role He plays in our lives.

Many view God as a man in the sky who watches over all; an all-powerful, all-knowing spirit who judges everyone. The first part is absolute rubbish. If God exists, He is certainly not a man, and the expanse of the sky is far too small to contain Him. I’ve heard critics, even scientists such as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, grapple with the question of whether God is all-good or all-powerful. Their argument is simple: if He is both, then He should have prevented tragedies like the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which struck on All Saints’ Day and killed tens of thousands.

I don’t even need to delve into history to question the idea of an all-powerful, all-good God. I only have to look at the criminal organizations in Nigeria, and indeed worldwide, that operate as churches, swindling people out of their money in God’s name. One could also ask why God would permit genocides in Rwanda, Gaza, Congo, or Nazi Germany, or why He watched as Africans were enslaved for four hundred years under the global machinery of the transatlantic slave trade. And I refuse to ignore that, according to the Bible, God Himself commanded the Israelites to commit mass killings. I could continue indefinitely listing the reasons that made me agnostic towards the idea of a God who permits evil and suffering.

Consequently, I strayed from the God I knew, from religion. I became partly nihilistic, searching for other ideas, other explanations. Perhaps science would explain it all. Perhaps there isn’t a God after all; perhaps all there is is pleasure, pain, the human experience, the pursuit of money, the care for self and family, and then death. So I buried myself in work. There were no prayers, no thought of some higher power to help me. It was in this state that I made a grave error, and here it is.

The human mind, I argue, is far too fragile to exist at the top of the food chain without a central core, a value system that drives us to endure, to survive, to produce, and to elevate ourselves and our families. When I partly abandoned God, I lost this very core, the thing that gave me purpose. Money could not replace what belief once gave me; money was never enough, but God was. The corporate world, for all its shiny facades, is too unsophisticated to replace a religious body because it taps into no one’s spirit. My CEO could never replace religious guidance; in fact, I hated corporate politics. They felt hollow compared to the brotherly love I found in religion, where your presence matters and your struggles are regularly met with genuine care. Conversely, my bosses scolded me without hesitation. It was all about meeting KPIs, appealing to clients, and getting to the money. Perhaps I am simply lucky to have grown up in the Jehovah’s Witness faith, as other forms of faith are just as insidious in their search for money. In my faith, we are encouraged to pursue spiritual goals, not wealth. We don’t pay tithes or any form of compulsory fees, only voluntary contributions. This was the life I knew, a stark contrast to the corporate world.

I drifted elsewhere. At one point, I even tried to make history my core, a credit to a very good friend of mine. History imbues you with the need to carpe diem, to seize the moment and create something that will stand the test of time. It rationalizes your struggles, making you believe they will be worth it in the end, giving you the will to survive and achieve success. History permeates everything, and eventually it will be all that remains, yet I came to see that history, too, is not enough. I discovered that something higher than the need to make history had been calling to me.

So, for five years, I was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. I couldn’t go to Christian meetings because I didn’t truly believe in God, and the corporate 9-to-7 was its own kind of hell. Sometimes I think about my grandfather and wonder if I have reverted to the very chaos he avoided by choosing organized religion, or about my father, who made that choice generational. Eventually, I knew I needed to organize and reevaluate my original core: God.

My Search for God: The Good, the Bad & the Godly 2 – Coming Soon

In contemporary discourse, very few topics are as fiercely debated or as grievously misunderstood as the so-called “gender war.” Popular narratives paint a picture of a battlefield where women, newly liberated by modernity, have forsaken tradition, seeking power, validation, and promiscuity with the top echelon of men, or men closer to that class. Meanwhile, men are portrayed either as emasculated “simps” languishing in bitterness or as ruthlessly ambitious aspirants clawing their way into the elusive 1%. And, of course, homosexuals are portrayed as largely free from this rancour. This narrative, while not wholly without basis, is, I argue, a profound misreading of the real conflict at play. The truth is both older and more unsettling: the real gender war is not between men and women. It is, and has always been, a war of men against men.

Understanding this requires us to look beyond contemporary grievances and interrogate the very structures underpinning modernity; structures largely created and maintained by a narrow elite of men. As I will argue, a postmodern lens reveals why our perceptions of this conflict are now more fragmented, distorted, and manipulated than ever before. It is an unfortunate tendency of the human mind to simplify complex phenomena into binaries: good vs. evil, conservative vs. progressive, man vs. woman. The “gender war” discourse is a casualty of this impulse. It has fueled the rise of the “manosphere; controversial figures like Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, Myron Gaines, Sneako, GehGeh and others. Influencers who, depending on one’s view, either guide or bully lost and angry young men (the so-called “incels” and “simps”) on how to become “Top Gs” or alpha males.

This reduction of complex social, economic, technological, and psychological transformations into simple stories of betrayal and victimhood blinds us to the deeper reality. Men blame women for embracing a culture they neither fully created nor fully control, and women, in turn, blame men for failing to “keep up.” Yet history is not simply a story of clear-cut causes and effects. It is the story of systems, structures, and struggles, often invisible to those trapped within them. The structures that have reshaped gender dynamics; from social media algorithms to the omnipresence of pornography, were not the invention of women. They were almost exclusively the creation of a small minority of powerful men. Thus, the real battle lines have been tragically misidentified.

First, let us consider the digital landscape; the great architects of modern social life. Mark Zuckerberg founded and dominates Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp); Twitter (now X) was purchased and reshaped by Elon Musk. Meanwhile, the pornography industry, with its overwhelming ownership, production, and distribution by men, continues to thrive. Each of these platforms has systematically altered human relationships, particularly romantic and sexual dynamics. Instagram, with its emphasis on visual perfection and social status, created an attention economy where a minority of individuals, often women, command the gaze and validation of millions. Tinder and its derivatives weaponized appearance into a cold economic marketplace. Pornography divorced sex from intimacy, commodifying the human body into infinitely consumable images.

None of these forces emerged naturally or neutrally. They were constructed, intentionally or not, by men. Thus, it is a bitter irony that so many young men now rail against women for adapting to a world that a few powerful men designed. The complaint that “women today think they have unlimited options” misses the deeper point: They do; but only because technological systems created by elite men made such illusions possible. We no longer live in reality itself but in a simulated “hyperreality,” where images and symbols take precedence over substance. Social media is the purest expression of this hyperreality. Relationships are mediated not by authentic human connection but by curated personas, filtered photographs, and algorithmically enhanced desirability.

In this simulated world, traditional courtship collapses. The average man is no longer competing within his local village or community; he is competing against an endless stream of digitally enhanced rivals, visible to the woman he admires at the swipe of a finger. The “gender war,” therefore, is not merely a sociological phenomenon; it is the postmodern collapse of relational reality itself. Expectations are no longer grounded in the tangible but in the idealized simulacrum. And crucially, this new reality was architected not by women, but by a handful of extraordinarily powerful men.

To see this war for what it truly is, we must abandon the illusion of solidarity among men. Throughout history, it has not been “men” as a monolith who ruled, but a narrow band of elite men who ruled over other men. The Roman aristocracy, the medieval lords, the industrial magnates of the 19th century, all understood a fundamental principle: the surest way to maintain power is to divide those beneath you. Today’s division is more insidious because it is psychological. The proliferation of pornography, the distortion of social values, and the promotion of hedonistic consumerism are not merely profitable industries, they function, whether by deliberate design or emergent effect, as tools of control.

A man consumed by endless dopamine cycles of pornography, masturbation, lust, envy and despair is not a threat to the status quo. He is pliable and easy going. He buys products he doesn’t need. He remains politically impotent. He blames women, not structures of power, for his suffering. If you were among the top 0.1% of men, would you not prefer it this way? Would you not subtly encourage the conditions that keep other men weakened, distracted, and forever competing for illusions?

Even the modern image of the “strong, independent woman” the corporate feminist, the social media influencer, the hyper-assertive ideologue must be viewed with nuance. At first glance, it appears to represent a seismic shift in gender power. But upon closer inspection, much of it was facilitated and amplified by corporate interests, largely male-dominated, who saw financial advantage in promoting certain narratives. The encouragement of women to prioritize careers over families, for example, was not purely a humanistic endeavour; it may have served to double the labor force, increase tax revenue, and expand consumer markets. Nevertheless, this is not to deny the genuine strides toward gender equality, which are both real and laudable. Nor is it to imply that women are mere passive recipients of change. Women have exercised agency throughout history, from suffrage movements to workplace revolutions to cultural shifts in norms around sexuality and marriage. Yet the broader architecture within which these changes occurred remains, for the most part, male-dominated.

Thus, when we strip away the illusions, the real war comes into focus: It is not men versus women nor is it masculine versus feminine. It is the elite few men versus the vast majority of men.  The conditions and realities of modernity were constructed not to liberate women or enslave men but to secure the continued dominance of those who already sat at the apex of the hierarchy. Women are not the enemy. They are rational actors responding to the incentives and structures presented to them. The tragedy is that countless men, disillusioned and angry, direct their fury at women rather than at the architects of their disenfranchisement. In this sense, the “gender war” is a masterstroke of misdirection; a false war that obscures the real one. What has changed is not the existence of hierarchy, but its mechanisms. What remains is the truth:  The real war has always been, and remains, among men.