In my conversation with a psychotherapist and trauma therapist, Jeremy
, we explored how workplace culture has shifted as masculinity was devalued and conflated with toxicity, among many other topics. This change made traits such as direction, assertiveness, hierarchy, and protection seem suspect. As men withdrew from leadership or muted their authority, organisations lost coherence, and women filled the gap, bringing different priorities and sensitivities into the system. What began as inclusion became feminisation where standards of excellence were replaced by feelings.This shift affects both sexes, but women carry much of its visible distortion. Politics and hierarchy have always existed in institutions, but feminisation has changed how they function. Power is maintained through perception rather than principle. Status and belonging are now signalled through the performance of empathy and moral correctness, a value system that both women and men have learned to emulate in order to survive and succeed in these environments.
Many women were trained in rule-based environments where progress depended on performance and meeting the expectations of authority. As those structures were eroded in the name of inclusion and diversity, the emphasis shifted toward process, consensus, and the performance of moral correctness. The loss of structure, combined with the incongruence between what women were conditioned for and the culture they now have to navigate, creates instability. Women, being higher in neuroticism, experience this instability as anxiety and distress, which often manifest as narcissistic behaviour ie. control, silencing, micromanagement, and image management. This behaviour can be defensive and rooted in insecurity or it can be opportunistic and expressed as ambition or self-anointed authority that uses bullying exclusion and moral posturing to maintain control. Feminisation has turned conformity into a survival skill where many men and women participate in the same performance culture to avoid social punishment. Both appear in workplaces that reward the performance of a feminised value system rather than excellence.
Feminisation of institutions has made this outcome predictable. When the masculine frame that maintains order and stability collapses, the culture becomes unstable. Females who rely on structure to regulate uncertainty react more strongly to that instability. Their vigilance and relational control intensify as women try to re-establish predictability in systems that no longer provide it.
Historically, institutions were built by men through cooperation, hierarchy, and accountability. As those frameworks eroded, organisations traded procedural authority for moral performance, relying on perception management to sustain legitimacy. In the current environment, institutional life has been reshaped around optics and the language of moral performance, producing what I called safety theatre, where systems claim to protect and include but amplify insecurity and social monitoring instead.
I’m not saying that I’m nostalgic for patriarchal institutions. However, acting as if the solution is to erase every trace of the masculine has made things worse. Institutions still need the discipline, boundaries, structure, and long range thinking that come more naturally to men alongside the social intelligence and coordination that are more natural for women to bring for systems to function. When one side disappears, the other becomes distorted producing a culture overrun with management and surveillance on one end and paralysis on the other. Everyone is paying for the imbalance in different ways.
This tension between masculine and feminine energies plays out structurally and psychologically. We also spoke about how emotion and cognition reflect the same tension in our institutions. Emotion gives information about what matters while cognition decides what to do with that information. When emotion is silenced workplaces become rigid and disconnected. When emotion leads people lose focus and become reactive. The goal is to give emotion space to be expressed and understood so that people regulate and think clearly. The masculine function turns that energy into plans and boundaries and the feminine function ensures that what is felt and observed informs those plans. Both are necessary yet when either dominates organisations lose coherence and accountability and people lose trust in the institution’s ability to act with integrity.
We hope you enjoy our conversation. We covered a lot of territory that touches on the state of modern institutions, the shifting balance between men and women in leadership and culture, and the deeper psychological forces that shape how we relate to power, stability, and change.
The main themes from our discussion are outlined in the timestamped summaries below.
Thank you
, , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with !For more of Jeremy’s work, I recommend subscribing to his Substack, where he unpacks psychological principles and theories in a way that makes them both accessible and applicable.
Summary of themes we covered
00:00 – 00:11 | Discernment and the need to feel special
The psychology of being chosen and why belonging can override judgment
How online and institutional spaces exploit the desire to feel exceptional
The pull between charisma and wisdom in digital communities
00:11 – 00:21 | Validation and emotional dependency
The rise of validation as a social value across therapy, work, and media
The shift from empathy as containment to empathy as performance
The consequences of dependence on affirmation instead of reflection
00:21 – 00:27 | Interpersonal narcissism and everyday power games
Narcissism as a relational pattern rather than a diagnosis
The subtle power tactics used to manage shame and preserve image
The work of staying grounded amid manipulation and status management
00:29 – 00:37 | The shame, envy and contempt trifecta
Examines the relationship between shame, envy and contempt as a social and emotional system
Shows how envy fuels comparison and contempt sustains superiority
Traces how these emotions generate cycles of resentment and rivalry
00:38 – 00:59 | Masculinity, femininity and institutional imbalance
Looks at institutions becoming emotionally saturated and risk averse
Explores the effects of losing masculine structure and direction
Describes how excessive sentimentality weakens decision making and stability
00:59 – 01:05 | Institutional collapse and the restoration of merit
Outlines the erosion of trust and accountability across institutions
Identifies scapegoating and performance as substitutes for competence
Emphasises the re-establishment of merit and standards as a path to integrity
01:05 – 01:23 | Relational intelligence and institutional trust
Extends the idea of relational intelligence to systems and structures
Explains how reciprocity rather than assumption builds institutional trust
Observes how narcissistic patterns appear in organisations and how to stay grounded within them
01:23 – 01:28 | Egregores and spiritual hunger
Describes the formation of collective belief systems around unmet spiritual needs
Examines belonging without transformation in pseudo-spiritual movements
Highlights discernment as protection against emotional capture
01:28 – 01:31 | Manufactured struggle and moral fatigue
Investigates how comfort culture creates artificial struggle for meaning
Notes the substitution of outrage for genuine growth
Ends with the call to build character and do meaningful work
Hack narcissism and support my work
I believe that a common threat to our individual and collective thriving is an addiction to power and control. This addiction fuels and is fuelled by greed - the desire to accumulate and control resources in social, information (and attention), economic, ecological, geographical and political systems.
While activists focus on fighting macro issues, I believe that activism also needs to focus on the micro issues - the narcissistic traits that pollute relationships between you and I, and between each other, without contributing to existing injustice. It’s not as exciting as fighting the Big Baddies yet hacking, resisting, overriding and deprogramming our tendencies to control others that also manifest as our macro issues is my full-time job.
I’m dedicated to helping people understand all the ways narcissistic traits infiltrate and taint our interpersonal, professional, organisational and political relationships, and provide strategies for narcissism hackers to fight back and find peace.
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