Defeating the hydra
This was originally written as a talk for the Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges (EAUC) community of practice in January 2026. Since then, I’ve heard that the Zapatistas (certainly amongst many others) have long used the metaphor of the hydra in a similar way - so I think I’m in good company!
Across climate breakdown, inequality and political polarisation (to name but a few issues), we are often fighting symptoms rather than causes. Can the metaphor of the hydra help us better understand the layered interplay between personal and social unconscious patterning that makes it so hard to change the system? And could centring care within our movements help us heal ourselves, our relationships, and society — while reclaiming a life- and love-centred culture?
Care is such a familiar part of being human that we rarely stop to think about it: it goes without question that we care for the people and places that are important to us. We can care for larger things too, like other species, the environment or ‘the planet’ - or more abstract things, like fairness or responsibility. Care at whatever level is a fundamental feature of our humanity.
But within systems of domination like patriarchy and capitalism, the importance of care is often challenged.
To understand why care can be problematic - and also so crucial when we’re thinking about meaningful social change - we need to look a bit deeper, into the unconscious wetlandsmarshlands of our inner lives and the shared assumptions that underlie social structures.
The helpful Hydra
The hydra of mythology was a terrible monster, hiding in a swamp and terrorising the local people. As one of his 12 labours, the hero Heracles was instructed to destroy the monster, but each time he cut off one of its heads, two more would grow from the stump.
Using the hydra as a metaphor, we could see our collective unconscious as the wetlands, and the monstrous, many-headed hydra as the harms of the system we have been born into and live entangled with. The heads of this hydra include patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy and ableism - in fact there’s a head for each of the harms this system has given rise to.
So the metaphor is helpful in several ways. It gives us a concise way of speaking about our complex, multi-faceted predicament as a monster that strikes out in many directions at once. It highlights the ultimate impossibility of trying to defeat the hydra head by head. And finally, and maybe most helpfully, it helps us talk more easily about the shared root cause of all these harms - the body of the hydra. Using it, we can simultaneously name the interconnectedness of all the harms, question the strategy of trying to destroy it one head at a time and identify a shared origin that we could instead target our collective attention on.
Trauma, power, and institutions
Can we retrace the metaphor and find the real world match for a hidden entity giving rise to all kinds of unwanted but hard to solve issues in the world? On a personal level, the concept of trauma - or more exactly, of traumatic patterning, provides a good match. Traumatic patterns are brainstem and nervous system activations, protective reflexes designed to get us out of life threatening situations. By their nature, they are unconscious and reflexive - they happen without our conscious thought or even awareness. They can cause all kinds of difficulties in our lives because once they are set in our nervous systems (usually in early childhood, when many things can feel life-threatening), they can be activated just by reminders of those early experiences, and mean that in a triggering situation, we’re suddenly no longer operating from our reasonable, adult consciousness, but from that of a frightened child (even if we have learned to mask that with an adult-seeming facade).
One of the most fundamental traumatic patterns that is embedded in many of us is obedience to those deemed in some way ‘superior’ to us. Our fundamental approach to life may mean that we tend to acquiesce to that or react against it (by either rebelling or assuming command), but it is integral to understanding why things are as they are today.
Because we are social animals, our traumatic patterning isn’t just individual - it is also socialised: large scale issues like war, poverty or patriarchal gender socialisation impact on many people’s lives all at once, ultimately giving birth to and creating feedback loops within cultures that develop out of these shared experiences. In personal therapy, we might work on the trauma we inherited or were impacted by in our families of origin, but because we have few if any models for conscious collective emotional work on these patterns, which have built up over many generations, they have grown deep roots within our social structures and institutions - roots that have become so buried in our cultural unconscious, we just assume: this is how things have to be.
To put it simply: traumatic patterns, whether individual or social, get activated when we feel threatened. In patriarchal societies like ours, that are underpinned by an ethos of domination, the ones that form the body of the hydra cause us to seek safety in taking power over others, or in giving our power away (which I call the ‘power over / under’, or ‘command / obedience’ dynamic’).
You could see this activation around threat, which leads to a power-over or power-under reflexive response as a kind of dance. Very often one person will start to do the steps of the ‘power-over’ or command dance - inviting the other to do the corresponding ‘power-under’ or obedience steps.
These dance steps go together: the command steps don’t run smoothly unless the intended partner ‘agrees’ to do the obedience ones: disagreeing leads to a confrontation and a power struggle. We’ve all been taught the steps of this power-over-and-under dance since we were very young, through (mostly unintentional) authoritarian parenting, schooling and in most of our workplaces. Because we learn this so early (it starts in early development, when we are forming foundational psychological patterns), the learning was implicit, rather than explicit (so we were much less likely to question the premise) and for so long (it continued over most of our experience of being parented and educated and in some cases, well into our working lives), it lives deep in our unconscious, ready to be enacted (often, because of all the above, without conscious thought) whenever it is ‘called’ by the actions of others, or simply the situation or structure we are in.
Because this ‘dance’ isn’t just interpersonal, it also happens in more static, structural forms: we could use a mainstream school as an example of a power structure that invites those within it to the command / obedience dance. The curriculum is set, usually by the Educational Authority, giving teachers some, but often very little real choice in deciding how to help the children learn. Class numbers are usually high, so that a lot of the teachers' time is taken with ‘crowd control’ rather than being able to focus on the learning needs of each child. Teachers aren’t trusted to be able to do their jobs without submitting debilitating amounts of paperwork. Attendance is compulsory, children are not free to make other choices about how to spend their time, and in most schools, beyond occasional small concessions, they also have little to no real agency to decide on what they learn and when.
All of these features can be seen as reflexive, unconscious attempts to maintain control and ensure that power is distributed unevenly between those who study, work in and oversee the school. One way to see how conditioned all of this is, is to think about what would happen in any of these examples, if the compliant partner were to refuse to comply. I think in most schools, discipline would be immediate and expulsion would quickly follow if the power struggle continued. Of course this is not to say that we don’t need any agreements on how we will behave with one another, just that the ones we have all tend to follow a very similar (control / obedience) pattern - and others, like peer-to-peer or relational-trust based structures are much less likely to be part of our institutions.
We are so habituated to this way of doing things that we mostly don’t even notice hierarchical, non-democratic structures like these - whether in education, health, or any number of other areas of life - we just accept this is how things are, because they are part of familiar social systems that have been traumatically imposed and endlessly reinforced - and which intimately connect to traumatic patterning in our personal unconscious.
It is this rich, layered, interplay between unconscious personal and social patterning that makes the hydra so incredibly hard to defeat. But if we do manage to become conscious of and process the trauma, it’s absolutely possible to process and be free of it.
Why care both sustains and threatens the system
All this relates to the issue of care, because when we get caught up in the dance of power-over-and-under, our natural, unconditioned desire to care for one another is compromised: we’re replicating, even if just in a small, momentary way, a system that by ruthless exploitation and extraction undermines our own and other’s humanity. And because it’s almost impossible not to participate in the system, or in the dance, we often find ourselves colluding with it - which can be very demoralising and can defuse our sense that we can - or are worthy to - do anything to change it.
Many of us are exhausted. We expect too much of ourselves, and our employers often expect too much of us as well. Many of us also have caring responsibilities at home or in our communities. At the same time, we carry constant awareness of environmental, national and international crises, while spending more and more of our lives in front of screens. Together these make deep rest increasingly difficult.
The hydra belittles our care, but also relies on it for its survival.
Without any human care, this system would have disintegrated long ago. By making it bearable through caring for one another within and around it, we soften its worst excesses, enabling it to continue - at least for now. Caring is the antithesis of the hydra, and of the traumatic patterning that caused and fuels it. But if our individualised care is exhausting and only mitigates the harms of the hydra, how do we actually change our shared situation?
Towards radical, collective care
It’s only through radical, collective care that we can truly make the social changes we’re so desperate to see. We see glimpses of how this could be in unions, mutual aid networks, worker cooperatives, land commons, and trauma-informed organising spaces - as well as in traditional indigenous ways of life and the collectivity of the Kurdish Freedom Movement. But to weave this ever more firmly and effectively into the fabric of our lives we have to be willing to take the social and emotional risks entailed by no longer agreeing to participate in the power-over/power-under dance and instead doing the work of creating viable, relational alternatives to the system we want to leave.
This issue has never been more important and urgent: we have catastrophically failed to stop runaway climate change, we’ve likely failed to stop cascading collapses of biodiversity, we’re failing in many places to stop the rise of the far right with its siren song of strong-man politics and knee-jerk kicking down that draws so potently on pre-existing internal and external traumatic patterning.
It’s important to remember here that at no point did the majority of people willingly opt into this system - quite the reverse.
Our ancestors did not willingly or easily give up their deeply sustainable, traditional ways of life. Capitalism was built on the forced dispossession of people from their lands - and the deliberate creation of poverty to overcome the so-called ‘idleness’ that their traditional lifestyles enabled. The trauma of the ruthless violence used to achieve this - and which continues, often in less obvious ways, to be used to keep us utterly dependant on the system, has led to our being willing to live with the unacceptable: homelessness, hunger, war, social stratification, poverty, wage slavery, endless extraction and pollution, continual competition and so on… and on... We are taught to despise the past and think of the physical comfort and convenience that capitalism has brought (to some) as preferable, but a lot of work has been put into maintaining and ‘selling’ that point of view back to us. Our ancestors and indigenous people the world over are aware of the huge value in their more present focused, collective, earth connected way of life, that is usually obscured by loud insistence that industrialisation and consumerism have answered all of our needs. Our addiction and mental health statistics tell another story.
By relearning and reclaiming the breadth of our history, we can draw on the strength of the outraged care of our ancestors, many of whom fought to the bitter end to stop their lands, communities and abundant ways of life being forcibly taken from them. And we can make common cause with and learn from indigenous peoples elsewhere who are still in that fight. We can re-learn the depth of belonging and connection that once was our birthright. An indigenous friend in Kenya recently said that “being evicted from our lands and from the communities we live in is, for us, what being taken from your partner and children would be for you.” It takes a huge amount of brutality to force people to give up that level of being at home in a world of mutuality.
It is not enough to ask those with power in this system to make a slightly better version of it - not because reforms are meaningless, but because the system itself continually and helplessly reproduces the same power dynamics. They are what created it: it isn’t able to change.
The system is the body of the hydra - it was created by and activates the internal and external patterning that makes us reproduce the power-over-and-under dance whether or not we want to.
How do we take collective responsibility for turning the whole logic of the system on its head, for transforming our culture so that our shared lives are centred on collective care, and our social structures and shared culture shift accordingly? There is no one way to do this. The solutions need to be brought into being by many of us together - but once we have a shared orientation around radical care, there are some pointers that may be useful.
How do we make this happen?
We can’t just think our way out of this predicament - we need to include awareness of our bodies and nervous systems and seriously address processing our individual and collective historic trauma. This way our politics becomes as much nervous-system co-regulation as a way to make things happen.
We can’t do this alone - we have inherited an enforced individualism that is not only not our true nature: it’s ultimately suicidal. We deeply, fundamentally need one another and the web of life that sustains us. To rebuild a collective, sustainable life, we need to continually grow our muscle of care (both nurturing and boundary setting), together with understanding and finding ways to diffuse the power-over/under dance wherever we find ourselves invited into it.
We need to build a high level of self and group emotional reflexivity. Care without emotional intelligence, consent or boundaries can become another form of control — which is why it is so important to work on building shared cultures of trust, honesty and strong, shared values.
And we need to remember that care is not just about survival, but about enabling everyone to be their full selves, creating more space for humour, joy, connection, creativity, and the pleasure of belonging.
All of this isn’t easy: if it was, we’d already have done it, so we shouldn’t berate ourselves for our failure. At the same time, we need to take it very seriously and use this moment - possibly one of the last where our collective choices can still meaningfully shape what comes next - to take wise, collective action.
What this looks like in practice will differ from place to place — but the work of finding out, together, has already begun and many, many of us are already engaged. The next step is finding ways to come together across our different orientations and movements; working out how we rebuild the deeper trust in ourselves and one another that growing up in a system of domination robs us of; and collectivising our individual and siloed care in larger, practically focused movements to meet our collective needs and start growing vitality and health back into our personal, social and environmental worlds.