Ben,

Verious cans of worms there. Don't know if i can fully explore them, though try;

Masculine versus feminine; One way I would "abstract" it is that what projects as masculine is linear, while feminine is circular. People, men and woman, tend to be attracted to leaders committed to a particular course of action, or direction. The ones tending to look at both sides of the coin are viewed as indecisive. As Harry Truman once said, "Give me a one armed economist! I'm sick of this, 'On the other hand.'"

So the reason why "masculinity is toxic," is because it has an inherent tendency to go overboard. If a little is good, more must be better.

Personally I've mostly lived in the horse world and these are very tenacious people, but also try to be very balanced. They go overboard and they are screwed. It's all up close and personal. The men and women tend to be on fairly equal terms. Three of my sisters are top thoroughbred trainers in the mid Atlantic region, while my brother and I tended to muddle around in more grunt work. So I guess I don't have a normal perspective on the situation.

As for competition versus cooperation, a big part of the problem I see with humanity is that it does tend to congeal into some basic situations and loses sight of the bigger picture. When everyone is playing the same game, for the same goals, it does tend to become zero sum. Yet the reason life is otherwise so profuse and dense is that all the various organisms don't all seek the same things and insist on the same rules, so there isn't some monoculture, where you are a leader, follower, or outsider. As I put it, when everyone is following the same rules, for the same goals, it becomes a race and everyone is on rabbit time, but the turtle is still plodding along, long after the rabbit has died.

Currently we have this culture of giantism/globalization, but it has sustained itself on debt drawn from its own future resources and that future is arriving.

The point is, I'm not trying to answer questions, just explore truths. Priests and politicians give you the answers. Philosophers try to give you the truth, good, bad, or indifferent. The reality though is that most people want answers, not truths, so there are lots of priests and politicians, but philosophy is pretty much neutered and confined to the back alleys of academia, arguing the same old questions.

To give some biological expression for my abstractions, we all do have the gut and heart processing the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system sorts through the patterns, in order to navigate. Motor and steering. Am I missing something? Hands, feet? Pibituary glands? Yes, there are lots of moving parts, but just trying to stick with the main points.