“Come, you spiritsThat tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,And fill me from the crown to the toe top-fullOf direst cruelty.”— William Shakespeare, Macbeth (Act 1, Scene 5)I saw Macbeth a few months ago, and this time something clicked.A king is murdered for his throne. Macbeth gains the power he wants, only to discover that power has consumed him. Ambition becomes paranoia, then violence, then madness, then death. It is usually described as a tragedy about ambition.But Shakespeare was seeing something larger. He was writing about what happens when we sever ourselves from relationship, wisdom, and the conditions that make life possible—and replace them with self-sovereignty and worldly power. He gives us two figures through whom to see it: Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.The play is a marriage and a crown. But the same pattern shows up in institutions, and in markets captured by a monetary and political system that privatizes gains, socializes losses, and turns money itself into an instrument of control.Lady Macbeth and the Unsexed SelfWhen Lady Macbeth learns of the witches’ prophecy, she calls upon the spirits: “Unsex me here.”It is one of the most disturbing requests in Shakespeare. She wants to strip away whatever in herself might prevent her from doing what power requires. She wants to become harder, more ruthless, less vulnerable. She wants the spirits to remove whatever in her still needs, waits, or receives, so that nothing stands between her and the crown.In other words, she wants to become an isolated self that needs no one, trusts no one, and answers to no one. This is unsexing.Unsexing is what happens when we suppress our own human nature in the pursuit of power—when we trade relationship for control, wisdom for calculation, receptivity for grasping, and the soul for the crown. To become unsexed is to be cut off from the natural conditions of creation: receptivity, relationship, the willingness to wait. And what is cut off from creation eventually turns destructive.In the world Shakespeare wrote for, women were expected to be obedient, silent, and devoted to whatever their husbands desired. They had limited access to property, political authority, and public power. If a woman wanted influence, she often had to exercise it indirectly, usually through her husband.She looked at what her culture called weakness and decided she would rather be something else. Lady Macbeth refuses that limitation. She wants direct power. And Shakespeare lets her have it. That is the horror. She gets what she asks for, and it destroys her, and through her, many others.She is often read as the villain who corrupts her husband. She is certainly a tempter. She mocks Macbeth’s hesitation, questions his courage, and pushes him toward murder. But Macbeth is the one who holds the knife. He is the one who chooses.After King Duncan’s murder, something changes between them. Before the murder, they are loving partners; they share plans, fears, and ambitions. After the murder, their intimacy disappears. Macbeth plots without her; Lady Macbeth unravels without him. She walks in her sleep, trying to wash imaginary blood from her hands. Macbeth offers no comfort or help.They are still married, but they are no longer united. Their once strong relationship becomes collateral damage in the pursuit of power. The blood cannot be washed away, and their creative union has become a destructive one.Macbeth and the Grasping SelfMacbeth is the masculine counterpart to Lady Macbeth’s unsexing. If Lady Macbeth shows the inward collapse, Macbeth shows the outward grasp. He begins as a celebrated warrior—loyal to his king, admired by his peers, trusted by his sovereign. He already has honor, position, and a life.Then the witches appear. They begin with a promise: “All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!” They do not tell him how or what it will cost. They offer him a vision of more, and the sense that it is owed to him.Macbeth later names the force:“I have no spurTo prick the sides of my intent, but onlyVaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itselfAnd falls on the other.”This is the central psychological insight of the play. Ambition that leaps beyond its proper limits eventually destroys itself. Macbeth already has enough, but enough is no longer enough. He wants the crown now, and he wants it before it has been earned. And so he takes it.The biblical story of Adam and Eve follows the same pattern. They had enough—the whole garden God had given them. But a voice tempted them to take what was not given. “Did God really say?” The question planted the idea of more: to be like God, to trade relationship for power. And they grasped for what had not been given.Macbeth’s grasp is its own kind of unsexing. He chooses the crown over relationship. And once he does, the relationships that might have restrained him begin to disappear. Power without relationship is isolating.The witches also offer something strangely modern: certainty about the future. They appear to possess knowledge he does not have. Because their prophecy gives him access to a future he cannot otherwise see, Macbeth begins organizing his present around it.In modern terms, the witches can be read as an image of what I’ll call “The Science”: the modern authority that promises certainty through data, models, algorithms, expertise, and prediction. I put “Science” in quotation marks to emphasize the cultural promise that enough calculation will remove uncertainty and tell us what to do. The technology will save us, we are told, as if it were a god.That promise now sits inside our monetary system. Central bankers speak with the same confidence, claiming to know the right price of money and the right level of demand. They have a model for unemployment, a model for inflation, a model for growth, and a dial for each one. Regulators and experts pretend to have answers to every problem that comes up. Their knowledge and calculations are impressive. Wisdom is another matter.Wisdom is a different way of seeing. It is the capacity to ask whether what we can do should be done. We can predict, calculate, model, and optimize without ever asking that question. Macbeth never asks it. He asks only how to get the crown, and anyone who stands in his way is removed.And once he has what he thinks he wants, he discovers that possessing it does not give him what he actually needed.By the end of the play, Macbeth has achieved what he wanted. He is king. He has power. He has control. And he has almost nothing left. When he hears of Lady Macbeth’s death, he gives one of the most devastating speeches in Shakespeare:“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,Creeps in this petty pace from day to dayTo the last syllable of recorded time…Life’s but a walking shadow… A taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury,Signifying nothing.”This is the voice of the isolated self—the self that grasped the world and lost its meaning. Macbeth has gained the crown, but the crown cannot give him love. He has gained power, but power cannot give him relationship. He has gained control, and control has given him nothing he can hold. He has reached the summit and discovered that there is nothing there.From the Crown to the MachineWhat happens inside Macbeth eventually happens inside civilizations. The individual pattern becomes an institutional pattern. A human being seeks power without relationship. Then a family does. Then a political system. Then an economy. Eventually an entire civilization can begin operating according to the same logic.Macbeth’s ambition is a mechanism of destruction in his own life. Debt is a mechanism of destruction in a society. I call both part of the architecture of extraction: a way of life that takes more than it creates, controls or destroys what it cannot relate to, and treats everything—including human beings, nature, and even money—as either an instrument for generating more power or an obstacle to be removed.The play reads as an allegory of finance because both the witches and the system promise a way around limits. The witches offer a shortcut. Macbeth takes it. The financial system offers wealth without production, return without relationship, expansion without limits. Our politicians and our people take it without question, and without wisdom.The Macbeths lost themselves. A society built on debt does the same thing: it strips itself of real value in exchange for paper claims. Think about a house. You take out a mortgage, then borrow against the mortgage, then borrow against that second loan. Each round feels like more money in your hand. It is more debt against the same house. One day you discover you no longer own the house. The bank owns it.What we are left with is not a free market, which corrects error through prices and profit and loss. It is a state-privileged system in which the price of money is set by a central bank, losses are socialized through bailouts, and the largest institutions operate with an implicit guarantee that they will not be allowed to fail. In the end, the entire asset base of the society—its land, its infrastructure, its future income—is turned into debt and sold off to a small group of creditors.Once a system is built around that logic, more is never enough. The machine has to keep growing, because the moment it stops, the whole thing seizes. A pension fund needs the assets it holds to appreciate. A bank needs the loans it made to be rolled over. A government needs the next bond auction to clear. It ends up consuming the very world that sustains it. Once Macbeth murdered the king, he had to keep killing in order to retain what he had grasped.The crisis we face is political and economic, but it is also civilizational. We have exiled wisdom from our institutions. We have confused information with understanding, calculation with intelligence, and power with strength. We have built systems capable of extracting enormous value while becoming disconnected from the relationships that make that value possible. We have become extraordinarily knowledgeable—and profoundly unwise.What Restores a CultureIt is tempting to blame Lady Macbeth. But what made her want to be unsexed in the first place? The culture that taught her she was weak is the culprit—a society that leans too heavily into the masculine. She is a picture of what a culture does when it treats one half of human nature as a weakness. Nobody wants to live inside a weakness. Had her culture seen femininity as a strength and treated it with dignity instead of disdain, she likely would never have needed to become something else.The masculine and feminine are not competing identities. They are complementary principles, and a society needs both: the impulse that reaches outward and the ground that receives it. When one is suppressed—when receptivity, nurture, patience, and openness to life are treated as liabilities—a culture loses the conditions of creation. The seed no longer seeks the womb; it seeks to conquer the ground. Creation becomes extraction. Life becomes consumption.And yet Macbeth is not ultimately a story about inevitability. It is a story about choice.Macbeth chooses the crown. Lady Macbeth chooses to unsex herself in pursuit of power. The other choice is harder: to receive rather than grasp, to open rather than control, to let relationship shape desire instead of letting desire destroy relationship.What looks like weakness turns out to be the only way back: the willingness to receive, to stay in relationship, to admit that calculation cannot tell you what to want. None of this is a return to rigid social roles. It is the restoration of a whole human being.Lady Macbeth is the soul that silences its own nature in order to acquire power. Macbeth is the soul that grasps what has not yet been given. The witches are the promise of knowledge without wisdom. The empty throne is where a system built on extraction finally arrives: everything acquired, nothing received.Writing in 1606, in the shadow of the Gunpowder Plot and the divine right of kings, Shakespeare saw the pattern centuries before we gave it our modern names. He saw what happens when legitimate order is violated by the naked pursuit of power, and where that road ends: not in freedom, not in fulfillment, but in “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”Wisdom is our hope. Pray for wisdom. Seek it now.This article was originally published at WendyWilliamson.com.The post The ‘Unsexing’ of Society—Shakespeare Saw It Coming appeared first on LewRockwell.