The Wall of Masculinity and War
Marathon runners sometimes confront what is referred to as
“the wall,” a pivotal moment when the
brain says there is no way to keep moving.
The metaphor is meant to convey a formidable psychological barrier, and
yet it is one that can be transcended to complete the 42 kilometer race.
In the course of human history, our society currently
faces an analogous wall of its own, one that we must break through, for it is
essential for our survival. Success will
require a movement of great courage and perseverance. Failure, however, means the likelihood that civilization
will end, a terminal finale that occurs in mere hours, once it is initiated. In a swift launch-code of judgement, twelve
thousand years of human striving and development will say good-bye in a nuclear
flash.
The challenge can be framed this way: will we continue to accommodate--to saber-rattle
and invite--the scourge of war? Or will we break through a longstanding wall
of immaturity to advance our collective consciousness beyond the dominance of might-makes-right?
To be blunt: will we avoid the annhilative force of World
War 3 and the ‘mutual assured destruction’ it inflicts on the globe and, in brave
retort, instead propel our mental health beyond the wall, achieving a new way
of being: a practice where the method is
reason and the goal shifts beyond greed and paranoia to the highest of virtues,
that is, the Good.
To answer the above questions in the affirmative is to confront
a corollary question, one that concerns how we define masculinity. Will we continue to abide narcissistic
dictators, who rule nations through force and demagogic fear? Shall we bow down, literally, to the tyranny
of wounded ego, of nihilism?
Readers who have made it this far might be shaking their
heads and muttering about hopeless idealism.
It is indeed an immense task to motivate people to consider that the
gender norm of masculinity can be rewritten to eschew, rather than reward, violence
and aggression. It seems impossible even
though the solution is quite doable in the sense that the adaptive potential of
the human mind is vast.
At the risk of redundancy, let me state that the wall we
face is mental, not physical. What stands
in our way of evolving gender norms is an obduracy of bias, a dogma stuck in its
claim that men simply cannot change. According
to this canard, ‘boys will be boys,’ ‘war is war,’ and violence is inevitable because males bear
an intractable curse.
Such a view is resignation.
It dams us to warfare and doom with the surety of a tragic
self-fulfilling prophecy. Despite the
infinite negative cost--the slay of civilization itself--the common belief is
that men are, in large part, immutably evil.
I would like to ask all men:
Is this how we want to be seen?
Is this what we are?
No matter how many times that arguments based on ‘human
nature’; on the specious precept that ‘it has always been this way,’ are shown
to be flawed and false; no matter how
many times they have been exposed as mainstays of brutal control, the decrees
of cruel kings who conquered logic to foster long eras of oppression, we humans
cling to the blinkered belief that we are consigned to destroy ourselves.
There is a chance that such gross ignorance will not win. In the last few hundred years, and with
accelerating pace, we have started to overcome patriarchy and its rhetorical
bludgeons, not just in theory but through actual example and practice. In science, if you falsify a hypothesis
through irrefutable evidence, the hypothesis is wrong. In critical thinking, if you demonstrate a
logical contradiction in a conclusion, the conclusion is dismissed. And that is what democratic movements have
done.
Equality is today a professed standard, one we have not
reached in full, and yet significant progress has been made. Many countries embrace universal suffrage and
civil rights. Slavery is illegal. The legalization and predominant acceptance
of gay marriage occurred in the United States in 2015. If Kamala Harris wins the US election in
November, the USA with have its first woman, Black and Southern Indian
president.
If the appeal to ‘human nature’ is a fallacious red herring,
what prevents us from discarding the crippling, ancient trope of the violence-driven
male?
Two core factors come into play, delineated by the
disciplines of psychology and sociology: (a) up to this day, who gets sovereign power has
always been determined by patriarchy, (b) every new generation of children has
been taught by those who have been sanctioned by patriarchy.
The problem, then, in simplest terms, is an entrenched
system of mind control that includes highly efficient techniques for extending
its tentacles into the future.
A correlative factor is (c) the ponderous weight of tradition. People get nostalgic about the past and seek
to maintain their traditional culture.
This tendency facilitates patriarchy’s remarkable status as a glaring injustice
that has managed to saddle humanity ever since the founding of ancient Sumer.
What patriarchy requires is an ignorance vortex, a system
that never allows society to advance beyond the domination of aggressive
males. This acculturation seeks to
dumb-down, not liberate, the mind. An
ignorance vortex is very good at preventing ethical progress. It limits knowledge and maintains division
and bias. The indoctrination starts in
infancy and carries on from there, steeping every developmental stage of a
human life in messages, both conscious and subconscious, flowing from all institutions
of society.
The benefits of escaping this darkness are vast for women,
men and nonbinary persons. There is a clinical
name for the debilitating condition that the majority of men suffer from worldwide: normative male alexithymia, an inability to
face what one is feeling, let alone express it in words.
For thousands of years, boys and men have been trained to lose
something very special. As Ruth Whippman
writes in a recent op-ed:
“All the old deficiencies and blind spots of male
socialization are still in circulation — the same mass failure to teach boys
relational skills and emotional intelligence, the same rigid masculinity norms
and social prohibitions that push them away from intimacy and emotionality … Under
patriarchy, boys and men get everything, except the thing that’s most worth
having: human connection.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/05/opinion/boys-parenting-loneliness.html
Such deficiencies give boys and men insecure egos prone to
irrational confrontation, as well as the tendency to fall in line under a ‘strongman’
leader. I put ‘strongman’ in quotes
because such leaders are not strong; they are exceedingly insecure and
parasitic on the vibrancy of a country. A
current example is Putin, whose ego-driven invasion of Ukraine could end
civilization.
Take a moment to grasp this:
END CIVILIZATION.
The survival of humanity comes down to whether we can dethrone
such leaders and defuse our tendency to bow before them. Can we psychologically mature? Many individuals already have, often through
personal therapy. Advanced emotional
skills are real and teachable; and yet emotionally secure people are not what a
social system of control based on insecurity wants.
Emotional skills and new levels of ethical awareness are
starting to spread to the general populace.
A critical steppingstone was the 19th Amendment, giving women
the right to vote in 1920. Today, younger
generations of males are beginning to reject the straitjacket of traditional
masculinity. The progressive impetus,
however, is in a race with a backlash from the only form of government the
world has ever known.
I like to label this as MMRP for might-makes-right and
patriarchy, two critical norms inculcated into most males. Using an acronym underscores an imposed
condition, one we can escape. Another
acronym is RBDE: reason-based democratic
equality.
Either we will end the 12,000 year curse of MMRP or it will end
us. The technologies we possess are near godlike, and will not bring happiness in
the hands of malignant narcissists like Putin or Trump. If Trump wins the US Presidential election in
November, it will tilt the whole world into fascism. Insecure male egos will, as they have so many
times in the past, saber-rattle and go to war.
As we develop powerful technology to shape reality and
world--nuclear, AI, robotic, genetic, nanite--we gain the ability to approach heaven
or invocate hell. Healthy honesty or enslaving
fear await our focus. Which will it
be?
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