Essay: The Wall of Masculinity and War

 

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 19^th 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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