#43 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (Masculine cultural DNA #11)

Jesuit John Powell wrote a little book entitled “Why I don’t tell you who I am” in which he explained that “that’s all I have and you might reject me”….Protection of our deepest most private self is hardly unexpected in a world of cruelty, meanness, flaunted and faux superiority and masculine bravado.

Never mind that there are “mean girls”; that is a situation for women to confront. We men have our own meanness, cruelty, bullying, and a stubborn fixation with the archetype that keeps this kind of attitude, behaviour, perception and outright abuse of power alive, and as the evidence indicates, growing.

A sensitive piece in The Atlantic’s most recent edition, tells the world that Joe Biden has struggled with a speech stutter from his youth. Written by another stutterer, John Hendrickson, a senior editor at The Atlantic, the piece tellingly urges the presidential candidate to “say it” that he does indeed suffer from a stutter. Hendrickson, though, is not sure he wants to hear his subject utter those words for his personal benefit, or if he believes Biden would relieve himself of considerable public scorn, anguish, criticism or scepticism.

Holding to the heroic role model of having worked with and overcome his speech impediment, Biden speaks privately with those who suffer from the same difficulty. Asked whether he thinks he would evoke pity from voters if he declared his “truth,” Biden wonders out loud how people could or would have pity for someone as fortunate, almost gilded as his life has been. Naturally, following his viewing of The King’s Speech, the inspirational film about the struggles of King George VI to overcome his own stutter, a neurological condition pertaining mainly to men, Biden noted that he had, without knowing anyone else who did, for years written speeches in a form that separated difficult words on the page with spaces in the copy just as he then learned the King had also done. The same night Biden watched The King’s Speech, he also left a recorded message of remembrance and reconnection on the phone of his speech therapist.

In a series of pieces about denial by men of any mere hint of weakness, vulnerability and the implications of such denial, personal connections to the trope seem relevant. My father suffered from a serious stutter, especially when he was at home, where the emotional, psychological ethos was often highly tense, even threatened by intemperate, unsuspected and mostly disconnected from the current reality emotional explosions from his wife, my mother. At work, where he supervised a staff of a dozen men and women, and gracefully and graciously served customers for over half a century, he speech was flawless, uninterrupted and imbued with integrity and authenticity.

As an adolescent, however, my impatience with his long pauses in his speech provoked what can only have been the most disrespectful and hurtful interjections, filling in his missing words. Only much later, when I learned of another colleague who also suffered from a life-long speech stutter, and who worked with neurologists to produce a device that through experiment proved adequate to the almost complete eradication of the struggle, did I secure the device and offer it to my father, in the hope that it would have the same result for him. The device consisted of a small plastic box containing batteries attached to a wire collar placed around the neck. A simple switch initiated a minor electric current, essentially a ‘shot of warmth’ into the neck when the wearer came upon a word difficult to say. My colleague demonstrated such a strict commitment to proving the value of the device that he read for three hours each night, with the device attached to his neck and his thumb on the button. The experiment was so successful that he then secured a weekly three-hour hosting post on a classical music show on radio station CFRB, then one of Toronto’s most powerful and most listened-to AM radio station. Listeners would never hear a speech pause. My father, having passed his sixty-fifth year when he received the device, was either unable or unwilling to commit fully to its use.

Whether Joe Biden will actually pull the curtain back from his stutter in the middle of his third campaign for the Democratic nomination for the presidency is still a matter for speculation. Having maintained his ‘silence’ (really his secrecy) in the face of a youth when he was dubbed “Stut” and considered by many to be less intelligent than his peers, and especially humiliated by a Catholic nun in speech class, there is reason to doubt his full disclosure. Surely, however, as with the more sensitive and responsible approach to public disclosure and acceptance of autism, Biden’s public accounting would go a long way to his own psychological and emotional relief, as well as to the prospect of public shame for having shamed him (and millions of others) throughout his life.

Shame, inevitably linked to anger, humiliation, and possibly even to revenge, while not exclusive to men, is a prominent experience given our deep and persistent consciousness of how we appear to other men. And there are so many ways by which men “attack” other men for our being different from what is considered ‘normal’ masculinity. Considering many of these ‘attacks’ as a pathway to ‘manhood,’ the kind of manhood that can stand up for itself, will not be pushed around, will not tolerate shaming, insults, taunting or worse,  a black eye, men (and their mothers and fathers) for centuries been engaged in a hot-house that nurtures the weed of revenge, and not the flower of turning the other cheek. And that kind of cultural ‘gardening’ begins with a conception of human beings (or is it mainly men?) as mostly sinful, flawed, imperfect and mostly to be defended against, not primarily accepted, honoured, trusted and respected.

Of course, the church has a giant share of culpability in this regard. In its attempt to cap any hint of arrogance, and to ensure the pre-eminence of humility among “believers” (not to mention the church’s need for control of members), as the sine-qua non of discipleship, and the purity of that obedience to the will of God, it has paradoxically generated centuries of natural, inevitable and uncontrolled and uncontrollable push-back. Physics posits that for every action there is a equal and opposite reaction; human nature suggests that whatever we hate we become. Extreme and absolute anything, is, apparently, according to the universe, the first seedling in generating its precise opposite. If I hate someone or something, I am much more vulnerable to incarnating that very “thing” that I hate.

However, to posit a view of human nature that begins with, and ends with, an expression of love, especially in the current cultural climate, is to flirt with social ostracism. In order to begin with love of another, one has to have an unwavering sense of one’s own person, not as an incarnation of perfection certainly, but as an honourable, trusting and trustworthy being. Quakers speak of the ‘divine light’ being within each person; some Christians speak of the “image of God” within each person;…and yet, our social conventions start with, (and continue long after childhood and adolescence), sanctions, punishments, accusations, judgements and shaming.

We, and men are especially implicated in this dynamic, shame others and then dismiss the shaming as a joke, a dissing, a kind of ‘arming’ the other for the field of battle, the journey of one’s life. As far back as 1854, Henry David Thoreau, in his historic treatise, Walden, wrote these words:

“You who govern public affairs, what need have you to employ punishments?” Love virtue, and the people will be virtuous. The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, While we do not subscribe to the classism and the easy and glib segregation of superior and common man, we, with Rousseau, subscribe, however quixotically and unabashedly to the notion that goodness is more defining of the nature of man, including men, than evil. The true key to all the perplexities of the human condition, Rousseau boldly claims, is the “natural goodness of man.” (From the University of Chicago Press website) Ghandi, too, having read Tolstoy’s “The Kingdom of God in Within You,” in which the ‘love as law of life’ and principles of non-violence base don love for the entire mankind were deeply embedded principles, cured him of scepticism and made him a firm believer in Ahimsa.*

So what is it that drives our (masculine) penchant for power, our volcanic hot pursuit of our enemies? What is it that drives our pursuit of the shame of the other searching, like obsessed gold diggers, for the weakest link ( criminality, unconscious bias, racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, bigotry, insouciance) of the other? Why are we, like Joe Biden, my father, millions of humans who struggle with any form of physical, emotional, psychic, intellectual or spiritual deformity?

Is it not, in fact, our imperfections that make us real, interesting, diverse, and obviously “unfinished” as fully developed individuals, not to mention as participants in an unfinished, developing culture? Why then are we so obsessed with the illegal, or sick (or both) categorizations of anything and everything that “we” consider to be abnormal?

Is it our collective cultural anxiety about not understanding what we cannot explain? Why, for example, are we fascinated by the new and as yet unexplained discoveries of the human mind, or the revelations of outer space also as yet unexplained, in a scientific perspective, and yet so revolted by the surprising, or the predictable behaviour of those of our human species that emerges from deprivation, depravity, and the slightest or monumental evidence of abuse?

We all know, at least our better angels tell us hourly, that any evidence of violence can be traced back to previous violence, whether it be on the battlefield, or in the bedroom, or in the schoolyard, or in the courtroom. It is our own deep and hidden and buried angst, anxiety, insecurity, failure, shame, crossing of boundaries, whether consciously or not, that causes pain, insult, offence, violence and even debasement of the other.

Having lived and worked in the United States for four years, I noticed a pronounced dependence on private insurance, law enforcement, the military and the power of money as status. The divisions between the ‘have’s’ and the ‘have-not’s’ in each of these four imperatives is a divide wider than the Grand Canyon. And the churches, at least those I observed, remain mute, gagged by the political correctness of their absolute co-dependence on the cheques of those very wealthy patrons whose membership in the establishment guarantees the complicity of the dependent religious hierarchy. Similarly, the political class too, is enmeshed in the same co-dependence with the fat-cats who write their cheques. Just last night, Cory Booker, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination protested the power of money in the campaigns of specific candidates, while he has committed to accepting money only from private, small, independent donors, rejecting money from PAC’s and from the pharmaceutical companies and environmental polluters.

Taking the high road, it seems, is also the road to elimination. And yet, paradoxically, the world sings the praises of a Ghandi, a Mandela, a Tolstoy, a Thoreau, a Rousseau, a Mother Theresa, without seeming to stop to reflect upon how vengeful, vindictive, judgemental, punitive, racist, homophobic, ageist, sexist we each tend to be (and to express overtly). Hypocrisy, dear reader, is a cocktail to which we are all addicted.

Not practicing what one preaches, lacking the willpower to live up to one’s own ideals and behaving in ways one knows are obviously wrong, are all moral failings. There is perhaps a different reason for our contempt of hypocrisy:

“We contend that the reason people dislike hypocrites is that their outspoken moralizing falsely signals their own virtue. People object, in other words, to the misleading implication---not to a failure of will or a weakness of character.” (The Real Problem with Hypocrisy, by Jillian Jordan, Roseanne Sommers and /David Rand, The New York Times, January 13, 2017, quoting the journal, Psychological Science)

Having railed against disavowed fear, against the unacknowledged Shadow, against the impunity we compliantly permit to those whose attitudes, behaviours and words deeply and permanently harm us, especially those in positions of power whose decisions have rendered us impotent, silent, and irrelevant, it is time to expose the writer’s deep-seated complicity in a masculine culture of social, political, and even religious “going along to get along”…I have failed myself, my family, my students, and my parishioners for having silently and complicitly navigated through clashing rocks and swirling whirlpools of the appeasement of my mother by my father, the appeasement of supervisors to their superiors, the complicity of radio station managers to the demands of advertisers, the religious bigotry of clergy under the guise of the gospel, the manipulation of supervisors who manipulated professional colleagues out of their jobs through deliberately over-loading their workday, the deceit of bishops who refused to face hard truths in their appointments, and failed to implement requisite supports, and who failed to acknowledge their professional incompetence and unprofessional judgements.

I also failed in my responsibilities to my family, when, without knowing how to navigate what I considered irreconcilable differences, I withdrew from their presence. Without the perception of legitimate and achievable options, I made what were unilateral decisions, thereby betraying the people I most cherished, my daughters.

I witnessed firsthand the impact of suicides of men who, starving for both personal and professional supports, took their own lives, in what can only be discerned as a screaming cry for help. And the number of men who continue to take their own lives grows whether through such serious trauma (PTSD), or a combination of trauma and the inevitable social, political, cultural, and even ecclesial neglect. We all have the blood of their deaths on our hands, for our shared, collective, complicit failure to treat the fragility and the innocence and the dignity and the goodness and the love each of us with the care, the commitment and the discipline we all need. And as men, we also continue to prop up a cultural norm of an addiction to power, to abuse, to indifference to weakness, and to the denial of our own vulnerability.

It is a stance that is both unsustainable and self-sabotaging. Just yesterday, I listened as Anthony Scaramucci, a former press relations officer of the president, for 11 days. He expounded on the self-loathing that eats away at the psyche of the current occupant of the Oval Office. Men, especially, have to be supportive of each other in order that more do not fall into the slough of self-hatred. There are so many influences that would have us fall; and there are so few guard-rails protecting us from sliding. Let’s commit to an infrastructure project that builds more of those guard rails.

*Ahimsa: In Jainism, ahimsa is the standard by which all actions are judged. For the ascetic, ahimsa entails the greatest care to prevent the ascetic from knowingly or unknowingly being the cause of injury to any live soul. (Britannica website)

#42 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (Masculine cultural DNA #10)

Have you ever noticed that there are many, very precise descriptions of the character/temperament of the plethora of dog breeds? Of course, the dogs in these depictions neither read nor complain about how they are characterized. Although there are multiple traits on which these observations are based, the primary one of “aggression v. friendliness/loyalty/playfulness/trainability abounds.

Having originated in the wolf DNA, after ten thousand years and scores of breeding experiments, there are now thousands of “human-pet-friendly” breeds available to those seeking a furry companion. Genetic engineering a new phenomenon in human applications, has been a feature of animal breeding for many years.

In a New York Times article by Perri Klass M.D. April 8, 2019, we read:

Behaviour problems in children, especially aggression and defiance, don’t get a great deal of sympathy, said Dave Anderson, a psychologist who is senior director of national programs at the Child Mind Institute in New York City. ‘For a child to get better requires just as much empathy and scaffolding as for a child who might be depressed, but behavioural issues inspire nowhere near as much empathy.

There is a persistent belief that these behaviors reflect poor parenting, he said, but in fact, there is often a strong biological component to behaviour issues, and the responses which come naturally to most parents faced with these behaviours may not have the desired results.

‘If you’re going to have persistent behaviour problems involving aggression and defiance, it’s already elevated at 2,’ said Michael F., Lorber, a senior research scientist with the Family Translational Research Group at New York University…

‘Our instincts as human beings are often wrong,’ Dr. Anderson said. ‘We tend to be negative behaviour detectors.’ When two siblings are playing quietly together, he said, ‘most parents are thinking, don’t jinx it, or let met do something on my to-do list.’ But when there is conflict, parents respond with anger and threats and punishment.

Those ways of responding to the negative behaviors, he said, are unlikely to work—with small children, with adolescents or adults. ‘We don’t tell partners to yell at partners as part of couples therapy; we don’t tell bosses to yell at employees for better productivity.’

Sensitive, mature, balanced, and effective parenting, without much more than the family of origin model of one’s own parents/guardians, is one of the more dysfunctional and/or omitted natural resources in many western families.

In his ground-breaking work, A Fine Young Man, Michael Gurian writes these words:

Many times, boys will show their fragility not through increased passivity but through increased bravado. When compared to adolescent girls, adolescent boys experiencing an average drop in self-esteem will pretend more self-confidence, will admit less weakness, will posture more, will pursue more overt attention, and will appear more aggressive. (Michael Gurian, A Fine Young Man, Tarcher/Putnam, Penguin, New York, 1999, p. 21-22)

Gurian also details the male emotional system a little later, in language any and all parents can both understand and reflect upon:

The development of the male emotional system follows the path of the development of male testosterone and brain development, and adaptations in male sexual biology. Over a period of millenia, human beings have been adapting all systems, including emotional systems, to changing conditions.

We have been adapting from hunting/gathering groups, when our main enemies were creatures of the savannah and when males didn’t even know who their offspring were, to agricultural extended families, when monogamy became normative and family relationships were considered of paramount importance, to industrial child-raising units, called families, but wherein only one caregiver—generally the mom—concentrates on children.

Our bodies and brains have adapted so that they can take in more stimulation and use creative and inventive functions far more readily. Our testosterone levels, body sized and genital size all have increased because of both increased population demands and increased aggression demands. For instance, as the need to fight wars developed over the last ten thousand years, our males needed to increase their testosterone levels in order to help humans survive. Our present testosterone levels are continually increasing as the population increases because high populations creates more competition for resources.

Over the last few thousand years, our sexual biology has adapted to include romance, a kind of human intercourse that was not needed tens of thousands of years ago when a male just mated with an estrous female and moved on. Now we try to mate for life with the help of romance strategies.

All these human adaptations comprise your adolescent boy’s history. Simultaneously, his brain and biology still resemble what his male ancestors were millenia ago. In some ways, our brains have changed; in other ways, our sexual biology, brain activity, and hormonal flow are still what they were in hunter/gatherer times. This is not surprising, since we have lived 98 percent of our human history as hunters/gatherers. (Gurian, Op. Cit. p. 31-32)

Anticipating what has become a rallying cry for some, Gurian notes sardonically, “Yeah, but as a gender males brought this on themselves! They overdominated females. They spent immense amounts of energy investing in testosterone activities like war and sport. They limited male brain use form emotional development so let them suffer a little.”

In response to this socially-accepted and even dominant view Gurian offers this:

The problem with this ideology is the biological truth that males have faced: They were and are propelled by biology, and especially the circumstance of exponentially increasing population, toward dominance and mechanism—a world with billions of people in it competing for resources is one that requires dominance strategies by which to manage huge groups of people without much attention to emotional detail. The males took on and still take on most of the dangerous work, and have done so with cultural scaffoldings in place that make this dangerous work possible. Now many of those scaffoldings have collapsed, and the confusion falls on our adolescent males.

…We’ve stripped away most of what little opportunity did exist for emotional development among males:

·        Our males used to have much more spiritual development, and therefor much more emotional contact with themselves and others through the Oue males use to have time in their work structures to form intimate relationships with other men and in which to mentor the young. They have little time for that now.

·        Our males used to have clear guidelines concerning how to nurture their families and mates, and how to find some emotional sustenance through marital stability. They have far less of that stability and those guidelines now.

·        Our males used to seek a depth of relationship with nature, in which they learned not only to hunt the fruits of nature but to transform, like alchemists, the relationships between man and nature into emotional and physical nurturance for whom communities. They have little time for this direct contact with nature’s divinity now.

·        Our males used to have extended families in which to develop their muted emotional beings. They have little extension of family now. In fact, many American (and we might add Canadian and western) men report having no other people except their wives with whom to discover life’s most important matters. If a divorce occurs, a man’s access to mirrors for his own emotional development diminishes dramatically. (Gurian, op. cit, p 37-38)

Male dominance, aggression, and even violence are not deployed only in times of military conflict. Just last night, for example, my wife and I watched a documentary entitled, Toxic Beauty, detailing the chemical development of “beauty products” like baby powder, (specifically by Johnson and Johnson) followed by one hundred years of marketing, while Johnson and Johnson knew fully that the product actually killed many women and endangered the lives of millions of others. Filled with asbestos, metal particles, and a list of other minerals, the product has birthed class-action law suits, complete with the kind of denials that once encased the arguments of the tobacco companies about the carcinogenic potential of their cigarettes. It was and is men who occupy the chief executive and upper management positions of companies like Johnson and Johnson, whose denials echo the current spate of denials about global warming and climate change from Republican lawmakers, especially Senators, and of course the current president, whose capacity for denial, avoidance, dissembling and outright demolition of empirically verified information/facts is, in a word, epic.

Dominance of women, by men, especially with the kind of impunity extended to Brett Cavanagh, whose life-long tenure on the Supreme Court cannot be challenged, outrages both women and men. He represents, like his notorious mentor, the president, the worst example of masculinity. And he has the cohort of conspirators, the Republican cadre of Senators who voted to confirm his appointment.

The masculine history of vacillating between bravado and withdrawal (socially, politically and sexually) is readily recounted in the stories of heroic incidents in battle, as well as in the counterpoint of denials by powerful men seeking to avoid the kind of transparency, accountability and authenticity they and we all trumpet as minimal benchmarks for leadership. 

Holding a mirror to personal experience...

I watched first my father who struggled to face his spouse’s wrath, a force of nature needing both heeding and confronting, at different times and in different circumstances. His “appeasement” of her dominance, acknowledged only in the latter stage of his eighth decade, enabled her abuse of both my sister and me. And while anger and a feeling of betrayal were my early emotional responses to our family history, especially his role, I have come to perceive a pattern in which his father too was submerged under the intense wrath and judgement of his spouse, my grandmother, for whom the world was an extension of her kindergarten class. Cold and harsh practicality and severe judgement of their spouses, as incarnated by driven, ambitious and determined women, like that harsh parenting of aggression in young children, is, to put it bluntly, counter-productive. It only serves to exacerbate the feelings of inadequacy in the husband. Joining in an addictive pattern with his spouse, a life-long alcohol-dependent wife, my uncle simply disappeared into the tiny space behind the counter of his ‘imports’ retail outlet.

And then, stories of a stern disciplinarian principal in Central Public School, Mr. Miller, seemed to this young boy the evidence that set the tone of the school where we all generally complied with directions. In senior elementary, it was the stature and the warmth of two male teachers, Bert Woodhouse, and Ken Johnson, a WWII veteran, whose combined auras flowed along the halls and into the classrooms enveloping each of us students, and one guesses, the teaching staff as well. Respect, good humour, warmth, and essential dignity were the hallmarks of these three years.

In high school, a gentle soul, John Harper, found himself in front of grade nine History and English classes where I sat. His self-effacing, reflective and extremely modest demeanour continue to have a warm corner in my memory bank. History, like fate, often has a way of acknowledging the silences of deep respect that needs no applause. Some fifty years later, I had the honour of visiting John in hospital, as he endured terminal cancer. We chatter about basketball; he asked if I would comb his hair; I complied with as much tenderness as I could. Word of his death the next morning reached me only a few hours after this visit.

There were other men, like the highly charismatic, extremely eloquent and intensely evangelistic clergy from Northern Ireland whose presence overflowed the building, the property surrounding the building and stretched throughout the whole town. Denouncing Roman Catholics who are “going to hell” from the pulpit, and denouncing movies, dancing, make-up and meal preparation on Sunday, from the pulpit were enough to drive this then sixteen-year-old permanently from attending the church, in spite of my father’s long-standing position on the church Session. There was also an Ontario Provincial officer, (Sargeant?) Claire Edgar, who investigated a vehicle accident in which I was the driver of a half-ton truck that rolled and struck the front fender of an oncoming taxi. His sincere, detailed investigation, his calm and respectful manner, linked to his decision not to charge conti
nue to comfort, support and sustain me as a life-long vehicle operator for these six decades.

(Dominion Store managers, Beer Store managers, university faculty, mentors and finally ecclesial supervisors to follow.)

#41 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (Masculine Cultural DNA #9)

Dr. Shohini Ghose, Professor of Physics and Computer Science at Wilfred Laurier University, in a podcast from CIGIonline,* describes quantum computing this way:

It’s useful to start with the example of flipping a coin. The result is either heads or tails, precise values, or as we say in computer language, one or zero. Because traditional computers work on electrical currents and voltages, it’s either on or off, one or zero. Quantum computing works in a completely different way. It is based on quantum physics, and the realization that a quantum particle can be described in a fluid state. We call it super position not just a one or a zero, but a combination of probabilities of being one or zero. So a quantum computer works not by switching voltages between one and zero electrical currents on and off or anything like that, but by manipulating all the possible states of a quantum particle. In the end, a quantum computer can still tell you if the result is heads or tails. But it’s the  process in the middle where a quantum computer can harness superposition and probabilities to compute more efficiently or do tasks that cannot even be done with traditional methods.

Newtonian physics, the law of gravitational states that every particle attracts every other particle in the universe with a force which is directly proportional tot eh product of their mases and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centres. (Wikipedia) Linearity, predictability, and the mathematics to support the fixed nature of the particles in the universe, have had a monumental influence on the world view that has been inherited by generations for centuries. The fixed nature of particles, and their relationship has influenced a kind of thinking that the universe is both predictable and measureable. Applied to the ‘big bang’ as well as to the question of how nature/universe/God works, men have speculated about how man relates to God, to a deity, and thereby how an identity dependent on relationship is conceptualized.

Heaven, “up” and Hell “down” is a simplistic example of such thinking. Light and dark are also simplistic metaphors for a linear universe, ostensible comprehensible to ordinary man. Extended to ‘right/wrong’ the dualistic nature of much of human thinking has propelled a kind of Manicheanism that tended to both simplify and render humans the perception of easily mastering “control” of what is considered normal human behaviour. Out of this kind of dualism several mythical, metaphorical deities, gods, goddesses, and universes have emerged. In a sense, physics implied a kind of mythology and metaphysic, perhaps for many even an epistemology, certainly a way of knowing.

Parallel to this kind of “physics” is a concept of the infinite, the unknowable, the otherness of not knowing, of speculating, of imagining. Local and universal have been positioned as comparable, tension-generating, and thereby both similar and different. Horizons, parameters, boundaries and the capacity to experience both freedom and resistance have been linked to our epistemology, at least in part, as a function of our awe and insignificance in the great beyond. Social rituals, and especially religious rituals have flowed from the worship of/aversion to various deities.

A century ago, the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats wrote a foreboding vision, “The Second Coming” a portion of which is entered here:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity,

Surely some revelation is at hand… W.B. Yeats, The collected poems of W.B. Yeats, quoted in Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Harper and Rowe, 1986, p.17.

With each and every mechanical, technological revolution comes a concomitant revolution in how we “see” ourselves…yet there are also patterns that overlap each of the shifts…It is as if our perception, our epistemology, as well as our mythology and religion are like the quantum concept of a particle, as “fluid”. Zeitgeists, like the constellations of stars, form, dissolve, reform and compel the fascination and the rigorous study of both poets and scientists. Observers, like unique pairs of eyes glued to the bottom end of the telescope, continue to “find” new evidence of previously unknown, unsubstantiated, and previously unconceived frames of reference, as well as the nature of the ingredients in those frames.

Is it too far a stretch to “think” out loud that the fluidity of the particle as conceived by quantum computing is more evidence of the residual reservoir of human ingenuity, human potential, human creativity, and the potential of masculine mystery to be further disclosed and applied to the previously dark, toxic and threatening male adherence to violence, including self-sabotaging violence?

I think not!

It is not so much that fear haunts the depths of the souls and hearts and minds of each and every man walking the planet. It is the degree of disavowal, denial, avoidance and outright demonizing of our most virulent fears that imprisons individuals, families, organizations and nations. Like its Siamese twin, pride, too often expresses our innate, inherent and universal fear. And each myth, metaphor, and religion that enshrines our disavowal of our fear, through the mask of our pride, needs to have its own respective layer peeled from the many faces we have learned to present to the world.

Masculinity encased in disavowed fear, masked by any kind of personal, organizational, national armour, is a masculinity that fails itself, and all others within its circle. Even the armour of a God clung to as saviour, without the requisite self-critical examination of how and when and if we avoid our most intimate truths, is little more than a hallowe’en caricature of a deity. At the root of human fear, at least in so far as western culture is concerned, is a primary perception of a deficit of goodness, value, worthiness and a preponderance of evil as the root nature of man, including both genders. As a failed and hollow theological construct to incarnate humility, one of the hallmarks of a Christian disciple, equating humans with our capacity to commit acts of abuse, (“ having sinned and come short of the glory of God” as St. Paul wrote) dominates the Newtonian version of Christianity.  Thereby, it follows that we are all in desperate need of salvation, a gift that can and will only come through grace, from the sacrifice of Jesus, Son of God, on Calvary, followed by the Resurrection, as symbol of the Atonement that accompanies salvation.

While disavowed fear encased and expressed in acts stuffed with hubris is a dynamic not restricted to a single gender, men, especially, are vulnerable to the dictates of such a psychological, as well as philosophical and ethical premise and starting point. We walk and talk the “walk” and the “talk” of those men, “heroes” and “kings” and “masjesties” whose glory has won battles, empires, queens and legions of honour and discipleship. We incarnate war, the warrior, the victory, and the spoils “to the victor” as images of deep and respected honour, value, and even the closest we might come to imitating something we could and too often do consider a deity.

President Barack Obama, in a conversation in the White House with former aide to Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson, uttered these words, (as Wilkerson himself repeated on MSNBC yesterday) “Washington has a bias for war!”

Deeply revealing and filled with both intimate insight into the culture of the U.S. capital, Obama uttered prophetic words that might seem trite and obvious to some. It says here that the bias, albeit unconscious, to war, has infected American culture from the inception of the nation. Founded and borne at the end of muskets, bayonets, canons, the United States has been impaled on the horns of its own petard for two-plus centuries. As a consequence, men, especially, have fallen victim to the seductive intoxicating liquor of the symbols, the rituals, the language, the uniforms, the laws and the parades that literally and metaphorically genuflect to all of the symbolism of war. The bias to war is and has been made more complex and seductive by the degree to which the public language, the political rhetoric and the competing narrative espouses a commitment to peace.

Uttering official vows to peace, however, followed by voting for pentagon budgets in the billions, to the extent that U.S. military “might” exceeds the combined potency of all other nations on the planet, is an ethical, psychological, philosophical, ethical and even religious pretzel and paradox that ensnares each and every male baby born in the United States. And the “image” of the “strong” boy infests every encounter in the parenting and the education of that boy. Not crying, “sucking it up,” “fitting into the relevant group” and achieving/winning/scoring/hammering/ in whatever engagement he might attempt is more than a social habit: it is a matter of masculine dogma. It is comparative, easily assessed, worn like a niche on a belt, more recently names (of women) scrawled on dorm room walls, and compelling such discipline/adherence/compliance that The Atlantic’s feature story this week is headlined: “The Miseducation of the American Boy” by Peggy Orenstein. Having interviews hundreds of American young men between 18 and 25, Orenstein asked one to describe the attributes of “the ideal guy” and heard and reports these replies:

Dominance. Aggression. Rugged good looks, (with an emphasis on height). Sexual prowess. Stoicism. Athleticism. Wealth (at least some day)….young men described just one narrow route to successful masculinity. (The Atlantic, January February 2020, p.65)

This report cannot be deployed as illustration for all young men in the west. It can, however, be used as a canary in a vast coal mine of masculine culture that “barnicles” to a war-biased nation, indeed that a war-biased nation requires in order to preserve its military budget and heritage, and to continue to throw its weight around, across the planet. Obeisance, sycophancy to power as a commitment to success is just one of the many requisites that are inculcated in young boys and young men in such a culture.

In Canada, many of the same qualities, to only a slightly moderated degree, have significant influence among young men, given the universality of the flow of the American culture across the 49^th parallel and the millions of dollars that assure the corporate world of successful marketing to young men in “the True North”.

It is not enough to posit a negative comparison between a “woke”** masculinity and one that can be dubbed “asleep” by comparison. Both focus on a public perception and performance, dependent on public recognition, acceptance and even potential adulation. The shift of masculine attention, from public performance, public recognition, public acceptance, and a perceived identity that defines an individual by his sexual preference, or his career/professional role, or his political/social/economic status neglects and potentially remains blind to the voices from the inner soul of the man.

These inner voices, however, cannot and must not be permitted to be claimed by a tyrant like trump who disavows the letter and the spirit of any legal, constitutional and traditional hedging of the power of the president. Presidential “genius” as so trumpeted by this occupant of the Oval Office, is not to be equated or identified with the unconscious of the individual man. His “genius” is merely another face of his mask, so conflated with his hollow ego that he suffers from the textbook definition of enantiodromia, the fusing of Shadow and Ego, to the impossibility of his evolving authentic identity.

Men who have served in positions of responsibility, authority and leadership, starting with my own father, hockey coach, school teachers and principals, team leaders, presidents, bishops, archbishops, CEO’s, over a period of fifty-plus years, have been observed in expressions of their own confidence, anxiety, avoidance, mis-representation of truths, power-trips, avoidances of full investigations and outright abandonments of their chief responsibilities. Fear of their spouse, their supervisor, their boards, their parishioners, their competitors, their professional peers, especially when those fears were hidden, too often compromised the fullest deployment of their potential. And the impacts of these failures have left a legacy of devalued people, minimally measured and rewarded achievements, restricted visions and plans, starched imaginative proposals and the reduction or elimination of authentic and valued people and positions. Every single human organization, from family to school, to college, to workplace, to church and to diocese has suffered from the failure of decent impoverished leadership from men whose potential never saw the light of day, through their own innate/socially imposed/conventional perceptions of what was possible.

To limit our perspective by what we “know” to be feasible, thereby avoiding the prospect of failure, is a failure by omission, through a degree of fear of failure (and the inherent hubris) that infrequently remained hidden in silence. And, our collective complicity in the dynamic of denial threatens our very survival. Men, as half of the planet’s population, can waken to the power of our own unconsciousness, face its implications and open to the potential fluid of our evolution.

*CIGI: Centre for International Governance Innovation

** The word “woke” is a political term of African-American origin referring to a perceived awareness of issues of social justice and racial justice.

#40 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (Masculine cultural DNA #8)

Remember, it is the secret force hidden deep within us that manipulates our strings; there lies the voice of persuasion, there the very life, there, we might even say, is the man himself. (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, quoted in Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries and Danny Miller, The Neurotic Organization, Diagnosing and Revitalizing Unhealthy Companies, Harper Business, 1990, p.1)

Surely, given our cultural unconscious bias against the unconscious, we are now more able to discern the degree to which our executives (both men and women) are applicants/candidates whose need for control will negatively impact both their prospective hires/workers and the culture of their prospective organization.

Domination, the “driver,” type A personalities, traditionally considered not only appropriate but actually preferential candidates for leadership given their penchant for aggressive, energetic, visionary and charismatic qualities leave many workers and organizations at serious risk of self-sabotage. Leaning excessively on any single archetype of masculinity, especially that of the “alpha” male, is not only restrictive of options among hiring agents, but more importantly, limits the capacity of many organizations to function in a healthy manner. Healthy, here, embraces respectful, integrous, authentic, and open relationships and the exercise of power at all levels of any organizational structure.

Let’s survey some of the neurotic organizations, and the potential risk that might attend to the history of hiring practices in those organizations. These categories of the neurotic organization are borrowed from The Neurotic Organization (cited above)

·        The “dramatic organization, with its aggressive leaders, its risk-embracing growth strategies and highly leveraged capital structure (op. cit. p. vii)

·        The paranoid organization (which) spends so much time tracking and fighting its enemies that it neglects to evolve a concerted strategy to cater to its customers…Executives devote(d) more attention to politicking, defensive legal manoeuvres, golden parachutes, and proxy fights than to the substance of corporate strategies. As this atmosphere of suspicion took hold, fight and flight considerations began to supercede manufacturing and marketing strategy. (op. cit. p. viii)

·        The depressive firm, an unresponsive, rigid organization that is frequently found in besieged or dying industries…(A)ttitudes of passivity, pessimism and helplessness prevail." (op. cit. p.viii)

If it is reasonable and cogent to ascribe unconscious motives of greed, fear and oppression respectively to the above three types of organizations, then this quote, from the above text can be expected to apply:

The goals and values of managers, the way they instill ideals and meaning into their organizations, and their use of cultural rituals are all extremely important to corporate success. (op.cit. p.x)

And from the Preface: Freud’s often-cited dictum about the dream of being the “royal road to the unconscious” has, perhaps, a wider applicability than he intended…The predominant fantasies, beliefs, and aspirations of key decision makers seem so pervasively to influence the nature of their organizations. Of course, we are referring here not to fantasies of the whimsical, fleeting sort but to those that come to characterize one’s “internal theatre.” They compose one’s picture of the world, which underlies and ultimately determines so much of behaviour and which comes to broadly influence, even epitomize, what is often called ‘character’ or ‘personality.’ (ibid, p.xi)

If we accept the notion that organizations reflect the character/world view/personality of their leaders, then a look at the nuanced neuroses of their executives merit careful scrutiny. Kets de Vries and Miller have chosen five neurotic styles that relate to the five most dysfunctional corporations:

Paranoid, compulsive, dramatic, depressive and schizoid. 

Without resorting to, or depending on a clinical definition of each of these classifications, it is significant to observe that each of these “types” are unlikely to be ferreted out from most profiling in executive hiring practices. Privacy, and the restricted right to ‘invade’ the private lives of potential and prospective leaders, renders the executive search process replete with minefields of “guessing,” “intuition,” “comparative” strengths and weaknesses, on the part of the hiring agents. Many “personality tests” are fraught with questions allegedly seeking “honest” answers, as a way to trap candidates into such danger zones as “difficult to manage”..,if candidate answers disclosed a degree of independence, creativity and courage that threatened those in power.

In the education system, at the secondary and post secondary level, as well as in the private corporate sector, and in the church, having served approximately fifty supervisors, I have noted a common denominator among male leaders: Many need the position of power and seek to protect their status through compliance with a higher authority who mandates them not to bring problems to those higher offices. Fear of public “trouble” regardless of how that “trouble” might surface and the political implications of that trouble, avoidance of turbulence, public exposure to deficits in process, production, and personality defects must be avoided at all costs. And in the event of such turbulence, challenging the rules and regulations, first of a public relations kind, and also of something determined as “ethical” malfeasance, highly superficial investigations, often if not always without due process, lead to quick decisions of “elimination of the problem.”

It was a Russian professor of Comparative Education in a Canadian university who taught a graduate education class how the Russians solved problems: by elimination. He, of course, was ridiculing his former nation. And yet, there is copious evidence that “elimination” of any and all problems, is the preferred path of many leaders, who themselves are determined to protect themselves, preserve their hold on power and eliminate the problem. And, after decades of this kind of management, in so many organizations, many have come to consider as “normal” this approach to any emergent problem.

The obvious risks to such an approach are many. The avoidance of the potential underlying “issues” inherent in the situation, and the need to address them, is only one. The impunity of failed orientation (or worse, completely absent orientation), the failure or omission of appropriate professional supervision and support, as well as the fear of counter-observations that would erode political support for the leaders are obvious influencers in how “problems” within organizations are addressed. The characterization of a candidate as a “tool” to be impulsively injected into a situation where previous conflict and tension, without due regard for the appropriate selection, orientation and supervision, is another of the reductionistic approaches infecting organizations in which leaders reactively operate in their own professional, (or worse private) interests.

When I worked in the United States, I noted the prevalence of military discipline methods/words/carrots/sticks among American families. Classical conditioning, perhaps appropriate, (actually that is very doubtful) in a military setting in boot camp, and clearly appropriate in dog training settings, has no place as the sole approach to relationships between parents and children. And we have all travelled through a parent-child tunnel, some of them filled with light, others not so much.

Each of us has experienced some degree of “control” in our early childhood. And

the degree to which we have been bound have analogous relevance to the managerial situations in all workplaces. “(Family) therapists have shown that family interactions often involve three destructive types of relationships of control:

1)    Superiors can bind their subordinates to the point of smothering their initiative, constraining their growth and essentially making them puppets

2)    Superiors can have the subordinate act as a proxy, serving as one who provide vicarious thrills and carries out dangerous and unacceptable missions for the boss.

3)    The expelling mode occurs when the superior takes no interest in his employees, offering them no guidance, support or security.” (Op. cit. p. 9)

Given that each of us has personal experience with one or more of these destructive types of relationships at home, we will bring those memories, and those wounds into our adult lives. This pertains to us as workers as it also does to those in positions of supervision. And, if and when we carry over these experiences into completely different situations, we engage in what is common known as transference.*

Without attempting to stomp through the swamp of specific neuroses, we each have fears, insecurities, and vulnerabilities that we would prefer neither define us nor compromise our opportunities to be effective and relevant as individuals, as employees, as partners and certainly as parents. It is the masculine attachment to our mask, and our many strategic and tactical moves to both develop that mask, and to sharpen our skill in deploying that mask, as if it were our identity, that we all can address, both deliberately and inadvertently. To be able and to will to discern when we are ‘covering’ up our fear, our self-loathing, our inadequacy, and our insecurity, and then to seek and to find those places and people where it is safe to “open” our private vault of the unconscious is essential to our very healthy existence. This dynamic is also essential to the developing health of our organizations.

And it is especially important that this “mask” versus “ego” tension be explored by healthy educators, healthy administrators, and healthy parents, half of whom are men.

Through literature, of course, we are able to probe our perspective on the hidden motivations of a character, as well as the abusive imposition of power that binds, expels, and/or proxies others. These occasions merit enlightened and critical reflection by all of the language teachers in the country. They also merit much more dedicated consideration by those who are empowered to select teaching faculties. Performance, as if it were a matter of charisma and entertainment along with the potential subsuming of the complexities of intellectual discernment and judgement, merits open discussion among educational leadership.

However, in a corporate, medical, legal, accounting and healthcare sector in which measureable performance objectives dominate, in a world view and ethical/moral hierarchy that supports the empirical, humans (including but not restricted to men) have become “means” to the “ends” of the organization. Objectively valuing both leadership and performance by numbers of clients, dollars, (the bigger, the better)

 misses many of the intricate, complex and hidden forces that generate those numbers.

And masculine leaders, executives, who have persistently resisted opening that vault of our “hearts” even to a spouse, can be traced to the emergency rooms of our hospitals, to the pubs and bars of our trendy districts, and to the court and board rooms of our divorce courts. It is not only men who suffer from our own repression; women are also in danger of a similar repression. However, this piece is addressed primarily to the many men, some of whom I had both the privilege and the sentence to serve.

Selecting for leadership those men who have “no enemies” is a dynamic that recurs far too often. Like emotional, intellectual and energetic turtles, these men, often if not always, have swum like pollywogs through the rivers and the creeks of their lives.

Avoiding being “caught” by the dazzle of a distracting lure, they have found various ways to survive, without attracting criticism, without embarrassing their supervisors, and without being entangled in the weeds or under a rock. Also selecting those whose ambition and energy “cover” their shy and much more serious and private natures, risks sabotaging both the candidate and the hiring agent/employer. The tendency to rely on the most sophisticated algorithms, and even eventually AI, it says here, runs the risk of sabotaging more departments to the hidden agendas and the hidden fears of those who are “in charge”.

Detecting patterns of fears, insecurities, traumas, and then beginning to appreciate how those fears make positive contributions to each of us, while not resolving all of  the complex human relationships inside families and organizations, would serve to open the possibility of more authentic individual responses, in all situations, and also offer the potential of enhanced clarity in tense situations. We all need to come to a place where our insecurities are an integral part of our strengths, not a guarantee of our disposability.

To the extent that we keep our feelings, our insights, our fears and vulnerabilities interred in the vault of our own making, encouraged and rewarded for that internment by a culture afraid to unlock that vault, we risk our own health (physical, mental, emotional and spiritual, and relational). And to a similar extent, we also participate in a drama that seeks to avoid drama at all costs, knowing as we do, that such avoidance only imposes additional locks and seals on our personal and cultural vaults.

Men, especially, although not exclusively, risk clinging to our vault longer and more rigidly than our female partners and co-workers. Those women are not “superior” to us; they are merely a little more in touch with their own personal truth, even if they too have had to repress much of it, in their disciplined efforts to “fit” into the masculine culture.

*Transference occurs when an individual, usually unconsciously, treats a current relationship as though it were an important relationship from the past. (Op. cit. p. 8)

#39 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (Masculine cultural DNA #7)

In his year-end interview with Vassy Kapelos of CBC’s Power and Politics, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used the phrase, “unconscious bias” in his attempt to confront the story about “black-face” from his teaching years, photos that threatened to derail his party’s re-election last fall.

As a privileged man, son of a former Prime Minister, Mr. Trudeau acknowledged his own blind-spot in applying black-face make-up to attend a party. Fair enough as far as it goes. But, the phrase opens a labyrinth of unconscious biases that are rooted in a fundamental “unconscious bias against the unconscious.”

Men, especially, carry an unconscious bias against hidden truths, traumas, tragedies and psychological minefields. Perhaps they could also be referred to as “mind-fields!” Concentrating on the outer world, the “facts” of each situation as ascertained and discerned by the senses, and then injected like an intellectual serum into the cognitive files of our brains seems diagnoseable as our modus operandi. And this innate process has many valuable rewards and justifications. It exercises our instinctual radar, programmed from a very early age, warning us of danger, of imminent threats, of discomfort, of ill-ease, and perhaps even of opportunities. And, as popular vernacular has it, our inner voice talks to an “adult”  voice expressing what might be considered a personal assessment of the relative significance of the specific “flag”. As an integral component of that assessment process, there are some larger and more deeply embedded foundations about what it is to be a man.

A significant impetus to constructing a man’s world view is his concept of the difference(s) between how a man reacts compared to how a woman reacts to a given situation. Comfortable with the intricate and “in-the-weeds” details of the “other’s” emotional, intuitive, imaginative, spiritual and ethical responses to a situation, women, generally, find a compassionate, caring, emotive and relational response more natural than do most men. This is definitely not to say that men are devoid of compassion, caring, empathy and spirituality. In fact, some research indicates that men have a very deep reservoir of empathy while restraining its expression and deployment to those situations they consider serious, emergent and “code red”. Whether or not the male orientation to trauma is qualitatively different from that of women, the male response is generally less “heated” or “emotional” or dramatic, and stereotyped as “hard-assed” and macho, and detached.

A male attitude to trauma, as portrayed through millions of hours of television and movie programming, is often an explosive surge of adrenalin, and an “attack” rush of energy. The relationship and emotional aspects of how individuals’ lives are and will be impacted by the emergency can come later, after the threat has been addressed.

This kind of natural well of masculine hard-wiring has implications for many of the historic and foundational programs that define the inferential structure of western culture. In our personal attention (avoidance) of our own bodies, except as instruments of a skill, or as magnets for relationships with others, we generally tend to leave our medical condition in a file marked “annoyance” or “irrelevance” unless and until we can no longer breathe, or digest our food, or remember our name. Not only is this attitude endemic to most men, (verified by family physicians who assert that men comply with treatment plans because when they finally arrive in the doctor’s office, the condition is so serious there is no other option), it also pervades our health care system, as well as the systems that control much of our western culture.

Our hospital wards are filled with patients in “crisis” conditions, as we are told, in order to better optimize limited, finite resources. Our insurance plans place little or no obligation either on doctors or patients to “prevent” health from deteriorating even though the pathway to prevention is well known, well documented, proven by research and relatively easily implemented, if we have the personal and collective will. Health education, however, remains at best a tertiary function in our health care system. Embedded in our collective co-dependence in the dynamic of crisis management is our insistence on independent, private, individualistic value of personal absolute control of our bodies, and our lives.

And herein lies another of the masculine mandates of not merely preference for, but actual religious dogma, that dictates silo “rights” of the individual, that aspirationally support freedom of choice, and the access of tankers of cash to those choices through advertising and political propaganda, all in the service of private enterprise at the expense of anything the smacks of a moderate posture of balance. Absolute (ism) whether it be ideological, theological, economic or nationalistic, and the perfection it both fosters and requires, is a serious threat not only to the masculine gender who defer to it far more readily than our female partners. A cliché has it that men live for their chosen task, while women exist for their relationship with tasks taking a second place. And the pre-eminence of how we perform our tasks, whether as brands of corporations or more insidiously as human “professionals” has now been reduced to a social compulsion that completely rejects imperfection. It is as if a human being is now analogous to the Lexus that comes off the assembly line, striving for perfection.

Problem is, however, that we are not produced by programmed robots, hygienically sanitized laboratories and factories, and reproduced perpetually by the same, identical parts and processes. The masculine relationship to technology, from the plow to the knife, to the hammer, the water-wheel, the miller-wheel, the combustion engine, the chemical test-tube and Bunsen burner, and more recently the nuclear reactor and rocket, and the digital chip continues to provide the sign-posts of western cultural development. It also undergirds the relative position of the human being to the machine, and to the corporation that controls first the machine and then, by default, the human operator. As machines are incapable of protesting working conditions, and immune to hand-overs, heart-attacks, cancers and ebola, corporations are incentivized to value them more highly than those imperfect human beings. This hierarchy is just another of the multiple hierarchies of power that, like barnacles, cling to the western culture, without being fully addressed as significant influences on how we live, and how we perceive our culture “works”.

Men have a predisposition that incarnates anxiety in chaos, in ambiguity, and in complexity, unless it captures the attention of those (historically mostly men) whose scientific skill, training and dedication seek to untangle those complexities.

In our daily lives, nevertheless, men and women carve out paths of convenience, comfort, predictability, and a path of least resistance, as well documented in numerous research projects. And then, we attempt to imply, if not actually impose a similar pattern on each of the situations we face in our work days. Measurement of costs and benefits, like technologies themselves, efficiencies more dominant than effectiveness, demonstrable and measureable productions/including savings and new processes tend to dominate many of the decisions taken in and by our organizations. Human need, by imposed “deference” tends to have to be relegated to the back of the cultural bus, given the unconscious bias of men to seek and to hold what we/they believe to be power and control.

The human need for food, shelter, and work with dignity, a universal and historic given in all cultures, is considered an “expense” on the public accounts, and that fact is relegated to a social impediment based on the simplistic, reductionistic and, it says here, masculine-based conception of the relative importance of humans as compared with machines, profits and power. Indigents, illiterates, mentally challenged, emotionally destitute, unemployed and homeless are the effluent of a masculine-dominated ethos and culture, and our shared “unconscious bias” that refuses to acknowledge complicity in rendering these people expendable and more insidious than that a serious “cost” to our economy.

How can we possible even begin to address the unconscious bias against other races if we are unable or unwilling to acknowledge our unconscious bias to the unconscious in our personal lives, and in our collective and shared lives.

Making nice, looking perfect, adopting zero-tolerance and zero-sum approaches to our problems, while neglecting the elephants that are sucking the oxygen out of our atmosphere, simply because we are not having the conversations that come from our unconscious, including our legitimate fear (another masculine symptom of denial), and our creativity that might begin to solve the impending crises, (another feature of humans denigrated by men, especially fathers whose sons wish to pursue careers in the arts,) and collaboration (another of the less valued potential values, when compared with competition, winning and conquering, all worshipped by the masculine stereotype.

How did men get here?

We followed in the foot-steps of our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers. And we also found support and encouragement from our mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers who were tragically silenced, either by compliance or by overt repression or both. Of course, there are glimpses of emergence from the darkness of our private unconscious, however, limited. Some men are actually reading, writing, painting, acting, dancing, composing, performing and conducting, directing, producing and creating in many fields. Additionally, men are also taking leading positions in philanthropics across the planet. Additionally, school programs include peer monitors in school yards, student input in discipline discussions. And while church attendance has fallen dramatically (well warranted, given the extrinsic, authority-obsessed, punishment-driven, and sin-seeded theology that dominates), men, like our female partners, are searching for meaning, purpose and identity that includes our emotions, relationships, parenting, and even the support for other men that can be seen in men’s groups, and Men’s Advocacy Agencies.

Recently my wife and I watched the movie, As Good As It Gets, with Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt. The issues facing men, among men, lept graphically and assaultingly off the screen. Nicholson’s character as obsessive-compulsive writer, hates gay men, and is manipulated into a hint of compassion by a gay man who comes to his partner’s aid against “Mervin” (Nicholson). Resisting the rigors of psychotherapy, Mervin also initially abuses the waitress who serves his daily meal in the New York restaurant. Upon learning of her son’s serious asthmatic condition, and repeated, unfulfilling visits to the emergency room, he asks his agent to have her doctor husband assess and treat the young boy on his nickel. Confident in his full and complete treatment, by a fully funded medical professional, the boy’s mother is at first sceptical and only fully rejoices when she learns he has scored a goal in a soccer game. The inattentive, cash-driven, superficial emergency-room treatment previously administered to this young boy and his cash-strapped mother is exposed as another of the “balance-sheet” idols of the American health-care system.

And only after a series of surprising and somewhat farcical, if realistic episodes, does Mervin actually come to his senses that his “waitress” means more than the fulfillment and delivery of his obsessive-compulsively driven daily meal. His awakening to his own unconscious, at the moment he utters these words, is an epiphany for which millions of men yearn, if still unconsciously: “You make me want to be a better man!”

As the stated or hidden goal of each man, Melvin’s utterance touches every member of the audience, and none more than his remark moves Carol, the waitress: “That is the best compliment I have ever received.”

Tortuous though the relationship is throughout the movie, Carol and Melvin as vulnerable and somewhat tortured individuals, nevertheless continue to grow from isolated independence and prickly postures that put others off to little “shoots” of dependence, kindness, compassion, empathy and the confidence that makes them possible. Being able to “see” the other, while continuing to resist a full-acknowledgement of the inner truths of one’s self, enhances the melting of the self-sabotage and the mask that attends the lives of millions of men.

Would that more “Melvin’s” would open to their own “gold” within the caves of their unconscious! And would that Justin Trudeau would open to the full implications of our shared “unconscious bias to the unconscious”!