The Man Enslaved by His Virtues

It appears to me that, among man's endless peculiarities, there exists a rather strange form of slavery. One which, unlike the ordinary varieties, is not necessarily accompanied by suffering, humiliation, or even the awareness of being enslaved.

In fact, the man experiencing it may be quite proud of himself.

He wakes early. Works diligently. Provides for others. Exercises discipline. Sacrifices pleasure. Endures hardship. Carries responsibilities which, apparently, would crush a lesser man.

Society admires him. His family may admire him. He may even admire himself.

And yet, one cannot help but wonder what would happen if, one morning, this admirable man decided that he did not wish to carry any of it.

Suppose he wanted to rest.

Suppose he wanted to refuse an obligation, withdraw from an ambition, or simply admit that he was afraid.

Would he remain the same man in his own estimation?

Or would something within him immediately rise in protest?

You're becoming weak. You're failing your responsibilities. A real man would never behave this way.

If the latter occurs, I believe we have encountered something worth investigating.

For it seems that a man may spend his entire life cultivating strength, only to discover that he has lost the freedom to be anything other than strong.

And if strength has become compulsory, in what sense does he possess it?

What Is Man?

It has been quite a difficult task to arrive at a satisfactory definition of man.

Across many religions, scholars, customs, and what appears to be the collective image of the ideal man, one encounters remarkably persistent expectations concerning what a man ought to be, what he ought to carry, how he ought to behave, and perhaps most importantly, what he ought never allow himself to become.

Of course, many thinkers, mystics, dating scholars, and what we would in the present century call gurus appear to have already discovered the perfect definition.

Their prescriptions are often delivered with admirable certainty, although it seems that the general mass has not fully managed to digest them, at least on average, so to speak.

One cannot help but notice this rather peculiar contradiction.

If the definition has already been settled with such precision, why does the question continue to return?

Why does man continue to struggle with himself? Why does every generation appear compelled to rediscover what the previous generation insisted it already understood?

I make no claim here to have arrived at some final or perfect definition of man. In fact, the further I have gone into the subject, the more it has appeared to me that man is considerably more mysterious than the certainty with which he is so often explained.

My purpose is somewhat different.

I would rather invite the individual to look inward with greater attention. To examine what has been inherited. What has been unconsciously desired. What has been imposed upon him. What he has mistaken for himself.

For it seems to me that the development of man cannot be understood merely by instructing him on what he ought to become.

One must first ask what, in fact, he already is.

And that question brings us to a distinction which I believe deserves considerably more attention.

Is man identical to masculinity?

Or is masculinity merely one force within the considerably larger phenomenon that is man?

The Man and His Masculinity

Man is commonly spoken of through the language of masculinity.

Strength. Provision. Protection. Discipline. Sacrifice. Dominance. Endurance. Responsibility.

These qualities may indeed belong to masculinity. Some may even be indispensable to the development of a man.

But a peculiar assumption begins to reveal itself when they are treated not merely as qualities of man, but as the totality of him.

It appears that the collective image frequently treats man as though he were only masculine.

As though development consisted primarily of increasing masculine qualities until the man had sufficiently approximated an ideal.

As though whatever in him is receptive, inward, imaginative, emotional, relational, tender, uncertain, mysterious, or feminine were either an inconvenience to overcome or evidence that his masculinity had somehow failed.

The distinction may at first appear semantic.

I do not believe it is.

For if man is greater than masculinity, then the development of masculinity cannot by itself constitute the development of man.

And if this is true, then a considerable portion of what we presently call becoming a better man may describe only the cultivation of one side of him.

Consider the man who has become extraordinarily disciplined.

He exercises daily, works long hours, and refuses himself pleasures which he considers unworthy. There is much to admire here. Self-control is no insignificant achievement.

But suppose this man is incapable of enjoying an afternoon of rest without experiencing guilt.

Suppose he becomes anxious whenever his productivity declines, or feels personally diminished when another man earns more money.

One might reasonably ask whether his discipline still serves him, or whether he has begun serving his discipline.

The same question applies to ambition.

A man may pursue wealth because he wishes to build something, provide for his family, acquire independence, or participate in some extraordinary undertaking.

But another man may pursue the same wealth because the possibility of being ordinary terrifies him.

From the outside, their conduct might look remarkably similar.

Both work. Both sacrifice. Both accumulate.

Yet one is moving toward something he has chosen, while the other may be running from something he cannot bear to confront.

The distinction is not necessarily visible in their achievements.

It resides in their relationship with those achievements.

And here, I believe, we arrive at the first knife.

A quality cannot be understood merely by observing its presence. We must also investigate the relationship between the individual and the quality he possesses.

When Virtue Becomes Vice

There is an enormous difference between desiring and being governed by desire.

There is an enormous difference between sacrifice and the inability to refuse sacrifice.

There is an enormous difference between carrying responsibility because one has chosen it and carrying responsibility because one fears that refusing it would make him less of a man.

A man may become enslaved by vice.

But he may also become enslaved by virtue.

The man who cannot resist pleasure is governed by pleasure. Yet the man who cannot refuse duty, sacrifice, suffering, or obligation without questioning his own masculinity may be governed just as thoroughly.

The master has merely changed clothes.

This strikes me as particularly interesting because we are generally quite comfortable recognizing the dangers of vice.

A man addicted to gambling has lost some measure of freedom. The same may be said of a man unable to resist alcohol, compulsive spending, or pleasures which repeatedly destroy what he values.

We understand that something is wrong when a person cannot refrain from an activity, even when refraining would clearly serve him.

But what happens when the activity is socially admired?

What happens when a man cannot stop working?

When he cannot refuse someone else's financial demands?

When he cannot withdraw from a conflict without feeling cowardly?

When he cannot permit himself to cry because he has constructed an identity around being unshakable?

Curiously, we may congratulate him for precisely the behavior that deserves examination.

His inability to rest becomes discipline.

His inability to refuse becomes generosity.

His inability to acknowledge fear becomes courage.

His inability to abandon an ambition becomes perseverance.

Yet these interpretations depend on something we have not established.

Whether he is acting freely.

Now, I should distinguish this from the ordinary difficulties of carrying responsibilities.

A father cannot simply abandon his children because he would prefer an afternoon of leisure. A person who has made a promise may have very good reasons to honor it even when doing so becomes unpleasant.

Duty sometimes requires us to act against our immediate desires.

I am not suggesting that discomfort invalidates responsibility.

Rather, I am asking whether the individual understands why he accepts the responsibility, whether he has examined its legitimacy, and whether he is capable of distinguishing an obligation he genuinely ought to fulfill from one he carries merely to preserve an image of himself.

A man may choose sacrifice and remain free.

But when sacrifice itself becomes the measure of his worth, he may begin manufacturing suffering simply to feel virtuous.

Apparently, even misery can become a rather respectable accomplishment.

The Peculiar Business of Provision

One place where I have observed this tension is in relationships between men and women.

I want to approach the matter carefully, because it is easy to turn observations about human behavior into accusations against an entire sex. That would tell us very little about either.

Nevertheless, a recurring pattern in some relationships, including situations I have observed among friends, has caught my attention.

A woman may decide that certain forms of physical intimacy should be reserved for marriage.

She is exercising a personal boundary, and that boundary deserves respect.

Now consider a man who decides that certain forms of financial provision should likewise be reserved for marriage.

Perhaps he enjoys buying dinner. Perhaps he is generous by nature. Perhaps he would gladly support a wife and children.

But he does not wish to assume substantial financial responsibilities for someone with whom he has not yet entered a lasting commitment.

In some social circles, his decision may be received rather differently.

He may be described as cheap, ungenerous, insufficiently masculine, or somehow incapable of fulfilling his role.

Why?

I find this curious.

The physical and financial matters are certainly not identical. They involve different forms of vulnerability, personal autonomy, and consequence, and they should not be treated as interchangeable commodities.

But there is a common question concerning the freedom to establish a boundary.

Why should the refusal to perform an expected role automatically constitute a deficiency of character?

Historically, masculine identity has frequently been associated with provision and protection, while feminine identity has often been associated with other expectations concerning intimacy, care, and selectivity.

The particulars differ enormously across cultures and individuals.

But inherited expectations have a peculiar ability to survive long after people have begun questioning the systems that produced them.

A person may reject traditional obligations in one area of life while preserving them in another.

Men do this. Women do this. I suspect we all do it far more frequently than we would care to admit.

And the important question here is not whether a man should pay for dinner.

Good heavens, that would be a rather disappointing conclusion to an investigation into the development of humanity.

The question is whether his generosity belongs to him.

Does he provide because he wishes to?

Or because he fears what refusing would say about his masculinity?

Can he experience the pleasure of giving without requiring the act of giving to establish his worth?

Can he establish a financial boundary without interpreting his own decision as evidence of inadequacy?

The same examination must, of course, be extended to every person involved.

Nobody's inherited role creates an automatic entitlement to another person's body, money, labor, or affection.

I am interested in the possibility that generosity becomes more meaningful when it is freely chosen.

And that a man who can provide, but can also consciously refuse to provide, may possess a rather different relationship with provision than a man who considers refusal psychologically impossible.

The Feminine Within

This brings us to what I consider one of the more mysterious aspects of the subject.

Since time immemorial, man has appeared strangely captivated by the feminine.

He seeks it, worships it, fears it, possesses it, idealizes it, condemns it, writes poetry about it, wages wars around it, builds families with it, destroys himself pursuing it, and occasionally spends extraordinary amounts of currency, whatever the currency is, attempting to impress it.

One might reasonably suspect that something more complicated is occurring here than mere attraction.

Carl Jung's work provides an interesting way of examining this phenomenon.

Jung used the concept of the anima to explore, among other things, the unconscious feminine dimension within a man's psychology. His terminology belongs to a particular historical psychological framework, not an established biological classification of men and women.

Still, the questions it raises are worth considering.

What happens when a man identifies so completely with a narrow image of masculinity that he cannot consciously acknowledge the qualities he has excluded?

What becomes of his tenderness, receptivity, emotional vulnerability, imagination, or longing for connection?

Do these qualities simply disappear?

I suspect not.

They may instead appear in indirect forms.

A man who cannot acknowledge his own vulnerability may become extraordinarily dependent upon someone who makes him feel safe enough to express it.

A man who regards emotional sensitivity as weakness may become fascinated by a woman in whom he perceives precisely that quality.

A man who cannot tolerate uncertainty within himself may demand impossible certainty from the person he loves.

And sometimes, perhaps, the woman he pursues carries an image he has not yet learned to recognize as his own.

This is not to suggest that every romantic attachment is an unconscious projection. People love one another for innumerable reasons, many of them entirely ordinary.

But projection offers one possible explanation for why certain attractions appear disproportionate to what the individual actually knows about the person before him.

He may believe he is encountering another human being, while simultaneously encountering something he has imagined, desired, feared, or disowned within himself.

And the difficulty begins when he mistakes one entirely for the other.

For no woman can permanently fulfill the psychological role of completing a man who refuses to encounter himself.

Nor, I would add, should she be expected to.

Perhaps man's relationship with the feminine outside himself cannot be fully understood until he has developed some relationship with the feminine within himself.

Perhaps desire itself changes character as the man becomes increasingly conscious of what he once sought only through another person.

This possibility interests me considerably more than the endless instructions about how a man should behave to attract women.

Those instructions usually begin with the performance.

I am interested in the performer.

The Image and the Man

Jung also wrote extensively about the persona, the social face through which an individual presents himself to the world.

I find this particularly relevant to masculinity.

A man may need to perform certain roles. He may be a father, husband, employer, protector, or leader.

Those roles have practical significance.

The difficulty arises when he becomes unable to distinguish himself from them.

Imagine a man who has built his entire identity around being the provider.

He is successful. His family depends on him. His social standing reflects his financial achievements.

Then circumstances change.

His business fails, he loses his employment, or he becomes physically incapable of maintaining his previous responsibilities.

What has he lost?

Certainly, he may have lost income, independence, and the ability to fulfill obligations that genuinely matter.

But if he experiences the loss as proof that he is no longer a man, something else has happened.

His identity has become inseparable from a particular function.

The provider was not merely a role he performed.

It had become the definition of his existence.

And when the role disappeared, he found himself confronting a rather frightening question.

Who am I without it?

This is why I have become suspicious of definitions of manhood that depend entirely upon performance.

A man who must continually demonstrate his masculinity through wealth, dominance, endurance, or the admiration of others may find himself permanently dependent upon circumstances he cannot control.

He appears powerful, yet his sense of self may be extraordinarily fragile.

One failure, one rejection, one loss of status, and the entire construction begins to tremble.

Now, the obvious temptation is to abandon the ideal altogether.

If strength can enslave us, perhaps weakness should be embraced. If ambition becomes compulsive, perhaps ambition itself is the problem.

But that would merely reverse the error.

We would still be allowing one side of the opposition to define the whole man.

I see little wisdom in escaping the tyranny of compulsory strength by making helplessness into a virtue.

Nor does the recognition that provision can become coercive mean generosity should be discarded.

The question is not which quality must win.

It is whether the man can develop a conscious relationship with the qualities available to him.

This brings us back to something I have repeatedly encountered in my own investigations: opposites need not always be enemies.

Strength and tenderness.

Ambition and contentment.

Solitude and connection.

Discipline and spontaneity.

One may be appropriate where the other is not.

A man might need extraordinary ambition to build something worthwhile, yet also need the capacity to recognize when further achievement has become an escape from himself.

He may need courage to confront danger, yet sufficient humility to acknowledge that fear is present.

He may need to sacrifice for those he loves, while retaining enough self-respect to recognize when sacrifice has become exploitation.

The difficulty is that no universal prescription can tell him, in every circumstance, which side ought to prevail.

That requires judgment.

And judgment requires awareness of the forces acting upon him.

The Development of Man

I have no particular interest in constructing another list of masculine commandments.

The world apparently has no shortage of those.

Nor am I suggesting that the developed man should float through life without responsibilities, obligations, or convictions, perpetually questioning everything until he becomes incapable of making a decision.

That would be an equally peculiar form of captivity.

My interest lies elsewhere.

I want to understand how a man may become capable of encountering the various forces within himself without immediately being governed by them.

Can he possess strength without becoming possessed by the image of strength?

Can he sacrifice without worshipping sacrifice?

Can he provide without requiring provision to prove his worth?

Can he love a woman without making her responsible for his relationship with life?

Can he experience tremendous desire while retaining the freedom to say no?

Can he ascend without becoming addicted to ascent?

Can he rest without becoming trapped by comfort?

Can he enter both greatness and balance consciously, rather than being thrown between them by circumstances?

I suspect that none of these questions can be answered satisfactorily through an isolated act of will.

A man may intellectually understand that his worth is not identical to his wealth, yet still experience humiliation when he loses money.

He may understand that vulnerability is not weakness, yet find himself unable to reveal sorrow in front of someone he loves.

He may acknowledge that he has inherited certain ideals, yet continue obeying them with remarkable enthusiasm.

Knowledge, apparently, does not automatically produce freedom.

And here I find Jung's idea of individuation particularly interesting.

Not as a fashionable synonym for self-improvement, nor as some final achievement in which the individual becomes perfectly integrated and permanently at peace.

Rather, as an ongoing confrontation with the parts of oneself that have remained unconscious, rejected, exaggerated, or mistaken for the whole personality.

The man who identifies exclusively with strength may need to encounter his weakness.

The man who worships reason may need to recognize the influence of feelings he has never examined.

The man who prides himself on sacrifice may need to discover why receiving something without earning it makes him uncomfortable.

And the man who considers himself entirely independent may need to investigate why he is so profoundly affected by the opinion of a stranger.

These encounters are not necessarily pleasant.

Indeed, I would be rather suspicious of any account of psychological development in which the individual discovers only admirable things about himself.

Yet I suspect they are necessary if he wishes to distinguish what he genuinely values from what he merely fears losing.

The developed man, then, may not be the man who has finally eliminated his contradictions.

He may be the man who has become sufficiently conscious of them that they no longer govern him without his knowledge.

And perhaps there is a further distinction worth preserving.

To become aware of an impulse is not to become its master automatically.

One may understand a pattern and still repeat it.

The investigation must eventually pass beyond explanation and enter conduct.

It is one thing to declare that a man should not be enslaved by ambition.

It is quite another to close the laptop when there is more money to be made, and discover whether he can bear the silence that follows.

It is one thing to claim that a man should possess emotional freedom.

It is another to acknowledge fear while standing before someone whose opinion matters to him.

The actual examination begins when an inherited ideal encounters a situation in which obedience is no longer obviously the right choice.

What does he do then?

Does he exercise judgment?

Or does he obey?

The Question That Remains

I began this inquiry wondering what man actually is.

The further I examine the matter, the less convinced I become that the answer can be found in a catalogue of admirable qualities.

I do not believe masculinity should be discarded. Nor do I believe that strength, ambition, sacrifice, discipline, and provision are merely oppressive inventions from which man must liberate himself.

These qualities have helped people survive, protect others, construct societies, and undertake extraordinary work.

But their usefulness does not establish that they constitute the entirety of a man.

And admiration for a quality does not exempt it from examination.

A man may build an extraordinary life through discipline while remaining inwardly terrified of disorder.

He may devote himself to providing for others while being incapable of imagining that he deserves affection without providing anything.

He may become admired for his courage while privately living in fear of appearing afraid.

The tragedy, if there is one, is that the world may continually reward him for never questioning the arrangement.

He receives admiration for his strength.

Respect for his sacrifice.

Approval for his endurance.

And perhaps, after many years, he begins to suspect that the qualities which earned him so much admiration have also become the conditions under which he permits himself to exist.

This is not an argument against virtue.

It is an argument for examining our relationship with virtue.

For if a man is incapable of refusing the role he performs, we ought at least to question whether the role remains his servant.

Perhaps development requires not merely acquiring admirable qualities, but learning to possess them without becoming identical to them.

To be strong when strength is required.

To be tender when tenderness is appropriate.

To fulfill a responsibility because it deserves fulfillment.

To refuse an obligation when it has no legitimate claim upon him.

To pursue greatness without requiring greatness to justify his existence.

And to encounter the feminine, the uncertain, the vulnerable, and the mysterious within himself without regarding their presence as an assault upon his masculinity.

I have no reason to believe this investigation reaches a final conclusion here.

In fact, I rather suspect it has only begun.

But one question remains with me.

What if the man who has spent his entire life trying to become the ideal man has never once stopped to ask who, exactly, is demanding that he become one?

He may discover that the command does not come from his father, his culture, his religion, or even the people whose admiration he seeks.

At least, not anymore.

He may have inherited it from them, certainly.

But after enough years, the command has become his own voice.

And this is perhaps the most peculiar form of slavery I have encountered.

The prisoner carries the keys. The guard wears his face. And the man has spent so long sharpening the knife that he has neglected to notice where its blade is pointing.

The master, apparently, need not be another man.

Sometimes he is the man we have been trying to become.