Beyond Stoic (And Desperately Lonely)
The journey of manhood demands that we move beyond our cultural obsession with rugged individualism.
I propose that manhood isn’t about something defined that we become, but the journey from boyhood (being born male) to a healthy self-determined adulthood. With that comes six critical ideas on what the journey of manhood (as opposed to the journey to manhood) would entail:
growing beyond cultural expectations,
overcoming societal obstacles, and
healing your psyche, to
discover your most authentic self and
use your gifts to serve the world.
Over several weeks, I will unpack these. This is the second on growing beyond cultural expectations. You can read part one here.
An Army of One
Back in the early 2000’s the US Army had an epically horrible and relatively short-lived but culturally perfect slogan, “An Army of One.” It replaced the 20-year-old, “Be All That You Can Be,” slogan that proved so effective in the ‘80s and ‘90s that they are bringing it back today, like Magnum PI and Fraiser. Never mind that the reboot most fitting for this post would be the show Friser originally spun off of, after all, we could all use a place where everyone knows our name and their always glad we came.
What made, “An Army Of One,” so relevant? Not only did it feed off of America’s obsession with the male warrior archetype, but it also highlighted our obsession with rugged individualism. That’s right, you, and you alone, are the Army.
Rugged Individualism
While Herbert Hoover popularized the words “rugged individualism” as the suggested response to the challenges brought on by the Great Depression, he was largely calling on an idea deeply rooted in the American ethos.
The early Colonies, be it the pursuit of religious freedom in the North or those seeking economic prosperity in the South, laid the groundwork for the kinds of people who would inhabit the new world.
The western frontier was ripe with opportunity for those willing to risk everything for the promise of opportunity that comes with land or gold. How could every man not begin to see himself as his own John Dutton from the hit show Yellowstone, willing to do anything to protect his family and his ranch?
But it’s not just the frontier spirit that Hoover drew from. We see the same in the industrial East where “self-made men” like Andrew Carnegie had made a fortune in the steel business and John D. Rockefeller did the same with oil. They were that generation’s version of Sam Walton, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos.
You could also point to the transcendental philosophers like Emerson and Thoreau who popularized European Enlightenment ideas that celebrated the supremacy of the individual, an idea originally birthed by people like Rene Descartes … you know, the guy who was wrong about humans as thinkers.
And that last bit is the key. Just as Descartes failed to grasp the nature of the human brain, our present-day conception of the rugged individual is misguided.
Individual or Collective?
But reliance on others has always been a part of the American story.
The colonies were called colonies because people from another land moved there and established a society … together.
Our Consitution opens with, “We the People,” and the contents are written with the following collective ends in mind:
establish Justice
insure domestic Tranquility
provide for the common defense
promote the general Welfare
ensure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves (plural)
We see this embodied by the settlers who made their way west … in groups. When threats would come they would circle the wagons in a unified defense. When it came time to develop roots in a certain place, neighbors would come together for a barn raising. Ultimately, to address the indigenous “threat,” they relied on the US Army to butcher natives and move the survivors onto reservations.
There is even an element of reliance on others for those, “self-made men.” In their day, they were described by another term, Robber Barons, a combination of the English aristocratic class with common thieves. It is an accurate description as these businesses thrived on the backs of workers who were paid starvation wages, the acquisition of competitors to create competition-squelching monopolies, the bribery of political leaders to create corporate-friendly policy, and glorified pump-and-dump stock schemes to take advantage of less savvy investors. They didn’t develop wealth on their own. They stood on the backs of others and manipulated a system until they could rig it for their benefit, but all of that required others.1 As Dr. Martin Luther King would describe it years later, they were truly the authors of “socialism for the rich, and rugged individualism for the poor.”
Even Hoover’s original declaration included local community efforts as a means to address the crisis. He was just philosophically opposed to a large-scale government response like the New Deal, which FDR implemented after ousting Hoover in the next election cycle.
No wonder there’s a male loneliness epidemic in our current cultural framework.
Three People We Need
If we are going to move forward well as men, we need to grow beyond the cultural expectation that we do life alone. And we can’t just expect our wives, girlfriends, or some woman who has yet to manifest to be the totality of our solution. In truth, we all need at least three other people in our lives (some of us will want more, other less, but we need at least three). And these three play very different roles as we need someone before us, someone standing next to us, and someone behind us.
Someone Before Us
Each of us has our path through life, and yet, the man the Bible describes as the wisest who ever lived is attributed as saying, “There is nothing new under the sun.” The point is that, while nobody can tell us the right path for our individual life, there is nothing we will experience that someone hasn’t already experienced before.
But when we operate under rugged individualism, this leaves us trying to figure out how to move forward in life sans historical wisdom. This rarely works. As one example, it explains why the Robber Barons have returned to our society after being restrained for decades.
When a wave of Democratic Boomers (including our current president) were elected to the Senate in the wake of Watergate, they brought their, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” mindset with them. They ignored the anti-trust wisdom of older Democratic Senators, opening the door for big business and bankers to once again peddle influence on both sides of the aisle (Republicans had long been the corporate party). The checks and balances that allowed both business and the middle class to thrive in the decades following World War II were abandoned and over the past 50 years, the middle class has largely disappeared. The majority of Americans today struggle because they ignored the wisdom of the previous generations.
This doesn’t mean we should just do what the previous generation did (restraining today’s Robber Barrons would make life better for us all … thank you Lina Kahn for stepping up). Instead we need to listen and learn so we can evaluate, pivot, and adapt. We need not just to know what others have done but why. We need someone to evoke awareness of what we cannot see so we can move forward with greater clarity.
Historically, we’ve called men who did this grandpa, dad, or uncle, but far too often, those roles today are left abdocated. For me, it’s the man I call my soul guide. For those of you lacking someone before you, this is a service I provide as a holistic life coach. While I can work with anyone, I am best with men who:
are dads (married or single)
have a history of bullying and/or abuse (including childhood sexual abuse)
those who have struggled with compulsive behavior (including compulsive sexual behavior)
men wrestling with faith, specifically popular forms of Christianity
male survivors of domestic violence
I can also facilitate psychedelic breathwork (no plants or chemicals required) that can provide access to your own psyche and what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious, deeper wisdom contained within all of us.
Someone Beside Us
But we need more than someone ahead of us, we also need someone beside us to remind us that we’re not alone in the struggle. There is a reason having a friend is one of the best things you can do for your overall health. We need to know that we’re not alone.
Someone Behind Us
Finally, we need someone behind us to pass on what we have learned. Not only is teaching one of the best ways to root wisdom without our psyches, but serving others gives us a purpose that makes life more meaningful.
Army Strong Together
When the Army ditched the Army of One slogan it replaced it with Army Strong. While still overhyping the warrior (it’s not the Peace Corps after all), I will give them credit for highlighting the collective over the individual. You are not strong, your Squad is strong. You are not strong, your Platoon is strong. You are not strong, your Batallion is strong. You are not strong, the Army is Strong.
So here are three questions to ask yourself:
Who is before you?
Who is beside you?
Who is behind you?
For an interesting read on this, check out Matt Stoller’s, “Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy” (affiliate). And yes, I see the irony of linking to an anti-monopoly book on Amazon.