Save Against Fear 2018

The time has come once again for Save Against Fear, the fundraiser convention that we run to support The Bodhana Group.

I love TBG, and I’m proud to serve on the board and support them however I can. In case you don’t know – The Bodhana Group uses games in therapy, primarily with children and youth who struggle with mental illness, Autism Spectrum Disorder, grief and other socio-emotional challenges. We are working on multiple games, research projects to put rigorous data behind what we do, and are running multiple groups in collaboration with care providers in the York, PA area.

Save Against Fear is an awesome, small, local convention held in Harrisburg PA. The schedule is flush with games, including multiple opportunities to game with game designers like Eddie Webb, Doug Levandowski and Jason Godeski among others. I think we’ll actually have six or seven designers in total, running their games. We also have plenty of Pathfinder Society games, board games, a game auction, and a huge collection of games that you can sign out and play.

I will be running Satanic Panic for a full table, and I will also be moderating our Game Designer’s Panel which should be a blast.

I know, this is basically a commercial for Save Against Fear, but if I can only go to one convention in a given year, this is the one I attend. It’s fun on its own terms, and in addition raises money for a good cause. Pretty much everyone you meet there will be awesome, because a nonprofit that uses games to heal children attracts some special folks, as you’d expect.

Maybe I’ll see you there this weekend.

Prayer (Goodbye Zu-zu)

Tonight our hamster died, so I decided to tell a story about prayer.

When we first got our hamster, Zu-zu, my daughter was so excited. She was 6 at the time (now 7) and was just enamored with this little creature. We had seen her at the pet store that afternoon and gotten her on an impulse, as we tend to do. We go to the pet store because it cheers us up, and is something we can do for free, but sometimes we come home with a creature.

Not long after, Zu-zu escaped her cage in my daughter’s room right around bedtime (Zu-zu turned out to be an elite escape artist). We went through the entire upstairs part of our house, but to no avail – the hamster was nowhere to be found. My daughter was really upset at the loss of her new pet. Eventually, hours after bedtime, she fell asleep, still tearful. I felt a lot of sympathy, and also had my own situation to feel bad about – I had stood up two wonderful women from my church with whom I had a lunch date.

I tried all I could think of to contact the two of them and apologize, and try to find a way to make amends, but they weren’t responding. I felt miserable about it because these were two genuinely good people whom I had just failed. They were the kind of people who would be really hurt by this kind of thing, as well.

That night, upset on my daughter’s behalf, and on my own behalf, I prayed. Now, I have a well-documented ambivalence with regard to prayer. Suffering from depression and anxiety, I’d been told many times that I could just pray these things away. They were all in my mind, after all. If it wasn’t working, it was because I was a failure – not faithful enough, secretly evil, too full of doubt, whatever. And working in a hospital as a chaplain, I had seen plenty of good people pray and still suffer for no discernible moral or theological reason. Balance that with the many stories of answered prayers I’ve heard as a pastor and a Christian in general, as well as the painful stories of unanswered prayers.

But, anyway, I prayed. I prayed that we would find Zu-zu, and that my two friends from church would forgive me. I didn’t know what else to do, and even I pray when I’m desperate.

That night, my daughter had a dream. She woke my spouse and I up to tell us about it. In her dream, she found Zu-zu in her room, standing on her hind legs and cleaning her face and smiling at her. So I thought, OK. I went into her room, looked around for a while by the light of my cellphone, and there was Zu-zu, standing on her hind legs, cleaning her face with her little paws.

The next day, my two friends let me know that they forgave me, and we made new lunch plans.

Prayer is weird and doesn’t make any sense. When put to a rigorous test, it tends to fail, yet billions of people believe in its efficacy. I wrote a whole book about not praying, but there it is. I prayed, and that’s what happened.

I remember the flood of thankfulness that I felt, the wonder that things had turned out OK after all. And my 6 year old having a predictive dream about finding her hamster – that was genuinely weird. Yes, sure, she could have just seen her hamster while half-asleep, thought she dreamed what she had, and told us about it. The hamster was in the dark and behind a dresser, but sure. That’s what could have happened. And my two friends might have just chosen that day to let me know that they forgave me. Just a coincidence.

Prayer is like that. It’s frustrating.

Goodbye Zu-zu.

On Being A White Male

I know, no one cares. Way too much is about being a white male already. That being said, I can’t fully understand what it is like to be anything else. And being a white male is distinct from whether I understand what it is to be a white male – which I continue to try to do. 

My dangerous TL;DR: it is clearly easier to be white and male than non-white and non-male in American society. That being said, I think it is common to overestimate how easy it is to be a white male.

One way to sum up American society would be: America is made by white males, for white males. I’m not arguing that point, it is clearly the case. What I do want to do is to add two Mad-Lib blanks to the statement and then fill them in and explain why. So the statement would become America is made by _____ white males, for white males _____.

I would fill in those blanks with the following, to make a more accurate and telling statement: America is made by rich white males, for white males to destroy ourselves and everything around us.

If you are not rich, America is not for you

Why is race as a social construct not overwhelmingly rejected as obviously false and harmful? Perhaps at a time when ignorance let us pretend that it had some basis in science, 100 or more years in the past. But why isn’t race categorized with phrenology, where it belongs?

One short answer is that the social construct of race is enough to divide poor white folks from poor people of color, so that they don’t realize that they have the exact same interests, which are in complete contradiction to the interests of the wealthy and ownership class. This is why millions of white Republicans vote against their best interests, and have for four decades solid. You can sit a white Republican down and point to how their votes lead to policies that materially make their lives measurably worse in every way, and yet there is no change. Why is that? Tribalism is part of it, but race is a huge element. Why do Red States publicly, vocally detest public assistance while simultaneously needing more public assistance than Blue States? Because public assistance is, in their perception, racialized. It is something lazy black and brown folks get from the Democratic Party, which is of course why they overwhelmingly vote Democratic, in this view.

Why is Silicon Valley doomsday-prepping? Why are they researching how to create Gault’s Gulch on Mars, or how to automate their home defenses, or how to mind-control their employees? Out of the understandable fear that a large segment of the population will realize that this whole system is designed to harm the vast majority of us for the profit of a few.

If you do not destroy yourself, America is not for you

The moment you decide to stop participating in societal self-harm, you will be pushed. As soon as you stop over-working and under-sleeping and self-medicating and emotionally anesthetizing, things start to fall apart fast. As soon as you ask, “Why would I sacrifice for a company that won’t sacrifice for me?” the cracks begin to show. Right when you decide that productivity and efficiency are not moral values – that they may very well be immoral ones – America turns ugly, is revealed in its ugliness.

Even dipping your toe in, asking, “Wait, what would a good life look like? What would flourishing look like?” brings a swift answer – it looks like nothing  you have ever experienced thus far. Asking that question, you are in uncharted territory. The system is not designed for you to flourish, and when you start trying to flourish, the system will push back.

Clearly, our society is made for white men, but it isn’t made for us to find joy and flourish and live good lives. It is a “blueprint for self-destruction”, to quote Utah Philips as I often do. It is a hand-grenade with a slow fuse, but the pin is pulled.

If you do not destroy everything around you, America is not for you

In 2018, it is impossible to even participate in our economy without materially contributing to the destruction of everyone and everything around us. With tremendous effort, and insight, and sacrifice, and planning, it might be possible to live a zero-sum life where the good you do and the harm you do are balanced out. I’m saying it is possible in theory, but it is so difficult that I’m not sure how one would do that. People who try end up looking absurd to those around them.

The system we have now is rocketing downward at such a break-neck speed that our brains haven’t evolved to even comprehend it. 21 Trillion dollars unaccounted for in war spending; species going extinct up to 10,000 times faster than they would be without us; ten football fields of rainforest burned and clear-cut every day; gallons of water wasted to produce every pound of meat – we are not capable of understanding the damage we are doing. The facts of our system beggar the imagination.

And as white men, what we’re offered is the chance to be in charge of this absurd horrorshow. That’s the carrot; that’s the dream. Someday, if I work  hard and keep my nose clean, I can rise to the upper reaches of this charnel-house of misery, exploitation, and the destruction of beauty.

…yay?

America is made by white males, for white males, but not by the vast majority of white males, and not for our flourishing. It’s like being born as Edward Scissorhands. As long as you are called upon to cut or stab people and things, including yourself, you are well-suited, even rewarded. This is just what we built you for. The moment you try to stop cutting and stabbing people and things, you find out that you have a serious problem on your hands (pun intended). You have been shaped in a way that doesn’t let you flourish, and that even keeps people around you from flourishing.

I think this is where some of the bitterness that white males express toward Feminism and Black Lives Matter comes from, the push-back and hostility when some people talk about “White privilege.” Because 99% of white males, just like 99.9% of everyone else, are living in the midst of a society that destroys them, and pushes them relentlessly to destroy the people and things around them. Occasionally we snatch some joy or meaning from life, but it’s such a battle. It seems like only a judgmental asshole would call this privilege, especially at first. (I get why that response is infuriating to everyone who isn’t a white male, too.)

The big disadvantage of being a white male

There are innumerable advantages to being a white male – sort of. Advantages in a horrifying system that is destroying all of us are…still advantages. But the big disadvantage of being a white male in America is that nothing I’ve said so far is intuitive or obvious. In fact, it is profoundly counter-intuitive and only realized with significant struggle. What is probably screamingly apparent to people who are not white and male is genuinely not apparent to us without some degree of effort – sometimes a ton of effort. We are white, and the world is bleached. We are male, and the world is chauvinized (enjoy my neologism).

At first glance, and at two-hundredth glance, America seems like just the place for us. Just look at it! We’re represented in all media. We’re in control of everything. We’re assumed to be competent when we are not, and assumed to be extraordinary when we are merely competent. If there is any place where we should be flourishing, surely this is the place!

Only we’re not. More of us are giving up on life, and committing suicide, and becoming nihilists. It’s shitty here and the fight to make our lives anything but shitty is a real one, and many of us lose that fight. If you take the “Red Pill”, then the reason for this lack of flourishing is “because Feminism.” If you are racist, or racist-adjacent, then the reason for this lack of flourishing is “because minorities.” Neither one is at all true, but figuring that out takes another whole round of struggle.

If you aren’t a white male, I imagine that it is much more apparent that this place is not for you and your flourishing. You’re under-represented. You’re not in control of anything, or hardly anything – not even your own body! An obviously shitty situation that is unfair, and infuriating, and dystopian, and claustrophobic – but easier to see clearly from the start. Or so I guess.

One response to this is clearly, “I demand a seat at the table.” And you fight for generations, and perhaps get that seat. And then you have a seat at the table where they create a world that pushes us to destroy ourselves and each other. I imagine it takes a while to realize that, and then what? All that long struggle to be at or near the top of the dystopia instead of the bottom.

But this is a post about white males.

The only way out

The only way out I can see is for white men to join the movements for liberation of women and people of color, not as self-sacrificing Saints of Woke-ness, but for our own survival and self-interest. Not so that we all have a seat at the table, but so we smash the table and burn down the shitty building it’s in, and build something else that doesn’t drive us to destroy ourselves and each other. Misogyny and racism are weapons used against us, just as they are weapons we are taught and encouraged to use against others.

And in the short term, maybe the foreseeable future, this will probably have to look like getting everyone a seat at the table. Because there is no way forward, no hope at all, in smashing this table, this system inimical to human flourishing, without the help and leadership of those who are not white and who are not men. And there are absolutely those white men and others who act in bad faith, climbing the ladder and pulling it up behind them, for reasons ranging from bigotry to perceived self-preservation.

This place is really fucked up, and it wasn’t made for 99% of us. We can’t flourish here unless it changes. And we have so many allies in fighting for that change, if we get our heads out of our collective asses and realize that it’s long past time.

I was going to write about the White Ethnostate and MGTOWs, but I’ll leave this here. I imagine I’ve said something here to upset everyone, so that’s fun.

Part 1: Orc Is A Process

There is a lot of speculation out there as to where orcs come from in the Tolkien legendarium. There are a lot of answers to this question. The slimy mud-pits of Peter Jackson’s Isengard come to mind, for example.

Some things we “know”: there seem to be no orc nor goblin women at all. There are no children, adolescents, etc. No orc villages where they grow up and raise crops. We have no idea what they eat in Goblin Town, when they can’t get dwarves and a hobbit. Orcs are, when we meet them, either singing tormentors or war-wearly soldiers who fear the secret police. We know that over time, mountain tunnels re-fill with orcs. They breed, if they breed, in secret, like vermin. They are described as “…squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.” (Letter 210) (I’m not going into the implicit racism here and elsewhere in Tolkien’s works – but there it is) In an unpublished letter to a Mrs. Munsby, he said, “There must have been orc-women. But in stories that seldom if ever see the Orcs except as soldiers of armies in the service of the evil lords we naturally would not learn much about their lives. Not much was known.” The ambiguity is increased by Tolkien’s method with his own legendarium, which I appreciate – treating it like a set of documents with multiple authors and a lot of uncertainty.

I just re-read The Lord of the Rings for the many-teenth time, and part of what was on my mind was this whole orc question. The text itself does not answer the question, and even reading Tolkien’s other writings and letters gives no clear, definitive answer. One theory found in the Silmarillion is that when Morgoth captured elves he twisted them, by slow torturous arts, into the first orcs. We know that Morgoth, and by extension Sauron and Saruman, cannot create new forms of life but can only twist what already exists. In the context of the Silmarillion, this is presented as a theory among the elves that they don’t know to be true.

So, if that is true, how did Saruman begin to create the half-orcs and goblin-men we see as early as when the hobbits first reach Bree? We can look at the White Wizard because, unlike Morgoth or Sauron, Saruman created orcs and goblins over the course of the story we know, and I think that the way his creations are described gives us insight into where orcs and goblins come from.

There must be some mid-way point between non-orc and orc that Saruman was able to reach while working in secret. Now, one assumption is that he bred half-orcs, meaning he presumably kidnapped humans and forced them to have sex with orcs. So the pits beneath Isengard would have been rape-pits. Now, Tolkien is famously uninterested in where dwarf-children come from – the only implication that dwarf-children even exist is that dwarves who used to live in Dale were highly-skilled toymakers. In this, Tolkien is simply drawing on his source material: Germanic myth and legend, equally uninterested in where dwarf-babies come from. (Come to think of it, all of his elvish characters also enter their particular stories as full-grown adults, and the elf-children tends to refer to elves who lived near the creation of the world rather than literal children.) But Tolkien is no more interested in dwarf-children than the Norse Sagas and Eddas were, and this disinterest is also applied to orcs.

My theory is that orcs are the result of torment. This explains a lot of things in the story, while bringing in the theory (attributed to the elvish creators of the stories Bilbo presumably translated in The Silmarillion as Translations From the Elvish by B. B.) that the first orcs were born of elves, twisted and tormented in the prisons beneath Angband in the First Age.

It Explains Goblin Town

When we first meet orcs, it is in The Hobbit, and they are called goblins. What do we learn about them? They are tricky – they have a clever trap designed to help them capture travelers who take refuge in a particularly desirable cave. Once the goblins have captured the dwarves, they sing a song about how they are going to drag them down underground to work as slaves, presumably until they die. In An Unexpected Journey, the Goblin King goes into greater detail, spelling out the torture as well as slavery that the dwarves have to look forward to.

But what if the reason that the caverns beneath the Misty Mountains slowly fill with goblins and orcs over the years is because they are capturing travelers, like the dwarves, and tormenting them underground until they become orcs themselves?

It reminds me of the short story of a person who is tortured by a devil in hell. Eventually, the devil hands the person the torture implements, because they have become a demon, and then a new person is sent to them in order to be tormented. Hell is self-sustaining.

It Explains Sauron’s Control of the East and South

We are told more than once in the Lord of the Rings that Sauron holds sway over the Haradrim, Corsairs of Umbar, Easterlings, and similar peoples living south and east of Mordor. Then why, one wonders, would he use orcs at all? Why not just bring up human conscripts, as he does during the War of the Ring, all the time? Why are his minions almost invariably orcs?

In my theory, he has control of these regions so that he always has a fresh supply of people to torment and turn into orcs. Additionally, this explains why orcs are racially coded as dark-skinned and/or Asian – just as people living in the East and South of Middle-Earth would be. If all of the living orcs were descendants of the first elves Morgoth captured and twisted to his own purposes, why would they have features reflecting the lands that Sauron controlled? They would all have twisted elvish features, one would assume.

One can speculate, perhaps, that Sauron lacked the power to capture and twist elves the way that Morgoth, most powerful of the Valar, could. Maybe Morgoth’s orcs, some of whom are still clearly around (note the conversations Sam overhears in the tower of Cirith Ungol between orcs who seem to remember the First Age), were superior, and Sauron is only able to round up humans who are easier to corrupt, to create his own orcs. That would fit with the overall theme, in the ancient world and in Middle-Earth, of decline over the centuries on all sides.

It Explains Why Mordor Is So Awful

Mordor, as a stronghold, makes no sense. High walls, literally raised by Sauron’s power and by his orcs after the fact, sometimes manufactured out of slag and industrial waste, encircle this land, keeping foes out and allies in. Within those encircling mountains is a horrific land where almost nothing grows, where the water is almost undrinkable, and the ‘air itself is a poisonous fume’ as Boromir explains in the first Peter Jackson film.

Mordor is precisely the kind of place that orcs would create – wherever we see them, they trample and harm and vandalize – but why would Sauron create it? Mordor makes no sense if orcs are just another species of being, like elf or dwarf or hobbit, but Mordor makes perfect sense if orcs are created by torment. They have to live in a perpetual hell in order to remain sufficiently orcish. The walls have to keep the orcs in as much as keep foes out, because torment is what makes an orc.

It Explains Saruman’s Half-Orcs

This is precisely why Saruman is working with what appear to be half-orcs or goblin-men – he has not had the time to twist his own slaves sufficiently to make them into full orcs. They are larger than normal for orcs, who are described as smaller in stature than most humans, and they are still able to move around freely during daytime, but they are sufficiently orcish to have all of the cruelty he desires in a personal army. This is why he is able to send some of the less-goblin-looking north as spies and, later, as ruffians serving the Boss Lotho. The orc-ing process is not complete. Throughout The Scouring of the Shire, the impression we have of Lotho’s men (really Sharky’s men) is that they are orcish humans. They have the racially-coded features, and the seemingly innate small-mindedness and cruelty, but are not so orcish that the hobbits know to resist them at first they way they would if they were invaded by a small army of goblins. (Ask Golfimbul)

It Connects Orcs to Wraiths

Wraiths are once-great humans, kings of Numenorean descent, twisted and warped so profoundly that they lose their physical bodies and all sense of individual will. They are called wraiths very intentionally, as wraith shares an Old English root word with wreath and writhe – to twist, or to be twisted. Orcs created by ongoing torment would fit the strong theme in Middle-Earth that evil can only corrupt what is and cannot create something new.

Against Authoritarianism

Not only are orcs twisted and cruel, but they are also thoroughly authoritarian, especially in the case of the orcs of Mordor. During the chapters following Shelob’s attack on Frodo, Sam overhears a lot of orc-talk, and it is almost always preoccupied with bosses, punishment, secret police, traitors, and so on – orcs here would fit perfectly well in a dystopian story like 1984 or Fahrenheit 451. This is a connection that Tolkien made intentionally – he said once in a letter that his own political leanings were more toward anarchism, as in the ‘abolishion of control.’ The heart of evil, for Tolkien, was the will to dominate other people. But in orcs, we have a people who are dominated and truamatized so thoroughly that they replicate their trauma wherever they go.

We all know of people like that, I think.

Trump Makes Orcs

Tolkien wrote to Christopher in Letter 71:

Yes, I think the orcs as real a creation as anything in ‘realistic’ fiction: your vigorous words well describe the tribe; only in real life they are on both sides, of course. For ‘romance’ has grown out of ‘allegory’, and its wars are still derived from the ‘inner war’ of allegory in which good is on one side and various modes of badness on the other. In real (exterior) life men are on both sides: which means a motley alliance of orcs, beasts, demons, plain naturally honest men, and angels. But it does make some difference who are your captains and whether they are orc-like per se!

To Tolkien, orcs were realistic, much as they have been panned since as irredeemably evil cannon-fodder. I’m not sure about entirely realistic, but if orc is a process, as I believe, then we can see that process at work wherever we look.  For example, who could possibly work at a concentration camp that served as a detention center for small children stolen from their asylum-seeking parents?

Orcs, that’s who.

And who is currently flourishing? Who is getting their way? We have a whole, large contingent in the United States of people who seem to mainly take pleasure in other’s suffering and discomfort. We have the vapid, nihilistic cruelty of Internet trolls, waves of rape threats aimed at any woman who dares appear in a science fiction film or comment on…anything, and a President who seems to have been elected solely to tear down various institutions. It is easy to see this as an age of orc-behavior, hurting for the sake of hurting, combined with growing comfort with regard to fear and authoritarianism.

In his refections on the Fourth Age, the so-called Age of Men, Tolkien talked about how he saw a rise in “orc-mischief,” that is, non-orcs behaving in orcish ways. A young cult arises in Gondor decades after the death of King Elessar – one can imagine such a cult arising on 4chan or through Breitbart. Hell, it already has. It’s called the alt-right by people who have forgotten what “Nazi” means.

The story of the Fourth Age never got off the ground for Tolkien, so among other things, we don’t know from his work what can be done about orcs, short of fighting them. This is where the presentation of evil in Middle-Earth is limited, as it is in any story. We only have the stories we have.

Perhaps the question is, what is the torment that has created these particular orcs? Because if I’m right, and if this is a meaningful comparison at all, then ending that torment, whatever it is, might be the way to halt the orc-process.

Another question that I’m thinking through, given the idea that orcs are created by torment, is why are almost all of the people engaging in orc-behavior in our day and age white? Even a cursory glance at American history reveals a panoply of torment aimed at non-whites by whites. Genocide and slavery and exploitation and apartheid. So why are all of these Trump-voting orcs white?

Thoughts on this interpretation of orcs? Of our current situation in the US? What do you think is the torment and its source? 

Repost: September 11th, 2001 – Please Forget

https://twofriarsandafool.com/2013/09/september-11th-2001-please-forget/

Men Have A Default, But Not A Path

…nor a goal.

I’m inching my way toward constructive work in helping to create and define positive masculinity, which leads me to think about masculinity a lot, which is weird. The reason it is weird is that there is no healthy, established pathway for the thoughts, and many of the pathways being built that I am aware of are going the wrong direction.

A Google glance at discussion around masculinity reveals a few consistent threads, none of which are helpful, and some of which are harmful:

1. Men are garbage and the source of every imagineable human problem, today and throughout history
2. Men are the real victims of powerful Feminists and reverse-sexism, and must band together and swallow the Red Pill and double down on toxicity
3. Men are innately hierarchical and aggressive, and are the victims of feminizing culture and unnatural restraints on their nature (compared to the good ol’ days); this one is related to the above but feels distinct
4. Men are less and less employable in modern economies (see who has the jobs created in the last 10 years and who lots the jobs that were lost), less and less happy and healty, committing suicide more often and overdosing more often, but no one can figure out why. See above.
   1. At the same time men are utterly in control and have all of the power, all of the wealth, and every possible privilege. We fill the prison cells and the penthouse suites.

Or, you can boil it down to two main threads:

• There is nothing positive about men, or
• There is nothing questionable about men

Why is it so hard to say that there are positive things about men and also questionable things about men? Not only is that the only hopeful way forward, but frankly it seems to be the fact of the matter.

In trying to start constructive work here, I’ve been focusing on my Profiles in Positive Masculinity. As I said when I started the series, rather than coming up with a ‘theory of manhood’ or something at the beginning, what I wanted to do is to present what I thought were examples of positive masculinity in the form of living human beings. This is following along with the old Greek idea of the phronemos – the wise one who teaches wisdom by example rather than by formula. (True wisdom cannot be taught with words, but it can be recognized and emulated.) My hope was, and is, that even lacking a clear path to positive masculinity, we could intuit examples of it and hold them up, and then maybe later out of that comes a theory, and then a path.

The big problem is that men who want to be good men do not have a good path to get there. What we learn from our dads and grandpas is questionable – of inconsistent quality, let’s say, since their contexts were ones where men had more unquestioned power (we might have as much power now, but it is not unquesitoned). What we learn from media is created to make us insecure so that we buy shit we don’t need and fear people we should ally ourselves with – that’s the purpose of media, to be blunt, and using media for anything else requires persistent reistsance and careful discernment. What we get from culture overall is what Utah Philips called a “blueprint for self-destruction” and, along the way, a blueprint for the destruction of others. That’s the default – we are time-bombs that, ideally, never go off. Or, failing that, maybe we only hurt ourselves. (See falling white male life expectancy and rising white male suicide rates for example)

For all the privilege that comes with being a man, this is also a horrible situation to be in. We’re given undeserved power by a system that not only hurts everyone else but hurts us as well, and so if we realize what’s going on we want to dismantle this system. We look for alternatives, and what’s articulated is either we need to be forever restrained (nothing about men is good) or that we have been lied to and we are the real victims (nothing about men is questionable). There is a third option, that men are obsolete, or headed toward obsolescence, but I don’t see this one articulated as often as the first two. It’s out there, though, so we can say there are three bad options: a jail cell, a toxic Red Pill, or obsolescence.

We’re in the penthouse of a building, but the building is on fire and there are no doors or windows.

And yet, some men stumble into positive masculinity. It’s stumbling because either a man got lucky and got great advice from the other men in his life, or he abandoned the destructive script and made it up as he went along and it turned out alright. Either someone showed him a fire escape, or he smashed through a wall and jumped.

Most men will do neither, and instead, follow the default laid out before them by  society and other men. And men are not unique in this – it is rare for any given person to break from the mold, so to speak. The problem is that the mold for men is a destructive one, for men and for everyone else.

This is my post laying out the problem. I’m not going to move to a solution here. Rather, I’ll try to continue to do slow constructive work through Profiles in Positive Masculinity, and see what comes of that. I welcome discussion, and ideas, and suggestions, as I go forward.

 

I Published A Thing: Charts of Darkness for Vampire

I published a thing!

You can click the cover image, or this link. If you play Vampire: the Masquerade, 1st Edition through V20, this is a fantastic resource, and you can pay what you want.