Which Way, Online Man?

I. Revival

‘Noble’ savages are, ultimately, just as boring as savage ones; more to the point, neither actually exist…A first step toward a more accurate and hopeful picture of world history might be to…simply do away with the notion that for hundreds of thousands of years, everyone on earth shared the same idyllic form of social organization.

― David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021

The patriarchy urges us to believe that women can only be either Madonnas or whores…Once a woman stops being a Madonna, she becomes a whore. Once she has proven that the perfection the public expected of her — perfection she never actually embodied or even attempted to claim — is out of her reach, she becomes a monster…Women deserve to be criticized, disliked, rejected, and embraced on our own terms. Our only option is to refuse the fantasies being sold to us and try to find people instead.

― Rayne Fisher-Quann, What Does It Mean To Get Woman’d?, 2022

There is a gaze that flattens people. It turns full, three-dimensional humans, capable of both good and evil, into uncomplicated caricatures, cardboard cutouts. It sticks them in simple and convenient boxes. It renders them distant and abstract.

These writers, and many others, urge us to take the opposite perspective: they call on us to see people up close, in high resolution, and to accept that we can all contain conflicting qualities. They are not the first to say this and won’t be the last.

We have gone sick by following a path of untrammeled rationalism, male dominance, attention to the visible surface of things, practicality, bottom-line-ism. We have gone very, very sick. And the body politic, like any body, when it feels itself to be sick, it begins to produce antibodies, or strategies for overcoming the condition of dis-ease.

The 20th century is an enormous effort at self-healing. Phenomena as diverse as surrealism, body piercing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, tattooing, the list is endless. What do all these things have in common? They represent various styles of rejection of linear values. The society is trying to cure itself by an archaic revival, by a reversion to archaic values.

So when I see people manifesting sexual ambiguity, or scarifying themselves, or showing a lot of flesh, or dancing to syncopated music, or getting loaded, or violating ordinary canons of sexual behaviour, I applaud all of this; because it's an impulse to return to what is felt by the body — what is authentic, what is archaic — and when you tease apart these archaic impulses, at the very center of all these impulses is the desire to return to a world of magical empowerment of feeling.

— Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival, 1991

Generation after generation has lunged for this. Beatniks, hippies, metalheads, ravers. Before them: religious revivals, Transcendentalism, World Fairs.

But carrying out an archaic revival in a system that perpetuates, rather than combats, this “flattening gaze” is often a losing game. In recent decades there have been massive overcorrections toward hedonism and mysticism. It’s not all Woodstock and Burning Man. It’s also Jonestown and Rajneeshpuram.

Generation Z is grabbing the torch. They love their mass gatherings but also their video games, hence concerts in Fortnite. In recent weeks they’ve flocked to BeReal, yet another social media app, though one that rejects curated, polished feeds in favor of naturalistic sampling of everyday moments. They have overcorrections too, like trendy conspiracies about Helen Keller being fake.

They are caught between the Internet’s delights and the urge to log off, unplug, and touch grass. They crave human connection and authenticity, but “attention to the visible surface of things” and “bottom-line-ism” plagues them at every turn.

The scary thing is you never know how long this is going to last, and I think that’s what eats a lot of us at night. It’s like, What’s next? How long can we entertain everyone for? How long before no one cares, and what if your life was worth nothing?

— TikTok star Baronscho being interviewed by Barrett Swanson for The Anxiety of Influencers, 2021

@moschinodoritothat high-grade mid

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@post.capitalist.pedagogy#stitch with @moshpitjones Autotelic Expressions of Self #autotelic #flow #psychology #art #creativity #philosophy #pedagogy

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We crave the opposite — this autotelos and its products, this flow, this magical empowerment of feeling. We crave being motivated by an actual task we’re doing, for its own sake, not some reward outside of it, like profit or status or staying alive.

So we flee, with mixed results, back to the real, the natural, the immediate, the sensory, like animals trying to head inland before a tsunami, and one that we can’t stop looking at.

II. Spectacle

The Spectacle is not a collection of images. Rather, it is a social relation among people, mediated by images.

— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967

The Society of the Spectacle was already in full swing when Debord coined the term. Radio, cinema, and mass production allowed it. Hollywood, mass advertising, and fascism brought it to life. The Internet and global capitalism have put it in our pockets.

It is entertainment, technology, capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, and racism, all bundled together. It’s a giant, gnarly, glittering mass, a global economy in which attention and consumer data run the show. It’s the exhaust from a Kardashian’s jet, the social media posts I see about it, my own three-minute drive to somewhere that’s a ten-minute walk away, and the fact that I’m writing about it. It’s a great, swirling engine, powered by taps and Amazon orders and oil and coal.

This is what’s flattening us, with all our quirks and details, into things more watchable, consumable, commodifiable, digestible, and disposable, warping our desires and dreams to fit its own whims and incentives.

I say “its own,” but there’s the rub. As Debord said, the Spectacle is our relationship to it. It is not a person in a director’s chair; it’s a screen, a lens. There is no single villain at the helm. There’s no Voldemort or Palpatine here. It is an “anti-conspiracy.”

We all perpetuate it in our various ways, every day, primarily by not getting together to stop or change it. We act like subjects in Milgram’s shock experiment, following its orders to stave off (what we think would be) chaos and the unknown. We make sacrifices to it, keeping it running with the blood and sweat and tears of certain people more than others. And though it may one day be run by women, or sustainable energy, that doesn’t mean it will disappear.

Late capitalism, baby. Disaster capitalism, casino capitalism, crony capitalism — all of which is to say: real capitalism, with fewer pesky “regulations” every year. It gives us hot dogs, Levi’s, asbestos, and drone strikes. To a lucky few, it gives surgical robots that can sew up a grape’s skin; to many others, it gives a medical system that will bankrupt you at the drop of a hat, like for getting a deadly infectious disease that millions have refused to take seriously and have allowed to mutate.

The Spectacle is now the water we swim in. It’s water that we’re more aware of than fish are, but largely numb and desensitized to. We grow more conscious of it with every global catastrophe, every song and movie about it, every terrible decision made for shits and giggles by people we’ve endowed with power. It rumbles on.

How far will we go for the Spectacle? Many works have asked this. The Truman Show. Black Mirror. Nope. Nathan Fielder’s work, both Nathan For You and The Rehearsal. Hulu documentaries about WeWork and Theranos and Fyre Fest. We will go as far as it takes to get the shot and keep the audience entertained.

The dust and the screaming

The yuppies networking

— Radiohead, Paranoid Android, 1997

A heart that's full up like a landfill

A job that slowly kills you

Bruises that won’t heal

I’ll take a quiet life

A handshake of carbon monoxide

No alarms and no surprises

— Radiohead, No Surprises, 1997

The juxtaposition of extremes like these has been depicted often, with increasing frequency over the last few decades, thanks to auteurs like Jordan Peele, Boots Riley, and David Lynch, and authors like Octavia Butler, Michael Crichton, and David Foster-Wallace. Scenes of alienation, chaos, and disaster sit with scenes of comfortable and systemic evils that mask or cause them. The scenes may be banal; office workers help a company do genetic experiments on people. They may be spectacular; dinosaurs and hyper-intelligent androids escape ill-conceived theme parks. They may be based on real events, like HBO’s excellent miniseries about Chernobyl. Real disasters ultimately just become part of it.

It grabs and grinds up all it sees, mundane joys and horrifying disasters, transforming them into content. It casts its white-hot gaze, made of attention and love and cruelty, across the landscape, turning things and people into a fine and profitable gray goo. We live both in fear of it and in total enraptured fascination with it. It is like the Eye of Sauron and it is like heaven.

People in an energy company’s cushy bureaucratic office make a mistake. Something doesn’t get inspected. A power cable falls. It starts a wildfire so large it turns the sky bright orange across the west coast. The headlines go crazy. Nothing changes.

It has latched onto our basic human desires for material comfort and individual freedom, giving us incredible tools for fantasizing and connecting with each other, but uses toxic, industrial, assembly-line methods to fulfill them, making our dreams and connections ever more distant.

A community in the thrall of the attention economy feels like an industrial farm, where our jobs are to grow straight and tall, side by side, producing faithfully without ever touching. Here, there is no time to reach out and form horizontal networks of attention and support...The villain here is not necessarily the Internet, or even the idea of social media; it is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.

— Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 2019

One thing many industrial farms do is “monoculture,” where instead of growing multiple crops in a given area, you repeatedly grow one. This degrades and destroys the soil in the long term but is often simpler and more profitable for food corporations in the short term.

The Society of the Spectacle turns us into monoculture people. Some resist this more than others. Some think that becoming a “monoculture person” makes them stronger; some realize it doesn’t. As such, the Spectacle is made up of participants both unwilling and zealous. Some lean wholeheartedly into it, hamming it up and scamming it up. Others reject it entirely, going off to live in the woods, where the only part of the Spectacle that can touch them is climate change. Most of us tread water in the middle.

III. Debate

The Spectacle is like a supervillain who absorbs your energy when you attack it. It has the ability to capture any correct criticism of it, including countercultural and revolutionary ideas, and use them to its advantage. It chews them up and spits them back out in profitable morsels.

This has happened to many who have argued for change in recent years. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. John Oliver and Hasan Piker. Climate scientists and union leaders. All get cast into the Spectacle’s boiling center, their message compromised and rendered less dangerous. It is what happened to the scientists in Don’t Look Up. The Spectacle takes its tax.

To what extent, if any, can we fix or fight the Spectacle from within? It is a contentious question. Some believe we have to abandon it altogether to save ourselves. Others believe we can shitpost our way to a better world — that the master’s tools can, in fact, dismantle the master’s house, or more appropriately, that the Spectacle’s witty clapbacks can dismantle the Spectacle’s poorly-constructed arguments.

Hasan Piker, currently the most popular political streamer on Twitch, resides in (or at least closer to) the latter camp.

He recently noticed a certain man named Andrew Tate appearing on the streams of some of his Twitch acquaintances. Tate is a former kickboxer and avid misogynist who has amassed a significant following with such views as “men shouldn’t use chopsticks,” “women in relationships shouldn’t have Instagrams,” and “women are more dangerous drivers.” Piker decided to debate him on this last question. He maintains that he didn’t have ulterior motives — that he doesn’t need the extra views or money. To hear him tell it, it was like he was trying to kick a patron out of a bar he was in because he was ruining the vibe. Piker is typically against what he and others call “debate bro” culture, acknowledging that debates in online spaces can easily devolve into screaming matches about conspiracies and ultimately have a toxic effect. In this case, he made an exception.

Some were livid that he did so. They thought he was doing more harm than good by debating Tate, and knew it, and was choosing to amplify absurd and destructive views for his own gain.

@moschinodoritoJust stop.

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Regardless of whether it “helped,” Piker did focus on both optics and content, and did make Andrew Tate look ridiculous. After the debate, Piker said the following: “A lot of [Andrew Tate’s fans] don’t respond to commentary. They need someone who’s also exuding ‘alpha masculine energy’ or whatever the fuck. They’re looking at shapes and colors. They’re not looking at, like, what you’re fucking saying.” He played the Spectacle’s game, and potentially (though, again, we can’t know for sure) in a way that drew attention to the ridiculousness of the question they were debating.

In the clip below, you can see this two-pronged strategy in action. Tate characterizes Piker’s support of the empirical data (which clearly shows men to be more dangerous drivers than women; insurance companies profit from this data) as “trusting the first thing you see on Google.” Piker not only refutes this in a way that makes Tate look silly, but then capitalizes on the optics. Tate looks stressed, rattled, shook. His back is against the ropes.

@hasandpikerI asked #cobratate how he knows the earth is a globe, since he doesn’t believe in scientists.. #andrewtate #fyp #foryou #debate #viral

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His single-minded adherence to “never backing down” made him unable to concede a point that was clearly and obviously wrong. His adherence to “only ever relying on his own eyes and ears” made him unable to acknowledge that science and technology are real things, and things that he benefits from, and things that allow pursuits even he would otherwise consider masculine. Despite being single-minded, he ends up inconsistent with the truth and inconsistent with his own values.

I do not bring this up as a “gotcha,” as if to shame him. That rarely works with people like him anymore. They don’t care about being hypocrites. There are probably some flat-earthers among his fans who were left completely unmoved by the clip above.

I bring them up to show you how becoming a “monoculture” person actually, paradoxically, counterintuitively, makes you full of holes. Inconsistent and contradictory. Andrew Tate and many others like him have succumbed to a tendency, encouraged by the Spectacle, to think that you must squash and flatten most parts of yourself and others and accentuate one piece to an insane degree. This, in fact, renders you weaker. It makes you unable to cope with the multifaceted and complicated realities of being a human. When you instead accept that multiple things can be true about you — “I may be a good and safe driver but also belong to a gender that is less safe on average” — you actually become less fraudulent. You may encounter conflicting and overlapping truths, as one does in reality, but they’re truths.

Actually being able to trust and rely on other people sometimes — to trust, for example, that building a system that meets their basic needs won’t make them all just leech off that system (something shown in many other countries) — actually makes you stronger. It creates a society that enables more individual freedom for everyone.

@dailydoseofhasanabiA lesson in leftist values, #marxism, and how free Americans truly are #fyp #hasan #hasanabi #twitch #twitchclips

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This should be obvious! You live with people! In a society! You form bonds! Starting from childhood, you have to be able to trust other people sometimes. You just do. This is preschool stuff.

Tate likes to act like he’s returning to some primal, “archaic revival” version of masculinity, but believing your personal experience and no other data is the precise opposite of that. You are “flattening” scientists, refusing to engage with the complex world around you, when you treat them all as untrustworthy. Obviously not every scientist in the world is doing their literal life’s work just to fool you.

The archaic revival is a return to a social arrangement where people have accountability to truth — consistency, integrity, focus, being a person of your word — not accountability to saying the most outrageous thing and doubling down, just to get views, or because changing your mind based on new data is somehow “feminine.”

The Spectacle tries to hold people like Tate accountable to the latter. It encourages saying things like “facts don’t care about your feelings,” then turning around and arguing that feelings — personal experiences — should override scientific facts. (When people take it way too far, like Alex Jones saying Sandy Hook was done by crisis actors, it is satisfying to see them held accountable to the truth again.)

For that reason, it does seem, in defense of Piker’s critics here, like a bit of a losing battle to do this within the Spectacle. Regardless of who you trust, it is actually impossible to know for sure what Piker’s motives were. It’s impossible to know, without detailed surveys of the people who watched the debate, whether Piker did more harm than good in debating Tate.

We are unable to hold Piker accountable for how he engages with misogyny. We are unable to hold the debate’s viewers accountable for listening to content — to logic and reason — rather than just paying attention to optics, to who looked and sounded more “dominant.” Most of all, we are unable to hold Tate accountable for having reasonable views in the first place. You can publicly humiliate him (or any other conservative pundit) until the cows come home and it may not do a damned thing. Their debate may, in the end, have been little more than a smashing and jolly good time for all blokes involved.

In a way, we all lose if we indulge the Spectacle too much, even when people like Hasan Piker “win.” Who wins, really, when we’re rehashing questions as stupid and regressive as “aren’t women drivers just the worst?” and “is science worth doing?”

What do we want to hold people accountable for? Fantasy or truth? Does it have to be all one or all the other? (Are you sensing a theme?)

Accountability, of course, is a loaded term. A lot of people know it better as “responsibility.” There is one person who, perhaps more than anyone, has corrupted that term. We’re going to reclaim it.

IV. Repression

You can’t mistake Dr. Jordan Peterson’s voice for anyone’s. His ultra-Canadian way of saying the short “o” sound, as in “hot” and “dog,” makes it easy for anyone who’s heard him speak to imagine him saying things like “phenomenon,” “paradoxical,” and “Hot Topic.”

In the video below, another psychologist, Dr. Gabor Maté, captures Dr. Peterson’s whole deal.

Dr. Peterson understands and capitalizes on our distaste for being told “don’t say that.” Obviously no one likes a scold. But then he uses the popularity he’s gained from hating on collective mandates and hyping up “personal responsibility” to turn around and…scold harder.

Just as it was with Tate, the way he cherry-picks his narratives in the short term creates glaring hypocrisy in the long term. He is, as Maté puts it so well, an “agent of repression posing as an agent of libertarianism.”

He says no one should have their speech repressed, yet believes queer people should repress their entire identities. He says queer people shouldn’t show pride, but is silent when his followers express “white pride.” He yells about people trying to “mandate” language, yet says nothing about right-wing governments banning books about race. All of these latter things lead to real violence — suicides and lynchings — but no, the real problem is facing consequences for deadnaming a trans person on Twitter.

He recently tweeted that gender-affirming surgery between consenting doctors and patients should be criminal. In the same tweet he knowingly referred to actor Elliot Page by the wrong name. Twitter is not the law, and cannot jail you, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he reacted to being banned.

In a 15-minute tirade that he was able to post unedited on Youtube (he, like Andrew Tate, is not held accountable for making factual statements) he said he’d “rather die” than delete the original tweet.

Toward the end of his tirade, he looked directly into the camera, melodrama dripping from his voice, and barked nine words that will live in infamy. “Up yours, woke moralists. We’ll see who cancels who.”

He is a showman. A clown. A fraud. At the first sign of trouble, he drops facts and tries to appeal to emotion — light, sound, color, vibe. He’s a one-man circus, a sleight of hand, a performance artist. So we ridicule him.

He is, like most who still side with him, increasingly devoid of integrity and accountability — responsibility — in his own positions. But since he in particular is known for preaching those things, he is not just a typical hypocrite; he is an uber-hypocrite, a meta-hypocrite.

This extends far and wide. You have Jewish pundits like Ben Shapiro siding with anti-Semites. You have Supreme Court justices in interracial marriages issuing opinions that bring us toward re-outlawing them. You have conservative women cheering on abortion policies that will bring actual violence and death onto their daughters, mothers, and sisters, and potentially themselves. You have Matt Walsh spending more effort making documentaries about the definition of “woman” than he would ever spend actually trying to help a woman.

Today, this is the platform of the right, and it has been used before in history: be so inconsistent, so hypocritical, that people become desensitized to your hypocrisy entirely. Then, once no one bothers to hold you accountable anymore, push forward with whatever insane, homicidal agenda you want. This is why, even though they largely don’t care about being fraudulent, we can’t ignore it. We can’t turn a blind eye. Making fun of it in the Spectacle may not be a real way to fight it, but it’s one way to see the receipts.

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@lookmomnomanThis is Reza Aslan. He is a Religious Scholar and has studied the human connection and religion through out history and is the author of the book "God: A Human History" #christianextremist #rightwingamerica #domesticterriosm #GOP #separationofchurchandstate #distubring #conservative #christiannationalism #fascism #fyp #votebluenomatterwho #taxthechurches #trumpsupporters

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It has been interesting to see this trend, this potent trio of capitalism and spectacle and toxic masculinity, apply not just to “the other team,” but also to people I used to listen to. Like many men of my generation, I liked early Joe Rogan podcasts when he mainly talked about comedy, drugs, martial arts, or whatever his guest was an expert on. I liked his curiosity about scientific topics. This has transformed into a false sense of authority on them. He’s recently parroted many false and tired talking points about COVID and trans people.

Dr. Peterson once boasted on Joe Rogan’s podcast that he had found a way to monetize his opponents. He gets invited to speak at universities; they protest; this gives him news coverage; he gets more views and a bigger paycheck. He is not ashamed, in other words, about the fact that he, as an online demagogue, can’t be held accountable for spreading hate, even as a man who claims to be Christian. He is quite proud. (“Remember when pride was a sin?”) When Twitter finally did hold him accountable, he couldn’t cope. He threw a tantrum.

But Dr. Peterson, like Rogan, was not always such an immature clown. Here, in rare form, he makes a case for…the truth.

Depression is a disease, and antidepressants, while imperfect, are medicine. They have helped many people. They affect brain circuitry, and brain circuitry affects emotion. Still, they are not a silver bullet. People with depression often need to try other things — things sometimes involving “personal responsibility” — to make breakthroughs in their treatment. They may need to address traumas with therapists, build new habits, break old ones, be social, exercise.

Holding yourself accountable for doing something you need to do — being responsible — is a Good Thing. You should hold yourself accountable for your plans, promises, and mistakes. That was largely the message Dr. Peterson started with. “Clean your room” is a popular summary of his early work.

If Dr. Peterson acknowledged one fact, it would make him a vastly more celebrated figure: in the real world your accountabilities are not only to yourself. They are to your family, your community, your environment. You should also hold yourself accountable for your end of deals you make and try to hold others accountable for their end. This is part of being a responsible person, too.

If he dropped this act of “all you twerps need to adhere to my confusing, repressive, hyper-individualist reading of Judeo-Christian morality” and went back to one of “have accountability to yourself and others,” it would work wonders for his audience numbers. He ought to consider it.

V. Masculinity

Man up, sit down

Chin up, pipe down

Socks up, don't cry

Drink up, just lie

Grow some balls, he said

Grow some balls

The mask of masculinity

Is a mask

A mask that's wearing me

— IDLES, Samaritans, 2018

In a brilliant article about a hotline for domestic abusers (yes, you read that right) Andrea Gonzalez-Ramirez captured this perfect quotation from someone she interviewed: “Compassion without accountability is collusion. Accountability without compassion is domination.”

No society, relationship, or individual person functions well without both. There are times in relationships, including your relationship to yourself, when domination or collusion are warranted. Total monopolization by either one is a recipe for trauma. Heartache and disaster. Boredom and stagnation.

This is precisely what the Spectacle and toxic masculinity seek to drown us in. A total lack of accountability to anything except what feels good is what plagues the Spectacle. A total lack of compassion is what plagues toxic masculinity. Here we are today, largely missing both.

There is a fun little matrix of damaging ways in which you can partially apply these. There’s compassion to oneself and accountability to others (scapegoating out-groups). There’s accountability to oneself and compassion to others (“white knight” savior complexes). There’s neither (total isolation and “doomerism”). All are alien and unhealthy.

People used to (and in healthy relationships still do) exercise both. When you know you’ll have to face someone again in the future, as people have for millennia, you have an incentive to use both. On the Internet, it’s different.

Dr. Peterson and Andrew Tate capitalize on this. Young men can “like and subscribe” to the models of masculinity they preach without actually having to do anything. The fans get to feel fuzzy. Their simple caricatures of real beliefs get confirmed and reinforced. They get to coast along in echo chambers and filter bubbles and “hug boxes” even as they paint the other side as the “sheep”.

These online personalities themselves — Dr. Peterson, Andrew Tate, Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder, Matt Walsh, and many others — aren’t going to raise a fuss about that. Hell no. It’s incredibly profitable that their fans’ complacency goes against the whole “personal responsibility” and “independence” thing they preach. Their audience remains hooked on their content, rarely if ever actually embodying the views they hold, resulting in more views and money over time.

It’s no secret and no surprise that many of their fans are spotty or entirely lacking in their ability to exercise accountability and especially compassion. Many lack it in their social responsibilities, the regulation of their emotions, and their willingness to log off and go outside. They are frequently in no position to understand applying both compassion and accountability to oneself or other people. Their role models preach accountability to oneself in ways that are already full of holes and incoherent rage, and they fail spectacularly to show it by example. The way they preach accountability to others? Nonexistent.

It’s also no surprise, then, that as women, people of color, and LGBTQIA+ people have become more visible in recent decades, asking to be viewed as full humans, these men have not taught their legions of fans the history of why they weren’t viewed this way in the first place, or how to oblige them now. On the contrary, they have taught their fans to grow ever more self-absorbed, to focus on the fact that white cis men may seem less visible by contrast, and to cling to the misplaced fear and conspiratorial thinking that follows. They coax their followers to apply only compassion to themselves and only accountability to others as intensely as ever.

“See those people?” goes their shtick. “Their desire to exist and express themselves, without being repressed and punished for doing so, for the first time in hundreds of years, is what’s morally degenerate, not us and our hypocrisy. Those people, not your own ancestors and elders and the toxic systems they’ve built, are the ones conspiring against your well-being.”

You're self-absorbed

Raving about your cryptic ways

Aren't willing to change old grudges

Hoping for your turn

All the basement stories you heard

Waiting for the world to bend around you

Staying at the end of a hallway

Dozens of doors you never tried to open

Narrow vision, you're the scapegoat

You try to fix things that have never been broken

- Men I Trust, Say Can You Hear, 2018

“Narrow vision, you’re the scapegoat.” The issue is not just when men latch on to other groups as scapegoats for their problems, but also — as I alluded to with the “matrix” of applying compassion and accountability badly — when men blame themselves entirely. Few, in fact, have only ever done one or the other. Many oscillate wildly between them, between self-care and self-denial, self-love and self-loathing, hatred of women and worship of them, spending too much time online and then beating themselves up for it. I’ve certainly done that last one. Both ends are ultimately just two different ways of being self-obsessed.

It is reducing yourself to one dimension to let yourself remain on either end of this pendulum. As we saw when discussing the Piker-Tate debate, that is the opposite of accountability. Pretending only one thing about someone (including yourself) is true, or assigning one-dimensionality to them, is to deny them accountability for their actions; it is to treat them not as a full, complex individual who can make a choice, but as an automaton, an avatar, an object to be placed on a pedestal or thrown in the dirt.

Being a person, including being a man, means acknowledging and dealing with, not just repressing and condemning, all the parts of yourself, all the human emotions and desires. “You try to fix things that have never been broken.”

Accepting parts of yourself is what lets you do the same for others. In order to consider other people as full human beings worthy of compassion and accountability, you have to consider yourself that way, too.

We have been taught to fear the very things that have the potential to set us free…We want a world where boys can feel, girls can lead, and the rest of us can not only exist but thrive. This is not about erasing men and women but rather acknowledging that man and woman are two of many — stars in a constellation that do not compete but amplify one another’s shine.

— Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary, 2020

There are few better or more fundamental ways of applying compassion and accountability to yourself than regulating and being in touch with your emotions, and the thoughts that arise from them. It’s one of the truest forms of “returning to the body.”

It is not in the (current) playbook of men like Dr. Peterson and Andrew Tate. The brand of masculinity they push is one that lets out rage and excitement like a firehose, squashing and repressing all other emotions (“weak” and “feminine” ones) as a knee-jerk reaction. It puts those emotions under a pressure cooker, making them burst out in other ways, and at inopportune times. When this happens, men (and people) tend to treat themselves and others poorly, making people around them react in ways that  may appear conspiratorial out of context but are perfectly reasonable.

Interrogating your emotions on a regular basis helps with this. Working on your mental health more broadly and consistently — firing on all cylinders with cognitive-behavioral therapy, meditating, exercising, being outside, using social media less, talking to friends more, cultivating hobbies you like — is a game changer for this.

@luckynumber41#duet with @cherdleys doing the impossible#fyp #foryou #gaming#lol#leagueoflegends #touchinggrass#funny

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VI. Freedom

I’m crazy about my baby

But I’m crazier inside

I’ve got plenty who’d come and save me

But I choose to run and hide

— IDLES, Meds, 2021

Roll me a blunt so I forget it

But it make the details look so vivid

Went through a lot of shit in the last year

Then I said, "Fuck it, I'ma handle my business"

I been 180 to talk to one lady

She been regulatin' on how I feel

Describe it as raw and real

I'm dealin' with all the ills

I'm tearin' up like I'm on Dr. Phil

— Denzel Curry, Walkin’, 2022

The way your brain handles emotions — the way you exercise compassion for what can’t be controlled and accountability for what can — is not set in stone. You can improve it.  It’s like a snowball. There are compounding returns. Virtuous cycles.

Working on this over time concretely and noticeably changes how you respond to negative thoughts, emotions, and situations — it gives you more freedom and choice, less discomfort and impulsiveness. Rolling the snowball every day soon makes those negative thoughts and emotions less likely to intrude in the first place.

You feel (and become) better equipped to fulfill responsibilities to yourself and others, and less prone to shrinking away from them in self-absorbed misery. And as you fulfill responsibilities, proving you’re reliable to yourself and others, it fills you with healthy confidence, making you more capable of fulfilling responsibilities, and so on.

It moves into the social realm. Understanding and expressing your full emotional range with confidence, rather than trying to come off a certain way all the time — cool, dominant, whatever it may be — empowers you to build more fulfilling and less limited relationships. You bring your full self to them. You have integrity. You can trust and cooperate with (or, as necessary, be skeptical of, and draw boundaries with) other people. You free up more of your attention for dealing with and catering to other people’s emotions, not just your own. And that — being someone who makes others feel safe and comfortable, being an emotional and material “provider” — is what’s “alpha.” That’s what makes you feel like “the man.”

And then the real work can begin. Then you can start working with others to build a society more like the one I’ve alluded to here and there: one where people regularly use compassion and accountability with each other, where big endeavors like democracy and science can happen, where meaningful work mixed with a social safety net makes everyone more free to achieve dope things.

We return, then, to what Rayne Fisher-Quann said we should do along with refusing the fantasies sold to us: find people. She gave away the final answer. The next question is “how.”

Whether we are the fluid product of our interactions with others is not our choice to make. The only choice is whether to recognize this reality or not.

If it's true that collective agency both mirrors and relies on the individual capacity to ‘pay attention’, then in a time that demands action, distraction appears to be (at the level of the collective) a life-and-death matter. A social body that can't concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can't think and act.

The first half of [this book] is about disengaging from the attention economy; the other half is about reengaging with something else.

― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 2019

The issue is not just that we need to turn away from technology. Going toward people needs to be its own thing, and is one that can still involve technology.

The capital-S Spectacle, while it doesn’t prevent this, greatly complicates it. It can erase accountability and ensnare us in things that feel good — video games, drugs, always fitting what we read into preexisting views — and keep us from the less immediately gratifying things, like studying reality, improving our communities, and protecting our environment.

But the archaic revival means ignoring neither the reality of the world (science) nor fun (spectacle). Making great and beneficial discoveries on teams with other people makes you feel alive. So does having fun.

You can have instant messaging without being lost in fantasies. You can have a natural, healthy interest in drama without binge-watching your life away or contributing to the deadly and dehumanizing cycle that Rayne Fisher-Quann describes as being woman’d. You can have debates like the ones held in ancient Athens, or among the Wendat natives of the Great Lakes region, that are done partly as forms of public gathering and spectacle but don’t devolve into shouting matches about conspiracies, because people are held accountable to each other and their reputations and not anonymous “likes.”

It is a bit of a bind.

I think it is a bind we can navigate. We need less spectacle, but it doesn’t have to be zero. Just less scrolling aimlessly and more talking to other humans. Less rumination, more awareness. Less time sedentary and indoors, more time with grass under our feet and dirt under our nails. We have to exercise accountability for working against the Spectacle and compassion for our desire to indulge in it. We are allowed to have fantasies; we just can’t let them take precedence over real people anymore.

We need a return to a “magical empowerment of feeling” that remains grounded in reality and doesn’t devolve into mysticism and hedonism. We need spaces where we can resist and escape the monopoly of the Spectacle. We need settings where compassion and accountability are easy, not hard, to extend to each other.

Many young people may seem either totally unprepared for this or nihilistic about it, either way resigned to an eternity of capitalism, but it’s not like that. Again, it’s more like individual members oscillate between nihilism and optimism, because every day, in spite of their nobler dreams, they see a hypermasculine and hypercapitalist world that appears unable to think beyond the individual. When they do fall hard to one side in a way that’s newsworthy, they may march into Dianne Feinstein’s office and be denied a climate plan, or they may write a white supremacist screed and do something unspeakably, horrifyingly violent.

Young people need tasks, great big collective tasks, that change this reality. They don’t just need this, but want this, too, despite how lazy and scatterbrained some older people have made them out to be. Dr. Peterson was right about this if nothing else: young people, especially young men, want purpose and responsibility. They want things that create hope for a better world. They don’t want dead-end jobs that leave them aimless, yearning for more, circling the drain until we all die in a wildfire or flood. They don’t want a “handshake of carbon monoxide.” They reject the impersonal corporate nightmare that’s been left at their feet to fester, the fumes circling all around them.

@commietrashhProf. Richard Wolff - Occupying Our Future: Solutions to Capitalist Crisis | #fyp #poltics #leftist #socialism #liberal #democrat

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They want to be allowed to care about each other. They, and we, want a world where the situation is not merely “a little more for the top 0.01% at the cost of many others’ lives,” nor merely “everybody has the exact same amount of comfort and safety forever.” We want something sane, something in between. (Are you sensing a theme?)

What better task, what better responsibility, can young men be engaged in, than making this happen? What better way is there to carry out a technology-infused archaic revival than to collectively build this better world that we know is possible? What better way is there for young men to prove their masculinity, with something concrete to show for their efforts, than this?

I was raised up believing I was somehow unique

Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see

And now after some thinking, I'd say I'd rather be

A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me

But I don't, I don't know what that will be

I'll get back to you someday soon you will see

- Fleet Foxes, Helplessness Blues, 2011

This last video shows an amusing but encouraging trend of programs and camps where men go to understand and exercise healthy masculinity. For this to be a thing, we must have clearly been deprived of it in profound ways. Many men are clearly hungry for this, as awkward and forced as it may seem.

If something did go terribly wrong in human history – and given the current state of the world, it’s hard to deny something did – then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history.

― David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021

“The freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence.” What if men could be emotionally close? What if our economy wasn’t just “no socialism for people at the bottom, pure socialism for people at the top”? What if people acknowledged that personal responsibility wasn’t everything, and that both effort and circumstance play factors in our lives, and that we need both compassion and accountability?

There is power in seeing many sides and possibilities where previously we saw only one or maybe two. (Are you sensing a theme?)

We each have the choice to turn up both the compassion and accountability knobs, for ourselves and others, at the same time, instead of pretending they are two ends of a single toggle. The same is true of personal and collective freedom. You do not have to, and should not, listen to people who deny this.

For some things in life, we don’t get that choice; sometimes we just have to live with facts we don’t like. But in times and places where we do get that choice, we must exercise it.

I’ve recently put serious effort into my mental health journey, but there are things I can’t do alone. There are things that need to be different. Less depressing.

I need more people to know that health, both mental and physical, is about both effort and circumstance. I need more people to know that cooperation and emotional regulation, not just pure tunnel-visioned domination, are manly. I need more people to know that queer and trans people being punished by the law for expressing their identity is happening not because there’s something morally wrong with being gender-nonconforming, but because the people tossing them in jail cannot imagine the world they so often claim to want: a world that allows freedom of expression.

The shortsighted and single-minded mentalities that make people avoid and reject these truths will continue to impede the health, physical and mental, of billions of people — including the people who hold them — until they are eliminated with facts, accountability, and compassion.

Those three things are not weak or wrong. They are how we start fixing things. They are how we refuse the fantasies being sold to us and find people instead.

So I ask again: which way, online man?