Toxic Masculinity or Toxic Morality?

Examining the root cause of the crisis for young men

Photo by Warren on Unsplash

What is wrong with young men today? I’m not the first to write those words and I certainly won’t be the last. Yet I wonder how many have actually stopped to ask if maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe the real question is: what is wrong for young men today?

Indeed, some people did ask the question in a way much closer to this during and after the #MeToo era. At that time, the most significant diagnosis of the problem boiled down to the idea of “toxic masculinity.” Boys are being accultured into toxic behavior by popular culture, movies, books, and social media that celebrates the hypermasculine man. The claim was that this hypermasculine ideal leads to hypermasculine behavior—bullying, abuse, emotional control, and so on. Young men receiving these messages on social media and podcasts are being told that their problems result from people who tell them they can’t be “that kind of man”—especially the women telling them that. Women are the problem, and these men turn their anger against women. Seeing the root of the problem in the toxic models being fed to boys and young men, #MeToo activists and commentators argued that if we could change the imagery of popular culture, we wouldn’t have these problems. As we will see, however, this is essentially a way of writing off the real problems young men experience.

The stakes could hardly be higher. Most mass shooters are young men. Most school shooters are young men. Most abusers of women and sexual harassers are young men. Many bullies are young men. Most in-your-face, “fuck you,” and otherwise anti-social interactions involve young men. All of this also spills over into politics where young men have been a dominant voting block for MAGA. Although shooters are statistical outliers, these other phenomena are not. The outliers are a tip of the iceberg, so to speak, and the iceberg is the crisis young men face.

What is going on here?

The other day, I stumbled into an insight that helped me understand. Before I share my reflection, I need to explore a small amount of depth psychology. James Hillman, the pre-eminent depth psychologist of the late Twentieth Century, published an essay entitled “Senex and Puer,” in which he explores the psychological phenomenology of these two psychic beings. Senex is the old man in each of us--money bags, the force of great limits, the one who closes down possibilities, father time. Senex measures and controls. He moves slow and is grounded. Puer, on the other hand, is the flying boy of all possibility. The creative one, the one who honors no limits. Puer wants what he wants when he wants it. Discipline is his enemy; work is anathema. Senex and puer are considered as inner beings or psychological forces that can overtake us whether we are aware of them or not. Kind of like a mood or falling in love.

Here is an excerpt from my journal in which I explore just a little bit about these two figures in the context of my own work, and then turn it toward this crisis of young men.

It occurs to me that my obligation to publish is of my own making. I do not have to write and should only do so when the intrinsic desire appears. Instead, I feel the obligation. These obligations, while they lead to production, trap my soul and create resistance. This is just as it has always been. Puer? Maybe. But so what? It balances the natural senex appearing at this stage of life. The measurer, the marker, the limiter. Senex is my spreadsheet god. Puer counters that. He drives me to the bar every night, care free. He says, “There’s no need to write.” Or rather, “there’s no need to publish.” He likes staying free of commitments. Likes staying in his house alone until he needs social interaction. He is care free. Free. Free. Freedom…

As I wrote, I recalled the group of MAGA ATV riders that came storming down the road the night before.

Freedom… Does this appear as shadow in the MAGA crowd? Those who live within the confines of senex-driven capitalism break free and break out on weekends, on ATVs, shouting their angry political rants and flying desecrated flags. These are not symbols of perfectionism, but expressions of desperation. “I can, goddammit, so I will!” Freedom. A flying boy, but a dark flying boy. A dissociated boy. An unconnected boy. And ultimately, a very dangerous boy in the assassins, school shooters, and mass shooters. To them, shooting become the ultimate expression of freedom. They are killing the rules of mass senex capitalism.

Perhaps you can see where I was going with this. These men are essentially trapped in the confines of a moral capitalism that is toxic to their souls. They work hard. They often cannot get ahead and see no way to change that. They lived trapped in the profound limitations of capitalism and all it tells us. And worst of all, they see no way out. To survive, they must engage the energy of the senex and his moral limits—the Protestant work ethic, the would be provider, the king of your own castle, the moral limits imposed by church, and the inability to articulate what goes on within. Whichever of these traps manifest, we can be sure of one thing psychologically: the equal and opposite force will assert itself and/or explode. Puer feels entitled to his freedom for all the sacrifice endured. And as an eternal psychological force, puer will not be suppressed.

Although my journal reflections focused on young MAGA men, partly because they are such a huge voting block, the right has no monopoly on toxic morality—there is plenty of toxic morality on the left—the thought police, ideological purity, political correctness, being a pleaser, and even willful self-submission. It’s just a different set of toxic moral rules. Like with the right, “freedom” is to be expressed in an ecstatic release from the rules and appears in similarly abusive behaviors—manipulation, control, love-bombing, emotional abuse and so on.

The cause is toxic morality

The toxicity we are dealing with then, is not toxic masculinity at all. Rather, it is the toxic morality that leads to explosions of puer rebellion. This helps us understand the crisis for young men. They are having the hope and joy of the psychic puer—the flying boy of their inner creativity—decapitated by one form or another of toxic morality. The immature and angry puer within lashes out in an expression of “freedom” or aligns itself with some way to feel free, nearly always at the expense of others—neighbors, colleagues, wife, subordinates, women, children, or “the world.” They lash out against “them,” whoever “them” is. This is why they feel like bullies, assert their “rights” over the consideration for others, manipulate and control, and sometimes, in deranged moments of super empowerment, break out with shootings or other catastrophic acts.

It seems then, that healing this would require a release not of so-called toxic masculinity, but rather, of toxic morality. Psychic tolerance for the internal diversity of the soul can bring young men back from the brink. We need not beat the puer out of them with moral and ideological strait jackets. No. We could find a way to engage young men as they are. We could honor the puer’s creative force and encourage young men toward engagement rather than repression and explosion. Psychic forces are real and have real world consequences, as every mass shooting demonstrates. The source of toxic masculinity is not movies and models. It is the imposition of toxic morality that suppresses a creative expression of freedom in a man—a force within men that cannot ultimately, be repressed.

This is why crusades against “toxic masculinity” are doomed to fail. These are social crusades that simply impose a different toxic morality, which the psyche responds to with a loud “Fuck you!” It then enacts that energy by roaring down a road in an ATV with freedom flags waving and an actual or proverbial middle finger flying around to everyone within a two mile earshot. Or, it enacts itself in defiant protest, which can become an orgy of violence. Or, it becomes an enactment against some other people—women, immigrants, or others. In all cases, this is the puer, the flying boy, the one who insists on a dark freedom, however it is expressed and no matter who it hurts. Indeed, such social crusades make the problem even worse.

If there is a societal approach to use, it must de-potentiate society’s toxic moralist traps. Instead, our society doubles down on traps. We suck wealth from the poor, trap people in debt, reduce wages, displace people from the means of living (especially via robots and AI), and otherwise curtail the flying boy in the male psyche. The message is that you must work, you must be disciplined, you must follow the rules. The flying boy in the psyche senses where things are going. It sees no way out. And it freaks out. Like all repressed or unexpressed psychic forms, however, it enters the psychological shadow where it’s power is magnified.

Why it could change

The AI/robotics revolution presents a discontinuity that provides an opportunity. As I described in my book What Is Postcapitalism?, the digitalization of everything, which includes AI and robotics, will disrupt capitalism as we know it. Every market that gets digitalized drives prices to zero due to the elimination of the cost of reproduction. In other words, markets can’t create prices anymore because you have virtually unlimited supply at zero cost. Technology leaders are fond of “disrupting markets” as they say, but this will be different. We are in the process of disrupting everything, including capitalism itself.

AI and robotics have the potential to profoundly disrupt labor markets. They provide endless labor at near zero incremental cost—even less than slavery—thereby tearing the floor out from under labor costs and employee value. Because we are conditioned to believe we all must work, such a disruption will create an enormous amount of personal and societal anxiety. No job means no income, and no income means you can’t survive. That is the capitalist logic. We are compelled to work for wages. As jobs disappear and are handled by AI and robotics, calls for the discipline of toxic morality will likely increase due to the anxiety. But as that pressure increases and as there are fewer and fewer opportunities for men to succeed, we can expect more incidences of puer-type explosions into toxic freedom. It could get ugly for a while.

At some point, however, society will move through this stage and accept the need to change for the benefit of all human beings—the young men included. When AI and robotics create enough wealth to free men from working for wages and provide them with a means to reasonable abundance, then the puer can come out of the shadow and expresses itself in male creativity. “Freedom” no longer equates with orgiastic destruction, nor even the in-your-face “Fuck you, I’ll do what I want” attitude. Rather, that energy goes to building, loving, art, community, athletic performance, and more. Beauty becomes a masculine virtue, an expression of the creative force. Compassion opens the heart and naturally replaces the ugliness of thoughtless, toxic behaviors we see in men today.

In our current world, these opportunities to grow are severely repressed and we see the results all around us. This coming break in the capitalist model, however, could change everything, but it depends on what we do to shape the future. The toxic morality that has driven so much pain in American society has the potential to be replaced, but only if we understand that we have this opportunity and work to develop its replacement as the new postcapitalist world emerges around us.

Anthony Signorelli