I always get the sense that the edifice of corporatized masculinity is like a house of cards that's constantly in danger of collapsing in on itself. It's counterintuitive that a subculture that values aggression and anti-intellectualism would be able to maintain any sort of organization beyond the level of the family without outside help, and the massive amount of money that goes into maintaining the bread and circuses system necessary to maintain this mythology reflects this.

There's a passage from the Tao Te Ching, which can be translated as: "When there is no peace in the family, there arises filial piety and paternal kindness." One interpretation that's relevant to this is that the creation of a large set of rules to govern and influence social interaction reflects a fundamental instability in the larger society. An obvious metaphor would be a man with weak bones who is implanted with iron bars to enable him to walk. These might reinforce isolated parts of his skeleton, but the iron bars can not serve the manifold functions of bone (replacing blood, creating new tissue from stem cells, growing and adapting to fluctuations in bodily activity, etc.).

And indeed, without the sense of organization handed down by the education/entertainment complex, without the artificial sense of self-respect engendered by New-Deal style "administrative" work and "leadership" positions, without the police to deter them from destroying themselves and their environment, I think that the vast majority of males would either be "lost at sea" or forced to learn some extremely painful, even fatal, lessons. I don't think that that's necessarily a "bad" thing, although my constitutional lack of empathy may skew my perspective somewhat. I do, however, think that the collapse of the edifice would lead to change, to a society that is unrecognizable to many.

Last edited by zevrem (06-01-2014 09:19:45 PM)