And so it went with my post on masculinity, as I wrote myself right out of what I thought I knew and found myself uncertain about where to go, what point it was trying to make or even how to end the essay. Instead of tossing it in the massive trash pile of essays without endings that are rotting somewhere in my computer, I took the advice of my friend and editor extraordinaire Mary Ellen Thompson and posted it as “Part 1.” I figured I could pass off my confusion and befuddlement as a sort of intentional cliffhanger that people would have to stay tuned to see how it all ended up and made sense. That way nobody had to know that I had written my way into a wordy wilderness that I had no map for.

Maps are great if you are trying to get somewhere specific, say from Atlanta to Albuquerque. Road maps offer what one might call the path of least resistance, the fastest or most expedient way to proceed from point A to point B. But even old school maps require a baseline amount of orientation, a sense of direction as well as an ability to toggle between an abstract representation and a physical reality. In other words, to use a map one must be able to simultaneously orient oneself in the world and in an abstraction (map), which at least to me often entails figuring out which direction is north.

My mother-in-law has the best sense of direction I know. She grew up fishing and farming in Prince Edward Island, Canada, and developed a much more intimate relationship with physical space than I have. She seems to have internalized a compass, which means that when she gives driving directions they are often framed in terms of the direction one should go, like “Go north on Route 33 and then west on Highway 6.” She does not need a compass to know which way north is any more than one needs a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing (Dylan, of course).

But on second thought, while one may not need a weatherman to know the wind is blowing, one does need to have a sense of direction to know which way the wind is blowing. My mother-in-law has that sense of direction. I do not. Sure, I can tell you which way is north if I am standing in my front yard, but my sense of direction is more local than global. Pluck me out of my immediate surroundings and I am like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, pointing in several directions at once because I really do not have an innate sense of how I am oriented in the world. If the sun is out and not too high in the sky I can often figure out what is east and west, and from there north and south. And then, and only then, can I state with any confidence which direction the wind is blowing.

So what does all of this have to do with Masculinity? Nothing and everything. Bear with me, for while it may seem like I have strayed far from my intended topic something tells me I am headed in the right direction. And what direction is that? In my humble experience, there is what is true, and I am either heading towards or away from it. And by ‘true’ I do not mean some absolute truth, but rather that which I know in my gut, bones and heart to be right, real and meaningful.

I started this whole post about masculinity lamenting the fact that so many young men seem to be adrift when it comes to figuring out what it means to be a man. Truth be told, I do not think this is solely a problem for young men, as I have been experiencing it in some way, shape or form for much of my life. And while I am not privy to much of what counts as the ‘manosphere’ on social media, I have read and poked around online enough to get the sense that men- both young and old- are being deluged with directions about how to ‘man up” or be a real man. From what I can gather, influencers are making a killing putting out content about how to fully realize one’s manly potential. That many of these influencers are also hawking tips on how to get rich and get women (usually in that order) makes sense if one views becoming a real man as an exercise in domination and accumulation. From what I can gather from the influencers I have happened upon, manly men attract and accumulate money, women, cars, muscles and the awe and admiration of men and women alike. Real men garner power and then wield it in ways that enhance it. Real men are certain about themselves- and for that matter about everything. And perhaps more than anything else, real men are not afraid. Many real men embrace the whole ‘no fear’ manly mandate and cultivate a ‘fuck with me and find out’ persona meant to instill fear in lesser men while- irony alert!- attracting women.

I have been thinking a lot about fear lately. Much to my chagrin, I found out recently that I have plenty of it (I know, not very manly of me). A few months ago I participated in a clinical trial for a drug being tested to treat what is known as ‘Adjustment Disorder.’ The drug is a derivative of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic or psychedelic mushrooms. I had no idea what adjustment disorder was when I was diagnosed with it, but once I learned that it encompassed the stress and the challenges that come with an unexpected and often catastrophic change in one’s life, it made perfect sense to me. As it was explained to me, rather than focusing on the individual symptoms of a difficult and sometimes traumatic life event, the diagnosis allows for a more holistic understanding of and approach to treating it. So in the case of my getting cancer, rather than diagnosing and treating me for the depression and/or anxiety that can (and did) accompany such a jarring shift in my reality, the goal would be to support my ability to adjust to this new reality, to accept it and integrate it into my life in a meaningful and intentional way. The underlying premise is that magic mushrooms can facilitate my adjustment to this new reality by increasing the neuroplasticity of my brain, effectively enabling it to mold itself to my new reality.

When I volunteered to be part of the study I had taken magic mushrooms a handful of times. My brother had turned me onto them in my early fifties, and had been an excellent guide in terms of how to take them. I never took a big dose with him, always keeping ‘one foot in one foot out’ as he put it, which meant still being in my right mind while also experiencing some of the psychedelic effects of the mushrooms. I found these trips to be pleasurable and illuminating, and also noticed that my mind felt different, perhaps lighter, less cluttered, for days if not weeks afterwards.

Six months before I was diagnosed with cancer two friends and I took what ended up being a pretty big dose of magic mushrooms. No more one foot in one foot out, as I found myself thrown into the deep end of my own psyche. When one of my friends panicked when he no longer felt in control of his experience, we stopped the music, turned on the lights and literally laid our hands on him as a means to ground him. He apologized to us for having to tap out, and felt bad that his fear had gotten the best of him. While he and my other friend turned on the television and started cooking dinner, I retreated to the loft because something told me I was not done with my trip….or better yet that my trip was not done with me.

There were three single beds in the loft, and I chose the middle one. I laid down in it, flat on my back, and put my phone in the large metal bowl that I then placed on my chest to amplify the trippy soundtrack that my brother had shared with me. I closed my eyes and opened my arms to receive whatever was coming my way. Fear came first, but instead of retreating into fight or flight mode I was able sit with it long enough to see what might be behind it. I found myself at what I later understood to be my own funeral. Everyone I knew and loved were around me, surrounding me, smiling and vibing to the trippy psychedelic soundtrack. For a moment I was terrified by the whole thought of being dead, but somehow I was able to sit with the fear until it gave way to something else, something new. I found myself smiling, as I realized that what I first took to be a funeral was also a birth. I had not died, but rather dissolved. What I had known to be me was no longer a separate entity. I had been reborn or better yet returned to being one with everyone and everything.

That last sentence remains a bit tricky for me to understand let alone explain, but that is how it felt. And I felt this way because I was feeling much more than I was thinking. My ego had loosened it’s ironclad grip on my perception of reality enough for me to experience something beyond my false sense of separateness. I felt I had finally come home, and felt a massive wave of relief wash over me. “Ah” “Yes” and “Wow” were all my mind could muster. The rest was beyond my thinking mind, beyond what I could put into words or share with others. But there it was, as powerful and poignant experience as I have had in my entire life.

The sense of death I experienced during that trip came back to me when I was diagnosed with cancer. For while I felt like I had metaphorically died during the mushroom trip, this time it was neither a metaphor nor a drill. The ego I felt had died during that last trip was very much alive and in full panic mode. And yet as I began my grueling course of chemotherapy everything in my mind sought to tamp down the growing sense of panic, the urge to fight or flight, the pure unadulterated fear that only gained ground as the chemo ravaged my body and then turned to wreak havoc on my mind. I struggled to understand what was happening to me along with what to do about my inability to think clearly and regulate my emotions. I felt like I was beginning to lose touch with reality, and with it those closest to me. I felt very alone and afraid but also not willing to share these very hard feelings with my family. So instead I shared my most bountiful emotion with them (anger), particularly after they tried to gently tell me that I had become emotionally dysregulated but not taking taking responsibility for their part in my dysregulation. Being the only man in the house, I felt like they refused to honor or validate my feelings. My mind had weaponized the larger mental health narrative to frame them as not allowing me to feel and express whatI felt were my, well, very male emotions. I started to pull inside myself, to see myself as on my own, in a me versus the them situation that I needed to extract myself from. I hit rock bottom when I announced to my spouse that I felt like it would be better if I moved out, if I went it alone, alone like Lone Wolf McQuaid.

It only dawned on me much later (in fact, right now) that my mushroom trip with my friends and my chemo trip sent me in opposite direction. The mushroom trip had sent me towards others, so much so that I had to surrender myself and become a part of them. This experience came with a profound sense of relief which I chalk up to not having to prop up the delusion of my being a separate entity, of allowing myself to surrender to the realization that I was connected to and a part of everyone and everything. I felt whole. I felt home. I felt emotions I had not allowed myself to feel before. I felt a profound and generalized sense of love for everyone and everything, what Hannah Arendt referred to as “Amor Mundi.”

By comparison, chemo trip was less a surrender than a retreat. I struggled with the realization that I was not in control of my body and increasingly my mind. I was in full-on panic mode and turned in on myself. I tried to circle the wagons around what, I am not sure, but I ended up being trapped alone with my fear, which brought on a profound sense of loneliness and anger. My ego was under assault, but of instead of surrendering it went on the offensive. I fed it whatever I could to keep it raging, adding fuel to the fire that drove me further inward, further away from others.

Hannah Arendt warned the world about an emerging social technology that could destroy humanity. It was not AI, but rather totalitarianism. She grasped the profound ability of totalitarianism to make us so afraid that we retreat into ourselves, abandoning any sense of a shared world. She feared that the terror generated by totalitarian techniques led us to banish ourselves to the lonely cell that our mind becomes when it is not illuminated by the thoughts, experiences and realities of others. This retreat severs our connection to others and ultimately our connection to ourselves.

I felt that terror firsthand during my clinical trial with psilocybin. I had met with a psychiatrist who had helped me set an intention for psychedelic experience. I had expressed a wish to integrate my own mortality into my life. If you asked me about death, I would tell you that of course I know I am going to die someday. But my ego had other ideas, as it was more than happy to feed the illusion that I could go on living, well, forever. Being diagnosed with cancer and going through chemotherapy challenged that illusion, and left me struggling to adjust to a very uncertain and to be honest terrifying reality.

I have sat on this post for much too long, so am going to publish it today as Part 2 of who knows how many posts on masculinity. I have more to say on what happened during my clinical trail with psilocybin and how it relates to my own journey as a human being who just so happens to be a man. As always, feel no compulsion to read or comment on this, but also know that I read and learn so much from your thoughts and responses. The more I use Substack, the more I see it as an opportunity to engage in a dialogue with friends and family about things that matter deeply to me. I also see it as an opportunity to widen my circle of friends and family, to connect with more people and to incorporate their wisdom and perspectives into my own. Finally, know that I am very grateful to still be here, posting my little musings and smiling in anticipation of being blown away by what ya’ll are thinking….

I was seventeen when the movie came out, and Chuck Norris was one of the brightest shining stars of what would now be considered the ‘manosphere.’ Arnold Schwarzennegger was another, as he had just starred in a the practially tongue-in-cheek proto-Viking movie “Conan the Barbarian” and would soon play the Terminator, a badass, unfeeling yet funny AF machine that for a generation of young men inadvertently became a guide, if not a goal, for being a man. Toss in Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo character, and you pretty much have the macho salad many young men were chomping on back then. These men stood on the shoulders of actors like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, who carried the manly man torch through the sixties and seventies. And let me not forget the man-tutelage that comes from being obsessed with professional wrestling from a young age, and perhaps even worse not realizing that it was not real much longer than is healthy to. Perhaps that should have come with the whole Santa Claus reveal, a sort of “And while we are at it pro-wrestling is not real either.” But it was real to us, just as real as Rambo and Lone Wolf McQuade and Dirty Harry and Rooster Coburn and the Terminator. We learned how to be men from men pretending to be men. Now that will do something to you.

My father died when I was four. My mother raised us three boys on her own, and while I struggled with not having a father back then I have since gained a certain appreciation for not having one man’s sense of what it means to be a man, and with it a father, imprinted on me. Having watched male friends struggle to step out of the shadow of their fathers, fight to not become their fathers, I felt almost lucky to be a father without a script for how to be a father. And yet, I still smuggled a script for being a father into my own parenting, and this script had a lot to do with how I had cobbled together a sense of what it meant to be a man.

Back to my daughter, who was telling me about all the lost young men she encounters in her life. She sees them as adrift in the choppy seas of a torqued, toxic masculinity, struggling with what it means to be a man in this day and age. For some reason she thinks that I might be able to help them. I find this funny considering what I wrote above about my own twisted Hollywood tutelage on being a man. I think my daughter sees my ongoing struggle to be more than just a man, my desire to be fully and completely human. She tells these young men that they should meet me because I have been a marine but also write poetry, do yoga and take mushrooms. I don’t think of myself in exactly these terms, but I get where she is coming from in the sense that I am, like most men, a living contradiction.

She gets that I have wrestled (amatuer, not pro;-)) with the question of what it means to be a man for much of my life, which at least for me has manifested in the sort of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde relationship with masculinity, between being a fully he-man and being fully hu-man. The former (he) I think of as a sort of concentrated, narrow and ultimately stultifying form of masculinity. The latter (hu) acknowledges that we are all made up of masculine and feminine energies, and that becoming fully ourselves is finding a balance or harmony between the two.

I think my daughter sees me as I am, as a boy who grew up with some really torqued instructions on how to be a man, as someone who has since tried to figure this out in a way that does not come at the expense of his or anyone else’s ability to express and ultimately become themselves. So being a man as sort of a side-project to being fully human, rather than the other way around. She also sees me as someone steeped in particular notions of strength, as someone who has had ‘anger issues’ his whole life, as someone who has not adequately dealt with some of the most traumatic experiences in his life, and finally as someone with an ambivalent relationship to violence.

She knows me and my story in a way that I cannot, and yet I know she knows me better than I know myself. I think this is in part because we share some of the same tendencies- probably passed on by nature and for better or worse by nurture- related to what I might call our masculine energies. Like me, she is both fascinated and repulsed by violence and puts a lot of weight into being strong and able to defend herself. Defend herself from what? Violence. Much like me, she has trained in violence (aka martial arts) to protect herself from violence. Like me, she thinks in scenarios and about weapons. I know we are not alone in this regard, as the whole MMA, tactical, bro-sphere is in part built on being able to not only defend oneself from violence, from getting your ass kicked, but also to go on the offensive, to be violent, to kick ass…..#tobeaman. But my daughter is by no stretch of the imagination a man. She would never want to be one either, as she can see how lost and trapped we are in our manliness. She has her hands full just trying to figure out how to be human in this world, let alone be a ‘wo’man.

Living in a house with four females, I take a fair amount of shit for being male. The cat is male, but because he is fixed or more highly realized or evolved than me he seems to get a pass on this front, which means that the four females (three humans and a little mutt) focus their derision on yours truly. I do my best to spread a bit of it to the cat, but he does a damn good job at keeping his man card hidden. Me, I can’t seem to stop pulling my man card out and looking to get it validated by said females. And validate it they do, just not in the way I might want. I catch the knowing looks, smiles and even cackles as they deal, in concert and en masse, with the unintended consequences of a human being trying to only be a man.

I have male friends who complain about being ganged up on by women. They feel like they cannot be men anymore, and sometimes send me videos and clips from the manosphere that usually involve some bald guy who takes himself too seriously and has spent too much time in the gym wanking about how he is under attack by women and unmanly men (aka women) and how he plans to assert his masculinity on other men and of course women, who while it might not seem like it really like, according to him, to be told what to do and be put in their place. Watching these dudes, I really wonder how they can keep a straight face while they spew their shit about who men are and what women want. I think many of them are making a living as ‘influencers,’ which makes me worried for the ‘influencees.’

I used to do an annual hunting trip in Montana with a group of men- all good people and friends- I met while living there. Montana might as well be known as Mantana, as I found the whole question of what it means to be a man on full display out there at all times. Men could be real men in Montana, driving big trucks, raising cows, hauling rocks, and shooting things- all that cowboy rugged individual shit. Rambo would fit in perfectly in Mantana, as would my main man Lone Wolf McQuade. I had found the place to be a bit stifling in part because gender roles seemed to be more fixed than back on the East Coast. In Montana, men went hunting while the women waited for them at home, becoming ‘hunting widows’ for several months. Sure there were a few women who could drop an elk but they were few and far between. So were the men who kept their hands and boots clean, who did not know how to dial in a rifle at the range, field dress an elk or coax a cutthroat trout out of the Yellowstone. And while each of us had aspects of ourselves that fit this bill, we knew that for all practical purposes these men were not even considered men.

We used to hunt close to the Marlboro Ranch, which was owned by Phillip Morris and where the actual Marlboro man would hang out, looking mustached and cool, riding horses and roping cows and smoking himself to death. We would stay in a small cabin, and when we were all together we would make food, drink whiskey, talk about hunts and guns and bullets while all the while giving each other incessant shit. And the shit usually revolved around our manliness or someone else’s lack of it, usually wandering into the murky waters of sexuality to discern who was more or less of a man, the flip side being always who was more or less gay. For a certain generation of men, I think it is difficult to talk about or traffic in masculinity without towing in homosexuality in some way, shape or form. I think this might be changing, albeit slowly, over time, but I think many of us tragically misidentified our natural, feminine energy as ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’ in nature, and spent much of our lives running away from it. Exhibit A would be the way the movie ‘Brokeback Mountain’ would get brought up if and when one of us made the mistake of trying to share too much with the group. For us it was not about TMI- as in too much information- as it was about too much intimacy, at least in a group setting. We were almost allergic to it, and broke out in accusations of gayness.

But then we would go out hunting, either alone or in pairs, and this is where we flipped the whole man script and related to one another as human beings. I would look forward to trudging out into the snow with one of my friends so that at some point we could drop the man-banter and open up to one another about the scary and real challenges of being ourselves, of being alive. While we did not always know what to do or say with what we shared, we did know that we had connected in way that we could not as larger group of men (or at least as the men we were pretending to be in front of one another.) We also knew, almost instinctively, that what got shared between us out there on the hunt was off limits for the manly man roasting that would go on when we got back. And roast we would, knowing full well that we were caricatures roasting caricatures, and that by enacting our mass caricaturing of manliness we were letting go of some of the worst or most toxic aspects of the masculinity we had been steeped in our whole lives but that no longer served us.

I will pick up the theme of caricatures in the next part, but will leave it here for now. I look forward to hearing any and all thoughts and ideas on what I have tried to communicate thus far. And in keeping with the whole manly man caricature theme, know that any dude wants to poke fun at the truth I am trying to share in this post that I will gladly punch their hair off:-). JK….

I am always torn about adding context to a poem but I think that a little might help here. This poem came to me after watching a friend pull his phone out and present it to me as evidence as to why he needed to take leave of the here and now and effectively be somewhere else. I have been noticing and thinking a lot about how our phones act as little time machines that transport us out of the present moment. Watching him take the call, I wondered about just how many of us are stranding ourselves (and by extension others) ‘elsewhere,’ anywhere but here, and imagined that much like one could hear the sea in a seashell that if one listened carefully one might he able to hear the sound of the whole world not being here.

Here

Producing it as
as incontrovertible
evidence
that yes
indeed
someone
or something
somewhere else
was desperately
in need
of his attention
right now
He whispered
I’ve got to
take this
as he pressed
his precious little
bar of busyness
to his ear
like a seashell
at the seashore
so that he
could hear
the sound of
everyone else
too pre
occupied
to be
just here.

Our drill instructors would shout “Discipline!” all day long, and each time they did we had to snap to attention and yell in unison, “Sir, discipline is the instant willing obedience to orders and respect for authority sir!” They would interpret even the slightest lag between their issuing of an order and our executing it as an egregious lack of discipline in need of swift and immediate punishment. So they would then shout, “Olympics!” to which we would respond, “Let the games begin!” And begin they did, as the drill instructors relished any opportunity to punish us - usually collective, often cruel- during the first two phases of basic training. One of their favorite games was taking us out and digging us in what looked like a beach volleyball court we knew only as the pit. “Digging” amounted to the entire platoon doing whatever exercise we were ordered to do- pushups, leg raises, jumping jacks, burpees- as fast as humanly possible. They would dig us until we were gassed out and sweating profusely, at which point they would yell “Powdered donuts!” and we would hurl ourselves onto the ground and roll around as if we were on fire. And then we would go about the rest of our day caked in a layer of fine dust with a of cupful of sand lodged in our underwear.

During the third phase of boot camp the drill instructors turned to what felt like a kinder, gentler approach. They punished us less, instead rewarding us for what we saw as our increasing ability to execute orders instantly. But this ability was predicated on our developing an insidious and dangerous disability. We had become disciplined Marines by shutting down our ability to think.

Our drill instructors saw it as their task to transform a bunch of undisciplined recruits into lean, mean fighting machines. We aspired to attain a machine-like proficiency (and efficiency) that eschewed thinking and for that matter feeling. Our ‘job’ was not to think about orders but rather to obey and execute them. When it came to orders we were being trained to be highly efficient automatons. We were told that unflinching obedience gave us, as Marines, a distinct advantage on the battlefield in the sense that there was no gap or lag or uncertainty in between the issuing and execution of an order. Our obedience automated, we would carry out orders without any regard for our personal safety, without any regard for regard, period.

So it comes as no surprise to me that the order to strike the boat a second time was followed/obeyed/executed seamlessly. I am not sure how many military personnel the execution of this order actually involved, but I imagine the order flowed down the chain of command unimpeded by any niggling questions being raised about its legality. In fact I would expect the service members who executed this order to receive commendations or even promotions for doing their jobs so well.

But what if the order to strike the boat a second time to kill the survivors violated international law? Who would be on the hook for this, the person who issued the illegal order or the persons who executed it? According to international law, both the issuer and executer of an illegal order bear responsibility for it. In theory, this means that everyone in the chain of command should be stopping to think about the legality of any and every order before executing it. After all, every single service member in the chain of command has, in theory, been instructed on the laws of war and on the Geneva conventions. We were, and I seem to recall that the exact example of firing on survivors of a disabled and sinking ship can be found in the curricula used to teach service members what, in the senseless slaughter that is war, is legal and illegal. (Spoiler alert, firing on survivors clinging to a disabled boat was deemed illegal)

Which brings me back to the dry classes about the Geneva conventions that we struggled to stay awake in during boot camp. Our drill instructors would sit in the back of the air-conditioned trailer that served as our classroom watching intently for the first shaved head to bob up and down to let them know some poor recruit was nodding off. Sleep deprived and exhausted, we did all we could to stay awake while some corporal droned on about how it was illegal to shoot people with a .50 caliber machine gun. When one of our heads bobbed, the lesson would be paused so the drill instructors could drag us outside to the closest available pit and dig us mercilessly while the poor recruit whose head-bobbing had initiated our collective punishment looked on, knowing full well that the drill instructors had spared him so that we would punish him later, perhaps in the form of a ‘blanket party’ where he would he pinned under his sheets in the middle of the night so the rest of us could pound him with bars of soap wrapped in our laundry bags. Was this legal? Of course not, but it was what the drill instructors encouraged us to do. And we did, following their subtle suggestions to take the law into our own hands and punish the problem recruit as if they were direct orders.

So when it came to following orders there was a huge disconnect between what we were learning in a classroom and what we were learning day in and day out at boot camp. In the classroom, we were explicitly being told that it was our duty to stop and consider the legality of an order before executing it. Outside of the classroom, we were implicitly being conditioned to obey orders instantly, automatically, without stopping to think. This strange situation reminded me of Daniel Kahnemann’s thesis in his groundbreaking book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahnemann makes a compelling argument much of what we think of as thinking is not thinking at all but rather automated responses emanating from our subconscious mind. The habituated mind reacts to a particular stimulus in a reflexive instead of reflective manner, which Kahnemann argues has served us well in situations where we need to think fast in order to survive. Thinking slow is an altogether different undertaking, as we are more trying to slow things down enough to be able to consider them with our conscious mind.

Kahnemann points out that these different kinds of thinking are often at odds if not at war with one another. Fast thinking happens in the moment, while slow thinking often takes place after the fact. Advertisers target our subconscious mind, hoping to condition it to connect our happiness to buying a new car or drinking lite beer. They know that even if we stop and think about the ridiculousness of the ads we are bombarded with day in and day out across multiple platforms that these ads still work because they are working on our subconscious rather than conscious minds. And so it goes with boot camp, where we are being told explicitly to stop and consider the legality of orders while we are being conditioned implicitly to do the exact opposite. And as Kahnemann argues, in the heat of the moment (or battle) the conscious mind does not stand a chance.

Every great dystopian -and for that matter utopian- vision is predicated on some form of mind control. Huxley’s Brave New World, Skinner’s Walden 2, Orwell’s 1984 all paid close attention to how to automate, and in so doing eliminate, thinking. Thinking can be dangerous to the overall smooth functioning of a state or society, so better to condition people to think they are thinking when in fact they are merely regurgitating pre-programmed party lines. Or to condition people to see their ‘job,’ perhaps even their lot in life, to not think but rather to obey others, to obey their orders.

Elizabeth Minnich links our ability to not think with our capability to engage in what she terms extensive evil. Building on the groundbreaking work of her mentor Hannah Arendt, Minnich honed in on how we turn to banalities - empty, unoriginal slogans and sayings - to justify not stopping to think about what we are doing, about the broader implications of our actions. Arendt had put forth the controversial thesis that the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was not so much evil as he was unable to think for himself. This inability made it possible for him to participate in the mass extermination of Jews without really stopping to think about what he was doing. Instead he thought about his job, his career, his narrow concerns, all the while contributing to a massive human machine assembled to carry out genocide as expediently and efficiently as possible. As Minnich argues, carrying out such an extensive evil hinges on getting a whole lot of non-evil people to not stop to consider if their actions are contributing to a larger, more extensive evil.

And so it goes with orders. Automate the system by turning humans into automatons. Train the subconscious mind while pretending to educate the conscious mind. Have people ready and willing to surrender control of their thoughts and their very ability to think to someone else. Have them aspire to becoming machines who do not think and feel but rather do and do fast and well exactly what they are told to do, over and over again, without giving one thought to what they are actually doing.

In The Last 600 Meters, the chilling documentary about the Battle of Fallujah during the Second Gulf War, a sniper explains that his job is not to make foreign policy, that he sees himself as only responsible for the last 600 meters of it. Foreign policy comes down to him in the form of orders, orders to take a shot, to take out a target, to pull the trigger on survivors clinging to a boat. He sees himself as responsible for executing the order, not thinking about it. Because thinking about it would mean being responsible for far more than the 600 meters between him and his target. It would mean stopping to think about the larger contexts that shaped the giving of that order as well as his compulsion to follow it. It would mean thinking about at least the last 600 years, about the rise of automated societies, automated armies, automated minds. It would mean stopping to think about why authoritarians love automation more than life itself.

I was writing a check to Adrian- the man who did the work for me- when he stepped away to take a call from someone interested in hiring Adrian do some work for him. An inveterate eavesdropper, I listened as Adrian explained he did not work by the hour but rather by the job. He had to repeat this, as the person on the other end seemed intent on hiring Adrian for an hourly rate. I could tell from Adrian’s tone that he did not really want to work for this person because he did not want to work by the hour. When Adrian hung up I could not help asking him about the call. He shook his head and said, “I am not going to let anyone tell me what my time is worth.”

His words stopped me in my tracks. I asked him to elaborate and he told me that he had been burned by people wanting him to work by the hour because people expected him, as a ‘latino,’ to work for less than white people. He prefaced this with “Don’t take this the wrong way,’” but he wanted to let me know that people routinely expected him to work for less than white people. He resented this because it denigrated his expertise, skills and abilities by setting a price for them in terms of his time, which because he is latino is expected to be worth less than white person’s time. He valued his time and did not want to traffic or trade in it. He knew that while his work would certainly take time, but he wanted to be the master of what he did, how he did it and how fast he worked, which meant not making time- or for that matter him being latino- the ultimate arbiter of the worth of his work.

Part of what stopped me in my tracks about Adrian’s statement is that I have been reading Lewis Mumford’s The Pentagon of Power about the rise of what he refers to as the megamachine. Mumford spends a good deal of time (ok, pages) laying out how the standardization and quantification of time as a measure of work contributed to the demise of the craft economy, which up until a few hundred years ago did not base the value of a product or service solely on the amount of time it took to produce of complete it. Before this, time had not yet been domesticated to the point where it could then be easily exchanged money.

Today most of us do not think twice about the notion that time is money. Even those of us who do not work for hourly rates often traffic in the crude personal calculus of what our time is worth. Truth be told, my even having Adrian do the work in my back yard came after a careful consideration of whether I had the time (or wanted to spend my time) doing the work myself. Under normal circumstances I would have done the work myself, in large part because I enjoy undertaking projects that demand as much from me mentally as they do physically. But given that I am recovering from the ravages of chemotherapy I could not physically do the job, or at least not in a timely manner. It probably would have taken me days if not weeks to do what Adrian and his team did in a matter of hours. We had agreed on a set price, and I was more than happy to pay him what he had quoted me for his work.

Being diagnosed with cancer brings with it the opportunity to have a whole new experience of and appreciation for time. My own answer to the question of what my time is worth is different now than before I had cancer. Cancer has forced me to think about time differently, to see it as more as a finite and precious resource. Before cancer I found it much easier to waste time as well as to put a set value or price on my time. Now, I notice time more, notice when I am spending it wisely as well as when I am wasting it. Much like Adrian, I find myself bucking the notion that a price tag could or even should be put on my time. It feels like trying to put a price on my soul so that I can then sell it to the highest bidder. I cannot help but think that quantifying and standardizing what should only be experienced and appreciated constitutes a form of violence that then makes possible even more violence. Perhaps this is the trick, the putting of a price on the priceless, that drives the automation and subsequent impoverishment of not only our society but also of our souls.

Adrian brought this point home to me with his stand against having someone else place a value on his time. He also shared with me that he too had been diagnosed with cancer about ten years ago, that he had gone through treatment and been in remission until the cancer came back during the pandemic. The doctors told him the cancer had spread and that his time was limited. But when he went back in for more tests several months later the cancer was nowhere to be found. The doctors were left scratching their heads while Adrian had no doubt that God had intervened and that his recovery had been a miracle. God had given Adrian the gift of more time but not endless time, and perhaps this is why he was not about to let any mere mortal tell him what this precious and precarious gift was worth.

What if we as a society, as a species, collectively refused to put a price on our time? I imagine that this would throw a huge wrench in our economy, perhaps even tank it, as it would make the seamless exchange of time for money (which is also the exchange of animate life for an inanimate, dead object) difficult if not impossible. And then what? What would rise from the ashes of the current economic arrangement that equates time and money? Perhaps human beings, which is to say humans bent on being human instead of becoming machines.