“The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”

— David Whyte

In an old village by the sea, there lies an old square. At one edge of the old square, there squats an old plane tree. And underneath the knotty branches of the old tree, there sits an old wooden bench.

On one hot, sunny day, a man sits down on this bench. He is dressed in a particular kind of summer style, everything made of cotton, everything well pressed, everything smart yet bland. He is watching his young children play in the square, smiling at them as he leans forward, his mind elsewhere.

Another young man, similarly outfitted, comes and stands by the bench. He, too, is watching his kids in the square, as they alternate between running and squatting, laughing and shouting. As he watches them play, he is thinking about an important project he is working on.

Eventually, he sits on the bench, and as he does, the two men briefly acknowledge each other with a nod and a muttered word of greeting. They sit like this for a while, their eyes gazing vacantly at the square through dark sunglasses, their minds flicking back and forth between here and somewhere else - the family commitments, the office, the clients, the household chores, the finances.

After a little while, one of the men glances at his watch. He stands, calls and beckons his children, who ignore him until he mentions ice cream. They scamper over, and as they leave, the man glances towards the other man, who is still looking into the middle distance but is vaguely aware of their departure.

Just after the departing man looks away, the man on the bench looks towards him, and they miss each other by a mere second or two, so he only catches the sides of their faces as they walk away.

The following day, one of the men returns. He’s on his own this time, a rare break from the hustle and bustle of shopping and other weekend chores. He liked this spot yesterday and is pleased to return alone for some respite, a peace he needs but cannot name.

It is hot and sunny again, and this time he leans back on the bench, feeling his body soften a little. He looks out towards the horizon, glad to be free of family responsibilities for a little while, yet feeling an undercurrent of sadness in his solitude, too.

Not long after this, the other man also returns. He has some spare time this afternoon and, whilst out for a rare walk, found himself drawn back to the picturesque square and bench. As he approaches, he notices the first man and, recognising him from the day before, offers him a nod and a tentative greeting, “Hi, how’s it going?”.

Perhaps because of the relaxing setting of the square and his uncommon feeling of leisure, the first man surprises himself in responding with warmth and an honest answer: “Ah, I’m pretty tired but glad to be here.” He gestures to the square with his hand. “It’s nice to do nothing for a bit.”

The second man surveys the square, the rich green leaves, the dappled light beneath them, and the twinkling sea beyond and finds himself smiling and nodding. “Yeah, it’s a great spot, isn’t it?”

There’s a brief silence before he speaks again, disguising his tentativeness. “Without the kids today?”

The first man squints up at him from the bench with an expression that looks like a frown. At first, the second man thinks he has offended him, but then notices a subtle smile underneath. “No kids today… a bit of alone time,” says the man on the bench, nodding.

The second man smiles back and shuffles his feet. Then - and this is something he will remember many years later - the first man slides himself along the bench, gestures to the space he has created and says “Do you want to join me?”

There’s an openness on his face that feels genuine and rare to the second man, and something more than that, too, something he himself knows too, a fleeting sense of risk, a glimpse of hunger.

Before he has fully replied, his body decides of its own accord, and he finds himself easing down on the bench. For a few seconds, there is an uncertainty, and nothing is said, the silence filled by the twitter of birds and the ocean breeze rustling the leaves.

Someone has to go first. That is the key that unlocks it all. Always, someone must go first and it doesn’t matter who.

One of the men begins with an enquiry about the week. The other responds, finding himself continuing with a tentative honesty, speaking with a frankness about the frustrations of his work, the targets that never end and the pressure that only seems to increase. The other nods knowingly, for once not speaking, not interjecting with his own experiences or interpretations. Something in him feels compelled to hear more.

When the first man has finished, the second man nods, pauses, and then speaks. He expresses how much this chimes with his own experiences of work right now. He shares of his challenges, the stresses and endless politicking, the juggle with family life.

The first man is nodding without knowing it, engrossed in what he is hearing, as the second man was when he spoke. Family life has been mentioned now, so family comes into the conversation too.

They continue in this fashion, back and forth, sometimes at length, sometimes in short bursts. They share their biographies, and they begin to notice the differences between them, but mostly how much they have in common.

They share where they grew up, what they studied, how they came into their professions, their various job titles and successes, their relationship statuses and history (both in long-term relationships), their family constellations (both fathers to two children, both with siblings and ageing parents).

They are beginning to realise - to remember actually - the richness in bearing witness to another’s experience, the relief of not needing to speak, or analyse, or participate in one-upmanship. It is a joy to be nourished by another’s story.

And as they speak, they each notice inwardly that they are less boastful than usual. What is to be gained? The prize here is different, albeit unclear.

Some of the challenges of fatherhood are shared, at first, just the ones that are obvious and sure to be recognised. Then, quite soon, some of their individual parental trials and complications: health issues with their children, fertility journeys, worries over the future, hints at feelings of inadequacy.

And then, somewhat surprisingly to both of them, they share some of the joys of fatherhood, the tiny moments of euphoria, the triumphs, the moments of deep satisfaction and pride, the unspeakably rich privilege of being entangled in a unique kind of love and responsibility and play and hope.

In the background of this first real conversation, they both wonder how they have met another, similar but different, who wishes to share something of their journey, the truth of it beneath the facade. In moments, it is as if they are each speaking to themselves, a twin they have hallucinated to fulfil this specific desire of witnessing. And they realise too, although not consciously yet, that they have been searching for this other for some time.

After an hour that seems like both days and a few minutes, there is silence once more. They both lean back and look out towards the sea, and the trance is broken. Then they switch back to the weather, as if returning to safe ground and familiar territory, as a kind of punctuation. It is very hot they both agree, and it will stay hot for a while, although one prefers this more than the other.

Eventually, one of the men takes a deep breath and sighs. “I’d better be going,” he says, reluctant but satisfied. He stands and offers his hand. The other man stands too, noticing the strange blend of disappointment and fullness in him, too.

They look each other in the eyes and shake hands with a curious aura of sacrament. As they do, one of the men says, “Nice chatting with you,” and he means it. And then, after a brief but palpable hesitation, he adds, “We should do this again.”

The other man nods in agreement, noticing something swell inside him, and he replies without hesitating to think. “How about the same time next week?”

“Deal.”

They smile, part company and head off in different directions.

A week passes. The men return to the same spot under the old plane tree, arriving within a few minutes of each other. They smile, shake hands and exchange a few words of greeting before they take their seats on the bench again, observing some new yet unspoken ritual.

There is a brief period of awkwardness as they each recall not just the memory but the feeling of their last conversation. It is as if they don’t know how to return to that place, and both are wondering if the other is feeling the same desire to do so.

But one of them goes first again. He asks after the other man’s week, this time enquiring after something specific that he remembers from last time, something that held some gravity in their last conversation, something with sonority for both of them.

The second man responds, and within moments they are into depths they have hardly shared with anyone, back to a frontier they are exploring together.

It is easier now, they realise. There is something to refer to, some familiarity with the terrain of each other’s lives. They are joining dots, mapping it together.

The time passes in the same strange way, a couple of hours vanishing like minutes yet feeling like weeks. Once again, they emerge from their exchange feeling enlivened and larger from this rare sustenance.

They will meet again; there is no question. Some invisible knowledge exists between them now. As they make arrangements and exchange details, there is a briskness to the way they communicate, as if their next meeting at the bench is to conclude a transaction. They exude a sense of urgency, one that is partly practical and partly from a deeper hunger that neither of them can name.

And so they keep meeting, each time excavating and mining old stories as well as current ones, and opening up new horizons from their endeavours. There are, too, wounds being tended to, although neither of them would name it this way, not yet.

Months pass like this. Through the seasons they meet, equipping themselves for the elements: umbrellas, scarves, heavy coats, sunglasses, hats, shorts, flip flops. Their meetings are now a permanent fixture in their weeks, their deepening relationship an anchor point in their lives. They are remembering something they didn’t know they had forgotten, their convening a practice of devotion in their otherwise atheist lives.

Neither of them ever names what they are doing, nor explicitly states that they should keep meeting with a certain frequency, and at a certain day or time; it happens of its own accord. Scheduling or diarising their burgeoning fellowship feels wrong somehow, almost profane.

Sometimes, one of them will bring a book for the other, something they might enjoy. Other times, cups of coffee or some fruit are shared. As their comfort deepens, they arrive wearing the truth of their current state, not disguising their anger or anxiety, stress or joy. The fullness of their lives is not left behind, it comes with them.

Years pass like this. The two men enter their middle years, with all of the turmoil, questioning and uncertainty this brings. Jobs change, their relationship with work changes, ambition changes and fades. Their marriages go through various cycles of neglect, turmoil and revival, yet surviving and growing. Their children grow older, first with the tumult of teenage years and then eventually leaving home, with the attendant emptiness neither of them tries to deny.

Through it all, they give each other an uncommon succour, their dialogues grounded in tough realities and genuine compassion over cheap comfort and platitudes.

Now when they meet, they ease straight into these larger conversations, tilling a fertile soil that becomes richer with each turn. There is sincerity and gravity to their exchanges, which are often intense, occasionally heavy, but always punctuated with humour and self-deprecation. They notice how they leave their gatherings feeling lighter and expansive.

The weather is rarely mentioned now, not in any literal sense anyway. If they talk about work, they explore the wider nature of it; the very notion of exchanging ones time for financial reward, the meaning it holds for them now, the dreams they have of purpose and vocation. If they talk about their relationships and families, it is to express pride, sadness, joy or something else heartfelt. If they talk about their health, they will remark frankly on what is changing, aching, decaying, and how their powers are fading.

They articulate their fears, their hopes, their failures and flaws. They speak of the demons that still haunt them, the memories and regrets that still plague. They share moments of celebration - birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, new jobs, and, over time, grandchildren. They marvel at the unfolding of their own and each other’s lives. What a thing to behold, they say, what a thing to be part of.

One day, one of the men arrives in the sober clothing of loss. They embrace, as has long been their custom, but today they hold each other tighter and longer, and when they sit, their shoulders touch as they speak. Their conversation that day is heavier and slower yet imbued with a certain love and relief, too.

As more years pass, there are more days like this. More losses and tragedy and sorrow. More connection and love in their shared intimacy. For long hours, they bear witness to each other’s grief, providing a measure and type of solace too deep for anyone else to truly see or fathom.

Now, in their elderhood, they meet at the bench every day. Their gaits are slightly more stilted and tentative as each year passes, but their eyes shine. As they sit, their joints crackle, they wheeze and sigh with good humour. When it is cooler - and now, most days feel cool - one of the men brings blankets for the two of them, something to keep the chill from their bones.

Sometimes their grandchildren play in the square in front of them, scampering and squealing, throwing up tiny clouds of dust in their wake. Every now and then, they will take in the scene, grinning unwittingly, eyes gleaming. Yes, what a thing to behold, although this no longer needs to be spoken out loud.

They speak now of the great themes waiting at the place where their frontier now stands. They speak of regret, of loss, of the very meaning of it all. They laugh, often, at their former selves and their current selves, at the childlike innocence and foolishness that still possess them; they guffaw at the absurdity of it all. They laugh so hard that tears sometimes roll over their crinkled cheeks.

They talk of the great democracy that awaits them both, conjuring it up as if a third entity has joined them on the bench. Neither of them would dream of avoiding it; yes, what a thing to be part of, what a wild ride, they say.

On some days, they sit in silence. An hour or two can pass without a word being spoken, but much is said in that priceless hush. After a while, one of them will sigh and nod, as if some shared and imperceptible endeavour has been completed. They will stand, embrace and part company with a few warm words.

A few more years pass, until one day, only one of the men arrives to sit on the bench. He has brought a solitary blanket today.

He rests his cane against the old bench as he sits down, taking in the ancient ocean and the horizon once more. It is a bright day, and he is glad of the dappled shade of the old plane tree.

Words form silently on his lips as he gazes out across the square. Then he reaches sideways with one gnarled hand and gently pats the seat next to him. He wipes his eyes. He smiles. And he sits for a while.

Our 18th Men’s Circle is starting in autumn.

We’re beginning our next online men’s Circle in October: 8 weeks with a group of fellow men having real and meaningful conversations, explorations into yourself and your role in the world.

We still have places available. You can find out more or enquire here.

[email header image: ‘Serpents’ by Gérard DuBois]

Creating a physical artefact felt important: something to be held and gathered around, something that could be passed to others. It is printed in the style of a newspaper, the power of the stories contained on a fragile material, and the ‘newspaper’ itself symbolic of our fathers.

We’re excited to have brought this into being and hope it is the first of many editions. Our first print run is now complete, with over half the copies already sold*.

In the next few weeks, we’ll be inviting the contributors to come together for a group conversation to reflect on their response to their own and other experiences shared.

We’re also keen to explore how we might bring a wider audience together around these stories - readings, salons, groups - in partnership with cultural institutions, bookshops and any other organisations who are interested.

We welcome your support:
1. If you’d like to buy or stock copies, you can order online at our website: Where Have All The Flowers Gone?

2. If you’re interested in hosting a reading or event, please get in touch via the website (or contact Al or I directly).


*this is a non-profit project, proceeds from sales will cover the cost of printing & shipping; any surplus will be donated to a men’s charity

Our 17th Men’s Circle is running now.

Our waitlist is open for our next online men’s Circle: 8 weeks with a group of fellow men having real and meaningful conversations, explorations into yourself and your role in the world.

You can find out more or enquire here.

[email header image: ‘Serpents’ by Gérard DuBois]

“You have to dig deep to bury your father.”

— Romani proverb

Two days ago, I unexpectedly found myself crying in an aisle of our local hardware store in Berlin. I had gone to buy my son a replacement football and instead found myself suddenly overwhelmed by memories of my dad. Taken by surprise, I stood almost paralysed amongst the shelves of plastic goods, with tears filling my eyes.

When I got home, my wife was making herself some lunch in the kitchen. She was in a chipper mood, pleased about the progress in the creative project she was working on. I began to make myself a smoothie and listened as she told me more. After a short while, she asked me how my day was going. I paused.

“Well…. I just had a bit of a cry in Woolworths.”

She turned around from the counter, a look of concern on her face. I paused again and then said the only thing I could say.

“I miss my dad,” I said, staring helplessly into a box of ingredients as tears ran down my cheeks.

Today marks 35 years to the day that my dad died. His death was quite sudden, a heart attack early morning as he waited at the top of our road for the minibus to take him to the factory. He was 52, I was 13, the youngest of his four children.

At that age, I had little comprehension of what I lost beyond the sense that the only person from whom I consistently felt love and affection was now gone forever. I buried this deep and thought I was moving on. ‘You’re on your own now, kid’, said some part of my psyche.

As a boy, like most boys, I saw my dad as a titan. Even then, I knew he was respected in our community as a man of integrity, a wise man, a courageous man. Later, after his death, I had to reconcile the parts of him that did not meet this image. The anger, the occasional violence, the demons he battled and the likely depression they caused.

In short, he was a giant with a long shadow, a complex, flawed and heroic figure, doing his best, setting high standards and falling short often. Not unlike the rest of us.

I came to terms with this duality a long time ago. What takes longer, and is still catching me off guard, are the rare moments where I intensely feel his absence, moments like now.

They say grief comes in waves or stages, but to me it feels more like an orbit, one that enlarges every year but narrows too, so that it passes quite close to me every now and then, close enough to shift the tides and make the seas stormy.

A few years ago, my sister and I bumped into my dad’s best friend, whom we hadn’t seen in at least a decade. He drove past us on the street and swung the car around, winding down his window as he pulled up. As I leaned in, he greeted me with a familiar beaming smile and said, “I thought it was you. You look like your dad.”

After we exchanged the usual headline pleasantries you exchange when you haven’t seen someone in years and there are too many life changes to update on, he told me he missed my dad. Tears filled his eyes. “He was my best friend, I haven’t had anyone like that since. We were like brothers, you see. Well, he was like a big brother to me.”

I felt a deep kinship for this kind and stoic man who had known my dad so well and could express his feelings so readily. After a little more chat, we said our goodbyes. As we walked away, my sister said to me softly, “He said you looked like Dad”. Perhaps only she could have intuited what this might mean to me.

Yet I couldn’t really see it myself back then, but now - five years later and almost three years into fatherhood - with a bigger beard, much more grey and far more wrinkles, I catch glimpses of my dad all the time. A glance in the mirror as I’m brushing my teeth, and there he is, a curious mix of Karl Marx and late-stage Saddam Hussein.

I’m a little over three years younger than my father was when he died, and these brief apparitions give me the sense of catching up to him, as if I will briefly inhabit who he was then, before time marches on. I will continue aging and he will remain frozen at 52. One day, I may look far older than he ever did.

I see him in my son, too, the peaked shape of his lips, the fullness of his cheeks, the twinkling eyes. But whereas I gaze at my son daily, my dad will never see his own face in his grandson, never experience that strange sensation of witnessing one’s future lineage. He will never bounce my son on his knee as he did with me, nor have him nestle into his broad chest. It comes in orbits, not waves.

But perhaps I should say what led to this particularly sudden sorrow in Woolworths. For over a week, I’ve found myself desiring stillness in an unusually pronounced way. Not my occasional longing for solitude and peace, this was an embodied sense that I had to slow down and stop.

As the days went on, my body seemed to make decisions for me. Despite having lots of things to do, I found myself taking slow walks around the park, gazing out of the window or sitting in my armchair in silence.

On Friday morning, I sat in the park for a while, feeling something building inside me. A few hours later, I went to a yoga class, arriving slightly early and sitting in silence on my mat. It was in that unlikely place and moment that the question landed in my head: “Are you proud of me Dad?” I felt the beginnings of tears, and then the class started, and I had to get up and move.

It’s an old question, one that rarely comes now but used to arrive frequently in my twenties, a time when I would reassure myself with cheap and immature answers.

The answer no longer matters. I have enough love and acceptance to not need it from my long-dead father, and to have come to terms with the not knowing. It is impossible to say whether my life or character would meet his values and worldview if he were still alive.

If he were here now, he’d be 87 and perhaps his conservative side would have become more hardline and severe. Or perhaps his truer, more loving and liberal side would have triumphed as he entered his dotage. Whatever that alternative history might have looked like, I would have needed to outgrow my need for an answer.

Yet somehow the question still matters, the echo of it still haunts me. Somehow it signifies something important, or maybe something yet to be understood.

Maybe one day the question won’t matter either. Maybe it’s not an inquiry but a recurring motif, a celestial body that comes around every now and then to remind me of the father I never had enough time with and the love that still longs to be expressed.

***

If you’ve read this far, I owe you a thank you. I wrote this for myself really, because I needed to express it and share it. To have it read by someone else is an added privilege.

Our 17th Men’s Circle is starting soon.

We’re beginning our next online men’s Circle in a few weeks: 8 weeks with a group of fellow men having real and meaningful conversations, explorations into yourself and your role in the world.

We still have places available. You can find out more or enquire here.

[email header image: ‘Serpents’ by Gérard DuBois]

[main image: my son looking at a picture of my dad]

“I sort of disappear. Like I feel a change in me whole body. Like there’s a fire in my body. I’m just there.. flying..like a bird. It feels like electricity, yeah… like electricity.”

— Billy Elliot

“The point of the body is to make love visible. You know, like an athlete trains their body so at the right moment they can perform at their peak power. And like a ballerina who uses their body to reveal beauty through dance, that's what our bodies are designed to do, to reveal love and commitment to a physical act. They're not built as an extraction mechanism of pleasure alone.”

— Pastor Jon Tyson

Tempelhofer Feld is a former airport now repurposed as Berlin’s largest public park. It attracts people from all walks of life with its array of spaces and facilities. During the summer, families will have barbecues within earshot of ravers with mobile sound systems, while cyclists and runners circle the perimeter.

On its eastern edge, close to where I live, there is a clutch of community allotments. Like most of the Feld, there is an incongruity to them, a ragtag collection of flourishing flower and vegetable plots framed by homemade benches and reclaimed wood fences, overlooking the huge tarmac slipway where airplanes turned in between take-offs and landings.

We were there on Saturday morning, my wife, my two-year old son and I, seeking wild rosemary for a stew we were cooking that evening. Amongst these randomly shaped plots, there is a makeshift playground - two wooden horses, one small and one larger, sitting amongst a small pit of woodchips.

Whilst my wife continued the search, my son and I were drawn to these wooden steeds. He took the smaller one and duly directed me to the bigger horse. I clambered on, surprised at how comfortable it was to sit legs abreast and gazing out across the flat expanse of the Feld ahead, where the sun was low in the sky.

In front of me, on the edges of the slipway, a few groups sat huddled against the breeze, someone was playing music on a sound system, and a few roller skaters moved back and forth on the slipway. Behind them, the Feld rolled on for a couple of kilometres, framed by the distant art deco terminal building and the grey and white clouds scudding across the sky.

One of these skaters in particular caught my eye, an Indian or Pakistani man perhaps in his fifties, clad in a black tracksuit. His jet black hair was receding far back from a widow’s peak, and his track top strained slightly around his midriff, the spread of middle-age visible. His roller blade boots were black too, although not the wheels - they were a fluorescent hot pink.

But his movement - that was what held my gaze. He glided across the rough bitumen as if he were skating on a rink, spinning, crouching and turning effortlessly. His arms moved in harmony, every now and then swirling through the air like a ballerina or flamenco dancer, creating sublime arcs and pirouettes. It was utterly beautiful.

I watched and kept watching, transfixed at his gracefulness, the poetry of his movement. At one point, when my wife came nearby, I called her over to point out the scene. “Check out this guy,” I said without taking my eyes from him.

He would finish one traverse of the slipway, make a wide, graceful turn or a short spin, and then return, all the time completely unaware of me watching from twenty metres or so away.

And what struck me most about this beauty was how immersed he was in it. There was no trace of self-consciousness nor of performing for someone else’s gaze. He seemed oblivious to the world, in flow, in his own private reverie, a carefree could-not-give-a-fuck attitude.

I caught myself in this strange scene: my wife foraging for wild herbs, my son now merrily collecting wood chips in his bucket, and me sitting atop a horse, partly obscured by the long wild grass, looking out over the flat expanse of a former airport. For a fleeting moment, I imagined myself a Native American gazing out across a vast prairie, in secret witness to this mesmerising foreign dance in front of me, a gorgeous ritual of expression.

I wanted to speak to him, but to do so would have felt like an intrusion, a crude interruption to this grace. Why did I want to speak to him? The well-worn instinct and desire to hear his story, to understand the etymology of his passion, to be in conversation with someone in their flow.

This rollerblader was a guy you would pass on the street and never imagine having this dance inside him. Perhaps you’d notice a sparkle in his smile or a shine in his eyes, but you would not picture this slightly overweight man of Indian origin moving like a pro figure skater.

My mind wandered to the previous week and an improv class I attended run by my friend Chris Heimann. To say Chris is an experienced teacher is an understatement; he is a former theatre director who taught improvisation at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London for 18 years, where his students included the recent Oscar-winner Jessie Buckley.

What I loved about the class, and Chris’ approach to his work, is viewing improvisation - in its boldest terms - as a practice for living a more authentic life. To step forward, to do something (or nothing), to give it a go, to express yourself without thinking about it or thinking about what others might think.

Before the class, I had felt the subtle but familiar trace of discomfort that comes with moving into a new practice where vulnerability and experimentation are called for, and where letting go of control or performance was the very point of it.

I left feeling a sense of liberation and energy, and a question in my head, “What is possible when I surrender to the moment and dance with what is here?”

Dance feels like a powerful metaphor - and practice - for male expression. In my younger years, I was a horrendously self-conscious dancer unless under the influence of party drugs. Now, in midlife, I dance more freely, giving less of a fuck what people think. I have begun to realise there is nothing at stake in my self-expression.

What that roller-blading middle-aged guy reminded is how constrained male self-expression is. Men are constantly, often silently, self-policing how they express themselves and how other men do so, too.

Clothing, music, dancing, hobbies, films, even our jobs - especially our jobs. The choices we make around what we allow ourselves to do are conditioned by what we believe ‘a man like me’ should do.

If we are honest, truly honest, and dig deep beneath those thoughts, there is a cowardly question lurking: what will the others think of me? Not just men, but everyone but everyone.

What will my parents think? Will they think I’m gay? Or feminine? Or weird?

Will they not take me seriously? Will they think I’m childish to play like this, to be exuberant, to be into something more esoteric?

“Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness. And this plot prosecutes its goals through a limiting of language. Language is the battleground over which the fight will take place. Because what we cannot say, we cannot communicate. And, by ‘say’ I mean dance, paint, sing, meme. What we cannot say, we cannot communicate.”

— Terrence McKenna

I see this persistent and great tragedy all around me, men unwilling to fully be themselves for fear of judgment and exclusion. There is safety in wearing the same trainers, the same brands of clothes, drinking the same drinks as the others, watching the same films and doing the same sort of serious work a man should do.

Safety of being accepted as part of the group, part of the masses. But underneath that illusory safety is a slow death of one’s soul.

In his poem ‘The Holy Longing’ (Selige Sehnsucht) Goethe wrote, “Tell a wise person, or else keep silent, because the mass man will mock it right away.” He was urging us to be careful who we share our deepest longings, passions and eccentricities with, for some will trample on them immediately.

For many men, witnessing others play the music inside them is threatening, a reminder that they are not doing so themselves, that they are living fearfully and obediently.

I once heard the performer Alok Vaid Menon say that the reason queer people are so hated by some is that they cannot tolerate seeing people live so unapologetically and vibrantly as who they feel themselves to be. Their self-expression is too much for the imprisoned soul of the mass man. I can believe it.

As I was writing this, my sister sent me a link to a dance music video. It’s set in a dark nightclub, and the whole thing is centred on a seemingly rich and powerful man played by the swarthy Jon Hamm, who, having snorted something to relax his inhibitions, begins to move and dance freely. That same couldn’t-give-a-fuck attitude, but this one requiring a line of something illicit to enable it.

And this reminded me of that legendary Fatboy Slim video for ‘Weapon Of Choice’, featuring Christopher Walken sitting glumly in a hotel lobby in a serious suit - until he is possessed of the need to dance. Walken, known for playing some of the hardest and most intense men in film history, was a trained dancer before he became an actor.

Now I’m remembering another rugged actor, Mads Mikkelsen, in the Danish film ‘Another Round’, about four midlife men (all teachers) who begin to experiment with keeping low levels of alcohol in their blood to boost their creativity and sense of aliveness.

There are predictable and hilarious consequences, but what the film is really about is the deep male desire to be unshackled from restrictive roles. In the film’s denouement, we see Mikkelsen’s lead character, aided by inebriation, finally express himself with incredible beauty through dance.

All of this, inevitably for me, leads to ‘Billy Elliot’. Ever since I first saw that film, a quarter of a century ago, there is one scene in particular that always makes me weep. It is when Billy’s father, a stern Scottish miner, and his brother, also a miner, forbid Billy to continue with his ballet dancing classes, something too feminine for them to understand.

They argue furiously with Billy and his dance teacher, yelling insults and threats. But by now, Billy has found the place where he most comes alive, and he resists - he has no choice other than to capitulate forever to a lesser life. As they fight, Billy flees out of the house, dancing across the small concrete yard, dancing on the wall and the outhouse roof, before dancing down the street, all while The Jam’s ‘Town Called Malice’ provides the angry soundtrack.

It is a scene of defiance, of a refusal to cave in to what is expected of not just a boy but a working-class boy, of a refusal to deny the heart’s passion, the fundamental human need to make art and express oneself.

In that scene, Billy is me. Billy is my own struggle to unshackle myself and set my heart free. And for me, Billy is also so many men in the modern world who have great wells of unexpressed art, music and creativity deep inside them.

The poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. once said, “Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.”

It would be a tragedy to die with all this inside us.

I hope we remember how to dance. Our lives may depend on it.

Our 17th Men’s Circle is starting on Weds 1st April.

We’re beginning our next online men’s Circle in a few weeks: 8 weeks with a group of fellow men having real and meaningful conversations, explorations into yourself and your role in the world.

We still have places available. You can find out more or enquire here.

[email header image: ‘Serpents’ by Gérard DuBois]

[main image: ‘Empire of the Sun’, 1987, IMDB]

Russ and I have been busy juggling various projects so we haven’t had as much time to spread the word on this group - and we still have spaces left for men who want to join this 8-week journey.

When people ask me what Circles is, I find myself saying some variation of this: it’s a space where men come together to have real and meaningful conversations.

What do I mean by that? I mean conversations that really deepen and expand our perspectives - on who we are, on what it means to be a man, on the roles we play, on life itself.

Nothing is forced. There’s no obligation to speak, listening is just as powerful and important. You go as far as you want to go, witnessing fellow men doing the same, pushing their boundaries and - sometimes - saying what they’ve needed to say for some time but haven’t had the chance to.

Here’s what some men in our most recent Circles said about the experience:

“I had the opportunity to touch on some topics nobody talks about. Taboo perhaps. Certainly sensitive and painful. Giving name to the things that until now stayed in the dark, just out of reach. Wrestling with them, becoming more of ‘me’.”

“Circles provide a rare opportunity to step away from the noise of everyday life and engage in conversations that are both challenging and uplifting. It’s about building emotional resilience, self-reflection, and brotherhood in a way that feels natural and empowering.

“It is a weekly place of solace where you are able to BE with other men and express your true feelings and vulnerabilities without bias.“

“A space where I was allowed to just be and listen and hear other men and remove myself from any pressures or expectations.”

“Perspective; there are no answers just perspective.”

“If you’re looking for a space to grow, challenge yourself, and connect with like-minded men, Circles is an incredible opportunity. It’s not about having all the answers but about showing up authentically, being heard, and supporting others on their journey. You’ll leave with greater clarity, deeper self-awareness, and a stronger sense of community.”

Interested? Come and join us.

You can find out more and make an enquiry to join here.

Stay well,

Jindy

Join Circles

“When the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at his son and sees himself in the face of the boy. He imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father. Inexplicably, he is moved by this. It is not just the sight of the boy that moves him, nor even the thought of standing inside his father, but what he sees in the boy of his own vanished past.”

— Paul Auster

“All wars are civil wars - men against their brothers.”

— James Hollis

I came to fatherhood later than most men. I was forty-five years old when my son was born, and although I had always wanted to be a father I had just begun to consider that perhaps it wasn’t going to be part of my story. Suffice to say, when my son was born, I experienced the overwhelming joy you’d expect when your deepest longing has manifested.

I have often said to my wife that, although there are huge advantages to being a younger parent, I’m glad that I came to it when I did. My life in my 20s was an amalgam of hedonism, a career I hated (but hadn’t yet admitted), unprocessed trauma and an alcohol dependency that acted as medication for all of this.

I was carrying a sackful of shit that needed to be healed. My 30s were when most of this work happened, at times a gruelling process. My 40s, so far, have been the happiest and most grounded years of my adult life.

Last week, this satisfaction with being an older dad was momentarily turned on its head. I suddenly felt a profound sadness at being an older father, as I envisaged how young my son would be when I die. Assuming I beat my genetics and reach the average life expectancy of 80 years, my son would be only 35 when I die.

It wasn’t so much the time I wouldn’t get to have with him, it was the idea that I wouldn’t be here to support and protect him. I then realised, of course, that I was viewing my son as he is now, a few months shy of his third birthday - innocent, defenceless, small - rather than the older boy, teenager and man that he will become. Over time, he will build the remarkable resilience and endurance that all humans gather as they age.

Some of this was also entangled in my own experience of my dad dying suddenly when I was 13, and he was just 52, a few years older than I am now. I know what it is to grow up without an elder man to guide you.

Yet still a sadness. Underneath this was something else. The desire to protect my son, even as an adult, was a signpost to a deeper realisation: that there is an uncertain world that I need to prepare him for, one that will be far more challenging than the one I came of age in. That was the real sadness. More than sadness, a sense of grief and deep responsibility.

War is no longer something unthinkable in the Western world. It now seems probable: throughout modern human history, when resources become scarce or are perceived to be scarce, there is competition for them. Which is a benign way of saying there is conflict and violence.

War is now being visited on nations all over the world. As I write, seventeen countries are involved in the war in the Middle East. Several of them are European, including my current home, Germany, and the country I originate from, the UK.

The desk I am currently sitting at is a day’s drive to another country at war - less than 900km from Berlin is the border with Ukraine, where the eastern edge of Europe is embroiled in war with Russia. That war has already seen around 1.7 million deaths, the majority of them men.

These conflicts are partly driven by the declining resources needed to support modern human civilisation. A senior executive from the European Central Bank, the last place you’ll find a tree-hugging leftie, recently said this in a speech: “We are running an ecological deficit by using natural resources 1.7 times faster than ecosystems can regenerate them. Put simply: we are in a structural deficit with nature, year after year.”

This takes place amidst the backdrop of a rapidly changing climate and degrading ecosystem that will threaten food and water supplies, and cause unimaginable damage through extreme weather, leading to ever more political and social instability. Last month, the UK government quietly buried their own national security report that outlined these consequences.

Whilst war between countries might not be the outcome for everyone, it is likely that all of us in developed countries, accustomed to our cheap and seemingly endless food and energy, will experience increasing domestic conflict in the form of civil unrest, social division and violence.

The response to all of this has been simple and predictable: big countries are grabbing whatever they can, whilst ignoring the long-term consequences. Smaller, less powerful countries are being left to fend for themselves.

When I left university in 2002, I was guaranteed a well-paid white-collar job. All it required was me spending a little bit of time applying for roles, and eventually, I had a place on a graduate scheme with an American corporation.

We had just come off the back of unprecedented economic growth in the 90s. Housing prices back then were much lower in relation to salaries, which meant, by the skin of my teeth, I was able to buy a flat in London, in late 2007 (just before the financial crash).

Most of us were only vaguely aware of this thing called ‘climate change’, and the US had not yet invaded Iraq.

The world seemed stable, predictable, growing. One could make plans for one’s future based on this sense of certainty and optimism. That world has gone and will not return in my lifetime.

One day, my son will leave home, if not physically then at least psychologically. Whereas previously he would have entered into a stable culture with fairly predictable political and social structures, that is no longer the case. The only thing certain about the future he faces is that it is increasingly uncertain and challenging.

As a father, the awareness of this reality takes on an entirely different resonance. What world do I need to prepare my son for?

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”

— Ernest Hemingway

This morning, he was briefly frustrated, heading towards tears, because he couldn’t get his trainer on his foot. A minute later, he was smiling as we skipped down the stairs.

He held my hand on the way to kindergarten as we listened to the bright morning birdsong. In just 13 years, the blink of an eye to a middle-aged father, he will be old enough to join the army.

What world do I need to prepare my son for? And what does that require of me?

These were the real questions that sat beneath that emotion last week. Yes, there was grief that my son might not experience the things I so took for granted, like security, peace and a full belly. And there was also the realisation that I need to prepare him for life in a way I never imagined I would.

All fathers - all parents - need to come to terms with a loss of innocence in their kids as they grow older. It is a journey for both adult and child.

All children experience some pain as they come into contact with the realities of the world - how it can feel unfair and harsh, seeing their magical fantasies evaporate, and learning the unavoidable certainties that face us all, like sickness and death.

But it is a new thing - or an old thing remembered - for your child will grow up in much more difficult circumstances than you did. For them, it is all they will know, but for us, there is the knowledge, perhaps guilt, that we have had it easier.

Like most parents, I want to preserve in him his tenderness, kindness, sweetness and playful nature so that he might become a kind, joyous and caring adult.

But I also need to teach him things that I’m not even sure I fully embody myself - to have skill with aggression, to be able to defend, to fight, to be spiritually and mentally strong, to be able to build things with his hands, to be able to build community, to be capable in adversity.

Tenderness and aggression are not mutually exclusive, but they can feel that way. And whilst these are age-old ways of raising sons too, they’re not ones we’re accustomed to in Western modernity, without the aid of the village, the tribe, and the initiatory rituals.

It is easy to raise a boy to be too weak to advocate for himself in the world. It is just as easy to raise a boy to be a savage.

I would not be disappointed if my son joined the military. Not because I believe in fighting, but because the military is a place where men can find an uncommon camaraderie, a sense of mission, and a level of discipline and training that are rare in modern life. There is military in his ancestry, too, in both my paternal and maternal lineage.

Yet there are very few fathers who would want their sons to go to war. War, often strangely referred to as theatre, is a place of death and suffering even for those who survive it. It is not to be wished for; it is a last resort. I have known many men who have fought in wars, and not one of them was keen to talk about it.

War will not be my choice or his. War and conflict might arrive whether we like it or not. It is this future which the loving and kind boy I hope to guide to manhood must also be prepared for.

There will be challenging times ahead, there will be a greater need for survival, and more brutality in the world. For boys and men, there will be a much greater expectation, and perhaps the need, to fight and protect.

This is what it means to be a father to a son right now. This bittersweet agony of knowing he must be much more prepared than I was for the stark future ahead, and that he may be called to do things no one should have to do.

I know, of course, that what I am feeling is not even a fraction of the unimaginable pain and grief felt by mothers and fathers in warzones all over the world, often at the hands of my country, and paid for by my taxes.

I did not for a second wish that horror for their children, and I do not wish it for mine. Yet here we are.

And it is only now that I’m beginning to fully understand what some parents mean when they say ‘I would die for my child’.

Our 17th Men’s Circle is starting on Weds 1st April.

We’re beginning our next online men’s Circle in a few weeks: 8 weeks with a group of fellow men having real and meaningful conversations, explorations into yourself and your role in the world.

We still have places available. You can find out more or enquire here.

[email header image: ‘Serpents’ by Gérard DuBois]

[main image: ‘Empire of the Sun’, 1987, IMDB]

“The Epstein class [is a] transnational elite, who basically flew from place to place and thought they were above the law, and they either trafficked in women, either abused underage girls, or still felt comfortable being part of Jeffrey Epstein’s network knowing that he was abusing and raping girls.”

— Congressman Ro Khanna

Epstein requires some explanation. I don’t mean the crimes and the grotesque public cover-up; they, of course, require explanation and justice. What I mean is the phenomenon of Epstein requires explaining, what he represents and what the ‘Epstein class’ represent.

There are two things I’ve found most disturbing about the Epstein files. The first is the grim detail they reveal about the horrific crimes and the global networks of power that this is wrapped up in.

The second is the scale of response to what has been revealed - by which I mean, the relatively muted, at times silent, mainstream media, politicians and institutions, and therefore from society at large. There is not nearly enough anger or outrage as a fuel for the justice needed and the much larger task of building a world beyond this one.

Perhaps this is part of the wider sense of unreality that so many of us are feeling. A couple of years ago, I heard Francis Weller suggest that we may already be in the underworld, we just don’t know it yet. It certainly feels like many things are upside down in our current world.

The original meaning of apocalypse is a time of revelations, a time when the veil is lifted, and we see the truth of things. Well, the portrait from the attic has been brought down and placed in front of us, with all its rottenness and degradation.

Is there any more explicit symbol of moral decay than everything that surrounds the Epstein class?

Silence.

The relative silence is startling. Journalists spend their careers searching for the smoking gun, their equivalent of Watergate, and here, laid out in millions of documents, is an entire arsenal of smoking guns. It should be the central theme of every media outlet’s coverage for weeks on end.

Yet, most of the mainstream journalism I’ve seen so far is obsessing over individuals and reporting with either a level of detachment that induces dissonance or the kind of articles reserved for celebrity gossip. In the UK in particular, the papers are in a frenzy over Peter Mandelson’s resignation and former Prince Andrew’s arrest. I understand it - the threat to these two institutions, government and royalty, is what attracts eyeballs and clicks.

But it misses the point too. The story here is not the scandal involving those two men, it is the scale of the network of rape, abuse and murder amongst the most powerful men (mostly) in the world and the flimsy public cover-up.

I’ve seen many people in the US, perhaps appalled at the intransigence amongst their own politicians, take note that in countries like the UK, the Epstein files are having consequences. This is true, but it’s also true that the consequences are limited. Two individuals named Peter and Andrew are just the thin end of what Epstein tells us.

It has revealed what was previously the domain of conspiracy thought, that the world is not only mostly run by a small set of interconnected patriarchal elites, but also their moral bankruptcy is so complete that something like child abuse and sex trafficking can become known and still be overlooked.

This is the reality we should be paying attention to. And yet, few in the mainstream of media and politics are bringing this into the light. Why? Perhaps because many of the Epstein class either own the mainstream media or are fearful of the power within this elite, which extends to foreign governments.

As I’ve sat with what has emerged from the Epstein case, often stumbling across deeply unpleasant details, what feels most important to me is to place this within the wider systems that we live within. This is not an isolated group of people, far from it. And their actions, whilst extreme and depraved, are also indicative of a deep sickness in our culture, one that touches every single one of us.

Men are at the heart of this horror. But this is about much more than gender.

The psychology of abuse, exploitation and capitalism.

It is not a new thought to suggest that the individual psyche required to inflict immense suffering on one group of people is unlikely to be limited to just that one group. In extremis, individuals behaving this way would like score highly on sociopathy or psychopathy, but in all cases, there is a marked absence of empathy and even a delight in the suffering of others.

Put another way, people with these traits see the world and the beings within it merely as objects for one’s own pleasure, gain and power. The psychology that believes women are chattel and children are sex toys is the same psychology that views 99% of humans as assets to be exploited, the natural world as potential profit to be extracted, democracy as an outdated inconvenience and technology as our new god.

We don’t need to look very far to see how these intersect: Elon Musk, revealed in the files as desperate to visit Epstein’s island, recently released Grok AI, a hugely energy intensive technology tool, that enabled users to ‘nudify’ women and girls; in other words, a piece of tech that enables the illegal sexualisation of real people, a perfect tool for paedophiles.

This is the same man who believes humanity’s future lies on another planet rather than the rare and precious one we currently have, is funding far-right movements across the world, promotes white supremacist content on his platforms and performed a Nazi-salute at a Trump rally. And the same man who said “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy”. It is no surprise then that Musk donated $288 million to Donald Trump’s re-election campaign.

Peter Thiel, also named extensively in the Epstein files, has - amongst many things - openly questioned democracy, founded Palantir, an organisation that views humans as mere data for war profits, and suggested that Greta Thunberg or the Pope may be the anti-Christ.

Like Musk, he believes Western civilisation is under threat from multiculturalism (code for people of colour), and he is also the mentor and key funder of JD Vance, the vice-president who many believe is Thiel’s puppet.

Musk, Thiel and their oligarch peers believe that rules and laws don’t apply to them. They bend or break them with impunity. Worse still, they don’t believe in any morality that you or I would understand or consider humane.

I find it profoundly disturbing that so many people, especially men in tech and entrepreneurial circles, will not only turn a blind eye to the character of people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel but also actively celebrate them as geniuses whose immorality and fundamental lack of humanity are mere flaws and errors that must be tolerated as part of a greater arc of progress.

What progress are we making exactly if it is built on rape, child abuse, exploitation, murder and genocide? What great future civilisation are we building if it is not one that has centred morality, compassion and basic human dignity?

Are these the people you want to entrust not just your personal data and your society to, but also your very mind and innermost thoughts as part of their transhumanist vision?

Maya Angelou’s words bear repeating: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

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The myth of the ‘good’ billionaire.

But it is not just the rich and powerful like Musk and Thiel, it is also billionaires considered more ‘benevolent’ and ‘nice’, as if such a thing were possible. Bill Gates, a self-appointed humanitarian leader, appears prominently in the files and accounts from his ex-wife, suggesting his association with Epstein was central to their divorce. The details in the files are grim reading.

Richard Branson, often portrayed as the UK’s plucky good billionaire, appears in the files too. Howard Lutnick, a billionaire and currently the US Secretary for Commerce, is shown to have had a long association with Epstein and visits to his island.

Ehud Barak, not a billionaire but the former Israeli Prime Minister, visited Epstein’s residence multiple times. Larry Summers, a former US Secretary of the Treasury and once president of Harvard University too. And of course, there’s Donald Trump, the current President of the United States.

This is just a small selection of the Epstein class, and the wealth and power they hold is extraordinary. All of these men associated with Epstein, whilst knowing something of who he was and what he was up to, many did so after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting from a minor, which is legal speak for paying a child for sex.

What is important is the distinctly male support that hovers around these billionaire figures. They are symbols of success, wrapped up in notions of wealth, power, entrepreneurship and innovation that appeal to many men - and not just young ones. Once again this is reflective of our culture and the way we condition men, namely that progress is power and accumulation, rather than moral maturity and compassion.

Power, Politics & Kyriarchy

“[Epstein] had three circles: a money circle, a power circle, and a sex circle.”

— UK government source

Patriarchy is an elite structure. I’ll say that again, patriarchy is an elite structure. Without an understanding of this, I’ve found it’s become almost impossible to have conversations about things like Epstein which quickly descend into ‘all men’ vs ‘not all men’, the latter now a trope despite being true.

Men from across the political and cultural spectrum were associated with Epstein - Donald Trump at one end and Noam Chomsky at the other, two men with fundamentally opposing views about the world. Meanwhile, you also have supposed spiritual gurus like Deepak Chopra, whose fakery has now been utterly exposed, alongside people like Jes Staley, the former CEO of Barclays Bank.

What might have drawn this seemingly diverse group of men into Epstein’s orbit? For some of them, the answer is obvious: an explicit desire to use and abuse women and children.

For others like Chomsky who are not directly implicated in sex crimes, what might have led them to associate with Epstein? And what do they share with the abusers?

The allure and influence of power.

In writing this essay, it occurred to me that my understanding of power is quite shallow. Not power in external, visible and mechanistic terms, but power as an immanent force in human culture, akin to love in its fundamental role. Foucault has been my starting point, and already there is something important in his work: his theory of force relations.

In this, he proposes that power is not a hierarchical structure, but instead it flows constantly in and amongst relationships in society, in institutions and political systems and, crucially, also in every social interaction. In this way, these numerous forces act against and upon each other, as well as sometimes combining to multiply the effect of power.

For example, a person like Donald Trump is undoubtedly a product of the forces of capitalism, and he is also a product of his own family and the American culture which contributed to his psychological conditioning - inadequacy, greed, narcissism and so on.

According to Foucault, resistance to power is also part of power. What is resisted or denied adds power to that very thing; one needs the other, in a symbiotic way. So multiple forces of power are always acting at once, in different ways.

Perhaps this offers some explanation as to why someone like Chomsky, a lifelong peace activist and critic of capitalism, can still be drawn to association with someone like Epstein, an explicit capitalist.

Perhaps it was Epstein’s apparent desire to surround himself with intellectuals that appealed to Chomsky’s vanity. Perhaps it was Epstein’s ability to manage money that appealed to a very common desire in Chomsky to protect his assets and grow his wealth.

Understanding the role of power provides an explanation for the women involved in enabling and protecting these crimes. I’ve seen patriarchy invoked as an explanation for the Epstein class and I understand why. But if anything, I think it offers too easy and thin an explanation.

If patriarchy, ‘the rule of the father’, is about systems of male dominance, that of course feels relevant. But just as relevant are the raw forces like power, status, wealth, class and race. Patriarchy is only one strand of the Epstein class.

If we are to reach for a framework to understand the Epstein class, kyriarchy feels more useful. Kyriarchy, ‘the master’s rule’, requires us to consider the multiple forces of domination and oppression acting at once.

Once we understand the intersectional nature of this power, we can appreciate, for example, that a middle-class white woman generally has far more power and privilege than a working-class black man.

It is also how we understand the number of women who were actively involved in supporting Epstein and, right now, blocking justice for the victims - the US Attorney General, Pam Bondi, being the most prominent.

As the head of the Department of Justice, Bondi is not just one of the most powerful people in the US, but one of the most powerful in the world. Notice, for example, that the kidnapping of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro was executed under her remit of domestic law enforcement, and immediately, we begin to see how these intersecting forces of power are acting upon individuals, influencing their ideology and actions.

Bondi will have seen much of the content of the files, but is not someone who gives the appearance of reluctantly obstructing justice against her conscience; she is doing it with a lack of empathy, a vigour and zeal that is truly disturbing - unless understood through the lens of power.

This is about men, undoubtedly. But it is about much more than just gender. To view it only as the evils of all men obscures a deeper understanding of how power flows through our society, how it is gained, rewarded and preserved, and how it is concentrated in the hands of a terrifyingly tiny few.

Cultures of abuse.

“We live in a paedophilic culture.”

— Carole Cadwalladr

Neither patriarchy nor kyriarchy explains the extreme levels of sexual deviancy and inhumanity that the Epstein files reveal. Epstein was a man who, according to journalist Michael Wolf, self-described himself as a “pervert but not crazy”. Amongst many dark acts, he commissioned a gruesome painting of a Biblical scene depicting child murder.

There are too many ugly and disturbing exchanges between him and the people in his orbit to share, but what they reveal is a culture at the extremities of what we understand to be our day-to-day reality.

Epstein extends far beyond individual men. When we look at Epstein and the men known to have associated with him, we see some common patterns in what these men believe and what they are manifesting at scale in the world.

The same psychology they possess that abused and exploited women and children, is the very same psychology that has enacted genocide, war for profit, exploitation of the natural world, colonialism and the corruption of democracy.

It is a psychology that believes in the primacy of the individual and personal gain, reducing everything and everyone else in the world to the role of resources to be exploited.

As Carole Cadwalladr puts it, “we live in a paedophilic culture”, an uncomfortable notion but one that rings true if we observe how exploitation is woven into the very fabric of our society.

Cadwalladr is one of the few journalists really piecing together the bigger picture over the last decade or so. I find her work extraordinarily insightful and brave. It is, for me, what real journalism looks like: a relentless pursuit of truth.

It was Cadwalladr who broke the Cambridge Analytica story back in 2017, which joined the dots between Brexit, Facebook, illegal data harvesting, American billionaires, Nigel Farage & UKIP, and Russian influence - global networks of power and wealth, exerting illegal and hidden control.

For this, she was nominated for the Pulitzer, and later hounded through the courts for years by Aron Banks, one of the key backers of Brexit (she eventually won her case, but not without it taking a toll on her).

Her recent work has been exposing the deep links between US tech oligarchs, the rise of fascism, and the undermining of democracy. As she put it in a recent piece on Epstein, “we can’t understand any of this until we realise that Epstein isn’t just a doorway, he’s also a mirror. His culture is our culture.”

His culture is our culture. This is the brutal truth we need to acknowledge: men like Epstein, Trump and Musk are ultimately the most visible manifestations of a culture we all participate in.

It is a culture in which we have a hierarchy that separates not only humans from animals the natural world, but flattens humans themselves into categories of inferiority: women, people of colour, gay people, trans people, poor people, working-class people, Palestinians, Jews, Muslims, even children; all are considered inferior and disposable to the culture that Epstein represents.

You may be reading this, thinking that this is not you. And yet it is. Your political choices, your consumer choices, your willingness to turn a blind eye to oppression in all its forms, your shallow conversations - all of them contribute to this culture.

Every time you click or buy from the Big Tech companies, you are contributing to this ecosystem. It is no longer morally deniable or too tenuous to say that your individual choices are somehow separate from this system.

Amazon, Google, Meta, X, OpenAI, Spotify and others like them are all at the centre of this ecosystem. The Big Tech leaders have openly expressed their fealty to Trump, demonstrating their willingness to burn down democracy and ramp up exploitation in pursuit of more profit and more power.

Most men know how this ecosystem of capitalist exploitation works. And yet most also remain passive and hypocritical, happy to portray themselves as allies and supporters on International Women’s Day or posting niceties on social media, but unwilling to stop using Instagram or buying products from Amazon. I suspect, if we one day make it through this dark era, there will be many men claiming they were always part of the resistance.

We participate in a culture that venerates greed and accumulation, and denigrates empathy and service. We repress genuine sexuality and intimacy in favour of porn and hyper-sexualised media content. We spend our days gazing at content on screens rather than viewing the world without mediation by an algorithm.

The hard truth is this: anywhere in our lives that we are not making moral choices or struggling with them, is likely to be a place where we are contributing to a world of exploitation.

I get it. It’s hard work trying to be moral in an increasingly immoral culture, but when did doing hard things become antithetical to being a human? Or being a man?

If we want our culture to change, to stop placing people like Epstein and Trump at the apex of our society, then we have to begin with ourselves and own choices.

The role of men & the conversations we all need to have.

“I am no longer certain that it is honorable to stand by as the helpless witness of a cataclysm, with no other hope than to die innocently and by accident, as a non-participant. But who are “we”? We are the intellectuals who have taken for granted that we could be “bystanders” and that our quality as detached observers could preserve our innocence and relieve us of responsibility.”

— Thomas Merton

If you’re reading this and you’re not a woman, it is worth considering for a moment what it might feel like to be one right now. Imagine seeing so many powerful men being exposed as abusers and worse, and yet so little is being done about it, especially in the US.

Imagine feeling that the world is run by men who are sexual predators, men who feel they can treat women and children as inferior and disposable, as simply objects for their pleasure, and brazenly getting away with it. There is understandable fury, fear and disillusionment amongst women.

I understand, at least in part, why it might seem men aren’t talking about it. My own experience is that they are talking about it. And also that they are not necessarily better equipped to talk about it than anyone else.

Most men have no reference point or experience into which we can place the depths of this depravity. Being a man does not automatically give one any deeper understanding of the desire to rape, abuse and murder. And amidst ongoing genocide, war, social collapse and the relentless bombardment of technological warfare, this is yet another horror that our minds are not prepared for.

Many years ago, I did a piece of work with a national policing agency in the UK. As part of the project, we visited police forces around the country, and members of our team met with the specialist units involved in child exploitation. What struck me then and stayed with me is the level of training and support these officers required, given that their roles routinely exposed them to graphic details of sex crimes.

What we are being exposed to en masse with the Epstein files is the kind of evidence and material that those specialist police officers are trained to review - officers who have ongoing access to expert psychological support. We, men and women, are not prepared for this, and I wonder if that is partly the intention of releasing some but not all of the files: to frighten and paralyse us.

This does not let men off the hook, though. If we are, understandably, not inclined to immersing ourselves in the darkness that has been put in front of us, we can at least be vocal about what this reveals about our society because this ultimately impacts everyone - us, our partners, our kids, our friends, our communities and the planet.

The Epstein class will not limit their sociopathic exploitation to women and children; they are coming for all of us one way or another.

Perhaps the simplest and most important thing we can do is to keep this conversation alive and to be alert to those who might feel fearful or angry right now. Initiate the conversation, however uncomfortable that might be. Listen first - deeply. No need to fix or act, just open your heart and listen. If there is action to be taken, it will emerge from that listening.

These conversations may not be comfortable and may take us to places we don’t want to go. It is not a new thought to suggest that some of the perpetrators of these crimes are themselves acting from their own trauma, their own abuse, neglect and self-hatred. If we seek to understand and prevent these horrors, we should also seek to understand how trauma and abuse are usually cyclical.

The perpetrators and supporters must be punished. At the same time, if we wish for a better future free from oppression and exploitation, we need to break the cycles of abuse and suffering. As we voice our anger and seek justice, we must also retain our own humanity and empathy.

In the end, all of the conjecture and discussion, including what I’ve written above, should not distract from the most important thing right now - justice for the victims and survivors. But it can take place alongside that process.

We must attempt to make sense of what this tells us about the world we live in, without flinching from the need for real justice and the long process of reckoning and rehabilitating our culture, work that will likely exceed our lifetimes.

If manhood is anything, it is surely the willingness to take a stand, to speak up against injustice, to protect those who need protecting, to do what is right rather than go along with what everyone else is doing, and to make difficult choices and do hard things.

Our 17th Men’s Circle is starting on Weds 1st April.

We’re beginning our next online men’s Circle in a few weeks: 8 weeks with a group of fellow men having real and meaningful conversations, explorations into yourself and your role in the world.

We still have places available. You can find out more or enquire here.

But I know I live half alive in the world,

I know half my life belongs to the wild darkness.

— Galway Kinnell

Son, I’m thirty.

I only went with your mother ‘cause she’s dirty

And I don’t have a decent bone in me.

What you get is just what you see, yeah.

— Happy Mondays

There’s this other man that lives inside me. His hair is matted and sticks out in frenzied curls. His beard is thick and tangled, covering half of his leathery-skinned face. You can almost glimpse his loincloth beneath his grubby, tattered cloak.

He walks with a staff, barefoot and nimble. In the cities, he crouches and mutters, but in the mountains and forests, he comes alive, howling and whooping. For if you look closely, if you can see past the crinkled cheeks and grubby hair, you’ll see that his eyes are alive with fire. WHOOOAAAAH yeah, FIRE!

Where’s the Wild Man? Where’s your Wild Man?

Where is he? The caves are empty, the forests are silent, even the sea is calm. Where’s the Wild Man?

He’s buried, deep inside each of us.

On International Men’s Day three weeks ago, we (Wild Twin) hosted a webinar exploring the archetype of the Wild Man. Riffing off the IMD theme for this year, ‘Celebrating Men and Boys’, we found ourselves drawn to what’s missing in modern masculinity - a sense of wildness.

Before your hackles rise or you feel yourself recoiling from the idea of men being wild, let me begin where we began in the webinar: we’re talking about wild rather than savage. This is something Robert Bly expressed many years ago.

What he was describing was the need for men to have some zaniness, some untamed, expressive energy about the way that they live. And - this is the important bit - if boys and men weren’t allowed or didn’t allow themselves to be wild, then the wildness can instead come out as savage, rough and uncontrolled, inflicting hurt on others and on oneself.

“Boys feel wild; they love their tree houses, their wild spots in the woods, they all want to go down to the river, with Huck, away from domesticating aunts. Boys love to see some wildness in their fathers, to see their fathers dancing or carrying on. Some boys are so afraid that they will become domestic that they become savage, not wild.”

— Robert Bly

Wildness, then, is good. More than good, it is essential and bountiful. We want men to be wild, wildly alive.

And yet they are not. Like Sisyphus, many men live dry, monotonous existences that, when it really comes to it, serve no one, least of all themselves.

Perhaps this has something to do with a lack of freedom and the crushing weight of the neoliberal nightmare we’re all trapped in, a society that centres soul-destroying work and the pursuit of material gain.

That’s another story for another time, but this much is true: too many modern men are not living at their edge, not living in full expression, and are confining themselves to safe, bland maps of life that is nothing more than a slow death.

‘Safe!’ you might cry. ‘Hooray! We want safety from men!’ This is not that safety, the one that means no harm is done to others and oneself. Quite the opposite. This is the safety that means stuff comes out sideways because it has nowhere else to go: anger, infidelity, violence, depression, addiction, cheap hedonism.

Where is the aliveness?

Where are the Wild Men? Well, let me give you a whistlestop tour (of the whistlestop tour we gave on November 19th).

We begin with something about the importance of wildness. Here we bring in the work of Prof. Niobe Way, who has spent almost 40 years as a researcher, speaking to teenage and adolescent boys to understand the world through their eyes. She’s written extensively about her findings (one of her books was made into the 2022 film ‘Close’).

Prof. Way talks about ‘thin stories’ and ‘thick stories’. Thin stories are the ones that dominate our mainstream conversation about boys and men: toxic masculinity, Andrew Tate, the manosphere, positive masculinity. These are narratives that flatten boys and men into simple villains or heroes.

Thick stories, meanwhile, are the richer, more nuanced and complex stories of how boys and men actually experience the world. You know, the idea that a boy can tell his mum he loves her, be moved by a piece of poetry and have a fight during a football match, all in the same day.

Wildness is a thick story. It is something not easily described by language, but you know when you see it and feel it.

At this point, it is worth saying that wildness is not limited to men and boys. Far from it. Women have just as much wildness and have also experienced the deep social conditioning that requires them to suppress it.

Yet it does feel like wildness in women has some more powerful modern works of exploration - the work of people like Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes (‘Women Who Run With The Wolves’), Glenn Doyle (‘Untamed’), Cheryl Strayed (‘Wild’) or perhaps the most well-known in this milieu, Elizabeth Gilbert.

Their work evokes the wildness that is carried but lying dormant in women. It lies dormant in men, too.

What does it mean for a man to be wild? We had a little think about this, without getting too caught up in our heads and came up with these words and phrases:

free-spirited

authentic

unashamedly real

undomesticated / untamed

aliveness

soulful

bold

intuitive

heart-centred

attuned to the world

My favourite of these is ‘unashamedly real’ which can be more easily thought of as ‘not giving a fuck what other people think’.

Ancient mythology

So, as we take a journey through history, where do we begin with the Wild Man? Well, almost at the beginning. Ancient myth (Greek, Roman, Norse) is full of the wild man archetype.

We see, for instance, Pan, the Greek god who lives in nature with his goats feet and horns on his head, playing his pipe in the wilderness (and always naked). He is hedonistic and lustful, also inducing fear in humans (his name is the origin of the modern ‘panic’).

We have Dionysus (aka Bacchus), the original party boy, Greek god of wine, pleasure, vegetation and wild frenzy. God of wild frenzy, what a claim! His party vibe was said to induce a state of wild ecstasy (baccheia, the stem of bacchanalia).

Last (in our very limited selection), we introduce Prometheus, perhaps the OG Wild Man. Who else has the chutzpah to steal fire from the gods and give it to humans, in open defiance of Zeus and his buddies? Alas, it didn’t end too well for him.

Because these are ancient myths, which always give us the salt with the sugar, we can see the shadow of the wildness, how the wild can teeter on the edge of the savage - sometimes falling fully into it.

These early myths give us a flavour of the wild man archetype, one we see represented in cultures all over the world: the yeti of the Himalayas, the sasquatch of North America, the yowie of Australia, the ngoloko of Kenya, and many more.

These mysterious wild men, real or mythical, share common features: hairy, tall, animalistic, mute, reclusive. It is notable that cultures all over the world have some version of this, a nod towards the archetypal nature of the Wild Man.

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The Middle Ages

In Europe in the Middle Ages, one of these figures was the Wude Wasa, literally translated as the ‘forest outcast’. This ‘Wood Wose’ was half man, half creature, his head and body hairy yet with bald patches on his knees and elbows, said to be because he crawled on all fours. It is unclear, though, why he was depicted as having bald patches on his nipples.

The Wood Wose was cast as a mentally ill figure: irrational, illogical, mute, and not in control of his impulses. The forest, another archetype, was an apt home, a place where the unwanted and repressed are placed or imagined to live.

The medieval Church (of course), demonised the Wood Wose. He was chronicled as a lustful, sinful figure who could entice the impious into sexual deviancy. There are parallels with witches (as many as a quarter of witches burned in Europe were in fact men), and the Wood Wose is often depicted being thrown into open flames.

But something happened after those brutal medieval years. The Wood Wose went from being a dangerous outcast to an escapist fantasy. His wildness became an antidote to the pressures of civilised society and increasing urbanisation, “a symbol of freedom from conformity or social order, and an icon of a vanishing world.”

The Industrialised Era

As we move into the era of the Industrial Revolution and what followed, we see an intensification of the man vs. wildness or man vs. nature conflict. Take Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. The book, written in 1881, was originally subtitled ‘or The Modern Prometheus’, a nod to the notion that the rogue scientist was stealing from the gods, this time life itself.

What’s notable is that both Dr Frankenstein and his ‘monster’ represent different sides of the Wild Man. Frankenstein is a renegade scientist, rejecting the orthodoxy of the establishment, going his own way despite the smears, ridicule and accusations of the mainstream scientific community. He is depicted as increasingly crazed in pursuit of his godly powers, a dramatic moral decline.

For his creation, the monster, this arc is almost in reverse. He is born innocent and childlike, keen to give and receive love, enchanted by the world and highly attuned to nature. But he’s rejected by society and his father-creator, who fear his power and non-conformity, and subject him to immense cruelty. Love is fleeting for the monster and ultimately denied to him, and without nurturance, he becomes savage rather than wild.

Fifty years later, we saw King Kong, the raging destructive beast. It is no coincidence that Kong is an ape, our wild ancestor, man before he became ‘civilised’. This huge ape lives on a mysterious tropical land called Skull Island, from where he is captured - knocked out by men with gas bombs and taken to New York City to display as ‘The Eighth Wonder of the World’.

Skull Island represents raw, untamed nature, while New York symbolises modern human civilization. And of course, it all ends badly, as it always does when man tries to control and repress wildness. Kong’s capture and exploitation show humanity’s attempt to dominate nature — and the disastrous results of that arrogance.

Modernity and Consumerism

As we move forwards a couple of decades, things get interesting. This is the Golden Age of advertising and growing consumerism and now we see the Wild Man portrayed as nod to what is increasingly rare yet longed for. In the 1950s, we see the Marlboro Man, the horse riding, taciturn, loner in the American outback

Marlboro Man was a non-domestic masculine fantasy, a man needing little other than himself and the wilderness, a picture of self-reliance; a man who could watch the sun set every night and sleep under the stars. The character embodied what men were craving - open space, nature, solitude, freedom from corporate life and family responsibilities, maybe freedom from the rational and materialistic pressures of modern life.

Over the years, the campaigns depicting Marlboro Man included construction workers, mechanics, Navy officers, and weightlifters. He lasted an astonishing 45 years from 1954 to 1999.

When the real-life cowboy, Darrell Winfield, who inspired the character died, The Economist (I kid you not) wrote an obituary: “No family tied the Marlboro Man down. He had no home, though he was once in a ramshackle shed, holding his tin cup out roughly for coffee… He epitomised resilience, self-sufficiency, independence and free enterprise.”

Wild Leading Men

The 1950s onwards was also the age of mass culture. First cinema and then radio and television became increasingly available to the masses, reflecting and spreading powerful characters and ideas back into the mainstream.

Here we see the Wild Leading Man, male actors not just depicting but living with abandon, danger and allure. Some of them were collectively known as The Hellraisers, famous for their wild partying, escapades and sexuality: Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris, Oliver Reed, and Marlon Brando (Brando even appeared in a film called ‘The Wild One’).

By modern standards, we may frown on some of their behaviour but it is worth considering what Harris once said in an interview when asked to reflect on his younger wild years: “We were children of the war, we came from the war. We wanted to grab life like that while it was there because we saw too much death, we read about too much death. Let’s drink as much as we can, let’s have as much sex as we can, let’s have as much relationships with women as we can and whatever other enjoyment is out there. Let’s grab it let’s make life a festival of total abandonment and do what we like because it could end tomorrow. That was our psyche, that was my generation.”

For Harris and his peers, this was life before mass media and social media. Over time, the wild leading man became less common and more hidden for fear of being demonised in the press. Some, like Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, bridged the gap.

Now, though, the Wild Man actor is a different beast. Outside the acceptable and safe wildness of actors like Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, there are men like Colin Farrell, perhaps, who are mostly castigated and shamed for wild behaviour.

Wild Rockstars

The music scene follows a similar arc to the film industry. From the 1950s onwards, we see an explosion of wild men musicians: all of the Rolling Stones, The Who, Ozzy Osbourne, Chuck Berry, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Jim Morrison, and even men like John Lennon breaking the norms - including the ones they might have established.

Their exploits fill books: TVs thrown out of hotel rooms, experiments with drugs, surreal and crazed performances, addictions, sex, but at the centre of it all, some of the greatest artistry we’ve ever known. It is interesting again to notice how the word ‘wild’ itself appears: Jim Morrison was known as the Wild Child, Miles Davis opens one of his albums with ‘Wild Man Blues’.

It was rebellion, explicitly acted out and sometimes performed. Once again, in modern music in a mass media age, this is increasingly rare. Perhaps the indie bands, perhaps the Gallaghers, perhaps parts of the hip-hop scene, perhaps bands like The Streets and Sleaford Mods? But mostly it’s banished, driven underground or shamed in public.

Wild Poets & Intellectuals

Wildness is not just extroverted partying, though, and is not just limited to artistic performers. Throughout literature, science and the ‘knowledge professions’, we see the Wild Man appearing.

Take the Beat poets, men like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who tore up the rules of poetry and prose, creating something new and rebellious, sometimes considered obscene and heretical. Kerouac’s style of writing was even known as ‘the wild form’.

There are figures like Charles Bukowski. Like much of his work, his poem ‘Go All The Way’, evokes the wildness that dances with madness to create something truly alive.

There’s Gil Scott Heron, perhaps most well known for ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’, a rallying cry that liberation in the modern age begins internally when we wean ourselves off mass media and mainstream culture.

Intellectuals like Christopher Hitchens constantly challenge orthodoxy. Hitchens is a brilliant example of a man being unapologetically himself with bold and provocative intellectual ideas.

The history of modern physics is full of the wild men, figures bordering on madness and heresy as they establish new frontiers of discovery and tear down outdated ideas: Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, David Bohm, Richard Feynman.

In psychology, figures like Freud and Jung were almost literal heretics, proposing radical new ideas about the human psyche that still form the basis of modern psychology, over a hundred years later.

Their ideas themselves have been furthered and challenged by men like James Hillman, the famous Jungian psychoanalyst & author, often described as a ‘renegade psychologist’ for challenging the orthodoxy of modern psychology.

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The Post-Modern Wild Man

This is where it gets really interesting. Now we start to see the Wild Man becoming both a deeply subversive and counter-cultural figure, whilst also becoming a performative and cultivated stereotype.

In 1996, the film ‘Fight Club’ was released, introducing the world to Tyler Durden, played by a young Brad Pitt. Durden, more than anything, represents the shadow of the modern man who is depressed, unfulfilled and living by someone else’s rules.

He rails against this dull, monotonous existence that many men were living and is rallying call for men to wake up, to take risks, to break the rules, to remember they are more than mere workers and consumers.

Many critics miss the point of the story, believing it to be a cartoonish call for men to become aggressive and violent, rather than seeing the extreme physicality portrayed as a symbolic means of liberation and self-empowerment. As Durden narrates, it’s not about getting muscular and ripped merely for aesthetics; it’s about getting strong to feel alive and capable again.

In 2016, we saw a more wholesome version of Tyler Durden, in the film ‘Captain Fantastic’. Played by the rugged Viggo Mortensen, we see a family man, living off-grid in Oregon, rejecting modern consumerism and his struggle to stay true to his principles after the death of his wife.

Their existence is rugged yet immersed in the beauty of the natural world: the kids all wear what they like, learn outdoor skills, know how to hunt and cook, and are highly educated through homeschooling. He is a demanding father, yet deeply tender and fiercely loving, never shying away from any question, however awkward it might be.

Wild men like Durden and Captain Fantastic continue the same tradition of the Wild Man throughout the ages, but perhaps even more acutely: challenging what does not feel true or right, living in accordance with a more natural and intuitive sense of the world rather than the order prescribed by the mainstream, and being unafraid to be different, cast as oddballs and outcasts.

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The Phoney Wild Man

All of this brings us to the most post-modern of wild men: the Phoney Wild Man.

The Phoney Wild Man is the real or depicted behaviour of men being wild, that is anything but wild. It is a flattened, curated, safely supervised and palatable idea of wildness.

In the Phoney, there is little or no real wildness, just an appropriation of the symbols and icons of the real Wild Man. It is like lacy underwear purchased from a high street department store, pretending to be an outrageously deviant kink costume, by adding a tassel or a silk eye mask.

We begin with James Bond. He appears in much of my writing and talking about masculinity because, as a character, he is so rich in archetypal symbolism. There’s much I enjoy about James Bond, but truly wild he is not. This is perhaps at the heart of some of his dissatisfaction.

Bond has the appearance of wildness: he travels the world, has lots of sex, drinks a lot, drives fast cars - but is he really doing what he wants? There’s a sense of constraint about him and definitely unfulfilment - how wild can you truly be if you can’t fully express yourself?

Although he occasionally breaks the rules, as an instrument of the establishment he still mostly follows them, a source perhaps of his mild self-loathing.

Then there’s superheroes, specifically the superheroes that dominate modern cinema: Spiderman, Captain America, Batman, Thor, Wolverine. Comic book superheroes are modern day versions of the ancient myths but stripped of real wildness, danger or darkness.

Although we see lots that seems wild - fighting evil, ludicrous amounts of aggression and violence, endless adventure - these superhero wild men are two-dimensional caricatures, living in a world that is almost entirely sexless and friendless. Their lives seem to have very little that looks interesting outside their mission, and it would be easy to imagine them as quite boring people when not ‘saving the world’.

The closest we get to wildness is Iron Man/Tony Stark, ironically portrayed by a real-life former wild man, Robert Downey Jr. The Hulk too offers some nod towards wildness, a kind of modern-day King Kong, but largely tamed and flattened into a ‘good guy’.

Perhaps the most well-known example of the Phoney Wild Man is one David Beckham. Good lord. Is there anyone quite as famous yet as vacuous as this man? Has he ever had an opinion that wasn’t scripted and polished up by someone else?

Sure, he has many of the visual markers of the Wild Man: bearded, rugged, tattooed, sexualised. But these feel more like the gap year students who go to India and get random Sanskrit words etched into their skin, or load up on ‘authentic’ Buddhist beads and bracelets on their Thai beach holiday.

Where’s the real wildness in Beckham, the boldness, self-expression, authenticity, creativity, daring, an interesting point of view on something or, for fuck’s sake, signs of an actual personality?

Beckham’s wildness is entirely fake. It is constructed, managed, regulated. And of course it is. He is a brand (worth $500 million) disguised as a man. He wants to be liked by everyone, everywhere, in order to maximise his value.

He is a man who has had every last trace of wildness sanitised out of him, in order to minimise the possibility of being disliked and to extract the maximum amount of profit.

Which is how this famous supporter of Pride and the LGBTQ community, was also a highly paid sports ambassador for Qatar where gay relationships are illegal and people have been flogged for their sexuality.

It is also how he was a partner in a whisky brand, featured in its adverts for years but was never shown drinking a drop of the actual product. Is there anything less wild than that?

When Wild Becomes Savage

Beyond the phoney wildness, there is something much darker. Remember that Bly quote from the beginning of this piece? What happens when wildness is not cultivated, not tempered with love, authenticity and connection?

What happens when wildness is consumed by power?

What happens when men become savage rather than wild?

Well, look around you. Most of the people running the world fit this bill. Welcome to Neoliberal Wild Man.

From Donald Trump, to Andrew Tate, to Elon Musk, to Mark Zuckerberg, their supposed strongman wildness has the same markers: domination, aggression, cruelty, violence, anger. Sure, there is plenty of boldness and risk taking in there too but these are not men enjoying wildness, they have been consumed by it.

Whereas the medieval Wood Wose’s sexually predatory nature was condemned, now it appears to be celebrated. They appeal to many because they ‘speak their mind’, or at least say the things that others wouldn’t dare to, with disregard for the impact this has on others.

Perhaps most importantly, they give the impression of not caring what others think, or whether they are liked or not - but in fact are desperate to be liked. This is the gaping hole at the centre of their souls. These Savage men have an insatiable need to be liked, praised, validated. They want only to take rather than give.

What looks like wildness in them is often not coming from a place of authenticity or true self-expression, but from a need to perform and accumulate power, especially power over others, in order to feel good.

They are more like tricksters, using their wildness to stir up discontent, greedy, self-serving, boring. Estranged from nature, from real connection with other humans, from even their own selves, their notions of wildness are bitter, vindictive and shallow imitations of it, a savagery that is somehow shocking yet boring at the same time.

The Most Famous Wild Man of All Time?

After that gruelling tour of savagery, you may need a palate cleanser. And here it is. Who might the be the most famous Wild Man of all time? And perhaps the most misrepresented too?

You guessed it. The son of a carpenter, born of a Jewish mother in the Middle East, and it’s his birthday next week: Jesus of Nazareth.

Yes, yes, the crucifixion was pretty wild and the water into wine, and so on. But most of what we think we know about Jesus Christ is a sanitised, Western fairytale. We usually see him presented as pure, dressed in white, carrying lambs, or with doves fluttering around his head.

Often there’s a halo, glowing white light, curiously milky white skin for a guy born in modern-day Palestine. This is Jesus, the good guy, the healer, the light. But what about the other sides of Jesus?

This is a man who marched into the Second Temple of Jerusalem, drove out the money lenders and overturned their tables over, as he spoke out against their practices: “Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house a house of merchandise”, he said.

He spoke out openly against religious institutes, religious leaders and their hypocrisy, against religion itself! Speaking of the priests of the time, he said, “They crush people with unbearable religious demands and never lift a finger to ease the burden. Everything they do is for show… What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you shut the door of the Kingdom of Heaven in people’s faces. You won’t go in yourselves, and you don’t let others enter either.”

It goes on like this. This was no softly-spoken hermit; this was a man raging against the orthodoxy of the day, speaking out against injustice. He was straight talking with his disciples too, rebuking them for following him rather than practicing what he was teaching them. In the Bible, there are at least five mentions of Jesus getting seriously angry at injustice, unkindness and low morals.

And then off he went into the desert to fast for 40 days, to face the Devil, and to reject his temptation. When he realised he was going to be crucified, there was no retreating to a luxury bunker or doing a runner, he faced his fate. Finally, after resurrection and being lifted into heaven… he came back!

Martin Shaw encapsulates Jesus perfectly: “We are dealing with someone that was born a fugitive, dies an outlaw, confuses, confounds, and often hurts in some deep spiritual awakening form of way. Almost everybody that he met, he affected, and then he has the audacity of coming back. What kind of devilment got into the petri dish of Western consciousness that we managed to domesticate someone like that? How did we pull the stinger out of someone like that? A wild Christ indeed.”

Yes, even with Jesus, we have managed to clean up and obscure the wildness, as if we’re whitewashing a Banksy mural or a William Blake painting. As the great John O’Donohue once said, “One of the tasks of our time... is to make God dangerous again”.

Reviving the Wild Man

So, we are almost at the end of this journey alongside the Wild Man. What might we have learned?

Let us remember this. We’re talking about wild, not savage or feral. The role of the wild man is to inspire boldness, authentic living, full expression, a sense of real, unshackled aliveness in men.

And yet much of this wildness has been domesticated, packaged and sold back to us, sanitised. We can see the impacts of this all around us - the isolation, the ecological destruction, the psychological suffering and the savagery.

What is wildness now? Perhaps it as simple as digital detox, time away from modern technology. Perhaps it is something more rogue, something that awaits us in the woods, amongst the valleys, far out at sea and high in the mountains.

If you’re still unconvinced, perhaps I can leave you with this:

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” (Howard Thurman).

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Who are we?

Wild Twin are Jindy Mann and Lucy Dale.

We’re a creative collective drawing on both old and new wisdom to shape new stories about men & masculinity. We are guided by myth, science, folklore, psychology, poetry, cultural awareness and wisdom traditions.

If you would like to deepen your understanding of men & masculinity, to better create with and speak to men, we invite you to join us in venturing to the edge of the forest, a place dense with knowing and not knowing, songs and stories, facts and mysteries.

One of the group opened our conversation by reading the poem ‘The Lanyard’ by Billy Collins, a beautiful homage to mothers written by a son.

We began sharing stories of what we had learned from our fathers. The first man to speak described his parents separating when he was 2 years old, the aversion to anger and fighting this had given him, the visceral reaction he felt against his father’s affairs with younger women.

Yet he recognised too the honesty and integrity he saw in his father, describing how he had “always been there for my mother, including financially”. He described his dad much later in life making a large sum of money and giving half to his mum because he felt it was the right thing to do.

He described also how his father used the metaphor of “stakes in the ground” as milestones for pursuing goals, and for cultivating self-discipline.

Another man described how, for all his flaws, his father had instilled in him the feeling that he could do anything. “Don’t be limited to one thing or role” was the message he heard, as well as his father’s maxim “Only donkeys don’t change their minds”. This, he reflected, was ironic as not changing his mind was one of his father’s flaws.

He noted too how “negative reinforcement” had both helped and hindered him as “I might not do something I should do, solely because of the way my dad has asked me to do it”.

This was echoed by another member of the group who reflected that his dad had “taught me how not to father my children”. At the same time, he noted that his father had given him a “builder mentality”, always seeking to create, make and solve problems.

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One man shared a story of travelling to West Africa with his son, enjoying the music scene there. He got chatting to a kora player who at one point said to him “You don’t truly succeed until your father dies.”

Another shared how he “hated” his dad for leaving his mum when he was two years old, and had worked to let go of his feelings, reconnecting with his dad. When he became a father himself, his dad was the first person to visit his new grandson. The man noted how his baby son would get upset when held by someone other than he or his wife, yet an immediate bond formed between baby boy and grandfather, his father.

Other stories were shared. Fathers who “gave me something to rebel against”, fathers who showed “incredible loyalty and hard work”, fathers who “embraced the seasons of life, constantly reinventing himself”.

As we reflected on what we’d heard from each other, one man said, “There’s more than just the people in this room in this conversation, it’s as if we’ve brought our fathers here”.

Another reflected on the “fullness” of our fathers, their strengths and flaws, their successes and struggles, the nuance and complexity of them as men.

As we closed, one man said he was going to call his dad. He noted how a recent family bereavement had seen people check in on his mum and grandmother but no-one had asked how his dad was doing. “We can treat our dads like humans too,” he said. Another expressed “gratitude for the men who shaped us”.

We closed with an invitation to imagine forward and consider how our future sons, real or otherwise, might reflect on us as father figures.

Circles are spaces where men come together to engage in meaningful conversations. You can find out more here.

You can also find out more about how we work with men inside organisations.

Find out more about our men’s groups here and follow us on LinkedIn here.

And learn more about Wild Twin, our mission to create richer, more meaningful stories about men.

— David Whyte

‘Friend’ is originally derived from Germanic and Indo-European roots, from which the Old English word ‘frēond’ originated. It originally meant to free, to like or to love.

Dr. Niobe Way, a Professor of Developmental Psychology, has been researching boyhood for over 40 years, by directly speaking and listening deeply to boys. Amongst her many insights, she describes the ‘boy culture’ of modern society in which caricatures of ‘hardness’ are celebrated but anything deemed ‘soft’ is denigrated. They learn masculine norms of emotional stoicism and hyperindependence. “In such a culture,” she says “friendships are seen as soft.”

What is friendship anyway? The ancient Greeks defined several types of love, amongst them ‘philia’, a kind of selfless and brotherly love for an equal. The philosopher Roman Krznaric writes, “The philia most prized by the Greeks, however, was the profound friendship that developed between comrades who had fought side by side on the battlefield. These brothers-in-arms had seen one another suffer and often risked their lives to save their companions from being impaled by a Persian spear. They considered themselves as equals, and would not only share their personal worries but also display extreme loyalty, helping one another in times of need without expecting anything in return.”

War, perversely, has long been one of the most potent places for the most intense bonds to form amongst men, the kind of friendship that transcends battle and is a lifelong commitment to each other. In everyday civilian life, the experience for most men is different and sources of friendship are more diverse.

Boys and adolescents are typically socialised in the notion that individualism and competing with other men is central to manhood, whilst intimacy and closeness are to be rejected as too effeminate. Entering manhood becomes an increasingly solitary or isolated journey.

It is no surprise then, that we see the chronic loneliness, alienation and longing for community amongst modern men: in 1990, 3% of men reported having no close friends; in 2021, this number had increased to 15%.

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So once again, what is friendship? Perhaps at it’s vaguest it is something outside family, outside marriage or romantic relationships, outside the parent-child bond - it is some other essential dynamic to move through life with us.

We know a good friendship, the qualities it has, the way it makes us feel - not just in the receiving but in the giving of friendship too.

And what of friendship that is not related to other people? What of our friendship with ourselves, a loving kindness to our own being? What of friendship with nature and the living world? With the experience of existence itself?

This post is from Kinship, our free online men’s community. It’s a place for men to connect with other men and engage with content, conversation and resources on topics like purpose, meaning, work, mental health and relationships.

To join the community, you can sign up here.

Find out more about our men’s groups here and follow us on LinkedIn here.

And learn more about Wild Twin, our mission to create richer, more meaningful stories about men.

— George Orwell

A few weeks ago, I saw a video shared on LinkedIn. It showed a YouTuber and provocateur called Charlie Veitch being confronted by a young man in a city centre.

Veitch apparently spends a lot of time recording himself confronting members of the public on the streets of UK cities like Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow. These are often people of colour or who he feels might be immigrants, as an extension of his views on migration and national identity, particularly Muslims (there is an irony here given that Veitch himself was born in Brazil to a Brazilian mother).

According to the caption, in this particular video, Veitch is harassing a young Muslim couple who are pushing their baby in a stroller. Veitch is then angrily confronted by a young white man who asks why he’s harassing a couple with a child. He tells Veitch to back off, who taunts him, asking if he thinks he’s “big enough”. The young man responds, seemingly looking Vetch in the eyes and telling him, “Take another step and I’ll take you out”. The video ends there.

You can watch the short clip here. It has an intensity to it that will be familiar to those who have ever encountered physical violence or the threat of it. It reminded me of many encounters I’ve had on and around amateur football pitches.

What struck me were the comments and reactions on the original LinkedIn post, including my own. I found myself supporting the young man’s response, perhaps influenced by the numerous other supportive comments underneath the post, including many who work in roles geared towards tackling social challenges like racism and gender inequality.

And then I caught myself. Here I am applauding this young fella for threatening another man with physical violence, because he’s doing so (seemingly) in defence of something I view as abhorrent (racial harassment).

What do I know about this lad? Nothing. For all I know, this is his approach to anything he views as wrong. Maybe this is how he deals with all conflicts. Maybe this is how he is at work or with his family.

Yet I was willing to cheer him on, however briefly, because he’s on my ‘side’ of the argument. What about when he isn’t on my side?

This is the paradox the video presents to me and to other people who might seek a better, safer society. If we want to tackle whatever we believe are the social ills, what actions and methods are we willing to encourage? If we’re willing to say yes to anger and aggression, where are we willing to draw the line?

And do we accept that whatever we applaud or encourage becomes more legitimised, and may therefore manifest in ways we don’t like?

And what of the male role here? The dominant narrative around men and violence is that it is a dangerous and undesirable aspect of modern society. Violence against women, in particular, is a prominent issue that few would disagree is something we need to tackle and minimise.

Yet, at the same time, there is a strong adjacent narrative that asks men to intervene, to stand up for others, to protect others, even, perhaps especially, in situations where there is danger and aggression present.

What about the risks posed by men running into situations of conflict? What happens when someone is accidentally injured, or worse? What happens when someone pulls a weapon? What happens when someone misreads the situation and exacerbates it by piling in? What happens if someone gets arrested? Will we still cheer then?

Descendants of violence

The paradox presented by the data on violence is quite well known yet largely ignored: roughly 80% of all violence is perpetrated by men, yet men are also more likely to be victims of violence - particularly homicides, of which men account for 70%. Most violence against women is perpetrated by men, but most violence perpetrated by men overall is against other men.

More strikingly, men in the UK are more than twice as likely as women to be victims of violence perpetrated by a stranger.

Discussions of violence are easily dragged into amateur anthropology - man as hunter, alpha males, survival of the fittest and so on. It’s not that these aren’t plausible theories but are they sufficient as an explanation of modern violence?

They are somewhat essentialist and cannot account for fluctuations in violence in society. They also limit violence to a very particular kind of physical action (I’ll come to that later).

What might be true, as Daniel Schmachtenberger argues, is that we are all descendants of violence. The very fact that we are alive today means our ancestors, somewhere along the line, endured or won wars that inflicted immense violence on others. Perhaps multiple times over.

“We are the descendants, unavoidably, of the people that scaled empire with all of the ecological harm, warfare, genocide, etc. We are genetically and mimetically and culturally the descendants of those processes.”

— Daniel Schmactenberger

This is not to say we are by nature violent, but rather that it is part of our cultural inheritance. This cannot fully explain violence in modern society, though, which is influenced not only by what has been inherited but by socialisation of roles and expectations, social conditions (like poverty and inequality) and, perhaps, the degree to which a culture accepts discourse that is divisive or dehumanising.

What is worthy of consideration in the question of the male role, that holds consistent from primates to humans, is that a male squaring off to another male carries a much higher likelihood of violence, even when one party may be seeking to de-escalate.

Asking a man to intervene in a conflict situation with another man, is not without a high degree of risk.

What do we expect?

Consider a man walking down the street who sees another man being physically and verbally abusive towards his dog. Any action that the first man takes invites a high possibility of confrontation, especially as the second man is in a heightened state, perhaps hijacked by his anger. When alcohol or drugs are involved, this risk multiplies significantly.

Yet, there is, even if subtle, an expectation that men should be able and willing to intervene and to protect. To be a bystander is considered complicit in the crime. However moral our justification might be, we are willing to support these acts in certain cases - when the violence is on ‘our’ side, it’s deemed noble and heroic.

This expectation of man as protector who might use violence when it is justified is hidden in plain sight. We see it all the time in action films where male heroes enact extraordinary acts of violence, which we not only forgive but celebrate, because they’re fighting evil.

We see it too in how we are kept safe from violence between nations. In the UK, 88% of the military is made up of men. In Germany, this figure is around 87% and in France it is around 83%. If war were to spread to Western Europe, no longer a far-fetched possibility, it would be mostly men sent to the frontlines and conflict zones to protect us - and expected to do so.

Whether we like it or not, our security relies on the potential and capacity for violence. We don’t want violence and yet our safety depends on it. We demonise violence yet applaud it too. As George Orwell noted of pacifists, “those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.”

I don’t want war or conflict anywhere, yet this is a belief I can hold from the comfort of never having known war nor the reality of violence that keeps me safe.

“The percentage of men who actively have violence interactions at some point in their lifetime is very low… So, if I was given a gazillion dollars to solve male violence, and I could only spend it on nurture sort of things or nature sort of things, [it’s] environment much more. And this is from someone [who] studies neurons and hormones and all this nuts and bolts biology… I think it’s much more social issues, socialisation and such.”

— Robert Sapolsky, Stanford professor, neuroscience and primatology

Visible and invisible violence

Violence is generally defined as extreme force or actions likely to hurt people and cause damage, including emotional harm. Yet it is more commonly understood to mean direct and harmful physical action between individuals.

And let’s be clear here - in the age of modern warfare, a soldier pushing a button from behind a desk to dispatch a drone missile is far more violent than someone throwing a punch in the street, but the former looks positively mundane.

And what of politics and business? A politician signing an exploitative, inequality-widening trade deal with a pen or implementing a policy that puts millions of children into poverty is surely more violent than any street brawl.

A politician using language that deepens divides, that suggests some humans are less human than others, and that groups of people are legitimate targets of anger is certainly at least as violent as the people who act on this rhetoric.

In primatology, where much of the behavioural theory on human violence stems from, it has been observed that males are more likely to enact violence through physical attacks and murder, whereas females enact violence by withholding food from competitors and their offspring. Both are ways of maintaining power and status.

What we consider ‘violence’ may itself be part of the problem - if we’re willing to starve a boy of good food, love and hope, it seems much more likely that if he makes it to adulthood, he may well aim a kick or punch at someone.

It is these roots, surely, that must be part of the goal of reducing violence. Yet, as is often the case, mainstream discourse focuses on the symptom rather than the cause, and places more emphasis on demonisation than on seeking to understand.

The male role.

Returning to the two men in the video above, if we are asking men to walk the fine line between protector and aggressor, hadn’t we better teach them something about anger, aggression and violence? And shouldn’t this start with boys?

Anger and aggression do not necessarily need to be behaviours that need ‘correction’, but natural traits in many to be worked with and harnessed. There are a few sections of society that understand this well: the military, professional sports and martial arts to name three.

All of these professions temper aggression and violence with discipline and self-awareness. An uncontrollably raging soldier, sportsman or boxer will fail spectacularly.

Years ago, I spent a period of time training in a boxing gym in South London, a traditional place housed underneath some railway arches. Three things there struck me very deeply.

The first is that the object of martial arts is not to fight. Anyone who has had any martial arts training will know that if you show up only wanting to throw punches and fight, you’ll be disappointed. The first emphasis is on intensive training, craft and self-discipline. Each of those will be worked on relentlessly before you’re allowed anywhere near a ring or mat.

The second was the strong culture of respect, safety and equality. Like most boxing gyms, these values were made very clear and visible, and maintained by the trainers and elders. Everyone was welcome under the arches, a place where anyone from any background was treated with respect, with women-only classes and free training for those not in employment.

On one occasion, my girlfriend, a petite woman under five feet four inches, came to meet me at the gym. Seeing that she looked lost, a tall, immensely muscular man detached himself from a group of other men, approached her and asked very gently if she needed help.

When she explained she was looking for me, he directed her to the part of the gym I was in. She told me later how safe and respected she felt throughout the whole encounter.

The third thing I became aware of in the gym was how untrained and unskilled I was in aggression against a stranger. After training there for a while, my trainer asked on the spur of the moment if I fancied getting into a ring to spar with a guy who was training for an amateur fight. This guy was huge, but he wasn’t going to throw any punches - I was going to throw them at him so he could work on his defence. ‘Why not?’ I thought.

It didn’t take long before my trainer was shouting at me to throw a proper, hard punch, which I found difficult to do towards someone I’d just met, even though he was fully padded up. After three rounds, I almost threw up from the exertion, and I began to realise just how much fitness and skill are needed to be a boxer, as well as how much controlled aggression.

I cannot claim to be a saint here. In this boxing ring, I couldn’t muster the aggression needed to throw a full-blooded punch, but I knew I had this within me because it had fuelled me on many football pitches, engaging in physical acts that were just on the right side of legal, and on more than one occasion, went beyond this.

This is the line to be walked, between aggression and violence, between competing and attacking, between knowing that dark side of us but not being overwhelmed by it. This is the razor edge that athletes in competitive sports play on, and an edge that most of us rarely go near.

Teaching, performing and honesty.

If we want less violence in men, perhaps we should be teaching boys about fighting and aggression. Not so that they will fight, but so that they can know how to fight, choose not to and be in a closer relationship with their capacity for anger and violence.

The artist and podcaster, Blindboy, talks of ‘theatres of aggression’, places that provide a controlled performance of anger and violence without it manifesting into reality: “People who listen to heavy metal tend to be very nice people; if you go to a heavy metal gig it’s one of the most beautiful examples of controlled safe aggression where at a distance this looks like a very toxic frightening place and then you get in there and you see no this is the theatre of toxicity this is the theatre of aggression. And hip hop’s like that too. It’s the theatre of aggression.”

Perhaps we need more places for violence to be performed rather than enacted?

And what of those boys and men of a different temperament, who simply don’t want to fight or don’t feel able to intervene in violent situations? Are they to be shamed as inadequate, as failed men? Will they, like in World War I, have white feathers publicly pinned on them for their cowardice?

“To truly become a man the shadow personality must be struggled with, but it cannot be repressed. The boy must not repress his aggressiveness since he needs the masculine power of his Red Knight shadow to make his way through the mature world.”

— Robert Johnson

In a world with rising tension, division and anger, how can we expect men to be safely capable of protecting others unless we’re able to have honest conversations about the prevalence and paradoxes of violence?

Otherwise, it must be asked: are we really seeking a less violent society? Or one where we ourselves experience less violence because more is inflicted on the Others?

Find out more about our men’s groups here and follow us on LinkedIn here.

And learn more about weaving richer, more meaningful stories about men here.

— James Hollis

Riots, violence and canaries in coalmines

I first began writing this post last August after several days of rioting in the UK, sparked by the killing of three girls in Southport and false rumours that subsequently circulated on social media.

In the weeks that followed, there was a huge response from across the mainstream media (and social media). A narrative and explanation quickly formed around what had happened. And as always happens, the explanation for something deeply complex was quite reductive and simplified.

I wrote long tracts of my original post, edited them, deleted them. Wrote them again, deleted them again. The world has moved on I thought - except it hasn’t really and we’re currently seeing a continuation of the same underlying conditions. Same as it ever was, except worse.

The post-UK riots narrative went something like this: ‘Social media inflamed tensions by spreading false rumours. Certain populist politicians joined in. Mobs of violent men went on a racist and xenophobic rampage. Therefore, we need to do something about these angry men and their proclivity for violence. We also need to regulate social media companies, as it was they who stoked up this trouble.’

Like any cultural narrative that takes hold, it contains many elements of truth and some elements of an explanation. Many of the men were certainly violent, some clearly racist or expressing racist views, and social media certainly played an essential role in enabling men to gather.

But the narrative also does something else: it misdirects, identifies the wrong underlying cause and excludes crucial details that help us to understand things that run counter to this mainstream narrative. It also lets the real culprits off the hook.

As someone who experienced a lot of racism growing up in the UK, watching the footage of the riots was deeply disturbing, but I couldn’t help noticing things that weren’t being commented on. For instance, the sense of carnival about the whole thing. It looked and felt like a day out for many young people.

And I say ‘people’ deliberately. I noticed in footage from different cities that whilst the rioters were mostly men, there were also women present in the crowds. More than once, I saw what looked like young heterosexual couples laughing and joking as they watched acts of destruction, as if at a comedy show.

And I couldn’t help but notice that all of the riots were in suburbs of cities that experienced severe deprivation, many of them former industrial towns and mining communities. So whilst the foreground of that footage looked like the 1984 miners’ strikes, the background often looked like an 90s rave.

One of the most insightful pieces of reporting I’ve seen is this piece in The Guardian titled ‘Local. Left behind. Prey to populist politics? What the data tells us about the 2024 UK rioters’. As good journalism should, it takes a close look at the actual evidence and seeks deeper narratives to help us understand what took place and why.

The report found, for instance, that a disproportionate number of rioters who were charged with crimes came from deprived backgrounds: “The area has levels of deprivation higher than the average for both England and Manchester. Close to two-thirds of households are considered deprived, substantially above the average. It is a common trait across the neighbourhoods from which the rioters hail. Well over half of those charged with offences – most commonly violent disorder – came from the most deprived 20% of neighbourhoods.”

The data also showed that rioters were far more likely to be in poor health and unemployed. The report quotes Dr Stephanie Alice Baker, a sociologist at the University of London and advisor to UK Parliament. She described these rioters as people who have been “left behind… decades of austerity, a cost of living crisis, the pandemic, inflation, rising rents, mortgages and energy bills have intensified collective grievances.”

The dominant narrative that took hold, and still persists, overlooked the larger, more fundamental macro issues underneath all of this. This wasn’t really about male anger or violence; that was the outcome rather than the cause. What this was really about was sections of society who have been screwed over, exploited, alienated and demonised for generations.

“Riots are always the canary in the cage. They reveal broader issues in society. The claim of ‘mindlessness’ serves to hide the signal they send.”

— Stephen Reicher, Professor of Psychology, University of St. Andrews

It’s the economy, stupid (and the community).

Show me a man who has a job that gives him basic dignity and pays a fair wage, who has enough time and resources be in a relationship, who has friends and a sense of connection to a community, and that has supportive role models in his life - and I’ll show you a man extremely unlikely to be radicalised, or to inflict hatred and violence on to others.

In the last 50 years, neo-liberal capitalism has ravaged jobs, education, healthcare, communities and social structures across developed countries (this interview with George Monbiot is an excellent explainer of this economic ideology). At the same time, whilst feminism has made progress in changing possibilities for women’s role in society, there has been no corresponding social shift for men.

So whilst traditional male roles and identities are being asked to change, there is little empathy or patience and scarce resources for men to re-examine their identities. Nor is there an acknowledgement of the confusion and fear this might bring.

This should be no surprise really. Modern capitalism depends on men being isolated, in competition with each other and viewing themselves only as providers. Marx described alienation as being distanced from the means of production. This has been the lived experience for almost everyone since the dawn of modernity and capitalism.

For men and boys, it has come hand in hand with a deep socialisation that alienates them from their own feelings and from each other. To be ‘feeling’ as a man is weak and inconvenient to the demands of capitalism. To be gathered in collectives and communities is a threat to the power structures of capitalism, the owners of capital.

I saw a few lines someone shared on Substack recently, that said something like this: It shouldn’t be considered radical to expect that someone working in McDonald’s can afford to pay their rent, their bills, to buy groceries and to live - because that’s the point of having a fucking job.

And yet, in the space of just a few decades, the possibility of having a single blue-collar job and supporting yourself or a family has been eroded - and we’ve barely noticed. Blue-collar work like manufacturing is no longer the secure choice it used to be, and vast numbers of people, especially men, have been forced in multiple gig-economy jobs which are even less secure, lacking in dignity and barely make ends meet.

“Today less than 25 per cent of [UK] workers have their terms and conditions set by negotiations between unions and employers (one of the lowest levels in Europe). But in the 1970s over 80 per cent of UK workers were covered by a collective agreement. That drop is the reason that real wages have not risen since 2007... More people are on benefits in work than those on benefits out of work. Some 14.4 million of our citizens live in poverty and 3.8 million in destitution… Such is the triumph of neoliberalism.”

— Lord John Hendy KC, Chair of the Institute of Employment Rights, ‘The neoliberal backdrop to the miners’ strike’

It seems to go unnoticed that gig jobs like Uber & cab driving, parcel delivery and fast food delivery are largely male workers. The prevailing narrative about the patriarchy focuses on the ‘tech bros’, male politicians and billionaires, holding them up as representative of all men when, in fact, they make up less than 0.1% of the male population. Importantly, these elite few are themselves instrumental in exploiting boys and men all over the world.

Whilst we may be shifting away from ‘provider’ as a dominant male archetype, men still need the dignity and purpose of work. It provides structure, meaning, self-sufficiency and connection.

Having decent, secure employment removes one of the fundamental lies that the far-right use to stoke anger and hatred: that immigrants have taken all of the jobs. And crucially, it also weakens the notion that female empowerment and liberation are a threat to masculine identity, something that numerous male influencers like to claim.

That TV show

One of the other significant cultural moments since I first started writing this post, was the release of a TV mini-series in the UK called ‘Adolescence’. You’ve probably heard of it, it seems to have become a global phenomenon.

I watched the show a little while after it was released, as my wife and I wanted to watch it together. In the period before we saw it, I was constantly hearing from people asking if I’d watched it and sharing their opinions on what it portrayed.

In case you haven’t watched it, I’ll do my best to summarise it concisely. It depicts a lower-middle-class family, a mum and dad with a son and a daughter, living in suburbia somewhere in northern England. The show centres on the 13-year old son, Jamie, who commits an awful crime, stabbing a girl to death. We later learn that he has been radicalised by hateful ‘manosphere’ content and social media, all from the supposed safety of his bedroom computer.

We also witness a loving family doing their best, with a focus on a father who works shifts and long hours running his plumbing business to provide for his family. The show later explores his feelings of failure and disbelief that having supposedly done all the right things, he still feels he has failed his son.

There’s much more to the show, including a whole thread with the police officers investigating the murder and the female psychologist who assesses Jamie.

There were all sorts of critiques about the show and what it tells us, but one theme in particular that struck me was on anger - specifically ‘male anger’, a term I see a lot in public discourse but without much exploration of it.

Much of the critique focused on the final episode, which is set a year after the murder with Jamie still in custody and awaiting trial at which he will plead guilty.

In that episode, it is the father’s 50th birthday. We see the family rise for breakfast determined to make it a celebration. The attempt at joy is soon punctured when the father goes outside to see graffiti sprayed in large letters on his work van: ‘PAEDO’.

We learn later that it is the work of local teenagers who cycle past and taunt him. We also learn that, due to the very public nature of his son’s crime, his business is on the brink of collapse as no-one wants to hire him.

They scrap their plans for birthday breakfast and head to the local hardware store so he can buy some paint to cover the graffiti. Taunted again by the teenagers, he explodes in rage.

He grabs one of the boys by his hoodie and screams in his face “Do you think this is fucking funny?”. He lets go of the boy and throws his bike after him as he runs away.

He returns to his van and hurls a tin of paint over it in rage. A security guard asks him if he’s going to clean up the mess in the car park. His fury deepens and he grabs a screwdriver points it at the security guard and tells him to fuck off.

On the drive home, his wife and daughter are visibly upset as he tries to calm himself down. At home, in the final scene, he and his wife speak in the bedroom where he breaks down in tears. We learn that he had a violent father who abused him as a child and he is determined not to become that man. Importantly, we also learn that he has never been violent or physical with his family.

Much was made of this final episode. Many found it shocking that this father was so full of rage. Some suggested he was a kind of monster, that this sort of anger was unacceptable and dangerous.

As a father, I watched it and was incredibly moved. And my reaction was mostly one of recognition. Angry? Of course he’s fucking angry.

He’s a man who was abused as a boy. He’s avoided becoming the violent man his father was, and is a loving and hardworking father. Yet his son has committed murder and is now about to go to prison. He is wracked with his own guilt and confusion. His business is collapsing, his humiliation is very public and he is being taunted, for no reason other than cruelty, as a padeophile.

Given all of that, good God, I’d be fucking livid.

And in truth, I felt his rage as I watched - I really felt it as if I knew it. The sheer helplessness of his situation, the grief, the shame, the collapse of his world.

I know that I, too, have that rage somewhere inside me. And I know that it is important that I know this about myself, rather than live in denial.

And why wouldn’t he, or I, feel that anger? Who gets to decide what we feel and how feel it?

“This behavior, this trait in the other person that causes you to react negatively—do you realize that he or she is not responsible for it? You can hold on to your negative feelings only when you mistakenly believe that he or she is free and aware and therefore responsible. But who ever did evil in awareness?”

— Anthony De Mello

This is one of the central cultural impacts of modernity on masculinity - the notion that all emotions are weak with the exception of anger.

This father was not a man seeking to inflict hurt or violence on to others, it was a man in utter desolation who knew no other way to respond - for he had not been raised or socialised to know any other way to respond.

In that final scene with his wife, we see him expressing his own shame, telling his wife she was the far better parent than he, that it is he alone who has failed. She reminds him that’s not true.

They cry together, they embrace, they laugh and show their love for each other, two people who have been together since they met at school. Their love is moving and present throughout the show.

But few wanted to talk about this. It was far easier to talk about the angry monster, a denial of the reality of what it means to be human, that we can be full of rage and full of love in the same day.

And in this framing was a limiting of what men are allowed to be, that anger is also not acceptable.

I understand where this stems from - a fear of the violence and abuse that so many men inflict on women and on each other, since the beginning of humankind. But denying men their anger or stigmatising it as an emotion only makes things worse. Repression of emotion is only ever a temporary illusion.

The anger that breaks a man down into boys,
that breaks the boy down into equal birds,
and the bird, then, into tiny eggs;
the anger of the poor
owns one smooth oil against two vinegars.

— Cesar Vallejo

The essential nature of anger

Anger is a fundamental emotion, one that we all experience and usually quite early in life. The American neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp proposed the existence of seven primary emotional systems in the brains of mammals: Seeking, Lust, Care, Play, Anger, Fear and Sadness.

His work itself was pre-dated by foundational research on human emotions. In the 1970s, psychologist Paul Ekman identified six basic emotions and Robert Plutchik’s Emotions Wheel (1980) defined eight basic emotions.

Numerous other studies and even spiritual traditions define a variety of basic emotions, varying from six to as many as ten. And all of them include anger as a basic emotion.

Panksepp proposed that anger was an ancestral inheritance, one that was instinctual but could be moderated by the sophisticated cognitive processes of the modern human brain. In his research with Margaret Zellner on the emotional systems, he described anger as an emotion that can support “goal-directed behaviour”.

“Some of these necessarily or indirectly lead to the physical harm or damage of things or people -- but some do only psychological harm, while others may involve no harm at all, as is the case with assertive actions to get one’s needs met. However, we do believe that all of these behaviors still deserve to be grouped under one umbrella because of what they have in common: effortful action.”

- Jaak Panksepp and Margaret Zellner

In other words, with appropriate consciousness and mental function, anger can provide the essential fuel to take action.

From the psychoanalytical perspective, James Hollis writes “The Indo-Germanic root angh ("to constrict") gives rise to the English words angst, anxiety, angina and anger. Perceived threats to the well-being of the organism involuntarily and repeatedly occasion this range of emotions. The child instinctually, intuitively, knows what is needed and feels both anger at betrayal and sorrow at the loss of the necessary nurturant Other.”

Anger, then, is a natural emotion, a healthy and essential response, especially if it is conscious and safely expressed. It often signals some other unspoken need or unfelt emotion.

And when repressed, anger can often be referred or displaced, leaking out in surprising ways or onto unsuspecting people.

“Isn’t it an intellectual tragedy that we have so little basic animal brain research on the nature of anger—such a pervasive problem in so many individual lives as well as our society as a whole?”

— Jaak Panksepp

As well as a general repression and stigmatisation of anger, what is also lacking in modern developed nation cultures are the rituals and practices that might help boys, before they become men, to know and work with their anger.

I once spoke with a Jungian consultant who had also been a martial arts instructor alongside his wife for over 20 years. They had both witnessed many boys and young men enter the dojo ready to fight, only to be easily taught a lesson by someone smaller but more experienced. What they had to learn very quickly, he said, was how to control and channel their anger.

Mobs, heroism and counter-anger.

The UK riots last year had echoes of the January 6th US insurrection in 2020, where mostly male mobs stormed the Capitol building.

It is worth noting - for it is easily forgotten - that although the people storming the building were mostly men, the people protecting the building and the people inside were also men.

I was deeply moved and shocked by the story of Michael Fanone, a Washington DC police officer who, in attempting to hold the line against the rioters, was dragged into the crowd and beaten unconscious. His own anger and his skill with aggression almost certainly saved lives - in hearing the emergency call for support, he came from across the city to defend the politicians who would later scorn and betray him.

The reasons behind this horrific episode of violence are too varied and complex to capture here or perhaps to even fully understand at all. But one of the key underlying conditions surely is the large constituency of dispossessed and alienated men that the US has created through its economic and political ideologies over the last few decades - the same shifts and forces that led to the UK riots.

And here, the political and social context is essential when talking about men. We will likely see more of this as we witness more brutality and oppression as late-stage capitalism crumbles. What we are already seeing is a collapse in living standards and a frantic response by those in power to the realisation that their power is finite.

Their answer is not to try to solve this but to turn people on each other, and, for some political parties, alienated men are the ideal constituency to prey on. Their anger is being stoked and harvested.

Our anger, if we feel it appropriate, should be directed at the tiny elite of people and institutions that orchestrate so much of it.

Understanding anger is not the same as tolerating violence. Understanding anger is not the same as accepting or inviting it. Understanding anger is the route to fighting for a change of conditions that mean our rage at the world becomes less necessary.

Rather than treating it with some avoidant or shaming response, men’s anger needs to be legitimised through an understanding and channelling of it.

There is a reason why, over the last four decades, governments all over the world have dismantled or weakened workers unions - it prevents men from collaborating and directing their anger at those who are oppressing and exploiting them.

We forget that patriarchy is an elite game, and that even those men who appear to be ‘winning’ are usually losing. We have now reached a point where even the wealthy middle-classes are stressed, unhealthy, addicted and constantly not feeling enough.

They are chasing the modernist ‘retirement fantasy’ that one day they will have enough to stop and then they will get to truly live their lives, doing the things they really care about and spending time with the people they love.

I know many of these men. As they slowly come to terms with the realisation they will never be in the 1%, a bitterness can take hold, and forms of depression or acting out can occur. An ugly unconscious anger can arise too, causing incredible harm to themselves and to those around them. In our culture, we simply call this midlife.

What if instead this anger were directed at their own systemic oppression where it might have great impact on creating better circumstances for everyone?

What if this anger were a signal for men to remember what they are truly longing for underneath it all?

War

As I bring this drawn-out piece to a close, tensions in the Middle East have intensified once more as the US and Israel have bombed Iran. The murdering seems to have no end.

It would be reductive to frame this death and destruction as a result of male anger, even if it does hold a kernel of truth.

But more importantly, would it not be normal, healthy and justified to see some male anger in response to this endless warmongering that only makes us all less safe? Where is it?

Find out more about our groups here and follow us on LinkedIn here.

1. In collaboration with Monika Jiang, we hosted an incredible gathering in Berlin last week for 32 men to explore masculinity, loneliness, connection and community. Find out more here.

2. Join our online community for men (Kinship), a place for self-discovery, wisdom and connection, drawing on our last 3 years of facilitating men’s groups. You can find out more here.

When it comes to the conversation around masculinity and the challenges experienced by men, there are two broad categories I could put all men’s work into.

One is focussed on defining or redefining masculinity and the role of man, as more positive and healthy, providing models and frameworks for what this looks like. The other encourages men to consider who they are individually, critically explore ideas around masculinity and gender, and find their own meaning and conclusions.

The former seems to be much more common. There is much conversation and exploration around new models of masculinity and a redefinition of the role of man that is healthier for everyone. This includes, for example, advocating for greater emotional literacy, talking more, taking on more responsibility for parenting and acting as an ally for women and other groups.

In themselves, these ideas are positive and well-intentioned. They seek to enable men to live healthier lives and to be in healthier relationships with those around them. 

These are also messages that are easily amplified by the mainstream media, as they provide language and concepts that are simple and easily repeated. Thus they have become the language of mainstream conversation around masculinity - an internet search for ‘positive masculinity’ will yield over 30 million results. Notably, certain consumer brands appear high up the results.

There is a deep shadow to all of this framing of what masculinity should be. Whilst we may, with good intentions, be crafting a much more positive idea of what masculinity is, we are also placing ourselves in the role of arbiter of what is ‘positive’ or ‘good’. 

Who gets to decide that? And how do they decide?

“In a new world where men and women share the same ambitions and workplace, perhaps a mutual incompatibility or creative tension between the sexes may have to be tolerated.”

(Camille Paglia)

Men are told to show more vulnerability, for example. This has perhaps become the most popular of pop psychology ideas, and perhaps also the most dangerous. To be vulnerable requires relationships and environments with a certain degree of trust and safety. It also requires an individual to feel able to venture into new territory, to practice what feels like a life-threatening act, often without the lived experience or confidence to do so. 

It therefore places the onus on the individual man rather than recognising the root causes and systemic reasons for why men do not how vulnerability. Some prominent feminists have remarked on this, questioning whether women really want men to be vulnerable.

Vulnerability itself is not a goal, it is a trait that is developed as men begin to question their role, and an inevitable development in beginning to relate to oneself and others more deeply.

Why then are so many people rushing to ‘design’ a new masculinity, a new role for men to take up?

This shadow lengthens when we start to consider how this is received across countries, social class, sexual orientation and the many other cultural differences boys and men live within. What are considered positive masculine norms in one place might be considered unacceptable in another. 

In Masaai tribes for example, circumcision is the essential ritual to initiate boys into manhood. They must then prove and exhibit their manhood through symbolic acts within the community such as carrying spears, herding livestock or hunting. It’s safe to say, this notion of manhood would be viewed very differently in Berlin or New York.

‘But those cultures are different to ours’, you might say. Which raises the question again of who gets to decide what a man should be in any particular culture. 

And what happens when an Englishman crosses the border into Wales? Or a Frenchman crosses the border into Spain? Or an American man into Mexico?

Can we respect the differences or will we impose our own ideas of masculinity and judge those that don’t subscribe to them?

“There are priests not only in religion. There are priests in philosophy and priests in politics. Every philosophical school has its priests. Often they are very learned; it is their business to administer the idea of the original thinker, to impart it, to interpret it, to make it into a museum object and thus to guard it. Then there are the political priests; we have seen enough of them in the last 150 years. They have administered the idea of freedom, to protect the economic interests of their social class.”

(Erich Fromm)

The shadow lengthens again when we start consider this question. Now that we’ve created a new idea or set of rules around what a man is, this orthodoxy must be maintained. 

And like all orthodoxies, there are negative and eventually counter-productive consequences: alternative ideas and voices are marginalised, a rigid ideology forms and people begin to wear it like a cloak, often unwittingly. 

People who challenge the orthodoxy are labelled as heretics, attacked or even ‘excommunicated’. Since new ideas never enter the sphere of thought, the orthodoxy eventually begins to desiccate but by now, it has often become the dominant way of approaching a particular topic. 

Until it begins to crumble, which it eventually does, more open-minded thought cannot emerge and the conversation cannot continue. The orthodoxy has in fact, held back progress for years. What was well-intentioned and empathetic became a dry, rigid dogma.

What is notable to me about most of the people taking this approach to defining a new, positive masculinity, is how narrow and limited their own perspective is. Their intentions might be noble but their perspective usually comes from the rational and scientific lens of Western thought.

We develop rules and principles for something as complex as gender, with no consideration or interest in the richly interwoven messiness of our origins and the unknowable heritage of being human.

Even conversations around men showing more emotion seemed to be tossed around like mathematical formulae. ‘If men are more vulnerable, then they will be more X and show more Y to other people’. Brene Brown’s sugary pop psychology confection has a lot to answer for.

Psychology is certainly part of the conversation, particularly in considering the socialisation and development of boys. Biology too is critical, yet seems to be a third rail for many people in discussing gender. 

Culture of course is part of the conversation, although this often gets bogged down in conversations about Andrew Tate and pornography, which overlooks the much greater influences on infant development, namely parents, peers and teachers. 

What rarely gets explored, are the aspects that are less scientific, less easy to find an enemy for or someone to blame, and that also hold ideas that might be uncomfortable or inconvenient to conventions of the day. 

Inter-generational and ancestral lineage, for example, is demonstrably part of every human. Each boy carries within him not only his father, but his grandfather, great-grandfather and so on.

Throughout this lineage there will be the experiences and traumas that shape this boy today. Somewhere along the way will be things like wars, famine, migration and abuse.

The mythical, meanwhile, is almost completely overlooked in the conversation about masculinity except by those of a Jungian or historical bent. A Jungian might say that we are, in part, always living ancient archetypal energies (which we have incorrectly popularised in our culture as fixed figures).

The archetypes of man and father for example, live within us but as ungraspable and ultimately unknowable forces - yet we can notice and feel the energies of them if we’re willing to pay attention. 

Popular and clearly defined ideas around ‘positive masculinity’ seem benign and helpful on the surface, yet are actually new orthodoxies.

I see orthodoxies forming everywhere, particularly in well-educated, middle class men. These are men who have a dangerous level of knowledge and influence.

In having learned a veneer of knowledge of feminism and gender equality, filtered through a mainstream Western lens, they now believe they know everything and take up the role of enforcing it upon others - an unintentional, and ironically patriarchal, form of dominance. 

At the same time, there are corners of themselves that remain unexplored and unconsciously anchored in gender roles. Their progressive outlook is mostly performative and masks the underlying attitudes and beliefs that mean the system does not change. 

They too watch porn and masturbate yet will fret about their kids doing the same, because they haven’t faced the truth of their own desires, kinks and fantasies, let alone know how to have conversations about them.

Orthodoxy can be poisonous. It requires conformity and the exclusion of other possibilities and any idea of the unknown, whether scientific or mystical. 

Orthodoxies need to obliterate any alternative suggestion or kernel of some other truth. Members of an orthodoxy will go to extreme lengths to root out, diminish or marginalise anything that risks their ideology.

If we are not careful, well-meaning people will simply create new suits of clothing for men to take up, new ways to police each other and maintain status, and new ways for men to feel unworthy for not meeting the standards.

Until we are able to hold paradoxes, explore nuance, listen to views that challenge ours, get into the darkest corners of human experience and have grown-up conversations throughout, we will keep forming and falling under the spell of ideologies and orthodoxies.

When it comes to masculinity, we must question everything and hold anything that seems like truth lightly.

Our goal is to keep exploring rather than to feel we’ve arrived.

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In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a king who betrayed Zeus by revealing him to be the kidnapper of another gods daughter. To punish him for his indiscretion, Zeus cast Sisyphus into the Underworld to eternally push a boulder uphill.

As soon as the boulder reached the top of this hill, it would roll off, back to the bottom where Sisyphus had to push it back again. Until the end of time, Sisyphus was condemned to keep pushing the boulder to the top of the hill.

This myth, the origin of the term Sisyphean, has come to symbolise work, or a life, that is endless and futile. At the same time, it is also regarded a symbol of the human spirit, the persistence and resilience that is inherent in being Sisyphean. It poses the existential question that leaves so many of us feeling queasy - why am I here?

This myth influenced French philosopher Albert Camus, who saw Sisyphus' unyielding labor as a metaphor for the human struggle against the absurdity of life, a cornerstone concept in existentialist philosophy. Camus describes him as the “absurd hero”, a man whose life appears to be a ceaselessly unimportant existence and yet carries some flavour of honour and nobility. 

Camus sees the deepest tragedy in Sisyphus coming from his own awareness. It is when he is most awake to his lot that he is most tortured - that period when he must walk back down the hill to begin again: “I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness.”

The “hour like a breathing space” feels uncannily like the modern ‘lunch hour’, the brief window that offers the possibility for introspection and reflection, and yet, under the weight of modern busyness, has become a precious and rare occurrence, an act that might even signify some form of rebellion or laziness. We have probably all witnessed, or participated in, the tragic spectacle of a man wolfing down takeaway sandwiches at his desk, whilst scrolling his emails.

And perhaps too, it is our own avoidance of this breathing space because of what might arise in that liminality. As Camus suggests, if the myth is tragic “that is because its hero is conscious”. Far better to keep grinding the boulder up the hill, cheek to stone, immersed and unconscious.

In his final analysis though, Camus sees this acceptance as a source of joy for Sisyphus, “his fate belongs to him”. He has accepted his lot, his work has no ambiguity and he is ultimately masterless in his unrelenting devotion to his task.

It is no coincidence that this myth, despite being one of the lesser great Greek myths, has entered everyday language, for it speaks to the experience that so many recognise in endless and pointless work.

It also depicts a masculine archetype that many men identify with, that of the enslaved and suffering worker, going about his repetitive tasks in silence and out of sight.

 In the 2022 film ‘Living’ (a remake of a 1952 Japanese original, ‘Ikiru’), we see a Sisyphean character called Mr. Williams played by Bill Nighy. Williams is a bland, beaten-down civil servant in 1950s London. His days are repetitions of the same tasks, the same people, the same lunch, the same train to and from the office. 

His work is pointless, or perhaps more accurately, has been made to feel pointless and without satisfaction. We see Mr. Williams and those he manages, endlessly shuffling planning applications around departments, often to avoid actually doing anything about them. It is a vivid depiction of the “bullshit jobs” that David Graeber describes.

Nighy’s home life offers no respite. His son and daughter-in-law, who live with him, see him only as a robotic figure, a wage slave who they themselves are eager to inherit wealth from. They know little of each other’s inner lives or emotions of any kind.

And so it will go on, the institutionalised Mr. Williams presumably trudging slowly towards retirement and then death. But this is disrupted when he receives a terminal diagnosis. He has six months to live. 

We all know what happens next. Our hero tears up the dry repetitive script of his life. He lets the boulder roll down and refuses to push it any longer. He seeks meaning and he finds purpose. He begins to learn how to live again.

Noting this phenomenon, with a kind of fury, the author Steven Pressfield remarks on what is required for some of us to awaken from our drudgery, taking the example of a person diagnosed with cancer who finally overcomes their resistance to living freely: “Is that what it takes? Do we have to stare death in the face to make us stand up and confront Resistance? Does Resistance have to cripple and disfigure our lives before we wake up to its existence? How many of us have become drunks and drug addicts, developed tumors and neuroses, succumbed to painkillers, gossip, and compulsive cell phone use, simply because we don't do that thing that our hearts, our inner genius, is calling us to?”

Providing another perspective on work and meaning, the beautiful 2023 film ‘Perfect Days’ depicts a protagonist, Hirayama, who sits somewhere between Sisyphus and Mr. Williams. He lives in present-day Tokyo, and works as a cleaner of public toilets. He is in late middle age, single with no kids, deeply introverted and spends most of his time in solitude. 

Each of his ‘perfect days’ is framed by repetition and defined by simplicity. He doesn’t own a clock, rises at dawn each day, wears the same clothes every day, follows the same daily and weekly routines. His most regular interactions are with the small plants that he cultivates in his two-room apartment, spraying them each morning with tender care before he leaves for work.

Yet his existence is rich in connection, purpose, variety and joy. He find these things in the most minuscule of tasks and moments - noticing the shadows cast by trees, listening to soulful cassette tapes in his van, inordinately fastidious in how he cleans a toilet bowl (he even uses a small mirror), warmly greeted every day by the owner of a noodle bar despite barely speaking. 

As we see as the story unfold, his life is not completely free from personal pain and difficulty, but what gives Hirayama a heroic quality is his approach to life - each moment is to be savoured because it is precious if we choose to make it precious. Hirayama approaches his work with devotion and absorption.  

The film invites us to consider what judgments we, and society, might make about work as humble as cleaning toilets. As Graeber points out, society would notice very quickly if garbage collectors, street sweepers and toilet cleaners disappeared. In that sense, these jobs hold real societal value and meaning, as opposed to the pointless work of bullshit jobs that inflict a “profound psychological violence”, devoid as they are of not only meaning but dignity.

Our culture has long embedded the notion that the male role is to quietly grind away at work, exchanging labour for payment simply to fulfil an expectation of masculinity. To provide for others might be noble and meaningful, yet it cannot truly be so if it comes at the expense of one’s soul and health. 

And yet we keep pushing the boulder uphill, perhaps unsure what else to do, perhaps lacking the courage to let go, perhaps fearful of being shamed by others as lazy and unproductive. 

Are we Sisyphus? Are we Mr. Williams? Are we Hirayama? None provide a perfect answer - each requires us to consider how consciously we take up our task, why we are doing it and what we are sacrificing in return. 

It serves all of us to consider the role of our work, for in doing so there is the promise of an existence unshackled from the straitjacket we might unwittingly be wearing. A free, vibrant and meaningful life awaits us all on the other side of these explorations, if we can muster the courage to stray from the herd. 

As a character in Living observes of Mr. Williams, “he has decided to grasp life, and we have to admire him for it”.

References:

• Camus, A. (1942). The Myth of Sisyphus. Éditions Gallimard

• Graeber, D. (2013). On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs. STRIKE! Magazine, [online] (3), Aug. Available at: https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ [Accessed 15 Feb. 2024].

• GreekMythology.com (2015). Sisyphus - Greek Mythology. [online] Greekmythology.com. Available at: https://www.greekmythology.com/Myths/Mortals/Sisyphus/sisyphus.html.‌

• Hamilton, E. (2013). Mythology. New York: Little, Brown

• Pressfield, S. (2002). The War of Art. Black Irish Entertainment LLC.

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Freedom, in classic philosophical interpretation, is a factor of phenomena like choice, will and capacity to act. For Aristotle, freedom was the “capacity to direct oneself”, a notion of self-determination. For Hobbes, freedom was the absence of constraints and obstacles that might “hinder a man in doing what he has a will to do”. 

In more recent times, Isaiah Berlin described the concepts of “negative and positive liberty” - being free of constraints and having the self-mastery to act.

In modern society, much of our understanding of freedom centres around choice. Despite significant evidence that free will does not exist, we centre our understanding of freedom around the idea that we are making conscious choices as men.

In this understanding, our societies are more free (and more rich) than ever with greater access and choice than at any point in history. Choice, apparently, over what we do, who we are, and who we are governed by.

Taking a historic view seems to reinforce this perspective. In medieval feudal societies, people were governed by lords and owners of land. They were effectively indentured slaves. 

Where once they had subsisted off common land, the introduction of enclosures, the taking ownership of land by very few, suddenly meant the masses could no longer raise enough crops and livestock to meet their needs - they now had to give their labour to someone else’s land in order to be paid in money and buy what they needed.

This not only separated people from the land, it also centralised wealth and control in the hands of very few. We might think of it as a precursor to capitalism. 

In Europe, there were brief interruptions to this social and economic structure, such as The Great Plague, when mass population decline meant fewer workers and therefore greater bargaining power and higher wages. In general though, people worked for an enobled elite, quite literally entitled as they owned the land and began to own the means of production.

As this shift unfolded between the 15th and 18th centuries, the subjugation of women was inherent and essential. The role of women became more centred around reproduction and sex. 

This became a way to divide and placate the working classes, particularly men by empowering them and disempowering women. It also became a necessity to control reproduction in order to grow populations - more workers meant more wealth in this fledgling notion of capitalism.

With the proletariat engaged in these gender dynamics, they were far less likely to organise or revolt as they had done many times in the pre-Industrial era. 

Men, meanwhile, began to take on the role of primary earner or ‘breadwinner’, a role which gave them greater economic power and social status than women, whilst still working for the lords and landowners (who were almost exclusively men). 

When capitalism and mass industrialisation arrived in the 18th century, things began to change. Now, men would ‘go to work’ in the new places of labour exchange - factories, mines, shipyards and so on. This further entrenched the gender roles of men as workers and earners, and women as mothers and homemakers. 

At the same time, it created the notion of cohorts of men gathering together in a place of work which, at first, enabled a sense of camaraderie and community but would later became a place of competition and isolation.

Next came a struggle for workers rights, fair pay and good working conditions. Unions, workers councils and campaigners made progress that was further enabled by changes to laws and legislation. The 8-hour workday however, was not just a recognition that workers needed leisure time but also a convenient way to create work shifts for production efficiency and to create a class of consumers - it was no good having masses of workers unable to buy the goods being produced in the economy.

But another important shift happened here. Whereas previously men had worked in close proximity to their families, often within the family home or land, and side by side with their children, now they left their families and spent their days in their places of work. Children now had far less contact with their father, especially sons who might have worked the land each day alongside their father.

As we entered the 20th century, mass work expanded from the ‘blue collar’ to the ‘white collar’, with the latter becoming the aspirational world in which not just the upper and middle classes thrived, but working classes could strive to enter as a means to find greater financial security and the freedom that comes with it. 

Technological advances, new industries and globalisation have transformed the nature of work in the last century or so. Even as recently as the last 20 years, laptops and smartphones, which were once the preserve of senior management and executives, have now become ubiquitous. We now take our work everywhere.

Where has this extraordinary increase in wealth, innovation and technological progress left the modern man? 

Across the world, men are roughly two to three times more likely than women to die by suicide - the rate is higher in wealthier countries. Mental health has worsened and mental illness has increased. 

Addictions to alcohol and other drugs have rocketed and are more common amongst men than in women. 

Physical health has also plummeted with rising obesity and preventable diseases like diabetes - obesity has nearly tripled in the last 40 years.

And alongside all of this, men are still far less likely to refer themselves for support like talking therapy. 

Modern man is simultaneously wealthier, sicker and more impoverished than ever. 

His impoverishment is one of the soul, a degradation which has happened through his enslavement in work that thoroughly bores him, in order to buy things he doesn’t need but might briefly lift this dullness and create a sense of status through consumption. 

Yes we have wealth, status and choice. But what has it cost us?

There is little joy or soul in this modern man, cosseted in this prison. The life force has been drained out of him.

The modern man now enslaves himself. He enmeshes his identity with that of his career and his organisation, becoming almost indistinguishable from his hard-won professional status. 

The Japanese have a term for this: Salary Man, the man who is utterly devoted to his work and his employer. Some ‘salarymen’ literally work themselves to death, a phenomenon known as karōshi.

In Japanese culture, this enmeshment can become so complete that some men take their own lives when separated from their employer by retirement or redundancy. 

In other parts of the world, this enmeshment and void is more commonly experienced as the emptiness that can follow retirement or earlier, in midlife, when a man might begin to feel the absence of meaning in his life despite his success.

Over time, this modern man can become so indistinguishable from his work persona that his wider personality becomes shaped into something quite robotic, functional and bureaucratic.

This is the man we might see barking orders at a waiter, treating family trips as a soulless exercise in planning and logistics, unable to truly relax and experience joy and stillness.

To compensate for this emptiness, his focus on work only intensifies as if the next promotion or next bonus will bring him the joy he craves without realising it. When it comes, it is a brief dopamine hit, experienced through more material possessions. And still the soul withers. 

Thus, he becomes a Convenient Man, an essential ingredient in the formless mass of consumerism and capitalism, an obedient participant in a system that denies his fullest expression and crushes his spirit. 

He is an unwitting devotee to notions of status, accumulation and possessions, all the while believing he has chosen this willingly. Even if he becomes aware of the trap into which he has fallen but has no sense of how he got here or how to rescue himself.

He works, consumes and scrolls his days away, giving away his most precious commodity for free - his attention.

In his recent work on what he describes as ‘techno-feudalism’, Yanis Varoufakis describes how even our leisure time now consists of giving away our precious attention to technology, enriching Big Tech business models. We are, in this sense, never not working for the feudal lords.

Convenient Man lives in the illusion of freedom. He enslaves himself for the benefit of others, all the while believing he is free and therefore, most importantly, asks few questions about the way things are. 

As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes, modern man exploits himself:

“Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation. This is more efficient than allo-exploitation, for the feeling of freedom attends it. The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited. Perpetrator and victim can no longer be distinguished.” 

He seeks to maintain this status quo because he believes it serves him. In this way, he can be manipulated and used by those around him - organisations, advertisers, politicians. 

The most unspeakable things can occur around him and Convenient Man will not only allow them but vote for them, believing he is empowering himself by participating in the ideology.

He will even vote for governments that act against his own interests. This is precisely why he is convenient. 

The great unfolding tragedy is that this path is no longer a solid or stable one. Whereas the plight of the working classes has long been known and largely overlooked, now middle-class men who have given their lives to accumulating wealth find themselves too being squeezed and pressured by stagnating wages and rising costs. 

As economies falter around the world and populism rises, what was once a guarantee of a secure, comfortable life and retirement may no longer exist.

How far then have we truly come since the feudal medieval times? 

We live longer and have more to eat, but are we alive? Are we free?

Are we enriched in any sense other than money and power over those with less than us?

You may recognise Convenient Man in parts of yourself or in others. You may wonder what is to be done? 

What is required, more than ever, is simple to state yet challenging to achieve. To emancipate ourselves from the role of Convenient Man, we must shift our consciousness and that of others around us. Our lives and their lives depend on it.

The environmental pressures and messages all around us stand in our way and suggest otherwise, yet it is clear that few are thriving.

We must question what we have previously held to be true, ideas that may have been imprinted on us at a very early age. 

We must unpick these stories and develop ones that serve us. We must learn our own history more fully and that of others.

We must begin to challenge, prod and poke at the culture and systems around us and simply ask ‘What is really going on? Why is it like this? What other way could it be for me?’

Only when we begin to question what we have taken for granted in terms of what constitutes success and what a good life really is, only then can we begin to truly free ourselves.

And in doing so, we will free others. We will not need to work to become passionate advocates of truth, justice and equality because we will begin to live those notions from deep within us. 

These men, who have unshackled themselves, emancipated themselves from their own tyranny, will not only live in fullness, beauty and joy, but will treat others with more dignity and respect - because they will no longer need to compete with others, dominate them or ignore them. 

Freedom in this sense, is not a static state, but a path to be walked, a practice to be devoted to, an idea to be lived. 

Who were you before the world told you who to be?

“Men need a vision of masculinity that is not just predicated on the thrilling highlights of an outdated romantic narrative – it needs to celebrate the true everyday happiness that comes from stable intimate relationships and a meaningful role in the here and now."

- Grayson Perry

Since first starting our Circles groups for men almost 3 years ago, one theme has been ever-present - a longing for more connection amongst men.

Many men are isolated and feel alone with their experiences - not just their challenges and struggles but also their hopes and their joy.

Even when we have plenty of people in our lives, we can still feel a sense of aloneness because those relationships don’t allow us to express ourselves as we’d like.

This is particularly true of relationships with other men. It’s not more people that we seek, it’s more meaningful connection. An experience of being unashamedly real, open and honest.

We’ve also seen that men feel a deep sense of curiosity and confusion about their role. There is a desire to explore the fundamental question of what it means to be a man.

This is why we’re creating Kinship, a community for men to gather, connect and explore these themes together.

We want to grow a community of men who are unmasking and liberating themselves from the tired roles and narratives that prevent them from living fuller, healthier and more free lives.

Men who want to live in their fullest expression and serve others by doing so.

What this community becomes will be shaped by its members, but here’s our starting point:

1. It’s a place for connection: somewhere to meet other men, with diverse stories & experiences, and who share a desire to lead more fulfilling and meaningful lives.

2. It’s a place for insight & wisdom: we will share thought-provoking and engaging content related to our journey as men and our masculinities drawing on philosophy, science, spirituality, mythology and ancient wisdom.

3. It’s a place for self-reflection: each week, we’ll share a theme or inquiry to provoke, inspire or spark curiosity and conversation.

The rest will emerge over time…

We’ve opened our waiting list and will be launching later this year.

If this feels like a space for you or men in your life, you can find out more here.

It is a tale of masculine wounding, midlife, the relationship with our mothers, finding our purpose, and healing and embracing our power as men.

Let us start with the king. The Fisher King is the last in a long line of kings who are keepers and protectors of the Holy Grail. However, he rules over a decaying and wasted kingdom. Crops won’t grow, churches are empty, the people are in despair. The source of this rot is a wound the King has in his thigh that won’t heal - in some tellings, the wound is in his groin. As we’ll see later, the wound is highly symbolic. 

“The whole land is in desolation, for a land mirrors the condition of its king, inwardly in a mythological dimension, as well as outwardly in the physical world.” [1]

Worse still, the wound is self-inflicted, in some tellings by accident and in others it is a result of his own moral failings. The King spends his days in pain, complaining about his discomfort as he is carried around in a cot. The only thing that brings him any respite is going fishing in the river, hence his Fisher King moniker.

The court jester tells the King that the only thing that will heal his wound and return prosperity to the land are the actions of an innocent fool who asks the ‘right question’ of the King. Many others have asked questions and none have asked the right one. So the King and his kingdom continue to wait in despair for this naive hero…

Now we turn to Parsifal, whose name means ‘pure fool’. He lives in poverty in a rural village, raised by an overbearing and overprotective mother. He knows nothing of his father who was in fact a knight. 

One day, a group of knights enters Parsifal’s village. He is utterly captivated by what he sees, these confident, noble and powerful men on their horses. With typical youthful exuberance and much to his mother’s chagrin, he declares that he too will become a knight.

She reluctantly allows Parsifal to leave, giving him a garment (a kind of undershirt), for him to wear - which he does so for most of his life. Again, this is also highly symbolic.

So Parsifal leaves his village and his mother’s embrace, and undergoes a series of trials and adventures. First, he arrives in the court of King Arthur only to be mocked and thrown out a young upstart.

Arthur’s court, however, has a damsel who has not smiled in years and in legend, only the greatest knight will be able to bring her joy. On meeting the young and innocent Parsifal, this damsel bursts into laughter. Arthur knights Parsifal on the spot and he enters the next chapter of his life in knighthood. 

Next, Parsifal seeks out the most fearsome knight of all, The Red Knight. Because Parsifal is innocent and naive, he has no fear of a much stronger and more experienced knight. He initially attempts to take the knight’s horse and armour but is easily knocked to the ground, and laughed at by The Red Knight. Parsifal however throws a dagger into the Red Knight’s eye, killing him instantly. 

The Red Knight represents “the shadow side of masculinity, the negative, potentially destructive power. To truly become a man the shadow personality must be struggled with, but it cannot be repressed. The boy must not repress his aggressiveness since he needs the masculine power of his Red Knight shadow to make his way through the mature world.” [1]

Thus, through Parsifal this episode teaches us that the anger and aggression present in the masculine must not be avoided nor allowed to go unchecked, but instead must be integrated (we explore this further below).

Newly emboldened and confident, Parsifal begins a series of heroic adventures, rescuing and dazzling fair maidens, and defeating a number of foes - but he keeps an oath to himself to never kill anyone. Instead, he asks all of his defeated foes to swear allegiance to Arthurs Court. [2]

Along the way, Parsifal acquires a mentor, a wise old man called Gournamond. He advises Parsifal that if he is ever in the presence of the Holy Grail, he must ask “Whom does the Grail serve?”. This, we know (but Parsifal does not) is the question that will heal The Fisher King’s wound and restore his kingdom.

This brings us to Parsifal’s first encounter with The Fisher King. One day, in search of somewhere to lodge for the night, Parsifal is directed towards the Grail Castle, a place “just down the road and to the left” [1].

Parsifal follows the directions and finds himself in “the Grail Castle, windows gleaming, knights and ladies greeting him, the splendor of which he had never dreamed of in his life.” [2]

What follows is a great feast and celebration with the king present, and the knights and maidens of his court. The Grail is brought out, but the king is unable to drink from it because of his wounds. At this moment, Parsifal remembers the advice of his wise mentor Gournamond - but he hesitates. He remembers too the advice of his mother before he left home, to never ask too many questions. 

So Parsifal keeps his silence and does not speak the question that would transform everything, although Parsifal is the only person in the kingdom who is unaware of the power of this question.

Soon the ceremony ends and the next morning Parsifal leaves on his horse. The Grail Castle vanishes for it only exists for those who discover it.

Parsifal continues on his travels, experiencing many more heroic adventures, rescuing damsels, vanquishing more foes and sending them to Arthur’s Court. By now, Parsifal is regarded as one of the greatest of all knights. He is summoned to Arthurs Court where a three-day festival commences. Parsifal is a returning hero, celebrated and honoured for his many great deeds over the years. 

At the very peak of the festival though, a “most hideous damsel” appears, riding in on a mule with twisted feet. She promptly “recites to the court all of Parsifal's sins and stupidities, the worst being his inability to ask the healing question in the Grail castle.” [3]. Parsifal is utterly humbled in front of the great audience that has just been celebrating him.

He realises in this moment the new quest he must undertake, the most important quest - to find the Grail Castle again and ask the question.

He also realises that if he is to succeed in his quest, he must now remove the undergarment made for him by his mother, which he has refused to take off all these years. He does so and sets off again. 

It takes Parsifal twenty long years to find the Grail Castle again. He receives directions from a hermit who tells him the castle is just down the road and to the left for “the Grail Castle is always close at hand.” [1]

Parsifal returns to the castle, now with the humility and experience of many years. Again, a feast and celebration is taking place, and again, the Grail is brought out in front of The Fisher King and Parsifal. The time though, Parsifal does not hesitate and asks the question: “Whom does the Grail serve?”

The court erupts in celebration for this is the question they have been waiting for. The question is answered thus: “You, My Lord, the Grail King.” [3]

The Fisher King is instantly healed and health and prosperity begins to return to the kingdom. Parsifal’s quest is finally complete. 

What does all of this mean? Perhaps the themes, characters and symbols in this summary have already resonated in some way. Before reading on, ask yourself which parts of the story or characters you felt a connection to, or felt some recognition of?

We began with The Fisher King and his wound. Although the origin of the wound is not certain, there is a symbolism of where it is located - his upper thigh or groin, the location of his sexual organs. This may suggest his sexual power is diminished but regardless, he has become an ‘impotent’ king and this has impacted his whole kingdom. 

It is notable also that the King spends his days complaining about his wound to those around him, yet seems unable to rouse himself to heal, leaving his court to suffer. This speaks to the many men we might know (or be ourselves), suffering and complaining in vain:

“I doubt if there is a woman in the world who has not had to mutely stand by as she watched a man agonize over his Fisher King aspect. She may be the one who notices, even before the man himself is aware of it, that there is suffering and a haunting sense of injury and incompleteness in him. A man suffering in this way is often driven to do idiotic things to cure the wound and ease the desperation he feels. Usually he seeks an unconscious solution outside of himself, complaining about his work, his marriage, or his place in the world.” [1]

The character of the King himself perhaps represents our truest being or soul - the longer it is misunderstood or unhealed, the longer we live in a barren outer and inner world. It is therefore our work as men to heal our ‘inner court’:

“Mythology teaches us that the king who rules over our innermost court sets the tone and character for that court and thus our whole life. If the king is well, we are well; if things are right inside, they will go well outside. With the wounded Fisher King presiding at the inner court of modern western man we can expect much outward suffering and alienation. And so it is: the kingdom is not flourishing; the crops are poor; maidens are bereaved; children are orphaned. This eloquent language expresses how a wounded archetypal underpinning manifests itself in problems in our external lives.” [1]

What ultimately heals the King? It is the naive fool that is Parsifal. What Parsifal represents is not truly foolishness but the innocent and playful energy within all of us. “A man must consent to look to a foolish, innocent, adolescent part of himself for his cure. The inner fool is the only one who can touch his Fisher King wound.” [1]

To become more whole we invite more of this part of ourselves into our being as men - the parts we probably left behind in childhood as we became ‘serious’ people. Parsifal is a separate character to the Fisher King, and in the same way, we must allow something ‘new’ to emerge or re-emerge within us. Indeed, it is Parsifal’s innocence that is the source of his fearlessness.

“For a man to be truly healed he must allow something entirely different from himself to enter into his consciousness and change him.” [1]

Parsifal himself represent this journey of masculinity from boy to adolescent, into adulthood and later the trials and agonies of midlife. A fundamental part of this is his relationship with his mother. The undershirt garment that is given to Parsifal represent his Mother Complex. In developmental psychology, the role of our mother is vital. She is our first relationship, our original connection to the feminine and the performer of many functions - emotional regulator, protector, source of love. 

And yet, for any man to develop and mature, there must ultimately be a separation from Mother. It is the nature of this separation that is key. If it is a violent split, there may be a psychic wound that remains unhealed and an unhealthy relationship or repression of the feminine might develop. 

On the other hand, if the mother relationship remains tethered in an overbearing or overly attached way, then the boy will never mature into a man, and will likely never separate in order to form his own self and discover his own sources of power and connection. It is this later dynamic that we see in Parsifal - until he realises that he must shed the undershirt and live as himself, trusting his own inner wisdom and guidance. This is the task for all boys and men and rarely comes without some pain, yet is an essential rite.

“No son ever develops into manhood without, in some way, being disloyal to his mother. If he remains with her, to comfort her and console her, then he never gets out of his mother complex. Often a mother will do all she can to keep her son with her. One of the most subtle ways is to encourage in him the idea of being loyal to her; but if he gives in to her completely then she often finds herself with a son severely injured in his masculinity. The son must ride off and leave his mother, even if it appears to mean disloyalty, and the mother must bear this pain.” [1]

In Parsifal, we also see the development and channelling of aggression. He defeats the Red Knight who represents the inner anger and aggression that perhaps sits within all of us. What this symbolises is not the defeat of aggression but the integration of it. 

Anger and aggression are often demonised in modern culture but are in fact essential for us to become functioning adults, if we are able to understand, integrate and channel these emotions healthily. One example of this is Martin Luther King who described ‘righteous indignation’ as a form of anger essential to making positive change for humanity and society.

In Parsifal’s realisation that he must return to the Grail Castle and the twenty years it takes him, we see the midlife journey - the discovery of a true and meaningful mission, and the long journey to accomplish it.

In the first half of life, we’ve vanquished many foes and won many battles but now we must find something beyond the winning, warring and competing. For most of us, this is a difficult journey fraught with confusion, angst, self-doubt and loneliness. 

And yet if we are to self-actualise in the way that Parsifal does, we must undertake this midlife journey with vigour and intention, or otherwise see out our days as hollow and unfulfilled men.

Longer tellings of this story also include much of Parsifal’s relationships with the women he meets along the way, and his shifting relationship with his own masculine and feminine, ultimately integrating these parts.

Parsifal’s story and that of The Fisher King are ultimately ones of male individuation, the acknowledgement, healing and integration of these separate parts of our selves. This is our quest as men.

And the Grail Castle itself? It exists only when we seek to find it and yet it is always there, ‘just down the road and to the left’. Perhaps this represents the journey from our heads to our hearts?

To explore this myth in more depth, Robert Johnson’s book ‘He’, referenced here, is an excellent telling and exploration of the symbolism within it.

References:

[1] Johnson, R.A. (2009). He : Understanding Masculine Psychology. New York: Harpercollins E-Books.

‌[2] Anon, (n.d.). The Story of Parsifal and the Grail Myth – Dr. Jaime G. Corvalan Foundation. [online] Available at: https://portalofconsciousness.com/the-story-of-parsifal/.

‌[3] The myth of Parsifal. (n.d.). Available at: https://marillesblog.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/the-myth-of-parsifal.pdf

Kinship: a community for men.

Journeying and discovering together is much richer, enjoyable and connecting than going it alone

We hear often from men in our groups that they would like to have an ongoing space for connecting with other men, in a space for real and open conversation.

In response to this, we’re creating Kinship, a community where we share stories, insights and tools for our development as men. It’s also a place to connect with others, share experiences and chat - as if we’re sitting around a real campfire.

It’s contribution-based so you pay-what-you-can or nothing at all.

We’ll be launching soon. If you’re interested, you can find out more here or reply to this post.

We played on boggy, uneven pitches all over south London. They were mostly on public parks so not maintained by groundskeepers. When it rained heavily, they became marshes of thick, ankle-deep mud. In winter, they would freeze so hard that they became like ice rinks that were treacherous to run on. And in summer, they became rock-hard dusty plateaus that would take your skin off when you slid for tackles, the friction burns taking weeks to heal.

The changing rooms at our home pitches were dilapidated wooden huts with no heating and often no functioning lighting. In winter they were freezing cold and always dark and dank. The showers were filthy and dribbled water reluctantly from two ancient shower heads (which is why we never used them). The toilets are best left to the imagination. 

Injuries were common, in part due to the pitches. Ambulances were a relatively common sight. All manner of joints, muscles and bones were broken and damaged (I had surgery on four occasions and visited the local hospital many more times). There were threats of violence from some teams, and every now and then, actual violence. 

If this all sounds awful, I can understand why you’d feel that. But let me tell you, those Sunday mornings were the highlight of my week and some of the best times of my life.

I remember the first time I played for this team. I walked into the changing rooms with my work pal who was the captain and had invited me to join. There was an atmosphere I recognised immediately of recurring jokes, poking fun at each other, recalling old stories and observations about the football results from the day before.

But something was different. There was an unspoken respect amongst all the ‘banter’. No jokes were overly harsh or personal, they were usually something the object of the joke could participate in themselves. There was an easy back and forth. Everyone was able to contribute, rather than a few dominant voices. 

As a newcomer, I was treated in the same way as my friend, the captain, and other players who had been part of the team for years. I later realised this sense of equality was part of the culture of the club. Length of service did not confer any special treatment in our team.

When my mate moved away from London a few months later, I was asked to be captain of the team. Years later, I reflected on the fact that newcomers to the team still experienced the same thing as I did on that first occasion - they would be welcomed, included in the conversation and jokes, and would witness me being treated exactly the same way as them.

We had strong-willed, confident characters throughout our team but egos were kept in check by each other. Fairness was more important than hierarchy. It created a sense of camaraderie. Men who joined our team usually stayed part of it for years.

After each game, we’d usually head to the pub, celebrating or commiserating for a short while and watching a live game together. This would soon give way to more interesting conversation about all manner of things. As a group, we were diverse in many ways - a mixture of races, nationalities, professions and interests. 

A girlfriend of one of the players nicknamed us ‘pseudo-lads’, observing that we were almost playacting at being these hard-men Sunday league footballers on the pitch and then would head to the pub where we were just as likely to discuss politics, music, philosophy, obscure comedy, literature and films, as we were to discuss football.

It was a common sight to see someone sitting on the edge of the conversation reading a broadsheet with a pint or explaining their understanding of Marxism, whilst others were debating whether that red card at Old Trafford was correct.

We adopted the moniker ‘pseudo-lads’ with self-deprecation and affection. It suited us.

On the pitch was quite different to off it. That became an arena for us to battle on and, occasionally, a canvas for something beautiful. The standard in our league became quite good, and over the few years from when I joined, so did our team. The league had a few current or former semi-professionals, and lots of players who had been in the youth ranks of big professional teams.

As we became better as a team, attracting more talented players, we started to see some success. Over a few years, we became not a just a good team but a very good one. By now, we had a proper training schedule over the summer, new kits, an established pre-match and warm-up routine. But most of all, we became a very organised, connected and effective team in a way that felt truly magical. 

We came to know each other as players so well that we moved instinctively, knowing where each other would be. Passes began to be played into spaces where we knew others would move to. We had routines and rituals for set-pieces. We were not, overall, the most talented team in the league but we were the most ruthlessly organised and committed. 

We began to reach cup finals. And then, for a glorious couple of years, we peaked as a team. We won the league with an incredible defensive record, and almost won it twice in a row. At one point, we went unbeaten for over a year. This was unheard of in our league.

To be part of this was thrilling but what felt most special about this, the thing I still reflect on and long for, is the sense of camaraderie, connection and brotherhood in the heat of competitive game.

In those rare moments, we were individual bodies moving like one living thing, in pursuit of something that, for those ninety minutes, was a mission that meant everything. A passer by observing us would likely have seen a group of sweaty men raggedly running around a pitch, the ball occasionally in play. But to us, we were engaged in a titanic struggle, a complex battle for glory against a sworn foe.

We were a diverse group of men operating like a well-oiled machine, a single organism with one hive mind, moving and responding to each other automatically in some magical way. It felt timeless and all encompassing in those moments, to have surrendered to something only possible within a group of others. 

We were aggressive and powerful but with control and without malice. We knew it wasn’t anything like real war yet we felt like warriors. We had each others backs. Every Sunday, we were a temporary community of brothers.

Does a sports team like this perform the same function as a deep and meaningful conversation about our feelings? Can it save marriages, make us better parents, enable us to deal with our darkest shit?

Maybe, maybe not but it can mean something - something essential and unspoken. Because what it did provide for me was an intimacy, a love and community amongst men that might not be verbalised but is felt, briefly, for those few muddy hours on a weekend morning. We had a shared mission, we had an ethic and we had each other.

And as our bond grew, we did provide some support and succour for each other outside the realm of Sunday mornings. Over time, we shared the highs and lows of each others lives - weddings, babies, break-ups, mental health challenges, unemployment - supporting and celebrating in the ways we knew how.

Tragically, one of our team died playing football, an undiagnosed heart defect taking his life. As a team, we attended his funeral and the wake, his mother expressing her gratitude to have us there whilst we remarked on how many lives he had touched. I recall a sense of us not quite knowing how to express our emotions or how to be around others in this place of mourning - but we were there, together, paying our respects to a lost teammate, doing our best as young men.

Communities and spaces like my former team are not easy to find for men. Contemporary Western society has seen a decline in ‘third spaces’ for men, places that provide a setting for socialising and interacting outside the roles men might inhabit at work and at home. 

“Surely the greatest tragedy for men in regard to the feminine principle is that their fear alienates them from their own anima, the principle of relatedness, feeling and connection to the life force. This alienation from self obliges alienation from other men as well.”

- James Hollis

Competitive sports like football are often easily derided as ‘boys being boys’, and whilst they may not offer everything for a healthy life, they do offer some essential parts of it. A place, for example, for aggression and competition, two qualities that have become somewhat problematic and misunderstood. Whilst these may have an undesired shadow side, they are also fundamentally normal instincts and healthy ones if expressed in a controlled and focussed environment. 

Martial arts like boxing and ju jitsu are examples of this, practices where aggression is required but only with the discipline and control that is essential to train. Football, whilst less controlled as an environment, also requires a high degree of discipline and self-control. Even at Sunday league level, a player with uncontrolled aggression will not last very long, and nor will a team that acts in the same way.

What my former team provided though was much more than competition and aggression - there was a sense of belonging. Walking into that changing room every Sunday was like putting on a favourite old coat, comforting yet also coupled with a mild thrill.

There is a deep desire for community and belonging amongst men. Drawing on his life as a war correspondent and researcher, Sebastian Junger describes in his book ‘Tribe’, the perversity of many modern young men going to war in horrific circumstances only to find a level of connection and community that they cannot find in everyday civilian life: “A modern soldier returning from combat - or a survivor of Sarajevo - goes from the kind of close-knit group that humans evolved for, back into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, and personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good. Even if he or she is part of a family, that is not the same as belonging to a group that shares resources and experiences almost everything collectively. Whatever the technological advances of modern society - and they're nearly miraculous - the individualized lifestyles that those technologies spawn seem to be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit.”

Loneliness and disconnection is killing men, and it is becoming a growing social issue. ‘Male loneliness’ might conjure up an idea of lone men sitting on park benches or sitting in a basement playing video games, yet it is also true of middle-class, wealthy men who go to work in offices, return to nice homes each evening, and spend time with their family and friends engaged in activities that might not fill their cup. 

“Loneliness isn’t just about being on your own, you can be lonely and surrounded by people. Your loneliness can arise from not being able to talk about the things that are important to you.”

- John Paul Davies (psychotherapist)

Loneliness is not the absence of people, it is the absence of meaningful connection, and it is this that is hard for many men to find in their lives in adequate quantities. One of the great ironies of patriarchy is that even for the minority of men who become the dominant figures within this system of privilege, it can be an isolating and lonely experience.

Perhaps one way to challenge this hegemony is to begin with what many men are lacking and longing for - community. In our men’s groups, we see this expressed over and over, spaces and relationships that allow intimacy, non-judgment and connection - real, meaningful connection through shared experiences.

Perhaps all men have a boy inside them that still wants to play in the mud with his friends, those times when we were part of a shared endeavour for no purpose other than spending intimate time together.

How might we cultivate more community amongst the men in our lives? How might we find it ourselves?

I’m fortunate in my life and work to connect with people in all manner of ways, through conversation, embodiment, nature and culture. All are valuable. All play their own role.

Yet I will always have a sense of longing for those too-rare experiences of brotherhood and male community, places where we might go deep and other places where we might remain shallow, but always with a sense of community.

And I will forever have waves of nostalgia when I catch a whiff of muscle rub or wet muddy grass, those Sunday mornings with my footballing brothers.

Above an elegance of snow, beneath

a silk-blue sky a brotherhood of four

birds. Can you mistake us?

To sun, to feast, and to converse

and all together—for this I have abandoned

all my other lives.

(from ‘Waxwings’ by Robert Francis)

Our community for men.

We hear often from men in our groups that they would like to have an ongoing space for connecting with other men, in a space for real and open conversation.

In response to this, we’ve created Kinship, a community where men can meet monthly for meaningful conversations hosted by us, and supported by selected content and resources that invite reflection and self-discovery.

You can find out more here or reply to this email. Let’s do this together, not alone.

Check in on someone.

For World Mental Health Day this week, Norwich City FC released this powerful and moving short film (<3 minutes).

It has prompted me to contact some people in my life who might appreciate it. I urge you to watch and share it.

Imagine also that the organisation has undertaken a number of ways of addressing these issues: women in leadership programs, targets for gender diversity, allyship programs, flexible work policies, active communities & networks for women, non-binary & trans people, gender equality informed policies & processes.

This, hopefully, represents a progressive and employee-focussed organisation, keen to address gender inequality. It, in fact, represents many modern organisations. And yet major challenges persist, not least with overall employee wellbeing in serious decline as well as ongoing gender inequalities. 

Now imagine an identical organisation - 50% male, same challenges, same policies. Except for one difference. This second organisation also has a community for men. In this community, there are spaces for real and open conversation, where men can share their stories and experiences, and be heard, supported and even challenged. 

They can share things they might be struggling with or find challenging, and also things that inspire them or bring them joy. They become accustomed to speaking with more honesty and vulnerability, and being truly heard by others. 

They also become accustomed to engaging in a dialogue where they come from a position of curiosity and not knowing, exploring things together as a group, rather than ‘fixing’. 

They can explore complex and sensitive topics, knowing they can make missteps and will not be judged but also that their worldview might be challenged by hearing a range other perspectives. They practice being in communion with a group of men without competing or seeking to win.

Which organisation would you prefer to work in? 

Which organisation do you think most people, regardless of gender, would prefer to work in?

The initiatives and policies in the first organisation are key to creating change, providing support and guardrails. The emphasis here is on addressing gender bias and inequality through the tackling and dismantling of structural barriers, enabling women to progress through focussed support and inviting men to contribute to this change through allyship.

What this first organisation doesn’t address is that men also need spaces and engagement because men also suffer, struggle and need support. The second organisation, meanwhile, recognises that by providing this sort of engagement with men, they are supporting not just men but everyone in the organisation.

We all live in an interconnected and symbiotic system of relationships. Engaging those 50 men is an act of humanity for everyone. It’s about understanding how we’ve arrived here and addressing the challenge on that basis - at the root, not the surface. 

And where is ‘here’? A point in history where there is still gender inequality and violence against women, declining mental health, homophobia and growing transphobia, racism, destruction of the planet and - men struggling and taking their own lives at horrific levels.

Much of this ‘here’ may have come at the hands of men, which in turn is largely a result of their own slavery to patriarchy and unhealed suffering.

And here, perhaps, lies the resistance. In recognising that the behaviour of men may be coming from their own wounds and repressed lives, we are required to develop some degree of empathy. 

Just as our perspective on an angry child shifts when we learn they have been neglected or abused, so it also shifts when we accept that men too, on the whole, are living under the tyranny of patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity.

As just as we might not immediately embrace the angry child with compassion, this does not mean we must immediately have loving kindness towards men, as a group that many feel are privileged or oppressive. After all, few of us can channel Mandela, Gandhi or the Dalai Lama.

It does, however, mean that if we really want to get to the root of addressing the inequality and challenges between genders, we must stop seeing it as a zero-sum game. 

We must recognise that many men are also suffering and wounded, often in less visible ways. We must recognise and advocate that men too need space, support, acknowledgment, and most of all, community.

After all, can we realistically expect men to advocate and show up for others, when they are still acting from their own unhealed wounds, unacknowledged suffering and the skewed expectations of masculinity drilled into them since they were boys?

The poetry & beauty of men

We often see and hear men express themselves in the most beautiful and tender ways.

These are not artists, musicians or poets. They’re everyday men who, like all of us, also have the capacity for rich emotional lives.

This week, a man shared a gorgeous poem to open our weekly Circle.

An alternative to ‘toxic masculinity’

This teacher and gender researcher shares an alternative to a term that has become ubiquitous, misused and detached from its original meaning.

In exploring masculinity and what it means to be a man, the very nature of the inquiry invites us to consider what ideas and stories we might hold about gender, often without knowing it. Where did our notion of ‘manhood’ and ‘masculinity’ begin? 

Many of these ideas stretch back to the earliest stories told by humans. These myths hold rich meaning and power. Myths in their original telling are vivid stories that show us, often in exaggerated form, how early humans viewed themselves and their place in the world. What we see now may only be echoes of these myths and yet in exploring the beginnings of these strands, we can reveal something important. 

These stories are not anchored in the past, they are passed down and enacted over and over again in the present as a ‘collective unconscious’ (Jung), a vast record of human experience which we are inextricably part of.

In exploring these stories, we may experience a sense of knowing that defies rational explanation. Why, for example, does the experience or mere idea of sitting around a campfire evoke something in so many men, even those who have never experienced it?

Exploring myth connects us to a narrative lineage, and reminds us of our place in a much bigger story that began long ago and will continue long beyond us. We may recognise that we are performing the same roles and dramas over and over again, just with different actors. 

The present cultural influence of myth is everywhere - to watch or experience modern stories and characters is often to relive ancient myth and mythical ideas. When we experience modern masculine roles, in films for example, we are experiencing archetypal characters and ideas that were originally represented in myth. Public figures such as politicians, business leaders and sportsmen all enact mythical roles and become modern mythical figures. 

These modern figures, as well as myths themselves, influence our ideas of ‘man’ and ‘manhood’, sometimes providing us with archetypal templates which we might take up without knowing it.

It is the felt experience of exploring myth that often speaks for itself, a recognition of a truth in the story even though it is clearly fantastical. Socrates said that when we hear something truly wise, it is like remembering something we had forgotten, that we are born with some innate knowing that becomes obscured.

Myth can offer the same remembering and a deeper exploration of what ‘man’ and ‘masculinity’ might mean for us now.

“You could say that myths are lies that tell the truth. They're narratives that can never be proven, but they reveal the inner underlying story of the soul.” (Michael Meade)

The Myth of Prometheus

The popular understanding of Prometheus is as the figure who created mankind itself, having been delegated this task by the gods along with his brother, Epimetheus. His brother, a foolish character whose name means ‘afterthought’, bungles this task, creating humans without the great gifts and physical prowess of animals, defenceless and pathetic. 

Prometheus, a deeply wise figure whose name means ‘forethought’, steps in to amend his brother’s work. He seeks to make man superior to the animals, creating them as upright figures on two feet. And then, in the great act he is most known for, he steals fire from the gods and gives it to mankind: ‘And now, though feeble and short-lived, Mankind has flaming fire and therefrom learns many crafts.’

Doubling down on his devotion to men, Prometheus ordains that the best part of animal meat will be kept for men, whilst the leftover bones and fat will offered to the gods on the altars - a heretical act. Worse still, he establishes this idea by tricking Zeus, disguising entrails and fat as healthy meat, which Zeus duly chooses.

This enrages the gods, most of all Zeus, the greatest of all the gods. His first act of vengeance is to create women because, so far, there were only men on the earth. He creates Pandora, a sweet maiden and “beautiful disaster” who is sent to captivate the men on earth in scorn for Prometheus’ passion for them. 

In another version of the story, Pandora is sent to earth with a box full of plagues and horrors. She is sent first to Epimetheus, who is warned by Prometheus not to accept gifts from the gods but ignores him. Eventually, ‘Pandora’s Box’ is unwittingly opened, a result of Pandora’s feminine curiosity.

Here, just like Eve in the Garden of Eden, we see women positioned as unwitting temptresses and disruptors of the great project of men.

Next, Zeus has Prometheus chained to a rock for eternity. Every day an eagle flies to Prometheus and pecks out his liver, an excruciating act of torture. Every night, his liver heals, ready for the eagle the following day. And yet Prometheus never regrets his actions in creating modern mankind.

In Prometheus’ story, we see prominently themes of power and betrayal amongst men. Prometheus is taking power from the gods to give to men, and in the process, betraying his friend and ally, Zeus. 

Prometheus is saying that not only are men worthy of this great power, but that he too is worthy as the arbiter and executor of this deed. In this we might see a sense of nobleness and rebellion, but also folly and arrogance, although he is usually presented as the former.

Prometheus’ creations go on to use this power in ways both wise and unwise, creative and destructive. Power has been given without the equivalent wisdom and responsibility. 

In Prometheus then, we see many traits, some conflicting with each other: trickster, troublemaker, freedom seeker, rebel, defiant one, optimist, wise man, fool. 

We see a noble and loving belief in men and mankind, and yet also their origin as creatures made to be superior to animals, deserving of great power and capable of deceit to obtain it. 

The role of women is clear - they are a punishment to men and mankind. They are relegated to an inferior status in the very beginnings of Prometheus’s story, a threat to his creations. “From her [Pandora], the first woman, comes the race of women, who are an evil to men, with a nature to do evil”. 

And yet we might wonder what mankind might have looked like in this myth were curiosity and humility not cast as feminine qualities? This aspect of the story seems to suggest that curiosity is an untrustworthy distraction that takes men away from the great missions and tasks they must undertake.

In the modern day, we see Prometheus-type figures in the most well-known business leaders. Figures like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos seem to channel this archetype of harnessing or taking the powers of the gods, perhaps seeing themselves as gods. Indeed, the term ‘titans’ is often invoked about tech billionaires. 

The great modern scientists are also often depicted as Promethean figures. Most recently, the film ‘Oppenheimer’ (based on a book titled ‘American Prometheus’) told the story of Robert Oppenheimer’s creation of the atomic bomb, a contemporary ‘stealing fire from the gods’, and is himself later publicly punished for years. In a divergence from the original myth however, Oppenheimer memorably foresees his ‘sin’ at Alamo, reciting the Baghdad Gita with himself as Vishnu, ‘the destroyer of worlds’.

The Prometheus myth is a deeply compelling one as a story of the origins of men and women, with much that feels relevant today. There is a complexity, nuance and duality to Prometheus’ character that exists in all of us, and yet a modern look at his story might question his wisdom. He’s the god of foresight - but what did he foresee in his own story?

References:

Hamilton, E. (2013). Mythology. New York: Little, Brown.

‌National Museums Liverpool. (n.d.). Prometheus: Stealing Fire from the Gods. [online] Available at: https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/world-museum/greek-myths-and-legends/prometheus-stealing-fire-gods.

‌Greek Myths & Greek Mythology. (2014). The Myth of Prometheus, myth of fire stolen by Prometheus. [online] Available at: https://www.greekmyths-greekmythology.com/prometheus-fire-myth/.