My internalized and externalized violence is a reflection of not having my father’s love. I feared my father’s abuse, his neglect, and his wrath. I didn’t know his tenderness or his need for it, yet in retrospect, it screamed out. His idolization of strong male figures, from Elvis Presley’s crooning Love Me Tender to Frank Sinatra with his tough-guy songs of love, should have let me know there was a soft, passionate side to my father, but I was too young to understand that. The pathos of James Dean and Marlon Brando was a mirror to that generation, picturing the man inside who was howling out to be someone and to be accountable for his inner turmoil.
My generation looked to the broken relationship between Luke and Darth Vader, the son trying to be strong and to remain faithful to himself while his father is overwhelmed by rage and violence tearing through his heart. What Luke must learn is that the Force is love. Luke taps into the love that courses through the universe as he tries to defeat the dark father who occupies a corner in the shadows of Luke’s soul. It starts to become obvious that this anguish is a condition of men across the generations.
We rely on the allegories found in religion that we must look to God for love; God is the Force. The neglect from our fathers doesn’t allow us to function fully, and so we lash out, ensuring others know our anguish. Reaching for a holy spiritual being, we are asking, begging, for acceptance and guidance, but often, the damage done is already so ingrained in our fabric that getting over ourselves and trusting the other is a gulf too wide to overcome without a time of healing in which others invest that trust and love in us that was missing in our childhood.
Our fascination with the strong man gives us the father hero missing from our youth. We search for the example of the man who could have loved us and yet had a steady patience and hand. In politics, we found Barack Obama a caring, nurturing father whom an intolerant faction of our society needed to emasculate and hate for showing them care when their hatred was already too deeply ingrained. With Donald Trump, we have a father who is condoning the anger of men to lash out at the perceived crimes against their happiness. Trump’s flippant lack of concern and demonstrations of belligerent hostility are the salve that legitimizes other men’s desire to continue the cycle of hurt.
We equate love with the feminine and hate with the male. While we can try to live with this, we often turn to acts of self-defeat by physically harming others, using them, and abusing ourselves with drugs, alcohol, and other means to avoid seeing ourselves for who we are. With love equated with the feminine and a perception of weakness, we subsequently bare our fangs against homosexuality as that takes the male love we subconsciously seek a step too far. Instead, some opt for a deep, loving relationship with a deity we cannot physically show or be seen to be in love with.
Our ideas of what love is have been broken and reduced to the carnal. Only when we possess the other and command them under our grip do we start to believe they might be there for us. We are afraid to let go of love once we own it, as our hearts don’t believe we can survive another act of neglect against our souls. On the other hand, women know that within their community, they can turn to one another for empathy; through their hugs, they find comfort and relief. Their strength must come from within and from those in their social circle, as they do not typically have the physical means to enter combat with men. They are always learning to endure their own hardship of having been born a woman.
A man must face his isolation as a solitary combatant in his world of rage; he must also accept the need to battle his fellow man so that love will not be found there either. His only solace is to find someone who loves him deeply or to look to God to share the hug of compassion. But man often cannot accept the trust to be found in love when he intuitively knows that the person he strikes emotionally or physically may always harbor resentment that chips away at the trust required for love to grow.
So he is forced to go it alone. Without a community and alone outside the tribe, we shiver and resent our weakness. Should we survive many cold nights alone among our fellow beasts we will congratulate ourselves with the narcissistic self-love that can only appeal to those who have known deep societal rejection.
When the fabric of society is torn asunder, and the egoistic means of elevating one’s self becomes the ultimate demonstration of strength, we’ve likely pushed the anti-mensch onto a pedestal that our species must topple if we are to survive our worst tendencies. Think Hitler, Nero, Attila the Hun, and Stalin.
This then raises the question: How do we decouple love from weakness and show men how to be fathers and husbands instead of monsters?
What about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus? Did this monster, the artificial son of man and distant progeny of woman, recognize a need for love only to inherently and early on know he’d been kicked out of the nest as a kind of living abortion? Is this allegory a reflection of an eternal recurrence afflicting humanity across the ages? Are we creating our own monsters every time we bring one more neglected child into being?
Then what of the hypocrisy of feigning concern for the unborn child while making the living child’s life unbearable? Maybe we can delude ourselves into a myth that this child, that will have never existed, might have been the perfect one, that we tossed the weaker one from the nest before we knew the strengths of the two? We instinctively know that both children are doomed due to the broken and malicious world where man fails to find love, and so what we do not kill in the womb, we are willing to sacrifice to the machine of war, and when that beast is not present, we create the mechanism of violence within our culture to eliminate the child that should have been aborted too.
Our guilt for being remorseless is manifested in our bowing before God while confessing our sins, though simultaneously deriving power from our ruthlessness. The more we amass, the better we can explain our sociopathic tendencies as our stuff confirms our wisdom of having made the right decisions; hence, our narcissism takes root, validating our callousness. Wealth ends up being the greatest violence perpetrated against our species as men try to resolve their sense of not being loved nor being willing to be loved after a lifetime of internal violence. This is our Amor fati.
Again, what of women in this tumultuous world? They are the real strength as they go on with the task of creating life and opportunity while enduring the agony of male domination, suppression, and an unwieldy biological form in constant revolt. It is their modicum of unrelenting love that has survived evolution and continues to give hope that we may yet overcome our base natures as wild beasts. Their tender caresses and hugs, when they pull us close to feel a moment of calm, might be the real superpower that James Dean was referring to when he said, “Only the gentle are ever really strong.”