John Wise

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.”

I often forget to use the word discernment while lamenting much of popular culture, which irks me. Maybe that makes me appear arrogant that with blanket statements I lay out my screed against so many things that entertain the masses. But I can’t help but see a correlation between what the average person consumes and the general malaise that afflicts our country. We cannot consume a diet of pure junk food and simultaneously have a fit body. We cannot listen to and learn English exclusively and claim we understand Chinese. If we never drive a car, ride a bike, or transport ourselves in any manner besides walking, we cannot put ourselves in the seat of a jet and claim we know how to fly. But this is effectively exactly what we do when we voice our opinions about complex subjects.

One does not learn from the Sons of Anarchy, Call of Duty, Lord of the Rings, or Sean Hannity without a healthy portion of discernment gleaned from vast reading and conversation about a breadth of subjects. While we may be very well entertained and even have our imaginations finding inspiration, these pablums are not the keys to enlightenment or even rudimentary knowledge.

When I was a child, I watched the Marx Brothers and especially loved the Harpo character. His extreme silliness was balanced with the most tender and passionate harp playing, showing me a sophisticated skill. Likewise, his brother Chico who played a kind of doltish fool and Harpo’s keeper, relied on his skill to “Get one over,” and then, in an instant, he’d sit down at the piano and demonstrate mad skills. A few years later, I’d be watching the Six Million Dollar Man and its formulaic nonsense where in addition to getting the bad guys, our hero would also do some small act of kindness for someone less fortunate, showing the audience that this half-man half-machine has some deep-seated humanity that inspired him to do good.

As the 1980s rolled around, characters became much more one-sided and simple; good guys were always good, and bad guys were really bad. I had to turn away from the medium, which was easy as books were bringing me into seeing a side of thought and reason I’d never seen in mass media. From Antonin Artaud, Kierkegaard, and Camus to Lautremont, Bukowski, and Schopenhauer, I stumbled into an unseen universe of potentiality that was non-existent in the well-spelled-out worlds of solid conclusions portrayed on TV, in the movies, and videogames. Initially, I didn’t find the archaic forms of electronic media to be dated or offensive; I was simply discerning between platforms as I sought out knowledge. The more I thought I was learning, the more I wondered why so many others felt the unrelenting need for mindless entertainment. As time went on and people like Stephen Hawking, Terrence McKenna, and David Deutsch stretched my ability to comprehend reality, I began resenting the damage I felt popular media was inflicting on our population at large.

I’ve heard more times than I can remember how the burden of existence affords the masses the justification to turn off their brains. It’s as though having children, getting married, owning a pet, and developing a career are forms of torture that the unwitting victim didn’t understand would be such a heavy responsibility to carry. So armed with a beer and the remote control or game controller, people retreat to a quiet corner to witness decay and misfortune as the media sorts the winners and losers.

Meanwhile, I have choices to make that allow me to discern what kinds of books I’ll read, what hobbies I’ll invest in, and where I’d like to travel for the sake of exploration. This human responsibility should NOT be taken lightly as we are the only species on earth that have the option to study things from the infinitesimally small ones found in quarks to trying to comprehend the universe and the things that exist between them. Angst hammers at my frontal lobe when I confront the reality that, otherwise, reasonable people cannot set aside 30 minutes a day for contemplation of self or the study of things outside their normal purview. I’d like to insist that my curiosity is normal and need to learn is a necessity, but the America I’ve grown up in cannot discern the difference between a healthy amount of desire for education and the celebration of the cessation of all things intellectual.

There have been moments when I thought I needed to get out, that my routine might slip into the overbearingly mundane and lead me into boredom. This plague situation, that demanded I stay home, stopped my wandering, as it has for so many others on our planet. In this confinement, I’ve lamented how restricted I feel at times, like the proverbial hamster on the treadmill. If only I could return to wandering, I wouldn’t feel so constrained, goes my thinking.

I’m at the point where I can see that the freedom to go where I wanted was simply a kind of illusion. My perception had me believing that the larger breadth of where I moved about was key to my happiness and that being at home was to be loathed. The reality is that my typical exploits were essentially no different than the moments I’m now living through. So, what changed? I stopped driving various and alternating streets I relied on to mix up the routine and was easily able to choose different locations where I’d shop, have coffee, eat breakfast, go to lunch, and share dinner with Caroline.

Now that I look at it, I was using the car to vary my direction and destination to prevent myself from seeing just how routine those actions were. In reality, I was on a quite similar treadmill built on my own delusion. I still have breakfast, coffee, lunch, and dinner, and, with less frequency, I go shopping. Without all the driving to add variety to my routine. In this sense, I was trying to avoid what Blaise Pascal had famously written back in 1654: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Yet, it is me sitting alone that brings me some of my greatest joy when I’m writing.

If I’m honest with myself, I must admit that aside from vacations and weekend getaways, my life was operating on well-worn paths that were just as plied as the smaller boundary our legs limit us to these days. So I must reconcile that my life, in fact, is not restricted at all but profoundly enhanced, aside from the vacation thing, as I now have more quiet time to spend in a room exploring my thoughts.

How else is it better? Caroline and I have been eating healthier for the past five months than during the previous 30 years. We cook at home, and besides bottled pasta sauce on our spaghetti squash, use nearly no processed foods. I even make my own cereal and vanilla extract, while Caroline has taken to baking various types of bread using dark rye, whole wheat, and even rye chops. We are spending an inordinate amount of time together compared to any other moment in our long relationship, and I can honestly proclaim that we are both incredibly happy about this aspect of being at home. Oh, in addition to the diminished ability to travel, our face-to-face social life with others obviously took a big hit, which is certainly a negative.

All-in-all, though, there is a silver lining to us being dragged out of the rat race, and that is we have this opportunity to explore how and why we are doing what we are now doing, and we are asking ourselves if the way we were living before actually had an advantage over our current situation. The longer this goes on, I think others will start to explore these questions on deeper levels and may also come to the conclusion that our time with ourselves and immediate loved ones is a kind of luxury that, in a different age was the norm.

Of course, this is nothing new as the existentialists were addressing these issues for the past 160 years or so, but now the concept is moving further out of the halls of academia and into our living rooms as the average person finds greater time to reconsider the purpose of things. Kierkegaard started the conversation about the futility of existence back in the mid-19th century, which died in 1960 with Sartre, coinciding with our graduation out of the post-World War II enlightenment, where social issues and civil liberties moved to center stage. The decline of education started around that time, initiated by those who wanted to contain dissent by effectively changing the conversation away from asking how and why to one of quiet pacification and finding meaning through consumption instead of exploring knowledge.

For 50 years, we’ve put the evolution of the mind on hold while we chased the dream of the 1% that understood that collecting ten cents each from 5 billion consumers who needed a pair of shoes or a VCR to be happy was better than trying to corral 200 million people who thought they desired equality. Now we are face-to-face with the realization that we’ve neglected a social and civil society which also means a ruling class grew ever more distant from fair governance. Our sense of community was replaced with fierce individualism as greed became our god. In this environment, we are now poles apart and angry with each other.

I have to wonder how many others are in this boat and are uncertain about where their happiness is and if this new existence can deliver the quality of life, they thought they were experiencing before. Then, once this new routine has been normalized and we are accustomed to making the majority of our meals, working from home, having our children learn online, and coming to rely on more online shopping, will we face the way things had been with dread should they threaten a return? Even after adjusting to these life-changing conditions, we still have to reckon with our dysfunctional government and education system that, at least for now, takes a back seat to our survival.

So, I don’t know how life can go back, but then again, there are those who are not adapting at all and are insistent that they will not budge from the routines in which they’ve grown crusty. But just because there is a plurality of a population resistant to change and their angst is being exploited by a media hungry for drama and a government desiring a fixed status quo, this hopefully won’t mean they are able to put the breaks on our next giant leap forward. Regarding my own personal leap forward, I still cannot see a clear path ahead, so I’ll just continue to plod along on this road of discovery as I try to sit quietly in my room while the plague rages on outside.