He That Wasteth His Father
Freud says your dad has to die for you to become a man. Modern psychology says you have to be a huge pussy.
“He that wasteth his father, and chaseth away his mother, is a son that causeth shame, and bringeth reproach.”
Proverbs 19:25
Freud said that “a man has to kill his father in order to become a man.” Or maybe he said that “a man doesn’t become a man until his father dies.” One of those two.
Jung agreed with the stipulation that the “death” of the father is symbolic in nature; our father dies when we stop seeing him as an immutable infallible entity and begin seeing him as a human. We must “kill” the father in our minds to become a man.
I’ve always liked this as a therapeutic exercise. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to kill my father (or anyone), nor do I want my dad to die, but at least the prospect of going on a mind-quest to hunt down my dad Predator-style seems like a “doable” mental exercise. Especially in comparison to the hijinks that positive psychology puts us up to.
Modern positive psychology pretends to ask very simple tasks of us:
“First learn to love yourself.”
“You’ve got to accept yourself”
“It’s time to let go of that anger and move to forgiveness”
“You need to start being kinder to yourself”
Where to start with any of these? How exactly do I “let go” of the anger? Roll down my driver’s side window and throw it onto the road like an empty Slurpee cup from 7-11?
Positive psychology is the psychology of the dullard, the impotent and un-heroic male find his home there in a hall of permissive weakness. Rather than courageously overcoming his bestial nature, positive psychology asks of a man only incremental change: “next time you’re about to get angry, take a deep breath.”
Fuck deep breaths, and fuck mindfulness. I say, “next time you’re about to get angry, try to use that anger to invade a neighboring country.”
I say, “next time you feel anxious, try to find and neutralize the threat, by force if necessary.”
I say, “rather than letting go, why don’t you squeeze harder until whatever’s bothering you stops breathing.”
(seriously, this is all metaphor)
I’m not against “letting go.” I think letting go of the expectations and impressions of others is the first step toward enlightenment. But what is the goddamn deal with the inherent powerlessness of the modern therapeutic ideology?
Why is psychology so pussified?
I’ve sat on my fair share of therapist’s couches in my life, and until I figured out the game, I would usually leave the office thinking that the best strategy for me would be to completely give up any strategy. The world was a chaotic place, they’d tell me, and I couldn’t count on anything. The power I have over situations and people is limited, and so it’s a mere fool’s errand to think I can change anything or anyone.
But this is bullshit, right? At least for me. I am a powerful person. I have a massive effect on people around me. I have charisma, people want to follow me, I have important things to say. Is it so wrong to recognize this? I find myself getting angry at the thought of how much more powerful and wealthy I’d be if I hadn’t spent 60 months of my life “spilling the beans” to weakling therapists.
Perhaps it is not my father I need to hunt through the jungle but it is “therapy” itself. The practice, at least for men, has become a weekly ritualistic castration, all at the low price of $125 a session (if you’re lucky). Go into a room, sit on a couch, play with some thingamajig on the table, and listen to some loser who probably has a miserable existence tell you just how powerless you are, just how scary the universe is, and just how much you need to stop trying to “do” anything and just accept the fact that you are a little ball of dust being spun about by the wind.
Fuck that. Start running, I’m coming for you, therapy.
If you are a person beset by circumstance beyond your control, perhaps it is wise for you to understand the enormity of the human matrix, to yield to the motion of the waves tossing you about, to learn how to be more resilient when you soar high and then crash low. That works if you are a person who is tossed about.
I’m sorry, I am not. Is that so terrible to say? Arrogance seems to have a high level of social currency these days, but only from certain demographics. Men are scarcely allowed to brag about their strength or their power over others. It’s something akin to dancing in the endzone? You should act like you’ve been there before, man.
If we’re talking optics, I agree. But a good friend once told me: “you can lie to me, you can lie to everyone, but please don’t lie to yourself.” I know it’s not that original, but I think about it a lot, especially I become more cognizant in my life of just how much I believe my own bullshit. Therapy plays a big part in that racket.
A father used to represent an oppressive force, both in the household and in the mind. I had an oppressive father, one who I feared, one whose emotions were inscrutable to me. He was masculine - powerful, determined, stoic, and threatening. He chose to put the roles of provider and protector above caregiver and teacher. I learned very little from him as a child, and as an adolescent and young adult, we drifted apart as I naturally rebelled. He was no longer capable of physically restraining my beliefs, and he was tactful enough to know that if he slapped me in the face when I was 22, it would be until 32 when I spoke to him again. So instead we spent that decade in a cold war, exchanging pleasantries and talking about my car (when we talked at all).
I would sit in therapy sessions and complain about him. I would wish that I had a father that encouraged my artistic side, who understood my hobbies, and who didn’t punish me for my sensitivity. After all, I had spent 16 years in school learning that being sensitive was important for a man. Men who aren’t sensitive are the ones who hurt women, and really women just want men to be more sensitive!
Let’s run that last line back: “women just want men to be more sensitive.” What an ultimate act of people-pleasing that sentence is. Believing in that, as I did, put me in a constant state of auditioning for women. I spent my 20s being mostly ignored, often taken for granted, and sometimes abused. I was confused as to why this was, after all - I was a sensitive man. Isn’t that what they wanted? Isn’t that what they complained about their husbands and boyfriends? What was wrong with me that I wasn’t drowning in pussy?
Well, mostly it was that I was a pussy. I bought into the narrative of sensitivity so wholesale, that I deluded myself into thinking that the more emotive, fragile, and pathetic I became, the more women would be attracted to me: again - all of it was an audition. So, in my late 20s I flipped the script, started reading r/TheRedPill and learned about hypergamy, the cock-carousel, the wall, “shit tests,” and all other manner of tricks that women played on men to get them to submit to them. And once a man submitted to a woman? He simply proved himself disposable, disgusting, and unworthy. He was immediately discarded, usually without notice.
This world I had entered insisted that relationships were a constant game of pursuing and fleeing, and that you wanted to be the one fleeing at all times. Moreover, the secret for an “ideal relationship” was to keep yourself fleeing at just the right distance: too slow and she catches you, too fast and she gives up in defeat. The only relationship that works is the one in which you - the man - has the upper hand.
What followed were three of the most destructive and sociopathic years of my life. I ran roughshod over women, discarding their feelings, intentionally ignoring them as a means to stoke interest, and acting in unintuitive ways to create a feeling of “dread” so that they would never feel like they had me caught. After all, you don’t get addicted to the winning; you get addicted to the losing, and the infrequent wins just keep you stuck there pulling the lever. I was the lever now.
Would you believe that it worked? I bet you can’t believe it - who woulda thought that mentally abusing people and making them feel unsure of themselves would cause them to want to do just about anything to please you! Man this stuff worked - as long as you didn’t think about the other side of the equation.
Most people don’t, really. That’s what I’ve found. I think that most people are pretty selfish and delusional. I think that most people are very good at reorienting the details of the situation to cast them as the hero and the other guy as the villain. I was never good at this, too empathic I guess - too able to put myself in someone else’s shoes. The damage I did to my soul in those three years was almost irreparable. Almost. I think I’ve got it now, rewritten my destiny and all, but…it was close. I feel mad about this pretty often. I hate that most people can do whatever they please and then find some way to come out on the other side feeling good about themselves. The fact that I am unable to do this paradoxically makes me a worse person in the long-run; the more miserable I feel about myself, the more I hate myself, the more likely I am to do evil. After all, if I’m already lost - what’s one more notch on the scorecard? I’m already going to hell.
But I’m not even good with nihilism. I couldn’t keep doing this to women, and eventually it caught up to me anyway. People got smart to my schemes and they banded together to call them out. I was banished. At the time, it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I felt very angry at first, especially because I was only parroting part-time the sorts of strategies that most men were doing as a career. I felt that people got me wrong, that I was just a little chubby boy wanting to be loved and that nothing I did was sinister - you’d do the same in my shoes! It didn’t matter, I made the mistake of making a philosophy out of it, whereas most men just hate women as a default.
The truth is that women are not part of an evil cabal dead-set on humiliating men and crushing their dreams. They are engaged in the same sort of folly that men are, though they often use different tactics. I came to appreciate the strategies of women, I found them artful, graceful, and collaborative. Women look out for each other in a way that men never could. I respected it, even if it meant I went home alone more times than I would have liked. I really like women, I’m happy to say. And no matter what that says about me or what it will do to my happiness, I just can’t deny it. I love the idea of a species who developed invisible forms of violence, secret networks of communication, and complex strategies of power, all while men were flopping around fields on horseback and stabbing each other in the face. Wouldn’t you rather be gossiping about Debra back home?
Who among us wouldn’t use the tools we have to get the things we want? Why would anyone choose to pair with someone out of pity? Why did I ever think that being an emotional mess would be attractive to women?
Here’s an even tougher question: why did I think that women know what they want?
It’s a weird question, and at first glance seems misogynistic. But it carries no negative feelings toward women. I think that women truly do think that they want a “sensitive” man. I also think that men could afford to be a little more sensitive than they are, and at the very least, could lower the threshold of what is required in order for them to “open up.” That said, I think women would want a sensitive man if it weren’t for the fact of what sensitivity costs a man. As a man’s sensitivity “rating” goes up, some other things go down, and those are things that most women - at least those interested in men - are usually not willing to barter.
I could write another essay on that (and I may), but right now the question at hand is “why did I think women know what they want?” This question is really just a form of a different, more complete question: “why would I think that anyone knows what they want?”
Usually people think they want what they already have, or who they are. If you were to ask me to describe my ideal partner, and then allowed me to babble and prattle about it for an hour, and you took notes - eventually you would find that I am describing myself. Perhaps that’s not true at my current age, but at 25? I certainly would have wanted myself.
And every person who I’ve dated who has been like me has not only been unattractive to me, they have also been insufferable. I already find it laborious to spend all day, every day with myself…and now I have to spend it with two of me? No thanks.
In reality, the women who I am most attracted to and most compatible with have few things in common with me. Or - more precisely - the things they have in common with me are usually detectable only on a vibrational level. The things that we use to describe our attractions are usually things that are grossly observable: hair color, height, wealth, education, occupation, interests, etc. But truly, the things that draw us to people are less than microscopic, they are “wavelength” size things that we probably could not name or describe.
So then, let me try now to name and describe one of them:
One of the women I was most attracted to in my life - and still continue to be attracted to on some level, though I have not seen her in years - had exactly zero of the qualities I would normally say I look for in a partner. However, when I think of her (as I think of her right now as I type this), I think of how her face moved about as she considered something. There was an asymmetry to it; a dimple would form only on her right cheek and her left eye would flicker in the corner. It was as if I could see her processing the terabytes of thought right there in front of me. Her eyes glazed over a bit, she would stare outward at an invisible horizon, even if we were in a small room. As she neared the end of her calculations, she would draw in a sharp breath through her nostrils and nod as if to indicate a point of internal catharsis. I loved her so much, I wish I could see her do this right now.
What is this thing that I have just described? There are some names for it, certainly. All of them would be a B- or lower in my book. It did something to me that cannot be captured by my vocabulary.
“So I have just been thinking about how I’d do it, I mean if I really wanted to think it through, that’s how I’d kill my dad.” I hadn’t realize how scary my statement might have seemed to a therapist living in this liability plague de nos jours. Credit to him, he managed to keep his reaction to a rotating chair shift, steadying himself on both arms and then lifting his ass and rotating his legs to the opposite orientation. His reaction gave me pause to reflect, and I clarified: “no I mean I’m not going to actually kill him but like how should I do it? Like if I did do it. In my mind I’m saying.”
Words cannot describe the embarrassed feeling that is summoned in me as I think back to my dorky therapist brainstorming how to set traps and load a crossbow and what kind of weather would be ideal to hunt my dad in. This man was such a moral coward, that he could not even summon the courage to tell me that my idea was stupid, obscene, a waste of time. And so we played it out, and exactly nothing changed in my life.
I realize now that in the ten years of separation from my father, I recruited all sorts of different fathers: Freud, Jung, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Rogers, Wallace, Paglia, Sartre, Nabokov, Herbert, Moore, Gaiman, Camus, Roth, Bukowski, Marquez, Hesse, Marx, Land, Fischer, Knausgaard, Tartt, and so many other fonts of masculine energy. Each of them with their own little ideas that work for them, and never intended to work for me. I thought at least one of them would have the objective truth. They only have their own truth.
As I think of this woman who I barely think of anymore, and I replay her face as she considers something deeply, there is no name for this thing that I love. But there is a way to describe it, and it is hard to say because it is not something usually said. I believe that the things that I love in women, the things I love in the women who reject me, are the things that remind me of my father. I have no mother wound. She was overbearing and emotional, but all in all she was great. My dad, on the other hand, I barely knew him.
Every failed relationship I have had with a woman is a failed relationship with my father.
In the last five years, I decided to put away my conflicts with him. I decided that I would rather have a dad than “be right” about the myriad political differences that held us apart. Surprisingly, I have found that my father was right about most things, that he was much smarter than I thought he was, and that he was more compassionate than I ever could be. Sure, he didn’t sign petitions about Darfur, but he gave up his life, his hobbies, and his body to raise the six children in my family. That’s more than I have ever done, and maybe ever will do.
I wonder if the one thing that neither positive psychology nor Freudian psychoanalysis would ever suggest would be the most right choice of all for me. I don’t need to kill my father. I need to love my father. The only people I need to kill are the many fathers who I tried to resurrect in his place. Corpses who wrote passionately about the working class, or about the nature of being, or about “the good.” What have these corpses ever done for me?
Compared to my actual dad? Jack fucking shit.