Psychology of the Tantalus
The Sublime Object of Masculinity
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Almost every man has at one point been told to man up or to be a real man. Personally, my response to that was usually what does it really mean to be more of a man and how am I supposed to be it? We’re often given a checklist – be more assertive, competitive, confident, muscular, and a whole host of other attributes. Most of these probably aren’t bad necessarily, but why exactly are they considered masculine and why exactly should we pursue them? In this essay I’m going to tackle the ideology behind “be more masculine”, and the tragic irony that this goal is actually preventing you from being your own person.
Because really, whether or not we’re giving biological arguments like higher testosterone or cultural arguments like deconstruct patriarchy, the point we’re doing this is to live the life we want. Become more competitive and dominant so you can get rich and easily attract women.1 Challenge toxic masculinity so that you can free your emotions and be accepted by women.2 Regardless of our intentions, we hope that by going through this process and becoming more of what we need to be, we’ll get the promised rewards.
I don’t mean to sound cynical or suspicious of men when I say that. It’s obviously okay to be motivated by “better relationships with women”. I think it’s foolish to say otherwise. I just mean that we constantly hear narratives that we aren’t enough as we are, and we need something more in order to achieve some sort of state of completion. There’s an assumption of lack, and you as a man must become more of the right kind of masculine in order to heal that wound. As you’ll find out by the end of this essay, this assumption lies at the heart of ideology itself and I call this heart, the Tantalus.
The Sublime Object of Masculinity
I’ll get into what I mean by the Tantalus in a moment, but that’s the second time I’ve implied that masculinity is an ideology. I do think there are biological reasons for why men tend to act in certain ways, but there’s obviously a huge cultural aspect to masculinity as well. So when I refer to the ideology of masculinity, I am referring to the social order that defines masculinity, whether that’s the rules and regulations about traditional masculinity or the challenges to masculinity. Everything we’ve talked about in my last few essays are components of that masculine ideology. I’ll cover the basics of what you need to know, but they definitely all support each other so definitely check those out in my playlist, “The Psychospiritual Prison”.
So, what exactly is the Tantalus? In Greek myth, Tantalus was a King who was punished for eternity by having water and grapes always just out of his reach.3 His name is the source of the word, tantalize, which means “to torment with the sight of something desired but out of reach.”
As a component of masculine ideology, the Tantalus is something that we are constantly trying to attain, but can never actually get to.
In his book Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Zizek refers to this as the Sublime Object.5,6 If we could only get that thing we would finally be complete. If we just become masculine enough, in just the right way, then we wouldn’t struggle with the pain of insufficiency. That raises the question though, where exactly does this insufficiency or incompletion come from?
Zizek references the work of Jacques Lacan, a psychotherapist whose work is notoriously technical and difficult to understand. I am not going to get into those details here. Another essay, perhaps even another channel like Plastic Pills7. What I do want to talk about though is the fundamental misrecognition that sparks our feelings of incompletion. The first time we look into a mirror as a kid and recognize ourselves, we realize this is my body, this is who I am, and thus, we see ourselves as a single entity.
That is the misrecognition because the truth of our direct experience is that we are a multiplicity, like, “my singular body? I can rub each individual hand and feel each individual finger moving”. I might be thinking of multiple different things, with various images, memories, and emotions, constantly shifting and moving and changing. If you’ve ever tried to quit something or to pick up a new habit, you know full well how many competing forces exist within you. And yet, when I look into that mirror I see an individual. This discrepancy is traumatizing because we feel incomplete, and yet we see a completion, a whole, a single body.
As we age and develop and learn about the social norms of our individualistic culture, we are given an external compass, a role for us to play in our society. I’m a man, I need to act this way, do these things, achieve these goals, talk this way about these things, etc. In other words, our society becomes the mirror that we are reflected in, and this new mirror tells us that to be a complete person we need to attain this thing, this Tantalus.
The irony is that our incompletion isn’t actually a problem. Remember this is a mis-recognition. Through the trauma of that misrecognition, we’ve learned that we are supposed to be the completed thing, which we are aren’t, and so we try to become complete, and yet again, we can never become complete. We’re motivated to accomplish something that cannot be accomplished, and that is the real trauma that we are all subjected to. Just like King Tantalus, we find ourselves in a prison in which what we think we need is always out of our reach.
And yet…become more masculine…This is part of how masculine ideology keeps us locked in place. Another issue is that much of our traditional masculine role has been attacked as oppressive, but we haven’t actually had anything substantial to replace it. I call this dynamic the battle between Kathekon and Akedia, between traditional masculine conformity (Kathekon) and the attack on that conformity (Akedia). In my last essay, Psychology of Epithymia, I introduced…Epithymia. She is the nihilistic hedonism that drives the conflict, because once we have nothing to live for we become focused on the most stimulating thing that grips our attention the most.
As the traditional masculinity of Kathekon is attacked by the anti-conformity of Akedia, each side becomes more and more reactionary, and thus stimulating. It’s not just that we have traditional masculinity vs. male feminists, but that those who represent traditional masculinity are responding to the most extreme, the most stimulating representatives of feminism, postmodernism, and whatever else they see as the “radical Left”, so to speak.
And of course, the Left also reacts more to the most outlandish representatives of the Kathekon, people like Andrew Tate for example. The fact that Andrew Tate is so extreme leads to a more extreme reaction because we perceive the problem as being that much more pressing and urgent. Again, all of this is driven by the Epithymian focus on the most stimulating thing because nothing else matters. We have no other way to figure out what we should focus on.
Shining above the battlefield like a Lovecraftian Deity is the Tantalus – a thing that cannot exist, but that we all orient our lives around pursuing. Epithymia whispers seductively in our ear, telling us to desire that thing because of the promised, stimulating rewards of both the Kathekon and Akedia. Again though, what exactly is this Sublime Object we are supposed to attain? I’ve said that it’s completion, I’ve said that it’s more masculinity, but what exactly is it?
Let’s take a look at a small sample of what Kathekon and Akedia are after. The Kathekon is associated with wealth and social status, whereas Akedia is more concerned about social justice and social liberation. To be very clear, I’m not trying to say these things are on equal moral footing. That is not my point in any way. I’m not making some dumb argument that they are exactly the same! What I’m trying to point to is the ideological context that both are inhabiting, and how that has contributed to a psychological deadlock within each of us.
What wealth and social liberation have in common is the idea of a deserved freedom. If you pursue wealth in a capitalistic fashion, you believe that those who are wealthy earned it by giving enough value to the market. Everyone is free to go to the library, watch youtube, and become skilled enough to deserve a high income. According to the Kathekon you deserve more freedom by earning it in the market. According to Akedia, social liberation is a deserved freedom that capitalist patriarchy is keeping from everyone. By dismantling systems of oppression and distributing wealth more equitably, we can become liberated people.
Now, the common idea that social status and social justice share is social legitimation. The Kathekon pursues social status through being as successful, competent, and worthy of authority as they can be. It’s about how society legitimizes greater individuality given the specific values of the Kathekon. You earn greater individuality by becoming wealthier, and so wealth makes your individuality more legitimate. You now have greater capacity to express your individuality.
Social justice is also about how society legitimizes your individuality, but this time through the values of Akedia. It’s about making sure that society is structured in a way where you aren’t disadvantaged because of your identity, whether gender, race, or sexuality. Society legitimates your individuality by not marginalizing your identity. You are now given a greater capacity to express your individuality.
I hope you can also see how deserved freedom and social legitimation support each other. The resonance I’m trying to point to between Kathekon and Akedia, is that both are motivated by an honouring of the individual through deserved freedom and social legitimation. Clearly, each defines these in very different ways, and that’s important, but the underlying ideology that connects them is the valuing of the individual and what it actually takes to protect the individual. In fact, it might be that Akedia pursues deserved freedom through social legitimation, whereas Kathekon pursues social legitimation through deserved freedom.
In either case, the Tantalus floating above the battlefield of Akedia and Kathekon, is individuality. I think the idea that capitalism celebrates the individual through things like personal responsibility, equal opportunity, and achievement makes sense. However, some might say that Akedia values group identity more than individual identity.
I think Akedia does care about group identity, but they do this as a method in support of marginalized individuals. They look at how systems oppress individuals based on their group identity, and so are concerned with dismantling those systems in order to legitimate such individuals.7 For example, Akedia says that a trans man is a legitimate man, but a system of cis gender oppression delegitimates his manhood. By dismantling that system we liberate his right to express his individuality.
The Scapegoat of Individuality
Individuality is the Tantalus, or the Sublime Object of Masculine Ideology. As the Tantalus, it is the thing we as men seek in order to be completed, but again, we can never be completed. It is by definition an unattainable goal. But, is it individuality that cannot be attained or completion? Obviously questioning the concept of individuality is very deep philosophical territory. And really, being “an individual” and “attaining completion” could be argued to be the same thing. In either case, answering that is simply beyond the scope of this particular essay. What I am trying to get to when I question individuality is to question how exactly Kathekon and Akedia define and pursue individuality.
Remember despite the resonance I identified before, Kathekon and Akedia are incredibly different. They define deserved freedom and social legitimation in very different ways. In fact, with the increasing polarization between Kathekon and Akedia, they now see each other as directly opposing each other’s pursuit of individuality. In other words, they scapegoat each other as the villain standing in the way of reaching individuality.
A scapegoat is a person or group we blame for why things are going wrong.8 For example, the Nazis scapegoated Jewish people, blaming them for society’s ills, and this justified the Holocaust. In the context of masculine ideology, Kathekon and Akedia blame each other. In the race to the hyperpolarized bottom we argue with the other on TV, online, and in our own heads. We fight for the right to live as individuals, which we’d be if it wasn’t for that damn group of people getting in our way!
I think this is one of Zizek’s beautiful insights. The more we blame the other for why we can’t achieve “individuality”, however we define it, the more we can avoid the fact that individuality will never complete us. Even as we pursue the standards of individuality of our own group, and attain our own definition of success, the fact that we never feel complete isn’t our fault, and certainly isn’t a limitation in how we define individuality. Instead, it is the scapegoat’s fault. Blaming the other side relieves us of the pain of being responsible for failing our impossible task.
In his analysis of Zizek, Rafael Winkler writes,6 “an inner deadlock … is displaced onto the outsider who is taken to be responsible for society’s failure to achieve harmony. From this it follows that harmony can be restored by eliminating the outsider.”
We all know what that would look like taken to the extreme, but a thing to keep in mind is that all of this is also taking place psychologically. One of the things I’ve mentioned several times throughout this mini-series is that 50 – 75% of us are Conformist to some degree.9,10 This entire mini-series has used the concepts of the Chained Vortex, the Kathekon, Akedia, Epithymia, and now the Tantalus, to articulate the structure of masculine psychological Conformity. When I talk about Kathekon and Akedia fighting it out, I am talking about how the cultural struggle outside of us is internalized. These forces battle within our mind.
For example, in my essay “Psychology of the Kathekon” I talked about how we partly define masculinity based on not being feminine. If you’re a man who is biased toward the Kathekon, then you’ll scapegoat those aspects of you that you feel are too feminine and that need to be changed. If you don’t achieve your goals it’s because you weren’t assertive enough, dominant enough, confident enough, and thus, were too feminine relative to the masculine individual you could be.
If you’re biased toward Akedia, you’ll scapegoat your inner toxic masculinity and the patriarchal conditioning you’re trying to break free from. In either case, you could fulfill your potential as the “good man” you could be, if it wasn’t for the bad parts of you that were holding you back from being the completed, individual we all desire to be.
The point is you experience this internal incoherence as a result of the fundamental misrecognition that you should be complete, even though that’s an impossible goal. Kathekon and Akedia compete externally and internally in defining what it means to be complete as an “individual”, which of course adds more internal incoherence. As a result of their competition, Epithymia becomes more powerful, directing us more toward the pure stimulation of hyperpolarization, which again, adds more internal incoherence.
And what do we do in response to all of this internal incoherence? We pursue individuality, again, however we define that. Despite their differences, because Kathekon and Akedia are resonant in their mutual pursuit of individuality, we are blinded to the impossibility of the goal of individuality itself. The entire ideology of masculinity perpetuates your incoherence. Its fundamental logic is grounded by the pursuit of a goal that perpetuates internal incoherence, which of course motivates you further in the pursuit of the thing that makes you incoherent. The cure is the very poison.
The Courage to Give a Damn
But wait, I’m saying the impossible goal of the Tantalus is Individuality, and yet, I’ve oriented my entire substack, let alone this mini-series, on the idea of becoming an individual. What the hell is this contradiction? If individuality is an impossible goal, how can we challenge conformity and become an individual?
The overarching point that I’m trying to make is that the pursuit of individuality can itself become a prison that separates us from our true individuality. The weirdness of that statement is my point, but try to think of it this way. What if achieving your goals actually requires you to be less dominant? What if your addiction to power, influence, and confidence are all separating you further and further away from the mission or people you care about? Or what if you need to be more assertive because you’ve allowed your identity to be erased in the name of keeping the peace and not being toxically masculine?
The point of this model I’ve been laying out in these last few essays is not to give a model of what masculinity should be or even how we should relate to our masculinity. I received a comment asking if Kathekon and Akedia are really the best ways to conceptualize masculinity, and my answer was no. However I think they are a stepping stone and that’s what you have to understand about this model. I’m trying to show you some of the ways you may already think about masculinity as a specific definition of individualism and how that is actually limiting you.1
For example, in the first essay, “Psychology of the Chained Vortex”, I talked about how the chains are the specific social norms that lock us in place. Through the process of socialization we are chained to certain negative emotions and that’s how conformity is enforced. This is a very negative framing of socialization and social norms. It frames being influenced in terms of unilateral power, which assumes that being influenced in any way is an inherently bad thing. This often contributes to men viewing emotional connection and reaching out for support as a “feminine” thing to do.
By viewing your socialization as an inherently negative process, as the concept of the Chained Vortex does, you reinforce the hyper-separation that prevents you from connecting with the people you care about. Aspects of this model reinforce the Conformist Prison that this very model is trying to help you escape from. The way you model and understand masculinity, keeps you from the goals you’re being given by that very masculinity.
Listen to how I’ve framed the battle with Conformity as a struggle in so many of my essays. I really do struggle every day with individuality. I struggle every day with trying to free myself from the influence of people I love and who love me. I struggle to separate myself from them in the name of individuality. I view their influence as an insult. Does that seem like a healthy form of love? And really, who would I be without this struggle if my entire identity as a man, as an individual, depends on this constant struggle? I lock myself in a perpetual battle for the very thing I cannot attain or else I risk losing myself.
Conformity itself becomes the scapegoat that we blame for our lack of individuality. If only I’d stop caring about what these people think of me. Do I want to be a sociopath? Is a lack of care really the goal? Maybe caring is okay. As the theologian Bernard Loomer says:12
“the capacity to absorb an influence is as truly a mark of power as the strength involved in exerting an influence … It is also a measure of our own strength … especially when this influence of the other helps to effect a creative transformation of ourselves and our world. The strength of our security may well mean that we do not fear the other, that the other is not an overpowering threat to our own sense of worth.”
And paraphrasing what he says elsewhere, being influenced by others does not necessitate a loss of our identity or our selfhood. You can be strengthened by your willingness to care and to be influenced by others. You can also be weakened by an overwhelming force that intends to do you harm or intends to force you into submission. Of course you can, but the solution to that reality is not to separate yourself and to view that as virtue.
Zizek says that these parts of ourselves that we repress return as a symptom. So let’s think our way through this. Unilateral power says that you only have self-worth when you are more powerful or have more influence than other people. If someone does something that shows that they’re better than you in some way, then that is a direct attack on your self-worth. As such, you feel envious. You wish you could do what they do and reap the rewards that they have. And yet, feeling envious is bad and painful, we shouldn’t feel envious of other’s accomplishments. So, we repress our envy.
Think about what happens when people are constantly bombarded with the success and status of others through social media. We’re overwhelmed by examples of people who will be more successful than us, more beautiful than us, more well-read than us, no matter how hard we try. We are constantly having our self-worth attacked and then repressing the envy we feel. When there is no hope for our own unilateral power over others through our own success, the next easiest thing to do is knock people down.
Cringe culture is the perfect manifestation of this dynamic. We can feel better than other people by making fun of them, even as they accomplish more than us. It becomes a far easier way to earn relative social status, by devaluing the status of other people. Even as they continually show us their accomplishments and the rewards they earn, we can win the game of unilateral power by calling them cringe.
The issue is that what we’re really practicing is devaluing ourselves. We devalue putting ourselves out there. We prevent ourselves from ever pursuing a passion because number one, we’ll never the best so obviously pursuing something meaningful is a waste of time, and second, we fear we’ll be labeled as cringe by other people.
The more this happens, the more emotionally charged our own sense of identity becomes and this dynamic emerges as a narcissism in which we feel motivated to fluff ourselves up. We tell ourselves that we don’t care about what other people think of us. We aren’t influenced by their opinions. We don’t need success, achievement, or anything else.
Notice how you feel about that. In some sense that sounds almost empowering, but in reality it becomes quite limiting. We never push ourselves to do anything in our lives. Even as our lives fall apart around us and we let opportunity after opportunity pass us by, we convince ourselves that we don’t actually need it. We’re an individual who doesn’t need social validation like all those cringe people do.
Like Zizek says, what we repress returns as a symptom.
The philosopher Hanzi Freinacht calls this dynamic sklavenmoral and thinks that it’s one of the most important emotional dynamics of our era.13 In a culture of nihilistic hedonism what we need is something meaningful to us. Meaning is partly defined by mattering, or feeling like we matter to those who matter to us.14 Think about what’s implied by saying you need to matter to people and to have people who matter to you. It violates the standards set by our need for self-worth through unilateral power, and only a cringe narcissist cares about what people think of them.
Through the pursuit of masculine individuality as an expression of unilateral power, we repress our conformity, we repress our envy, we repress our desire for accomplishment, and we repress our need for mattering. The fundamental logic of masculine ideology acts to defeat the very goal it holds up as the pinnacle of masculinity – being your own individual.
Even if you do work to break yourself out of the “cringe trap” you end up in the trap of the Kathekon, pursuing social status, wealth, and women as a sign of your masculine individuality, but locked within the conformity that Kathekon represents. If you pursue the standards of the Akedia, you end up deconstructing any source of meaning because the logic of Akedia is to deconstruct everything, including logic itself.15,16 All of this is embedded within a culture of narcissistic, nihilistic hedonism that pulls us toward that which is most stimulating to us, rather than that which is truly most meaningful to us.
I know that this seems so negative and hopeless, and this is only one form that Tantalus can take. There are also various forms that Kathekon and Akedia can take, and so there are other things that can act as a Tantalus. I’ve only really given a bird’s eye view to help understand one way this might manifest. With that being said though, I really am hopeful for what the future holds. In my next essay I’m finally going to put all the pieces of this Prison together so that we can begin charting a way forward.
Until then, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on masculinity, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.
If you like this, check out the recommended order here. Scroll to the bottom.
References:
1 – Connell, R. (2005). Masculinities (2 edition). Polity.
2 – hooks, bell. (2003). The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. Atria.
3 – Dictionary.com | Meanings & Definitions of English Words. (2024a, October 21). Dictionary.Com. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/tantalus
4 – Dictionary.com | Meanings & Definitions of English Words. (2024b, October 21). Dictionary.Com. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/tantalize
5 – Zizek, S. (2009). The Sublime Object of Ideology (2 edition). Verso.
6 – Winkler, R. (2024). Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology: A Reader’s Guide (1st edition). Bloomsbury Academic.
7 – PlasticPills (Director). (2019, July 25). Lacan—The Mirror Stage, The Imaginary, and Social Media (How am I not myself?) [Video recording].
https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=50k_IUMrehU
8 – PhD, S. B., & Kellner, D. (1991). Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. Guilford Publications.
9 – Dictionary.com | Meanings & Definitions of English Words. (2024c, October 22). Dictionary.Com. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/scapegoat
10 – Kegan, R. (1998). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (Reprint edition). Harvard University Press.
11 – Cook-Greuter, S. (2021). Ego Development: A Full-Spectrum Theory Of Vertical Growth And Meaning Making.
12 – Loomer, B. (1976). Two Conceptions of Power. Process Studies, 6(1), 5–32. https://doi.org/10.5840/process19766126
13 – Freinacht, H. (2019). Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two. Metamoderna ApS.
14 – Wolf, S., Koethe, J., Adams, R. M., Arpaly, N., Haidt, J., & Macedo, S. (2012). Meaning in Life and Why It Matters. Princeton University Press.
15 – Andersen, L. R. (2023). Polymodernity: Meaning and hope in a complex world (1st edition). Nordic Bildung.
16 – Storm, J. A. J. (2021). Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (First Edition). University of Chicago Press.