The Psychospiritual Prison
Straightjacketing of Masculine Conformity
When I was a kid I was bullied mercilessly. I had a love-hate relationship with recess because I was desperate to have fun and play with the other kids, and yet too many of those experiences ended with a reminder that I was an outcast. For example, as kids do, we played tag. Being the fat kid, I was seen as an easy target. I wasn’t sure at first if I was being targeted, but it became clear that I was. We had a rule that the person who was just “it” couldn’t be tagged back and made the chaser again. So, if I had tagged someone, the fastest kid would let themselves get tagged so that they could then tag me as easily and quickly as possible.
During one experience that stood out for all of us, we started the typical charade of ostracism masquerading as play. I was determined not to get caught. I rounded one part of the playground, passing someone else who was trying to get away. Obviously they would be tagged because they were the closer target, that’s just how the game was played, but the chaser ran right past them to get to me. I snapped. I cried and screamed profanities at them. The adult came running over and grabbed me by the wrist, I tore my arm away, and then pushed her away from me.
Two things happened because of that experience. The kids now knew if they pushed me hard enough I would explode and they played that game often. The adults now knew that I was a troubled kid who would explode just because he had been tagged. I remember one teacher talking to me at some point and she told me that I was too sensitive, and that I needed to stop being such a sore loser. They didn’t see and thus didn’t believe, that I was being targeted. My inability to emotionally deal with ostracism was mirrored back to me by the adults that there was simply something wrong with me.
As men we are taught that we must always be in control. Too many people who listen to that story will agree with that teacher. I needed to toughen up. I needed to lose weight and become more physically fit. If I had been placed at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy, then I needed to be taught how to rise up it. I was choosing to be a victim and as a young boy, I needed to man up and do better. Push those tears down and run faster.1 I’m not saying girls don’t get bullied in similar ways, but I doubt whether this same advice would be given to a girl. This is the straightjacketing of masculinity that I’m sure you’ve heard so much about.
In this essay, I am going to give a broad overview of the model of masculine psychological conformity that I have spent the last 5 essays discussing. You don’t need to read them to understand this one, but to get the full picture it would obviously help. You can find it in my playlist, “The Psychospiritual Prison” and starting at the essay, “Psychology of the Chained Vortex”. By the end of this essay today you’ll have legitimate action steps for how to break yourself out of this prison of masculinity.
If you prefer YouTube or Spotify, please click those links.
The Structure of the Prison
Now, as my own story implied, this Prison of masculine conformity begins when you’re a child, perhaps even from the moment of birth. For example, there’s evidence that boys are praised differently than girls. Both sexes are praised just as much, but the difference in the type of praise is related to differences in their psychology when they’re tested 5 years later. Here boys are more likely to be praised for how much effort they put in.2 In another study, fathers were more likely to treat their daughters in emotion-oriented ways, and their sons in achievement-oriented ways.3 There obviously are pros and cons to this of course, but the point is, you are taught to be “masculine” from a very young age.
I call this process the Chained Vortex. We all have vortices of negative emotions within us that threaten to suck inside. If you’re triggered with anxiety, jealousy, anger, sadness, or shame, each of these are a vortex that can take you over. When you were a child, you learned that certain behaviours would active a certain vortex, and that other behaviours would protect against a vortex. It’s through the application and prevention of negative emotion that you learn to avoid misbehavior and move toward good behaviour. In other words, you learn to conform to the standards your parents have for you or else you risk painful emotions.
The Chains are the specific norms, rules, and regulations for proper conduct. By the time you’re an adult, you follow those rules without question because you assume they’re the normal, natural, and moral way of doing things. Often enough you may not even be aware of the fact that you’re doing these things. If you’ve ever driven the exact same way to work every single day you may sometimes zone out and realize you’ve made it to work without thinking. You have no real memory of the drive. The process of getting to work has become so automatic that you don’t need to be aware of it in order to do it. This is also how conformity works. It simply becomes a habit that you aren’t aware of.4
So, let’s take all of the Chains that constitute the whole body of social norms, rules, and regulations that we must follow as men. That’s what I call the Kathekon. As a man you’re agentic. You’re independent, rugged individuals who don’t need to rely on anyone else. You’re less emotional and you’re motivated to climb the hierarchy. Your goals in life are around chasing social status, wealth, and women in whatever ways are socially acceptable, though sometimes breaking those rules is what makes you more of a man. In other words, we can call this Kathekon traditional masculine conformity.5,6
To be clear, I understand that it’s a little more complex than this, there are nuances that I’m simplifying. I’m squashing a larger time period and different types of masculinity into a very small one, but this gives you rough overview of what I mean by the Kathekon.
Either way, historically this has functioned quite well for most men. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s moral by our standards today, but the Kathekon provided men with a compass that could guide them through life. It could also give them meaning in life. They knew why they were alive.
However, in the past 60 years especially, the challenges to this conformity have become more and more powerful. The challenges to wealth and status through anti-capitalist critique, the feminist critique of patriarchy, and the LGBT+ movement have all made the Kathekon seem not only unnecessary, but outrightly pathological and oppressive.
I call all of that, Akedia. It’s the challenge and anti-conformity in the face of the Kathekon and all it represents. Akedia attacks the Kathekon as toxic masculinity, again as the patriarchy that tries to oppress women and turns men into emotionless abusers. In many ways I think what Akedia stands for is necessary. There are definitely a lot of aspects of traditional masculinity that needed to change. Feminism and LGBT+ have gone a long way toward the liberation of people who were subjugated by the Chains of the Kathekon.
However, if you notice, Akedia has also come to represent its own body of social norms, rules, and regulations. Akedia itself has its grip on a whole host of Chains that also threaten to pull men into vortices of negative emotion. For example, 59% of Gen Z and 48% of Millennial men haven’t approached a woman in person in the year prior to the study. Around 50% of men didn’t approach because they feared social consequences.7
There’s a popular belief that the MeToo movement, which would be Akedia, has made dating unsafe for men who make honest mistakes. It’s not that they were malicious, weird, or creepy, but that they were shy or just weren’t ever taught how to flirt. And whether or not that’s a legitimate fear is irrelevant. If a majority of men fear that this will happen, then that’s an unintended consequence of how Akedia works. Fear of social consequences in dating acts as a specific Chained Vortex that makes men conform to what they believe Akedia wants from them.
So, notice what’s going on here. On one side you have the Kathekon pulling on the chains of masculinity, and on the other Akedia pulling on chains of masculinity. And furthermore, the harder the Kathekon pulls in one direction, the harder Akedia will pull in the other direction. This division of moral standards has created confusion in men because each standard competes for their attention. Again, you can read the full playlist if you want to go deeper into how that actually happens.
The point is that as the Kathekon and Akedia fight over the definition of “good masculinity”, Epithymia begins to speak louder and louder in the ears of men. Epithymia represents the nihilistic hedonism that emerges when we’re as divided as we are today. When we don’t know who to listen to, the voice that becomes the loudest is the most stimulating voice. In this way hedonism might be drugs, porn, video games, or outrage at the moral failings of someone we’ve been taught hate. Jordan Peterson is a masculine role model who gets men to hate postmodern neo-Marxists. Other role models get men to hate the worst representatives of the Kathekon like Andrew Tate or Rollo Tomassi.
My point is not to say they’re morally equivalent, but when men don’t have some sort of clear framework to guide them, they’re far more likely to be guided by whatever stimulates them the most. Even though the Kathekon and Akedia both offer clear frameworks, the reactionary antagonism between them creates confusion and promotes pathological standards of conduct. Again, these standards of conduct become increasingly guided by Epithymia, because she guides us toward the most stimulating versions of the things and people we react toward or against.
The final piece of this puzzle is the Tantalus. This is a goal that we are directed toward that perpetuates our imprisonment. The example that I gave in my last essay was individuality. Kathekon and Akedia have their own vision of the liberated individual, whether that’s liberation through social status and wealth, or liberation through social justice and a dismantling of the patriarchy. Again, I’m not saying these things are morally equivalent, but we can see how this becomes a trap based on how the Tantalus functions in the context of the entire Prison.
Remember that the way the Chained Vortex functions is that you’re pursuing the Kathekon or Akedia because you’re avoiding the pain of the Chained Vortex. You pursue wealth and status because you fear being a poor beta who can’t earn a woman’s affections. You pursue social justice because you fear being a misogynist who perpetuates systems of oppression. In either case, you pursue these goals because you feel deficient in some way and accomplishing these goals will help complete you. You’ll no longer be that bad, deficient, immoral person who is causing all of these problems in your own life or in the lives of others.
The issue is that you can never actually achieve this state of “completion” where you no longer feel deficient or incomplete. Part of being human is feeling incomplete. The trap is that you’re taught that feeling incomplete is a bad thing, and that pursuing completion is a possible goal. The promise of the Kathekon and Akedia is that if you follow their rules and regulations you can attain the state of completion you’re looking for. You’re motivated to conform not only by your fear of painful emotional vortices, but by the promise of completion, of salvation, if you and everyone else would only just conform.
Again, though, Epithymia has caused the Kathekon and Akedia to react with increasing intensity against each other. This in turn causes Epithymia to speak all the louder, motivating you to react with even greater intensity. You fight harder and harder to achieve your goal of “individuality” that has been defined by these competing forces. You constantly feel like you’re failing because you literally cannot achieve the goal of completion. This causes you to blame the other side for your failures, which blinds you to the fact that the goal you’re pursuing is impossible. Fortunately, you don’t have to admit that it’s impossible if you can find someone to blame for holding you back.
The Kathekon and Akedia pull the Chains binding you to the Vortex. Epithymia whispers in your ear louder and louder until she’s screaming the rewards of Tantalus’ individuality you’d achieve if it weren’t for the other side getting in your way. The more you fight for your freedom and individuality the tighter the Chains bind you to the Vortex. With your eyes glued to the promises of individuality you can pretend like your efforts are guiding you closer and closer to your goal when in reality they’re fortifying the very Prison you seek desperately to be free from.
How do we break free?
The Function of the Prison
To break free from this Prison, you have to understand the function that it serves. I’ve talked a lot about the idea of an “external compass” given to us by our culture. The Psychospiritual Prison lays out the full structure of that external compass. The function that it serves then, as I’ve said, is to guide us through our lives. It gives us a way to relate to ourselves, to society, and to reality itself in a way that helps us to survive, to achieve goals, and which goals to even have in the first place.
Despite its clear toxicity, you have to understand that without this external compass we would be completely lost. In his book, Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm gives an extremely compelling account of why we seem to fear freedom and choose oppressive dictatorships. He gives a simple answer here:8
“growing [individuality] means growing isolation, insecurity, and thereby growing doubt concerning one’s life, and with all that a growing feeling of one’s own powerlessness and insignificance as an individual.”
If you read my essay “Psychology of Akedia” then you’re probably connecting the dots to the definition I gave of meaning in life. Coherence, things make sense. If you challenge the external compass, then you are telling yourself that things no longer make as much sense as you thought they did. Purpose, your challenge takes away what gave you purpose in life. The future the compass had envisioned for you is no longer possible. Significance, once you become aware of the Prison you realize how so much of what you thought was your own individuality was actually handed to you by forces far larger and more powerful than you, that make you feel so insignificant. Fourthly and finally, mattering, everything you thought mattered to you, the lifestyles and the people, is now revealed to be ideological conformity that has imprisoned you.
To deconstruct the Prison is to deconstruct everything you thought you knew about the world, everything that gave you meaning and a sense of morality. Fromm goes on to say:8
“if the [societal] conditions …, do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality …, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. [Individuality] then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction.”
On the one hand, we’re locked within a fragmented cultural mess that has us pitted against each other in the pursuit of a goal that is impossible, and only serves to fortify the walls of the Prison itself. On the other, we have the infinite ambiguity of a freedom we lack the ability to tolerate, let alone thrive within.
Another quote from Fromm:8
“Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission … which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom.”
In other words, any attempt you make toward your own freedom outside the Prison causes you to flee back to the Prison itself. Think about how this relates to what I’ve said about the Chained Vortex and how it enforces conformity. Your fear of freedom becomes another Vortex that Chains you within your Prison. The very process of trying to become free just becomes a new training ground for conformity itself. You’re like a rat who’s taught through electric shock to run down the maze to get the rewards. If you make an attempt to escape the maze you’re shocked back in line by the fear of freedom itself. If you try to stop just to catch your breath you’re shocked by poverty to get moving or else you’ll get left behind again.
I’ve previously analogized conformity with addiction. Dr. Marc Lewis talks about the difference between seeking and liking.9 If you’re addicted to something you’ll often chase after it even as it destroys your life. You don’t like what it’s doing to you, and you may not even really like the way it makes you feel necessarily, but you’re compelled to desperately seek after it time and time again. This is motivated by a need to relieve the intense negative emotions associated with addiction.
Trapped within the Psychospiritual Prison of Masculine Conformity we become addicted to the false rewards that we’re taught will relieve us from the very pain the Prison causes us, and the pain that we experience any time we even think about freeing ourselves from that Prison. However, now that we know the function of the Prison that is our external compass, we can begin to break ourselves free. A final quote from Erich Fromm:8
“freedom from external authority is a lasting gain only if the psychological conditions are such that we are able to establish our own individuality.”
The Meta-Ideological Chad
If you’ve read my two essays, “3 Keys to Your Authentic Self” and then “Psychology of the MetaMasculine”, you already have a good starting point for beginning to develop the psychology necessary to thrive within freedom. The fact of the matter is that transcending the Prison is a long and difficult process, one that I am still working on, but the key point is that individuality, whatever that turns out to be, is not a destination because it is not a completion.
That’s one of the fundamental keys to deconstructing the Prison. Realize that there is no destination or completion of your individuality. It is a never-ending process in which our entire concept of “individual” needs to be deconstructed and then reconstructed. Zizek offers four important quotes in The Sublime Object of Ideology:10
“…the greatest mass murders and holocausts have always been perpetrated in the name of man as harmonious...”
“…the only thing man can do is accept fully this cleft, this fissure, this structural rooting-out, and to try as far as possible to patch things up afterwards…”
“a subjective position which finally accepts ‘contradiction' as an internal condition of every identity.”
“the final moment of the psychoanalytic process is, for the [client], precisely when he gets rid of this question - that is, when he accepts his being as non-justified by the big Other.”
In other words, we must accept that there is no completion that we can ever get to, remove that “completely”. Secondly, contradiction is not only inevitable, but the very means by which we improve ourselves and society. Thirdly, we must let go of our external compass and create an internal compass.
Ryan Nakade jokingly refers to this as the Meta-Ideological Chad.11,12 The fact is that we are always operating with an ideology of some kind so we can’t get rid of it altogether. This is the trap that Akedia falls into. When they try to deconstruct everything that the Kathekon stands for, they just end up with their own ideological Prison they’re blind to. Instead, we want to become meta-ideological, where we are not only aware of which ideology we’re using, but we’re able to play with different ideologies.
We have to be able to see the false dichotomy of the Kathekon and Akedia, and instead go meta to or beyond it. Again, read my essay on the MetaMasculine to get another look at what I mean by that. This meta-ideological perspective is so important because the reason the Tantalus’ individuality is a trap is because of the overall structure, including the other components. It’s the antagonism between Kathekon and Akedia, the Epithymian drive for the most stimulating thing, and the belief that we need completion – all of these work together to make the promise of Tantalus a false one.
Nakade further refers to depth, distance, and diversity as integral parts of meta-ideology.13 You don’t find your individuality in any specific ideology, but in the awareness of that ideology and the playful sincerity with which we operate a diversity of ideologies. This requires a certain level of distance from any one ideology so that you aren’t fully invested in it. You can remove yourself from an ideology to look at it from the perspective of another ideology. This requires a certain depth of understanding in these ideologies so that you actually know what you’re talking about. This obviously also requires a diversity of ideologies that you can play with and have fun with, rather than just one you accept without question as the one true noble ideology.
Obviously being very educated is profoundly important. You want to commit yourself to life-long learning from a diversity of sources who disagree with each other and with you. However, you also want practices that help you deal with your emotions. Playing with ideologies is not merely emotionally taxing for yourself because you have to challenge ideas you may hold closely, but it’s also emotionally taxing because it requires a high level of empathy for the other. You don’t necessarily have to agree with a different ideology, but you have to empathize enough with its followers, with the human beings who do follow it, in order to understand why they agree with it.
Something like meditation can be very important for dealing with your emotions, but you also have to work with your body as well. I’m going to have future essays going into somatic work, but the book, My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem is extremely informative.14
Altogether these constitute three very important pillars for development – cognitive, emotional, and somatic. The philosopher Layman Pascal has an awesome book called “Gurdjieff for a Time-Between-Worlds” that goes into them.15 However, a fourth pillar I’d highlight is social development. My copy of Layman’s book is on the other side of the country, so unfortunately I couldn’t confirm if he had highlighted social development as much as I do. I know for a fact that he discusses the first three though. I just want to mention that to make sure I was giving credit where it was due.
Either way, the point of social development is because you need to actually be able to navigate social situations. You can meditate all you want, read all the books you want, and do somatic work until your body is a supple leopard, but if you freeze up the moment you find yourself in front of people who are challenging you in real time, that’s something that reinforces the Prison. The first three pillars are very obviously going to help with that, but I think there is a meaningful enough difference to highlight social development, whether we define that as empathy or assertiveness.
With all of that being said, that is the full overview of the Psychospiritual Prison of Masculine Conformity, and some legitimate things you can begin doing to free yourself from it. In the next essay I’m going to give my perspective on why there was such a misunderstanding around the man vs. bear fiasco. In the essay after that, I’m going to take a deeper dive into the disintegration of the Prison and the sometimes very painful steps in the process toward true individuality.
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 essay, please find the recommended order here. Scroll to the bottom.
References:
1 – Sexton, J. Y. (2020). The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making. Counterpoint.
2 – Gunderson, E. A., Gripshover, S. J., Romero, C., Dweck, C. S., Goldin-Meadow, S., & Levine, S. C. (2013). Parent Praise to 1-3 Year-Olds Predicts Children’s Motivational Frameworks 5 Years Later. Child Development, 84(5), 1526. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12064
3 – Mascaro, J. S., Rentscher, K. E., Hackett, P. D., Mehl, M. R., & Rilling, J. K. (2017). Child gender influences paternal behavior, language, and brain function. Behavioral Neuroscience, 131(3), 262. https://doi.org/10.1037/bne0000199
4 – Duhigg, C. (2012). The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (First Edition). Doubleday Canada.
5 – Connell, R. (2005). Masculinities (2 edition). Polity.
6 – hooks, bell. (2003). The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. Atria.
7 – Alexander. (2023, July 14). Risk Aversion and Dating—Date Psychology. https://datepsychology.com/risk-aversion-and-dating/
8 – Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from Freedom. Farrar & Rinehart, inc.
9 – Lewis, M.D. (2015). The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease (Illustrated edition). Public Affairs.
10 – Zizek, S. (2009). The Sublime Object of Ideology (2 edition). Verso.
11 – Nakade, R. (2021a, June 18). 5 Signs You’re a Meta-Ideological Chad. Medium. https://greenteaji108.medium.com/5-signs-youre-a-meta-ideological-chad-8c7f62d6d90c
12 – Nakade, R. (2021b, December 29). The Real Problem of “Ideology.” Medium. https://greenteaji108.medium.com/the-real-problem-of-ideology-5837eca61f8b
13 – Nakade, R. (2021c, December 30). Three Ways to Avoid Becoming an Ideologue. Medium. https://greenteaji108.medium.com/three-ways-to-avoid-becoming-an-ideologue-945e6e7e6063
14 – Menakem, R. (2017). My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Central Recovery Press.
15 – Pascal, L. (2024). Gurdjieff for a Time Between Worlds: Hyperpersonal Essays on the Grandfather of Metamodern Spirituality. Sky Meadow Press.