Why Men are Disintegrating

Today we’re going to talk about disintegration: why men are disintegrating.

We’ve been talking about life and existence.

We are standing in a circle. This is the place where all things begin. We are joining hands. The stars whisper to us. In the center of the circle, possibility is born. And from this first act comes civilization. This is the primordial transcendence of the human condition. 

Men and women. What’s happening to them? Let us first understand where we are, in existence, and then in history.

I want you to understand what a partner is in this life. A partner is the one standing beside you in the circle of being. They are there with you in this first act, joining hands with you, as we all turn to dust. We feel each other slipping through each other’s very fingers. Love in this way is an act of profound courage, the first and last strength.

This is where we are in existence. 

Now. Where are we in history? 

Women have a long list today about men’s shortcomings. Let us be more precise. This is an American phenomenon, or perhaps an Anglo one. And when we say “men,” by and large, we mean “white American men,” if you want to employ American thinking to begin with.

So what is happening to men? Men around the world are struggling, to some degree, it’s true. But in America, something different is happening. One can scarcely go a day without women accusing men of failing them. Is it true?

Let me cut through all this complaining and recrimination. Here is what is happening to American men, and you can decide for yourself whether pity, scorn, contempt, sympathy, or something else is deserved. 

American men are disintegrating.

I mean this in the following way. 

We go through life, come to life, with a kind of existential inheritance. This is the place that we are told we will be. It is made of many things. Power, status, money, respect, and so forth.

What is happening to American men is very simple. 

They were told that they would helm the predatory institutions of such a society. For that reason, by and large, they do not even see the institutions of such a society in this way, or that society is collapsing. From them, too often, the response is: “Stop worrying so much! Everything’s fine!” Is it? 

Only now they find themselves like everyone else. Instead of captaining and helming and rising through America’s predatory systems, suddenly, they are their mercy. Like everyone else, American men, find themselves in the jaws and teeth of utterly merciless systems and institutions, being ripped apart. Which treat them like commodities, like flesh, like bones to be scraped. 

In America, nothing and nobody is allowed to have what is had in the rest of the wealthy world, and much of the world besides. Inherent dignity. The right to exist. Not to be merely chewed up, torn apart, and spat out, once the meat has come off the bone. Once the systems and institutions of predatory capitalism have extracted what they hunger for. Only they matter.

American men did not expect this. They thought they mattered, too. and they are shocked to discover that in fact they do not. They are just more meat, money, flesh, bone. And they do not know not just “what to do” about it, but who they are supposed to be now. Are they just subhumans, like everyone else? How can that be? Isn’t that a fate worse than death? Day after day of humiliation and deprivation and abnegation and being seen as nothing at all?

In many ways, it can indeed be. As many of the rest of us know.

Women are different. They are much more attuned to the predatory nature of systems and institutions, because they have been at their mercy. For generations. There is an understanding amongst women that systems and institutions don’t just fail them, but prey on them. And this goes deep.

As a women, you understand: you will earn less money, even if you are a better worker. You understand: a man can fail upwards in life, but a woman will hit a glass ceiling. You know that you should smile and nod and look pretty and perhaps that way, the spectre of violence will not haunt you so. You know, through whispers, perhaps, that this man is a predator, and he gets away with it, and that one is, too.

Women do not come to existence with the inheritance of men. They see systems and institutions, in America, more so for what they are. I am not saying “every woman” does or even that “most women see the truth.” I am just saying that women are more existentially attuned to the predatory nature of American systems and institutions.

Remember why we stand in the circle. The place where all things begin. Here, we reject annihilation. We link hands and cast it out. This is the Mother Insight from which civilization itself is born. 

In this way, we cast out existential negation.

Now. What is the plight of American men? They come to existence expecting a certain inheritance: that they and they alone will have the right to bring existential negation into being. They will decide who gets to exist, and who gets not to. They will decide who gets money, by way of jobs, power, status, respect, esteem. They will decide what hierarchies exist, and how, and for what reason. They will mete out the rewards, and decide the punishment and the pain, too. Only now that relationship is breaking down. 

The predatory systems and institutions of the monstrous phantasm called capitalism, an illusion whose teeth draw real blood, are preying on them too.

And here, American men made a fatal mistake. A tremendous one, that must be called foolish. They expected predatory systems and institutions not to prey on them, in the end, too.

This is arrogance. It is self-deceit. It’s sort of funny, in a morbid way. That is not condemnation. We are standing in a circle. But where have the men gone?

You see, in practice, what all this means is this. 

Women understand, to a greater degree, that America is collapsing. This thing once called a society does not exist, function, or work anymore. 

Men do not. That is because their existential inheritance is to see the systems and institutions of American power and dominance and money and so forth as good ones. Not just functional ones, but morally just, correct, and right. They were to inherit them, after all. So they are in profound denial that anything much is wrong systemically. And so they are left disoriented, bewildered, and undone.

Please tell me if this pattern doesn’t hold true in your life. I have seen it a thousand times and more now. The women understand that collapse is real. They are desperate for men to link hands with them. But the men deny that the earth beneath their feet is quaking. Can a circle be formed that way? Can it stay strong? Can it endure?

Now let me summarize where men are, existentially.

One: their existential inheritance tells them that predatory systems of power and dominance, which we call predatory capitalism, are good ones. That is because, two, they were taught they would inherit them, and of course, to expect to be at the top of a thing is to see a thing as worthy and noble in the first place. Three: instead, the systems and institutions have turned around and are preying on the “men,” too, just like everyone else.

Please see what the verbal sleight of hand reveals. These predatory institutions and systems have always preyed on everyone else. That included plenty of men, too, but this time, I didn’t put it in quotes. “Men” are a central focus of concern now, because every other kind of person was never a person at all. 

But of course, for example, Black men have suffered for generations. And here they are. We don’t often include them in this fractured way of thinking. Because this is about who is a person, and who is not.

Suddenly, “men,” meaning white American men, are just like the rest of us. They are not really people at all. Personhood was a thing they were told they would not just have, but could determine for everyone else, too. Here I am, I have failed upwards, and I decide who gets a job, who gets a raise, who gets to work, who counts, and so on, and of course, here I don’t mean “every” man, I’m just speaking of a shared existential inheritance, an approach to being. Now, they are just like everyone else, which is to say, the thing that we are not when we are not people. Above, I called that thing meat, bones, flesh. 

This is what existential negation is. And for American men, the tables have turned, in a way they cannot understand or digest. Instead of being the ones who have the power to existentially negate, they are now existentially negated, too, just like everyone else.

And so men are lost. They do not know what to do about this, this sudden volte-face, this upside-downness.

You see, they feel betrayed. These systems were supposed to give me superhuman powers of existential negation, and I was to be atop them. But now here they are, negating me, too. How can that be? Is it me, is it the system, or should I just pretend none of it’s happening at all?

And so men are groping and grasping. They are chasing caricatures of hyper-masculinity, offered to them by YouTube influencers and what have you. But understand, for the first time, perhaps, what “masculinity” means, in the American context: it is the power of existential negation, and further, the monopoly over it. 

So now “men” find themselves at the mercy of existentially negative institutions. And to their way of reasoning, the answer is: if I am only more “masculine,” perhaps the system will allow me a place again. And so they seek an answer to their betrayal and a compass for their disorientation in this form: in a predatory place, I must become even more of a predator to survive.

Here, “men” teach us a grim and terrible lesson. Perhaps we should have a little sympathy for them. Because in a place as existentially negative as America, now, what is left of society belongs to the most predatory of all. It belongs to people at a predatory intensity so high they can only really be called psychopaths, perhaps.

So men are chasing this form of moral reasoning. I must become more of a predator to survive. To be a man is to be an apex predator. Is it? Is that all a “man” is? What does that make of a woman? A child? An elderly one? And how far away from fascism is this, anyways?

They end up in a place of terrible conflict. Because the truth is that very, very few of us can ever operate at the level of predatory intensity that belongs to those who have risen to the top of America’s suicidally destructive institutions and systems. For the vast majority of us, what is left of our consciences and morals will not allow it. Our souls would be undone long before we were able to become those kinds of creatures.

So American “men” now long to be something they cannot be, and will never be, yet tell themselves they must be, to survive, to mate, to marry. Psychopathic predators, stalking emotionlessly, and doing such terrible things, that the world reels in revulsion. This is an unconscious drive, in many ways, but of course you can see it plainly, in the manfluence game. But ask a woman, once in a while, and she might tell you that in fact, she would just like an interesting human being, being a real person, who is able to love, not a predator dripping in blood and guts.

This conflict grinds American men to dust. They are disintegrating amidst it, and now you are ready to understand what I mean. They are disintegrating literally: emotionally, relationally, socially, psychologically. Because not only is none of this a solution to the problem, they have still not even begun to understand the problem at all.

Their place in existence has disintegrated. They have been betrayed. Instead of predator, they became prey. Yet it is not in their nature to be the kind of predator that can look away while children are torn apart, or people are left to die, because that is not in anyone’s nature, except those who have absolute deficiencies of the soul. So there men are, stumbling, struggling, falling apart, as their place in existence disintegrates, and worse, trying to please the very systems, values, and institutions which laughed and humiliated them and ripped them apart.

And that leaves women feeling abandoned. 

Where did the men go?

Men are not standing in the circle. They have left, and are beating their chests in the jungle. They are howling and screaming in rage. See how strong I am. I will become an apex predator. That is how I will win this game called existence. But that is not how the game is won, because it is not a game in the first place.

Existence is lived. And it is lived fully, or in an empty way.

To live it fully, we must stand in the circle. So that there is a center.

From that center, all things begin. 

We protect the place and space in which possibility itself is born.

There, the first cities, letters, alphabets arose, and became art, science, literature, reason, truth, justice. 

The circle is the beginning. And it is also the end. When you stand with me in this circle, we are outside time. All history’s great minds and noblest souls are here with us.

This is mortality and frailty. We are holding hands as we turn to dust. But it is also the conquest of death, through love, because through this, and only through this first act, do we bequeath anything at all. This is courage.

Women feel abandoned because men have forgotten their responsibility. Not just their little ones, which are household chores. Nor even their adult ones, which are to provide. And not even their moral ones, which are to remain true. But their existential one. To stand in the circle, which takes courage and strength of the truest and highest forms—and never turn away.

American men have been betrayed, it’s true, but it is also necessary to say: did you really believe that these systems and institutions wouldn’t prey on you, in the end, too? Come now. And can’t you see that now you must give up your childish faith in them, because in the end, to them, you are what you always were, just like the rest of us, everyone else, nothing, inhuman, not a person at all?

Once men do that, then perhaps they will become men again. They will be the people who women want and need them to be and long for them to be. They will provide not just money and reassurance but direction and guidance in an unstable world. They will not just act like children, depressed and sulking, but rise to the challenge of existence, as it truly is. They will be capable of love again, instead of nursing the wound of betrayal from another, from the world itself, which of course, is a form of infidelity, too, to a partner.

This is higher strength. It is the strength of the soul. It is what women are looking for in men today, finding nothing of it, and it is the rarest of men who understands why. We are all looking for this strength of the soul, by the way, and women, these days, often have more of it than men. And that is precisely why they often do not feel men are their equals. They are correct. There is a deficiency here in men today, one of maturity, in this way of true strength, the strength to stand still in the circle of being, even as the world falls away beneath your feet.

Men are children now. They are not men. I know it and you know it and we all know it. Only they do not know it. They need to be something more than the small things they have made of themselves. A child is small. Men must mature now. So they can stand strong in existence. Beside us. That is where we need them. 

A partner is the one who stands beside us in the circle. They are the one we perform the first act of existence with. Joining hands, with them, we create possibility itself, and cast out annihilation.

But if a man is a person who doesn’t care about anything real, is a thinly veiled narcissist, has the strange presence of a child about them, is sulking over being betrayed by another, can anyone trust them existentially? Be with them in any genuine way? They have precluded the possiblity of an existentially authentic relationship.

What is worse—and this is the funny part—when men realize that they cannot be the psychopathic hyperpredators that have risen to the top in a place as unfortunate as America, then many of them regress. This is why men look and even dress like children these days. So much so that at the cafe, when I watch dates, the girls and women make an effort. The men look like twelve year olds. My lovely wife and her friends giggle. The women try not to show their disappointment. Little signs or big ones? A man should not look like a child, and when they do, it’s a sign that men do not understand how small they have become.

What happens on these dates I observe? The woman wants someone who can stand in the circle of existence with them. This is what we all want. But the man is someone who is first and foremost trying to preserve his broken relationship with predatory systems and institutions, which have already decided he is just meat, nothing, nobody. 

And so the women are less and less interested, because the men are not really having relationships with anyone but the very things which have betrayed them. 

The men are not really there. They are not really on these dates. They’re not really in these marriages, in these relationships, and the women know it, hence, the feeling of abandonment. The men are still haven’t figured out that systems which have betrayed them aren’t going to reward them for being a more obedient predator, and that they don’t have it in them to be apex psychopaths, and that is not what anyone wants, anyways.

The men are nowhere. They are not in existence at all right now. That is why they feel so lost. They are trying to please the systems and institutions which have betrayed them, ripped them apart, and left them for dead, hoping that way, they will have what they were promised, which is being above everyone else, and having the power of existential negation.

None of that will come to pass. When you are being existentially negated, of course, the point is that there will be nothing left of you. You will be humiliated and then eviscerated and then ground to nothing.

And in this sense, the circle of being is the place all things begin. Because in every moment, we are already becoming dust. We do not need systems that bay for our blood to do it faster.

All this is how and why men are disintegrating. 

They are coming undone existentially, because their place in existence is gone now, but they are still looking for it, like children, hoping that if they just please daddy, no matter how abusive he is, perhaps he will love them again. That is why when we disintegrate, of course, we regress, and that is why men have this eerie, phantasmal, child-like presence today. 

They hope that perhaps they will be rewarded with the prize they were promised, which was to make the rest of us less than people. But the system needed, at last, their souls, too. It ran out of everyone else under the sun to make unpeople, and in the end, only “men” were left. So of course it came for them. And in all this, they have no place left in existence. 

None of the rest of us had a place in existence, either, or at least, not one that we liked very much.

This is why the first act was the forming of the circle.

Men will grow now as they come full circle. They must begin at the beginning. They are at the end. Of a way, of a society, of a “model of masculinity,” of a mode of being. To go back that far, to the most ancient place, to the first act, where, in which all things began, is asking a great deal. Perhaps too much. And many of them will not make that journey of the soul, truth be told. 

Perhaps we should be a little gentle, then. Understanding what men are experiencing. It is a great trauma. Perhaps one of the greatest of all. Existential betrayal. Even if it comes through one’s own arrogance, and reveals the curse in one’s inheritance.

Or, if you like, do not be gentle. But let me offer a warning. Being too hard on those who have suffered existential trauma in the form of betrayal by what they trusted most, which is not necessarily a woman or a partner, but an inheritance of the world and a place in it, are already reeling, unmoored, undone.

So men today are lost in perpetuating the cycle of betrayal by abandoning those they want to care about in an existential way. Their challenge is finding their way back to the ancient place where the first act took place, and goes one, and must continue, or else all is lost, the circle of being.

All this too is how societies collapse. You’ve heard, of course, of women from many other countries seeking relationships with men in more prosperous, stable, and advanced ones. American women are not far away from that. And in this, American men do not understand: that they are not as successful at finding mates anymore isn’t solely a personal failing, it is one of the starkest signs of social collapse there is. 

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

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