My Liberal Male Guilt Complex

Earlier, tonight, which is to say, late yesterday, I talked to my sister Mary, on the phone. (Hi, Mary!) It went very well. We have a wide ranging discussion where I got to air out a lot of my problems without having to directly come out and whine about them. We kind of more shifted from casual conversation into discussing them, without explicitly stating that we were going to discuss them, like a dance, except hard to know who was leading.

I got to air many of the problems, that have been vexing me, and Mary suggested a reason for it that seemed to described exactly one of my pocket theories for my lack of direction, which I think about be called the Liberal Male Guilt Complex, or in my specific case, the Liberal White-Middle-Class-Male Guilt Complex. In brief, the basic idea behind it is that certain men in this day and age, aware of the injustices done against other groups throughout human history, feel bad about those things, do not desire to be part of the problem, and thus are going about sabotaging their ambitions. It's not that they don't want to succeed, it's that they don't feel they deserve to succeed, so they go about making sure they don't. At the same time, the revolutions in the structure of modern society that have been going on for the last couple of decades haven't come up with a new role for men in society that conforms to those changing values, which really only leaves the traditional model in place, or no model at all. Which means, of course, that men who agree with the values that have come about in the last couple of decades are left not really knowing what to do with themselves, hence the need for sabotage. Who can you succeed in society if your success hurts society? I mean, if (white) men are disproportionately and unfairly filling the job ranks, then isn't your success, if you seek it, a way of keeping the disadvantaged down? Never mind that it makes your the capitalist oppressor of the lower classes. The result is mindbending identity crisis issues. Mary's advice is to just get over it and try to succeed anyways, I think.

Women, in this New Era, are faced with a slightly different problem. It's not so much a question of not having any role to fill, its not knowing which role to fill, that of stereotypical housewife/mother, or that of go-getter. That is the "typical" male and female roles, which are impossible to perform at once which driving yourself to the point of exhaustion. Short of completely changing the way labor is performed in this country, and I think it will take a socialist revolution to change our labor paradigm this much, women are stuck making a choice that is going to cut off one of those things that society is pushing them to be. Now, they have the option of just going completely in one direction, but there will be blowback for this from some circles, no matter what they do. Of course some people manage to find jobs that allow them to fulfill all their desires, but that's usually circumstantial to the requirements of the job, and not applicable to wider society.

Oh, also, Mary was quite and constant to point out, and I agree with here, that all this is bullshit and hearsay, and I agree with her. This could be totally wrong and just based on anecdotal evidence. But still, it felt nice to hear someone else say this, someone who wasn't me. Usually, arguments of this nature come from the right, and are basically made to argue that everyone should just go back to the way things were. The left, or liberals, especially those of the identity politics crowd, tend to dismiss such arguments on the ground of there point of origin. Hearing Mary say such things gives me confidence such concerns aren't just my Inner Conservative piping up, but are, maybe, actual concerns. In fact, I think liberals ignore these things at their peril, since i think it is the fact that these problems exist might account for a certain amount of the traction that that conservative values hold in our society. It social liberalism doesn't offer people a new way to live, they won't even bother to consider that arguments about how it it is more just and stuff like that.

Anyways, another thing Mary said is that I probably need to start journaling my thoughts, to try to work through these issues that are hanging me up. Once I get them aired out, shaped into written form, it will be easier for me to observe them, put some distance between me and them. This is as good a place for that as any, I guess. So expect more complaining in the future.

Such complaints are, of course, actually related to the whole Blogging About Writing Thing, which is the actual purpose of this job, since my various mental hangups, which have gotten me stuck in my shit job, living at home, and basically feeling miserable and directionless, are also the reasons for my Not Writing, so getting over all that crap is actually instrumental to the actual purpose of this blog. What a circumlocutory path this is.