Seek Power
I'm a white middle-class American male. I'm far from a one-percenter, but needless to say, based on my demographics, I've spent most of my life in privilege.
As men, society teaches us to seek power. We should go after the good job that gives us command over other people. We should go after a larger and larger salary as time marches on. We should find a woman and bring her under our wing in order to start a family. Etc.
This is the lesson we're taught almost from the very first. What's usually not taught is what we should do with this power once we attain it. (Either that, or we've obdurately ignored the lessons we were taught about our responsibility to others.)
More importantly, here's what we did not learn: power does not come automatically with privilege. Some measure of it does, and this certainly gives you more choices in your life compared to others who aren't as privileged as we are. But I've found that the privileged men I've known in my life went out into the world with high expectations about what their privilege entitled them to. They were all supposed to have fast-track careers at big companies that landed them somewhere near the top. They were all supposed to start massively successful entrepreneurial ventures. They were all supposed to get the trophy wife and have kids that didn't have cognitive disabilities.
Perhaps you identify with this. Perhaps when you grew up, became a man, and ventured out into the world, you discovered that things weren't as easy as you were taught. In the wake of the mortgage crisis of 2008, I think we've collectively learned this lesson in spades. Getting a college education and purchasing a house didn't magically shield us from the economic horrors and massive foreclosures that pulled the rug out from under many of us. Power concentrates at the top, and we suddenly learned that we were nowhere near as close to the top as we might have thought.
As men, we should seek power. But it is not power over our external world that yields the greatest return. It is power over ourselves. Where society would teach us that we should conquer others around us in order to achieve our highest ideal, we must ignore this and play a different game with different rules. Men seek to influence. To control. They want to feel they can affect change over the forces that govern them and the people in their lives.
It is important for men to do this, but before we can master the world around us, we must master ourselves. We either rule over our lower selves, our base instincts and desires, or they rule over us. This is the most difficult, and most important, conquest that exists in the world. We are each of us our own worst enemy. Sun-Tzu's first rule of war is to know your enemy, but most of us are so poorly acquainted with ourselves that it's impossible to believe that we've conquered ourselves.
It is only after we have learned to handle power over ourselves that we are ready to handle power over the world around us.
As men, society teaches us to seek power. We should go after the good job that gives us command over other people. We should go after a larger and larger salary as time marches on. We should find a woman and bring her under our wing in order to start a family. Etc.
This is the lesson we're taught almost from the very first. What's usually not taught is what we should do with this power once we attain it. (Either that, or we've obdurately ignored the lessons we were taught about our responsibility to others.)
More importantly, here's what we did not learn: power does not come automatically with privilege. Some measure of it does, and this certainly gives you more choices in your life compared to others who aren't as privileged as we are. But I've found that the privileged men I've known in my life went out into the world with high expectations about what their privilege entitled them to. They were all supposed to have fast-track careers at big companies that landed them somewhere near the top. They were all supposed to start massively successful entrepreneurial ventures. They were all supposed to get the trophy wife and have kids that didn't have cognitive disabilities.
Perhaps you identify with this. Perhaps when you grew up, became a man, and ventured out into the world, you discovered that things weren't as easy as you were taught. In the wake of the mortgage crisis of 2008, I think we've collectively learned this lesson in spades. Getting a college education and purchasing a house didn't magically shield us from the economic horrors and massive foreclosures that pulled the rug out from under many of us. Power concentrates at the top, and we suddenly learned that we were nowhere near as close to the top as we might have thought.
As men, we should seek power. But it is not power over our external world that yields the greatest return. It is power over ourselves. Where society would teach us that we should conquer others around us in order to achieve our highest ideal, we must ignore this and play a different game with different rules. Men seek to influence. To control. They want to feel they can affect change over the forces that govern them and the people in their lives.
It is important for men to do this, but before we can master the world around us, we must master ourselves. We either rule over our lower selves, our base instincts and desires, or they rule over us. This is the most difficult, and most important, conquest that exists in the world. We are each of us our own worst enemy. Sun-Tzu's first rule of war is to know your enemy, but most of us are so poorly acquainted with ourselves that it's impossible to believe that we've conquered ourselves.
It is only after we have learned to handle power over ourselves that we are ready to handle power over the world around us.