Unreal City: reflections of a suicide

II. Male Suicide and Gender Ideology

This is the second part of a series, part one of which can be found here. It was mostly written between 2019 and 2021. The recent death of Peter Lynch, who apparently committed suicide in prison after being sentenced for speechcrime, is a dark vector of connection to current events, one that also ties into the theme of next week’s installment: the suicide of the individual as microcosmic reflection of the suicide of the culture.

"With a night light

It feels alright

But I'm scared when the dark comes to me again

With a half light

It'll feel right

But I'm scared when the dark comes to me again"

-Unfinished song recorded by Toby in around August 2011

Like most people who kill themselves, my brother would be described as a man “with a lot going for him”. Those who met him were entranced by his good looks, his intellect, his impressive academic and professional career, and so forth. According to the logic of our time, a man like Toby was winning the zero-sum game of life. The possibility that the superficial trappings of success may not be sufficient to prevent self-murder raises some uncomfortable questions about the nature of our society.

So, to account for the spectre of male suicide haunting the rainbow masquerade ball, the jabbering, vacuous mouthpieces of industrial civilization attempt to lay the blame on 'patriarchal norms' and 'toxic masculinity', and encourage vulnerable men to adopt their ideology: a paper published in BMC Psychiatry in 2020 'concludes' that “conforming to some masculine norms may be deleterious to the mental health of young males, placing them at greater risk of suicidal ideation” and that “dismantling norms that rigidly enforce masculine norms, particularly in relation to heteronormativity, is likely to benefit the broad population of males, not only those who do not conform to heterosexual and other masculine norms”. “Norms that rigidly enforce norms” - get rid of those and all your worries will be dismantled, my boy. You vill vear ze sparkly dress, and be happy.

My brother was not someone who was raised to believe in the value of repressing one's emotions. He was highly sensitive person who was perfectly able to cry, and was honest about his vulnerability in the presence of those with whom he felt truly comfortable. His guardedness was did not arise from a desire to put up a 'manly front' of some kind, but from a basically secretive nature that probably derived from his own inner psychic fragmentation. He showed what he believed to be different faces to everyone he met, and these separate sub-personas had to be kept in the dark about each other - “worlds collide” was the phrase he kept repeating in perturbation when our parents visited him at university in Exeter, and hence risked seeing the personas that he presented to his friends there. Denied initiation into the mysteries of Nature by the Ouroborous-loop of self-consuming modernity, he went in search of the grounding and reintegration; never an easy voyage in a culture that provides very few accurate maps or navigation aids.

While proponents of the “toxic masculinity” narrative point out that it is not intended to be an attack on masculinity itself, merely a critique of the more unhealthy expressions of it, the phrase itself works on a subconscious level. By linking the concept 'toxic' with the concept 'masculinity', the phrase conjures up the sense of an evil, sludgey, dark, and highly gendered pollution, requiring special protective gear to handle safely. A masculinity made of “hammers and nails and puppy-dog's tails”, as the old rhyme has it. Men of all social strata are told to simply “be better at everything” by members of the ruling class, which presumably involves reading turgid grievance studies literature and attending seminars to learn “what's wrong about masculinity”. The question of what's right about masculinity would presumably be considered too toxic to even ask.

The paradoxes are too strong for a human psyche to assimilate. One of the deepest pressures facing a man is the expectation of competence; the incompetence of men in contrast with the competence of women is a trope of modern comedy, presented as a locus of ridicule – the underlying reason for this humour is the implicit assumption that a man should out-perform women in these situations, and his failure to do so invites justifiable derision. Men are being told that they are incompetent while being told to improve in every single way; being told what's wrong with their 'masculinity' but not what's right; being told to treat women with respect but chastised as “fascists” when they decide to give up on porn for its hideous impact on human sexuality. Abusive and misogynistic men maintain their standing in the progressive community by waffling about consent, the wolves in sheep's clothing bleating louder than any of the flock.

Ideology proliferates when political dogmas fill the vacuum left by the absence of meaning and connection. Identity politics is an inevitable manifestation of a mechanised society; authentic and justifiable emancipation is not always easy to distinguish from the greater assimilation of the human organism into the corporate-industrial machine. Gender roles have at numerous points in human history been excessively restrictive, but the push for their total eradication has less to do with true liberation, and more to do with the requirements of an urbanised capitalist super-culture which requires an obedient and docile workforce. The traditional domestic roles of women, which in many cases had provided distinct spheres of power and influence when extended families and small communities were the basis of the social organism, are inevitably destroyed by the industrial system's continual assault on traditional human culture, and the route to “re-empowerment” is provided through the promise of ascension within corporate and financial hierarchies, and images of affected “independence” promoted by the predatory men who run the entertainment industry. Greater dependence on the industrial machine is the result of this false “independence”; motherhood and the value of raising a family is denied. Parenthood is routinely described by state-friendly media outlets as “horrifying”, “one of the crappiest things that can ever happen to you”, “regrettable”, or even “producing a lifetime of carbon emissions” in an age of “climate apocalypse”. The industrial system, once again, blames Nature for its own intrinsic pathology.

Industrial society requires increasing mechanisation and the outsourcing of human labour to machines; this reliance on technology presupposes dehumanisation as the goal and product of the machine's process. That which is defined as “masculine” and “feminine” is largely irrelevant to the machine's propaganda, which is endlessly adaptable to a multiplicity of narratives, and deliberately promotes cognitive dissonance in order to control and fragment human resistance. Your vague sense of alienation and inner fragmentation can be repackaged and sold back to you in the form of ontologically meaningless categories like 'nonbinary' or 'genderqueer', and you can be distracted from your angst by a false sense of community with other consumers.

“Identity, stability, community”, as the slogan of Huxley's World-State goes. Men and women might wear the same tracksuits and practise compulsory polyamory, but the tour of the Hatcheries at the beginning of Brave New World reveals that fragmented male psyches are ultimately behind this assault on motherhood, this ultimate expression of pathological misogyny: to deny the most essential characteristic of being a woman, while selling it as “female emancipation.”

The industrial system is intrinsically hostile to both “masculinity” and “femininity” regardless of what those concepts may signify, because the distinction itself not useful for a totalising system that requires uniformity even in the guise of “diversity”. As Stone Age Herbalist put it in a conversation for the Dodcast, it's not so much a war on masculinity as a war on difference.¹ The increase of suicide is a phenomenon created by the industrial system itself, a fact demonstrated to a truly shocking degree in those regions effected by brutal “lockdown” policies enacted in the wake of COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021. I suspect the reason that men are more likely to respond to the pressures of modernity by suicide is related to factors that are at least partly inborn and intrinsic; the fact that this viewpoint is hugely unpopular in the modern world has no particular bearing on its essential accuracy.² For Jung, the male propensity for suicide was caused when the ego becomes possessed by the negative anima. Jung's observations – developed further by followers such as Marie Louise von Franz - led him to suppose that the male unconscious was personified by a feminine “anima” figure that, when activated in a dysfunctional manner, would lure the man to his death, as personified by this Siberian folktale quoted by von Franz:

One day a lonely hunter sees a beautiful woman emerging from the deep forest on the other side of the river. She waves at him and sings: Oh. come, lonely hunter in the stillness of dusk. Come, come! I miss you. I miss you! Now I will embrace you. embrace you! Come, come! My nest is near, my nest is near. Come, come, lonely hunter, now in the stillness of dusk. He throws off his clothes and swims across the river, but suddenly she flies away in the form of an owl, laughing mockingly at him. When he tries to swim back to find his clothes, he drowns in the cold river. (Man and His Symbols 1974 187-189)

Note the appearance of the owl, echoed in Toby's daylight encounter with the owl; the owl in Priestley's Dangerous Corner; the owl into which capricious lover Bloddeuwedd is transformed as punishment for the betrayal of solar hero Lleu Llaw Gyffes in the Welsh mythic cycle Mabinogion.³

Von Franz’s insights here run deeper than any attempts at academic pedantry can hope to unravel.

1. Sadly, this is no longer online, as SAH was threatened with doxxing.

2. The rise in female suicide rates is also worth noting.

3. This latter myth is given a modern Jungian spin in Alan Garner's The Owl Service, a highly sophisticated young adult novel from the 1960s that became a BBC series.