America's Father Wound
The true depth of America's violence problem
America’s got a problem. Well, maybe more than one. Ok, you’re right, we have a lot more than one. But the problem that is most horrifying, saddening & urgent to address is the one I’m going to attempt to shed some light on in this article.
I would define the problem thusly: America has a Father Wound. A great, gaping, seething Father Wound.
What is a Father Wound you may ask? This is a fair question, for although it is likely intuitively understandable, unless you’re swimming in a psychoanalytic ponds and can breathe that water, the combination of the words may not be immediately clear. If you are, salutations, fellow nerd.
So, let’s explore then define this concept. A Father Wound is derived from a larger concept in Jungian work called a complex. A complex is a constellation of thoughts, emotions, behaviors & sensations around a certain locus point or ‘object’ in Jungian Psycho-Analytic theory. In our case, naturally, the object is the ‘Father’. Because every being in the animal kingdom has a father (whether you love him, hate him or his head was chopped off by his praying mantis lover after the coital act), a father complex is ubiquitous to all humans on various levels. This is what the Jungians refer to as an ‘Archetype’.
An archetype can be defined as the amalgamation of the essence of a certain thing, as such, across time and space, or breadth and depth. In our case, the archetype of ‘Father’ as such, is evolved over all the manifestations of father that has passed down evolutionarily through millions of years of human evolution, coalescing into repeated patterns over time.
There are descending levels to this phenomenon of the “archetype”. If we stopped at the level we just elucidated, it would be fair to name it the universal. If we then were to analyze the characteristics of American fatherhood, we could speak of the ‘Archetypal American Father’ and so on down the descending levels of analyses. A particular historical epoch, a country, a community or a family. All are apt levels of analyses. All these factors make up a Father Complex within an individual, including the fathers own unique personality.
Simple enough, no? Assuming you’re still with me, this article will address America’s Father complex. Hopefully I’ve not shocked any readers to death after that last sentence? Only one? Well, the strong must carry on.
A key aspect of analyzing an archetype that bears pointing out as well is, that it can be discerned by empirical data. This bears out by isolating particular demographic factors to then ascertain the specific subset of the population we wish to analyze. Once again, Fathers. That’s right you guessed it. So, without any further belaboring, let us proceed.
In order to build a solid foundation from which to address fatherhood, one must look at the substrata. In this case, manhood. We shall draw from the universal dimensions of manhood, into fatherhood to then analyze how these universal concepts manifest in an American context. These being quite large concepts, my intent is to be as brief and effective as possible (how I’m told the ladies like it, amirite fellas??).
In order to get a clear view of such lofty conceptual heights, it seems most beneficial to start at our nearest living animal cousin to shed some enlightening contrast on our species. Human beings evolved into our Hominid (No longer chimpanzees but not anatomically modern humans) ancestors approximately 6 million years ago. Over those millions of years, we developed eventually into what anthropologist’s call ‘anatomically modern humans’. That is; human beings with the same exact biology as us, as far as we can tell from the archaeological record. Therefor we assume they had essentially the same general experience all humans have today, except for TikTok & Tesla, among other things.
Over thousands of generations fathers did what fathers did; pass on Manhood &Culture to their progeny. This goes on into the present day. This speaks exactly to the concept of archetypal manhood – what men do and have always done, irrespective of time, place and particular cultural-historical context. We can trace this set of behaviors designated as ‘Manhood’ even further back to our chimp and other great ape ancestors. These comparisons provide us with robust insight into the fundamental patterns and drives that humans still manifesting in modern day.
Prominent among both male chimpanzees and humans is the propensity towards violence. This is highly relevant to our modern American Father wound, as we shall explore later. But let us look at how violence manifests itself in the chimpanzee society.
Male chimps are highly territorial creatures, predicated on achieving social dominance within their “Troop” hierarchy to control and defend resources both internally and externally. This essentially boils down to food, territory and mating opportunities. Male chimps participate in a lifelong series of games of networking, coordination & conflict to secure these afore mentioned resources. You may be able to see already the immense similarity between our male chimp ancestors and the core impetus of male behavior throughout human history.
Within this context, male chimps can be very violent and aggressive. With the strength on average 10x that of a grown human adult male, they will battle both internally and externally other males for group dominance. They have been well known to fight ‘wars’ with neighboring chimp troops over hunting groups as well as battle in internal power struggles. While it is not laced with poetic romance or epic intrigue, we can start to clearly see where the many iterations of humanities sagas of power struggles and wars find their roots. Male chimps have even been known to tear apart their relatives they’d been raised with if they move to another tribe and the troops come into conflict.
Being that we share over 99% of the same DNA as these creatures, it is no wonder that the propensity for violence in humanity is overwhelmingly evident. We just happen to do it with better technology. And in case you think this is simply a symptom of modernity, there is overwhelming evidence suggesting that premodern societies as well as contemporary, in situ hunter gatherer societies experience equivalent or far higher murder and/or violent death rates than modern societies. It is not surprising at all then that an endemic problem for humanity is war. Death to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s noble savage, literally.
Because violence is baked into our genetic cake, you’ll no doubt find if you read history for one second, much of it is based around war and/or the power struggle to control resources. Throughout the history of mankind war has been a proving ground for men to do the same as our chimp ancestors, secure resources. It is a domain that is an unforgiving crucible to develop one’s own self-control and networking capabilities, with dure consequences for failure. War is also a place where one learns the business of life. And fundamentally, though this point may seem exceedingly obvious, violence is endemic and inherent to maleness & thus manhood.
This may seem almost a silly thing to write, but it is precisely this fundamental truth that is so often ignored, waylaid or minimized that leads to much of the particularly obscene and rampant societal discord we have seen over the last two most recent decades in America. In turn, it is the misapprehension of fundamental characteristics of maleness, ergo manhood and thus fatherhood that has led to America’s Father wound.
Yet, as human history has advanced, so too fortunately, has our ability to solve conflict peacefully. This genetic, social arms race is as miraculous as it is terrifying, culminating in both the Nobel peace prize and nuclear warheads. This alternative channel to outright physical conflict is called politics. Thus, Von Clausewitz said, “War is the continuation of politics through other means”. Evolutionary science flips that statement on its head – Politics is war through other means. Regardless, the fundamental interrelationship between politics and war is made quite clear and succinct within that quote.
Though the ability for peaceable sociability no doubt evolved in tandem with the capacity for aggressive, physical domination, it is the symbolic aspect throughout many cultures that appears repeatedly that the Word, as such, is the fundamental male quality that brings life to the primordial feminine darkness. This is certainly true for Christian cosmology.
Following this thread, it is the Word: the ability to socialize, relate and interact without physical violence, that is the key to peaceful relating. And so, this is another fundamental aspect of Manhood – the ability to master and transmute violence into self-control through language.
The other core aspect of manhood is procreation. We all had parents who hung out with some birds and bees and then a stork appeared to bring us along. The male, in nearly all species of animal, is the initiator of this song and dance of life.
Not only does this happen at the animal and familial level for humanity but it also happens on a cultural level as well. Ubiquitously and universally, all human societies have cultural initiation rituals and vessels for creating a shared narrative. This inseminates the uncultured, primal child with the respective contents of the society, which then promulgates an evolved version of the original matter through the individuals lifetime. No doubt, women have a tremendous amount of influence and procreative capacity to infuse and create culture, but this is outside of the scope of this article, though it bears mentioning and keeping in mind.
It is therefor these two core aspects of Manhood; 1. Violence and it’s taming & 2. life giving – both biologically & culturally, that are foundational. They are analogous to Natural Selection (Survival of the fittest) and Sexual Selection (Selection through mating success) throughout the animal kingdom, respectively. It is from these two areas that all else in the father complex runs downstream. It is fair to say that Fatherhood cannot be achieved without first developing Manhood. It is the fundamental failure to bear these responsibilities that has led to the Father Wound that manifest in multiple crises in modern America. We are erring deeply in our ability to fulfill the process that are necessary to create Manhood and thus Fatherhood. We are not teaching our boys to tame their violence or be responsible for their creative capacities – both biological and cultural. This in turn manifest itself in all manner of horrendous statistics from mass shootings, incarceration, deaths of suicide and suicide-by-proxy through opioids or other drugs, forever wars and corrupt, inept politicians.
Although America has always, like the rest of humanity, had problems with violence and illness, we’ve never seen these particular manifestations. Though there are no doubt myriad streams that confluence into the river of the afore mentioned issues, and I am elucidating just channel, I am attempting to put my finger on a wellspring that fuels many streams. It is also important to acknowledge these issues are not random. Instead it is possible to discern and trace the changing factors in American society over the last 70 odd years that preceded our current maladies that seem to be the causal drivers of the abnegation of responsibility of manly enculturation that in turn has created our father wound.
The starting point of our modern problems seems to be both great wars. In synopsis; the European powers obliterating each other with modern weaponry traumatized two generations to such an extreme that it marked an indelible wound in the psyche of the world. Particularly around many of the aspects of archetypal manhood and thus fatherhood, which as we’ve seen are nested like Russian Dolls. Naught 20 years after the ‘war to end all wars’, Europe once again plunged the world into the penultimate display of horror in history manifested through totalitarian political ideologies – Nazism and Communism; resulting in the barbarous deaths of hundreds of millions of lives.
America, in both wars, was the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’. So our Fathers fought in these wars nobly. But the age-old trap with confronting evil is that you must gird against turning into something worse than the monster you seek to defeat. However wary one may be of this principle; it was seemingly unavoidable in the last great war. Western, democratic societies grew more totalitarian in order to deal with the political, military and technological cohesion of their enemies. We inherently became more authoritarian, centralized, despotic and industrialized as societies. This no doubt had immeasurable benefits, but it also came with costs that we are now attempting to grapple with the sour fruits of.
This fundamental dynamic of fighting great, global wars against nations possessed by evil ideologies fundamentally bared it’s weight on the psyche of each individual in society alive at the time. The fundamental principles of American culture being the Judeo-Christian ethic that can be summarized as prizing an individual ethical relationship with God, Love, Truth and Freedom above all else was inherently forced to compromise it’s integrity through these wars.
In order to defeat collectivism, one must sacrifice the self. In order to coordinate masses of people, one must spin narratives that bely the Truth at the individual level and prize the collective. In order to maintain the hegemonic world order that arose from the ashes of the second world war, one must constantly be armed and prepared for war – eschewing peace & constantly fearing one’s own shadow. The collective superseded the apotheosis of the individual in the last century.
In this way, America sacrificed its moral might for political. In this way we pursued wars out of fear instead of lovingly defending freedom. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq – all wars that were echoes of the initial assumption of worldly dominance. Waged because our leadership could not hold back, could not admit they were wrong and could not abstain from the temptation to grab power for its own sake.
This in turn turned an entire generation, starting with the Greatest, into being blindly conformist to the current powers that be (now dubbed the Military Industrial Complex) or rejecting outright all fundamental, classical aspects of our society, particularly of Manhood and Americanism through the Civil Rights and Sexual Revolution. Both camps have their vices and virtues, but both fundamentally demanded the abnegation of the responsibility of each individual man to first fulfill his core responsibilities at maximal spiritual depth. The entire boomer generation of men, whether right or left, was grounded in the small ‘s’ self of Adam Smith’s and other economists’ conception. The rational individual of the market, empirically measured, manifesting pure self-interest. This is to be contrasted with the Judeo-Christian tradition upon which America was predicated – that men should be grounded in the Fear and Love of God.
Emerging from this source of the socio-spiritual development, society became hyper industrial in tandem. This took the modern man out of the home and out of the community daily, atomizing him into a toolkit of skills to be sold on an open market rather than a living breathing human being that in turn was a part of a great organic community. Manhood became solely about making money, playing the breadwinner and the role in turn became the man; though in latent potential, there is always so much more.
So over decades, the two fundamental processes that gird men against the vicissitudes and evils of life, were left fallow in their fields. The ability to wisely tame violence and inseminate the proper potential in one’s life was not properly transmitted to the boomers. The greatest generation was traumatized by the collective horrors of the great wars and in their attempt to reject the pathological aspects of society that furnished them with such horrors they could only replace them with shallow consumerism and small ‘s’ selfhood, which has no power over societies natural magnetism of conformity inducing authority.
These dynamics have dove tailed over the last 70 years to produce a self-perpetuating cycle in society where shallow, materialistic self-interest profits off the deep spiritual wounding and malaise of several generations. Because no deep spiritual healing is ever done at a cultural level, more suffering is manifested, thereby which the wrong level of solution is inherently propositioned again because nothing deeper exists than sheer materialism for the greatest and boomer generations. Their ability to have faith deeper than their egos was obliterated in fiery hells of the two world wars.
This manifests itself today in our institutional decay, the grotesque, wanton violence in our schools and religious venues (enculturation factories) & the vast increase in deaths of suicide, self-harm and addiction.
Because boys grow up in a culture that denies the core aspects of their deepest evolutionary being – violence & procreation – they’re unable to deal with these forces when they naturally arise in a conscious, guided manner by those who are wiser and more experienced. We simply allow our sons to develop in a haphazard form of osmosis. Different men deal with this developmental path more successfully than others. But the plights of the weakest of us is where we can evaluate the true robustness of a system, and this is where it becomes painfully and obviously evident that America’s system of male maturation and enculturation is failing dreadfully. The most vulnerable congregate in hateful, bilious online chatrooms & forums. Here the true meaning of toxic masculinity rears it’s hideous face. In reality, it is unmoored and unguided masculinity. It is uninitiated manhood.
The pattern is clear. Men who do not deal with the fundamental aspects of the manhood will lash out – whether at themselves or society. It is up to Americans now to find the moral fortitude to acknowledge the true depth of the problem so that in turn adequate and appropriate solutions may be tried.