A friend of mine posted an essay this week entitled Machismo…and Why? The paragraphs of the essay described toxic masculinity as a range of behaviors, a state of male arrested development. Males in socially elevated positions present themselves as powerful, yet behave as a child of 3 or 4 years of age going into a raging snit when circumstance obstructs fulfillment of their desire.

Life from start to finish is a rough game. Birth is hazardous, – we come into this world crying. Death which stalks everyone, means the loss of all that is precious, that we imagined was our possession, – almost certainly will be greeted with a scream or a whimper.

Therefore do I learn to transform the obstruction of my desires, which are infinite, my mini-deaths into life? If I fail to learn the lesson, – then what?

I may become an instance of toxic masculinity, a dangerous, raging lunatic. That is, – a person who will just take what he desires, an empty soul forcing those without power to pay the price for my unfulfilled desires. Do I even need to say that the President of the United States is the “poster-child”, the icon of this mal-adapted, male adulthood? Germane to the issue is the history and meaning of the term, rape: “seize prey; abduct, take and carry off by force.”

This quotation from Hakim Bey is a meditation upon the toxic male adult, the will to visit raw murder, war, famine, and greed upon others. Also Bey speaks to the path of release from a hell-on-earth, a Babylon promising salvation. Well, enough from me. You can read Bey and think for yourself…

Paradoxically
the monist path also cannot be followed
without some sort of “murder, war, famine, greed”:
the transformation of
death into life…

Give each of these four terms
a different mask of language
(to call the Furies “The Kindly Ones” is not mere euphemism
but a way of uncovering yet more meaning).
Masked, ritualized, realized as art, the terms
take on their dark beauty,
their “Black Light.”

Instead of murder say the hunt,
the pure paleolithic economy
of all archaic and non-authoritarian tribal society…
Instead of war say insurrection,
not the revolution of classes & powers
but of the eternal rebel,
the dark one who uncovers light.
Instead of greed say yearning,
unconquerable desire, made love.
And then instead of famine, which is a kind of mutilation,
speak of wholeness, plenty, superabundance, generosity of the self
which spirals outward toward the Other.

Without this dance of masks, nothing will be created.
The oldest mythology makes Eros the firstborn of Chaos.
Eros, the wild one who tames,
is the door through which the artists
returns to Chaos, the One,
and then re-returns, comes back again,
bearing one of the patterns of beauty.

The artist, the hunter, the warrior:
one who is both passionate and balanced,
both greedy & altruistic to the utmost extreme.

We must be saved from all salvations
which save us from ourselves,
from our animal which is also our anima,
our very lifeforce,
as well as our animus,
our animating self-empowerment,
which may even manifest
as anger and greed.

BABYLON has told us
that our flesh is filth
–with this device & promise of salvation it enslaved us.

But—if the flesh is already “saved,”
already light,
if even consciousness itself is a kind of flesh,
a palpable & simultaneous living aether
–then we need no power to intercede for us.
The wilderness, as Omar says,
is paradise even now.

T. A. Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism by Hakim Bey, COMMUNIQUE #6 II. Murder—War—Famine–Greed, page 41 – 42.

Always enough time for a song. This one by Eddie Money, Two Tickets To Paradise will elevate your spirit.