Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man by Sam Keen

Author:Sam Keen [Keen, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2010-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

From Artificial Toughness to Virile Fear

As we push deeper into the interior of a man’s psyche, we discover that in back of the facade of toughness and control there is an entire landscape of undifferentiated fears, with all manner of beasts, demons, and ghosts lurking in the shadows. And to win our soul or rescue our self from its entrapment in our personality, we have to do battle with a legion of fears we never knew we had.

How long ago was it that we men forced our fear into exile and condemned it to live in the shadow? Evolution demanded that the male be tough enough to repel the onslaught of saber-toothed tigers, or more recently, corporate raiders. If you want the no-nonsense definition of a man, skip the claim that we are Homo sapiens and go directly to “fearless” and its synonyms—undaunted, bold, intrepid, audacious, brave, courageous, valiant, valorous, doughty, daring, adventurous, heroic, gallant, plucky, gritty.

I can hardly remember a time when I wasn’t working at being fearless. Can you? It started with seemingly innocent advice and guidance from grown men, big brothers, and sometimes mothers: “Don’t be a scaredy-cat. There is nothing to be afraid of.” Early on, we learned that fear could be controlled in the same way as grief: Lock your jaw to prevent it from quivering, tighten your chest, and push yourself to the edge of danger to prove yourself. We flirted with fearful things: walking through graveyards at midnight; running through the turf of rival gangs; sneaking into a haunted house; stealing a car; jumping from the cliff high above the swimming hole; taking a dare; going to the whorehouse. And, finally, we went to war—without ever acknowledging the depths of our terror. Every time we resisted yielding to the seduction of fear, we fell more deeply in love with our own image of ourselves as heroes. We are men; we are unafraid. We can do what must be done.

But we paid a terrible price for our conquest of fear, for viewing ourselves as actual or potential heroes.

For starters, we reduced our world to an arena within which courage is constantly demanded, and other virtues—patience, honesty, kindness, contentment, intelligence, wisdom—are not cultivated. Somehow, men have managed, although not without the complicity and cooperation of women, to create a world dominated by competition and warfare. We are in constant danger and must regularly risk our lives in order to ensure our survival. It is as if modern history has become the story of the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral. Better cosmocide than cowardice. Even with glasnost and the crumbling of “the communist threat,” we are finding it difficult to break our addiction to fear and defensiveness. Somehow courage has become a rogue virtue, a virtue perverted into a vice.

Perhaps the greatest price men have paid for their obsession with fearlessness is to have become tough on the outside but empty within. We are hollow men. The connection between fearlessness and feelinglessness should be obvious. Fear, along with grief, joy, and anger, is one of the primal feelings.

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