Men Are Designed to Be Useful Not Broken

The campaign trying to break men and why it is wrong

The Course of Empire: The Savage State. Thomas Cole. 1834

I propose an archetype in this essay that I see more and more often in our culture.

This essay is, in part, inspired by Sappho. Her quote applies equally well to the modern day when she says, “They had never found you, peace, more difficult to endure.”

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There is a male figure I see so often in contemporary advertisements and movies that I have come up with a name for him: the broken man. This man comes in many forms, but let us focus on one in particular. His shoulders roll forward and his grey sweat pants are stretched and soiled looking. His stomach protrudes over them and he has a patchy, unkempt semi-beard. He is inept at relationships, a failure when it comes to the simplest of household tasks, and a loser that needs to be patiently coddled like a bumbling infant. But his eyes are what stick with me the most. They are vacant. Dull. The concept of the broken man is so ubiquitous that I can only conclude we are supposed to believe that all men are incapable of self-command and, above all, useless – useless to themselves, their families, and their communities.

I have a bone to pick with the creators of the broken man movement. It is of note that this movement is a path of destruction, not deliverance. I believe that the broken man is not only damaging to the interior lives of real, living people, but to society as a whole. To illustrate this point, let us draw on the example of the Mae, a pre-state tribe of Papua New Guinea, to see what reality has to say on the matter.

One ethnographer observed the Mae and wrote that most of their scars were from arrowheads. A man is expected to be in command of himself no matter his suffering, even when he is shot in battle. “Without taking his eyes off the enemy, he simply pulls out an arrow that is lightly lodged and, if the shaft is intact, uses it himself. If the arrow is deeply embedded but the man can still move about, he breaks off the shaft and goes on fighting.”¹

What then is the nature of this ancient mode of masculinity?

Mae boys in the process of becoming men are told “This is what pain is all about.” They learn that all forms of hardship are outside of our control. Hardship will find us no matter how hard we flee from it, or lament about it, or wish it to leave us alone, so it must be accepted and prepared for.

They are also told, “If you are wounded and have to withdraw, warn the men on either side of you, lest you leave them with their flanks unprotected.” The boys learn that they are not the center of the universe, but that their role is to keep their brothers, sisters, children, parents, and communities safe.

Pulling out the arrow and reusing it, then, defines two of their social values: self-command and usefulness to others.

It is significant that self-command and usefulness to community – of all the human traits to choose from – are under fire today. The contrast between the Mae view of men and the uselessness of the broken man staggers the mind.

What do the creators of the broken man say? “We are sowing the broken man into the soil of our culture to end violence and aggression, not command and usefulness.” What then will you do about the violence and aggression that is – and always has been – in our midst? Violence and aggression have two faces: one evil and one noble. It is worth remembering that the enemy always gets a vote. No matter the lengths we might go to eliminate violence, there are those who will do the opposite.

Now what would have happened if a Mae village collectively decided to replace bright eyed archery practice with a heavy lidded television addiction? What might a Mae matriarch say? She might say something to the effect of, “What are you babbling about you privileged fools? The men in the field with red ink on their faces and war feathers dyed green in their hair would be slaughtered. Then the enemy would walk into our village and massacre our entire tribe. Is this what you want?”

And if the example of the Mae is not modern enough, then let us ask what a mother in the early twentieth century would say about the prospect of her children growing up beneath the thumb of some tyrant or another. For her part, she might say, “What are you babbling about you privileged wretches? Do you not see your contradiction? Socially engineering men to be more docile and submissive destroys their command and usefulness, and without command and usefulness, what then? The Mae might watch as clouds of smoke blacken the sky above a burning village, but for us it would be an entire country on fire. The world might now be draped in a swastika or hammer and sickle.”

If the creators of the broken man get what they want, we will have peace only through bloodshed: through the massacre of the docile and the victory of the violent. If these are the means by which the creators of the broken man think we should earn peace, then they are evil. If it is not, then they are fools. In either case, we are in bad hands.

To which the creators of the broken man might say, “Yes, but we must end toxic masculinity.” What are they calling toxic? Toxic is defined as “very harmful in a pervasive or insidious way.”² The abuser is toxically masculine. The sadist is toxically masculine. The man tearing an arrow out of his leg and walking back into the fight is not toxically masculine – he is simply masculine. The issue at hand is that the creators of the broken man label every last trace of masculinity as toxic, and this is, in part, because they have never laid eyes on the ancient mode of masculinity. And why have they not seen it? Because they never needed to – they have known nothing but peace.

It is ironic that the broken man can only be a concept when times are peaceful and safe, yet peace and safety are what the creators of the broken man claim to desire. It is ironic that the voices claiming that men are too violent and aggressive and toxic are the very same voices who know the least about war and violence and death.

They know nothing of the willingness to die doing some good deed that might lie at the core of the man driving a bobcat, or pinching a stethoscope, or viewing the world through the green glow of night vision goggles as his legs dangle from a Little Bird helicopter (MH-6).

Let us dig a bit deeper into this latter category to illustrate a point. If the creators of the broken man know the fighters on the Little Bird personally, they do not know them professionally, and never see the evil they see. The creators of the broken man think that their own world is the “real” world, and that the men who harness violence for noble ends live in some nonsensical, needlessly violent world. A thought experiment clears this up nicely. If the “real” world vanishes, then the men on the Little Birds will keep doing exactly what they are doing at this very moment. If the men on the Little Birds vanish, then the “real” world will burn. Whose world, then, is “real”? Whose world ought to be prepared for?

To be fair, this delusion exists for a reason. Ancient men did not deploy to some remote country when they fought — violence happened in and around the home and it permeated every single aspect of ancestral living. Every man, woman, and child saw it. They heard the screams in the forest at night and they stepped around the apple-red pools of blood in the dewy morning. They did not walk wearily around the men who were violent on their behalf as if they belonged on a therapist’s couch with a coloring book and some glitter crayons. They knew his value because they saw it all and suffered alongside him. 

Pulling out the arrow and reusing it is the reality that molded the ancestral man, the war-like man, the un-broken man, the Stoic man, to respond positively to hardship. Whether he is fired, or ill, or injured, or finds himself in war or under tyranny, he can break the shaft and walk back into the fight for his kith and kin.

I will go out on a limb and suggest that we should not trust whoever thinks the most noble aspects of humanity need to be erased from our cultures and conditioned out of our genes with Clockwork Orange-style methods. Whether they are well or ill intentioned, I am not sure it matters. In the words of the longshoreman philosopher, Eric Hoffer, “a savior who wants to turn men into angels will be as much a hater of human nature as a monster who wants to turn them into slaves and animals.”³

I care nothing for the broken man. I personally do not know a single man like him. My only concern is for those who write him into their scripts, that hire the actors to play him, that allocate the capital to place him in advertisements and movies, and who have a reason for doing so.

Regardless, is this the best that the minds behind the broken man can come up with? Is it for this that they wail and gnash their teeth? What is one worthless ideology but a bit of mold on a blueberry? The other blueberries are fine. Let us throw out the moldy one and be done with it. Destruction and deliverance lie within – life is too short and beautiful to choose destruction.⁴ 

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1. Meggitt, Mervyn John. “Blood Is Their Argument: Warfare Among the Mae Enga Tribesmen of the New Guinea Highlands.” (1978).

2. Merriam-Webster

3. Hoffer, Eric. “The Temper of Our Time.” (1967)

4. Epictetus uses the analogy of a physical trainer to highlight a point about human nature. “The boy he is training is thrown: ‘get up’, he says, ‘and wrestle again, until you get strong.’ React in some such way yourself, for I would have you know that there is nothing more easily prevailed upon than a human soul. You have but to will a thing and it has happened, the reform has been made; as, on the other hand, you have but to drop into a doze and all is lost. For it is within you that both destruction and deliverance lie.” [4.9.16]

Little Bird helicopter