"Toxic masculinity" is a modern phenomenon. It's a neurosis born of a mismatch between the remnants of earlier systems of ritual honor and the dynamics of an atomized global village that bombards everyone with a fire hose of unintelligible social stressors.

Yes, abuse of women by men has always been a thing, I'm not saying that misogyny or gratuitous violence was never a problem before, but I am saying that the behaviors we see now are their own unique thing contingent on our current social/technological reality.

And it's a problem because whatever your opinion of ritualized violence or hierarchy or whatever, the fact is that currently there's modern firepower everywhere and people "mysteriously" snapping and causing more harm than physically possible in older times.

I'm not saying bring back dueling or whatever, the #1 rule of history is that you can never go back. If some guy is a coward but also mentally, and for that matter physically, sick from a chronic overdose of cortisol and neural excitation, he won't be interested in a fair fight.

Unfortunately, psychotherapy seems too out of touch to do much about it: AFAIK it's still mostly hung up on 19th century philosophy and science.

The only way out I know is to relentlessly build competence: NOT instrumental competence but literacy

There's always going to be someone trying to sell you something, someone gaslighting you. That might be an obvious platitude, but it's still true.

The less capable you are of reading your own situation, the more you'll take their word for it, the more you'll let them write it.

I'm not even saying that people are doing it out of malice or even know what they're doing, the behavior is distributed and a consequence of everyone being both hyperconnected and walled off at the same time. I'm also not saying "unplug" or "open up to people", THAT'S a platitude

I'm also not saying the following things:

- "Follow YOUR truth" (scream yourself hoarse into a void)

- "Ignore it" (you can't)

- "Think harder" (feed the concept by relentlessly spinning your wheels)

What I am saying is to work relentlessly on what feels relevant regardless of what other people think. It won't solve all your problems, but every second spent on YOUR projects is a second not dignifying other people's bullshit, and more importantly:

Every step of progress on YOUR deep questions creates a coordinate system that is that much less reliant on external validation.

Am I saying other people don't matter? No, for one thing I never said your own projects have to be inherently selfish. I'm saying overcome contests.

Yes, contests were a part of life for time immemorial, hierarchies, blah blah blah. Times changed. We live in an extremely diffuse and networked world, being "the best" at something means jack shit: would you rather be "the best" scientist or cure cancer?

That other people matter is why this is so important: seeking knowledge isn't selfish--you need to *know* what to do. But if you can't teach yourself to unsee the background cacophony of thinly veiled pissing contests you'll never see yourself, or anyone else, as a real person.

TLDR, therapy or instrumental efficacy or platitudes can't make mass neurosis go away: it's on you to actively build up affective infrastructure that makes you less vulnerable to bullshit and then after you've stopped hurting yourself and others you can help others do the same

And one more thing before I'm misunderstood: this isn't about abstract knowledge, it's about taking something on and growing with it instead of letting the world gaslight you out of it. for some people this is an intellectual thing, for others a spiritual thing, whatever works.