What Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and Kant Taught Us About Being A Man - Part 1

All right, team, welcome back to the mantalk Show. I'm Connor Beaton and today I'm going to be giving you five psychological pillars that you can deploy as a man from philosophical thinkers. So we're going to be diving into some great philosophers and the wisdom that they left us through their body of work. And one of the reasons why I think this is so important is something sometimes people talk about, you know, philosophers and they talk about their concepts and their theories and their ideas, but they don't talk about how do you actually integrate these things in your life? What's the practical way that you can do this? So I'm going to talk about these main concepts or lessons from these philosophers and then I'm going to give you practical ways that you can implement these things. So let's dive straight in. We're going to start with Dostoevsky, with the Roshan. There's a. There's a really. And the reason why I wanted to start with this is because I think this is one of the main things that has become so prominent in our culture and society and that is the shirking of responsibility, the letting go of responsibility and the adoption of a victim mentality and a victim orientation and identity. It has become so common in modern culture. And in fact, I would say that parts of modern culture actively teach people and men that your suffering is primarily someone else's fault. Right? Blaming your parents, blaming your culture, blaming your government, blaming women, blaming whatever it is. And if you look at the stories and what I will just say about that is it's hard because in our culture it's become quite powerful to identify as the victim, to be the victim, to be the quote, unquote, oppressed. There is a reallocation and a shift of power that has taken place where if you identify as someone who has been taken advantage of or who feels oppressed or who feels like you've been a victim of something, there can be a tremendous amount of power and attention and righteousness and virtuousness that, that you can gain from that. So much so that you never get out of being a victim. You never get out of identifying as a victim. Now, I am not victim blaming. I'm not saying that people don't go through real things where they are victimized. That happens. I work with countless people all the time who have gone through these types of circumstances. I'm not saying that you should avoid or neglect your trauma or the abuse that you experience or any of those types of things. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that we can trade healthy responsibility and owning and choosing responsibility in our life for blaming everyone else for the circumstances of our life while actively rejecting any type of ownership and responsibility. And this is psychologically damaging. It will psychologically undermine your. You, especially you as a man, because the masculine and men are grown through challenge. And when you take this path of rejecting personal responsibility wholesale and trade it in for my life looks like it is because my dad did this and my mom did that and society this and government that and, you know, women this and blah, blah, blah, blah. What ends up happening is that you never have to take responsibility for the outcomes in your life. You never have to mature. Part of psychological maturation is taking ownership and responsibility over the things that you are genuinely responsible for in your life. So if you look at Dostoevsky's stories, the men in his stories teach us the opposite of my life is a result of everybody else's actions. It's their fault. It actually teaches us that freedom without personal responsibility is. Is a kind of madness. Freedom without personal responsibility becomes madness. And you see this in the characters in Notes from the Underground and the Brothers Karamazov. You see this in the story where the most dangerous character, the most kind of insidious character like that person is really lethal. It's not the tyrant, because the tyrant is very clear and concise. You can see it for what it is. You can see the tyrant for what he is. It's actually the resentful man who refuses responsibility but demands moral superiority. So he refuses to take responsibility for his own actions. The things that he's contributed, the things that he's done that have created the circumstances that he's in, while simultaneously demanding a kind of moral superiority, a virtuousness, a righteousness, demanding respect. And this is where many men get caught. They want to. And maybe this is you. Maybe this is somebody that, you know, we get caught wanting to reject our own responsibility in the conflict in our relationship. You want to. You end up rejecting responsibility for, you know, where your finances are at, because you want to blame situations and circumstances that have unfolded in your life or because of parents or whatever it is. So what do we do? How do we begin to focus on this one piece? Well, first you have to stop narrating your life. You have to stop seeing your life primarily through the lens of grievance, primarily through the lens of other people have done you wrong. And this is very hard for some men, especially if you are a man who has genuinely experienced trauma or abuse or abandonment or neglect. It is so easy. And I remember, I remember being there. I remember being in this space of like, if only my childhood looked. Looked different. If only I hadn't gone through these things. If only I'd been dealt a different set of cards by God or life or universe or whatever it is, I wouldn't be in this situation. I wouldn't feel like this. And so we have to stop looking at life through the lens of grievance and wishing that we had something else. So ask yourself daily, or at the very least for the next week, write down this question and begin to journal about it. Where am I avoiding personal responsibility because it hurts my self image? Or where am I avoiding personal responsibility in exchange for playing the victim? Ugh. You're probably not going to like really looking at that, but again, this is real shadow work. Okay, next piece is take ownership before you feel ready or confident. Sometimes we as men especially, we're in this space of blaming other people or playing the victim a little bit or, you know, being hesitant or feeling like we're lacking confidence and insecure. We can avoid responsibility, but in fact, it is the process of. Of a little bit, not a lot of bit, but a little bit overloading the psychological musculature of taking on responsibility. So just like at the gym, the fastest way to get stronger and grow your muscles is by pushing how much you can actually lift. You have to push the weight and you do that incrementally. You don't do it so much that the bar falls on you and you know, you choke yourself out, but you do it incrementally where you're pushing your limit. So take ownership and responsibility over things in your relationship, in your career and your finances, your health, at your work work before you feel ready. Take it on. And lastly, most importantly, choose consistently the responsibility you wish to carry. Choose the. The responsibility you want to carry. Stop being crushed by the weight of carrying you do not care about. I see this with so many men. They are in jobs they don't care about, with responsibility they do not want. They are in circumstances where they have all of this responsibility, carrying the responsibility of what their parents expected from them and friends and family members and coworkers that they do not want at all. Now, obviously there is some responsibility that we have to carry that we just don't really like, right? The responsibility of filing taxes. I don't really enjoy that. It's not a responsibility that I give a shit about, but it's part of life. And so that's a responsibility that we kind of have to carry. But what makes us stronger as men is that we actively say, I want to carry the weight of this responsibility. I want to be a provider for my family, and I want to carry that weight because it feels good to me, it matters to me. And maybe I don't feel capable or competent of doing that yet effectively, but I am going to learn how to do that. And the reason why this is so important is. And this shows up again in Dostoevsky's work very, very clearly. His work embodies that, especially Notes from Underground. A man who chooses responsibility gains dignity even when he suffers. A man who chooses responsibility actively and openly gains dignity, gains strength, gains worth and value, gains confidence even when suffering is involved. So that's pillar number one. Choose your responsibility and take a look at your life and really start to see, where am I avoiding choosing responsibility? That would actually help me grow. Maybe you need to open up your bank account every single day. Maybe you need to really track your spending and be responsible in that way. Maybe you need to be responsible with what you put into your mouth and your body, what you are eating. Choose that responsibility. Okay, pillar number two is going to come from Mr. Emmanuel Kant. And this is really going to be about self mastery before moralizing, which again is kind of antithetical to our culture where we have a bunch of people that are keyboard warriors that think that, you know, they have the moral obligation and right to tell everybody else how they should live without having any quality of self mastery or self impulse control over themselves. But here's the thing. Kant's core insight, and I like Immanuel Kant's work, as challenging as some of it, most of it is to read. I was going to say some of it, but all of it's pretty hard. And he was a really strange character. I mean, if you learn about Immanuel Kant, he was disciplined to a neurotic sense. You know, eat the same thing at the same time, walk on the same path. He was a very interesting individual. But his core insight in the sense that I'm going to talk about right now, is about moving away from. It's not necessarily about politeness or rules necessarily. Although if you looked at his life and you looked at some of his work, it could be very easy to interpret some of what he's saying as be rules oriented, be very polite. But his life and his work is really a representation of develop inner sovereignty. Develop inner sovereignty. And this, you could relate it with inner authority, or you could relate it with Inner mastery. But I like this notion of inner sovereignty. Kant's work really says freedom is not doing whatever you want, whenever you want. Freedom is I have the ability to, to govern myself even when my impulses rebel. I have the ability to govern myself, to say, here's the direction I'm going. I'm not willing to succumb to these impulses. I'm not willing to fall prey to this sabotaging behavior. I'm not going to cave and give in. And this is something that a lot of men feel, a lot of, you know, that inner sovereignty, inner authority, being able to have some level of control over your impulses, some level of mastery over your impulses is an aim, It's a goal that many men know that once you achieve some of that sovereignty, there is a tremendous amount of worth, value, confidence, competence, that all coincide with it. So the truth, as most of us know, as most of you probably know, is that a man who cannot regulate himself to becomes either controlled by his desire or controlled by ideology. So highly impulsive men, men that are not able to regulate or discern internally, they become controlled either by desires, lusts, you know, things like porn and weed and booze and all those types of things that just absolutely dominate and control their life, or they become controlled by ideology. And. And Kant would say that both forms are really a type of slavery. So what do we do? How do we start to gain a sense of inner sovereignty? Well, first, build non negotiable habits. Focus on one, just one. So many men that I work with and see, they try and build eight habits at once, right? It's like, here's my morning routine and I look at it and they're trying to go from having no morning routine to, to having like 12 things that they do in the morning and they get overwhelmed and then it doesn't happen. So build one non negotiable habit, whether it's with your sleep, it's with a working block, you know, blocking out time to do something specific. It's, you know, part of a morning routine where it's like every single morning I'm going to journal for 30 minutes, come hell or high water, right? I'm going to do that. Second part of this to develop inner sovereignty is delay gratification on purpose because this will strengthen your will. This actually develops the, again, the psychological, emotional and somatic or physical musculature to say no to your impulses. Delay gratification. You want to watch porn? Put the timer on for 10, 15 minutes and force yourself to go Sit and meditate or breathe or do breathwork or work out. And what you'll probably notice is that the impulse to do that has declined. And this is something I'm working on right now with my four and a half year old son. He has an impulse, right? I want Mac and cheese, or, you know, I want a cookie or something like. And we delay the gratification. And it's so fascinating to see him learning how to do that. I gave him a choice the other night. You know, as a treat sometimes I'll make him this like, you know, protein rich Mac and cheese, right? It's like super bougie, ridiculous Mac and cheese. I didn't have that growing up. I had Kraft dinner dinner, right? But he gets protein rich Mac and cheese, all natural ingredients, blah, blah, blah. And I said, do you want to eat all of it now or do you want to eat a little bit now and have some leftover for tomorrow? Now I gave him time. I could see him processing. And I can tell you that me at four and a half year old would have been like, give me all of that now. Let me stuff that in my face. Because nobody taught me impulse control. Nobody taught me delayed gratification. So if you are a man who struggles with delayed gratification, who is a slave to his desires, whatever those might be, porn, weed, booze, yada, yada, yada, start to delay gratification on purpose. Create a system, set a timer, and this will strengthen your will and your determination. The last piece of this is measure. And this is maybe going to be paradoxical for some of you. Measure your freedom based on what you can refuse, not what you can indulge yourself in. Oh, this was so hard for me. I used to see freedom as a kind of indulgence. You know, it's like, oh, I have time to myself now. I can watch the show that I want and eat the food that I want and stuff myself with potato chips and popcorn and ice cream and, ah, freedom, right? How much can I indulge in? And that was freedom to me. But really I was beholden to these behaviors that made me feel like crap, made me not like myself. And so begin to measure your freedom as a man by all the things you can refuse, all the things that you are actively working to say no to. Because for most of you, for most of us men in a culture of modernity and materialism, we are chronically inundated with, say yes, say yes, buy this, take this on, you should want more, et cetera. And so the man who is able to call out the BS and to refuse things and to call that freedom. I'm not doing that, that and that and that and that. Because what really matters to me is doing this right. I'm not going to think about traveling to these places. I want to go to Japan. That's where I'm going. So self control, inner authority, it's not repression. It is authority over your own nervous system. It is authority over your own impulses, and it is the active ability to refuse the things that, you know, you're not interested in. And that creates a form of freedom. All right, pillar number three, we're going to move on to the German, to Nietzsche. And this is really about the integration of the shadow. Nietzsche is a very interesting character. He's polarizing. You know, he's a little controversial here and there, depending on the social circles that you are in. But Nietzsche, I think, really saw something that modern culture still avoids, and that is the denial of aggression. That is our relationship with aggression as something that might potentially be, dare I say, meaningful. Now, I know that might get some spark, some heated debate and comments on Spotify or YouTube, but the denial of aggression does not make you a good man. It actually makes you more dangerous because, number one, you don't know what you're capable of. You have no idea what you're capable of. And it's more often than not the men who do not know what they're capable of from an aggressive standpoint, and that end up getting into altercations and situations where they either really hurt somebody or they really get hurt because they don't know what that's like. Right? Tyson said everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. The amount of men that I know, that I've, you know, coached, talked with, that has literally never been punched in the face that do not know their own level of aggression. It's a bit. It can be dangerous, but it can also disconnect you from a sense of fire. So our modern culture tells men, the less aggressive you can be, the more you disconnect and repress your own aggression, the safer you are, the better man you are, instead of the more that you can curate, cultivate, understand, have a relationship with your own aggression, with your own anger, the more that you will be able to provide a sense of trust and safety for other people. Okay, so men are usually taught, suppress your darkness, right? Be nice, suppress the aggression, suppress the anger, or it's totally okay to act it out unconsciously. Right? Rage, addiction, domination. And these are the sort of two polarities that again, maybe not socially acceptable, but that men generally choose. And Nietzsche had an alternative which is very similar to Jung. There's a lot of similarities between how Nietzsche saw the development of a man and how Jung would have talked about it. But Nietzsche, his path was integration. Can you bring your aggressiveness, your anger, this force inside of you, right, this intensity that exists inside of you, can you not cut yourself off from it, not castrate yourself from it? But can you actually begin to embody it in a way where it's not the constant sword that you're using to be aggressive, to try and dominate, but to have it be a part of your being? And he said, he who fights monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster. But if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes back into you. So here is the beautiful point of all this, which I think he sums up so well. He articulates so well. You need to be able to know what you're capable of. You need to be able to understand your own specific brand of violence or aggression or anger, whichever one you want to, you know, to choose. For some people, they might not like the word violence or aggression, they might like the word anger. But you need to be able to look at the monster in you. You need to be able to understand the monster in you instead of trying to neuter him. But then you need to make sure that you put in guardrails and relationships so that you do not become that monster. Because again, if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you. And so in this way, we begin to integrate. So how do you do this? Name your capacity for dominance, for aggression. Name what it actually looks like. And for you as a man, it's likely going to be, depending on the level of work that you've done, that you've moved into one of these two camps, right, that on the one hand, maybe you've completely neutered yourself from it, You've suppressed it, you've repressed it, you've pushed it down. You actively avoid any type of anger, anything that might be constituted as aggression because of your background or upper bringing or what you've been told. And on the other hand, you may be somebody that has a proclivity towards losing your temper and trying to dominate other people, trying to control situations, trying to, maybe you unconsciously or consciously are more aggressive to get an outcome and start to channel, start to channel. So step number one is identify your specific brand of aggression, of fierceness, of intensity. What is your Specific brand of intensity and fierceness and really start to build a relationship with it and understand it and then find an outlet to channel it into. Can you channel it into physical training? Can you channel it into the leadership of your company or the leadership in your business or your relationship? Can you channel it into boundary setting? Right. We cannot understand that a boundary has been crossed or set a boundary without some connection to healthy anger. Right. That's usually the indicator that, hey, somebody stepped over a boundary. I didn't like that. That actually made me a little upset. Or I'm going to set a boundary, hey, don't do that. That's not okay with me. I'm not interested in that. Again, anger is required for that. But also, you could channel this aggression, this intensity, this fierceness, again, whatever word resonates for you, into your creativity, into creating and building something meaningful. And then lastly, stop confusing moral purity. Oh, I don't have any violence. I'm just not a violent person. I don't have any aggression. With psychological health, I see a lot of men saying this. I've seen this for over a decade since I've been doing this work where men say, you know, I'm just, I don't have any anger. I'm just, I don't have any aggression. I don't have any violence. That level of moral purity is not psychological health. You have disconnected from something meaningful. Right. A harmless man. And this is what I'm going to leave you with in this pillar. A harmless man is not a good man. A good man is dangerous but disciplined. Right. As the saying goes, it takes dangerous good men to keep the dangerous bad men in check. If you are not capable of being dangerous, you are of no use. When the dangerous, bad, evil men who legitimately want to do harm to you or your family or society or culture or women or community or children or whatever it is, you are useless at being able to confront and stand up to them. So a harmless man is not a good man. He just appears to be. And oftentimes what I have found is it is the quote unquote man who is maybe not quote unquote man. It is the man who is quote unquote harmless. Gotta put the air quotes in the proper place. Right? Right. It is the man who is quote unquote harmless who is oftentimes the most controlling, vindictive, passive aggressive, angsty, angry, below the surface, sabotaging, judgmental, critical. You can just go down the laundry list. So. Or he really, truly is just getting walked over in life. Thank you so much for tuning in. Don't forget to share this with somebody in your life that you know will enjoy it. So don't forget to like and subscribe if you enjoy this type of content. Until next week, Connor Beaton signing off.