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Chris Bateman's avatar

If I don't entirely agree with your thesis here, David, I don't entirely repudiate it either. We are most aligned in the idea that the collapse of the practices of virtue ethics (surviving only in the negative, 'virtue signalling', which is not virtuous) has caused wretched problems downstream. But a lot of this seems to me to spring from the atomisation of society. I would suggest men are in psychic dire straights these days largely because individuals have been set adrift, not because they aren't storming battlements. And this proposition applies nearly as well to women, too...

I have personally had a rich interior life and if, in my youth, it caused me trouble, then I would also reflect that I got through it because I had close friends who I talked to often and intimately. As a consequence of this experience of 'neuroticism' (as you flag it here), I have become a more creative thinker, which has aided me in my career. I rather doubt I could have been a person who 'acts rather than thinks', and although I would never presume that my experience was automatically applicable to others, neither would I want to extoll a path that counselled the tearing apart the tapestry of my own life.

Stay wonderful!

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Bettina's avatar

From the disadvantaged viewpoint of a woman, but having a son and having had a father, husband, brother etc, I agree with David and instinctively feel that men need 'action' - to different degrees according to personality - otherwise like any frustrated innate desire, it can become distorted or perverted. Despite current cultural expectations, men ARE different to women as any cursory observation of children in a playground will show.

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