MANHOOD: CHARGE IT!
August 2000

"The best things in life are not things" I saw this thought on a bumper sticker lately.

"The best things in life are free." Many say that. Most of us believe that.

"Priceless" is the word we use for our most important experiences. On some level we know that.

But there is another level in us, a deep, primitive, irrational level that also insistently says, "for everything else there's Mastercard." I feel that level in me, as much as I would protest otherwise. I feel it when I compulsively peek at the Dow Jones Industrial average. I feel it when bills come in and my checking account dwindles. It's the Mastercard level, the everything else, that affects my emotion in spite of myself. It's that level that can upset my equilibrium in ways that shouldn't matter.

What is it about money that compels? Why does it feel like the ultimate report card, even though the head says that test is bogus. Why does it feel like the ultimate, fail-safe comfort even though we know somehow that there's not much warmth in a cold bank vault.

I do know that I must acknowledge that irrational yearning, that shadow desire, or I give it too much power as it prowls around in my unconscious. I do know that at a certain point the desire for money becomes self-defeating. But I wonder where that point is. Does embracing this shadow desire really defang it?

I wonder if it is that irrational, often masculine, part of us, the part that yearns for the comfort or the status that money brings, that keeps us from finding true satisfaction. Is it the price that keeps us from finding something priceless. Is it even the price that keeps us from finding true manhood.

I know that men are raised to be the keepers of the purse, as well as its replenisher. To be a provider is part of the job description, to make money a prerequisite of manhood. And men unthinkingly fall back on this position when explaining their preoccupation with job and salary. "It's for the family." "Do you think I like this job."

Yet there seems to be something more, something deeper and more compelling than providing,, that drives us.

Let me take a stab. For in naming some deeper truths we may also name a path to freedom from our unfreedom. As Jung said, "What is unconscious becomes our fate." If preoccupation with money can be a detour to true life satisfaction, then this work of consciousness does become priceless.

For some of us, money can be the ultimate emotional comfort, the ultimate short term tranquilizer. This is often not because of our weakness, but because of our history that had both emotional and financial shortcomings. Often, for reasons outside our parents' control, they became so preoccupied with financial security that there wasn't much left for emotional nurturing. Remember, our fathers struggled with those same financial demons as we do, without the alternatives, such as a men's movement, that we have today. My father peeked at the DJI average every chance he could. Possibly, our mothers were anxious about finances, and maybe depressed at the thought of raising so many children with so few resources, emotional and financial. Our parent's generation grew up with the trauma of the Depression. Many of us suffer the secondary trauma from that same time.

I have talked to many men who feel compelled to save. They are often married to women who have a need to spend. Both are trying to deal with anxiety around money. The men have their parents' anxious need for security, especially since they are supposed to be finally responsible for the purse. Their wives open their purse as a way of finding some temporary euphoria, as an escape from the grim financial anxieties of the house. Both suffer from a scarcity mentality that leads to tremendous insecurity.

In this family climate, enough money would seem the greatest redemption of all. Material possessions would have magical, even erotic, qualities. Financial security would seem the most effective comfort around. The words matter and material come from the Latin word mater, which means mother. Money can be a mother object that touches yearnings deeper than dollars and cents are meant to touch. A full bank account would be like full breasts and warm arms coddling us at a level far younger and more fragile than our chronological age. Inner spiritual peace would seem so remote as to be ludicrous. Material well-being, in money or things, would be too compelling a goal.

The yearning for financial success can also compel a man to amass material things as a show of manhood. This desire would satisfy another primitive level of yearning in a man. If a man does not feel a man from the inside out, he will adopt as many outer trappings of cultural manhood as he can find. This may be the only clue he has in trying to achieve the inner feeling of manhood.

Much of that feeling would come from beating other men in the financial game. Winning in marketplace competition would be the mark of having arrived in the world of men. Financial success becomes a badge of courage, financial struggles produce seeming initiatory wounds. It would not be how much money, but how much more, that seals the victory. This man would need respect, instead of security, to feel some semblance of peace, unstable though it is.

The hunt for this kind of success can also be a way for a man to honor his father, as well as redeem him. Often men will continue a father's path as a way of finally getting his father's blessing. Sometimes he will strive for financial success as a way of proving the rightness of his father's financial dreams, giving this gift to his failed father. In either case, the father's blessing is the deeper need, the proof of a son's worthiness, the proof of his manhood.

Money as a proof of manhood is far more potent a motivator than the things that money can buy. Let's face it, today we live better than many kings of old. The vast majority of those reading this essay are in the upper economic class of the entire world. If we had our wealth in another time, or in a third world country, we would be considered a man's man.

But there will never be enough money to quiet our deepest longings. The longings come from another place. The yearning for money seems so strong because it comes from our deep hardwired need for the peace that manhood brings, or the inner security that comes from trusting in the arms of a higher power or in the rightness of a higher calling. The journey to manhood is indeed priceless. It can't be bought with a Mastercard

Larry Pesavento, Copyright © 1999, 2000  

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