What happened in Germany in the 1930s can be viewed through a purely economic lens. Germany had lost the first World War, been economically hamstrung by the Treaty of Versailles, and famously, inflation was so rampant that children needed to truck dollar bills in a wheelbarrow to purchase a loaf of bread. When Adolf Hitler ran for office, he promised to put the German people back to work through the vehicles of militarism and imperialism—which he did.
But the lens of masculinity, or of gender politics generally, is just as important to understanding 1930s Germany. Explicitly in Hitler’s Mein Kampf and coursing through his campaign speeches, and right up through his time as Fuhrer, Germany was construed as “emasculated” by other Western powers, and it was no coincidence that the country’s economic renewal was sought through military might. In tandem, German men were cast as paragons of masculinity—strong and noble—while marginalized types such as Jews, queer people, or anyone of darker skin were associated with femininity and thereby weakness. In restoring Germany to economic greatness, Hitler strove also to reinforce—or establish anew—a rigid and traditional gender hierarchy.
This observation is starkly applicable to the contemporary US, where data show that younger generations are beginning to skew conservative versus liberal across gendered lines. That is, Gen Z men are more apt to self-describe as conservative while Gen Z women or queer people are more apt to self-describe as liberal, and by significant margins. As CNN contributor Van Jones recently opined on Bill Maher’s “Real Time” show, part of this striation is attributable to behavior on the political left: so often, it seems that any form of masculinity is outlawed in this sector, meaning that Gen Z men naturally find a home in the conservative movement. Not coincidentally, this conservative shift is also fostered by a media-sphere of blustering, macho pundits like Steven Crowder, Andrew Tate, and Jordan Peterson—men deeply afraid of inner androgyny who loudly and brazenly assert masculine stereotypes.
And yet there are material causes underlying this ideological debate. As in the Germany of the 1930s, the US of today has “fallen” economically in the eyes of the world—following a shift from a producer to a consumer economy throughout the latter half of the 20th century, and a series of “failed” military expansion efforts from Vietnam through Afghanistan, the country is but a simulacrum of the land of opportunity once fabled; in particular, younger Americans have lost hope of owning a home, student debt has skyrocketed, and a bipartisan majority of Americans determine the country is headed in the “wrong” direction. Listlessness pervades the contemporary US, but owing to their cultural injunction to pose as “breadwinners,” men most acutely embody this emotion.
As in the Germany of the 1930s, there are populist figures who offer a prayer of “restoring” America’s former economic greatness, most notably Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Sanders’s vision is Marxist, calling for economic opportunity to be wrested from a seedy billionaire class and returned to a desperate proletariat; Trump’s is capitalist-dystopian, calling for the southern border to be secured against an influx of immigrants and for inner cities to be fortified against crime. Nevertheless, these figures share in insisting that an industrial economy can be revived: whether through a green revolution or in defiance of one, American manufacturing can once again boom, and an economy like that of the 1950s and -60s constitute our beacon to the world.
As the German people should have been in the 1930s, I am skeptical of this saccharine vision. In contrast with figures like Sanders and Trump, I believe that climate change invites a more fundamental revolution for human society than politics or economics are capable of assimilating, tempering the growth imperative writ large. From my perspective, the question is not whether an industrial economy will be powered by wind, coal, or solar power; the question is how to induce a world in which people simply use fewer resources, and hence less production is necessary. This is because independent of climate change, the earth is a finite resource; it needs time and care in order to replenish itself, and that means humanity as a whole needs to become comfortable with inactivity.
As a man myself, without realizing it I have spent a great deal of my life compulsively behaving from insecurity. That is, I have spent a great deal of my life in a frenzy of activity, in my case mostly reading, writing, producing videos, and teaching. At times this work has been purposeful, but in many cases it has been a mere cover for unexamined complexes which roiled within: anxiety, an interior sense of lack, a need to somehow “establish” myself in the outer domain and thereby be “seen.” Although inescapable and existential, these dynamics are no doubt worsened for men, because unlike women we are not taught to derive our worth from relationships; instead, men must project our identity alone upon a meaningless universe, and the entire gambit is a measure of our strength.
Over the past several years, my compulsive behavior has begun to unravel, and I am more immediately and lastingly aware of the sources of my mania. Rather than leaping from discomfort to activity in order to head off the former, I am more prone to sit with that discomfort, getting curious about its origin and often watching it dissipate. In these states, I witness a more essential definition of myself than I would ever acquire from work or achievement: I am a font of love, as all human beings are at their core; I am a flowering of attention, happening to exist in this body but worth no more nor less than any other being. There may be—indeed, there are—myriad impulses to do things from this state, but there is also a knowing that my value will not be defined by these actions; rather, that value was inherent before I was aware of it, and even when I expire its quantity will not reduce.
Unlike the Germany of the 1930s, my hope for America is that it navigates the crucible of stillness induced by macrocosmic events, observing, but not acting upon the desire to leap into activity. In a world that sufficiently stays with and thereby alchemizes this discomfort, men will not need to compulsively work, earn money, and/or achieve fame in order to escape their inner monologues of worthlessness; instead, they will have value as teachers, lovers, and mere witnesses of beauty and humanity, and they will not view themselves as different from women in essential respects. Yes, obviously men were born into different bodies from women, and factors like testosterone do breed different wiring, but men will be able to regard these factors as ephemeral: the body is but a plaything, the brush with which we spread our love and attention onto the world.
Within each man there exists an opportunity to shepherd this transition, conducting a meditative healing in the quiet of his soul. There, either independently or in brotherhood with other men, he can nurture and accept his very self—in all that self’s strange magnificence, gingerly, incrementally, and against a storm of noise. Let us not mistake this noise for the boundless reserve that is ourselves.
Jackson Holzberg Buckley 