Thoughts on the Future of Men

I was speaking with my friend "Joe" about men and the future. Afterwards I was wrestling with a mighty work on that but by the time I got to the end it was so weighty I didn't want to publish it. So here are some earlier notes from soon after our talk.

Men have been the traditional fighters for protection of the wider human community forever; that fighting role almost defines men. (I wrote about men and women as protectors here.)

That wider human community is under serious threat now.

Men as a community sleep; they don't know they're a community. As a group, they (we) are isolated, disengaged and distracted. We’re concerned with petty concerns and unaware of the great call. If something different is to happen some will have to step outside the known world, declare a new possibility and call others who resonate with a new vision. Could that happen?

MKP and Warrior-Monk
One early men's attempt to make change we both know is the ManKind Project (MKP). (MKP started in 1984 and until 2025, 68, 000 men have been through the initiation.) Another was the Warrior-Monk training which flourished in the day; it sought to integrate the Warrior archetype and higher consciousness. Awesome idea! You know about that too.

I think the real issue facing men is the unclear social /political field between men and women. In the wider culture it's seen as risky and volatile to talk about real issues between the sexes and those conversations seldom happen. It’s amazing that around this issue that concerns all of us, men and women can't have a conversation that is trusting enough for real learning about the sexes to take place.

MKP doesn't address the political conversation between the sexes either. The inability to grapple with this doesn’t originate within the organization but is simply the organization conforming to the larger culture in which silence around difficult subjects is taken for granted and seldom tested. The trouble with that is,

"When you break up the individuals from a community into individual units, they become disempowered because it's the collective consciousness and the collective energy of the group from which power comes.” Bruce Lipton

Men are a community broken into individual units around the sexes. Few men are able to recognize, articulate or speak to it confidently. Men as individuals and men as a community are functionally illiterate about men and society. As any large organization, MKP will have a hard time talking about difficult issues; at present they sidestep them.

Some men could face them though.

That brings us to the Warrior-Monk training which you know well. All men don’t want to but a subsection of men would absolutely be able to do good work and plant seeds of a trusting conversation. I can also imagine trusting intentional conversation between men and women. (I've done this to good effect using Dyads (pairs) with strict protocols.)

The people are out there, the need is there. Maybe it needs to go slow or very slow and start as a prototype.

I'll describe some thoughts about what I think it might looks like.

Andrew