Larry Pesavento is a member of the TMC Advisory Council, a therapist, an author and the Founder of CHRISTOS - A Center for Men located in Cincinnati, Ohio.

"In 1993 Larry Pesavento started CHRISTOS men's center to help initiate a dialogue about how a man in this confusing, elderless world can find a sense of identity, place and pride. He had been counseling men for close to 25 years and learned from their struggles as well as his own. He then decided to write a book about the internal journey that a man must take in order to find a sense of peace and generativity. He felt called to write this book to share what he had learned as part of his own journey and struggle with manhood.

For more info about Larry Pesavento, visit his web-site, http://www
.christoscenter
.com/
E-mail: Larpes@aol.com

MENSIGHT will publish a chapter each month and we would like for you to submit suggestions and discuss your opinions on our Men's Issues Forum.

Chapter 7 - Part 1 - The Vader Voice

The father represents a view of the world outside the family. To the young boy this is the world of strangers. The father's world was the marketplace of the village, today's social and business world. The young boy is both afraid of and fascinated by this new world. He knows this is the world of men. He instinctively knows this is where his manhood lies.

The father's world brings us to the so-called patriarchy. The word patriarchy means rule by fathers. In a patriarchy, the father's rules are most important. In a patriarchy, the father's world holds the highest values and goals. We live today in a patriarchy where the cultural fathers' values of marketplace success are paramount. In our modern patriarchy, the highest values reside in the world of business, and power is used to protect commerce. In our patriarchy, there is no world beyond this marketplace world.

From a patriarchal viewpoint the marketplace is where manhood is found. This is the place a man is initiated. From the view of a patriarchal society, the marketplace is the only reality a man should aspire to. In this reality, profit is the 'bottom line' and financial success is the ultimate criteria of manhood. There is no next step. There is no realization that a man must separate from the father, as well as a mother, in order to become a man. In a patriarchal society there is no room for elders and the inner journey into a deeper reality.

Here, the father wound goes even deeper than the wounds from our own fathers. The patriarchy tells us that identifying with this marketplace father is the end of the line, the goal of our manhood. Much of modern society's yardstick for male maturity is based on Freud's Oedipal struggle. Our cultural assumption is that the end of male development results in the son's identity with the father, causing a boy to also identify with the patriarchy, the greater father.

In our cultural scenario, the boy learns to be the good son of a father culture that values the hard work and productivity of a marketplace reality. By the fruits of this productivity, a son moves toward manhood. He becomes a good provider to his family and a good, contributing citizen of his community. In this psychological scenario, the more a man identifies with the rules and mores of the father culture the more mature he is. The more 'productive' he is the more a man he is.

The patriarchy is the real author of the flawed training manual that is our bible. The patriarchy wounded our fathers, who unknowingly wounded us. The patriarchy now creates the deeper father wound in all of us, because it takes advantage of our archetypal need for fathering. If the patriarchy fathered us, and then let us go to elders, it would be a blessing. But our patriarchy stops at the village boundaries, refusing to acknowledge the reality of the wilderness, withholding the clues to our deeper manhood.

Patriarchal Reality

Most men see themselves as 'realists'. They don't want to be seen as naive, idealistic, or crazy. For them there is only the one reality, the reality of material success and social well-being. The assumptions of their life go unchallenged. For someone to say that there is another reality, outside the village, is threatening. Going along with the program means staying within the agreed upon reality of the patriarchal culture, within our modern consensus reality. Academics call this a mythos.

A consensus reality is a reality that everyone in society unknowingly agrees to. It is a world view or paradigm that goes unquestioned. Questioners are considered heretics or lunatics. Sometimes some questioners are charitably called misguided prophets. Others are uncharitably done away with. An example of consensus reality from another time in history can give perspective on the patriarchal paradigm we now live in.

During Galileo's time the earth was considered the center of the universe. That bottom line reality had all kinds of implications for the reality of everything else. Because the earth was at the center of the universe, mankind was the center and reason for all life. God was up in heaven, above the moon, where unchanging truth resided. The pope, known as Papa as he is today, knew truth better than anyone else because he was intermediary between God and the people. Society was structured on a hierarchical order with God at the top, patriarchal authorities in the middle, and the rest of us looking up to find the truth. The father archetype was paramount because the father was the stepping stone to God.

In Galileo's time, the Bible was true in every word. And it talked about the sun revolving around the earth. As Martin Luther said of Copernicus, "This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth." The people who said that this geocentric universe didn't work were labeled as crazy or evil. These people pointed to another reality that was foreign and uncomfortable to consider. This reality was also a threat to the patriarchal church which controlled the life of the Western world at that time, and patriarchal governments who received their authority from the church. A new astronomy threatened the foundations of their current patriarchal culture. It created the possibility of a different consensus reality, a new mythos that actually held the seeds of our modern, political democratic ideals.

Copernicus and Galileo were correct. They had the truth. They were also at odds with the current consensus reality. They were punished for believing in another paradigm. They were seen as disloyal to Church and God and the current father's world. They were seen as sinners.

Today, our consensus reality is still represented by the father. However, the father is no longer the pope, but the free market father, the commercial father of mercantilism and the democratic marketplace. In Galileo's time people were taught not to believe their own eyes. The Church would tell them what they were seeing. They were expected to see the world through the Church's eyes. In our culture, the patriarchal consensus reality tells us what is true. We are taught to see the world through the patriarch's eyes. As Sam Keen points out, "In the secular theology of economic man Work has replaced God as the source from whom all blessings flow."

Modern men are unknowingly affected by a view of manhood that is essentially a view of uninitiated men. This view is just as flawed as the view that the sun revolved around the earth. Thus, society acts as a dark father. This dark father keeps us stuck in the marketplace, rather than a kingdom, to bolster its own view of reality and to seek its own gain.

Take a corporation that is extremely competitive and hard-driving. It is probable that the culture of this corporation assumes that an employee gives most of his life to his work. He works long hours, is 'on call', does 'whatever it takes' to get the job done. A man's highest values are expected to coincide with the corporation's highest values. Though words like family values are mouthed as most important, the corporate family still demands the most allegiance.

The patriarchal consensus reality in these corporations is that profit, winning, status, money are the highest values. Other cultural considerations become secondary. William Pfaff, a syndicated columnist, writing in Notre Dame magazine, states: "A change in belief about the responsibilities of corporate management also has taken place. Maximized return on investment capital, the new argument goes, is the sole appropriate criterion for corporate decisions. The notion that 'social return' may be as important as fiscal return in assessing corporate conduct is ruled out." In many corporate cultures one is literally expected to give one's life for these values. In return for unquestioned loyalty, the father corporation guarantees care of the good son for life.

Sam Keen calls this new culture a 'corpoarchy'. The corpoarchy now defines much of our modern consensus reality. The corpoarchy has in many ways replaced the matriarchy and patriarchy in providing every man's social parenting. Anyone who tries to live their life by other values, such as family or a wider spirituality, will be seen as weak, not having the 'right stuff'. To the corporation, this person will be a traitor, or at the least, naive or incompetent.

As we will see, the values that indigenous people lived by were not discovered in the marketplace. Marketplace values were derived from values found in the initiatory wilderness, the other side of the spirit. The marketplace itself had no mystery, no answers to their deepest questions. It wasn't made for that. It was a tool, a vehicle only. Fathers deferred to elders in the realm of values.

In an elderless society, fathers, in the guise of patriarchy, fill the vacuum left by the absence of elders. In many ways, the problem is not the excesses of fathers as the dearth of elders. Elders have not shown us a new reality and haven't taught us how to find our own voices.

The Father Inside

The father, both in primitive times and today, symbolizes the values of the well-ordered and efficient marketplace. In itself, the values and goals of the marketplace are good and necessary. The father's role in giving a boy the ego strength to negotiate this world of material survival and creative productivity is crucial. Also. The father's masculine energy is vital in leading the boy away from a kind of narcissistic, playboy mentality of the maternal world. The problem is that the marketplace is not where a man traditionally found his maturity. The modern problem is most men are stuck in the father's world, overstaying in a world of incomplete manhood.

Most men stay stuck in the patriarchal world because men hunger for a father's presence and a father's voice. Because sons hunger for masculine energy, a subtle thing happens inside every man. Sons unknowingly incorporate their personal father, as well as their patriarchal father, inside their psyches. These fathers, once inside, survive in the shadows of their mind, speaking to them of life and manhood. This is the origin of the father voice in every man. The father voice is absorbed into every man because we are hardwired to absorb it. Our fatherÕs words, influenced by the patriarchy's words, then become like a software program inside our minds, a program that we didn't know we had.

All of us have self talk that goes on in our heads most of the time. Unfortunately we rarely think about who is talking. Men who start the inner journey discover an inside male voice early in their journey. These men then start to wonder where those words come from. However, most men just assume this masculine voice is their won, containing their own thoughts. The problem is that uninitiated men arrogantly assume all their thoughts are their own. Not being familiar with the inner life they are naive about their inner workings. They rarely question that these voices and these words may come from somewhere else..

Unfortunately, some inner voices speak the words of others. What uninitiated men don't realize is that, starting as children, we all record in our heads the repeated dialogues from the most important people in our lives. Our brains are like tape recorders, picking up and storing important conversations, especially from fathers and other older men. These other older men could be teachers, coaches, priests, or media heroes we see on TV. These stored conversations, these tapes, are often the sources of the words playing in all men's heads. If these tapes contain the words of initiated men we possess wisdom that will bring us a long way toward manhood. If these tapes are of uninitiated men, carrying the patriarchal voices, these voices bring us very flawed wisdom and a great amount of shame.

Freud called these inner voices from older men the superego. This is the part of the psyche that contains voices speaking of society's laws, ethics, mores and social customs. Freud saw the need for men to identify with this father voice as part of the necessary final steps in the creation of a mature man. This father identification was the crucial part of the boy giving up the mother and following his father's ideals. Freud realized that great problems could arise when a man's father had a flawed superego. However, when the father's superego coincided with the prevailing social norms, Freud felt the path to maturity was secure. The son could identify with the father's world and thus leave the world of the mother. The internalization of the patriarchal superego became the mark of maturity and the resultant man a pillar of civilized society. Freud never questioned the values of the patriarchal world of his society or the possibility of growth beyond this point.

This patriarchal voice originates in the deepest parts of our own psyches. This is both the voice of society that tells a boy how to be a man as well as the voice of expectations of a son's own father. Frank Pittman calls this voice the 'male chorus'. The chorus speaks for the masculine consensus reality of the time. In our society it can be a good voice up to a certain point in a man's development. However, this voice invariably turns negative if a man strives to find his own initiatory path, outside the marketplace and outside the consensus reality of our time. Like the engulfing mother the competitive father tries to keep the boy in his domain after the boy is ready to move on. The patriarchal voice warns a man in stern and shameful ways if he strays outside patriarchal reality.

In my work I often deal with dreams as part of therapy. Invariably in the first part of a man's therapy his dreams will contain a dark, shadowy male figure who is trying to hurt him with a knife, gun, stick or other phallic object. Sometimes the dark male presence tries to destroy with an explosive. This male figure is the patriarchal archetype of the dark father that the man carries inside of him. Bombs and guns most often represent the angry words of the father aimed at the boy, negative explosions that destroy a boy's self-esteem and confidence. Knives, spears, and other long thin objects often represent the tongue of the father, using wounding words meant to harm. These dreams are one proof of the dark patriarchal voice, and presence, that resides deep in every man. These dreams are the warnings that a man knows are present if he thinks of straying or if he fails to measure up.

The Vader Voice

The father and his patriarchal voice resides in our unconscious. Unless the personal voice of a healthy, initiated father is strong, the patriarchal voice of our culture becomes our de facto father. The voice of a personal, uninitiated father merely strengthens and adds credibility to the voices of the patriarchy. Most of us have powerful patriarchal voices inside because our fathers unreflectively passed them along to us. For most men this patriarchal voice says things like "be in control", "work to take care of the family", "don't let the company down", "don't let them see you sweat", "winning is the only thing", "real men donÕt make mistakes". The patriarchal voice carries the commandments of the masculine mystique that Frank Pittman and Warren Farrell talk about. As Frank Pittman points out, "when we see men overdoing their masculinity, we can assume that they haven't been raised by men, that they have taken cultural stereotypes literally, and that they are scared they aren't being manly enough."

One of the strongest messages of the patriarchal voice is its incessant command to "be productive". This message plays in most men's minds, including myself, with the monotony of a misbegotten mantra. It seems to speak everywhere, not just at work, but at home or anywhere else where there is any free time. It speaks while trying to relax or be with friends. It starts to speak the moment one awakens and it reminds us if we sleep too late. This mantra creates a great deal of agitation if it is not followed. For in the patriarchy the proof of manhood and self-esteem is in productivity, only in productivity.

After the patriarchal voice gives its commandments it often adds the call words 'asshole', or 'dumbshit', or 'sorry fucker'. The voice acts like a tough drill sergeant with a new recruit. This is why I call it the Vader voice. The voice is usually angry because it comes from the dark father who sees failure as disloyalty. Like Darth Vader, the voice is there for its own dark purposes, the purposes of another Empire. Like Vader it tolerates no disloyalty or failure. There is more to say of Vader later.

The irony for 99.9% of men is we are all ultimately failures in the patriarchy. Few of us ever reach the top. There are few presidents of corporations or generals in the Army. There are even fewer presidents of the United States. I have talked to many successful executives who have thought of themselves as failures because they never made it close enough to the top. Yet the top is the only place the patriarchy really recognizes manhood. In the patriarchy there are thousands of losers to one winner. The winner is a man, king of the hill. The rest of us are still boys, never quite making it.

The Vader voice keeps reminding us of our sorry state and our failures, to shame us into continuing. This voice is so toxic because the losers never realize they are in a no-win situation. The truth is the patriarchy only prepares a man to be a winner. It prepares a man to soar, feeding his flying fantasies all along the way. Yet the system is set up so that most men crash, feeling like failed sons. Most men donÕt realize that the gaming tables are rigged, until it is too late. The system is set up to shame, and to keep men boys serving someone else's needs.

Fortunately it is never too late. But the answer is very unpatriarchal and paradoxical. As we will see, a man can only become a mature man by facing and integrating loss. Loss is actually the doorway to manhood. Initiation involves learning to form an alliance with loss, in the depths of one's own person. But the patriarchy cannot recognize loss. Winning is the only thing. Real manhood is outside its consensus reality. The Vader voice doesn't speak of loss as an opportunity. Loss is only a tragedy and a sign of failure. The image of the winner is the image of manhood.

Just before the stock market collapse in 1929 there were many men who felt briefly like winners. They had more money than they ever dreamed of from speculation in the stock market. When the collapse happened men lost millions. However many wealthy men were not bankrupt. They lost millions, but still held on to enough money to have a comfortable life. Yet there were many of these men, some still technically wealthy, who destroyed themselves through suicide, or lived as broken men, because they were no longer at the top. They couldn't stand the voice that called themselves losers. That voice ultimately destroyed them.

A young man came to counseling who had talent as an artist. He had gone to art school and done quite well. He was now living with friends, away from home, unsure of his next moves. He was a young man in his 20's in that 'tween' time I mentioned earlier. He felt confused and unmotivated. He had taken a job as a busser in a restaurant to get by. He felt discouraged that all his friends were getting married and had good jobs. He didn't want that life, but he couldn't get it out of his head that he should be productive and responsible like his father. He didn't recognize the patriarchal voice that seems to be obsessed with production and social recognition. Neither could he see the falsehood of the patriarchal voice that said he should become a man by having a wife and family. As we will see the patriarchal voice most often talks of pseudo-initiations. In this case marriage, family, and a 'good job' were portrayed as this young man's initiation. His calling as an artist was seriously imperiled by his patriarchal voice and its false message of manhood. His road to manhood was blocked by words, words he thought contained his own rules.

Larry Pesavento and MENSIGHT ask you to submit suggestions and discuss your opinions on our Men's Issues Forum.