@rush

The Dilemma Of The Performative Male The consultant who is sent into his office to gather clients, is rarely encouraged to seek truth in their problems. He sees his clients and his computer, and nothing beyond, then sinks into the role of being a cog in the corporate machine. The professor scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, and is ridden by the routine of research, where the soul is subjected to dollars. The student becomes a messenger to artificial intelligence, outsourcing their studies to a machine that is far from creative. These are but performative people, unaware of the impotence of their character. Identifying a performative person is like running a turing test to find if a machine is human, you’ll know they're real when they stop pretending. All of us go home each evening, and at some moment in time, with whatever degree of consciousness, we go back over all the signs, seeking confirmation that aids in the continuity of our being. This is not self awareness, it’s self justification. The willingness to accept awareness for one's own life, the source of self respect, is what gives someone character. If you take a walk down Soi Cowboy in Bangkok, you’ll find that a man’s sexual choices are the result and the sum of his fundamental insecurities. He may walk about, laugh, talk to people, no longer conscious of himself, lacking self respect, all while he lies awake some nights counting the sins committed. The man who is ashamed of his uncertain values, will want the easiest type of woman he can find, the woman he discounts, and the cheapest to negotiate with. It is the rental of a prostitute that will satiate his lust, not the company of a woman reflecting the noblest version of himself. It’s true, or more accurately, not false that evils are caused by insufficient knowledge. Harm is also done by people who want to feel important. They may not intend for malice, let alone plan for it, but they surely will justify it in order to think well of themselves. “I am good, am I not, very, very good? All right then, tell me why I am so good.” Such feelings may get projected onto others, especially to those that will accept the cash to validate such myths. Men who fool themselves are often the ones to throw hot coal in the face of others. I know this because it’s the same feelings I channel when I write, witnessing a man yelling at a waiter on a cruise for a joke about him being drunk at the dinner table, or the moment a man handed a cigarette to a child selling roses outside of a club in Bangkok. I’m no better. I want people to read such words and consider me insightful, the same way I read the literary influences that precede me. Yet there’s no point dwelling on silly evils, even if horrific, because suffering is not compelling. It happens as long as you react, but it’s more interesting, more complex, more demanding to behave beautifully as one can under such circumstances.

0 reply

0 recast

0 reaction