The Men Who Sell The World

Behold the male self-help guru. He's proud, he's loud, and he's here to change your life, for the price of a few dollars and a big chunk of your consciousness. Alchemising their outsize personalities and the door-kicking affordances of the Internet, these self-styled paragons of betterment have come to dominate the discourse around contemporary masculinity and desirability in recent years. There's a method to their madness and it seems to be working. The question is, why? By Indran Paramasivam.

IT'S IN THE WATER

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

Mark Twain's words are haunting. Especially now. When so much of the finite commodity that is life is spent online. When so much of what happens in real life is inherited from, circulated in, and fed back into the online sphere. Where opinions flow free, inundating your feeds with an ubiquity so obvious, it washes over you like a breath you don't notice you're taking. On most days, you're ambivalent. Until the moment it clicks-you latch on to some idea/thought/ad lib and the transformation begins.

Nothing happens in a vacuum. Across the span of time, cultures and tongues, transcendence has been shown to be triggered by its antithesis: we want what we don't have; if it's broken, we have to fix it. Likewise, the messaging around becoming a better version of the man you currently are isn't new. Religion, philosophy, the army, your father, and Michael Bay have all been goading you towards betterness. It's just that what being better is, is a matter of semantics. After all, what's better if it can't be measured, quantified, and compared against worse? Depending on whom you ask, being better means having more cars, more money, more women, a soaring trajectory, galactic biceps, or the exact opposite of all of that.

Patriarchy is an impinging force-no one is spared from it. Even those who enforce its bite. The male ego is patriarchy's dartboard, but the bullseye is wherever the barb lands. Modernity, especially this accelerated modernity, where competition is intractable from existence, is a Darwinistic manifestation. Which also makes it a bustling marketplace for how to be better-and business, it seems, is booming.