The Broken American Male: And How to Fix Him

1.

I Am a Broken American Male

AT THE heart of modern American living is a paradox that no one can quite figure out. On the one hand, America is the richest, most prosperous country in the history of the world. Its standard of living has no parallel and no precedent. America has given us comforts and opportunities that are the envy of the world. On the other hand, our country is becoming more and more depressed. All this treasure has not brought us contentment.

Our country is full of people who aren’t happy: men who feel like failures, women who feel they’re not good enough. Joy in America seems elusive, and few seem satisfied with their lives. This is curious. We have more choices than anyone who has lived before us. We are better educated, with more college degrees than any generation that has preceded us.

So why on earth are we so miserable?

And I don’t merely ask this question about others. I ask it about myself as well. I’m not, thank G-d, a depressed man, but I could be a lot happier. I often wonder what percentage of the time I’m happy. I’d be lucky if it’s 60 percent—at most. And this percentage is much higher than it used to be.

Like you, I often feel dissatisfied with my life, as though something’s passing me by, as though I’m missing something. I feel like I’m not maximizing my potential, like I’m not being everything I could be.

I often find myself thinking about a conversation my mother used to have with my father long ago. I was a little boy, growing up in Los Angeles. My parents were not happy together. There was a tense atmosphere at home. My father would come home pretty late, just before we kids went to bed. Invariably, he did not come home with a giant smile on his face. He came home looking a little sullen, a little defeated. Part of this was attributable to his having worked very hard. We did not have a lot of money and my father’s life, as an immigrant who came to the United States barely speaking English, was never easy. But exhaustion alone could not explain his unhappiness. Something was bugging him, and my mother sensed it. She understood that no matter what he had, he wasn’t satisfied with it. He always seemed focused on what he didn’t have. Something was eating away at him. I remember her repeatedly coaxing my father to find more fulfillment in his blessings. Yoav, you have five healthy children. You have a wife who loves you. You have a beautiful family. Why isn’t that enough? But it wasn’t enough. It was never enough. Not enough to make him happy, not enough to make him feel good about himself, and certainly not enough to make him feel successful.

Their conversation plays in my mind repeatedly, on an endless loop. It haunts me because I wonder why I have in many ways become like my father. I, thank G-d, have eight beautiful children and a wife who loves me and is extremely devoted to me. Why isn’t that enough? What’s eating away at me? Why can’t I find real joy and fulfillment from my blessings? What is missing in my life? Why do I feel like a failure?

Men today seem so darn angry. Turn on the radio and listen to the endless conversations taking place on conservative and liberal talk stations. While they speak from different ends of the political spectrum, the one thing they have in common is anger. Each side endlessly identifies the enemy within that bothers them. Talk radio is an overwhelmingly masculine medium. Listen to the men who call up and join the radio hosts to vent about their favorite bogeyman of the day They seem really bothered by things happening in this country. Most of all, they seem bothered by life.

As I was completing the manuscript for this book, the story broke of the horrific massacre at Virginia Tech in which twenty-seven innocent students and five faculty members were slaughtered in cold blood. The murderer, Seung-Hui Cho, sent NBC News a now infamous multimedia manifesto in which he raged against the world and the fellow students he sought to punish. There have been far too many mass shootings in America by angry and deranged people (and the killers are nearly always men rather than women). Two things immediately came to mind as I reviewed Cho’s deranged ramblings: first, the evil choices this murderer made in venting his anger at people who didn’t cause it, and second, the highly unhealthy culture in which this young man was immersed and how it seemed to exacerbate the anger already inside him.

Cho’s rage is not an isolated incident. True, not every college student pulls out a gun and starts blowing away his classmates. But that does not mean death is not on their minds. American students, a group you might think would be filled with verve and life, have depression and suicide rates that are scarcely believable. The New York Times recently reported that suicide is the second leading cause of death for college students. Almost one in 10 college students has made a suicide plan. Nearly half of all students report having felt so depressed that they could not function in the previous year (April 25, 2007). And if that’s what’s happening to students who have yet to live much of their lives, just imagine the impact on those of us whom life has already disappointed.

It is the men today who are especially broken. From our earliest years we men are conditioned to perform in order to become successes. We are never allowed just to be. Whether it’s performing on the sports field, striving to be popular among the girls in class, or earning money to impress a boss or our peers, we have scant opportunity to simply be human. Men today are angry because, as psychologist Warren Farrell points out, they are not allowed to be human beings but instead are conditioned to be human doings. The result is that they rarely form deep, intimate relationships where their souls can be nurtured. Stripped of their humanity, a lot of men are becoming very angry. They feel unloved, disenfranchised, alienated, and rejected. They don’t have a place to call home. They are frustrated at the injustice of being judged for their grades, or by the kind of girl that will talk to them at a party, or by the kind of job they can get after they graduate.

Men today are angry because, as psychologist Warren Farrell points out, they are not allowed to be human beings but instead are conditioned to be human doings.

The rage builds up to fever pitch until it explodes. And we are witnessing more and more horrific explosions. Anger in men is on a continuum and nearly all men today are somewhat angry, Cho being very much more than most. But he is scarcely alone. Whether it’s the young gunmen at Columbine who exploded due to feeling bullied and marginalized at school, or the explosion of violence at a day-trading company because the gunman felt ripped off, or the increasingly frequent eruptions on university campuses, the anger of the broken American male is becoming deadly. And it must be addressed.

We have to begin to nurture our men. From their earliest years, we have to put less emphasis on success and more emphasis on emotion. We have to make our boys feel valuable whether or not they are great athletes and whether or not they get into a great university. We have to make husbands and fathers feel special even if they can’t buy the big house or take us on the exotic vacation. We have to find criteria other than the Forbes 400 to identify success.

Only by directly addressing the disenfranchisement of the broken American male can we hope to avoid unspeakable tragedies like the one that occurred at Virginia Tech.

In this book I hope to address why so many American men today are broken, and how, in their brokenness, they are damaging their wives, harming their children, and ruining their families. If we heal America’s men, America can have happier and more intact families. And perhaps in the process I will also heal myself.

IT WAS the holiday season, 2006, and The New York Times saw fit to run a series of page-one stories about the huge bonuses being brought home by Wall Street investment bankers. The numbers were staggering. To give you an idea of the flavor of the articles, the second story in the series was titled Wall St. Bonuses: So Much Money, Too Few Ferraris. The Times listed one trader after another who was either taking home a fifty-million-dollar bonus or buying a twenty-million-dollar apartment in Manhattan. As I read, I started to get depressed. That old feeling of personal failure began to gnaw away at me.

To be sure, I had seen stories about rich people before, and the Forbes list of the four hundred richest Americans. Lists like these always made me feel a bit worthless. I wasn’t reading about someone else’s success but about my own failure. After all, the winners were on the list. Losers like me weren’t. But this time it was a lot worse. I had just turned forty the month before, in November; I had entered middle life, and most of the people I was reading about were either my age or even younger. And this wasn’t a list of just a few hundred superrich people. Rather, this was a whole class of individuals, investment bankers, in their thirties and forties—hundreds of them, thousands of them—who were taking home cash bonuses averaging about a million dollars apiece. And living in the New York area, I knew a lot of these people. They were my friends and acquaintances. I read on, feeling tinier and tinier as I did.

I examined the reasons for my feelings of insignificance and could identify them all too well. I had been through this hundreds of times before. It wasn’t that I had eight children whom I struggled to support, because G-d had always been kind to me and, while my wife and I were never rich, we were usually able to maintain a comfortable middle-class and, later, upper-middle-class lifestyle. Less so was it the feeling that these men could afford luxuries and opulence that were beyond my reach, because, aside from being blessed with a beautiful home, I have never much been into luxury or opulence. Rather, it was the feeling that these men had made it and I had not. They had made the right choices in life, going into fields where the money was, where success was, whereas I had become a rabbi, lecturer, and writer where, for the most part, the money wasn’t.

Like many of you, I work pretty hard. I am primarily motivated by a religious calling to spread values, morality, and ethics. But I am also motivated by a desire to provide my family with a good and comfortable life, as well as to achieve recognition for my work. But clearly, based on the moving of the bar to impossible standards, I had not achieved much at all.

I knew that my feelings of insignificance were unjustified. I am blessed to host a national TV show and have written many books. I am invited to lecture around the world. Most important, I have a wonderful and loving family. So why, when I read those articles, did I feel like a failure? In a really good year, I can make a few hundred thousand dollars, which by any standard should be considered enough. But compared to these bonus billionaires, I was nothing. A big zero. I didn’t even rate. If I got a really good book advance of, say, eighty thousand dollars, that’s what these guys blew on a weekend of gambling. And on a single trade in their hedge funds, they could make ten times that in an instant. By the single standard of success that had become entrenched in American culture—how much money you have and how much money you make—I was just another loser. No matter that in my life I had saved hundreds of marriages and rescued a great many children from destructive choices. No matter that in the course of eleven years as rabbi at Oxford University in England I had reintroduced thousands of Jewish students to their ancient heritage and had helped tens of thousands to better commit themselves to a life of values. And no matter that I was an involved father who truly loved his children and actively raised them. No, none of that mattered. The only thing that mattered in America was money and success. And they were synonymous. I could no longer appreciate myself because I had bought the great American lie that life is about the endless pursuit of wealth. If I didn’t have the cash, then I hadn’t lived. I could not take pride in my achievements because they were too modest. Sure, I was a counselor on IV. But I wasn’t Dr. Phil. His TV show dwarfed my own. I was a personality in the media, but I wasn’t Oprah. Her name recognition obliterated mine. Relative to all the truly successful people, I was a failure.

I could no longer appreciate myself because I had bought tie great American lie that life is about tie endless pursuit if wealth. If I didn’t have the cash then I hadn’t lived. I could not take pride in my achievements because they were too modest

To be sure, I had struggled with low self-esteem throughout my life. My parents divorced when I was a boy and I grew up with my father living thousands of miles away and with a single mother who worked her guts out just to make ends meet. Children of divorce wrestle with issues of self-esteem more than most. That lack of self-esteem propelled me in my boyhood to spend way too much time trying to prove myself to others. After my parents split up and my mother moved us to Miami from Los Angeles, I would give presents to the cool kids in my class to try to get them to like me. I would invite them to my home in the hope that they would reciprocate. But I always thought that this was mostly an adverse effect of my turbulent childhood, because I was not given the security of a peaceful two-parent home and therefore internalized a lot of insecurity. I always thought that as I got older, the feelings of worthlessness would slowly diminish. They did, but not by much. As I grew older, I did become conscious of the fact that my unhappy childhood was only one factor that led to feeling like I was inconsequential. After all, I knew way too many people—men especially—who were exactly like me. And many had had happy childhoods with involved parents who rarely fought. No, there was something more, something else that was affecting me. Whatever it was, it was all around me and was utterly inescapable. I could feel it ruining me. My slow recognition of the forces that were making me and so many other men feel like failures was the genesis of this book.

AMERICA is in the grip of a soulless capitalism that is slowly destroying the American male and bringing down the American female and family with him. We all want money. We want to be successful. But we are paying for that success with our families. We men are broken. Our wives are becoming depressed and unhappy. A great many are actually leaving us. Our kids are uninspired, bored, and prefer the company of their friends to us. It’s time we discover the causes of this downward spiral and take measures to counter it.

At no point in history was there ever a single criterion for success as there is today.

People have always wanted to make something of their lives. The human desire to distinguish oneself is innate. The German philosopher Georg Hegel called this drive the thymotic urge, the will to seek recognition, the desire to earn the respect of our peers, the motivation to corroborate our uniqueness and humanity through achievement. In modern-day parlance, we would say that everyone wants to be a somebody. So how is modern America different? Because in every other period the definition of success included something other than money. In every other culture, money, fame, and power counted as markers of success—but never exclusively so. There was always something else. A man was expected to be enlightened enough to know to what purpose money and power should be put. There was always a need to cultivate virtues outside of power and wealth. Whether it was civic duty in ancient Greece, oratory and military service in ancient Rome, moral virtue and prophetic calling in ancient Israel, or patriotism in colonial America, money counted for a lot but it wasn’t everything. Most of the founding fathers of this great nation were men of means. But they were not considered to be successful as men unless they heeded the calling of their nation and directed their resources toward the fulfillment of the dream of independence. In imperial Britain the landed gentry were expected to be educated, refined, and assume positions of leadership. In the Christian kingdoms of medieval Europe, wealthy and gallant knights were expected to defend the defenseless. It didn’t make any difference how hypocritical these values and ideals were or how sincere the men were who purported to embody them. What was important was the expectation. The accumulation of money and power was never enough to determine a man’s value. There was always something else.

Fast-forward to modern-day America where success is determined exclusively by money, power, fame, and preferably an amalgamation of all three. There is nothing else. The poster child for this destructive truth is Donald Trump, America’s most famous businessman. By any measure but money, Trump is a failure. He failed at two marriages. As a shallow braggart who can never stop promoting himself and as someone who cannot stop ogling young, pretty females, he fails at being a refined gentleman. It seems he has not succeeded as a philanthropist. As the embodiment of the American dream, he has come to portray that dream as a soulless capitalist nightmare. And yet not only is Trump the most renowned businessman in America, he’s the guy we all want to emulate. We all want to be his apprentice! What has made this man a guru who attracts tens of millions of students? Is it that he has class? Come on! A sense of personal honor, perhaps? Give me a break. Nobility of spirit, depth of purpose? Nope. Is it his hair, perhaps? I think not. So what is it then? He has money. Lots and lots of money. And he has buildings. He has fame. And all this gives him power. There it is. Mystery solved. There is nothing else. But that’s okay, because those are the things that matter. So we watch Trump’s TV show, attend his seminars, and buy his books in an effort to be just like him. And we do it without holding our noses. We’re not turned off by his narcissism because narcissism, the singular focus on self, is that which makes you rich.

There are serious consequences to soulless capitalism for the American individual and the American family. Men who feel like failures— those who compare themselves to the Trumps of this world and feel like they have not accomplished much—are ruining their wives, who blame themselves for their husbands’ brokenness and in turn feel permanently inadequate. And the biggest losers of all are our children, who are not being inspired by their parents and are largely raising themselves. My purpose in this book is not just to point out the problem but also to offer a solution. But this cannot be done unless we understand Just how bad it has gotten. Amid the many challenges facing the American family today, soulless capitalism, along with its destructive effect on men and women, is the biggest problem of all.

Amid the many challenges facing the American family today, soulless capitalism, along with its destructive effect on men and women, is the biggest problem if all.

The unbridled lust for money and recognition drives fathers to become workaholics who spend precious little time with their kids. It creates men who neglect their home life in favor of office life. It also numbs men in their relationships as they are slowly transformed from people into machines. Soulless capitalism, as we’ll see, also makes women depressed. The singular focus on money and materialism robs everything of depth and substance, reducing it to its most superficial shell. Soulless capitalism dictates that what determines the value of a thing is its price tag and its value on the open market. This means that men are judged by their net worth. And it means that women are valued for their packaging alone. Their beauty becomes a commodity with which they can purchase the love of a man, especially a successful man. An attractive woman becomes something akin to a superfast car, namely, an object that a man just has to have. Evolutionary biologists like to point out that the male search for feminine beauty is Darwinian in nature. Women are valued for their beauty and shapeliness because those characteristics indicate a capacity for fertility and child-rearing. But if this were the case then we would not see the hell-bent emphasis on women being superthin. On the contrary, big hips and not an emaciated, anorexic look are an indication of fertility. Without body fat a fetus has nothing to nourish it. No, the modern emphasis on the linear as opposed to curvaceous look of women is a product of women being created in the male, linear image.

The combined pressures of being married to a broken man who feels like a failure and living in a society that values them for their beauty and youth above all else leave most women feeling inadequate in every way. They fail at making their husbands happy, and they also fail, as time progresses, at remaining youthful and beautiful. The soulless capitalist environment that promotes women as trophies provides women one single criterion of importance: their looks. Beauty is to women what money is to men. And just as men are made to feel that they are never rich silently assaulted on a daily basis for not being blond enough, tall enough, thin enough, and, of course, young enough. Consequently, they are nearly as broken as our men. And as our children witness broken fathers and inadequate mothers, they conclude that what they themselves should aspire to as they get older is not love—something they have rarely witnessed—but objects, material things that can be purchased with money And slowly, soullessness becomes an American family heirloom transmitted from generation to generation.

And slowly, soullessness becomes an American family heirloom transmitted from generation to generation.

The American family is dying the cold death of neglect. It is ravaged by divorce. It is soured by strife. Built as it is on a broken male and an inadequate female, it has lost its center. It is disintegrating from boredom and listlessness. It is decentralized, lacking; a nucleus around which it can revolve. Most tragically, it is lacking in love. And if we don’t rescue the American family from its terminal decline, we will lose our country and our way of life.

Does a country with a 50-percent divorce rate deserve to call itself civilized?

Ask yourself this question: Does a country with a 50-percent divorce rate deserve to call itself civilized?

Will a country where most kids see their parents fighting rather than getting along raise a generation of healthy or damaged youths? And can we really hope to bring peace to the world if our own homes are filled with strife? Great fissures are already showing in our country We are divided between right and left, conservative and liberal, religious and secular. We don’t have peace on the inside, so how can we have peace on the outside? And it all begins with the family The American family is rotting from the top down and is in desperate need of salvation. Saving the American family from collapse is our foremost national emergency It is not terrorists who threaten us the most. They can hurt us, but they can never destroy us. But we can destroy ourselves. The Oxford historian Arnold Toynbee demonstrates in his classic A Study of History that great civilizations are never defeated from the outside. Rather, they crumble from the inside. The Romans were not destroyed by invading barbarians, Goths or Huns. Rather, they sealed their fate with political corruption, crumbling families, and self-serving civic institutions. The Incas were not defeated by Pizarro and the invading Spanish so much as by civil war, internecine fighting among the royal family, and fractured leadership. And the Ottoman Empire, the sick man of Europe, collapsed from generations of strife in the governing family, bribery, and astounding moral and civic