Part 3: Propaganda Becomes Blueprint: How We Learned to Control Instead of Connect

In Parts 1 and 2, I explored my father's escape into yard work and why men cling to control as traditional strength becomes irrelevant. Now I want to dig into how we learned these patterns, how propaganda shaped our understanding of intimacy, and the real damage it's caused.

Part 1: Raking Leaves: My Father's Escape and What It Taught Me About Masculinity

Part 2: The Death of Male Strength: Why Men Cling to Control

The Most Propagandized People on Earth

We are the most propagandized people on Earth. As Americans, we are the most propagandized people I think to ever exist. Everything is sold to us, especially intimacy. Every single thing is being bought and sold by lobbyists and marketing people.

So what do we do? We drag those expectations into our homes. Into our marriages. Into our bedrooms. Into our daughters' and sons' futures.

As men, we're filled to the brim with porn, with images of what a man's supposed to be, with women doing what we say. We expect them to perform. We expect them to be like the things we see. We want to control them. And in the world we're living in right now, it is the most toxic form of partnership you can get.

My Own Journey

My wife and I have wrestled with all of this. I've wrestled with myself, my expectations, my conditioning, the damage I didn't even know I was doing. You're hearing me be vulnerable right now. Ten years of weekly therapy, thousands of hours of yoga and meditation, and I'm still peeling back layers.

And the more I peel back, the more I see how much harm men have done to women. Not just physically. Emotionally. Culturally. Spiritually. Systemically. It's mostly been done by men. If women are participating, they're participating because they've been propagandized too, saying things like what Megan Kelly just said, that a 15-year-old is not really a kid, that it's not as bad as a real child. That shit is bonkers to me.

Anxiety and the Need to Control

I think we have to take a hard look at how religion is playing into all of this. It needs to be a very deep and frank conversation with oneself.

If you're living a life with a lot of anxiety, the way you want to fix that is by controlling things, by controlling outcomes. If you're sitting around anxious about things not in your control, and you as a man are applying that to your spouse or your person, trying to control them and whatever they're doing in your day to day, that's just a sign of you feeling out of control.

That anxiety spurs a lot of this, especially in men. It spurs desires, mental shifts like, "If I could get a girl in distress, I could save her, get her to do whatever I want and control that." That's something I think we need to wrestle with a lot because that is what we are fed in most propaganda, a knight in shining armor from Disney on down. That's the underlying tone most of the time.

If you're living in fear every day, fear of the unknown, of the worst thing happening, you're probably going to lean toward wanting to control that with intimacy. And "intimacy" is in quotations there.

What's in Your Feed?

These are the big feelings to wrestle with. What's in your news feed right now? What's in your bookmarks? What's in that search history? What did you grow up in? How sexualized did your parents treat you? Really explore that.

If you were a woman: you need to be pretty, smile, don't ruffle feathers, let the men do their thing, just be in the backseat, be a passenger.

If you were a man: you're the athlete, you're so strong.

These were things we were told. I don't blame my parents for raising us. They were raised by a generation coming out of war, coming out of immense trauma without any healing or healthy thoughts. The people who came out of the Vietnam War, World War II, they were told to just not talk about it. So it festers and builds and builds and creates fear and anxiety, which then spurs into this.

It's all connected. None of this is about the human experience, whether it's being at war, fighting some other, stealing land, taking land while we're all on a rock spinning. It's all bullshit.

The Next Generation

I think about my 14-year-old son opening his phone and getting Joe Rogan clips pushed to him, or Turning Point garbage, or even Scott Galloway on one of his "off" days, where you're like, what the fuck is this guy talking about? How is he supposed to navigate that? What narrative will shape him? As he has his first girlfriend, what is he thinking about?

Will he think intimacy is control? Will he think it's fear? Or will he think intimacy is joy, connection, mutual respect? Will he think this person is fun to be with, this person makes me a better human?

That's what keeps me up at night. And that's why the work I'm about to describe in Part 4 matters so much.

Next in this series: Part 4 - "Leaving Some Leaves Behind: The Work Men Need to Do"