My workplace has a ton of these "Rise & Grind™️©️®️" Sigma and Ligma mindset books all over the place. I read them from time to time to gaze into the dreaded and loathsome Manosphere and understand my enemy.
The core of these books is a sort of bastardized self-actualization. I genuinely don't think becoming accountable to set of values and being active member in one's own life is a bad thing; in fact I think if they left it at that a lot of guys would be better for it. However, I find it to be uniquely corrupted by neoliberalism and capitalism, in that it twists and warps manhood into this ideal that demands the domination of everything and everyone around. It turns manhood into a zero-sum game.
A lot of these books blogs websites do offer somewhat meaningful mental frameworks for “achievement” but I'm always questioned as to what end. much of it is a false myth of manhood and recapturing a masculinity that never existed which I feel uniquely disappoints men. Patriarchy leaves men particularly vulnerable to these sorts of traps and snares when they are feeling down and out.
I do think it's good to strive and do your best, but that should never EVER come at the cost of someone else doing the same. If anything you should be helping others become their best too, so you two can be your best together and shine even brighter. I hate how the modern world has made being a dude about just being a dick with a bunch of stuff rather than being a good person. Discipline, steadfast commitment, pushing through failure, all that sort of stuff is great and good but not if it's just implemented to get a new shiny bauble or whatever. Capitalism really does hinder men's ability to live up their supposed values and virtues. We can’t be the mean we want to be with under capitalism, we can’t be the men we actually should be as along as capitalism is rules over us
Being a great man should be defined by your ability actually live out manly virtues, not these fast food Mc-ideals of debasing yourself for some coin. A good dude is more than his ability to dominate.
I don't know what my larger point is, but I'm just typing this at work cause they got me working on a Sunday and all these dumb books are lying around the "leadership" library. It's just so fuckin' corny.
I think one of the issues I have bringing this up with men is that they tend to put up a wall when it comes to that final leap of accepting that gender is fake. Most (lib/left) women tend to kinda at least get on board with the idea of disinvesting from gender and I think that's due to the general awareness of their own oppression.
In order to beat patriarchy we need a mass movement of not just queer people and not just 'allies' but a mass line of everyone, because gender is fake for everyone and it oppresses everyone. If only queer people are talking about this stuff and doing the organizing around it, as we have been for decades, it won't get off the ground. Masc investment in patriarchal norms seems to be the biggest block, and whenever I bring it up with men they just kinda shut down and don't wanna talk about it. But they have no issues blaming women for their problems and get tons of engagement when that's the spin on the topic.
Gender is fake in the same way that money, culture, and national borders are fake. You can't possibly strictly reduce them down to purely naturalistic phenomenon, but they also couldn't possibly exist without a natural & material world to make reference to. Also while they absolutely do change in exactly what they mean, and how they function over time, they're still extremely important & have very real consequences to people in the times & places where they exist. You can't just act like they aren't real at all, and expect to not face consequences for doing so.
They're also all deeply inextricable to the fabric of Class Society, and can only really begin to be challenged with the abolition of economic classes.
That's my position on things.
I do face consequences for doing so, every day. I just decided that it was worth dealing with to not be depressed all the time.