He: Understanding Masculine Psychology 

By Robert A. Johnson

83 pages

First published Jan. 1, 1974

It was sitting inconspicuously on the built-in bookcase behind the headboard, along with several hundred other books I brought to Villa Santana about 15 years ago, hoping to one day find the time to read them.

It looked to be about 80 pages. (More of a longish essay than a book.) The yellowed paper gave its age away. Nearly 50 years old.

I was ambivalent about the title: He: Understanding Masculine Psychology. I remembered the name of the author, Robert A. Johnson. But only vaguely. Wasn’t he one of those spiritual hippie writers that were so popular among university students in the 1980s?

On the back cover, there was a blurb summarizing the book’s thesis:

“What does it really mean to be a man? What are some of the landmarks along the road to mature masculinity? And what of the feminine components of a man’s personality? Women have developed, over the centuries, considerable expertise in the technique of adapting to men, and for good reason, but that is not the same as truly understanding them. The transition from male childhood to real manhood is a complicated struggle….”

Beneath that was a paragraph about Robert A. Johnson: A “noted lecturer and Jungian analyst in private practice in San Diego, CA”… “studied Jungian Psychology at the Jung Institute in Switzerland and at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in India”… “also the author of She: Understanding Feminine Psychology and We: Understanding the Psychology of the Romantic Love.”

It was only 80 pages. And my relationship with the idea of masculinity has been a recurring area of interest in my life. So, I decided to give it a try.

One of my favorite sayings is, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” I take it to mean that there are many ideas we encounter growing up that we can’t understand until much later. I always thought it was a quote from Lao Tzu, a must-read (or pretend-to-have-read) ancient Chinese philosopher when I was in college. But I looked it up. Nope. It was not Lao Tzu.

Actually, nobody knows where the maxim came from. But whoever said it was speaking to me. I’ve had that experience of learning something important that I’d read or heard before but ignored at least a hundred times. And I’ve been told by at least a hundred people that something I said or wrote had that effect on them.

He is a book that I feel like I needed to read right about this time in my life. It is a serious book about male psychology – about how boys are made and how easy it is for them to turn out badly. But also how, if they act in accordance with their nature, they can achieve a satisfying equilibrium with nature and an equally satisfying level of wisdom as they age.

What I Liked About It 

For such a short treatise, Johnson presents a surprising number of fascinating ideas.

He provides a readable, concise, and convincing analysis of the symbolism in the legend of King Arthur and the Holy Grail. He also offers his own take on how the King Arthur/ Holy Grail mythology highlights important facts about what, at the core, it means to be a boy and a man. And he provides an intriguing introduction to the psychological insights and theories of Carl Jung.

Jung is, or was, considered one of the most important psychological philosophers of the 20th century. Equal to Freud. Yet today, he’s almost forgotten. In He, we get a succinct explanation of Jungian psychology and the Jungian conception of masculinity.

I Was Ready for This Book 

In those brief 80 pages, Johnson helped me realize that, at age 72, when I should be well into my wise and settled years, I’m still stuck at a threshold that I should have passed through many years ago. I still haven’t made the transition from the restless, striving, never-satisfied middle years of manhood to the level of maturity that will only come when I stop trying to be so much of a man.

It took me a just a few hours to read He, but it had a strong impact on my thinking about myself.

I recommend it (to both men and women) without hesitation.

The Geetar Revolution

Oliver Anthony Music 

You’ve probably heard about this fellow Oliver Anthony Music and his recording of “Rich Men North of Richmond.” It shot to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart when it was released last week.

It’s the second such working-class anthem that has taken off this summer. In July, Jason Aldean had a huge hit with “Try That in a Small Town,” which was denounced by the left as racist and praised by the right as the new hymn of the silent minority.

Both songs share political and social sentiments – including anger at leftist ideas and a pro-American bias. But the lyrics of “Rich Men North of Richmond” are less vague and more specific. They read like a Libertarian critique against big government and woke culture.

And, as Bill Bonner points out in a recent essay, the song has a nuance that “Try That in a Small Town” lacks:

“The ‘rich men north of Richmond’ idea is clean and simple. It avoids all the political claptrap and distracting culture wars. Democrats vs. Republicans… LGBTQ rights… racism… inequality… blah, blah, blah.

“In the things that really matter – money and war – the elites of both parties are unified, as tight as a head gasket. Presidents change… but the laws, regulations, bureaucracy, the Deep State, the wars and deficits don’t.

“Why? Because they suit the rich men north of Richmond…”

  Read the entire essay here.

Art, History, and Race

If you saw the movie Oppenheimer (reviewed by me in the Aug. 4 issue), you probably noticed that there was just the smallest sprinkling of people of color in the cast. That generated a fair amount of criticism from critics and Hollywood progressives that have been promoting the idea that casting directors should be following a quota system in their hiring. A quota that roughly equates with the percentage of the general population that a particular minority group represents. In the US, that’s about 14% African American, 19% Hispanic, 7% Asian, and maybe 10% Irish and 2% Jewish.

“Let’s start with the painfully obvious,” Dan Gardner says in his essay titled Art, History, and Race. “America in the 1940s and 1950s was a far less diverse, tolerant, open society…. For us today, it’s a monotonous ocean of white men. But that was elite America in that era.”

Read the entire essay here.

“A Cold Email Got Me My Job” 

“Everyone says networking is the route to success,” writes Olivia Reingold in The Free Press. “But I’ve always been a strong believer that any door can open if you score the right invitation. My advice? Don’t ever ask to ‘pick’ someone’s brain. The trick is to get inside their brain. Start by googling them, or rereading or relistening to their work. Why do you like it? Tell them that. Make them know they matter.”

I made essentially the same argument many years ago in my book Automatic Wealth for Grads.

Here’s the gist of some of what I said in the chapter about how to write a great job application letter:

The most important thing you need to realize about getting a job is this: The people who will be reading your letter are not really interested in you.

If they’re not interested in you, then what are they interested in?

I’ll tell you: They’re interested in themselves.

Think of getting a job as a direct-marketing challenge. The direct marketer knows that, to make a sale, everything he writes must be focused on the prospect’s problems and how much better his life will be after he’s bought the product.

When seeking a job, the prospect is the person you want to work for and you are the product.

So, the number one job of any sales pitch to that prospect (a letter, phone call, or personal meeting) is NOT to sell yourself as smart and well educated, but as someone smart and knowledgeable enough to solve his problems.

And to do that, you have to do a good deal of research. To begin with, you should research the industry to understand its problems and challenges. Then research the company itself and find out everything you possibly can about it. Is it growing, in limbo, or losing revenue? What are the main factors affecting that? And then, finally, dig up what you can about the person you are going to be working for. What kind of boss is he?

If your first effort is a letter, make it as specific and personalized as you possibly can. Don’t make it sound like you’ve been snooping around, but make it clear that you (1) understand how the business works, (2) have some idea of what the primary challenges are in terms of profit growth, and (3) are interested in helping this particular person accomplish more with less stress because you will be there to take responsibility for whatever he needs.

   Click here to read Olivia’s article.

And if you’d like a copy of Automatic Wealth for Grads – for yourself or as a gift to a young person just starting out – you can order it directly from us. List price is $22.95. But for readers of this blog, the price is $15 (which includes free shipping).

To order your copy:

* Send a check for $15.

* Make the check payable to Cap & Bells Press, LLC. (No cash, please.)

* Include your name and mailing address and mail it to:

Cap & Bells Press

Attn: GKoo

290 SE 2nd Ave.

Delray Beach, FL 33444

Bring Up the Bodies 

By Hilary Mantel

432 pages

Published May 8, 2012

For the month of August, the Elder Mules selected Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies.

Mantel’s name was familiar to me, but I knew nothing about her books. I worried that this one might be one of those novels that is better suited for the book clubs that our spouses belong to. So, I googled it. Turns out it’s a historical novel – and a good one. It’s the second book in a trilogy charting the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, the powerful minister in the court of King Henry VIII. The other two books in the trilogy are Wolf Hall (2009) and The Mirror and the Light(2020). Both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies won the Man Booker Prize.

I’ve always been interested in the story of Henry VIII and his eight wives, one of whom, Anne Boleyn, was famously beheaded. What brought about her downfall? And what did Thomas Cromwell have to do with it? Bring Up the Bodies does a detailed and entertaining job of explaining all that.

Critical Reception 

* “Bring Up the Bodies (the title refers to the four men executed for supposedly sleeping with Anne) isn’t nostalgic, exactly, but it’s astringent and purifying, stripping away the cobwebs and varnish of history, the antique formulations and brocaded sentimentality of costume-drama novels, so that the English past comes to seem like something vivid, strange, and brand new.” (Charles McGrath)

* “Historical fiction has many pitfalls, multiple characters and plausible underwear being only two of them. How should people talk?… How much detail – clothes, furnishings, appliances – to supply without clogging up the page and slowing down the story?… Mantel sometimes overshares, but literary invention does not fail her: She’s as deft and verbally adroit as ever.” (Margaret Atwood)

* “[The book’s] ironic ending will be no cliffhanger for anyone even remotely familiar with Henry VIII’s trail of carnage. But in Bring Up the Bodies it works as one. The wonder of Ms. Mantel’s retelling is that she makes these events fresh and terrifying all over again.” (Janet Maslin) 

“I Keep Writing the Same Poptimism Piece Because Nothing Ever Changes” 

An interesting article by Freddie deBoer on the political popularity of Taylor Swift and how it represents another regrettable stage in the morbidity of American culture. Click here.

How Lewis Strauss Orchestrated Robert Oppenheimer’s Downfall 

Oppenheimer, the movie, was, as I said above, a good movie, but not a great one. It suggested all sorts of historical and scientific questions it didn’t even try to answer. But one question it did answer was about the increasingly antagonistic relationship between Oppenheimer, the quantum physics genius, and Lewis Strauss, an amateur physicist who used his fortune and influence to become one of America’s most important atomic-energy advisors during the Cold War.

Click here for the whole story.

“Welcome to the MAGA Hamptons!”

“Every summer, the haute bourgeoisie of Middle America descend on Lake of the Ozarks to jet ski, barbecue ribs, and (until 2023) drink a shit-ton of Budweiser,” writes Max Meyer, in The Free Press.

Click here to read more.