What does it mean to be a good man in a world that rewards men for being big, loud, and unbreakable?
We live in a culture that rewards extraction[1]and dominance. Consider the rise of strongman politics, where powerful men embody a reactive masculinity: not-weak, not-poor, not-woman – dominance at all costs. Our inherited script for manhood is reactive. Goodness requires chosen responsibility, and the leaders we choose reveal what kind of men we truly value. A good man is neither he who obeys tradition nor rebels against it, but rather one who consciously authors his values.
The default script for manhood today is less a set of values than a set of negations: don’t be emotional, don’t be vulnerable, don’t be thoughtful. As Kimmel puts it, “Whatever the variations by race, class, age, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, being a man means ‘not being like women.’ This notion of anti-femininity lies at the heart of contemporary and historical conceptions of manhood, so that masculinity is defined more by what one is not rather than who one is.”[2]
This reactive identity leaves men hollow: if a man defines himself only by what he is not, he never has to answer what he is for. It is like looking into a mirror and finding no reflection. His disdain blinds him. To see himself truly, a good man must move from negation to creative commitment – what he builds, whom he protects, and what responsibilities he accepts. To be a good man, he must choose what he serves.
One afternoon, at the park with my kids, I watched a father scold his son, maybe seven years old, for crying. “Stop it. Stop crying. I’m tired of this. You’re a big boy. Big boys don’t cry.” The boy went quiet – not calm, he was clearly still very upset. I understood the father’s frustration; I’ve felt it myself. I have two sons, one about that age, and I’ve surely told them to stop whining before. But I would never tie their right to feel to their right to be male. I would never suggest that their worth as boys depends on their ability to suppress tears.
Moments like that reveal how early the reactive script begins. Masculinity gets framed not as something to grow into, but as something to defend against softness, against vulnerability, against anything that might look like weakness. Yet childhood is precisely when a person is supposed to feel big emotions without knowing what to do with them. Their brains are still forming; they are still learning how to hold what rises inside them. In those moments, what they need most isn’t correction but presence. Not dominance, but steadiness. Not shame, but guidance.
Choosing what you serve is difficult because much of what men think they want is scripted. Fromm puts it this way:
Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows “what he wants,” while he actually wants what he is supposed to want. In order to accept this it is necessary to realize that to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. It is a task we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready‑made goals as though they were our own.[3]
Hooks says, “to create loving men, we must love males.” She goes on to state that we must build an environment that discourages men from upholding “sexist-defined notions of male dominance.”[4] In other words, society must express substantial buy-in for a man who struggles to find and live by his values, and who rejects strongman anti-values.
Authorship isn’t simply choosing what feels good; it’s accepting the burden of living by those values when they cost you status, wealth, power. If the good man is an author of his own values, those values become love and responsibility, not dominance and extraction.
But there’s a danger in the language of “creating your own values.” When taken naively, it can turn value-driven existence into lifestyle branding. As MacIntyre posits, “The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and…There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture.”[5] In other words, how can one answer “What am I to do?” if one cannot answer “What story am I part of?” Telling each man to author his values risks producing more emotive, incoherent stances.
Authorship must involve conscious editing of inherited stories rather than writing a new story entirely. A good man does not pretend that his values supersede tradition; he chooses which parts of his tradition to deepen (care, courage, justice) and which reactive scripts (misogyny, domination, numbness) to refuse in service of his values. Good men are not free-floating individuals. They are responsible inheritors – willing to claim and expand the best of their cultural inheritance and to disobey the worst.
Yet these are rarely the men our culture celebrates. The strongmen dominating today’s headlines follow the reactive script for masculinity almost perfectly distilled. To them, manhood is defined largely by what it cannot be: never weak, never dependent, never publicly vulnerable – and by what it can seize, command, or subdue.
Set against them are figures like Václav Havel and Nelson Mandela, who embody a different model of male strength. Havel rose not through force or spectacle but through conscience, speaking plainly about responsibility and the moral cost of living falsely. His authority came from a willingness to suffer for truth rather than perform power. After decades in prison, Mandela chose reconciliation over revenge, building a future that included his former enemies. Neither man projected invincibility. Both showed that restraint, honesty, and accountability can command deeper loyalty than domination ever could.
Where the strongman model promises safety through control and extraction, this quieter model tries to offer safety through truth-telling, solidarity, and the acceptance of real limits. When we celebrate strongmen, we reward the “bad man” traits of extraction, domination, non-weakness. Havel puts it best, “…the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better.”[6] If good humans choose to build, protect, and take responsibility instead of dominate, the significance isn’t just personal – it’s civilization-building.
Being a good man today is not about perfect conformity to tradition or loud rebellion against it. It is about consciously choosing which values he will build his life on. The reactive script rooted in negation (not-woman, not-weak) is empty. Self-authorship must be tethered to the best of our traditions, and we must all acknowledge our complicity in what we choose to reward (domination vs. responsibility; humiliation vs. empathy) through the men we admire.
The question isn’t just what kind of man one wants to be, but what kind of men one is willing to reward. In a culture that prizes extraction and dominance, choosing to build, protect, and take responsibility is not only good; it’s quietly revolutionary in a world that rewards the opposite.
[1] In the context of capitalism and culture, Extraction refers to a “take-make-waste” economic model focused on the rapid, large-scale removal of natural resources, labor, and data for profit, often disregarding ecological limits and social equity. It treats nature and human communities as boundless, disposable inputs rather than as parts of a regenerative system.
[2] Michael Kimmel, Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era
[3] Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (a.k.a. The Fear of Freedom)
[4] bell hooks, The Will to Change
[5] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
[6] Václav Havel, The Art of the Impossible
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Previously Published on substack and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Pixabay
