Vulnerability Is Not a Virtue
But It Is Important for Men to Stay Grounded
Vulnerability is not a virtue
It seems almost ridiculous to even have to make this statement. As a man, the word “Vulnerability” conjures up stories of tactical oversights and points of unguarded exposure left to be exploited by an enemy.
Achilles’ heel. That thermal exhaust point on the Death Star. The missing scale on Smaug’s belly. A careless revelation that invites doom.
For thousands of years, it has been the job of men to protect the perimeter—to seek out potential vulnerabilities and fortify or conceal them, to lock the doors and mend the fences that keep the wolves at bay so that the hens can roost, the women can cluck, and the children can play and remain oblivious to the beasts roaming beyond our boundaries.
Men have always been wary of those who seek to know their vulnerabilities.
Why would you ask, if not to cause harm?
Vulnerabilities are classified and revealed even to allies only on a “need-to-know” basis.
Would you post the location of your “hide-a-key” on social media? It would be unwise to do so.
Watch the speech version of this essay on YouTube
And yet, over the past few years, we’ve seen men’s coaches and women insist that men become “more vulnerable” and even go so far as to say that “vulnerability is not a weakness.”
This sounds like crazy talk to men. Of course vulnerability is weakness. That is, in fact, the dictionary definition of “vulnerability”: to be “capable of being physically or emotionally wounded” and “open to attack or damage.” It comes from the Latin vulnero which means “to wound, injure, or hurt.”
In an instance of dark comedy, the first example of “vulnerable” used in a sentence that Mirriam-Webster offers is, “He was very vulnerable after his divorce.” No shit, Mirriam.
When I first heard men implore other men to become “more vulnerable” I dismissed it as women’s talk show therapy talk nonsense that had percolated into the men’s space through wives, girlfriends, and female therapists.
And I was basically right. The idea appears to have come from Oprah-endorsed social work researcher Brené Brown’s 2010 TED Talk, “The Power of Vulnerability.”
I encourage men to visit her website and determine whether they want to accept and internalize her frame and language.
I watched Brown’s talk, which is essentially about encouraging human connection by sharing fears, admitting that we are imperfect, and believing that we are “enough.”
At 22 million views on just one platform, you can imagine the influence this had and the permission slip it gave millions of women to believe that no matter what they did or how they looked, they were (in her words) “worthy of love” and “enough.” This talk essentially ghost-wrote a deluge of Facebook posts, TikTok rants about self-love, Lizzo songs, and Tinder profiles.
I wouldn’t say that was necessarily what Brown meant to inspire, but her presentation seemed to favor confession and feeling over accountability or meritocracy. She never addressed the possibility that sharing vulnerabilities may also lead to negative outcomes—which is where any man’s head would go immediately. Vulnerability means weakness, and there is nothing “powerful” about it.
Brené Brown seems like a smart enough lady, and I’m sure she probably addressed potential criticisms in books and articles. But this was a TED Talk, and it’s what went viral. No one reads the fine print. It wasn’t a talk for men. It was a talk that told college-educated female Democrats what they wanted to hear.
I mentioned Brown to a friend who works in the corporate world. He laughed and said she is basically the patron saint of every woman who works in human resources.
One would expect women to resonate with this kind of message. Sigmund Freud and Camille Paglia would have something to say about women displaying their “wounds” as a means of “empowerment.”
But we are talking about men and how, over a decade later, men are being told to embrace vulnerability as a virtue.
As I mentioned, this frame is not only linguistically ridiculous but also instinctively repulsive to men because it inverts their natural tactical orientation toward protection.
Setting that aside for a moment, there is a positive message here that is resonating with some men, and I think it can be reframed in a masculine context and positively incorporated into existing masculine virtues.
The idea that vulnerability is a “virtue” or “powerful” or a “strength” has legs because it has contrarian appeal. In marketing, saying something unexpected that inverts an instinctive belief attracts attention. It sounds deep and meaningful, implies hidden wisdom, and makes people want to know more. It’s a good hook. Unfortunately, this also leads to a lot of nonsense talk because when people hear something counterintuitive from a trusted source, they try to make it make sense for themselves to feel like they understand the hidden wisdom. Contrarian ideas sound complicated, and complicated ideas make people feel clever and interesting.
When questioned about why they believe that “vulnerability can be a strength,” I’ve had numerous men tell me what vulnerability “really means” and then proceed to redefine the word according to however they “feel” about it.
Weakness and mediocrity also have a natural appeal to lazy souls who seek reassurance that they will be loved and valued no matter what they do. The “you are enough” message is as comforting as a mother’s embrace…or heroin. It’s good for very small children to hear that they are special no matter what they do, but for adult males, this is a poisonous and potentially addictive message. The masculine impulse drives away from the nurturing comfort of the void and out into the world of action, achievement, meritocracy, and hierarchy. No man achieves anything of value by repeating the mantra, “I am enough.”
Brown’s message is that using vulnerability to achieve connection in relationships has some merit, in the sense that for someone to really “know” you, they also have to know that you’re a human who has problems. People who truly know you know what you struggle with. They know more than you reveal to the outside world. Because men are more tactically oriented, they generally require you to build trust with them before they reveal their problems. Women expect to be protected, so they feel more comfortable sharing their problems with others. Smarter women know this is unwise and still play their cards a little closer to the chest. It is natural for men to want to withhold information that could potentially be used against them.
Simply declaring a “safe space” and asking men to open up to strangers strikes me as suspicious and predatory. There are prominent men’s groups online that manipulate men into crying while cameras are running. It seems to me that cathartic tears are the product being sold. There is a time and a place for that kind of cathartic release, and it isn’t in a group of strangers filmed in 4K. That’s either emotional exploitation or emotional exhibitionism.
It seems unfair to blame Ms. Brown for the excesses of TikTok, but there is an epidemic of emotional exhibitionism right now. You’ve all seen the videos of women crying about politics, breakups, or even something trivial right into their phone cameras for a live audience. Male or female, this should be universally mocked as a desperate cry for attention.
But, as “vulnerability” is also linked to “authenticity,” a wider range of influencers share what should be embarrassing details about their lives to build rapport with their audiences.
The masculine approach to sharing a problem with the public would be to do so after the fact.
“Here is something I struggled with, and here is the solution that helped me overcome it.”
That would be productive.
But there is also a voyeuristic appeal to watching someone go through some kind of struggle, and some men and women end up living in their own reality television shows. People tune in for the vicarious drama, and the subject struggles all the way to a payday. This potentially staged, exaggerated, or simply exhibitionistic display of “authentic vulnerability” for profit has been called “McVulnerability” by some, and I rather like that. (Though I hate that I just linked to The Atlantic)
This kind of performative exposure aside, there is a tendency in men to avoid admitting any wrongdoing or imperfection and thereby attempt to maintain an aura of perfection and impenetrability. However consistent this may be with the nature of men, it can actually hinder their growth and progress both as men and generally as human beings. This is the truth that the vulnerability message really taps into.
Several years ago, I talked about this with Ryan Michler from Order of Man—who also grimaced at the “vulnerability is a virtue” message.
As we discussed, I said, “The word they are looking for that makes sense is ‘humility,’ and humility has always been a masculine virtue.”
And that has been my response ever since. When people tell men to be more vulnerable, what they should be doing is asking them to be more humble.
Admit that you aren’t perfect. Admit that you don’t know everything. Be teachable. Maintain a “white belt” mentality. Admit that you make mistakes, apologize, and take responsibility for them.
Humility
So, we’ve taken the skull-exploding “vulnerability is strength” kumbaya and extracted a message that makes sense to men—transmuting vulnerability into humility.
Men have been encouraging each other to be humble and modest and to “check their egos” for a long time. I had no negative associations with the word humility personally, so it made sense to me as a catch-all for a cluster of ideas that are essential to masculine hierarchy.
For years, I was satisfied with humility as a response to calls for “vulnerability,” but after digging in, I think we can do better.
Humility entered the lexicon as a virtue through Christianity, from the Latin humilitās. The meaning isn’t all that appealing.
insignificance, lowliness, unimportance, degradation, debasement, humiliation, submissiveness, obedience…
Most men don’t mean anything this derogatory when they say, “humility.”
But its dictionary definition doesn’t make me want to encourage “humility” much more than telling men to be “vulnerable.” In pre-Christian Latin, it was used the way we use “humiliate” to describe someone being brought low or reduced in status. Its root, humus, literally means “ground” or “earth.”
Early Latin translations of Christian material used humilitās to describe the qualities and actions of Jesus Christ as a god who manifested himself in human form and allowed himself to be degraded, tortured, and put to death by men. In Colossians 3, the Apostle Paul told Christians to “put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness,” and “longsuffering.” In the first century, this would have been a stark contrast to the Roman Empire’s ethos that glorified status, power, and wealth. St. Augustine later spoke of humility specifically as a Christian virtue, frequently contrasting humility with the sin of pride.
This kind of self-hating melodramatic exhortation to debasement is precisely why I’ve always found Christianity anti-human, anti-meritocratic, anti-masculine, and aesthetically repulsive. It’s a cult of self-deprecation whose adherents routinely call themselves “slaves,” “wretches,” “sinners,” “sheep,” and “children” and theatrically proclaim their own unworthiness. From this perspective, why wouldn’t vulnerability be a virtue?
The formation of status hierarchies is a human universal and essential to any masculine understanding of the world. Any handful of men will work out a hierarchy amongst themselves without being prompted, and as a leader of a group of men, it is always fascinating to me how much men want to establish hierarchies and standards. They want to gamify hierarchy and will work to achieve higher status within the system. The military has always known this. The Boy Scouts knew this. Being proud of one’s achievements and elevated status is one of the most natural things in the world.
But, as Nietzsche observed, those who see themselves as low status or outsiders will invert hierarchies due to the poisonous jealousy of ressentiment. What he called “slave morality” glorifies low status and accuses high status of pride and corruption. This morality was cooked into Christianity and remained even when Christians became some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world, thereby normalizing a particular kind of cognitive dissonance.
In a pre-Christian sense, hierarchy actually means divine or holy order or rule by priests. But pre- and non-Christians have always placed their own limits on what Christians would call pride, and others would call overbearing “ego” or simply arrogance.
Hierarchies are natural to our species but don’t work unless they are respected and men defer to one another when appropriate. Rigid hierarchies like caste systems can be oppressive, and I suspect they chill innovation by stifling ambition when opportunities for social mobility are absent. I’m not certain one could prove that theory, as innovation has occurred regardless. Might it have happened faster otherwise? Is faster always more desirable? Who knows? But every human system promotes some version of “knowing your place,” “respecting the chain of command,” etc. In the military, the refusal to respect status hierarchies is called insubordination. In a recent piece, I wrote about men who attempt to jump the hierarchy by asserting expertise they gained without experience—and how annoying that is to most other men.
In contrast to the Christian and Buddhist emphasis on rejecting worldly status, other philosophies and religions focus on maintaining the natural, cosmic, or divine order of things by respecting boundaries and avoiding the overestimation of one’s place in the world.
Arrogance, Hubris, and “Ego”
The Greeks frequently warned against what they called hubris, which was loosely defined as pride or arrogance but was used to describe an overestimation of one’s abilities or the overstepping of natural boundaries. This was most often invoked in myth when men or women challenged the gods or claimed to be better than the gods, but we can see how it would apply to human arrogance and disrespect for hierarchy as well. The more balanced approach advocated was known as sophrosyne, a virtue which Heraclitus called “paying heed to the nature of things” but the scope of sophrosyne is broader and probably best equated with the virtue we understand as temperance.
When men warn today against arrogance or hubris, they tend to use the word “ego.” As I’ve written elsewhere, this is unfortunate because “ego” simply means “I” in Latin. So popular phrases like “ego death” and “kill your ego” return to the self-denying and even, if taken literally, the suicide. No one actually means suicide when they say this, but death is the only true escape from self-concept—though DMT advocates will claim otherwise.
Who tells you to overcome your ego—yourself—other than yourself?
Who do you overcome your ego for, if not your ego?
Comically, the people who say they have overcome their egos usually can’t wait to tell you about it—and how it makes them more enlightened than you are.
Ego has become a synonym for arrogance, and I think this meaning crept into our collective consciousness through translations of Buddhist concepts via Eastern martial arts. I always hesitate to summarize Buddhist concepts because there are a thousand flavors of Buddhism and every Buddhist will argue that whatever you say isn’t what Buddha really meant or it isn’t what Buddhism teaches. But Buddhists, as far as I can tell without converting to one of the true Buddhisms, teaches that the self is an illusion. And this illusion is generally spoken about in American English as “ego.” The idea of “ego” as “rational self-concept” comes from translations of Freud, who actually used the German word “Ich” or “I.”
When a man today criticizes your ego, he is identifying what he sees as arrogance and hubris, and an overestimation of yourself and your abilities. He is saying that your idea that you are worthy and have potential has overstepped into a realm of delusion that is impeding your progress and preventing you from becoming better. The comical example is the untrained and untested fighter who believes he can fight if he gets angry enough and, therefore, refuses to actually train and spar, which would shatter that overestimation of his abilities. Another common example is what is called “ego lifting,” which is when a man puts more weight on the bar than he can reasonably expect to lift well, and he ends up injuring himself or performing partial reps to maintain his inflated self-concept. A wiser man would tell him to work up to that weight methodically so that he can really, properly lift that weight. This is another unfortunate but common use of the word ego as a synonym for delusional arrogance.
Remaining Grounded
I think we can extract something contemporary from the word “humility” while setting aside the self-degradation and prostration culturally associated with it. As I mentioned, the root of humility is “humus,” which means “ground.”
In the Order of Fire and Solar Idealism, we have a saying that we are men, “born of the earth, reaching forever upward.”
We are men and must remember that we are human and not gods, and the Greeks would have agreed. Whatever we achieve and however high we reach, we are still animals born of and connected to the earth. We are not omniscient, and we all make mistakes. We are constrained by physical reality and the limitations of our bodies. We may fly in planes, but we must remember that we cannot leap from one without a parachute. We must remain mindful of natural and human hierarchies. We can and should push ourselves and test our limits, but we cannot simply imagine ourselves operating at levels of proficiency we have not earned through work, learning, and practice.
We are vulnerable—killable, fallible, and often mistaken by our very nature. It is essential to remain cognizant of this, and not pretend to be something we are not.
Men, and especially young men, are attracted to what seems like superhuman confidence. But when they attempt to emulate it without putting in the work to build that confidence based on some kind of real-world feedback, they often fail or end up looking ridiculous. It is probably a better practice, and I think Cicero would agree, to under-promise and work with confidence to over-deliver. Leave the comedy of boastfulness to professional wrestlers, among whom we always prefer to see the underdog triumph over the overweening heel.
Remember the myth of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun—ignoring advice to moderate his flight.
“Minos shut Daedalus and his son Icarus in the labyrinth. But Daedalus made wings for himself and his son, and fastened them with wax. And he gave them to Icarus, warning him not to fly high lest the sun melt the wax, nor low lest the sea wet the wings. But Icarus, disregarding his father’s advice, flew higher, and the wax melting, he fell into the sea, which was called after him the Icarian Sea, and he perished. Daedalus escaped to Camicus in Sicily.”
Apollodorus, Library, Epitome 1.12–13 (translated by J.G. Frazer, 1921, Loeb Classical Library).
Vulnerability is not a virtue, but it is a reality.
The virtue here is to look upward, believe in your own worth, and soar toward your highest ideals—but remain grounded in reality.
Stay Solar ऋत
As the son of an electrician, the word grounded immediately inspired a search for the electrical symbol ⏚ for “earth ground.” It looked familiar, and I remembered that it is the symbol that Earth Papi uses for his brand of grounded sandals. This kind of grounding is, of course, another rabbit hole entirely and may be of interest. It looks like he has a stylish-looking line of full shoes now, available at