They wear boxing gloves by their attitude, as if looking for a fight. They forget, though, that they could wear gloves of peace just as well. For both postures are equally arbitrary, though one is obviously less troublesome than the other. This attitude of false righteousness comes from something quite not right, and strives to step on others in a manner which only serves to punish themselves. It is unfortunate, truly, to witness a man who is tense and stressed by the continuous struggle to find and create conflicts for the sheer sport of it. They are accustomed to a mind rife with inner turmoil, and to therefore express it continually in outer forms by breaking the potential bridges which could have otherwise connected them to other poor devils.

Life is all about entanglements and freeing oneself from them. We see how tangled webs of relationships can cause conflict not only in our personal sphere but also amongst the relations of nations warring with one another due to past baggage and misconceptions. For every relationship that goes sour there is this need to store in our memory luggage of what has been and what must happen henceforth, forever more. One must look to another with a certain negative glare, and cast thoughts and intentions which poison the air not only to them and yourself, but also every man, woman and child unlucky enough to stand in-between. This is the stuff of Shakespearian tragedy, where the predictable sequence of cause and effect take their silly forms and plummet the quality of the environment.

Men are far more innocent than they appear. The causes of such psychological postures have never been truly of their own doing. It is, like many things, a cycle of events which keep one generation to behaving badly, and teaching the next how to continue on the same way of folly. There are deeply ingrained assumptions about how we must be in the wake of personal relationships with those who step in and out of our lives. For one, we are led to believe that we should be hurt by slight offences which disregard our self-importance. If a man were to stub your toe, surely you have some right to find out if he had done it on purpose. If so, there are a variety of methods to recompense and respond to the attack. Yet from simple affronts such as this we have built towers of socially elaborated ones which are simply nonsense to begin with.

A man who doesn’t take himself so seriously will likely have, for example, half of the number of these buttons to be pressed than one who boosts a shiny self-image. He will not believe himself to be particularly special or better than anyone else, nor does he hold the notion that he is owed or deserving of treatment above and beyond the ordinary standard. A man such as this will have very little reason to respond to the perceived affronts which another may naturally find of great worth to defend and retaliate. The game is far more simple for him and he is hurt only by the natural follies which require him to address for the sake of survival, health and genuine fairness. He will cry when he must, but no more than is necessary for a grown man. When he bleeds, he will groan and moan only when his limit of endurance has failed him. When it is over, his memory does not linger.