Something happens at the edge of ordinary experience that performance culture cannot account for. A person sits with someone who is dying and finds themselves undone by a love they did not know they carried. Another person, in a moment of crisis, perceives something about a distant friend that they could not have known by ordinary means and is right. Someone returns from the threshold of death with a sense of having been held by something vast and unconditioned, and finds that their reality has lost its grip. A father looks at his child and is seized by a tenderness so complete it feels like an encounter with the ground of being.
These are not marginal experiences. They are among the most commonly reported and most deeply transforming events in human life. They arrive from outside of the perceived self, and demand a response that no performance can fake.
They are also, in the deepest sense, experiences filled with value. They are moments in which the interior life is summoned and reveals the quality of one’s character
The culture I’ve described in recent articles has produced a particular kind of person who is highly skilled at managing impressions, accumulating credentials, and projecting dominance or competence on the social environment. This person may be genuinely talented. They may even, by many conventional measures, be successful. It is a person who would likely miss a depth experience described above. What is in question is whether they can be present enough to an experience with any perceivable depth to recognize it.
This is core to the character crisis. It is not simply that people are making choices contrary to human flourishing. If they’re living in a framework structurally incapable of relational and experiential depth that’s an interior life incapable of character. You can’t be truly generous if generosity is content for an audience. You can’t be truly courageous if courage is a brand. You can’t be truly compassionate if compassion is a transaction.
From an open and relational perspective, every moment of experience at every level of reality, is constituted by its feeling-responses to the world. What a thing is, at its most fundamental level, is the quality of its response to what it is received by its experiences.
The self, in this framework, is an ongoing creative project, a series of responsive occasions in which the world is taken up, felt, evaluated, and woven into each new moment of experience. Character is the habitual depth and quality of our creative response. Virtue is the cultivation of prehensive sensitivity, the expansion of the self’s capacity to feel and respond to the world with greater depth, greater inclusion, and greater fidelity to what is genuinely valuable.
In contrast, the performance self is contracted. It has narrowed the range of what it allows itself to actually experience and feel. Dominance cultures, including the manosphere cultures void of feeling. They are cultures where feelings are ignored and systematically suppress the prehensive range that would make a moral life possible. In this framework, empathy and its suppression is not strength, but a kind of blindness.
Ontologically challenging experiences can address that blindness.
As alluded to earlier, experiences at the edge of ordinary frameworks, near-death experiences, altered states of consciousness, and encounters with the sacred that arrive unbidden and uninvited, are interesting because they challenge performance based and materialist metaphysics.
They are experiences of expansion. They break the contracted self open. They present the person with a reality that exceeds their accepted framework and that makes demands on the interior life that no amount of status or achievement can answer.
The near-death experiencer who returns speaking of a love that held them at the boundary of death is not immediately marketable. The person who has genuinely felt, across distance, the distress of someone they love is not performing. The mystic who has encountered the lure of the divine toward what is genuinely good and beautiful, has been addressed by something that performance has no category for.
These experiences function, phenomenologically, as interruptions of the performing self. They are moments in which the world presses through the armor of the performing ego, reaches through the liminal and touches the interior. What answers that touch is character and the quality of the response depends on the depth available when no audience is present.
These experiences are unusual but illustrate how they crack open the window into the moral and spiritual formation of a person. The person who has had such an experience and finds it transforming is someone whose prehensive range has been forcibly expanded. They have felt something real that was previously outside their contracted awareness. That expansion needs to be understood and integrated as a moral and spiritual opportunity for character development.
Open and relational theology, rooted in process metaphysics, offers a framework for understanding these experiences and how they can help form the moral maturity that can be applied to our character crisis.
In this framework, God is not the commanding sovereign who imposes virtue from outside as prescriptive dogma. God is the one who continually offers to each occasion of experience the call of the best possibility available in the moment, the call toward what is genuinely good, genuinely beautiful, and genuinely true. Maturity is the deepening capacity to receive and respond to that call with greater fidelity. It is not compliance. It is creativity.
Character formation occurs when one’s experience opens them toward genuine goodness, whose responses are trained over time to feel more widely and whose capacity for greater creative integrity leads toward the good that is available in each situation. Values once discarded are embraced with eagerness.
Empathy is viewed as a foundational capacity because it is a basic form of prehension of another’s experience. A culture that trains its young men to suppress empathy is not training them to be stronger. It is training them to be fake, less present, and incapable of the relational depth needed for a genuine human life.
Humility is now the accurate perception of one’s own place within a web of relations that one did not create and cannot control. It’s part of a theology with the metaphysical grounding for why and how reality works. Where the self finally opens and discovers a universe that includes all possibilities.
What does this mean for the person who wants to serve as a guide in this cultural moment?
One must first genuinely inhabit their own interior. Not perfectly. Not without failure. But seriously, over time, with the willingness to be changed by what they find there. This is the only authority that can speak to the longing for the character that lies beneath the performance. Beneath the loud proclamations of dominance and success lies something less glamorous but more real, an unmet need for connection and care.
The guide must be prepared to receive all experiences and especially the disruptive and unusual as occasions for creative change. When someone comes having been broken open by an experience they cannot categorize, the guide who has a theological framework wide enough to receive that experience without either dismissing it or inflating it can help that person understand what has happened to them as an invitation to deeper formation. The experience is not the destination. It is a disruption of the contracted self, and the task is integration.
The guide must consistently model and reframe what maturity looks like. In a culture that has redefined maturity as achievement, independence, and dominance, the guide must hold open a different image. One must be able to model how one has been genuinely changed by their encounters with the world, how failures teach them, how they embrace an extended range of what they can feel, how they have learned that their deepest identity is relational rather than transactional. Open and relational theology provides the metaphysical ground for how this orientation of the self is oriented by its relations, and the mature self is the one that has learned to inhabit those relations with integrity.
The guide will also name the spiritual poverty of the performance self without contempt for the people trapped within it. The young men being formed by dominance culture are not villains. They have been offered up impoverished experiences by the cultural environment that surrounds them. The lure of genuine goodness has not ceased. It has been obscured. Our task is a re-orientation that helps people see and hear, beneath the noise of the performance economy, the persistent and patient call toward a fuller and more genuine human life.
It may seem that I may believe an unusual experience is needed in order to shock one out of their performance reality. I don’t, rather the above are examples of experiences where an increasing number of individuals seem to be presenting with them. As such, they provide opportunities to introduce an interiority, a metaphysics capable of expanding what’s possible beyond the performance culture.
The hiddenness of moral character is not permanent. And what is required for its recovery is not a return to older forms, many of which carried their own distortions. I’m proposing a retrieval of what was genuinely true in our wisdom traditions and creatively setting them in a theological and metaphysical framework more applicable to the present moment.
Open and relational theology, with its insistence that reality is fundamentally relational, that God calls rather than compels, and that moral maturity is an expansion of prehensive depth rather than the enforcement of external compliance, offers such a framework. It can speak to the person formed by performance without condemning it. It can honor the hunger for authenticity while directing it toward a deeper and more genuine form. It can be ready to accept with special care the one whose performance self is broken open by an unexpected experience.
Open and relational character formation and development is worth creating. We seek to keep it alive in a culture that has forgotten its depth. It is a slow, unspectacular, irreducibly relational, and important work for those willing to take it up.