My wife has never been one to traffic in lazy generalizations about men and women, but a few years ago she offered one observation so sharp it lodged itself in my brain. Men, she said, have a peculiar itch that women conspicuously lack: the need to write a manifesto. Not a gentle essay about waking up early to tend tomatoes and eggplant while discovering the joys of fiber and self-care. No. A manifesto is something else entirely—a doctrinal collision, an absolutist thunderclap so brimming with rectitude, so certain of its own world-historical importance, that its author feels morally obligated to broadcast it to the four corners of the earth. Silence would be selfish. Restraint would be unethical.
A manifesto, of course, cannot emerge from a vacuum. It requires a conversion story—preferably violent. The man was once lost, deformed, wandering in a fog of ignorance. Then something happened. The cosmos intervened. He was singled out. Enlightened. Charged with a mission. His truth, having been hard-won and privately revealed, must now be universalized. To keep it to himself would be a crime against humanity. Thus the manifesto is born: part gospel, part grievance, part personal branding exercise.
My wife was not complimenting men. She was diagnosing a particular strain of virulent egotism—one that disguises itself as sincerity and moral urgency while quietly pursuing something else: control. To impose a worldview is to dominate. To dominate is to feel powerful. Strip away the rhetoric and you find that many manifestos are not about helping others live better lives but about arranging the world so it finally stops resisting the author’s will.
Because many men will inevitably produce many manifestos, conflict follows. Doctrines metastasize. Defenses harden. Footnotes sprout like fortifications. Converts gather. Commentaries appear. Some commentaries become so influential they eclipse the original manifesto and establish themselves as superior, corrected versions. The ecosystem expands, competitive and self-referential, like an intellectual CrossFit gym where everyone is chasing the same leaderboard.
What my wife was really saying, I think, is that men don’t create philosophies primarily to serve others. They create them the way athletes build muscle: to compete. A manifesto is intellectual athletics—grandstanding, bluster, and chest-thumping in paragraph form. It’s less a tool for understanding the world than a way to announce dominance within it.
Here is my confession, one I may or may not share when my wife gets home tonight: I, too, feel the pull of the manifesto. The fantasy of a grand conversion, followed by the construction of a flawless, infallible system that explains everything, is intoxicating. But if I’m honest, what draws me to that fantasy isn’t egotism so much as fear. The world is a roiling swamp of ambiguity and uncertainty. A manifesto promises certainty on a silver platter, a pacifier for the anxious adult who wants the noise to stop.
Perhaps my wife is right. Egotism may just be fear in a tuxedo. Men, for whatever reason—biology, culture, testosterone, self-loathing—seem especially adept at projecting their inner chaos onto the world and then mistrusting it for the mess they recognize in themselves. The manifesto becomes a coping mechanism, a way to simulate control in a reality that stubbornly refuses to cooperate.
Women don’t write manifestos because a manifesto lectures. It talks down. It closes the case. Women talk instead. Life, as they seem to understand it, is an open court—conversation, improvisation, shared meaning, surprise, trust. Men, by contrast, barricade themselves inside doctrine, shout it through a megaphone, and grow indignant when no one salutes.
When my wife gets home, I think I’ll abandon the manifesto project. I’ll try something riskier. I’ll start a conversation. I’ll listen.
Cinemorphosis 