The series Breaking Bad was, apparently, quite a success. (I think I’m close to a decade late on its original popularity.) The depiction of an average Joe’s decent from decency to total degeneracy seems to have struck a chord with us – do we prefer the Walter White we start with, the modestly compensated and compliant chemistry teacher who feels a deep sense of dissatisfaction with his polite success or the world-altering power of Walter White’s industrialized meth empire in the later seasons?
Whatever the intrigue, I had to make it all the way to the final and closing episode to hear the profound and humble self-accusation from the good-gone-bad-guy Walter. I think if many of us fathers could say these words, much of our inner tensions and outer disorders would be lessened, if not obliterated. I am speaking especially to that tension created by the demands of our “outer world” of business and work and the “inner world” of God and family, two spheres that often seem to be at war for our focus.
(Spoiler alert.)
In the last episode our teacher-turned-drug-dealing-overlord is coming to the end of his rope. He intuits and even moves toward his impending demise, and he’s trying to wrap up some loose ends. On a visit to his wife, he begins a refrain he must have repeated in every episode, some words we men likely say often to ourselves and others. “Everything I did I did for my family.” Walter would say this to himself and others, especially in the aftermath of some despicable act, from poisoning a child to, well, creating a meth manufacturing empire. But in this last visit to his wife, he changes the end of the refrain, saying something we might not have seen in the first few episodes, but which became clearer and clearer: “Everything I did I did for myself.” He admits that he was good at what he did, that he liked being good at it, and that the whole thing – from the very start – was not some necessary evil he did so as to provide for a household, but a total act of ego-empire building. He was dissatisfied with the demands of mere fatherhood, and wanted something that was truly and wholly for his own glory and satisfaction. It took his empire crumbling to see this, but it was true the whole time.
This admission creates some sort of eerie relief, even as the consequences of so much evil begin to close in. I have experienced enough of my own personal turmoil and seen the downfall of many good men to know that often things could have gotten better long before they got worse if we were just willing to admit our true motives, and turn away from them toward authentic virtue and selflessness.
Deep Motivations
I think many of us would say that we desire a simple life of modest and steady provision for our family. We would likely extol the virtues of the yeoman’s hard work and family-focus, and happily apply it to our own work and state in life, even if that state is very different in modern and technological society. We would affirm the truth explicitly taught in scripture and in our cultural imagination, that being contented with the basics is a virtue, especially when we can then focus more time attending to higher goods like friends, learning, leisure, family, and prayer.
Yet, very often we find life getting more complicated, demanding, and consuming. Our businesses grow, careers advance, and engagements expand. Perhaps the demands we face are not born from a professional meth lab, but nonetheless we have our little empires that cry out for and demand our time and heart. I mean, if we were to ignore them, look at how bad it would be!
And, like Walter, many such endeavors likely have the cover of providing for a family – and are even tacitly that. Yet, like Walter, it is possible that we have simply not noticed or admitted how the satisfaction of our own desires and ambitions – those quite dislodged from the more meager realities of our vocation – have crept in. Who doesn’t like success, admiration, and recognition? Who doesn’t want to be a “good leader” or “critical asset” in a business or organization? We find ourselves often feeling the tension between home and work, but, c’mon, we know our minds are wrapped up in these things, but we do them all ultimately for our family – right? Our originating motive is pure, therefore everything we do is ultimately for our family. So we tell ourselves at least.
The fact is, the experience of success and control is rewarding, perhaps more sensibly rewarding than spiritual and moral goods. Since we can easily grow to like such rewards, that thing we began “for the family” begins being pursued for its own sake. Like any intemperance, that food we eat because we need the fuel becomes the gluttony we feed because we like the taste. Our life is hectic and busy in ways that make living for God and family difficult, but if we dig down how much of that busyness is truly born from the demands God has placed on us and not the demands our own empire-building has created?
Now, let’s be clear: hard work, strong leadership, and the rewards that accompany these things are not bad. These things are honorable. But, as Aquinas says, “happiness cannot principally consist [of honor],” because it only regards some excellence in us, not the whole self. (And, for the millions of men for whom this temptation is moot because they are literally working the only jobs available to them, this might not apply.) Yet, as Aquinas also notes, no good (specifically prudent) action can be truly good if it is not good for those we have charge over – it must be the common good of our vocation. We must stop telling our families we can’t focus on them as much as we want because we’re so focused on providing for them. What can happen to us men, a thing that Walter White admitted in the end, is that our true motivations are in the satisfaction we feel at the image in our mind of our reign and rule. At the least, these things might run parallel with each other, creating or exacerbating the temptation to having our self-assessment be based on our own egos rather than the faithful fulfilling of our vocations.
This might seem like circular naval-gazing, since the motives of the human heart are harder to know than we often admit. Heck, we can idealize and idolize some image we have created within us of how a good father looks, striving after that image instead of the actual good of our family itself. The key seems to be not in some inner tug-of-war or balancing act, but in keeping our eyes firmly on God and pleasing Him by faithfulness to our vocation – and mistrusting our justification more than a little. As Thomas a Kempis puts it in the Imitation of Christ, using some literary license for God’s words to us:
My Son, I must be thy Supreme and final end, if thou desirest to be truly happy. Out of such purpose thy affection shall be purified, which too often is sinfully bent upon itself and upon created things. For if thou seekest thyself in any matter, straightway thou wilt fail within thyself and grow barren. Therefore refer everything to Me first of all, for it is I who gave thee all. So look upon each blessing as flowing from the Supreme Good, and thus all things are to be attributed to Me as their source.
When the men set to build the Tower of Babel, scripture says they did it to gain a name for themselves (Gen. 11). Their plans come to ruin and division, as we know. But have you ever noticed that in the very next chapter of Genesis God uses some very similar words when He tells Abram that He “will make his name great” (ch. 12)? The men of Babel and Abram seemed to have been in the same business of “nation building.” Both had the trouble of work and governance. The former, however, sought to make their own names great by their own efforts. Abram, the faithful one, allowed God to be the source of all he was.
It seems morose to chase after how often our inner motives are brewed in selfishness and ego-building. The thing is, it is freeing because once we dislodge that greatest idol we face – the ego – God is eager to place us back on our feet as His beloved son, a place higher than we could ever get on our own. And, to be a faithful father must begin in being a beloved son. Sometimes, the first step just seems to be that we admit how much of the things we have convinced ourselves and others we do for some pure motive or necessity is really all about us. A stopped clock is right twice a day, and sometimes great wisdom comes from a humbled and depraved meth cooking kingpin.