As part of my research for a book project, I’ve been reading about positive psychology.

One of the big problems with the majority of psychology and medicine alike is that they are both predominantly sickness-oriented. If you go to a normal doctor, he has no idea how to work with a man over 25 who is athletic. He’s trained to handle sick people, and wary of malpractice lawsuits, so he’s going to give conservative advice and try to minimize risk instead of maximizing performance.

I went to an ophthalmologist a few months ago. I had what turned out to be a “vitreous floater” in my eye because I’d taken a shin to the face at high speed during a round of jiu-jitsu. The doctor and I were the same age, and he asked, “what would possess someone your age to do jiu-jitsu?! I like to…walk my dog.”

He was actually a pretty cool doctor, and had some experience dealing with boxers and football players, so he told me it was no big deal and pretty common. (I chose him carefully and drove an hour to his office for a reason.)

But any adult man who trains hard has probably heard something like this. “You should stop deadlifting,” is pretty common advice.

The same is true, perhaps even more so, when it comes to psychology. Therapists are trained to treat people with mental problems, and help them get to normal. Few are focused on helping normal people excel at life.

And, because they interpret softer data than chemical testing, there is a real danger of them projecting “sickness” or “trauma” onto someone. Their business models aren’t designed to help healthy people.

Martin Seligman attempted to address this when he became President of the American Psychology Association (APA) in 1998. He initiated a push for a “positive psychology” designed to help people make their lives more fulfilling and productive. After a decade of research with his colleagues, he published his second book on the topic, titled Flourishing. In it, he describes his PERMA model for assessing and promoting psychological well-being, and explains some of the experiments and projects that he gives to students and professionals that seem to increase positive emotions and an overall sense of flourishing. Among them are gratefulness exercises and journaling good things that happened during your day.

Of course, there are many other practices that you can do that are widely believed to produce a more positive and productive state of mind. Meditation and prayer are both recognized as contributing to an overall sense of well-being. Seligman worked with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who has studied and written about “flow states” that make life feel engaging and fulfilling.

If there are practices you can do to increase an overall sense of happiness and well-being, it makes sense that there would also be ways to “practice unhappiness.”

I’ve written about this from many different angles, but it’s something I encounter constantly online, and it is a persistent problem exacerbated by social media.

To be sure, some people have always “practiced unhappiness.”

Your Boomercon relative who settles down to yell at Fox News every night is practicing unhappiness. And so is his gray-haired-hippie counterpart with Trump Derangement Syndrome who is obsessing over CNN or whatever.

But social media makes it easy and almost guarantees that at least someone else will know that you’re screaming at the TV.

Maybe it makes guys feel “seen.”

I encounter this in my feed all the time when someone new follows me or likes a post or makes a comment. I check their profile—hoping maybe they’re cool—and scroll through a catalog of daily shit-posting going back months or years.

If most of what you have to share with the world has to do with what makes you angry, what does that say about who you are?

Most of these guys are just reposting political memes and new articles and angry things other men wrote. They’re not pundits and no one is paying them to do it.

They’re doing it for, and I think to themselves.

If that’s something you’re doing daily, you’re practicing unhappiness. Over time, I believe that in most cases that’s going to have a negative impact on your sense of well-being and just make you a miserable bastard.

You’re just turning yourself into your own generation’s version of the jerk on the couch or the deranged old man screaming at the sky.

When I see a feed or a profile like that these days, it reads as mental illness to me. I don’t want to interact with that person. I don’t want that in my life.

It may just be a daily release valve for an otherwise cheerful and reasonable guy.

But my guess is…probably not.

I’m not saying that you have to pretend that everything is going perfectly or live in a world of rainbows and sunshine. But it’s one thing to point out problems and make social commentary, and another to set aside time every day to ruminate on problems beyond your control.

Are you trying to make the world a better place, or is this just a bad habit?

I was also reading through Abraham Maslow’s Motivation and Personality. In describing traits he associated with a self-actualized person, he noted that they seemed better able to see the world as it is, without projecting their own mental state outward onto it in a way that colors everything in a particular way.

It was found that self-actualizing people distinguished far more easily than most the fresh, concrete, and idiographic from the generic, abstract, and rubricized. The consequence is that they live more in the real world of nature than in the man-made mas of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs, and stereotypes that most people confuse with the world, They are therefore far more apt to perceive what is there rather than their own wishes, hopes, fears, anxieties, their own theories and beliefs, or those of their cultural group. "The innocent eye," Herbert Read has very effectively called it.

[…]

One does not complain about water because it is wet, or about rocks because they are hard, or about trees because they are green. As the child looks out upon the world with wide, uncritical, undemanding, innocent eyes, simply noting and observing what is the case, without either arguing the mater or demanding that it be otherwise, so does the self-actualizing person tend to look upon human nature in himself and in others.

Now, Maslow’s “study” was about as far from being properly scientific as you could imagine, but there is some truth to this that you can recognize in happy, successful men when compared to miserable men.

Both can recognize that something is not as they would prefer it to be or think it “should” be.

But the first recognizes this in a matter-of-fact way, and the second will often become consumed by or obsessed with the same issue. The negative man consumes news about problems every day and ruminates on them, and that practice colors his perception about not only that issue, but other things as well.

He conditions himself to see problems, and distorts reality to find problems and connect good or neutral things to problems.

“I see a red door and I want to paint it black…”

This practice makes him less able to enjoy life.

I think practicing happiness vs. practicing unhappiness is an interesting topic and highly relevant to the idea of “staying solar.” So CB Robertson and I are going to make that our topic for this week’s live DIALOG show at 7:30PM PST on Sunday night.

If you have some thoughts to share on the practice of happiness or unhappiness, join us in the live chat.

Stay Solar

I’ve been busy working on a book, but The Bro Diet diet came up in conversation the other day. So here’s something fun and light while I torture myself doing moral philosophy.

Decades ago, broscientists from around the world reached a consensus regarding the optimal baseline diet for bros who are ready to “eat clean” and train to reach their physical potential.

Representatives from both The House of Natty and The House of Tren Hard Eat Clen were present. They came to a rare agreement on this one item before they returned to their customary bickering and exchanging accusations about being “jelly losers” or being “drug addicts and cheaters with tiny nuts.”

Scattered representatives from warring federations of powerlifters allowed the motion to pass. However, they did collaborate to issue a strongly worded statement about the necessity of donuts, pizza, and candy for high performance situations or even particularly demanding sets.

The recipe for the bro diet was then chiseled into Milo’s second stone, which had been hidden from historians by the mysterious Mithraic bros sometime during the final years of the Roman Empire. After the work was done, the stone was returned to its secret location where it is stored beside the real Arc of the Covenant and the stones from the documentary The Fifth Element. You need a Bro Multi-Pass and a ginger baddie escort to view the original engraving.

The formula endured through the dark ages of GNC deception and misleading Celltech endorsements. It survived the carnivore diet that every dude who didn’t want to “count calories” went on so he could brag about eating steaks and lose ten pounds of water weight. During the plague years, the bro diet was passed down to the “real ones” who were ready for the true knowledge while sensitive young men on X (Formerly Twitter) were busy sunning their balls, rubbing honey on their nipples, and exploring the Dionysian realms of organic wine mom wisdom.

Today, most wayward bros have thankfully returned to the scientific method and careful research. Nearly every man who has seen the inside of the gym has become “something of a scientist” himself.

But no matter how many Chinese research chemicals you inject into your love handles, if you want to make gains—you’re still going to have to get your macros right.

Now, you can actually reach your macros in all kinds of inventive ways. I could tell you how to do it with cheeseburgers or turkey sandwiches. There’s that whole Ninja-creami protein ice cream thing I’ve heard so much about. I’ve always thought someone should host a “Chopped”-style cooking show where chefs have to compete to hit numbers, because you can get really creative with this. There are Instagram channels that teach you all kinds of tricks. A good friend of mine is an American chef who studied in India, and he wrote a cookbook showing how to make Indian classics macro-friendly.

All of that is good.

But if you’re serious about getting into better shape as a man, and you’ve never lived on meal preps of chicken and rice for at least three months, you are NOT READY for any of that information.

I hear men and women complain all the time that they “just couldn’t count calories” or that they “need more variety.” Others insist that “enjoying food is an important part of life,” or that they’re “trying to eat healthy in an intuitive way.” Some of them just have too many family events and would feel “rude” if they didn’t eat all of the snacky pies and cheesy cakes that their feeder relatives push on them like double-chinned dope dealers.

All of those reasons are copium and no one who says these things is ever serious about “the life.” Almost none of them will make any progress unless they have a trainer holding their hand and scolding them into “eating like an adult” every day.

The bro diet is not ayahuasca or magic mushrooms, but it does have something to teach you.

It will teach you to stop caring about what food tastes like.

The bro diet will teach you that every single meal does not in fact have to be a party in your goddamn mouth.

Many of your ancestors were glad to get a bowl of gruel and a chicken wing.

Most people ate fairly plain food outside of festivals and special occasions.

You can do that too, and be glad that it’s chicken and rice and broccoli with sriracha.

It could be, well…gruel.

Or hardtack.

The men who discovered America and the North Pole and Shackleton’s men who explored Antarctica survived on rock hard bread that they had to dip in water so it wouldn’t chip their fucking teeth.

You can get by on chicken and rice for a few months.

It will be good for you.

Call it a “cleanse.”

You don’t have to eat the bro meal forever. Like I said, there are options and hacks. It’s not a “forever diet.”

But you need to START with chicken and rice. You need to have that experience.

It’s something you will come back to. It’s a home base. When I mentioned it, a jacked guy I know commented, “It’s a classic because it never fails.”

If you commit to chicken and rice, you will recomp. It will be good. And you will remember that.

Here is the recipe. You can change the proportions. You can cut or grow on this just by varying the amount of chicken and rice.

The basic meal, the one in my refrigerator right now, is:

There’s some big fake debate in the news right now about $20 burritos. That’s probably only happening in retarded commie cities in blue states where they raised the minimum wage too high and tax the hell out of every business. But even in “flyover country,” a trip to McDonald’s will set you back almost $15. Most food costs a lot more than it should, everywhere.

That said, at the reasonably nice chain grocery store across from my house in a Phoenix suburb, chicken breasts are about $2.99/pound. Rice costs almost nothing. A single Bro Meal prep costs about $3. “Locking in” on a bro diet is about as cheap as you can eat.

I am no food Philistine. I never stopped appreciating food, and, when I turn it on, I’m a decent and intuitive cook. I trained as a pastry cook for a hot minute under a chef who was once voted the best in Paris. I have a vintage copy of Larousse Gastronomique, just like Hannibal Lecter. My favorite cookbook is Meat: A Kitchen Education by James Peterson.

If I had to order a last meal, I’d start with a charcuterie board. Nothing too exotic. Prosciutto and Finocchiona. STFU I like fennel. Let’s say it’s Promethean. Maybe surprise me with something gamey like wild boar salami. The cheeses would include a Morbier and Humboldt fog, because I like the idea of the ash in the middle. Then maybe something like a La Tur and a pungent brie that smells like “ze feet of ze angels.” I would be drinking Negronis because they are my favorite drink, and a singular joy of my existence. I would be mixing them myself because I watched them made in Florence where the drink was invented and mine are now better than most. Raw oysters, served on ice with a champagne mignonette. An Italian preparation of Octopus. Maybe bites of carpaccio, steak tartare, and roasted marrow. My favorite comfort entree is a proper Bolognese, but I might just go for a ribeye. Shoestring frites. Steak frites are precious and overrated, but shoestring frites are the best fries. American steak fries are soft, sloppy, and vulgar. Like your mom.

I don’t really do dessert, but, if pressed, I could do espresso and a pistachio gelato and not be mad about it. Maybe some Fernet-Branca.

You don’t have to stop enjoying food. You just have to let go of the idea that you need to enjoy every meal.

I can love all of these finer things, and enjoy them all from time to time.

But I can live, day to day, on chicken and rice, protein shakes, and low-fat cottage cheese.

You can, too.

And if you’ve never done it, you probably need to.

Just for a few months, until you learn what the bro diet has to teach you.

Stay Solar

I’m actually clocking in and tracking hours on this one, which I have never done before. I’ve logged about 145 hours on this book, and I suspect that number is low, and I mi…

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In the past two days, I’ve been “corrected” by two different Jungians on two different platforms.

I wasn’t writing or speaking about Jung directly. But many Jungians seem to feel a powerful sense of ownership over any terms or concepts introduced by or even used in Jungian thought.

Like certain Christians, Jungians will jump into your comments out of nowhere and give you their version of “ya’ll motherfuckers need Jesus.”

And there’s a reason for that.

Jungianism

For most of us, Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist who, as one of the pioneers of depth psychology, made many insightful observations about the human condition. Jung’s work has influenced the world—one might even say “the collective unconscious”—in many profound ways. Some of his influence has probably been consistent with his vision, and some seems to have spawned unintended reactions or popular reinterpretations that were unintended. I pointed out what I believe has been a negative impact of his use of the Latin word animus recently that probably has very little to do with what he was actually trying to convey in his work.

The ideas—the memes—that we put out there live lives of their own. And, like children, they don’t always do what we had hoped they would do.

For most of us, Jung is one thinker to read among many.

For others, Jung was a prophet.

That’s why Jungians rush to defend a man who has been dead for over 65 years.

For them, he was not A man, but THE man.

For me, and maybe for you, Jung presented some models and frames that help us understand human thought and behavior. He classified some extremely esoteric aspects of culture in interesting ways.

For Jungians, Jung presented a complete worldview and the key to understanding human life.

Jungianism is essentially a religion. And when you understand it in this way, the behavior of Jungians makes a lot more sense.

Freud doesn’t seem to command the same kind of loyalty. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find another psychiatrist or psychologist who does.

I suspect this is because Jung’s work had a very well-developed spiritual and esoteric dimension. Jung wasn’t some dispassionate scientist, content to conduct experiments and publish studies. He wrote volumes on alchemy and religious symbolism and the occult. He produced beautiful and mysterious illuminated dream journals like the Red Book. One can spend an entire lifetime reading his works and interpreting them and arguing with other Jungians about what Jung meant vs. what Jung really, really meant.

And people do.

There are several academic and accrediting organizations for professional Jungian therapists and Jungian scholars. And there are more accessible public organizations like the International Association for Jungian Studies (IAJS) that you can join to attend Jungian seminars and webinars and purchase journals produced by the top contemporary Jungian thinkers. I checked out their web site, and you can pick up award-winning books there like Jung’s Studies in Astrology.

Beyond the world of accredited professional Jungian therapists and scholars, there are also all kinds of Jungian thinkers and life coaches driving their Jungian gypsy wagons all over the Internet, promising “initiation” and “deep shadow work.” To be fair to the professionals, these are probably the Jungians who I am most likely to come into contact with in my line of work. But there seems to be a good bit of “woo” on the professional side, too.

As a naturally suspicious man, I admit that I immediately distrust anyone whose aim is to tell me my unconscious motivations. Since I don’t “know” them, that’s just a blank slate they can write anything on. There’s a massive opportunity there for manipulation and abuse. And, to the extent that we believe in the concept of unconscious motivations, even a Jungian “guide” who has the best intentions may also be acting on unconscious motivations that are less noble. It’s a very murky realm.

The same could be said of priests or coaches of any kind. So I’m not claiming that Jungians are distinctively wicked or suspicious—only that they are human.

I write about myth and archetypes and symbols, so I have many interests in common with Jungians.

As a man who started his own religion, I’m certainly not saying that it’s wrong for Jungians to be so religious. People need some kind of cohesive worldview and naturally seek out and create communities for people with the same or compatible worldviews. It’s just helpful to understand who you’re talking to and how they understand the world.

When you deal with Jungians, they’re going to refer back to his works like Muslims citing the Quran. They’re going to attempt to reconcile every issue they encounter and every experience they have with Jung’s framing, just like Catholics trying to reconcile their views with 2000 years of church doctrine.

What would Jung think of this? What Would Jung Do?

General and Specific Language and Meaning

Within the context of any religion or worldview, words develop specific meanings that are unknown, incomprehensible, or (most often) irrelevant to outsiders. And that’s normal. That’s part of the process of constructing deep meaning.

I spoke about this briefly in a video I produced yesterday for The Order of Fire, introducing people to our “semiotic engineering project.”

In it, I referred to an argument I made in 2025 in a Substack piece about the runes. When I saw the way that words and even types of trees took on new esoteric meanings within a religious context, it helped me to understand the concept of meaning in general and also presented creative opportunities for the development of new narratives and symbols.

In the Order of Fire, we have made up or appropriated words and names and symbols that mean very specific things to our members that they do NOT mean to outsiders.

I was having a conversation with CB Robertson this morning about SOMA. He was making connections between our concept of SOMA (as a sacred beverage related to the production and offering of excellence) and his interpretations of scenes from the works of Homer. It was interesting to us, but it would have sounded like complete nonsense to almost any Hindu.

Yesterday, I had a Jungian slip into my DMs to lecture me about how I was “lost” and was using the words “differentiation” and “non-differentiation” improperly.

I have access to many dictionaries.

I meant exactly what I said, and was using the words in the ways I’ve used them countless times before, in the context of a very specific narrative and argument.

But he’d slipped out of self awareness. He didn’t realize he was evaluating a non-Jungian from within a Jungian frame.

Words have general and culturally specific meanings.

This is why it is important to define terms when you’re making an argument.

But people become so immersed in their own worldview that they forget that outside of that worldview or area of expertise, nothing they’re saying makes any sense.

This is something to think about when you’re dealing with different groups of people.

Are they speaking to you as if you are in their esoteric group?

If so, do they know they are doing it?

And, what about you?

Are you doing it, too?

Stay Solar.

Jonathan Haidt’s worries about political polarization seem quaint and nostalgic now, well over a decade after The Righteous Mind was first published. The book was written in and for an America I remember and grew up in, where the two political parties didn’t really seem that different, and weren’t yet openly playing what has become a zero sum game. Its apparent and explicit message is “guys, can’t we all just try to get along?”

But I didn’t read The Righteous Mind to find out how to “get along” with “liberals” in that version of America where it didn’t matter much, day-to-day, whether Bill Clinton or George Bush was president. When this book was published, even Barack Obama was against gay marriage and illegal immigration.

I came across Haidt’s research because I’m writing a book about virtue, and I wanted to know who had followed up on Donald Brown’s research on human universals—which are essentially themes that all human communities have in common. I’ve long argued that if you’re going to develop moral systems that work for humans, they need to work in harmony with what is known about human nature.

Packed inside this book that does a pretty good job trying to explain 2012 conservatives to 2012 Democrats, there’s also impressive psychological research, philosophical argumentation, and an attempt to present a universal model of human morality. The insights that Haidt and his colleagues presented are worth examining outside the context of a book that, as a friend remarked, appears at first glance to be “airport book slop.”

So, here are some of the key ideas, though the book actually is very well written and persuasive and I do recommend that you read it for yourself.

The Social Intuitionist Model of Morality

The first big idea Haidt unpacks is that most of our moralizing as humans is emotional and based on intuition. The way he describes intuition sounds a lot like stereotyping, which is often presented as a bad thing, but obviously a survival mechanism. We see or read vibes and get a feeling about a situation, which he calls “the elephant” and then use reason, which he calls “the rider” to support our feelings so that we can justify them to others.

This is the way I’ve always seen any kind of apologetics. People decide they believe a thing and then come up with reasons to convince others why they are right to believe it, when those reasons usually have nothing to do with why they started believing it in the first place.

Humans can reason their way to new beliefs and positions, and sometimes they do, but that’s not the default. Haidt believes that a lot of our capacity for moral reasoning evolved to influence members of our groups to think well of us and manage our reputations.

Here’s a provocative quote:

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason. We all need to take a cold hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it is. The French cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber recently reviewed the vast research literature on motivated reasoning (in social psychology) and on the biases and errors of reasoning (in cognitive psychology). They concluded that most of the bizarre and depressing research findings make perfect sense once you see reasoning as having evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people.

WEIRD Morality

Haidt didn’t come up with it, but he uses the acronym WEIRD to identify the uniqueness of Western civilization. WEIRD stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. WEIRD people tend to value individual autonomy above a wider range of human moral concerns. Our emphasis on autonomy is still seen as strange to many others in the world today, and even among Westerners, that emphasis varies. Libertarians would value autonomy above all other concerns, followed by liberals, and then less so among conservatives.

I’d add here that while I think this was still true in the early 2010s, the viral Marxism of hive-minded wokeness and the absolute partisan obedience of so-called liberals during the lockdowns, masking, and coerced injections of the early 2020 wiped out any meaningful association between Democrats and “liberty” or “autonomy.” Haidt and I grew up with a myth of the Democratic Party that portrayed them as advocates of individual freedom and that once seemed to be the case, but it no longer is.

A very specific set of socially subversive hedonisms are actively promoted by the left, but autonomy of the body, education, and even the right to defend one’s own life are all right-coded now. The “liberty” of the left has become “you can do drugs and sodomize each other in furry costumes, but you have to get the shots, learn our litanies in our schools, and if anyone other than a white man rapes or murders you, that’s unfortunate but acceptable.”

A lot of the guys who were brought up believing in the “freedom myth” of the Democratic Party have a hard time letting go of it for reasons Haidt actually explains elsewhere in the book. It’s part of their identity to be part of that team, and because people hate traitors more than enemies, the social cost of switching teams is extremely high. Say goodbye to writing for or being written about favorably in The New York Times.

There’s More to Morality Than Harm and Fairness

Haidt showed that David Hume’s idea that morality was based in the sentiments or feelings was closer to what research now shows, but this idea was buried in favor of systematizers who wanted to reduce all human morality down to one or two basic principles that could govern all decisions.

Hume wrote that:

Morality is nothing in the abstract Nature of Things, but is entirely relative to the Sentiment or mental Taste of each particular Being; in the same Manner as the Distinctions of sweet and bitter, hot and cold, arise from the particular feeling of each Sense or Organ. Moral Perceptions therefore, ought not to be class’d with the Operations of the Understanding, but with the Tastes or Sentiments.

Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Early editions (1748/1750).*

However, Jeremy Bentham came along and attempted to reduce human morality down to promoting pleasure and reducing harm. Immanuel Kant then introduced his categorical imperative, saying that you shouldn’t do anything you wouldn’t want to make a universal law. Both of these ideas reduced morality to making decisions that reduced harm to the individual. Haidt suggests that both of these men were probably somewhere on the autism spectrum, and didn’t understand other people very well.

The idea that there was more to morality than harm and fairness led to the development of a broader human “taste palette” for morality, which Haidt and his colleagues called Moral Foundations Theory.

Moral Foundations Theory

Moral Foundations Theory as explained in the The Righteous Mind proposes five moral “foundations” which Haidt and others believed to be innate moral intuitions in humans. The idea is that cultures then build on these foundational elements in different ways and emphasize some elements more than others. These are:

Care/Harm

Fairness/Cheating

Loyalty/Betrayal

Authority/Subversion

Sanctity/Degradation

However, in 2023, Haidt and his colleagues updated their list of foundations, which you can find on their web site at

https://moralfoundations.org/

Care — Intuitions about avoiding emotional and physical damage to another individual (kindness, nurturance, preventing suffering).

Equality — Intuitions about equal treatment and equal outcomes for individuals.

Proportionality — Intuitions about individuals getting rewarded in proportion to their merit or contribution (this captures the “fairness as merit/deservingness” intuition that was previously bundled into Fairness).

Loyalty — Intuitions about cooperating with ingroups and competing with outgroups (patriotism, self-sacrifice for the group).

Authority — Intuitions about deference toward legitimate authorities and defense of traditions (providing stability).

Purity — Intuitions about avoiding bodily and spiritual contamination and degradation (body as temple, self-discipline, naturalness, spirituality).

In The Righteous Mind, Haidt attempted to explain to the COEXIST bumper sticker liberals of the early 2010s that they were only speaking to the Care and Equality moral intuitions, while conservatives seemed to be addressing most or all of the moral intuitions, which was giving them an edge. Unfortunately, because these types are globalist, anti-nationalist, and anti-tribal, while human beings are and always have been extremely tribal, they will refuse to understand this, or pretend to.

This month’s outrage over Nolan’s DEI Odyssey film comes to mind here. There’s a saying on X: “liberals pretending not to understand things.” It means that liberals/democrats know they are trying to desecrate something—in this case, one of the literary foundations of Western culture—but pretend to be unable to understand why anyone would be upset. They do this, and then repost reviews that applaud the film for being “subversive,’ indicating that they knew exactly why others found elements of the film offensive, and were happy they were offended. Those arguing on behalf of a more faithful and reverent treatment of Homer’s epic are, in the language of MFT, demonstrating loyalty, defending a tradition, and taking offense to the intentional degradation of something they hold as sacred.

Turning Food Into Babies

One of the ideas from The Righteous Mind that stuck with me was that, from an evolutionary perspective, the most successful cultures aren’t just successful at war, they are also successful at “procuring food and turning it into children.” It’s obvious, but notably an area in which WEIRD cultures are failing. Mike Judge’s 2006 film Idiocracy famously pointed this out, as it comically portrayed well-off liberals waiting to have one or two children as their idiot counterparts had many.

Haidt wrote about Rubicons in the book, and as a liberal toying with conservative ideas, he probably knew that adding any criticism of feminism or the mainstreaming of homosexuality to the book would be…well…let’s just say “distracting” for his intended audience. However, these major features of WEIRD “progress” are obviously and directly at odds with the goal of “turning food into babies.” Western nations that embrace these forms of “progress” all have population replacement problems. And the pushback against these ideas tends to come primarily from religious people, because most successful religions have patriarchy and proscriptions against homosexuality coded into them. If you look at one of the most successful “new” religions, Mormonism, you’ll also notice that the Mormons have a great reputation for promoting patriarchal structures, discouraging homosexuality, and turning food into babies.

Haidt argued in The Righteous Mind that we rarely reason our way to opinions as individuals, and that most of our reasoning tends to be rationalization for emotional responses. Many of our “gut responses” to things are not necessarily innate in themselves (though some may be). Many of these responses probably, and I think Haidt would agree with this, become emotionally embedded through cultural programming that works in harmony with his moral foundations. He more or less explains this when he writes about his experiences in India and people’s emotional reactions to different behaviors.

But one thing The Righteous Mind brought to mind for me was the idea of cultural reasoning. It seems obvious to me, though I don’t know how you’d prove it scientifically, that cultures reason at a level beyond individuals. When the Mormons encourage members of their tribe to have a lot of kids, they’re just repeating themes from the Old Testament.

“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it...” (Genesis 1:28).

But where did that idea come from?

Christians would answer “God, moron. God said it, it’s right there.”

But, as a non-believer, I see that as the encoded collective wisdom of a tribal culture that figured out that they’d be better off if they encouraged their members to have more babies, and discouraged behaviors that prevent them from having babies. I think cultures learn and reason. People try out different ideas, and find out they don’t work.

One of the major responses that conservatives (and I) have to communism or even entertaining communist ideas is that we can point to all of the times in our lifetimes and recent memory that communism has been tried and resulted in mass murder, poverty, and corruption.

There is a pushback on feminism and homosexuality right now in America, notably among a lot of young men, because Boomers tried out open homosexuality and feminism and there have been a lot of negative effects on normal people. The worst of which was probably the progression from feminism and homosexuality into widespread gender confusion, pronoun confusion, and the coerced sterilization and mutilation of children and young adults. Over the last few generations, people gave these things a try, and then people assessed the foreseen and unforeseen results.

Western governments tried to solve the declining birth rates these innovations produced with third world immigration. This has allowed some members of the political class to manipulate electorates and consolidate power. But for the average person, the net result has been turning high trust societies into low-trust societies.

Basically, my theory is that cultures do science, and then they encode the results of their experiments into myth and religion. Myth and religion are emotional technologies that produce intuitive responses that, among other things, encourage people to turn food into babies. Cultures reason and then convert reason into intuition.

Many scientific writers like Haidt seem willing to admit this when they look at rules about cleanliness and food handling in Leviticus, but are more likely to dismiss other religiously encoded behavioral models as superstition.

This doesn’t mean that every encoded morality of every religion or culture is equally right or good or that the negative effects of a given experiment couldn’t have been mitigated in a different way and with different coding. Some of the encoded moralities might also be dysfunctional alone, but functional in packages.

But does suggest how many cultures developed similar, in the words of Kipling, “Gods of the Copybook Headings.”

Religion and Tribalism

One of the more satisfying parts of The Righteous Mind was Haidt’s dismissal of the tedious arguments of the New Atheists, who insisted that religion was the worst thing that ever happened to mankind. You still hear this from people who gobbled up these ideas during their formative years in the 2000s, or as responses from people who have been traumatized in some way by a religious group—which is something that absolutely happens. (Religious people are just people, and people sometimes treat each other very poorly.) If you would have asked me in my early twenties, I would have agreed that “religion is stupid and bad.”

The reality though, is that religion actually has a lot of positive effects—which is part of the reason why I started my own.

Rituals that seem “silly” to outsiders have a unifying effect on groups, and initiate a phenomenon that Haidt calls “The Hive Switch.” He describes humans as “90% chimp and 10% bee” and says that humans survived and thrived in part because they can get on the same page and act collectively. Religions create group experiences that encourage a sense of oneness using human technologies that you can also find in military exercises, sporting events, and rave culture.

The New Atheists claimed that non-religious people were better people, but studies have shown that to be false. Religious people tend to be happier, make better neighbors and help people around them, often even people outside their groups—at least until there is a religious conflict and the hive switch flips them into crusade/jihad mode. The New Atheists argued that was the bad part, and it can be, but generally speaking, religious cultures do better and their people have a sense of purpose and fulfillment and connection that non-religious people struggle to create without the technology of religion.

Haidt makes some suggestions about how corporations could make use of the hive switch, but over the past few decades, many have tried to implement these kinds of suggestions to create corporate tribalism. However, in a culture of free agents and at-will employment, everyone knows that they could get a new job or be laid off at any time, so this kind of corporate culture ends up seeming nauseatingly fake and gay. A major feature of tribalism is also a sense of shared fate, which can be whipped up easily, but it only lasts to the effect that the individuals feel that they actually share and benefit from the fate of what Haidt acknowledges elsewhere is merely a legal entity that exists primarily for its own perpetuation and expansion, not necessarily to benefit humans or the members of its “hive.”

Conclusion

The Righteous Mind ends on the “can’t we all just get along” note that seems less relevant (or realistic) in today’s political climate.

Like Haidt, I started out as a liberal, and reality challenged a lot of my own ideas. Anyone reading this review will see evidence of my own political tribalism. I do think you need to pick a team and decide what you believe is best for society as a whole. And I don’t think you have to see direct benefit for yourself to do that.

But, looking past the political framing, The Righteous Mind is a solid companion to The Way of Men and even Fire in the Dark. The post 2020 world saw a massive drop in trust concerning “science,” research, and academia. For very good reasons. But it also created a lot of woo and wishful thinking about human nature. I believe, and I think Haidt would agree, that if we’re going to create new proscriptions for how humans SHOULD behave, it would be best to begin from descriptive observations about how they DO behave.

And then the big circus trick is to take suggestions derived from those conclusions and turn riders into elephants.

*The same analogy appears in the final (1777) edition, sec. XII, pt. 3: “Morals and criticism are not so properly objects of the understanding as of taste and sentiment. Beauty, whether moral or natural, is felt, more properly than perceived.” A readable text of the final edition is at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4320/4320-h/4320-h.htm.

1 - Everything is Fake (And Gay)

The men who say that “everything is fake and gay” are, sadly, often right.

It’s a sentiment they share, somewhat ironically, with postmodernists.

And Nietzsche. It really all goes back to Nietzsche.

He told the world that God was dead, but it kept on running around like a chicken with its head cut off until it figured out what he meant.

Or what I think he meant. Everyone seems to know what Nietzsche meant, but so many of us disagree.

It was a French philosopher, Jean-François Lyotard, who provided the persistent definition of postmodernism in his 1979 book, The Postmodern Condition.

Lyotard, who had an unfortunate name, wrote that the postmodern condition was characterized by “incredulity toward metanarratives.” Basically, the idea is that people have lost faith in the stories about the world that guided their ancestors and conferred authority on their institutions. There is a prevailing sense that everything has been contrived, or, as Baudrillard later added, simulated.

So, God is dead, and everything is fake and gay.

2. Postmodernism and Commercialism

Another thing that postmodernists and many thinkers on the right have in common is their critique of materialism and commercialism.

The thinking goes that when people believe that God is Dead, and nothing means anything anymore, there’s nothing left to do but chase sex and money.

Everything is about getting one or the other, and every new story is just some kind of come-on or sales pitch.

And those two things are somewhat interchangeable. Sex sells everything and many evolutionary psychologists would probably say that the ultimate if not proximate reason why men chase money is because attaining status and resources is part of the male reproductive strategy.

The postmodernist solution to the idea that every story you’re being told is some kind of manipulation seems to have been to laugh about it and turn everything they believe to be fake into something that is also gay.

Andy Warhol anticipated this cultural shift with his appropriation of pop culture and commercial advertising, but by the 1980s, artists and architects were making intentionally postmodern art and buildings characterized by pastiche and ironic references.

Many people retreated into a kind of spiritual and aesthetic hipsterism that was terrified of taking anything too seriously. This peaked in the late 2000s. Grow a goofy mustache and make silly art. Ride a unicycle. Nothing really matters. I lived in Portland at the time. It was ridiculous.

The postmodern mindset even seeped into the world of comics. In the spazzy Deadpool films, the hipsterish hero is so hungry for chuckles that even when he’s serious, he has to crack jokes and drop clever references.

This desperation to be seen as knowingly clever and funny—but never serious or sincere about anything—seems exceptionally empty and I don’t think people who live and stay this way ever feel fulfilled.

3. Commercialism and The Right

The postmodern reaction on the right to the idea that everything is fake and gay and materialistic has been to try to turn back the clock.

Trump tapped into this with his slogan “Make America Great Again,” which he appropriated from Ronald Reagan. But making America great again is a vague and pleasant thing that allows you to move the goalposts whenever you need to. I’ve come to respect Trump as an incredibly Machiavellian man who I happen to agree with, and who seems to truly want the best for America. But he also understands that politics is the art of the possible and isn’t strongly tethered to any specific version of the past.

Most conservatives and traditionalists on the right, however, believe that the solution is to resurrect some previous order. Their reaction to a commercially driven order and widespread “incredulity toward metanarratives” is to find an old metanarrative and double down on it. Some look back to monarchies, pagan empires, and a few to more recent fascist projects. Many more are true believers and members of established religious communities, so the orders they want to revive seem closer and their projects seem more plausible. However, putting any one denomination of Christianity in charge of America—much less “the West” is not. The fracturing of Catholicism into competing factions—or, one might say, “metanarratives”—was one of the reasons Nietzsche wrote that God was dead. The Catholics lost their monopoly on capital-T “Truth.”

The conservative Christian response to materialism and “incredulity toward metanarratives,” however, has also become a commercial enterprise. If I were more cynical and opportunistic—or perhaps just smarter— I would start selling “Christ is King” crusader merch. So hot right now. Or I’d reinvent myself, slap a Bible quote and a crucifix into an Instagram profile, and offer some kind of fitness or mindset coaching for “Christian men.” The Christian market is still growing and it will continue to attract both good and bad men as long as it remains lucrative.

This online commercialization of Christianity will inevitably create some suspicion about the motives of these Christian salesmen and their ads, automations, click funnels, six-packs, sparkly teeth and supplement regimes.

It will probably also lead to some incredulity about their narratives, meta or otherwise.

4. Sales Fatigue

Sales isn’t new or evil or even “capitalist.” Trade is a human universal. So you can’t rationally be mad that people are trying to sell things.

I sell things, too.

Gotta make a living somehow.

Buy my books and t-shirts and apply to join my religious organization for philosophy and mythology nerds who lift and practice martial arts here.

The rational concerns about consumerism and commercialization from both the right and left have to do with the sense that financial gain has superseded all other human values, and the feeling that every space and interaction has become polluted with sales pitches.

People used to buy and sell in marketplaces, and there have probably always been something like door-to-door salesmen. Then newspapers, radio, and television brought advertisements into people’s homes. Seemed fair and honest.

Gotta pay the bills.

Now we carry around these little devices everywhere we go, and every time we look at something on them, someone is trying to sell us something.

Social media became a bit of a bait and switch, too. People logged onto apps like Facebook initially to network and share thoughts and ideas with their friends and neighbors. Ads were there to pay the bills, and that made sense.

But then people started trying to make money posting about their lives, as if they were your friends, but they were also always selling something. This started out relatively innocently, as personalities gained large followings for things they were doing or saying, and companies approached them to start recommending their products. Most of the people online who were sharing their lives had “real jobs.”

At some point in the mid-to-late 2010s, the REAL salespeople discovered social media and started gaming the system. They dumped money into slick productions and circle-jerk cross-promotional podcasts and developed apps for the apps that helped them capture attention and monetize it. By 2022, every place online where we went for entertainment or to interact with our friends was filled with aggressive, manipulative, high-pressure salespeople. And half of what they were selling were systems to help you and your friends also become aggressive, manipulative, high-pressure salespeople.

All of a sudden, your aunt Susan had a ring light and she was developing her personal brand to monetize her quilting course.

It seemed like EVERYONE online was always trying to sell you something.

Everyone became a huckster.

And people got sick of it. They developed sales fatigue.

Some have called it a “trust recession.”

5. Fake Authenticity

People got burnt out on the slick, high-pressure sales culture.

But the money didn’t go away, and neither did the salesmen. They just responded to the market and changed tactics.

They started pretending to be “just like you,” yapping into their phones casually like they were talking to their best friend on Facetime.

Even politicians started talking into little handheld DJI lavaliers like they weren’t multi-millionaires surrounded by teams of public relations professionals.

Everyone wanted to look “real” and “unscripted.”

The thing is, this selects for people who are really good at running their mouths.

You know what kinds of people tend to be really good at talking fast in a convincing and charismatic way?

Professional salespeople, actors, habitual liars, narcissists, and psychopaths.

I’m not saying that skilled communicators can’t be good people. Many are. I wish I was better at this myself.

But being a convincing, off-the-cuff speaker does not correlate with honesty. The abilities that produce fluent, seemingly authentic talk overlap heavily with the abilities that produce effective manipulation.

The phrases “fast talker” and “smooth talker” have negative connotations for good reasons.

So the pressure to perform “authentically”—because make no mistake, you are performing the second you turn the camera on, even if the lighting is bad and you’re wearing pajamas—is going to select for a bunch of talented manipulators.

Eventually people are going to figure that out, and they’ll be disappointed, and conclude once again that everything is fake and gay and overcommercialized.

6. Anything for Attention

If there’s one thing that the online salespeople beat into our skulls, it’s that social media created an “attention economy.”

This unfortunately seems to have convinced many people that attention is the highest value, and that “any publicity is good publicity.”

I discussed this at greater length in a recent essay titled “The Ringmaster’s Advice.”

The attention economy produces a lot of people who will do or say anything for attention. They don’t believe or care about what they’re saying or doing. They’re just playing a game to score views, likes, and shares.

So, like the salespeople and the fast talkers—and there’s a great deal of overlap in these circles—the people who will say or do anything for attention create another layer of fakeness.

There are people who will keep falling for these schemes, and there are others who will become cynical and nihilistic.

But, if men truly want to emerge from the postmodern condition and live in a world that is less fake and less gay, what they need to demand is sincerity. Not performative “authenticity.”

What is needed is an insistence that men mean what they say and say what they mean. Socially stigmatize insincere attention-seeking and dishonesty as well as hipsterish irony and cleverness. And socially elevate and recognize people who really seem to be passionate and committed to their work and their words.

7. Sincerity

Sincerity is unfortunately hard to prove, precisely because so many people are so good at faking it.

What makes it even more complicated is that being sincere doesn’t mean that you can’t change your mind. In fact, being able to admit that you sincerely believed something and then figured out you were wrong because you accumulated new evidence or experiences is often a sign of sincerity. But not always. Sometimes, saying that you were wrong can be damage control.

Sincerity becomes a question of character, in the sense that Aristotle wrote about it, as a habit. What is this man in the habit of doing and how consistent is his behavior over a long period of time? What do his core values seem to be, over a long period of time? Where is he putting his time and effort?

Sincerity is also a question of intention. Is this man doing or saying something because he truly believes it is good, or because he may gain something by doing or saying it? That kind of sincere intent is actually what Aristotle called “nobility” or kalokagathia—the “good and beautiful” way of living.

We’ve had decades of people trying to seem clever and ironic, because the postmodern condition convinced them that anyone who truly believed in anything was a fool. They were terrified of being laughed at for taking themselves or anything else “too seriously” or trying too hard.

We’ve suffered through a vertical video rapid-fire barrage of liars and con-men and desperate buffoons who will do or say anything for attention.

I think the world is ready for serious men of conviction who say what they mean and mean what they say again.

I think the world is ready for a new age of sincerity.

Maybe I’m wrong.

But I hope I’m right.

Stay Solar.

“Brothers shall fight and fell each other, And sisters’ sons shall kinship stain; Hard is it on earth, with mighty whoredom; Axe-time, sword-time, shields are sundered, Wind-time, wolf-time, ere the world falls; Nor ever shall men each other spare.”

Völuspá 45, Bellows translation.

I’m working on a new piece about sincerity, and it brought to mind this old piece that warned of what the seeress called a “mighty whoredom.” Fourteen years later, it feels like a prophecy of my own. I was responding to online trends and discourse at the time, but 2012 was actually the year that Tinder launched. It was also the year that Facebook acquired Instagram. OnlyFans wouldn’t appear until 2016.

I couldn’t have imagined how many relatively normal men and women would become full or part-time strippers online.

The part-time whoredom is somewhat sadder, like some Dickensian tale of a fallen woman engaging in a spot of streetwalking to make ends meet.

I couldn’t have imagined the world of fitness influencers, or how commonplace it would become for male and female trainers alike to use provocative gestures and nearly nude imagery to sell programs, coaching, or supplements.

And I certainly couldn’t have imagined how many people would be doing it just for the attention, even when they weren’t selling anything at all.

It’s an interesting look back—from our present time of Looksmaxxing and Hawk-Tua.

This piece also shows what kind of content I was writing for the Alt-Right in 2012, before the media discovered the movement and its leaders decided to inhabit their caricature and just go “full Nazi.”

Now that we’ve had our trip down memory lane, I’ll get back to work on that piece about sincerity.

Stay Solar

Everyone a Harlot (2012)

Published on AlternativeRight.com and later republished in A Sky Without Eagles (2014).

Ego-inflating rhetoric is everywhere. At work, at school , and at the mall, Americans expect everyone to tell ‘em how special, talented and important they are. In our inverted world, the weak are somehow strong, everyone who survives a hangnail is “brave,” and every bean-counter who works for the Department of Defense is a goddamn hero.

At GloboCorp, the human resources department tries to convince every John and Juanita that they are absolutely essential to the success of the organization. Everyone’s creative talents are valued, and everyone from the janitor to the CEO is capable of making tremendous positive contributions. In his recent book about the value of work, Matthew B. Crawford argued that modern corporations devalue meaningful achievement when they pander to us and speak as though everyone were some sort of Einstein.

Americans like to be told that they are brilliant and brave, but as a people these aren’t our highest values anymore. Who can name five legitimate, recent war heroes? The hoi polloi don’t care too much about who is smart, either. They only care about science when they want to lose weight, win an argument on the Internet, or find out how the world is going to end. If you can name ten guys doing hard science right now, you’re probably a scientist.

Most people know they aren’t Einsteins, and they really don’t care. They have a more pressing concern.

What they’re really asking themselves is, “Am I hot, or not?”

Beautiful people are the brightest beacons in our floating world. Attractive models and actors get far more praise and attention than Medal of Honor recipients. People love technology, but they use it to keep up with the Kardasians. They pack into gyms, but strength and fitness are by-products of their desire to be desired. A six-pack has a higher value than a powerful bench press or a heavy squat. No one cares how much Tatum Channing or Brad Pitt lifts, or how fast they can run, or what they can build, or how many men they could defeat in combat. They’re admired for being desirable.

It used to be that only young women worried excessively about being desired. In traditional patriarchal societies, a woman who no one wants as a wife becomes a burden on her parents. An unwanted woman could never become a mother or runs a household. She remained forever a dependent daughter or an independent, lonely spinster. For women of marriageable age, attractiveness had a very high value, and while the importance of attractiveness decreases with age, most men would still rather have a pretty wife than an ugly one. Whether by habit or by nature, many women tend to enjoy painting and adorning themselves to appear youthful, fertile, feminine and appealing.

However, the woman who cares the most about being desired is the harlot, because her survival depends on her ability to lure men into her loins.

Some will point to male ornamentation as a counter-example, but the motivation behind male embellishment has traditionally been different. When men decorated themselves, they did it to appear more fearsome or to communicate status. Samurai wore rouge, and like many finer points of samurai grooming, they did it so that their enemies would respect them as virile opponents even after they were dead. They didn’t tart themselves up to get laid. They did it to gain the respect of men.

Last weekend, a movie about male strippers made $39.2 million dollars at the box office. America’s come a long way since Flashdance.

In The Way of Men, I used Bonobos and Chimpanzees to compare the female-oriented society to the male-oriented society. People aren’t exactly the same as apes, but I think Chimps and Bonobos make revealing metaphors for where we’ve been, and where we seem to be headed.

Bonobos live luxuriously, with access to as much food as they need. Female coalitions check male aggression, and males rarely form tight-knit groups. Males don’t know who their fathers are, only their mothers. Sex is, as a bar whore once said to a pal of mine, “like shaking hands.” Homosexuality is commonplace because sex is a social activity, and everyone has sex with everyone. It’s not about reproduction; sex is about mutual masturbation and having a good time. Sex is a major part of bonobo life. Bonobos are said to be peaceful, and while that may not be completely true, they’re definitely matrilineal and exceptionally horny.

Chimpanzees form patriarchal hunting groups. The males stick together, and the females end up moving from group to group. Sex is a reproductive activity. Homosexuality is rare. Males dominate females and the males at the top of the male hierarchy control the group.

America is fast becoming a “Bonobo Masturbation Society,” devoted to pleasure and organized primarily to serve the interests of females. More and more men are raised by single mothers, and males are discouraged from organizing without female supervision. Sex is social, and the majority of the hard, dangerous work that men used to do is either done by machines, idiot-proofed, or outsourced to countries where life is cheap. Women and dishonorable men micromanage male aggression with endless laws and lawsuits, and bad boys who can’t pay big lawyers are drop-kicked into a multi-billion dollar prison industry that boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world.

In our Bonobo Masturbation Society, fucking is one of the only things men are encouraged to do that actually makes them feel like men.

Throughout the Alt-Right, several writers have criticized “pick-up artist” culture and “game.”

Because just about the only manly thing that most men are allowed to do is bang, I am more sympathetic. I see what many call game as a kind of gateway masculinity. Game is essentially assertiveness training for a generation of young men who spent most of their lives playing “mother may I?”

Manliness is like a talent. Some males are more gifted than others, but like any talent, masculinity has to be pushed and developed to amount to anything impressive. Boys who were raised by single moms or overprotective parents and put through the public school feminist brain-washing system were never tried or trained by groups of hard men. You can’t hand a hen-pecked boy a high school diploma and expect him to spit like Clint Eastwood.

When they talk about game, men in the Manosphere are shoveling through the bullshit that the system tells boys about girls. This is work that needs to be done. If average young guys believe the official malarkey they are told about sex and relationships, they’ll be used and abused by entitled American girls for the rest of their lives. And, as they unpack feminist myths about the sexes, I’ve seen a lot of those guys start to wonder what it really means to be men. This is an important conversation. However, it almost seems like a safer route in today’s cultural climate to make chasing poon a long-term lifestyle choice. That’s where the positive mean slides toward a negative extreme.

Andy Nowicki wrote that if men really wanted to undermine the matriarchy, they would stop fucking. He may have his own (possibly religious) reasons for saying so, but I think he has a point.

Our feminist, globalist handlers would love nothing more than to keep young men -- the most dangerous and potentially revolutionary group in any civilization – completely distracted by tang. And while it may feel like asserting dominance (in conveniently the most harmless way possible), if everything you do is designed to make you more appealing to women, you’re an eager vibrator. When your muscle is just for show, when everything you do is to make yourself more desirable, you’re playing the female role. When your worth as a man depends on how many women you can lure to your loins, you’re just a gigolo.

As Hunter S. Thompson noted, sex is the most fun for amateurs. It’s great when you’re young, pretty, naïve and carefree—but “old whores don’t do much giggling.”

Mark Simpson had a lot of this figured out when he coined the word “metrosexual” way back in 1994. The metrosexual is not necessarily gay or effeminate in the flamboyant sense of the word—that’s just the way people picked up the word. Simpson’s idea of the metrosexual is a “mirror man” whose highest narcissistic concerns are pleasure-seeking and being regarded as “desirable.” He may be in love with himself, but that, too, is a shallow kind of love. He cares more about how he looks and how well he fucks than what he has achieved or how well he is respected. It’s a harlot’s vanity.

Hugh Hefner was far ahead of his time. It was homosexual men who pioneered the bonobo lifestyle en masse. Before today’s PUAs were in pre-school, homos were doing it for the numbers, looking for validation, basing their self-worth on how many and how hot. Homosexual men rejected traditional male roles and expectations, and channeled all of their masculine aggression into sex for the sake of sex. Their idea of masculinity became masturbatory—a pumped up Tom of Finland caricature of masculine form without function or honor or virtue. Homosexual men, because they were men, set the cultural stage for objectifying men the way that men have always objectified women.

As pilot bonobos, the homos discovered the downsides of harlotry. An experienced player was bound to acquire a handful of STDs, and AIDS practically wiped out an entire generation of “sexually liberated” men. For many, there are also psychological costs. Being desired is a drug, and it’s addictive. When it’s your highest value, it becomes your identity. One of the problems—and this has always been a curse to women -- is that sexual attractiveness is linked to the mating instinct, and it peaks in the young. Men mature more flatteringly than women, but most men who trade on their sex appeal won’t relax into the confident, secure, middle-aged manhood of their forefathers. Like homos and movie stars, I wonder how many of today’s players will chase steroids and sex drugs and eventually convince themselves that maybe that Kenny Rogers face lift will look better on them than it does on him. (It won’t, fellas. You’ll still look like an old lesbian who can’t blink.) There’s something particularly desperate, sad and undignified about a man of a certain age who spends too much time looking for sexual validation.

What’s worse is that straight men aren’t in the market for men, they’re in the market for women, so biology puts them at a major disadvantage. Game strategist Heartiste recently posted about an online dating experience where together, the two best looking guys managed to get a total of 50 messages from women, while the most attractive woman got over 536 messages from men in the same time period. That playing field will never be close to equal, but game is gaining popularity because men see that disparity and want to increase their odds.

Good-looking men with some game may be able to keep at it for most of their lives, and they’ll end up with some good stories. A small minority of men have always been libertines, and some men are probably particularly well suited to it. Some will have regrets, and some won’t.

The problem isn’t what happens to a few players, but what we become as a society when everyone wants to be a player. Libertinism used to be a form of rebellion, but increasingly, it’s part of the program. In a society where sex and attractiveness are the highest values, what happens to the other two-thirds of the curve?

The flesh won’t be democratized. Attractiveness isn’t any more evenly distributed than strength, size, or IQ. The world is full of fat, ugly people. People can improve their lot with diet and exercise and grooming—and they should—but you can only put so much lipstick on a pig. Some men and women just aren’t that great looking. A lot of people are actually pretty repulsive. A few should probably avoid daylight altogether, because they frighten small children.

Women have always been aware of the cruel elitism of beauty’s natural hierarchy. In societies where other virtues had higher value, they could focus on piety or simply being good mothers. When women were “sexually liberated,” some feminists (usually the fat, ugly ones) thought they could rely on social conditioning to give us all permanent beer goggles and make every bloated hag as desirable as Heather Locklear. If only Barbie had realistic proportions, or we were forced to watch more morbidly obese people on television, then fewer tears would tumble into buckets of ice cream. They keep pushing for “fat acceptance” and keep telling us that “big is beautiful.” When that doesn’t work, they barrage us with bad clichés and try to convince us that beauty is either in the eye of the beholder, or “on the inside.” We might patronize them, or try to be more sensitive, but pretending everyone is equally beautiful is just as absurd and untrue as pretending everyone is an Einstein.

No one wants a Barbie doll with cankles, and the de-objectification of women is at odds with the Zietgeist of our oversexed Bonobo Masturbation Society. Andrea Dworkin lost, and more teenage girls than ever are watching hardcore porn to learn how to twist, stroke and swallow like the pros. I go to the gym and I see young guys who aren’t there to lift or get big. They’re following routines to “cut up” and build a body “for the ladies.” Those ladies are tanning, getting boob jobs, and trying to look like strippers. A friend who teaches High School in California said they had to cancel Halloween dress-up days because the kids didn’t want to be scary or cute anymore. Boys and girls alike used the holiday as an excuse to come to school as close to naked as possible.

People used to have decent aspirations. They wanted to have families. They wanted to do good work. They wanted to be good citizens, good Christians, good people. Now everyone wants to be a player and a porn star. Everyone wants to be the kind of monkey that all of the other monkeys wants to rub up against.

We call this matrilineal hump-fest “progress,” and seek our moral redemption in recycling.

Sex may be natural, and it sure is fun, but it’s just a part of life. A society that over-emphasizes sex to the point where it seems like the only thing in life that means anything is grotesque and degraded, and for most people it delivers more emptiness than ecstasy.

In healthy patriarchies, men push themselves to earn the respect and admiration of other men. They work to prove their strength, courage and competence to each other. Men pride themselves on their reputation for mastery of their bodies, their actions, and their environment. They want to be known for what they can do, not just how well or who they can screw. And they sure as hell don’t waste their time trying to figure out what they can do to bedazzle bimbos.

Hell, in some places, when a man is ready to take a wife, he just picks one and kidnaps her. Men used to get married and get on with their lives. It seems like a healthier life path to me, and I’ve previewed what the other side has to offer.

Recently, I watched Restrepo, a documentary about soldiers fighting in Afghanistan. There was this scene in it where the Americans had to negotiate with local tribal elders. The elders were a bunch of dead serious-looking old dudes and their long beards were dyed bright red with henna.

Our tribal “allies” in the graveyard of empires have their problems. They shit in their hands and rape little boys. Their customs leave room for improvement.

However, as I watched their grave eyes, I wondered if any of these men had spent much time wondering, “Am I hot, or not?”

The work of living involves cleaning up messes.

Sometimes they’re your own messes, but a lot of the time, they’re not.

There are guys out there who say that whatever happens to you is YOUR FAULT.

But it isn’t.

It’s good to take ownership over your situation, but plenty of things will happen in life that are completely out of your control. It’s what the ancients called “fate” and that’s also why people believe in luck.

Heraclitus wrote that “the thunderbolt steers all things.” There are many ways to interpret that, but storms come out of nowhere. I was running an event recently and all of the weather reports were wrong. We got thunder and lightning three hours later than we were supposed to.

There will be unforeseen plagues, tornados, and hurricanes. Something can fall off a truck and smash your windshield. Someone could invent something that makes your job obsolete. And yes, sometimes the worst people come into power and the worst ideas become popular.

You rarely get to start working from how things “should be.” In fact, if you did, there wouldn’t be any work to do. Congratulations, everything is perfect. Sounds pretty boring.

You have to begin work by acknowledging the reality of the situation before you. If you want to change that situation, you need to come up with a plan to move things closer to how you think things “should be” or how you want them to be.

When someone wants to sell me on how things “should be,” I ask to see their “flow chart.” What is the actual sequence of steps required to achieve the outcome you want? What challenges will you face, and how will you handle them? What resources are required?

There’s an old South Park Episode in which gnomes present a business plan which starts with “collect underpants” and the goal is “profit.” Phase 2 of the plan (which is essentially the whole plan) is a big question mark.

There’s an older cartoon, familiar in math and science circles, in which the second step of a mathematical derivation is scribbled out as “Then a miracle occurs.”

How are you getting from “collect underpants” to “profit???,” and what miracle needs to occur for you to get there?

Let me see your flow chart. Work the plan out.

A lot of people get fixated on things that they think “should” happen, but fail to address substantial obstacles in the way. I may even agree with them about what I think “should” happen. But that doesn’t mean that it’s going to happen.

This is true in every area of life, but seems to be especially true of politics. People who truly understand politics understand that it is the “art of the possible.” But 90% of the population seems completely unable to conceptualize the obstacles on the political landscape. They just want what they want.

I see guys all the time saying things like “THOSE people should be tried and hung!”

It sounds really tough to say that. Like you’re ready to make the hard, ugly decisions and say things other men are afraid to say.

In some cases, I probably agree with you.

But how does that get done? Realistically speaking? You’re obviously not just going to do it yourself. What are the things preventing that from happening? How are similar, less extreme propositions being received, and what does that tell you about the likelihood of your desired outcome?

But, because they aren’t working out the flow chart, they just get mad because their totally out-of-pocket idea isn’t being implemented. So, to anyone serious, it sounds more like a tantrum than a rational proposal.

And what’s worse is that when you are obsessively vocal about an extreme, far-fetched outcome, you are more likely to be dismissed as an unserious person who is just venting and that makes you less able to help your allies achieve an incrementally better step in the right direction.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have ideals, or some sense of how you really think things “should” be.

Of course you should.

However, an ideal is a direction, not a destination.

A flow chart is also a good way to evaluate your ideals themselves. Is human nature one of the obstacles you’d have to overcome for things to be the way they “should” be? People everywhere on the political spectrum have ideals that are totally inconsistent with the thousands of years of data we have concerning human behavior. Has what you want ever happened or lasted very long? If not, why not?

If you’re thinking that there is also a danger in being overly cautious or waiting to work out the perfect plan, you’re right. That can become a form of procrastination. Acting on an imperfect plan is usually better than waiting until you’ve worked out every last detail. But at least have some kind of plan that doesn’t require a miracle to happen.

The plan that works will also probably not be the plan you started with. You will have to update the plan as you proceed and the situation evolves.

A good model for this process is John Boyd’s OODA decision making loop. OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Actions produce responses that provide new information. New information requires reorientation and new decisions will have to be made that lead to new actions, and the loop repeats. This is true in business and grappling and even personal relationships.

Big changes are possible. I’ve seen them happen in my lifetime and I’ve even been surprised a few times. I’m not one of these doomers who believes that “nothing ever happens.” But when change does happen, it generally happens because a lot of people worked together to implement realistic incremental plans that laid the foundation for that change.

No big changes happened because a bunch of people sat around complaining about how things “should be.”

That’s like saying “I should be a millionaire.” You could be, but you’re going to need some kind of plan to get there that realistically acknowledges the obstacles in your way.

Many of the problems we face today took years to create.

We have inherited a big mess. A lot of things happened that “should not” have happened. Mistakes were made.

But that’s life. It’s going to throw all kinds of things at you that are sub-optimal. Things you didn’t “deserve” or ask for. Cleaning up messes you didn’t create is as normal as dealing with bad weather.

Some messes only require a dustpan.

But if you want to clean up a really big mess, you’re going to need a plan.

Stay Solar

16 years ago, feminist Hanna Rosin published an article in The Atlantic proclaiming “The End of Men.” Everyone in the media seemed to think she was extremely clever. Rosin turned it into a TED Talk and later into a book.

She was not alone. Feminists and their performative male “allies” had been doing victory laps for years—publishing scores of books and editorials simultaneously scolding men and mocking what appeared to be their decline as leaders in business, culture, and even at home. I documented all of this at the time in a series of essays titled No Man’s Land.

When I started writing about men and masculinity, it was open season on men, and all normal male behavior was stigmatized or suspect. This continued well after Rosin’s proclamation through the late 2010s, as young American men were told everywhere and every day that the future was female.

But, because of the sheer audacity and finality of her book and article’s title, I believe that Rosin should be regarded as the Fukuyama of Feminism.

Because it wasn’t The End of Men, was it, Hanna?

UFC 250 was just one night.

But as fighter jets flew in formation over the White House at the end of the National Anthem and the U.S. Marine Band started playing walkout music, it struck me what a powerful moment this was for American men.

It’s not that it’s a done deal, or that there isn’t a long way to go to undo the damage that feminism has done. Countless men still returned to work or school on Monday to get berated by castrating Karens. The American cathedral still believes that masculinity is bad, and the leaders of the commonwealth nations in the rest of the Anglosphere are still profoundly cucked.

But I don’t think any of us writing in the Manosphere in 2010 could have even imagined UFC fights at The White House. The phrase “toxic masculinity” wasn’t even popular yet, but the UFC is about as “toxic” as you can get. MMA fights are a spectacle of primal masculinity and virtue in its purest sense—a celebration of strength and courage and fighting prowess.

I don’t know whether it was intentional or not, but there were thankfully no fights between women on the card. It was a night of pure manliness, and the ghost of Teddy Roosevelt must have been over the moon.

Some will say and have said that it was all “bread and circuses” and, in some sense, it certainly was.

Others have said that it was merely a symbolic gesture.

But symbols matter. Narratives matter. That is, after all, why feminists fought so hard to control them for so long. That’s why we’ve had to endure DEI CEOs and fat lesbian fire chiefs and girl power remakes of classic guy movies. That’s why they wanted a female president so desperately that they ran a mid alcoholic whore and may even do it again. That’s why just a few years ago, The White House was filled with drag queens instead of guys with cauliflower ears. The far left understands the power of symbols, and they have been playing one long game of “capture the flag.”

I’m not saying I wouldn’t like the economy to be better or gas to be cheaper, and I have some concerns about other things. But one thing Trump has done really well is make meaningful symbolic gestures—even when they didn’t legally change much of anything. Having the President of the United States say there are only two genders and we’re not doing that pronoun shit anymore was a big deal. It was important. Someone at the top of the hierarchy needed to put their foot down.

A President is not a king who speaks for god and country at the same time in the majestic plural. But he is a figurehead, perhaps first and foremost. And as a figurehead, he is essentially a cultural leader. Which is why the left and the cathedral hate Trump so much. His culture undermines their culture. He elevates what they despise—the values of what they call “flyover country.”

It looks like, come July, the White House will host a rodeo. And they’ll hate that too.

Good.

The left will happily tell you why “feeling represented” matters.

Men also need to feel represented. And that’s what I think UFC 250 accomplished. I once wrote an essay titled “A Sky Without Eagles.” The gist of it was that I want to be impressed by the men who my culture elevates. We used to be surrounded by statues of warriors and heroes and aspirational portraits of men who we agreed were great, because they were men who actually did the kinds of things we dreamed of doing. Men who were like us, flawed and human, but in some way, better. The left hates great men, because greatness is antithetical to its blown-out religion of “equality”

MMA fighters are not the only examples of what it means to be a good man or a man who is good at being a man. But they are one example of men who are really good at something most men dream of doing. And that thing that they are good at sits right at the center of what it has always meant to be good at being a man. To see that thing elevated is to see manliness itself elevated.

I’ve been saying for years that when I look upward, when I look at what my culture and country elevate, I want to see eagles. Men who are exceptional. Men who are better than me at something. I want to see eagles in the sky.

Thunderbirds and Blue Angels soaring together over the White House to open a UFC fight is a pretty good start.

Stay Solar

It’s early morning in ancient Rome. An accomplished man from a noble line has recently died. His friends and family gather in the twilight outside his home and prepare to carry his body through the streets to an ancestral tomb or burial ground beyond the sacred boundary of the eternal city. Then, several men emerge from the atrium of the home wearing wax masks known as imagines maiorum. The molds for the masks were cast from the faces of the dead man’s male ancestors while they were alive and in their prime. The long, solemn procession — the pompa funebris — begins, and the deceased is accompanied into the afterlife by the faces of his respected forefathers.

Records suggest that the entourage moved through the Forum to the Rostra, where the eulogy, or laudatio funebris, was given, as the seated, masked figures looked on. This was a display of family continuity and prestige.

When I was researching the concept of animus for a recent video, this image really captured my imagination. It’s so haunting and cinematic — this parade of the preserved faces of the dead.

So, I decided to try to create my own imago maiorum and document the process. You can watch it in my latest video, here:

Here are the materials I used to make this Roman Death Mask:

Rolls of Plaster Gauze
https://amzn.to/4ojyEog

Yellow Beeswax
https://amzn.to/4vcEZVq

100% Pure Fully Rendered Grass Fed Grass Finished Beef Tallow- (4 lbs)
https://amzn.to/4e24VwK

Zinsser 408 Bulls Eye Shellac Traditional Finish & Sealer Spray, 12 oz, Clear
https://amzn.to/4uv7e0e

I may actually make a second attempt, using a more modern process to achieve a more detailed result. Beeswax is good, but fragile. A translucent amber resin mask would be a striking and more permanent variation on the same theme.

Body Double Silk Lifecasting Silicone - Pint Unit
https://amzn.to/4vAclNq

Since I was a young man fresh out of art school, captivated by the work of Matthew Barney, I’ve always been interested in the intersection between art, meaning, physical action, and the body. It’s really exciting for me to be doing things in this area and making little films about it, 30 years later.

I hope you enjoy this project.

Stay Solar.

TBH, that’s what I am going for. Sometimes, I actually ask myself, “How would Shatner deliver this line?”

Someone who watched my recent introduction to the Greek concept of thumos asked me if there were examples of similar concepts in other cultures. I thought that was an interesting question, so I did some research.

AI suggested the Germanic Óðr, but I’m extremely familiar with that concept, and it is much…weirder. Óðr has more to do with vision or inspiration. Óðr has been associated with the battle frenzy of Berserkers, which would make it more relevant to thumos in theory. However, my understanding is that (perhaps sadly) the popular conception of Berserkers is basically modern fan fiction based on a few vague poetic references that are loosely associated with a few images of men wearing animal skins.

Also suggested was the Vedic manyu (मन्यु). I checked with my Sanskrit guy, Ed, and that is actually a very promising comparison to thumos. I may explore that further in this little series, but Vedic material is extremely alien to most Americans. They think it’s Hindu and associate it with hippies and white women who get divorced and do yoga.

The Roman animus actually seems like the closest match to thumos that would be familiar or interesting to Western audiences. Thumos feels a little wilder in many of the Greek sources, like something that needs to be reigned in. Animus seems to be a little closer to a steadfast patriarchal masculine soul that can be ignited to go out and seek honor through acts of virtue.

I found this fantastic quote from Sallust that shows this aspect of animus:

“I have often heard that in the past, Q. Maximus, P. Scipio, and other eminent men of our state, used to say that their soul (animus) was most irresistibly fired to accomplish acts of manly virtue when they gazed upon the wax images of their ancestors. To be sure, it was not the wax or the image that had such power in itself, but the memory of things done that nourished the flame in the breast of extraordinary men, and that flame did not die down until their manly virtue had equalled that fame and glory.”

Sallust, The Jugurthine War.

That quote also brought up the fantastic Roman tradition of making wax masks, or imagines (ih-MAH-gih-nehs), of prominent men in their prime, so that, when they died, their families could continue to revere them as they were at their peak and remember their great deeds. The wax masks were made from plaster casts, and each son would receive one of each of his ancestors’ masks to take home and display prominently so he would remember who he came from every day. The masks were also worn by family members during funeral processions, to demonstrate that the dead were joining their honored ancestors. The tradition is referred to as imagines maiorum, and meaning roughly “images of the great ones.” The individual masks were called imagines (plural) or imago (singular).

I’ve been so inspired by this that I am planning to make one of myself and document that process. I don’t have any kids to pass the mask on to, but it fits in the realm of my artistic endeavors, and there are other ways that the things men do endure (like writing books). So it may end up in someone’s hands. I think this would be a really powerful tradition for men who do have families to revive.

If you want to watch my video on the concept of animus, you can find it here.

It also covers my issues with how Carl Jung repurposed the word animus to mean the masculine aspect of the female psyche. I’ve spoken about this before, but I think Jung’s ideas percolated out into pop psychology and convinced many men unfamiliar with his work that they had a “feminine side,” which was not really part of mainstream Western thought before Jung. I even think this influenced Marxist gender theory and the trans movement, making the whole diabolical endeavor seem more plausible to normies. This has had disastrous, mutilating consequences for many individuals and has been profoundly negative for our species as a whole.

On a happier note, will be joining and I on our new weekly live show, DIALOG this Sunday at 7:30PM PST. We’re going to talk about authenticity via Heidegger (courtesy Robertson), Guzy’s concept of “extegrity,” and masculine aesthetics, including the phenomenon of “looksmaxxing.” Robertson and I explored that a bit in a previous episode, and I really just see looksmaxxing as a renaming of a perennial phenomenon that occurs when male vanity and aesthetics become detached from virtue and start running around by themselves. It’s like synthol or wearing lifts in your shoes or male girdles. Or maybe even codpieces, now that I think about it.

Join us this Sunday night, and please, chime in with comments or questions.

Stay Solar.

You were not meant for a different age.

You are not an old soul.

You are not a special type of man.

The good news is that you are also not living in a doomed, fallen era.

You are just a man, living in a world that keeps changing—for good and bad, as it always has.

The fact that things are not as you wish them to be, or as you believe that they should be, based on your reading of history does not make you a secret king or an aristocrat of the soul or anything else.

It just makes you a man with a belief.

And “belief” is just a churchy word for an opinion that you’re deeply attached to on an emotional level.

So, you have an emotional opinion about history and the way that the world should be—but isn’t.

Well, you know what they say about opinions.

“Opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one.”

—Dirty Harry (1988)

History is just a story. It’s right there in the word.

Some of what you read and believe about history is probably accurate. But a lot of what you think you know about history probably did not, in fact, happen “just so.”

History is a story someone told about what happened. Look at how many competing stories, recollections, and questionable “facts” there are about things that happened just 5, 20, or 60 years ago.

People are still arguing about who assassinated JFK, who is responsible for 9/11, and why the world shut down in 2020.

What does the whole Epstein thing look like in a hundred years?

Now reach back a few thousand years into a reality with no video or recording devices.

Just a bunch of recopied books and scrolls and cross-referenced inscriptions.

Tell me again what you think you know about the details of the life and death of Caesar, or Alexander, or Buddha.

So many of the “authoritative” histories we refer to as primary sources were works commissioned by or written to gain the favor of powerful men.

Joseph Campbell said that:

“Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.”

In one sense, he was right.

Myth speaks metaphorically about the timeless realities of being a human animal and our collective experience of human life.

Myth is a thread that connects us emotionally to the past. We still feel the same feelings and can empathize with a tormented Hercules seeking redemption, or the rage of Achilles in response to a public insult, or the story of a man trying to make it home to his family.

Or someone cursed with foresight that no one heeds.

History is a chronology of debatable details, scribbled down by men with their own agendas and interpreted by other men—and sometimes women, adding another level of distortion—centuries later.

Myths are beautiful and they make life interesting and meaningful. They are dreams that we can draw from to elevate and motivate our spirits and they allow us to speak in metaphors that enrich human language and experience.

All art is, more or less, an exercise in mythmaking.

However, the world of myth can also become an escape from reality, the demands of the present, and the call to action. This is true whether we’re talking about someone who seems to live in a reality dreamed up by a science fiction author, or someone who retreats into a curated myth about the past and compares everything in the present to it.

I’m not saying that things were never objectively or subjectively “better” or “more beautiful” than they are now. And I’m also not saying that they were worse, or that the present is better.

What I am saying is that we have no direct personal experience of the past.

Men may be drawn to an aesthetic—so many of these fixations with the past are aesthetic fixations. Or perhaps the allure of a certain period is more conceptual, and men find themselves drawn to their perception of a particular experience or how they imagine a different social order might “feel.”

Of course, how a different social order might “feel” would depend on one’s place in a given hierarchy. People never imagine themselves as thralls or guttersnipes.

Every period in history was rotten for somebody.

It is important—and grounding—to remember that the men of history who lived in ages that may appear golden from the hindsight of our high and distant mountain seats were men who lived in their own times. They, too, may have been inspired by stories about the past, but they lived and acted in the present. The men who we associate with the great ages and civilizations were both in them and of them. Caesar may have admired Alexander, but he was a Roman, not a Greek. He is remembered because he influenced his own world in his own time.

Every few years, I see a resurgence of interest in doomer prophets like Julius Evola.

I can see the appeal. I was reading all of the big “decline” and “cyclical history” authors myself, a decade ago when they became trendy and influential in the early Alt-Right.

However, Evola, in particular, is a poisonous and emasculating influence. He romanticizes a resignation to impotence and inaction. He makes doing nothing sound cool by calling it “riding the tiger,” but in practice, it looks less like riding Tigger and more like being Eeyore.

Evola and his fans and imitators convince young, sensitive, romantic men that they live in a fallen and unredeemable age. Appropriating an Indian myth, Evola called his fallen age the “Kali Yuga.” However, the Hindu consensus seems to be that the Kali Yuga started in 3102 BC, well before the Athenians invaded Troy and 2,000 years before Homer wrote the Iliad. So everything in Western Civilization that men who read Evola consider “good” and “beautiful” appears to have happened in India’s age of Kali Yuga.

Nevertheless, Evola, a Hermeticist, constructed a golden age myth that he called the world of Tradition, and contrasted his made-up world of Tradition with the Modern world, situated in the age of Kali Yuga.

Evola’s complaints about the modern world—stripped of their metaphysical woo and post-World War II Italian fascist disappointment—should be familiar to all of us.

In his works, he recognizes the crisis of meaning and consensus that Nietzsche and many others have pointed out and that is still relevant today.

However, instead of seeing this as a problem to be addressed through vitality, creation, and action, Evola flatters his readers by telling them they are special just for recognizing the problem and wanting something different, better, or more like what they believe existed in the past. But, placing the back of his hand on his defeated brow—just above his monocle—Evola sighs and explains that nothing can be done, and anything that seems to be good should just be allowed to fail because it is doomed anyway.

In his own words…

We shall now examine the principle of “riding the tiger” as applied to the external world and the total environment. Its significance can be stated as follows: When a cycle of civilization is reaching its end, it is difficult to achieve anything by resisting it and by directly opposing the forces in motion. The current is too strong; one would be overwhelmed. The essential thing is not to let oneself be impressed by the omnipotence and apparent triumph of the forces of the epoch. These forces, devoid of connection with any higher principle, are in fact on a short chain. One should not become fixated on the present and on things at hand, but keep in view the conditions that may come about in the future. Thus the principle to follow could be that of letting the forces and processes of this epoch take their own course, while keeping oneself firm and ready to intervene when “the tiger, which cannot leap on the person riding it, is tired of running.” The Christian injunction “Resist not evil” may have a similar meaning, if taken in a very particular way. One abandons direct action and retreats to a more internal position.

Julius Evola. Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

How will you know, exactly, when the tiger gets tired of running?

This mentality is attractive precisely because it requires nothing of its adherents.

You—yes, you—you amazing snowflake—are an aristocrat of the soul who sees a problem that cannot be fixed. So you don’t have to do anything, because there’s no point in doing anything. You’re better than that. Just work on yourself.

Retreat into books and fiddle while Rome burns, because it’s going to burn anyway, no matter what.

Don’t create anything new or better, because it is destined to fail.

Don’t work to preserve the remains of what seems to be better, or support moves in the right direction, because it’s all going down.

It’s the Kali Yuga, bro. It’s in the stars.

This defeatism comically makes Evola the best friend that “Modernity” ever had.

Listen to the man in the monocle as he whispers in your ear.

“Don’t resist. It’s so gentle…

Like slipping into a warm bath.”

Evola speaks of revolt and “spiritual” resistance, but in an internal, private sense. He doesn’t even wink at terrorism or insurgent warfare like his contemporary Ernst Jünger did in Der Waldgang.

True resistance is futile. Just let it happen.

These kinds of predictions about the cycles of civilizations and the destiny of decline are most appealing when things appear to be moving in the wrong direction in the world around you, or, especially, in your own life. They offer grand, sweeping explanations and a poetic narrative for social dissolution, disorder, and misfortune.

However, a “civilization” is more of an academic classification than a street-level reality. It’s an illusion created by nerds. To borrow from the East as Evola did, it is māyā.

Within what we might call the grand “decline of the West,” the fortunes of entire nations have risen and fallen. Men have achieved great things and made beautiful works of art. Families and even dynasties have been founded. Cities and skyscrapers have been constructed. Men have gone to outer space.

If you are reading this, you are probably, like myself, little more than a literate peasant in the big picture. Perhaps the arc of your “civilization” is beyond the productive scope of your concern.

I have seen whole cohorts of young men get wrapped up in narratives of doom and decline and these masturbatory fantasies about being noble souls enduring a fallen age. And the net effect of this fixation is that they make the perfect the enemy of the good. Nothing good, or better, will ever be good enough for them. “Riding the Tiger” is essentially an apocalyptic religion of waiting, inaction, and social critique. The communities they create become black holes of bad morale that undermine any change for the better.

Meanwhile, the leveling left took the opposite approach. They put one foot in front of the other, day after day, year after year—replacing judges, professors, and officials, making incremental gains. Their vision produced something ugly and dystopian, but their willingness to act proved far more effective than retreating into sullen fantasies about fallen ages.

If man has a natural destiny and a timeless purpose, it is to overcome chaos and create order within the perimeter of his influence and maintain that order for as long as he can.

This is what we have been doing, over and over again, one life at a time, for thousands of years.

Our own lives are limited, and we can never know another time. We can only be alive right now. The world we live in is the only world we will ever know.

Stop worrying about the plot arcs of centuries, and do your job.

Overcome chaos where you find it and create order where you can. Try to make things better and avoid making them worse. And when you can’t do that, at least support the men who can.

The men who you read about and admire from the past were men of their own times.

And you must be a man of yours. You have no alternative.

I’m going to borrow a cliché from the fitness industry and say, instead of complaining that the world isn’t the way it should be, focus on making it “1% better.”

Stay Solar ऋत

and I are going to talk more about Evola, fallen age fantasies—and the morale destroying men who make the perfect the enemy of the good, effectively making the world worse in the process—on tonight’s DIALOG show on YouTube.

Please join us.

It is Saturday in the marketplace.

The air is thick with a dry haze of dust kicked up from the rolling carts and shuffling feet. A light wind blows the canvas stalls. The vendors bark and haggle as people pick up their wares and finger them with simian interest.

Young men who are not otherwise occupied with work gather in the square. They arrange themselves in small jovial groups. Some squat to play games. Others lean on crates and watch the girls go by—offering hoots, hollers, and whistles of admiration.

A man emerges from the throng at the low end of town. He is wearing a well-worn black suit and he is carrying a spectacular contraption that appears to be some kind of organ. He walks up to where the young men are gathered. Ceremoniously, he prepares his device, adjusting each part with the feigned gravity of a man performing an ancient rite. The young men watch from the corners of their eyes.

Then the man begins to play his organ, and there is something about the sound of it that captures the attention of men—but especially young men. The man sings along to the music using words that every man knows well and wants to hear again and again. He sings songs of injustice and betrayal and wrongs that can only be righted by men of courage.

“If not now, when? If not us, then who?”

Something deep in the bellows of the instrument drones like bagpipes in the distance. It is only an organ, but the men hear war drums—like a blank filled in by the mind. The man’s skilled fingers dance over the keys. The top notes are ululating Valkyries and the low notes hit like a chorus of your forefathers resonating from the caverns of Hades.

This is the song and the sound of thumos, the spirit of man without which there would be nothing to recommend us. It is the call to righteous adventure and action, and the men in the marketplace are enraptured.

But the player—we will call him The Player—plays this sacred song carelessly and selfishly.

The song of thumos is meant to inspire action. It seeks resolution and justice.

But the Player loves the crowd more than the cause.

He wants to keep them there in the town square, circling round, caught up in the song, getting angrier and angrier. But The Player will neither send them into battle nor release them to return home. The conflict he sings of can have no resolution, So he changes the song as the shadows grow long to keep the young men stomping around him.

The men circle and circle as the days go by. And their families worry. And their mothers cry.

But the Player keeps on playing and playing and changing his tune.

And the young men, once lively and strong, slowly waste away. They spend the rest of their lives in the circle, accomplishing nothing, until they are gone. And then, and only then, The Player moves on.

The Player is the kind of organ grinder who was once accompanied by a monkey. The monkey would dance to his music and collect change from passersby.

But this Player is not accompanied by a monkey.

Because he knows where to find many, he knows how to make them dance, and change isn’t really what he wants.

I introduced the phrase “Organ Grinder of Thumos” way back in 2020 in an Instagram post. I always loved the image, but realized recently that I had never formalized it in an essay.

and I will be talking about rage-baiters, thumos, and the culture of unresolvable anger that wastes the lives of righteous men on the first episode of our re-booted LIVE show — DIALOG — tonight on YouTube at 7:30PM PST.

It will air simultaneously on both of our channels and on The Order of Fire’s channel.

CB and I have a great, well-established rapport and he is a great balance to my character and energy. I’m, well…kind of a bohemian artist type. He is a working electrician, married father of five who spends his free time exploring philosophy and the works of Homer. He recently launched an ambitious Homer course that he has already worked through with two cohorts of students in the past.

Watch a reading of this essay on Youtube.

This week, I condensed my pair of essays on submission grappling into a 13-minute video for YouTube. The video includes footage of me grappling, shot over 6 or 8 months, but I’m really proud of the first minute and a half. It’s the first thing I’ve done that really feels like a movie to me.

Once I had the first 30 seconds edited and put to music, I became totally obsessed with it. My writing has always been a little bit “Fight Club,” the movie that, in some roundabout way, started my career as a writer and “gonzo anthropologist” of masculinity.

While I had to transition to a grappling montage eventually, you can see how the video could have been turned into something more like a short film—if I had spent another few weeks intentionally filming the guys I grapple with and had someone else film me with the same camera.

Platforms and Creative Limitations

Format limitations actually encourage creativity. Being able to do “anything” is like trying to comprehend limitless space or eternity. It’s a lot easier to figure out how to fill an 18x24-inch canvas.

Instagram encouraged me to level up my photography, and I landed on a process I really enjoyed for years. I created a distinct “character” and a vibe. It was basically me—a man—usually wearing the same thing, wandering though the world, contemplating existence.

I was basically a philosopher who couldn’t find a shirt.

It was a theme inspired by others, but I made it my own.

Here are two of my favorite shots.

There was also a physical process involved, because the kind of shots I wanted to take usually involved hiking to some remote location. So it wasn’t just posting photos of myself, I had to go DO something to earn the photo. As I got a sense of what I liked to shoot, I moved around the American West seeking ruined buildings, waterfalls, mountaintops, and “good rocks.”

As a writer, though, Instagram was a waste of time. I realized yesterday that I introduced the phrase “the organ grinders of thumos” on Instagram and a podcast, and never fully developed it into an essay.

(I’m going to revisit that for Substack, soon. )

Instagram is an ephemeral platform. Everything you do there scrolls away, and no one ever comes back to it. YouTube is the opposite. People are still watching videos I made years ago.

As Instagram chased TikTok, everyone wanted video, and photos weren’t getting seen anymore. This forced me to get into video, but, again, everything on Instagram is temporary. So you can spend 3 hours editing 30 seconds of video, but no one will see it in a week.

Short-form vertical video is also ugly and unsatisfying.

Instagram has basically become a sales and comedy platform. Like TikTok, it looks like what the characters in the movie Idiocracy would watch.

I think a lot of men feel gross after doom-scrolling through that mind-melting garbage, and have limited use or stopped using the platform completely. I encourage this. It’s useful for fitness and martial arts, and that’s about it.

YouTube has the opposite feel. Men go there to learn things, and leave feeling smarter instead of dumber.

As a creator, I realized too late that, referencing a great line from House of Cards, “Instagram is the McMansion and YouTube is the house on the hill.”

You can post full documentaries, short films, and television-quality educational videos—in addition to the “talk show” format many people use it for.

Next month I’ll be doing that, too, re-launching a weekly live show to talk about philosophy and current events with .

But YouTube (by way of Instagram) has gotten me really into filmmaking.

It’s incredibly time-consuming. Assume that every time you see a shot of me going through a door, for instance, I actually filmed 10 takes of it, on each side of the door. And maybe I tried a detail shot of a hand on a doorknob or my feet stepping outside that may or may not have made the final cut. For that minute and a half of video, I mentioned that proud of, I actually reviewed the cut and did re-shoots of a few clips because I realized that there was no reason for me to “break the 4th wall” in that sequence.

I have to credit a young filmmaker and influencer for showing me what was possible.

This video totally one-shotted me on what we can do now with this accessible technology.

“What if you just filmed yourself as if you were the main character in a feature film?”

People on the right are always complaining about popular culture—saying that the far left owns it and uses it to spread propaganda. They’re right, but instead of complaining, they could just make their own movies. The technology has never been more accessible.

I couldn’t quite justify the FX3 that Stefan used in the film above, so I bought an FX30, which is just one step down. With lenses, tripods, and gizmos, you can get started for about $3k. (You’ll never stop adding on or upgrading, but that’s a different issue.) The FX3 is a Netflix-approved camera, meaning it is good enough to shoot a feature you’d watch on Netflix.

You may never sell a film to Netflix, but YouTube is right there, and there is no barrier to entry.

It’s not easy. It’s a craft, and I am still at the very beginning of this learning curve. I’ve developed a ton of respect for the work and expertise that goes into it. But it’s been exciting and rewarding so far. I’ve started taking videography work for strength sports and possibly other projects here in the Phoenix, Arizona area to help finance my new obsession.

If you don’t like the stories they’re telling, you can tell your own.

You can just create a better culture.

Or at least try.

Stay Solar.

It was titled, “What Is Masculinity?” and it was meant as an introduction to The Way of Men.

Over the past 11 years or so, it has been viewed around 370,000 times, and a few hundred people find their way to it every week.

It was the best video I could make at the time. You can hear electrical system or HVAC or something buzzing in the background.

I recorded it at Elite Performance Center in 2014, with some big tires barely visible on the wall behind me. The gym was owned by powerlifter and fitness influencer Chris Duffin. I was renting some office space there that I had turned into my tattoo shop, New Barbarian Tattoo. Those were some great years—I spent every day at the gym working out, talking to, and occasionally tattooing the powerlifters and strongmen who trained there.

My Substack has been quiet for a bit because I decided to remake that video, and it turned out to be a lot of work.

I rewatched the original video, and it was better than I had imagined. It was from a period before I had done much public speaking, but it isn’t embarrassing. It’s a bit of a “Which way, Western man?” motivational speech.

The new video covers the same subject matter but in greater depth and with a higher-quality presentation.

A lot has happened in the masculinity space in the past decade, so I also wanted to address the boom of masculinity and “alpha” influencers. In 2014, most of the talk about masculinity was still coming from or reacting to mainstream feminist commentary.

But today, young men are hearing more about masculinity from other men. That’s better, but the men doing the talking have a wide range of motivations—as they always have.

When men talk about masculinity and virtue, they are usually trying to manage social/tribal norms or influence men to take some kind of action. Whether they are good influences or bad influences—or influencers—is going to depend a lot on your worldview.

One of the things that makes my work different is that it was more about exploring an idea than producing a product or mere self-promotion. I approached masculinity as a topic and wanted to present myself in the new video as a subject-matter expert. I also wanted to really drive home the “gang theory” of masculinity for a new generation of viewers and readers, because I consider it one of my major contributions to masculinity as a field of study.

AI Slop vs. Artfully Curated Imagery

I think many of us have conflicting feelings about the use of AI in creative endeavors.

I wrote a rant about AI slop a few months back that I never published because I realized that my objections were mostly snobbery. I’ve spent decades studying art and cultivating a distinctive aesthetic. So when I can tell an image is not just AI but specifically ChatGPT, I know someone with no taste used a free account to crank out the lowest-effort imagery imaginable.

A friend said we’re going to look back on this period and laugh the way we laughed at people who used Papyrus and Comic Sans and put animated .gifs all over their GeoCities websites.

I think it is possible to use AI to create Art. I follow some professional art directors on Instagram who are doing wild stuff that clearly takes hours of generating and tweaking and animating transitions.

For editorial work that is not “fine art,” using AI video and photography just replaces stock photography and stock video. If the aim is communication, then the most effective video is not “whatever you can find online” but the video that communicates the idea most effectively.

When I made the original “What Is Masculinity?” video, I had to buy individual copyright-cleared videos. I think I paid as much as $50 for 30 seconds of “the best video I could find” of apes being social.

Today, I pay for access to some stock video sites like Artlist and Envato. Both are good values, and many of the videos available are artfully shot. But they don’t always have what I really want.

So, for this project, I went back to AI. I have a subscription to SuperGrok, and using Grok, I was able to generate a prompt that produced the vibe and cinematography of an early 1960s Bond film.

Here are some of my favorite clips. Grok was freestyling with sound for the most part, and I rarely used it.

So, I was able to generate evocative imagery that actually added depth to my presentation emotionally and conceptually. And I was able to maintain a consistent visual style and a classic feel. The period look also allowed me to gesture at the current field of masculinity influencers without calling anyone out specifically, which gives the finished piece a longer shelf life.

The real-life “work” of the video was me reading the script I wrote, in a scene I lit and shot carefully over 3 days (including some rewrites to improve mood and pacing). I’m proud of the end result. I think it’s a good mix and a tasteful use of AI as a tool.

Will it get 300k views over the next 10 years? Who knows? But I think it was worth doing.

The older I get, the more important it feels to do work you are proud of and believe you will still be proud of for years to come.

I’m proud of many of my books and essays, and I’m also proud of the work I’ve put into learning video production and filmmaking over the past year or two. So that is where I am directing my efforts these days.

The new video is mostly meant to introduce new readers to my work and The Way of Men, but I hope many of you will give it a watch as well.

Stay Solar

Aristotle showed up at Plato’s Academy when he was seventeen years old. Plato was about sixty at the time. Plato’s Academy wasn’t a school with desks. It was a gym tucked into a grove of olive trees.

I’ve been to its ruins, and I knocked out some pushups as a tribute.

A better tribute would have been to fight someone, preferably naked. The Academy wasn’t a gym with weights or machines. It was a gym for wrestling and boxing, where young men beat the shit out of each other. And, after they were done beating the shit out of each other, they walked around the olive grove with Plato, talking philosophy. I like to imagine Aristotle with a black eye, and both of these guys probably had cauliflower ear.

I say probably, because I’ve been grappling regularly for 8 or 9 years, and my left ear has only thickened up a bit. So, you never know. I’m a little mad about it, honestly. It reads as a badge of honor, and I feel like I’ve earned it. But some guys never get it, and some guys are draining their ears after two weeks. I’ve seen it happen.

I go to open mat almost every Sunday morning. In between rolls, we usually talk about grappling and work out problems. But as the guys get to talking, we often end up talking about life. And ideas. What’s going on in the world? What is good and bad, and right and wrong? And that’s basically what philosophy is. It’s not forced. It’s just men talking about life and ideas in the most natural way possible, in between three-to-five-minute rounds of trying to break each other’s arms and legs and choke each other unconscious.

Just like Plato and Aristotle and the guys in that olive grove 2400 years ago.

I’m so grateful that I have been able to participate in this ancient thing. And I think I understand something about Plato and Aristotle and their experience on a visceral, human level that you can’t get from reading books in a library.

It’s true that we live in a very different world. For instance, I generally prefer to wear shorts when I grapple. But there is some part of that experience that is as timeless as men talking around a fire.

I also believe that it’s good for men, psychologically. I want to say spiritually, and I know what I mean by that, but the word spiritual could mean too many different things to different people.

This is the way that men have always played. It’s the way that fathers roughhouse with sons.

We are not so different from dogs in the way we play-fight, and we’d wag our tails if we had them. Playing this game makes us happy.

Dogs can really go at it and never draw blood or hurt each other. They know when to stop. If they hurt each other, it is only by accident or because things escalated and got out of hand.

Men are the same. Today, most of us are raised to be so nice to each other that I often have to tell new guys that it is OK to be a little mean. There is a difference between hurting someone and injuring them.

This game is supposed to hurt. There are weird nerds who call that masochism, but they don’t know what they’re talking about.

They should join our club.

To paraphrase Patton, it’s not about getting hurt, it’s about hurting the other guy. Getting hurt is just part of the process.

And this is good for men, too.

It’s become popular for men to say that “comfort is the enemy.”

Well, you know what’s uncomfortable? Some guy who is bigger than you on top of you, trying to choke you unconscious. That is real fucking uncomfortable. But it’s good for men, psychologically—maybe even spiritually—to have to push through that. To want to give up, when you can barely breathe, and you’re in pain, when you don’t know what to do, and the guy is just better than you. To have to dig deep and find that part of yourself that says “not today” and find a way to hold out or get out of a bad position. To refuse to give up and solve the problem and get to a place where you can breathe again. Fuck your cold showers and ice baths. That’s some self-overcoming. That’s medicine. Do that twenty times a week and repeat. Then go home, take a hot shower, and be glad you can.

On the mats, you always hear guys saying, “I really needed this.”

Because we do need this.

“After fighting, everything else in your life got the volume turned down. You could deal with anything.”

—Fight Club

Submission grappling isn’t real fighting, strictly speaking, and I talked about why in the first part of this essay.

But you know what I mean.

Some parts are the same, or at least connected.

Submission grappling is a game, but one of the things that I think keeps it interesting is that it is an endless game.

It’s become a cliché to say that grappling is like physical chess. I don’t play chess, but there is probably something to that.

There are always new strategies to learn, and the game becomes more interesting as you get better.

They say purple belt is the most fun, and while I can’t speak to being a brown or black belt, purple has been fun for me. The game became less stressful. No one expects you to be a master. You’re just supposed to be pretty good and have some idea what you’re doing. The basic principles are there. I don’t feel like I’m in mortal danger most of the time, so I can try weird shit and fuck around and find out.

Submission grappling can also create a “flow state,” which can become a positive addiction.

(This has nothing to do with “flow rolling.”)

A flow state is a mental state in which you become totally engaged in an activity. You stop thinking about bills, work, the news—whatever else is going on in your world. You become totally immersed in a task, “in the zone.”

People also enter flow states while playing video games.

To enter a flow state, you need clear goals and immediate feedback, which grappling obviously provides. You try something, and it works, or it doesn’t, and you’re immediately presented with a new problem.

A flow state also requires a balance between your skill level and the challenge of the task.

If a grappling opponent’s skill, strength, or speed is totally overwhelming, you’ll probably never enter a flow state and will be more likely to experience anxiety. I remember rolling with a 210-pound D1 wrestler back when I was a white belt. I felt like I was going to have a panic attack. I had no idea what was happening, and it was happening too fast. I held it together, of course, but I definitely did not enter a flow state.

The same is true if your opponent is too much smaller or weaker or comparatively unskilled. You may have fun and practice good habits and maybe even get some ideas—but the exchange won’t be intense enough to enter a flow state.

Flow states are extremely fulfilling, and when people start having flow state experiences, they want to have more of them. That’s one of the things I think keeps people coming back to grappling, especially after they get injured. Flow states are hard to come by. And the immediate feedback that grappling provides is so physical, so close to initiating a “fight or flight” response, that it snaps you into a state of urgency even when you’re distracted or having a bad day.

It is easy to run down modern men, and say that we aren’t what we should be or what we used to be. And in many cases, I’d agree.

Most of us will never have occasion to crawl through the jungle with a knife in our teeth to fight another man to the death. Or fight for glory at Troy or die holding the oriflamme.

But we should also be able to recognize small movements in the right direction.

Thirty years ago, it was extremely uncommon for a man over twenty-five to be involved in any kind of sport as anything but a spectator. You got a job and watched football on TV and that was it. Even going to the gym was pretty niche. Young men who wrestled in high school and college just stopped when they left school. But, due to the rise in popularity of jiu-jitsu and submission grappling, men all over the country and the world are wrestling and competing in a combat sport well into their fifties. That’s a very positive development in terms of their own mental and physical health, and also in terms of its influence on their children and their communities. Thirty years ago, these guys would have been on their couches drinking beer. Where I train, fathers often sign up after signing up their kids, and grappling becomes an activity that brings whole families together while instilling good sportsmanship and discipline.

This introduction of middle-aged men into the world of combat sports also creates a positive intergenerational exchange. I’m 51, and I roll with 18-to 24-year-olds all the time. These young men may or may not have had positive male role models. At our gym, they are surrounded by cops, firemen, doctors, nurses, contractors, combat vets, tradesmen and all kinds of other accomplished and responsible adult men. Sometimes, they ask for advice.

They’re also seeing that men don’t have to let themselves go or fall apart at 30. And we get something from them, too. The speed and fearlessness of youth are real. Nothing makes me feel younger or more alive than starting from standing with a dude in his twenties. I’m grateful that I can still do it.

But then, men used to be virile and vital for much longer than we’ve been conditioned to think in the 20th and early 21st Centuries.

They say Leonidas was 60 when he fought in the shade at Thermopylae.

And that brings us back to Plato. Was he out of the game, or did he get a round in with Aristotle once in a while?

Everything I’ve read seems to suggest that it’s entirely possible.

And if so, I bet it was good for both of them.

Stay Solar. ऋत

I don’t play card games or board games or video games.

I don’t like gambling at all.

If you organized some kind of “team-building” exercise with a little “friendly competition,” I’d start eyeballing the exits.

Bingo? Hungry Hungry Hippos? Pin the tail on the donkey?

I’m out.

But I do like submission grappling. I guess you could say it’s my favorite game.

Two parts of that statement could be controversial. So I’m going to unpack those before I tell you why submission grappling is my favorite game.

To start, I didn’t call it “jiu-jistu.”

I didn’t call it jiu-jitsu because I’m not Japanese.

And this thing men are doing around the world in their nogi spandex superhero outfits stopped being Japanese a long time ago, to the extent that it ever was in the first place.

This thing we do isn’t Brazilian either, but everyone’s going to keep calling it BJJ in their Instagram bios. As an acronym, BJJ is uncomfortably close to a slang for blowjobs, but it’s still a hell of a lot shorter than “submission grappling” and they only give us so many characters to summarize our niche networking identities.

Hey, a sketchy acronym never stopped the BBC.

We could just call this thing wrestling, which it is. There are paintings and statues of men wrestling or grappling going back thousands of years, using what appear to be some of the same moves we use today.

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest story in the world, the powerful King Gilgamesh grappled with a man the gods had to create to compete with him. He still beat the guy, who was named Enkidu, with what is assumed to be some kind of takedown. But he was so impressed with Enkidu’s strength of body and will that the two immediately became best friends. Wrestling is old.

So we could call it wrestling, but in America, “wrestling” is the very specific sport that people do in school.

American folkstyle or scholastic wrestling is a great foundation for any kind of grappling or fighting. I wish I had done it when I was the right age. I don’t know if you can train an adult to move like a high school or collegiate wrestler. The guys who did it seem to carry some of it with them forever, even when they get old and fat. They’ll limp into the room complaining about their backs and then pull a fireman’s carry out of nowhere.

There’s also catch wrestling, which is its own rabbit hole. I kind of like its vibe, but most of the techniques that work seem to get adopted and incorporated into nogi grappling and MMA.

I guess I’ll still kick rocks and call this thing jiu-jitsu when I put on the anachronistic pajamas.

That’s when it still looks Japanese. I’m not a big fan of the gi. I don’t enjoy the gi game as much as the nogi game. It’s slow, hot, and awkward.

I used to train at Jeremy Horn’s gym in Utah, and heard him say once that gi is “a different sport.” I tend to agree. Gi is not wrong or bad, but a lot of the techniques are very specific to that particular outfit. It’s just a slightly different game.

It makes a lot of sense to be able to think about someone’s clothing as a potential weapon. In any real conflict the real advantage to gi training would be your understanding of the underlying principles of using clothing to contain or choke someone and your ability to improvise using those principles. Because you never know what someone is going to be wearing. There is no standard modern uniform. Gi transfers well to suits, but almost no one wears suits anymore but lawyers and bankers. I would strongly advise you to avoid getting in a fight with a lawyer.

If I’m calling it jiujitsu in a gi, then I guess my belt is in jiujitsu. I’m a four stripe purple belt. I’m not sure how much belts mean beyond blue, unless you’re advertising yourself as a teacher. There are so many different standards. Some people test for belts. Some people compete for them. Some gyms give them out based on time in. Some people pay for them. Favoritism and nepotism are factors more often than most would ever admit.

Most respected instructors seem to give belts and stripes out based on a mysterious combination of holistic individualized skill assessment and “vibes.” Submission grappling is always evolving so there really is no set curriculum to master. Different techniques and styles work (or don’t work) for different body types and varying levels of strength and athleticism. Age is also a factor. If you held everyone to a standard of being able to compete with a talented, dedicated, athletic 24-year-old, almost no one over 40 would ever get a belt. And offering no possibility of advancement or recognition for “Rob from accounting” would destroy many of the positive things that submission grappling has to offer young and older men alike. So belts have become a big gray area, and I think anyone who has trained at different gyms for five or more years knows that. Everyone seems to have their own idea of how it “should be,” but it don’t necessarily be like that.

I said there were two potentially controversial parts of me calling “submission grappling” my “favorite game”.

The second is the idea that it is a “game.”

A lot of people consider this thing we do “fighting” or “self-defense.” I really don’t.

There are definitely overlaps with fighting and self-defense. But as anyone who does MMA will quickly point out, you can do a lot of things in submission grappling or “sport jiujitsu” that fall apart when you can throw hands, knees, and elbows. Likewise, a lot of MMA probably falls apart if you introduce knives, eye gouging, guns, blunt objects, beer bottles, and FIGHTING FOR YOUR FUCKING LIFE.

There are levels of realism in fighting that you can’t approach with any “sport” or “game” unless you’ve been invited to some sadistic millionaire’s secret island to fight to the death for his amusement.

Self-defense in the real world also involves the law.

Most of us don’t live in the wild west, though a lot of men like to pretend that they do.

If you’re a normal man, or (worse) a man who looks a little dangerous, any serious study of self defense has to address the local laws and how a judge, a DA, or a jury will evaluate your use of force.

As exciting as your Van Damme fantasy might be, if you have to use violence, in most places you will be expected to flee or neutralize your attacker and avoid using “excessive” force—whatever that means to whoever is evaluating it. And the people evaluating it will probably be people who have never been in a fight and have absolutely no familiarity with physical violence.

The world is also full of hard surfaces and if you accidentally beat your attacker to death, you may end up facing a charge. If you maim him, there could be a civil suit.

That doesn’t have to make sense or be right.

If you’re attacked, I don’t think you should have to think about what happens to your attacker.

But the law has almost nothing to do with what makes sense or what is right.

Thanks to the engineered decline of American cities, and decades of the left bankrolling inner city judges, DAs, and lawmakers, the places where you are most likely to have to resort to violence are the places where you will also be judged most harshly for doing so. That’s the reality of the situation.

Putting legal issues, knives, and blunt objects aside, MMA is about as close as you can get to real fighting as a “sport” or “game.”

I’ve trained MMA and striking in the past, but I do think there is a sunset on how much hard sparring you want to do. If you’re a young guy, go train MMA or Muay Thai, and then retire into submission grappling in your late 30s or early 40s for “fun.” You probably don’t need to get kicked or punched in the head or knees for decades upon decades.

All of that said, I have always preferred to train submission grappling in gyms that have an MMA or self-defense focus and instructors who have an awareness of and a natural aversion to techniques that only work on soft mats or in situations where no one can punch you in the face. I don’t want my go-to strategy in an emergency to be a guard pull or a butt scoot.

In terms of self-defense, what I do think I get out of submission grappling is a familiarity with managing another man who wants to hurt me. It is true that a meth-head who doesn’t care if he lives or dies is going to bring a different energy to a fight than “Rob from accounting.” But I think someone who actually manages another man’s weight and strength 2-4 times a week, like Rob and I, is much better prepared to deal with a real fight—especially if he hasn’t learned to forget about kicks and punches—than some guy who has only ever watched fighting on TV.

Rob and I have also developed some balance and timing and reactions that require practice.

For instance, if someone shoots a sloppy takedown on me, there is a 90% chance my body will have them in a guillotine before we hit the ground. I won’t have to think about it. It’s just a really high percentage move for me, and I’ve had it locked in for 6-8 years. I also know how and usually when to bail out of it or roll and finish it from mount. So, if the fall doesn’t break my back or knock me out, dude is probably getting choked. There are a lot of little things like that in my toolkit for a real fight. Some are so second nature that I don’t even know them.

However, real violence is chaotic. There are tons of variables and anything could happen. So I’m not delusional and I don’t present myself as some kind of badass. But I do think I am better prepared to deal with violence than a man who has never practiced a functional martial art.

By “functional” martial art, I mean one that involves regular sparring of some kind. If you’re not rolling or sparring with a wide variety of other men who want to win against you on a regular basis, you’re basically just learning dance moves.

I’ve talked a little shit here.

But in Part 2 of this essay on “my favorite game” I will revert to being a proper member of the jiu-jit…I mean, “submission grappling” cult.

I’m going to talk about why I recommend that men practice submission grappling, and why the popularity of BJJ—or whatever you want to call it—has made such a positive contribution to modern Western culture.

Stay Solar

The photo above was a still taken from a video of me grappling with one of the members of the Order of Fire at our recent Arizona Fire Ritual event.

Check out our ritual event recap video.

The Order of Fire is currently accepting applications.

Find Out More and Apply To Join

https://orderoffire.com/

The new Netflix documentary “Inside the Manosphere” is not about “The Manosphere.”

It’s a documentary about any male influencer catering to a young, male audience who was willing to perform in Louis Theroux’s freak show for reusable coffee-cup-clutching London Capitolites.

A serious documentary about “The Manosphere” as a men’s movement that emerged in the 2010s as a response to the excesses of Third Wave feminism and the dystopian society it created could still be filmed, but this isn’t it. No attempt was made to discuss the history or context of the “manosphere,” and few of its early authors or influencers were featured or mentioned.

To be fair, Theroux’s team did make an effort.

I was actually invited to participate by producer Oli Roy, but I declined.

(See screenshots of his email and my response below.)

I remember talking to Anthony “Dream” Johnson about this at the time. Johnson was known as the “President of the Manosphere” for several years. He indicated that Theroux’s team had reached out to several of the other men we knew. I suspect that, like myself, none of them were ultimately willing to give Theroux the clown show he wanted.

So he found guys with names like “HStikkyTokky” (aka Harrison Sullivan) to interview instead.

The Actual Manosphere

The word “manosphere” was originally coined to describe a cluster of blogs written by and for men that emerged in the late 2000s, which were critical of feminist and liberal orthodoxies. It was a riff on the term “blogosphere,” which was used at the time to describe the online world of “blogs,” which is where we were all writing back then.

I entered the “manosphere” around 2010, when I started writing about masculinity theory for a Men’s Rights Activism (MRA) blog known as The Spearhead. These MRA blogs overlapped with Pick-Up-Artist (PUA) blogs and blogs for “Men Going Their Own Way” (MGTOW) in terms of interest and audience. There were occasional ripples in these communities from the exhausted mythopoetic men’s movement in the 1990s. However, much of the more philosophical content was focused on establishing a realistic view of the contemporary sexual marketplace and exploring human nature, a concept that blank slate feminists had rejected. We were all writing about the conflict between masculinity and feminism from different perspectives in the early 2010s, sharing thoughts and information.

The real standout was “Roissy in DC,” later known as “Heartiste.” Like many of the men writing during that period, many attempts were made to silence and deplatform him, but an archive of the original site and its history is still live at https://heartiste.org/. If you want to understand where the majority of the “red pill” ideas that are commonplace in what Theroux presents as “The Manosphere” now came from, read Heartiste.

Of course, many other authors and influencers came and went, and some of us are still around. There were manosphere meetups and conferences, such as the International Conference on Men’s Issues (ICMI), organized by MRA Paul Elam, and the 21 Convention, organized by Johnson. The 21 Convention included speakers like Dr. Robert Glover, Rollo Tomassi, Richard Cooper, Noah Revoy, Pastor Michael Foster, Richard Grannon, Pat Stedman, Elliot Hulse, Alexander Cortes, Tanner Guzy, and yours truly. There were also many, many PUA coaches, who sometimes took guys at the conference out into “the field” in Orlando nightclubs to show them how to pick up girls.

The rise of Jordan B. Peterson and influencers like Jocko Willink in the mid 2010s accompanied the return of GWOT vets, and sincere interest in the Western “crisis of masculinity” went semi-mainstream. I think a lot of vets came back from overseas, wondering, “What the hell happened to men in my country?” They encountered all of the problems with feminism and the growing gender and sexual confusion that “The Manosphere” had already outlined, tried to make sense of it, and attempted to point men in a more productive direction. A number of more positive influencers and podcasters emerged, basically replacing bloggers—including Ryan Michler’s and his “Order of Man.”

The original “Manosphere” could have reasonably been described as being politically libertarian, or “libertarian-ish” in orientation.

Chateau Heartiste’s slogan was “where pretty lies perish.” When men realize they’ve been lied to about what women want, they naturally start to wonder what other “pretty lies” the liberal establishment and mainstream media have told them. So there were many intersections between “The Manosphere” and the human biodiversity and race realist movements, religious movements, the “dark enlightenment,” and various other conservative and “right-wing” political movements.

Before Jordan Peterson, aside from PUA coaching, there wasn’t a lot of money in talking about masculinity as a man unless you spoke for “The Cathedral” as a male feminist.

However, social media revealed what advertisers have long understood: male insecurity can be monetized. So a bunch of guys who cared about money far more than they cared about helping men or being a positive influence on society appeared and saturated the “manosphere’s” market with sensational clips of them repeating “red pill” truths and distortions alike, while talking about “the matrix” as if they had just watched the 1999 movie and come up with all of these ideas themselves. Using armies of foreign video clippers, they dominated the attention economy through short-form video and streaming. In doing so, they spread both the most sensible and the most extreme ideas of the Manosphere to a new and very young audience.

For many, the early Manosphere was primarily a reaction to radical feminism. So, when feminist magazines and websites started folding, and many feminists were cowed into submission by the trans community that labeled them TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists), some of the guys ran out of things to say, pivoted, or became irrelevant.

The Manosphere, as I originally experienced it, was a very big tent full of different factions of men who shared many of the same concerns about what was happening to men and masculinity. However, some feuds emerged between major players, and the whole scene started to look cliquish and melodramatic. Some performatively Christian masculinity influencers stopped cooperating with everyone else and began sabotaging or distancing themselves from any elements of the broader men’s movement they couldn’t control. Red Pill and PUA guys moved on or just focused on their areas of expertise. The fitness guys went back to the gym.

Many of us were, by the early 2020s, speaking and writing about the Manosphere in the past tense. The conferences disappeared, and to whatever extent the Manosphere endured, it had become unrecognizable to those who pioneered it.

The Manosphere had also accomplished its original mission. It shifted the Overton Window. Conversations about men and women and feminism that were beyond the pale in the 2010s were becoming mainstream, and “woke” leftism, after peaking in 2020-2022, was becoming “un-cool” with the kids.

As I mentioned above, the Manosphere’s ideas had been picked up and disseminated by a younger crop of social media-savvy influencers who could connect with younger men and possessed sales and marketing skills that many of the OG guys lacked.

All of that was happening somewhat under the radar until it started looking like Trump would win the 2024 election. The mainstream media continues to be clueless about how the left lost young men. They seem incapable of meaningful self-reflection or of recognizing that telling men what they should want is not the same as giving them what they actually want. It turns out that demonizing men for four generations and telling them to step aside because “the future is female” somehow didn’t win over their hearts or minds. But since they can’t admit fault or wrongdoing without changing their core messages, all they seem to be able to do is point, sputter, and assign blame.

“It must have been those terrible Manosphere podcasts corrupting the minds of the youth!”

All kinds of lefty rags picked up the dead Manosphere label and applied it to every male podcaster or influencer with a mostly male audience who had shifted away from the woke Democrats. Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and even Tucker Carlson were included in their new “Manosphere.”

A Clown Show Inside a Circus

Today, for bewildered leftist cucks like Theroux, the “Manosphere” includes any male influencer who goes off message and says anything that conflicts with feminism or the orthodoxies of liberal globalists.

This is the true entry point of Theroux’s documentary. “Inside the Manosphere” is not a documentary about The Manosphere as it would be recognized by anyone who was actually involved in it. It’s a documentary about the bugaboo of the Manosphere that the media is using to rationalize the international shift in the Zeitgeist revealed by Trump’s 2024 election.

In the documentary itself, Theroux plays a surrogate for his intended audience, asking concerned, out-of-touch questions and objecting when he feels compelled to signal virtue on behalf of polite society. He awkwardly follows around some extremely materialistic male influencers as they show off their cars, luxury apartments, fans, view counts, and assorted whores.

Theroux set up some “gotcha” moments for his subjects, but most of them fizzled. He was trying to catch the influencers in a contradiction and make them look like liars or frauds, but he was unsuccessful because most of these guys openly admit that they just say things to get a reaction from their audience. Their shared expertise is, for the most part, producing viral, controversial clips for short-form video platforms. When Theroux attempted to call out Harrison for saying “Fuck the Jews,” without missing a beat, Harrison said, “I was just clip farming. I don’t really hate the Jews.”

You can’t catch a man in a contradiction if he tells you his words mean nothing.

Theroux managed to make Sneako look like a kid out of his depth and Myron Gaines look like a creepy manipulator, but only by letting them be themselves. The documentary won’t hurt either of them. Harrison Sullivan came off looking exactly like the man his fans want him to be. If anyone seemed to get caught out of character, it was Justin Waller. He seemed like a potentially decent man with some kind of moral compass who was pretending to be a sociopath for the Internet. Or maybe he’s just the slickest one, and he conned me, too. I have no idea.

I turned down Theroux’s little expose because I’d want to say things that I believed were serious and important and be assured that they would go on record. I would have wanted to talk about some of the history I shared in this essay. But I’ve dealt with mainstream journalists and documentary producers—who tend to be world-class time wasters—enough to know that would never happen, even before Netflix got its hands on the rough cut. These infotainment documentary producers are just looking for a few sexy, funny, or outrageous clips. Truth is not high in their hierarchy of values.

If a meaningful truth was exposed, it was about the similarity between Theroux and his subjects.

The most cutting and insightful remark in this documentary about “The Manosphere” came from a woman.

When Theroux brought up the legal charges that Harrison was evading in the UK, Harrison’s protective mother intervened.

“If you don’t agree with what Harrison’s doing, then why are you making money off of it on a program by publicizing it?”

That was the real “gotcha.”

I’m surprised they left it in. But the fact that they did makes it a better product. Which is, as Harrison’s mom pointed out, all it is at the end of the day.

She exposed the reality that we were watching two men from different generations doing pretty much the same thing. They were both promoting, perpetuating, and profiting from controversy.

Theroux has been stacking cash by chasing controversy and attention for twenty-five years. He’s played his curious and confused but ultimately respectable Last Man character in documentaries about Nazis, prisoners, prostitutes, Scientologists, far-right activists, drug addicts, anorexic, and murderers. He even chased down Joe Exotic, the “Tiger King.”

If “The Manosphere” looks like a clown show, it is a clown show inside Theroux’s long-running circus.

And if it has a positive message, it is that there are all kinds of people who make their living from selling controversy, and their version of “being real” is faker than anything or anyone they criticize.

Stay Solar ऋत

If you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy my recent related essay, “The Ringmaster’s Advice.”

If you want to read more about broader history and context of The (actual) Manosphere, Grokipedia does a pretty good job. The Wikipedia article was, as one might expect, primarily authored by a lesbian feminist.

Last year, I wrote that most of the best men I know would describe themselves as being “kinda libertarian.”

Libertarian-ish.

What that means is that, like me, they want to maximize their own agency. They don’t want the government or anyone else micromanaging their lives. And, because they’re reasonable and fair-minded guys, they figure that means staying out of other men’s business as well.

It’s a Platonic spin on the Golden Rule, where justice means that everyone minds their own business because they all just want to be left alone.

“Don’t Tread on Me,” or, basically, “fuck off,” is baked into the American mindset.

All of my ancestors got here in the 19th Century, so I’m not the biggest fan of the phrase “Heritage American.” But one aspect of our collective American heritage is that most of us come from people who left some claustrophobic space overseas with lower social mobility and a lot more “rules” to come try their luck in a wide open space and relative anarchy.

“Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above…Don’t fence me in…”

And this kept on going, especially out here in the West, well into the 20th Century. If you want to try something crazy—any damn thing—head in the general direction of California. Make a movie. Invent something wild. Build a roadside attraction. Start a cult.

Any damn thing.

I love that America. I love that about America. I love any damn thing.

America is still big, and you can still drive for countless hours on freeways that the European mind cannot comprehend. There are plenty of places where there’s no one around for miles and miles.

But America isn’t quite so wide open or anarchic anymore. A lot of places are actually pretty crowded. And power—the kind of power that other people can and will use to micromanage your life—can reach every isolated trailer and secluded backwater.

We all learned that, or should have, in 2020-2022. We all should have learned that there are people who aren’t “libertarian-ish.” Not even a little bit. Petty tyrants who get off on abusing administrative control and anti-human idealists who can only be happy if you help them realize their vision and sign on to their revolution. We found out, or should have, that there are a lot of them. And if you give them power, any power at all, they will use it to get more. They will NOT leave you alone. And they will NOT let you do “any damn thing.” They might not even let you leave your house.

If I have one political orientation, it is making sure those people can never do that again.

Guys who want to appear “enlightened” and “above it all” think it makes them sound cool to say there is no difference between the political parties in America.

As George Carlin said, “It’s one big club, and you ain’t in it.”

To a certain extent, that is true and always has been. One of the most disappointing things about Donald E. Brown’s list of Human Universals is that “oligarchy” seems to be more or less our default system of political organization as a species. And, if you’re really honest with yourself and take a sober look at history, you know that’s the truth.

Let’s not live in a world of lies.

But let’s also admit that it DOES matter which oligarchy is in charge. Kings and dictators stay in power because a particular class of wealthy men make that possible. Sometimes, they get snatched from their beds in the middle of the night when other groups of wealthier or more daring men decide that would be in their best interests. Communist and fascist parties alike always end up functioning as some kind of oligarchy. The best and worst societies in history were all effectively oligarchies.

Every year in Davos, a bunch of oligarchs get together and talk about how they want to subvert your elected governments and reshape the world. Most people weren’t really paying attention to them until 2020, when they realized that their “conspiracy” was actually being televised. Billionaires like George Soros have been telling us what they want, and they have been using their foundations to reshape our world more or less openly for many years.

I’m not going to unpack all of that here, but Matthew Crawford recently wrote about the “Open Society” that many of those oligarchs want. It’s basically what I have been calling “The Empire of Nothing” for a decade—since I wrote about it in Becoming a Barbarian.

This is not the world that ALL of the oligarchs want. Elon Musk may be crazy in his own way and he has his own wild sci-fi dreams. I don’t agree with everything he says or wants. Sometimes he seems almost naive. But that man is, in spirit, as American as fuck. The guy who figured he could catch rockets definitely belongs to my America of “any damn thing.”

Oligarchs may effectively run America, but they are still playing a grand Game of Thrones with each other. It actually does matter who wins, if you want to maximize your agency and keep as much of the America of “any damn thing” as alive as possible.

You can say there is only one political party, but you won’t convince me. That’s a very low-resolution cope.

In 2020, I sold my house and my land and moved from a blue state to a red state because the difference between how the two teams were handling the world situation was like night and day.

I’ve lived in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and I can tell you there is no place in America I’d rather live than California. It’s America’s most beautiful state, and it has the best weather. It’s not even close. It’s our Mediterranean. But I’m not there, because the wrong people—working for the wrong oligarchs—ended up in charge. The bureaucracy there is so byzantine and corrupt, favoring the worst kinds of behavior. Until California is solidly a red state, if that is even possible, you won’t catch me there for more than a few days.

Before you say it, yes, I realize that some of the guys on the red team are working for or with the wrong oligarchs. Many of them are also corrupt. Everyone knows that. Your average Boomer who watches FOX News knows that at this point.

I wrote that most of the best men I know would describe themselves as being “kinda libertarian.” But they’re NOT libertarians. And neither am I. Because we’re not retarded.

Capital “L” libertarians, for the most part, believe in open borders and free trade. They don’t want anyone telling anyone what to do. This makes them our allies when the Empire of Nothing oligarchs are trying to micromanage our lives. But it makes them enemies of any meaningful spirit of nationalism. The open borders guys and international free trade guys will undermine and sabotage any policy that puts the interests of American citizens first. This makes them the allies of the Empire of Nothing. Libertarians hate government, so they will try to undermine whoever is in power at any given time as soon as the people in power actually try to DO anything.

Matt Forney, an interesting character and OG manosphere writer who recommended The Way of Men in 2012 under the pseudonym Ferdinand Bardamu, recently wrote this banger that I can’t get out of my head.

“This fundamental nihilism of libertarians is why they cannot be trusted, ever. Libertarians are not conservatives who like to smoke pot. They are libtards who hate paying taxes. They are natural allies of the left.”

I’m not sure if that’s exactly true, but it is catchy.

Whether it is true or not, the grand strategy of the “libtards” or blue team who are advancing the interests of the Empire of Nothing oligarchs has been to flood nations with immigrants and then control them with handouts and preferential treatment in exchange for votes, collected by any means possible. This strategy has worked, which is why Somalians are influential in the politics of Minnesota, and a Muslim communist was just elected to run New York City.

If there is one thing that communists, Muslims, and the Open Society oligarchs DO NOT care about, it is individual liberty. You know…that thing that makes guys say they are “kinda libertarian.” The folks from The Empire of Nothing also don’t care about a “free market of ideas,” either.

To make it current, a few days ago, Virginia Democrats passed a law requiring public school teachers in the state to teach the Democrats’ version of the January 6 “insurrection,” specifying the language they must use to describe the events of that day if they discuss them at all. In the UK, Australia, and Canada, you can already be charged for hate speech crimes if you speak out about the immigrants that their bureaucrats are flooding their countries with to undermine the influence of voters whose families have lived there for generations. We already know that many tech companies will censor speech in favor of the Open Society oligarchs and the political parties they control when those parties are in power. If you lived through 2020-2022 as an adult, you know this.

This is a zero-sum game.

The Empire of Nothing oligarchs will do anything to stack the deck and make sure they attain absolute, lasting control of everyone’s speech, movement, personal health choices, everything. There won’t BE a Libertarian Party to poison the well of the winning team. There won’t BE a bunch of blackpilling trolls sharing spicy podcast clips and hot takes. Those people will all be deplatformed, silenced, or imprisoned.

What libertarians don’t seem to realize is that open borders allow bad actors to manipulate elections, and that will essentially destroy everything that libertarians—and their libertarian-ish occasional supporters—actually care about. Not for four or eight years. Those “nothing ever happens” days are over. Generations will suffer for this.

If you want to maximize individual agency within a nation, you have to tightly control its borders. This is partly to reduce foreign influence and manipulation in elections. But it’s also because greater agency requires a high-trust society. At least, you need a high-trust society to enjoy greater agency and a high standard of living. If you want a low-trust society with a lower standard of living and a less effective and therefore less oppressive bureaucracy, go to India.

I am a pragmatic man, at heart. And that’s a very American thing to be.

It’s not that I can’t imagine a more perfect society, but if you can’t show me a realistic pathway to get there from where we are, I’m not interested. Write a novel or a whole dialogue about what a perfect society might look like. That’s fun, but if we’re talking politics, I want to hear a real plan.

Show me the flow chart.

Where can we realistically get to that is better, starting where we are now?

We will always be ruled by a wealthy elite. Rich men are always going to get away with things, sometimes really bad things, that we should not want for ourselves and could not hope to get away with. This has always been true. Name a nation or civilization one quarter as comparably large, wealthy, and powerful as the United States is right now, in which that was not the case. I’ll wait.

(I’m just kidding. Not waiting. It never happened, and it’s not real.)

So manage your expectations a little bit.

The best we can hope for is to have the best oligarchs win.

And by “the best,” I mean “the best” for us. For me. For you. For the men and women who were born and raised here. I’m rooting for the oligarchs who facilitate the maximum amount of individual freedom and the highest quality of life for American citizens.

When I wrote Becoming a Barbarian in 2016, things looked pretty bad. It looked like the United States was locked into the managed decline and engineered dysfunction pioneered by the Europeans and Commonwealth nations. Feminism, gender confusion, obesity, and a postmodern sense of meaninglessness and disconnection were not only being promoted but also institutionalized. That was the mainstream, and it looked like it would last a long time. An America that deserved to be mocked and hated. I figured anyone who was against all of that was going to have to “go to the mattresses,” as the mafia would say, become “barbarians”—outsiders—and wait it out.

Then this wild real estate mogul who likes putting his name on buildings in flashy gold came along and said, “What if we don’t have to decline?”

“What if we actually have the best hand of cards and we play to win?”

I was skeptical. I thought we were cooked. And we still might be.

It took a while, but Trump tapped into younger Americans’ collective rejection of self-flagellation, self-hatred, and self-sabotage. And that’s all the Democrats had to offer—more of the same. A culture that hated being American, and desperately wanted to replace anyone who liked being an American with anyone else, from anywhere, who believed anything else, as long as—like Boomers—they hated everything about America but the American dollar, which they also pretended to hate.

Americans wanted to win again. They wanted to be proud to be Americans and to be part of a winning team.

It started with a slogan.

“Make America Great Again.”

But that’s not a mature political ideology. It’s a hat.

MAGA is attached to a man—one of history’s Great Men, in the sense that Thomas Carlyle meant it—but still, just a man. Powered by Big Macs, Diet Coke, and a dream, he seems to have boundless energy for “the great game,” but he is 79 years old. If America is truly going to experience anything that could be called a new Golden Age, the energy he harnessed must not only survive his presidency and the man himself but also gain enough momentum to continue inspiring people and guiding policy for decades.

In the long term, MAGA is essentially American Nationalism.

Nationalism has acquired a bad name, and people who hate nationalism will try to associate it with 20th-century fascism as soon as possible. That used to work.

The Boomer generation was terrified that any serious nationalism would inevitably end in global thermonuclear war. Maybe that was a good thing for them to be afraid of, and maybe that’s partially why it never happened. And it’s good that it never happened, and currently seems unlikely to happen, even if Americans stop hating themselves.

Today, I think more people realize that the hatred of nationalism comes from the people who hate nations, because they still want the “workers of the world” to “unite.” Marx and Engels argued in the Manifesto of the Communist Party that “working men have no country.”

I hope more people realize today that the rhetoric of communism is a con for plebs promoted by aspiring oligarchs who want to manage the redistribution of wealth. The plebs never actually win after they are “united.” They mostly just die or live in poverty and fear until the descendants of the original communist oligarchs get bored and sloppy and everything falls apart. I hope this is true, but some people will always fall for the same old con.

“It will be different this time...”

Nationalism is the only legitimate attitude of, well…a nation. Any government that isn’t nationalistic is essentially treasonous to the people born within its borders. When individual men cede some personal autonomy to any organizing body, they do it, at least in theory, because they believe it will make their lives better. If that government seems to be doing anything but making the lives of its citizens or subjects better, if it seems to be more concerned with the welfare of outsiders than insiders, or if the people at the top are taxing and spending for their own benefit, historically, we call that tyranny. That is, unless they can convince the masses that their lives getting worse is actually somehow “better,” and that seems to have been the aim of many of these managerial states.

I’m not a political theorist or a policy guy. I hate writing about politics, to be honest, and I only do it to work ideas out for myself and to argue with the guys who follow me who seem to be going off the rails or in what I believe is an unproductive direction.

And every once in a while, I seem to put a ripple out into the ether.

There are people on both the right and left who are addicted to the idea that nothing will ever be good enough until America becomes “something radically different,” no matter how much violence and suffering that would cause, and without any real sense of what that looks like or a viable plan to get there. So they reject any reasonable plan that might get us to “better” because it will never be some idiosyncratic “best.” And in doing so, they effectively hand the country to the people who have been content to manage and profit from America’s decline in approximately the way that European elites managed and profited from the declines of their own nations

I’ve written about things that I thought were bad, but I don’t want that to be my whole brand. I genuinely want America to get better. I want the Americans around me to be successful. I want to be proud to be an American. It’s the only nationality I can ever truly be.

So here is what American Nationalism looks like to me:

First, a nation is literally defined by its boundaries. The government of that nation has a duty to serve the collective interests of its citizens. Any duty a nation has to “humanity” or “the world” or the citizens of any other nation should always be subordinate to the interests of its citizens. Let’s call this Rule One.

In Becoming a Barbarian, I wrote about the “moral gear shift.” In the book I am working on, I call it the Janian model of morality, referring to the Roman god of gates. Men should have one face for outsiders and another for insiders, and be ruthless about maintaining the integrity of that boundary to maintain order and prosperity. A nation, like any home, needs to control who comes in and out. When you buy groceries, you don’t expect strangers to walk in, open the fridge, and make a sandwich.

That said, the United States isn’t a colonial backwater anymore. It’s one of the world’s major economic and military powers, in constant competition with other major nationalistic powers—like Russia and China. Absolute isolationism isn’t a realistic option. All kinds of actions have to be taken to maintain access to the resources and alliances necessary for maintaining the prosperity of a major world power. But if American military and economic power is overextended and the cost-benefit ratio starts to look bad over a long enough period of time, refer back to Rule One.

Beyond that, let’s return to the household model. What you’d want for your nation is essentially what you’d want for your family and friends.

I want my family and friends to be successful. If I had kids in the house, I’d want them to have substantial opportunities to work, become self-sufficient, and start their own households. I’d want them to have social and economic mobility and be able to work hard to build better lives. Not everyone has to become rich, nor does anyone “deserve” to become rich. Not everyone cares about acquisition to the same extent. But I’d want my friends and family to be able to find reasonably fulfilling work and maintain a relatively high standard of living. I’d want my kids, friends, or family to be healthy and strong — not just “functional.” We’re humans—physical beings—and the state of our bodies influence our entire life experience and our sense of happiness and fulfillment. So, if I were running a household or influencing a community, I’d do things to facilitate and encourage the health and vitality of those people.

I’d also want things in my family or community to be orderly. I’d want people who break the rules or threaten the health, property, or prosperity of others to be punished or removed from the household or community. There are also social norms and boundaries that have to be established and maintained to live in a healthy, functioning society of humans. I say humans, specifically, because if you don’t account for human nature—which is the mistake that Boomers made—whatever society you create is going to be extremely dysfunctional. As nice an idea as the “free market of ideas” is, every functional human society has taboos and socially unacceptable ideas. Every household needs a household culture. Returning from the scale of a household to the scale of America, I don’t think America can be “great again” until we make communism and Marxist thought socially unacceptable again. McCarthy didn’t go hard enough.

That’s basically what American Nationalism means to me. This is very simple, and I’m sure people will argue about the individual details at a more complex level of discourse. But what I’ve outlined is something reasonable that I think a lot of people could get on board with.

America is more than just an “idea.” It’s also about 316 million legal citizens who are more American than they can ever be anything else.

The once popular, now widely reviled Vivek Ramaswamy has consistently made the mistake of invoking what could be called “Ellis Island Americanism.” It is true that America was once a place of seemingly endless land and opportunity, and Americans did invite and welcome the tired, hungry, and poor from all over the world. These people settled America, and America needed settlers because it is difficult to maintain claims on land if it isn’t settled, inhabited, and run by your citizens. But that has long since been accomplished. No foreign nation is disputing America’s claim to its 50 states. America no longer needs to be what I called in Becoming a Barbarian, the “Mother of Exiles.”

Whoever is here, legally, is here. They’re Americans. We may not all get along, but if we draw the line between Americans and foreigners and keep it, I think we can work things out. If we don’t, we never will. Getting rid of the people who are not here legally is going to hurt some feelings and get a little ugly, but the world isn’t fair. A nation without meaningful borders isn’t a nation at all.

I want to live in the American Golden Age. I want to see it happen. I want to see Americans win, be prosperous, and be healthy. To do that, I think we’ll have to let go of some persistent libertarian fantasies rooted in a time and a reality that is long gone. America is an Empire now. And I want to see it become an American Empire, not an Empire of Nothing.

If you enjoyed this essay, read or listen to my 2016 book Becoming a Barbarian, which has influenced many thinkers and remains relevant today.

The paperback and Kindle editions of The Order of Fire’s Journal of Solar Culture, Volume 03, exploring and advancing the religion and philosophy of Solar Idealism, were just released last week.

Listening to old men complain about young men is like listening to a conversation about the weather.

It’s so predictable that it’s comforting.

“Oh really, is there a problem with these kids today? Let’s get to the bottom of this…”

Each generation of young men will adopt some goofy style and haircut. They will have strange customs and slangs, and they will do things a little differently as they respond to a different environment than “what we had back in our day, when things made sense.”

One of the predictable features of men is that some of them will always try to distinguish themselves in some way from the men who preceded them.

This is actually why all universalist ideologies schism. The moment you accept that one truth is absolute and reject all tweaking—there’s nothing for the new kids to do. If humanity were ever to develop the perfect system, after a few generations, some new kids would tear it apart out of sheer boredom.

This was actually one of the first criticisms I received about The Way of Men. It was author Sam Sheridan, actually. In a Facebook message, he said something like “don’t men always complain about the failing masculinity of men in the next generation?”

It’s true, they do.

But that doesn’t mean that we can’t notice trends that seem to be moving in the wrong direction.

So, I’m not going to complain about haircuts or slang.

People have attributed so many social and political tendencies to Zoomers and Generation Alpha that reading them is more like listening to someone interpret a Rorschach test than anything else. People see what they want to see.

But I do have one concern that I believe is valid when it comes to “kids today.”

Many who came of age in the last decade do seem to have accepted and internalized what social media taught them: that attention is the highest value, no matter what it is for.

“Well, it got a lot of views and a ton of engagement” seems to be reason enough for saying or doing almost anything. That’s what all of the platforms reward, whether you’re an aspiring political pundit or Mr. Beast.

And that’s what we’re all told to do if we want to be “relevant.”

Say something controversial, maybe even crazy. Get people to fight about it.

It doesn’t matter if it’s true, or whether you believe it—as long as it commands eyeballs and thumbs.

Social media elevates the type who says something wild and then laughs, unaffected, as the plebs fight it out in the comments.

That creates power. One thing I noticed about the Liver King at his peak, is that he’d created and seemed to be feeding off entire ecosystems of haters and supporters. Other people were making money just talking about him. And that just made him more famous. It was impressive, though eventually it seemed to have taken a toll on the man himself. But while it may have broken Brian Johnson, the other Brian Johnson is still running a different kind of freakshow, and Andrew Tate seems to thrive on negative attention. Like the Venom symbiote, hate and rage just seem to make him stronger.

There is no question that creating a spectacle works. You can’t argue with results. People who can command attention and monetize it win the Internet.

But.. is it good?

Does it create the best men, the best society, the best kind of life?

People say, “any publicity is good publicity” all the time. It’s become a modern truism. But people don’t seem to give much thought to where it came from.

While there is no proof that he used exactly those words, the quote is widely attributed to showman P.T. Barnum. I think it’s safe to say that even if he never said “any publicity is good publicity,” it describes his lived ethos.

P.T. Barnum was the founder of the Barnum & Bailey Circus, billed as “The Greatest Show on Earth.” He advertised fake mermaids and a woman who claimed to be George Washington’s 161-year-old nurse. Barnum’s traveling shows featured midgets, Siamese twins, bearded ladies, and even “Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy.”

There’s no record of him saying these exact words either, but he is also widely credited with the quote, “there’s a sucker born every minute.”

P.T. Barnum did describe himself as the “Prince of Humbug,” proudly owning his reputation for hoaxes and “harmless” deceptions.

Barnum was an interesting character, but he’s not a man we should be encouraging other men, especially young men, to emulate. Unfortunately, his ethos is more or less what social media has been teaching kids for the past ten years.

And at the same time, everyone complains that everything is “fake and ghey.”

Well… if you follow the ringmaster’s advice, don’t be surprised when you end up living in a circus.

During last week’s State of the Union Address, we were shown a very different sort of man: U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer 5 Eric Slover. The helicopter pilot was acknowledged for heroic action in a clandestine mission in Venezuela. Slover was part of a unit known as the “night stalkers” and he was supporting a Delta Force operation. Both groups are well known for working quietly and avoiding public attention.

As he received his medal in front of the Joint Session of Congress and the world via live broadcast, Slover looked extremely uncomfortable. He had the look of a man who knew he was being greatly honored, but who was not used to and somewhat bothered by participating in a massive spectacle.

Chasing spectacles wasn’t what put him in that room. Slover is very likely a man who has spent his life chasing excellence and the quiet recognition and respect of his peers.

Honor is a man’s reputation for virtue in his peer group, and Slover’s virtue fits the oldest Roman definition of virtus there is.

Honor and virtue are the opposite of “any publicity is good publicity.”

While the guy who runs a circus and a freak show revels in being known as the “prince of humbug,” to a man who cares about his reputation for virtue, being publicly recognized as a con artist, a cheat, a liar, or a coward would be deeply disturbing. Imagine what a man like Slover’s reaction to being accused of things like that would be. He would be mortified.

The social media influencer who feeds on attention would call that a weakness. But that’s because he really has no honor or reputation that matters to him. He has no values beyond money and attention, or will say he does and then change them when the wind blows in another direction.

Humans evolved to operate in small groups, and as men, our desire for honor is a product of that kind of environment. How do we process the fickle evaluations of the faceless multitudes?

Many of the best men avoid dealing with that—so we end up seeing less of them and more of the kind of men who seek attention above all else.

We see too many ringmasters and freaks. But being a ringmaster or a freak is probably not the best or most admirable way to live. Yes, it works, but there is a cost. Most of us aren’t made for it psychologically, and I’m not convinced we should try to adapt to it. I don’t think that’s who we should want to become.

Your life is a story. Do you want the story to be, “I stood for nothing, and did anything for attention?”

If I had one thing to say to younger men today, it would be this:

“Don’t take the ringmaster’s advice.”

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